I'm baffled by the idea that we should expect "cults that podcast X has chosen to do episodes about" to be any sort of time-and-space-independent sampling of cults. That leaves me incredibly skeptical of any conclusions that they draw.
Yeah, they tried to say "there's one effect biasing towards relatively recent cults that have had time to wrap up, and another effect biasing away from a time period where they already have lots of cults, so it all probably cancels out", but I just don't believe that the second effect is significant.
The fact that there don't appear to be any cults from the first century AD, or around the first Millennium, or the 1830s, indicates that this is very much a biased sample of cults. (Also, where is Lyndon LaRouche?!)
Author here - I certainly don't make any any presumption that is anything like an unbiased sample, which is why I keep the conclusion very general - rising in 50s, peaking in .
sorry - peaking 70s/80s, and declining through 90s until today. I don't see why the bias in sample would invalidate that conclusion. I agree with you Kenny that the effect you bring up is likely negligible but who knows what the show creators are thinking; also cults from more distant past may have less sources and thus are not chosen, certainly may have an effect in the same direction of my conclusion (a cult deficit in recent decades). By way of example - there are definitely some south korean cults that were not in the dataset... a quick search shows Church of God Jesus Witnesses, Shincheonji Church of Jesus, Providence, and Grace Road Church... these are founded in 1964, 1984, 1980, 2002 respectively. So one is more recent, but the recent are near that peak of 70/80s
If anyone has looked at the GME subreddit, which is based on the belief that their stock will have a MOASS (mother of all short squeezes) and shoot up to millions of dollars in price, they will be able to recognize pretty much every single sign of a cult. I think our ability to resist cults is likely just as bad as it ever way, frankly. Article about it:
Not an expert but I'm fairly sure that a fundamental feature of cults is that they try to cut members off from their non-cult family and friends. I can't imagine that GME does that.
Yeah, I grew up in a cult that's still around today (under different management, as they say) in central Virginia. Having lmy formative years lived within the ebbs and flows of flower child hubris, I'd not wish it upon anyone contra Thiele etc.
> The same study also claims there’s no correlation between “intellectual compatibility” and relationship satisfaction
I presume his is *after* people having self-selected themselves into a relationship (afaict from the abstract. Didn't read the full text because paywall.)
Obligatory reminder that there is no correlation between height and performance in the NBA for similar reasons. If you're short and in the NBA, it means you're exceptional in other ways. If a couple has a 40 point IQ difference, it means they're clicking really well on some other axis.
Maybe you could check compatibility between random groups of couples after speed dating for a bit to evaluate the claim about (temporary) partner satisfaction and intelligence.
I think people select for intelligence levels similar to themselves and would feel bothered if assigned a partner that was 40 IQ points different. I would be interested in the nature of relationships with gaps that large. I think it would almost always have male higher.
On that topic, I find the idea that people are overestimating their partner's IQs by 40 extremely surprising. Does everyone think their partners are literal geniuses? I can honestly (and not very nicely) say that if I am overestimating my current partner's IQ by 40 points, then she shouldn't have been able to manage middle school, let alone high school, college, and employment (all of which she did).
They supposedly overestimate their own IQs by 30, so I expect you'll see a typical Dunning-Kruger curve where 70 thinks they're 110, 100 thinks they're 130, but 160 thinks they're 150. From there, it's only a slight additional overestimate to think their partner is 10 IQ points smarter. Similarly to driving competence, I expect very few people to think of themselves as having below average IQ.
(Note: I just googled Dunning-Kruger curve, and basically all the results are wrong. The Dunning-Kruger effect in the popular imagination features a prominent Mount Stupid, where incompetent people think they're very competent, and then a sharp decline in confidence as people realise how bad they are. In fact, people's self-assessments of their competence tend to increase monotonically with increasing actual competence, but just with a slope smaller than 1, which leads to an overestimate that gradually becomes more accurate.)
The slope smaller than 1 = more accurate self assessment at higher competencies is dependent on the difficulty of the test.
Basically on easy tests people overestimate their ability which makes smarter people more accurate, and on hard tests people underestimate their ability which makes dumber people more accurate.
People don't know how IQ is defined. And some know it in the sense that they could tell the definition, but don't really use that knowledge when making estimates of their or other people's IQ.
I often see people treat, say, an IQ of 115 as just slightly above average, but 85 as seriously retarded, even though they are at the same distance from the median (one is smarter than ~84% of the population, the other smarter than the bottom 16%). Likewise, people don't realize how much more exceptional an IQ of 145 is than one of 115 (the former is smarter than ~99.86% of the population); this requires not only knowledge of the definition, but also some approximate values of the normal distribution.
Theoretically it does go to ~195: one in 7.8 billion corresponds to ~6.32 sigma. Though the definition of fitting the discrete individuals to a normal distribution starts to break down at the extremes.
And of course, in practice, it's impossible to calibrate an IQ test at the extremes. To determine the IQ of the smartest people in the world, you would have to test everyone in the world, or at least all plausible candidates.
Yeah, I was under the impression that *test scores* didn't really go beyond 155 because after that the group sizes were too small to calibrate it. Am I right about that 155 number?
Above 145 the methodologies are dubious at best. Even 130-145 has such large error bars as to warrant caution. The core validity is within two standard deviations of the mean.
It may well be the case: no actual test will be able to give a score near the extremes. What I meant was based on the theoretical definition of fitting the distribution of the entire humanity to a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. I didn't say practically, I said theoretically, and I meant it.
Simplifying this, I would guess a great many people's sense of IQ is defined by those sorts of clickbait "If you can solve this puzzle your IQ is over 200!" puzzles that people post on Facebook. And at least an equal number have basically no sense of IQ whatsoever.
A lot of people running around talking about their statistically unlikely to impossible IQs because they are starting from childhood IQs, which are not deviation IQs, and then going through multiple rounds of exaggeration (i.e. first the parents to the individual and then the individual to other people).
all the iq test i taked as a kid were deviation IQs and that has been standard for generations. If you are 100 you might have taked a mental age based iq test as a kid
That assumes they understand average as 100, genius as 150, and so on. But if you are inferring average (etc) from reported IQ scores, it's going to skew high, because low IQs aren't reported much, and very exaggerated IQs of 190 or 210 are reported a lot. If you think an IQ 210 is a genius, you are going to think IQ 160 is merely smart.
I wonder whether people who think their partner is smarter than they are are more likely to be accommodating during disagreements, or at least some disagreements.
I would guess that the thinking they're smarter would correlate with how much 'in love' they still are. And that would also correlate with disagreements. I mean we all think our children are above average. (living in Lake Wobegon :^)
I think it does, but not for the implied reason. Basically I bet people who think they are smarter than their partners rate are less agreeable than people who rate their partners smarter.
Now we have to compare how the same person behaves towards different partners, when (s)he considers some of those partners smarter than him/her, and some of them dumber.
I saw a graph drawn to illustrate this once, I swear it was in an SSC comment like ten years ago. I will attempt to replicate it here: https://files.catbox.moe/rqpbbe.png
I remember being surprised while drinking wine with some female friends and the topic turned to “who is smarter, you or your husband.” I was the only one who thought her husband was smarter. I wondered if we were all interpreting the question the same way.
My husband and I are probably evenly matched in general skills and verbal ability, but he’s much more quantitative on top of that, so that’s why I rated him as smarter. But the part of cognitive function that does advanced math doesn’t come up in our daily lives, so it’s never played a role in how we relate to one another.
Quick! Think of the smartest and stupidest people you’ve ever met!
In my observation, the gap between husband and wife intelligence tends to increase on other tail, with husband > wife on the right tail and husband < wife on the right tail. 2.5 SDs out on the right tail of the IQ distribution (common in my profession), I have not encountered a case of husband < wife. But 1 SD out on the left tail, it’s not surprising when the wife of the assistant gardener is cleverer than he is.
For what it’s worth, this observation is consistent with the hypothesis of greater male variance in intelligence.
Who are the smartest and stupidest people you’ve ever met?
"husband > wife on the right tail and husband < wife on the right tail."
I assume you meant left tail in the second case.
"2.5 SDs out on the right tail" "1 SD out on the left tail" Whose IQ are you referring to here, the husband or the wife? If you primarily refer to the husband's: As long as the spouses' intelligence isn't perfectly correlated, it is to be expected that very smart men are usually smarter than their wives, and very dumb men are usually dumber than their wives—simply because, compared to an outlier, it's likely that the wife is closer to the mean. It is also expected that very smart women are usually smarter than their husbands, and very dumb women are usually dumber than their husbands.
One could look at mate preferences, or the slightly higher male variance. But such considerations are likely trumped by the above effect (that an outlier of either sex will usually have a spouse who is less of an outlier).
Yes, I meant left tail in the second case, and yes, I meant husband’s IQ for SDs. You make a good point concerning outliers. However, if I take my sample from academic pairs with which I’m familiar, so that both members are outliers, the observation is still mostly right. However, among such pairs I have once observed a potential wife > husband.
If you're measuring relative to the husband, then you should expect this to happen even with equal variance: if partner selection is less than perfectly correlated with intelligence, it is necessarily the case that the smartest people will have spouses who are on average less smart than they are, and the stupidest will have spouses who are on average smarter.
So it can both be the case that of the smart married men you meet, most have stupider wives, *and* that of the smart married women you meet, most have stupider husbands. But if the smart people you run into are mostly men (due to gender ratios in your profession), you'll mostly have occasion to sample from the former case.
(Ignoring the unmarried and unstraight here - correlations of those things with intelligence could of course skew these results.)
That said, my wife and her friends like to exchange wife memes, the best of which is only an exaggeration of a true phenomenon: A caption of “I asked him to peel half of the potatoes and boil them”, above an image of half-peeled potatoes boiling in a pot.
But that just brings up the idea that men and women have different domains of work. I am sure wives think their husbands stupid when it comes to packing lunches for the kids, and visa versa for changing the oil or home repair.
Okay, so that study picks a really silly methodology:
"Participants assessed their own and their partner's intelligence on a 1–25 point rating scale." lmao
"In order to place the 25-point scale SAI scores onto a scale more comparable to a conventional IQ score (i.e., M = 100; SD = 15), we transformed the scores such that values of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 were recoded to 40, 45, 50, 55, 60... 140, 145, 150, 155, 160." double lmao
It's like their *trying* to make people overestimate their intelligence. Why not "transform" to 50 and then we'll have an overestimation of 40 points! Better headlines, yay.
If it isn't obvious why, it's because someone like me (who belongs squarely in the middle of the curve) would have no hesitation in giving myself a 15. 1-25 is a silly scale, most people like their scales obviously symmetric (1-10, 1-100) etc.
Also, if I wanted to give myself a rating that's higher than 12 but not that muhc higher, i have no choice but to say 13. 5 whole points!
Lastly, a scale with a max of 160 tramsformed (read: disguised) to 25 is just plain dumb.
Lit review of "IQ estimation" they mention also contradicts them:
With respect to intelligence, specifically, Heck, Simons, and Chabris (2018) asked a general community sample of Americans to respond to the following item: ‘I am more intelligent than the average person.’ They found that 65% of the participants agreed with the statement, which is greater than the null expectation of 50%.
In comparison to their objectively measured IQs (Digit Symbol and Vocabulary subtests from the WAIS), the men were found to have overestimated their IQ by 7.8 IQ points, on average, whereas the women, as a group, did not over- estimate their intelligence (mean difference of −1.6 IQ points; not statistically significant from zero).
Overall terrible methodology. But it's psychology, what did we expect?
With regards to #11, the quote from Paul Krugman is:
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
"First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.
But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as money? That's a very different kind of question.
And the fact that people are throwing around my 98 quote actually shows that they don't get this point -- that they're confusing technology with monetary economics."
The tweet Matt Darling had about it being a skeptical point of view and correct does not seem like a reasonable interpretation to me unless there is some aspect to this that I am missing.
"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." is not equivalent to being skeptical about the economy doubling as a result of the internet unless you're being way too charitable. "most people have nothing to say to each other!" seems pretty absurd as well.
It would be like if there was a bunch of chatter about AI taking off and reaching a singularity and I said "AI is a completely useless waste of time" and here we are in 2021 without singularity so I was correct.
I agree with everything you write. Just want to point out "most people have nothing to say to each other" is kind of metaphorically profound and not wrong as of 2021 social media.
Unfortunately, the history was muddled by fact that Krugman initially misremembered which piece this quote was from. It was from Red Herring magazine, not the NY Times Magazine as he originally thought. Snopes confirmed this with Krugman:
> * Within two or three years, the current mood of American triumphalism--our belief that we have pulled economically and technologically ahead of the rest of the world--will evaporate. All it will take is a few technological setbacks or a mild recession here while Europe or Japan recovers a bit.
> * The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
> * As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.
I see an explicit and wrong claim about the growth rate of the internet. I'd say the OP tweets are revising history, although I guess you could reasonably defend Krugman by claiming (1) the debate over the overall growth rate was the important context and (2) that his prediction was just purposeful hyperbole. (See title of the piece.)
China has been too successful in promoting college degrees. In particular, if you want one of the coveted government jobs, you need a college degree. As a result, vocational training is quite low-status, so unsurprisingly nobody wants to study for such jobs any more. This endangers the country's ability to actually produce things and therefore China's position as the world's factory. So in order to promote vocational training, they are merging these different kinds of schools, but people are understandably upset that they might get a vocational degree for the work and fees to get a college degree, especially since the authorities apparently gave no warning whatsoever about the move.
So overall it looks like a ham-fisted, ill-planned move to get more vocational degrees into circulation.
>China has been too successful in promoting college degrees. In particular, if you want one of the coveted government jobs, you need a college degree. As a result, vocational training is quite low-status, so unsurprisingly nobody wants to study for such jobs any more. This endangers the country's ability to actually produce things
Phew, I'm glad the West dodged that one.
Between this and population issues, it looks like China is coming out the far side of the demographic transition and finding that the low birthrate tertiary economy's grass isn't necessarily greener over here.
We were all worried China would overtake us, but then we realised that just meant they'd be suffering from all of our pathologies much sooner! That'll show them!
I'm guessing this is sarcastic, in which case I'll point out that the US still manufactures a huge amount of goods. We just don't employ nearly as many people per capita doing it because automation has been so successful.
What manufacturing jobs require vocational degrees? I thought the primary worker base for Chinese manufacturing jobs was migrant workers from the rural provinces.
Sure there's lots of use for unskilled labor, but a factory also need machinists and specialist technicians of all sorts. You don't need to know much to put a plastic head on a toy doll, but if you need to die press steel parts then you need some people who know how to repair or reset the die press.
I get their intention, but I agree with you that this specific idea is a very bad way of dealing with the problem. The UK did something similar in the 70s I think, and now they have a serious shortage of nurses to the point that any foreign nurse will immediately get a visa, because the vocational courses (like nursing) took on more characteristics of university degrees over time, while earnings from these jobs didn't increase, so you get the cost and stress of a university degree with the lower pay of a traditionally vocational profession. Which noone wants.
This is probably not the exact failure mode that the Chinese idea will experience, but it shows that there are always unintentional consequences.
Government interference is the most likely cause (I don't know about the UK nurses, but that's a pretty common baseline guess given the scenario).
It may not be a direct "nurses cannot make more than [$X]" law, but could be based on things like cost constraints. If the government pays for health care and only offers $XXX for a particular treatment, then the total cost of that treatment, including salaries and benefits for the necessary staff, cannot exceed that number.
Because the NHS is the public health service, funded by government (and the Byzantine organisational structures that have resulted from decades of various governments of all stripes trying to half-privatise it, give it autonomy, split it up, re-unify it and so on is a complete morass) the staff are on civil/public service pay scales, which are a nightmare to try and navigate. You can have a look here to see what they are: https://nursingnotes.co.uk/agenda-for-change-nhs-pay-bands/
Band 5 is where you get the nursing staff pay rates beginning:
"Band 5
Examples of the NHS staff paid at Band 5 are; staff nurses, newly qualified midwives and paramedics, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, and biomedical scientists."
4+ years experience £15.70 an hour £30,615 per annum
In dollars that's $21.94 an hour and $42,782.93 per annum. By comparison with American pay scales:
"The average nursing pay scale in the U.S
In March 2019, The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that between May 2017 and May 2018, registered nurses brought in a median salary of $71,730 per year – a 3.7% increase compared to the previous year.
The majority of nurses make from $48,690 to $104,100 annually. The average (mean) nurse salary at national level is $75,510."
So while being an experienced nurse isn't *bad* money as such, it'll take a while to work up to that pay rate and if you've got student loans etc. it's not really worth it. Becoming an agency nurse, where you're called in as temp help for over-stretched wards and so forth, pays a lot better. On the other hand, this site says that's not as rosy as it's painted: https://www.nurses.co.uk/nursing/blog/a-quick-overview-of-nurses--salaries-in-the-uk-in-2021/
Or you can try and get a job in America, which as you see, also pays a hell of a lot better.
My understanding is that British salaries are posted as post-tax and represent take home pay, whereas per annum salaries in America are uniformly stated in pre-tax terms. This would seem to narrow the salary gap substantially - is that not the case here?
I'm told part of the problem specifically with nursing in the UK is there are enough working class people who would be happy with the pay and conditions, but they struggle with the academic requirements of the course (some of which are at best marginal to the needs of the job).
Polytechnics were raised to the status of universities, but separate vocational qualifications remain. I don't think that had anything to do with the crisis in nursing.
I can't really blame people for it. I mean ISIS terrorist, gay nightclub, I think people will make pretty reasonable assumptions here, even though they're wrong.
Reasonable at the time. It is a Hell of a coincidence that he'd pick a gay night club to shoot up. But wikipedia has had the most recent story for a while, with solid source links. So I'd expect anyone writing about it now to refresh their memory first.
It was, on day one, reasonable to suspect that Mateen had shot up the Pulse nightclub because of the LGBT connection for the same reason that it was reasonable to suspect that SARS CoV-2 had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There's a very unusual sort of event that can plausibly be linked to an unusual sort of institution, and look, here's an event of that sort that occurred in or adjacent to an institution of that sort. It's not proof, and there are other possible explanations, but it is Bayesian evidence.
Difference is, in the case of the Pulse nightclub, followup investigation very quickly produced overwhelming evidence for the alternate explanation, "Pissed-Off Muslim generically hates Decadent Western Society". In the case of SARS CoV-2, followup investigation has conspicuously failed to find supporting evidence for the "natural zoonotic origin" hypothesis.
But in both cases, one explanation is more politically correct than the other, and that rather than evidence dominates the public narrative.
This is funny, and kinda true, but he mostly vents his hatred for the media by referencing a _small_ part of it that confirms his hatred (or, rather, the reasonable criticisms he has of the overall industry).
I think that's really Greenwald's point. The fact that this information was known at the time, has not had any significant update, and people STILL believe he attacked the club because he was anti-gay says a lot about the rest of the media and those that follow them.
Yeah you have US Senators who still have not gotten the message.
"On Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) falsely described the massacre as an "unspeakable act of hate toward the LGBTQ+ community.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) went even further, claiming “the LGBTQ+ community was targeted and killed—all because they dared to live their lives.” Her fellow Illinois Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin, claimed forty-nine lives were lost due to “anti-LGBTQ hate” (he forgot the +)."
I'd always assumed the Muslim terrorist shot up the gay nightclub because he hated America and hated gays, but apparently he just searched for "nightclub" rather than "gay nightclub."
But I'm not wholly confident in that because this type of "search engine forensics" is new to me.
I feel like it's less than maximally helpful to just say "this story was false", which could be read in a misleading way (e.g., that the event never happened at all). Better to specify in what way it's false, i.e., that (according to this report, anyway), what's false is that the photo op was the reason for the violent clearing of protesters.
Regarding the Pulse shooting:
I think you've actually left out the most interesting part here, which is that (IIRC) the government actually hid the full transcript of the 911 call for a week, releasing only an abridged version in the meantime, seemingly to hide the shooter's motive as an Islamist. So this isn't, like, different media outlets all independently getting distracted by the possible angle of it as an anti-gay hate crime and ignoring any other possible motive; it's that they didn't know about the real motive when the topic was hottest, because the government covered it up.
Also, "being loyal to Isis" and "hating gay people" are two things that kind of go together... so no one who heard "he pledged loyalty to Isis" would think, "Ah, my mistake! He didn't hate gay people, he was just loyal to Isis." They would think, "He hates gay people AND is loyal to Isis."
#14 I'm guessing the black bird is the black eagle from the German coat of arms.
Australia and India (the turbaned elephant at right) aren't part of the G7 but they were prominently invited as guests this time around... along with South Korea who don't seem to be depicted. The fact that the G7 has suddenly decided to invite all the medium-sized powers surrounding China on all sides into their exclusive club has not escaped China's notice, I suppose.
No idea about the frogs, nor the gas canisters. The IV drip I guess indicates that someone is unhealthy, but who exactly?
They always invite some non-members - this one invited fewer than usual.
I think the drip on the left, which seems to be labelled with something like the PRC flag, indicates Australia's dependent on Chinese money and suffering from Chinese sanctions. The one on the right is definitely India being sick from COVID (note that Modi didn't go in person because of how badly India's doing).
Frog was explained above as Taiwan. I don't know about the gas either.
Yes (with the exception of South Africa). I was noting that it wasn't unusual to invite people at all (which "suddenly decided" and "exclusive club" kind of implied).
I'm fairly sure they knew and intended that Beijing (and anyone worried about Beijing) would notice; the implication was national news here in Oz.
The artist did a fantastic job on the animals, they're all clearly identifiable species. The German coat of arms is a generic black eagle, no particular species, so the artist picked one. I believe it's a Black Hawk-Eagle, Spizaetus tyrannus, found in South and Central America, and I think I've even found the photo the artist used for reference: https://www.peregrinefund.org/explore-raptors-species/eagles/black-hawk-eagle
I hadn't known the gray wolf was the semi-official national animal of Italy, but that makes sense due to Romulus and Remus being raised by wolves. Apparently, the Chinese are friends with the Italians at the moment, so the Italian wolf is depicted with more dignity.
Something about the depiction of the wolf reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the original Last Supper, but I can't say exactly what. But clearly the artist put a fair amount of effort into his painting, so I don't think it's implausible that he might have thrown in a shout-out to Leonardo.
Nineteenth century political cartoons in England and America used to be highly elaborate like this, with lots of this kind of detailed Easter egg symbolism. In the 20th Century, the style changed to political cartoons with only one joke that you could read fast, but this old style cartoon makes a nice throwback, although I'd probably get tired of this if it became the dominant fashion once again.
Very umm... surprised about that Monmouth polling result, because Democrats are quite clearly backing noon the question, and pretty reliably the Democrats taking a position on something ensures that at least a third of the population will agree with them.
I'm so confident about this that I'm going to assume the research (a single poll) is mistaken.
My guess is most people don't connect this seemingly common sense question to the controversy about voting rights they've heard about (and would split along party lines if they realized this was something their party had a contrary opinion on).
Perhaps they support voter ID law in abstract, but not when such laws (apear to) conflict with voting accesability. Whenever liberal media mention voter ID laws they bring up the connection with the latter issue, making their audience sympthetic to their side.
This is where my crazy idea for a constitutional amendment that states can pick whatever standard they want, but they need to use the same standard for voter ID, accessing abortion services, purchasing a gun, and starting a buisness.
* perhaps legislatures dont mind depriving certain groups from those other things any more as they mind disenfranchising them,
* this issues seems to granular and specific to be governed by something as grand as a constitutional amendment
* with the current state of US politics it is plenty hard enough to bet a simple bill through congress, how can we hope to do so for a constitutional amendment on a controversial issue like voter id laws
Regardless of how relatively uninformed people answer seemingly common sense questions, we do all agree that in-person voting fraud basically doesn't exist, and voter ID laws are just a part of the current Republican all-out-offensive to make it harder for minorities to vote--right? I just want to level-set here.
I don't know if you're talking about consensus with the public at-large, or this comment stream. Either way I'm asking, not setting.
My larger point is that when someone retreats to "Well the public thinks this" or "We need to restore public trust" - it generally tells me they don't have a good argument on its own merits. See Ted Cruz' speech when voting against certifying the election results.
Isn't the whole spirit of this blog to poke holes in counter-intuitive stuff that the general public believes simply because it seems to make sense?
Why is the public's opinion important here? Or are we trying to trying to say this is just a purely curious intellectual exercise in how public attitudes are formed wrt to partisanship - and that the subject happens to be about Voter ID is irrelevant?
It was a legitimate question. Unlike almost all other venues that allow political discussion, this is a smart, well-informed comment stream. I was genuinely curious if anyone here believes in-person voter fraud is a real problem. So far I haven't seen one argument suggesting that anyone actually believes it is a problem - just stuff about how everyone should have ID out of general principle.
If we can all agree that in-person voter fraud is not a real problem (again - I haven't seen a single argument here to the contrary), then everything that follows from this false claim comes into question, especially Republicans' motives.
The discussion changes to - ok IDs are good but not until we simplify the process and make sure everyone can easily get one. Which is of course exactly the opposite of what Republicans are doing - another facet of this that the "everyone should have ID" crowd tends to ignore.
No, we do not agree. Many of us believe that the bar for obtaining valid ID is set very low already, and that voter fraud really happens on a regular basis.
Also I tend to think anyone who truly believes minorities are unable to obtain ID needs to show their work.
This I agree with, and I would support efforts to help those people obtain ID - frankly voting might be a fringe benefit compared with being able to easily prove your identity in order to avail yourself of programs intended to alleviate your poverty and/or homelessness.
I've found various results showing that in various metro areas something like 10-15% of residents lack ID and a similar number lack any sort of banking relationship. Getting people access to these things would be huge. (It's one reason I really like the idea of city Metrocards that you can reload with cash and spend at local businesses - even beyond the benefits for the transit system.)
Not saying you do this. But I get this line a lot from people who support Voter ID laws. The conversation always goes like this:
1) They say "I just don't see what the big deal is..."
2) I point out the real issue with getting ID for some people
3) they say "Well I support making it easy for them to get ID" - and then don't really think about it any further.
This is ignoring the entire issue that red states are doing this specifically *because* they know it's hard for certain people to get IDs. They are also actively doing things to make it even *harder* for those people to get an ID. They sure aren't going to make it easier.
Maybe some of the lower-level politicians are true believers in voter fraud. But that was never the genesis of this push for voter ID, initiated by ALEC. As we can see by them also shutting down polling stations in urban areas, cutting back on early voting and Sunday voting, making it much harder to mail-in votes, removing drop boxes, all these new state laws that put more power in the handle of the legislature - the very people being voted on, etc.
Red states also pursue benign cases of voter fraud like sending someone to jail for 5 years who didn't realize they couldn't vote while on probation. The penalties are so far beyond the scope of the crime - deliberately to send a scare message. Their motives in all this are beyond transparent.
And old people. I have a jeremiad about helping my 85-year-old mother get ID and register to vote in a new state after her driver's license had expired. Appointments at DMV were hard to get, there were long lines and she had issues with standing (and with urinary continence), and I ultimately had to take her to get a passport photo and then do all the passport paperwork and drag her to the post office, etc. The other people in her assisted living facility faced similar challenges. If they'd just accept expired driver's licenses as ID, it would all be a lot easier.
Good. Personally, I'd make it so you can only vote if you register 5 years in advance, by diligent uncovering of and deciphering of the registration instructions, which would be written in Linear B in invisible ink on a piece of paper in the unmarked bottom drawer of a locked cabinet in an unused basement of an abandoned but locked building with large fluorescent DANGER POISONOUS SNAKES AND SPIDERS signs tacked all over its exterior.
And then the voting booths would only be open from 3:00 to 3:17 am on a Sunday immediately following the Daylight Savings Time switch, in an unheated empty grain silo or coal bunker with no public transportation for miles, and you have to climb an unlighted 60-foot ladder in poor repair to get in through a small window. With shards of broken glass all around the perimeter.
I don't want anyone exercising such an awesome power as the franchise unless he really, really wants to, and is determined and clever enough to figure out how to do it despite every ordinary obstacle. The contrary idea that it ought to be so easy that any nimrod should be able to do it with two brain cells and a working index finger is bananas, if not suicidal, and I cannot fathom a practical or moral reason to justify it, unless one secretly assumes the world is in fact run by the Illuminati and voting is a meaningless feel-good affirmation exercise.
Something like less paranoia about DNA and fingerprint registries could help with this…
So much of the problem seems to be that people have no idea what they actually want. We want the state to be able to ID us (and give us an ID that can be used for various purpose) but we also want this to be an extremely difficult and painful process fragmented over multiple state and federal agencies — and then we’re surprised that some people don’t want to engage in that difficult and painful process!?!
In person voter fraud simply doesn't exist on more than a super rare one-off basis. Every study that's ever been done shows this, and it is just pure common sense if you think about the mechanics involved (you need to know someone who's registered and isn't going to vote) and the risk/reward (risking a felony to cast one extra vote). Fear of in-person voter fraud is something drummed up by right-wing media. There is no basis for it.
We literally have people in this thread talking about how hard it is to get an ID in Texas. Republicans (specifically a think tank/lobbyist group called ALEC) - crunched the numbers and realized a lot of black people don't have ID or an easy way to provide the proof needed get one. Your lived experience is not the same as everyone else's.
I'm not a big fan of imagining things exist that have never been found and make no sense on their face. How about we put the burden of proof on the people proposing onerous new laws? Why is the imaginary specter of in-person voter fraud more important than the very real stories of people who find it almost impossible to round up their birth certificate or otherwise jump through all the hoops to get an ID - which are deliberately made harder? Shouldn't we err on the site of *not* disenfranchising people?
How can you be so convinced of something you have no evidence for, despite study after study(and investigation after investigation) (including those by the Republican Party under G.W. Bush and D.J. Trump) finding that it just doesn't exist.
I'm not American; I watch these debates while knowing little about the process. What are the requirements for registering to vote? What prevents one from registering multiple times, with fake names? I assume you don't need an ID when registering either, or at least people who advocate for the right to vote without having an ID would demand not requiring an ID for registration either.
Anyways, most likely many Republicans support voter ID laws because they benefit their party, and many Democrats support abolishing them because it benefits their party.
My own opinion is that a voting system should offer a reasonable degree of guarantee that no significant fraud occurs, not just empirically seem to result in little fraud. Moreover, a voting system should allow a voter to easily understand and trust that the system guarantees that no significant fraud occurs, without having to trust studies and media stories. In a politically charged debate, everyone involved is likely to be very biased; the Democratic media and researchers is likely to "drum down" voter fraud (even if it exists), while the Republicans are likely to drum it up (even if it doesn't). Many people's answer to "do you think significant fraud occurs" is likely to be "I don't know". In my case, that's because I'm not an American and I don't follow the matter closely; but I expect that most Americans aren't in a position to verify the claims either way.
> What are the requirements for registering to vote? What prevents one from registering multiple times, with fake names?
Voting is managed by the states, so each is slightly different. In mine, you need to be a "resident" of a given county for 30 days.
You need some physical wet ink copy of your signature on file. If you already have a drivers license, you did a wet ink copy of your signature then, and can use it by reference.
You don't need a residential address -- you can be homeless -- but you need a mailing address where you can be contacted. If a person were to register 30 fake people to vote, they would still need a name, signature, and mailing address on file for them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggZssFS0yM there are many examples of actual court cases about voter fraud in recent times! It only seems like an unthinkable rarity because you're swallowing the rhetoric that it basically doesn't exist.
Neither of these would have been fixed by voter ID. No one is claiming fraud doesn't exist - just the kind of in-person voter fraud that voter ID laws stop.
Thanks - this pretty much sums up what I'm trying to say better than I can:
"You can see how this applies to the topic at-hand. The fundamental test here is this: In any of the red states that have passed new Voter ID laws, or other laws that restrict the ability of poor people young people, women and so on to exercise their franchise, were any significant funds appropriated or allocated for compliance assistance?
Were any new offices, call-lines, visiting experts and grace periods set up to help them comply? “Here is an onerous new burden upon the poor, women and so on -- but we are going to show our commitment to assist voters with these new regulations, by allocating money.” A serious effort to go out into the communities and help the poor, minorities, recent immigrants, women, young people – to obtain the identification they need to exercise their sovereign right to vote.
Note! This type of outreach would not just help them with voting, but would likely help them to STOP being poor! By helping them get on the path to helping themselves. This should be what conservatives are for.
Instead these efforts are sabotaged, deliberately and relentlessly. Not one red cent has been allocated for compliance assistance in any of the red states that have passed these new voter ID laws.
My only issue with this is the idea that making it harder for people to vote and trying to get more people to vote are the same thing. One is pro-democracy, the other is anti-democracy. I know of zero cases of blue states making it harder for red counties to vote the way many red states seem singularly dedicated to making it harder for blue cities to vote.
I don't think that's a fair comparison, a Republican would probably say one position is pro-election integrity the other is anti-election integrity. There is some tradeoff between ease of voting and election integrity with moving in one direction favoring Republicans and moving in the other favoring Democrats. Neither side is truly pro-democracy as both aspects are important in a democratic election.
I'm just summarizing what the article says. If it were just voter ID laws then maybe. What's the rationale for making it harder to get an ID, closing DMV offices, closing polling stations, making rules like there can only be one drop box for the entire inner city of Houston, curtailing early voting, curtailing Sunday voting, curtailing vote by mail, making the registration period shorter, a whole host of other voter suppression efforts, and most ominously in many states now - putting ultimate power to reject results in the hands of the legislature - the very people getting elected - instead of the Secretary of State?
I obviously can't speak to the mentality of everyone taking a survey, but I had to get a Texas driver's license last year in order to vote. I support the idea in abstract that voters should need to present some form of government-issued ID. On the other hand, I already had that in the form of a California driver's license which I'd opted to just keep renewing because California allowed me to long after I'd moved to Texas, since I didn't actually drive.
It was the specifics of the implementation that were tough to swallow. Not only did you need a Texas ID, but the wait time for an appointment became six months, you couldn't do walk-in and needed an appointment, for some reason when you got there they had no way to look up whether you had an appointment by your name, address, email, or any other identifier and you needed to have a confirmation number, and they increased the requirement to get an ID to having to show four forms of verification that you lived at a specific address.
One, this clearly excludes actual "houseless" people, which seems blatantly unconstitutional. People living on the street still have the right to vote, and excluding them is probably at least part of why we have so many laws hostile to them.
But two, this also excludes a lot of homeless but still housed people just down on their luck. I witnessed a man in the office arguing with the woman issuing the IDs for nearly 40 minutes while I was there. He brought in this father because he had to move back in with his parents and his name was not on any of the utility bills or the lease. He wasn't paying rent. But he had the personal testimony of the homeowner that he did, in fact, live there. Not good enough, and they sent him away without an ID.
So sure, requiring ID in general is fine. But the specifics of how a lot of states choose to implement this seems clearly intended to suppress poor people from voting.
As a general thing, I think there should be pressure to make it easier for people to get ID, and not just for voting. Not having ID makes people's lives a lot harder.
Many states allow something like a letter from a homeless shelter as proof of residence. I cannot find confirmation that this would count in Texas, though.
Generally, bureaucracies work not by making things impossible, but by making them harder. The man who moved in with his father could get around this just by getting his name on a utility bill.
Legally, and I wouldn't recommend doing this with someone you can't trust to pay the bills, but assuming he can trust his parents to pay it, it wouldn't be a problem. (I have done this to get residency before.)
I take your point about this being a work around, but it's one of those things - the kind of people who are poor enough that getting an ID is really, really difficult are exactly the kind of people who don't exactly have an extensive network of people they can trust to cosign things. Though it may work in some cases, it's not really an acceptable general solution.
Counterpoint: if you are that disconnected from society that you don't have a good social network or employment, should we actually be working to facilitate their vote?
Under Section 2: Proof of Residency, they will now accept an affidavit from someone else who resides at the same address. They did not accept that last October. They also reduced proof of residency documents from 4 to 2, but even now, just having your name on a utility bill isn't enough since you need more than one form of proof.
Too much of the debate around voter access (and many other government services for that matter) focuses on the difference between "hard" and "impossible". Not nearly enough focuses on the difference between "easy" and "hard". I think this is because people think that if something is a right, then "hard but not impossible" means the problem has been solved, and ignores the fact that the actual number of people accessing this right changes far more when you move from "hard" to "easy" than when you move from "impossible" to "hard".
This exactly. The idea is just to put the thumb on the scale to ensure some percentage of people affected won't go through the hassle. You don't have to make getting an ID impossible, just hard, to get the desired effect.
Of course, due to the wait time for appointments and office closures, it actually was "impossible" if you didn't think of it well in advance. I was quite lucky to bother looking at appointment availability all the way back in April.
The new requirements for proof of address verification is tied to the Federal Real ID requirements. In most states, you can still get a "non-Real ID" license or ID without needing those requirements. Not sure about Texas specifically.
Yes, and the DMV closures were almost certainly more due to Covid than any intentional effort at voter suppression. It is nonetheless not a great look, which I think Matt is doing an excellent job of illustrating above, to be pushing all these new ID requirements on voters in the year it just so happens to be the most difficult it has ever been to get an ID.
Notably, Texas already had voter ID laws. And I voted in 2018, with the ID I had then. They changed the law to further restrict exactly what forms of ID they would accept, and it's pretty hard to interpret that as being anything other than a reaction to Democrats sweeping so many city and county positions in the state and damn near managing to come within spitting distance of Ted Cruz.
I'm not surprised at all, because most people are horribly uninformed as to what the actual law is even on their pet issues.
Gun control and abortion are two good examples of this on the left, while immigration and foreign aid are two good examples of this on the right. If you ask left-leaning people what they think the laws should be, nominal pro-gun control and pro choice people will suggest laws which are less restrictive of gun ownership and more restrictive of abortion than the laws on the books. Likewise, I've seen similar surveys where right-leaning people suggest restrictions on immigration and foreign aid which would end with higher levels of both than currently exist.
That said, I think a lot of this comes down to trick questions. John Q Public doesn't have the statistical literacy to evaluate the data on policy even if he cared to, but the general public can still make correct decisions when the fraction of people with skin in the game on a particular issue to be informed is large enough and motivated enough to check the bureaucracy. Limiting both the scope of government and the franchise can help ensure that people with skin in the game are a large enough fraction to challenge machine politicians.
Re 2: how did they come up with those numbers? Ok, California being California, but there's countries there. They say that there's more cults in Massachusetts (pop. 7 millions) than in all of India (pop. 1366 millions). Or is it per something like 100k?
Re 18: Wait are you saying in English people are not told in schools what a grammatical root is and that words share them?
I can tell you that my daughter certainly learned about them in elementary (or maybe middle) school, although they call them "stems" these days instead of "roots." I guess they're branching out.
18: I don't think it's so bad as "not knowing what a grammatical root is", it's that some of these pairings aren't so obvious, and some of these ending (-like id, -ific, and -or) are less common.
Like, if I wanted to make "liquid" a noun, I would say ... "liquid", not "liquor." So even though it's obvious that "liquor" and "liquid" are related, I had never noticed that was the same connection as "horror / horrid." Same with "stupor / stupid" -- on reflection, they're clearly related, but since "stupor" hardly functions as a synonym for "stupidity", it's easy to miss that.
Honestly, I feel a little bit like the crazy one now, with you and Scott both acting like there's nothing interesting in this chart. Some of the combinations are obvious, but the non-obvious ones (and the fact that some combinations "could" exist, but don't), are what make it interesting!
Of course people who speak English are told in schools about grammatical roots and the connections between words. And even people who never have any formal schooling manage to learn about this too, because they will productively apply prefixes and suffixes to new words that they encounter.
The issue is that there are many words that were historically formed by these processes that have undergone some amount of semantic and/or phonetic drift since then, and are sometimes more common than the word they were derived from, so that they get stored psychologically as separate lexical entries, rather than with the compositional process.
I definitely find that it's much more obvious that "warmth" is "warm+th" than it is that "width" and "depth" are "wide+th" and "deep+th", which are in turn more obvious than that "breadth" and "height" are "broad+th" and "high+th". I haven't found anything to confirm or deny whether "cold" is itself historically "cool+th".
For other formations, I think that "coincidence" being "co+incidence" is decidedly non-obvious, and very few English speakers know that "helicopter" is "helico+pter" (but in this case the only other words with "helix" and "pter" are uncommon words).
But I've noticed the same thing with speakers of other languages. I remember a German friend being shocked once when I pointed out to him how cute it was that "Handschuh" is "Hand+Schuh". I suspect there are similarly common and obvious words in English that I rarely notice as having this sort of root formation, even without going to the odd Latin endings in that chart.
"I wonder if this is one of those things that's easier to see as a non-native speaker? "
Quite possibly. I'm currently studying Bulgarian, and I'll quite often need to ask my tutor for a word I don't know, and I'll go "Oh! Is that derived from [other Bulgarian word]?", and she'll have no strong opinion.
This is not directly related but I traced the etymology of the word to latin "cado" meaning "to fall", making coincidence a construction of the sort "to fall together". The equivalent word in Dutch, "samenvallen", is constructed the same way semantically, but using different words.
This is just conjecture but I wonder if both languages got the construction through Latin, and it was then "nativized" in Dutch* but not in English. If that's the case then whoever "nativized" it in Dutch surely must have thought of it as two separate units.
* or rather at any point after the Dutch and English lineages split, I suppose
Sounds plausible. Bulgarian does the same: съвпадение (sŭvpadenie) which, if I'm not getting confused, is a combination of съ = together, в = in/into, + падение = falling
Could well be. To me "coincidence" usually just feels like an atomic word. Once I noticed the etymology, it's obvious. But I think most people don't think of a coincidence as two incidents that share some feature in common - it somehow feels like it would have to have more than just that.
I would go further and say that the word has two meanings, a technical one that is just "co-" + "incidence" and the colloquial one that has a connotation of surprise. An example of the former is describing a neuron as a "coincidence detector." But native speakers typically learn the second meaning before we learn the word "incidence," so that plus the difference in meaning makes the construction non-obvious.
Author here - it is just raw counts, not per 100k or anything. Should be taken with a boulder of salt, also because it is from an American podcast and presumably biased towards american cults
#31: A common polyamory talking point is “you wouldn’t be jealous if your friend had other friends”. Now psychologists find that people definitely get jealous if their friends get other friends.
I think that polyamorists lack this sense of jealousy or a strong form of it and monogamists have it. To me, it does not seem like something that could be argued away. If someone said "You wouldn't be jealous if your friend had other friends", I can't imagine someone saying "You're right. This emotion of jealousy has ceased" To me, it does not seem like something that can just go away. I think maybe some polyamorists have some blank slatist type of beliefs. And there is likely some "same-minding" going on. Likewise, non-poly people probably think poly people are lying or suppressing their feelings of jealousy.
24: Related: In addition to all the usual reasons, studies with unwoke conclusions are now being removed from journals because people make “serious and credible threats of personal violence” against the editors of journal editors who keep them up.
Very concerning. Acquiescing to this sort of behavior could make it more common. If you think opposition to unwoke conclusions is bad currently, imagine if instead of a petition it was a credible and serious death threat every time.
Colonialism not a good system, so it's an overall positive that it was removed from a journal. It's really a shame that it takes death threats for a journal to realise their publishing standards might be a bit low.
I think a case could be made that the Soviet Union was just as imperialistic as the USA, but that's probably more neo-colonialism than colonialism. I assume you see backing oppressive dictators as justified if they have the right kind of politics, but that's exactly what the CIA thought, not exactly the USA's proudest moment.
Yeah as the history shows, for quite a few people it may take death threats to realize their political views are incorrect. That's why the masses need a stern but fair Party's hand to guide them, or in the most stubborn cases make the threats reality.
I realise that I am crossing a taboo when I don't start panicking about "death threats", and when I don't give in to the mass hysteria that surrounds "death threats". But I think that my politically incorrect scepticism here has some solid grounding. Note that the journal never provided any substantiation of the deaths threats or evidence that they occurred at all.
Even if we make the assumption that these "death threats" did occur, it seems strange that colonialism and all the violence that goes along with such a system is openly advocated, yet death threats cross some imaginary line.
I'm also not a pacifist, but it seems strange to me that death threats are so taboo yet warmongering for colonial war is not considered essentially a death threat directed towards multitudes of people.
>Note that the journal never provided any substantiation of the deaths threats or evidence that they occurred at all.
This is a decent point, although the only scenario I can think of where they'd make up a death threat in this situation is if they received a credible threat of something other than death (as caving to a death threat is less embarrassing than caving to blackmail or legal threats). If there was cause to remove it within their procedures there's no obvious reason to invent a death threat, and if they didn't have a problem with it staying up there doesn't seem any obvious reason to take it down.
Scott Alexander also states this is because of the "unwoke conclusions" the article made. But without knowing who made the threat or if there was any threat at all it makes no sense to make this assumption. For all Scott Alexander knows, the death-thereat could have come from an "unwoke" anti-colonial organization such as Hamas.
This is the kind of sloppy assumptions and writing that occurs when you try to cram everything into the "woke vs anti-woke" paradigm, rather than looking at important things such as a materialist economics and geopolitics.
Oh sure "serious and credible threats of violence" - even less serious than death threats, then. I'm am updating my priors even further away from "woke" SJWs being a problem here. This is so vague it could be literally anything.
That's basically what I'm saying. Violence and threats of violence are justified if they are promoting the left ideology and the working class interests, because the oppressed suffered so much from hands of the oppressors it's basically self-defense. Anyone expressing any thoughts which my be construed to support interests of the elites is as good as physically attacking the proletariat, so no measures against such a person (or, if necessary, their family and friends) would be excessive.
Miles G seems to me be writing with an ironic tone, in an attempt to get you to back down from what seemed to be your initial position. I'm willing to ask you directly, without rhetoric, because I'd like to see you state your position clearly. I want other people here who may be evaluating your ideas to see what you think on this point.
Marxbro, is it your position that violence against a person (or the threat of violence) is sometimes justified because of something that person believes, says or writes?
I suggest you read classic works like "Discourse On Colonialism" by Cesaire, "A Dying Colonialism" by Fanon and "Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism" by Nkrumah. A background in Marx and Lenin also helps when analysing colonialism.
Referring to books you have read isn’t a coherent form of argument. An astrologer could do that. Defend their positions tater than expect people to read the books you have read.
Learn to surmise. Would you accept that an astrologer point you to a book to prove the argument. Or somebody religious point you to the bible when he’s arguing the existence of God. Or says you can’t debate Christianity until you’ve read acquinas. Or Mormonism until you’ve read the book or Mormon.
...in your personal opinion, and I am skeptical that "an author supports something which I disagree with" is sufficient justification for censorship.
The question, of course, is: not a good system compared to what? I've not had time to read the whole thing, but from a quick skim, he brings up instances where the alternative is clearly worse by any humane measure (and cites citizens of former colonies wishing to have the former colonists back in charge). And of course, not all colonial powers were identical in their policies. It is absurd to think that colonialism was *entirely* negative in its effects, meaning that reasonable people ought to be willing to participate in a good faith cost-benefit analysis.
At any rate, I'd suggest that *you* should at least give it a fair hearing before declaring that it should be unavailable, on the basis that one should never call for the censorship of a text that one has not personally read, lest people be led by a mob into silencing voices who are telling us something we would be better off having heard. And yes, I'm aware that the fact that this link exists is proof that it has not been fully censored from the web, but given the profound illiberal turn that many on the political left have taken in recent years, I don't think anyone who values freedom of expression can afford to be complacent in condemning censoriousness.
Very well*. But that still doesn't answer the point that Gilley is making, which is that some versions of colonialism have had obvious positives as well as negatives for the colonised territories, and that in some cases the anticolonial voices are ignoring those positives in their attempt to paint the colonial powers as purely bad. If you think he is wrong, you are welcome to address his errors, but if you think that he should be silenced simply for making the argument, then (a) you don't have any reasonable grounds for complaint if Scott excludes you from his comment section, and (b) once we accept that whoever manages to seize control of the means of censorship should get to silence anyone they disagree with, we end up with a bloody struggle for control of the means of censorship (which optimises not for "who has the most correct ideas" but for "who is best at winning a bloody struggle") *and* create widespread resentment among the segments of society whose views are now banned from the public square.
* Okay, fine, I'll address that as well. I was just using 'illiberal' in the everday colloquial sense that is roughly synonymous with 'authoritarian' with a side dish of 'censorious'. But you say that "liberalism is fundamentally incorrect", which sounds like you are claiming that liberalism is fundamentally merely a collection of *factual claims*, rather than a collection of values that optimise for some set of outcomes, as opposed to other political philosophies that optimise for some other outcomes.
Insofar as optimising too relentlessly for any one value means that you forgo the benefit of all the others, then sure, optimising for absolute maximum liberalism will mean you miss out on something worth having, but so will optimising for maximum any-other-political-philosophy, so it is not clear in what sense liberalism is fundamentally incorrect in a way that includes the possibility of some other political philosophy being fundamentally correct.
"Authoritarian" is an essentially nonsense category as liberals use it. Liberalism is authoritarian, it's all about the authority of the capitalist class.
They didn't "realise their publishing standards might be a bit low". They said nothing about changing their standards. Threats of violence from, say, ISIS, on other papers might have the same effect.
While I might be inclined to agree with you on colonialism, I disagree on the methods. A paper should be rejected because it's wrong or badly done, not because the editor was threatened with leg-breaking.
Yeah, I think this gets into how the words "jealousy" and "envy" used to have separate meanings: envious meant "wanting something someone else has" and jealous meant "being protective of what you have", and particularly 'jealous' generally had a connotation of marital faithfulness.
... but nowadays they're basically used as synonyms that muddies the water. I think when someone says "you wouldn't be jealous if your friends had other friends" they're probably trying to invoke the old meaning of jealous, while the study is probably more measuring the modern meaning of envy.
I have known several poly people who do feel jealousy, although others who don't. The ones who do feel jealousy and yet stay in open relationships generally think that their jealousy is something like a vice, or a flaw that they need to handle and work around, without imposing their jealousy on their partners. You can't argue yourself out of an emotion, but you can choose how that emotion affects your behavior.
I strongly suspect that the claimed absence of a feeling of jealousy or the anti-jealousy feeling of "compersion" are exaggerated if not entirely false.
I don't have data, nor does anyone else, but it certainly seems from what I've seen in person and read about (from poly advocates, not detractors) their relationships explode in exactly the way one would expect from a situation where the parties involved are unsuccessfully suppressing sexual jealousy. The longest-lasting open marriages seem to be the ones which directly address jealousy, with ground rules to prevent male sexual jealousy ("one penis policy") and/or formally elevate the status of the wife over mistresses to prevent female romantic jealousy. This makes sense, as both seem universal in foreign cultures which tolerate extramarital sex.
Here's an interesting genetics potential: Through Ancestry.com, I recently made contact with relatives on my mom's mom's side of the family which we'd never had any social contact with. Like me, a large percentage of them turned out to be polyamorous. Is there a "jealousy" gene that we're all lacking?
Yes but also no. That is, everything is heritable, but also everything is polygenic (and often highly so).
(Stated as a casual generalization for those of the audience compelled to 'technical' correctness - yes, cystic fibrosis is monogenic, and you can construct a hypothetical with zero heritability.) .
"If someone said "You wouldn't be jealous if your friend had other friends", I can't imagine someone saying "You're right. This emotion of jealousy has ceased" To me, it does not seem like something that can just go away."
If the friend in common was always "oh sorry, I can't hang out with you, me and New Friend have plans" or "yeah, I know I promised we'd all go to that new movie together, but New Friend already saw it" and so on, I think pretty soon someone might feel that they were being replaced as a friend and that the friendship was under threat. Being jealous in return seems like a natural conclusion.
"24: Related: In addition to all the usual reasons, studies with unwoke conclusions are now being removed from journals because people make “serious and credible threats of personal violence” against the editors of journal editors who keep them up."
But Scott, you have also previously censored by posts on this blog for coming to some very politically inconvenient conclusions. It seems weird that you complain about this while also censoring voices on the left such as mine.
I'm unsure what you are talking about. I have previously been censored on this blog for coming to politically incorrect conclusions. I have not threatened any violence.
And yet Scott has been threatened, not just for what he posts but what he allows to be posted in his comment sections and loosely-affiliated subreddits. "Scott is not a free speech absolutist because people kept trying to get him fired over internet drama" is a well-documented phenomenon that does not seem weird at all.
I do not "feel" that I was censored, I have previously been banned from SSC comments for pointing out that one of Scott Alexander's buddies had deliberately misquoted Marx.
And no, that's not what I was implying. I was making the observation that certain conclusions will get you censored from from the SSC community.
His best claim was that DF's correct quote of Marx didn't capture some small meaning that he believed was different. Not only did he *not* justify this claim, he simply repeatedly hurled accusations at DF, including a claim that he didn't know what ellipses were. Not once in any of this was there *any* evidence that DF "misquoted Marx", much less that he did so "deliberately".
So, now we just turn it back to marxbro. Why are you lying about what happened? Why do you consistently lie about what happened and what you have done and said in the past? It seems weird that you complain about Scott when you constantly lie all the time about him.
Friedman didn't use ellipses in 2 out of the 5 places they would be required. Also he cut out important information that changes the meaning of the sentence, which you are not supposed to do when quoting and using ellipses.
I provided evidence for these claims that are easily confirmed if you simply read the two texts in question.
Personally I think Friedman knows perfectly well what ellipses are and is simply lying.
Personally, I think Friedman doesn't know how the markup makes blockquoting appear. He even explicitly conceded: "I will concede, however, that I didn’t bother to put ellipses between separate paragraphs, just within paragraphs to mark elisions." You ignored this in order to continue ranting at the sky, and now are lying about what happened.
You simply lied in claiming that you got banned for showing that he "deliberately" misquoted Marx. DF is a suspected liar (by you), but you're now a proven liar. Why are you lying about what happened? Why do you consistently lie about what happened and what you have done and said in the past? It seems weird that you complain about Scott when you constantly lie all the time about him.
There should be ellipses between the paragraphs or some sort of indication that these quotes are from a number of different pages. David Friedman provides no such thing because "he didn't bother". If "I didn't bother" is a good excuse for intellectual fraud, well, I think the standards of the Rationalist community have slipped so low as to be laughable.
None of this addresses the fact that Friedman erases Marx's actual examples of "middle class" positions, which misleads the modern reader who is not used to the Marxist analysis of class.
Again, deleting important information which changes the meaning of a passage is not something you should do when using ellipses. This could not have been done without some forethought - this is the smoking gun that proved Friedman lied.
Yes, but the experience of "hey, lots of unrelated people all across the ideological spectrum are telling me that my behavior here is inappropriate/annoying/etc" ought to raise your prior on "maybe my behavior should change" a little and lower your prior on "I'm being censored for my views".
Scott is open about his moderation policy, which involves censoring people. Admittedly, he frames it as a manner of approach to that polite expressions of potentially offensive ideas are permissible.
I don't see why people are aiming to change my human nature. I've pointed out many errors in Scott's reasoning and that seems to be a valuable contribution.
I'm sorry, I should have been more specific: As a fellow lefty, I can tell you that people censor/ignore/remove you because they believe that you are annoying, not because you are leftist
""Annoying" is a completely subjective assessment"
...is true only to the limited extent that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is true. That is, if most people individually find your commenting style annoying, then it is reasonable to round that off, in colloquial speech, to "you are annoying", even if there are some who find you non-annoying, just as, if we can look at, say, five women and generally predict that if you polled a large number of men, one of them would be judged most beautiful by a large majority, we can colloquially call her beautiful even if there are some who are not particularly attracted to her.
Your commenting style here tends to come off as aggressive and very much having an axe to grind, so it would not surprise me at all if you are being banned from the comment section not because you are making good points that no one can answer, but because you are making points in an abrasive manner that tends to raise people's blood pressure unnecessarily.
I mean, I was using the phrase in the colloquial metaphorical sense. I could equally have phrased it "you are making points in an abrasive manner that tends to piss people off unnecessarily", but whatever.
Though, to take your claim at face value, I am not a doctor, but I was under the impression that being angered tends to cause a rise in blood pressure *regardless* of one's underlying levels of health. You seem to be implying that it has that effect only on people who already had an unhealthily high resting blood pressure level. That would certainly be a surprise, but I would need to defer to the knowledge of the medically informed among us: does anger cause a spike in blood pressure even among the healthiest people?
No, actually my enjoyment at this point is so diminished that once I find that he's participating in the comments it removes most of my desire to continue reading them at all.
I'm sorry if this comes across as rude, but I struggle to understand why you think that the reason people dislike your contributions is your political viewpoint. You've recieved many replies, both previously and in this thread, which said the opposite of that. It seems obtuse to disregard them.
I think the most straightforward and likely explanation is that marxbro is simply a deliberate troll. Obviously there's a degree of Poe's Law involved, but on the whole I think his participation makes more sense in the context of someone being deliberately obnoxious than someone actually trying to convince others of a point.
I'd be a lot more excited to read your comments if half of them weren't trying to get one over on Scott for things that happened long before I started commenting here.
Your posting in the "death threat" comment tree above is you posting ideology, which is interesting and worth having around. In this comment tree, though, your posting is entirely combative and has very little substance - communist or otherwise.
If you stick to the former, people will get less irritated by your presence.
Things that happened "long before" your appearance here still have relevance. This are some very easy mistakes that the Rationalist community are making, yet they never get fixed no-matter how often I point them out.
The only way I can read threads that marxbro is "participating" in, is to read every *other* comment (I keep bro's out of my fovea). Sometimes it's worth it...
Re Greenwald and gassing the park: The IG report which Greenwald is relying on states that USPP did this at the direction of the Secret Service ,but the report also explicitly states that it did not interview any Secret Service personnel.
Agreed. But even more nefariously, Greenwald is a clever guy who's whole schtick is convincing you that everyone is lying to you. It's actually REALLY easy for intelligent people to think they are somehow above getting conned by it.
Yes, it is very important that people not start to wonder whether the FBI was behind January 6th plotting like they were behind so many terrorism plots that they prosecuted, and apparently the Whitmer kidnapping plot too. We can't have people suspect that our national security apparatus is helping develop the threats it is supposed to defend us against.
The claim by Greenwald (not necessarily by Michael P) is that the FBI planned the terrorist plots to entrap potential terrorists and arrest them, not so that the plots actually take place. There's a least a kernel of truth to this, in that FBI agents did help terrorists make progress with their plots. From Wikipedia's article on the Whitmer kidnapping plot:
"The third vehicle, which was also occupied by an undercover agent, was tasked with monitoring for any followers or suspicious activity in the area. On the way back to Garbin's property, the group discussed abandoning the kidnapping plan and instead destroying the vacation home entirely.[53]"
"an undercover agent told Fox [a conspirator] that the explosives necessary for destroying the bridge would cost about $4,000"
"Fox ordered the explosives from the undercover agent that same day."
That wouldn't be a problem: everyone really is lying to, including Greenwald, and me. The problem is that he convinces you that everyone is lying to you, except him. (tongue slightly in cheek)
Yeah. Scott unfortunately has a habit of being over generous to things that go against the mainstream consensus. Which sometimes leads to interesting areas, but often leaves him flat out wrong.
It's both more and less complicated than that, but perhaps the most interesting bit starts on page 15:
>At approximately 6:16 p.m., contrary to the operational plan and before the USPP gave the first dispersal warning, the Secret Service entered H Street from Madison Place. The USPP civil disturbance unit commanders told us that the Secret Service met significant resistance from the crowd and protesters threw water bottles and eggs at the officers. USPP video we reviewed confirmed this account and showed the Secret Service responding by deploying pepper spray. The Secret Service retreated closer to the construction fence on H Street in front of Madison Place and ultimately cleared and secured the area in front of the gate onto H Street from Madison Place (see Figure 8). A USPP civil disturbance commander told us and USPP video we reviewed showed that the Secret Service’s early deployment drew additional protesters to the east end of
H Street, increasing tensions between law enforcement and the protesters. The USPP and ACPD civil disturbance unit commanders told us they were surprised when they saw the Secret Service enter H Street before the USPP had given any dispersal warning, but they said they did not follow the Secret Service onto H Street at that time.
>The USPP civil disturbance unit commander, the USPP operations commander, and the USPP incident commander all told us that the Secret Service lieutenant later apologized for the early entry onto H Street during the operation but did not explain why it occurred. The USPP officers we interviewed did not know why the Secret Service entered H Street before the USPP gave the first dispersal warning. Some speculated it occurred because of miscommunication between a Secret Service supervisor and his officers near the gate area. Others guessed it could have occurred because the USPP and the Secret Service did not have a shared radio channel and had no way of intercepting and resolving conflicting radio communications. The USPP acting chief of police, USPP incident commander, and USPP operations commander all told us they had no reason to believe that the Attorney General's visit to the park at 6: 10 p.m. influenced the Secret Service's early deployment.
The Secret Service jumped the gun, and apparently it isn't worth asking them why. We're left with "some speculated" and "others guessed". That portrays any claim like "we found no evidence that..." in a significantly different light.
See also page 17:
>Contrary to the operational plan, the USPP and ACPD civil disturbance units deployed onto H Street approximately 1 minute before the USPP incident commander completed the third dispersal warning. USPP video evidence showed that after the second warning, a USPP civil disturbance unit commander transmitted over his radio that the Secret Service and the civil disturbance units were ready and waiting on the “go-ahead.” The USPP incident commander responded that he would give the third warning and then head to their location in a couple of minutes. The USPP civil disturbance unit commander replied that it was getting “a little hairy over here” and that the Secret Service was already “out there.” The USPP incident commander told us he could not recall whether he planned to order the civil disturbance units to deploy over the radio or if he intended to walk to their location and issue the order. He told us the plan was “thrown off a little bit” when the Secret Service deployed early.
Oh, it is worth asking the Secret Service why they jumped the gun, at least in my opinion. But that would be a different Inspector General's area of responsibility.
Regardless, "the Secret Service deployed [slightly] early for unknown reasons" is very different from the original claim of "USPP did this at the direction of the Secret Service".
> Regardless, "the Secret Service deployed [slightly] early for unknown reasons" is very different from the original claim of "USPP did this at the direction of the Secret Service".
What "this" are you concerned about? There is a question about who was in charge of general law enforcement responses to the multiple protests in DC, and the answer there is as clear as is typical for any DC law enforcement organization question. As far as the USPP is concerned though, they were operating as part of a joint command with USSS.
There is a very different question, where "this" refers to the clearing of a protest ahead of the established schedule, without adequately informing the protestors that they were to be forcibly removed, and with a level of violence specifically exceeding what the USPP had authorized. The IG report is fairly consistent that such was instigated by USSS decisions on the ground, with other responses - notably including MPD's use of CS gas - coming as a result of the subsequent escalation.
Maybe you're operating in an environment where the first question seems more salient. I don't think too many others are.
> Oh, it is worth asking the Secret Service why they jumped the gun, at least in my opinion. But that would be a different Inspector General's area of responsibility.
If this report was never meant to investigate the cause of events or actions beyond USPP's involvement, then it is very strange that some - Scott included - seem to have taken it as dispositive. What do you think their error was?
The comment I was quoting apparently had "gassing the park" as the antecedent of "this". As the IG report makes clear, neither the USPP not the Secret Service did that at all. I think the more charitable reading is to take "clearing protesters from the park" as what those agencies did, because the narrative that Greenwald was concerned with was the alleged rationale for doing that.
Maybe you think that the important thing is whether that happened on time, versus starting 5 or 10 minutes early, but you work awfully hard to imagine that every problem in clearing rioters from the park traces to the timing. Contrary to your son, the IG report is not "consistent" about any of the things you claimed. For example, the report is very clear that MPD was briefed on the operation to clear Lafayette Park but was not part of it in any way. It attributes the use of CS gas by MPD to violence by the rioters against MPD officers after the park was cleared, not to "subsequent escalation". You invented that attribution. The report is also clear that none of the agencies supporting the operation used CS gas, that the Secret Service did not start clearing the park before the dispersal warnings, and that the Secret Service deployed only 5 minutes before the first warning, 10 minutes before the final warning, and that the timing was not affected by the Secret Service deploying.
The error is yours, in thinking that a bounded inquiry cannot be comprehensive enough to dispel the factually wrong narratives of why the park was cleared and who used CS gas and similar crowd control agents.
I don't think you realize how little of this factually disagrees with anything that's been said. Your "charitable reading" still isn't engaging with the basic argument as multiple people have laid out here, and you've sliced the events into ad-hoc categories to try and dismiss imagined nitpicks in detail. I think we're done here.
> It attributes the use of CS gas by MPD to violence by the rioters against MPD officers after the park was cleared, not to "subsequent escalation".
But this line in particular made me laugh, so there's that.
What other replies? There are some conspiracy hypotheses and tinfoil hat nonsense like the idea that the guy who broke Snowden's leaks is gaslighting everyone.
Providing something more detailed seems entirely appropriate.
Re 6 'Also, standard disclaimer that this was done in Scandinavia where poverty works differently.' - yep those Finns are pretty weird but they're still not in Scandinavia - see corrections on last week's post and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia or ask any Finn, (or Swede, Dane or Norwegian, though they may be too cool to care).
If it helps, I used to think Oakland was in San Francisco, but it turns out there's some water in between. Well, the Baltic Sea is bigger than your Bay, plus a whole different language - Finnish 😁
Hmmm - successful middle-aged suicide - is that really something to be proud of? I did 23andme the other day and turns out I'm exactly 25% Ashkenazi - my mum's dad who escaped the Nazis, became an engineer in Cambridge but died when she was 3 we don't know why. I'm still waiting to see what cool weird features I might have...
Apparently Scott’s usage is common in English (the wiki article you linked had a large section on what people mean by Nordic and Scandinavian depending on who is speaking I found interesting). However, since the Nordic residents themselves tend to prefer Nordic for the larger group and Scandinavian for the narrower group that you mentioned (Sweden, Norway, and Denmark) I’m inclined to match their usage.
As an aside from someone who has lived in the Bay Area, I wouldn’t really knock anyone for calling the whole region “San Francisco”. I sometimes used that descriptor when traveling outside the US.
Frankly, as a Finn, I don't tend to get too worked up if someone calls Finland Scandinavia. I mean, it's wrong and all, but I get where they come from. It's usually Scandinavians who get more upset about this than Finns.
The Wikipedia article you link to seems to confirm that there are many different definitions of Scandinavia, in English the term is often used to refer to what might be more accurately termed "the Nordic Countries" (although Finland is still a bit of an outlier). Note the Denmark is also on the other side of the Baltic from the Scandinavian peninsula, albeit a lot closer!
Your link contradicts you... but the Finnish page agrees (going by the map) https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandinavia, while the Norwegian page isn't obvious to someone using google translate, but generally seems to think finland is Scandinavian. The Swedish page seems to think not, and even says (google translate):
"In English, the concept of the Nordic Countries has not had a major impact, and English-speaking historians, political scientists and other researchers have included Finland in Scandinavia because Finland has a very long history with Sweden."
The Norwegian page does *not* include Finland, it only claims that in non-Scandinavian countries, the term is often used (wrongly) synonymously with the "Nordic countries" (Norden).
"Normal people don’t notice that truth is just true+th, or depth is deep+th, or that horror is related to horrify? I had never even considered the possibility that people might not notice these things. Is the Language Log author crazy, or am I?"
You'd be shocked. Generally, I was surprised what my English native speaker linguist friend hadn't grokked (about English), and she was likewise surprised about some stuff I hadn't realized about my native language (that she was learning at the time).
I think generally stress shifts can do a lot to confound a native speaker (as well as vowel changes I guess). So maybe not exactly true/truth, but the rest of them...
Maybe I was thinking of Terror -> Terrific -> Terrible as having very different connotations these days. Anyway, watching Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. Got me thinking about this.
I love linguistics and etymology and word roots, and have done for at least 30 years. But there was an example along the lines of true->truth which I was only pointed out to me last year and I was shocked to discover I'd never realised before. I think it was "slow"->"sloth" (as in the deadly sin).
Oh wow, I had never noticed that one! I've just been trying to figure out whether "cold" is historically "cool+th" with parallel vowel and consonant shifts to what happened in "breadth" and "height".
Looking at etymologies on Wiktionary, the "col-" root is indeed related to "cool" but the "-d" suffix doesn't seem related to "-th" (the former was PIE *-tó-s, the latter *-iteh₂).
In Re: Graeber. As noted in the comments (yes) of the article, his claim was that the jobs *are* bullshit, not that the specific individuals think that they are (perhaps due to high prescription rates of drugs causing 5-HT1AR-mediated passive coping...?). This study misread his book.
I was thinking along these lines as well. If someone asked me - even a researcher - whether I thought my job was BS, I'd likely say no; after all who wants to tarnish your own sense of self-worth especially if you've dedicated a substantial portion of your life doing said work? But I do realize my job is BS and isn't improving life here on Earth even if I won't tell that to a stranger.
Jobs are often part-time bullshit. If you spend half your time developing a medical device (senseful), you spend the other half writing documents to make the FDA happy (bullshit).
Yes, it would seem more appropriate to grade the percentage of time you spend at the workplace which is wasted. Very few jobs would score an outright 100 I'd guess, over 50 - much much more.
The problem with that metric would be that e.g. firefighters or active duty military personnel would be dinged massively. Their actual job comprises less than 10%, maybe even less than 1%, of the time they spend on the job.
A lot of jobs, including critical blue-collar jobs like security or HVAC techs, are preventative in nature. Most of the time you're on the clock you're not doing much but when a problem comes up your employer is going to be really really glad they paid to have someone on-site to deal with it. The alternative can be orders of magnitude more expensive.
Yeah, but his attempts to prove his claim rely a whole lot on specific individuals thinking that their jobs are bullshit. That's why good half of the book is dedicated to personal stories of people that mailed to him.
If you remove that part, his claim look very weak.
Doesn't that just point to the fact that these people who wrote the personal stories were in fact more self-realized than the people who are passively accepting that they are being "compensated for their time" rather than working on or with something worthwhile to humanity or the human condition? For me, this goes back to "Shop Class as Soulcraft" from like 20 years ago. As somebody who neither has nor makes any money it's no longer a motivator at my age, so there is no way that I would dig holes and fill them in again or stand all day in a bucket of shit despite being 'well compensated for my time'.
That's one interpretation. Another interpretation is that the people who wrote these personal stories are experiencing some kind of modernist anomie that has alienated them from the truth that the other people are better at interpreting (i.e., that the job has value, though it is value that their experience is somewhat removed from).
I think it's quite plausible that before we decide which group of people has the more authentic view of their life, we might want to gather meaningful statistics on how big this groups are, and who they are, so that we can theorize about this in a bit more of a grounded way.
There's a massive distribution on what anyone considers 'bullshit', so they will all seem viable in the right context. I have never worked a job that didn't contain some % of work that was bullshit (unnecessary, serving no purpose). The problem with a term like 'bullshit' is it has many, many interpretations, which is why this survey sucks - that ~10% refuse collectors think their work is 'bullshit' is more likely to be 'my job sucks and my boss is a dick' than 'my work offers no social value'.
But what you define as 'bullshit' is totally coloured by what you think your society should be prioritising. I think the argument is more about work's function in society and how time gets spent in the workplace than about narrowly defining whether telemarketing is bullshit or not.
1. The story is about Rutgers *Law School*, not Rutgers University. (This was personally a relief to me; I would be much more concerned if this was happening at Rutgers University, which has about 70,000 students (the law school has ~1,000).)
2. The rule was that any student org requesting funding must "plan at least one (1) event that addresses their chosen topics through the lens of Critical Race Theory, diversity and inclusion, or cultural competency." So groups could get away with doing a diversity-and-inclusion thing instead of a CRT thing. Obviously still not great, but IMO less scary than if it had to be specifically CRT.
I also came to the comments for this. The phrasing on 23 is overstated -- the mandate would have applied to fewer people than implied, and would have been less strictly CRT-related than implied.
"Death" on the internet is a little fuzzier where users can simply vanish without anyone knowing why, but since Q stopped posting last year, I think this means it's technically no longer a cult.
Author here - This is probably a pretty good definition, but there are also many cases where a new charismatic leader takes over and the group still stays very culty. This is why I didn't really include any analysis of how long cults existed or if they still do today, the end of cult gets very murky...
Yes, I was going to make a similar comment. I came of age in the 80s, when accusations of various cults kidnapping and brainwashing people (and the necessary subsequent "deprogramming" of former cult members) was still very much in the news (and in novels, and movies, etc.) I bought all of it, of course; so did most everyone else. The current sad state of the media, though, is making me rethink this. It may be possible that most of these cults weren't made up of wild-eyed charismatic leaders brainwashing the spiritually adrift. That might have just been Manson and Jim Jones. The rest were probably just somewhere along the Christianity to hippy-dippy spectrum.
Re 20, on how weirdly long it took to optimize 3 point shooting. I've certainly wondered the same thing, but one hypothesis is that defensive rules in the 90s and early 00s were what made 3 point shooting relatively less valuable.
1. Hand checking meant the defense could maul smaller players much more, making it harder for them to get open
2. The requirement on playing man-to-man defense prevented defenders from sagging off their man on the three point lines, both making it easier for the shooter to blow by them and get an easy 2, and also meant that they were covered much more tightly even when far out.
I'm unclear how much this explains, but it is baffling otherwise.
This is definitely accurate. Changes to rules in defense made the 3-point shot more profitable, but also increased the value of guards in general, and they're more likely to be good perimeter shooters.
The other thing, though, is that an efficient market hypothesis isn't trying to say a market is accurately and rationally allocating every good at all times. That depends on liquidity. The NBA only has 30 teams, the GMs and players alike tend to have large buyouts in their contracts, on the player side removing a player doesn't mean you necessarily free up all the cap space. There's a whole lot of friction preventing quick change. These types of innovations tend to be seen at the college level instead, where there are many more teams and the players rotate through much more quickly. But they didn't percolate up to the NBA for a long time because the NCAA allowed zone defense but the NBA didn't. Once the NBA started allowing a zone, it made a lot more sense for NBA coaches to adopt strategies they saw work at the college level.
Something else, though, is winning an actual championship is hard. Only one team a year can do it, and it often ends up being dictated by who is healthiest by the end of the season. The 7 seconds or less Suns of Mike D'Antoni started the current three-point happy era, and the Daryl Morey Rockets after hiring D'Antoni perfected the approach, but neither team ever even made a finals, usually thwarted by old stalwarts like the Lakers and Spurs with a much more traditional do-it-all wing combined with a talented post player, or the Heat with their superteam centered on explosive players who drive and score at the basket.
The only team to actually win with this three-point happy strategy has been the Warriors, but I would argue that the strategy isn't why they won. The NBA is much more star-driven then other sports leagues because only five men are on the court at a time for one team, so individual players make a much larger impact. The Warriors won because they were able to retain a generational talent at an extreme discount because he happened to have early injury concerns around his ankles right around the time he came up for his first shot at a post-rookie scale big contract. Locking him up cheaply allowed them to assemble way more stars than is normally feasible given the constraints of the salary cap.
Think about what happened to the Portland Trailblazers. They had the same thing happen with Greg Oden, except he didn't recover, it ended his career, and they tanked. If he had been injured earlier, they'd have drafted Kevin Durant instead, and now they're possibly a dominant dynasty franchise of the last 15 years. If Curry had actually had to retire, the Warriors never get anywhere. That may have purely been a matter of timing, like medical technology for top athletes has seemed to get a lot better really quickly in the past 15 years.
D'Antoni's Suns didn't make the finals, but then Van Gundy's Magic did, and then Mavericks won it all, using their 3-point shooting to humiliate the stalwart champions Lakers in the process. (At that point, the stalwarts started noticing something's up and 3-point usage started growing league-wide.) Warriors' are not an outlier in this tale, they're just another step in the steady progression of 3-point success stories. (The final one, perhaps, now that everyone got the memo and there's less (no?) inefficiency to exploit.)
One other point is that up until the 21st century, US sports were defined by orthodox thinking. US pro sports leagues have about 30 teams, and they don't change ownership often. They generally agreed to only hire insiders who built their careers on orthodox lines of thinking, and you got status by winning "the right way." Mediocre results didn't get you booted out of the guild right away, but preaching heresy did. The "Moneyball" Oakland A's were the first really notorious defectors, and when that book became a smash hit everyone wanted to be seen as innovative. You can draw a straight line from them to the current Houston Astros, who defected as much as possible up until they got sanctioned for violating an ambiguous rule that many other teams also violated in a less flagrant manner. The 3 point shooting trend is simply another instance of innovation replacing orthodoxy once it becomes acceptable to be innovative.
23: The Rutgers thing is crazy! In college I ran a club where we tutored ELL elementary school students, at their school. We didn't have events beyond taking the kids to a park or doing arts and crafts once a semester. Should we have held events promoting critical race theory? What.
31: Can confirm, I've always been jealous of my friends' other friends. I'm still poly though, so.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think there would be a substantial difference between the craziness off doing an CRT event with elementary schoolers vs law school students. (also as a comments elsewere note you were also allowed to o a generic "inclusivity" event instead)
It doesn't seem weird that you might, for example, have a 30-minute internal discussion with your members about how poor/minority students might face different challenges or have different cultural competencies, and how you might slightly tailor your mentoring to help them more precisely in light of this. This actually seems like a reasonably good idea that would improve the quality of service your group provided, and afaict would have satisfied the very vague, broad mandate from the school.
Re 10: post factum this does not seem surprising: after all, object recognition happens in temporal lobe, while visual cortices process low-level features. And when I imagine something, I imagine an object rather than separate lines or blobs of colour.
In fact, it's hard for me to imagine all the lines clearly. I wonder if painters, who are trained to pay more attention to small visual details, activate their visual cortices more than non-painters when imagining things
“21: Claim: despite its pro-sex-worker image, Sweden actually persecutes sex workers plenty, they just find stupider ways to do it. EG if you (a sex worker) pay half the rent for your two-person apartment, they can arrest your roommate for “profiting from sex work”. Or they can arrest your landlord for the same.”
…Sure they can. But it is not stupid behaviour. Remember it is Swedes you are talking about: the most rational people in the world. It is 100 per cent rational behaviour, if you accept the underlying world view.
…Which is a big if of course, but that’s the case with regard to any rational behaviour – it is only rational relative to some overarching worldview.
So what is the worldview of Swedish legislators?
The worldview is that all sex workers are victims of oppression.
….That not all of them agree with this (including the Swedish sex worker whose rant you link to) is noticed, but not given a large weight. Not all US slaves perceived themselves as oppressed either, right?
You do not legally pursue and punish victims. Therefore, it is not illegal to sell sex in Sweden, and in other countries with similar legislation. The Swedes are not liberal in the sense of “celebrating” sex work; they just do not want to punish victims.
For the record: This legislation is in the process of diffusing worldwide. Sweden is historically known as an important innovator of social legislation more generally. My prediction is that this will happen here as well.
Where there are victims, there are perpetrators. They come in two types: Pimps and customers. Both are regarded as oppressors in this world view.
And you punish oppressors.
That is why both pimping and buying sex is illegal in Sweden.
Making it illegal to buy sex, obviously reduces the market. (I am fairly certain it is illegal for a Swedish citizen to buy sex also outside Sweden, even if it is legal in the country – say the Netherlands – where he/she buys sex. I.e. the customer can be legally pursued in Sweden if this is discovered.)
Then for the main point: how do define “pimping”?
The Swedes go for what can be labelled “the extended pimping-concept”.
Meaning that anyone, and I mean anyone, who earns money interacting with a sex worker, is legally speaking a pimp.
…That is why a landlord, or a boy/girlfriend, or a bank handling the bank account a sex worker, etc. etc., risks being persecuted as a pimp. And therefore all of these – again, very rationally! – try to avoid dealing with sex workers. Which again limits the ability of sex workers to ply their trade.
The combined effect of the above is to keep sex work at a much lower level than it would otherwise be. Furthermore – and this is the beauty & the point of the policy – it is done without having to pursue or punish the sex workers themselves.
In short, it is an anti-oppressive way to deter sex work.
Calling it "stupid" is pretty accurate in my book. It's a lot like lethal injection - still has all the benefits and downsides of the guillotine, it just looks prettier.
I'm not sure whether your last sentence was meant to be sarcastic or not, but if it was serious: if I make it illegal to sell food to someone, I'm pretty sure I am in fact an oppressor.
I hope the last line is sarcasm, too. Their legislation does punish sex workers -- they struggle to purchase housing, have romantic partners, keep a bank account, and a lot of other things the average person takes for granted.
I'm probably stating the obvious here, but an important point is that the aim of the Swedish legislators is to suppress all sex work. Doing this through punishing sex workers directly will harm people that are forced into the profession. Doing it indirectly will harm those who are doing sex work by choise proportionally more. It looks like a lot of commentators here are of the opinion that voluntary sex work is a plus for society, but this is not what the legislators thought. I don't know why Sweden still has a reputation as a free-sex society just because some Swedish actresses appeared naked on the screen in the sixties!
…if I was serious or ironic in my defence of the ”Swedish approach” to sex work?
Both, actually. Scott A’s post was a bit flippant, so I wanted to reply in the same lighthearted way.
However, magic mushroom & j.m.e (and others), if you want a serious discussion, let me start by saying of course no-one in Sweden, or anywhere else, believe all sex workers are victims. In reality some are, and some arent’t.
The happy hooker - stereotype is not a total myth, but neither is the borderline psychiatric case with a child abuse backstory and father issues. Most fall in-between; plus they have good days and bad days.
The majority in most populations (and thus the median voter) do not like sex work, but for different reasons. Christians & conservatives for obvious reasons; Marxists also for obvious reasons (“sex work is an example of how capitalism commodifies everything, even love”), Romantics because sex work reminds them that sex can be cold an impersonal, which they hate; and people like me because sex work has negative externalities for everyone else.
Negative externalities, how so? Well, if you are a young, intellectual male who has not yet had any children, i.e. if you are a stereotype libertarian, you may not see it. But believe me, when you get children your “protector gene” switches from off to on, and you start to worry about the social and physical environment you child grows up in. In particular if you have sons. (I could elaborate, but you probably see where I am going.)
However, if you want to curb sex work, you have a problem with simply making it illegal. The problem is that some sex workers (again, not all) are really victims of circumstances beyond their control. And you do not want to kick those who are laying down. So what do you do instead?
You choose the Swedish solution. Keep sex work legal, but punish everybody on both sides of sex workers; those who benefit (“pimps” broadly defined) and customers. That way, you curb sex work without pushing those who need compassion, further down into the dirt.
As far as the happy, resource-rich sex worker is concerned: Find something else to do. You have the resources to do it.
Politically, it is a case of what John Rawls would call overlapping consensus. A broad coalition of very strange political bedfellows pushed through the Swedish legislation.
Which is my final point: This broad coalition probably exists in most countries. The only ones who are really opposed, plus dare to say so loud, are the organisations of sex workers themselves, plus dyed-in-the-wool (mostly young/childless) libertarians – and they are max 20 percent of the electorate.
That is why I am predicting the “Swedish solution” will come soon, to a country near you.
Another obvious source of support for curbing sex work is non-prostitute women whom it competes with. Just like taxi drivers hate Uber, long-term renters hate AirBnB, and anglers hate cormorants.
And another obvious source of opposition, beyond sex workers and libertarians, are men who patronize prostitutes, or want to retain the option to do so.
I don't see where you are going with the existence of sex work being a problem for parents with sons. As you observed, it doesn't bother young guys, so why should it bother our dads?
It's not always socially acceptable to publically come out and say "I pay women for sex", so clients are not the best advocates. Consensus seems to be that they're either sleazy or pathetic.
For the second point, if you have an ideological opposition to sex work and you're childless, you may be inclined to adopt a "live and let live" approach - nobody's forcing you to pay for sex. However, if you become a parent you may become more concerned about making it difficult and socially unacceptable for your son to hire sex workers (and even more concerned about your daughter becoming one) - I think most people hold those they love to a higher moral standard than the general population, because they take transgressions personally.
Clients don't make good vocal advocates by admitting they are clients. But they vote, so politicians have an incentive to take their preferences into account. They can also advocate for legalization without admitting that they are clients, e.g. appealing to freedom.
>That way, you curb sex work without pushing those who need compassion, further down into the dirt.
Superficially, maybe. In practice, no, because of the aforementioned "banning people from selling X a life-critical service" (i.e. "X is now dependent on criminals to survive") - this is particularly an issue because once a lady is known as a prostitute she won't exactly be able to convince a landlord otherwise.
Are you predicting this "solution" only for places that currently have a full ban (e.g. US except Nevada), or for places that currently have fully-legal prostitution?
There are two debates here, let's keep them separate:
a) Is the Swedish solution likely to attract a majority of voters/a winning coalition in many/most countries?
b) Would it be a good thing if it did?
The first is an empirical question, where we may arrive at an answer. The second is a normative question, where we could discuss till the end of days.
Concerning the first question: Based on good old diffusion theory, I believe this Swedish innovation is likely to spread, since I believe a broad overlapping consensus-coalition can be mobilized for this reform in many countries. (Just as another Swedish social innovation has spread: Its prohibition against corporal punishment of children by parents (1979), which by now has diffused to 78 of the world's 192 states.)
But do not take my word for it. Here is the diffusion so far:
Sex buyer law, Swedish model; Innovated by Sweden (1999). Early adopters: Norway (2009) Iceland (2009) Canada (2014) Northern Ireland (2015) France (2016) Ireland (2017) Israel (2018).
Maybe Nevada will be a laggard, we'll see...
Concerning the normative question, question b): It is not a black-and-white thing. You can launch arguments against the Swedish approach, and not only libertarian ones.
The main losers are not sex workers themselves, but men who for various reasons cannot get laid without paying for it. Pornography is now their only outlet. They cannot even travel to Thailand any more, without risking legal action back home.
The Danes, who are more similar to the Amsterdam-Dutch than to Swedes, some years ago had an arrangement where social workers could connect people with severe disabilities to sex workers, so the former could get some in their lives. Under Swedish law, such social workers (and anyone else adopting this role) could be prosecuted, and would probably lose their job in the process.
It’s the incel-debate. Their numbers are growing. Something like twenty percent of males are now childless in the Nordics at age forty (more than double the similar percentage for women), and the “deaths from despair” reported by Angus Deaton and others in the US is probably related to this. The selection pressure on males has increased dramatically during the last 50 years.
So I am not saying there is no pain involved. Tough luck for a lot of men, but – to return to question a) - my prediction is that they are highly likely to be in a minority of voters in many, if not most, countries. Also because their suffering is not the type of suffering that will attract a sufficient number of sympathy-votes to get the median voter on board. And the median voter is the one that matters.
a) I was under the impression that the "Nordic model" of neo-abolitionism had mostly been adopted only by countries that had previously banned prostitution (i.e. the model was adopted as decriminalisation of prostitutes), but it appears I was wrong and basically all of them started with it legal. My apologies for the confusion.
b) There is an empirical question here: you keep saying that this is an attempt to curb sex work without hurting prostitutes:
[[["Furthermore – and this is the beauty & the point of the policy – it is done without having to pursue or punish the sex workers themselves.
In short, it is an anti-oppressive way to deter sex work.", "That way, you curb sex work without pushing those who need compassion, further down into the dirt.
As far as the happy, resource-rich sex worker is concerned: Find something else to do. You have the resources to do it.", "The main losers are not sex workers themselves,"]]]
...but Scott pointed out in the OP and people have noted since that it indirectly puts their lives in danger, and in a way not fixable by ceasing prostitution (since you're never getting off a "suspected prostitute" landlord blacklist once you're on it). So, which of the following is it:
i) You're challenging this claim (in this case I would appreciate an actual rebuttal rather than a simple restatement), or
ii) You're agreeing that these kinds of laws do hit prostitutes hard, but are restating that this is the sales pitch for these kinds of laws (which I don't think anyone actually disputes)?
It’s been an interesting exchange of views, but this thread is getting long, so this must be my last entry.
I’ll concentrate on the question: But is not this Swedish-type approach to sex work (also) oppressive to sex workers?
Well, to some extent certainly, but remember there are degrees in hell.
Sex workers are not handcuffed in policy razzias and spend time in jail. I assume we agree that that’s real oppression.
Then again, they are after all legally selling something it is illegal to buy. Which in itself is likely to serve as a nudge to do something else.
Add to this the “extended pimp-concept” which makes it very difficult for them to earn a living as sex workers, or to have boy/girlfriends (since boys/girlfriends risk being prosecuted as pimps). This policy certainly puts humps in the road for their chosen path in life.
Political scientists differentiate various types of policy instruments the state uses to influence the behaviour of its citizens. The big five are:
1) Coercion. Do as we say, or we will come and get you & fine you and/or put you in jail.
2) Incentives. Do as we say, and carrots are coming your way; do not, and there will be significantly fewer carrots.
3) Nudges. You are free to pursue your chosen path in life, but we will put humps in the road for you that you must climb if you do not heed our advice to choose another path. Still, you are totally free to climb them. They’re pretty exhausting, though; and we may make them even more exhausting if we see you have the stamina to climb the first ones.
4) Information. We tell you what you should do, and we hope you listen (your state as your friendly doctor).
5) Deliberation. Let’s talk together, and let’s see if I can convince you that I am right.
These five measures differ in the degree of oppression/coercion, from strong (no. 1) to mild (no 5).
...The last one is preferable if you can make it work, since if I can convince you that you should do as I say for your own good, I do not have to monitor your behaviour to see if you comply; instead you will do your future monitoring of your own self yourself.
The old solution, to make sex work illegal = coercive measure type (1). Very hard indeed.
The Swedish, “modern” solution is a mix of measure (2) and (3), but with a lot of (4) and (5) thrown in as well.
...In addition to a lot of preventive stuff, aimed at limiting the probability that someone will start selling sex in the first place. The latter includes stuff like generous social security benefits for single parents plus the state REALLY comes after absent fathers to get them to pay child maintenance; attempts to maintain a full-employment economy; and a thousand other ways to limit dire poverty plus enhance the ”human capital” of citizens.
...so ok, the Swedish policy is “oppressive” to a degree; in particular to well-functioning sex workers who think their work is fun, and/or that they perform a valuable service (some sex workers function almost as informal social workers vis a vis some clients, I am aware of that; in a cold world bought sex can provide ersatz human warmth, which is better than nothing. Oh well).
To repeat the bottom line: It is “oppression” of sorts, but there are degrees of oppression, and “Swedish” oppression strategies are pretty mild, compared to being handcuffed and put in a police van.
…It is not a stern, patriarchal way for the state to rule its citizens; it is rather a motherly iron-fist-in-a-silk-glove kind of way. Which is the story of state rule in Scandinavia more generally - and increasingly elsewhere as well, I may add.
Like it or do not like it – to be ruled increasingly in subtle rather than crude ways, is our fate in a modern, state-dominated world.
> The happy hooker - stereotype is not a total myth, but neither is the borderline psychiatric case with a child abuse backstory and father issues.
Those who champion the worldview where all sex workers are inherently oppressed must therefore be asserting a strong confidence in the counterfactual claim that both the happy and psychiatric cases would be better off if they didn't have sex work to fall back on. I have no idea how they would have achieved this confidence.
Many prostitutes in Western Europe are Eastern Europeans who aren't eligible for welfare benefits in Sweden, and don't have generous welfare state in the country they are citizens of.
It oppresses sex workers, since the worldview that sex all sex workers are victims of oppression is nonsense. At some point you admit that all this is conditioned on that worldview, but for the rest of the comment, you act like the policy is good, without that condition, as if that worldview actually made sense.
And if some of the parties transacting with the prostitute (such as a pimp or a customer) are actually coercing her, so she has no choice, then how is she not harmed by other parties (landlord, bank) refusing to do business with her?
Accepting for the moment the premise that sex workers are oppressed victims, it does not at all follow that a landlord, bank, or boy/girlfriend are oppressive victimizers. A person who is being forced to perform manual labor (say, by being threatened with extralegal bodily harm) is obviously an oppressed victim of whoever is forcing them to do it, but that does not mean their bank/landlord/life partner should be punished! Indeed, that seems to actually be punishing the innocent, not the guilty!
I would disagree that it totally avoids punishing sex workers, being homeless due to state intervention is definitely oppressive, but I can see the logic if the goal is to decrease the amount of sex work without just sending people to prison for it.
The claim that the Lafayette Square incident (the violent clearing of the park in front of the church) has nothing to do with the photo op is disputed. The inspector general was reporting on the decisions of one of the several law enforcement agencies present (the US Park Police), and didn't interview a lot of involved figures from other agencies; the report also contains some interesting subtext and redactions. See https://www.nycsouthpaw.com/p/reading-the-park-police-ig-report for a full argument on that.
The politico article (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/09/dc-police-tear-gas-trump-photo-op-492630) also has some murkiness. Park Police knew POTUS was on his way, and the POTUS team knew the protestors were in the park. Even if the initial reason for clearing the park was not related to Trump's walk through, his team knew they would have to clear protestors to travel that path and those clearing the path knew Trump was coming.
"""
The Park Police only learned that Trump would be walking through the area around 6:10 p.m. when Attorney General Bill Barr, then on the scene, asked the operations commander, “Are these people still going to be here when POTUS [President of the United States] comes out?”
[...]
The Park Police at 6:23 p.m. started warning protestors to clear the area. Shortly after, the Park Police began broadcasting warnings to the demonstrators to leave the park.
In the event that the two events really *aren't* linked, it doesn't really shine a good light on the police anyway. Because the alternative is that the park police tear gassed protesters in a park before curfew for no reason, and then Trump just happened to show up later. I don't really see how that's supposed to be better.
It's not better as regards the police, but if true it does exonerate Trump of any direct responsibility. The incident became infamous because the narrative it painted was of Trump behaving like some kind of petty tinpot dictator, rolling out violent police for the sake of a random photo op intended to better his personal image.
I think Glenn's piece is far too harsh against the media - every indication at the time was that the events were related. Sure a report many months later may shed some light and reveal that some of the media claims are dubious, but I don't think it's at all clear that an apology is in order.
I also worry that Scott is generally too quick to buy into anti-media narratives, especially ones that claim to contest popular beliefs.
It wasn't "many months" later; it was three or four *days* later that the FBI was saying that the whole closeted-self-hating-gay-killer thing was looking pretty sketchy. And the New York Times knew this, considering it worthy of mentioning in the 20th paragraph of their Omar Mateeen story du jour.
So the *entire* media didn't get this one wrong. But there's no excuse for the ones that ran with the story after the fourth day. And, yeah, if you highlight something on day one and find out it was probably false on day four, I think it's reasonable to assume you owe your readers at least a correction, and not one buried twenty paragraphs down.
Argh, and now I have to correct myself, because it took the Washinngton Post one month and four days to get it right. Jul!=Jun. So, NYT right but buried at T+4 days, WaPo prominently right at T+1 month.
To be clear, I was only talking about the Lafayette Square incident in my last post.
The club shooting is less of a forgivable mistake, and I think in that case it's likely willful disregard of the facts. I suspect the authors expected to get crucified on social media if they came out and said an attack on a gay bar wasn't motivated by homophobia.
"I also worry that Scott is generally too quick to buy into anti-media narratives, especially ones that claim to contest popular beliefs."
At this point a disposition in favor of anti-media narratives—even it leads you to sometimes overcorrect—is probably warranted, given how mendacious and incompetent they have shown themselves to be
Re 19: While I won't dispute the correctness of Greenwald's main points, I'd like to mention he's still quite biased (everyone is). Him being mostly right makes it harder to notice the biased opinions and claims. So if you needed a reminder from a stranger on the internet to be diligent - here it is.
See SBLL's comment above yours. That IG report interviewed the Park Police. The Park Police already had plans to clear the square. The timing of the clearing was at the behest of the Secret Service.
The IG report interviewed the Secret Service and found that it was pre scheduled...
Wait, no they didn't. The IG didn't interview the Secret Service at all. So we don't know why that particular timing was selected. Greenwald doesn't point that out because he has an axe to grind.
Presumably they planned for that because there were a bunch of violent insurrectionists who had spent the previous evenings attacking police at that location and trying to overrun the White House.
This isn't machine gunning. There are full time snipers on the top of the white house who will shoot to kill someone who enters with unknown intent. That's been the policy for decades. If the protesters had ever presented a credible threat, they'd be dead.
I don't know if it's a matter of official policy or just institutional culture, but the Secret Service tends to be much more serious about this kind of thing than the Capitol Police, plus the Capitol is a public building. The White House is much better defended.
The IG interviewed the USPP and found that it was scheduled by the USPP and Secret Service working together, that the Secret Service advised the USPP that Trump would be making an unscheduled visit to the park sometime later that day, and that learning about the visit (even without knowing the timeline) "did not change their operational timeline" at all.
Where does the report say the timing was "at the behest of the Secret Service"?
[The following _kinda_ answers Michael P's last question, but also indicates other things that seem to me different from what his first paragraph suggests.]
The report says (unless that nycsouthpaw link has outright fabricated things) that:
- some official made a request (redacted in the publicly-released report) that from context seems clearly to have involved accelerating the timescale of clearing out the protestors. (The USPP say they said no.)
- at 6:10pm, AG Bill Barr visited Lafayette Square. (They did not interview him.)
- at 6:16pm, "contrary to the operational plan", the Secret Service turned up. (They did not interview anyone from the Secret Service.)
- at 6:28pm, "contrary to the operational plan", USPP and ACPD civil disturbance units were deployed onto H Street (the north side of Lafayette Square). This was shortly _before_ the third dispersal warning to protestors. (They did not interview anyone from the ACPD.)
- the USPP incident commander said that the plan was "thrown off a little bit" by the Secret Service's early deployment.
So. The original story was that protestors were dispersed, arguably with excessive force, in order to clear the way for Trump's photo op. What we now learn doesn't change anything about the "excessive force" bit. It suggests that the USPP had been going to clear them out some time that day anyway -- but it also says that there were attempts to get them to do it earlier (seems likely that that was for the photo op), and that in fact they _did_ have to do it earlier because the Secret Service turned up early.
I'm not really seeing how anything here is better than the original story that e.g. Glenn Greenwald is so angry about. The Trump administration did (so far as we can tell) ask for protestors to be cleared out of the way for the photo op. The protestors were cleared out of the way. Nothing has changed in what we know about how forcefully they were cleared out of the way. It seems as if the exact timing of the clearing-out-of-the-way was in fact precipitated by the Secret Service, presumably because of the photo op. So the only new thing here is that apparently the protestors _would_ have been cleared out at some point even without the photo op. (But not at the same time, and we don't know whether in the same way.)
If someone was upset, before, because the Trump administration wanted protestors cleared out of Lafayette Square for his photo op, they should still be upset; nothing here has contradicted that.
If someone was upset, before, because they think excessive force was used by the people doing the clearing out, they should still be upset; nothing about that part of the story has changed.
For someone to have been upset by the old version of the story but not the new one, I think they'd need to have been upset specifically _that the USPP were willing to go along with the administration's request to chase protestors away for a photo op_. I dunno, maybe that's what some people were upset about, but I don't recall anything about that, and I (watching from outside the US) had no idea what specific people were allegedly firing rubber bullets and tear gas and whatnot at the crowd.
Or, I guess, maybe you could have been upset at the level of force because you thought it was excessive _when protestors are being chased away for a photo op_, but think that level of force is reasonable _when protestors are being chased away so a fence can be built_? (Though I don't see anything here to indicate that they wouldn't still have been chased away for the photo op if there hadn't already been plans in place to do it that day for other reasons. And the presence of ACPD units as well as USPP makes it not obvious to me whether it's the USPP who were responsible for the alleged excessive force anyway.)
The organizations involved are important. The police departments of Alexandria County and DC are not part of the president's administration. They were the ones using tear gas canisters and apparently more force, according to both the IG report and the federal judge who just dismissed most of the claims against Trump administration officials -- but not against the Alexandria and DC police -- over the incident.
I think the motivation for clearing out the protesters is also relevant, including in determining what level of force is justified. Putting up fencing to protect public property is stewardship, whether one agrees or disagrees with the particular decision. A photo op is a promotional event that does not deserve the same deference or use of force.
I count myself someone who would be upset if they got chased away for a photo op but not for a fence (in this case, because the fence was there to keep people out who had recently committed felony arson against the church in question).
I do care whether the incident was made worse because Trump wanted to be there, but it sounds like what they actually intended to do in removing the crowd was going to happen anyway. That Trump piggybacked on the scene could be negative, neutral, or even positive, depending on your perspective. I would consider it slightly positive to draw light to an active riot outside of the White House, especially because it was generally underreported by news reporters.
> I do care whether the incident was made worse because Trump wanted to be there, but it sounds like what they actually intended to do in removing the crowd was going to happen anyway.
If the level of force used is a concern, then the bungling of the plan's execution can't be treated as a secondary consideration. We don't have enough detail to distinguish malice and incompetence, but we don't *need* to in order to trace the failure. And from there, none of the plausible explanations look positive.
Level of force is not a concern, due to how belligerent the crowd was and how criminal their activities had been in the run up to it. They received multiple warnings to disperse, knew their activities were illegal, and chose to stay. I can't say that I'm actually concerned about the fact that they were tear gassed and forcibly removed.
I would care if they were going to let the crowd stay there or kindly ask them to leave, but then Trump was coming so they went all in on authoritarian responses, but that's not what appears to have happened. Trump's presence may have changed the timeframe some, but not the event or level of force used. I'm not bothered by that at all.
The timing is fairly significant here. I was present at the protest. Everyone there with a cell phone received a warning that curfew would begin at 7pm. I spoke with several of the MPD officers as well as several Army officers about when I should leave and was assured it was fine to stay until 7 at which time I planned on taking the metro home. I was right at the existing fence at the park when the attach occurred without any audible warning and was not able to avoid being exposed to the gas and projectiles.
Then the MPD was incompetent as well as trigger-happy, because the plain and short text of their boss's curfew order (https://mayor.dc.gov/release/mayor-bowser-orders-curfew) meant almost everyone had to be off the streets and off public transport by 7, not "start to go home at 7".
Did you grow up somewhere that curfew meant "start going home at time X" rather than "be home by X"? The latter was always how I heard it used.
What does where I grew up have anything to do with this? I am simply relaying my firsthand account of what actually happened there. Regardless, I’m sure you would have to agree that curfew doesn’t mean “be home by some arbitrary and secret amount of time before x”. It’s strange to me that the plane text of the claim by greenwald restated here is false according to the ig report. The police did violently clear the protesters from the street, and as others have pointed out here, the reason can be at least partially ties to the photo op. Just because you seem to relish the violent response to what was at the time a peaceful expression of first amendment rights doesn’t change the facts.
I'm trying to be charitable, because standard English usage of "curfew" in the context of being in private areas means "be in private at this time", not "arguably be making your way to some private place at this time". If yougrew up somewhere that "curfew" didn't have its usual meaning, that would explain your mistake. The plain text of the curfew order was for people to be in private at 7, and you just wrote that you were planning on violating that.
Greenwald's claim is not that the police didn't use force to clear the streets -- but that Democrats and most of the media falsely claimed that the park was cleared specifically for Trump's photo op, and also that the Trump administration was who deployed CS gas and other area denial weapons. I really don't know how you misunderstood his claim so thoroughly.
While I appreciate your condescension regarding the meaning of "curfew", you don't appear to be willing to respond to my point. Again, I’m sure you would have to agree that curfew doesn’t mean “be in private by some arbitrary and secret amount of time before x”. The curfew was at 7pm. I spoke with several officers who assured me that it was safe and acceptable to be out until then, further clarifying the meaning of "curfew"; it would not begin before 7. I had no intent of violating the curfew, that is precisely why I checked with the law enforcement while there. Nevertheless I was violently attacked before this time.
The claim above is this: "the story that the police violently cleared a park in front of a DC church last year so Trump could do a photo op there was false." Why you are bringing "Democrats" and "media" into this is beyond me. The clear factual reporting in this IG report supports that at least some of the responsibility for violently clearing the park in front of a DC church can be directly tied to the Trump photo op. Again, for example "contrary to the operational plan", the Secret Service turned up and participated in the attack. Therefore the claim that the protest wan't cleared up for the photo op is false. Some as of yet unknown percentage (due to the limited scope of this IG) of the reason for violently clearing the park was for the photo op.
My whole reason for commenting is that the timing of this event is critical. I (and assume others present) was fully intending to comply with the curfew and leave. I did not observe any violence or vandalism on behalf of the people there. Yet a violent attack occurred before I or anyone else there had the opportunity to return home in compliance with the curfew. Why did this happen before 7? This IG report doesn't really get to the bottom of that.
> Last year, Rutgers University instituted a requirement that all student clubs that they must hold at least one event promoting critical race theory
This is a strengthening of what the FIRE article actually says. It quotes the Student Bar Association amendment as saying "plan at least one (1) event that addresses their chosen topics through the lens of Critical Race Theory, diversity and inclusion, or cultural competency". So as I read the letter of it, you can skip the CRT if you still have an event on either diversity and inclusion or cultural competency, both of which seem like much fuzzier concepts. Of course, this doesn't preclude the idea that the first item will get used as a default interpretation for the latter two and thus close the options down further than a naïve reading of the text would indicate, nor other shenanigans, but I don't see good evidence for those in my quick reading of the FIRE article.
(To be clear, I decline for the moment to present any opinion about how bad or good this would be at either strength; I just wanted to note the discrepancy.)
Also, 'event that addresses' is very different from 'event about'.
Arguably, if your first meeting of the year features a banner that says 'We welcome our new members from all walks of life', you have 'addressed inclusion and diversity' at an event.
Of course, whether you can gt away with that or not depends on how much of a stickler the administration wants to be. But given my experience running campus groups, I'm like 80% confident that the administration just wants to publish a PR statement saying they've made this requirement, and is not interested in being sticklers about it unless and until someone publicly calls them out on not enforcing it.
Hmm… I can sort of see what you mean if I twist it, but based mainly on your description I'm not sure that would weaken it much? If what you're mainly worried about is chilling effects, “this could be used to bring the hammer down on you at any random time if you've ever failed to do it ‘for real’ in the past” doesn't sound better than “we'll actually be checking more or less consistently”. In fact to me it sounds worse—if “until someone publicly calls them out” is true, that becomes a form of “if someone decides to attack you in this way, we commit to joining them”.
And the text doesn't just say “addresses”, it says “addresses *their chosen topics* through *the lens* of”. So maybe you could get away with doing the above at an event whose ‘topic’ is ‘welcome!’ but that really feels like a stretch.
Yeah, I don't know... the administration can destroy you at any time for any reason, and often does destroy you out of sheer impersonal bureaucratic pedantry.
I guess I'm just speaking from my own experiences running campus clubs, the sinisterness and sword-of-Damocles nature of this doesn't feel much worse than any of the other realities such clubs tend to operate under, and this one feels low-threat to me. If they passed this at my college when I was running my clubs, I'd roll my eyes and be annoyed that I had to put up a poster and say a few words about this at one of our event, but I'd be a lot less worried about this killing my club than I am about a new space-reservation requirement or some new bureaucrat with a novel worry about liability issues or changes to the campus parking policy making it impossible for members to get to meetings or etc.
Of course, I recognize that I'm speaking about the experience of people inside the club, and this story is mostly gaining attention because it's a culture war topic that people outside the club care about regardless of the effect it has on any actual club. But I think the people who feel that way should explicitly acknowledge that this is their stake in the story, and not try to use the lens of 'those poor, scared clubs' to justify their position.
#34. Does anyone know whether this is being discussed in the Social Justice community? A little research is pretty much just turning up people who cite the Telegraph article.
...Sweden has a "pro-sex-worker" reputation? What? Maybe this refers to the Nordic Model for prostitution, but pro-sex-work organizations tend to regard the Nordic Model as anti-sex-worker in practice, and in general, Sweden is one of the most anti-sex-work cultures in existence, period, as far as I know.
There does exist a certain tendency for Americans to assume that since Sweden is "leftist" (a bit dubious claim, currently, considering the strong tendency of neoliberalization in Swedish economic policies in recent years) and secular, it's also socially liberal in all issue that are considered a part of social liberalism within American context, which tends to lead to mixups. I've heard stories of American liberals going to Sweden, being fascinated by the enlightened progressive perspectives of their new Swedish friends, and then toking up and watching their new friends look at them like they just murdered a puppy, unaware of the strongly anti-drug culture in Sweden.
The social democracies of Europe serve a curious political role in American politics, standing in for a kind of Platonic ideal. The less you know about the particulars, the better it works.
The drug policies in Sweden (supposedly based heavily on the work of Nils Bejerot) are particularly vile. The country has a moralistic streak that's caused it to keep a heavy punitive/criminal approach to even small cases of possession relative to its neighbors, with higher fatality rates to go with it.
Wait are you saying that low rates of drug abuse in Nordic countries are (at least in some part) driven by a strong social stigma associated with it? Not by acceptance and tolerance? I'm shocked, shocked!
Specifically I'm comparing Sweden to its neighbors. Its zero tolerance approach and higher death rate compared to,, Norway's more harm-reduction approach and progress toward decriminalization.
The Lafayette Square report specifically vindicated the Park Service in following orders, but does not actually vindicate the other actors - Secret Service and ... unbadged officers from the Bureau of Prison Affairs (??!!?). If anything, if you actually read the damn thing it paints a picture where park service officers were confused and not even told about the visit, and were concerned about what they saw.
Without even saying how poorly advised the entire visit was. Like, no one is denying he used his power to execute the world's worst photo op. Whether the Park Service committed any crimes was kind of a side show.
But I guess Greenwald clearly has his agenda to pursue and can't be expected to inform his readers instead of getting them to blindly trust him on this stuff.
> Like, no one is denying he used his power to execute the world's worst photo op
I would "deny" that.
If rioters attempt to burn down a church within sight of the White House then the President visiting the church in a show of defiance seems like... well, a pretty reasonable thing to do. If it were a group of far-right rioters attempting to torch the same church during the Biden administration I'm sure he'd do something very similar and the media would react very differently.
Except the fire was almost 24 hours before the square was cleared and the Reverends at the church didn't seem too upset by it:
Fisher rushed to the church “with a sinking feeling” after seeing videos of fires burning in nearby buildings and then in the church itself.
“But then when I got here, honestly, there was a lot to be grateful for,” he told ENS. The church’s windows are being boarded up to protect it from further damage, he said.
He and Budde expressed gratitude that no one was harmed by the fire and stressed that the systemic racism and police brutality that ignited the recent unrest are far bigger concerns.
“There’s understandably attention on us,” Fisher told ENS, “but I want to point the attention back to where it really should be, which is the purpose of the protests, and the people who did what they did to the church do not represent the majority, who are here for reasons that we totally support.”
“We will rebuild the church, while keeping our focus on the deeper wounds of this country that we must heal,” Budde wrote on Facebook.
"If it were a group of far-right rioters attempting to torch the same church" this implies burning the church was the intended goal of the demonstrators, which it clearly was not.
Burning the church was certainly an intended goal of *some* of the demonstrators or it wouldn't have happened.
And visiting the *next day* after a disaster is the sort of thing presidents routinely do to show that they care. You certainly don't want the president visiting while the fire department is still trying to put out the fire or the arsonists are still actively trying to burn it down! Would you complain that a president waited *one whole day* to visit the site of a flood? Or a hurricane or a major public shooting?
I wouldn't want to appear too upset about a little bit of arson of I were the Reverend, that's a good way to encourage them to come back and finish the job.
I find that I dislike greenwald enough to reflexively assume anything he says is some flavor of self aggrandizing bullshit.
This is probably unfair, I think we can all agree.
Why then? We probably agree on 90+% of things, including spitting when we see a lib and making the sign of the cross when see *gasp* a con!
His exit from his last paper was super ugly and public, to the point where someone totally not plugged in like me had an opinion on it, which primed me to dislike him.
Then, I happened to see his interaction on twitter, which sealed the deal.
Goes to show, one iffy first impression and a personality mismatch can create lots of flimsy animosity. Gotta try to normalize to "Dudes a prick, but his articles are probably 1 s/d off fine."
My own impression was that when the Intercept started, it was rather interesting, covering a lot of stories not found elsewhere, but over the years, it became much more normie left-liberal and driven by political calculus rather than just ideological considerations, which were there from the beginning. Greenwald’s exit from the Intercept was certainly public, but what was ugly about it? His stated reasons seem valid— his contract allowed him to write about what he wanted, but the editors wouldn’t let him write about Hunter Biden.
I just recalled Razib Khan’s take on Greenwald, with which I agree:
Glenn Greenwald leaves for Substack. Greenwald is kind of a dick. He’s very disagreeable and often unpleasant. This is one reason I actually trust him more than other journalists. He deludes himself, he’s human, but he’s not a conformist, which is the norm among most journalists (look at the middle school level burns coming from some bluecheck reporters at places like The New York Times).
His entire worldview seems to basically have become opposition to mainstream democrats. So he's willing to believe and spread anything that goes against them, even if it's from people he should disagree with more (like the Russian government) in an extreme version of "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup". So he's a good investigative reporter where it serves that agenda, but not otherwise
From what I've seen? Frequently. He isn't as vulnerable to flavor-of-the-month groupthink (which makes him valuable, albeit decreasingly so), but his epistemic standards are otherwise unremarkable and I find he makes common kinds of errors with more frequency than I find acceptable. Rule Thinkers In and all that, but he isn't a daily read for me.
I think Greenwald is disgusted with how mainstream Democrats have been conspiring against the Bernie/AOC wing of the party for some time now, and how various journalists and media outlets have helped and quite openly played along with it. I don't find his opposition unwarranted, given his priors.
He isn't though. He goes on Fox News all the time and has loving chats with Tucker Carlson. The guy who is far more a foe of AOC/Bernie than the DNC ever was.
He went on the show 13 times this year. You can look at some of the transcripts. He thinks Carlson is a true socialist, (google Greenwald daily caller Carlson socialist) I don't think it's unfair to think Greenwald shares a lot of Carlson's views.
Political horse-shoe: Meat-loving paleoconservative father of four pure-bred WASPs teams up with vegan Jewish socialist and adoptive father of mixed-raced Brazilian children.
I do think there's an interesting question and genuine space for debate here - you see it as legitimising Carlson, but Greenwald may see it as an opportunity to give Carlson's viewers a perspective they wouldn't otherwise encounter.
I don't think the fact that he makes the occasional appearance on Tucker Carlson's show (I don't watch Fox News so I'm taking your word for this) negates anything he said in the above links. What does he talk about when he goes on the show?
Early 2016 Greenwald and Trump era Greenwald are apparently vastly different people.
To quote an interview he gave to the Daily Caller, "He (Greenwald) went on to say that he “would describe a lot of people on the right as being socialists,” such as former White House strategist Steve Bannon and “the 2016 iteration” of former President Donald Trump as a candidate, “based on what he was saying.”
“I consider Tucker Carlson to be a socialist,” Greenwald said of the Daily Caller co-founder.
I actually googled it after you asked and he's been on Carlson's show this year on January 8th, 12th, 20th, 28th, February 9th, March 12th, 30th, April 6th, 19th, 27th, May 4th and 12th, and June 3rd.
That's 13 times in less than six months which is more than "occasional."
Well, it's somewhat hard to tell because the transcripts only identify people as Speaker 1, Speaker 2, etc., but it seems like in his most recent two appearances, I see he criticized inefficient and wasteful defense spending (hardly controversial), criticized MSNBC and CNN for fearmongering about Covid and Russia, and making the case for civil libertarianism re: vaccines. Since I don't watch those networks, either, it's hard to say whether the latter was fair or not, but it's a sad day if arguments for civil libertarianism and personal autonomy start falling on deaf ears on the left.
I guess what I'm saying here is that Greenwald strikes me as a pretty obvious dissident progressive (ie, someone who is philosophically a progressive, but disagrees frequently with other progressives re: goals, tactics, etc), and the content of his appearances on tv, not to mention his extensive body of written work, doesn't lead me to think otherwise.
I've read his stuff off and on for a long time (back to at least his Guardian days), but didn't follow him closely until the recent blow up with the Intercept. He's definitely got a chip on his shoulder about certain topics, and is willing to be a jerk about how far he'll push an idea. Even in his articles calling out people for continuing to spread known lies, which he should totally keep doing, he posts Twitter interactions where he comes across like a jerk and seems to feel totally justified because his underlying cause is correct. I agree with his underlying cause, but he's often not sympathetic due to his approach.
> 6: No Causal Associations Between Family Income And Subsequent Psychiatric Disorders, Substance Misuse, And Violent Crime Arrests: A Nationwide Finnish Study Of >650,000 Individuals And Their Siblings.
And the related comment seem obviously wrong to me, and I'm leaving this here as a note that I intend to read the papers.
> The same study also claims there’s no correlation between “intellectual compatibility” and relationship satisfaction within relationships; ie you’re not more likely to have a happy relationship if your partner has a similar IQ to you (but see comment here).
People who hold it may have been exposed to many individual instances of media figures being hysterical or stupid about russiagate, but mostly in the form of reading articles about how stupid the media was being and presenting cherry-picked examples (and presenting pundits/celebrities/activists as 'journalists').
I don't think this is the impression you would get if you actually read every individual article every indiviual report wrote on the topic. It's certainly not the impression I got from my own reading at the time.
He wasn't straight and narrow about Russiagate. You had the more wacky Russiagate theories. (Actual Russian hacking of voting machines to change votes, for example)
The totally prosaic Russiagate theory is based on two streams. In the longer term, before running in 2016, Trump said that he had been getting a lot of loans from Russian banks... which is odd because he's not creditworthy. In the actual 2016 election, Russian hackers sent phishing emails to democratic and republican officials, gained access to emails in both cases, but decided to send only Democrat John Podesta's emails to wikileaks, which conveniently decided to drop the first batch 8 hours after Trump's access Hollywood tape came out. They then dropped daily batches of 1-2000 emails for 3 weeks which, despite there being nothing particularly scandalous, kept the "Hillary Clinton + Emails" story going for a long time.
The question then became how much coordination was there between the Trump team and the Russians in the 2016 election? The Mueller report didn't say "no coordination." It said, "We lack concrete evidence of coordination. Note that a lot of the people we wanted to ask wouldn't talk to us (including the president). Also, since justice department policy says sitting presidents can't be charged with a crime, we will describe our difficulty in accessing key witnesses, but make no determination on whether obstruction of justice occurred. Also, we decided not to look into Trump's finances. This report does not accuse or exonerate the president of any wrong doing... because we pre determined that we can't make a pronouncement either way, no matter what we find."
William Barr sees this and writes a cover letter saying that it is a total exoneration.
Headlines ensue, the "liberal" Glenn Greenwald who hates the military industrial complex takes the word of the Attorney General who managed Iran-Contra a proclaims Russiagate debunked..
A few weeks later, people read the actual report. They see that it says, that the investigators found no smoking gun... but also that the White House blocked access to a lot of the possible shooters and wouldn't open their gun safes to let investigators look.
"Headlines ensue, the "liberal" Glenn Greenwald who hates the military industrial complex takes the word of the Attorney General who managed Iran-Contra a proclaims Russiagate debunked.."
It was debunked.
“As soon as news broke that Trump had been elected President, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new Administration,” the report states. “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”
That's a great site. On the theories, I was always somewhere between 5 or 6. I never believed 7 because that didn't make sense.
One of the main issues with the Mueller report was that it wasn't allowed to look into Trump's finances. This meant we don't know if pre existing monetary relationships were involved.
I think cases 1-3 are all proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. (It would be interesting to hear where Greenwald is on this or most people who shout about Russia gate being debunked. The Mueller report showed a lot of evidence for 4, but due to lack of access and stonewalling, was not able to talk to the people who could confirm 5/6.
I don't think 7 was ever a possibility, or even taken very seriously, by Russiagate proponents. There, it was more 6, Trump would be unduly influenced by his preexisting relationship with Russia in ways that would be detrimental to the United States.
> I think cases 1-3 are all proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. (It would be interesting to hear where Greenwald is on this or most people who shout about Russia gate being debunked. The Mueller report showed a lot of evidence for 4, but due to lack of access and stonewalling, was not able to talk to the people who could confirm 5/6.
Someone who paid attention could have been confident in 4 in 2019, but the disclosures accompanying the most recent sanctions a couple months ago clinches it for being in the "beyond a shadow of a doubt" bucket as well.
Wait, cases 1-3 are simultaneously proven? It's all a giant set of coincidences and disconnected events AND those other things? Especially if we throw in Dan L thinking that it's all a giant set of coincidences and disconnected events AND Russian intelligence actively penetrated the Trump campaign?! (FYI, they had a follow-up article where they expressly said that some of the theories you're now embracing didn't survive later revelations.)
It's absurdly unclear what you think was actually shown.
Be careful of giving Greenwald credibility just because he contradicts the mainstream.
I would want to see some sort of systematic way that he's better, rather than just an observation that "whenever the mainstream goes wrong, the guy that contradicts the mainstream is better". If you can predict in advance which sort of story he'll be more likely to be right about than the mainstream, not based on the facts (which we don't have yet) but based on the stories that the mainstream and he are both writing, then there's something useful.
> I would want to see some sort of systematic way that he's better, rather than just an observation that "whenever the mainstream goes wrong, the guy that contradicts the mainstream is better"
If the mainstream is almost always wrong, that seems like a decent indicator. The mainstream is pretty homogenous and corporate, so I think there are strong priors suggesting mainstream coverage is frequently wrong.
Re #18 - Perhaps not Geoff Pullum's finest moment, but I wonder whether I'm being "whooshed". I also note the post is from 2011. (Not that that changes anything.) I still find the table interesting: only two "~ific"s, and /horror→horrific/ is quite a contrast to /terror→terrific/. The effect of usage on semantics is a terrific thing.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
Regarding Point 14: "Still trying to figure out who the black bird and the frog are supposed to be, or why Australia seems to have replaced Germany in the G7."
Yes, the black bird looks like an eagle to me, and that's on the coats of arms of many Central and Eastern European nations. It's not double-headed, so we can rule out those countries 😀
2: “The cult deficit” is the theory that we don’t have as many cults as we used to and this says something important about our society.
I wondered what definition of “cult” they were using and to their credit, they do seem to have tried to distinguish between “religion, sect and cult”. I also agree that the 50s-70s were the prime years for cults in modern times. But I also think that the broader picture is that the impulse for cults is closely related to the same impulse that causes heresies or the swell of increased religious fervour in Great Awakenings (those types of revivals happened in both Britain and America). In the 17th century Commonwealth, a plethora of independent splinter groups sprang up and the official Puritans, after executing the king, beating down the Anglicans, and establishing themselves as the (temporary) authority didn’t much like that and set about squashing them. What differentiates Ranters and Levellers from a cult? Same with the mushrooming of small denominations and non-denominational bodies in American Protestantism: are the Westboro Baptists a cult or a denominational splinter body?
9: Upset that the Atlanta Braves unfairly stereotype Native Americans? Apparently Atlanta is an equal opportunity offensive-sports-team-haver: their team used to be called the Atlanta Crackers (and their Negro League team was the Atlanta Black Crackers!)
I have no dog in this fight but I think that Atlanta absolutely should go back to being the Crackers. Reclaim that slur! 😀 And to be fair to Atlanta, it looks like the problematic team name started off as the Boston Braves, then moved on to be the Milwaukee Braves, and have only now pitched up in Atlanta, so it’s not the fault of the city they have this name.
17: Claim: counties where the seminal pro-KKK movie Birth Of A Nation was played on its five year “tour” had more lynchings and race riots after the showing. Somewhat less believable claim: counties where it played still have more hate crimes today. I bet this turns out to be one of those persistence studies that doesn’t replicate.
Yeah, for this one, I’m going to go with “the places that ‘Birth Of A Nation’ was that kind of a super-hit were like that before it came along, and they’re like that since it left and it was because they were like that it was such a hit, not that it made them be like that”.
19: I’ve really been appreciating Glenn Greenwald lately. I think of myself as a pretty informed news consumer, but as the Garfield meme says, I am not immune to propaganda, and Greenwald has been doing a great job telling me which of the things I believed aren’t true. For example, the story that the police violently cleared a park in front of a DC church last year so Trump could do a photo op there was false (edit: see here for some debate). And apparently there was no link between the Pulse gay nightclub shooting and anti-LGBT hate - it was just an Islamic terrorist randomly choosing a place to shoot up to make his geopolitical point. Weird.
Trying to think of a polite way to put this, but you actually believed the whole “The Pulse shooting was anti-gay” line? From the start, it seemed clear that (a) at the time the media was very twitchy about seeming to push an “all Muslims are terrorists” line (and that was a cogent reason) so they downplayed the shooter’s ethnicity and alleged motivations (b) the LGBT crowd, again for what they perceived as good reasons, didn’t think of this as “anti-American” but “specifically aimed at us, because everyone wants to persecute us and they’d all be shooting us if they could” crime and grabbed the publicity on this and made that the official message. My view at the time, and since, was “this was someone not very well in the head, with a political grudge, attacking what he perceived as a soft target representing the worst of American culture” and not “specifically anti-gay”.
23: Last year, Rutgers Law School instituted a requirement that all student clubs that they must hold at least one event promoting critical race theory or related topics, or else lose most of their funding. After pressure from FIRE, a pro-free-speech-in-education advocacy group, they now appear to have backed down.
Critical Race Theory started off as a legal thing, so at least it makes sense that a law school should be involved. But mandating that every student club has to toe the party line on this topic? Surely that is going beyond what the administration of the school can do? I mean, suppose a Catholic university demanded every student club recited the Angelus before a meeting, there would be no problem telling them where to get off (not that such would ever happen in anyone’s wildest dreams or nightmares).
27:
yesterday i learned that there's a whole millennia-long debate about astrology in judaism and one of the positions is "astrology is true for everyone except jews because god gives jews more free will" and this is my new headcanon now
33: A common polyamory talking point is “you wouldn’t be jealous if your friend had other friends”. Now psychologists find that people definitely get jealous if their friends get other friends.
Again, this for me is another “is anyone surprised to learn this?” Kids get *very* jealous if their best friend seems to be friendly with other kids, they have to be taught to get this kind of possessiveness out of them. And I can’t speak from experience here, but isn’t there something about being in a relationship where one partner tries to cut the other off from their former friends? Or if you break up it gets tough because now you find out how many of the friends you had were their friends, rather than friends of both of you, and now you’ve lost a chunk of acquaintance?
42: The worst infographic ever?
That is really bad. Mind you, it makes me feel like a giantess now as I can tower over my titchy five foot two and shorter sisters, meanwhile I’m up on my tippy-toes trying to reach the top shelves in the kitchen cupboards 😁
RE: 27 Whoops, forgot the astrology one. In modern astrology, taking the foundation of the modern state of Israel, that associates the astrological sign of Taurus with it.
Long before that, the archangel Michael is associated as the prince/guardian spirit of Israel, going up against such as the angel that is the prince of Persia on their behalf.
Re: 2 and cults, I was touched by the little table contrasting "cult" with "science" and the virtues of Pure Real True Science:
- Authorities have no special access or claim to truth and the truth is always and forever subject to revision
(So this is why we hear cries of "Follow the science!" and "Dr. Fauci is a true oracle/a sham conman"? At least the "subject to revision" is true, what with "masks, no good/masks, all the time!")
- The truth can be questioned, should be questioned, and will almost certainly change
(Oh yeah? And when religion does this under "development of doctrine", then it's scorned as "they're only changing their beliefs because modern people now know better"?)
- Creativity and freethinking promoted and celebrated
(Umm, see above about "studies with unwoke conclusions are now being removed from journals because people make “serious and credible threats of personal violence” against the editors of journal editors who keep them up")
- Knowledge grows exponentially
Okay, so every field has the Pure True Beautiful Ideal, and then the slightly more grubby in practice Real Life version, so I'm not mocking so much as gently poking fun at the contrasts.
The theory is beautiful, why the heck won't reality conform!!!! 😁 This is also the messiness of biological systems, where the lovely results in vitro in the lab go to pot once you start testing them in vivo (or why, as Scott has talked about, for any particular anti-depressant you'll get some people love it and think it's a miracle cure, most people are okay on it, and some people find it makes everything worse).
Yup for sure - I'm a high school biology teacher so you are speaking my language. I always talk about how we have vast libraries of compounds that kill cancer cells in a petri dish, but don't seem to work in the human body as an example of the messiness of biology.
Both - sometimes it is because the compound gets processed differently in the body in a way that disables it or the tumor has a way of protecting itself in the body in a way it doesnt when they are just bare cells, at least this is my understanding
> But mandating that every student club has to toe the party line on this topic?
Technically, the mandate just said thy had to 'address' it. I think they could fulfill this requirement by coming out against it... although I won't speculate on what other repercussions such a decision might have.
Student Club For Knitting Home-Made Yoghurt does a session on "Why CRT Is A Steaming Pile Of Horse Manure"? Yeah, I imagine that would be a lively, intense, and short-lived run they had! 😁
No, it said they had to address the *club's* topic *through the lens of* XYZ. FIRE specifically noted that this is stronger than merely saying it has to be covered - if you say CRT's a pile of horseshit you're not using the lens of CRT.
Re The Atlanta Crackers - The etymology section of the Wiki page seems to have overlooked what to me is a natural assumption: The name has to do with the “crack of the bat” when a player gets a good hit. That isn’t even mentioned (if only to be discredited as a possibility).
Was Moldbug inspired by ESR? That seems like the canonical and much more mainstream usage of "cathedral" to represent a form of authority with harmful side-effects, and it would be familiar to anyone programming in the 80s and 90s. Though the spirit of the opposition seems much different, in cathedral and bazaar advocating for decentralization versus centralization. I don't really know much about Moldbug, but that seems quite the opposite of what he wants, as I understand he is an advocate of monarchy, which is as centralized as you can possibly make a government. Ironically, his Urbit project aims to decentralize the allocation of digital address space.
"Ironically, his Urbit project aims to decentralize the allocation of digital address space."
I thought all galaxies, stars, planets and moons were sold by the Tlon Corporation or resold by someone who bought from them, isn't that just trying to create a new monopoly (which is to be fair, a very Moldbug thing to want)?
I looked into it elsewhere and it seems like the answer is that they sold and gave away enough galaxies to create a decentralized market of galaxy-holders. In short, they had a monopoly at the start but threw it away.
from https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1: "The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice.” Sounds pretty decentralized to me. One could try saying that the axes "centralized <-> decentralized" and "authoritarian <-> libertarian" are orthogonal, I guess.
I wish xHamster published the age ranges of the survey respondents. On the one hand, it feels like people identifying as Antifa and Alt-Right are more likely to be young, and probably more into porn for that reason. On the other hand, actually paying for porn is going to be mitigated by having money, which is more likely to be the case when you're older. Either way, I'd like to see the conflicting possibilities at least explored.
"On the other hand, actually paying for porn is going to be mitigated by having money, which is more likely to be the case when you're older."
On the other other hand, actually *paying* for porn is going to be correlated with not knowing the internet is overflowing with free porn. There are so many confounders that I think you'd have to ask a much narrower question to get anywhere.
Yeah, and isn't there a bit of an obvious selection bias in a *porn site* running a survey on the intersection of porn/politics?
At face value it seems to say things like "Alt Right is more likely to watch porn than a normal conservative", but that's not really supported since "watches porn" is kind of a pre-condition for being in the survey pool.
All it really seems to say is that they're more willing to pay for the privilege, which seems more likely to be confounded by things like economic class or age than actual political alignment.
On the Obesity Wars article, the first paragraph has the usual "As federal employees, we had no outside funding or conflicts of interest", for which my usual response is "you had no *explicitly monetary* conflict of interest, and either you're too naive to recognize other sorts of conflict of interest or you expect the audience will be".
Sure enough, they had a conflict of interest. As cogs in the machinery of the federal bureaucracy, they had an interest not to publish work that conflicted with the preferred narrative of the bureaucracy, because publishing such work will result in your reputation being trashed while publishing work that conforms to the narrative will result (see Mokdad) in your reputation being enhanced. For most humans, that's a powerful incentive, more than sufficient to result in unpopular scientific findings being buried and popular ones being published despite weak evidence and shoddy math.
Flegal being by her own admission naive, she didn't realize the conflict and went ahead with publishing work that wasn't in her own best interest. Then got a front-row seat to the trashing of her own reputation. It's as if a researcher at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Research Institute published a paper saying that cigarette smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, and was surprised to see their salary suddenly reset to zero.
Most people are better than Flegal at understanding their own non-monetary interests. But often not very good at understanding other people's non-monetary interests, and thus prone to overestimate the dispassionate objectivity of e.g. "senior scientists at the CDC". How can we go about increasing this understanding?
James Buchanan would be rolling over in his grave right now if it wasn't for the fact that he knew no one would ever listen to public choice theory once they were subjected to it.
I mean, do we *want* to dispel the idea that government research is and should be untainted? I'd rather make the reality match the press than the press match the reality.
If you want to make reality match the press, it would seem that step #1 has to be dispelling the bogus idea that reality already matches the press. Otherwise, whatever step #2 is, nobody ever bothers to do it.
WRT #32, I note the pessimism about the COVID vaccine, writing last August. "How will we greet the COVID-19 vaccine, when it arrives hopefully in the next year or two?"
Perhaps "during the Trump administration," was difficult for people to fathom, but I can't recall anyone in a position to know who doubted we'd have it by February at the latest.
I'm 6", 188lbs, with abs. I was a bit surprised to find out that technically I'm overweight. Same thing for my Gym filled very healthy individuals. I've only done a quick search, but it seems like most studies simply use BMI and therefore will classify many athletes as overweight. I wonder if this partly explains the slightly decreased mortality among the overweight. If you also had a bodyfat % available for classification, how much would the numbers change?
My intuition was the same as I'm also borderline "obese". Then I saw a study about using body fat % vs BMI years ago. BMI usage, even as a crude tool, ended up being really effective and overwhelmingly more cost effective. Also remember that the margin of error for body fat % is way larger than BMI. I'm very skeptical that we can do much better than BMI as a research end point.
Yeah that all sounds correct. I'm quite curious how the numbers would change if we took everyone in the overweight category who could deadlift 2.5X bodyweight and moved them back to regular category. My intuition is that these athletes are pretty significant outliers and will effect the data. Of course this would be too costly.
What is your waist circumference? That is often used in conjunction with your BMI to appropriately diagnose overweight/obesity. Because you are muscular, your waist size is likely well within the normal range. For a male something like below 40 inches is in the normal range.
When we talk about obesity/overweight, we're talking about a pretty wide range. 6 feet and 188 lbs is a BMI of 25.5—you'd be officially "normal" if you lost 5 lbs. I don't think anyone seriously believes that gaining or losing the 1 lb that might take someone over the 25 BMI threshold makes a meaningful difference in health, or in appearance either. Seems like mildly overweight 25-27 BMI is just fine, with the caveat that the person who is mildly overweight at a young age has much less leeway to gain weight with age while staying healthy and attractive. Also, the caveat that your mostly-male highly muscular gym buddies are not typical of people with mildly overweight BMIs.
BUT the argument that 25 BMI is probably fine should not be extended to a conclusion that obese, and especially morbidly obese, is fine.
Elite strength athletes are not nearly enough of a percentage of the overall population to make a dent in population-wide effects like this You just understand that, if you life, whatever is presented in the literature as correlating with BMI is unlikely to apply to you. All the nasty effects of obesity are caused by things that correlate with BMI like body fat percentage, amount of time spent sedentary, and quality of diet, but those things are harder to measure than BMI.
It's a general problem with the popular press and culture discussion around being overweight in the first place, though. The bad things happen because you have too much fat, not enough muscle, are too inactive, and eat crap. Those things correlate with also being overweight, but just being overweight in and of itself is mostly not bad, though it will have some direct effects like putting more stress on joints and just making it harder to fit in confined spaces (airline seats, cars, whatever), that have nothing to do with longevity but may decrease your quality of life anyway. Those same things happen to very tall people and very muscular people too, though.
At 6', 188lbs, the parent is far from an elite strength athlete. That height and weight (with abs) is just someone who is in good shape. Half the people who frequent a gym look like that. I had the same experience in high school, I'm 5'8" and I weighed something like 185 (with very low body fat) due to sports and weightlifting and discovered that I was only a few pounds away from obese (like obviously I know it's irrelevant and I was healthy, but it affected how I saw the BMI). At the time, I looked muscular, but also just utterly unremarkable if you saw me in the street.
My first roommate in college was similar, he played lineman on the football team and he was very big, but if you saw him, you'd classify him as "a little overweight" for sure (like maybe 10-20 pounds on a guy who was 6'6", but a naive BMI put him at "morbidly obese."
I agree that people can just mentally except themselves from the literature, but I don't agree that people like this don't make up enough of the population to affect a study that just looks at height and weight (like if you were gathering stats from doctor's office physicals or something).
"Is there some story behind why California has 120 legislators but every interesting proposal I hear about is sponsored by the same guy?"
The status quo necessarily has the support of the majority because that's how it becomes the status quo. If you think California's status quo is boring then the only interesting bills are going to come from a small number of nonconformists.
I appreciate that you're identifying when links are paywalled. Is there any way you could also identify when the link requires an account to read the article? I'm trying to keep my potential online vulnerabilities to a minimum
#22: too much of a dichotomy; few jobs are entirely bullshit or entirely free of bullshit. Better to ask what percentage of time spent at work is wasted on bullshit with no societal value (I would say mine is fairly high).
#40: I'm not buying the second half of that at all. In my experience, significant differences in intelligence can cause friction in virtually any relationship, not just romantic ones.
>Better to ask what percentage of time spent at work is wasted on bullshit with no societal value
i largely agree, but it should be kept in mind that this is confounded by the need to maintain peak capacity labor levels.
ie an office may be 50% bullshit much of the time, but require everyone to do 100% meaningful work during quarterly crunches. The bullshit in these cases is a byproduct of needing high peak capacity infrequently and needing to maintain that level of labor availability even when you have nothing to do with it, and deciding to assign it bullshit when it's not being used productively instead of just telling it to go spend time with its family.
I agree with this. I used to work at a place that had a fairly consistent yearly trend - busy for 1/4 of the year, slow for 1/4 of the year, and comfortable about half the year. We walked a tightrope between having enough employees for the busy quarter and wasting money paying people to do nothing in the slow quarter. Sometimes we found ourselves understaffed and everyone working 10-14 hour days when we let staffing get too low.
The end result was that during the slow months we would get grilled about looking busy (nobody said those words, but it was obvious) and then all of the make-work we were asked to do was instantly forgotten the moment we had enough real work to keep us busy again.
#27 (astrology applying to almost everybody except for the Chosen) is basically the plot of John C. Wright's Somewhither. There's a multiverse that splits off based on choices, but regular human choices don't have enough punch to split off a whole universe - so whenever there's a miracle, another world is created which didn't have that miracle. The main antagonists are headquarted in the completed Tower of Babel and have astrology that really, *really* works, down to the minute with sufficient steampunk calculation power applied to the prediction tasks. The only exception are the Chosen, or people close enough to them to be in the 'shadows' they cast.
But the immunity only lasts so long as you obey your higher nature; if you give into baser instincts, then the astrology is going to retroactively work again, and the bad guys will not just be on your doorstep but will have gotten there even before you did. Fighting somebody with working astrology is...well, like trying to fight Prometheus in Scott's story "A Modern Myth" from a few years back.
I'm kind of surprised Flegal is only writing about her experiences with the "Obesity Wars" now. Did something prompt this?
I've always been surprised more attention hasn't been given to how weird and frenzied a bunch of the science in this area is. As a layman who got really interested in obesity and nutritional science following an eating disorder, I was shocked at how shaky and poor most of the science is, and how many perverse incentives are tangling up everything. There appears to be a lot of straight lying.
I had no idea until I read this piece and was shocked by it. I'm likewise amazed it is not getting more popular attention and appreciate Scott's presentation of it here.
Could you expand on how bad you've found nutritional science to be?
As for Flegal, I can easily imagine that it took time for her mistreatment to pile up, and more time for her to decide it was a narrative and worth making public.
I downloaded the colonialism paper from SciHub, and fwiw the abstract is horribly written and reeks of that "uninformed freshman uses phrases they think sound sophisticated" style. I was going to read the whole paper because I get a kick out of reading cancelled material, but honestly they've strongly signaled a lack of any real inquisitiveness or insight.
This is how not to write:
> For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is
high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a
general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in
most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those
concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by
and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology
imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart
sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in
many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states
today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance;
by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies
from scratch.
---
Yeah the Language Log author is crazy.
Are there any proposed causal models for why being slightly overweight would be healthier?
I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately since a while ago when I measured as having a very slight potassium deficiency at a checkup. It was easy to correct (and probably caused in significant part by my getting a lot of exercise and sweating a lot,) but when I started looking into the potassium contents of various foods considered rich in potassium, I realized that at a 2000cal/day diet, most people are almost certainly getting well short of the DRV, even if eating "healthy" diets. And the same applies to many other micronutrients.
Humans aren't really meant to live on 2000 calories per day for ideal operation. We're meant to live on significantly more than that, at much higher activity levels than most modern people meet. You don't burn off micronutrients with exercise (mostly; you do sweat out salts,) so adjusting down our caloric intake to meet our reduced energy demands may leave us with significantly lower than ideal levels of micronutrients.
Personally, I barely eat processed foods (I eat a bit if you count ostensibly whole wheat pasta and bread as processed,) but since I've become stringent about counting micronutrients, I've found that it's actually quite difficult to meet the DRV on many of them, even on a much healthier diet than most Americans get, at 2000 calories per day. In fact, my equilibrium level of caloric consumption is closer to 3000 calories per day (due to regular vigorous exercise,) and I still struggle to meet the DRV of many micronutrients at that level of food intake, without eating any processed foods (and this is accounting for the fact that I only eat empty-calorie indulgences about once per 2-3 weeks. I'm not at the far extreme, but I'm *much* further down the curve of obsessive health-attentiveness than most Americans.)
Strict attentiveness to food labels, and looking up nutrition labels online for foods (ex. chicken breasts) which don't have nutritional content labeling in the store. I rarely (less than once per two weeks) eat food I did not prepare myself. I used to weigh all the ingredients I put into the meals I made, but since I've been doing this for a pretty long time now, I'm satisfied with eyeballing them based on the intuitions I've built up about food quantities. I can also calculate expected calorie expenditure based on exercise levels, eat a target level of calories, and lose, gain or maintain weight at a rate which corresponds to my predictions within a small margin of error.
I mostly just base micronutrient targets on nutrition labels as well, although with some supplemental research. For example, the DRV for iron listed on nutrition labels is actually based on the recommended value for women, and adult women need more than men to replace losses due to menstruation. There are a lot of micronutrients whose contents pretty much only feature on fortified cereals and multivitamins (how much of my DRV of selenium do I get? I have no idea, and tracking that would far exceed the level of effort I'm willing to put in given that no health officials seem to regard selenium deficiency as any sort of public health crisis.)
Based on CDC guidelines, I know that I routinely get less than 100% of my DRV of potassium, calcium, and magnesium. I get at least the recommended amounts of vitamins A and C, but can't adequately track my levels of vitamin D because I don't know how much I'm getting from sun exposure, and I don't bother to keep track of all the different B vitamins. I'd estimate that I probably get approximately 100% of the DRV of folate.
I cannot rule out that the CDC's guidelines for recommended values of various micronutrients are well in excess of those required for optimal health, and indeed for some micronutrients I suspect that that is very likely the case.
The quality of the research is a seperate issue to the censorship because credible researchers felt the paper was worthy until they got threatened. The bar for publication is shifting from having "undergone double-blind peer review" to whether researchers anticipate receiving threats of violence.
"Are there any proposed causal models for why being slightly overweight would be healthier?"
It's entirely possible that what we classify as "overweight" is in fact closer to 'typical' or what the human body itself considers a desirable weight, and that "normal" weight is in fact underweight. We don't understand metabolism all that well (see also: the obesity paradox, where obese people are more likely to get several diseases but also far more likely to survive them/escape the worst impacts of them). Some of the most critical components like leptin were only discovered in the past 20 years. We thought fat was just inert calorie storage until recently too (it isn't--it's part of the endocrine system).
Possibly having a bit of "cushion" is protective against severe illness--if you have fat reserves, it will take longer to start starving if you can't eat, and starving is extremely hard on the body. Possibly fat reserves have some salutary effect on metabolic process we don't understand. Possibly many people maintain a "normal" weight by restrictive eating, and so they are malnourished (relatedly: weight loss, intentional or not, is correlated with premature mortality).
For weight, much like height, being in the middle of the bell curve seems protective: both extremes (extremely high weight, and extremely low weight) have negative impacts, in much the same way it's not ideal to be 4 feet tall or 7 feet tall.
Don't you have to be careful about Berkson's paradox for that sort of thing? (in this case, it'd be that the sorts of cancer that obesity causes are more survivable than the average cancer that non-obese people get)
This is also where researchers need to be careful about when they measure the weight. If you simply measure everyone's weight and then find whether they die in the next <some period T>, you end up confounded by the people who had already lost weight due to a disease that later killed them. You also can't just regress life expectancy as a function of present weight for this same reason.
Also, it isn't just disease that does this. Smoking, amphetamines, and opioids all suppress appetite and also shorten your life.
And, of course, many forms of dieting are extremely unhealthy. Compared to just being a normal weight to begin with, actually losing a lot of weight can shorten your life.
>Are there any proposed causal models for why being slightly overweight would be healthier?
My layman's understanding is: the immune system is suppressed in people who are underweight (as the body attempts to save calories - it's like the old and counterproductive saying "starve a fever", but you're effectively pre-starved), and this effect extends up through what is conventionally termed "healthy" weight, but this wasn't well-understood or accounted for when the conventional definitions were drawn up (i.e. they were optimising for heart disease alone rather than all-cause problems). It should be pretty obvious why being immunocompromised is not healthy and results in excess mortality.
I know the doctors I've talked to (in Oz) have recommended the "overweight" range to me, although I wouldn't generalise (I have perennial issues with accidental weight loss due to anorexia-the-symptom, so I imagine they want to keep my target a bit higher than usual).
I don't understand the thing where it's definitely true that dog ownership leads to much higher mild and moderate exercise, but that this nonetheless doesn't translate to improvements in physical and mental health.
I thought it was a given that exercise (including mild and moderate) is one of the best things for mental and physical health.
Is the pet article implying that this isn't true?
Also it seems like a lot of correlation being inflated with causation. (e.g. for the claim that pet owners have slightly lower mental health, perhaps sadder people are more likely to get pets in the first place. Maybe for company, or maybe high mental health people have lives that are too full for pet maintenance)
Also, I dislike the grouping of cats and dogs, as I think dogs are more likely to be beneficial (mostly because of the whole exercise and getting out of the house and meeting the neighbors thing)
It's possible dog ownership doesn't have a relationship with increased light exercise because most people who consider themselves equipped to take care of a dog are people who would have gotten similar levels of exercise doing something else if they hadn't had one, and the people for whom that exercise would be a significant increase over their baseline feel like taking care of a dog would be too difficult.
People less inclined to exercise to begin with may also be inclined to get lower-maintenance dogs. A husky would demand activity levels which would certainly qualify as "exercise" to take care of properly, but conversely, if you were the sort of person inclined to go running regularly, a pug might be an actual impediment to that. Low-activity dogs may not demand enough physical activity of their owners for it to be measurably beneficial.
Hmmm, this doesn't map to my own experience or to the experiences of my friends.
I currently walk over a mile every day to take my dog to the creek, and I very definitely would not do this or similar walking if it weren't necessary because of the dog. The exact same thing is true of my friend that I am currently visiting. They specifically got a high energy dog (husky x border collie) to force them to get daily exercise they otherwise wouldn't.
I do agree that people who actively COULDN'T walk a dog are unlikely to get active pups (and wouldn't get any extra exercise by owning a couch potato greyhound or lap dog), and people who ALREADY run a lot are unlikely to get pugs (but still might run even more than their baseline if they got a husky, etc)
It could be that for some pet owners, the increased light exercise might replace more intense exercise: Walking a dog is more active than sitting on the couch, but having to stop to pick up poop and match the dog's pace can interfere with a more intense workout. It might also give people less time to do other beneficial things like cook healthy food or develop relationships with humans.
Based entirely on personal observation, my theory is that the benefits from pet ownership are real, but there are also negatives that Big Dog doesn't talk about. Needing to take care of a pet is stressful for someone who has a busy life: There's the work of training and cleaning up after them, the cost of vet bills (or the guilt if you can't or won't pay) and the grief when they die.
Re: people not noticing stuff about language, I hadn't noticed the etymology of "tiramisù" either until my late teens *even though I'm a native Italian speaker*. Likewise for the etymology of "malaria" (Italian for "bad air"). Also, while I've known there's an insect called "cricket" since I was a kid and I've known there's a sport called "cricket" since I was a kid, I've managed to never think about these two facts at the same time and not notice there's a sport called like an insect *until my late twenties*.
And for those that don't know Italian, "tira mi sù" is "pick me up". (And learning that helped me notice the accent mark and get the stress correctly on the last syllable. Also, I was shocked to learn that this dessert that exists in every traditional Italian restaurant is so recent that its earliest attested appearance in print is after I was born: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiramisu
It's quantifying exactly *how* long. Half-life of 117 years means, at any given point in time, if you consider all currently unproven mathematical conjectures, you expect half of them be proven within 117 years.
How many more instances of this does everybody else need before they really and truly internalize the idea that the news is fundamentally untrustworthy and you cannot default to assuming good faith?
I don't know how to ask this question in a less inflammatory way. Those are two examples of egregious and intentional lies that went uncorrected for months if not years, that all just so happen to slant the story in a direction that is politically convenient for a specific faction. How do you see this happen and then gell-mann your way into thinking "nah the rest of the news is still fine". I don't understand
Both "the news is fundamentally trustworthy" and "the news is fundamentally untrustworthy" are overly simplistic and unworkable, for basically the same reasons as what you'd get if you replaced 'news' with 'science'. They're made up of many people and many organizations with plenty of competing incentives - if you treat them as institutions at all, you have to include many of their strongest criticisms as coming internally. Greenwald is a journalist, after all, and I'd make the argument that in this context Scott absolutely is as well.
If you want to know how to be better at deriving true beliefs from the news, I can give plenty of advice or recommendations. But if you're looking to define its fundamental essence, I don't think your project is going to be very fruitful.
I wonder if this idea ports to another subject. Hypothesize with me for a moment
"When surveyed privately, most Americans support family formation and traditional relationships. But in public they support casual hookup culture because they think everyone else does and want to get dates!"
While it's certainly a possibility in any given case, that works in both directions. Both sides of multiple issues are saying "people are scared to admit that they agree with my position, but secretly do." How do you reconcile this?
It's obviously self-serving to suggest that even though your position polls at below [50% or some other useful measurement], you actually have a mandate from a larger population. The Silent Majority has been a meme for 50 years or more.
I am curious about how your hypothesis explains people using Tinder instead of forming traditional families. They're not just lying about it on surveys, they're actually doing the thing they say they prefer. That seems like actually preferring it.
Re #34, the testosterone study, it was pretty cool that they included both male and female subjects. We think of testosterone as a male thing, even though women have it too at lower levels, so the effect of different testosterone levels on women doesn't get enough attention.
I think 6 is a very bad study, at last insofar as anyone wants to use it to support the idea that poverty doesn't cause these outcomes. It may of course contain interesting and useful findings that a more nuanced reading would bring to light.
Firsts of all, it says that the correlation between poverty and bad outcomes is attenuated when you control for a set of factors, BUT these factors are themselves clearly caused at last in part by poverty. These include highest parental education (hard for poor parents to get higher ed degrees), urbanicity (poor parent's cant afford houses in the suburbs), and parental psychiatric disorders/antisocial behaviors (if you're studying whether poverty causes these exact things, you can't analyze it as though the existence of these things in poor parents in not caused by poverty - that's begging the question).
Saying that poverty does not cause bad outcomes because they're actually caused by these factors which are (plausibly) themselves caused by poverty, is a bit like saying that jumping out of an airplane without a parachute doesn't cause death, because actually it's hitting the ground that causes death. True as far as it goes, and a good result to highlight if you're trying to convince someone to wear a parachute before they jump, but not really an endorsement of jumping out of airplanes without parachutes (as people may be trying to apply the fining here).
As to the sibling adjustment, I largely disregard it for two reasons, one of which Scott gets at.
The first is that, if I'm reading it correctly, the sibling adjustment is applied after the adjustment for 'confounding factors' I talked about above, which I also reject (in terms of disputing a causal story for poverty). So we're already coming into the sibling adjustment with a data set I find to b wrong, improperly weighted towards a lower correlation and less to explain than it should have.
Second, as Scott gets at, as far as I can tell the sibling adjustment is just done by taking the parent's income when each sibling turned 15, and finding that bad outcomes don't change much if incomes went up or down in between. Although that's good to know in it's own right - it implies poverty-related interventions need to happen earlier than highschool - this seems a very weak measure to dispute a causal role of poverty.
-15 is pretty old in terms of development, one might expect most of the critical phases that determine these outcomes to happen sooner, when poverty may have been the same for each child.
-We just said in the previous analysis that factors which may be caused by poverty, like parental education levels or personality disorders, explain much of the variance. These things are unlikely to change with parental income over the short-term; you don't suddenly retroactively get a diploma or cure your life-long anxiety disorder just because your income went up by $15,000 this year.
-Even to the extent that important factors do change with income, they're unlikely to change very fast. This is partially due to inertia and people staying in familiar situations or needing to pay off debts accrued before changing their material situation. And it's partially because the measure looks at income rather than wealth. The odds that a family that made $30k for 20 years and now has made $45k for the last 2 years will own a house/own a working car/etc is much lower than a family that has made $45k for the last 20 years, but as far as I can tell the analysis treats them as identical.
Overall, I don't begrudge the analysis itself, it teaches us important things about what factors stemming from poverty cause these outcomes, which helps to suggest more targeted interventions in poverty-stricken communities. All true knowledge is useful, and it seems plausible that they got at some true knowledge with the data analysis itself.
However, I hugely begrudge the conclusions they draw, an how they try to narrativize these conclusions improperly. To me, it looks like they're saying 'bad outcomes aren't caused by poverty, they're caused by things that are caused by poverty, and therefore we shouldn't worry about fixing poverty and should use tiny, focused micro-interventions on those things instead, or just wash our hands by assuming those things are genetic and can't be changed/are a matter of personal responsibility.'
In terms of the science of their own analysis, this conclusion seems dangerously wrong/disingenuous. In terms of public policy impact and public education, this conclusion seems very dangerously wrong-headed and misleading, and feels intended to grab headlines and get future funding/speaking fees from rightwing ideological sources.
So yeah, I don't like that part of the paper, and think it should be disregarded as transparently wrong/unfounded.
Re: 7 - 'Is it ethical to hire baboons to do our drudge work and pay them in booze' is probably a good precursor to ethical debates around the deployment and use of semi-sentient AI in the future.
Nice Lynx, Thx. Related to 35. Sci-hub (and lone geniuses*) On the referral of the other Scott A. (Aaronson) We watched the documentary "The Internet's Own Boy". Nerd recommended if you haven't seen it. Having a world wide rent seeking scheme, where by publishers hang onto the worlds research papers is a bad idea. (And hey if they give up rights to the world after X-years, there can be no threats of violence to the original publisher. "Sorry, it belongs to the world now."
*lone genius is kinda silly. It's always better to have a group of them riffing off each other.
Re: 13, I wonder how it would affect support for voter ID if it were given in contrast to the alternatives that are currently in place - having to provide identifying information like full name, address and birthdate, sign an affidavit to your identity, etc. - rather than just being given in a vacuum, especially since most voters may not know about these measures.
Saying 'would you like security measure X' is likely to give a very different result than 'would you like security measure X or security measure Y.' As far as I know, no on is advocating getting rid of voter ID *and* all the security measures currently in place in states that don't require it already, so framing the question without those measures being mentioned feels less relevant to the actual policy question at hand.
Re: obesity, overweight, not overweight. studies. Did the analysis also pull out an under-weight category? (I'm guessing underweight has higher risk, and lumping with 'not overweight' would pull it down.... and so results are not surprising. A category error?)
The previous signalman lost both his legs in a work accident, so he trained his pet baboon to pull the signal levers instead, as well as push his wheelchair and help around the house.
When a passenger complained about a baboon being in charge of the signals (which are kind of a safety critical part of the railway) the company's solution was to make the baboon an official company employee.
I go back and forth between being intensely appreciative of modern safety regulations and regret that I missed the narrow slice of human history where you could get away with outsourcing train signaling to a baboon
I wonder what XHamster is going to do with that data now, knowing that their primary paying customers are extremists on either side of the aisle who want to tear each other's heads off.
"I wonder what XHamster is going to do with that data now, knowing that their primary paying customers are extremists on either side of the aisle who want to tear each other's heads off."
Enemies to lovers, rated XXX, you won't believe what happens when a busty young antifa activist gets lost in the woods and she stumbles into the cabin of an alt-right stud. 30 scorching hot minutes of no-holds-barred political action where preconceptions are not the only thing wrecked!
There are enough fics of this over on the EMCSA that I'm kind of bored sick of them.
(Spoiler alert: essentially all of them end with the feminist becoming a happy housewife and raising children. Stories written *by* feminists - and there are quite a few - don't tend to go for this sort of "redemption".)
Religious cults may be on the downswing, but political and business cults have been on the upswing. There have been several pieces by Andrew Sullivan on Substack about the "woke" cult and certainly the "Trump" cult has an identifiable leader, for example. The segmenting effect of media (and social media) has encouraged this phenomenon, no doubt.
Landmark (which has mainstreamed itself) was founded by the people that started Est in the 70's. But one could argue that crypto subculture as others like it could be a kind of cult.
On youtube, Coffeezilla describes an ecosystem of "gurus" who prey on gullible men. It seems to be mostly selling low-quality overpriced "education" on how to get rich. Most of it seems to be just selling stuff directly rather than setting up an MLM structure.
MLMs would meet many of the criteria of cults (I grew up in a cult so when I left as an early adult read all about them - they don't all need a single charismatic leader. The Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, are run by "The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society" which is a fairly faceless corporation and therefore insist they can't be a cult (which cult experts disagree with)
As far as I can tell, there's a gender split. MLMs aimed at men start with "get really rich really fast". MLMs aimed at women are more like "you can make some money (usually selling stuff rather than finance) while spending time at home and you can also get somewhat rich".
If anyone knows about MLMs and the like aimed fairly equally at men and women, tell me about them.
Author here - good points, and I touch on some of these themes in the article. The internet/tech/politics/business are definitely transforming the nature of cults.
In relation to the Trump phenomenon taking hold in more conservative populations:
"...societies that are less tolerant of deviant behavior may have a lower rate of cult formation, but may be more susceptible to mass revolutions in which cult-like dynamics take over. "
This was a cogent observation in your piece and one I hadn't considered.
We are this long after the links post and nobody has riffed on the fact that supersonic jets are to be manufactured by a company named "Boom?" ACX, you are letting me down.
Kind of weird that the Obesity article assigns pseudonyms "Professor 1" and "Professor 2" and "Prestigious School of Public Health" only after already stating the full name of the individuals in question. The fact that "PSPH" is actually the "Harvard School of Public Health" (HSPH) is easily googled.
I'm not saying they needed to remain anonymous, I just don't the point of the indirection on "Professor 1", "Professor 2" and PSPH.
Leaving out the names helps emphasize to the reader that the problem of interest for this paper is a *behavior pattern some professors engage in* rather than a problem with those two professors in particular. Get rid of those two professors and leave incentives the same and some *other* professors might fill the same slots.
On the ticker-tape parade thing, I kept thinking the obvious event that was left out in recent memory is either December 10/11, 2020 (Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine approved) or December 17/18 (Moderna vaccine approved) or the day a couple days later when the first doses were injected into non-trial patients in the United States.
I guess there's an obvious reason why there were no parades on those dates, but in retrospect, it seems obvious that the Golden Gate Bridge, Freedom Tower, Willis Tower, Gateway Arch, and similar monuments in every city should absolutely have been lit up in special colors that night.
I was a bit confused about the Less Wrong post not having mentioned this as a date that should have been celebrated, but then I saw the Less Wrong post was from August. But still, it should have posited this as a future celebration that we *should* prepare for!
Not confirmed. The IG talked to the Parks Police and they said they didn't do it for a photo op and had an existing plan to clear the park to put up a fence.
The IG also says that the Parks Police reported that the Secret Service and Bureau of Prisons arrived and then the Park Police cleared the park.
The IG did not talk to the Secret Service so whether or not they asked the Parks Police to move up the time table or called any audibles to the people on the ground in the park isn't known.
Oh man, re: chess and calories, I've long had a superstition: I used to powerlift, and as a result I have a pretty finely tuned sense of what I need to eat and when, plus a sense of different types of physical and mental exhaustion. As a programmer I noticed that after particularly challenging days of programming, I felt like I needed to eat a bit more and I felt a similar sensation to the "you have used all up your normal stores of energy" sensation that comes after a high volume lifting day (which is different from the feeling of a lower volume, heavy weight lifting day).
Based on those sensations my superstition was that thinking hard burned calories in a noticeable way plus it used micronutrients in a way that was somehow similar to endurance exercise. Obviously just a casual guess based on my personal experience.
Re #29, it's because utilitarian thinking in government is incredibly rare, so [a person who's willing to consider what's both important and possible to achieve] will have a lot of interesting proposals relative to the typical politician.
This is highly speculative and possibly just a side effect of having listened to too many Firesign Theatre albums, but perhaps there are many fewer cults these days because nearly every American is already in a cult, namely the cult of television. TV is in some sense a metacult, the cult that has something for everyone except for the people who somehow figured out how to make themselves resistant to marketing & advertising. When there were only four channels, there were too many gaps through which individual people, who are always irreducibly weird, would get bored, turn off the TV and go do something else. Now the television metacult has infinite plasticity in order to shape many different messages, some combination of which will fit almost everyone's priors and give them the "I knew it!" dopamine boost, which satiates their desire for a satisfactory explanation of just what the hell is going on around here.
Only with the advent of Youtube. I'm still old fashioned enough to believe that people's critical faculties tend to be more engaged when they're reading than when they're watching video. If cable exponentiated this effect compared to broadcast TV, then I don't know how many Knuth up-arrows to apply to this effect when comparing online video to cable because cable did not have the capacity to tailor what it offers each user based on that user's history. The ubiquitous recommendation algorithms tighten the ideological/cultural lock-in feedback loop tremendously.
How many folks e.g. under 30 even watch TV regularly? May be just my social circle, but I'd guess - not that many. I personally never had a working TV at my home since 2010. What you say can be equally applied to internet echo chambers though, as Nancy Lebovitz noted.
Nope and not going to. But my friends who do seem to be mostly using youtube to distract their kid(s). And in any case, isn't the point that you have *your child* watching TV so that you can have some much needed free time, not watching it yourself (for which you presumably have less time once you have a child)?
Maybe cults have only seemed to decline because newer ones are less obviously religious. Consider UFO-logy, feminism, environmentalism, "wokeism", the New Atheism and Atheism Plus. Do they not have scriptures, prophets, popes, dogmas, infidels, sinners, heretics and blasphemers? Do they not have inquisitions and witch-hunts? Even Covid-19 seems to follow this pattern, with rituals and true believers.
Author here - It's a good point and I kind of gesture towards something like this in the article. I guess you could argue that these don't really fit the classic definition of a cult, although they certainly shared some similarities as you say.
I wouldn't describe them as cults, arguably "movement" (with its religious connotations and external focus) fits them much better. They may still be providing people with something that people used to join cults to look for though.
Cults are usually defined as being small enough to have tight-knit-group dynamics. None of these are that small or that tight-knit, at least as whole movements (certainly there are cults within some of them). These are better compared with organised religion than with cults (and indeed, cults usually don't have the ability to do inquisitions and witch-hunts except occasionally on a town scale, and usually haven't codified their scriptures yet).
" Do they not have scriptures, prophets, popes, dogmas, infidels, sinners, heretics and blasphemers? Do they not have inquisitions and witch-hunts? "
No. The answer is no, they do not. Who is the Pope of feminism? What is the scripture of Atheism? "Has influential figures" is not the same thing as a Pope or prophet, or else literally everything is a cult. Similarly "Has written content that is highly regarded" isn't scripture. And COVID-19 is a pandemic, not a cult. It doesn't care if you believe in it
:) So what you're saying is that it's high time for us to create a cult? (I realise tone doesn't carry, so let me clarify for the literal readers: I am not serious.)
On point #18, I think most people notice most of these, but that any given person will miss some. I was shook when I realized that "only" is just "one-ly".
Setting aside whether it is accurate or not, it's still important to push back on the Lone Genius thing because it counteracts a fundamental bias of fiction. Fiction operates under a number of restrictions that prevent it from accurately reflecting reality, and one of those is that everything has to be done by a small number of characters that the audience can identify with. If the Apollo Program were a movie, there'd be like 5 named engineers who did everything important.
32: Why did we stop having ticker tape parades? (metaphorically and literally)
1. The windows in modern office buildings cannot be opened. So, you can't throw ticker tape out of them.
2. Ticker tape started to disappear in the 1970s, it is long since dead and gone replaced by Bloomberg terminals. Model 28 and 33 TTYs and their paper tape control mechanisms were replaced by PCs and microcomputers in the 1970s. Their ghost lives on in the innards of Unix systems.
We can solve both problems at once by setting up a device file that prints data out of the building. Whenever there's a ticker-tape parade, you simply need to run $ cat /dev/urandom >> /dev/out-the-window
> 17: Claim: counties where the seminal pro-KKK movie Birth Of A Nation was played on its five year “tour” had more lynchings and race riots after the showing. Somewhat less believable claim: counties where it played still have more hate crimes today. I bet this turns out to be one of those persistence studies that doesn’t replicate.
How do you propose to replicate that one? Make another racist movie, show it in some counties, then wait 100 years and see if there are more hate crimes in those counties?
Since the crowd here at ACX has a lot of interest in programming, nootropics / hallucinogens, cryptocurrency and polyamory I'm surprised nobody has talked about John McAfee's recent assassination.
The antivirus software company founder had been in Spanish custody pending extradition to the US for his ideological unwillingness to pay federal income tax. During that time, he repeatedly expressed concern that he would be killed in a way meant to look like a suicide and took measures to make his desire to live clear including repeatedly tweeting about his optimism and good prison conditions as well as getting a tattoo to that effect. He was subsequently found hanged in his cell, with Spanish authorities claiming he had committed suicide while in custody.
Between this and your prior comment, I'd like you to clarify something for me:
What sort of evidence would you require to think that a 'troll' had been assassinated rather than committing suicide?
If McAfee's statements have negative evidentiary value, making it seem more likely that he committed suicide, then the hypothesis that he committed suicide is effectively unfalsifiable. Independent investigators will not be allowed to examine physical evidence, and the claim of the Spanish government holds no evidentiary value because they would make the same denials regardless of whether they killed him or not.
I would be SO surprised if the Spanish GOVERNMENT had killed an American citizen instead of extraditing him. That's allegiance-breaking behavior for little to no reason.
>What sort of evidence would you require to think that a 'troll' had been assassinated rather than committing suicide?
Wouldn't that just be the usual sort of evidence that someone had been murdered? A witness or video, forensic evidence of defensive wounds on the victim, killer's DNA under the victim's fingernails, suspicious deposit in the prison-guard/assassin's bank account, confession from the killer when confronted by some subset of the above, that sort of thing?
Most people who appear to have committed suicide, have in fact committed suicide rather than being assassinated. And most assassins screw up and leave evidence. Absent specific evidence of assassination, suicide is by far the most likely explanation.
Who do you imagine would be conducting the investigation to uncover that kind of physical evidence? Because if the Spanish authorities did kill himself, they would seem unlikely to want to reveal that fact.
Would you apply this same standard to someone wanted by China who conveniently committed suicide while in North Korean custody after expressing fear that he would be killed in exactly that manner? Or would you reasonably infer that Beijing was trying to send a message?
It's unclear to me why the government would kill him if they were going to extradite him anyway, but I guess killing people for not paying income tax (and making it look like an accident) sends a stronger message than criminal prosecution?
I'm struggling to understand the conspiracy at work here.
I haven't looked into it carefully but from the little I've read the HSPH arguments seemed more convincing than Flegal's arguments: I think their basic point is that people often lose weight from diseases shortly before they die and Flegal's studies don't do anything to adjust for that which sounds plausible to me, and she doesn't seem to have any actually convincing criticisms of their research.
Sociologically this was interesting to read; I previously had only heard the other side of the story so I had cast it in my head as "brave scientists fight to combat the government's shoddy science and misinformation." But I guess the other side of that "it's not The Government, it's a random researcher at the CDC who feels looked down on and bullied by the prestigious scientists at Harvard," and probably both sides feel like they're the underdogs here.
Flegal seems to be arguing that she's the subject of an isolated demand for rigor. All the arguments to the tune of "you didn't adjust for x" could also be applied to the Mokdad et al. paper. The main difference between the two was the dataset used.
#17 doesn't seem to implausible at all, but you have to break the assumption of causation. It isn't surprising counties with a lot of lynchings would be places that would be very receptive to a Birth of the Nation tour. It also doesn't seem surprising that high lynching counties in the past would be high hate crime counties today. But it doesn't follow from that showing a film for a few nights nearly 100 years ago was the cause.
That was my thought, I did worry that they may just be looking at absolute numbers and finding higher occurrences of lynchings in places with a higher population, but I'm pretty sure they've normalised the data (hard to tell).
It is also a very small difference though, maybe screening Birth of A Nation had some weird domino effect in combination with the other factors you mentioned.
I posted the same thing, but deleted it after reading the paper itself and reading up on the film.
Birth of a Nation was the first long movie and consequently an unprecedented smash hit; it was shown all over the US (indeed, the paper's "did this county screen BoaN" measure isn't based on records but on "did this county have a theatre capable of screening it"). After adjusting for inflation, it's still in the top 5 highest-grossing US films ever.
There's still the potential for a confound with which places had a theatre, but this specific issue seems to be covered.
>The cutest cognitive bias: people overestimate their own IQ by 30 points (!), but overestimate their romantic partner’s IQ by 40. The same study also claims there’s no correlation between “intellectual compatibility” and relationship satisfaction within relationships; ie you’re not more likely to have a happy relationship if your partner has a similar IQ to you (but see comment here).
Re: #32 ticker tape parades, the linked hypotheses would be insufficient if no parade happens once COVID is over. That's the outcome I predict.
I suspect there are fewer parades simply because public spending on such things was deprioritized. I'm inclined to add "because of upward transfers of wealth" which we've seen over the past 40+ years; achievements are "privatized/corporatized", regardless of how much public investment went into them. Will Pfizer or AstraZeneca shell out for a parade?
> Will Pfizer or AstraZeneca shell out for a parade?
They definitely would if it advertised them (and if they weren't illegal because of a pandemic).
However, when the achievement is by some greedy corporation that only cares about its self-interest, it would feel like being suckers to give them free advertising. Even as a libertarian who doesn't think there is anything wrong with a corporation that only cares about its self-interest, I'm going to do the same towards them, and not give them something (such as advertising) if I don't get something in exchange.
#40 I know exactly where that 30 comes from. I scored 106 on a paper test in middle school and 135+ on every single online (international? American?) test I've taken since to prove to myself I'm not average.
One thing to sort of have an idea about "ah yes, Indo-European language family" and another to see the traces of "yep, coming from a common pool of myths and ideas and concepts and imagery".
I find it very likely that most of the xhamster results are confounded by age. Older people are less likely to identify as alt-right or antifa (and arguably far-right). Note that antifa and alt-right score about the same on basically every item.
fascinating re CFF and subjective time. i'm surprised by this:
"Toads have a CFF of about 10% of humans, and so might experience the world in fast-forward"
i would have speculated [from cold] the opposite: that life for the toad is slo-mo, compared to mine. the toad, if i get it, has a higher frame-rate than my organic camera. that's why the toad's CFF is one tenth of mine - the flashes seem separate for the Toad because of all those non-lit frames between his lit ones.
since the toad has 10x more filmframes to go thru than i do, life takes longer for the toad - so i would have guessed. but skimming the article, i gather that the contrary interp is: faster frame-rate means a faster brain, so faster life. i likely mangle / oversimplify.
Might be a bit late on this one, but basketball 2- and 3-point shooting can be predicted by the Matching Law (along with other sports like baseball throws, and all behavior, really). For those not familiar with it, briefly, Matching Law states that behavior allocation among choices is proportional to the reinforcement received from those choices.
For 18, I count myself as one of the normal people who do not (at least consciously) notice the patterns in that table, and find it interesting when such patterns are pointed out.
As a point of pride, I recently noticed after 15 years of being taught 'trigonometry', that the word itself is very logical: trigon = triangle, metry = measurement of, so trigonometry = measurement of triangles!
> 25: Related: when surveyed privately, most Saudi men support women working outside the home. But in public they oppose it because they think everyone else opposes it and don’t want to get in trouble!
It's not true that they think that "everyone else opposes it". Most people know that a majority is in favor, they just somewhat underestimate the size of that majority. From the article:
> We start by describing the measured misperception about social norms relating to WWOH [women working outside the home]. Thea verage (median) guess is that 63% (67%) of other session participants agree with the pro-WWOH statement. The average level of agreement across all sessions is 87%, a number larger than the guesses of close to 70% of participants.
Regarding #20, I remember basketball coach Billy Donovan stating this back in 2007, when asked what kind of shots he liked: "Layups, dunks, and Lee Humphrey." (Humphrey was a 3-point specialist.)
At the time that was a novel concept, but it seems that the rest of basketball has embraced this.
I posted the Average Female Height chart in Slack at work, including the text above it ("The worst infographic ever?"). Someone in engineering complained to HR that it's offensive, it went up the chain to *at least* the VP of tech, came back down the chain to me, and my manager had a conversation with me about it.
Like I know this sounds like some kind of facebook boomer Republican made-up story but it's true.
In halcyon days, advertisements would say "SEX! Now that we have your attention..."
Today, porn site xHamster, desperate for advertising that will make it stand out, turns to politics, correctly believing that politics is way more attention-grabbing than porn.
Re 18: People not noticing the sensible rules of their language is actually one of the key drivers of language change (along with people pronouncing vowels weird and people getting conquered).
The case-in-point is grammatical gender (ever wondered why Spanish forks are boys and spoons are girls?). Linguistic theory says that noun classes start pretty sensibly (e.g. between living and non-living things), but break down over time for reasons covered in "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories" (1). Also, native speakers make mistakes and mistakes are contagious, especially prior to grammatical standardization and enforcement (aka literacy).
John McWhorter, pop linguist, covers this idea thoroughly in an episode of his podcast Lexicon Valley called "Why Do Languages Have Gender?" (2). He cites experimental evidence that speakers of languages with eroding (but still sensible!) noun classes do not perceive objects with the same grammatical markers as being related by some higher concept. In other words, native speakers see the markers as arbitrary rules. Adult language learners are probably *more* likely to pick up on the underlying significance because they are consciously memorizing rules, not acquiring the language as a child would (as commenter @r0seo36qwkegm2ci pointed out below with their Bulgarian studies).
English has a slew of weird properties that most native speakers never consciously perceive. For example, have you ever thought about the fact that stress is the only difference between many related verbs and nouns? Trees produce produce, drugs addict addicts, advocates advocate and communes commune! (3)
Finally, relationships between words in English might be more obvious on the page than in other languages because we haven't had any significant spelling reform in centuries. This is good fun for historians and wordniks, but terrible for anyone trying to learn how to read. (4)
Any data set that claims South Korea has only had 2 cults is wildly off. Cults are Korean pasttime.
My childhood cult was excluded. I looked at the source, a podcast, and they predictably went after the lowest hanging fruit (and I don't blame them).
I'm baffled by the idea that we should expect "cults that podcast X has chosen to do episodes about" to be any sort of time-and-space-independent sampling of cults. That leaves me incredibly skeptical of any conclusions that they draw.
Yeah, they tried to say "there's one effect biasing towards relatively recent cults that have had time to wrap up, and another effect biasing away from a time period where they already have lots of cults, so it all probably cancels out", but I just don't believe that the second effect is significant.
The fact that there don't appear to be any cults from the first century AD, or around the first Millennium, or the 1830s, indicates that this is very much a biased sample of cults. (Also, where is Lyndon LaRouche?!)
Author here - I certainly don't make any any presumption that is anything like an unbiased sample, which is why I keep the conclusion very general - rising in 50s, peaking in .
sorry - peaking 70s/80s, and declining through 90s until today. I don't see why the bias in sample would invalidate that conclusion. I agree with you Kenny that the effect you bring up is likely negligible but who knows what the show creators are thinking; also cults from more distant past may have less sources and thus are not chosen, certainly may have an effect in the same direction of my conclusion (a cult deficit in recent decades). By way of example - there are definitely some south korean cults that were not in the dataset... a quick search shows Church of God Jesus Witnesses, Shincheonji Church of Jesus, Providence, and Grace Road Church... these are founded in 1964, 1984, 1980, 2002 respectively. So one is more recent, but the recent are near that peak of 70/80s
Start by defining "cult" as opposed to "religion" or maybe even "all-consuming hobby".
Or “political obsession”?
If anyone has looked at the GME subreddit, which is based on the belief that their stock will have a MOASS (mother of all short squeezes) and shoot up to millions of dollars in price, they will be able to recognize pretty much every single sign of a cult. I think our ability to resist cults is likely just as bad as it ever way, frankly. Article about it:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/cargo-cult-investing-ce232cf34c46
Not an expert but I'm fairly sure that a fundamental feature of cults is that they try to cut members off from their non-cult family and friends. I can't imagine that GME does that.
Yeah, I grew up in a cult that's still around today (under different management, as they say) in central Virginia. Having lmy formative years lived within the ebbs and flows of flower child hubris, I'd not wish it upon anyone contra Thiele etc.
Re 38:
> The same study also claims there’s no correlation between “intellectual compatibility” and relationship satisfaction
I presume his is *after* people having self-selected themselves into a relationship (afaict from the abstract. Didn't read the full text because paywall.)
Obligatory reminder that there is no correlation between height and performance in the NBA for similar reasons. If you're short and in the NBA, it means you're exceptional in other ways. If a couple has a 40 point IQ difference, it means they're clicking really well on some other axis.
Maybe you could check compatibility between random groups of couples after speed dating for a bit to evaluate the claim about (temporary) partner satisfaction and intelligence.
I think people select for intelligence levels similar to themselves and would feel bothered if assigned a partner that was 40 IQ points different. I would be interested in the nature of relationships with gaps that large. I think it would almost always have male higher.
On that topic, I find the idea that people are overestimating their partner's IQs by 40 extremely surprising. Does everyone think their partners are literal geniuses? I can honestly (and not very nicely) say that if I am overestimating my current partner's IQ by 40 points, then she shouldn't have been able to manage middle school, let alone high school, college, and employment (all of which she did).
They supposedly overestimate their own IQs by 30, so I expect you'll see a typical Dunning-Kruger curve where 70 thinks they're 110, 100 thinks they're 130, but 160 thinks they're 150. From there, it's only a slight additional overestimate to think their partner is 10 IQ points smarter. Similarly to driving competence, I expect very few people to think of themselves as having below average IQ.
(Note: I just googled Dunning-Kruger curve, and basically all the results are wrong. The Dunning-Kruger effect in the popular imagination features a prominent Mount Stupid, where incompetent people think they're very competent, and then a sharp decline in confidence as people realise how bad they are. In fact, people's self-assessments of their competence tend to increase monotonically with increasing actual competence, but just with a slope smaller than 1, which leads to an overestimate that gradually becomes more accurate.)
Thank you for actually looking up the effect you referenced. I have been quietly fuming about that misunderstanding for some time.
The slope smaller than 1 = more accurate self assessment at higher competencies is dependent on the difficulty of the test.
Basically on easy tests people overestimate their ability which makes smarter people more accurate, and on hard tests people underestimate their ability which makes dumber people more accurate.
People don't know how IQ is defined. And some know it in the sense that they could tell the definition, but don't really use that knowledge when making estimates of their or other people's IQ.
I often see people treat, say, an IQ of 115 as just slightly above average, but 85 as seriously retarded, even though they are at the same distance from the median (one is smarter than ~84% of the population, the other smarter than the bottom 16%). Likewise, people don't realize how much more exceptional an IQ of 145 is than one of 115 (the former is smarter than ~99.86% of the population); this requires not only knowledge of the definition, but also some approximate values of the normal distribution.
I would also bet that the average person thinks that IQ scores go up to 200 or something.
Theoretically it does go to ~195: one in 7.8 billion corresponds to ~6.32 sigma. Though the definition of fitting the discrete individuals to a normal distribution starts to break down at the extremes.
And of course, in practice, it's impossible to calibrate an IQ test at the extremes. To determine the IQ of the smartest people in the world, you would have to test everyone in the world, or at least all plausible candidates.
Yeah, I was under the impression that *test scores* didn't really go beyond 155 because after that the group sizes were too small to calibrate it. Am I right about that 155 number?
Above 145 the methodologies are dubious at best. Even 130-145 has such large error bars as to warrant caution. The core validity is within two standard deviations of the mean.
"Theoretically it does go to ~195" – last I heard the Stanford-Binet, at least, peaks at 160; is that no longer the case?
It may well be the case: no actual test will be able to give a score near the extremes. What I meant was based on the theoretical definition of fitting the distribution of the entire humanity to a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. I didn't say practically, I said theoretically, and I meant it.
Simplifying this, I would guess a great many people's sense of IQ is defined by those sorts of clickbait "If you can solve this puzzle your IQ is over 200!" puzzles that people post on Facebook. And at least an equal number have basically no sense of IQ whatsoever.
People unfamiliar with normal distributions probably underestimate significantly how much of a difference 2 standard deviations make.
According to a comment on the motte (https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/o4ooc7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_21_2021/h2sq0d9/), this is a bad result from a bad paper whose authors for some reason decided to linearly map a 25-point subjective assessment scale onto IQ.
A lot of people running around talking about their statistically unlikely to impossible IQs because they are starting from childhood IQs, which are not deviation IQs, and then going through multiple rounds of exaggeration (i.e. first the parents to the individual and then the individual to other people).
all the iq test i taked as a kid were deviation IQs and that has been standard for generations. If you are 100 you might have taked a mental age based iq test as a kid
The extended norms used for children are not deviation IQs. There aren’t kids of the relevant ages on the planet to justify the ceilings used.
The ceiling for the WISC is 4 st dev, which is one in every ~31,000. You really think there aren't 31k kids of any given age on the planet?
That assumes they understand average as 100, genius as 150, and so on. But if you are inferring average (etc) from reported IQ scores, it's going to skew high, because low IQs aren't reported much, and very exaggerated IQs of 190 or 210 are reported a lot. If you think an IQ 210 is a genius, you are going to think IQ 160 is merely smart.
I wonder whether people who think their partner is smarter than they are are more likely to be accommodating during disagreements, or at least some disagreements.
I would guess that the thinking they're smarter would correlate with how much 'in love' they still are. And that would also correlate with disagreements. I mean we all think our children are above average. (living in Lake Wobegon :^)
I think it does, but not for the implied reason. Basically I bet people who think they are smarter than their partners rate are less agreeable than people who rate their partners smarter.
Now we have to compare how the same person behaves towards different partners, when (s)he considers some of those partners smarter than him/her, and some of them dumber.
I saw a graph drawn to illustrate this once, I swear it was in an SSC comment like ten years ago. I will attempt to replicate it here: https://files.catbox.moe/rqpbbe.png
Maybe you are thinking of this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart
I remember being surprised while drinking wine with some female friends and the topic turned to “who is smarter, you or your husband.” I was the only one who thought her husband was smarter. I wondered if we were all interpreting the question the same way.
My husband and I are probably evenly matched in general skills and verbal ability, but he’s much more quantitative on top of that, so that’s why I rated him as smarter. But the part of cognitive function that does advanced math doesn’t come up in our daily lives, so it’s never played a role in how we relate to one another.
Quick! Think of the smartest and stupidest people you’ve ever met!
In my observation, the gap between husband and wife intelligence tends to increase on other tail, with husband > wife on the right tail and husband < wife on the right tail. 2.5 SDs out on the right tail of the IQ distribution (common in my profession), I have not encountered a case of husband < wife. But 1 SD out on the left tail, it’s not surprising when the wife of the assistant gardener is cleverer than he is.
For what it’s worth, this observation is consistent with the hypothesis of greater male variance in intelligence.
Who are the smartest and stupidest people you’ve ever met?
"husband > wife on the right tail and husband < wife on the right tail."
I assume you meant left tail in the second case.
"2.5 SDs out on the right tail" "1 SD out on the left tail" Whose IQ are you referring to here, the husband or the wife? If you primarily refer to the husband's: As long as the spouses' intelligence isn't perfectly correlated, it is to be expected that very smart men are usually smarter than their wives, and very dumb men are usually dumber than their wives—simply because, compared to an outlier, it's likely that the wife is closer to the mean. It is also expected that very smart women are usually smarter than their husbands, and very dumb women are usually dumber than their husbands.
One could look at mate preferences, or the slightly higher male variance. But such considerations are likely trumped by the above effect (that an outlier of either sex will usually have a spouse who is less of an outlier).
Yes, I meant left tail in the second case, and yes, I meant husband’s IQ for SDs. You make a good point concerning outliers. However, if I take my sample from academic pairs with which I’m familiar, so that both members are outliers, the observation is still mostly right. However, among such pairs I have once observed a potential wife > husband.
If you're measuring relative to the husband, then you should expect this to happen even with equal variance: if partner selection is less than perfectly correlated with intelligence, it is necessarily the case that the smartest people will have spouses who are on average less smart than they are, and the stupidest will have spouses who are on average smarter.
So it can both be the case that of the smart married men you meet, most have stupider wives, *and* that of the smart married women you meet, most have stupider husbands. But if the smart people you run into are mostly men (due to gender ratios in your profession), you'll mostly have occasion to sample from the former case.
(Ignoring the unmarried and unstraight here - correlations of those things with intelligence could of course skew these results.)
That said, my wife and her friends like to exchange wife memes, the best of which is only an exaggeration of a true phenomenon: A caption of “I asked him to peel half of the potatoes and boil them”, above an image of half-peeled potatoes boiling in a pot.
But that just brings up the idea that men and women have different domains of work. I am sure wives think their husbands stupid when it comes to packing lunches for the kids, and visa versa for changing the oil or home repair.
Somebody’s funny bone is broken.
Okay, so that study picks a really silly methodology:
"Participants assessed their own and their partner's intelligence on a 1–25 point rating scale." lmao
"In order to place the 25-point scale SAI scores onto a scale more comparable to a conventional IQ score (i.e., M = 100; SD = 15), we transformed the scores such that values of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 were recoded to 40, 45, 50, 55, 60... 140, 145, 150, 155, 160." double lmao
It's like their *trying* to make people overestimate their intelligence. Why not "transform" to 50 and then we'll have an overestimation of 40 points! Better headlines, yay.
If it isn't obvious why, it's because someone like me (who belongs squarely in the middle of the curve) would have no hesitation in giving myself a 15. 1-25 is a silly scale, most people like their scales obviously symmetric (1-10, 1-100) etc.
Also, if I wanted to give myself a rating that's higher than 12 but not that muhc higher, i have no choice but to say 13. 5 whole points!
Lastly, a scale with a max of 160 tramsformed (read: disguised) to 25 is just plain dumb.
Lit review of "IQ estimation" they mention also contradicts them:
With respect to intelligence, specifically, Heck, Simons, and Chabris (2018) asked a general community sample of Americans to respond to the following item: ‘I am more intelligent than the average person.’ They found that 65% of the participants agreed with the statement, which is greater than the null expectation of 50%.
In comparison to their objectively measured IQs (Digit Symbol and Vocabulary subtests from the WAIS), the men were found to have overestimated their IQ by 7.8 IQ points, on average, whereas the women, as a group, did not over- estimate their intelligence (mean difference of −1.6 IQ points; not statistically significant from zero).
Overall terrible methodology. But it's psychology, what did we expect?
Oh god, that's beyond terrible. Completely invalidates the entire point of #38.
That's probably because the authors overestimated their own IQ by something like 30 points and in fact shouldn't be doing any studies.
Yeah, I doubt you belong squarely in the middle of the curve.
Haha thank you, kind stranger. I'm afraid that particular fact is an inconvenient truth. But I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.
With regards to #11, the quote from Paul Krugman is:
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
This article (https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-internet-quote-2013-12) has a response from Krugman about it:
"First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.
But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as money? That's a very different kind of question.
And the fact that people are throwing around my 98 quote actually shows that they don't get this point -- that they're confusing technology with monetary economics."
The tweet Matt Darling had about it being a skeptical point of view and correct does not seem like a reasonable interpretation to me unless there is some aspect to this that I am missing.
"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." is not equivalent to being skeptical about the economy doubling as a result of the internet unless you're being way too charitable. "most people have nothing to say to each other!" seems pretty absurd as well.
It would be like if there was a bunch of chatter about AI taking off and reaching a singularity and I said "AI is a completely useless waste of time" and here we are in 2021 without singularity so I was correct.
I agree with everything you write. Just want to point out "most people have nothing to say to each other" is kind of metaphorically profound and not wrong as of 2021 social media.
Krugman's error was to believe that because people have nothing to say each other, this would stop them saying it.
Unfortunately, the history was muddled by fact that Krugman initially misremembered which piece this quote was from. It was from Red Herring magazine, not the NY Times Magazine as he originally thought. Snopes confirmed this with Krugman:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/
The original piece is here:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html
The key quote:
> * Within two or three years, the current mood of American triumphalism--our belief that we have pulled economically and technologically ahead of the rest of the world--will evaporate. All it will take is a few technological setbacks or a mild recession here while Europe or Japan recovers a bit.
> * The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
> * As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.
I see an explicit and wrong claim about the growth rate of the internet. I'd say the OP tweets are revising history, although I guess you could reasonably defend Krugman by claiming (1) the debate over the overall growth rate was the important context and (2) that his prediction was just purposeful hyperbole. (See title of the piece.)
What's the logic behind the Chinese merger of vocational and private school diplomas?
China has been too successful in promoting college degrees. In particular, if you want one of the coveted government jobs, you need a college degree. As a result, vocational training is quite low-status, so unsurprisingly nobody wants to study for such jobs any more. This endangers the country's ability to actually produce things and therefore China's position as the world's factory. So in order to promote vocational training, they are merging these different kinds of schools, but people are understandably upset that they might get a vocational degree for the work and fees to get a college degree, especially since the authorities apparently gave no warning whatsoever about the move.
So overall it looks like a ham-fisted, ill-planned move to get more vocational degrees into circulation.
>China has been too successful in promoting college degrees. In particular, if you want one of the coveted government jobs, you need a college degree. As a result, vocational training is quite low-status, so unsurprisingly nobody wants to study for such jobs any more. This endangers the country's ability to actually produce things
Phew, I'm glad the West dodged that one.
Between this and population issues, it looks like China is coming out the far side of the demographic transition and finding that the low birthrate tertiary economy's grass isn't necessarily greener over here.
We were all worried China would overtake us, but then we realised that just meant they'd be suffering from all of our pathologies much sooner! That'll show them!
"Phew, I'm glad the West dodged that one."
I'm guessing this is sarcastic, in which case I'll point out that the US still manufactures a huge amount of goods. We just don't employ nearly as many people per capita doing it because automation has been so successful.
https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/america-still-makes-things
What manufacturing jobs require vocational degrees? I thought the primary worker base for Chinese manufacturing jobs was migrant workers from the rural provinces.
I guess the fitters and plumbers etc in factories need training?
Sure there's lots of use for unskilled labor, but a factory also need machinists and specialist technicians of all sorts. You don't need to know much to put a plastic head on a toy doll, but if you need to die press steel parts then you need some people who know how to repair or reset the die press.
Thanks
I get their intention, but I agree with you that this specific idea is a very bad way of dealing with the problem. The UK did something similar in the 70s I think, and now they have a serious shortage of nurses to the point that any foreign nurse will immediately get a visa, because the vocational courses (like nursing) took on more characteristics of university degrees over time, while earnings from these jobs didn't increase, so you get the cost and stress of a university degree with the lower pay of a traditionally vocational profession. Which noone wants.
This is probably not the exact failure mode that the Chinese idea will experience, but it shows that there are always unintentional consequences.
Something about that seems off. How do you get a shortage of nurses without any corresponding increase in pay for nurses?
Government interference is the most likely cause (I don't know about the UK nurses, but that's a pretty common baseline guess given the scenario).
It may not be a direct "nurses cannot make more than [$X]" law, but could be based on things like cost constraints. If the government pays for health care and only offers $XXX for a particular treatment, then the total cost of that treatment, including salaries and benefits for the necessary staff, cannot exceed that number.
The government sets the pay of NHS nurses directly.
Because the NHS is the public health service, funded by government (and the Byzantine organisational structures that have resulted from decades of various governments of all stripes trying to half-privatise it, give it autonomy, split it up, re-unify it and so on is a complete morass) the staff are on civil/public service pay scales, which are a nightmare to try and navigate. You can have a look here to see what they are: https://nursingnotes.co.uk/agenda-for-change-nhs-pay-bands/
Band 5 is where you get the nursing staff pay rates beginning:
"Band 5
Examples of the NHS staff paid at Band 5 are; staff nurses, newly qualified midwives and paramedics, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, and biomedical scientists."
4+ years experience £15.70 an hour £30,615 per annum
In dollars that's $21.94 an hour and $42,782.93 per annum. By comparison with American pay scales:
"The average nursing pay scale in the U.S
In March 2019, The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that between May 2017 and May 2018, registered nurses brought in a median salary of $71,730 per year – a 3.7% increase compared to the previous year.
The majority of nurses make from $48,690 to $104,100 annually. The average (mean) nurse salary at national level is $75,510."
So while being an experienced nurse isn't *bad* money as such, it'll take a while to work up to that pay rate and if you've got student loans etc. it's not really worth it. Becoming an agency nurse, where you're called in as temp help for over-stretched wards and so forth, pays a lot better. On the other hand, this site says that's not as rosy as it's painted: https://www.nurses.co.uk/nursing/blog/a-quick-overview-of-nurses--salaries-in-the-uk-in-2021/
Or you can try and get a job in America, which as you see, also pays a hell of a lot better.
I like the cute distinction here; nurses don't count as "medical staff", they're "clinical staff" but so are secretaries and ambulance drivers. Nice way to treat them, NHS! https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce-and-business/workforce-diversity/nhs-workforce/latest
My understanding is that British salaries are posted as post-tax and represent take home pay, whereas per annum salaries in America are uniformly stated in pre-tax terms. This would seem to narrow the salary gap substantially - is that not the case here?
I'm told part of the problem specifically with nursing in the UK is there are enough working class people who would be happy with the pay and conditions, but they struggle with the academic requirements of the course (some of which are at best marginal to the needs of the job).
Polytechnics were raised to the status of universities, but separate vocational qualifications remain. I don't think that had anything to do with the crisis in nursing.
Not sure why you're giving Greenwald credit on the Pulse shooting. The Washington Post had that story back in 2016- https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/no-evidence-so-far-to-suggest-orlando-shooter-targeted-club-because-it-was-gay/2016/07/14/a7528674-4907-11e6-acbc-4d4870a079da_story.html. It just didn't sink in which is fascinating in and of itself.
I can't really blame people for it. I mean ISIS terrorist, gay nightclub, I think people will make pretty reasonable assumptions here, even though they're wrong.
Reasonable at the time. It is a Hell of a coincidence that he'd pick a gay night club to shoot up. But wikipedia has had the most recent story for a while, with solid source links. So I'd expect anyone writing about it now to refresh their memory first.
It was, on day one, reasonable to suspect that Mateen had shot up the Pulse nightclub because of the LGBT connection for the same reason that it was reasonable to suspect that SARS CoV-2 had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There's a very unusual sort of event that can plausibly be linked to an unusual sort of institution, and look, here's an event of that sort that occurred in or adjacent to an institution of that sort. It's not proof, and there are other possible explanations, but it is Bayesian evidence.
Difference is, in the case of the Pulse nightclub, followup investigation very quickly produced overwhelming evidence for the alternate explanation, "Pissed-Off Muslim generically hates Decadent Western Society". In the case of SARS CoV-2, followup investigation has conspicuously failed to find supporting evidence for the "natural zoonotic origin" hypothesis.
But in both cases, one explanation is more politically correct than the other, and that rather than evidence dominates the public narrative.
Greenwald is motivated by a deep and abiding hatred for any media that isn't Glen Greenwald.
This is funny, and kinda true, but he mostly vents his hatred for the media by referencing a _small_ part of it that confirms his hatred (or, rather, the reasonable criticisms he has of the overall industry).
How does he feel about Matt Taibbi?
I've noticed that he references/mentions Taibbi pretty positively, e.g. for reporting claims contrary to 'The Consensus'.
I think that's really Greenwald's point. The fact that this information was known at the time, has not had any significant update, and people STILL believe he attacked the club because he was anti-gay says a lot about the rest of the media and those that follow them.
Yeah you have US Senators who still have not gotten the message.
"On Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) falsely described the massacre as an "unspeakable act of hate toward the LGBTQ+ community.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) went even further, claiming “the LGBTQ+ community was targeted and killed—all because they dared to live their lives.” Her fellow Illinois Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin, claimed forty-nine lives were lost due to “anti-LGBTQ hate” (he forgot the +)."
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-enduring-false-narrative-about
I'd always assumed the Muslim terrorist shot up the gay nightclub because he hated America and hated gays, but apparently he just searched for "nightclub" rather than "gay nightclub."
But I'm not wholly confident in that because this type of "search engine forensics" is new to me.
Regarding the Last Supper picture:
The black bird on the left is Germany; the frog is Taiwan. There's a link (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226050.shtml) in the Steve Hsu blog post that explains it.
Regarding the protester clearing:
I feel like it's less than maximally helpful to just say "this story was false", which could be read in a misleading way (e.g., that the event never happened at all). Better to specify in what way it's false, i.e., that (according to this report, anyway), what's false is that the photo op was the reason for the violent clearing of protesters.
Regarding the Pulse shooting:
I think you've actually left out the most interesting part here, which is that (IIRC) the government actually hid the full transcript of the 911 call for a week, releasing only an abridged version in the meantime, seemingly to hide the shooter's motive as an Islamist. So this isn't, like, different media outlets all independently getting distracted by the possible angle of it as an anti-gay hate crime and ignoring any other possible motive; it's that they didn't know about the real motive when the topic was hottest, because the government covered it up.
I don't get why the elephant is on the drip. COVID?
Yes
Yes, India is dying. (And Japan is giving everyone irradiated water!)
Blimey, a lot of symbolism to unpack in there! I thought G7 was basically Biden setting out his new multilateral stall while Boris frolicked around in his boxers on a Cornish beach... like this https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2021/jun/11/martin-rowson-g7-boris-johnson-joe-biden-merkel-trudeau-macron-draghi-yoshihide-suga-cartoon
Not so sure about the Pulse Shooting. The day after CNN mentioned that the shooter pledged loyalty to ISIS - https://web.archive.org/web/20160613115710/http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/12/us/orlando-shooting-timeline/ - so I don't think anything was covered up.
Also, "being loyal to Isis" and "hating gay people" are two things that kind of go together... so no one who heard "he pledged loyalty to Isis" would think, "Ah, my mistake! He didn't hate gay people, he was just loyal to Isis." They would think, "He hates gay people AND is loyal to Isis."
#14 I'm guessing the black bird is the black eagle from the German coat of arms.
Australia and India (the turbaned elephant at right) aren't part of the G7 but they were prominently invited as guests this time around... along with South Korea who don't seem to be depicted. The fact that the G7 has suddenly decided to invite all the medium-sized powers surrounding China on all sides into their exclusive club has not escaped China's notice, I suppose.
No idea about the frogs, nor the gas canisters. The IV drip I guess indicates that someone is unhealthy, but who exactly?
They always invite some non-members - this one invited fewer than usual.
I think the drip on the left, which seems to be labelled with something like the PRC flag, indicates Australia's dependent on Chinese money and suffering from Chinese sanctions. The one on the right is definitely India being sick from COVID (note that Modi didn't go in person because of how badly India's doing).
Frog was explained above as Taiwan. I don't know about the gas either.
> They always invite some non-members - this one invited fewer than usual
still, it is significant that all the ones they did invite are so near to China.
Yes (with the exception of South Africa). I was noting that it wasn't unusual to invite people at all (which "suddenly decided" and "exclusive club" kind of implied).
I'm fairly sure they knew and intended that Beijing (and anyone worried about Beijing) would notice; the implication was national news here in Oz.
The artist did a fantastic job on the animals, they're all clearly identifiable species. The German coat of arms is a generic black eagle, no particular species, so the artist picked one. I believe it's a Black Hawk-Eagle, Spizaetus tyrannus, found in South and Central America, and I think I've even found the photo the artist used for reference: https://www.peregrinefund.org/explore-raptors-species/eagles/black-hawk-eagle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Germany
The German eagle also seems to reference to a photo of Angela Merkel glaring at Donald Trump during a G7 meeting, which went viral in 2018. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/201806/1106435.shtml
I hadn't known the gray wolf was the semi-official national animal of Italy, but that makes sense due to Romulus and Remus being raised by wolves. Apparently, the Chinese are friends with the Italians at the moment, so the Italian wolf is depicted with more dignity.
Something about the depiction of the wolf reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the original Last Supper, but I can't say exactly what. But clearly the artist put a fair amount of effort into his painting, so I don't think it's implausible that he might have thrown in a shout-out to Leonardo.
Nineteenth century political cartoons in England and America used to be highly elaborate like this, with lots of this kind of detailed Easter egg symbolism. In the 20th Century, the style changed to political cartoons with only one joke that you could read fast, but this old style cartoon makes a nice throwback, although I'd probably get tired of this if it became the dominant fashion once again.
Higgs Bison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNndRK8bOu0
Very umm... surprised about that Monmouth polling result, because Democrats are quite clearly backing noon the question, and pretty reliably the Democrats taking a position on something ensures that at least a third of the population will agree with them.
I'm so confident about this that I'm going to assume the research (a single poll) is mistaken.
"Backing no on the question"
It's more than just this one poll though, there are quite a few sources saying the same thing.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/15/how-americans-view-some-of-the-voting-policies-approved-at-the-ballot-box/
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_lifestyle/march_2021/75_support_voter_id_laws
(among others)
My guess is most people don't connect this seemingly common sense question to the controversy about voting rights they've heard about (and would split along party lines if they realized this was something their party had a contrary opinion on).
Perhaps they support voter ID law in abstract, but not when such laws (apear to) conflict with voting accesability. Whenever liberal media mention voter ID laws they bring up the connection with the latter issue, making their audience sympthetic to their side.
This is where my crazy idea for a constitutional amendment that states can pick whatever standard they want, but they need to use the same standard for voter ID, accessing abortion services, purchasing a gun, and starting a buisness.
I love the concept, though I have have no idea whether it would lead to ID being harder or easier to get.
Eyebeam is one of my favorite comics.
I think that would have a few issues
* perhaps legislatures dont mind depriving certain groups from those other things any more as they mind disenfranchising them,
* this issues seems to granular and specific to be governed by something as grand as a constitutional amendment
* with the current state of US politics it is plenty hard enough to bet a simple bill through congress, how can we hope to do so for a constitutional amendment on a controversial issue like voter id laws
Add "buying cigarettes and alcohol" and we have a deal!
Regardless of how relatively uninformed people answer seemingly common sense questions, we do all agree that in-person voting fraud basically doesn't exist, and voter ID laws are just a part of the current Republican all-out-offensive to make it harder for minorities to vote--right? I just want to level-set here.
You don't get to set consensus.
I don't know if you're talking about consensus with the public at-large, or this comment stream. Either way I'm asking, not setting.
My larger point is that when someone retreats to "Well the public thinks this" or "We need to restore public trust" - it generally tells me they don't have a good argument on its own merits. See Ted Cruz' speech when voting against certifying the election results.
Isn't the whole spirit of this blog to poke holes in counter-intuitive stuff that the general public believes simply because it seems to make sense?
Why is the public's opinion important here? Or are we trying to trying to say this is just a purely curious intellectual exercise in how public attitudes are formed wrt to partisanship - and that the subject happens to be about Voter ID is irrelevant?
> Either way I'm asking
Asking "we all agree with <my conclusion>--right?" is attempting to frame the discussion. Even if you are Just Asking Questions.
It was a legitimate question. Unlike almost all other venues that allow political discussion, this is a smart, well-informed comment stream. I was genuinely curious if anyone here believes in-person voter fraud is a real problem. So far I haven't seen one argument suggesting that anyone actually believes it is a problem - just stuff about how everyone should have ID out of general principle.
If we can all agree that in-person voter fraud is not a real problem (again - I haven't seen a single argument here to the contrary), then everything that follows from this false claim comes into question, especially Republicans' motives.
The discussion changes to - ok IDs are good but not until we simplify the process and make sure everyone can easily get one. Which is of course exactly the opposite of what Republicans are doing - another facet of this that the "everyone should have ID" crowd tends to ignore.
No, we do not agree. Many of us believe that the bar for obtaining valid ID is set very low already, and that voter fraud really happens on a regular basis.
Also I tend to think anyone who truly believes minorities are unable to obtain ID needs to show their work.
It's not minorities in general that have trouble getting ID, it's poor people in general, and especially homeless people.
This I agree with, and I would support efforts to help those people obtain ID - frankly voting might be a fringe benefit compared with being able to easily prove your identity in order to avail yourself of programs intended to alleviate your poverty and/or homelessness.
I've found various results showing that in various metro areas something like 10-15% of residents lack ID and a similar number lack any sort of banking relationship. Getting people access to these things would be huge. (It's one reason I really like the idea of city Metrocards that you can reload with cash and spend at local businesses - even beyond the benefits for the transit system.)
Not saying you do this. But I get this line a lot from people who support Voter ID laws. The conversation always goes like this:
1) They say "I just don't see what the big deal is..."
2) I point out the real issue with getting ID for some people
3) they say "Well I support making it easy for them to get ID" - and then don't really think about it any further.
This is ignoring the entire issue that red states are doing this specifically *because* they know it's hard for certain people to get IDs. They are also actively doing things to make it even *harder* for those people to get an ID. They sure aren't going to make it easier.
Maybe some of the lower-level politicians are true believers in voter fraud. But that was never the genesis of this push for voter ID, initiated by ALEC. As we can see by them also shutting down polling stations in urban areas, cutting back on early voting and Sunday voting, making it much harder to mail-in votes, removing drop boxes, all these new state laws that put more power in the handle of the legislature - the very people being voted on, etc.
Red states also pursue benign cases of voter fraud like sending someone to jail for 5 years who didn't realize they couldn't vote while on probation. The penalties are so far beyond the scope of the crime - deliberately to send a scare message. Their motives in all this are beyond transparent.
And old people. I have a jeremiad about helping my 85-year-old mother get ID and register to vote in a new state after her driver's license had expired. Appointments at DMV were hard to get, there were long lines and she had issues with standing (and with urinary continence), and I ultimately had to take her to get a passport photo and then do all the passport paperwork and drag her to the post office, etc. The other people in her assisted living facility faced similar challenges. If they'd just accept expired driver's licenses as ID, it would all be a lot easier.
Good. Personally, I'd make it so you can only vote if you register 5 years in advance, by diligent uncovering of and deciphering of the registration instructions, which would be written in Linear B in invisible ink on a piece of paper in the unmarked bottom drawer of a locked cabinet in an unused basement of an abandoned but locked building with large fluorescent DANGER POISONOUS SNAKES AND SPIDERS signs tacked all over its exterior.
And then the voting booths would only be open from 3:00 to 3:17 am on a Sunday immediately following the Daylight Savings Time switch, in an unheated empty grain silo or coal bunker with no public transportation for miles, and you have to climb an unlighted 60-foot ladder in poor repair to get in through a small window. With shards of broken glass all around the perimeter.
I don't want anyone exercising such an awesome power as the franchise unless he really, really wants to, and is determined and clever enough to figure out how to do it despite every ordinary obstacle. The contrary idea that it ought to be so easy that any nimrod should be able to do it with two brain cells and a working index finger is bananas, if not suicidal, and I cannot fathom a practical or moral reason to justify it, unless one secretly assumes the world is in fact run by the Illuminati and voting is a meaningless feel-good affirmation exercise.
I can tall you're being satirical, but I'm curious about what you actually believe.
Something like less paranoia about DNA and fingerprint registries could help with this…
So much of the problem seems to be that people have no idea what they actually want. We want the state to be able to ID us (and give us an ID that can be used for various purpose) but we also want this to be an extremely difficult and painful process fragmented over multiple state and federal agencies — and then we’re surprised that some people don’t want to engage in that difficult and painful process!?!
In person voter fraud simply doesn't exist on more than a super rare one-off basis. Every study that's ever been done shows this, and it is just pure common sense if you think about the mechanics involved (you need to know someone who's registered and isn't going to vote) and the risk/reward (risking a felony to cast one extra vote). Fear of in-person voter fraud is something drummed up by right-wing media. There is no basis for it.
We literally have people in this thread talking about how hard it is to get an ID in Texas. Republicans (specifically a think tank/lobbyist group called ALEC) - crunched the numbers and realized a lot of black people don't have ID or an easy way to provide the proof needed get one. Your lived experience is not the same as everyone else's.
How certain can you be in the results of a study on voter fraud, when you ban one of the stronger forms of evidence from existing?
I'm not a big fan of imagining things exist that have never been found and make no sense on their face. How about we put the burden of proof on the people proposing onerous new laws? Why is the imaginary specter of in-person voter fraud more important than the very real stories of people who find it almost impossible to round up their birth certificate or otherwise jump through all the hoops to get an ID - which are deliberately made harder? Shouldn't we err on the site of *not* disenfranchising people?
How can you be so convinced of something you have no evidence for, despite study after study(and investigation after investigation) (including those by the Republican Party under G.W. Bush and D.J. Trump) finding that it just doesn't exist.
Are you not aware of a certain extremely large incident of mass voter fraud about 40 years ago?
No. Feel free to elucidate.
I'm not American; I watch these debates while knowing little about the process. What are the requirements for registering to vote? What prevents one from registering multiple times, with fake names? I assume you don't need an ID when registering either, or at least people who advocate for the right to vote without having an ID would demand not requiring an ID for registration either.
Anyways, most likely many Republicans support voter ID laws because they benefit their party, and many Democrats support abolishing them because it benefits their party.
My own opinion is that a voting system should offer a reasonable degree of guarantee that no significant fraud occurs, not just empirically seem to result in little fraud. Moreover, a voting system should allow a voter to easily understand and trust that the system guarantees that no significant fraud occurs, without having to trust studies and media stories. In a politically charged debate, everyone involved is likely to be very biased; the Democratic media and researchers is likely to "drum down" voter fraud (even if it exists), while the Republicans are likely to drum it up (even if it doesn't). Many people's answer to "do you think significant fraud occurs" is likely to be "I don't know". In my case, that's because I'm not an American and I don't follow the matter closely; but I expect that most Americans aren't in a position to verify the claims either way.
> What are the requirements for registering to vote? What prevents one from registering multiple times, with fake names?
Voting is managed by the states, so each is slightly different. In mine, you need to be a "resident" of a given county for 30 days.
You need some physical wet ink copy of your signature on file. If you already have a drivers license, you did a wet ink copy of your signature then, and can use it by reference.
You don't need a residential address -- you can be homeless -- but you need a mailing address where you can be contacted. If a person were to register 30 fake people to vote, they would still need a name, signature, and mailing address on file for them.
Social science studies are generally garbage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis), there have been legal cases finding voter fraud quite recently (https://altoday.com/archives/28697-former-gordon-mayor-elbert-melton-convicted-of-voter-fraud-sentenced-to-year-in-jail for one example) as well as many examples of well-attested if not legally proven fraud in living memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal), and demanding that we all agree that something does not exist because it would be politically convenient for you is not in the least convincing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggZssFS0yM there are many examples of actual court cases about voter fraud in recent times! It only seems like an unthinkable rarity because you're swallowing the rhetoric that it basically doesn't exist.
Here's another example https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/01/26/san-antonio-campaign-worker-traded-gift-bags-for-ballot-changes-investigators-say/
Neither of these are going to show up in your studies
Neither of these would have been fixed by voter ID. No one is claiming fraud doesn't exist - just the kind of in-person voter fraud that voter ID laws stop.
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2014/10/voter-id-laws-scam-or-accountability.html
Thanks - this pretty much sums up what I'm trying to say better than I can:
"You can see how this applies to the topic at-hand. The fundamental test here is this: In any of the red states that have passed new Voter ID laws, or other laws that restrict the ability of poor people young people, women and so on to exercise their franchise, were any significant funds appropriated or allocated for compliance assistance?
Were any new offices, call-lines, visiting experts and grace periods set up to help them comply? “Here is an onerous new burden upon the poor, women and so on -- but we are going to show our commitment to assist voters with these new regulations, by allocating money.” A serious effort to go out into the communities and help the poor, minorities, recent immigrants, women, young people – to obtain the identification they need to exercise their sovereign right to vote.
Note! This type of outreach would not just help them with voting, but would likely help them to STOP being poor! By helping them get on the path to helping themselves. This should be what conservatives are for.
Instead these efforts are sabotaged, deliberately and relentlessly. Not one red cent has been allocated for compliance assistance in any of the red states that have passed these new voter ID laws.
Not one red cent."
I agree with this analysis of voter ID and the arguments around it: https://fakenous.net/?p=2341
My only issue with this is the idea that making it harder for people to vote and trying to get more people to vote are the same thing. One is pro-democracy, the other is anti-democracy. I know of zero cases of blue states making it harder for red counties to vote the way many red states seem singularly dedicated to making it harder for blue cities to vote.
I don't think that's a fair comparison, a Republican would probably say one position is pro-election integrity the other is anti-election integrity. There is some tradeoff between ease of voting and election integrity with moving in one direction favoring Republicans and moving in the other favoring Democrats. Neither side is truly pro-democracy as both aspects are important in a democratic election.
I'm just summarizing what the article says. If it were just voter ID laws then maybe. What's the rationale for making it harder to get an ID, closing DMV offices, closing polling stations, making rules like there can only be one drop box for the entire inner city of Houston, curtailing early voting, curtailing Sunday voting, curtailing vote by mail, making the registration period shorter, a whole host of other voter suppression efforts, and most ominously in many states now - putting ultimate power to reject results in the hands of the legislature - the very people getting elected - instead of the Secretary of State?
I obviously can't speak to the mentality of everyone taking a survey, but I had to get a Texas driver's license last year in order to vote. I support the idea in abstract that voters should need to present some form of government-issued ID. On the other hand, I already had that in the form of a California driver's license which I'd opted to just keep renewing because California allowed me to long after I'd moved to Texas, since I didn't actually drive.
It was the specifics of the implementation that were tough to swallow. Not only did you need a Texas ID, but the wait time for an appointment became six months, you couldn't do walk-in and needed an appointment, for some reason when you got there they had no way to look up whether you had an appointment by your name, address, email, or any other identifier and you needed to have a confirmation number, and they increased the requirement to get an ID to having to show four forms of verification that you lived at a specific address.
One, this clearly excludes actual "houseless" people, which seems blatantly unconstitutional. People living on the street still have the right to vote, and excluding them is probably at least part of why we have so many laws hostile to them.
But two, this also excludes a lot of homeless but still housed people just down on their luck. I witnessed a man in the office arguing with the woman issuing the IDs for nearly 40 minutes while I was there. He brought in this father because he had to move back in with his parents and his name was not on any of the utility bills or the lease. He wasn't paying rent. But he had the personal testimony of the homeowner that he did, in fact, live there. Not good enough, and they sent him away without an ID.
So sure, requiring ID in general is fine. But the specifics of how a lot of states choose to implement this seems clearly intended to suppress poor people from voting.
As a general thing, I think there should be pressure to make it easier for people to get ID, and not just for voting. Not having ID makes people's lives a lot harder.
Many states allow something like a letter from a homeless shelter as proof of residence. I cannot find confirmation that this would count in Texas, though.
Generally, bureaucracies work not by making things impossible, but by making them harder. The man who moved in with his father could get around this just by getting his name on a utility bill.
But then he'd be responsible for paying the utility bill, would he not?
Legally, and I wouldn't recommend doing this with someone you can't trust to pay the bills, but assuming he can trust his parents to pay it, it wouldn't be a problem. (I have done this to get residency before.)
I take your point about this being a work around, but it's one of those things - the kind of people who are poor enough that getting an ID is really, really difficult are exactly the kind of people who don't exactly have an extensive network of people they can trust to cosign things. Though it may work in some cases, it's not really an acceptable general solution.
Counterpoint: if you are that disconnected from society that you don't have a good social network or employment, should we actually be working to facilitate their vote?
Interestingly, this made me lookup again what the requirements actually were, and it seems they changed: https://www.dps.texas.gov/Internetforms/Forms/DL-15.pdf
Under Section 2: Proof of Residency, they will now accept an affidavit from someone else who resides at the same address. They did not accept that last October. They also reduced proof of residency documents from 4 to 2, but even now, just having your name on a utility bill isn't enough since you need more than one form of proof.
Too much of the debate around voter access (and many other government services for that matter) focuses on the difference between "hard" and "impossible". Not nearly enough focuses on the difference between "easy" and "hard". I think this is because people think that if something is a right, then "hard but not impossible" means the problem has been solved, and ignores the fact that the actual number of people accessing this right changes far more when you move from "hard" to "easy" than when you move from "impossible" to "hard".
This exactly. The idea is just to put the thumb on the scale to ensure some percentage of people affected won't go through the hassle. You don't have to make getting an ID impossible, just hard, to get the desired effect.
Of course, due to the wait time for appointments and office closures, it actually was "impossible" if you didn't think of it well in advance. I was quite lucky to bother looking at appointment availability all the way back in April.
The new requirements for proof of address verification is tied to the Federal Real ID requirements. In most states, you can still get a "non-Real ID" license or ID without needing those requirements. Not sure about Texas specifically.
Yes, and the DMV closures were almost certainly more due to Covid than any intentional effort at voter suppression. It is nonetheless not a great look, which I think Matt is doing an excellent job of illustrating above, to be pushing all these new ID requirements on voters in the year it just so happens to be the most difficult it has ever been to get an ID.
Notably, Texas already had voter ID laws. And I voted in 2018, with the ID I had then. They changed the law to further restrict exactly what forms of ID they would accept, and it's pretty hard to interpret that as being anything other than a reaction to Democrats sweeping so many city and county positions in the state and damn near managing to come within spitting distance of Ted Cruz.
I'm not surprised at all, because most people are horribly uninformed as to what the actual law is even on their pet issues.
Gun control and abortion are two good examples of this on the left, while immigration and foreign aid are two good examples of this on the right. If you ask left-leaning people what they think the laws should be, nominal pro-gun control and pro choice people will suggest laws which are less restrictive of gun ownership and more restrictive of abortion than the laws on the books. Likewise, I've seen similar surveys where right-leaning people suggest restrictions on immigration and foreign aid which would end with higher levels of both than currently exist.
That said, I think a lot of this comes down to trick questions. John Q Public doesn't have the statistical literacy to evaluate the data on policy even if he cared to, but the general public can still make correct decisions when the fraction of people with skin in the game on a particular issue to be informed is large enough and motivated enough to check the bureaucracy. Limiting both the scope of government and the franchise can help ensure that people with skin in the game are a large enough fraction to challenge machine politicians.
Re 2: how did they come up with those numbers? Ok, California being California, but there's countries there. They say that there's more cults in Massachusetts (pop. 7 millions) than in all of India (pop. 1366 millions). Or is it per something like 100k?
Re 18: Wait are you saying in English people are not told in schools what a grammatical root is and that words share them?
I can tell you that my daughter certainly learned about them in elementary (or maybe middle) school, although they call them "stems" these days instead of "roots." I guess they're branching out.
I guess that writer was going out on a limb
18: I don't think it's so bad as "not knowing what a grammatical root is", it's that some of these pairings aren't so obvious, and some of these ending (-like id, -ific, and -or) are less common.
Like, if I wanted to make "liquid" a noun, I would say ... "liquid", not "liquor." So even though it's obvious that "liquor" and "liquid" are related, I had never noticed that was the same connection as "horror / horrid." Same with "stupor / stupid" -- on reflection, they're clearly related, but since "stupor" hardly functions as a synonym for "stupidity", it's easy to miss that.
Honestly, I feel a little bit like the crazy one now, with you and Scott both acting like there's nothing interesting in this chart. Some of the combinations are obvious, but the non-obvious ones (and the fact that some combinations "could" exist, but don't), are what make it interesting!
Of course people who speak English are told in schools about grammatical roots and the connections between words. And even people who never have any formal schooling manage to learn about this too, because they will productively apply prefixes and suffixes to new words that they encounter.
The issue is that there are many words that were historically formed by these processes that have undergone some amount of semantic and/or phonetic drift since then, and are sometimes more common than the word they were derived from, so that they get stored psychologically as separate lexical entries, rather than with the compositional process.
I definitely find that it's much more obvious that "warmth" is "warm+th" than it is that "width" and "depth" are "wide+th" and "deep+th", which are in turn more obvious than that "breadth" and "height" are "broad+th" and "high+th". I haven't found anything to confirm or deny whether "cold" is itself historically "cool+th".
For other formations, I think that "coincidence" being "co+incidence" is decidedly non-obvious, and very few English speakers know that "helicopter" is "helico+pter" (but in this case the only other words with "helix" and "pter" are uncommon words).
But I've noticed the same thing with speakers of other languages. I remember a German friend being shocked once when I pointed out to him how cute it was that "Handschuh" is "Hand+Schuh". I suspect there are similarly common and obvious words in English that I rarely notice as having this sort of root formation, even without going to the odd Latin endings in that chart.
I agree about helicopter, but I'm surprised that you would find "coincidence" non-obvious.
I wonder if this is one of those things that's easier to see as a non-native speaker?
"I wonder if this is one of those things that's easier to see as a non-native speaker? "
Quite possibly. I'm currently studying Bulgarian, and I'll quite often need to ask my tutor for a word I don't know, and I'll go "Oh! Is that derived from [other Bulgarian word]?", and she'll have no strong opinion.
This is not directly related but I traced the etymology of the word to latin "cado" meaning "to fall", making coincidence a construction of the sort "to fall together". The equivalent word in Dutch, "samenvallen", is constructed the same way semantically, but using different words.
This is just conjecture but I wonder if both languages got the construction through Latin, and it was then "nativized" in Dutch* but not in English. If that's the case then whoever "nativized" it in Dutch surely must have thought of it as two separate units.
* or rather at any point after the Dutch and English lineages split, I suppose
Sounds plausible. Bulgarian does the same: съвпадение (sŭvpadenie) which, if I'm not getting confused, is a combination of съ = together, в = in/into, + падение = falling
Could well be. To me "coincidence" usually just feels like an atomic word. Once I noticed the etymology, it's obvious. But I think most people don't think of a coincidence as two incidents that share some feature in common - it somehow feels like it would have to have more than just that.
I would go further and say that the word has two meanings, a technical one that is just "co-" + "incidence" and the colloquial one that has a connotation of surprise. An example of the former is describing a neuron as a "coincidence detector." But native speakers typically learn the second meaning before we learn the word "incidence," so that plus the difference in meaning makes the construction non-obvious.
Author here - it is just raw counts, not per 100k or anything. Should be taken with a boulder of salt, also because it is from an American podcast and presumably biased towards american cults
#31: A common polyamory talking point is “you wouldn’t be jealous if your friend had other friends”. Now psychologists find that people definitely get jealous if their friends get other friends.
I think that polyamorists lack this sense of jealousy or a strong form of it and monogamists have it. To me, it does not seem like something that could be argued away. If someone said "You wouldn't be jealous if your friend had other friends", I can't imagine someone saying "You're right. This emotion of jealousy has ceased" To me, it does not seem like something that can just go away. I think maybe some polyamorists have some blank slatist type of beliefs. And there is likely some "same-minding" going on. Likewise, non-poly people probably think poly people are lying or suppressing their feelings of jealousy.
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24: Related: In addition to all the usual reasons, studies with unwoke conclusions are now being removed from journals because people make “serious and credible threats of personal violence” against the editors of journal editors who keep them up.
Very concerning. Acquiescing to this sort of behavior could make it more common. If you think opposition to unwoke conclusions is bad currently, imagine if instead of a petition it was a credible and serious death threat every time.
Colonialism not a good system, so it's an overall positive that it was removed from a journal. It's really a shame that it takes death threats for a journal to realise their publishing standards might be a bit low.
What about Marxist colonialism?
I'm unsure what you're referring to.
I think a case could be made that the Soviet Union was just as imperialistic as the USA, but that's probably more neo-colonialism than colonialism. I assume you see backing oppressive dictators as justified if they have the right kind of politics, but that's exactly what the CIA thought, not exactly the USA's proudest moment.
Kaliningrad
Yeah as the history shows, for quite a few people it may take death threats to realize their political views are incorrect. That's why the masses need a stern but fair Party's hand to guide them, or in the most stubborn cases make the threats reality.
I realise that I am crossing a taboo when I don't start panicking about "death threats", and when I don't give in to the mass hysteria that surrounds "death threats". But I think that my politically incorrect scepticism here has some solid grounding. Note that the journal never provided any substantiation of the deaths threats or evidence that they occurred at all.
Even if we make the assumption that these "death threats" did occur, it seems strange that colonialism and all the violence that goes along with such a system is openly advocated, yet death threats cross some imaginary line.
I'm also not a pacifist, but it seems strange to me that death threats are so taboo yet warmongering for colonial war is not considered essentially a death threat directed towards multitudes of people.
>Note that the journal never provided any substantiation of the deaths threats or evidence that they occurred at all.
This is a decent point, although the only scenario I can think of where they'd make up a death threat in this situation is if they received a credible threat of something other than death (as caving to a death threat is less embarrassing than caving to blackmail or legal threats). If there was cause to remove it within their procedures there's no obvious reason to invent a death threat, and if they didn't have a problem with it staying up there doesn't seem any obvious reason to take it down.
Scott Alexander also states this is because of the "unwoke conclusions" the article made. But without knowing who made the threat or if there was any threat at all it makes no sense to make this assumption. For all Scott Alexander knows, the death-thereat could have come from an "unwoke" anti-colonial organization such as Hamas.
This is the kind of sloppy assumptions and writing that occurs when you try to cram everything into the "woke vs anti-woke" paradigm, rather than looking at important things such as a materialist economics and geopolitics.
The linked abstract does not seem to include any hint to what was in the Viewpoint article.
The journal did not describe them as death threats. Do you have some additional source of information about these threats?
Oh sure "serious and credible threats of violence" - even less serious than death threats, then. I'm am updating my priors even further away from "woke" SJWs being a problem here. This is so vague it could be literally anything.
That's basically what I'm saying. Violence and threats of violence are justified if they are promoting the left ideology and the working class interests, because the oppressed suffered so much from hands of the oppressors it's basically self-defense. Anyone expressing any thoughts which my be construed to support interests of the elites is as good as physically attacking the proletariat, so no measures against such a person (or, if necessary, their family and friends) would be excessive.
Remember that the proletariat are simply responding to the violence that is committed against them. They have a right to self-defence.
Miles G seems to me be writing with an ironic tone, in an attempt to get you to back down from what seemed to be your initial position. I'm willing to ask you directly, without rhetoric, because I'd like to see you state your position clearly. I want other people here who may be evaluating your ideas to see what you think on this point.
Marxbro, is it your position that violence against a person (or the threat of violence) is sometimes justified because of something that person believes, says or writes?
"Colonialism" isn't really a system at all, it's a label applied somewhat incoherently to a bunch of vaguely related practices.
I suggest you read classic works like "Discourse On Colonialism" by Cesaire, "A Dying Colonialism" by Fanon and "Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism" by Nkrumah. A background in Marx and Lenin also helps when analysing colonialism.
Referring to books you have read isn’t a coherent form of argument. An astrologer could do that. Defend their positions tater than expect people to read the books you have read.
The argument is contained within those books. I don't think it's especially time-efficient for me to re-type them.
Learn to surmise. Would you accept that an astrologer point you to a book to prove the argument. Or somebody religious point you to the bible when he’s arguing the existence of God. Or says you can’t debate Christianity until you’ve read acquinas. Or Mormonism until you’ve read the book or Mormon.
Why is colonialism not a good system?
"Colonialism not a good system"
...in your personal opinion, and I am skeptical that "an author supports something which I disagree with" is sufficient justification for censorship.
The question, of course, is: not a good system compared to what? I've not had time to read the whole thing, but from a quick skim, he brings up instances where the alternative is clearly worse by any humane measure (and cites citizens of former colonies wishing to have the former colonists back in charge). And of course, not all colonial powers were identical in their policies. It is absurd to think that colonialism was *entirely* negative in its effects, meaning that reasonable people ought to be willing to participate in a good faith cost-benefit analysis.
At any rate, I'd suggest that *you* should at least give it a fair hearing before declaring that it should be unavailable, on the basis that one should never call for the censorship of a text that one has not personally read, lest people be led by a mob into silencing voices who are telling us something we would be better off having heard. And yes, I'm aware that the fact that this link exists is proof that it has not been fully censored from the web, but given the profound illiberal turn that many on the political left have taken in recent years, I don't think anyone who values freedom of expression can afford to be complacent in condemning censoriousness.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/the_case_for_colonialism
The left have taken an "illiberal" turn because liberalism is fundamentally incorrect.
Very well*. But that still doesn't answer the point that Gilley is making, which is that some versions of colonialism have had obvious positives as well as negatives for the colonised territories, and that in some cases the anticolonial voices are ignoring those positives in their attempt to paint the colonial powers as purely bad. If you think he is wrong, you are welcome to address his errors, but if you think that he should be silenced simply for making the argument, then (a) you don't have any reasonable grounds for complaint if Scott excludes you from his comment section, and (b) once we accept that whoever manages to seize control of the means of censorship should get to silence anyone they disagree with, we end up with a bloody struggle for control of the means of censorship (which optimises not for "who has the most correct ideas" but for "who is best at winning a bloody struggle") *and* create widespread resentment among the segments of society whose views are now banned from the public square.
We could avoid all of that simply by agreeing and enforcing a society-wide truce that says that *no one* gets to wield the weapons of censorship against anyone, as per https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first-amendment/ and of course https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
* Okay, fine, I'll address that as well. I was just using 'illiberal' in the everday colloquial sense that is roughly synonymous with 'authoritarian' with a side dish of 'censorious'. But you say that "liberalism is fundamentally incorrect", which sounds like you are claiming that liberalism is fundamentally merely a collection of *factual claims*, rather than a collection of values that optimise for some set of outcomes, as opposed to other political philosophies that optimise for some other outcomes.
Insofar as optimising too relentlessly for any one value means that you forgo the benefit of all the others, then sure, optimising for absolute maximum liberalism will mean you miss out on something worth having, but so will optimising for maximum any-other-political-philosophy, so it is not clear in what sense liberalism is fundamentally incorrect in a way that includes the possibility of some other political philosophy being fundamentally correct.
"Authoritarian" is an essentially nonsense category as liberals use it. Liberalism is authoritarian, it's all about the authority of the capitalist class.
They didn't "realise their publishing standards might be a bit low". They said nothing about changing their standards. Threats of violence from, say, ISIS, on other papers might have the same effect.
While I might be inclined to agree with you on colonialism, I disagree on the methods. A paper should be rejected because it's wrong or badly done, not because the editor was threatened with leg-breaking.
Someone can realise that they're wrong after being threatened with leg-breaking. These are not mutually exclusive things.
Yeah, I think this gets into how the words "jealousy" and "envy" used to have separate meanings: envious meant "wanting something someone else has" and jealous meant "being protective of what you have", and particularly 'jealous' generally had a connotation of marital faithfulness.
... but nowadays they're basically used as synonyms that muddies the water. I think when someone says "you wouldn't be jealous if your friends had other friends" they're probably trying to invoke the old meaning of jealous, while the study is probably more measuring the modern meaning of envy.
I have known several poly people who do feel jealousy, although others who don't. The ones who do feel jealousy and yet stay in open relationships generally think that their jealousy is something like a vice, or a flaw that they need to handle and work around, without imposing their jealousy on their partners. You can't argue yourself out of an emotion, but you can choose how that emotion affects your behavior.
This kind of thing always strikes me as incredibly unhealthy and I feel bad for all involved
I strongly suspect that the claimed absence of a feeling of jealousy or the anti-jealousy feeling of "compersion" are exaggerated if not entirely false.
I don't have data, nor does anyone else, but it certainly seems from what I've seen in person and read about (from poly advocates, not detractors) their relationships explode in exactly the way one would expect from a situation where the parties involved are unsuccessfully suppressing sexual jealousy. The longest-lasting open marriages seem to be the ones which directly address jealousy, with ground rules to prevent male sexual jealousy ("one penis policy") and/or formally elevate the status of the wife over mistresses to prevent female romantic jealousy. This makes sense, as both seem universal in foreign cultures which tolerate extramarital sex.
Here's an interesting genetics potential: Through Ancestry.com, I recently made contact with relatives on my mom's mom's side of the family which we'd never had any social contact with. Like me, a large percentage of them turned out to be polyamorous. Is there a "jealousy" gene that we're all lacking?
I'd sooner chalk it up to the dreaded "culture" factor over genetics, but it's possible.
Yes but also no. That is, everything is heritable, but also everything is polygenic (and often highly so).
(Stated as a casual generalization for those of the audience compelled to 'technical' correctness - yes, cystic fibrosis is monogenic, and you can construct a hypothetical with zero heritability.) .
"If someone said "You wouldn't be jealous if your friend had other friends", I can't imagine someone saying "You're right. This emotion of jealousy has ceased" To me, it does not seem like something that can just go away."
If the friend in common was always "oh sorry, I can't hang out with you, me and New Friend have plans" or "yeah, I know I promised we'd all go to that new movie together, but New Friend already saw it" and so on, I think pretty soon someone might feel that they were being replaced as a friend and that the friendship was under threat. Being jealous in return seems like a natural conclusion.
"24: Related: In addition to all the usual reasons, studies with unwoke conclusions are now being removed from journals because people make “serious and credible threats of personal violence” against the editors of journal editors who keep them up."
But Scott, you have also previously censored by posts on this blog for coming to some very politically inconvenient conclusions. It seems weird that you complain about this while also censoring voices on the left such as mine.
It's almost as if he fears serious threats of personal violence.
These were not "serious threats of personal violence", this was an expose of deliberately misleading citations within the Rationalist community.
These which? No one mentioned any specifics and there's definitely been more than one threat.
I'm unsure what you are talking about. I have previously been censored on this blog for coming to politically incorrect conclusions. I have not threatened any violence.
And yet Scott has been threatened, not just for what he posts but what he allows to be posted in his comment sections and loosely-affiliated subreddits. "Scott is not a free speech absolutist because people kept trying to get him fired over internet drama" is a well-documented phenomenon that does not seem weird at all.
Where is the evidence that people tried to get Scott fired over internet drama?
I was censored for pointing out blatant mistakes, not for making any threats.
If you feel that you're being censored, why are you still here?
Are you implying that the SSC community condones threats of personal violence?
I do not "feel" that I was censored, I have previously been banned from SSC comments for pointing out that one of Scott Alexander's buddies had deliberately misquoted Marx.
And no, that's not what I was implying. I was making the observation that certain conclusions will get you censored from from the SSC community.
Cool. So why are you still commenting here?
Because Scott moved to substack and I was able to make a new account.
I think he meant, "why do you want to comment here?"
I enjoy being one of the only leftists that comments here and actually corrects Scott on his misrepresentations of Marxist political theory.
This is false. He was banned for being obnoxious marxbro. I was there. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/18/book-review-inventing-the-future/#comment-733925
His best claim was that DF's correct quote of Marx didn't capture some small meaning that he believed was different. Not only did he *not* justify this claim, he simply repeatedly hurled accusations at DF, including a claim that he didn't know what ellipses were. Not once in any of this was there *any* evidence that DF "misquoted Marx", much less that he did so "deliberately".
So, now we just turn it back to marxbro. Why are you lying about what happened? Why do you consistently lie about what happened and what you have done and said in the past? It seems weird that you complain about Scott when you constantly lie all the time about him.
Friedman didn't use ellipses in 2 out of the 5 places they would be required. Also he cut out important information that changes the meaning of the sentence, which you are not supposed to do when quoting and using ellipses.
I provided evidence for these claims that are easily confirmed if you simply read the two texts in question.
Personally I think Friedman knows perfectly well what ellipses are and is simply lying.
Personally, I think Friedman doesn't know how the markup makes blockquoting appear. He even explicitly conceded: "I will concede, however, that I didn’t bother to put ellipses between separate paragraphs, just within paragraphs to mark elisions." You ignored this in order to continue ranting at the sky, and now are lying about what happened.
You simply lied in claiming that you got banned for showing that he "deliberately" misquoted Marx. DF is a suspected liar (by you), but you're now a proven liar. Why are you lying about what happened? Why do you consistently lie about what happened and what you have done and said in the past? It seems weird that you complain about Scott when you constantly lie all the time about him.
There should be ellipses between the paragraphs or some sort of indication that these quotes are from a number of different pages. David Friedman provides no such thing because "he didn't bother". If "I didn't bother" is a good excuse for intellectual fraud, well, I think the standards of the Rationalist community have slipped so low as to be laughable.
None of this addresses the fact that Friedman erases Marx's actual examples of "middle class" positions, which misleads the modern reader who is not used to the Marxist analysis of class.
Again, deleting important information which changes the meaning of a passage is not something you should do when using ellipses. This could not have been done without some forethought - this is the smoking gun that proved Friedman lied.
As a fellow lefty, I can tell you that you are censored/ignored/removed because you are annoying, not because you are leftist
"Annoying" is a completely subjective assessment.
So is "blatant mistakes", but that didn't stop you from making it.
No, the mistakes I pointed out were blatant.
You reason like the Bellman from The Hunting of the Snark. If you keep repeating it, that proves it!
Yes, but the experience of "hey, lots of unrelated people all across the ideological spectrum are telling me that my behavior here is inappropriate/annoying/etc" ought to raise your prior on "maybe my behavior should change" a little and lower your prior on "I'm being censored for my views".
Scott is open about his moderation policy, which involves censoring people. Admittedly, he frames it as a manner of approach to that polite expressions of potentially offensive ideas are permissible.
I don't see why people are aiming to change my human nature. I've pointed out many errors in Scott's reasoning and that seems to be a valuable contribution.
It "seems" that way to you. Think it possible you are not the best judge of your own case. And an incentive scheme can take human nature as a given.
I'm sorry, I should have been more specific: As a fellow lefty, I can tell you that people censor/ignore/remove you because they believe that you are annoying, not because you are leftist
Then they should toughen up and stop finding logic and reason so "annoying".
You don't use logic or reason.
Yes I do.
""Annoying" is a completely subjective assessment"
...is true only to the limited extent that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is true. That is, if most people individually find your commenting style annoying, then it is reasonable to round that off, in colloquial speech, to "you are annoying", even if there are some who find you non-annoying, just as, if we can look at, say, five women and generally predict that if you polled a large number of men, one of them would be judged most beautiful by a large majority, we can colloquially call her beautiful even if there are some who are not particularly attracted to her.
Your commenting style here tends to come off as aggressive and very much having an axe to grind, so it would not surprise me at all if you are being banned from the comment section not because you are making good points that no one can answer, but because you are making points in an abrasive manner that tends to raise people's blood pressure unnecessarily.
If people's blood pressure is raised by my posting I suggest they go get some exercise and eat a little better.
I mean, I was using the phrase in the colloquial metaphorical sense. I could equally have phrased it "you are making points in an abrasive manner that tends to piss people off unnecessarily", but whatever.
Though, to take your claim at face value, I am not a doctor, but I was under the impression that being angered tends to cause a rise in blood pressure *regardless* of one's underlying levels of health. You seem to be implying that it has that effect only on people who already had an unhealthily high resting blood pressure level. That would certainly be a surprise, but I would need to defer to the knowledge of the medically informed among us: does anger cause a spike in blood pressure even among the healthiest people?
As a nonleftist, I concur.
For the folks who are newer around here: Please don't feed marxbro1917.
Aw c'mon, you have to get at least a little enjoyment out of watching him being given rope.
I used to, a bit... but it's just tiresome now.
I actually think they've improved a little bit! Their comments seem a _little_ more substantive!
No, actually my enjoyment at this point is so diminished that once I find that he's participating in the comments it removes most of my desire to continue reading them at all.
Same.
I don't see why having a diversity of political viewpoints represented in this comments section would make you less excited to read the comments.
I'm sorry if this comes across as rude, but I struggle to understand why you think that the reason people dislike your contributions is your political viewpoint. You've recieved many replies, both previously and in this thread, which said the opposite of that. It seems obtuse to disregard them.
It's not "obtuse" for me to disregard false claims, it's actually a very acute thing for me to do.
I think the most straightforward and likely explanation is that marxbro is simply a deliberate troll. Obviously there's a degree of Poe's Law involved, but on the whole I think his participation makes more sense in the context of someone being deliberately obnoxious than someone actually trying to convince others of a point.
I'd be a lot more excited to read your comments if half of them weren't trying to get one over on Scott for things that happened long before I started commenting here.
Your posting in the "death threat" comment tree above is you posting ideology, which is interesting and worth having around. In this comment tree, though, your posting is entirely combative and has very little substance - communist or otherwise.
If you stick to the former, people will get less irritated by your presence.
Things that happened "long before" your appearance here still have relevance. This are some very easy mistakes that the Rationalist community are making, yet they never get fixed no-matter how often I point them out.
The only way I can read threads that marxbro is "participating" in, is to read every *other* comment (I keep bro's out of my fovea). Sometimes it's worth it...
Re Greenwald and gassing the park: The IG report which Greenwald is relying on states that USPP did this at the direction of the Secret Service ,but the report also explicitly states that it did not interview any Secret Service personnel.
I am very concerned that Scott seemed to take Greenwald's take at face value.
Agreed. But even more nefariously, Greenwald is a clever guy who's whole schtick is convincing you that everyone is lying to you. It's actually REALLY easy for intelligent people to think they are somehow above getting conned by it.
Yes, it is very important that people not start to wonder whether the FBI was behind January 6th plotting like they were behind so many terrorism plots that they prosecuted, and apparently the Whitmer kidnapping plot too. We can't have people suspect that our national security apparatus is helping develop the threats it is supposed to defend us against.
This is tinfoil hat nonsense.
The claim by Greenwald (not necessarily by Michael P) is that the FBI planned the terrorist plots to entrap potential terrorists and arrest them, not so that the plots actually take place. There's a least a kernel of truth to this, in that FBI agents did help terrorists make progress with their plots. From Wikipedia's article on the Whitmer kidnapping plot:
"The third vehicle, which was also occupied by an undercover agent, was tasked with monitoring for any followers or suspicious activity in the area. On the way back to Garbin's property, the group discussed abandoning the kidnapping plan and instead destroying the vacation home entirely.[53]"
"an undercover agent told Fox [a conspirator] that the explosives necessary for destroying the bridge would cost about $4,000"
"Fox ordered the explosives from the undercover agent that same day."
My impression is that FBI traps are planned so that the violence is prevented. If this wasn't done as carefully, some explanation is needed.
Undercover agent says another criminal plot (slightly different to the original) would cost money.
That's not aiding and abetting.
We should have bipartisan Congressional investigation, then.
Congressional oversight, on a bipartisan basis, of law enforcement and roots of the January events would be a good idea.
That wouldn't be a problem: everyone really is lying to, including Greenwald, and me. The problem is that he convinces you that everyone is lying to you, except him. (tongue slightly in cheek)
Yeah. Scott unfortunately has a habit of being over generous to things that go against the mainstream consensus. Which sometimes leads to interesting areas, but often leaves him flat out wrong.
Where does the IG report state that the USPP cleared the park at the direction of the Secret Service?
It's both more and less complicated than that, but perhaps the most interesting bit starts on page 15:
>At approximately 6:16 p.m., contrary to the operational plan and before the USPP gave the first dispersal warning, the Secret Service entered H Street from Madison Place. The USPP civil disturbance unit commanders told us that the Secret Service met significant resistance from the crowd and protesters threw water bottles and eggs at the officers. USPP video we reviewed confirmed this account and showed the Secret Service responding by deploying pepper spray. The Secret Service retreated closer to the construction fence on H Street in front of Madison Place and ultimately cleared and secured the area in front of the gate onto H Street from Madison Place (see Figure 8). A USPP civil disturbance commander told us and USPP video we reviewed showed that the Secret Service’s early deployment drew additional protesters to the east end of
H Street, increasing tensions between law enforcement and the protesters. The USPP and ACPD civil disturbance unit commanders told us they were surprised when they saw the Secret Service enter H Street before the USPP had given any dispersal warning, but they said they did not follow the Secret Service onto H Street at that time.
>The USPP civil disturbance unit commander, the USPP operations commander, and the USPP incident commander all told us that the Secret Service lieutenant later apologized for the early entry onto H Street during the operation but did not explain why it occurred. The USPP officers we interviewed did not know why the Secret Service entered H Street before the USPP gave the first dispersal warning. Some speculated it occurred because of miscommunication between a Secret Service supervisor and his officers near the gate area. Others guessed it could have occurred because the USPP and the Secret Service did not have a shared radio channel and had no way of intercepting and resolving conflicting radio communications. The USPP acting chief of police, USPP incident commander, and USPP operations commander all told us they had no reason to believe that the Attorney General's visit to the park at 6: 10 p.m. influenced the Secret Service's early deployment.
The Secret Service jumped the gun, and apparently it isn't worth asking them why. We're left with "some speculated" and "others guessed". That portrays any claim like "we found no evidence that..." in a significantly different light.
See also page 17:
>Contrary to the operational plan, the USPP and ACPD civil disturbance units deployed onto H Street approximately 1 minute before the USPP incident commander completed the third dispersal warning. USPP video evidence showed that after the second warning, a USPP civil disturbance unit commander transmitted over his radio that the Secret Service and the civil disturbance units were ready and waiting on the “go-ahead.” The USPP incident commander responded that he would give the third warning and then head to their location in a couple of minutes. The USPP civil disturbance unit commander replied that it was getting “a little hairy over here” and that the Secret Service was already “out there.” The USPP incident commander told us he could not recall whether he planned to order the civil disturbance units to deploy over the radio or if he intended to walk to their location and issue the order. He told us the plan was “thrown off a little bit” when the Secret Service deployed early.
Bleh, missed a line break - that bit between the first two block quotes should be included with them, it's a contiguous excerpt.
Oh, it is worth asking the Secret Service why they jumped the gun, at least in my opinion. But that would be a different Inspector General's area of responsibility.
Regardless, "the Secret Service deployed [slightly] early for unknown reasons" is very different from the original claim of "USPP did this at the direction of the Secret Service".
Reversing quote order for flow reasons.
> Regardless, "the Secret Service deployed [slightly] early for unknown reasons" is very different from the original claim of "USPP did this at the direction of the Secret Service".
What "this" are you concerned about? There is a question about who was in charge of general law enforcement responses to the multiple protests in DC, and the answer there is as clear as is typical for any DC law enforcement organization question. As far as the USPP is concerned though, they were operating as part of a joint command with USSS.
There is a very different question, where "this" refers to the clearing of a protest ahead of the established schedule, without adequately informing the protestors that they were to be forcibly removed, and with a level of violence specifically exceeding what the USPP had authorized. The IG report is fairly consistent that such was instigated by USSS decisions on the ground, with other responses - notably including MPD's use of CS gas - coming as a result of the subsequent escalation.
Maybe you're operating in an environment where the first question seems more salient. I don't think too many others are.
> Oh, it is worth asking the Secret Service why they jumped the gun, at least in my opinion. But that would be a different Inspector General's area of responsibility.
If this report was never meant to investigate the cause of events or actions beyond USPP's involvement, then it is very strange that some - Scott included - seem to have taken it as dispositive. What do you think their error was?
The comment I was quoting apparently had "gassing the park" as the antecedent of "this". As the IG report makes clear, neither the USPP not the Secret Service did that at all. I think the more charitable reading is to take "clearing protesters from the park" as what those agencies did, because the narrative that Greenwald was concerned with was the alleged rationale for doing that.
Maybe you think that the important thing is whether that happened on time, versus starting 5 or 10 minutes early, but you work awfully hard to imagine that every problem in clearing rioters from the park traces to the timing. Contrary to your son, the IG report is not "consistent" about any of the things you claimed. For example, the report is very clear that MPD was briefed on the operation to clear Lafayette Park but was not part of it in any way. It attributes the use of CS gas by MPD to violence by the rioters against MPD officers after the park was cleared, not to "subsequent escalation". You invented that attribution. The report is also clear that none of the agencies supporting the operation used CS gas, that the Secret Service did not start clearing the park before the dispersal warnings, and that the Secret Service deployed only 5 minutes before the first warning, 10 minutes before the final warning, and that the timing was not affected by the Secret Service deploying.
The error is yours, in thinking that a bounded inquiry cannot be comprehensive enough to dispel the factually wrong narratives of why the park was cleared and who used CS gas and similar crowd control agents.
I don't think you realize how little of this factually disagrees with anything that's been said. Your "charitable reading" still isn't engaging with the basic argument as multiple people have laid out here, and you've sliced the events into ad-hoc categories to try and dismiss imagined nitpicks in detail. I think we're done here.
> It attributes the use of CS gas by MPD to violence by the rioters against MPD officers after the park was cleared, not to "subsequent escalation".
But this line in particular made me laugh, so there's that.
https://www.google.com/search?q=IG+report+state+that+the+USPP+cleared+the+park+at+the+direction+of+the+Secret+Service
So you cannot point to anything in the IG report that actually says what you attributed to it?
Have you looked at the other replies to my initial comment. Providing anything more detailed seems redundant, no?
What other replies? There are some conspiracy hypotheses and tinfoil hat nonsense like the idea that the guy who broke Snowden's leaks is gaslighting everyone.
Providing something more detailed seems entirely appropriate.
33: About Sci-hub: Opening the torrent links on my browser gives me a 404, but if I open them with Tor I'm able to download the file.
Re 6 'Also, standard disclaimer that this was done in Scandinavia where poverty works differently.' - yep those Finns are pretty weird but they're still not in Scandinavia - see corrections on last week's post and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia or ask any Finn, (or Swede, Dane or Norwegian, though they may be too cool to care).
If it helps, I used to think Oakland was in San Francisco, but it turns out there's some water in between. Well, the Baltic Sea is bigger than your Bay, plus a whole different language - Finnish 😁
Hmmm - successful middle-aged suicide - is that really something to be proud of? I did 23andme the other day and turns out I'm exactly 25% Ashkenazi - my mum's dad who escaped the Nazis, became an engineer in Cambridge but died when she was 3 we don't know why. I'm still waiting to see what cool weird features I might have...
Apparently Scott’s usage is common in English (the wiki article you linked had a large section on what people mean by Nordic and Scandinavian depending on who is speaking I found interesting). However, since the Nordic residents themselves tend to prefer Nordic for the larger group and Scandinavian for the narrower group that you mentioned (Sweden, Norway, and Denmark) I’m inclined to match their usage.
As an aside from someone who has lived in the Bay Area, I wouldn’t really knock anyone for calling the whole region “San Francisco”. I sometimes used that descriptor when traveling outside the US.
Frankly, as a Finn, I don't tend to get too worked up if someone calls Finland Scandinavia. I mean, it's wrong and all, but I get where they come from. It's usually Scandinavians who get more upset about this than Finns.
Nordic is still the best word here, though.
Frankly as a Finn, you wouldn't tend to get too worked up by definition 😉 Those Scandis on the other hand... bunch of divas or what?
The Wikipedia article you link to seems to confirm that there are many different definitions of Scandinavia, in English the term is often used to refer to what might be more accurately termed "the Nordic Countries" (although Finland is still a bit of an outlier). Note the Denmark is also on the other side of the Baltic from the Scandinavian peninsula, albeit a lot closer!
Your link contradicts you... but the Finnish page agrees (going by the map) https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandinavia, while the Norwegian page isn't obvious to someone using google translate, but generally seems to think finland is Scandinavian. The Swedish page seems to think not, and even says (google translate):
"In English, the concept of the Nordic Countries has not had a major impact, and English-speaking historians, political scientists and other researchers have included Finland in Scandinavia because Finland has a very long history with Sweden."
The Norwegian page does *not* include Finland, it only claims that in non-Scandinavian countries, the term is often used (wrongly) synonymously with the "Nordic countries" (Norden).
"Normal people don’t notice that truth is just true+th, or depth is deep+th, or that horror is related to horrify? I had never even considered the possibility that people might not notice these things. Is the Language Log author crazy, or am I?"
You'd be shocked. Generally, I was surprised what my English native speaker linguist friend hadn't grokked (about English), and she was likewise surprised about some stuff I hadn't realized about my native language (that she was learning at the time).
I think generally stress shifts can do a lot to confound a native speaker (as well as vowel changes I guess). So maybe not exactly true/truth, but the rest of them...
Terror -> terrific is unintuitive for many native English speakers. There's another word like that I can't think of right now.
Maybe I was thinking of Terror -> Terrific -> Terrible as having very different connotations these days. Anyway, watching Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. Got me thinking about this.
Awful / awesome?
All these sets of words used to have similar meanings, but their connotations have shifted over time.
The main divergence seems to be between things that inspire awe in a good way and ones that inspire it in a bad way.
And it's not uncommon when reading older books to stumble upon those original meanings, takes you aback momentarily.
I love linguistics and etymology and word roots, and have done for at least 30 years. But there was an example along the lines of true->truth which I was only pointed out to me last year and I was shocked to discover I'd never realised before. I think it was "slow"->"sloth" (as in the deadly sin).
Oh wow, I had never noticed that one! I've just been trying to figure out whether "cold" is historically "cool+th" with parallel vowel and consonant shifts to what happened in "breadth" and "height".
Looking at etymologies on Wiktionary, the "col-" root is indeed related to "cool" but the "-d" suffix doesn't seem related to "-th" (the former was PIE *-tó-s, the latter *-iteh₂).
There are also plenty of mistakes in the other direction (words that seem kind of similar are often erroneously assumed to have common etymologies).
E.g. that whole kerfluffle over “niggardly” which sounds like a racial slur but is not actually connected to it.
In Re: Graeber. As noted in the comments (yes) of the article, his claim was that the jobs *are* bullshit, not that the specific individuals think that they are (perhaps due to high prescription rates of drugs causing 5-HT1AR-mediated passive coping...?). This study misread his book.
I was thinking along these lines as well. If someone asked me - even a researcher - whether I thought my job was BS, I'd likely say no; after all who wants to tarnish your own sense of self-worth especially if you've dedicated a substantial portion of your life doing said work? But I do realize my job is BS and isn't improving life here on Earth even if I won't tell that to a stranger.
Jobs are often part-time bullshit. If you spend half your time developing a medical device (senseful), you spend the other half writing documents to make the FDA happy (bullshit).
Yes, it would seem more appropriate to grade the percentage of time you spend at the workplace which is wasted. Very few jobs would score an outright 100 I'd guess, over 50 - much much more.
The problem with that metric would be that e.g. firefighters or active duty military personnel would be dinged massively. Their actual job comprises less than 10%, maybe even less than 1%, of the time they spend on the job.
A lot of jobs, including critical blue-collar jobs like security or HVAC techs, are preventative in nature. Most of the time you're on the clock you're not doing much but when a problem comes up your employer is going to be really really glad they paid to have someone on-site to deal with it. The alternative can be orders of magnitude more expensive.
There is a lot of motte and bailey about what makes a job "bullshit."
Yeah, but his attempts to prove his claim rely a whole lot on specific individuals thinking that their jobs are bullshit. That's why good half of the book is dedicated to personal stories of people that mailed to him.
If you remove that part, his claim look very weak.
Doesn't that just point to the fact that these people who wrote the personal stories were in fact more self-realized than the people who are passively accepting that they are being "compensated for their time" rather than working on or with something worthwhile to humanity or the human condition? For me, this goes back to "Shop Class as Soulcraft" from like 20 years ago. As somebody who neither has nor makes any money it's no longer a motivator at my age, so there is no way that I would dig holes and fill them in again or stand all day in a bucket of shit despite being 'well compensated for my time'.
That's one interpretation. Another interpretation is that the people who wrote these personal stories are experiencing some kind of modernist anomie that has alienated them from the truth that the other people are better at interpreting (i.e., that the job has value, though it is value that their experience is somewhat removed from).
I think it's quite plausible that before we decide which group of people has the more authentic view of their life, we might want to gather meaningful statistics on how big this groups are, and who they are, so that we can theorize about this in a bit more of a grounded way.
I just read the Wiki for "Bullshit Jobs". None of his examples of bullshit jobs resonate with me at all. They all seem viable in the right context.
His argument seems like a highly rhetorical exercise to serve as a foundation for his political agenda (UBI or whatever).
There's a massive distribution on what anyone considers 'bullshit', so they will all seem viable in the right context. I have never worked a job that didn't contain some % of work that was bullshit (unnecessary, serving no purpose). The problem with a term like 'bullshit' is it has many, many interpretations, which is why this survey sucks - that ~10% refuse collectors think their work is 'bullshit' is more likely to be 'my job sucks and my boss is a dick' than 'my work offers no social value'.
But what you define as 'bullshit' is totally coloured by what you think your society should be prioritising. I think the argument is more about work's function in society and how time gets spent in the workplace than about narrowly defining whether telemarketing is bullshit or not.
For example, I'd say any job in the tech industry is bullshit regardless of an individual worker's view of its value. (emoji insertion.)
Maybe some of those people are "waste management consultants" ala Tony Soprano.
Two corrections on the Rutgers link:
1. The story is about Rutgers *Law School*, not Rutgers University. (This was personally a relief to me; I would be much more concerned if this was happening at Rutgers University, which has about 70,000 students (the law school has ~1,000).)
2. The rule was that any student org requesting funding must "plan at least one (1) event that addresses their chosen topics through the lens of Critical Race Theory, diversity and inclusion, or cultural competency." So groups could get away with doing a diversity-and-inclusion thing instead of a CRT thing. Obviously still not great, but IMO less scary than if it had to be specifically CRT.
I also came to the comments for this. The phrasing on 23 is overstated -- the mandate would have applied to fewer people than implied, and would have been less strictly CRT-related than implied.
Fixed, thanks.
How does one distinguish a 'cult' from any other religious group?
I'm inclined to suggest that the usual rule applies: I belong to the true religion; you belong to respectable sect; they belong to a cult.
A cult needs a living, charismatic leader. So some cults would be: Jesus and his disciples. Joseph Smith's in his lifetime. The Manson Family.
A religion can only start after the original prophet is dead.
This implies that Scientology might now qualify, but it seems that it's appeal is still largely celebrity driven, even if they aren't nominal leaders.
"Death" on the internet is a little fuzzier where users can simply vanish without anyone knowing why, but since Q stopped posting last year, I think this means it's technically no longer a cult.
Author here - This is probably a pretty good definition, but there are also many cases where a new charismatic leader takes over and the group still stays very culty. This is why I didn't really include any analysis of how long cults existed or if they still do today, the end of cult gets very murky...
Yes, I was going to make a similar comment. I came of age in the 80s, when accusations of various cults kidnapping and brainwashing people (and the necessary subsequent "deprogramming" of former cult members) was still very much in the news (and in novels, and movies, etc.) I bought all of it, of course; so did most everyone else. The current sad state of the media, though, is making me rethink this. It may be possible that most of these cults weren't made up of wild-eyed charismatic leaders brainwashing the spiritually adrift. That might have just been Manson and Jim Jones. The rest were probably just somewhere along the Christianity to hippy-dippy spectrum.
Re 20, on how weirdly long it took to optimize 3 point shooting. I've certainly wondered the same thing, but one hypothesis is that defensive rules in the 90s and early 00s were what made 3 point shooting relatively less valuable.
1. Hand checking meant the defense could maul smaller players much more, making it harder for them to get open
2. The requirement on playing man-to-man defense prevented defenders from sagging off their man on the three point lines, both making it easier for the shooter to blow by them and get an easy 2, and also meant that they were covered much more tightly even when far out.
I'm unclear how much this explains, but it is baffling otherwise.
This is definitely accurate. Changes to rules in defense made the 3-point shot more profitable, but also increased the value of guards in general, and they're more likely to be good perimeter shooters.
The other thing, though, is that an efficient market hypothesis isn't trying to say a market is accurately and rationally allocating every good at all times. That depends on liquidity. The NBA only has 30 teams, the GMs and players alike tend to have large buyouts in their contracts, on the player side removing a player doesn't mean you necessarily free up all the cap space. There's a whole lot of friction preventing quick change. These types of innovations tend to be seen at the college level instead, where there are many more teams and the players rotate through much more quickly. But they didn't percolate up to the NBA for a long time because the NCAA allowed zone defense but the NBA didn't. Once the NBA started allowing a zone, it made a lot more sense for NBA coaches to adopt strategies they saw work at the college level.
Something else, though, is winning an actual championship is hard. Only one team a year can do it, and it often ends up being dictated by who is healthiest by the end of the season. The 7 seconds or less Suns of Mike D'Antoni started the current three-point happy era, and the Daryl Morey Rockets after hiring D'Antoni perfected the approach, but neither team ever even made a finals, usually thwarted by old stalwarts like the Lakers and Spurs with a much more traditional do-it-all wing combined with a talented post player, or the Heat with their superteam centered on explosive players who drive and score at the basket.
The only team to actually win with this three-point happy strategy has been the Warriors, but I would argue that the strategy isn't why they won. The NBA is much more star-driven then other sports leagues because only five men are on the court at a time for one team, so individual players make a much larger impact. The Warriors won because they were able to retain a generational talent at an extreme discount because he happened to have early injury concerns around his ankles right around the time he came up for his first shot at a post-rookie scale big contract. Locking him up cheaply allowed them to assemble way more stars than is normally feasible given the constraints of the salary cap.
Think about what happened to the Portland Trailblazers. They had the same thing happen with Greg Oden, except he didn't recover, it ended his career, and they tanked. If he had been injured earlier, they'd have drafted Kevin Durant instead, and now they're possibly a dominant dynasty franchise of the last 15 years. If Curry had actually had to retire, the Warriors never get anywhere. That may have purely been a matter of timing, like medical technology for top athletes has seemed to get a lot better really quickly in the past 15 years.
Markets can't efficiently allocate luck.
D'Antoni's Suns didn't make the finals, but then Van Gundy's Magic did, and then Mavericks won it all, using their 3-point shooting to humiliate the stalwart champions Lakers in the process. (At that point, the stalwarts started noticing something's up and 3-point usage started growing league-wide.) Warriors' are not an outlier in this tale, they're just another step in the steady progression of 3-point success stories. (The final one, perhaps, now that everyone got the memo and there's less (no?) inefficiency to exploit.)
One other point is that up until the 21st century, US sports were defined by orthodox thinking. US pro sports leagues have about 30 teams, and they don't change ownership often. They generally agreed to only hire insiders who built their careers on orthodox lines of thinking, and you got status by winning "the right way." Mediocre results didn't get you booted out of the guild right away, but preaching heresy did. The "Moneyball" Oakland A's were the first really notorious defectors, and when that book became a smash hit everyone wanted to be seen as innovative. You can draw a straight line from them to the current Houston Astros, who defected as much as possible up until they got sanctioned for violating an ambiguous rule that many other teams also violated in a less flagrant manner. The 3 point shooting trend is simply another instance of innovation replacing orthodoxy once it becomes acceptable to be innovative.
23: The Rutgers thing is crazy! In college I ran a club where we tutored ELL elementary school students, at their school. We didn't have events beyond taking the kids to a park or doing arts and crafts once a semester. Should we have held events promoting critical race theory? What.
31: Can confirm, I've always been jealous of my friends' other friends. I'm still poly though, so.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think there would be a substantial difference between the craziness off doing an CRT event with elementary schoolers vs law school students. (also as a comments elsewere note you were also allowed to o a generic "inclusivity" event instead)
It doesn't seem weird that you might, for example, have a 30-minute internal discussion with your members about how poor/minority students might face different challenges or have different cultural competencies, and how you might slightly tailor your mentoring to help them more precisely in light of this. This actually seems like a reasonably good idea that would improve the quality of service your group provided, and afaict would have satisfied the very vague, broad mandate from the school.
Re 10: post factum this does not seem surprising: after all, object recognition happens in temporal lobe, while visual cortices process low-level features. And when I imagine something, I imagine an object rather than separate lines or blobs of colour.
In fact, it's hard for me to imagine all the lines clearly. I wonder if painters, who are trained to pay more attention to small visual details, activate their visual cortices more than non-painters when imagining things
“21: Claim: despite its pro-sex-worker image, Sweden actually persecutes sex workers plenty, they just find stupider ways to do it. EG if you (a sex worker) pay half the rent for your two-person apartment, they can arrest your roommate for “profiting from sex work”. Or they can arrest your landlord for the same.”
…Sure they can. But it is not stupid behaviour. Remember it is Swedes you are talking about: the most rational people in the world. It is 100 per cent rational behaviour, if you accept the underlying world view.
…Which is a big if of course, but that’s the case with regard to any rational behaviour – it is only rational relative to some overarching worldview.
So what is the worldview of Swedish legislators?
The worldview is that all sex workers are victims of oppression.
….That not all of them agree with this (including the Swedish sex worker whose rant you link to) is noticed, but not given a large weight. Not all US slaves perceived themselves as oppressed either, right?
You do not legally pursue and punish victims. Therefore, it is not illegal to sell sex in Sweden, and in other countries with similar legislation. The Swedes are not liberal in the sense of “celebrating” sex work; they just do not want to punish victims.
For the record: This legislation is in the process of diffusing worldwide. Sweden is historically known as an important innovator of social legislation more generally. My prediction is that this will happen here as well.
Where there are victims, there are perpetrators. They come in two types: Pimps and customers. Both are regarded as oppressors in this world view.
And you punish oppressors.
That is why both pimping and buying sex is illegal in Sweden.
Making it illegal to buy sex, obviously reduces the market. (I am fairly certain it is illegal for a Swedish citizen to buy sex also outside Sweden, even if it is legal in the country – say the Netherlands – where he/she buys sex. I.e. the customer can be legally pursued in Sweden if this is discovered.)
Then for the main point: how do define “pimping”?
The Swedes go for what can be labelled “the extended pimping-concept”.
Meaning that anyone, and I mean anyone, who earns money interacting with a sex worker, is legally speaking a pimp.
…That is why a landlord, or a boy/girlfriend, or a bank handling the bank account a sex worker, etc. etc., risks being persecuted as a pimp. And therefore all of these – again, very rationally! – try to avoid dealing with sex workers. Which again limits the ability of sex workers to ply their trade.
The combined effect of the above is to keep sex work at a much lower level than it would otherwise be. Furthermore – and this is the beauty & the point of the policy – it is done without having to pursue or punish the sex workers themselves.
In short, it is an anti-oppressive way to deter sex work.
Calling it "stupid" is pretty accurate in my book. It's a lot like lethal injection - still has all the benefits and downsides of the guillotine, it just looks prettier.
I'm not sure whether your last sentence was meant to be sarcastic or not, but if it was serious: if I make it illegal to sell food to someone, I'm pretty sure I am in fact an oppressor.
I hope the last line is sarcasm, too. Their legislation does punish sex workers -- they struggle to purchase housing, have romantic partners, keep a bank account, and a lot of other things the average person takes for granted.
I'm probably stating the obvious here, but an important point is that the aim of the Swedish legislators is to suppress all sex work. Doing this through punishing sex workers directly will harm people that are forced into the profession. Doing it indirectly will harm those who are doing sex work by choise proportionally more. It looks like a lot of commentators here are of the opinion that voluntary sex work is a plus for society, but this is not what the legislators thought. I don't know why Sweden still has a reputation as a free-sex society just because some Swedish actresses appeared naked on the screen in the sixties!
…if I was serious or ironic in my defence of the ”Swedish approach” to sex work?
Both, actually. Scott A’s post was a bit flippant, so I wanted to reply in the same lighthearted way.
However, magic mushroom & j.m.e (and others), if you want a serious discussion, let me start by saying of course no-one in Sweden, or anywhere else, believe all sex workers are victims. In reality some are, and some arent’t.
The happy hooker - stereotype is not a total myth, but neither is the borderline psychiatric case with a child abuse backstory and father issues. Most fall in-between; plus they have good days and bad days.
The majority in most populations (and thus the median voter) do not like sex work, but for different reasons. Christians & conservatives for obvious reasons; Marxists also for obvious reasons (“sex work is an example of how capitalism commodifies everything, even love”), Romantics because sex work reminds them that sex can be cold an impersonal, which they hate; and people like me because sex work has negative externalities for everyone else.
Negative externalities, how so? Well, if you are a young, intellectual male who has not yet had any children, i.e. if you are a stereotype libertarian, you may not see it. But believe me, when you get children your “protector gene” switches from off to on, and you start to worry about the social and physical environment you child grows up in. In particular if you have sons. (I could elaborate, but you probably see where I am going.)
However, if you want to curb sex work, you have a problem with simply making it illegal. The problem is that some sex workers (again, not all) are really victims of circumstances beyond their control. And you do not want to kick those who are laying down. So what do you do instead?
You choose the Swedish solution. Keep sex work legal, but punish everybody on both sides of sex workers; those who benefit (“pimps” broadly defined) and customers. That way, you curb sex work without pushing those who need compassion, further down into the dirt.
As far as the happy, resource-rich sex worker is concerned: Find something else to do. You have the resources to do it.
Politically, it is a case of what John Rawls would call overlapping consensus. A broad coalition of very strange political bedfellows pushed through the Swedish legislation.
Which is my final point: This broad coalition probably exists in most countries. The only ones who are really opposed, plus dare to say so loud, are the organisations of sex workers themselves, plus dyed-in-the-wool (mostly young/childless) libertarians – and they are max 20 percent of the electorate.
That is why I am predicting the “Swedish solution” will come soon, to a country near you.
Another obvious source of support for curbing sex work is non-prostitute women whom it competes with. Just like taxi drivers hate Uber, long-term renters hate AirBnB, and anglers hate cormorants.
And another obvious source of opposition, beyond sex workers and libertarians, are men who patronize prostitutes, or want to retain the option to do so.
I don't see where you are going with the existence of sex work being a problem for parents with sons. As you observed, it doesn't bother young guys, so why should it bother our dads?
It's not always socially acceptable to publically come out and say "I pay women for sex", so clients are not the best advocates. Consensus seems to be that they're either sleazy or pathetic.
For the second point, if you have an ideological opposition to sex work and you're childless, you may be inclined to adopt a "live and let live" approach - nobody's forcing you to pay for sex. However, if you become a parent you may become more concerned about making it difficult and socially unacceptable for your son to hire sex workers (and even more concerned about your daughter becoming one) - I think most people hold those they love to a higher moral standard than the general population, because they take transgressions personally.
Clients don't make good vocal advocates by admitting they are clients. But they vote, so politicians have an incentive to take their preferences into account. They can also advocate for legalization without admitting that they are clients, e.g. appealing to freedom.
>That way, you curb sex work without pushing those who need compassion, further down into the dirt.
Superficially, maybe. In practice, no, because of the aforementioned "banning people from selling X a life-critical service" (i.e. "X is now dependent on criminals to survive") - this is particularly an issue because once a lady is known as a prostitute she won't exactly be able to convince a landlord otherwise.
Are you predicting this "solution" only for places that currently have a full ban (e.g. US except Nevada), or for places that currently have fully-legal prostitution?
There are two debates here, let's keep them separate:
a) Is the Swedish solution likely to attract a majority of voters/a winning coalition in many/most countries?
b) Would it be a good thing if it did?
The first is an empirical question, where we may arrive at an answer. The second is a normative question, where we could discuss till the end of days.
Concerning the first question: Based on good old diffusion theory, I believe this Swedish innovation is likely to spread, since I believe a broad overlapping consensus-coalition can be mobilized for this reform in many countries. (Just as another Swedish social innovation has spread: Its prohibition against corporal punishment of children by parents (1979), which by now has diffused to 78 of the world's 192 states.)
But do not take my word for it. Here is the diffusion so far:
Sex buyer law, Swedish model; Innovated by Sweden (1999). Early adopters: Norway (2009) Iceland (2009) Canada (2014) Northern Ireland (2015) France (2016) Ireland (2017) Israel (2018).
Maybe Nevada will be a laggard, we'll see...
Concerning the normative question, question b): It is not a black-and-white thing. You can launch arguments against the Swedish approach, and not only libertarian ones.
The main losers are not sex workers themselves, but men who for various reasons cannot get laid without paying for it. Pornography is now their only outlet. They cannot even travel to Thailand any more, without risking legal action back home.
The Danes, who are more similar to the Amsterdam-Dutch than to Swedes, some years ago had an arrangement where social workers could connect people with severe disabilities to sex workers, so the former could get some in their lives. Under Swedish law, such social workers (and anyone else adopting this role) could be prosecuted, and would probably lose their job in the process.
It’s the incel-debate. Their numbers are growing. Something like twenty percent of males are now childless in the Nordics at age forty (more than double the similar percentage for women), and the “deaths from despair” reported by Angus Deaton and others in the US is probably related to this. The selection pressure on males has increased dramatically during the last 50 years.
So I am not saying there is no pain involved. Tough luck for a lot of men, but – to return to question a) - my prediction is that they are highly likely to be in a minority of voters in many, if not most, countries. Also because their suffering is not the type of suffering that will attract a sufficient number of sympathy-votes to get the median voter on board. And the median voter is the one that matters.
Aren't the sex workers pretty big losers themselves? If it is in fact true they struggle to get a bank account or find housing.
a) I was under the impression that the "Nordic model" of neo-abolitionism had mostly been adopted only by countries that had previously banned prostitution (i.e. the model was adopted as decriminalisation of prostitutes), but it appears I was wrong and basically all of them started with it legal. My apologies for the confusion.
b) There is an empirical question here: you keep saying that this is an attempt to curb sex work without hurting prostitutes:
[[["Furthermore – and this is the beauty & the point of the policy – it is done without having to pursue or punish the sex workers themselves.
In short, it is an anti-oppressive way to deter sex work.", "That way, you curb sex work without pushing those who need compassion, further down into the dirt.
As far as the happy, resource-rich sex worker is concerned: Find something else to do. You have the resources to do it.", "The main losers are not sex workers themselves,"]]]
...but Scott pointed out in the OP and people have noted since that it indirectly puts their lives in danger, and in a way not fixable by ceasing prostitution (since you're never getting off a "suspected prostitute" landlord blacklist once you're on it). So, which of the following is it:
i) You're challenging this claim (in this case I would appreciate an actual rebuttal rather than a simple restatement), or
ii) You're agreeing that these kinds of laws do hit prostitutes hard, but are restating that this is the sales pitch for these kinds of laws (which I don't think anyone actually disputes)?
It’s been an interesting exchange of views, but this thread is getting long, so this must be my last entry.
I’ll concentrate on the question: But is not this Swedish-type approach to sex work (also) oppressive to sex workers?
Well, to some extent certainly, but remember there are degrees in hell.
Sex workers are not handcuffed in policy razzias and spend time in jail. I assume we agree that that’s real oppression.
Then again, they are after all legally selling something it is illegal to buy. Which in itself is likely to serve as a nudge to do something else.
Add to this the “extended pimp-concept” which makes it very difficult for them to earn a living as sex workers, or to have boy/girlfriends (since boys/girlfriends risk being prosecuted as pimps). This policy certainly puts humps in the road for their chosen path in life.
Political scientists differentiate various types of policy instruments the state uses to influence the behaviour of its citizens. The big five are:
1) Coercion. Do as we say, or we will come and get you & fine you and/or put you in jail.
2) Incentives. Do as we say, and carrots are coming your way; do not, and there will be significantly fewer carrots.
3) Nudges. You are free to pursue your chosen path in life, but we will put humps in the road for you that you must climb if you do not heed our advice to choose another path. Still, you are totally free to climb them. They’re pretty exhausting, though; and we may make them even more exhausting if we see you have the stamina to climb the first ones.
4) Information. We tell you what you should do, and we hope you listen (your state as your friendly doctor).
5) Deliberation. Let’s talk together, and let’s see if I can convince you that I am right.
These five measures differ in the degree of oppression/coercion, from strong (no. 1) to mild (no 5).
...The last one is preferable if you can make it work, since if I can convince you that you should do as I say for your own good, I do not have to monitor your behaviour to see if you comply; instead you will do your future monitoring of your own self yourself.
The old solution, to make sex work illegal = coercive measure type (1). Very hard indeed.
The Swedish, “modern” solution is a mix of measure (2) and (3), but with a lot of (4) and (5) thrown in as well.
...In addition to a lot of preventive stuff, aimed at limiting the probability that someone will start selling sex in the first place. The latter includes stuff like generous social security benefits for single parents plus the state REALLY comes after absent fathers to get them to pay child maintenance; attempts to maintain a full-employment economy; and a thousand other ways to limit dire poverty plus enhance the ”human capital” of citizens.
...so ok, the Swedish policy is “oppressive” to a degree; in particular to well-functioning sex workers who think their work is fun, and/or that they perform a valuable service (some sex workers function almost as informal social workers vis a vis some clients, I am aware of that; in a cold world bought sex can provide ersatz human warmth, which is better than nothing. Oh well).
To repeat the bottom line: It is “oppression” of sorts, but there are degrees of oppression, and “Swedish” oppression strategies are pretty mild, compared to being handcuffed and put in a police van.
…It is not a stern, patriarchal way for the state to rule its citizens; it is rather a motherly iron-fist-in-a-silk-glove kind of way. Which is the story of state rule in Scandinavia more generally - and increasingly elsewhere as well, I may add.
Like it or do not like it – to be ruled increasingly in subtle rather than crude ways, is our fate in a modern, state-dominated world.
Amor fati.
Thanks for the exchange of views!
> The happy hooker - stereotype is not a total myth, but neither is the borderline psychiatric case with a child abuse backstory and father issues.
Those who champion the worldview where all sex workers are inherently oppressed must therefore be asserting a strong confidence in the counterfactual claim that both the happy and psychiatric cases would be better off if they didn't have sex work to fall back on. I have no idea how they would have achieved this confidence.
I mean, we are talking about Sweden, I doubt the alternative is starvation when there's a generous welfare state to fall back on.
Many prostitutes in Western Europe are Eastern Europeans who aren't eligible for welfare benefits in Sweden, and don't have generous welfare state in the country they are citizens of.
It oppresses sex workers, since the worldview that sex all sex workers are victims of oppression is nonsense. At some point you admit that all this is conditioned on that worldview, but for the rest of the comment, you act like the policy is good, without that condition, as if that worldview actually made sense.
And if some of the parties transacting with the prostitute (such as a pimp or a customer) are actually coercing her, so she has no choice, then how is she not harmed by other parties (landlord, bank) refusing to do business with her?
Accepting for the moment the premise that sex workers are oppressed victims, it does not at all follow that a landlord, bank, or boy/girlfriend are oppressive victimizers. A person who is being forced to perform manual labor (say, by being threatened with extralegal bodily harm) is obviously an oppressed victim of whoever is forcing them to do it, but that does not mean their bank/landlord/life partner should be punished! Indeed, that seems to actually be punishing the innocent, not the guilty!
I would disagree that it totally avoids punishing sex workers, being homeless due to state intervention is definitely oppressive, but I can see the logic if the goal is to decrease the amount of sex work without just sending people to prison for it.
The claim that the Lafayette Square incident (the violent clearing of the park in front of the church) has nothing to do with the photo op is disputed. The inspector general was reporting on the decisions of one of the several law enforcement agencies present (the US Park Police), and didn't interview a lot of involved figures from other agencies; the report also contains some interesting subtext and redactions. See https://www.nycsouthpaw.com/p/reading-the-park-police-ig-report for a full argument on that.
The politico article (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/09/dc-police-tear-gas-trump-photo-op-492630) also has some murkiness. Park Police knew POTUS was on his way, and the POTUS team knew the protestors were in the park. Even if the initial reason for clearing the park was not related to Trump's walk through, his team knew they would have to clear protestors to travel that path and those clearing the path knew Trump was coming.
"""
The Park Police only learned that Trump would be walking through the area around 6:10 p.m. when Attorney General Bill Barr, then on the scene, asked the operations commander, “Are these people still going to be here when POTUS [President of the United States] comes out?”
[...]
The Park Police at 6:23 p.m. started warning protestors to clear the area. Shortly after, the Park Police began broadcasting warnings to the demonstrators to leave the park.
"""
In the event that the two events really *aren't* linked, it doesn't really shine a good light on the police anyway. Because the alternative is that the park police tear gassed protesters in a park before curfew for no reason, and then Trump just happened to show up later. I don't really see how that's supposed to be better.
It's not better as regards the police, but if true it does exonerate Trump of any direct responsibility. The incident became infamous because the narrative it painted was of Trump behaving like some kind of petty tinpot dictator, rolling out violent police for the sake of a random photo op intended to better his personal image.
I think Glenn's piece is far too harsh against the media - every indication at the time was that the events were related. Sure a report many months later may shed some light and reveal that some of the media claims are dubious, but I don't think it's at all clear that an apology is in order.
I also worry that Scott is generally too quick to buy into anti-media narratives, especially ones that claim to contest popular beliefs.
It wasn't "many months" later; it was three or four *days* later that the FBI was saying that the whole closeted-self-hating-gay-killer thing was looking pretty sketchy. And the New York Times knew this, considering it worthy of mentioning in the 20th paragraph of their Omar Mateeen story du jour.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/us/orlando-shooting.html?emc=eta1
The Washington Post, however considered it headline-worthy four days after the attack. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/no-evidence-so-far-to-suggest-orlando-shooter-targeted-club-because-it-was-gay/2016/07/14/a7528674-4907-11e6-acbc-4d4870a079da_story.html
So the *entire* media didn't get this one wrong. But there's no excuse for the ones that ran with the story after the fourth day. And, yeah, if you highlight something on day one and find out it was probably false on day four, I think it's reasonable to assume you owe your readers at least a correction, and not one buried twenty paragraphs down.
Argh, and now I have to correct myself, because it took the Washinngton Post one month and four days to get it right. Jul!=Jun. So, NYT right but buried at T+4 days, WaPo prominently right at T+1 month.
To be clear, I was only talking about the Lafayette Square incident in my last post.
The club shooting is less of a forgivable mistake, and I think in that case it's likely willful disregard of the facts. I suspect the authors expected to get crucified on social media if they came out and said an attack on a gay bar wasn't motivated by homophobia.
"I also worry that Scott is generally too quick to buy into anti-media narratives, especially ones that claim to contest popular beliefs."
At this point a disposition in favor of anti-media narratives—even it leads you to sometimes overcorrect—is probably warranted, given how mendacious and incompetent they have shown themselves to be
Re 19: While I won't dispute the correctness of Greenwald's main points, I'd like to mention he's still quite biased (everyone is). Him being mostly right makes it harder to notice the biased opinions and claims. So if you needed a reminder from a stranger on the internet to be diligent - here it is.
See SBLL's comment above yours. That IG report interviewed the Park Police. The Park Police already had plans to clear the square. The timing of the clearing was at the behest of the Secret Service.
The IG report interviewed the Secret Service and found that it was pre scheduled...
Wait, no they didn't. The IG didn't interview the Secret Service at all. So we don't know why that particular timing was selected. Greenwald doesn't point that out because he has an axe to grind.
I look forward to GG's expose on why the US Park Police pre-planned for tear-gassings in their construction project.
Presumably they planned for that because there were a bunch of violent insurrectionists who had spent the previous evenings attacking police at that location and trying to overrun the White House.
If they tried to "overrun" the white house, they'd be dead.
Contrary to leftist ideals, the best solution is not always to immediately machine-gun enemies of the state.
-1
This isn't machine gunning. There are full time snipers on the top of the white house who will shoot to kill someone who enters with unknown intent. That's been the policy for decades. If the protesters had ever presented a credible threat, they'd be dead.
We know this because some other people overran the Capitol building and they're all dead now.
I don't know if it's a matter of official policy or just institutional culture, but the Secret Service tends to be much more serious about this kind of thing than the Capitol Police, plus the Capitol is a public building. The White House is much better defended.
The IG interviewed the USPP and found that it was scheduled by the USPP and Secret Service working together, that the Secret Service advised the USPP that Trump would be making an unscheduled visit to the park sometime later that day, and that learning about the visit (even without knowing the timeline) "did not change their operational timeline" at all.
Where does the report say the timing was "at the behest of the Secret Service"?
[The following _kinda_ answers Michael P's last question, but also indicates other things that seem to me different from what his first paragraph suggests.]
The report says (unless that nycsouthpaw link has outright fabricated things) that:
- some official made a request (redacted in the publicly-released report) that from context seems clearly to have involved accelerating the timescale of clearing out the protestors. (The USPP say they said no.)
- at 6:10pm, AG Bill Barr visited Lafayette Square. (They did not interview him.)
- at 6:16pm, "contrary to the operational plan", the Secret Service turned up. (They did not interview anyone from the Secret Service.)
- at 6:28pm, "contrary to the operational plan", USPP and ACPD civil disturbance units were deployed onto H Street (the north side of Lafayette Square). This was shortly _before_ the third dispersal warning to protestors. (They did not interview anyone from the ACPD.)
- the USPP incident commander said that the plan was "thrown off a little bit" by the Secret Service's early deployment.
So. The original story was that protestors were dispersed, arguably with excessive force, in order to clear the way for Trump's photo op. What we now learn doesn't change anything about the "excessive force" bit. It suggests that the USPP had been going to clear them out some time that day anyway -- but it also says that there were attempts to get them to do it earlier (seems likely that that was for the photo op), and that in fact they _did_ have to do it earlier because the Secret Service turned up early.
I'm not really seeing how anything here is better than the original story that e.g. Glenn Greenwald is so angry about. The Trump administration did (so far as we can tell) ask for protestors to be cleared out of the way for the photo op. The protestors were cleared out of the way. Nothing has changed in what we know about how forcefully they were cleared out of the way. It seems as if the exact timing of the clearing-out-of-the-way was in fact precipitated by the Secret Service, presumably because of the photo op. So the only new thing here is that apparently the protestors _would_ have been cleared out at some point even without the photo op. (But not at the same time, and we don't know whether in the same way.)
If someone was upset, before, because the Trump administration wanted protestors cleared out of Lafayette Square for his photo op, they should still be upset; nothing here has contradicted that.
If someone was upset, before, because they think excessive force was used by the people doing the clearing out, they should still be upset; nothing about that part of the story has changed.
For someone to have been upset by the old version of the story but not the new one, I think they'd need to have been upset specifically _that the USPP were willing to go along with the administration's request to chase protestors away for a photo op_. I dunno, maybe that's what some people were upset about, but I don't recall anything about that, and I (watching from outside the US) had no idea what specific people were allegedly firing rubber bullets and tear gas and whatnot at the crowd.
Or, I guess, maybe you could have been upset at the level of force because you thought it was excessive _when protestors are being chased away for a photo op_, but think that level of force is reasonable _when protestors are being chased away so a fence can be built_? (Though I don't see anything here to indicate that they wouldn't still have been chased away for the photo op if there hadn't already been plans in place to do it that day for other reasons. And the presence of ACPD units as well as USPP makes it not obvious to me whether it's the USPP who were responsible for the alleged excessive force anyway.)
The organizations involved are important. The police departments of Alexandria County and DC are not part of the president's administration. They were the ones using tear gas canisters and apparently more force, according to both the IG report and the federal judge who just dismissed most of the claims against Trump administration officials -- but not against the Alexandria and DC police -- over the incident.
I think the motivation for clearing out the protesters is also relevant, including in determining what level of force is justified. Putting up fencing to protect public property is stewardship, whether one agrees or disagrees with the particular decision. A photo op is a promotional event that does not deserve the same deference or use of force.
I count myself someone who would be upset if they got chased away for a photo op but not for a fence (in this case, because the fence was there to keep people out who had recently committed felony arson against the church in question).
I do care whether the incident was made worse because Trump wanted to be there, but it sounds like what they actually intended to do in removing the crowd was going to happen anyway. That Trump piggybacked on the scene could be negative, neutral, or even positive, depending on your perspective. I would consider it slightly positive to draw light to an active riot outside of the White House, especially because it was generally underreported by news reporters.
> I do care whether the incident was made worse because Trump wanted to be there, but it sounds like what they actually intended to do in removing the crowd was going to happen anyway.
If the level of force used is a concern, then the bungling of the plan's execution can't be treated as a secondary consideration. We don't have enough detail to distinguish malice and incompetence, but we don't *need* to in order to trace the failure. And from there, none of the plausible explanations look positive.
Level of force is not a concern, due to how belligerent the crowd was and how criminal their activities had been in the run up to it. They received multiple warnings to disperse, knew their activities were illegal, and chose to stay. I can't say that I'm actually concerned about the fact that they were tear gassed and forcibly removed.
I would care if they were going to let the crowd stay there or kindly ask them to leave, but then Trump was coming so they went all in on authoritarian responses, but that's not what appears to have happened. Trump's presence may have changed the timeframe some, but not the event or level of force used. I'm not bothered by that at all.
The timing is fairly significant here. I was present at the protest. Everyone there with a cell phone received a warning that curfew would begin at 7pm. I spoke with several of the MPD officers as well as several Army officers about when I should leave and was assured it was fine to stay until 7 at which time I planned on taking the metro home. I was right at the existing fence at the park when the attach occurred without any audible warning and was not able to avoid being exposed to the gas and projectiles.
Then the MPD was incompetent as well as trigger-happy, because the plain and short text of their boss's curfew order (https://mayor.dc.gov/release/mayor-bowser-orders-curfew) meant almost everyone had to be off the streets and off public transport by 7, not "start to go home at 7".
Did you grow up somewhere that curfew meant "start going home at time X" rather than "be home by X"? The latter was always how I heard it used.
What does where I grew up have anything to do with this? I am simply relaying my firsthand account of what actually happened there. Regardless, I’m sure you would have to agree that curfew doesn’t mean “be home by some arbitrary and secret amount of time before x”. It’s strange to me that the plane text of the claim by greenwald restated here is false according to the ig report. The police did violently clear the protesters from the street, and as others have pointed out here, the reason can be at least partially ties to the photo op. Just because you seem to relish the violent response to what was at the time a peaceful expression of first amendment rights doesn’t change the facts.
I'm trying to be charitable, because standard English usage of "curfew" in the context of being in private areas means "be in private at this time", not "arguably be making your way to some private place at this time". If yougrew up somewhere that "curfew" didn't have its usual meaning, that would explain your mistake. The plain text of the curfew order was for people to be in private at 7, and you just wrote that you were planning on violating that.
Greenwald's claim is not that the police didn't use force to clear the streets -- but that Democrats and most of the media falsely claimed that the park was cleared specifically for Trump's photo op, and also that the Trump administration was who deployed CS gas and other area denial weapons. I really don't know how you misunderstood his claim so thoroughly.
While I appreciate your condescension regarding the meaning of "curfew", you don't appear to be willing to respond to my point. Again, I’m sure you would have to agree that curfew doesn’t mean “be in private by some arbitrary and secret amount of time before x”. The curfew was at 7pm. I spoke with several officers who assured me that it was safe and acceptable to be out until then, further clarifying the meaning of "curfew"; it would not begin before 7. I had no intent of violating the curfew, that is precisely why I checked with the law enforcement while there. Nevertheless I was violently attacked before this time.
The claim above is this: "the story that the police violently cleared a park in front of a DC church last year so Trump could do a photo op there was false." Why you are bringing "Democrats" and "media" into this is beyond me. The clear factual reporting in this IG report supports that at least some of the responsibility for violently clearing the park in front of a DC church can be directly tied to the Trump photo op. Again, for example "contrary to the operational plan", the Secret Service turned up and participated in the attack. Therefore the claim that the protest wan't cleared up for the photo op is false. Some as of yet unknown percentage (due to the limited scope of this IG) of the reason for violently clearing the park was for the photo op.
My whole reason for commenting is that the timing of this event is critical. I (and assume others present) was fully intending to comply with the curfew and leave. I did not observe any violence or vandalism on behalf of the people there. Yet a violent attack occurred before I or anyone else there had the opportunity to return home in compliance with the curfew. Why did this happen before 7? This IG report doesn't really get to the bottom of that.
> Last year, Rutgers University instituted a requirement that all student clubs that they must hold at least one event promoting critical race theory
This is a strengthening of what the FIRE article actually says. It quotes the Student Bar Association amendment as saying "plan at least one (1) event that addresses their chosen topics through the lens of Critical Race Theory, diversity and inclusion, or cultural competency". So as I read the letter of it, you can skip the CRT if you still have an event on either diversity and inclusion or cultural competency, both of which seem like much fuzzier concepts. Of course, this doesn't preclude the idea that the first item will get used as a default interpretation for the latter two and thus close the options down further than a naïve reading of the text would indicate, nor other shenanigans, but I don't see good evidence for those in my quick reading of the FIRE article.
(To be clear, I decline for the moment to present any opinion about how bad or good this would be at either strength; I just wanted to note the discrepancy.)
Whoops, looks like some other people already had this one handled between the time I started writing the comment and the time I hit Post.
Also, 'event that addresses' is very different from 'event about'.
Arguably, if your first meeting of the year features a banner that says 'We welcome our new members from all walks of life', you have 'addressed inclusion and diversity' at an event.
Of course, whether you can gt away with that or not depends on how much of a stickler the administration wants to be. But given my experience running campus groups, I'm like 80% confident that the administration just wants to publish a PR statement saying they've made this requirement, and is not interested in being sticklers about it unless and until someone publicly calls them out on not enforcing it.
Hmm… I can sort of see what you mean if I twist it, but based mainly on your description I'm not sure that would weaken it much? If what you're mainly worried about is chilling effects, “this could be used to bring the hammer down on you at any random time if you've ever failed to do it ‘for real’ in the past” doesn't sound better than “we'll actually be checking more or less consistently”. In fact to me it sounds worse—if “until someone publicly calls them out” is true, that becomes a form of “if someone decides to attack you in this way, we commit to joining them”.
And the text doesn't just say “addresses”, it says “addresses *their chosen topics* through *the lens* of”. So maybe you could get away with doing the above at an event whose ‘topic’ is ‘welcome!’ but that really feels like a stretch.
Yeah, I don't know... the administration can destroy you at any time for any reason, and often does destroy you out of sheer impersonal bureaucratic pedantry.
I guess I'm just speaking from my own experiences running campus clubs, the sinisterness and sword-of-Damocles nature of this doesn't feel much worse than any of the other realities such clubs tend to operate under, and this one feels low-threat to me. If they passed this at my college when I was running my clubs, I'd roll my eyes and be annoyed that I had to put up a poster and say a few words about this at one of our event, but I'd be a lot less worried about this killing my club than I am about a new space-reservation requirement or some new bureaucrat with a novel worry about liability issues or changes to the campus parking policy making it impossible for members to get to meetings or etc.
Of course, I recognize that I'm speaking about the experience of people inside the club, and this story is mostly gaining attention because it's a culture war topic that people outside the club care about regardless of the effect it has on any actual club. But I think the people who feel that way should explicitly acknowledge that this is their stake in the story, and not try to use the lens of 'those poor, scared clubs' to justify their position.
#34. Does anyone know whether this is being discussed in the Social Justice community? A little research is pretty much just turning up people who cite the Telegraph article.
...Sweden has a "pro-sex-worker" reputation? What? Maybe this refers to the Nordic Model for prostitution, but pro-sex-work organizations tend to regard the Nordic Model as anti-sex-worker in practice, and in general, Sweden is one of the most anti-sex-work cultures in existence, period, as far as I know.
There does exist a certain tendency for Americans to assume that since Sweden is "leftist" (a bit dubious claim, currently, considering the strong tendency of neoliberalization in Swedish economic policies in recent years) and secular, it's also socially liberal in all issue that are considered a part of social liberalism within American context, which tends to lead to mixups. I've heard stories of American liberals going to Sweden, being fascinated by the enlightened progressive perspectives of their new Swedish friends, and then toking up and watching their new friends look at them like they just murdered a puppy, unaware of the strongly anti-drug culture in Sweden.
The social democracies of Europe serve a curious political role in American politics, standing in for a kind of Platonic ideal. The less you know about the particulars, the better it works.
The drug policies in Sweden (supposedly based heavily on the work of Nils Bejerot) are particularly vile. The country has a moralistic streak that's caused it to keep a heavy punitive/criminal approach to even small cases of possession relative to its neighbors, with higher fatality rates to go with it.
Wait are you saying that low rates of drug abuse in Nordic countries are (at least in some part) driven by a strong social stigma associated with it? Not by acceptance and tolerance? I'm shocked, shocked!
Specifically I'm comparing Sweden to its neighbors. Its zero tolerance approach and higher death rate compared to,, Norway's more harm-reduction approach and progress toward decriminalization.
Ah, got it, that's another story then. I was assuming you're writing about the Scandinavian countries in general.
Editing point: There's two 25's and two 28's in the list.
The Lafayette Square report specifically vindicated the Park Service in following orders, but does not actually vindicate the other actors - Secret Service and ... unbadged officers from the Bureau of Prison Affairs (??!!?). If anything, if you actually read the damn thing it paints a picture where park service officers were confused and not even told about the visit, and were concerned about what they saw.
Without even saying how poorly advised the entire visit was. Like, no one is denying he used his power to execute the world's worst photo op. Whether the Park Service committed any crimes was kind of a side show.
But I guess Greenwald clearly has his agenda to pursue and can't be expected to inform his readers instead of getting them to blindly trust him on this stuff.
> Like, no one is denying he used his power to execute the world's worst photo op
I would "deny" that.
If rioters attempt to burn down a church within sight of the White House then the President visiting the church in a show of defiance seems like... well, a pretty reasonable thing to do. If it were a group of far-right rioters attempting to torch the same church during the Biden administration I'm sure he'd do something very similar and the media would react very differently.
Except the fire was almost 24 hours before the square was cleared and the Reverends at the church didn't seem too upset by it:
Fisher rushed to the church “with a sinking feeling” after seeing videos of fires burning in nearby buildings and then in the church itself.
“But then when I got here, honestly, there was a lot to be grateful for,” he told ENS. The church’s windows are being boarded up to protect it from further damage, he said.
He and Budde expressed gratitude that no one was harmed by the fire and stressed that the systemic racism and police brutality that ignited the recent unrest are far bigger concerns.
“There’s understandably attention on us,” Fisher told ENS, “but I want to point the attention back to where it really should be, which is the purpose of the protests, and the people who did what they did to the church do not represent the majority, who are here for reasons that we totally support.”
“We will rebuild the church, while keeping our focus on the deeper wounds of this country that we must heal,” Budde wrote on Facebook.
https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2020/06/01/fire-causes-minor-damage-to-st-johns-the-church-of-presidents-in-washington-during-night-of-riots/
"If it were a group of far-right rioters attempting to torch the same church" this implies burning the church was the intended goal of the demonstrators, which it clearly was not.
Burning the church was certainly an intended goal of *some* of the demonstrators or it wouldn't have happened.
And visiting the *next day* after a disaster is the sort of thing presidents routinely do to show that they care. You certainly don't want the president visiting while the fire department is still trying to put out the fire or the arsonists are still actively trying to burn it down! Would you complain that a president waited *one whole day* to visit the site of a flood? Or a hurricane or a major public shooting?
I wouldn't want to appear too upset about a little bit of arson of I were the Reverend, that's a good way to encourage them to come back and finish the job.
If the government agency who planned and executed the operation is "kind of a side show", what's the main show we should be paying attention to?
The executive branch that told them to do it?
I find that I dislike greenwald enough to reflexively assume anything he says is some flavor of self aggrandizing bullshit.
This is probably unfair, I think we can all agree.
Why then? We probably agree on 90+% of things, including spitting when we see a lib and making the sign of the cross when see *gasp* a con!
His exit from his last paper was super ugly and public, to the point where someone totally not plugged in like me had an opinion on it, which primed me to dislike him.
Then, I happened to see his interaction on twitter, which sealed the deal.
Goes to show, one iffy first impression and a personality mismatch can create lots of flimsy animosity. Gotta try to normalize to "Dudes a prick, but his articles are probably 1 s/d off fine."
My own impression was that when the Intercept started, it was rather interesting, covering a lot of stories not found elsewhere, but over the years, it became much more normie left-liberal and driven by political calculus rather than just ideological considerations, which were there from the beginning. Greenwald’s exit from the Intercept was certainly public, but what was ugly about it? His stated reasons seem valid— his contract allowed him to write about what he wanted, but the editors wouldn’t let him write about Hunter Biden.
I just recalled Razib Khan’s take on Greenwald, with which I agree:
Glenn Greenwald leaves for Substack. Greenwald is kind of a dick. He’s very disagreeable and often unpleasant. This is one reason I actually trust him more than other journalists. He deludes himself, he’s human, but he’s not a conformist, which is the norm among most journalists (look at the middle school level burns coming from some bluecheck reporters at places like The New York Times).
His entire worldview seems to basically have become opposition to mainstream democrats. So he's willing to believe and spread anything that goes against them, even if it's from people he should disagree with more (like the Russian government) in an extreme version of "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup". So he's a good investigative reporter where it serves that agenda, but not otherwise
But is he wrong?
From what I've seen? Frequently. He isn't as vulnerable to flavor-of-the-month groupthink (which makes him valuable, albeit decreasingly so), but his epistemic standards are otherwise unremarkable and I find he makes common kinds of errors with more frequency than I find acceptable. Rule Thinkers In and all that, but he isn't a daily read for me.
I think Greenwald is disgusted with how mainstream Democrats have been conspiring against the Bernie/AOC wing of the party for some time now, and how various journalists and media outlets have helped and quite openly played along with it. I don't find his opposition unwarranted, given his priors.
He isn't though. He goes on Fox News all the time and has loving chats with Tucker Carlson. The guy who is far more a foe of AOC/Bernie than the DNC ever was.
He went on the show 13 times this year. You can look at some of the transcripts. He thinks Carlson is a true socialist, (google Greenwald daily caller Carlson socialist) I don't think it's unfair to think Greenwald shares a lot of Carlson's views.
Political horse-shoe: Meat-loving paleoconservative father of four pure-bred WASPs teams up with vegan Jewish socialist and adoptive father of mixed-raced Brazilian children.
I do think there's an interesting question and genuine space for debate here - you see it as legitimising Carlson, but Greenwald may see it as an opportunity to give Carlson's viewers a perspective they wouldn't otherwise encounter.
I mean...he's written about it fairly extensively. Here's one example:
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/31/the-bernie-bros-narrative-a-cheap-false-campaign-tactic-masquerading-as-journalism-and-social-activism/
And another: https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/10/glenn_greenwald_bernie_sanders_would_have
I don't think the fact that he makes the occasional appearance on Tucker Carlson's show (I don't watch Fox News so I'm taking your word for this) negates anything he said in the above links. What does he talk about when he goes on the show?
Early 2016 Greenwald and Trump era Greenwald are apparently vastly different people.
To quote an interview he gave to the Daily Caller, "He (Greenwald) went on to say that he “would describe a lot of people on the right as being socialists,” such as former White House strategist Steve Bannon and “the 2016 iteration” of former President Donald Trump as a candidate, “based on what he was saying.”
“I consider Tucker Carlson to be a socialist,” Greenwald said of the Daily Caller co-founder.
https://dailycaller.com/2021/03/03/glenn-greenwald-interview-tucker-carlson-socialism-christian-datoc-omeed-malik-populism/
I actually googled it after you asked and he's been on Carlson's show this year on January 8th, 12th, 20th, 28th, February 9th, March 12th, 30th, April 6th, 19th, 27th, May 4th and 12th, and June 3rd.
That's 13 times in less than six months which is more than "occasional."
He generally talks about defense department and intelligence agency stuff and how progressives aren't progressive. You can pop over to the site I found and read the transcripts. https://www.novakarchive.com/fox-news-tucker-carlson/tag/Glenn+Greenwald
Well, it's somewhat hard to tell because the transcripts only identify people as Speaker 1, Speaker 2, etc., but it seems like in his most recent two appearances, I see he criticized inefficient and wasteful defense spending (hardly controversial), criticized MSNBC and CNN for fearmongering about Covid and Russia, and making the case for civil libertarianism re: vaccines. Since I don't watch those networks, either, it's hard to say whether the latter was fair or not, but it's a sad day if arguments for civil libertarianism and personal autonomy start falling on deaf ears on the left.
I guess what I'm saying here is that Greenwald strikes me as a pretty obvious dissident progressive (ie, someone who is philosophically a progressive, but disagrees frequently with other progressives re: goals, tactics, etc), and the content of his appearances on tv, not to mention his extensive body of written work, doesn't lead me to think otherwise.
I've read his stuff off and on for a long time (back to at least his Guardian days), but didn't follow him closely until the recent blow up with the Intercept. He's definitely got a chip on his shoulder about certain topics, and is willing to be a jerk about how far he'll push an idea. Even in his articles calling out people for continuing to spread known lies, which he should totally keep doing, he posts Twitter interactions where he comes across like a jerk and seems to feel totally justified because his underlying cause is correct. I agree with his underlying cause, but he's often not sympathetic due to his approach.
> 6: No Causal Associations Between Family Income And Subsequent Psychiatric Disorders, Substance Misuse, And Violent Crime Arrests: A Nationwide Finnish Study Of >650,000 Individuals And Their Siblings.
And the related comment seem obviously wrong to me, and I'm leaving this here as a note that I intend to read the papers.
> The same study also claims there’s no correlation between “intellectual compatibility” and relationship satisfaction within relationships; ie you’re not more likely to have a happy relationship if your partner has a similar IQ to you (but see comment here).
I also roll to doubt this.
Be careful of given Greenwald credibility just because he contradicts the mainstream
He is credible; he was one of the few American journalists to stay on the straight and narrow about Russiagate.
I think this impression is cause by toxoplasma.
People who hold it may have been exposed to many individual instances of media figures being hysterical or stupid about russiagate, but mostly in the form of reading articles about how stupid the media was being and presenting cherry-picked examples (and presenting pundits/celebrities/activists as 'journalists').
I don't think this is the impression you would get if you actually read every individual article every indiviual report wrote on the topic. It's certainly not the impression I got from my own reading at the time.
He wasn't straight and narrow about Russiagate. You had the more wacky Russiagate theories. (Actual Russian hacking of voting machines to change votes, for example)
The totally prosaic Russiagate theory is based on two streams. In the longer term, before running in 2016, Trump said that he had been getting a lot of loans from Russian banks... which is odd because he's not creditworthy. In the actual 2016 election, Russian hackers sent phishing emails to democratic and republican officials, gained access to emails in both cases, but decided to send only Democrat John Podesta's emails to wikileaks, which conveniently decided to drop the first batch 8 hours after Trump's access Hollywood tape came out. They then dropped daily batches of 1-2000 emails for 3 weeks which, despite there being nothing particularly scandalous, kept the "Hillary Clinton + Emails" story going for a long time.
The question then became how much coordination was there between the Trump team and the Russians in the 2016 election? The Mueller report didn't say "no coordination." It said, "We lack concrete evidence of coordination. Note that a lot of the people we wanted to ask wouldn't talk to us (including the president). Also, since justice department policy says sitting presidents can't be charged with a crime, we will describe our difficulty in accessing key witnesses, but make no determination on whether obstruction of justice occurred. Also, we decided not to look into Trump's finances. This report does not accuse or exonerate the president of any wrong doing... because we pre determined that we can't make a pronouncement either way, no matter what we find."
William Barr sees this and writes a cover letter saying that it is a total exoneration.
Headlines ensue, the "liberal" Glenn Greenwald who hates the military industrial complex takes the word of the Attorney General who managed Iran-Contra a proclaims Russiagate debunked..
A few weeks later, people read the actual report. They see that it says, that the investigators found no smoking gun... but also that the White House blocked access to a lot of the possible shooters and wouldn't open their gun safes to let investigators look.
"Headlines ensue, the "liberal" Glenn Greenwald who hates the military industrial complex takes the word of the Attorney General who managed Iran-Contra a proclaims Russiagate debunked.."
It was debunked.
“As soon as news broke that Trump had been elected President, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new Administration,” the report states. “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-05-21/american-hustle
If you want an at-the-time accounting of what the Russiagate theories were, you can't get a better "serious anti-Trump think piece from folks who pride themselves on a history of work on the presidency and national security" than this article from Lawfare: https://www.lawfareblog.com/seven-theories-case-what-do-we-really-know-about-laffaire-russe-and-what-could-it-all-mean
And the question is, today, post-Mueller, post-everything-else, go back and try to estimate where reality was compared to the belief.
That's a great site. On the theories, I was always somewhere between 5 or 6. I never believed 7 because that didn't make sense.
One of the main issues with the Mueller report was that it wasn't allowed to look into Trump's finances. This meant we don't know if pre existing monetary relationships were involved.
I think cases 1-3 are all proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. (It would be interesting to hear where Greenwald is on this or most people who shout about Russia gate being debunked. The Mueller report showed a lot of evidence for 4, but due to lack of access and stonewalling, was not able to talk to the people who could confirm 5/6.
I don't think 7 was ever a possibility, or even taken very seriously, by Russiagate proponents. There, it was more 6, Trump would be unduly influenced by his preexisting relationship with Russia in ways that would be detrimental to the United States.
> I think cases 1-3 are all proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. (It would be interesting to hear where Greenwald is on this or most people who shout about Russia gate being debunked. The Mueller report showed a lot of evidence for 4, but due to lack of access and stonewalling, was not able to talk to the people who could confirm 5/6.
Someone who paid attention could have been confident in 4 in 2019, but the disclosures accompanying the most recent sanctions a couple months ago clinches it for being in the "beyond a shadow of a doubt" bucket as well.
Wait, cases 1-3 are simultaneously proven? It's all a giant set of coincidences and disconnected events AND those other things? Especially if we throw in Dan L thinking that it's all a giant set of coincidences and disconnected events AND Russian intelligence actively penetrated the Trump campaign?! (FYI, they had a follow-up article where they expressly said that some of the theories you're now embracing didn't survive later revelations.)
It's absurdly unclear what you think was actually shown.
Be careful of giving Greenwald credibility just because he contradicts the mainstream.
I would want to see some sort of systematic way that he's better, rather than just an observation that "whenever the mainstream goes wrong, the guy that contradicts the mainstream is better". If you can predict in advance which sort of story he'll be more likely to be right about than the mainstream, not based on the facts (which we don't have yet) but based on the stories that the mainstream and he are both writing, then there's something useful.
> I would want to see some sort of systematic way that he's better, rather than just an observation that "whenever the mainstream goes wrong, the guy that contradicts the mainstream is better"
If the mainstream is almost always wrong, that seems like a decent indicator. The mainstream is pretty homogenous and corporate, so I think there are strong priors suggesting mainstream coverage is frequently wrong.
Unless you're only interested in yes/no questions, just differing from someone who is always wrong isn't any guide to whether or not you're right.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence
Re #18 - Perhaps not Geoff Pullum's finest moment, but I wonder whether I'm being "whooshed". I also note the post is from 2011. (Not that that changes anything.) I still find the table interesting: only two "~ific"s, and /horror→horrific/ is quite a contrast to /terror→terrific/. The effect of usage on semantics is a terrific thing.
From Terry Pratchett's "Lords and Ladies":
“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.”
Regarding Point 14: "Still trying to figure out who the black bird and the frog are supposed to be, or why Australia seems to have replaced Germany in the G7."
See: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226050.shtml for a complete explanation.
On two points raised rethorically, above:
1. The frog 1000ntd (New Taiwanese Dollar) bills (https://twitter.com/jtsa18/status/1407567320172597248)
2. I think that the black bird is a black eagle, which is Germany's national animal, i.e., rather than a black hawk, as described in the Global Times article, above (https://whatsanswer.com/what-is-the-national-animal-of-germany/#:~:text=The%20National%20Coat%20of%20Arms,Roman%20Emperor%20Charlemagne%2C%20With%20the%E2%80%A6)
Yes, the black bird looks like an eagle to me, and that's on the coats of arms of many Central and Eastern European nations. It's not double-headed, so we can rule out those countries 😀
What's the other frog (to the left, in the bucket)
I tried to find an explanation but to no avail, I suppose it will be there somewhere in the Chinese press, but I am confined to Google Translate, so its unlikely to lead to a fruitful search. I would dare to speculate that the frog in the pail may be a sly reference to Jim Smiley's frog Dan'l, from Mark Twain's story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, though that's perhaps too meta :) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of_Calaveras_County and http://www.novelexplorer.com/the-celebrated-jumping-frog-of-calaveras-county/literary-qualities-86/
I found this blogpost, by SS Quah, that adds some additional explanations on the cartoon https://ssquah.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-last-g7-supper.html
On reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/nzymx8/cartoon_by_chinese_state_press_mocking_germany/
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3szUoCUcAE7gqw?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
I loved this post. Informative and amusing! Great to wake up to. Thank you.
2: “The cult deficit” is the theory that we don’t have as many cults as we used to and this says something important about our society.
I wondered what definition of “cult” they were using and to their credit, they do seem to have tried to distinguish between “religion, sect and cult”. I also agree that the 50s-70s were the prime years for cults in modern times. But I also think that the broader picture is that the impulse for cults is closely related to the same impulse that causes heresies or the swell of increased religious fervour in Great Awakenings (those types of revivals happened in both Britain and America). In the 17th century Commonwealth, a plethora of independent splinter groups sprang up and the official Puritans, after executing the king, beating down the Anglicans, and establishing themselves as the (temporary) authority didn’t much like that and set about squashing them. What differentiates Ranters and Levellers from a cult? Same with the mushrooming of small denominations and non-denominational bodies in American Protestantism: are the Westboro Baptists a cult or a denominational splinter body?
9: Upset that the Atlanta Braves unfairly stereotype Native Americans? Apparently Atlanta is an equal opportunity offensive-sports-team-haver: their team used to be called the Atlanta Crackers (and their Negro League team was the Atlanta Black Crackers!)
I have no dog in this fight but I think that Atlanta absolutely should go back to being the Crackers. Reclaim that slur! 😀 And to be fair to Atlanta, it looks like the problematic team name started off as the Boston Braves, then moved on to be the Milwaukee Braves, and have only now pitched up in Atlanta, so it’s not the fault of the city they have this name.
17: Claim: counties where the seminal pro-KKK movie Birth Of A Nation was played on its five year “tour” had more lynchings and race riots after the showing. Somewhat less believable claim: counties where it played still have more hate crimes today. I bet this turns out to be one of those persistence studies that doesn’t replicate.
Yeah, for this one, I’m going to go with “the places that ‘Birth Of A Nation’ was that kind of a super-hit were like that before it came along, and they’re like that since it left and it was because they were like that it was such a hit, not that it made them be like that”.
19: I’ve really been appreciating Glenn Greenwald lately. I think of myself as a pretty informed news consumer, but as the Garfield meme says, I am not immune to propaganda, and Greenwald has been doing a great job telling me which of the things I believed aren’t true. For example, the story that the police violently cleared a park in front of a DC church last year so Trump could do a photo op there was false (edit: see here for some debate). And apparently there was no link between the Pulse gay nightclub shooting and anti-LGBT hate - it was just an Islamic terrorist randomly choosing a place to shoot up to make his geopolitical point. Weird.
Trying to think of a polite way to put this, but you actually believed the whole “The Pulse shooting was anti-gay” line? From the start, it seemed clear that (a) at the time the media was very twitchy about seeming to push an “all Muslims are terrorists” line (and that was a cogent reason) so they downplayed the shooter’s ethnicity and alleged motivations (b) the LGBT crowd, again for what they perceived as good reasons, didn’t think of this as “anti-American” but “specifically aimed at us, because everyone wants to persecute us and they’d all be shooting us if they could” crime and grabbed the publicity on this and made that the official message. My view at the time, and since, was “this was someone not very well in the head, with a political grudge, attacking what he perceived as a soft target representing the worst of American culture” and not “specifically anti-gay”.
23: Last year, Rutgers Law School instituted a requirement that all student clubs that they must hold at least one event promoting critical race theory or related topics, or else lose most of their funding. After pressure from FIRE, a pro-free-speech-in-education advocacy group, they now appear to have backed down.
Critical Race Theory started off as a legal thing, so at least it makes sense that a law school should be involved. But mandating that every student club has to toe the party line on this topic? Surely that is going beyond what the administration of the school can do? I mean, suppose a Catholic university demanded every student club recited the Angelus before a meeting, there would be no problem telling them where to get off (not that such would ever happen in anyone’s wildest dreams or nightmares).
27:
yesterday i learned that there's a whole millennia-long debate about astrology in judaism and one of the positions is "astrology is true for everyone except jews because god gives jews more free will" and this is my new headcanon now
33: A common polyamory talking point is “you wouldn’t be jealous if your friend had other friends”. Now psychologists find that people definitely get jealous if their friends get other friends.
Again, this for me is another “is anyone surprised to learn this?” Kids get *very* jealous if their best friend seems to be friendly with other kids, they have to be taught to get this kind of possessiveness out of them. And I can’t speak from experience here, but isn’t there something about being in a relationship where one partner tries to cut the other off from their former friends? Or if you break up it gets tough because now you find out how many of the friends you had were their friends, rather than friends of both of you, and now you’ve lost a chunk of acquaintance?
42: The worst infographic ever?
That is really bad. Mind you, it makes me feel like a giantess now as I can tower over my titchy five foot two and shorter sisters, meanwhile I’m up on my tippy-toes trying to reach the top shelves in the kitchen cupboards 😁
RE: 27 Whoops, forgot the astrology one. In modern astrology, taking the foundation of the modern state of Israel, that associates the astrological sign of Taurus with it.
Long before that, the archangel Michael is associated as the prince/guardian spirit of Israel, going up against such as the angel that is the prince of Persia on their behalf.
Re: 2 and cults, I was touched by the little table contrasting "cult" with "science" and the virtues of Pure Real True Science:
- Authorities have no special access or claim to truth and the truth is always and forever subject to revision
(So this is why we hear cries of "Follow the science!" and "Dr. Fauci is a true oracle/a sham conman"? At least the "subject to revision" is true, what with "masks, no good/masks, all the time!")
- The truth can be questioned, should be questioned, and will almost certainly change
(Oh yeah? And when religion does this under "development of doctrine", then it's scorned as "they're only changing their beliefs because modern people now know better"?)
- Creativity and freethinking promoted and celebrated
(Umm, see above about "studies with unwoke conclusions are now being removed from journals because people make “serious and credible threats of personal violence” against the editors of journal editors who keep them up")
- Knowledge grows exponentially
Okay, so every field has the Pure True Beautiful Ideal, and then the slightly more grubby in practice Real Life version, so I'm not mocking so much as gently poking fun at the contrasts.
Author here - glad you enjoyed it and all I have to say is lol, you are depressingly correct. Why does reality always have to be so non-ideal?
The theory is beautiful, why the heck won't reality conform!!!! 😁 This is also the messiness of biological systems, where the lovely results in vitro in the lab go to pot once you start testing them in vivo (or why, as Scott has talked about, for any particular anti-depressant you'll get some people love it and think it's a miracle cure, most people are okay on it, and some people find it makes everything worse).
Yup for sure - I'm a high school biology teacher so you are speaking my language. I always talk about how we have vast libraries of compounds that kill cancer cells in a petri dish, but don't seem to work in the human body as an example of the messiness of biology.
They don't kill cancer cells in human beings or they cause so much damage they aren't worth it?
Both - sometimes it is because the compound gets processed differently in the body in a way that disables it or the tumor has a way of protecting itself in the body in a way it doesnt when they are just bare cells, at least this is my understanding
> But mandating that every student club has to toe the party line on this topic?
Technically, the mandate just said thy had to 'address' it. I think they could fulfill this requirement by coming out against it... although I won't speculate on what other repercussions such a decision might have.
Student Club For Knitting Home-Made Yoghurt does a session on "Why CRT Is A Steaming Pile Of Horse Manure"? Yeah, I imagine that would be a lively, intense, and short-lived run they had! 😁
No, it said they had to address the *club's* topic *through the lens of* XYZ. FIRE specifically noted that this is stronger than merely saying it has to be covered - if you say CRT's a pile of horseshit you're not using the lens of CRT.
On the Biden thing. It was made by a random artist on the equivalent of deviant art. Not official production. So I wouldn't class it as propoganda.
Re The Atlanta Crackers - The etymology section of the Wiki page seems to have overlooked what to me is a natural assumption: The name has to do with the “crack of the bat” when a player gets a good hit. That isn’t even mentioned (if only to be discredited as a possibility).
Was Moldbug inspired by ESR? That seems like the canonical and much more mainstream usage of "cathedral" to represent a form of authority with harmful side-effects, and it would be familiar to anyone programming in the 80s and 90s. Though the spirit of the opposition seems much different, in cathedral and bazaar advocating for decentralization versus centralization. I don't really know much about Moldbug, but that seems quite the opposite of what he wants, as I understand he is an advocate of monarchy, which is as centralized as you can possibly make a government. Ironically, his Urbit project aims to decentralize the allocation of digital address space.
"Ironically, his Urbit project aims to decentralize the allocation of digital address space."
I thought all galaxies, stars, planets and moons were sold by the Tlon Corporation or resold by someone who bought from them, isn't that just trying to create a new monopoly (which is to be fair, a very Moldbug thing to want)?
Maybe in practice. Their messaging is definitely around decentralization.
I looked into it elsewhere and it seems like the answer is that they sold and gave away enough galaxies to create a decentralized market of galaxy-holders. In short, they had a monopoly at the start but threw it away.
from https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1: "The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice.” Sounds pretty decentralized to me. One could try saying that the axes "centralized <-> decentralized" and "authoritarian <-> libertarian" are orthogonal, I guess.
I wish xHamster published the age ranges of the survey respondents. On the one hand, it feels like people identifying as Antifa and Alt-Right are more likely to be young, and probably more into porn for that reason. On the other hand, actually paying for porn is going to be mitigated by having money, which is more likely to be the case when you're older. Either way, I'd like to see the conflicting possibilities at least explored.
I think also both alt right and antifa are "very online" which will correlate
"On the other hand, actually paying for porn is going to be mitigated by having money, which is more likely to be the case when you're older."
On the other other hand, actually *paying* for porn is going to be correlated with not knowing the internet is overflowing with free porn. There are so many confounders that I think you'd have to ask a much narrower question to get anywhere.
Horseshoe theory rides again.
I had this thought too. Although I want to believe the study's conclusion that antifa and far left are both mostly nonstraight.
Yeah, and isn't there a bit of an obvious selection bias in a *porn site* running a survey on the intersection of porn/politics?
At face value it seems to say things like "Alt Right is more likely to watch porn than a normal conservative", but that's not really supported since "watches porn" is kind of a pre-condition for being in the survey pool.
All it really seems to say is that they're more willing to pay for the privilege, which seems more likely to be confounded by things like economic class or age than actual political alignment.
What I wish is that they had published the numbers falling into each category - there is an obvious "Lizardman Constant" possibility here.
On the Obesity Wars article, the first paragraph has the usual "As federal employees, we had no outside funding or conflicts of interest", for which my usual response is "you had no *explicitly monetary* conflict of interest, and either you're too naive to recognize other sorts of conflict of interest or you expect the audience will be".
Sure enough, they had a conflict of interest. As cogs in the machinery of the federal bureaucracy, they had an interest not to publish work that conflicted with the preferred narrative of the bureaucracy, because publishing such work will result in your reputation being trashed while publishing work that conforms to the narrative will result (see Mokdad) in your reputation being enhanced. For most humans, that's a powerful incentive, more than sufficient to result in unpopular scientific findings being buried and popular ones being published despite weak evidence and shoddy math.
Flegal being by her own admission naive, she didn't realize the conflict and went ahead with publishing work that wasn't in her own best interest. Then got a front-row seat to the trashing of her own reputation. It's as if a researcher at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Research Institute published a paper saying that cigarette smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, and was surprised to see their salary suddenly reset to zero.
Most people are better than Flegal at understanding their own non-monetary interests. But often not very good at understanding other people's non-monetary interests, and thus prone to overestimate the dispassionate objectivity of e.g. "senior scientists at the CDC". How can we go about increasing this understanding?
James Buchanan would be rolling over in his grave right now if it wasn't for the fact that he knew no one would ever listen to public choice theory once they were subjected to it.
I mean, do we *want* to dispel the idea that government research is and should be untainted? I'd rather make the reality match the press than the press match the reality.
If you want to make reality match the press, it would seem that step #1 has to be dispelling the bogus idea that reality already matches the press. Otherwise, whatever step #2 is, nobody ever bothers to do it.
WRT #32, I note the pessimism about the COVID vaccine, writing last August. "How will we greet the COVID-19 vaccine, when it arrives hopefully in the next year or two?"
Perhaps "during the Trump administration," was difficult for people to fathom, but I can't recall anyone in a position to know who doubted we'd have it by February at the latest.
Re: The Obesity Wars.
I'm 6", 188lbs, with abs. I was a bit surprised to find out that technically I'm overweight. Same thing for my Gym filled very healthy individuals. I've only done a quick search, but it seems like most studies simply use BMI and therefore will classify many athletes as overweight. I wonder if this partly explains the slightly decreased mortality among the overweight. If you also had a bodyfat % available for classification, how much would the numbers change?
My intuition was the same as I'm also borderline "obese". Then I saw a study about using body fat % vs BMI years ago. BMI usage, even as a crude tool, ended up being really effective and overwhelmingly more cost effective. Also remember that the margin of error for body fat % is way larger than BMI. I'm very skeptical that we can do much better than BMI as a research end point.
I'll see if I can dig the study up.
Yeah that all sounds correct. I'm quite curious how the numbers would change if we took everyone in the overweight category who could deadlift 2.5X bodyweight and moved them back to regular category. My intuition is that these athletes are pretty significant outliers and will effect the data. Of course this would be too costly.
What is your waist circumference? That is often used in conjunction with your BMI to appropriately diagnose overweight/obesity. Because you are muscular, your waist size is likely well within the normal range. For a male something like below 40 inches is in the normal range.
When we talk about obesity/overweight, we're talking about a pretty wide range. 6 feet and 188 lbs is a BMI of 25.5—you'd be officially "normal" if you lost 5 lbs. I don't think anyone seriously believes that gaining or losing the 1 lb that might take someone over the 25 BMI threshold makes a meaningful difference in health, or in appearance either. Seems like mildly overweight 25-27 BMI is just fine, with the caveat that the person who is mildly overweight at a young age has much less leeway to gain weight with age while staying healthy and attractive. Also, the caveat that your mostly-male highly muscular gym buddies are not typical of people with mildly overweight BMIs.
BUT the argument that 25 BMI is probably fine should not be extended to a conclusion that obese, and especially morbidly obese, is fine.
Elite strength athletes are not nearly enough of a percentage of the overall population to make a dent in population-wide effects like this You just understand that, if you life, whatever is presented in the literature as correlating with BMI is unlikely to apply to you. All the nasty effects of obesity are caused by things that correlate with BMI like body fat percentage, amount of time spent sedentary, and quality of diet, but those things are harder to measure than BMI.
It's a general problem with the popular press and culture discussion around being overweight in the first place, though. The bad things happen because you have too much fat, not enough muscle, are too inactive, and eat crap. Those things correlate with also being overweight, but just being overweight in and of itself is mostly not bad, though it will have some direct effects like putting more stress on joints and just making it harder to fit in confined spaces (airline seats, cars, whatever), that have nothing to do with longevity but may decrease your quality of life anyway. Those same things happen to very tall people and very muscular people too, though.
Should obviously say "if you lift," not "if you life." Everyone lifes.
At 6', 188lbs, the parent is far from an elite strength athlete. That height and weight (with abs) is just someone who is in good shape. Half the people who frequent a gym look like that. I had the same experience in high school, I'm 5'8" and I weighed something like 185 (with very low body fat) due to sports and weightlifting and discovered that I was only a few pounds away from obese (like obviously I know it's irrelevant and I was healthy, but it affected how I saw the BMI). At the time, I looked muscular, but also just utterly unremarkable if you saw me in the street.
My first roommate in college was similar, he played lineman on the football team and he was very big, but if you saw him, you'd classify him as "a little overweight" for sure (like maybe 10-20 pounds on a guy who was 6'6", but a naive BMI put him at "morbidly obese."
I agree that people can just mentally except themselves from the literature, but I don't agree that people like this don't make up enough of the population to affect a study that just looks at height and weight (like if you were gathering stats from doctor's office physicals or something).
And to clarify, besides being tall, my roommate also looked unremarkable. He wasn't a mountain of muscle, just a big, slightly overweight looking guy.
"Is there some story behind why California has 120 legislators but every interesting proposal I hear about is sponsored by the same guy?"
The status quo necessarily has the support of the majority because that's how it becomes the status quo. If you think California's status quo is boring then the only interesting bills are going to come from a small number of nonconformists.
Re 36:
I appreciate that you're identifying when links are paywalled. Is there any way you could also identify when the link requires an account to read the article? I'm trying to keep my potential online vulnerabilities to a minimum
#22: too much of a dichotomy; few jobs are entirely bullshit or entirely free of bullshit. Better to ask what percentage of time spent at work is wasted on bullshit with no societal value (I would say mine is fairly high).
#40: I'm not buying the second half of that at all. In my experience, significant differences in intelligence can cause friction in virtually any relationship, not just romantic ones.
>Better to ask what percentage of time spent at work is wasted on bullshit with no societal value
i largely agree, but it should be kept in mind that this is confounded by the need to maintain peak capacity labor levels.
ie an office may be 50% bullshit much of the time, but require everyone to do 100% meaningful work during quarterly crunches. The bullshit in these cases is a byproduct of needing high peak capacity infrequently and needing to maintain that level of labor availability even when you have nothing to do with it, and deciding to assign it bullshit when it's not being used productively instead of just telling it to go spend time with its family.
I agree with this. I used to work at a place that had a fairly consistent yearly trend - busy for 1/4 of the year, slow for 1/4 of the year, and comfortable about half the year. We walked a tightrope between having enough employees for the busy quarter and wasting money paying people to do nothing in the slow quarter. Sometimes we found ourselves understaffed and everyone working 10-14 hour days when we let staffing get too low.
The end result was that during the slow months we would get grilled about looking busy (nobody said those words, but it was obvious) and then all of the make-work we were asked to do was instantly forgotten the moment we had enough real work to keep us busy again.
Yes, very good point.
I love how the hybrid Bison was in the 20,000 year old cave paintings all this time.
#27 (astrology applying to almost everybody except for the Chosen) is basically the plot of John C. Wright's Somewhither. There's a multiverse that splits off based on choices, but regular human choices don't have enough punch to split off a whole universe - so whenever there's a miracle, another world is created which didn't have that miracle. The main antagonists are headquarted in the completed Tower of Babel and have astrology that really, *really* works, down to the minute with sufficient steampunk calculation power applied to the prediction tasks. The only exception are the Chosen, or people close enough to them to be in the 'shadows' they cast.
But the immunity only lasts so long as you obey your higher nature; if you give into baser instincts, then the astrology is going to retroactively work again, and the bad guys will not just be on your doorstep but will have gotten there even before you did. Fighting somebody with working astrology is...well, like trying to fight Prometheus in Scott's story "A Modern Myth" from a few years back.
It was a weirdly enjoyable sort of book.
I'm kind of surprised Flegal is only writing about her experiences with the "Obesity Wars" now. Did something prompt this?
I've always been surprised more attention hasn't been given to how weird and frenzied a bunch of the science in this area is. As a layman who got really interested in obesity and nutritional science following an eating disorder, I was shocked at how shaky and poor most of the science is, and how many perverse incentives are tangling up everything. There appears to be a lot of straight lying.
I had no idea until I read this piece and was shocked by it. I'm likewise amazed it is not getting more popular attention and appreciate Scott's presentation of it here.
Could you expand on how bad you've found nutritional science to be?
As for Flegal, I can easily imagine that it took time for her mistreatment to pile up, and more time for her to decide it was a narrative and worth making public.
I downloaded the colonialism paper from SciHub, and fwiw the abstract is horribly written and reeks of that "uninformed freshman uses phrases they think sound sophisticated" style. I was going to read the whole paper because I get a kick out of reading cancelled material, but honestly they've strongly signaled a lack of any real inquisitiveness or insight.
This is how not to write:
> For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is
high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a
general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in
most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those
concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by
and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology
imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart
sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in
many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states
today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance;
by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies
from scratch.
---
Yeah the Language Log author is crazy.
Are there any proposed causal models for why being slightly overweight would be healthier?
I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately since a while ago when I measured as having a very slight potassium deficiency at a checkup. It was easy to correct (and probably caused in significant part by my getting a lot of exercise and sweating a lot,) but when I started looking into the potassium contents of various foods considered rich in potassium, I realized that at a 2000cal/day diet, most people are almost certainly getting well short of the DRV, even if eating "healthy" diets. And the same applies to many other micronutrients.
Humans aren't really meant to live on 2000 calories per day for ideal operation. We're meant to live on significantly more than that, at much higher activity levels than most modern people meet. You don't burn off micronutrients with exercise (mostly; you do sweat out salts,) so adjusting down our caloric intake to meet our reduced energy demands may leave us with significantly lower than ideal levels of micronutrients.
Personally, I barely eat processed foods (I eat a bit if you count ostensibly whole wheat pasta and bread as processed,) but since I've become stringent about counting micronutrients, I've found that it's actually quite difficult to meet the DRV on many of them, even on a much healthier diet than most Americans get, at 2000 calories per day. In fact, my equilibrium level of caloric consumption is closer to 3000 calories per day (due to regular vigorous exercise,) and I still struggle to meet the DRV of many micronutrients at that level of food intake, without eating any processed foods (and this is accounting for the fact that I only eat empty-calorie indulgences about once per 2-3 weeks. I'm not at the far extreme, but I'm *much* further down the curve of obsessive health-attentiveness than most Americans.)
Strict attentiveness to food labels, and looking up nutrition labels online for foods (ex. chicken breasts) which don't have nutritional content labeling in the store. I rarely (less than once per two weeks) eat food I did not prepare myself. I used to weigh all the ingredients I put into the meals I made, but since I've been doing this for a pretty long time now, I'm satisfied with eyeballing them based on the intuitions I've built up about food quantities. I can also calculate expected calorie expenditure based on exercise levels, eat a target level of calories, and lose, gain or maintain weight at a rate which corresponds to my predictions within a small margin of error.
I mostly just base micronutrient targets on nutrition labels as well, although with some supplemental research. For example, the DRV for iron listed on nutrition labels is actually based on the recommended value for women, and adult women need more than men to replace losses due to menstruation. There are a lot of micronutrients whose contents pretty much only feature on fortified cereals and multivitamins (how much of my DRV of selenium do I get? I have no idea, and tracking that would far exceed the level of effort I'm willing to put in given that no health officials seem to regard selenium deficiency as any sort of public health crisis.)
Based on CDC guidelines, I know that I routinely get less than 100% of my DRV of potassium, calcium, and magnesium. I get at least the recommended amounts of vitamins A and C, but can't adequately track my levels of vitamin D because I don't know how much I'm getting from sun exposure, and I don't bother to keep track of all the different B vitamins. I'd estimate that I probably get approximately 100% of the DRV of folate.
I cannot rule out that the CDC's guidelines for recommended values of various micronutrients are well in excess of those required for optimal health, and indeed for some micronutrients I suspect that that is very likely the case.
The quality of the research is a seperate issue to the censorship because credible researchers felt the paper was worthy until they got threatened. The bar for publication is shifting from having "undergone double-blind peer review" to whether researchers anticipate receiving threats of violence.
That feels bad.
"Are there any proposed causal models for why being slightly overweight would be healthier?"
Since you can't be simultaneously overweight and anorexic, it might be healthy by virtue of protecting against an uncommon but much worse condition.
"Are there any proposed causal models for why being slightly overweight would be healthier?"
It's entirely possible that what we classify as "overweight" is in fact closer to 'typical' or what the human body itself considers a desirable weight, and that "normal" weight is in fact underweight. We don't understand metabolism all that well (see also: the obesity paradox, where obese people are more likely to get several diseases but also far more likely to survive them/escape the worst impacts of them). Some of the most critical components like leptin were only discovered in the past 20 years. We thought fat was just inert calorie storage until recently too (it isn't--it's part of the endocrine system).
Possibly having a bit of "cushion" is protective against severe illness--if you have fat reserves, it will take longer to start starving if you can't eat, and starving is extremely hard on the body. Possibly fat reserves have some salutary effect on metabolic process we don't understand. Possibly many people maintain a "normal" weight by restrictive eating, and so they are malnourished (relatedly: weight loss, intentional or not, is correlated with premature mortality).
For weight, much like height, being in the middle of the bell curve seems protective: both extremes (extremely high weight, and extremely low weight) have negative impacts, in much the same way it's not ideal to be 4 feet tall or 7 feet tall.
Some diseases, notably cancer, cause loss of weight. Having some reserves might help.
Going from memory, I think that's basically what I read. Obese people survive cancer better despite tending to be diagnosed with cancer later.
Don't you have to be careful about Berkson's paradox for that sort of thing? (in this case, it'd be that the sorts of cancer that obesity causes are more survivable than the average cancer that non-obese people get)
This is also where researchers need to be careful about when they measure the weight. If you simply measure everyone's weight and then find whether they die in the next <some period T>, you end up confounded by the people who had already lost weight due to a disease that later killed them. You also can't just regress life expectancy as a function of present weight for this same reason.
Also, it isn't just disease that does this. Smoking, amphetamines, and opioids all suppress appetite and also shorten your life.
And, of course, many forms of dieting are extremely unhealthy. Compared to just being a normal weight to begin with, actually losing a lot of weight can shorten your life.
>Are there any proposed causal models for why being slightly overweight would be healthier?
My layman's understanding is: the immune system is suppressed in people who are underweight (as the body attempts to save calories - it's like the old and counterproductive saying "starve a fever", but you're effectively pre-starved), and this effect extends up through what is conventionally termed "healthy" weight, but this wasn't well-understood or accounted for when the conventional definitions were drawn up (i.e. they were optimising for heart disease alone rather than all-cause problems). It should be pretty obvious why being immunocompromised is not healthy and results in excess mortality.
I know the doctors I've talked to (in Oz) have recommended the "overweight" range to me, although I wouldn't generalise (I have perennial issues with accidental weight loss due to anorexia-the-symptom, so I imagine they want to keep my target a bit higher than usual).
I don't know if this has been posted yet, but the calories burning while playing chess link reminded me of this cool short story: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lom9cb/kindness_to_kin/
I found this story from this interaction on Twitter. Turns out Eliezer wrote it
https://twitter.com/anderssandberg/status/1402940494980784129?s=21
Side note, I read the referenced book in the tweet, Blindsight, and it was very interesting, exploring the necessity of consciousness
I don't understand the thing where it's definitely true that dog ownership leads to much higher mild and moderate exercise, but that this nonetheless doesn't translate to improvements in physical and mental health.
I thought it was a given that exercise (including mild and moderate) is one of the best things for mental and physical health.
Is the pet article implying that this isn't true?
Also it seems like a lot of correlation being inflated with causation. (e.g. for the claim that pet owners have slightly lower mental health, perhaps sadder people are more likely to get pets in the first place. Maybe for company, or maybe high mental health people have lives that are too full for pet maintenance)
Also, I dislike the grouping of cats and dogs, as I think dogs are more likely to be beneficial (mostly because of the whole exercise and getting out of the house and meeting the neighbors thing)
It's possible dog ownership doesn't have a relationship with increased light exercise because most people who consider themselves equipped to take care of a dog are people who would have gotten similar levels of exercise doing something else if they hadn't had one, and the people for whom that exercise would be a significant increase over their baseline feel like taking care of a dog would be too difficult.
People less inclined to exercise to begin with may also be inclined to get lower-maintenance dogs. A husky would demand activity levels which would certainly qualify as "exercise" to take care of properly, but conversely, if you were the sort of person inclined to go running regularly, a pug might be an actual impediment to that. Low-activity dogs may not demand enough physical activity of their owners for it to be measurably beneficial.
Hmmm, this doesn't map to my own experience or to the experiences of my friends.
I currently walk over a mile every day to take my dog to the creek, and I very definitely would not do this or similar walking if it weren't necessary because of the dog. The exact same thing is true of my friend that I am currently visiting. They specifically got a high energy dog (husky x border collie) to force them to get daily exercise they otherwise wouldn't.
I do agree that people who actively COULDN'T walk a dog are unlikely to get active pups (and wouldn't get any extra exercise by owning a couch potato greyhound or lap dog), and people who ALREADY run a lot are unlikely to get pugs (but still might run even more than their baseline if they got a husky, etc)
It could be that for some pet owners, the increased light exercise might replace more intense exercise: Walking a dog is more active than sitting on the couch, but having to stop to pick up poop and match the dog's pace can interfere with a more intense workout. It might also give people less time to do other beneficial things like cook healthy food or develop relationships with humans.
Based entirely on personal observation, my theory is that the benefits from pet ownership are real, but there are also negatives that Big Dog doesn't talk about. Needing to take care of a pet is stressful for someone who has a busy life: There's the work of training and cleaning up after them, the cost of vet bills (or the guilt if you can't or won't pay) and the grief when they die.
Re: people not noticing stuff about language, I hadn't noticed the etymology of "tiramisù" either until my late teens *even though I'm a native Italian speaker*. Likewise for the etymology of "malaria" (Italian for "bad air"). Also, while I've known there's an insect called "cricket" since I was a kid and I've known there's a sport called "cricket" since I was a kid, I've managed to never think about these two facts at the same time and not notice there's a sport called like an insect *until my late twenties*.
And for those that don't know Italian, "tira mi sù" is "pick me up". (And learning that helped me notice the accent mark and get the stress correctly on the last syllable. Also, I was shocked to learn that this dessert that exists in every traditional Italian restaurant is so recent that its earliest attested appearance in print is after I was born: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiramisu
Ciabatta is also a recent invention. First produced in 1982.
Can someone explain what #37 is saying? Is it basically saying that math problems take a long time to solve?
It's quantifying exactly *how* long. Half-life of 117 years means, at any given point in time, if you consider all currently unproven mathematical conjectures, you expect half of them be proven within 117 years.
19)
How many more instances of this does everybody else need before they really and truly internalize the idea that the news is fundamentally untrustworthy and you cannot default to assuming good faith?
I don't know how to ask this question in a less inflammatory way. Those are two examples of egregious and intentional lies that went uncorrected for months if not years, that all just so happen to slant the story in a direction that is politically convenient for a specific faction. How do you see this happen and then gell-mann your way into thinking "nah the rest of the news is still fine". I don't understand
Both "the news is fundamentally trustworthy" and "the news is fundamentally untrustworthy" are overly simplistic and unworkable, for basically the same reasons as what you'd get if you replaced 'news' with 'science'. They're made up of many people and many organizations with plenty of competing incentives - if you treat them as institutions at all, you have to include many of their strongest criticisms as coming internally. Greenwald is a journalist, after all, and I'd make the argument that in this context Scott absolutely is as well.
If you want to know how to be better at deriving true beliefs from the news, I can give plenty of advice or recommendations. But if you're looking to define its fundamental essence, I don't think your project is going to be very fruitful.
Based on the explanations elsewhere in these comments, "the news" comes out looking a lot better than Greenwald here.
25)
Epistemic status: exploratory.
I wonder if this idea ports to another subject. Hypothesize with me for a moment
"When surveyed privately, most Americans support family formation and traditional relationships. But in public they support casual hookup culture because they think everyone else does and want to get dates!"
I bet you there's something there
I too hypothesise that everyone secretly agrees with me
This is neither true, necessary, nor kind.
While it's certainly a possibility in any given case, that works in both directions. Both sides of multiple issues are saying "people are scared to admit that they agree with my position, but secretly do." How do you reconcile this?
It's obviously self-serving to suggest that even though your position polls at below [50% or some other useful measurement], you actually have a mandate from a larger population. The Silent Majority has been a meme for 50 years or more.
I am curious about how your hypothesis explains people using Tinder instead of forming traditional families. They're not just lying about it on surveys, they're actually doing the thing they say they prefer. That seems like actually preferring it.
Re #34, the testosterone study, it was pretty cool that they included both male and female subjects. We think of testosterone as a male thing, even though women have it too at lower levels, so the effect of different testosterone levels on women doesn't get enough attention.
"Claim: very high support (80% of Americans) for requiring ID to vote; non-whites more likely to support ID requirements than whites are."
It's not true:
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?fips=27&year=2012&f=0&off=51&elect=0
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?fips=37&year=2018&f=0&off=53&elect=0
I think 6 is a very bad study, at last insofar as anyone wants to use it to support the idea that poverty doesn't cause these outcomes. It may of course contain interesting and useful findings that a more nuanced reading would bring to light.
Firsts of all, it says that the correlation between poverty and bad outcomes is attenuated when you control for a set of factors, BUT these factors are themselves clearly caused at last in part by poverty. These include highest parental education (hard for poor parents to get higher ed degrees), urbanicity (poor parent's cant afford houses in the suburbs), and parental psychiatric disorders/antisocial behaviors (if you're studying whether poverty causes these exact things, you can't analyze it as though the existence of these things in poor parents in not caused by poverty - that's begging the question).
Saying that poverty does not cause bad outcomes because they're actually caused by these factors which are (plausibly) themselves caused by poverty, is a bit like saying that jumping out of an airplane without a parachute doesn't cause death, because actually it's hitting the ground that causes death. True as far as it goes, and a good result to highlight if you're trying to convince someone to wear a parachute before they jump, but not really an endorsement of jumping out of airplanes without parachutes (as people may be trying to apply the fining here).
As to the sibling adjustment, I largely disregard it for two reasons, one of which Scott gets at.
The first is that, if I'm reading it correctly, the sibling adjustment is applied after the adjustment for 'confounding factors' I talked about above, which I also reject (in terms of disputing a causal story for poverty). So we're already coming into the sibling adjustment with a data set I find to b wrong, improperly weighted towards a lower correlation and less to explain than it should have.
Second, as Scott gets at, as far as I can tell the sibling adjustment is just done by taking the parent's income when each sibling turned 15, and finding that bad outcomes don't change much if incomes went up or down in between. Although that's good to know in it's own right - it implies poverty-related interventions need to happen earlier than highschool - this seems a very weak measure to dispute a causal role of poverty.
-15 is pretty old in terms of development, one might expect most of the critical phases that determine these outcomes to happen sooner, when poverty may have been the same for each child.
-We just said in the previous analysis that factors which may be caused by poverty, like parental education levels or personality disorders, explain much of the variance. These things are unlikely to change with parental income over the short-term; you don't suddenly retroactively get a diploma or cure your life-long anxiety disorder just because your income went up by $15,000 this year.
-Even to the extent that important factors do change with income, they're unlikely to change very fast. This is partially due to inertia and people staying in familiar situations or needing to pay off debts accrued before changing their material situation. And it's partially because the measure looks at income rather than wealth. The odds that a family that made $30k for 20 years and now has made $45k for the last 2 years will own a house/own a working car/etc is much lower than a family that has made $45k for the last 20 years, but as far as I can tell the analysis treats them as identical.
Overall, I don't begrudge the analysis itself, it teaches us important things about what factors stemming from poverty cause these outcomes, which helps to suggest more targeted interventions in poverty-stricken communities. All true knowledge is useful, and it seems plausible that they got at some true knowledge with the data analysis itself.
However, I hugely begrudge the conclusions they draw, an how they try to narrativize these conclusions improperly. To me, it looks like they're saying 'bad outcomes aren't caused by poverty, they're caused by things that are caused by poverty, and therefore we shouldn't worry about fixing poverty and should use tiny, focused micro-interventions on those things instead, or just wash our hands by assuming those things are genetic and can't be changed/are a matter of personal responsibility.'
In terms of the science of their own analysis, this conclusion seems dangerously wrong/disingenuous. In terms of public policy impact and public education, this conclusion seems very dangerously wrong-headed and misleading, and feels intended to grab headlines and get future funding/speaking fees from rightwing ideological sources.
So yeah, I don't like that part of the paper, and think it should be disregarded as transparently wrong/unfounded.
Re: 7 - 'Is it ethical to hire baboons to do our drudge work and pay them in booze' is probably a good precursor to ethical debates around the deployment and use of semi-sentient AI in the future.
Nice Lynx, Thx. Related to 35. Sci-hub (and lone geniuses*) On the referral of the other Scott A. (Aaronson) We watched the documentary "The Internet's Own Boy". Nerd recommended if you haven't seen it. Having a world wide rent seeking scheme, where by publishers hang onto the worlds research papers is a bad idea. (And hey if they give up rights to the world after X-years, there can be no threats of violence to the original publisher. "Sorry, it belongs to the world now."
*lone genius is kinda silly. It's always better to have a group of them riffing off each other.
Re: 13, I wonder how it would affect support for voter ID if it were given in contrast to the alternatives that are currently in place - having to provide identifying information like full name, address and birthdate, sign an affidavit to your identity, etc. - rather than just being given in a vacuum, especially since most voters may not know about these measures.
Saying 'would you like security measure X' is likely to give a very different result than 'would you like security measure X or security measure Y.' As far as I know, no on is advocating getting rid of voter ID *and* all the security measures currently in place in states that don't require it already, so framing the question without those measures being mentioned feels less relevant to the actual policy question at hand.
Re: obesity, overweight, not overweight. studies. Did the analysis also pull out an under-weight category? (I'm guessing underweight has higher risk, and lumping with 'not overweight' would pull it down.... and so results are not surprising. A category error?)
There's so much more worth reading about the baboon-signalman: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/559031/signalman-jack-baboon-worked-railroad-south-africa
The previous signalman lost both his legs in a work accident, so he trained his pet baboon to pull the signal levers instead, as well as push his wheelchair and help around the house.
When a passenger complained about a baboon being in charge of the signals (which are kind of a safety critical part of the railway) the company's solution was to make the baboon an official company employee.
I go back and forth between being intensely appreciative of modern safety regulations and regret that I missed the narrow slice of human history where you could get away with outsourcing train signaling to a baboon
I wonder what XHamster is going to do with that data now, knowing that their primary paying customers are extremists on either side of the aisle who want to tear each other's heads off.
"I wonder what XHamster is going to do with that data now, knowing that their primary paying customers are extremists on either side of the aisle who want to tear each other's heads off."
Enemies to lovers, rated XXX, you won't believe what happens when a busty young antifa activist gets lost in the woods and she stumbles into the cabin of an alt-right stud. 30 scorching hot minutes of no-holds-barred political action where preconceptions are not the only thing wrecked!
I don't condone pornography, and I would advise against it's consumption; but... I won't lie, I would be tempted to watch that.
Come for the premise, stay for the plot 😉
There are enough fics of this over on the EMCSA that I'm kind of bored sick of them.
(Spoiler alert: essentially all of them end with the feminist becoming a happy housewife and raising children. Stories written *by* feminists - and there are quite a few - don't tend to go for this sort of "redemption".)
Religious cults may be on the downswing, but political and business cults have been on the upswing. There have been several pieces by Andrew Sullivan on Substack about the "woke" cult and certainly the "Trump" cult has an identifiable leader, for example. The segmenting effect of media (and social media) has encouraged this phenomenon, no doubt.
What do you mean by business cults? MLMs and the like?
Landmark (which has mainstreamed itself) was founded by the people that started Est in the 70's. But one could argue that crypto subculture as others like it could be a kind of cult.
On youtube, Coffeezilla describes an ecosystem of "gurus" who prey on gullible men. It seems to be mostly selling low-quality overpriced "education" on how to get rich. Most of it seems to be just selling stuff directly rather than setting up an MLM structure.
MLMs would meet many of the criteria of cults (I grew up in a cult so when I left as an early adult read all about them - they don't all need a single charismatic leader. The Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, are run by "The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society" which is a fairly faceless corporation and therefore insist they can't be a cult (which cult experts disagree with)
As far as I can tell, there's a gender split. MLMs aimed at men start with "get really rich really fast". MLMs aimed at women are more like "you can make some money (usually selling stuff rather than finance) while spending time at home and you can also get somewhat rich".
If anyone knows about MLMs and the like aimed fairly equally at men and women, tell me about them.
Agile
Author here - good points, and I touch on some of these themes in the article. The internet/tech/politics/business are definitely transforming the nature of cults.
In relation to the Trump phenomenon taking hold in more conservative populations:
"...societies that are less tolerant of deviant behavior may have a lower rate of cult formation, but may be more susceptible to mass revolutions in which cult-like dynamics take over. "
This was a cogent observation in your piece and one I hadn't considered.
"SSC’s former sparring partner Mencius Moldbug seems to be doing well"
You mean other than his wife dying?
My first thought is that the cult graph is just lead exposure.
We are this long after the links post and nobody has riffed on the fact that supersonic jets are to be manufactured by a company named "Boom?" ACX, you are letting me down.
It's not really nominative determinism when you name your company something related to your product.
The correct response is to predict that the boom will come at the end of the flights, not the start.
Kind of weird that the Obesity article assigns pseudonyms "Professor 1" and "Professor 2" and "Prestigious School of Public Health" only after already stating the full name of the individuals in question. The fact that "PSPH" is actually the "Harvard School of Public Health" (HSPH) is easily googled.
I'm not saying they needed to remain anonymous, I just don't the point of the indirection on "Professor 1", "Professor 2" and PSPH.
Leaving out the names helps emphasize to the reader that the problem of interest for this paper is a *behavior pattern some professors engage in* rather than a problem with those two professors in particular. Get rid of those two professors and leave incentives the same and some *other* professors might fill the same slots.
On the ticker-tape parade thing, I kept thinking the obvious event that was left out in recent memory is either December 10/11, 2020 (Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine approved) or December 17/18 (Moderna vaccine approved) or the day a couple days later when the first doses were injected into non-trial patients in the United States.
I guess there's an obvious reason why there were no parades on those dates, but in retrospect, it seems obvious that the Golden Gate Bridge, Freedom Tower, Willis Tower, Gateway Arch, and similar monuments in every city should absolutely have been lit up in special colors that night.
I was a bit confused about the Less Wrong post not having mentioned this as a date that should have been celebrated, but then I saw the Less Wrong post was from August. But still, it should have posited this as a future celebration that we *should* prepare for!
On 19: So "park cleared" - true, "Trump then does photo op" - true, but "park cleared FOR photo op" - false? Or just not confirmed?
Not confirmed. The IG talked to the Parks Police and they said they didn't do it for a photo op and had an existing plan to clear the park to put up a fence.
The IG also says that the Parks Police reported that the Secret Service and Bureau of Prisons arrived and then the Park Police cleared the park.
The IG did not talk to the Secret Service so whether or not they asked the Parks Police to move up the time table or called any audibles to the people on the ground in the park isn't known.
Oh man, re: chess and calories, I've long had a superstition: I used to powerlift, and as a result I have a pretty finely tuned sense of what I need to eat and when, plus a sense of different types of physical and mental exhaustion. As a programmer I noticed that after particularly challenging days of programming, I felt like I needed to eat a bit more and I felt a similar sensation to the "you have used all up your normal stores of energy" sensation that comes after a high volume lifting day (which is different from the feeling of a lower volume, heavy weight lifting day).
Based on those sensations my superstition was that thinking hard burned calories in a noticeable way plus it used micronutrients in a way that was somehow similar to endurance exercise. Obviously just a casual guess based on my personal experience.
Re #29, it's because utilitarian thinking in government is incredibly rare, so [a person who's willing to consider what's both important and possible to achieve] will have a lot of interesting proposals relative to the typical politician.
This is highly speculative and possibly just a side effect of having listened to too many Firesign Theatre albums, but perhaps there are many fewer cults these days because nearly every American is already in a cult, namely the cult of television. TV is in some sense a metacult, the cult that has something for everyone except for the people who somehow figured out how to make themselves resistant to marketing & advertising. When there were only four channels, there were too many gaps through which individual people, who are always irreducibly weird, would get bored, turn off the TV and go do something else. Now the television metacult has infinite plasticity in order to shape many different messages, some combination of which will fit almost everyone's priors and give them the "I knew it!" dopamine boost, which satiates their desire for a satisfactory explanation of just what the hell is going on around here.
Presumably the same for the internet, probably more so.
Only with the advent of Youtube. I'm still old fashioned enough to believe that people's critical faculties tend to be more engaged when they're reading than when they're watching video. If cable exponentiated this effect compared to broadcast TV, then I don't know how many Knuth up-arrows to apply to this effect when comparing online video to cable because cable did not have the capacity to tailor what it offers each user based on that user's history. The ubiquitous recommendation algorithms tighten the ideological/cultural lock-in feedback loop tremendously.
Author here - interesting I like it, I discuss the role of the internet from a similar perspective in the article.
How many folks e.g. under 30 even watch TV regularly? May be just my social circle, but I'd guess - not that many. I personally never had a working TV at my home since 2010. What you say can be equally applied to internet echo chambers though, as Nancy Lebovitz noted.
Do you have a child? That's how they get you.
Nope and not going to. But my friends who do seem to be mostly using youtube to distract their kid(s). And in any case, isn't the point that you have *your child* watching TV so that you can have some much needed free time, not watching it yourself (for which you presumably have less time once you have a child)?
You seem to be unfamiliar with the dynamics of cults! Good for you, I'm glad you're not addicted to TV.
Maybe cults have only seemed to decline because newer ones are less obviously religious. Consider UFO-logy, feminism, environmentalism, "wokeism", the New Atheism and Atheism Plus. Do they not have scriptures, prophets, popes, dogmas, infidels, sinners, heretics and blasphemers? Do they not have inquisitions and witch-hunts? Even Covid-19 seems to follow this pattern, with rituals and true believers.
Author here - It's a good point and I kind of gesture towards something like this in the article. I guess you could argue that these don't really fit the classic definition of a cult, although they certainly shared some similarities as you say.
I wouldn't describe them as cults, arguably "movement" (with its religious connotations and external focus) fits them much better. They may still be providing people with something that people used to join cults to look for though.
I've seen cults described at high-demand groups. You can dabble in any of the things you list, or have them at the center of your life.
Rationalism also follows this pattern.
Scott has written on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/
Cults are usually defined as being small enough to have tight-knit-group dynamics. None of these are that small or that tight-knit, at least as whole movements (certainly there are cults within some of them). These are better compared with organised religion than with cults (and indeed, cults usually don't have the ability to do inquisitions and witch-hunts except occasionally on a town scale, and usually haven't codified their scriptures yet).
" Do they not have scriptures, prophets, popes, dogmas, infidels, sinners, heretics and blasphemers? Do they not have inquisitions and witch-hunts? "
No. The answer is no, they do not. Who is the Pope of feminism? What is the scripture of Atheism? "Has influential figures" is not the same thing as a Pope or prophet, or else literally everything is a cult. Similarly "Has written content that is highly regarded" isn't scripture. And COVID-19 is a pandemic, not a cult. It doesn't care if you believe in it
There are some strange grammatical mistakes in the post that make it hard to read.
# 23: "...a requirement that all student clubs that they must hold..."
# 24: "...against the editors of journal editors..."
Maybe have an editor look over your blogs before posting?
:) So what you're saying is that it's high time for us to create a cult? (I realise tone doesn't carry, so let me clarify for the literal readers: I am not serious.)
You're saying we're not already a cult? We have a Rightful Caliph and everything! 😀
On point #18, I think most people notice most of these, but that any given person will miss some. I was shook when I realized that "only" is just "one-ly".
Setting aside whether it is accurate or not, it's still important to push back on the Lone Genius thing because it counteracts a fundamental bias of fiction. Fiction operates under a number of restrictions that prevent it from accurately reflecting reality, and one of those is that everything has to be done by a small number of characters that the audience can identify with. If the Apollo Program were a movie, there'd be like 5 named engineers who did everything important.
https://locusmag.com/2013/01/david-brin-our-favorite-cliche-a-world-filled-with-idiots-orwhy-films-and-novels-routinely-depict-society-and-its-citizens-as-fools/
32: Why did we stop having ticker tape parades? (metaphorically and literally)
1. The windows in modern office buildings cannot be opened. So, you can't throw ticker tape out of them.
2. Ticker tape started to disappear in the 1970s, it is long since dead and gone replaced by Bloomberg terminals. Model 28 and 33 TTYs and their paper tape control mechanisms were replaced by PCs and microcomputers in the 1970s. Their ghost lives on in the innards of Unix systems.
We can solve both problems at once by setting up a device file that prints data out of the building. Whenever there's a ticker-tape parade, you simply need to run $ cat /dev/urandom >> /dev/out-the-window
Passes for hacker humor.
> 17: Claim: counties where the seminal pro-KKK movie Birth Of A Nation was played on its five year “tour” had more lynchings and race riots after the showing. Somewhat less believable claim: counties where it played still have more hate crimes today. I bet this turns out to be one of those persistence studies that doesn’t replicate.
How do you propose to replicate that one? Make another racist movie, show it in some counties, then wait 100 years and see if there are more hate crimes in those counties?
There could be other locations or other movies to look at, but it'll be impossible to find a 1:1 comparison.
Since the crowd here at ACX has a lot of interest in programming, nootropics / hallucinogens, cryptocurrency and polyamory I'm surprised nobody has talked about John McAfee's recent assassination.
The antivirus software company founder had been in Spanish custody pending extradition to the US for his ideological unwillingness to pay federal income tax. During that time, he repeatedly expressed concern that he would be killed in a way meant to look like a suicide and took measures to make his desire to live clear including repeatedly tweeting about his optimism and good prison conditions as well as getting a tattoo to that effect. He was subsequently found hanged in his cell, with Spanish authorities claiming he had committed suicide while in custody.
People here tend not to jump in without evidence right after something happens.
People here tend not to take someone like McAfee at their word.
People here tend not to like purposefully stating a discussion with emotionally laden words like "assassination" right off the bat.
McAfee was a professional troll. There's no reason to take anything he said seriously.
If a troll decides to kill himself, there's no better way than to loudly announce you won't do it, then off yourself.
God speed, you wonderful bastard! o7
Between this and your prior comment, I'd like you to clarify something for me:
What sort of evidence would you require to think that a 'troll' had been assassinated rather than committing suicide?
If McAfee's statements have negative evidentiary value, making it seem more likely that he committed suicide, then the hypothesis that he committed suicide is effectively unfalsifiable. Independent investigators will not be allowed to examine physical evidence, and the claim of the Spanish government holds no evidentiary value because they would make the same denials regardless of whether they killed him or not.
I don't know what happened, but people that are really sure immediately after the fact get negative credence in my book.
I would be SO surprised if the Spanish GOVERNMENT had killed an American citizen instead of extraditing him. That's allegiance-breaking behavior for little to no reason.
Obviously the IRS activated one of their professional killers deep undercover in Spain - come on, the Hollywood script writes itself!
>What sort of evidence would you require to think that a 'troll' had been assassinated rather than committing suicide?
Wouldn't that just be the usual sort of evidence that someone had been murdered? A witness or video, forensic evidence of defensive wounds on the victim, killer's DNA under the victim's fingernails, suspicious deposit in the prison-guard/assassin's bank account, confession from the killer when confronted by some subset of the above, that sort of thing?
Most people who appear to have committed suicide, have in fact committed suicide rather than being assassinated. And most assassins screw up and leave evidence. Absent specific evidence of assassination, suicide is by far the most likely explanation.
Who do you imagine would be conducting the investigation to uncover that kind of physical evidence? Because if the Spanish authorities did kill himself, they would seem unlikely to want to reveal that fact.
Would you apply this same standard to someone wanted by China who conveniently committed suicide while in North Korean custody after expressing fear that he would be killed in exactly that manner? Or would you reasonably infer that Beijing was trying to send a message?
It's unclear to me why the government would kill him if they were going to extradite him anyway, but I guess killing people for not paying income tax (and making it look like an accident) sends a stronger message than criminal prosecution?
I'm struggling to understand the conspiracy at work here.
Claiming he'll never suicide then offing himself just to confuse people and stick it to the man sounds completely in character for him.
I haven't looked into it carefully but from the little I've read the HSPH arguments seemed more convincing than Flegal's arguments: I think their basic point is that people often lose weight from diseases shortly before they die and Flegal's studies don't do anything to adjust for that which sounds plausible to me, and she doesn't seem to have any actually convincing criticisms of their research.
Sociologically this was interesting to read; I previously had only heard the other side of the story so I had cast it in my head as "brave scientists fight to combat the government's shoddy science and misinformation." But I guess the other side of that "it's not The Government, it's a random researcher at the CDC who feels looked down on and bullied by the prestigious scientists at Harvard," and probably both sides feel like they're the underdogs here.
Flegal seems to be arguing that she's the subject of an isolated demand for rigor. All the arguments to the tune of "you didn't adjust for x" could also be applied to the Mokdad et al. paper. The main difference between the two was the dataset used.
seems right; I imagine academics also thought Mokdad was badly done but didn't bother to criticize it because they agreed with the conclusions
#17 doesn't seem to implausible at all, but you have to break the assumption of causation. It isn't surprising counties with a lot of lynchings would be places that would be very receptive to a Birth of the Nation tour. It also doesn't seem surprising that high lynching counties in the past would be high hate crime counties today. But it doesn't follow from that showing a film for a few nights nearly 100 years ago was the cause.
That was my thought, I did worry that they may just be looking at absolute numbers and finding higher occurrences of lynchings in places with a higher population, but I'm pretty sure they've normalised the data (hard to tell).
It is also a very small difference though, maybe screening Birth of A Nation had some weird domino effect in combination with the other factors you mentioned.
I posted the same thing, but deleted it after reading the paper itself and reading up on the film.
Birth of a Nation was the first long movie and consequently an unprecedented smash hit; it was shown all over the US (indeed, the paper's "did this county screen BoaN" measure isn't based on records but on "did this county have a theatre capable of screening it"). After adjusting for inflation, it's still in the top 5 highest-grossing US films ever.
There's still the potential for a confound with which places had a theatre, but this specific issue seems to be covered.
My personal pick for worst infographic ever is the Bicycle of Education: https://i.imgur.com/Unzbc65.jpg
That's absolutely horrific. It's not just bad communication, it's anti-communication. I understand less than before I looked at it.
>The cutest cognitive bias: people overestimate their own IQ by 30 points (!), but overestimate their romantic partner’s IQ by 40. The same study also claims there’s no correlation between “intellectual compatibility” and relationship satisfaction within relationships; ie you’re not more likely to have a happy relationship if your partner has a similar IQ to you (but see comment here).
I saw this on reddit. The study is absolutely horrendous. A commenter broke it down here. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/o4ooc7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_21_2021/h2sq0d9/
The TLDR is that the study didn't even ask people to estimate IQ. It asked about intelligence on a subjective scale then did a nonsense conversion
Re: #32 ticker tape parades, the linked hypotheses would be insufficient if no parade happens once COVID is over. That's the outcome I predict.
I suspect there are fewer parades simply because public spending on such things was deprioritized. I'm inclined to add "because of upward transfers of wealth" which we've seen over the past 40+ years; achievements are "privatized/corporatized", regardless of how much public investment went into them. Will Pfizer or AstraZeneca shell out for a parade?
> Will Pfizer or AstraZeneca shell out for a parade?
They definitely would if it advertised them (and if they weren't illegal because of a pandemic).
However, when the achievement is by some greedy corporation that only cares about its self-interest, it would feel like being suckers to give them free advertising. Even as a libertarian who doesn't think there is anything wrong with a corporation that only cares about its self-interest, I'm going to do the same towards them, and not give them something (such as advertising) if I don't get something in exchange.
#40 I know exactly where that 30 comes from. I scored 106 on a paper test in middle school and 135+ on every single online (international? American?) test I've taken since to prove to myself I'm not average.
Yeah but do you know the one weird trick to get rid of belly fat though?
And in music recommendations for today, kids, The Hu cover Metallica's Sad But True singing the Mongolian version of the lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpxA_ZxGX_M&t=354s
Metallica are doing a special anniversary release of The Black Album plus there will be a cover version: https://www.nme.com/news/music/metallica-announce-special-reissue-of-the-black-album-and-star-studded-covers-album-2975279
One track of the cover version is Miley Cyrus feat. Elton John, Yo Yo Ma and a bucket load of others on a version of "Nothing Else Matters": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqoQY9bobow&t=34s
History/mythology/Indo-European issues: I'm fascinated with the parallels between Zeus and Indra; here we have the thunderbolt of Zeus/vajra of Indra and the similarities in the depictions between Greek red-figure vase here https://twitter.com/rudolf_eckhardt/status/1184978478363533314 and a painting of Indra here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra#/media/File:Indra_deva.jpg
It's also present in Buddhism called the vajra or, in Tibetan Buddhism, the dorje (but the association with Hinduism and Buddhism is a lot clearer).
Presumably there was influence back and forth, I went down the rabbit hole starting with the Heliodorus Pillar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliodorus_pillar which then led on to the Indo-Greek Kingdom (came after the Graeco-Bacrtians who came after the Selucids who came after Alexander the Great) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom.
One thing to sort of have an idea about "ah yes, Indo-European language family" and another to see the traces of "yep, coming from a common pool of myths and ideas and concepts and imagery".
I find it very likely that most of the xhamster results are confounded by age. Older people are less likely to identify as alt-right or antifa (and arguably far-right). Note that antifa and alt-right score about the same on basically every item.
> Is the Language Log author crazy, or am I?
I think what "people don't notice" is that 1. There are these patterns, but 2. not all of the words that seem like they could exist actually do.
Uh, Yarvin wrote you like 5 novel length love letters a few months ago.
By which I mean highly supportive posts.
Any chance you're gonna start writing actual essays again? It seems like you've written about 4 since moving to substack.
fascinating re CFF and subjective time. i'm surprised by this:
"Toads have a CFF of about 10% of humans, and so might experience the world in fast-forward"
i would have speculated [from cold] the opposite: that life for the toad is slo-mo, compared to mine. the toad, if i get it, has a higher frame-rate than my organic camera. that's why the toad's CFF is one tenth of mine - the flashes seem separate for the Toad because of all those non-lit frames between his lit ones.
since the toad has 10x more filmframes to go thru than i do, life takes longer for the toad - so i would have guessed. but skimming the article, i gather that the contrary interp is: faster frame-rate means a faster brain, so faster life. i likely mangle / oversimplify.
I think 10% of CFF means that it has lower frame-rate.
Might be a bit late on this one, but basketball 2- and 3-point shooting can be predicted by the Matching Law (along with other sports like baseball throws, and all behavior, really). For those not familiar with it, briefly, Matching Law states that behavior allocation among choices is proportional to the reinforcement received from those choices.
Here's a link to that one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1284234/
Also for baseball: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jaba.381
And chess openings: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7061917/
For 18, I count myself as one of the normal people who do not (at least consciously) notice the patterns in that table, and find it interesting when such patterns are pointed out.
As a point of pride, I recently noticed after 15 years of being taught 'trigonometry', that the word itself is very logical: trigon = triangle, metry = measurement of, so trigonometry = measurement of triangles!
> 25: Related: when surveyed privately, most Saudi men support women working outside the home. But in public they oppose it because they think everyone else opposes it and don’t want to get in trouble!
It's not true that they think that "everyone else opposes it". Most people know that a majority is in favor, they just somewhat underestimate the size of that majority. From the article:
> We start by describing the measured misperception about social norms relating to WWOH [women working outside the home]. Thea verage (median) guess is that 63% (67%) of other session participants agree with the pro-WWOH statement. The average level of agreement across all sessions is 87%, a number larger than the guesses of close to 70% of participants.
DIY gene therapy on a virus to cure lactose intolerance.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a17804128/scientist-painstakingly-documents-his-own-diy-gene-therapy/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoczYXJeMY4
He was lactose tolerant for about 18 months, and then needed lactaid, but not as much as he used to.
Regarding #20, I remember basketball coach Billy Donovan stating this back in 2007, when asked what kind of shots he liked: "Layups, dunks, and Lee Humphrey." (Humphrey was a 3-point specialist.)
At the time that was a novel concept, but it seems that the rest of basketball has embraced this.
Okay so check this out.
I posted the Average Female Height chart in Slack at work, including the text above it ("The worst infographic ever?"). Someone in engineering complained to HR that it's offensive, it went up the chain to *at least* the VP of tech, came back down the chain to me, and my manager had a conversation with me about it.
Like I know this sounds like some kind of facebook boomer Republican made-up story but it's true.
This is full-on moral panic mode.
In halcyon days, advertisements would say "SEX! Now that we have your attention..."
Today, porn site xHamster, desperate for advertising that will make it stand out, turns to politics, correctly believing that politics is way more attention-grabbing than porn.
Re 18: People not noticing the sensible rules of their language is actually one of the key drivers of language change (along with people pronouncing vowels weird and people getting conquered).
The case-in-point is grammatical gender (ever wondered why Spanish forks are boys and spoons are girls?). Linguistic theory says that noun classes start pretty sensibly (e.g. between living and non-living things), but break down over time for reasons covered in "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories" (1). Also, native speakers make mistakes and mistakes are contagious, especially prior to grammatical standardization and enforcement (aka literacy).
John McWhorter, pop linguist, covers this idea thoroughly in an episode of his podcast Lexicon Valley called "Why Do Languages Have Gender?" (2). He cites experimental evidence that speakers of languages with eroding (but still sensible!) noun classes do not perceive objects with the same grammatical markers as being related by some higher concept. In other words, native speakers see the markers as arbitrary rules. Adult language learners are probably *more* likely to pick up on the underlying significance because they are consciously memorizing rules, not acquiring the language as a child would (as commenter @r0seo36qwkegm2ci pointed out below with their Bulgarian studies).
English has a slew of weird properties that most native speakers never consciously perceive. For example, have you ever thought about the fact that stress is the only difference between many related verbs and nouns? Trees produce produce, drugs addict addicts, advocates advocate and communes commune! (3)
Finally, relationships between words in English might be more obvious on the page than in other languages because we haven't had any significant spelling reform in centuries. This is good fun for historians and wordniks, but terrible for anyone trying to learn how to read. (4)
(1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
(2) https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2021/01/language-gender-noun-classes
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun
(4) https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the-english-language-is-holding-kids-back/385291/