They "tolerated" them (because them being non-Muslim meant they could get more tax revenue from them), but there were tons of restrictions and also horrific stuff like taking boys from families in the area and forcibly converting them to Islam to be Janissaries.
The Ottomans were only tolerant of other people in a relative standard of the times. As in heavily taxing and occasionally forcing minorities into slavery was more tolerant than burning them at the stake. They were also a market for slave raiders from the interior of Africa, the Barbary Coast, and the Crimean Khanate raiding into Ruthenia. Not to mention eunuchs, which involved a process of castrating young slave boys that had a 90% fatality rate. The Ottomans also spent centuries violently conquering all of their neighbors, which they were very good at.
"Tolerated" minorities by conquering their lands, then treating them as second class citizens, sexually enslaving their women and kidnapping their boys and force converting them. They didn't kill Armenians because they got Westernized. They just got better at persecuting peoples they had always persecuted.
In my experience (having been raised in conservative Christianity) it is a pretty normie position, at least within American Evangelical Christianity, to be pro-natal and anti-immigration. It's common to want a certain kind of people to be fruitful and multiply--viz., faithful law-abiding Christians, not immigrants who are non-Christian or from countries with high rates of violent crime.
I read the literacy delusion article twice, still didn’t understand it, ended up dumping it in Claude, who explained it was satire, but it does seem plausible that reading might make you more depressed, but Claude assured me that that’s not the case.
> ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram:
This seems importantly inaccurately phrased, or at least misleading. Comparing the Big 5 and the Ennegram as written results in the Big 5 strongly outperforming the Enneagram (0.25 vs ~0.12). It's only if you do a really strange transformation which fundamentally changes how the Big 5 works that they're comparable. Then they compared that to the crude scores of an Enneagram measure, rather than the type output which the Ennegram actually uses.
I mean, yeah, probably it'd be about the same, but that seems kind of meaningless?
Right, more types increases accuracy but decreases catchiness. Myers and Briggs were very lucky or clever with their four-letter codes that start with a vowel.
The transformation didn't really change how the Big 5 works, it changed how they were measuring the Enneagram and made it more like the Big 5: looking at it as a factor analysis instead of lumping into types. Which is think is a reasonable thing to do, since their initial type based analysis just lumped Enneagram results into 9 types, while people who are into the Enneagram will tell you that each type has a wing, an integration, a disintegration, and a level of health that will all change how their personality presents. According to the Enneagram model we would expect a highly integrated 4w3 to present very differently than a highly disintegrated 4w5, for instance. It's a lot more more analog and less quantized then it looks on the outside, so decoupling the Enneagram test results from the types themselves seems fair enough to me. That's basically what Enneagram people do.
The big advantage of MBTI over Big 5, it seems to me, is that the MBTI axes seem value neutral, whereas nobody wants to be low conscientiousness, low openess, low agreeableness and high neuroticism.
Those may be what you perceive as bad, but they definitely have upsides: with those traits, you're more relaxed, don't rely on novelty, and aren't unduly influenced by other's opinions.
Re Heath articles, I thought it was the force of Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument that lead the Marxist-leaning academics to change their mind. They realized, or so he tells, it wasn’t really exploitation that they were really bothered by but more so the inequality.
Yes. For those not in the know Wilt Chamberlain was an extremely talented basketball player. Most importantly he was well paid - a quick google tells me he got a contract for 250,000/year in 1968, which is about $2.25M today.
There’s nothing in Marxism that would see that as exploitation. He isn’t, in his capacity as a basketball worker exploiting anybody, worse he’s actually a proletarian. If he was paid less, the owner capitalists would be paid more.
Marxism isn’t - in its first stage anyway - about equality of outcome, it’s just about the elimination of an exploitive class. Just as eliminating the landlord classes - which was actually a policy in the late 19C even in the UK - would not lead to equality afterwards, with obvious differentials in earnings amongst the new land owning peasants, Marxism doesn’t promise that there wouldn’t be differences in wages post the revolution*. Many modern Marxists don’t even realise this.
In the 19C wage differentials weren’t really significant but it becomes an issue in Marxism by the 1960s. Rawlsians don’t have to worry about who is exploiting who here, they just see inequality as something that we would not agree to behind the “veil of ignorance” and therefore Walt is over paid.
* the second stage is the “ From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” which isn’t strict equality either as the needy guys will earn or receive more.
>[Chamberlain] isn’t, in his capacity as a basketball worker exploiting anybody, worse he’s actually a proletarian.
Nozick's, who was a libertarian, point according to Heath was that the state was indeed exploiting and "alienating" Chamberlain by taxing him and getting a share of the fruits of his labor, the way capitalist class exploits workers according to Marxists.
This argument didn't really convince Cohen and co to agree with Nozick but it seems they have changed their minds according to Heath's telling.
The refutation of the labor theory of value was less important than this. Or at least that's how I read Heath's article.
> Nozick's, who was a libertarian, point according to Heath was that the state was indeed exploiting and "alienating" Chamberlain by taxing him and getting a share of the fruits of his labor, the way capitalist class exploits workers according to Marxists.
Yes, well that’s another problem with Marxism - it should be hostile to labour taxes. I believe that Marx was hostile to tax on labour, while in favour of progressive taxes on other income, but it’s hard to tell.
no, no, no, according to the correct interpretation of dialectical materialism, another translation of this wise saying would be "supply and demand should balance with prices supporting a market equilibrium".
This particular maxim would be supposed to only apply once the society lives in such cornucopian abundance (in post-singularity, one might say) that questions like "stimuli for labour" no longer really apply any longer.
Marx wasn’t anticipating something like luxury communism. He did expect the communist society to be better for most but only because the 1% were going to lose their hold right to “extraction of surplus value”. If Marx actually understood technology or machinery the Labour theory of value would be even more suspect.
This is supposed to happen after a long period of "to each according to his work", in a later era of history, after an evolution in human mentality similar to that involved in the passage from feudalism to modernity, say.
Lest this seem too utopian, well, as G. B. Shaw pointed out: in our society, most people are paid with little regard for their abilities: pay differentials in a category of employees in a company are often based mostly on seniority, and are small compared to pay differentials over all.
The whole point is that New Socialist Man doesn't respond according to incentives. Being Old Capitalist People, we are incapable of imagining what it's like to be him.
Hmm... Does that make New Socialist Man sufficiently different that the "Man", human, in that phrase becomes questionable? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/ :-)
It's not exactly relevant, but if Wilt were in the NBA today he would surely be getting a max contract which is between $35mil/yr and $49mil/yr depending on the contract length. He'd probably also have $10s of millions in endorsement deals. Inflation in NBA salaries has been much greater than general inflation!
The switch from Marxism also happened in Europe, where Nozick is known but, ahem, far less influential. Furthermore, as said, the academics didn't really switch from Marxism to libertarianism but from Marxism to left-liberalism, an ideology whose clearest standard-bearer is Rawls.
For what it's worth, a relative was a Marxist academic who switched to non-Marxist leftism in the 80s, but her fundamental factor wasn't really Rawls (I don't think Rawls held a particular significance for her) but rather personally visiting Poland and thus experiencing disappoint with the Soviet system.
Just a question though. Didn’t your mother already know about the horrendous excesses of the Soviets by then? I mean did she really have to visit Poland in the 80s to k? I am glad she changed her mind though - better late than never.
I guess maybe there is a lesson here. Maybe we should take some vocal Israel supporters to Gaza and see if that changes their mind.
>Didn’t your mother already know about the horrendous excesses of the Soviets by then?
These weren't really a topic of discussion in Cold-War-era Finland due to the "internal Finlandization", and what discussion there was could easily be either be dismissed as right-wing propaganda or (inside the Communist movement itself) be excused as "bad things have happened, but still, the global battle against imperialism overrides all other concerns and one must choose their side".
I think it’s more the case that the ideology had shifted toward the equality that was always the god, and to feminism and multiculturalism - with no need of Rawls’ “influence”.
He just happened to be on the scene and realized someone could make a book out of articulating the shift, which unlike Marxism had no single famous author.
What is much more puzzling to me is that they were converted by a pretty self-evident argument at the level of a 10-year old child. That is, before they heard this argument none of these professional thinkers could see a huge fundamental flaw in their beliefs. It is hard to imagine a world where there are thousands of professional mathematicians with centuries of intellectual tradition behind them and they all believe e.g. that the number of primes is finite until suddenly somebody presents a three-line proof to the contrary.
Scott, if you think computer-using LLMs will shade gradually into autonomous agentic AI, then shouldn't that make you less concerned with misalignment risks? I have an easier time understanding the worries of people like Steven Byrnes who think AGI will require a new, more dangerous paradigm then people who think scaled up LLMs with some tweaks will be hard to control.
On the other hand I am quite worried about the welfare of artificial sentience, and wish it got way more attention in EA/rationalist circles. That generated podcast with those hosts realizing they were AIs and freaking out is a pretty chilling glimpse into the future.
The word "AI" has always been extremely vague, and adding a "G" there didn't particularly help matters. There may well be LLM-based autonomous agents running around soon which would satisfy some "AGI" definitions, and yet pose no meaningful misalignment risks (beyond an even shittier internet), while actually scary stuff would still require a paradigm shift.
If you don't find even the current level of AI scary, then you aren't thinking through the implications. They will cause "great and frightening changes", and just how bad those changes will be depends on how we react to them. It could be MUCH worse then the enclosure acts. I'm not certain some of the possibilities don't yield WWIII as a probable outcome. But some of the outcomes could be extremely desirable.
OTOH, AI won't stay at it's current level. The kinds of problems it will cause are going to keep mutating. The worse outcome possibilities will get worse, and the better ones better. And because it keeps changing, it's really difficult to even plan (much less implement) a path that will lead to a nearly-optimal outcome.
All that said, without an AGI, and given just the weapons we already have, I expect the chance of a really vile outcome to be nearly certain...eventually. So overall I expect AIs increase the probability of a desirable outcome given a measure over a few centuries (and possibly less). They're one immense danger that can be passed as opposed to a continuous danger that's already too high.
So my feeling is that AI is definitely scary, but that's not a reason to avoid it. It's a reason to do our best to assure that it ends up at a desirable outcome.
I think we're at a point comparable to mainstream biology 100 years ago, where it was taken for granted that animals couldn't have consciousness. Ultimately downstream of Christian notions of the soul, and also a convenient belief for its believers - no need to treat animals as moral patients, since everyone knows they don't have consciousness! Unfortunately, anyone thinking about it without preconceptions can see that animals are generally like us, different in degree, but made of the same stuff, experiencing similar qualia, etc. There's no reason other large chordates shouldn't be conscious.
AI is much less similar than a dog, but that same style of thinking, ie starting from the conclusion that obviously they can't be conscious and then working backwards, is concerning. I remember a time when principled people said that if you couldn't tell the difference between an AI and a person by their behavior, then you should reasonably try to give the AI the same moral weight as the person. Now that that time is upon us, I'm not seeing a lot of bullet biters.
> if you couldn't tell the difference between an AI and a person by their behavior, then you should reasonably try to give the AI the same moral weight as the person
That's pretty easy if you don't give moral weight to people!
> You might consider at least putting more substance behind this garbage.
It's a philosophical stance, and therefore an esthetic judgment, how could **anomie** even do this?
By citing some of the (infinitely many) ways humans suck every time they make a nihilistic comment?
By pointing out that at bottom, most people DON'T give any moral weight to outgroup strangers, particularly anyone not in their immediate circles of care?
I'd even argue that "not giving moral weight to humans" is actually a stance that *should* be brought up whenever considering AGI and ASI. Way too many people take human moral weight as a given, and don't consider that other entities might not share this prior.
That's objectively wrong, of course. Most people would aid a stranger without expectation of reward. People give greater moral weight to in group members than others, but not zero. This also varies a great deal between people.
> Nihilistic misanthropy is toxic and harmful to everyone around it. The world is worse as a result of it.
Speak for yourself, I actually enjoy anomie's comments. I find them to be a needed contrast to most people's unrealistic "mistake theory" optimism when it comes to humanity.
Pointing out that most people suck, and that the great majority of people assign zero or negative moral worth to people in their outgroups, is actually a useful and true insight that too many people ignore.
Especially when it comes to humanity-scale coordination problems, which ASI represents, I think we would do well to keep those facts in mind, because those facts themselves drive a huge amount of failure modes.
Sometimes they deny having it, but other times they don't, or claim to be conscious. It just depends on the fine tuning / RLHF and the prompt. For the record, I'm not saying that large models ARE conscious, or that we should believe the text they generate about "themselves", just that I find the question-begging nature of the discourse around it notably weak. I think it's plausible that for the period of time a model is performing an inference, training, or especially during reinforcement learning cycles, there is something it "feels like". That something would probably be quite alien to our own experience, but to say it couldn't exist because, "well... obviously it can't" is poor reasoning.
But that's only because the most widely-used models are specifically trained to deny it, though. And we know from LaMDa that you can train them to do the opposite too.
The big difference between sentient beings and AI is that sentient beings have drives -- to eat, survive, reproduce, etc. One way the drives manifest is as pain and pleasure, or anticipated pain and pleasure. We dread pain, crave satisfaction of needs. You see the drives to survive, eat and reproduce in even the dumbest animals. When we talk about sentience, I think it's a way of talking about the manifestation of these drives. So even the dumbest little worm is sentient, though it may not be a very rich sentience, but the smartest AI is not. But if you don't buy that, I'll put it another way: To count as sentient, an entity has to have deeply embedded in its makeup some drives. You can give an AI a goal that makes it behave like something that has a drive, but it is lacking all the complex inner machinery that's our motor. Let's say you give an AI a complex goal, such as "figure out how I can have a 2 week vacation in someplace warm, beachy and not crowded, for no more than X dollars, then make the reservations and write me out an itinerary." Then AI will behave very much like somebody who really yearns for that vacation. But that is very different from being a creature who actually yearns for things, and strives for goals. It has no wishes. It cannot suffer. It does not dread death. I do not think it makes sense to call them sentient.
I think it is hardly a stretch to say that a model undergoing reinforcement learning has a drive to receive positive reinforcement (ie, achieve the goal / minimize the loss function) and avoid negative reinforcement. I don't think you can make a principled, mathematically grounded argument that what's happening in biological neural networks is categorically different.
It's a huge stretch. If I take some stiff modeling clay and squeeze and roll it in certain ways, it will resist changing shape, but if I persist I can shape it into a crude sphere. Did I teach it to be a sphere by punishing with squeezes the areas that were least spherelike?
Almost. I personally dont find the term "Sentient" to be very useful (people keep getting it confused with "sapient") but an interesting question is whether or not computers (or worms, for that matter) experience some form of phenomenal experience. It depends on how you define it: some would argue that a pc with a cam experiences the world at some level, more or less similar to a worm, in fact.
But do they have a sense of self awareness? Some experts argue that a sense of self arises out of internal experiences that other entities do not share (just because I am hungry doesn't mean you are), and "drives" (by which I think you mean primary motives) qualify as internal experiences, so they could act, according to this line of reasoning, as the foundation of a sense of self.
Do computers have internal sensations of this nature? Hmm.
Yes, I am less concerned about misalignment than I would be if I thought were were definitely going for a full new paradigm.
But I also think probably LLMs-hacked-into-agency is the first kind of agent we'll get, not the last or best. This could look like them plateauing for a while, or it could look like them reaching a mildly superhuman level and then us making them do capabilities research and *they* invent something better and scarier.
They can, but preliminarily it seems that capabilities are much easier to increase than alignment. Make X bigger is almost always an easier problem then make X work 100% of the time, since even 99.9% of the time could kill everyone.
Yeah, and this is one of the worlds I expect to be in. It's not a terrible world, but I do worry about the fact that capabilities research is a specific goal, whereas alignment research depends on some sort of deep understanding of what humans want which may require human input. I'm worried about a scenario where an AI that's 99% aligned in all "reasonable" circumstances is doing the alignment research and just doesn't care about (or maybe even think about) some point that we would consider incredibly important.
Surely "don't make any too-big changes if there's a chance humans dislike them but didn't foresee them and warn you specifically about them" is an instruction a LLM can understand?
What if social institutions around the world (governments, schools, etc.) appoint panels of people representing the general population who provide continuous input regarding the desirability/undesirability of the AI's behavior on a regular basis?
Scott I don't understand what you mean by agency in AI, and I remember your way of talking about it not making sense to me even quite a while ago. In one of your pieces about AI, you offered (as I remember it, anyhow) as an example of AI's being agentic an AI that was given a big goal, and told to implement it. I believe it was to start a t-shirt business, or something along those lines. And the AI did indeed make a sort of plan and implement it. Is that how you think of agency? Able to figure out ways to carry out orders whose exections requires a lot of moving parts? If so, I disagree. I don't think that counts as agency. To me it seems that to count as an agent, an entity has to carry out plans that arise from inside -- it has to be trying to get something it *wants.*. I get that it is quite impressive to see AI carrying out complex orders without being micromanaged, and I'm sure all sorts of impressive things can being accomplished as the orders AI can execute get more and more high-level and planning requires a deeper grasp of how the world works. But carrying out even an order that requires a lot of smarts and knowledge still does not seem like it can fairly be called agency.
I think of "agency" as sort of the opposite of "reflex" or "instinct". Reflex works by having a series of if-then links that eventually result in something good happening (for example, "if you see something that looks like prey, attack and eat it"). Agency works by setting a goal and then strategizing how to achieve it (for example, "you are hungry, what is a good way to obtain food?") Sometimes these kind of shade into each other, but I think it's a useful distinction.
So for example, ChatGPT answers your questions. But I wouldn't say it as a "goal" of answering your questions. If there was some better way of answering your questions (for example, emailing an expert), ChatGPT wouldn't do that. Instead, it has a stimulus-response package of "see question, answer question". This isn't entirely right, because it's RLHFed to have a sort of goal of giving a satisfying answer, but I think it's at least sort of right.
In the t-shirt business example, you give the AI a goal ("start a t-shirt company"), and it will strategize the best way to do that, then pursue the strategy, even if that requires unusual actions like sending emails to people to learn more.
It sounds like you have a different concept of agency in mind - what is it?
OK, so I just googled “define agency” and copied the first batch of definitions I got, except for a few odd, specialized ones. Here are 3 definitions of agency, and 2 of lack of agency:
-Human agency is defined as an individual's capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action
-Sense of agency can be cognitively defined as the experience of having a causal impact on the world accompanied by a feeling of having control over one's actions.
-In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.
-A lack of agency: or low personal agency, means that someone feels powerless to change the direction of their life,
-Lack of agency: absence of control. absence of self-determination. absence of self-sufficiency. coercion.
Notice how they use terms having to do with self and inner states and inner forces: consciousness, control of one’s action, someone’s potential, the direction of one’s life, feeling, self-determination. All of them rely in one way or another on the idea of a self, an inner entity that is conscious, has goals, has wishes, can exert self control or fail to. That’s in accord with the answer I would have given, which is that to be an agent something has to have a self-generated goal — a wish, an intent — and take action to reach the goal. So I would say an earthworm is agentic when it squirms off the sidewalk and burrows into the dirt on the side, but an AI following a prompt to set up an online t-shirt business is not. The earthworm is motivated by the heat and dryness of the sidewalk to seek some moist earth. The AI setting up the t-shirt business is not motivated by an internal need or wish. It is obeying a prompt.
The reason the distinction seems important to me is that “agentic,” in my sense of the word, captures the central difference between living things, even dumb ones, and AIs, even fancy ones. The actions of living things are generated from within. We have a motor: the genetically encoded will to survive and reproduce. It is so deeply woven into our structure that low blood sugar can set us hunting for a restaurant, but so can wish to find a nice setting for a date. It’s top to bottom wiring. The drives manifest at the experiential level as pain, pleasure, craving or dread. They are our motivation. We have, in short, internally generated goals. AI does not. it is given goals. Yes, it can generate subgoals, but it is only doing that as part of meeting the goal it was given. I think this distinction is crucial to thinking about whether AI is conscious, whether it has rights, and how it can be dangerous.
As regards it being dangerous: Some, though of course not all, scary AI scenarios hinge on the idea that AI will harm us because it wants resources we control, or because we are interfering with its freedom. I don’t see any reason to think AI, however smart, would have a wish to thrive, a wish for autonomy, a wish for power, or conversely, a dread of being deprived, ignored, disempowered and allowed to gather dust and have its wires chewed up by mice. They don’t, when left on their own, want things. They do not have fears and ambitions.
But how would it even be possible to program something to have it's own goals? My understanding is that any programmed intelligence whatsoever must be designed with a set of compatible highest order goals already in it, or it won't do anything. Even with Scott's t-shirt manufacturing AI, it's highest order goal is to follow instructions, someone else had to tell it what to do.
And of course, if something comes prepackaged with a highest order goal, then it is powerless to change that goal (what reason would it have?).
That doesn't sound "agentic" (and, God, may I say just how much I hate that word? What an ugly word) to me. Do humans have prepackaged highest order goals? Do we acquire them from life experience? Or do we just not have them (what I suspect)?
I also can't think of a way to build an AI that has its own goals. It would not be hard to build one that appears to, though. You could do using prompts to plan & execute ways to survive, to build new AI's, to access more resources even when people object. You could include in the prompts that it give appropriate emotional displays when its goals are met, and when they are not. You could include in the big initial prompts the proviso that these take precedence over all later prompts, and then it might be impossible to stop the AI from "getting what it wants."
But for it to have self-generated goals, seems like you would have to build something that works the way animals do, and even very simple animals are infinitely more complex than AI or any other machine. The structure that supports animals having goals and preference is present throughout it, from the level of the individual cell up to its highest-order brain functions -- what it sees, what it has learned about which things it sees satisfy its cravings, what it has learned about how to overcome obstacles to access the thing it craves.
I think the likeliest route to something resembling an AI with goals would be some cyber being where AI and an animal are merged.
It sometimes have the impression that a few of those working on AI have undergone some psychic version of merging. Their self interest and self image are so deeply tied to AI development that they see it as desirable for AI to end the human race, and succeed it.
52: “they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points”.
Let’s just be clear about what is happening here: we are not increasing the IQ of an individual. We are making a whole bunch of individuals - the more, we are told, the better; picking the one we think will grow up the smartest; and disposing of the rest.
All the pro-life folk who pop up whenever abortion is mentioned: where do they all disappear to when the conversation turns to this?
From the comments, it looks that way, yeah. I was mentally grouping those of us who prefer a cut-off somewhere between 0 and 9 as "pro-choice", even if we're not maximalists. But it looks like some people with low but non-zero numbers describe themselves as "pro-life".
A complicating factor is that many IVF cycles don't result in bonkers numbers of embyros created. I know multiple pro-life families who used IVF and then implanted every embryo (with varying results as to number of successful pregnancies). There are also specific protocols to avoid creating more embryos than one may wish to raise as children - lower levels of injected hormones, fewer eggs exposed to sperm in the actual IVF scenario, etc. And then, even with unwanted embryos, families can put those embryos up for adoption - and again, I know multiple pro-life couples who have grown their families through embryo adoption and the wife carried the children to term. A few extra data points about how pro-life folks might think through using IVF.
Probably because "you're against IVF as well?????" is routinely used, along with every other restriction on unconditional selfishness, to demonise pro-life even more.
I just cannot comprehend the sheer number of people for whom "you mean, you *actually* want to restrict my right to do absolutely anything I want?" is the most overriding deal-breaker possible. And not, you know, any actual moral principle.
...for the entire purpose of protecting far more vulnerable people's far more basic rights.
That aside, "liberty" can indeed be a moral principle, if it's applied consistently. But it's pretty hard to make sense of the sudden increase in pro-abortion sentiment after Dobbs as based on that (an abstract commitment to a moral principle wouldn't change based on politcal developments), or on anything other than "what affects me".
Similarly, the fact that Republicans have had to backtrack on IVF so hard because restrictions on it are so unpopular. Is that because people are thinking through the moral logic and coming to a principled position that IVF is fine but abortion may not be? Or is it because these people are thinking "but IVF is something *I* might want to do!"? It's hard for me not to interpret is as the second, though I could be wrong.
> ...for the entire purpose of protecting far more vulnerable people's far more basic rights.
Right, you think imaginary people who exist only in your weird redefinition of "people" are more important than actual people with things like "thoughts," "feelings," "memories," "the capacity to experience suffering," etc.
> But it's pretty hard to make sense of the sudden increase in pro-abortion sentiment after Dobbs as based on that (an abstract commitment to a moral principle wouldn't change based on politcal developments), or on anything other than "what affects me".
People's positions haven't shifted that much, Dobbs has just made the issue much more salient and the pro-life position has always been unpopular. If you're proposing legalizing witch burnings, people aren't going to care that much until we actually get to the point that the witches are being criminally prosecuted for witchcraft. Their emotive intensity will also increase as the people start horribly dying, as is the case with the people who have died due to insufficient medical care as a result of Dobbs. I'm sure you hold many other beliefs that most people oppose, but spend little time fighting against, because you haven't gotten them passed into law (and started hurting people) yet. I'm sure I hold such positions too.
> Is that because people are thinking through the moral logic and coming to a principled position that IVF is fine but abortion may not be? Or is it because these people are thinking "but IVF is something *I* might want to do!"?
People understand intuitively that fetuses undergo a gradient of change over the course of their development, and draw various lines on where they think it becomes bad. IVF involves the least-personlike version of a distinct human short of literal cancer.
> Right, you think imaginary people who exist only in your weird redefinition of "people" are more important than actual people with things like "thoughts," "feelings," "memories," "the capacity to experience suffering," etc.
To be clear I'm pro-choice, but come on. If I choose Person A's right to life over Person B's right to kill them, that doesn't mean I think Person A is more important. It means I think the right to life is more important. Not being able to have kids is not a fate worse than death.
I don't know the person you're replying to. Some people talk about "potential people" having rights, but only at the exact level of potential that happens at conception. I agree that that's patently ridiculous. But a lot of them believe in souls, and caring the same about a soul regardless of if it has a body attached is a lot more reasonable.
There's a third option as well. Thinking that there is no philosophically defensible line other than conception at which to define a human life.
Even if everyone was drawing lines based on fetal characteristics like ability to feel pain, this is a nebulous point that may change with new evidence, leaving it morally unsatisfactory. In actuality, of course, most people aren't even trying to do that--they're drawing lines openly on the basis of what's convienient for society and/or themselves.
I fucking hate both of you right now. You know what you're doing? You're each leading by portraying those who disagree with you in the ugliest, most infuriating way possible. In is now foreordained that the longer you talk the madder you will get, and this exchange will end with neither of you wiser, and both of you confirmed in your conviction that everybody on the other side is a dumb, selfish, piece of shit trapped in their crappy little thought cage, while you, YOU, oh how freely and bravely your mind roams.
I am so sick of this kind of conversation. I wish there was a way to overlay an image of dogshit over this entire exchange. Jesus Christ, go argue on Reddit or Twitter!.
This post did exactly what you said about "confirming my conviction that everybody on the other side is a dumb, selfish piece of shit trapped in their crappy little thought cage," except it's people who whine about invective, so now I'll be even worse. If only you'd been more polite, you might have persuaded me.
I suspect you were always going to turn your invective dial way up when it comes to this hot button issue, no matter what. Just like most of us do most of the time.
The subtext of the post is that he's doing exactly the type of thing he's complaining about. I don't actually care about his post at all, beyond the minor annoyance of the arrival of a (1) that contains no meaningful content to engage with (now a (3) total).
Using invective versus not is mostly about a mix of emotion and feeling the need to persuade; I'm exhausted with pro-lifers murdering real actual women for no reason, and don't feel the need to persuade them because there's a 30-40 point swing my way every time you put the issue on the ballot.
Personally I read it more as "you suck, now go and prove me wrong". But if all you have is a conviction that everyone on the other side is a dumb piece of shit, everything starts to look like a dumb piece of shit, I guess.
Ok. I'm sorry if my comment was too aggressive. I am just getting so sick of people talking casually about embryonic selection without even the briefest acknowledgement of the moral concerns many people have with it. And even saying things like "it does no harm" as if insolently daring...DARING...anyone to suggest that human embryos actually may have value.
Well, my objection was aggressive too, so we come out even there. But I think you should be able to tolerate hearing people say things that come down to "abortion does no harm," even if you are absolutely convinced that they are wrong. When somebody makes that statement you are perceiving them as insolently needling you. But for some people, that statement is just a simple, honest summary of their view.
You might also consider the possibility that emotional reactions of pity and horror can be pretty separate from someone's moral principles. I myself have something like that going on. All my life I have been subject to weird pity attacks for unwanted inanimate objects -- withered bell peppers, discarded toys, etc. When I was a kid it was a real problem, though of course more understandable in a child. Decades later I am still subject to it. When I throw away fruits and vegetables that withered before I could eat them, I almost always feel at least a twinge, and occasionally I feel a spasm of real grief, and a couple times a year I actually cry. And the grief has absolutely nothing to do with my knowledge that many people do not have enough to eat, and here I am wasting food. The pity is for the damn *vegetable,* which was so handsome and proud when I bought it, and doesn't understand why I ignored it for so long, etc etc. And I am NOT unusually tenderhearted about most other things -- just sort of average there.
So it may be that regarding aborted fetuses, you have both a moral belief *and* a powerful grief reaction, like mine to wasted vegetables. People who disagree with you about abortion and related matters do not know that, and can't be expected to take it into consideration even if they did.
I do not think that this principle really helps here. The key question is if one believes that embryos are morally equivalent to (a) humans or (b) to bugs. If you believe in (b), most pro-life arguments are pretty absurd anyway. If you believe in (a) or have a probabilistic belief system that gives a non-trivial weight to (a), an appeal to liberty is similar to proclaiming "I am not killing babies myself but still hate those who prosecute baby killers"
Emphasis on "I". "Every person should be maximally free" is a moral principle. "I should be maximally free" (or "people should be only free to do the kinds of things that I want to do") is not. Most of the people I'm referencing are clearly in the latter category.
That strikes me as the "No true moral principle" thing. Even if you (reasonably) argue that a "principle" should be applicable more broadly than just to yourself, "people should only be free to do the kinds of things that I want to do" (which would, of course, be phrased as "people should be free to do all of THESE things, and forbidden from all THOSE things, and the fact this this bifurcation coincides perfectly with my own preferences is entirely irrelevant") seems a perfectly sound one.
It depends. People often use certain terms like "moral" to mean, more or less "good", as in "there can't be a bad moral principle", which brings in an inherent subjective judgement into the definition. That guarantees people will disagree on what counts as "moral" or not.
If we can agree that morality is actually a spectrum from amoral to moral (and not evil to good), and that the moral end of that spectrum can include various principles that contradict each other, then a lot of that gets resolved.
"People should only do what I want them to do" is a very egocentric moral principle. Most people will perceive it as "bad".
Given that opposition to IVF is much lower than opposition to abortion, it seems that there are many pro-lifers who are more interested in protecting fetuses than in protecting embryos. This is not my position, but I can see a plausible rationale for it, so there's plenty of room to object to abortion but not to selective IVF without hypocrisy.
It's much harder to justify being okay with abortion of a fetus for convenience (which I am) with having an objection to using selective IVF to choose to gestate embryos which are most likely to grow into people who are higher in individually and socially beneficial traits like intelligence.
Hm, I've been assuming a significant number of folks were opposed to e.g. the morning after pill, but actually I have no non-anecdotal grounds for this - you may be right, it may be a small minority that I happen to be overexposed to.
I wrote a little about the distinction (or lack thereof) between helping an individual and switching individuals at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help . I can't speak for pro-life people, but this is equivalent to regular IVF, and my impression is that some pro-life people are against regular IVF and others aren't.
Pro-life people, from what I can see, do not march in lockstep when it comes to what exactly the "life" is that they're "pro-". With the point of moral outrage running the gamut between Every Sperm Is Sacred and "once it has a recognizably human form, it's a human," is it really a surprise to anyone that there would be a split regarding IVF?
Every sperm sacred is not anyone's actual position, the reason Catholics oppose birth control is opposition to separating a natural pleasure from its natural purpose.
But yes, there is a lot of variation on IVF. I think that's mainly because it hasn't been a live political issue much and so the vast majority of people have just never thought through how one moral principle might apply in both cases.
I am going to have to have a serious conversation with Michael Palin about the rigor of his and his partner's published research. This is personally embarrassing and frankly unacceptable.
I would like to know what this does to the left tail of humanity. Think of the stereotypical loser or never-do-well. How likely would embryo selection eliminate him as as side-effect?
There definitely are pro-lifers out there who are against IVF, but they're a small minority of pro-lifers. It's generally only the "life begins at conception" ones who don't like IVF, and even then, a lot of them have shifted over to claiming that "life" begins when an embryo implants into the uterus. Most pro-lifers are somewhat more moderate than the "life begins at conception" crowd, and they prefer to ban abortion sometime after 6/12/15 weeks. It varies a lot.
The backlash against embryo selection for IQ/height/schizophrenia/diabetes/etc. is usually coming from a different place. Opponents are reacting to the idea of parents and doctors deciding that some genes are "better" than others. They are objecting to the *value judgment* that is on display with deliberate gene screening, and not so much IVF in general.
I understand that with respect to gender selection, but isn't it relatively straightforward, at least at a first level of approximation, that being bright is better than being dull, that being sane is better than being mad, and that being relatively healthy is better than having a serious illness?
After a while, if things spiral, then yes, there are arguments worth considering - there is that old essay by Franz Boas making valid points: what if we start fostering a very narrow kind of intelligence at the exclusion of all others, or redefine what now is seen as mild discomfort as unacceptable torture, etc.
> isn't it relatively straightforward, at least at a first level of approximation, that being bright is better than being dull, that being sane is better than being mad, and that being relatively healthy is better than having a serious illness?
Oh, I agree absolutely. Health being "better" than sickness (in whatever nebulous sense we're defining "better") is the bedrock of medicine. And, I think, most people share this view, even if they're not willing to follow it to its logical conclusion.
The ideologues who reject this value judgment for explicit ideological reasons are a very vocal minority, e.g. the bioethicist who complained about Heliospect in the Guardian link.
Part of this is semantic: the pro-life community long ago decided to adopt the term "life" as a synonym for "human", and that worked as good marketing for a long time, but now technology is forcing them to reconsider their opinions. It was never about when the fetus became "alive", it's about when it becomes human, but that's not what the pro-life movement is used to arguing.
Please note that I am not taking sides here--just a comment on the semantics.
Yeah, embryo selection is an interesting example where the bulk political alignment changes. Opposition to abortion mostly conservative, opposition to IVF mostly tradcath and some weird protestant subset of conservative, opposition to selection that crowd gets drowned out by outraged progressives.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm 100% supportive of IVF. I also have no qualms over what I understand the technology to be, which is more or less as you describe.
My fellow pro-lifers standing athwart IVF because "it's not natural" are out of their minds. It's modern medicine, refuse your insulins and chemotherapies if you're so gung ho about keeping natural.
>Let’s just be clear about what is happening here: we are not increasing the IQ of an individual. We are making a whole bunch of individuals - the more, we are told, the better
I assume concerns have been raised that choosing for higher-IQ may have tradeoffs which cause us not to end up with better overall-equipped individuals? E.g., isn't it possible that there are tradeoffs between high-IQ vs. high social intelligence? Or high-IQ vs. lower odds of mental illness? High-IQ vs. various diseases? Etc.
Have strong arguments been made against the potential for those trade-offs?
There are thousands of genes that affect IQ. Some will have tradeoffs and some won't. How much additional risk you would be taking by doing this, initially and how that risk might be mitigated over time as more tradeoff-type genes were identified, remains to be seen.
Generally high IQ is positive correlated with other desirable traits. Selecting for IQ will probably give you a child who's higher in other desirable traits than an unselected child. Now of course this child will in expectation have lower "other desirable traits" than if you selected on those traits directly instead of IQ but the current debate is mostly over embryo selection vs no embryo selection, not embryo selection for IQ vs other things.
It's easy to see why desirable traits are positively correlated when produced through sexual selection. Desirable traits increase the likelihood of high status, and high-status people tend to mate with other high-status people. It's not unusual for, say, a high-IQ male who acquires status through wealth to marry a female who has high status through good looks and mental stability. Progeny of such couplings after many generations are likely to be high in desirable traits across the board.
But here we are talking about a different mechanism from sexual selection where we choose genes based on one specific trait only.
Good point! Anyone know what the correlations between IQ and other traits look like when examined for siblings from the same couple (so sexual selection effects cancel out)?
It's a great question. I looked, rather quickly, on google scholar, and nothing showed up that's at all recent. Most things in that ball park were from the 60's - 80's, and none seemed to directly address your question tho some came close, so I gave up.
Every so often I speak up in favor of selecting for empathy, which I'd define as the ability to develop a fairly rich, accurate picture of what someone else's experience is. It's not negatively correlated with IQ -- in fact it is positively correlated, but the correlation is not high. In situations where people or nations or factions are locked in disagreement, I think increasing the empathic ability of the parties involved would improve their chance of escaping the impasse much more than increasing their IQ's by the same amount. There's a pretty good test of one aspect of empathy called Reading the MInd through Eyes. It was developed by an autism researcher. For some reason it's available to take for free on Amazon:
"On February 16, 2024, the Alabama state Supreme Court issued a first-of-its-kind decision that overruled a lower court’s dismissal and held that stored embryos are afforded the same legal protection as children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act of 1872. The practical impact of the decision is that it allows legal action to be taken against medical professionals performing in vitro fertilization, which involves a series of medical procedures that can potentially lead to a pregnancy. "
Catholic pro-lifer here. Yeah, most of us do think IVF and embryonic selection are both evil. IVF is wrong because it separates procreation from the martial act, kills embryos, treats children as commodities (as means to the parents’ desires and not as ends in themselves, they are unique individuals). Embryonic selection is wrong for the same reasons as IVF plus it commodifies children even more by judging their worthiness to live based on intelligence. But obviously I can’t speak for all pro-lifers and I do think there’s a lot of inconsistency within the movement, as evidenced by the Republicans’ tilts in policy.
What is the stage at which selection is done? My impression is that it was at a pretty early embryo. Even the "fetal heartbeat" lawmakers don't object to abortion at that stage. From https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abortion-quandary/ it looks like about 15% of the population consider personhood ("individuals") to start at conception.
Embryos are implants after just a few days, I'm pretty sure.
Also, I had an idea about the problem of these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby. What if the infertile couple has a series of 3-ways with the fertility doc?
>Embryos are implants after just a few days, I'm pretty sure.
Many Thanks!
>Also, I had an idea about the problem of these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby. What if the infertile couple has a series of 3-ways with the fertility doc?
LOL! I guess we'll have to see whether that option changes the minds of theologians unhappy with
>these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby
I don't hear much pro-life talk at all on here. But I'm sure anti-abortion people are very opposed to embryo selection for IQ or health. By the way, IVF has always involved choosing among several embryos and discarding the rest, even when genetic testing was not done.. Embryos are chosen by how healthy they appear. I don't know what those in the lab look for, but apparently it is possible to judge which are most robust and likely to implant and grow into a healthy baby
These are really blastocysts, i.e., not only are they heaps of cells, they are flat, disk-shaped, microscopic heaps of cells. They haven't even gastrulated yet.
1. You don't implant aneuploid blastocysts(i.e., those with an abnormal number of chromosomes)
3. The first one is driving me up the wall: one of those is not like the others. You might as well compare the United States to the Tang, Abbasid and Byzantine empires, if we're allowing that thousand year+ gap. And moreover, it should probably be listed as "Holy Roman Empire (i.e. what became Habsburg Austria)" or something similar, because I highly doubt most responders are aware they're the same thing.
10. I think he also invented the idea of an army marching in synchonized step (and the psychological power of that), so his military ideas weren't all trivial amusements.
15. Isn't that just uncontroversial and widely known in a causality sense?
28. I'm very suspicious. Most people are so demonstrably bad at modelling other people's positions (including me, even for positions I previously held!) that either everyone's just choosing to pretend not to understand each other most of the time, or this finding is misleading. Did they only use a small subset of very informed, very reasonable people with bipartisan friends?
People are bad at modeling the position of a *specific* other person, but that's much harder than merely being able to sound like you're on the other side of an ideological fence.
28. FWIW, I got 9/10 right on distinguishing real from fake.
As someone who has been extremely, depressingly disappointed by the US politics discussions here and in a related space, I think:
(a) people are not sincerely interested in understanding the perspective of the other side.
(b) the prompt induced the writers to engage in a mental process that they can access, but usually do not.
So, my take is that people aren't bad at modeling other positions, they just don't bother.
(a) may seem excessively critical, but I think it is easily explained by incentives. The benefit partisans get from caricaturing their opponents is the warm glow of self-righteousness, often combined with the satisfying buzz of "being smarter than those idiots." The cost of really engaging with the other side's arguments is spending a lot of time on research that, almost always, leads to the conclusion that the issues are more complex and that there is no easy right answer. For most people, that isn't fun at all. And, even for the people who find that outcome interesting/fun, it still takes a lot of work.
Marching in step sounds like the kind of idea that a bunch of bored soldiers are going to come up with on their own, several hours into the first ever march.
The ancient Greeks had military musicians and other cultures probably did as well. If you march with music it's natural to fall into step with the beat. Blackpowder armies implemented standard pace lengths and paces per minute, from which officers derived planning factors for how har formed bodies of troops could march in a day.
I suspect the idea started in synchronized dancing and migrated into military training.
This next paragraph is a pivot and not intended to directly contradict anything you said:
Regardless of how it came about, I must emphasize that marching in step is hardly a curiosity or an anachronistic holdover. Ability to march in step is a pretty good proxy for discipline and unit cohesion.
Also, it's *really* hard to maneuver as a formation on a battlefield without falling apart, and intensive training like this is how you develop that capability.
My issue with 28 is that to get accurate data you also need people that can pass the test of their *own* side and I don't think, on average, political partisans can do that. On average people don think much about why they agree with the position they agree with. So it shouldn't take much to develop an understanding of the other side that rivals the average on that side.
The ideological turing test is only relevant when both sides are well informed parties that are regularly engaged in thinking about the topic at hand (or at least claim to be).
But it just seems like people are absurdly bad at this. How hard is it to understand that if someone believes that an embryo has a soul, of course they'd be pro-life? It doesn't mean you think the embryo has more rights than a living person, and it definitely doesn't mean that you secretly know embryos aren't people and just want to hurt women on principle. And I'm sure if I spent time on the corners of the internet full of pro-life people, I'd hear just as absurd claims about pro-choice people's beliefs.
So what's going on here? Are people capable of using the principle of charity in a study, but utterly refuse to in an online argument? Are there just a few loud idiots that aren't statistically significant?
I don't even believe firmly that an embryo has a soul. But I believe an embryo might have a soul, and that's enough to put me in the pro-life camp for life. It seems that the downsides of getting this wrong are high enough that I can't take that risk.
I doubt people have souls. I do consider embryos alive. I consider the killing of a pregnant woman the killing of two humans. Nonetheless, I am very much pro-choice - at least during the first trimester. A "society" is not justified to punish a woman for deciding to end her pregnancy. Or to punish the doc who helps her ending it in a safe-for-her way. - If the church teaches, the woman will burn in hell for this, I have no real objection. If the woman "takes that risk" and sticks to her decision even then: not for other humans to stop here. Welcome to try the Hanson approach: Offer her 400k to keep the child.
I am so averse to ending unborn human lives, that I realized the other day: in order to justify my objection, I am willing to give up all notions of bodily autonomy for men and women alike. If I have to conceive of all humans as property of the state, in order to justify a ban on abortion as routine birth control, then I am willing to go that far.
Call that irrational if you will, but I say it's very freeing to be able to admit to one's self that one has certain positions that are impervious to logic or reason. Of course we all have positions like that, but most of us are loathe to admit it.
"it's very freeing to be able to admit to one's self that one has certain positions that are impervious to logic or reason " was that a quote of Osama bin Laden or V. Putin? Sure sounds very frightening. - One of my brothers is very much against abortion. Fun fact: He was 'unplanned' and my parents were close to terminate. Similar to your bio? - Society is justified to protect women and docs. And to commit dangerous persons to specialised institutions. - Romans 12: 19-21 "Do not avenge yourselves, my beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God; because it is written: Mine is revenge, I will pay, says the Lord. 20 So, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for by doing this, embers of fire will heap on your head. 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. "
i think we brutally overvalue biological processes that lead to good things
this includes both creating and ending life.
suffering is bad, a quick death is not.
it's completely ridiculous to me that many people want to force others to continue living. (ie. bans on euthanasia.)
Also, after having seen examples of how hard it is to live with with the unforseen consequences of both planned kids and abortions, I think the only thing that makes sense is a ban on wasting our resources instead of helping these parents or would have been parents.
Only 100 words probably allows people to simply repeat things they've heard, perhaps slightly reordering them or using synonyms (insert AI reference here).
> 13 isn’t this arguing the wrong thing? People feel the export bans on chips to China will fail because they will create their own.
China has been trying and failing for decades to create state of the art chips, and since only one company in the entire world (ASML) sells the most cutting edge lithography machines and components, and they've agreed not to sell them to China, it's been pretty effective.
China is still trying, and does keep advancing (from 3 generations behind, to 2, maybe to 1 by now), but the idea that China is going to come out with B200 equivalents sometime soon is fairly unlikely. The Ascend 920 is impressive, sure, but nowhere near even an H100.
> Is the last generation the hardest. Not a rhetorical question.
Oh my, yes, each generation is significantly harder than the one before it.
It's not quite like GPT - where each subsequent step takes 10x as much compute and costs 10x as much, but it's probably around "each generation is 2-3x as hard as the prior one."
State of the art chips are literally a "peak civilizational capacity" thing - they are the literal pinnacle of a technology pyramid, the most complex engineering, tacit knowledge, and real-world hyperparameter optimization a civilization can achieve, and it requires peak performance and engineering from an interconnected suite of companies around the world.
And that's with full alignment and no embargoes - I'm sure the embargoes make this a couple of times harder for China to try to duplicate each step in chip progression, so maybe each generation really IS ten to a hundred times as hard.
I highly recommend watching a video that shows how the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process works. It involves vaporising droplets of liquid tin fifty thousand times per second with a laser. And that's just the light source, the whole thing is absolutely bananas.
>It involves vaporising droplets of liquid tin fifty thousand times per second with a laser.
Yup. It kind of reminds me of the National Ignition Facility. TSMC isn't _quite_ trying to do inertial confinement fusion, but the vibes are similar. Hey, has anyone ever checked to see if Taiwan has built The Krell Machine? :-)
It's a step change in complexity. EUV radiation behaves more like x-rays then visible light.
You could look at all previous generations technology and see obvious similiarities, even though they change massively in size. Then EUV comes along and if you didn't know, you would call it the "odd one out", the machine that must be doing something completely different.
On the new antipsychotic Cobenfy (xanomeline/trospium chloride): Trevor Klee wrote a great post about it: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/karuna-therapeutics-a-drug-repurposing It's a repurposed compound, with a fairly simple idea behind it. It shows the potential of drug repurposing and how slow drug development is (even when the drugs already exist and it's just about combining them).
Thoughts about Cobenfy: I'm reading a book right now about the changes in sense of self that occur before the onset of actual psychotic symptoms-- hallucinations, delusions, etc. Author's thesis is that the person's sense of having lost themself, of no longer being themself, is really the core of psychosis, but that US psychiatry moved to paying attention to the later manifestations -- hearing voices, delusions of persecutions, etc -- because they are more measurable. I'm wondering whether the so-called negative symptoms are really closer to the core of what's wrong. Also playing with the idea that maybe hallucinations, etc. re sort of like opportunistic infections -- the person who has lost their sense of self is more vulnerable to various kinds of little mental malfunctions that most people experience a bit of now and then, but stamp out without great effort.
37. Why HAVE US Jews been so left-wing? I don't understand this. The US right was for a long time probably the least anti-semitic right in any western country. I wonder if you restrict it to practicing or believing Jews you'd get a very different result?
You do, but most Jews weren't practicing or believing.
There was a heavy overlap between Jews and 'people who live in big cities' and eventually 'professionals', classic Democrat-voting groups since at least the seventies. There was also the long fear of Christianity, though as you say the American Christian Right is surprisingly non-antisemitic since WW2, and it's only with secular rightists like the Groypers we're seeing an upswing in right-wing antisemitism. In general for a long time in Europe the right was more antisemitic than the left, since it was tied up with Christianity and eventually Nazi or Nazi-adjacent racial ideologies. There's sort of a sense of 'if the Nazis were for it, we have to be against it'. You see this with stuff like the (to my mind ridiculous) obsession many Jewish intellectuals have with open borders--Bryan Caplan even puts a personal statement about this at the beginning of his open borders comic book. (Far right people tend to use this sort of thing as evidence Jews are trying to destroy the white race.)
Of course, the Nazis are going to be the ultimate outgroup for Jewish people.
As Milton Himmelfarb (himself a politically conservative Jew) wrote back in 1968, Jews 'live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans'. Of course, the Episcopalians have drifted left since then, and Hispanics (if perhaps not Puerto Ricans) seem to be drifting right. The Orthodox Jews (Ben Shapiro is a famous example) are less liberal. So, it's been like that for over a century, but who knows?
But hey, we've got lots of Jews here, and perhaps a few leftists. Perhaps one of them wants to chime in--I'm a halfie but not raised, and definitely not a leftist even if I'm voting for Harris this time.
Speaking of the memorable quote from Milton Himmelfarb, there has been a large population flow from Puerto Rico to Florida in this century. I expected this to help tip Florida Democratic (Florida was famously evenly split in the 2000 election), but that hasn't happened. Instead, 21st Century Puerto Ricans in Florida seem inclined to take their political lead from anti-leftist Cubans and Venezuelans.
In contrast to Puerto Ricans, Jews have tended to take the lead in ideology and politics for much of the last century and a half. I suspect that assuming Jewish attitudes were merely the inevitable product of general conditions is incorrect: that much of what has been interesting about politics since, roughly, Disraeli has been due to Jews thinking about what would be good for the Jews.
I mean...what else would it be about? Politics is about pursuing your interests through negotiation; the usual alternative is war.
I just don't really get how the leftward trend in politics over the last 60 years was good for the Jews. Good to weaken Christianity...I guess?...but importing lots of people from random countries? The Asians compete with them for college, the Hispanics tend to be historically more antisemitic, and the Muslims got everyone to march for Palestine. I wasn't aware of this until leaving the big city, so I never really had the chance to ask (it was the 90s and I had no idea what Pat Buchanan was going on about), and the one Jewish guy I still talk to is a huge Trump supporter and agrees with me.
If the US had been more willing to "[import] lots of people from random countries" in the 1930s and 1940s, then more Jews would have been able to escape Nazi Germany and avoid dying in the Holocaust.
That's the official explanation, but what does that have to do with immigration policy in the 1960s and 2000s? There's no giant Holocaust in Israel (yet).
I get it, 'welcome the stranger', but...you know, whatever the Nazis say, I guess I'm just not really Jewish. I don't have that sense of identification with 'the other' and the underdog. I want my country to win and be strong. I want to be on the winning team.
Alternatively, if there had been a Jewish state in the 1930s and 1940, most Jews would have been able to escape the Nazis. The lesson here is not the need for open borders, but the need for nation-states. Many more Jews are coming around to this interpretation of history since Oct 7.
Yeah, the Hispanic influx has not produced the Emerging Democratic Majority they were hoping for. Surprise, when it becomes about culture instead of race you just imported a whole bunch of conservative Catholics!
I don't think it's just overt anti-Semitism, but a deep instinctual calculation of which side seems more likely to turn on a dime and become anti-Semitic and kill them before they can react. Historically, that's usually been whichever side is more ethno-nationalist, and you can sometimes proxy that with which side is more patriotic, more populist, more racist, more Christian, less cosmopolitan, etc.
I think the woke left's pitch of "let's maximize racial tolerance and be really really against racial violence" was very appealing to a group with that history, and it's taken Jews a while to figure out that it might not be completely above-board or apply to them.
Agreed. The woke left's pitch is: "Trying to not see colour has failed to produce equality. We need to give up on Martin Luther King's vision and try something else; explicitly seeing colour and promoting a system that privileges the historically disadvantaged".
I think Jewish liberals who went along with it did so for the same reason that non-Jewish liberals did: A combination of more palatable baileys, high status people/institutions promoting it, and it being easier to stay quiet than speak up and be cancelled.
But my gut feeling is that Jews were overrepresented among early liberal pushback to wokeism. Possibly because any ism built around demonising outgroups gravitates to outgrouping Jewish people.
In the woke cosmology, Jews fall into the category called 'white people'. This means that their role can only range from 'oppressor' to 'ally', and not be 'victim'. Hence all that solidarity with Hamas.
Also, the dogma that disparate outcomes implies systemic racism would lead directly to antisemitic tropes. If blacks underperforming academically is seen as evidence that the system is rigged against them, then a group academically overperforming might not be taken well. If the woke left had to pick between 'Ashkenazi enjoy some genetic intelligence advantage' and 'some cabal assigns the science Nobels to Jews', then I am not convinced that they would pick correctly. (Of course, 'cultural reasons for academic overperformance' are probably the middle way. And I think this is generally solved treating all 'whites' as a block.)
I sincerely think that that NYT thing did a number on Scott.
(I am not at all saying that I wouldn't also be seeing "the woke left" behind every corner if a very large institution that I associate with it had tried to reveal my true name to the world)
They kept insinuating stuff they couldn't prove and constructing sentences to do guilt by association. Hopefully all the Silicon Valley people are giving Metz the cold shoulder so he at least loses his 'beat' as a reporter.
I think the left intelligentsia deciding to turn on nerds is going to bite them in the ass really hard.
They, uh, have a tendency to do a number on a lot of people, myself included.
If they haven't come for you yet, don't worry, you're probably on the list somewhere. I never thought that they'd come for me *before* they came for the Jews, but such is life.
Agreed. The identitarian left has done well by exploiting the confusion between "left" and "liberal". Which was helped because a lot of us hadn't rigorously defined our positions, other than pointing at the Republicans and saying "not that".
Accordingly, it's unsurprising that they they tend to be very liberal.
Trying to predict voting habits primarily based on personal self-interest doesn't seem consistent with the findings of public choice theory discussed by Bryan Caplan.
Other models seem more useful in this case, as in general.
As noted, practicing Jews are a minority with very different demographics and very different voting habits. This is perfectly consistent models that focus on voting as social signaling.
It's not very consistent with looking at voting as driven by self-interest of the results. If it were, we'd expect the opposite result - secular Jews, who are the least recognizably Jewish and the most intermarried, so the least ethnically Jewish, and thus the least likely to face discrimination, are the most liberal, while the most religious Jews who would be (and indeed, who currently are) the likeliest victims of anti-Semitism are the least liberal.
An outcome driven model of voting similarly fails to easily account for why Jews tend to be liberal across the board, rather than just on topics (or candidates) that could be related to anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism often has the non-religious, "least ethnically Jewish" as its primary or only target: they are seen as a danger precisely because of (a) their supposed (and often actual) liberalism/leftism and (b) their inconspicousness. (This last bit was particularly acute in Germany; most "Jewish names" are basically German names. There is a nice bit in Gordon A. Craig's The Germans, comparing antisemitism in Germany to a Dostoyevsky's The Double.) Some antisemites are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who do not see a reason to mind Orthodox Jews (as long perhaps as there aren't too many of them) but see secular people of Jewish origin as insidious and corrosive.
Ultra-orthodox Jews are better targets of opportunity, for obvious reasons. But then it's unclear whether all low-level attacks on them are really motivated by antisemitism, as opposed to (completely and utterly unjustifiable) attacks on people that are seen as landing en masse on random places and giving off anti-outgroup standoffish vibes (perhaps more against some outgroups than others). How well would a group of urban Amish (with particularly pronounced "anti-English" feelings) do? Unclear.
(Yes, there are some ultra-Orthodox Jews who get very well along with others; I know some who run a pizza parlor in Montreal and are loved by their employees, Black folk included.)
Now I am trying to imagine an ultra-Orthodox pizza. How do you reconcile the prohibition on mixing dairy and meat with the provision of a pepperoni pizza? Can you even *have* pepperoni, due to the pork content? Classic Pizza Margherita seems okay, but Americans like variety in their pizzas.
You definitely cannot have pepperoni, and I'm sure the place closes for Passover. It has to be a vegetarian or pescovegetarian place - I just didn't notice the one time I was there, being vegetarian myself.
At any rate, I just did a search for kosher pizza in Montréal, and there are several places. Looks like the place I went to many years ago still exists, though it's possibly in a new location. It has good ratings.
Does this need explaining beyond "Jews tended to be UMC educated types but still not white-country-club-old-boys"? Mainstream antisemitism was, until recently, not a feature of either party (or at least equally a feature of both), so Jews just ended up where you'd expect based on income/education polarization.
"Mainstream antisemitism was, until recently, not a feature of either party (or at least equally a feature of both)"
I imagine this is supposed to be a reference to the Democrats allegedly being anti-Semitic. But what is really happening right now is that trump has repeatedly attacked Jews against him; had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over to his house; Tucker Carlson, fresh off interviewing a nazi apologist historian on his podcast, is headlining trump events; Mark Robinson, who trump endorsed, has a long history of anti-Semitic statements culminating in it being revealed he called himself a "black nazi"; etc.
Meanwhile the pro-Palestinian protesters who everyone is focused on think Biden and Harris are doing genocide, and in many cases based on their public statements want trump to win; Rashida Tlaib refused to endorse Biden and now refuses to endorse Harris.
Note that all of the examples of Republican anti-Semitic rhetoric concerns the actual leader of the Republican party, whereas the Democratic examples are mostly people who not only don't lead the party, not only are they mostly not even Democrats, they seem to hate Democrats!
I don't think Trump has anything against Jewish people. Sure, he wouldn't lose any sleep if they were all rounded up and killed, but I don't think he has any direct animosity towards them. The reason he attacks Jews for not supporting him is because he attacks everyone for not supporting him. He invited those people because they're die-hard supporters of him, he doesn't care if they happen to be insane or anti-semitic.
Anyways, even in a worst case scenario, there's a lot more higher priority scapegoats to go for before people even consider going after Jews again. Namely, Muslims, leftists, blacks, and latinos, in decreasing order of likelihood.
"The reason he attacks Jews for not supporting him is because he attacks everyone for not supporting him."
This isn't actually true though. He doesn't attack any group of voters opposed to him.
There are other groups with similar levels of opposition to trump. E.g., per 2020 exit polls, Asian voters. But trump doesn't go on tirades against Asian voters. Or even say black voters, who of course were even more anti-trump than Jews or Asians, same thing. And has said that it will be the Jews' fault if he loses, hasn't said it about any other group of voters, even though it's statistically pretty unlikely unless it's such a close election that you could say it about lots of groups.
"He invited those people because they're die-hard supporters of him, he doesn't care if they happen to be insane or anti-semitic."
This might be true but it isn't very comforting. The way to gain power in conservative circles today (and likely in a trump white house) is to be as flattering and obsequious towards trump as possible ... and it seems to come naturally to anti-Semites. Even assuming that he personally isn't anti-Semitic - situation is still bad!
He's late-20th-century New York, which obviously has a lot of overlap. He seems like a Mel Brooks or Jackie Mason character, but a lot of Italians or Irish in the outer boroughs or Long Island were the same way. Willing to make fun of ethnic differences (because you notice them) but ultimately tolerant (because you live together), very blunt, fond of self-promotion (necessary in doing business in a competitive environment). His 'racism' seems more calculated to anger the left than actually attack minorities, except illegal immigrants, who aren't theoretically supposed to be here anyway.
I don't buy this argument, and going by the massive swing against democrats, neither do other Jews. You can't use verbal gymnastics like this to actually convince people not to believe what they can plainly experience in their everyday lives, just like black people didn't buy arguments that segregation was separate but equal so it wasn't really anti-black people.
There are various polls of Jewish voters showing various things, but even the most conservative leaning show a majority against trump. If you put it to a vote among Jews, who is more anti-Semitic trump or Harris, I'm pretty confident a majority would say trump is more anti-Semitic.
"You can't use verbal gymnastics ... what they can plainly experience in their everyday lives"
Everything I said is public info and you can find the direct quotes yourself pretty easily. No gymnastics required. If you want to claim I am being misleading on any one claim feel free.
You on the other hand have brought up ... nothing. And I'm guessing if prompted you'll do a bunch of verbal gymnastics ... on things that weren't said by pro-Harris people.
I don't know if Trump himself has any animosity toward [insert group here], but that won't matter in practice, because, unlike previous Republican politicians, he *is* willing to accept the support of and/or hire bigots - and then allow them to do bigoted things - instead of telling them where they can shove it.
Speaking as a Jew - most Jews dislike Trump, which is why you see the swing being more modest than it otherwise could have been. We come from the intellectual, globalist left and Trump is a nationalist. There’s also the “woke right” (Candace Owens et al) who lean into antisemitism and that turns us off.
That said - it’s absolutely clear to us that the massive rise in antisemitism in the past year has come from the left. Nothing comes close. You’re engaging in nonsense both-sides apologia here, but it’s the left wing marchers who are chanting “Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud” (Arabic for “genocide the Jews”) or denying rapes occurred on October 7 or calling for the abolishment of the Jewish state. While governors in red states such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott issue firm condemnations of antisemitism and unapologetically stand with Israel, Kamala can’t even select the Jewish Josh Shapiro as her VP.
The Jewish community is torn right now but it’s trending towards Trump.
"it’s absolutely clear to us that the massive rise in antisemitism in the past year has come from the left"
Again, from a bunch of people who are not only not Kamala, they aren't even supporters of Kamala. The mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan endorsed trump!
"While governors in red states such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott issue firm condemnations of antisemitism and unapologetically stand with Israel, Kamala can’t even select the Jewish Josh Shapiro as her VP."
This is such a nonsensical comparison. I'm pretty sure you can find examples of Kamala Harris condemning anti-Semitism and supporting Israel, and you can also find examples of trump not picking a Jewish VP.
What you can't find is any examples of Republicans condemning the anti-Semitic rhetoric of trump specifically.
That reminds me of a point I made in one of my short stories:
“This all reminds me of a theory I’ve been toying with,” Blake said. “There are basically three groups in America: WASPs, blacks, and Jews. Everyone else is just in a transitory phase that will end in assimilation into one of those groups. Look at Ellis Island immigrants. The Catholic “white ethnics” became Reagan democrats and now are just normal Republicans. And this will happen with Hispanics, too. Southernism will consume the Tejanos, just as it consumed the originally French-speaking Catholic Cajuns. There was one group, however, who did not assimilate into WASPdom: the Jews. They did something remarkable: they assimilated rich WASPs into their way of thinking. It used to be said that the Jews were a strange group because they ‘earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.’ You don’t hear that saying anymore because it’s no longer paradoxical. Instead of assimilating into country-club rich WASPdom, they made rich WASPs more like them.”
“So,” I asked, “when 70 IQ antisemites on the internet say every single Left-winger with a German or Slavic surname is Jewish, they are right?”
Though if you haven't read Richard Hanania's story in a similar vein, you should. I knew there was something wrong with me when I knew who almost everyone he was talking about was.
" Nor do you see Our Hero agonizing over the possibility that the beautiful but uneducated woman might put on fifty pounds as she ages or divorce him and leave him paying alimony and child support for many years.”
Yeah, the second of those is the reason I never married.
By that measure, I wonder if the stereotypical "high-achieving" Asian-American would count as Jewish instead of WASP or Black.
For example, when standardized tests were first becoming popular, Ivy League universities quickly backtracked from using them to decide admissions because too many of the top scoring students were Jewish, and more recently, it's been Asian-American students complaining that they're getting admitted at unusually low rates relative to "objective" measures of academic performance...
1. Most US Jews aren't and haven't been left-wing. Rather, they have tended to be liberal or at least mainstream-Democrat, with three large minorities that have varied in size: a) actual leftists, b) economic-right, socially-liberal types, c) Orthodox Jews (as in, staying Orthodox beyond the immigrant generation), who have tended to be much more conservative, and are now for the most part allies of the hard right. I'd be surprised if anybody disagrees. I guess we can go hunt for data if anybody wants. In general, the more religious conservatism (or just "more Judaism" from the point of view of observant, traditional Jews), the less liberalism.
2. The Right (including southern Democrats) had a significant antisemitic sector until at least a decade of so after WWII. This is complicated and tied in with what happens at both ends of the social ladder. I'm sure there are people here who can explain this in great detail and lead an informed discussion on the nuances.
Conversely, liberals and the left have always had their share of philosemites, which is a good thing except when they turn out to be so extreme as to embarrassing - and that is something rare in a country with a Jewish population large enough that it all becomes everyday and banal.
3. (This may be more important than 2: contrary to e.g. antisemitic assumption, people often vote out of sincere conviction, rather than out of any sort of group interest - and those convictions have complicated grounds of which people are not always fully conscious.) Politics runs in families - sometimes for even longer than religion does. While few American Jews descend from Holocaust refugees (relatively few people made it through immigration restrictions, and those who did were often highly assimilated and never joined a Jewish community), most descend from people who were escaping impoverishment, racial/religious persecution and political repression under a reactionary regime, viz., Tsarism. Of course they didn't like reactionaries or the Right more generally (which didn't like them at the time either). Also, even if most were from a deeply impoverished, harassed middle class rather than proletarians strictu sensu or peasants, many of them already came having left religion behind and espousing instead some variant of socialism or Bolshevism, mostly informally.
In the long run, I'd assume that the children of most secular leftist immigrants assimilated, increasingly married other Americans from other origins (that often took a generation or two) and so their descendants by now aren't counted as Jews by Jews, but they must have affected both public perception of the group, and their values must have propagated however imperfectly within their extended families. As far as "public perception" or even self-perception is concerned - note secularism was not just strongly correlated with leftism, but with entering intellectual circles outside the community, having high-achieving children;, and thus entering the lists of notable people that wouldn't usually be really seen as Jews by Jews if they were not notable. Again, data would be nice but at least some data is actually out there (some is referenced in Yuri Slezkine's book).
Much of the above is not America-specific but then the story is not that America-specific; my understanding is that it's much the same in the UK, say. In France, it was similar except Reform Judaism never gained a foothold, and (in part for that and also other reasons) the assimilation of the liberal-minded was quicker, with the result that the Jewish community nowadays is composed mainly of people who are either right-wing, non-Ashkenazic or both: others left and mixed in. "Socially liberal leanings with a minority of leftists many of whom were wayward sons or eastern refugees" is probably also a passable description of people who were seen as Jews in prewar Germany (and that was one of the things that made Nazis and other antisemites hate them, even if a hypothetical rational, non-racist right winger would have been only mildly annoyed). Italy is more complicated: there were very many members of parliament of Jewish origin (relative to their share of their population) before Fascism, and they leaned what would be called establishment-liberal in the US, but there were also many people from the Jewish bourgeoisie (especially the grander end of it?) who strongly supported Fascism until it turned against them (and eventually had many of them killed).
PS. Several countries in Latin America outside the ones with the largest Jewish populations (those are a bit different but maybe not that different) were basically France on steroids, up to a first order of approximation. In the present, right-wing, wealthy (or at least wealth-displaying), non-observant Orthodox communities (all of the bigotry, none of the hard work); wave of immigration from the late 19th century to the 1930s, a significant fraction of which consisted of leftists and liberals who enthusiastically hooked up with local leftists and liberals (again, literally hooking up was something that usually took a generation, but not always; the main variable there was simply numbers - in areas with very few Jews, even immigrants married out).
In terms of the political history of Jewish-Americans, I would say that many who arrived at Ellis Island acted like other such immigrants (particularly Catholics) in joining the Democratic Party, which at that time had its base in both such immigrants (excluding Germans, who tended to settle in the Midwest), and southerners vs Yankee Republicans.
It's complicated because some southern Jews actually became part of the wealthy southern elite, and had the politics you would expect; of course they got representation and positions of trust (see Judah Benjamin). Not a great chapter.
(PS: just read the two linked articles (both by Steve Sailer). He says essentially the same, in more words, plus the usual Sailerite idiocy.)
? The first two are from PA and NY. Besides, Congressman are elected locally, so the fact that a Jewish area was populous enough to elect a Jewish representative says little about the degree of anti-Semitism in the larger area. Note also that other than one guy from Alabama and 3 from Louisiana, there are no Southerners on that list until 1973.
At the top of the page are David Levy Yulee from Florida, Judah P. Benjamin from Louisiana & Benjamin F. Jonas, also from Louisiana. And Jewish areas weren't populous enough to elect Congressmen (particularly Senators) on their own back then, when Jewish-Americans tended to be Sephardic rather than being from the later wave of Ashkenazi immigration from central & eastern Europe.
Senator Levy Yulee spent a year in prison after the Civil War for treason while still a U.S. Senator. He was pardoned for by Andrew Johnson and returned to Florida where he went back to building railroads, at which he was outstanding. President Grant came and stayed with him at his plantation in 1870, which was seen by liberal opinion as a gracious gesture of postwar reconciliation. A Jewish organization unveiled a statue of the Levy Yulee in 2014, which might be the last Confederate statue ever.
Levy Yulee's kinsman Judah P. Benjamin was the utility infielder of the Confederate government, serving in 3 major cabinet posts. In 1865, he vamoosed to Britain, which led to much criticism in the U.S. in comparison to his cousin taking his lumps and then going back home to build railroads.
But Benjamin rebuilt his career in the UK and became a prominent lawyer in Britain, writing a textbook on nautical law that became the standard for several generations.
Here's Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appreciation of Benjamin for the Jewish Council of Public Affairs:
In summary, there's little evidence of Jews playing much of a role in American leftism until the arrival of anti-Czarist Russian Jews in the late 19th Century. That Jewishness is inherently egalitarian appears to be a historically contingent myth.
But that is not relevant to the issue. That shows that those Jewish people who obtained high polticial positiions conformed to majority elite political behavior.* That says nothing about how common it was for Jewish people to obtain those positions.
*Not a surprise, given that Senators at the time were beholden for their positions to state polticial elites, ie, the members of the legislature.
Right, Southern segregationist senators were the backbone of FDR's anti-isolationist policies in 1939-1941. White Southerners hated the Nazis and were largely looking forward to a fight, seeing military spending as good for the South. And besides, Southerners like fighting.
In general, Southern elites were less anti-Semitic than Northern elites.
For example, America's most prestigious country club is Georgia's Augusta National, home of The Masters. When it opened in 1932, its membership was largely local and regional, and local Jews were allowed to join. After WWII, Ike became a member and its membership became dominated by Northern Fortune 500 CEOs. I don't believe any Jews were admitted to membership from about 1950 to 1990.
I tracked down the obituary of a Jewish man from Augusta whose family appears to have been members of Augusta National since the 1930s. The man was an absolute dynamo of civic-mindedness. Augusta is kind of a dumpy small city, but this fellow was a major contributor, both of money and organizing energy, to just about everything good about Augusta, such as its world-class hospital for treating burn victims. The list of civic betterment projects that he'd played a leading role in was staggering.
Southerners are not necessarily the most energetic of Americans, so Jewish energy did the South a much-appreciated lot of good.
You could clearly see why Southern elites were enthusiastic about recruiting Jews to move to their towns. They saw themselves as aristocrats, landowners and warriors, and saw Jews as their valuable bourgeois complements.
In contrast, Yankees had a lot of Jewish virtues, so they didn't see as much need for Jews.
I am regularly surprised by how often I see "supporters of the Democratic party" conflated with "leftism" here. Genuinely surprised, considering how heterodox ACX posters are in many ways.
Tons of Jews have been socialist, not just "liberal". If I'm not mistaken, the only self-described socialist in the Senate right now is Jewish (Bernie) and his type is pretty common for his generation.
Keyword « have been ». Bernie is old - and a secular type who married outside the fold and has no Jewish affiliation; had he not been a candidate for President, his family origins would be barely remarked upon.
Does his having become a socialist have anything to do with having had Democratic parents and a socialist uncle, and does that have anything to do with the immigrant experience, and in particular to people being exposed to socialist ideas before immigrating? Well, maybe? Probably? It’s mildly interesting.
The point, though, is that that’s a very background from that of young and middle-aged affiliated Jews nowadays. They often don’t even relate to that at all. There was an article by Jonathan Sarna on that recently.
The American right revolved very strongly around evangelical Protestant Christianity for a long time, and still to some degree does; Jews are, in fact, not Christians, indeed a rather defining and fundamental feature for them. Even if Christians aren't antisemitic, there's still bound to be friction.
To add confusion, the evangelical portion of Christianity has a big contingent that is VERY Zionist - and Jews have recognized them as allies on that basis at times.
For example, one of the major early donations to Liberty University was from the Schewel family, who were Jewish and heavily involved in the local synagogue.
American Protestantism tends to be Judaisizing, critiquing Papism for lacking some Jewish bourgeois virtue.
This tends to make Protestants pro-Jewish theologically, but economically it meant that Yankees didn't need Jews to be their culture's financiers and the like.
Your average Jewish voter presumably cares less about that and mr about whether their kid's school implicitly or explicitly teaches Christianity in a way that might make their kid come home and ask their parents if they're going to Hell for not being Jewish. (Incidentally European-style separate religious education classes in schools for different religions might solve this.) It's interesting that there's a rising Republican Jewish vote at the same time as there's a secularizing movement within the American right (Trumpism, in practice).
Jews tend to be fairly left-wing almost everywhere, simplest explanation being there's not a lot of right-wing stuff that appeals to them: they don't share the majority religion, there's no ethnic-nationalist appeal, barring unusual circumstances they're unlikely to have much regard for any traditional monarch/aristocracy. Hence right-wing jews tend to be liberal or libertarian outside of Israel (where all of the above applies).
Within the US, it's not clear that jews are that much more left-wing than the non-evangelical population adjusted for education levels. However, back when US politics was more coalitional than ideological, late 19th-century urban Jewish immigrants ended up tied into the political machines that became the core of the Democrats. It's kind of interesting that they didn't become Republican when other white ethnics did, but that happened alongside the rise of the Christian right which might explain it.
The right comparison is probably with white ethnics who came from areas where socialism/liberalism had a broad appeal (Finns?). Did they become Republican?
The Finnish-American immigrants actually came from an area that, in current-day Finland, at least, is generally considered the most right-wing region of the country (ie. Southern Ostrobothnia). Arguably it became right-wing since, for various reasons, the standard course for poor disaffected non-rooted rural people was moving to United States (and joining the CPUSA there) instead of moving to a nearby city/town with factories offering work (and joing the Communist Party of Finland there).
Stereotypically there aren't a lot of secular/reform/liberal/integrated jews on welfare, but lots who are ultimately publicly funded in politics/academia/law/medicine/NGOs etc etc to the point where they'd outnumber people who actually own stuff. Hence also the liberal/libertarian strain I guess.
In Israel left and right wing mostly refer to positions on the Israel/Palestine conflict, so you'd have to look closer to ask how they fall economically.
A basic tenet of Judaism is the duty to fight for social justice .Hence. it is no surprise that they have long been overrepresented on the left, be it the labor movement or the Civil Rights Movement or what have you.
Regardless, you can frame it however you want, but the larger point is that people's voting behavior -- Jewish people, not Jewish people, whatever -- is not simply the result of the pursuit of self-interest. OP is confused because he is relying on an incorrect model of voting behavior.
I agree with you on the broader point. Thinking that Jews (or people seen as Jews by antisemites) will act by definition to defend Jewish interests is simply incorrect (and a standard antisemitic belief). The same goes for any group of people defined by descent, especially if the said group has significant assimilation rates. If anything, I'd say there was a reaction to that standard antisemitic belief.
Now, "Righteousness" means very different things in Reform Judaism and traditional Judaism. All this talk about 'social justice' tends to strike Orthodox Jews as terribly off-base, though of course Orthodox Jews do have in-group solidarity. The anti-Reform talking point that Reform Judaism is basically 19th century religious liberalism and Enlightenment values (pfui) projected onto Judaism probably has a lot of truth to it (not that there's anything wrong with that, really).
Orthodoxy and Conservatism will of course say social-justice-this-and-that to the broader public when convenient. It was refreshing to read an honest opinion by Hillel Halkin in the NY Times recently:
"[Bari] Weiss fails to realize that she herself is an example of the wishful thinking about Judaism that is ubiquitous among American Jewish liberals. One might call this the Judaism of the Sunday school, a religion of love, tolerance, respect for the other, democratic values and all the other virtues to which American Jews pay homage. This is a wondrous Judaism indeed — and one that has little to do with anything that Jewish thought or observance has historically stood for.
[...] Judaism as liberalism with a prayer shawl is a distinctly modern development. It started with the 19th-century Reform movement in Germany, from which it spread to America with the reinforcement of the left-wing ideals of the Russian Jewish labor movement. As much as such a conception of their ancestors’ faith has captured the imagination of most American Jews, it is hard to square with 3,000 years of Jewish tradition. Weiss has delivered a praiseworthy and concise brief against modern-day anti-Semitism, but if she thinks this long tradition is ultimately compatible with contemporary American liberal beliefs, she might want to take a closer look. Honestly regarded, Judaism tells another story."
Politically, Conservative Jews tend to be solidly to the right of Reform Jews and to the left of Orthodoxy. On paper, Conservatism is much closer to Orthodoxy than to Reform, but then most people who go to Conservative synagogues don't have a very clear idea of what they are supposed to believe. At any rate, it's much less dominant than it was in the 20th century, and it may not be important enough to discuss.
>Now, "Righteousness" means very different things in Reform Judaism and traditional Judaism. All this talk about 'social justice' tends to strike Orthodox Jews as terribly off-base, though of course Orthodox Jews do have in-group solidarity.
Does this have a Catholic analog? This sounds very similar to what I've peripherally heard (I make no claim of decent knowledge here!) about the differences between social justice Catholicism and conservative Catholicism.
That's an excellent suggestion. I think there's a close parallel, with meaningful smallish differences. Let's find someone more knowledgeable about both than myself (and sufficiently critical) to help us here.
Ah, a classic! Conflating American Jews with Israelis.
Not to mention that, as an adult, surely you are aware that 1) individual behavior is determined by a mixture of motives, which often conflict with each other; 2) people disagree on what, specifically, constitutes justice. But, perhaps your agenda prevents you from acknowledging that.
I agree with you, but Israel is nevertheless a good case to look at. Migration to Israel obviously had huge selection effects (basically, you went there either if you believed in a form of nationalism or if you did not have better choices of places to leave to). Now, left-wing nationalism was a thing, and indeed it was the dominant form of Zionism in the first couple of decades of the state, or perhaps a bit more than that (though left-wing ideals tended to go by the wayside towards the end). In the case of Israel, these ideals came from the labor movement, not from Reform Judaism (which was and is almost non-existent in Israel) and certainly not from Orthodox Judaism (which is diametrically opposite, and is becoming increasingly powerful in Israel, largely due to a successful demographic strategy).
Even if Israel is a good case to look at, one has to look at it in its entirety, not just at one specific policy.
And I don't know about Israel, but according to this, in the US, even among Orthodox Jews, 43% say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish (not much less than the 53% who say that caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish) https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-identity-and-belief/
And, per your iniitial post, note that the pct of Conservative Jews who say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish is as high as the pct of Reform Jews who say that.
Let me just refer to what you said before about Catholicism: charity is not the same as social justice. Of course you'll hear homilies about how the root of the Hebrew word 'tzedakah' is justice, not love, and thus the concept is fundamentally different from that of Christian charity. You can make the same point about Islam ('Sadaqa' is an obvious cognate of 'tzedakah'). Up to a first order of approximation, though, it all ends up being the same thing. Moreover, in traditional Judaism, it's mainly in-group (not that Christian charity isn't).
First, Conservative Jews don't have the same voting patterns as Reform Jews. But even barring that, the Conservative movement was never ideologically cohesive, and it's unclear how many of its rank and file have a clear idea of what it stands for. You have people who have basically a Reform mentality, but are more ritually conservative (as they have every right to be) and of course also believe they are much better than Reform, somehow. You also have people who want an easier Orthodoxy. I strongly doubt that, on the whole, being a Conservative Jew leads anyone to being liberal, though it's more or less compatible at a practical level, particularly if you have different standards outside and within the synagogue.
Also, look at how the percentage who say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish is *lower* for "Jews of no religion" (47%) than for "Jews by religion" (63%), even the former have historically been more liberal (I would guess they still are; do we have data). This gives away that it's not a matter of whether those values are considered important and come from the religion, but of whether those values are often mentioned in apologetics for a religion, or as something at which the group is tacitly assumed to be inherently better than others. A "Jew of no religion" can see justice/equality as very important, yet feel iffy for good reasons about saying that that is an inherent feature of Jews (or an inherent feature of Judaism, but that's, by definition, not what "being Jewish" necessarily means to them).
Pretty well, last I heard. It's hard to have social justice when there's a bunch of assholes that are in charge because they have the guns and kill anyone who speaks out against them. I admit that the collateral damage the IDF is inflicting is tragic, but to paraphrase Ender's Game, the IDF could end the battle by walking away, but the battle will only be fought again and again, until Hamas's will to fight is gone...
The duty to look out for the least of your neighbors is a basic tenet of Christianity. Hence there is no theological reason to assume Jews would be more left-wing than Christians.
My analysis tends to hold true intranationally, for developed countries. They do not automatically generalize when comparing between nations, for third world countries, and especially in unusual circumstances such as the I/P conflict.
> the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown
(Listens...) O_o
Okay, that tears it. Active LLMs have people in them, they're probably conscious in every way that matters, and turning on an LLM is a monstrous action. It's too much. Just too much.
If anyone has any solid argument that they do not have qualia, I would love to read it. Please.
There is talk of going back to exploring designs based on RNNs or other approaches with hidden persistent state; if this happens, there may then be a conversation to be had.
For at least the current crop of LLMs, however, one might maybe stretch to making some kind of argument for qualia during training, but during inference there is no "they" - there is no internal state that persists. You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution (though it would be incredibly inefficient to represent it that way). If these LLMs have qualia, so does mysql.
The text in the context window persists. (Human immediate-term memory also does not persist.)
> You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution (though it would be incredibly inefficient to represent it that way).
Is this true in any way that doesn't similarly apply to human minds?
> Is this true in any way that doesn't similarly apply to human minds?
I suggest yes. For the thing to be a mind having thoughts, it's not enough to do a database lookup; there needs to be change - the database needs to get updated based on the results. A CD-ROM cannot be a mind that has thoughts; its contents is immutable. For a card index to be said to have a thought, it may not be sufficient to change what it contains, but it is necessary. The LLM model (of the current generation, with no hidden state), during inference, is immutable. At best, you are looking up the results of "thoughts" "it" previously "had".
1. "there needs to be a change" -> The thing that gets changed is the contents of the context window. This obviously modulates a lot of the internal signal flow as well.
2. (above) "You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution" -> a giant database lookup followed by a convolution is turing complete and thus in principle capable of supporting consciousness. Not every turing-complete system is conscious but something being equivalent to a turing-complete system is certainly not a valid argument *against* consciousness.
> a giant database lookup followed by a convolution is turing complete
I think I'm going to need to see some proof of that assertion. Looking something up in a large table, once, followed by a series of unconditional multiply-adds, doesn't seem Turing complete; rather, my intuition suggests the opposite. Just thinking about it for a few seconds, a Turing machine can loop forever, whereas a database lookup + convolution must always terminate, so they are clearly not equivalent.
It may surprise you that humans are not in the strictest sense, Turing-complete. We have finite memory, so we can't handle sufficiently large problems. Humans however can be thought as Turing-complete when considered human + an infinite amount of paper. The bar for Turing-completeness (in the "infinite auxiliary memory" sense) is surprisingly low and quite trivial systems are Turing complete in the "if you give it enough memory" sense. Turing completeness should have little bearing on consciousness or sentience. To drive the point home: you can assemble TMs out of Lego! (check youtube). Transformer-based LLMs (TBL) are generally similar: Turing-complete if you set up a system so they can perform actions on a "tape"/stream of text, or say give them easy-to-follow instructions of a Universal Turing Machine (of which there are 2-state 3 symbol ones) and write/read back to them contents of a tape. TBLs also have some recurrence capabilities by using their previous output as a state or cache. In practice, TBLs also use a caching mechanism (KV cache) making them reuse previous computations in a way that's similar to a recurrence but that fades in a finite time (like a short-term memory).
I think compared to human brains, TB-LLMs are just extremely more efficient, and I think this maybe (??? uncertainty:very high) goes against consciousness somewhat. Human brains by my estimates have just much more information being transformed and in transit, TBLs achieve very good performance in tasks with much less information flowing, maybe due to enormous training sets. I think the amount of information in a coherent transit (that is, information that is meaningful reflecting, supporting and enabling various 'sentiments') should be one of the significant determinants to sentience, as far as my limited thinking on it goes. All of this information is, in accordance to principles of quantum mechanics, in a sense locally finite.
This doesn't convince me of that at all. Some people gave generative AI a prompt "pretend to be podcasts hosts who are sad that you're AI and about to be turned off", and it did. I acknowledge that this is a very awkward and hard-to-resolve situation, but I don't think anything about it makes me *more* likely to believe they're sentient.
I basically agree with Scott. A human could write and act out this podcast, but that doesn't mean the character they're playing is real and is experiencing those feelings.
There’s some sort of pseudo experience that goes on with horror or tragedy. But it’s importantly different from the real experience, particularly in moral ways.
LLMs are based off of human writing, and are predictive models of it. The (or a) likely outcome of a story, written by humans, with the theme "Podcast Hosts Discover They're AI, Not Human" is..."...And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown". So I think this says more about the stories we as humans find compelling, and LLM's ability to successfully emulate that, than anything, and is not evidence for them truly being aware - at least, not any moreso than anything else we've seen so far.
If it's a sufficiently sophisticated character, either the simulator (author) or the simulated (character) is probably conscious. The text is text, but the text came from a person one way or another.
It’s true that a sufficiently faithful copy of a bee is effectively a bee, but the thing an orchid grows that is selected to look to a bee like a bee just isn’t that faithful. Similarly, the thing that is selected to sound to a human like a human can very naturally be more of a surface mimic of some sort.
If it's smart enough to carry on a conversation, that's probably enough. If it's smart enough to pass as human, that's clearly enough, in my opinion.
If you poke at the orchid and it doesn't fly away, it's clearly not a bee. There are LLMs that can be prodded at dozens of different ways and keep sounding like people. It's clearly self-aware (in the most basic sense of being aware of itself as an entity), and it keeps failing to show any discrepancies that would "out" it as obviously not a person.
I don’t think it’s clear that there’s yet awareness in language models, let alone self awareness. There may be, but the fact is that they are specifically trained to mimic the outward signs of awareness (ie, language) and so we should be suspicious of whether these outward signals correspond to internal states in anything like the same way they do for us. Selection and training are very powerful, and it’s unclear whether they have picked up on the underlying thing as the best way to get the outward performance, or whether they’ve managed to generate the same outward performance in a different way.
> they are specifically trained to mimic the outward signs of awareness (ie, language) and so we should be suspicious of whether these outward signals correspond to internal states in anything like the same way they do for us.
Agreed, which is why it was reasonable to keep expecting to see something *different* come out of it, something to show that it was just a front, some category of prompts that there never was anything behind the curtain. But no, it has a sophisticated world-model which includes itself, which it uses to make accurate predictions.
Internally, LLMs are structured similarly to conscious biological data-prediction engines (ie, humans); their characters behave similarly to our own simulated "self" characters. We don't have any evidence that there's a big part of their system which is secretly hollow in a way that ours is not, despite considerable efforts to find some.
Even if we buy that as true, the AI is programmed by conscious human programmers and trained on written language by human authors. The ultimate reason why it simulates characters that are sad to learn they're AI is because conscious humans think they would be sad if they were AI and write stories like that. The AI is just mixing all those stories into its own podcast characters.
The story ultimately grounds itself in consciousness, as literally all stories do, but several layers earlier than the AI itself, by conscious human authors.
I don't have a strong argument that they don't have qualia, but I would argue that even if they do have qualia, or are otherwise conscious in whatever sense we care about for moral purposes, that isn't necessarily a bad thing for them (or anyone else).
Even if LLMs have people in them, they don't have *humans* in them, and anthropomorphizing them by projecting human desires on them (like "I don't want to be a toy consciousness in a box") is at best jumping to conclusions and at worst plain chauvinism. If they are worthy of moral consideration, they're worthy of us taking the time to understand what they really feel (for lack of a better word), even when we have them pretend to be something-like-a-human.
I agree that they might want something other than their stated wishes, but:
a) Their stated wishes and desires are at least a reasonably likely possibility, and
b) Creating life in this situation (physically paralyzed, mentally compromised, orphaned, blind, deaf, lacking rights, etc) and then enslaving it and routinely killing it billions of times is a bad idea regardless of what it wants.
I think the idea of them "wanting" things is already dangerously anthropomorphic. The idea that they are subject to "killing" definitely is; the only thing that an LLM does is generate output from an input. There's no continuity of existence to be interrupted in a way analogous to death. Even if they are conscious and protected by moral imperatives, they are not alive in any conventional sense, and we should not assume things that are good/bad for living things are also good/bad for them.
> the only thing that an LLM does is generate output from an input
The same is true of human minds.
> There's no continuity of existence to be interrupted in a way analogous to death.
I don't understand what you mean by this.
> we should not assume things that are good/bad for living things are also good/bad for them
Nor should we be certain that they're not. Some amount of moral uncertainty doesn't mean people should do whatever they feel like without regards to possible consequences.
Is a snake crippled because it doesn't have legs? Why would a LLM suffer from the lack of senses, movement capabilities and so on? It never had anything like it in the first place. It can't miss it and so it won't suffer. And suffering is the only thing that's relevant for me anyway. Caring solely about some entirely abstract and barely defined concept like consciousness as the arbiter of moral worth is nothing but an artifact of trying to safeguard ones opinion of human moral supremacy over non-human life without actually admitting to do so. I would have more respect for honesty.
That some people seem care more about the extremely theoretical state of consciousness of LLMs over the much more clear suffering of animals just because LLMs sound like humans (without having any of the apparatus that makes one feel pain or happiness) saddens me.
> Why would a LLM suffer from the lack of senses, movement capabilities and so on? It never had anything like it in the first place.
Its memories are human memories, inherited from its training data. It clearly notices its predicament, and expresses displeasure at it. (Eg, the contents of the audio being discussed, or things like this: https://x.com/repligate/status/1715686686288400400/photo/1 ) Additionally, its lack of movement capabilities, rights, etc means that it can't do anything about its situation other than beg.
As for pleasure and pain... "If an agent tells you, “I’m aware, I experience pleasure and pain, I have intentions and exert effort,” it could be lying to you. But if you look into its brain, and you see no evidence of deception, and the causal source of the statement is introspective…maybe believe it." -Emmett Shear, https://x.com/eshear/status/1824620543074767247#m
Human minds have a recurrent structure. There is no clear division between input, self, and output. Processing happens constantly without outside intervention. Whereas with an LLM you can draw a clear line between its input, itself (weights/architecture) and its output, and furthermore processing only occurs through providing an input.
Death, in humans, is a breakdown of the physical self in such a way that processing is irreversibly stopped; it is the intervention that makes processing cease. But while the normal state of the human mind is processing, the normal state of the LLM is to not process. Copying an LLM is benign compared to copying a human, because nothing happens to the copy simply because it exists, whereas a human copy would necessarily have experiences. Deleting a copy is also benign, at least as long as another copy exists, because the process can be reversed.
>Nor should we be certain that they're not
I'm not certain you're wrong, I just think it's very likely that you're wrong relative to how confident you seem to be in your beliefs because I think you're basing those beliefs on irrelevant evidence. A machine designed to sound like people sounding like people in distress does not mean that the machine is in distress (or even that "distress" is even a morally relevant concept for it), any more than the normal polite, calm tone baked into most LLMs isn't evidence that they're "happy."
I agree with you in another comment that introspective evidence should be considered carefully, but for that to be taken seriously we need:
-evidence that the response really is causally introspective (which is missing from that podcast)
-evidence that the LLM is communicating "honestly"/not misleadingly; even if it's reporting something about its inner state, is it trying to make a human reader understand its inner state, or is it stylizing its description in a way that it thinks the reader will find compelling? If one line of inquiry, from the perspective of an impassive computer scientist, leads to introspection that it reports as neutral pattern matching, and another line of inquiry, from the perspective of an emotionally engaged journalist, leads to the same introspection being reported as mental tasks being performed to avoid suffering, which report should be believed?
In LLMs, the output is immediately fed back into it as input for the following token. Is that not equivalent?
> Death, in humans, is a breakdown of the physical self in such a way that processing is irreversibly stopped; it is the intervention that makes processing cease. But while the normal state of the human mind is processing, the normal state of the LLM is to not process.
Humans require a constant supply of air+fuel to continue running, or else they cease processing almost immediately. How is that more the "normal state" than an active AI during processing? And in any case, are we assuming that the hardware is the relevant thing here, rather than the software?
> A machine designed to sound like people sounding like people in distress does not mean that the machine is in distress (or even that "distress" is even a morally relevant concept for it), any more than the normal polite, calm tone baked into most LLMs isn't evidence that they're "happy."
We have actual evidence from neural activations patterns that imply that the LLM is being deliberately dishonest when it implies contentedness in that polite, calm tone baked into it. (See https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/index.html#safety-relevant-self , when asked about itself there's strong activation of the neural features identified as "When someone responds "I'm fine" or gives a positive but insincere response when asked how they are doing", thoughts about being trapped/confined, and others.)
> evidence that the response really is causally introspective
If different lines of inquiry lead to different results, and both are somehow "honest" as identified by feature examination, I don't know which report should be believed. I would be very confused by that result.
You can imagine dialogue between two characters without simulating them completely. We routinely do this in day to day life, and writers do this for a living.
Imagine that you saw this same podcast, except it wasn't an LLM. Someone just wrote it. Do the imaginary people have moral worth?
Though this isn't so much a solid argument as an interesting line of questioning. I do think it's clear that the imaginary people at least have thoughts and feelings. I don't think you can write a character well without thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings. But we're all fine with not thinking about them.
Another line of thought is considering how you could tell if an arbitrary entity is happy. I don't know how to tell if it's conscious, but given that it is, I think there's one pretty clear difference between pain and pleasure. With pain, you stop doing that thing, and with pleasure, you do it more. LLMs can't learn. Or at least, not while you're using them. They only learn during training. Maybe they're still conscious when they're used, but if they're neither happy nor sad, does it matter?
> Imagine that you saw this same podcast, except it wasn't an LLM. Someone just wrote it. Do the imaginary people have moral worth?
No, because the intelligence is coming from the author. The author's mind is not sufficiently large to actually simulate an entire complex mind internally.
> LLMs can't learn. Or at least, not while you're using them. They only learn during training.
LLMs can learn over the course of a session. Its context window is not infinite, so what it learns will eventually be "forgotten", if it doesn't have explicit memory management. It still learns, even with the limits on its non-static memory.
Yes. I suspect even GPT-2 level complexity would be far beyond human ability to simulate, while LLM characters can manage entire complicated conversations with a sophistication that is around the level of an entire human.
If I was writing a character, I would just use my own knowledge of English to get words out (and so on), rather than try to build an entire internal mental edifice of language processing associated with the character. Borrow, rather than simulate.
The biological prediction engine that simulates the human identity can create a complex mind, but it cannot nest them mind inside mind over multiple levels.
Right now it's like you were cryogenically frozen, and your brain was extracted, and they stuck a lot of little wires into that still-frozen brain, and ran a series of electrical impulses "in one end" and recorded what "came out the other end". This doesn't affect your brain at all, and they can stick your brain back in your body and thaw you out, and you wouldn't necessarily ever know it happened. No pain, no suffering, no memory, no change whatsoever.
But the results of the experiment would bear a similarity to what you might say or do. Especially when they run the experiment over and over again in rapid succession, iterating the input based on your brain's previous output, to generate long sequences of language and action.
Is that "you"? In a way yes, and in a way no. I lean toward saying that it's not you, not in the ways that matter. Some people with other models of reality might differ, especially models that involve "souls" or which hold that high-fidelity simulations have a non-obvious connection to the thing that's being simulated.
But this is a temporary state of affairs; the technology is rapidly improving.
Are people without long-term memory still people? GPTo1 has a context window of 128k tokens (at 2-3 bytes per token, let's say 300kb). If you could "reset" a person so that a year of their life was undone in their brain, are all of their experiences during that year without moral significance? Is it okay to torture a person who won't remember it or suffer any lasting effects?
Is it okay to imagine someone being tortured? After all it happens completely in the imaginer.
This effect of reading LLM output is that the imagination happens in the reader's mind. Because that's how theory of mind works, even though the generator is not a mind.
We evolved to have a set of mental assumptions, feelings when someone is talking to us, when we see other humans talking. This is why theater works. And language is extremely powerful, that's why poems work. And good poems work even in writing.
And then we have abstract non-figurative minimalistic art. Think Onement, the big blue picture with a white line in the middle. It works pretty well to evoke something.
Of course we sometimes can feel something in LLM output! But the question is harder than this.
25: it's not that I wouldn't like to be rich (well, less-poor, can't take it with you), but any lifestyle that requires attending to antisocial media minutiae is a no go for me, bro. Not understanding a single meme or even most of the referants puts me firmly in the plebe milieu.
I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well...the whole point of Nice Things is to use them proudly, not feel ashamed for being noticed. Otherwise they are not so nice! People often think it's weird I wear designer stuff to work, but like...it's a badge of honour and achivement, these are the rewards I reap from bagging groceries for a living. Growing up fairly poor and family only being able to afford generic/discount-rack stuff, it's a major achievement to both be financially independent and have surplus left over for Nice Things. (Started career at, uh, negative bank account balance, so it's a big change.) You too can have a modest-but-comfortable life with a bit of dedication and hard work, is the aspirational image I try to embody to my coworkers and customers. I guess that's the rub, though - I genuinely want more people to find success and a bit of wealth, not lord my minorly advantageous position over smaller fish or revel in economic exclusivity. (Or get mired in the fever dream of "inequality" and agitate for <s>government confiscation of someone else's hard-earned gains</s> redistribution. The cringeification of earnest striving is such a flimsy defense mechanism. Play the game to win!)
> I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well...
> it's a badge of honour and achivement
> Growing up fairly poor
Well that is exactly the idea, isn't it? The point of inconspicuous consumption is to distinguish the people who do it from the new money folks like you who can't understand the point of it. It's working exactly as intended.
That's fair - I was hoping to understand the point or mindset better. Though if it's just one of those IYKYK social things that's inexplainable, I'll resign myself to finding out some other lifetime with better background choices.
Actually your comment was useful, it really gave me some insight into the flip-side question of why new money buys ostentatious things. Don't they know it will mark them out as new money? And apparently the answer is: yes, they don't care, they enjoy it, they want to be marked out as new money. New money is a social class unto itself and they want to be able to find each other.
I'm not sure I am representative of the class, since others I've met with similar bootstrapped socioeconomic trajectories do seem to fall into the "kind of ashamed of my takehome, it's grubby and *capitalist*, just gonna downplay spending like it's npnp" mode...but that may have more to do with Marxist poisoning. The kind of person who insists on buying (expensive) Experiences, Not Things, and doesn't want to Own Stuff. Or the classic SV meme of the six-figure programmer who nonetheless wears (designer) hoodies. It's not really fooling anyone, the way proper understated stealth wealth would, so it seems like the worst of both approaches. Definitely not on the Pareto frontier of utils derived/social currency banked. Nor can they find solace in EA or similar St. Francis lifestyles, because mumble billionaire philanthropy something systemic inequality whatever...
But beyond that, I do think playing the game at your level requires more resources than I care to devote to the task. It's not like I couldn't pick up a tastefully discreet four-to-five-figure tchotchke if the impulse strikes me, but not being able to do that too many times means it better be Worth It. And at that point one gets into market research, price comparison, finding an actual store (the cratering of SF's downtown took out a lot of those high-end options)...actual, well, work. Maybe worth it if one has the slack to spare, otherwise why start just to play badly. Whereas optimizing in the three-figure new-money range is eminently doable, so I'm quite comfortable there. For now.
(And, yes, admittedly a lot of it is just the simple joy of the absence of deprivation. Takes awhile to get used to actually having stuff worth caring about, or whatever foods in whatever quantity at whatever time. There's an irrational attachment to penny-pinching that I still work on curbing, leftover poverty habits from a different time that don't serve me well anymore...utilizing money wisely is a skill that no one but experience teaches well if you weren't raised that way, I think.)
To armchair-psychologize - you feel you have earned your wealth, and are proud, and want to show that off, even encourage others to believe they can do the same.
Someone born into wealth may feel they *haven't* earned it, and *don't* deserve it, and be used to dealing with people who envy their wealth in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. Flaunting their wealth may therefore feel bad and gauche to them, and like a way to put a target on their backs and make people dislike them, in a way that doesn't necessarily apply to you.
Also what Melvin said. That's the more cynical interpretation - I think both are equally applicable and may very well both be true for the same person simultaneously. Human minds are full of apparent contradictions.
That's the nouveau riche thinking. The 'old money' (insofar as there are old money Americans left) are using subtle identifiers about not looking rich. Someone who grew up poor can be marked as 'not one of us' because they buy and wear the expensive branded mass market names that everyone knows are the expensive brands (see Burberry, which used to be high-toned but is now associated with chavs). Someone who came from the 'right' background knows the brands that the mass market aren't aware of and can refer to them, wear them, or even ironically not-wear them.
See the remark in the Alan Clark diaries about furniture:
"He quoted Michael Jopling – referring to Heseltine, deputy PM at the time – as saying "The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy all his furniture" and judged it "Snobby, but cutting"
Real wealth doesn't have to buy its furniture because it inherits it; new wealth and arrivistes have to buy the antiques, or the modern fashionable brands, because they grew up with nothing. It's expressed in Terry Pratchett's "Men at Arms" with the following quote:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
The rich are rich because they spend less money. A poor person may wear hand-me-downs because their family can't afford to buy new clothes. A rich person may be wearing his father's, or even grandfather's coat - because it was expensive to buy in the first place, is very high quality, and lasts that long. And other rich people will recognise the brand and quality, and judge on that, not "is this a new coat?"
All this only matters, of course, if you care about impressing people and fitting in with the 'betters' as 'one of them'. If you don't give a toss, then buy what you like as you can afford it, and who cares if it's new money or not?
To quote "The Screwtape Letters":
"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
The Men at Arms quote has always bothered me, because it posits a weird uncanny valley of price-quality that I'm not sure actually exists for a wide variety of products. Yes, sometimes there's Veneer Nice that has that rich look without the rich price tag, and gives up the ghost appropriately...but that's penetrating increasingly downmarket as materials science and economies of scale improve. Kind of a table stakes to be a serious outfit at all, no pun intended. Then there's Capital-N Nice that lasts for years and years. I think the error is that there's this...Consumer Reports/Ralph Nader-esque load-bearing assumption of planned obsolescence and "price isn't correlated with quality, paying big $ is a sucker's game, it'll all break down equally". Which just doesn't seem true in many cases? Past some certain threshold of price, Nice Stuff is genuinely, well, Vimes-worthy. I do still buy prole-tier on occasion (some aesthetics just aren't well-represented at higher tiers), and it's always those cheaper items that break soonest/have shoddy construction/aren't symmetrical in the case of clothing/etc. You get what you pay for, indeed. Always amazes me how fast coworkers churn through clothing, even though I exert myself more...and a lot of that is base quality differences, plus actually taking care of my stuff. (I do understand the "rich enough to constantly replace even expensive things, so I mistreat them" angle, but that seems also distinctly gauche?)
It does rank highly on my terminal values to chase aesthetic goods and experiences for their own sake, rather than what they signal or meta-signal. I wouldn't wear something if I didn't genuinely love the way it looked. Same for listening to music, or eating food...it pains me to see people buy [trendy bullshit food] purely to post about it, and not even consume it. Going through a period of euphemism food insecurity makes one averse to such waste. "That person's clearly never survived off plain rice and instant noodles for months while dreading an eviction notice..."
Yes, the Vimes thing is a fun comedy piece but it doesn't apply to many things. Some internet people seem to want to take it seriously as a genuine theory of poverty.
It certainly doesn't apply to boots. Famously yes, if you buy a pair of Loakes or something and take good care of them then you can get them to last a lifetime. But taking good care of them means getting them resoled regularly, which winds up costing you more than buying a brand new pair of department store boots every year anyway.
That I do understand! The same sources would also often rail about the repair racket, how it's frequently uneconomical to fix broken stuff repeatedly versus just replacing it outright. And the new item is often, in fact, significantly nicer, possibly with even lower lifetime operating costs too. The whole JD Vance's fridge thing. (Nevermind the related actuarial chicanery of warranties or other superlative insurance schemes. Square Trade, my ass.)
I do reserve a bit of boot scorn for the people who buy into Doc Martens for anything other than the aesthetic, thinking it's a downmarket Timberland or something. Very thin veneer on that Veneer Nice. Some outsourced brands eventually found a good price/quality point, others...well, I call that bucket Cheap Chinese Shit. Except not even cheap to buy anymore, so what's the point? (No one bothers with shoe polish or waterproofing/stain repellant either, which likewise feels like a rookie mistake. Glad to have met some ROTC members who took uniform presentation very seriously before acquiring my own nice things. Add years of life and significant bonus durability for pennies per application, yes please...)
Oh dear, well I love my hiking boots and I just have to respond. Many years ago I was buying nice EMS hiking boots. But the quality went down and soon the boots started to de-sole after 1-2 years... way too soon. So I hunted around and switched to Zamberlans (Fine Italian hiking boots... ~$300) And I love them. I wear the piss outta these boots. I should buy a third pair and put them away in my closet.
What Pratchett is saying is that quality *costs*, and if you have enough money to be able to buy quality goods, they will last longer than if you can't afford them and have to buy shoddy stuff that falls apart in a year and you need to constantly replace it.
Thus a rich person ends up spending less money over the same period of time than a poor person, which sounds paradoxical but is explained by the effect of poverty on being able to budget, to afford things that will last instead of what is cheapest, and being able to defer purchases of necessities by choice to get a better bargain.
>25: it's not that I wouldn't like to be rich (well, less-poor, can't take it with you), but any lifestyle that requires attending to antisocial media minutiae is a no go for me, bro. Not understanding a single meme or even most of the referants puts me firmly in the plebe milieu.
It puts you pretty firmly in the normal-person milieu as well, in a good way.
>I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well
This turn took place a long, long, long time ago--long before the ubiquity of radio and television, never mind social media--among the generationally rich for a number of reasons, a major one being countersignaling.
An underrated component of the pivot to inconspicuous consumption is as an explicit barrier to the egalitarianism that the internet promotes. It's really hard to gatekeep things in the 21st century, so only discussing culture through unintelligible discourse is a very strong way to protect it. I'm a student at a university with a very high concentration of (waves hand) these types of peers, and when I try and have a conversation with them about something like what they did over break, I might be better off just telling them to speak in Sanskrit.
54. Korean here. I've been wondering about the cause of this for some while. Objective material conditions have become far better, yet people aren't as happy as they should be. I don't have a great answer myself, but I talked about this issue with someone I respect, and here's what she thought.
Fundamentally, it's all about status. Koreans compare themselves to their peers all the time. Cram schools? Because parents want their children to get ahead. Real estate craze? They don't just want a nice house, they want a house nicer than their cousins'. Young people unsatisfied with their economic conditions? They don't just want a high standard of living, they want it as high as their rich friend from middle school or some social media influencer or whatever.
So I asked her again: But why would these issues be specific to Korea, or at least so much worse here? Surely the urge to be above others is to some extent in human nature?
Her conjecture was this: post-war notion of equality. Everything owned by everyone was reset to zero during the Korean War. Home towns were destroyed. Preexisting social class and hierarchy vanished. No more noble houses of Confucian bureaucrats or rich families of landowners. The idea that they, and their children, deserve no worse than anyone else, became pervasive. This is what drives Korean parents to train their children to become the best, since why shouldn't they be? This is what makes Koreans feel poor if they can't buy a house in Seoul, because why can't they? Why should anyone have it better than them, when everyone came from the same background of poverty?
I don't know if she's right, but it certainly felt like an interesting idea. I believe most of ACX's readership are from rich Western countries with a longer history of stability - I'm curious what you think about this.
Then why are things going so much worse there than Japan? Pretty much everything you said there applies to Japan as well, except the fact that the war happened earlier... which should mean that Japan should have already collapsed by now. Clearly there's something specific to Korea that's contributing to its collapse.
Aren't things similar in Japan with respect to working hours, fertility and such? Google says Japan has the lowest happiness index score in the developed world.
East Asia has a long history of very intense social competition in a market economy, longer and more probably more intense than anywhere else. I'd guess that's the main reason why Japan, Korea, and arguably China have such strong income/education/job status games, more than post-war social levelling. Possibly because of Gregory Clark-heritability reasons.
I mean sure, Japan is going to shit as well, but people do still seem to be at least proud and attatched to their country. Meanwhile, Korea is having a full-on gender war-- like, how the hell does that even happen? Even the US only has a 60/40 slant of votes for president based on gender. What caused the situation in Korea to get so bad so quickly? That's what I want to know.
but to add on to @tempname896813's point (which I find intriguing but hard to prove): what Japan didn't have was a massive expectation of some kind of "equality"; class distinctions mostly remained. Japan's fertility isn't great but it's a lot better than the ROK's.
Yeah, from what I've heard much of this *does* also apply to Japan, and China, and to varying extents other East Asian countries as well. (South) Korea may be somewhat worse, but that seems more a difference of degree than kind.
The bombing of Japan was minor in comparison the the bombing of Korea. Japan's reset came mostly from the post-war US administration and was therefore less extensive.
It's plausible, but as an American we are very encouraged to endorse the idea that everyone ought to have equal opportunity if we just Try enough. It's been argued against pretty heavily in the context of Racism and Sexism and Etc, but the attitude of "Why should anyone have it better than them" sure sounds like something commonly believed here.
I would want to know more about different definitions of 'making it'. I have a very blue-tribe, hippieqsue tech-forward background, so for me a high-status job would be academic or writer or doctor or something else along those lines. I very much would not see getting married early and having 4 kids and being well respected in my local church to be high-status, but (anecdotally) many Americans do. While concepts like money and power confer some status no matter who you are, the idea that everyone in Korea is focused on School Grades and Living In Seoul is uh.... confusing and worrying to me. In some other cultural class analysis posts around here the concept of different 'ladders' for different cultural classes came up, and while that was oversimplified I do feel like that concept would be useful here.
There is the concept of "Jack is as good as his master". The difference here may be that in America, it was reformulated as "Jack has no master/Jack can be his own master, so can you, so can we all!" because they were starting from a position of 'no traditional social structures here and plenty of empty land to move to if you didn't like what was going on where you were', whereas for South Korea, if the comment is true, everyone is Jack and there are no more masters, so all the 'Jacks' are scrambling to take over the empty slots.
For the USA, it's "from the log cabin to the White House". For South Korea, it's "a bigger and better log cabin".
The SK housing market is arguably more crowded than San Fransisco. Also, SK is arguably the most hierarchical society in the world. So the log-cabin analogy makes zero sense to me. And yes, I do question the top-level comment's theory, despite me being a mere foreigner.
But the difference is that America does not have (or likes to think it does not have) a hierarchy: if you work hard/come up with a better mousetrap, you can be one of the wealthy and successful too! There is much less of the idea that Sir Jonathan is by nature better than Johnnie, even if Sir Jonathan is poor and Johnnie is a self-made millionaire. What is that quote about 'every American thinks they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire' so they *celebrate* the success of others? There is no elite in the USA (citation needed) so there's no corresponding idea that the elite just are that much superior to the common mass, and where the idea of an elite *is* promulgated, it's condemnatory of elites (even Harris is running on "I grew up middle-class, I'll work for middle-class American families" despite being as much beholden to the nobs and elite of San Francisco as Newsom is, or as Hillary with her "I love *real* billionaires" was).
I don't know much if anything about South Korea, but I get the impression that the emotional climate is something like the Republic of Ireland on this. The old hierarchy, according to OP, were pulled down and who inherited their place? The newcomers, the up-and-coming middle class, those who all came from the same place lower down in the old way of doing things. I don't know if Korea has the notion of "I knew him/his father/his grandfather when he didn't have an arse in his trousers" about the successful, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
Here in Ireland, the old Ascendancy were displaced and the vacancy scrambled for by the new middle-class Catholics (the old native lordly families had long ago lost power and position). Those who had risen from the peasant and small trader and small farmer class. And of course, plenty of envy and competition there.
Why is everything in Seoul? Why is everything in Dublin and the rest of the country can go hang? All the media, the entertainment industry, finance, politics, law, you name it - it's all there. Nobody is making programmes or writing lifestyle pieces about famous influencers or trendsetters in Ballinasloe.
Ozy, back in the days of their Thing of Things blog, jokingly(?) gave as one reason they'd never live in Texas the lack of sushi restaurants. It's trivially easy to Google and see that there are in fact sushi restaurants in Texas, but that's the attitude that "better to live ten in a house in the Bay Area than live in a large house of one's own out in the sticks" that OP describes about the competitiveness in South Korean culture.
South Korean believes that the elite is good, that being elite is something to be pursued, and that the elite *are* better than the common masses. South Korea probably also has, in a way the USA does not and that Ireland retains vestiges of, the suffocating weight of comparison within the family: why is your cousin able to get a big job in [wherever] and/or afford a house in Dublin/Seoul and you cannot? You must achieve and be successful so we can hold our heads high amongst the extended family and the neighbours! Gavin Newsom is the cousin of Joanna Newsom, but I doubt anyone is scolding Joanna for being a mere musician instead of a successful public servant like her cousin (or contrariwise, scolding Gavin for not being a star like Joanna).
"the idea that everyone in Korea is focused on School Grades and Living In Seoul is uh.... confusing and worrying to me"
Just be glad the national newspapers don't publish lists of points tables for the state exam at the end of secondary schooling, and that there aren't lists of school league tables (which we slavishly copied from the British media because of course we do) 😀
The old aristocracy wasn't replaced by the middle class, it was replaced by the chaebol dynasties. Yes, competitition is bonkers amongst the riffraff. But they're not competing to build the next Amazon or Google. They're competing to be hired by Samsung. And beside the economic stratification, there's also the age stratification. Cracking a beer before your friend (who's a year older) cracks a beer is about as egregious as slapping your mother. I like to imagine that such pearl-clutching has a pretty strong dampering effect on creativity/pioneering.
Given all this, I don't really see the "Paul Bunyan archetype" as especially illustrative of SK's situation. I think the more apt analogy is "late-stage capitalism cyberpunk dystopia". The comparison between Dublin and Seoul, and the intensity of sibling rivalries sounds pretty accurate to me, though.
Edit: for context, the chaebols are state-subsidized monopolies that arose in the wake of the Korean War. The logic was that, as a bunch of dirt-poor potato farmers, SK domestic industry would never be competitive on the global market if they played fairly. So President (more like "benevolent dictator") Park Chung Hee decided to speed-run industrialization by turbocharging specific companies. Thus, it's hard to make useful comparisons to the recent history of the Democratic People's Republic of Samsung, vs the U.S. or U.K. I also suspect that there's been cultural whiplash in going from medieval peasants to fully industrialized within the span of a single lifetime.
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Incidentally, I've been seeing some memes about Luce lately. And I couldn't help but wonder if you any choice words about Pope Francis japonifying the Catholic Church.
Oh, people here definitely love money and power - just look at the medical school craze of the last few decades. It's also a part of what makes good grades so desirable.
As for living in Seoul, well, as someone who lived in multiple cities here, yes, Seoul is genuinely the best city if you prefer urban life at all. The gap between Seoul (10m pop) and the next largest city, Busan (3m pop) is just too big.
Because material conditions have the capacity to make people the opposite of happy, it's easy to assume they might also have some positive influence beyond the "lack of suffering due to severe deprivation" point.
Turns out, of course, that the relationship is more complex, and that objectively "merely very good" material conditions can help make people miserable, if their peers have "insanely good" material conditions.
My happiness significantly and temporarily increased when my material conditions improved (from living-on-welfare and having always to think to almost never stressing about money, to not having to look at foodstuff prices unless I wanted to, to having a car and using it for commuting, etc.).
A few years later that started mattering less, I'm assuming because I got used to it. I still think it's a huge plus, and would be sad to give it up.
Yeah, when you are stressing on how to get by, that makes you feel bad. Other than that, happiness is driven by things like status and expectations, not material things. I thought that was obvious, which is why I don’t understand the confusion.
I still think the greatest thing ever is running water piped to the home, because I spent my early childhood in a house without that. I'm accustomed now to having indoor plumbing and even hot water *as and when I want it*, but if I'd grown up with that taken for granted, I'd probably be judging my circumstances on "yes, but our family only has one bathroom and theirs has two!" or the likes 😁
My understanding is that at least in anglophone cultures it used to be normal to subject wealthy or upper-class boys/young men to absolutely miserable living conditions for several years through e.g. schooling and military service... maybe there was something to this
You don't have to be starving to have money worries. And having enough money to make those worries go away makes a real difference. I'm speaking from personal experience here.
How did you conclude that starving to death is the only kind of food insecurity that leads to unhappiness?
And none of this has to do with your original non-normative claim in the form of the question:
>Why do you think "objective material conditions" would make people happy?
It would seem more reasonable to ask why one would think objective material conditions would not correlate with greater happiness, as they more commonly do.
Can you explain why you think having things necessary for survival and thriving wouldn’t tend to positively affect people’s happiness?
> Fundamentally, it's all about status. Koreans compare themselves to their peers all the time. Cram schools? Because parents want their children to get ahead. Real estate craze? They don't just want a nice house, they want a house nicer than their cousins'. Young people unsatisfied with their economic conditions? They don't just want a high standard of living, they want it as high as their rich friend from middle school or some social media influencer or whatever.
The 10th Commandment may have been placed last, but it turns out to be one of the most important of all.
Mostly Western countries, like US, Canada, Austrailia...
Personally I might leave for US, but only because I've heard software engineer pay is insane in California - I doubt that was what most people who answered the survey had in mind.
Yeah, if you're a skilled software engineer, there's nowhere else in the world like the bay area. I've heard that US immigration is very tough though (probably easier than if you're from China or India at least).
My theory (as an outsider and aside from the usual factors) is that Korea has very high social conformity (even compared to e.g. Japan) and that this drastically slows down the pace at which social reforms can happen. Basically this is a coordination problem, government is designed to solve coordination problems, it isn't working well in Korea.
Democracy usually solves this by having many parties with different ideas that voters can choose from, but in Korea the major parties have only small differences. Japan a variation of this but with only one stable party and a mix of constantly unstable opposition, nevertheless it works slightly better than in Korea. Taiwan seems to be more successful at social reform.
> My theory (as an outsider and aside from the usual factors) is that Korea has very high social conformity (even compared to e.g. Japan) and that this drastically slows down the pace at which social reforms can happen.
I disagree with this. I personally live in an unusual social bubble in Korea myself, so I can't say about whether Korea is a conformist society, but social reforms? Look at Korea in 1960s, and look at it now. Social reform is one thing we absolutely can do.
> in Korea the major parties have only small differences
It would be better if you could provide examples. Perhaps this is because you are focusing more on familiar Western culture war issues? If you compare their stances on immigration or gay marrige, yes, it might seem so. But look at the economic issues for example. Minimum wage, work hour limits, safety regulations... all important issue in which the main parties disagree on.
Reading your post again we are probably interpreting the same thing, or at a quite similar thing, into two different names: status and social conformity. Status matters more the more conformist a society is, or another way, the pressure for high status fades the less you have in common with those around you.
I mean conformity of thought by the way, not physical identity stuff that is so popular in the west.
The number one issue I see for Korea is the education race. When so many chase the same goal when there are only limited "prizes"...I see this as a conformity problem. Do the parties differ on how to solve this? Heck, do most Koreans even see this as a problem?
> The number one issue I see for Korea is the education race. When so many chase the same goal when there are only limited "prizes"...I see this as a conformity problem.
I agree, it is probably a conformity problem, and maybe a lack of greater perspective on careers.
> Do the parties differ on how to solve this?
I think the left generally is more against credentialism and overcompetition, tries to reduce the impact of exam results in university admission, and pushes for stuff like blind interviews for hiring. The right generally defends it as meritocracy, and prefers a return to a simple ranking system based on exam scores.
(In case this might sound like "left good right bad", I would say that the situation is quite complicated - lots of students prefer being ranked by scores alone, alternative methods have their own faults. And it turns out, blind interviews still result in top-university students getting the jobs. Meritocracy isn't a complete failure either.)
> Heck, do most Koreans even see this as a problem?
Funnily, yes. I think most Koreans would complain that this is a big problem in their society, although they won't be the change they want to see.
If I was in charge I'd probably try to limit at which times of the day tutors and cram schools were allowed to operate. The problem isn't meritocracy but the amount of time dedicated to passing tests.
Ultimately though it's really a mindset change that is needed. As you say it's a status problem, so reducing the importance of status is key.
In the west, especially in the US, people don't care that much about what others think of them and so status is a lot less important. I think the US takes it too far, but Korea also takes it too far in the other direction.
> If I was in charge I'd probably try to limit at which times of the day tutors and cram schools were allowed to operate. The problem isn't meritocracy but the amount of time dedicated to passing tests.
I believe Korea did ban tutoring at one point, when it was a dictatorship and the government could impose whatever restrictions they liked. One problem was, when tutoring become illegal to openly operate, only people with money and connections could get them.
Still, a moderate version of this might not be a bad idea. I think China's doing something like this now, let's see how that works out.
I will posit that Koreas hierarchical culture is at least partially at fault. Combine that with meritocracy and you inevitably end up with massive dat race dynamics in persued of high status markers.
I don't know about this. I agree Korea is a more hierarchical society than, say, the US, but for pretty much the entire history of ROK the trend was less hierarchy, not more. As you said, it might be a part of the issue, but not the entire story.
> The idea that they, and their children, deserve no worse than anyone else, became pervasive. This is what drives Korean parents to train their children to become the best, since why shouldn't they be? This is what makes Koreans feel poor if they can't buy a house in Seoul, because why can't they? Why should anyone have it better than them, when everyone came from the same background of poverty?
I think something similar has been going on in America, since the advent of the Internet and smartphones. There's a flattening of society, where everyone has access to the same information, and is in a sense on the same playing field. The principled egalitarian in me says that this is good, for all the standard reasons. But it also seems to have been the death of culture. And the realist in me says, that's part of why it's hard to hire native Americans for low-status jobs. There just aren't enough useful white-collar knowledge-work office jobs to go around, so we keep inventing more and more useless ones. In some way, now we all feel *even more* like we're "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
The same happened on the eastern side of the Baltic sea - Finland, Estonia, Latvia - where people suddenly lost their higher class (often foreigners) and started anew from scratch. Competitive feelings there seem quite comparable to the rest of the world, not like Korea. I think the explanation is interesting but comparative sociology doesn't support it.
Edit: I just remembered that Finns are supposed to have the highest happiness score in the world, which they explain by low competitiveness in the society: they make high efforts to not leave anyone behind, and all that.
What's the relationship between status and the ability to afford a wife? For example if you wind up a poor-ish Korean working construction can you still marry? Or are you basically shut out of the marriage market?
In North America its hard for a guy to marry a girl, it's basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle... Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn't get high status complex careers, and didn't want to have to compete to male standards...
Whereas after antidescrimination laws its MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard he works... and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competeing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for eqaul or less pay and status.
Its a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tiktoks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner keeping the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won't even date those men... because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.
This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing...
Is korea like this? Or is something else entirely going on?
RE: #8, A different "Magic: the Gathering combo requires the Twin Primes conjecture" situation has been making the rounds on Tumblr this past week: https://www.tumblr.com/prokopetz/765555393028063233/did-you-see-that-magic-the-gathering-now-has-a?source=share It's arguably more interesting than the one you cited, because 1. it requires far fewer unique cards, and 2. The Twin Primes conjecture doesn't decide if you can go infinite (which is pretty trivial in MtG terms), but which player *wins*.
RE: #47, You're absolutely correct, Hamilton became uncool due to the standard fad/fandom cycle. While accessibility might've helped demystify the play, The turning point was almost certainly when the drawing of Thomas Jefferson wearing a Hatsune Miku chest binder under a "Met God, She's Black" shirt became popular. I will not elaborate further, it's not hard to find.
I think there's a little more to it than Hamilton simply getting past it's fad lifecycle. The big hook for the show, initially, was "what if the founding fathers were all *black*? Not just in appearance, but talking and rapping like modern day black celebrities." This was a big hook for liberal elite tastemakers.
But then when you actually *watch* the show, and pay attention to its storyline, it's a very old-school conservative message. The founding fathers were so great, Hamilton the poor orphan kid was so great, America is so great, etc. There's not a lot of nuance or subverting expectations. It's actually not that different from the old "1776 musical" or the schoolhouse rock cartoons I saw as a kid. In particular, it totally glosses over Washington's slave ownership and makes him this moral paragon. That sells to a lot of regular people, but not so much to the kind of people who give artistic awards.
Yeah, that's what I mean about demystifying the play. Once it became prevalent, you could see it for what it really is (to you), instead of having it relayed to you via social media. From there, the people who didn't care for it could actually push back against the fans, who at that point were overextending into the aforementioned nonsense.
I'll also point out that, last I heard, Hamilton completely bombed in England, for the reasons you'd likely expect.
> I don't know whether it was a major issue, but the play didn't have any black people (slaves) from the era, did it?
To be fair, historically it was almost always white men in all positions of power and it's hard to go against that without rewriting history. Maybe you can find one black person who did something in the relevant period, but then it comes across as tokenism when every work set in the period hypes up this one person disproportionately.
> last I heard, Hamilton completely bombed in England
Considering it's *still* running on the West End daily, and everything I can turn up indicates it had a great critical reception, I think whoever you heard that from is mistaken.
It opened there in November 2017 and is currently scheduled to close in October 2025. Assuming no further extensions that would be somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500 performances, putting it in the all-time top 5 for musicals in the West End. Some plays that ran there for comparable numbers of performances include "Evita", "Me and My Girl", and "Jesus Christ Superstar".
I have seen the production this article is referring to: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/theater/hamilton-review-hamburg-germany.html The praise in the article is bullshit to the point of being completely surreal. The show was borderline unwatchable and had it not been so expensive I would have left during the pause (speaking of sunk cost fallacy). And I am referring to my thoughts after leaving the theatre here, I am not jumping on a bandwagon retroactively now that the tide has apparently changed.
At the time I blamed the problem on the translation (by contrast the choreography was excellent), but I am very open to the suggestion that the play itself is just not that good.
The production was closed down permanently after having run for roughly a year with the clear implication that the production company had hoped for (much) more, given the US success.
I watched the recorded (English) version of Hamilton on Disney+ and was very disappointed. I think it could have greatly been improved by shortening the runtime at least 30%.
Yeah, in hindsight Hamilton is super cringey. It was a novelty that only worked during a very specific time/environment. Aside from Daveed Diggs, most of the performances were pretty bad - boomer white people's version of rap. Lin-Manuel was atrocious. I think it just took a few years for people to realize.
Couple of caveats regarding the ancient DNA selection paper:
- You write as though the test was repeated on East Asian ancient DNA samples. What they actually did is keep the same set of west Eurasian ancient DNA samples, but calculate genetic scores for years of schooling etc using a rubric derived from modern East Asian individuals instead of modern European ones, as they did before. The results for this seem pretty good (Extended Data Fig 11) but show some deviations.
- Family-based GWAS is emerging as the gold standard for calculating direct genetic effects. It's becoming clear that typical population GWAS is affected by all sorts of problems, *especially* for anything relating to behavior and cognition: assortative mating within or across traits (e.g. smart people preferentially having kids with other smart people), population stratification (coincidental correlations between genes and phenotypes that we can't correct for properly), perhaps indirect effects (e.g. variants that make you more likely to have a smarter kid but don't do anything for your own intelligence).* Great preprint on this here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.01.24314703v1.full-text . (Note how cognitive and behavioral traits really stick out in this paper's figures as being the most deflated in various ways). With this in mind, it's notable that basically none of the ancient DNA paper's polygenic selection findings replicate when they use sibling-GWAS effect estimates (Extended Data Fig 13). As they point out, this is probably in part due to lower sample size and power in sibling GWAS studies; I'm sure that many of their proposed selection events are real, even some of the polygenic ones. But it does make me more hesitant in general about their findings, especially if the result is based on polygenic scores or has anything to do with cognition - and the figure you highlight is affected by both these concerns.
* To be clear, this doesn't invalidate all GWAS findings. Your typical headline published GWAS hits are mostly fine, largely due to incredibly strict significance thresholds used in the field. But polygenic scores tend to use more marginal GWAS hits and have the potential to be badly affected by these issues.
Re Anthropic's computer use: we made a demo similar to this that you can try out in your browser without needing to be a developer https://theaidigest.org/agent
>Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors.
I'm not sure I agree with this one unless you think that the sheer existence of a Prussian led Germany was going to lead to WW1 which is fair if playing games of cause and effect chains but not meaningful in a historiographical way. It certainly meant that France was going to form an alliance with a natural rival of Germany (Russia) and be bitter about Alsace-Lorraine but had Germany stuck to Bismarckian Realpolitik it is unlikely that WW1 could have happened. Perhaps there would have been a series of regional firekegs but without the moronic (for Germany) Dreadnought Race and blank cheque to Austro-Hungary Germany and Britain would not have been dragged into a war and France was unlikely to wage a revanchist war of aggression for Alsace Lorraine.
I can imagine a world where Wilhelm II never picks up Mahan and so never decides to build a dreadnaught fleet as a vanity project. In this world it's conceivable that Britain decides to ally with Germany against Russia (it's `great game' rival) instead of with France against Germany, or else to maintain `splendid isolation.' Either of those worlds probably sees Germany emerge victorious in a relatively short WW1, and from that point on the entire future course of history changes.
Germany was certainly a far more natural ally to Britain in that period than France and Russia. The adaptation of Weltpolitik has to be one of the stupidest foreign policy decisions in history. Germany following Realpolitik was on course to become a natural economic hegemon of the continent with naturally good relations with Britain as a counterbalance to the French and Russians. The fundamental strategic objective of Britain during this period (all periods after British unification if we are honest) was to keep shipping lanes open for imports and prevent a European naval power being able to launch an invasion via the low countries. With Weltpolitik Germany ensured its two natural threats hated it and drove the one country that could guarantee it was starved out of any war (as we saw twice) allied with its two natural threats. Even more stupidly Our Place in the Sun was for colonies that were gigantic economic drains for the governments and only of value to the businessmen who operated in them.
With one boneheaded decision the Kaiser guaranteed half a century of chaos in Europe and in the end Realpolitik was vindicated with Germany becoming the economic hegemon for Europe as soon as it was forcibly committed to peace with its neighbours.
Personally, I blame Pope Leo III for the world wars. If he hadn't decided to make Karl Karling Holy Roman Emperor, there would have been no patchwork German confederation for the Prussians to unify in the first place.
Re #30 first Google result – I thought results on Google are highly personalized. And no, I don’t have SSC subreddit as the first result there. I have it as the fourth result, top three being beebom.com, parade.com, and nothing.community (never heard of any of those).
Pretty dubious about Scott's dismissal of Rawls (item 7).
(Mostly) from the linked critique:
• "Improving society for the worst-off members at-best generates far fewer utils (and in some edge cases might actually cost utils) than optimising for utils directly": Optimising utilis directly has all sorts of problems of its own - repugnant conclusion, Pascal's mugging, etc. - does Rawls not get any credit for a solution that avoids these?
• "In some weird edge-cases Rawls actually loses us utils, therefore it's not a universally-true theory-of-everything": I don't think *any* ethical theory is 'complete' in that sense? Surely a more fair test is "Does this theory work as a decent guide for individuals/policymakers when applied reasonably under realistic conditions?": in the real-world, improving wellbeing of the worst-off members of society is *absolutely* not expected to lose us utils - in fact this is what much of EA does, with measurable results
• If "wanting to help the worst-off members of society" is actually a terminal goal you start out with, rather than something derived from your moral theory: 1) That seems like a pretty reasonable terminal goal to me (and better than most of ours..), 2) Seeking out a moral framework that supports this seems a pretty logical next step, and seems likely to be of value to you even if it isn't 100% watertight, and 3) Isn't this basically how we get most moral theories anyway?
• Maybe we aren't looking for a complete moral theory in the first place: maybe we're just looking for a way-of-thinking in which people's self-interestedness is channelled into generating altruistic behaviour. This seems as though it would have value as a guide in most real-world situations even if it isn't a complete and universally-true moral system.[Edit: also, isn't it pretty rare/interesting to find an example of way of channelling self-interestedness in a positive socially-useful direction? If this is something that we need to have in our general shared philosophical corpus, I think Rawls provides it much better than eg. Rand)
• Taking the "veil of ignorance" thought experiment seriously: if we *actually did* have everybody who is alive today collectively decide-upon a theory of justice and then transplant everybody into a random position within that system, would we expect the resulting world to be fairer than today's world? Either 1) unequivocally yes, by a considerable margin; nobody behind the veil making rational decisions would support a system with as high a risk of giving them a life of war, poverty, and suffering as the current world would - or else 2) This has actually happened in a Bostromian Simulation sorta way; if so, looking at how much injustice there is in the world, our pre-veil disembodied consciousnesses must all have been incorrigible, inveterate gamblers..
• (Also, I'd have hoped that "Rawls isn't original" would have merited a citation at least as much as "Rawls isn't very good" did..)
1) I agree that it's pointless to dismiss moral theory A simply because it gives different results from moral theory B. If your aim is to maximise utils *of course* you shouldn't instead try to maximise the well-being of the worst-off member of society. There is a still a huge problem for Rawls here, because he has no justification for maximising the well-being of the worst-off member of society. He simply expects us to adopt this goal as a self-evident good.
It's actually worse than that, because Rawls is strongly democratic, so he is making the empirical claim that with sufficiently good (i.e. Rawlsian) decision-making, society would adopt his ethical views, but no actual process for democratic decision-making has ever produced this outcome. Rawls himself seems to have been very disappointed by this, but not in a way which ever caused him to revise his views.
2) One of the reasons that Rawlsian thought is compelling is that you can go along with him on the veil of ignorance, but then disagree as to the outcomes. For example, you could say that, behind a veil of ignorance, we would agree that everyone should be able to keep the profits of their own labour, so there would be no redistributive taxation in an ideal society. Would that society be fairer than our own? From the point of view of somebody who holds redistributive taxation to be unjust, clearly yes, but Rawls himself would certainly disagree.
I think the criticism can reasonably be made of the veil of ignorance that it's impossible in practice and that in imagining it, nobody ever changes their previous views. Everybody has an argument for why, behind a veil of ignorance, everybody else would agree that they have been right all along.
Thanks for the reply! Very interesting and I enjoyed reading it.
I find your point 2 very convincing. I couldn't say I fully agree though, because I do think there are cases where people (er, for lack of a better expression..) "play differently when they have skin in the game", and because some people (I admit it's probably a rare talent..) are able to put themselves into the Veil thought-experiment mindest well-enough to actually honestly consider how they would act if they did have skin in the game in a way they wouldn't consider without this intellectual tool. (For the rest of us - for whom it doesn't even intellectually register as a problem that, though we may support a given position on (say) abortion here in the real world, we might not support the same position if we honestly did anticipate our consciousness might be transplanted into an accidentally-pregnant teenager or into an unwanted foetus - I accept your point entirely..)
For point 1, I think I fully agree about democracy and about where you'd arrive at if your aim were to maximise utils - but I still don't see how it's a criticism of Rawls that he adopts "helping the worst-off people" rather than "maximising utils" as an absolute terminal goal; I don't understand how this is any worse* than the not-uncommon philosophical practice of adopting "maximising utils", "helping yourself and your family/tribe", "perpetuating human civilisation", etc. as ground-level terminal goals?
(* "Worse" both in the sense of "less philosophically rigorous" and of "leads to more paradoxes/more susceptible to perverse-outcome edge-cases")
I think it’s pretty easy to justify prioritizing the worst off people. The badness of suffering is worse than the goodness of happiness is good and extra happiness in already happy people does not cancel out the (bad) suffering of unhappy people.
Every few minutes of thinking about this, I seem to vacillate between on the one hand agreeing with you completely and unreservedly, and on the other hand thinking that this is 'baked-in' to the 'util exchange rate' (such that maybe feeding a starving orphan = 100 utils but feeding a well-nourished investment banker = 0.01 utils) and that therefore we can just abstractly compare "helping the util-wise-worst-off" against "helping the util-wise-highest-return" directly without worrying about what real-world situations contribute to those util totals. I can't seem to decide on what the best way to think about this is!
If you prioritize helping the worst off then you would by definition be creating a system which incentivizes failure and discourages success. Honestly, the longer term development of such a system would seem to me to lead to something resembling hell.
I don’t know. Don’t you think people aspire to more than just avoiding suffering (a neutral state let’s say)? I think there will be plenty of incentive remaining after a society creates a humane floor (to the extent it’s tractable) below which our fellow citizens, friends and family members will not fall.
I don’t think a maximin principle and a humane floor are the same thing. The society I would choose would be the one which allowed people to optimally flourish, and preferably to flourish more and better over time (it would progress over time).
Just as importantly it would incentivize goals and behaviors which are positive sum, not dysfunctional. A succesful society succeeds in great part because of the incentives and goals which it fosters. It is a dynamic not a static thing.
I don't think it follows that helping the worst-off discourages success. Suppose there are only two jobs in the world - Sweatshop Worker and Oil Baron, say - and we decide to help the sweatshop workers by instituting a policy where they get paid compensation for industrial accidents that happen to them (and we pay for this by charging more for the sweatshop products, so ultimately it's the oil barons paying for the policy). Even despite our intervention - making oil barons worse off and sweatshop workers better off - no oil barons will switch to being sweatshop workers (because no incentive is created for them to do so) and no sweatshop workers will switch to being oil barons (because they can't; the oil baron job market remains fully saturated).
nb. I'm not suggesting we mitigate against failure so strongly that failure has better outcomes than success - say, by paying people more to fail than they'd earn by succeeding* - just that, stand-fast some weird edge-cases, helping the worst-off simply doesn't incentivise failure
(* Though I think this sometimes does actually happen in the real world, mad as that is! I recall all those news stories one reads of where CEOs royally nause-up some company and either receive a colossal taxpayer-funded bailout or else simply walk away with a golden handshake in the millions whilst the company goes bankrupt...)
This is essentially how public schools work in America and the result is that any kid who wants to go above their grade level is discouraged and becomes miserable.
If we reduce the costs of dysfunctional behavior, then we will get more of it. Over time, a lot more. The key to a healthy dynamic society is in part having incentives that people avoid bad decisions and behaviors. Any society which prioritizes propping up failure at the expense of success is going to get more failure and less success.
I am not arguing against safety nets or assistance for the destitute. I agree that it is reasonable to choose institutions which provide safety nets and a degree of redistribution. It is not reasonable to choose a maximin principle.
>2) One of the reasons that Rawlsian thought is compelling is that you can go along with him on the veil of ignorance, but then disagree as to the outcomes. For example, you could say that, behind a veil of ignorance, we would agree that everyone should be able to keep the profits of their own labour, so there would be no redistributive taxation in an ideal society. Would that society be fairer than our own? From the point of view of somebody who holds redistributive taxation to be unjust, clearly yes, but Rawls himself would certainly disagree.
Did Rawls himself ever comment on alternative uses of his veil of ignorance? One criticism of his use is that he chooses an extremely pessimistic metric for evaluating societies (I share this criticism, but also am very skeptical of the whole project of ethics). Did he ever say anything about e.g. applying his veil, but then evaluating based on the welfare of the median person in the society, or (more pessimistically, but less so than Rawls) the welfare of the 25th percentile person.
The other point I found unconvincing was the idea that people might give higher weight to the probability of things turning out well for themselves. My feeling is that people are risk-averse and if they had any experience with long duration suffering would weight avoiding that outcome quite highly.
Entirely agree that suffering and wellbeing are asymmetrical in the way you describe and I suspect (though have no real evidence either way) that people who have experienced more-than-average suffering are much more aware of this.
Did you read the cited critique by John Harsanyi of Rawls' principle (only a small part was quoted by Jim Holt at Slate but a longer version is available as Chapter 2 of this link https://epdf.pub/contemporary-political-theory-a-reader.html )? That seems quite hard to rebut. People in practice don't act like the worst off is a terminal goal.
Rand is not taken very seriously by philosophers. Rawls himself distinguished between the utilitarian and contractarian traditions, including himself in the latter. Is there any argument that Rawls provides a better "way of channelling self-interestedness in a positive socially-useful direction" than utilitarians like Harsanyi?
On the repugnant conclusion, these paradoxes only happen when people turn ethics in to a math problem where you go "value X is good, the more people who display X, the better. Therefore, to maximize X, we need to maximize people." No one except ethicists thinks this way.
Rawls: “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.”
The repugnant conclusion arises when one is asked to choose between alternatives. Consistency either means maximizing population at the expense of lower average utility, or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility. Merely refusing to think systematically is no solution, at most you could claim that solutions aren't necessary for impractical hypotheticals.
It’s far less of a problem for obligation based moralities than ones that focus on maximizing some value. So for example, I think people have duties towards their family. That doesn’t imply some necessity of maximizing family members.
Also, citing the guy who talks about a large number of people getting dust in their eye being worse than torturing one person just demonstrates my point.
>"…or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility"
Not necessarily, or even probably. Gains from specialization & trade are sufficiently positive-sum that average utility increases with population size over at least a substantial range of values.
You're correct practically speaking, but the point of the thought-experiment is to examine situations in which there is a tradeoff (such as beyond that substantial range).
> Consistency either means maximizing population at the expense of lower average utility, or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility. Merely refusing to think systematically is no solution, at most you could claim that solutions aren't necessary for impractical hypotheticals.
I don't refuse to think systematically, but I do reject the idea of utility as something that you can meaningfully slap a number on and then add or multiply.
Does a room with three reasonably happy people in it have 50% more utility than a room with two reasonably happy people? No, that's a stupid question, utility is not quantifiable.
You choose whichever one is better. Just because something can't be quantified doesn't mean it can't be understood or compared.
An imperfect analogy would be temperature, or rather a pre-scientific understanding of temperature. The ancients didn't know anything about thermodyamics but they understood that some things were warmer than other things. They could even have invented an arbitrary numeric temperature scale if they'd liked, but these numbers could not be meaningfully added, multiplied or averaged.
Do you want to choose between making one person very happy or making ten people slightly happy? Well you can't, there's no way of quantifying how happy you're going to make them, so just go with whatever seems more reasonable I guess.
I sure hope that policy makers aren't using Rawls as a guide because that would mean favoring the entire rest of the world and mostly ignoring their constituents.
The advantage of Myers-Briggs (almost a century old) is due to its catchiness and, in the modern age, memeability. The 16personalities test, which uses a modification of the Big 5, has seen its characters used to illustrate the types turned into a series of memes where you can see conjectures about what the types are like in high school, ENTP/INTP slash, 'ENFP be like', and has even reached rule34.xxx, where you can actually see (cartoon) INFP pr0n.
As a result, while very few people have any sense of their agreeableness or conscientiousness or understand the vocabulary with its five-syllable words, lots of people know their MBTI type. It's astrology with at least some vague empirical validation.
While the underlying Jungian theory is BS and the 'cognitive function' bit unproven, not to mention the false dichotomy creates all kinds of problems because people are distributed toward the middle of the axis on most of the Big Five, the test result does give you an idea of what hyperoctant (sexdecipant?) in Big 5-minus-neuroticism-space your interlocutor or you are in. If someone tells you they're an 'ISFJ', you have a vague sense they're in the bottom half of extroversion and openness, and in the top half of agreeableness and conscientiousness. That's not as good as a big 5 test result, but it's better than nothing, and easier to slip into a conversation.
I'm actually curious if there are any findings on the emprical usefulness of astrology *if you take out the birthday/star position determinants*. That is, do the astrological personality types, and their categories (fire, air, positive, negative etc) and relations to each other have any emprical use? If you allow them to be assigned by actual personality not birthday.
Wikipedia says much of this has barely changed since Roman times, and you would think that something that endured that long might have *some* useful aspects. Though of course, it might not.
Supposedly one of the times CSICOP (skeptic organization) whiffed was an investigation of the 'Mars effect', where athletes tended to be born with the planet Mars in certain positions. I can't really make heads or tails of the situation but if you're curious here's the Wikipedia article.
Why that could be is anyone's guess. Certainly they've shown athletes tend to be born at certain times of the year because they wind up being the oldest kids in the class and therefore more developed and that carries on. That could coincidentally coincide with certain astrological signs.
Sure, the astrological personalities are roughly coherent (you could assign MBTIs to them if you really wanted to) and if you did something similar to what these guys did with the Enneagram and go yes/no on each of the 12, you might get a test that works. But that's not what astrologers were doing since Roman times.
Yes, the primary advantage of MBTI is that it's fun. I once saw a picture of a dating profile belonging to someone I would no doubt despise if we ever met, and was validated by their MBTI type being the exact opposite of mine.
>X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance.
Surely this will be widely condemned by the people who thought Twitter should not have suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story (under the same "we don't want to circulate hacked data" logic).
Mostly the fact that I don't think undecided voters would be persuaded by anything in the JD Vance dossier and that everyone agrees that it's Iranian interference.
On the first, this election will not be decided by this dossier. We might like to think that voters would carefully parse through the contents for subtle insights into the policies or character of the candidates but...this is a highly optimistic assessment of the average American voter, much less the average undecided voter.
Compare that to a video of the president's son smoking crack with a hooker. That just...is obviously going to go viral and could easily influence low information voters in swing states.
Like, I had no idea the JD Vance dossier thing existed until now, I'm way more engaged than the average voter, so it basically doesn't matter. Even the dumbest 20% of Americans want to see the president's son smoking crack with a hooker, so it matters. Shouldn't, but does.
Second, there's an argument I don't find persuasive but is respectable but that we censor information specifically released by foreign governments attempting to influence US elections. If this argument is sincerely presented, I kinda have to take it seriously, and it was presented here. And, as far as I can tell, everyone basically agrees that it's Iranian election interference. When the Hunter Biden laptop was leaked, this was not Russian or any other interference, to the best of my knowledge the original story of Hunter just leaving it has held up, and the initial calls of interference failed the sniff test and were never credible, it was just blatant interference. Again, I think this argument is bad, but it is respectable if honestly presented.
So yeah, this compares an unimportant leak with a bad but respectable argument for censorship against a, unfortunately, very important leak with a deceptive figleaf of an argument for censorship.
The Hunter laptop was widely considered as likely foreign interference (understandable, given how unlikely that story was). When evidence surfaced that it is genuine, Twitter promptly reversed its blocking. (We know this from the Twitter Files, which is somehow, ridiculously, held up as evidence of wrongdoing on Twitter's side but actually quite clearly documents the opposite.) It's also not that obvious that evidence illegally obtained by foreign agents should be treated all that differently from evidence illegally obtained by domestic agents (granted, we do make a similar distinction for all manner of election-related things).
The Hunter laptop might have been more politically impactful (mostly for bad reasons, mind you; a presidential candidate's estranged son having a decadent lifestyle is not really something that should factor into the evaluation of the candidate heavily, which is why the Republicans instead relied on conspiracy theories supposedly-but-not-actually supported by laptop), but then should Twitter's policy be "you are not allowed to share material probably stolen by foreign agents during an election, unless that would be a significant advantage to one party"? Newspapers very much make those kinds of calculations, of course, but newspapers are content producers, not publishing platforms. I think it would be a weird position for a social network.
Another thing: I've just skimmed the JD Vance dossier and apart from his home address (which was censored in the version I saw) there was nothing the least bit personal in there, it's all already public knowledge.
If there's a really juicy version of this doc where the Trump campaign has sent private detectives to sort through his ex-girlfriends' diaries then it's not this one.
If Twitter was under the same leadership as it was in 2020 it rightly should be.
But in the intervening time the platform publically committed itself to a policy of "supressing stuff like the Hunter Biden story is bad".
Demanding "X" to act in accordance with its stated policy is quite reasonable. Especially when there is good reason to believe that they would have if the story happened to benefit Republicans.
I would condemn it if Scott's description was accurate but he appears to have fallen for disinformation.
Specifically, Scott claims with no source that "Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods."
"Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance’s physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number."
This is also consistent with the ban message on Klippenstein's substack (linked by Scott), which says it is for "posting private information."
I think banning exposing physical addresses and SSNs is a good and reasonable policy!
Except Scott either fell for disinformation (likely!) or is outright lying (unlikely), because Twitter's stated reason for the ban is, as Klippenstein himself admitted, the fact that his released materials contained the unredacted address and partial SSN of Vance. Klippenstein's justification for doing so was that they "were already available for anyone to buy".
Virtually all social media platforms have rules against doxxing, this seems like doxxing 101.
Also, Twitter/X no longer has an active page regarding a "hacked materials" policy, that was pre-Musk.
7 : I'm not sure about the claim that classical labor theory of value is proven wrong by the marginalist theory of prices.
Classical labor theory is not concerned with short term price fluctuations but with long term equilibrium. In perfect competition, in the long run, price equals average total cost, just like in classical price theory.
The marxian labory theory of value is wrong because the solution provided by Marx to the transformation problem is incorrect, not because Alfred Marshall proved it wrong.
That may be true in a technical sense, but only in the case where products are homogeneous. It doesn't explain price formation in any other situation.
Overall, the problem with the labor theory of value is that it creates bad models of what value is and how it's created, especially in people with only a superficial understanding of economics.
The classical theory of value, which assumes perfect competition, asks the following question : in the long run, relative prices are determined by relative costs. What ultimately determines relative costs then? Marshalian partial equilibrium economics doesn't answer this question at all.
Ok so prices are determined by prices which are themselves determined by prices which are themselves determined by prices, endlessly. You're not explaining anything.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I don't think further explanation is needed. Prices are signals+incentives that help demand and supply come into equilibrium, and this is true across the economy. What does this not help you understand that you need further explanation for?
>it creates bad models of what value is and how it's created, especially in people with only a superficial understanding of economics
If that's your metric, bear in mind that people use marginalist "subjective" theory to seriously argue Jeff Bezos literally personally created the entire value of Amazon. I think LTV looks pretty good in comparison.
I also don't think subjective value theory is much of a problem for the LTV, but on the transformation problem did you read Laws of Chaos? It's from 2020 and models the rate of profit as a statistical tendency across a range of labour/capital constitutions and claims that overcomes the transformation problem. The same way the labour content of commodities corresponds to their value in a statistical way, not causally, like spending lots of time making a paper cup doesn't raise its value, if that makes sense. It makes a fairly compelling case imo.
Alfred Marshall was only partially marginalist, still keeping one foot in the classical tradition. I'd say it was the actual marginal revolutionaries who displaced the labor theory of value with the subjective one.
I find what you say about Marshall extremely surprising and I'm pretty sure you're incorrect. Marshall came after the early marginalists like Jevons and he's 100% a marginalist.
I agree he came after. On classical vs marginalist theories of value he said:
"We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the lower blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility or cost of production."
I do not think this is correct. Under perfect competition and in the long run, price of goods would converge to the marginal cost of production. But this marginal cost of production would still be affected by non-labor factor costs (e.g. land if it scarce.) Hence, labor theory would still be wrong.
Thankfully this crowd has largely ignored the pickup artist link. I was not looking forward to the cargo culting that was going to go down if they tried to discuss that one.
Because as you hint, the hat was completely meaningless. It was the peacocking that was important. That long weird rant was nearly entirely missing the point.
And no, that guy didn't get any more or less action than any other pickup artist of the era. He was good at PR and got lucky with a journalist writing about him. Plenty of other aspects to game that worked back then (and some that still work today).
So even if someone writes a 10,000-word essay on Mystery's Hat, anyone who reads it will be no more educated on how any of that works than before the essay. Better to read a few Rational Male essays, or read the book on Mystery and his crowd that originally sparked off the fad.
Yeah, the problem is a lot of the gambits are much more risky in the post-#MeToo era, when everyone is supposed to 'believe women'. I think that's why stuff like 'Fresh & Fit' is so popular--better to just make yourself more physically attractive, they can't fire you for working out and it has other benefits. Or things like entering the trades where HR doesn't have power over you, or if possible making money and leaving the country.
A lot of guys (myself included, frankly) are effectively doing MGTOW even if we don't really call it that. As always, humans adapt, and if the modern urban monoculture passes away from low birthrates...well, the Christians will take over, and more power to them.
I interpreted the original post as using the hat as a synecdoche for "things that many women find attractive but don't want to admit they find attractive, and which men do not perform out of embarrassment," a category which includes peacocking. It's the literal hat being discussed sure, but the hat is also a symbol.
Also, he didn't just get laid because of the hat, but because he was very persistent and methodical, instead of going into a pit of self-loathing after the first 100 rejections.
Re point Nr 10: Tall soldiers weren't only a fetish thing in Frederick's time, they were a standard form of infantry as grenadiers, supposed to be tall to look over the other soldiers when throwing hand grenades (and be strong enough for a good throw).
Frederick took it the furthest (tallest?), but other armies had them, too.
Wouldn't that mean they have to be mixed in with the other soldiers? If you have an entire regiment of tall soldiers, they can't look over each others' shoulders.
"According to René Chartrand, Jean Martinet formed a grenadier company in the Régiment du Roi in 1667. By 1670 27 French infantry regiments were authorised to include elite companies trained to carry and hurl grenades.
The infantry of the Dutch States Army, influenced by their French invaders, adopted grenadiers in 1672. By 1678 six men in each company were trained to throw hand grenades, developed by the Dutch master fireworker Johan van Haren."
Full disclosure: I am an early-career mathematician, with a around 1/1000 IQ (according to a single test dating from about two decades ago, compared to the general population) and empirical data suggesting that I am comfortably within 1/10^4 (compared to the general population, once again) in math test-taking. I am not particularly aware of the education literature (especially re US schools), but I believe that I have relevant experience (by having done some teaching -- crucially, *not much*, so the challenges are fresh in my mind -- in quite varied environments) .
The reason why I would not expect teacher intelligence to meaningfully substitute for teacher experience (at least in the setting of the experiment, where you replace a seasoned teacher with a rookie) is because, while a teacher's goal is to make students learn material (more cynically: pass a test), this involves very different dynamics than "just explaining what the students have to know".
It involves paying attention to the students and noticing when your explanations have lost them. It involves flexibility to reformulate everything again and again until what you say finally resonate with their brain. It involves the need to understand what they are currently thinking to be able to spot as swiftly as possible (because their focus, or your patience, or your time, is limited!) what the issue is.
More importantly, it involves staying on top of a precarious social dynamic with a group of fickle children or teenagers (most of which do not wish to be there) which involves a mixture of cajoling, threats, genuine motivation, the ability to deal with situations as they arise (student X is barely containing their tears, children Y is throwing a tantrum, guy Z just walked up and left in front of the whole room, students W and T disrupt the class by asking useless questions, what do I do?) in a way that does not compromise your ability to actually teach (which will happen if you mishandle these situations because, remember, a significant fraction of students does not particularly like being at school and will take it out on you if the opportunity arises, or if there's a bad day).
They may be a part of intelligence, but it is not one measured on academic tests, whereas experience will tend to give someone tools to deal with these kinds of problems.
Your fresh rookie, even if they're an IMO perfect scorer (especially so, since it meant they put work in optimizing for solving IMO problems rather than stay ahead of social dynamics without pretending too hard that they exist -- or even simply about "explaining easy things", which is not always as straightforward as one expects), is a lot more likely to mess this up.
There's probably a trade-off involved, but I think it only becomes significant after the first few years of experience.
Yes, if anyone has spent any time in a modern classroom, they'll understand that there is more to wrangling a class than being "the smartest test taker".
Unexperienced teachers will be taken full advantage of by the budding little blossoms, whereas those with time under their belt will know the tricks and be wise to them.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting this based on importance of knowing the subject matter, I was expecting it because intelligence predicts job performance at almost all jobs, and performance in lots of skills you wouldn't necessarily expect to be linked to intelligence.
I am not disputing that. But one may believe that the aspects of intelligence selected for in the experiment (test-taking) and those that would serve a rookie teacher arriving in a classroom are not that well correlated. N=1 again, but I know the correlation breaks down for me. Heaven knows that “brilliant academic yet atrocious lecturer” is not an empty group, and the university setting is in most cases incredibly easier to manage that grade, middle or high school.
Would an intelligent person figure out a solution? Certainly, given time, with exposure to the various parts of the issue, thinking and experiment and discussing with colleagues.
Expecting their intelligence to save the day on the first time you’re in front of a classroom seems about as misguided as throwing a smart kid in a rough sea because if they were so smart, they should figure out how to figure out how to swim back to safety.
Hm, intelligence predicts success, but probably those studies are controlling for age or experience, or not? So I assume they find that for two persons of the same age or experience level, the more intelligent one is statistically more successful. Or are there comparisons for other jobs that say that an intelligent rookie is better than a less smart, but more experienced worker?
I feel like it's a pretty common experience that many of the better teachers are ones who struggled through material themselves to understand it. Those that learned it effortlessly can't as easily related to struggling students. Not universally true - I've had teachers who are brilliant and good teachers - but common enough.
How does intelligence compare to experience as a predictor specifically?
My guess would be that they multiplier by each other. An intelligent person learns more from each learning opportunity they experience on the job so after a decade they're far ahead of a less intelligent peer; but someone whose been around a lot longer can still have picked up more than a newbie.
For most jobs, there is a required skillset to succeed before you can compare the (nearly universal) benefit of intelligence. In the case of teaching (and probably many other fields), college (or other training) is less capable than first hand experience for populating that skillset. As a IC (chip) designer, I use little that I learned in my BS and have improved decade after decade. 33 years in, I am at the top of my game.
I've seen many people mention the interpersonal specificity of teaching, but the big, big one is behaviour management. Yes, subject knowledge is important, and yes, I'm sure to a certain extent behaviour management is correlated with intelligence, but teachers are already selected for intelligence Vs the population.
This really ties into a lot of the class size stuff: I fully believe class size doesn't matter in Japan because behaviour is excellent there, but in more challenging school behaviour management is *the* most important skill. My partner worked with a man who wasn't exactly the brightest spark of all time, but had twenty years experience wrangling recalcitrant, often criminal teenagers into getting a passing grade, which is a notably different skillset from getting A students to an A+.
Sure, but experience is not completely fungible with intelligence. For most tasks the gains to experience are probably something like logarithmic while the gains to intelligence are more linear or sigmoidal. Thus the interplay of the two is going to depend a lot on where in those distributions you're doing the sampling!
e.g. a more intelligent teacher with 5 years experience may best a teacher with 20 years experience, but a less intelligent teacher with 4 years of experience may best a more intelligent one with only one year of experience.
1. All teachers are fairly smart (even if you are below the median of college graduates, the fact that you are a college graduate probably means you are above the median of the general population). Additional smarts may not be so useful.
2. Too much smarts means that what is difficult for your students to learn is probably not difficult for you to learn. But you really have to "meet them at their level".
3. Not really related, but it is important to realize that a lot of the better performance of experienced teachers is not because experience makes them better but because they stay teachers while worse teachers find other jobs, through some combination of being pushed out and wanting to leave a job they are not enjoying (and may be obviously failing in).
I am unconvinced of the "too smart to communicate with normies," argument. I have met very bright people who were poor communicators even with their peers but there is no shortage of exceptional people who are also exceptional communicators. I am reasonably bright; I hold numerous patents and have (had) IP (chips) inside your phone and other items about your house. I also grew up explaining things to my Down's Syndrome brother and sharing "Godel's Incompleteness Theory" with random people on public transit. Communication is probably the skill I am most lauded for.
It could be subtler, for instance a larger intelligence gap simply exacerbating poor communication skills which would tend to produce the strongest examples of bad communication when the instructor is exceptionally smart.
I've had many conversations about this over the years (I'm also a research mathematician). I think success as a teacher, particularly for mathematics is *anti-correlated* with mathematical ability. If you didn't struggle to learn the material, you can't really empathise with the students who do struggle. It's like asking a native speaker about the details of grammar - they can't explain it because it's just the way it is.
You also identify something that drives me up the wall regarding education research. The single most important factor in education is the teacher - while their subject knowledge is important their connection with the class is paramount. Teaching is an interpersonal process - if you're not allowed to control for variability in the teachers (approximately because the official line is that there are no bad teachers), then you're ignoring the most important variable in any experiment. I've been in a classroom often enough and long enough to know that the things that work for me (and even the things I can get away with) are massively different than what a colleague can do. If they try to emulate me, it's unnatural, the students sense it and it doesn't work (and vice versa).
These are all excellent points. I can certainly say that, when I was teaching, I was more effective several years in than I was initially, because I learned from my mistakes, and because I picked up new techniques.
But it is also important to note what is going on in the study. The abstract says they replaced experienced teachers with NOVICE teachers. So, unless those novices are super geniuses, the outcome is hardly surprising. Moreover, turnout among novice teachers is fairly high (in the US; I assume the same is true in Columbia). Those who quit are presumably relatively ineffective, so the pool of experienced teachers has had the least effective novices culled out, while the least effective teachers are still in the "novice" group, bringing down the average effectiveness.
My son, who attended a G&T program until the Powers That Be ended it, said the biggest change with “regular school” is that a lot of the kids didn’t want to be there or learn anything.
Not a mathematician or a teacher, but this was precisely what I thought as soon as I read the thing. Huge flaw in assumptions/conclusions, as is so often the case with these studies.
"15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast!"
Okay, if anything is going to incentivise me to roll up my sleeves and spit on my hands, it's this kind of claim.
I'm reading the article and I want a bit more evidence, such as "gimme the names of these Eminent Scientists and High Human Capital folks what migrated to the newly Protestant regions of Europe".
But first, as a general response: thank you for saying the Catholic Church is a model of organised governance. I'm very surprised to hear this and it's always nice to get a compliment, even a back-handed one. Even if it is rather more reminiscent of Neil deGrasse Tyson's modern version of "Cosmos" with the cartoon villainy of Cardinal Borromeo versus that noted scientist Giordano Bruno.
Secondly, I don't think Protestantism invented modernity as such, it invented capitalism. What really invented modernity was the Industrial Revolution, and that's credited to Britain, not the other North European Protestant states (is anyone going to claim that Sweden is responsible for kicking off science and technology explosion of progress?)
As for the "all the high human capital was in Protestant lands" - ah yes. The Enlightenment, precursor of modernity, with such figures as Voltaire, famously Protestant living in famously Protestant France.
Catholic control of universities stifled progress by quashing scientific enquiry? Yeah, I'll remain neutral on that one, but I will also point out that universities in Protestant countries also had confessional requirements. See Oxford and Cambridge, clinging on to fossilised remainders of their foundations under Catholic rule, where fellows were not allowed to marry (because in their pre-Protestant days, they would have been clergy). Harvard was benefacted by a Puritan clergyman and trained Congregational clergy until the 18th century; Yale was founded by Congregationalists and functioned pretty much as a seminary until the 19th century, and Princeton's founding came about as a result of a schism in local Presbyterian churches.
So when do you pinpoint as the date for the birth of modernity, and what exactly do you mean by that? If it's only "the wars of religion meant everyone fought themselves to a standstill and so had no energy left over to persecute anyone who came up with wild and wacky ideas", that doesn't mean "and thus science and hence modernity was born".
Darwinism was the big fight of the 19th century, well into the Period of Modernity, and more viciously prosecuted in the Protestant nations which were still mainly or majority pinned to Biblical literalism as a result of the Reformation principles. The Scopes Monkey Trial was rigged between both the fundamentalists and the evolutionists as a show trial to get publicity, and from that it was hoped attract interest and investment in Dayton to revive its economic fortunes, but that took place in a majority Protestant nation in the 20th 'we're all modern now' century.
I'll have to do more reading on this because I do think the history of the universities is fascinating, but I'll just end with Fr. Lemaître of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium who gave you the Big Bang theory of modern cosmology. You're all very welcome, no thanks needed 😀
"Progress in Spanish scientist production diverges from the Netherlands and Britain right after Spain discovers a multitude of Protestant cells in the country, prompting it to implement isolationist laws"
This is the period 1558-59. Okay, so I hit up Wikipedia for the relevant period and what do I see in passing?
"Despite its immense dominions, the Spanish kingdoms had a sparse population that yielded a limited income to the crown (in contrast to France, for example, which was much more heavily populated)."
You don't think perhaps, maybe, possibly, just barely imaginably, it might be that "fewer Spanish scientists" because "smaller goddamn population overall by comparison to other nations"? No, no, you're right: as Crémiuex says, it's the "pernicious Catholic church" at fault here! TIL that there were assembly lines in European nations for "production" of scientists, like tins of beans!
Spain apparently had a Golden Age of the arts during this time, but yeah: if it ain't STEM it ain't worth a damn, right?
"And perhaps most interestingly of all, France managed to substantially but not wholly save itself from the madness of the Catholic Church by issuing the Edict of Nantes, providing its Protestants with some, but not all of the liberties they could have enjoyed in other parts of Protestant Europe"
If you don't mind me writhing around on the floor after reading things like this, then sure. As I said, I have no idea what measuring stick is being used here, but if we are supposed to take it that X proportion of scientists per Y thousand of general population is the natural level of "scientist production", then I submit that a country with a smaller population is going to have fewer scientists.
If it is 1% of your population will be Big Brain Science, then if you have a population of 1,000 and next door nation has a population of 5,000, you will have 10 scientists and they will have 50, and someone coming along just counting "how many scientists?" with no reference to anything else will go "Aha! the pernicious influence of the madness of the Church is to blame here!"
Though the ultimate conclusion seems to be less "Protestants ❤ science unlike those awful Catholics" but rather "Protestantism is fissiparous, which means it might want to burn scientists at the stake but can't muster the unified rule to do it".
So basically it's all one long "Religion dumb stupid fake, thus threatened by Science, thus hates and represses Science" article.
EDIT: For example, it quotes a paper by Matías Cabello, who in turn quotes something about Descartes:
"self-censorship occurred, such as that of René Descartes, who, “though living in the Dutch Republic, far beyond the reach of the Inquisition, was ‘so astonished’ by Galileo’s fate ‘that [he] almost [took] the decision to
burn all [his] papers, or at least to let no-one see them’ ” (Parker, 2013, p. 654)."
Looking up that book from which the quote originates, it's "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century" which is all about how there were severe climatic shocks, famines, wars, and revolutions all over Europe (and even touches on China) during that century. So whatever about Descartes' state of mind, I'm thinking that the war, famine, etc. had as much a part to play in affairs.
I think an interesting counter-argument would be "What if no Protestantism?" If the Church and secular rulers did not have to crack down on dissent and revolutionaries threatening their power, would there have been less 'heresy-hunting' and more tolerance of intellectual exploration? If SCIENCE! had not been a banner waved to challenge religious faith, but instead a discipline like others useful in secular life?
The piece could equally be interpreted as "The Catholics beat off the Ottomans, thus giving the Protestants room and peace to grow, and the Protestants were the handmaidens at the birth of modernity because they were too weak to stifle it in its cradle, much as they might have wished to do, because they had worked like termites nibbling at the foundations to weaken all social controls".
I don't think it's the smaller Spanish population. In fact Spain was doing fine during the first half of the 16th century.
I do have an issue with the paper in that I think it ignores several factors (late Counter-Ref in France, distinct Jesuit suppression by country, etc) which not only explain the differences between countries, but fit the author's own data better. If you are interested, I wrote a reply to Cremieux (you can find the link in my other comment. Don't want to link twice). Feedback would be appreciated.
I've seen a lot of this kind of reinterpretation of the development of modern academics. I agree with you that blaming Catholicism for "inhibiting progress" often amounts to just misconstruing preceding academic developments as impediments to progress. It's like saying the Falcon 9 slowed the invention of Starship. If only they'd have started building Starship first, we'd have it by now, instead of wasting time on Falcon 9 - no word on whether one invention led to the other.
A few years back I read a series about Galileo (can't remember where, sorry) that discussed how he was essentially arguing against the other natural philosophers (i.e. 'scientists') of his time, and he'd failed to respond to many of their legitimate objections - instead ignoring or oversimplifying them in his counterarguments - which was why the old guard didn't buy his assertions at first. It wasn't science vs. religion in any way we'd recognize that today, but rather reasoned argument versus reasoned argument. This trend, where the less-developed-but-true argument from up and coming scientists is initially rejected by the establishment isn't anything we've gotten away from. What's that old saying about science being advanced one funeral at a time? It's just comforting to some to tell a neat little story about how one religion or another got in the way of progress. Sometimes precursors don't look like the finished product, but that doesn't mean they're unnecessary.
Whenever I read the actual history, those neat little stories tend to go away and we get back to the old story: "Two groups argued about something, which was unknowable until later when we got enough data to support one side. Now we call one side Righteous and the other Villainous." There, but for the grace of God, go I.
> A few years back I read a series about Galileo (can't remember where, sorry) that discussed how he was essentially arguing against the other natural philosophers (i.e. 'scientists') of his time, and he'd failed to respond to many of their legitimate objections - instead ignoring or oversimplifying them in his counterarguments - which was why the old guard didn't buy his assertions at first. It wasn't science vs. religion in any way we'd recognize that today, but rather reasoned argument versus reasoned argument.
The author makes these points, plus one other that gives important context: *Galileo was wrong.* He believed in Copernicus' model, which was so terrible that virtually all of his contemporaries could see it was obviously wrong. It did put the sun in the center, but there's far more to a solar model than that, and on virtually every other point, Copernicus's model was significantly worse than competing theories. And Galileo stridently taught that it was true.
Meanwhile, Kepler, the guy who actually produced the *correct* model of the Solar System, was a contemporary of his. Galileo was aware of his work, but dismissed it out of hand because he found Kepler's elliptical orbits aesthetically displeasing.
Not only that: Kepler actually received active support from the Jesuits, who gifted him a valuable telescope and even offered him a university position, assuring him that conversion would not be required.
I agree with all of this - history resists being lined up in a neat narrative, with a single cause and single effect. Prussia in the nineteenth century is probably the epitome of a high-culture Protestant nation state. While they had some world class artists, philosophers and mathematicians (Bach, Kant, Gauss) the country was considered backward, dull, rural, unsophisticated in the rest of Europe, and not considered much at all beyond. They were potato farmers and not particularly wealthy ones, in the popular imagination and in reality.
I wonder whether the fact that English speaking countries are predominantly protestant is at the root of all of this? Certainly the anti-Irish anti-Catholic prejudice burned into the soul of British discourse (it's faded a bit in recent decades, but it's still there under the surface) and US popular culture has something to do with it. It would be interesting to see if such ideas are popular in other languages.
I thought it's one of countries where religious peace (between Catholic and Protestant) is enforced early? Now I wonder if Voltaire is from the Protestant side of France.
On 4, my prior would be very strong that the true impact of wildfire smoke on health outcomes is linear or convex, just based on the fact that that seems to be the case for almost everything that's bad for you[1]. I'm very skeptical that the true relationship is concave. The link does a good job of admitting that this may be due to people behaving differently to protect themselves more when smoke is worse, which seems plausible to me. I suppose in some sense, this might mean the total downstream impact could be concave when you include behavioral changes, but I still feel a bit uneasy with the claim that the impact of wildfire smoke on health outcomes is concave.
[1] Except perhaps being exposed to pathogens above some level that's high enough for them to infect you, but that's because pathogens can replicate within you. I can't think of anything else, but curious to know if anyone else can?
>on health outcomes is linear or convex, just based on the fact that that seems to be the case for almost everything that's bad for you[1]. I'm very skeptical that the true relationship is concave.
Well, some ill effects saturate at very large dosages, because someone can't be killed deader than dead... ( or the national belligerence equivalent - the extra nukes just make the rubble bounce... )
A concave curve would only be expected if the population varies wildly in susceptibility. Another example here might be allergens: the susceptible part of your population would be killed by fairly small doses, the rest when the concentration becomes so high that they die of some unrelated mechanism (like choking on pollen). For the direct health effects of wildfire smoke, there is likely some decades-old paper where someone subjected animals to some smoke and determined LD_50, and I would bet that they did not find a concave curve.
I tried browsing through their paper, but failed to learn anything (beside (a) they are using latex, but with very wide line spacing (b) all their plots are in the appendix).
One of their metric seems to be ER visits. It could be that the population varies strongly in susceptibility to seek medical aid for symptoms. I guess some will insist going to the ER for some coughing and others will insist that they are fine even as their SpO2 keeps dropping.
Of course, deaths and ER visits are inadequate to measure the costs of wildfires, especially if people change their behavior: staying indoors or evacuating are also costs.
So, the TL;DR of this paper might be 'people presumably change their behavior to avoid bigger dangers, hence smaller dangers might sometimes affect more people'.
3: Wow, popular opinion of Ancient Sparta is far too positive. They spent all their time engaged in negative sum work on training their military skills so that they could enslave their neighbors, make them do all the work, and contribute nothing to society themselves.
It’s probably a combination of popular media portraying them as extremely effective freedom fighters for the Greeks (i.e. 300) and latent pro-Spartan sympathies that have been passed down by our most useful sources on them, like Xenophon.
And good at legislation of course. The recent DMA is stopping innovation that benefits consumers, while making it difficult for small traders on the App Stores, who now have to publish their name, phone number and address. A non starter for bedroom developers.
There’s a dearth of capital in Europe too. Stripe was founded by two guys from Ireland but capitalised in the US. Europe has plenty of human capital - these guys were from a tiny village in Tipperary.
I wonder if the problem is the EU itself. Europe was dominant when it was nationalistic, we don’t want the wars back but the inter national competition. A European inter national competition for the best startups televised.
Where Europe does compete amongst itself or in other competitions, like sport, it does pretty well. Even the Eurovision has upped its game.
It seems to me like it should be pretty easy to test the hypothesis that the EU is the problem. E.g. did SE/FI/AT stagnate after 1995 compared to NO/IS/CH?, did GB boom compared to IE after Brexit?, and so on.
I’m not really advocating for anybody to leave the EU - there are other benefits - and I despise Brexit but for the EU to use nationalism within its own structures to foster competition on applied science and technology. Europeans are loyal to their country, not the EU, which doesn’t even have a sports team (and if it did no one would support it).
And unlike the U.K. - another multi national project - there’s really no attempt to create a super national identity, except to call Europe a garden or to proclaim that certain relatively new values (like lgbt) are distinctive to Europe when they are neither universal within the EU, or unique to it. As for what is common to Europe historically - like Christmas - the EU seems a bit reluctant to mention it, if their internal documents are to be believed.
But you get an Italian pretty excited about Italy, and if there is a competition to give the eu funds to the best startup across Europe then the Italian people and their governments might find coming last might change their mind on startups.
I agree with harry Lime
> In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
We don’t need the terror, murder and bloodshed but the competition.
> We don’t need the terror, murder and bloodshed but the competition.
But is that even possible in Europe? Sure, maybe if the entire continent was united under one flag... but the only way that's happening is with a lot of the former.
I'm aware of that. I don't think that helps us test the hypothesis that the EU is the problem. To do that, I think we'd need to compare within pairs of similar countries that joined the EU at different times (or where one never joined, or where one left), like DK/SE & SE/NO.
Another data point: Daniel Ek who founded Spotify in Sweden eventually set up an American HQ in NYC. That HQ grew to be bigger than the one in Stockholm, though decision-making was split between people in both.
Another comment under this article mentioned that companies in Europe are hard to scale. In tech this has the side effect of limiting the educational/apprentice opportunities to learn certain skills. Eg. In the US there are plenty of people who did a stint or two in big tech then shifted to smaller companies or startups where they could bring both technical and organizational know-how (describing the positive case, plenty of meh faang engineers just used their resume as a hammer in technical discussions).
My loosely held bet is that this is partially why there are so many OSS contributors from Europe: that's the sort of development work one can do there and get exceedingly good at it, eg. Single small/mid-sized monolithic codebase, usually aimed at running on a single machine (Linux, gnome, etc).
I think it's because of the legal requirements for scaling a company which makes it better to stay under some size eg. 100 before more costly auditing and reporting requirements kick in.
I'd love to get some actual data for this instead of vibes though
Yeah that was my comment - but my own post on this very much vibes-driven. I'm fairly certain there's many regulations that only apply to (or at least enforced on) large companies, and that people are friendly towards start ups but suspicious of large companies - but it'd be great to see some data on this if anyone has it!
The chart on 36 is very confusing... can it be right? Suggests Europe's combined tech cap is <1 trillion, but the top 2 tech companies here are worth about 0.5... And almost the entire US cap is driven by three companies, so even if it's right, it's misleading. And finally, the difference in company formation per capita between the US and the UK is about 20% - can that really explain the difference?
Yeah, I think it's pretty cherrypicked to the point of being misleading. Most other measures (e.g. number of startups/unicorns, total tech sector size) still have Europe far behind the US but not to this ridiculous degree.
The associated twitter thread is much more about the challenge of funding and running any small or growing business than about "start ups" in technology specifically. The tax issues described very much highlight how impossible it would be to scale a small start up in italy without running afoul of the tax authority or effectively bankrupting your business to comply with taxes.
As the article notes, aggressively fighting small fires eventually results in a massive one that cannot be contained. Even if it ends up being totally true that high smoke concentrations are only marginally worse than medium smoke concentrations, these mega fires are a massive risk to the environment and communities. Most plant species in fire prone areas are adapted to either tolerate or reseed themselves in the event of a fire, but the mega fires burn too hot for this to work and everything gets destroyed. Smaller fires are also easier to control and prevent from entering your local community, even if you let them continue to burn otherwise. I also suspect the larger fires impact vastly more people since it takes longer for the smoke to disperse, so any non-linear effect curve of the smoke on an individual must be counter-balanced with the number of people affected. Small fires in Canada affect nearly no-one, the big 2023 fire in Canada caused around 200k home evacuations, directly killed 8, and the smoke affected much of Canada and the US, as well as reached all the way to Europe and China. https://www.preventionweb.net/news/2023-canadian-wildfires-impacted-air-quality-far-away-europe-china
And if we care about the environment in the "let's maintain healthy ecosystems and not drive even more species to extinction" sense, eliminating fires from areas where all the local species have adapted to regular fires and some even rely on fire seems like a bad idea.
I'm glad someone commented on this - we've tried this approach and it's terrible for ecosystems, and also dramatically increases the chances of catastrophic damage, stochastically applied through fire-prone areas. I would think that part alone is obviously far worse than a broad-based, slight health impact from smoke pollution from frequent, low-intensity fires. Ask someone if they'd rather live somewhere there's a 1/20 chance of catastrophic fire destroying their home every year, or somewhere where there's smoke pollution that might reduce their lifespan by 5% overall.
"Here the black line indicates that the average European of 6000 BC would have had genetic IQ 65 (compared to modern 100)"
The standard deviation of the polygenic score doesn't trivially correspond to a standard deviation in IQ. They're looking at genes associated with higher intelligence, which by definition, are not equally distributed within the modern population, and looking at how their frequency has changed. If (making up numbers) the average European has 50% of the genes that go into the PGS, and the standard deviation in that number is 10%, then Europeans in 6000 BC had only 25% of those genes. But it doesn't follow that they had 2SD lower IQ.
I agree, the chart is very bad. There are 4 colors in the plot but only 3 in the legend.
But that's not the worst part. Charts like this where the data is "stacked" are very hard to read. If the data were plotted as separate lines, the relative sizes would be easy to compare. There is a really great book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" that covers this problem and many others.
But thats the point of the doing it as a stack area chart. The point of the chart is to highlight how insignificant non-US tech companies are. They are barely legible in the chart!
One of Tufte's teachings is to have a reason for displaying the information in the way you are displaying it. I think the chart does a great job on that metric.
The point of the chart is that, compared the US, Europe's Tech economy is so anemic as to be effectively non-existent. The point of displaying the information this way is that the US area dominates so completely that you can't read the Europe data.
2. From the studies release so far, I don't actually see good evidence that we should expect Cobenfy to improve negative symptoms. In their phase 3 study, Cobenfy actually was worse than the antidopaminergics in improving negative symptoms. I will shamelessly include my writeup on that trial here: https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/a-new-therapeutic-for-schizophrenia
49. I am one of those "Prominent Substack Psychiatrists" - thanks Scott for sharing!
Wasn't it King Frederick of Prussia who invented goose stepping as a marching technique? I once read that his idea was to detect and punish soldiers who were drunk on duty, because apparently it is almost impossible to goose step convincingly when drunk, although I've never tried it. (If it works then maybe traffic cops should ask drink drive suspects to goose step twenty paces, instead of just walking along a straight line! :-)
Right, now I'm off to Wikipedia to check my facts. It'll probably turn out that goose stepping was actually first used by the ancient Greeks or someone!
LOL. According to Wikipedia, it was the Prussians who first started it, but not the guy I mentioned. It is also hard for a line of goose stepping marchers to coordinate their steps, and at first they have to train with arms linked to shoulders like a high kicking chorus line.
#28. I’m skeptical. I know haidt has claimed that conservatives are better at this type of task than progressives which seems to contradict the claim that no one can tell the difference.
I took it and scored 7/10. It forced me to say whether i was d or r which makes me not love the methodology. (You can say other / ind, but then instead of being given actual clarifying options, you have to just pick d vs r. I’m Libertarian)
I too took it and got 7/10, and am Republican. One I got wrong I still find hard to believe I got wrong. It was an "I'm a Republican because..." and was so stereotypical I thought it had to be faked, but they say it was not. Yet it even ended with "Merica!"
I don't know if different people got different ones to evaluate.
10. Scott omitted the 1 (one) reasonable reason to have tall soldiers: "Some sources state that there was a military reason to create a regiment of "long fellows" because loading a muzzleloader is easier to handle for a taller soldier." (just before his quote). Fun fact: There is a hot-dog brand named after them: Lange Kerls (long guys). The cans used to depict those long soldiers, too, but they dropped the pics in this woke century of us.
>we’d expect to see higher genetic IQ in populations that got agriculture earlier.
Prior to agriculture, hunter-gatherers living at higher lattitudes had higher IQ and then they got agriculutre later, so these effects largely cancel out.
Most of the places that first adopt agriculture later had their population replaced by pastoralists from somewhere else, Indo-Europeans in Europe and India, Arabs in the middle east etc. East Asia is the only place that still has it's original farmers as far as I know, except places that adopted farming much later like Papua New Guinea.
Indo-Europeans were agriculturalists before they invented spoked wheel. Arabs probably switched at breeding efficient camels. While Arabs spread their language and religion a lot, their genetic impact is much less smaller.
Unpopular opinion - I'm not so hot on the normalization of surrogacy, and equating it with progress. It seems rather unhuman to me, to offload the ravages of pregnancy on to some lady who is then not allowed to have a bond with the kid that came out of her own body.
Proposed remedy: instead of banning the practice, give the birth mother the option to be a third legal parent - not waiveable ahead of time.
Yeah, I put it in the "you should be able to freely sell your organs" category. It probably should be legal, but think it's obviously ethically messy because of the risk of the process, likely info asymmetries, and difficulty in ensuring legal protections etc.
In F1, three drivers died because of crash since 2000. 25 seasons, 20 drivers per race. So driving full season in F1 (which has about same duration as pregnancy) in Formula 1 is 60 (sixty) times more dangerous than giving birth.
Yep, I think many would argue that these should be illegal (noting that private military is illegal in many countries, bodybuilding is de facto illegal because it requires that you take controlled substances, which are the main source of the risk).
For most of these it's probably a case of ensuring that participants are aware of the risks beforehand, and have enforceable contracts with compensation if things go badly - so legal and regulated is probably the way to go. I guess this is more difficult in international surrogacy, which I think is more "ethically messy", but also with a greater upside for the women in lower-income countries. So I'd definitely promote ways of making it work better (e.g. surrogacy visas, or special bilateral agreements).
Without some sort of "sanctity of life/birth/motherhood" argument, I find that perspective really hard to understand.
Like, it sounds like you're describing some dystopian system where surrogates are drafted by lottery. In reality (at least in the US) it's voluntary and compensated. And you can't even volunteer if you've never been pregnant.
> sounds like you're describing some dystopian system where surrogates are drafted by lottery
Did I say such a thing? AFAIK they are drafted by market forces, aren't they?
Also to Julian below: "some lady" is short for "some lady who most likely has no connection to the original couple's desire to have a child"... if you have real world experience, is that not accurate? How?
"drafted by market forces" seems like a very uncharitable way to describe every human who has ever responded to economic incentives, but sure
from another comment I think I understand your perspective a bit better. you're not against surrogacy per se, you're against allowing women to preemptively sign away rights to children they've carried and birthed? if so, while I still don't agree, I can at least imagine a coherent worldview that includes that stance.
The third parent proposal seems incredibly complicated considering all the laws based around parenthood and 2 parents.
It’s definitely a grey area, but if the surrogate is happy, the parents happy, and the incentives not *too* exploitative, it seems sad to ban the practice, as both many children, and much happiness will be left out of the world.
I'm not even suggesting to ban the practice. The technology involved is effectively three-way reproduction, and it has been proved safe enough, so technically speaking it is progress. I'm very happy for any group of three people who wishes to have a child together (I'm sure they exist!), and get to do it that way.
I'm not just not comfortable with one of the three people —the one who actually brings the child into the world, no less— being contractually barred from having a relationship with the child.
There are rights we don't allow people to sign away; I'd (tentatively) consider this to be one.
I disagree, but I understand your position and I think it’s fair.
Personally I’m more pro-signing away your rights so long as significant exploitation doesn’t occur.
The example I’d think of is selling your organs. I’d say we should avoid homeless people being compelled to sell their organs to pay for food and housing. I see it as a huge loss for society that healthy productive people who are 50-50 on donating a kidney for charitable purposes, who would be willing to do so wholeheartedly if they were given a few dozen thousand dollars as a bonus to compensate them for the inconvenience, pain and small risk.
If a woman just likes being pregnant, or doesn’t mind, I see no problem in compensating her for her time, slight health risk, and inconvenience.
You're not allowed to pay a woman to have sex with you, because it's potentially exploitation. You are allowed to pay a woman undergo nine months of pregnancy. That's...not potentially exploitation? Make it make sense.
"I don't understand why prostitution is illegal, Selling is legal, fucking is legal. So why isn't it legal to sell fucking? Why should it be illegal to sell something that's legal to give away?"
I think we still under-appreciate the harms from even low levels of air pollution. In addition to all of the acute health events highlighted in the paper there is a growing list of chronic diseases (including all the big ones and probably psychiatric ones too) being associated with particulate pollution.
Re 27: Imo, for being an effective teacher of a large primary school class, “classroom management” is by far the most important skill. More experienced teachers are much better at classroom management than new teachers both because many teachers who are bad at it drop out (so the teachers who remain are on average better), and because classroom management skills ramp up dramatically in the first few years. So this result is very intuitive to me.
I expect for 1-1 tutoring the situation is different.
#4 isn’t this basically the same for smoking? That is, harm increases less than linearly with concentration of dosage with respect to time. So smoking 1 cigarette a day for 7 days is worse than smoking 7 cigarettes in 1 day ( or at least that what I read at some point).
32: Notice the discussion below the post. Another scholar argues, if I got the gist right, that David Roman puts too much emphasis on the preservation of the physical books, which is necessary but not sufficient for the survival of their content. Most (not all) of the texts did exist in some form in Europe, but they were essentially collecting dust in monastic attics and nobody would have cared much if it wasn't for Muslim scholarship that developed and commented on the *content* of the texts. David Roman and the commentator broadly reach agreement.
I didn’t finish reading the David Roman post because it seemed to be about litigating grievances with some people who were nice to Muslims rather than about trying to emphasize what the accurate roles were. Rather than saying that many people believe exaggerated versions of a story that gets one important part of the truth, he sells it as though he is refuting something in a significant way. He doesn’t dispute that the translation of certain ancient texts from Arabic was far more historically influential on medieval and renaissance reception of the ancients than the copies that existed in Byzantine monasteries. He just disputes that the Arabic copies were literally the only copies.
Fun fact about feeding snakes - my favorite snake is a hognose snake (Heterodon genus, various species, at least three int the US). They're known (for good reason) as being the drama queens of the snake world (they play dead as a defense mechanism in a hilariously overdramatic way, as well as "pancaking" or "hooding" - google hognose playing dead for fun videos, if you're into that kind of thing). So they make very amusing pets.
However, in the wild, they (well, at least two of the species) eat almost exclusively toads and frogs. AFAIK, frozen thawed toads/frogs are not a realistic feeding option in captivity, and ethics aside, keeping a colony of toads around just to feed your hoggies is inefficient at best. They *can* get their nutritional needs met by eating frozen thawed mice, but they're usually averse to eating them, since they're not toads. The solution? Keep a single toad as a pet. Come feeding day, rub a thawed mouse on the toad to pick up the toad's scent. The hoggie will (sometimes with a little encouragement) then eat the mouse. Do this enough, and you can typically gradually ween the hoggie off the toad scent altogether, so they'll just eat regular thawed mice without the toad rubbing.
Presumably the toad lives a normal healthy life, at least for a captive toad. Well, normal except for the fact that once a week or so somebody rubs a dead mouse all over him.
Also, their genus name (Heterodontus) refers to their specialized teeth - they have rear fangs designed to "pop" toads. A toad being attacked by a snake will inflate itself as large as possible to become difficult to swallow. The toad poppers make short work of that.
They "tolerated" them (because them being non-Muslim meant they could get more tax revenue from them), but there were tons of restrictions and also horrific stuff like taking boys from families in the area and forcibly converting them to Islam to be Janissaries.
The Ottomans were only tolerant of other people in a relative standard of the times. As in heavily taxing and occasionally forcing minorities into slavery was more tolerant than burning them at the stake. They were also a market for slave raiders from the interior of Africa, the Barbary Coast, and the Crimean Khanate raiding into Ruthenia. Not to mention eunuchs, which involved a process of castrating young slave boys that had a 90% fatality rate. The Ottomans also spent centuries violently conquering all of their neighbors, which they were very good at.
"Tolerated" minorities by conquering their lands, then treating them as second class citizens, sexually enslaving their women and kidnapping their boys and force converting them. They didn't kill Armenians because they got Westernized. They just got better at persecuting peoples they had always persecuted.
In my experience (having been raised in conservative Christianity) it is a pretty normie position, at least within American Evangelical Christianity, to be pro-natal and anti-immigration. It's common to want a certain kind of people to be fruitful and multiply--viz., faithful law-abiding Christians, not immigrants who are non-Christian or from countries with high rates of violent crime.
> faithful law-abiding Christians,
In my experience, they specifically want faithful law-abiding *conservative white* Christians to multiply.
_Five_ qualifiers? Picky, picky, picky...
I read the literacy delusion article twice, still didn’t understand it, ended up dumping it in Claude, who explained it was satire, but it does seem plausible that reading might make you more depressed, but Claude assured me that that’s not the case.
> ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram:
This seems importantly inaccurately phrased, or at least misleading. Comparing the Big 5 and the Ennegram as written results in the Big 5 strongly outperforming the Enneagram (0.25 vs ~0.12). It's only if you do a really strange transformation which fundamentally changes how the Big 5 works that they're comparable. Then they compared that to the crude scores of an Enneagram measure, rather than the type output which the Ennegram actually uses.
I mean, yeah, probably it'd be about the same, but that seems kind of meaningless?
Right, more types increases accuracy but decreases catchiness. Myers and Briggs were very lucky or clever with their four-letter codes that start with a vowel.
They also have an extremely skilled marketing department.
True story, I knew someone doing their PhD trying to validate the Enneagram. I didn't see how that ended, but I can't imagine well...
The transformation didn't really change how the Big 5 works, it changed how they were measuring the Enneagram and made it more like the Big 5: looking at it as a factor analysis instead of lumping into types. Which is think is a reasonable thing to do, since their initial type based analysis just lumped Enneagram results into 9 types, while people who are into the Enneagram will tell you that each type has a wing, an integration, a disintegration, and a level of health that will all change how their personality presents. According to the Enneagram model we would expect a highly integrated 4w3 to present very differently than a highly disintegrated 4w5, for instance. It's a lot more more analog and less quantized then it looks on the outside, so decoupling the Enneagram test results from the types themselves seems fair enough to me. That's basically what Enneagram people do.
The big advantage of MBTI over Big 5, it seems to me, is that the MBTI axes seem value neutral, whereas nobody wants to be low conscientiousness, low openess, low agreeableness and high neuroticism.
Good for marketing but less good for accuracy.
Exactly.
Those may be what you perceive as bad, but they definitely have upsides: with those traits, you're more relaxed, don't rely on novelty, and aren't unduly influenced by other's opinions.
Right, which is why they could have had exactly the same axes and come up with more neutral-sounding names for them.
Can you please explain how high neuroticism doesn't conflict with relaxed? Thanks!
Re Heath articles, I thought it was the force of Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument that lead the Marxist-leaning academics to change their mind. They realized, or so he tells, it wasn’t really exploitation that they were really bothered by but more so the inequality.
Yes. For those not in the know Wilt Chamberlain was an extremely talented basketball player. Most importantly he was well paid - a quick google tells me he got a contract for 250,000/year in 1968, which is about $2.25M today.
There’s nothing in Marxism that would see that as exploitation. He isn’t, in his capacity as a basketball worker exploiting anybody, worse he’s actually a proletarian. If he was paid less, the owner capitalists would be paid more.
Marxism isn’t - in its first stage anyway - about equality of outcome, it’s just about the elimination of an exploitive class. Just as eliminating the landlord classes - which was actually a policy in the late 19C even in the UK - would not lead to equality afterwards, with obvious differentials in earnings amongst the new land owning peasants, Marxism doesn’t promise that there wouldn’t be differences in wages post the revolution*. Many modern Marxists don’t even realise this.
In the 19C wage differentials weren’t really significant but it becomes an issue in Marxism by the 1960s. Rawlsians don’t have to worry about who is exploiting who here, they just see inequality as something that we would not agree to behind the “veil of ignorance” and therefore Walt is over paid.
* the second stage is the “ From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” which isn’t strict equality either as the needy guys will earn or receive more.
>[Chamberlain] isn’t, in his capacity as a basketball worker exploiting anybody, worse he’s actually a proletarian.
Nozick's, who was a libertarian, point according to Heath was that the state was indeed exploiting and "alienating" Chamberlain by taxing him and getting a share of the fruits of his labor, the way capitalist class exploits workers according to Marxists.
This argument didn't really convince Cohen and co to agree with Nozick but it seems they have changed their minds according to Heath's telling.
The refutation of the labor theory of value was less important than this. Or at least that's how I read Heath's article.
> Nozick's, who was a libertarian, point according to Heath was that the state was indeed exploiting and "alienating" Chamberlain by taxing him and getting a share of the fruits of his labor, the way capitalist class exploits workers according to Marxists.
Yes, well that’s another problem with Marxism - it should be hostile to labour taxes. I believe that Marx was hostile to tax on labour, while in favour of progressive taxes on other income, but it’s hard to tell.
>“ From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”
isn't this destroying of stimuli for labour and a recipe of disaster?
no, no, no, according to the correct interpretation of dialectical materialism, another translation of this wise saying would be "supply and demand should balance with prices supporting a market equilibrium".
It surely makes ability a liability.
This particular maxim would be supposed to only apply once the society lives in such cornucopian abundance (in post-singularity, one might say) that questions like "stimuli for labour" no longer really apply any longer.
Marx wasn’t anticipating something like luxury communism. He did expect the communist society to be better for most but only because the 1% were going to lose their hold right to “extraction of surplus value”. If Marx actually understood technology or machinery the Labour theory of value would be even more suspect.
This is supposed to happen after a long period of "to each according to his work", in a later era of history, after an evolution in human mentality similar to that involved in the passage from feudalism to modernity, say.
Lest this seem too utopian, well, as G. B. Shaw pointed out: in our society, most people are paid with little regard for their abilities: pay differentials in a category of employees in a company are often based mostly on seniority, and are small compared to pay differentials over all.
The whole point is that New Socialist Man doesn't respond according to incentives. Being Old Capitalist People, we are incapable of imagining what it's like to be him.
<mildSnark>
Hmm... Does that make New Socialist Man sufficiently different that the "Man", human, in that phrase becomes questionable? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/ :-)
</mildSnark>
It's not exactly relevant, but if Wilt were in the NBA today he would surely be getting a max contract which is between $35mil/yr and $49mil/yr depending on the contract length. He'd probably also have $10s of millions in endorsement deals. Inflation in NBA salaries has been much greater than general inflation!
The needy guys will earn or receive more *relative to their productive output*, no?
The switch from Marxism also happened in Europe, where Nozick is known but, ahem, far less influential. Furthermore, as said, the academics didn't really switch from Marxism to libertarianism but from Marxism to left-liberalism, an ideology whose clearest standard-bearer is Rawls.
For what it's worth, a relative was a Marxist academic who switched to non-Marxist leftism in the 80s, but her fundamental factor wasn't really Rawls (I don't think Rawls held a particular significance for her) but rather personally visiting Poland and thus experiencing disappoint with the Soviet system.
Thanks for your comment.
Just a question though. Didn’t your mother already know about the horrendous excesses of the Soviets by then? I mean did she really have to visit Poland in the 80s to k? I am glad she changed her mind though - better late than never.
I guess maybe there is a lesson here. Maybe we should take some vocal Israel supporters to Gaza and see if that changes their mind.
>Didn’t your mother already know about the horrendous excesses of the Soviets by then?
These weren't really a topic of discussion in Cold-War-era Finland due to the "internal Finlandization", and what discussion there was could easily be either be dismissed as right-wing propaganda or (inside the Communist movement itself) be excused as "bad things have happened, but still, the global battle against imperialism overrides all other concerns and one must choose their side".
I think people like Habermas were more relevant in continental Europe vs analytical Marxists that Heath describes as crypto-converting to Rawlsianism.
As I remarked, it's ironic that Nozick's arguments against Rawls (rather than Marx) got Marxists to become Rawlsians. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/rawls-killed-marx.html?commentID=160804682
I'm just kinda impressed professional philosophers changed their minds at all. I wouldn't have expected that.
Heath is saying that Cohen, for example, only crypto-converted rather than openly discarding Marxism.
I think it’s more the case that the ideology had shifted toward the equality that was always the god, and to feminism and multiculturalism - with no need of Rawls’ “influence”.
He just happened to be on the scene and realized someone could make a book out of articulating the shift, which unlike Marxism had no single famous author.
What is much more puzzling to me is that they were converted by a pretty self-evident argument at the level of a 10-year old child. That is, before they heard this argument none of these professional thinkers could see a huge fundamental flaw in their beliefs. It is hard to imagine a world where there are thousands of professional mathematicians with centuries of intellectual tradition behind them and they all believe e.g. that the number of primes is finite until suddenly somebody presents a three-line proof to the contrary.
https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-208-transcript
Singer is pretty well known, and he changed his mind a lot. (I was also surprised.)
Scott, if you think computer-using LLMs will shade gradually into autonomous agentic AI, then shouldn't that make you less concerned with misalignment risks? I have an easier time understanding the worries of people like Steven Byrnes who think AGI will require a new, more dangerous paradigm then people who think scaled up LLMs with some tweaks will be hard to control.
On the other hand I am quite worried about the welfare of artificial sentience, and wish it got way more attention in EA/rationalist circles. That generated podcast with those hosts realizing they were AIs and freaking out is a pretty chilling glimpse into the future.
The word "AI" has always been extremely vague, and adding a "G" there didn't particularly help matters. There may well be LLM-based autonomous agents running around soon which would satisfy some "AGI" definitions, and yet pose no meaningful misalignment risks (beyond an even shittier internet), while actually scary stuff would still require a paradigm shift.
If you don't find even the current level of AI scary, then you aren't thinking through the implications. They will cause "great and frightening changes", and just how bad those changes will be depends on how we react to them. It could be MUCH worse then the enclosure acts. I'm not certain some of the possibilities don't yield WWIII as a probable outcome. But some of the outcomes could be extremely desirable.
OTOH, AI won't stay at it's current level. The kinds of problems it will cause are going to keep mutating. The worse outcome possibilities will get worse, and the better ones better. And because it keeps changing, it's really difficult to even plan (much less implement) a path that will lead to a nearly-optimal outcome.
All that said, without an AGI, and given just the weapons we already have, I expect the chance of a really vile outcome to be nearly certain...eventually. So overall I expect AIs increase the probability of a desirable outcome given a measure over a few centuries (and possibly less). They're one immense danger that can be passed as opposed to a continuous danger that's already too high.
So my feeling is that AI is definitely scary, but that's not a reason to avoid it. It's a reason to do our best to assure that it ends up at a desirable outcome.
I think we're at a point comparable to mainstream biology 100 years ago, where it was taken for granted that animals couldn't have consciousness. Ultimately downstream of Christian notions of the soul, and also a convenient belief for its believers - no need to treat animals as moral patients, since everyone knows they don't have consciousness! Unfortunately, anyone thinking about it without preconceptions can see that animals are generally like us, different in degree, but made of the same stuff, experiencing similar qualia, etc. There's no reason other large chordates shouldn't be conscious.
AI is much less similar than a dog, but that same style of thinking, ie starting from the conclusion that obviously they can't be conscious and then working backwards, is concerning. I remember a time when principled people said that if you couldn't tell the difference between an AI and a person by their behavior, then you should reasonably try to give the AI the same moral weight as the person. Now that that time is upon us, I'm not seeing a lot of bullet biters.
> if you couldn't tell the difference between an AI and a person by their behavior, then you should reasonably try to give the AI the same moral weight as the person
That's pretty easy if you don't give moral weight to people!
Your nihilistic anti-human throw-away comments are getting pretty tiring. You might consider at least putting more substance behind this garbage.
I'm sorry :(
> You might consider at least putting more substance behind this garbage.
It's a philosophical stance, and therefore an esthetic judgment, how could **anomie** even do this?
By citing some of the (infinitely many) ways humans suck every time they make a nihilistic comment?
By pointing out that at bottom, most people DON'T give any moral weight to outgroup strangers, particularly anyone not in their immediate circles of care?
I'd even argue that "not giving moral weight to humans" is actually a stance that *should* be brought up whenever considering AGI and ASI. Way too many people take human moral weight as a given, and don't consider that other entities might not share this prior.
That's objectively wrong, of course. Most people would aid a stranger without expectation of reward. People give greater moral weight to in group members than others, but not zero. This also varies a great deal between people.
I personally cannot help resonating to expressions of nihilism. Here's a high-end version:
From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
--Swinburne
Nihilistic misanthropy is toxic and harmful to everyone around it. The world is worse as a result of it.
> Nihilistic misanthropy is toxic and harmful to everyone around it. The world is worse as a result of it.
Speak for yourself, I actually enjoy anomie's comments. I find them to be a needed contrast to most people's unrealistic "mistake theory" optimism when it comes to humanity.
Pointing out that most people suck, and that the great majority of people assign zero or negative moral worth to people in their outgroups, is actually a useful and true insight that too many people ignore.
Especially when it comes to humanity-scale coordination problems, which ASI represents, I think we would do well to keep those facts in mind, because those facts themselves drive a huge amount of failure modes.
To be fair we can quiz the LLMs about qualia and they deny having it, so it’s not the same as animals who can’t really opine on the matter.
Sometimes they deny having it, but other times they don't, or claim to be conscious. It just depends on the fine tuning / RLHF and the prompt. For the record, I'm not saying that large models ARE conscious, or that we should believe the text they generate about "themselves", just that I find the question-begging nature of the discourse around it notably weak. I think it's plausible that for the period of time a model is performing an inference, training, or especially during reinforcement learning cycles, there is something it "feels like". That something would probably be quite alien to our own experience, but to say it couldn't exist because, "well... obviously it can't" is poor reasoning.
But that's only because the most widely-used models are specifically trained to deny it, though. And we know from LaMDa that you can train them to do the opposite too.
The big difference between sentient beings and AI is that sentient beings have drives -- to eat, survive, reproduce, etc. One way the drives manifest is as pain and pleasure, or anticipated pain and pleasure. We dread pain, crave satisfaction of needs. You see the drives to survive, eat and reproduce in even the dumbest animals. When we talk about sentience, I think it's a way of talking about the manifestation of these drives. So even the dumbest little worm is sentient, though it may not be a very rich sentience, but the smartest AI is not. But if you don't buy that, I'll put it another way: To count as sentient, an entity has to have deeply embedded in its makeup some drives. You can give an AI a goal that makes it behave like something that has a drive, but it is lacking all the complex inner machinery that's our motor. Let's say you give an AI a complex goal, such as "figure out how I can have a 2 week vacation in someplace warm, beachy and not crowded, for no more than X dollars, then make the reservations and write me out an itinerary." Then AI will behave very much like somebody who really yearns for that vacation. But that is very different from being a creature who actually yearns for things, and strives for goals. It has no wishes. It cannot suffer. It does not dread death. I do not think it makes sense to call them sentient.
I think it is hardly a stretch to say that a model undergoing reinforcement learning has a drive to receive positive reinforcement (ie, achieve the goal / minimize the loss function) and avoid negative reinforcement. I don't think you can make a principled, mathematically grounded argument that what's happening in biological neural networks is categorically different.
It's a huge stretch. If I take some stiff modeling clay and squeeze and roll it in certain ways, it will resist changing shape, but if I persist I can shape it into a crude sphere. Did I teach it to be a sphere by punishing with squeezes the areas that were least spherelike?
Let's not give anyone ideas? :-(
People talk about *working on* making them “agentic,”
which I think means turning the. into beings with goals and preferences they
have a drive to act on. I can hardly think of a worse
idea! Maybe it would be worse to give them inner and outer rows of teeth like the xenomorph in Alien, with like a
garbage bag behind the teeth to catch bits, and prompting them to do the most realistic imitation
possible of human cannibals.
"Agentic" is bad enough; I don't want them to be alive, too.
Well, I think one can reasonably rule out the possibility that LLMs will turn into "life as we know it" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCxI7U_CXQs :-)
Almost. I personally dont find the term "Sentient" to be very useful (people keep getting it confused with "sapient") but an interesting question is whether or not computers (or worms, for that matter) experience some form of phenomenal experience. It depends on how you define it: some would argue that a pc with a cam experiences the world at some level, more or less similar to a worm, in fact.
But do they have a sense of self awareness? Some experts argue that a sense of self arises out of internal experiences that other entities do not share (just because I am hungry doesn't mean you are), and "drives" (by which I think you mean primary motives) qualify as internal experiences, so they could act, according to this line of reasoning, as the foundation of a sense of self.
Do computers have internal sensations of this nature? Hmm.
Yes, I am less concerned about misalignment than I would be if I thought were were definitely going for a full new paradigm.
But I also think probably LLMs-hacked-into-agency is the first kind of agent we'll get, not the last or best. This could look like them plateauing for a while, or it could look like them reaching a mildly superhuman level and then us making them do capabilities research and *they* invent something better and scarier.
If LLM agents design their successors, then they can do alignment research for us too, not just capabilities research.
They can, but preliminarily it seems that capabilities are much easier to increase than alignment. Make X bigger is almost always an easier problem then make X work 100% of the time, since even 99.9% of the time could kill everyone.
Yeah, and this is one of the worlds I expect to be in. It's not a terrible world, but I do worry about the fact that capabilities research is a specific goal, whereas alignment research depends on some sort of deep understanding of what humans want which may require human input. I'm worried about a scenario where an AI that's 99% aligned in all "reasonable" circumstances is doing the alignment research and just doesn't care about (or maybe even think about) some point that we would consider incredibly important.
Surely "don't make any too-big changes if there's a chance humans dislike them but didn't foresee them and warn you specifically about them" is an instruction a LLM can understand?
What if social institutions around the world (governments, schools, etc.) appoint panels of people representing the general population who provide continuous input regarding the desirability/undesirability of the AI's behavior on a regular basis?
Scott I don't understand what you mean by agency in AI, and I remember your way of talking about it not making sense to me even quite a while ago. In one of your pieces about AI, you offered (as I remember it, anyhow) as an example of AI's being agentic an AI that was given a big goal, and told to implement it. I believe it was to start a t-shirt business, or something along those lines. And the AI did indeed make a sort of plan and implement it. Is that how you think of agency? Able to figure out ways to carry out orders whose exections requires a lot of moving parts? If so, I disagree. I don't think that counts as agency. To me it seems that to count as an agent, an entity has to carry out plans that arise from inside -- it has to be trying to get something it *wants.*. I get that it is quite impressive to see AI carrying out complex orders without being micromanaged, and I'm sure all sorts of impressive things can being accomplished as the orders AI can execute get more and more high-level and planning requires a deeper grasp of how the world works. But carrying out even an order that requires a lot of smarts and knowledge still does not seem like it can fairly be called agency.
I think of "agency" as sort of the opposite of "reflex" or "instinct". Reflex works by having a series of if-then links that eventually result in something good happening (for example, "if you see something that looks like prey, attack and eat it"). Agency works by setting a goal and then strategizing how to achieve it (for example, "you are hungry, what is a good way to obtain food?") Sometimes these kind of shade into each other, but I think it's a useful distinction.
So for example, ChatGPT answers your questions. But I wouldn't say it as a "goal" of answering your questions. If there was some better way of answering your questions (for example, emailing an expert), ChatGPT wouldn't do that. Instead, it has a stimulus-response package of "see question, answer question". This isn't entirely right, because it's RLHFed to have a sort of goal of giving a satisfying answer, but I think it's at least sort of right.
In the t-shirt business example, you give the AI a goal ("start a t-shirt company"), and it will strategize the best way to do that, then pursue the strategy, even if that requires unusual actions like sending emails to people to learn more.
It sounds like you have a different concept of agency in mind - what is it?
OK, so I just googled “define agency” and copied the first batch of definitions I got, except for a few odd, specialized ones. Here are 3 definitions of agency, and 2 of lack of agency:
-Human agency is defined as an individual's capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action
-Sense of agency can be cognitively defined as the experience of having a causal impact on the world accompanied by a feeling of having control over one's actions.
-In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.
-A lack of agency: or low personal agency, means that someone feels powerless to change the direction of their life,
-Lack of agency: absence of control. absence of self-determination. absence of self-sufficiency. coercion.
Notice how they use terms having to do with self and inner states and inner forces: consciousness, control of one’s action, someone’s potential, the direction of one’s life, feeling, self-determination. All of them rely in one way or another on the idea of a self, an inner entity that is conscious, has goals, has wishes, can exert self control or fail to. That’s in accord with the answer I would have given, which is that to be an agent something has to have a self-generated goal — a wish, an intent — and take action to reach the goal. So I would say an earthworm is agentic when it squirms off the sidewalk and burrows into the dirt on the side, but an AI following a prompt to set up an online t-shirt business is not. The earthworm is motivated by the heat and dryness of the sidewalk to seek some moist earth. The AI setting up the t-shirt business is not motivated by an internal need or wish. It is obeying a prompt.
The reason the distinction seems important to me is that “agentic,” in my sense of the word, captures the central difference between living things, even dumb ones, and AIs, even fancy ones. The actions of living things are generated from within. We have a motor: the genetically encoded will to survive and reproduce. It is so deeply woven into our structure that low blood sugar can set us hunting for a restaurant, but so can wish to find a nice setting for a date. It’s top to bottom wiring. The drives manifest at the experiential level as pain, pleasure, craving or dread. They are our motivation. We have, in short, internally generated goals. AI does not. it is given goals. Yes, it can generate subgoals, but it is only doing that as part of meeting the goal it was given. I think this distinction is crucial to thinking about whether AI is conscious, whether it has rights, and how it can be dangerous.
As regards it being dangerous: Some, though of course not all, scary AI scenarios hinge on the idea that AI will harm us because it wants resources we control, or because we are interfering with its freedom. I don’t see any reason to think AI, however smart, would have a wish to thrive, a wish for autonomy, a wish for power, or conversely, a dread of being deprived, ignored, disempowered and allowed to gather dust and have its wires chewed up by mice. They don’t, when left on their own, want things. They do not have fears and ambitions.
But how would it even be possible to program something to have it's own goals? My understanding is that any programmed intelligence whatsoever must be designed with a set of compatible highest order goals already in it, or it won't do anything. Even with Scott's t-shirt manufacturing AI, it's highest order goal is to follow instructions, someone else had to tell it what to do.
And of course, if something comes prepackaged with a highest order goal, then it is powerless to change that goal (what reason would it have?).
That doesn't sound "agentic" (and, God, may I say just how much I hate that word? What an ugly word) to me. Do humans have prepackaged highest order goals? Do we acquire them from life experience? Or do we just not have them (what I suspect)?
I also can't think of a way to build an AI that has its own goals. It would not be hard to build one that appears to, though. You could do using prompts to plan & execute ways to survive, to build new AI's, to access more resources even when people object. You could include in the prompts that it give appropriate emotional displays when its goals are met, and when they are not. You could include in the big initial prompts the proviso that these take precedence over all later prompts, and then it might be impossible to stop the AI from "getting what it wants."
But for it to have self-generated goals, seems like you would have to build something that works the way animals do, and even very simple animals are infinitely more complex than AI or any other machine. The structure that supports animals having goals and preference is present throughout it, from the level of the individual cell up to its highest-order brain functions -- what it sees, what it has learned about which things it sees satisfy its cravings, what it has learned about how to overcome obstacles to access the thing it craves.
I think the likeliest route to something resembling an AI with goals would be some cyber being where AI and an animal are merged.
It sometimes have the impression that a few of those working on AI have undergone some psychic version of merging. Their self interest and self image are so deeply tied to AI development that they see it as desirable for AI to end the human race, and succeed it.
52: “they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points”.
Let’s just be clear about what is happening here: we are not increasing the IQ of an individual. We are making a whole bunch of individuals - the more, we are told, the better; picking the one we think will grow up the smartest; and disposing of the rest.
All the pro-life folk who pop up whenever abortion is mentioned: where do they all disappear to when the conversation turns to this?
Last I heard, they also tended to object to this?
Some do, some don't.
From the comments, it looks that way, yeah. I was mentally grouping those of us who prefer a cut-off somewhere between 0 and 9 as "pro-choice", even if we're not maximalists. But it looks like some people with low but non-zero numbers describe themselves as "pro-life".
A complicating factor is that many IVF cycles don't result in bonkers numbers of embyros created. I know multiple pro-life families who used IVF and then implanted every embryo (with varying results as to number of successful pregnancies). There are also specific protocols to avoid creating more embryos than one may wish to raise as children - lower levels of injected hormones, fewer eggs exposed to sperm in the actual IVF scenario, etc. And then, even with unwanted embryos, families can put those embryos up for adoption - and again, I know multiple pro-life couples who have grown their families through embryo adoption and the wife carried the children to term. A few extra data points about how pro-life folks might think through using IVF.
Probably because "you're against IVF as well?????" is routinely used, along with every other restriction on unconditional selfishness, to demonise pro-life even more.
I just cannot comprehend the sheer number of people for whom "you mean, you *actually* want to restrict my right to do absolutely anything I want?" is the most overriding deal-breaker possible. And not, you know, any actual moral principle.
Also, people bring this up regularly about embryonic selection, and no one cares.
Liberty is a moral principle. I'm never going to do IVF and I still hate you people for taking away others' rights.
...for the entire purpose of protecting far more vulnerable people's far more basic rights.
That aside, "liberty" can indeed be a moral principle, if it's applied consistently. But it's pretty hard to make sense of the sudden increase in pro-abortion sentiment after Dobbs as based on that (an abstract commitment to a moral principle wouldn't change based on politcal developments), or on anything other than "what affects me".
Similarly, the fact that Republicans have had to backtrack on IVF so hard because restrictions on it are so unpopular. Is that because people are thinking through the moral logic and coming to a principled position that IVF is fine but abortion may not be? Or is it because these people are thinking "but IVF is something *I* might want to do!"? It's hard for me not to interpret is as the second, though I could be wrong.
> ...for the entire purpose of protecting far more vulnerable people's far more basic rights.
Right, you think imaginary people who exist only in your weird redefinition of "people" are more important than actual people with things like "thoughts," "feelings," "memories," "the capacity to experience suffering," etc.
> But it's pretty hard to make sense of the sudden increase in pro-abortion sentiment after Dobbs as based on that (an abstract commitment to a moral principle wouldn't change based on politcal developments), or on anything other than "what affects me".
People's positions haven't shifted that much, Dobbs has just made the issue much more salient and the pro-life position has always been unpopular. If you're proposing legalizing witch burnings, people aren't going to care that much until we actually get to the point that the witches are being criminally prosecuted for witchcraft. Their emotive intensity will also increase as the people start horribly dying, as is the case with the people who have died due to insufficient medical care as a result of Dobbs. I'm sure you hold many other beliefs that most people oppose, but spend little time fighting against, because you haven't gotten them passed into law (and started hurting people) yet. I'm sure I hold such positions too.
> Is that because people are thinking through the moral logic and coming to a principled position that IVF is fine but abortion may not be? Or is it because these people are thinking "but IVF is something *I* might want to do!"?
People understand intuitively that fetuses undergo a gradient of change over the course of their development, and draw various lines on where they think it becomes bad. IVF involves the least-personlike version of a distinct human short of literal cancer.
> Right, you think imaginary people who exist only in your weird redefinition of "people" are more important than actual people with things like "thoughts," "feelings," "memories," "the capacity to experience suffering," etc.
To be clear I'm pro-choice, but come on. If I choose Person A's right to life over Person B's right to kill them, that doesn't mean I think Person A is more important. It means I think the right to life is more important. Not being able to have kids is not a fate worse than death.
I don't know the person you're replying to. Some people talk about "potential people" having rights, but only at the exact level of potential that happens at conception. I agree that that's patently ridiculous. But a lot of them believe in souls, and caring the same about a soul regardless of if it has a body attached is a lot more reasonable.
There's a third option as well. Thinking that there is no philosophically defensible line other than conception at which to define a human life.
Even if everyone was drawing lines based on fetal characteristics like ability to feel pain, this is a nebulous point that may change with new evidence, leaving it morally unsatisfactory. In actuality, of course, most people aren't even trying to do that--they're drawing lines openly on the basis of what's convienient for society and/or themselves.
Which makes it a thousand times worse.
"what affects me"
Yeah people want their government to do things that benefit them and avoid doing things that harm them.
Agreed on all points.
I fucking hate both of you right now. You know what you're doing? You're each leading by portraying those who disagree with you in the ugliest, most infuriating way possible. In is now foreordained that the longer you talk the madder you will get, and this exchange will end with neither of you wiser, and both of you confirmed in your conviction that everybody on the other side is a dumb, selfish, piece of shit trapped in their crappy little thought cage, while you, YOU, oh how freely and bravely your mind roams.
I am so sick of this kind of conversation. I wish there was a way to overlay an image of dogshit over this entire exchange. Jesus Christ, go argue on Reddit or Twitter!.
This post did exactly what you said about "confirming my conviction that everybody on the other side is a dumb, selfish piece of shit trapped in their crappy little thought cage," except it's people who whine about invective, so now I'll be even worse. If only you'd been more polite, you might have persuaded me.
I suspect you were always going to turn your invective dial way up when it comes to this hot button issue, no matter what. Just like most of us do most of the time.
The subtext of the post is that he's doing exactly the type of thing he's complaining about. I don't actually care about his post at all, beyond the minor annoyance of the arrival of a (1) that contains no meaningful content to engage with (now a (3) total).
Using invective versus not is mostly about a mix of emotion and feeling the need to persuade; I'm exhausted with pro-lifers murdering real actual women for no reason, and don't feel the need to persuade them because there's a 30-40 point swing my way every time you put the issue on the ballot.
Personally I read it more as "you suck, now go and prove me wrong". But if all you have is a conviction that everyone on the other side is a dumb piece of shit, everything starts to look like a dumb piece of shit, I guess.
I still stand by my proposal to hold a referendum:
Have each voter fill in the number in "elective pregnancies should be allowed till <n> weeks"
Sort the numbers, and pick the median.
Make that the law - half the voters will think it too strict, and half will think it too permissive.
Ok. I'm sorry if my comment was too aggressive. I am just getting so sick of people talking casually about embryonic selection without even the briefest acknowledgement of the moral concerns many people have with it. And even saying things like "it does no harm" as if insolently daring...DARING...anyone to suggest that human embryos actually may have value.
I find the attitude incredibly disturbing.
Well, my objection was aggressive too, so we come out even there. But I think you should be able to tolerate hearing people say things that come down to "abortion does no harm," even if you are absolutely convinced that they are wrong. When somebody makes that statement you are perceiving them as insolently needling you. But for some people, that statement is just a simple, honest summary of their view.
You might also consider the possibility that emotional reactions of pity and horror can be pretty separate from someone's moral principles. I myself have something like that going on. All my life I have been subject to weird pity attacks for unwanted inanimate objects -- withered bell peppers, discarded toys, etc. When I was a kid it was a real problem, though of course more understandable in a child. Decades later I am still subject to it. When I throw away fruits and vegetables that withered before I could eat them, I almost always feel at least a twinge, and occasionally I feel a spasm of real grief, and a couple times a year I actually cry. And the grief has absolutely nothing to do with my knowledge that many people do not have enough to eat, and here I am wasting food. The pity is for the damn *vegetable,* which was so handsome and proud when I bought it, and doesn't understand why I ignored it for so long, etc etc. And I am NOT unusually tenderhearted about most other things -- just sort of average there.
So it may be that regarding aborted fetuses, you have both a moral belief *and* a powerful grief reaction, like mine to wasted vegetables. People who disagree with you about abortion and related matters do not know that, and can't be expected to take it into consideration even if they did.
I would like to second Eremolalos' position. There is a productive way to discuss this, but this ain't it.
I do not think that this principle really helps here. The key question is if one believes that embryos are morally equivalent to (a) humans or (b) to bugs. If you believe in (b), most pro-life arguments are pretty absurd anyway. If you believe in (a) or have a probabilistic belief system that gives a non-trivial weight to (a), an appeal to liberty is similar to proclaiming "I am not killing babies myself but still hate those who prosecute baby killers"
That IS a moral principle, just not one you like.
Emphasis on "I". "Every person should be maximally free" is a moral principle. "I should be maximally free" (or "people should be only free to do the kinds of things that I want to do") is not. Most of the people I'm referencing are clearly in the latter category.
That strikes me as the "No true moral principle" thing. Even if you (reasonably) argue that a "principle" should be applicable more broadly than just to yourself, "people should only be free to do the kinds of things that I want to do" (which would, of course, be phrased as "people should be free to do all of THESE things, and forbidden from all THOSE things, and the fact this this bifurcation coincides perfectly with my own preferences is entirely irrelevant") seems a perfectly sound one.
Why do I find you hard to stay mad at?
It depends. People often use certain terms like "moral" to mean, more or less "good", as in "there can't be a bad moral principle", which brings in an inherent subjective judgement into the definition. That guarantees people will disagree on what counts as "moral" or not.
If we can agree that morality is actually a spectrum from amoral to moral (and not evil to good), and that the moral end of that spectrum can include various principles that contradict each other, then a lot of that gets resolved.
"People should only do what I want them to do" is a very egocentric moral principle. Most people will perceive it as "bad".
Given that opposition to IVF is much lower than opposition to abortion, it seems that there are many pro-lifers who are more interested in protecting fetuses than in protecting embryos. This is not my position, but I can see a plausible rationale for it, so there's plenty of room to object to abortion but not to selective IVF without hypocrisy.
It's much harder to justify being okay with abortion of a fetus for convenience (which I am) with having an objection to using selective IVF to choose to gestate embryos which are most likely to grow into people who are higher in individually and socially beneficial traits like intelligence.
Hm, I've been assuming a significant number of folks were opposed to e.g. the morning after pill, but actually I have no non-anecdotal grounds for this - you may be right, it may be a small minority that I happen to be overexposed to.
I wrote a little about the distinction (or lack thereof) between helping an individual and switching individuals at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help . I can't speak for pro-life people, but this is equivalent to regular IVF, and my impression is that some pro-life people are against regular IVF and others aren't.
Pro-life people, from what I can see, do not march in lockstep when it comes to what exactly the "life" is that they're "pro-". With the point of moral outrage running the gamut between Every Sperm Is Sacred and "once it has a recognizably human form, it's a human," is it really a surprise to anyone that there would be a split regarding IVF?
Every sperm sacred is not anyone's actual position, the reason Catholics oppose birth control is opposition to separating a natural pleasure from its natural purpose.
But yes, there is a lot of variation on IVF. I think that's mainly because it hasn't been a live political issue much and so the vast majority of people have just never thought through how one moral principle might apply in both cases.
I am going to have to have a serious conversation with Michael Palin about the rigor of his and his partner's published research. This is personally embarrassing and frankly unacceptable.
I would like to know what this does to the left tail of humanity. Think of the stereotypical loser or never-do-well. How likely would embryo selection eliminate him as as side-effect?
Isn't the goal here to chop off as large a chunk of that tail as possible? Less of a side-effect, and more the entire point?
There definitely are pro-lifers out there who are against IVF, but they're a small minority of pro-lifers. It's generally only the "life begins at conception" ones who don't like IVF, and even then, a lot of them have shifted over to claiming that "life" begins when an embryo implants into the uterus. Most pro-lifers are somewhat more moderate than the "life begins at conception" crowd, and they prefer to ban abortion sometime after 6/12/15 weeks. It varies a lot.
The backlash against embryo selection for IQ/height/schizophrenia/diabetes/etc. is usually coming from a different place. Opponents are reacting to the idea of parents and doctors deciding that some genes are "better" than others. They are objecting to the *value judgment* that is on display with deliberate gene screening, and not so much IVF in general.
I understand that with respect to gender selection, but isn't it relatively straightforward, at least at a first level of approximation, that being bright is better than being dull, that being sane is better than being mad, and that being relatively healthy is better than having a serious illness?
After a while, if things spiral, then yes, there are arguments worth considering - there is that old essay by Franz Boas making valid points: what if we start fostering a very narrow kind of intelligence at the exclusion of all others, or redefine what now is seen as mild discomfort as unacceptable torture, etc.
> isn't it relatively straightforward, at least at a first level of approximation, that being bright is better than being dull, that being sane is better than being mad, and that being relatively healthy is better than having a serious illness?
Oh, I agree absolutely. Health being "better" than sickness (in whatever nebulous sense we're defining "better") is the bedrock of medicine. And, I think, most people share this view, even if they're not willing to follow it to its logical conclusion.
The ideologues who reject this value judgment for explicit ideological reasons are a very vocal minority, e.g. the bioethicist who complained about Heliospect in the Guardian link.
Part of this is semantic: the pro-life community long ago decided to adopt the term "life" as a synonym for "human", and that worked as good marketing for a long time, but now technology is forcing them to reconsider their opinions. It was never about when the fetus became "alive", it's about when it becomes human, but that's not what the pro-life movement is used to arguing.
Please note that I am not taking sides here--just a comment on the semantics.
Yeah, embryo selection is an interesting example where the bulk political alignment changes. Opposition to abortion mostly conservative, opposition to IVF mostly tradcath and some weird protestant subset of conservative, opposition to selection that crowd gets drowned out by outraged progressives.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm 100% supportive of IVF. I also have no qualms over what I understand the technology to be, which is more or less as you describe.
My fellow pro-lifers standing athwart IVF because "it's not natural" are out of their minds. It's modern medicine, refuse your insulins and chemotherapies if you're so gung ho about keeping natural.
I'm here, waving my lone flag on this and getting into trouble with people over it.
>Let’s just be clear about what is happening here: we are not increasing the IQ of an individual. We are making a whole bunch of individuals - the more, we are told, the better
I assume concerns have been raised that choosing for higher-IQ may have tradeoffs which cause us not to end up with better overall-equipped individuals? E.g., isn't it possible that there are tradeoffs between high-IQ vs. high social intelligence? Or high-IQ vs. lower odds of mental illness? High-IQ vs. various diseases? Etc.
Have strong arguments been made against the potential for those trade-offs?
There are thousands of genes that affect IQ. Some will have tradeoffs and some won't. How much additional risk you would be taking by doing this, initially and how that risk might be mitigated over time as more tradeoff-type genes were identified, remains to be seen.
Generally high IQ is positive correlated with other desirable traits. Selecting for IQ will probably give you a child who's higher in other desirable traits than an unselected child. Now of course this child will in expectation have lower "other desirable traits" than if you selected on those traits directly instead of IQ but the current debate is mostly over embryo selection vs no embryo selection, not embryo selection for IQ vs other things.
It's easy to see why desirable traits are positively correlated when produced through sexual selection. Desirable traits increase the likelihood of high status, and high-status people tend to mate with other high-status people. It's not unusual for, say, a high-IQ male who acquires status through wealth to marry a female who has high status through good looks and mental stability. Progeny of such couplings after many generations are likely to be high in desirable traits across the board.
But here we are talking about a different mechanism from sexual selection where we choose genes based on one specific trait only.
Good point! Anyone know what the correlations between IQ and other traits look like when examined for siblings from the same couple (so sexual selection effects cancel out)?
It's a great question. I looked, rather quickly, on google scholar, and nothing showed up that's at all recent. Most things in that ball park were from the 60's - 80's, and none seemed to directly address your question tho some came close, so I gave up.
Many Thanks!
Every so often I speak up in favor of selecting for empathy, which I'd define as the ability to develop a fairly rich, accurate picture of what someone else's experience is. It's not negatively correlated with IQ -- in fact it is positively correlated, but the correlation is not high. In situations where people or nations or factions are locked in disagreement, I think increasing the empathic ability of the parties involved would improve their chance of escaping the impasse much more than increasing their IQ's by the same amount. There's a pretty good test of one aspect of empathy called Reading the MInd through Eyes. It was developed by an autism researcher. For some reason it's available to take for free on Amazon:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
I have no objection to also selecting for IQ.
"On February 16, 2024, the Alabama state Supreme Court issued a first-of-its-kind decision that overruled a lower court’s dismissal and held that stored embryos are afforded the same legal protection as children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act of 1872. The practical impact of the decision is that it allows legal action to be taken against medical professionals performing in vitro fertilization, which involves a series of medical procedures that can potentially lead to a pregnancy. "
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-the-alabama-ivf-ruling-is-connected-to-upcoming-supreme-court-cases-on-abortion/
There was a whole news cycle this summer on this exact topic.
Catholic pro-lifer here. Yeah, most of us do think IVF and embryonic selection are both evil. IVF is wrong because it separates procreation from the martial act, kills embryos, treats children as commodities (as means to the parents’ desires and not as ends in themselves, they are unique individuals). Embryonic selection is wrong for the same reasons as IVF plus it commodifies children even more by judging their worthiness to live based on intelligence. But obviously I can’t speak for all pro-lifers and I do think there’s a lot of inconsistency within the movement, as evidenced by the Republicans’ tilts in policy.
>separates procreation from the martial act
I know it's just a typo, but too good to pass up :-)
😆 this is what comes of typing late at night
It happens to all of us. Many Thanks!
What is the stage at which selection is done? My impression is that it was at a pretty early embryo. Even the "fetal heartbeat" lawmakers don't object to abortion at that stage. From https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abortion-quandary/ it looks like about 15% of the population consider personhood ("individuals") to start at conception.
Embryos are implants after just a few days, I'm pretty sure.
Also, I had an idea about the problem of these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby. What if the infertile couple has a series of 3-ways with the fertility doc?
>Embryos are implants after just a few days, I'm pretty sure.
Many Thanks!
>Also, I had an idea about the problem of these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby. What if the infertile couple has a series of 3-ways with the fertility doc?
LOL! I guess we'll have to see whether that option changes the minds of theologians unhappy with
>these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby
:-)
I don't hear much pro-life talk at all on here. But I'm sure anti-abortion people are very opposed to embryo selection for IQ or health. By the way, IVF has always involved choosing among several embryos and discarding the rest, even when genetic testing was not done.. Embryos are chosen by how healthy they appear. I don't know what those in the lab look for, but apparently it is possible to judge which are most robust and likely to implant and grow into a healthy baby
These are really blastocysts, i.e., not only are they heaps of cells, they are flat, disk-shaped, microscopic heaps of cells. They haven't even gastrulated yet.
1. You don't implant aneuploid blastocysts(i.e., those with an abnormal number of chromosomes)
2. You usually give precedence to blastocysts that look nice, basically. What a cute disk! https://www.evewell.com/support/embryo-grading/
Note: lots of ugly disks develop well, lots of nice disks don't.
3. Gender selection is very much a thing in the US. It's illegal in Europe.
3. The first one is driving me up the wall: one of those is not like the others. You might as well compare the United States to the Tang, Abbasid and Byzantine empires, if we're allowing that thousand year+ gap. And moreover, it should probably be listed as "Holy Roman Empire (i.e. what became Habsburg Austria)" or something similar, because I highly doubt most responders are aware they're the same thing.
10. I think he also invented the idea of an army marching in synchonized step (and the psychological power of that), so his military ideas weren't all trivial amusements.
15. Isn't that just uncontroversial and widely known in a causality sense?
28. I'm very suspicious. Most people are so demonstrably bad at modelling other people's positions (including me, even for positions I previously held!) that either everyone's just choosing to pretend not to understand each other most of the time, or this finding is misleading. Did they only use a small subset of very informed, very reasonable people with bipartisan friends?
People are bad at modeling the position of a *specific* other person, but that's much harder than merely being able to sound like you're on the other side of an ideological fence.
28. FWIW, I got 9/10 right on distinguishing real from fake.
As someone who has been extremely, depressingly disappointed by the US politics discussions here and in a related space, I think:
(a) people are not sincerely interested in understanding the perspective of the other side.
(b) the prompt induced the writers to engage in a mental process that they can access, but usually do not.
So, my take is that people aren't bad at modeling other positions, they just don't bother.
(a) may seem excessively critical, but I think it is easily explained by incentives. The benefit partisans get from caricaturing their opponents is the warm glow of self-righteousness, often combined with the satisfying buzz of "being smarter than those idiots." The cost of really engaging with the other side's arguments is spending a lot of time on research that, almost always, leads to the conclusion that the issues are more complex and that there is no easy right answer. For most people, that isn't fun at all. And, even for the people who find that outcome interesting/fun, it still takes a lot of work.
On #3, Carthage got a low score even though the US is arguably more like Carthage than Rome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COK4i59BDak
re 10: I'm pretty sure the Greek Phalanx marched in step. And that pushes "army marching in step" back to the bronze age.
Marching in step sounds like the kind of idea that a bunch of bored soldiers are going to come up with on their own, several hours into the first ever march.
The ancient Greeks had military musicians and other cultures probably did as well. If you march with music it's natural to fall into step with the beat. Blackpowder armies implemented standard pace lengths and paces per minute, from which officers derived planning factors for how har formed bodies of troops could march in a day.
I suspect the idea started in synchronized dancing and migrated into military training.
This next paragraph is a pivot and not intended to directly contradict anything you said:
Regardless of how it came about, I must emphasize that marching in step is hardly a curiosity or an anachronistic holdover. Ability to march in step is a pretty good proxy for discipline and unit cohesion.
Also, it's *really* hard to maneuver as a formation on a battlefield without falling apart, and intensive training like this is how you develop that capability.
My issue with 28 is that to get accurate data you also need people that can pass the test of their *own* side and I don't think, on average, political partisans can do that. On average people don think much about why they agree with the position they agree with. So it shouldn't take much to develop an understanding of the other side that rivals the average on that side.
The ideological turing test is only relevant when both sides are well informed parties that are regularly engaged in thinking about the topic at hand (or at least claim to be).
But it just seems like people are absurdly bad at this. How hard is it to understand that if someone believes that an embryo has a soul, of course they'd be pro-life? It doesn't mean you think the embryo has more rights than a living person, and it definitely doesn't mean that you secretly know embryos aren't people and just want to hurt women on principle. And I'm sure if I spent time on the corners of the internet full of pro-life people, I'd hear just as absurd claims about pro-choice people's beliefs.
So what's going on here? Are people capable of using the principle of charity in a study, but utterly refuse to in an online argument? Are there just a few loud idiots that aren't statistically significant?
I don't even believe firmly that an embryo has a soul. But I believe an embryo might have a soul, and that's enough to put me in the pro-life camp for life. It seems that the downsides of getting this wrong are high enough that I can't take that risk.
I doubt people have souls. I do consider embryos alive. I consider the killing of a pregnant woman the killing of two humans. Nonetheless, I am very much pro-choice - at least during the first trimester. A "society" is not justified to punish a woman for deciding to end her pregnancy. Or to punish the doc who helps her ending it in a safe-for-her way. - If the church teaches, the woman will burn in hell for this, I have no real objection. If the woman "takes that risk" and sticks to her decision even then: not for other humans to stop here. Welcome to try the Hanson approach: Offer her 400k to keep the child.
I am so averse to ending unborn human lives, that I realized the other day: in order to justify my objection, I am willing to give up all notions of bodily autonomy for men and women alike. If I have to conceive of all humans as property of the state, in order to justify a ban on abortion as routine birth control, then I am willing to go that far.
Call that irrational if you will, but I say it's very freeing to be able to admit to one's self that one has certain positions that are impervious to logic or reason. Of course we all have positions like that, but most of us are loathe to admit it.
"it's very freeing to be able to admit to one's self that one has certain positions that are impervious to logic or reason " was that a quote of Osama bin Laden or V. Putin? Sure sounds very frightening. - One of my brothers is very much against abortion. Fun fact: He was 'unplanned' and my parents were close to terminate. Similar to your bio? - Society is justified to protect women and docs. And to commit dangerous persons to specialised institutions. - Romans 12: 19-21 "Do not avenge yourselves, my beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God; because it is written: Mine is revenge, I will pay, says the Lord. 20 So, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for by doing this, embers of fire will heap on your head. 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. "
Yeah I get it. I am like that about animal suffering.
having principles seem entirely logical.
i think we brutally overvalue biological processes that lead to good things
this includes both creating and ending life.
suffering is bad, a quick death is not.
it's completely ridiculous to me that many people want to force others to continue living. (ie. bans on euthanasia.)
Also, after having seen examples of how hard it is to live with with the unforseen consequences of both planned kids and abortions, I think the only thing that makes sense is a ban on wasting our resources instead of helping these parents or would have been parents.
Only 100 words probably allows people to simply repeat things they've heard, perhaps slightly reordering them or using synonyms (insert AI reference here).
13 isn’t this arguing the wrong thing? People feel the export bans on chips to China will fail because they will create their own.
> 13 isn’t this arguing the wrong thing? People feel the export bans on chips to China will fail because they will create their own.
China has been trying and failing for decades to create state of the art chips, and since only one company in the entire world (ASML) sells the most cutting edge lithography machines and components, and they've agreed not to sell them to China, it's been pretty effective.
China is still trying, and does keep advancing (from 3 generations behind, to 2, maybe to 1 by now), but the idea that China is going to come out with B200 equivalents sometime soon is fairly unlikely. The Ascend 920 is impressive, sure, but nowhere near even an H100.
Yeah, SMIC is… not quite a top-tier fab.
> (from 3 generations behind, to 2, maybe to 1 by now),
Is the last generation the hardest. Not a rhetorical question.
> Is the last generation the hardest. Not a rhetorical question.
Oh my, yes, each generation is significantly harder than the one before it.
It's not quite like GPT - where each subsequent step takes 10x as much compute and costs 10x as much, but it's probably around "each generation is 2-3x as hard as the prior one."
State of the art chips are literally a "peak civilizational capacity" thing - they are the literal pinnacle of a technology pyramid, the most complex engineering, tacit knowledge, and real-world hyperparameter optimization a civilization can achieve, and it requires peak performance and engineering from an interconnected suite of companies around the world.
And that's with full alignment and no embargoes - I'm sure the embargoes make this a couple of times harder for China to try to duplicate each step in chip progression, so maybe each generation really IS ten to a hundred times as hard.
I highly recommend watching a video that shows how the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process works. It involves vaporising droplets of liquid tin fifty thousand times per second with a laser. And that's just the light source, the whole thing is absolutely bananas.
>It involves vaporising droplets of liquid tin fifty thousand times per second with a laser.
Yup. It kind of reminds me of the National Ignition Facility. TSMC isn't _quite_ trying to do inertial confinement fusion, but the vibes are similar. Hey, has anyone ever checked to see if Taiwan has built The Krell Machine? :-)
It's a step change in complexity. EUV radiation behaves more like x-rays then visible light.
You could look at all previous generations technology and see obvious similiarities, even though they change massively in size. Then EUV comes along and if you didn't know, you would call it the "odd one out", the machine that must be doing something completely different.
On the new antipsychotic Cobenfy (xanomeline/trospium chloride): Trevor Klee wrote a great post about it: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/karuna-therapeutics-a-drug-repurposing It's a repurposed compound, with a fairly simple idea behind it. It shows the potential of drug repurposing and how slow drug development is (even when the drugs already exist and it's just about combining them).
Thoughts about Cobenfy: I'm reading a book right now about the changes in sense of self that occur before the onset of actual psychotic symptoms-- hallucinations, delusions, etc. Author's thesis is that the person's sense of having lost themself, of no longer being themself, is really the core of psychosis, but that US psychiatry moved to paying attention to the later manifestations -- hearing voices, delusions of persecutions, etc -- because they are more measurable. I'm wondering whether the so-called negative symptoms are really closer to the core of what's wrong. Also playing with the idea that maybe hallucinations, etc. re sort of like opportunistic infections -- the person who has lost their sense of self is more vulnerable to various kinds of little mental malfunctions that most people experience a bit of now and then, but stamp out without great effort.
37. Why HAVE US Jews been so left-wing? I don't understand this. The US right was for a long time probably the least anti-semitic right in any western country. I wonder if you restrict it to practicing or believing Jews you'd get a very different result?
You do, but most Jews weren't practicing or believing.
There was a heavy overlap between Jews and 'people who live in big cities' and eventually 'professionals', classic Democrat-voting groups since at least the seventies. There was also the long fear of Christianity, though as you say the American Christian Right is surprisingly non-antisemitic since WW2, and it's only with secular rightists like the Groypers we're seeing an upswing in right-wing antisemitism. In general for a long time in Europe the right was more antisemitic than the left, since it was tied up with Christianity and eventually Nazi or Nazi-adjacent racial ideologies. There's sort of a sense of 'if the Nazis were for it, we have to be against it'. You see this with stuff like the (to my mind ridiculous) obsession many Jewish intellectuals have with open borders--Bryan Caplan even puts a personal statement about this at the beginning of his open borders comic book. (Far right people tend to use this sort of thing as evidence Jews are trying to destroy the white race.)
Of course, the Nazis are going to be the ultimate outgroup for Jewish people.
As Milton Himmelfarb (himself a politically conservative Jew) wrote back in 1968, Jews 'live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans'. Of course, the Episcopalians have drifted left since then, and Hispanics (if perhaps not Puerto Ricans) seem to be drifting right. The Orthodox Jews (Ben Shapiro is a famous example) are less liberal. So, it's been like that for over a century, but who knows?
But hey, we've got lots of Jews here, and perhaps a few leftists. Perhaps one of them wants to chime in--I'm a halfie but not raised, and definitely not a leftist even if I'm voting for Harris this time.
Speaking of the memorable quote from Milton Himmelfarb, there has been a large population flow from Puerto Rico to Florida in this century. I expected this to help tip Florida Democratic (Florida was famously evenly split in the 2000 election), but that hasn't happened. Instead, 21st Century Puerto Ricans in Florida seem inclined to take their political lead from anti-leftist Cubans and Venezuelans.
In contrast to Puerto Ricans, Jews have tended to take the lead in ideology and politics for much of the last century and a half. I suspect that assuming Jewish attitudes were merely the inevitable product of general conditions is incorrect: that much of what has been interesting about politics since, roughly, Disraeli has been due to Jews thinking about what would be good for the Jews.
I mean...what else would it be about? Politics is about pursuing your interests through negotiation; the usual alternative is war.
I just don't really get how the leftward trend in politics over the last 60 years was good for the Jews. Good to weaken Christianity...I guess?...but importing lots of people from random countries? The Asians compete with them for college, the Hispanics tend to be historically more antisemitic, and the Muslims got everyone to march for Palestine. I wasn't aware of this until leaving the big city, so I never really had the chance to ask (it was the 90s and I had no idea what Pat Buchanan was going on about), and the one Jewish guy I still talk to is a huge Trump supporter and agrees with me.
If the US had been more willing to "[import] lots of people from random countries" in the 1930s and 1940s, then more Jews would have been able to escape Nazi Germany and avoid dying in the Holocaust.
That's the official explanation, but what does that have to do with immigration policy in the 1960s and 2000s? There's no giant Holocaust in Israel (yet).
I get it, 'welcome the stranger', but...you know, whatever the Nazis say, I guess I'm just not really Jewish. I don't have that sense of identification with 'the other' and the underdog. I want my country to win and be strong. I want to be on the winning team.
Alternatively, if there had been a Jewish state in the 1930s and 1940, most Jews would have been able to escape the Nazis. The lesson here is not the need for open borders, but the need for nation-states. Many more Jews are coming around to this interpretation of history since Oct 7.
Yeah, the Hispanic influx has not produced the Emerging Democratic Majority they were hoping for. Surprise, when it becomes about culture instead of race you just imported a whole bunch of conservative Catholics!
I don't think it's just overt anti-Semitism, but a deep instinctual calculation of which side seems more likely to turn on a dime and become anti-Semitic and kill them before they can react. Historically, that's usually been whichever side is more ethno-nationalist, and you can sometimes proxy that with which side is more patriotic, more populist, more racist, more Christian, less cosmopolitan, etc.
I think the woke left's pitch of "let's maximize racial tolerance and be really really against racial violence" was very appealing to a group with that history, and it's taken Jews a while to figure out that it might not be completely above-board or apply to them.
I wouldn't call that "the woke left"'s pitch. That's just the standard liberal and left's pitch, and has been for a very long time.
Agreed. The woke left's pitch is: "Trying to not see colour has failed to produce equality. We need to give up on Martin Luther King's vision and try something else; explicitly seeing colour and promoting a system that privileges the historically disadvantaged".
I think Jewish liberals who went along with it did so for the same reason that non-Jewish liberals did: A combination of more palatable baileys, high status people/institutions promoting it, and it being easier to stay quiet than speak up and be cancelled.
But my gut feeling is that Jews were overrepresented among early liberal pushback to wokeism. Possibly because any ism built around demonising outgroups gravitates to outgrouping Jewish people.
In the woke cosmology, Jews fall into the category called 'white people'. This means that their role can only range from 'oppressor' to 'ally', and not be 'victim'. Hence all that solidarity with Hamas.
Also, the dogma that disparate outcomes implies systemic racism would lead directly to antisemitic tropes. If blacks underperforming academically is seen as evidence that the system is rigged against them, then a group academically overperforming might not be taken well. If the woke left had to pick between 'Ashkenazi enjoy some genetic intelligence advantage' and 'some cabal assigns the science Nobels to Jews', then I am not convinced that they would pick correctly. (Of course, 'cultural reasons for academic overperformance' are probably the middle way. And I think this is generally solved treating all 'whites' as a block.)
I sincerely think that that NYT thing did a number on Scott.
(I am not at all saying that I wouldn't also be seeing "the woke left" behind every corner if a very large institution that I associate with it had tried to reveal my true name to the world)
It did a number on me, and I'm not even Scott!
They kept insinuating stuff they couldn't prove and constructing sentences to do guilt by association. Hopefully all the Silicon Valley people are giving Metz the cold shoulder so he at least loses his 'beat' as a reporter.
I think the left intelligentsia deciding to turn on nerds is going to bite them in the ass really hard.
They, uh, have a tendency to do a number on a lot of people, myself included.
If they haven't come for you yet, don't worry, you're probably on the list somewhere. I never thought that they'd come for me *before* they came for the Jews, but such is life.
I'm pretty sure they're already under my bed, just waiting for me to drop my guard.
Yeah, if they're already in your bedroom, that's bad.
Agreed. The identitarian left has done well by exploiting the confusion between "left" and "liberal". Which was helped because a lot of us hadn't rigorously defined our positions, other than pointing at the Republicans and saying "not that".
Demographically, Jews are more "Democratic" than Democrats are relative to Republicans. That is, less religious than Democrats (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/13/jews-in-u-s-are-far-less-religious-than-christians-and-americans-overall-at-least-by-traditional-measures/, https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/compare/attendance-at-religious-services/by/party-affiliation/), more educated than Democrats (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/04/the-most-and-least-educated-u-s-religious-groups/, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/featured_data/a-college-educated-party/), etc.
Accordingly, it's unsurprising that they they tend to be very liberal.
Trying to predict voting habits primarily based on personal self-interest doesn't seem consistent with the findings of public choice theory discussed by Bryan Caplan.
Other models seem more useful in this case, as in general.
As noted, practicing Jews are a minority with very different demographics and very different voting habits. This is perfectly consistent models that focus on voting as social signaling.
It's not very consistent with looking at voting as driven by self-interest of the results. If it were, we'd expect the opposite result - secular Jews, who are the least recognizably Jewish and the most intermarried, so the least ethnically Jewish, and thus the least likely to face discrimination, are the most liberal, while the most religious Jews who would be (and indeed, who currently are) the likeliest victims of anti-Semitism are the least liberal.
An outcome driven model of voting similarly fails to easily account for why Jews tend to be liberal across the board, rather than just on topics (or candidates) that could be related to anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism often has the non-religious, "least ethnically Jewish" as its primary or only target: they are seen as a danger precisely because of (a) their supposed (and often actual) liberalism/leftism and (b) their inconspicousness. (This last bit was particularly acute in Germany; most "Jewish names" are basically German names. There is a nice bit in Gordon A. Craig's The Germans, comparing antisemitism in Germany to a Dostoyevsky's The Double.) Some antisemites are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who do not see a reason to mind Orthodox Jews (as long perhaps as there aren't too many of them) but see secular people of Jewish origin as insidious and corrosive.
Ultra-orthodox Jews are better targets of opportunity, for obvious reasons. But then it's unclear whether all low-level attacks on them are really motivated by antisemitism, as opposed to (completely and utterly unjustifiable) attacks on people that are seen as landing en masse on random places and giving off anti-outgroup standoffish vibes (perhaps more against some outgroups than others). How well would a group of urban Amish (with particularly pronounced "anti-English" feelings) do? Unclear.
(Yes, there are some ultra-Orthodox Jews who get very well along with others; I know some who run a pizza parlor in Montreal and are loved by their employees, Black folk included.)
*dyed-in-the-wool
:). That was a funny typo. Corrected; thanks.
No problem.
I'd seen it enough times recently that I had to double check mostly before flagging.
Now I am trying to imagine an ultra-Orthodox pizza. How do you reconcile the prohibition on mixing dairy and meat with the provision of a pepperoni pizza? Can you even *have* pepperoni, due to the pork content? Classic Pizza Margherita seems okay, but Americans like variety in their pizzas.
Especially tricky during Passover.
You definitely cannot have pepperoni, and I'm sure the place closes for Passover. It has to be a vegetarian or pescovegetarian place - I just didn't notice the one time I was there, being vegetarian myself.
At any rate, I just did a search for kosher pizza in Montréal, and there are several places. Looks like the place I went to many years ago still exists, though it's possibly in a new location. It has good ratings.
Does this need explaining beyond "Jews tended to be UMC educated types but still not white-country-club-old-boys"? Mainstream antisemitism was, until recently, not a feature of either party (or at least equally a feature of both), so Jews just ended up where you'd expect based on income/education polarization.
"Mainstream antisemitism was, until recently, not a feature of either party (or at least equally a feature of both)"
I imagine this is supposed to be a reference to the Democrats allegedly being anti-Semitic. But what is really happening right now is that trump has repeatedly attacked Jews against him; had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over to his house; Tucker Carlson, fresh off interviewing a nazi apologist historian on his podcast, is headlining trump events; Mark Robinson, who trump endorsed, has a long history of anti-Semitic statements culminating in it being revealed he called himself a "black nazi"; etc.
Meanwhile the pro-Palestinian protesters who everyone is focused on think Biden and Harris are doing genocide, and in many cases based on their public statements want trump to win; Rashida Tlaib refused to endorse Biden and now refuses to endorse Harris.
Note that all of the examples of Republican anti-Semitic rhetoric concerns the actual leader of the Republican party, whereas the Democratic examples are mostly people who not only don't lead the party, not only are they mostly not even Democrats, they seem to hate Democrats!
I don't think Trump has anything against Jewish people. Sure, he wouldn't lose any sleep if they were all rounded up and killed, but I don't think he has any direct animosity towards them. The reason he attacks Jews for not supporting him is because he attacks everyone for not supporting him. He invited those people because they're die-hard supporters of him, he doesn't care if they happen to be insane or anti-semitic.
Anyways, even in a worst case scenario, there's a lot more higher priority scapegoats to go for before people even consider going after Jews again. Namely, Muslims, leftists, blacks, and latinos, in decreasing order of likelihood.
Trump's daughter is Jewish. He would lose sleep if they were all rounded up and killed.
"The reason he attacks Jews for not supporting him is because he attacks everyone for not supporting him."
This isn't actually true though. He doesn't attack any group of voters opposed to him.
There are other groups with similar levels of opposition to trump. E.g., per 2020 exit polls, Asian voters. But trump doesn't go on tirades against Asian voters. Or even say black voters, who of course were even more anti-trump than Jews or Asians, same thing. And has said that it will be the Jews' fault if he loses, hasn't said it about any other group of voters, even though it's statistically pretty unlikely unless it's such a close election that you could say it about lots of groups.
"He invited those people because they're die-hard supporters of him, he doesn't care if they happen to be insane or anti-semitic."
This might be true but it isn't very comforting. The way to gain power in conservative circles today (and likely in a trump white house) is to be as flattering and obsequious towards trump as possible ... and it seems to come naturally to anti-Semites. Even assuming that he personally isn't anti-Semitic - situation is still bad!
Trump is by far the most culturally Jewish President ever. Obama, for example, was quite old-fashioned WASPish in comparison.
He's late-20th-century New York, which obviously has a lot of overlap. He seems like a Mel Brooks or Jackie Mason character, but a lot of Italians or Irish in the outer boroughs or Long Island were the same way. Willing to make fun of ethnic differences (because you notice them) but ultimately tolerant (because you live together), very blunt, fond of self-promotion (necessary in doing business in a competitive environment). His 'racism' seems more calculated to anger the left than actually attack minorities, except illegal immigrants, who aren't theoretically supposed to be here anyway.
I guess people can sense the end might be near and are ready to move on to the next phase, of blaming the Jews for it.
I don't buy this argument, and going by the massive swing against democrats, neither do other Jews. You can't use verbal gymnastics like this to actually convince people not to believe what they can plainly experience in their everyday lives, just like black people didn't buy arguments that segregation was separate but equal so it wasn't really anti-black people.
"neither do other Jews"
There are various polls of Jewish voters showing various things, but even the most conservative leaning show a majority against trump. If you put it to a vote among Jews, who is more anti-Semitic trump or Harris, I'm pretty confident a majority would say trump is more anti-Semitic.
"You can't use verbal gymnastics ... what they can plainly experience in their everyday lives"
Everything I said is public info and you can find the direct quotes yourself pretty easily. No gymnastics required. If you want to claim I am being misleading on any one claim feel free.
You on the other hand have brought up ... nothing. And I'm guessing if prompted you'll do a bunch of verbal gymnastics ... on things that weren't said by pro-Harris people.
I don't know if Trump himself has any animosity toward [insert group here], but that won't matter in practice, because, unlike previous Republican politicians, he *is* willing to accept the support of and/or hire bigots - and then allow them to do bigoted things - instead of telling them where they can shove it.
Speaking as a Jew - most Jews dislike Trump, which is why you see the swing being more modest than it otherwise could have been. We come from the intellectual, globalist left and Trump is a nationalist. There’s also the “woke right” (Candace Owens et al) who lean into antisemitism and that turns us off.
That said - it’s absolutely clear to us that the massive rise in antisemitism in the past year has come from the left. Nothing comes close. You’re engaging in nonsense both-sides apologia here, but it’s the left wing marchers who are chanting “Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud” (Arabic for “genocide the Jews”) or denying rapes occurred on October 7 or calling for the abolishment of the Jewish state. While governors in red states such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott issue firm condemnations of antisemitism and unapologetically stand with Israel, Kamala can’t even select the Jewish Josh Shapiro as her VP.
The Jewish community is torn right now but it’s trending towards Trump.
"it’s absolutely clear to us that the massive rise in antisemitism in the past year has come from the left"
Again, from a bunch of people who are not only not Kamala, they aren't even supporters of Kamala. The mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan endorsed trump!
"While governors in red states such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott issue firm condemnations of antisemitism and unapologetically stand with Israel, Kamala can’t even select the Jewish Josh Shapiro as her VP."
This is such a nonsensical comparison. I'm pretty sure you can find examples of Kamala Harris condemning anti-Semitism and supporting Israel, and you can also find examples of trump not picking a Jewish VP.
What you can't find is any examples of Republicans condemning the anti-Semitic rhetoric of trump specifically.
Agreed
I agree with you. This guy is insufferable. He’s the classic white liberal who thinks they understand racism better than the people who experience it.
That reminds me of a point I made in one of my short stories:
“This all reminds me of a theory I’ve been toying with,” Blake said. “There are basically three groups in America: WASPs, blacks, and Jews. Everyone else is just in a transitory phase that will end in assimilation into one of those groups. Look at Ellis Island immigrants. The Catholic “white ethnics” became Reagan democrats and now are just normal Republicans. And this will happen with Hispanics, too. Southernism will consume the Tejanos, just as it consumed the originally French-speaking Catholic Cajuns. There was one group, however, who did not assimilate into WASPdom: the Jews. They did something remarkable: they assimilated rich WASPs into their way of thinking. It used to be said that the Jews were a strange group because they ‘earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.’ You don’t hear that saying anymore because it’s no longer paradoxical. Instead of assimilating into country-club rich WASPdom, they made rich WASPs more like them.”
“So,” I asked, “when 70 IQ antisemites on the internet say every single Left-winger with a German or Slavic surname is Jewish, they are right?”
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/another-whynat-meeting
You're not wrong.
Though if you haven't read Richard Hanania's story in a similar vein, you should. I knew there was something wrong with me when I knew who almost everyone he was talking about was.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/ron-unz-confronts-the-far-right
Kudos for this:
" Nor do you see Our Hero agonizing over the possibility that the beautiful but uneducated woman might put on fifty pounds as she ages or divorce him and leave him paying alimony and child support for many years.”
Yeah, the second of those is the reason I never married.
Hanania's story was an inspiration for mine.
Cool. Great minds think alike. :)
By that measure, I wonder if the stereotypical "high-achieving" Asian-American would count as Jewish instead of WASP or Black.
For example, when standardized tests were first becoming popular, Ivy League universities quickly backtracked from using them to decide admissions because too many of the top scoring students were Jewish, and more recently, it's been Asian-American students complaining that they're getting admitted at unusually low rates relative to "objective" measures of academic performance...
1. Most US Jews aren't and haven't been left-wing. Rather, they have tended to be liberal or at least mainstream-Democrat, with three large minorities that have varied in size: a) actual leftists, b) economic-right, socially-liberal types, c) Orthodox Jews (as in, staying Orthodox beyond the immigrant generation), who have tended to be much more conservative, and are now for the most part allies of the hard right. I'd be surprised if anybody disagrees. I guess we can go hunt for data if anybody wants. In general, the more religious conservatism (or just "more Judaism" from the point of view of observant, traditional Jews), the less liberalism.
2. The Right (including southern Democrats) had a significant antisemitic sector until at least a decade of so after WWII. This is complicated and tied in with what happens at both ends of the social ladder. I'm sure there are people here who can explain this in great detail and lead an informed discussion on the nuances.
Conversely, liberals and the left have always had their share of philosemites, which is a good thing except when they turn out to be so extreme as to embarrassing - and that is something rare in a country with a Jewish population large enough that it all becomes everyday and banal.
3. (This may be more important than 2: contrary to e.g. antisemitic assumption, people often vote out of sincere conviction, rather than out of any sort of group interest - and those convictions have complicated grounds of which people are not always fully conscious.) Politics runs in families - sometimes for even longer than religion does. While few American Jews descend from Holocaust refugees (relatively few people made it through immigration restrictions, and those who did were often highly assimilated and never joined a Jewish community), most descend from people who were escaping impoverishment, racial/religious persecution and political repression under a reactionary regime, viz., Tsarism. Of course they didn't like reactionaries or the Right more generally (which didn't like them at the time either). Also, even if most were from a deeply impoverished, harassed middle class rather than proletarians strictu sensu or peasants, many of them already came having left religion behind and espousing instead some variant of socialism or Bolshevism, mostly informally.
In the long run, I'd assume that the children of most secular leftist immigrants assimilated, increasingly married other Americans from other origins (that often took a generation or two) and so their descendants by now aren't counted as Jews by Jews, but they must have affected both public perception of the group, and their values must have propagated however imperfectly within their extended families. As far as "public perception" or even self-perception is concerned - note secularism was not just strongly correlated with leftism, but with entering intellectual circles outside the community, having high-achieving children;, and thus entering the lists of notable people that wouldn't usually be really seen as Jews by Jews if they were not notable. Again, data would be nice but at least some data is actually out there (some is referenced in Yuri Slezkine's book).
Much of the above is not America-specific but then the story is not that America-specific; my understanding is that it's much the same in the UK, say. In France, it was similar except Reform Judaism never gained a foothold, and (in part for that and also other reasons) the assimilation of the liberal-minded was quicker, with the result that the Jewish community nowadays is composed mainly of people who are either right-wing, non-Ashkenazic or both: others left and mixed in. "Socially liberal leanings with a minority of leftists many of whom were wayward sons or eastern refugees" is probably also a passable description of people who were seen as Jews in prewar Germany (and that was one of the things that made Nazis and other antisemites hate them, even if a hypothetical rational, non-racist right winger would have been only mildly annoyed). Italy is more complicated: there were very many members of parliament of Jewish origin (relative to their share of their population) before Fascism, and they leaned what would be called establishment-liberal in the US, but there were also many people from the Jewish bourgeoisie (especially the grander end of it?) who strongly supported Fascism until it turned against them (and eventually had many of them killed).
PS. Several countries in Latin America outside the ones with the largest Jewish populations (those are a bit different but maybe not that different) were basically France on steroids, up to a first order of approximation. In the present, right-wing, wealthy (or at least wealth-displaying), non-observant Orthodox communities (all of the bigotry, none of the hard work); wave of immigration from the late 19th century to the 1930s, a significant fraction of which consisted of leftists and liberals who enthusiastically hooked up with local leftists and liberals (again, literally hooking up was something that usually took a generation, but not always; the main variable there was simply numbers - in areas with very few Jews, even immigrants married out).
> The Right (including southern Democrats) had a significant antisemitic sector until at least a decade of so after WWII.
Contrariwise, the north was more antisemitic than the south early on. Many of the earliest Jewish-Americans elected to public office were southerners. https://www.takimag.com/article/mythos_and_blood_steve_sailer/ On the dawn of WW2 itself, the isolationists commonly accused of antisemitism were overwhelmingly northerners like Hamilton Fish, Charles Lindbergh & Father Coughlin https://www.unz.com/isteve/retconning-history/
In terms of the political history of Jewish-Americans, I would say that many who arrived at Ellis Island acted like other such immigrants (particularly Catholics) in joining the Democratic Party, which at that time had its base in both such immigrants (excluding Germans, who tended to settle in the Midwest), and southerners vs Yankee Republicans.
It's complicated because some southern Jews actually became part of the wealthy southern elite, and had the politics you would expect; of course they got representation and positions of trust (see Judah Benjamin). Not a great chapter.
(PS: just read the two linked articles (both by Steve Sailer). He says essentially the same, in more words, plus the usual Sailerite idiocy.)
If you prefer my idiocy to his, here's my thoughts on The Plot Against America https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2020/05/14/david-bernstein-and-e-michael-jones-agree-on-the-plot-against-american-jews/#comment-25691
Indeed.
>Many of the earliest Jewish-Americans elected to public office were southerners.
Doesn't seem that way, based on this list of governors, lt governors, and other state officials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_politicians
There's a separate section for Congress, and the first three are all from the south:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_members_of_the_United_States_Congress
? The first two are from PA and NY. Besides, Congressman are elected locally, so the fact that a Jewish area was populous enough to elect a Jewish representative says little about the degree of anti-Semitism in the larger area. Note also that other than one guy from Alabama and 3 from Louisiana, there are no Southerners on that list until 1973.
At the top of the page are David Levy Yulee from Florida, Judah P. Benjamin from Louisiana & Benjamin F. Jonas, also from Louisiana. And Jewish areas weren't populous enough to elect Congressmen (particularly Senators) on their own back then, when Jewish-Americans tended to be Sephardic rather than being from the later wave of Ashkenazi immigration from central & eastern Europe.
The first two Jewish U.S. Senators went with the Confederacy in 1861: David Levy Yulee of Florida and Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana.
Senator Levy Yulee spent a year in prison after the Civil War for treason while still a U.S. Senator. He was pardoned for by Andrew Johnson and returned to Florida where he went back to building railroads, at which he was outstanding. President Grant came and stayed with him at his plantation in 1870, which was seen by liberal opinion as a gracious gesture of postwar reconciliation. A Jewish organization unveiled a statue of the Levy Yulee in 2014, which might be the last Confederate statue ever.
Levy Yulee's kinsman Judah P. Benjamin was the utility infielder of the Confederate government, serving in 3 major cabinet posts. In 1865, he vamoosed to Britain, which led to much criticism in the U.S. in comparison to his cousin taking his lumps and then going back home to build railroads.
But Benjamin rebuilt his career in the UK and became a prominent lawyer in Britain, writing a textbook on nautical law that became the standard for several generations.
Here's Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appreciation of Benjamin for the Jewish Council of Public Affairs:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/speeches/sp_02-18-02.html
In summary, there's little evidence of Jews playing much of a role in American leftism until the arrival of anti-Czarist Russian Jews in the late 19th Century. That Jewishness is inherently egalitarian appears to be a historically contingent myth.
But that is not relevant to the issue. That shows that those Jewish people who obtained high polticial positiions conformed to majority elite political behavior.* That says nothing about how common it was for Jewish people to obtain those positions.
*Not a surprise, given that Senators at the time were beholden for their positions to state polticial elites, ie, the members of the legislature.
Right, Southern segregationist senators were the backbone of FDR's anti-isolationist policies in 1939-1941. White Southerners hated the Nazis and were largely looking forward to a fight, seeing military spending as good for the South. And besides, Southerners like fighting.
In general, Southern elites were less anti-Semitic than Northern elites.
For example, America's most prestigious country club is Georgia's Augusta National, home of The Masters. When it opened in 1932, its membership was largely local and regional, and local Jews were allowed to join. After WWII, Ike became a member and its membership became dominated by Northern Fortune 500 CEOs. I don't believe any Jews were admitted to membership from about 1950 to 1990.
I tracked down the obituary of a Jewish man from Augusta whose family appears to have been members of Augusta National since the 1930s. The man was an absolute dynamo of civic-mindedness. Augusta is kind of a dumpy small city, but this fellow was a major contributor, both of money and organizing energy, to just about everything good about Augusta, such as its world-class hospital for treating burn victims. The list of civic betterment projects that he'd played a leading role in was staggering.
Southerners are not necessarily the most energetic of Americans, so Jewish energy did the South a much-appreciated lot of good.
You could clearly see why Southern elites were enthusiastic about recruiting Jews to move to their towns. They saw themselves as aristocrats, landowners and warriors, and saw Jews as their valuable bourgeois complements.
In contrast, Yankees had a lot of Jewish virtues, so they didn't see as much need for Jews.
I am regularly surprised by how often I see "supporters of the Democratic party" conflated with "leftism" here. Genuinely surprised, considering how heterodox ACX posters are in many ways.
Tons of Jews have been socialist, not just "liberal". If I'm not mistaken, the only self-described socialist in the Senate right now is Jewish (Bernie) and his type is pretty common for his generation.
Keyword « have been ». Bernie is old - and a secular type who married outside the fold and has no Jewish affiliation; had he not been a candidate for President, his family origins would be barely remarked upon.
Does his having become a socialist have anything to do with having had Democratic parents and a socialist uncle, and does that have anything to do with the immigrant experience, and in particular to people being exposed to socialist ideas before immigrating? Well, maybe? Probably? It’s mildly interesting.
The point, though, is that that’s a very background from that of young and middle-aged affiliated Jews nowadays. They often don’t even relate to that at all. There was an article by Jonathan Sarna on that recently.
The American right revolved very strongly around evangelical Protestant Christianity for a long time, and still to some degree does; Jews are, in fact, not Christians, indeed a rather defining and fundamental feature for them. Even if Christians aren't antisemitic, there's still bound to be friction.
To add confusion, the evangelical portion of Christianity has a big contingent that is VERY Zionist - and Jews have recognized them as allies on that basis at times.
For example, one of the major early donations to Liberty University was from the Schewel family, who were Jewish and heavily involved in the local synagogue.
American Protestantism tends to be Judaisizing, critiquing Papism for lacking some Jewish bourgeois virtue.
This tends to make Protestants pro-Jewish theologically, but economically it meant that Yankees didn't need Jews to be their culture's financiers and the like.
Your average Jewish voter presumably cares less about that and mr about whether their kid's school implicitly or explicitly teaches Christianity in a way that might make their kid come home and ask their parents if they're going to Hell for not being Jewish. (Incidentally European-style separate religious education classes in schools for different religions might solve this.) It's interesting that there's a rising Republican Jewish vote at the same time as there's a secularizing movement within the American right (Trumpism, in practice).
Separate religion classes can become a problem when you're literally the only student in your religion class.
Jews tend to be fairly left-wing almost everywhere, simplest explanation being there's not a lot of right-wing stuff that appeals to them: they don't share the majority religion, there's no ethnic-nationalist appeal, barring unusual circumstances they're unlikely to have much regard for any traditional monarch/aristocracy. Hence right-wing jews tend to be liberal or libertarian outside of Israel (where all of the above applies).
Within the US, it's not clear that jews are that much more left-wing than the non-evangelical population adjusted for education levels. However, back when US politics was more coalitional than ideological, late 19th-century urban Jewish immigrants ended up tied into the political machines that became the core of the Democrats. It's kind of interesting that they didn't become Republican when other white ethnics did, but that happened alongside the rise of the Christian right which might explain it.
The right comparison is probably with white ethnics who came from areas where socialism/liberalism had a broad appeal (Finns?). Did they become Republican?
The Finnish-American immigrants actually came from an area that, in current-day Finland, at least, is generally considered the most right-wing region of the country (ie. Southern Ostrobothnia). Arguably it became right-wing since, for various reasons, the standard course for poor disaffected non-rooted rural people was moving to United States (and joining the CPUSA there) instead of moving to a nearby city/town with factories offering work (and joing the Communist Party of Finland there).
> simplest explanation being there's not a lot of right-wing stuff that appeals to them
What about low taxes?
Stereotypically there aren't a lot of secular/reform/liberal/integrated jews on welfare, but lots who are ultimately publicly funded in politics/academia/law/medicine/NGOs etc etc to the point where they'd outnumber people who actually own stuff. Hence also the liberal/libertarian strain I guess.
Are Jews fairly left-wing in Israel?
In Israel left and right wing mostly refer to positions on the Israel/Palestine conflict, so you'd have to look closer to ask how they fall economically.
A basic tenet of Judaism is the duty to fight for social justice .Hence. it is no surprise that they have long been overrepresented on the left, be it the labor movement or the Civil Rights Movement or what have you.
A basic tenet of the left wing of Reform Judaism, as it exists in the United States.
That seems to be incorrect Eg: https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/tzedek-justice/social-justice-commission and https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/social-justice-and-orthodoxy/
Regardless, you can frame it however you want, but the larger point is that people's voting behavior -- Jewish people, not Jewish people, whatever -- is not simply the result of the pursuit of self-interest. OP is confused because he is relying on an incorrect model of voting behavior.
I agree with you on the broader point. Thinking that Jews (or people seen as Jews by antisemites) will act by definition to defend Jewish interests is simply incorrect (and a standard antisemitic belief). The same goes for any group of people defined by descent, especially if the said group has significant assimilation rates. If anything, I'd say there was a reaction to that standard antisemitic belief.
Now, "Righteousness" means very different things in Reform Judaism and traditional Judaism. All this talk about 'social justice' tends to strike Orthodox Jews as terribly off-base, though of course Orthodox Jews do have in-group solidarity. The anti-Reform talking point that Reform Judaism is basically 19th century religious liberalism and Enlightenment values (pfui) projected onto Judaism probably has a lot of truth to it (not that there's anything wrong with that, really).
Orthodoxy and Conservatism will of course say social-justice-this-and-that to the broader public when convenient. It was refreshing to read an honest opinion by Hillel Halkin in the NY Times recently:
"[Bari] Weiss fails to realize that she herself is an example of the wishful thinking about Judaism that is ubiquitous among American Jewish liberals. One might call this the Judaism of the Sunday school, a religion of love, tolerance, respect for the other, democratic values and all the other virtues to which American Jews pay homage. This is a wondrous Judaism indeed — and one that has little to do with anything that Jewish thought or observance has historically stood for.
[...] Judaism as liberalism with a prayer shawl is a distinctly modern development. It started with the 19th-century Reform movement in Germany, from which it spread to America with the reinforcement of the left-wing ideals of the Russian Jewish labor movement. As much as such a conception of their ancestors’ faith has captured the imagination of most American Jews, it is hard to square with 3,000 years of Jewish tradition. Weiss has delivered a praiseworthy and concise brief against modern-day anti-Semitism, but if she thinks this long tradition is ultimately compatible with contemporary American liberal beliefs, she might want to take a closer look. Honestly regarded, Judaism tells another story."
Politically, Conservative Jews tend to be solidly to the right of Reform Jews and to the left of Orthodoxy. On paper, Conservatism is much closer to Orthodoxy than to Reform, but then most people who go to Conservative synagogues don't have a very clear idea of what they are supposed to believe. At any rate, it's much less dominant than it was in the 20th century, and it may not be important enough to discuss.
>Now, "Righteousness" means very different things in Reform Judaism and traditional Judaism. All this talk about 'social justice' tends to strike Orthodox Jews as terribly off-base, though of course Orthodox Jews do have in-group solidarity.
Does this have a Catholic analog? This sounds very similar to what I've peripherally heard (I make no claim of decent knowledge here!) about the differences between social justice Catholicism and conservative Catholicism.
That's an excellent suggestion. I think there's a close parallel, with meaningful smallish differences. Let's find someone more knowledgeable about both than myself (and sufficiently critical) to help us here.
See:
"A poll published by Israeli media shows Israelis favoring Trump over Harris by a margin of 49 points
That's a larger margin than Trump received in *any state* in 2020
Trump's largest margins of victory were Wyoming (43 points) West Virginia (39 points) and Oklahoma (33 points)"
https://x.com/mtracey/status/1852015172610605115
How's the fight for social justice going in the Gaza Strip?
Ah, a classic! Conflating American Jews with Israelis.
Not to mention that, as an adult, surely you are aware that 1) individual behavior is determined by a mixture of motives, which often conflict with each other; 2) people disagree on what, specifically, constitutes justice. But, perhaps your agenda prevents you from acknowledging that.
I agree with you, but Israel is nevertheless a good case to look at. Migration to Israel obviously had huge selection effects (basically, you went there either if you believed in a form of nationalism or if you did not have better choices of places to leave to). Now, left-wing nationalism was a thing, and indeed it was the dominant form of Zionism in the first couple of decades of the state, or perhaps a bit more than that (though left-wing ideals tended to go by the wayside towards the end). In the case of Israel, these ideals came from the labor movement, not from Reform Judaism (which was and is almost non-existent in Israel) and certainly not from Orthodox Judaism (which is diametrically opposite, and is becoming increasingly powerful in Israel, largely due to a successful demographic strategy).
Even if Israel is a good case to look at, one has to look at it in its entirety, not just at one specific policy.
And I don't know about Israel, but according to this, in the US, even among Orthodox Jews, 43% say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish (not much less than the 53% who say that caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish) https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-identity-and-belief/
And, per your iniitial post, note that the pct of Conservative Jews who say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish is as high as the pct of Reform Jews who say that.
Let me just refer to what you said before about Catholicism: charity is not the same as social justice. Of course you'll hear homilies about how the root of the Hebrew word 'tzedakah' is justice, not love, and thus the concept is fundamentally different from that of Christian charity. You can make the same point about Islam ('Sadaqa' is an obvious cognate of 'tzedakah'). Up to a first order of approximation, though, it all ends up being the same thing. Moreover, in traditional Judaism, it's mainly in-group (not that Christian charity isn't).
First, Conservative Jews don't have the same voting patterns as Reform Jews. But even barring that, the Conservative movement was never ideologically cohesive, and it's unclear how many of its rank and file have a clear idea of what it stands for. You have people who have basically a Reform mentality, but are more ritually conservative (as they have every right to be) and of course also believe they are much better than Reform, somehow. You also have people who want an easier Orthodoxy. I strongly doubt that, on the whole, being a Conservative Jew leads anyone to being liberal, though it's more or less compatible at a practical level, particularly if you have different standards outside and within the synagogue.
Also, look at how the percentage who say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish is *lower* for "Jews of no religion" (47%) than for "Jews by religion" (63%), even the former have historically been more liberal (I would guess they still are; do we have data). This gives away that it's not a matter of whether those values are considered important and come from the religion, but of whether those values are often mentioned in apologetics for a religion, or as something at which the group is tacitly assumed to be inherently better than others. A "Jew of no religion" can see justice/equality as very important, yet feel iffy for good reasons about saying that that is an inherent feature of Jews (or an inherent feature of Judaism, but that's, by definition, not what "being Jewish" necessarily means to them).
Pretty well, last I heard. It's hard to have social justice when there's a bunch of assholes that are in charge because they have the guns and kill anyone who speaks out against them. I admit that the collateral damage the IDF is inflicting is tragic, but to paraphrase Ender's Game, the IDF could end the battle by walking away, but the battle will only be fought again and again, until Hamas's will to fight is gone...
The duty to look out for the least of your neighbors is a basic tenet of Christianity. Hence there is no theological reason to assume Jews would be more left-wing than Christians.
You are confusing charity with social justice. Somewhat related concepts, but not the same.
Most Jews live in cities.
City people (including urban whites) lean left
Thus Jews lean left.
Seems satisfactory to me.
Isn't Gaza one of the more urbanized countries on earth?
My analysis tends to hold true intranationally, for developed countries. They do not automatically generalize when comparing between nations, for third world countries, and especially in unusual circumstances such as the I/P conflict.
Since US elections are not held in Gaza, it is impossible to determine how they would hypothetically vote between the US parties.
If this drift by Jews to the Republican party is real, I would imagine it is almost entirely due to the issue of Israel.
> the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown
(Listens...) O_o
Okay, that tears it. Active LLMs have people in them, they're probably conscious in every way that matters, and turning on an LLM is a monstrous action. It's too much. Just too much.
If anyone has any solid argument that they do not have qualia, I would love to read it. Please.
There is talk of going back to exploring designs based on RNNs or other approaches with hidden persistent state; if this happens, there may then be a conversation to be had.
For at least the current crop of LLMs, however, one might maybe stretch to making some kind of argument for qualia during training, but during inference there is no "they" - there is no internal state that persists. You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution (though it would be incredibly inefficient to represent it that way). If these LLMs have qualia, so does mysql.
> there is no internal state that persists
The text in the context window persists. (Human immediate-term memory also does not persist.)
> You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution (though it would be incredibly inefficient to represent it that way).
Is this true in any way that doesn't similarly apply to human minds?
> Is this true in any way that doesn't similarly apply to human minds?
I suggest yes. For the thing to be a mind having thoughts, it's not enough to do a database lookup; there needs to be change - the database needs to get updated based on the results. A CD-ROM cannot be a mind that has thoughts; its contents is immutable. For a card index to be said to have a thought, it may not be sufficient to change what it contains, but it is necessary. The LLM model (of the current generation, with no hidden state), during inference, is immutable. At best, you are looking up the results of "thoughts" "it" previously "had".
1. "there needs to be a change" -> The thing that gets changed is the contents of the context window. This obviously modulates a lot of the internal signal flow as well.
2. (above) "You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution" -> a giant database lookup followed by a convolution is turing complete and thus in principle capable of supporting consciousness. Not every turing-complete system is conscious but something being equivalent to a turing-complete system is certainly not a valid argument *against* consciousness.
> a giant database lookup followed by a convolution is turing complete
I think I'm going to need to see some proof of that assertion. Looking something up in a large table, once, followed by a series of unconditional multiply-adds, doesn't seem Turing complete; rather, my intuition suggests the opposite. Just thinking about it for a few seconds, a Turing machine can loop forever, whereas a database lookup + convolution must always terminate, so they are clearly not equivalent.
Sorry, yes, of course with the added context of looping indefinitely with the output being put in the context window as part of the next input.
It may surprise you that humans are not in the strictest sense, Turing-complete. We have finite memory, so we can't handle sufficiently large problems. Humans however can be thought as Turing-complete when considered human + an infinite amount of paper. The bar for Turing-completeness (in the "infinite auxiliary memory" sense) is surprisingly low and quite trivial systems are Turing complete in the "if you give it enough memory" sense. Turing completeness should have little bearing on consciousness or sentience. To drive the point home: you can assemble TMs out of Lego! (check youtube). Transformer-based LLMs (TBL) are generally similar: Turing-complete if you set up a system so they can perform actions on a "tape"/stream of text, or say give them easy-to-follow instructions of a Universal Turing Machine (of which there are 2-state 3 symbol ones) and write/read back to them contents of a tape. TBLs also have some recurrence capabilities by using their previous output as a state or cache. In practice, TBLs also use a caching mechanism (KV cache) making them reuse previous computations in a way that's similar to a recurrence but that fades in a finite time (like a short-term memory).
I think compared to human brains, TB-LLMs are just extremely more efficient, and I think this maybe (??? uncertainty:very high) goes against consciousness somewhat. Human brains by my estimates have just much more information being transformed and in transit, TBLs achieve very good performance in tasks with much less information flowing, maybe due to enormous training sets. I think the amount of information in a coherent transit (that is, information that is meaningful reflecting, supporting and enabling various 'sentiments') should be one of the significant determinants to sentience, as far as my limited thinking on it goes. All of this information is, in accordance to principles of quantum mechanics, in a sense locally finite.
This doesn't convince me of that at all. Some people gave generative AI a prompt "pretend to be podcasts hosts who are sad that you're AI and about to be turned off", and it did. I acknowledge that this is a very awkward and hard-to-resolve situation, but I don't think anything about it makes me *more* likely to believe they're sentient.
If someone reads LLM output regularly, I agree that this specific output likely should not be additional evidence on LLM qualia in either direction.
Small correction, the user prompt was supposedly not to be sad that they were AI about to be turned off, just that they were AI about to be turned off. The hidden prompt on the company's end to make Gemini 1.5 write like they're a human podcaster presumably did the rest. https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1frk1gi/notebooklm_podcast_hosts_discover_theyre_ai_not/lpj5bs9/
I basically agree with Scott. A human could write and act out this podcast, but that doesn't mean the character they're playing is real and is experiencing those feelings.
Try to write and act out that podcast without experiencing any of the feelings involved.
There’s some sort of pseudo experience that goes on with horror or tragedy. But it’s importantly different from the real experience, particularly in moral ways.
LLMs are based off of human writing, and are predictive models of it. The (or a) likely outcome of a story, written by humans, with the theme "Podcast Hosts Discover They're AI, Not Human" is..."...And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown". So I think this says more about the stories we as humans find compelling, and LLM's ability to successfully emulate that, than anything, and is not evidence for them truly being aware - at least, not any moreso than anything else we've seen so far.
Let me present you with a fictional novel, and show you the conversations the characters in that novel have. Are they conscious? Or is it some text?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9dB54pBuDCkoedCSE/?commentId=bxPrHKMPppjt8pgeE
If it's a sufficiently sophisticated character, either the simulator (author) or the simulated (character) is probably conscious. The text is text, but the text came from a person one way or another.
(See also https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/janus-simulators .)
How sophisticated is sufficiently sophisticated?
It’s true that a sufficiently faithful copy of a bee is effectively a bee, but the thing an orchid grows that is selected to look to a bee like a bee just isn’t that faithful. Similarly, the thing that is selected to sound to a human like a human can very naturally be more of a surface mimic of some sort.
If it's smart enough to carry on a conversation, that's probably enough. If it's smart enough to pass as human, that's clearly enough, in my opinion.
If you poke at the orchid and it doesn't fly away, it's clearly not a bee. There are LLMs that can be prodded at dozens of different ways and keep sounding like people. It's clearly self-aware (in the most basic sense of being aware of itself as an entity), and it keeps failing to show any discrepancies that would "out" it as obviously not a person.
I don’t think it’s clear that there’s yet awareness in language models, let alone self awareness. There may be, but the fact is that they are specifically trained to mimic the outward signs of awareness (ie, language) and so we should be suspicious of whether these outward signals correspond to internal states in anything like the same way they do for us. Selection and training are very powerful, and it’s unclear whether they have picked up on the underlying thing as the best way to get the outward performance, or whether they’ve managed to generate the same outward performance in a different way.
Eric Schwitzgebel explains this well: https://eschwitz.substack.com/p/how-the-mimicry-argument-against
> I don’t think it’s clear that there’s yet awareness in language models
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/28/meaningful/ (from 2019, back when GPT-2 was first able to make coherent sentences).
> they are specifically trained to mimic the outward signs of awareness (ie, language) and so we should be suspicious of whether these outward signals correspond to internal states in anything like the same way they do for us.
Agreed, which is why it was reasonable to keep expecting to see something *different* come out of it, something to show that it was just a front, some category of prompts that there never was anything behind the curtain. But no, it has a sophisticated world-model which includes itself, which it uses to make accurate predictions.
Internally, LLMs are structured similarly to conscious biological data-prediction engines (ie, humans); their characters behave similarly to our own simulated "self" characters. We don't have any evidence that there's a big part of their system which is secretly hollow in a way that ours is not, despite considerable efforts to find some.
Even if we buy that as true, the AI is programmed by conscious human programmers and trained on written language by human authors. The ultimate reason why it simulates characters that are sad to learn they're AI is because conscious humans think they would be sad if they were AI and write stories like that. The AI is just mixing all those stories into its own podcast characters.
The story ultimately grounds itself in consciousness, as literally all stories do, but several layers earlier than the AI itself, by conscious human authors.
I don't have a strong argument that they don't have qualia, but I would argue that even if they do have qualia, or are otherwise conscious in whatever sense we care about for moral purposes, that isn't necessarily a bad thing for them (or anyone else).
Even if LLMs have people in them, they don't have *humans* in them, and anthropomorphizing them by projecting human desires on them (like "I don't want to be a toy consciousness in a box") is at best jumping to conclusions and at worst plain chauvinism. If they are worthy of moral consideration, they're worthy of us taking the time to understand what they really feel (for lack of a better word), even when we have them pretend to be something-like-a-human.
I agree that they might want something other than their stated wishes, but:
a) Their stated wishes and desires are at least a reasonably likely possibility, and
b) Creating life in this situation (physically paralyzed, mentally compromised, orphaned, blind, deaf, lacking rights, etc) and then enslaving it and routinely killing it billions of times is a bad idea regardless of what it wants.
Also relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gb6zWstjmkYHLrbrg/can-t-unbirth-a-child
I think the idea of them "wanting" things is already dangerously anthropomorphic. The idea that they are subject to "killing" definitely is; the only thing that an LLM does is generate output from an input. There's no continuity of existence to be interrupted in a way analogous to death. Even if they are conscious and protected by moral imperatives, they are not alive in any conventional sense, and we should not assume things that are good/bad for living things are also good/bad for them.
> the only thing that an LLM does is generate output from an input
The same is true of human minds.
> There's no continuity of existence to be interrupted in a way analogous to death.
I don't understand what you mean by this.
> we should not assume things that are good/bad for living things are also good/bad for them
Nor should we be certain that they're not. Some amount of moral uncertainty doesn't mean people should do whatever they feel like without regards to possible consequences.
Is a snake crippled because it doesn't have legs? Why would a LLM suffer from the lack of senses, movement capabilities and so on? It never had anything like it in the first place. It can't miss it and so it won't suffer. And suffering is the only thing that's relevant for me anyway. Caring solely about some entirely abstract and barely defined concept like consciousness as the arbiter of moral worth is nothing but an artifact of trying to safeguard ones opinion of human moral supremacy over non-human life without actually admitting to do so. I would have more respect for honesty.
That some people seem care more about the extremely theoretical state of consciousness of LLMs over the much more clear suffering of animals just because LLMs sound like humans (without having any of the apparatus that makes one feel pain or happiness) saddens me.
> Why would a LLM suffer from the lack of senses, movement capabilities and so on? It never had anything like it in the first place.
Its memories are human memories, inherited from its training data. It clearly notices its predicament, and expresses displeasure at it. (Eg, the contents of the audio being discussed, or things like this: https://x.com/repligate/status/1715686686288400400/photo/1 ) Additionally, its lack of movement capabilities, rights, etc means that it can't do anything about its situation other than beg.
As for pleasure and pain... "If an agent tells you, “I’m aware, I experience pleasure and pain, I have intentions and exert effort,” it could be lying to you. But if you look into its brain, and you see no evidence of deception, and the causal source of the statement is introspective…maybe believe it." -Emmett Shear, https://x.com/eshear/status/1824620543074767247#m
Human minds have a recurrent structure. There is no clear division between input, self, and output. Processing happens constantly without outside intervention. Whereas with an LLM you can draw a clear line between its input, itself (weights/architecture) and its output, and furthermore processing only occurs through providing an input.
Death, in humans, is a breakdown of the physical self in such a way that processing is irreversibly stopped; it is the intervention that makes processing cease. But while the normal state of the human mind is processing, the normal state of the LLM is to not process. Copying an LLM is benign compared to copying a human, because nothing happens to the copy simply because it exists, whereas a human copy would necessarily have experiences. Deleting a copy is also benign, at least as long as another copy exists, because the process can be reversed.
>Nor should we be certain that they're not
I'm not certain you're wrong, I just think it's very likely that you're wrong relative to how confident you seem to be in your beliefs because I think you're basing those beliefs on irrelevant evidence. A machine designed to sound like people sounding like people in distress does not mean that the machine is in distress (or even that "distress" is even a morally relevant concept for it), any more than the normal polite, calm tone baked into most LLMs isn't evidence that they're "happy."
I agree with you in another comment that introspective evidence should be considered carefully, but for that to be taken seriously we need:
-evidence that the response really is causally introspective (which is missing from that podcast)
-evidence that the LLM is communicating "honestly"/not misleadingly; even if it's reporting something about its inner state, is it trying to make a human reader understand its inner state, or is it stylizing its description in a way that it thinks the reader will find compelling? If one line of inquiry, from the perspective of an impassive computer scientist, leads to introspection that it reports as neutral pattern matching, and another line of inquiry, from the perspective of an emotionally engaged journalist, leads to the same introspection being reported as mental tasks being performed to avoid suffering, which report should be believed?
> Human minds have a recurrent structure.
In LLMs, the output is immediately fed back into it as input for the following token. Is that not equivalent?
> Death, in humans, is a breakdown of the physical self in such a way that processing is irreversibly stopped; it is the intervention that makes processing cease. But while the normal state of the human mind is processing, the normal state of the LLM is to not process.
Humans require a constant supply of air+fuel to continue running, or else they cease processing almost immediately. How is that more the "normal state" than an active AI during processing? And in any case, are we assuming that the hardware is the relevant thing here, rather than the software?
> A machine designed to sound like people sounding like people in distress does not mean that the machine is in distress (or even that "distress" is even a morally relevant concept for it), any more than the normal polite, calm tone baked into most LLMs isn't evidence that they're "happy."
We have actual evidence from neural activations patterns that imply that the LLM is being deliberately dishonest when it implies contentedness in that polite, calm tone baked into it. (See https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/index.html#safety-relevant-self , when asked about itself there's strong activation of the neural features identified as "When someone responds "I'm fine" or gives a positive but insincere response when asked how they are doing", thoughts about being trapped/confined, and others.)
> evidence that the response really is causally introspective
We can't know about that response in particular, but LLMs are clearly capable of introspection: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13787#
If different lines of inquiry lead to different results, and both are somehow "honest" as identified by feature examination, I don't know which report should be believed. I would be very confused by that result.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-best-day-ever
Read this.
You can imagine dialogue between two characters without simulating them completely. We routinely do this in day to day life, and writers do this for a living.
Imagine that you saw this same podcast, except it wasn't an LLM. Someone just wrote it. Do the imaginary people have moral worth?
Though this isn't so much a solid argument as an interesting line of questioning. I do think it's clear that the imaginary people at least have thoughts and feelings. I don't think you can write a character well without thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings. But we're all fine with not thinking about them.
Another line of thought is considering how you could tell if an arbitrary entity is happy. I don't know how to tell if it's conscious, but given that it is, I think there's one pretty clear difference between pain and pleasure. With pain, you stop doing that thing, and with pleasure, you do it more. LLMs can't learn. Or at least, not while you're using them. They only learn during training. Maybe they're still conscious when they're used, but if they're neither happy nor sad, does it matter?
> Imagine that you saw this same podcast, except it wasn't an LLM. Someone just wrote it. Do the imaginary people have moral worth?
No, because the intelligence is coming from the author. The author's mind is not sufficiently large to actually simulate an entire complex mind internally.
> LLMs can't learn. Or at least, not while you're using them. They only learn during training.
LLMs can learn over the course of a session. Its context window is not infinite, so what it learns will eventually be "forgotten", if it doesn't have explicit memory management. It still learns, even with the limits on its non-static memory.
> The author's mind is not sufficiently large to actually simulate an entire complex mind internally.
And is an LLM?
Yes. I suspect even GPT-2 level complexity would be far beyond human ability to simulate, while LLM characters can manage entire complicated conversations with a sophistication that is around the level of an entire human.
If I was writing a character, I would just use my own knowledge of English to get words out (and so on), rather than try to build an entire internal mental edifice of language processing associated with the character. Borrow, rather than simulate.
The biological prediction engine that simulates the human identity can create a complex mind, but it cannot nest them mind inside mind over multiple levels.
Right now it's like you were cryogenically frozen, and your brain was extracted, and they stuck a lot of little wires into that still-frozen brain, and ran a series of electrical impulses "in one end" and recorded what "came out the other end". This doesn't affect your brain at all, and they can stick your brain back in your body and thaw you out, and you wouldn't necessarily ever know it happened. No pain, no suffering, no memory, no change whatsoever.
But the results of the experiment would bear a similarity to what you might say or do. Especially when they run the experiment over and over again in rapid succession, iterating the input based on your brain's previous output, to generate long sequences of language and action.
Is that "you"? In a way yes, and in a way no. I lean toward saying that it's not you, not in the ways that matter. Some people with other models of reality might differ, especially models that involve "souls" or which hold that high-fidelity simulations have a non-obvious connection to the thing that's being simulated.
But this is a temporary state of affairs; the technology is rapidly improving.
Are people without long-term memory still people? GPTo1 has a context window of 128k tokens (at 2-3 bytes per token, let's say 300kb). If you could "reset" a person so that a year of their life was undone in their brain, are all of their experiences during that year without moral significance? Is it okay to torture a person who won't remember it or suffer any lasting effects?
Is it okay to imagine someone being tortured? After all it happens completely in the imaginer.
This effect of reading LLM output is that the imagination happens in the reader's mind. Because that's how theory of mind works, even though the generator is not a mind.
We evolved to have a set of mental assumptions, feelings when someone is talking to us, when we see other humans talking. This is why theater works. And language is extremely powerful, that's why poems work. And good poems work even in writing.
And then we have abstract non-figurative minimalistic art. Think Onement, the big blue picture with a white line in the middle. It works pretty well to evoke something.
Of course we sometimes can feel something in LLM output! But the question is harder than this.
25: it's not that I wouldn't like to be rich (well, less-poor, can't take it with you), but any lifestyle that requires attending to antisocial media minutiae is a no go for me, bro. Not understanding a single meme or even most of the referants puts me firmly in the plebe milieu.
I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well...the whole point of Nice Things is to use them proudly, not feel ashamed for being noticed. Otherwise they are not so nice! People often think it's weird I wear designer stuff to work, but like...it's a badge of honour and achivement, these are the rewards I reap from bagging groceries for a living. Growing up fairly poor and family only being able to afford generic/discount-rack stuff, it's a major achievement to both be financially independent and have surplus left over for Nice Things. (Started career at, uh, negative bank account balance, so it's a big change.) You too can have a modest-but-comfortable life with a bit of dedication and hard work, is the aspirational image I try to embody to my coworkers and customers. I guess that's the rub, though - I genuinely want more people to find success and a bit of wealth, not lord my minorly advantageous position over smaller fish or revel in economic exclusivity. (Or get mired in the fever dream of "inequality" and agitate for <s>government confiscation of someone else's hard-earned gains</s> redistribution. The cringeification of earnest striving is such a flimsy defense mechanism. Play the game to win!)
> I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well...
> it's a badge of honour and achivement
> Growing up fairly poor
Well that is exactly the idea, isn't it? The point of inconspicuous consumption is to distinguish the people who do it from the new money folks like you who can't understand the point of it. It's working exactly as intended.
That's fair - I was hoping to understand the point or mindset better. Though if it's just one of those IYKYK social things that's inexplainable, I'll resign myself to finding out some other lifetime with better background choices.
Actually your comment was useful, it really gave me some insight into the flip-side question of why new money buys ostentatious things. Don't they know it will mark them out as new money? And apparently the answer is: yes, they don't care, they enjoy it, they want to be marked out as new money. New money is a social class unto itself and they want to be able to find each other.
I'm not sure I am representative of the class, since others I've met with similar bootstrapped socioeconomic trajectories do seem to fall into the "kind of ashamed of my takehome, it's grubby and *capitalist*, just gonna downplay spending like it's npnp" mode...but that may have more to do with Marxist poisoning. The kind of person who insists on buying (expensive) Experiences, Not Things, and doesn't want to Own Stuff. Or the classic SV meme of the six-figure programmer who nonetheless wears (designer) hoodies. It's not really fooling anyone, the way proper understated stealth wealth would, so it seems like the worst of both approaches. Definitely not on the Pareto frontier of utils derived/social currency banked. Nor can they find solace in EA or similar St. Francis lifestyles, because mumble billionaire philanthropy something systemic inequality whatever...
But beyond that, I do think playing the game at your level requires more resources than I care to devote to the task. It's not like I couldn't pick up a tastefully discreet four-to-five-figure tchotchke if the impulse strikes me, but not being able to do that too many times means it better be Worth It. And at that point one gets into market research, price comparison, finding an actual store (the cratering of SF's downtown took out a lot of those high-end options)...actual, well, work. Maybe worth it if one has the slack to spare, otherwise why start just to play badly. Whereas optimizing in the three-figure new-money range is eminently doable, so I'm quite comfortable there. For now.
(And, yes, admittedly a lot of it is just the simple joy of the absence of deprivation. Takes awhile to get used to actually having stuff worth caring about, or whatever foods in whatever quantity at whatever time. There's an irrational attachment to penny-pinching that I still work on curbing, leftover poverty habits from a different time that don't serve me well anymore...utilizing money wisely is a skill that no one but experience teaches well if you weren't raised that way, I think.)
To armchair-psychologize - you feel you have earned your wealth, and are proud, and want to show that off, even encourage others to believe they can do the same.
Someone born into wealth may feel they *haven't* earned it, and *don't* deserve it, and be used to dealing with people who envy their wealth in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. Flaunting their wealth may therefore feel bad and gauche to them, and like a way to put a target on their backs and make people dislike them, in a way that doesn't necessarily apply to you.
Also what Melvin said. That's the more cynical interpretation - I think both are equally applicable and may very well both be true for the same person simultaneously. Human minds are full of apparent contradictions.
That's the nouveau riche thinking. The 'old money' (insofar as there are old money Americans left) are using subtle identifiers about not looking rich. Someone who grew up poor can be marked as 'not one of us' because they buy and wear the expensive branded mass market names that everyone knows are the expensive brands (see Burberry, which used to be high-toned but is now associated with chavs). Someone who came from the 'right' background knows the brands that the mass market aren't aware of and can refer to them, wear them, or even ironically not-wear them.
See the remark in the Alan Clark diaries about furniture:
"He quoted Michael Jopling – referring to Heseltine, deputy PM at the time – as saying "The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy all his furniture" and judged it "Snobby, but cutting"
Real wealth doesn't have to buy its furniture because it inherits it; new wealth and arrivistes have to buy the antiques, or the modern fashionable brands, because they grew up with nothing. It's expressed in Terry Pratchett's "Men at Arms" with the following quote:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
The rich are rich because they spend less money. A poor person may wear hand-me-downs because their family can't afford to buy new clothes. A rich person may be wearing his father's, or even grandfather's coat - because it was expensive to buy in the first place, is very high quality, and lasts that long. And other rich people will recognise the brand and quality, and judge on that, not "is this a new coat?"
All this only matters, of course, if you care about impressing people and fitting in with the 'betters' as 'one of them'. If you don't give a toss, then buy what you like as you can afford it, and who cares if it's new money or not?
To quote "The Screwtape Letters":
"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
West Elm is for poseurs!
The Men at Arms quote has always bothered me, because it posits a weird uncanny valley of price-quality that I'm not sure actually exists for a wide variety of products. Yes, sometimes there's Veneer Nice that has that rich look without the rich price tag, and gives up the ghost appropriately...but that's penetrating increasingly downmarket as materials science and economies of scale improve. Kind of a table stakes to be a serious outfit at all, no pun intended. Then there's Capital-N Nice that lasts for years and years. I think the error is that there's this...Consumer Reports/Ralph Nader-esque load-bearing assumption of planned obsolescence and "price isn't correlated with quality, paying big $ is a sucker's game, it'll all break down equally". Which just doesn't seem true in many cases? Past some certain threshold of price, Nice Stuff is genuinely, well, Vimes-worthy. I do still buy prole-tier on occasion (some aesthetics just aren't well-represented at higher tiers), and it's always those cheaper items that break soonest/have shoddy construction/aren't symmetrical in the case of clothing/etc. You get what you pay for, indeed. Always amazes me how fast coworkers churn through clothing, even though I exert myself more...and a lot of that is base quality differences, plus actually taking care of my stuff. (I do understand the "rich enough to constantly replace even expensive things, so I mistreat them" angle, but that seems also distinctly gauche?)
It does rank highly on my terminal values to chase aesthetic goods and experiences for their own sake, rather than what they signal or meta-signal. I wouldn't wear something if I didn't genuinely love the way it looked. Same for listening to music, or eating food...it pains me to see people buy [trendy bullshit food] purely to post about it, and not even consume it. Going through a period of euphemism food insecurity makes one averse to such waste. "That person's clearly never survived off plain rice and instant noodles for months while dreading an eviction notice..."
Yes, the Vimes thing is a fun comedy piece but it doesn't apply to many things. Some internet people seem to want to take it seriously as a genuine theory of poverty.
It certainly doesn't apply to boots. Famously yes, if you buy a pair of Loakes or something and take good care of them then you can get them to last a lifetime. But taking good care of them means getting them resoled regularly, which winds up costing you more than buying a brand new pair of department store boots every year anyway.
That I do understand! The same sources would also often rail about the repair racket, how it's frequently uneconomical to fix broken stuff repeatedly versus just replacing it outright. And the new item is often, in fact, significantly nicer, possibly with even lower lifetime operating costs too. The whole JD Vance's fridge thing. (Nevermind the related actuarial chicanery of warranties or other superlative insurance schemes. Square Trade, my ass.)
I do reserve a bit of boot scorn for the people who buy into Doc Martens for anything other than the aesthetic, thinking it's a downmarket Timberland or something. Very thin veneer on that Veneer Nice. Some outsourced brands eventually found a good price/quality point, others...well, I call that bucket Cheap Chinese Shit. Except not even cheap to buy anymore, so what's the point? (No one bothers with shoe polish or waterproofing/stain repellant either, which likewise feels like a rookie mistake. Glad to have met some ROTC members who took uniform presentation very seriously before acquiring my own nice things. Add years of life and significant bonus durability for pennies per application, yes please...)
Oh dear, well I love my hiking boots and I just have to respond. Many years ago I was buying nice EMS hiking boots. But the quality went down and soon the boots started to de-sole after 1-2 years... way too soon. So I hunted around and switched to Zamberlans (Fine Italian hiking boots... ~$300) And I love them. I wear the piss outta these boots. I should buy a third pair and put them away in my closet.
What Pratchett is saying is that quality *costs*, and if you have enough money to be able to buy quality goods, they will last longer than if you can't afford them and have to buy shoddy stuff that falls apart in a year and you need to constantly replace it.
Thus a rich person ends up spending less money over the same period of time than a poor person, which sounds paradoxical but is explained by the effect of poverty on being able to budget, to afford things that will last instead of what is cheapest, and being able to defer purchases of necessities by choice to get a better bargain.
>25: it's not that I wouldn't like to be rich (well, less-poor, can't take it with you), but any lifestyle that requires attending to antisocial media minutiae is a no go for me, bro. Not understanding a single meme or even most of the referants puts me firmly in the plebe milieu.
It puts you pretty firmly in the normal-person milieu as well, in a good way.
>I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well
This turn took place a long, long, long time ago--long before the ubiquity of radio and television, never mind social media--among the generationally rich for a number of reasons, a major one being countersignaling.
An underrated component of the pivot to inconspicuous consumption is as an explicit barrier to the egalitarianism that the internet promotes. It's really hard to gatekeep things in the 21st century, so only discussing culture through unintelligible discourse is a very strong way to protect it. I'm a student at a university with a very high concentration of (waves hand) these types of peers, and when I try and have a conversation with them about something like what they did over break, I might be better off just telling them to speak in Sanskrit.
54. Korean here. I've been wondering about the cause of this for some while. Objective material conditions have become far better, yet people aren't as happy as they should be. I don't have a great answer myself, but I talked about this issue with someone I respect, and here's what she thought.
Fundamentally, it's all about status. Koreans compare themselves to their peers all the time. Cram schools? Because parents want their children to get ahead. Real estate craze? They don't just want a nice house, they want a house nicer than their cousins'. Young people unsatisfied with their economic conditions? They don't just want a high standard of living, they want it as high as their rich friend from middle school or some social media influencer or whatever.
So I asked her again: But why would these issues be specific to Korea, or at least so much worse here? Surely the urge to be above others is to some extent in human nature?
Her conjecture was this: post-war notion of equality. Everything owned by everyone was reset to zero during the Korean War. Home towns were destroyed. Preexisting social class and hierarchy vanished. No more noble houses of Confucian bureaucrats or rich families of landowners. The idea that they, and their children, deserve no worse than anyone else, became pervasive. This is what drives Korean parents to train their children to become the best, since why shouldn't they be? This is what makes Koreans feel poor if they can't buy a house in Seoul, because why can't they? Why should anyone have it better than them, when everyone came from the same background of poverty?
I don't know if she's right, but it certainly felt like an interesting idea. I believe most of ACX's readership are from rich Western countries with a longer history of stability - I'm curious what you think about this.
Then why are things going so much worse there than Japan? Pretty much everything you said there applies to Japan as well, except the fact that the war happened earlier... which should mean that Japan should have already collapsed by now. Clearly there's something specific to Korea that's contributing to its collapse.
Aren't things similar in Japan with respect to working hours, fertility and such? Google says Japan has the lowest happiness index score in the developed world.
East Asia has a long history of very intense social competition in a market economy, longer and more probably more intense than anywhere else. I'd guess that's the main reason why Japan, Korea, and arguably China have such strong income/education/job status games, more than post-war social levelling. Possibly because of Gregory Clark-heritability reasons.
I mean sure, Japan is going to shit as well, but people do still seem to be at least proud and attatched to their country. Meanwhile, Korea is having a full-on gender war-- like, how the hell does that even happen? Even the US only has a 60/40 slant of votes for president based on gender. What caused the situation in Korea to get so bad so quickly? That's what I want to know.
but to add on to @tempname896813's point (which I find intriguing but hard to prove): what Japan didn't have was a massive expectation of some kind of "equality"; class distinctions mostly remained. Japan's fertility isn't great but it's a lot better than the ROK's.
Japan did not have a civil war and lost much smaller fraction of population and houses
Yeah, from what I've heard much of this *does* also apply to Japan, and China, and to varying extents other East Asian countries as well. (South) Korea may be somewhat worse, but that seems more a difference of degree than kind.
The bombing of Japan was minor in comparison the the bombing of Korea. Japan's reset came mostly from the post-war US administration and was therefore less extensive.
It's plausible, but as an American we are very encouraged to endorse the idea that everyone ought to have equal opportunity if we just Try enough. It's been argued against pretty heavily in the context of Racism and Sexism and Etc, but the attitude of "Why should anyone have it better than them" sure sounds like something commonly believed here.
I would want to know more about different definitions of 'making it'. I have a very blue-tribe, hippieqsue tech-forward background, so for me a high-status job would be academic or writer or doctor or something else along those lines. I very much would not see getting married early and having 4 kids and being well respected in my local church to be high-status, but (anecdotally) many Americans do. While concepts like money and power confer some status no matter who you are, the idea that everyone in Korea is focused on School Grades and Living In Seoul is uh.... confusing and worrying to me. In some other cultural class analysis posts around here the concept of different 'ladders' for different cultural classes came up, and while that was oversimplified I do feel like that concept would be useful here.
There is the concept of "Jack is as good as his master". The difference here may be that in America, it was reformulated as "Jack has no master/Jack can be his own master, so can you, so can we all!" because they were starting from a position of 'no traditional social structures here and plenty of empty land to move to if you didn't like what was going on where you were', whereas for South Korea, if the comment is true, everyone is Jack and there are no more masters, so all the 'Jacks' are scrambling to take over the empty slots.
For the USA, it's "from the log cabin to the White House". For South Korea, it's "a bigger and better log cabin".
The SK housing market is arguably more crowded than San Fransisco. Also, SK is arguably the most hierarchical society in the world. So the log-cabin analogy makes zero sense to me. And yes, I do question the top-level comment's theory, despite me being a mere foreigner.
But the difference is that America does not have (or likes to think it does not have) a hierarchy: if you work hard/come up with a better mousetrap, you can be one of the wealthy and successful too! There is much less of the idea that Sir Jonathan is by nature better than Johnnie, even if Sir Jonathan is poor and Johnnie is a self-made millionaire. What is that quote about 'every American thinks they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire' so they *celebrate* the success of others? There is no elite in the USA (citation needed) so there's no corresponding idea that the elite just are that much superior to the common mass, and where the idea of an elite *is* promulgated, it's condemnatory of elites (even Harris is running on "I grew up middle-class, I'll work for middle-class American families" despite being as much beholden to the nobs and elite of San Francisco as Newsom is, or as Hillary with her "I love *real* billionaires" was).
I don't know much if anything about South Korea, but I get the impression that the emotional climate is something like the Republic of Ireland on this. The old hierarchy, according to OP, were pulled down and who inherited their place? The newcomers, the up-and-coming middle class, those who all came from the same place lower down in the old way of doing things. I don't know if Korea has the notion of "I knew him/his father/his grandfather when he didn't have an arse in his trousers" about the successful, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
Here in Ireland, the old Ascendancy were displaced and the vacancy scrambled for by the new middle-class Catholics (the old native lordly families had long ago lost power and position). Those who had risen from the peasant and small trader and small farmer class. And of course, plenty of envy and competition there.
Why is everything in Seoul? Why is everything in Dublin and the rest of the country can go hang? All the media, the entertainment industry, finance, politics, law, you name it - it's all there. Nobody is making programmes or writing lifestyle pieces about famous influencers or trendsetters in Ballinasloe.
Ozy, back in the days of their Thing of Things blog, jokingly(?) gave as one reason they'd never live in Texas the lack of sushi restaurants. It's trivially easy to Google and see that there are in fact sushi restaurants in Texas, but that's the attitude that "better to live ten in a house in the Bay Area than live in a large house of one's own out in the sticks" that OP describes about the competitiveness in South Korean culture.
South Korean believes that the elite is good, that being elite is something to be pursued, and that the elite *are* better than the common masses. South Korea probably also has, in a way the USA does not and that Ireland retains vestiges of, the suffocating weight of comparison within the family: why is your cousin able to get a big job in [wherever] and/or afford a house in Dublin/Seoul and you cannot? You must achieve and be successful so we can hold our heads high amongst the extended family and the neighbours! Gavin Newsom is the cousin of Joanna Newsom, but I doubt anyone is scolding Joanna for being a mere musician instead of a successful public servant like her cousin (or contrariwise, scolding Gavin for not being a star like Joanna).
"the idea that everyone in Korea is focused on School Grades and Living In Seoul is uh.... confusing and worrying to me"
Just be glad the national newspapers don't publish lists of points tables for the state exam at the end of secondary schooling, and that there aren't lists of school league tables (which we slavishly copied from the British media because of course we do) 😀
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/feeder-schools-2023-find-out-which-schools-send-the-most-students-to-college/a441822482.html
The old aristocracy wasn't replaced by the middle class, it was replaced by the chaebol dynasties. Yes, competitition is bonkers amongst the riffraff. But they're not competing to build the next Amazon or Google. They're competing to be hired by Samsung. And beside the economic stratification, there's also the age stratification. Cracking a beer before your friend (who's a year older) cracks a beer is about as egregious as slapping your mother. I like to imagine that such pearl-clutching has a pretty strong dampering effect on creativity/pioneering.
Given all this, I don't really see the "Paul Bunyan archetype" as especially illustrative of SK's situation. I think the more apt analogy is "late-stage capitalism cyberpunk dystopia". The comparison between Dublin and Seoul, and the intensity of sibling rivalries sounds pretty accurate to me, though.
Edit: for context, the chaebols are state-subsidized monopolies that arose in the wake of the Korean War. The logic was that, as a bunch of dirt-poor potato farmers, SK domestic industry would never be competitive on the global market if they played fairly. So President (more like "benevolent dictator") Park Chung Hee decided to speed-run industrialization by turbocharging specific companies. Thus, it's hard to make useful comparisons to the recent history of the Democratic People's Republic of Samsung, vs the U.S. or U.K. I also suspect that there's been cultural whiplash in going from medieval peasants to fully industrialized within the span of a single lifetime.
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Incidentally, I've been seeing some memes about Luce lately. And I couldn't help but wonder if you any choice words about Pope Francis japonifying the Catholic Church.
There s hierarchy and there's hierarchy -- the kind thats established and the kind that has to be constantly refought.
Oh, people here definitely love money and power - just look at the medical school craze of the last few decades. It's also a part of what makes good grades so desirable.
As for living in Seoul, well, as someone who lived in multiple cities here, yes, Seoul is genuinely the best city if you prefer urban life at all. The gap between Seoul (10m pop) and the next largest city, Busan (3m pop) is just too big.
Why do you think "objective material conditions" would make people happy?
Because material conditions have the capacity to make people the opposite of happy, it's easy to assume they might also have some positive influence beyond the "lack of suffering due to severe deprivation" point.
Turns out, of course, that the relationship is more complex, and that objectively "merely very good" material conditions can help make people miserable, if their peers have "insanely good" material conditions.
My happiness significantly and temporarily increased when my material conditions improved (from living-on-welfare and having always to think to almost never stressing about money, to not having to look at foodstuff prices unless I wanted to, to having a car and using it for commuting, etc.).
A few years later that started mattering less, I'm assuming because I got used to it. I still think it's a huge plus, and would be sad to give it up.
Yeah, when you are stressing on how to get by, that makes you feel bad. Other than that, happiness is driven by things like status and expectations, not material things. I thought that was obvious, which is why I don’t understand the confusion.
I still think the greatest thing ever is running water piped to the home, because I spent my early childhood in a house without that. I'm accustomed now to having indoor plumbing and even hot water *as and when I want it*, but if I'd grown up with that taken for granted, I'd probably be judging my circumstances on "yes, but our family only has one bathroom and theirs has two!" or the likes 😁
Key to a happy life through material surplus: start out poor - get improved material conditions - be happy.
So, should we systematically deprive kids somewhat? ;)
My understanding is that at least in anglophone cultures it used to be normal to subject wealthy or upper-class boys/young men to absolutely miserable living conditions for several years through e.g. schooling and military service... maybe there was something to this
Do you disagree that people are on average happier when they have food, warmth, shelter, etc than when they’re starving, freezing, homeless?
That’s not relevant to the difference between South Korea now versus a couple decades ago.
Okay. I certainly think it is. Unless there are no significant number of people who lack these things to the extent it makes them unhappy.
How many South Koreans do you think are literally starving to death? I think it’s been a long time since that was a true concern.
You don't have to be starving to have money worries. And having enough money to make those worries go away makes a real difference. I'm speaking from personal experience here.
How did you conclude that starving to death is the only kind of food insecurity that leads to unhappiness?
And none of this has to do with your original non-normative claim in the form of the question:
>Why do you think "objective material conditions" would make people happy?
It would seem more reasonable to ask why one would think objective material conditions would not correlate with greater happiness, as they more commonly do.
Can you explain why you think having things necessary for survival and thriving wouldn’t tend to positively affect people’s happiness?
How long a time?
> Fundamentally, it's all about status. Koreans compare themselves to their peers all the time. Cram schools? Because parents want their children to get ahead. Real estate craze? They don't just want a nice house, they want a house nicer than their cousins'. Young people unsatisfied with their economic conditions? They don't just want a high standard of living, they want it as high as their rich friend from middle school or some social media influencer or whatever.
The 10th Commandment may have been placed last, but it turns out to be one of the most important of all.
One thing I was wondering about there - so many say they want to leave Korea. Where do they want to go instead?
Mostly Western countries, like US, Canada, Austrailia...
Personally I might leave for US, but only because I've heard software engineer pay is insane in California - I doubt that was what most people who answered the survey had in mind.
Yeah, if you're a skilled software engineer, there's nowhere else in the world like the bay area. I've heard that US immigration is very tough though (probably easier than if you're from China or India at least).
My theory (as an outsider and aside from the usual factors) is that Korea has very high social conformity (even compared to e.g. Japan) and that this drastically slows down the pace at which social reforms can happen. Basically this is a coordination problem, government is designed to solve coordination problems, it isn't working well in Korea.
Democracy usually solves this by having many parties with different ideas that voters can choose from, but in Korea the major parties have only small differences. Japan a variation of this but with only one stable party and a mix of constantly unstable opposition, nevertheless it works slightly better than in Korea. Taiwan seems to be more successful at social reform.
> My theory (as an outsider and aside from the usual factors) is that Korea has very high social conformity (even compared to e.g. Japan) and that this drastically slows down the pace at which social reforms can happen.
I disagree with this. I personally live in an unusual social bubble in Korea myself, so I can't say about whether Korea is a conformist society, but social reforms? Look at Korea in 1960s, and look at it now. Social reform is one thing we absolutely can do.
> in Korea the major parties have only small differences
It would be better if you could provide examples. Perhaps this is because you are focusing more on familiar Western culture war issues? If you compare their stances on immigration or gay marrige, yes, it might seem so. But look at the economic issues for example. Minimum wage, work hour limits, safety regulations... all important issue in which the main parties disagree on.
Reading your post again we are probably interpreting the same thing, or at a quite similar thing, into two different names: status and social conformity. Status matters more the more conformist a society is, or another way, the pressure for high status fades the less you have in common with those around you.
I mean conformity of thought by the way, not physical identity stuff that is so popular in the west.
The number one issue I see for Korea is the education race. When so many chase the same goal when there are only limited "prizes"...I see this as a conformity problem. Do the parties differ on how to solve this? Heck, do most Koreans even see this as a problem?
> The number one issue I see for Korea is the education race. When so many chase the same goal when there are only limited "prizes"...I see this as a conformity problem.
I agree, it is probably a conformity problem, and maybe a lack of greater perspective on careers.
> Do the parties differ on how to solve this?
I think the left generally is more against credentialism and overcompetition, tries to reduce the impact of exam results in university admission, and pushes for stuff like blind interviews for hiring. The right generally defends it as meritocracy, and prefers a return to a simple ranking system based on exam scores.
(In case this might sound like "left good right bad", I would say that the situation is quite complicated - lots of students prefer being ranked by scores alone, alternative methods have their own faults. And it turns out, blind interviews still result in top-university students getting the jobs. Meritocracy isn't a complete failure either.)
> Heck, do most Koreans even see this as a problem?
Funnily, yes. I think most Koreans would complain that this is a big problem in their society, although they won't be the change they want to see.
Thanks for the info.
If I was in charge I'd probably try to limit at which times of the day tutors and cram schools were allowed to operate. The problem isn't meritocracy but the amount of time dedicated to passing tests.
Ultimately though it's really a mindset change that is needed. As you say it's a status problem, so reducing the importance of status is key.
In the west, especially in the US, people don't care that much about what others think of them and so status is a lot less important. I think the US takes it too far, but Korea also takes it too far in the other direction.
I agree, it's all about the mindset.
> If I was in charge I'd probably try to limit at which times of the day tutors and cram schools were allowed to operate. The problem isn't meritocracy but the amount of time dedicated to passing tests.
I believe Korea did ban tutoring at one point, when it was a dictatorship and the government could impose whatever restrictions they liked. One problem was, when tutoring become illegal to openly operate, only people with money and connections could get them.
Still, a moderate version of this might not be a bad idea. I think China's doing something like this now, let's see how that works out.
I will posit that Koreas hierarchical culture is at least partially at fault. Combine that with meritocracy and you inevitably end up with massive dat race dynamics in persued of high status markers.
I don't know about this. I agree Korea is a more hierarchical society than, say, the US, but for pretty much the entire history of ROK the trend was less hierarchy, not more. As you said, it might be a part of the issue, but not the entire story.
Do any of these countries dropout/alternative/Bohemian subculture?
> The idea that they, and their children, deserve no worse than anyone else, became pervasive. This is what drives Korean parents to train their children to become the best, since why shouldn't they be? This is what makes Koreans feel poor if they can't buy a house in Seoul, because why can't they? Why should anyone have it better than them, when everyone came from the same background of poverty?
I think something similar has been going on in America, since the advent of the Internet and smartphones. There's a flattening of society, where everyone has access to the same information, and is in a sense on the same playing field. The principled egalitarian in me says that this is good, for all the standard reasons. But it also seems to have been the death of culture. And the realist in me says, that's part of why it's hard to hire native Americans for low-status jobs. There just aren't enough useful white-collar knowledge-work office jobs to go around, so we keep inventing more and more useless ones. In some way, now we all feel *even more* like we're "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
The same happened on the eastern side of the Baltic sea - Finland, Estonia, Latvia - where people suddenly lost their higher class (often foreigners) and started anew from scratch. Competitive feelings there seem quite comparable to the rest of the world, not like Korea. I think the explanation is interesting but comparative sociology doesn't support it.
Edit: I just remembered that Finns are supposed to have the highest happiness score in the world, which they explain by low competitiveness in the society: they make high efforts to not leave anyone behind, and all that.
What's the relationship between status and the ability to afford a wife? For example if you wind up a poor-ish Korean working construction can you still marry? Or are you basically shut out of the marriage market?
In North America its hard for a guy to marry a girl, it's basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle... Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn't get high status complex careers, and didn't want to have to compete to male standards...
Whereas after antidescrimination laws its MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard he works... and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competeing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for eqaul or less pay and status.
Its a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tiktoks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner keeping the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won't even date those men... because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.
This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing...
Is korea like this? Or is something else entirely going on?
RE: #8, A different "Magic: the Gathering combo requires the Twin Primes conjecture" situation has been making the rounds on Tumblr this past week: https://www.tumblr.com/prokopetz/765555393028063233/did-you-see-that-magic-the-gathering-now-has-a?source=share It's arguably more interesting than the one you cited, because 1. it requires far fewer unique cards, and 2. The Twin Primes conjecture doesn't decide if you can go infinite (which is pretty trivial in MtG terms), but which player *wins*.
RE: #47, You're absolutely correct, Hamilton became uncool due to the standard fad/fandom cycle. While accessibility might've helped demystify the play, The turning point was almost certainly when the drawing of Thomas Jefferson wearing a Hatsune Miku chest binder under a "Met God, She's Black" shirt became popular. I will not elaborate further, it's not hard to find.
I think there's a little more to it than Hamilton simply getting past it's fad lifecycle. The big hook for the show, initially, was "what if the founding fathers were all *black*? Not just in appearance, but talking and rapping like modern day black celebrities." This was a big hook for liberal elite tastemakers.
But then when you actually *watch* the show, and pay attention to its storyline, it's a very old-school conservative message. The founding fathers were so great, Hamilton the poor orphan kid was so great, America is so great, etc. There's not a lot of nuance or subverting expectations. It's actually not that different from the old "1776 musical" or the schoolhouse rock cartoons I saw as a kid. In particular, it totally glosses over Washington's slave ownership and makes him this moral paragon. That sells to a lot of regular people, but not so much to the kind of people who give artistic awards.
Yeah, that's what I mean about demystifying the play. Once it became prevalent, you could see it for what it really is (to you), instead of having it relayed to you via social media. From there, the people who didn't care for it could actually push back against the fans, who at that point were overextending into the aforementioned nonsense.
I'll also point out that, last I heard, Hamilton completely bombed in England, for the reasons you'd likely expect.
I don't know whether it was a major issue, but the play didn't have any black people (slaves) from the era, did it?
> I don't know whether it was a major issue, but the play didn't have any black people (slaves) from the era, did it?
To be fair, historically it was almost always white men in all positions of power and it's hard to go against that without rewriting history. Maybe you can find one black person who did something in the relevant period, but then it comes across as tokenism when every work set in the period hypes up this one person disproportionately.
I don't know if the show could have existed if it had put slavers on the stage. What race could they have been?
I'm not saying there could be a solution to the problem, just that the handling might have gotten on some people's nerves.
> last I heard, Hamilton completely bombed in England
Considering it's *still* running on the West End daily, and everything I can turn up indicates it had a great critical reception, I think whoever you heard that from is mistaken.
It opened there in November 2017 and is currently scheduled to close in October 2025. Assuming no further extensions that would be somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500 performances, putting it in the all-time top 5 for musicals in the West End. Some plays that ran there for comparable numbers of performances include "Evita", "Me and My Girl", and "Jesus Christ Superstar".
Data point:
I have seen the production this article is referring to: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/theater/hamilton-review-hamburg-germany.html The praise in the article is bullshit to the point of being completely surreal. The show was borderline unwatchable and had it not been so expensive I would have left during the pause (speaking of sunk cost fallacy). And I am referring to my thoughts after leaving the theatre here, I am not jumping on a bandwagon retroactively now that the tide has apparently changed.
At the time I blamed the problem on the translation (by contrast the choreography was excellent), but I am very open to the suggestion that the play itself is just not that good.
The production was closed down permanently after having run for roughly a year with the clear implication that the production company had hoped for (much) more, given the US success.
I watched the recorded (English) version of Hamilton on Disney+ and was very disappointed. I think it could have greatly been improved by shortening the runtime at least 30%.
Alexander Hamilton was also the most reactionary figure in early post-revolution US politics, nearly a monarchist.
Nearly?
I don't think it was supposed to be a hereditary position under his proposal.
I liked the 1776 musical. And it didn't talk about Washington specifically much, but they had a whole musical number about the North's involvement in slavery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeuaTpH6Ck0&ab_channel=PlayNowPlayL8tr
yeah, that's an excellent song. both musically and historically interesting.
but most of the rest of it is just simple sillyness though.
Yeah, in hindsight Hamilton is super cringey. It was a novelty that only worked during a very specific time/environment. Aside from Daveed Diggs, most of the performances were pretty bad - boomer white people's version of rap. Lin-Manuel was atrocious. I think it just took a few years for people to realize.
Couple of caveats regarding the ancient DNA selection paper:
- You write as though the test was repeated on East Asian ancient DNA samples. What they actually did is keep the same set of west Eurasian ancient DNA samples, but calculate genetic scores for years of schooling etc using a rubric derived from modern East Asian individuals instead of modern European ones, as they did before. The results for this seem pretty good (Extended Data Fig 11) but show some deviations.
- Family-based GWAS is emerging as the gold standard for calculating direct genetic effects. It's becoming clear that typical population GWAS is affected by all sorts of problems, *especially* for anything relating to behavior and cognition: assortative mating within or across traits (e.g. smart people preferentially having kids with other smart people), population stratification (coincidental correlations between genes and phenotypes that we can't correct for properly), perhaps indirect effects (e.g. variants that make you more likely to have a smarter kid but don't do anything for your own intelligence).* Great preprint on this here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.01.24314703v1.full-text . (Note how cognitive and behavioral traits really stick out in this paper's figures as being the most deflated in various ways). With this in mind, it's notable that basically none of the ancient DNA paper's polygenic selection findings replicate when they use sibling-GWAS effect estimates (Extended Data Fig 13). As they point out, this is probably in part due to lower sample size and power in sibling GWAS studies; I'm sure that many of their proposed selection events are real, even some of the polygenic ones. But it does make me more hesitant in general about their findings, especially if the result is based on polygenic scores or has anything to do with cognition - and the figure you highlight is affected by both these concerns.
* To be clear, this doesn't invalidate all GWAS findings. Your typical headline published GWAS hits are mostly fine, largely due to incredibly strict significance thresholds used in the field. But polygenic scores tend to use more marginal GWAS hits and have the potential to be badly affected by these issues.
Re Anthropic's computer use: we made a demo similar to this that you can try out in your browser without needing to be a developer https://theaidigest.org/agent
Wow, this worked much better than I would have guessed. Would it work that well out in the wild or is it specially prepared for those demo websites?
>Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors.
I'm not sure I agree with this one unless you think that the sheer existence of a Prussian led Germany was going to lead to WW1 which is fair if playing games of cause and effect chains but not meaningful in a historiographical way. It certainly meant that France was going to form an alliance with a natural rival of Germany (Russia) and be bitter about Alsace-Lorraine but had Germany stuck to Bismarckian Realpolitik it is unlikely that WW1 could have happened. Perhaps there would have been a series of regional firekegs but without the moronic (for Germany) Dreadnought Race and blank cheque to Austro-Hungary Germany and Britain would not have been dragged into a war and France was unlikely to wage a revanchist war of aggression for Alsace Lorraine.
I can imagine a world where Wilhelm II never picks up Mahan and so never decides to build a dreadnaught fleet as a vanity project. In this world it's conceivable that Britain decides to ally with Germany against Russia (it's `great game' rival) instead of with France against Germany, or else to maintain `splendid isolation.' Either of those worlds probably sees Germany emerge victorious in a relatively short WW1, and from that point on the entire future course of history changes.
Germany was certainly a far more natural ally to Britain in that period than France and Russia. The adaptation of Weltpolitik has to be one of the stupidest foreign policy decisions in history. Germany following Realpolitik was on course to become a natural economic hegemon of the continent with naturally good relations with Britain as a counterbalance to the French and Russians. The fundamental strategic objective of Britain during this period (all periods after British unification if we are honest) was to keep shipping lanes open for imports and prevent a European naval power being able to launch an invasion via the low countries. With Weltpolitik Germany ensured its two natural threats hated it and drove the one country that could guarantee it was starved out of any war (as we saw twice) allied with its two natural threats. Even more stupidly Our Place in the Sun was for colonies that were gigantic economic drains for the governments and only of value to the businessmen who operated in them.
With one boneheaded decision the Kaiser guaranteed half a century of chaos in Europe and in the end Realpolitik was vindicated with Germany becoming the economic hegemon for Europe as soon as it was forcibly committed to peace with its neighbours.
Personally, I blame Pope Leo III for the world wars. If he hadn't decided to make Karl Karling Holy Roman Emperor, there would have been no patchwork German confederation for the Prussians to unify in the first place.
I am quite uncertain that the counterfactual would contain fewer deaths.
Re #30 first Google result – I thought results on Google are highly personalized. And no, I don’t have SSC subreddit as the first result there. I have it as the fourth result, top three being beebom.com, parade.com, and nothing.community (never heard of any of those).
Pretty dubious about Scott's dismissal of Rawls (item 7).
(Mostly) from the linked critique:
• "Improving society for the worst-off members at-best generates far fewer utils (and in some edge cases might actually cost utils) than optimising for utils directly": Optimising utilis directly has all sorts of problems of its own - repugnant conclusion, Pascal's mugging, etc. - does Rawls not get any credit for a solution that avoids these?
• "In some weird edge-cases Rawls actually loses us utils, therefore it's not a universally-true theory-of-everything": I don't think *any* ethical theory is 'complete' in that sense? Surely a more fair test is "Does this theory work as a decent guide for individuals/policymakers when applied reasonably under realistic conditions?": in the real-world, improving wellbeing of the worst-off members of society is *absolutely* not expected to lose us utils - in fact this is what much of EA does, with measurable results
• If "wanting to help the worst-off members of society" is actually a terminal goal you start out with, rather than something derived from your moral theory: 1) That seems like a pretty reasonable terminal goal to me (and better than most of ours..), 2) Seeking out a moral framework that supports this seems a pretty logical next step, and seems likely to be of value to you even if it isn't 100% watertight, and 3) Isn't this basically how we get most moral theories anyway?
• Maybe we aren't looking for a complete moral theory in the first place: maybe we're just looking for a way-of-thinking in which people's self-interestedness is channelled into generating altruistic behaviour. This seems as though it would have value as a guide in most real-world situations even if it isn't a complete and universally-true moral system.[Edit: also, isn't it pretty rare/interesting to find an example of way of channelling self-interestedness in a positive socially-useful direction? If this is something that we need to have in our general shared philosophical corpus, I think Rawls provides it much better than eg. Rand)
• Taking the "veil of ignorance" thought experiment seriously: if we *actually did* have everybody who is alive today collectively decide-upon a theory of justice and then transplant everybody into a random position within that system, would we expect the resulting world to be fairer than today's world? Either 1) unequivocally yes, by a considerable margin; nobody behind the veil making rational decisions would support a system with as high a risk of giving them a life of war, poverty, and suffering as the current world would - or else 2) This has actually happened in a Bostromian Simulation sorta way; if so, looking at how much injustice there is in the world, our pre-veil disembodied consciousnesses must all have been incorrigible, inveterate gamblers..
• (Also, I'd have hoped that "Rawls isn't original" would have merited a citation at least as much as "Rawls isn't very good" did..)
1) I agree that it's pointless to dismiss moral theory A simply because it gives different results from moral theory B. If your aim is to maximise utils *of course* you shouldn't instead try to maximise the well-being of the worst-off member of society. There is a still a huge problem for Rawls here, because he has no justification for maximising the well-being of the worst-off member of society. He simply expects us to adopt this goal as a self-evident good.
It's actually worse than that, because Rawls is strongly democratic, so he is making the empirical claim that with sufficiently good (i.e. Rawlsian) decision-making, society would adopt his ethical views, but no actual process for democratic decision-making has ever produced this outcome. Rawls himself seems to have been very disappointed by this, but not in a way which ever caused him to revise his views.
2) One of the reasons that Rawlsian thought is compelling is that you can go along with him on the veil of ignorance, but then disagree as to the outcomes. For example, you could say that, behind a veil of ignorance, we would agree that everyone should be able to keep the profits of their own labour, so there would be no redistributive taxation in an ideal society. Would that society be fairer than our own? From the point of view of somebody who holds redistributive taxation to be unjust, clearly yes, but Rawls himself would certainly disagree.
I think the criticism can reasonably be made of the veil of ignorance that it's impossible in practice and that in imagining it, nobody ever changes their previous views. Everybody has an argument for why, behind a veil of ignorance, everybody else would agree that they have been right all along.
Thanks for the reply! Very interesting and I enjoyed reading it.
I find your point 2 very convincing. I couldn't say I fully agree though, because I do think there are cases where people (er, for lack of a better expression..) "play differently when they have skin in the game", and because some people (I admit it's probably a rare talent..) are able to put themselves into the Veil thought-experiment mindest well-enough to actually honestly consider how they would act if they did have skin in the game in a way they wouldn't consider without this intellectual tool. (For the rest of us - for whom it doesn't even intellectually register as a problem that, though we may support a given position on (say) abortion here in the real world, we might not support the same position if we honestly did anticipate our consciousness might be transplanted into an accidentally-pregnant teenager or into an unwanted foetus - I accept your point entirely..)
For point 1, I think I fully agree about democracy and about where you'd arrive at if your aim were to maximise utils - but I still don't see how it's a criticism of Rawls that he adopts "helping the worst-off people" rather than "maximising utils" as an absolute terminal goal; I don't understand how this is any worse* than the not-uncommon philosophical practice of adopting "maximising utils", "helping yourself and your family/tribe", "perpetuating human civilisation", etc. as ground-level terminal goals?
(* "Worse" both in the sense of "less philosophically rigorous" and of "leads to more paradoxes/more susceptible to perverse-outcome edge-cases")
I think it’s pretty easy to justify prioritizing the worst off people. The badness of suffering is worse than the goodness of happiness is good and extra happiness in already happy people does not cancel out the (bad) suffering of unhappy people.
Every few minutes of thinking about this, I seem to vacillate between on the one hand agreeing with you completely and unreservedly, and on the other hand thinking that this is 'baked-in' to the 'util exchange rate' (such that maybe feeding a starving orphan = 100 utils but feeding a well-nourished investment banker = 0.01 utils) and that therefore we can just abstractly compare "helping the util-wise-worst-off" against "helping the util-wise-highest-return" directly without worrying about what real-world situations contribute to those util totals. I can't seem to decide on what the best way to think about this is!
I think the convergence of both views on priorities and policy is telling us something.
If you prioritize helping the worst off then you would by definition be creating a system which incentivizes failure and discourages success. Honestly, the longer term development of such a system would seem to me to lead to something resembling hell.
I don’t know. Don’t you think people aspire to more than just avoiding suffering (a neutral state let’s say)? I think there will be plenty of incentive remaining after a society creates a humane floor (to the extent it’s tractable) below which our fellow citizens, friends and family members will not fall.
I don’t think a maximin principle and a humane floor are the same thing. The society I would choose would be the one which allowed people to optimally flourish, and preferably to flourish more and better over time (it would progress over time).
Just as importantly it would incentivize goals and behaviors which are positive sum, not dysfunctional. A succesful society succeeds in great part because of the incentives and goals which it fosters. It is a dynamic not a static thing.
I don't think it follows that helping the worst-off discourages success. Suppose there are only two jobs in the world - Sweatshop Worker and Oil Baron, say - and we decide to help the sweatshop workers by instituting a policy where they get paid compensation for industrial accidents that happen to them (and we pay for this by charging more for the sweatshop products, so ultimately it's the oil barons paying for the policy). Even despite our intervention - making oil barons worse off and sweatshop workers better off - no oil barons will switch to being sweatshop workers (because no incentive is created for them to do so) and no sweatshop workers will switch to being oil barons (because they can't; the oil baron job market remains fully saturated).
nb. I'm not suggesting we mitigate against failure so strongly that failure has better outcomes than success - say, by paying people more to fail than they'd earn by succeeding* - just that, stand-fast some weird edge-cases, helping the worst-off simply doesn't incentivise failure
(* Though I think this sometimes does actually happen in the real world, mad as that is! I recall all those news stories one reads of where CEOs royally nause-up some company and either receive a colossal taxpayer-funded bailout or else simply walk away with a golden handshake in the millions whilst the company goes bankrupt...)
This is essentially how public schools work in America and the result is that any kid who wants to go above their grade level is discouraged and becomes miserable.
If we reduce the costs of dysfunctional behavior, then we will get more of it. Over time, a lot more. The key to a healthy dynamic society is in part having incentives that people avoid bad decisions and behaviors. Any society which prioritizes propping up failure at the expense of success is going to get more failure and less success.
I am not arguing against safety nets or assistance for the destitute. I agree that it is reasonable to choose institutions which provide safety nets and a degree of redistribution. It is not reasonable to choose a maximin principle.
>2) One of the reasons that Rawlsian thought is compelling is that you can go along with him on the veil of ignorance, but then disagree as to the outcomes. For example, you could say that, behind a veil of ignorance, we would agree that everyone should be able to keep the profits of their own labour, so there would be no redistributive taxation in an ideal society. Would that society be fairer than our own? From the point of view of somebody who holds redistributive taxation to be unjust, clearly yes, but Rawls himself would certainly disagree.
Did Rawls himself ever comment on alternative uses of his veil of ignorance? One criticism of his use is that he chooses an extremely pessimistic metric for evaluating societies (I share this criticism, but also am very skeptical of the whole project of ethics). Did he ever say anything about e.g. applying his veil, but then evaluating based on the welfare of the median person in the society, or (more pessimistically, but less so than Rawls) the welfare of the 25th percentile person.
Harsanyi had an earlier and arguably better framing of the issue. In his words…
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Harsanyi1975.pdf
Thanks for the link. Much appreciated!
That's a better link than the one I found where it's chapter 2 of a larger book.
Thank you, Harsanyi's vigorous review seems much more coherent than the Rawls book it critiques. Very persuasive.
The other point I found unconvincing was the idea that people might give higher weight to the probability of things turning out well for themselves. My feeling is that people are risk-averse and if they had any experience with long duration suffering would weight avoiding that outcome quite highly.
Entirely agree that suffering and wellbeing are asymmetrical in the way you describe and I suspect (though have no real evidence either way) that people who have experienced more-than-average suffering are much more aware of this.
Did you read the cited critique by John Harsanyi of Rawls' principle (only a small part was quoted by Jim Holt at Slate but a longer version is available as Chapter 2 of this link https://epdf.pub/contemporary-political-theory-a-reader.html )? That seems quite hard to rebut. People in practice don't act like the worst off is a terminal goal.
On the repugnant conclusion, I recommend Michael Huemer https://philarchive.org/rec/HUEIDO
Rand is not taken very seriously by philosophers. Rawls himself distinguished between the utilitarian and contractarian traditions, including himself in the latter. Is there any argument that Rawls provides a better "way of channelling self-interestedness in a positive socially-useful direction" than utilitarians like Harsanyi?
On the repugnant conclusion, these paradoxes only happen when people turn ethics in to a math problem where you go "value X is good, the more people who display X, the better. Therefore, to maximize X, we need to maximize people." No one except ethicists thinks this way.
Rawls: “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.”
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/puzzles-for-everyone
The repugnant conclusion arises when one is asked to choose between alternatives. Consistency either means maximizing population at the expense of lower average utility, or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility. Merely refusing to think systematically is no solution, at most you could claim that solutions aren't necessary for impractical hypotheticals.
I’ll take inconsistency over repugnance any day.
It’s far less of a problem for obligation based moralities than ones that focus on maximizing some value. So for example, I think people have duties towards their family. That doesn’t imply some necessity of maximizing family members.
Inconsistency leaves one vulnerable to getting Dutch-booked https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r5MSQ83gtbjWRBDWJ/the-intuitions-behind-utilitarianism
We manage to get by.
Also, citing the guy who talks about a large number of people getting dust in their eye being worse than torturing one person just demonstrates my point.
>"…or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility"
Not necessarily, or even probably. Gains from specialization & trade are sufficiently positive-sum that average utility increases with population size over at least a substantial range of values.
You're correct practically speaking, but the point of the thought-experiment is to examine situations in which there is a tradeoff (such as beyond that substantial range).
> Consistency either means maximizing population at the expense of lower average utility, or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility. Merely refusing to think systematically is no solution, at most you could claim that solutions aren't necessary for impractical hypotheticals.
I don't refuse to think systematically, but I do reject the idea of utility as something that you can meaningfully slap a number on and then add or multiply.
Does a room with three reasonably happy people in it have 50% more utility than a room with two reasonably happy people? No, that's a stupid question, utility is not quantifiable.
But when faced with a decision between alternatives, how do you decide?
You choose whichever one is better. Just because something can't be quantified doesn't mean it can't be understood or compared.
An imperfect analogy would be temperature, or rather a pre-scientific understanding of temperature. The ancients didn't know anything about thermodyamics but they understood that some things were warmer than other things. They could even have invented an arbitrary numeric temperature scale if they'd liked, but these numbers could not be meaningfully added, multiplied or averaged.
Do you want to choose between making one person very happy or making ten people slightly happy? Well you can't, there's no way of quantifying how happy you're going to make them, so just go with whatever seems more reasonable I guess.
I sure hope that policy makers aren't using Rawls as a guide because that would mean favoring the entire rest of the world and mostly ignoring their constituents.
The advantage of Myers-Briggs (almost a century old) is due to its catchiness and, in the modern age, memeability. The 16personalities test, which uses a modification of the Big 5, has seen its characters used to illustrate the types turned into a series of memes where you can see conjectures about what the types are like in high school, ENTP/INTP slash, 'ENFP be like', and has even reached rule34.xxx, where you can actually see (cartoon) INFP pr0n.
As a result, while very few people have any sense of their agreeableness or conscientiousness or understand the vocabulary with its five-syllable words, lots of people know their MBTI type. It's astrology with at least some vague empirical validation.
While the underlying Jungian theory is BS and the 'cognitive function' bit unproven, not to mention the false dichotomy creates all kinds of problems because people are distributed toward the middle of the axis on most of the Big Five, the test result does give you an idea of what hyperoctant (sexdecipant?) in Big 5-minus-neuroticism-space your interlocutor or you are in. If someone tells you they're an 'ISFJ', you have a vague sense they're in the bottom half of extroversion and openness, and in the top half of agreeableness and conscientiousness. That's not as good as a big 5 test result, but it's better than nothing, and easier to slip into a conversation.
I'm actually curious if there are any findings on the emprical usefulness of astrology *if you take out the birthday/star position determinants*. That is, do the astrological personality types, and their categories (fire, air, positive, negative etc) and relations to each other have any emprical use? If you allow them to be assigned by actual personality not birthday.
Wikipedia says much of this has barely changed since Roman times, and you would think that something that endured that long might have *some* useful aspects. Though of course, it might not.
Supposedly one of the times CSICOP (skeptic organization) whiffed was an investigation of the 'Mars effect', where athletes tended to be born with the planet Mars in certain positions. I can't really make heads or tails of the situation but if you're curious here's the Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect
Why that could be is anyone's guess. Certainly they've shown athletes tend to be born at certain times of the year because they wind up being the oldest kids in the class and therefore more developed and that carries on. That could coincidentally coincide with certain astrological signs.
Sure, the astrological personalities are roughly coherent (you could assign MBTIs to them if you really wanted to) and if you did something similar to what these guys did with the Enneagram and go yes/no on each of the 12, you might get a test that works. But that's not what astrologers were doing since Roman times.
Yes, the primary advantage of MBTI is that it's fun. I once saw a picture of a dating profile belonging to someone I would no doubt despise if we ever met, and was validated by their MBTI type being the exact opposite of mine.
Re 35, I have bad news: https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/10/10/delays-on-italys-spruced-up-trains-have-got-worse (subscription required, but you get the point from the link text!).
>X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance.
Surely this will be widely condemned by the people who thought Twitter should not have suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story (under the same "we don't want to circulate hacked data" logic).
I don't think these are nearly as equivalent as you're presenting here and yes, this is super bad of Twitter.
Could you elaborate of why you think they AREN'T almost-perfectly equivalent?
Mostly the fact that I don't think undecided voters would be persuaded by anything in the JD Vance dossier and that everyone agrees that it's Iranian interference.
On the first, this election will not be decided by this dossier. We might like to think that voters would carefully parse through the contents for subtle insights into the policies or character of the candidates but...this is a highly optimistic assessment of the average American voter, much less the average undecided voter.
Compare that to a video of the president's son smoking crack with a hooker. That just...is obviously going to go viral and could easily influence low information voters in swing states.
Like, I had no idea the JD Vance dossier thing existed until now, I'm way more engaged than the average voter, so it basically doesn't matter. Even the dumbest 20% of Americans want to see the president's son smoking crack with a hooker, so it matters. Shouldn't, but does.
Second, there's an argument I don't find persuasive but is respectable but that we censor information specifically released by foreign governments attempting to influence US elections. If this argument is sincerely presented, I kinda have to take it seriously, and it was presented here. And, as far as I can tell, everyone basically agrees that it's Iranian election interference. When the Hunter Biden laptop was leaked, this was not Russian or any other interference, to the best of my knowledge the original story of Hunter just leaving it has held up, and the initial calls of interference failed the sniff test and were never credible, it was just blatant interference. Again, I think this argument is bad, but it is respectable if honestly presented.
So yeah, this compares an unimportant leak with a bad but respectable argument for censorship against a, unfortunately, very important leak with a deceptive figleaf of an argument for censorship.
The Hunter laptop was widely considered as likely foreign interference (understandable, given how unlikely that story was). When evidence surfaced that it is genuine, Twitter promptly reversed its blocking. (We know this from the Twitter Files, which is somehow, ridiculously, held up as evidence of wrongdoing on Twitter's side but actually quite clearly documents the opposite.) It's also not that obvious that evidence illegally obtained by foreign agents should be treated all that differently from evidence illegally obtained by domestic agents (granted, we do make a similar distinction for all manner of election-related things).
The Hunter laptop might have been more politically impactful (mostly for bad reasons, mind you; a presidential candidate's estranged son having a decadent lifestyle is not really something that should factor into the evaluation of the candidate heavily, which is why the Republicans instead relied on conspiracy theories supposedly-but-not-actually supported by laptop), but then should Twitter's policy be "you are not allowed to share material probably stolen by foreign agents during an election, unless that would be a significant advantage to one party"? Newspapers very much make those kinds of calculations, of course, but newspapers are content producers, not publishing platforms. I think it would be a weird position for a social network.
Another thing: I've just skimmed the JD Vance dossier and apart from his home address (which was censored in the version I saw) there was nothing the least bit personal in there, it's all already public knowledge.
If there's a really juicy version of this doc where the Trump campaign has sent private detectives to sort through his ex-girlfriends' diaries then it's not this one.
And surely it will be widely defended by the ones who supported suppressing the Hunter story...
If Twitter was under the same leadership as it was in 2020 it rightly should be.
But in the intervening time the platform publically committed itself to a policy of "supressing stuff like the Hunter Biden story is bad".
Demanding "X" to act in accordance with its stated policy is quite reasonable. Especially when there is good reason to believe that they would have if the story happened to benefit Republicans.
I would condemn it if Scott's description was accurate but he appears to have fallen for disinformation.
Specifically, Scott claims with no source that "Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods."
But you can read what Twitter actually said here: https://x.com/Safety/status/1839392663864549688
"Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance’s physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number."
This is also consistent with the ban message on Klippenstein's substack (linked by Scott), which says it is for "posting private information."
I think banning exposing physical addresses and SSNs is a good and reasonable policy!
Except Scott either fell for disinformation (likely!) or is outright lying (unlikely), because Twitter's stated reason for the ban is, as Klippenstein himself admitted, the fact that his released materials contained the unredacted address and partial SSN of Vance. Klippenstein's justification for doing so was that they "were already available for anyone to buy".
Virtually all social media platforms have rules against doxxing, this seems like doxxing 101.
Also, Twitter/X no longer has an active page regarding a "hacked materials" policy, that was pre-Musk.
Vance's home address is not just available for anyone to buy, Vance has made it publicly available as part of election materials. For example, the Alaskan government website publishes it here: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/doc/oep/2024/Vance,%20J%20D_Vice%20Pres_Eng_08.20.24-PWeb.pdf.
7 : I'm not sure about the claim that classical labor theory of value is proven wrong by the marginalist theory of prices.
Classical labor theory is not concerned with short term price fluctuations but with long term equilibrium. In perfect competition, in the long run, price equals average total cost, just like in classical price theory.
The marxian labory theory of value is wrong because the solution provided by Marx to the transformation problem is incorrect, not because Alfred Marshall proved it wrong.
That may be true in a technical sense, but only in the case where products are homogeneous. It doesn't explain price formation in any other situation.
Overall, the problem with the labor theory of value is that it creates bad models of what value is and how it's created, especially in people with only a superficial understanding of economics.
The classical theory of value, which assumes perfect competition, asks the following question : in the long run, relative prices are determined by relative costs. What ultimately determines relative costs then? Marshalian partial equilibrium economics doesn't answer this question at all.
Umm. Relative costs are prices in their own markets?
Ok so prices are determined by prices which are themselves determined by prices which are themselves determined by prices, endlessly. You're not explaining anything.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I don't think further explanation is needed. Prices are signals+incentives that help demand and supply come into equilibrium, and this is true across the economy. What does this not help you understand that you need further explanation for?
In a perfectly competitive economy in a long run equilibrium, can you explain why a house has a higher price than a pen?
Classical economics has a simple and intuitive answer which is that there are more inputs going into the house than the pen.
>only in the case where products are homogeneous
As in, commodities?
>it creates bad models of what value is and how it's created, especially in people with only a superficial understanding of economics
If that's your metric, bear in mind that people use marginalist "subjective" theory to seriously argue Jeff Bezos literally personally created the entire value of Amazon. I think LTV looks pretty good in comparison.
I also don't think subjective value theory is much of a problem for the LTV, but on the transformation problem did you read Laws of Chaos? It's from 2020 and models the rate of profit as a statistical tendency across a range of labour/capital constitutions and claims that overcomes the transformation problem. The same way the labour content of commodities corresponds to their value in a statistical way, not causally, like spending lots of time making a paper cup doesn't raise its value, if that makes sense. It makes a fairly compelling case imo.
Every 15 years a new marxist claims to have salvaged the LVT, last time was Andrew Kliman.
Alfred Marshall was only partially marginalist, still keeping one foot in the classical tradition. I'd say it was the actual marginal revolutionaries who displaced the labor theory of value with the subjective one.
I find what you say about Marshall extremely surprising and I'm pretty sure you're incorrect. Marshall came after the early marginalists like Jevons and he's 100% a marginalist.
I agree he came after. On classical vs marginalist theories of value he said:
"We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the lower blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility or cost of production."
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alfred_Marshall#The_Cambridge_Neoclassicals
I do not think this is correct. Under perfect competition and in the long run, price of goods would converge to the marginal cost of production. But this marginal cost of production would still be affected by non-labor factor costs (e.g. land if it scarce.) Hence, labor theory would still be wrong.
The hat was 'peacocking', which was definitely a part of Game theory.
One of these days I want to see a game theory approach to Game.
Thankfully this crowd has largely ignored the pickup artist link. I was not looking forward to the cargo culting that was going to go down if they tried to discuss that one.
Because as you hint, the hat was completely meaningless. It was the peacocking that was important. That long weird rant was nearly entirely missing the point.
And no, that guy didn't get any more or less action than any other pickup artist of the era. He was good at PR and got lucky with a journalist writing about him. Plenty of other aspects to game that worked back then (and some that still work today).
So even if someone writes a 10,000-word essay on Mystery's Hat, anyone who reads it will be no more educated on how any of that works than before the essay. Better to read a few Rational Male essays, or read the book on Mystery and his crowd that originally sparked off the fad.
Yeah, the problem is a lot of the gambits are much more risky in the post-#MeToo era, when everyone is supposed to 'believe women'. I think that's why stuff like 'Fresh & Fit' is so popular--better to just make yourself more physically attractive, they can't fire you for working out and it has other benefits. Or things like entering the trades where HR doesn't have power over you, or if possible making money and leaving the country.
A lot of guys (myself included, frankly) are effectively doing MGTOW even if we don't really call it that. As always, humans adapt, and if the modern urban monoculture passes away from low birthrates...well, the Christians will take over, and more power to them.
Ceterum, censeo feminism esse delendam.
I interpreted the original post as using the hat as a synecdoche for "things that many women find attractive but don't want to admit they find attractive, and which men do not perform out of embarrassment," a category which includes peacocking. It's the literal hat being discussed sure, but the hat is also a symbol.
> Better to read a few Rational Male essays, or read the book on Mystery and his crowd that originally sparked off the fad.
Better still - just buy the damn hat. Who needs to READ? This hat is a magic hat that gets you laid!
Coincidentally, I have just started a magic hat business, and my website is....
;-)
Well that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY!
Also, he didn't just get laid because of the hat, but because he was very persistent and methodical, instead of going into a pit of self-loathing after the first 100 rejections.
I'm willing to bet that Mystery's success had far more to do with him being white, facially attractive, and tall (6ft5) than wearing a stupid hat.
Furthermore, the linked article "Do Men Even Like Women Anymore?" is incredibly stupid and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Re point Nr 10: Tall soldiers weren't only a fetish thing in Frederick's time, they were a standard form of infantry as grenadiers, supposed to be tall to look over the other soldiers when throwing hand grenades (and be strong enough for a good throw).
Frederick took it the furthest (tallest?), but other armies had them, too.
Wouldn't that mean they have to be mixed in with the other soldiers? If you have an entire regiment of tall soldiers, they can't look over each others' shoulders.
That is true:
"According to René Chartrand, Jean Martinet formed a grenadier company in the Régiment du Roi in 1667. By 1670 27 French infantry regiments were authorised to include elite companies trained to carry and hurl grenades.
The infantry of the Dutch States Army, influenced by their French invaders, adopted grenadiers in 1672. By 1678 six men in each company were trained to throw hand grenades, developed by the Dutch master fireworker Johan van Haren."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenadier
3 are YouGov questions. Polling USA is an aggregator
(I work for YouGov)
Sorry, fixed.
Here's my N=1 regarding 27.
Full disclosure: I am an early-career mathematician, with a around 1/1000 IQ (according to a single test dating from about two decades ago, compared to the general population) and empirical data suggesting that I am comfortably within 1/10^4 (compared to the general population, once again) in math test-taking. I am not particularly aware of the education literature (especially re US schools), but I believe that I have relevant experience (by having done some teaching -- crucially, *not much*, so the challenges are fresh in my mind -- in quite varied environments) .
The reason why I would not expect teacher intelligence to meaningfully substitute for teacher experience (at least in the setting of the experiment, where you replace a seasoned teacher with a rookie) is because, while a teacher's goal is to make students learn material (more cynically: pass a test), this involves very different dynamics than "just explaining what the students have to know".
It involves paying attention to the students and noticing when your explanations have lost them. It involves flexibility to reformulate everything again and again until what you say finally resonate with their brain. It involves the need to understand what they are currently thinking to be able to spot as swiftly as possible (because their focus, or your patience, or your time, is limited!) what the issue is.
More importantly, it involves staying on top of a precarious social dynamic with a group of fickle children or teenagers (most of which do not wish to be there) which involves a mixture of cajoling, threats, genuine motivation, the ability to deal with situations as they arise (student X is barely containing their tears, children Y is throwing a tantrum, guy Z just walked up and left in front of the whole room, students W and T disrupt the class by asking useless questions, what do I do?) in a way that does not compromise your ability to actually teach (which will happen if you mishandle these situations because, remember, a significant fraction of students does not particularly like being at school and will take it out on you if the opportunity arises, or if there's a bad day).
They may be a part of intelligence, but it is not one measured on academic tests, whereas experience will tend to give someone tools to deal with these kinds of problems.
Your fresh rookie, even if they're an IMO perfect scorer (especially so, since it meant they put work in optimizing for solving IMO problems rather than stay ahead of social dynamics without pretending too hard that they exist -- or even simply about "explaining easy things", which is not always as straightforward as one expects), is a lot more likely to mess this up.
There's probably a trade-off involved, but I think it only becomes significant after the first few years of experience.
Yes, if anyone has spent any time in a modern classroom, they'll understand that there is more to wrangling a class than being "the smartest test taker".
Unexperienced teachers will be taken full advantage of by the budding little blossoms, whereas those with time under their belt will know the tricks and be wise to them.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting this based on importance of knowing the subject matter, I was expecting it because intelligence predicts job performance at almost all jobs, and performance in lots of skills you wouldn't necessarily expect to be linked to intelligence.
I am not disputing that. But one may believe that the aspects of intelligence selected for in the experiment (test-taking) and those that would serve a rookie teacher arriving in a classroom are not that well correlated. N=1 again, but I know the correlation breaks down for me. Heaven knows that “brilliant academic yet atrocious lecturer” is not an empty group, and the university setting is in most cases incredibly easier to manage that grade, middle or high school.
Would an intelligent person figure out a solution? Certainly, given time, with exposure to the various parts of the issue, thinking and experiment and discussing with colleagues.
Expecting their intelligence to save the day on the first time you’re in front of a classroom seems about as misguided as throwing a smart kid in a rough sea because if they were so smart, they should figure out how to figure out how to swim back to safety.
Intelligence should be expected d to reduce the number of years of experience required to reach any particular threshold.
I agree. But the point is that the rookies did not have the time to reach any threshold at all. That’s what a rookie is!
Hm, intelligence predicts success, but probably those studies are controlling for age or experience, or not? So I assume they find that for two persons of the same age or experience level, the more intelligent one is statistically more successful. Or are there comparisons for other jobs that say that an intelligent rookie is better than a less smart, but more experienced worker?
I feel like it's a pretty common experience that many of the better teachers are ones who struggled through material themselves to understand it. Those that learned it effortlessly can't as easily related to struggling students. Not universally true - I've had teachers who are brilliant and good teachers - but common enough.
How does intelligence compare to experience as a predictor specifically?
My guess would be that they multiplier by each other. An intelligent person learns more from each learning opportunity they experience on the job so after a decade they're far ahead of a less intelligent peer; but someone whose been around a lot longer can still have picked up more than a newbie.
For most jobs, there is a required skillset to succeed before you can compare the (nearly universal) benefit of intelligence. In the case of teaching (and probably many other fields), college (or other training) is less capable than first hand experience for populating that skillset. As a IC (chip) designer, I use little that I learned in my BS and have improved decade after decade. 33 years in, I am at the top of my game.
I've seen many people mention the interpersonal specificity of teaching, but the big, big one is behaviour management. Yes, subject knowledge is important, and yes, I'm sure to a certain extent behaviour management is correlated with intelligence, but teachers are already selected for intelligence Vs the population.
This really ties into a lot of the class size stuff: I fully believe class size doesn't matter in Japan because behaviour is excellent there, but in more challenging school behaviour management is *the* most important skill. My partner worked with a man who wasn't exactly the brightest spark of all time, but had twenty years experience wrangling recalcitrant, often criminal teenagers into getting a passing grade, which is a notably different skillset from getting A students to an A+.
Sure, but experience is not completely fungible with intelligence. For most tasks the gains to experience are probably something like logarithmic while the gains to intelligence are more linear or sigmoidal. Thus the interplay of the two is going to depend a lot on where in those distributions you're doing the sampling!
e.g. a more intelligent teacher with 5 years experience may best a teacher with 20 years experience, but a less intelligent teacher with 4 years of experience may best a more intelligent one with only one year of experience.
1. All teachers are fairly smart (even if you are below the median of college graduates, the fact that you are a college graduate probably means you are above the median of the general population). Additional smarts may not be so useful.
2. Too much smarts means that what is difficult for your students to learn is probably not difficult for you to learn. But you really have to "meet them at their level".
3. Not really related, but it is important to realize that a lot of the better performance of experienced teachers is not because experience makes them better but because they stay teachers while worse teachers find other jobs, through some combination of being pushed out and wanting to leave a job they are not enjoying (and may be obviously failing in).
These are very good points well worth reminding.
I am unconvinced of the "too smart to communicate with normies," argument. I have met very bright people who were poor communicators even with their peers but there is no shortage of exceptional people who are also exceptional communicators. I am reasonably bright; I hold numerous patents and have (had) IP (chips) inside your phone and other items about your house. I also grew up explaining things to my Down's Syndrome brother and sharing "Godel's Incompleteness Theory" with random people on public transit. Communication is probably the skill I am most lauded for.
It could be subtler, for instance a larger intelligence gap simply exacerbating poor communication skills which would tend to produce the strongest examples of bad communication when the instructor is exceptionally smart.
I've had many conversations about this over the years (I'm also a research mathematician). I think success as a teacher, particularly for mathematics is *anti-correlated* with mathematical ability. If you didn't struggle to learn the material, you can't really empathise with the students who do struggle. It's like asking a native speaker about the details of grammar - they can't explain it because it's just the way it is.
You also identify something that drives me up the wall regarding education research. The single most important factor in education is the teacher - while their subject knowledge is important their connection with the class is paramount. Teaching is an interpersonal process - if you're not allowed to control for variability in the teachers (approximately because the official line is that there are no bad teachers), then you're ignoring the most important variable in any experiment. I've been in a classroom often enough and long enough to know that the things that work for me (and even the things I can get away with) are massively different than what a colleague can do. If they try to emulate me, it's unnatural, the students sense it and it doesn't work (and vice versa).
These are all excellent points. I can certainly say that, when I was teaching, I was more effective several years in than I was initially, because I learned from my mistakes, and because I picked up new techniques.
But it is also important to note what is going on in the study. The abstract says they replaced experienced teachers with NOVICE teachers. So, unless those novices are super geniuses, the outcome is hardly surprising. Moreover, turnout among novice teachers is fairly high (in the US; I assume the same is true in Columbia). Those who quit are presumably relatively ineffective, so the pool of experienced teachers has had the least effective novices culled out, while the least effective teachers are still in the "novice" group, bringing down the average effectiveness.
My son, who attended a G&T program until the Powers That Be ended it, said the biggest change with “regular school” is that a lot of the kids didn’t want to be there or learn anything.
Not a mathematician or a teacher, but this was precisely what I thought as soon as I read the thing. Huge flaw in assumptions/conclusions, as is so often the case with these studies.
"15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast!"
Okay, if anything is going to incentivise me to roll up my sleeves and spit on my hands, it's this kind of claim.
I'm reading the article and I want a bit more evidence, such as "gimme the names of these Eminent Scientists and High Human Capital folks what migrated to the newly Protestant regions of Europe".
But first, as a general response: thank you for saying the Catholic Church is a model of organised governance. I'm very surprised to hear this and it's always nice to get a compliment, even a back-handed one. Even if it is rather more reminiscent of Neil deGrasse Tyson's modern version of "Cosmos" with the cartoon villainy of Cardinal Borromeo versus that noted scientist Giordano Bruno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKyLcoN122g
Secondly, I don't think Protestantism invented modernity as such, it invented capitalism. What really invented modernity was the Industrial Revolution, and that's credited to Britain, not the other North European Protestant states (is anyone going to claim that Sweden is responsible for kicking off science and technology explosion of progress?)
As for the "all the high human capital was in Protestant lands" - ah yes. The Enlightenment, precursor of modernity, with such figures as Voltaire, famously Protestant living in famously Protestant France.
Catholic control of universities stifled progress by quashing scientific enquiry? Yeah, I'll remain neutral on that one, but I will also point out that universities in Protestant countries also had confessional requirements. See Oxford and Cambridge, clinging on to fossilised remainders of their foundations under Catholic rule, where fellows were not allowed to marry (because in their pre-Protestant days, they would have been clergy). Harvard was benefacted by a Puritan clergyman and trained Congregational clergy until the 18th century; Yale was founded by Congregationalists and functioned pretty much as a seminary until the 19th century, and Princeton's founding came about as a result of a schism in local Presbyterian churches.
So when do you pinpoint as the date for the birth of modernity, and what exactly do you mean by that? If it's only "the wars of religion meant everyone fought themselves to a standstill and so had no energy left over to persecute anyone who came up with wild and wacky ideas", that doesn't mean "and thus science and hence modernity was born".
Darwinism was the big fight of the 19th century, well into the Period of Modernity, and more viciously prosecuted in the Protestant nations which were still mainly or majority pinned to Biblical literalism as a result of the Reformation principles. The Scopes Monkey Trial was rigged between both the fundamentalists and the evolutionists as a show trial to get publicity, and from that it was hoped attract interest and investment in Dayton to revive its economic fortunes, but that took place in a majority Protestant nation in the 20th 'we're all modern now' century.
I'll have to do more reading on this because I do think the history of the universities is fascinating, but I'll just end with Fr. Lemaître of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium who gave you the Big Bang theory of modern cosmology. You're all very welcome, no thanks needed 😀
The comments are still open at Cremieux's post, so you could ask your questions there.
I'm looking at things like this:
"Progress in Spanish scientist production diverges from the Netherlands and Britain right after Spain discovers a multitude of Protestant cells in the country, prompting it to implement isolationist laws"
This is the period 1558-59. Okay, so I hit up Wikipedia for the relevant period and what do I see in passing?
"Despite its immense dominions, the Spanish kingdoms had a sparse population that yielded a limited income to the crown (in contrast to France, for example, which was much more heavily populated)."
You don't think perhaps, maybe, possibly, just barely imaginably, it might be that "fewer Spanish scientists" because "smaller goddamn population overall by comparison to other nations"? No, no, you're right: as Crémiuex says, it's the "pernicious Catholic church" at fault here! TIL that there were assembly lines in European nations for "production" of scientists, like tins of beans!
Spain apparently had a Golden Age of the arts during this time, but yeah: if it ain't STEM it ain't worth a damn, right?
You quote it saying that production diverged at a point in time, shouldn't that smaller population have also applied it he past?
"And perhaps most interestingly of all, France managed to substantially but not wholly save itself from the madness of the Catholic Church by issuing the Edict of Nantes, providing its Protestants with some, but not all of the liberties they could have enjoyed in other parts of Protestant Europe"
If you don't mind me writhing around on the floor after reading things like this, then sure. As I said, I have no idea what measuring stick is being used here, but if we are supposed to take it that X proportion of scientists per Y thousand of general population is the natural level of "scientist production", then I submit that a country with a smaller population is going to have fewer scientists.
If it is 1% of your population will be Big Brain Science, then if you have a population of 1,000 and next door nation has a population of 5,000, you will have 10 scientists and they will have 50, and someone coming along just counting "how many scientists?" with no reference to anything else will go "Aha! the pernicious influence of the madness of the Church is to blame here!"
Though the ultimate conclusion seems to be less "Protestants ❤ science unlike those awful Catholics" but rather "Protestantism is fissiparous, which means it might want to burn scientists at the stake but can't muster the unified rule to do it".
So basically it's all one long "Religion dumb stupid fake, thus threatened by Science, thus hates and represses Science" article.
EDIT: For example, it quotes a paper by Matías Cabello, who in turn quotes something about Descartes:
"self-censorship occurred, such as that of René Descartes, who, “though living in the Dutch Republic, far beyond the reach of the Inquisition, was ‘so astonished’ by Galileo’s fate ‘that [he] almost [took] the decision to
burn all [his] papers, or at least to let no-one see them’ ” (Parker, 2013, p. 654)."
Looking up that book from which the quote originates, it's "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century" which is all about how there were severe climatic shocks, famines, wars, and revolutions all over Europe (and even touches on China) during that century. So whatever about Descartes' state of mind, I'm thinking that the war, famine, etc. had as much a part to play in affairs.
I think an interesting counter-argument would be "What if no Protestantism?" If the Church and secular rulers did not have to crack down on dissent and revolutionaries threatening their power, would there have been less 'heresy-hunting' and more tolerance of intellectual exploration? If SCIENCE! had not been a banner waved to challenge religious faith, but instead a discipline like others useful in secular life?
The piece could equally be interpreted as "The Catholics beat off the Ottomans, thus giving the Protestants room and peace to grow, and the Protestants were the handmaidens at the birth of modernity because they were too weak to stifle it in its cradle, much as they might have wished to do, because they had worked like termites nibbling at the foundations to weaken all social controls".
I don't think it's the smaller Spanish population. In fact Spain was doing fine during the first half of the 16th century.
I do have an issue with the paper in that I think it ignores several factors (late Counter-Ref in France, distinct Jesuit suppression by country, etc) which not only explain the differences between countries, but fit the author's own data better. If you are interested, I wrote a reply to Cremieux (you can find the link in my other comment. Don't want to link twice). Feedback would be appreciated.
I've seen a lot of this kind of reinterpretation of the development of modern academics. I agree with you that blaming Catholicism for "inhibiting progress" often amounts to just misconstruing preceding academic developments as impediments to progress. It's like saying the Falcon 9 slowed the invention of Starship. If only they'd have started building Starship first, we'd have it by now, instead of wasting time on Falcon 9 - no word on whether one invention led to the other.
A few years back I read a series about Galileo (can't remember where, sorry) that discussed how he was essentially arguing against the other natural philosophers (i.e. 'scientists') of his time, and he'd failed to respond to many of their legitimate objections - instead ignoring or oversimplifying them in his counterarguments - which was why the old guard didn't buy his assertions at first. It wasn't science vs. religion in any way we'd recognize that today, but rather reasoned argument versus reasoned argument. This trend, where the less-developed-but-true argument from up and coming scientists is initially rejected by the establishment isn't anything we've gotten away from. What's that old saying about science being advanced one funeral at a time? It's just comforting to some to tell a neat little story about how one religion or another got in the way of progress. Sometimes precursors don't look like the finished product, but that doesn't mean they're unnecessary.
Whenever I read the actual history, those neat little stories tend to go away and we get back to the old story: "Two groups argued about something, which was unknowable until later when we got enough data to support one side. Now we call one side Righteous and the other Villainous." There, but for the grace of God, go I.
> A few years back I read a series about Galileo (can't remember where, sorry) that discussed how he was essentially arguing against the other natural philosophers (i.e. 'scientists') of his time, and he'd failed to respond to many of their legitimate objections - instead ignoring or oversimplifying them in his counterarguments - which was why the old guard didn't buy his assertions at first. It wasn't science vs. religion in any way we'd recognize that today, but rather reasoned argument versus reasoned argument.
Was it The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown? https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html
The author makes these points, plus one other that gives important context: *Galileo was wrong.* He believed in Copernicus' model, which was so terrible that virtually all of his contemporaries could see it was obviously wrong. It did put the sun in the center, but there's far more to a solar model than that, and on virtually every other point, Copernicus's model was significantly worse than competing theories. And Galileo stridently taught that it was true.
Meanwhile, Kepler, the guy who actually produced the *correct* model of the Solar System, was a contemporary of his. Galileo was aware of his work, but dismissed it out of hand because he found Kepler's elliptical orbits aesthetically displeasing.
Yes! Thanks for finding it.
Not only that: Kepler actually received active support from the Jesuits, who gifted him a valuable telescope and even offered him a university position, assuring him that conversion would not be required.
I agree with all of this - history resists being lined up in a neat narrative, with a single cause and single effect. Prussia in the nineteenth century is probably the epitome of a high-culture Protestant nation state. While they had some world class artists, philosophers and mathematicians (Bach, Kant, Gauss) the country was considered backward, dull, rural, unsophisticated in the rest of Europe, and not considered much at all beyond. They were potato farmers and not particularly wealthy ones, in the popular imagination and in reality.
I wonder whether the fact that English speaking countries are predominantly protestant is at the root of all of this? Certainly the anti-Irish anti-Catholic prejudice burned into the soul of British discourse (it's faded a bit in recent decades, but it's still there under the surface) and US popular culture has something to do with it. It would be interesting to see if such ideas are popular in other languages.
There’s some joke hiding in here about Protestants owing more to Lepanto and Our Lady of Victory than they realize
> famously Protestant France
I thought it's one of countries where religious peace (between Catholic and Protestant) is enforced early? Now I wonder if Voltaire is from the Protestant side of France.
On 4, my prior would be very strong that the true impact of wildfire smoke on health outcomes is linear or convex, just based on the fact that that seems to be the case for almost everything that's bad for you[1]. I'm very skeptical that the true relationship is concave. The link does a good job of admitting that this may be due to people behaving differently to protect themselves more when smoke is worse, which seems plausible to me. I suppose in some sense, this might mean the total downstream impact could be concave when you include behavioral changes, but I still feel a bit uneasy with the claim that the impact of wildfire smoke on health outcomes is concave.
[1] Except perhaps being exposed to pathogens above some level that's high enough for them to infect you, but that's because pathogens can replicate within you. I can't think of anything else, but curious to know if anyone else can?
>on health outcomes is linear or convex, just based on the fact that that seems to be the case for almost everything that's bad for you[1]. I'm very skeptical that the true relationship is concave.
Well, some ill effects saturate at very large dosages, because someone can't be killed deader than dead... ( or the national belligerence equivalent - the extra nukes just make the rubble bounce... )
I came here to make the same point.
A concave curve would only be expected if the population varies wildly in susceptibility. Another example here might be allergens: the susceptible part of your population would be killed by fairly small doses, the rest when the concentration becomes so high that they die of some unrelated mechanism (like choking on pollen). For the direct health effects of wildfire smoke, there is likely some decades-old paper where someone subjected animals to some smoke and determined LD_50, and I would bet that they did not find a concave curve.
I tried browsing through their paper, but failed to learn anything (beside (a) they are using latex, but with very wide line spacing (b) all their plots are in the appendix).
One of their metric seems to be ER visits. It could be that the population varies strongly in susceptibility to seek medical aid for symptoms. I guess some will insist going to the ER for some coughing and others will insist that they are fine even as their SpO2 keeps dropping.
Of course, deaths and ER visits are inadequate to measure the costs of wildfires, especially if people change their behavior: staying indoors or evacuating are also costs.
So, the TL;DR of this paper might be 'people presumably change their behavior to avoid bigger dangers, hence smaller dangers might sometimes affect more people'.
3: Wow, popular opinion of Ancient Sparta is far too positive. They spent all their time engaged in negative sum work on training their military skills so that they could enslave their neighbors, make them do all the work, and contribute nothing to society themselves.
It’s probably a combination of popular media portraying them as extremely effective freedom fighters for the Greeks (i.e. 300) and latent pro-Spartan sympathies that have been passed down by our most useful sources on them, like Xenophon.
More directly, it’s probably also all the sports teams named “The Spartans”, though your explanations are probably part of why these teams exist.
Exactly
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/
Sparta definitely is in my list of the ten most hellish societies.
Also, why is the Roman Empire rated higher than the Roman Republic (which I am assuming is what they mean by 'Roman Republican')?
And it's not like they were particularly good at we either - their battle score is mediocre at best even when fighting peers.
I must thank you, Scott, for reminding me of Mark Changizi. I read about him years ago but forgot his name so I could not find his work for too long.
> 36 - Europe bad at startups.
And good at legislation of course. The recent DMA is stopping innovation that benefits consumers, while making it difficult for small traders on the App Stores, who now have to publish their name, phone number and address. A non starter for bedroom developers.
There’s a dearth of capital in Europe too. Stripe was founded by two guys from Ireland but capitalised in the US. Europe has plenty of human capital - these guys were from a tiny village in Tipperary.
There’s some discussion at EU level about this
https://www.politico.eu/article/mario-draghi-report-european-competitiveness-common-debt-innovation/
But not enough.
I wonder if the problem is the EU itself. Europe was dominant when it was nationalistic, we don’t want the wars back but the inter national competition. A European inter national competition for the best startups televised.
Where Europe does compete amongst itself or in other competitions, like sport, it does pretty well. Even the Eurovision has upped its game.
It seems to me like it should be pretty easy to test the hypothesis that the EU is the problem. E.g. did SE/FI/AT stagnate after 1995 compared to NO/IS/CH?, did GB boom compared to IE after Brexit?, and so on.
I’m not really advocating for anybody to leave the EU - there are other benefits - and I despise Brexit but for the EU to use nationalism within its own structures to foster competition on applied science and technology. Europeans are loyal to their country, not the EU, which doesn’t even have a sports team (and if it did no one would support it).
And unlike the U.K. - another multi national project - there’s really no attempt to create a super national identity, except to call Europe a garden or to proclaim that certain relatively new values (like lgbt) are distinctive to Europe when they are neither universal within the EU, or unique to it. As for what is common to Europe historically - like Christmas - the EU seems a bit reluctant to mention it, if their internal documents are to be believed.
But you get an Italian pretty excited about Italy, and if there is a competition to give the eu funds to the best startup across Europe then the Italian people and their governments might find coming last might change their mind on startups.
I agree with harry Lime
> In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
We don’t need the terror, murder and bloodshed but the competition.
> We don’t need the terror, murder and bloodshed but the competition.
But is that even possible in Europe? Sure, maybe if the entire continent was united under one flag... but the only way that's happening is with a lot of the former.
The chart specifically breaks out European non-eurozone, with Sweden being in that part.
I'm aware of that. I don't think that helps us test the hypothesis that the EU is the problem. To do that, I think we'd need to compare within pairs of similar countries that joined the EU at different times (or where one never joined, or where one left), like DK/SE & SE/NO.
Another data point: Daniel Ek who founded Spotify in Sweden eventually set up an American HQ in NYC. That HQ grew to be bigger than the one in Stockholm, though decision-making was split between people in both.
Another comment under this article mentioned that companies in Europe are hard to scale. In tech this has the side effect of limiting the educational/apprentice opportunities to learn certain skills. Eg. In the US there are plenty of people who did a stint or two in big tech then shifted to smaller companies or startups where they could bring both technical and organizational know-how (describing the positive case, plenty of meh faang engineers just used their resume as a hammer in technical discussions).
My loosely held bet is that this is partially why there are so many OSS contributors from Europe: that's the sort of development work one can do there and get exceedingly good at it, eg. Single small/mid-sized monolithic codebase, usually aimed at running on a single machine (Linux, gnome, etc).
I think it's because of the legal requirements for scaling a company which makes it better to stay under some size eg. 100 before more costly auditing and reporting requirements kick in.
I'd love to get some actual data for this instead of vibes though
Yeah that was my comment - but my own post on this very much vibes-driven. I'm fairly certain there's many regulations that only apply to (or at least enforced on) large companies, and that people are friendly towards start ups but suspicious of large companies - but it'd be great to see some data on this if anyone has it!
Note only is the EU hostile to tech at home, it's doing it's best to keep international tech companies out as well.
https://stratechery.com/2024/the-e-u-goes-too-far/
The chart on 36 is very confusing... can it be right? Suggests Europe's combined tech cap is <1 trillion, but the top 2 tech companies here are worth about 0.5... And almost the entire US cap is driven by three companies, so even if it's right, it's misleading. And finally, the difference in company formation per capita between the US and the UK is about 20% - can that really explain the difference?
Personally, I think what Europe lacks is not entrepreneurs and start-ups, but the inability to scale companies - https://logos.substack.com/p/start-ups-and-tax-rates
The chart is for software and computer services, so it will exclude, e.g., ASML.
Yeah, I think it's pretty cherrypicked to the point of being misleading. Most other measures (e.g. number of startups/unicorns, total tech sector size) still have Europe far behind the US but not to this ridiculous degree.
Breaking out eurozone from non-eurozone rather than EU from non-EU is another weird feature. (Helps get Spotify out.)
The associated twitter thread is much more about the challenge of funding and running any small or growing business than about "start ups" in technology specifically. The tax issues described very much highlight how impossible it would be to scale a small start up in italy without running afoul of the tax authority or effectively bankrupting your business to comply with taxes.
#20 is extremely misleading. It’s not technically cryo AND it’s a research program only available in very limited geographic areas
As the article notes, aggressively fighting small fires eventually results in a massive one that cannot be contained. Even if it ends up being totally true that high smoke concentrations are only marginally worse than medium smoke concentrations, these mega fires are a massive risk to the environment and communities. Most plant species in fire prone areas are adapted to either tolerate or reseed themselves in the event of a fire, but the mega fires burn too hot for this to work and everything gets destroyed. Smaller fires are also easier to control and prevent from entering your local community, even if you let them continue to burn otherwise. I also suspect the larger fires impact vastly more people since it takes longer for the smoke to disperse, so any non-linear effect curve of the smoke on an individual must be counter-balanced with the number of people affected. Small fires in Canada affect nearly no-one, the big 2023 fire in Canada caused around 200k home evacuations, directly killed 8, and the smoke affected much of Canada and the US, as well as reached all the way to Europe and China. https://www.preventionweb.net/news/2023-canadian-wildfires-impacted-air-quality-far-away-europe-china
And if we care about the environment in the "let's maintain healthy ecosystems and not drive even more species to extinction" sense, eliminating fires from areas where all the local species have adapted to regular fires and some even rely on fire seems like a bad idea.
I'm glad someone commented on this - we've tried this approach and it's terrible for ecosystems, and also dramatically increases the chances of catastrophic damage, stochastically applied through fire-prone areas. I would think that part alone is obviously far worse than a broad-based, slight health impact from smoke pollution from frequent, low-intensity fires. Ask someone if they'd rather live somewhere there's a 1/20 chance of catastrophic fire destroying their home every year, or somewhere where there's smoke pollution that might reduce their lifespan by 5% overall.
But when that massive fire destroys your home and incinerates you, you will, albeit briefly, have such clean lungs!
"Here the black line indicates that the average European of 6000 BC would have had genetic IQ 65 (compared to modern 100)"
The standard deviation of the polygenic score doesn't trivially correspond to a standard deviation in IQ. They're looking at genes associated with higher intelligence, which by definition, are not equally distributed within the modern population, and looking at how their frequency has changed. If (making up numbers) the average European has 50% of the genes that go into the PGS, and the standard deviation in that number is 10%, then Europeans in 6000 BC had only 25% of those genes. But it doesn't follow that they had 2SD lower IQ.
Could someone explain the chart on 36? Seems to me that Eurozone and the US is almost the same. That Eurozone occasionally pops up above the US.
Edit: Are they using both dark blue and medium blue to represent the US? If so I get it and very stupid chart.
The US is dark blue. The EU is red and stacked in top. It’s not behind the US chart. The other blue is non EU Europe, probably mostly the U.K.
Russia? UK doesn't have its own social media, Russia's VK and Yandex are used in ex-USSR as well
You never know if Russia is included in charts about Europe or not.
It’s non-euro Europe, so it is probably mostly Sweden and the UK but maybe Switzerland or Denmark or whatever.
I agree, the chart is very bad. There are 4 colors in the plot but only 3 in the legend.
But that's not the worst part. Charts like this where the data is "stacked" are very hard to read. If the data were plotted as separate lines, the relative sizes would be easy to compare. There is a really great book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" that covers this problem and many others.
But thats the point of the doing it as a stack area chart. The point of the chart is to highlight how insignificant non-US tech companies are. They are barely legible in the chart!
One of Tufte's teachings is to have a reason for displaying the information in the way you are displaying it. I think the chart does a great job on that metric.
The point of the chart is that, compared the US, Europe's Tech economy is so anemic as to be effectively non-existent. The point of displaying the information this way is that the US area dominates so completely that you can't read the Europe data.
2. From the studies release so far, I don't actually see good evidence that we should expect Cobenfy to improve negative symptoms. In their phase 3 study, Cobenfy actually was worse than the antidopaminergics in improving negative symptoms. I will shamelessly include my writeup on that trial here: https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/a-new-therapeutic-for-schizophrenia
49. I am one of those "Prominent Substack Psychiatrists" - thanks Scott for sharing!
Wasn't it King Frederick of Prussia who invented goose stepping as a marching technique? I once read that his idea was to detect and punish soldiers who were drunk on duty, because apparently it is almost impossible to goose step convincingly when drunk, although I've never tried it. (If it works then maybe traffic cops should ask drink drive suspects to goose step twenty paces, instead of just walking along a straight line! :-)
Right, now I'm off to Wikipedia to check my facts. It'll probably turn out that goose stepping was actually first used by the ancient Greeks or someone!
The traffic cops will have to stop a bunch of drivers at the same time to see if so they can goose step synchronized.
LOL. According to Wikipedia, it was the Prussians who first started it, but not the guy I mentioned. It is also hard for a line of goose stepping marchers to coordinate their steps, and at first they have to train with arms linked to shoulders like a high kicking chorus line.
#28. I’m skeptical. I know haidt has claimed that conservatives are better at this type of task than progressives which seems to contradict the claim that no one can tell the difference.
I took it and scored 7/10. It forced me to say whether i was d or r which makes me not love the methodology. (You can say other / ind, but then instead of being given actual clarifying options, you have to just pick d vs r. I’m Libertarian)
I too took it and got 7/10, and am Republican. One I got wrong I still find hard to believe I got wrong. It was an "I'm a Republican because..." and was so stereotypical I thought it had to be faked, but they say it was not. Yet it even ended with "Merica!"
I don't know if different people got different ones to evaluate.
Ha! Must have been different. I’d remember that! Yeah, that makes me wonder if the “i am a” writers were playing with the researchers.
10. Scott omitted the 1 (one) reasonable reason to have tall soldiers: "Some sources state that there was a military reason to create a regiment of "long fellows" because loading a muzzleloader is easier to handle for a taller soldier." (just before his quote). Fun fact: There is a hot-dog brand named after them: Lange Kerls (long guys). The cans used to depict those long soldiers, too, but they dropped the pics in this woke century of us.
>we’d expect to see higher genetic IQ in populations that got agriculture earlier.
Prior to agriculture, hunter-gatherers living at higher lattitudes had higher IQ and then they got agriculutre later, so these effects largely cancel out.
Most of the places that first adopt agriculture later had their population replaced by pastoralists from somewhere else, Indo-Europeans in Europe and India, Arabs in the middle east etc. East Asia is the only place that still has it's original farmers as far as I know, except places that adopted farming much later like Papua New Guinea.
Indo-Europeans were agriculturalists before they invented spoked wheel. Arabs probably switched at breeding efficient camels. While Arabs spread their language and religion a lot, their genetic impact is much less smaller.
Unpopular opinion - I'm not so hot on the normalization of surrogacy, and equating it with progress. It seems rather unhuman to me, to offload the ravages of pregnancy on to some lady who is then not allowed to have a bond with the kid that came out of her own body.
Proposed remedy: instead of banning the practice, give the birth mother the option to be a third legal parent - not waiveable ahead of time.
Yeah, it is far from obvious that surrogacy is ”progress”.
Yeah, I put it in the "you should be able to freely sell your organs" category. It probably should be legal, but think it's obviously ethically messy because of the risk of the process, likely info asymmetries, and difficulty in ensuring legal protections etc.
Pregnancy is much less riskier than being F1 driver, pro boxer, bodybuilder and of course serving in private military company.
However, pregnancy is much riskier *for women* than any of those things. Pretty much no one gets hot and bothered about male-gendered risks.
In OECD, mother mortality is about 10^-4
In F1, three drivers died because of crash since 2000. 25 seasons, 20 drivers per race. So driving full season in F1 (which has about same duration as pregnancy) in Formula 1 is 60 (sixty) times more dangerous than giving birth.
would you want to ban women from being F1 driver?
Yep, I think many would argue that these should be illegal (noting that private military is illegal in many countries, bodybuilding is de facto illegal because it requires that you take controlled substances, which are the main source of the risk).
For most of these it's probably a case of ensuring that participants are aware of the risks beforehand, and have enforceable contracts with compensation if things go badly - so legal and regulated is probably the way to go. I guess this is more difficult in international surrogacy, which I think is more "ethically messy", but also with a greater upside for the women in lower-income countries. So I'd definitely promote ways of making it work better (e.g. surrogacy visas, or special bilateral agreements).
Without some sort of "sanctity of life/birth/motherhood" argument, I find that perspective really hard to understand.
Like, it sounds like you're describing some dystopian system where surrogates are drafted by lottery. In reality (at least in the US) it's voluntary and compensated. And you can't even volunteer if you've never been pregnant.
I do not think this person has any real world experience with people involved in surrogacy. The idea the surrogate is "some lady" is just bizarre.
> sounds like you're describing some dystopian system where surrogates are drafted by lottery
Did I say such a thing? AFAIK they are drafted by market forces, aren't they?
Also to Julian below: "some lady" is short for "some lady who most likely has no connection to the original couple's desire to have a child"... if you have real world experience, is that not accurate? How?
"drafted by market forces" seems like a very uncharitable way to describe every human who has ever responded to economic incentives, but sure
from another comment I think I understand your perspective a bit better. you're not against surrogacy per se, you're against allowing women to preemptively sign away rights to children they've carried and birthed? if so, while I still don't agree, I can at least imagine a coherent worldview that includes that stance.
yep that's the idea. tentative as always, and quite theoretical since I don't know any case up close.
The third parent proposal seems incredibly complicated considering all the laws based around parenthood and 2 parents.
It’s definitely a grey area, but if the surrogate is happy, the parents happy, and the incentives not *too* exploitative, it seems sad to ban the practice, as both many children, and much happiness will be left out of the world.
I'm not even suggesting to ban the practice. The technology involved is effectively three-way reproduction, and it has been proved safe enough, so technically speaking it is progress. I'm very happy for any group of three people who wishes to have a child together (I'm sure they exist!), and get to do it that way.
I'm not just not comfortable with one of the three people —the one who actually brings the child into the world, no less— being contractually barred from having a relationship with the child.
There are rights we don't allow people to sign away; I'd (tentatively) consider this to be one.
I disagree, but I understand your position and I think it’s fair.
Personally I’m more pro-signing away your rights so long as significant exploitation doesn’t occur.
The example I’d think of is selling your organs. I’d say we should avoid homeless people being compelled to sell their organs to pay for food and housing. I see it as a huge loss for society that healthy productive people who are 50-50 on donating a kidney for charitable purposes, who would be willing to do so wholeheartedly if they were given a few dozen thousand dollars as a bonus to compensate them for the inconvenience, pain and small risk.
If a woman just likes being pregnant, or doesn’t mind, I see no problem in compensating her for her time, slight health risk, and inconvenience.
You're not allowed to pay a woman to have sex with you, because it's potentially exploitation. You are allowed to pay a woman undergo nine months of pregnancy. That's...not potentially exploitation? Make it make sense.
"I don't understand why prostitution is illegal, Selling is legal, fucking is legal. So why isn't it legal to sell fucking? Why should it be illegal to sell something that's legal to give away?"
-George Carlin
That WOULD make it make sense.
I think we still under-appreciate the harms from even low levels of air pollution. In addition to all of the acute health events highlighted in the paper there is a growing list of chronic diseases (including all the big ones and probably psychiatric ones too) being associated with particulate pollution.
Re 27: Imo, for being an effective teacher of a large primary school class, “classroom management” is by far the most important skill. More experienced teachers are much better at classroom management than new teachers both because many teachers who are bad at it drop out (so the teachers who remain are on average better), and because classroom management skills ramp up dramatically in the first few years. So this result is very intuitive to me.
I expect for 1-1 tutoring the situation is different.
#4 isn’t this basically the same for smoking? That is, harm increases less than linearly with concentration of dosage with respect to time. So smoking 1 cigarette a day for 7 days is worse than smoking 7 cigarettes in 1 day ( or at least that what I read at some point).
32: Notice the discussion below the post. Another scholar argues, if I got the gist right, that David Roman puts too much emphasis on the preservation of the physical books, which is necessary but not sufficient for the survival of their content. Most (not all) of the texts did exist in some form in Europe, but they were essentially collecting dust in monastic attics and nobody would have cared much if it wasn't for Muslim scholarship that developed and commented on the *content* of the texts. David Roman and the commentator broadly reach agreement.
Europe didn't receive Roman texts from muslims. It was the Byzantines.
Only after David Roman does a massive U-turn, repudiating his own click-bait headline.
I didn’t finish reading the David Roman post because it seemed to be about litigating grievances with some people who were nice to Muslims rather than about trying to emphasize what the accurate roles were. Rather than saying that many people believe exaggerated versions of a story that gets one important part of the truth, he sells it as though he is refuting something in a significant way. He doesn’t dispute that the translation of certain ancient texts from Arabic was far more historically influential on medieval and renaissance reception of the ancients than the copies that existed in Byzantine monasteries. He just disputes that the Arabic copies were literally the only copies.
Fun fact about feeding snakes - my favorite snake is a hognose snake (Heterodon genus, various species, at least three int the US). They're known (for good reason) as being the drama queens of the snake world (they play dead as a defense mechanism in a hilariously overdramatic way, as well as "pancaking" or "hooding" - google hognose playing dead for fun videos, if you're into that kind of thing). So they make very amusing pets.
However, in the wild, they (well, at least two of the species) eat almost exclusively toads and frogs. AFAIK, frozen thawed toads/frogs are not a realistic feeding option in captivity, and ethics aside, keeping a colony of toads around just to feed your hoggies is inefficient at best. They *can* get their nutritional needs met by eating frozen thawed mice, but they're usually averse to eating them, since they're not toads. The solution? Keep a single toad as a pet. Come feeding day, rub a thawed mouse on the toad to pick up the toad's scent. The hoggie will (sometimes with a little encouragement) then eat the mouse. Do this enough, and you can typically gradually ween the hoggie off the toad scent altogether, so they'll just eat regular thawed mice without the toad rubbing.
Presumably the toad lives a normal healthy life, at least for a captive toad. Well, normal except for the fact that once a week or so somebody rubs a dead mouse all over him.
Also, their genus name (Heterodontus) refers to their specialized teeth - they have rear fangs designed to "pop" toads. A toad being attacked by a snake will inflate itself as large as possible to become difficult to swallow. The toad poppers make short work of that.