To be fair, his idiocy is slightly overrated. I recently watched a French documentary series about WW2, Apocalypse, and they portrayed him as reasonably competent, for a warmongering megalomaniac. His allies, in comparison, were actual idiots. Mussolini couldn't get anything done in relatively irrelevant Africa, and Japanese stupidly dragged the reluctant US into the war by strategically and tactically abysmal Pearl Harbor.
Hitler was in many ways more competent than Stalin, who managed to squander much of the massive demographic and industrial advantage the USSR had relative to Germany in the early 1930s, gut his military leadership and bring his country very close to collapse in late 1941. People forget that the Tsarist military performed much better encounter for encounter against a far better trained and led German army in WWI. Soviet victory in WWII was mostly due to German exhaustion, and basically inevitable once the initial German gamble failed.
Lend-lease also played an important part. Even considering all that, without the US invasion some sort of stalemate might've been reached, and Heisenberg could've eventually stumbled upon the bomb first. You really don't need too many counterfactuals for history taking a much different course.
It's horribly tempting to speculate - suppose Hitler hadn't gone all-in on race theory? Suppose instead Nazi Germany treated Jews under an equivalent of the Jim Crow laws? Could the regime have lasted? I think it probably would have eventually collapsed, given the economic constraints, and if Hitler had still decided to go to war to restore German greatness.
But without the Holocaust, there would be a lot less easy way of saying "Fascism is Evil" and a lot more excuse for keeping out of the war, if it went ahead. Even with that, suppose he hadn't invaded Poland but had declared war on the Soviet Union at the very start? Is it totally impossible he would have not been on at least tenuous basis of alliance or "we're not going to interfere" with the Western nations for that?
He managed to turn his silly little boys' club into a party that became the government of Germany and a world power (even if for a very brief time). That argues some level of competence and ability, even given the chaotic nature of German politics at the time.
What counts as sinister and hidden? Not wanting people to believe that Covid is the fault of virologists seems like an entirely natural motive for virologists to have — but implies that claims by virologists that Covid couldn't possibly be a lab leak should be viewed with great suspicion. Attributing to the other two the motive of wanting people to believe that what they do is very important also seems natural, and a ground for at least some skepticism.
You don't need sinister hidden motivations to be influenced by your unconscious biases. That said, saying "this work is probably biased, I just can't tell how, so I won't believe it" is seeing the speck in your neighbor's eye while not noticing the log in your own.
This seems subject to reference class tennis. What if the relevant history is all countries over all time? Modern countries in the past 50 years? Any entity that can commit violence upon it's subjects?
I don't know if you've chosen the correct reference class or not.
CFS seems pretty solid to me. Their reactor design is very similar to conventional research tokamaks. It's broadly accepted in the field that energy-profitable fusion with a conventional tokamak design is a matter of scale, and that it can be scaled up in terms of size or in terms of magnet power. The big multinational government-backed project (ITER) is taking the "size" approach, since at the time it was designed, the best available superconducting magnets were near their limit in terms of the field density they could generate. CFS is taking the other approach, using newer and better superconductor materials to increase the magnetic field power. A lot of the senior people are experienced fusion researchers, many of whom had previously been involved with ITER. The magnet assemblies have been demonstrated at component scale, and the company has published peer-reviewed papers on their reactor design.
The other fusion startups are trying to develop varying degrees of novel reactor designs. Some are modelled off other research reactor designs that are somewhat well studied and show some promise at scaling up better than conventional tokamaks but which haven't been studied as thoroughly and thus have some degree of additional physics risk and engineering challenge. Tokamak Energy uses a spherical tokamak design (a variant of a conventional tokamak where the "donut hole" in the center is as small as possible, which is thought to scale up more efficiently but is challenging because there's a bunch of magnets and stuff that need to go in the donut hole).
General Fusion and Helion are using different hybrids approaches between magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Both of their approaches seem to be theoretically sound as far as we know, but they're a lot further from the beaten trail and there's considerably more risk of unknown unknowns rearing their ugly heads on either the engineering or the physics fronts.
No, about 7 years ago Helion was claiming that they would reach breakeven within 5 years. They walked that back about 4 years ago citing a combination of failure to secure sufficient funding and unforeseen technical hurdles, they then went into stealth mode and haven't made a peep until this new announcement.
I'm not convinced at all by 3, but this is the first time in a while I've been willing to consider that it *might* actually be, say, 8-10 years away. Priors still say probably not, but they've passed an "I'm not even going to bother paying attention" bar for me at least.
Keep in mind that the original claim, back in the 70s, was "if you fund our research, fusion power will be available within 20 years". Over the last 50 years, there has been less total funding for fusion than they asked to get over those 20 years, so it's hardly surprising they didn't manage to succeed without funding
None of the alternatives to the regular tokamak have had full scale facilities before so it's hard to say what their chances are. I'm no insider, though I've been soaking it up for a few months
I believe if you draw a straight line from Helion, TAE or General Fusion's experimental results to a full scale experiment you have a commercial scale output, probably with better economics than tokamaks. Experience with tokamaks and laser inertial however is that straight lines are not to be expected
CFS is notable in this regard in that they are a tokamak design with much more validated physics and with a new superconductor magnet that makes commercial levels of output possible. The physics will be tested by SPARC in about 2025 along with General Fusion's 70% scale facility and Helion in 2024. From what I can tell the economics aren't a home run but are possible. If you compare to coal with air pollution costs it appears the CFS tokamak concept is immediately competitive. Their ARC concept proposes a first of its kind reactor producing electricity at twice the cost of fission and similar to the first of its kind fission pilot plant
One of the CFS guys put it this way - the non tokamak concepts have bigger physics unknowns and the tokamaks have bigger engineering challenges
It's worth noting Helion isn't claiming a commercial level plant and I suspect not a sustained net electricity output either, but that a single pulse will put out net electricity. Their pulses are quite short. Their concept is really interesting because it proposes that the expansion of the magnetically crushed plasma will induce a current in the same electromagnets which can be captured as electricity at 85% efficiency. The other concepts go by the usual thermal conversion of heat to steam turbines at 40% efficiency
It's hard to accurately judge where Helion is right now, since they've been very secretive. CFS comes to conferences and publishes papers (with simulations and not yet any plasma experiments, but their concept is backed by decades of knowledge from tokamak research.). General Fusion comes to conferences and has fewer papers, and they haven't made outwardly -super-visible progress in overall plasma confinement in the past few years. It's worth nothing that their 'Fusion Demonstration Plant' which they plan to build in the UK is not in line with what other companies or governments would call a 'Fusion Demonstration Plant': as I understand it will just be doing deuterium plasmas (no tritium) and will not be even trying to produce electricity; it's just a first integrated test of the plasma and driver system; this is kind of on par with where tokamaks were in the 1980s.
Helion energy is planning to do D-3He fusion, which is much harder from a plasma perspective (iirc about 5x higher temperatures are required). They claim on their website to have 9keV ion temperatures, but they don't (often?) come to conferences or (recently) publish papers and there's not (to my knowledge) independent validation of their claims. I do think that if their plasmas and machine engineering could work out, it would be a very exciting and potentially low-cost overall system. However especially on the plasma side this is a big 'if'.
They might just be better financed now. If getting to fusion is a matter of scale, then having the resources to actually build a working plant to scale would make a big difference in progress.
Yeah people bring up that the private companies have consistently said something like "working reactor in 10 years" and say this shows it's just hype but the statement fully fleshed out is more like "working reactor in 10 years with full funding if things go smoothly"
Private funding is now getting to the point where funding will be sufficient, this should especially become the case by around 2025 if one of the demonstrators gets the net energy Kitty Hawk moment. (This appears to be a high likelihood for CFS) Then we'll start to see what the roll of the dice is on things going smoothly
The magnets are the big breakthrough. Older niobium-based superconductors can't handle much more than about 10 T worth of magnet fields without breaking down and losing their superconductivity and get really finicky as you approach that. You can (we think) make a working fusion reactor within that limit by making it bigger, but bigger means a lot more expensive, on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Expensive enough that no one government wants to put up all the money, so you get all the headaches of a government megaproject multiplied by trying to juggle cooperation and coordination between the US, Russia, the EU, Japan, Korea, India, and China. That megaproject (ITER) has been semi- languishing in government megaproject hell since the 1980s, finally broke ground in 2007, and is scheduled to start experiments in 2025.
REBCO-based superconductors have been around since the 1980s, but they're tricky materials to work with and it's only in the last 5-10 years that the engineering challenges of making a practical big giant magnet out of it have come close to getting worked out. REBCO stays superconducting at mich higher temps that Niobium alloys, liquid nitrogen rather than liquid helium, and it can handle much higher magnetic field powers (20-40 T).
This lowers the scale of the project by quite a bit, to the point where a project with ITER-level goals can reasonably be done with commercial funding.
A secondary factor is computer modelling. A ton of work has been done in parallel with ITER on smaller research reactors to flesh out our understanding of near-breakeven fusion plasma, which gives us a great dataset for physics simulations, and there's enormously more computing power available now than even a few years ago to do the sims with. It's the computer simulation capacity that's made all the novel reactor design projects feasible to attempt.
Materials science has always been the most underappreciated science.
So many of the wonderful inventions in the world seem to come down to "Well, this idea has been around for ages, but we haven't had materials with the right properties until now".
cf beanstalk. If we have a material that is suitable, then we could build a beanstalk for no more than what Apollo cost - possibly for about what ISS cost. Obviously, those are big amounts of money, but they are also big amounts that humanity is already demonstrably prepared to commit to space.
And a beanstalk would have a huge impact on access to space - it would make SpaceX Starship look expensive.
People were talking in another thread about physics people getting government funding, but I think that funding physics and materials science is ultimately how we get all our advancements.
I would give Helion <1% chance of success (meaning fusion (Q_plasma > 5) within 10 years), General Fusion <10% chance of success, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems / SPARC > 50% chance of success.
One simple thing to check is how engaged the company is with the broader fusion community. At the American Physical Society - Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP) conference two weeks ago, SPARC was discussed in two 30 min talks, nine 12 min talks, and eight posters. General Fusion was discussed in seven posters. Helion didn't have a presence there at all.
Three other startups that I think are worth watching are: Type One Energy (stellarator in Wisconsin), Renaissance Fusion (stellarator in France), and Tokamak Energy (spherical tokamak in the UK). Other startups might make the news, but I think that they can be largely ignored.
Plasma physics and associated sciences are not simple and it's easy to trick yourself. As an example, there was an early experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZETA_(fusion_reactor) ) where scientists thought that their neutron measurements (evidence of fusion reactions) were from a true 'hot' plasma (indicator of success) but in reality they were due to effects from specific instabilities, which was evidence that their idea would *not* scale to a reactor.
Fusion is complicated. There are lots of important sub-problems which the broader fusion community has had to deal with. Even if your design is very different, you're likely to encounter at least some of these. So it is valuable to tap into the decades of expertise of the broader community.
I should also note that my estimates are based on more than just whether they showed up at the conference. I'll write some more details about why I think Helion is implausible from a physical (instead of community) standpoint.
One obvious counterexample to this is the Wright Brothers. Aviation, ca. 1900, was a Very Hard Problem with a large community trying to simultaneously tackle hard problems in propulsion, aerodynamics, controls, and materials. And basically all following each other down the same wrong track (airplanes with two-axis flight controls and inherently stable in roll). The Wrights *followed* that community, and to some extent engaged with select members, but mostly hid in their bicycle shop and did their own thing.
It wasn't until four years after they invented the airplane, and two years after Santos-Dumont was credited for inventing something very charitably described as an "airplane", that the Wrights went public with an airplane that actually worked.
W/re fusion, there are a lot of people who have been doing much the same thing for fifty years with not much to show for it. And some people who have been trying novel approaches while deeply engaged with the mainstream fusion community and ditto. I'm not going to rule someone out because they aren't part of the Official Fusion Community.
Not being engaged in the broader community is not sufficient reason to rule out Helion, although it's not a good sign. See my other comment on the physical reasons why I'm skeptical that Helion will get fusion anytime soon.
In the last 50 years, the mainstream fusion community has improved fusion performance (as measured by the triple product) by five orders of magnitude. We have less than an order of magnitude to go. The start-ups that use standard techniques only have to close this final gap, instead of achieving all of this progress on their own.
Helion has several important problems that make their success implausible.
They are using D-He3 fusion. This requires 5 times hotter temperatures as the usual goal of D-T fusion. The reason they want to use the D-He3 reaction is because it doesn't produce neutrons. But their plasma will also have D-D fusion reactions, which either produces tritium and a proton or He3 and a neutron, with equal probability. Their plasma will be producing neutrons, just not as many as a D-T plasma. He3 does not exist in significant quantities on the surface of the earth. Other fusioneers who want to use He3 suggest that the best way to get it is to mine the surface of the moon. Helion claims that they're going to produce the He3 themselves using D-D reactions. So they will need at least twice as many D-D fusion reactions as D-He3 reactions.
Helion is planning on compressing their fuel. This sounds nice because it means that you can get higher density (causing more collisions) without having to maintain that high density in steady state. The problem is that compressing fuel tends to cause instabilities. When you try to squeeze something, it tends to squish out between your fingers instead of being compressed. This has been the main challenge for the inertial confinement fusion program at NIF - and it has already cost them more than 3 years. They have made progress recently by manufacturing their capsule with extremely highly precision. Helion is starting with something fluid, so they can't use NIF's strategy.
Helion's plan is for a pulsed power source. You create two plasmas, compress them and collide them, and then extract energy. Each time you do this is called a "shot". Current experiments like NIF and Z-pinch can do about 1 shot per day. To make a feasible power plant, you would need at least 1 shot per second. I don't know how they're going to speed things up by a factor of 100,000 compared to existing experiments.
While I don't think that their approach is particularly plausible, I applaud them for their efforts and for their ability to get people excited about fusion. $500,000,000 is a lot of money - possibly more than what Commonwealth has raised.
My predictions: They will get an experiment built within 2-3 years. The experiment is small enough that they can just buy the He3. They will have problems with compressing the plasma, so their Q will be about an order of magnitude lower than expected. Maybe after another 2-5 years of experiments, they'll have figured out how to make the compression work, so they can announce that they GOT FUSION. The shot rate will still be only a few times per day, but they can use the hype to get more money. I would guess that increasing the shot rate to once per second is at least as hard as dealing with the compression, so they will be not be selling electricity to the grid anytime soon.
I agree D-He3 is perhaps pie in the sky. However I think it's less of a moonshot than it appears for a few reasons. The neutron motivation is solid - D-T neutrons are 14 MeV vs D-D neutrons at 2.5 MeV and less of them. This creates two advantages in that the reactor can be far smaller without the need for serious shielding and at the same time may not have its lifetime limited by the neutron flux
Helion proposes that their full scale reactor could be 50MW vs a CFS style D-T tokamak needing to be 200MW at the smallest size to contain enough shielding. This would allow Helion to serve a larger market potentially including powering container ships, and their larger plants would benefit from modularity where they should not only need less downtime but would have a much easier time with one or a few modules out of service at a time. Combining this with much less worry about capital intensive plants having their lifetimes cut short by D-T neutron flux makes up some substantial part of the ground lost in having a much more difficult reaction to create
If Helion's energy capture system really works there is another large gain. I may be incorrect here but it appears in theory Helion would need a power gain + initial power of 1.18 to reach breakeven. They only need to gain 20% energy for net breakeven after the input energy plus gained energy are recovered at 85% efficiency. By the same numbers a thermal plant would need a gain + input power of 2.5 for breakeven electricity conversion - a gain of 150%
So Helion's basic reaction is less likely but if they make it to the starting line the finish line is relatively close. Their sourcing of He3 seems like a pretty notable question mark but the pulse rate is actually not as big of a concern. The current Trenta machine can pulse every 10 mins while the 2024 Polaris is proposed to be able to pulse once per second temporarily. The ten minutes is nice and it will certainly be interesting to see if they can close in on second pulses. Supposedly the limiting factor is removing the fusion product 'exhaust' between pulses and they have done it fast enough on some small scale and are hoping they can scale that up
If all else fails I don't know how their concept compares as a D-T reactor but they could try it as I believe TAE have indicated they would license their design for D-T use while they continued work on trying to get it to aneutronic levels
I did not know that Trenta can do a shot every 10 minutes. They only need to improve this by 2.5 orders of magnitude instead of 5 orders of magnitude.
The best way to measure how close you are to fusion is with the triple product: temperature * density * confinement time. Helion has not published triple products for Trenta, so I don't know how close they are. Their last experiment, Venti, had a triple product 300 times too small for fusion. (Source: random comments.) Trenta has five times higher temperature than Venti, but we don't know its density or confinement time. <Do you think that this means it's better than expected?> I expect that they're already having trouble with compression. It's common in fusion to try to scale your experiment up by an order of magnitude or two, but then run into new instabilities or turbulence that take years to work around.
Helion's energy capture system could also be a significant improvement, although I don't know what the best efficiency they have achieved so far is. They also don't have the extra ~25% energy from the Li6 + n -> He4 + T reaction in the breeding blanket for tokamaks.
The size of fusion power plants is mostly determined by the energy confinement time. The farther a particle has to go (across magnetic field lines) to get to the wall, the longer it stays in the plasma. When you make a fusion device this big, there ends up being enough room for shielding - except for the thin central column of spherical tokamaks.
D-He3 seems like a great reaction for second generation fusion devices. Once we get good at confining plasmas, then we can push to higher temperatures and smaller sizes with He3. For a first generation device, you're just making your life more difficult.
I'm reminded of Type One Energy, which says that they hope to use a D-D reaction, but will check whether D-D or D-T is more feasible in their experiment. I am confident that they will "find out" that D-T is easier. Helion might "end up" using D-T for their first generation reactors as well.
Helion's claiming they'll be able to run the same or similar equipment with D-D fuel to generate the He3. I'm skeptical of this on a couple fronts:
D-D fusion is even harder than D-He3 and releases considerably less energy, so your fuel generation cycle is likely to be significantly energy negative. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does need to be factored into the calculation. It also multiplies your capital costs, since every pulse you run with D-D fuel to generate He3 consumes equipment time that is now no longer available for your power generation cycle.
The other problem is that D-D fusion isn't aneutronic: it yields 50% He3+n and 50% T+p. So in addition to the tritium (which isn't really a waste product, since you can sell it), you've got a high-energy neutron to deal with for every He3, and the whole point of using D+He3 in the first place was so you'd have a nice, well-behaved high-energy proton to handle instead of a neutron. So you'll still have the same number of neutrons to deal with (or somewhat more, since you're likely to lose some He3 in the process somewhere), and you're still going to need an answer to the same engineering challenges of neutron shielding that the D-T fueled reactors have.
There are a couple residual benefits, thought, if the can get it all working. Neutron shielding and power generation are now separable, simplifying the engineering challenges somewhat. Using the neutrons to generate tritium is demoted from a critical requirement to a stretch goal for the neutron shielding system. The neutrons from D-D reaction are considerably less energetic, so there's correspondingly less waste heat to vent. You can potentially capture useful energy from the protons a lot more efficiently than from neutrons. And you can use different facilities for you D-D reactions and your D-He3 reactions, so you could have a big centralized facility for He3 generation with all the neutron shielding, leaving your power generation reactors small and relatively free of the burden of neutron shielding.
The D-D reactions also offer a potential offramp short of successful power generation. If Helion gets the fuel generation cycle working but not the power generation, and CFS or one of the other D-T fueled projects does succeed, then there's going to be a huge market for Tritium that Helion could fill. A D-T reactor should be able to make a lot of its own tritium (the neutron is captured by a lithium in the shielding system, which them splits into a tritium and a helium 4), but would need to be 100% efficient at this to be fully self sufficient: there are proposed solutions to this involving neutron multipliers (materials like beryllium or lead that can emit multiple neutrons after absorbing one), but it'd be cleaner and simpler to just buy it if it's available in the required quantities at a vaguely reasonable price.
D-D fusion is not so much harder than D-He3 that you can avoid having an unpleasant amount of D-D fusion going on anyplace you have enough D to make D-He3 happen.
Well, maybe in something like a two-beam system where the D is kept "cold" and fuses with He3 only by directed kinetic energy, but I don't think any of the current contenders are proposing that (and it probably wouldn't work if they did).
"Unpleasant" is relative. D-T fusion is already producing 2 or 3 orders less radioactive waste than fission. Depending on the conditions in the D-He3 reactor, we'd drop another few orders of magnitude.
I'm still skeptical we'll somehow leapfrog to success with D-He3 before D-T.
Well described! re: How much harder is D+D or D+3He fusion than D+T, here's the classic "triple product" plot from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Fusion_tripleprod.svg/1920px-Fusion_tripleprod.svg.png. You can see that D3He fusion requires about an order of magnitude higher temperature at the same density and confinement time -- that is, an order of magnitude higher pressure (P = n * T). DD fusion requires two orders of magnitude higher density or confinement at the same temperature, so still an order of magnitude higher pressure. (Note this is a pretty rough mathematical guideline: given all the challenges of getting plasmas to do what you want, e.g. instabilities, this is a lower-limit than a threshold for fusion ignition.) So a reactor that can just not reach the pressure conditions necessary for either of those will probably ignite D-T almost trivially. This is why if they're not talking about at least demonstrating first burn with DT, it's hard to take them seriously.
re: How much better are the CFS magnets? It's been a long time since I studied tokamaks, but if I recall correctly, magnetic confinement fusion power is expected to scale with peak magnetic field to the fourth power (B^4). This means that by doubling the peak field strength, CFS can build an igniting tokamak (in theory) that is 1/16 the volume of ITER. This takes it from the international megaproject scale (>$10bn, 40 yrs) to something achieved more locally in space and time (< $1bn, "5 years"). The reason to be bullish on CFS is that tokamak physics is about as well understood as anything in fusionland, and their breakthrough directly pushes a highly critical factor.
I think it's also generally underappreciated that igniting a plasma will result in novel conditions that, if history is any indicator, will not behave quite how we expect. The recent (near) ignition event on the National Ignition Facility is exciting primarily because it will let us test ignited plasma behavior, assuming we can repeat it. CFS's SPARC will also be a research machine to understand how to control and engineer magnetically-confined burning plasmas.
Hot off the presses, CFS has raised 2 billion to build SPARC and begin work on ARC. In a week private fusion funding has more than doubled
I was reading on the B^4th power relationship recently and it doesn't result in 16x more density due to one of the other factors being radius squared - so I think you would have 16x more density at the same size as ITER but the ARC wiki page describes it as allowing the same power as ITER at a quarter of the size
It is one of those great cosmic coincidences that America has produced the two greatest chess players of all time (as defined by dominance over their contemporaries), both of whom quit at the height of their dominance to never play chess again.
The best way of describing Bobby Fischer to a non-chess player is to imagine an Eskimo tennis player who cleared away the snow to create his own tennis court, trained exclusively by himself, then showed up at Wimbledon, where every single player colluded and conspired against him (sharing training techniques, intentionally throwing matches to ensure better rest for his opponents), but nevertheless won every match without losing a set or a game, and then immediately disappeared, only to show up decades later to blame the Eskimos for 9/11.
Fischer did have to famous successful parents, so really not Eskimo like.
In fact someone whose mother defected to Stalin's Soviet Union to study medicine is exactly the kind of person you expect to be a 9/11 truther and a chess prodigy.
"It is one of those great cosmic coincidences that America has produced the two greatest chess players of all time (as defined by dominance over their contemporaries)..."
Both Morphy and Fischer had amazing peaks, but also *short* peaks.
Capablanca went undefeated for eight years, which included games in tournaments and defeating Lasker to become world champion...
I have never seen a realistic claim that Morphy was the "greatest of all time." Greatest at the time he was playing, sure.
But if we define "greatest of all time" to be "dominance over their contemporaries" as Jackie'sDad did, then how does going eight years without losing (while still playing in tournaments and a world chess championship match) not even get into the conversation?
The problem is that, when you really consider the situation involved, the "8 years without losing" streak becomes significantly less impressive than it may appear at first because so he played so few games. It's not his fault, of course, but limited capability for international travel + fewer top players + political considerations etc meant that there were far fewer chess tournaments in which he could face other top players. More specifically, he played 63 consecutive games without losing, while a super grandmaster like Ding Liren, for instance, went 100 straight with no losses 3 years ago (mostly against 2700+ players).
This isn't meant to disqualify Capablanca as one of the greatest players ever, mind you; he was a world champion, and he was certainly dominant in his time. But he's not in contention for greatest player ever, since, in the eyes of most observers, he can't really hold a candle to Kasparov, or Fischer (or even Carlsen, honestly).
With regards to Morphy's argument for being the greatest ever, I would recommend you watch some of the videos in which Ben Finegold explains why that's a reasonable position to hold.
1. In addition to Bezos, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were also abandoned by their biological parents. At least some of their motivation must have been to make their biological parents deeply regret having ever abandoned them.
Perhaps success in big tech is enabled by having the kind of genes that would allow you to abandon a child, plus being raised in a environment by the kind of parents who would adopt an abandoned child.
Steve Jobs was not an uncritical person, but he had nothing but appreciation for how well his adoptive parents raised him. For example, when Steve was getting picked on in school, he told his parents he had to go to a better school so they sold their house and moved to a better school district.
The person I felt sorry for was Steve's adoptive little sister. Did anybody ask her if she wanted to move and leave her school friends behind?
In general, can you imagine having for an older brother the World's Greatest Salesman? Especially if you don't share any of his Reality Distortion Field genes?
Three of the last ten Presidents have had a different surname at times in their lives, including Gerald Ford who was in general extremely non-exotic. The lesson I take from that is that lots of people have had family drama.
Seems something of a high-rise strategy. After all, Arthur and Romulus's siblings didn't turn out quite so well...
I'd suggest 20% chance of criminal career, 79% chance of fairly normal life and 1% chance of being a legendary archetype for your people. Odds of the last may lower if said archetype already exists...
I'm not sure there's a canonical childhood history for Morgana (because there's no real canonical Arthurian tradition), but I'd missed that possibility... As Moses had at least one brother (Aaron) raised by his parents maybe the abandonment strategy works best if you just abandon one child: it probably creates quite a driven (if vengeful) personality, and avoids the risks caused by association with siblings seen in the case of Remus.
We may need some more data points to be sure though.
I say Geoffrey of Monmouth is the canonical version, since it actually got accepted as actual history before people concluded he had an "inordinate love of lying".
I say Malory is the canonical version. He's got all of the major characters, and to the best of my knowledge everything in English written after Malory references Malory, directly or indirectly.
Moses wasn't really abandoned. Mom was running a number to save him from the Gestapo. She left Miriam to watch him and Miriam talked the Princess into letting Mom be his wet nurse.
It wouldn't help, since you don't have the genes for the personality which *spontaneously* abandons them, which is what gives the child the necessary characteristic for success. If you abandon your children because you want to improve their life outcomes, that just proves you have unusually strong conscientiousness and willingness to sacrifice for the future well-being of your children, that is, the act selects for exactly the opposite of what abandonment selects for in nature.
This is actually a parable about all attempts at intentional design of society.
This raises an interesting question: Why is abandonment as children so popular a precursor in our hero stories and myths? (They often end up with terrible step-mothers, which just makes things that much worse.) Is it that we love the intrigue of the come-from-way-behind mythos to conquer all? Or is there something about that kind of adversity that really does foster psychological hero potential in people and our myths have captured it?
What % of people are abandoned by their fathers and what % of billionaires are.
This Daily Mail article is the best I can find, it says one in five with second families don't see the kids from their first family, not the relevant statistic but doesn't indicate an order of magnitude.
The generic response to this is that an unusually large % of highly successful people were orphaned, which wouldn't fit your hypothesis, or at least be a stretch.
The thing is, the same logic applies to inmates. I suspect that the burden of huge responsibility early in life makes some great and some break. I think Jonathon Haidt said something like that.
2.5% of children are adopted and another 4% don't live with either parent. That would be 6.5% of children.
How many billionaires are adopted?
Another possibility, though: people who adopt children are disproportionately likely to be wealthy, so the odds of being adopted and ending up rich are probably distorted. Especially if you are adopted as a baby/small child rather than later on due to behavioral problems.
Steve Jobs was the biological child of two grad students and was placed for adoption through an agency. He was placed with two working class parents of fairly similar ethnicity to his more upscale biological parents (one German-American parent in each pair, while one biological parent was Syrian, the nephew of the Syrian foreign minister IIRC, and one adoptive parent was Armenian). His biological parents had one more child together, the prominent novelist Mona Simpson. (These days, I presume, it's much harder to adopt a child from higher class biological parents than yourselves.)
Jeff Bezos's mother was from Cowboy-American gentry and her first husband was a Danish-American. The marriage broke up after a few years and his mother remarried a kindly Cuban immigrant manager at Exxon.
Larry Ellison was born during WWII when his biological father was an Italian-American pilot in the military and his mother was a Jewish-American teen. At 9 months she gave him up for adoption to her uncle and aunt and didn't see him for 48 years.
Other zillionaires: Bill Gates' father was a distinguished figure in the Puget Sound legal profession and his paternal grandfather owned a furniture store. Mark Zuckerberg is a classic Ellis Island immigrant progression across four generations of peddler to Post Office employee to very prosperous dentist to tycoon.
Sam Walton's father was something of a ne'er do well, but his uncle owned a big regional chain of stores. Michael Milken's father was a middle class accountant but his uncle was a tycoon.
There's a whole post on gwern.net about how very successful people were disproportionately likely to have grown up in a bad family environment OR a perfect family environment, but no inbetween.
Came here to say this, you definitely can read the full text. Also to say that clinically as well as in studies like this one, we are often relying on pet owners' reports of symptoms, so you're just back in the territory of human expectations influencing perceived outcome. Seizures are less subjective for people to assess in their pets than for instance "severity of arthritis pain" but still more subjective than you might think. My typical seizure monitoring visit might consist of me asking "About how many seizures has Fluffy had in the last three months?" and if I'm really lucky, Fluffy's owner saying "I saw one that lasted about 2 minutes, and there was a puddle of urine on the kitchen floor once so I think there was another since he doesn't usually break housetraining." The pet owners who are in these studies are generally more diligent than usual and are supposed to keep diaries, but the fundamental problem remains.
In the discussion the authors write that they cannot distinguish placebo effects in their study from regression to the mean:
Regression to the mean is a statistical term used to describe the fluctuations of biological variables that occur over time and take the form of a sine wave around the mean.11 Epilepsy is a waxing and waning disorder, and fluctuations in seizure frequency are common over the course of the disease. Owners are most likely to seek a change in therapy for their pet when seizures are under poor control. Over the short term, improvement in the seizure frequency is probable, regardless of the treatment administered. However, this improvement is often erroneously attributed to a recently instituted change in therapy, whereas in fact it is because of an effect of time.
"A broad survey of academic philosophers found that the only group who majority one boxes on newcomb's problem are those who study ancient Greek and Roman philosophy." - Interestingly, my (weakly held) belief is that rationalists tend to be way more into classical aesthetics / classical history in general than the average nerd. I don't care much for classical stuff; also I'd two-box.
I think this is probably just a coincidence or that classical philosophers don't study the weird math-y stuff that would make two-boxing seem justified. But if I had to come up with a cuter theory, it would be that mostly upper-class people get into classics, and upper-class people are less likely to make the choice that makes them seem like grubby money-maximizers desperate for an extra $1K.
Classical literature/philosophy actually includes a problem roughly isomorphic to Newcomb's, called the "lazy argument" (ἀργὸς λόγος), that makes two-boxing seem undesirable:
You are suffering from a disease, and Fate has determined whether you will or will not recover from it. You reason that if you are fated to recover, then it is useless to see a doctor (because you will recover with or without their help) and that if you are fated *not* to recover, then it is *also* useless to see a doctor (because you will die with or without their help); you thus conclude that, live or die, you shouldn't bother with the expense of seeing the doctor.
(For Newcomb mapping, let the $1000 box correspond to what you save by not going to the doctor, and let the million-or-nothing box correspond to the value of your life; the lazy argument's conclusion is that you should two-box.)
The ancients were not happy with this—'if anything about the future is true, you may as well not bother doing anything' seemed like an unhealthy outcome—and their usual answer, attributed to Chrysippus, was that obviously Fate would have also determined whether you are going to see a doctor and that it's reasonable your predetermined prognosis might depend on that, so there could still be good in giving up the value of the doctor's fee.
Academic Philosophy in the last century has relied a lot on thought experiments. As opposed to ancient philosophers who tended to make broader appeals to people's intuitions about day to day life. So would make sense classical philosophers are less inclined to seperate out their normal intuitions
When I dug around in these demographics, it generally looked like the closer you are to decision theory, the more likely you were to two-box. Just as some of the questions about non-classical logic got a lot of continental philosophers, it looks like one-boxing is primarily philosophers who aren't familiar with the problem.
What I really want to know, and I don't think I can validate from their interface yet, is whether my anecdotal sense is right that decision theorists older than me are mostly two-boxers while decision theorists younger than me are often one-boxers or hold some weird mixed view like me.
Your theory about a possible classical philosophy/one-box connection spurred me to think. If it isn't just a coincidence, then it might be that a character trait (disinclination to optimize) influences choice of specialization (choosing classical philosophy over other fields of philosophy).
What do I mean by 'disinclination to optimize'? Most living philosophers seem to evaluate classical philosophy as an unsatisfactory foundation for Western philosophy. (Go check the reference list for Plato and Aristotle.)
A philosopher seeking to optimize/maximize* their potential contribution to philosophy would be more likely to avoid specializations which are considered unsatisfactory. Therefore, this philosopher would be more likely to avoid classical philosophy.
By contrast, a philosopher who is disinclined to optimize lacks that reason. Thus this philosopher would be less likely to avoid classical philosophy. They would be more likely to find it good enough.
Similarly, taking one box instead of two boxes would be good enough for them.
*I leave open what optimizing/maximizing one's potential contribution to philosophy actually means for philosophers, if it means anything at all.
Latin is the gateway to studying classics, and in the US lots of people study Latin in part because they are Catholic. Does being raised Catholic make you more likely to one box?
I would imagine that Christians in general are more likely to one-box than atheists. Christianity is all about making deals with all-powerful beings, and if an all-powerful being tells you they're doing something nice for you then you'd better darn well believe it. Atheists hear about the existence of a supposedly all-powerful being and immediately start thinking about how they can outsmart it.
As for Catholicism versus Protestantism, I get the impression that Catholicism encourages a somewhat more philosophical approach to religion than many Protestant denominations (e.g. meditating on the mysteries of the rosary) but possibly not quite so much as Judaism.
I like the classical side, but find newcomb's problem to be like other similar thought experiments (trolleys, Chinese boxes) that to me are just bogus. If you assume X, where X happens to be impossible/false, everything/anything can be proved. My aspirations to become a philosopher get foiled by what I read about philosophy.
I wonder how it would change people's answers if it was phrased as being "a pretty good predictor, gets things right at least 3/4 of the time" - putting it in the territory where people picture a savvy human rather than a god.
With a "pretty good predictor" I'd two box, with a perfect predictor I'd one-box.
With a mere mortal as the predictor it becomes a bit of a "he thinks I think he thinks I think" game. I'm betting I probably _could_ predict what people would do 75% of the time, because I think that 75% of the time people will two-box it when facing a mere mortal.If I ever get rich enough to be eccentric instead of just crazy, maybe I will try this.
Sure, "just" needs to simulate. You're hiding a lot of non-trivial semantic properties behind that "just", and per Rice's theorem, all non-trivial semantic properties are undecidable.
Perhaps you are being confused by the popular informal statement of Rice's theorem? The confusing thing is that "semantic property of the program" is supposed to mean a property of the partial function computed by the program. A program in the sense of the theorem (a Turing machine) can use unbounded time and memory before it outputs anything, or it can use unbounded time and memory and not output but just run indefinitely. So informally, when it runs for a long time there is no point at which we could say "ok, it definitely won't output anything" because it could always run for a little longer and output. But the predictor needs to test the behavior of a finite system (presumably also in finite time, but it doesn't matter). The computer science equivalent is running a program for n steps and looking what it did.
> If you assume X, where X happens to be impossible/false, everything/anything can be proved.
Newcombs paradox generalizes pretty gracefully to versions of omega that are merely very good at predicting what you are going to do, so I don't know if this objection is as valid here as it is for eg. the Trolley Problem.
If omega is merely very good, then it necessarily admits some two box solutions depending on specific circumstances, in which case it's no longer a paradox and no longer as a single solution.
I think it don't : either you have a non super good predictor with comparabke pay off, in which case twi boxer thinking they can beat the predictor makes sense.... Or you have super good predictor and order of magnitude appart pay off. In which sense, it still makes sense to be a two boxer, like it does to play at the lottery : even if you loose on average, there is on non zero chance of life changing event while the average gain (or loss) does not change anything in your life. This is a existing thing, and we can observe a huge amount of people bet in this case, even if not playing have a better average payoff...
A lot of philosophers are bad at writing thought experiments, and try to stipulate things that our imagination resists. Newcomb is an example like that.
The standard move is to re-describe the Newcomb problem in a medical way. Suppose we discover that masks do nothing to block viruses, but that people who regularly wear masks have lower covid infection rates (presumably because of some common cause). In that case, do you wear a mask? (Wearing a mask is like one boxing and not wearing one is like two boxing.)
I believe the standard internet-rationalist one-boxers claim that this version is importantly different from the standard presentation, and go for the two-boxing equivalent here.
- Your parent is randomly assigned a judge. Some judges are much harsher than others
- If your parent got a harsher judge, you are slightly less likely to be a criminal yourself.
The study generated interest because it came to the unpleasant conclusion that having your criminous parent thrown in prison (this being more likely under harsh judge) was better than having him around in your life. Or maybe it scares you into following the law. But any way you cut it, this is a nurture effect.
Outside my field, but assuming it was conducted competently it has beautiful randomization and relevance to the question.
Locking people up has a lot of beneficial effects. Turns out most criminals won't change, so locking them up for a long time keeps them from committing more crimes and pulling more people into crime.
Sure, but there's also a pretty common type of a career criminal where nobody really expects them to become straight again, and yet this alone isn't enough for a life sentence, if they're caught over a trifle off they go after a short sentence.
It seems like justice system wasn't really designed with these considerations in mind, judging the "character" comes distant second to the severity of the crime at hand. Maybe at some point this led to a beneficial balance, but by now everything is so far gone that maybe it's time to redesign the system from the ground up. Sadly society doesn't appear to be up to the task...
This is what "three strikes" laws and similar things are designed to do - someone keeps ending up in court time and again for committing various crimes, they clearly aren't going to change their ways.
The fraction that change does also depend on the nature of the carceral system - the American one seems to actively make people *more* criminal, whereas other countries do successfully reform at least some of the criminals incarcerated.
False, actually. Criminals have very high recidivism rates globally. Countries which solve a lower percentage of crimes have "lower" recidivism rates because they simply fail to arrest as high of a percentage of criminals.
This is similar to thinking that you are lowering COVID rates by not testing it.
People always point to Scandinavian countries as evidence but can never separate out the confounders. There are more Americans per capita who commit crimes for the first time compared with these countries, which obviously cannot be a direct result of recidivism (maybe you could argue its indirect because their criminal parents are reformed and therefore better parents than American criminals, but this ought to be observable simply through a higher heritability of criminality in the US).
You also have to assume that none of these differences between the US and Scandinavia are demographic based. Certain ethnic groups in the US commit the vast majority of crime per capita, and these ethnic groups are a much smaller part of the population of scandanavian countries. Maybe, you know, people of Northern European ancestry are more easily "rehabilitated" than certain other demographic? Scoff at that all you want, but if your analysis does not make a bona fide consideration of this possibility, then your analysis is junk.
The state, for very good reasons, wants to keep kids and parents together, even if the parents are not stellar or are even actively bad. I hate the idea of kids staying with their terrible parents, but hate the idea of the state routinely deciding who is a bad parent even more.
When parents are in jail, there are fewer, possibly no, opportunities for the parents to be around the kids, so the state has to go with other options. That also has the benefit of a fair (hopefully) judiciary to review a case and determine if the parent really should be punished and put in jail. There are significant checks on the system, and the state has to make a compelling case. It's not perfect, of course, but I have a lot more confidence in that system for taking kids away than a bureaucratic option.
This isn't terribly surprising and is almost certainly one of the reasons why mass incarceration lowers crime - throw criminals in jail for a long time, they aren't around to mess up their kids/suck them into their own criminal stuff. Likewise, the kid isn't exposed to that stuff and doesn't see it as normalized, and also looks at it as bad - they got locked up forever, they should avoid such things to have the same effect to them.
As a veterinarian, I frequently think about placebo effects, but for humans, not for animals. I rarely get to observe the seizures or other clinical signs ("symptoms" are for humans) myself. Instead, I have to rely on the owner/guardian's assessment and report which can be highly biased. The placebo effect in question should be for the humans reporting the number of seizures their dogs are experiencing after giving them a new medication.
I think the dog placebo study linked in #5 is also terrible because it's comparing placebo to baseline instead of comparing placebo to no placebo. The effect could be all regression to the mean. If they want to run this study properly, they need to randomize dogs into placebo vs no placebo and blind the owners about which group their dog is in.
You could carefully construct different placebos to test against.
Perhaps you can make a placebo that only the humans notice (perhaps praying for the dog?), vs placebos that the pets notice more. Eg neutral tasting Vs bitter pills. Presumably, the owners wouldn't sample the pills for taste.
On 10 (painted classical sculptures), a friend of mine said something similar: “I don't buy it. Why would they spend weeks or months carefully carving the marble and then spend an afternoon slapping some flashy colors on it? … I think archaeologists are only finding scant molecular evidence of the *base coat* on the statue. I bet the statues were also covered with highlights, layers, shades, etc.”
My favorite theory is that the paint we have found is (in at least some cases) an amateurish repaint done some years after the work was painted (presumably much better) the first time. No idea how viable the theory is, but it's amusing to think about.
I think there's a lot to be said for using practical domain knowledge to inform history. This reminds me of Janet Stephens, the real-life hairdresser whose research into Roman hairstyles has revealed just how much those hairstyles were sewn; or the historical re-enacters who put their clay pipes down by the fire to dry overnight, and when the next morning they threw a new log on the fire, realised why archaeology finds so many broken pipes.
If a culture made detailed naturalistic sculptures, then painted them in flat colors, it would be unique in the history of the world. Flat colors go with abstraction; shading goes with naturalism.
That's the direction they're going for: might we get away with just some bright lightbulbs? They managed to confirm that having a bunch of them strung out in the room works.
Honestly, I doubt a single source of light on the ceiling will be enough - it's too weak if it's not right in front of your face. And if you make it bright enough, it'll probably be painful when accidentally looked at.
I'm currently experimenting with a setup of ceiling light plus around a 2m bar at the top of a wall. It's ok, but it'd probably be easier to tolerate if it were spread on several walls, or even better all over the ceiling.
On the U of A topic - I *really* struggle to see what they're going to do to promote diversity of ideology that isn't either a.) just being a right-leaning culture overall, which, fine, or b.) allowing some pretty heinous stuff because they don't want to draw a line on, say, anti-LGBT speech and actions.
Their thesis - that universities are too woke to function - is not nearly as true in my experience (at a Midwestern public school, so admittedly not the MOST woke school in America) as they seem to think it is.
I believe (for anecdotal reasons) that the wokeness level varies enormously from college to the next. U of A might not even turn out to the most anti-woke school out there.
Given various of the founders were involved in hounding out people for not supporting the Iraq war, or making anti Israel statements, seems unfortunately likely that"free speech" will mean "my in group gets to decide what is allowed not yours".
Unfair. There's a lot of universities that protect all speech. You don't hear much about them simply because if they have that culture then there tends not be calls for cancellations and the like, or the university shoots them down.
Unfortunately I *worked* at their number 2 college and it was terrible.
For example, I was part of their cancer moonshot deal while Trump was running the first time, and one of the leads would spam hipchat shitting on Trump supporters (Not Trump; sometimes, yes, but usually specifically the people who like him). I asked him to stop because my family is full of them and I HAVE to work and would prefer not to hear my boss's boss shitting on my family all day while I do it. He refused.
I tried to report it up the ladder and the U was awfully unresponsive. In fact they used their commitment to free speech *to defend someone with institutional power pushing his views on his subordinates all day*.
Okay, then. If *that's* what they mean by a commitment to free speech, so be it. So I started refuting what he said in slack every. single. time. he said it. I tried to do it as calmly and rationally - but persistently and consistently as possible.
LO AND BEHOLD by contract wasn't renewed despite good performance. And This isn't the only thing I saw while I was there by far.
In summary, UofC's speech code seems nice on paper but *in practice* seems to be deployed to protect a progressive majority's right to push their view on their subordinates (including students) and to use their power to lock people they disagree with out of the conversation (or bully them into silence). It simply uses the type of language FIRE (god bless 'em unironically) likes to hear so they get the good ranking.
All that being said, given my personal experience, as far as I'm concerned you have to eliminate everything below UofC. So you've shown one University.
Openly discriminating against LGBT people by for example refusing to enroll them in courses, allow them to join clubs, that sort of thing. Definitely free association! But...
The impression I get is that wokeness flows from the top down for colleges with a bias to the liberal arts, racial minorities, and left politics in the area broadly. Small Elite liberals arts schools > Ivies > elite public universities > mid-tier colleges > trade schools
My dad used to recite this fable as a cautionary tale (which was its original usefulness.) But all these variations on a theme illustrate its power as a larger commentary on trust, and how much trust comes into play in situations of love and war...
If you watch a lot of commentary by GM Ben Finegold, you come to love Paul Morphy. Apparently there's a lot of disagreement about Morphy's true strength; they'll say "Everybody he played against sucked. How can you say he was objectively strong?" But Ben argues that that's exactly the point. How exactly do you become so dominant over everybody in the world without there being anybody to teach you?
Came here to note exactly this. It's like if Steph Curry showed up 5 years after James Naismith invented basketball; what the heck is this guy doing here absent the evolutionary process that should have produced him?
And, as Finegold points out, although he obviously made his name flaying dudes alive in knife-edge tactical positions, on the rare occasions that he got into a slow positional game he played it in a way that, again, shows a deep understanding of those types of positions that's just totally out of place in his context.
In his match against Andersen (the best player besides him at the time), he crushed Andersen quickly in a couple of game. Then Andersen won a 70 move slug fest and said "Morphy needed only 20 moves to beat me, while I needed 70".
Ben Finegold is hilarious! You can see from Morphy's aggression and sacrifices how much he was just toying with contemporaries the same way you can disrespect people way below your skill level in other domains by trying things that shouldn't work.
I think your summary of Caplan is fair. Granted, it's admirable that he's open about it, and he was clear he'd say these things upfront, and he adhered to the terms of the bet. But even so it seems a little weak.
Then again, in the same vein -- his half-hearted rebuttal to me serves as a ringing endorsement of the book and I will probably read it now!
No no no, those points were strictly in service to his "look how leftist they are" point!
With geoengineering, Bryan failed to engage at all with the climatological arguments in the book against geoengineering. I think he basically bulverized the authors, saying that they only dislike geoengineering because it would allow a billionaire to unilaterally solve warming without government involvement, which Bryan Caplan wrongly assumed the authors inherently would hate, based on his sterotypes of leftists. So circular!
With nuclear, Bryan has a fair point: the authors ought to have gone out of their way to praise it, instead of failing to mention it at all. That would've given the book more credibility, particularly in Bryan's eyes. My defense of the authors is to presume they just weren't looking for ways to signal their lack of left-wing bias, or just thought the topic riles people up and would distract from their core points. Or maybe they just think that nuclear power is good exactly to the extent that the market says it's good, assuming externalities are priced correctly (that being primary message of the book). I.e., no need to praise it just for the sake of signaling.
It's not what I got from his rebuttal. It's not a situation where the book makes a good point, but Caplan dismisses it due to an unreliable source. It's that the book is basically asking the reader to take a lot on faith, and Caplan just doesn't have the necessary level of faith in the author. That's a fair conclusion, and the reason why he didn't expect to be convinced in the first place.
If I'm considering a complicated topic and I'm about to read an untrusty source on that topic, I can tell in advance that I'll only be convinced if the author manages to give me a gears-level understanding of his arguments. If I can't "grok" his points, I am not going to take them on faith.
And since climate change is a rather complicated topic, Caplan could have been pretty sure in advance that it's unlikely he'll change his mind. The chance of it happening is proportional to the chance the authors can clearly explain their reasoning on that complicated topic. It's not proportional to how convinced you are, but with how complicated the topic is.
Wait, did you read the book? I thought it left as little to faith as was possible in a single volume book! But that could be my own bias, since I already thought climate change was a big problem before reading the book.
I'd love to find someone who started skeptical and whose mind was changed by _Climate Shock_.
I'm just explaining Caplan's likely thought process, since I think Scott's and others' in this thread are using a rather uncharitable interpretation.
Personally, I'm very much not interested in climate science :) It's the perfect mix of being an imprecise and complex science, culture war topic and in any case, there's nothing I can do about it so it can only, at most, increase my anxiety level. In this respect I could make the same bet with you and be reasonably sure to win, because my conviction is not based on the content of the book.
And even on a purely intellectual level it's unlikely to change much for me. I already think humans are changing the climate - that much is pretty obvious. I'm not concerned with small to moderate change, because I think we'll grow economically and technologically much faster than the climate. I'm somewhat afraid of a Venus-like scenario, but the consensus seems to be it is unlikely. I'm already pro-technology. I'm rabidly anti-pollution, and this overlaps a lot with climate. So see, yet again a case of not considering the book relevant, even before reading it. Having read it and saying "yeah, it's interesting, but I'm still 90% what I said above" is by far the most likely outcome.
> I’d previously cited a claim in Joseph Henrich’s Secret Of Our Success that people liked spicy foods because they were antibacterial, but an article in Nature says there is “little evidence” to support that claim.
Does this generalize to all spices, or just capsaicin and similar 'hot' things? Spices being antimicrobial is still the best explanation I've heard for why we've evolved to like their taste, in small amounts.
I always thought hot spice was to hide the taste of food that is spoiling. It’s not that we evolved the spicy taste, it’s that we can tolerate it better than the evolutionary learning that spoiled food should not be eaten.
That's one of those weird ideas people made up about the medieval Europe.
In actual medieval Europe, rich people ate spice because it tasted good, and poor people didn't because they couldn't afford it. Then global trade opened up and the poor started eating spice, so the rich started eating bland food to set themselves apart. Having convinced themselves that spice doesn't actually taste good, they made up weird reasons for their ancestors to have eaten spice.
If spice actually did cover up the taste of things you shouldn't eat, wouldn't having a taste for spice be dysgenic?
One possible source of the claim that medieval food was overspiced is the introduction to _Two Fifteenth Century Cookerybooks_, a 19th c. publication of the Early English Text Society. It comments on the strong stomachs of our ancestors as shown by the cinnamon soup on page X. Turning to that page one finds not a recipe but a menu. The fact that the editor thought putting cinnamon in soup was evidence of a strong stomach tells us more about 19th c. English cooking than about 15th c.
Most medieval recipes don't give quantities, so although you can tell what spices they used you can't tell how much. I've tried to estimate spice quantities from a couple of sources, one a recipe that did have quantities (for a spiced wine), one the shopping list for an enormous several day feast, which had quantities. My conclusion was that the spicing was no greater than in many modern cuisines.
Could you provide citations for your contention that rich people decided spice didn’t taste good when it became more available, and that they made up the claim that spices were used to cover up spilled food?
Fashions come and go in food like everything else. I don't think people did really believe spices tasted 'bad', but it was like fashions in clothing.
Purple was a very expensive dye-stuff because it was hard to produce, so it was a luxury good which became a signifier of royalty.
Then in 1856 an eighteen year old chemist accidentally synthesised an artificial purple dye, which became known as "mauve", and now everyone could afford it from royalty down to housemaids. There was a craze for it, and like all crazes, it ran its course by becoming so ubiquitous that people tired of it.
When even the ploughman or parlour maid can afford pepper on their meals, the cachet of the spice is lost. Trendsetters turn to new styles and means of preparing food and now perhaps instead of vivid spicy flavours, you go for minimalist 'freshness' or rich, creamy, buttery recipes.
People in the past weren't stupid, they knew that eating spoilt food makes you sick (and quite possibly die, given that this was before modern medicine).
This is my opinion - not that hot spice allows you to eat food you shouldn't but that it makes it a lot nicer to eat food that you have no better option for. Evolution isn't the only explanation for all things, I say
Like cheese that's gone off but it's February and food's short. Or somewhat less in terms of necessity, if 90% of what you eat is rice or potatoes and you can make it spicy that is what you will happily do
Yeah I definitely speak from grounds of ignorance on this but I assume hot spices have traditionally been less expensive than something like being able to eat meat weekly
If spoilt food were all there was to eat, you would eat it, spices or not. Unless you think people were literally starving to death or at least suffering through chronic malnutrition in lieu of eating gross cheese?
People will literally eat dead people in the absence of any other food, and probably without any hot sauce handy.
I wouldn't count 'hot' spicy among the things we've evolved to like. Plants evolved capsaicin specifically to hurt us, and other mammals. It's just a weird cultural quirk that we grew to like it. No child starts out liking spicy food, but I'm pretty sure all children like cinnamon.
"Antibacterial" was not a thing until the late 19th century. I think the claim is better posed as "people liked spices because they thought that they alleviated ailments". And some of them do.
Ginger was used in folk remedies for the stomach and it seems to help with motion sickness at least. (Personal experience, with crystallised ginger.) Wikipedia talks about it being used in foods for pregnant and nursing women.
Turmeric was also used for digestive problems.
Clove and nutmeg, spices from the Spice Islands, were used as remedies for all sorts of things. Clove oil is still used for toothache.
Those are just the spices that spring to mind.
I think several other highly scented and flavoured seeds, roots, and flowers would also have been used in medieval remedies. Saffron, for example, simply because it was so expensive. The placebo effect existed.
But regardless of what people believe they're good for, adding small amounts of them to your food makes it taste better. Yet add too much of them and it tastes worse. Why? There must be a reason that our tastebuds respond favorably to certain chemical compounds, but only in small amounts.
There are multiple roles that spices can play for the human body, such as a digestive aid or an antioxidant, but they also have antimicrobial and antifungal activity, which seems to me like the most intuitive explanation for why we like to have a little of them. These are chemicals that are toxic to the things that make us sick, but less so to us, so we seem to have evolved to detect these mostly harmless substances by taste, and so we are motivated to use them to make our food less appetizing to germs.
Incidentally, this is exactly the same strategy that germs use against us. Food spoils not merely because it has bacteria and fungi growing in it, but also because they produce chemicals toxic to us in the process of consuming it, making it less likely that an animal eats it anyway. As a result, the germs get the food all to themselves.
Purified salt, sugar and fat? Sure. But butter is 81% fat and the quantity of butter in your food has to be truly obscene before it's no longer good to eat, while a few extra teaspoons of coriander will ruin it.
Spicy foods may or may not kill bacteria, but Capsaicin tends increase the production of intestinal mucus. This thicker intestinal lining seems to be correlated with a lot of good things, including beneficial microbiota such as Akkermansia Muciniphilia and decreased inflammation.
It seems plausible that Christianity reached a majority of the Roman Empire in the middle of the 4th century as that would place it halfway between the Edict of Milan, tolerating Christianity, and the Edict of Thessalonica, establishing Christianity.
I had always wondered how much teeth the late Roman Empire could have shown when enforcing Christian orthodoxy given that its capacities were degrading. If however Christianity was growing organically and the official actions were simply recognitions of this growth then the enforcement problem goes away.
I wonder if there were some institutional limitations in the empire that made recognition of Christianity necessary once it achieved 10% adherence. Establishment in 380 is easier to understand as with a 40% growth rate per decade Christianity would have already saturated growth potential in the empire by then.
This calculation is very sensitive to what gets counted as Christianity. There were a LOT of very popular sects that get retconned as heresies but clearly had substantial market share and certainly contributed to the ultimate acceptance of more or less familiar orthodoxy post- Constantine.
> A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status.
Not really. This was a big thing with the USSR too: they'd bury us in economic productivity with their stakhanovite New Soviet Men freed from the waste of capitalism (cf. that _Conquest of Bread_ review incidentally). Then it was with Japan, they'd surpass us with their unique Japan Inc. fusion of pseudo-democracy in which one party was always elected and worked hand-in-glove with the zaibatsus (or maybe South Korea, or another Asian Tiger). Then it was China... http://web.archive.org/web/20090302203414/http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/myth.html You'll note all the countries in question are still below (sometimes vastly) US per capita.
The conclusion is more "the Industrial Revolution is a helluva drug", and can make any regime look good and get high on its own ideological supply about how it has restarted history and inaugurated the Caliphate or China Dream or Japan as #1 or whatever.
Plus modern singapore's original dictator was Cambridge educated and seems to have stolen a bunch of governance approaches from liberal democracies (plenty of ways he was absolutely terrifyingly authoritarian, of course, but it's still a much more liberal-democracy-shaped autocracy from *some* angles, at least if you squint hard enough).
Certainly a really weird outlier on enough axes that I doubt it generalises to other non-democracies except for the part where I'm very glad not to live there, though.
fun fact: every country above the US on GDP PPP per capita rankings (no matter which one: CIA, IMF, or World Bank) has a population less than 10 million.
Aside from oil and microstates, the only places with higher GDP per capita than the USA are Ireland (genuinely wealthy, but also a lot of business book their entire EU revenue there, so that inflates the numbers a bit) and Switzerland (also genuinely wealthy, but also famously full of banks with money from other countries)
I'm using wikipedia's GDP per Capita PPP list, mostly just because I don't know enough to judge between different estimates so defaulting to "whatever wikipedia chooses" is always going to get an answer somewhere in the right ballpark.
Even looking at other countries just behind the US, they are again mostly oil, microstates, or small European countries (Denmark, Netherlands, Austria) until you reach Taiwan and then Germany. And those are quite a lot poorer than the US.
The first (even just arguably) authoritarian state that is neither oil, nor a microstate is Poland (and that's very arguable), then Hungary (also arguable), then Turkey (less arguable in that it's not in the EU, but still was more democractic not all that long ago), and then (omitting Russia because of oil), Belarus (not seriously arguable, and no recent history of democracy to have backslid from).
China is notably just about world average GDP per capita.
The Isle of Man is a petrostate? I think it's financial services there actually. At least I could see it on the way to school on a clear day for 7 years, and there was a notable lack of oil rigs...
I will absolutely acknowledge that Singapore is a lot bigger than the other microstates - and that its GDP is mostly based on economic activity in actual Singapore, where most microstates are wealthy because economic activity in other countries is brought into the microstate.
It perhaps belongs in the earlier paragraph where I'm trying to discuss the reasoning rather than just dropping it into the oil and microstate categories.
btw, when Nikita Khrushchev said "We will bury you" he meant the USSR's system would outlast the USA's system.
Agree with that last paragraph. If China had a non-corrupt libertarian-ish government for the last 80 years it likely would have already surpassed the US in GDP per capita due to IQ.
I am not very well-versed in recent Russian history, but "non-corrupt libertarian-ish government" is not how I would describe a country that gave away state-owned enterprises to politicians' cronies, assassinated journalists, and printed so much money that they got hyperinflation.
Well let’s see with China. It’s a decade away from developed status by most measures, present trends continuing. Anyway the cities are developed in terms of local GDP.
I don't think it's fair to say the garish reconstructions of statues' original paintworks are *bad*, precisely. They are misunderstood; at worst they are misleading; but they're not incorrect, because they're made simply to reflect which colours we are *certain* were used over which areas. (i.e. we know there would have been shading over that red in Augustus's hair, but scientifically, we *know* there was a base layer of that bright shade of red, and that's what the picture shows.) Not to be lifelike reproductions of how they originally would have looked.
They're scientific displays, not attempts at full restorations, and it's not the archeologists' fault that clickbaity social media posts can't tell the difference.
I've been to lectures on ancient Greece and Rome where the speakers (including museum outreach officers and professional classics teachers) showed garishly painted reconstructions as "what these statues actually looked like".
Re: #32, Viral load is how much virus you have in your body. Viral *dose* is how much you were exposed to. Conflating these convinced lots of people that early studies showing higher viral loads in more serious cases was evidence for Robin's idea. In fact, however, you don't know much about initial exposure amounts unless you're doing an HCT. Which, of course, we should have allowed far earlier.
Nukes are another one where extinction was wildly overestimated, I can only imagine because most of the theorists lived in New York City or Washington, DC, maybe, where indeed a full nuclear exchange would've erased *your* world. But what's the argument for how even 20,000 1MT explosions is going to wipe out everyone in Sri Lanka or Java or Mozambique? Most of the planet wouldn't be within 2000 miles of a detonation, and unless you want to invoke nuclear winter -- a deeply dubious hypothesis -- or some unknown super-duper fallout effect a la "On the Beach" all that happens is that the center of civilization shifts from the Europe-North America axis to somewhere else.
I'd agree that nuclear winter is a deeply dubious hypothesis, but even if it only has a 1 in 100 chance of being bad enough to wipe us out that then a 1 in 1000 chance of a nuclear war doing us in would imply a 1 in 10 chance of a large nuclear war in the future, which sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Sure, that math is sound, except I'd personally put the odds of nuclear winter being true as more like 1 in 1 million and the odds of a future nuclear war of the magnitude that was plausible in the 80s as 1 in 100,000 or less. For one thing, there would have to be a massive warhead building spree among the nuclear powers, and for another there'd have to be some superpower conflict that looked like the Cold War, and neither seems to be in the offing.[1]
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[1] I don't consider all-out war plausible in the case of Taiwan because I don't think the present or plausible future US Administrations would go for it.
> odds of a future nuclear war of the magnitude that was plausible in the 80s as 1 in 100,000 or less. For one thing, there would have to be a massive warhead building spree among the nuclear powers
Is existing supply not sufficient enough to get "we are all so fucked" levels?
> I'd personally put the odds of nuclear winter being true as more like 1 in 1 million
This seems really low (if that is 1 in 1 000 000 chance after full scale nuclear war happened)
> Is existing supply not sufficient enough to get "we are all so fucked" levels?
In short, probably not. Depends where your line for fucked is really. You could probably take out 40% of all humanity if some supervillain reprogrammed all the nukes to maximise human misery, but they're not actually aimed like that in real life. It would be the seminal catastrophe of the modern age and the largest non-pandemic mass casualty event in history, but unlikely to lead to extinction.
I wouldn't guess so, no. The US and Russia are both down to about 5000 warheads, probably with an average yield of 300kt in the US, a bit higher in Russia (the USSR favored larger yields because their aiming was poorer). You've got a relative handful elsewhere that add up to maybe another 1,000, with an average yield around 250kt would be my wild guess.
This is way down from the peak of the Cold War, in the mid 80s when the US and USSR totaled maybe 60-70,000 warheads with an average yield closer to 1MT, and even under those circumstances I doubt the climate or humanity could realistically be wiped out. My suspicious is that we flatter ourselves in thinking what we can imagine in nuclear explosions can have as big an abrupt climatological impact as a large igneous province eruption or big meteor impact. It's a big, big planet, and anyway the nukes would not be distributed in such a way as to maximize damage to the ecosphere.
Wikipedia says the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa is estimated to be in energy about 200MT, and it had global effects that were just noticeable. Scaling it up by 10x to 20x to represent a full nuclear exchange in modern times suggests global effects that are quite noticeable, probably significantly damaging (e.g. to agriculture), but I don't see wiping out all life, or even all civilization. If you told me a billion people might starve to death, I'd believe that might be true. But this wouldn't end humanity.
TL, DR: The catastrophic version that even hints in the direction of human extinction, is extremely bad science being pressed into the service of propaganda. If you're going to make policy decisions on the basis of "but *maybe* they're right", then there is no policy you can't be manipulated into by having someone publish a "scientific study" promising doom if you don't do what they want you to do.
1 in 1000? That's insane. Even a new Ice Age wouldn't drive humanity *extinct* because, well, we thrived during the last one. I mean, maybe we don't have airplanes and smartphones, maybe we live in caves and hunt animals with pointed sticks, but extinct is a very, very high bar to cross.
At a slight tangent, there is pretty good evidence that anthropogenic warming — starting not with the industrial revolution but with the spread of agriculture about seven thousand years ago — is the reason the next glaciation hasn't started yet. Google "Ruddiman" or see my summary of the argument:
It's certainly possible, and I will take a look -- thank you for the link. But I will admit my priors are pretty strong against, on the broad grounds that (1) the carbon cycle is pretty huge, and humans even now are only a smallish part of it (to the extent people can even estimate things like the flux back and forth between atmosphere and ocean), and (2) I'm doubtful climate is that balanced on a knife edge anyway, stable complex systems tends to have lots of negative feedback loops, and I'm doubtful we know enough about climate to have identified all of them (and correctly added them to general circulation models).
On the larger point, that even the worst (responsible) predicted global warming is not *necessarily* an especially big deal for humans (or the planetary ecology), my inclination is to agree. We (and the rest of the Earth's biosphere) have survived far greater perturbations of the climate, e.g. much larger swings in temperature or sea level.
The assumption as I understand it has always been that the natural swings happened very slooooowly, and it's different if they happen fast, but I think that's an assumption -- I don't know that anyone has reliable data on how fast temperature swung during Ice Age stadial onsets, for example, or after Chicxulub, or the eruption of some large igneous province, and I'm a little dubious the climate always made a nice smooth gradual transition. The other thing about complex systems with a large number of coupled degrees of freedom is that *when* they make a transition from one stable state to another, it's often not smooth -- cf. crystallization or any other phase transition.
It's certainly possible this time is different, but I'd need to see a much better argument for that, backed up by something a lot more persuasive than a computer model, to give it the most serious consideration (the kind that justifies statements about having only 10 years to save the planet or something).
Take a look at the graph of temperature and CO2 during the interglacials shown in the blog post I linked to. Our interglacial is quite odd, since temperature and CO2 start back up a few thousand years in. The interglacial that most closely matches its (nonhuman) inputs is earlier than those on the graph, and was ending at the point corresponding to now.
The issue of whether human effects were large enough to matter has been extensively hashed out in the literature, and I give links to Ruddiman's original piece and to the recent review article.
> The extinction risk from "unaligned AI" is completely made up and is 0 for the foreseeable future.
While 1 in 10 seems really high to me this specific problem has nasty property that it has plausible way of going from "nothing happening" to "it is too late to do anything" within very short time. That gets smaller as more and more things are controlled indirectly via internet-connected programs.
In this field many things moved from SF to actually happening in really short time.
> Bioweapons are much more of a danger than anything else because of their ability to spread and linger.
The rationality community is a huge target for the AI scam, as some of the people who promote it are part of it.
The entire name "AI" is really a misnomer. They're not at all like people, and honestly, not even intelligent or even really trying to be intelligent. They're tools we use to solve problems. Google is a very useful tool, but not only can it not take over the world, it isn't even a relevant question - it's like asking if a hammer would take over the world.
Creating an actual artificial person would be an enormous undertaking and would not be something you could do accidentally.
But the entire notion of a runaway AI is wrong. AIs can't magically make themselves smarter. It's tied into the magical pseudo-religious singularity, which is the opposite of how reality works.
The more we improve things, the HARDER it is to make further improvements. The idea that you would make an AI that makes itself super smart super fast is just not how things work at all; the better something is, the harder it is to eke out additional improvements, because you've already gotten all the low-hanging fruit.
Bioweapons, conversely, are immensely dangerous because they are self replicating, uncontrollable, and can burn in every direction. Animals have been put under threat by various diseases, and the COVID response pretty much proves that we have very limited ability to successfully contain the spread of diseases.
It seems obvious from your arguments that you are not really familiar with the AI issue. For example the argument about AIs not being people is often raised and easily dismissed. There is no requirement that AIs be like people in order to jeopardize human life. The classic example of AI alignment issues (paperclip maximizer) addresses this easily.
"The more we improve things, the HARDER it is to make further improvements."
Well... most of the time. Before forges, it was pretty hard to do metallurgy, then it got a lot easier. I agree with you in that I think it is unlikely for intelligence to quickly explode. However, I'm not willing to bet everything on that. Once you can construct a machine as "smart" as the smartest human researcher in machine intelligence, it does seem at least possible that machine intelligence could increase rapidly.
As far as bioweapons, I think it's a reasonable risk for societal collapse, not such a risk for extinction. Plenty of survivalists out there.
Whilst I accept AI as a risk (although the real risk is presumably poor design) the paperclip maximiser seems a particulary weak argument, in that it requires a scenario where maximising paperclips is required. I can't see how any AI would be designed just to maximise one thing, since there is no scenario where the answer is always more paperclips. So a paperclip-manufacturing AI would be aiming to produce the optimum amount, not the maximum amount, of paperclips. If your standard example of risk required an AI without optimisation considered then you can probably expect scepticism.
> I can't see how any AI would be designed just to maximise one thing
Nowadays it is routinely done with for example image recognition, the worry is that someone would manage to build something actually smart (maybe completely by accident!) and still apply the same type of reward function.
The paperclip maximizer is an evil genie that a witch doctor is saying they need to be paid to study rituals to make it go away.
It relies entirely on magical thinking. AIs do not even remotely function in this fashion, and it is completely unrealistic nonsense. It's not how economics works, it's not how AI works, it's not how optimization works, and the entire notion is as implausible as rubbing a lamp or asking a monkey's paw for something and getting "cursed" with what you wished for.
I am very familiar with the arguments. I just happen to actually understand what AI actually is, rather than having magical notions about magical computers, and also to be familiar with similar legends about "being careful for what you wish for" and evil wish-granting creatures, tropes which the notion draws on.
> Well... most of the time. Before forges, it was pretty hard to do metallurgy, then it got a lot easier.
What you generally see is an S-shaped curve - initially, you have no idea what you're doing. Then you develop something, and see some growth. Then, as you make the technology better, you eventually start to approach its limits, as you have done all the easy stuff to improve it, and are left with the hard things, where you have to eke out increasingly small improvements or do harder things to make things better.
The problem is...
> Once you can construct a machine as "smart" as the smartest human researcher in machine intelligence, it does seem at least possible that machine intelligence could increase rapidly.
This is ascribing a magical quality to intelligence and research. It's not how these things actually work.
In real life, a lot of research is trying to figure out something that works, then trying it, and then figuring out what went wrong.
In real life, this sort of back and forthing takes a long period of time. Ramping up the production of a new type of computer chip takes a year or more, simply because you have to work out all the bugs in the process and get everything working right. Being smart is nowhere near enough; it takes a lot of effort and experimentation.
You learn about things via experimentation, and being super smart only lets you design better experiments, not bypass the need for them.
The entire idea of runaway intelligence is based on a lack of comprehension of this. Making something as intelligent as a human is not the bottom of the S-curve, it's the top of it, somethin you can only do after you have done a huge amount of very difficult work.
Worse, the whole thing is actually built on the back of computing technology - you have to have extremely advanced computational technology to even make a decent AI, and building better *computer chips* is extremely difficult. The technology has gotten increasingly mature over time, and the point at which "oh, we might be able to build something which maybe has human-ish levels of intelligence" also lies around the point at which quantum tunneling prohibits further miniaturization, which has been the major driver of advancements in computing.
In other words, the hardware is going to already be almost as good as it *can* be, just to actually build something like that.
And frankly, even that might not be enough.
On top of *literally all of that*, it is reliant on unrealistic notions about HOW intelligence works. An expert program is not the same thing as general intelligence, it's more like a tool or equation. An artificial person would need to use expert programs for the same reason that humans do.
> You learn about things via experimentation, and being super smart only lets you design better experiments, not bypass the need for them.
If AI is running experiments on making better AI program then many experiments can take place within computer and there is no need to make anything physical.
Also, anyway nowadays you can order electronic build to your specification online, no need to appear in person.
Noone reasonable claims that AI will just increase some smartness counter and become smart. The claim is that it could be able to make needed experiments and bypass some limitations blocking humans.
> The entire idea of runaway intelligence is based on a lack of comprehension of this. Making something as intelligent as a human is not the bottom of the S-curve, it's the top of it, somethin you can only do after you have done a huge amount of very difficult work.
And if such human-level program would be actually working (I hope that it is unlikely to be achieved, and I expect that it will not be done within say 100 years) then it would start a new S-shaped curve.
Something as smart as human but runnable as computer program would be game-breaking even if it would not be capable of self-improvement.
If we ever made an AGI, it would be extremely stupid. Like a baby with a flame thrower. It is extremely likely to terminate itself. It would take a long time to grow out of that phase, and that would also be the signal to the rest of the world that non-aligned AGI has gone from "remote" to "plausible."
It does not require magic. We even have already examples of extremely limited self-learning programs.
> The more we improve things, the HARDER it is to make further improvements
That is general heuristic, not something always true. For example computing increased to dramatically improve computing - without computers we would have no chance to design modern CPUs and software.
In general software has several self-accelerating or at least self-sustaining loops that is quite scary, and it is not clear at all where are various limits.
> Creating an actual artificial person would be an enormous undertaking and would not be something you could do accidentally.
The problem is that it is not necessary to create person, it is enough to create something that is effective enough. We can be really harmed by Stuxnet-equivalent on a wider scale and plausible negative effects are increasing.
> the harder it is to eke out additional improvements, because you've already gotten all the low-hanging fruit
The entire problem is that we could stumble upon entire garden of low-hanging-fruit. We did it repeatedly with programming.
> It does not require magic. We even have already examples of extremely limited self-learning programs.
They are more like "a complicated computer program that a human set up to do a bunch of busywork that generates a black box heuristic to solve some problem well enough".
>That is general heuristic, not something always true. For example computing increased to dramatically improve computing - without computers we would have no chance to design modern CPUs and software.
But we are seeing decreases, not increases, in the rate of advancement. We maxed out clockspeed two decades ago; we have to do massive parallelization because we can't massively improve single cores at the rate we were previously. Problems that can't be parallelized are not improving very quickly at all.
On top of that, as we have further miniaturized computer chips, it has become increasingly more difficult to make the next generation of them. Even with all our advanced technology, further improvements are harder, not easier, and cost more and more money to make.
We are approaching the physical limits of what is possible; some parts of the transistors on these chips literally cannot be further miniaturized due to quantum tunnelling, and the more we shrink things, the closer we get to the absolute physical limits.
> We can be really harmed by Stuxnet-equivalent on a wider scale and plausible negative effects are increasing.
Not in the sense that is claimed. Moreover, this risk is not due to AIs, but due to more stuff being put online - AIs aren't even the relevant part of this threat, malicious actors can do the same.
> The entire problem is that we could stumble upon entire garden of low-hanging-fruit. We did it repeatedly with programming.
> > > AIs can't magically make themselves smarter.
> > It does not require magic. We even have already examples of extremely limited self-learning programs.
> They are more like "a complicated computer program that a human set up to do a bunch of busywork that generates a black box heuristic to solve some problem well enough".
I agree. But I would not assume that "bunch of busywork that generates a black box heuristic to sort of solve some problem" cannot be also used to become quite smart.
In many aspects human brain seems to be bunch of black box heuristics that were created by millions of generations of evolutionary busywork.
> But we are seeing decreases, not increases, in the rate of advancement
Yes, nowadays. After step part of S curve. And maybe it can be repeated.
> Humans already exist.
Human brains are not necessarily optimal or sole way to operate in a smart way.
Re 34: In addition to Paul Morphy, it is also said that José Raúl Capablanca similarly learned to play at the age of four simply by watching his father. It's claimed that after watching a few games, he played against his father and beat him on the first try.
If you are interested in this sort of thing you might want to check out these series produced by Agadmator on YouTube, an excellent and accessible chess reviewer:
I'm watching through the Capablanca saga right now. The most noticeable difference is that Morphy played fierce attacking chess, almost always winning before the endgame, whereas Capablanca played very conservative, positional chess. Win one pawn, trade down, enter a slightly favorable endgame, win it.
Everyone would probably agree that Morphy looks like the greater genius (including Capablanca himself, based on what he said about Morphy), but it still seems to show that the genius axis is pretty orthogonal to the playstyle axis.
I'm not sure I would agree. Capablanca was a chess machine who was notorious for being lazy at opening preparation and training in general, which seems to implies he had a very strong innate talent.
I think that says more about the level of competition - a fierce attacking playstyle is very efficient at demolishing weaker opponents, but against people who don't make mistakes every game goes long.
Bosnians are tall because genetics. Why are Filipinos so short, though? Maybe not genetics. I have a 5'6" relative with a shorter immigrant Filipina wife whose whole family was short, and they had kids who are both 5'11 or so. Hybrid vigor, or tall genes on an American diet?
"Then Republicans will capture all branches of government with large majorities, and build lots of solar panels in order to own the libs. Also promote race-blind hiring, build lots of housing to fight homelessness, repeal SALT deductions, regulate Big Business, pull out of foreign wars, heck, why not legalize marijuana? "
If my evil mustache-twisting branch of the Republicans (population 2, me and Newt Gingrich, and I'm not sure about me) gets in charge, we'll build nukes instead of solar to own the libs. You wouldn't like what we do about homelessness though ("are there no workhouses?")
Do either Newt or yourself have moustaches to twirl? That is the key question! I note that Ted Cruz has gone the full "beard and moustache" route, so if plenitude of facial hair is the scale of Evil Republicanism, he is indeed the High Panjandrum of same.
I had the impression that long term homeless in the USA were mostly better served by mental institutions than workhouses, though deregulating employment and housing construction ought to help the (substantial) fraction of the homeless population that are there short-term
"Bosnians are tall because genetics. Why are Filipinos so short, though? Maybe not genetics."
If this were true then we would simply observe average height 2nd+ generation filipino americans with no "american" admixture. Bringing (presumably) european genes into it just confuses the whole issue.
" Hybrid vigor"
Hybrid vigor isn't a thing, at least, not in terms of race-mixing between broad population groups.
The growth rate of Christianity estimate assumes that Christianity began during the presumed adult life of Jesus, which is not as well-supported an assumption as you might expect. At the very least, there was a lot of messianic Judaism around well before the ADs and those congregations would have been easy pickings.
<i>The growth rate of Christianity estimate assumes that Christianity began during the presumed adult life of Jesus, which is not as well-supported an assumption as you might expect.</i>
It's one of the best-supported assumptions of ancient history.
That's an interesting assertion. Compared to what other assumtptions? I'm not aware of much evidence from "during the presumed adult life of Jesus", or from before about 70CE?
The Epistles, and possibly the Synoptic Gospels and Acts (depending on where you stand on the "Was Acts written before Paul's martyrdom?" question), date from before AD 70. Even if they didn't, the existence of multiple sources dating from between AD 70 and 100 would still make Jesus' career one of the best-attested in the ancient world. (By way of comparison, many events in early Roman history are known about chiefly through Livy, writing three centuries or more after the fact; the earliest surviving source for Alexander's life and career is Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BC; and so on.)
The synoptic gospels are not multiple sources, they're one source: Mark. Luke and Matthew were written later and the authors were obviously using Mark as source material. Mark being both the earliest and the most threadbare version of the story, we can safely judge the later elaborations to be fictions, and as far as the supposed Q goes, most of the sayings added later appear to be retcons of Pauline doctrine.
<i>The synoptic gospels are not multiple sources, they're one source: Mark. Luke and Matthew were written later and the authors were obviously using Mark as source material.</i>
They're using Mark as *a* source, but since they incorporate new information, they're evidently not using him as their only source. Even if they were just copying everything from Mark, having one source from a few decades after the events would still make Jesus' life better-attested than the lives of most known people from antiquity.
<i>Mark being both the earliest and the most threadbare version of the story, we can safely judge the later elaborations to be fictions,</i>
That's not a safe judgement at all.
<i>and as far as the supposed Q goes, most of the sayings added later appear to be retcons of Pauline doctrine.</i>
Or alternatively, "Pauline doctrine" was just Christian doctrine, not something he'd made up himself. (Which also resolves the "But why did people let Paul, who'd never even seen Jesus in the flesh, preach?" question you raise below.)
There were multiple Christian churches in different places run by different people, I think it's an oversimplification to say Paul's was "just Christian doctrine".
"would still make Jesus' career one of the best-attested in the ancient world"
No. Every single pericope in the Gospel of Mark, taken individually, will likely be concluded by most scholars (if you exclude evangelicals) to be fictional. And since Mark was the source for all the other gospels, we don't really have anything reliable about any historical Jesus.
<i>most scholars (if you exclude evangelicals)</i>
It's true, if you exclude scholars who think they're true, the ones you have left will think they're fictional. That doesn't tell us anything about whether they're actually true, though.
(Also, speaking as someone with a background in ancient history, the average standard of New Testament scholarship frankly seems rather sloppy by comparison, so I wouldn't put much weight on the academic consensus of New Testament scholars.)
Not really. The sort of Jewish-Hellenic syncretism exemplified by later orthodox Christianity definitely predates Jesus' supposed lifetime, Philo of Alexandria being a pretty well-known exemplar of a Jewish philosopher who writes a lot of stuff that sure sounds Christian except he has no idea who Jesus is. Christianity is unambiguously an outgrowth of pre-existing religious and philosophical trends and not some sort of idosyncratic, sui generis innovation by its founder. That opens up the timeline for its expansion significantly.
Even the earliest text of the New Testament, Hebrews, makes no reference to anything in Jesus' human biography (and even sort of suggests that he didn't have one), which at the very least proves that Jesus' life and times was by no means the foundational element of the religion that later took him as its central figure.
Wait where did you get that Hebrew was the earliest Christian text ? As far as I am aware of, most of Paul's genuine letters were written at least ten years before.
Wikipedia agrees with me btw, though it does not agree with itself, giving a different date in the article on Hebrews and the one on dating the Bible.
As you say, there's a lot of ambiguity about when it was written, and I tend to favor the earliest estimates but it's not essential to the point. What's true of Hebrews is true of all the authentic Pauline epistles. Paul never talks about Jesus' human biography and never cites any reference to anything Jesus said or did that wasn't taken from either the Old Testament (he sees Jesus as speaking to him through the Hebrew Bible) or his own personal revelations. Not only that, but he's writing to a community of Christians that, at least as far as Paul is concerned, would not find this unusual.
Paul is an apostle after all, a person who has seen Jesus in revelation, not a "disciple" (a concept used in the Gospels that Paul is totally unaware of, likely because the Gospels were authored after Paul's extant writing career ended).
I don't want to get into the whole "Jesus myth" debate because it's a rabbit hole and fundamentally unanswerable, but what's pretty clear is that you could be a Christian, as Paul undoubtedly was, without having had any identifiable influence from a human Jesus. Paul was eventually converted (at least ostensibly) through contact with Christians, not with Jesus himself (except through revelation of course). Saying that Christianity must have begun with the career of Jesus the person is assuming things not actually in evidence. And for the record, it disagrees with a lot of early Christian theology, which despite believing in Jesus the human, saw Christianity "pre-figured" in the Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy, and even other religions; in other words, God was laying the groundwork and teaching the lessons of Christianity long before Jesus actually came on the scene.
The idea that Christianity as a religion began with Jesus the person, human teacher and nice guy whose biography is more or less accurately reflected in the Gospels, is not only a pretty narrow reading of the evidence that sort of falls apart when you look closely, it's not even particularly pious. It's sort of an attempt to have Christianity without any of the supernatural stuff that early Christians wouldn't have blinked at but modern observers get nervous about.
The fact that Christianity did sprung fully formed after the Crucifixion, but borrowed heavily from both Judaism and Greek philosophy is pretty well supported and I dare say pretty obvious.
The claim that "that Jesus' life and times was by no means the foundational element of the religion that later took him as its central figure." seems to me of a much more dubious nature, especially when it relies on a debatable early date* for one single (not Pauline) epistle.
Paul is notoriously uninterested in the details of Jesus life, but he actually quotes Jesus explicitly once in 1 Cor 11, 23-25, when talking about the Eucharist - undoubtedly a central fixture of early christianity, and obviously refers basically all the time to the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Anyway I feel you are motte-and-baileying me between "Jesus was by non means the foundational element of the religion which later..." and "Early Christianity heavily borrows from Judaism and Greek philosophy"...
The contention that "Christianity sprung fully formed after the Crucifixion" is not just incorrect, it's silly. There was ENORMOUS conflict and disagreement within Christianity as to what exactly it was, what it required of its adherents, and which texts or authorities were legitimate and which weren't. Paul's epistles are mostly about these disagreements, which he tries to resolve using the Old Testament combined with his personal revelations.
We don't even see an attempt to formalize a canon until a hundred years post-Jesus, and that's Marcion, who takes the Hebrew Bible, some Pauline Epistles, and a variant version of Luke and nothing else. Marcion had some pretty different ideas about what this canon demonstrated and the Marcionite heresies wound up in the dustbin but it's just an accident of history that we got the particular formalized Christian canon that we did. Hell, Constantine's own Bible didn't even include all the same books as the King James Bible does.
All of this is to back up my original point, which is that the growth rate of Christianity is very sensitive to some highly subjective judgments about when you start counting and who you count.
Paul doesn't discuss Moses' human biography, either, and yet he refers to him often, uses his name as a shorthand for "the Torah/Law" and his life as examples:
Now, if you want to argue "The human figure of Moses had little to nothing to do with the Jewish belief that sprang up around him", go right ahead. But I would say that Paul doesn't go into "Now Moses was born on this date in this place and his parents' family name was..." because he doesn't need to, his audience *know* who Moses is. Same with Jesus - the audience know who this guy is.
Do you accept that Paul aka Saul started out as in some form a persecutor of 'the Christians', believing them to be Jewish heretics or zealots or messianists of the type drawing adverse Roman attention?
If so, then there had to be a pre-existing community calling themselves or otherwise identified in some way with a figure called "Christ". If you want to lump the Essenes and the followers of John the Baptist in with them, you may do so, but I think that's a red herring.
And this group pre-dates Paul (who often gets the credit/blame for having invented Christianity) and they had to be - what?
At the very least, followers of the latest cult leader/preacher who had come to the same end as most of the cult leaders/revolutionary preachers at the time. The survivors then clung together and - if we go the liberal interpretation route - hallucinated the Resurrection, or at least the nominal leaders did, and they managed to convince themselves that the dead human was in some way still alive, or his presence was so vivid a memory for them that he was 'living' in them, and they built a cult around him and propagated it, swiping bits from Jewish prophecy about a Messiah and influences from all the other religions and beliefs in the surrounding Middle East, with some Greek and Roman elements thrown in as well. (Feel free to throw in "kergyma" and "conjuring trick with bones" as you like):
Trying to hew narrowly to the point, it obviously would make no sense to try and trace the spread of Judaism from the lifetime of Moses (assuming you could identify when that was). It would make even LESS sense if you're a believer in Judaism, since the religion itself stretches back to the beginning of time, at least in principle.
I'm similarly arguing that calling AD 33 "year zero" for Christianity and estimating its adherents to number around 1000 in AD 40 (as the linked source does) is pure ad hoc silliness EVEN IF Jesus was a real person who did all or most of the things attributed to him by the Gospels. The region was absolutely lousy with messianic Judaism and salvific mystery cults. "Conversion" would basically involve nothing more than a little bit of whatever the Roman equivalent of Whiteout was.
My favorite instance of Jesus revisionism is Koenraad Elst's "Psychology of Prophetism" in which he claims that Revelations is actually the earliest book of the New Testament, written by Jesus himself after Pontius Pilate faked the crucifiction: http://voiceofdharma.org/books/pp/ch3.htm
<i>Not really. The sort of Jewish-Hellenic syncretism exemplified by later orthodox Christianity definitely predates Jesus' supposed lifetime, Philo of Alexandria being a pretty well-known exemplar of a Jewish philosopher who writes a lot of stuff that sure sounds Christian except he has no idea who Jesus is. Christianity is unambiguously an outgrowth of pre-existing religious and philosophical trends and not some sort of idosyncratic, sui generis innovation by its founder. That opens up the timeline for its expansion significantly.</i>
Early Christians, contemporary Jews, and contemporary Romans were all pretty clear that Christianity represented a new religion.
<i>Even the earliest text of the New Testament, Hebrews, makes no reference to anything in Jesus' human biography (and even sort of suggests that he didn't have one), which at the very least proves that Jesus' life and times was by no means the foundational element of the religion that later took him as its central figure.</i>
Hebrews doesn't suggest that Jesus didn't have a human biography, probably wasn't the earliest text of the New Testament, and even if it was the earliest, would only have been so by a few years.
Hebrews seems oddly indifferent to the question, particularly given the constant and intense interest in it throughout history, up to and including this conversation.
Because it was a letter about specific matters, not designed to be a text elucidating history for people almost two millennia later? Arguments from silence require at least establishing a probability that the source in question would reasonably include the absent information. I'm not sure this can be accepted about Paul's letters. None of which stops scholars trying to read things into it of course...
Note in general I agree that early Christianity was very fluid and ill-defined, with the life of Christ being a relatively late development. But we can't argue this point too hard if the evidence is not clear.
>Last spring Robin Hanson and others mooted the idea that viral load affected disease severity; eg if you inhaled one coronavirus particle, you’d get a mild coronvirus case, but if you inhaled 100,000, you’d get a severe case.
I'm pretty sure Scott meant it as "Hanson and others suggested the idea", but amazingly, apparently while moot-the-verb means "bring up for discussion", moot-the-adjective can mean "disputed" or "deprived of practical significance": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moot
What a terrible word. Also, communication is hard.
I've never actually heard it used in the context of "bringing something up for discussion", exclusively in the negation context. Definitely a dangerous word to use.
I too read it to mean "made irrelevant the idea that higher initial viral loads implied a more acute disease severity", and have been looking to understand more because this implies a breakthrough in our understanding of how life works.
It also means 'meeting, gathering' as in a moothall. Never had a problem with understanding it though, as context is everything, although it could be a nightmare for second-language speakers I guess.
33 is disappointingly weak, they make some good theoretical points against the spices/infections theory but struggle to find good evidence other than showing that it's about as predictive as any other classic East/West difference.
19: This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point.
I think after reading either The Dictator's Handbook (Bueno de Mesquita/Smith) or Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu/Robinson) that this stops being a great mystery. For autocrats, improving the general wellbeing of your population not only isn't beneficial, but likely harmful to themselves.
I still think this makes China an interesting data point. Their advanced surveillance, censorship, and behavioural systems seem to have kept the party's grip on power secure while they've opened up the economy. It'd be interesting to see if other nations can pull off something similar.
You may be interested in Acemoglu's and Robinson's new book, "The Narrow Corridor". Its thesis is that for development you need both a strong central government (that can boss around the regions, and everyone else), *and* strong civil institutions that constrain the government to acting in the interests of society in general rather than to enrich those with connections to the positions of power.
The "corridor" of the title is a path between too-strong government on the one hand (e.g. Stalinist USSR, North Korea) and too-strong civil society on the other, for example Afghanistan (a bunch of "warlords" make and unmake the government), Argentina (large landowners ran the government to suit themselves), several places in Africa (kin-group allegiances overrule national interest), Yemen (also warlords).
The books seems to me to be sort of related to the theses of McCloskey's "Bourgeois" trilogy.
A & R wouldn't be optimistic about Xi's Panopticon China, I don't think. There is no countervailing force to the central government, certainly not any that represents the interests of ordinary citizens.
I'm not sure that there's not potentially the force of the ordinary citizens though. If things go badly for Xi (and I think they will: he strikes me as more Edogan than Putin,ire focused on eliminating internal opposition rather than establishing an equilibrium) then his problem is going to be popular unrest. The Chinese population have either a standard of living or aspirations towards one that they will not likely sacrifice for the vanity of one leader. And the nature of the Chinese Communist Party is such that there will be people happy to take advantage of this.
Re 17 - I'm reading <i>The Best and the Brightest</i> and still early in the Vietnam war, but according to Halberstam, untruth is everywhere. True believers believe in lies, and everyone else knows that they can kiss their careers goodbye if they buck the consensus that the war is going well and will be won in a few years or less. Not just Army people but journalists and politicians and anyone who wants to be respectable. So bad statistics go up the line and are acted on.
That sounds so much like "misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program". And the reasons seem similar. The active liars believing they are the good people fighting the good fight for justice and progress, and the others too scared not to go along--and often not having much of anything to put in place of the lies, at least not anything that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the goal isn't possible, which is of course unthinkable.
12 - cyclosporine: This happens all the time. You can't discover the hypothesis of your experiment in the results. Any hypothesis generated AFTER looking at the results is a new hypothesis and must be tested in a new experiment. Otherwise, you're fooling yourself into believing that any natural variation between two randomly assembled groups must be causal.
You can though. Really, it is even ok to plumb your resultant data set for new hypotheses. However, your level of confidence drops the more you plumb. Presumably, since the number of dimensions of your data is finite, even if you look for every imaginable correlation, there still exists a valid statistical test for significance.
In the real world, though, that's not how clinical trials work. They collect a mountain of data, including the study nurse asking each patient, "did you experience any adverse events since last time we met?" Then they write that down and compare the groups at the end. Since that encompasses literally EVERY possible medical issue, only a study larger than the population of the planet would be sufficiently powered for the number of different potential factors you're measuring. This is why we use the heuristic, "You can't find your hypothesis by mining the results."
It most assuredly does not encompass "literally EVERY possible medical issue." I clearly stated in my data that "the dimensions of your data is finite."
I was just arguing the very narrow issue that you can in fact add hypotheses after the fact but that the rules change and that those additions need to be essentially random (not cherry picked from thousands of combinations). If they were cherry picked then there is math that can be performed to determine the validity of those new results.
The simplest example would be 2 hypothesis instead of 1. This could be done by using 1/2 of the data points (randomly selected) for each hypothesis. So you have 2 slightly less accurate studies. This is obviously true. If you have more hypotheses than data points then obviously you have little to no statistical significance.
I understand. I'm saying that actual subgroup analyses in reports such as these are almost always one of two things:
1. Planned (and powered) subgroup analyses, conditional on the primary endpoint (and all preceding secondary endpoints) meeting statistical significance.
2. An unplanned subgroup analysis, cherry-picked from the data. Nearly every safety signal, or 'surprising' result matches this.
For example, there was a study on Zofran to see if it caused teratomas in pregnant women. It didn't. But a post-hoc subgroup analysis showed increased neonatal cardiac defects in the treatment group. Follow-up studies didn't find the same effect (no surprise), but there are still doctors who think there's something to be concerned about here, because they don't understand that there was bound to be some statistically interesting finding when comparing the medical outcomes between two groups like this - especially since it included outcomes for both mothers and their babies - and nobody used appropriate statistical controls like what you described to perform the post-hoc analyses. They jus re-ran the original test looking for statistical significance, and assumed the same rules apply, when they don't.
Your method is also possible, but it's rarely done because every patient enrolled is very expensive, so lots of clinical trials ride the edge of statistical power. So you can certainly design that study, but if you're reading about a study in the literature that has reported findings, chances are it's either (1) or (2) above.
I agree completely. I was arguing a very narrow position that this: "You can't discover the hypothesis of your experiment in the results." is wrong. That you can in fact do that so long as you don't look at the"surprising result" out of a large set.
I guess the issue here is that neither of us realized the person on the other end of the conversation had a deep understanding of the issue. Me by correcting what I thought was your misunderstanding but was probably just simplification for the audience or possibly wording. You by assuming that my criticism was wrong rather than narrow.
At this point it is very clear that we are both saying exactly the same thing.
Yeah, this is definitely a problem of miscommunication betwixt us as you pointed out. The heuristic is technically incorrect, but it's useful for the general public (and for any grad student who isn't paying attention in stats, because it helps keep them out of trouble later). It helps avoid the error of repeating post-hoc analyses that are effectively designed as though they were equivalent to the original analysis and based on the same assumptions (which they're not).
It's a difficult nuance for most people to see, unfortunately, which is why we get so many of these false reports in the media. They see the one report showing heart defects and get alarmed. Then they see the second report showing no defects and it's not intuitive to them to say, "okay, that first result was obviously just a random result". Instead, they see two results pointing opposite directions and don't know which one to trust. They just average the two together in their minds (or worse, in a pseudo-Bayesian way they update the prior formed from the first report to be a little less certain of the original result).
I think a lot of the public perception of the replication crisis comes from this phenomenon. (Not saying anything of the actual replication crisis.) They see a report that claims X, based on surprising post-hoc analyses that weren't powered to make the associated claim, and think "Wow, I never knew that!" Then comes the inevitable reversal, since only a small percentage of results 'discovered' this way are likely to be real, and they think, "Science duped me again! Oh right, most of their results are garbage, can't trust them." But really it's just bad science communication.
But a valid statistical test only shows potential significance. To prove this is not one of the 5% or whatever of false results you need to hypothesise a mechanism and then prove it works. It's not enough to rely on statistical tests, as if you have p>0.1 and ten thousand possible interactions between your data, there's going to be a strong suspicion that that's just a statistical fluke.
I think what REF is claiming is that if you design your study with enough power you can make valid post-hoc subgroup analyses. In theory this is possible if, for example, you KNOW you're only making 5 comparisons and even though you started with a single comparison analysis if you designed your study with a 2-sided alpha of 0.01 powered at 99%, you might still have enough statistical power 'left over' to do multiple post-hoc comparisons, just at lower but still reasonable confidence.
In practice when the number of possible comparisons is open-ended, as is particularly relevant for clinical trials, this is not valid no matter how many patients you have, or how clever you are at coming up with a mechanistic explanation. Since few clinical trials are powered for more than their primary and secondary endpoints (many not even for secondary endpoints) it's entirely unacceptable to go looking for more than hypotheses for future testing in the subgroup analyses.
Whenever I see these post-hoc subgroup analyses presented as 'promising results' from a clinical trial, my prior on the null hypothesis goes up to around 95%. I should start tracking this, though, because I think my prior is set too LOW.
Do others really think that the question in #8 is a good proxy for wokeness? I’m not sure I support the hardline stance that minorities should receive 0 extra help for climbing the food chain (mainly because nepotism is useful, can rely on race, and maybe we should compensate a little for it). I usually think of wokeness as more aligned with cancel culture. Am I just out of date on definitions?
I agree with you. "woke" is an amorphous blob of nothing and takes the shape of whatever the speakers dislikes or likes depending on where they stand on the issue. The answer to the question in the tweet can't be described as woke or anti woke without knowing what solution the answerer would give. Preferential college admission is a lot less woke than "no whites can get in to college until all minorities that want to go are admitted".
"I agree with you. "woke" is an amorphous blob of nothing and takes the shape of whatever the speakers dislikes or likes depending on where they stand on the issue"
It's AT LEAST as well defined as "racism", an word at this stage that is utterly meaningless, and I sincerely doubt you have a problem with the word racism.
"Preferential college admission is a lot less woke than "no whites can get in to college until all minorities that want to go are admitted"."
It's still woke, it's explicit racial discrimination against whites.
"extra help" is also super nebulous - eg. one might think that AA is a travesty but also agree that the current college admission system in the US is riddled with bias, and wish to reform it to something genuinely neutral (eg. exam results) - helping discriminated minorities by neutralising the discrimination, rather than trying to compensate for it without removing it.
Except every single non-asian minority applicant capable of getting accepted on the basis of merit is already getting accepted . Any other effects, like legacy admissions or outright bribery, only keep out minority students who would be getting accepted through affirmative action. What else could possibly be the case? That some merit-based minorities are missing out while affirmative actions students are being admitted?
If things were truly neutral and depended only on exam results, the outcome would be more asians, more whites generally, more rural & military whites specifically, and less blacks and hispanics.
Black and hispanics students are already grossly overrepresented at selective colleges based on their exam results. Making things only about exam results *necessarily* means less black and hispanic students getting in.
It seems to me people are most likely to answer this in a way that broadly aligns with their ideology, not on the basis of the specific details of the question itself.
As for your justification for giving benefits to minorities, there's no evidence that white people engage in racial nepotism.
Which is to say, any preferences that white people have for white applicants over black applicants are almost certainly not 'nepotism'.
And part of the reason that black graduates are elss academically capable on average is likely because of affirmative action in the first place! Letting les capable students in colleges results in less capable graduates, and employers implicitly calibrate their hiring accordingly, cancelling out any benefit of affirmative action and simply meaning that white applicants are the victim of explicit racial discrimination and the average college graduate is less capable.
Re: 31 -- Thank you so much for this support! I'm preparing part 3 now and have had some amazing discussion with David Friedman and others in the hidden open threads here on ACX already but let me put a brief outline of what I intend to say here in case I can get additional comments before it goes to press:
0. Probably quoting Scott's take here, of course.
1. A pointer to Scott's brilliant "Learning to Love Scientific Consensus" as the most general argument for why it's not reasonable to dismiss climate concerns.
2. How Bryan Caplan complained about lack of cost/benefit analysis in his debate with Yoram Bauman and now seems to be moving the goalposts.
3. Something about carbon capture getting slightly more realistic and an excuse to show off beeminder.com/climate maybe, unless anyone tells me that would look kind of opportunistic.
4. An answer to why Wagner and Weitzman didn't signal their lack of left-wing bias on nuclear power (the main question Bryan asked me in his last reply).
5. Calling Bryan out on skipping over the climatological arguments against geo-engineering.
6. As Scott writes in #29 here, admitting that, 7 years later, things currently look a bit less scary than "10% of chance of 6 degrees by 2100" but that that doesn't impugn Wagner and Weitzman's credibility nor does the scariness downgrade imply wait-and-see becoming rational.
7. Something about Bryan's bet with Yoram and how Bryan thought climatologists were overconfident in their predictions that warming would catch back up after that seeming pause and how they were super right and how imperative it is to update on that. Scout mindset!
8. Possible ending: "Wait, am I really saying that Bryan is going to lose that bet with Yoram Bauman even though HE HAS LITERALLY NEVER LOST A BET EVER? Yes. Would anyone like to make a side bet on that? I will give you extremely good odds! Even better, would you pre-commit to changing your mind about climate change if Bryan does lose that bet?"
9. Or end with a focus on our common ground: Revenue neutral carbon taxes should at least be a small Pareto improvement from a libertarian perspective. And of course fossil fuel subsidies should be outrageous to the whole political spectrum.
Scott called his interpretation "maybe unfair" but I'd say it's too generous. The authors of Climate Shock aren't even particularly left-wing. One was a particularly highly respected and influential economist, which is part of why I thought Bryan Caplan might find the book persuasive.
(For those who don't know, I lost a $500 bet with Bryan over this.)
(1) Don't make bets with people that rely on "if you change your mind, you'll lose, and I'm leaving it up to you to say if you changed your mind or not". That's an immediate incentive for anyone to think "What a chump, all I have to say is I didn't change my mind and I'm better off by 50 spondulicks!"
(2) If you do trust his honour and integrity enough that he will be honest as to whether or not he changed his mind, you don't get to weasel out afterwards by "Oh, he *should* have changed his mind because the argument was *so* convincing, but he didn't because he has prejudices about lettuce in place!"
Again, if you think the person will not change their mind about something because of their lettuce-prejudice, why are you even bothering in the first place? Either you think the person *is* persuadable and honest, so you have to take your lumps if you lose the bet, or you think they're not, in which case the bet is dumb from the start.
I think the perception from the other side is that (a) his honour and integrity were worth trusting (b) his explanation for not changing his mind rested very heavily on a lettuce-prejudice prior that, according to his own explanation, appeared to be much stronger than people had previously expected.
Or, roughly: "I believe that the prior I had not realised was there to that strength was sufficiently strong that the strength of the evidence itself hasn't been considered to the extent I would have liked, but nonetheless I have (a) lost fairly in terms of the terms of the bet (b) learned something - even if not the thing I was expecting to learn about - so of course I'm going to pay up"
Having an opinion about which lumps you've taken -while- taking said lumps and paying your dues seems a fair enough response to me.
To double-clarify, I paid Bryan the $500 immediately. Sorry to come off as a sore loser. I think this debate is world-shakingly important and want to be as clear as I can about exactly how Bryan is being biased and wrong about climate change.
Also I should repeat from a previous (probably hidden) open thread my rationale in making the bet. I'm a fan of Bryan Caplan and have long been impressed with his intellectual honesty. I personally found the book Climate Shock highly compelling and the least left-biased take I'd seen. It's by extremely serious Harvard economists who love markets, etc etc. So I thought it had a chance of changing Bryan's mind. I gave Bryan odds that would naively imply I thought it had a huge chance of changing his mind which seems irrational but the meta-game from my point of view was that it was worth $500 to get Bryan to read the book and maybe blog about it. Probably other minds would get changed if not Bryan's. From the ACX comments so far, that's looking likely!
From my perspective, the book didn't change his mind, you've lost that bet, but that doesn't meant here's no chance for *you* to change his mind, and I suspect you care more about his beliefs than about the cash.
then the top 77 countries are all democracies apart from a handful of rich petrostates. The non-democracies start at 78, with Iran, China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in a roughly similar place.
I have no idea why anyone would have thought that China was going to catch up with the US or South Korea or Japan; they just seem to have stopped eating dirt and taken their place among the Russias and Turkmenistans of the world.
There was this idea in the 1990s that there was a natural sequence where they grew under dictatorship then democratized and continued to grow. Then those academics realized China and Russia weren't democratizing and panicked that maybe they could continue to grow without democratizing. Now we'll see whether the more traditional perspective (that they would hit a limit without democratization) was just right all along.
One interesting thing to note is that the US-China GDP gap has actually *increased* in absolute terms over the last decade.
In 2021, the gap between the US and China is approximately $8.5 trillion ($23.2 vs $14.7 trillion).
In 2011, the gap between the US and China was approximately $7.2 trillion ($14.8 vs $7.6).
While China's GDP is a higher *percentage* of the US GDP, in absolute terms, the GDP gap has actually increased in favor of the US to the tune of about $1.3 trillion - the US is, in absolute terms, growing faster than China is.
Yeah, this is a point I've heard before that I think is underappreciated. In actual great power competition relative statistics are less relevant than absolute. And in absolute terms the US is winning. Though it's also fair to point out China couldn't muster even a comparable force without its economic growth. And that China hugely outnumbers the US.
>This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point.
There's no mystery here, those who continue who have a weak do-nothing government and allow Western capital to bleed it dry sink, those who have some sort of spine and don't allow western capital to bleed it dry do well, assuming they aren't made a pet project of the West for geopolitical reasons like say Taiwan for instance that is. It's not a coincidence that three of the four 'Asian Tigers' are Western pet projects for geostrategic reasons, the West has just to take the rare decision not to bleed these countries dry because its in their interests not to.
What countries are western capital bleeding dry and how are they doing so? Also, how does your hypothesis treat North Korea which absolutely does not let western capital in at all?
I recommend you read books like the Open Veins of Latin America to get a good idea of what I'm talking about.
As for North Korea, that country is hermitized by the West and they've been engaging in economic sabotage for some time, although admittingly the government is far too idealistic and less pragmatic in economic matters.
The East is purposefully economically dependent on the West and so when the West is in a position of power it smacks the East around naturally because its in their interests to do so.
If it's purposefully dependent then whose purpose is it? That describes intentionality, whose intention? What's the latest example of the West smacking the East around? How has this led to them being bled dry? You're just gesturing at something as if you don't want to say it.
Well to give an example, there's the 'African Growth and Opportunity Act' which coerces African governments to have policies that favour Western economic interests. If they refuse to engage in such policies and don't open up their economy for Western capital to run wild then there are punishments economically for that African nation per the act.
> As for North Korea, that country is hermitized by the West and they've been engaging in economic sabotage for some time, although admittingly the government is far too idealistic and less pragmatic in economic matters.
I'm pretty skeptical of simple explanations for complex geopolitical phenomena. There's a zillion reasons why some countries have succeeded and others have not, and "Western capital" is almost certainly one factor, but there's a lot of other things going on at the same time.
But your dichotomy strikes me as pretty unfalsifiable. If a country is heavily involved with Western capital and it does badly, it means that Western capital bled it dry, but if it does well then it means it was a "pet project for geostrategic reasons". I'm not sure what kind of sequence of events could be taken as evidence against your theory.
Also there's plenty of countries which have been a pet project of Western geostrategy and still done poorly, like Afghanistan and South Vietnam.
>But your dichotomy strikes me as pretty unfalsifiable. If a country is heavily involved with Western capital and it does badly, it means that Western capital bled it dry, but if it does well then it means it was a "pet project for geostrategic reasons".
No, that's not how it works. Places like Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong were pet projects of the West for strategic interests because of the Cold War. There are not any other pet projects in Asia, except maybe Japan but they're doing pretty well regardless.
>Also there's plenty of countries which have been a pet project of Western geostrategy and still done poorly, like Afghanistan and South Vietnam.
Not for very long, and there was the additional fact that heinous wars were being waged during this very short period.
How was Hong Kong a strategic interest during the Cold War? I'm not unfamiliar with the strategic thinking of the era, having lived through it and studied it a bit on my own, and I don't recall having heard this argument. How would the prosperity of Hong Kong, say, have helped restrain Soviet influence?
How so? Why more than Singapore, say, or Sri Lanka or Thailand or the Phillipines, or in general any other up-and-coming country? If the "strategic interest" you had in mind is just "showing that a liberal democracy does better than a communist dictatorship so yay USA" then the US had "strategic interests" in every non-aligned non-First-World nation or city state during the Cold War, which seems....a bit broad.
Generally, when people say "strategic interests" it has at least *some* military angle. You can argue the US had a strategic interest in seeing that West Germany recovered its strength quickly after 1945, because it was on the front lines of any potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe (and in fact those pushing hardest at the time for assisting the Germans to get back on their feet were US military commanders).
I'm not seeing how Hong Kong qualifies. (And you may want to bear in mind that China was not seen as a major opponent during the Cold War.)
Not really true. The US didn't do anything about most of the Latin American countries closing off their economies to imports to try and do Import Substitution Industrialization, and there were vast amounts of western bank capital invested in the region throughout the 1970s (just look up Citibank alone). They didn't get richer like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan because ISI sucks - if your internal market is too small to support competing firms (or you explicitly create state-owned monopolies), then you just end up with oligarchies enriching themselves with bad companies with low productivity.
>The US didn't do anything about most of the Latin American countries closing off their economies to imports to try and do Import Substitution Industrialization,
Brett didn't merely say "The US didn't do anything". It was specifically "about [...] closing off their economies to imports". So your link had better be about Import Substitution Industrialization rather than just regime change generally!
Your beliefs are derived from 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories, not how real world economies actually function.
IRL, the entire notion of "bleeding them dry" is a Big Lie; in real life, people in developing countries are poor because they produce very little value on a per capita basis. There's not much value that can be wrung out of subsistence farmers in Africa; they produce 1% of the food that an American farmer does.
The same applies to Latin America.
What predicts improvements in living conditions is industrialization, mechanization, automation, education (and real education, not "our leader is great" indoctrination), etc. Or, to put it another way, all the things that come with increases in per-capita productivity.
Because in the end, literally the only thing that matters is increases in per-capita productivity.
Developing countries that are competent at what they do are rare, because the route to being a developed country is pretty clear at this point; we already have them, so it's a question of executing on that. The thing is, if you can do that, you'd probably already be a developed country - so the number of countries that goes between these categories is low. You have to fundamentally change your culture, which many people don't want to do.
If you are willing to do it, you can develop within a person's working career. But you need a significant level of social buy-in, and many people want scapegoats rather than "you need to change your way of life and thinking on a fundamental level".
The entire notion that the developed world is "bleeding them dry" is an obvious falsehood - indeed, countries that do trade with the developed world do better than those who don't, and the developed world deploys MORE resources to these countries than they get in return (hence why these countries have far better standards of development now than they did 20-30 years ago).
>Your beliefs are derived from 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories, not how real world economies actually function
What would the idea of colonialism have to do with Jews? Perhaps it's indicative of your own prejudiced mindset that you associate such things with Jews.
> in real life, people in developing countries are poor because they produce very little value on a per capita basis. There's not much value that can be wrung out of subsistence farmers in Africa; they produce 1% of the food that an American farmer does.
And why do you think this is? It's this way for a reason you know, have you ever stopped and thought about what this reason is? You should 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' by Walter Rodney to understand the economic history of Africa.
>The entire notion that the developed world is "bleeding them dry" is an obvious falsehood - indeed, countries that do trade with the developed world do better than those who don't,
That would lend credence to the idea the poor countries are building their economy off unfair and unequal relations with the Global South.
> What would the idea of colonialism have to do with Jews? Perhaps it's indicative of your own prejudiced mindset that you associate such things with Jews.
Naw, it's because your beliefs come from Karl Marx, whose worldview was severely warped by these 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories. Many of his rantings were an attempt to rationalize these beliefs.
Leftist notions that the reason why group A is poor and group B is rich is that group B stole from group A is rooted in these conspiracy theories.
IRL, it's not really related to the story of why some areas are rich and others are poor. It's an attempt to scapegoat external forces for internal issues.
> And why do you think this is?
Culture and way of life is one of the largest factors. All you have to do is look at Taiwan and South Korea and compare them to the PRC and and North Korea. What's the difference? They were one people, originally. Now things are wildly different. This is because NK and the PRC embraced Communism while South Korea and Taiwan became capitalist democracies.
You have to fundamentally change the way you operate on a basic level if you want to be a wealthy, developed country; we've figured out massively better ways of doing things over time. You must move with the times. The old way of doing things was a way associated with the low state of living that people endured previously.
There's also the question of genetic inequality, though that's not yet proven; people from some areas might or might not be burdened with an unfair preponderance of alleles which are not optimized for modern society and puts them at a biological disadvantage. The overwhelming majority of experts in the field (almost 90%) believe that genetic inequality plays some role in group inequality, and half believe it is responsible for 50% or more, based on the fact that a number of genetic traits that have major effects on life outcomes are highly heritable. However, until more of these alleles are nailed down, this only remains an unverified hypothesis.
> You should 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' by Walter Rodney to understand the economic history of Africa.
This is a complete fabrication by a soicalist crank, I'm afraid.
The entire thing is based on a complete lack of comprehension of basic economics.
Africa was colonized because it was weak and poor, which made it easy to conquer. Africa was abandoned because it wasn't worth keeping; colonization was a hallmark of mercantilism. In a capitalist society, it is recognized that building tall, not wide, is the route to prosperity; you become wealthy by increasing per capita productivity, and the poor, in a capitalist system, are a drain on the system, as they consume more resources than they create.
The notion that Europe became rich because Africa became poor is not rooted in reality; in real life, Europe was rich before it colonized Africa (which is why it so easily conquered Africa in the first place!), and its further development was not due to African colonization, but due to Europe's industrialization.
Africa remained poor because it did not industrialize.
> You should read about the United Fruit Company.
You should read about the decline of Argentina.
The UFC was evil, but its power was so great precisely because the countries down there were weak and corrupt, which made it easy for a privately owned corporation to do nasty things.
IRL, the poverty of Latin America is mostly due to localized issues, like corruption, embrace of far right and far left politics, high crime, and myriad other factors. While it is true that the USSR spreading socialism down there didn't help things, most of the issues were rooted in problems that predated the 20th century, but just kept getting carried forward through the present.
Latin America did not magically end up poor or underdeveloped relative to the US and Canada, it was due to the local decisions of local people. Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world at one point before it stagnated due to internal problems.
> That would lend credence to the idea the poor countries are building their economy off unfair and unequal relations with the Global South.
People who produce more value have a higher standard of living than those who produce less value. Shock and surprise. Welcome to basic economics.
The reason why those countries are better off is because they produce more value and so can engage in more trade. Trade is bilaterally useful - both sides benefit, with trade allowing these countries to buy capital goods that help them develop.
> IRL, the entire notion of "bleeding them dry" is a Big Lie; in real life, people in developing countries are poor because they produce very little value on a per capita basis. There's not much value that can be wrung out of subsistence farmers in Africa; they produce 1% of the food that an American farmer does.
Sure, and the Congo Free State was so blatantly horrible that it was a huge humanitarian scandal over a century ago for the cartoonishly evil levels of mistreatment that people experienced there. It was awful and evil even by the standards of the late 19th and early 20th century.
You can steal from the poor, but it's not a great route to general prosperity, and it isn't why people are poor in the developing world today.
The entire notion of this is completely wrong and is based on a complete lack of understanding of history and economics - or, in other words, *reality*.
Economics is not a zero-sum game, the absolute size of the economy can (and does) change. Industrialization caused insane levels of economic growth because per capita productivity increased by two orders of magnitude, because automation and mechanization allows you to do the work of a hundred men (or more!).
IRL, everyone was poor originally. The idea of primitive accumulation of capital is false - in real life, almost all capital accumulation in all of history happened in the 20th and 21st century. Rapid industrialization has happened in multiple countries, and there are more self-made rich people than ever before - the numbers have been going up, and up, and up.
Anyone with even the most basic level of knowledge about reality knows this.
Turns out, you shouldn't base your entire belief system on the ravings of a narcissistic anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Who knew?
I think you should be more charitable to people and not say that their beliefs are based on the "ravings of a narcissistic anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist". If you disagree with someone, just lay out the reasons for it. There's no point to say it's a "raving". It seems like you're just insulting the outgroup.
It is not some unique case. See for example USSR-cause ruination still affecting occupied countries and many other cases where quite poor area was made even more poor by colonizer/occupier.
> but it's not a great route to general prosperity
I agree, that is not changing that it happened.
> it isn't why people are poor in the developing world today.
At least partially it is a reason, even if not the most important one.
Nope, you're simply assuming all populations are equally capable, but this is a wholly unfounded assumption. It also ignores why these countries were dirt poor before the west ever set foot in them.
> 3: Speculations on the rise of Christianity. A consistent 40% per decade growth rate maintained from St. Peter to Constantine would fit observations nicely; we know this is possible in theory because Mormonism has also grown at about 40% per decade the past century. Also, plausibly Constantine’s conversion barely changed the growth rate at all.
The thing I think would surprise people most about early Christianity is that it was a religion of the urban poor/middle classes. The best evidence we have for a pattern is that Christianity spread along trade routes to various urban populations and from there out to the countryside. Rural populations and elites seem to have been the holdouts.
I'd expect that the 3rd Century was a real turning point for three reasons. Firstly, the deurbanization scattered a lot of Christian populations to the countryside. Secondly, a century of crisis and civil war left the Church as the only operating national organization. One which gave charity and expected its members to die in a time where dying was a very real possibility. Lastly, there were some theological changes that made conversion more attractive and easier.
The last one is, imo, probably the big effect of Constantine. The end of official persecution allowed Christians to relax certain standards that were meant to let them survive under persecution but meant having some distrust of outsiders. These changes were probably at the center of various heresies like the Donatists.
> 4: Related:
Weak explanation #1: Most Classics scholars are Latin speakers and Latin is a highly synthetic, logical language. It has a bunch of connecting words that imply fairly specific logical relations. This became even more pronounced as it became the language of academia later on. I expect every Classics scholar knows formal logic to some extent.
Weak Explanation #2: Most Classical philosophy would have considered someone who took a small guaranteed payout over risking it for a greater reward a coward. Whether that's the Greeks talking of insufficient desire for glory or the Romans considering it foolish to think you can actually isolate yourself from risk. People who deeply engage with these philosophies end up adopting them to some extent.
> 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread.
Kropotkin's best point is the idea that cooperation is a competitive strategy. That helping the less fortunate is not just an irrational moral stance but actually make you, the person helping them, more competitive in any sort of evolutionary competition (economic or biological).
The issue is that he wants to completely abolish property and thinks that production will still happen under these circumstances. He literally proposes things like that people will work to feed other people out of, basically, altruism. In some sense anarchism is to the left of Communism. You can kind of draw a spectrum between feudalism/slave societies (where people can own anything, even people) capitalism (where people can own anything except people), communism (where people can own private property but not means of production/labor), and anarchism (where people can't own anything). (Technically, Kropotkin says you can own property. But he also says it can be taken from you if you refuse to give it away. He just... never addresses this.)
To take the example of bread, both Communism and Capitalism argue that people produce bread and that other people can then purchase it and own it. Communism argues that the bread belongs to the person whose labor produced it while capitalists argue it belongs to the person who hired the baker. But Kropotkin style anarachists argue that neither of them can own the bread: the concept of ownership is itself wrong. It was actually the Communist philosophers who pointed out that an anarchist vision that expects bakers to produce bread and then give it away gives them no incentive to work. (They also considered it theft of the baker's labor.)
This is not an exaggeration. Kropotkin mentions how pianos will be produced in his ideal society. (He thinks this is something he has on the Communists because apparently Communists won't want to make pianos. And the idea of a collectively owned piano will mean no art can be produced.) His answer: the collective that produces pianos will give them away for free to artists for their own personal, altruistic reasons. He brings up a woman at the commune-factory loving an artist or the entire group of workers being moved by the beautiful performance of an artist.
Kropotkinite anarchism sounds nice because it has all those slogans about decommodification. "Everyone gets bread! Everyone gets healthcare! No one shall be denied any necessity or luxury! No one needs to work!" But once you dig deep into the theory it has some profoundly weird ideas about property, production, and how economics work. Perhaps most disturbingly, it has a very unusual definition of violence whereby simply owning something is an act of violence that justifies defensive violence to take things. Communists say something similar about factory owner's factories. But left anarchists say that about everything.
> 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point.
The myth of Chinese hyper-competence is something you can only believe if you have no direct contact with China. No one in China believes it. Not even the CCP in official propaganda! I have no idea about Xi specifically. But the average westerner just doesn't seem to have a good idea what's going on.
(The Chinese themselves have noticed this, by the way, and spend a lot of time criticizing the west for its economic advice for the rest of the world being narcissistic. The semi-official response to Piketty was basically, "This guy has no idea what anything that isn't Western Europe looks like. He doesn't even accurately describe the Americas or Eastern Europe let alone China or Africa.")
Anyway, Xi's competence is kind of a moot point. There's this weird narrative that emerged that dictatorships trade economic growth/prosperity in exchange for democratic rights. So, for example, the Chinese accept totalitarian rule in exchange for the growth the CCP's model provides. The issue with this was always that it misunderstood the accountability of totalitarian rulers. If China experiences low growth do you think the Communists are going to stop ruling China? No, of course not. Some kind of growth for civil rights contract doesn't work in a dictatorship because the dictatorship isn't making deals with its populace.
This is the fundamental mistake of this analysis. It implicitly assumes Xi's goals are things like the maximization of Chinese GDP or that his power significantly relies on the general welfare. Xi's power relies on the Communist Party's continued power and his power within it. That's what he's maximizing. Xi's very internally focused and he's spent his rule destroying anything that looks like a potential alternative power center. We've noticed a few that are more visible to us like tech. But he's also done it to various institutions in the CCP itself, to various kinds of media, to camera manufacturers... If you measure Xi by the amount of power he's amassed to the CCP and himself personally then he's been highly successful.
(This is also why I think Xi's somewhat baffled comments about international prestige are genuine. He spends like 90% of his time on internal affairs so when other countries react he's a little frustrated. It's just not where he wants to spend his time.)
> 24: Sort of related: I console myself with the idea that the Democrats have some kind of grand strategy to both make everyone hate them as much as possible, and also push policies that will accomplish exactly the opposite of all their goals. Then Republicans will capture all branches of government with large majorities, and build lots of solar panels in order to own the libs. Also promote race-blind hiring, build lots of housing to fight homelessness, repeal SALT deductions, regulate Big Business, pull out of foreign wars, heck, why not legalize marijuana? Viewed this way, maybe Biden and Pelosi are the greatest political geniuses of their generation!
This strikes me as evidence that democracy works. The Democrats have been captured by an unpopular but wealthy/powerful elite whose ideology is not producing good outcomes and are getting punished for it. This isn't a purely pro-right wing thing either. Working class Democrats have repeatedly staged backbench revolts over the past year. The real question for me is twofold: Firstly, did Biden misunderstand his mandate or is the Democratic Party so captured by far left staffers that it effectively can't chart a moderate course? And two, if this is clearly unsustainable (and I'd argue it is) then how does the Democratic Party shift to prevent becoming non-viable as a party?
Honestly, if you wanted to restore my faith in democracy then kicking Trump out of office and rebuking the radical left types in quick succession would have me feeling very bullish about the wisdom of the common American. It'd make me feel that the American people actually are acting as the game theoretic mob boss trying to get us to the good state of the prisoner's dilemma.
"The myth of Chinese hyper-competence is something you can only believe if you have no direct contact with China. No one in China believes it. Not even the CCP in official propaganda! I have no idea about Xi specifically. But the average westerner just doesn't seem to have a good idea what's going on."
That because the myth of Chinese hyper-competence is not meant for understanding China. It's not about China, but about the West and its internal faults, like inequality for left-wingers or mass immigration for right-wingers.
If I am not mistaken, it's not similar to not just the Japan-craze of the 1970's/1980's, but the Sinophilia of the Enlightenment Era.
Any thinking about this as if Biden is misplaying a mandate is inherently mistaken I believe. Democrats are unhappy that not *enough* things are happening (the fault of the senate). Hence low approval rates.
I don't think so. That's the story people on the left would like to be true. It's a Fifty Stalins argument. The issue isn't the left wing ideals itself but merely that they aren't going far enough left fast enough.
The truth is that Biden's approval ranking is sinking with moderates, not Democrats. (And with Republicans if that matters.) Democrats have sunk from 98 to 90. Moderates have gone from 61 to 35. (And from 12 to 6 with Republicans.) Meanwhile the generic ballot shows the same: it's the moderates who're leaving, not the Democrats.
Likewise, most polls on the subject show that dissatisfaction is driven by Democrat policy as practiced (lockdowns, inflation, etc) and that the failure to pass their agenda isn't really a driver. Which makes sense. Do you really think moderates are punishing the Democratic Party for not being left enough? Moderates, who are defined by not being leftists?
To be absolutely clear, what is the wildly left policy that Biden has successfully pushed and is thus driving moderates to repudiate him in your eyes?
Moderates may be defecting because they have fears about stuff like CRT or something, but it has nothing to do with Biden "overplaying his mandate". That is divorced from reality.
The infrastructure package is broadly popular, which is why it got Republican support.
The fake propaganda "human infrastructure" package which is actually a big expansion of welfare programs is not, and is being pushed back against because we are seeing high rates of inflation from handing out too much money from tax breaks and actual cash handouts to people. It's why the program had to be cut down by so much to pass at all, if it actually does.
On top of that, the "wokeness" narrative is deeply toxic and awful. The Rittenhouse thing was completely divorced from reality, and not only that, but it was *obviously* so. They shot themselves in the face over it for no reason; it wasn't actually important in any grander way.
In the end, the people who were out rioting and setting shit on fire and breaking stuff are all enemies of America - all the QAnon rioters, all the "BLM" rioters (many of whom were actually far leftists as well as various criminal elements who made use of BLM as cover for their own activities), they're *all* baddies to all Americans. Everyone wants these people to knock it off and go home.
Siding with them is a losing move, and the Democrats, for whatever reason, decided that they couldn't just wash their hands of these people, who are an anchor to them politically.
Governing in a moderate sort of way is broadly popular, while trying to side with one of these insane "tribes" is not.
The same applies to pushing the woke "systemic racism" thing (which is derived from CRT and CRT adjacent beliefs). The entire notion that inequality is caused primarily by racism isn't actually true; while racism may play some small role, most differences we see today aren't driven by modern day racism.
The fact that they lie about things that can easily be verified to be false is damaging. The fact that the Democrats decided to repeatedly lie about the Rittenhouse case was stupid and showed just how divorced from reality they have become, and it put a lot of people off and made them recognize that the Democrats are just as tribalistic and delusional as the Republicans are, just about different things.
The fact that crime rates and inflation rates are going up is just the 1970s all over again. They have learned nothing from Carter's failures.
You want to win? Be charismatic, be moderate, and put the criminals in prison.
All this crime and inflation stuff is really bad for people, and when people don't feel safe and feel like they're losing money, that's bad for you politically.
"Systemic racism" is a woke thing. And he put his foot in his mouth in the lead up to the Rittenhouse case - trying to defuse things a bit after the fact didn't save him there.
But his biggest flaw in regards to this is his failure to rein in or push back against the far leftist narrative in general; he doesn't control messaging well at all, and so it is easy to put things in his mouth.
He doesn't end up coming off as being moderate, and perception in that regard is important. If he was seen as a moderating force against the far left, that would be helpful, but instead he ended up being taken for a ride on the "human infrastructure" thing, which he bungled badly (and indeed, allowing it to get tied to the more popular infrastructure bill was a bad bit of political calculus, and also was seen as him betraying the Republicans who voted for it on the condition that the two weren't tied together).
Perception is really important, and he seems to have been taken for a ride by the far left and the "Squad", who ended up voting against his infrastructure bill anyway, so he looked weak and like he was trying to appease them, and like it didn't even help.
Before I continue: what evidence would I have to bring for you to believe the Democrat's loss of popularity their policies? What would falsify your belief?
Or is it an article of faith that Democratic policies are right? Because the latter is common but I can't argue people out of positions that are faith based.
Great! You're right, it's trivial. Afghanistan is the biggest policy the Biden administration has actually implemented. (BBB and the infrastructure bill haven't actually happened yet. Fed policy is more a staffing issue and you're very specific about something Biden did so I suspect you'd claim Yellen is someone different.)
How does polling work on that? Overwhelmingly negative. About half of people rate the handling poor (the lowest score) and 2/3rds have a predominately negative view of it.
If you want to say this doesn't count I'll expect you to admit you're moving the goalposts.
I thought it was a step or two removed from that, with "pagan" originally meaning "of the countryside" with connotations of "yokel", and from there entering military slang as a synonym for "civilian" (i.e. the local yokels the career legionaries were stationed near), and thence was borrowed by Christians as a term for non-Christians due to early Christianity getting more traction among the legions than among the provincial civilians.
More like, due to the early Christians viewing themselves as soldiers of Christ. From there, it's a very small step to seeing non-Christians as like civilians, that is, pagani.
Wikipedia claims that both were causes - I was not aware about 'milites Christi', thanks!
> In the time of the Roman empire, individuals fell into the pagan class either because they were increasingly rural and provincial relative to the Christian population, or because they were not milites Christi (soldiers of Christ).
Possibly. There's the added wrinkle that non-Christian Romans would have associated the country with backward religious practices already.
There's an idea that Roman pagans were tolerant of other religions. They could be but they could also be harsh religious persecutors. And they were often snobs about it. So pagan religion to a pre-Christian Roman meant something like the backward, ridiculous rites of uneducated peasants or barbaric peoples. Plus Roman soldiers/administrators would have brought their "superior" religious practices and set up local shrines. They would talk about pagan religion meaning local religion which was implicitly backward. Especially in Europe. Of course, they also sometimes adopted such religions which almost inherently made them non-pagan. Presumably there was a lot of bickering over exactly what counted in some Roman equivalent of culture war.
So the Roman Christians didn't need to invent the word's meaning wholesale. Their specific division of the world into Christian and pagan was new. But the division of the world into acceptable and unacceptable religions already existed. The real Christian innovation was tying the concept of following Christianity (and eventually a specific kind of Christianity) to Roman-ness. By the fall of the empire to be Roman was to be Christian.
"Honestly, if you wanted to restore my faith in democracy then kicking Trump out of office and rebuking the radical left types in quick succession would have me feeling very bullish about the wisdom of the common American."
Unfortunately, Trump seems poised to win the Republican nomination in 2024. Which, for non-Trumpists, means another few years of holding our tongues and going to the mat for Biden/Harris even as their agenda falls apart and material conditions grow worse.
"A thing we haven't seen tried, and I wonder if it might work, is a 2024 primary campaign that runs neither to Trump's left or right but straight at him. Attack him as the guy who managed to lose to Biden, who didn't build the wall, didn't repeal Obamacare, kept losing and losing."
"A campaign like this doesn't have to buy any hated MSM talking points, doesn't need to sound like Bill Kristol. The candidate can bash the media relentlessly. But can also say that the media has always been biased against GOP, but Trump got caught in their games and lost."
"This would work best from someone with a real MAGA track record like Ron DeSantis. The line is "I supported you, I was rooting for you, I believed in your agenda (and still do), but you screwed it up and got beat by Democrats and the media, and we can't let that happen again.""
I'm trying to imagine how else someone like DeSantis runs a primary against Trump. I'm also having trouble imagining that potentially strong candidates such as DeSantis will simply stand aside if Trump runs in 2024.
I wanted to see Amy Klobuchar get the nod in 2020. Smart, effective, hard working no bullshit Amy.
Daughter of an alcoholic having Neil Gorsuch hostilely ask her if she didn’t like beer too. She stayed on point unflustered and graciously accepted his later apology.
I think she could have eviscerated Trump in debates. She had had plenty of practice handling semi literate bullies getting to where she was at that point. I’m fairly sure she could have shown the nation what a small man he really is.
Her experience as a formal prosecutor effectively killed her chances last time. Next time that could be an asset.
I don't know. I'd take Pence as establishment vs DeSantis as populist as a major improvement in the specific personalities running. But no idea what it'll actually look like. (Don't like Abott much though, insofar as I like any Republican.)
Specifically at a national level, the main policies being pushed by the Democrats seem to be popular (things like infrastructure, 4 weeks leave, 2 years community college, etc). But I think it would be a mistake to believe policy matters. The public doesn't pay attention, for example most Trump voters weren't asking for or even aware that a large corporate tax cut was his most significant economic policy. I don't think the economy is too important either, perceptions of the economy basically reversed on the Trump->Biden transition, and even if individuals are doing OK they'll imagine others aren't based on partisan leanings (true for either side).
Disassociating themselves from the unhinged left is probably also futile - you can't control the actions of everybody in such a large group, and spending time infighting would be a distraction.
If they want to win, they should probably focus on branding/vilifying the other side. Find examples of the unhinged right (not overly difficult), and try to associate that with the broader party as much as possible. Find a more compelling moral panic than racism, global warming, terrorism, or the fear of SJWs. You'd need to work on it and promote certain stereotypes, but maybe you could find helpful things on the right-wing twitter alternatives.
Yes, this would involve pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire of US politics. Maybe that's what winning looks like?
Thank you. The idea that somehow Biden has been too aggressive at pushing for infrastructure and that is why his poll numbers are down is just basically laughable.
The fake "human infrastructure" thing - which is just a big expansion of welfare state stuff - is much less so. Hence why they tried to rebrand it as "infrastructure".
Had the Democrats just passed the initial bipartisan infrastructure bill months ago, they would have looked competent. Instead, they managed to bicker and fight and be stupid, turning an easy win (that would have cemented the idea that the Democrats are Competent and Get Stuff Done) into a huge stupid fight.
Primary everyone in the Democratic party in the House who voted against the infrastructure bill, and make sure that they lose and don't exist anymore. That will help things significantly, I think.
The whole wokeness and far leftist stuff is very bad for them as well, and has been too much adopted as part of the party brand. And it's not just perception - it's reality.
Trying to vilify the right only works if you yourself aren't doing reprehensible things. Trump lost because he was terrible - but Republicans downballot did better than Trump did. Trump was a hinderance, not an asset.
It's not just the presidency, but also the House and the Senate - you want to win, you need to win those downballot races, too.
Popular in a limited arena, maybe, when the other poll response is "don't care at all." But popular relative to knocking down COVID or having gas stay at $2/gallon or being able to buy a used car at a reasonable discount from new? Kind of doubt it.
If your opponents are going to slam you for inflation, the continuance of COVID mandates, and the astronomical cost of used cars -- and they will -- then saying by gum we passed a measure to rebuild a bunch of bridges and by and by that will improve our economic situation is totally not going to work. People will laugh if that's the best argument that can be made.
Infrastructure is pretty highly visible. Fixing a bunch of bridges and improving roads IS something that people like. So is expanded high speed internet access. Those are all things that, if executed on, will actually make people happy.
The problem is that there are a lot of other issues as well.
In my entire lifetime, I cannot recall a single election won on the basis of fixing bridges or roads. Maybe that would be true if the roads and bridges were in shambles, and we went from "have to pick my way around potholes and burning wrecks at 20MPH to speeding down the well-repaired orderly highway at 65MPH" but that isn't the case at all here. We're talking about retrofitting bridges so that maybe they last longer (and the absence of a bridge falling down does not get people excited), or some helpful projects in a few scattered places of the country that might make an extra 100,000 people here and there happy -- but not an extra 20 million voters nationwide.
Now on the other hand the number of people enraged about paying close to (or above!) $100 to fill their gas tank, or who watched the exit from Afghanistan play out in squalid detail, or who thought COVID would finally be addressed in some sensible and effective way[1] once that doofus Trump was booted -- that's a *lot* of people, spread across a lot of states. The fact that in 18-24 months some local company will get a good contract to add an HOV lane to a 2-mile stretch of the local freeway is not going to even come close to compensating.
--------------------
[1] Setting aside the question of whether it is even hypothetically possible for such a plan to exist, it is nevertheless the case that the Democrats ran on "Trump fucked up the COVID response" and the clear implication was "and we won't!"
I don't know any of this but I am amused by the volte-face on Kyrsten Sinema.
I only became aware of her due to fawning coverage on Tumblr when she was first elected to the Senate, with tons of photos of her being sworn in by Mike Pence and jubilant commentary on how he must absolutely hate having to swear in an out and proud bisexual, etc. Her clothing choices were also much admired.
Now she's an Enemy of the People, and getting articles written about her as to how she's motivated purely by personal ambition (what, in a professional politician? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!) and "Saturday Night Live" parodied her fashion sense as “all the Scooby Doo characters at the same time”:
So... you're telling me sexual identity politics is *not* a reliable method of voting in a public representative? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you part deux!
> Specifically at a national level, the main policies being pushed by the Democrats seem to be popular (things like infrastructure, 4 weeks leave, 2 years community college, etc)
This is due to what's called debundled polling. You can get majorities to say they support more or less everything if you divorce them from the costs. This is also how Republicans get people to say they want lower taxes. If you bundle them you find Democratic policies are significantly less popular. That's why the talking point is effectively a statistics trick.
> But I think it would be a mistake to believe policy matters. The public doesn't pay attention
Of the things I listed most are policy matters. They just aren't the policy matters the left wishes people cared about. They want people to care about social justice or paid family leave but people are responding more strongly to inflation and school closure.
> I don't think the economy is too important either,
This isn't what people say. People say the economy is a huge concern and point to objective measures like inflation or decreasing consumer spending power.
> Disassociating themselves from the unhinged left is probably also futile - you can't control the actions of everybody in such a large group, and spending time infighting would be a distraction.
Clinton, Obama, and Biden all successfully did it. Biden only lost it when he started compromising with his far left, in part because his coalition is so narrow he needs everyone onboard. When you have to get literally every single Democrat on board you need to bring even your craziest members into the tent.
> If they want to win, they should probably focus on branding/vilifying the other side. Find examples of the unhinged right (not overly difficult), and try to associate that with the broader party as much as possible. Find a more compelling moral panic than racism, global warming, terrorism, or the fear of SJWs. You'd need to work on it and promote certain stereotypes, but maybe you could find helpful things on the right-wing twitter alternatives. Yes, this would involve pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire of US politics. Maybe that's what winning looks like?
Maybe it is. Negative partisanship and all that. Though what they'd need to do that is find some new lever. Democrats already more or less maximally vilify Republicans in institutions they dominate. They'd either need to find new institutions to dominate or it'd just be more of the same. Though I agree that (combined with Republicans attempts to do the same) effectively creates a dumpster fire.
Covering pre-existing conditions was popular, just not the total government take-over of health care and the death panels (especially when it would be so easy to write a replacement without that stuff!).
The Republican establishment is against certain things ideologically, but some portion of their base isn't, so it's better to be concerned about the particulars in the marketing.
The Democratic-sympathizing media (who are often happy to sell out their own side too for a few clicks) aren't helping them brand it, since these bills are mostly talked about by the price tags rather than anything in them.
My point is it doesn't matter too much what the major things are or where the trillions of dollars go. Both parties will test out what narratives they can sell to the public and what sticks will be determined mostly by what's emotionally compelling.
> People say the economy is a huge concern
Sure people care about the economy, it just might not matter much politically. This goes for the Democrats too, the economy was doing pretty well pre-covid but that wasn't helping Trump out much, because partisan attachment is now the most important factor for economic outlook.
Obviously the present inflation is real but also obviously this has to do with both supply chains and the massive COVID spending that has already happened under both Trump and Biden, that on a yearly basis was like 10x as big as the bills being discussed (which haven't had any impact on the economy yet).
> Clinton, Obama, and Biden all successfully <disassociated themselves from the hard left>
I was too young to pay close attention for Clinton, but I don't think this was true for Obama. I have family that read a lot of WSJ op-eds at the time (and I'd also read some myself) and he was practically the second coming of Malcolm X. His biggest issues were his open class warfare and his divisive rhetoric. He was even on the same board as Ayers who was a terrorist. And the WSJ isn't even on the more extreme side of things.
I think like the Iraq war this is one of those things where people feel less strongly in retrospect but had more intensity at the time. Particularly at the beginning the narrative of him being an angry radical was pretty strong, although eventually I think he became more of a known quantity. Maybe also kind of like people treating Trump as an unserious sideshow at first, although it's hard to maintain that after him winning the presidency. But it's not too hard to manufacture narratives out of mostly nothing if you're consistent in repeating/reinforcing them.
> Democrats already more or less maximally vilify Republicans
I think there's still some room. The man at the top isn't clear that his enemies are "sick and evil". I'm not sure he's even clear that major parts of society are domestic enemies. He might be able to get his base to believe that his opponents have already de-facto ended democracy, and elections and the courts are now a farce, which would make it easier to ignore them if necessary later. Until polling indicates a quarter of his base believe that his opponents are literal pedophiles, and they might have to resort to violence to save the county, I think there is at least *potential* to dial it up.
Since there are a number of differences between the parties, but the human nature is probably pretty similar.
> My point is it doesn't matter too much what the major things are or where the trillions of dollars go. Both parties will test out what narratives they can sell to the public and what sticks will be determined mostly by what's emotionally compelling.
This is the Sophist's position. That the actual underlying reality or truth doesn't have any effect on whether narratives function. I don't believe that though there are plenty who do.
> Sure people care about the economy, it just might not matter much politically.
How's that? You mention a bit below Trump also did things that led to inflation. I'd argue Biden did more but that's not really my point here. My point is that Biden put in policies, people are upset about the economy, and people will punish the Democrats because they're in power.
> I was too young to pay close attention for Clinton, but I don't think this was true for Obama. I have family that read a lot of WSJ op-eds at the time (and I'd also read some myself) and he was practically the second coming of Malcolm X.
The right certainly didn't like him. But what matters isn't the right, it's the people who can be won over. The center. And they moved back and forth depending on what he was delivering at the time in part because he repeatedly tried to portray himself as a moderate. This was one of Biden's virtues: even back then he had a reputation for being a moderate, mainstream kind of guy. Which was a good compliment to a Black President who wanted to completely overhaul healthcare. Kamala doesn't serve nearly the same function for Biden.
> I think there's still some room. The man at the top isn't clear that his enemies are "sick and evil". I'm not sure he's even clear that major parts of society are domestic enemies.
He doesn't do this because he can't. Hillary tried to say things like this and got punished for it. He's doing a balancing act right now between calling them awful names in front of the progressives and saying they're his friends in front of the moderates.
> Until polling indicates a quarter of his base believe that his opponents are literal pedophiles, and they might have to resort to violence to save the county, I think there is at least *potential* to dial it up.
Acceptance of violence and unwillingness to associate with the other party is already very high. As is willingness to use state apparatus against domestic opponents. It could get higher I suppose. But it's in the process of getting worse.
But I was already talking more about production. How else could the DNC push this message further? The truth is they'd need to find something that broadcasts into parts of America that aren't NYC (etc) based. And they just don't have that in a solid way.
I don't actually believe that the truth is unimportant or (entirely) unknowable, just that it is only loosely related to public opinion. This is because we live in a complex world and economy where it often takes a lot of effort to understand even basic things. [1]
That isn't totally an indictment of the public. People often pay more attention to things that are relevant to their own lives that they have some control over.
But I don't see how public opinion can be consistently correct, because it isn't even consistent with itself. People were overwhelmingly for the Iraq war before they were overwhelmingly against it. And the public often passionately holds completely opposite opinions at the same time.
Polls often show people only have a vague idea of what is presently going on or even about things like geography. And of course they are up against total professionals who's job it is to manipulate them, and who test their strategies in focus groups.
I'd like to add that I'm a general supporter of democracy and very skeptical of authoritarianism, but it's not at all because I believe the public is naturally correct or can't be manipulated.
> <on Obama> But what matters isn't the right, it's <...> The center. And they moved back and forth depending on what he was delivering at the time in part because he repeatedly tried to portray himself as a moderate
No. Obamacare was overwhelmingly unpopular, now Elizabeth Warren's senate seat went to a Republican, and they got wiped out in the next election.
He *didn't* succeed in winning the center. Our current narratives are different from the past narratives, and the past narratives just get memory-holed when they don't match. We were concerned about hyper-inflation in ~2010 due to our responses to the financial crisis, and everyone was talking about Zimbabwe and making analogies.
> He doesn't do this because he can't.
This is true, these things happen gradually. Trump couldn't win the Republican primary in 1992 because the base wasn't ready for it. But in 2015 43% of the party thought Obama was a Muslim, and he was able to use that to stand out in a crowded primary. Keep in mind the preceding threat to destroy the country before the Left was Islamic terrorism. Interestingly, from what I see online and in real life many people are warming up to the idea that regime change could be the answer in both cases. After all, if you face an existential threat...
> How else could the DNC push this message further?
I'm not sure, but more importantly I don't want them to. There are worse things than losing. Better marketing is fine, but dialing it up to 11 would risk their base turning against them and a left-wing demagogue hijacking their party (and wouldn't automatically solve their other problems). Historically parties pass some stuff and then lose and it's not the end of the world if that happens again.
Of course, if in 2024 things continue in the direction of Trump's post-election behavior things may come to a head, in which case total complacency wouldn't be appropriate. It would be worth thinking about what can be done in response. I don't think that scenario is a foregone conclusion yet, although it's not exactly unlikely either.
[1] My current views on economic matters are somewhat similar to Ray Dalio's (where you can find many publications at economicprinciples.org), although I'm certainly open to learning more and changing my mind.
> I don't actually believe that the truth is unimportant or (entirely) unknowable, just that it is only loosely related to public opinion.
As you say: Traditionally this is an anti-democratic position. Do you cleave to those politics as well? If you don't, how do you justify mass participation in politics?
> No. Obamacare was overwhelmingly unpopular, now Elizabeth Warren's senate seat went to a Republican, and they got wiped out in the next election.
As it happens I was involved in that election. The issue is the candidate they ran was unpopular and didn't campaign since she thought she had it in the bag. The Republicans also ran someone very far to the left. He supported gay marriage before Obama himself did. The general red wave was a more general reaction, largely to Obamacare, but it did get done and ultimately defended in part because the center was on board. Also, Obama kind of shot himself in the foot by just lying about what he was doing. Remember the lie of the year being about Obamacare?
Obama then won the center in 2012 which led to a bunch of crowing about emerging democratic majorities. I agree people tend to memory hole competing narratives but I don't think it's me that's doing it.
> This is true, these things happen gradually. Trump couldn't win the Republican primary in 1992 because the base wasn't ready for it. But in 2015 43% of the party thought Obama was a Muslim, and he was able to use that to stand out in a crowded primary. Keep in mind the preceding threat to destroy the country before the Left was Islamic terrorism. Interestingly, from what I see online and in real life many people are warming up to the idea that regime change could be the answer in both cases. After all, if you face an existential threat...
I more or less agree with this. Though I think the left is more dependent on moderates than the right at the moment and for as long as that continues the Democrats have to be 'nicer' to win. But again, all that could shift.
> I'm not sure, but more importantly I don't want them to. There are worse things than losing.
I agree with this too. My general position is that the preservation of democracy is often more important than specific policy preferences. I think the American people are trying to vote for that moderation but unfortunately not getting it. And I think that's where the focus ought to be: elites need to realize that if they cosplay civil war hard enough it will eventually become a civil war.
"When you have to get literally every single Democrat on board you need to bring even your craziest members into the tent."
There are no crazy Democrats, and there are no sane Democrats, either. There are just Democrats. Functionally, all Democratic politicians in congress are completely identical. Democrats can profitably conclude the same about Republicans, which is precisely why straight-ticket voting is on the rise. It takes less to be a "moderate" than ever these days.
Latin is no more logical than any other language. Grammatically it is not all that different that Lithuanian or Russian. In fact a language that uses three different root words to describe the paradigm of the verb "to carry" (ferro = I bring, tuli = i brought, latus = has been brought) is arguably not logical at all. The fact that Classical Latin is taught as if it were an artificial logical language is probably why people struggle to master it.
To be clear, when I say logical I mean literally that it conforms to and expresses formal logic well. In part because most formal logic was originally written in Latin. I don't mean generically better or superior or that it doesn't have exceptions to its rules.
Regarding Newcomb's problem, maybe the difference between classicists and other academics is familiarity with the ancient Greek understanding of how prophecy works.
My own analysis of the problem, for what it's worth:
If we accept the premise of the question, then my decision in the present of how many boxes to take affects the prophet's action in the past. I want to make the decision that causes the prophet to give me a million dollars.
But, realistically, I wouldn't accept the premise of the question. My decision in the present can't possibly affect the "prophet's" action in the past, so I might as well take both boxes.
I wonder how much of the difference in people's answers depends on much they accept that, in a logic puzzle, you're supposed to accept whatever ridiculous premise the puzzle includes whether or not you're accept it in real life.
>I wonder how much of the difference in people's answers depends on much they accept that, in a logic puzzle, you're supposed to accept whatever ridiculous premise the puzzle includes whether or not you're accept it in real life.
I've always taken it that you must accept the 'rules of the game', it's a game after all. I'm totally one box on that basis
I seem to recall that less intelligent people tend to ignore counterfactual conditions, though, which would seem to create an issue with "non-academics one-box more often" if you think the predictor is a counterfactual.
It depends on the character of the predictor: if it/they/he predict that most people are greedy and will prefer the chance of one million in local currency of whatever designation, then it will predict "you will pick box B" and then you pick box B and get a million.
If the predictor is expecting you to be up on game theory and paradoxes, it will predict "you are the kind of smarty-pants who thinks I will predict you choose box B, so you will choose both boxes in order to get the maximum return. Joke's on you, chum, I predicted that and you only get $1,000".
You have to assume the predictor is at least as smart as you are, so if it knows the 'optimum' solution is to pick both boxes (on the assumption that it will only predict 'picking one'), and it knows you are smart and know that is the optimum solution, then it will predict accordingly and you get what is in box A and a whopping nothing in box B.
Whereas, if it knows you are a common dumb-ass, you come out a million richer 😁
If the predictor can literally see the future, the correct move is to pick the one box in order to get the million. If the predictor is what you're imagining, a non-psychic making guesses at the future, the correct move is to pick both.
But how does the ability to make sufficiently accurate guesses differ from literally seeing the future is this regard? That's why I always thought the thought experiment was clumsily constructed btw, it's only relevant due to Newcomb-like problems purportedly being common in real life, without any implausible superpredictors.
If the predictor can literally see the future, then my choice now retroactively changes what the predictor put in the box. If the predictor is just a really good guesser, then the box has what it has regardless of what I actually do.
Among other things, game theory taught me the value of being able to credibly commit to an option beforehand in situations like Newcombs paradox. It is also called keeping your promises or being trustworthy, which is a generally a useful trait to have..."dumb-asses" to use your language might know this without having studied game theory.
"I wonder how much of the difference in people's answers depends on much they accept that, in a logic puzzle, you're supposed to accept whatever ridiculous premise the puzzle includes whether or not you're accept it in real life"
Well flip, this explains why I'm always getting these things wrong!
From now on, I will remember "If my immediate reaction is 'take box B, that's a million quid!', I must remember that is the sensible real-life action, and instead do the 'take both boxes, end up with $1,000' solution".
I think a typical formulation of Newcomb's problem includes "The Great Predictor has performed this trick many times before in the past, so you have reason to believe that his predictions are as accurate as claimed." What level of accuracy you need before you consider your actions to be "causing" the prediction is up to you, I suppose.
Also, the predictor doesn't actually need to be perfect for the problem to apply - if the payoff ratio is 1 million vs 1 thousand, then you only need a tiny bit above 50% accuracy for one-boxing to have a better payoff.
Maybe it also depends on how much you let your actual circumstances infiltrate your evaluation. I mean, if you *actually* gave me this choice, I would take the one box even if I knew (or assumed) that the predictor flipped a coin to decide what to do. A 50% chance to win $1 million is way more valuable to me in real life than the certainty of an extra $1000.
You *always* get the second box, which may or may not contain a $1 million. Your choice is just whether or not you take the first box with the $1,000. If the box-packer is just flipping a coin without regard to your choice, two-boxing is the clear winner.
I probably stated that badly. I don't mean that I *know* the the predictor is just flipping a coin, I mean that even if I assumed the worst case is that the predictor is flipping a coin, I would take one box. Since I don't *know* the predictor is flipping a coin -- the problem states that he is not, that he is very good at this prediction biz -- then I don't act on your logic. What I'm saying is that I would make the choice based on the assumption that the predictor does predict me correctly *and* that my residual doubt in that assumption can be quite high and I would still make it.
I have a feeling that the underlying issue in the two box problem is hubris.
Given the assumption that outcomes are the will of God, or fate if you prefer, trying to game that system is to put yourself above God or above faith. The difficulty comes with someone or something actually telling you how things are going to turn out.
A gods-fearing Greek, wary of Midas-like hubris, might show restraint by picking neither the mystery box nor two boxes. Instead, he or she might choose only the *other* box (the one with the visible $1000), or even refuse both boxes.
'Taking' a box or boxes might mean being forced to eat them (as in 'taking medicine'), or 'having' a box or boxes might mean being forced to carry it/them for life.
In re #17: Math education in K-12 in California has been steadily going down the toilet for the past 10 years, maybe longer, in a horrifying way. If I hadn't spent umpty hours tutoring -- and made use of some fortunate online programs -- my kids would've had a very sketchy familiarity with math, and, worse, with quantitative thinking of any sort.
I think it's a real problem. You get adults, very smart people, who are so uncomfortable with the basic ideas of math -- operations, logical consistency, abstract representations of number and manipulations thereof -- that they are helpless when a question has some quantitative aspect that is amenable to math.
I remember reading a very bright lawyer assert that, for all we know, putting up massive offshore windfarms would slow down the trade winds and drastically change the weather along the East Coast. He wasn't a stupid guy, but he was helpless at the basics of quantitative thinking, so the idea of estimating the cross-sectional area of 5,000 wind turbines and comparing to the cross-section area of the relevant portion of the atmosphere would be to him like reading the decrees of Ramses II in Coptic, not only impossible but unthinkable.
Id est, I think innumeracy is a growing problem, at least among California graduates of average general ability, and the reforms in education over the past 10 years seem to have made the problem far worse.
If I had to take a guess at the underlying cause, I'd say it's from allowing to many PhDs in education into the room, and ironically in math, and not enough developmental psychologists and even pediatricians. The curriculum and methods of instruction have been changed in ways that would make all kinds of sense *if we were teaching adults* and if the teachers were all PhD math professors. But for real children being taught by actual grade-school teachers, it's a disaster. Core skills in which children *can* excel at a given age, and which a typical grade-school teacher *can* effectively teach, are neglected in favor of skills that are often beyond the students' cognitive development stage, and with which the teacher has very limited intuitive grasp herself. The result is the worst of both worlds: you get *neither* basic building-block competence *nor* the hoped-for improvement in advanced-level intuition.
It's a disaster, and I don't know how it can be reversed. (I see the current movement to pushing all of algebra off to HS, and calculus to college, as in some ways a private recognition that the situation is unraveling, although the public reasons advanced are all social-justice goodness.) I'm discouragingly reminded of the situation that a good friend of mine told me existed in Burma during the dictatorship: public school was utterly worthless, and the only way to be successful was to hire private tutors after school, which of course completely ruined the idea of public schooling.
California is huge and there are a lot of school districts. My son (middle school) has very good teachers and the material i have seen was solid. It might not be as advanced of a math as children his age have in China or Russia, but it is not bad. They have a great weekly math club with advanced problems. But that's in a very good school district, so probably not the norm.
Good to know. Although I live in a very good district also -- the average value of houses in it exceeds $1 million these days -- and this is largely where my experience lies. You're certainly right that there is considerable local variation.
What you say should also underscore how pointless discussions of these kids' "innate cognitive ability" in math and studies of what "learning approaches" work are, if the kids in these studies either barely multiply or are bored out of their minds with the easy repetitiveness.
If you bring a cohort of normal, smart kids into algebra in grade 9 after 8 years of doing no meaningful homework problems, work, practice, studying whatsoever.... How are they supposed to be able to do anything if their parents aren't supplementing somehow?!
> You’d apply for a nursing job with your nursing degree from Random For-Profit U, and the hospitals would say “What, never heard of them, forget it”, and that was also a scam if you went into a nursing program expecting to be able to work as a nurse at the end of it.
I can't believe no one hast piped in yet to say: this is absolutely not a thing, at all.
No one has ever asked to see my degree, or yours, and they never will.
There are essentially 3 categories of name recognition for colleges/universities. There are widely-known names like Stanford, Yale, MIT, etc. There are names that are known within a particular field (Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, or UIUC in computer science) or within a local region (Colorado School of Mines). And then there's _everyone else_.
As far as anyone reading my resume is concerned, especially if they're not from around here, Metropolitan State College of Denver is completely indistinguishable from any of the other ~4000 colleges in the US. They can probably guess from the name that it's a state college rather than private or for-profit. If they bother to google it they might be very confused, because it changed its name in 2012. But I don't worry about that, because no one googles it, because they don't care. And they _certainly_ don't care enough to call the school up and verify that I actually went there and graduated!
So, yeah. This is just completely, 100% a non-issue. Assuming they get off the ground, after 4 years there will be people putting "University of Austin" on their resumes, and no one will think twice about it.
I think the example was poorly chosen. In allied health sciences, my impression is that yes nobody will care from which place you got a degree, once you've been on the job for a few years. The fact that you are licensed, have assorted post-graduate certifications, have experience in this or that working situation matter way more. It might help you with the very first job, though. I think that's a thing.
It's probably also the case in some very practical fields, like game programming, I think they might very well not give much of a damn past your first employment, and perhaps not even so much then -- my impression is that people can readily get into those careers via nontraditional education and/or good job experience.
But in other areas, e.g. if you want to be a professor of physics or something, where you got both your degrees is going to matter for a long time in your career, in my experience. If you went to a scruffy second-rate place, you better have a really outstanding contribution if you want a fancy job, and for that matter, you probably won't get a look until you've moved around between some lesser status places a bit.
Nah, where you got your PhD will matter, but nobody will remember or care where you did your undergrad. (Source, tenured physics professor with plenty of colleagues who did their undergrads in obscure places. PhDs invariably name brand though. Yes, getting into name brand PhD program is harder if you are applying from a `scruffy second rate' place, but by no means is it impossible...
I wouldn't go that far. My experience is that it matters, but less than your graduate program (and at that less than who your advisor is). It's one more box to check, and it's worth bearing in mind the competition for such jobs is *so* intense that even small little extra tidbits like that can easily make a difference between being asked to interview and not.
Depends how the hiring is done. Some places want a copy of your actual degree, others just want a list of what electives you took. If it's a recognisable name (University of Pumpkinville) where they've been hiring graduates with that qualification for decades, they won't bother.
Some places will ring up or email to check, but that's generally only if (a) they have very strict policies in place, often these will be state or government bodies that have such rules or (b) there's a gap in your CV, you can't/won't provide a copy of the original documents, or the qualifying body is in another country.
Where places do ring up to verify is about references/recommendations, because they want to speak to the employer and generally letters of reference are very vague (deliberately so in order to avoid leaving liability if either the recruiting company or the ex-employee are unhappy with the result).
But I have spent a lot of time on the hiring side of the desk. I have never verified an applicant's degree, never considered doing it, never been at a company that did it, never worked with anyone who has mentioned ever doing it, never even _heard_ of anyone doing it.
Because no one cares.
I realize I might sound super cynical about it or something, but this is all based on trust. There is a social norm against lying on one's resume about one's education, and there seems to be broad adherence to that norm. So broad, in fact, that actual enforcement of that norm rounds down to zero. This is probably efficient.
The sad part about it, to me, is just the credentialism aspect. If the stories we tell about higher education were true, then we *would* care about where applicants went to school, more than just checking against the list of well-known names. If education is truly worth so much, and a $40k/y school is materially better than a $10k/y school, then I ought to check each applicant's school against the USN&WR rankings, right? But again, no one does that. We just look for a degree, ok there it is, box checked, moving on. (Takeaway: get the cheapest degree you possibly can!)
I do, but I hire people with PhDs almost entirely, and it's very easy to check that because it's not a big community. I can probably confirm so-and-so was in Professor X's group just by a moment's googling, and anyway during the hiring discussions there will be an inevitable amount of discussion over the graduate experience, and it would be very difficult to fake being in Professor X's group if you weren't.
#18 The expert reactions don't sound like excuse-making to me. It's pretty tricky to run a good study where one of the variables is people's beliefs about themselves, because beliefs have causes and those causes can be huge confounds.
In this case, what causes a person to believe they have covid? Probably one of the main things is covid-like symptoms, which can mismatch with actually having covid if the person is sick with something else or if they have (near-)asymptomatic covid.
So the study found that feeling sick and mistakenly thinking it's covid is associated with feeling sick months later, while feeling fine when you secretly have covid is associated with feeling fine months later.
A useful approach to judging a source of information is to find something it says which overlaps with something you know about. Some time back Noah had a long discussion of Adam Smith. Very nearly everything he said was false, interpreting out of context quotes in ways impossible for anyone who read the context, ways that interpreted him as much closer to modern progressive views than he was. I pointed out the errors in the comment section, he responded to other comments so presumably read mine, but he neither defended what he had written nor retracted it. I concluded that he was either incompetent or dishonest, hence not useful as a source of information.
I have a blog post that discusses the case in detail:
Sounds like a case of a Gell-Mann Realization (Gell-Mann Amnesia but it's the realization before the amnesia: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you), except online instead of in-print. I don't know why people afford blogs and tweets by journalists the same credulousness they afford the newspaper, though - Gell-Mann Amnesia should be less of a problem online because everyone knows they should be skeptical on the internet. But if anything, it seems to be worse.
" It was so good that Pfizer, “in consultation with” the FDA, stopped the trial early because it would be unethical to continue denying Paxlovid to the control group."
3. The Mormon growth rate is less than meets the eye. If you stop going, they don't take you off the membership rolls even if you're an avowed atheist who hasn't attended in decades - they just mark you as "inactive" unless you specifically take action to have your name removed from the membership. They tend to lose a lot of active members in the first year or so after conversion, but they stay on there as members.
This is from an ex-Mormon guy and is polemical, but if you look at measures trying to get a more accurate view of the active membership count (such as the growth in stakes and wards - wards being your basic congregation of 100-200 members attending each sunday, and stakes being collections of those wards), it doesn't look so good. Active membership growth has slowed heavily since the 1990s, even with reforms designed to make it easier to have wards with smaller numbers of active members.
24. Wow, those numbers. I wonder if Republicans will actually do better than their huge mid-term victory in 2010. It's quite possible, although the Senate seats up for grabs are not really in their favor.
31. Reminds me of when Caplan decided he didn't want to believe in the preponderance of studies on the minimum wage and unemployment. He very much does not want to deviate away from a libertarian understanding of things - very strong priors.
I particularly like this question: "Explain why market-driven downward nominal wage rigidity leads to unemployment without implying that a government-imposed minimum wage leads to unemployment."
And yet we see from the empirical evidence that such a minimum wage does not lead to unemployment, or to relatively minor increases in unemployment at best (and even that's debatable). That suggests that either his premise is wrong, or his understanding of how such a wage floor affects the market for labor is wrong.
It's like believing that "gravity pulls all things to the ground", and then having someone tell you about birds flying through air - only for you to stubbornly insist that such things are impossible, because gravity pulls all things to the ground.
I'm not familiar with that particular argument, but note that the claim is not that raising the minimum wage will raise the national unemployment rate. Minimum wage workers are a tiny fraction of the labor force, so even if the minimum wage substantially increased their unemployment rate the effect on the national unemployment rate would be invisibly small, lost in the noise.
What studies show that raising the minimum wage doesn't reduce employment opportunities for minimum wage workers? Card and Krueger, if I remember correctly, doesn't actually observe unemployment rates, just what some group of employers say they plan to do. It does point out a way in which the obvious prediction could be false — a point made much earlier by Stigler, but still interesting. But it depends on the market for unskilled labor being a monopsony, which seems implausible.
>"And yet we see from the empirical evidence that such a minimum wage does not lead to unemployment"
No one that has ever run a business could believe such a thing. It's almost mind blowing that any educated person could believe such a thing. You would have to believe that the cost of something does not at all impact how much of it is purchased? After any Economics 101 class it would be immediately obvious that increasing the cost of labor would result in some amount of less labor being hired after the increase going forward.
You could argue "sure some low wage workers will end up not getting hired that would have otherwise been hired and they will be worse off BUT workers that stay employed and that still end up getting hired will be better off and the benefit of the second group outweighs the harm done to the first group". That would be a legitimate argument to make. But there is no reality where just as many low wage workers get hired at $10, $15, and $20/hour. It's obvious on it's face that over any given period more businesses would take on more low wage workers at $10/hour than they would at $20/hour. When you increase the minimum wage you leave some low wage workers without jobs and worse off. An intellectually honest proponent of increasing the minimum wage should be able to maintain their position while still understanding and accepting this fact.
I'm in agreement with this "Red Wave" notion; the swings in that graph are all over the place, and who knows if 2022 will hold up to the numbers? Remember the hopes around the Blue Wave for the 2020 election, which didn't eventuate, and even the Blue Wave of 2018 is a mixed result, depending on what sources you look at - either it "crushed" Republicans, or the Democrats won the House but the Republicans maintained control of the Senate, so things were liable to deadlock.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans did make gains, win seats back and even flip some seats, but that tends to happen with all mid-term elections for all parties, where the opposition makes gains as the party in power fail to deliver on all the shiny election promises.
18. Another possible confounder, different from what McConway and Strain brought up:
Let's say, hypothetically, there's a general factor that makes some people more prone to psychosomatic illnesses. That would make those same people more prone to thinking they have long covid. But it would also make them more prone to incorrectly think that they had Covid. And this association would be because of that general factor, rather than because of beliefs about their illness per se.
I.e.: "People who think they had covid, but did not actually have covid" is probably a very different population from people who have had covid. And I think that makes it even more difficult to compare them.
On 33, my niece had a gut parasite infection and didn't know it. One day she craved hot peppers, and the next day she excreted dead parasites in her feces. So maybe we like spicy food for the anti-parasite properties.
I was thinking something similar - "these are literally insecticidal compounds, it makes sense that they wouldn't work on bacteria, but what about worms?"
Scott, to the extent you are comfortable sharing, I'd like to hear about the habits that support your productivity and how they have evolved over time. For example: do you prefer to work from home, an office, cafe, library? Different locations for different tasks? Desk or comfy couch? Laptop or battlestation? How do you plan/structure your work sessions? Do you find it difficult to focus your attention on your goals, or does it generally feel easy/fun? How do you employ nutrition, caffeine, and exercise? How do you organize your thoughts and notes? How do you avoid getting endlessly distracted and de-focused by the firehose of time sinks online (e.g. Twitter)?
Some people have *very* severe symptoms from covid -- including death. Others have mild symptoms. Others have none.
Does anyone know: is the severity consistent for a single individual?
As in: I had covid. It was like a cold (but lasted a little longer) and I temporarily lost my sense of smell. No *serious* symptoms at all. If I get covid again, should I expect the same severity (or less)? Or is it a crapshoot every time?
I'm triple-vaccinated. I wear a mask when appropriate. I'm doing what I can to help end things. But I want to know how much I should fear actually getting it myself *again*.
Anecdata says that reactions to vaccines are correlated with each other and with COVID symptoms (in the few people I know who had COVID and then the vaccine). This suggests, but certainly doesn't prove, that COVID symptoms might be correlated for the same person.
On 21, University of Austin: I'm sympathetic to the stated goal, but I don't think they have much chance of success.
Building new universities ex nihilo is *hard*, and it's become pretty much a lost art in the United States over the past fifty years. We can build new community colleges (or their for-profit equivalent), or expand existing university systems, but how many successful new universities have there been in the past half-century? It's not just a matter of buying a building and hiring a bunch of teachers; that's what all the for-profit universities did, and they got results ranging from outright fraud too mediocre. There's too many mismatched incentives that need to be somehow aligned, and network effects that need to be put in place.
Maybe someone can do that. But, given the role that incentive alignment and network effects are going to play, anyone who can do that has to know that their first impression is going to be critical. So they're going to want to come out with something that is as close as possible to a working university, and as detailed a plan as they can come up with for the rest. At very least, a mission statement that will inspire confidence that they'll get the hard parts right, and a group of people with a solid reputation for institution-building.
This group, has none of that. About all they've got is a mission statement that is mostly generic pablum plus "we're totally Not Woke and we're going to be the antidote to Academic Wokeness!"
Which, as you note, is going to make them the Voat to traditional academia's Reddit.
I assume they are collecting whatever non-woke & anti-woke (including right-wing) scholars are left in the academia, as well as calling out those who've been out of the scene because of wokeness.
I'm certain that's what they want to do, but pulling it off will be a challenge. The unwoke scholars left in academia, are still in academia for a reason. That reason is unlikely to be served by signing on to what will look to them like a very dubious school that is more likely to tarnish their reputation than to provide them a comfortable new academic home. And the ones who have been out of the scene because of the wokeness, will be hard to distinguish from the ones who have been out of the scene due to their own lack of talent.
You only need a few big-name scholars, and that only in fields were that kind of thing really counts, like law or maybe business. For most of your instructors, you just need good teacher-scholars, and I would not be surprised if you could actually hire those among the young recently degreed *more* easily if you said stuff like "Hey, you know that Diversity & Inclusion statement over which you've been sweating? We don't give a shit! If you've published 3 papers in first-rank journals and you know how to run a lab, come on over."
If that's the *only* difference, yeah. If you throw in, "...and if you don't care about your professional reputation, which will be trashed worse than it would if you were at Liberty U, and if you don't care that your grad students will care more about Pwning the Libs than studying math and proper lab technique", then most of them will hold their nose and sign the DEI statement. Even a small chance of that will weigh more than a tiresome DEI statement for most "teacher-scholars". And most students.
You need to establish credibility as a Real University if you want real scholars to sign on, and you need to establish that credibility before you've done any real scholarship. That's where making a solid first impression is important, and that first impression has to be centered on scholarship, not anti-wokeness.
The youngest "real" university that most people here have heard of is Evergreen State College (chartered 1967, first classes held 1971, *just* outside the "past fifty years" mark), and you've heard of them for all the wrong reasons.
Well regarded in what sense? Matt Groening parodied Evergreen State College in Futurama about a decade ago - "Your degree is from Evergreen State College? Get a real degree!" Seattle's Almost Live ridiculed Evergreen State on a regular basis, as well - "Because even burnouts need a degree!"
I would at least nominate UC Merced (2005), though I guess that's kind of an edge case (one campus of a larger system, and how many people have actually heard of it?)
Yeah, it's about the best example of "let's form a new university in the post-1971 United States" you can find, and it's not a *bad* example. The UATX crowd would be doing the world at least a small favor if they manage to create a conspicuously non-woke school of that stature. But Merced did benefit from being created as a part of the existing UC system, and I'd really rather see an example of someone having done such a thing from scratch.
Bret and Heather have talked about how great Evergreen was for freedom and initiative (for example, a professor could design a full-time course that lasted a semester).
And then there was a little too much freedom and initiative.
I'll add that I think Benjamin Boyce is a very good interviewer and a credit to Evergreen.
"how many successful new universities have there been in the past half-century?"
I haven't got any numbers on that, but there is one recent university foundation which seems to have succeeded in getting founded, getting students, and getting accredited, and surviving to date, Ave Maria University:
"Ave Maria University (AMU) is a private Catholic university in Ave Maria, Florida. Ave Maria University shares its history with the former Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which was founded in 1998 and closed in 2007. The school was founded by Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza.
Ave Maria University currently offers 33 undergraduate and three graduate degrees. Graduate programs include M.A. and Ph.D. studies in Theology and a Master of Theological Studies for non-traditional students. Undergraduate students must complete a core curriculum of 14 required courses in philosophy, theology, composition, science, math, history, political science, and a foreign language.
In 2012 U.S. News & World Report reported that the university had a student–teacher ratio of 12:1, with 696 undergraduate students paying an average of $19,440 in tuition and fees for the school year 2011–2012, with some also paying $8,350 for a dorm room and meals. The university's rating was in "Tier 2", below 178 other American colleges ranked in "Tier 1".
In 2015, College Factual ranked Ave Maria University as a Top 10 college in the state of Florida. In December 2015, The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools renewed Ave Maria University's accreditation.
Law school
Although they were both established by Monaghan, the Ave Maria School of Law and Ave Maria University are separate entities. The Ave Maria School of Law is controlled by a board that is independent of AMU. Ave Maria School of Law is a fully American Bar Association-accredited Catholic law school, located on a campus in Naples, Florida. It has a current enrollment of 375 students and offers a Juris Doctor (J.D.) program.
After receiving accreditation in 2005, the law school was moved by Monaghan from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the north side of Naples, Florida. Many students chose not to continue their studies, and the school's high ranking with U.S. News & World Report dropped dramatically, down to the lowest ranked level (tier 4) from 2008 to 2011, then failing to achieve any ranking in 2012. In 2014, the law school regained its tier 4 position.
Accreditation
In June 2010, the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) declared that Ave Maria had obtained "accredited membership" status. This allows the university to award bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees accredited by the SACS. The university had previously received full accreditation from the American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) in June 2008. On October 7, 2011, the local ordinary, Bishop Frank Joseph Dewane, formally recognized the institution as a Catholic university pursuant to the code of canon law. In December 2015, The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools reaffirmed Ave Maria University's accreditation."
I was extremely sceptical when I heard about this whole project - the university and the corresponding planned community - back when it was mooted, I expected the entire project to crash and burn, but they seem to be doing okay so far.
So it is doable, but you do probably need some very deep pockets, and someone bull-headed with a clear vision of what it is they want, to make it happen.
I think the best - and maybe the only - way to build a university from scratch is to start with a research institute - basically focusing on the "creating knowledge" part of the university. Then you can slowly expand to PhD students, then graduates, then undergrads as you gain recognition both in the research community ("This guy and this guy works at "New University" so it must be great" becoming "I could refer my student who wants to do a PhD to this guy at New University and then "I should enroll as a graduate at New University".
Also having deep pockets and making tuition cheap should help...
Well, a major part of the difficulty is that college-age cohorts are steadily shrinking, and may be about to do so even faster. Plus information about colleges has become easier to find, and big colleges compete effectively everywhere better, what with the industrialization of the college-finding and college-application business. As a consequence, small regional colleges are finding themselves under brutal financial pressure and are suffering, kind of the way small bookstores are being driven out of business by Amazon and even B&N -- and this would most likely be even more true for a brand new college, which would necessarily have to start small.
This doesn't have all that much to do with global reputation, and I think that is weaker factor than people think. Sure, everyone would love to have a Harvard parchment, but for almost everybody that's just not possible, so people will be deciding based on reputation further down, where the sheer age and number of Nobelists is less important, where the presence of certain programs, or my uncle went there, or even I met someone at the local college fair and he seemed really cool and knowledgeable plays a role.
I don't think it would be super hard for a start-up college to do OK on those grounds, past a few years in, but...it's definitely hard when the eligible cohort is shrinking, when "local" isn't so local anyway, thanks to the Internet and communications flow generally, and when the established players have fine-tuned their ground game in the recruiting biz so well.
Yes so far they have managed to only hire three faculty fellows, only two with PhDs and neither a “big name”.
They may end up hiring only a few handful of faculty, none particularly prominent, from various fields with only common denominator that they left their previous places under not so great terms.
Ironically in such a case, the only major they will be qualified to offer is in “grievance studies”
Can I challenge you to explain your own position on climate change? I have had this reaction to your posts before - that you seem to buy into the mainstream concerns but have never explained your reasoning that I have seen. In that past I just thought "hey, no one can go through every topic" but since you denigrate Caplan's skepticism I feel like it is more important. I think your opinion is unfair without showing your own reasons for supporting it. His point that disasters are very rare and most fear-mongering doesn't come true has way more common sense / outside view support than just that his opponents are left wingers.
Just from objections that require no discussion of the technical evidence, you can look at 1) there was previously a movement of climate alarmism regarding global cooling, which turned out to be bogus but was otherwise extremely similar in terms of its supporting coalition, goals to control economic policy/resources, etc; 2) climate messaging predicting disaster have been vastly over-exaggerated, with many claims of "world over in 2010/2015/2020 if no action", and many different climate models being run and being used as the basis for alarmism, with most ultimately being quite inaccurate and the others being subject to survivor bias. Both of these factors decrease the probability that the models actually know what they are talking about and can be trusted which is exactly what Caplan was saying; 3) Warm weather being a clear positive to the proliferation of life that we currently observe on Earth, which spans a far larger temperature range than even the most drastic climate change; etc. Why is your prior so strong that the climate change fears are real, that you call out someone who is skeptical without discussion?
"since it’s by left-wingers it’s probably biased in some hard-to-detect way and he can ignore it"
I'm not sure on my quick reading whether this is a totally fair reading of Caplan's position, but it seems plausibly so, and you don't have to have a view on the underlying subject to believe that this is a bad argument by Caplan.
Thanks for the reply! When I read Caplan's position it seemed more that he had a very low prior on severe disaster that could affect all of humanity. The authors being left-wing was one small piece of evidence that they were motivated by something other than reason, i.e. politics since this cause is a hobby horse of their political faction, which is why he is not updating after reading their arguments. Scott treating Caplan as obviously wrong because he has a very different prior than Scott rubbed me the wrong way (as someone who is closer to Caplan). To me it seems like an excellent argument of exactly the type Scott typically responds to which is what motivated me to comment!
And on that post you linked, I did see that and it seems like Scott is just accepting the consensus position (just like he did on the Caplan post) and then arguing from that. I am interested to know why Scott supports the consensus position - it seems to me (non-expert) as the classic unexamined opinion that he loves to skewer on this blog. There is a ton of very detailed reasoning out there arguing that it is way overblown and I would love to see Scott truly engage. Fingers crossed for a deep dive from him.
I don't think global cooling was ever as widely supported as global warming is now. A better comparison would be the population scare of the sixties. It had a very similar pattern — people insisting that everyone competent agreed on the terrible threat, and Julian Simon was experimental error. And that one we now know was wrong. We don't know if population growth was on net good or bad, but we know that it wasn't as bad as fast as was being claimed, since population continued to grow in poor countries and they got richer and better nourished rather than the opposite.
Also, most of the dated predictions were in the form not of "the world will end by 2010 if we don't do anything" but "If we don't do anything by 2010 it will be too late to prevent the world from eventually ending (more realistically, very bad things happening) due to climate change." We can't know that is true. But we can know that the people who made such predictions didn't stop arguing for action against climate change after their deadline passed, which is pretty good evidence that they didn't actually believe what they were saying.
The thing is, the population growth scare was also fake news. It wasn't actually supported by science - in fact, a lot of scientists pushed back against it as a narrative. That population growth was going to happen was known, but the idea of disasterous effects? Those weren't scientific at all.
There's a doomsday cult that latches onto current issues and tries to make them out to be The End of the World As We Know It.
As someone who remembers the 1970s, I see the disastrous effects of population growth in the United States every day. Obviously more a quality of life issue than existential threat to our existence, but still...
Other than Julian Simon, what scientists were pushing back against the claim that population growth would have large negative effects? I don't think my piece got much attention. My impression at the time was that Ehrlich's views were more extreme than most but well within the Overton Window and that Simon's weren't.
My primary objection to Scott's fear-mongering ("Millions of people will die..") is that climate related mortality has been falling ever since it was first measured i.e. throughout the last hundred years. Which, amazingly, overlaps with the one degree rise in temperatures.
Other than that, my gripe would be that contrary to every other subject, Scott seems to get his information from hysterics who write for Vox or the Guardian. If he actually read the IPCC reports - tedious as they are - he'd know that the predicted impact of climate change (compared to other things like technological, demographic and political changes) is "Small".
> My primary objection to Scott's fear-mongering ("Millions of people will die..") is that climate related mortality has been falling ever since it was first measured i.e. throughout the last hundred years
Depends on how you count it. If Syrian civil war (or future war) is even partially caused by climate change then assigning relevant proportion of deaths there would change it drastically.
Also, note that "Millions of people will die.." prediction for the next century means 'only' that more than 10 000 people will die each year as result of that.
For comparison, there are about 800 000 suicide deaths each year and 1 200 000 people killed by cars and other vehicles, 10 000 000 due to cancers ( https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death ).
Global cooling was a media thing. It is a standard example of "ignorant journalists blowing up something that is stupid and fringe into a big thing temporarily". It's literal fake news.
People have known about global warming since the late 19th century, and it has been observable since the 1970s.
The reason is quite simple - the greenhouse effect arises from obvious real-world physical things and people observed that we were burning a bunch of fossil fuels, which was probably going to increase atmospheric CO2 (which was later determined to be correct - the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up significantly).
As it is fairly trivial to prove that CO2 can trap heat by absorbing and re-emitting infrared "light", it was obvious that this was going to lead to some amount of global warming, barring some countervailing process that they weren't aware of in the late 19th century.
As it turns out, there is no sufficiently countervailing process, so global temperatures have been going up for the last century or so.
IRL, the actual good consensus models have been very close to correct overall on global warming. The extreme ones are often posted and pushed for political reasons; the actual scientific consensus on projected warming has actually been very close to the actual trend there.
The actual scientific consensus on global warming is that it is a problem. We don't know most of what it will actually *do* with much confidence; for instance, our predictions on hurricanes is poor because there's no actual net trend in hurricanes from the pre-satellite era once you adjust for hurricanes we would not have observed, and there are countervailing factors against hurricanes that are increased by global warming (wind shear) as well as factors which promote hurricanes (warmer water and air has more energy and can hold more precipitation).
We know that:
* Global warming will increase temperatures.
* Higher temperatures will increase dessication of land and plants, which, combined with changes in rainfall patterns, will cause increased desertification in some places (though which particular places will suffer from this is moderate to low confidence)
* Precipitation will increase overall, but how it will change locally will vary significantly (high degree of confidence on increase in preciptation, but moderate to low on how it will affect any particular region)
* Global warming will increase the overall arable land in the northern hemisphere
* Global warming will gradually melt the ice caps and expand the oceans a bit; the ice caps totally melting will take centuries to millennia, but we will see somewhere between a couple feet and a couple meters of sea level rise by 2100 - hardly the super apocalyptic scenario
* Higher CO2 concentration in the ocean will affect the ocean's pH; very high confidence on this, but moderate to low confidence on how it will impact any particular species.
* Heat waves will be a bit worse but winters won't be as bad overall in terms of low temperatures (high confidence), but we might see some worse storms during the winter due to increased precipitation
A lot of other stuff is way more vague.
In the long run - say hundreds to thousands of years - sea level rise will be the most problematic issue. But it isn't a huge proximate issue for countries like the US, though for very low-lying countries, it is a big deal (hence why island countries are freaking out over this).
The weather stuff is more of a proximate issue but the degree of the problems involved is very fuzzy, but it's definitely not "end of the world" apocalyptic, more "increased damage costing us money". Some effects are obvious (worse heat waves are directly caused by higher temperatures, more precipitation due to more evaporation due to higher temperatures) but how that affects any particular location is much more vague.
Thanks for your reply! We agree on the facts - I don't disagree with any of your points. I would add that "increased CO2 in atmosphere causes plants to grow faster, thereby increasing harvest per unit land" and "negative feedback loops are already known" (greenhouse effect is proportional to log CO2, not linear CO2, so each marginal unit of CO2 released is less of a concern; higher CO2 leads to greater plant growth increasing the speed at which CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere).
So given those agreed upon facts... you say "The actual scientific consensus on global warming is that it is a problem". Why is it a problem? That is what I am hoping Scott would address rather than taking it for granted when arguing against Caplan. Personally I see several negatives (sea level rise, dessication in certain areas) and several positives (increased arable land, increased harvest per unit land, increased precipitation in some areas). The net impact could easily be positive and it certainly isn't a disaster that would justify remaking large portions of the economy. Or at least, that is my opinion, I think that Caplan's skepticism is reasonable given these facts (even if he did not cite them directly), and I wish Scott would state why he disagrees and sees global warming as a large issue if he is going to dismiss Caplan out of hand.
It's a problem mostly because it is disruptive and because it makes it easier for parasites to survive over the winter in a number of temperate zones. Overall it is probably a net benefit to agriculture but is not so good for ocean stuff as the changes to acidity are not good.
Melting the ice caps - which would take a long time - WOULD be a huge deal, but it's not a problem that will manifest itself within any sort of reasonable time span for most places.
Also, while there are feedback loops, plants don't actually really "remove" CO2 so much as temporarily sequester it, and unless we add significant amount of forest globally (which probably isn't very likely) it won't really affect net CO2 much so much as decrease our harvest cycle length. The carbon in question is still part of the carbon cycle, so you reach a new equilibrium state at a higher CO2 level until the long-term processes remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere.
Everything is more complicated, but honestly, it's pretty simple.
Humans burning fossil fuels puts a lot of ancient sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere.
This is happening at a much faster rate than carbon is naturally sequestered, resulting in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to rise significantly.
This is what causes global warming, as CO2 scatters infrared light and thus ends up causing the Earth to radiate less energy into space, resulting in a higher homeostatic temperature on the surface.
This has a variety of effects, some good, some bad, but it also represents a change from how things are, and that incurs certain costs.
Plants do not sequester CO2 unless they are in some way removed from the biosphere, such as, for instance, by being buried under silt or something similar that prevents them from decaying and releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
No, it's not simple at all, sorry. That's why there has been considerable debate about it for the past 100 years, among very smart people. I grant you that it can be cartoonized for presentation in a pamphlet, but I don't see how that's relevant. You can simplify any complex issue into baby talk while preserving some essential truth. And so?
Climate change and the human influence in it, or even just the question of what rising CO2 does to the climate, is one of the most complex issues that human beings have ever tried to understand, which is why it is taking so long, costing so much, and engendering so much debate.
I agree with most of what you say, although you might have mentioned a decrease in the total number of tropical cyclones predicted, although an increase in strength. Two points were I disagree:
"* Higher temperatures will increase dessication of land and plants, which, combined with changes in rainfall patterns, will cause increased desertification in some places (though which particular places will suffer from this is moderate to low confidence)"
CO2 fertilization reduces the need of plants for water, which may more than compensate for reduced water. Note that the figure on drought in the SPM of the latest report ignores this. We know that, so far, the planet has been greening, presumably due to that effect, which suggests the opposite of net desertification.
"(hence why island countries are freaking out over this)"
I interpret the motive as to get rich countries to give them money. Have any island countries actually changed their own behavior, for instance stopped investing in development that would be worthless if the island was flooded via SLR.
One of my favorite quotes from an earlier IPCC report:
"Some low-lying developing countries and small island states are expected to face very high impacts that, in some cases, could have associated damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of GDP."
Contrast the magnitude of that with the talk about flooded islands and millions of refugees.
> CO2 fertilization reduces the need of plants for water, which may more than compensate for reduced water.
The problem isn't "reduced water", it's a higher rate of evaporation, resulting in the dry being more dry. More variation in this is not a good thing, even if the average is the same overall (or even if there is MORE water overall).
The main issue isn't crops (which will probably see better growth rates overall), it's increased risk of wildfires.
> I interpret the motive as to get rich countries to give them money. Have any island countries actually changed their own behavior, for instance stopped investing in development that would be worthless if the island was flooded via SLR.
Kiribati bought land in Fiji that they can potentially relocate to, if worst comes to worst and the islands become uninhabitable. In fact, their president (now former president) suggested that people start leaving the islands now and moving elsewhere because the amount of land (and fresh water) is going down even as the population goes up, and it is better to move sooner and in an orderly fashion than later and be screwed.
The Marshal Islands are also pursuing options of buying land elsewhere for relocation.
Some of it is definitely begging for money, but some of them are putting their money where their mouth is.
Honestly, though, I think most of those very low-lying countries are probably doomed regardless.
"The problem isn't "reduced water", it's a higher rate of evaporation, resulting in the dry being more dry."
What matters for fires isn't dry ground it's dry plants; dirt doesn't burn. If you reduce the moisture available to the plant by 10% and the plant's need for moisture by 20% — because more CO2 means the plant doesn't have to pass as much air through its leaves to get the carbon it needs, which means less evaporation — the plant ends up less dry and less inflammable. So it's the balance between less moisture and less need for moisture that matters.
Possibly. What is your reason for believing that? I've also seen the claim that the problem is that restrictions on logging have let more inflammable material accumulate.
I don't think the hypothesis that rising CO2 levels leads to rising global mean temperatures is nearly as simple as "CO2 absorbs in the IR." If nothing else, it's well known that the strong absorption IR bands of CO2 are fully saturated at pre-industrial CO2 levels, with an optical depth well below 1km. As I understand it, the proposed mechanism is much more subtle, and relies on the temperature being much lower at the altitudes at which atmospheric CO2 becomes optically thin so e.g. if that altitude is raised (by increasing CO2 concentration) then the temperature is lower and Wien's Law tells us energy radiated to space will be less.
The reason why adding more CO2 increases the greenhouse effect is the same reason why throwing on two blankets will give you better insulation than just one: the heat has to escape both the inner and outer blankets to escape.
CO2 doesn't just absorb IR, it also emits it via black body radiation, the same as anything else. This is then reabsorbed by other CO2, which then re-emits it, etc.
The more CO2 is in the atmosphere, the more times this happens, making it harder for that energy to escape from the atmosphere because there's more CO2 it has to go through.
If that was caplan's reason, then why did he even bother to read the book? clearly he thought he would be able to find a flaw and gotcha the author. that he couldnt is at least evidence for me, even if it is not for caplan
To win a bet :) Put it differently: if he refused to read, wouldn't people say now that it wasn't fair?
Anyways, he had a decent reason to read it: the author may have been capable to describe a reasoning chain that would convince him. That's, after all, the best way of updating on evidence. As it was they couldn't do that, not due to any fault of theirs but simply because the subject is too complex. Which explains both why he was sure he'll win and why he won.
"the author may have been capable to describe a reasoning chain that would convince him."
The post made it sound like he was just looking for a reasoning chain that he could refute, and couldn't find one, so just said he doesn't believe anything from the guy who wrote it.
You are saying Scott's post does not conform to his comment policy? Isn't everybody ok with Scott using probabilistic reasoning and not only saying things >99% true? He has a whole monday post every week on this.
> While it’s true that there are many biased people out there, and some of them make strong arguments, I also notice this is a fully general excuse for never changing your mind in response to anything, however convincing it would be otherwise. Seems bad.
Maybe it sounds that way if you willfully blind yourself to the twelve trillion ways the left lies to us every day.
At what point does the burden shift, such that I am no longer obligated to assume that people who hate me always speak truly, and the left has to maybe give some token investment in honesty before we give them a moment of our time?
More generally/neutrally: at what point does an organization become so corrupt that it is acceptable to act irrationally towards them, in order to extort them into acting better?
I asked Substack, they said they added a feature for me to ban accounts by name and words used, I am still trying to find the feature they added. If I can't do it soon, I'll bother them again.
The bounding on climate change isn't really a surprise; we've actually known for a good while that the higher scenarios were implausible and required implausible rates of warming. People were way too accepting of those higher scenarios as plausible.
And yes, lying to people about how climate change is the end of the world is awful. It's really the same sort of thing that we saw back in the day with things like The Population Bomb and Future Shock, which were similar nonsense.
"We've actually known for a good while" - are you denying The Science (genuflect in awe at the sacred name), you science-denier climate change denialist????? 😀
The science has been pretty clear on the potential range of global warming for some time now, honestly. Most of the scenarios were known to be implausible simply based on real world emissions and warming data. It's been pretty clear what path we're on, some people just don't want to admit that because there's much more disaster porn with the higher warming scenarios.
There's literally an apocalyptic cult that has been claiming that the world would experience catastrophe in the near, imminent future. They latch onto current issues and then claim they will cause the downfall of civilization.
That doesn't mean that these aren't real issues - it's just that these groups latch onto these real world issues and shriek about them and claim it is the end of the world when in fact they are not.
The Population Bomb and Future Shock are the same sort of apocalyptic literature and failed predictions from this same group.
I'd include 'Limits to growth' in that group. I think it's a little like Scott's lizardman constant but in the form of a hysterics one. There's a certain proportion of people who will look into the future and (because it is dark and uncertain) fill it with fearful imaginings.
This is a constant but is multiplied by the amount of free time people have for their worrying. As the Chinese saying has it "No food on the table, only one problem. Food on the table, many problems".
Hysteria has space to propagate when we're comfortable, fed and secure enough to find dark places to peer into.
I am not sure that I disagree with you generally, but saying, "it is clear what path we are on," seems problematic. We are continuously narrowing the range of possible outcomes (in terms of temperature) and coming to better understand the likely ramifications associated with them. I agree that the most pessimistic were probably based on absurd assumptions. Presumably though, so were the most optimistic, no?
Not really. There's really only one "tier" of "prediction" below the real path, but that was for a low emissions scenario that no one thought was realistic, just like, "what if everyone reduced emissions by a bunch, what would it look like?"
I don't follow how that is different from what I said. Are you saying that pessimistic and optimistic are asymmetrical because "nobody thought [optimstic] was realistic"? Who's "nobody"? Presumably the scientists doing the predicting did. Anyone who trusted the scientists doing the predicting did as well.
They didn't think it was realistic, actually. They were generated as parts of sets.
I don't think you quite understand how these things are created.
Basically, you create a model based on various assumptions. The various "scenarios" were putting in different sets of assumptions.
Like, there are models where people stop emitting carbon entirely, and we look at what warming would still happen anyway. That is obviously unrealistic, but it doesn't mean it doesn't get modelled to get a better understanding.
If I could ban one thing forever from online discourse, it would be mocking your opponents by declaring that Everyone Must Bow Before Their Most Holy Strawman.
I have to say, three aspects of this broader social trend make me grind my teeth:
1. The intrusion of tribalism into my cherished backwater supposedly safe from same. I went *into* science to *avoid* the bullshit primate poo-flinging aspects of most other fields of human endeavor. Christ, is no place safe? If this was to be part of my professional identity, I could've just skipped a lot of years of eating Ramen and gone into business or the law. Bah. There should be some refuge for those who dislike primate status games.
2. The gross failure to acknowledge the key role of skepticism *in* science. The big reason "science" has the reputation for reliability it does is because for centuries scientists have held to the principle of deep empirical skepticism.
You tell me Herr Professor Doktor Graf von Hoightytoighty, FRS, science advisor to the Emperor Napoleon himself, has proven Unlikely Hypothesis X in a paper published in Nature, peer-reviewed by a hundred sages with measured IQs over 150, and I, as a schmo from nowhere, say "Oh very interesting. Let's see the data."
That complete indifference to authority and consensus is understood and accepted to be the ideal norm in empirical science. Nobody believes anything unless he sees the data, and he can (if he chooses) reproduce the experiment for himself. And only *because* of this extreme internal skepticism has it been the case for two centuries or so that when science finally says "here, we think this is true" you can take it to the bank. On what logically self-consistent grounds, then, can we condemn anyone else for practicing the very foundation of our business?
There's certainly a line between skepticism and being a crank, to be sure, and that line is worth thinking about (and arguing about). But only a complete nimrod would deny the existence of the line per se, by saying that being skeptical about the received wisdom is somehow automatically beyond the pale. It may or may not be, but it has to be argued, it can't be assumed.
3. The general failure to make distinctions of degree. Doubt that humans are changing the climate is not in the same category as doubt that COVID vaccines work which is not in the same category as thinking the Apollo landing was faked or it's possible to build a perpetual motion machine. At one end we have the skepticism that is central to science itself (vide supra), while at the other end we have fruitcakery. But it's very important to make distinctions, and *not* lump everyone to the right or left of your preferred sense/non dividing line into the same category.
I feel like this has savage social costs. You tell everyone that doubting global warming is essentialy the same as doubting the Second Law, and suddenly *they* see no downside to the latter. Why not? If I'm to be labeled as a troglodyte by the fancy crowd no matter what, I stop caring about that. Maybe vaccines *do* cause autism -- after all, this idea is condemend by the same assholes who pissed on me for doubting the proposition that opposing a carbon tax is equivalent to gassing the Jews. Maybe all of mainstream medicine *is* a conspiracy to establish a permanent leak between the peasants' pockets and Big Pharma, and so it makes sense to treat this lump in my breast with magnetic bracelets and aromatherapy instead of the nasty pills that make me sick.
The fact that people really do complain about science denialism (which is not surprising, since people do in fact deny science facts as well-established as the earth being round) does not make your post any less obnoxious. "Genuflect in awe at the sacred name of Science" is cheap mockery that doesn't belong on this site. You might as well have said "Global warming alarmists are religious fanatics! Lol!"
If hysteria cannot even be lightly mocked, then indeed we have reached the pitch of religion.
And given that I'm a Christian, who gets told constantly to lighten up when jokes about sacred concepts are made, and the name of whose revered founder is used as a common swear word or curse - "Jesus!" "Christ's sake!" "Jesus fucking Christ!" (or have you never seen the 'JFC' acronym used online?), "Christ on a crutch" and so forth - the holy name we are never to use without bowing our heads in reverence - then I have very little sympathy for secular claims on reverence to the very fountain of "no sacred cows, scepticism is our highest value, question everything, no appeals to authority".
If you can't stand hearing fun poked at the zealots, who trot out the entire line about "if you question any fragment of the catastrophic picture painted by exaggerated newspaper headlines then you are guilty of the crime and sin of science denialism", then I suggest you put cotton wool in your ears.
I'm not mocking science, I am mocking the Golden Calf some have made with its name slapped on.
But with the lives of legends, there is always a license to produce yet another interpretation. In Galileo and the Science Deniers, astrophysicist Mario Livio has invoked that license to tell Galileo’s story once more, this time with a particular concern for Galileo’s relevance to science today (and the impediments to its acceptance). “In a world of governmental antiscience attitudes with science deniers at key positions,” Livio writes, “Galileo’s tale serves … as a potent reminder of the importance of freedom of thought.”
...In Livio’s view, today’s deniers of climate change science or the validity of evolutionary theory are comparable to the religious opponents of Galileo’s scientific views, particularly his insistence on the motion of the Earth around the sun. Serving that end, the book is not an in-depth biography as much as a summary of Galileo’s life and science, plus a thorough recounting of the events leading up to his famous trial. Livio plays the role of a highly capable legal commentator in analyzing the issues raised during the trial, including discussion of the questionable tactics by the prosecution and Galileo’s not always effective defense."
Complete, of course, with "The big bad Church covered up the truth":
"Livio’s account of this well-known story is enhanced by insights drawn from more recent scholarship, including the discovery in 1998 of a letter written during the trial suggesting that a plea bargain might have been considered. Of particular interest is Livio’s account of a Galileo biography written by Pio Paschini, commissioned in the 1940s by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, supposedly to explain how the Catholic Church had not really persecuted Galileo, but helped him. Instead, Paschini’s manuscript told the truth, so the church refused to publish it. In the 1960s, after Paschini’s death, the church relented, authorizing publication — but only after revisions that bowdlerized the original version to portray the church in a more favorable light."
And we have an entire Twitter devoted to fighting the good fight against "climate deniers"
If I could ban one thing from online discourse, it would be the assumption that one can know the subconscious motivations of millions of people one doesn't know and doesn't like.
Their first response was someone whose initials were "HA", which the person replying thought was them laughing at them "ha ha". The second response was someone with initials "BS", which can remind the cruder-minded of us as "bullshit".
So the nominative determinism is "you end up working for a company which laughs scornfully at its customers around privacy issues and spins a line of corporate blah in disregard, and this company requires you to sign off on messages with your initials, which fortuitously signal the derision and the verbiage in question".
Let me have a look at the political elements of these links:
8) I guess this can be explained by seeing wokeness and its discontents as a dialectics:
Trumpist national conservatism -> Democrat & woke opposition -> Trumpist reaction
The growth of wokeness in the last 5 years is mainly the effect of Democrat & Democrat-adjacent political mobilization, which is the cumulation of American identitarian trends since the 90s. There's a component of falling into the official #Resistance line as well, that has eased when the sponsors of such ideological trends are in office.
15) I'm not sure if these can come online before the current global energy crunch (part of which is self-inflicted) deteriorates into a terminal situation.
16) There are enough studies showing how Vitamin D supplements, in dosages well above the official prescription, is a sufficient immunity booster that works for most pathogens. Antivaxxers claim that such preventative treatments are suppressed in favor of allopathic treatments which enables Big Pharma rent-seeking, and the incentives are there for this to be true without negating the importance of cures or vaccinations.
17) I read from the HBD crowd that the general level of intelligence (IQ) is largely consistent across time & ethnic groups, which points to a biological explanation of education attainment. That implies expanding education -> title inflation. So a reshuffling of who gets what kind of education will tremendously help.
19) I don't think China needs, or will ever be, high-income. After all, at its height (Song & Ming eras) China was upper-middle income relative to the most developed parts of the world at that time. The main economic goals of CCP are simply a moderately prosperous (i.e. lower middle-class) society, developing a large productive base as an economic power, and reaching technological frontiers. On the other hand, much of the gap between China & the developed world should be financialized services that add little to real production.
24) I think instead of RINOs, a Trumpist faction will seize power after the electoral victories and revenge their leader's ouster. Both sides have radicalized, they both think in terms of "oppress or be oppressed", and everyone caught in the middle suffer.
I read the old institutional bifurcation essay and our hosts know it is coming. But he probably underestimates the willingness of right-wing institutions to totally root out the "neutral" part, the old institutions that have shifted left, and to build an explicitly right-wing edifice, all those with the end goal of eliminating anything slightly to the left of far-right physically. In a way, Traditional Conservatives & Fascists will win the cultural war by sheer force and domination.
> Antivaxxers claim that such preventative treatments are suppressed in favor of allopathic treatments which enables Big Pharma rent-seeking, and the incentives are there for this to be true without negating the importance of cures or vaccinations.
Ech, Big Pharma would have no problem from benefiting from both (see fish oil posts on SSC).
Deliberate suppression of effective preventive therapy seems like weird combination of ultra-malicious and forward thinking altruism. It is not like some CEO will last for decades to get benefit from more ill people.
Though I 100% expect that they neglect promoting effective ones.
Does this say anything about in what proportions long COVID may be physiological or psychosomatic? It could be 10% due to blood cells and 90% due to nocebo.
My pet theory is the statue paint jobs are the same phenomenon as our reconstructions of with dinosaurs that look like grey shrink-wrapped muscle and bone, as the images of modern animals 'reconstructed' with that method demonstrate. Soft tissue doesn't fossilise, feathers and pigments usually don't either, and so dinosaurs could have had all kinds of crazy body features. But we can't say with confidence that they definitely did have any specific features, so artists are scared to draw them with features that aren't well supported by scientific evidence. Being unwilling to take a guess at something that could be right results in an impression that definitely isn't right. Because 'not speculating' isn't actually an option. Like a police sketch artist saying "Suspect was wearing a hat so we don't know the hair colour, so to avoid speculating I've drawn him as bald".
But yeah I bet we only have direct evidence of the base coat of paint that was directly in contact with the statue. Layers adding detail and shading would be added on top, but all we have evidence for is the base coat, so artists who "don't want to speculate" hypothesise absurd base-coat-only paint jobs.
1. You might not get dementia but you will die of renal failure
2. You will wish you had dementia - the capsules smell and taste so extremely nasty you would do anything to forget them! The likelihood of graft versus host disease was preferable to continued consumption, so I was very, very happy when I could finally stop them.
Did you know we have (I think it's up to) seven Berlin patients at this point and that the immune dynamics of bone transplants are super sex sensitive? Receiving male bone marrow increases your chance of cancer returning but decreases your chance of graft versus host if you're dude, and if you're a woman - just try to get female bone marrow.
All the people who took IL6 inhibitors for COVID didn't report an alleviation in depression (lol the major confounding factor there being almost dying) and that's a pretty hyped up field right now in neuroimmunology. The IL6 inhibitor they took doesn't cross the blood brain barrier though, but neither does cyclosporine? I know IL6 is actively produced on both sides the BBB and is able to transport in either direction.
The people who are like "stop brain inflammation, solve everything" kind of remind me of Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF who gave that ted talk on insulin signaling that gave rise to an entire generation of proselytizing low-carb dieters who unintentionally simplified themselves to match her 959 cell model organism. You need insulin, you need cytokines. But perhaps not so much - a selective IL-6 blocker only active in the brain would be pretty jazzy.
The BBB being permeable to certain cytokines exacerbates permeability- had a cousin in Ireland almost die of anti-NMDAR which was preceded by six months of paranoid behavior. Also happens when people take checkpoint inhibitors for melanoma due to both skin and brain being ectoderm derived.
Scott Russo at Mt Sinai I think made an IL-6 KO mouse, right next to Rockefeller where they made leptin mouse which should totally be their taxidermized mascot to represent their amount of funding.
Thanks for joining me on this episode of typing into the void while avoiding deadlines.
Another weird factoid about stem cell donors (if female) is that the number of pregnancies they have had affects the chances of a recipient getting GVHD. I assume, with no evidence, that this is related to the number of kinds of circulating fetal cells that remain in a mother's bloodstream after pregnancy. You might just get some completely unmatched cells containing half their DNA from the father of one of her children.
Nonetheless, and even though enjoying my third episode of shingles this week (at least it's T2 and not S3 like last time!), I'm glad to be done with the cyclosporine!
That Cynthia Kenyon TED talk is pretty cringy. I wonder if the real intended audience was the Society of Si Valley Billionaires Who Want to Live Forever. They are known to give out research money.
I wonder if the Democrats worked so hard to paint the previous President as unPresidential, racist, sexist, corrupt and traitorous that they have, as an unintended consequence, lowered the bar of judgement for the current President?
The claim in 6 seems wrong, or at least drastically over-simplified. The current population of Herzegovina is ethnically Slavic, and the Slavs arrived in the 6th century (having been preceded by Illyrians, Celts and Germans), so conditions in the paleolithic can't be relevant. The linked article refers to "people of the Gravettian culture" being exceptionally tall, but the Gravettian culture stretched from Portugal to Russia. This could possibly explain why Europeans are tall (although more work would be required to show genetic continuity between Gravettian and modern populations), but it can't tell us anything about Herzegovinans specifically.
Today's Europeans are a mix of Paleolithic Europeans and people who came later, mostly the latter. IIRC, the Paleolithic blood is strongest in the Balkans and Scandinavia, and I assume that conclusion was made on the basis of DNA tests done on living people.
So if today's Herzegovinians are Slavs by blood, then it means that particular group of Slavs had a lot of Paleolithic ancestry. (Also, ethnic identity doesn't always match DNA as well as one might expect. There was a discussion on a previous thread about how Hungarians are ethnic Magyars (an Asian nomad tribe) but genetically pretty much like Germans.)
I expressed myself poorly. The population research was indeed done on living people; but there's a big distance between that data and the conclusion they apparently reached about the paleolithic ancestral lifestyle. That reasoning relied on a lot more than just DNA tests on living people.
I also expressed myself poorly. I read from another source (National Geographic, maybe?) that Paleolithic European blood is now strongest in the Balkans. It didn't mention height.
Modern population of Herzegovina has the lowest Slavic admixture of all Slavic nations. So it actually makes sense. Bear in mind that generally, a country speaking a certain language does not every ancestor of every individual spoke that language. What usually happened is that foreigners would impose their rule over the local population and so make the local populace slowly switch to the foreign language (which has high prestige). For example, most biological ancestors of the English aren't Germanic.
Indeed it makes no sense to describe prehistoric people as Slav, Germanic or whatever, since these terms are only meaningful as language-related descriptors. At the point that we can't say what language was spoken, we can't describe someone using a linguistic designation. And there's certainly no good reason to applodern ethnic designations to prehistoric populations.
#17 - San Francisco’s new math curriculum “delays Algebra 1 by one year and mandates all students to take the same set of courses sequentially from 8th to 10th grade.”
I would have been absolutely miserable, and demanded home schooling. My public high school’s willingness to allow advanced students to accelerate in math, English, and science, including offering free-to-me community college classes and self-study, was uncritically the best thing public school ever did for me. Probably saved me a semester of college and got a math minor on my degree too.
I agree with Scott, this appears to be part of a trend of lowering standards and claiming improvement when more people pass the lower standard (SFUSD got more people to pass Algebra 1 by dropping the requirement to pass a state competency test at the end, and got “more students enrolled in advanced math” by creating a new class and declaring it “advanced”, despite it not meeting the UC standards for such).
But also another disturbing trend, namely reducing “inequity” by eliminating opportunities for the talented to demonstrate and nurture their abilities. Real Harrison Bergeron crap.
UATX seems to involve a lot of people (e.g. Heather Heying, Kathleen Stock, Peter Boghossian) who have resigned from their universities because of criticism from students. I am curious to see how they hope to prevent the same sort of situation from happening at UATX.
I suppose they could try to apply some kind of ideological filter when accepting applicants. Maybe just by hiring lots of known conservatives, they can rely on their reputation to repel non-conservative students? But conservative students could someday conceivably want to protest something. What if the campus Christian Coalition or whatever decides to protest Boghossian's atheism, or demand Heying teach intelligent design in her evolutionary biology classes?
Perhaps they could create a school code of conduct which limits the amount or type of protesting that students are allowed to participate in? They could ban demonstrations altogether, since Stock regards students standing with signs as harassment. I'm not sure how restricting students' freedom of speech and assembly meshes with their whole "fearless pursuit of truth" slogan and their supposed commitment to Enlightenment liberalism. This also potentially creates the problem of alienating their customers - if students feel like their views are being stifled in the special University of Not Stifling Views, they'll just vote with their feet and go to a different university.
It seems pretty intractable if you ask me.
But also, it seems like if Stock, Boghossian, Heying, et. al. believed in ideas competing in the free marketplace of ideas, they would have, like, accepted the fact that some of their views were not competitive in that marketplace, instead of withdrawing and trying to create a new market where their views won't be subject to competition at all. I feel like founding an entire free speech university based on a hypocritical unwillingness to tolerate others' free speech is doomed from the outset because that's a contradiction that just can't be resolved.
But, who knows, maybe they'll square the circle on this one.
That could potentially be true for Boghossian (some students apparently filed a Title IX claim against him, which the university had to investigate, and apparently handled poorly), but not for Stock or Heying, at least, based on what they've said about the matter.
I don't know how much time you spend among the left, but the idea of "leftist groupthink" is sort of a contradiction in terms. The left is a Balkanized hellscape of factions that spend most of their time looking for excuses to hate each other.
The feminist vs. trans rights conflict is a textbook case of this. "TERF" means "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" and refers to ideas like "men are inherently oppressive and therefore trans women, who are definitely actually men, are inherently oppressive". Back when I was in college the idea "men are inherently oppressive and therefore there should be women-only spaces and women-only groups where women can be safe from men", along with other "radical feminist" ideas, were about as far left as you could get, and were considered anathema to the right, who made the same "groupthink" accusations against radfems as they now make against wokes. The picture was of manhating lesbian separatists quoting Andrea Dworkin and debating whether all hetero sex was rape because of the inherent power differential between men and women.
Now that exact same faction of feminism is on the outs (except in the UK for some reason) because their exclusion of male-bodied people has run afoul of the trans rights movement. Stock has noticed that there are lots of "males" on lesbian dating sites and "males" taking up meagre resources earmarked for women and "males" abusing women at the same statistical base rate regardless of whether they claim to be women or not. Her (formerly leftist, politically-ubercorrect groupthink) sexual politics are now reactionary, politically-uber-incorrect wrongthink. Or, as we could call it if we didn't want to speak only in politically-charged hyperbole, people have changed their minds.
Lots of American radfems have changed their minds and are totally supportive of trans women and their ontological claims about their own gender. Some haven't. The two sides snipe at each other regularly. Sometimes they offer arguments and evidence. Sometimes they speak in apocalyptic rhetoric, like you did in your comment. This is not a picture of ideological conformity. This is a picture of ideological competition. One idea outcompetes another. Then a new idea comes along and outcompetes that one.
The process is sometimes ugly and brutal because people have a lot emotionally invested in these questions. Personally, for me, it went pretty smoothly. I changed my mind from the essentialist conception of gender to the social construct conception of gender without much cognitive dissonance, and with no one yelling at me or berating me. I just read a bunch of writings by feminists on both sides, and decided the "gender critical" ones were mistaken and the social constructionists' ideas matched my own thoughts and experiences more closely.
TERFs and trans activists both have approximately the same capacity to influence me through non-competitive means, which is approximately zero. No one showed up at my school waving a sign. No one scrutinized any of my lessons or curriculum materials. Is it so hard to believe that a reasonable, fair-minded person would consider both sides, from a disinterested perspective, and freely come down on the "woke" side? Especially when the left, in this case (as with many others) holds a wide diversity of views which are subject to constant debate and questioning from other, opposing leftists?
Or, put another way: how do you suppose "wokes" - or any other historically-ascendant progressive group in academia - settle on the views that become the consensus views? Is it simply a raw exercise of power, where the Leftist Council throws darts at bulletin board and whatever buzzword they hit becomes the new Woke Ideology? No. There's debate. There's tons of debate. There's occasionally vicious debate. It's just that the debate sometimes excludes professors like Stock, who use their positions to bully students, or Boghossian, who violate ethical principles to make a point.
On one hand, there *is* a competition among various left-wing views. On the other hand, there also seem to be obvious *winners*.
Like, in the example you mentioned, TERFs clearly lost the war. What I mean is that I would expect a TERF lecturer at university to be cancelled, but no amount of TERF students would be able to cancel an anti-TERF lecturer.
How exactly is the woke dogma decided, that is an interesting questions. If I had to guess, I would say that it is probably some combination of "popular support" and "a petty fight that escalated beyond control and then became a precedent".
"I would expect a TERF lecturer at university to be cancelled"
Consider that all the times TERF lecturers at universities don't get canceled. How many of those times make international headlines?
There's the example of Donna Hughes. She wrote a TERFy article and her university released a statement saying Hughes had the right to her opinion, but the university did not endorse it. There was a petition to fire her but the university upheld her right to academic freedom. She still works there.
But even that example got media coverage because Hughes wrote a TERFy article. There are probably hundreds of professors who hold transphobic or "gender-critical" views but don't have those views published - or teach in departments where gender politics are irrelevant. Most people aren't going to care what their physics professor thinks about whether trans women should play on the men's or women's sports teams.
There was a minor controversy a few years ago in linguistics when Geoff Pullum misgendered a trans person in a blog post, and was criticized for it by a trans linguist. Pullum was gracious as could be for a famously irascible professor, and wasn't canceled.
We read media accounts of the most extreme cases, but these cases are rare, and in almost every case the "canceled" person isn't actually canceled - Pullum, Hughes, Kathleen Stock - none of these people were fired. Pullum demonstrated maturity and engaged in productive dialogue with his critics. Hughes blustered and called a lawyer and the thing blew over. Stock doubled down on the behavior that earned her criticism and then left in a huff when that strategy mysteriously failed to win her critics over.
Aside from an excellent analysis and engagement with critics, Grossman goes into the data we have on cancellations and finds that at current rates the average university sees one disinvitation attempt every 200 years, only half of which are successful. He quotes Adam Gurri in saying "If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved" - and I have to agree with this.
I think the plan is to laugh at student protests that bear no plausible relationship to the quality of education. Whether this will work or not depends a lot on who is footing the bill for the tuition and what they think of the protests.
Exempli gratia, if *my* kid were involved in a protest about a professor's use of pronouns in a calculus class, he would have to answer to me -- and it would not be a pleasant conversation. If the kid doesn't want to start scanning the Help Wanted - No Experience Necessary ads in craiglist, he will exhibit an abrupt change in focus.
Nor will he be able to "vote with his feet," as you say, unless I countersign that proposal, and I'm going to be taking a hard look at the quality of education in thermodynamics or circuit design, and not caring a fig about the attitude towards student protest over the shibboleths o' the day.
So the college need have no fear of dismissing such protests out of hand, at least from parents like me. Whether other parents fit into the same category is the big question.
Okay, real question: would you send your kid to MIT to study thermodynamics or circuit design? Because their "cancelation" of Dorian Abbot also has no plausible relationship to the quality of education there, right? Especially since the cancelation was not in the physics or computer engineering department?
If the answer is "yes" then I don't think the UATX people have a chance: there's no value proposition for a practical-minded parent to send their kids to the anti-woke school if the regular school is better on the merits despite some of the students having some odd ideas.
If the answer is "no" then you have to bite the bullet and admit that ideology is more important to you then pedagogical quality, in which case your dispute with your kid protesting the calculus teacher is going to occur because you have different ideologies, not because protesting is inherently frivolous. But this leaves open the chance that UATX might do something that you found disqualifying, just like MIT has done, which means that UATX is stuck in the position of having to conform to its students' (or their parents') ideological demands.
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So either way I don't see this problem as solved for UATX even with parents like yourself involved.
Certainly I would send my kid to MIT to do Course 5 or 6. I don't particularly give a shit about what goes on in the Green Buliding, those people are flakes anyway.
But your conclusion from that "yes" seems strained. You are assuming that UATX cannot compete *at any level* with a "woke" school. That seems unlikely. It seems much more likely that they will end up (if they succeed at all) with some level of quality/reputation that is equal to some "woke" schools, better than some, not as good as others. I agree they won't be able to compete with the better schools, as far as I'm concerned, but they can obviously compete with the lesser schools, and they might have an advantage with respect to the peer schools.
So that means they have a tiebreaker advantage, which translates to $$$ success at the margin -- *if* parents believe at the margin it's better to have a school that focuses strictly on factual education and doesn't allow its mission to be hijacked by the usual passions for Changing Everything that infect the sophomore mind. Which I kind of think is likely, I don't know many parents who are like "Oh boy! Sign me up to fork out $20,000/year so my kid can learn to question the orthodoxies more passionately!"
Certainly, UATX may turn out to be just as "woke" as any other school, only in some other direction. You have to genuflect to a giant statue of Donald Trump at the gates, say, or you can't be a Jew or atheist, or if a woman you have to major in Home Ec and defer to your male teachers' opinion, wear a hijab, whatever.
In that case, they would have failed in their promise and have nothing more or less to offer than a "woke" school, except maybe a different polarity. And I agree that would probably not work well because there already exist options along those lines.
But I'm really not seeing what any of this has to do with my original comment, and the original subject of what they plan to do about student protest. I said I surmised that their plan was to ignore student protest over social issues, and I said for me (as a parent footing the bill) they can do that with impunity, indeed with my support, and that therefore -- this being my point -- it didn't matter at all what the *students* thought of that action. What students think doesn't matter at all, as far as colleges are concerned, except insofar as it affects what parents or the government (the two major billpayors) think. Golden Rule: him with the gold makes the rules.
While it's true that many vit D studies failed, it's wrong to say it only succeeded on bone health. It's effective in preventing respiratory tract infections (common cold etc.), with a strong and crazy significant effect for those with vit D deficiency.
That doesn't seem to vindicate Vitamin D at all. It seems a bit like, "giving water to people who are dying of thirst, helps them succumb less slowly to other disorders."
Unlike Archipelago, global admins have absolute power. They can ban communities (sorta like being able to nuke any island they don't like), globally ban users (sorta like being able to walk in to any island and summarily execute one of its citizens without even asking permission of the island's government), and unilaterally replace community admins (sorta like being able to stage a coup against any island government they don't like).
It might be both possible and awesome to create a decentralized reddit that works exactly the same as reddit except there are multiple competing aggregators and no global admins. Moderation would be up to the individual communities and voluntary alliances thereof, instead of some all-powerful god-king of the entire archipelago. Sure there would be some communities for witches, but most communities would be nice and no one would have enough power to be a good target for a campaign to pressure him into starting a worldwide witch-hunt.
It doesn't have to be based on a blockchain. It could be a thousand websites running their own tiny instance of a one-community reddit-clone, coupled with an RSS feed that lets people aggregate content however they like. But I feel like that wouldn't catch on because it would be slightly less convenient than reddit, and people are lazy. I started reading SSC a lot more after it moved to Substack so I could get every post delivered by email. Trivial inconveniences can probably have huge effects on growth rates of social media empires. Combining decentralization with maximal convenience is a hard problem that needs to be solved to liberate alleged liberal democracies from oligarchical control over all of their discourse.
A less-ambitious project would be to convert Reddit from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy or even a republic. But as long as it's a centralized website, technologically speaking, someone has absolute power, and you can only kind of trust them not to wield it. It's better to have a technological assurance that no one will go around nuking random islands. Decentralization gives each island an impenetrable nuke-shield.
IDK, never used Usenet much because I was born in the mid-80s and by the time I got online reliably in 97 or so I was using websites with their own homebrew proto-wordpress and proto-UBB.
As I recall, all of Usenet was archipelago, sort of. Every node in it was a news server, constantly serving posts to its leaf users, accepting their posts, and copying those posts with its neighboring servers. Most of those servers happily accepted any post, and any request for a new group. (I remember a spate of new groups one day, whose names were little more than the dot separators and hyphens and asterisks, which, when listed in order, depicted the face of Jerry Garcia, who had recently passed.) That meant that if you were getting your news from those servers, you got pretty much everything.
Some servers didn't accept or forward everything, though. This was mostly for mundane reasons - Usenet's disk storage could get fairly large by that day's standards, and typical servers only had a gigabyte or so to use for that purpose, so it was common for some servers to arbitrarily refuse the "entertainment" section of Usenet and only propagate the arguably more wholesome stuff like sci, comp, mayyybe rec (which was mostly "recreation for nerds who presumably do more with sci and comp"), and a handful of other trees that didn't get enough action to be a concern. But alt.* got plenty, and was virtually all fluff, so there was an acceptable reason to reject it. That also meant your news server wouldn't get it if the only other server "upstream" from you was rejecting it.
I can't remember off the top of my head the names (I think digg was one?); but I think there have been 4+ attempts at decentralized/ totally censorship free reddit.
They all immediately devolved into porn bots, actual-factual-Nazis, and all the people that can't function in polite society shitting loudly into a microphone then calling people who chose not to listen moral cowards.
Hacker news is less censored than Reddit, but hasn't become a cesspit.
Why Voat failed, imo:
* grew up during reddit purges of right wingers. founder effects led to it going hard right.
* Still totally centralized with a global admin and a main page that has a monopoly on aggregation using a dumb most popular list. No algorithmic personalization worth a damn. So normies got bombarded with content they weren't interested in and left. This amplified the founder effect. This amplification wouldn't happen with a decent collaborative filtering algorithm to show people what they individually want to see. In that case the normies would find what they like and stick around. Unconditionally jamming the most popular posts down everyone's throats leads people who aren't in to that sort of thing boiling off of the site, which leads to the site becoming more fringe and spiralling closer to the black hole of disreputability.
TL;DR: evaporative cooling of group beliefs can be mitigated by making an effort to cater to non-central members of the group. Voat failed because it didn't.
Hacker news may be less censored than Reddit but is more aggresively moderated.
Maybe it is not obvious, but traffic is low enough for one person (dang) to be capable of effective moderation. They are really good at this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang
Not sure is it full-time job, part-time job or really dedicated unpaid person.
HN also has quite clear purpose, identify and picky users with strong aversion toward undesirable types of content. For example making pun-only-posts will get you downvoted and flagged rather than praised like on Reddit.
To be clear: content that would be welcomed and upvoted on Voat or Reddit and accepted here would be elimiated on Hacker News.
I expect that comments that would be accepted on HN is a subset of what would be accepted on Reddit and subset of what would be accepted here.
And community is self-selected to people fully (or nearly fully) wanting such moderation, so it does not come as a censorship but executing community norms.
Porn bots, actual-factual-Nazis would be banned on sight there.
As argument in favor of decentralization, I don't think HN would be improved by giving Reddit CEO spez the power to nuke the entire HN community whenever some comments there offend him. I don't think any community that is not already under the thumb of spez would voluntarily elect to become so.
Speaking of nominative determinism, am I the only one to notice how awesome it is that one of the rough estimates for the size of the Christian population in the fourth century comes from someone called "Goodenough?"
If anything, your paragraph understates Morphy's genius. He basically invented modern chess play -- Kasparov called him "the forefather of modern chess." His style was frequently tactical, dynamic, and aggressive, but entirely sound. Before him, people played like lunatics. Now, people play like Morphy, but with the benefit of a century of experience that players have accumulated since then, now with some slight modifications inspired by AlphaZero.
I’m a little disappointed by #24. That Twitter post to me shows a complete lack of understanding of the issues with building renewable energy and sometimes who is opposed.
First in reference to the Alameda County wind project. There is a way to responsibly site wind and solar projects and that location happens to be about as bad as it gets for killing raptors and we know this from decades of wind turbines functioning at that site.
Save Our Mesa sounds like NIMBY not environmentalists.
Greenpeace has always been extreme, but I do agree we are screwing up by not encouraging nuclear to at a minimum stay online if it’s already built.
I admit I have no idea what the tweets are related to the NJ turnpike.
But in general I just find it frustrating this idea that carbon reduction should be done at the expense of everything thing else. Nothing else should factor in because this is too dire. Well I agree, climate change is dire. But why wouldn’t we cover roofs with solar long before we start impacting sensitive ecosystems? Roof top solar has much lower impacts from a carbon footprint anyhow. My point is, we haven’t run out of places to build clean energy so that we need to put it in the worst places now.
>First in reference to the Alameda County wind project. There is a way to responsibly site wind and solar projects and that location happens to be about as bad as it gets for killing raptors and we know this from decades of wind turbines functioning at that site.
That is also what I had heard about that project, that it was particularly bad for killing raptors, but I see in the Twitter responses some who claim that if you look at the data, it isn't true. Now I don't know what to believe. If the story about that location being particularly bad for raptors is false, we have a big problem, because it would show that it's easy to convince the public that any given green project isn't really green. How do we get the truth out?
I’m an ornithologist in the energy industry and have seen presentations from researchers at that site showing the numbers. It’s a lot. In particular the impacts to golden eagles, which have been declining in recent years. You can see some numbers from this report below, but think in terms of this being just one wind area and if we put turbines in more areas like this that are known for their high numbers of raptors versus making the attempt to locate in areas less likely to have impacts. https://www.acgov.org/cda/planning/landuseprojects/documents/Final_APWRA_BirdFatalityStudy2005-2013_041816.pdf
> “tolerate everyone” sounds good until you get confronted with pedophiles, Nazis, al-Qaeda supporters, and super-woke people who demand you censor everyone else.
This is interesting because, in fact, a professor at Old Dominion University was just "cancelled" precisely for expressing views that those attracted to children should be supported rather than stigmatized. (Note the difference between "attracted to children" and "actual child molester.") I would claim that the professor in question, Allyn Walker, is in fact right, and is expressing exactly the kind of contrary view that academia should welcome. A more thoughtful approach to this issue would help advance human well-being, both by preventing child abuse through support, and by helping those with the attraction. Unfortunately, the politics of the situation prevent taking them seriously.
Alas, my guess is that those who talk about supporting the open exchange of ideas aren't going to leap in to defend this one.
(Disclaimer: I am one of the people attracted to children. Naturally you might read bias into my opinion here.)
I think the problem here is that we have seen something similar before: in the early 1980s radical left wing organisations were having one of their occasional quests to reorganise society, and whilst many of their targets were laudable (racial equality, acceptance of homosexuality) there was a marginal movement towards understanding of paedophilia. Much of this was probably well-meaning support for those fighting to cope with it, but it allowed some organisations with an agenda of actually promoting paedophilia to get a platform (the example most often held up here in the UK is the Paedophile Information Exchange). So a legitimate concern to help people deal with a sexual preference that cannot be exercised is regarded with caution because people have in the past used this as an excuse to try and move the conversation towards legitimising that preference.
I've heard about this, although I'm too young to have direct memories of it. What I've never really been able to answer is the extent to which this was actually a popular movement and the extent to which it was a small movement whose prominence was artificially raised in order to discredit left wing organizations more generally. (I know this was a perceived relationship that the LGBT movement had to fight against.)
In any case, I don't feel like that history should affect our decision-making, any more than other extreme perceptions/actions should color reasonable expressions of other viewpoints. (Say, violent anti-war protestors, or extreme libertarian militia groups, or religious cults.) I grant it affects public opinion anyway, but that social pressure would seem to be exactly what those who oppose cancel culture are trying to fight against.
The politics of this one do seem very complicated. When I saw "cancelled" I jumped to the assumption that this was a complaint about "cancel culture" on the left. But then I dove in and it looks like it's more complicated than that - Walker says they were targeted for cancelation by right-wing media and on the basis of their trans identity.
>Walker said their research was “being misrepresented in right-wing media,” making it “unsafe to remain on campus.” “The university’s decision to place me on administrative leave really acknowledges the gravity of the threats to me and other people on campus,” they said.
>“That research was mischaracterized by some in the media and online, partly on the basis of my trans identity,” Walker said in the statement Wednesday. “As a result, multiple threats were made against me and the campus community generally.”
It looks to me like this was started by a misguided by well-intentioned vaguely lefty student, then picked up by the right as part of their normal program of equating trans people and Democrats with pedophilia, and it seems like it's genuinely dividing the left, some of whom are afraid of feeding the right-wing narrative of equating LGBT people with pedophilia.
It's also interesting that a cancellation attempt driven by the right wing - with support by Fox News and OANN - has been wildly successful, despite broad support for Walker from academics who point out that Walker's research here is very much in line with the mainstream in their field in terms of harm reduction and preventing non-offending pedophiles from becoming offenders. I hope this puts "woke" "cancel culture" in perspective - it seems to me like the right-wing moral panic brigade has far more cancellation power than e.g. trans rights activists.
Right wing cancellation is different in two important ways:
1. Institutions are overwhelmingly left-wing, and Walker was not placed on leave because administrators are opposed to him being able to express his particular views. So "cancelling" by the right refers to public shaming and supposed harassment/threats, whereas left wing cancelling is more direct deplatforming by left-aligned institutions themselves. Maybe Tucker Carlson's piece indirectly encouraged people to send threats to Walker, but if this were just Carlson et al. criticizing Walker, he would not have been placed on leave and certainly not leave as a form of punishment.
2. Right-wingers typically attempt to "cancel" people for things more like this, such as defense of people who are often child sex predators (not all pedophiles are child sex predators, but all child sex predators are pedohpiles), which are partially issues concerning moral judgement (in addition to pragmatic matters of what stops pedophiles from offending), whereas the left typically cancel for actual empirical matters i.e. the existence and heritability of the black/white IQ gap.
24. Politics is a subset of Fashion, the most powerful force in the universe.
The Laws of Fashion were made clear by Jesus: 'The first will be the last and the last will be the first."
Wokism will die on the vine soon, like Feminism did before it, which undermined concern for black Americans in its time.
Concern for Native Americans may be the next big thing, but that would undermine concern for black Americans much like the trans thing has undermined concern for women with vaginas.
I'm not convinced that radical progressives help conservatives politically. Most Americans want to get to Sweden: more business friendly, taxes aren't homework you can go to jail for failing to do correctly, a bigger social safety net.
Not sure what will replace wokism but likely something worse. Humans want to punish their outgroup and we can't change that. We can declare war against the Chinese or the Iranians. That could rally the troops.
I think it's irrational to think what should rightly be considered black nationalism is going to go away anywhere soon.
Feminism fell out of favor partly because A) women broadly achieved equality, and B), there were bigger "victims" to focus on.
Black socio-economic equality is largely going backwards and its hyper-speculative to suggest that any of the woke policies currently being introduced or considered are going to rapidly upend this trend.
As for bigger victims, then native americans have worse outcomes but they're too small and quiet a group to replace black people as the favored victim group. So who else is there? The majority of trans people in absolute terms are white, so that undermines their victim status relative to blacks. And opposition to "racism" is a hell of a lot more universal amongst americans than acceptance of transpeople are.
So unless one of these things changes, I don't think black nationalism is falling out of favor any time soon.
For 18 (self reported long covid symptoms correlate more with thinking you've had covid than actually having had it), isn't that exactly what you'd expect even if it's not psychosomatic? Bob isn't going to think he's got long covid without also thinking he had covid at one point, is he?
This seems really dumb, so I'm assuming I'm missing something. Would be grateful if somebody can tell me what it is.
2) He didn't test positive for Covid, but nevertheless believes he had it.
So I think you are correct. Isn't it generally estimated that the number of people who had Covid is likely a factor of ~4 higher than those who tested positive for it? So, if Long Covid is not psychosomatic, you should expect that 80% of people with Long Covid did not test positive for Covid.
On the rate of conversion to Christianity, note the Roman Empire was actually pretty slow. Ireland first received missions around 440-50 (Palladius, and earliest likely date for Patrick) and was seemingly fully Christian by the historical threshold in c. 600. The English (who admittedly may have ruled over a somewhat Christian population already) got their first recorded mission in 597 and there's no trace of paganism in writings from the 690s. In both cases a collection of peoples (neither area was unified) seem to have fully converted in around a century.
And the adoption of Christianity in former colonies of European powers was often even more rapid. Islam is similar: both religions seem on occasion to be able to spread through a society or area with incredible rapidity.
I'm also a boring non-athletic Jew and not the one to write it but there's a really interestingh comparison to be made between Richard and the Hungarian guy who pushed his daughters into chess.
In his book on consciousness, Mark Solms (a Friston collaborator) uses "Markov blanket" as fairy dust to sprinkle over any problem that can't be solved.
Concerning no. 22: "Related: Woolf University is an accredited university that “lets qualified organizations join as member colleges and offer accredited degrees”. I think the idea is that if you want to start a new college but are intimidated by the accreditation process, you can instead become an affiliate/subcollege of Woolf and since they are accredited, now you are too. I don’t know enough about education to know whether this will work but it seems like a cool idea."
..In the European countries I am familiar with, it is quite common that established universities merge with community colleges/polytechnics/university colleges, giving the latter university status in the process. And in 1992 Tony Blair allowed all UK polytechnics that felt like universities to call themselves universities, creating dozens of new universities with the stroke of a pen.
That said, there are universities and then there are universities in Europe. Many years ago I was invited to hold the "Nordic scholar lecture" at the University of Edinburgh, one of the four oldest universities in the UK, and rather self-conscious about the fact. At that time I worked at a University College.
After the lecture, which I thought went quite well, the faculty invited to the traditional wine and small-talk. Four-five professors with half-centimeter-thick tweed jackets gathered around me and we had the following conversation:
"Thank you so much for your talk...By the way, did you say you work at a University College in your country?" "Well yes." "Yes...Isn't that what we used to call a Polytechnic?" “Eh...but you do not have many of those any more, do you? They are all universities now." "Yes...they are what we call 1992-universities." By then I understood where this was going, and said defiantly: "Yes, well, my college is about to apply for university status, and I believe we will choose the title City University". Which made the professor pause, look at his fellow Edinburgh professors gathered round, and say, sort-of to himself: "Yes...City University. That's what they call themselves, these days."
UK: you have your PMs wrong. The 1992 legislation was under John Major, five years before Blair. As I recall it had been contemplated by Mrs Thatcher who was generally attracted by measures that moved responsibilities from local to central government.
My mistake entirely. Certainly not one made by the Edinburgh professors back in the day.
The Edinburgh guest lecture was a rather interesting anthropological experience. I would be surprised if other countries, including the US, has a similar fine-grained nomenclatura within Academia. "1992 university" indeed.
My general hypothesis is that UK culture has been as influenced by the caste culture in India, as India has been influenced by British culture. Due to their long colonial life together. (Perhaps far fetched, but still.)
While at it: The Edinburgh experience would have fitted perfectly in the now classic British political science sitcom, Yes Minister; including the famous scene where the Head of the Department of Administrative Affairs, Humphrey, explains the characteristics of "British democracy". In particular the line: "We need our universities - both of them".
"Also, plausibly Constantine’s conversion barely changed the growth rate at all."
A leading biography of Constantine ("Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor") argues just this.
"so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. "
You clearly don't need liberal democracy to reach developed country status, but it doesn't obviously hurt. It seems China's development course is 39 years or so behind Japan's:
and, obviously, it has grown from both a lower level than Japan relative to the U.S. and to a lower level than Japan relative to the U.S. -China's GDP per capita by PPP today is around where the USSR's was relative to the U.S. during the late 1960s. The reason for this is obvious; China is far less capitalist than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Singapore.
Nevertheless, Noah's post is a classic example of Hanania's dictum that most China analysis is cope. China contained COVID better than any other country (despite being its origin) and the BRI has clearly been useful for China at buying third world foreign influence. China also has a high vaccination rate, and has been the world's largest vaccine exporter, making such unlikely places as Morocco and Cambodia more vaccinated than the U.S.
China has already beaten the US, so you're arguing a moot point. China's GDP is over 30% larger than the US when you use the more correct purchasing power parity GDP. And they're growing faster, too. They are also better positioned globally for the future.
They're leaving us behind in their dust. GDP per capita is not relevant when talking national power. If considering the People, the Happiness Index (which has a bit of GDP in the calculation) is more relevant than per capita GDP. What's most relevant is total GDP and a power structure with the will and plan to deploy it strategically.
As for Japan and the USSR and South Korea, none of that matters. The past is never like the future. Only trends and positioning matters. The future only follows the past until it does not, due to a qualitative change like the internet.
There is now a big difference (which changes everything) in the present and the future with China versus the Soviet Union in the past and their breakdown due to the unmanageable allocation complexities of a command economy.
My idea is that command economies are the future and will be Far More competitive than our market system very soon as it already seems to be in China. The overlooked realization is that Ai is perfectly designed to cap off a command economy, but not a market economy. Once China's Ai gets smart enough from perusing all that phone data China will take off to the moon. The Soviets did not have that.
The so-called, but aptly termed, global Deep State - the institutional investors and Davos crowd who own and run the world (0.1% of all corporations own and thus control 80% of trans-national corporations, according to a Swiss complexity scientist)) - are using covid as cover to herd all the Western governments under a one-world governance umbrella of totalitarianism where all is digitized and managed (for our own good). The steps to totalitarianism are essentially already complete.
Other than wanting the remaining 18% of global income that did not accrue to the global rich and powerful (Oxfam 2017 data), they want to compete and beat China's machine - and you need an authoritarian digitized non-market command system in the West to do that, because that's what hooks best to an Ai.
The Great Race will be won by whomever first gets a functioning governance Ai. But it can go nowhere unless hooked to a command economy with a cowed population kept in line with a police-surveillance state.
We definitely have a China-style social credit system in our future. The vaccine passports ("Paper's please.") are actually technology platforms that will eventually have all you data - your complete file - updated in real-time (VP's are happening now in ten states). That will be hooked to your central bank digital currency account - a government controlled bank account, which 90 countries are now working on. Taxes will be debited before you can buy food. Dissent will be debited as in China - because even a utopia needs everyone to think the same. Once the CBDC and VP are linked your life/freedom and privacy/soul will be over. If you disagree you go into the internment camps, as is happening now in Australia. Don't believe it? Google "whatsherface" and see her sassy videos on both the isolated Australian camps and Canada's RFP for camps in every province. Do your own research, people, because the media lies to your face.
"18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic."
ok, lets imagine some groups.
1:People who got severe covid symptoms and believe they had covid. (.1, who had covid, .2 who did not.)
2:People who got mild or no covid symptoms and believe they had covid.(.1, who had covid, .2 who did not.)
3:people who got severe symptoms and don't believe they had covid. (.1, who had covid, .2 who did not.)
4:people who got mild symptoms or no covid symptoms and don't believe they had covid.(.1, who had covid, .2 who did not.)
1.1 are probably pretty common
1.2 are probably pretty rare because of ubiquitous testing.
2.1 seem to be pretty common, there's a whole subculture of the antivaxer movement of people who seem to have convinced themselves they got covid in november 2019 because they just associated the last cold they had with it.
2.2 also seem to be pretty common.
3.1 people with severe symptoms mostly probably had covid or at least the chance to confirm it.
3.2 is probably rare
4.1 these are probably also pretty common since a large fraction of people get no significant symptoms
4.2 this is the biggest groups, probably.
So people who got severe symptoms are overwhelmingly likely to believe/know they had covid.
A lot of people who actually had covid but didn't know about it had very mild symptoms.
So this seems to just be saying that people who had severe symptoms were more likely to have long-covid.
The Noahpinion piece on China makes some good points. However, I think it's important to distinguish between "competence" and "causing a country to take a counterfactually successful trajectory". The latter is much more difficult. My take is that Xi is very "competent" in the usual sense, but that it's genuinely a very hard problem to chart a successful path for China. Even saying he's taken them down a shockingly unsuccessful path does not negate competence, nor predicts against many of the downstream results of such competence that are the point of using the word: for example, China annexing Taiwan in the next decade, or continuing to achieve its other geopolitical goals (even if those goals seem silly).
Do you think I’ll get a tenure track job with my PhD thesis - Hitler Wasn’t Wrong About Anything - The True History of Europe 1920-1945?
To be fair, his idiocy is slightly overrated. I recently watched a French documentary series about WW2, Apocalypse, and they portrayed him as reasonably competent, for a warmongering megalomaniac. His allies, in comparison, were actual idiots. Mussolini couldn't get anything done in relatively irrelevant Africa, and Japanese stupidly dragged the reluctant US into the war by strategically and tactically abysmal Pearl Harbor.
How many warmongering megalomaniacs ever accomplished a tenth of what hitler did (for better or for worse)?
Hitler was in many ways more competent than Stalin, who managed to squander much of the massive demographic and industrial advantage the USSR had relative to Germany in the early 1930s, gut his military leadership and bring his country very close to collapse in late 1941. People forget that the Tsarist military performed much better encounter for encounter against a far better trained and led German army in WWI. Soviet victory in WWII was mostly due to German exhaustion, and basically inevitable once the initial German gamble failed.
Lend-lease also played an important part. Even considering all that, without the US invasion some sort of stalemate might've been reached, and Heisenberg could've eventually stumbled upon the bomb first. You really don't need too many counterfactuals for history taking a much different course.
It's horribly tempting to speculate - suppose Hitler hadn't gone all-in on race theory? Suppose instead Nazi Germany treated Jews under an equivalent of the Jim Crow laws? Could the regime have lasted? I think it probably would have eventually collapsed, given the economic constraints, and if Hitler had still decided to go to war to restore German greatness.
But without the Holocaust, there would be a lot less easy way of saying "Fascism is Evil" and a lot more excuse for keeping out of the war, if it went ahead. Even with that, suppose he hadn't invaded Poland but had declared war on the Soviet Union at the very start? Is it totally impossible he would have not been on at least tenuous basis of alliance or "we're not going to interfere" with the Western nations for that?
(Very weird, that double-posted).
Ahem. As I was saying:
He managed to turn his silly little boys' club into a party that became the government of Germany and a world power (even if for a very brief time). That argues some level of competence and ability, even given the chaotic nature of German politics at the time.
> But I'm also not defending the Jews, who are trying to destroy my rights and liberties
wait what? Are you somehow convinced that they operate in some union against you?
What?
What counts as sinister and hidden? Not wanting people to believe that Covid is the fault of virologists seems like an entirely natural motive for virologists to have — but implies that claims by virologists that Covid couldn't possibly be a lab leak should be viewed with great suspicion. Attributing to the other two the motive of wanting people to believe that what they do is very important also seems natural, and a ground for at least some skepticism.
You don't need sinister hidden motivations to be influenced by your unconscious biases. That said, saying "this work is probably biased, I just can't tell how, so I won't believe it" is seeing the speck in your neighbor's eye while not noticing the log in your own.
> and lacks historical perspective
This seems subject to reference class tennis. What if the relevant history is all countries over all time? Modern countries in the past 50 years? Any entity that can commit violence upon it's subjects?
I don't know if you've chosen the correct reference class or not.
CFS seems pretty solid to me. Their reactor design is very similar to conventional research tokamaks. It's broadly accepted in the field that energy-profitable fusion with a conventional tokamak design is a matter of scale, and that it can be scaled up in terms of size or in terms of magnet power. The big multinational government-backed project (ITER) is taking the "size" approach, since at the time it was designed, the best available superconducting magnets were near their limit in terms of the field density they could generate. CFS is taking the other approach, using newer and better superconductor materials to increase the magnetic field power. A lot of the senior people are experienced fusion researchers, many of whom had previously been involved with ITER. The magnet assemblies have been demonstrated at component scale, and the company has published peer-reviewed papers on their reactor design.
The other fusion startups are trying to develop varying degrees of novel reactor designs. Some are modelled off other research reactor designs that are somewhat well studied and show some promise at scaling up better than conventional tokamaks but which haven't been studied as thoroughly and thus have some degree of additional physics risk and engineering challenge. Tokamak Energy uses a spherical tokamak design (a variant of a conventional tokamak where the "donut hole" in the center is as small as possible, which is thought to scale up more efficiently but is challenging because there's a bunch of magnets and stuff that need to go in the donut hole).
General Fusion and Helion are using different hybrids approaches between magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Both of their approaches seem to be theoretically sound as far as we know, but they're a lot further from the beaten trail and there's considerably more risk of unknown unknowns rearing their ugly heads on either the engineering or the physics fronts.
"For a long time, fusion energy has been 10-20 years away. Now it is 3 years away."
Given that the first part of this is true - they have indeed been promising fusion for a long time - I am very darn interested in the second part.
It's a big, big claim and I wonder if by 2024 they will be coming out with "sorry guys, unforeseen circumstances, but in another 10 years we promise!"
So they've already hit the "yeah, three years was too optimistic" obstacle?
No, about 7 years ago Helion was claiming that they would reach breakeven within 5 years. They walked that back about 4 years ago citing a combination of failure to secure sufficient funding and unforeseen technical hurdles, they then went into stealth mode and haven't made a peep until this new announcement.
I'm not convinced at all by 3, but this is the first time in a while I've been willing to consider that it *might* actually be, say, 8-10 years away. Priors still say probably not, but they've passed an "I'm not even going to bother paying attention" bar for me at least.
Keep in mind that the original claim, back in the 70s, was "if you fund our research, fusion power will be available within 20 years". Over the last 50 years, there has been less total funding for fusion than they asked to get over those 20 years, so it's hardly surprising they didn't manage to succeed without funding
If they were heading to any kind of success funding, private or public, would have materialised.
None of the alternatives to the regular tokamak have had full scale facilities before so it's hard to say what their chances are. I'm no insider, though I've been soaking it up for a few months
I believe if you draw a straight line from Helion, TAE or General Fusion's experimental results to a full scale experiment you have a commercial scale output, probably with better economics than tokamaks. Experience with tokamaks and laser inertial however is that straight lines are not to be expected
CFS is notable in this regard in that they are a tokamak design with much more validated physics and with a new superconductor magnet that makes commercial levels of output possible. The physics will be tested by SPARC in about 2025 along with General Fusion's 70% scale facility and Helion in 2024. From what I can tell the economics aren't a home run but are possible. If you compare to coal with air pollution costs it appears the CFS tokamak concept is immediately competitive. Their ARC concept proposes a first of its kind reactor producing electricity at twice the cost of fission and similar to the first of its kind fission pilot plant
One of the CFS guys put it this way - the non tokamak concepts have bigger physics unknowns and the tokamaks have bigger engineering challenges
It's worth noting Helion isn't claiming a commercial level plant and I suspect not a sustained net electricity output either, but that a single pulse will put out net electricity. Their pulses are quite short. Their concept is really interesting because it proposes that the expansion of the magnetically crushed plasma will induce a current in the same electromagnets which can be captured as electricity at 85% efficiency. The other concepts go by the usual thermal conversion of heat to steam turbines at 40% efficiency
It's hard to accurately judge where Helion is right now, since they've been very secretive. CFS comes to conferences and publishes papers (with simulations and not yet any plasma experiments, but their concept is backed by decades of knowledge from tokamak research.). General Fusion comes to conferences and has fewer papers, and they haven't made outwardly -super-visible progress in overall plasma confinement in the past few years. It's worth nothing that their 'Fusion Demonstration Plant' which they plan to build in the UK is not in line with what other companies or governments would call a 'Fusion Demonstration Plant': as I understand it will just be doing deuterium plasmas (no tritium) and will not be even trying to produce electricity; it's just a first integrated test of the plasma and driver system; this is kind of on par with where tokamaks were in the 1980s.
Helion energy is planning to do D-3He fusion, which is much harder from a plasma perspective (iirc about 5x higher temperatures are required). They claim on their website to have 9keV ion temperatures, but they don't (often?) come to conferences or (recently) publish papers and there's not (to my knowledge) independent validation of their claims. I do think that if their plasmas and machine engineering could work out, it would be a very exciting and potentially low-cost overall system. However especially on the plasma side this is a big 'if'.
They might just be better financed now. If getting to fusion is a matter of scale, then having the resources to actually build a working plant to scale would make a big difference in progress.
Yeah people bring up that the private companies have consistently said something like "working reactor in 10 years" and say this shows it's just hype but the statement fully fleshed out is more like "working reactor in 10 years with full funding if things go smoothly"
Private funding is now getting to the point where funding will be sufficient, this should especially become the case by around 2025 if one of the demonstrators gets the net energy Kitty Hawk moment. (This appears to be a high likelihood for CFS) Then we'll start to see what the roll of the dice is on things going smoothly
The magnets are the big breakthrough. Older niobium-based superconductors can't handle much more than about 10 T worth of magnet fields without breaking down and losing their superconductivity and get really finicky as you approach that. You can (we think) make a working fusion reactor within that limit by making it bigger, but bigger means a lot more expensive, on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Expensive enough that no one government wants to put up all the money, so you get all the headaches of a government megaproject multiplied by trying to juggle cooperation and coordination between the US, Russia, the EU, Japan, Korea, India, and China. That megaproject (ITER) has been semi- languishing in government megaproject hell since the 1980s, finally broke ground in 2007, and is scheduled to start experiments in 2025.
REBCO-based superconductors have been around since the 1980s, but they're tricky materials to work with and it's only in the last 5-10 years that the engineering challenges of making a practical big giant magnet out of it have come close to getting worked out. REBCO stays superconducting at mich higher temps that Niobium alloys, liquid nitrogen rather than liquid helium, and it can handle much higher magnetic field powers (20-40 T).
This lowers the scale of the project by quite a bit, to the point where a project with ITER-level goals can reasonably be done with commercial funding.
A secondary factor is computer modelling. A ton of work has been done in parallel with ITER on smaller research reactors to flesh out our understanding of near-breakeven fusion plasma, which gives us a great dataset for physics simulations, and there's enormously more computing power available now than even a few years ago to do the sims with. It's the computer simulation capacity that's made all the novel reactor design projects feasible to attempt.
Materials science has always been the most underappreciated science.
So many of the wonderful inventions in the world seem to come down to "Well, this idea has been around for ages, but we haven't had materials with the right properties until now".
Cf. fully artificial hearts. Almost entirely a materials science problem.
cf beanstalk. If we have a material that is suitable, then we could build a beanstalk for no more than what Apollo cost - possibly for about what ISS cost. Obviously, those are big amounts of money, but they are also big amounts that humanity is already demonstrably prepared to commit to space.
And a beanstalk would have a huge impact on access to space - it would make SpaceX Starship look expensive.
People were talking in another thread about physics people getting government funding, but I think that funding physics and materials science is ultimately how we get all our advancements.
Improvements in materials science and better computer modelling of high energy plasmas based on a lot more experimental data.
I recently finished a Ph.D. in plasma physics.
I would give Helion <1% chance of success (meaning fusion (Q_plasma > 5) within 10 years), General Fusion <10% chance of success, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems / SPARC > 50% chance of success.
One simple thing to check is how engaged the company is with the broader fusion community. At the American Physical Society - Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP) conference two weeks ago, SPARC was discussed in two 30 min talks, nine 12 min talks, and eight posters. General Fusion was discussed in seven posters. Helion didn't have a presence there at all.
Three other startups that I think are worth watching are: Type One Energy (stellarator in Wisconsin), Renaissance Fusion (stellarator in France), and Tokamak Energy (spherical tokamak in the UK). Other startups might make the news, but I think that they can be largely ignored.
"One simple thing to check is how engaged the company is with the broader fusion community."
Why is this a meaningful thing to check?
Plasma physics and associated sciences are not simple and it's easy to trick yourself. As an example, there was an early experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZETA_(fusion_reactor) ) where scientists thought that their neutron measurements (evidence of fusion reactions) were from a true 'hot' plasma (indicator of success) but in reality they were due to effects from specific instabilities, which was evidence that their idea would *not* scale to a reactor.
Fusion is complicated. There are lots of important sub-problems which the broader fusion community has had to deal with. Even if your design is very different, you're likely to encounter at least some of these. So it is valuable to tap into the decades of expertise of the broader community.
I should also note that my estimates are based on more than just whether they showed up at the conference. I'll write some more details about why I think Helion is implausible from a physical (instead of community) standpoint.
One obvious counterexample to this is the Wright Brothers. Aviation, ca. 1900, was a Very Hard Problem with a large community trying to simultaneously tackle hard problems in propulsion, aerodynamics, controls, and materials. And basically all following each other down the same wrong track (airplanes with two-axis flight controls and inherently stable in roll). The Wrights *followed* that community, and to some extent engaged with select members, but mostly hid in their bicycle shop and did their own thing.
It wasn't until four years after they invented the airplane, and two years after Santos-Dumont was credited for inventing something very charitably described as an "airplane", that the Wrights went public with an airplane that actually worked.
W/re fusion, there are a lot of people who have been doing much the same thing for fifty years with not much to show for it. And some people who have been trying novel approaches while deeply engaged with the mainstream fusion community and ditto. I'm not going to rule someone out because they aren't part of the Official Fusion Community.
Not being engaged in the broader community is not sufficient reason to rule out Helion, although it's not a good sign. See my other comment on the physical reasons why I'm skeptical that Helion will get fusion anytime soon.
In the last 50 years, the mainstream fusion community has improved fusion performance (as measured by the triple product) by five orders of magnitude. We have less than an order of magnitude to go. The start-ups that use standard techniques only have to close this final gap, instead of achieving all of this progress on their own.
Helion has several important problems that make their success implausible.
They are using D-He3 fusion. This requires 5 times hotter temperatures as the usual goal of D-T fusion. The reason they want to use the D-He3 reaction is because it doesn't produce neutrons. But their plasma will also have D-D fusion reactions, which either produces tritium and a proton or He3 and a neutron, with equal probability. Their plasma will be producing neutrons, just not as many as a D-T plasma. He3 does not exist in significant quantities on the surface of the earth. Other fusioneers who want to use He3 suggest that the best way to get it is to mine the surface of the moon. Helion claims that they're going to produce the He3 themselves using D-D reactions. So they will need at least twice as many D-D fusion reactions as D-He3 reactions.
Helion is planning on compressing their fuel. This sounds nice because it means that you can get higher density (causing more collisions) without having to maintain that high density in steady state. The problem is that compressing fuel tends to cause instabilities. When you try to squeeze something, it tends to squish out between your fingers instead of being compressed. This has been the main challenge for the inertial confinement fusion program at NIF - and it has already cost them more than 3 years. They have made progress recently by manufacturing their capsule with extremely highly precision. Helion is starting with something fluid, so they can't use NIF's strategy.
Helion's plan is for a pulsed power source. You create two plasmas, compress them and collide them, and then extract energy. Each time you do this is called a "shot". Current experiments like NIF and Z-pinch can do about 1 shot per day. To make a feasible power plant, you would need at least 1 shot per second. I don't know how they're going to speed things up by a factor of 100,000 compared to existing experiments.
While I don't think that their approach is particularly plausible, I applaud them for their efforts and for their ability to get people excited about fusion. $500,000,000 is a lot of money - possibly more than what Commonwealth has raised.
My predictions: They will get an experiment built within 2-3 years. The experiment is small enough that they can just buy the He3. They will have problems with compressing the plasma, so their Q will be about an order of magnitude lower than expected. Maybe after another 2-5 years of experiments, they'll have figured out how to make the compression work, so they can announce that they GOT FUSION. The shot rate will still be only a few times per day, but they can use the hype to get more money. I would guess that increasing the shot rate to once per second is at least as hard as dealing with the compression, so they will be not be selling electricity to the grid anytime soon.
+5 Informative
I agree D-He3 is perhaps pie in the sky. However I think it's less of a moonshot than it appears for a few reasons. The neutron motivation is solid - D-T neutrons are 14 MeV vs D-D neutrons at 2.5 MeV and less of them. This creates two advantages in that the reactor can be far smaller without the need for serious shielding and at the same time may not have its lifetime limited by the neutron flux
Helion proposes that their full scale reactor could be 50MW vs a CFS style D-T tokamak needing to be 200MW at the smallest size to contain enough shielding. This would allow Helion to serve a larger market potentially including powering container ships, and their larger plants would benefit from modularity where they should not only need less downtime but would have a much easier time with one or a few modules out of service at a time. Combining this with much less worry about capital intensive plants having their lifetimes cut short by D-T neutron flux makes up some substantial part of the ground lost in having a much more difficult reaction to create
If Helion's energy capture system really works there is another large gain. I may be incorrect here but it appears in theory Helion would need a power gain + initial power of 1.18 to reach breakeven. They only need to gain 20% energy for net breakeven after the input energy plus gained energy are recovered at 85% efficiency. By the same numbers a thermal plant would need a gain + input power of 2.5 for breakeven electricity conversion - a gain of 150%
So Helion's basic reaction is less likely but if they make it to the starting line the finish line is relatively close. Their sourcing of He3 seems like a pretty notable question mark but the pulse rate is actually not as big of a concern. The current Trenta machine can pulse every 10 mins while the 2024 Polaris is proposed to be able to pulse once per second temporarily. The ten minutes is nice and it will certainly be interesting to see if they can close in on second pulses. Supposedly the limiting factor is removing the fusion product 'exhaust' between pulses and they have done it fast enough on some small scale and are hoping they can scale that up
If all else fails I don't know how their concept compares as a D-T reactor but they could try it as I believe TAE have indicated they would license their design for D-T use while they continued work on trying to get it to aneutronic levels
I did not know that Trenta can do a shot every 10 minutes. They only need to improve this by 2.5 orders of magnitude instead of 5 orders of magnitude.
The best way to measure how close you are to fusion is with the triple product: temperature * density * confinement time. Helion has not published triple products for Trenta, so I don't know how close they are. Their last experiment, Venti, had a triple product 300 times too small for fusion. (Source: random comments.) Trenta has five times higher temperature than Venti, but we don't know its density or confinement time. <Do you think that this means it's better than expected?> I expect that they're already having trouble with compression. It's common in fusion to try to scale your experiment up by an order of magnitude or two, but then run into new instabilities or turbulence that take years to work around.
Helion's energy capture system could also be a significant improvement, although I don't know what the best efficiency they have achieved so far is. They also don't have the extra ~25% energy from the Li6 + n -> He4 + T reaction in the breeding blanket for tokamaks.
The size of fusion power plants is mostly determined by the energy confinement time. The farther a particle has to go (across magnetic field lines) to get to the wall, the longer it stays in the plasma. When you make a fusion device this big, there ends up being enough room for shielding - except for the thin central column of spherical tokamaks.
D-He3 seems like a great reaction for second generation fusion devices. Once we get good at confining plasmas, then we can push to higher temperatures and smaller sizes with He3. For a first generation device, you're just making your life more difficult.
I'm reminded of Type One Energy, which says that they hope to use a D-D reaction, but will check whether D-D or D-T is more feasible in their experiment. I am confident that they will "find out" that D-T is easier. Helion might "end up" using D-T for their first generation reactors as well.
Helion's claiming they'll be able to run the same or similar equipment with D-D fuel to generate the He3. I'm skeptical of this on a couple fronts:
D-D fusion is even harder than D-He3 and releases considerably less energy, so your fuel generation cycle is likely to be significantly energy negative. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does need to be factored into the calculation. It also multiplies your capital costs, since every pulse you run with D-D fuel to generate He3 consumes equipment time that is now no longer available for your power generation cycle.
The other problem is that D-D fusion isn't aneutronic: it yields 50% He3+n and 50% T+p. So in addition to the tritium (which isn't really a waste product, since you can sell it), you've got a high-energy neutron to deal with for every He3, and the whole point of using D+He3 in the first place was so you'd have a nice, well-behaved high-energy proton to handle instead of a neutron. So you'll still have the same number of neutrons to deal with (or somewhat more, since you're likely to lose some He3 in the process somewhere), and you're still going to need an answer to the same engineering challenges of neutron shielding that the D-T fueled reactors have.
There are a couple residual benefits, thought, if the can get it all working. Neutron shielding and power generation are now separable, simplifying the engineering challenges somewhat. Using the neutrons to generate tritium is demoted from a critical requirement to a stretch goal for the neutron shielding system. The neutrons from D-D reaction are considerably less energetic, so there's correspondingly less waste heat to vent. You can potentially capture useful energy from the protons a lot more efficiently than from neutrons. And you can use different facilities for you D-D reactions and your D-He3 reactions, so you could have a big centralized facility for He3 generation with all the neutron shielding, leaving your power generation reactors small and relatively free of the burden of neutron shielding.
The D-D reactions also offer a potential offramp short of successful power generation. If Helion gets the fuel generation cycle working but not the power generation, and CFS or one of the other D-T fueled projects does succeed, then there's going to be a huge market for Tritium that Helion could fill. A D-T reactor should be able to make a lot of its own tritium (the neutron is captured by a lithium in the shielding system, which them splits into a tritium and a helium 4), but would need to be 100% efficient at this to be fully self sufficient: there are proposed solutions to this involving neutron multipliers (materials like beryllium or lead that can emit multiple neutrons after absorbing one), but it'd be cleaner and simpler to just buy it if it's available in the required quantities at a vaguely reasonable price.
> D-D fusion is even harder than D-He3
I thought so, too. It makes concerns about stray D-D reactions in the D-He3 mix seem overblown.
D-D fusion is not so much harder than D-He3 that you can avoid having an unpleasant amount of D-D fusion going on anyplace you have enough D to make D-He3 happen.
Well, maybe in something like a two-beam system where the D is kept "cold" and fuses with He3 only by directed kinetic energy, but I don't think any of the current contenders are proposing that (and it probably wouldn't work if they did).
"Unpleasant" is relative. D-T fusion is already producing 2 or 3 orders less radioactive waste than fission. Depending on the conditions in the D-He3 reactor, we'd drop another few orders of magnitude.
I'm still skeptical we'll somehow leapfrog to success with D-He3 before D-T.
Well described! re: How much harder is D+D or D+3He fusion than D+T, here's the classic "triple product" plot from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Fusion_tripleprod.svg/1920px-Fusion_tripleprod.svg.png. You can see that D3He fusion requires about an order of magnitude higher temperature at the same density and confinement time -- that is, an order of magnitude higher pressure (P = n * T). DD fusion requires two orders of magnitude higher density or confinement at the same temperature, so still an order of magnitude higher pressure. (Note this is a pretty rough mathematical guideline: given all the challenges of getting plasmas to do what you want, e.g. instabilities, this is a lower-limit than a threshold for fusion ignition.) So a reactor that can just not reach the pressure conditions necessary for either of those will probably ignite D-T almost trivially. This is why if they're not talking about at least demonstrating first burn with DT, it's hard to take them seriously.
re: How much better are the CFS magnets? It's been a long time since I studied tokamaks, but if I recall correctly, magnetic confinement fusion power is expected to scale with peak magnetic field to the fourth power (B^4). This means that by doubling the peak field strength, CFS can build an igniting tokamak (in theory) that is 1/16 the volume of ITER. This takes it from the international megaproject scale (>$10bn, 40 yrs) to something achieved more locally in space and time (< $1bn, "5 years"). The reason to be bullish on CFS is that tokamak physics is about as well understood as anything in fusionland, and their breakthrough directly pushes a highly critical factor.
I think it's also generally underappreciated that igniting a plasma will result in novel conditions that, if history is any indicator, will not behave quite how we expect. The recent (near) ignition event on the National Ignition Facility is exciting primarily because it will let us test ignited plasma behavior, assuming we can repeat it. CFS's SPARC will also be a research machine to understand how to control and engineer magnetically-confined burning plasmas.
Hot off the presses, CFS has raised 2 billion to build SPARC and begin work on ARC. In a week private fusion funding has more than doubled
I was reading on the B^4th power relationship recently and it doesn't result in 16x more density due to one of the other factors being radius squared - so I think you would have 16x more density at the same size as ITER but the ARC wiki page describes it as allowing the same power as ITER at a quarter of the size
It is one of those great cosmic coincidences that America has produced the two greatest chess players of all time (as defined by dominance over their contemporaries), both of whom quit at the height of their dominance to never play chess again.
The best way of describing Bobby Fischer to a non-chess player is to imagine an Eskimo tennis player who cleared away the snow to create his own tennis court, trained exclusively by himself, then showed up at Wimbledon, where every single player colluded and conspired against him (sharing training techniques, intentionally throwing matches to ensure better rest for his opponents), but nevertheless won every match without losing a set or a game, and then immediately disappeared, only to show up decades later to blame the Eskimos for 9/11.
Fischer did have to famous successful parents, so really not Eskimo like.
In fact someone whose mother defected to Stalin's Soviet Union to study medicine is exactly the kind of person you expect to be a 9/11 truther and a chess prodigy.
What sort of guns you like to shoot in the nude, Paula?
Paula, you have more pressing problems.
Your Mccaffrey antivirus subscription has lapsed!
Or she likes to kill or maim people who aren't wearing clothes? That's just awful!
I feel like Substack could use a report button... and maybe Akismet or something
Yeah, it's not like his family history predicted stability for him.
"It is one of those great cosmic coincidences that America has produced the two greatest chess players of all time (as defined by dominance over their contemporaries)..."
Both Morphy and Fischer had amazing peaks, but also *short* peaks.
Capablanca went undefeated for eight years, which included games in tournaments and defeating Lasker to become world champion...
Capablanca is not really considered a serious contender for the greatest player of all time, while Morphy and (especially) Fischer are.
I have never seen a realistic claim that Morphy was the "greatest of all time." Greatest at the time he was playing, sure.
But if we define "greatest of all time" to be "dominance over their contemporaries" as Jackie'sDad did, then how does going eight years without losing (while still playing in tournaments and a world chess championship match) not even get into the conversation?
The problem is that, when you really consider the situation involved, the "8 years without losing" streak becomes significantly less impressive than it may appear at first because so he played so few games. It's not his fault, of course, but limited capability for international travel + fewer top players + political considerations etc meant that there were far fewer chess tournaments in which he could face other top players. More specifically, he played 63 consecutive games without losing, while a super grandmaster like Ding Liren, for instance, went 100 straight with no losses 3 years ago (mostly against 2700+ players).
This isn't meant to disqualify Capablanca as one of the greatest players ever, mind you; he was a world champion, and he was certainly dominant in his time. But he's not in contention for greatest player ever, since, in the eyes of most observers, he can't really hold a candle to Kasparov, or Fischer (or even Carlsen, honestly).
With regards to Morphy's argument for being the greatest ever, I would recommend you watch some of the videos in which Ben Finegold explains why that's a reasonable position to hold.
And here's a pop song that references Fischer; Prefab Sprout, 1984, "Cue Fanfare":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBE3H06uUg
Small typo: “ets qualified" should be "Lets qualified"
1. In addition to Bezos, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were also abandoned by their biological parents. At least some of their motivation must have been to make their biological parents deeply regret having ever abandoned them.
Perhaps success in big tech is enabled by having the kind of genes that would allow you to abandon a child, plus being raised in a environment by the kind of parents who would adopt an abandoned child.
I hadn’t thought about the callousness angle…but it does makes sense.
I don't know about Bezos or Ellison, but what I know of Jobs suggest he was a pretty cold father.
Cold to all his daughters but not to his son, Reed.
This just blew my mind.
I don't know why their parents abandoned them. Poverty/desperation strikes me as less callous than just not wanting to raise one's child.
Steve Jobs was not an uncritical person, but he had nothing but appreciation for how well his adoptive parents raised him. For example, when Steve was getting picked on in school, he told his parents he had to go to a better school so they sold their house and moved to a better school district.
The person I felt sorry for was Steve's adoptive little sister. Did anybody ask her if she wanted to move and leave her school friends behind?
In general, can you imagine having for an older brother the World's Greatest Salesman? Especially if you don't share any of his Reality Distortion Field genes?
So you're saying if I want my kids to be rich and successful, I need to abandon them at birth? Worked for Moses, Romulus, and King Arthur...
Perhaps a surprising number of presidents too--Ford and Clinton.
And Obama.
Three of the last ten Presidents have had a different surname at times in their lives, including Gerald Ford who was in general extremely non-exotic. The lesson I take from that is that lots of people have had family drama.
"So you're saying if I want my kids to be rich and successful, I need to abandon them at birth? Worked for Moses, Romulus, and King Arthur..."
Yes! Also, if you want to become rich you should bet everything on 17 five times running...
Seems something of a high-rise strategy. After all, Arthur and Romulus's siblings didn't turn out quite so well...
I'd suggest 20% chance of criminal career, 79% chance of fairly normal life and 1% chance of being a legendary archetype for your people. Odds of the last may lower if said archetype already exists...
Arthur's half-sisters and adopted brother were all raised by their birth parents. He had no other siblings to the best of my knowledge.
I'm not sure there's a canonical childhood history for Morgana (because there's no real canonical Arthurian tradition), but I'd missed that possibility... As Moses had at least one brother (Aaron) raised by his parents maybe the abandonment strategy works best if you just abandon one child: it probably creates quite a driven (if vengeful) personality, and avoids the risks caused by association with siblings seen in the case of Remus.
We may need some more data points to be sure though.
I say Geoffrey of Monmouth is the canonical version, since it actually got accepted as actual history before people concluded he had an "inordinate love of lying".
But he doesn't have Lancelot or Guenivere! He certainly doesn't underlie the French romance tradition, which has its own core stories.
I say Malory is the canonical version. He's got all of the major characters, and to the best of my knowledge everything in English written after Malory references Malory, directly or indirectly.
Probably improves their odds. On the other hand, if you want them to be happy, it's a different calculation entirely.
Moses wasn't really abandoned. Mom was running a number to save him from the Gestapo. She left Miriam to watch him and Miriam talked the Princess into letting Mom be his wet nurse.
You need to (have the genes to) be the kind of person who would abandon them, and yet raise them in a nurturing environment. Kavka's toxin IRL.
It wouldn't help, since you don't have the genes for the personality which *spontaneously* abandons them, which is what gives the child the necessary characteristic for success. If you abandon your children because you want to improve their life outcomes, that just proves you have unusually strong conscientiousness and willingness to sacrifice for the future well-being of your children, that is, the act selects for exactly the opposite of what abandonment selects for in nature.
This is actually a parable about all attempts at intentional design of society.
And if you want a boy to be able to look out for himself after you've abandoned him, name him Sue.
The Orphan of Destiny ...
This raises an interesting question: Why is abandonment as children so popular a precursor in our hero stories and myths? (They often end up with terrible step-mothers, which just makes things that much worse.) Is it that we love the intrigue of the come-from-way-behind mythos to conquer all? Or is there something about that kind of adversity that really does foster psychological hero potential in people and our myths have captured it?
My son calls it the Orphan of Destiny motif seen in Moses, Oedipus, Romulus and
And? And what? The tension of this orphaned comment!
We need to look at base rates.
What % of people are abandoned by their fathers and what % of billionaires are.
This Daily Mail article is the best I can find, it says one in five with second families don't see the kids from their first family, not the relevant statistic but doesn't indicate an order of magnitude.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2510371/amp/Britains-130-000-absent-dads-One-fathers-lose-contact-children-earlier-relationships.html
The generic response to this is that an unusually large % of highly successful people were orphaned, which wouldn't fit your hypothesis, or at least be a stretch.
The thing is, the same logic applies to inmates. I suspect that the burden of huge responsibility early in life makes some great and some break. I think Jonathon Haidt said something like that.
What percentage, though?
2.5% of children are adopted and another 4% don't live with either parent. That would be 6.5% of children.
How many billionaires are adopted?
Another possibility, though: people who adopt children are disproportionately likely to be wealthy, so the odds of being adopted and ending up rich are probably distorted. Especially if you are adopted as a baby/small child rather than later on due to behavioral problems.
Steve Jobs was the biological child of two grad students and was placed for adoption through an agency. He was placed with two working class parents of fairly similar ethnicity to his more upscale biological parents (one German-American parent in each pair, while one biological parent was Syrian, the nephew of the Syrian foreign minister IIRC, and one adoptive parent was Armenian). His biological parents had one more child together, the prominent novelist Mona Simpson. (These days, I presume, it's much harder to adopt a child from higher class biological parents than yourselves.)
Jeff Bezos's mother was from Cowboy-American gentry and her first husband was a Danish-American. The marriage broke up after a few years and his mother remarried a kindly Cuban immigrant manager at Exxon.
Larry Ellison was born during WWII when his biological father was an Italian-American pilot in the military and his mother was a Jewish-American teen. At 9 months she gave him up for adoption to her uncle and aunt and didn't see him for 48 years.
Other zillionaires: Bill Gates' father was a distinguished figure in the Puget Sound legal profession and his paternal grandfather owned a furniture store. Mark Zuckerberg is a classic Ellis Island immigrant progression across four generations of peddler to Post Office employee to very prosperous dentist to tycoon.
Sam Walton's father was something of a ne'er do well, but his uncle owned a big regional chain of stores. Michael Milken's father was a middle class accountant but his uncle was a tycoon.
Not true of Bill Gates, though. And he is a much more psychologically stable individual.
There's a whole post on gwern.net about how very successful people were disproportionately likely to have grown up in a bad family environment OR a perfect family environment, but no inbetween.
Or, you know, that's the story that is more interesting.
> I can’t read the full text,
Pubmed notes on the right hand side that it's "free", because there's an Open Access link you can read: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1939-1676.2009.0407.x
Came here to say this, you definitely can read the full text. Also to say that clinically as well as in studies like this one, we are often relying on pet owners' reports of symptoms, so you're just back in the territory of human expectations influencing perceived outcome. Seizures are less subjective for people to assess in their pets than for instance "severity of arthritis pain" but still more subjective than you might think. My typical seizure monitoring visit might consist of me asking "About how many seizures has Fluffy had in the last three months?" and if I'm really lucky, Fluffy's owner saying "I saw one that lasted about 2 minutes, and there was a puddle of urine on the kitchen floor once so I think there was another since he doesn't usually break housetraining." The pet owners who are in these studies are generally more diligent than usual and are supposed to keep diaries, but the fundamental problem remains.
In the discussion the authors write that they cannot distinguish placebo effects in their study from regression to the mean:
Regression to the mean is a statistical term used to describe the fluctuations of biological variables that occur over time and take the form of a sine wave around the mean.11 Epilepsy is a waxing and waning disorder, and fluctuations in seizure frequency are common over the course of the disease. Owners are most likely to seek a change in therapy for their pet when seizures are under poor control. Over the short term, improvement in the seizure frequency is probable, regardless of the treatment administered. However, this improvement is often erroneously attributed to a recently instituted change in therapy, whereas in fact it is because of an effect of time.
"A broad survey of academic philosophers found that the only group who majority one boxes on newcomb's problem are those who study ancient Greek and Roman philosophy." - Interestingly, my (weakly held) belief is that rationalists tend to be way more into classical aesthetics / classical history in general than the average nerd. I don't care much for classical stuff; also I'd two-box.
I think this is probably just a coincidence or that classical philosophers don't study the weird math-y stuff that would make two-boxing seem justified. But if I had to come up with a cuter theory, it would be that mostly upper-class people get into classics, and upper-class people are less likely to make the choice that makes them seem like grubby money-maximizers desperate for an extra $1K.
I wonder if the focus on virtue as the ground of ethics is also important.
Classical literature/philosophy actually includes a problem roughly isomorphic to Newcomb's, called the "lazy argument" (ἀργὸς λόγος), that makes two-boxing seem undesirable:
You are suffering from a disease, and Fate has determined whether you will or will not recover from it. You reason that if you are fated to recover, then it is useless to see a doctor (because you will recover with or without their help) and that if you are fated *not* to recover, then it is *also* useless to see a doctor (because you will die with or without their help); you thus conclude that, live or die, you shouldn't bother with the expense of seeing the doctor.
(For Newcomb mapping, let the $1000 box correspond to what you save by not going to the doctor, and let the million-or-nothing box correspond to the value of your life; the lazy argument's conclusion is that you should two-box.)
The ancients were not happy with this—'if anything about the future is true, you may as well not bother doing anything' seemed like an unhealthy outcome—and their usual answer, attributed to Chrysippus, was that obviously Fate would have also determined whether you are going to see a doctor and that it's reasonable your predetermined prognosis might depend on that, so there could still be good in giving up the value of the doctor's fee.
Academic Philosophy in the last century has relied a lot on thought experiments. As opposed to ancient philosophers who tended to make broader appeals to people's intuitions about day to day life. So would make sense classical philosophers are less inclined to seperate out their normal intuitions
When I dug around in these demographics, it generally looked like the closer you are to decision theory, the more likely you were to two-box. Just as some of the questions about non-classical logic got a lot of continental philosophers, it looks like one-boxing is primarily philosophers who aren't familiar with the problem.
What I really want to know, and I don't think I can validate from their interface yet, is whether my anecdotal sense is right that decision theorists older than me are mostly two-boxers while decision theorists younger than me are often one-boxers or hold some weird mixed view like me.
Your theory about a possible classical philosophy/one-box connection spurred me to think. If it isn't just a coincidence, then it might be that a character trait (disinclination to optimize) influences choice of specialization (choosing classical philosophy over other fields of philosophy).
What do I mean by 'disinclination to optimize'? Most living philosophers seem to evaluate classical philosophy as an unsatisfactory foundation for Western philosophy. (Go check the reference list for Plato and Aristotle.)
A philosopher seeking to optimize/maximize* their potential contribution to philosophy would be more likely to avoid specializations which are considered unsatisfactory. Therefore, this philosopher would be more likely to avoid classical philosophy.
By contrast, a philosopher who is disinclined to optimize lacks that reason. Thus this philosopher would be less likely to avoid classical philosophy. They would be more likely to find it good enough.
Similarly, taking one box instead of two boxes would be good enough for them.
*I leave open what optimizing/maximizing one's potential contribution to philosophy actually means for philosophers, if it means anything at all.
Latin is the gateway to studying classics, and in the US lots of people study Latin in part because they are Catholic. Does being raised Catholic make you more likely to one box?
I was raised Catholic and I'd definitely one-box.
I would imagine that Christians in general are more likely to one-box than atheists. Christianity is all about making deals with all-powerful beings, and if an all-powerful being tells you they're doing something nice for you then you'd better darn well believe it. Atheists hear about the existence of a supposedly all-powerful being and immediately start thinking about how they can outsmart it.
As for Catholicism versus Protestantism, I get the impression that Catholicism encourages a somewhat more philosophical approach to religion than many Protestant denominations (e.g. meditating on the mysteries of the rosary) but possibly not quite so much as Judaism.
"Atheists hear about the existence of a supposedly all-powerful being and immediately start thinking about how they can outsmart it."
Weird take on atheists, who hear about the existence of a supposedly all-powerful being and simply don't believe in such a thing.
I like the classical side, but find newcomb's problem to be like other similar thought experiments (trolleys, Chinese boxes) that to me are just bogus. If you assume X, where X happens to be impossible/false, everything/anything can be proved. My aspirations to become a philosopher get foiled by what I read about philosophy.
There's nothing logically impossible about Newcomb's thought experiment.
Are you saying that it's not impossible, or that it's some other kind of impossibility that doesn't qualify as a _logical_ impossibility?
> There's nothing logically impossible about Newcomb's thought experiment.
Yes, a 100% accurate predictor of human behaviour is logically impossible. See Rice's theorem.
Even a very accurate predictor is implausible due to complexity theory.
With payoffs of 1 million and 1,000, you don't even need a very accurate predictor:
Payoff from 1-boxing: 1m * P(correct)
Payoff from 2-boxing: 1m * P(incorrect) + 1000
The two payoffs are equal at p(correct) = 0.5005. Above that, 1-boxing will have a better payoff.
Do you think a person could guess someone's decision on the Newcomb problem more than 50.05% of the time?
I wonder how it would change people's answers if it was phrased as being "a pretty good predictor, gets things right at least 3/4 of the time" - putting it in the territory where people picture a savvy human rather than a god.
With a "pretty good predictor" I'd two box, with a perfect predictor I'd one-box.
With a mere mortal as the predictor it becomes a bit of a "he thinks I think he thinks I think" game. I'm betting I probably _could_ predict what people would do 75% of the time, because I think that 75% of the time people will two-box it when facing a mere mortal.If I ever get rich enough to be eccentric instead of just crazy, maybe I will try this.
Rice's theorem has no relevance here, the predictor just needs to simulate your brain for a finite time.
Sure, "just" needs to simulate. You're hiding a lot of non-trivial semantic properties behind that "just", and per Rice's theorem, all non-trivial semantic properties are undecidable.
Perhaps you are being confused by the popular informal statement of Rice's theorem? The confusing thing is that "semantic property of the program" is supposed to mean a property of the partial function computed by the program. A program in the sense of the theorem (a Turing machine) can use unbounded time and memory before it outputs anything, or it can use unbounded time and memory and not output but just run indefinitely. So informally, when it runs for a long time there is no point at which we could say "ok, it definitely won't output anything" because it could always run for a little longer and output. But the predictor needs to test the behavior of a finite system (presumably also in finite time, but it doesn't matter). The computer science equivalent is running a program for n steps and looking what it did.
> If you assume X, where X happens to be impossible/false, everything/anything can be proved.
Newcombs paradox generalizes pretty gracefully to versions of omega that are merely very good at predicting what you are going to do, so I don't know if this objection is as valid here as it is for eg. the Trolley Problem.
If omega is merely very good, then it necessarily admits some two box solutions depending on specific circumstances, in which case it's no longer a paradox and no longer as a single solution.
No longer has a single solution.
I think it don't : either you have a non super good predictor with comparabke pay off, in which case twi boxer thinking they can beat the predictor makes sense.... Or you have super good predictor and order of magnitude appart pay off. In which sense, it still makes sense to be a two boxer, like it does to play at the lottery : even if you loose on average, there is on non zero chance of life changing event while the average gain (or loss) does not change anything in your life. This is a existing thing, and we can observe a huge amount of people bet in this case, even if not playing have a better average payoff...
A lot of philosophers are bad at writing thought experiments, and try to stipulate things that our imagination resists. Newcomb is an example like that.
The standard move is to re-describe the Newcomb problem in a medical way. Suppose we discover that masks do nothing to block viruses, but that people who regularly wear masks have lower covid infection rates (presumably because of some common cause). In that case, do you wear a mask? (Wearing a mask is like one boxing and not wearing one is like two boxing.)
I believe the standard internet-rationalist one-boxers claim that this version is importantly different from the standard presentation, and go for the two-boxing equivalent here.
Thanx for this. When I think about it this way, my prior is to wear a mask. So I guess that makes me a one-boxer and confirms the classics stereotype.
I don't think they're the same at all, in the above situation I wouldn't wear a mask, but I'm definitely a one-boxer.
(And I expect that I'll end up with a million dollars and no covid. One should try to win.)
[Maybe add EY's talk with Paul Christiano on takeoff speeds](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds)
I think this was, in some sense, the most awaited one of the discussions.
Re nature vs. nurture for criminality, I'm reminded of this study from Ohio.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/2021-norris.pdf
Key points:
- You have a parent who committed a crime in Ohio
- Your parent is randomly assigned a judge. Some judges are much harsher than others
- If your parent got a harsher judge, you are slightly less likely to be a criminal yourself.
The study generated interest because it came to the unpleasant conclusion that having your criminous parent thrown in prison (this being more likely under harsh judge) was better than having him around in your life. Or maybe it scares you into following the law. But any way you cut it, this is a nurture effect.
Outside my field, but assuming it was conducted competently it has beautiful randomization and relevance to the question.
Isn't there an obvious third option there involving revoking custory without a long prison sentence?
Locking people up has a lot of beneficial effects. Turns out most criminals won't change, so locking them up for a long time keeps them from committing more crimes and pulling more people into crime.
What's the benefit of eventually letting them out then?
There's a reason why we used to hang so many criminals...
Some people do "age out" of criminal behavior. Others don't, and need to be incarcerated indefinitely.
Sure, but there's also a pretty common type of a career criminal where nobody really expects them to become straight again, and yet this alone isn't enough for a life sentence, if they're caught over a trifle off they go after a short sentence.
It seems like justice system wasn't really designed with these considerations in mind, judging the "character" comes distant second to the severity of the crime at hand. Maybe at some point this led to a beneficial balance, but by now everything is so far gone that maybe it's time to redesign the system from the ground up. Sadly society doesn't appear to be up to the task...
This is what "three strikes" laws and similar things are designed to do - someone keeps ending up in court time and again for committing various crimes, they clearly aren't going to change their ways.
The fraction that change does also depend on the nature of the carceral system - the American one seems to actively make people *more* criminal, whereas other countries do successfully reform at least some of the criminals incarcerated.
False, actually. Criminals have very high recidivism rates globally. Countries which solve a lower percentage of crimes have "lower" recidivism rates because they simply fail to arrest as high of a percentage of criminals.
This is similar to thinking that you are lowering COVID rates by not testing it.
People just lie about it for propaganda purposes.
Cutting off the right hand off thieves helps them to reform not to steal so much, and try out a career in begging instead.
There's no good evidence for this.
People always point to Scandinavian countries as evidence but can never separate out the confounders. There are more Americans per capita who commit crimes for the first time compared with these countries, which obviously cannot be a direct result of recidivism (maybe you could argue its indirect because their criminal parents are reformed and therefore better parents than American criminals, but this ought to be observable simply through a higher heritability of criminality in the US).
You also have to assume that none of these differences between the US and Scandinavia are demographic based. Certain ethnic groups in the US commit the vast majority of crime per capita, and these ethnic groups are a much smaller part of the population of scandanavian countries. Maybe, you know, people of Northern European ancestry are more easily "rehabilitated" than certain other demographic? Scoff at that all you want, but if your analysis does not make a bona fide consideration of this possibility, then your analysis is junk.
The state, for very good reasons, wants to keep kids and parents together, even if the parents are not stellar or are even actively bad. I hate the idea of kids staying with their terrible parents, but hate the idea of the state routinely deciding who is a bad parent even more.
When parents are in jail, there are fewer, possibly no, opportunities for the parents to be around the kids, so the state has to go with other options. That also has the benefit of a fair (hopefully) judiciary to review a case and determine if the parent really should be punished and put in jail. There are significant checks on the system, and the state has to make a compelling case. It's not perfect, of course, but I have a lot more confidence in that system for taking kids away than a bureaucratic option.
This isn't terribly surprising and is almost certainly one of the reasons why mass incarceration lowers crime - throw criminals in jail for a long time, they aren't around to mess up their kids/suck them into their own criminal stuff. Likewise, the kid isn't exposed to that stuff and doesn't see it as normalized, and also looks at it as bad - they got locked up forever, they should avoid such things to have the same effect to them.
this requires defining aggression against other prisoners as not-crime, I think.
They commit fewer crimes in prison than they do outside of it due to the higher degree of supervision.
Also, to some extent, we care less about the well-being of prisoners than the general public.
As a veterinarian, I frequently think about placebo effects, but for humans, not for animals. I rarely get to observe the seizures or other clinical signs ("symptoms" are for humans) myself. Instead, I have to rely on the owner/guardian's assessment and report which can be highly biased. The placebo effect in question should be for the humans reporting the number of seizures their dogs are experiencing after giving them a new medication.
I think the dog placebo study linked in #5 is also terrible because it's comparing placebo to baseline instead of comparing placebo to no placebo. The effect could be all regression to the mean. If they want to run this study properly, they need to randomize dogs into placebo vs no placebo and blind the owners about which group their dog is in.
You could carefully construct different placebos to test against.
Perhaps you can make a placebo that only the humans notice (perhaps praying for the dog?), vs placebos that the pets notice more. Eg neutral tasting Vs bitter pills. Presumably, the owners wouldn't sample the pills for taste.
On 10 (painted classical sculptures), a friend of mine said something similar: “I don't buy it. Why would they spend weeks or months carefully carving the marble and then spend an afternoon slapping some flashy colors on it? … I think archaeologists are only finding scant molecular evidence of the *base coat* on the statue. I bet the statues were also covered with highlights, layers, shades, etc.”
He suggests that the statues might have looked like life-size versions of today's painted miniatures, which is intriguing: https://www.facebook.com/steeleky/posts/10120183205650904
My favorite theory is that the paint we have found is (in at least some cases) an amateurish repaint done some years after the work was painted (presumably much better) the first time. No idea how viable the theory is, but it's amusing to think about.
Given how often this seems to have happened to great paintings, I wouldn't at all be surprised. E.g., the history of attempts to restore da Vinci's Last Supper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation-restoration_of_Leonardo_da_Vinci%27s_The_Last_Supper
Or maybe an amateurish first paint! Perhaps the original sculptors preferred the bare marble aesthetic, which then later became unpopular.
We need to let a warhammer nerd loose on the Elgin Marbles. Or at the very least, SLA print them a 1:72 reproduction of that Augustus statue to paint.
Service Level Agreement?
Symbionese Liberation Army?
Student Leadership Academy?
Probably StereoLithographic Apparatus (for 3d printing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereolithography )
I think that might be the British Museum's plan B just in case anyone forces them to give them back.
Why bother with 3D printing when we could just have a robot carve a replica out of marble? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/world/europe/carrara-italy-robot-sculptures.html
I think there's a lot to be said for using practical domain knowledge to inform history. This reminds me of Janet Stephens, the real-life hairdresser whose research into Roman hairstyles has revealed just how much those hairstyles were sewn; or the historical re-enacters who put their clay pipes down by the fire to dry overnight, and when the next morning they threw a new log on the fire, realised why archaeology finds so many broken pipes.
If a culture made detailed naturalistic sculptures, then painted them in flat colors, it would be unique in the history of the world. Flat colors go with abstraction; shading goes with naturalism.
The full-room light approach they tested was notably much less bright than even a normal light box would be (more light generated, but the bulbs were much less close to the eyes, so effectively less bright). See EA Forum here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ei2uYbn2zrzmBjEsp/sleep-effective-ways-to-improve-it?commentId=smDmE2vgCtpC4Ftnw
Still a nice idea, but arguably not really a test of the lumenator idea.
So how is this different from just having some bright lightbulbs in your room?
That's the direction they're going for: might we get away with just some bright lightbulbs? They managed to confirm that having a bunch of them strung out in the room works.
Honestly, I doubt a single source of light on the ceiling will be enough - it's too weak if it's not right in front of your face. And if you make it bright enough, it'll probably be painful when accidentally looked at.
I'm currently experimenting with a setup of ceiling light plus around a 2m bar at the top of a wall. It's ok, but it'd probably be easier to tolerate if it were spread on several walls, or even better all over the ceiling.
I recently added some pretty bright plant growth light to my living room, and I've noticed it's livened it up a lot.
On the U of A topic - I *really* struggle to see what they're going to do to promote diversity of ideology that isn't either a.) just being a right-leaning culture overall, which, fine, or b.) allowing some pretty heinous stuff because they don't want to draw a line on, say, anti-LGBT speech and actions.
Their thesis - that universities are too woke to function - is not nearly as true in my experience (at a Midwestern public school, so admittedly not the MOST woke school in America) as they seem to think it is.
I believe (for anecdotal reasons) that the wokeness level varies enormously from college to the next. U of A might not even turn out to the most anti-woke school out there.
Given various of the founders were involved in hounding out people for not supporting the Iraq war, or making anti Israel statements, seems unfortunately likely that"free speech" will mean "my in group gets to decide what is allowed not yours".
Unfair. There's a lot of universities that protect all speech. You don't hear much about them simply because if they have that culture then there tends not be calls for cancellations and the like, or the university shoots them down.
Name three. The University of Chicago was the bastion of free speech, but searching for 'woke and University of Chicago' I get lots of articles...
And yes free speech means that Nazis and racists and the KKK and... get to voice their opinions. (No one has to listen...)
I'd start here
https://www.thefire.org/the-2021-college-free-speech-rankings/
Unfortunately I *worked* at their number 2 college and it was terrible.
For example, I was part of their cancer moonshot deal while Trump was running the first time, and one of the leads would spam hipchat shitting on Trump supporters (Not Trump; sometimes, yes, but usually specifically the people who like him). I asked him to stop because my family is full of them and I HAVE to work and would prefer not to hear my boss's boss shitting on my family all day while I do it. He refused.
I tried to report it up the ladder and the U was awfully unresponsive. In fact they used their commitment to free speech *to defend someone with institutional power pushing his views on his subordinates all day*.
Okay, then. If *that's* what they mean by a commitment to free speech, so be it. So I started refuting what he said in slack every. single. time. he said it. I tried to do it as calmly and rationally - but persistently and consistently as possible.
LO AND BEHOLD by contract wasn't renewed despite good performance. And This isn't the only thing I saw while I was there by far.
In summary, UofC's speech code seems nice on paper but *in practice* seems to be deployed to protect a progressive majority's right to push their view on their subordinates (including students) and to use their power to lock people they disagree with out of the conversation (or bully them into silence). It simply uses the type of language FIRE (god bless 'em unironically) likes to hear so they get the good ranking.
All that being said, given my personal experience, as far as I'm concerned you have to eliminate everything below UofC. So you've shown one University.
> anti-LGBT speech and actions
Why should that speech be banned? And not pro-LGBT speech instead?
I think we are all in opposition to assault and battery. What actions did you have in mind?
Openly discriminating against LGBT people by for example refusing to enroll them in courses, allow them to join clubs, that sort of thing. Definitely free association! But...
...that's not speech.
If you followed the people that want to do this I doubt you'd have any concern about this happening.
The impression I get is that wokeness flows from the top down for colleges with a bias to the liberal arts, racial minorities, and left politics in the area broadly. Small Elite liberals arts schools > Ivies > elite public universities > mid-tier colleges > trade schools
> 20: Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion.
THANK YOU. I saw this once back when it was first published, forgot the reference, and had been looking for it since!
My dad used to recite this fable as a cautionary tale (which was its original usefulness.) But all these variations on a theme illustrate its power as a larger commentary on trust, and how much trust comes into play in situations of love and war...
If you watch a lot of commentary by GM Ben Finegold, you come to love Paul Morphy. Apparently there's a lot of disagreement about Morphy's true strength; they'll say "Everybody he played against sucked. How can you say he was objectively strong?" But Ben argues that that's exactly the point. How exactly do you become so dominant over everybody in the world without there being anybody to teach you?
Came here to note exactly this. It's like if Steph Curry showed up 5 years after James Naismith invented basketball; what the heck is this guy doing here absent the evolutionary process that should have produced him?
And, as Finegold points out, although he obviously made his name flaying dudes alive in knife-edge tactical positions, on the rare occasions that he got into a slow positional game he played it in a way that, again, shows a deep understanding of those types of positions that's just totally out of place in his context.
In his match against Andersen (the best player besides him at the time), he crushed Andersen quickly in a couple of game. Then Andersen won a 70 move slug fest and said "Morphy needed only 20 moves to beat me, while I needed 70".
Ben Finegold is hilarious! You can see from Morphy's aggression and sacrifices how much he was just toying with contemporaries the same way you can disrespect people way below your skill level in other domains by trying things that shouldn't work.
I think your summary of Caplan is fair. Granted, it's admirable that he's open about it, and he was clear he'd say these things upfront, and he adhered to the terms of the bet. But even so it seems a little weak.
Then again, in the same vein -- his half-hearted rebuttal to me serves as a ringing endorsement of the book and I will probably read it now!
Heart-eyes! So gratifying to read this. Thank you!
The left wing bias was only one point in the review.
The bigger points were eg not taking nuclear or geoengineering serious.
No no no, those points were strictly in service to his "look how leftist they are" point!
With geoengineering, Bryan failed to engage at all with the climatological arguments in the book against geoengineering. I think he basically bulverized the authors, saying that they only dislike geoengineering because it would allow a billionaire to unilaterally solve warming without government involvement, which Bryan Caplan wrongly assumed the authors inherently would hate, based on his sterotypes of leftists. So circular!
With nuclear, Bryan has a fair point: the authors ought to have gone out of their way to praise it, instead of failing to mention it at all. That would've given the book more credibility, particularly in Bryan's eyes. My defense of the authors is to presume they just weren't looking for ways to signal their lack of left-wing bias, or just thought the topic riles people up and would distract from their core points. Or maybe they just think that nuclear power is good exactly to the extent that the market says it's good, assuming externalities are priced correctly (that being primary message of the book). I.e., no need to praise it just for the sake of signaling.
It's not what I got from his rebuttal. It's not a situation where the book makes a good point, but Caplan dismisses it due to an unreliable source. It's that the book is basically asking the reader to take a lot on faith, and Caplan just doesn't have the necessary level of faith in the author. That's a fair conclusion, and the reason why he didn't expect to be convinced in the first place.
If I'm considering a complicated topic and I'm about to read an untrusty source on that topic, I can tell in advance that I'll only be convinced if the author manages to give me a gears-level understanding of his arguments. If I can't "grok" his points, I am not going to take them on faith.
And since climate change is a rather complicated topic, Caplan could have been pretty sure in advance that it's unlikely he'll change his mind. The chance of it happening is proportional to the chance the authors can clearly explain their reasoning on that complicated topic. It's not proportional to how convinced you are, but with how complicated the topic is.
Wait, did you read the book? I thought it left as little to faith as was possible in a single volume book! But that could be my own bias, since I already thought climate change was a big problem before reading the book.
I'd love to find someone who started skeptical and whose mind was changed by _Climate Shock_.
I'm just explaining Caplan's likely thought process, since I think Scott's and others' in this thread are using a rather uncharitable interpretation.
Personally, I'm very much not interested in climate science :) It's the perfect mix of being an imprecise and complex science, culture war topic and in any case, there's nothing I can do about it so it can only, at most, increase my anxiety level. In this respect I could make the same bet with you and be reasonably sure to win, because my conviction is not based on the content of the book.
And even on a purely intellectual level it's unlikely to change much for me. I already think humans are changing the climate - that much is pretty obvious. I'm not concerned with small to moderate change, because I think we'll grow economically and technologically much faster than the climate. I'm somewhat afraid of a Venus-like scenario, but the consensus seems to be it is unlikely. I'm already pro-technology. I'm rabidly anti-pollution, and this overlaps a lot with climate. So see, yet again a case of not considering the book relevant, even before reading it. Having read it and saying "yeah, it's interesting, but I'm still 90% what I said above" is by far the most likely outcome.
> I’d previously cited a claim in Joseph Henrich’s Secret Of Our Success that people liked spicy foods because they were antibacterial, but an article in Nature says there is “little evidence” to support that claim.
Does this generalize to all spices, or just capsaicin and similar 'hot' things? Spices being antimicrobial is still the best explanation I've heard for why we've evolved to like their taste, in small amounts.
I always thought hot spice was to hide the taste of food that is spoiling. It’s not that we evolved the spicy taste, it’s that we can tolerate it better than the evolutionary learning that spoiled food should not be eaten.
That's one of those weird ideas people made up about the medieval Europe.
In actual medieval Europe, rich people ate spice because it tasted good, and poor people didn't because they couldn't afford it. Then global trade opened up and the poor started eating spice, so the rich started eating bland food to set themselves apart. Having convinced themselves that spice doesn't actually taste good, they made up weird reasons for their ancestors to have eaten spice.
If spice actually did cover up the taste of things you shouldn't eat, wouldn't having a taste for spice be dysgenic?
One possible source of the claim that medieval food was overspiced is the introduction to _Two Fifteenth Century Cookerybooks_, a 19th c. publication of the Early English Text Society. It comments on the strong stomachs of our ancestors as shown by the cinnamon soup on page X. Turning to that page one finds not a recipe but a menu. The fact that the editor thought putting cinnamon in soup was evidence of a strong stomach tells us more about 19th c. English cooking than about 15th c.
Most medieval recipes don't give quantities, so although you can tell what spices they used you can't tell how much. I've tried to estimate spice quantities from a couple of sources, one a recipe that did have quantities (for a spiced wine), one the shopping list for an enormous several day feast, which had quantities. My conclusion was that the spicing was no greater than in many modern cuisines.
Could you provide citations for your contention that rich people decided spice didn’t taste good when it became more available, and that they made up the claim that spices were used to cover up spilled food?
Fashions come and go in food like everything else. I don't think people did really believe spices tasted 'bad', but it was like fashions in clothing.
Purple was a very expensive dye-stuff because it was hard to produce, so it was a luxury good which became a signifier of royalty.
Then in 1856 an eighteen year old chemist accidentally synthesised an artificial purple dye, which became known as "mauve", and now everyone could afford it from royalty down to housemaids. There was a craze for it, and like all crazes, it ran its course by becoming so ubiquitous that people tired of it.
When even the ploughman or parlour maid can afford pepper on their meals, the cachet of the spice is lost. Trendsetters turn to new styles and means of preparing food and now perhaps instead of vivid spicy flavours, you go for minimalist 'freshness' or rich, creamy, buttery recipes.
People in the past weren't stupid, they knew that eating spoilt food makes you sick (and quite possibly die, given that this was before modern medicine).
If https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2021/2/5/the-limits-of-the-proposed-behavioral-immune-system is correct, this actually varied widely by culture.
This is my opinion - not that hot spice allows you to eat food you shouldn't but that it makes it a lot nicer to eat food that you have no better option for. Evolution isn't the only explanation for all things, I say
What do you mean by food that you have no better option for?
Like cheese that's gone off but it's February and food's short. Or somewhat less in terms of necessity, if 90% of what you eat is rice or potatoes and you can make it spicy that is what you will happily do
I don't know about that, if you're eating 90% rice and potatoes to survive, how would you afford spice?
Yeah I definitely speak from grounds of ignorance on this but I assume hot spices have traditionally been less expensive than something like being able to eat meat weekly
I know spice was expensive in Europe, because it had to be imported, but I don't think it was expensive in the places it grew.
Marginal utility in the other 10%. It takes very little habanero. But spicy cheesy mashed potatoes? Yum.
If spoilt food were all there was to eat, you would eat it, spices or not. Unless you think people were literally starving to death or at least suffering through chronic malnutrition in lieu of eating gross cheese?
People will literally eat dead people in the absence of any other food, and probably without any hot sauce handy.
I wouldn't count 'hot' spicy among the things we've evolved to like. Plants evolved capsaicin specifically to hurt us, and other mammals. It's just a weird cultural quirk that we grew to like it. No child starts out liking spicy food, but I'm pretty sure all children like cinnamon.
Also capsicum is a New World plant, so it doesn’t really make sense that its use in say Thai cuisine is some ancient cultural evolution.
"Antibacterial" was not a thing until the late 19th century. I think the claim is better posed as "people liked spices because they thought that they alleviated ailments". And some of them do.
Ginger was used in folk remedies for the stomach and it seems to help with motion sickness at least. (Personal experience, with crystallised ginger.) Wikipedia talks about it being used in foods for pregnant and nursing women.
Turmeric was also used for digestive problems.
Clove and nutmeg, spices from the Spice Islands, were used as remedies for all sorts of things. Clove oil is still used for toothache.
Those are just the spices that spring to mind.
I think several other highly scented and flavoured seeds, roots, and flowers would also have been used in medieval remedies. Saffron, for example, simply because it was so expensive. The placebo effect existed.
But regardless of what people believe they're good for, adding small amounts of them to your food makes it taste better. Yet add too much of them and it tastes worse. Why? There must be a reason that our tastebuds respond favorably to certain chemical compounds, but only in small amounts.
There are multiple roles that spices can play for the human body, such as a digestive aid or an antioxidant, but they also have antimicrobial and antifungal activity, which seems to me like the most intuitive explanation for why we like to have a little of them. These are chemicals that are toxic to the things that make us sick, but less so to us, so we seem to have evolved to detect these mostly harmless substances by taste, and so we are motivated to use them to make our food less appetizing to germs.
Incidentally, this is exactly the same strategy that germs use against us. Food spoils not merely because it has bacteria and fungi growing in it, but also because they produce chemicals toxic to us in the process of consuming it, making it less likely that an animal eats it anyway. As a result, the germs get the food all to themselves.
Salt, sugar and fat also taste bad in large quantities, so maybe it is more about the mind than properties of spices.
Purified salt, sugar and fat? Sure. But butter is 81% fat and the quantity of butter in your food has to be truly obscene before it's no longer good to eat, while a few extra teaspoons of coriander will ruin it.
Spicy foods may or may not kill bacteria, but Capsaicin tends increase the production of intestinal mucus. This thicker intestinal lining seems to be correlated with a lot of good things, including beneficial microbiota such as Akkermansia Muciniphilia and decreased inflammation.
How is eating anti-bacterial things good? Doesn't it hurt our gut flora?
It seems plausible that Christianity reached a majority of the Roman Empire in the middle of the 4th century as that would place it halfway between the Edict of Milan, tolerating Christianity, and the Edict of Thessalonica, establishing Christianity.
I had always wondered how much teeth the late Roman Empire could have shown when enforcing Christian orthodoxy given that its capacities were degrading. If however Christianity was growing organically and the official actions were simply recognitions of this growth then the enforcement problem goes away.
I wonder if there were some institutional limitations in the empire that made recognition of Christianity necessary once it achieved 10% adherence. Establishment in 380 is easier to understand as with a 40% growth rate per decade Christianity would have already saturated growth potential in the empire by then.
This calculation is very sensitive to what gets counted as Christianity. There were a LOT of very popular sects that get retconned as heresies but clearly had substantial market share and certainly contributed to the ultimate acceptance of more or less familiar orthodoxy post- Constantine.
> A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status.
Not really. This was a big thing with the USSR too: they'd bury us in economic productivity with their stakhanovite New Soviet Men freed from the waste of capitalism (cf. that _Conquest of Bread_ review incidentally). Then it was with Japan, they'd surpass us with their unique Japan Inc. fusion of pseudo-democracy in which one party was always elected and worked hand-in-glove with the zaibatsus (or maybe South Korea, or another Asian Tiger). Then it was China... http://web.archive.org/web/20090302203414/http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/myth.html You'll note all the countries in question are still below (sometimes vastly) US per capita.
The conclusion is more "the Industrial Revolution is a helluva drug", and can make any regime look good and get high on its own ideological supply about how it has restarted history and inaugurated the Caliphate or China Dream or Japan as #1 or whatever.
“actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”
Didn't Singapore already prove that?
The generalizability of the Singapore model has long been in doubt due to its size and location.
Plus modern singapore's original dictator was Cambridge educated and seems to have stolen a bunch of governance approaches from liberal democracies (plenty of ways he was absolutely terrifyingly authoritarian, of course, but it's still a much more liberal-democracy-shaped autocracy from *some* angles, at least if you squint hard enough).
Certainly a really weird outlier on enough axes that I doubt it generalises to other non-democracies except for the part where I'm very glad not to live there, though.
Singapore proves that in the same way that, say, Shanghai (with 5x the population incidentally) would, or oil petro-states. It's extremely noncentral.
fun fact: every country above the US on GDP PPP per capita rankings (no matter which one: CIA, IMF, or World Bank) has a population less than 10 million.
Well there is a lot of work there moving out of the list the countries you didn’t like, for reasons the help the argument for the US.
Aside from oil and microstates, the only places with higher GDP per capita than the USA are Ireland (genuinely wealthy, but also a lot of business book their entire EU revenue there, so that inflates the numbers a bit) and Switzerland (also genuinely wealthy, but also famously full of banks with money from other countries)
[Oil: Qatar, Norway, UAE; microstates: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Singapore, Macau, Isle of Man, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands)
I'm using wikipedia's GDP per Capita PPP list, mostly just because I don't know enough to judge between different estimates so defaulting to "whatever wikipedia chooses" is always going to get an answer somewhere in the right ballpark.
Even looking at other countries just behind the US, they are again mostly oil, microstates, or small European countries (Denmark, Netherlands, Austria) until you reach Taiwan and then Germany. And those are quite a lot poorer than the US.
The first (even just arguably) authoritarian state that is neither oil, nor a microstate is Poland (and that's very arguable), then Hungary (also arguable), then Turkey (less arguable in that it's not in the EU, but still was more democractic not all that long ago), and then (omitting Russia because of oil), Belarus (not seriously arguable, and no recent history of democracy to have backslid from).
China is notably just about world average GDP per capita.
The Isle of Man is a petrostate? I think it's financial services there actually. At least I could see it on the way to school on a clear day for 7 years, and there was a notable lack of oil rigs...
Mann is in my "microstate" section, not the "oil" section.
Also, if you were on the British side, then I had a similar view - and I know how many clear days there are in that area, and it isn't many.
I will absolutely acknowledge that Singapore is a lot bigger than the other microstates - and that its GDP is mostly based on economic activity in actual Singapore, where most microstates are wealthy because economic activity in other countries is brought into the microstate.
It perhaps belongs in the earlier paragraph where I'm trying to discuss the reasoning rather than just dropping it into the oil and microstate categories.
btw, when Nikita Khrushchev said "We will bury you" he meant the USSR's system would outlast the USA's system.
Agree with that last paragraph. If China had a non-corrupt libertarian-ish government for the last 80 years it likely would have already surpassed the US in GDP per capita due to IQ.
Libertarianism didn’t work for Russia in the 90s.
I am not very well-versed in recent Russian history, but "non-corrupt libertarian-ish government" is not how I would describe a country that gave away state-owned enterprises to politicians' cronies, assassinated journalists, and printed so much money that they got hyperinflation.
Well let’s see with China. It’s a decade away from developed status by most measures, present trends continuing. Anyway the cities are developed in terms of local GDP.
I don't think it's fair to say the garish reconstructions of statues' original paintworks are *bad*, precisely. They are misunderstood; at worst they are misleading; but they're not incorrect, because they're made simply to reflect which colours we are *certain* were used over which areas. (i.e. we know there would have been shading over that red in Augustus's hair, but scientifically, we *know* there was a base layer of that bright shade of red, and that's what the picture shows.) Not to be lifelike reproductions of how they originally would have looked.
They're scientific displays, not attempts at full restorations, and it's not the archeologists' fault that clickbaity social media posts can't tell the difference.
I was in a museum (Athens, Acropolis museum) and actually read descriptions and they successfully confused me.
I've been to lectures on ancient Greece and Rome where the speakers (including museum outreach officers and professional classics teachers) showed garishly painted reconstructions as "what these statues actually looked like".
Re: #32, Viral load is how much virus you have in your body. Viral *dose* is how much you were exposed to. Conflating these convinced lots of people that early studies showing higher viral loads in more serious cases was evidence for Robin's idea. In fact, however, you don't know much about initial exposure amounts unless you're doing an HCT. Which, of course, we should have allowed far earlier.
re 30/ (Stop telling kids they'll die of climate change).
Opening sentence of article is: IS CLIMATE CHANGE the biggest threat to humanity? Many people would say so.
I'd remind everyone of Scott's review of Toby Ord's "The Precipice" and the table Scott synthesised from it.
Risk of extinction from-
climate change ~ 1 in 1000
engineered pandemics ~ 1 in 30
unaligned AI ~ 1 in 10
There have been a few occasions when I've wanted to remind people of this round here. Climate change is a problem, but not THAT much of a problem
Where are nuclear weapons here? I feel like unaligned AI is way too high here too.
1 in 1000
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/
Yeah, I'm skeptical too.
Nukes are another one where extinction was wildly overestimated, I can only imagine because most of the theorists lived in New York City or Washington, DC, maybe, where indeed a full nuclear exchange would've erased *your* world. But what's the argument for how even 20,000 1MT explosions is going to wipe out everyone in Sri Lanka or Java or Mozambique? Most of the planet wouldn't be within 2000 miles of a detonation, and unless you want to invoke nuclear winter -- a deeply dubious hypothesis -- or some unknown super-duper fallout effect a la "On the Beach" all that happens is that the center of civilization shifts from the Europe-North America axis to somewhere else.
I'd agree that nuclear winter is a deeply dubious hypothesis, but even if it only has a 1 in 100 chance of being bad enough to wipe us out that then a 1 in 1000 chance of a nuclear war doing us in would imply a 1 in 10 chance of a large nuclear war in the future, which sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Sure, that math is sound, except I'd personally put the odds of nuclear winter being true as more like 1 in 1 million and the odds of a future nuclear war of the magnitude that was plausible in the 80s as 1 in 100,000 or less. For one thing, there would have to be a massive warhead building spree among the nuclear powers, and for another there'd have to be some superpower conflict that looked like the Cold War, and neither seems to be in the offing.[1]
-------------
[1] I don't consider all-out war plausible in the case of Taiwan because I don't think the present or plausible future US Administrations would go for it.
> odds of a future nuclear war of the magnitude that was plausible in the 80s as 1 in 100,000 or less. For one thing, there would have to be a massive warhead building spree among the nuclear powers
Is existing supply not sufficient enough to get "we are all so fucked" levels?
> I'd personally put the odds of nuclear winter being true as more like 1 in 1 million
This seems really low (if that is 1 in 1 000 000 chance after full scale nuclear war happened)
> Is existing supply not sufficient enough to get "we are all so fucked" levels?
In short, probably not. Depends where your line for fucked is really. You could probably take out 40% of all humanity if some supervillain reprogrammed all the nukes to maximise human misery, but they're not actually aimed like that in real life. It would be the seminal catastrophe of the modern age and the largest non-pandemic mass casualty event in history, but unlikely to lead to extinction.
I wouldn't guess so, no. The US and Russia are both down to about 5000 warheads, probably with an average yield of 300kt in the US, a bit higher in Russia (the USSR favored larger yields because their aiming was poorer). You've got a relative handful elsewhere that add up to maybe another 1,000, with an average yield around 250kt would be my wild guess.
This is way down from the peak of the Cold War, in the mid 80s when the US and USSR totaled maybe 60-70,000 warheads with an average yield closer to 1MT, and even under those circumstances I doubt the climate or humanity could realistically be wiped out. My suspicious is that we flatter ourselves in thinking what we can imagine in nuclear explosions can have as big an abrupt climatological impact as a large igneous province eruption or big meteor impact. It's a big, big planet, and anyway the nukes would not be distributed in such a way as to maximize damage to the ecosphere.
Wikipedia says the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa is estimated to be in energy about 200MT, and it had global effects that were just noticeable. Scaling it up by 10x to 20x to represent a full nuclear exchange in modern times suggests global effects that are quite noticeable, probably significantly damaging (e.g. to agriculture), but I don't see wiping out all life, or even all civilization. If you told me a billion people might starve to death, I'd believe that might be true. But this wouldn't end humanity.
We discussed nuclear winter at great length on Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/11/ot47-openai/#comment-344892
with my main contribution at: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/11/ot47-openai/#comment-346878
TL, DR: The catastrophic version that even hints in the direction of human extinction, is extremely bad science being pressed into the service of propaganda. If you're going to make policy decisions on the basis of "but *maybe* they're right", then there is no policy you can't be manipulated into by having someone publish a "scientific study" promising doom if you don't do what they want you to do.
1 in 1000? That's insane. Even a new Ice Age wouldn't drive humanity *extinct* because, well, we thrived during the last one. I mean, maybe we don't have airplanes and smartphones, maybe we live in caves and hunt animals with pointed sticks, but extinct is a very, very high bar to cross.
At a slight tangent, there is pretty good evidence that anthropogenic warming — starting not with the industrial revolution but with the spread of agriculture about seven thousand years ago — is the reason the next glaciation hasn't started yet. Google "Ruddiman" or see my summary of the argument:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-humans-held-back-glaciers.html
It's certainly possible, and I will take a look -- thank you for the link. But I will admit my priors are pretty strong against, on the broad grounds that (1) the carbon cycle is pretty huge, and humans even now are only a smallish part of it (to the extent people can even estimate things like the flux back and forth between atmosphere and ocean), and (2) I'm doubtful climate is that balanced on a knife edge anyway, stable complex systems tends to have lots of negative feedback loops, and I'm doubtful we know enough about climate to have identified all of them (and correctly added them to general circulation models).
On the larger point, that even the worst (responsible) predicted global warming is not *necessarily* an especially big deal for humans (or the planetary ecology), my inclination is to agree. We (and the rest of the Earth's biosphere) have survived far greater perturbations of the climate, e.g. much larger swings in temperature or sea level.
The assumption as I understand it has always been that the natural swings happened very slooooowly, and it's different if they happen fast, but I think that's an assumption -- I don't know that anyone has reliable data on how fast temperature swung during Ice Age stadial onsets, for example, or after Chicxulub, or the eruption of some large igneous province, and I'm a little dubious the climate always made a nice smooth gradual transition. The other thing about complex systems with a large number of coupled degrees of freedom is that *when* they make a transition from one stable state to another, it's often not smooth -- cf. crystallization or any other phase transition.
It's certainly possible this time is different, but I'd need to see a much better argument for that, backed up by something a lot more persuasive than a computer model, to give it the most serious consideration (the kind that justifies statements about having only 10 years to save the planet or something).
> the carbon cycle is pretty huge, and humans even now are only a smallish part of it
humans had pretty large effect on landuse and out influence is quite rapid (smaller that mega-scale volcanic activity but it is quite high bar)
Take a look at the graph of temperature and CO2 during the interglacials shown in the blog post I linked to. Our interglacial is quite odd, since temperature and CO2 start back up a few thousand years in. The interglacial that most closely matches its (nonhuman) inputs is earlier than those on the graph, and was ending at the point corresponding to now.
The issue of whether human effects were large enough to matter has been extensively hashed out in the literature, and I give links to Ruddiman's original piece and to the recent review article.
I have to agree with Bryan that a bad solution to global warming could be much more of a risk than global warming itself.
These numbers seem mostly made up.
The extinction risk from "unaligned AI" is completely made up and is 0 for the foreseeable future.
Bioweapons are much more of a danger than anything else because of their ability to spread and linger.
> The extinction risk from "unaligned AI" is completely made up and is 0 for the foreseeable future.
While 1 in 10 seems really high to me this specific problem has nasty property that it has plausible way of going from "nothing happening" to "it is too late to do anything" within very short time. That gets smaller as more and more things are controlled indirectly via internet-connected programs.
In this field many things moved from SF to actually happening in really short time.
> Bioweapons are much more of a danger than anything else because of their ability to spread and linger.
Not for extinction
The rationality community is a huge target for the AI scam, as some of the people who promote it are part of it.
The entire name "AI" is really a misnomer. They're not at all like people, and honestly, not even intelligent or even really trying to be intelligent. They're tools we use to solve problems. Google is a very useful tool, but not only can it not take over the world, it isn't even a relevant question - it's like asking if a hammer would take over the world.
Creating an actual artificial person would be an enormous undertaking and would not be something you could do accidentally.
But the entire notion of a runaway AI is wrong. AIs can't magically make themselves smarter. It's tied into the magical pseudo-religious singularity, which is the opposite of how reality works.
The more we improve things, the HARDER it is to make further improvements. The idea that you would make an AI that makes itself super smart super fast is just not how things work at all; the better something is, the harder it is to eke out additional improvements, because you've already gotten all the low-hanging fruit.
Bioweapons, conversely, are immensely dangerous because they are self replicating, uncontrollable, and can burn in every direction. Animals have been put under threat by various diseases, and the COVID response pretty much proves that we have very limited ability to successfully contain the spread of diseases.
It seems obvious from your arguments that you are not really familiar with the AI issue. For example the argument about AIs not being people is often raised and easily dismissed. There is no requirement that AIs be like people in order to jeopardize human life. The classic example of AI alignment issues (paperclip maximizer) addresses this easily.
"The more we improve things, the HARDER it is to make further improvements."
Well... most of the time. Before forges, it was pretty hard to do metallurgy, then it got a lot easier. I agree with you in that I think it is unlikely for intelligence to quickly explode. However, I'm not willing to bet everything on that. Once you can construct a machine as "smart" as the smartest human researcher in machine intelligence, it does seem at least possible that machine intelligence could increase rapidly.
As far as bioweapons, I think it's a reasonable risk for societal collapse, not such a risk for extinction. Plenty of survivalists out there.
Whilst I accept AI as a risk (although the real risk is presumably poor design) the paperclip maximiser seems a particulary weak argument, in that it requires a scenario where maximising paperclips is required. I can't see how any AI would be designed just to maximise one thing, since there is no scenario where the answer is always more paperclips. So a paperclip-manufacturing AI would be aiming to produce the optimum amount, not the maximum amount, of paperclips. If your standard example of risk required an AI without optimisation considered then you can probably expect scepticism.
> I can't see how any AI would be designed just to maximise one thing
Nowadays it is routinely done with for example image recognition, the worry is that someone would manage to build something actually smart (maybe completely by accident!) and still apply the same type of reward function.
The paperclip maximizer is an evil genie that a witch doctor is saying they need to be paid to study rituals to make it go away.
It relies entirely on magical thinking. AIs do not even remotely function in this fashion, and it is completely unrealistic nonsense. It's not how economics works, it's not how AI works, it's not how optimization works, and the entire notion is as implausible as rubbing a lamp or asking a monkey's paw for something and getting "cursed" with what you wished for.
I am very familiar with the arguments. I just happen to actually understand what AI actually is, rather than having magical notions about magical computers, and also to be familiar with similar legends about "being careful for what you wish for" and evil wish-granting creatures, tropes which the notion draws on.
> Well... most of the time. Before forges, it was pretty hard to do metallurgy, then it got a lot easier.
What you generally see is an S-shaped curve - initially, you have no idea what you're doing. Then you develop something, and see some growth. Then, as you make the technology better, you eventually start to approach its limits, as you have done all the easy stuff to improve it, and are left with the hard things, where you have to eke out increasingly small improvements or do harder things to make things better.
The problem is...
> Once you can construct a machine as "smart" as the smartest human researcher in machine intelligence, it does seem at least possible that machine intelligence could increase rapidly.
This is ascribing a magical quality to intelligence and research. It's not how these things actually work.
In real life, a lot of research is trying to figure out something that works, then trying it, and then figuring out what went wrong.
In real life, this sort of back and forthing takes a long period of time. Ramping up the production of a new type of computer chip takes a year or more, simply because you have to work out all the bugs in the process and get everything working right. Being smart is nowhere near enough; it takes a lot of effort and experimentation.
You learn about things via experimentation, and being super smart only lets you design better experiments, not bypass the need for them.
The entire idea of runaway intelligence is based on a lack of comprehension of this. Making something as intelligent as a human is not the bottom of the S-curve, it's the top of it, somethin you can only do after you have done a huge amount of very difficult work.
Worse, the whole thing is actually built on the back of computing technology - you have to have extremely advanced computational technology to even make a decent AI, and building better *computer chips* is extremely difficult. The technology has gotten increasingly mature over time, and the point at which "oh, we might be able to build something which maybe has human-ish levels of intelligence" also lies around the point at which quantum tunneling prohibits further miniaturization, which has been the major driver of advancements in computing.
In other words, the hardware is going to already be almost as good as it *can* be, just to actually build something like that.
And frankly, even that might not be enough.
On top of *literally all of that*, it is reliant on unrealistic notions about HOW intelligence works. An expert program is not the same thing as general intelligence, it's more like a tool or equation. An artificial person would need to use expert programs for the same reason that humans do.
> You learn about things via experimentation, and being super smart only lets you design better experiments, not bypass the need for them.
If AI is running experiments on making better AI program then many experiments can take place within computer and there is no need to make anything physical.
Also, anyway nowadays you can order electronic build to your specification online, no need to appear in person.
Noone reasonable claims that AI will just increase some smartness counter and become smart. The claim is that it could be able to make needed experiments and bypass some limitations blocking humans.
> On top of *literally all of that*, it is reliant on unrealistic notions about HOW intelligence works
We don't really know how intelligence works and it is not reasonable to assume that our brain are sole or the best way how a smart agent can operate.
> The entire idea of runaway intelligence is based on a lack of comprehension of this. Making something as intelligent as a human is not the bottom of the S-curve, it's the top of it, somethin you can only do after you have done a huge amount of very difficult work.
And if such human-level program would be actually working (I hope that it is unlikely to be achieved, and I expect that it will not be done within say 100 years) then it would start a new S-shaped curve.
Something as smart as human but runnable as computer program would be game-breaking even if it would not be capable of self-improvement.
If we ever made an AGI, it would be extremely stupid. Like a baby with a flame thrower. It is extremely likely to terminate itself. It would take a long time to grow out of that phase, and that would also be the signal to the rest of the world that non-aligned AGI has gone from "remote" to "plausible."
> AIs can't magically make themselves smarter.
It does not require magic. We even have already examples of extremely limited self-learning programs.
> The more we improve things, the HARDER it is to make further improvements
That is general heuristic, not something always true. For example computing increased to dramatically improve computing - without computers we would have no chance to design modern CPUs and software.
In general software has several self-accelerating or at least self-sustaining loops that is quite scary, and it is not clear at all where are various limits.
> Creating an actual artificial person would be an enormous undertaking and would not be something you could do accidentally.
The problem is that it is not necessary to create person, it is enough to create something that is effective enough. We can be really harmed by Stuxnet-equivalent on a wider scale and plausible negative effects are increasing.
> the harder it is to eke out additional improvements, because you've already gotten all the low-hanging fruit
The entire problem is that we could stumble upon entire garden of low-hanging-fruit. We did it repeatedly with programming.
> It does not require magic. We even have already examples of extremely limited self-learning programs.
They are more like "a complicated computer program that a human set up to do a bunch of busywork that generates a black box heuristic to solve some problem well enough".
>That is general heuristic, not something always true. For example computing increased to dramatically improve computing - without computers we would have no chance to design modern CPUs and software.
But we are seeing decreases, not increases, in the rate of advancement. We maxed out clockspeed two decades ago; we have to do massive parallelization because we can't massively improve single cores at the rate we were previously. Problems that can't be parallelized are not improving very quickly at all.
On top of that, as we have further miniaturized computer chips, it has become increasingly more difficult to make the next generation of them. Even with all our advanced technology, further improvements are harder, not easier, and cost more and more money to make.
We are approaching the physical limits of what is possible; some parts of the transistors on these chips literally cannot be further miniaturized due to quantum tunnelling, and the more we shrink things, the closer we get to the absolute physical limits.
> We can be really harmed by Stuxnet-equivalent on a wider scale and plausible negative effects are increasing.
Not in the sense that is claimed. Moreover, this risk is not due to AIs, but due to more stuff being put online - AIs aren't even the relevant part of this threat, malicious actors can do the same.
> The entire problem is that we could stumble upon entire garden of low-hanging-fruit. We did it repeatedly with programming.
Not really.
Humans already exist.
> > > AIs can't magically make themselves smarter.
> > It does not require magic. We even have already examples of extremely limited self-learning programs.
> They are more like "a complicated computer program that a human set up to do a bunch of busywork that generates a black box heuristic to solve some problem well enough".
I agree. But I would not assume that "bunch of busywork that generates a black box heuristic to sort of solve some problem" cannot be also used to become quite smart.
In many aspects human brain seems to be bunch of black box heuristics that were created by millions of generations of evolutionary busywork.
> But we are seeing decreases, not increases, in the rate of advancement
Yes, nowadays. After step part of S curve. And maybe it can be repeated.
> Humans already exist.
Human brains are not necessarily optimal or sole way to operate in a smart way.
Re 34: In addition to Paul Morphy, it is also said that José Raúl Capablanca similarly learned to play at the age of four simply by watching his father. It's claimed that after watching a few games, he played against his father and beat him on the first try.
If you are interested in this sort of thing you might want to check out these series produced by Agadmator on YouTube, an excellent and accessible chess reviewer:
Morphy series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDnx7w_xuguGhe-QDilZ6SvJCAedNiy6Q
Capablanca series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDnx7w_xuguH7szQrhNeLKoBZm-8Pumfq
Bobby Fischer series (Fischer was mentioned in a previous post): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDnx7w_xuguENa5LgFG7Gi8aYRVVnXxFE
I'm watching through the Capablanca saga right now. The most noticeable difference is that Morphy played fierce attacking chess, almost always winning before the endgame, whereas Capablanca played very conservative, positional chess. Win one pawn, trade down, enter a slightly favorable endgame, win it.
Everyone would probably agree that Morphy looks like the greater genius (including Capablanca himself, based on what he said about Morphy), but it still seems to show that the genius axis is pretty orthogonal to the playstyle axis.
I'm not sure I would agree. Capablanca was a chess machine who was notorious for being lazy at opening preparation and training in general, which seems to implies he had a very strong innate talent.
I think that says more about the level of competition - a fierce attacking playstyle is very efficient at demolishing weaker opponents, but against people who don't make mistakes every game goes long.
Bosnians are tall because genetics. Why are Filipinos so short, though? Maybe not genetics. I have a 5'6" relative with a shorter immigrant Filipina wife whose whole family was short, and they had kids who are both 5'11 or so. Hybrid vigor, or tall genes on an American diet?
"Then Republicans will capture all branches of government with large majorities, and build lots of solar panels in order to own the libs. Also promote race-blind hiring, build lots of housing to fight homelessness, repeal SALT deductions, regulate Big Business, pull out of foreign wars, heck, why not legalize marijuana? "
If my evil mustache-twisting branch of the Republicans (population 2, me and Newt Gingrich, and I'm not sure about me) gets in charge, we'll build nukes instead of solar to own the libs. You wouldn't like what we do about homelessness though ("are there no workhouses?")
Do either Newt or yourself have moustaches to twirl? That is the key question! I note that Ted Cruz has gone the full "beard and moustache" route, so if plenitude of facial hair is the scale of Evil Republicanism, he is indeed the High Panjandrum of same.
I had the impression that long term homeless in the USA were mostly better served by mental institutions than workhouses, though deregulating employment and housing construction ought to help the (substantial) fraction of the homeless population that are there short-term
"Bosnians are tall because genetics. Why are Filipinos so short, though? Maybe not genetics."
If this were true then we would simply observe average height 2nd+ generation filipino americans with no "american" admixture. Bringing (presumably) european genes into it just confuses the whole issue.
" Hybrid vigor"
Hybrid vigor isn't a thing, at least, not in terms of race-mixing between broad population groups.
The growth rate of Christianity estimate assumes that Christianity began during the presumed adult life of Jesus, which is not as well-supported an assumption as you might expect. At the very least, there was a lot of messianic Judaism around well before the ADs and those congregations would have been easy pickings.
<i>The growth rate of Christianity estimate assumes that Christianity began during the presumed adult life of Jesus, which is not as well-supported an assumption as you might expect.</i>
It's one of the best-supported assumptions of ancient history.
That's an interesting assertion. Compared to what other assumtptions? I'm not aware of much evidence from "during the presumed adult life of Jesus", or from before about 70CE?
The Epistles, and possibly the Synoptic Gospels and Acts (depending on where you stand on the "Was Acts written before Paul's martyrdom?" question), date from before AD 70. Even if they didn't, the existence of multiple sources dating from between AD 70 and 100 would still make Jesus' career one of the best-attested in the ancient world. (By way of comparison, many events in early Roman history are known about chiefly through Livy, writing three centuries or more after the fact; the earliest surviving source for Alexander's life and career is Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BC; and so on.)
The synoptic gospels are not multiple sources, they're one source: Mark. Luke and Matthew were written later and the authors were obviously using Mark as source material. Mark being both the earliest and the most threadbare version of the story, we can safely judge the later elaborations to be fictions, and as far as the supposed Q goes, most of the sayings added later appear to be retcons of Pauline doctrine.
<i>The synoptic gospels are not multiple sources, they're one source: Mark. Luke and Matthew were written later and the authors were obviously using Mark as source material.</i>
They're using Mark as *a* source, but since they incorporate new information, they're evidently not using him as their only source. Even if they were just copying everything from Mark, having one source from a few decades after the events would still make Jesus' life better-attested than the lives of most known people from antiquity.
<i>Mark being both the earliest and the most threadbare version of the story, we can safely judge the later elaborations to be fictions,</i>
That's not a safe judgement at all.
<i>and as far as the supposed Q goes, most of the sayings added later appear to be retcons of Pauline doctrine.</i>
Or alternatively, "Pauline doctrine" was just Christian doctrine, not something he'd made up himself. (Which also resolves the "But why did people let Paul, who'd never even seen Jesus in the flesh, preach?" question you raise below.)
There were multiple Christian churches in different places run by different people, I think it's an oversimplification to say Paul's was "just Christian doctrine".
"would still make Jesus' career one of the best-attested in the ancient world"
No. Every single pericope in the Gospel of Mark, taken individually, will likely be concluded by most scholars (if you exclude evangelicals) to be fictional. And since Mark was the source for all the other gospels, we don't really have anything reliable about any historical Jesus.
<i>most scholars (if you exclude evangelicals)</i>
It's true, if you exclude scholars who think they're true, the ones you have left will think they're fictional. That doesn't tell us anything about whether they're actually true, though.
(Also, speaking as someone with a background in ancient history, the average standard of New Testament scholarship frankly seems rather sloppy by comparison, so I wouldn't put much weight on the academic consensus of New Testament scholars.)
Not really. The sort of Jewish-Hellenic syncretism exemplified by later orthodox Christianity definitely predates Jesus' supposed lifetime, Philo of Alexandria being a pretty well-known exemplar of a Jewish philosopher who writes a lot of stuff that sure sounds Christian except he has no idea who Jesus is. Christianity is unambiguously an outgrowth of pre-existing religious and philosophical trends and not some sort of idosyncratic, sui generis innovation by its founder. That opens up the timeline for its expansion significantly.
Even the earliest text of the New Testament, Hebrews, makes no reference to anything in Jesus' human biography (and even sort of suggests that he didn't have one), which at the very least proves that Jesus' life and times was by no means the foundational element of the religion that later took him as its central figure.
Wait where did you get that Hebrew was the earliest Christian text ? As far as I am aware of, most of Paul's genuine letters were written at least ten years before.
Wikipedia agrees with me btw, though it does not agree with itself, giving a different date in the article on Hebrews and the one on dating the Bible.
As you say, there's a lot of ambiguity about when it was written, and I tend to favor the earliest estimates but it's not essential to the point. What's true of Hebrews is true of all the authentic Pauline epistles. Paul never talks about Jesus' human biography and never cites any reference to anything Jesus said or did that wasn't taken from either the Old Testament (he sees Jesus as speaking to him through the Hebrew Bible) or his own personal revelations. Not only that, but he's writing to a community of Christians that, at least as far as Paul is concerned, would not find this unusual.
Paul is an apostle after all, a person who has seen Jesus in revelation, not a "disciple" (a concept used in the Gospels that Paul is totally unaware of, likely because the Gospels were authored after Paul's extant writing career ended).
I don't want to get into the whole "Jesus myth" debate because it's a rabbit hole and fundamentally unanswerable, but what's pretty clear is that you could be a Christian, as Paul undoubtedly was, without having had any identifiable influence from a human Jesus. Paul was eventually converted (at least ostensibly) through contact with Christians, not with Jesus himself (except through revelation of course). Saying that Christianity must have begun with the career of Jesus the person is assuming things not actually in evidence. And for the record, it disagrees with a lot of early Christian theology, which despite believing in Jesus the human, saw Christianity "pre-figured" in the Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy, and even other religions; in other words, God was laying the groundwork and teaching the lessons of Christianity long before Jesus actually came on the scene.
The idea that Christianity as a religion began with Jesus the person, human teacher and nice guy whose biography is more or less accurately reflected in the Gospels, is not only a pretty narrow reading of the evidence that sort of falls apart when you look closely, it's not even particularly pious. It's sort of an attempt to have Christianity without any of the supernatural stuff that early Christians wouldn't have blinked at but modern observers get nervous about.
The fact that Christianity did sprung fully formed after the Crucifixion, but borrowed heavily from both Judaism and Greek philosophy is pretty well supported and I dare say pretty obvious.
The claim that "that Jesus' life and times was by no means the foundational element of the religion that later took him as its central figure." seems to me of a much more dubious nature, especially when it relies on a debatable early date* for one single (not Pauline) epistle.
Paul is notoriously uninterested in the details of Jesus life, but he actually quotes Jesus explicitly once in 1 Cor 11, 23-25, when talking about the Eucharist - undoubtedly a central fixture of early christianity, and obviously refers basically all the time to the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Anyway I feel you are motte-and-baileying me between "Jesus was by non means the foundational element of the religion which later..." and "Early Christianity heavily borrows from Judaism and Greek philosophy"...
The contention that "Christianity sprung fully formed after the Crucifixion" is not just incorrect, it's silly. There was ENORMOUS conflict and disagreement within Christianity as to what exactly it was, what it required of its adherents, and which texts or authorities were legitimate and which weren't. Paul's epistles are mostly about these disagreements, which he tries to resolve using the Old Testament combined with his personal revelations.
We don't even see an attempt to formalize a canon until a hundred years post-Jesus, and that's Marcion, who takes the Hebrew Bible, some Pauline Epistles, and a variant version of Luke and nothing else. Marcion had some pretty different ideas about what this canon demonstrated and the Marcionite heresies wound up in the dustbin but it's just an accident of history that we got the particular formalized Christian canon that we did. Hell, Constantine's own Bible didn't even include all the same books as the King James Bible does.
All of this is to back up my original point, which is that the growth rate of Christianity is very sensitive to some highly subjective judgments about when you start counting and who you count.
Paul doesn't discuss Moses' human biography, either, and yet he refers to him often, uses his name as a shorthand for "the Torah/Law" and his life as examples:
https://omilacombe.ca/saint-paul-biblical-figure-moses/
Now, if you want to argue "The human figure of Moses had little to nothing to do with the Jewish belief that sprang up around him", go right ahead. But I would say that Paul doesn't go into "Now Moses was born on this date in this place and his parents' family name was..." because he doesn't need to, his audience *know* who Moses is. Same with Jesus - the audience know who this guy is.
Do you accept that Paul aka Saul started out as in some form a persecutor of 'the Christians', believing them to be Jewish heretics or zealots or messianists of the type drawing adverse Roman attention?
If so, then there had to be a pre-existing community calling themselves or otherwise identified in some way with a figure called "Christ". If you want to lump the Essenes and the followers of John the Baptist in with them, you may do so, but I think that's a red herring.
And this group pre-dates Paul (who often gets the credit/blame for having invented Christianity) and they had to be - what?
At the very least, followers of the latest cult leader/preacher who had come to the same end as most of the cult leaders/revolutionary preachers at the time. The survivors then clung together and - if we go the liberal interpretation route - hallucinated the Resurrection, or at least the nominal leaders did, and they managed to convince themselves that the dead human was in some way still alive, or his presence was so vivid a memory for them that he was 'living' in them, and they built a cult around him and propagated it, swiping bits from Jewish prophecy about a Messiah and influences from all the other religions and beliefs in the surrounding Middle East, with some Greek and Roman elements thrown in as well. (Feel free to throw in "kergyma" and "conjuring trick with bones" as you like):
https://www.wisdom2be.com/essays-insights-wisdomwritings-spirituality/bishop-john-shelby-spong-on-the-resurrection
That is the influence of the human Jesus, at the very basic.
Here's my go-to guy on the Historical Jesus question:
https://historyforatheists.com/category/historical-jesus/
But then again, I'm one of the mouth-breathers who believe in all that supernatural stuff, so there you go 😀
Trying to hew narrowly to the point, it obviously would make no sense to try and trace the spread of Judaism from the lifetime of Moses (assuming you could identify when that was). It would make even LESS sense if you're a believer in Judaism, since the religion itself stretches back to the beginning of time, at least in principle.
I'm similarly arguing that calling AD 33 "year zero" for Christianity and estimating its adherents to number around 1000 in AD 40 (as the linked source does) is pure ad hoc silliness EVEN IF Jesus was a real person who did all or most of the things attributed to him by the Gospels. The region was absolutely lousy with messianic Judaism and salvific mystery cults. "Conversion" would basically involve nothing more than a little bit of whatever the Roman equivalent of Whiteout was.
My favorite instance of Jesus revisionism is Koenraad Elst's "Psychology of Prophetism" in which he claims that Revelations is actually the earliest book of the New Testament, written by Jesus himself after Pontius Pilate faked the crucifiction: http://voiceofdharma.org/books/pp/ch3.htm
<i>Not really. The sort of Jewish-Hellenic syncretism exemplified by later orthodox Christianity definitely predates Jesus' supposed lifetime, Philo of Alexandria being a pretty well-known exemplar of a Jewish philosopher who writes a lot of stuff that sure sounds Christian except he has no idea who Jesus is. Christianity is unambiguously an outgrowth of pre-existing religious and philosophical trends and not some sort of idosyncratic, sui generis innovation by its founder. That opens up the timeline for its expansion significantly.</i>
Early Christians, contemporary Jews, and contemporary Romans were all pretty clear that Christianity represented a new religion.
<i>Even the earliest text of the New Testament, Hebrews, makes no reference to anything in Jesus' human biography (and even sort of suggests that he didn't have one), which at the very least proves that Jesus' life and times was by no means the foundational element of the religion that later took him as its central figure.</i>
Hebrews doesn't suggest that Jesus didn't have a human biography, probably wasn't the earliest text of the New Testament, and even if it was the earliest, would only have been so by a few years.
Hebrews seems oddly indifferent to the question, particularly given the constant and intense interest in it throughout history, up to and including this conversation.
That's a bit vague. What information would you expect to see, where, and why?
Because it was a letter about specific matters, not designed to be a text elucidating history for people almost two millennia later? Arguments from silence require at least establishing a probability that the source in question would reasonably include the absent information. I'm not sure this can be accepted about Paul's letters. None of which stops scholars trying to read things into it of course...
Note in general I agree that early Christianity was very fluid and ill-defined, with the life of Christ being a relatively late development. But we can't argue this point too hard if the evidence is not clear.
>Last spring Robin Hanson and others mooted the idea that viral load affected disease severity; eg if you inhaled one coronavirus particle, you’d get a mild coronvirus case, but if you inhaled 100,000, you’d get a severe case.
Can someone share a link or a reference to this?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/variolation-may-cut-covid19-deaths-3-30x.html
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/know-when-to-fold-em.html
Thank you!
I'm not sure where he got the idea that this was mooted; it appears to be correct.
I'm pretty sure Scott meant it as "Hanson and others suggested the idea", but amazingly, apparently while moot-the-verb means "bring up for discussion", moot-the-adjective can mean "disputed" or "deprived of practical significance": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moot
What a terrible word. Also, communication is hard.
I've never actually heard it used in the context of "bringing something up for discussion", exclusively in the negation context. Definitely a dangerous word to use.
I too read it to mean "made irrelevant the idea that higher initial viral loads implied a more acute disease severity", and have been looking to understand more because this implies a breakthrough in our understanding of how life works.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2015/jan/16/mind-your-language-moot-point
It also means 'meeting, gathering' as in a moothall. Never had a problem with understanding it though, as context is everything, although it could be a nightmare for second-language speakers I guess.
Or Entmoot.
33 is disappointingly weak, they make some good theoretical points against the spices/infections theory but struggle to find good evidence other than showing that it's about as predictive as any other classic East/West difference.
19: This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point.
I think after reading either The Dictator's Handbook (Bueno de Mesquita/Smith) or Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu/Robinson) that this stops being a great mystery. For autocrats, improving the general wellbeing of your population not only isn't beneficial, but likely harmful to themselves.
I still think this makes China an interesting data point. Their advanced surveillance, censorship, and behavioural systems seem to have kept the party's grip on power secure while they've opened up the economy. It'd be interesting to see if other nations can pull off something similar.
You may be interested in Acemoglu's and Robinson's new book, "The Narrow Corridor". Its thesis is that for development you need both a strong central government (that can boss around the regions, and everyone else), *and* strong civil institutions that constrain the government to acting in the interests of society in general rather than to enrich those with connections to the positions of power.
The "corridor" of the title is a path between too-strong government on the one hand (e.g. Stalinist USSR, North Korea) and too-strong civil society on the other, for example Afghanistan (a bunch of "warlords" make and unmake the government), Argentina (large landowners ran the government to suit themselves), several places in Africa (kin-group allegiances overrule national interest), Yemen (also warlords).
The books seems to me to be sort of related to the theses of McCloskey's "Bourgeois" trilogy.
A & R wouldn't be optimistic about Xi's Panopticon China, I don't think. There is no countervailing force to the central government, certainly not any that represents the interests of ordinary citizens.
I'm not sure that there's not potentially the force of the ordinary citizens though. If things go badly for Xi (and I think they will: he strikes me as more Edogan than Putin,ire focused on eliminating internal opposition rather than establishing an equilibrium) then his problem is going to be popular unrest. The Chinese population have either a standard of living or aspirations towards one that they will not likely sacrifice for the vanity of one leader. And the nature of the Chinese Communist Party is such that there will be people happy to take advantage of this.
Here's pseudoerasmus on The Narrow Corridor:
https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1179746491247874049
Re 17 - I'm reading <i>The Best and the Brightest</i> and still early in the Vietnam war, but according to Halberstam, untruth is everywhere. True believers believe in lies, and everyone else knows that they can kiss their careers goodbye if they buck the consensus that the war is going well and will be won in a few years or less. Not just Army people but journalists and politicians and anyone who wants to be respectable. So bad statistics go up the line and are acted on.
That sounds so much like "misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program". And the reasons seem similar. The active liars believing they are the good people fighting the good fight for justice and progress, and the others too scared not to go along--and often not having much of anything to put in place of the lies, at least not anything that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the goal isn't possible, which is of course unthinkable.
12 - cyclosporine: This happens all the time. You can't discover the hypothesis of your experiment in the results. Any hypothesis generated AFTER looking at the results is a new hypothesis and must be tested in a new experiment. Otherwise, you're fooling yourself into believing that any natural variation between two randomly assembled groups must be causal.
You can though. Really, it is even ok to plumb your resultant data set for new hypotheses. However, your level of confidence drops the more you plumb. Presumably, since the number of dimensions of your data is finite, even if you look for every imaginable correlation, there still exists a valid statistical test for significance.
In the real world, though, that's not how clinical trials work. They collect a mountain of data, including the study nurse asking each patient, "did you experience any adverse events since last time we met?" Then they write that down and compare the groups at the end. Since that encompasses literally EVERY possible medical issue, only a study larger than the population of the planet would be sufficiently powered for the number of different potential factors you're measuring. This is why we use the heuristic, "You can't find your hypothesis by mining the results."
It most assuredly does not encompass "literally EVERY possible medical issue." I clearly stated in my data that "the dimensions of your data is finite."
I was just arguing the very narrow issue that you can in fact add hypotheses after the fact but that the rules change and that those additions need to be essentially random (not cherry picked from thousands of combinations). If they were cherry picked then there is math that can be performed to determine the validity of those new results.
The simplest example would be 2 hypothesis instead of 1. This could be done by using 1/2 of the data points (randomly selected) for each hypothesis. So you have 2 slightly less accurate studies. This is obviously true. If you have more hypotheses than data points then obviously you have little to no statistical significance.
I understand. I'm saying that actual subgroup analyses in reports such as these are almost always one of two things:
1. Planned (and powered) subgroup analyses, conditional on the primary endpoint (and all preceding secondary endpoints) meeting statistical significance.
2. An unplanned subgroup analysis, cherry-picked from the data. Nearly every safety signal, or 'surprising' result matches this.
For example, there was a study on Zofran to see if it caused teratomas in pregnant women. It didn't. But a post-hoc subgroup analysis showed increased neonatal cardiac defects in the treatment group. Follow-up studies didn't find the same effect (no surprise), but there are still doctors who think there's something to be concerned about here, because they don't understand that there was bound to be some statistically interesting finding when comparing the medical outcomes between two groups like this - especially since it included outcomes for both mothers and their babies - and nobody used appropriate statistical controls like what you described to perform the post-hoc analyses. They jus re-ran the original test looking for statistical significance, and assumed the same rules apply, when they don't.
Your method is also possible, but it's rarely done because every patient enrolled is very expensive, so lots of clinical trials ride the edge of statistical power. So you can certainly design that study, but if you're reading about a study in the literature that has reported findings, chances are it's either (1) or (2) above.
I agree completely. I was arguing a very narrow position that this: "You can't discover the hypothesis of your experiment in the results." is wrong. That you can in fact do that so long as you don't look at the"surprising result" out of a large set.
I guess the issue here is that neither of us realized the person on the other end of the conversation had a deep understanding of the issue. Me by correcting what I thought was your misunderstanding but was probably just simplification for the audience or possibly wording. You by assuming that my criticism was wrong rather than narrow.
At this point it is very clear that we are both saying exactly the same thing.
Yeah, this is definitely a problem of miscommunication betwixt us as you pointed out. The heuristic is technically incorrect, but it's useful for the general public (and for any grad student who isn't paying attention in stats, because it helps keep them out of trouble later). It helps avoid the error of repeating post-hoc analyses that are effectively designed as though they were equivalent to the original analysis and based on the same assumptions (which they're not).
It's a difficult nuance for most people to see, unfortunately, which is why we get so many of these false reports in the media. They see the one report showing heart defects and get alarmed. Then they see the second report showing no defects and it's not intuitive to them to say, "okay, that first result was obviously just a random result". Instead, they see two results pointing opposite directions and don't know which one to trust. They just average the two together in their minds (or worse, in a pseudo-Bayesian way they update the prior formed from the first report to be a little less certain of the original result).
I think a lot of the public perception of the replication crisis comes from this phenomenon. (Not saying anything of the actual replication crisis.) They see a report that claims X, based on surprising post-hoc analyses that weren't powered to make the associated claim, and think "Wow, I never knew that!" Then comes the inevitable reversal, since only a small percentage of results 'discovered' this way are likely to be real, and they think, "Science duped me again! Oh right, most of their results are garbage, can't trust them." But really it's just bad science communication.
But a valid statistical test only shows potential significance. To prove this is not one of the 5% or whatever of false results you need to hypothesise a mechanism and then prove it works. It's not enough to rely on statistical tests, as if you have p>0.1 and ten thousand possible interactions between your data, there's going to be a strong suspicion that that's just a statistical fluke.
I think what REF is claiming is that if you design your study with enough power you can make valid post-hoc subgroup analyses. In theory this is possible if, for example, you KNOW you're only making 5 comparisons and even though you started with a single comparison analysis if you designed your study with a 2-sided alpha of 0.01 powered at 99%, you might still have enough statistical power 'left over' to do multiple post-hoc comparisons, just at lower but still reasonable confidence.
In practice when the number of possible comparisons is open-ended, as is particularly relevant for clinical trials, this is not valid no matter how many patients you have, or how clever you are at coming up with a mechanistic explanation. Since few clinical trials are powered for more than their primary and secondary endpoints (many not even for secondary endpoints) it's entirely unacceptable to go looking for more than hypotheses for future testing in the subgroup analyses.
Whenever I see these post-hoc subgroup analyses presented as 'promising results' from a clinical trial, my prior on the null hypothesis goes up to around 95%. I should start tracking this, though, because I think my prior is set too LOW.
Yes. Sorry, read this after I re-replied above. That was what I was saying. Cheers.
Do others really think that the question in #8 is a good proxy for wokeness? I’m not sure I support the hardline stance that minorities should receive 0 extra help for climbing the food chain (mainly because nepotism is useful, can rely on race, and maybe we should compensate a little for it). I usually think of wokeness as more aligned with cancel culture. Am I just out of date on definitions?
I agree with you. "woke" is an amorphous blob of nothing and takes the shape of whatever the speakers dislikes or likes depending on where they stand on the issue. The answer to the question in the tweet can't be described as woke or anti woke without knowing what solution the answerer would give. Preferential college admission is a lot less woke than "no whites can get in to college until all minorities that want to go are admitted".
"I agree with you. "woke" is an amorphous blob of nothing and takes the shape of whatever the speakers dislikes or likes depending on where they stand on the issue"
It's AT LEAST as well defined as "racism", an word at this stage that is utterly meaningless, and I sincerely doubt you have a problem with the word racism.
"Preferential college admission is a lot less woke than "no whites can get in to college until all minorities that want to go are admitted"."
It's still woke, it's explicit racial discrimination against whites.
"extra help" is also super nebulous - eg. one might think that AA is a travesty but also agree that the current college admission system in the US is riddled with bias, and wish to reform it to something genuinely neutral (eg. exam results) - helping discriminated minorities by neutralising the discrimination, rather than trying to compensate for it without removing it.
Except every single non-asian minority applicant capable of getting accepted on the basis of merit is already getting accepted . Any other effects, like legacy admissions or outright bribery, only keep out minority students who would be getting accepted through affirmative action. What else could possibly be the case? That some merit-based minorities are missing out while affirmative actions students are being admitted?
If things were truly neutral and depended only on exam results, the outcome would be more asians, more whites generally, more rural & military whites specifically, and less blacks and hispanics.
Black and hispanics students are already grossly overrepresented at selective colleges based on their exam results. Making things only about exam results *necessarily* means less black and hispanic students getting in.
Lots of people don't answer the literal question and instead signal which tribe they support.
Like you, I'd be hesitant to say "they should get zero extra help" but I might still say so in a poll to register my displeasure at modern wokeness.
It seems to me people are most likely to answer this in a way that broadly aligns with their ideology, not on the basis of the specific details of the question itself.
As for your justification for giving benefits to minorities, there's no evidence that white people engage in racial nepotism.
It's possibly the case that white people with an identical resume get hired more than black people for non-affirmative action positions, but this is perfectly rational considering that blacks with identical education levels have significantly lower literacy and numeracy abilities than white people (page 36: https://web.archive.org/web/20170501225350/https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf) and are probably less hard-working ona verage: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/02/04/new-research-suggests-that-effort-at-work-is-correlated-with-race
Which is to say, any preferences that white people have for white applicants over black applicants are almost certainly not 'nepotism'.
And part of the reason that black graduates are elss academically capable on average is likely because of affirmative action in the first place! Letting les capable students in colleges results in less capable graduates, and employers implicitly calibrate their hiring accordingly, cancelling out any benefit of affirmative action and simply meaning that white applicants are the victim of explicit racial discrimination and the average college graduate is less capable.
Re: 31 -- Thank you so much for this support! I'm preparing part 3 now and have had some amazing discussion with David Friedman and others in the hidden open threads here on ACX already but let me put a brief outline of what I intend to say here in case I can get additional comments before it goes to press:
0. Probably quoting Scott's take here, of course.
1. A pointer to Scott's brilliant "Learning to Love Scientific Consensus" as the most general argument for why it's not reasonable to dismiss climate concerns.
2. How Bryan Caplan complained about lack of cost/benefit analysis in his debate with Yoram Bauman and now seems to be moving the goalposts.
3. Something about carbon capture getting slightly more realistic and an excuse to show off beeminder.com/climate maybe, unless anyone tells me that would look kind of opportunistic.
4. An answer to why Wagner and Weitzman didn't signal their lack of left-wing bias on nuclear power (the main question Bryan asked me in his last reply).
5. Calling Bryan out on skipping over the climatological arguments against geo-engineering.
6. As Scott writes in #29 here, admitting that, 7 years later, things currently look a bit less scary than "10% of chance of 6 degrees by 2100" but that that doesn't impugn Wagner and Weitzman's credibility nor does the scariness downgrade imply wait-and-see becoming rational.
7. Something about Bryan's bet with Yoram and how Bryan thought climatologists were overconfident in their predictions that warming would catch back up after that seeming pause and how they were super right and how imperative it is to update on that. Scout mindset!
8. Possible ending: "Wait, am I really saying that Bryan is going to lose that bet with Yoram Bauman even though HE HAS LITERALLY NEVER LOST A BET EVER? Yes. Would anyone like to make a side bet on that? I will give you extremely good odds! Even better, would you pre-commit to changing your mind about climate change if Bryan does lose that bet?"
9. Or end with a focus on our common ground: Revenue neutral carbon taxes should at least be a small Pareto improvement from a libertarian perspective. And of course fossil fuel subsidies should be outrageous to the whole political spectrum.
Scott called his interpretation "maybe unfair" but I'd say it's too generous. The authors of Climate Shock aren't even particularly left-wing. One was a particularly highly respected and influential economist, which is part of why I thought Bryan Caplan might find the book persuasive.
(For those who don't know, I lost a $500 bet with Bryan over this.)
My criticism of it is this:
(1) Don't make bets with people that rely on "if you change your mind, you'll lose, and I'm leaving it up to you to say if you changed your mind or not". That's an immediate incentive for anyone to think "What a chump, all I have to say is I didn't change my mind and I'm better off by 50 spondulicks!"
(2) If you do trust his honour and integrity enough that he will be honest as to whether or not he changed his mind, you don't get to weasel out afterwards by "Oh, he *should* have changed his mind because the argument was *so* convincing, but he didn't because he has prejudices about lettuce in place!"
Again, if you think the person will not change their mind about something because of their lettuce-prejudice, why are you even bothering in the first place? Either you think the person *is* persuadable and honest, so you have to take your lumps if you lose the bet, or you think they're not, in which case the bet is dumb from the start.
I think the perception from the other side is that (a) his honour and integrity were worth trusting (b) his explanation for not changing his mind rested very heavily on a lettuce-prejudice prior that, according to his own explanation, appeared to be much stronger than people had previously expected.
Or, roughly: "I believe that the prior I had not realised was there to that strength was sufficiently strong that the strength of the evidence itself hasn't been considered to the extent I would have liked, but nonetheless I have (a) lost fairly in terms of the terms of the bet (b) learned something - even if not the thing I was expecting to learn about - so of course I'm going to pay up"
Having an opinion about which lumps you've taken -while- taking said lumps and paying your dues seems a fair enough response to me.
Thanks, Matt! I think you nailed it.
To double-clarify, I paid Bryan the $500 immediately. Sorry to come off as a sore loser. I think this debate is world-shakingly important and want to be as clear as I can about exactly how Bryan is being biased and wrong about climate change.
Also I should repeat from a previous (probably hidden) open thread my rationale in making the bet. I'm a fan of Bryan Caplan and have long been impressed with his intellectual honesty. I personally found the book Climate Shock highly compelling and the least left-biased take I'd seen. It's by extremely serious Harvard economists who love markets, etc etc. So I thought it had a chance of changing Bryan's mind. I gave Bryan odds that would naively imply I thought it had a huge chance of changing his mind which seems irrational but the meta-game from my point of view was that it was worth $500 to get Bryan to read the book and maybe blog about it. Probably other minds would get changed if not Bryan's. From the ACX comments so far, that's looking likely!
From my perspective, the book didn't change his mind, you've lost that bet, but that doesn't meant here's no chance for *you* to change his mind, and I suspect you care more about his beliefs than about the cash.
I don't like Caplan at all, but if I made a bet that Caplan would change his mind based on Caplan's assessment of the rules, I would be the idiot.
Now, if it was just "I paid $500 to get Caplan to read a book," well, fine.
I don't think it's too opportunistic.
Ok, phew, it's unanimous!
>A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”
I'm not sure why anybody would have thought this. If you look at the list of countries by GDP per capita
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
then the top 77 countries are all democracies apart from a handful of rich petrostates. The non-democracies start at 78, with Iran, China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in a roughly similar place.
I have no idea why anyone would have thought that China was going to catch up with the US or South Korea or Japan; they just seem to have stopped eating dirt and taken their place among the Russias and Turkmenistans of the world.
There was this idea in the 1990s that there was a natural sequence where they grew under dictatorship then democratized and continued to grow. Then those academics realized China and Russia weren't democratizing and panicked that maybe they could continue to grow without democratizing. Now we'll see whether the more traditional perspective (that they would hit a limit without democratization) was just right all along.
One interesting thing to note is that the US-China GDP gap has actually *increased* in absolute terms over the last decade.
In 2021, the gap between the US and China is approximately $8.5 trillion ($23.2 vs $14.7 trillion).
In 2011, the gap between the US and China was approximately $7.2 trillion ($14.8 vs $7.6).
While China's GDP is a higher *percentage* of the US GDP, in absolute terms, the GDP gap has actually increased in favor of the US to the tune of about $1.3 trillion - the US is, in absolute terms, growing faster than China is.
Yeah, this is a point I've heard before that I think is underappreciated. In actual great power competition relative statistics are less relevant than absolute. And in absolute terms the US is winning. Though it's also fair to point out China couldn't muster even a comparable force without its economic growth. And that China hugely outnumbers the US.
>This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point.
There's no mystery here, those who continue who have a weak do-nothing government and allow Western capital to bleed it dry sink, those who have some sort of spine and don't allow western capital to bleed it dry do well, assuming they aren't made a pet project of the West for geopolitical reasons like say Taiwan for instance that is. It's not a coincidence that three of the four 'Asian Tigers' are Western pet projects for geostrategic reasons, the West has just to take the rare decision not to bleed these countries dry because its in their interests not to.
What countries are western capital bleeding dry and how are they doing so? Also, how does your hypothesis treat North Korea which absolutely does not let western capital in at all?
I recommend you read books like the Open Veins of Latin America to get a good idea of what I'm talking about.
As for North Korea, that country is hermitized by the West and they've been engaging in economic sabotage for some time, although admittingly the government is far too idealistic and less pragmatic in economic matters.
I already have. Please feel free to give your answer as if I'm familiar with the relevant literature. But please do give me an actual answer.
The East is purposefully economically dependent on the West and so when the West is in a position of power it smacks the East around naturally because its in their interests to do so.
If it's purposefully dependent then whose purpose is it? That describes intentionality, whose intention? What's the latest example of the West smacking the East around? How has this led to them being bled dry? You're just gesturing at something as if you don't want to say it.
https://issafrica.org/iss-today/exploiting-minerals-exploiting-communities
"The East"? "The West"? "Smacks around"? "Their interest"?
Your non-answer is so non-specific that I've seen fortune cookies that are more concrete than that.
Well to give an example, there's the 'African Growth and Opportunity Act' which coerces African governments to have policies that favour Western economic interests. If they refuse to engage in such policies and don't open up their economy for Western capital to run wild then there are punishments economically for that African nation per the act.
> As for North Korea, that country is hermitized by the West and they've been engaging in economic sabotage for some time, although admittingly the government is far too idealistic and less pragmatic in economic matters.
wait what
I'm pretty skeptical of simple explanations for complex geopolitical phenomena. There's a zillion reasons why some countries have succeeded and others have not, and "Western capital" is almost certainly one factor, but there's a lot of other things going on at the same time.
But your dichotomy strikes me as pretty unfalsifiable. If a country is heavily involved with Western capital and it does badly, it means that Western capital bled it dry, but if it does well then it means it was a "pet project for geostrategic reasons". I'm not sure what kind of sequence of events could be taken as evidence against your theory.
Also there's plenty of countries which have been a pet project of Western geostrategy and still done poorly, like Afghanistan and South Vietnam.
>But your dichotomy strikes me as pretty unfalsifiable. If a country is heavily involved with Western capital and it does badly, it means that Western capital bled it dry, but if it does well then it means it was a "pet project for geostrategic reasons".
No, that's not how it works. Places like Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong were pet projects of the West for strategic interests because of the Cold War. There are not any other pet projects in Asia, except maybe Japan but they're doing pretty well regardless.
>Also there's plenty of countries which have been a pet project of Western geostrategy and still done poorly, like Afghanistan and South Vietnam.
Not for very long, and there was the additional fact that heinous wars were being waged during this very short period.
How was Hong Kong a strategic interest during the Cold War? I'm not unfamiliar with the strategic thinking of the era, having lived through it and studied it a bit on my own, and I don't recall having heard this argument. How would the prosperity of Hong Kong, say, have helped restrain Soviet influence?
Hong Kong being economically successful would have important symbolic power, as would its economic failure.
How so? Why more than Singapore, say, or Sri Lanka or Thailand or the Phillipines, or in general any other up-and-coming country? If the "strategic interest" you had in mind is just "showing that a liberal democracy does better than a communist dictatorship so yay USA" then the US had "strategic interests" in every non-aligned non-First-World nation or city state during the Cold War, which seems....a bit broad.
Generally, when people say "strategic interests" it has at least *some* military angle. You can argue the US had a strategic interest in seeing that West Germany recovered its strength quickly after 1945, because it was on the front lines of any potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe (and in fact those pushing hardest at the time for assisting the Germans to get back on their feet were US military commanders).
I'm not seeing how Hong Kong qualifies. (And you may want to bear in mind that China was not seen as a major opponent during the Cold War.)
Now that the Cold War is over, should we expect those countries to fail?
Not really true. The US didn't do anything about most of the Latin American countries closing off their economies to imports to try and do Import Substitution Industrialization, and there were vast amounts of western bank capital invested in the region throughout the 1970s (just look up Citibank alone). They didn't get richer like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan because ISI sucks - if your internal market is too small to support competing firms (or you explicitly create state-owned monopolies), then you just end up with oligarchies enriching themselves with bad companies with low productivity.
>The US didn't do anything about most of the Latin American countries closing off their economies to imports to try and do Import Substitution Industrialization,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
Take a look at this list, you'll see that Latin American nations appear significantly more often.
Brett didn't merely say "The US didn't do anything". It was specifically "about [...] closing off their economies to imports". So your link had better be about Import Substitution Industrialization rather than just regime change generally!
Your beliefs are derived from 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories, not how real world economies actually function.
IRL, the entire notion of "bleeding them dry" is a Big Lie; in real life, people in developing countries are poor because they produce very little value on a per capita basis. There's not much value that can be wrung out of subsistence farmers in Africa; they produce 1% of the food that an American farmer does.
The same applies to Latin America.
What predicts improvements in living conditions is industrialization, mechanization, automation, education (and real education, not "our leader is great" indoctrination), etc. Or, to put it another way, all the things that come with increases in per-capita productivity.
Because in the end, literally the only thing that matters is increases in per-capita productivity.
Developing countries that are competent at what they do are rare, because the route to being a developed country is pretty clear at this point; we already have them, so it's a question of executing on that. The thing is, if you can do that, you'd probably already be a developed country - so the number of countries that goes between these categories is low. You have to fundamentally change your culture, which many people don't want to do.
If you are willing to do it, you can develop within a person's working career. But you need a significant level of social buy-in, and many people want scapegoats rather than "you need to change your way of life and thinking on a fundamental level".
The entire notion that the developed world is "bleeding them dry" is an obvious falsehood - indeed, countries that do trade with the developed world do better than those who don't, and the developed world deploys MORE resources to these countries than they get in return (hence why these countries have far better standards of development now than they did 20-30 years ago).
>Your beliefs are derived from 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories, not how real world economies actually function
What would the idea of colonialism have to do with Jews? Perhaps it's indicative of your own prejudiced mindset that you associate such things with Jews.
> in real life, people in developing countries are poor because they produce very little value on a per capita basis. There's not much value that can be wrung out of subsistence farmers in Africa; they produce 1% of the food that an American farmer does.
And why do you think this is? It's this way for a reason you know, have you ever stopped and thought about what this reason is? You should 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' by Walter Rodney to understand the economic history of Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Europe_Underdeveloped_Africa
>The same applies to Latin America.
You should read about the United Fruit Company.
>The entire notion that the developed world is "bleeding them dry" is an obvious falsehood - indeed, countries that do trade with the developed world do better than those who don't,
That would lend credence to the idea the poor countries are building their economy off unfair and unequal relations with the Global South.
> What would the idea of colonialism have to do with Jews? Perhaps it's indicative of your own prejudiced mindset that you associate such things with Jews.
Naw, it's because your beliefs come from Karl Marx, whose worldview was severely warped by these 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories. Many of his rantings were an attempt to rationalize these beliefs.
Leftist notions that the reason why group A is poor and group B is rich is that group B stole from group A is rooted in these conspiracy theories.
IRL, it's not really related to the story of why some areas are rich and others are poor. It's an attempt to scapegoat external forces for internal issues.
> And why do you think this is?
Culture and way of life is one of the largest factors. All you have to do is look at Taiwan and South Korea and compare them to the PRC and and North Korea. What's the difference? They were one people, originally. Now things are wildly different. This is because NK and the PRC embraced Communism while South Korea and Taiwan became capitalist democracies.
You have to fundamentally change the way you operate on a basic level if you want to be a wealthy, developed country; we've figured out massively better ways of doing things over time. You must move with the times. The old way of doing things was a way associated with the low state of living that people endured previously.
There's also the question of genetic inequality, though that's not yet proven; people from some areas might or might not be burdened with an unfair preponderance of alleles which are not optimized for modern society and puts them at a biological disadvantage. The overwhelming majority of experts in the field (almost 90%) believe that genetic inequality plays some role in group inequality, and half believe it is responsible for 50% or more, based on the fact that a number of genetic traits that have major effects on life outcomes are highly heritable. However, until more of these alleles are nailed down, this only remains an unverified hypothesis.
> You should 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' by Walter Rodney to understand the economic history of Africa.
This is a complete fabrication by a soicalist crank, I'm afraid.
The entire thing is based on a complete lack of comprehension of basic economics.
Africa was colonized because it was weak and poor, which made it easy to conquer. Africa was abandoned because it wasn't worth keeping; colonization was a hallmark of mercantilism. In a capitalist society, it is recognized that building tall, not wide, is the route to prosperity; you become wealthy by increasing per capita productivity, and the poor, in a capitalist system, are a drain on the system, as they consume more resources than they create.
The notion that Europe became rich because Africa became poor is not rooted in reality; in real life, Europe was rich before it colonized Africa (which is why it so easily conquered Africa in the first place!), and its further development was not due to African colonization, but due to Europe's industrialization.
Africa remained poor because it did not industrialize.
> You should read about the United Fruit Company.
You should read about the decline of Argentina.
The UFC was evil, but its power was so great precisely because the countries down there were weak and corrupt, which made it easy for a privately owned corporation to do nasty things.
IRL, the poverty of Latin America is mostly due to localized issues, like corruption, embrace of far right and far left politics, high crime, and myriad other factors. While it is true that the USSR spreading socialism down there didn't help things, most of the issues were rooted in problems that predated the 20th century, but just kept getting carried forward through the present.
Latin America did not magically end up poor or underdeveloped relative to the US and Canada, it was due to the local decisions of local people. Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world at one point before it stagnated due to internal problems.
> That would lend credence to the idea the poor countries are building their economy off unfair and unequal relations with the Global South.
People who produce more value have a higher standard of living than those who produce less value. Shock and surprise. Welcome to basic economics.
The reason why those countries are better off is because they produce more value and so can engage in more trade. Trade is bilaterally useful - both sides benefit, with trade allowing these countries to buy capital goods that help them develop.
There's nothing unfair about it.
Which of Karl Marx's "rantings" were an attempt to "rationalize these beliefs"?
Most of them, really. The entire core of socialism is built up around these beliefs.
He believed that Jews were controlling the masses through banks, loans, corporations, and governments. Hence why he hated all those things.
He called money the God of Israel. He hated money.
He believed that Jews were behind every tyrant. He wanted no head of state.
The list goes on.
"He believed that Jews were controlling the masses through banks, loans, corporations, and governments."
Can you quote where he said this?
> IRL, the entire notion of "bleeding them dry" is a Big Lie; in real life, people in developing countries are poor because they produce very little value on a per capita basis. There's not much value that can be wrung out of subsistence farmers in Africa; they produce 1% of the food that an American farmer does.
Being poor does not mean that you cannot be still robbed. See say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State
Sure, and the Congo Free State was so blatantly horrible that it was a huge humanitarian scandal over a century ago for the cartoonishly evil levels of mistreatment that people experienced there. It was awful and evil even by the standards of the late 19th and early 20th century.
You can steal from the poor, but it's not a great route to general prosperity, and it isn't why people are poor in the developing world today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8OeVaydBJQ
The entire notion of this is completely wrong and is based on a complete lack of understanding of history and economics - or, in other words, *reality*.
Economics is not a zero-sum game, the absolute size of the economy can (and does) change. Industrialization caused insane levels of economic growth because per capita productivity increased by two orders of magnitude, because automation and mechanization allows you to do the work of a hundred men (or more!).
IRL, everyone was poor originally. The idea of primitive accumulation of capital is false - in real life, almost all capital accumulation in all of history happened in the 20th and 21st century. Rapid industrialization has happened in multiple countries, and there are more self-made rich people than ever before - the numbers have been going up, and up, and up.
Anyone with even the most basic level of knowledge about reality knows this.
Turns out, you shouldn't base your entire belief system on the ravings of a narcissistic anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Who knew?
I think you should be more charitable to people and not say that their beliefs are based on the "ravings of a narcissistic anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist". If you disagree with someone, just lay out the reasons for it. There's no point to say it's a "raving". It seems like you're just insulting the outgroup.
> in real life, almost all capital accumulation in all of history happened in the 20th and 21st century
And areas/societies that had accumulated starter capital where much better positioned to exploit this.
Also, countries which had significant accumulated capital were place where this process started - and it was not an accident.
In short even if growth in last 200 years dwarfed anything before, it was still heavily affected by initial state.
It is not some unique case. See for example USSR-cause ruination still affecting occupied countries and many other cases where quite poor area was made even more poor by colonizer/occupier.
> but it's not a great route to general prosperity
I agree, that is not changing that it happened.
> it isn't why people are poor in the developing world today.
At least partially it is a reason, even if not the most important one.
Nope, you're simply assuming all populations are equally capable, but this is a wholly unfounded assumption. It also ignores why these countries were dirt poor before the west ever set foot in them.
> 3: Speculations on the rise of Christianity. A consistent 40% per decade growth rate maintained from St. Peter to Constantine would fit observations nicely; we know this is possible in theory because Mormonism has also grown at about 40% per decade the past century. Also, plausibly Constantine’s conversion barely changed the growth rate at all.
The thing I think would surprise people most about early Christianity is that it was a religion of the urban poor/middle classes. The best evidence we have for a pattern is that Christianity spread along trade routes to various urban populations and from there out to the countryside. Rural populations and elites seem to have been the holdouts.
I'd expect that the 3rd Century was a real turning point for three reasons. Firstly, the deurbanization scattered a lot of Christian populations to the countryside. Secondly, a century of crisis and civil war left the Church as the only operating national organization. One which gave charity and expected its members to die in a time where dying was a very real possibility. Lastly, there were some theological changes that made conversion more attractive and easier.
The last one is, imo, probably the big effect of Constantine. The end of official persecution allowed Christians to relax certain standards that were meant to let them survive under persecution but meant having some distrust of outsiders. These changes were probably at the center of various heresies like the Donatists.
> 4: Related:
Weak explanation #1: Most Classics scholars are Latin speakers and Latin is a highly synthetic, logical language. It has a bunch of connecting words that imply fairly specific logical relations. This became even more pronounced as it became the language of academia later on. I expect every Classics scholar knows formal logic to some extent.
Weak Explanation #2: Most Classical philosophy would have considered someone who took a small guaranteed payout over risking it for a greater reward a coward. Whether that's the Greeks talking of insufficient desire for glory or the Romans considering it foolish to think you can actually isolate yourself from risk. People who deeply engage with these philosophies end up adopting them to some extent.
> 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread.
Kropotkin's best point is the idea that cooperation is a competitive strategy. That helping the less fortunate is not just an irrational moral stance but actually make you, the person helping them, more competitive in any sort of evolutionary competition (economic or biological).
The issue is that he wants to completely abolish property and thinks that production will still happen under these circumstances. He literally proposes things like that people will work to feed other people out of, basically, altruism. In some sense anarchism is to the left of Communism. You can kind of draw a spectrum between feudalism/slave societies (where people can own anything, even people) capitalism (where people can own anything except people), communism (where people can own private property but not means of production/labor), and anarchism (where people can't own anything). (Technically, Kropotkin says you can own property. But he also says it can be taken from you if you refuse to give it away. He just... never addresses this.)
To take the example of bread, both Communism and Capitalism argue that people produce bread and that other people can then purchase it and own it. Communism argues that the bread belongs to the person whose labor produced it while capitalists argue it belongs to the person who hired the baker. But Kropotkin style anarachists argue that neither of them can own the bread: the concept of ownership is itself wrong. It was actually the Communist philosophers who pointed out that an anarchist vision that expects bakers to produce bread and then give it away gives them no incentive to work. (They also considered it theft of the baker's labor.)
This is not an exaggeration. Kropotkin mentions how pianos will be produced in his ideal society. (He thinks this is something he has on the Communists because apparently Communists won't want to make pianos. And the idea of a collectively owned piano will mean no art can be produced.) His answer: the collective that produces pianos will give them away for free to artists for their own personal, altruistic reasons. He brings up a woman at the commune-factory loving an artist or the entire group of workers being moved by the beautiful performance of an artist.
Kropotkinite anarchism sounds nice because it has all those slogans about decommodification. "Everyone gets bread! Everyone gets healthcare! No one shall be denied any necessity or luxury! No one needs to work!" But once you dig deep into the theory it has some profoundly weird ideas about property, production, and how economics work. Perhaps most disturbingly, it has a very unusual definition of violence whereby simply owning something is an act of violence that justifies defensive violence to take things. Communists say something similar about factory owner's factories. But left anarchists say that about everything.
> 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point.
The myth of Chinese hyper-competence is something you can only believe if you have no direct contact with China. No one in China believes it. Not even the CCP in official propaganda! I have no idea about Xi specifically. But the average westerner just doesn't seem to have a good idea what's going on.
(The Chinese themselves have noticed this, by the way, and spend a lot of time criticizing the west for its economic advice for the rest of the world being narcissistic. The semi-official response to Piketty was basically, "This guy has no idea what anything that isn't Western Europe looks like. He doesn't even accurately describe the Americas or Eastern Europe let alone China or Africa.")
Anyway, Xi's competence is kind of a moot point. There's this weird narrative that emerged that dictatorships trade economic growth/prosperity in exchange for democratic rights. So, for example, the Chinese accept totalitarian rule in exchange for the growth the CCP's model provides. The issue with this was always that it misunderstood the accountability of totalitarian rulers. If China experiences low growth do you think the Communists are going to stop ruling China? No, of course not. Some kind of growth for civil rights contract doesn't work in a dictatorship because the dictatorship isn't making deals with its populace.
This is the fundamental mistake of this analysis. It implicitly assumes Xi's goals are things like the maximization of Chinese GDP or that his power significantly relies on the general welfare. Xi's power relies on the Communist Party's continued power and his power within it. That's what he's maximizing. Xi's very internally focused and he's spent his rule destroying anything that looks like a potential alternative power center. We've noticed a few that are more visible to us like tech. But he's also done it to various institutions in the CCP itself, to various kinds of media, to camera manufacturers... If you measure Xi by the amount of power he's amassed to the CCP and himself personally then he's been highly successful.
(This is also why I think Xi's somewhat baffled comments about international prestige are genuine. He spends like 90% of his time on internal affairs so when other countries react he's a little frustrated. It's just not where he wants to spend his time.)
> 24: Sort of related: I console myself with the idea that the Democrats have some kind of grand strategy to both make everyone hate them as much as possible, and also push policies that will accomplish exactly the opposite of all their goals. Then Republicans will capture all branches of government with large majorities, and build lots of solar panels in order to own the libs. Also promote race-blind hiring, build lots of housing to fight homelessness, repeal SALT deductions, regulate Big Business, pull out of foreign wars, heck, why not legalize marijuana? Viewed this way, maybe Biden and Pelosi are the greatest political geniuses of their generation!
This strikes me as evidence that democracy works. The Democrats have been captured by an unpopular but wealthy/powerful elite whose ideology is not producing good outcomes and are getting punished for it. This isn't a purely pro-right wing thing either. Working class Democrats have repeatedly staged backbench revolts over the past year. The real question for me is twofold: Firstly, did Biden misunderstand his mandate or is the Democratic Party so captured by far left staffers that it effectively can't chart a moderate course? And two, if this is clearly unsustainable (and I'd argue it is) then how does the Democratic Party shift to prevent becoming non-viable as a party?
Honestly, if you wanted to restore my faith in democracy then kicking Trump out of office and rebuking the radical left types in quick succession would have me feeling very bullish about the wisdom of the common American. It'd make me feel that the American people actually are acting as the game theoretic mob boss trying to get us to the good state of the prisoner's dilemma.
"The myth of Chinese hyper-competence is something you can only believe if you have no direct contact with China. No one in China believes it. Not even the CCP in official propaganda! I have no idea about Xi specifically. But the average westerner just doesn't seem to have a good idea what's going on."
That because the myth of Chinese hyper-competence is not meant for understanding China. It's not about China, but about the West and its internal faults, like inequality for left-wingers or mass immigration for right-wingers.
If I am not mistaken, it's not similar to not just the Japan-craze of the 1970's/1980's, but the Sinophilia of the Enlightenment Era.
I'd agree with that plus some propaganda meant to manage external relations.
Any thinking about this as if Biden is misplaying a mandate is inherently mistaken I believe. Democrats are unhappy that not *enough* things are happening (the fault of the senate). Hence low approval rates.
I don't think so. That's the story people on the left would like to be true. It's a Fifty Stalins argument. The issue isn't the left wing ideals itself but merely that they aren't going far enough left fast enough.
The truth is that Biden's approval ranking is sinking with moderates, not Democrats. (And with Republicans if that matters.) Democrats have sunk from 98 to 90. Moderates have gone from 61 to 35. (And from 12 to 6 with Republicans.) Meanwhile the generic ballot shows the same: it's the moderates who're leaving, not the Democrats.
Likewise, most polls on the subject show that dissatisfaction is driven by Democrat policy as practiced (lockdowns, inflation, etc) and that the failure to pass their agenda isn't really a driver. Which makes sense. Do you really think moderates are punishing the Democratic Party for not being left enough? Moderates, who are defined by not being leftists?
To be absolutely clear, what is the wildly left policy that Biden has successfully pushed and is thus driving moderates to repudiate him in your eyes?
Moderates may be defecting because they have fears about stuff like CRT or something, but it has nothing to do with Biden "overplaying his mandate". That is divorced from reality.
The infrastructure package is broadly popular, which is why it got Republican support.
The fake propaganda "human infrastructure" package which is actually a big expansion of welfare programs is not, and is being pushed back against because we are seeing high rates of inflation from handing out too much money from tax breaks and actual cash handouts to people. It's why the program had to be cut down by so much to pass at all, if it actually does.
On top of that, the "wokeness" narrative is deeply toxic and awful. The Rittenhouse thing was completely divorced from reality, and not only that, but it was *obviously* so. They shot themselves in the face over it for no reason; it wasn't actually important in any grander way.
In the end, the people who were out rioting and setting shit on fire and breaking stuff are all enemies of America - all the QAnon rioters, all the "BLM" rioters (many of whom were actually far leftists as well as various criminal elements who made use of BLM as cover for their own activities), they're *all* baddies to all Americans. Everyone wants these people to knock it off and go home.
Siding with them is a losing move, and the Democrats, for whatever reason, decided that they couldn't just wash their hands of these people, who are an anchor to them politically.
Governing in a moderate sort of way is broadly popular, while trying to side with one of these insane "tribes" is not.
The same applies to pushing the woke "systemic racism" thing (which is derived from CRT and CRT adjacent beliefs). The entire notion that inequality is caused primarily by racism isn't actually true; while racism may play some small role, most differences we see today aren't driven by modern day racism.
The fact that they lie about things that can easily be verified to be false is damaging. The fact that the Democrats decided to repeatedly lie about the Rittenhouse case was stupid and showed just how divorced from reality they have become, and it put a lot of people off and made them recognize that the Democrats are just as tribalistic and delusional as the Republicans are, just about different things.
The fact that crime rates and inflation rates are going up is just the 1970s all over again. They have learned nothing from Carter's failures.
You want to win? Be charismatic, be moderate, and put the criminals in prison.
All this crime and inflation stuff is really bad for people, and when people don't feel safe and feel like they're losing money, that's bad for you politically.
Ok, but I was talking specifically about Biden? (Or were you agreeing with me?)
Biden made leftists upset after Rittenhouse by saying "The Jury system works". My entire point is that the nebulous left is not Biden.
I agree with you that wokeness is a losing narrative. I don't see how Biden is actually being woke in his policies.
"Systemic racism" is a woke thing. And he put his foot in his mouth in the lead up to the Rittenhouse case - trying to defuse things a bit after the fact didn't save him there.
But his biggest flaw in regards to this is his failure to rein in or push back against the far leftist narrative in general; he doesn't control messaging well at all, and so it is easy to put things in his mouth.
He doesn't end up coming off as being moderate, and perception in that regard is important. If he was seen as a moderating force against the far left, that would be helpful, but instead he ended up being taken for a ride on the "human infrastructure" thing, which he bungled badly (and indeed, allowing it to get tied to the more popular infrastructure bill was a bad bit of political calculus, and also was seen as him betraying the Republicans who voted for it on the condition that the two weren't tied together).
Perception is really important, and he seems to have been taken for a ride by the far left and the "Squad", who ended up voting against his infrastructure bill anyway, so he looked weak and like he was trying to appease them, and like it didn't even help.
Before I continue: what evidence would I have to bring for you to believe the Democrat's loss of popularity their policies? What would falsify your belief?
Or is it an article of faith that Democratic policies are right? Because the latter is common but I can't argue people out of positions that are faith based.
Polling on something Biden DID. It would be rather trivial if your view was correct.
Also disambiguate between Biden and generic feelings about Democrats to actually address my point.
Great! You're right, it's trivial. Afghanistan is the biggest policy the Biden administration has actually implemented. (BBB and the infrastructure bill haven't actually happened yet. Fed policy is more a staffing issue and you're very specific about something Biden did so I suspect you'd claim Yellen is someone different.)
How does polling work on that? Overwhelmingly negative. About half of people rate the handling poor (the lowest score) and 2/3rds have a predominately negative view of it.
If you want to say this doesn't count I'll expect you to admit you're moving the goalposts.
> Rural populations and elites seem to have been the holdouts.
Note origin of the word "pagan".
I thought it was a step or two removed from that, with "pagan" originally meaning "of the countryside" with connotations of "yokel", and from there entering military slang as a synonym for "civilian" (i.e. the local yokels the career legionaries were stationed near), and thence was borrowed by Christians as a term for non-Christians due to early Christianity getting more traction among the legions than among the provincial civilians.
More like, due to the early Christians viewing themselves as soldiers of Christ. From there, it's a very small step to seeing non-Christians as like civilians, that is, pagani.
Wikipedia claims that both were causes - I was not aware about 'milites Christi', thanks!
> In the time of the Roman empire, individuals fell into the pagan class either because they were increasingly rural and provincial relative to the Christian population, or because they were not milites Christi (soldiers of Christ).
Possibly. There's the added wrinkle that non-Christian Romans would have associated the country with backward religious practices already.
There's an idea that Roman pagans were tolerant of other religions. They could be but they could also be harsh religious persecutors. And they were often snobs about it. So pagan religion to a pre-Christian Roman meant something like the backward, ridiculous rites of uneducated peasants or barbaric peoples. Plus Roman soldiers/administrators would have brought their "superior" religious practices and set up local shrines. They would talk about pagan religion meaning local religion which was implicitly backward. Especially in Europe. Of course, they also sometimes adopted such religions which almost inherently made them non-pagan. Presumably there was a lot of bickering over exactly what counted in some Roman equivalent of culture war.
So the Roman Christians didn't need to invent the word's meaning wholesale. Their specific division of the world into Christian and pagan was new. But the division of the world into acceptable and unacceptable religions already existed. The real Christian innovation was tying the concept of following Christianity (and eventually a specific kind of Christianity) to Roman-ness. By the fall of the empire to be Roman was to be Christian.
Originally: villager, rustic, civilian, non-militant. Used by Augustine it was heathen, not a Jew or Christian.
"Honestly, if you wanted to restore my faith in democracy then kicking Trump out of office and rebuking the radical left types in quick succession would have me feeling very bullish about the wisdom of the common American."
Unfortunately, Trump seems poised to win the Republican nomination in 2024. Which, for non-Trumpists, means another few years of holding our tongues and going to the mat for Biden/Harris even as their agenda falls apart and material conditions grow worse.
That would be unfortunate. I'll hope someone else comes along.
There’s the rub. Who?
I find these tweets from Josh Barro interesting to contemplate: https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1463332888171143175
"A thing we haven't seen tried, and I wonder if it might work, is a 2024 primary campaign that runs neither to Trump's left or right but straight at him. Attack him as the guy who managed to lose to Biden, who didn't build the wall, didn't repeal Obamacare, kept losing and losing."
"A campaign like this doesn't have to buy any hated MSM talking points, doesn't need to sound like Bill Kristol. The candidate can bash the media relentlessly. But can also say that the media has always been biased against GOP, but Trump got caught in their games and lost."
"This would work best from someone with a real MAGA track record like Ron DeSantis. The line is "I supported you, I was rooting for you, I believed in your agenda (and still do), but you screwed it up and got beat by Democrats and the media, and we can't let that happen again.""
I'm trying to imagine how else someone like DeSantis runs a primary against Trump. I'm also having trouble imagining that potentially strong candidates such as DeSantis will simply stand aside if Trump runs in 2024.
I wanted to see Amy Klobuchar get the nod in 2020. Smart, effective, hard working no bullshit Amy.
Daughter of an alcoholic having Neil Gorsuch hostilely ask her if she didn’t like beer too. She stayed on point unflustered and graciously accepted his later apology.
I think she could have eviscerated Trump in debates. She had had plenty of practice handling semi literate bullies getting to where she was at that point. I’m fairly sure she could have shown the nation what a small man he really is.
Her experience as a formal prosecutor effectively killed her chances last time. Next time that could be an asset.
Right it was Kavanaugh with his inane “I like beer riff” Sorry, Neil. I guess I shouldn’t eyeball my microdose.
Fuckin eh, Amy has a temper. I wouldn’t cross her. Neither should any whiny little narcissist
I don't know. I'd take Pence as establishment vs DeSantis as populist as a major improvement in the specific personalities running. But no idea what it'll actually look like. (Don't like Abott much though, insofar as I like any Republican.)
Specifically at a national level, the main policies being pushed by the Democrats seem to be popular (things like infrastructure, 4 weeks leave, 2 years community college, etc). But I think it would be a mistake to believe policy matters. The public doesn't pay attention, for example most Trump voters weren't asking for or even aware that a large corporate tax cut was his most significant economic policy. I don't think the economy is too important either, perceptions of the economy basically reversed on the Trump->Biden transition, and even if individuals are doing OK they'll imagine others aren't based on partisan leanings (true for either side).
Disassociating themselves from the unhinged left is probably also futile - you can't control the actions of everybody in such a large group, and spending time infighting would be a distraction.
If they want to win, they should probably focus on branding/vilifying the other side. Find examples of the unhinged right (not overly difficult), and try to associate that with the broader party as much as possible. Find a more compelling moral panic than racism, global warming, terrorism, or the fear of SJWs. You'd need to work on it and promote certain stereotypes, but maybe you could find helpful things on the right-wing twitter alternatives.
Yes, this would involve pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire of US politics. Maybe that's what winning looks like?
Thank you. The idea that somehow Biden has been too aggressive at pushing for infrastructure and that is why his poll numbers are down is just basically laughable.
The infrastructure package is popular.
The fake "human infrastructure" thing - which is just a big expansion of welfare state stuff - is much less so. Hence why they tried to rebrand it as "infrastructure".
Had the Democrats just passed the initial bipartisan infrastructure bill months ago, they would have looked competent. Instead, they managed to bicker and fight and be stupid, turning an easy win (that would have cemented the idea that the Democrats are Competent and Get Stuff Done) into a huge stupid fight.
Primary everyone in the Democratic party in the House who voted against the infrastructure bill, and make sure that they lose and don't exist anymore. That will help things significantly, I think.
The whole wokeness and far leftist stuff is very bad for them as well, and has been too much adopted as part of the party brand. And it's not just perception - it's reality.
Trying to vilify the right only works if you yourself aren't doing reprehensible things. Trump lost because he was terrible - but Republicans downballot did better than Trump did. Trump was a hinderance, not an asset.
It's not just the presidency, but also the House and the Senate - you want to win, you need to win those downballot races, too.
Yeah I agree. Congress played this poorly.
Popular in a limited arena, maybe, when the other poll response is "don't care at all." But popular relative to knocking down COVID or having gas stay at $2/gallon or being able to buy a used car at a reasonable discount from new? Kind of doubt it.
If your opponents are going to slam you for inflation, the continuance of COVID mandates, and the astronomical cost of used cars -- and they will -- then saying by gum we passed a measure to rebuild a bunch of bridges and by and by that will improve our economic situation is totally not going to work. People will laugh if that's the best argument that can be made.
Infrastructure is pretty highly visible. Fixing a bunch of bridges and improving roads IS something that people like. So is expanded high speed internet access. Those are all things that, if executed on, will actually make people happy.
The problem is that there are a lot of other issues as well.
In my entire lifetime, I cannot recall a single election won on the basis of fixing bridges or roads. Maybe that would be true if the roads and bridges were in shambles, and we went from "have to pick my way around potholes and burning wrecks at 20MPH to speeding down the well-repaired orderly highway at 65MPH" but that isn't the case at all here. We're talking about retrofitting bridges so that maybe they last longer (and the absence of a bridge falling down does not get people excited), or some helpful projects in a few scattered places of the country that might make an extra 100,000 people here and there happy -- but not an extra 20 million voters nationwide.
Now on the other hand the number of people enraged about paying close to (or above!) $100 to fill their gas tank, or who watched the exit from Afghanistan play out in squalid detail, or who thought COVID would finally be addressed in some sensible and effective way[1] once that doofus Trump was booted -- that's a *lot* of people, spread across a lot of states. The fact that in 18-24 months some local company will get a good contract to add an HOV lane to a 2-mile stretch of the local freeway is not going to even come close to compensating.
--------------------
[1] Setting aside the question of whether it is even hypothetically possible for such a plan to exist, it is nevertheless the case that the Democrats ran on "Trump fucked up the COVID response" and the clear implication was "and we won't!"
I don't know any of this but I am amused by the volte-face on Kyrsten Sinema.
I only became aware of her due to fawning coverage on Tumblr when she was first elected to the Senate, with tons of photos of her being sworn in by Mike Pence and jubilant commentary on how he must absolutely hate having to swear in an out and proud bisexual, etc. Her clothing choices were also much admired.
Now she's an Enemy of the People, and getting articles written about her as to how she's motivated purely by personal ambition (what, in a professional politician? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!) and "Saturday Night Live" parodied her fashion sense as “all the Scooby Doo characters at the same time”:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/27/kyrsten-sinema-ambition-loyalty-517224
So... you're telling me sexual identity politics is *not* a reliable method of voting in a public representative? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you part deux!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9JZGju0Rg8
> you can't control the actions of everybody in such a large group
You can throw them out of party/clearly disassociate/stop promoting them/stop funding them and throw out of party people clearly supporting them.
> Specifically at a national level, the main policies being pushed by the Democrats seem to be popular (things like infrastructure, 4 weeks leave, 2 years community college, etc)
This is due to what's called debundled polling. You can get majorities to say they support more or less everything if you divorce them from the costs. This is also how Republicans get people to say they want lower taxes. If you bundle them you find Democratic policies are significantly less popular. That's why the talking point is effectively a statistics trick.
> But I think it would be a mistake to believe policy matters. The public doesn't pay attention
Of the things I listed most are policy matters. They just aren't the policy matters the left wishes people cared about. They want people to care about social justice or paid family leave but people are responding more strongly to inflation and school closure.
> I don't think the economy is too important either,
This isn't what people say. People say the economy is a huge concern and point to objective measures like inflation or decreasing consumer spending power.
> Disassociating themselves from the unhinged left is probably also futile - you can't control the actions of everybody in such a large group, and spending time infighting would be a distraction.
Clinton, Obama, and Biden all successfully did it. Biden only lost it when he started compromising with his far left, in part because his coalition is so narrow he needs everyone onboard. When you have to get literally every single Democrat on board you need to bring even your craziest members into the tent.
> If they want to win, they should probably focus on branding/vilifying the other side. Find examples of the unhinged right (not overly difficult), and try to associate that with the broader party as much as possible. Find a more compelling moral panic than racism, global warming, terrorism, or the fear of SJWs. You'd need to work on it and promote certain stereotypes, but maybe you could find helpful things on the right-wing twitter alternatives. Yes, this would involve pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire of US politics. Maybe that's what winning looks like?
Maybe it is. Negative partisanship and all that. Though what they'd need to do that is find some new lever. Democrats already more or less maximally vilify Republicans in institutions they dominate. They'd either need to find new institutions to dominate or it'd just be more of the same. Though I agree that (combined with Republicans attempts to do the same) effectively creates a dumpster fire.
> <on entire bill vs stuff in bill>
Covering pre-existing conditions was popular, just not the total government take-over of health care and the death panels (especially when it would be so easy to write a replacement without that stuff!).
The Republican establishment is against certain things ideologically, but some portion of their base isn't, so it's better to be concerned about the particulars in the marketing.
The Democratic-sympathizing media (who are often happy to sell out their own side too for a few clicks) aren't helping them brand it, since these bills are mostly talked about by the price tags rather than anything in them.
My point is it doesn't matter too much what the major things are or where the trillions of dollars go. Both parties will test out what narratives they can sell to the public and what sticks will be determined mostly by what's emotionally compelling.
> People say the economy is a huge concern
Sure people care about the economy, it just might not matter much politically. This goes for the Democrats too, the economy was doing pretty well pre-covid but that wasn't helping Trump out much, because partisan attachment is now the most important factor for economic outlook.
Obviously the present inflation is real but also obviously this has to do with both supply chains and the massive COVID spending that has already happened under both Trump and Biden, that on a yearly basis was like 10x as big as the bills being discussed (which haven't had any impact on the economy yet).
> Clinton, Obama, and Biden all successfully <disassociated themselves from the hard left>
I was too young to pay close attention for Clinton, but I don't think this was true for Obama. I have family that read a lot of WSJ op-eds at the time (and I'd also read some myself) and he was practically the second coming of Malcolm X. His biggest issues were his open class warfare and his divisive rhetoric. He was even on the same board as Ayers who was a terrorist. And the WSJ isn't even on the more extreme side of things.
I think like the Iraq war this is one of those things where people feel less strongly in retrospect but had more intensity at the time. Particularly at the beginning the narrative of him being an angry radical was pretty strong, although eventually I think he became more of a known quantity. Maybe also kind of like people treating Trump as an unserious sideshow at first, although it's hard to maintain that after him winning the presidency. But it's not too hard to manufacture narratives out of mostly nothing if you're consistent in repeating/reinforcing them.
> Democrats already more or less maximally vilify Republicans
I think there's still some room. The man at the top isn't clear that his enemies are "sick and evil". I'm not sure he's even clear that major parts of society are domestic enemies. He might be able to get his base to believe that his opponents have already de-facto ended democracy, and elections and the courts are now a farce, which would make it easier to ignore them if necessary later. Until polling indicates a quarter of his base believe that his opponents are literal pedophiles, and they might have to resort to violence to save the county, I think there is at least *potential* to dial it up.
Since there are a number of differences between the parties, but the human nature is probably pretty similar.
> My point is it doesn't matter too much what the major things are or where the trillions of dollars go. Both parties will test out what narratives they can sell to the public and what sticks will be determined mostly by what's emotionally compelling.
This is the Sophist's position. That the actual underlying reality or truth doesn't have any effect on whether narratives function. I don't believe that though there are plenty who do.
> Sure people care about the economy, it just might not matter much politically.
How's that? You mention a bit below Trump also did things that led to inflation. I'd argue Biden did more but that's not really my point here. My point is that Biden put in policies, people are upset about the economy, and people will punish the Democrats because they're in power.
> I was too young to pay close attention for Clinton, but I don't think this was true for Obama. I have family that read a lot of WSJ op-eds at the time (and I'd also read some myself) and he was practically the second coming of Malcolm X.
The right certainly didn't like him. But what matters isn't the right, it's the people who can be won over. The center. And they moved back and forth depending on what he was delivering at the time in part because he repeatedly tried to portray himself as a moderate. This was one of Biden's virtues: even back then he had a reputation for being a moderate, mainstream kind of guy. Which was a good compliment to a Black President who wanted to completely overhaul healthcare. Kamala doesn't serve nearly the same function for Biden.
> I think there's still some room. The man at the top isn't clear that his enemies are "sick and evil". I'm not sure he's even clear that major parts of society are domestic enemies.
He doesn't do this because he can't. Hillary tried to say things like this and got punished for it. He's doing a balancing act right now between calling them awful names in front of the progressives and saying they're his friends in front of the moderates.
> Until polling indicates a quarter of his base believe that his opponents are literal pedophiles, and they might have to resort to violence to save the county, I think there is at least *potential* to dial it up.
Acceptance of violence and unwillingness to associate with the other party is already very high. As is willingness to use state apparatus against domestic opponents. It could get higher I suppose. But it's in the process of getting worse.
But I was already talking more about production. How else could the DNC push this message further? The truth is they'd need to find something that broadcasts into parts of America that aren't NYC (etc) based. And they just don't have that in a solid way.
> This is the Sophist's position.
I don't actually believe that the truth is unimportant or (entirely) unknowable, just that it is only loosely related to public opinion. This is because we live in a complex world and economy where it often takes a lot of effort to understand even basic things. [1]
That isn't totally an indictment of the public. People often pay more attention to things that are relevant to their own lives that they have some control over.
But I don't see how public opinion can be consistently correct, because it isn't even consistent with itself. People were overwhelmingly for the Iraq war before they were overwhelmingly against it. And the public often passionately holds completely opposite opinions at the same time.
Polls often show people only have a vague idea of what is presently going on or even about things like geography. And of course they are up against total professionals who's job it is to manipulate them, and who test their strategies in focus groups.
I'd like to add that I'm a general supporter of democracy and very skeptical of authoritarianism, but it's not at all because I believe the public is naturally correct or can't be manipulated.
> <on Obama> But what matters isn't the right, it's <...> The center. And they moved back and forth depending on what he was delivering at the time in part because he repeatedly tried to portray himself as a moderate
No. Obamacare was overwhelmingly unpopular, now Elizabeth Warren's senate seat went to a Republican, and they got wiped out in the next election.
He *didn't* succeed in winning the center. Our current narratives are different from the past narratives, and the past narratives just get memory-holed when they don't match. We were concerned about hyper-inflation in ~2010 due to our responses to the financial crisis, and everyone was talking about Zimbabwe and making analogies.
> He doesn't do this because he can't.
This is true, these things happen gradually. Trump couldn't win the Republican primary in 1992 because the base wasn't ready for it. But in 2015 43% of the party thought Obama was a Muslim, and he was able to use that to stand out in a crowded primary. Keep in mind the preceding threat to destroy the country before the Left was Islamic terrorism. Interestingly, from what I see online and in real life many people are warming up to the idea that regime change could be the answer in both cases. After all, if you face an existential threat...
> How else could the DNC push this message further?
I'm not sure, but more importantly I don't want them to. There are worse things than losing. Better marketing is fine, but dialing it up to 11 would risk their base turning against them and a left-wing demagogue hijacking their party (and wouldn't automatically solve their other problems). Historically parties pass some stuff and then lose and it's not the end of the world if that happens again.
Of course, if in 2024 things continue in the direction of Trump's post-election behavior things may come to a head, in which case total complacency wouldn't be appropriate. It would be worth thinking about what can be done in response. I don't think that scenario is a foregone conclusion yet, although it's not exactly unlikely either.
[1] My current views on economic matters are somewhat similar to Ray Dalio's (where you can find many publications at economicprinciples.org), although I'm certainly open to learning more and changing my mind.
> I don't actually believe that the truth is unimportant or (entirely) unknowable, just that it is only loosely related to public opinion.
As you say: Traditionally this is an anti-democratic position. Do you cleave to those politics as well? If you don't, how do you justify mass participation in politics?
> No. Obamacare was overwhelmingly unpopular, now Elizabeth Warren's senate seat went to a Republican, and they got wiped out in the next election.
As it happens I was involved in that election. The issue is the candidate they ran was unpopular and didn't campaign since she thought she had it in the bag. The Republicans also ran someone very far to the left. He supported gay marriage before Obama himself did. The general red wave was a more general reaction, largely to Obamacare, but it did get done and ultimately defended in part because the center was on board. Also, Obama kind of shot himself in the foot by just lying about what he was doing. Remember the lie of the year being about Obamacare?
Obama then won the center in 2012 which led to a bunch of crowing about emerging democratic majorities. I agree people tend to memory hole competing narratives but I don't think it's me that's doing it.
> This is true, these things happen gradually. Trump couldn't win the Republican primary in 1992 because the base wasn't ready for it. But in 2015 43% of the party thought Obama was a Muslim, and he was able to use that to stand out in a crowded primary. Keep in mind the preceding threat to destroy the country before the Left was Islamic terrorism. Interestingly, from what I see online and in real life many people are warming up to the idea that regime change could be the answer in both cases. After all, if you face an existential threat...
I more or less agree with this. Though I think the left is more dependent on moderates than the right at the moment and for as long as that continues the Democrats have to be 'nicer' to win. But again, all that could shift.
> I'm not sure, but more importantly I don't want them to. There are worse things than losing.
I agree with this too. My general position is that the preservation of democracy is often more important than specific policy preferences. I think the American people are trying to vote for that moderation but unfortunately not getting it. And I think that's where the focus ought to be: elites need to realize that if they cosplay civil war hard enough it will eventually become a civil war.
"decreasing consumer spending power."
Fiction. I have been convinced by the events of the past year Rick Perlstein was completely correct in his explanation of the 1970s inflation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEC96
"When you have to get literally every single Democrat on board you need to bring even your craziest members into the tent."
There are no crazy Democrats, and there are no sane Democrats, either. There are just Democrats. Functionally, all Democratic politicians in congress are completely identical. Democrats can profitably conclude the same about Republicans, which is precisely why straight-ticket voting is on the rise. It takes less to be a "moderate" than ever these days.
Latin is no more logical than any other language. Grammatically it is not all that different that Lithuanian or Russian. In fact a language that uses three different root words to describe the paradigm of the verb "to carry" (ferro = I bring, tuli = i brought, latus = has been brought) is arguably not logical at all. The fact that Classical Latin is taught as if it were an artificial logical language is probably why people struggle to master it.
To be clear, when I say logical I mean literally that it conforms to and expresses formal logic well. In part because most formal logic was originally written in Latin. I don't mean generically better or superior or that it doesn't have exceptions to its rules.
Though also, I really have no faith in my actual hypothesis. It's just a swing in the dark.
Regarding Newcomb's problem, maybe the difference between classicists and other academics is familiarity with the ancient Greek understanding of how prophecy works.
My own analysis of the problem, for what it's worth:
If we accept the premise of the question, then my decision in the present of how many boxes to take affects the prophet's action in the past. I want to make the decision that causes the prophet to give me a million dollars.
But, realistically, I wouldn't accept the premise of the question. My decision in the present can't possibly affect the "prophet's" action in the past, so I might as well take both boxes.
I wonder how much of the difference in people's answers depends on much they accept that, in a logic puzzle, you're supposed to accept whatever ridiculous premise the puzzle includes whether or not you're accept it in real life.
>I wonder how much of the difference in people's answers depends on much they accept that, in a logic puzzle, you're supposed to accept whatever ridiculous premise the puzzle includes whether or not you're accept it in real life.
I've always taken it that you must accept the 'rules of the game', it's a game after all. I'm totally one box on that basis
I seem to recall that less intelligent people tend to ignore counterfactual conditions, though, which would seem to create an issue with "non-academics one-box more often" if you think the predictor is a counterfactual.
It depends on the character of the predictor: if it/they/he predict that most people are greedy and will prefer the chance of one million in local currency of whatever designation, then it will predict "you will pick box B" and then you pick box B and get a million.
If the predictor is expecting you to be up on game theory and paradoxes, it will predict "you are the kind of smarty-pants who thinks I will predict you choose box B, so you will choose both boxes in order to get the maximum return. Joke's on you, chum, I predicted that and you only get $1,000".
You have to assume the predictor is at least as smart as you are, so if it knows the 'optimum' solution is to pick both boxes (on the assumption that it will only predict 'picking one'), and it knows you are smart and know that is the optimum solution, then it will predict accordingly and you get what is in box A and a whopping nothing in box B.
Whereas, if it knows you are a common dumb-ass, you come out a million richer 😁
If the predictor can literally see the future, the correct move is to pick the one box in order to get the million. If the predictor is what you're imagining, a non-psychic making guesses at the future, the correct move is to pick both.
But how does the ability to make sufficiently accurate guesses differ from literally seeing the future is this regard? That's why I always thought the thought experiment was clumsily constructed btw, it's only relevant due to Newcomb-like problems purportedly being common in real life, without any implausible superpredictors.
If the predictor can literally see the future, then my choice now retroactively changes what the predictor put in the box. If the predictor is just a really good guesser, then the box has what it has regardless of what I actually do.
Among other things, game theory taught me the value of being able to credibly commit to an option beforehand in situations like Newcombs paradox. It is also called keeping your promises or being trustworthy, which is a generally a useful trait to have..."dumb-asses" to use your language might know this without having studied game theory.
"I wonder how much of the difference in people's answers depends on much they accept that, in a logic puzzle, you're supposed to accept whatever ridiculous premise the puzzle includes whether or not you're accept it in real life"
Well flip, this explains why I'm always getting these things wrong!
From now on, I will remember "If my immediate reaction is 'take box B, that's a million quid!', I must remember that is the sensible real-life action, and instead do the 'take both boxes, end up with $1,000' solution".
I think a typical formulation of Newcomb's problem includes "The Great Predictor has performed this trick many times before in the past, so you have reason to believe that his predictions are as accurate as claimed." What level of accuracy you need before you consider your actions to be "causing" the prediction is up to you, I suppose.
Also, the predictor doesn't actually need to be perfect for the problem to apply - if the payoff ratio is 1 million vs 1 thousand, then you only need a tiny bit above 50% accuracy for one-boxing to have a better payoff.
Maybe it also depends on how much you let your actual circumstances infiltrate your evaluation. I mean, if you *actually* gave me this choice, I would take the one box even if I knew (or assumed) that the predictor flipped a coin to decide what to do. A 50% chance to win $1 million is way more valuable to me in real life than the certainty of an extra $1000.
You *always* get the second box, which may or may not contain a $1 million. Your choice is just whether or not you take the first box with the $1,000. If the box-packer is just flipping a coin without regard to your choice, two-boxing is the clear winner.
I probably stated that badly. I don't mean that I *know* the the predictor is just flipping a coin, I mean that even if I assumed the worst case is that the predictor is flipping a coin, I would take one box. Since I don't *know* the predictor is flipping a coin -- the problem states that he is not, that he is very good at this prediction biz -- then I don't act on your logic. What I'm saying is that I would make the choice based on the assumption that the predictor does predict me correctly *and* that my residual doubt in that assumption can be quite high and I would still make it.
I like this analysis.
I have a feeling that the underlying issue in the two box problem is hubris.
Given the assumption that outcomes are the will of God, or fate if you prefer, trying to game that system is to put yourself above God or above faith. The difficulty comes with someone or something actually telling you how things are going to turn out.
Been a great subject from Oedipus to Macbeth.
Obviously this is a special case of the two box problem.
A gods-fearing Greek, wary of Midas-like hubris, might show restraint by picking neither the mystery box nor two boxes. Instead, he or she might choose only the *other* box (the one with the visible $1000), or even refuse both boxes.
'Taking' a box or boxes might mean being forced to eat them (as in 'taking medicine'), or 'having' a box or boxes might mean being forced to carry it/them for life.
I suppose attending an anti-woke university might help you get hired by an anti-woke employer.
In re #17: Math education in K-12 in California has been steadily going down the toilet for the past 10 years, maybe longer, in a horrifying way. If I hadn't spent umpty hours tutoring -- and made use of some fortunate online programs -- my kids would've had a very sketchy familiarity with math, and, worse, with quantitative thinking of any sort.
I think it's a real problem. You get adults, very smart people, who are so uncomfortable with the basic ideas of math -- operations, logical consistency, abstract representations of number and manipulations thereof -- that they are helpless when a question has some quantitative aspect that is amenable to math.
I remember reading a very bright lawyer assert that, for all we know, putting up massive offshore windfarms would slow down the trade winds and drastically change the weather along the East Coast. He wasn't a stupid guy, but he was helpless at the basics of quantitative thinking, so the idea of estimating the cross-sectional area of 5,000 wind turbines and comparing to the cross-section area of the relevant portion of the atmosphere would be to him like reading the decrees of Ramses II in Coptic, not only impossible but unthinkable.
Id est, I think innumeracy is a growing problem, at least among California graduates of average general ability, and the reforms in education over the past 10 years seem to have made the problem far worse.
If I had to take a guess at the underlying cause, I'd say it's from allowing to many PhDs in education into the room, and ironically in math, and not enough developmental psychologists and even pediatricians. The curriculum and methods of instruction have been changed in ways that would make all kinds of sense *if we were teaching adults* and if the teachers were all PhD math professors. But for real children being taught by actual grade-school teachers, it's a disaster. Core skills in which children *can* excel at a given age, and which a typical grade-school teacher *can* effectively teach, are neglected in favor of skills that are often beyond the students' cognitive development stage, and with which the teacher has very limited intuitive grasp herself. The result is the worst of both worlds: you get *neither* basic building-block competence *nor* the hoped-for improvement in advanced-level intuition.
It's a disaster, and I don't know how it can be reversed. (I see the current movement to pushing all of algebra off to HS, and calculus to college, as in some ways a private recognition that the situation is unraveling, although the public reasons advanced are all social-justice goodness.) I'm discouragingly reminded of the situation that a good friend of mine told me existed in Burma during the dictatorship: public school was utterly worthless, and the only way to be successful was to hire private tutors after school, which of course completely ruined the idea of public schooling.
California is huge and there are a lot of school districts. My son (middle school) has very good teachers and the material i have seen was solid. It might not be as advanced of a math as children his age have in China or Russia, but it is not bad. They have a great weekly math club with advanced problems. But that's in a very good school district, so probably not the norm.
Good to know. Although I live in a very good district also -- the average value of houses in it exceeds $1 million these days -- and this is largely where my experience lies. You're certainly right that there is considerable local variation.
What you say should also underscore how pointless discussions of these kids' "innate cognitive ability" in math and studies of what "learning approaches" work are, if the kids in these studies either barely multiply or are bored out of their minds with the easy repetitiveness.
If you bring a cohort of normal, smart kids into algebra in grade 9 after 8 years of doing no meaningful homework problems, work, practice, studying whatsoever.... How are they supposed to be able to do anything if their parents aren't supplementing somehow?!
> You’d apply for a nursing job with your nursing degree from Random For-Profit U, and the hospitals would say “What, never heard of them, forget it”, and that was also a scam if you went into a nursing program expecting to be able to work as a nurse at the end of it.
I can't believe no one hast piped in yet to say: this is absolutely not a thing, at all.
No one has ever asked to see my degree, or yours, and they never will.
There are essentially 3 categories of name recognition for colleges/universities. There are widely-known names like Stanford, Yale, MIT, etc. There are names that are known within a particular field (Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, or UIUC in computer science) or within a local region (Colorado School of Mines). And then there's _everyone else_.
As far as anyone reading my resume is concerned, especially if they're not from around here, Metropolitan State College of Denver is completely indistinguishable from any of the other ~4000 colleges in the US. They can probably guess from the name that it's a state college rather than private or for-profit. If they bother to google it they might be very confused, because it changed its name in 2012. But I don't worry about that, because no one googles it, because they don't care. And they _certainly_ don't care enough to call the school up and verify that I actually went there and graduated!
So, yeah. This is just completely, 100% a non-issue. Assuming they get off the ground, after 4 years there will be people putting "University of Austin" on their resumes, and no one will think twice about it.
I mean, maybe? But your anecdote doesn't seem particularly convincing and it's weirding me out a bit that you seem so confident that it should be?
I think the example was poorly chosen. In allied health sciences, my impression is that yes nobody will care from which place you got a degree, once you've been on the job for a few years. The fact that you are licensed, have assorted post-graduate certifications, have experience in this or that working situation matter way more. It might help you with the very first job, though. I think that's a thing.
It's probably also the case in some very practical fields, like game programming, I think they might very well not give much of a damn past your first employment, and perhaps not even so much then -- my impression is that people can readily get into those careers via nontraditional education and/or good job experience.
But in other areas, e.g. if you want to be a professor of physics or something, where you got both your degrees is going to matter for a long time in your career, in my experience. If you went to a scruffy second-rate place, you better have a really outstanding contribution if you want a fancy job, and for that matter, you probably won't get a look until you've moved around between some lesser status places a bit.
Nah, where you got your PhD will matter, but nobody will remember or care where you did your undergrad. (Source, tenured physics professor with plenty of colleagues who did their undergrads in obscure places. PhDs invariably name brand though. Yes, getting into name brand PhD program is harder if you are applying from a `scruffy second rate' place, but by no means is it impossible...
I wouldn't go that far. My experience is that it matters, but less than your graduate program (and at that less than who your advisor is). It's one more box to check, and it's worth bearing in mind the competition for such jobs is *so* intense that even small little extra tidbits like that can easily make a difference between being asked to interview and not.
“ And they _certainly_ don't care enough to call the school up and verify that I actually went there and graduated!”
How would you know if they did?
Depends how the hiring is done. Some places want a copy of your actual degree, others just want a list of what electives you took. If it's a recognisable name (University of Pumpkinville) where they've been hiring graduates with that qualification for decades, they won't bother.
Some places will ring up or email to check, but that's generally only if (a) they have very strict policies in place, often these will be state or government bodies that have such rules or (b) there's a gap in your CV, you can't/won't provide a copy of the original documents, or the qualifying body is in another country.
Where places do ring up to verify is about references/recommendations, because they want to speak to the employer and generally letters of reference are very vague (deliberately so in order to avoid leaving liability if either the recruiting company or the ex-employee are unhappy with the result).
I wouldn't, of course.
But I have spent a lot of time on the hiring side of the desk. I have never verified an applicant's degree, never considered doing it, never been at a company that did it, never worked with anyone who has mentioned ever doing it, never even _heard_ of anyone doing it.
Because no one cares.
I realize I might sound super cynical about it or something, but this is all based on trust. There is a social norm against lying on one's resume about one's education, and there seems to be broad adherence to that norm. So broad, in fact, that actual enforcement of that norm rounds down to zero. This is probably efficient.
The sad part about it, to me, is just the credentialism aspect. If the stories we tell about higher education were true, then we *would* care about where applicants went to school, more than just checking against the list of well-known names. If education is truly worth so much, and a $40k/y school is materially better than a $10k/y school, then I ought to check each applicant's school against the USN&WR rankings, right? But again, no one does that. We just look for a degree, ok there it is, box checked, moving on. (Takeaway: get the cheapest degree you possibly can!)
I do, but I hire people with PhDs almost entirely, and it's very easy to check that because it's not a big community. I can probably confirm so-and-so was in Professor X's group just by a moment's googling, and anyway during the hiring discussions there will be an inevitable amount of discussion over the graduate experience, and it would be very difficult to fake being in Professor X's group if you weren't.
#18 The expert reactions don't sound like excuse-making to me. It's pretty tricky to run a good study where one of the variables is people's beliefs about themselves, because beliefs have causes and those causes can be huge confounds.
In this case, what causes a person to believe they have covid? Probably one of the main things is covid-like symptoms, which can mismatch with actually having covid if the person is sick with something else or if they have (near-)asymptomatic covid.
So the study found that feeling sick and mistakenly thinking it's covid is associated with feeling sick months later, while feeling fine when you secretly have covid is associated with feeling fine months later.
A useful approach to judging a source of information is to find something it says which overlaps with something you know about. Some time back Noah had a long discussion of Adam Smith. Very nearly everything he said was false, interpreting out of context quotes in ways impossible for anyone who read the context, ways that interpreted him as much closer to modern progressive views than he was. I pointed out the errors in the comment section, he responded to other comments so presumably read mine, but he neither defended what he had written nor retracted it. I concluded that he was either incompetent or dishonest, hence not useful as a source of information.
I have a blog post that discusses the case in detail:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/07/noah-smith-on-adam-smith.html
Sounds like a case of a Gell-Mann Realization (Gell-Mann Amnesia but it's the realization before the amnesia: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you), except online instead of in-print. I don't know why people afford blogs and tweets by journalists the same credulousness they afford the newspaper, though - Gell-Mann Amnesia should be less of a problem online because everyone knows they should be skeptical on the internet. But if anything, it seems to be worse.
I'm banning you for a week for this comment. It's false, unproductive, and seems calculated to anger people and make the discussion worse.
" It was so good that Pfizer, “in consultation with” the FDA, stopped the trial early because it would be unethical to continue denying Paxlovid to the control group."
I think this also meets those criteria.
3. The Mormon growth rate is less than meets the eye. If you stop going, they don't take you off the membership rolls even if you're an avowed atheist who hasn't attended in decades - they just mark you as "inactive" unless you specifically take action to have your name removed from the membership. They tend to lose a lot of active members in the first year or so after conversion, but they stay on there as members.
This is from an ex-Mormon guy and is polemical, but if you look at measures trying to get a more accurate view of the active membership count (such as the growth in stakes and wards - wards being your basic congregation of 100-200 members attending each sunday, and stakes being collections of those wards), it doesn't look so good. Active membership growth has slowed heavily since the 1990s, even with reforms designed to make it easier to have wards with smaller numbers of active members.
http://simonsoutherton.blogspot.com/2021/08/blog-post.html
24. Wow, those numbers. I wonder if Republicans will actually do better than their huge mid-term victory in 2010. It's quite possible, although the Senate seats up for grabs are not really in their favor.
31. Reminds me of when Caplan decided he didn't want to believe in the preponderance of studies on the minimum wage and unemployment. He very much does not want to deviate away from a libertarian understanding of things - very strong priors.
31: I find his points persuasive and disagree with you: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/03/the_vice_of_sel.html.
I particularly like this question: "Explain why market-driven downward nominal wage rigidity leads to unemployment without implying that a government-imposed minimum wage leads to unemployment."
And yet we see from the empirical evidence that such a minimum wage does not lead to unemployment, or to relatively minor increases in unemployment at best (and even that's debatable). That suggests that either his premise is wrong, or his understanding of how such a wage floor affects the market for labor is wrong.
It's like believing that "gravity pulls all things to the ground", and then having someone tell you about birds flying through air - only for you to stubbornly insist that such things are impossible, because gravity pulls all things to the ground.
I'm not familiar with that particular argument, but note that the claim is not that raising the minimum wage will raise the national unemployment rate. Minimum wage workers are a tiny fraction of the labor force, so even if the minimum wage substantially increased their unemployment rate the effect on the national unemployment rate would be invisibly small, lost in the noise.
What studies show that raising the minimum wage doesn't reduce employment opportunities for minimum wage workers? Card and Krueger, if I remember correctly, doesn't actually observe unemployment rates, just what some group of employers say they plan to do. It does point out a way in which the obvious prediction could be false — a point made much earlier by Stigler, but still interesting. But it depends on the market for unskilled labor being a monopsony, which seems implausible.
>"And yet we see from the empirical evidence that such a minimum wage does not lead to unemployment"
No one that has ever run a business could believe such a thing. It's almost mind blowing that any educated person could believe such a thing. You would have to believe that the cost of something does not at all impact how much of it is purchased? After any Economics 101 class it would be immediately obvious that increasing the cost of labor would result in some amount of less labor being hired after the increase going forward.
You could argue "sure some low wage workers will end up not getting hired that would have otherwise been hired and they will be worse off BUT workers that stay employed and that still end up getting hired will be better off and the benefit of the second group outweighs the harm done to the first group". That would be a legitimate argument to make. But there is no reality where just as many low wage workers get hired at $10, $15, and $20/hour. It's obvious on it's face that over any given period more businesses would take on more low wage workers at $10/hour than they would at $20/hour. When you increase the minimum wage you leave some low wage workers without jobs and worse off. An intellectually honest proponent of increasing the minimum wage should be able to maintain their position while still understanding and accepting this fact.
I'm in agreement with this "Red Wave" notion; the swings in that graph are all over the place, and who knows if 2022 will hold up to the numbers? Remember the hopes around the Blue Wave for the 2020 election, which didn't eventuate, and even the Blue Wave of 2018 is a mixed result, depending on what sources you look at - either it "crushed" Republicans, or the Democrats won the House but the Republicans maintained control of the Senate, so things were liable to deadlock.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans did make gains, win seats back and even flip some seats, but that tends to happen with all mid-term elections for all parties, where the opposition makes gains as the party in power fail to deliver on all the shiny election promises.
I'm sympathetic to Caplan's economics, but find his anti-Hansonian perspective horribly unjustified: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/08/the_antihansoni.html
18. Another possible confounder, different from what McConway and Strain brought up:
Let's say, hypothetically, there's a general factor that makes some people more prone to psychosomatic illnesses. That would make those same people more prone to thinking they have long covid. But it would also make them more prone to incorrectly think that they had Covid. And this association would be because of that general factor, rather than because of beliefs about their illness per se.
I.e.: "People who think they had covid, but did not actually have covid" is probably a very different population from people who have had covid. And I think that makes it even more difficult to compare them.
On 33, my niece had a gut parasite infection and didn't know it. One day she craved hot peppers, and the next day she excreted dead parasites in her feces. So maybe we like spicy food for the anti-parasite properties.
Capsaicin is the original ivermectin?
I was thinking something similar - "these are literally insecticidal compounds, it makes sense that they wouldn't work on bacteria, but what about worms?"
My wife ate a whole bunch of popcorn one night, and the next morning she passed a tapeworm.
Scott, to the extent you are comfortable sharing, I'd like to hear about the habits that support your productivity and how they have evolved over time. For example: do you prefer to work from home, an office, cafe, library? Different locations for different tasks? Desk or comfy couch? Laptop or battlestation? How do you plan/structure your work sessions? Do you find it difficult to focus your attention on your goals, or does it generally feel easy/fun? How do you employ nutrition, caffeine, and exercise? How do you organize your thoughts and notes? How do you avoid getting endlessly distracted and de-focused by the firehose of time sinks online (e.g. Twitter)?
Some people have *very* severe symptoms from covid -- including death. Others have mild symptoms. Others have none.
Does anyone know: is the severity consistent for a single individual?
As in: I had covid. It was like a cold (but lasted a little longer) and I temporarily lost my sense of smell. No *serious* symptoms at all. If I get covid again, should I expect the same severity (or less)? Or is it a crapshoot every time?
I'm triple-vaccinated. I wear a mask when appropriate. I'm doing what I can to help end things. But I want to know how much I should fear actually getting it myself *again*.
Anecdata says that reactions to vaccines are correlated with each other and with COVID symptoms (in the few people I know who had COVID and then the vaccine). This suggests, but certainly doesn't prove, that COVID symptoms might be correlated for the same person.
On 21, University of Austin: I'm sympathetic to the stated goal, but I don't think they have much chance of success.
Building new universities ex nihilo is *hard*, and it's become pretty much a lost art in the United States over the past fifty years. We can build new community colleges (or their for-profit equivalent), or expand existing university systems, but how many successful new universities have there been in the past half-century? It's not just a matter of buying a building and hiring a bunch of teachers; that's what all the for-profit universities did, and they got results ranging from outright fraud too mediocre. There's too many mismatched incentives that need to be somehow aligned, and network effects that need to be put in place.
Maybe someone can do that. But, given the role that incentive alignment and network effects are going to play, anyone who can do that has to know that their first impression is going to be critical. So they're going to want to come out with something that is as close as possible to a working university, and as detailed a plan as they can come up with for the rest. At very least, a mission statement that will inspire confidence that they'll get the hard parts right, and a group of people with a solid reputation for institution-building.
This group, has none of that. About all they've got is a mission statement that is mostly generic pablum plus "we're totally Not Woke and we're going to be the antidote to Academic Wokeness!"
Which, as you note, is going to make them the Voat to traditional academia's Reddit.
I assume they are collecting whatever non-woke & anti-woke (including right-wing) scholars are left in the academia, as well as calling out those who've been out of the scene because of wokeness.
I'm certain that's what they want to do, but pulling it off will be a challenge. The unwoke scholars left in academia, are still in academia for a reason. That reason is unlikely to be served by signing on to what will look to them like a very dubious school that is more likely to tarnish their reputation than to provide them a comfortable new academic home. And the ones who have been out of the scene because of the wokeness, will be hard to distinguish from the ones who have been out of the scene due to their own lack of talent.
You only need a few big-name scholars, and that only in fields were that kind of thing really counts, like law or maybe business. For most of your instructors, you just need good teacher-scholars, and I would not be surprised if you could actually hire those among the young recently degreed *more* easily if you said stuff like "Hey, you know that Diversity & Inclusion statement over which you've been sweating? We don't give a shit! If you've published 3 papers in first-rank journals and you know how to run a lab, come on over."
If that's the *only* difference, yeah. If you throw in, "...and if you don't care about your professional reputation, which will be trashed worse than it would if you were at Liberty U, and if you don't care that your grad students will care more about Pwning the Libs than studying math and proper lab technique", then most of them will hold their nose and sign the DEI statement. Even a small chance of that will weigh more than a tiresome DEI statement for most "teacher-scholars". And most students.
You need to establish credibility as a Real University if you want real scholars to sign on, and you need to establish that credibility before you've done any real scholarship. That's where making a solid first impression is important, and that first impression has to be centered on scholarship, not anti-wokeness.
The youngest "real" university that most people here have heard of is Evergreen State College (chartered 1967, first classes held 1971, *just* outside the "past fifty years" mark), and you've heard of them for all the wrong reasons.
Well regarded in what sense? Matt Groening parodied Evergreen State College in Futurama about a decade ago - "Your degree is from Evergreen State College? Get a real degree!" Seattle's Almost Live ridiculed Evergreen State on a regular basis, as well - "Because even burnouts need a degree!"
I would at least nominate UC Merced (2005), though I guess that's kind of an edge case (one campus of a larger system, and how many people have actually heard of it?)
Yeah, it's about the best example of "let's form a new university in the post-1971 United States" you can find, and it's not a *bad* example. The UATX crowd would be doing the world at least a small favor if they manage to create a conspicuously non-woke school of that stature. But Merced did benefit from being created as a part of the existing UC system, and I'd really rather see an example of someone having done such a thing from scratch.
Bret and Heather have talked about how great Evergreen was for freedom and initiative (for example, a professor could design a full-time course that lasted a semester).
And then there was a little too much freedom and initiative.
I'll add that I think Benjamin Boyce is a very good interviewer and a credit to Evergreen.
"how many successful new universities have there been in the past half-century?"
I haven't got any numbers on that, but there is one recent university foundation which seems to have succeeded in getting founded, getting students, and getting accredited, and surviving to date, Ave Maria University:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_University
"Ave Maria University (AMU) is a private Catholic university in Ave Maria, Florida. Ave Maria University shares its history with the former Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which was founded in 1998 and closed in 2007. The school was founded by Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza.
Ave Maria University currently offers 33 undergraduate and three graduate degrees. Graduate programs include M.A. and Ph.D. studies in Theology and a Master of Theological Studies for non-traditional students. Undergraduate students must complete a core curriculum of 14 required courses in philosophy, theology, composition, science, math, history, political science, and a foreign language.
In 2012 U.S. News & World Report reported that the university had a student–teacher ratio of 12:1, with 696 undergraduate students paying an average of $19,440 in tuition and fees for the school year 2011–2012, with some also paying $8,350 for a dorm room and meals. The university's rating was in "Tier 2", below 178 other American colleges ranked in "Tier 1".
In 2015, College Factual ranked Ave Maria University as a Top 10 college in the state of Florida. In December 2015, The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools renewed Ave Maria University's accreditation.
Law school
Although they were both established by Monaghan, the Ave Maria School of Law and Ave Maria University are separate entities. The Ave Maria School of Law is controlled by a board that is independent of AMU. Ave Maria School of Law is a fully American Bar Association-accredited Catholic law school, located on a campus in Naples, Florida. It has a current enrollment of 375 students and offers a Juris Doctor (J.D.) program.
After receiving accreditation in 2005, the law school was moved by Monaghan from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the north side of Naples, Florida. Many students chose not to continue their studies, and the school's high ranking with U.S. News & World Report dropped dramatically, down to the lowest ranked level (tier 4) from 2008 to 2011, then failing to achieve any ranking in 2012. In 2014, the law school regained its tier 4 position.
Accreditation
In June 2010, the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) declared that Ave Maria had obtained "accredited membership" status. This allows the university to award bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees accredited by the SACS. The university had previously received full accreditation from the American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) in June 2008. On October 7, 2011, the local ordinary, Bishop Frank Joseph Dewane, formally recognized the institution as a Catholic university pursuant to the code of canon law. In December 2015, The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools reaffirmed Ave Maria University's accreditation."
I was extremely sceptical when I heard about this whole project - the university and the corresponding planned community - back when it was mooted, I expected the entire project to crash and burn, but they seem to be doing okay so far.
So it is doable, but you do probably need some very deep pockets, and someone bull-headed with a clear vision of what it is they want, to make it happen.
I think the best - and maybe the only - way to build a university from scratch is to start with a research institute - basically focusing on the "creating knowledge" part of the university. Then you can slowly expand to PhD students, then graduates, then undergrads as you gain recognition both in the research community ("This guy and this guy works at "New University" so it must be great" becoming "I could refer my student who wants to do a PhD to this guy at New University and then "I should enroll as a graduate at New University".
Also having deep pockets and making tuition cheap should help...
Starting with a research institute seemed intuitively more plausible to me as well, but do those ever actually turn into universities?
Well, a major part of the difficulty is that college-age cohorts are steadily shrinking, and may be about to do so even faster. Plus information about colleges has become easier to find, and big colleges compete effectively everywhere better, what with the industrialization of the college-finding and college-application business. As a consequence, small regional colleges are finding themselves under brutal financial pressure and are suffering, kind of the way small bookstores are being driven out of business by Amazon and even B&N -- and this would most likely be even more true for a brand new college, which would necessarily have to start small.
This doesn't have all that much to do with global reputation, and I think that is weaker factor than people think. Sure, everyone would love to have a Harvard parchment, but for almost everybody that's just not possible, so people will be deciding based on reputation further down, where the sheer age and number of Nobelists is less important, where the presence of certain programs, or my uncle went there, or even I met someone at the local college fair and he seemed really cool and knowledgeable plays a role.
I don't think it would be super hard for a start-up college to do OK on those grounds, past a few years in, but...it's definitely hard when the eligible cohort is shrinking, when "local" isn't so local anyway, thanks to the Internet and communications flow generally, and when the established players have fine-tuned their ground game in the recruiting biz so well.
Yes so far they have managed to only hire three faculty fellows, only two with PhDs and neither a “big name”.
They may end up hiring only a few handful of faculty, none particularly prominent, from various fields with only common denominator that they left their previous places under not so great terms.
Ironically in such a case, the only major they will be qualified to offer is in “grievance studies”
Can I challenge you to explain your own position on climate change? I have had this reaction to your posts before - that you seem to buy into the mainstream concerns but have never explained your reasoning that I have seen. In that past I just thought "hey, no one can go through every topic" but since you denigrate Caplan's skepticism I feel like it is more important. I think your opinion is unfair without showing your own reasons for supporting it. His point that disasters are very rare and most fear-mongering doesn't come true has way more common sense / outside view support than just that his opponents are left wingers.
Just from objections that require no discussion of the technical evidence, you can look at 1) there was previously a movement of climate alarmism regarding global cooling, which turned out to be bogus but was otherwise extremely similar in terms of its supporting coalition, goals to control economic policy/resources, etc; 2) climate messaging predicting disaster have been vastly over-exaggerated, with many claims of "world over in 2010/2015/2020 if no action", and many different climate models being run and being used as the basis for alarmism, with most ultimately being quite inaccurate and the others being subject to survivor bias. Both of these factors decrease the probability that the models actually know what they are talking about and can be trusted which is exactly what Caplan was saying; 3) Warm weather being a clear positive to the proliferation of life that we currently observe on Earth, which spans a far larger temperature range than even the most drastic climate change; etc. Why is your prior so strong that the climate change fears are real, that you call out someone who is skeptical without discussion?
"since it’s by left-wingers it’s probably biased in some hard-to-detect way and he can ignore it"
I'm not sure on my quick reading whether this is a totally fair reading of Caplan's position, but it seems plausibly so, and you don't have to have a view on the underlying subject to believe that this is a bad argument by Caplan.
Also, he's already explained a lot of his position: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids
Thanks for the reply! When I read Caplan's position it seemed more that he had a very low prior on severe disaster that could affect all of humanity. The authors being left-wing was one small piece of evidence that they were motivated by something other than reason, i.e. politics since this cause is a hobby horse of their political faction, which is why he is not updating after reading their arguments. Scott treating Caplan as obviously wrong because he has a very different prior than Scott rubbed me the wrong way (as someone who is closer to Caplan). To me it seems like an excellent argument of exactly the type Scott typically responds to which is what motivated me to comment!
And on that post you linked, I did see that and it seems like Scott is just accepting the consensus position (just like he did on the Caplan post) and then arguing from that. I am interested to know why Scott supports the consensus position - it seems to me (non-expert) as the classic unexamined opinion that he loves to skewer on this blog. There is a ton of very detailed reasoning out there arguing that it is way overblown and I would love to see Scott truly engage. Fingers crossed for a deep dive from him.
I don't think global cooling was ever as widely supported as global warming is now. A better comparison would be the population scare of the sixties. It had a very similar pattern — people insisting that everyone competent agreed on the terrible threat, and Julian Simon was experimental error. And that one we now know was wrong. We don't know if population growth was on net good or bad, but we know that it wasn't as bad as fast as was being claimed, since population continued to grow in poor countries and they got richer and better nourished rather than the opposite.
Also, most of the dated predictions were in the form not of "the world will end by 2010 if we don't do anything" but "If we don't do anything by 2010 it will be too late to prevent the world from eventually ending (more realistically, very bad things happening) due to climate change." We can't know that is true. But we can know that the people who made such predictions didn't stop arguing for action against climate change after their deadline passed, which is pretty good evidence that they didn't actually believe what they were saying.
The thing is, the population growth scare was also fake news. It wasn't actually supported by science - in fact, a lot of scientists pushed back against it as a narrative. That population growth was going to happen was known, but the idea of disasterous effects? Those weren't scientific at all.
There's a doomsday cult that latches onto current issues and tries to make them out to be The End of the World As We Know It.
As someone who remembers the 1970s, I see the disastrous effects of population growth in the United States every day. Obviously more a quality of life issue than existential threat to our existence, but still...
What makes you believe that whatever changes you see as disastrous are due to population growth?
Are you talking about population concentration in certain cities?
Other than Julian Simon, what scientists were pushing back against the claim that population growth would have large negative effects? I don't think my piece got much attention. My impression at the time was that Ehrlich's views were more extreme than most but well within the Overton Window and that Simon's weren't.
My primary objection to Scott's fear-mongering ("Millions of people will die..") is that climate related mortality has been falling ever since it was first measured i.e. throughout the last hundred years. Which, amazingly, overlaps with the one degree rise in temperatures.
Other than that, my gripe would be that contrary to every other subject, Scott seems to get his information from hysterics who write for Vox or the Guardian. If he actually read the IPCC reports - tedious as they are - he'd know that the predicted impact of climate change (compared to other things like technological, demographic and political changes) is "Small".
Yup. The actual scientific reports don't really project enormous changes. Mostly just modest changes in maximum heat and minimum heat.
Have you seen https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids ? "Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change"
> My primary objection to Scott's fear-mongering ("Millions of people will die..") is that climate related mortality has been falling ever since it was first measured i.e. throughout the last hundred years
Depends on how you count it. If Syrian civil war (or future war) is even partially caused by climate change then assigning relevant proportion of deaths there would change it drastically.
Also, note that "Millions of people will die.." prediction for the next century means 'only' that more than 10 000 people will die each year as result of that.
For comparison, there are about 800 000 suicide deaths each year and 1 200 000 people killed by cars and other vehicles, 10 000 000 due to cancers ( https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death ).
for "millions", surely at least 20,000, right?
Could we settle for "A few dozen, give or take"?
Yeah, I agree with this nitpicking. Still: something that will kill millions (over century) can be still 60 times less deadly than cars and trucks.
Global cooling was a media thing. It is a standard example of "ignorant journalists blowing up something that is stupid and fringe into a big thing temporarily". It's literal fake news.
People have known about global warming since the late 19th century, and it has been observable since the 1970s.
The reason is quite simple - the greenhouse effect arises from obvious real-world physical things and people observed that we were burning a bunch of fossil fuels, which was probably going to increase atmospheric CO2 (which was later determined to be correct - the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up significantly).
As it is fairly trivial to prove that CO2 can trap heat by absorbing and re-emitting infrared "light", it was obvious that this was going to lead to some amount of global warming, barring some countervailing process that they weren't aware of in the late 19th century.
As it turns out, there is no sufficiently countervailing process, so global temperatures have been going up for the last century or so.
IRL, the actual good consensus models have been very close to correct overall on global warming. The extreme ones are often posted and pushed for political reasons; the actual scientific consensus on projected warming has actually been very close to the actual trend there.
The actual scientific consensus on global warming is that it is a problem. We don't know most of what it will actually *do* with much confidence; for instance, our predictions on hurricanes is poor because there's no actual net trend in hurricanes from the pre-satellite era once you adjust for hurricanes we would not have observed, and there are countervailing factors against hurricanes that are increased by global warming (wind shear) as well as factors which promote hurricanes (warmer water and air has more energy and can hold more precipitation).
We know that:
* Global warming will increase temperatures.
* Higher temperatures will increase dessication of land and plants, which, combined with changes in rainfall patterns, will cause increased desertification in some places (though which particular places will suffer from this is moderate to low confidence)
* Precipitation will increase overall, but how it will change locally will vary significantly (high degree of confidence on increase in preciptation, but moderate to low on how it will affect any particular region)
* Global warming will increase the overall arable land in the northern hemisphere
* Global warming will gradually melt the ice caps and expand the oceans a bit; the ice caps totally melting will take centuries to millennia, but we will see somewhere between a couple feet and a couple meters of sea level rise by 2100 - hardly the super apocalyptic scenario
* Higher CO2 concentration in the ocean will affect the ocean's pH; very high confidence on this, but moderate to low confidence on how it will impact any particular species.
* Heat waves will be a bit worse but winters won't be as bad overall in terms of low temperatures (high confidence), but we might see some worse storms during the winter due to increased precipitation
A lot of other stuff is way more vague.
In the long run - say hundreds to thousands of years - sea level rise will be the most problematic issue. But it isn't a huge proximate issue for countries like the US, though for very low-lying countries, it is a big deal (hence why island countries are freaking out over this).
The weather stuff is more of a proximate issue but the degree of the problems involved is very fuzzy, but it's definitely not "end of the world" apocalyptic, more "increased damage costing us money". Some effects are obvious (worse heat waves are directly caused by higher temperatures, more precipitation due to more evaporation due to higher temperatures) but how that affects any particular location is much more vague.
Thanks for your reply! We agree on the facts - I don't disagree with any of your points. I would add that "increased CO2 in atmosphere causes plants to grow faster, thereby increasing harvest per unit land" and "negative feedback loops are already known" (greenhouse effect is proportional to log CO2, not linear CO2, so each marginal unit of CO2 released is less of a concern; higher CO2 leads to greater plant growth increasing the speed at which CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere).
So given those agreed upon facts... you say "The actual scientific consensus on global warming is that it is a problem". Why is it a problem? That is what I am hoping Scott would address rather than taking it for granted when arguing against Caplan. Personally I see several negatives (sea level rise, dessication in certain areas) and several positives (increased arable land, increased harvest per unit land, increased precipitation in some areas). The net impact could easily be positive and it certainly isn't a disaster that would justify remaking large portions of the economy. Or at least, that is my opinion, I think that Caplan's skepticism is reasonable given these facts (even if he did not cite them directly), and I wish Scott would state why he disagrees and sees global warming as a large issue if he is going to dismiss Caplan out of hand.
It's a problem mostly because it is disruptive and because it makes it easier for parasites to survive over the winter in a number of temperate zones. Overall it is probably a net benefit to agriculture but is not so good for ocean stuff as the changes to acidity are not good.
Melting the ice caps - which would take a long time - WOULD be a huge deal, but it's not a problem that will manifest itself within any sort of reasonable time span for most places.
Also, while there are feedback loops, plants don't actually really "remove" CO2 so much as temporarily sequester it, and unless we add significant amount of forest globally (which probably isn't very likely) it won't really affect net CO2 much so much as decrease our harvest cycle length. The carbon in question is still part of the carbon cycle, so you reach a new equilibrium state at a higher CO2 level until the long-term processes remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere.
OK that's totally not true about plants, you're forgetting about the ocean, which is a massive biosphere:
https://theconversation.com/tiny-plankton-drive-processes-in-the-ocean-that-capture-twice-as-much-carbon-as-scientists-thought-136599
The arguments are considerably more subtle and complex than what you're suggesting here.
Everything is more complicated, but honestly, it's pretty simple.
Humans burning fossil fuels puts a lot of ancient sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere.
This is happening at a much faster rate than carbon is naturally sequestered, resulting in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to rise significantly.
This is what causes global warming, as CO2 scatters infrared light and thus ends up causing the Earth to radiate less energy into space, resulting in a higher homeostatic temperature on the surface.
This has a variety of effects, some good, some bad, but it also represents a change from how things are, and that incurs certain costs.
Plants do not sequester CO2 unless they are in some way removed from the biosphere, such as, for instance, by being buried under silt or something similar that prevents them from decaying and releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
*Plants do not permanently sequester CO2 I should say. They do temporarily do so.
No, it's not simple at all, sorry. That's why there has been considerable debate about it for the past 100 years, among very smart people. I grant you that it can be cartoonized for presentation in a pamphlet, but I don't see how that's relevant. You can simplify any complex issue into baby talk while preserving some essential truth. And so?
Climate change and the human influence in it, or even just the question of what rising CO2 does to the climate, is one of the most complex issues that human beings have ever tried to understand, which is why it is taking so long, costing so much, and engendering so much debate.
I agree with most of what you say, although you might have mentioned a decrease in the total number of tropical cyclones predicted, although an increase in strength. Two points were I disagree:
"* Higher temperatures will increase dessication of land and plants, which, combined with changes in rainfall patterns, will cause increased desertification in some places (though which particular places will suffer from this is moderate to low confidence)"
CO2 fertilization reduces the need of plants for water, which may more than compensate for reduced water. Note that the figure on drought in the SPM of the latest report ignores this. We know that, so far, the planet has been greening, presumably due to that effect, which suggests the opposite of net desertification.
"(hence why island countries are freaking out over this)"
I interpret the motive as to get rich countries to give them money. Have any island countries actually changed their own behavior, for instance stopped investing in development that would be worthless if the island was flooded via SLR.
One of my favorite quotes from an earlier IPCC report:
"Some low-lying developing countries and small island states are expected to face very high impacts that, in some cases, could have associated damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of GDP."
Contrast the magnitude of that with the talk about flooded islands and millions of refugees.
> CO2 fertilization reduces the need of plants for water, which may more than compensate for reduced water.
The problem isn't "reduced water", it's a higher rate of evaporation, resulting in the dry being more dry. More variation in this is not a good thing, even if the average is the same overall (or even if there is MORE water overall).
The main issue isn't crops (which will probably see better growth rates overall), it's increased risk of wildfires.
> I interpret the motive as to get rich countries to give them money. Have any island countries actually changed their own behavior, for instance stopped investing in development that would be worthless if the island was flooded via SLR.
Kiribati bought land in Fiji that they can potentially relocate to, if worst comes to worst and the islands become uninhabitable. In fact, their president (now former president) suggested that people start leaving the islands now and moving elsewhere because the amount of land (and fresh water) is going down even as the population goes up, and it is better to move sooner and in an orderly fashion than later and be screwed.
The Marshal Islands are also pursuing options of buying land elsewhere for relocation.
Some of it is definitely begging for money, but some of them are putting their money where their mouth is.
Honestly, though, I think most of those very low-lying countries are probably doomed regardless.
"The problem isn't "reduced water", it's a higher rate of evaporation, resulting in the dry being more dry."
What matters for fires isn't dry ground it's dry plants; dirt doesn't burn. If you reduce the moisture available to the plant by 10% and the plant's need for moisture by 20% — because more CO2 means the plant doesn't have to pass as much air through its leaves to get the carbon it needs, which means less evaporation — the plant ends up less dry and less inflammable. So it's the balance between less moisture and less need for moisture that matters.
The plants are more desiccated; it's one of the factors that has been involved in recent wildfire seasons.
Possibly. What is your reason for believing that? I've also seen the claim that the problem is that restrictions on logging have let more inflammable material accumulate.
I don't think the hypothesis that rising CO2 levels leads to rising global mean temperatures is nearly as simple as "CO2 absorbs in the IR." If nothing else, it's well known that the strong absorption IR bands of CO2 are fully saturated at pre-industrial CO2 levels, with an optical depth well below 1km. As I understand it, the proposed mechanism is much more subtle, and relies on the temperature being much lower at the altitudes at which atmospheric CO2 becomes optically thin so e.g. if that altitude is raised (by increasing CO2 concentration) then the temperature is lower and Wien's Law tells us energy radiated to space will be less.
The reason why adding more CO2 increases the greenhouse effect is the same reason why throwing on two blankets will give you better insulation than just one: the heat has to escape both the inner and outer blankets to escape.
CO2 doesn't just absorb IR, it also emits it via black body radiation, the same as anything else. This is then reabsorbed by other CO2, which then re-emits it, etc.
The more CO2 is in the atmosphere, the more times this happens, making it harder for that energy to escape from the atmosphere because there's more CO2 it has to go through.
Christ no. The moment you're telling me a CO2 molecule emits like a black body, I'm done.
And a gaseous molecule at that! Good grief.
You are correct, I misspoke.
It's incorrect to say that they emit black body radiation, but they do emit IR, which is then trapped by another CO2 molecule, etc.
It's not like the energy is absorbed and stays there forever.
If that was caplan's reason, then why did he even bother to read the book? clearly he thought he would be able to find a flaw and gotcha the author. that he couldnt is at least evidence for me, even if it is not for caplan
To win a bet :) Put it differently: if he refused to read, wouldn't people say now that it wasn't fair?
Anyways, he had a decent reason to read it: the author may have been capable to describe a reasoning chain that would convince him. That's, after all, the best way of updating on evidence. As it was they couldn't do that, not due to any fault of theirs but simply because the subject is too complex. Which explains both why he was sure he'll win and why he won.
"the author may have been capable to describe a reasoning chain that would convince him."
The post made it sound like he was just looking for a reasoning chain that he could refute, and couldn't find one, so just said he doesn't believe anything from the guy who wrote it.
Does this sound to you like a charitable interpretation?
It sounds like a Bayesian interpretation.
Do you mean my interpretation of what Scott wrote, or Scott's interpretation of Caplan?
Of Caplan.
If it's bayesian than it's not obviously true. It's obviously not kind. This only leaves useful, and that's rather doubtful.
Which doesn't make it particularly charitable, in the way we try to keep things here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/
You are saying Scott's post does not conform to his comment policy? Isn't everybody ok with Scott using probabilistic reasoning and not only saying things >99% true? He has a whole monday post every week on this.
what is the takeaway from the twitter conspiracies link?
> While it’s true that there are many biased people out there, and some of them make strong arguments, I also notice this is a fully general excuse for never changing your mind in response to anything, however convincing it would be otherwise. Seems bad.
Maybe it sounds that way if you willfully blind yourself to the twelve trillion ways the left lies to us every day.
At what point does the burden shift, such that I am no longer obligated to assume that people who hate me always speak truly, and the left has to maybe give some token investment in honesty before we give them a moment of our time?
More generally/neutrally: at what point does an organization become so corrupt that it is acceptable to act irrationally towards them, in order to extort them into acting better?
You probably should look into mirror given that you equated vaccines with nazism
Would someone on the left believe you always speak the truth to them?
#5: Clever Hans.
Scott, the spam problem is getting out of control. Every post lately has a comment from the same porno spambot. Can't something be done about this?
email tos@substackinc.com - linking the specific comment
https://substack.com/tos
I wish I had been aware of that contact earlier.
I asked Substack, they said they added a feature for me to ban accounts by name and words used, I am still trying to find the feature they added. If I can't do it soon, I'll bother them again.
They seem to have started using fancy unicode characters in their messages, which might cause some trouble with that.
Ban anything with a moderate to high fraction of non-ASCII unicode characters?
Is there any Russian/Arabic substack? That would likely need to be specially coded and enabled per blog.
And would still ban people quoting something in Russian/Arabic/Greek/etc.
The bounding on climate change isn't really a surprise; we've actually known for a good while that the higher scenarios were implausible and required implausible rates of warming. People were way too accepting of those higher scenarios as plausible.
And yes, lying to people about how climate change is the end of the world is awful. It's really the same sort of thing that we saw back in the day with things like The Population Bomb and Future Shock, which were similar nonsense.
"We've actually known for a good while" - are you denying The Science (genuflect in awe at the sacred name), you science-denier climate change denialist????? 😀
The science has been pretty clear on the potential range of global warming for some time now, honestly. Most of the scenarios were known to be implausible simply based on real world emissions and warming data. It's been pretty clear what path we're on, some people just don't want to admit that because there's much more disaster porn with the higher warming scenarios.
But but but....... What about code red for humanity and only 12 years left to save the planet?????
There's literally an apocalyptic cult that has been claiming that the world would experience catastrophe in the near, imminent future. They latch onto current issues and then claim they will cause the downfall of civilization.
That doesn't mean that these aren't real issues - it's just that these groups latch onto these real world issues and shriek about them and claim it is the end of the world when in fact they are not.
The Population Bomb and Future Shock are the same sort of apocalyptic literature and failed predictions from this same group.
I'd include 'Limits to growth' in that group. I think it's a little like Scott's lizardman constant but in the form of a hysterics one. There's a certain proportion of people who will look into the future and (because it is dark and uncertain) fill it with fearful imaginings.
This is a constant but is multiplied by the amount of free time people have for their worrying. As the Chinese saying has it "No food on the table, only one problem. Food on the table, many problems".
Hysteria has space to propagate when we're comfortable, fed and secure enough to find dark places to peer into.
Very well said. I like to think that somehow, as individuals and as a society we can find a way solve this problem.
I am not sure that I disagree with you generally, but saying, "it is clear what path we are on," seems problematic. We are continuously narrowing the range of possible outcomes (in terms of temperature) and coming to better understand the likely ramifications associated with them. I agree that the most pessimistic were probably based on absurd assumptions. Presumably though, so were the most optimistic, no?
Not really. There's really only one "tier" of "prediction" below the real path, but that was for a low emissions scenario that no one thought was realistic, just like, "what if everyone reduced emissions by a bunch, what would it look like?"
I don't follow how that is different from what I said. Are you saying that pessimistic and optimistic are asymmetrical because "nobody thought [optimstic] was realistic"? Who's "nobody"? Presumably the scientists doing the predicting did. Anyone who trusted the scientists doing the predicting did as well.
They didn't think it was realistic, actually. They were generated as parts of sets.
I don't think you quite understand how these things are created.
Basically, you create a model based on various assumptions. The various "scenarios" were putting in different sets of assumptions.
Like, there are models where people stop emitting carbon entirely, and we look at what warming would still happen anyway. That is obviously unrealistic, but it doesn't mean it doesn't get modelled to get a better understanding.
If I could ban one thing forever from online discourse, it would be mocking your opponents by declaring that Everyone Must Bow Before Their Most Holy Strawman.
beleester, I think you are not taking the huge problem of Science Denialism seriously enough.
The American Psychological Association explore the psychology behind it:
https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/science-denial-disbelief
Guides for scientists on how to address it:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0966842X12001783
https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/19/1/2/463780
Newspaper article on what drives people to deny science:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth
How to talk to the science denier in your life:
https://theconversation.com/science-denial-why-it-happens-and-5-things-you-can-do-about-it-161713
How to rebut it:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0746-8
Scientific American takes the historical view:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-how-science-denial-works-look-to-history/
And many, many, many more. You'll note that climate change comes up often, along with anti-vaccines and other topics.
The science may be settled, but mostly it's settled that denialism is the problem.
I have to say, three aspects of this broader social trend make me grind my teeth:
1. The intrusion of tribalism into my cherished backwater supposedly safe from same. I went *into* science to *avoid* the bullshit primate poo-flinging aspects of most other fields of human endeavor. Christ, is no place safe? If this was to be part of my professional identity, I could've just skipped a lot of years of eating Ramen and gone into business or the law. Bah. There should be some refuge for those who dislike primate status games.
2. The gross failure to acknowledge the key role of skepticism *in* science. The big reason "science" has the reputation for reliability it does is because for centuries scientists have held to the principle of deep empirical skepticism.
You tell me Herr Professor Doktor Graf von Hoightytoighty, FRS, science advisor to the Emperor Napoleon himself, has proven Unlikely Hypothesis X in a paper published in Nature, peer-reviewed by a hundred sages with measured IQs over 150, and I, as a schmo from nowhere, say "Oh very interesting. Let's see the data."
That complete indifference to authority and consensus is understood and accepted to be the ideal norm in empirical science. Nobody believes anything unless he sees the data, and he can (if he chooses) reproduce the experiment for himself. And only *because* of this extreme internal skepticism has it been the case for two centuries or so that when science finally says "here, we think this is true" you can take it to the bank. On what logically self-consistent grounds, then, can we condemn anyone else for practicing the very foundation of our business?
There's certainly a line between skepticism and being a crank, to be sure, and that line is worth thinking about (and arguing about). But only a complete nimrod would deny the existence of the line per se, by saying that being skeptical about the received wisdom is somehow automatically beyond the pale. It may or may not be, but it has to be argued, it can't be assumed.
3. The general failure to make distinctions of degree. Doubt that humans are changing the climate is not in the same category as doubt that COVID vaccines work which is not in the same category as thinking the Apollo landing was faked or it's possible to build a perpetual motion machine. At one end we have the skepticism that is central to science itself (vide supra), while at the other end we have fruitcakery. But it's very important to make distinctions, and *not* lump everyone to the right or left of your preferred sense/non dividing line into the same category.
I feel like this has savage social costs. You tell everyone that doubting global warming is essentialy the same as doubting the Second Law, and suddenly *they* see no downside to the latter. Why not? If I'm to be labeled as a troglodyte by the fancy crowd no matter what, I stop caring about that. Maybe vaccines *do* cause autism -- after all, this idea is condemend by the same assholes who pissed on me for doubting the proposition that opposing a carbon tax is equivalent to gassing the Jews. Maybe all of mainstream medicine *is* a conspiracy to establish a permanent leak between the peasants' pockets and Big Pharma, and so it makes sense to treat this lump in my breast with magnetic bracelets and aromatherapy instead of the nasty pills that make me sick.
I think the worst thing was when people banked the good reputation of existing vaccines as an order that they must get the new vaccine.
And the targets of this decided "well, maybe I don't like those old vaccines either."
As "science messaging" it totally sucks.
PS: Please get your shots.
The fact that people really do complain about science denialism (which is not surprising, since people do in fact deny science facts as well-established as the earth being round) does not make your post any less obnoxious. "Genuflect in awe at the sacred name of Science" is cheap mockery that doesn't belong on this site. You might as well have said "Global warming alarmists are religious fanatics! Lol!"
If hysteria cannot even be lightly mocked, then indeed we have reached the pitch of religion.
And given that I'm a Christian, who gets told constantly to lighten up when jokes about sacred concepts are made, and the name of whose revered founder is used as a common swear word or curse - "Jesus!" "Christ's sake!" "Jesus fucking Christ!" (or have you never seen the 'JFC' acronym used online?), "Christ on a crutch" and so forth - the holy name we are never to use without bowing our heads in reverence - then I have very little sympathy for secular claims on reverence to the very fountain of "no sacred cows, scepticism is our highest value, question everything, no appeals to authority".
If you can't stand hearing fun poked at the zealots, who trot out the entire line about "if you question any fragment of the catastrophic picture painted by exaggerated newspaper headlines then you are guilty of the crime and sin of science denialism", then I suggest you put cotton wool in your ears.
I'm not mocking science, I am mocking the Golden Calf some have made with its name slapped on.
Ding-ding-ding! And here we go, two for the price of one, a new biography of Galileo using the latest headline buzzword. Can it get any better?:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/book-new-galileo-biography-parallels-modern-science-denialism
"Galileo and the Science Deniers
But with the lives of legends, there is always a license to produce yet another interpretation. In Galileo and the Science Deniers, astrophysicist Mario Livio has invoked that license to tell Galileo’s story once more, this time with a particular concern for Galileo’s relevance to science today (and the impediments to its acceptance). “In a world of governmental antiscience attitudes with science deniers at key positions,” Livio writes, “Galileo’s tale serves … as a potent reminder of the importance of freedom of thought.”
...In Livio’s view, today’s deniers of climate change science or the validity of evolutionary theory are comparable to the religious opponents of Galileo’s scientific views, particularly his insistence on the motion of the Earth around the sun. Serving that end, the book is not an in-depth biography as much as a summary of Galileo’s life and science, plus a thorough recounting of the events leading up to his famous trial. Livio plays the role of a highly capable legal commentator in analyzing the issues raised during the trial, including discussion of the questionable tactics by the prosecution and Galileo’s not always effective defense."
Complete, of course, with "The big bad Church covered up the truth":
"Livio’s account of this well-known story is enhanced by insights drawn from more recent scholarship, including the discovery in 1998 of a letter written during the trial suggesting that a plea bargain might have been considered. Of particular interest is Livio’s account of a Galileo biography written by Pio Paschini, commissioned in the 1940s by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, supposedly to explain how the Catholic Church had not really persecuted Galileo, but helped him. Instead, Paschini’s manuscript told the truth, so the church refused to publish it. In the 1960s, after Paschini’s death, the church relented, authorizing publication — but only after revisions that bowdlerized the original version to portray the church in a more favorable light."
And we have an entire Twitter devoted to fighting the good fight against "climate deniers"
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ClimateBrawl&src=hashtag_click
But I am being much too nasty when making jokey responses to a comment on here. Yes, bad bad me! Indeed, one might even say, Despicable Me!
If I could ban one thing from online discourse, it would be the assumption that one can know the subconscious motivations of millions of people one doesn't know and doesn't like.
Sorry for a dumb question but can someone explain why 2. is nominative determinism?
Their first response was someone whose initials were "HA", which the person replying thought was them laughing at them "ha ha". The second response was someone with initials "BS", which can remind the cruder-minded of us as "bullshit".
So the nominative determinism is "you end up working for a company which laughs scornfully at its customers around privacy issues and spins a line of corporate blah in disregard, and this company requires you to sign off on messages with your initials, which fortuitously signal the derision and the verbiage in question".
Oh i didn't realize they were actually someone's initials (which is obvious in hindsight). This was hilarious, thanks for explaining!
Let me have a look at the political elements of these links:
8) I guess this can be explained by seeing wokeness and its discontents as a dialectics:
Trumpist national conservatism -> Democrat & woke opposition -> Trumpist reaction
The growth of wokeness in the last 5 years is mainly the effect of Democrat & Democrat-adjacent political mobilization, which is the cumulation of American identitarian trends since the 90s. There's a component of falling into the official #Resistance line as well, that has eased when the sponsors of such ideological trends are in office.
9) https://shadowban.eu/
15) I'm not sure if these can come online before the current global energy crunch (part of which is self-inflicted) deteriorates into a terminal situation.
16) There are enough studies showing how Vitamin D supplements, in dosages well above the official prescription, is a sufficient immunity booster that works for most pathogens. Antivaxxers claim that such preventative treatments are suppressed in favor of allopathic treatments which enables Big Pharma rent-seeking, and the incentives are there for this to be true without negating the importance of cures or vaccinations.
17) I read from the HBD crowd that the general level of intelligence (IQ) is largely consistent across time & ethnic groups, which points to a biological explanation of education attainment. That implies expanding education -> title inflation. So a reshuffling of who gets what kind of education will tremendously help.
19) I don't think China needs, or will ever be, high-income. After all, at its height (Song & Ming eras) China was upper-middle income relative to the most developed parts of the world at that time. The main economic goals of CCP are simply a moderately prosperous (i.e. lower middle-class) society, developing a large productive base as an economic power, and reaching technological frontiers. On the other hand, much of the gap between China & the developed world should be financialized services that add little to real production.
24) I think instead of RINOs, a Trumpist faction will seize power after the electoral victories and revenge their leader's ouster. Both sides have radicalized, they both think in terms of "oppress or be oppressed", and everyone caught in the middle suffer.
I read the old institutional bifurcation essay and our hosts know it is coming. But he probably underestimates the willingness of right-wing institutions to totally root out the "neutral" part, the old institutions that have shifted left, and to build an explicitly right-wing edifice, all those with the end goal of eliminating anything slightly to the left of far-right physically. In a way, Traditional Conservatives & Fascists will win the cultural war by sheer force and domination.
Yes, the NRx will probably win by simply outliving their enemies.
> Antivaxxers claim that such preventative treatments are suppressed in favor of allopathic treatments which enables Big Pharma rent-seeking, and the incentives are there for this to be true without negating the importance of cures or vaccinations.
Ech, Big Pharma would have no problem from benefiting from both (see fish oil posts on SSC).
Deliberate suppression of effective preventive therapy seems like weird combination of ultra-malicious and forward thinking altruism. It is not like some CEO will last for decades to get benefit from more ill people.
Though I 100% expect that they neglect promoting effective ones.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/ - Big Pharma totally can benefit from preventive therapy. There is no need for suppression when you can add zero to the end of price.
The PM of Albania Edi Rama is taller than both at 2,01m.
18: About long COVID there is very promising research done in Erlangen, Germany: https://www.fau.eu/2021/06/21/news/research/long-term-changes-to-blood-cells-triggered-by-covid-19-infection/
Seems like COVID makes lasting changes on blood cells, so doesn't seem like psychsomatic.
Does this say anything about in what proportions long COVID may be physiological or psychosomatic? It could be 10% due to blood cells and 90% due to nocebo.
My pet theory is the statue paint jobs are the same phenomenon as our reconstructions of with dinosaurs that look like grey shrink-wrapped muscle and bone, as the images of modern animals 'reconstructed' with that method demonstrate. Soft tissue doesn't fossilise, feathers and pigments usually don't either, and so dinosaurs could have had all kinds of crazy body features. But we can't say with confidence that they definitely did have any specific features, so artists are scared to draw them with features that aren't well supported by scientific evidence. Being unwilling to take a guess at something that could be right results in an impression that definitely isn't right. Because 'not speculating' isn't actually an option. Like a police sketch artist saying "Suspect was wearing a hat so we don't know the hair colour, so to avoid speculating I've drawn him as bald".
But yeah I bet we only have direct evidence of the base coat of paint that was directly in contact with the statue. Layers adding detail and shading would be added on top, but all we have evidence for is the base coat, so artists who "don't want to speculate" hypothesise absurd base-coat-only paint jobs.
Two problems with cyclosporin:
1. You might not get dementia but you will die of renal failure
2. You will wish you had dementia - the capsules smell and taste so extremely nasty you would do anything to forget them! The likelihood of graft versus host disease was preferable to continued consumption, so I was very, very happy when I could finally stop them.
Did you know we have (I think it's up to) seven Berlin patients at this point and that the immune dynamics of bone transplants are super sex sensitive? Receiving male bone marrow increases your chance of cancer returning but decreases your chance of graft versus host if you're dude, and if you're a woman - just try to get female bone marrow.
All the people who took IL6 inhibitors for COVID didn't report an alleviation in depression (lol the major confounding factor there being almost dying) and that's a pretty hyped up field right now in neuroimmunology. The IL6 inhibitor they took doesn't cross the blood brain barrier though, but neither does cyclosporine? I know IL6 is actively produced on both sides the BBB and is able to transport in either direction.
The people who are like "stop brain inflammation, solve everything" kind of remind me of Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF who gave that ted talk on insulin signaling that gave rise to an entire generation of proselytizing low-carb dieters who unintentionally simplified themselves to match her 959 cell model organism. You need insulin, you need cytokines. But perhaps not so much - a selective IL-6 blocker only active in the brain would be pretty jazzy.
The BBB being permeable to certain cytokines exacerbates permeability- had a cousin in Ireland almost die of anti-NMDAR which was preceded by six months of paranoid behavior. Also happens when people take checkpoint inhibitors for melanoma due to both skin and brain being ectoderm derived.
Scott Russo at Mt Sinai I think made an IL-6 KO mouse, right next to Rockefeller where they made leptin mouse which should totally be their taxidermized mascot to represent their amount of funding.
Thanks for joining me on this episode of typing into the void while avoiding deadlines.
Another weird factoid about stem cell donors (if female) is that the number of pregnancies they have had affects the chances of a recipient getting GVHD. I assume, with no evidence, that this is related to the number of kinds of circulating fetal cells that remain in a mother's bloodstream after pregnancy. You might just get some completely unmatched cells containing half their DNA from the father of one of her children.
Nonetheless, and even though enjoying my third episode of shingles this week (at least it's T2 and not S3 like last time!), I'm glad to be done with the cyclosporine!
That was fun..
That Cynthia Kenyon TED talk is pretty cringy. I wonder if the real intended audience was the Society of Si Valley Billionaires Who Want to Live Forever. They are known to give out research money.
Re 24: Sort of related:
I wonder if the Democrats worked so hard to paint the previous President as unPresidential, racist, sexist, corrupt and traitorous that they have, as an unintended consequence, lowered the bar of judgement for the current President?
lol that was *not* hard work
The claim in 6 seems wrong, or at least drastically over-simplified. The current population of Herzegovina is ethnically Slavic, and the Slavs arrived in the 6th century (having been preceded by Illyrians, Celts and Germans), so conditions in the paleolithic can't be relevant. The linked article refers to "people of the Gravettian culture" being exceptionally tall, but the Gravettian culture stretched from Portugal to Russia. This could possibly explain why Europeans are tall (although more work would be required to show genetic continuity between Gravettian and modern populations), but it can't tell us anything about Herzegovinans specifically.
Today's Europeans are a mix of Paleolithic Europeans and people who came later, mostly the latter. IIRC, the Paleolithic blood is strongest in the Balkans and Scandinavia, and I assume that conclusion was made on the basis of DNA tests done on living people.
So if today's Herzegovinians are Slavs by blood, then it means that particular group of Slavs had a lot of Paleolithic ancestry. (Also, ethnic identity doesn't always match DNA as well as one might expect. There was a discussion on a previous thread about how Hungarians are ethnic Magyars (an Asian nomad tribe) but genetically pretty much like Germans.)
> I assume that conclusion was made on the basis of DNA tests done on living people.
Your optimism is greater than mine, there.
I wouldn't call it optimism. It just seems like it would be easier to get DNA from living people.
I expressed myself poorly. The population research was indeed done on living people; but there's a big distance between that data and the conclusion they apparently reached about the paleolithic ancestral lifestyle. That reasoning relied on a lot more than just DNA tests on living people.
I also expressed myself poorly. I read from another source (National Geographic, maybe?) that Paleolithic European blood is now strongest in the Balkans. It didn't mention height.
Modern population of Herzegovina has the lowest Slavic admixture of all Slavic nations. So it actually makes sense. Bear in mind that generally, a country speaking a certain language does not every ancestor of every individual spoke that language. What usually happened is that foreigners would impose their rule over the local population and so make the local populace slowly switch to the foreign language (which has high prestige). For example, most biological ancestors of the English aren't Germanic.
Indeed it makes no sense to describe prehistoric people as Slav, Germanic or whatever, since these terms are only meaningful as language-related descriptors. At the point that we can't say what language was spoken, we can't describe someone using a linguistic designation. And there's certainly no good reason to applodern ethnic designations to prehistoric populations.
#17 - San Francisco’s new math curriculum “delays Algebra 1 by one year and mandates all students to take the same set of courses sequentially from 8th to 10th grade.”
I would have been absolutely miserable, and demanded home schooling. My public high school’s willingness to allow advanced students to accelerate in math, English, and science, including offering free-to-me community college classes and self-study, was uncritically the best thing public school ever did for me. Probably saved me a semester of college and got a math minor on my degree too.
I agree with Scott, this appears to be part of a trend of lowering standards and claiming improvement when more people pass the lower standard (SFUSD got more people to pass Algebra 1 by dropping the requirement to pass a state competency test at the end, and got “more students enrolled in advanced math” by creating a new class and declaring it “advanced”, despite it not meeting the UC standards for such).
But also another disturbing trend, namely reducing “inequity” by eliminating opportunities for the talented to demonstrate and nurture their abilities. Real Harrison Bergeron crap.
UATX seems to involve a lot of people (e.g. Heather Heying, Kathleen Stock, Peter Boghossian) who have resigned from their universities because of criticism from students. I am curious to see how they hope to prevent the same sort of situation from happening at UATX.
I suppose they could try to apply some kind of ideological filter when accepting applicants. Maybe just by hiring lots of known conservatives, they can rely on their reputation to repel non-conservative students? But conservative students could someday conceivably want to protest something. What if the campus Christian Coalition or whatever decides to protest Boghossian's atheism, or demand Heying teach intelligent design in her evolutionary biology classes?
Perhaps they could create a school code of conduct which limits the amount or type of protesting that students are allowed to participate in? They could ban demonstrations altogether, since Stock regards students standing with signs as harassment. I'm not sure how restricting students' freedom of speech and assembly meshes with their whole "fearless pursuit of truth" slogan and their supposed commitment to Enlightenment liberalism. This also potentially creates the problem of alienating their customers - if students feel like their views are being stifled in the special University of Not Stifling Views, they'll just vote with their feet and go to a different university.
It seems pretty intractable if you ask me.
But also, it seems like if Stock, Boghossian, Heying, et. al. believed in ideas competing in the free marketplace of ideas, they would have, like, accepted the fact that some of their views were not competitive in that marketplace, instead of withdrawing and trying to create a new market where their views won't be subject to competition at all. I feel like founding an entire free speech university based on a hypocritical unwillingness to tolerate others' free speech is doomed from the outset because that's a contradiction that just can't be resolved.
But, who knows, maybe they'll square the circle on this one.
Perhaps students demonstrating was only a problem for them because the university administration took it seriously. This one won't.
That could potentially be true for Boghossian (some students apparently filed a Title IX claim against him, which the university had to investigate, and apparently handled poorly), but not for Stock or Heying, at least, based on what they've said about the matter.
I don't know how much time you spend among the left, but the idea of "leftist groupthink" is sort of a contradiction in terms. The left is a Balkanized hellscape of factions that spend most of their time looking for excuses to hate each other.
The feminist vs. trans rights conflict is a textbook case of this. "TERF" means "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" and refers to ideas like "men are inherently oppressive and therefore trans women, who are definitely actually men, are inherently oppressive". Back when I was in college the idea "men are inherently oppressive and therefore there should be women-only spaces and women-only groups where women can be safe from men", along with other "radical feminist" ideas, were about as far left as you could get, and were considered anathema to the right, who made the same "groupthink" accusations against radfems as they now make against wokes. The picture was of manhating lesbian separatists quoting Andrea Dworkin and debating whether all hetero sex was rape because of the inherent power differential between men and women.
Now that exact same faction of feminism is on the outs (except in the UK for some reason) because their exclusion of male-bodied people has run afoul of the trans rights movement. Stock has noticed that there are lots of "males" on lesbian dating sites and "males" taking up meagre resources earmarked for women and "males" abusing women at the same statistical base rate regardless of whether they claim to be women or not. Her (formerly leftist, politically-ubercorrect groupthink) sexual politics are now reactionary, politically-uber-incorrect wrongthink. Or, as we could call it if we didn't want to speak only in politically-charged hyperbole, people have changed their minds.
Lots of American radfems have changed their minds and are totally supportive of trans women and their ontological claims about their own gender. Some haven't. The two sides snipe at each other regularly. Sometimes they offer arguments and evidence. Sometimes they speak in apocalyptic rhetoric, like you did in your comment. This is not a picture of ideological conformity. This is a picture of ideological competition. One idea outcompetes another. Then a new idea comes along and outcompetes that one.
The process is sometimes ugly and brutal because people have a lot emotionally invested in these questions. Personally, for me, it went pretty smoothly. I changed my mind from the essentialist conception of gender to the social construct conception of gender without much cognitive dissonance, and with no one yelling at me or berating me. I just read a bunch of writings by feminists on both sides, and decided the "gender critical" ones were mistaken and the social constructionists' ideas matched my own thoughts and experiences more closely.
TERFs and trans activists both have approximately the same capacity to influence me through non-competitive means, which is approximately zero. No one showed up at my school waving a sign. No one scrutinized any of my lessons or curriculum materials. Is it so hard to believe that a reasonable, fair-minded person would consider both sides, from a disinterested perspective, and freely come down on the "woke" side? Especially when the left, in this case (as with many others) holds a wide diversity of views which are subject to constant debate and questioning from other, opposing leftists?
Or, put another way: how do you suppose "wokes" - or any other historically-ascendant progressive group in academia - settle on the views that become the consensus views? Is it simply a raw exercise of power, where the Leftist Council throws darts at bulletin board and whatever buzzword they hit becomes the new Woke Ideology? No. There's debate. There's tons of debate. There's occasionally vicious debate. It's just that the debate sometimes excludes professors like Stock, who use their positions to bully students, or Boghossian, who violate ethical principles to make a point.
On one hand, there *is* a competition among various left-wing views. On the other hand, there also seem to be obvious *winners*.
Like, in the example you mentioned, TERFs clearly lost the war. What I mean is that I would expect a TERF lecturer at university to be cancelled, but no amount of TERF students would be able to cancel an anti-TERF lecturer.
How exactly is the woke dogma decided, that is an interesting questions. If I had to guess, I would say that it is probably some combination of "popular support" and "a petty fight that escalated beyond control and then became a precedent".
"I would expect a TERF lecturer at university to be cancelled"
Consider that all the times TERF lecturers at universities don't get canceled. How many of those times make international headlines?
There's the example of Donna Hughes. She wrote a TERFy article and her university released a statement saying Hughes had the right to her opinion, but the university did not endorse it. There was a petition to fire her but the university upheld her right to academic freedom. She still works there.
But even that example got media coverage because Hughes wrote a TERFy article. There are probably hundreds of professors who hold transphobic or "gender-critical" views but don't have those views published - or teach in departments where gender politics are irrelevant. Most people aren't going to care what their physics professor thinks about whether trans women should play on the men's or women's sports teams.
There was a minor controversy a few years ago in linguistics when Geoff Pullum misgendered a trans person in a blog post, and was criticized for it by a trans linguist. Pullum was gracious as could be for a famously irascible professor, and wasn't canceled.
We read media accounts of the most extreme cases, but these cases are rare, and in almost every case the "canceled" person isn't actually canceled - Pullum, Hughes, Kathleen Stock - none of these people were fired. Pullum demonstrated maturity and engaged in productive dialogue with his critics. Hughes blustered and called a lawyer and the thing blew over. Stock doubled down on the behavior that earned her criticism and then left in a huff when that strategy mysteriously failed to win her critics over.
But these are anecdotes too. Here's something better: https://grossman.arcdigital.media/p/no-america-is-not-experiencing-a
Aside from an excellent analysis and engagement with critics, Grossman goes into the data we have on cancellations and finds that at current rates the average university sees one disinvitation attempt every 200 years, only half of which are successful. He quotes Adam Gurri in saying "If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved" - and I have to agree with this.
I think the plan is to laugh at student protests that bear no plausible relationship to the quality of education. Whether this will work or not depends a lot on who is footing the bill for the tuition and what they think of the protests.
Exempli gratia, if *my* kid were involved in a protest about a professor's use of pronouns in a calculus class, he would have to answer to me -- and it would not be a pleasant conversation. If the kid doesn't want to start scanning the Help Wanted - No Experience Necessary ads in craiglist, he will exhibit an abrupt change in focus.
Nor will he be able to "vote with his feet," as you say, unless I countersign that proposal, and I'm going to be taking a hard look at the quality of education in thermodynamics or circuit design, and not caring a fig about the attitude towards student protest over the shibboleths o' the day.
So the college need have no fear of dismissing such protests out of hand, at least from parents like me. Whether other parents fit into the same category is the big question.
Okay, real question: would you send your kid to MIT to study thermodynamics or circuit design? Because their "cancelation" of Dorian Abbot also has no plausible relationship to the quality of education there, right? Especially since the cancelation was not in the physics or computer engineering department?
If the answer is "yes" then I don't think the UATX people have a chance: there's no value proposition for a practical-minded parent to send their kids to the anti-woke school if the regular school is better on the merits despite some of the students having some odd ideas.
If the answer is "no" then you have to bite the bullet and admit that ideology is more important to you then pedagogical quality, in which case your dispute with your kid protesting the calculus teacher is going to occur because you have different ideologies, not because protesting is inherently frivolous. But this leaves open the chance that UATX might do something that you found disqualifying, just like MIT has done, which means that UATX is stuck in the position of having to conform to its students' (or their parents') ideological demands.
cccc
So either way I don't see this problem as solved for UATX even with parents like yourself involved.
(I don't know where the cccc came from but without an edit button...)
Certainly I would send my kid to MIT to do Course 5 or 6. I don't particularly give a shit about what goes on in the Green Buliding, those people are flakes anyway.
But your conclusion from that "yes" seems strained. You are assuming that UATX cannot compete *at any level* with a "woke" school. That seems unlikely. It seems much more likely that they will end up (if they succeed at all) with some level of quality/reputation that is equal to some "woke" schools, better than some, not as good as others. I agree they won't be able to compete with the better schools, as far as I'm concerned, but they can obviously compete with the lesser schools, and they might have an advantage with respect to the peer schools.
So that means they have a tiebreaker advantage, which translates to $$$ success at the margin -- *if* parents believe at the margin it's better to have a school that focuses strictly on factual education and doesn't allow its mission to be hijacked by the usual passions for Changing Everything that infect the sophomore mind. Which I kind of think is likely, I don't know many parents who are like "Oh boy! Sign me up to fork out $20,000/year so my kid can learn to question the orthodoxies more passionately!"
Certainly, UATX may turn out to be just as "woke" as any other school, only in some other direction. You have to genuflect to a giant statue of Donald Trump at the gates, say, or you can't be a Jew or atheist, or if a woman you have to major in Home Ec and defer to your male teachers' opinion, wear a hijab, whatever.
In that case, they would have failed in their promise and have nothing more or less to offer than a "woke" school, except maybe a different polarity. And I agree that would probably not work well because there already exist options along those lines.
But I'm really not seeing what any of this has to do with my original comment, and the original subject of what they plan to do about student protest. I said I surmised that their plan was to ignore student protest over social issues, and I said for me (as a parent footing the bill) they can do that with impunity, indeed with my support, and that therefore -- this being my point -- it didn't matter at all what the *students* thought of that action. What students think doesn't matter at all, as far as colleges are concerned, except insofar as it affects what parents or the government (the two major billpayors) think. Golden Rule: him with the gold makes the rules.
I must be a lousy philosopher because from my reading of the problem, I still can't see why anyone would two-box.
While it's true that many vit D studies failed, it's wrong to say it only succeeded on bone health. It's effective in preventing respiratory tract infections (common cold etc.), with a strong and crazy significant effect for those with vit D deficiency.
https://www.bmj.com/content/356/bmj.i6583
That doesn't seem to vindicate Vitamin D at all. It seems a bit like, "giving water to people who are dying of thirst, helps them succumb less slowly to other disorders."
Sure, but vit D is unique in that most of us are deficient due to our indoor lifestyle.
If large part of people is dying from thirst then such recommendation is quite useful.
Every time the Democratic establishment comes up, I think of this scene from the Simpsons:
https://twitter.com/dailysimpsons/status/1245108469612417024?lang=en
Perhaps they are right just now.
To console myself I remember this one from the Simpsons:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/the-simpsons-fox-news-racist-2010-11%3famp
Just thanks for linking this. It is truly hilarious and it goes on pile of my favorite downloaded clips.
Anything else similar?
Reading Freedom on the Centralized Web (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/) got me thinking:
Reddit is mostly like Archipelago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/): lots of independent communities doing their own thing. The main site basically only exists for the convenience of finding and aggregating communities' content.
Unlike Archipelago, global admins have absolute power. They can ban communities (sorta like being able to nuke any island they don't like), globally ban users (sorta like being able to walk in to any island and summarily execute one of its citizens without even asking permission of the island's government), and unilaterally replace community admins (sorta like being able to stage a coup against any island government they don't like).
It might be both possible and awesome to create a decentralized reddit that works exactly the same as reddit except there are multiple competing aggregators and no global admins. Moderation would be up to the individual communities and voluntary alliances thereof, instead of some all-powerful god-king of the entire archipelago. Sure there would be some communities for witches, but most communities would be nice and no one would have enough power to be a good target for a campaign to pressure him into starting a worldwide witch-hunt.
It doesn't have to be based on a blockchain. It could be a thousand websites running their own tiny instance of a one-community reddit-clone, coupled with an RSS feed that lets people aggregate content however they like. But I feel like that wouldn't catch on because it would be slightly less convenient than reddit, and people are lazy. I started reading SSC a lot more after it moved to Substack so I could get every post delivered by email. Trivial inconveniences can probably have huge effects on growth rates of social media empires. Combining decentralization with maximal convenience is a hard problem that needs to be solved to liberate alleged liberal democracies from oligarchical control over all of their discourse.
A less-ambitious project would be to convert Reddit from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy or even a republic. But as long as it's a centralized website, technologically speaking, someone has absolute power, and you can only kind of trust them not to wield it. It's better to have a technological assurance that no one will go around nuking random islands. Decentralization gives each island an impenetrable nuke-shield.
Is that what alt.* was?
I know that Mastodon does the same thing for twitter.
IDK, never used Usenet much because I was born in the mid-80s and by the time I got online reliably in 97 or so I was using websites with their own homebrew proto-wordpress and proto-UBB.
As I recall, all of Usenet was archipelago, sort of. Every node in it was a news server, constantly serving posts to its leaf users, accepting their posts, and copying those posts with its neighboring servers. Most of those servers happily accepted any post, and any request for a new group. (I remember a spate of new groups one day, whose names were little more than the dot separators and hyphens and asterisks, which, when listed in order, depicted the face of Jerry Garcia, who had recently passed.) That meant that if you were getting your news from those servers, you got pretty much everything.
Some servers didn't accept or forward everything, though. This was mostly for mundane reasons - Usenet's disk storage could get fairly large by that day's standards, and typical servers only had a gigabyte or so to use for that purpose, so it was common for some servers to arbitrarily refuse the "entertainment" section of Usenet and only propagate the arguably more wholesome stuff like sci, comp, mayyybe rec (which was mostly "recreation for nerds who presumably do more with sci and comp"), and a handful of other trees that didn't get enough action to be a concern. But alt.* got plenty, and was virtually all fluff, so there was an acceptable reason to reject it. That also meant your news server wouldn't get it if the only other server "upstream" from you was rejecting it.
I can't remember off the top of my head the names (I think digg was one?); but I think there have been 4+ attempts at decentralized/ totally censorship free reddit.
They all immediately devolved into porn bots, actual-factual-Nazis, and all the people that can't function in polite society shitting loudly into a microphone then calling people who chose not to listen moral cowards.
Hacker news is less censored than Reddit, but hasn't become a cesspit.
Why Voat failed, imo:
* grew up during reddit purges of right wingers. founder effects led to it going hard right.
* Still totally centralized with a global admin and a main page that has a monopoly on aggregation using a dumb most popular list. No algorithmic personalization worth a damn. So normies got bombarded with content they weren't interested in and left. This amplified the founder effect. This amplification wouldn't happen with a decent collaborative filtering algorithm to show people what they individually want to see. In that case the normies would find what they like and stick around. Unconditionally jamming the most popular posts down everyone's throats leads people who aren't in to that sort of thing boiling off of the site, which leads to the site becoming more fringe and spiralling closer to the black hole of disreputability.
TL;DR: evaporative cooling of group beliefs can be mitigated by making an effort to cater to non-central members of the group. Voat failed because it didn't.
Hacker news may be less censored than Reddit but is more aggresively moderated.
Maybe it is not obvious, but traffic is low enough for one person (dang) to be capable of effective moderation. They are really good at this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang
Not sure is it full-time job, part-time job or really dedicated unpaid person.
HN also has quite clear purpose, identify and picky users with strong aversion toward undesirable types of content. For example making pun-only-posts will get you downvoted and flagged rather than praised like on Reddit.
To be clear: content that would be welcomed and upvoted on Voat or Reddit and accepted here would be elimiated on Hacker News.
I expect that comments that would be accepted on HN is a subset of what would be accepted on Reddit and subset of what would be accepted here.
And community is self-selected to people fully (or nearly fully) wanting such moderation, so it does not come as a censorship but executing community norms.
Porn bots, actual-factual-Nazis would be banned on sight there.
As argument in favor of decentralization, I don't think HN would be improved by giving Reddit CEO spez the power to nuke the entire HN community whenever some comments there offend him. I don't think any community that is not already under the thumb of spez would voluntarily elect to become so.
And also, HN would not benefit from being easier to discover and use by Reddit users.
It would not definitely not benefit from Reddit user interface and ads promoting bitcoin gambling.
Speaking of nominative determinism, am I the only one to notice how awesome it is that one of the rough estimates for the size of the Christian population in the fourth century comes from someone called "Goodenough?"
If anything, your paragraph understates Morphy's genius. He basically invented modern chess play -- Kasparov called him "the forefather of modern chess." His style was frequently tactical, dynamic, and aggressive, but entirely sound. Before him, people played like lunatics. Now, people play like Morphy, but with the benefit of a century of experience that players have accumulated since then, now with some slight modifications inspired by AlphaZero.
20: "I can swim," whispered the Scorpion.
“Great! Leave me out of this for once.” replied the Frog.
I’m a little disappointed by #24. That Twitter post to me shows a complete lack of understanding of the issues with building renewable energy and sometimes who is opposed.
First in reference to the Alameda County wind project. There is a way to responsibly site wind and solar projects and that location happens to be about as bad as it gets for killing raptors and we know this from decades of wind turbines functioning at that site.
Save Our Mesa sounds like NIMBY not environmentalists.
Greenpeace has always been extreme, but I do agree we are screwing up by not encouraging nuclear to at a minimum stay online if it’s already built.
I admit I have no idea what the tweets are related to the NJ turnpike.
But in general I just find it frustrating this idea that carbon reduction should be done at the expense of everything thing else. Nothing else should factor in because this is too dire. Well I agree, climate change is dire. But why wouldn’t we cover roofs with solar long before we start impacting sensitive ecosystems? Roof top solar has much lower impacts from a carbon footprint anyhow. My point is, we haven’t run out of places to build clean energy so that we need to put it in the worst places now.
>First in reference to the Alameda County wind project. There is a way to responsibly site wind and solar projects and that location happens to be about as bad as it gets for killing raptors and we know this from decades of wind turbines functioning at that site.
That is also what I had heard about that project, that it was particularly bad for killing raptors, but I see in the Twitter responses some who claim that if you look at the data, it isn't true. Now I don't know what to believe. If the story about that location being particularly bad for raptors is false, we have a big problem, because it would show that it's easy to convince the public that any given green project isn't really green. How do we get the truth out?
I’m an ornithologist in the energy industry and have seen presentations from researchers at that site showing the numbers. It’s a lot. In particular the impacts to golden eagles, which have been declining in recent years. You can see some numbers from this report below, but think in terms of this being just one wind area and if we put turbines in more areas like this that are known for their high numbers of raptors versus making the attempt to locate in areas less likely to have impacts. https://www.acgov.org/cda/planning/landuseprojects/documents/Final_APWRA_BirdFatalityStudy2005-2013_041816.pdf
Thanks!
:)
> “tolerate everyone” sounds good until you get confronted with pedophiles, Nazis, al-Qaeda supporters, and super-woke people who demand you censor everyone else.
This is interesting because, in fact, a professor at Old Dominion University was just "cancelled" precisely for expressing views that those attracted to children should be supported rather than stigmatized. (Note the difference between "attracted to children" and "actual child molester.") I would claim that the professor in question, Allyn Walker, is in fact right, and is expressing exactly the kind of contrary view that academia should welcome. A more thoughtful approach to this issue would help advance human well-being, both by preventing child abuse through support, and by helping those with the attraction. Unfortunately, the politics of the situation prevent taking them seriously.
Alas, my guess is that those who talk about supporting the open exchange of ideas aren't going to leap in to defend this one.
(Disclaimer: I am one of the people attracted to children. Naturally you might read bias into my opinion here.)
I think the problem here is that we have seen something similar before: in the early 1980s radical left wing organisations were having one of their occasional quests to reorganise society, and whilst many of their targets were laudable (racial equality, acceptance of homosexuality) there was a marginal movement towards understanding of paedophilia. Much of this was probably well-meaning support for those fighting to cope with it, but it allowed some organisations with an agenda of actually promoting paedophilia to get a platform (the example most often held up here in the UK is the Paedophile Information Exchange). So a legitimate concern to help people deal with a sexual preference that cannot be exercised is regarded with caution because people have in the past used this as an excuse to try and move the conversation towards legitimising that preference.
I've heard about this, although I'm too young to have direct memories of it. What I've never really been able to answer is the extent to which this was actually a popular movement and the extent to which it was a small movement whose prominence was artificially raised in order to discredit left wing organizations more generally. (I know this was a perceived relationship that the LGBT movement had to fight against.)
In any case, I don't feel like that history should affect our decision-making, any more than other extreme perceptions/actions should color reasonable expressions of other viewpoints. (Say, violent anti-war protestors, or extreme libertarian militia groups, or religious cults.) I grant it affects public opinion anyway, but that social pressure would seem to be exactly what those who oppose cancel culture are trying to fight against.
" and whilst many of their targets were laudable (racial equality"
This is extremely debatable, especially if you're going to use an ambiguous word with loads of baggage like "equity".
The politics of this one do seem very complicated. When I saw "cancelled" I jumped to the assumption that this was a complaint about "cancel culture" on the left. But then I dove in and it looks like it's more complicated than that - Walker says they were targeted for cancelation by right-wing media and on the basis of their trans identity.
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/11/17/old-dominion-professor-allyn-walker/ -
>Walker said their research was “being misrepresented in right-wing media,” making it “unsafe to remain on campus.” “The university’s decision to place me on administrative leave really acknowledges the gravity of the threats to me and other people on campus,” they said.
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/11/24/allyn-walker-odu-professor-resigns/ -
>“That research was mischaracterized by some in the media and online, partly on the basis of my trans identity,” Walker said in the statement Wednesday. “As a result, multiple threats were made against me and the campus community generally.”
Here's lefty-site Jezebel giving Walker a space to defend their views - https://jezebel.com/professor-on-leave-after-comments-about-people-attracte-1848089269 - and note they feature a clip of right-wing Tucker Carlson going after those views.
Here's "heterodox" and anti-woke journalist Jesse Singal - i.e. one of those who talks about supporting the open exchange of ideas - leaping in to defend this one: https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1464321165682479104
It looks to me like this was started by a misguided by well-intentioned vaguely lefty student, then picked up by the right as part of their normal program of equating trans people and Democrats with pedophilia, and it seems like it's genuinely dividing the left, some of whom are afraid of feeding the right-wing narrative of equating LGBT people with pedophilia.
It's also interesting that a cancellation attempt driven by the right wing - with support by Fox News and OANN - has been wildly successful, despite broad support for Walker from academics who point out that Walker's research here is very much in line with the mainstream in their field in terms of harm reduction and preventing non-offending pedophiles from becoming offenders. I hope this puts "woke" "cancel culture" in perspective - it seems to me like the right-wing moral panic brigade has far more cancellation power than e.g. trans rights activists.
Right wing cancellation is different in two important ways:
1. Institutions are overwhelmingly left-wing, and Walker was not placed on leave because administrators are opposed to him being able to express his particular views. So "cancelling" by the right refers to public shaming and supposed harassment/threats, whereas left wing cancelling is more direct deplatforming by left-aligned institutions themselves. Maybe Tucker Carlson's piece indirectly encouraged people to send threats to Walker, but if this were just Carlson et al. criticizing Walker, he would not have been placed on leave and certainly not leave as a form of punishment.
2. Right-wingers typically attempt to "cancel" people for things more like this, such as defense of people who are often child sex predators (not all pedophiles are child sex predators, but all child sex predators are pedohpiles), which are partially issues concerning moral judgement (in addition to pragmatic matters of what stops pedophiles from offending), whereas the left typically cancel for actual empirical matters i.e. the existence and heritability of the black/white IQ gap.
24. Politics is a subset of Fashion, the most powerful force in the universe.
The Laws of Fashion were made clear by Jesus: 'The first will be the last and the last will be the first."
Wokism will die on the vine soon, like Feminism did before it, which undermined concern for black Americans in its time.
Concern for Native Americans may be the next big thing, but that would undermine concern for black Americans much like the trans thing has undermined concern for women with vaginas.
I'm not convinced that radical progressives help conservatives politically. Most Americans want to get to Sweden: more business friendly, taxes aren't homework you can go to jail for failing to do correctly, a bigger social safety net.
Not sure what will replace wokism but likely something worse. Humans want to punish their outgroup and we can't change that. We can declare war against the Chinese or the Iranians. That could rally the troops.
Otherwise we will continue our internecine fight
I think it's irrational to think what should rightly be considered black nationalism is going to go away anywhere soon.
Feminism fell out of favor partly because A) women broadly achieved equality, and B), there were bigger "victims" to focus on.
Black socio-economic equality is largely going backwards and its hyper-speculative to suggest that any of the woke policies currently being introduced or considered are going to rapidly upend this trend.
As for bigger victims, then native americans have worse outcomes but they're too small and quiet a group to replace black people as the favored victim group. So who else is there? The majority of trans people in absolute terms are white, so that undermines their victim status relative to blacks. And opposition to "racism" is a hell of a lot more universal amongst americans than acceptance of transpeople are.
So unless one of these things changes, I don't think black nationalism is falling out of favor any time soon.
For 18 (self reported long covid symptoms correlate more with thinking you've had covid than actually having had it), isn't that exactly what you'd expect even if it's not psychosomatic? Bob isn't going to think he's got long covid without also thinking he had covid at one point, is he?
This seems really dumb, so I'm assuming I'm missing something. Would be grateful if somebody can tell me what it is.
Bob might think he had Covid because:
1) He tested positive for Covid
2) He didn't test positive for Covid, but nevertheless believes he had it.
So I think you are correct. Isn't it generally estimated that the number of people who had Covid is likely a factor of ~4 higher than those who tested positive for it? So, if Long Covid is not psychosomatic, you should expect that 80% of people with Long Covid did not test positive for Covid.
Are they looking at "thinking he has long Covid" or "thinking he has the same symptoms that people who think they have long Covid report?"
On the rate of conversion to Christianity, note the Roman Empire was actually pretty slow. Ireland first received missions around 440-50 (Palladius, and earliest likely date for Patrick) and was seemingly fully Christian by the historical threshold in c. 600. The English (who admittedly may have ruled over a somewhat Christian population already) got their first recorded mission in 597 and there's no trace of paganism in writings from the 690s. In both cases a collection of peoples (neither area was unified) seem to have fully converted in around a century.
And the adoption of Christianity in former colonies of European powers was often even more rapid. Islam is similar: both religions seem on occasion to be able to spread through a society or area with incredible rapidity.
Scott you should watch King Richard regarding the Family post esp the last paragraph. I didn't like it that much but it's very relevant.
I'm also a boring non-athletic Jew and not the one to write it but there's a really interestingh comparison to be made between Richard and the Hungarian guy who pushed his daughters into chess.
In his book on consciousness, Mark Solms (a Friston collaborator) uses "Markov blanket" as fairy dust to sprinkle over any problem that can't be solved.
Concerning no. 22: "Related: Woolf University is an accredited university that “lets qualified organizations join as member colleges and offer accredited degrees”. I think the idea is that if you want to start a new college but are intimidated by the accreditation process, you can instead become an affiliate/subcollege of Woolf and since they are accredited, now you are too. I don’t know enough about education to know whether this will work but it seems like a cool idea."
..In the European countries I am familiar with, it is quite common that established universities merge with community colleges/polytechnics/university colleges, giving the latter university status in the process. And in 1992 Tony Blair allowed all UK polytechnics that felt like universities to call themselves universities, creating dozens of new universities with the stroke of a pen.
That said, there are universities and then there are universities in Europe. Many years ago I was invited to hold the "Nordic scholar lecture" at the University of Edinburgh, one of the four oldest universities in the UK, and rather self-conscious about the fact. At that time I worked at a University College.
After the lecture, which I thought went quite well, the faculty invited to the traditional wine and small-talk. Four-five professors with half-centimeter-thick tweed jackets gathered around me and we had the following conversation:
"Thank you so much for your talk...By the way, did you say you work at a University College in your country?" "Well yes." "Yes...Isn't that what we used to call a Polytechnic?" “Eh...but you do not have many of those any more, do you? They are all universities now." "Yes...they are what we call 1992-universities." By then I understood where this was going, and said defiantly: "Yes, well, my college is about to apply for university status, and I believe we will choose the title City University". Which made the professor pause, look at his fellow Edinburgh professors gathered round, and say, sort-of to himself: "Yes...City University. That's what they call themselves, these days."
UK: you have your PMs wrong. The 1992 legislation was under John Major, five years before Blair. As I recall it had been contemplated by Mrs Thatcher who was generally attracted by measures that moved responsibilities from local to central government.
Ah, thanks for the correction.
My mistake entirely. Certainly not one made by the Edinburgh professors back in the day.
The Edinburgh guest lecture was a rather interesting anthropological experience. I would be surprised if other countries, including the US, has a similar fine-grained nomenclatura within Academia. "1992 university" indeed.
My general hypothesis is that UK culture has been as influenced by the caste culture in India, as India has been influenced by British culture. Due to their long colonial life together. (Perhaps far fetched, but still.)
While at it: The Edinburgh experience would have fitted perfectly in the now classic British political science sitcom, Yes Minister; including the famous scene where the Head of the Department of Administrative Affairs, Humphrey, explains the characteristics of "British democracy". In particular the line: "We need our universities - both of them".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs
...that line must have been hard to swallow for the University of Edinburgh, though.
There are distinctions within distinctions in Academia.
The $CITY $HISTORIC_PERSON_FROM_CITY Universities
Paul Morphy: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
He's known as the "Pride and Sorrow of Chess" because of how he just quit chess.
"Also, plausibly Constantine’s conversion barely changed the growth rate at all."
A leading biography of Constantine ("Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor") argues just this.
"so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. "
You clearly don't need liberal democracy to reach developed country status, but it doesn't obviously hurt. It seems China's development course is 39 years or so behind Japan's:
https://eharding.substack.com/p/the-forty-year-gap-between-china
and, obviously, it has grown from both a lower level than Japan relative to the U.S. and to a lower level than Japan relative to the U.S. -China's GDP per capita by PPP today is around where the USSR's was relative to the U.S. during the late 1960s. The reason for this is obvious; China is far less capitalist than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Singapore.
Nevertheless, Noah's post is a classic example of Hanania's dictum that most China analysis is cope. China contained COVID better than any other country (despite being its origin) and the BRI has clearly been useful for China at buying third world foreign influence. China also has a high vaccination rate, and has been the world's largest vaccine exporter, making such unlikely places as Morocco and Cambodia more vaccinated than the U.S.
Also, it's not China that put China in a worse position on the diplomatic stage; the U.S. foreign policy establishment did that.
Similarly, even if Shanghai is poorer than American Blacks, that is still cope.
China has already beaten the US, so you're arguing a moot point. China's GDP is over 30% larger than the US when you use the more correct purchasing power parity GDP. And they're growing faster, too. They are also better positioned globally for the future.
They're leaving us behind in their dust. GDP per capita is not relevant when talking national power. If considering the People, the Happiness Index (which has a bit of GDP in the calculation) is more relevant than per capita GDP. What's most relevant is total GDP and a power structure with the will and plan to deploy it strategically.
As for Japan and the USSR and South Korea, none of that matters. The past is never like the future. Only trends and positioning matters. The future only follows the past until it does not, due to a qualitative change like the internet.
There is now a big difference (which changes everything) in the present and the future with China versus the Soviet Union in the past and their breakdown due to the unmanageable allocation complexities of a command economy.
My idea is that command economies are the future and will be Far More competitive than our market system very soon as it already seems to be in China. The overlooked realization is that Ai is perfectly designed to cap off a command economy, but not a market economy. Once China's Ai gets smart enough from perusing all that phone data China will take off to the moon. The Soviets did not have that.
The so-called, but aptly termed, global Deep State - the institutional investors and Davos crowd who own and run the world (0.1% of all corporations own and thus control 80% of trans-national corporations, according to a Swiss complexity scientist)) - are using covid as cover to herd all the Western governments under a one-world governance umbrella of totalitarianism where all is digitized and managed (for our own good). The steps to totalitarianism are essentially already complete.
Other than wanting the remaining 18% of global income that did not accrue to the global rich and powerful (Oxfam 2017 data), they want to compete and beat China's machine - and you need an authoritarian digitized non-market command system in the West to do that, because that's what hooks best to an Ai.
The Great Race will be won by whomever first gets a functioning governance Ai. But it can go nowhere unless hooked to a command economy with a cowed population kept in line with a police-surveillance state.
We definitely have a China-style social credit system in our future. The vaccine passports ("Paper's please.") are actually technology platforms that will eventually have all you data - your complete file - updated in real-time (VP's are happening now in ten states). That will be hooked to your central bank digital currency account - a government controlled bank account, which 90 countries are now working on. Taxes will be debited before you can buy food. Dissent will be debited as in China - because even a utopia needs everyone to think the same. Once the CBDC and VP are linked your life/freedom and privacy/soul will be over. If you disagree you go into the internment camps, as is happening now in Australia. Don't believe it? Google "whatsherface" and see her sassy videos on both the isolated Australian camps and Canada's RFP for camps in every province. Do your own research, people, because the media lies to your face.
6. Actually the tallest should be Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania. 2.01m of height, although males in Albania don't tend to be THAT tall.
"18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic."
ok, lets imagine some groups.
1:People who got severe covid symptoms and believe they had covid. (.1, who had covid, .2 who did not.)
2:People who got mild or no covid symptoms and believe they had covid.(.1, who had covid, .2 who did not.)
3:people who got severe symptoms and don't believe they had covid. (.1, who had covid, .2 who did not.)
4:people who got mild symptoms or no covid symptoms and don't believe they had covid.(.1, who had covid, .2 who did not.)
1.1 are probably pretty common
1.2 are probably pretty rare because of ubiquitous testing.
2.1 seem to be pretty common, there's a whole subculture of the antivaxer movement of people who seem to have convinced themselves they got covid in november 2019 because they just associated the last cold they had with it.
2.2 also seem to be pretty common.
3.1 people with severe symptoms mostly probably had covid or at least the chance to confirm it.
3.2 is probably rare
4.1 these are probably also pretty common since a large fraction of people get no significant symptoms
4.2 this is the biggest groups, probably.
So people who got severe symptoms are overwhelmingly likely to believe/know they had covid.
A lot of people who actually had covid but didn't know about it had very mild symptoms.
So this seems to just be saying that people who had severe symptoms were more likely to have long-covid.
The Noahpinion piece on China makes some good points. However, I think it's important to distinguish between "competence" and "causing a country to take a counterfactually successful trajectory". The latter is much more difficult. My take is that Xi is very "competent" in the usual sense, but that it's genuinely a very hard problem to chart a successful path for China. Even saying he's taken them down a shockingly unsuccessful path does not negate competence, nor predicts against many of the downstream results of such competence that are the point of using the word: for example, China annexing Taiwan in the next decade, or continuing to achieve its other geopolitical goals (even if those goals seem silly).
Re: Constantine and Christianity, "History for Atheists" has a new video up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HBv_X6k35g
My guess on the sibling criminality thing is that having a much older sibling likely means the younger sibling grew up less poor.