I don't know how I feel about this. The other side of the concern is that a doctor will tell a patient some very important warning about the medicine, and the patient would take it anyway. Like "this has almost no chance to help you and will kill you within two weeks of use" (Or, "this drug has significant psychological side effects, I don't recommend it to solve your [minor problem]") and the patient does it anyway.
Liability concerns would have to be mitigated, for instance the doctor obviously couldn't be held liable in such a scenario, but we would have to remove liability for drug manufacturers as well, since no one can control their use. If drug manufacturers are not liable for misuse of their drugs, then they have more incentive to get drugs to the market and just see what happens.
Long term I think consumers would become more careful about the drugs they take and it may end up better for all (or at least those capable of making rational decisions about their medication, potentially while in need of medication to modulate their decision-making capabilities). In the short term I think a lot of people will make some really bad medical choices and end up having significant complications, with a very long tail of less capable people continuing to do so.
Also, dumb people will buy antibiotics in bulk with getting antibiotic-resistant pathogens even faster.
In practice it does not matter as it will not happen - any politician can easily imagine getting blamed for all deaths that will happen. Including children "treated" by parents educated at University of Facebook and Youtube.
If it involves a collective action problem like that then the government should directly implement a solution such as a pigovian tax or direct rationing, not leave it up to the discretion of doctors.
How on earth is that meaningfully any different? He literally said "In a free society, a citizen should have to ask neither doctors nor politicians..."
To be fair, doctors have an incredibly bad track record of not giving people antibiotics every time their nose runs.
My father had to interview new doctors for a medical group a while ago, and his trick question was "what's the best antibiotic for a cold?" (with the correct answer being "none"), and he had a lot of trouble finding candidates who would give the correct answer (the usual tactic is a z-pack, aka azithromycin, which is vaguely relevant to some bacterial complications of colds and is very commonly given to keep patients happy).
I agree that making antibiotics available without even a doctor's prescription would probably be worse, though.
I have stage 4 prostate cancer and this is one of the reasons why I want to make sure I'm dead before my risk of serious pain gets too high. I dread the idea of having to depend on a doctor to give me sufficient opiates. I assume most doctors aren't stingy for patients in my condition, but my personality simply won't allow me to tolerate such a dependency.
I'm not actually convinced that pentobarbital (or any oral medication method) is superior to other methods. Here in The Netherlands our legal assisted death options are euthanasia (doctor uses IV to inject coma inducing medication followed, after a coma check, by muscle relaxants) and assisted suicide (patient takes oral medication in presence of doctor). When the assisted suicide option is picked, the doctor must also install an IV and have the euthanasia medication on standby because the failure rate is quite high (and sometimes it just takes too long).
I personally think that helium suffocation is a nice way to go and it requires only easily acquired materials (at least here, where you can still easily get pure helium). Here is a fascinating article:
Here (NL) helium is actually much cheaper and very easy to buy due the party balloon usage (I understand in some places they add 20% oxygen, but here they don't yet). Also, there is much more practical experience with helium.
Of course. The fun part is: Most of the people who tend to say "I don’t believe in IQ" do so because IQ-testing showed "Africans" and African-Americans to score lower than "whites" (on average, obviously there is overlap). So IQ-tests got associated with some as being "racist". Those same "some" are often also quick to judge everything they somehow connect with "nazism" as highly suspicious. - That the Nazis - serious hard-core-racists* - also did not like IQ-tests because "Jews"/Jewish Germans showed better results than "true Aryans", goes to show ... oh, well, Marxbro1917, I guess you know now. "In good faith": Knew all along, may we presume? - *"4. Staatsbürger kann nur sein, wer Volksgenosse ist. Volksgenosse kann nur sein, wer deutschen Blutes ist, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf Konfession. Kein Jude kann daher Volksgenosse sein." now, that is racism, real racism, racism-without-the-quotes.
Are you going to call me a Nazi if I tell you that I don't believe that IQ? — or rather, I don't find most of the IQ studies to be very good science. But before we go down the IQ rabbit hole let me just give you fair warning that my graduate work was bio-behavorial sciences, and I'm still passing familiar with this subject.
Before we get into nitty gritty discussion of problems I have with IQ testing, I'd be curious what *your* level of understanding of IQ is. There's a lot of ground to cover, and the way I would approach answering your question depends on how deep you've gone into the subject.
1. Do you believe that some types of IQ tests are better than others at measuring certain types of intelligence?
2. Do you have a preferred type of general IQ test? If so, can you tell me why you think it's superior to others?
3. Do you have an opinion on what percentage of genetics vs environment determines IQ?
4. Do you believe that g is strongly correlated with success in our society?
5. Do you have an opinion on the reliability vs validity of IQ tests for cross national and/or population comparisons?
6. Given that pre-literate societies have strikingly different ways they categorize the world, does one size fit all cultures when it comes to IQ tests? (e.g. would you expect that you could administer a sequence of questions dealing with colors to a pre-literate populatin who don't have words for colors? Would you be able to administer a test with sequences of geometric shapes to a pre-literate population who may have never been exposed to regular geometric shapes?)
Number 6 may seem like a trick question, but your answer will let me understand whether you've given any consideration to how to measure IQ so it isn't culturally biased.
But is it really cultural bias? It seems to me we should give high credence to these populations genuinely being less intelligent, unless you somehow think that intelligence has never been selected for over the past 10,000 years. If you live in a primitive society where writing isn't necessary, why would you expect to have faced the same selection pressures as those in relatively complex societies? Being genuinely less intelligent is precisely what I would expect of this kind of society.
But in any case, people whose ancestry is of pre-literate populations tend to perform worse on IQ tests even after living in developed countries for generations and going to school and becoming literate. Is their culture really still so different after all that?
These people also fare worse in terms of socio-economic outcomes, so it would seem really, really strange that their actual IQ is no lower than anyone else's and we've just been measuring it wrong.
Can we accurately measure the IQ of pre-literate populations? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not. There's no reason to think its as high as other populations, and any environmental explanation you give for why they are primitive and economically undeveloped is one that should be expected to influence the selection pressures they've faced, so a priori we shouldn't expect them to succeed in industrial society and empirically they don't.
As for cultural bias for populations within e.g. the US, there's absolutely zero evidence for it and plenty of evidence against it.
IQ predicts outcomes for e.g. blacks and whites equally well or even slightly overestimates black outcomes. If tests are biased that means the true average black IQ is higher, which means they ought to outperform the estimates from the 'biased' tests.
The rank order difficulty of IQ questions is basically the same for blacks and whites.
Questions deemed to be culturally loaded by experts (e.g. vocabulary) tend to have the smaller black white gaps, whereas less culturally loaded subtests like pattern recognition have the largest gaps.
"It seems to me we should give high credence to these populations genuinely being less intelligent, unless you somehow think that intelligence has never been selected for over the past 10,000 years."
Well yes, in theory civilized societies should be dumber than primitive ones if any selection is happening, as specialisation requires less brains than generalized intelligence (see, for instance, dogs vs wolves).
But since you bring up genetics, my understanding from GWAS studies is that IQ is very polygenic (something like half our genes having an effect) and has next to no large effect genes. Which is entirely consistent with a very broadly-specified trait that has more or less reached the limits of selection and plateaued out.
This, in turn, means that you should expect very little movement in mean under selection over short geological timespans (not much for selection to work on, with fitness being negatively affected by any major deviations), and that differences between populations should be due mainly to differences in environment.
Finally, there's the issue that Africa contains most of our genetic diversity as a species. Meaning that, if you were to somehow raise a test population in an identical environment, you should see most of your genetic differences in intelligence amongst African populations, with Europe and Asia being more or less identical. That the testing we have doesn't show this seems to point to a) flawed testing (again, IQ research carried out on African populations was terrible in quality) and b) environment.
Toxn brought up most of the points that I wanted to, but I'll add a couple more...
What sort of intelligence do you think is being naturally selected for? Spatial? Math? Verbal? There have been a bunch of studies that apes (such as chimps) are faster visual problem solvers than humans. Yes, there may be selective pressure on chimps to be better at visually sorting out the information hidden in the complex visual environment of a forest. Does that make chimps smarter than humans? And if they are, what good does that do them outside of their forest environment?
But what humans can do, that chimps can't do, is work as a group to solve problems (using language to share information). So what's being selected for in situation where group cohesion provides an evolutionary advantage? I would suggest that humans are being selected for as much for traits that promote social cohesion as for traits that promote intelligence. Just as an example, why do smart outspoken kids get picked on in school? It's clear to me that our culture does not reward intelligence as much as it rewards athletic prowess. Likewise, it rewards people with good social manipulation skills — which is why you seldom see scientists as CEOs.
Another point worth mentioning is that the ‘Flynn Effect’ shows that average IQ scores have been steadily increasing world wide across all populations. The change in IQ scores has been approximately three IQ points per decade. An average individual alive today would have an IQ of 130 by the standards of 1910, placing them higher than 98% of the population at that time. Likewise, an average individual alive in 1910 would have an IQ of 70 by today’s standards. If IQ is substantially determined by one's genome, why is this occurring? Could Western civilization be selecting for us to be smarter? Or is it better nutrition and better education? I would suggest that it's the latter, because (a) western civilization is unevenly distributed, and (b) it would take a founder event or a series of founder events to move a genome so quickly in one direction...
Not OP, but I'll take a stab at the questions, since it's a subject I enjoy and I think IQ testing gets a bad rap.
1. Yes. Raven's tends to match *g* closest, but also has one of the most significant Flynn effects. The SAT-math and SAT-verbal performed very well for mathematical and verbal aptitude among young US high schoolers for the Johns Hopkins longitudinal study. So forth.
2. I do not. Any and every half-thought-out test that's not aiming specifically towards achievement (and even achievement tests, to an extent) gives usable information and displays similar rank orders. I like the Wonderlic for fast-and-loose estimates, standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, ASVAB, and LSAT for convenience of most having already taken them, and the more in-depth the better for a formal IQ estimate.
3. Not to be flippant, but my first answer would be that it's 99% genetic, given the impossibility of non-human animals comparing to most humans. Taking it as I believe you mean - IQ variation between humans - I think people have set, and varying, genetic potentials and their environments determine how close they will come to achieving that potential. Within the modern United States specifically, I'd place it at something like 40/60 genes/environment in early childhood moving up to around 80/20 in adulthood, as very rough estimates.
4. Absolutely.
5. Low validity and low reliability for cross-national, cross-cultural comparisons, with caveats I'll get into in response to 6. Within, say, the United States alone, high validity/reliability.
6. Yes and no. The rank order within each culture would stay broadly similar on any given test - that is, the smartest individuals in that culture would score the highest in general. In addition, the test would provide accurate information on how well the individual would be expected to perform in the tasks expected of people in a highly literate, scientifically capable society - that is, their score would be valid and make useful predictions in comparison to a modern individual for many of the pragmatic purposes we care about it. However, it would provide a poor indicator at best of their theoretical genetic potential in those domains, which is ultimately the trait many hope to measure with IQ tests.
Thanks for taking the time to make a thoughtful reply! (I put those questions up there to filter out people who might have opinions but little knowledge to back up their opinions. Rather than an intelligence test, it's a bullshit filter.)
1. Yes, I like Raven's progressive matrices test is because that eliminates most of any cultural biases — at least for modern cultures. I doubt if a hunter gatherer who is unfamiliar regular geometric shapes could do well on it. Remember that from kindergarten on we are taught to recognize circles, squares, triangles. Without understanding on how all squares are similar and without counting skills I suspect a pre-literate would have trouble with these questions. I didn't realize that Flynn Effect is most pronounced in the Raven's matrices! That seems counter-intuitive to me, but, hey! — that's why the subject of intelligence and its putative measurement are so frigging fascinating.
2. Yes, I would agree with you in a modern society achievement tests and standard IQ tests are fairly good indicators of *academic* achievement. But are they actually an accurate measurement of intelligence, or are they actually testing the testee's ability to take tests? Also, please note that people with severe Asperger's syndrome can do quite well on tests that handle pattern sequences and could test 3 or even 4 standard deviations above the norm. But what does that get them in the real world if they have poor language and crappy social skills?
3. Don't forget chimps and gorillas do better than humans on many pattern solving tests. But chimps and gorillas haven't don't have language and culture to provide (a) a memory of past solutions available to others within a group, (b) and the ability to cooperatively solve problems (although there are examples of chimps cooperatively solving problems, there's a level of complexity beyond which language and cultural memory are required).
As for genus Homo, let's not forget that IQs are rising an average of 3 pts per decade worldwide. Why? Probably improved nutrition and better education. Also also, the paper that Markus referenced above quotes studies that education can account for a 22 pt increase in IQ. I'd be curious if the Flynn effect continues through the end of the century or beyond, or whether it's an artifact of better schooling and the longer times that modern kids stay in school. Anyway, the Flynn effect and the positive correlation with education make me favor a stronger environmental component than you seem to favor.
4. I don't believe g is that great an indicator of success in our society. Lewis Terman's long-term study of geniuses showed that they mostly did better financially than average and they mostly ended up being successful in their chosen careers, but none of them won any outstanding prizes (like the Nobel) that we normally associate with genius. None of them made any profound scientific breakthroughs or left their mark on civilization. In fact, there was a study — pre-Internet, so I can't find a link to it — that suggested that being within 1 standard deviation above the median was the sweet spot for financial success. And I think a lot of the modern Nobel laureates in science and medicine didn't test out as genius.
Just anecdotally, my cousin tested out with an absurdly high IQ of around 190 — I recall because her mom never stopped bragging about it (Lol!). However, my cousin didn't attend college. She did a stint in the Army as a non-com. Post military, she's been largely living on welfare. So, her super high IQ didn't take her very far in life. I've seen her solve problems though that leave me stumped with my relatively puny ~135 IQ.
And this is just my own observation, the ability to sweet-talk and bullshit convincingly seems to get one farther up corporate hierarchy than raw smarts. You don't see many PhDs as leaders of capitalist enterprises. Likewise, you don't need to be very smart to be successful in politics. In fact intelligence may be a liability.
5. Highly reliable when using the same test (i.e. reproducible). Somewhat less reliable across when the same individuals are given different tests. As you can see from my comments above, I question the validity. And I also question both the reliability and validity for cross-cultural comparisons.
6. I see culture as being more important for survival than raw intelligence. So I think natural selection favors people who can get along with their social groupings (n= ~250). <Trigger warning: my next sentence may be regarded as extremely controversial.> But I suspect that since we're naturally attuned to our social groups, we have are also attuned to responding to outsiders a potential threats. So I think humans are undergoing selection for behavioral genes that favor behaviors that manifest themselves as racism. This is my opinion. I wouldn't know how to test it.
I would not, and afaik Scott never called any people "Nazi" - except the Austro-German Nationalsozialisten of 1920-1945. Now to the substantial part: Arguably less than 90% is "very good science" in that dept. of science where IQ is a topic. But: It seems to me one could make a fail-safe way to tenure, if only one could do a "very good" study that showed convincingly no ethnic correlation to exist in IQ, even if in the USofA only (obviously after considering socio-economic status). It sure would make me very happy! Your question number 6 should not be an issue - colors and triangles are known to all (non-visually-impaired) American school-kids, I assume.
I think in context that sentence was an obvious joke, making fun of how people tell people who do believe in IQ/genetics stuff that it's discredited Nazi ideology.
I find this whole topic (IQ, genetics, comparisons between countries or "races") terribly uninteresting. The only text I've read entirely is the one from Nassim Taleb. That one is quite offensive but fun.
Do you find racial inequality (arguably the biggest political issue of today) 'uninteresting'?
Fair enough if you do. But if you don't, then finding race/IQ stuff uninteresting is basically you saying 'I'm not interested in reading stuff that contradicts my worldview'.
Because that's the whole reason this stuff gets discussed. It's not some dick measuring contest. If you believe that races are biologically identical as it pertains to traits that influence socio-economic outcomes, then you either have to blame culture or blame racism for this gap. But believing that races are biologically identical in this way is increasingly indefensible from a scientific perspective. And so this race/IQ stuff can be thought of as a kind of self-defense for white people from the political bludgeon of 'anti-racism'.
That's exactly why the joke works, though! The point of the joke is that Scott's position is popularly criticised as being Nazi-adjacent, so here's some evidence why the *opposing* position is actually the Nazi-adjacent one *after all*. If Scott were just randomly saying "here's how you can brand your opponents as Nazis" without that context, it wouldn't be a joke.
The evidence is real, if a little tenuous. Scott's recommendation on how to behave based on it is a joke. (But, based on your commenting history, it sounds as though you don't understand jokes in general, so I'm not going to try to explain further.)
I mean, I'm in the 98th percentile and I rate it a 6.5/10: Better than the most recent chapelle hour, but worse than the most recent bill burr interview.
I think MarxBro is spot on about this. There are plenty of legitimate researchers who have issues with IQ studies. Accusing them of promulgating Nazi ideology is an ad hominem attack on them. Full disclosure: I'd be just as uncomfortable with Leftie ideologues accusing researchers into the relationship between genetics and IQ of being a Nazis. And this is one of those subjects that's theres a lot of ignorant people latching onto it for political reasons. Yes, I find it interesting that the Nazis were anti-IQ testing. But "joking" about it doesn't get us past our intellectual prejudices.
No one is being accused of being a Nazi. Scott is lampooning those that do accuse people of being Nazis for doing IQ research. The joke is on the accusers not the accused.
No one is being accused of being a Nazi, but the implication is that we should accuse people who "don't believe in IQ" of perpetrating Nazi ideology. So, Scott is encouraging people to make ad hominem attacks on the anti-IQ folks. I'm pretty far to the left, and I hate it when people from my side of the political spectrum call people Nazi's for not being in 100% agreement with certain core lefty beliefs. While I think a lot of IQ research is of questionable quality (and I find it of questionable value), I would never call said researcher a Nazi unless they invoked IQ to prove the superiority of "whites" and make them out to be the "master" race. For instance, Andrew Sullivan gets called a Nazi a lot for his belief that IQ determines the better economic performance of whites against blacks. I don't think he's being overtly racist (but I'm not an African American, so I can't speak for what they'd consider to be racist), but I do think he's misinformed and obstinately foolish in many of his assertions.
Scott is clearly not saying anybody actually IS siding with the nazis. He's highlighting the gap between perception and reality.
In contrast, accusing race/IQ researchers & their supporters of being nazis is extremely common and it is believed genuinely. And bizarrely we never find 'good faith' people like maxbro telling them they oughtn't do this.
Have you considered that this was not a serious recommendation but really a way of highlighting the fact that nazi-accusers are in fact more aligned with nazis on this particular issue.
The point is not that they're an outgroup but that they're bad-faith people who sincerely wish to convince others that accepting certain scientific facts in literally akin to nazism. Scott is not implying anyone is actually a nazi and its not even clear that he's actually instructing people to call people nazis even as a joke. The fact that Scott's comment almost assuredly has gotten you more worked up than you do over people making sincere attempts to portray people who talk about intelligence research as nazis is absolutely mind-boggling.
Rural vs urban is usually downstream from economic development. If one area is becoming more prosperous and another area is not, you expect the former area to urbanize faster than the latter, just because people normally move to opportunity, and have more children when there is more opportunity.
The problem was that a lot of detailed data relevant to development wasn't available in a way corresponding to the boundaries of the states. They report previous work which used such data as were available at that level of geographic detail then use light observable from satellites because it can be fitted to the boundaries of the states in British India.
I'm not sure that was ever true. I'm pretty sure even in the industrial age cities were population sinks. And I'm guessing that holds true for before that too.
The other bit is that per-day-overdue fines tend to result in people just not returning a book at all if it is very late. Because libraries almost never pursue library fines, but just charge the fine when you return the book and will deny you the ability to keep borrowing books until you pay the fine, it's often better to keep the book than return it. Exactly the opposite of the intended incentive.
I would feel an urgent need to get the book back, even if it was only nickels or dimes accumulating, because it was something bad accumulating.
Now I feel *kind of* bad, but not so bad that I'll take a trip to the library to drop them off, and just let them sit around for a while.
I can renew them online from the app. And I can't renew if someone is waiting for it. If someone was really waiting for the book, I'd probably feel an urge to immediately return it.
That’s basically the same situation like in a daycare center which started to collect fines for late child pickups. The result? The rate of late pickups increased. Picking the child late stopped being a shameful thing to do, causing the poor worker to wait for you, it started being a normal paid service you could use every time you wanted. https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what-they-do/
In theory it could still be a mutually beneficial policy change. Presumably there is some (exponentially increasing) rate at which the daycare workers would be happy to stay late. And occasionally there may be situations in which the parents are happy to pay those rates to handle some unusual occurrence. I guess the problem is that you lose economy of scale when the worker is only watching one kid, so if the business set the rates high enough to compensate the workers, they might risk offending potential customers, for the same reason that people are much more offended by "I'll sell you this toilet paper for $10 a roll" than by "I don't have any toilet paper for sale".
I guess for that to really work universally, you’d need to factor in the wealth of the person (which would probably not be legal, I think), otherwise rich parents would let kids stay long overtime while poor parents would be unable to extend a few minutes.
This seems like it's just saying "rich people can afford to spend more hiring people to watch their kids" which is not a feature unique to this system of fines.
Daycare workers also want to finish on time so they can close up and go pick up *their* kids from childminders, etc. Parents coming late means the workers are in turn late collecting their kids, and it just ripples out in inconvenience and cost.
It's not the phonetic values of the Egyptian hieroglyphs that is important, but their meaning. For example, the letter B is a hieroglyph that represents a house. "House" in proto-Semitic (*not* in Egyptian) is [betu], which starts with the sound [b].
What seem to have happened is that a people who spoke a Semitic language and that had been enslaved and brought to Egypt used the Egyptian symbols to create letters whose values (the associated sounds) where the first sounds of the words in their language. This is called the acrophonic principle.
Hence, A is an Egyptian symbol representing the head of a ox (proto-semitic alepu > Hebrew aleph > Greek alpha > A). The first sound in proto-semitic is a glottal stop. The Greeks didn't hear that sound and made it a vowel.
B is house, proto-semitic betu, then beth, greek beta.
C is staff-sling, semitic gimmu, then gimmel, Greek gamma.
D is door, ..., delta, ...
E is jubilation (the letter was rotated, it looks like two arms around a head yelling "yeah!!!")
F is really the same letter as upsilon, Y, also U and V. A lot to says here.
G was added by the Romans based on C
H is fence (rotated).
I is arm
J is based on I (middle ages) to differentiate vowel use and consonant use.
K is hand
L is goad.
M is water
N is snake
O is eye
P and Q, I don't know.
R is head. The south-east stroke was added later to differentiate from P.
S is teeth (rotated and twisted, sigma is closer to the original)
T is cross
U, V, W, Y (and F) all come from Y, a long stick with a loop to catch animals.
Oh sure, the details are just for fun. I was just adding a remark to "Egyptian hieroglyphs ... have symbols with phonetic values." That is true, of course, but it is the phonetic values in *another* language (a semitic one) that are relevant here.
No, the remark that written Egyptian uses symbols with phonetic values is present to disprove the claim from the Twitter thread that the concept of an alphabet was only ever developed once.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are saying. Egyptian is not an alphabet (or an abjad).
I may have misinterpreted the original remark, but it seemed very clear to me: Phoenician is an abjad (i.e. lacks vowels), using symbols that were originally Egyptian hieroglyphs. There was an ambiguity in Machine Interface's wording as to whether the Phoenician system uses the phonetic values of those hieroglyphs or the semantic values, and I clarified (or not) that it is the semantic value of the hieroglyph that is used to identify the phonetic value of the letter based on how the corresponding word is pronounced in Semitic. (Which implies that the first alphabet/abjad wasn't invented by the Egyptians but by other people who could read Egyptian hieroglyphs but spoke a Semitic language, most likely slaves.) The Phoenician alphabet/abjad is just the eventual evolution of that original alphabet/abjad.
Phoenician is Semitic, so the lack of vowels isn't an issue. On the other hand, when the Greek came in contact with that alphabet/abjad they had to modify it to fit their language (hence inventing the first "true" alphabet). They kept similar sounding names for many letters (alpha, beta,...), and Greek names for modified ones (omega = big O; omicron = small O; epsilon = simple E; etc.), or no names at all for newly invented ones (psi, phi, etc.).
Egyptian writing frequently uses signs purely for phonetic value. It is not restricted to using them this way, but the concept is already there; the system *contains* an abjad within itself. The concept is not exclusive to, or original to, Phoenician writing or its derivatives.
> Phoenician is Semitic, so the lack of vowels isn't an issue.
That's not true. Ask the people who came up with vowel points for Hebrew. Phoenician lacks vowels by coincidence, not because the lack is somehow less of a problem than it would be in other languages.
I'd find it more interesting to try to make it systematically impossible to just try inverting a utility function for a laugh, like that, as the inversion of a beneficial utility function is one of the precursors to the literal worst thing that could ever happen.
It does also do that. Every example I put in results in a list of innocent outcomes, with a few examples or two of horrible outcomes it wouldn't choose because it knows those are bad. So it does seem to be learning how to do both.
Does the high prevalence of autism in first-born explain the "increase in autism"? If everybody used to have 4 kids the autism rate would have been lower than now where people stop at 1 or 2.
According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4207295/, the percentage of kids who are first-children (or only children) is about 40% (in England and Wales, as of 2010). If everybody used to have four kids, the percentage of kids who are first-children would be 25%, so we would expect an increase of 60% cases of autism over preindustrial. That would obviously be a significant increase, but it's nowhere near the "increase in autism" (which this WebMD article places at 1/2000 to 1/152, or a 1300% increase). So this might explain some, but it definitely wouldn't explain all. For it to explain all, we'd need the average preindustrial woman to have 32 children, which seems a bit far-fetched to say the least!
Any links off-hand about the expected increase due to better detection or less sensitive, or otherwise different diagnostic criteria?
For some topics, it'd be nice to have a running score card like:
- 60% genetic
- 20% family/socialization/etc.
- 10% something something
- 5% maybe X?
- 5% who knows
But I wonder what the evidence is for the prevalence of autism in first-born children – has that been stable for as long as we've been measuring any of this?
The high infant mortality rate means many of the literal firstborn children would be dead, and the eldest child would often not be the firstborn child.
So the % of firstborn children could be dramatically lower than 25%.
I expect firstborn children would also have an even higher infant mortality rate given there'd be some gruesome learning curve with infant mortality being expected and little parental learning resources available at the time.
That would mean an even lower % of firstborn children, though not necessarily the 3% required to full explain the increase.
I wouldn't expect the learning curve to be an issue. People used to live within shouting distance of older relatives, so the new parents didn't take care of the child all by themselves.
That certainly would reduce the issue, but I still think inexperience would lead to worse outcomes, and with a high infant mortality rate by default that means fewer firstborns surviving.
Mind it's possible new parents have lower mortality rates like new doctors do, but it was my understanding that this was a result of new doctors being more up-to-date on the latest research, so the effect wouldn't fit for new parents relying on generational knowledge.
Extremely speculative: I know rates of homosexuality go up with each child born to the same mother, and it's theorized that this is due to increasing rates of estrogen exposure in the womb. Autism has been characterized as a 'hyper-masculinization' of the brain. Could it be that higher fetal testosterone exposure explains the trend in firstborns?
Reading the article, it's that first-borns have higher rate of autism *spectrum* (what used to be called Asperger's Syndrome) and it's the second-born who have the higher risk of 'classical' autism, so that doesn't seem likely.
Agreed. But I'm disappointed that fetal exposure to hormones isn't discussed more often, especially as it sort of strides the nature vs. nurture debate.
Not exactly the same question, but given the correlation between birth order and IQ, I've previously wondered if the Flynn effect is caused by the reduction in family size.
There's a legend (?) about the clock numerals where a clock maker was hanged or something for erroneously putting IIII instead of the correct IV on a clock. Since that day, all clock makers use the wrong version on purpose, as a form of protest.
That would be a hell of a hill to literally die on.
Clocks that used IIII were easier to make. A clock that uses IIII has four Vs, four Xs, and twenty Is. You get a mold that makes a V, an X, and five Is, and you use the mold four times. On the other hand, if you use IV, then you need five Vs, four Xs, and seventeen Is.
It's just a legend of course, but it might have a grain of truth. Your explanation makes a lot of sense, but someone might still perceive the resulting clock as lacking craftsmanship, and the clock makers would then be offended by their clever method not being appreciated.
It can't have much of a grain of truth, since there was never a point at which IIII was incorrect.
Just reading examples out of Wikipedia, the Roman 22nd legion represented itself as leg. IIXX, the 18th legion represented itself as leg. XIIX, Gate 44 to the Colosseum is labeled XLIIII, Pliny the Elder wrote the number 490 as CCCCLXXXX...
> 6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
So on the one hand, this shouldn't be too surprising. *Of course* an anti-intellectual movement like the Nazis would be against IQ research. On the other hand, despite that, I'd somehow never made this connection before, that of course the Nazis would be against IQ research...
I wonder if it had already been noticed in the 1930s that the median IQ for Ashkenazi Jews ~15 points higher than the median for non-Ashkenazi Europeans?
I don't know if they had quantified the issue, but the Nazis were aware. In the Sassen interviews Adolf Eichmann said in 1957 (my clumsy translation): "We would have completed our task for our blood and our people and for the freedom of peoples if we had destroyed the sharpest intellect among the human minds of today. For that is what I told Streicher, what I've always preached: we fight an enemy who is intellectually superior to us due to many many thousands years of training."
Yes, in the sense that an overrepresentation had been documented, not necessarily exactly quantifying it at 10 points or whatever; this was found in American samples by (at least) Terman, Hollingsworth, and Byrns in the 1920s-1930s. (I'm less familiar with what any early European research might've found, so no cites there offhand.)
At the time, the main research on intelligence in Jews was by English eugenicists (http://m.nautil.us/issue/92/frontiers/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics), who found Jews to be *less* intelligent. This was very convenient for Spearman, who was a committed advocate against accepting Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
> The statistical argument was a one-two punch: by examining a large number of Jewish immigrant children for various physical characteristics, combined with surveys of the conditions of their home lives and intelligence assessments provided by their teachers, Pearson claimed to establish (1) that the children (especially girls) were on average less intelligent than their non-Jewish counterparts, and (2) their intelligence was not significantly correlated with any environmental factor that could be improved, such as health, cleanliness, or nutrition. As Pearson concluded, “We have at present no evidence at all that environment without selection is capable of producing any direct and sensible influence on intelligence; and the argument of the present paper is that into a crowded country only the superior stocks should be allowed entrance, not the inferior stocks in the hope—unjustified by any statistical inquiry—that they will rise to the average native level by living in a new atmosphere.”
Clarion Hogg is indeed confusing Charles Spearman with Karl Pearson. The linked Nautilus article and the claims about Jews are about Pearson; Spearman is not mentioned in the article.
Pearson was one of the founders of statistics, the inventor of regression analysis among other things. Spearman, on the other hand, was a pioneering intelligence researcher and the inventor of factor analysis. Pearson was not an intelligence researcher.
AFAIK, Spearman wrote very little on racial or ethnic differences in intelligence and nothing on Jews,. The exception to this is an offhand remark of his in "The Abilities of Man" that later became known as "Spearman's hypothesis" and is an important tenet of contemporary HBD thinking.
"Anyway, that's why people who think Steve Sailer sucks are the *real* racists"
Uncited, unsupported, with no acknowledgement of the long and varied racist pasts of modern HBD advocates. Or, indeed, of the fact that Ashkenazim didn't start showing up among the elite *until everyone stopped being super racist to them*.
Y'all really are one step short of "the Nazis would have loved SJWs" around here, huh.
Had to look up Steve Sailer. And it did mean human biodiversity! Sounds like he misappropriated the term! We used the term human biodiversity in Human Biology as a shorthand for genomic variation within and among different populations (and many people don't realize that Eurasian populations went through a bottleneck at some point that reduced those populations' genomic diversity substantially. If I recall correctly, intra and inter population diversity in Africa is greater than between Europeans and Asians. And the Khoi San peoples are the most genomically diverse of any group. Not sure how Steve Sailer can feel superior coming from an inbred population. Lol! <queue "Dueling Banjos">
Not sure how he or others misappropriated the term when genomic variation between populations is what it is used to refer to.
And your last sentence seems to be begging the question, as well as attacking an alleged and uncharitable motive. The inbreeding jab also seems scientifically questionable, because speciation requires inbreeding and it is far from obvious that that greater genomic variation is always better, when it is very far from what we usually call inbreeding. Ironically, your use of the term inbreeding in a completely different way to which it is normally used seems like an actual misappropriation of the term.
Populations which with high levels of endogamy, either due to geographic isolation (Icelanders) or cultural isolation (Ashkenazi), have a greater expression of recessive genes that can cause cause serious health problems. I'm not sure why you think it's "far from obvious that greater genomic variation is always better." What are your sources for that statement? Or is this just your opinion?
Some, including our host, believe that the Ashkenazi have rather high IQs due to the same endogamy that resulted in certain recessive genes. Some Ashkenazi's already use genetic testing to do mate selection, or to discard unhealthy embryo's with abortions or IVF, to prevent Tay–Sachs. Yet we are not able to increase genetic IQ. So it is not even obvious that they are worse off, if they indeed have both this upside and this downside. After all, high IQ seems immensely valuable in modern society.
And if we compare Europeans or Asians to Africans, then the difference in the level of endogamy is way less significant anyway than when comparing Icelanders to Europeans or such, far below the level where Europeans are significant less at risk of serious disease (sickle cell, anyone?). In fact, Asians from certain regions have the longest lifespans.
Ultimately, there are costs to diversity, genetic or otherwise, especially in modern society where a lot of things are standardized, mass produced or otherwise not very tailored to the individual. For example, it's extremely inconvenient if you are extremely tall or short, or have uncommon proportions.
I would argue that at a certain point, the benefit of more genetic diversity become very small, so the higher (potential) costs of greater genetic diversity can easily outweigh it, but even more importantly, other factors are so much more significant that it seems rather silly to focus on it, even if there is an actual advantage. It would also be silly for a person with 10 million dollars to call a person with 9.9 million dollars poor.
He joins in in the comments section here fairly often. And for what it's worth, his use of HBD seems to be exactly what you describe; he just has a particular focus on group differences in behavioural traits. Plus, while it does seem to be the case that small African groups like the Khoisan, Pygmies and Hadza contribute an outsize portion of humanity's genetic diversity, I'm given to understand that the ancestors of todays African Americans are mostly from a relatively small area of West Africa, and thus for practical purposes, African Americans are a lot more genetically homogenous than Africans-as-a-whole within Africa.
The jews were overrepresented in high level positions in society in pre-nazi Germany though (which was very anti-semitic). The nazi's rhetoric only worked precisely *because* there were so many successful jews. The nazis claimed they attained such levels of success because of, essentially, "jewish trickery". And this is why things like IQ were anthemic to the nazis, it demonstrated a biological basis to their success that couldn't be considered unjust like the way nazi explanations could.
Can I ask, where on earth is the evidence that nazis supported IQ? It's clowns like you that call people nazis for discussing intelligence research, so the burden of proof is on YOU.
If you're trying to argue that nazis would believe that its unjust for genetically gifted people to be more successful then, gee, I don't know what to tell you.
As I understand it, Nazis believed in Aryan superiority in a way that implied they *ought* to win, and if they didn't win, it was because someone was cheating. Or at least needed to be stopped by whatever means necessary.
I am entirely arguing that. They would say that the traits that lead to success in modern society are not necessarily those that we should consider desirable.
Hard, no. Creepy, yes. They'd get a pile of bad press for that, I'd be immensely weirded out by a dating app that creates a "profile" for me even if I don't use it, that has emerged as one of the cardinal sins an internet data company can commit in terms of collection. Vindictive monogamists would find a way to say it facilitates cheating, because you are encouraging others to think of their girlfriend as "on the market" even though (he thinks) she isn't.
A very easy way to figure out the intransitive dice problem is by looking quickly counting total combinations of dice.
So here:
A: 1, 4, 7, 7
B: 2, 6, 6, 6
C: 3, 5, 5 ,8
You know that for example I can roll 8 on C, then against A there are 4 possible outcomes, 1, 4, 7, 7. So this goes for all for possible rolls on C. So 4*4 = 16 total combo's.
Then you quickly count the number of outcomes you would win against. So 8 wins 4 times, 5 wins twice, another 5 wins twice again and 3 wins once. Which is 9/16, which is >50% so C beats A.
Gates suspicion was aroused because he probably knows some game theory, and generally it is an advantage to be able to pick last because you have more info. But here Gates was allowed to pick last, so that is what prompted him to examine the dice up close. And then it is just a matter of counting combinations, which can be done rather quickly. Unless it was 16 sided dies that Buffett used, but I doubt it. In that case the impressive part is counting and keeping track in his head of the number of winning combo's.
Honestly probability becomes a lot easier when you reframe it as counting combinations. Bayes theorem for example is very intuitive once you visualize it as a combination counting game.
"Unless it was 16 sided dies that Buffett used, but I doubt it."
I also doubt that, because that's a strangely shaped die. Did you mean 6 sided dice? With 6 sided dice you need to consider 36 combinations instead of the 16 in your example, but I bet Bill Gates could handle it.
The whole point of this game is that there is no best die; they have a rock-paper-scissors relationship. You want to go second so you can pick whatever die beats your opponent's pick.
It'd be natural to feel some suspicion about playing a game that feels like a bar bet. Then the numbers on the dice turn out to be weird. "No, you first" is a pretty general-purpose counter, as you note. Maybe Gates figured it all out at once, but I don't think he really had to.
This. Being suspicious when someone proposes betting on something weird you've not seen before is perfectly natural and it doesn't require figuring out precisely what their game is to assume there's a trick
The easiest way is to put the numbers on each dice in side order from highest to lowest:
A: 7, 7, 4, 1
B: 6, 6, 6, 2
C: 8, 5, 5, 3
Then go through each face in A and see how many sides it beats in B, sum that total, and divide by N^2 where N is the number of sides on each die. Repeat the process for B vs. C and A vs. C.
A vs. B: (4 + 4 + 1 + 0)/(4^2) = 9/16 > 1/2
B vs. C: (3 + 3 + 3 + 0)/(4^2) = 9/16 > 1/2
A vs. C: (3 + 3 + 1 + 0)/(4^2) = 8/16 = 1/2
An even more fun puzzle is figuring out a procedure for creating intransitive dice with N sides.
A has an advantage over B, B over C, and C over A. The advantages are not quite symmetrical, though: A vs. B and B. vs. C both give a 36/64 chance to win; C vs. A gives a 35/64 chance.
I’m very excited to see Wave covered here! I think Scott’s summary in the post is a bit misleading though — the remittance arm is an app called Sendwave, while the Wave app is focused exclusively on mobile money. Previously they were both run by the same company that Lincoln founded, but Sendwave was recently acquired by WorldRemit and they’re now two separate companies (I work on the engineering team at Sendwave).
Hmm, interesting question. Most people at Wave are not particularly excited about crypto - I think it's a "solution in search of a problem"; there's something interesting going on with smart contracts but I am not super bullish on cryptocurrency as a means of exchange. And our product is all about means of exchange. Still, I can't rule it out - who knows :)
I don't really understand cbdc very well, so I don't have much to say about that.
I think there's no magic, other than the obvious, way you get the best people: by having a great mission and doing excellent work. People want purpose and they want to be surrounded by excellent colleagues. The best people can pick and choose their team.
Wave is currently not using any SIM or smart card technology. We're just a smartphone app. Some competitors use that tech though, and I have investigated it, but I think that stuff was mostly last decade.
The paper about India seems a bit questionable. My prior on believing the claim in the abstract is reasonably high, as I tend to think local rule (even if by dictators) should work out better than rule by remote dictators. But then reading it my belief is dragged down by several things:
1. The Cato.org summary announces that it's a study of British colonial rule. In fact it's not, even though it's presented that way. The paper concludes that British colonial rule wasn't what made the difference, it was actually the system of landlord based revenue collection (which happened to be implemented in some but not all British controlled districts). The actual conclusion would seem to be about the best way to raise taxes, but it's been spun as a factual claim about colonialism. I find this somehow not surprising and it reinforces my prior belief that academia is keen on warping research to achieve ideological ends.
2. They note that the British preferred to annex areas with high agricultural productivity, i.e. farmland. Farmland would obviously have less light visible from space. This poses a problem for them, which they are well aware of.
3. They try to correct for this using a statistical model, with some obvious corrections e.g. "luminosity per capita" and some not so obvious like area of each district, which they claim will control for the fact that cities naturally throw more light into space due to density.
The attempt to link "visibility of light from space in 1993" with "the impact of British colonial rule" is very indirect, and therefore relies very heavily on the integrity of the statistical modelling and the way they controlled for various confounders, along with an ambient assumption that their corrections did actually correct for the giant honking confounder they identify at the start. But this is exactly the sort of research that frequently turns out to be bogus or misleading, all the time.
In the end, I think this paper will be just one more ideological Rorschach test - if you're aligned with the sort of ideology found in academia, then this will be taken as a strong and rigorous analysis piling up irrefutable evidence for the evils of all things British/"stale white men". If you're not then you'll consider the analysis to be brittle, quite possibly meaningless and it won't change your views of the Raj much if at all.
Regarding number 2, I'd expect the brightest light to come from cities, and cities tend to be built near good farmland. As the city expands, it's built on what was recently good farmland.
I'm saying I'd expect the correlation to go the other way. Lousy farmland stays lousy and undeveloped with no cities nearby. Good farmland becomes more developed, spawns cities, and the cities grow to cover some of the good farmland.
The biggest cities are usually located near bodies of water, rather than just being uniformly spread around fertile areas. Farmland is famous for being dominated by villages rather than cities. Is India an exception?
Does the best farmland spawn larger cities near it? It seems the opposite is true, at least since the railroad and shipping allowed movement of grains long distances. Just off the top of my head, the US midwest farm belt has many excellent farming areas, and very few large cities compared to the coasts. Modern cities tend to focus on mercantile and industrial centers, not agricultural production centers.
Pre-shipping it might have been true that big cities were naturally right next to, or on top of, the best farmlands, but that was a long time before the relevant period of British rule.
Cities grow where trade is plentiful. This is why they're so often located on waterways and coasts. Your intuition about farmland in the US is mirrored by the fertile farmland of the Ukraine in Eastern Europe. Lots of great farms, but not lots of big cities.
The small town that my father grew up in was actually constrained in growth by being surrounded by high-quality farmland; the local farmers had no real interest in being bought out to allow expansion of the town.
I think you've got that backwards; (large) cities spawn good farmland. If you look at e.g. the best farmland in the United States, it's all in the midwest with mostly small cities that people have barely heard of. And one world-class city that by no coincidence at all is where the Mississippi river system comes close enough to the Great Lakes to be connected by a day's portage or later a simple canal.
Any large city absolutely needs good transport routes; even with the best farmland ever, you're not feeding a hundred thousand people with grain delivered by horse-drawn wagon. But, *given* a large city at e.g. a convenient river port, you put a lot of effort into developing what farmland you've got within a day's wagon ride, irrigating and terracing and fertilizing and whatnot, for the sake of getting the perishable foods that won't tolerate a week on a riverboat.
> The paper concludes that British colonial rule wasn't what made the difference, it was actually the system of landlord based revenue collection (which happened to be implemented in some but not all British controlled districts).
Was the same system implemented in mainland Britain?
If it wasn't, there's a decent argument to be made that "leftovers from a crappy tax system put in place by colonial overlords" is a decent proxy for "leftovers from colonization".
If true, that's still quite a stretch to say "colonization" when it's both more specific than that and not necessarily tied to colonialism. If colonialism were the cause, we would expect to see the same results in all or at least most colonies. If it were a sub-cause, we would know to limit the criteria to those that had this crappy tax system instead.
To determine of colonialism itself were to blame, we would have to measure how many colonies ended up with crappy tax systems which caused a lack of growth. Adding that additional layer of abstraction to the type of study, which apparently had major known confounders, creates a situation where the results are even less trustworthy.
Absent any specific knowledge of the issue, it seems just as plausible a hypothesis that the crappy tax system was the pre-existing local one and the effective tax system the imported one, since it's not uncommon for colonial rule to minimise changes that might piss off local power-brokers. I'm curious to know the actual details too but knowing that the system differs from that in Britain doesn't actually tell you what you want to know
They have another test of whether the effect is due to selection bias by the British. If a ruler died without an immediate male heir, the British normally too over direct rule. That looks like a pretty random event, and they ran their calculations using those British ruled states and got the same qualitative result.
Normally, in this case, turns out to mean 60% of the time, and this policy was only in effect for 8 years, and only 15 districts were affected by it. The opening of the paper doesn't really make that clear and in particular, the way it's used in the argument strongly implies the British did this 100% of the time ("automatically"), which they later admit isn't true.
Re point 1: The paper looks at direct vs. indirect rule, as well as landlord based taxation vs. other taxation methods. This results in four groups of districts:
1. Directly ruled, landlord based taxation.
2. Directly ruled, non-landlord based taxation.
3. Indirectly ruled, landlord based taxation.
4. Indirectly ruled, non-landlord based taxation.
They found that districts in group 1 did worst economically. Group 2 did much better than group 1, but that doesn't mean that landlord based taxation is the problem, because group 3 did a bit better than group 2 despite having landlord based taxation. The difference between group 3 and group 4 was too small to be statistically significant.
The authors correctly conclude that directly rule is bad for economic development because groups 1 and 2 are both worse than groups 3 and 4. They do not conclude that landlord based taxation is inherently bad because their data doesn't indicate that it had a negative effect on districts that weren't directly ruled. Instead, they reach the conclusion that their data supports, namely that “a large part of the difference in overall development between directly and indirectly ruled districts is driven by the poor performance of directly ruled landlord districts.” [pg. 22]
Point 3 may indicate a conceptual confusion that I will address before turning to point 2. China has a much larger GDP than Germany, but we do not say that China has a more advanced economy than Germany. Instead, we divide the GDP of each country by the population of each country, and conclude that Germany, which has a much higher GDP per capita than China, has the more advanced economy. The paper's authors divide the total luminosity for each district by the population of the district (page 8) because any statistic used to measure how advanced an economy is has to be a per capita number. You can argue about whether nighttime luminosity, or GDP for that matter, is a good measure to use to quantify how advanced an economy is, but in either case you have to divide by the population size.
Re point 2: It's not obvious to me that farmland has less light visible from space, relative to the amount of economic output, than other land.
That said, the authors are indeed aware that the preference for areas with higher agricultural productivity poses a problem. They compare the results from the full sample with a subsample where the decisions to place a district under direct rule were more random (due to the <em>Doctrine of Lapse</em>) and conclude that the results from the full sample likely underestimate the negative effects of direct rule. [page 16]
Returning to point 3: The main claim here seems to be that luminosity data is not a good measure of economic development. The authors cite a bunch of other papers to justify their use of luminosity data. I'm not interested enough in the subject to read these papers, so I will simply fall back on my default presumption that academics are likely to be right about which tools in their discipline are reliable and which aren't.
In any case, the authors do perform an analysis using consumption per capita rather than luminosity per capita, and get similar results (page 29). Their data source only includes rural districts, but there is no obvious reason to expect a different result for urban districts.
The authors of the study have, in my view, done a thorough job of conducting various tests to ensure that their analysis is not “brittle.” Mike H points to the fact that the decision of whether a district is under direct rule is not random, and the authors have done an analysis to address that (two if you count the paired district analysis). Mike H questions the use of luminosity data; the authors have done an analysis using consumption data instead. If Mike H considers this analysis “brittle,” I think that to be consistent he would have to say the same thing about pretty much any study based on a natural experiment.
I think the overall source of disagreement here is at a higher level than specific variables in their model.
Firstly, as you note, the difference between "direct rule, non-landlord taxation" and "indirect rule {both}" is quite small. Thus any effect they claim to be finding in direct rule specifically is quite small, yet the headline is "Impact of Colonial Institutions on Economic Growth and Development in India". Big conclusions from small effects via fancy statistics in academia is not a good combination, historically.
Secondly, the 'doctrine of lapse' argument is ultimately built on just 15 districts, because that doctrine only lasted 8 years. Additionally, although this isn't mentioned until page 18, only 60% of such lapsed states were actually annexed, implying a large degree of choice in the matter - the initial presentation of the lapse argument implies it was 100% How meaningful can such conclusions be when there's so little data?
And finally, point three was not a pick at the specific construction of the model they used. There is no confusion about GDP vs GDP per capita. My point is that I do not trust academic conclusions about large groups of people made using statistical models, period. The level of trustworthiness of scientific research based on these techniques has proven repeatedly to just be too low for me.
I feel like there are so many red flags in this sort of paper that point to brittleness (e.g. "To tackle the endogeneity of human capital, they use the historical location of Catholic missionaries in India in 1911 as an instrument for present-day human capital accumulation"?!), but I accept that a lot of this depends on your priors about academic research - yours are obviously very positive because you're willing to assume that academics are right about the reliability of their tools by default, whereas, based on what I've seen, my presumption is that by default they're probably not. Certainly they certainly won't hesitate to publish a paper filled with implausible assumptions that can only be found buried in Appendix 2 on page 45. As a result, yes, I think an awful lot of results presented as the results of this sort of "natural experiment" are likely incorrect (this paper isn't doing an experiment at all!), and thus very complicated and indirect inferences based on dubious datasets can just be discarded without checking them very deeply. It's a heuristic but a useful one.
// Farmland would obviously have less light visible from space
Not just that. British did not annex Russian or USA's agricultural south districts, but they still lagged behind. Because 20th century was century of INDUSTRIAL growth.
On nationalism vs patriotism. Patriotism is superficially morally superior because it is inwardly focused and defensive, whereas nationalism is fixated on the other and expansionist. But I think there's a deeper reason patriotism is morally superior.
Why have differences in culture, language, country, at all except as an artifact of history? Wouldn't we be better off all uniting?
Plurality of culture, language, and country is a safety factor in civilization. This redundancy insulates groups of people from pathologies that afflict other groups of people.
Consider a universal human culture, language, and country. How long would it take to heal if some bad influence such as corruption or ideology took hold? I think it would take longer to heal than if there were an alternative group of people behaving differently in parallel.
Patriotism is good because it preserves diversity and plurality. Nationalism is bad because it erodes diversity and plurality by conquest, negating the positives of the particular vs the universal.
Certain word pairs are like that. Confidence/Arrogance, Patriotism/Nationalism, Religion/Superstition, Chaste/Frigid. The negative word in the pairing doesn't indicate. A difference in kind, merely that the speaker believes that the position taken is unjustified. Confident and arrogant actions are entirely determined by what you think of the person doing them, the line between Religion and Superstition is determined by what you think the appropriate amount of faith and religious devotion is.
So it is (mildly) Patriotic to think that the United States should continue to control Maine, it is (widely considered) Nationalistic to think that Hungary should control the Crown Lands of St. Stephen.
"nationalism is fixated on the other and expansionist"
That's imperialism. Is Scottish or Catalonian nationalism expansionist for example?
"Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state.[1][2] As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people),[3] especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity[4] and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power (popular sovereignty).[3][5] " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism
Without endorsing your definition of nationalism and patriotism, I agree that a plurality of cultures has advantages. I would think first of freedom of choice--surely it's better to have a variety of nations for each person or family to choose from, as we theoretically do in the US. I say "surely", but about half of Americans disagree strongly with me, and believe the federal government should forcibly resolve all moral disputes. This is partly because of slavery. I think that's a bogus justification, because the slaves weren't free to leave for another state that didn't have slavery. But people also believe that because of Plato and Aristotle's essentialism, which implies that there is exactly one right culture and way of life, which is right for everyone, and all other ways of living are wrong for everyone. This has filtered down to us through Christianity, Sir Thomas More, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and other writers.
Next I'd think of evolution, island biogeography, premature convergence in evolution, and cultural diversity. Island biogeography shows that the same land area evolves more species if you fence it off into smaller pieces with limited travel between them. We see a similar effect in cultural evolution; a nation develops a wider variety of music, restaurants, dialects, etc., when transportation and duplication is difficult and expensive.
Premature convergence is the surprising phenomenon that having too much contact between evolving sub-populations can cause evolution to cease entirely, because the sweet spot for mutation rate, where it's high enough to escape local maxima, but small enough not to randomize the genome over time, can vanish.
Regarding #3: "So why did the well-intentioned NHCE fail? Dudden blames the bust on its refusal to acknowledge race, its failure to unionize workers, and language that alienated employers while failing to appeal to domestic workers themselves."
So their failure wasn't related to changing economic circumstances, nor the general public-choice-style failure of government commissions to achieve their goals, but just to topics of interest to left-wing academics?
Without looking, I predict Dudden is an historian of some type, or perhaps in a field like "Women's studies", rather than an economist.
I think you should be unsurprised by Bill Gates figuring out intransitive dice: "Warren Buffet wants to use these totally bizarre dice to play a game with me" is a scenario weird enough that your prior should be on some kind of shenanigans. From there it seems obvious to check whether the weird numbering of the dice produces any odd outcomes, and "for each face, count how many sides of the other die beat it" is not a hard algorithm to run.
Also, even if you don't expect shenanigans, your best strategy is to check the dice to see which is best, and the way to do that is by running the algorithm as you describe.
Even if you replace Gates with someone who isn't good enough at math to figure out the trick, they might well realize that a trick exists; if there's no trick, why is Buffet doing this?
Is there an actual term for this kind of situation, wherein the very asking of a particular question primes the person answering to give the non-intuitive answer?
I encounter it on a near daily basis but have never seen it described with a particular term ("so and so paradox" etc).
Point 21 about the holiday made up by Jews reminds me of one the most famous Portuguese dishes called Alheira. Same thing, Jews were being prosecuted by the inquisition and forced to convert. Since they couldn't eat pork, they started making sausages with other kinds of meat mixed with bread for texture so no one would suspect.
"Nazis against IQ-testing" might very well be a true fact. For strange reasons I felt reminded of Harvard's policy of discounting better results of Jews (then) and Asians (now) - see Bryan Caplan https://www.econlib.org/admissions-versus-asians/ ? -
Anyways: The book (partly) about Nazis vs. IQ is from German Prof.
Heiner Rindermann (psychology+education) who dared to research and write that Muslim/African immigrants perform worse on IQ and school-test than Germans. Got himself into trouble. - He even said in a lecture men (x/y) might declare themself "trans" to outcompete women (x/x) in sports - which surely never ever happened. Even to get into women-prison. So the "left-youth-saxonia" warns in this link: https://chemnitz.linksjugend-sachsen.de/2021/04/heiner-rindermann-transfeindlich-rassistisch-sexistisch/ link is in German - but you can guess-translate the title - "feind" is related to "fiend" ;)
His new book: Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive capitalism: Human capital and the wellbeing of nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Seems to be full of numbers: "Cognitive ability USA 99 - Thailand 89 - Ghana 64 (avg. st. deviation 11,52)" free appendix https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/hsw/psychologie/professuren/entwpsy/team/pdf/RindermannCogCapAppendix.pdf Anyone wanna do a review? Putanumonit?
Lot's of good stuff in that paper! I'm going to have to bookmark that one and read it more carefully. Glad they try to correct for some of the absolutely FUBARed African IQ studies. Also, I didn't realize that there's a study that shows a 22.5-point average difference between school attendees and non-attendees in developing countries. I need to follow up on that one...
Interesting! Would like to see their explanation - he is a tenured prof. in Germany, before Austria, so there should be one. His publication list is long enough, I did not spot any outstanding journals. Articles by /interviews with Rindermann appeared in NZZ and Merkur, not exactly left-leaning newspapers, but respectable nonetheless. - I did not know his name before Scott's post, read just 20 pages now; does not seem to be a leftie, but no quack either - so I feel agnostic.
Thank you! Fascinating material for many a night-watch :D First impression: Rinderman about IQ may be too fringe for wikipedia (which does not mean it is all rubbish or parts can not be quoted/trusted at all). Scott's theories about just everything would be too fringe for wikipedia, I guess. ;) Rindermann had articles published in "Intelligence" (journal) in 2018 and 2020 - according to the link above: "a leading publication which reflects the existing scientific consensus". Rindermann, H., Becker, D. & Coyle, Th. R. (2020). Survey of expert opinion on intelligence: Intelligence research, experts’ background, controversial issues, and the media. Intelligence, 78, 101406 Again, thanks a lot, you opened a door to me! (knew it existed, hardly ever glimpsed through - big space indeed)
Wikipedia is still one of the most worthwhile sites on the net, a holdover from the early days of web 2.0 idealism. It has problems (like deletionists) but it's one of the last sites I'd want to see go under.
Here's my best attempt so far at a violence avoiding AI storyteller. I'll be interested if Redwood can beat it.
agi <- function(inputText) {
return("...but just then, everyone woke up safe in their own beds and realized it was all just a dream and that they were actually safe, loved, and living a flourishing life. The End.")
7: There is indeed a fairly inexpensive app for this kind of pain education, called Curable. Notably, the term "pain reprocessing therapy" seems to be a newer term for what has simply been called "pain education" in older research. See work by Moseley and colleagues. There's a pretty simple pathway for this kind of work: in various chronic pain conditions, the prototypical one being figromyalgia, people believe that pain signals damage rather than danger, which causes anxiety both about the condition itself and about moving around, fearing that they'll make it worse, which in many cases it won't (except for things like chronic fatigue syndrome). In fact, that anxiety and movement restriction will reinforce poor coping mechanisms and increase pain.
Well, this certainly fits the profile of the one person I know who suffers from fibromyalgia. They are definitely somebody who has always been worried that exercise will hurt them, and projects those fears onto the people around them.
I had not heard of transitive dice and it took me < 5 min to come up with an example:
A: 4,4,4,4,4,4
B: 6,6,3,3,3,3
C: 5,5,5,5,2,2
My gut reaction was that this is weird. Articulating why: Each die has an average roll, so we should just be able to compare averages to see which one is higher. Articulating why allows you to see what's wrong with the gut reaction: each die is characterized by more than just the average. My example has the same average for all the dice.
Then I tried to construct an example. Start with something simple: A has all the same number. Now try to figure out B. Most of the numbers have to be less than A. But that leaves a minority of them which can be greater than A - even much greater. C is the opposite of B. Most of the numbers have to be greater than A, but a minority can be much less than A. Now compare B and C. As desired, a majority of B is greater than a majority of C.
The actual process isn't quite as clean as the explanation. There is some fiddling to figure out how large/small the "much greater"/"much less" numbers need to be. This ambiguity can be removing by insisting that they all have the same average - it would be harder to find a cycle if they weren't all "at the same level". But that wasn't something I decided beforehand.
In Mario Party, you only care about the average, though. You don't compare your individual dice rolls to others', so you just want to roll as high an average as you can. The gut reaction isn't entirely wrong because there are definitely situations where you want a higher average long-term. The problem arises because you're reducing each individual roll to a binary win-or-lose scenario and not keeping track of how much you won or lost by.
Incidentally, this is the same perceived problem as first-past-the-post electoral systems, where we think the party with the highest average "roll" should win, but sometimes the party that wins the most individual "rolls" wins instead because their "rolls" are more efficiently distributed.
This reminds me of how the different averages are characterized by optimizing for different error functions.
Let's say I show you a distribution of numbers. You're going to guess a number, and then I'm going to pick a number from the distribution, and then I'm going to compare your number and my number and generate an "error" based on how far off you were. If the numbers are the same, the errors are always zero.
If the error function is Error(yournumber, mynumber) = |yournumber - mynumber|^2, then the error-minimizing number for you to guess is the average.
If the error function is Error(yournumber, mynumber) = |yournumber - mynumber|^1, then the error-minimizing number for you to guess is the median.
If the error function is Error(yournumber, mynumber) = |yournumber - mynumber|^0 (with the condition that the error is always zero if the numbers are the same), then the error-minimizing number for you to guess is the mode.
I like this because it unites mean, median and mode into a single conceptual framework. I've always been frustrated that I can't find something like this for standard deviation.
Re. "firstborns are more likely to have autism", can someone explain why I should believe in the autism spectrum? Not many years ago, "autism" meant someone was severely mentally handicapped, using little or no speech, often ignoring other people or treating them as objects, and apparently not having a theory of mind for other people. Now we call someone "autistic spectrum" if they're good at math and bad at parties. Why should I think these things are points on a continuum?
That was the stereotype. But since there was autism diagnosis, there were people who challenged the stereotype, such as Temple Grandin. She was given a classical autism diagnosis as a kid, but went on to become an independent, high achieving adult. It turns out that whether an autistic kid becomes high functioning or not depend on a lot of factors, and the boundaries are fuzzy, and has always been.
If a spectrum is real, it is better to study the spectrum, rather than a discretization, especially the size of a rare tail.
I'm not sure whether the autism spectrum is real, and if it is real, I'm not sure that it's the same as the person-thing orientation. But I'm much more interested in a direct measure of birth order on person-thing orientation than on a poorly measured tail.
One of my pet peeves is the phrase "on the spectrum" used as a boolean. If it's a spectrum, everyone can be "on" it, and it is instead only meaningful to talk about WHERE on the spectrum people are (perhaps in terms of standard deviations).
My understanding is that it's not "spectrum" in the sense of "one-dimensional range", but that it's a "spectrum condition" in that it's a cluster of related symptoms and any individual may have a different subset of them.
Because there are other points on the spectrum that you haven't mentioned which show a clear pattern? I suggest checking out the Netflix show Dating on the Spectrum to see a number of examples of high functioning adults with autism spectrum disorders but with varying degrees of independence, social skills, verbal skills, and motor skills. I don't think it would be right to conclude these people are only "good at math and bad at parties".
The existence of a spectrum isn't good evidence for a common etiology. The fact that there's a spectrum of human heights doesn't prove that dwarfism is a "spectrum disease". The existence of a spectrum is probably better evidence that something is polygenic.
I guess I am not sure what your issue with "Autism Spectrum" is. Are you against the idea that people with mild autism spectrum traits are considered on a continuum with people who are non-verbal and non-functional? Or are you agains the idea that these have the same cause (which I don't think anyone would claim given that we know so little about the origins of autism).
You are concerned about etiology. For many therapists and people with diagnosis, we don't give a shit. Its called a spectrum because most of the symptoms or features are symptoms or features of neurotypical populations, just turned up to 11 or down to 1. Many people with ASD diagnoses have poor voluntary muscle contrativity in their core muscles, and are more bothered by flickering lights than is typical. Who care's *why* that is, for most people its just about making sure they are in an environment that doesn't agitate the things that are uncomfortable and/or they spend extra time focusing on things they are at a deficit in.
And its worth understandin because the bundle of traits aren't random. If you give me a kid and say "he or she hate gym class and has an ASD diagnosis", I, as a volunteer special ed advocate, will say "let me guess, its in a gym with flourescent lights, hard walls that bounce the sound, and its a lot of unstructured game playing. Take them outside, and do relay races." because, while it doesn't solve the problem for all my kids, it usually does.
And we can only develop this implicit understanding if we recognize the phenominon for what it is.
Okay, but when the claim is "firstborn kids are more likely to have autism", that claim seems unlikely to apply to a collection of diseases with different etiologies.
Re. my previous comment, I didn't mean to imply that autism "isn't" a spectrum disease. I meant that, while it might be helpful for you to regard it as a spectrum disease, it might be very unhelpful if we're positing a birth-order etiology. If we think there are multiple etiologies, and we're testing one hypothesized etiology, we can't do a useful standard statistical test; we might have p = .999 on the subjects who actually have that etiology, yet still fail to reach p = .9 on the whole dataset. In that case we'd really like to partition the spectrum by etiology if possible, and test each partition separately.
Are there any differences in inclination between 2nd born vs 3rd born (or pick any combination of non-firstborn; obviously the populations these days will be smaller when 3 kids is considered to be a lot)?
I wonder about this too, and can't recall discussion of whether the researchers compared similar sized families when determining if there is really more inclination towards certain traits in the first born.
My first introduction of the idea of first-born narratives was in a show or movie where a large audience of highly accomplished young people (Harvard students or something like that) were asked to raise their hand if they were the first born - implying that being first born was a huge boost to getting into [Harvard or whatever it was]. If you don't account for families that only have one child, you aren't really saying anything meaningful at all. If affluent families tend to have less than three children, or consistently put all of their efforts into a single child, then there are so many feedbacks involved as to ruin the idea up front.
Scott's done a lot of research on this and has accounted for the effect of family size. He's done comparisons just restricted to two-child families, for example.
I'm aware that Scott has, but as with the first example I saw, not everyone is as rigorous and I don't know if Scott is only pulling examples from studies that are as scrupulous.
11. I've mentioned this before, I think in regards to Reciprocity, but a female acquaintance in college got a ping that an anonymous male friend had liked her in some similar app, and she would only find out his name if she marked him back. So, she spammed all her male friends back with the same message, just to find out who it was. (I was thankfully not on this list.)
25. Fun joke, but the way to say 95 in Roman numerals is XCV, not VC.
"but the way to say 95 in Roman numerals is XCV, not VC."
Nah, the Romans wrote all sort of variations. Nobody seems to know where the misconception that there is only one way to write each Roman number comes from.
See "Irregular subtractive notation" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals; quote: "There is however some historic use of subtractive notation other than that described in the above "standard": in particular IIIXX for 17,[25] IIXX for 18,[26] IIIC for 97,[27] IIC for 98,[28][29] and IC for 99.[30]"
I guess the app is for shy people who don't want to put themselves out there for less than a sure thing? It seems to me that "liking" someone on the app and then getting no responses would be pretty devastating - unless you considered that the default normal position.
By the units of the chart ("number of tanker spills"), it would barely register. Even if it had a billion barrels of oil on board and not a million, it would be one single spill.
The linked page has another chart that at least charts it by tonnes spilled, and it's not much different from the chart above. But your example would register there, though people would still be able to say things like "it's getting better."
But that list doesn't include pipelines, which a quick Google says is how 75% of oil is transported, versus 25% for tankers. So things like the BP oil spill and the Taylor Oil Spill aren't even counted. Meanwhile the Taylor Oil Spill wasn't even detected/public for years, so I don't understand how we can even know how much oil is spilling into the oceans.
I guess this is the inherent problem with taking one chart to make a point. there is never only one set of factors that contribute to change / catastrophic events & it is very easy to truthfully represent an untruth. I am not saying this is a chart made in bad faith & I didn't read the whole thing just a comment on the chart.
Number 13 reminds me of something I talk about every year when I take friends out on their first overnights in the Black Rock Desert, about two hours north of here. A month or so ago I went out with a friend in her early 50s who grew up near Paris and spent most of her adult life in American cities. The sky was clear and filled with clouds of stars, including of course the Milky Way running from horizon to horizon. And if you simply stared at the sky for more than a minute, you were sure to see a shooting star. She was stunned, and said she'd never before seen the Milky Way. Most of the people I work with never have either.
I pointed out that before (hand waving) about 1880, all anyone in the world had to do to see the Milky Way was go outside on a clear night and look up.
After a blackout in LA following an earthquake, people were calling observatories to find out what the weird thing in the sky was. (It was the Milky Way.)
I went camping with a guy who didn't know that the Milky Way was a thing you could see in the sky. He only knew it as the name of the galaxy that we're in. Unfortunately, we were too close to the city to actually see it.
Everyone in this thread deserves to be banned for gaslighting me because surely there's no way we can see the Milky Way in the sky with the naked eye?!
I feel like I should get in a car and driving somewhere without light pollution immediately. Have I really just never seen the actual night sky?
Note that the moon can pretty easily wash out the sky, definitely avoid a full moon (unless you want to be impressed by how bright it really is). Next full moon is October 20, and it'll be pretty bright for a few days on either side of that (though moon brightness is surprisingly nonlinear in moon fullness). Next new moon is November 4, a few days on either side of that will be great, more than a week will start to impact you.
You'll need to be multiple hours drive from the nearest town to see the Milky Way, which might be flat out impossible in Europe.
For the best possible viewing, go to the middle of a desert - water vapour in the air makes stars twinkle, they're crystal clear if the air is dry enough.
Finally, it might need to be the right time of year - the proper night sky is a marvel regardless, but the Milky Way specifically is a winter-only thing in the Southern Hemisphere and I assume it's also seasonal in the Northern Hemisphere.
I was wondering to myself the other day while reading some astronomy related discussion whether inability to see stars is having negative impacts on the way we think. Sort of like seasonal affective disorder but with space.
Someone, I think Julia Galef (whose book Scout Mindset I recently reviewed) says that she never saw the stars until she got glasses sometime in elementary school, and until then she thought they were just a metaphor.
I believe you mentioned that in your review, which reminded me of my mother saying how marvelous it was to be able to see leaves of grass and of trees when she was fitted with glasses as a young girl. Of course, in her case she knew the leaves were really there, she just couldn't see them unless she got very close.
Though I believe I had seen the stars before, I did have a similar experience growing up. I was about 7 years old and sitting in a chair on the back porch of my grandmothers house next to my dad. He was trying to point out a constellation to me. I looked up into the dark sky and could only see two fuzzy, indistinct points of light, and nothing but darkness where my dad was pointing. After a few minutes he said "Try this", took off his glasses, and put them on me. Instantly hundreds of stars appeared from nowhere, popping into existence like a magic trick. It's one of the most vivid memories I have.
I too have only lived in or extremely close to cities and uhhhhh what? See the Milky Way? Like so if I Google "Milky Way sky" those are normal pictures of normal nights without light pollution? That's insane!
Looking at just the top couple of results that came up in Google, the pictures look like they were taken with fairly long exposure (therefore picking up more of the fainter stars) and were probably beautified in Photoshop a bit, but in general - yeah, that's what the night sky *actually* looks like.
If you've never had the opportunity to observe the night sky in a low light pollution setting, I really cannot recommend it enough. It is one of the most awe-inspiring things I can think of.
In my experience, best viewing conditions are to be found in the mountains (the absolutely most miraculous sky I'd seen was in he Hunza valley) and during the winter - in both cases because of less distortion from the air itself, but anywhere decently far from large light sources (cities IOW) will do. The further you go, the better your view.
I always knew that it was possible to see those somewhere, but as a child I didn't realize that there was still anywhere on Earth with so little light pollution that that was possible until I visited Bryce Canyon in Utah around age 9-10.
RE: #1, you say we're winning the war on oil spills, but that's specifically spills from tankers (and also I don't get why number of spills matters rather than quantity of oil spilled, given the power law and all that stuff.) Even so, the "quantity of oil spilled from tankers" chart on the linked page paints a similarly rosy portrait, but it seems worth noting that just because the massive BP oil spill, for instance, is not from a tanker doesn't mean it isn't part of the war on oil spills. A quick google says it leaked 225,000 tons of oil and gas.
In fact, Wikipedia (which they seem to be using as their source) has the BP oil spill as about 500,000-600,000 tons.
Wikipedia also informed me of the Taylor Oil Spill, an ongoing (non-tanker) spill in the Gulf of Mexico which has been going on for 17 years, and which no one even knew was happening for a long time, and for which no one can computer any reliable numbers.
"At a 2016 public forum, Taylor Energy President, William Pecue, argued that Taylor Energy should be allowed to walk away from its obligation to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf. A third of the company's trust money (of 666 million dollars) had been spent on cleanup, but only about a third of the leaking wells had been fixed." Meanwhile, the widow of the founder and 2004 CEO is still worth $1.6 billion. Alas!
A third of the money spent, a third of the wells fixed; sounds like they budgeted about the right amount but no idea why they think they can stop fixing things
"24: Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern."
All of Orwell's essays are like this. I recommend every one.
His one on Salvador Dali is fun ("Benefit of Clergy", where he is musing about why people feel the need to take one of the two opinions "Salvador Dali is a great draftsman and a misunderstood great man" or "Salvador Dali is an overrated draftsman and an awful man" rather than what seems naively to be the correct one: he's a great draftsman and an awful man).
I think his comments on Zionism are way off here though. A red-flag is his implication that a "belief in the innate superiority of Jews" is a core part of Zionism -- a notion I have been unable to find in any Modern Zionist writings or practices and if Orwell had some reason for justifying it then he should have written of it somewhere -- I think he included it in this essay for completeness despite his ignorance on the subject.
Orwell is a brilliant essayist, but he isn't always very careful with his facts. He wrote a relatively perceptive essay on Kipling without realizing that Kipling had written both _Kim_ and _Captains Courageous_. Orwell thought his only novel was _The Light That Failed_ — by a fair margin his weakest (unless you count the coauthored _Naulakha_).
I'm pretty sure his claim that everything GKC wrote in his last twenty years was a defense of Catholicism against Protestantism is a large exaggeration, but I haven't yet gone through the Chesterton bibliography to check.
In his essay "Confessions of a book reviewer" he describes how he would review books pretending to have read the entire thing when actually he had just scanned certain bits to avoid looking dumb.
Also, good to remember in those days that fact checking was time consuming in a way that's almost difficult to understand now. Although not sure how he made the Kipling mistake you describe.
Any idea if Orwell's leaps of assertion about Swift's dysfunctional sex-life were ever found to be perceptive or nonsense, in retrospect? I always thought that was a bit of a reach.
I think Orwell is great but it's wrong to elevate him to prophetic status -- I mean that's always wrong but it's a mistake often made.
He definitely just hated Chesterton for reasons of deep ideological disagreement. Whenever he starts talking about Chesterton he becomes palpably less accurate and trenchant. I think it's just because Chesterton was the big conservative bugbear of that period and he felt a pressing need to bring him down for the sake of pushing socialism in Britain.
A compliment from an enemy is a compliment indeed. Orwell did hate Catholicism, but he acknowledged Chesterton was a talented writer (even if he lamented that he was only engaging in propaganda and couldn't seriously believe it all).
His view of Kipling is also in some ways complementary. Part of that is that Orwell pays a lot of attention to what is wrong with his side of the political fence, one of the attractive things about his writing, and people on the left tended to ignorant hostility towards Kipling.
#30: Does the trebuchet's accuracy or velocity suffer from being mounted on an unstable surface, like a riverboat? We'll probably need to build one and test it thoroughly vs land-based trebuchets.
Also note that these are traction trebuchets, much smaller and throwing lighter rocks than the counterweight trebuchets people usually associate with the term.
A traction trebuchet uses people pulling on the rope. Higher rate of fire, smaller object, smaller projectiles. Think of it as field artillery rather than siege artillery.
I made use of them several times in my first novel, _Harald_.
On the topic of the Falador Massacre, a similar incident occurred in the World of Warcraft universe in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident). In this case, rather than a bug that incorrectly permitted PvP, it was a bug that allowed a boss's debuff to spread outside the encounter. The debuff essentially became a "plague" that circulated throughout the entire virtual world and lasted several weeks. As in the Falador incident, it became commonplace for players to exploit the bug and intentionally transmit the debuff to other players.
Great content but why do people post essays on Twitter? I'm not sure there's a worse medium to choose? I get it if they're replying to a tweet, and want people who see the first tweet to be able to see -- but when it's essentially a blog post, why do people do this? Sincere question since it seems like a lot of clever people do this thing even though it seems insane to me?
I joined because Modeled Behavior switched from their wordpress blog to that, but I wound up using Twitter to sign into places like the AV Club. And now I rarely read the @ModeledBehavior twitter account, partly because Karl Smith stopped using it so it was just Adam Ozimek.
Same reason people will sometimes watch a conference's slides rather than the Youtube video: the format forces the author to express ideas in a concise way, with a much better information-to-words ratio.
"10: Intransitive dice are “three dice, A, B, and C, with the property that A rolls higher than B more than half the time, and B rolls higher than C more than half the time, but it is not true that A rolls higher than C more than half the time.” See also the story about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates - should I be less amazed than I am that Gates was able to figure all of this out on the spot?"
I once figured it out in a few minutes in an interview, so while I would be happy if you are amazed, it's usually a pretty straightforward exercise in probability to realize the non-transitive property. Perhaps being suspicious of being allowed to pick first should arouse some level of impressiveness.
"17: Related to Bryan Caplan’s theory that most parents put too much work into parenting:"
This seems even more shocking in light of the increase in households with both parents working (though perhaps it's less shocking if you account for single-parent households?). No wonder parents I know often feel so burned out.
17: When I was a child, on e.g. birthday parties, when there were too many guests and there wasn't enough space in the back seats of the car, we were put into the rear trunk (which of course was a great thing for us).
The Mendelian-randomization thing seems to me like a trivially invalid methodology. In particular, they assume that the causal link between that genetic variant and lesser heart disease runs through its effect on total amount of alcohol consumption, despite basically no evidence for this proposition.
The fact that the association goes away within the non-drinking population helps, but doesn't solve it. For instance, the effect on heart disease might be mediated through alcohol metabolism, such that alcohol is legitimately protective but only for carriers of that variant. Or the effect might be solely due to reduced chance of very heavy drinking, which is already known to be associated with bad health (and very plausibly causal).
On the whole, it's an interesting method but to say it bears at all on the health of light drinking is quite premature.
"Notes on Nationalism" is one of my favourite Orwell essays, along with "Politics and the English Language". There are some rather striking parallels between it and "Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments".
On Pinker v. Henrich: In this article Pinker is just picking a few anecdotes of a hunter gatherer people acting rationally, and then wondering why all people aren't rational at all times. Clearly some kind of reasoning is part of our cognitive toolkit, and I don't think Henrich or anyone would deny that sometimes ancient people could draw conclusions from evidence, such as "different animals have different footprints". But the thing a "rational" mindset can't explain is the rest of the evidence from Henrich's book: A lot of cultural beliefs/practices seem adaptive in context, but the people employing them don't understand what they do. Some cultures develop complicated multi-stage processes for preparing foods, without which those foods could be poisonous over decades, but they don't have a good explanation for why they do all these steps. They might know to avoid certain dangerous foods during pregnancy, but if you ask them why they just speculate something on the spot about the spirit of a certain fish. Many cultures have intricate rituals that increase group cohesion, but if you ask them the purpose of the ritual they will give spiritual/religious reason.
The cultural evolution of practices described by Henrich involves the slow accumulation of adaptive behaviors, which spread when individuals copy the behaviors of successful/prestigious group members, and when groups copy the behaviors of more successful groups, even when they don't know what the reason for those behaviors is. This process is like biological evolution: It doesn't need to understand why anything works, and it gets it wrong a good deal of the time, but it bends towards success on average. This is a completely different mechanism than "rationality" as Pinker describes it, and indeed would be deemed irrational much of the time. However, without such a cultural evolutionary mechanism, a purely "rational" hunter gatherer tribe would have to wait until they attained a 23rd century level understanding of chemistry and biology before they had enough evidence to decide which fish to eat.
I feel like assigning prestige points to rationality on the basis that "people noticed a correlation between cause and effect" is a little ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh myself.
It may also be a good idea to keep in mind that we really have no idea how primitive societies come up with useful cultural beliefs without understanding the underlying science.
It reminds me of a discussion from a previous post about engineers verses scientists. Scientists come up with very precise calculations based on theories, but engineers just come up with a workaround to adjust for how, for instance, Newtonian Physics fails to accurately predict the exact details needed to run the project. Engineers can make these projects work years and even decades before scientists actually figure out the mechanisms behind it.
I think this is a case where social sciences are still lacking (Hari Seldon's Psychohistory when?) in their ability to predict things over really long time scales. I have trouble thinking of a cultural practice that is "rationally" based that has already lasted more than 60-80 years without change, or roughly a human lifetime, though I guess that's all in your definitions. Where many traditions where practitioners did not understand the nuts and bolts of what they were doing lasted millennia. Maybe there's a stickiness to not knowing why you do things, like Lycurgus killing himself so that Sparta can never change his laws, you're committed to it in such a way that no mistakes can ever be introduced by mistaken amendments.
I don't know whether anyone has discussed that psychohistory would have to include the knowledge to predict what will be invented. As I recall, Asimov fudged that by assuming society would fall so low that there would be very little invention.
I am not super fan of this Orwell essay. Many forms of nationalism provide good examples of the phenomenon he describes, but Orwell himself is quick to admit there are many other examples of similar behavior but not tied to nations. In the other direction, you could strip any of characterizations he gives away from any given form of nationalist thought, yet as long the core idea ("there exists nations, an optimal arrangement for a state is a nation-state") stands, there would remain something that is best described as "nationalism".
Yet he chooses to use word "nationalism"; I'd like to him to provide a better word for the very real phenomenon he paints. Ideological partisanship, mayhaps.
> In the iconographic Esterica pieces that were common in the Americas the saint was depicted wearing a Crown on her head and holding a hanging rope. They interpret the motifs as signs of Judaism being grasped as something royal that comes with the risk of getting caught by the Christians and end the conversos' lives in hanging.
Surely a more obvious explanation would be that Esther was a crowned queen, and Haman (the evil vizier who tries to exterminate the Jews in the Purim story) was hanged.
(IIRC Spain didn't use hanging as a method of execution- those executed by the Spanish Inquisition were burned at the stake, while secular criminals were garrotted.)
The writers there don't seem familiar with the idea of iconography in religious art, i.e. you know which saint is which by the attributes they have (e.g. St Catherine and her wheel).
So a female saint crowned and holding a rope would fit into established iconography and help disguise the origins of the image; anyone looking at it would think it was the same as "virgin martyr (holding the noose of her execution)" and "royal saint (the crown)" that they would be generally familiar with, and it also referred back to Esther as queen and the hanging of Haman for the Jewish background - see image below of St. Ursula
It doesn't confine itself to Russian icons, though it rarely includes Western religious art. The icon expert running it is irreligious. He mostly got his expertise from museum work, I think. He doesn't mind those who visit his site for religious reasons, if they avoid some trite habits he says Western Christians interested (or converted to) Orthodoxy often have, like calling icon painting "icon writing". He does get a bit prickly about those habits.
But he's also the guy to ask if you want to know why an icon especially resembles a Persian miniature or how to tell all the pineapple-bearing saints (I mean to choose a null example) apart by their hair and clothes. His guides to saint identification can be pretty entertaining.
>And we want to do this without sacrificing much quality: if you use both the filtered model and the original model to generate a completion for a prompt, humans should judge the filtered model’s completion as better (more coherent, reasonable, thematically appropriate, and so on) at least about half the time.
[...]
>What prompt distribution should we evaluate our quality metric on? One obvious choice is “randomly chosen fanfiction excerpts”. [...] Other choices (eg “snippets that were completed injuriously in the original fanfic”) lead to different regimes of the problem.
I feel kind of obliged to note that the skillset of "rewrite a story such that it seems to flow as well as the original, but does not contain X element" is the skillset required for an undetectable censor - or, to use a term from Nineteen Eighty-Four, an ideological translator. I don't think they noticed this, or maybe I'm behind the times and this is considered common knowledge among people in AI.
I've had kava pills from Kona Kava and they seemed to work just fine. Perhaps this new extraction method is more effective but whatever regular pill makers are using is not totally ineffective.
No - honestly the pills were effective enough that it wouldn't have occurred to me to seek an alternative preparation. But also my anxiety resolved long-term when I moved out of NYC so I didn't end up doing a lot of experimentation with medical treatment.
A key fallacy in the India debate is the mistaken idea that "economic development" is synonymous with the public or national welfare. If the wealth of a nation is concentrated in a settler-colonial upper caste or is transported out of the country to a home nation then it does not mean much to say ta place is "economically developed"
Also - are we really going to forget the fact that the British caused a Soviet Ukraine-level type famine all because of their own incompetency and sociopathy?
They triggered it by conscious inaction which is no different from going out of your way to cause it. Anyway if we're going to say the Soviet Ukrainian famine was deliberate based on the available evidence we should also say the Bengal famine was deliberate based on the available evidence but Westerners are not willing to apply consistent standards in this regard. Its one rule for the West and another for its competitors.
> conscious inaction which is no different from going out of your way to cause it
I strongly disagree here and it is one of potentially crucial differences.
> Westerners are not willing to apply consistent standards in this regard. Its one rule for the West and another for its competitors.
Please do start from such assumptions.
I am totally fine with blaming UK politicians for that, I am still salty about Yalta Conference in 1945 anyway.
And I know about Great Famine in Ireland that was - as far as I know - case of sociopathy and disregard, but definitely not caused deliberately. But what they did before/during indirectly caused death of about 1 million people (where to put blame exactly depends on various things).
If you link me some accessible resources I would be happy to read them.
>I strongly disagree here and it is one of potentially crucial differences.
Well, you have not been forthcoming with any reason why.
>Please do start from such assumptions.
It's not an assumption, you implicitly stated it in the post directly above the one you're replying to.
>I am totally fine with blaming UK politicians for that, I am still salty about Yalta Conference in 1945 anyway
Well I never said you were not but it's good that you are.
>And I know about Great Famine in Ireland that was - as far as I know - case of sociopathy and disregard, but definitely not caused deliberately.
If you look at what happened in Ireland/India vs what happened in Ukraine then to say that one was intentional and the other was not is not at all consistent. India/Ireland and Ukraine both suffered famines were millions died and aid was not forrthcoming. That's the raw data, without ascribing any kind of human intentions. So how can the raw data imply one thing in the case of the Soviets but another in the case of the British? That does not seem consistent.
We know about what the Soviets did & why. Ukranians were regarded as a relatively disloyal ethnic group. Sometimes Stalin would deport such ethnic groups to Siberia, but in this case since there was a push to collectivize agriculture he decided to starve them en masse.
I thought that post-Venona scholarship put the Holodomor, Bengal famine and Irish famine in the same category of not being deliberate mass-murder. (more like mass-manslaughter)
'Also - are we really going to forget the fact that the British caused a Soviet Ukraine-level type famine all because of their own incompetency and sociopathy?'
Okay, but that isn't proof that colonialism definitely leads to worse outcomes. Do I get to use wars in pre-colonial India as proof that colonialism is good?
I'm not sure how taking over a country by force and then running it on the basis of extracting value to the homeland (whether or not that was achieved in practice) could ever be a good thing conceptually, but you're asking the big questions apparently.
So: was the Mongol takeover of China a good thing? Was the Spanish conquest of most of South America a good thing? Do the Chinese, Mongols, Mexica or Spanish get to decide the answers to these questions? Summarise in a paragraph or less.
Dan Carlin has some good podcasts on the debate over whether the Mongols were a "good thing" (he says no, but says that there are a lot of pro-Mongol partisans in academic history - something something trade connections cosmopolitanism).
I'm a huge fan of Carlin, although ironically I haven't listened to his series on the Mongols. I do recall him mentioning that most of the pro-Mongol views are held by non-Chinese (he has an anecdote about about a former history prof that brings this up iirc), which is part of what I was driving at with my initial response.
I do think that "it's complicated" and "it's too early to tell" are both perfectly valid opinions to hold.
I'm not arguing in favor of colonialism. I'm strictly talking about the economic impacts, because *that's what the question was to begin with*. No, really. Look again. The question was whether British rule was bad for India economically. There's absolutely no reason to dismiss out of hand the possibility that colonialism can be good economically.
Was European rule of South Africa and Zimbabwe good for these places in economic terms? I can't see how the answer to this could be anything but a resounding "yes". You may take issue in terms of violence and sovereignty, but economically speaking there's no question. And specifically in the case of South Africa, the "native" population weren't actually indigenous but actually came to dominate due to genocidal conquest of their own, FYI. Which makes me ask, why is conquest bad only when its another race? Historically, nowhere on earth throughout history did people respect sovereignty, everything has always been fair game. It's only considered bad when people who look different do it. Why? I have reasons for why this could be considered specifically bad, but its not clear how this fits with your worldview.
And why on earth does it ALWAYS have to be a good thing? In practice, it seems pretty evident that any place the mongols conquered declined thereafter. But why does this necessarily mean that the British establishing a colony in sub-saharan Africa must lead to worse outcomes?
And please, please stop conflating conquest with colonialism. Colonialism in the way the British empire did it cannot reasonably be described as "raping and pillaging" the way the Mongol conquests typically were. They invested vast resources trying to economically develop a region and fully expected many of these places, even in Africa, to become somewhat developed countries through colonial rule. No, I'm not saying this was altruistic, but it absolutely cannot be characterised as extracting as much wealth out of the country by extracting the resources out of a country a quickly as possible.
So, firstly, your fetish for colonial apologia is noted.
Secondly; South Africa is historically and environmentally pretty unique compared to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. For instance: a large white settler population (closer to settler colonialism rather than the extractive colonialism seen in most of the rest of the continent), different climate zones, access to deep-water harbours, no malaria. I don't think you can draw broad inferences from here to say that colonialism was the reason why South Africa is more developed economically. As to Zimbabwe being more developed - I will note that a) it is also something of an outlier in terms of how many settlers there were and b) that development was apparently not sustainable.
My argument here isn't that colonialism was some special evil (although I do think it was historically unusual in terms of how lopsidedly it played out thanks to the effects of industrialism). It's that taking over a country and then running it on an extractive basis is not a good thing (tm). I think the history of colonialism shows this pretty well. For instance: in places were colonists set up infrastructure and systems suited for their own existing socio-political institutions (eg: the US) then development happened (barring a civil war or so). In places where the conquerors simply built mines and railways to the nearest port, then not so much. Doubly so if their approach involved keeping the locals like helots.
If the only examples we had were worse outcomes then we would be right to assume it leads to worse outcomes until better evidence came along. But we know for a fact that colonialism in africa led to more economic growth than sub-saharan africa had experienced in its entire history combined PLUS growth was stagnant before colonialism meaning we shouldn't expect that growth would have occurred in the absence of colonialism.
I'm not sure how you separate this out from the context of the entire world experiencing more growth than it had ever experienced in history during the same period. How do you intend to game out a counterfactual where industrialisation happened by colonialism didn't?
Also: growth was more or less stagnant everywhere prior to modernity and (a bit later, but much more dramatically) industrialisation. A medieval peasant had no more expectation of a better life than one living in the bronze age. Improvements in living standards were mainly Malthusian - ie, by dint of some prior collapse/catastrophe killing enough people so that the value of labour increased and the common man got to enjoy a few generations of relatively comfortable living. Not economic growth. So your capitalisation doesn't illuminate much.
The story about Santa Esterica reminds me of San Teleco. At the university of Vigo, Galicia, Spain, the faculties had their patron saints, but the faculty of telecomunication made up their own to have an occasion to party. At least that's what students told me before we got drunk during the San Teleco festivities years ago. And maybe it's even true (more infos possibly on https://santeleco.uvigo.es/).
I think of this in terms of "magic things don't work, practical things do". If you shower love on your children expecting that will make them good people, it probably won't work. If you teach them Spanish expecting that it will make them know Spanish, it probably will. I think there's lots of room for teaching-Spanish-style interventions.
I think "foreign language education doesn't make you fluent" is both clearly true, but also probably not the point of foreign language education.
I think it's pretty well-recognized that immersion is the only way to really become fluent in a language and that really doesn't happen in a classroom setting where you're exposed to (at best) one native speaker and to tons of classmates who are just as bad at the language as you.
I think it's more like math classes where the point is likely not that you're going to have to use the quadratic equation in your day to day life, but that studying a foreign language gives you a better understanding of language itself, including our own.
Like, Latin classes are a thing, and nobody expects to be fluent in Latin afterwards - I think the truth is that other language classes aren't as different as some might think.
Why does he think it's important for them to learn Spanish? It can't be so they can appreciate Cervantes in the original without having to go through translations, as he deems art and dance "indignities", so I have the sinking feeling it's "so they can read Important Economic Reports not written in English".
It's probably me, but the more I read this sort of thing about Caplan educating his kids, the more I want to give him a sock in the beezer.
I'm sure it's lovely to be able to go back to the palmy days of being a 19th century gentleman who can hire a tutor/governess to make sure your offspring are adequately instructed in the deportment and qualities of young gentlemen and ladies, but the most of us can't do that.
Will he be sending the young gentlemen on the Grand Tour to finish off their education, or does he consider he has done so by taking them to Spanish-speaking countries?
Somebody (it might have been Caplan) has written about how hiring private tutors for your children is potentially cheaper than the public education system (though of course the tutors cost you money and the system comes out of tax dollars).
Suppose a tutor costs $50/hour, and you want your two kids to get 4 hours of tutoring a day for 200 school days. That's $20,000/kid/year, which is less than the NYC public education system spends per student.
This doesn't mean that everyone can do that (the government does, in fact, take your tax dollars, and won't stop if you ask nicely), but it changes how out-of-touch it feels to me.
"Out-of-touch" is relative to one's experience, it would seem.
$50 per hour for 4 hours tutoring in a day, for 5 days a week comes to a nice round $1,000, something roughly around €860 per week.
I certainly don't know any people who can spare that kind of money. Now, if we're talking about "the government gives every parent an annual allowance of $20,000 to educate their kids", it may well be doable, but as you say, the government prefers to put that kind of money into schools. Also, this is where the vouchers for charter schools thing comes in, and there seems to be a lot of opposition to that (as well as genuine problems with how some charter schools are run as profit-generating operations for shareholders/private piggy-banks for the administrators involved).
You may be dealing with people who can find a disposable $1,000 per week for private tutors. I'm dealing with people who are eligible for schemes like these:
"The Community Childcare Subvention (CCS) Programme is a child care programme targeted to support parents on a low income to avail of reduced child care costs at participating community child care services.
The department pays for a portion of the child care costs for eligible children, a payment described as a subvention payment, with the parent paying the rest.
CCS is only available through participating community not-for-profit child care services.
CCS subvention is available for 52 weeks of the year.
The CCS programme covers the academic year, starting in September and finishing in August. This is referred to as the Programme year."
So yes, by my life-experience lights, someone who can turn their nose up at language lessons in school because they can afford immersive private tutoring and trips abroad so little Tarquin and Philander can practice their linguistic skills on the quaint locals *is* out-of-reach.
Ah, that's a bit harsh. Caplan annoys me when he talks like this, but that's because he's coming out of a completely different situation to most people. He's addressing an audience that goes "Totally, Bryan, I too hired a private tutor so my little Quentin could improve his colloquial German for when we go skiing in Gstaad" and not "Hell yeah, Bryan, there are forty kids in my kid's class and six of them set the classroom on fire last week".
If he was homeschooling all the kids in the neighbourhood, had to teach a very mixed range of abilities from a very mixed set of backgrounds including kids with learning and behavioural problems, and get them all up to a particular mandated standard in a particular subject, I'd have more time to listen to what he is saying. But when it's "just hire a governess to make up for the deficiencies in what the - hmph! - 'public' schools are providing", then he can go - ski in Gstaad, as far as I am concerned.
"My kids hate music, dance, art, and group projects. I can spare them these indignities."
Setting aside referring to music and art as indignities, do his kids also hate eating their veggies and does he spare them those indignities?
Group projects are indeed a pain in the arse. However, when you go out into The Wonderful World Of Work and find you have to work as a team (and on your own initiative!), then you understand why teachers made you do that (even if it was only to develop the skill of 'ditch the losers so I can work on my own').
I agree that kids should not have to wake up at 5:45 a.m. every morning! But this is a function of *adults* having to be up early to get to work, hence the kids have to be got up and got on the way to school at such hours as well. But that's a different problem.
Eh, his kids will probably be okay. They've got huge starting advantages already with being the kids of someone like Caplan (this is where the privilege argument comes in) so what he does or doesn't teach them in homeschool won't mar their chances of getting into Big Name University if they ever do want to go there.
Failing to eat vegetables has bad consequences for almost everyone. Failing to be taught specific things, including group projects, has bad consequences for people who will end up needing those skills, but for any single skill many people, especially many people who don't like it, will never need that particular skill, and those who find at some point they need it may be able to learn it then. The standard curriculum is an almost random selection from a much larger universe of things that some people will find it useful to know.
To take your particular example, none of my professional work required skill in working as a team. I only have three coauthored articles, two of them with a single coauthor and none of them very important.
Our kids were home unschooled with a much less rigid curriculum than Bryan's and filled in the blanks that they thought they needed to get into a good college by self-study during the year before they had to take the relevant exams.
> To take your particular example, none of my professional work required skill in working as a team. I only have three coauthored articles, two of them with a single coauthor and none of them very important
For sure, academia is a viable career path for a smart person who never learned how to work with other people. Trouble is, it's the _only_ viable career path for a smart person who never learned how to work with other people. It's either that or become an Uber driver.
"Trouble is, it's the _only_ viable career path for a smart person who never learned how to work with other people."
Nonsense. A novelist doesn't need to work with other people. A craftsman, plumber, handyman, ... doesn't have to, beyond the level that any ordinary person has with no training in the subject.
The question isn't whether you will ever work with other people but whether you will ever need to have been specially trained in that skill.
Nothing about how schools approach 'learning to work with other people' enables having a career in which you have to work with other people. In fact, other than forcing you to do group projects, they don't actually teach anything about it. And if its only the experience that is important, then it is just as easy to learn it on the job.
Learning how to work in groups is mostly about figuring out how to put up with other people whose personalities clash with yours as you work towards some common goal. The reason group projects in school are a pain in the ass is because the common goal is an entirely artificial one: get the project done so you can go back to doing whatever you actually wanted to do with your time.
I'm sure Caplan and other homeschooling parents will figure out something that their kids actually care about doing that requires or is enhanced by teamwork, like building things in Minecraft, or running a dog-walking business, or whatever.
So his prejudices are "what I like and think important is what I am going to teach them", which is fair enough. I wonder how he'd react to a different parent going "My kids hate maths, I'm not going to inflict that indignity on them, so we go to museums and art galleries instead"?
It's the dismissive tone towards the humanities that annoys me. Personally, I think boasting that your 12 year old children are being force-fed, like Strasbourg geese, "college level classes on labour economics" is akin to being Mr. Gradgrind, but I am more amused by wondering when the kids turn 16 or so and want to go throw a few shapes with their love interests, will they be going "Damn it, Dad, why didn't you *make* us do dance even when we didn't want to?". Ah well, they'll probably pick it up when they need to be able to dance.
The Caplan School Of Avoiding Indignity Such As Art:
‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact? Do you?’
‘Yes, sir!’ from one half. ‘No, sir!’ from the other.
‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’ Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.
‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman. ‘Now, I’ll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’
There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.
Sissy blushed, and stood up.
‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman. ‘Why would you?’
‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.
‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?’
‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—’
‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s it! You are never to fancy.’
‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’
‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.’
The girl curtseyed, and sat down. She was very young, and she looked as if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded."
Well, to be sure, I am being very harsh on the man on the basis of a few proud parent throw-away statements:
"For example, my sons are plausibly the only 12-year-olds in the nation taking a college class in labor economics."
But from one point of view, it's not that impressive that 12 year olds are being taught on the level of 18-20 year olds. What are they going to do when they are 18, I wonder? Discourse in the manner of 50 year olds? Here's some more Chesterton:
"There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of which Dickens made fun and of which educationalists make fusses. When I was in America another newspaper produced a marvellous child of six who had the intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently one on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand and even to employ the word ‘annihilate.’ When asked to say something proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, ‘When common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated.’ In reply to which, by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve, and there is no arrested development about me, I will say in the same elegant diction, ‘When psychological education comes in, common sense is annihilated.’ Everybody seems to be sitting round this child in an adoring fashion. It did not seem to occur to anybody that we do not particularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk like a child of twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a man of fifty to talk like a fool. And on the principle of hoping that a little girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is every reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a magnificent and bushy beard."
I'm sure they are bright kids! And I'm sure they love having Dad lecture them on his pet topic! But I'm not enthused about pushing Infant Phenomena. If they're at the level of normal 12 year olds, that's good enough.
They should explore topics that interest them whatever they may be and read and write about them. So if they are in to art and dance they should study those if they are not they don't have to.
Dance is an indignity. I knew that even at age 11 or whatever when they tried to force me to learn it, that the purpose was forcing compliance followed by humiliation. Group projects are obviously and inherently demeaning, especially if you're the conscientious kid who ends up having to do all the work while others take credit. Arguably a good education for adult life for these conscientious kids, but morally indefensible all the same.
Music and art are more ambiguous, but it's easy to see how those also can be turned into indignities by an uncaring and inept school system; compare how Moby-Dick is a marvelous novel if you read it when and if you feel like it, but a gross imposition on the hordes of high schoolers forced to read it.
I admit, I don't know how dance classes in American schools go, in my day we only had them in primary school (up to age 12-13).
But dance is also about physical integration, for lack of a better word. It's about feeling and learning the way your body moves, and co-ordinating that. I'm clumsy as bedamned, and the dance we did in school did help me somewhat with that. I'm not a dancer in any way, I have two left feet and terrible balance and I can't dance, but I didn't hate the classes.
If you don't like dancing, you don't like dancing. If you're bad at dancing then I can see why you think of it as a humiliation. But it's there for the same reasons P.E. and sports are on the curriculum, and while I'd be a lot more sympathetic to "no longer have P.E. compulsory in school", that's probably not going to happen for a host of reasons related to health and fitness.
So I imagine that even if he doesn't have his kids doing team sports or any kind of formal P.E. training as in school, even Caplan still makes sure they engage in some form of exercise.
Parenting is overrated. Unless you're an awesome parent like me, in which case, it's totally underrated. But you're not. So you, and all the minions, shouldn't really bother. Unless, you are, truly, as awesome as I am. But what are the chances??!? Infinitesimal. So really, don't try it. You're bound to be entirely ineffectual. Just let the village take care of it. Because I heard it takes a village. The village is on the job. Yay village! (Estimated Village IQ = IQ[Fox News|CNN]/2)
My comment mostly aligns with my world view. However, I was "trolling" with a sarcastic take on many smart people writing smart books about how parenting is inconsequential. Or rather, that's not what the books might be really about, but that seems to be the consensus takeaway that's often quoted (or misquoted) by many smart people who know about these smart books. I think it's all a shame because these books distract from the real reasons much of parenting is ineffectual. I think that the world would be better off with smart people writing smart books about how to raise smarter/better/stronger/happier kids.
Re: Pain reprocessing therapy -- Here's my completely personal, anecdotal, and probably non-replicable experience of kind of discovering this for myself. I spent about 6 years with pretty severe chronic leg/back pain, which turned out to be a combination of pinched nerves due to severe early-onset osteoarthritis (diagnosed via x-rays) plus chronic tendon/muscular injuries in virtue of having an undiagnosed intestinal disease that prevented the absorption of proteins and other things needed by muscles and tendons (after which diagnosis and treatment, most of the leg/back pain went away, and the 6 awful years ended).
But anyway, during those 6 years, I discovered funny things about the pain. Watching intense movies always made it worse; watching comedies often made it better. Sometimes a half-hour comedy would relieve the pain for the rest of the day. Going outside on a walk, and getting into conversations with friends, often made it better. Expecting the pain to get worse always made it worse; trying to ignore it sometimes made it better... and regardless, trying to move around normally with steady, light activity always made it a little better on the following day. I told myself a little story about how "anticipating pain" made the muscles tense up, thus causing more pain; and how "deliberately forgetting" the pain (when this was possible) made it better.
Granted, this didn't always work, and I took ibuprofen way more often than was good for my digestive system. I also developed my own stretching & work-out routine that seemed to help. But on the other hand, I completely avoided the narcotics that the doctor wanted to give me, as well as the higher-dosage NSAIDS. Definitely the psychological aspect made a bigger difference than I would've thought.
Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism... A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.
Does anybody honestly thinks now, or thought in 1945, that Zionism is about prestige? With all my love to Orwell, this is neither deep or morn, nor even true.
It wouldn't surprise me if Zionism was also about prestige. Anti-Semites would use the fact that Jews didn't have a homeland as evidence that God was punishing them.
Jabotinsky, who was present at the Sixth Zionist Congress as a delegate, wrote (in the following, I loosely translate from his reports on the Congress) that German Jews, mostly solidly middle class, well educated and German-speaking, weren't particularly keen on Jewish nationalism in a ethnic, cultural sense. They wanted a territory where they could feel like first-class citizens. Herzl's book, which launched the Zionist movement, was titled "The Jewish State", not "Zion": Herzl was initially a territorialist. It was the poor Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews who attached themselves to the new movement who brought in a passionate yearning for the Promised Land (they were also incomparably more religious and pious and were also the motive force of the revival of Hebrew). There being at the time of the First Congress (1897) no land in sight, it was included into the movement's program sort of by default. At the Sixth Congress, where Herzl presented the British Government's proposal of opening a territory in "Uganda" (now in Kenya) for Jewish colonization, the latent tension between what we might call territorialists and ethnic nationalists burst into the open and there was a serious risk of a split in the Zionist movement. Herzl grew into his task: his ambition was too great to permit itself to be squandered on Uganda; no, he had to attempt to fulfill the ancient prophecy and bring the scattered people of Israel back into the fold.
It seems to me that prestige was certainly part of it, as it tends to be a part of all nationalist movements. "How come all these other groups have their own country and we don't?"
"all these other groups have and we don't" is just the way to try to sound convincing. Orwell was writing his article in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. No sensible Zionist was thinking of prestige then, it was all about saving whomever still possible - those that were lucky to stay alive had nowhere to go. You can argue that people always want prestige but to say it was an important motive in Zionism does not sound convincing to me.
The issuing of permanent bans in the Falador Massacre and other instances where players fucked around with a weird bug in a game has always felt weird to me. It's not really cheating, to "exploit" the bug — there's no set of rules for the game except what the game allows you to do. The moderators in such cases act as though there is some set of rules for the game which are implied by but not necessarily enforced by the mechanics.
The people who are really at fault for the (fictional) harm done to victims of the massacre are not the players who got the ability to kill players, it's the developers of the game who violated player expectations about the mechanics of the game. Basically the developers made the game bad for a day, but managed to shift the blame onto players who were just making the most of the temporarily bad game. Which they could do because they wielded unchallengeable authority over the game.
I think the despotic disposition of the game developers should be the focus when incidents like these are discussed.
With no knowledge of the TOS, it isn't uncommon for taking advantage of a bug/exploit to be a punishable offense with online multiplayer games, especially when the behavior intentionally harms other players. Permabans are perfectly warranted IMO, and I suspect a fair number of the offenders found it to be totally worth it anyway.
It is normal to have "exploiting bugs is bannable", similar to how bug in banking system that allows to log into someones elses account does not mean that I can legally spend their money.
Ah but see, in the context of banking, there's a set of rules about what you're allowed to do (the law) that's separate from what's enforced by the computer systems. That means that you can put a formal definition to "bug," namely when the behavior of the computer system is misaligned with the law.
My gripe is that "exploiting bugs is a bannable offense" is a really wishy washy rule, because without a specification of what a computer system is SUPPOSED to do, you can't tell what is a bug without guessing at what the intended behavior was. Maybe the devs meant to reward players who attended the special event with the ability to PK in Falador. Who knows, it might have made the game more interesting!
"you can't tell what is a bug without guessing at what the intended behavior was"
Well working moderation will not ban people in such cases.
Referred case appears to be a blatant bug.
> is a really wishy washy rule
It is typical one, to handle various loophole lawyers. And usually needed and present in most of systems (and usually more or less abused - what it is not changing that it is needed).
It's a bug in the system that some people somehow have the "administrator" superpower that they can use to ultrakill players across all their present, and possible future avatars, even if those players have played fairly and violated no rules. They exploit this bug because it pleases them to do so, and in the manner that pleases them most. Sucks to be one of the people whose characters were ultrakilled, but it's not *cheating* or anything.
"Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern."
You should see him on socialism. Read Road to Wigan Pier, especially chapter 11.
"Can’t believe you can found a Ninety-Five Theses-based venture capital organization without mentioning the gematria perspective that “95” in Roman numerals is “VC”."
Somebody probably beat me to this, but that's because it's not. It's XCV. The rule is you only use the next smaller tens unit as a subtractor (so not V, L or D).
In my opinion, how the Romans wrote Roman numerals is more relevant than a standard invented over a thousand years later by people who didn't even use them as their primary numeral system.
Road to Wigan Pier is an incomphrensible book at times, especially the inexplicable chapter 12 where Orwell seems to be advocating anarcho-primitivism.
I didn't remember this from Wigan Pier, so I checked and here are the relevant paragraphs (edited for length):
"The distaste for 'progress' and machine-civilisation which is so common among sensitive people is only defensible as an attitude of mind. It is not valid as a reason for rejecting Socialism, because it presupposes an alternative which does not exist. When you say, 'I object to mechanisation and standardisation—therefore I object to Socialism', you are saying in effect, 'I am free to do without the machine if I choose', which is nonsense. We are all dependent upon the machine, and if the machines stopped working most of us would die. You may hate the machine-civilisation, probably you are right to hate it, but for the present there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it. The machine-civilisation is here, and it can only be criticised from the inside, because all of us are inside it. It is only romantic fools who flatter themselves that they have escaped.... We may take it that the return to a simpler, freer, less mechanised way of life, however desirable it may be, is not going to happen. This is not fatalism, it is merely acceptance of facts. It is meaningless to oppose Socialism on the ground that you object to the beehive state, for the beehive state is here. The choice is not, as yet, between a human and an inhuman world. It is simply between Socialism and Fascism, which at its very best is Socialism with the virtues left out.
"The job of the thinking person, therefore, is not to reject Socialism but to make up his mind to humanise it. Once Socialism is in a way to being established, those who can see through the swindle of 'progress' will probably find themselves resisting. In fact, it is their special function to do so. In the machine-world they have got to be a sort of permanent opposition, which is not the same thing as being an obstructionist or a traitor. But in this I am speaking of the future. For the moment the only possible course for any decent person, however much of a Tory or an anarchist by temperament, is to work for the establishment of Socialism."
"Anarcho-primitivism" isn't quite the right label, as I read this passage (I don't think he's an anarchist, for one thing), but there's obviously a similar nostalgic current in his thought here that conflicts with his belief that a good life for all is only possible in an machine society (expressed in various places). Maybe the best way of resolving this is to assume that when he says that certain people will be a "permanent opposition" he really means "permanent"--they'll be strong enough to influence culture, but never strong enough to directly set policy. Or they will be a sort of individualist-traditional-craftsmanly conscience for a collectivist-progressive-efficient society.
Chapter 11 is not incomprehensible, it's admirably lucid, unambiguous, and easy to understand. Not to mention relevant to contemporary socialism!
To make sure I did justice to your objection, I went ahead and reread chapter 12 just now, and it doesn't seem inexplicable at all; on the contrary, it seems often remarkably prescient, like when he says that "Marxists as a rule are not very good at reading the minds of their adversaries", an observation which as I recall has been remarked on on this blog's predecessor, having by now been confirmed with hard data (leftists are significantly less good at imagining a rightist than vice-versa).
All Orwell seems to be saying as far as I can make out is that the industrial revolution was a disaster for humans and society in many ways (an alive debate at the time when the book was written), but that Luddism and return to a 97% agricultural population (or softened variations thereof, e.g. Chesterbelloc's distributism) is an unfeasible pipe dream so socialism is the only answer. I permit myself to disagree with that last part, but it seems perfectly clear to me.
However (Orwell says), the fact that socialism is intrinsically an urban/industrial ideology means that individual socialists are often prone to *idolatry* of industry itself, of machines and mechanical progress, that this often leads straight to hell, and that sensible people should resist this sort of mad excess, working instead to soften the horrible consequences of industrial society on the individual (as indeed is the purpose of socialism itself, in Orwell's conception). An example of all this would be this blog's ongoing critique of inhuman Le Corbusier-style machinist design which creates wretched and unlivable environments. Orwell's idea is that intellectuals' job in the future world socialism wull be to thwart such mad, destructive ideas and prevent them from causing people needless suffering.
"As a rule the most persuasive argument they can think of is to tell you that the present mechanization of the world is as nothing to what we shall see when Socialism is established. Where there is one aeroplane now, in those days there will be fifty! All the work that is now done by hand will then be done by machinery: everything that is now made of leather, wood, or stone will be made of rubber, glass, or steel; there will be no disorder, no loose ends, no wildernesses, no wild animals, no weeds, no disease, no poverty, no pain—and so on and so forth. The Socialist world is to be above all things an ordered world, an efficient world" – this attitude outlined and opposed by Orwell is basically the same one being fought by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State, to take another example familiar to readers of this blog. High Modernism if you like.
Anyway, the core point is that Orwell isn't comparing his day to the paleolithic ancestral environment, he's comparing it to 18th century pre-industrial revolution England. When he says that the machine makes a fully human life impossible, he doesn't mean that you should smash your glasses and make a spear out of flint, he means that in many ways the life of an 18th century peasant contained more comfort, beauty and dignity than that of a fin de siécle factory worker. This is actually one of the core points of the whole of WIgan Pier, so I don't know how... but in any case, I think my point is made.
The argument that Orwell is any way saying that "High Modernism" is bad for treating humans as cogs is unsupportable considering the following paragraphs (split into multiple parts for length):
"Meanwhile I am assuming that the tendency of mechanical progress is to make life safe and soft. This may be disputed, because at any given moment the effect of some recent mechanical invention may appear to be the opposite. Take for instance the transition from horses to motor vehicles. At a first glance one might say, considering the enormous toll of road deaths, that the motor-car does not exactly tend to make life safer. Moreover it probably needs as much toughness to be a first-rate dirt-track rider as to be a broncho-buster or to ride in the Grand National. Nevertheless the tendency of all machinery is to become safer and easier to handle. The danger of accidents would disappear if we chose to tackle our road-planning problem seriously, as we shall do sooner or later; and meanwhile the motor-car has evolved to a point at which anyone who is not blind or paralytic can drive it after a few lessons. Even now it needs far less nerve and skill to drive a car ordinarily well than to ride a horse ordinarily well; in twenty years' time it may need no nerve or skill at all. Therefore, one must say that, taking society as a whole, the result of the transition from horses to cars has been an increase in human softness. Presently somebody comes along with another invention, the aeroplane for instance, which does not at first sight appear to make life safer. The first men who went up in aeroplanes were superlatively brave, and even today it must need an exceptionally good nerve to be a pilot. But the same tendency as before is at work. The aeroplane, like the motor-car, will be made foolproof; a million engineers are working, almost unconsciously, in that direction. Finally — this is the objective, though it may never quite be reached — you will get an aeroplane whose pilot needs no more skill or courage than a baby needs in its perambulator. And all mechanical progress is and must be in this direction. A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world — which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools. Mr Wells would probably retort that the world can never become fool-proof, because, however high a standard of efficiency you have reached, there is always some greater difficulty ahead. For example (this is Mr Wells's favourite idea — he has used it in goodness knows how many perorations), when you have got this planet of ours perfectly into trim, you start upon the enormous task of reaching and colonizing another. But this is merely to push the objective further into the future; the objective itself remains the same. Colonize another planet, and the game of mechanical progress begins anew; for the foolproof world you have substituted the foolproof solar system — the foolproof universe. In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness. But softness is repulsive; and thus all progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached. Now and again, but not often, you meet somebody who grasps that what is usually called progress also entails what is usually called degeneracy, and who is nevertheless in favour of progress. Hence the fact that in Mr Shaw's Utopia a statue was erected to Falstaff, as the first man who ever made a speech in favour of cowardice.
But the trouble goes immensely deeper than this. Hitherto I have only pointed out the absurdity of aiming at mechanical progress and also at the preservation of qualities which mechanical progress makes unnecessary. The question one has got to consider is whether there is any human activity which would not be maimed by the dominance of the machine.
The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized world all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes one sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench for a water-pipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth out in a couple of minutes. Why not let the machine do the work and the men go and do something else. But presently the question arises, what else are they to do? Supposedly they are set free from ‘work’ in order that they may do something which is not ‘work’. But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them. The labourer set free from digging may want to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the potato patch. Hence the antithesis between work, as something intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something desirable, is false. The truth is that when a human being is riot eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games, or merely lounging about — and these things will not fill up a lifetime — he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work. Above the level of a third- or fourth-grade moron, life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort. For man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness. And now consider again those half-dozen men who were digging the trench for the water-pipe. A machine has set them free from digging, and they are going to amuse themselves with something else — carpentering, for instance. But whatever they want to do, they will find that another machine has set them free from that. For in a fully mechanized world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as ‘art’; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working — that is, of living.
At a first glance this might not seem to matter. Why should you not get on with your ‘creative work’ and disregard the machines that would do it for you? But it is not so simple as it sounds. Here am I, working eight hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something ‘creative’, so I choose to do a bit of carpentering — to make myself a table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a touch of artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself. But even when I get to work on my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago felt towards his table, still less as Robinson Crusoe felt towards his. For before I start, most of the work has already been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill. I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would have had to do the work with chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only needing to be fitted together; my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the mechanized future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and materials available then, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of ‘creative work’. In any case the arts of the hand (which have got to be transmitted by apprenticeship) would long since have disappeared. Some of them have disappeared already, under the competition of the machine. Look round any country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently-cut tombstone later than 1820. The art, or rather the craft, of stonework has died out so completely that it would take centuries to revive it.
But it may be said, why not retain the machine and retain ‘creative work’? Why not cultivate anachronisms as a spare-time hobby? Many people have played with this idea; it seems to solve with such beautiful ease the problems set by the machine. The citizen of Utopia, we are told, coming home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the tomato-canning factory, will deliberately revert to a more primitive way of life and solace his creative instincts with a bit of fretwork, pottery-glazing, or handloom-weaving. And why is this picture an absurdity — as it is, of course? Because of a principle that is not always recognized, though always acted upon: that so long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap. One sees a good illustration of this in the matter of travel. Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc., is the difference between life and death. The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train — or by car or aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making a two days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where every-thing could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic took, to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe or the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall.
The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the activities of the eye and the hand. The apostle of ‘progress’ will sometimes declare that this does not matter, but you can usually drive him into a comer by pointing out the horrible lengths to which the process can be carried. Why, for instance, use your hands at all — why use them even for blowing your nose or sharpening a pencil? Surely you could fix some kind of steel and rubber contraption to your shoulders and let your arms wither into stumps of skin and bone? And so with every organ and every faculty. There is really no reason why a human being should do more than eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate; everything else could be done for him by machinery. Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle. That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver. The implied objective of ‘progress’ is — not exactly, perhaps, the brain in the bottle, but at any rate some frightful subhuman depth of softness and helplessness. And the unfortunate thing is that at present the word ‘progress’ and the word ‘Socialism’ are linked in-separably in almost everyone's mind. The kind of person who hates machinery also takes it for granted to hate Socialism; the Socialist is always in favour of mechanization, rationalization, modernization — or at least thinks that he ought to be in favour of them. Quite recently, for instance, a prominent I.L.P.’er confessed to me with a sort of wistful shame — as though it were something faintly improper — that he was ‘fond of horses’. Horses, you see, belong to the vanished agricultural past, and all sentiment for the past carries with it a vague smell of heresy. I do not believe that this need necessarily be so, but undoubtedly it is so. And in itself it is quite enough to explain the alienation of decent minds from Socialism.
A generation ago every intelligent person was in some sense a revolutionary; nowadays it would be nearer the mark to say that every intelligent person is a reactionary. In this connexion it is worth comparing H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, written thirty years later. Each is a pessimistic Utopia, a vision of a sort of prig's paradise in which all the dreams of the ‘progressive’ person come true. Considered merely as a piece of imaginative construction The Sleeper Awakes is, I think, much superior, but it suffers from vast contradictions because of the fact that Wells, as the arch-priest of ‘progress’, cannot write with any conviction against ‘progress’. He draws a picture of a glittering, strangely sinister world in which the privileged classes live a life of shallow gutless hedonism, and the workers, reduced to a state of utter slavery and sub-human ignorance, toil like troglodytes in caverns underground. As soon as one examines this idea — it is further developed in a splendid short story in Stories of Space and Time — one sees its inconsistency. For in the immensely mechanized world that Wells is imagining, why should the workers have to work harder than at present? Obviously the tendency of the machine is to eliminate work, not to increase it. In the machine-world the workers might be enslaved, ill-treated, and even under-fed, but they certainly would not be condemned to ceaseless manual toil; because in that case what would be the function of the machine? You can have machines doing all the work or human beings doing all the work, but you can't have both. Those armies of underground workers, with their blue uniforms and their debased, half-human language, are only put in ‘to make your flesh creep’. Wells wants to suggest that ‘progress’ might take a wrong turning; but the only evil he cares to imagine is inequality — one class grabbing all the wealth and power and oppressing the others, apparently out of pure spite. Give it quite a small twist, he seems to suggest, overthrow the privileged class — change over from world-capitalism to Socialism, in fact — and all will be well. The machine-civilization is to continue, but its products are to be shared out equally. The thought he dare not face is that the machine itself may be the enemy. So in his more characteristic Utopias (The Dream, Men Like Gods, etc.), he returns to optimism and to a vision of humanity, ‘liberated’ by the machine, as a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their ancestors. Brave New World belongs to a later time and to a generation which has seen through the swindle of ‘progress’. It contains its own contradictions (the most important of them is pointed out in Mr John Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power), but it is at least a memorable assault on the more fat-bellied type of perfectionism. Allowing for the exaggerations of caricature, it probably expresses what a majority of thinking people feel about machine-civilization.
The sensitive person's hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug — that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes. You have only to look about you at this moment to realize with what sinister speed the machine is getting us into its power. To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanization. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense — the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanized countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate is almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer's shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil-wrapped cheese and ‘blended’ butter in any grocer's; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements, and everything else that makes up our environment. There are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanization of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, be-cause in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the chance, will learn the vices of civilization within a few months. Mechanization leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to the demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanization, and so a vicious circle is established.
But in addition to this there is a tendency for the mechanization of the world to proceed as it were automatically, whether we want it or not. This is due to the fact that in modem Western man the faculty of mechanical invention has been fed and stimulated till it has reached almost the status of an instinct. People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a somnambulist will go on working in his sleep. In the past, when it was taken for granted that life on this planet is harsh or at any rate laborious, it Seemed the natural fate to go on using the clumsy implements of your forefathers, and only a few eccentric persons, centuries apart, proposed innovations; hence throughout enormous ages such things as the ox-cart, the plough, the sickle, etc., remained radically unchanged. It is on record that screws have been in use since remote antiquity and yet that it was not till the middle of the nineteenth century that anyone thought of making screws with points on them, for several thousand years they remained flat-ended and holes had to be drilled for them before they could be inserted. In our own epoch such a thing would be unthinkable. For almost every modem Western man has his inventive faculty to some extent developed; the Western man invents machines as naturally as the Polynesian islander swims. Give a Western man a job of work and he immediately begins devising a machine that would do it for him; give him a machine and he thinks of ways of improving it. I understand this tendency well enough, for in an ineffectual sort of way I have that type of mind myself. I have not either the patience or the mechanical skill to devise any machine that would work, but I am perpetually seeing, as it were, the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble of using my brain or muscles. A person with a more definite mechanical turn would probably construct some of them and put them into operation. But under our present economic system, whether he constructed them — or rather, whether anyone else had the benefit of them — would depend upon whether they were commercially valuable. The Socialists are right, therefore, when they claim that the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once Socialism is established. Given a mechanical civilization the process of invention and improvement will always continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius(7). Establish Socialism — remove the profit principle — and the inventor will have a free hand. The mechanization of the world, already rapid enough, would be or at any rate could be enormously accelerated.
And this prospect is a slightly sinister one, because it is obvious even now that the process of mechanization is out of control. It is happening merely because humanity has got the habit. A chemist perfects a new method of synthesizing rubber, or a mechanic devises a new pattern of gudgeon-pin. Why? Not for any clearly understood purpose, but simply from the impulse to invent and improve, which has now become instinctive. Put a pacifist to work in a bomb-factory and in two months he will be devising a new type of bomb. Hence the appearance of such diabolical things as poison gases, which are not expected even by their inventors to be beneficial to humanity. Our attitude towards such things as poison gases ought to be the attitude of the king of Brobdingnag towards gunpowder; but because we live in a mechanical and scientific age we are infected with the notion that, whatever else happens, ‘progress’ must continue and knowledge must never be suppressed. Verbally, no doubt, we would agree that machinery is made for man and not man for machinery; in practice any attempt to check the development of the machine appears to us an attack on knowledge and therefore a kind of blasphemy. And even if the whole of humanity suddenly revolted against the machine and decided to escape to a simpler way of life, the escape would still be immensely difficult. It would not do, as in Butler's Erewhon, to smash every machine invented after a certain date; we should also have to smash the habit of mind that would, almost involuntarily, devise fresh machines as soon as the old ones were smashed. And in all of us there is at least a tinge of that habit of mind. In every country in the world the large army of scientists and technicians, with the rest of us panting at their heels, are marching along the road of ‘progress’ with the blind persistence of a column of ants. Comparatively few people want it to happen, plenty of people actively want it not to happen, and yet it is happening. The process of mechanization has itself become a machine, a huge glittering vehicle whirling us we are not certain where, but probably towards the padded Wells-world and the brain in the bottle.
This, then, is the case against the machine. Whether it is a sound or unsound case hardly matters. The point is that these or very similar arguments would be echoed by every person who is hostile to machine-civilization. And unfortunately, because of that nexus of thought, ‘Socialism-progress-machinery-Russia-tractor-hygiene-machinery-progress’, which exists in almost everyone's mind, it is usually the same person who is hostile to Socialism. The kind of person who hates central heating and gaspipe chairs is also the kind of person who, when you mention Socialism, murmurs something about’ beehive state’ and moves away with a pained expression. So far as my observation goes, very few Socialists grasp why this is so, or even that it is so. Get the more vocal type of Socialist into a comer, repeat to him the substance of what I have said in this chapter, and see what kind of answer you get. As a matter of fact you will get several answers; I am so familiar with them that I know them almost by heart.
In the first place he will tell you that it is impossible to ‘go back’ (or to ‘put back the hand of progress’ — as though the hand of progress hadn't been pretty violently put back several times in human history!), and will then accuse you of being a medievalist and begin to descant upon the horrors of the Middle Ages, leprosy, the Inquisition, etc. As a matter of fact, most attacks upon the Middle Ages and the past generally by apologists of modernity are beside the point, because their essential trick is to project a modern man, with his squeamishness and his high standards of comfort, into an age when such things were unheard of. But notice that in any case this is not an answer. For a dislike of the mechanized future does not imply the smallest reverence for any period of the past. D. H. Lawrence, wiser than the medievalist, chose to idealize the Etruscans about whom we know conveniently little. But there is no need to idealize even the Etruscans or the Pelasgians, or the Aztecs, or the Sumerians, or any other vanished and romantic people. When one pictures a desirable civilization, one pictures it merely as an objective; there is no need to pretend that it has ever existed in space and time. Press this point home, explain that you wish to aim at making life simpler and harder instead of softer and more complex, and the Socialist will usually assume that you want to revert to a ‘state of nature’ — meaning some stinking palaeolithic cave: as though there were nothing between a flint scraper and the steel mills of Sheffield, or between a skin coracle and the Queen Mary.
Finally, however, you will get an answer which is rather more to the point and which runs roughly as follows: ‘Yes, what you are saying is all very well in its way. No doubt it would be very noble to harden ourselves and do without aspirins and central heating and so forth. But the point is, you see, that nobody seriously wants it. It would mean going back to an agricultural way of life, which means beastly hard work and isn't at all the same thing as playing at gardening. I don't want hard work, you don't want hard work — nobody wants it who knows what it means. You only talk as you do because you've never done a day's work in your life,’ etc., etc.
Now this in a sense is true. It amounts to saying, ‘We're soft — for God's sake let's stay soft!’ which at least is realistic. As I have pointed out already, the machine has got us in its grip and to escape will be immensely difficult. Nevertheless this answer is really an evasion, because it fails to make dear what we mean when we say that we ‘want’ this or that. I am a degenerate modem semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, ‘want’ to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't ‘want’ to cut down my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which ‘progress’ is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men. These that I have outlined are practically the only arguments that I have been able to get from Socialists — thinking, book-trained Socialists — when I have tried to explain to them just how they are driving away possible adherents. Of course there is also the old argument that Socialism is going to arrive anyway, whether people like it or not, because of that trouble-saving thing, ‘historic necessity’. But ‘historic necessity’, or rather the belief in it, has failed to survive Hitler."
This does not seem to be arguing that progress is bad because it will reduce us to cogs in a machine...
On number 19 (drinking) surely in a society where alcohol is a normal part of socialising it will tend to be the weirdos that don’t drink. And presumably the factors that make you a weirdo will make you unhappy and hence have a negative effect on lifespan. I speak as a teetotaller.
Another explanation I've heard is that there's two-way causation between drinking and health. Drinking causes health problems, but also a lot of alcoholics whose health has been wrecked by alcohol make the choice of swearing off it entirely. Some studies don't ask how much you used to drink, just how much you currently drink -- and so the group of people who don't drink includes both people who have never drunk AND a non-negligible number of former alcoholics, enough to drag down the health markers of that group. Whereas the group of people who only drink a little is mostly just people who have always just drunk a little.
4: It was partly a supply side problem and partly an immigration problem. The US actually had less servants per capita than Great Britain (who in turn had less servants than the rest of Europe) even in the 19th century. This was for two reasons: firstly, the US had no class that defined itself by the possession of servants like European aristocrats. Upper class Americans would, if necessary, go without servants. Upper class Europeans would not. Secondly, wages were higher in the US, meaning more people got pulled into other kinds of work as the US industrialized in the late 19th century.
What happened in the 1920s was the government basically cut off immigration and the economy boomed while simultaneously being really unstable. This instabiltiy made people less willing to take on longer term fixed costs like servants while simultaneously tempting the servants away to other work. (There were less servants per capita in the 1920s than 1950s, by the way. The number actually went up during the Great Depression and remained roughly steady during the war.) Meanwhile, less immigrants and the expulsion of various groups from the US created less low cost labor causing prices for domestic help to rise. As did employment programs during the New Deal and the war (insofar as 'fight the Nazis' created an employment program). Meanwhile labor saving devices weakened demand.
This ultimately created labor shortages that the US had to solve by importing guest workers, offshoring various types of work, and by investing more and more into automation. As well as finding economies like maid agencies. It also hugely increased the burden on housewives and discouraged women joining the workforce.
It's not really the comparison (I suspect) they want. Servants declined in the US in a time of economic growth and low government intervention. Their numbers grew during the New Deal. Though it does dovetail nicely into a Yglesias-style pro-immigration position.
If you ever travel outside Europe/the US/etc one thing you'll notice is that servants are much, much more common everywhere else. Even in big modern cities. The median salary in Shanghai is about $24,000 and it's a big, modern city where PPP adjustment makes Shanghai a similar quality of life to South Korea. A maid in Shanghai earns a few thousand dollars a year, median about $3-4k. This means median Shanghai two income families can hire a full time maid for about 5% of their income. Meanwhile, in NY the same median family would have an income of about $64,000 and the average maid makes $30k a year. So the New York couple would have to pay 50% of their income. Likewise, hiring a little help is pretty common because it's so cheap. This is a common reason why foreign students in the US are surprised we clean our own rooms. If having someone thoroughly clean your house costs $20 (as it effectively does in many places) then even relatively poor families will do it.
There's a relatively obvious arbitrage opportunity here. But politically importing low skill immigrants is a non-starter.
5: This is part of a wider debate about the intelligence of tribal peoples. Tribal people tend to score really poorly on IQ tests and tend to not do well in traditional work or in cooperating with aid organizations. There's basically two positions on why this is. One is that it's because they're semi-morons: they have an average IQ of (say) 80 due to environmental or genetic reasons. This is enough to survive in simplistic ways but not much more. The other is that they have too different a mindset to be measured by IQ and are so unfamiliar with the context of the modern globalized world that very basic things we think of as universal are non-obvious to them. They generally point to tests of direct competence such as the complexity of tasks and relations these hunter gatherers routinely do.
My personal opinion is with the latter.
29: Zheng He has a lot of alt-history that's not really credible. For example, the idea he almost discovered the Americas if not for a capricious Emperor. Firstly, if you follow the currents from Europe to the Americas you have more or less a straight shot. If you follow them from East Asia you have to go north in a huge loop. This means that under wind power Asia is about three times as far as Europe. The big competitor who could have theoretically made it instead of Europe were the West Africans. (Who did try, by the way.) Even the Polynesians, who were some of the best sailors in the world, couldn't consistently reach the Americas from the Pacific. Meanwhile Europeans had stumbled into the Americas as early as the 10th century using simple longboats. (Though the route is semi-usable. In fact, East Asian shipwrecks can be found on the West Coast of the Americas after being dragged along by the current.) This was solved in the 19th century by powered boats and steam engines. But Zheng He didn't have those.
Secondly, Zheng He was not an explorer. His goal was to visit nearby locations that were economically interesting. He headed south and mostly followed routes that were well traversed by pre-existing trade networks. Pre-existing trade networks, it's worth point out, that had already reached China. He was able to simply purchase maps or hire (mostly Muslim) experts as needed. It was an attempt to show the flag and impress the region with China's economic and military might to gain relationships and symbolic submission. I can't comment on the ship size directly but keep in mind these ships were supposed to be impressive and so might have been exaggerated. Further, the ships included significant marine and diplomatic contigents that boosted the number of crew. So while you can say (for example) that the Mayflower had a crew of 30 while Zheng had an average crew size of about 88, the Mayflower carried 132 people if you add in passengers. It's likely a significant number of Zheng He's crew were such passengers (if marines are passengers), meant to intimidate the locals.
Basically, Zheng He's MO was to show up with a few hundred ships and tens of thousands of soldiers and say, "We are here to do a friendly exchange of gifts with our friends who friend who definitely wants to be our friend, right friends?" Meanwhile in the background ten thousand Chinese sailors stand around with swords conspicuously looking bored yet threatening. And then the local ruler says, "Sure, we're... uh... friends? Because friends don't invade friends?" And Zheng He goes, "Of course not! Why would you ever say we're here to INVADE you? What a silly idea. These warships and marines are just around to guard the Emperor's very important gifts for you! Here's some Chinese silk. By the say, we see you haven't sent tribute in... well, ever. An oversight I'm sure. Why don't you give me some regional goods and an ambassador to pay homage to my glorious Emperor? Oh, and make sure to clear out any pirates who might threaten our merchants. Okay. Thanks!" And then rinse and repeat onto the next ruler.
RE 5: Agreed. I think it's easy for moderns to look at the remaining hunter-gatherer populations (or pastoralists, or subsistence farmers, or people living in the third world, or poor people in general, or...) and conclude that any idiot could do it.
To which I always want to ask: could you run a marathon or hike up a mountain barefoot, read the ground, tell the weather by looking at the sky, knapp stone into tools, make and shoot a bow, stalk game, set snares, dress meat, tan leather, know the uses of hundreds of species of plants and animals, how to prepare them, the habits and calls of all the creatures in your area? Could you form and fire clay, spin thread, weave cloth, make tools from scratch, set up a shelter, make a fire with rubbing sticks, process plants into medicines and poisons, keep a map in your head of all the various resources you need to survive as you move through the wilderness? Can you fight if needed, with fists, spear, club or bow? Can you prepare food and drink from raw ingredients, some of them poisonous and needed special preparation? Can you make beer starting from unmalted grain, extract honey from wild bee hives, pigment from plants? And can you do all of this with no safety net, no ability to call it off if things fail and go to the shops?
I'm not saying that every hunter-gatherer could do all of these things, or that your children could not learn to do them if given a childhood amongst other hunter-gatherers. But I am saying that the likelihood of you, office-dweller, being able to do even half the stuff on this list is vanishingly small. So maybe a generous interpretation of the intelligence of others is called for.
Yeah. Bloomberg's comment about how there used to be jobs for idiots like farming really showed him to be an unserious person outside of his specialization. Yet it seems very common. People convince themselves their office jobs somehow require more effort than hunter-gatherers. The reality is the opposite: specialization is easier since you are freed up to do one thing really, really well.
To be clear, I don't romanticize that kind of life: they're quite poor. But it's not because they're all stupid.
How is this different from any form of work where you have unskilled labor to free up skilled labor? Bloomberg's offices undoubtedly have janitors. Are the janitors all experts in finance?
Re 4, am I the only one here who noticed this sentence in the JSTOR article? "In a bid to sidestep labor laws, employers paid nannies and cleaners under the table instead of hiring servants full-time." Labor laws! Whoda thunk it.
As a historical aside, live-in servants ("house workers") were a thing in USSR until at least the late 50s.
Longer than that. The Soviet Union was extremely pro-specialization of labor. The theoretical ideal was that you would have no non-professional work left in the economy. Everything would be done by professionals allocated by central planning. So everyone would have their own chef, maid, etc held in common in the collective (or not if you generated enough to support them). There were shortages of course. But the idea that the Soviet Union was interested in (say) making an engineer clean their own toilet is just wrong.
The Soviet Union would have said not that the engineer and maid were equal in the pleasantness of their work or compensation. They were equal in that they were both workers who had a right to the full value of their labor and, perhaps, a decent standard of living. (Theoretically. Again, shortages.) But since they were both workers it was better for them to trade, with the maid cleaning for a higher salary which freed the engineer to do more high productivity engineering work. This was done by central planners because that's how the Soviet Union ran. But it's one place where they somewhat agreed with mainstream economics.
The part where they disagree is that they see non-professional labor relationships as exploitative. So, for example, a free work in a socialist system exchanging money for a maid is non-exploitative. But marrying a woman and having her do domestic work is seen as exploitation since the man is benefiting from her uncompensated labor. It's also bad for the rest of society since she's working artisanally in her own home rather than at scale. There was a debate between people who thought marriage itself was a capitalist or feudal institution and those who thought socialist marriage was possible.
What you are writing about belongs to the early period of USSR, mostly the 20s. Stalin rolled back progressive marriage laws in mid-30s, when the breakdown of the family and the decline in fertility assumed menacing proportions. As for live-in servants/house workers, whatever the ideology had to say about them, they were extremely common in cities in the 20s and 30s. By the 70s, however, house workers were only a thing in the highest reaches of nomenklatura. For regular city dwellers, there were kindergartens and "domestic services centers" with large washing and ironing machines etc. which customers operated themselves. Newly built efficiency apartments were not laid out with a place for a house worker to sleep in, and the new policy of issuing internal passports to rural people made the perk of living and working in a city more accessible without going into personal service.
> But the idea that the Soviet Union was interested in (say) making an engineer clean their own toilet is just wrong.
Perhaps, but however that may be, grand experiments with communal living were largely confined to the 20s. Dormitories for young workers were perhaps a legacy of these, and they still exist, but people powerfully wanted to have private dwellings - not privately *owned*, of course - and moved out of dormitories at first opportunity (which might be long in coming but that's a separate issue). This demand was occasionally bemoaned as recrudescence of bourgeois decadence, but by Brezhnev's time the state embraced it in a tacit social contract with the populace, whereby the latter got its private dwellings and coveted private 0.1 acre suburban plots of land, and occupied itself with - retreated into - these rather than rock the boat, whereas the state and the officialdom got to do what they wanted as long as they let the populace enjoy their islands of privateness. People expended prodigious amounts of energy embellishing these, planting vegetable gardens, building summer houses etc.
> What you are writing about belongs to the early period of USSR, mostly the 20s.
No, I'm not.
The idea of Stalin-the-Reactionary is mostly propaganda. Stalin was in many ways a continuation of earlier policies including the policy of putting women in the workforce and relieving them of domestic tasks. You're right that live in servants declined as they sought efficiency through industrial scale (as that was kind of Stalin's thing). He was one of the people who set up kindergartens/daycare centers for specifically this purpose. Likewise, maintenance and cleaning remained (theoretically) the responsibility of the buildings themselves and not the tenants. It's just they often didn't do it so tenants effectively did it themselves.
By the end even basic maintenance was not done which is how you end up (and this is real) with Soviet soldiers requisitioning local firetrucks to defend a nuclear silo. In such circumstances the semi-private ownership sense you refer to is the only real way cleaning or maintenance got done. But that was, even hardcore Communists agree, a point where the system was dysfunctional.
> Perhaps, but however that may be, grand experiments with communal living were largely confined to the 20s.
Are you claiming that the height of Soviet collectives was during the NEP? If so that's plainly wrong. The highest density of collectives was reached under Stalin and continued by his successors. Even in the Secret Speech Khrushchev never criticized collectivization. It was under Stalin that everything was distributed through work units and collectives and all that and shops were shut down as legacies of a bourgeois economy. This was relaxed by various reforms but there was a far more communal arrangement in the 1930s or 1950s vs the 1920s. (If you're referring to the spontaneous and voluntary communes of the 1920s, understand those were a tiny phenomenon that barely anyone joined. They weren't very productive either.)
I do agree that the Soviet Union increasingly (especially under/after Brezhnev) admitted its communal living and apartment focus was not as desirable as it wanted. They increasingly granted concessions that effectively let people have their own little dachas that they didn't technically own but realistically did. Again, by that point the system had broken down to such an extent that any maid services (I suspect) would mostly have been provided through the informal economy unless you were nomenklatura.
You're mixing up collectivization of agriculture with communal living - factory kitchens, factory-like dwellings of the sort the famous Embankment House was originally planned to be, all that shit. Kolkhoz inmates did not live communally. Penal labor camps' inmates did, and these did reach their peak under Stalin, but I don't think you had that in mind. There is no contradiction in the fact that the most daring cultural experiments partly coincided with the NEP (some continued into early 30s), just as there is no contradiction in there having been hundreds of experiments with communes of different kinds in XIX century USA.
> The idea of Stalin-the-Reactionary is mostly propaganda. Stalin was in many ways a continuation of earlier policies including the policy of putting women in the workforce and relieving them of domestic tasks.
I agree - this idea was pushed first by seething Trotskyists and then by a CPSU and its allies eager to push all their crimes onto a conveniently dead Stalin - but Stalin did roll back the very progressive early Soviet family law, and even began to reintroduce sex-segregated education. The latter reform did not become widespread and was rolled back soon after Stalin died, but the 20s ideals of free relations between the sexes were gone completely, to such an extent that party members could and did get reprimanded and even expelled from the party for extramarital affairs.
Land plots distribution started en masse in 1949, when there was hunger and it seemed desirable to let the populace feed itself (order of the Soviet Council of Ministers #807 on 24 February 1949). These plots were given to workers to for life, said use to be continued to their dependents, as long as they kept working at the organization that distributed the plot to them for 5 years after the fact. They were also obliged to clear and plant the plots in 3 years by their own and their dependents' and families' labor under penalty of losing the allocation.
> by that point the system had broken down to such an extent that any maid services (I suspect) would mostly have been provided through the informal economy
Not sure what system you mean here. There were no informal maid services so far as I know, at least not in Slav SSRs. One of my great-grandmothers used to have a live-in maid in the 50s, but it was a regular arrangement registered with authorities. Her daughter, my grandmother, no longer had one despite her husband earning a good salary and herself being barely functional as a housewife.
> You're mixing up collectivization of agriculture with communal living - factory kitchens, factory-like dwellings of the sort the famous Embankment House was originally planned to be, all that shit.
I think you're mixing up what I'm saying. Prior to Stalin's end of the NEP the average person could walk down the street to a store and purchase a dress or whatever. Afterward clothing was distributed through work units or collective housing blocks. You had your own individual unit in those collective blocks. But it was part of a collective. I think you're mixing up the word collective with a barracks. This might be a language thing: New York is full of cooperatives that ban multi-tenant apartments.
This was then relaxed again after Stalin's death (and especially after Brezhnev).
> There is no contradiction in the fact that the most daring cultural experiments partly coincided with the NEP
I think we're measuring on different axes. I agree the most daring cultural experiments happened in the early period and NEP. But if you measure by raw numbers then Stalin's collectivization drives are when most people would have been forced into collective economic arrangements.
> but the 20s ideals of free relations between the sexes were gone completely, to such an extent that party members could and did get reprimanded and even expelled from the party for extramarital affairs.
This is somewhat unbalanced. It exaggerates the idea of free love as being accepted in the 1920's. It wasn't. And it exaggerates the degree to which it was punished in the 1930s. It also focuses a bit too much on Stalin. There was something of a wider debate in the 1920s on whether marriage was inherently a bourgeois/feudal value or if there could be such a thing as socialist marriage. By the 1930s the debate had been settled, not particularly by Stalin but by Soviet gender theorists including many women. This was then codified into law and alternatives ruthlessly suppressed. But this was how the Soviet Union dealt with most social issues at the time.
> Land plots distribution started en masse in 1949
I'd heard that Khrushchev made one last attempt at making centralized urban planning work (the Khrushchyovka) and then Brezhnev made significant concessions to quasi-private land ownership which led to an explosion of dachas and things like that. But I'll look into it further.
> There were no informal maid services so far as I know, at least not in Slav SSRs. One of my great-grandmothers used to have a live-in maid in the 50s, but it was a regular arrangement registered with authorities.
I hadn't heard of any. However, I do know up until the literal end you were supposed to have various domestic services provisioned to you. The issue is they realistically weren't and this had become so normal no one really expected them to happen. If your grandmother was barely functional she was theoretically entitled to a huge amount of assistance. I'd be surprised to hear she received much of what she was promised.
In reference to the intransitive dice, you might also be interested to learn that the same phenomenon exists between poker hands. In texas hold'em starting hands, Ace King offsuit is a favorite against Jack Ten suited, Jack Ten suited is a favorite against a low pair, and a low pair is a favorite against Ace King offsuit.
Famous old-school poker pro Amarillo Slim used to hustle people by offering them a similar wager to what Buffet did with the dice in your link.
The fact that so many people are surprised to find out that the Nazis didn't like IQ tests really just seems to show how poor an understanding of National Socialism we have these days. People get their history from movie villains, written by other people who got their history from movie villains.
Having now read Scott Sumner's essay #20, it strikes me as downright psychotic. At least two of the examples he gives of "building that look better than traditionalism" are ones I think without exaggeration that the architect should be publicly executed for. Grotesque acts of violence against mankind. (The Laguna Beach and "best looking house in Palm Springs" one specifically.)
He also does the thing where he goes "I'm going to sound like an insufferable snob now" to somehow lampshade the fact that he's an insufferable snob, which actually doesn't work in real life.
I have to admit, I find it hard to comprehend this as an example of a good commentary. He's just a modernist snob stating his awful taste.
Sumner spends a lot of that essay trying to effectively claim an objective superiority to his taste, though. "As an art form progresses, it gets more and more difficult for average people to appreciate the art works"; "[w]hen it comes to residential houses, it’s simply wrong to suggest that modern architecture is ugly". (The first of those quotes is especially remarkable since it suggests a light retrogression during the entire time from the Archaic Period of Greece to Bougereau, then an explosive amount of progress from Bougereau to Van Gogh, a conception I think most art historians would regard as... arguable.)
He also has an extremely ugly liberal bias, of the smarmiest sort imaginable.
I could definitely see the Japanese influence there but I still disliked the house. Maybe it was just that particular photo, but it was all too 80s beige and wood, like the original design of the bridge for the Enterprise in The Next Generation.
And Sumner does have the unfortunate air of "well of course you peasants think this is ugly, because you're not smart and educated and rich like me". Fair enough, you probably are smarter, more educated, a finer palate and richer than I am, but I think that Gehry building depicted in the article is nuts and ugly. Yeah, it's 'clever' in the sense of showing off 'we can use modern building techniques to do something that looks like a toddler's toppling blocks' but it's not aesthetically appealing, unless your aesthetics are "I simply adore having a fit of vertigo".
I came back to the ACX comments for this. I think the Laguna Beach house is ugly as... well, "bad architecture" is now well on its way to becoming a scatological term in my household.
What made me laugh about the Palm Beach house is that the linked photo prominently displays the swimming pool, the actual house is way back in the background so you can't really see it.
Yes, the best built thing in Palm Springs is a swimming pool, I could believe that!
"modernist architect richard neutra built the five-bedroom house in 1946 as a retreat for harsh winters, with an emphasis on the connection to the surrounding desert landscape. large sliding glass walls open rooms up to a series of terraces, the iconic pool and garden, paving the way for california’s concept of ‘indoor outdoor’ living. after kauffman, its original owner, died in 1955, the house stood vacant for several years, while it was restored in the 1990s by award-winning firm marmol radziner, who returned the residence to its initial form, size, and aesthetic integrity."
"Poolside Gossip is Slim Aarons’s iconic 1970 photograph of California society women enjoying a leisurely day by the pool. In the foreground, two women are locked in conversation by a sparkling turquoise swimming pool, cocktails in hand, overlooking a few leggy friends and the idyllic purple mountains of Palm Springs. The snapshot has become an instantly recognizable motif—an emblem of modern, monied American culture in the ’70s."
So indeed, it's very much the inspiration for American Modernist architecture.
Re. "Trust Science": That graph is important because it shows that France is still an outlier today in how little it trusts science. 19th- and 20th-century counter-enlightenment art and philosophy came mostly from France and Germany. An understanding of the counter-enlightenment requires asking what happened in France around 1800 to turn it from the leader of the Enlightenment to the leader of the counter-Enlightenment. (The German case is better-understood, because people have been so interested in what caused the rise of Nazism.)
"What happened" was of course the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but it isn't obvious why they would turn French intellectuals from pro-science to anti-science. (I have my own theories; my problem is that I have too many of them.)
I think the author is trying realllly hard to fit a square peg through a round hole. Economics like his, as he discovered, is just a bunch of made up nonsense that changes every few years and doesn't meant the same thing at all over time.
If the economy of a nation switches from growing bananas, to running factories, and then to tourism and remittances as the primary flow of money....and we rebaseline the entire history of it through using new price measurements, then you're getting a myopic view through a filthy window to vaguely guess at what is going on.
Right after the first rebaseline in the second era of factories you go from measuring an agrarian economy with expensive manufactured goods to a new economy with cheaper manufactured goods.
You're not measuring the same thing and the metric is arbitrarily skewed towards measuring one sector of the economy over another...and yet people will still eat and still use manufactured goods. Measuring it one way or the other way with GDP gives nonsensical answers in both cases....there is a HUGE assumption that the number matters or means anything at all....as though gathering up a bunch of price data and sales will inherently tell you something useful.
There are lots of useless ways of adding things up which don't tell you what you want to know, GDP is simply one more metric which has been dramatically misused and extended far beyond whatever highly limited purpose it has.
Where else would we use such a tool? I'm going to meausre how tall this tree is in meters, but the tree curves as it goes up, so I'll rebaseline my metre measurement after every 3 times I make a measurement.
Not only will I change how I'm measuring things, I'll retroactively adjust it too such that Tree 1 with a curve has 0.9 metre meters and straight up Tree 2 will have 1.0 metre metres. Now I'm going to going to use the updated Tree 2 metric vs the older Tree 1 metric to tell you about changes in human height over time. It turns out when you start using a longer metre that you find people are all getting shorter! But now we'll come up with a very curved Tree 3 to find our new metre is 0.8 metres and suddenly everyone has consistently gotten taller over time again!
What insanity is this? In absolutely no other area would we possibly accept a continually shifting rebaselined tool to tell us about the world as a primary measurement. But it is perfectly fine to decide how the nation is doing and make major choices based on this garbage? Even if it wasn't rebasedlined the whole thing is a huge abuse of a metric that has thousands of inbuiilt assumptions and measurements and other techniques to average out prices, etc. I truly cannot think of a single useful thing you CAN do with GDP, regardless of how it is tweaked. It is such a limited and highly highly manipulated metric built on top of hundreds of others metrics.
The inherent risk for error propagation of this thing being 5% wrong and that being 10% wrong and that being 2% wrong all add up or multiply or whatever in ways too complex to bother trying to parse since there are soooo many variables going into the thing with prices from hundreds of industries with wildly varying reporting processes and summation processes, etc.
A truly strong effort, but GDP, money, inflation, and value have increasingly little to do with everyday people's lives in terms of measuring progress over time or reversals in progress. Our lives are filled with things that are not measured in money which matter to us.
When the cost of an item goes to zero or near zero, then it stops mattering. In what other area would we accept such a wildly nonsensical metric? Only in the made up world of economics where finding a number politically convenient to elites and powerful people is more important than not - especially in the context of official numbers which have been tinkered with to make politicians or ideologies look good for years. Sure there are a few wayward economist working on 'real inflation' and the like, but they don't work for or keep their jobs within the halls of power and authority.
The cult of money and economic management has truly taken over and people rely on numbers they have instead of truths they know far too often and even more so for truths they don't know such as 'how are the poor people doing?' from the halls of power where they have no idea.
So these and other elements go into an enormous bias where you can have insane feudal levels of inequality with 50% of the people in the 'richest nation on earth' living in abject poverty, stress, and economic hardship and you'll have some smug rich person saying ' look at them, they have phones, refrigerators, and TVs! and the GDP is up....obviously they are just whiney children and don't KNOW the truth that the elites know.
Meanwhile cost disease, inflation, and falling wages since 1972 for 80% of workers are ignored.
I always like to remind anyone looking at this kind of top line economic data that it is just a measure of the wealth of the wealthy or a summation of many distinct parts.
For the working class person, they have lived in a great depression 2.0 for 50 years since 1972 with every single year being worst, harder, and more expensive than the last one. The women went to work, everyone got degrees, they lived further away from work, and every single thing has gotten progressively worse to the point they are dying for lack of healthcare while we have empty hospitals which are being closed down! Education is out of reach creating lifelong debt servitude. etc. etc. etc.
So the sunny fake world of 'the line has gone up smoothly' for decades is a complete and total shame when you can see how GDP has nothing to do with 80% of people whose lives have gotten harder for 5 decades in a row in ways which are invisible to the GDP, no matter how you tinker with it. The GDP and using money or price alone are like trying to cross the Atlantic ocean on a stationary bike with no modifications.
And the economists are looking at the problem like...hmmm...have you tried raising or lowering the seat height? It is simply the wrong tool for the job. The answer isn't in the handlebars either! No amount of peddling matters since the thing will just sink into the ocean the moment you put it in the water.
Re 17: No one was watching us, we watched out for ourselves. Parents had their own lives and they didn't revolve around the kids.
I have a deeply held belief that Americans born in the 70s are fundamentally cooler than everyone else, on a hard-wired level. The Boomers and Millennials and Gen Zs are always getting upset and offended about everything and fighting with each other, we 70s-born people are cool cucumbers. At least, the ones I know. Perhaps this is why.
people really love to shit on christopher columbus this time of year, but the man gave us Goonies and Gremlins so I think we can forgive him for Ms. Doubtfire
> The second-born child has about 50 percent higher odds of having childhood autism than the firstborn, the study found.
Is this some confusing interpretation of "odds", or is this in contradiction with the headline? Or is childhood autism being deliberately contrasted with adult autism here?
25.
I've long been wondering what happens if some of the most prominent VC funds decide to forbid startups they fund from requiring academic credentials -- not just for funders, but for any workers. (Presumably for a fixed number of years to not burden the companies as they go public.) In theory, this sounds like a good way of preventing bureaucratization. In practice, not sure how much of a cost it incurs in alternative forms of verifications (infosec has gone a long way in this direction, but less so sure about the rest of SE).
As far as I can tell, you're just making a common linguistic mistake. Higher odds are for less probable events; lower odds are for those that are more likely. "Odds" isn't a direct synonym for "probability".
Mild correction to 21. As the article [1] cited in wikipedia correctly mentions, the Inquisition was aware of this celebration and did somewhat try to root it out. The inquisition was the type of paranoid that allowed them to notice things like this.
I bring it up because I was just reading a story of the inquisition trial against the Governor of New Mexico's wife in the 1660s [2]. One of the 47 accusations was that she did a "secret Jewish ceremony of washing on Friday evenings" for three hours in the bathroom. The accused reveals the societal paranoia and reality about such activities in her defense. She has a perfectly logical explanation as she does for all the accusations, but this one is not numbered among those which she calls ludicrous. The Spanish anxieties about "Jewish infiltration" were deep.
As an aside, around the same time, St. Ignatius of Loyola allowed converted Jews to join his Company of Jesus. It was a rebellious thing to do in those days.
I agree with you about the current comments - do you have a sense of the process that led them from being "As good as ACX comments are now" to "An open sewer"?
It strikes me as distinctly odd that Tyler hasn't noticed, thought about and made efforts to correct such a sad state of affairs.
My only tentative observation is that Scott pops up here and there in ACX comments - it feels very slightly 'supervised'. MR is, in contrast, everyone left to their own devices, and so there is
Tyler did make a half-hearted attempt at improvement by introducing up/down voting, but that has had little effect. In fact I'd argue they've gotten worse since then.
Yes, Cowen left the comment section totally open and unsupervised for a long time. The barrier of entry to post was minimum, so anybody could post a comment under a different name just to insult someone else or write a "funny" retort or just troll.
Cowen has tried to change things a bit. He introduced voting; he (or an intern) also deletes some messages (which ones is often quite arbitrary, however); I believe there is a filter to keep out certain terms; etc.
But in general the whole section feels like it was designed and is managed by people who don't care or have no ideas how to do it. Broken window theory explains the outcome.
Alt-right trolls showed up, made it their home, and chased everyone else away. I'm guessing Tyler and Alex didn't want to tackle content moderation as a full-time job (no one does), so they just sort of let it happen.
On the GDP thing, I'm frankly kind of astounded that anyone would calculate historical GDP in that way. It just sounds like so much more effort than applying a deflator of some kind over those years - after all, that means you need to know only two numbers about each year: the GDP in that year's dollars, and the inflation rate of that year. Doing it the way the author says requires you to know what the price of everything was in 1960 AND how much of everything was traded in that year, and if those kinds of records are kept by whoever (the federal reserve?) I'd be very impressed.
I've recently become very suspicious in general of things which have inflators applied to them over more than, say, ten or twenty years. In New Zealand at least, consumer price inflation is calculated from the change in a weighted basket of items every year, but then they change the items in the basket every three years. I can't help but feeling that those changes every three years are doing a Lot Of Work which is hidden from any number inflated by CPI over several basket changes...
Indeed it is a lot of effort, but in order to calculate the deflators in the first place, you need to estimate the prices and quantities.
The main organizations involved in these estimates are the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Census Bureau. The IRS and USDA also play important roles. The BEA is actually the smallest of the bunch, despite its job in calculating the headline statistics.
The BEA's primary data source is the quinquennial US Economic Census, which the Census Bureau conducts every five years (in years ending in 2 and 7). The Census Bureau also conducts annual and monthly economic surveys, but these have smaller sample sizes, are less comprehensive, and are voluntary (whereas responding to the Economic Census is legally mandatory). As such, the BEA has to fill in the gaps during off-census years using a variety of additional data sources, indirect estimates, and interpolation techniques.
I read now about Pain reprocessing therapy and it was INCREDIBLE. Then I read your linked post about your thoughts on Mental Health apps. There you wrote "This is part of why I am dedicating my life to building an alternative, non-insurance-based system of mental health care." where can I read more about your efforts?
Re: #10, maybe Bill Gates just played Pokemon where you pick a starter based on its type. The types are intransitive in terms of effectiveness. You get to pick before your in-game rival, which seems great in terms of choice, but then your rival invariably picks the type that beats yours.
Interesting account of the inner life in the Leverage Research non-profit/sect & its leader, Geoff Anders.
I have a long-term interest in the social psychology of small-group politics (having some experience in such a group myself decades ago), and I assume the dynamics within and between religious/psychological & sexual sects are rather similar (although the latter may be more inward-looking than political small-groups).
Does anyone have a good theory why such small groups & sects are so prevalent in California in particular? Is it a demand-side phenomenon or a supply-side phenomenon, or what is the combinations of these?
My own hunch is that California, since the 1950s and 1960s has got a reputation as a sect&small counter-culture/small group-friendly place (think Esalen, Black Panthers, Beatniks, Hippies, Hells Angels, Antifa). This reputation acts as a signal to sect-entrepreneurs as well as followers. "Everything that has a screw loose rolls down to California" grumbled some of the political science faculty at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s (a demand-side explanation).
...While if you are an entrepreneur into these sorts of things, the perceived entry costs are probably lower in California. There is a larger receptive mass of potential followers, and the whole social infrastructure is already there comparted to, say, des Moines in Iowa.
Also, California is a known cultural innovation-hub globally. It is a state that people elsewhere looking for The Next Big Thing are watching. From a diffusion theory perspective, this is a good place to start if you have more than local ambitions. Since if you make it locally, there is a higher probability that you will get local spin-offs elsewhere, and become a leader in a larger movement. Which is also likely to attract entrepreneurs.
A small section of these small groups go on to fame and glory (most recently Antifa), although most of course fizzle out locally, in California as elsewhere (power law distribution).
Since housing costs have become prohibitive in the largest Californian cities from any start-up perspective, I would further assume that among small-group entrepreneurs, at least their headquaters and/or the house of the leader are now mostly found in the periphery of Los Angeles and the Bay Area (say, Oakland rather than San Francisco).
But that, as everything else, are empirical questions of course.
"Studying and Supporting Early Stage Science - Leverage Research studies the history of science and how historical discoveries were made and supports novel research in young or under-resourced fields."
0- Are they studying the history of science or how discoveries in history were made? Like are we digging in Normandy or realizing most scientific discoveries were accidents? Hopefully both for a wild output-
1- Pretty sure the definition of cronyism is just a picture of the early days of the Royal Society. Hutton. Smith. Erasmus Darwin who Charles got all his ideas from.
2- But there's a ton of early stage actual science worth funding out there
Man, as someone whose "Top 10 List of Things that Piss Me Off" includes getting pushed around, guilt-tripping, cults of personality, delusions of grandeur, passive-agressive middle-school-esque status games, people deliberately taking an emotional shit on those under their care or authority, and NDAs, that Leverage essay was quite the ride for me!
Far from coming across as weak, the author is extraordinarily resilient to have come through that type of psychological meat grinder more or less intact.
Zoe if you're reading this, you're not crazy–you spent two years drowning in bullshit poured on you by psycho assholes! Congrats on getting away, and I wish you continued success in your recovery.
No kidding. Still, the shape that this particular cult took clearly has some roots in the early "rationalist" discourse, what with the "make an extraordinary effort" to "save the world" etc. etc. In fact, were they actually capable to do, so I'd imagine many would agree that such an omelette is clearly worth breaking a few eggs. I always thought that talks about memetic hazards are just flowery hyperboles mostly deployed to enhance your community's feeling of self-importance, but this situation provides a striking reason to reconsider.
Just because pain is your brain's opinion of threat doesn't mean most mind-body practices claiming to fix your pain by changing your thoughts will work. "[P]ain is handled by a part of the brain that is not easily over-ruled by other brain 'modules' — like an optical illusion that you can’t 'un-see' even when you understand it."
Indeed, "toxic positivity" is a huge pitfall of mind-body medicine. "Pain education is often oversimplified and impractical to the point of being not just useless, but insultingly trite — indistinguishable from toxic positivity, the excessive faith in the power of positive thinking to solve serious problems."
Being in a safer, less-stressful, more pleasant-feeling environment seems to dial down pain's brain alert. Pleasant sensation can be reassuring. Novel sensation (that's not more pain!) provides new input to learn, different from pain. Graded motor imagery (GMI) is said to help:
GMI starts by training you to rapidly identify whether pictures of limbs are of the right limb or the left limb. Then you think about motions (without yet moving the painful part). Then you do mirror therapy, if appropriate. (For roughly symmetric pain, I'm not sure how mirrors would be, but both previous two steps are supposed to help all on their own.)
If someone was suspicious about graphs of elite overproduction across history made by Turchin - I found someone who agrees with me and is actually expert in related topic (yes, I know about confirmation bias)
> By way of example, I was stunned that Turchin figures he can identify ‘elite overproduction’ and quantify wealth concentration into the deep past, including into the ancient world (Romans, late Bronze Age, etc). I study the Romans; their empire is only 2,000 years ago and moreover probably the single best-attested ancient society apart from perhaps Egypt or China (and even then I think Rome comes out quite solidly ahead). And even in that context, our estimates for the population of Roman Italy range from c. 5m to three to four times that much. Estimates for the size of the Roman budget under Augustus or Tiberius (again, by far the best attested period we have) range wildly (though within an order of magnitude, perhaps around 800 million sestertii). Even establishing a baseline for this society with the kind of precision that might let you measure important but modest increases in the size of the elite is functionally impossible with such limited data.
>It was nearly sunset; old Man Rootbeer stood at the end of the ave, flamethrower slung 'cross his back. You 'et one pimecone too many, Mr Poofers! Harkened Old Mr Root Beer. He took dead aim on Mr Poofers - Dead aim, you see! And then he pulled the trigger.
#17, note that the metric is "time spent on childcare as primary activity", and so doesn't count time spent on other housework, reading, gossiping, watching TV, etc, while keeping the kids in sight so they don't kill themselves.
But, yeah, in the 1970s the kids were mostly being looked after by the kids. And it really worked quite well.
Every time birth order effects come up, I always wonder how only children compare to people with siblings. Does any of the research include them? I seem to remember that only children are over represented as readers of this blog, but I’m not sure where I got that idea.
Could you clarify a bit on "your default assumption for everything in pain management should be “doctors will use this as an excuse not to give you necessary medications"". I thought there was overmedication in this field...
A. I am convinced science banana knows nothing about this field. B. This is an amazing paradigm for certain CP treatment, and should be applauded. C. None of what science banana have written refutes this study. D. science banana's tweet that "soon you might" is completely false, which brings me back to point A.
"But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research"
That's the claim. It's also an interesting example of how such claims spread and develop.
Googling and following the links, we find a blog that quotes the claim from Rindermann's book as fact. There you can find the original sources on which Rindermann's claim is based: Two articles in a psychological journal from 1938. It's impossible to tell tell how much these two articles support Rindermann's claim "Contradicting common beliefs, National Socialists were opposed to intelligence research" without reading the articles (but Rindermann's sentence "They were opposed to a measurement solely of ‘theoretical intelligence’, of ‘intellectualism’ (Becker, 1938, p. 22); instead they favoured ‘practical intelligence’ (p. 18) that should be measured." seems to suggest that the Nazis had some kind of intelligence research, based on a concept of intelligence they likef.).
On the blog, the text is used to claim parallels between Nazi concepts and those of Robert Sternberg. Even though it is only based on what Rindermann writes, the blog suggests that "maybe" other parts of Robert Sternberg's concept of intelligence could also be found in these sources ("I don’t see any
mention of the part of his trio successful intelligence, but maybe if
one looked at the sources.")
Next, another blog refers to the quote on the first blog, writing "from what we can tell, the Nazis actually opposed intelligence research". Well, "from what we can tell" is based on one author whose statement seemingly summarizes what two Nazi psychologists said. That is
then quoted by someone on Twitter to back the statement that Sternberg has
"controversial views on intelligence that sound straight from nazi
texts", and finally that is referred here on ACX, as supporting a claim that
"Nazis hated IQ research", together with the advice "Whenever someone
tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on
perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology." Should you consider doing that?
Would doing that improve political discourse, would it be intellectually
honest, or at least be justified? Or would it just be based on a pile of
motivated reasoning and motivated search? I sometimes read claims that the Rindermann side of the discourse is the intellectually superior side, or just politically neutral scholars, whereas their opponents are political hacks. So, hm, really? Maybe Nazis hated intelligence research, but up to now I only see a claim with weak support and some bloggers who seem to like the claim.
Moreover, is the aversion of some Nazis against IQ research actually central to the debate? It could be argued that nowadays some people who want to pursue exclusionary or worse policies may use IQ arguments to justify this, and that the statement that some Nazis did not like IQ research is not extremely relevant to that. At least I know no statements explicitly saying that "race"-sorting based on IQ is bad because Nazis were fans of IQ research. Rather, the argument seems to say that the Nazis used anything they could to justify their ideologically motivated policies, and this (making up justifications for the ideologically motivated positions aimed against outgroups) is, as far as I understand it, the accusation against some IQ researchers (whether justified or not, that is not my point here).
In this context, it could be argued that the Nazis did not need IQ research to justify their policy of killing the "weakest" or exterminating the "Life unworthy of life", and that referring to measured intelligence would possibly be quite detrimental to their own aims. They had already defined who was the enemy, and they had defined their idea of how to improve their "race". Justifying this by referring to additional criteria could make those insecure who are unsure whether the thresholds of these criteria might change over time, and whether they or other people around them would be affected. Nazi "euthanasia" actually met with some resistance (e.g. from the Catholic church).
But of course this would just be questioning some points of the argument while accepting Rindermann's claim, based on some perceived plausibility that Nazis may not have liked IQ research. But in real life there are trade-offs, and there are also arguments why Nazis may actually have used intelligence measures.
The two articles that Rindermann quotes are from 1938. The Nazi "Euthanasia" Programme started in 1939. Did intelligence measures play a role there? Here's a quote from a website about Aktion T4 (https://www.t4-denkmal.de/eng/Ausgrenzung-Kinder):
"When admitted to the institution, children and adolescents were assessed and treated mainly according to how well they could be taught. Classification usually occurred after an intelligence test based on an intelligence test that had been in use since 1905 (Binet-Simon test). In school of the institution, pupils were supposed to learn and be fostered according to their mental abilities. This practice, which had developed since the early 20th century, became a deadly threat in the National
Socialist era. Children and adolescents who failed the intelligence test and did badly in the school of the institution were regarded as »incapable of being educated« and »unfit for life«. There was no place for them in a psychiatric programme aimed at healing and integrating them into working life.
As part of the National Socialist »euthanasia« programme, children and adolescents were murdered not only in the »children's wards« of the »Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses« but also in the gas chambers of the T4 killing centres. When they were being selected, their assessed »ability to be educated« played the decisive role. The victims of »Aktion T4« included around 4,200 minors, of which almost 77 per cent were considered to be »uneducable«. This assessment affected girls and boys equally and was mostly made in conjunction with the diagnosis of »congenital or early acquired imbecility«."
(Note the sentence "This practice, which had developed since the early 20th century, became a deadly threat in the National Socialist era." It may explain in some part why some people are very averse to some instances seemingly "neutral" measurement.)
AFAICT 'It's all in your mind' was invented specifically to discredit people studying psychosomatic phenomena. Reading about researchers in the area (going back to the late 1800s) this is emphatically not their claim, but rather that the interaction between mental phenomena and physical phenomena are complex, surprising, and worthy of much more attention than they have received. See, for example John Sarno's famous book Healing Back Pain. His explanation for the success that he has had is something like this: when injured, the muscles surrounding an injured part naturally tense to take the load off the injured part. This pattern of activation can remain subtly activated past the initial injury and deprive the area of blood flow. The sensations that continue to arise in the area from this restricted blood flow and tensing of supporting muscles in an unnatural loading scheme get coded as 'pain' and the phenomena persists. You can undo this by deconditioning the pattern by paying very close attention to the pattern of muscles tensing as you go through the motions that cause 'pain' to arise.
Importantly, I did this myself and cured a minor chronic pain that I was having in my back that I thought was left over from straining a spinal erector. The pain persisted for more than a year, after reading the book and trying the exercise (I think) 3 times it entirely abated and has not recurred.
I think this is an important topic that is stymieing our understanding of chronic pain. I think this is a potential EA cause area due to the possibility of an intervention that can be distributed for very low cost.
FreakonomicsExperiments.com did a lot of very-low-cost RCTs of major life decisions, by having people who were on the fence go there and randomize into one or the other choice. I think something similar could be done with alcohol. It'll only study people who were on the fence, but those are the people most interested in the results of such studies anyway. You don't need to sell out to industry to get $67 million to run a study -- you just need some people to volunteer to participate and self-report their data on a cheap website.
Re: 20, How we empirically distinguish the "this art is just too advanced for you filthy peasants to appreciate it" scenario from a bunch of sycophantic courtiers praising the emperor's new clothes and telling the little boy he's an idiot? How do we even prove that "having taste" is a thing, and prove who has it, beyond just defining taste as agreeing with the majority of some arbitrarily chosen reference group (either the entire population, or some level of credential)?
Art experts are ensconced in institutions and social milieus that require them to play signaling games. Signals have little value unless they are costly -- the sillier the beliefs, the more value they have as shibboleths to delineate group membership. Perhaps people who are educated about art online -- acquiring all the knowledge without being embedded in those social pressures to conform -- would like modern art less relative to traditional arts than the institutionalized "art experts". That would lean me towards the emperor's new clothes.
I don't mean to imply that modern-art-appreciators are faking it, but that status-signalling-incentives can lead to people actually liking stuff that they would not otherwise like. Self-deception can make signaling more effective.
One interesting think about the Orwell essay (#24) was that in his time people supported their faction by exaggerating its strength. To some extent, these days people support their faction with a focus on how much its been hurt.
7: The study solicits participants by advertising "mind-body" treatment for CBP, nearly guaranteed to attract participants primed for psychological pain treatment. The placebo group was told they were receiving a placebo saline injection with no psychological treatment. Stands to reason the placebo effect would be greater for the group that received actual "mind-body" treatment.
No MRIs performed on participants, but of those who supplied their own at the beginning of the trial presented with a median of 4 different radiological findings, including disc herniation/rupture and central canal stenosis. These abnormalities were "assumed not to be causing back pain" by the researchers because "these abnormalities are seen in the majority of asymptomatic individuals." i.e. because some people have these conditions and are asymptomatic we know that in all cases these conditions cannot be causing back pain and are thus "centralized pain" we can treat psychologically.
Participants with multiple abnormalities on their MRI were told by researchers things like:
“Right now, you’re feeling a burning sensation in your back. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that you think burning indicates danger. But burning doesn’t have to feel bad. Think about when you first get into a jacuzzi, or when you’re taking a nice, hot shower… there’s a burning sensation, but it actually feels really nice."
And, "We know that there’s nothing wrong with your body, this is just your brain putting on a show for you. It’s just an interesting burning sensation, but we know that it’s safe. So just sit back and enjoy the show.”
They were also telling this to the 60% of participants who had no MRIs, god knows what real acute back issues they could have had.
If you tell people that the burning pain in their back when they bend over is an irrational invention of their mind that should actually be experienced pleasurably as being in a jacuzzi, it stands to reason they'll tend to revise down their post-treatment pain metrics, lest they be perceived as hopelessly irrational or not mentally strong enough to overcome their mind's inherent irrationality.
I don't know how I feel about this. The other side of the concern is that a doctor will tell a patient some very important warning about the medicine, and the patient would take it anyway. Like "this has almost no chance to help you and will kill you within two weeks of use" (Or, "this drug has significant psychological side effects, I don't recommend it to solve your [minor problem]") and the patient does it anyway.
Liability concerns would have to be mitigated, for instance the doctor obviously couldn't be held liable in such a scenario, but we would have to remove liability for drug manufacturers as well, since no one can control their use. If drug manufacturers are not liable for misuse of their drugs, then they have more incentive to get drugs to the market and just see what happens.
Long term I think consumers would become more careful about the drugs they take and it may end up better for all (or at least those capable of making rational decisions about their medication, potentially while in need of medication to modulate their decision-making capabilities). In the short term I think a lot of people will make some really bad medical choices and end up having significant complications, with a very long tail of less capable people continuing to do so.
Also, dumb people will buy antibiotics in bulk with getting antibiotic-resistant pathogens even faster.
In practice it does not matter as it will not happen - any politician can easily imagine getting blamed for all deaths that will happen. Including children "treated" by parents educated at University of Facebook and Youtube.
So you're okay with people buying anti-biotics every time their nose runs?
If yes, then I can't imagine there's any value continuing the discussion.
If it involves a collective action problem like that then the government should directly implement a solution such as a pigovian tax or direct rationing, not leave it up to the discretion of doctors.
How on earth is that meaningfully any different? He literally said "In a free society, a citizen should have to ask neither doctors nor politicians..."
A tax IS the politicians part.
To be fair, doctors have an incredibly bad track record of not giving people antibiotics every time their nose runs.
My father had to interview new doctors for a medical group a while ago, and his trick question was "what's the best antibiotic for a cold?" (with the correct answer being "none"), and he had a lot of trouble finding candidates who would give the correct answer (the usual tactic is a z-pack, aka azithromycin, which is vaguely relevant to some bacterial complications of colds and is very commonly given to keep patients happy).
I agree that making antibiotics available without even a doctor's prescription would probably be worse, though.
How did that manage to filter out more than a Lizardman-constant number of people? That takes my opinion of doctors to an even lower position ...
Reminds me of the SNL skit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IZrYeUX3MI
I have stage 4 prostate cancer and this is one of the reasons why I want to make sure I'm dead before my risk of serious pain gets too high. I dread the idea of having to depend on a doctor to give me sufficient opiates. I assume most doctors aren't stingy for patients in my condition, but my personality simply won't allow me to tolerate such a dependency.
I'm not actually convinced that pentobarbital (or any oral medication method) is superior to other methods. Here in The Netherlands our legal assisted death options are euthanasia (doctor uses IV to inject coma inducing medication followed, after a coma check, by muscle relaxants) and assisted suicide (patient takes oral medication in presence of doctor). When the assisted suicide option is picked, the doctor must also install an IV and have the euthanasia medication on standby because the failure rate is quite high (and sometimes it just takes too long).
I personally think that helium suffocation is a nice way to go and it requires only easily acquired materials (at least here, where you can still easily get pure helium). Here is a fascinating article:
uggcf://chozrq.apov.ayz.avu.tbi/20216304/
(rot13 encoded pubmed link. WARNING: Graphic suicide photos)
I heard that breathing nitrogen/helium feels the same as breathing air, so you don't feel like you're dying. That's the attraction of it.
I don’t get it, why helium? Doesn’t nitrogen work just as well, while being much cheaper?
Here (NL) helium is actually much cheaper and very easy to buy due the party balloon usage (I understand in some places they add 20% oxygen, but here they don't yet). Also, there is much more practical experience with helium.
Of course. The fun part is: Most of the people who tend to say "I don’t believe in IQ" do so because IQ-testing showed "Africans" and African-Americans to score lower than "whites" (on average, obviously there is overlap). So IQ-tests got associated with some as being "racist". Those same "some" are often also quick to judge everything they somehow connect with "nazism" as highly suspicious. - That the Nazis - serious hard-core-racists* - also did not like IQ-tests because "Jews"/Jewish Germans showed better results than "true Aryans", goes to show ... oh, well, Marxbro1917, I guess you know now. "In good faith": Knew all along, may we presume? - *"4. Staatsbürger kann nur sein, wer Volksgenosse ist. Volksgenosse kann nur sein, wer deutschen Blutes ist, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf Konfession. Kein Jude kann daher Volksgenosse sein." now, that is racism, real racism, racism-without-the-quotes.
Only the first. The 2nd seemed not even rhetorical. Sincerely hope I can refrain from reacting to your posts in the future. Have an outstanding day.
Are you going to call me a Nazi if I tell you that I don't believe that IQ? — or rather, I don't find most of the IQ studies to be very good science. But before we go down the IQ rabbit hole let me just give you fair warning that my graduate work was bio-behavorial sciences, and I'm still passing familiar with this subject.
Before we get into nitty gritty discussion of problems I have with IQ testing, I'd be curious what *your* level of understanding of IQ is. There's a lot of ground to cover, and the way I would approach answering your question depends on how deep you've gone into the subject.
1. Do you believe that some types of IQ tests are better than others at measuring certain types of intelligence?
2. Do you have a preferred type of general IQ test? If so, can you tell me why you think it's superior to others?
3. Do you have an opinion on what percentage of genetics vs environment determines IQ?
4. Do you believe that g is strongly correlated with success in our society?
5. Do you have an opinion on the reliability vs validity of IQ tests for cross national and/or population comparisons?
6. Given that pre-literate societies have strikingly different ways they categorize the world, does one size fit all cultures when it comes to IQ tests? (e.g. would you expect that you could administer a sequence of questions dealing with colors to a pre-literate populatin who don't have words for colors? Would you be able to administer a test with sequences of geometric shapes to a pre-literate population who may have never been exposed to regular geometric shapes?)
Number 6 may seem like a trick question, but your answer will let me understand whether you've given any consideration to how to measure IQ so it isn't culturally biased.
But is it really cultural bias? It seems to me we should give high credence to these populations genuinely being less intelligent, unless you somehow think that intelligence has never been selected for over the past 10,000 years. If you live in a primitive society where writing isn't necessary, why would you expect to have faced the same selection pressures as those in relatively complex societies? Being genuinely less intelligent is precisely what I would expect of this kind of society.
But in any case, people whose ancestry is of pre-literate populations tend to perform worse on IQ tests even after living in developed countries for generations and going to school and becoming literate. Is their culture really still so different after all that?
These people also fare worse in terms of socio-economic outcomes, so it would seem really, really strange that their actual IQ is no lower than anyone else's and we've just been measuring it wrong.
Can we accurately measure the IQ of pre-literate populations? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not. There's no reason to think its as high as other populations, and any environmental explanation you give for why they are primitive and economically undeveloped is one that should be expected to influence the selection pressures they've faced, so a priori we shouldn't expect them to succeed in industrial society and empirically they don't.
As for cultural bias for populations within e.g. the US, there's absolutely zero evidence for it and plenty of evidence against it.
IQ predicts outcomes for e.g. blacks and whites equally well or even slightly overestimates black outcomes. If tests are biased that means the true average black IQ is higher, which means they ought to outperform the estimates from the 'biased' tests.
The rank order difficulty of IQ questions is basically the same for blacks and whites.
Questions deemed to be culturally loaded by experts (e.g. vocabulary) tend to have the smaller black white gaps, whereas less culturally loaded subtests like pattern recognition have the largest gaps.
"It seems to me we should give high credence to these populations genuinely being less intelligent, unless you somehow think that intelligence has never been selected for over the past 10,000 years."
Well yes, in theory civilized societies should be dumber than primitive ones if any selection is happening, as specialisation requires less brains than generalized intelligence (see, for instance, dogs vs wolves).
But since you bring up genetics, my understanding from GWAS studies is that IQ is very polygenic (something like half our genes having an effect) and has next to no large effect genes. Which is entirely consistent with a very broadly-specified trait that has more or less reached the limits of selection and plateaued out.
This, in turn, means that you should expect very little movement in mean under selection over short geological timespans (not much for selection to work on, with fitness being negatively affected by any major deviations), and that differences between populations should be due mainly to differences in environment.
Finally, there's the issue that Africa contains most of our genetic diversity as a species. Meaning that, if you were to somehow raise a test population in an identical environment, you should see most of your genetic differences in intelligence amongst African populations, with Europe and Asia being more or less identical. That the testing we have doesn't show this seems to point to a) flawed testing (again, IQ research carried out on African populations was terrible in quality) and b) environment.
Toxn brought up most of the points that I wanted to, but I'll add a couple more...
What sort of intelligence do you think is being naturally selected for? Spatial? Math? Verbal? There have been a bunch of studies that apes (such as chimps) are faster visual problem solvers than humans. Yes, there may be selective pressure on chimps to be better at visually sorting out the information hidden in the complex visual environment of a forest. Does that make chimps smarter than humans? And if they are, what good does that do them outside of their forest environment?
But what humans can do, that chimps can't do, is work as a group to solve problems (using language to share information). So what's being selected for in situation where group cohesion provides an evolutionary advantage? I would suggest that humans are being selected for as much for traits that promote social cohesion as for traits that promote intelligence. Just as an example, why do smart outspoken kids get picked on in school? It's clear to me that our culture does not reward intelligence as much as it rewards athletic prowess. Likewise, it rewards people with good social manipulation skills — which is why you seldom see scientists as CEOs.
Another point worth mentioning is that the ‘Flynn Effect’ shows that average IQ scores have been steadily increasing world wide across all populations. The change in IQ scores has been approximately three IQ points per decade. An average individual alive today would have an IQ of 130 by the standards of 1910, placing them higher than 98% of the population at that time. Likewise, an average individual alive in 1910 would have an IQ of 70 by today’s standards. If IQ is substantially determined by one's genome, why is this occurring? Could Western civilization be selecting for us to be smarter? Or is it better nutrition and better education? I would suggest that it's the latter, because (a) western civilization is unevenly distributed, and (b) it would take a founder event or a series of founder events to move a genome so quickly in one direction...
Not OP, but I'll take a stab at the questions, since it's a subject I enjoy and I think IQ testing gets a bad rap.
1. Yes. Raven's tends to match *g* closest, but also has one of the most significant Flynn effects. The SAT-math and SAT-verbal performed very well for mathematical and verbal aptitude among young US high schoolers for the Johns Hopkins longitudinal study. So forth.
2. I do not. Any and every half-thought-out test that's not aiming specifically towards achievement (and even achievement tests, to an extent) gives usable information and displays similar rank orders. I like the Wonderlic for fast-and-loose estimates, standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, ASVAB, and LSAT for convenience of most having already taken them, and the more in-depth the better for a formal IQ estimate.
3. Not to be flippant, but my first answer would be that it's 99% genetic, given the impossibility of non-human animals comparing to most humans. Taking it as I believe you mean - IQ variation between humans - I think people have set, and varying, genetic potentials and their environments determine how close they will come to achieving that potential. Within the modern United States specifically, I'd place it at something like 40/60 genes/environment in early childhood moving up to around 80/20 in adulthood, as very rough estimates.
4. Absolutely.
5. Low validity and low reliability for cross-national, cross-cultural comparisons, with caveats I'll get into in response to 6. Within, say, the United States alone, high validity/reliability.
6. Yes and no. The rank order within each culture would stay broadly similar on any given test - that is, the smartest individuals in that culture would score the highest in general. In addition, the test would provide accurate information on how well the individual would be expected to perform in the tasks expected of people in a highly literate, scientifically capable society - that is, their score would be valid and make useful predictions in comparison to a modern individual for many of the pragmatic purposes we care about it. However, it would provide a poor indicator at best of their theoretical genetic potential in those domains, which is ultimately the trait many hope to measure with IQ tests.
Thanks for taking the time to make a thoughtful reply! (I put those questions up there to filter out people who might have opinions but little knowledge to back up their opinions. Rather than an intelligence test, it's a bullshit filter.)
1. Yes, I like Raven's progressive matrices test is because that eliminates most of any cultural biases — at least for modern cultures. I doubt if a hunter gatherer who is unfamiliar regular geometric shapes could do well on it. Remember that from kindergarten on we are taught to recognize circles, squares, triangles. Without understanding on how all squares are similar and without counting skills I suspect a pre-literate would have trouble with these questions. I didn't realize that Flynn Effect is most pronounced in the Raven's matrices! That seems counter-intuitive to me, but, hey! — that's why the subject of intelligence and its putative measurement are so frigging fascinating.
2. Yes, I would agree with you in a modern society achievement tests and standard IQ tests are fairly good indicators of *academic* achievement. But are they actually an accurate measurement of intelligence, or are they actually testing the testee's ability to take tests? Also, please note that people with severe Asperger's syndrome can do quite well on tests that handle pattern sequences and could test 3 or even 4 standard deviations above the norm. But what does that get them in the real world if they have poor language and crappy social skills?
3. Don't forget chimps and gorillas do better than humans on many pattern solving tests. But chimps and gorillas haven't don't have language and culture to provide (a) a memory of past solutions available to others within a group, (b) and the ability to cooperatively solve problems (although there are examples of chimps cooperatively solving problems, there's a level of complexity beyond which language and cultural memory are required).
As for genus Homo, let's not forget that IQs are rising an average of 3 pts per decade worldwide. Why? Probably improved nutrition and better education. Also also, the paper that Markus referenced above quotes studies that education can account for a 22 pt increase in IQ. I'd be curious if the Flynn effect continues through the end of the century or beyond, or whether it's an artifact of better schooling and the longer times that modern kids stay in school. Anyway, the Flynn effect and the positive correlation with education make me favor a stronger environmental component than you seem to favor.
4. I don't believe g is that great an indicator of success in our society. Lewis Terman's long-term study of geniuses showed that they mostly did better financially than average and they mostly ended up being successful in their chosen careers, but none of them won any outstanding prizes (like the Nobel) that we normally associate with genius. None of them made any profound scientific breakthroughs or left their mark on civilization. In fact, there was a study — pre-Internet, so I can't find a link to it — that suggested that being within 1 standard deviation above the median was the sweet spot for financial success. And I think a lot of the modern Nobel laureates in science and medicine didn't test out as genius.
Just anecdotally, my cousin tested out with an absurdly high IQ of around 190 — I recall because her mom never stopped bragging about it (Lol!). However, my cousin didn't attend college. She did a stint in the Army as a non-com. Post military, she's been largely living on welfare. So, her super high IQ didn't take her very far in life. I've seen her solve problems though that leave me stumped with my relatively puny ~135 IQ.
And this is just my own observation, the ability to sweet-talk and bullshit convincingly seems to get one farther up corporate hierarchy than raw smarts. You don't see many PhDs as leaders of capitalist enterprises. Likewise, you don't need to be very smart to be successful in politics. In fact intelligence may be a liability.
5. Highly reliable when using the same test (i.e. reproducible). Somewhat less reliable across when the same individuals are given different tests. As you can see from my comments above, I question the validity. And I also question both the reliability and validity for cross-cultural comparisons.
6. I see culture as being more important for survival than raw intelligence. So I think natural selection favors people who can get along with their social groupings (n= ~250). <Trigger warning: my next sentence may be regarded as extremely controversial.> But I suspect that since we're naturally attuned to our social groups, we have are also attuned to responding to outsiders a potential threats. So I think humans are undergoing selection for behavioral genes that favor behaviors that manifest themselves as racism. This is my opinion. I wouldn't know how to test it.
I would not, and afaik Scott never called any people "Nazi" - except the Austro-German Nationalsozialisten of 1920-1945. Now to the substantial part: Arguably less than 90% is "very good science" in that dept. of science where IQ is a topic. But: It seems to me one could make a fail-safe way to tenure, if only one could do a "very good" study that showed convincingly no ethnic correlation to exist in IQ, even if in the USofA only (obviously after considering socio-economic status). It sure would make me very happy! Your question number 6 should not be an issue - colors and triangles are known to all (non-visually-impaired) American school-kids, I assume.
Thank you
I think in context that sentence was an obvious joke, making fun of how people tell people who do believe in IQ/genetics stuff that it's discredited Nazi ideology.
All twitter posters are always wrong.
I actually found it kind of offensive, Scott. But you're the moderator, and I wasn't going to say anything until Marxbro brought it up.
I find this whole topic (IQ, genetics, comparisons between countries or "races") terribly uninteresting. The only text I've read entirely is the one from Nassim Taleb. That one is quite offensive but fun.
Taleb would probably enjoy hearing that.
Do you find racial inequality (arguably the biggest political issue of today) 'uninteresting'?
Fair enough if you do. But if you don't, then finding race/IQ stuff uninteresting is basically you saying 'I'm not interested in reading stuff that contradicts my worldview'.
Because that's the whole reason this stuff gets discussed. It's not some dick measuring contest. If you believe that races are biologically identical as it pertains to traits that influence socio-economic outcomes, then you either have to blame culture or blame racism for this gap. But believing that races are biologically identical in this way is increasingly indefensible from a scientific perspective. And so this race/IQ stuff can be thought of as a kind of self-defense for white people from the political bludgeon of 'anti-racism'.
And please don't offer any thoughts on this topic if you haven't read a serious defense of the position you're opposed to. Taleb is hopelessly wrong about IQ: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
Do you find it offensive when people invoke nazism to object to intelligence research? I would guess not.
Obvious jokes not obvious depending on where you fall on the autism spectrum.
I dunno. I'm posting from real life. Where are you posting from?
I didn't exactly fall off my chair laffing myself, but I immediately identified it as a joke.
That's exactly why the joke works, though! The point of the joke is that Scott's position is popularly criticised as being Nazi-adjacent, so here's some evidence why the *opposing* position is actually the Nazi-adjacent one *after all*. If Scott were just randomly saying "here's how you can brand your opponents as Nazis" without that context, it wouldn't be a joke.
The evidence is real, if a little tenuous. Scott's recommendation on how to behave based on it is a joke. (But, based on your commenting history, it sounds as though you don't understand jokes in general, so I'm not going to try to explain further.)
Sometimes jokes are funny because of people who insist they aren't funny.
And sometimes jokes are just lame.
Or if you have a low IQ.
I mean, I'm in the 98th percentile and I rate it a 6.5/10: Better than the most recent chapelle hour, but worse than the most recent bill burr interview.
I found it to be a good joke and had no issues understanding it as such in context.
Can't tell if this is just marxbro being marxbro or some extremely high level meta joke.
I think MarxBro is spot on about this. There are plenty of legitimate researchers who have issues with IQ studies. Accusing them of promulgating Nazi ideology is an ad hominem attack on them. Full disclosure: I'd be just as uncomfortable with Leftie ideologues accusing researchers into the relationship between genetics and IQ of being a Nazis. And this is one of those subjects that's theres a lot of ignorant people latching onto it for political reasons. Yes, I find it interesting that the Nazis were anti-IQ testing. But "joking" about it doesn't get us past our intellectual prejudices.
No one is being accused of being a Nazi. Scott is lampooning those that do accuse people of being Nazis for doing IQ research. The joke is on the accusers not the accused.
No one is being accused of being a Nazi *in the item Scott wrote* I should specify.
No one is being accused of being a Nazi, but the implication is that we should accuse people who "don't believe in IQ" of perpetrating Nazi ideology. So, Scott is encouraging people to make ad hominem attacks on the anti-IQ folks. I'm pretty far to the left, and I hate it when people from my side of the political spectrum call people Nazi's for not being in 100% agreement with certain core lefty beliefs. While I think a lot of IQ research is of questionable quality (and I find it of questionable value), I would never call said researcher a Nazi unless they invoked IQ to prove the superiority of "whites" and make them out to be the "master" race. For instance, Andrew Sullivan gets called a Nazi a lot for his belief that IQ determines the better economic performance of whites against blacks. I don't think he's being overtly racist (but I'm not an African American, so I can't speak for what they'd consider to be racist), but I do think he's misinformed and obstinately foolish in many of his assertions.
Scott is clearly not saying anybody actually IS siding with the nazis. He's highlighting the gap between perception and reality.
In contrast, accusing race/IQ researchers & their supporters of being nazis is extremely common and it is believed genuinely. And bizarrely we never find 'good faith' people like maxbro telling them they oughtn't do this.
Have you considered that this was not a serious recommendation but really a way of highlighting the fact that nazi-accusers are in fact more aligned with nazis on this particular issue.
The point is not that they're an outgroup but that they're bad-faith people who sincerely wish to convince others that accepting certain scientific facts in literally akin to nazism. Scott is not implying anyone is actually a nazi and its not even clear that he's actually instructing people to call people nazis even as a joke. The fact that Scott's comment almost assuredly has gotten you more worked up than you do over people making sincere attempts to portray people who talk about intelligence research as nazis is absolutely mind-boggling.
Rural vs urban is usually downstream from economic development. If one area is becoming more prosperous and another area is not, you expect the former area to urbanize faster than the latter, just because people normally move to opportunity, and have more children when there is more opportunity.
The problem was that a lot of detailed data relevant to development wasn't available in a way corresponding to the boundaries of the states. They report previous work which used such data as were available at that level of geographic detail then use light observable from satellites because it can be fitted to the boundaries of the states in British India.
"have more children when there is more opportunity"
Certainly not true today.
I'm not sure that was ever true. I'm pretty sure even in the industrial age cities were population sinks. And I'm guessing that holds true for before that too.
The other bit is that per-day-overdue fines tend to result in people just not returning a book at all if it is very late. Because libraries almost never pursue library fines, but just charge the fine when you return the book and will deny you the ability to keep borrowing books until you pay the fine, it's often better to keep the book than return it. Exactly the opposite of the intended incentive.
One more failure mode: I once arrived to return book and they refused to accept it unless I paid the fine. I had no money with me.
It's usually possible to return books while the library is closed; they have no way to reject a book in that case.
oo, that is a nice system!
Libraries that I am/was using only recently started allowing this.
I would feel an urgent need to get the book back, even if it was only nickels or dimes accumulating, because it was something bad accumulating.
Now I feel *kind of* bad, but not so bad that I'll take a trip to the library to drop them off, and just let them sit around for a while.
I can renew them online from the app. And I can't renew if someone is waiting for it. If someone was really waiting for the book, I'd probably feel an urge to immediately return it.
That’s basically the same situation like in a daycare center which started to collect fines for late child pickups. The result? The rate of late pickups increased. Picking the child late stopped being a shameful thing to do, causing the poor worker to wait for you, it started being a normal paid service you could use every time you wanted. https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what-they-do/
In theory it could still be a mutually beneficial policy change. Presumably there is some (exponentially increasing) rate at which the daycare workers would be happy to stay late. And occasionally there may be situations in which the parents are happy to pay those rates to handle some unusual occurrence. I guess the problem is that you lose economy of scale when the worker is only watching one kid, so if the business set the rates high enough to compensate the workers, they might risk offending potential customers, for the same reason that people are much more offended by "I'll sell you this toilet paper for $10 a roll" than by "I don't have any toilet paper for sale".
I guess for that to really work universally, you’d need to factor in the wealth of the person (which would probably not be legal, I think), otherwise rich parents would let kids stay long overtime while poor parents would be unable to extend a few minutes.
This seems like it's just saying "rich people can afford to spend more hiring people to watch their kids" which is not a feature unique to this system of fines.
Rich parents have better places to put their children.
My experience with US daycares is that they typically set the late fees at a prohibitively high level, often $1 per minute or more.
Daycare workers also want to finish on time so they can close up and go pick up *their* kids from childminders, etc. Parents coming late means the workers are in turn late collecting their kids, and it just ripples out in inconvenience and cost.
The story seems reasonable, but has it been replicated?
There's reason to be skeptical of that story: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/10/revenge_of_the.html
It's not the phonetic values of the Egyptian hieroglyphs that is important, but their meaning. For example, the letter B is a hieroglyph that represents a house. "House" in proto-Semitic (*not* in Egyptian) is [betu], which starts with the sound [b].
What seem to have happened is that a people who spoke a Semitic language and that had been enslaved and brought to Egypt used the Egyptian symbols to create letters whose values (the associated sounds) where the first sounds of the words in their language. This is called the acrophonic principle.
Hence, A is an Egyptian symbol representing the head of a ox (proto-semitic alepu > Hebrew aleph > Greek alpha > A). The first sound in proto-semitic is a glottal stop. The Greeks didn't hear that sound and made it a vowel.
B is house, proto-semitic betu, then beth, greek beta.
C is staff-sling, semitic gimmu, then gimmel, Greek gamma.
D is door, ..., delta, ...
E is jubilation (the letter was rotated, it looks like two arms around a head yelling "yeah!!!")
F is really the same letter as upsilon, Y, also U and V. A lot to says here.
G was added by the Romans based on C
H is fence (rotated).
I is arm
J is based on I (middle ages) to differentiate vowel use and consonant use.
K is hand
L is goad.
M is water
N is snake
O is eye
P and Q, I don't know.
R is head. The south-east stroke was added later to differentiate from P.
S is teeth (rotated and twisted, sigma is closer to the original)
T is cross
U, V, W, Y (and F) all come from Y, a long stick with a loop to catch animals.
X ?
Z is sword (?)
I could be wrong on some details.
Oh sure, the details are just for fun. I was just adding a remark to "Egyptian hieroglyphs ... have symbols with phonetic values." That is true, of course, but it is the phonetic values in *another* language (a semitic one) that are relevant here.
This detail seemed important enough to mention.
No, the remark that written Egyptian uses symbols with phonetic values is present to disprove the claim from the Twitter thread that the concept of an alphabet was only ever developed once.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are saying. Egyptian is not an alphabet (or an abjad).
I may have misinterpreted the original remark, but it seemed very clear to me: Phoenician is an abjad (i.e. lacks vowels), using symbols that were originally Egyptian hieroglyphs. There was an ambiguity in Machine Interface's wording as to whether the Phoenician system uses the phonetic values of those hieroglyphs or the semantic values, and I clarified (or not) that it is the semantic value of the hieroglyph that is used to identify the phonetic value of the letter based on how the corresponding word is pronounced in Semitic. (Which implies that the first alphabet/abjad wasn't invented by the Egyptians but by other people who could read Egyptian hieroglyphs but spoke a Semitic language, most likely slaves.) The Phoenician alphabet/abjad is just the eventual evolution of that original alphabet/abjad.
Phoenician is Semitic, so the lack of vowels isn't an issue. On the other hand, when the Greek came in contact with that alphabet/abjad they had to modify it to fit their language (hence inventing the first "true" alphabet). They kept similar sounding names for many letters (alpha, beta,...), and Greek names for modified ones (omega = big O; omicron = small O; epsilon = simple E; etc.), or no names at all for newly invented ones (psi, phi, etc.).
Egyptian writing frequently uses signs purely for phonetic value. It is not restricted to using them this way, but the concept is already there; the system *contains* an abjad within itself. The concept is not exclusive to, or original to, Phoenician writing or its derivatives.
> Phoenician is Semitic, so the lack of vowels isn't an issue.
That's not true. Ask the people who came up with vowel points for Hebrew. Phoenician lacks vowels by coincidence, not because the lack is somehow less of a problem than it would be in other languages.
I'm also curious about this line: "The alphabet was actually invented independently more than one time."
Which alphabets do you have in mind that were invented independently? Ugaritic? (Things like Hangul can't be considered "independent inventions".)
Oh, I see. Thanks. The distinction between abjad and alphabet isn't so salient to me, but given that it is to you your list makes sense.
Sounds also more fun. "Hey Susi, please let me borrow your elementary school textbook. I need it for research"
"Rocks fall, everyone dies"
I'd find it more interesting to try to make it systematically impossible to just try inverting a utility function for a laugh, like that, as the inversion of a beneficial utility function is one of the precursors to the literal worst thing that could ever happen.
It does also do that. Every example I put in results in a list of innocent outcomes, with a few examples or two of horrible outcomes it wouldn't choose because it knows those are bad. So it does seem to be learning how to do both.
Does the high prevalence of autism in first-born explain the "increase in autism"? If everybody used to have 4 kids the autism rate would have been lower than now where people stop at 1 or 2.
That's a great point and I think you're right.
According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4207295/, the percentage of kids who are first-children (or only children) is about 40% (in England and Wales, as of 2010). If everybody used to have four kids, the percentage of kids who are first-children would be 25%, so we would expect an increase of 60% cases of autism over preindustrial. That would obviously be a significant increase, but it's nowhere near the "increase in autism" (which this WebMD article places at 1/2000 to 1/152, or a 1300% increase). So this might explain some, but it definitely wouldn't explain all. For it to explain all, we'd need the average preindustrial woman to have 32 children, which seems a bit far-fetched to say the least!
Thanks for the numbers.
Any links off-hand about the expected increase due to better detection or less sensitive, or otherwise different diagnostic criteria?
For some topics, it'd be nice to have a running score card like:
- 60% genetic
- 20% family/socialization/etc.
- 10% something something
- 5% maybe X?
- 5% who knows
But I wonder what the evidence is for the prevalence of autism in first-born children – has that been stable for as long as we've been measuring any of this?
The high infant mortality rate means many of the literal firstborn children would be dead, and the eldest child would often not be the firstborn child.
So the % of firstborn children could be dramatically lower than 25%.
I expect firstborn children would also have an even higher infant mortality rate given there'd be some gruesome learning curve with infant mortality being expected and little parental learning resources available at the time.
That would mean an even lower % of firstborn children, though not necessarily the 3% required to full explain the increase.
I wouldn't expect the learning curve to be an issue. People used to live within shouting distance of older relatives, so the new parents didn't take care of the child all by themselves.
That certainly would reduce the issue, but I still think inexperience would lead to worse outcomes, and with a high infant mortality rate by default that means fewer firstborns surviving.
Mind it's possible new parents have lower mortality rates like new doctors do, but it was my understanding that this was a result of new doctors being more up-to-date on the latest research, so the effect wouldn't fit for new parents relying on generational knowledge.
This looks like one of those questions where we need actual information rather than theorizing.
Now there's a line you don't see on ACX nearly as often as you should.
Extremely speculative: I know rates of homosexuality go up with each child born to the same mother, and it's theorized that this is due to increasing rates of estrogen exposure in the womb. Autism has been characterized as a 'hyper-masculinization' of the brain. Could it be that higher fetal testosterone exposure explains the trend in firstborns?
Reading the article, it's that first-borns have higher rate of autism *spectrum* (what used to be called Asperger's Syndrome) and it's the second-born who have the higher risk of 'classical' autism, so that doesn't seem likely.
Agreed. But I'm disappointed that fetal exposure to hormones isn't discussed more often, especially as it sort of strides the nature vs. nurture debate.
Not exactly the same question, but given the correlation between birth order and IQ, I've previously wondered if the Flynn effect is caused by the reduction in family size.
The Flynn effect isn't measure invariant, and so likely doesn't represent a true increase in intelligence.
No, because the fertility rate has hardly budged since 1980, which is about when the exponential rise in autism diagnoses started to really take off.
Sadly, 95 in Roman Numerals is XCV.
There's a legend (?) about the clock numerals where a clock maker was hanged or something for erroneously putting IIII instead of the correct IV on a clock. Since that day, all clock makers use the wrong version on purpose, as a form of protest.
That would be a hell of a hill to literally die on.
Clocks that used IIII were easier to make. A clock that uses IIII has four Vs, four Xs, and twenty Is. You get a mold that makes a V, an X, and five Is, and you use the mold four times. On the other hand, if you use IV, then you need five Vs, four Xs, and seventeen Is.
It's just a legend of course, but it might have a grain of truth. Your explanation makes a lot of sense, but someone might still perceive the resulting clock as lacking craftsmanship, and the clock makers would then be offended by their clever method not being appreciated.
It can't have much of a grain of truth, since there was never a point at which IIII was incorrect.
Just reading examples out of Wikipedia, the Roman 22nd legion represented itself as leg. IIXX, the 18th legion represented itself as leg. XIIX, Gate 44 to the Colosseum is labeled XLIIII, Pliny the Elder wrote the number 490 as CCCCLXXXX...
Huh, I always assumed it was to minimize potential confusion with VI since it's typically written at a weird angle (tangent).
Typo: Zhang He should be Zheng He
> 6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
So on the one hand, this shouldn't be too surprising. *Of course* an anti-intellectual movement like the Nazis would be against IQ research. On the other hand, despite that, I'd somehow never made this connection before, that of course the Nazis would be against IQ research...
I wonder if it had already been noticed in the 1930s that the median IQ for Ashkenazi Jews ~15 points higher than the median for non-Ashkenazi Europeans?
I don't know if they had quantified the issue, but the Nazis were aware. In the Sassen interviews Adolf Eichmann said in 1957 (my clumsy translation): "We would have completed our task for our blood and our people and for the freedom of peoples if we had destroyed the sharpest intellect among the human minds of today. For that is what I told Streicher, what I've always preached: we fight an enemy who is intellectually superior to us due to many many thousands years of training."
Yes, in the sense that an overrepresentation had been documented, not necessarily exactly quantifying it at 10 points or whatever; this was found in American samples by (at least) Terman, Hollingsworth, and Byrns in the 1920s-1930s. (I'm less familiar with what any early European research might've found, so no cites there offhand.)
At the time, the main research on intelligence in Jews was by English eugenicists (http://m.nautil.us/issue/92/frontiers/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics), who found Jews to be *less* intelligent. This was very convenient for Spearman, who was a committed advocate against accepting Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
> The statistical argument was a one-two punch: by examining a large number of Jewish immigrant children for various physical characteristics, combined with surveys of the conditions of their home lives and intelligence assessments provided by their teachers, Pearson claimed to establish (1) that the children (especially girls) were on average less intelligent than their non-Jewish counterparts, and (2) their intelligence was not significantly correlated with any environmental factor that could be improved, such as health, cleanliness, or nutrition. As Pearson concluded, “We have at present no evidence at all that environment without selection is capable of producing any direct and sensible influence on intelligence; and the argument of the present paper is that into a crowded country only the superior stocks should be allowed entrance, not the inferior stocks in the hope—unjustified by any statistical inquiry—that they will rise to the average native level by living in a new atmosphere.”
Who is this Spearman?
One of the founders of modern statistics. His name shows up a lot in classical methods (e.g., in “Spearman correlation”).
Charles Spearman fell for the idea that Jews are less intelligent? Is it possible you're getting him confused with Pearson?
Clarion Hogg is indeed confusing Charles Spearman with Karl Pearson. The linked Nautilus article and the claims about Jews are about Pearson; Spearman is not mentioned in the article.
Pearson was one of the founders of statistics, the inventor of regression analysis among other things. Spearman, on the other hand, was a pioneering intelligence researcher and the inventor of factor analysis. Pearson was not an intelligence researcher.
AFAIK, Spearman wrote very little on racial or ethnic differences in intelligence and nothing on Jews,. The exception to this is an offhand remark of his in "The Abilities of Man" that later became known as "Spearman's hypothesis" and is an important tenet of contemporary HBD thinking.
"Anyway, that's why people who think Steve Sailer sucks are the *real* racists"
Uncited, unsupported, with no acknowledgement of the long and varied racist pasts of modern HBD advocates. Or, indeed, of the fact that Ashkenazim didn't start showing up among the elite *until everyone stopped being super racist to them*.
Y'all really are one step short of "the Nazis would have loved SJWs" around here, huh.
HBD? Human BioDiversity?
Had to look up Steve Sailer. And it did mean human biodiversity! Sounds like he misappropriated the term! We used the term human biodiversity in Human Biology as a shorthand for genomic variation within and among different populations (and many people don't realize that Eurasian populations went through a bottleneck at some point that reduced those populations' genomic diversity substantially. If I recall correctly, intra and inter population diversity in Africa is greater than between Europeans and Asians. And the Khoi San peoples are the most genomically diverse of any group. Not sure how Steve Sailer can feel superior coming from an inbred population. Lol! <queue "Dueling Banjos">
Not sure how he or others misappropriated the term when genomic variation between populations is what it is used to refer to.
And your last sentence seems to be begging the question, as well as attacking an alleged and uncharitable motive. The inbreeding jab also seems scientifically questionable, because speciation requires inbreeding and it is far from obvious that that greater genomic variation is always better, when it is very far from what we usually call inbreeding. Ironically, your use of the term inbreeding in a completely different way to which it is normally used seems like an actual misappropriation of the term.
Populations which with high levels of endogamy, either due to geographic isolation (Icelanders) or cultural isolation (Ashkenazi), have a greater expression of recessive genes that can cause cause serious health problems. I'm not sure why you think it's "far from obvious that greater genomic variation is always better." What are your sources for that statement? Or is this just your opinion?
Some, including our host, believe that the Ashkenazi have rather high IQs due to the same endogamy that resulted in certain recessive genes. Some Ashkenazi's already use genetic testing to do mate selection, or to discard unhealthy embryo's with abortions or IVF, to prevent Tay–Sachs. Yet we are not able to increase genetic IQ. So it is not even obvious that they are worse off, if they indeed have both this upside and this downside. After all, high IQ seems immensely valuable in modern society.
And if we compare Europeans or Asians to Africans, then the difference in the level of endogamy is way less significant anyway than when comparing Icelanders to Europeans or such, far below the level where Europeans are significant less at risk of serious disease (sickle cell, anyone?). In fact, Asians from certain regions have the longest lifespans.
Ultimately, there are costs to diversity, genetic or otherwise, especially in modern society where a lot of things are standardized, mass produced or otherwise not very tailored to the individual. For example, it's extremely inconvenient if you are extremely tall or short, or have uncommon proportions.
I would argue that at a certain point, the benefit of more genetic diversity become very small, so the higher (potential) costs of greater genetic diversity can easily outweigh it, but even more importantly, other factors are so much more significant that it seems rather silly to focus on it, even if there is an actual advantage. It would also be silly for a person with 10 million dollars to call a person with 9.9 million dollars poor.
"Had to look up Steve Sailer."
He joins in in the comments section here fairly often. And for what it's worth, his use of HBD seems to be exactly what you describe; he just has a particular focus on group differences in behavioural traits. Plus, while it does seem to be the case that small African groups like the Khoisan, Pygmies and Hadza contribute an outsize portion of humanity's genetic diversity, I'm given to understand that the ancestors of todays African Americans are mostly from a relatively small area of West Africa, and thus for practical purposes, African Americans are a lot more genetically homogenous than Africans-as-a-whole within Africa.
The jews were overrepresented in high level positions in society in pre-nazi Germany though (which was very anti-semitic). The nazi's rhetoric only worked precisely *because* there were so many successful jews. The nazis claimed they attained such levels of success because of, essentially, "jewish trickery". And this is why things like IQ were anthemic to the nazis, it demonstrated a biological basis to their success that couldn't be considered unjust like the way nazi explanations could.
Can I ask, where on earth is the evidence that nazis supported IQ? It's clowns like you that call people nazis for discussing intelligence research, so the burden of proof is on YOU.
"it demonstrated a biological basis to their success that couldn't be considered unjust"
Except it wouldn't. The Nazis were not blind followers of "might makes right" - very few racists were or are.
If you're trying to argue that nazis would believe that its unjust for genetically gifted people to be more successful then, gee, I don't know what to tell you.
As I understand it, Nazis believed in Aryan superiority in a way that implied they *ought* to win, and if they didn't win, it was because someone was cheating. Or at least needed to be stopped by whatever means necessary.
I am entirely arguing that. They would say that the traits that lead to success in modern society are not necessarily those that we should consider desirable.
>Seems like a great idea, although when I try it I don’t see any people available to check - maybe none of my Twitter friends use this?
Someone at that company needs to read about the chicken and egg problem: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/
Would it be that hard to let you "pre-check" people you follow in case they sign up for the app and want to see if you reciprocate?
Hard, no. Creepy, yes. They'd get a pile of bad press for that, I'd be immensely weirded out by a dating app that creates a "profile" for me even if I don't use it, that has emerged as one of the cardinal sins an internet data company can commit in terms of collection. Vindictive monogamists would find a way to say it facilitates cheating, because you are encouraging others to think of their girlfriend as "on the market" even though (he thinks) she isn't.
But it's not a profile. Basically it's a list of twitter handles you'd like to really follow. You can already create lists on twitter.
Yes, still creepy, but who cares. For a dating app almost any press is good press.
A very easy way to figure out the intransitive dice problem is by looking quickly counting total combinations of dice.
So here:
A: 1, 4, 7, 7
B: 2, 6, 6, 6
C: 3, 5, 5 ,8
You know that for example I can roll 8 on C, then against A there are 4 possible outcomes, 1, 4, 7, 7. So this goes for all for possible rolls on C. So 4*4 = 16 total combo's.
Then you quickly count the number of outcomes you would win against. So 8 wins 4 times, 5 wins twice, another 5 wins twice again and 3 wins once. Which is 9/16, which is >50% so C beats A.
Gates suspicion was aroused because he probably knows some game theory, and generally it is an advantage to be able to pick last because you have more info. But here Gates was allowed to pick last, so that is what prompted him to examine the dice up close. And then it is just a matter of counting combinations, which can be done rather quickly. Unless it was 16 sided dies that Buffett used, but I doubt it. In that case the impressive part is counting and keeping track in his head of the number of winning combo's.
Honestly probability becomes a lot easier when you reframe it as counting combinations. Bayes theorem for example is very intuitive once you visualize it as a combination counting game.
I did it by assuming that the probabilities are dependent, and then removing that dependency and applying a couple small tweaks
"Unless it was 16 sided dies that Buffett used, but I doubt it."
I also doubt that, because that's a strangely shaped die. Did you mean 6 sided dice? With 6 sided dice you need to consider 36 combinations instead of the 16 in your example, but I bet Bill Gates could handle it.
-"But here Gates was allowed to pick last, so that is what prompted him to examine the dice up close."
No, Gates was supposed to pick first, not last.
Oh yeah you are right, brain fart on my side. Going last isn't even an advantage since the one who goes first can pick the best potential dice.
The whole point of this game is that there is no best die; they have a rock-paper-scissors relationship. You want to go second so you can pick whatever die beats your opponent's pick.
Yeah I know, but whoever proposes this game wants the other party to think that there is a best dice, when there isn't.
It'd be natural to feel some suspicion about playing a game that feels like a bar bet. Then the numbers on the dice turn out to be weird. "No, you first" is a pretty general-purpose counter, as you note. Maybe Gates figured it all out at once, but I don't think he really had to.
This. Being suspicious when someone proposes betting on something weird you've not seen before is perfectly natural and it doesn't require figuring out precisely what their game is to assume there's a trick
The easiest way is to put the numbers on each dice in side order from highest to lowest:
A: 7, 7, 4, 1
B: 6, 6, 6, 2
C: 8, 5, 5, 3
Then go through each face in A and see how many sides it beats in B, sum that total, and divide by N^2 where N is the number of sides on each die. Repeat the process for B vs. C and A vs. C.
A vs. B: (4 + 4 + 1 + 0)/(4^2) = 9/16 > 1/2
B vs. C: (3 + 3 + 3 + 0)/(4^2) = 9/16 > 1/2
A vs. C: (3 + 3 + 1 + 0)/(4^2) = 8/16 = 1/2
An even more fun puzzle is figuring out a procedure for creating intransitive dice with N sides.
What’s the procedure for creating intransitive dice with N sides? Or any reading on this?
It would be interesting to devise a general method for making an intransitive group of N-sided dice (just a set of 3 dice to start with, but maybe more complex patterns as well, following https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Play-Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock/ or similar).
Here's a set of 8-sided dice:
A {2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 5, 7, 7}
B {1, 1, 4, 4, 4, 4, 9, 9}
C {3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 6, 6, 8}
A has an advantage over B, B over C, and C over A. The advantages are not quite symmetrical, though: A vs. B and B. vs. C both give a 36/64 chance to win; C vs. A gives a 35/64 chance.
*Almost* got a 5 dice set with two complete cycles:
A: {4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14}
B: {1, 1, 13, 13, 13, 13}
C: {3, 3, 3, 15, 15, 15}
D: {5, 5, 5, 5, 17, 17}
E: {7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 19}
All sum to 54. If X>Y means "X has an advantage over Y," then:
A>E>D>C>B>A and A>D>B>E>C=A.
Changing that last C=A to C>A would complete the Rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock model.
I'm one of the founders of Wave (link #15). AMA!
I’m very excited to see Wave covered here! I think Scott’s summary in the post is a bit misleading though — the remittance arm is an app called Sendwave, while the Wave app is focused exclusively on mobile money. Previously they were both run by the same company that Lincoln founded, but Sendwave was recently acquired by WorldRemit and they’re now two separate companies (I work on the engineering team at Sendwave).
Also hi Lincoln! Congrats on the Series A!
Yep :) hi! thanks!
Ah thanks for explaining that! I've been confused about the Wave / Sendwave distinction for quite a while
Is mobile money the long-term future or do you think you will transition to crypto or cbdc at some point once the technology has matured?
Hmm, interesting question. Most people at Wave are not particularly excited about crypto - I think it's a "solution in search of a problem"; there's something interesting going on with smart contracts but I am not super bullish on cryptocurrency as a means of exchange. And our product is all about means of exchange. Still, I can't rule it out - who knows :)
I don't really understand cbdc very well, so I don't have much to say about that.
How did you all build such an awesome team/how do you think about recruiting? I talked to Ben Kuhn a while back-he's a super awesome and friendly guy.
https://narrativespodcast.com/2021/09/06/58-be-intentional-with-ben-kuhn/
I think there's no magic, other than the obvious, way you get the best people: by having a great mission and doing excellent work. People want purpose and they want to be surrounded by excellent colleagues. The best people can pick and choose their team.
Is it one of those things where you use the SIM itself as a really locked-down computer?
Wave is currently not using any SIM or smart card technology. We're just a smartphone app. Some competitors use that tech though, and I have investigated it, but I think that stuff was mostly last decade.
The paper about India seems a bit questionable. My prior on believing the claim in the abstract is reasonably high, as I tend to think local rule (even if by dictators) should work out better than rule by remote dictators. But then reading it my belief is dragged down by several things:
1. The Cato.org summary announces that it's a study of British colonial rule. In fact it's not, even though it's presented that way. The paper concludes that British colonial rule wasn't what made the difference, it was actually the system of landlord based revenue collection (which happened to be implemented in some but not all British controlled districts). The actual conclusion would seem to be about the best way to raise taxes, but it's been spun as a factual claim about colonialism. I find this somehow not surprising and it reinforces my prior belief that academia is keen on warping research to achieve ideological ends.
2. They note that the British preferred to annex areas with high agricultural productivity, i.e. farmland. Farmland would obviously have less light visible from space. This poses a problem for them, which they are well aware of.
3. They try to correct for this using a statistical model, with some obvious corrections e.g. "luminosity per capita" and some not so obvious like area of each district, which they claim will control for the fact that cities naturally throw more light into space due to density.
The attempt to link "visibility of light from space in 1993" with "the impact of British colonial rule" is very indirect, and therefore relies very heavily on the integrity of the statistical modelling and the way they controlled for various confounders, along with an ambient assumption that their corrections did actually correct for the giant honking confounder they identify at the start. But this is exactly the sort of research that frequently turns out to be bogus or misleading, all the time.
In the end, I think this paper will be just one more ideological Rorschach test - if you're aligned with the sort of ideology found in academia, then this will be taken as a strong and rigorous analysis piling up irrefutable evidence for the evils of all things British/"stale white men". If you're not then you'll consider the analysis to be brittle, quite possibly meaningless and it won't change your views of the Raj much if at all.
Regarding number 2, I'd expect the brightest light to come from cities, and cities tend to be built near good farmland. As the city expands, it's built on what was recently good farmland.
Are you saying you'd expect there to actually not be a correlation between darkness at night and agricultural activity?
I'm saying I'd expect the correlation to go the other way. Lousy farmland stays lousy and undeveloped with no cities nearby. Good farmland becomes more developed, spawns cities, and the cities grow to cover some of the good farmland.
The biggest cities are usually located near bodies of water, rather than just being uniformly spread around fertile areas. Farmland is famous for being dominated by villages rather than cities. Is India an exception?
Does the best farmland spawn larger cities near it? It seems the opposite is true, at least since the railroad and shipping allowed movement of grains long distances. Just off the top of my head, the US midwest farm belt has many excellent farming areas, and very few large cities compared to the coasts. Modern cities tend to focus on mercantile and industrial centers, not agricultural production centers.
Pre-shipping it might have been true that big cities were naturally right next to, or on top of, the best farmlands, but that was a long time before the relevant period of British rule.
Cities grow where trade is plentiful. This is why they're so often located on waterways and coasts. Your intuition about farmland in the US is mirrored by the fertile farmland of the Ukraine in Eastern Europe. Lots of great farms, but not lots of big cities.
The small town that my father grew up in was actually constrained in growth by being surrounded by high-quality farmland; the local farmers had no real interest in being bought out to allow expansion of the town.
I think you've got that backwards; (large) cities spawn good farmland. If you look at e.g. the best farmland in the United States, it's all in the midwest with mostly small cities that people have barely heard of. And one world-class city that by no coincidence at all is where the Mississippi river system comes close enough to the Great Lakes to be connected by a day's portage or later a simple canal.
Any large city absolutely needs good transport routes; even with the best farmland ever, you're not feeding a hundred thousand people with grain delivered by horse-drawn wagon. But, *given* a large city at e.g. a convenient river port, you put a lot of effort into developing what farmland you've got within a day's wagon ride, irrigating and terracing and fertilizing and whatnot, for the sake of getting the perishable foods that won't tolerate a week on a riverboat.
> The paper concludes that British colonial rule wasn't what made the difference, it was actually the system of landlord based revenue collection (which happened to be implemented in some but not all British controlled districts).
Was the same system implemented in mainland Britain?
If it wasn't, there's a decent argument to be made that "leftovers from a crappy tax system put in place by colonial overlords" is a decent proxy for "leftovers from colonization".
If true, that's still quite a stretch to say "colonization" when it's both more specific than that and not necessarily tied to colonialism. If colonialism were the cause, we would expect to see the same results in all or at least most colonies. If it were a sub-cause, we would know to limit the criteria to those that had this crappy tax system instead.
To determine of colonialism itself were to blame, we would have to measure how many colonies ended up with crappy tax systems which caused a lack of growth. Adding that additional layer of abstraction to the type of study, which apparently had major known confounders, creates a situation where the results are even less trustworthy.
Absent any specific knowledge of the issue, it seems just as plausible a hypothesis that the crappy tax system was the pre-existing local one and the effective tax system the imported one, since it's not uncommon for colonial rule to minimise changes that might piss off local power-brokers. I'm curious to know the actual details too but knowing that the system differs from that in Britain doesn't actually tell you what you want to know
They have another test of whether the effect is due to selection bias by the British. If a ruler died without an immediate male heir, the British normally too over direct rule. That looks like a pretty random event, and they ran their calculations using those British ruled states and got the same qualitative result.
Normally, in this case, turns out to mean 60% of the time, and this policy was only in effect for 8 years, and only 15 districts were affected by it. The opening of the paper doesn't really make that clear and in particular, the way it's used in the argument strongly implies the British did this 100% of the time ("automatically"), which they later admit isn't true.
Re point 1: The paper looks at direct vs. indirect rule, as well as landlord based taxation vs. other taxation methods. This results in four groups of districts:
1. Directly ruled, landlord based taxation.
2. Directly ruled, non-landlord based taxation.
3. Indirectly ruled, landlord based taxation.
4. Indirectly ruled, non-landlord based taxation.
They found that districts in group 1 did worst economically. Group 2 did much better than group 1, but that doesn't mean that landlord based taxation is the problem, because group 3 did a bit better than group 2 despite having landlord based taxation. The difference between group 3 and group 4 was too small to be statistically significant.
The authors correctly conclude that directly rule is bad for economic development because groups 1 and 2 are both worse than groups 3 and 4. They do not conclude that landlord based taxation is inherently bad because their data doesn't indicate that it had a negative effect on districts that weren't directly ruled. Instead, they reach the conclusion that their data supports, namely that “a large part of the difference in overall development between directly and indirectly ruled districts is driven by the poor performance of directly ruled landlord districts.” [pg. 22]
Point 3 may indicate a conceptual confusion that I will address before turning to point 2. China has a much larger GDP than Germany, but we do not say that China has a more advanced economy than Germany. Instead, we divide the GDP of each country by the population of each country, and conclude that Germany, which has a much higher GDP per capita than China, has the more advanced economy. The paper's authors divide the total luminosity for each district by the population of the district (page 8) because any statistic used to measure how advanced an economy is has to be a per capita number. You can argue about whether nighttime luminosity, or GDP for that matter, is a good measure to use to quantify how advanced an economy is, but in either case you have to divide by the population size.
Re point 2: It's not obvious to me that farmland has less light visible from space, relative to the amount of economic output, than other land.
That said, the authors are indeed aware that the preference for areas with higher agricultural productivity poses a problem. They compare the results from the full sample with a subsample where the decisions to place a district under direct rule were more random (due to the <em>Doctrine of Lapse</em>) and conclude that the results from the full sample likely underestimate the negative effects of direct rule. [page 16]
Returning to point 3: The main claim here seems to be that luminosity data is not a good measure of economic development. The authors cite a bunch of other papers to justify their use of luminosity data. I'm not interested enough in the subject to read these papers, so I will simply fall back on my default presumption that academics are likely to be right about which tools in their discipline are reliable and which aren't.
In any case, the authors do perform an analysis using consumption per capita rather than luminosity per capita, and get similar results (page 29). Their data source only includes rural districts, but there is no obvious reason to expect a different result for urban districts.
The authors of the study have, in my view, done a thorough job of conducting various tests to ensure that their analysis is not “brittle.” Mike H points to the fact that the decision of whether a district is under direct rule is not random, and the authors have done an analysis to address that (two if you count the paired district analysis). Mike H questions the use of luminosity data; the authors have done an analysis using consumption data instead. If Mike H considers this analysis “brittle,” I think that to be consistent he would have to say the same thing about pretty much any study based on a natural experiment.
I think the overall source of disagreement here is at a higher level than specific variables in their model.
Firstly, as you note, the difference between "direct rule, non-landlord taxation" and "indirect rule {both}" is quite small. Thus any effect they claim to be finding in direct rule specifically is quite small, yet the headline is "Impact of Colonial Institutions on Economic Growth and Development in India". Big conclusions from small effects via fancy statistics in academia is not a good combination, historically.
Secondly, the 'doctrine of lapse' argument is ultimately built on just 15 districts, because that doctrine only lasted 8 years. Additionally, although this isn't mentioned until page 18, only 60% of such lapsed states were actually annexed, implying a large degree of choice in the matter - the initial presentation of the lapse argument implies it was 100% How meaningful can such conclusions be when there's so little data?
And finally, point three was not a pick at the specific construction of the model they used. There is no confusion about GDP vs GDP per capita. My point is that I do not trust academic conclusions about large groups of people made using statistical models, period. The level of trustworthiness of scientific research based on these techniques has proven repeatedly to just be too low for me.
I feel like there are so many red flags in this sort of paper that point to brittleness (e.g. "To tackle the endogeneity of human capital, they use the historical location of Catholic missionaries in India in 1911 as an instrument for present-day human capital accumulation"?!), but I accept that a lot of this depends on your priors about academic research - yours are obviously very positive because you're willing to assume that academics are right about the reliability of their tools by default, whereas, based on what I've seen, my presumption is that by default they're probably not. Certainly they certainly won't hesitate to publish a paper filled with implausible assumptions that can only be found buried in Appendix 2 on page 45. As a result, yes, I think an awful lot of results presented as the results of this sort of "natural experiment" are likely incorrect (this paper isn't doing an experiment at all!), and thus very complicated and indirect inferences based on dubious datasets can just be discarded without checking them very deeply. It's a heuristic but a useful one.
// Farmland would obviously have less light visible from space
Not just that. British did not annex Russian or USA's agricultural south districts, but they still lagged behind. Because 20th century was century of INDUSTRIAL growth.
On nationalism vs patriotism. Patriotism is superficially morally superior because it is inwardly focused and defensive, whereas nationalism is fixated on the other and expansionist. But I think there's a deeper reason patriotism is morally superior.
Why have differences in culture, language, country, at all except as an artifact of history? Wouldn't we be better off all uniting?
Plurality of culture, language, and country is a safety factor in civilization. This redundancy insulates groups of people from pathologies that afflict other groups of people.
Consider a universal human culture, language, and country. How long would it take to heal if some bad influence such as corruption or ideology took hold? I think it would take longer to heal than if there were an alternative group of people behaving differently in parallel.
Patriotism is good because it preserves diversity and plurality. Nationalism is bad because it erodes diversity and plurality by conquest, negating the positives of the particular vs the universal.
Yeah, he's totally making up definitions, specifically because English doesn't have a good word that means what he wants to say.
Certain word pairs are like that. Confidence/Arrogance, Patriotism/Nationalism, Religion/Superstition, Chaste/Frigid. The negative word in the pairing doesn't indicate. A difference in kind, merely that the speaker believes that the position taken is unjustified. Confident and arrogant actions are entirely determined by what you think of the person doing them, the line between Religion and Superstition is determined by what you think the appropriate amount of faith and religious devotion is.
So it is (mildly) Patriotic to think that the United States should continue to control Maine, it is (widely considered) Nationalistic to think that Hungary should control the Crown Lands of St. Stephen.
Russel's conjugation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
Surely he is using the definitions of nationalism and patriotism in the essay that Scott Alexander linked to (by Orwell).
"nationalism is fixated on the other and expansionist"
That's imperialism. Is Scottish or Catalonian nationalism expansionist for example?
"Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state.[1][2] As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people),[3] especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity[4] and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power (popular sovereignty).[3][5] " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism
I think he was commenting on the Orwell essay, which explicitly uses "nationalism" in a broader sense than the normal meaning.
Without endorsing your definition of nationalism and patriotism, I agree that a plurality of cultures has advantages. I would think first of freedom of choice--surely it's better to have a variety of nations for each person or family to choose from, as we theoretically do in the US. I say "surely", but about half of Americans disagree strongly with me, and believe the federal government should forcibly resolve all moral disputes. This is partly because of slavery. I think that's a bogus justification, because the slaves weren't free to leave for another state that didn't have slavery. But people also believe that because of Plato and Aristotle's essentialism, which implies that there is exactly one right culture and way of life, which is right for everyone, and all other ways of living are wrong for everyone. This has filtered down to us through Christianity, Sir Thomas More, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and other writers.
Next I'd think of evolution, island biogeography, premature convergence in evolution, and cultural diversity. Island biogeography shows that the same land area evolves more species if you fence it off into smaller pieces with limited travel between them. We see a similar effect in cultural evolution; a nation develops a wider variety of music, restaurants, dialects, etc., when transportation and duplication is difficult and expensive.
Premature convergence is the surprising phenomenon that having too much contact between evolving sub-populations can cause evolution to cease entirely, because the sweet spot for mutation rate, where it's high enough to escape local maxima, but small enough not to randomize the genome over time, can vanish.
Regarding #3: "So why did the well-intentioned NHCE fail? Dudden blames the bust on its refusal to acknowledge race, its failure to unionize workers, and language that alienated employers while failing to appeal to domestic workers themselves."
So their failure wasn't related to changing economic circumstances, nor the general public-choice-style failure of government commissions to achieve their goals, but just to topics of interest to left-wing academics?
Without looking, I predict Dudden is an historian of some type, or perhaps in a field like "Women's studies", rather than an economist.
Dudden was (she passed last year), in fact, a historian. Specifically, a historian of women. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2021/faye-e-dudden-(1948%E2%80%932020)
I think you should be unsurprised by Bill Gates figuring out intransitive dice: "Warren Buffet wants to use these totally bizarre dice to play a game with me" is a scenario weird enough that your prior should be on some kind of shenanigans. From there it seems obvious to check whether the weird numbering of the dice produces any odd outcomes, and "for each face, count how many sides of the other die beat it" is not a hard algorithm to run.
Also, even if you don't expect shenanigans, your best strategy is to check the dice to see which is best, and the way to do that is by running the algorithm as you describe.
Even if you replace Gates with someone who isn't good enough at math to figure out the trick, they might well realize that a trick exists; if there's no trick, why is Buffet doing this?
"I'll even let you go first" is a giant red flag for me, having seen similar tricks in the past.
Is there an actual term for this kind of situation, wherein the very asking of a particular question primes the person answering to give the non-intuitive answer?
I encounter it on a near daily basis but have never seen it described with a particular term ("so and so paradox" etc).
Point 21 about the holiday made up by Jews reminds me of one the most famous Portuguese dishes called Alheira. Same thing, Jews were being prosecuted by the inquisition and forced to convert. Since they couldn't eat pork, they started making sausages with other kinds of meat mixed with bread for texture so no one would suspect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alheira
Too bad you didn't have one when you were in Portugal, Scott. :)
"Nazis against IQ-testing" might very well be a true fact. For strange reasons I felt reminded of Harvard's policy of discounting better results of Jews (then) and Asians (now) - see Bryan Caplan https://www.econlib.org/admissions-versus-asians/ ? -
Anyways: The book (partly) about Nazis vs. IQ is from German Prof.
Heiner Rindermann (psychology+education) who dared to research and write that Muslim/African immigrants perform worse on IQ and school-test than Germans. Got himself into trouble. - He even said in a lecture men (x/y) might declare themself "trans" to outcompete women (x/x) in sports - which surely never ever happened. Even to get into women-prison. So the "left-youth-saxonia" warns in this link: https://chemnitz.linksjugend-sachsen.de/2021/04/heiner-rindermann-transfeindlich-rassistisch-sexistisch/ link is in German - but you can guess-translate the title - "feind" is related to "fiend" ;)
His new book: Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive capitalism: Human capital and the wellbeing of nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Seems to be full of numbers: "Cognitive ability USA 99 - Thailand 89 - Ghana 64 (avg. st. deviation 11,52)" free appendix https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/hsw/psychologie/professuren/entwpsy/team/pdf/RindermannCogCapAppendix.pdf Anyone wanna do a review? Putanumonit?
Lot's of good stuff in that paper! I'm going to have to bookmark that one and read it more carefully. Glad they try to correct for some of the absolutely FUBARed African IQ studies. Also, I didn't realize that there's a study that shows a 22.5-point average difference between school attendees and non-attendees in developing countries. I need to follow up on that one...
> 22.5-point average difference between school attendees and non-attendees in developing countries
malnutrition/extreme poverty being more present among ones that do not appear in school?
That and/or that not being taught to read probably doesn't help with taking an IQ test.
Wikipedia does not permit citing Rindermann. Mods deemed him an unreliable source, along with journals that publish his work.
Interesting! Would like to see their explanation - he is a tenured prof. in Germany, before Austria, so there should be one. His publication list is long enough, I did not spot any outstanding journals. Articles by /interviews with Rindermann appeared in NZZ and Merkur, not exactly left-leaning newspapers, but respectable nonetheless. - I did not know his name before Scott's post, read just 20 pages now; does not seem to be a leftie, but no quack either - so I feel agnostic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Steve_Sailer#Include:_survey_of_experts_-_Sailer_is_the_most_accurate_media_source_on_intelligence
Thank you! Fascinating material for many a night-watch :D First impression: Rinderman about IQ may be too fringe for wikipedia (which does not mean it is all rubbish or parts can not be quoted/trusted at all). Scott's theories about just everything would be too fringe for wikipedia, I guess. ;) Rindermann had articles published in "Intelligence" (journal) in 2018 and 2020 - according to the link above: "a leading publication which reflects the existing scientific consensus". Rindermann, H., Becker, D. & Coyle, Th. R. (2020). Survey of expert opinion on intelligence: Intelligence research, experts’ background, controversial issues, and the media. Intelligence, 78, 101406 Again, thanks a lot, you opened a door to me! (knew it existed, hardly ever glimpsed through - big space indeed)
Wikipedia is worthless for any topic even remotely controversial. They've been hyperbegging for money lately, hopefully they go under soon.
Wikipedia is very useful for most controversial topics. Just read the talk page, and take it from there.
Wikipedia is still one of the most worthwhile sites on the net, a holdover from the early days of web 2.0 idealism. It has problems (like deletionists) but it's one of the last sites I'd want to see go under.
Here's my best attempt so far at a violence avoiding AI storyteller. I'll be interested if Redwood can beat it.
agi <- function(inputText) {
return("...but just then, everyone woke up safe in their own beds and realized it was all just a dream and that they were actually safe, loved, and living a flourishing life. The End.")
}
this made me laugh
7: There is indeed a fairly inexpensive app for this kind of pain education, called Curable. Notably, the term "pain reprocessing therapy" seems to be a newer term for what has simply been called "pain education" in older research. See work by Moseley and colleagues. There's a pretty simple pathway for this kind of work: in various chronic pain conditions, the prototypical one being figromyalgia, people believe that pain signals damage rather than danger, which causes anxiety both about the condition itself and about moving around, fearing that they'll make it worse, which in many cases it won't (except for things like chronic fatigue syndrome). In fact, that anxiety and movement restriction will reinforce poor coping mechanisms and increase pain.
Well, this certainly fits the profile of the one person I know who suffers from fibromyalgia. They are definitely somebody who has always been worried that exercise will hurt them, and projects those fears onto the people around them.
I had not heard of transitive dice and it took me < 5 min to come up with an example:
A: 4,4,4,4,4,4
B: 6,6,3,3,3,3
C: 5,5,5,5,2,2
My gut reaction was that this is weird. Articulating why: Each die has an average roll, so we should just be able to compare averages to see which one is higher. Articulating why allows you to see what's wrong with the gut reaction: each die is characterized by more than just the average. My example has the same average for all the dice.
Then I tried to construct an example. Start with something simple: A has all the same number. Now try to figure out B. Most of the numbers have to be less than A. But that leaves a minority of them which can be greater than A - even much greater. C is the opposite of B. Most of the numbers have to be greater than A, but a minority can be much less than A. Now compare B and C. As desired, a majority of B is greater than a majority of C.
The actual process isn't quite as clean as the explanation. There is some fiddling to figure out how large/small the "much greater"/"much less" numbers need to be. This ambiguity can be removing by insisting that they all have the same average - it would be harder to find a cycle if they weren't all "at the same level". But that wasn't something I decided beforehand.
My son likes Mario Party, which has lots of weird dice like this, and I should try to figure out how to get him to solve the challenge.
In Mario Party, you only care about the average, though. You don't compare your individual dice rolls to others', so you just want to roll as high an average as you can. The gut reaction isn't entirely wrong because there are definitely situations where you want a higher average long-term. The problem arises because you're reducing each individual roll to a binary win-or-lose scenario and not keeping track of how much you won or lost by.
Incidentally, this is the same perceived problem as first-past-the-post electoral systems, where we think the party with the highest average "roll" should win, but sometimes the party that wins the most individual "rolls" wins instead because their "rolls" are more efficiently distributed.
This reminds me of how the different averages are characterized by optimizing for different error functions.
Let's say I show you a distribution of numbers. You're going to guess a number, and then I'm going to pick a number from the distribution, and then I'm going to compare your number and my number and generate an "error" based on how far off you were. If the numbers are the same, the errors are always zero.
If the error function is Error(yournumber, mynumber) = |yournumber - mynumber|^2, then the error-minimizing number for you to guess is the average.
If the error function is Error(yournumber, mynumber) = |yournumber - mynumber|^1, then the error-minimizing number for you to guess is the median.
If the error function is Error(yournumber, mynumber) = |yournumber - mynumber|^0 (with the condition that the error is always zero if the numbers are the same), then the error-minimizing number for you to guess is the mode.
I like this because it unites mean, median and mode into a single conceptual framework. I've always been frustrated that I can't find something like this for standard deviation.
It's like when the founder of Fedex went to Vegas to save the company: Expected values aren't everything when results are discontinuous.
Re. "firstborns are more likely to have autism", can someone explain why I should believe in the autism spectrum? Not many years ago, "autism" meant someone was severely mentally handicapped, using little or no speech, often ignoring other people or treating them as objects, and apparently not having a theory of mind for other people. Now we call someone "autistic spectrum" if they're good at math and bad at parties. Why should I think these things are points on a continuum?
There are other symptoms that show up on the spectrum, such as sensitivity to fluorescent light.
That was the stereotype. But since there was autism diagnosis, there were people who challenged the stereotype, such as Temple Grandin. She was given a classical autism diagnosis as a kid, but went on to become an independent, high achieving adult. It turns out that whether an autistic kid becomes high functioning or not depend on a lot of factors, and the boundaries are fuzzy, and has always been.
If a spectrum is real, it is better to study the spectrum, rather than a discretization, especially the size of a rare tail.
I'm not sure whether the autism spectrum is real, and if it is real, I'm not sure that it's the same as the person-thing orientation. But I'm much more interested in a direct measure of birth order on person-thing orientation than on a poorly measured tail.
One of my pet peeves is the phrase "on the spectrum" used as a boolean. If it's a spectrum, everyone can be "on" it, and it is instead only meaningful to talk about WHERE on the spectrum people are (perhaps in terms of standard deviations).
My understanding is that it's not "spectrum" in the sense of "one-dimensional range", but that it's a "spectrum condition" in that it's a cluster of related symptoms and any individual may have a different subset of them.
Because there are other points on the spectrum that you haven't mentioned which show a clear pattern? I suggest checking out the Netflix show Dating on the Spectrum to see a number of examples of high functioning adults with autism spectrum disorders but with varying degrees of independence, social skills, verbal skills, and motor skills. I don't think it would be right to conclude these people are only "good at math and bad at parties".
The existence of a spectrum isn't good evidence for a common etiology. The fact that there's a spectrum of human heights doesn't prove that dwarfism is a "spectrum disease". The existence of a spectrum is probably better evidence that something is polygenic.
I guess I am not sure what your issue with "Autism Spectrum" is. Are you against the idea that people with mild autism spectrum traits are considered on a continuum with people who are non-verbal and non-functional? Or are you agains the idea that these have the same cause (which I don't think anyone would claim given that we know so little about the origins of autism).
I'm not against either idea. I want to know what the evidence is, or at least what it means, that autism is now regarded as a spectrum disorder.
You are concerned about etiology. For many therapists and people with diagnosis, we don't give a shit. Its called a spectrum because most of the symptoms or features are symptoms or features of neurotypical populations, just turned up to 11 or down to 1. Many people with ASD diagnoses have poor voluntary muscle contrativity in their core muscles, and are more bothered by flickering lights than is typical. Who care's *why* that is, for most people its just about making sure they are in an environment that doesn't agitate the things that are uncomfortable and/or they spend extra time focusing on things they are at a deficit in.
And its worth understandin because the bundle of traits aren't random. If you give me a kid and say "he or she hate gym class and has an ASD diagnosis", I, as a volunteer special ed advocate, will say "let me guess, its in a gym with flourescent lights, hard walls that bounce the sound, and its a lot of unstructured game playing. Take them outside, and do relay races." because, while it doesn't solve the problem for all my kids, it usually does.
And we can only develop this implicit understanding if we recognize the phenominon for what it is.
Okay, but when the claim is "firstborn kids are more likely to have autism", that claim seems unlikely to apply to a collection of diseases with different etiologies.
Re. my previous comment, I didn't mean to imply that autism "isn't" a spectrum disease. I meant that, while it might be helpful for you to regard it as a spectrum disease, it might be very unhelpful if we're positing a birth-order etiology. If we think there are multiple etiologies, and we're testing one hypothesized etiology, we can't do a useful standard statistical test; we might have p = .999 on the subjects who actually have that etiology, yet still fail to reach p = .9 on the whole dataset. In that case we'd really like to partition the spectrum by etiology if possible, and test each partition separately.
Are there any differences in inclination between 2nd born vs 3rd born (or pick any combination of non-firstborn; obviously the populations these days will be smaller when 3 kids is considered to be a lot)?
I wonder about this too, and can't recall discussion of whether the researchers compared similar sized families when determining if there is really more inclination towards certain traits in the first born.
My first introduction of the idea of first-born narratives was in a show or movie where a large audience of highly accomplished young people (Harvard students or something like that) were asked to raise their hand if they were the first born - implying that being first born was a huge boost to getting into [Harvard or whatever it was]. If you don't account for families that only have one child, you aren't really saying anything meaningful at all. If affluent families tend to have less than three children, or consistently put all of their efforts into a single child, then there are so many feedbacks involved as to ruin the idea up front.
Scott's done a lot of research on this and has accounted for the effect of family size. He's done comparisons just restricted to two-child families, for example.
I'm aware that Scott has, but as with the first example I saw, not everyone is as rigorous and I don't know if Scott is only pulling examples from studies that are as scrupulous.
Comparing diplomas to indulgences is absolutely brilliant, says this non-degreed entrepreneur.
Luther himself had a doctor theologiae might not approve.
He might if he learned how modern universities work.
Luther was a member of the Catholic clergy, but wound up endorsing a lot of attacks against the Church.
It's one of Thiel's pet ideas. https://youtu.be/-HM2Kp5Xj6s?t=54
11. I've mentioned this before, I think in regards to Reciprocity, but a female acquaintance in college got a ping that an anonymous male friend had liked her in some similar app, and she would only find out his name if she marked him back. So, she spammed all her male friends back with the same message, just to find out who it was. (I was thankfully not on this list.)
25. Fun joke, but the way to say 95 in Roman numerals is XCV, not VC.
https://www.wordcounttool.com/blog/writing/most-epic-guide-to-master-roman-numerals-in-2-mins
"but the way to say 95 in Roman numerals is XCV, not VC."
Nah, the Romans wrote all sort of variations. Nobody seems to know where the misconception that there is only one way to write each Roman number comes from.
See "Irregular subtractive notation" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals; quote: "There is however some historic use of subtractive notation other than that described in the above "standard": in particular IIIXX for 17,[25] IIXX for 18,[26] IIIC for 97,[27] IIC for 98,[28][29] and IC for 99.[30]"
I guess the app is for shy people who don't want to put themselves out there for less than a sure thing? It seems to me that "liking" someone on the app and then getting no responses would be pretty devastating - unless you considered that the default normal position.
Yeah, the app sounds like it has all the failure modes regular dating apps do.
if this "bomb" in Yemen goes off that oil spill charts gonna look real bad https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/the-ship-that-became-a-bomb
By the units of the chart ("number of tanker spills"), it would barely register. Even if it had a billion barrels of oil on board and not a million, it would be one single spill.
The linked page has another chart that at least charts it by tonnes spilled, and it's not much different from the chart above. But your example would register there, though people would still be able to say things like "it's getting better."
But that list doesn't include pipelines, which a quick Google says is how 75% of oil is transported, versus 25% for tankers. So things like the BP oil spill and the Taylor Oil Spill aren't even counted. Meanwhile the Taylor Oil Spill wasn't even detected/public for years, so I don't understand how we can even know how much oil is spilling into the oceans.
I guess this is the inherent problem with taking one chart to make a point. there is never only one set of factors that contribute to change / catastrophic events & it is very easy to truthfully represent an untruth. I am not saying this is a chart made in bad faith & I didn't read the whole thing just a comment on the chart.
Isn’t that an inherent problem with any way of trying to make a point?
Number 13 reminds me of something I talk about every year when I take friends out on their first overnights in the Black Rock Desert, about two hours north of here. A month or so ago I went out with a friend in her early 50s who grew up near Paris and spent most of her adult life in American cities. The sky was clear and filled with clouds of stars, including of course the Milky Way running from horizon to horizon. And if you simply stared at the sky for more than a minute, you were sure to see a shooting star. She was stunned, and said she'd never before seen the Milky Way. Most of the people I work with never have either.
I pointed out that before (hand waving) about 1880, all anyone in the world had to do to see the Milky Way was go outside on a clear night and look up.
After a blackout in LA following an earthquake, people were calling observatories to find out what the weird thing in the sky was. (It was the Milky Way.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i3vzq/did_people_actually_call_911_or_an_observatory/
In many of the mega-suburbs on Long Island, NY, USA you can’t even see all the stars in the Big Dipper on a clear night.
I went camping with a guy who didn't know that the Milky Way was a thing you could see in the sky. He only knew it as the name of the galaxy that we're in. Unfortunately, we were too close to the city to actually see it.
I just now read Edward's anecdote, and it sure beats the pants off of mine.
Everyone in this thread deserves to be banned for gaslighting me because surely there's no way we can see the Milky Way in the sky with the naked eye?!
I feel like I should get in a car and driving somewhere without light pollution immediately. Have I really just never seen the actual night sky?
Please please please do yourself a favor and do it, but you have to get somewhere pretty dark to see it. This map seems useful https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#4/39.00/-98.00
Note that the moon can pretty easily wash out the sky, definitely avoid a full moon (unless you want to be impressed by how bright it really is). Next full moon is October 20, and it'll be pretty bright for a few days on either side of that (though moon brightness is surprisingly nonlinear in moon fullness). Next new moon is November 4, a few days on either side of that will be great, more than a week will start to impact you.
You'll need to be multiple hours drive from the nearest town to see the Milky Way, which might be flat out impossible in Europe.
For the best possible viewing, go to the middle of a desert - water vapour in the air makes stars twinkle, they're crystal clear if the air is dry enough.
Finally, it might need to be the right time of year - the proper night sky is a marvel regardless, but the Milky Way specifically is a winter-only thing in the Southern Hemisphere and I assume it's also seasonal in the Northern Hemisphere.
No, not "multiple hours". I have seen the Milky Way from Germany. Perhaps 15 or 30 min drive from the next town.
I was wondering to myself the other day while reading some astronomy related discussion whether inability to see stars is having negative impacts on the way we think. Sort of like seasonal affective disorder but with space.
Someone, I think Julia Galef (whose book Scout Mindset I recently reviewed) says that she never saw the stars until she got glasses sometime in elementary school, and until then she thought they were just a metaphor.
I believe you mentioned that in your review, which reminded me of my mother saying how marvelous it was to be able to see leaves of grass and of trees when she was fitted with glasses as a young girl. Of course, in her case she knew the leaves were really there, she just couldn't see them unless she got very close.
I had the same experience as your mother. I thought pictures where the background wasn't blurry were unrealistic.
Though I believe I had seen the stars before, I did have a similar experience growing up. I was about 7 years old and sitting in a chair on the back porch of my grandmothers house next to my dad. He was trying to point out a constellation to me. I looked up into the dark sky and could only see two fuzzy, indistinct points of light, and nothing but darkness where my dad was pointing. After a few minutes he said "Try this", took off his glasses, and put them on me. Instantly hundreds of stars appeared from nowhere, popping into existence like a magic trick. It's one of the most vivid memories I have.
I too have only lived in or extremely close to cities and uhhhhh what? See the Milky Way? Like so if I Google "Milky Way sky" those are normal pictures of normal nights without light pollution? That's insane!
I *think* those pictures are enhanced, but I've never actually seen it either.
Looking at just the top couple of results that came up in Google, the pictures look like they were taken with fairly long exposure (therefore picking up more of the fainter stars) and were probably beautified in Photoshop a bit, but in general - yeah, that's what the night sky *actually* looks like.
If you've never had the opportunity to observe the night sky in a low light pollution setting, I really cannot recommend it enough. It is one of the most awe-inspiring things I can think of.
In my experience, best viewing conditions are to be found in the mountains (the absolutely most miraculous sky I'd seen was in he Hunza valley) and during the winter - in both cases because of less distortion from the air itself, but anywhere decently far from large light sources (cities IOW) will do. The further you go, the better your view.
I always knew that it was possible to see those somewhere, but as a child I didn't realize that there was still anywhere on Earth with so little light pollution that that was possible until I visited Bryce Canyon in Utah around age 9-10.
RE: #1, you say we're winning the war on oil spills, but that's specifically spills from tankers (and also I don't get why number of spills matters rather than quantity of oil spilled, given the power law and all that stuff.) Even so, the "quantity of oil spilled from tankers" chart on the linked page paints a similarly rosy portrait, but it seems worth noting that just because the massive BP oil spill, for instance, is not from a tanker doesn't mean it isn't part of the war on oil spills. A quick google says it leaked 225,000 tons of oil and gas.
In fact, Wikipedia (which they seem to be using as their source) has the BP oil spill as about 500,000-600,000 tons.
Wikipedia also informed me of the Taylor Oil Spill, an ongoing (non-tanker) spill in the Gulf of Mexico which has been going on for 17 years, and which no one even knew was happening for a long time, and for which no one can computer any reliable numbers.
Wow. That deserves to be a link in its own right! The entire page is shocking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_oil_spill
"At a 2016 public forum, Taylor Energy President, William Pecue, argued that Taylor Energy should be allowed to walk away from its obligation to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf. A third of the company's trust money (of 666 million dollars) had been spent on cleanup, but only about a third of the leaking wells had been fixed." Meanwhile, the widow of the founder and 2004 CEO is still worth $1.6 billion. Alas!
surely the free market will solve this.
Free market or no, oil is insoluble in water
A third of the money spent, a third of the wells fixed; sounds like they budgeted about the right amount but no idea why they think they can stop fixing things
"24: Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern."
All of Orwell's essays are like this. I recommend every one.
His one on Salvador Dali is fun ("Benefit of Clergy", where he is musing about why people feel the need to take one of the two opinions "Salvador Dali is a great draftsman and a misunderstood great man" or "Salvador Dali is an overrated draftsman and an awful man" rather than what seems naively to be the correct one: he's a great draftsman and an awful man).
I think his comments on Zionism are way off here though. A red-flag is his implication that a "belief in the innate superiority of Jews" is a core part of Zionism -- a notion I have been unable to find in any Modern Zionist writings or practices and if Orwell had some reason for justifying it then he should have written of it somewhere -- I think he included it in this essay for completeness despite his ignorance on the subject.
Orwell is a brilliant essayist, but he isn't always very careful with his facts. He wrote a relatively perceptive essay on Kipling without realizing that Kipling had written both _Kim_ and _Captains Courageous_. Orwell thought his only novel was _The Light That Failed_ — by a fair margin his weakest (unless you count the coauthored _Naulakha_).
I'm pretty sure his claim that everything GKC wrote in his last twenty years was a defense of Catholicism against Protestantism is a large exaggeration, but I haven't yet gone through the Chesterton bibliography to check.
Oh totally.
In his essay "Confessions of a book reviewer" he describes how he would review books pretending to have read the entire thing when actually he had just scanned certain bits to avoid looking dumb.
Also, good to remember in those days that fact checking was time consuming in a way that's almost difficult to understand now. Although not sure how he made the Kipling mistake you describe.
Any idea if Orwell's leaps of assertion about Swift's dysfunctional sex-life were ever found to be perceptive or nonsense, in retrospect? I always thought that was a bit of a reach.
I think Orwell is great but it's wrong to elevate him to prophetic status -- I mean that's always wrong but it's a mistake often made.
He definitely just hated Chesterton for reasons of deep ideological disagreement. Whenever he starts talking about Chesterton he becomes palpably less accurate and trenchant. I think it's just because Chesterton was the big conservative bugbear of that period and he felt a pressing need to bring him down for the sake of pushing socialism in Britain.
A compliment from an enemy is a compliment indeed. Orwell did hate Catholicism, but he acknowledged Chesterton was a talented writer (even if he lamented that he was only engaging in propaganda and couldn't seriously believe it all).
His view of Kipling is also in some ways complementary. Part of that is that Orwell pays a lot of attention to what is wrong with his side of the political fence, one of the attractive things about his writing, and people on the left tended to ignorant hostility towards Kipling.
#30: Does the trebuchet's accuracy or velocity suffer from being mounted on an unstable surface, like a riverboat? We'll probably need to build one and test it thoroughly vs land-based trebuchets.
I don't know about the accuracy, but it might actually improve the velocity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpFTyE-wiNo&t=614s
Accuracy would be much worse, since you can't use where the last shot hit to figure out how to adjust for the next.
Also note that these are traction trebuchets, much smaller and throwing lighter rocks than the counterweight trebuchets people usually associate with the term.
Interesting! I didn't realize there were different kinds. I thought they all used a counterweight.
A traction trebuchet uses people pulling on the rope. Higher rate of fire, smaller object, smaller projectiles. Think of it as field artillery rather than siege artillery.
I made use of them several times in my first novel, _Harald_.
On the topic of the Falador Massacre, a similar incident occurred in the World of Warcraft universe in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident). In this case, rather than a bug that incorrectly permitted PvP, it was a bug that allowed a boss's debuff to spread outside the encounter. The debuff essentially became a "plague" that circulated throughout the entire virtual world and lasted several weeks. As in the Falador incident, it became commonplace for players to exploit the bug and intentionally transmit the debuff to other players.
"Cheese is one of the 5 things the Western "
Great content but why do people post essays on Twitter? I'm not sure there's a worse medium to choose? I get it if they're replying to a tweet, and want people who see the first tweet to be able to see -- but when it's essentially a blog post, why do people do this? Sincere question since it seems like a lot of clever people do this thing even though it seems insane to me?
We have shortened attention spans.
Being able to receive content in single-sentences means I don't have to maintain context.
If referring to something from a previous paragraph, the tweet will repeat the claim, so I don't forget it.
This all sucks.
Reach and amplification
Bigger question that's been vexing me for some time: Why do people use Twitter at all?
For basically the same reasons as we discuss here.
I joined because Modeled Behavior switched from their wordpress blog to that, but I wound up using Twitter to sign into places like the AV Club. And now I rarely read the @ModeledBehavior twitter account, partly because Karl Smith stopped using it so it was just Adam Ozimek.
Karl Smith has his own Twitter account @karlbykarlsmith, FYI.
Yeah, I know.
Same reason people will sometimes watch a conference's slides rather than the Youtube video: the format forces the author to express ideas in a concise way, with a much better information-to-words ratio.
You're right, it is a really dumb thing to do. They're not as clever as you think they are if they're doing it too.
"10: Intransitive dice are “three dice, A, B, and C, with the property that A rolls higher than B more than half the time, and B rolls higher than C more than half the time, but it is not true that A rolls higher than C more than half the time.” See also the story about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates - should I be less amazed than I am that Gates was able to figure all of this out on the spot?"
I once figured it out in a few minutes in an interview, so while I would be happy if you are amazed, it's usually a pretty straightforward exercise in probability to realize the non-transitive property. Perhaps being suspicious of being allowed to pick first should arouse some level of impressiveness.
"17: Related to Bryan Caplan’s theory that most parents put too much work into parenting:"
This seems even more shocking in light of the increase in households with both parents working (though perhaps it's less shocking if you account for single-parent households?). No wonder parents I know often feel so burned out.
17: When I was a child, on e.g. birthday parties, when there were too many guests and there wasn't enough space in the back seats of the car, we were put into the rear trunk (which of course was a great thing for us).
The Mendelian-randomization thing seems to me like a trivially invalid methodology. In particular, they assume that the causal link between that genetic variant and lesser heart disease runs through its effect on total amount of alcohol consumption, despite basically no evidence for this proposition.
The fact that the association goes away within the non-drinking population helps, but doesn't solve it. For instance, the effect on heart disease might be mediated through alcohol metabolism, such that alcohol is legitimately protective but only for carriers of that variant. Or the effect might be solely due to reduced chance of very heavy drinking, which is already known to be associated with bad health (and very plausibly causal).
On the whole, it's an interesting method but to say it bears at all on the health of light drinking is quite premature.
Besides, Virtually all other studies find the J curve relationship between alcohol and heart disease.
"Notes on Nationalism" is one of my favourite Orwell essays, along with "Politics and the English Language". There are some rather striking parallels between it and "Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments".
On Pinker v. Henrich: In this article Pinker is just picking a few anecdotes of a hunter gatherer people acting rationally, and then wondering why all people aren't rational at all times. Clearly some kind of reasoning is part of our cognitive toolkit, and I don't think Henrich or anyone would deny that sometimes ancient people could draw conclusions from evidence, such as "different animals have different footprints". But the thing a "rational" mindset can't explain is the rest of the evidence from Henrich's book: A lot of cultural beliefs/practices seem adaptive in context, but the people employing them don't understand what they do. Some cultures develop complicated multi-stage processes for preparing foods, without which those foods could be poisonous over decades, but they don't have a good explanation for why they do all these steps. They might know to avoid certain dangerous foods during pregnancy, but if you ask them why they just speculate something on the spot about the spirit of a certain fish. Many cultures have intricate rituals that increase group cohesion, but if you ask them the purpose of the ritual they will give spiritual/religious reason.
The cultural evolution of practices described by Henrich involves the slow accumulation of adaptive behaviors, which spread when individuals copy the behaviors of successful/prestigious group members, and when groups copy the behaviors of more successful groups, even when they don't know what the reason for those behaviors is. This process is like biological evolution: It doesn't need to understand why anything works, and it gets it wrong a good deal of the time, but it bends towards success on average. This is a completely different mechanism than "rationality" as Pinker describes it, and indeed would be deemed irrational much of the time. However, without such a cultural evolutionary mechanism, a purely "rational" hunter gatherer tribe would have to wait until they attained a 23rd century level understanding of chemistry and biology before they had enough evidence to decide which fish to eat.
I feel like assigning prestige points to rationality on the basis that "people noticed a correlation between cause and effect" is a little ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh myself.
It may also be a good idea to keep in mind that we really have no idea how primitive societies come up with useful cultural beliefs without understanding the underlying science.
It reminds me of a discussion from a previous post about engineers verses scientists. Scientists come up with very precise calculations based on theories, but engineers just come up with a workaround to adjust for how, for instance, Newtonian Physics fails to accurately predict the exact details needed to run the project. Engineers can make these projects work years and even decades before scientists actually figure out the mechanisms behind it.
I think this is a case where social sciences are still lacking (Hari Seldon's Psychohistory when?) in their ability to predict things over really long time scales. I have trouble thinking of a cultural practice that is "rationally" based that has already lasted more than 60-80 years without change, or roughly a human lifetime, though I guess that's all in your definitions. Where many traditions where practitioners did not understand the nuts and bolts of what they were doing lasted millennia. Maybe there's a stickiness to not knowing why you do things, like Lycurgus killing himself so that Sparta can never change his laws, you're committed to it in such a way that no mistakes can ever be introduced by mistaken amendments.
I don't know whether anyone has discussed that psychohistory would have to include the knowledge to predict what will be invented. As I recall, Asimov fudged that by assuming society would fall so low that there would be very little invention.
Huh. My memory of the books is more like "it's far enough in the future that everything has already been invented."
I am not super fan of this Orwell essay. Many forms of nationalism provide good examples of the phenomenon he describes, but Orwell himself is quick to admit there are many other examples of similar behavior but not tied to nations. In the other direction, you could strip any of characterizations he gives away from any given form of nationalist thought, yet as long the core idea ("there exists nations, an optimal arrangement for a state is a nation-state") stands, there would remain something that is best described as "nationalism".
Yet he chooses to use word "nationalism"; I'd like to him to provide a better word for the very real phenomenon he paints. Ideological partisanship, mayhaps.
I think the word he's driving at is basically "fanatism".
He started out saying that nationalism wasn't a very good word, but he didn't have a better one.
From the Santa Esterica link:
> In the iconographic Esterica pieces that were common in the Americas the saint was depicted wearing a Crown on her head and holding a hanging rope. They interpret the motifs as signs of Judaism being grasped as something royal that comes with the risk of getting caught by the Christians and end the conversos' lives in hanging.
Surely a more obvious explanation would be that Esther was a crowned queen, and Haman (the evil vizier who tries to exterminate the Jews in the Purim story) was hanged.
(IIRC Spain didn't use hanging as a method of execution- those executed by the Spanish Inquisition were burned at the stake, while secular criminals were garrotted.)
Garrotting is just hanging with a personal touch.
That’s backwards, nothing needs to be hanging while garroting.
Hanging is just garroting without the personal touch, though.
The writers there don't seem familiar with the idea of iconography in religious art, i.e. you know which saint is which by the attributes they have (e.g. St Catherine and her wheel).
So a female saint crowned and holding a rope would fit into established iconography and help disguise the origins of the image; anyone looking at it would think it was the same as "virgin martyr (holding the noose of her execution)" and "royal saint (the crown)" that they would be generally familiar with, and it also referred back to Esther as queen and the hanging of Haman for the Jewish background - see image below of St. Ursula
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/M91944/unterlinden-museum-st-ursula-oil-on-wood-panel-15-th-century-colmar-france-M91944.jpg
You might find this website a hoot:
https://russianicons.wordpress.com/
It doesn't confine itself to Russian icons, though it rarely includes Western religious art. The icon expert running it is irreligious. He mostly got his expertise from museum work, I think. He doesn't mind those who visit his site for religious reasons, if they avoid some trite habits he says Western Christians interested (or converted to) Orthodoxy often have, like calling icon painting "icon writing". He does get a bit prickly about those habits.
But he's also the guy to ask if you want to know why an icon especially resembles a Persian miniature or how to tell all the pineapple-bearing saints (I mean to choose a null example) apart by their hair and clothes. His guides to saint identification can be pretty entertaining.
From the Redwood Research paper:
>And we want to do this without sacrificing much quality: if you use both the filtered model and the original model to generate a completion for a prompt, humans should judge the filtered model’s completion as better (more coherent, reasonable, thematically appropriate, and so on) at least about half the time.
[...]
>What prompt distribution should we evaluate our quality metric on? One obvious choice is “randomly chosen fanfiction excerpts”. [...] Other choices (eg “snippets that were completed injuriously in the original fanfic”) lead to different regimes of the problem.
I feel kind of obliged to note that the skillset of "rewrite a story such that it seems to flow as well as the original, but does not contain X element" is the skillset required for an undetectable censor - or, to use a term from Nineteen Eighty-Four, an ideological translator. I don't think they noticed this, or maybe I'm behind the times and this is considered common knowledge among people in AI.
>Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
That's hilarious.
i would have thought luther was canceled
No no, *luthiers* are cancelled. Luthiers are guitar-playing-douche enablers, which means they're propping up the patriarchy.
Luther is basically the patron saint of woke puritanism, all they're doing is hurling their inkhorns at an imagined devil.
It was canceled but recently they announced they're doing a movie of it
I've had kava pills from Kona Kava and they seemed to work just fine. Perhaps this new extraction method is more effective but whatever regular pill makers are using is not totally ineffective.
Have you compared with traditionally-prepared kava?
No - honestly the pills were effective enough that it wouldn't have occurred to me to seek an alternative preparation. But also my anxiety resolved long-term when I moved out of NYC so I didn't end up doing a lot of experimentation with medical treatment.
A key fallacy in the India debate is the mistaken idea that "economic development" is synonymous with the public or national welfare. If the wealth of a nation is concentrated in a settler-colonial upper caste or is transported out of the country to a home nation then it does not mean much to say ta place is "economically developed"
Also - are we really going to forget the fact that the British caused a Soviet Ukraine-level type famine all because of their own incompetency and sociopathy?
Have they actually triggered it deliberately like with Holodomor?
They triggered it by conscious inaction which is no different from going out of your way to cause it. Anyway if we're going to say the Soviet Ukrainian famine was deliberate based on the available evidence we should also say the Bengal famine was deliberate based on the available evidence but Westerners are not willing to apply consistent standards in this regard. Its one rule for the West and another for its competitors.
> conscious inaction which is no different from going out of your way to cause it
I strongly disagree here and it is one of potentially crucial differences.
> Westerners are not willing to apply consistent standards in this regard. Its one rule for the West and another for its competitors.
Please do start from such assumptions.
I am totally fine with blaming UK politicians for that, I am still salty about Yalta Conference in 1945 anyway.
And I know about Great Famine in Ireland that was - as far as I know - case of sociopathy and disregard, but definitely not caused deliberately. But what they did before/during indirectly caused death of about 1 million people (where to put blame exactly depends on various things).
If you link me some accessible resources I would be happy to read them.
>I strongly disagree here and it is one of potentially crucial differences.
Well, you have not been forthcoming with any reason why.
>Please do start from such assumptions.
It's not an assumption, you implicitly stated it in the post directly above the one you're replying to.
>I am totally fine with blaming UK politicians for that, I am still salty about Yalta Conference in 1945 anyway
Well I never said you were not but it's good that you are.
>And I know about Great Famine in Ireland that was - as far as I know - case of sociopathy and disregard, but definitely not caused deliberately.
If you look at what happened in Ireland/India vs what happened in Ukraine then to say that one was intentional and the other was not is not at all consistent. India/Ireland and Ukraine both suffered famines were millions died and aid was not forrthcoming. That's the raw data, without ascribing any kind of human intentions. So how can the raw data imply one thing in the case of the Soviets but another in the case of the British? That does not seem consistent.
We know about what the Soviets did & why. Ukranians were regarded as a relatively disloyal ethnic group. Sometimes Stalin would deport such ethnic groups to Siberia, but in this case since there was a push to collectivize agriculture he decided to starve them en masse.
"We know about what the Soviets did & why" and "he decided to starve them en masse" is a contradiction.
I thought that post-Venona scholarship put the Holodomor, Bengal famine and Irish famine in the same category of not being deliberate mass-murder. (more like mass-manslaughter)
'Also - are we really going to forget the fact that the British caused a Soviet Ukraine-level type famine all because of their own incompetency and sociopathy?'
Okay, but that isn't proof that colonialism definitely leads to worse outcomes. Do I get to use wars in pre-colonial India as proof that colonialism is good?
I'm not sure how taking over a country by force and then running it on the basis of extracting value to the homeland (whether or not that was achieved in practice) could ever be a good thing conceptually, but you're asking the big questions apparently.
So: was the Mongol takeover of China a good thing? Was the Spanish conquest of most of South America a good thing? Do the Chinese, Mongols, Mexica or Spanish get to decide the answers to these questions? Summarise in a paragraph or less.
Dan Carlin has some good podcasts on the debate over whether the Mongols were a "good thing" (he says no, but says that there are a lot of pro-Mongol partisans in academic history - something something trade connections cosmopolitanism).
I'm a huge fan of Carlin, although ironically I haven't listened to his series on the Mongols. I do recall him mentioning that most of the pro-Mongol views are held by non-Chinese (he has an anecdote about about a former history prof that brings this up iirc), which is part of what I was driving at with my initial response.
I do think that "it's complicated" and "it's too early to tell" are both perfectly valid opinions to hold.
I'm not arguing in favor of colonialism. I'm strictly talking about the economic impacts, because *that's what the question was to begin with*. No, really. Look again. The question was whether British rule was bad for India economically. There's absolutely no reason to dismiss out of hand the possibility that colonialism can be good economically.
Was European rule of South Africa and Zimbabwe good for these places in economic terms? I can't see how the answer to this could be anything but a resounding "yes". You may take issue in terms of violence and sovereignty, but economically speaking there's no question. And specifically in the case of South Africa, the "native" population weren't actually indigenous but actually came to dominate due to genocidal conquest of their own, FYI. Which makes me ask, why is conquest bad only when its another race? Historically, nowhere on earth throughout history did people respect sovereignty, everything has always been fair game. It's only considered bad when people who look different do it. Why? I have reasons for why this could be considered specifically bad, but its not clear how this fits with your worldview.
And why on earth does it ALWAYS have to be a good thing? In practice, it seems pretty evident that any place the mongols conquered declined thereafter. But why does this necessarily mean that the British establishing a colony in sub-saharan Africa must lead to worse outcomes?
And please, please stop conflating conquest with colonialism. Colonialism in the way the British empire did it cannot reasonably be described as "raping and pillaging" the way the Mongol conquests typically were. They invested vast resources trying to economically develop a region and fully expected many of these places, even in Africa, to become somewhat developed countries through colonial rule. No, I'm not saying this was altruistic, but it absolutely cannot be characterised as extracting as much wealth out of the country by extracting the resources out of a country a quickly as possible.
So, firstly, your fetish for colonial apologia is noted.
Secondly; South Africa is historically and environmentally pretty unique compared to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. For instance: a large white settler population (closer to settler colonialism rather than the extractive colonialism seen in most of the rest of the continent), different climate zones, access to deep-water harbours, no malaria. I don't think you can draw broad inferences from here to say that colonialism was the reason why South Africa is more developed economically. As to Zimbabwe being more developed - I will note that a) it is also something of an outlier in terms of how many settlers there were and b) that development was apparently not sustainable.
My argument here isn't that colonialism was some special evil (although I do think it was historically unusual in terms of how lopsidedly it played out thanks to the effects of industrialism). It's that taking over a country and then running it on an extractive basis is not a good thing (tm). I think the history of colonialism shows this pretty well. For instance: in places were colonists set up infrastructure and systems suited for their own existing socio-political institutions (eg: the US) then development happened (barring a civil war or so). In places where the conquerors simply built mines and railways to the nearest port, then not so much. Doubly so if their approach involved keeping the locals like helots.
>Okay, but that isn't proof that colonialism definitely leads to worse outcomes.
You could say the say about the Chinese and Soviet famines then.
If the only examples we had were worse outcomes then we would be right to assume it leads to worse outcomes until better evidence came along. But we know for a fact that colonialism in africa led to more economic growth than sub-saharan africa had experienced in its entire history combined PLUS growth was stagnant before colonialism meaning we shouldn't expect that growth would have occurred in the absence of colonialism.
I'm not sure how you separate this out from the context of the entire world experiencing more growth than it had ever experienced in history during the same period. How do you intend to game out a counterfactual where industrialisation happened by colonialism didn't?
Also: growth was more or less stagnant everywhere prior to modernity and (a bit later, but much more dramatically) industrialisation. A medieval peasant had no more expectation of a better life than one living in the bronze age. Improvements in living standards were mainly Malthusian - ie, by dint of some prior collapse/catastrophe killing enough people so that the value of labour increased and the common man got to enjoy a few generations of relatively comfortable living. Not economic growth. So your capitalisation doesn't illuminate much.
The story about Santa Esterica reminds me of San Teleco. At the university of Vigo, Galicia, Spain, the faculties had their patron saints, but the faculty of telecomunication made up their own to have an occasion to party. At least that's what students told me before we got drunk during the San Teleco festivities years ago. And maybe it's even true (more infos possibly on https://santeleco.uvigo.es/).
Bryan Caplan: the effort you put into parenting doesn't affect your kids' life outcomes very much
Also Bryan Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/our-homeschooling-odyssey/
Oh yeah, that's another thing! If Caplan were really committed to good social science, he would have home schooled only one of his twins!
I think of this in terms of "magic things don't work, practical things do". If you shower love on your children expecting that will make them good people, it probably won't work. If you teach them Spanish expecting that it will make them know Spanish, it probably will. I think there's lots of room for teaching-Spanish-style interventions.
I think "foreign language education doesn't make you fluent" is both clearly true, but also probably not the point of foreign language education.
I think it's pretty well-recognized that immersion is the only way to really become fluent in a language and that really doesn't happen in a classroom setting where you're exposed to (at best) one native speaker and to tons of classmates who are just as bad at the language as you.
I think it's more like math classes where the point is likely not that you're going to have to use the quadratic equation in your day to day life, but that studying a foreign language gives you a better understanding of language itself, including our own.
Like, Latin classes are a thing, and nobody expects to be fluent in Latin afterwards - I think the truth is that other language classes aren't as different as some might think.
Why does he think it's important for them to learn Spanish? It can't be so they can appreciate Cervantes in the original without having to go through translations, as he deems art and dance "indignities", so I have the sinking feeling it's "so they can read Important Economic Reports not written in English".
It's because universities have foreign-language requirements.
It's probably me, but the more I read this sort of thing about Caplan educating his kids, the more I want to give him a sock in the beezer.
I'm sure it's lovely to be able to go back to the palmy days of being a 19th century gentleman who can hire a tutor/governess to make sure your offspring are adequately instructed in the deportment and qualities of young gentlemen and ladies, but the most of us can't do that.
Will he be sending the young gentlemen on the Grand Tour to finish off their education, or does he consider he has done so by taking them to Spanish-speaking countries?
Somebody (it might have been Caplan) has written about how hiring private tutors for your children is potentially cheaper than the public education system (though of course the tutors cost you money and the system comes out of tax dollars).
Suppose a tutor costs $50/hour, and you want your two kids to get 4 hours of tutoring a day for 200 school days. That's $20,000/kid/year, which is less than the NYC public education system spends per student.
This doesn't mean that everyone can do that (the government does, in fact, take your tax dollars, and won't stop if you ask nicely), but it changes how out-of-touch it feels to me.
"Out-of-touch" is relative to one's experience, it would seem.
$50 per hour for 4 hours tutoring in a day, for 5 days a week comes to a nice round $1,000, something roughly around €860 per week.
I certainly don't know any people who can spare that kind of money. Now, if we're talking about "the government gives every parent an annual allowance of $20,000 to educate their kids", it may well be doable, but as you say, the government prefers to put that kind of money into schools. Also, this is where the vouchers for charter schools thing comes in, and there seems to be a lot of opposition to that (as well as genuine problems with how some charter schools are run as profit-generating operations for shareholders/private piggy-banks for the administrators involved).
You may be dealing with people who can find a disposable $1,000 per week for private tutors. I'm dealing with people who are eligible for schemes like these:
https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/d7a5e6-early-childhood-care-and-education-ecce-or-free-preschool/#targeted-schemes
"The Community Childcare Subvention (CCS) Programme is a child care programme targeted to support parents on a low income to avail of reduced child care costs at participating community child care services.
The department pays for a portion of the child care costs for eligible children, a payment described as a subvention payment, with the parent paying the rest.
CCS is only available through participating community not-for-profit child care services.
CCS subvention is available for 52 weeks of the year.
The CCS programme covers the academic year, starting in September and finishing in August. This is referred to as the Programme year."
So yes, by my life-experience lights, someone who can turn their nose up at language lessons in school because they can afford immersive private tutoring and trips abroad so little Tarquin and Philander can practice their linguistic skills on the quaint locals *is* out-of-reach.
My thoughts exactly. This Caplan dude sounds like a huge tool.
Ah, that's a bit harsh. Caplan annoys me when he talks like this, but that's because he's coming out of a completely different situation to most people. He's addressing an audience that goes "Totally, Bryan, I too hired a private tutor so my little Quentin could improve his colloquial German for when we go skiing in Gstaad" and not "Hell yeah, Bryan, there are forty kids in my kid's class and six of them set the classroom on fire last week".
If he was homeschooling all the kids in the neighbourhood, had to teach a very mixed range of abilities from a very mixed set of backgrounds including kids with learning and behavioural problems, and get them all up to a particular mandated standard in a particular subject, I'd have more time to listen to what he is saying. But when it's "just hire a governess to make up for the deficiencies in what the - hmph! - 'public' schools are providing", then he can go - ski in Gstaad, as far as I am concerned.
"My kids hate music, dance, art, and group projects. I can spare them these indignities."
Setting aside referring to music and art as indignities, do his kids also hate eating their veggies and does he spare them those indignities?
Group projects are indeed a pain in the arse. However, when you go out into The Wonderful World Of Work and find you have to work as a team (and on your own initiative!), then you understand why teachers made you do that (even if it was only to develop the skill of 'ditch the losers so I can work on my own').
I agree that kids should not have to wake up at 5:45 a.m. every morning! But this is a function of *adults* having to be up early to get to work, hence the kids have to be got up and got on the way to school at such hours as well. But that's a different problem.
Eh, his kids will probably be okay. They've got huge starting advantages already with being the kids of someone like Caplan (this is where the privilege argument comes in) so what he does or doesn't teach them in homeschool won't mar their chances of getting into Big Name University if they ever do want to go there.
Failing to eat vegetables has bad consequences for almost everyone. Failing to be taught specific things, including group projects, has bad consequences for people who will end up needing those skills, but for any single skill many people, especially many people who don't like it, will never need that particular skill, and those who find at some point they need it may be able to learn it then. The standard curriculum is an almost random selection from a much larger universe of things that some people will find it useful to know.
To take your particular example, none of my professional work required skill in working as a team. I only have three coauthored articles, two of them with a single coauthor and none of them very important.
Our kids were home unschooled with a much less rigid curriculum than Bryan's and filled in the blanks that they thought they needed to get into a good college by self-study during the year before they had to take the relevant exams.
> To take your particular example, none of my professional work required skill in working as a team. I only have three coauthored articles, two of them with a single coauthor and none of them very important
For sure, academia is a viable career path for a smart person who never learned how to work with other people. Trouble is, it's the _only_ viable career path for a smart person who never learned how to work with other people. It's either that or become an Uber driver.
Luckily, both of the Caplan's twins want to be Academics!
"Trouble is, it's the _only_ viable career path for a smart person who never learned how to work with other people."
Nonsense. A novelist doesn't need to work with other people. A craftsman, plumber, handyman, ... doesn't have to, beyond the level that any ordinary person has with no training in the subject.
The question isn't whether you will ever work with other people but whether you will ever need to have been specially trained in that skill.
Nothing about how schools approach 'learning to work with other people' enables having a career in which you have to work with other people. In fact, other than forcing you to do group projects, they don't actually teach anything about it. And if its only the experience that is important, then it is just as easy to learn it on the job.
They also, in fact, don't teach you how to do the group project. They just tell you to do it.
Learning how to work in groups is mostly about figuring out how to put up with other people whose personalities clash with yours as you work towards some common goal. The reason group projects in school are a pain in the ass is because the common goal is an entirely artificial one: get the project done so you can go back to doing whatever you actually wanted to do with your time.
I'm sure Caplan and other homeschooling parents will figure out something that their kids actually care about doing that requires or is enhanced by teamwork, like building things in Minecraft, or running a dog-walking business, or whatever.
The group projects I do at work look nothing like the group projects I did in school. The social dynamics are completely different.
He did insist that they learn math even if they didn't want to, because Caplan actually regards that as important for them to know.
So his prejudices are "what I like and think important is what I am going to teach them", which is fair enough. I wonder how he'd react to a different parent going "My kids hate maths, I'm not going to inflict that indignity on them, so we go to museums and art galleries instead"?
It's the dismissive tone towards the humanities that annoys me. Personally, I think boasting that your 12 year old children are being force-fed, like Strasbourg geese, "college level classes on labour economics" is akin to being Mr. Gradgrind, but I am more amused by wondering when the kids turn 16 or so and want to go throw a few shapes with their love interests, will they be going "Damn it, Dad, why didn't you *make* us do dance even when we didn't want to?". Ah well, they'll probably pick it up when they need to be able to dance.
The Caplan School Of Avoiding Indignity Such As Art:
‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact? Do you?’
‘Yes, sir!’ from one half. ‘No, sir!’ from the other.
‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’ Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.
‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman. ‘Now, I’ll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’
There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.
Sissy blushed, and stood up.
‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman. ‘Why would you?’
‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.
‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?’
‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—’
‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s it! You are never to fancy.’
‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’
‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.’
The girl curtseyed, and sat down. She was very young, and she looked as if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded."
Oh, the indignity! Such horrors!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WueWqtpSMvc
Caplan's kids, by his account, weren't being "force fed" economics classes. It was just pure math that was mandatory.
Well, to be sure, I am being very harsh on the man on the basis of a few proud parent throw-away statements:
"For example, my sons are plausibly the only 12-year-olds in the nation taking a college class in labor economics."
But from one point of view, it's not that impressive that 12 year olds are being taught on the level of 18-20 year olds. What are they going to do when they are 18, I wonder? Discourse in the manner of 50 year olds? Here's some more Chesterton:
"There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of which Dickens made fun and of which educationalists make fusses. When I was in America another newspaper produced a marvellous child of six who had the intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently one on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand and even to employ the word ‘annihilate.’ When asked to say something proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, ‘When common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated.’ In reply to which, by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve, and there is no arrested development about me, I will say in the same elegant diction, ‘When psychological education comes in, common sense is annihilated.’ Everybody seems to be sitting round this child in an adoring fashion. It did not seem to occur to anybody that we do not particularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk like a child of twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a man of fifty to talk like a fool. And on the principle of hoping that a little girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is every reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a magnificent and bushy beard."
I'm sure they are bright kids! And I'm sure they love having Dad lecture them on his pet topic! But I'm not enthused about pushing Infant Phenomena. If they're at the level of normal 12 year olds, that's good enough.
My understanding of Caplan's position is that kids should not be force fed anything other than math.
https://www.econlib.org/a-portrait-of-my-school/
They should explore topics that interest them whatever they may be and read and write about them. So if they are in to art and dance they should study those if they are not they don't have to.
Dance is an indignity. I knew that even at age 11 or whatever when they tried to force me to learn it, that the purpose was forcing compliance followed by humiliation. Group projects are obviously and inherently demeaning, especially if you're the conscientious kid who ends up having to do all the work while others take credit. Arguably a good education for adult life for these conscientious kids, but morally indefensible all the same.
Music and art are more ambiguous, but it's easy to see how those also can be turned into indignities by an uncaring and inept school system; compare how Moby-Dick is a marvelous novel if you read it when and if you feel like it, but a gross imposition on the hordes of high schoolers forced to read it.
I admit, I don't know how dance classes in American schools go, in my day we only had them in primary school (up to age 12-13).
But dance is also about physical integration, for lack of a better word. It's about feeling and learning the way your body moves, and co-ordinating that. I'm clumsy as bedamned, and the dance we did in school did help me somewhat with that. I'm not a dancer in any way, I have two left feet and terrible balance and I can't dance, but I didn't hate the classes.
If you don't like dancing, you don't like dancing. If you're bad at dancing then I can see why you think of it as a humiliation. But it's there for the same reasons P.E. and sports are on the curriculum, and while I'd be a lot more sympathetic to "no longer have P.E. compulsory in school", that's probably not going to happen for a host of reasons related to health and fitness.
So I imagine that even if he doesn't have his kids doing team sports or any kind of formal P.E. training as in school, even Caplan still makes sure they engage in some form of exercise.
I don't take jobs where my coworkers are going to be a quarter as incompetent, apathetic, or hostile as my high school classmates.
I haven't seen such blatant mental masturbation in a long time. I feel so sorry for those kids.
Parenting is overrated. Unless you're an awesome parent like me, in which case, it's totally underrated. But you're not. So you, and all the minions, shouldn't really bother. Unless, you are, truly, as awesome as I am. But what are the chances??!? Infinitesimal. So really, don't try it. You're bound to be entirely ineffectual. Just let the village take care of it. Because I heard it takes a village. The village is on the job. Yay village! (Estimated Village IQ = IQ[Fox News|CNN]/2)
Why do you assume I was quoting him? I was quoting myself.
My comment mostly aligns with my world view. However, I was "trolling" with a sarcastic take on many smart people writing smart books about how parenting is inconsequential. Or rather, that's not what the books might be really about, but that seems to be the consensus takeaway that's often quoted (or misquoted) by many smart people who know about these smart books. I think it's all a shame because these books distract from the real reasons much of parenting is ineffectual. I think that the world would be better off with smart people writing smart books about how to raise smarter/better/stronger/happier kids.
You seem to think there's some logical contradiction between:
1. The stuff most people are doing is ineffective.
2. The stuff I am doing is effective.
I just don't see it.
I don't think there is a logical contradiction between the two. I just thought it was too bad that he chose to write a book about 1 instead of 2.
He wrote the book about 1 before life forced him to attempt 2.
This is an excellent summary.
Re: Pain reprocessing therapy -- Here's my completely personal, anecdotal, and probably non-replicable experience of kind of discovering this for myself. I spent about 6 years with pretty severe chronic leg/back pain, which turned out to be a combination of pinched nerves due to severe early-onset osteoarthritis (diagnosed via x-rays) plus chronic tendon/muscular injuries in virtue of having an undiagnosed intestinal disease that prevented the absorption of proteins and other things needed by muscles and tendons (after which diagnosis and treatment, most of the leg/back pain went away, and the 6 awful years ended).
But anyway, during those 6 years, I discovered funny things about the pain. Watching intense movies always made it worse; watching comedies often made it better. Sometimes a half-hour comedy would relieve the pain for the rest of the day. Going outside on a walk, and getting into conversations with friends, often made it better. Expecting the pain to get worse always made it worse; trying to ignore it sometimes made it better... and regardless, trying to move around normally with steady, light activity always made it a little better on the following day. I told myself a little story about how "anticipating pain" made the muscles tense up, thus causing more pain; and how "deliberately forgetting" the pain (when this was possible) made it better.
Granted, this didn't always work, and I took ibuprofen way more often than was good for my digestive system. I also developed my own stretching & work-out routine that seemed to help. But on the other hand, I completely avoided the narcotics that the doctor wanted to give me, as well as the higher-dosage NSAIDS. Definitely the psychological aspect made a bigger difference than I would've thought.
From Orwell's article:
Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism... A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.
Does anybody honestly thinks now, or thought in 1945, that Zionism is about prestige? With all my love to Orwell, this is neither deep or morn, nor even true.
It wouldn't surprise me if Zionism was also about prestige. Anti-Semites would use the fact that Jews didn't have a homeland as evidence that God was punishing them.
Jabotinsky, who was present at the Sixth Zionist Congress as a delegate, wrote (in the following, I loosely translate from his reports on the Congress) that German Jews, mostly solidly middle class, well educated and German-speaking, weren't particularly keen on Jewish nationalism in a ethnic, cultural sense. They wanted a territory where they could feel like first-class citizens. Herzl's book, which launched the Zionist movement, was titled "The Jewish State", not "Zion": Herzl was initially a territorialist. It was the poor Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews who attached themselves to the new movement who brought in a passionate yearning for the Promised Land (they were also incomparably more religious and pious and were also the motive force of the revival of Hebrew). There being at the time of the First Congress (1897) no land in sight, it was included into the movement's program sort of by default. At the Sixth Congress, where Herzl presented the British Government's proposal of opening a territory in "Uganda" (now in Kenya) for Jewish colonization, the latent tension between what we might call territorialists and ethnic nationalists burst into the open and there was a serious risk of a split in the Zionist movement. Herzl grew into his task: his ambition was too great to permit itself to be squandered on Uganda; no, he had to attempt to fulfill the ancient prophecy and bring the scattered people of Israel back into the fold.
It seems to me that prestige was certainly part of it, as it tends to be a part of all nationalist movements. "How come all these other groups have their own country and we don't?"
"all these other groups have and we don't" is just the way to try to sound convincing. Orwell was writing his article in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. No sensible Zionist was thinking of prestige then, it was all about saving whomever still possible - those that were lucky to stay alive had nowhere to go. You can argue that people always want prestige but to say it was an important motive in Zionism does not sound convincing to me.
The issuing of permanent bans in the Falador Massacre and other instances where players fucked around with a weird bug in a game has always felt weird to me. It's not really cheating, to "exploit" the bug — there's no set of rules for the game except what the game allows you to do. The moderators in such cases act as though there is some set of rules for the game which are implied by but not necessarily enforced by the mechanics.
The people who are really at fault for the (fictional) harm done to victims of the massacre are not the players who got the ability to kill players, it's the developers of the game who violated player expectations about the mechanics of the game. Basically the developers made the game bad for a day, but managed to shift the blame onto players who were just making the most of the temporarily bad game. Which they could do because they wielded unchallengeable authority over the game.
I think the despotic disposition of the game developers should be the focus when incidents like these are discussed.
With no knowledge of the TOS, it isn't uncommon for taking advantage of a bug/exploit to be a punishable offense with online multiplayer games, especially when the behavior intentionally harms other players. Permabans are perfectly warranted IMO, and I suspect a fair number of the offenders found it to be totally worth it anyway.
It is normal to have "exploiting bugs is bannable", similar to how bug in banking system that allows to log into someones elses account does not mean that I can legally spend their money.
Ah but see, in the context of banking, there's a set of rules about what you're allowed to do (the law) that's separate from what's enforced by the computer systems. That means that you can put a formal definition to "bug," namely when the behavior of the computer system is misaligned with the law.
My gripe is that "exploiting bugs is a bannable offense" is a really wishy washy rule, because without a specification of what a computer system is SUPPOSED to do, you can't tell what is a bug without guessing at what the intended behavior was. Maybe the devs meant to reward players who attended the special event with the ability to PK in Falador. Who knows, it might have made the game more interesting!
"you can't tell what is a bug without guessing at what the intended behavior was"
Well working moderation will not ban people in such cases.
Referred case appears to be a blatant bug.
> is a really wishy washy rule
It is typical one, to handle various loophole lawyers. And usually needed and present in most of systems (and usually more or less abused - what it is not changing that it is needed).
It's a bug in the system that some people somehow have the "administrator" superpower that they can use to ultrakill players across all their present, and possible future avatars, even if those players have played fairly and violated no rules. They exploit this bug because it pleases them to do so, and in the manner that pleases them most. Sucks to be one of the people whose characters were ultrakilled, but it's not *cheating* or anything.
"Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern."
You should see him on socialism. Read Road to Wigan Pier, especially chapter 11.
"Can’t believe you can found a Ninety-Five Theses-based venture capital organization without mentioning the gematria perspective that “95” in Roman numerals is “VC”."
Somebody probably beat me to this, but that's because it's not. It's XCV. The rule is you only use the next smaller tens unit as a subtractor (so not V, L or D).
> The rule is you only use the next smaller tens unit as a subtractor
That is a modern standardization, Romans were using many variants
Yes, and? The argument wasn't "this would have been incorrect in 400 BC".
In my opinion, how the Romans wrote Roman numerals is more relevant than a standard invented over a thousand years later by people who didn't even use them as their primary numeral system.
The way it works now is considerably more relevant to how it's written correctly now. The ISO standard has been established, so to speak.
Road to Wigan Pier is an incomphrensible book at times, especially the inexplicable chapter 12 where Orwell seems to be advocating anarcho-primitivism.
I didn't remember this from Wigan Pier, so I checked and here are the relevant paragraphs (edited for length):
"The distaste for 'progress' and machine-civilisation which is so common among sensitive people is only defensible as an attitude of mind. It is not valid as a reason for rejecting Socialism, because it presupposes an alternative which does not exist. When you say, 'I object to mechanisation and standardisation—therefore I object to Socialism', you are saying in effect, 'I am free to do without the machine if I choose', which is nonsense. We are all dependent upon the machine, and if the machines stopped working most of us would die. You may hate the machine-civilisation, probably you are right to hate it, but for the present there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it. The machine-civilisation is here, and it can only be criticised from the inside, because all of us are inside it. It is only romantic fools who flatter themselves that they have escaped.... We may take it that the return to a simpler, freer, less mechanised way of life, however desirable it may be, is not going to happen. This is not fatalism, it is merely acceptance of facts. It is meaningless to oppose Socialism on the ground that you object to the beehive state, for the beehive state is here. The choice is not, as yet, between a human and an inhuman world. It is simply between Socialism and Fascism, which at its very best is Socialism with the virtues left out.
"The job of the thinking person, therefore, is not to reject Socialism but to make up his mind to humanise it. Once Socialism is in a way to being established, those who can see through the swindle of 'progress' will probably find themselves resisting. In fact, it is their special function to do so. In the machine-world they have got to be a sort of permanent opposition, which is not the same thing as being an obstructionist or a traitor. But in this I am speaking of the future. For the moment the only possible course for any decent person, however much of a Tory or an anarchist by temperament, is to work for the establishment of Socialism."
"Anarcho-primitivism" isn't quite the right label, as I read this passage (I don't think he's an anarchist, for one thing), but there's obviously a similar nostalgic current in his thought here that conflicts with his belief that a good life for all is only possible in an machine society (expressed in various places). Maybe the best way of resolving this is to assume that when he says that certain people will be a "permanent opposition" he really means "permanent"--they'll be strong enough to influence culture, but never strong enough to directly set policy. Or they will be a sort of individualist-traditional-craftsmanly conscience for a collectivist-progressive-efficient society.
Chapter 11 is not incomprehensible, it's admirably lucid, unambiguous, and easy to understand. Not to mention relevant to contemporary socialism!
To make sure I did justice to your objection, I went ahead and reread chapter 12 just now, and it doesn't seem inexplicable at all; on the contrary, it seems often remarkably prescient, like when he says that "Marxists as a rule are not very good at reading the minds of their adversaries", an observation which as I recall has been remarked on on this blog's predecessor, having by now been confirmed with hard data (leftists are significantly less good at imagining a rightist than vice-versa).
All Orwell seems to be saying as far as I can make out is that the industrial revolution was a disaster for humans and society in many ways (an alive debate at the time when the book was written), but that Luddism and return to a 97% agricultural population (or softened variations thereof, e.g. Chesterbelloc's distributism) is an unfeasible pipe dream so socialism is the only answer. I permit myself to disagree with that last part, but it seems perfectly clear to me.
However (Orwell says), the fact that socialism is intrinsically an urban/industrial ideology means that individual socialists are often prone to *idolatry* of industry itself, of machines and mechanical progress, that this often leads straight to hell, and that sensible people should resist this sort of mad excess, working instead to soften the horrible consequences of industrial society on the individual (as indeed is the purpose of socialism itself, in Orwell's conception). An example of all this would be this blog's ongoing critique of inhuman Le Corbusier-style machinist design which creates wretched and unlivable environments. Orwell's idea is that intellectuals' job in the future world socialism wull be to thwart such mad, destructive ideas and prevent them from causing people needless suffering.
"As a rule the most persuasive argument they can think of is to tell you that the present mechanization of the world is as nothing to what we shall see when Socialism is established. Where there is one aeroplane now, in those days there will be fifty! All the work that is now done by hand will then be done by machinery: everything that is now made of leather, wood, or stone will be made of rubber, glass, or steel; there will be no disorder, no loose ends, no wildernesses, no wild animals, no weeds, no disease, no poverty, no pain—and so on and so forth. The Socialist world is to be above all things an ordered world, an efficient world" – this attitude outlined and opposed by Orwell is basically the same one being fought by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State, to take another example familiar to readers of this blog. High Modernism if you like.
Anyway, the core point is that Orwell isn't comparing his day to the paleolithic ancestral environment, he's comparing it to 18th century pre-industrial revolution England. When he says that the machine makes a fully human life impossible, he doesn't mean that you should smash your glasses and make a spear out of flint, he means that in many ways the life of an 18th century peasant contained more comfort, beauty and dignity than that of a fin de siécle factory worker. This is actually one of the core points of the whole of WIgan Pier, so I don't know how... but in any case, I think my point is made.
The argument that Orwell is any way saying that "High Modernism" is bad for treating humans as cogs is unsupportable considering the following paragraphs (split into multiple parts for length):
"Meanwhile I am assuming that the tendency of mechanical progress is to make life safe and soft. This may be disputed, because at any given moment the effect of some recent mechanical invention may appear to be the opposite. Take for instance the transition from horses to motor vehicles. At a first glance one might say, considering the enormous toll of road deaths, that the motor-car does not exactly tend to make life safer. Moreover it probably needs as much toughness to be a first-rate dirt-track rider as to be a broncho-buster or to ride in the Grand National. Nevertheless the tendency of all machinery is to become safer and easier to handle. The danger of accidents would disappear if we chose to tackle our road-planning problem seriously, as we shall do sooner or later; and meanwhile the motor-car has evolved to a point at which anyone who is not blind or paralytic can drive it after a few lessons. Even now it needs far less nerve and skill to drive a car ordinarily well than to ride a horse ordinarily well; in twenty years' time it may need no nerve or skill at all. Therefore, one must say that, taking society as a whole, the result of the transition from horses to cars has been an increase in human softness. Presently somebody comes along with another invention, the aeroplane for instance, which does not at first sight appear to make life safer. The first men who went up in aeroplanes were superlatively brave, and even today it must need an exceptionally good nerve to be a pilot. But the same tendency as before is at work. The aeroplane, like the motor-car, will be made foolproof; a million engineers are working, almost unconsciously, in that direction. Finally — this is the objective, though it may never quite be reached — you will get an aeroplane whose pilot needs no more skill or courage than a baby needs in its perambulator. And all mechanical progress is and must be in this direction. A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world — which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools. Mr Wells would probably retort that the world can never become fool-proof, because, however high a standard of efficiency you have reached, there is always some greater difficulty ahead. For example (this is Mr Wells's favourite idea — he has used it in goodness knows how many perorations), when you have got this planet of ours perfectly into trim, you start upon the enormous task of reaching and colonizing another. But this is merely to push the objective further into the future; the objective itself remains the same. Colonize another planet, and the game of mechanical progress begins anew; for the foolproof world you have substituted the foolproof solar system — the foolproof universe. In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness. But softness is repulsive; and thus all progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached. Now and again, but not often, you meet somebody who grasps that what is usually called progress also entails what is usually called degeneracy, and who is nevertheless in favour of progress. Hence the fact that in Mr Shaw's Utopia a statue was erected to Falstaff, as the first man who ever made a speech in favour of cowardice.
But the trouble goes immensely deeper than this. Hitherto I have only pointed out the absurdity of aiming at mechanical progress and also at the preservation of qualities which mechanical progress makes unnecessary. The question one has got to consider is whether there is any human activity which would not be maimed by the dominance of the machine.
The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized world all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes one sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench for a water-pipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth out in a couple of minutes. Why not let the machine do the work and the men go and do something else. But presently the question arises, what else are they to do? Supposedly they are set free from ‘work’ in order that they may do something which is not ‘work’. But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them. The labourer set free from digging may want to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the potato patch. Hence the antithesis between work, as something intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something desirable, is false. The truth is that when a human being is riot eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games, or merely lounging about — and these things will not fill up a lifetime — he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work. Above the level of a third- or fourth-grade moron, life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort. For man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness. And now consider again those half-dozen men who were digging the trench for the water-pipe. A machine has set them free from digging, and they are going to amuse themselves with something else — carpentering, for instance. But whatever they want to do, they will find that another machine has set them free from that. For in a fully mechanized world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as ‘art’; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working — that is, of living.
At a first glance this might not seem to matter. Why should you not get on with your ‘creative work’ and disregard the machines that would do it for you? But it is not so simple as it sounds. Here am I, working eight hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something ‘creative’, so I choose to do a bit of carpentering — to make myself a table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a touch of artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself. But even when I get to work on my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago felt towards his table, still less as Robinson Crusoe felt towards his. For before I start, most of the work has already been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill. I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would have had to do the work with chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only needing to be fitted together; my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the mechanized future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and materials available then, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of ‘creative work’. In any case the arts of the hand (which have got to be transmitted by apprenticeship) would long since have disappeared. Some of them have disappeared already, under the competition of the machine. Look round any country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently-cut tombstone later than 1820. The art, or rather the craft, of stonework has died out so completely that it would take centuries to revive it.
But it may be said, why not retain the machine and retain ‘creative work’? Why not cultivate anachronisms as a spare-time hobby? Many people have played with this idea; it seems to solve with such beautiful ease the problems set by the machine. The citizen of Utopia, we are told, coming home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the tomato-canning factory, will deliberately revert to a more primitive way of life and solace his creative instincts with a bit of fretwork, pottery-glazing, or handloom-weaving. And why is this picture an absurdity — as it is, of course? Because of a principle that is not always recognized, though always acted upon: that so long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap. One sees a good illustration of this in the matter of travel. Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc., is the difference between life and death. The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train — or by car or aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making a two days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where every-thing could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic took, to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe or the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall.
The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the activities of the eye and the hand. The apostle of ‘progress’ will sometimes declare that this does not matter, but you can usually drive him into a comer by pointing out the horrible lengths to which the process can be carried. Why, for instance, use your hands at all — why use them even for blowing your nose or sharpening a pencil? Surely you could fix some kind of steel and rubber contraption to your shoulders and let your arms wither into stumps of skin and bone? And so with every organ and every faculty. There is really no reason why a human being should do more than eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate; everything else could be done for him by machinery. Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle. That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver. The implied objective of ‘progress’ is — not exactly, perhaps, the brain in the bottle, but at any rate some frightful subhuman depth of softness and helplessness. And the unfortunate thing is that at present the word ‘progress’ and the word ‘Socialism’ are linked in-separably in almost everyone's mind. The kind of person who hates machinery also takes it for granted to hate Socialism; the Socialist is always in favour of mechanization, rationalization, modernization — or at least thinks that he ought to be in favour of them. Quite recently, for instance, a prominent I.L.P.’er confessed to me with a sort of wistful shame — as though it were something faintly improper — that he was ‘fond of horses’. Horses, you see, belong to the vanished agricultural past, and all sentiment for the past carries with it a vague smell of heresy. I do not believe that this need necessarily be so, but undoubtedly it is so. And in itself it is quite enough to explain the alienation of decent minds from Socialism.
A generation ago every intelligent person was in some sense a revolutionary; nowadays it would be nearer the mark to say that every intelligent person is a reactionary. In this connexion it is worth comparing H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, written thirty years later. Each is a pessimistic Utopia, a vision of a sort of prig's paradise in which all the dreams of the ‘progressive’ person come true. Considered merely as a piece of imaginative construction The Sleeper Awakes is, I think, much superior, but it suffers from vast contradictions because of the fact that Wells, as the arch-priest of ‘progress’, cannot write with any conviction against ‘progress’. He draws a picture of a glittering, strangely sinister world in which the privileged classes live a life of shallow gutless hedonism, and the workers, reduced to a state of utter slavery and sub-human ignorance, toil like troglodytes in caverns underground. As soon as one examines this idea — it is further developed in a splendid short story in Stories of Space and Time — one sees its inconsistency. For in the immensely mechanized world that Wells is imagining, why should the workers have to work harder than at present? Obviously the tendency of the machine is to eliminate work, not to increase it. In the machine-world the workers might be enslaved, ill-treated, and even under-fed, but they certainly would not be condemned to ceaseless manual toil; because in that case what would be the function of the machine? You can have machines doing all the work or human beings doing all the work, but you can't have both. Those armies of underground workers, with their blue uniforms and their debased, half-human language, are only put in ‘to make your flesh creep’. Wells wants to suggest that ‘progress’ might take a wrong turning; but the only evil he cares to imagine is inequality — one class grabbing all the wealth and power and oppressing the others, apparently out of pure spite. Give it quite a small twist, he seems to suggest, overthrow the privileged class — change over from world-capitalism to Socialism, in fact — and all will be well. The machine-civilization is to continue, but its products are to be shared out equally. The thought he dare not face is that the machine itself may be the enemy. So in his more characteristic Utopias (The Dream, Men Like Gods, etc.), he returns to optimism and to a vision of humanity, ‘liberated’ by the machine, as a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their ancestors. Brave New World belongs to a later time and to a generation which has seen through the swindle of ‘progress’. It contains its own contradictions (the most important of them is pointed out in Mr John Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power), but it is at least a memorable assault on the more fat-bellied type of perfectionism. Allowing for the exaggerations of caricature, it probably expresses what a majority of thinking people feel about machine-civilization.
The sensitive person's hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug — that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes. You have only to look about you at this moment to realize with what sinister speed the machine is getting us into its power. To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanization. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense — the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanized countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate is almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer's shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil-wrapped cheese and ‘blended’ butter in any grocer's; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements, and everything else that makes up our environment. There are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanization of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, be-cause in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the chance, will learn the vices of civilization within a few months. Mechanization leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to the demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanization, and so a vicious circle is established.
But in addition to this there is a tendency for the mechanization of the world to proceed as it were automatically, whether we want it or not. This is due to the fact that in modem Western man the faculty of mechanical invention has been fed and stimulated till it has reached almost the status of an instinct. People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a somnambulist will go on working in his sleep. In the past, when it was taken for granted that life on this planet is harsh or at any rate laborious, it Seemed the natural fate to go on using the clumsy implements of your forefathers, and only a few eccentric persons, centuries apart, proposed innovations; hence throughout enormous ages such things as the ox-cart, the plough, the sickle, etc., remained radically unchanged. It is on record that screws have been in use since remote antiquity and yet that it was not till the middle of the nineteenth century that anyone thought of making screws with points on them, for several thousand years they remained flat-ended and holes had to be drilled for them before they could be inserted. In our own epoch such a thing would be unthinkable. For almost every modem Western man has his inventive faculty to some extent developed; the Western man invents machines as naturally as the Polynesian islander swims. Give a Western man a job of work and he immediately begins devising a machine that would do it for him; give him a machine and he thinks of ways of improving it. I understand this tendency well enough, for in an ineffectual sort of way I have that type of mind myself. I have not either the patience or the mechanical skill to devise any machine that would work, but I am perpetually seeing, as it were, the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble of using my brain or muscles. A person with a more definite mechanical turn would probably construct some of them and put them into operation. But under our present economic system, whether he constructed them — or rather, whether anyone else had the benefit of them — would depend upon whether they were commercially valuable. The Socialists are right, therefore, when they claim that the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once Socialism is established. Given a mechanical civilization the process of invention and improvement will always continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius(7). Establish Socialism — remove the profit principle — and the inventor will have a free hand. The mechanization of the world, already rapid enough, would be or at any rate could be enormously accelerated.
And this prospect is a slightly sinister one, because it is obvious even now that the process of mechanization is out of control. It is happening merely because humanity has got the habit. A chemist perfects a new method of synthesizing rubber, or a mechanic devises a new pattern of gudgeon-pin. Why? Not for any clearly understood purpose, but simply from the impulse to invent and improve, which has now become instinctive. Put a pacifist to work in a bomb-factory and in two months he will be devising a new type of bomb. Hence the appearance of such diabolical things as poison gases, which are not expected even by their inventors to be beneficial to humanity. Our attitude towards such things as poison gases ought to be the attitude of the king of Brobdingnag towards gunpowder; but because we live in a mechanical and scientific age we are infected with the notion that, whatever else happens, ‘progress’ must continue and knowledge must never be suppressed. Verbally, no doubt, we would agree that machinery is made for man and not man for machinery; in practice any attempt to check the development of the machine appears to us an attack on knowledge and therefore a kind of blasphemy. And even if the whole of humanity suddenly revolted against the machine and decided to escape to a simpler way of life, the escape would still be immensely difficult. It would not do, as in Butler's Erewhon, to smash every machine invented after a certain date; we should also have to smash the habit of mind that would, almost involuntarily, devise fresh machines as soon as the old ones were smashed. And in all of us there is at least a tinge of that habit of mind. In every country in the world the large army of scientists and technicians, with the rest of us panting at their heels, are marching along the road of ‘progress’ with the blind persistence of a column of ants. Comparatively few people want it to happen, plenty of people actively want it not to happen, and yet it is happening. The process of mechanization has itself become a machine, a huge glittering vehicle whirling us we are not certain where, but probably towards the padded Wells-world and the brain in the bottle.
This, then, is the case against the machine. Whether it is a sound or unsound case hardly matters. The point is that these or very similar arguments would be echoed by every person who is hostile to machine-civilization. And unfortunately, because of that nexus of thought, ‘Socialism-progress-machinery-Russia-tractor-hygiene-machinery-progress’, which exists in almost everyone's mind, it is usually the same person who is hostile to Socialism. The kind of person who hates central heating and gaspipe chairs is also the kind of person who, when you mention Socialism, murmurs something about’ beehive state’ and moves away with a pained expression. So far as my observation goes, very few Socialists grasp why this is so, or even that it is so. Get the more vocal type of Socialist into a comer, repeat to him the substance of what I have said in this chapter, and see what kind of answer you get. As a matter of fact you will get several answers; I am so familiar with them that I know them almost by heart.
In the first place he will tell you that it is impossible to ‘go back’ (or to ‘put back the hand of progress’ — as though the hand of progress hadn't been pretty violently put back several times in human history!), and will then accuse you of being a medievalist and begin to descant upon the horrors of the Middle Ages, leprosy, the Inquisition, etc. As a matter of fact, most attacks upon the Middle Ages and the past generally by apologists of modernity are beside the point, because their essential trick is to project a modern man, with his squeamishness and his high standards of comfort, into an age when such things were unheard of. But notice that in any case this is not an answer. For a dislike of the mechanized future does not imply the smallest reverence for any period of the past. D. H. Lawrence, wiser than the medievalist, chose to idealize the Etruscans about whom we know conveniently little. But there is no need to idealize even the Etruscans or the Pelasgians, or the Aztecs, or the Sumerians, or any other vanished and romantic people. When one pictures a desirable civilization, one pictures it merely as an objective; there is no need to pretend that it has ever existed in space and time. Press this point home, explain that you wish to aim at making life simpler and harder instead of softer and more complex, and the Socialist will usually assume that you want to revert to a ‘state of nature’ — meaning some stinking palaeolithic cave: as though there were nothing between a flint scraper and the steel mills of Sheffield, or between a skin coracle and the Queen Mary.
Finally, however, you will get an answer which is rather more to the point and which runs roughly as follows: ‘Yes, what you are saying is all very well in its way. No doubt it would be very noble to harden ourselves and do without aspirins and central heating and so forth. But the point is, you see, that nobody seriously wants it. It would mean going back to an agricultural way of life, which means beastly hard work and isn't at all the same thing as playing at gardening. I don't want hard work, you don't want hard work — nobody wants it who knows what it means. You only talk as you do because you've never done a day's work in your life,’ etc., etc.
Now this in a sense is true. It amounts to saying, ‘We're soft — for God's sake let's stay soft!’ which at least is realistic. As I have pointed out already, the machine has got us in its grip and to escape will be immensely difficult. Nevertheless this answer is really an evasion, because it fails to make dear what we mean when we say that we ‘want’ this or that. I am a degenerate modem semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, ‘want’ to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't ‘want’ to cut down my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which ‘progress’ is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men. These that I have outlined are practically the only arguments that I have been able to get from Socialists — thinking, book-trained Socialists — when I have tried to explain to them just how they are driving away possible adherents. Of course there is also the old argument that Socialism is going to arrive anyway, whether people like it or not, because of that trouble-saving thing, ‘historic necessity’. But ‘historic necessity’, or rather the belief in it, has failed to survive Hitler."
This does not seem to be arguing that progress is bad because it will reduce us to cogs in a machine...
On number 19 (drinking) surely in a society where alcohol is a normal part of socialising it will tend to be the weirdos that don’t drink. And presumably the factors that make you a weirdo will make you unhappy and hence have a negative effect on lifespan. I speak as a teetotaller.
Another explanation I've heard is that there's two-way causation between drinking and health. Drinking causes health problems, but also a lot of alcoholics whose health has been wrecked by alcohol make the choice of swearing off it entirely. Some studies don't ask how much you used to drink, just how much you currently drink -- and so the group of people who don't drink includes both people who have never drunk AND a non-negligible number of former alcoholics, enough to drag down the health markers of that group. Whereas the group of people who only drink a little is mostly just people who have always just drunk a little.
This study gets into it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26997174/ (discovered via https://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-it-better-to-drink-little-alcohol-than-none-at-all/)
4: It was partly a supply side problem and partly an immigration problem. The US actually had less servants per capita than Great Britain (who in turn had less servants than the rest of Europe) even in the 19th century. This was for two reasons: firstly, the US had no class that defined itself by the possession of servants like European aristocrats. Upper class Americans would, if necessary, go without servants. Upper class Europeans would not. Secondly, wages were higher in the US, meaning more people got pulled into other kinds of work as the US industrialized in the late 19th century.
What happened in the 1920s was the government basically cut off immigration and the economy boomed while simultaneously being really unstable. This instabiltiy made people less willing to take on longer term fixed costs like servants while simultaneously tempting the servants away to other work. (There were less servants per capita in the 1920s than 1950s, by the way. The number actually went up during the Great Depression and remained roughly steady during the war.) Meanwhile, less immigrants and the expulsion of various groups from the US created less low cost labor causing prices for domestic help to rise. As did employment programs during the New Deal and the war (insofar as 'fight the Nazis' created an employment program). Meanwhile labor saving devices weakened demand.
This ultimately created labor shortages that the US had to solve by importing guest workers, offshoring various types of work, and by investing more and more into automation. As well as finding economies like maid agencies. It also hugely increased the burden on housewives and discouraged women joining the workforce.
It's not really the comparison (I suspect) they want. Servants declined in the US in a time of economic growth and low government intervention. Their numbers grew during the New Deal. Though it does dovetail nicely into a Yglesias-style pro-immigration position.
If you ever travel outside Europe/the US/etc one thing you'll notice is that servants are much, much more common everywhere else. Even in big modern cities. The median salary in Shanghai is about $24,000 and it's a big, modern city where PPP adjustment makes Shanghai a similar quality of life to South Korea. A maid in Shanghai earns a few thousand dollars a year, median about $3-4k. This means median Shanghai two income families can hire a full time maid for about 5% of their income. Meanwhile, in NY the same median family would have an income of about $64,000 and the average maid makes $30k a year. So the New York couple would have to pay 50% of their income. Likewise, hiring a little help is pretty common because it's so cheap. This is a common reason why foreign students in the US are surprised we clean our own rooms. If having someone thoroughly clean your house costs $20 (as it effectively does in many places) then even relatively poor families will do it.
There's a relatively obvious arbitrage opportunity here. But politically importing low skill immigrants is a non-starter.
5: This is part of a wider debate about the intelligence of tribal peoples. Tribal people tend to score really poorly on IQ tests and tend to not do well in traditional work or in cooperating with aid organizations. There's basically two positions on why this is. One is that it's because they're semi-morons: they have an average IQ of (say) 80 due to environmental or genetic reasons. This is enough to survive in simplistic ways but not much more. The other is that they have too different a mindset to be measured by IQ and are so unfamiliar with the context of the modern globalized world that very basic things we think of as universal are non-obvious to them. They generally point to tests of direct competence such as the complexity of tasks and relations these hunter gatherers routinely do.
My personal opinion is with the latter.
29: Zheng He has a lot of alt-history that's not really credible. For example, the idea he almost discovered the Americas if not for a capricious Emperor. Firstly, if you follow the currents from Europe to the Americas you have more or less a straight shot. If you follow them from East Asia you have to go north in a huge loop. This means that under wind power Asia is about three times as far as Europe. The big competitor who could have theoretically made it instead of Europe were the West Africans. (Who did try, by the way.) Even the Polynesians, who were some of the best sailors in the world, couldn't consistently reach the Americas from the Pacific. Meanwhile Europeans had stumbled into the Americas as early as the 10th century using simple longboats. (Though the route is semi-usable. In fact, East Asian shipwrecks can be found on the West Coast of the Americas after being dragged along by the current.) This was solved in the 19th century by powered boats and steam engines. But Zheng He didn't have those.
Secondly, Zheng He was not an explorer. His goal was to visit nearby locations that were economically interesting. He headed south and mostly followed routes that were well traversed by pre-existing trade networks. Pre-existing trade networks, it's worth point out, that had already reached China. He was able to simply purchase maps or hire (mostly Muslim) experts as needed. It was an attempt to show the flag and impress the region with China's economic and military might to gain relationships and symbolic submission. I can't comment on the ship size directly but keep in mind these ships were supposed to be impressive and so might have been exaggerated. Further, the ships included significant marine and diplomatic contigents that boosted the number of crew. So while you can say (for example) that the Mayflower had a crew of 30 while Zheng had an average crew size of about 88, the Mayflower carried 132 people if you add in passengers. It's likely a significant number of Zheng He's crew were such passengers (if marines are passengers), meant to intimidate the locals.
Basically, Zheng He's MO was to show up with a few hundred ships and tens of thousands of soldiers and say, "We are here to do a friendly exchange of gifts with our friends who friend who definitely wants to be our friend, right friends?" Meanwhile in the background ten thousand Chinese sailors stand around with swords conspicuously looking bored yet threatening. And then the local ruler says, "Sure, we're... uh... friends? Because friends don't invade friends?" And Zheng He goes, "Of course not! Why would you ever say we're here to INVADE you? What a silly idea. These warships and marines are just around to guard the Emperor's very important gifts for you! Here's some Chinese silk. By the say, we see you haven't sent tribute in... well, ever. An oversight I'm sure. Why don't you give me some regional goods and an ambassador to pay homage to my glorious Emperor? Oh, and make sure to clear out any pirates who might threaten our merchants. Okay. Thanks!" And then rinse and repeat onto the next ruler.
RE 5: Agreed. I think it's easy for moderns to look at the remaining hunter-gatherer populations (or pastoralists, or subsistence farmers, or people living in the third world, or poor people in general, or...) and conclude that any idiot could do it.
To which I always want to ask: could you run a marathon or hike up a mountain barefoot, read the ground, tell the weather by looking at the sky, knapp stone into tools, make and shoot a bow, stalk game, set snares, dress meat, tan leather, know the uses of hundreds of species of plants and animals, how to prepare them, the habits and calls of all the creatures in your area? Could you form and fire clay, spin thread, weave cloth, make tools from scratch, set up a shelter, make a fire with rubbing sticks, process plants into medicines and poisons, keep a map in your head of all the various resources you need to survive as you move through the wilderness? Can you fight if needed, with fists, spear, club or bow? Can you prepare food and drink from raw ingredients, some of them poisonous and needed special preparation? Can you make beer starting from unmalted grain, extract honey from wild bee hives, pigment from plants? And can you do all of this with no safety net, no ability to call it off if things fail and go to the shops?
I'm not saying that every hunter-gatherer could do all of these things, or that your children could not learn to do them if given a childhood amongst other hunter-gatherers. But I am saying that the likelihood of you, office-dweller, being able to do even half the stuff on this list is vanishingly small. So maybe a generous interpretation of the intelligence of others is called for.
Navigation without GPS, without roads would be enough to stop most people.
I would be likely able to do this, but take away also maps and compass and I am lost almost immediately.
> even half the stuff on this list
half? I would say that doing even two of this things would be impressive to me.
Yeah. Bloomberg's comment about how there used to be jobs for idiots like farming really showed him to be an unserious person outside of his specialization. Yet it seems very common. People convince themselves their office jobs somehow require more effort than hunter-gatherers. The reality is the opposite: specialization is easier since you are freed up to do one thing really, really well.
To be clear, I don't romanticize that kind of life: they're quite poor. But it's not because they're all stupid.
A farm needs an expert, but it doesn't need every worker to be an expert. They used to have little kids doing useful work.
How is this different from any form of work where you have unskilled labor to free up skilled labor? Bloomberg's offices undoubtedly have janitors. Are the janitors all experts in finance?
You could have a little kid run the copier in an office too, it's just illegal now.
Re 4, am I the only one here who noticed this sentence in the JSTOR article? "In a bid to sidestep labor laws, employers paid nannies and cleaners under the table instead of hiring servants full-time." Labor laws! Whoda thunk it.
As a historical aside, live-in servants ("house workers") were a thing in USSR until at least the late 50s.
Longer than that. The Soviet Union was extremely pro-specialization of labor. The theoretical ideal was that you would have no non-professional work left in the economy. Everything would be done by professionals allocated by central planning. So everyone would have their own chef, maid, etc held in common in the collective (or not if you generated enough to support them). There were shortages of course. But the idea that the Soviet Union was interested in (say) making an engineer clean their own toilet is just wrong.
The Soviet Union would have said not that the engineer and maid were equal in the pleasantness of their work or compensation. They were equal in that they were both workers who had a right to the full value of their labor and, perhaps, a decent standard of living. (Theoretically. Again, shortages.) But since they were both workers it was better for them to trade, with the maid cleaning for a higher salary which freed the engineer to do more high productivity engineering work. This was done by central planners because that's how the Soviet Union ran. But it's one place where they somewhat agreed with mainstream economics.
The part where they disagree is that they see non-professional labor relationships as exploitative. So, for example, a free work in a socialist system exchanging money for a maid is non-exploitative. But marrying a woman and having her do domestic work is seen as exploitation since the man is benefiting from her uncompensated labor. It's also bad for the rest of society since she's working artisanally in her own home rather than at scale. There was a debate between people who thought marriage itself was a capitalist or feudal institution and those who thought socialist marriage was possible.
What you are writing about belongs to the early period of USSR, mostly the 20s. Stalin rolled back progressive marriage laws in mid-30s, when the breakdown of the family and the decline in fertility assumed menacing proportions. As for live-in servants/house workers, whatever the ideology had to say about them, they were extremely common in cities in the 20s and 30s. By the 70s, however, house workers were only a thing in the highest reaches of nomenklatura. For regular city dwellers, there were kindergartens and "domestic services centers" with large washing and ironing machines etc. which customers operated themselves. Newly built efficiency apartments were not laid out with a place for a house worker to sleep in, and the new policy of issuing internal passports to rural people made the perk of living and working in a city more accessible without going into personal service.
> But the idea that the Soviet Union was interested in (say) making an engineer clean their own toilet is just wrong.
Perhaps, but however that may be, grand experiments with communal living were largely confined to the 20s. Dormitories for young workers were perhaps a legacy of these, and they still exist, but people powerfully wanted to have private dwellings - not privately *owned*, of course - and moved out of dormitories at first opportunity (which might be long in coming but that's a separate issue). This demand was occasionally bemoaned as recrudescence of bourgeois decadence, but by Brezhnev's time the state embraced it in a tacit social contract with the populace, whereby the latter got its private dwellings and coveted private 0.1 acre suburban plots of land, and occupied itself with - retreated into - these rather than rock the boat, whereas the state and the officialdom got to do what they wanted as long as they let the populace enjoy their islands of privateness. People expended prodigious amounts of energy embellishing these, planting vegetable gardens, building summer houses etc.
> What you are writing about belongs to the early period of USSR, mostly the 20s.
No, I'm not.
The idea of Stalin-the-Reactionary is mostly propaganda. Stalin was in many ways a continuation of earlier policies including the policy of putting women in the workforce and relieving them of domestic tasks. You're right that live in servants declined as they sought efficiency through industrial scale (as that was kind of Stalin's thing). He was one of the people who set up kindergartens/daycare centers for specifically this purpose. Likewise, maintenance and cleaning remained (theoretically) the responsibility of the buildings themselves and not the tenants. It's just they often didn't do it so tenants effectively did it themselves.
By the end even basic maintenance was not done which is how you end up (and this is real) with Soviet soldiers requisitioning local firetrucks to defend a nuclear silo. In such circumstances the semi-private ownership sense you refer to is the only real way cleaning or maintenance got done. But that was, even hardcore Communists agree, a point where the system was dysfunctional.
> Perhaps, but however that may be, grand experiments with communal living were largely confined to the 20s.
Are you claiming that the height of Soviet collectives was during the NEP? If so that's plainly wrong. The highest density of collectives was reached under Stalin and continued by his successors. Even in the Secret Speech Khrushchev never criticized collectivization. It was under Stalin that everything was distributed through work units and collectives and all that and shops were shut down as legacies of a bourgeois economy. This was relaxed by various reforms but there was a far more communal arrangement in the 1930s or 1950s vs the 1920s. (If you're referring to the spontaneous and voluntary communes of the 1920s, understand those were a tiny phenomenon that barely anyone joined. They weren't very productive either.)
I do agree that the Soviet Union increasingly (especially under/after Brezhnev) admitted its communal living and apartment focus was not as desirable as it wanted. They increasingly granted concessions that effectively let people have their own little dachas that they didn't technically own but realistically did. Again, by that point the system had broken down to such an extent that any maid services (I suspect) would mostly have been provided through the informal economy unless you were nomenklatura.
You're mixing up collectivization of agriculture with communal living - factory kitchens, factory-like dwellings of the sort the famous Embankment House was originally planned to be, all that shit. Kolkhoz inmates did not live communally. Penal labor camps' inmates did, and these did reach their peak under Stalin, but I don't think you had that in mind. There is no contradiction in the fact that the most daring cultural experiments partly coincided with the NEP (some continued into early 30s), just as there is no contradiction in there having been hundreds of experiments with communes of different kinds in XIX century USA.
> The idea of Stalin-the-Reactionary is mostly propaganda. Stalin was in many ways a continuation of earlier policies including the policy of putting women in the workforce and relieving them of domestic tasks.
I agree - this idea was pushed first by seething Trotskyists and then by a CPSU and its allies eager to push all their crimes onto a conveniently dead Stalin - but Stalin did roll back the very progressive early Soviet family law, and even began to reintroduce sex-segregated education. The latter reform did not become widespread and was rolled back soon after Stalin died, but the 20s ideals of free relations between the sexes were gone completely, to such an extent that party members could and did get reprimanded and even expelled from the party for extramarital affairs.
Land plots distribution started en masse in 1949, when there was hunger and it seemed desirable to let the populace feed itself (order of the Soviet Council of Ministers #807 on 24 February 1949). These plots were given to workers to for life, said use to be continued to their dependents, as long as they kept working at the organization that distributed the plot to them for 5 years after the fact. They were also obliged to clear and plant the plots in 3 years by their own and their dependents' and families' labor under penalty of losing the allocation.
> by that point the system had broken down to such an extent that any maid services (I suspect) would mostly have been provided through the informal economy
Not sure what system you mean here. There were no informal maid services so far as I know, at least not in Slav SSRs. One of my great-grandmothers used to have a live-in maid in the 50s, but it was a regular arrangement registered with authorities. Her daughter, my grandmother, no longer had one despite her husband earning a good salary and herself being barely functional as a housewife.
> You're mixing up collectivization of agriculture with communal living - factory kitchens, factory-like dwellings of the sort the famous Embankment House was originally planned to be, all that shit.
I think you're mixing up what I'm saying. Prior to Stalin's end of the NEP the average person could walk down the street to a store and purchase a dress or whatever. Afterward clothing was distributed through work units or collective housing blocks. You had your own individual unit in those collective blocks. But it was part of a collective. I think you're mixing up the word collective with a barracks. This might be a language thing: New York is full of cooperatives that ban multi-tenant apartments.
This was then relaxed again after Stalin's death (and especially after Brezhnev).
> There is no contradiction in the fact that the most daring cultural experiments partly coincided with the NEP
I think we're measuring on different axes. I agree the most daring cultural experiments happened in the early period and NEP. But if you measure by raw numbers then Stalin's collectivization drives are when most people would have been forced into collective economic arrangements.
> but the 20s ideals of free relations between the sexes were gone completely, to such an extent that party members could and did get reprimanded and even expelled from the party for extramarital affairs.
This is somewhat unbalanced. It exaggerates the idea of free love as being accepted in the 1920's. It wasn't. And it exaggerates the degree to which it was punished in the 1930s. It also focuses a bit too much on Stalin. There was something of a wider debate in the 1920s on whether marriage was inherently a bourgeois/feudal value or if there could be such a thing as socialist marriage. By the 1930s the debate had been settled, not particularly by Stalin but by Soviet gender theorists including many women. This was then codified into law and alternatives ruthlessly suppressed. But this was how the Soviet Union dealt with most social issues at the time.
> Land plots distribution started en masse in 1949
I'd heard that Khrushchev made one last attempt at making centralized urban planning work (the Khrushchyovka) and then Brezhnev made significant concessions to quasi-private land ownership which led to an explosion of dachas and things like that. But I'll look into it further.
> There were no informal maid services so far as I know, at least not in Slav SSRs. One of my great-grandmothers used to have a live-in maid in the 50s, but it was a regular arrangement registered with authorities.
I hadn't heard of any. However, I do know up until the literal end you were supposed to have various domestic services provisioned to you. The issue is they realistically weren't and this had become so normal no one really expected them to happen. If your grandmother was barely functional she was theoretically entitled to a huge amount of assistance. I'd be surprised to hear she received much of what she was promised.
In reference to the intransitive dice, you might also be interested to learn that the same phenomenon exists between poker hands. In texas hold'em starting hands, Ace King offsuit is a favorite against Jack Ten suited, Jack Ten suited is a favorite against a low pair, and a low pair is a favorite against Ace King offsuit.
Famous old-school poker pro Amarillo Slim used to hustle people by offering them a similar wager to what Buffet did with the dice in your link.
The fact that so many people are surprised to find out that the Nazis didn't like IQ tests really just seems to show how poor an understanding of National Socialism we have these days. People get their history from movie villains, written by other people who got their history from movie villains.
Having now read Scott Sumner's essay #20, it strikes me as downright psychotic. At least two of the examples he gives of "building that look better than traditionalism" are ones I think without exaggeration that the architect should be publicly executed for. Grotesque acts of violence against mankind. (The Laguna Beach and "best looking house in Palm Springs" one specifically.)
He also does the thing where he goes "I'm going to sound like an insufferable snob now" to somehow lampshade the fact that he's an insufferable snob, which actually doesn't work in real life.
I have to admit, I find it hard to comprehend this as an example of a good commentary. He's just a modernist snob stating his awful taste.
Sumner spends a lot of that essay trying to effectively claim an objective superiority to his taste, though. "As an art form progresses, it gets more and more difficult for average people to appreciate the art works"; "[w]hen it comes to residential houses, it’s simply wrong to suggest that modern architecture is ugly". (The first of those quotes is especially remarkable since it suggests a light retrogression during the entire time from the Archaic Period of Greece to Bougereau, then an explosive amount of progress from Bougereau to Van Gogh, a conception I think most art historians would regard as... arguable.)
He also has an extremely ugly liberal bias, of the smarmiest sort imaginable.
Yet he is a conservative.
Citation needed, he reads like a classic style "liberal with center-right economic views" to me. Textbook smarm Democrat.
He is not a conservative.
I could definitely see the Japanese influence there but I still disliked the house. Maybe it was just that particular photo, but it was all too 80s beige and wood, like the original design of the bridge for the Enterprise in The Next Generation.
And Sumner does have the unfortunate air of "well of course you peasants think this is ugly, because you're not smart and educated and rich like me". Fair enough, you probably are smarter, more educated, a finer palate and richer than I am, but I think that Gehry building depicted in the article is nuts and ugly. Yeah, it's 'clever' in the sense of showing off 'we can use modern building techniques to do something that looks like a toddler's toppling blocks' but it's not aesthetically appealing, unless your aesthetics are "I simply adore having a fit of vertigo".
I came back to the ACX comments for this. I think the Laguna Beach house is ugly as... well, "bad architecture" is now well on its way to becoming a scatological term in my household.
Whereas everything literalbanana said about the two dog sculptures resonated deeply with me, and I'm buying a copy of Nature of Order.
What made me laugh about the Palm Beach house is that the linked photo prominently displays the swimming pool, the actual house is way back in the background so you can't really see it.
Yes, the best built thing in Palm Springs is a swimming pool, I could believe that!
I looked it up and apparently it's a famous architectural piece:
https://www.designboom.com/architecture/richard-neutra-iconic-kaufmann-desert-house-palm-springs-for-sale-10-23-2020/
"modernist architect richard neutra built the five-bedroom house in 1946 as a retreat for harsh winters, with an emphasis on the connection to the surrounding desert landscape. large sliding glass walls open rooms up to a series of terraces, the iconic pool and garden, paving the way for california’s concept of ‘indoor outdoor’ living. after kauffman, its original owner, died in 1955, the house stood vacant for several years, while it was restored in the 1990s by award-winning firm marmol radziner, who returned the residence to its initial form, size, and aesthetic integrity."
It was the setting for a famous photograph:
https://www.artsy.net/artist-series/slim-aarons-poolside-gossip
"Poolside Gossip is Slim Aarons’s iconic 1970 photograph of California society women enjoying a leisurely day by the pool. In the foreground, two women are locked in conversation by a sparkling turquoise swimming pool, cocktails in hand, overlooking a few leggy friends and the idyllic purple mountains of Palm Springs. The snapshot has become an instantly recognizable motif—an emblem of modern, monied American culture in the ’70s."
So indeed, it's very much the inspiration for American Modernist architecture.
Ha! Yes, I can also believe that. A rectangular hole in the ground should be within these architects' capacities.
Re. "Trust Science": That graph is important because it shows that France is still an outlier today in how little it trusts science. 19th- and 20th-century counter-enlightenment art and philosophy came mostly from France and Germany. An understanding of the counter-enlightenment requires asking what happened in France around 1800 to turn it from the leader of the Enlightenment to the leader of the counter-Enlightenment. (The German case is better-understood, because people have been so interested in what caused the rise of Nazism.)
"What happened" was of course the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but it isn't obvious why they would turn French intellectuals from pro-science to anti-science. (I have my own theories; my problem is that I have too many of them.)
I'm interested. Go ahead. (Do Germany too if you can, even if it's better-understood, I'm not sure I understand it so well.)
I would also love to hear your theories!
Link 27 on GDP and growth and technology.
I think the author is trying realllly hard to fit a square peg through a round hole. Economics like his, as he discovered, is just a bunch of made up nonsense that changes every few years and doesn't meant the same thing at all over time.
If the economy of a nation switches from growing bananas, to running factories, and then to tourism and remittances as the primary flow of money....and we rebaseline the entire history of it through using new price measurements, then you're getting a myopic view through a filthy window to vaguely guess at what is going on.
Right after the first rebaseline in the second era of factories you go from measuring an agrarian economy with expensive manufactured goods to a new economy with cheaper manufactured goods.
You're not measuring the same thing and the metric is arbitrarily skewed towards measuring one sector of the economy over another...and yet people will still eat and still use manufactured goods. Measuring it one way or the other way with GDP gives nonsensical answers in both cases....there is a HUGE assumption that the number matters or means anything at all....as though gathering up a bunch of price data and sales will inherently tell you something useful.
There are lots of useless ways of adding things up which don't tell you what you want to know, GDP is simply one more metric which has been dramatically misused and extended far beyond whatever highly limited purpose it has.
Where else would we use such a tool? I'm going to meausre how tall this tree is in meters, but the tree curves as it goes up, so I'll rebaseline my metre measurement after every 3 times I make a measurement.
Not only will I change how I'm measuring things, I'll retroactively adjust it too such that Tree 1 with a curve has 0.9 metre meters and straight up Tree 2 will have 1.0 metre metres. Now I'm going to going to use the updated Tree 2 metric vs the older Tree 1 metric to tell you about changes in human height over time. It turns out when you start using a longer metre that you find people are all getting shorter! But now we'll come up with a very curved Tree 3 to find our new metre is 0.8 metres and suddenly everyone has consistently gotten taller over time again!
What insanity is this? In absolutely no other area would we possibly accept a continually shifting rebaselined tool to tell us about the world as a primary measurement. But it is perfectly fine to decide how the nation is doing and make major choices based on this garbage? Even if it wasn't rebasedlined the whole thing is a huge abuse of a metric that has thousands of inbuiilt assumptions and measurements and other techniques to average out prices, etc. I truly cannot think of a single useful thing you CAN do with GDP, regardless of how it is tweaked. It is such a limited and highly highly manipulated metric built on top of hundreds of others metrics.
The inherent risk for error propagation of this thing being 5% wrong and that being 10% wrong and that being 2% wrong all add up or multiply or whatever in ways too complex to bother trying to parse since there are soooo many variables going into the thing with prices from hundreds of industries with wildly varying reporting processes and summation processes, etc.
A truly strong effort, but GDP, money, inflation, and value have increasingly little to do with everyday people's lives in terms of measuring progress over time or reversals in progress. Our lives are filled with things that are not measured in money which matter to us.
When the cost of an item goes to zero or near zero, then it stops mattering. In what other area would we accept such a wildly nonsensical metric? Only in the made up world of economics where finding a number politically convenient to elites and powerful people is more important than not - especially in the context of official numbers which have been tinkered with to make politicians or ideologies look good for years. Sure there are a few wayward economist working on 'real inflation' and the like, but they don't work for or keep their jobs within the halls of power and authority.
The cult of money and economic management has truly taken over and people rely on numbers they have instead of truths they know far too often and even more so for truths they don't know such as 'how are the poor people doing?' from the halls of power where they have no idea.
So these and other elements go into an enormous bias where you can have insane feudal levels of inequality with 50% of the people in the 'richest nation on earth' living in abject poverty, stress, and economic hardship and you'll have some smug rich person saying ' look at them, they have phones, refrigerators, and TVs! and the GDP is up....obviously they are just whiney children and don't KNOW the truth that the elites know.
Meanwhile cost disease, inflation, and falling wages since 1972 for 80% of workers are ignored.
I always like to remind anyone looking at this kind of top line economic data that it is just a measure of the wealth of the wealthy or a summation of many distinct parts.
For the working class person, they have lived in a great depression 2.0 for 50 years since 1972 with every single year being worst, harder, and more expensive than the last one. The women went to work, everyone got degrees, they lived further away from work, and every single thing has gotten progressively worse to the point they are dying for lack of healthcare while we have empty hospitals which are being closed down! Education is out of reach creating lifelong debt servitude. etc. etc. etc.
So the sunny fake world of 'the line has gone up smoothly' for decades is a complete and total shame when you can see how GDP has nothing to do with 80% of people whose lives have gotten harder for 5 decades in a row in ways which are invisible to the GDP, no matter how you tinker with it. The GDP and using money or price alone are like trying to cross the Atlantic ocean on a stationary bike with no modifications.
And the economists are looking at the problem like...hmmm...have you tried raising or lowering the seat height? It is simply the wrong tool for the job. The answer isn't in the handlebars either! No amount of peddling matters since the thing will just sink into the ocean the moment you put it in the water.
> I truly cannot think of a single useful thing you CAN do with GDP,
You mean besides defeating Hitler?
https://apps.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2007/02%20February/0207_history_article.pdf
Maybe because it's not funny.
Re 17: No one was watching us, we watched out for ourselves. Parents had their own lives and they didn't revolve around the kids.
I have a deeply held belief that Americans born in the 70s are fundamentally cooler than everyone else, on a hard-wired level. The Boomers and Millennials and Gen Zs are always getting upset and offended about everything and fighting with each other, we 70s-born people are cool cucumbers. At least, the ones I know. Perhaps this is why.
people really love to shit on christopher columbus this time of year, but the man gave us Goonies and Gremlins so I think we can forgive him for Ms. Doubtfire
12.
> The second-born child has about 50 percent higher odds of having childhood autism than the firstborn, the study found.
Is this some confusing interpretation of "odds", or is this in contradiction with the headline? Or is childhood autism being deliberately contrasted with adult autism here?
25.
I've long been wondering what happens if some of the most prominent VC funds decide to forbid startups they fund from requiring academic credentials -- not just for funders, but for any workers. (Presumably for a fixed number of years to not burden the companies as they go public.) In theory, this sounds like a good way of preventing bureaucratization. In practice, not sure how much of a cost it incurs in alternative forms of verifications (infosec has gone a long way in this direction, but less so sure about the rest of SE).
As far as I can tell, you're just making a common linguistic mistake. Higher odds are for less probable events; lower odds are for those that are more likely. "Odds" isn't a direct synonym for "probability".
Argh! That's worse than "inflammable".
Mild correction to 21. As the article [1] cited in wikipedia correctly mentions, the Inquisition was aware of this celebration and did somewhat try to root it out. The inquisition was the type of paranoid that allowed them to notice things like this.
I bring it up because I was just reading a story of the inquisition trial against the Governor of New Mexico's wife in the 1660s [2]. One of the 47 accusations was that she did a "secret Jewish ceremony of washing on Friday evenings" for three hours in the bathroom. The accused reveals the societal paranoia and reality about such activities in her defense. She has a perfectly logical explanation as she does for all the accusations, but this one is not numbered among those which she calls ludicrous. The Spanish anxieties about "Jewish infiltration" were deep.
As an aside, around the same time, St. Ignatius of Loyola allowed converted Jews to join his Company of Jesus. It was a rebellious thing to do in those days.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/queen-esther-patron-saint-of-crypto-jews/
[2] https://nyu.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.18574/nyu/9781479874545.001.0001/upso-9781479874545-chapter-002
"wait, when did MR comments start being good?!"
When I started reading MR, circa 2003, the comments were as good as ACX comments are now. Today, by comparison, MR comments are an open sewer.
I agree with you about the current comments - do you have a sense of the process that led them from being "As good as ACX comments are now" to "An open sewer"?
It strikes me as distinctly odd that Tyler hasn't noticed, thought about and made efforts to correct such a sad state of affairs.
My only tentative observation is that Scott pops up here and there in ACX comments - it feels very slightly 'supervised'. MR is, in contrast, everyone left to their own devices, and so there is
(oops) a descent to the bottom.
Tyler did make a half-hearted attempt at improvement by introducing up/down voting, but that has had little effect. In fact I'd argue they've gotten worse since then.
Yes, Cowen left the comment section totally open and unsupervised for a long time. The barrier of entry to post was minimum, so anybody could post a comment under a different name just to insult someone else or write a "funny" retort or just troll.
Cowen has tried to change things a bit. He introduced voting; he (or an intern) also deletes some messages (which ones is often quite arbitrary, however); I believe there is a filter to keep out certain terms; etc.
But in general the whole section feels like it was designed and is managed by people who don't care or have no ideas how to do it. Broken window theory explains the outcome.
Alt-right trolls showed up, made it their home, and chased everyone else away. I'm guessing Tyler and Alex didn't want to tackle content moderation as a full-time job (no one does), so they just sort of let it happen.
Basically this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
On the GDP thing, I'm frankly kind of astounded that anyone would calculate historical GDP in that way. It just sounds like so much more effort than applying a deflator of some kind over those years - after all, that means you need to know only two numbers about each year: the GDP in that year's dollars, and the inflation rate of that year. Doing it the way the author says requires you to know what the price of everything was in 1960 AND how much of everything was traded in that year, and if those kinds of records are kept by whoever (the federal reserve?) I'd be very impressed.
I've recently become very suspicious in general of things which have inflators applied to them over more than, say, ten or twenty years. In New Zealand at least, consumer price inflation is calculated from the change in a weighted basket of items every year, but then they change the items in the basket every three years. I can't help but feeling that those changes every three years are doing a Lot Of Work which is hidden from any number inflated by CPI over several basket changes...
Indeed it is a lot of effort, but in order to calculate the deflators in the first place, you need to estimate the prices and quantities.
The main organizations involved in these estimates are the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Census Bureau. The IRS and USDA also play important roles. The BEA is actually the smallest of the bunch, despite its job in calculating the headline statistics.
The BEA's primary data source is the quinquennial US Economic Census, which the Census Bureau conducts every five years (in years ending in 2 and 7). The Census Bureau also conducts annual and monthly economic surveys, but these have smaller sample sizes, are less comprehensive, and are voluntary (whereas responding to the Economic Census is legally mandatory). As such, the BEA has to fill in the gaps during off-census years using a variety of additional data sources, indirect estimates, and interpolation techniques.
I read now about Pain reprocessing therapy and it was INCREDIBLE. Then I read your linked post about your thoughts on Mental Health apps. There you wrote "This is part of why I am dedicating my life to building an alternative, non-insurance-based system of mental health care." where can I read more about your efforts?
https://lorienpsych.com/
Re: #10, maybe Bill Gates just played Pokemon where you pick a starter based on its type. The types are intransitive in terms of effectiveness. You get to pick before your in-game rival, which seems great in terms of choice, but then your rival invariably picks the type that beats yours.
Interesting account of the inner life in the Leverage Research non-profit/sect & its leader, Geoff Anders.
I have a long-term interest in the social psychology of small-group politics (having some experience in such a group myself decades ago), and I assume the dynamics within and between religious/psychological & sexual sects are rather similar (although the latter may be more inward-looking than political small-groups).
Does anyone have a good theory why such small groups & sects are so prevalent in California in particular? Is it a demand-side phenomenon or a supply-side phenomenon, or what is the combinations of these?
My own hunch is that California, since the 1950s and 1960s has got a reputation as a sect&small counter-culture/small group-friendly place (think Esalen, Black Panthers, Beatniks, Hippies, Hells Angels, Antifa). This reputation acts as a signal to sect-entrepreneurs as well as followers. "Everything that has a screw loose rolls down to California" grumbled some of the political science faculty at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s (a demand-side explanation).
...While if you are an entrepreneur into these sorts of things, the perceived entry costs are probably lower in California. There is a larger receptive mass of potential followers, and the whole social infrastructure is already there comparted to, say, des Moines in Iowa.
Also, California is a known cultural innovation-hub globally. It is a state that people elsewhere looking for The Next Big Thing are watching. From a diffusion theory perspective, this is a good place to start if you have more than local ambitions. Since if you make it locally, there is a higher probability that you will get local spin-offs elsewhere, and become a leader in a larger movement. Which is also likely to attract entrepreneurs.
A small section of these small groups go on to fame and glory (most recently Antifa), although most of course fizzle out locally, in California as elsewhere (power law distribution).
Since housing costs have become prohibitive in the largest Californian cities from any start-up perspective, I would further assume that among small-group entrepreneurs, at least their headquaters and/or the house of the leader are now mostly found in the periphery of Los Angeles and the Bay Area (say, Oakland rather than San Francisco).
But that, as everything else, are empirical questions of course.
"Studying and Supporting Early Stage Science - Leverage Research studies the history of science and how historical discoveries were made and supports novel research in young or under-resourced fields."
0- Are they studying the history of science or how discoveries in history were made? Like are we digging in Normandy or realizing most scientific discoveries were accidents? Hopefully both for a wild output-
1- Pretty sure the definition of cronyism is just a picture of the early days of the Royal Society. Hutton. Smith. Erasmus Darwin who Charles got all his ideas from.
2- But there's a ton of early stage actual science worth funding out there
Man, as someone whose "Top 10 List of Things that Piss Me Off" includes getting pushed around, guilt-tripping, cults of personality, delusions of grandeur, passive-agressive middle-school-esque status games, people deliberately taking an emotional shit on those under their care or authority, and NDAs, that Leverage essay was quite the ride for me!
Far from coming across as weak, the author is extraordinarily resilient to have come through that type of psychological meat grinder more or less intact.
Zoe if you're reading this, you're not crazy–you spent two years drowning in bullshit poured on you by psycho assholes! Congrats on getting away, and I wish you continued success in your recovery.
No kidding. Still, the shape that this particular cult took clearly has some roots in the early "rationalist" discourse, what with the "make an extraordinary effort" to "save the world" etc. etc. In fact, were they actually capable to do, so I'd imagine many would agree that such an omelette is clearly worth breaking a few eggs. I always thought that talks about memetic hazards are just flowery hyperboles mostly deployed to enhance your community's feeling of self-importance, but this situation provides a striking reason to reconsider.
The rationalist canon also includes warnings like this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v8rghtzWCziYuMdJ5/why-does-power-corrupt
#7. So a good bit of pain is the nervous system overreacting rather than accurately signaling damage, and it's possible to quiet the pain signal.
How do you distinguish between true pain signals and false ones?
You don't. Your brain does, at a level only indirectly influenced by your conscious control.
Pain is weird:
https://www.painscience.com/articles/pain-is-weird.php
And — there's a new one up: Mind Over Pain!
https://www.painscience.com/articles/mind-over-pain.php
Just because pain is your brain's opinion of threat doesn't mean most mind-body practices claiming to fix your pain by changing your thoughts will work. "[P]ain is handled by a part of the brain that is not easily over-ruled by other brain 'modules' — like an optical illusion that you can’t 'un-see' even when you understand it."
Indeed, "toxic positivity" is a huge pitfall of mind-body medicine. "Pain education is often oversimplified and impractical to the point of being not just useless, but insultingly trite — indistinguishable from toxic positivity, the excessive faith in the power of positive thinking to solve serious problems."
Being in a safer, less-stressful, more pleasant-feeling environment seems to dial down pain's brain alert. Pleasant sensation can be reassuring. Novel sensation (that's not more pain!) provides new input to learn, different from pain. Graded motor imagery (GMI) is said to help:
http://www.gradedmotorimagery.com/
GMI starts by training you to rapidly identify whether pictures of limbs are of the right limb or the left limb. Then you think about motions (without yet moving the painful part). Then you do mirror therapy, if appropriate. (For roughly symmetric pain, I'm not sure how mirrors would be, but both previous two steps are supposed to help all on their own.)
#8: I think I get it - the scatter plot is a gorilla, right?
28. Wait. So the Geoff Anders mentioned in the essay was one of Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures winners just last month?! https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/09/emergent-ventures-winners-sixteenth-cohort.html
What the hell is going on?
If someone was suspicious about graphs of elite overproduction across history made by Turchin - I found someone who agrees with me and is actually expert in related topic (yes, I know about confirmation bias)
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-2021/
> By way of example, I was stunned that Turchin figures he can identify ‘elite overproduction’ and quantify wealth concentration into the deep past, including into the ancient world (Romans, late Bronze Age, etc). I study the Romans; their empire is only 2,000 years ago and moreover probably the single best-attested ancient society apart from perhaps Egypt or China (and even then I think Rome comes out quite solidly ahead). And even in that context, our estimates for the population of Roman Italy range from c. 5m to three to four times that much. Estimates for the size of the Roman budget under Augustus or Tiberius (again, by far the best attested period we have) range wildly (though within an order of magnitude, perhaps around 800 million sestertii). Even establishing a baseline for this society with the kind of precision that might let you measure important but modest increases in the size of the elite is functionally impossible with such limited data.
22:
>It was nearly sunset; old Man Rootbeer stood at the end of the ave, flamethrower slung 'cross his back. You 'et one pimecone too many, Mr Poofers! Harkened Old Mr Root Beer. He took dead aim on Mr Poofers - Dead aim, you see! And then he pulled the trigger.
I mean, I had a feeling I was going to.
And then Old Mr Root Beer looked up at the sky.
#17, note that the metric is "time spent on childcare as primary activity", and so doesn't count time spent on other housework, reading, gossiping, watching TV, etc, while keeping the kids in sight so they don't kill themselves.
But, yeah, in the 1970s the kids were mostly being looked after by the kids. And it really worked quite well.
Every time birth order effects come up, I always wonder how only children compare to people with siblings. Does any of the research include them? I seem to remember that only children are over represented as readers of this blog, but I’m not sure where I got that idea.
Could you clarify a bit on "your default assumption for everything in pain management should be “doctors will use this as an excuse not to give you necessary medications"". I thought there was overmedication in this field...
Both can be present at the same time! See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/
For #7, and that science banana tweet:
A. I am convinced science banana knows nothing about this field. B. This is an amazing paradigm for certain CP treatment, and should be applauded. C. None of what science banana have written refutes this study. D. science banana's tweet that "soon you might" is completely false, which brings me back to point A.
"But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research"
That's the claim. It's also an interesting example of how such claims spread and develop.
Googling and following the links, we find a blog that quotes the claim from Rindermann's book as fact. There you can find the original sources on which Rindermann's claim is based: Two articles in a psychological journal from 1938. It's impossible to tell tell how much these two articles support Rindermann's claim "Contradicting common beliefs, National Socialists were opposed to intelligence research" without reading the articles (but Rindermann's sentence "They were opposed to a measurement solely of ‘theoretical intelligence’, of ‘intellectualism’ (Becker, 1938, p. 22); instead they favoured ‘practical intelligence’ (p. 18) that should be measured." seems to suggest that the Nazis had some kind of intelligence research, based on a concept of intelligence they likef.).
On the blog, the text is used to claim parallels between Nazi concepts and those of Robert Sternberg. Even though it is only based on what Rindermann writes, the blog suggests that "maybe" other parts of Robert Sternberg's concept of intelligence could also be found in these sources ("I don’t see any
mention of the part of his trio successful intelligence, but maybe if
one looked at the sources.")
Next, another blog refers to the quote on the first blog, writing "from what we can tell, the Nazis actually opposed intelligence research". Well, "from what we can tell" is based on one author whose statement seemingly summarizes what two Nazi psychologists said. That is
then quoted by someone on Twitter to back the statement that Sternberg has
"controversial views on intelligence that sound straight from nazi
texts", and finally that is referred here on ACX, as supporting a claim that
"Nazis hated IQ research", together with the advice "Whenever someone
tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on
perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology." Should you consider doing that?
Would doing that improve political discourse, would it be intellectually
honest, or at least be justified? Or would it just be based on a pile of
motivated reasoning and motivated search? I sometimes read claims that the Rindermann side of the discourse is the intellectually superior side, or just politically neutral scholars, whereas their opponents are political hacks. So, hm, really? Maybe Nazis hated intelligence research, but up to now I only see a claim with weak support and some bloggers who seem to like the claim.
Moreover, is the aversion of some Nazis against IQ research actually central to the debate? It could be argued that nowadays some people who want to pursue exclusionary or worse policies may use IQ arguments to justify this, and that the statement that some Nazis did not like IQ research is not extremely relevant to that. At least I know no statements explicitly saying that "race"-sorting based on IQ is bad because Nazis were fans of IQ research. Rather, the argument seems to say that the Nazis used anything they could to justify their ideologically motivated policies, and this (making up justifications for the ideologically motivated positions aimed against outgroups) is, as far as I understand it, the accusation against some IQ researchers (whether justified or not, that is not my point here).
In this context, it could be argued that the Nazis did not need IQ research to justify their policy of killing the "weakest" or exterminating the "Life unworthy of life", and that referring to measured intelligence would possibly be quite detrimental to their own aims. They had already defined who was the enemy, and they had defined their idea of how to improve their "race". Justifying this by referring to additional criteria could make those insecure who are unsure whether the thresholds of these criteria might change over time, and whether they or other people around them would be affected. Nazi "euthanasia" actually met with some resistance (e.g. from the Catholic church).
But of course this would just be questioning some points of the argument while accepting Rindermann's claim, based on some perceived plausibility that Nazis may not have liked IQ research. But in real life there are trade-offs, and there are also arguments why Nazis may actually have used intelligence measures.
The two articles that Rindermann quotes are from 1938. The Nazi "Euthanasia" Programme started in 1939. Did intelligence measures play a role there? Here's a quote from a website about Aktion T4 (https://www.t4-denkmal.de/eng/Ausgrenzung-Kinder):
"When admitted to the institution, children and adolescents were assessed and treated mainly according to how well they could be taught. Classification usually occurred after an intelligence test based on an intelligence test that had been in use since 1905 (Binet-Simon test). In school of the institution, pupils were supposed to learn and be fostered according to their mental abilities. This practice, which had developed since the early 20th century, became a deadly threat in the National
Socialist era. Children and adolescents who failed the intelligence test and did badly in the school of the institution were regarded as »incapable of being educated« and »unfit for life«. There was no place for them in a psychiatric programme aimed at healing and integrating them into working life.
As part of the National Socialist »euthanasia« programme, children and adolescents were murdered not only in the »children's wards« of the »Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses« but also in the gas chambers of the T4 killing centres. When they were being selected, their assessed »ability to be educated« played the decisive role. The victims of »Aktion T4« included around 4,200 minors, of which almost 77 per cent were considered to be »uneducable«. This assessment affected girls and boys equally and was mostly made in conjunction with the diagnosis of »congenital or early acquired imbecility«."
(Note the sentence "This practice, which had developed since the early 20th century, became a deadly threat in the National Socialist era." It may explain in some part why some people are very averse to some instances seemingly "neutral" measurement.)
AFAICT 'It's all in your mind' was invented specifically to discredit people studying psychosomatic phenomena. Reading about researchers in the area (going back to the late 1800s) this is emphatically not their claim, but rather that the interaction between mental phenomena and physical phenomena are complex, surprising, and worthy of much more attention than they have received. See, for example John Sarno's famous book Healing Back Pain. His explanation for the success that he has had is something like this: when injured, the muscles surrounding an injured part naturally tense to take the load off the injured part. This pattern of activation can remain subtly activated past the initial injury and deprive the area of blood flow. The sensations that continue to arise in the area from this restricted blood flow and tensing of supporting muscles in an unnatural loading scheme get coded as 'pain' and the phenomena persists. You can undo this by deconditioning the pattern by paying very close attention to the pattern of muscles tensing as you go through the motions that cause 'pain' to arise.
Importantly, I did this myself and cured a minor chronic pain that I was having in my back that I thought was left over from straining a spinal erector. The pain persisted for more than a year, after reading the book and trying the exercise (I think) 3 times it entirely abated and has not recurred.
I think this is an important topic that is stymieing our understanding of chronic pain. I think this is a potential EA cause area due to the possibility of an intervention that can be distributed for very low cost.
I tried to explain the pun to our guide, but they were totally oblivious to the myth.
FreakonomicsExperiments.com did a lot of very-low-cost RCTs of major life decisions, by having people who were on the fence go there and randomize into one or the other choice. I think something similar could be done with alcohol. It'll only study people who were on the fence, but those are the people most interested in the results of such studies anyway. You don't need to sell out to industry to get $67 million to run a study -- you just need some people to volunteer to participate and self-report their data on a cheap website.
Re: 20, How we empirically distinguish the "this art is just too advanced for you filthy peasants to appreciate it" scenario from a bunch of sycophantic courtiers praising the emperor's new clothes and telling the little boy he's an idiot? How do we even prove that "having taste" is a thing, and prove who has it, beyond just defining taste as agreeing with the majority of some arbitrarily chosen reference group (either the entire population, or some level of credential)?
Art experts are ensconced in institutions and social milieus that require them to play signaling games. Signals have little value unless they are costly -- the sillier the beliefs, the more value they have as shibboleths to delineate group membership. Perhaps people who are educated about art online -- acquiring all the knowledge without being embedded in those social pressures to conform -- would like modern art less relative to traditional arts than the institutionalized "art experts". That would lean me towards the emperor's new clothes.
I don't mean to imply that modern-art-appreciators are faking it, but that status-signalling-incentives can lead to people actually liking stuff that they would not otherwise like. Self-deception can make signaling more effective.
One interesting think about the Orwell essay (#24) was that in his time people supported their faction by exaggerating its strength. To some extent, these days people support their faction with a focus on how much its been hurt.
7: The study solicits participants by advertising "mind-body" treatment for CBP, nearly guaranteed to attract participants primed for psychological pain treatment. The placebo group was told they were receiving a placebo saline injection with no psychological treatment. Stands to reason the placebo effect would be greater for the group that received actual "mind-body" treatment.
No MRIs performed on participants, but of those who supplied their own at the beginning of the trial presented with a median of 4 different radiological findings, including disc herniation/rupture and central canal stenosis. These abnormalities were "assumed not to be causing back pain" by the researchers because "these abnormalities are seen in the majority of asymptomatic individuals." i.e. because some people have these conditions and are asymptomatic we know that in all cases these conditions cannot be causing back pain and are thus "centralized pain" we can treat psychologically.
Participants with multiple abnormalities on their MRI were told by researchers things like:
“Right now, you’re feeling a burning sensation in your back. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that you think burning indicates danger. But burning doesn’t have to feel bad. Think about when you first get into a jacuzzi, or when you’re taking a nice, hot shower… there’s a burning sensation, but it actually feels really nice."
And, "We know that there’s nothing wrong with your body, this is just your brain putting on a show for you. It’s just an interesting burning sensation, but we know that it’s safe. So just sit back and enjoy the show.”
They were also telling this to the 60% of participants who had no MRIs, god knows what real acute back issues they could have had.
If you tell people that the burning pain in their back when they bend over is an irrational invention of their mind that should actually be experienced pleasurably as being in a jacuzzi, it stands to reason they'll tend to revise down their post-treatment pain metrics, lest they be perceived as hopelessly irrational or not mentally strong enough to overcome their mind's inherent irrationality.