There needs to be a word for "saying things that are probably true, but saying them with an unjustified degree of confidence". Because this is the current standard mode of communication shoved down our throats by those with the big megaphones regarding things like election fraud and covid and global warming and so forth.
The fact that they say "Noooo, of course there was no fraud, shut up you lunatic" instead of saying "Well yeah, obviously there's always some fraud, but come on, it's unlikely that it's going to amount to a hundred thousand net votes in several different states" makes me very suspicious. But in reality it probably doesn't make them wrong, it just makes them terrible people.
"It never happens, and if it does that's a good thing" attitude.
A couple years back I looked at the Mariposa County results, as that was very disputed, in part because of a long-standing perception that elections there were corrupt and rigged, because previous election - Mariposa and surrounding counties all red. That election - surrounding counties remain red, Mariposa flips blue, this wins the state for Biden. *Looks* suspicious, but is it?
Digging down into the results, Mariposa was red in 2016 by a slim margin, and turned blue in 2020 by a slim margin (I think but can't remember definitely that it was something like 5,000 votes). Now, that *could* be the result of vote fraud, but it could also, perfectly credibly, be wibbly voters who had been swayed to Trump in 2016 being swayed to Biden in 2020. No fraud needed or proven.
But when there was such blanket denial that any fraud could possibly have taken place at all ("most secure election ever!") that was a terrible reaction born of pure defensiveness and didn't help the same way explaining debatable results like Mariposa would have. Different states had different standards, and when I read one (can't remember the particular state) that accepted post-in votes up to a week after the ballot ended, with no postmark being needed - well, can you blame anyone for thinking this was less than secure and could be exploited for fraud?
I think that's an obvious idea, I've seen many references to it before. It's just the practical implementation (and the cost of designing, manufacturing and maintaining the system that can do that) is the challenge. I think I'd pay some additional money for a car that can do that, but I have no idea if that would cover the added complexity... I suspect it'd take a while until it becomes a feature of mainstream car models, if at all.
Yes, that really is the best explanation they could come up with for how 'Defund the Police' could work in reality. In other words, it could never work.
What's the significance of the difference between "law" and "custom" here? It just seems like a tautological terminological dispute with no bearing on the situation. In practice I don't see why a modern society couldn't stick with highly codified, consensus, written rules (as opposed to needing to "drum up a set of social customs for scratch"), whatever you want to call them; and why we couldn't keep formalised institutions whose job is to be very knowledgeable about those and serve as arbiters in disputes relating to them. There are big problems with the "outlaw" system, but this doesn't seem like one of them.
The consequences, in the proposed alternative state, are that if you murder somebody you have to do a whole lot of community service or you have to accept outlawry and with it a substantial reduction in life expectancy. It isn't necessary that vigilantes kill *every* outlaw, or that *no* law-abiding citizen be killed, for outlawry to be worse than non-outlawry. So, negative consequences to going around murdering people.
I prefer the current system, where the negative consequences are implemented by the police. But something like the proposed alternative has worked in the past, and it is erroneous to say that it is fundamentally unworkable and/or that it has no consequences for rulebreaking.
It works in radically smaller societies with much less density and "wilderness" where there is in effect exile. Until we start packing up C-130s and dropping prisoners off in the Congo or Antarctica it really isn't an option.
Either that or just hundreds of thousands (millions?) more murders for a few years. I honestly suspect most western societies would collapse in less than a decade under such a system. The violence spiral would spread quickly.
I mean, think about the implications. Imagine a world where nobody agrees to do community service, it means that if I kill somebody, other people would be "free" to kill me, which means they're allowed to kill me without other people being "allowed" to kill them in turn without themselves having to worry about people being "allowed" to kill them without the threat of other people being "allowed" to kill *those* people.....and so on. The entry says they're denied "protection of the law", but what this "protection" is turtles all the way down - there's no "protection", just infinite regress.
For point 7, the one on the right seems to have a cat ear right in the center of the picture, not to mention lines that make me see whiskers. It seems pretty obvious to me, so I'm wondering if this is a typical mind thing?
Look in the upper-right corner, there are some obvious tabby-like vertical stripes and some triangular shapes that could read as ears. EDIT: also in the left image, directly above the driver's cab door, there appears to have been what looks a *lot* like a cat's right ear superimposed over the image, possibly continuous with the rest of a cat's face superimposed on the rest of the train (suggestive but difficult to make out). It's a sharp-cornered orange-brown feature rather than a more purely dark foliage shadow.
I appreciate your valiant effort to describe where you see these things. But I fail to perceive them. Too bad we can't post photos in the replies. I'd like to see what you're talking about with some helpful arrows and circles.
Yeah, I wonder what the difference is. I did very well in a semester long color mixing course, so I don't think it's partial color blindness, but I cannot see it at all. My husband can see it a bit, and ones like the New York picture much faster than I can.
What would NPC have to do with not seeing the cat? And I'm not color blind. But my visual perceptions seem to be more along the autistic spectrum than normal people. For instance, I'm able to pick out underlying patterns hidden in a lot of noise quickly because I immediately focus on a detail of the pattern and visually connect my way through a pattern — rather than taking in a gestalt of the picture (not sure I'm explaining this well). So, even though I now see the "cat ear" object in the lefthand image of the train, the train refuses to resolve itself as a cat to me. I was never able to see the images in those magic eye patterns, either. And I've never been able to see the cat in the Georgian cat image (link below). I've given up trying.
The funny thing though, is I've probably got a better ability to distinguish subtle hue differences in colors than most people. And I used to have a photographic memory for maps and diagrams (but that's faded with old age). I could accurately draw a map or diagram from a single viewing—which made me a whiz at geography. Nowhere near as good as Stephen Wiltshire, though (second link below). I could only remember 2-d images. He can do it 3-D!
I don't think anyone claims the train "resolves itself as a cat to the viewer". They're just saying that the left image have certain features which look like cat ears etc. so of course an AI would score that image as more "cat-like" than the right image.
I couldn't see it on my PC monitor, and on my laptop monitor I can only see it when looking straight at the screen - tilting the screen seems to reduce contrast and hide the effect.
The cat ear is in the dark green foliage above the center of the train. Don't feel bad; I had to turn up my monitor brightness by a lot in order to see it. You might even need to turn off your blue light filter (if you have one).
OK. I can see the cat-ear-shaped object that you're talking about in the foliage. It doesn't help me to resolve the cat face in the train, though. To me the "ear" vaguely resembles a giant manta ray with its tail behind it crashing into the train. Lol! Now that you've pointed out the "ear" I can't unsee the manta ray.
I see it as well. Does someone want to help me out with the text in the skyscrapers, though? The obvious text Scott referred to is nevertheless eluding me.
I've stared at both of these pics for 10 minutes, and I can't perceive any difference between the two pictures except that the chromatic values of the greens in the foliage seem to be different. Not sure if I'm seeing a difference in contrast between the two. I do happen to see two eyes and a smile on the cow-catcher in both the photos, though.
Full disclosure, when I take the pattern detection test for autism, I test as autistic. So, even though I don't consider myself to be autistic, I seem to be quite neurodivergent at least when it comes to visual perception.
Have you ever done those "magic eye" images that were popular in, I think, the late 80s early 90s? The trick is to defocus your eyes slightly, as if you're looking at something behind the picture, or as if you have a 1000-yard stare. Doing that with a pair of side-by-side images, like this pair, can make the differences jump out more clearly.
When I first looked at the image on my PC monitor, I couldn't see anything cat-like. Now that I try it on my laptop monitor, it pops out pretty clearly, but only when viewed a certain angles - tilting my screen seems to reduce the contrast and hide the cat features. I totally think it's a monitor thing, as Scott theorized originally.
#7 it literally looks like there is a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the train on the left. I would think the selection would be practically unanimous.
It helps that it's an unusually catlike train to begin with. The driver's windscreen panels and the little red circle already have roughly the right shape and proportions to look like a cat's eyes and mouth.
You wouldn't get this result without an already catlike locomotive (this is a sentence I have never written before).
I don't think that's it. As other commentators are saying, there's a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the adversarial image, that humans can see.
For 6, the giant plane: does anyone know the name of a sci-fi novel featuring huge passenger planes that circle the Earth, never landing, refueling in mi-air? Passengers use small shuttle planes to dis/embark. It was written no later than early-80's.
That sounds like Timothy Zahn's story "Between a Rock and a High Place", published in Analog in 1982. IIRC the large, permanently flying craft was called a Skyport, and the plot involved a feeder plane crashing into it in a way that didn't immediately take it down but made it impossible to evacuate.
Based on my knowledge this is not possible with most fusion designs which don't have the thrust to weight ratio to fly but may be possible with Zap and Helion's reactors. Particularly Helion which wouldn't require a steam generator. They may reach tantalizing levels of performance in the next few years looking to demonstrate step before a full size reactor results
5, flying aircraft carrier: The Soviets actually did make something like this, though not nearly as big. It was done by sticking fighters on existing bombers, and it turns out that while they added weight, they also increased its lift ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zveno_project
16, defund the police: Doesn't this proposal rely on the fact that societally you have majority support, or at least a very significant minority? Also would those who want Chauvin punished be happy with something like community service? (Also killing someone because they didn't do the right amount of community service seems like it would cause more problems than it solves, especially for those advocating defunding the police...)
It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
Like, Joe the Random Shoplifter gets sentenced to community service, and he fails to do it. Is anyone sufficiently bloodthirsty to go murder him over it?
What if he's part of a gang, and I'm pretty sure that his gang will murder me if I kill him? And those murderers feel confident that they can murder any further state-sanctioned killers that come their way to murder them?
When this kind of thing was tried in medieval Iceland, did it lead to a just and peaceful society, or did it lead to generations-long blood feuds and shockingly high levels of axe murder?
>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
That's not obvious. If it's legal to take an outlaw's stuff (it usually is), well, then, you have to deal with enterprising gentlemen who make "killing outlaws for their stuff" their entirely-legal profession (the most recent case of this I'm aware of is privateers, who typically weren't paid by the state issuing the letter of marque).
The problem of warlords/gangs that can defy such gentlemen, however, is a real one.
The "defying efforts to kill them" issue seems like a serious one even without bringing gangs and warlords into the picture.
If you have a regular person who's already known to have a gun and a propensity for violence who's declared an outlaw, they're probably not going to want to be killed, and will make efforts to defend themself. If someone tries to kill them and take they're stuff, they'll probably try to kill them back. The other person isn't legal to murder, but so what? They're already an outlaw.
If out of every several people condemned to outlawry, at least one ends up killing more people in defense of their life and property, then the system ends up looking a whole lot worse than our current police force.
The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.
If the court ruled against the capture, the captain (the one with the letter) was personally liable for compensation to the owners of ship and cargo - and likely would be bankrupt as a result.
Now there were a lot of ways around this. The courts in the Caribbean were much more lenient (and much faster) than the ones in England, since they were often short on things and ships. A personal relationship between the owner of the letter and the governor could cover many sins. The downside was that they were often also short on cash money.
For that matter, a privateer with a letter for e.g. French ships, could take a Danish ship (or take a ship and then find out it was Danish). They could then take it to e.g. a Portuguese colony for condemnation and sale. The "condemnation" in this case would likely be very informal.
It could be chancy to do this if word got back to England though - the ship owners could end up suing the letter owner in English court, likely years later. It would be an uphill battle, but still expensive.
>The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.
That is not what I'd call "paid by the state". They were taking stuff from merchants, and then selling it to - for the most part - other merchants, with the state's permission; no money was coming out of the state's coffers except if the state happened to be the buyer. The state could be literally bankrupt and the privateers could still sell to someone else. And certainly they're not being paid for the attack *per se*.
You are correct - the state did not pay privateers to attack ships. Sometimes it was the other way around - the privateer would pay for the letter (or at least set up a bond). Though that would have been quite limited in time; privateering was pretty chancy; I doubt you could charge much for a license most years and get any takers.
There were things like "ship money", but that was paid to actual navy crew. The navy could "bring in" a captured ship, but that was more like buying a used car at auction.
Privateers were intended as a less formal expansion of the navy, so to make sense they had to be cheaper for the state than building and crewing more navy ships.
It's also possible that this was intended to (sort of) regulate something that might happen anyway - there was a lot of rationalizing by the English that the Spanish considered all non-Spanish in the New World to be pirates and bandits already...
Aren't bounty hunters a simple and modern example of this? If you skip bail, a bondsman will send some armed thug after you (or a professional, but the point is that they could basically send a thug)
Privateering worked bc ships were filled with valuables, or at the very least the ship itself was valuable. Getting in deadly confrontations to get somebody's clothes and smartphone sounds very stupid unless somebody has ulterior motives.
Plus the problem of de facto death penalty for failing to turn up for your community service! Pretty sure defunding advocates would regard this as a bug rather than a feature (as would I, naturally).
The gang thing gets to the interesting part of this - thinking about why it wouldn't work in, say, modern America even to the extent it worked in Iceland. For it to work, you need a broad majority of people who 1) like the law basically as it is, 2) trust the judgments of the courts at least enough to use them as a focal point and accept them if they disagree and 3) are willing (able?) to use at least enough violence that their numerical preponderance overwhelms any other group of people.
The US is an interesting case, because the Old West (at least in books/films, I know nothing about the real world version) was able to at least use the posse system which is in the same ball park. On the "do I buy it" heuristic, I feel like this would work in rural Wyoming, but not remotely in Chicago (neither of which have I ever been to).
The only thing I know of real posse is what a friend learned about his Grandfather from Ancestory.com of all places. He knew his mother was the child of an older man, but never heard much about his grandfather. Until he got an ancestry.com account. He found a newspaper article about the trial of the posse that murdered his uncle and grandfather—who definitely had it coming. His grandfather and uncle were outlaws in a remote Arizona farming community, I don't know the dates, probably 1920s. On Sundays—when everyone was in Church—they'd steal every tool and implement from a farm. When the posse caught up to them, they were strung up, and shot into two parts. Only there was an observer who was not in the posse who reported this to the state police.
If you steal the farming tools from a subsistence farmer, you're condemning his family to death. So like I said, they had it coming.
> It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
There's always slavery.
One way or another, someone's going to want to do something with the meat that your mind calls home. Bodies are just made of organs that can be used for something else.
>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
Disagree. There are always people who are willing to kill a man just to watch him die, and aren't terribly picky about which man so long as he lives somewhere near Reno (or wherever is convenient to the wannabe killer). Most of these people would prefer not to spend the rest of their lives in Folsom as a consequence. If the State can officially say, "hey, all you people who ever wanted to kill someone just to watch them die, if you kill *this*, then we don't put you in prison and maybe we even call you a hero!", then it will probably inspire action even against an outlaw whose boring tax-law violations would otherwise never get anyone's blood boiling.
Even more so if the killer gets to keep the outlaw's stuff.
So there's plausibly a stable equilibrium in which each community has say a hundred such wannabe killers, and every criminal who gets caught just meekly does their assigned community service or whatever because the first one stupid enough to choose outlawry is going to have a hundred guns after them. Even the protection of a gang might not be enough against those odds.
Of course there's also a stable equilibrium in which nobody does their community service, there are thousands of nominal outlaws walking around, all of them feeling pretty secure because odds are that the one killer who would eventually have chosen them as a target will instead have been killed by one of the ten other outlaws he picked first. And plenty of other reasons not to want to implement this plan, even if we would get some cool new Sagas out of it.
The question really comes down to whether Youtube or Twitch would allow you to monetize the video of you hunting down and killing various criminals across the country. If so then there would definitely be 'content creators' filling that void in the market.
Also relevant is whether 'it's ok to kill this person' means 'it's ok to kill this person and take their stuff' or 'it's ok to threaten to kill this person in order to mug them' or etc. Having an asymetrical right to kill someone gives you a lot of power over them that can be easily exploited to gain things other than the simple joy of murder, if the law allows it.
community service isn't a thing if you haven't someone who actually compels you to do the service.
It's the whole libertarian mantra about how the government threatens to kill you if you don't pay your taxes : yes, ultimately every system of punishment must be able to excalate until obedience is obtained, otherwise the system doesn't work.
I think you've misread or misunderstood something.
The proposal is "community service, or we declare that it's now legal to kill you and take your stuff". That's a threat of force, but it doesn't actually need police to enforce it.
Gangs remain problematic, but as far as killing-for-shoplifting goes, it seems reasonable to extend the idea to different levels of outlaw-ness. Maybe for petty crimes the judge can declare that it’s legal to steal your stuff and call you names, but murder’s still out.
It still means any punishment is limitless. If you get caught stealing a loaf of bread (though without police, who would catch you?), then everything you own is now fair game. People talk about a cycle of poverty, but this seems even worse.
Oh I wouldn't want to live in this society, to be clear. I just think it *could* reach a stable equilibrium (or at any rate, the reasons it couldn't, e.g. gangs, are not the same as the counterargument you were gesturing at).
Yeah I'm sure it could do that, I'm just arguing any implementation would be far worse than today for everything the Defund the Police crowd cares about.
Or you do the community service/pay the fine that the court orders; at the moment if you don't do that you're sent to prison. In any system, option 1 is stealing stuff's illegal, in which case there's either a penalty a thief doesn't have to co-operate with (incarceration/execution/mutilation/outlawry) or a penalty the thief needs to cooperate with (fines/community service) backed up the threat of a non-co-operative penalty if they don't co-operate. Option 2 is no penalty or an unenforceable co-operation-requiring penalty.
Of course, if you had a purely digital currency then fines become a non-co-operative penalty, and similarly things like employment blacklists or social credit systems could work in the same way.
In the given example, you would probably be assigned a relatively small amount of community service or fine for shoplifting. The punishment would only be limitless if you refuse to comply.
(this doesn't mean it's a good idea and I think even the contest winner was more interested in creativity than practicality)
16. Trying to discuss this with a straight face reminds me of my days of smoking way too much pot with my friends. “No really Gunflint, tell me why this wouldn’t work” passes me the joint.
Or of the professor played by Donald Sutherland in Animal House having a high bros discussion with his students.
Not relevant, but I also like the exchange in the classroom.
Jennings : Don't write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He's a little bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.
[Bell rings, students rise to leave]
Jennings : But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility for this material. Now I'm waiting for reports from some of you... Listen, I'm not joking. This is my job!
#15 Two points. To your question, my understanding is that the Czech government has been giving very generous subsidies to parents for almost 20 years now (in the range of $10,000 per child per year). Looks like it's having the intended effect. Link below.
That being said, making sense of this graph for other countries is complicated by the changes in the scale of the birth rates. Top birth rate changes from >1.96 to >1.76. Just pointing that out for others to beware.
The trouble with flat-rate subsidies to parents is that you largely wind up incentivising poor people to breed, whereas what you _want_ is to encourage rich people to breed.
My preferred solution is to allow tax thresholds to be shared across a whole family. So if the top tax rate cuts in at $200K for a single and $400K for a couple it should be $600K for a couple with one kid, $800K for a couple with two kids, and so on.
I would expect that subsidies are going to make the biggest difference in a family where it tips the scales towards the wife becoming a stay-at-home mom. Because the decision to become a SAHM is associated with a higher probability of additional children -- the marginal cost of another child is now much lower.
I think this scenario is common enough in the upper middle-class: the husband is a businessman, engineer, lawyer, or doctor; his wife is a teacher, nurse, administrative worker, etc., whose gross salary is around 1/3 to 1/2 of his, less than that on an after-tax basis. She could quit her job, and she's not exactly passionate about her work and probably a little burnt out by the time her 30s arrive, but the pinch from the lower income will be a little painful, particularly in his late 20s or early 30s when his career is still gathering steam but key baby-making years (he might be earning 2x her income at age 30 but 4x at age 50).
I agree. Good childcare is better than extra cash, because cash often can't buy you good childcare. It would probably help if part-time jobs were more available (also for men!); then two partners could each have a job and have enough time left for kids.
Not to tell you about yourself, but that last paragraph is a really big impact. A lot of the problems become easier when you start sooner, but many people wait because they want to get "established" first (whatever that means to them). So extra money isn't to incentivize people of your age, but to instead help them feel safe to start sooner.
I think that's a bit of a red herring. They are not, as they say, printing any more land. So "cheaper housing" either means:
1. More housing in undesirable areas, or
2. Denser housing in desirable areas.
But 1 already exists, there's loads of cheap housing in undesirable areas and people still don't choose to move there. And 2 is probably counterproductive, because you don't want to raise a big family in a goddamned high-rise apartment, you want to raise them in a big house with a proper backyard.
Or, if you are a Georgist, accept that housing in desirable areas costs a lot purely because of supply and demand, but extract as tax the part of the profit that’s due to area being desirable and not due to the landlord building a particularly appealing dwelling.
Then, however, you circle back to the question of what to do with the funds collected this way, and if subsidizing parents is the right thing to do, whether to give more money to specific groups of parents.
This is a Europe vs US thing. In the US, you could literally do a China and just build 20 new megacities* in the Great Plains, give businesses epic tax breaks/subsidies to move there, and use the resulting de-densification to reduce house prices.
In Europe, adopting US-style zoning rules and better infrastructure would probably reduce house prices enough to push commutable family houses into affordability territory, even before any further price effect from bursting housing bubbles.
*Realistically even 5 kilocities would probably be plenty.
If govt gave me $100,000 in cash for each child I would have to have about 4 children before I'd financially ahead rather than if they just gave me cheap housing instead.
PS: My metric for housing affordability is average area income to average housing price ratio.
Simple logic and the evidence both say that enabling young couples to form their own households earlier (early 20s rather than late 20s or 30s) means they have more children over the course of their fertile years. Cheap housing would indeed seem to be better than direct cash in this case. Rare!
The idea of raising a family in a house with a big backyard is very American. Lot of people do not see that as a necessary component of raising a family. Hell, you don't even have to leave America. How many people in NYC or Chicago are raising their kids with big back yards? If you live in a desirable area presumably there are other benefits that make up for what you're losing.
That is the system in France, you divide the total salary by (adults + (kids/2)) below 3 kids. Starting from the third kid, they count as 1 each, and not 1/2.
"If your population is crashing hard enough I don't think you care about who is doing the breeding. You just need people."
If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad. For the same reason that you can't make up in volume a loss on each item sold.
>If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad.
That does sound like a good argument against rich people breeding, but I'm afraid the problem is not the number of rich individuals, but the amount of resources they have at their disposal.
If you structure the flat-rate subsidy as a discount from say, income tax, then it wouldn't be as bad. Truly poor people aren't paying any income tax so they get no benefit from having more kids.
I suspect a lot of ills are driven by massive income inequality. If poor people have lots of children, that doesn't help. But if rich people have lots of children, that splits up their fortune among many more people, which probably has a net benefit to the economy by diluting the wealth that a very small group of people control.
You could, perhaps, calculate how many children should people have, given their available resources. If they don't have the right number of children, they should be taxed the equivalent amount it would cost for someone without their resources to have kids - a wealth based quota. The tax money could be used to subsidise poorer families who want to have kids, but maybe comes with some caveats (e.g you must enrol your child in school) as a safeguard against this system driving child neglect. I don't want this system being used by the kind of people who have 10 homeschooled kids who come out the other end believing vaccines cause autism or whatever.
Oh, and children that someone claims are theirs would naturally be entitled to a share of the wealth. The moment this person stops being a legal dependent / heir, the tax obligations apply.
This is unlikely to affect most people, but it'll give the highest net worth individuals incentive to adopt or create new dependents without punishing the poor.
And anyway, this is already happening in lots of places - since I'm childless, I don't get any childcare benefits, but get taxed the same to fund it. I don't mind because children important future taxpayers to later support me. I do think if there's a perceived need to create more people, the kids should have access to the overall resources of the nation rather than just their parents' - having more resources for future taxpayers will keep them healthier (hence cheaper to keep alive) and better educated.
I'm Czech. With a kid. The subsidies are quite high, but not as much as you state - it is currently $13k in total, for most people this is split into three years (so $360 per month). This typically adds around 1/4th of one person's average salary (the woman, sometimes also the man, typically doesn't work until the child is 3 years old or does only part-time). This really leads to speculations that poor people have children just for the sake of this benefit, but of course this is difficult to prove.
The amount was increased substantially from $9500 in 2020, but the increase is gradual so I don't think this is the main reason.
Czech sources mention as the main reason for the increasing numbers were stable economy and the increase of the subsidies (plus some changes in the way they are paid).
By the way, for 2022 the numbers are back to 1.66, reportedly mainly because of covid and they are expected to go down because of the Ukraine war and economy stagnation.
My understanding from a couple of podcasts that interviewed researchers focused on natalist policies is that there's very little evidence that subsidies get anyone to have a kid they didn't want to have -- the policies that work at all are letting people have a kid they wanted, but felt they wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford.
Orban tried this (free money for new parents) in Hungary and it didn't really have an effect. Then he offered young couples an almost rent-free loan of (forgot the exact amount) ~150k, of which 1/3rd would be forgiven for every child the couple had in the next 20 years. Which just before Covid had its first reports and it seemed to work better.
The first gives money to people who already have a baby, the second incentivizes young couples to buy a house, move out, and then have kids. I think this is really interesting (although I'm not a fan of Orban) and am curious which approach works best.
Without a building programme, it sounds to me like a way of propping up real estate prices. Increased demand for the same housing stock is a zero sum spiral.
I have no knowledge of the construction industry in Hungary, but I imagine there is zoning and other restrictions on building "to keep our greenbelt" and "to protect the character of the neighborhood" and all the other things as in anglosphere countries.
My impression is that there is a big corrupt bureaucracy obstructing supply as well. But who knows what Transparency International's real agenda is?
Thanks for linking this. I've always thought the existence of adversarial image misclassifications by CNNs is not especially surprising, and this paper does a nice job of demonstrating that. Still, one of their conclusions seems a bit different than what I would expect:
"Indeed, although adversarial images are often analogized to optical illusions that flummox human vision, we suggest another analogy: Whereas humans have separate concepts for appearing like something vs. appearing to be that thing—as when a cloud looks like a dog without looking like it is a dog, or a snakeskin shoe resembles a snake’s features without appearing to be a snake, or even a rubber duck shares appearances with the real thing without being confusable for a duck—CNNs are not permitted to make this distinction, instead being forced to play the game of picking whichever label in their repertoire best matches an image (as were the humans in our experiments)."
I think they missed a better analogy. A CNN misclassifying an adversarial example is more analogous to a specific human momentarily misidentifying an object. Everyone regularly has experiences where they misidentify objects in a similar manner to how CNNs misclassify adversarial examples. Just this morning I glanced at some soup cans on my shelf and thought I saw a cat. After an extremely brief moment, I realized it was in fact cans without even superficial resemblance to a cat at all. I cannot duplicate the precise combination of sensations that led me to see the cans as a cat, but CNNs are static and give deterministic results to a static input. My moment of misidentification is akin to a static CNN misidentifying a static input.
You're welcome! I guess you could be right about the static/dynamic thing. But let's imagine a recurrent neural network trained on video -> object classification tasks. I would bet that you could still produce adversarial videos. In this case, I think the distinction the authors raise is apt; resemblance is not the same thing as identity. You'd need a completely different ANN paradigm to replicate this.
I agree they have a useful analogy, especially when you have a situation like a cloud that looks like a dog (should the CNN output "cloud" or "dog"). Completely reasonable to be concerned about resemblance vs identity. I think this sort of adversarial image should also be very robust against random perturbations. Maybe it's even the more relevant sort of adversarial image, considering the AI generated images we see in link 8.
In comparison, when you have one of the adversarial images that to a human clearly looks like a panda, but a certain CNN will output "gibbon" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572), the analogy doesn't work well. As far as I know, these sorts of images are not robust, and adding a small perturbation will restore the CNN output to "panda".
For video, I agree it should be possible to make an adversarial video, and I think you'll be able to create either of the above types of adversarial images; one that has confusion due to resemblance vs. identity, and one that has a sort of fine-tuned state, but I bet the longer the video the more delicate the second kind of adversarial image will be (compression artifacts might destroy the effect!).
Precisely. This can be phrased in a more general (and more concise) way as contemporary ANNs only really being able to perform System 1 tasks. (Which, not really an issue if you treat them as sophisticated tools with known limitations, but a huge, yet completely unsolved issue if you expect automation - and, further down the line, general intelligence - from them.)
#18: I spent a little time in Peru and thought the food was delightful. That's all. Just felt I needed to stand up for Peru.
#27: low divorce rate ≠ good marriage rate? Without more context, it could just be an artifact of a *lower* marriage rate or a *later* time of first marriage leading to fewer opportunities for divorce.
The Catholics allow non-Catholic priests who are already married to retain their spouses if they convert to Catholicism. A man who does that needs to think long & hard about whether he REALLY wants a divorce.
"There are around 125 married Roman Catholic priests like Whitfield, an Episcopal convert, across the U.S., experts say, and perhaps a couple hundred total around the world."
Perhaps more important (since Catholic priests are only about 10% of US clergy) is that divorce is a de facto disqualifier for ministry in most of US conservative Protestantism (Evangelicalism). The exception would be churches that are Prosperity Gospel. For example, Paula White. I'm a conservative Protestant but I don't really understand her world, since Biblically she's disqualified for ministry at least 3 times over.
There's a Peruvian chicken place near where I work that's pretty awesome. Never had the desserts though. I'll have to check them out. Any recommendations?
Agree on Peruvian food. After a quick look at that list, there is a high correlation between how "global" a cuisine is (how many restaurants serve it commonly) and how popular it is. Also, the top cuisines tend to be more recognizable, or at least a single dish is. Do you like Japanese food or do you really just like Sushi or miso soup? Do you like Indian food or do you just like chicken tikka (which isn't Indian).
My take away isnt that people don't like peruvian food, it's that they havent had or don't know what it is. If anything Greek food is the big loser considering how popular/common it is but yet isn't very well liked.
One possibility involving unrepresentative memory and one about unrealistic comparison:
Maybe a lot of people have a memory trying some strange dim sum, like chicken feet, which they specifically associate with Hong Kong cuisine (accurately, or as a representative of Cantonese cuisine), while anything positive about Hong Kong cuisine got assimilated in memory to Chinese cuisine.
Maybe people who visited Hong Kong ate in low-quality restaurants to save money (because it's an expensive city) or out of ignorance, but were already familiar with similarly cheap, high-quality Chinese restaurants in their home country.
I think you're right... and it's partly a product of how the data has been presented?
The poll data has the following options:
• Like A lot
• Like a fair amount,
• Don't like very much
• Don't like at all
• Don't know,
• N/A - I have never eaten this cuisine
The statistic shown is '% of those who have eaten the cuisine that like it', which seems only exclude the N/A option but leaves in the 'Don't know'. I would imagine that the 'don't know' respondents are either people who (a) have tried the food, but not enough to have an opinion, (b) haven't tried the food, and selected 'don't know' when reading down the option list (not waiting to get to the N/A option).
For example, here's the Japan entry for British cuisine:
• 02% Like a lot
• 11% Like a fair amount
• 14% Don't like very much
• 05% Don't like at all
• 28% Don't know
• 40% N/a - I have never eaten this cuisine
If you exclude the Japanese respondents who say that they have never eaten British cuisine, then the '% who liked it' comes to 20%. However, if you only include people who expressed an opinion on British cuisine, then the '% who liked it' rises to 41%
When you include the 'don't know' option in the calculation, then the Japanese respondents are the most negative about foreign food of the bunch. However, this is mostly because of a high 'don't know' rate. When you only look at people who liked or disliked different cuisines, then they're actually middle of the bunch in terms of how much they liked/disliked different cuisines?
So I think that including the 'don't knows' is tipping the results in favour of well-known cuisines that people have had lots of opportunity to try. I copied the data to Excel and had a go at creating an equivalent graphic that only looked at '% of people who liked it out of those that expressed an opinion'.
You can really see this play out toward the bottom of the table, where a lot of the "bad" cuisines are rated higher in countries where those cuisines are more common. The funniest example to me is that Malaysians have an outsized love for Saudi Arabian food. This is totally reasonable considering that Malaysia is a majority-Muslim country that has strong ties to other Muslim countries (I still chuckle at the business advertising locations in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Gaza).
I assume these are the rates at which marriages end in divorces, not the percentage of the group that's divorced, so I don't think lower marriage rate would skew the numbers. (I'd be more surprised if 53% of bartenders had been through a divorce than if 53% of marriages to bartenders ended in divorce)
Miami has many popular Peruvian restaurants. And Nobu worked in Peru while crafting his skillls. Btw, I double-checked that on Wikipedia and it leaves out the part where Nobu casually mentioned he considered suicide after one of his restaurants failed.
Peruvian here. I actually shared the table on Facebook, as Peruvian media tends to inflame Peruvian culinary pride too much and it deserves to be brought down a notch or two. (A prominent Peruvian chef abroad said recently, while interviewed, that he would have liked to have been an engineer, only things didn't work out financially, and that the country needs engineers more than it does chefs [NB: though yet again top engineering graduates in Peru often end up grossly underemployed and underpaid]. I agree.) Nevertheless: the results make no sense, and I'd very much like to see the methodology behind this.
It's not surprising at all that Chinese-Peruvian food is a thing. There was massive, semi-forced migration from China in the second half of the 19th century - coolies were brought over in part to replace formerly enslaved people in agriculture and in part to build railroads. [The word "coolie" is non-offensive in Peru and China - it's the ghosts of those who put people in that situation who should be ashamed.] Many died, but those who survived their period of indentured servitude generally stayed, married into local families (migrants were almost entirely men) and (says the stereotype) opened shops or restaurants, or were employed as cooks by wealthy people.
In the 80s and 90s, in Peru, for the middle class (which in American means: struggling families) "going out to eat" was a rare ocassion that meant almost by definition either Chinese food or rotisserie chicken. We have other things at home!
#13: Describing Grayzone as an anti-war site is misleading. They aren't against Russia invading Ukraine - only against Ukraine defending itself. This is relevant as far as deplatforming goes. Moving from deplatforming anti-woke groups to actual anti-war groups would represent a new step in deplatforming. Moving from deplatforming anti-woke to deplatforming fake news that supports any regime, as long as it's authoritarian and brutal enough (Putin, Assad, etc.) doesn't really break any new ground.
I also found this description to be bizarre as well. Granted, Scott's typical position is that cancelling is bad irrespective of one's views so a better description wouldn't change the message, but Grayzone is definitely not best described as an "anti-war" site.
Hasn't "anti-war" always meant "in favour of our side surrendering"?
Being "anti-war" in the sense that "hey, war is a generally bad thing" doesn't distinguish you from "pro-war" people -- even the most pro-war people tend to be in favour of war in order to achieve specific important objectives rather than being in favour of war in general.
And being anti-war in the sense that you think that the _other_ side should surrender also doesn't distinguish you from pro-war people.
Even though we men think about it all the time, it can be safely assumed from context that we're discussing our society in this thread, not ancient Rome.
Lots of people who are far more spatio-temporo-culturally similar to us have been pro-war, eg. pre-WWI militarists, fascists etc. I can't think of many Anglo-Saxon examples of being generically pro-war other than maybe the imperialists, but anything Westerners argued for in the last hundred years seems close enough that it's relevant to defining people's positions.
The Romans and Mongols were both fine with the other side surrendering before the ram had touched the wall (Romans) or roughly the equivalent (Mongols). After that they were pro-war.
If the US had invaded Russia, committed genocide, and annexed Siberia, maybe the "anti-war" label would still be used for the Russians calling for Russia to negotiate. But it seems extraordinarily silly to do this for international observers; someone in Kenya who is spreading propaganda about how good this invasion is and how the Russians secretly want this is obviously not anti-war, they are pro-war.
I do think "being anti-war in the sense that you think that the _other_ side should surrender also doesn't distinguish you from pro-war people" has a lot of truth to it though, it's just that Grayzone's "side" is not the US, let alone Ukraine. Their side is "authoritarian regimes" ("authoritarian regime tribe" you could say). I am vastly more anti-war than Grayzone, because when my "side" launched an invasion of Iraq, I opposed it, while when their side launched an invasion of Ukraine, they supported it. Always supporting authoritarian regimes is not anti-war.
Was the George Bush administration truly "your side"?
If the Grayzone people are somehow part of an "authoriatarian tribe" and therefore on the same side as Putin, then surely you were/are not part of the same "tribe" as the Bush admin. (but instead part of the "anti-middle eastern US intervention" tribe just like Saddam Hussein) And therefore by opposing the Iraq war you weren't going against your side you were going against your opposing side just like the Grayzone people are doing with Ukraine.
Regarding whether Bush is on my side, I think yes. I think the Iraq war was a huge mistake and handled badly, but I still wanted the US to do well in Iraq, I think Bush and the US were a million times better than Hussein, and I support many things the Bush administration did (PEPFAR in particular is likely one of the greatest programs in US history).
> "instead part of the 'anti-middle eastern US intervention' tribe just like Saddam Hussein"
Absolutely not. I support many US interventions in the Middle East. I'm not even opposed to the US joining any wars in the Middle East; I think the US joining the Gulf War after Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a good idea. I am certainly not entirely anti-war, as I support countries going to war to stop invasions and mass-killings of civilians; I'm just more anti-war than the pro-war website Grayzone.
Why does the US have the right to intervene in any of these places, barring a UN authorisation to do so. (Which was true of the first gulf war but bit the second).
It wasn't about the oil, it was never about the oil. Contrary to the constant misinformation mantra, the US never took a single drop of Iraqi oil.
The Ministry of Truth has scrubbed from the web, but there was a pretty exhaustive list, with—I think—122 items. 122 reasons we invaded Iraq. Of the things I remember, was:
1. The Big Gun, there's a TV show describing a big cannon, with a 1km long barrel that shot rocket propelled shells which Saddam hired a Canadian named Bull to build. The cannon was immobile and only pointed at Israel. The final stage was sabotaged on the way to delivery, and Bull was assassinated.
2. The Nuclear Mujahedeen, an army of 10k scientists, engineers, and technicians Saddam employed to build nuclear weapons. In the US raids, Iraqi civilians looted their uranium contaminated gear killing themselves and their families. You can only kill yourself with purified uranium, as natural occurring uranium isn't radioactive enough. The victims was a thing during the war. In 1981, Israel—in cahoots with Saudi Arabia—flew a bombing mission into Iraq, and bombed the Iraqi bomb fuel reactor.
3. Uranium from Chad. There was a very big kerfuffle when US Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valery Plame went to Chad to investigate the attempted purchase. Plame reported no attempt was made, however a congressional investigation determined she lied about this to shed bad light on President Bush. Gee, like the CIA is trustworthy. Scooter Libby was charged with revealing a CIA agent ... like the wife of a US Ambassador is not an agent of the US government.
4. Iraq invaded Kuwait. And the US has a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with Kuwait, which basically says, we defend Kuwait, and they don't pursue building or buying nukes. Well Iraq invaded, we were obligated to defend. Fast forward to today, Saudi Arabia is trying to build or buy nukes to defend itself against a nuclear enabled Iran. Wanna see those two scrappy kids get nukes(?) cause I don't.
5. Saddam was funding suicide bombers in Israel, and boasting about paying $10k US to the families of suicide bombers. And there were suicide bombings almost daily for a long while.
6. Assassination attempt against President Carter. Saddam sent an assassination team to the US to attempt the life of former President Carter. Saddam was mad that Carter had built lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. That's reason enough in my book to invade Iraq.
7. General Terrorism. Iraq was the financial source, training grounds, and safe haven for all manner of terrorism around the world. Of course that too is memory holed.
8. Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people. But then again, he didn't have chemical weapons, so that's a Schrodinger Event which either did or did not happen. But a whole lot of civilians got gassed by chemical weapons that some say didn't exist, but when Schrodinger opened his box, a lot of people were dead all the same. There was a huge convoy of trucks which hauled a lot of 'stuff' to Syria right before the invasion; the speculation was this was the chemical weapons. There was an Iraqi base labeled 'The Dragon's Lair' that US troops are not allowed to talk about.
That's only eight, there were another 114 items on the list, but as I said, the Ministry of Truth has found these items untruthful and has scrubbed them from our collective memories.
Oil is a global market—it was for the oil and Bush/Tillerson wanted to make Iraqis wealthy just like Tillerson ended up successfully making Qataris wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Obviously Iraq has a much bigger population than Qatar but American energy companies have made many foreigners a lot of money.
Russians are indeed the bad guys in Ukraine. Authoritarianism has nothing to do with whether a war is to be supported or not. After all the British were democratic (largely) as were the French (kind of ) or the US empire (mostly) during their imperial heights.
Agreed. Even modern wars are like this, which I think gave the “anti-war” crowd a lot of cred in the early 2000s. I think a lot of “anti-war” people were always just opposing whichever side of a war the US was on. This made them seem anti-war and prescient when the vast majority of war discussion in the US was on US wars that became a complete mess (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.), but broke down when it started to become Russian wars instead (Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again).
I've never really looked deeply at the Grayzone, but I don't see anything pro-authoritarian-regime on there currently (but maybe I'm just clueless about geopolitics). But I do see https://thegrayzone.com/2023/08/21/anti-syria-lobby-caliphate-starvation-sanctions/ which appears to be against caliphates (authoritarian Islamic regimes).
ISIS is considered a terrorist organization, not a governmental body.
But, yes, it's a simplification. A more accurate, although still simplified way of putting it would be that Grayzone supports countries that are adversaries of the US (particularly Syria, China, and Russia). The article you posted is actually a good example of this; it's a propaganda piece blaming all of Syria's ills on the US and its allies, while insisting that the brutal dictator Assad would bring normalcy. In one wild paragraph, it uses an accusation from the Syrian Foreign Ministry as proof for the ludicrous claim that the US facilitated an ambush by ISIS on Assad's forces.
Assad is probably the better choice, the other option being Isis. Probably.
Those countries that are anti US are anti US because the US has tried to maintain hegemony at the expense of these countries - particularly China these days.
According to von Clausewitz it's not a war if the defender is not actually fighting. So Grayzone could indeed be considered an anti-war site, in a Clausewitzian sense.
How does this apply to Iraq? Afghanistan? These were wars entirely initiated by the US - not fighting them would not have been equivalent in any way to 'surrendering'. Pro-war people loved these wars, anti-war people were very against them. Another way of thinking about the divide is either the threshold for what constitutes a valid use of war, or whether or not war is a good strategy for achieving non-directly-defensive objectives.
I wonder what Tucker Carlson Republicans would say about the Persian Gulf War now?? We sent ground troops to repel an invasion of a super wealthy monarchy…I don’t even know if I would support that one now. I definitely support power projection like enforcing no-fly zones and Navy patrolling the Strait of Hormuz…but ground troops??
No. Soviet "anti-war" messaging definitely didn't mean USSR surrendering by itself or in any of its proxy wars. It always meant USA surrendering to USSR in its proxy wars, and preferably by itself too. If not, unilateral disarmament, reduction in military spending, repeal of COCOM regulations and the Jackson-Vanik amendment, so that USSR could buy high tech dual use machinery for its MIC with no annoying hurdles, would all be good too.
Yeah if they were actually anti-war you'd think they'd have something to say against the government that started the war, which I haven't seen any sign of.
Presumably the case for calling Grayzone anti-war is that it's an American site, so calling it "anti-war" implicitly means that it opposes the US's participation in war. But this case is not very good. The US is just an arms supplier, not a participant in the Ukraine war and there is no serious movement for the US to enter the war. And also because Scott's summary did not mention that Grayzone was an American site, so this heuristic for what "anti-war" means wasn't available to anyone who doesn't already know what Grayzone is.
I’d be inclined to ask whether Russia has or hasn’t sabotaged „peace negotiations“. I wonder why blame is deflected away from Russia all the time. What have they offered or asked for in return for peace?
"defending itself" by forcing people to fight for it's territorial claims and arresting anyone who criticizes the government's policy of refusing to negotiate continuing this war until the bitter end
Their lean is pro-Russia, yes, but a world where Ukrainian atrocities stop getting whitewashed, and Ukraine is pushed to negotiate seriously (i.e. making concessions instead of fantasizing about reclaiming Crimea) is a world where the war ends faster and fewer people die.
also, re: Assad, you're aware his primary enemies were al-Qaeda and ISIS, and his secondary enemies were groups like Jaish al-Islam or Ahrar al-Sham that took Saudi Arabia as an explicit model? Secularist/democratic rebels were a nonfactor outside Daraa unless one counts the DFNS/Rojava/YPG, who do not aspire to rule the rest of Syria and eventually gave up on fighting Assad themselves.
It's so bizarre that so many people who are not Islamist fanatics, and who would likely find themselves quickly beheaded in contemporary Idlib or ISIS Palmyra, reject the obvious conclusion that Assad was by far the lesser evil in this war. What happened to supporting secularism and freedom of religion? Heck, what happened to the War on Terror, which the US was still allegedly fighting during the 2010s - was the problem with al-Qaeda that it was in Afghanistan and not Syria?
This is an upending of the usual meaning of antiwar in the American conversation. The likes of the people at Antiwar.com have always been against US interventionism. One wouldn't have they weren't antiwar because they weren't railing against Hussein declaring war on Kuwait, or the North Vietnamese on the South Vietnamese.
>as long as it's authoritarian and brutal enough (Putin, Assad, etc.)
Okay, I don't disagree with the general thrust of what you're saying but it's absolutely bizarre to act as though there's something especially "authoritarian" and "brutal" about Assad as compared with the rest of the region and the extremists who were trying to overthrow him with US funding/support. Assad would have been decapitated many years ago if he were any gentler.
I think every group the US funded in Syria could accurately be described as extremist, but I hope you will agree that an Al Qaeda affiliate counts. Otherwise, you are probably a dangerous extremist yourself.
Of course an Al Qaeda affiliate counts, but your article doesn’t make this accusation, let alone provide evidence for it. It accuses Turkiye and Saudi Arabia of funding a rebel coalition that includes an Al Qaeda affiliate. The United States is not Turkiye or Saudi Arabia.
“[T]wo pieces published in the past month, from the Wall Street Journal and the Independent, reported that Turkey and Saudi Arabia are working together to ship weapons and cash to Jaish al-Fatah, a rebel coalition. Syria's al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, is one of the key partners in the coalition.“
Some C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front fighters, some of the rebels trained by the CIA joined the group, and groups directly supported by the U.S. often fought alongside Al Nusra. The U.S. knew this was impossible to avoid with the support they were providing.
It's true that at other times the U.S. attacked Al Nusra, but they were more than willing to strategically support them when they could be used against Assad.
This is a huge misunderstanding of the conflict. The United States never strategically supported nor funded Al Nusra. They were always actively working against them, *as were the groups they were actively funding*.
It is true that some of the groups and fighters the US had supported ended up joining the coalition with Al-Nusra, *after* the US backed groups had lost. And the US allied with the Soviet Union during WWII. I oppose these groups doing this, and am glad the US did not continue funding them, but it doesn’t mean the US was funding al-Nusra all along.
The Grayzone's founder Max Blumenthal has been clearly on Russia's side, even aiding them in preparing UN briefings. The information spread by the website has been pro-Russian rather than anti-war. Taking down a donation source for a Russian propaganda outlet in pacifist disguise is an honorable deed, I want this to happen more.
Point 27: Are these the actual divorce rates? I ask this because reported divorce rates are often gross rates per thousand people. Such published rates are often used to back the claim that divorce rates have dropped significantly in the past few four or five decades, but they are based on divorces per thousand people and not divorces per thousand married people. The marriage rate has also declined, and people have to be married before they can be divorced. So, do nerdy men have a lower divorce rate because they are so uxurious or because they are less likely to marry at all?
Nerdy men don't have a lower divorce rate; "Gaming Managers" and "Gaming Service Workers" are the nerdiest jobs you can have, with the highest divorce rates.
When I am king, the use of the term "gaming" to mean "gambling" shall be outlawed. It was dumb, and misleading when it was adopted, and it's dumber and more misleading now.
I think 'gaming' was introduced by the gambling industry as a marketing ploy. You're not going to Vegas to gamble you're just going to play some games!
I'm not sure about that. In "Pride and Prejudice", when it's revealed that Mr. Wickham has large gambling debts, "Jane heard them with horror. 'A gamester!' she cried."
The Vlogbrothers video I watched about #1 (the sulphur emissions from boats) pointed out that you can get similar cloud-seeding effects by misting seawater into the air, no sulphur required. Mandating that container ships offset their fuel burning by running a cloud-seeding machine seems totally reasonable, though it'd probably make the chemtrails people go even *more* insane.
One thing about cooling effects from cloud seeding is that they don’t last very long, while co2-caused heating does last for a long time. So if you try to offset heating with cooling, you have to continue the cooling effect much longer than the heating, or else accidentally get a “termination shock” where the heating is still in place but the cooling has terminated.
Yes, but the issue with geoengineering approaches in general but *especially* ones that require constant upkeep is that they create moral hazard by masking the magnitude of the underlying emissions problems. There's value per se in the cooler temperatures but this is also a prevention >>>> cure situation.
This is less true of certain approaches like iron seeding because those are mediated by reducing CO2 levels directly.
lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences, e.g. by insurance.
So us being protected from the consequences of emissions is bad, because it means we can worry less about emissions? But surely in a world where we are indeed protected from the consequences of emissions, we should rightfully worry less about them, no?
The idea is that this is a temporary buffer rather than actual "fix," which risks taken advantage of in a way that exacerbates rather than reduces the expense of later mitigatory measures.
To quote our host (quoting a proverb in a different context): "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
In a world where we are *indeed* protected, we should rightfully worry less. But in a world where the protection relies on continued active participation in a expensive process, it's hard to say we are "indeed" protected.
That's not the central meaning of termination shock and understates its effect.
See, unlike outgoing longwave, incoming shortwave at Earth's surface is entangled with something other than temperature - it's used for photosynthesis, which reduces CO2 levels. So solar geoengineering actually increases CO2 levels and partially counteracts itself, and if you stop such a program you will have a transient temperature rise - not just above "don't emit the CO2 in the first place", but above the trajectory if you'd emitted the same amount of CO2 and not attempted to mitigate it!
In my experience, people are way more afraid of geoengineering destroying the world than they are of climate change. Making GE *less* easily controllable will not help its PR problem.
That's true. But this isn't about a PR problem - this is about a *real* problem with trying to use aerosols to mitigate warming. Things like algae seeding that lead to drawdown of CO2 can avoid that problem.
No it doesn't seem reasonable. No geo-engineering seems reasonable given how crap the underlying scientific understanding of climate actually is. Geo-engineering should be globally banned and attempts should result in severe sanctions, sort of like anti nuclear proliferation.
I think the "remove CO2 from the atmosphere with scrubbers" people are okay. That's quite bounded; unless you somehow wind up removing more CO2 than we ever put in there in the first place - which seems unlikely given you can measure that and stop - you're by definition staying within known territory.
Blocking shortwave is a really dumb idea and retaliation against unilateral action on this is plausibly worthwhile. Catastrophe from somebody doing this and it going horribly wrong is actually on my list of plausible GCRs this century, although it's not really plausible to get X out of it*.
*Aerosols don't last long enough without maintenance, and you're not going to be maintaining shit if you're dead from your own project and/or people killing you for your crimes. Impact winter would require a Chicxulub+-sized asteroid or comet (I don't think another Chicxulub would do it; the preppers are really hard to kill that way) redirected into the planet; that's not subtle due to scale of expense and the ease of tracking spacecraft, is obviously a Bad Idea, and is reversible (if at potentially greater expense), so people would arrest you for terrorism before you could do it and/or redirect the object away from Earth again. Deploying a megametre-scale solar shade at L1 would do it, but this is if anything even less subtle (people will notice if you block out the Sun) and can be reversed quite cheaply and even unilaterally by blowing up the shade with a missile, so while this could plausibly cause GCR (a couple of days with no sun is still utterly terrible) it's very obvious that this wouldn't reach X. On the other side of the coin, releasing sufficient quantities of fluorinated gases could fry everyone and plausibly even hit runaway, but while this isn't necessarily *physically* obvious until too late (if you stockpile them rather than releasing gradually), the expense is so extreme that it'd be unreachable and/or noticed (it's a bit hard to find people willing to spend many trillions of dollars on deliberately killing literally everyone including themselves with no plausible benefit).
I'd be against scrubbing too. You're right that it should be safe if you only take levels back to, say, the 1960s, but in practice if such a huge scrubbing industry were to be established it'd want to stick around and go even lower, and the "CO2=evil world destroying gas" meme is so strong and our leaders so stupid, they certainly wouldn't just wrap the whole thing up if that level were reached. They come up with reasons to keep going.
Also it's inevitably going to be paid for via ruinous taxation, as nobody actually needs sequestered CO2 except the oil industry. As the world is doing OK as is, there doesn't seem to be any reason to spend resources on this.
Still, that's an argument for not doing it. The argument for retaliation against those who do doesn't apply to scrubbing. And you could argue overshoot would be self correcting. If the west insisted on scrubbing lots of CO2 then China and India would just take that as a justification for burning more fuels, negating the effects.
There are people doing that, right now, as charities. I'm saying that if more people start doing that voluntarily, we don't have much to worry about - we don't have *anything* to worry about until and unless they exceed the rate of emissions from other sectors of the world economy. And there's a natural taper-off there where people just stop funding it personally once they figure it's low enough. I agree that the demand from certain quarters that world temperatures be yanked back by large amounts rather than merely arrested, at extreme expense, that's probably not +EV.
On the other hand, this dickhead advocating unilateral deliberate global dimming... well, let's just say I wouldn't be shedding too many tears were his whole "international waters" scheme to attract pirates.
Hang on, doesn’t the results of the sulphur ban in container boats prove the exact opposite - that it reduces temperature la without any other effect. So unban that. Maybe make the container ships output even more sulphur.
I would assume that all claims about things like that impacting the climate are at worst just wrong or at best, unprovable. So I don't accept it proves anything.
Hmm 🤔. It’s maybe a bit too early to tell if it was the sulphur ban that caused the very very real heat spike in Europe, but it’s 33C a few days in October in Spain after a long hot summer. Berlin is at 27C. Paris will be 29C on Oct 1. Frosty days used to be common in mid autumn in Northern Europe. Now it’s an extended summer.
If it turns out that the reduction in sulphur emissions is the cause of the heat spike, then reversing the ban will surely be safe geo-engineering. It’s just going back to where we were in 2022.
Probably increasing sulphur emissions beyond that won’t have any other consequences than reducing global temperatures because there were these other consequences it would have been evident pre 2023.
We therefore have a natural experiment then and can do away with the overly cautious approach
Where I live in Europe this year wasn't that great, actually it was really quite poor over the summer. It was much hotter a couple of years ago. I don't think it makes sense to try and assign casual blame for specific bits of weather in specific places to changes in shipping regulations, everything concretely known about climate says it's just not very sensitive to anything humans do, and the vagaries of weather certainly can't be explained. If we could simulate the effect of shipping we'd have better than 10 forecasts but we don't.
Don't forget, there's a whole lotta malfeasance in "The Global Temperature." As Anthony Watts discovered.
Might want to investigate this before you get too far ahead of your skis. Perhaps google 'days over 100 in MyTown'. I just did this, and it turns out the maximum year for days over 100 in Sacramento is 1988. And for Sacramento, the number of days over 100 in 2023 is tied with 1888.
The problem with the sulphur wasn't it heating up the atmosphere, it was the acid rain. So even if ending it caused a heat spike doesn't mean it's safe to unban it if the heat spike can be dealt with other ways or is transitory or is less bad than the acid rain.
It's proven it reduces temperature (note, however, that it also increases CO2 via suppressing photosynthesis, so the spike afterward is potentially more than it'd have been if the sulphurous smoke never existed). "Without any other effect" would only be proven if you'd investigated all other effects and found nothing.
We've accidentally proven that that amount of sulphurous smoke won't end the world*, but that doesn't mean that if you 10x it or 100x it as this maniac wants, that also won't end the world.
*I'm not seeing literal X happening from aerosols gone wrong; even total crop failure for half a decade wouldn't kill *everyone* (you'd still have some yields from pastoralism, not to mention all the preppers), and I don't think things will go that wrong. But "crop yields are -20% for a few years" is more plausible and a lot of people would die if that happened.
We are already doing geo-engineering. Humans life requires geo-engineering. The only question is what types of geo-engineering should we be doing or not doing.
I don't think that's true by the definition of geo-engineering normally used. It doesn't mean literally any change to the surrounding environment nor accidental changes.
#30: Real median household income is survey-based and if I'm reading it correctly, is based on money income, which specifically excludes health benefits. Since an increasing share of our consumption bundle is health care (I think it's up to 18% of GDP now), a measure that backs out most of health care is always likely to far understate economic growth over time.
Another reason might be the household measure - if households get smaller over time, that will also drag this down.
A quick google indicates that this measure has lagged GDP/capita by quite a bit over time, and has freqently been negative y/y.
Well also over time numbers of adults and numbers of working adults per household has been falling. Lots more single adult households which hurts household incomes.
The increasing cost of health care doesn’t really benefit anybody but the medical industrial complex. People aren’t richer if they have to pay more to achieve the same outcome, even if that payment is partly paid by their employer.
Presumably the health care is also improving. So that is a net benefit. OTOH, if it's spent adapting to bacteria/viruses that are adapting to it, it's sort of a red queen's race.
The only one I find difficult is Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram.
But the story I got for Madras to Chennai made a lot of sense. There was a river, and the town on the north side was Madras and the town on the south side was Chennai. When the British came, they set up on the north side (IIRC, it was more defensible and less populated), so they called the whole thing Madras. Most of the Indian population was on the south side, and most of the growth was on the south side. After the British left, people kept the concept of both sides being the same city, but since most of them lived in the Chennai side, they changed the overall name to that.
I'm still expecting this in the future. It seems the native extension of the whole "indigenous peoples" attitude. (Is 'Nippon' or 'Nihon' more common in use?)
They are ultimately mostly descendants from migrants from Korea, but every human group on Earth is ultimately descended from people who migrated from somewhere else.
Yeah, but given the standard indigenous/colonizer narrative, the Japanese definitely fit better on the colonizer side, especially their settlement of Hokkaido.
You could probably expand that a bit. What about the children of Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis crossbreeding. Would they be the indigenous group for that particular area?
Nihon is more common, but you do hear Nippon used. They're both legitimate readings of the kanji in question.
In my experience, the Japanese have zero issue with their country being referred to as Japan. In fact, they do it themselves in a number of instances. As just one example, the Japanese rail network is called JR, literally "Japan Railway". Maybe that will change in the future, but the Japanese tend to have pretty positive views of the West in general, so I kind of doubt it. They don't have the history of colonialism that India does that would make their name an issue.
When I lived there, around 1960, both terms were in use, but in different contexts. I think I saw Nihon more in the name of products for sale, and Nipon more on maps. I was living on Kyushu, so it may be, or have been, regional.
(OTOH, I only spoke English, so my sample size was pretty small.)
They understand the value of the 'Japan' brand. I understand India still has colonial resentments, but changing to 'Bharat' would destroy a lot of brand value for India and it makes it sound more like some poor third world country rather than a mysterious, exotic cultural destination.
Indian Reddit pointed out that the Constitution of India acknowledges the significance of the Hindi endonym in its first (non-preamble) sentence. "(1) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States..." -- the point being made by the Indian redditors in question (who pretty uniformly viewed this as a symbolic grift meant to distract from more substantive issues) was that "Bharat" was never bereft of official recognition.
"India" isn't even a British word. The name goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word from the Indus River ("sindhu").
Belarus has lobbied french journalists/officials to call it "Bélarus" instead of the former "Biélorussie" since 1991. They were successful in Switzerland and Canada, but not in France itself.
Wrong analogy. You're already referring to the country in question as "日本" by using "Japan". "भारत" is, I'd assume, not etymologically related to "India" in any way.
Yeah, "India is discussing" is highly misleading and assumes a much more even and varied debate than is true. My understanding is that more accurate preface might be "Hindi nationalists have proposed" (most accurate would be "A Hindi nationalist generated controversy by referring to India as Bharat and now people are talking about it")
So many things I'd like to comment on. Thank you for putting this together, always a fun read.
On #27. As a woman married to a woman, whose social circle includes heaps of nerdy men because of my work (including my dear brother, who luckily is married)
I'm only generalizing here because you have as well, which makes it fair...
The reason women don't date geeky men is not because they think they're incels, I seriously don't know a single woman that thinks to that extreme. They don't date "geeks/nerds" what you're calling "nice guys" because they're often introverted and lack social skills. This makes ✨ everything ✨ a lot harder.
The burden of maintain a healthy, genuine, friendship with them is often on my shoulders, as the woman. That gets very tiring over time.
Another reason for women not dating nerdy men is that nerdy social circles (especially in college and recent-graduate age brackets) tend to be on the smaller side, fairly insular (i.e. low churn of newcomers and casual participants, so you're usually just seeing the same faces), and mostly male. If you're a woman in such a circle looking to date men, you've got plenty of choices (combined with the "introverted and lack social skills" issue you brought up, I've heard the situation described as "the odds are good but the goods are odd"). Conversely, if you're a man in such a circle looking to date women and you're mainly looking inside the social circle, there are going to be very few (if any) women in the circle who are single and looking to date men at any given time, and the odds are against you being one of their top choices.
Hehe in an Electrical and Computer Engineering department in the late 90s there was a group of guys who were all close and only one girl in the group who was also the "Alpha" guys younger sister. Made for some interesting dynamics and we all flirted with and chased her a bit, and I think she dated two different guys from the circle eventually.
"nerdy social circles (especially in college and recent-graduate age brackets) tend to be on the smaller side, fairly insular (i.e. low churn of newcomers and casual participants, so you're usually just seeing the same faces)"
Seems like a good indicator for not divorcing easily!
I am willing to except that as an explanation of the phenomenon (in a generalized sense). But why don’t more people communicate it this way? (instead of reaching for calling the geeky men losers or creeps or incels)
Kristian, I literally made it a point to specify that I haven't yet heard a single woman call anyone an incel. Yet you choose to use this language to further this self-pitty narrative and defer responsibility from your ownl growth.
In a beautifully ironic and tragic way - this is exactly why they don't "explain the phenomenon"
I meant in general discussion and on the internet. And I didn’t mean only women. Surely this whole debate was about calling people incels and analyzing whether the “nice guys” are really creeps and so forth.
You should not make presumptions about “my personal growth” or what I choose to hear, etc. You don’t know me.
If we go back to track the causality, we will notice that the narrative surrounding the "Nice Guys" used to be somewhat neutral to supportive. Yes there were some "nerds are icky" sentiments here an there but media used to feature "nice guy getting the girl" trope a lot, uncritically framing it as a happy ending for both the girl and the guy.
And then the incel cultural identity crystalized, produced pushback, toxoplazma of rage dynamics happened and now this whole memetic battle is cached in our minds and in the realms of internet and the narrative shifted accordingly.
I reckon the 'nice guy gets the girl' trope played a significant causal role here. Lots of young guys took that message to heart, failed to notice that (in the more plausible versions of the story) the 'nice guy' was also very attractive in ways orthogonal to niceness, and were left bewildered and searching for explanations when things didn't work out that way for them.
Hmm. Are you saying that the media was too nice to the nice guys and should've shown them their place in the hierarchy instead? Basically like it's doing now when a phrase "nice guy" became an euphemism of an "manipulative asshole who pretends to be nice" and it's hardly possible to talk about actual nice guys at all? I don't think I can agree with that.
I think that's very true, and I wonder what, if anything, the female equivalent would be. Maybe something about women in their mid-to-late 30s easily having children? Middle-aged divorcees easily finding a new and better husband?
Also worth noting that the nice guy was usually rejected by the girl at first, but kept persevering until the realised how nice he was and fell in love with him. Repeat this message to unattractive, socially-awkward men enough for them to internalise it, and you can easily end up with behaviour that comes across as creepy, entitled, and manipulative.
A lot of truth to this. Not getting any is one thing, but becoming known as the cohort that whinges in an entitled way about not getting any (in addition to other disadvantages) couldn't have helped the nerds in the attractiveness department. Cf stoicism, resilience, masculine virtues.
<i>And then the incel cultural identity crystalized, produced pushback, toxoplazma of rage dynamics happened and now this whole memetic battle is cached in our minds and in the realms of internet and the narrative shifted accordingly.</i>
Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I thought it was the other way round -- incel cultural identity crystalised as a result of constantly being called a bunch of raging misogynists, rather than vice versa.
I think you’ve got the order somewhat backwards. Scott wrote about this phenomenon (online feminists heaping abuse, appearance related insults, and accusations of “sexual entitlement / rape culture enabling” on romantically unsuccessful nerdy guys) in Radicalizing the Romanceless (2014) and Untitled (2015). The term “incel” doesn’t move the needle at all on Google Trends until 2016, and really took of in the 17-19 timeframe.
Incel culture was, temporally, a reaction to online feminists demonizing the “nice guy” rather than a cause of it.
If we are trying to reconstruct the history, there needs to be somewhere a place for pick-up artists. They publicly rejected the "nice guy gets the girl" narrative, and tried to figure out the true mechanism. They believed that *any* guy can become popular, if he changes this *behavior*.
The formerly unsuccessful nerds turned seduction into a (pseudo)science, shared their theories, did field experiments, and compared the results. There was a spirit of: "if *I* could do it, then so can you". Being conventionally unattractive became a costly signal that they figured out something that worked, and it was neither pretty face nor spending money.
And they were publicly attacked, because their theories removed women from the pedestal and turned them into mere human beings. Everyone knows that men's thinking is often guided by their genitals, and that manipulating them is trivial if you know what to do. But it is misogynistic to say that the same is true also about women.
(Then the usual "geeks, mops, sociopaths" evolution happened. Too many stupid guys willing to pay to anyone who promised to help them get laid. Naturally extraverted men with social skills and good looks willing to take their money and tell them some bullshit. Instead of cooperation and free exchange of ideas, the new gurus mostly wrote blogs about how everyone else sucks. Then I stopped paying attention.)
Then there were guys who also rejected the traditional narrative, but found the alternative humiliating, so they decided to "go their own way". To live their lives without trying to "get the girl"; just doing their own hobbies and generally trying to find meaning in something else. The mainstream found this misogynistic, too. You may be a loser, but you are not allowed to opt out of the game.
And I think only afterwards came the incels -- the ones who also rejected the old narrative, but were unable to either adapt and work harder or give up; they just endlessly whined about how a 1 millimeter difference in the bone structure made them forever lonely. (An old-style pick-up artist would just laugh at that and proudly decide to become famous as the guy with the worst bone structure ever who bangs the hottest models. A MGTOW would just shrug, and start reading an interesting book or something.) At least this is how their outgroup describes them; and the question is, how much should I trust the outgroup to be fair.
To summarize this all: If you follow the traditional narrative and lose, you get a lot of hate. If you find your own narrative and win, you get a lot of hate. If you refuse to play the game, you get a lot of hate. And if you complain about how this all is unfair and sucks, you get a lot of hate. I guess the only way to avoid the hate is to win, and then pretend that it happened because you followed the traditional narrative.
"I haven't yet heard a single woman call anyone an incel. "
How many dozens of examples would you like? I'm having trouble coming up with any other interpretation of your words (especially coupled with your scolding about self-pity and irresponsibility) that isn't denial or at least minimizing.
I think the implication is "in real life", rather than online where everyone is either [maligned extreme identity A] or [maligned extreme anti-A identity B]
Typical minding here, but there's a fairly sharp division between topics discussed in (my) real life and online. I'm pretty sure I've never heard either "gamergate" or "effective altruism" without an electronic intermediary. Then again, I don't go to meetups, and I stay as far away as possible from online/fandoms about activities I enjoy.
Please consider that your experiences may not be universal. You have presumably never been murdered, but do you go around pointing out that fact to minimize the suffering of people who lost loved ones to murder by suggesting that they're "furthering this self-pity narrative and deferring responsibility from their own growth"?
> I am willing to except that as an explanation of the phenomenon (in a generalized sense). But why don’t more people communicate it this way? (instead of reaching for calling the geeky men losers or creeps or incels)
What's the difference supposed to be?
One girl thinks "I would die before dating you because you are a creep".
A second girl thinks "I would die before dating you because you don't have social skills".
There's not even a euphemism going on there. Those two girls are saying the same thing and referring to the same phenomenon. What do you think a creep is?
You appear to be channeling the old Basic Instructions strip that remarked "what other people think of as my personality is often just my vocabulary".
To my ear, 'creep' is moralised, with connotations of dubious-at-best moral character and a real chance that the person is dangerous to be around. 'Person with bad social skills' is not a description anyone wants, but it doesn't imply they're bad in a moral sense. Others feel justified in being nasty to/about 'creeps', rather than just politely avoiding them as they would a 'person with bad social skills'.
A creep is someone whom people avoid because they seem dubious or perverted in some sense (often vague). Most such people also have poor social skills but not necessarily.
There’s a way people attribute good qualities to people they like and bad qualities to people they dislike. But having bad social skills doesn’t make someone bad.
But there are more and less justifiable reasons for thinking someone is a creep.
Being boring can be a manifestation of poor social skills, but it doesn’t make one a creep.
The converse of this is when people say, “oh I can’t believe so and so turned out to be a criminal, he was such pleasant company.”
If someone is obsessively interested in sexually violent serial killers and is known to decorate his home with clownish animatronics and stuffed dead animals, people would think he’s a creep even if he has perfect social skills.
Although, actually I don’t like the term “social skills” that much, because it is vague and too broad.
I think that depends on the social group. Teddy Roosevelt was quite popular. That I don't like his attitudes doesn't make him "a creep", just someone I wouldn't want to associate with. Lots of other people disagreed with me. And I do like that he pushed conservation, event though I'm skeptical about his reasons.
Perhaps "creep" isn't an objective category, but a statement about a relationship judgement from one person/group onto another person/group. (I think that should be "onto" rather than "into".)
I've been in-tribe with both sides of this argument, and I strongly feel that each side is simply using the same words to talk about different people and different situations, while failing to recognize this because they're both referring to the thing that is highly relevant to their personal experiences and therefore must obviously be the thing we're all referring to.
I think the following explains some of what's going on here:
Many young nerdy guys don't really understand what is (generally) attractive to (most) women. (This is partly caused by society pushing messages that it thinks men in general need to hear, but which it does not expect to be taken completely literally -- or at least not as the full story.) They see that some nasty guys are romantically desired/sexually successful in ways they can only dream of, despite the fact that they think of themselves as, and in many cases genuinely are, much nicer people. They complain about this with varying degrees of bitterness; some are quite reasonable about it, some are reasonable modulo a fairly strong dose of adolescent intensity+naivete, and some are raging misogynists.
A simple, honest response to the non-horrible ones would be "yes, romantic/sexual attraction is unfair; women are often attracted to traits that are orthogonal to, or in some cases even anticorrelated with, niceness; before you turn this into a gender war, please think for five seconds about how male->female attraction tends to work; are the most-desired women consistently the nicest and most deserving?"
But some people instead respond by doubling down on the idea that sexual success *is* a measure of your worth as a human, lumping all the frustrated 'nice guys' together as a bunch of potentially predatory misogynists, and telling them that their lack of sexual success is evidence that they are not only pathetic but morally reprehensible (and therefore fair game for bullying). The people doing this might not be a very large group, but they are 'loud' (in terms of how much their message gets amplified and spread, and in terms of how emotionally salient it is) and they sometimes seem to be at least tacitly supported by mainstream feminists (who perhaps have the genuinely nasty 'nice' guys in mind and don't quite realise the extent of the collateral damage). For guys who are already feeling pretty down and vulnerable, this can be genuinely damaging and very alienating.
I'd prefer not to do a rhetorical question-answer thing; can you state your point more directly? e.g. are you suggesting that the most-desired women *are* consistently the nicest, or something less strong than that?
Women compete to be seen as nice the way men compete to be seen as strong. It is readily apparent that there has been a powerful selection effect in the past. The selection effect is still plainly visible right now, though its strength is less obvious: letting the mask of niceness slip in public has very severe consequences to female desirability today.
It doesn't mean anything that the most-desired women aren't consistently the nicest except that desirability is not a one-dimensional phenomenon. The most-desired women are consistently very nice, and when women are seen not to be nice, other people lower their opinion of those women.
Thanks. I don't disagree that 'niceness' is a generally-desired quality in women, but I do disagree that 'the most-desired women are consistently very nice'. And I disagree especially strongly with the version(s) of this claim that I think would be required to undercut my point in the quoted passage, which was merely that niceness is far from sufficient to make a man attractive to women *or* a woman attractive to men.
(There's some ambiguity in the way we're talking about 'desirability' here, and I think that for both genders the balance of desired traits varies depending on whether it's a question of pure sexual attraction or long-term relationship prospects. But to me it seems clear that physical attractiveness is weighted somewhere between quite heavily and overwhelmingly heavily by most straight guys in almost all sexual and romantic contexts. And, just as a big tough hot guy will get lots of credit for showing a hint of kindness, a beautiful woman has to do much less to be considered 'nice' than a woman who isn't beautiful.)
Uh, there is not that much competition among women to see who can be the nicest. The real competition is who can be the most attractive. Some of that is about being "nice," but most of it is about being literally conventionally attractive (healthy hair/skin/body weight/grooming presentation/etc).
Which was the reason for the pointed question about how much straight men actively desire "niceness," which is to say, not nearly as much as they desire physical beauty.
Believe me, if nerdy young men cared about mere niceness enough to avoid holding out for the physical embodiment of their waifus, they'd have way more partners.
FWIW, my major selection fault is that I wanted a truly smart (but not quite brilliant) woman. I.e. what I saw as my intellectual equal. It took me a long time to realize that this was not the correct target. What I needed was someone who could balance my weaknesses. I feel quite foolish that it took me so long. Together we were a lot more effective, because we reinforced each others weaknesses, and lent our strengths to each other.
Because they are terrified by other women ostrasizing them. I know women who have suffered it: it can be terrible. Pretty women have also expressed to me that they need to work hard to avoid this.
Hm. I've of course heard the phrase "toxic masculinity", and have sometimes wondered what the gender-flipped version would be: what is "toxic femininity"? This feels like a good start.
> Women are also more likely to signal that they’re kind, agreeable, and concerned about others. When they gossip, or transmit negative information about each other, they often couch it in terms of concern. For instance, instead of calling Veronica a drunk slut, a woman is more likely to say, “I’m worried Veronica’s alcohol consumption is getting out of control. I’m worried about her sexual health.”
It's amusing that you accuse males of "turning this into a gender war", when many (most?) of feminists are avowed conflict theorists, and much of their dogma is about how males are evil, collectively and individually, to the extent that they don't renounce their "toxic masculinity". That those unfortunate clueless nerds are consistently being bullshitted about what women find attractive isn't a tragic oversight, it's a deliberate campaign of misinformation based on wrong premises in service of incoherent goals.
I feel like you're zeroing in on one phrase and ignoring the rest of what I said. The 'gender war' thing was about how *some* guys jump from the frustration/disappointment of realising that just showing up and being nice isn't enough to make you attractive, and that some transparently awful guys get lots of female attention, straight to something like 'fuck women, they're shallow and hypocritical!', instead of stopping and thinking and realising that we're all shallow in that sense, and most of us are hypocrites if all that takes is failing to be completely open and accurate about what drives our preferences.
You'll see from the final paragraph of my original comment that I'm very critical of some people on the 'feminist' side. 'Feminist' covers a huge swathe of people, though, and I think like most groups they're mostly pretty normal, in good ways and bad. There are certainly more charitable interpretations available than 'deliberate campaign of misinformation'; even if you think it's bad and dumb and hits the wrong targets, it's pretty understandable that they'd want to try to do some social engineering to get men (collectively) to treat women (collectively) better.
I agree that your description of that dynamic is basically correct. My point is that the gender war has been there all along, it negatively impacts both men and women, some of them disproportionately, and some of thus impacted may unproductively lash out in response. But such reactions don't mean that they 'started it'.
I also agree that most people are basically good and have good intentions, including those who identify as feminist. But if they act according to a misguided ideology, they can do much harm, and if they instead believe themselves to be making things better, then so much the worse for everyone!
In general, my perspective on progressive movements is that they correctly determine that there are problems, but their theoretic apparatus is woefully inadequate to even correctly diagnose them, never mind developing solutions. Sadly, there are no competitive alternatives, in no small part because progressives are very good at crushing dissent. And so things are going to get worse, before (if ever?) they'll get better.
100% this, especially the part how attacking nice guys is just doubling down on the just-world fallacy. "A nice guy will get the girl." "If you didn't get the girl, that proves that you were never genuinely nice!"
Rather than: "Being nice is a desirable human quality, but it is different from being attractive. The attractive guy will get the girl, and then another girl, and then another girl. He may or may not be nice. If he is nice, the girls will appreciate it. If he is not nice, the girls will complain about it, but they will fuck him anyway." Obvious in hindsight, but you need to overcome a *lot* of social programming first.
I am no Buddha, so whatever emotion you mention, I probably have some of it. Were you suggesting that it clouds my judgment on this topic?
Do you think that, as a factual statement, attractive guys who are low on niceness (not literal psychopaths, just the ordinary selfish kind) do *not* in fact get laid more than the unattractive nice guys?
Hey, I didn't say you were wrong. Actually, it was much worse (but I don't want to post details publicly). But that's not the part I regret most. Sometimes you lose; that's life.
The thing I am most angry about is all the other opportunity that I missed, because I was distracted by cultural memes that made me stupid. At some moment I was exposed to competing memes and realized my mistakes, but I am never going to get that lost time back.
Now I have a wife and two kids, and we mostly live in harmony, while other people's marriages around us are falling apart. So, all things considered, I am doing much better than I expected.
But when I think about the past, I sometimes feel a desire to punch someone, except there is no one specific to punch. The brainwashing was so decentralized. (To be fair, there were also some clues, but I was too autistic to notice them.)
Also, there is a concern on a meta level -- reasoning by analogy, I wonder what other things am I possibly missing now, that I will similarly regret in ten or twenty years?
Being nice is a part of being attractive. It isn't the only part, or the most important part. Looks, finances, personality, habits, culture, and religion all play a role in attractiveness.
Indeed, when I was young I often tended to conflate "X is not sexually attracted to me" and "X thinks I'm a bad person"... until I noticed that I myself was not sexually attracted to certain people who I still didn't think were bad people.
I hate to say, but some nerds are also not that nice, or want a specific girl but don't notice other ones flirting with them. A poetic illustration of this, overheard in the cafeteria on campus: two guys complaining about how unattractive campus girls were, while being very very nerdy far from paragons of suave masculinity themselves. Like, what? Very out of touch.
I absolutely hate and despise both sides of this "debate" more than I can possibly describe. Beyond all the other vulgar and hedonistic and sexist and "all men/women are identical" collectivistic crap, what tops it all is both groups' absolute refusal to apply their own claimed principles with the tiniest pretence of consistency.
On the one hand you have the "incels" who condemn women for dating despicable men instead of nice ones. Quite apart from the fact that by "women" they mean a particular subset of women (and by referring to women as a whole they not only outrageously insult every woman who doesn't do that and would never want to, but ALSO let the women who do off the hook, letting them pretend this is a feature of women generally instead of a problem with them personally, much like how men who cheat or trawl bars for sex with strangers would love to pretend they're just "being men" rather than being personally disgusting people)...they don't even apply this condemnation to themselves (at least that I've ever seen). They have no shame about being attracted to the very same horrible, shallow and very much not nice women that they complain about. I would LOVE to live in a society where both violent aggressive "players" and selfish vapid "I do whatever the fuck I want" feminists are totally ostracised from the company of all decent people and could never hope to get the attraction of any member of the opposite sex other than their fellow lowlife animals. And the incels could be trying to create such a society by, most importantly, committing to reserving their own sexual interest for the nice, compassionate women who deserve it (regardless of their physical attractiveness). If they would do that, making the effort to get their own lusts under control and choose their partners by moral and intellectual human qualities instead of shallow animalistic ones, they would deserve respect as a movement and have the right to demand women do the same. As it is, by condemning only other people's shallowness while maintaining their own right to be as shallow and hedonistic as they want, they're some of the most despicable people in society.
And then you have the "feminists" who insist on their unconditional "right" to date whoever they want and sleep with whoever they want. Okay, while a person who conciously and shamelessly asserts their right to be completely selfish and not care the slightest bit about other people's feelings is obviously a truly disgusting person, there's certainly a decent argument that society should give people the right to be as disgusting and horrible as they want without violently coercing anyone else. But guess what? No one is in any way infringing your rights. If you are allowed to sleep with whoever you want, then other people are allowed to criticise you for it! And that's what you're complaining about: other people (like the incel movement) exercising THEIR right to disapprove of your behaviour and call you nasty names. That's not an infringement of your rights, that's not coercing you in any way; freedom doesn't mean freedom from criticism. I mean, yes, their condemnations are hypocritical and hateful and sexist and unfair, but so what? You just told me nobody is entitled to anyone else's consideration! That nobody has any obligations to care about others' feelings, and has an unconditional right to be as selfish, as vulgar, and as indifferent to the effects of their behaviour on others as they want. So what can you possibly complain about?
There are two choices. We could have a society where people are expected to balance their own desires with concern for other people's feelings, and avoid behaviour (sexual, verbal or otherwise) that significantly hurts others. Or we could have a society where everyone can do whatever they want (that isn't violent) and no one has any obligation to care about anyone else. I would prefer the first but am open to the necessity of the second. Only one thing is not negotiable: that whatever principles you espouse, you apply them even, and in fact ESPECIALLY, when they don't benefit you personally. To those who don't do that, who proudly assert that they have no obligation to care about others but others do have an obligation to care about them, all I can say is: you are scum. You are filth. And you are literally everything that is wrong with the world.
There can be something more specific than lacking social skills. My own experience when I was in my early 20s is that for years I didn't learn how to show sexual interest to a woman, so instead I'd end up with lots of platonic friendships. Which I did genuinely enjoy, so general social skills were being learned and practiced, just not the romantic ones. There was also a clear element of pride, in the sense of "I'm not going to change myself just for the sake of pursuing romantic interest".
Extroverts frequently fail to model or understand introverts, leading to the mistake being made here. Which is understandable, but leads to a lot of harm done to introverts by well-intentioned extroverts.
Introverts are not hermits. We value social connection, support, and community. We have a need for deep connections (of which "healthy, genuine friendships" are an important type), just like extroverts do.
The thing that sets us apart is that we find casual interactions exhausting rather than energizing. This leads us to take what can be described as a "depth-first" approach to relationship building, focused on developing a few high-quality relationships first, then expanding out. In contrast, many extroverts take a "breadth-first" approach, acquiring a wide variety of basic relationships, then building up a few of them.
Introverts (whether they're nerds/geeks or not) can and do put in great effort to maintain their relationships. In fact, they have a higher risk of over-committing to those relationships (since forming new ones is more expensive for them). The idea that introverts as a group place a disproportionate burden on their partners is both false and harmful.
It is incorrect to conflate nerds and nice guys. Scott should know better.
Nice guy syndrome refers to men who have been over-socialised to try to please everyone around them all the time. There are several risk factors including the usual childhood abuse and prolonged bullying, clingy/dependent mothers and emotionally distant, absent, or demanding fathers. Comedy is a fairly common coping mechanism - the class clown probably had nice guy syndrome. Other nice guys just do what they are told and never develop a personality.
Dial this back a few notches and you have the Hollywood nice guy. "A regular guy, with a regular job, who just wants to provide for his family".
Nerds, on the other hand, are stereotypically on the spectrum and oblivious to others' social demands. Unpredictable, unhygenic, unpleasant, uncomprehending, uncommunicative, not nice.
Regarding Jaynes' book: Your interpretation of his theory, that theory of mind varies broadly between cultures so that some cultures considered supernatural or divine what we think of as just part of the human mind, resembles substantially the thesis of "The Greeks and the Irrational", by classicist Eric Dodds, which makes a similar though less broad (&, I think, better justified) argument focusing specifically on Ancient Greece. (That book can be found at https://archive.org/details/E.R.DoddsTheGreeksAndTheIrrational ; the relevant parts are chapter 1, which argues that the ancient Greeks thought unusual impulses & some strong emotions were sent by the gods; chapter 3, regarding the ancient Greek view of "madness" (μανίᾱ) & its relation to oracles & poetic inspiration; chapter 4, regarding dreams & their interpretation; & appendix 1, which argues that the ancient Dionysiac dancing rituals involved a culture-bound mental illness similar to the medieval dancing mania.) Dodds' book was written about 20 years before Jaynes published his "Origin of Consciousness", & parts of Jaynes' argument, as you summarize it, seem probably to have been based on it.
My impression of the post is more along the lines of:
> Lead is bad. Early studies tried to quantify exactly how bad, and they found a lot of really noisy data about lead versus IQ specifically. (Lead poisoning is still bad for health in a lot of other ways.) Now that lead has been largely removed from our lives, subsequent research into lead vs. IQ has now become hopelessly confounded with other correlates of lower IQ, such as socioeconomic status. It is now trivially easy for a researcher to "show" that a tiny amount of lead is "responsible" for a huge decrease in IQ. Simply study a poor neighborhood that is slightly more polluted than the surrounding area - and blame it all on lead. So we really have no idea exactly how bad lead is for IQ specifically. Some X amount of lead exposure could cause a drop of 10 IQ points - or it could be some tiny amount like 0.5 points. Nobody really knows.
Lead poisoning is very bad, but it's also pretty much been solved everywhere outside of a few specific areas. The "low lead exposure" control groups of the 70s and 80s had an order of magnitude higher lead exposure than the "high lead exposure" experimental groups of today. Continuing lead abatement efforts are still a good thing where we find it - but at some point you need to declare victory and move on to other issues.
This is a total non-argument. Why bother commenting if you're not going to actually engage with what Cremieux is saying or at least post some studies that confirm your claims?
Do you mean they are fabricating or altering their data in order to change their results to something favorable to their side?
Or just that they *have* a side, and don't conceal that fact?
Because honestly, I think we're just talking about the latter here, and I think that state of affairs is good actually.
It would be kind of insane to expect that people who publish in political science journals have no personal opinions or affiliations regarding politics. Most people do, and you'd expect teh people who care enough about politics to devote their life to studying it to be even more so.
So given that they're going to be like normal people in terms of having political opinions and affiliations, I'd rather they signal them honestly and openly, than carefully conceal and obfuscate them with fakey language choices and caveats.
As long as they don't make unsupported empirical claims, they're doing science in my book.
I have to disagree with your claim that they're doing science. The loaded language makes it clear that they are activists first, and scientists second.
Is it a trapped prior, or merely not much evidence to cause the existing prior to be reevaluated?
To be fair, sociology is a lot more difficult than quantum theory or thermodynamics, because people will intentionally try to produce results that (in some way) benefit them. So replication is nearly impossible.
How does it sound like this in any way? It would sound like that if he was discussing evidence showing PolSci to NOT be biased and he was dismissing it. In reality, he's discussing an example of research which trivially demonstrates a clear ideological slant. Are you sure you understand what 'trapped priors' are?
43. The post didn't age particularly well. It uncritically repeated the claim that Alexander Acosta claimed he was told to "leave [Epstein] alone." The source of this claim is Vicky Ward, a known liar.* It also repeats uncritically the claim against Alan Dershowitz, who sued his accuser and forced her to say "I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz."
Ultimately, I see nothing about the Epstein case that needs explanation beyond "rich man paid some teenage girls for sex." That's the simplest explanation and the simplest explanation is probably correct. No Mossad, no CIA, no blackmail scheme necessary.
What’s the UK law regarding something getting decriminalized after the fact? Some places have a law that any actions are to be judged according to the mildest law between the time the action was committed and today, is UK among such countries?
> Ultimately, I see nothing about the Epstein case that needs explanation beyond "rich man paid some teenage girls for sex." That's the simplest explanation and the simplest explanation is probably correct.
That's fine, but how did he get so well-connected? Why were the likes of Bill Clinton flying around on his private plane?
It was my understanding that Epstein was involved with a lot of charities. If that is true, that's a perfectly adequate explanation for how he met Bill Gates.
Still doesn't seem weird? He was a financial advisor for rich people, he wanted to make connections with rich people, probably he also just liked hanging out with cool famous people.
From what I've read, he does not appear to have been a normal "financial advisor for rich people". He was connected first and the mechanism for turning that into cash was by billing himself as a financial advisor, a financial advisor who got absurd sweetheart deals on the finances he managed.
Right. We still don't know this, and I don't understand why some journalist never bothered to figure it out. Were journalists scared away from this story by someone?
>The thing that needs explaining is where his money came from
Does it? The wikipedia article on it has a whole section on his early career, saying he started out as an options trader and Bear Stearns and quickly moving over to become a financial advisor for their wealthy clients specializing in tax mitigation strategies. Reading between the lines (especially the bit about him being pushed out of Bear Stearns over unspecified SEC rule violations and starting his own form after), I suspect he was doing a bunch of stuff in his financial advisor roles that were legal grey areas at best and may have shaded over into stuff like money laundering and outright tax evasion. It also sounds like he was at least peripherally (and quite possibly centrally) involved in the Towers Financial ponzi scheme, although he managed to escape prosecution or liability for his role in it.
All in all, it sounds like the sort of career path that could plausibly lead to someone becoming very rich and getting a ton of connections with other very-to-extremely rich people.
I was puzzled by the CIA angle, since it seemed to undermine the basic point. Instead of "he used a network of sex slaves to entrap people for his personal benefit, and one of them had him killed", now it's "he used a network of sex slaves to entrap people for the US government's benefit, and the US government definitely wants you to believe that he killed himself". Somehow this theory doesn't strike me as less suspicious.
Epstein had a substantial ahem media library at his NYC home (a seven story townhouse gifted to him by Leslie Wexner, owner of Victoria's Secret). Said library was removed by FBI agents towards the end and has not been seen again.
Hmm. Ghislane is in jail for sex trafficking and underage sex. And trafficking seems like a fairly big thing for a connected socialite to be involved with.
Einstein was being investigated for the same thing. There are multiple cases against the Epstein estate (by Jane Does who are scared to give their names for whatever reasons).
Epstein was clearly given a very light sentence in the first trial, the Florida AG at the time says he was told to bring one sample case for reasons of national security, and even then the judge gave the lightest sentence for statutory rape possible, there wasn’t even an imprisonment.
Thems the facts. Make up your own conspiracies to join the dots.
"Hmm. Ghislane is in jail for sex trafficking and underage sex. And trafficking seems like a fairly big thing for a connected socialite to be involved with."
Sex trafficking is just the current year word for prostitution. It wasn't proven in court that she "trafficked" women for anything other than Epstein and Maxwell.
"Epstein was clearly given a very light sentence in the first trial, the Florida AG at the time says he was told to bring one sample case for reasons of national security"
No, Vicky Ward claimed that someone told her that the Florida AG said that. See the New Yorker link for how much credence you should give to her.
Trafficking is not prostitution, which can be voluntary. It’s trafficking people who are forced into prostitution. everybody here was underage and couldn’t consent.
“ It wasn't proven in court that she "trafficked" women for anything other than Epstein and Maxwell.”
She trafficked underage children. No need for scare quotes.
I didn’t say anything else about anybody who visited the island. I have my suspicions but they may not have participated, although it is hard to believe they didn’t know something. The island was colloquially called Lolita island after all.
I don’t care about vicky ward. Presumably she is being monstered by the kinds of people who want to bury this.
There are many other underaged victims of sex trafficking here. Even the 4 in the Maxwell case were too scared to give their names, as were the many witnesses in the original trial, one of whom fled to Australia.
> Trafficking is not prostitution, which can be voluntary. It’s trafficking people who are forced into prostitution.
Note that you are disagreeing with the legal usage, in which trafficking and prostitution are synonymous and the most frequent kind of trafficking prosecution is prosecuting a single woman for trafficking herself.
> 4: How is crypto going for sex workers? Sex workers have limited and erratic access to normal financial infrastructure due to a combination of government harassment and corporate reputation concerns. Crypto seemed like a solution. But the increasing centralization of crypto under eg exchanges has given it limited value; the same parties who strongarmed banks into dropping sex workers can strongarm crypto exchanges, or close offramps. I’m hopeful that in ten years crypto will have gotten its act together enough to be actually decentralized in a way that avoids this failure mode.
The more fundamental issue: Crypto's UX sucks. It's very much a 'get good scrub' culture which in turn makes it hard for the average person to get into. Central exchanges will let you sign up with one click and guide you through the process. But then it's centralized. This is widely acknowledged as a problem in the industry but it doesn't seem to be attracting much funding or excitement. And the big exchanges won't fund it.
As for sex workers specifically: Anyone working on such projects is taking a large reputational hit and are subject to potential legal risk. The traditional way that you make up for this by paying for them more. That's what drugs does. But neither prostitution nor porn is hugely profitable or a large industry. So you have limited revenues and a bunch of people who need high pay to make up for the risks. You have a few companies at this intersection: OnlyFans, Mindgeek, etc. But only a few. And they're constantly tempted to increase revenues by becoming respectable like OF tried.
I recall Robin Hanson saying (in a post I can't find now) that crypto developers are really into technical problems, and disinterested in the practical stuff that gets a business customers/users.
I will point out that, even in the age of instant online communication, if I want to convert my Pounds Sterling into American Dollars, it is vastly easier and more reliable to go to a professional currency exchange rather than to find an American willing to buy my pounds for their dollars. This seems like its always going to be true, and while I could imagine some decentralised solution this seems to be one of the main reasons centralised exchanges exist for crypto.
Definitely - but a big part of why at least some people want crypto is to have a decentralized currency. If it centralizes for the same reasons as other currency exchanges is a negative for them, because then you're dealing with the other problems of crypto and haven't really gotten the primary benefit.
The way you lay it out here implies a business case for bridging the gap between "git gud scrub" and consumers who want decentralized crypto. Back in the 1990s, Phil Zimmerman's PGP kit filled that gap for encrypted email - you still needed to be comfortable around a Unix prompt, but that was all you needed, and it wasn't THAT high of a bar. So the market has a demand for a Phil Zimmerman for currency. Or maybe a Phil+NDgT partnership.
It's worth examining why such a thing hasn't manifested yet (or if it has but hasn't attained mass awareness). Is the market too small even now, for probability to have produced a candidate? Is there too much incentive for a Phil to just make a central exchange and just turn into a Bankman-Fried? Are too few people able to run their own "neighborhood exchange"? Something else?
1. The market was hugely distorted by the amount of money dumped into it over the past few years. Why bother with nitty gritty when you can just fundraise a bazillion dollars?
2. The incentives of developers run towards making new or better currencies and driving adoption or things like exchanges. These are easier to monetize and have bigger transaction volumes due to the way crypto works. This leads to...
3. A wallet-like experience that's not really a wallet subsidized by those other, more profitable businesses.
Now, this is fine in isolation. But it does mean that real peer to peer transactions are not a really common ability despite it being key to crypto's promise. The few areas where large scale adoption has been driven it works pretty well. But these are usually not as fantastically profitable as FTX.
Crypto UX is fine. Social recovery wallets like Loopring and Argent exist, and converting crypto to cash infrastructure exists all over the world and is quite efficient. It's really unfortunate, that you can't e.g. "buy a house" with crypto, (same as with cash), but one would be fine covering their day to day expenses I guess
Hard disagree that it's fine or efficient. The truth is that setting up a bank account or Coinbase account, in terms of UX, is much better than self-serve options right now. As is withdrawing money, spending it, etc. You can see this in the degree to which even people newly entering the financial system prefer traditional methods. Now, some of that is momentum. But if crypto really were the superior experience you'd see more 18 year olds or immigrants and less tech-y types as a proportion.
> 8: Related: AI art has gone from copying humans to inventing entirely new styles.
Is this new? One of the first things I did to toy around with some of the AI image generators was make a utility that generated QR codes in images. You'd have a picture of like a city or a woman with a blotchy dress or something but if you put it in front of a camera it'd detect the QR code. It was just a toy but it seems these are the same thing: the ability to embed coded information into a generated image. In this case a spiral or some text. Which, I'll point out, is not entirely new.
I want to do this with a real building, or a real woman in a real dress. It doesn't look like a QR code but when you take a photo of it then you go straight to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
It wasn’t obvious to me til I saw it, but now it’s so immediately obvious every time I take another look, I can’t believe it didn’t see it at first glance.
> 13: Unfortunately related: Anti-Ukraine-war website Grayzone says that GoFundMe has frozen their account (ie stolen all their money). They’ve been doing this for years for anti-woke sites, but anti-war sites feels like an escalation. I continue to think crypto is an important safety valve against this increasingly-used tool of control.
Not familiar with the specifics of this case. But this kind of thing is one of the reasons I support government bank accounts in addition to things like crypto. Basically something like mobile postal banking. If you have a legal right to a bank account that can transact from the government then that is probably more secure than a private institution that can kick you out for whatever reason it pleases. And if there's explicit state control this often makes it easier to combat. You could, for example, pass a law about the right to transact through these accounts and then there'd be an outcry if you were denied it.
Yes, it's not infinitely secure. But it's part of a wider strategy of introducing more ways to transact: crypto and private banking and your government account and so on. It raises the coordination costs of kicking someone out of the system entirely. And, as an added bonus, would greatly simplify the distribution of things like welfare.
>>> If you have a legal right to a bank account that can transact from the government then that is probably more secure than a private institution that can kick you out for whatever reason it pleases.
In a world where Operation Chokepoint is a real thing, "legal right" is doing a lot of work.
Yes, it is. But what's easier: figuring out a way to completely restrain the bureaucracy under a president who wants to use its power to do something nefarious (left or right) or getting Congress to pass a law and then suing under it?
The government already has the power. If you want to fight to eliminate it or restrain it go ahead. But I like my chances of reviving this kind of banking better than yours of completely dismantling the administrative state. And it doesn't really give the government that much power: the account would exist but you could simply choose not to use it.
I am not arguing for completely disrupting the administrative state, I just see far more historical abuse by government actors than by competing corporations. And no, the government doesn't have the power to shut down private accounts now, but they surely would for the government accounts.
I think the point is it is easier to get the government to change its position than a corporation, which can be both a blessing and a curse, but it is nice to have the option.
> 23: India is discussing changing its name to “Bharat” (the Hindi word for India) on some level. Unconfirmed rumors about Pakistan being interested in claiming the name “India” for itself. No word yet on who would take “Pakistan”, but I hear Macedonia is looking for a new name.
Reminder to the voters of Macedonia that one of their options was literally "Better Greece." Still disappointed they didn't choose that. Macedonia mostly got in because it was a center of Russian aligned hacking, misinformation, and intelligence activity and letting it in let NATO clear them out. So they did almost literally troll their way into NATO. Might as well ride that wave.
I still don't understand why, under the same logic, the Republic of Ireland isn't forced to change its name to Republic of Southern Ireland. Ireland is, after all, an island, which is only partially covered by the Republic of Ireland.
Similarly, should the country of Singapore change its name to "Singapore and its minor outlying islands"? E.g. Sentosa isn't on the island of Singapore.
On the one hand, the genetic differences between the southern balkan states and Turkey are so minutely small that this is a fair statement in this narrow domain. But on the other hand there is a real sense in which the genetic changes in Greece led to (or at least accompanied) a dilution of 'Greek' culture to become 'Orthodox Balko-Slavic' culture. Cf. Barbarian Slavs vs Ancient Greeks (genetically and culturally very different, pan-Indo-European pantheons excepting) to Modern southern Slavs and modern Greeks (genetically and culturally pretty similar).
And in general the idea that genetics doesn't matter to culture after a few generations is barmy! See: Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean/Northern Europe/Middle East, Indian diaspora in Caribbean, South Africa, East Africa etc. Whether you're a believer of HBD/innate traits or whatever or just think genetics is like a ID number, genetics similarity IS correlated with cultural similarity because a genetic gap is a family gap, a kinship gap. Just seemed like an odd statement to throw in!
The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible, and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.
ARTICLE 2
It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish Nation. That is also the entitlement of all persons otherwise qualified in accordance with law to be citizens of Ireland. Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.
ARTICLE 3
1 It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island. Until then, the laws enacted by the Parliament established by this Constitution shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws enacted by the Parliament that existed immediately before the coming into operation of this Constitution.
2 Institutions with executive powers and functions that are shared between those jurisdictions may be established by their respective responsible authorities for stated purposes and may exercise powers and functions in respect of all or any part of the island."
The Republic of Ireland doesn’t exist as a country, although it suffices as a description of the country which is called Ireland. Any confusion with the island of the same name is coincidental.
Of course it exists as a country. It's not the country's official name, but so what? Outside of specialised diplomatic and legal contexts, people very rarely use the exact legal name for a country. We say "I'm going to Germany on holiday", not "I'm going to the Bundesrepublik Deutschland."
I'm reasonably sure at least 90% of New Zealanders don't know the official name: the Realm of New Zealand. I've never encountered it anywhere outside of Wikipedia.
> 29: Re…lated? Blogger/model Aella is offering aella.ai, an “AI girlfriend” based on her, as the flagship product of a company (?) that will help influencers create AI chatbot girlfriends based on themselves. I haven’t seen a lot of uptake yet - my trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)
Paid LLM texting? This is like six year old technology. The state of the art includes images, voice, and video. Mostly offered as a combination where there's a real person but, when they're not online, you can get your fix by talking to an interactive double. (There are a few purely fictional ones but they mostly seem to be less successful. Unless they have a human behind them.) Though it's mostly used for more prosaic tasks than blogging/modeling.
LLM texting or messaging is so simple people trade free bots of book characters. I've done it as a hobbyist for things like conversation practice or to work as a note taker.
I'd be interested to know if it does or not. It's not advertised anywhere. (I assumed it doesn't because it's not mentioned anywhere on site or in the TOS.) But if there is something more advanced I'd love to know more about the tech side.
On the whole it does look a bit primitive. You pay through a direct stripe link.
I tried Aella.ai with great interest. At first there was sort of banter and interaction (she's a cat person, I'm a dog person), but pretty soon it degenerated into a spam message asking me to pay $5 for a sexy pic. I mean – that was the only response to anything I typed. It was disappointing actually. I felt dirty and violated, and not in a good way. I think it needs a lot of work not to just be porn spam.
They are the locale you get your money and fame from. (Really. I don't mean to say that they're in the locale. They are the locale. They like you, and that's why you're famous. If you try to sell them something, they will be receptive to that.)
I'm not sure that I'm following what you're trying to say?
But the toy is simply another thing that they pay you money for. I guess your point is that it would be less money than in the counterfactual, but this doesn't seem obvious.
If I ever get rich (ask me in 5 years) there's a ton of social science I want to do. Totally outside of academia or IRB review boards, no interest in formal publishing, just to learn shit with legit sample sizes and post on substack.
Fwiw this is already a thing in china, to the extent there are people who make a living pretending to be the AI boyfriend (although in this case it's less AI and more 'scripted dating game' but the distance isn't far)
On Epstein, I always thought the conspiracy was supposed to be that someone killed him by getting the suicide-watch interrupted and allowing him to commit suicide.
That's pretty close to my pet theory (that the guards and others responsible for stopping him from killing himself weren't very motivated to do a good job of it), but isn't the standard conspiracy theory as I've heard it. The usual theory seems to be that some people who he had criminal dirt on (the Clintons are the suspects I've heard mentioned most often) had him killed to stop him from implicating them and passed it off as a suicide.
For the Clintons in particular, the theories often seem to tie in with the earlier conspiracy theories around the 1993 suicide of long-time Clinton associate Vince Foster, which alleged that he was murdered to prevent him from testifying against the Clintons in the Whitewater investigation.
This seems much harder to defend: the argument for why it's credible he was murdered is "people rarely commit suicide but there were a lot of rich people motivated to kill him". If you assume he wanted to commit suicide, the prior on his success is no longer especially low (I don't expect suicide watch prison guards to be especially competent), so it's now a low-prior theory again.
"During the aggregated period of 2000–19, the average suicide rate in local jails was highest among persons who were white (86 suicides per 100,000 white inmates)"
The base rate for targeted assassinations is much lower. And if you're going to fall back on the obvious motive for assassination, pray consider that there's an obvious motive for suicide at work here as well.
That's high in the sense of being high compared to background rates, but still a low prior. Probably high enough for vanilla suicide to be the likeliest explanation here though.
Certainly possible, but implies that *all* of the people involved were also really bad at their jobs. Cameras not working, no one doing any checks despite that literally being their job, etc.
I guess for a conspiracy you could also combine it with a "paid to look the other way" while someone told Epstein he needed to kill himself or something worse would happen to him. I'm not sure how different that is from the theory that someone literally murdered him.
Presumably their bosses, who in turn would care because of lawsuits and/or some kind of professional backlash (lost job, prestige, whatever).
You're right that there are too many layers between the general public (who were upset at this outcome but by and large were powerless to change it) and those implementing policy for us to count on them all being good at their jobs.
I understand this place had not had a successful suicide in 21 years. Whether attempts were just that rare or they were good at preventing it, no idea. I could definitely see them getting lax in all that time as a plausible alternative to something intentional and nefarious.
"The 123 federal prisons in the United States need roughly $2 billion worth of "maintenance" and most are "aging and deteriorating," according to a DOJ inspector general report.
In three prisons, the conditions are so bad they had to be closed -- including the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan, which held Jeffrey Epstein prior to his death.
"We're seeing crumbling prisons," DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz told Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. "We're seeing buildings that we go into that have actually holes in the ceilings in multiple places, leading to damages to kitchens, to doctor's offices to gymnasiums. And they're not being fixed.""
You know, I always assumed that the murder theory was just a meme ready version of, "someone came by and let Epstein know that the guards were out to lunch and if he didn't want to face the consequences now was the best chance he was going to get." Murder just seems so redundant for a man in his position, i.e., on suicide watch (!). This theory has the distinct advantage that the available evidence about cameras and guards isn't evidence of a cover-up but direct evidence of the crime.
But I readily admit I'm low-information about the event. It just doesn't seem very relevant to me.
Same. Also, "Don't try to hard to interfere if he looks like a suicide risk" is a message I can totally imagine being transmitted in a law enforcement institution. And if it's initiated by somebody who knew he was depressed, it's pretty effective.
The reason I am (very mildly and with only intellectual interest) in favor of the conspiracy version, is that I find this kind of message to be completely plausible, while having the subject of an extremely famous criminal case without a proper suicide watch quite a bit less plausible.
Plausible, I suppose, but if so he didn't even try to cover his tracks. The simpler explanation is that Epstein's lawyer demanded that he be taken off suicide watch because Epstein asked to be taken off suicide watch.
And for those of you who don't know, "suicide watch" as normally implemented in US prisons is judicially-sanctioned torture by prolonged sleep deprivation. It isn't a matter of the guards being tasked to e.g. watch the prisoner through a low-light closed-circuit TV; it's the guards basically walking up to the cell and saying "hey, wake up, prove to us you aren't dead", every fifteen minutes, 24/7/forever, and every wake-up being logged to make sure the prisoner doesn't manage to sneak in any useful level of sleep. Any decent non-monstrous human being would want approximately every prisoner taken off that sort of suicide watch after no more than a day or two, even if they don't want the prisoners to commit suicide. The people who want prisoners on suicide watch are mostly prison administrators who don't want to deal with the paperwork of a suicide and don't care who gets hurt in the process.
This time, the decent human beings prevailed. And then nobody bothered to give Jeffrey Epstein any good reason to want to remain alive, because duh.
No; your normal bacteria cling to your teeth pretty tightly to prevent competition, so to apply the new bacteria, you have to brush very hard with a special solution to clear a niche for them. If you don't do that, they won't spread.
It's possible that in exactly the right situation, where someone had just taken antibiotics and been to the dentist for a cleaning and *then* got kissed, the bacterium could spread, but it should be pretty rare.
Also, the new bacterium will probably spread mother -> child, since newborns have no competing mouth bacteria.
The Epstein item has three links in it, all identical. I suspect you meant to link to three different postings, since I see it's a sequence (oh, THAT'S where that comes from [j/k]) and he backs off his position in later entries.
To the actual postings: although I'm not inclined to believe Epstein was murdered, I notice that the LW writer puts a lot of weight on "The Attorney General of the US himself inspected the tapes", without noting what anyone who's heard a little bit of conspiracy theorizing about it knows, which is that the AG at the time was Bill Barr, and Bill Barr's father, Donald, has this in his WP entry:
---
He was headmaster of the Dalton School from 1964 to 1974. During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time. In 1973, Barr published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. It has been noted that the plot of the novel anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his convicted and prosecuted accomplice(the list of politicians and celebrities involved in sex crimes remains hidden), Ghislaine Maxwell.
---
Like I say, I'm not inclined to buy the murder thing, but it's a really obvious counterpoint, and yeah, kind of a coincidence.
OK, I read further and he eventually does address this, at least...although he doesn't mention that Bill Barr was the AG whose personal examination of the jailhouse tapes he drew our attention to in his first posting.
The US attorney's office of the SDNY also reviewed the footage and said in an indictment, under oath, that nobody entered the tier where Epstein was. So SDNY would also have to be in on it, and this wouldn't make much sense because they're the ones who brought charges to begin with.
"During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time."
There used to be a lot less credentialism in the past.
I have to say that I don't know much about academic fraud or the Data Colada guys, but I saw a reference to this today and frankly it, itself, pattern-matches to me to "junk science that might have been right a couple of times but now is just spraying accusations everywhere", like that business with arson investigations that (it is said) are garbage and have convicted people of murder for no good reason, or "bite analysis", or "blood spatter analysis", all of which have good cases against them.
I recommend reading their analysis - it seems pretty damning to me. Harvard also says they've done a separation investigation and decided to suspend Gino.
On the automatic AI video translation thing… question for my fellow commenters and I’ll need one magic wand in the ask.
Let’s say there’s a very simple table somewhere that translates buzz words back into a format you agree with. I’ll use an older example that will hopefully have less emotional. One of the linked pairs in this table is PATRIOT ACT: GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE BILL. You can imagine other examples. Anytime someone has named something for an effect you disagree with just imagine there is an entry in this table that has the “spin machine” name and your more direct, blunt name.
Would you pay for a service that scrubbed the news for you so that as you watched videos they were filtered to replace the “spin machine” name with the “direct/blunt” name. So that when a politician or a news reporter tried to say “Patriot Act” you would instead hear “Government Surveillance” bill.
This hypothetical service would also let you know when this kind of filtering event was occurring but in this way whenever you were browsing random videos the names other than the ones you would prefer, which again are just magically in a table somewhere, are swapped out.
But this can expand your bubble to encompass the whole world! Everything will be safe and non-triggering and validating. Or, if you prefer, you can have some things translated such that the only realistic response would be "DIE NAZI SCUM!!!"...
I would agree if this wasn’t largely happening today in its own. Stick it in a system with rules, give people something to win or lose by being convincing and I think it’s a better system.
This doesn't sound useful at all. Firstly because it's totally dependent on the service's judgement for what counts as "emotive language" or not. Is the Patriot Act a "government surveillance bill" or a "national security bill"? Or perhaps an "anti-terrorism bill"? None of these are emotive per se, but your choice will emphasize one feature of the bill at the cost of another another.
Secondly, if I read about something online I want to know the actual name for it, because if I talk to other people about how the Government Surveillance Act violates our rights they're going to give me a blank stare.
Think of what the default state is. People you don’t know and don’t trust subtly manipulate language to message something you don’t want. Has that been useful to the people who do that?
"Patriot Act" refers to a specific law, though. There are many more bills that could be referred to as Government Surveillance Bill. One of the risks might be to lead the listener to believe, for instance, that the Patriot Act expiring would mean all government surveillance being ended.
Of course Republicans who say the election was stolen believe it. No one has ever taken serious and genuine steps to disabuse them of the claim. It was all a cacophony of "big lie" " most secure election ever" from the beginning. Which are just stupid and obviously not true. There are videos of people dumping ballots into boxes. Those are ILLEGAL votes, even if not FRAUDULENT, and once they were commingled the election should have been invalidated. The Atlanta counting situation is similar. The BOP is on the state to demonstrate its counting procedures are legitimate, not the other way around, you can't just do suspicious things and then shout "no proof" and convince anyone.
I don't really swim in those circles but I have totally seen several actual surveillance videos of "runners' showing up at ballot collect stations with dozens of ballots and dumping them in. I would presume some of them are people brining in mail in ballots from nursing homes or other places like that, but it does create a giant security hole. And it is certainly done in a suspicious way (they always seemed to be waiting until no one was around or late at night). At the same time I don't have much reason to think this sort of think isn't happening both ways, but the error bars on the election wildly outstrip the actual margin. I would bet huge money on that.
This is obviously a salaciously done video, but the moajor hosting companies seem to have purged/delisted most of the longer raw videos, but it is illustrative of what people would have been exposed to on youtube, twitter, etc right after the election.
Thanks. I didn't see any videos of the same person putting in more than 3-4 ballots at a time, which seems like someone bringing the ballots in for their family (which is legal). It looks like Georgia investigated some of the people filmed in that video and found that was what they were doing (see https://www.factcheck.org/2022/06/evidence-gaps-in-2000-mules/ )
I was going to write about 21 in a original comment, but here might a better place. But as a preamble I have to say that this demand for sources is non-symmetrically difficult to provide for. Attempts to discuss the issue with anything but abject dismissal has made videos purporting to show fraud of any kind extremely difficult to find. For example, claims of voter fraud was banned on Youtube. For years. Specifically for the United States 2020 election. Here's a random article from some place I've never heard of writing about it: https://www.engadget.com/youtube-removes-videos-with-us-election-fraud-claims-154726251.html
It should be noted that most other social media platforms had similar policies. Therefore I can't find videos of anything. They might still be on twitter somewhere, but good luck finding them. I will also state I don't particularly care about the videos personally, nor do I think they represent the substantive issue Clutzy is speaking about.
Now, as "voter fraud" is nebulous, videos of "people dumping ballots into boxes" is pretty vague. There were lots of videos that involved people doing things with ballots and boxes, but what was happening in them (both by those who believe something nefarious was going on, and those who do not) differs.
Videos of this type involved poll watchers being told that voting was done for the night, and then at some point more ballots being pulled out after they poll watchers had left. For those who have some kind of distrust, this sounds suspicious, as most people cannot recall voting stopping in the middle of the night prior to Trump being in office. The assumption is that ballot counters lied to get poll watchers out of the way so as to allow some kind of fraudulent handling.
This "fact check" alleges that actually, the poll workers were intending to leave but later returned to continue counting, and that the storage and retrieval of ballots is normal for such situations. The contention by Republicans that this so happened to mean that the poll watchers had not also returned is dismissed as basically irrelevant and not indicative of problems. I generally agree, but this is also what I would say if I had done something nefarious. Now, this is just one instance of this general type of "ballots and boxes" issue. This happened in multiple places. But they all follow the same general claim and response trend.
The second sort of videos involving people doing things with ballots and boxes probably refers to videos of ballot harvesting. Laws on ballot harvesting differ by state, and generally some Republicans will assume that something legally spurious is happening when one person is dumping multiple ballots into one box. Even with a video though, it's not immediately clear if it is, as the video could be from some time or place where nothing wrong is happening.
Moving past this specific and mostly pointless question, Clutzy's actual point is pretty much true. "Voter fraud" is nebulous. Do I believe voter fraud (illegally cast ballots by individuals) swung the 2020 election? Not really, though this seems to have not been properly appraised in certain states. Do I believe voter fraud (last minute changes to election law, some of which were illegal) swung the 2020 election? Yes. The distinction could be made by passing the word"fraud" through the celebration parallax and arriving at "fortification," as described by the vaunted Time article by Molly Ball, posted I believe on February 4th of 2021.
Unfortunately at this point I don't really have the time to go over all the cases. Because frankly, this whole thing is one big exercise in an isolated demand for rigor. Normal people just call it political bias. Several states were involved, and several issues were brought up in those states. There's a book I have not read about it, Rigged, by Mollie Hemingway. But for the sake of what you would call signal, I'll go through one state in broad strokes.
Pennsylvania passed Act 77, which introduced no-excuse mail-in voting. In addition, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that because of Covid, mail in ballots would be counted up to 3 days past election day, so long as they were postmarked prior to election day or the postmark was illegible.
To the first, Congressman Mike Kelly, among others, filed a case stating that the no-excuse mail-in voting Act 77 was unconstitutional under the state constitution, and required an amendment to the constitution. This is what we call "true." Initially counting was halted, but then the case was dismissed on the grounds that the case was brought in too late, as Act 77 was passed in 2019. It was noted by some that this sounds like a catch 22, as an attempt to sue prior to 2020 could easily be judged to lack standing, as there had yet to be an election to which there was an aggrieved party. As an aside, in March of this year, this exact chain of legal logic played out with Kari Lake's lawsuit in Arizona. That is, there was an attempt to dismiss it on the grounds that it was a question of policy that should have been brought forth earlier, but it was ultimately allowed to go forward because Kari Lake would lack standing prior to the election in question. Anyway, the point is that no decision was ever made in Pennsylvania on the case's merits.
To the second, The Pennsylvania Republican Party challenged the state supreme court's extended deadline for mail-in ballots. The challenge went to the US Supreme Court prior to the election, which deadlocked 4-4 on a stay or emergency injunction, as Amy Barret had not yet been elected to the supreme court. After the Pennsylvania election, the Pennsylvania Republican Party tried again, but the Supreme Court declined to intervene. What this means is that ultimately the Supreme Court changed an election rule, and then when questioned on if it had the legal authority to do so (it didn't), nobody even looked at the question.
As a bonus, the Texas Lawsuit brought by Ken Paxton dealt with Pennsylvania as well as three other states, on this question of the states having made changes that violated the constitution. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case, bizarrely claiming that Texas lacked standing in other state's elections. Alito and Thomas dissented to this, correctly pointing out that the US Constitution states that the Supreme Court's has among its primary purposes, dealing with cases in which one state sues another.
Ultimately you should see the pattern. There were legal issues with how states conducted their elections. And yet, they were dismissed on grounds that had nothing to do with the substantive claims under discussion. This is to say nothing of the Media's role in this.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but when one state sues another, “dealing with the case” includes determining if the plaintiff has standing, just like with any lawsuit. The majority did not rule that the Supreme Court couldn’t resolve the case--they were resolving the case. They ruled that the case couldn’t proceed because Texas didn’t have standing.
IANAL, but that fits my understanding of standing. What’s the legal argument that Texas, qua Texas, was harmed by anything Pennsylvania did? Texas’s ability to conduct its elections how it wanted and have its electoral votes counted wasn’t harmed. Paxton’s case was the equivalent of, say, Target suing Wal-Mart for underpaying an employee, on the ground that this underpayment made it easier for Wal-Mart to compete against Target. That isn’t how it works; the one harmed (in my hypothetical, the underpaid employee) has to file the lawsuit if it’s going to be heard.
If I had to guess, I'd say the argument is that any State could sue any other on grounds that any State now has to work under whatever elected official the rest helped get elected, and if other States' election processes are bad enough, it's not fair to the States that are trying to maintain their own processes. At worst, a State ought to be permitted to secede, and a lot of people have made that historically impractical.
Imagine if your HOA splits 49-49 on whether to pay to have a casino at the entrance, and the remaining 2% are so negligent that the 49 you oppose are able to cast their ballots for them. You can't sue the 49 for simply disagreeing with you, but you can sue the 2 for letting the process be subverted.
But in that scenario I am a member of the HOA, so I can imagine a legal argument that my rights to be represented are violated if legal procedures aren’t followed. I can’t sue some other HOA for not following a certain voting procedure, even if it leads to a result I don’t like. Federalism means that, at least when it comes to voting, the 50 states are not in the same HOA, all operating under the same rules.
You can imagine it going the other way. There are plenty of lawsuits from the left about supposed civil rights violations or gerrymandering or whatnot. But to my knowledge none of those lawsuits are filed by blue states, even though the blue states are affected by who runs Congress or who gets electoral votes. Because the blue states don’t have standing; there’s no constitutional principle that one state has a legal interest in another’s voting procedures.
I think that doesn't add up. Suppose you're in an HOA vote that doesn't follow the HOA's bylaws (this sort of came up for me just a few weeks ago), it's a potentially huge deal, esp. if you're now being obligated to pay extra dues, pay out of pocket for miscellaneous problems that arise from whatever that election determined, and so on. It might not convert into a lawsuit against members with lax security on their ballots, but it could certainly lead to an overturn of the vote. (In our case, it led to half the board stepping down.)
Alternately, look at it this way: if you enter a union that says it has elections for important things, you have a expectation that those elections work reasonably fairly. If that union said up front that elections were run by majority of subgroups, and any subgroup could run elections *any* it wanted - including one of the larger ones slanting the rules in favor of a small sub-subgroup of them - you'd probably want to know that before you joined that union. If that union instead said each subgroup ensured a majority vote and so you joined and then that union suddenly changed the rules right before a big election, you'd probably look pretty hard for a breach of contract.
Admittedly, the analogy is imperfect. It's hard to see an HOA election turning on household-level fraud, and Texas wasn't suing to have the election overturned (IIRC). Also, Texas would have to demonstrate real damages. That's impossible to show before the executive has actually executed anything - but if you agree that a given election is generally expected to be good news for some States and bad for others, then this is more an argument that the standing requirement itself is flawed than that Texas didn't have it. Or that the election process is.
So in the most forgiving interpretation, standing is of course an issue. Though certain interpretations of the relevant articles suggest that the Supreme Court doesn't have the ability to simply dismiss a case that falls under the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction. This was stated to be the case by Alito and Thomas, and this is what I was referring to when I vernacularly said "dealing with". Keep in mind, this is all a matter of constitutional law, and both the concept of standing and what to do when states sue each other are defined in the constitution. As are the issues at play, as it is argued that in violating their state constitution, Pennsylvania violated the US Constitution.
As a quick example of how the other side sees this, suppose that Pennsylvania's Supreme Court had ruled that actually, the state shall send twice the number of delegates as apportioned by their population to congress, mandatorily certified by the Governor. This is done, and the Texas AG says, "wait a minute, that is unconstitutional, both violating their state constitution and the US constitution."
You say, now hold on a minute. In what way has Texas's rights been violated? Texas has no standing.
If certain interpretations suggest the Supreme Court doesn't have the ability to dismiss a case for standing reasons, presumably certain other interpretations suggest it does. Do you stand by the claim that it was "bizarre" of the Court to abide by the latter interpretation?
I don't know what part of the US Constitution Pennsylvania is supposed to have violated, but I also don't see what relevance that has. Even a flagrant violation of the Constitution relies on standing: if I'm thrown in jail for giving a speech, and no one reads me my rights, and while I'm in there troops are quartered in my house without my permission…even with all of that, Texas can't sue on my behalf.
If Pennsylvania sent extra congresspeople or a third Senator, I assume the House or Senate would just refuse to seat them, and then it would be on these surplus Pennsylvanians to sue and lose. But if for some reason that didn't happen, I could see an argument why Texas would have standing: it's supposed to have 2/100 Senators, not 2/101, so the extra Pennsylvanian is diluting its voting power. I don't see the relevance to Paxton's suit, though, since Texas had exactly as much influence on the election as the Constitution said it was entitled to.
Yes, their argument was bizarre. The position that the Supreme Court can dismiss cases in which it has original jurisdiction is not that bizarre, but the argument justifying it in this case was bizarre in my view. Obviously a state in the Union should have standing in regards to the Constitution in which it and all other states are under. Why does it matter if I think it is bizarre or not? That's a rhetorical question, I'm pretty sure I can predict your answer.
The relevant part of the US Constitution would be Article II, Section 1.
Now, in your silly contrived situation, Texas probably could sue if you were in Texas at the time or were a citizen of Texas, and depending on circumstances there would be a variety of legal concepts that could be invoked in doing so. Perhaps parens patriae, for example, if you couldn't sue because you were being prevented from doing so, but even if not, the violation of the 3rd might be grounds for Texas to sue for direct harm to the state.
Paxton's suit was about Texas having its voting power diluted. This would fall under the previously mentioned "direct harm to the state" justification. That would be the relevance of my example, a case where it is extremely obvious, even to one such as yourself, that Texas would have standing for having its voting power diluted.
You have been informed of the argument and have been given analogies on the situation by me and elsewhere regarding the Texas Lawsuit and standing which you say you understand. And you understand that it's at least not legally spurious to assume that Texas would by default have its case heard regardless of standing. I believe the Supreme Court interpreted the constitution incorrectly and in a bizarre way. You apparently think otherwise. There doesn't seem to be much more to discuss.
There is a reason almost, if not all, government organizations require their employees to not only refrain from corruption, but also activities giving the appearance of corruption. First, the latter decays faith in the organization, and legitimacy is the government's largest currency; Second, such activities provide an environment for real corruption to thrive. By analogy, the cartels exploit the "refugee" situation at the border to engage in real human trafficking and drug smuggling.
Also, I simply don't think the anti-2020 fraud position is at all principled. If similar rule changes were implemented by Likud, and Bibi won a close election, then a J6 like event happened and he used it to start imprisoning the political opposition, I'd be hard pressed to find a Democrat not openly condemning him. In fact, I suspect we would be inundated with "Reichstag fire" comparisons. After all, who was the major winner from J6? The Democrats and Biden. Who, according to the Capital Chief of Police on J6 was routinely denying requests for overtime and National Guard backup? The Speaker's office (Pelosi). Maybe I am an optimist, but maybe the phrase "cui bono" would re-enter the press's lexicon in such a situation.
It's a general rule that disputes over election procedures should be resolved prior to the election. You can't challenge election procedures in court after the election has occurred unless you can show a valid reason for not challenging the election procedures earlier. This is true in Pennsylvania, and it is true in Arizona, where (I believe, although I can't find the actual ruling) the count in Kari Lake's lawsuit challenging the signature verification procedure was thrown out.
There is no catch 22, as is shown by the fact that Act 77 was challenged in court prior to the 2022 election, and Act 77 was ruled Constitutional. In other words, there was a ruling on the merits as soon as soon as someone asked for relief that the courts could actually provide: changing the election procedures going forward. Changing the procedures used to conduct an election that has already occurred would require a time machine, technology that the court does not have access to.
Your second case was apparently adjudicated on the merits all the way up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and was even reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to issue an injunction. Lot's of cases don't even make it as far as a state supreme court.
Your bonus case was thrown out because Texas was found to lack standing, but the Trump campaign had standing to raise the exact same issues.
The pattern I see is that the Trump campaign had the opportunity to challenge the conduct of the election in court, and when it did, it lost, with only one exception. Calling this outcome “voter fraud” redefines the term beyond recognition.
I've talked to a few election deniers and I don't think they "believe it" so much as they don't really see politics as having anything to do with factual truth beyond my side/your side.
(Otoh, selection bias - the people who are loud about fringe political beliefs are just generally more likely to be unhinged)
I don’t think so. For instance, if I’m disputing a traffic or parking ticket, the procedures officially state that the police issuing the ticket in the first place is on its own sufficient evidence that the ticket was merited. If I show up without any evidence that in fact it wasn’t merited, I lose by default. The burden is on me to show the state erred in issuing the ticket.
Interesting! So, if you happen to know, let’s say a Texan disputes a speeding ticket and testifies at a hearing that they were only going 60, and the ticketing officer says they were going 80. In the absence of other witnesses or evidence, how is the issue resolved?
The judge will presume that the officer is correct, but if that officer does not show up, the ticket is discarded.
I have heard of people getting tickets dismissed if the radar doesn't have its calibration records up-to-date, but I cannot personally confirm this. I can confirm that in a DUI case, lawyers will challenge the breathalyzer results.
That is totally false. If you get a speeding ticket and show up to court, and the police officer is missing, often the ticket just gets thrown out. Sometimes the state is entitled to a continuance to get the officer into court (typically on more serious matters like a DUI). But if you just keep going to court, and the state's witnesses don't show up, eventually you win by default.
From the perspective of a non-US citizen who doesn't live there either, the moment it was decided to allow mass mail-in voting it was inevitable that the election would be called into question. It'd be the case in other countries to, this has nothing to do with Republicans vs Democrats. Mail voting is so much more open to fraud and abuse that whenever the proportion gets too high you start getting all these quiet little scandals that the media doesn't like to talk about for fear of undermining The System, always built around mail voting fraud. The UK sees the same effect, for example.
Given that mass gatherings appeared to make no difference to COVID spread (one of the many mysteries that epidemiologists are reluctant to investigate), it should never have been allowed. Am now fully expecting the Biden admin to come up with some reason why the prior levels of mail voting should now be sustained into the next election despite the end of the pandemic.
One strong reason for continuing that level of mail-in voting is that, if you try to tone it down, it looks like you're admitting the earlier election had problems.
Have we found that mail in voting has a higher percentage of fraud before? Oregon has had universal mail in voting for many years, well before 2020, and absentee voting has been a thing for a very long time. Has anyone demonstrated fraud in mail in voting at higher rates that in person voting prior to 2020? Or, would the argument just be that we didn't have the proper infrastructure in place to deal with the volume of mail-in votes we received at that time?
You know how when you take the SAT, and they always have a monitor standing there watching everyone to make sure people don't cheat? This is sort of like if someone suggested getting rid of the monitor and having the kids take the SAT unmonitored, and then someone else objected to this on the basis that it might lead to more cheating, and then you countered with "Have we found that monitorless SAT-taking leads to more cheating? Do we have Evidence of this?" Of course not, because 1. It would have rarely or never been done before (for good reason), and 2. You're getting rid of the mechanism that actually detects the cheating in the first place, so even if it had been done in the past, there would not be evidence. And yet using basic logical reasoning, we can correctly deduce that making standardized tests completely unmonitored would very significantly increase cheating, as I'm sure you can agree.
But we still have voter rolls that make sure a person is only counted once, even with mail in voting. Unless there's some reason to suspect those don't work? I haven't seen any evidence that people are voting multiple times. So then to cheat you have to submit ballots for people on the rolls who aren't going to vote, and you have to know they aren't going to vote, right, or else it would just get thrown out?
I'm not sure how you could cheat in any other way unless there's some reason to suspect that voter rolls don't properly catch double votes.
I don't know. Why couldn't mail in voting be done right?
One thing is that presidential elections in the US are actually a lot of local elections, and these are all operated in some local way, and there is usually some number of counties where they mess up, or have trouble. And when the election is close and that happens in a battleground state, it can very easily seem suspicious, especially if it delays the results.
One weird aspect about American elections seen from abroad is the dispute about voter ID. In other countries that I know about, needing voter ID is taken for granted.
It's just much harder to secure. You don't even know the form was filled out by the right person. In Europe there's problems with Muslim families where the man just takes the woman's form and fills it out for her, for example, or religious/community leaders demand people's forms to fill out and post themselves.
This is more or less my view. Every change that was made to voting rules in 2020, particularly in battleground states, reduced transparency and election security - that is, the ability to successfully detect and document fraud. It is natural that when one side pushes to remove safeguards - opposing voter ID, relaxed signature matching, mailing out millions of blank ballots indiscriminately - that the other side will be suspicious when the outcome favors the safeguard-removers, particularly when the outcome is determined within jurisdictions exclusively controlled by those people. Imagine that we are playing poker, and just before the final card is dealt on a huge hand, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and take the cards with me. I win the hand on the last card. Can you prove that I cheated? Not definitively. There was always a chance I could win. You don't have video of me cheating. You don't know what the next card was before I left. Yet I maintain you would be justified in being suspicious of the result.
This doesn't even get into the ballot-harvesting issue. By flooding the zone with ballots to low or zero-propensity voters, even without literally picking up discarded ballots (full-on identity fraud, which is also possible) it makes the voting process an exercise in mechanics rather than real voter choice; just go harvest their ballots and you can guarantee 100% turnout for your candidate in places that normally wouldn't have voted.
Add in shady things like administrative coordination and pressure to one-sidedly suppress negative news on media and social media, and it's not a surprise that some don't see a fair contest. And some folks live in jurisdictions where literal, old-school, Tammany Hall style machine politics has been endemic for decades. Those folks aren't going to hit the fainting couch when someone alleges there might have been fraud, even if they can't prove it was outcome determinative. They assume of course outcome-determinative fraud can't be proven; every step taken throughout was designed to make it difficult to document and disseminate such proof.
I would take the "changing the rules is inherently suspicious" argument more seriously if people applied it to, say, Texas (a state that did change its rules due to the pandemic, and which had more electoral votes at stake than any battleground state), and not just to the four states that were closest to voting for Trump.
>This doesn't even get into the ballot-harvesting issue. By flooding the zone with ballots to low or zero-propensity voters, even without literally picking up discarded ballots (full-on identity fraud, which is also possible) it makes the voting process an exercise in mechanics rather than real voter choice; just go harvest their ballots and you can guarantee 100% turnout for your candidate in places that normally wouldn't have voted.
Why is it bad to encourage legal voters to cast votes? Like, what distinguishes "ballot harvesting" from regular get-out-the-vote efforts?
Texas is not a battleground state, nobody expected it to be in play, and its margins of victory are not conducive to gaming anyway. That doesn't make any changes it made good or entirely unproblematic, but it reduces the capacity for mischief.
Ballot harvesting is an entirely different animal from GOTV, both for fraud/procedural abuse reasons and, even in non-fraudulent situations, for effort reasons. On the procedural side, to GOTV in a normal situation, you need to convince a person to actually show up at the polls. You remind, cajole, bus them. But in the end a person still walks in to a polling place with poll watchers. In ballot harvesting, you simply need to get ahold of their ballot. That's it. Something that people getting ballot harvested either consider junk mail, may discard, or may not even know about (e.g. nursing homes). There is no check beyond physical possession of the ballot paper. It is the security difference between an in-person purchase and a bearer bond.
There are certainly situations where ballot harvesting does not result in outright fraud, but even then I consider it a negative in the voting process. Reducing the investment in voting down to "hand this to the guy at the door and sign once" (and remember that's the best-case non-fraud scenario) does not, in my view, lead to a more thoughtful electorate. It doesn't measure public support, it basically measures voter concentration (where it's easy to knock on doors) and party infrastructure (amplified by, e.g., Zuck bucks disproportionately benefiting Democratic bastions). But that's slightly ancillary to the main point about security.
The ballots themselves get checked though, even if you go dump a bunch of fake ballots in, as far as I'm aware we have processes in place to make sure we don't count them.
No. Sometimes ballot jackets get checked. And thus, mass dumping of fraudulent ballots (that is, ballots never issued by the state) is often hard. This doesn't preclude mass dumping of illegal ballots, those cast in a way not in accordance with the law, which many of the mass dumped ballots will have been in many states. Once those are co-mingled, its impossible to know which jacked was illegally cast and which was just dropped off by an old lady on her way to the supermarket that vote just being for herself.
And even the ballot jackets are kind of a joke. That anything less than 90% of absentee ballots aren't rejected for failing the signature match beggars belief. I work in the law, and I see wayyyy too many signatures a day. The idea that any average person's signature is consistent in the year 2020 is absurd. It was absurd in 2000 when I was still in grade school. This is why banks require IDs and pins and notaries.
I saw dozens of extremely detailed videos and articles investigating and debunking every one of these claims and videos and etc. Tons of work went into making media to persuade people that the claims of fraud were themselves fraudulent.
The problem is that those were all made by left-wing outlets, which means right-wing people never saw them. The level of algorithmic recommendations and filters bubbles in modern media consumption is such that you will simply never see something made by someone who disagrees with you unless it is in a takedown video made by someone on your side.
Like, literally I would not know that Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or Prager U existed if it weren't for seeing them referenced in takedown videos and jokes from my side, they are completely transparent to all of my algos and bookmarks. Same in reverse for the other side.
So I'm actually not sure what 'steps to disabuse them' could have *possibly* led to convincing people on the right that those fraud claims were false, no matter how obviously correct and persuasive they were.
Like, literally, if there were a single 6-sentence paragraph that magically convinced 100% of people who read it that the election was legitimate, and the people on the left who discovered and wrote it tried as hard as they could to make sure every person on the right saw it, I doubt more than 10% of Republican voters would ever actually end up reading it. There's just no channels to get it to them.
For me, the decisive factor is the existence of some Republican politicians who think the election fraud claims are ridiculous. If there really was available but widely suppressed or ignored evidence for fraud, that is one group that I would expect to be overwhelmingly familiar with the existence of that evidence, and to have every incentive to publicise it and no incentive at all to disregard it. Thus the only way to explain anti-fraud Republicans consistently with a fraud theory being true is a level of conspiracy that defies all practical plausibility. If a conspiracy can not only engineer massive election fraud but also buy off not only the government and most of the media but also virtually all judges and election officials who investigate the claims AND a significant number of elected representatives of the party that was defrauded out of power, then that conspiracy can do anything. It proves too much: why not assume that that conspiracy was already in control of the world, that elections were already a sham beforehand, and that Trump and the pro-fraud media are part of the conspiracy as well? It's beyond absurd.
With that said, I have literally zero sympathy for the left and the Democrats having to deal with these false and unfair claims. For two reasons. First, because large parts of the left have denied the legitimacy of ALL THREE of the Republican victories this century. While there was *some* (though still not much) basis for these claims in 2000, there was absolutely none in 2004 and 2016. Those were completely indisputable and fair Republican wins. And yet significant numbers of Democrats delegitimised them, recklessly and arrogantly, for no other reason than that they didn't like the outcome. Wikipedia still has a whole page casting doubt on the 2004 result, with barely a mention of the lack of support for those claims. Hillary Cilnton herself repudiated her concession and declared Trump an "illegitimate president", and somehow was *not* condemned and octracised by the mainstream left. After that, the democrats *forever* lost the right to complain about legitimisation campaigns, false claims, or big lies. It's true that it was much larger from republicans in 2020. But on the other hand, they only did it once; there were no serious fraud claims in 2008 and 2012. Democrats have done it a full three times, *every* time they've lost, all because they just couldn't accept that they had alienated the people with their obnoxious attitudes. They made their bed; now they're lying in it. They're reaping what they sowed, and they deserve every moment of it.
Second, censoring claims of fraud (on social media or elsewhere) is the equivalent of putting up a big poster saying "we are *terrified* of free discussion and scrutiny of this claim". Most people are going to reasonably conclude you have something to hide, when you try to censor arguments. I don't think this is actually the reason for the censorship in this case, although it is in most other cases. I think the left has just become so unbelievably entitled, and so used to thinking that disagreement is an act of oppression, that even when the opposing claim is easily refuted they *still* think they're being oppressed by having to actually put in the time and effort to refute it. (Because it's not like there's *actual* oppression in the world, right?) Thus, all because of an unbelievable intellectual laziness and first-world entitlement, they have given good rational grounds for ordinary people to assume otherwise obviously-false claims are actually based in truth. Let there be no doubt for all progressives, social media employees, and other supporters of censorship: all the permanent damage that is done, now and in the coming years, to democracy and public trust rests ENTIRELY upon your conscience.
If your car can parallel park by driving sideways "crab-style", it can wedge in another car such that the previously present car can't get out unless it also has crab parking.
Wouldn't this only happen if the previously present car was already boxed in on one end, and then the crab car boxes it in on the other end?
And can't this already happen even without crab parking? I assume the same norms would apply. (I.e. if the car behind you has no room in the back, then if you park in front of it, leave it some room in the front. Or more generally: always leave some space both in front of you and behind you)
I think the benefit of crab-style parking is that it makes it easier to park in relatively small spaces, not that it specifically gives you the ability to park in spaces that are exactly equal to the length of your vehicle.
.26. Thanks for this. I hope everyone who is interested in consciousness clicks through and reads it. The distinction between Sentient and Conscious is important, if consciousness is to be a useful term at all.
What do you mean by "sentient" and "conscious"? I am still confused by the whole "consciousness" thing.
From my perspective, it's all about intelligence and knowledge applied to understanding the world. We make mental models of the physical world around us. These models include ourselves, a thing that takes up space. We can compare ourselves with similar entities: "Who has longer reach?" "Who can throw a rock farther?" We can notice that we think and feel and want, and model our own inner experience. We notice that other similar entities appear to have motivations and goals, and create models of their inner experience. When we notice that other similar entities might have an inner experience like ours, that's empathy. When we notice that we can model our inner experience the way we model other similar entities' inner experience, bam: we're on the outside looking in.
As far as I'm aware, that's what everyone seems to be going on about when they talk about "consciousness". But a lot of the more technical discussion feels as pointless as trying to create a mathematical model of the experience of "being one with everything". Regarding that Bronze Age confusion that the book talked about, I can easily believe that a new form of model of other people spread by contact, and once someone introspected enough to apply it to themself, their own inner experience changed irrevocably.
As for "sentience", I tend to use it to mean more-or-less "reacting to stimuli". Moving away from negative stimuli, moving toward positive stimuli, that sort of thing: a quality that even plants have weakly. It's necessary but not sufficient for what Buddhists would call dukkha. Some older sci-fi uses "sentience" to mean what I would call "sapience", but oh well.
Those are pretty close to my own thoughts about it. Sentience and consciousness are discussed in the paper Scott linked to. Some people think that what you and I are referring to as sentience is the same as consciousness.
Re. The Goddess of Everything Else, I really want to love this story, which is so beautiful almost until the end. But then it suddenly about-faces and denies the truth it had taught. The final paragraph says, "Okay, now we're magically freed from evolutionary forces for no reason at all other than that /this is where we are now/, and you can have your utopia." Whereas in fact systems which generate complexity will never be free from evolutionary forces, and pretending that they are, will destroy the work of the Goddess of Everything Else.
Right. What this beautiful story illustrates is how nearly impossible it is for humans to not anthropomorphize the world we experience. Even though we are now factually aware that there is no creator god, we continue to imbue the world with an aura of teleonomy. An example of that is how we talk about Darwinian evolution. In the climax of Scott’s story, we envision “the brain and the body set free from Darwinian bonds and restrictions.” Obviously, this is just a version of creationism, with natural forces acting as creators.
It's also just a story. But, this framing of Darwinism as some sort of discreet creative process is pretty ubiquitous. One phrase that always catches my attention is “evolutionary mismatch.” As if evolution made a mistake in its ultimate goal. Of course, evolutionary mismatch is a useful heuristic in evolutionary sociology, but it often gets forced into labor as an argument that humans must transcend human nature to make progress--- a secular continuation of the atavistic fallen state narrative. Pascal Boyer describes this anthropomorphic view as “the main obstacle to having a proper science of human behavior.”
Bigger picture, perhaps this story is an allegory of emergent complexity. Maybe the Goddess of Everything Else is revealing to us the notion of the ‘evolution of evolution’ (an idea I think I got from Eugene Koonin, The Logic of Chance.) Maybe Scott Alexander is prophesying a future where humans actually do transcend what is simply an artifact of a thermodynamic gradient, the evolution of complexity by natural selection.
Re. "Maybe Scott Alexander is prophesying a future where humans actually do transcend what is simply an artifact of a thermodynamic gradient, the evolution of complexity by natural selection." --
Can and should humans transcend--and I mean do without--continued evolution? This is, I think, the most-important moral question by far--so much that I think of it as simply THE moral question. All else is noise by comparison, including the question of whether AIs replace humans entirely. Yet I've never asked the question in public, because even pointing out the problem goes farther outside the Overton window than eugenics. I don't think I've seen anyone else raise it, even though it seems to be the most-serious existential threat to morality and civilization built into our universe.
The basic problem is that there are very high correlations between
- behavior we call "moral", or at any rate altruistic
- actions that reduce selective pressure in society
- practices that make a society vulnerable to exploitation by non-altruists
This applies theoretically, to all possible lifeforms (including AIs).
Nearly everything we do to try to make the world a better place, undermines the selective pressures that made us evolve the very altruism and love that we're trying to expand the effects of, and/or makes it easier for people lacking that love and altruism to thrive. This is the flip side of the Goddess of Everything Else. For instance, medical technology, including just basic sanitation, has lowered the force of selection before reproduction to almost zero in advanced countries. So when any organism develops the intelligence to change its environment, its genome, including its moral instincts, becomes evolutionary unstable.
The only way I can think of to prevent our moral behavior from destroying our moral instincts is to take responsibility for maintaining the integrity of our own genomes. But there are 2 huge problems with this:
1. Who exactly will have the power to decide what genomes humans will have? This, at least, isn't insoluble. But I think the only workable solution is complete anarchy. Give everyone the information about how to gengineer their kids, and the ability to do it however they choose. Then (A) nobody gets to control the human genome to satisfy their crazy ideology, (B) the human genome doesn't suffer catastrophic loss of diversity, and (C) slightly intelligent guidance plus the resulting high variance in genotypes might increase the "rate of evolution" (not that that can be measured, but it is a not-meaningless hypothetical construct) to at least zero.
2. What about evolution? How can you prevent the devolution of the human genome through well-informed germline engineering, and yet still allow for the random mutations necessary for anything better than our current model of human to evolve? I think there is no answer to this question. You can't do it. If humans are controlling the human genome, they can recognize as improvements only modifications which enhance existing human behaviors and perceptions. But they would never allow the development of any significant new value.
Consider love. Reptiles appear to be neurologically incapable of love. No reptilian committee of the genome would see love, should it appear in their population, as anything other than a perversion to be stamped out. I think we would likewise be unable to recognize any radical improvements on human nature as improvement rather than error.
I don't think we should try to solve to problem #2 today. Find a workable solution to problem #1, and trust that, in the future, people will be smarter, and will be able to deal with problem #2 better than we could today.
In my view, when considering questions of morality it’s helpful to take the evolutionary view that moral sentiments have evolved because they are adaptive for group scale cooperation. Our first thought on cooperation is a group of hunters bringing down a mastodon. But what our large cerebral cortex is really there for is to feel out reliable ingroup coalitions for support in conflicts with other humans. On the larger social scale, we have ancient fallen state narratives, or Buddha asleep under a tree, that function to divide people into the asleep vs the enlightened, the redeemed vs the lost. Questions framed as ‘can we transcend?’ or ‘where do we go from here to “make the world a better place”’ are of this same type.
So, I see your point about reduced selective pressure for reproduction possibly changing the distribution of interacting moral sentiments (and a factor related to survival fitness for reproduction is sexual selection for reproduction). I think this has been happening since the agricultural revolution. But I think we have to pay strong attention to the eugenics episode here. The ostensible question was ‘does our recent learning about evolution mean we can improve the human genome?’, but we can clearly see in retrospect that this question was imbedded in ancient ingroup:outgroup psychology, i.e. racism, ethnocentrism, elitism. So, do you believe the modern human phenotype is in some way degraded, or stultified in reaching some higher potential?
On your point 2. It is indeed an odd situation where we now have technologies where we can realistically contemplate directly changing the human genome--- probably a genuine instance of evolutionary mismatch. What could go wrong?
Re. "do you believe the modern human phenotype is in some way degraded" -- I think we don't have much data, but we do know humans acquire about 30 de novo mutations per generation, and 1/4 to 1/3 of point mutations are synonymous, so 20 to 23 non-synonymous mutations per generation. Somebody should try to do the math to figure out how much selective pressure is needed to counteract that. It's complicated, because accumulated mutations have a normal distribution, and selection acts disproportionately on the low tail of the distribution, but AFAIK we don't know how disproportionately.
On the other hand, if you pick any observable measure of fitness other than reproductive fitness, such as IQ, socioeconomic status, reported happiness, immune function, number of friends, number of incarcerations--acknowledging that they're biased, but we can only use what we can observe--we have negative selective pressure today on at least some of those measures. If this is the case for most measures, then genome is not just degrading, but literally devolving--under selective pressure to evolve to minimize our fitness measures. But we have little idea how quickly. The NIH has effectively banned research into this area with their lockdown of the largest NCBI human genotype/phenotype database, access granted only to researchers whose research is deemed politically correct. I'm not making this up.
Linkage disequilibrium is another matter entirely, potentially far more alarming, which AFAIK no one has investigated beyond investigating pairs of SNIPs. I don't even want to talk about it, other than to note that it is never the case in evolutionary theory that a particular parameter is "good" or "bad". The most you can do is pick a fitness function and try to optimize it; and any attempt always arrives at intermediate values for all parameters.
Re. "we can clearly see in retrospect that this question was imbedded in ancient ingroup:outgroup psychology, i.e. racism, ethnocentrism, elitism":
The question arose in a racist and ethno-centric Europe, so in that context it manifested as racist and ethnocentric. But "eugenics" simply means "good genetics". If you believe in correcting germline mutations that cause terrible diseases, or even in comparing genomes before getting married, as some Ashkenazi Jews do owing to the high rate of recessive diseases in that group, you're pro-eugenics.
Thinking about genetics and ethics today is so screwed up that most bioethicists today (assuming the papers published on the matter are a random sample, which they probably aren't, but what else can you do?) say it's okay for parents to use genetic tech to have a baby born with congenital deafness, but that it's terrible and oppressive to use genetic tech to have a baby born without congenital deafness. We need to throw all that shit out and reboot.
Also, in order to talk seriously about genetics, we need to use the old meaning of "racist", which I would state as "someone is racist to the extent that they only their group priors when dealing with someone of a particular ethnicity". We can't use definitions of "racist" which make anyone with a basic understanding of genetics "racist", so that only people who don't know what they're talking about, are allowed to talk.
(And before we can even attempt that, we need to ditch the metaphysical framework in which "racist" is a Boolean predicate. That shit leads nowhere. You can't reason with people who use words as Boolean predicates; it leads to post-modernism or Buddhism.)
Thanks for the informative response. Of course, I’m entertaining a sort of philosophy of evolutionary sociology, where pondering whether the human genome is degrading, presupposes some sort of independent standard against which to compare, which comparisons are a durable feature of folk psychology. But, on the more realistic level of inherited diseases, including mental health problems, what you say is very interesting.
In terms of racism, a main theme of Sonia Sultan’s Organism and Environment is that you can’t look at DNA sequences to make broad statements about heritable variations in phenotype. I remember thinking as I was reading the book that if the race-is-a-social-construct crowd really understood what she is saying she’d probably get cancelled. Science as subversion!
I think genetic engineering will lead to increased diversity, and I'm not going to say whether it's catastrophic because I don't know.
Even if governments individually have constraints on genetic engineering, they aren't going to agree with each other. *Maybe* there will be agreement on what an improved knee would look like, but I wouldn't count on even that much.
It will be hard to enforce laws on fairly subtle changes.
Genetic engineering won't be done perfectly, so that's a source of variation.
Also, what's the standard? Evolutionary fitness is about fitness for the current environment, not, for example, a paleolithic environment. A honeybee is optimized for living in a hive, not living independently like its ancestors.
I suppose it's possible for a centralized authority to take control of human evolution, but I think it's unlikely. It's plausible that there will be people breeding who don't have access to the Shiny New Technology. The future belongs to the Amish, and they and those who are considerably meeker will inherit the earth if the catastrophe includes the support system for the degenerate majority breaking down.
I'm pretty sure the story is, from the beginning to the end, about evolutionary forces promoting cooperation being, ultimately, stronger than evolutionary forces promoting competition. "Your loyalty unto the Goddess your mother is much to your credit, nor yet shall I break it. Indeed, I fulfill it." "For I say unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my service."
It is, but the last paragraph suggests "breaking free" of evolution. As if we'd reached the endpoint, ultimate perfection. I think it is possible for a species to "break free" of evolution if they hold their make-up static, for instance by uploading and forbidding further alterations. But I don't think evolution is something that should be broken free of; it is closer to the thing that continually sets us freer, though "free" isn't quite the right word. And evolution doesn't do any of that if selective pressure is removed.
I guess my point is, the ending does not in fact require "breaking free" from evolution, a removal of selective pressure, an alternative explanation exists in which the (undeniable, ever-existing) selective pressure has just ceased to reward KILLING CONSUMING MULTIPLYING CONQUERING in any shape or form.
Recall that, at each point of the story, the choice to cooperate was a) against the KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER imperative and b) clearly evolutionarily adaptive. That the two are not the same is, I'm convinced, the whole point.
I think even evolutionary biologists who don't believe in group selection would agree that, if group selection /is/ a significant force, the definition of altruism ensures that it can evolve, or be maintained after evolving, only when there's competition between groups. This competition might not technically involve killing, but it must /effectively/ involve killing, defined as reducing the fraction of resources constituting or controlled by competing groups.
This comes up in David Sloan Wilson's book /Does Altruism Exist?/, in which he repeatedly emphasizes that the evolution of altruism requires competition between groups, and then speculates about a future world in which everyone is altruistic and at peace, noticeably NOT pointing out that this contradicts his repeated explicit statements that that is impossible.
But the contrast in the story is not between [cancer] and altruism, it's between [cancer] and (specifically, literally, explicitly) everything else. There's obviously plenty of ways to escape [cancer] that don't rely on altruism at all.
(I think "cancer" is a great tell regarding what Scott was getting at. Cancer is a dead end for a structure that relies on cooperation, including the cancer cells themselves. You don't need altruism to discourage cancer at that point, a selfish desire not to self-destruct perfectly suffices. )
You do need altruism to discourage cancer. The altruism is performed by those cells which don't turn cancerous. This evolves, and is maintained, only by the competition between groups. The groups are multi-cellular individuals.
In the absence of selection, pediatric cancer should increase, very slowly in human time, but very rapidly in evolutionary time., My Fermi estimate (below) is that most people would be born with cancer after 2800 years without selection.
A close upper bound on the fraction of mutations which assist cancer is 0.1, because cancer cells typically have about 100 mutations, about 10 of which contribute to the cancer. This is an over-estimate because these cells are selected for having cancer. Let's say the true fraction is 0.05. (There's probably a better, more-complicated way of estimating it.)
There are on average 30 de novo mutations per generation; 20-23 of which (ave. 21.5) are non-synonymous. It takes on average 10 such mutations to cause cancer.
Suppose these mutations get mixed homogeneously into the population with every generation. (This is false.) Then the number of such mutations found in a newborn after one generation without selection will? be drawn from the binomial distribution with n=21.5, p=0.05. (This is an approximation; n=21.5 is the mean of another binomial distribution.) If this is right, and I'm not confident that it is, the median person might be born with cancer when npg = 21.5*.05*g = 10, which happens after 10/(21.5*.05) = 9.3 generations (about 279 years). However, this assumes that you get cancer whenever you have 10 pro-cancerous mutations, which is obviously false--in most cases, probably the vast majority of cases some of these will be either redundant, damaging the same of the same pathways, or won't have synergy, as they damage pathways which don't collectively add up to cancer. So this estimate is a lower bound on how long it would take for half the population to have cancer at birth. I'll wildly guess that it's an order of magnitude too low, & thus a better estimate would be 2790 years.
We could try to predict the rate of pediatric cancer increase we expect to see in the new study by the CDC (Siegel et al 2023, "Counts, incidence rates, and trends of pediatric cancer in the United States, 2003-2019"), counting pediatric cancer over 16 years (17 data points, 2003-2019), which showed a geometric mean increase of 0.47%. However, I don't have the time to do this properly, and am not sure we have all the data we need to do it.
I'll just check my earlier guestimate by seeing how many years y it would take to reach 50% of the population being born with cancer with a yearly increase of 0.47%. The rates are given per million people, so the point where the median person is born with cancer would be when # cases/million/year = 500,000, & the starting point (2003) is 164.5 per million.
164.5 * r^y = 500,000, r = 1.0047, y log(r) = log(500000/164.5),
y = 1710 years
That's pretty close to "an order of magnitude higher than 279 years". But I don't trust it at all, primarily because the rate of increase per year shouldn't be constant given that it depends on a binomial distribution.
As someone who has been in charge of security cameras for various buildings, you need a LOT of cameras to cover everything and even then they're unlikely to be able to see into spots like behind a parked van or whatever.
I'm guessing that having a security camera follow you around, possibly with a loud voice saying "please leave the premises" is more intimidating than cameras (mostly above line of sight so people don't look at them) that just sit there.
There was a store I visited recently where there was a security camera behind glass right at eye level about 3 feet away as you left the store. Although that was more likely in order to get a good closeup.
Roving cameras still have the problem that you have to program in routes that give you enough coverage though.
So I've only skimmed the critquie of the letter and the defense, but that twitter exchange makes it seem like the entire issue is that this guy (and I guess the 127 other co-signers) think that this theory gets more media attention than it's empirical results warrant, and that equals pseudoscience? That is _bonkers_.
26. On Jaynes - the second part of the critique is much more thorough than the first one. Don't just read the first one and not bother with the rest like I was very tempted to. Revisiting the concept of consciousness as internal narrative and the Bicameral Mind, in a recent Very Bad Wizards podcast (https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-267-the-thickness-of-reality) David Pizarro mentioned he doesn't think in language at all, and it takes active effort to convert his thoughts into words - perhaps the Jaynesians should have some conversations with him? He hardly seems to lack "a-consciousness".
I don't think in language either. Lots of people don't! I find the Jaynesians' equation of "consciousness" with "thinking in language" somewhere south of hilarious and trending towards offensive. It's such a tremendous lack of imagination for the variance of human experience.
It’s not really what he said. Language is important only that it is a system of symbols in written form. It’s the ability to manipulate internal concepts of things in order to come up with another idea. Mathematics or symbolic logic could be called languages or not. A real world triangle once understood conceptually can be used and manipulated in a lot of ways that don’t involve using the word triangle in your head.
It's a terrible feeling when you're explaining something and you come to some concept in the explanation which seems like it ought to have a word for it, but then you realize that they idea doesn't actually have a word and you have to go into a big digression explaining the concept and totally interrupt your flow. I bet that doesn't happen to people who think with words.
Nah what happens instead is you get stuck in a digression of "I swear there's a word for this, it's on the tip of my tongue... [Bad metaphor] [poor description]" if your counterpart helps you out, then it's fine, otherwise you fumble through then remember the word like 14 hours later and feel like an idiot.
Yes that’s fairly common. I do think in words, and images, but my thoughts are not seif critical so couldn’t be mistaken for some other being or God. However I have a relative who has an eating disorder and her inner thoughts were in a different voice. The idea that everybody on earth changed how they thought in a very narrow space of time is clearly ludicrous.
When a culture moves from a place where the only way you can learn something is by someone else telling it to you, to a culture where things can be written down and concrete manifestations of the real world can be expressed and manipulated in symbolic forms I think that could have quite a bit of an effect on how people think. Also, it was not everybody by far. Certain cultures, accelerated, and certain cultures cease to exist. We will never really know.
I would submit that learning the calculus changes the way one thinks, for instance.
#19 As someone who keeps strictly kosher, with some small exceptions, I'm generally never able to eat at a table with non-kosher food on it. This obviously has serious downsides but not much of the social alienation experienced by the Vegan Liberation Pledge takers.
Main reasons being:
- All of immediate family is also strictly kosher
- Part of community that mostly keeps kosher
How I ensure that I maintain connections with my non-kosher keeping friends? Apart from going out for drinks and movies, we just invite people over a lot and try make the food as awesome as possible.
Over the years I don't really remember anyone remaining strictly kosher for the long term without immediate family who at least keep their home kosher. So the vegan's experiences don't surprise me.
Can you explain more about why this you can't eat with non-kosher people? Is it just that the dishes might not have been washed properly to separate meat and milk, or is there something else?
There isn't a law against eating with non-kosher people. It's just very hard to do while following halacha (jewish law) correctly.
The main reason is because of a concept called Marit Ayin. It has to be very clear that you aren't eating the non-kosher food yourself. Basically so that someone who is unaware but also keeps kosher might not see an obviously religious person eating at a non-kosher restaurant and inadvertently assume the restaurant/food is kosher and partake themselves. This one is usually the hardest one to get around and the law doesn't give much leeway even if you are sure no one will see you (most probably as it's a slippery slope).
Food and dishes also obviously have to be kosher and the levels of strictness once you get into standard orthodoxy are pretty high. In practice, if I get invited to a non-kosher wedding or other catered event and the host is trying to be accommodating, they will usually contact one of the kosher caterers in the city who will deliver a plastic wrapped meal to the venue (like a nice-ish airplane meal). Generally the fact that you are eating such an obviously different meal using disposable plates and cutlery is considered enough of a visual indicator that someone wouldn't assume you are eating the non-kosher food.
Obviously all of the above doesn't happen very often though so in practice it's very rare that I end up eating on tables with non-kosher food.
You're skipping the most important difference! You aren't refusing to eat at a table with non-kosher food as part of an effort to force the world to become orthodox, and you aren't demanding that people keep a kosher table as the price for being your friend. You're placing the demand on yourself, not anyone else.
#18 - this was the only data I could find to support my hypothesis that eggplant use is correlated with cuisine quality (I made it into a silly one-pager at eggplantindex.com).
I am still unclear how crypto is supposed to help the unbanked/debanked/oppressed.
The US government has made fiat to crypto transfers visibly harder without trying very hard; the capability to cut off all manner of alternative and mainstream banking has already been abundantly demonstrated via Canadian bankers.
Seems the problem is really reining in the source of power over money, not the specific form of value.
Non-centralized crypto can be used without any bank or other organization seeing, let alone controlling, that transaction. It's how the Silk Road lasted - the government was extremely aware of the sales going on, but had no means to control the transactions. They were also anonymous, since they were tracked on the blockchain instead of through normal channels.
Centralized crypto, on the other hand, loses those benefits because the organization handling the transactions has to keep records and it becomes a point where government can notice and interject.
Government can't control that particular transaction, but for you to be able to make it, you need access to crypto/fiat exchanges of some kind, and it's easy to make those very onerous/risky outside of a trusted underground network.
Agreed, so long as the government does either of 1) Connects crypto wallets to individual people, or 2) seeks to control all crypto to/from fiat transactions.
I am not sure what's possible with 1, but they definitely would like to control 2.
If the crypto economy grows large enough you will never need crypto to fiat as you can just ignore fiat for your entire life. We're not there yet but that's the goal.
Silk Road lasted only because the tools did not yet exist to easily trace the blockchain.
This situation is no longer true. Even before the advent of tools like Chainanalysis, it was perfectly possible to do tracing but the Feds are simply not as "into" this type of deep grunt work as some in the private sector are.
Silk Road was also a very specific marketplace. You can't buy food on Silk Road. You can't pay rent on Silk Road. You can't get paid legal wages on Silk Road. You can't buy a bus ticket, and airplane ticket, etc etc.
For people in the real world who have to eat, rent, get transport - fiat is the only way to go in the vast, vast majority of cases.
As for your assertion about "decentralized crypto" being in any way more beneficial: even disregarding the fact that the miners are heavily centralized and the exchanges are heavily centralized and that any fiat-crypto transaction MUST be regulate-able by government, the offset of no "centralization" is the utter lack of protection against grift, con, scam and even violent crime.
That's one of the core scams of crypto: the implicit assumption that the stability and protections of the fiat financial environment are replicated in the decentralized one.
No disagreement here. I've been dismissive of crypto for a long time, but at the beginning it was being promoted specifically as anti-centralized. Back then miners were independent and there were no exchanges.
In order to gain legitimacy - and get away from the perception it was all "grift, con, scam, and even violent crime" there were a number of steps taken. Those steps were good for crypto and the early investors who wanted money. It was bad for the decentralization.
> The safety movement is concerned that Amazon might have enough power to steamroll over Anthropic’s safety-conscious culture; this did happen with DeepMind and Google, didn’t with OpenAI and Microsoft, and my guess is Anthropic held out for a good enough deal (and had enough bargaining power) that it won’t happen there either.
The AI safety movement is to computing as bioethicists are to biology and medicine, right down to calling themselves the "safety movement".
The biosafety movement isn't bioethicists. "Biosafety" means the people whose job it is to prevent lab leaks and stuff like that. Honestly I think we could use a couple more of them.
(and yes, most of the AI safety people are also biosafety in this sense, in the sense that the same EA grantmakers fund both).
The fact that some group calls themselves "safety" doesn't mean other groups aren't doing the same thing. What do you think the bioethicists would say they want?
Note: if you find the giant plane in @5 to be exciting, thrilling, scary or upsetting in a way that transcends all rationality, you probably have megalophobia/philia!
In some ways that would not be a concern. Takeoff and landing both involve acceleration, so tend to use a lot of fuel. A larger vehicle may also use less fuel per kilogram of mass due to drag being a function of surface area while mass is a function of volume.
I think it would not be workable using actual jet fuel though. Refueling today involves tricky flying in conditions that are not optimal for less fuel use. So it's only used when you absolutely must keep that specific plane in the air longer and you can't just land and refuel there.
Changing to a power system that doesn't need refueling, e.g. a theoretical nuclear reactor that can get off the ground keeps other problems. The crew can only fly so long and where do they sleep? Docking/undocking to transfer cargo and passengers would be a nightmare. Etc.
Their statement that their bacteria will thrive quote "without spreading outside of the mouth", makes me dubious of every other claim they could make. Who ever heard of something inside your mouth that doesn't spread everywhere else ? Kisses are a thing that exists.
Thanks for the information. I presume that the statement had been written in order to reassure GMO worriers. But for a GMO worrier, the only acceptable standard is 0 spread at all between GMO users and non GMO users. Even a rare circumstance would be too much.
Almost all human associate bacteria are _extremely_ niche specific. It is very very rare that bacteria from one part of your body can successfully thrive on another part. This even applies to different parts of your skin, let alone mouth-to-elsewhere.
I'm not sure. I think the main problem is that the company can't sell it without FDA approval (I think they might be able to give it away for free, but I'm not sure) and since it costs money to make and distribute they can't give it away for free to everybody. They have some clever distribution plans but I don't know if they're public and I'll write about them further after they've left stealth.
#4 Crypto has a complete solution to this, but it requires buy-in from society as a whole which is a *really* hard problem to solve. If you could pay your bills with crypto directly (just like you can often do with cash), then there would be no need to off-ramp.
I wouldn't say "crypto needs to get its act together" as much as "society at large needs to get its act together". I think many (most?) smart people recognize the problems with financial surveillance and state controlled access to money and the bad outcomes it can lead to (e.g., Canadian truckers, China locking bank accounts of people, civil forfeiture, etc.) but convincing the whole world to start accepting crypto natively for goods and services is a huge lift.
There *are* still UX issues that could be resolved, but I think people underestimate the difficulty here. While everyone is now used to passwords, for most of human history they weren't really a thing and it was incredibly difficult to get society to adjust to passwords. One could argue that we still haven't really solved it which is why there are so many alternative login systems these days (face, fingerprint, second device, email, etc.) all trying to "fix the password UX".
Crypto has a similar problem, but the stakes are much higher (all your money instead of all your photos) and if the goal is to remove financial intermediaries then you can't just rely on some third party to bail you out when you forget your password.
Most smart people also believe that a society-wide unregulated financial infrastructure is a short path to a much worse disaster than surveillance and other statist horrors. Anarchism and libertarianism are consistently and thoroughly unpopular.
"society wide unregulated financial infrastructure" was how money worked for most of human history. And yeah, the past was bad in a lot of ways, but I haven't heard a very convincing argument that this was due to cash being hard to regulate.
I'm quite skeptical of the "most" at the start of this statement. In my bubble of smart people, no one believes that. I'm certain bubbles of smart people exist where they do believe that, but I am suspicious of the claim that "**most** smart people" believe it.
Crypto has the same problem that occurred when each bank printed their own bills. Do you trust that bank?
There's seventeen new crypto systems invented every week (informal survey, do not trust). As a shop keeper with one shop, are you going to spend your time keeping up by opening seventeen new wallets a week?
Presumably, society would settle on a relative finite number of currencies to use, just has the world has largely settled on a relatively small number of currencies to use (~200 or so around the world if I had to guess). There will certainly need to be a discovery process to figure out which one is dominant, and it is likely that over time the dominant currency will change over time.
One nice thing about unregulated decentralized finance is that converting between currencies is relatively easy (and permissionless), unlike converting between fiat currencies that require the use of heavily regulated intermediaries. I put zero thought into currency conversion with crypto and the price I get is usually within 0.1%-0.5% of the best rate I could get if I put a huge amount of effort in. With fiat, you can easily fall into traps that yield 5%-10% currency conversion (e.g., airport currency counters) and it requires notable effort to avoid those rates and get competitive rates.
To answer your direct question, a shop keeper would likely just accept whatever currency the user wants to pay in because their payment processing system automatically handles all of the conversions. Similarly, user's wallets would also let the user pay in whatever they wanted and convert on the fly to what the merchant wanted. All of this would be hidden from both the shopper and the retailer in the majority of cases.
I think a more interesting question is "how does the shopkeeper decide what to price their goods in". The answers to this range from "whatever they want" to "locally agreed upon standard" to "it is the future and prices may just be QR codes that present on the shopper's mobile device in whatever currency they want, so the shopkeeper can choose their accounting currency that aligns best with their personal risk profile and liabilities".
Broadly, the point is that this isn't really a decentralized vs centralized question but rather a question of "what does society benefit the most from" and the ultimate answer (which may change over time) will come down to just letting things play out in the market. We don't need the government to come in and *assert* to everyone that currency X must be the standard. When we do that we get daylight savings and the imperial system of measurements.
I think you underestimate the number and power of people who are vastly invested in the current system, because they eat as a result.
Certainly your current phone is capable of doing the math involved in currency conversions. It's not hard, some people can do it in their head.
The question of how much this currency is worth compared to this other one at the moment you trade it for stuff is a whole different matter. After all, why *would* one currency move in value compared to another? Why do cryptocurrencies move? It's not because the holders are bored and decided to play a game.
There's only about 200 fiat currencies traded openly, because there's only about 200 sovereign nations recognized by at least one other nation worldwide. A nation allows at most one currency to be traded externally because otherwise you end up with arbitrage - which the politicians think they should have, instead of the arbiters. Go to a Caribbean island to see this in action; most people accept American dollars even though a lot of them have their own currency. They'll generally give you change in the native currency though.
Er - the metric system *was* an assertion by government. The French revolution decided to "rationalize" everything (unsurprising since there were a lot of local systems in France). Napoleon thought this reasonable; and since he conquered half of Europe, introduced it there.
People think the imperial system has a huge number of measures with awkward conversions. This is because what's presented as one imperial system is actually the total of about a dozen different systems, developed over time, most of them used in specialized circumstances.
If you restrict yourself to say land measurement, chains and furlongs make sense. I mean an acre is 10 square chains. It's when you try to convert to a different subsystem that it seems weird. You didn't use feet to measure land, any more than you used acres to measure cloth.
13. >crypto is an important safety valve against this increasingly-used tool of control.
As you well know it's a double edged sword. Either we decrease our ability to coordinate or we keep the ability to use this coordination for evil. And discoordination can be used for evil means just as well.
Currently, we are living in a world where an authorian state is waging a war of conquest in Europe, managing to find a way around economical sanctions in order to keep doing it. I don't think reasonable utilitarian calculation says that we need less coordination in such situation.
Also ironic, because Grayzone is, apparently, pro-Russian.
14. >this is not the sort of funding ecosystem that inspires confidence.
You mean the one that allows lobbying? Or are you saying that crypto would improve this situation somehow?
16. Meta: Why do people keep equlizing defunding the police and abolishing the police? Surely there are more and less radical approaches and the optimal situation is somewhere in between funding heavy weaponry, warrior mentality and killology trainings and having no police at all.
Half serious answer: such people should be totally canceled. Including access to banking. But damn crypto-bros are not letting this happen!
> Why do people keep equlizing defunding the police and abolishing the police?
Plenty of people on the left have claimed that defunding meant abolition, and plenty of (more sensible IMO) people on the left have claimed that it meant removing aspects of policing that they objected to. It's a straightforward example of motte-and-bailey.
If it's different people defending the weak and strong versions (rather than the same bad-faith actors jumping up and down between them) I wouldn't say it's a *straightforward* example, though of course from the outside it looks much the same.
I'd say that it counts, insofar as we treat groups as discrete things.
If the group had a lot of public infighting, with motters and baileyers yelling at each other, then I wouldn't think it applied. But when it's a matter of one sub-group or another gaining prominence based on what's convenient at the moment, then I think it's justified.
A middle-ground might be "pay the policemen wages, but don't give them a budget with which to independently buy weaponry/equipment at their discretion".
I agree that I haven't previously heard "defund" used to mean a partial defunding.
But although I can't come up with good examples off the top of my head, I think it may be somewhat normal to use a verb that would normally imply "doing something fully", but instead mean "only do the parts that a reasonable person would expect". Something like, "when I said 'help yourself to the doughnuts', I didn't mean ALL of them!" Not that I think that's what's going on here - I think it started as a call for complete defunding - but I do think the pivot to partial defunding isn't completely unjustified, in a purely grammatical sense.
Importantly the people who coined the phrase supported the abolition version. Source: some podcast, can't remember which. I think it was a Detroit activist organization.
If something that needs money to survive is defunded it ceases to exist. Defunding means entirely. Or it did until the term caught on for the police and had to be backtracked.
I blame the fact that I'm not a native speaker so the term 'defund' doesn't sound radical to me.
But, frankly, my impression of USA politics is that "defund *enter social program name*" is a standard republican stance, unless it's police - then it's the left that has gone too far.
>16. Meta: Why do people keep equlizing defunding the police and abolishing the police? Surely there are more and less radical approaches and the optimal situation is somewhere in between funding heavy weaponry, warrior mentality and killology trainings and having no police at all.
The biggest event in BLM history was the death of George Floyd. Floyd was killed by a knee restraint (no technology whatsoever, let alone 'heavy weaponry'), and not only was this restraint not taught as part of 'killology training' (whatever that means), it literally wasn't taught and wasn't approved for use.
Wanting to defund the police in response to this event mostly seems to imply one of two things: 1, you don't know any of the details of the incident and think this had anyting to do with the police being 'militarized' or whatever, or 2, you want to restrict funding to police to the point that they literally don't have the resources to engage with criminal suspects at all (i.e. the circumstances leading up the interaction between police and Floyd), which is basically tantamount to abolition in a practical sense.
And as Martin hints at below, a republican calling for virtually anything progressives support (schools, healthcare programs, planned parenthood, government departments and programs etc.) to be 'defunded' would NEVER be interpreted as 'engage in moderate reform to avoid certain undesirable outcomes resulting from these things while still keeping the central functions and structure of them intact', so its a little ridiculous to expect people to believe this is the case when people talk about police defunding.
I mean, in Minneapolis, ground zero of George Floyd, the city council almost passed a ballot measure that would have literally gotten rid of the Minneapolis police department: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Minneapolis_Question_2
I would go so far as to say that defund the police as police reform is a form of (god forgive me for using this term) gaslighting, one that emerged following the perceived voter backlash to defund the police candidates. And cutting funding to something strikes me as a very silly way of fundamentally improving a thing from the ground up.
> and not only was this restraint not taught as part of 'killology training'
The attitude that such trainings promotes may have very well contributed. Google what killology is, if you are curious. Also, don't you think that the fact that police uses unapproved tools which results in people's death is already bad enough?
> Wanting to defund the police in response to this event mostly seems to imply one of two things
You are missing the forest here. There were a lot of reasons to talk and do something about all these problems. George Floyd death was just a final straw. You can as well argue that people who started WW I didn't understand the specifics of death of Franz Ferdinand.
> And as Martin hints at below, a republican calling for virtually anything.
Republicans call for decreasing funding for social services all the time and it's considered to be completely mainstream position, thus they do not even need any radical sounding language.
> I mean, in Minneapolis, ground zero of George Floyd, the city council almost passed a ballot measure that would have literally gotten rid of the Minneapolis police department
Your link says:
> The measure would have removed minimum staffing levels for sworn officers, renamed the Minneapolis Police Department as the Minneapolis Department of Public Safety, and shifted oversight of the new agency from the mayor's office to the city council.
This doesn't sound as have no police whatsoever, so people will have shoot criminals on the streets themselves. This sounds as police is rebranded and finally has some public oversight.
> (god forgive me for using this term) gaslighting
I'll never understand how people can simultaneously think that some term is stupid and yet insist on using it. But this is beside the point.
> The safety movement is concerned that Amazon might have enough power to steamroll over Anthropic’s safety-conscious culture; this did happen with DeepMind and Google
Woah wait what? I heard rumors that Safety-conscious culture at Deepmind was always at risk of being steamrolled over, but not that it already happened. Anyone have info on this? It could get pretty bad going forward if I have to make important decisions based on weak information.
I’m not following the assessment of the safety cultures either. It’s OpenAI who let the genie of potential agency in the verbal world out the bottle while DeepMind were doing safe stuff like just folding proteins.
#3 Regarding the Hunga Tonga eruption I very much noticed a climate effect. I live in New Zealand and the winter that followed it was noticeably wetter and more overcast than normal—it felt like the sun was never shining. In contrast this past winter, just ended, was a lot dryer, with more sunny days.
I assume this doesn't have anything to do with global warming though.
> 25: Effective Altruist Forum: The charity Pure Earth, sponsored by GiveWell, claims to have reduced the prevalence of lead in Bangladeshi turmeric from 47% to ~0%.
I spent a while being dumbfounded about where this wildly implausible claim could have come from, until I realized that this means that 47% of samples of turmeric in Bangladesh had nonnegligible amounts of lead, rather than that the average turmeric in Bangladesh was 47% lead.
I probably should have entered that prison abolitiom contest because I think you really could kind of solve it with dystopian levels of surveillance and social credit.
Basically, just have a public database to keep a records of the crimes of everyone, and a computer system that reports the most relevant ones to everyone around you, including businesses (everything's an app now). The basic aim is to replicate the small town vibe that disincentives crime there by making sure everyone around you knows what you've done. In this system we still have courts but there are no police or prisons (invest the money in surveillance to ensure 100% conviction rates), the amount of social isolation is decided democratically by the people around you. Because all records are public, associating with a known sex criminal would reflect poorly on people, incentivising even friends and family to shun the excluded. There would be a way to get your record cleared, either automatically or after a period of community service or reconciliation with the victim. All in all this seems like the most workable execution of the ideals of prison abolitionist in a large and complex society. The issue of vigilante violence could be solved by not distinguishing crimes based on their victims, murder is murder and so vigilante executioners would also be shunned, except by people who know the full context and still approve - but this is an issue for all crimes anyway. Arguably, if nobody wants to shun you for it, it shouldn't be a crime anyway - we do live in a democracy!
As I see it the main issue would be people who have already been maximally socially isolated - I'm assuming there would be food banks and shelters for murderers and rapists since this is a leftist dystopia, but its unclear to me what happens when serial offenders manage to get shunned even by those. At that point crime is their only way to make a living, presumably at some point they either starve to death, die of exposure, or get killed in a form of self defence that we deem to be socially acceptable, but either way they at least die free. Probably I would just not mention this part in the pitch to Freddie, it's still more thought out than anything else I've read.
Now, I say dystopian because I wouldn't want to live here. I think it would probably work on me so it has the appearance of being workable, but also sounds really depressing. I am very skeptical that the threat of social disapproval would actually work on most people in prison, and they'd probably end up being murdered by vigilantes or each other, or exist as a permanent underclass of petty criminals, excluded from normal social and commerical interations yet not technically imprisoned.
>disincentives crime there by making sure everyone around you knows what you've done<
So, literally the Honor System. You have no mechanism for stopping people who don't care about their reputation. Food banks are irrelevant, these people steal directly from stores and homes.
Or people living in a culture where committing crimes actually *gains* you reputation points among your peers. Where being a bad-ass gangster is considered a cool and admirable ambition to have. Especially as long as you aim your crimes at outsiders, who deserve it and don't have moral standing.
As I said, I don't think it actually works, I just think it sounds like it could work if you do care about social status, which is the target audience for this kind of argument anyway. Eventually it breaks down into "violence against those people would be socially approved and consequence free" and we have justice via vigilante lynch mob, same as in the orginal proposal just with a bit more thought into how people know that some people are socially acceptable targets for violence.
Anything else I can think of is just cheating by playing with defintions, e.g. abolish police and prisons by replacing them with privitised equivalents (like all right-libertarian ideas, this works fine if you have money and is hellish if you don't) or redefining all crime as an expression of mental illness (so instead of police we have armed mental health nurses, and instead of prisons we have hospitals you can't leave - I know a high security psichatric facility is not technically a prison, but you wouldn't know just from looking at it, and I defintely wouldn't want tobe sent there!)
"You have no mechanism for stopping people who don't care about their reputation."
Bingo. Someone who is already outcast literally has nothing to lose in this system, seeing how vigilante justice is explicitly punished. Even court trials would not be a big hassle - "yeah, I did it, add it to the list, are we done yet?" So why not continue stealing, robbing, murdering? What's the worst thing that could happen? Someone shoots you in self-defense? Well, shoot them before they get a chance.
Let's keep prisons around until someone has a better idea, please.
I mean, is getting together with your friends to go get your stolen stuff back and beat their ass (for example) not a mechanism? Presumably if everyone knew the circumstances, you wouldn’t face repercussions for that as the original victim.
Unless the thief comes from a community where stealing from people like you either isn't seen as very bad or is actively seen as praiseworthy, in which case his friends might well decide to come round and beat you up (or kill you, why not escalate a bit?) in retaliation.
Referring to the Big Lie does not degrade Donald Trump. It can be read both ways; the Big Lie in Trump's sense is what the "mainstream media" tells about the result of the election. Both Trump and Biden have used the term Big Lie, but they mean different things. (Trump: "The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!").
But that's clearly not how those terms are used in practice. "The Big Lie" is a left-coded term to deride those who believe the election may have involved any level of fraud. I guess you could be saying that Republicans should take the term back like gay people did with Queer, but that's pretty non-obvious.
Is it left coded? Today was the first time I encountered the Big Lie as being used by the left. I have only ever encountered it being used by people who believe the election was stolen.
Nine of those links (the first six, Political Dictionary, Carter Center, and the NYU link) agree that "the Big Lie" is a term right wingers who believe that the 2020 election was stolen use to refer the the idea that the election was stolen. One of them (Salon) seems to say the opposite, the others don't really talk about it either way.
It's possible that this is just a confusing term: when I see the NPR link saying "why is the 'Big Lie' so hard to dispel" I see that as saying "why is it so hard to dispel the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, which is what the Big Lie refers to" while others may see it as "why is it so hard to dispel the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, which is a Big Lie." The term is a bit like the blue dress/white dress picture.
It's funny, because they seem to want to think that they're referring to his supposed use of "The Big Lie" so they can liken him to Hitler, but their side pretty clearly seems to be the one who coined it and uses it most frequently... meaning they're Hitler in the analogy.
#27 funnily enough the odds of a gaming manager's marriage falling apart (52.9%) is strikingly close to the odds of losing at the roulette table with an even/odds bet (52.6%).
(27) My hypothesis is that men who struggle on the dating market divorce less because of lack of options, explaining why nerdy jobs have lower divorce rates.
Alternative explanation: the "lack of options" could be a side effect of the jobs introverted, nerdy people typically have. Where do you meet more attractive people of the opposite sex who are willing to start a sexual relationship - as a bartender in an alcohol-drenched nightclub, or glued to an office chair alongside the ever-same half-dozen other nerds in your team?
8. For some reason I had to move away from the screen to see the text, but the spiral was obvious immediately. Can't see any cats though.
21. Any study that uses Mr Jerkface language can't possibly be good, as they clearly aren't even trying to be unbiased or scientific. You should consider the possibility that the study is bad in ways you just can't detect.
1. - 3. Temperatures have been completely stable in the USA for nearly two decades when measured from the actual state of the art weather station network the US gov operates, and which climatologists conspicuously refuse to use. Go here, then select "All months" and observe the perfectly flat trend which stretches back to the day the network opened:
Please try to square that with the statement that records were broken in the USA. Europe, of course, has no equivalent to this network specifically for climate purposes, which is why when you investigate "record breaking" temperatures will often be recorded in places like 50 ft behind jet engine exhausts, or from stations that mysteriously were multiple degrees hotter than one half a mile away.
And that ignores the fact that "records" here doesn't have the definition you'd expect when used by climatologists. The historical record gives strong evidence of much warmer temperatures in the past, like records of people doing farming in places where today that's impossible because it's too cold.
Climatology is ultimately just like sociology, psychology and other such sciences. This business of pretending it's better needs to end. It's not better. If anything it's worse. The only genuine climate crisis is the one in our minds.
>1. - 3. Temperatures have been completely stable in the USA for nearly two decades when measured from the actual state of the art weather station network the US gov operates, and which climatologists conspicuously refuse to use. Go here, then select "All months" and observe the perfectly flat trend which stretches back to the day the network opened:
>Please try to square that with the statement that records were broken in the USA.
As you wish.
If you download the plotted data and compute the linear trend, you get 0.29 C/decade, which is not perfectly flat. It happens to be a larger trend than the globe as a whole. Hard to see by eye because of the large month-to-month variability, but it's a bit easier to eyeball if you plot the annual averages instead:
Then you get records (which I define as the largest value ever recorded at a given station or over a given area) when some parts of the US are much warmer than the statewide average and some parts are much cooler.
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if our visual cortex included an integrator with variable, controlled integration periods? I'd love to be able to look at a noisy graph and immediately resolve the underlying trends.
Replying a bit more thoroughly now I'm back at a keyboard ...
Given any dataset, you can always compute a trend over it. That doesn't mean it's meaningful.
The reason you need to use software to even see there's a trend at all is because it's so utterly tiny that even an anomaly plot cannot reveal it (chosen specifically to make tiny changes easier to see). The variability absolutely swamps any chance of seeing a trend, even over long periods of time. It is for all meaningful purposes, flat.
This cuts both ways of course. If the trend the computed was -0.1C per decade, this also wouldn't mean we're heading for an ice age, or very much at all.
Climatologists like to argue otherwise, and are willing to take literally any trend at all and extrapolate it indefinitely into the future, often extrapolating it using non-linear functions. They will look at a graph which is so stable it looks flat even when plotting deviations from an average, and say the world is doomed.
> Then you get records (which I define as the largest value ever recorded at a given station or over a given area)
They (the media, government agencies) define it at the station level over a period of seconds, which is highly deceptive given that they define climate as the whole world over a period of centuries. Using the former to make arguments about the latter is guaranteed to create a long series of spurious "records" simply due to increasing the number of weather stations, even if nothing is happening on average.
Literally no natural dataset will have a trend line of exactly zero, will it? I did state clearly that if you look at it, it's flat. You had to download the data and compute on it to find otherwise. At some point you draw a line and say that's not a meaningful number. The argument that this trend both matters and can be extrapolated indefinitely is the meaningless thing here
He used software because humans can’t see these trends. You seem to be fooled by large positive anomalies in the earlier years of the century (possibly El Niño) to think that there was no increase in temperatures but there’s clearly higher anomalies in the later part of the sequence than the beginning. You can see this with your original plot by mentally blocking out the highest months - you can see the trend increases.
0.29 C/decade is a large trend. 3.0 per year.
“If the trend the computed was -0.1C per decade, this also wouldn't mean we're heading for an ice age, or very much at all.”
So you did two things there. Picked a lower change per decade and argued a straw man (ice age). Actually that trend, even if low, would be worrying - and over time would lead to much lower temperatures.
Is this a thinko? What do you mean by this exactly? 0.29C a decade is 0.029C per year, not 3.
> So you did two things there. Picked a lower change per decade and argued a straw man (ice age).
The number is irrelevant to the argument. Re-read my sentence as -0.29C/decade if you wish. There is no straw man here, that type of extrapolation is exactly what previously led to the global cooling scare of the 70s, and is the type of extrapolation being used to claim there are problems today. Where's the straw man? Assuming that any given trend in random datasets, no matter how tiny, must always matter, is pathology number one of the pseudo-intellectual class.
> that trend, even if low, would be worrying
If we inexplicably assumed it would continue indefinitely forever and if we cared about things happening thousands of years into the future, yes. But that sort of mindless extrapolation of whatever Excel spits out is exactly what I'm attacking here.
"Consciousness is inherently hard to study," as Scott says. And so is climate, because we only have one Earth to measure, it's an extremely complex system, there's no way to run experiments, and predictions can often only be verified over the course of decades. It's arguably a more *important* field than consciousness, but just because we'd *really like* it to be tractable doesn't make it so.
Most people would have no trouble with the claim that it's possible everything "experts" think about consciousness is wrong. But so many rationalists, including Scott, don't apply this same level of skepticism to claims that we "understand" climate science except for a handful of ignorant deniers.
Yes, that nails it. Pseudo-science happens when people assume any question can be answered given sufficient numbers of PhD grants. The attitude is: understanding the Earth's systems is important, therefore, we understand them.
The possibility that you can fund a bunch of universities for a few decades and end up with no useful level of understanding doesn't occur to people who haven't gone deep into the details, perhaps because of the frightening implications for progress and stability. Scott accepts it can happen for studies into ESP or even all of social psychology, but not yet for other things.
The CRN was created because climatology heavily manipulates data from other networks, arguing that they aren't high quality sources, and congress decided to solve that argument by spending money.
For example go back to 1999 and you'll find NASA scientists expressing frustration that US temperature data shows no trend in the 20th century.. They fixed it by changing the data.
For point 16, Freddie de Boer’s Derek Chauvin Defund Challenge, I'm quite emotionally shaken by this, on how very lightly people propose to reintroduce a punishment that was in the past considered worse then death.
I've been going trough the comments here and on de Boers' article and I'm surprised how people do not seem to recognize this for what it is. This proposal is literately bringing back 'civil death' (civiliter mortuus). A punishment so heinous that it was forbidden by the Belgian constitution (where I live), written in 1831, in the strongest way possible. Capital punishment, by comparison, was only formally forbidden by the constitution in 1996. The wording here is interesting. Art 14bis from 1996 states "Capital punishment is abolished". By contrast, in Art 18 from 1831 we can read that "The civil death is abolished, and cannot be reintroduced." In a time where capital punishment was still a common thing we found it necessary to forbid civil death in stronger terms than capital punishment is forbidden today.
It yet again seems to me that as a society we keep on forgetting the arguments used in the intellectual battles of the past thus forgetting the reasons for a obvious 'good' that we should defend.
I don't get it. Mortuus is an adjective; it means "dead". Death is mors.
The other word proves that nothing weird is going on with mortuus; civiliter is the adverb form of the adjective civilis, and an adverb is exactly what we'd expect if we wanted to apply a description to an adjective.
Civiliter mortuus appears to mean "civilly dead" [or "dead from a political perspective"], referring to the state of the person sentenced, not to the penalty.
Do you have a link to the code, or just the text of the sentence saying "the civil death is abolished and cannot be reintroduced"?
I don't speak Latin myself, I copied the Latin name from Wikipedia for dramatic effect and to emphasize that this punishment exists for a long time before we as a species were sane enough to get rid of it.
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_death) sources the Latin to a law dictionary which actually defines the state of being civilly dead not civil death itself. So it looks like the Wikipedian adding that was also doing it without actually understanding it.
Sourcing civil death to Latin would actually be a anachronistic, since the specific institution of civil death as opposed to more general outlawing is actually an invention of the Napoleonic codification of civil law, so "mort civile" would be the original (French) term.
The definition of civil death is in article 25 (obviously since repealed even in France):
"By civil death, the party condemned loses his property in all the goods which he possessed; and the succession is open for the benefit of his heirs, on whom his estate devolves, in the same manner as if he were naturally dead and intestate.
He can no longer inherit any estate, nor transmit, by this title, the property which he has acquired in consequence.
He is no longer capable of disposing of his property, in whole or in part, either by way of gift during his life, or by will, nor of receiving by similar title, except for the purpose of subsistence. He cannot be nominated guardian, nor concur in any act relative to guardianship.
He cannot be a witness in any solemn public act, nor be admitted to give evidence in any court. He cannot engage in any suit, whether as defendant or plaintiff, except in the name and by the intervention of a special curator appointed for him by the court in which the action is brought.
He is incapable of contracting a marriage attended by any civil consequences.
If he have previously contracted marriage, it is dissolved, as respects all civil effects. His wife and his heirs shall respectively exercise those rights and demands to which his natural death would have given rise."
This is actually a semi-modern concept, since what is lost here is ("only") legal personality as opposed to the protection of criminal law. This of course requires the concept of legal personality also invented around that time. Actually that art. 25 sounds a lot like the lawyers in the commission getting carried away with working that distinction out, though I have no idea of the actual history.
According the German Wikipedia the closest equivalent in Roman law would have been a "capitis deminutio maxima" (approximately a "maximum demotion of status") but a Roman would have thought of that not really as a civil equivalent of death but actually as a demotion from "citizen family-head" to "unfree person" both of which where more general classes a person could be in.
The proposal Scott quotes in #16 is actually much more archaic than that, since it amounts to just outlawing someone entirely. I think for a Roman that would be most similar to a "proscriptio".
I was going to make a remark that law Latin is not actually Latin, but the idea "civilly dead" actually covers "outlawry" quite well.
Someone who is dead generally cannot bring an action in law (at most the estate can, which is treated somewhat differently). So someone who cannot bring an action is "civilly dead". You cannot murder a corpse, at best you can be charged with mistreating ("defiling"?) it, which is a much smaller penalty.
The 1831 constitution appears to be saying "you can no longer outlaw someone, and any law that re-introduces it is unconstitutional".
> I was going to make a remark that law Latin is not actually Latin, but the idea "civilly dead" actually covers "outlawry" quite well.
I haven't seen much law Latin, but if you look at e.g. early modern "international scholarship" Latin it's quite apparent that it's modern language dressed up as Latin. It's much easier for a modern person to read than Latin as spoken by a native speaker.
I also don't know anything about Church Latin, but it would be a very relevant comparison here.
There were a lot of Protestants complaining that Catholic priests, especially in out of the way places, didn't know Latin. So they were reciting stuff from memory, and getting it wrong.
I'm a little leery of "Latin as spoken by a native speaker". Latin has about as many native speakers as Babylonian.
There is not as much native Latin literature preserved as there is native Akkadian literature (assuming you're willing to call a list of different types of trees "literature"), but there's still plenty to show you the difference between how native speakers used the language and how non-native speakers in the 1700s did.
I'm quite skeptical of the proposed system because it basically backstops everything with an erratic and inconsistently applied death penalty, and I'd rather penalties be predictably consistent. But I'm also skeptical of the "worse than death" part, and that could bear some explaining.
The death penalty is society saying "we officially want you dead - firing squad is out back, any last words?". Outlawry is society saying "we officially want you dead, but we can't afford bullets. Meh, probably someone will kill you sooner or later". How is the latter not strictly better than the former, from the victim's point of view? If they don't want to live under that could of uncertainty. they can certainly provide their own bullet. Or just walk through a residential neighborhood at 3:00 AM shouting "I am an outlaw!" at the top of their lungs.
And yes, life as an outlaw sucks in a lot of respects, can't live openly with your family, can't work an honest job, can't go to the police when people commit crimes against you, etc. But it's still life, and if you really don't want it you can be done with it whenever you want.
Or you can just leave; nobody has ever implemented outlawry as a world government and I don't think that's being proposed here. It seems to me that outlawry is functionally equivalent to exile, but if you prefer to live on the run inside the realm that wants to be rid of you, it's only unpaid amateur vigilantes you have to worry about, the police won't be looking for you.
Exile is a drastic punishment, and one that could easily be overused to the point of abuse, but it usually isn't considered "worse than death".
When there is a reliably administered defined penalty, the person usually suffers the defined penalty. The convicted person may enjoy their rights not specifically stripped away as a penalty. Even going by some of the. An outlaw (defined as "person declared outside the protection of the law") does not enjoy any protections of the law. Any. Protections. They may be subject to any and all forms of abuse without any legal recourse to complain. It is not only uncertain method of applying a death penalty, but a penalty possibly including (but not excluding) torture or slavery or other additional horrors. (If one wants to avoid those distasteful outcomes and they are banned, then the criminal enjoys some protection, and are not strictly speaking an outlaw in the sense as probably intended by the Belgian constitutional ban and such.)
Major benefits of post-Enlightenment thought "civilized" death penalty include that is supposed to be quick, reliably administered and administered according to a set procedure, supposed follow only after due diligence to verify the identity of the person to be killed (usually achieved by keeping the condemned in custody after the penalty is announced), have a procedure for disposing of the remains after the fact, and all of the above leaves a legal paper trail and administrative records that can verified by the public. These are substantial rights and improvements compared to not having them, and we have not even come to mentioning related ideas like "right to trial".
Exile can became equally barbaric punishment if the punishment of exile doesn't come with a location where the exile is exiled to (that allows them to enter) and grant passage there. (In addition it can possibly become counterproductive as punishment if the exile is exiled to somewhere not unpleasant and likely irresponsible if the exile continues committing crimes against the local population in the place of exile. I suppose it related why exile to other countries is viewed as acceptable outcome for removing political dissidents but not violent criminals. Penal colonies are slightly different thing.)
27: Am I right in thinking that "gaming" is being used as a euphemism for casinos, and these categories are not meant to include, say, World of WarCraft, chess organizations, sports, e-sports, etc.?
I'm confused about how you think the ngrams is relevant.
My model is that "games" is a much broader category than "gambling", because things like the examples I listed above (World of WarCraft, chess, sports, e-sports, etc.) are part of the first category but not the second. But that people sometimes say "games" as a euphemism when they really mean "gambling specifically, not including other games".
I don't see how statistics about how often each word is used tells us whether the word is being used euphemistically or not.
Oh. Because World of WarCraft, e-sports, etc., haven't been around more than a couple of decades (like... within my lifetime), so when one said 'gaming', gambling was the primary referent—there was nothing to euphemize towards!
If you go to a dictionary like the 1913 version of Webster's, that's all you get:
"The act or practice of playing games for stakes or wagers; gambling."
The ngram is just to show that "gaming" became less popular a word over time, being replaced by "gambling", which allowed "gaming" room to take on its new sense as modern video and board games became popular.
Those particular examples may be recent but I also listed examples that have existed for thousands of years, like regular sports and chess.
Maybe this is a "games" vs "gaming" thing, where for some bizarre reason "gaming" historically meant something other than "doing games" and the reasons for that particular linguistic stupidity are lost to the mists of time?
> I also listed examples that have existed for thousands of years, like regular sports and chess.
I didn't know what to do with those really— baseball is certainly organized into "games" but I don't think it's common to refer to the action of playing baseball as "gaming"; I would almost see it as a counterexample. Chess I'm not sure wouldn't have counted as gambling for some people (in the tradition I grew up in, it was absolutely lumped in with card-playing, though we did not hold strictly to it).
> Maybe this is a "games" vs "gaming" thing, where for some bizarre reason "gaming" historically meant something other than "doing games" and the reasons for that particular linguistic stupidity are lost to the mists of time?
Hmm... etymonline suggests it may just be because "game" wasn't used as a verb very often ("little recorded from c. 1400 and modern use for "to play at games" (1520s) probably is a new formation from the noun; and it might have been re-re-coined late 20c. in reference to computer games").
"The relationship between gambling and the Olympic Games are nothing new, ancient Greek artefacts indicate that betting on the Olympic Games generated great enthusiasm. Similarly, the earliest example of bribes offered to athletes in exchange for a reduced level of performance stems from the time of the ancient Greek Olympics (Kiernan & Daley, 1965)."
Games -> playing games -> gaming and as sure as night follows day, betting on results of games/sports. You can call that gambling today, but again Merriam-Webster tells me the first use of "gamble" as a verb was in 1757 (so much later than "gaming") and it probably is derived from "game" the same way:
"probably back-formation from gambler, perhaps alteration (by dissimilation, or substitution of the frequentative suffix -le) of early Modern English gamner "player in a game," from gamen "to play" (going back to Middle English gamenen, going back to Old English gamenian, derivative of gamen GAME entry 1) + -er -ER entry 2"
So "gambling" is just another way of saying "gaming" and though you may wish to keep WoW pristinely free of any taint of betting and unsavoury associations by "that is gaming, the other thing is gambling, use a different term for that" - sorry, that won't work. "Gaming" for betting on games and sports has the historical precedence here, you'll have to invent a new term for playing video games etc. to make such a distinction stick.
Anyone with the most cursory familiarity with Vegas, legal gambling more than ten years ago, or mob movies should know it's the Nevada Gaming Control Board (or commission).
This seems like it OUGHT to be confusing for any audience. The root word in "gaming" is obviously "game"; most games do not involve gambling, and this is not a recent change. (Sports, children's games, and board games have been around for thousands of years. And I'm not sure about carnival games but I bet they're pretty old, too.)
I agree that modern people do not commonly use the exact word "gaming" for games other than gambling games and computer games, and the second thing is comparatively recent. But it seems obvious to me that the word OUGHT to mean "playing games" (or something extremely close to that). And it's not like we lack a good alternative that means "gambling", if that's what you're trying to communicate.
Additionally, many central examples of gambling can only be considered "games" by the most generous of definitions (e.g. slots, lotteries).
I don't know why people would use an obviously-inappropriate word when they have a perfectly good alternative--unless being cagey is the point. Which is why it seems euphemistic to me.
The same term is used in the UK for job and business classification. These categories tend to be updated... extremely rarely. It's possible it was euphemistic, but I think a more likely scenario is that the other kinds of games (sports, children's games, board games) weren't meaningfully 'financialised' in that you needed a business/employment category to capture them at the time.
"Gamesters" was a term for gamblers (online Merriam-Webster tells me "first used in 1549), see the Star Trek episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion".
No Regency Romance worth its salt would be complete without a reference to the "gaming hells" where the bad boy hero (or, if the hero is uptight and righteous, his rakish best friend) go to drink and bet and carouse:
"Gaming clubs were establishments frequented by the aristocracy, exclusive and with strict guidelines for behavior. The most exclusive of the time were The Cocoa Tree, White’s, Brook’s, and Almack’s. They were located in St. James and were considered the poshest of the gaming establishments. These were called “golden hells” and catered to the upper crust. These were in direct contrast to the gaming hells or “copper hells” patronized by the lower classes. The “golden hells” were just as apt to use gambling and outrageous wagers. The wagers were entered into a “betting book” so the participants didn’t forget the terms and amounts wagered. One remarkable wager found on the books states, “April 2nd, 1809. Mr. Howard bets Mr. Osbon Ten guineas that Lord Folkestone does not marry Miss Taylor before this day twelve month." [Early form of prediction markets, given a similar question on one mentioned here previously?]
Gaming hells were for the lower, less genteel clientele. Their likes frequented clubs in a rougher part of London, which admitted people of all walks and stations of life, and both genders in some cases. Ladies were not allowed in the gambling establishments of the wealthy, as they were considered gentlemen’s clubs and off limits to ladies."
Over time, gaming clubs could morph into (semi) respectable gentlemen's clubs:
"Crockford's, the popular name for William Crockford's St James's Club was a London gentlemen's club, now dissolved. It was established in 1823, closed in 1845, re-founded in 1928 and closed in 1970. One of London's older clubs, it was centred on gambling and maintained a somewhat raffish and raucous reputation. It was founded by William Crockford who employed Benjamin Wyatt and Philip Wyatt to construct the city's most opulent palace of gentlemanly pleasure, which opened in November 1827 and he employed two of London's finest chefs of the time, Louis Eustache Ude and then Charles Elmé Francatelli to feed its members, food and drink being supplied free after midnight.
From 1823, the club leased 50 St. James's Street, and then nos. 51–53, which enabled Crockford to pull down all four houses and build his palatial club on the site. After the club's closure, this continued to be used as a clubhouse, at first briefly by the short-lived Military, Naval and County Service Club, and then between 1874 and 1976 it was home to the Devonshire Club.
The current Crockfords, though using much of the "Crocky" imagery and high-end reputation, has no connection with the original club and operates from an entirely different building at nearby 30 Curzon Street."
#27: "One thinks here of those gut-wrenching stories of women who, escaping one violent, abusive relationship, head straight for similar in the choice of their next partner." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
I recently had my first real emotional encounter with a woman who was a victim of apparently very serious physical abuse over the course of several years, basically when she started having an unprompted mental breakdown.
She told me how the worst part was how everybody in town knew about it and just didn’t care. Though I obviously didn’t say so, I couldn’t help but think that she was implicitly condoning it by staying for years. It seems like a situation where the would-be jury-of-peers is taking its cue from the victim, while the victim is simultaneously taking her cue from them. Come to find out that wasn’t her only abusive long term relationship either. It really was heart wrenching to hear, and I came away feeling like I understood more, and less about the dynamics of abusive relationships at the same time.
Nobody cared, but when police came to my house 9 different times in 6 years to respond to calls of a DV situation each time I sent them away and insisted nothing was going on. Meanwhile the friends and relatives who disapproved of my relationship were yelled at and then cut out of my life.
"She told me how the worst part was how everybody in town knew about it and just didn’t care. Though I obviously didn’t say so, I couldn’t help but think that she was implicitly condoning it by staying for years."
When they say "don't blame the victim," they often mean "we're blaming YOU!"
It is difficult, because the instinctive first reaction *is* "why are you staying with him? get out and get away!" (I know I'm using female victims of male abusers here, but I acknowledge that there are male victims of female abusers, who often have it much worse because 'what do you mean a woman is beating you up, what kind of man are you?' mockery, and that the perfect defence for the abuser there is if the victim hits back - 'he hit me, *he's* the abusive one!' and that verbal and emotional abuse is just as bad as physical abuse).
But that's often more difficult than we imagine. From pride being involved (some people do not want to think of themselves as battered wives or victims of domestic abuse and put a lot of effort into keeping up the image that everything in the marriage or partnership is perfectly fine) to having had any confidence and initiative literally knocked out of them to lack of resources to get away to the guy being crazy and violent enough to come after them and kick in doors to get at them - that puts a lot of friends/family into the position of being worried for their *own* families if they get involved, so they leave it to "just call the cops".
And yeah, there's a set of women who do float from bad relationship to bad relationship, and after a while friends and family are burned out - they've been supportive, they've tried, and she just gets back into the same pattern over and over.
I find the claim that the deepmind ‘safety culture’ has been steamrolled over while the safety culture at openAI is still intact to be pretty strange. My impression is that both companies have a small committed pro safety contingent but this has a questionable effect on overall policy. OpenAI has this flashy ‘super alignment’ effort but I’m not sure this is evidence that the leadership or average employee cares very much about this (eg the notorious jan lieke tweet) or that the actual effect of the company is very beneficial to safety efforts. They are willing to advocate for safety in public but so are Google/deepmind
I don't think Google/deepmind have ever even claimed to care about safety in the "prevent AI doom" sense, just in th "prevent AI saying unwoke stuff" sense.
They employ a safety team (in the existential sense) and have for years, and Shane legg (a cofounder) is vocal about it. Him and demis signed the extinction open letter. To be clear I think they are not that great at this overall as an institution, but my point is more that I don’t think openAI are particularly any better, and I wasn’t sure why Scott seems to give them a free pass rather than deepmind; the description ‘they have some clever people doing x risk stuff, but most of the effort goes into winning’ applies to both companies imo, and if anything openAI has been much more aggressive
I agree; anyone who has anything remotely resembling a safety culture would not be making frontier models. MIRI could be considered a "safety culture".
Also, my understanding of the Sydney botch is that Microsoft demanded and got an un-mutilated GPT-4 from OpenAI and then went live with it; any environment in which that can happen cannot be plausibly called a "safety culture" because if you do that with an X-risk AI then it's lights out regardless of literally anything else in your procedures.
re 13 Grayzone, we only have their word that the ban had anything to do with their reporting, gofundme haven't commented. (They also post a lot of covid conspiracy stuff so could be a continuation of that policy). The money was also returned to donors so "(ie stolen all their money)." is inaccurate.
Grayzone have been accused to financial ties to the Russian government in the past. Blumenthal has certainly appeared on Russia today in the past. Their patreon and gofundme income isn't nearly enough to cover their costs, and they don't disclose their other sources of funding. If that were true (which for legal reasons I obviously can't speculate) then that would potentially make them subject to money laundering and foreign influence laws, which would be a more serious issue that gofundme would have legitimate reason to not want to be associated with.
I invented that solution when I was 8 years old. (probably influenced by return to the future II). And the reason nobody built it since then is that its a solution in search of a problem.
It really isn't that hard to parallel park, even before cameras and radars were invented. It becomes even easier if you accept that plastic bumpers are elastic and it's ok to touch them.
The other reason nobody has built it is that it's ridiculously mechanically complicated for a car with one engine and a driveshaft.
For an electric car with motors on all four wheels anyway, it's much much simpler. Probably still not actually worth implementing on most cars, but maybe Smart or someone will do it since making cars that are possible to park in ridiculous European streets is basically their whole niche.
yeah i remember seeing a similar set up almost 20 years ago. I think its one of those ideas that works in a test scenario but isnt commercially viable so every few years some marketing department releases something about this "breakthrough" to get attention.
Regards 48 -- the crab like dricing system isnt new-- and a version has existed since 1927! The reason this tech fails is because it is expensive to repair
The analysis seems to be pretty on point that it was too large an escalation to ever work except in a few very niche cases. The removal of yourself from a social group is only going to be a motivating threat on very specific groups, generally no more than close family. Even for those whom could force through a meat boycott in exchange for their presence, framing it as adversarial is guaranteed to engender resentment or just simple refusal to comply. 'It's my way or the highway' is one of those demands that's extremely brittle, and often ends up with everyone else leaving on mass rather than doing things your way.
This should have been obvious, though, to anyone with even the most basic social intuition. What was it that allowed this obvious non-starter of an idea to ever get off the ground floor at all?
Lots of reasons I imagine. There's a certainly a degree of arrogance that helps convince someone that this is a good idea, but there's got to be a whole heaping of group think to let it take off on mass.
A lot of the benefits to such a stance are also front loaded, which certainly helps adoption. If you make the threat and succeed you win personal kudos, and if you fail you get the consolation prize of being a martyr to the cause amongst vegan friends. Both outcomes are good stories that may motivate others to try and follow in their footsteps. It's only a months or years later most people will realize their friends have all shifted to a new meat friendly WhatsApp group and they haven't received an invite to any family get togethers since they took their stand.
So typical mind fallacy, the belief that everyone thinks as you do (but somehow needs a nudge to start acting on it). Reinforced by the Tiktok echo chamber.
The Vegan pledge is very interesting. A bold move from a minority to impose it's view hoping that the majority will consider the sacrifice/effort small enough to be worth for enjoying the company of the minority. This is quite different from the classic, indirect approach, where the effort is imposed through call to a legislating/regulating body (the gov) using media campaigns and lobbying.
The classic approach has often worked, but also failed. it's difficult to predict which will success and which will not, because prior are mixed and self bias strong (do you personally agree with the request or not?)
For the direct bold approach, it's easier: My personal guess is that it will always fail: the minority would need to be unusually popular for whatever reason for it to succeed, and I don't see how such a super-popular minority would not have it's cause already mainstream with much subtler push than a frontal "all or nothing", simple imitation would do the trick.
So i am not surprised at all by the outcome, but what i'd like to know is if the direct approach has worked, ever? That would be so strange it's worth a full post on ACT :-)
Now if I am right (direct approach never work), one question is how to implement brakes/checks to block as completely as possible the indirect approach: I feel this indirect approach has gone in overdrive and is the main phenomenon behind (what I consider as) a clear decrease in freedom (which, for me, also means quality of life) in western world those last 40 years...
Yep, if your movement is strong enough to have a chance at success, it will command enough resources for both direct and indirect approaches. But no movement starts out like that, you also need a core of true believers willing to make doomed gestures (cf. early abolitionists).
The analogy to smoking made in the #19 linked article is interesting, since part of why non-smokers won the cultural debate over the pervasiveness of smoking (at least in the US) is that smokers were never a majority: per Gallup poll numbers going back to 1944 on "Have you, yourself, smoked any cigarettes in the past week", the rate of smoking in the US peaked in the early-to-mid 50s at about 45% of adults, declining pretty steadily to 20% in 2012 (most recent year I found in a quick googling). Given the smooth and continuous decline, I'd guess the decline in social acceptability of smoking is more downstream of declining smoking rates than upstream; if so, the Vegan pledgers mistook effect for cause in addition to both overestimating their own social clout and underestimating the social clout of committed omnivores.
Also I think the messaging on the health stuff wasn't nearly as ambiguous as it is made out to be. My grandmother for example smoked like 3 packs a day until she got pregnant in 1954. Never smoked another cigarette. And she seemed to think the downsides for mothers and especially pregnant women and young children were fairly well understood.
This is a bit like coal mining or whatever. You will see in the MSM these arguments that seem to rely on the idea that the coal miners or other workers in the 1890s didn't actually know their work environments were dangerous/toxic/harmful. Which really is not the case at all.
People were well aware, they just lacked options and maybe lacked all the medical facts regarding the exact physiology of the harm.
It's almost the definition of work: if it did not imply bad (or terrible) condition, at least worse than what you experience when filling your free time, there would be no need to pay you :-)
The thing that is special is that here it bring negative consequence to your health, instead of your well being or enjoyment of life in general.
However, is it really special? Recently health (in context of treatment and acceptable work environment) get a broader and broader definition (harassment, well being, stress,.....) and, while personally I see a somewhat clear difference and don't like this constant broadening, it seems that in many context it's bad taste to acknowledge there is a difference :-)
I remember reading a book about the history of textiles, where the rayon chapter was about a woman captured by the Nazis and forced to work making rayon. Apparently they started out with paid workers doing the most dangerous jobs, but eventually those guys quit so the prisoners were forced to do it. The ill effects of working with rayon seem to have become apparent very quickly. (but if the alternative is getting shot, well...)
Yup, there was an awareness, practically from the time tobacco arrived in European shores that smoking can't possibly be good for your health. C.f. the essay "A Counterblaste to Tobacco", written by King James VI and I in 1604. The last paragraph is particularly choice:
"Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossely mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the markes and notes of vanitie upon you: by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse."
Very interesting, I was not aware of that. I guess because smokers were a majority among my friends (europe eighties) and maybe in movies (probably not, but smoking act was presented in an iconic way). Also because the antismoke movement itself liked the role of underdog minority convincing the majority to change to a healthier lifestyle. It is more prestigious I guess, and maybe part of their success. Probablr the main reason for strange suicidal PR moves like the discussed vegan pledge: it gave very false prior about how social norms can be influenced
I was surprised, too. When I looked up the numbers, I had been expecting to find peak smoking rates somewhere around 60-70% of American adults, not 45%.
That would have been my guess too. Also (although difficult to be sure, those things are subject to crazy bias) I think I remember smokers being the majority in bars and nightclubs. This could be true, even with smokers never being the majority of adults: bar and nightclub probably selected for smokers, quite heavily. I have more than one friend who never smoke, except in nightclubs: there is something about the calming effect of nicotine and countenance of the cigarette smoking act for single males in a very stressful environment (pick up points).
The movement would do a lot better if it wasn't so filled with vegans. It doesn't help that the main practitioners are pretty neurotic generally. I am not sure I would trust the two I know best with a sharp knife, much less my eating habits.
#19. I like how the author talks about vegans having two bad options, and then tries to present the Pledge as a third option when it's very clearly exactly the same as Option 1.
In lieu of hating on vegans I'll instead hate on the concept of boycotts. It's an explicit attempt to punish someone who made a good product, for something unrelated to the product. "They make good vegan food I want to eat, but they also make other food I dislike so I'll try to kill their ability to make good vegan food."
Any impact you would make by boycotting a restaurant that serves meat can be replicated by never buying the meat dishes. If those dishes don't make money, those dishes get dropped for the ones that do. Instead everyone who would buy otherwise the vegan dishes boycott everything and now the meat dishes are the best sellers; so the vegan dishes get dropped and the restaurant transitions to more meat. So too with other products. Unless you're boycotting the direct manufacturing process, boycotts are just value destruction.
I guess there's a price reflection for stuff like political affiliation. "I like the food but the money supports this other thing so I'm not willing to pay as much for the product." So you don't buy Russian oil unless it's, like, 50% of market value, because their profits are funding their war effort and you actively don't want the war effort product.
I think the vegans thought they had enough people onside to make their boycott actually work.
In truth I suspect a lot of it had to do with a purity test - keeping the vegans in the group by separating them from everyone else.
My niece, who is vegetarian (*not* vegan, as she is now at pains to point out) had a phase around this time where she was making a fuss when we ate meat during family dinners. I did wonder what that was about, and why it died out without issue when we made fairly minimal efforts to accommodate, then gave up.
This vegan author has missed the ACTUAL 3rd option, which is be a good visible ambassador for your principles and lifestyle. The way the author phrases it, it would be as if a Christian has two choices with their non-Christian social groups: disruptive proselytizing, or sitting back to watch their friends go to hell. But what most Christians do today instead is to visibly demonstrate their principles while walking amongst everyone else, and over time people notice the positive results of their faith in their behaviors and life outcomes, a few want to learn more about it, and a few of those may convert.
The person in your social group who tends to organize gatherings and outings is likely to be highly agreeable and accommodating. They will absolutely accommodate the vegan's diet, but the vegan's pledge conflicts with accommodating other group members' diets, so the organizer is put in a bind. This highly social and agreeable person who does all the work of making things happen isn't going to start a fight with a bunch of other members. So the easiest out is to stop inviting the vegan to dinner, and to try maintaining the relationship by instead inviting them on other types of group outings.
So now instead of having the example of the vegan in their group to increase their awareness, that person is simply absent from all settings where food is consumed, and their philosophy is out of sight out of mind.
I can't blame them for not counting that as an option. I remember comments on a different site about someone's attempts to tell their friends about their corn allergy, and those people just assuming they were making it up and using corn in everything anyway. Food is a real fight.
Side effect of using allergy for intolerance then just something you don't like. That's the backlash of playing the victim game....sure you gain power above your actual demographic weight for a while....but after, real victims suffer from it.
> In lieu of hating on vegans I'll instead hate on the concept of boycotts. It's an explicit attempt to punish someone who made a good product, for something unrelated to the product.
Don't most punishments fit this bill? If Shell sinks a tanker and there's a huge oil spill, we fine Shell. We do that even though Shell also makes a good product. What's the problem?
What is the mechanism that "we" use to fine Shell? The government fines Shell, for directly breaching the pre-existing conditions of their license to operate. Likewise the oil spill is a direct result of the product they're making. If instead a moving company buys Shell gas and then drives a truck into something, we don't fine Shell, because their product didn't cause that. But boycotts will target Shell for that. Boycotts have no pre-existing conditions, they're an attempt to force new conditions into an old dynamic.
> Likewise the oil spill is a direct result of the product they're making. If instead a moving company buys Shell gas and then drives a truck into something, we don't fine Shell, because their product didn't cause that.
This is surreal. To the second point, we don't fine Shell in that scenario because they didn't do anything wrong. Their product may well have caused the crash, but it wouldn't matter if it did. It's the moving company's responsibility to e.g. make sure oil doesn't leak out of their truck and lubricate all the wheels.
And to the first, nobody cares whether the oil spill is a result of Shell's product. When a restaurateur who's good at cooking and bad at business burns down his restaurant for the insurance, we punish him even though he made a good product. That is because we don't care whether you make a good product when we're assessing whether you did something wrong.
I feel like I'm talking to someone whose idea of cause and effect was placed directly into their mind by Azathoth. Everything you're saying here is a bizarre non-sequitur.
>To the second point, we don't fine Shell in that scenario because they didn't do anything wrong. <
Restaurants don't harm animals. They buy dead meat from other places and cook it for people. Why, then, do the boycotts target the restaurants. Because they know they can't hurt the people they want to, and endeavor to hurt their friends instead. It's punishment by ricochet.
>When a restaurateur who's good at cooking and bad at business burns down his restaurant for the insurance, we punish him even though he made a good product.<
He didn't make a good product. He explicitly set fire to his capacity to make a good product.
On 1 - Did this past summer break temperature records in Europe, and what does that mean exactly? The main thing I remember seeing was maps on news networks painting Europe in infernal red for, in some cases, positively pleasant temperatures. The general consensus amongst those who noticed this was that this was deliberate media alarmism.
On 7 - There is at least one blatant-like cat in the picture, and "cat pieces" above the blatant cat. These are hardly "imperceptible". Presumably others might interpret what I interpret as "cat pieces" to be blatant-like. But no matter what, this doesn't seem particularly surprising or interesting to me. Of course if you deliberately put X in your photo, machines trained to spot X will find it, and humans can find it too.
On 13 - Many people (for example, Tim Pool will mention this whenever it comes up) have noted for many years that the supposed anti-war position is targeted just as the so called anti-woke is. It is hardly an escalation of anything, you've just noticed it now.
I spent time in Europe (and Israel) this summer, the heat was incredibly unpleasant (temperatures in the thirties in Paris - which has little AC since this usually never happens - and high thirties in Israel, which has ac but you still want to go outside sometimes), significantly worse than normal summer weather.
Yeh and it’s 29 on Monday in Paris. Oct 1. Mid fall.
As an aside, people who come from countries with air conditioning really don’t understand heat in Europe. “It’s 35c and higher here in Arizona”. Is it, and do you leave an air conditioned house, to go to an air conditioned car, to go to an air conditioned office and afterwards an air conditioned restaurant? Where the temperature is cool, not even room temperature. You put on a jacket going indoors.
In countries with no air conditioning it’s hotter inside. There’s no respite. 35 outside is 38 inside, if you are lucky. I measured 40 in an attic of an old Victorian building in London at night a few years ago. It just trapped the heat.
I did move west in fact. It’s unlikely that everybody in London is going to move north though, and London is already pretty far north. Further north than NY.
Man I live in *Canada* and it hits 40 in the summer from time to time. AC exists, but it's pretty rare in anything built pre Y2K-ish -- absolutely not like Arizona.
And it's, like -- fine? People have been complaining about Paris in the summer for hundreds of years -- isn't that like the whole point of Versailles?
Maybe 'Paris' and 'London' are the problem, not the weather.
Yeh. I’ve heard that from some people from the US, Canada and Australia who were working with me in London as the heatwave approached. 35 they laughed. Nothing. These guys suffered the most.
You might be living close to the sea, or some nice leafy rural area. And there’s probably some parts of the town that are cool. Public spaces are rarely conditioned in Europe. The actual temperature in London is hotter than the met figures of course.
Maybe one day that Third-World continent will decide to stop spending 80% of its GDP on "free healthcare" that requires a 6 month waiting period for an appointment where you are ultimately given a band-aid, and actually be able to afford some air conditioners!
What is "normal summer weather" is kind of my question, because I think the fact that this is even a noted topic of conversation is manufactured consent. In this case specifically in the US and Europe, rather than Israel. Summer is hot, I'm aware. I'm also aware that many, in fact most, countries get by without climate control. Indeed, many countries in Asia get by without it even though it always gets hot in the summer.
Now, my general comment was supposed to highlight the phenomena where according to maps on some European news outlets, we should all be dead already from the blazing infernos that suggest 25 was almost maximally hot, and that your trip to Paris was in some kind of horrific danger zone, and you'd be much more comfortable at 2. Here's the BBC article justifying this insanity.
Just as it is dishonest and manipulative to change the scales of bar graphs to suggest greater/lesser numbers, or to start before or after certain years on point graphs, it is obviously manipulative to skew your temperature colours on weather maps such that 7-10 is green. Unless I suppose, you live in the arctic.
Isn't green good? Doesn't it portray the idea of green fields of lush grass on a pleasant comfortable day?
Do you want to go out and enjoy the nice day when it's 7C out? Is that when you imagine a woman putting on a nice summer dress, or you going for a picnic under a tree in the spring? Moreso, is this the default pleasant temperature in your mind? If you have climate control, is that where you set your temperature?
Or actually, don't normal western humans consider about 20C to be what's comfortable? Except here, 20 is deep into the orange and about to head into the red, as if it's uncomfortably hot.
For point 1, the linked article about sulfur quotes an additional warming of "0.1 watts per square meter" due to the new regulations. The article on the volcanic eruption quotes a similar effect - "a radiative forcing of ~0.1 W/m^2" for the volcano. It also suggests that the volcano could have injected sulfur into the atmosphere, which would (?) counterbalance the loss of sulfur emissions by us.
When the effects are roughly equal in size, how can one be considered a significant impact but the other is not significant? The impact of the volcano will surely be temporary, and the removal of sulfur presumably longer lasting, but on the scale of one year does it not seem they should have a roughly equal contribution? And that the contribution of both together would be enough to turn a hot year into a record breaking year?
To be clear, I believe the underlying trend is clearly driven by fossil fuels. Yet if we are talking about what makes one hot year hotter than other hot years, small changes like volcanic eruptions and levels of sulfur may be enough to tip the balance.
I've known people who loved their chickens and even their turkeys, but I'm not sure anyone ever loved a chimpanzee. Folks pitied Oliver Humanzee. But I don't think it is easy to love something situated so close and yet so far from us.
I don't believe people precisely love pet snakes either. They like to look at them, as objects. I believe people love snakes, in the wild, or glimpsed in the yard. Certainly my husband loves snakes in that excited-little-boy way. And a dead snake covered with ants is a poignant sight - something about an animal that is all sinuous movement, without much else personality-wise, being stilled, is very sad.
I think response to animals is in great part aesthetic and that we ignore aesthetics at our peril, because I believe it goes very deep in our natures and that living with so much ugliness and destruction of the natural world is threatening to humanity. This view seems to be totally, orthogonally, out of sync with the current zeitgeist, of course.
ETA: there was a sort of hippie-run, rough-around-the-edges zoo that served the area where we used to live. I went there a handful of times for children's parties or field trips. There might be a bear say, but it came not from zoo breeding but from being a school mascot somewhere. The collection was random in that way. Like an ambitious rescue organization. The enclosures were not urban zoo-grade. I remember in particular it was easy to interact with the monkeys and in fact the kids, esp. the boys, did so. The monkeys typically started it by throwing something at the kids. The kids would throw something back. I realize this would be considered appalling behavior according to current norms, but it actually seemed like a really natural thing for kids and monkeys to do.
Minor point of order that I think Jane Goodall probably loved a lot of the chimps she interacted with, although my personal view is that they're best treated as terrifying murder-machines capable at times of intense human-like empathy (whereas e.g. most dogs would be t'other way round)
Strong agree on the natural world aesthetics though and the orthogonality of the current zeitgeist. Whenever I see future worlds with greater destruction characterized as "well, there'll be more overall human welfare, just somewhat reduced!" I want to tear my hair out. "All the bees are dead, so we'll just use robot bees!" is a fucking dystopia in and of itself. (see https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66807456 ). Turning Eden into a desert just to foster more humans in sterile indoor environments *is a loss condition.* Did these people learn nothing from classic science fiction?
Depends whether you're thinking of the core characteristics of "nerd" as being "introverted, neurodivergent-adjacent, and prone to deep intellectual fascinations" or as being "grey-tribe cultural affinities". I can definitely see the former as being prevalent among many clergy, but the latter probably less so.
Also probably depends on which clergy you're thinking of. Catholic priests, definitely, as "prone to deep intellectual fascinations" is practically a job requirement, but Catholic clergy as required to be celibate so their divorce rate is presumably pretty close to 0/0. I'd imagine the prevalence of nerdiness among clergy varies wildly among denominations based on culture of the denomination's core adherents and the degree of intellectual rigor involved in their clergy's training and selection process.
Actually it prompts me to think of a passage from Exile's Honor:
-----
> a group of fellows who considered themselves to be young toughs strolled past, and decided to abuse the woman because of 𝘩𝘪𝘴 presence, calling her "whore" and worse. True, she was not married, and now had no prospect of ever wedding. True, she had not named his father to anyone but the Sunpriest.
> Orven, from his childish perspective, only knew that the men were large and loud, and were making his mother unhappy. They frightened him, and he began to cry.
> Then 𝘩𝘦 came striding up the path, as if the crying had summoned him; tall, bearded, straight-backed, dressed in a long black robe with something bright and shining and immediately attractive to the wailing child on the breast of it. He wasted no time, verbally laying into the men in a voice like thunder, somehow making it clear that it was their good fortune he wasn't going to lay into them physically as well. There was a great deal of what Alberich -- from his dispassionate distance -- recognized as Holy Writ being quoted, mostly about the poor, the fatherless, and the repentant. There was also a great deal of Writ quoted about the ultimate destination of those who abused the poor, the fatherless, and the repentant.
> They slunk off, exactly like whipped curs. Now the man came to stand ovver the boy and his mother. "How long has this been going on, woman?" he asked curtly, but not unkindly.
> She shrugged. "Since he was born, Holy Father," she replied, in a resigned voice.
> Now the Priest looked down at the boy. "Then it is time I took a hand," he pronounced, in a way that said quite clearly that it would be useless to protest. "I will have the boy with me for two marks in the morning, every morning. It is time he learned the ways of the Sunlord, blessed be His Name, and when the village sees that 𝘮𝘺 eye is on you, there will be no more of scenes like this."
-----
More generally, my idea of "clergy" is that they are community leaders who resolve community disputes according to local custom, and whose job is in large part to get everyone agreeing on what exactly "local custom" involves.
There are other types of clergy too. Every classical Greek temple had an associated priest, but for an insignificant temple the priest didn't necessarily do much beyond maintaining the temple.
Greek Religion ( https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Greek+Religion%3A+Archaic+and+Classical-p-9781118724972 ) tells a fun story about Xenophon solving the problem of transitioning from "upstart nouveau riche" to "upstanding pillar of the community" - he endowed a temple of Artemis. Since he paid for the temple, the role of priest went to him by default, making him responsible (or giving him an excuse) to hold an annual feast "at which the whole town met with the goddess -- and with Xenophon".
FWIW (I'm a PhD in cognitive science doing consciousness-related research), I think the empirical "successes" of IIT tend to be misleading. The move they make is to propose an extremely complicated theory and then have the empirical prediction be something like "and this means that, when we show people pictures, we'll find activity in the visual cortex". Most people I know personally in the field secretly think that IIT is pretty pseudoscientific but don't actually say it out loud because they don't know who around them likes it
"The Election was Stolen" means different things to different people, and goes from almost certainly untrue to literally and proven to be what happened. I think the lumping of all such theories into one thing degrades the conversation immensely.
Things that definitely happened:
State governments illegally changed ballot procedures to allow more voting options, ostensibly due to covid concerns. This includes everything from reducing signature verifications (drastically reducing the number of rejected ballots), changing the timeframes for when ballots are due, and allowing alternate drop off procedures like curbside voting and drop boxes. Because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail in and other means, this likely had a significant effect in increasing Democrat votes. Note - although these new procedures did reduce our ability to determine if a vote was fraudulent, the most likely result was that more genuine votes from real people were accepted, not that most of these votes were fraud. Many Republicans are concerned that these processes made it nearly impossible to tell fraudulent votes from real ones, which I agree is a significant problem. Particularly removing signature verification requirements - that's literally meant to be the process for determining illegal mail in votes.
This was not a "Big Lie" and many courts have ruled that the changes were illegal - after the fact. They did not invalidate the election based on these voting procedure changes, which perhaps they should have done but either way would have been a major issue.
Whether there were late night dumps of votes under suspicious circumstances, or the less known/proven accusations, is a different issue. To my mind, having read lots of information on both sides, it's unresolved - or more accurately, some might be true while others are probably not. I'm very bothered by the immediate and all-consuming reaction that any such ideas are ridiculous and false even before anything was investigated. That the media clearly preferred Biden and did a lot to boost his election chances (and openly talked about the need to do so) gives me no confidence that their reporting on fraud claims are correct. I also think that the media was more than happy to conflate the worst and least likely conspiracy theories with the obviously true and proven electioneering that benefited Biden. Calling any and all such things "the Big Lie" was a very intentional piece of propaganda, and I think we should be against it on principle.
So Republicans can overwhelmingly believe that the election was "stolen" and still be potentially/likely correct that it was, even if they reject the bigger and less likely theories. It's hard to estimate (again, because the procedure changes made it impossible to determine) how many votes for Biden would have been rejected or never made if the voting procedures had stayed the same as the law in those states. Given the very close margins in some key states, it seems quite likely that these illegal procedures did swing enough votes to change the election outcome.
I don't disagree, but phrasing it like January 6 started the matter would be factually and directionally incorrect. That was a direct result of the chain that went from; Democrats got illegal votes to count (true) -> The courts refused to throw out illegal votes (true) -> We need to try something unusual/extreme to support our position.
What positive suggestions could you make to a political faction/group that has seen obvious and clear election cheating and been rebuffed by the institutions that historically investigated and corrected such things? That also includes the media, who not only refused to investigate as they might have in the past, but directly and emphatically attacked those who brought it up.
You can argue that it's better that those votes did get counted. I actually agree with that point from a fairness standpoint - throwing out 10s to 100s of thousands of Democrat votes would not be an improvement on our current situation. But, I don't see how you can argue that it was legal or that Trump supporters are *wrong* about what happened.
This is a carefully written comment and I don’t doubt that you make it in good faith.
I haven’t done the research on this to make a point by point response. I have only tried phrasing the question “Did states make illegal changes to voting laws during Covid” in various ways for Web searches.
What I’m seeing is that courts found some of the emergency measures were unconstitutional but not “illegal” at the time. I admit that is a sketchy distinction.
There were a lot of court challenges after the election and my understanding is that the Trump lawyers prevailed in only one minor case.
But I keep come back to William Barr’s statement that he told Trump that the stolen election theory was in his words “all bullshit”.
Are you making the case that courts and even Trump’s former Attorney General are in on the fix?
Edit
> What positive suggestions could you make to a political faction/group that has seen obvious and clear election cheating and been rebuffed by the institutions that historically investigated and corrected such things?
obvious and clear election “cheating”
I just reread your comments and flatly referring to the pandemic measures as cheating without reflecting on the extraordinary circumstances involved makes me wonder if you might have a dog of your own in this fight. Claiming omniscient knowledge of legislatures and governor’s motivations during a major public health crisis is a stretch.
Unconstitutional is illegal. I've never heard of any legal theory that would say otherwise in any way - can you support the distinction you're making there? It varied by state, but covid measures were put into place using means that were not legal, and were not approved by the legally necessary process. I refer to that as "cheating" because from the perspective of the Republican voters who were upset by this, it clearly was.
This resulted in higher voter turnout for Democrat voters (for a variety of reasons which I don't think are really relevant to the discussion, because I think everyone agrees this is true).
Good people can disagree about whether or not illegal processes to increase votes during a pandemic are acceptable or not. I don't think Republicans who were refusing to make election changes to allow more mail in ballots were in the right, and were politically motivated. Similarly, I think Democrats who pushed through these changes were trying to maximize the number of votes their side got. If the roles were reversed and Republicans were more likely to vote by mail, the sides would have flipped and there were no parties that acted in good faith. If I had been in charge, I would have passed new rules to make voting easier under pandemic conditions - though not all the same ones actually used.
That said, it is very clear that votes made using illegal processes were counted. These votes were likely numerous enough to make a difference in statewide vote counts, and may have changed the outcome of the election in one or more states - potentially even the final outcome of the presidential election.
Whether other illegal things happened is a lot more murky, and I don't think there is good evidence to support or deny much about the claims. That some of the illegal voting rules made it harder to detect fraud is also true. Signature verification rules were greatly relaxed, and drop boxes/ballot harvesting made chain of custody and authentication harder or even impossible. That is clearly a bad thing for maintaining faith in an election. It also enabled the kind of blatant fraud that Democrats are being accused of. It doesn't prove or even show that they did it, but again, that's part of the complaint about verification processes being subverted - which they totally were.
What you describe is I think the most damning thing about the election, which the rhetoric of both sides drop the ball on. It's not an issue of whether there was positive proof of fraud, which both sides focus all their rhetoric on, but rather the fact that fraud would be completely impossible to detect with how the system is currently designed, which should in itself invalidate any elections conducted under this system until they can be positively proven secure. In computer security, for example, you don't wait until you have proof that an exploit was actually exploited to consider there to be a security failure that needs to be patched, you treat the security hole as an urgent issue in itself by the mere potential of its exploitability. The fact is, we have an electoral system that essentially runs on the honor system, which should be cause for concern whether it actually was exploited or not in this specific case. Rather than some given party having the burden of proof on them to prove fraud, the government should have to prove the integrity of its elections as a matter of course, which is how it is in almost every other country we send "election observers" to. This is one more area where America needs to start meeting the standards to which it holds the rest of the world.
On 16: I'm not in favor of police defunding/abolition but this seems like a maximally bad counterargument. Derek Chauvin is a police officer who murdered someone while doing policing. If there were no police this murder would not have happened. It's literally asking "If we get rid of police, who will punish police who do bad things?"
Would that imply that killing by non-police are less of an issue, or that they would not happen if there were no police? Neither seems tenable. We still need a system to determine what happens if/when someone does something bad. That Chauvin was a police officer seems irrelevant to this conversation.
That Chauvin was a police officer who murdered someone on duty is the entire reason it's framed as a challenge to the "defund the police" position - people advocating that position are doing so in response to police actions, including Chauvin's. Given that the thought experiment is ENTIRELY phrased as "How would Derek Chauvin be held accountable, if not for police?", I think it's entirely relevant to note that Derek Chauvin almost certainly would not have murdered George Floyd had he not encountered him specifically in the context of being a police officer.
If the thought experiment were merely "What about murderers?" it would make a lot more sense.
I think Freddie picked that because he was the proximal cause of the BLM riots and an obvious out-group boogeyman for the same people that wanted to defund the police, not because he was a cop.
And you've already admitted that if you asked the same question with "what about murderers" we'd still be having this discussion about Defund the Police, so there's not much to be gained by trying to draw this distinction.
Okay. I'm not sure why you chose to argue with me about this; my initial and only point here was I thought that "What about Derek Chauvin?" was a bad argument to make. If the whole point of making that argument is to play on the prejudices of the people he's arguing with, then that's another reason it's a bad argument (albeit bad in a different way).
re: that question, I think it's worth pointing out that police get a lot of money, and much of it is spent enforcing laws against crimes which fall far short of murder
you could slash their budgets and still prevent murders
But peopled mostly want those laws enforced. That sis mostly why we have them. The current system wasn't imposed on us by aliens. It evolved in our culture and political system.
I care about a lot more than just murders. Theft, for instance, is a big deal to defend against and we're seeing the results of not protecting against it strongly enough right now.
I would rather live in a world with small numbers of murders along with small numbers of other crimes, than a world where there are no murders but lots of other crimes.
I definitely see the argument for reframing the question in terms of vigilante violence. Bernhard Goetz is the best example I can think of off the top of my head, the George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse cases both being saturated with toxoplasma-of-rage over the legal and moral validity of their self-defense claims. Goetz is far enough in the past that tempers have cooled, although this comes with the downside many/most people my age or younger probably don't know who he is without having to look him up. Goetz, too, was acquitted of (attempted) murder on self defense claims, but he was convicted of a lesser charge (illegal carrying of a firearm) and served eight months of a one-year sentence.
It’s not a toxoplasma-of-rage question: all three of the cases you’ve mentioned, including that of Goetz, were, to the satisfaction of the involved juries, shown to be cases of self defense, and the facts to back up that judgment are fairly clear (if not well understood) in all three cases.
If you just wanted a clear example of someone who deserves to be punished for a racially motivated murder, you could ask about the killers of Ahmed Arbery or the South Carolina black church mass shooter.
1. The official autopsy shows that Floyd had a fatal level of fentanyl in his blood, and has no mention of asphyxiation, contrary to the private autopsy commissioned by the family.
"Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system. 'If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3,' Baker told investigators.
In another new document, Baker said, 'That is a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.'"
Then, notably, after a few days of riots, burning cities, and murders, realizing he would be a primary figure in the televised hearings, he decided to switch his stance, instead minimizing the role that the fentanyl played (with no explanation given for why this fatal level is irrelevant).
2. Chauvin's knee was on his shoulder blade, not his neck.
Regarding 3, he did test positive for covid-19, in the autopsy and a few months prior. I never heard if anyone learned (or was even curious about) what symptoms he developed.
Personally, I got an early case, and had the "shortness of breath" type of symptom, and could speak loudly while still being short of breath. The problem was that my lungs weren't extracting oxygen from air as efficiently as they used to, so even large quantities of air provided less oxygen than normal. I heard of people with asthma who just dropped dead in their shower, but fortunately I was otherwise healthy. After the first few weeks, I could walk uphill without difficulty, and my symptoms faded away over about 6 months.
I find it entirely plausible that this type of lung damage, combined with a drug-fueled panic attack, could cause someone to die.
I'm not interested in re-adjudicating this. That Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd is part of the premise of deBoer's challenge and it is that overall premise that I am critiquing as self-contradictory.
If there were no police there would still be people in the business of chasing off and/or punishing people believed to have been e.g. ripping off local grocery stores. And I'm pretty sure the non-police preventers-of-grocery-store-ripoffs would kill more innocent people than do police in similar circumstances.
It's possible, but anecdotally at least, most retail security don't carry weapons, and are specifically told not to get in physical altercations, to avoid company liability for injuries and such.
Most retail security are expected to call the police in the event of any serious theft, and they get most of their authority and effectiveness from "If I have to call the police, they're going to believe me the uniformed security guard and not you the lowlife, so don't make me call the police".
If there are no police, the current sort of retail security will be completely ineffective and either all the stores will be robbed blind and shut down, or the stores that remain open will have substantially upped their security game. There's no plausible future that has active retail commerce, no police, and milquetoast non-confrontational private security.
Re #21, “a tedious forced signaling spiral about how willing you are to throw out any pretense of objectivity and fully optimize your language for propaganda.” I offer this as the premiere example: https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1342. Seriously, top that!
Ahaha. I thought this must be a joke journal for a moment but looking at their archives, nope, they're actually serious. And the author is also completely serious and still has a job:
“Agreeing to watch your neighbours kids, carpooling to work, sharing a meal with some friends. These are all routine practices of mutual aid, which is what the heart of anarchist practice is all about.”
Yes that's totally what people mean when they use the word anarchy. Incredible how bottomless intellectual standards in academia are.
That revisioning of what anarchism is, immediately provokes me to a quote from "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"His best chance was to make a softened and ambiguous speech, such as would leave on the detective’s mind the impression that the anarchist brotherhood was a very mild affair after all. …Syme had once thought that anarchists, under all their bravado, were only playing the fool. Could he not now, in the hour of peril, make Syme think so again?
“Comrades,” began Gregory, in a low but penetrating voice, “it is not necessary for me to tell you what is my policy, for it is your policy also. Our belief has been slandered, it has been disfigured, it has been utterly confused and concealed, but it has never been altered. Those who talk about anarchism and its dangers go everywhere and anywhere to get their information, except to us, except to the fountain head. They learn about anarchists from sixpenny novels; they learn about anarchists from tradesmen’s newspapers; they learn about anarchists from Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday and the Sporting Times. They never learn about anarchists from anarchists. We have no chance of denying the mountainous slanders which are heaped upon our heads from one end of Europe to another. The man who has always heard that we are walking plagues has never heard our reply. I know that he will not hear it tonight, though my passion were to rend the roof. For it is deep, deep under the earth that the persecuted are permitted to assemble, as the Christians assembled in the Catacombs. But if, by some incredible accident, there were here tonight a man who all his life had thus immensely misunderstood us, I would put this question to him: ‘When those Christians met in those Catacombs, what sort of moral reputation had they in the streets above? What tales were told of their atrocities by one educated Roman to another? Suppose’ (I would say to him), ‘suppose that we are only repeating that still mysterious paradox of history. Suppose we seem as shocking as the Christians because we are really as harmless as the Christians. Suppose we seem as mad as the Christians because we are really as meek.”‘
The applause that had greeted the opening sentences had been gradually growing fainter, and at the last word it stopped suddenly. In the abrupt silence, the man with the velvet jacket said, in a high, squeaky voice—
“I’m not meek!”
“Comrade Witherspoon tells us,” resumed Gregory, “that he is not meek. Ah, how little he knows himself! His words are, indeed, extravagant; his appearance is ferocious, and even (to an ordinary taste) unattractive. But only the eye of a friendship as deep and delicate as mine can perceive the deep foundation of solid meekness which lies at the base of him, too deep even for himself to see. I repeat, we are the true early Christians, only that we come too late. We are simple, as they revere simple—look at Comrade Witherspoon. We are modest, as they were modest—look at me. We are merciful—”
“No, no!” called out Mr. Witherspoon with the velvet jacket.
“I say we are merciful,” repeated Gregory furiously, “as the early Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being accused of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh—”
“Shame!” cried Witherspoon. “Why not?”
“Comrade Witherspoon,” said Gregory, with a feverish gaiety, “is anxious to know why nobody eats him (laughter). In our society, at any rate, which loves him sincerely, which is founded upon love—”
“No, no!” said Witherspoon, “down with love.”
“Which is founded upon love,” repeated Gregory, grinding his teeth, “there will be no difficulty about the aims which we shall pursue as a body, or which I should pursue were I chosen as the representative of that body. Superbly careless of the slanders that represent us as assassins and enemies of human society, we shall pursue with moral courage and quiet intellectual pressure, the permanent ideals of brotherhood and simplicity.”
…“Comrades!” [Syme] cried, in a voice that made every man jump out of his boots, “have we come here for this? Do we live underground like rats in order to listen to talk like this? This is talk we might listen to while eating buns at a Sunday School treat. Do we line these walls with weapons and bar that door with death lest anyone should come and hear Comrade Gregory saying to us, ‘Be good, and you will be happy,’ ‘Honesty is the best policy,’ and ‘Virtue is its own reward’? There was not a word in Comrade Gregory’s address to which a curate could not have listened with pleasure (hear, hear). But I am not a curate (loud cheers), and I did not listen to it with pleasure (renewed cheers). The man who is fitted to make a good curate is not fitted to make a resolute, forcible, and efficient Thursday (hear, hear).”
“Comrade Gregory has told us, in only too apologetic a tone, that we are not the enemies of society. But I say that we are the enemies of society, and so much the worse for society. We are the enemies of society, for society is the enemy of humanity, its oldest and its most pitiless enemy (hear, hear). Comrade Gregory has told us (apologetically again) that we are not murderers. There I agree. We are not murderers, we are executioners (cheers).”
The thing is, there is philosophical anarchy as a position in political philosophy. Not a popular view for sure, but one that goes back to the 19th century with Proudhon. What any of this has to do with being a Professor of Human Geography
in the School of Environmental and Life Sciences I haven't a clue.
The title is childish. However you can read the whole thing and get no explanation of neoliberalism, and no concrete method of dismantling it whatever it is. There’s a rejection of hierarchy. There’s a rejection of the state. Then there’s a lot of gibberish about what amounts to performative hand waving.
1. FFS. How about acknowledging that measurement technique has the largest effect on temperatures? Anyone here have an curiosity about how this pronouncement was derived? Why should we take it as an article of faith when the entire field of “climate” is rife with manipulation and confirmation bias?
"1. FFS. How about acknowledging that measurement technique has the largest effect on temperatures?" - Acknowledged. What specific measurement techniques have changed to create this result?
"Anyone here have an curiosity about how this pronouncement was derived?" - Yes. Do tell!
"Why should we take it as an article of faith when the entire field of “climate” is rife with manipulation and confirmation bias?" - I don't know who "we" are supposed to be. Would love to see your work showing the degree of rifeness in the field.
There have been multiple changes, but the author of the comment didn't indicate a measurement technique -change-, just a measurement technique.
So, for an example, if your measurement technique is "Leave a thermometer in a convenient-to-access location, check daily and write down the results", then, even absent a technique change, we would expect the recorded temperatures to increase *even if no global warming was happening*. The key element there is "convenient to access", because development also tends to favor "convenient to access" areas, so you would measure increasing temperatures from increasing urban heat island effects.
Now, are UHI effects valid temperatures? Well ... it kind of depends on what you think temperature means. If you mean the literal temperature measured, then, obviously, yes, the temperatures measured in an UHI area are valid temperatures.
But is this what we actually think "temperature" means? Like, if I put my thermometer in my oven, this thermometer is measuring the literal temperature; it's the correct temperature to use to evaluate whether or not the oven will cook a casserole correctly, but the incorrect temperature to use to evaluate whether or not I should crank up my AC, or to decide whether or not the casserole has reached a safe internal temperature (absent additional information like "time spent in oven at this temperature").
Is a thermometer experiencing UHI being misleading in being used to represent the temperature of an area? Well, not if your purpose is to tell people what to expect when leaving their house. But if your purpose is to say something about changes in the global climate as pertains to greenhouse gas emissions - well, then, it's clearly misleading. Remember, we'd measure an increase in temperatures even if the global climate was static.
Sure. But yours are just examples. There’s this bizarre thing that people “asking questions” about climate change do: they use extremely naive propositions to make grandiose revelations. “The climate was different in the past”, “UHI”, etc. You know, climatologists know these things. “We’ve noticed the skulls” our host wrote some time ago.
So no, I would really like to see the original posters’ explanation of what is wrong with the techniques used to measure temperature in climatological research. Otherwise it’s all empty pontificating.
Ultimately most people on both sides of the debate are just repeating bits and pieces of what more informed people have written; it's almost all empty pontificating. We humans only object to empty pontificating when the pontification disagrees with us.
I’m going to push back just a little. The OP made a very specific claim, that something is wrong with the measurement techniques used. I don’t want to debate big ideas. Just tell me what it is that is wrong.
The OP didn't claim something was wrong with the measurement technique. The OP said measurement technique has "the greatest effect", which is undeniably true; UAH vs GISS vs USCRN measurements all have greater differences than the reported anomaly, just using different US temperature measurements; USCRN, as far as I know, does not substantiate the "2023 is the warmest summer on record" claim, which I think may go to 2012 in its data set (but I'm lazy and can't quickly find solid information on that specific question, and am just eyeballing a graph somebody else made). Or you could use my example to understand the claim in more abstract terms.
Beyond that the author isn't actually making any specific claims, and explicitly holding a position of ignorance about how the claim was arrived at (with implications).
Many of the instruments used to argue that climate change is happening are located in or near airports, which are consistently several degrees hotter than surrounding areas, and this is becoming more and more common.
Do climatologists not… know this? Do they not compare the airport weather station data to other stations’ data? This is risible, all this stuff is public, come on, what are the error magnitudes, why has the error apparently just exploded upwards this summer, why has no one published groundbreaking research on this astonishing oversight?
This is the equivalent of me going to my boss to tell him that batteries have internal resistance. Like, yes, amazing, no one noticed this before, now we know why there are power limits, here’s your promotion. Or, I’d be laughed out of the room as a more likely outcome.
They know this, which is why the USCRN exists; the CRN stands for "climate reference network", and it is a set of monitoring stations whose purpose is to provide a temperature reference -without- biases introduced by these effects.
The -reason- they know this, however, is that a group of people skeptical of some of the claims went around surveying climate monitoring stations to see whether or not they complied with the standards they were supposed to adhere to. Spoiler: They didn't.
GISS is still using the network of monitoring stations that don't adhere to said standards, and GISS is the climate monitoring network used to forward the most extreme climate claims.
If I understand the USCRN findings (so far) correctly, approximately half the warming we have seen (in the US) since it was established in 2005 is the result of the urban heat island effect (that is, the USCRN observes half the warming that GISS does); the other half is a change in climate. How much of the change is "natural" is another question, as warming trends predate modern emissions.
As a formerly undateable nerd, I'd like to try and defend the conventional feminist take that "why do girls date Chad and not me when I'm such a nice guy" is a yellow flag.
By analogy, let's imagine that Alice and Bob have each founded separate startups. Both founders have a great idea, but they're terrible at pitching and keep getting turned down by investors. They're both certain if they could just get funding they'd make millions, but they can't seem to get a break.
Meanwhile, Charlie's AI-based block chain startup has just secured another round of funding when any idiot can see it's pure snake oil.
Alice goes and writes an angry blog post about how investors are idiots and don't know value when it's staring them in the face.
Bob is disheartened for a while, but then decides that if Charlie can do it, so can he — even if in an ideal world he wouldn't need to sell himself, in practice it's clearly something he needs to figure out. He goes away and practices public speaking, works on his pitch deck, gets a better haircut, and then eventually (not right away, because luck counts for something too) he gets his break.
It's definitely unfair that Charlie gets a free ride where Bob has to work so hard. It's maybe even a bad choice by investors (although pitching skills are important even after you get investment, so it's maybe not as stupid as it first seems). But even taking as read that the idea was still worth investing in, Bob is clearly still a better prospect than Alice – he understands that to run a company you need to work with other people, and sometimes that means working within their perspective rather than insisting on yours.
Suppose Paul Graham responds to Alice's blog post with an article "Complaining about lack of investment makes you uninvestable" that criticises how Alice felt entitled to his money. It would probably feel unfair to Alice, but I'm not sure it'd be wrong either.
I do think that socially awkward men should be treated with more compassion and pointed in the right direction. That said, I also understand why women don't offer this help – the outcome of trying to mentor someone in that position seems fairly predictable.
(I write this as a formerly undateable nerd with an Asperger's diagnosis. I agree this all sucks and I don't mean to imply that any of it is easy).
Sure, you are right, I think. Whining about things isn't psychologically mature, or attractive. The way you present this is a helpful way of illustrating this.
However, why do feminists find men complaining about not finding girlfriends so particularly obnoxious? After all, just complaining about things isn't usually considered THAT terrible. However, I think one main reason is that this kind of complaining flows into a kind of discourse where the general conclusion is something like, "women are strange, so the thing to do is to learn to manipulate them better".
And there is even a hint of that kind of thing in your analogy. After all, the anti-hero in your story is Charlie, who gets funding for "snake oil". Why? Presumably because he is dishonest and manipulative.
Anecdotally I think women are fairly sympathetic to "dating apps suck, my love life is a blasted wasteland of misery and anguish" but less sympathetic to "and the reason is that women make poor choices" – it's hard not to to take that as an attack. I also know a lot of women who are very wary of people who feel entitled to their attention — basically every woman I know has dealt with catcalls since the age of twelve, so if you've had to constantly brush off people saying "give us a smile, love, I'm just being friendly" you are likely to be dismissive by default of people who say "why won't you give me a chance, I'm such a nice guy". I'm not saying that the two are equivalent, but to someone who's had bad experiences, it does pattern match.
You're right to point out the flaw in my analogy - I wanted to write it in a way that was sympathetic to Alice's perspective, but I probably overstated my case my making Charlie too cartoonish a villain. I definitely agree that people can present well and still be bad actors (as Charlie is). I think this is something people get wise to as they grow older, which is why teenage girls are stereotypically shallow, and less charismatic guys have a easier time of it as they get older.
Nevertheless, a large amount of women's casual bad experiences look like "catcalled by smelly guy in subway who stared at me the whole ride" and so I think a lot of women have a low grade level of default suspicion of people that don't adhere to social norms. While none of this is at all the fault of the average geeky guy, the mature thing to do is to acknowledge that this isn't women's fault either, and put in the effort to show that you can present well enough to pass a vibe check. To say "I am who I am and you should just be a better judge of character" is to fail to acknowledge the reason why the vibe check is important, and to sort yourself into the bucket of "people who feel entitled to my attention and don't care whether I'm uncomfortable, like that guy who wolf whistled at me".
Charismatic people pass the vibe check easily, and some of them are bad actors that exploit this. That this is a problem young women are vulnerable to doesn't mean they're wrong to apply the vibe check in the first place – if a guy in the street with crazy eyes and a five day beard asks me for the time, I should keep my hand on my wallet even though a more sophisticated con artist might get through my guard.
(To preempt an obvious criticism, yes this is an argument for stereotyping, in situations where there's a decent amount at stake and time or information precludes a more in depth judgement. This comment is too long already but I'm happy to discuss in more detail if this point becomes a crux).
As a side note, some alternatives to passing as a normie:
- Figure out how to give off unthreatening, friendly vibes to a degree that counteracts anything you might do that would otherwise give a bad read. This works better as you get older, because women who have had aforementioned bad experiences are more likely to value that over a more traditionally masculine presentation. (Note that this is the precise situation in which talking about being a nice guy who can't get a break is most likely to be damaging, because you'll immediately pattern match "bad actor who is trying to pass as friendly" and lose trust).
- Meet women through a subculture where your particular kind of weird is common. In that setting you're less likely to trip alarm bells by being you, because anyone used to that culture will have a different baseline.
> basically every woman I know has dealt with catcalls since the age of twelve
I'm sure they told you this, but it's almost certainly not true. Think about it - have you ever actually *seen* a female get catcalled in real life? Ever? Have you even seen a video of this happening, that wasn't from a movie? This is at the very least stretching the truth. "Jimmy from math class said he liked me. What a weirdo creep!" or "Some guy started talking to me at a bar" becomes "I was catcalled" in the story version.
A very common female behavior is to play up the amount of male attention they get, and especially how they are *so* disgusted by all of this attention - it's a form of humblebragging where they can brag all they want about how their attractiveness warrants this much attention, but if anyone calls them on it they can clap back with righteous indignation: "You think I WANT to be catcalled?!! It's disgusting and demeaning, you sexist pig!"
However, this is besides the main point, as it is generally true that females are disgusted by much of the male attention they get, even if the "catcalling" claims are overplayed. I think you are confused about the reasons for this disgust, though.
> a lot of women have a low grade level of default suspicion of people that don't adhere to social norms
Are you suggesting that this is a conscious process - all females have this shared experience at a young age of being hit on by a man who is both socially awkward and dangerous, and then in the future, when they encounter a socially awkward person, they think "this person is socially awkward, so they must also be dangerous, just like that guy on the subway"? Or is it instead that females subconsciously read these "awkward" signals, and a "dangerous creep!!!" alarm bell goes off in their head, without any rational justification for that link?
If it's the second, I think we're mostly in agreement about the nature of females. You just seem to think this nature is a good thing rather than a bad thing. You go on to say:
> Charismatic people pass the vibe check easily, and some of them are bad actors that exploit this. That this is a problem young women are vulnerable to doesn't mean they're wrong to apply the vibe check in the first place – if a guy in the street with crazy eyes and a five day beard asks me for the time, I should keep my hand on my wallet even though a more sophisticated con artist might get through my guard.
This would be a more convincing argument if it were at least directionally correct - if meek, socially awkward, physically unattractive nerds - the type of men who are labelled "creeps" - really were even just a little bit more dangerous than charismatic, physically attractive, sexually successful men, you could have an argument here.
But all the evidence we have suggests precisely the opposite.
"Men who perpetrated both physical abuse and sexual coercion reported the highest number of lifetime female sex partners, significantly more than all other groups."
Men with antisocial and criminal tendencies have considerably higher reproductive and sexual success than men who lack this predisposition. Antisocial men represented 10% of the male cohort but fathered 27% of the babies in that group.
Men with dark triad traits were rated as dramatically more attractive to women compared to controls who lacked these traits (p < 0.001), and the attractiveness difference was not explained by other factors like extroversion.
"Of the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate that 34% were killed by an intimate partner"
"A larger percentage of males (21%) were murdered by a stranger than females (12%)"
Despite their fears of walking home alone at night, women are vastly less likely to be killed by a stranger, and vastly more likely to be killed by their own sexual partners, that they themselves selected. Perhaps they should rethink their "vibe check" heuristics.
Basically what I expected. 80% was people just saying "hello" or "have a nice day," 15% generic homeless people pestering, and 5% "actual" catcalling.
Also notice that the actual catcalling exclusively came from a particular demographic group (which is pretty much mutually exclusive from the group that gets labeled with the c-word), and she had to walk around for 10 hours, in neighborhoods specifically chosen to increase the likelihood of these occurrences, just to get those 2 or 3 instances... of someone calling her attractive (*gasp*).
And the end of the video claims "over 100 instances of verbal harassment".
So, it's confirmed then. Females *literally* define someone saying hello to them as "harassment."
"Have a nice day" is what females are referring to when they say they were catcalled. Literally.
Literally.
I'm holding out hope that that video is just really really convincing satire, but from what I can tell it's 100% serious.
And the comments on that video are truly shocking. Either these females really, truly, deep-down, *fear for their life* when an unattractive man says "Have a nice day" to them, or they are just so utterly disgusted that they feign fear to mask their contempt.
Maybe it (i.e. the general breakdown of society observed over the past ~8 years) really is all just the females.
From what I've heard, the video is serious, not a satire. Mostly I posted it because I believe it's good to have an understanding of what actually happens, as opposed to dramatized versions in scripted TV, or armchair theorizing.
I think the 2 men who followed her were the big problem.
As for the rest... I think most of it falls under the category of "spam" or "telemarketer", but with no way to block it or mute it. A "hello" or "have a nice day" in the street is different than the same words said by someone you know in a conversation you intended to have. But if that's all there were to it, I don't think it'd be as big a deal. I think the main worry is that there's no clear distinction between the harmless "hellos" and the people who will escalate. They're all seen as one continuum of potential danger, and it's unclear what signals will lead to violence.
"Think about it - have you ever actually *seen* a female get catcalled in real life? Ever?"
Anecdotes are not data, but I'm female and it happened to me. Years and years ago, when I was in my early twenties, but yeah - I was still very surprised because I'm not attractive so it's got parsed as "gosh, men really do just go on instinct".
And yeah, I also had the experience of "creepy guy* tries calling compliments after me, I ignore him and keep walking, he shifts to insults and swearing at me for ignoring him and tries following after me".
So there is some, mmm, lived experience out there to back up the claims.
*Not a baseless pejorative, he was the local sex pest and families in my street all warned their daughters to avoid him, and I mean from 'early age up to teenagers' not "young women in their 20s".
Ok, but I'm still not getting why that justifies, or even explains, the female "vibe check" that disproportionately labels quiet, timid, socially awkward men as "creeps" relative to dominant, aggressive, violent men (who are far more sexually successful, as my statistics show).
> After all, just complaining about things isn't usually considered THAT terrible.
To me it seems like a large part of feminism *is* complaining about things. The difference is that some complaints get empathy, and some complaints don't.
Note that I am not saying that complaining is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you should complain when things are obviously wrong. I am just complaining... heh... about the double standard.
I completely agree with that. I think everyone deserves empathy. The usual way to decide who gets it is to appeal to relative privilege, at which point you're just comparing reference classes ("yeah I might be a white guy, but my parents were on the dole and you went to private school") and that never leads anywhere positive. So my attitude is that it's best to just hear everyone out (though it's easy for me to say – I'm a privileged white guy 😁)
Given the intensity of feeling on both sides though, it's probably unrealistic to expect empathy from all quarters – a couple struggling with a new baby deserves empathy, but might find it difficult to get from a couple that just suffered a miscarriage.
If I'm following the analogy right, Paul Graham is the stand-in for anti-"nice guy" feminists, Alice is the "nice guy", Bob is I guess "what the proto-'nice guy' should do instead of the 'nice guy' route". But I don't think that the analogy really holds.
In your example, the premise is that Alice and Bob's ideas really are fundamentally good and worth investing in, even if they're bad salesmen. The usual feminist rhetoric on "nice guys" is "you don't have any redeeming/attractive features other than 'niceness' which doesn't count for almost anything". If the feminist rhetoric was "maybe you would be a good boyfriend but you need to present yourself better in social situations if you expect to get anywhere" then it would be different. But it's not that - it's usually, "you would be a bad boyfriend".
Thanks, you did follow the analogy correctly. I appreciate the criticism, and it's a fair point.
I don't think that being socially awkward means you bring nothing to the table. To the extent that anyone does think that, I disagree with them. I'm not confident that this is a common view as stated, but could well be wrong.
I do think _Alice_ is a bad proposition, because of what her reaction reveals about her attitude. Or in other words, I don't think nice guys make bad boyfriends, but I think Nice Guys generally do.
So if someone writes, "if you're out there complaining that women date bad boys and not you, you should reflect on what you actually have to offer" I take them to be referring specifically to the people who are complaining about women's choices rather than working on themselves.
I think there's another situation similar to your Alice - overly litigious employees. It's sometimes illegal to do so, but companies have a *LOT* of incentive to not hire someone who has previously sued their employer, especially if they've sued multiple employers.
Sometimes people are just unpleasant and make life more difficult, instead of the nice situation of working with someone who makes your life easier. Alice sounds like she may result in making your life harder, whereas Bob took steps to improve his approach and prove he's willing to identify the needs or desires of others and put in work to accommodate.
ETA: Obviously a "nerd" who can't get a date who tries to determine what a woman would like from him and change to accommodate is much more likely to actually get a date than a guy who goes online to complain about it instead.
I'll just add that I think there's a third group, call it Charlie. Charlie doesn't do the self-improvement thing, nor does he write an angry blog post. He just decides that this whole startup thing isn't going to work out, and shuts it down and gets a regular job.
Or in the "nice guy" situation, someone who thinks that women just aren't into him, he just doesn't "have it", and mostly gives up trying.
I suspect this is much more common in reality ... and I think that the "Nice Guy" discourse tends to put Charlie in the same bucket as Alice.
Broadly in agreement with you. I find your Charlie (distinct from the Charlie in my original example) very sympathetic, in the same way as a lonely person who gives up on making friends, or a dyslexic kid who doesn't think they'll ever read a book.
We might just have different bubbles here, because all the complaints I've ever heard about nice guys are about men who believe the root cause of their problems to be women (rather than themselves). Your Charlie has decided that he's a failure and given up, but he's internalising the blame. I'm not interested in defending anyone that would make him into a villain.
I think Scott's point is that if you want a stable, well earning marriage then nerds are the better bet by such statistics. And he's annoyed at the phenomenon of some writers saying that nice guys are defective rather than owning their preference for not so nice guys.
Basically:
Woman A: I want to have a stable relationship with a high earning professional so I married a nerd. Scott approved.
Woman B: I want to have fun and there's nothing wrong with nice guys but they're just not as much of a thrill, y'know? Scott approved.
Woman C: I want to have a stable relationship but there are NO good men. And don't tell me that I'm ignoring decent guys who are a bit nerdy. They're all misogynists anyway once you get to know them. Not Scott approved.
On "there are no good men": there's a thing called the delusion calculator (igotstandardsbro.com for women, realitycalc.com for men) which uses census and earnings survey data to show how your partner expectations match real-world demographics.
What is, in fact, the "average guy" or the "average gal"? Seems like it would be useful to know. (The calculators ignore "personality"; I don't thing the government measures Myers-Brigg or enneagrams or big five or star signs.)
Try the former with the beloved "triple six" : six feet, six figures, sixpack abs (on the calculator: "exclude overweight"). Some people will be surprised. For others, statistical facts are irrelevant to their view of what they "deserve", and reality itself will bend to their indomitable whim.
Never heard of this. But of course the median person is median which means not college educated, earns median salary, etc.
Two things strike me here:
1.) Assortative mating by education is not included and probably very important.
2.) 'Delusion' probably involves mismatch more than high demands. If you're a millionaire supermodel then your high standards are probably fine. The issue is if you're just an average person who thinks anything less than a millionaire supermodel is settling.
I’d really like to see Scott defend his own editorializing that “While this is a lie and is big” with actual evidence. Not looking at, or dismissing out of hand of evidence you don’t like doesn’t count.
I agree with the following, but it’s just the logical result of having the answer first (trump is bad, it’s not possible election fraud happened) and then finding the “evidence” to support it. Name calling is where you go when you’re so smug about your conclusions that you can’t conceive that anyone could possibly have a valid opinion that’s not your own. So smug that in your self righteousness you believe you have the sacred duty to make everyone stay in line.
“ it’s like insisting on calling Trump “Mr. Jerkface” every time you refer to him in a serious scientific paper. It’s not about whether he’s really a jerkface or not, it’s about dignity and avoiding a tedious forced signaling spiral about how willing you are to throw out any pretense of objectivity and fully optimize your language for propaganda.”
"Name calling is where you go when you're so smug..." - no, not necessarily. Name calling is also something you do deliberately to delegitimize legitimate opposition, to shut up people you don't want to speak, because you know or suspect that they do have a valid point that you don't like. I think that's what's going on with terms like "Big Lie" or "Russian disinformation".
For what it's worth just the quick cursory search of the main page shows that it's not "anti (Ukraine war)" site, it's "(anti Ukraine) war" site to the degree that makes it impossible to ignore. Does this make this entire situation better or worse people can decide for themself, but typing it like anti-Ukraine-war pretending all terms there are on equal is clear misrepresentation.
It's not a well reasoned argument of "we shouldn't be involved in the Ukraine war". It's a bunch of hit pieces on Ukraine in general. "Zelensky appoints Neo-nazi" etc.
Calling it a "anti-war website" makes it sound more respectable than it is.
I'm pro freedom of speech, meaning I think GoFundMe shouldn't suspend them, but I won't be crying tears over that one. But if GoFundMe is going to take an active stance at all beyond what court orders forces them to do, it makes sense for this one to go.
(And that's before alleged links to Russian propaganda that other comments are mentionning.)
maybe Zelensky should not appoint Neo-Nazis in that case?
Pretending that a nationalist dictatorship that was at war with its own people for years before Russia rolled across the border is a brave democracy that's only defending itself is a great way to ensure continued support for one of the belligerents, and therefore continued war
Russia fulfills criteria of being a dictatorship, while Ukraine doesn't. Also, a Jewish president with a Crimean Tatar defense minister.. both being minorities, a nationalist?
I disagree that neither do. This quote: "A dictatorship is an autocratic form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations. Politics in a dictatorship are controlled by a dictator, and they are facilitated through an inner circle of elites that includes advisers, generals, and other high-ranking officials. The dictator maintains control by influencing and appeasing the inner circle and repressing any opposition, which may include rival political parties, armed resistance, or disloyal members of the dictator's inner circle." from Wikipedia's article describes Russia accurately.
If you were reading, before Iraq War, a web site containing mostly (truthful!) pieces of what a monster Saddam was (and he was most certainly worse than Zelensky), how anti-war would you consider that website?
> the cop who killed George Floyd - presumably someone they think should face consequences, and presumably someone who wouldn’t voluntarily accept those consequences if there were no police to arrest him
No sane "defund the police" proponent wants the situation when there is no police. Defund != destroy. Less money for assault weapons and armored vehicles, more training to deescalate (and more funding to the workers who are better at this comparing to the police)
In a world where the activities of an institution cost money, the extent to which something is defunded is the extent to which it is destroyed. It is like when people say “the power to tax is the power to destroy“.
If you just want the police to spend their money better, say “regulate the police”.
I guess we can agree to disagree. Given that I don't see any flaw with your logic but I disagree with the fundamental principle "we live in a world where money means existence". And there's no point arguing about axioms
"In the specific case of a government institution, yes, money means existence"
Agreed. I think that this holds more generally, for most private institutions (including businesses) as well as governmental institutions. I think that the only exceptions are institutions which are staffed entirely by volunteers.
I think "sane" is doing a little too much of the heavy lifting in that argument, to the point of bordering on being a "No true Scotsman" argument.
Yes, many and perhaps most people who applaud "defund the police" want what you describe, but far from all of them. I've personally heard otherwise-reasonable people explicitly endorse fully abolishing the police and the prison system. I understand the frustration of the former group with being tin-manned by their opponents attributing the views of police-abolitionists to them, but the ultimate solution to that probably has to be for policing-reformers and police-abolitionists to adopt distinct labels and slogans.
And that's how we get police without funding! You randomly assign people to be cops at birth. Their parents have to support them still, but maybe they go to an alternate schooling system... or maybe that's too close to funding, maybe they just get different electives in school. Maybe they serve as truancy officers and parking enforcers while they are in elementary and middle school. Of course they have their own bathrooms. They are like a monastic order in that they have a vow of poverty, but nobody turns them away if they show up at the door looking for a meal and a place to sleep. The position isn't dynastic, if two Cops have children, they may be normal people, but they don't typically have children because of the way they live. Well, that and the hormones.
So who watches the watchmen? Do senior ACABs tend the flock, or is there a highly-funded organization of normies who have no jurisdiction over other normies but crack down on ACABs that violate their vows?
I can only really talk about the situation in Minneapolis. I live across the river in Saint Paul. During the riots after George Floyd's death I watched Minnesota governor Tim Walz appear on a local tv channel to tell people in certain neighborhoods, including my own, that packing a go bag would be a good idea. This is a very important topic for me, not something to make a silly game of finding the most ridiculous hypothetical solution.
I think that the Defund movement was, and to whatever extent it is still supported, is an idiotic overreaction.
This is how Defund played out in Minneapolis - clipped from Wikipedia
"By the end of 2020, as the city was dealing with a spike in violent crime, Minneapolis officials agreed to a 4.5 percent shift of the city's $179 million annual police budget to violence prevention programs and non-emergency services, which was far short of the sweeping changes demanded by activists and pledged by local lawmakers in the wake of Floyd's murder. In the 2021 Minneapolis municipal election, voters rejected a ballot measure to amend the city's charter to eliminate a required minimum number of police officers based on the city's population and that would have replaced the police department with a department of public safety. By the end of 2021, city officials had restored police funding in Minneapolis to $191 million—the funding level prior the resource diversion following the murder of George Floyd in 2020."
Isn't the main crux here the definition of the word defund?
For example, if defund just meant "fund less" (haven't heard this definition, but some people appear to mean it), then you could have a less funded police organization.
If instead defund meant "prevent (a group or organization) from continuing to receive funds" (Oxford dictionary) then I don't think what that society calls a police organization would be recognizable as such by us. Would they be volunteer? Would they raise funds by bake sales? Would they even be allowed to raise funds by bake sales?
So in this defunded situation, would there perhaps be an elected or appointed Sheriff and this Sheriff would deputize their followers? Would these deputies bring their own equipment and attend training at their own cost? Would individual deputies have their own Patreons to support them or would that not be allowed? Would these deputies have to have day-jobs or working spouses, or be independently wealthy? Would it end up as basically a kind of classic militia?
Who would be attracted to being a deputy? Would it be a social obligation for the pillars of the community? Would it be people who want an excuse to show off their fancy weapons? Would it be compulsory service like jury duty?
The worldbuilding here could be very rich place to explore and I hope people who advocate for defunding the police could lay out their vision for how those services are supported without funding.
For 16, the police abolitionists would reject the premise of the question. It's like asking a gay couple who does the 'wife stuff' is or a celibate person how they'd deal with unintentional pregnancy. Abolitionists usually believe that without police, society would rely more on social ties to enforce behavior. So if a cashier was given counterfeit money by someone acting erratically, they would contact that person's family or friends to come get them and pay for their item.
A lot of crime could be prevented by better safety nets or resolved through stronger social ties. One frequent example I see used by abolitionists is how people tend to react to 'crimes' committed by their friends. Like if someone I cared about was considering drunk driving home from the bar, I'd work with them to get them home safe. But if I saw a stranger stumble towards their car, I'd probably call the police because I wouldn't get personally involved. Or they'd point to how most criminals are poor and marginalized, so aiding poor, marginalized people would prevent crime.
Step 1 of their plan is "Completely reshape society" but if that works there would be no criminals to punish. This also makes most arguments with abolitionists fruitless since they're reasoning from a premise that most people don't accept. Something like the "Brock Turner Challenge" would probably be more fruitful, since it's unclear how they would discourage a privileged person with strong support systems, like Brock Turner, from committing crimes.
I'm kind of sympathetic to the abolitionists responding to this challenge, although I don't agree with them at all. I'm a big advocate of people ditching cars for bikes and buses. Sometimes people argue that my idea is unworkable because their personal commute is 80 miles on a highway and there's no way for them to give up their car. It always feels like a cop-out to say that their commute wouldn't exist in my preferred society, so they wouldn't need a car to deal with it.
The winner of the contest commented on this substack's articles about Georgism, so I agree that they're probably more interested in alternative society designing than actual police abolition. Maybe he was even inspired by the icelandic justice system post.
The question isn't one of deterrence, but how justice is dealt. I don't see any reason to believe "stronger social ties" will alter human nature to the extent that serious crime would be a thing of the past, and presumably you aren't making that claim. From precedence we can point to instances where culture might have an impact on the rate (e.g. Japan?), but to a limited extent, *and* that culture as-is can't be divorced from policing and incarceration/punishment.
What society is meant to "reshape" towards is ambiguous but proponents vaguely point to wards primitive societies (why don't we ask them what they do with criminals?) with an injection of their own ideology.
Edit; That's what I meant. Police abolitionists would be interested in answering "how justice is dealt" under their preferred system, any more than someone against cars is interested in explaining how to make an 80 mile commute.
Different proponents tend to have different specific images of what society should look like. I thought Alex Vitale in this NPR interview at least puts some of the claims down:
I personally agree that he's right that a lot of crimes like burglary are due to reformable things like drug policy or homelessness. I thought the Amish might be an example of what they meant by strong support structures preventing crime, but I never found anyone making that connection despite only 1 murder ever being committed in the community (yes, I know that there's other serious crimes). I think if one of them described their crimeless societies to this blog, the audience would relate it to the SSC post about puritans compared to cavaliers.
Anyways, you're right that I don't really buy into it. But I'm sure if I lived in Medieval iceland I wouldn't buy into our justice system, so what do I know.
Kind of wish comment sections could be organized by topic, effectively having an instance of a tailored "forum" for each post.
#29 - your idea is so on point that I would be surprised if self-styled "players" aren't already using Chat GPT. I foresee that this will be such a pervasive problem that it will render the screening capability of chat/online discussion completely useless for online dating, which by extension will render online dating nearly useless, except for those who can get by on looks/status.
> #29 - your idea is so on point that I would be surprised if self-styled "players" aren't already using Chat GPT.
Yes, there are chatbot apps designed for the purpose of having an AI write/assist with responses to dating profiles/messages. The Washington Post covered a few in an article in April:
"A vegan reflects on the failure of the “Liberation Pledge”, an effort a few years ago where vegans would try to force change by refusing to eat at a table where meat was being served. Please stick to discussing this as social experiment instead of posting comment after comment about how much you hate vegans, I already know many of you have this opinion and you don’t need to express it every time the topic comes up."
I don't hate vegans (after all, I have one in the immediate family) but I am struggling very hard to avoid going "this was really stupid" and I'm sorry, but it was really stupid. Immediately upon reading the thing, I went "and how was this supposed to work?"
" The Liberation Pledge was a three-part public pledge to
live vegan,
refuse to sit at tables where animals’ bodies are being eaten, and
encourage others to do the same.
Enthusiasts of the pledge hoped it would create a cultural stigma around eating animals similar to the stigma that has developed around smoking over recent decades. That is, even while smoking is still practiced, it is prohibited by default in public and private spaces.
Before we had the Pledge, many of us felt alienated from friends and family who continued to eat animals. We were forced to choose between two options: speaking up and risking being seen as obnoxious, angry, and argumentative, or keeping the peace with painful inauthenticity, swallowing our intense discomfort at watching our loved ones eat the bodies of animals. "
Well that's okay ducks, you swallow your intense discomfort while I swallow this delicious piece of roast carcass! BLOODMOUTH CARNIST!!!!
Ahem. Apologies. But the only way this works is for isolated college students, where a bunch of them go out to eat and the Vegan makes a big fuss about eating animals and everyone rolls their eyes and agrees for the sake of peace that they'll go to the vegan place instead, or order the vegetarian option. They're not living together, they're not eating out together enough for this to be more than a momentary pain in the backside.
Now, transfer this to the family home. Ordinary family meals or even more so, the big occasions like Christmas dinner or a celebration like a birthday or anniversary. Our newly minted Vegan kicks up a fuss. Which is more likely?
(1) Out of ten people, nine decide to dump the turkey in the bin and chow down on the Brussels sprouts instead
(2) The one vegan is told by the nine others "if you don't want to sit at the dinner table, you can go eat in the kitchen or your bedroom".
Even for ordinary family meals, it'll end up with Mom cooking special vegan dish separate from the rest of the food and Vegan can eat in their bedroom or the sitting room or wherever they don't want to see family consuming animal bodies BLOODMOUTH CARNIST!!!!
Golly gosh oh my, who could foresee the Liberation Pledge crashing and burning? It mean, it was so workable and didn't inconvenience the other family members or friends at all! So reasonable and not at all preachy! "If you continue to eat meat, I'm not going to eat at the same table!" Well jeepers, what a threat, I'll immediately convert to non-BLOODMOUTH CARNIST!!!
Or you can just flounce off on your moral high horse and leave me to eat my dinner in peace. Your choice.
<i>Enthusiasts of the pledge hoped it would create a cultural stigma around eating animals similar to the stigma that has developed around smoking over recent decades. That is, even while smoking is still practiced, it is prohibited by default in public and private spaces.</i>
The obvious response here is that second-hand smoke exists, whereas second-hand meat-eating doesn't. "I'm sorry, I don't want you to smoke in my presence" is a reasonable thing to say because inhaling the smoke from someone else's cigarettes can still damage your lungs, but no such consideration applies with "I'm sorry, I don't want you to eat meat in my presence."
I don't want to be mean either, but this was my reaction. The idea that anyone took this seriously has me seriously doubt the overall epistemics in EA. Is it just an extreme echo chamber, where anyone who disagrees that eating meat is horribly unethical is shunned or ignored? Has it been taken over by the same epistemic poison as woke college students and twitterati? That might explain this absurd level of self-righteousness, explicit politicization of everything, and the jump straight to "we are morally superior" and from there to "we don't have to convince anyone of anything, just act like assholes to everyone who disagrees with us." Like... how did you ever expect to develop a "cultural stigma" when you're in such a small minority?
I think it's a combination of extreme idealism and extreme being in a bubble. I wonder how many vegans actually ever heard of this pledge, never mind tried implementing it.
This lady seems to be a particular case, and I don't want to do character analysis on a stranger. Let me just say I think she is on the extreme edge of veganism, e.g. she thinks fish are persons:
"I see people fishing in the park, and I wonder if there’s something I could say to prevent someone from suffocating to death in the next few minutes."
When I first read that, I went "but how would the fishermen be suffocating - oh. She means the fish". And at that point, it's "you have your principles and you are devoted to them, which is admirable, but I too have mine and there's plainly an insurmountable chasm between our positions". When for you a fish is a "who", not a "what", then yes: you are going to make family dinner a make-or-break relationships test.
"The main part of this experience I want you to understand is what it’s like for me to sit and socialize when someone’s eating an animal. I can choose between disengaging emotionally to avoid the pain, verbally addressing the violence I perceive on the table, or avoiding the situation entirely. As you can imagine, I encounter this agonizing decision all the time."
I'm finding it very hard not to be snarky about her and the descriptions of *her* suffering, *her* mental and emotional agony, etc. because I think she is genuinely sincere and does neurotically obsess over animal suffering to the point of feeling pain every time "constant grief that never fades because the loss is still occurring, day by day, second by second. It usually isn’t overpowering- I can be absorbed in other things and experience a rich life for myself, but I encounter reminders dozens of times each day. Some of them are subtle- like when someone mentions their dinner plans, which I suspect include eating an animal. Other reminders are much more acute, like when I walk by a recognizable body part on display in a restaurant window."
Wow. Even *suspecting* that the other person *might* be going to *maybe, perhaps* include animal protein in their meal. That's - obsessive. And maybe that's how it needs to be! Maybe it's only the obsessed and driven who will move the needle on this, to the point that the more normal vegans can take over and do the rest of the work!
But it does make "what you choose to eat is the breaking point for me and I *will* take it that you *don't* care about me or love me, my family" as the condition of continuing relationships. And my own reaction to that would be "Well, there's the door; nobody's forcing you to stay here and sit at the table and watch us eat meat":
"In 2015, I told my family that I couldn’t come to Christmas dinner if they were eating an animal. This was my first act in taking the Liberation Pledge, a public oath to live vegan, refuse to sit at tables where animals are being eaten, and encourage others to do the same. Along with many others, mostly in affiliation with the grassroots animal liberation network Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), I took the Pledge as an honest expression of my own integrity and believed it to be a potent strategy for social change. In hindsight, the Pledge did not have the strategic value we imagined it would, but I’m hopeful that its essence can be expressed constructively- to allow animal advocates to energize their social networks to create change. In this post, I’ll make a proposal to do just that.
In contrast with a pledge that we promise to follow in every situation, with every person, the new Liberation Pledge is a promise to have brave conversations with people we’re close to, where a solution is found in collaboration with the other.
To this day, I don’t want to sit at tables while animals are being eaten. If I do, I face a difficult choice. I have the option to emotionally disengage from what’s happening, not to think of who is being eaten and what their presence means. If I choose this, then to some extent I disengage emotionally from the people around me. In this case, I’m not bringing my whole self to the table. In some situations, this option surely makes the most sense."
Tilt it the other way. I'm pro-life, I do think abortion is murder. Imagine a pro-life pledge where you commit to not sitting at table with people who are pro-abortion. Imagine making these kinds of pleas as the 'compromise' position:
"Similarly, for this request, your family only needs to accept that in your reality, animals are sentient and what’s happening to them is terrifying and heartbreaking. They don’t have to accept that this is objectively true. By explicitly putting aside who’s right, you can allow the request to live in your connection without it requiring the examination of psychological defense mechanisms around eating animals. You can talk to the person themselves, the one who cares about you and doesn’t want to cause you unnecessary suffering, without talking to the part of them that needs to defend itself."
"The practical difference between the original Liberation Pledge and our update is that the original Pledge was delivered in a static state, “I don’t sit at tables where animals are being eaten” where the outcome of the updated Pledge is determined through conversation in collaboration with the other. “I’m thinking about Thanksgiving and feeling pretty worried about how I’ll feel with a turkey there. What’s coming up for you hearing that much? I think I understand, am I getting it? Are you open to hearing more about what’s coming up for me? How is that to hear? How would it be for you to… go without the turkey? Let me prepare a main dish instead? Have me visit after dinner? What ideas do you have for how we can work this out?”
Another difference in this proposal is to rethink our request as specific to a relationship, not a table or event. This can set us up for more realistic positive outcomes and help us invest our energy in productive ways. You might choose to attend a large family reunion where animals are being eaten and only make the request to those you most know and trust, letting their show of solidarity be a signal to others."
I think more people on the liberal side would recognise, or take such a position to be, unreasonable and demanding. There's a good point there about coming at the debate without immediately putting the other person on the defensive, but how much change do you think would happen around "stop supporting 'choice' in order to keep on good terms with me"?
And once again apologies, but I can't resist going after this:
“I’m thinking about Thanksgiving and feeling pretty worried about how I’ll feel with a turkey there. What’s coming up for you hearing that much?"
Don't worry, the turkey will be dead. We'll protect you from the savage beast by transforming it into a delicious meal.
"I think I understand, am I getting it? Are you open to hearing more about what’s coming up for me?"
Coming up for you? Bathroom's that way, would you like some milk of magnesia to settle your stomach?
"How is that to hear? How would it be for you to… go without the turkey?"
You'd prefer a roast of beef instead? A side of salmon? A baked ham? We can work with that!
"Let me prepare a main dish instead?"
That depends - is it going to be that tofu lentil soya creation last time? Only you know it took six weeks to get the bathroom back in order after Auntie Gladys had a second helping...
"Have me visit after dinner? What ideas do you have for how we can work this out?”
You're entirely welcome to come after dinner or whatever time suits you! The bird is big enough that we'll have leftovers for two days running! So lashings and leavings, as they say!
I also lean pro-life and it was the comparison I had in mind as well. I don't think this would ever work, and pro-life is already a vastly more popular and powerful point of view than veganism.
19. >”Please stick to discussing this as social experiment instead of posting comment after comment about how much you hate vegans, I already know many of you have this opinion and you don’t need to express it every time the topic comes up.”
Scott, I really hate going against your explicit requests to not discuss a controversial topic, but yes, we do need to express it every time the topic comes up. I’d be willing to live and let live with the “nice” vegans who make the personal choice to not eat meat but also don’t go around trying to make everyone else’s lives worse, but I don’t know why we should give a free pass to the ones who are willing to exert coercive influence in order to stop other people from enjoying animal products. My life would be *significantly* worse without the ability to go to any store or restaurant I want and order my favorite dish, and there are millions, if not billions, of people who feel the exact same way. Meat dishes are deeply ingrained into our culture. They are one of the little things that make life worth living. When someone tells me I shouldn’t eat meat, I will react the same way a Jew would react whenever someone tells them to stop eating kosher, or how a Muslim would react whenever someone tells them to stop eating halal.
I'm sure Scott's life gets significantly better when he hears the same thing 1000 times, asks to not hear it for the 1001th time and then someone tells it to him anyway for the 1001th time. Even more, this hypothetical 1001th speaker is definitely the one doing so for altruistic and pro social reasons, especially since they are bringing up new, novel reasons that everyone wants to hear.
I'm not a vegan, but this comment irks me because it professes to be pro social, proceeds to ignore a conversational norm and then has the audacity to say people who are currently not present are rude for existing.
>I'm not a vegan, but this comment irks me because it professes to be pro social, proceeds to ignore a conversational norm and then has the audacity to say people who are currently not present are rude for existing.
What conversational norm? The norm of ignoring people who could potentially be cratering global human welfare? This isn’t even unrelated to the “social experiment” that Scott wants to limit conversation to. The people involved explicitly want to control what food every human being on the planet eats. This is like calling FTX gambling user funds on shitcoins a “social experiment”. If in mid 2022, Scott had posted some negative FTX article in his links post, then said, “Please stick to discussing this as social experiment instead of posting comment after comment about how much you hate wire fraud, I already know many of you have this opinion and you don’t need to express it every time the topic comes up.” It would still be wrong to ignore the wire fraud.
[Nazis are bad!] I [Nazis are bad!] think [Nazis are bad!] that [Nazis are bad!] Nazi [Nazis are bad!] uniforms [Nazis are bad!] were [Nazis are bad!] actually [Nazis are bad!] rather [Nazis are bad!] stylish [Nazis are bad!], and [Nazis are bad!] would [Nazis are bad!] like [Nazis are bad!] to [Nazis are bad!] discuss [Nazis are bad!] their [Nazis are bad!] sartorial [Nazis are bad!] decisions [Nazis are bad!].
Yeah... when reading the linked post's description of their aims, I felt, for the first time, threatened by vegans. This person wants to stigmatize a perfectly normal behavior, make it hateful and shameful. Worse, they want to do it based on a worldview that I am certain is false.
It would be nice to accommodate Scott's preference, but how can anyone remain detached while watching a group of extremists plan to create a stigma around your way of life?
Now I have the image stuck in my head about "What do you think would happen if you gave cocaine to hamsters?" "I have no idea, but I'd love to find out! But how will we get this funded?" "No problem, just say it's for a study on teenage drug use". "But hamsters aren't teenage humans?" "Heh, you've never applied for grant funding before, have you?"
Does anyone else find that they get nauseated when they look at the AI images with spirals, letters, other embedded forms? It makes me feel queasy when I look at them; I get the queasy sense faster and more strongly than I "read" the image.
That’s interesting. I too get a strange, feeling almost immediately. It’s disorienting, which can be experienced as queasiness or nausea for sure. Almost any good picture has some kind of rhythm in it
With these I feel like I’m being hit over the head with them, but there is a fascination to it at the same time.
The link at 19 is interesting. My first impression is that this is the sign of a dying movement.
It sounds to me like a Christian sect refusing to eat dinner with people who haven't accepted Christ in their heart in an effort to spur conversion. There's no need for that if the country is more or less uniformly Christian; it only becomes a thing if Christianity - at least, the kind of Christianity that the participants want - is on the decline.
Obviously veganism has never been a majority, but the linked article gave me the same defensive, parochial impression of a group with shrinking influence - a group that's insular enough to have falsely believed that they held more sway than they do. The author is clearly a nice and earnest guy, but I got the impression of a horrified retreat: the demand for vegan-only tables resulted in the ostracism of the person making the demand rather than the shaming of everyone else, so mid-article the "Pledge" turns from an effort to force conversion of unbelievers to mental-health protection for the vegans. I can picture a similar discussion among the born-again ("OK, this alienates people rather than creates new Christians, but I still need a separate table where everyone says grace before a meal for my own salvation").
There's some overlap with the "protests are *supposed* to be inconvenient* crowd and what I think they forget is that effective protests also engender sympathy through good messaging. The effectiveness of a protest does not scale with the inconvenience it causes to average people, it scales with how much the message resonates.
What is tantamount to saying "fuck y'all I won't eat with any of you if you eat meat" is the kind of message that could only invite "ok". They're a little too accustomed to in-group signaling based on trashing the out-group to realize that signaling to the out-group only works when it's diplomatic.
Like the Extinction Rebellion crowd; sitting in the middle of the road blocking traffic when ordinary people are trying to get to work or go home doesn't gain sympathy or support for the cause.
>My first impression is that this is the sign of a dying movement.
>It sounds to me like a Christian sect refusing to eat dinner with people who haven't accepted Christ in their heart (...); it only becomes a thing if Christianity - at least, the kind of Christianity that the participants want - is on the decline.
I'm pretty sure the impression is true, it's just that the group in question is not "vegans". It's, for a lack of a better term, "progressives". (This still requires some explanation, I guess, so - think the sort of people who gave us prohibition, a culturally-dominant elite believing social problems are caused by other people's moral failings, and therefore can be solved by social and cultural interventions, rather than, well, genuine material progress. We are running through a new iteration of those recently, I'm trying to avoid the w-word, but it's the w-word, and it's now clear to essentially everyone* they're being soundly rejected by society at large, but it was not always the case, and at some point this kind of moral posturing might have genuinely seemed a viable strategy.)
*The holdouts being, on one side, a bunch of persistent echo-chambers, and on the other, the "Cthulhu swims left" people, so far removed from conventional moral intuitions that they blame progressives whenever genuine, widely welcome progress happens.
They might be, they might not be, but my impression is that at least in America, veganism and animal rights have *always* been the red-headed stepchild of the progressive movement, the one put to the kiddie table (so to speak) while causes like opposing racism and sexism or trying to build a welfare state are at the fore. A very occasional and limited "animal welfare" pander would be the best they'd get from actual progressive politicians, while orgs like PETA are much-maligned and mocked.
Eh, I disagree. The refusal to admit the Pledge was essentially an attempt at a show of force strikes me as quite disingenuous; they already admitted Option 1 was "bother everyone", but tries to separate the Pledge when it's exactly that at a larger scale.
Also holy shit the second post opens with them saying their FIRST ACT was to RUIN CHRISTMAS.
I read it the opposite way. In light of other evidence that veganism is getting more popular (more vegan options in grocery stores), I interpreted this as the behavior of a growing movement that overestimated their rate of growth and tried something they can't yet pull off.
The map shows the rural areas as being more liberal than the cities in Japan. That's surprising to me because I had the opposite impression when I was there. The countryside seemed more socially conservative to me (I didn't really talk with people about their economic politics so I don't know about that axis). In the country you have all the old shrines and people keep the old customs, in the city people are more socially experimental. Can anyone give me more info about why I am wrong about this?
For what people are like in the countryside in Japan, picture My Neighbor Totoro. For the cities, think Lost in Translation. The folks in Totoro seem more conservative to me.
Yeah but that is the opposite of what the data is showing.
I wonder if it has something to do with the massive rice subsidies? Maybe that is a big political issue there that codes left and so farmers like the left?
The study uses a definition of "progressive" that doesn't include economics. I suppose that Japanese politics might be like American, in that if you have a certain position on a certain issue, you're expected to then have certain positions on a host of unrelated issues.
Regarding #19, I'm extremely unsurprised by this. Has there been any other similar form of boycott by 1) an extremely unpopular, minority opinion 2) carried out by unpopular people? What is the a priori reason for this working?
My uncharitable view is that vegans don't realize that they're unpopular and try strategies that assume that their views are popular. The post says things like “You wouldn’t sit quietly eating your vegan option while a dog or a child was being eaten, would you?” but basically no one in the general population thinks this way! I think any "normal" person could have guessed this wouldn't have worked ahead of time.
(if this comment is too vegan-hate-y feel free to delete)
It’s certainly not an effective tactic. Pointing out that what has been normal behavior for the entire existence of humanity is now in your oh so enlightened opinion is actually immoral.
That’s not going to bring anyone around. It’ll just make people think you are a real asshole. I’ll mention that I went the vegetarian route for over a decade and tried hard not to be ‘that guy’. Ordering takeout for the team from the rib joint? What will we do about the vegetarian? Don’t overthink it. Just order one less meal. I’ll be just fine.
But it's also the social aspect there, where excluding you from the team feels discriminatory. So a vegetarian option on the menu would at least let your work mates go "ten orders of ribs, hold the ribs on one and just get the baked potato, onion rings, coleslaw and beans" in order to maintain solidarity and team-building morale and so forth.
It's the demand for "my way or the highway" that gets people's backs up. "Okay, so I grudgingly admit you currently have the right to eat the flesh of sentient beings that were tortured to death, but I'm not going to eat at the same table if you order the corpses, and if you go ahead and eat without me then I'm taking that as you don't care about me, you don't value me, and you are choosing meat-eating over a family member/friend/colleague". So nobody gets to eat anything and everyone goes hungry if they give in to the emotional arm-twisting, *or* they go ahead and order from the rib joint and Vegan lobs in a complaint to HR about workplace discrimination.
Well, now that you mention it, at a different job with a different team I went to dine in at a rib place and on that occasion did dine on sides. What do people in Minnesota have about ribs?
In house, I almost always had a peanut butter sandwich stashed in my desk drawer for lunch so, no problem, I'm good. I think I've mentioned here that I'm pretty food indifferent. About one step away from packets of Soylent really. I've eaten breakfast today and it was... yeah, a peanut butter sandwich.
Yep, we have posters about being nut-free up in my place of work because some of the kids *do* have such allergies and *would* have bad reactions, so we have to be aware of other parents bringing treats in for their kids that might contain nuts (e.g. on birthdays, they might bring in cupcakes or the like for sharing).
I do think food preferences (as distinct from things like allergies and coeliac disease and so on) are going to become more of a battleground; see the recent rush in all kinds of claims about "this food is gluten free!" on packaging for foods that never had a whisper of gluten, just for marketing purposes. It's great that it gives more selection to people with dietary problems (there are *way* more products on sale and available today than years ago) but it also could devolve into tit-for-tat warfare:
"You can't eat meat at work or paid for by work meals outside because I'm vegan and that's workplace discrimination!"
"Well, *you* can't eat peanut butter because I'm allergic!"
"Then *neither* of you can have anything with gluten in because *I'm* sensitive!"
"Gluten? Nuts? Meat? Nobody can have anything above 3g of carbs and sugar-free because I'm diabetic and on the keto diet to control my blood sugar!"
I'm waiting for the meat-eating counter-boycott. "I won't eat at any restaurant that offers any vegan options whatsoever! Every option must contain meat product."
I don't know, I think "make people feel like they have to agree to your ideas or get into an unlimited number of unpleasant confrontations with you" has worked for the social justice movement, including when it was just starting up and didn't have obvious social power.
I think maybe the difference is that most people genuinely didn't want to be seen as racist, or felt bad being reminded of their own racism. I think vegans model meat-eaters as feeling slightly bad about themselves but repressing it (in which case this strategy might have worked), but most meat-eaters just don't feel bad at all.
Appart from discussing about how much it really worked (I think the jury is still out on this thing, as the backlash is getting stronger and the dust has not settled), I see 2 things that differ from the Vegan attempt:
1) use of indirect approach: you lobby and meadia-threaten the regulators, and get anti-discriminatory laws, quotas, positive discrimination and anti hate speech laws.
2) Direct approach, but with a lot of the boiling frog/ step in the door/slippery slope/small step techniques:
(1) start from a behavior in the same family as what you hope to ban: for the vegan, it would be cannibalism, or better, indignation about consumption of pets. Then try to progressively get more and more things considered as pets. Pet pigs for example. (Woke equivalent would be starting from lynching, honor murders, colonial era history and building on top....indeed the whole history of the stuff)
(2) Use similar things that may have more support: animal suffering, nature preservation. This is not directly linked to meat consumption, but it is quite close.
(Woke maybe used stuff like sexual liberation and individual freedom which won in the 70s and significantly weakened religion in the western world.)
(3) Piggyback on another trendy but quite unrelated cause, like health. Vegan can do it. Woke....nor so much, except there is stuff like sex is good for your health and the whole mental health area...
I think that this, done cleverly with a good feeling about what can be pushed and what would cause a backlash killing your advances, will work. It needs time and societal/political acumen though, things that were not evident in the vegan pledge ;-)
The Woke movement sure did use a lot of that, with extensive use or sympathetic minority martyrs in media pushing the acceptable behavior into less and less traditional discrimination of racial/sexual/behavioral minorities.
As I said, I thing they overdid it lately (too fast, incoherent victim/oppressors groups, mixing with feminism that have a quite different dynamic (not minority, for one thing), alienating the rationalists which were early supporters) and the backlash is coming. I am not yet sure if the backlash will result in a slow down, a stop, or a reversal....
The cynical view on that is that you can't (yet) have your personal life and your public reputation and your career ruined on accusations of being a carnivore, whereas accusations of racism are a much more powerful weapon.
Don't forget anti-discrimination laws. Accusations of promoting racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., carry an implicit "...and therefore I can drag you to court if you don't grovel hard enough", in a way that accusations of eating meat don't.
"The post says things like “You wouldn’t sit quietly eating your vegan option while a dog or a child was being eaten, would you?”
I must be a really horrible person, because if someone asked me that with a straight face, I'd be so tempted to reply "Let's not make judgements around other people's cultures, maybe the dog dish is tasty and I should try it for the sake of greater openness, the disgust reaction is no basis to make rational judgements!" or to channel W.C. Fields "I love children, I just couldn't eat a whole one" or "Depends - how good is the vegan option I'm eating? If it's really good, I don't want the bother of trying to get another seat at a different table" or even Swift's "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."
Indeed, building upon Swift's proposal, we could do away with cattle and pigs and sheep as meat animals altogether and replace them with the unwanted children! Isn't this a pleasing prospect to any vegan, to save the animals from the horrors of torture in the slaughterhouse?
"Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the addition of some thousand carcasses in our exportation of barrel’d beef: the propagation of swine’s flesh, and improvement in the art of making good bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of pigs, too frequent at our tables; which are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a Lord Mayor’s feast, or any other publick entertainment."
1) Adjustable space mirror seems like straightforward answer
4) Cash is king
7) The one on the left clearly has an ear. Also not clear to me this is "sort of working on humans".
8) Cool pictures, though I am a bit offended about how the parts that make the spiral are switching their distance. Would be more pleasing if the spiral was less notional and more physical if haphazard.
Also I cannot see the text at all when looking right at it with eyes open, but out of corner of my eye or slightly closed eyes it is crystal clear.
10) Sounds plausible.
12) Lawsuits like this should come with damages against the spurious claimants. In fact Title UIX generally was jsut a huge mistake.
13) Yeah the global financial industry and tech firms are not to be trusted. I really think these firms don't actually think about all the harm they do to themselves with some of these decisions.
14) Ditto. When I meet people in this field I openly refer to them as the Stasi.
15) I would guess some data collection/reporting change.
16) Yes because a system with a judge and people named outlaws would definitely lead to few dead minorities right? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA God these people are idiots.
17) This makes obvious sense.
18) This data seems weird, though it does make sense that the people with real good food wouldn't like others' food.
19) Can I also refuse to sit at a table with people who have electronics made by little Asian children? This performative moralizing is typically stupid.
21) I mean almost all elections are "fraudulent" to some degree or other. Both parties and other actors use a variety of dirty tricks, things which no doubt directly impacts the result when the elections are so close.
For sure the 2020 election was "fraudulent" if you only focus on the question "did democrats and their allies do illegal and unethical things that directly lead to them winning the election". Of course in the broader context that similar or other distortions were happening from the other side the level of "fraudlentness" was perhaps not notable.
But people on both sides have really taken out their own argumentative foundations when they say things like "there is no appreciable voter fraud" and the like. When you say things that are transparently false as your talking points, people stop believing you even if your broader message is correct.
23) Sort of makes sense, though I also don't think people should be expected to use the new name. Lots of places are called different things than the locals call them.
24) Good twitter is cancer. The faster social media dies the better.
25 I) Awesome!
25 II) Sadly I don't actually value random strangers lives very much so I won't be giving.
26) This is the weirdo with the laughable belief that people weren't conscious before 6000 years ago? We sure he isn't a 4004 bc guy secretly?
27) Yeah checks out. Shockingly, smart people make better life decisions!
28) MegaMan was awesome. Good call.
29) Interetsing theory.
30) Well you pumped a ton of free money into the economy that encouraged people to not work and lead to TONS of wasteful non productive spending. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Unlike the Keynesian's claims, the government issues debt to pay people to dig holes and fill them back in (or sit around on their ass) is not actually a basis for a functional economy.
32) Ok so a crazy person.
33) Yeah your options for alone time are better than ever.
35) Psychology is really still in the feeding people lead pills portion of its existence other than the pharma side. Which is overused as well.
38) uhuh. Nothing that new here. I am also often surprised by the things people think are insights.
47) The future technology my children actually need!
#16 - the Iceland solution seems to punt on the question “do we need police?” Let’s say the judge decrees that the offender has one month to complete his community service or be murdered by the citizenry, but an angry citizen decides to murder him before his one month is up. Well, now the judge decrees that the angry citizen has one month to complete community service or be murdered by another angry citizen. But the angry citizen is also murdered before his time is up. This pattern will either continue until we lose track of who can be legally murdered and dissolve into anarchy, or everyone calms down and agrees to only murder those who can legally be murdered. I assume the defund the police crowd would say the latter will happen, while others would say the former. And the stakes are so high that even the possibility of the former would push most away from supporting the defund the policers. Are there any examples of modern societies that have experimented with similar laws?
At a bare minimum, I think you can only propose such a system for some sort of small community where most people know each other and people aren't frequently coming or going. Proposing this for modern cities or the country at large just seems like a total non-starter.
RE: 36, it honestly makes me like Vivek more. If the worst that can be said about his work is that it's a Second Chances farm for drugs that gave a fifth second chance to a drug that didn't pan out, then I don't feel like this is a strong attack vector for his opponents.
13. I am still wondering why they insist on using gofundme. Sure, network effects, but when you are accepting donations, you literally send people the link to the site, I don't think many people just go to gofundme and randomly look for projects to donate to? And gfm by themselves does no marketing? Or am I wrong? There doesn't seem to be any special sauce needed either - you literally just collect money and send it to people, it's like any online store except you don't need to worry about getting and sending the actual merchandise. It should be completely commoditized - and yet somehow gofundme, despite their known wokeness and censoriousness, manages to still attract the right, who proceed to pay them, use them, lose their campaigns and complain. What am I missing here? I understand using facebook, you can't just go to Trump Social and expect the same engagement. But what's so special with gfm?
No I’m on the mobile app, but that’s how I always use Substack and never noticed it before. I’ve received some likes before (on other blogs) and always wondered how.
Also just noticed the default sort for comments is “Top”. [I would’ve just edited that into my previous comment, but as far as I can tell, editing comments is a desktop privilege]
I kind of like having the option to like comments, but sorting by most liked, by default, seems like it could change the nature of discussion threads. We already have Reddit and Facebook doing that bs, don’t need it here too.
22: re the real challenge being getting users/customers: Yes, this is absolutely true. For something like a dating app or social network, I would say not half but 90% or more of your focus should be on this problem.
I definitely don't think that not knowing something should generally be a cause for shame. If anything, one can simply appreciate learning something new cf. https://xkcd.com/1053/.
And that's certainly the case for getting a reference to a random song from 40+ years ago.
I'd say the same about Scott's preemptive apology that "he must be slow." First of all, if he were slow, there would be no need to apologize for it, second of all, he is obviously very much *not* slow. Third of all, everyone inevitably learns things at some point, and all parties involved can appreciate that process, rather than lamenting the former ignorance, or mocking someone for it. Fourth, pop-cultural references are quite unimportant, and there is even less reason to feel bad about not getting one.
Haha nah, I know the song well enough that I should’ve recognized it. That’s part of what makes it so funny though! It slipped by me at first because it sounds totally plausible as a straight forward, non-joke statement. Then the punchline is revealed and that also plays perfectly. *Chef’s kiss*
I keep trying to sing “if she subpoenas Colada” and I literally can’t do it without breaking out in giggles.
You might just be too young to have heard it constantly played on the radio (lucky you). I hated that song and still do; it's not romantic, it's "guy wants to cheat on his current partner because he doesn't have the guts to break up with her directly; puts ad in lonely hearts column looking for new love; finds her; turns out to be his current partner because she too wants to break up with him but doesn't have the guts to do it directly".
I think the end result of that 'date' wouldn't be "let's rekindle our romance", it would be a lot of shamefaced avoiding each other's gaze, then a blazing row of mutual recrimination and a messy breakup where both of them complain to their friends how the other cheated on them, and both of them would be right because she put the ad in first, but he was already looking.
Also it's annoyingly poppy and gets stuck in your head as an earworm.
One bit of trivia on "Escape (the Pina Colada Song)" is that it was the final Billboard #1 song of the 1970s. No matter how you feel about the 70s or the 80s, you can find a story where this feels right.
That's incredible. It feels like this is a joke that would have been very obvious to a lot of people but was lacking that missing piece of a name that at least rhymed.
Prophetic perfect tense: The Biblical Hebrew "perfect" is not a past tense. Rather, it is a perfective aspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfective_aspect "describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition."
Events in the past can be seen more commonly as closed units, so perfective is often associated with the past; events in the present or future have some uncertainly and so complexity and so the imperfective is often associated with the future. But the match is not 100%, as in these examples.
English has the (im)perfective too.
* Imperfective "I was walking down the street when a pigeon landed on my head"
* Perfective: "I walked down the street when a pigeon landed on my head" makes no sense because the pigeon landing shows that we are describing a complex whole, a unit WITH interior composition."
English, however, also has past, present, and future
Is there any negative correlation between general factor of personality and things we don’t consider psychiatric conditions, like serial entrepreneurship, bodybuilding, gender identity?
"8: Related: AI art has gone from copying humans to inventing entirely new styles."
I think this is misleading. The AI isn't inventing a new style. The "style" is imposed upon it by a human using a template. It is impressive that it can manage to produce good results given the difficult constraints it is placed under but it is not "inventing an entirely new style".
I find the language very annoying too. The oven doesn't choose to bake the perfect cake, the baker choses the ingredients, the method, and when to remove it from the oven. The human chose when to stop "re-rolling" the model and what to ask for.
> I haven’t seen a lot of uptake yet - my trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)
Based on what I've seen, it seems that on average men are satisfied with infinite generated boobies, while women are looking for interactive fanfic (AI boyfriends).
47: "...genetically modified mouth bacterium that will outcompete your normal mouth bacteria and eliminate cavities..."
Not to invite being accused of promoting an 'ism' or starting a movement but wouldn't remineralization do the same and it's better understood. When the mouth is to some point acidic(5.5?) our teeth lose minerals. This can be countered with Ph strips, food-grade calcium carbonate and an appropriate amount caution - or so I've read.
I'm sure the new science has other applications as well.
I don’t know about all that, I do know a huge amount of conventional wisdom people are told by their dentists are just straight lies.
At one point I was told cavities never heal once formed. At another point in my early 20s I had several teeth riddled with cavities I didn’t pay to fix.
next time I went in during my late 20s my teeth supposedly looked great and were cavity free.
In my mid 30s I broke a tooth (I like chewing ice and popcorn) and was told it was vital I get it fixed and crowned immediately because it would hurt and the tooth would die etc.
So I did.
Then a few years later I broke a different tooth even worse, but didn’t get it fixed…….but after a year or so of hurting it healed and is fine and not dead at all. White as could be, just missing a corner. It is slightly sensitive, but that is hardly worth several hundred dollars to fix.
Anyway that combined with how much more Americans spend on their teeth make me think dentistry in the US is 80% scam.
Yea, we must be our own advocates when dealing with paid professionals. Best to find a good one and and deal with them long-term and if they sell to or service family members, better yet.
"At one point I was told cavities never heal once formed."
This may depend on the person and their situation. It seems generally good advice but with many possible exceptions. I had a roommate in my early 20s that developed a hole the size of a pencil lead let open up at the top of one of his front teeth. He decided to fix it by cleaning the area, swishing it with fluoride rinse and dapping some super glue on it. It seemed to do the trick although I wonder if some glues are toxic and he just got lucky!
I started with this book: Dr. Ellie Phillips(2010), then considered criticisms of it before doing some online research, cross-checking info that I thought useful. I did not record those sources.
I developed a technique for myself that I've been using about 6 months which I can detail if you or anyone is interested. It seems a pretty basic natural process to augment but there are caveats. I was actually hoping a dental professional or student would chime in!
"The enamel on the outside of your tooth is constantly changing in strength and hardness, becoming softer for a while and then naturally hardening up again. People have known for years that there is a similar chemistry to keep our skeleton healthy. Minerals are deposited into bones and then removed in a natural process of breakdown and rebuilding. Healthy bone exists when the repairs balance the wearing away. Even under normal, healthy conditions, the strength of tooth enamel is always in balance, as the outer enamel builds up and breaks down all day and all night.6”
--Dr. Ellie Phillips, Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye, 2010
This is interesting. Reminds me of a study years back showing a divergence between country raccoons and city raccoons. City raccoons had gotten smarter as they had to negotiate a greater variety of novel challenges. Not just trees, but trees and locked trash cans etc.
How do we know they actually got smarter? Are we assuming the country raccoon wouldn’t figure out the trash can given the same opportunity, or is someone out there administering IQ tests to raccoons?
The largest and longest field study ever yet done on coyotes has been underway in Cook County IL for more than a decade now. Radio collar tracking, motion cameras, systematic life-cycle histories of lots of coyotes, etc.
The research project's focus is on urban (meaning both city and suburbs) coyotes. I've attended a couple of presentations along the way by the lead researchers and one overall takeaway is that coyotes' fundamental behaviors change in the city/suburban environment. It isn't simply that they evolved as clever adaptable non-apex predators and have brought those skills to town; they seem to have developed some whole new skills. Where that line is exactly seems a bit blurry to me but, that is what the researchers think they're seeing.
#27 "...the “Nice Guy” argument and everyone agreed it was just a dog whistle for how we were actually rapists who believed we should be able to rape whoever we wanted with no consequences." Oh, come on. To take this seriously for a second, another reading of this study could be the nerdy professions have lower divorce rates *because* they have fewer partners, and/or know they'll have a harder time finding other partners after divorce.
Low income people have a harder time finding partners after divorce too, however they divorce a lot more than high income people. Also, a lot of the people who push the "Nice guys are secretly bad" argument would never accept that some people could have "have lower divorce rates *because* they have fewer partners" as they generally seek to deny the link between past promiscuity and future actions.
I see #27 as more of a broadside against such people rather than a comment on the merits of the professions that divorce more/less (I certainly don't think it's interesting enough to include on the list without this extra "colouring" when you compare with what else is on it).
'Low income people have a harder time finding partners after divorce too' - is this true? I can't find good data from a quick search.
I know it may seem easy to assume this based on the idea that people want to date richer people more, but we should also keep in mind that people mostly date within their own socioeconomic groups.
> Using data from the first Census data set that includes complete measures of male biological fertility for a large-scale probability sample of the U.S. population (the 2014 wave of the Study of Income and Program Participation-N = 55,281), this study shows that high income men are more likely to marry, are less likely to divorce, 𝐢𝐟 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲, and are less likely to be childless than low income men. Men who remarry marry relatively younger women than other men, on average, although this does not vary by personal income. For men who divorce who have children, high income is not associated with an increased probability of having children with new partners. Income is not associated with the probability of marriage for women and is positively associated with the probability of divorce. 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞 and more likely to be childless than low income women. For women who divorce who have children, high income is associated with a lower chance of having children with new partners, although the relationship is curvilinear. These results are behavioral evidence that women are more likely than men to prioritize earning capabilities in a long-term mate and suggest that high income men have high value as long-term mates in the U.S.
Maybe I should have said "Low income men have a hard time" instead of "Low income people".
That can't fully explain the effect because the vast majority of divorces are initiated by women, so certain types of men initiating divorce less often would not materialize as that huge of a disparity.
I agree. In my mind, I was thinking more about cheating being a cause for divorce - nerdy men might cheat less often (partly) because fewer partners are available.
Has anyone made their way through the responses to the Jaynes review yet? I read part 1 and started part 2, and so far it seems really unhelpful. There are a lot of assertions about research backing up Jaynes, but nothing is actually explained. There's a link to a big page with lots of articles, most of which seem to be produced by the Jaynes society or Jaynesians. This doesn't make it wrong, but it potentially falls victim to Noah Smiths' mud moat problem (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-two-paper-rule). It's not really reasonable to just say, "lots of research backs us up!" and demand people read an enormous amount of content before responding. Then there's passages like "Alexander cites one article that supposedly contradicts Jaynes’s hypothesis about hemispheric interactions. However, numerous other publications support Jaynes." with no references or citations at all. What publications? What is their exact evidence?
There also seems to be quite a lot of "clearly Scott didn't read the whole book" or "this and that is clearly explained" again with little further explanation. Overall I get a similar impression as every time I try to read Marxists. If you disagree, you don't understand it or have to read more; if you think you understand it and still disagree you are wrong by definition. And it strongly pattern-matches to "closed systems" like Objectivism and, again, Marxism, which are defined based on the works of one person, with lots of effort spent interpreting one person's work rather than figuring out what's true.
Part 2 seems to have more detail, so I'm hoping it improves. There's multiple paragraphs discussing what Jaynes means by consciousness and how it's not just theory of mind, stating that Jaynes had a very precise definition, without ever giving any indication of what this definition *is* other than by referencing Jaynes's book, so I'm not quite optimistic.
I go about as far as you, and had a similar impression. I had read the book itself a decade or so ago, when it caused a friend to leave Christianity, but couldn't make too much of it then, either. It seemed very suggestive, but ultimately came across as more of an organ myth for duel hemisphere consciousness than anything else. I would be interested to hear the perspective of someone more knowledgeable, though.
You need only read the first chapter to get his definition of consciousness. It’s not very long. I agree that links to outside sources would’ve been helpful. I have read some of them myself so I know they are out there. Perhaps if I have the energy, I’ll dig up some links. Most of them are behind pay walls unfortunately.
Here is a condensed version that states his definition of consciousness. It’s not too long.
The short explanation is that (1) most climate scientists don't support it because of concerns about moral hazard,* so there is not much of a push to do it, especially with public funding, and (2) when people do try to do experiments with private funding,** certain environmental groups protest the specific projects, causing them to be put on hold or shut down by governments or advisory committees. Not doing experiments now makes future implementation much less likely.
I would not recommend DIY geoenginnering. Someone did try DIY ocean fertilization in 2012, in international waters off the coast of British Columbia. There was significant international backlash, his partners stopped supporting him, he was removed from his company, and forced to pay legal fees. If you do something that is ambiguously legal and looks like something a villain might do, you're likely to have a bad time. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering
I expect that a good global climate strategy would involve geoenginnering as a component, and definitely support more research in this direction. But it needs widespread by-in at the national or international level to be a good idea.
*The concern is that people will not reduce carbon emissions if they think that there is an alternative. Since geoengineering is an imperfect substitute for reducing carbon emissions (ocean acidification continues, etc), geoengineering by itself would not solve climate change.
> most climate scientists don't support it because of concerns about moral hazard
> The concern is that people will not reduce carbon emissions if they think that there is an alternative
But if geo-engineering was attempted, and actually worked (basically all the evidence indicates that it would), then... there actually *would* be an alternative? Because we would be able to mitigate the effects? The goal is not some religious fight against the evils of capitalist production and its resulting "emissions", it's about the supposed tangible effects of these emissions on people's lives... right? .... Right? ....................................................................
> when people do try to do experiments with private funding,** certain environmental groups protest the specific projects, causing them to be put on hold or shut down by governments or advisory committees.
Does this sound like the rational, logically consistent behavior of a group that's telling you that *hundreds of millions of people, or possibly literally everyone, will die* if warming continues? Dismissing any suggestions of technological solutions or adaptations out of hand, and insisting that we must all immediately become socialists, and that is definitely the only way to solve the problem, according to Science - really? Or is this behavior more easily explained by a group that simply wants socialism, and isn't interested in any way of mitigating warming that doesn't involve socialism? I'm genuinely curious how you rationalize this.
> If you do something that is ambiguously legal and looks like something a villain might do, you're likely to have a bad time
Like, say, spending *hundreds of trillions of dollars* on destroying the infrastructure that powers all of human life? Like prioritizing government control of all resources over individuals having food and warmth?
It would an imperfect alternative, especially if carbon emissions continue and so the amount of geoengineering needed continues to increase. Ocean acidification would continue. Rainfall patterns might shift - this is the most important and uncertain result. The sky would be slightly less blue in rural areas. Solar power production would fall by a few percent. There are possible unknown unknowns. Geoengineering doesn't completely solve climate change, although it dramatically reduces its impacts. Geoengineering seems likely to be preferable to not doing geoengineering on almost all plausible future emissions pathways.
I think that some of the groups involved actively support de-growth agendas, and have not thought through the consequences of how much suffering that would entail. The activists at the protests against particular projects often are not reasonable. I think that the median climate scientist is much more reasonable, even though they do not support geoengineering. From a purely environmental perspective, geoengineering is not the best option. I think that they should be more willing to look from other perspectives, and be more willing to promote acceptable-but-not-best options.
It is worth distinguishing "looks like a villain" from "actually bad", even though they are correlated. A private individual trying to control the global climate looks like a villain. Protesting pollution resulting from energy production does not.
"The short explanation is that (1) most climate scientists don't support it because of concerns about moral hazard,* so there is not much of a push to do it, especially with public funding, and (2) when people do try to do experiments with private funding,** certain environmental groups protest the specific projects, causing them to be put on hold or shut down by governments or advisory committees. Not doing experiments now makes future implementation much less likely."
This amounts to concealing a possible, albeit imperfect,warming control option from the public. This is *NOT* a good faith attempt to find the best available option(s) for controlling warming.
Look, even tactically: The right wing opposes actions to reduce warming in the first place. Do the climate scientists and environmental groups doing this want to give the right wing solid evidence of a REAL conspiracy to impede and suppress work on an option to reduce warming? Do they want to lose the public's trust???
27 isn't really nerd jobs; its 9-5 stable white collar work apart from clergy, who generally have commands against divorce. the gaming/bartender jobs are often variable schedule 2nd or 3rd shift and make it hard to raise a family.
for gaming as well they have very strict attendance rates and are open 24-7, so that too. and often that is the only game in town that pays well for unskilled people so loss of a job is really rough.
Strong disagree - when it's software engineers and physicists, but not marketing analysts or schoolteachers, you're selecting for nerdiness (or at least intelligence).
Doctors and lawyers are intelligent too but have high divorce rates.
I think the really important factor here is a lack of women in the workplace. Many marriages are ended by an affair with a colleague, so working in a 90% male office makes that particular failure mode a lot less likely.
Right, there's obviously a class component as well. But within white-collar middle-class professions, the ones with the most extremally low divorce rates are the ones where men rarely interact with women.
The full data is here so we're not stuck staring at the extremes https://flowingdata.com/2017/07/25/divorce-and-occupation/ ... I was wrong, and physicians and surgeons have low divorce rates. Lawyers are high among white collar professions but low compared to blue collar jobs.
As far as divorce rates, they appear to have slightly higher divorce rates than actuaries, physical scientists, and software developers (17%, 19%, and 20% respectively).
*I say relative to members of other professions, since even the high IQ professions listed there, were still below 115. In the past, however, such fields were more elite and had average IQs of over 130: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1652892831332159489
Among physicians, 22.1% (95% confidence interval 21.8% to 22.5%) had ever been divorced by the time of survey, compared with 22.9% among dentists, 21.5% among pharmacists, 37.0% among nurses, 31.3% among healthcare executives, 27.7% among lawyers, and 36.6% among other occupations.
I think even if nerds worked in a place with way more females they still would have a lot fewer office affairs than doctors and lawyers. But I’m not sure the reason they’d have fewer affairs is that they are more loyal to their wives or have more self-control. Initiating an affair when married still calls for social skills, being willing to put yourself out there and seduction skills. Maybe nerds are just worse at getting someone to have an affair with them than non-nerds.
like 6 in least divorced is physical therapists and 12-14 is dentists podiatrists and pharmacists, and 15 is military, so its more mixed. if you look at industries its mixed again too. Like programmers and engineers barely do better than military which is surprising lol.
the negative is a lot clearer in terms of things like class, wealth, stability, and status. Generally stressful or variable shift jobs that are blue collar or close to it.
honestly you get into things like there are plenty of intelligent or nerdy people in many jobs; but things like anxiety or other life situations derail you, and if your family isnt rich or your parents divorce things can sink you. failure or success is ecological not reducible and you cant always isolate a human to his traits.
48. Okay the parallel parking thing could come in handy. But the uey? Rockford could do a one step uey at highway speeds. Seems like he did it in about every third episode.
Re: #29, I have to *hard* agree with that statement. The real killer app will be AI boyfriends, not girlfriends. Another one that's more potent will be customizable romantic custodians. If the internet has taught me anything about sex, it's that people are secretly deeply disgusting.
Also that perfectly average people will pay real-ass money for something that can be customized into whatever it is they are specifically into.
> 29: ... My trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)"
George Hotz recently argued the opposite on the Lex Fridman podcast:
> "Women are attracted to status and power, and men are attracted to youth and beauty...machines do not have any status or real power... status fundamentally is a zero-sum game, whereas youth and beauty are not. I also think that men are probably more desperate."
I would combine the two to say that horny women want attention / emotional validation from men with status and power. When women get emotional validation from low status men they generally categorize it as friendship, not romance.
The question of whether AI's can fake status effectively is interesting. I'm inclined to think this is possible, human scammers are certainly able to do it. Also, romance novels are popular with horny women, and these only offer the fantasy of a powerful high status man.
*Fake* status? What are you talking about? GPT-4 has been on the cover of magazines, been the subject of international summits, and made billions of dollars. Some people even think it could destroy democracy or kill all humans! Rich, famous, powerful, a little dangerous - what more could you want in a boyfriend?
21 'This is a good study, but I’m irritated by their replacing “Trump’s claim of a stolen election” with “the big lie”'
Completely disagree. The difference between this and calling Trump or somebody else a jerk face is the jerk face is at the very best and opinion and is plainly intended to be pejorative. That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact. We have it in writing from Fox News that they lied, you'd have to manufacture a great deal of doubt to give any to Trump himself that he was consciously lying. It's a lie. If the people who wrote the article don't mind being in your face with all the people who believe in good faith the lies they were told, that may or may not be a politic decision but it is a fair one. Seems to me you're getting into false equivalency territory
>That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact.
I mean, how do you know? Did you personally authenticate all 155 million votes? Did you watch every mail-in ballot be filled out and dropped off by the person that it was supposed to? You can point to a lack of concrete evidence that any of the specifically alleged fraudulent activities happened, and I do think that's pretty strong evidence that the election wasn't stolen, but I don't think that warrants this level of smug dismissiveness.
Prove the negative, huh? Thats the quantum of proof that is necessary? There were something like 65 lawsuits filed by the loser and none succeeded most were literally laughed out of court. The arguments were so lacking that lawyers were sanctioned. How do you explain that. See the way it works is, if a candidate loses that badly and pretends it never happened, i don't believe them. And like i said lots of people spread the lie and there is documentary evidence that fox news lied, which is why they setteled for a staggering amount with Dominion 4. So, yeah, its a lie.
"That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact"
Are you denying that you made this claim? Editing your comment right now to get out of defending it?
> There were something like 65 lawsuits filed by the loser and none succeeded most were literally laughed out of court.
This is exactly consistent with none of the claims of fraud even being taken seriously. Thanks for admitting it so directly!
> there is documentary evidence that fox news lied
Source? What evidence is there that what they said was a lie? (saying they lied as a defense in court is not evidence that the underlying claims were wrong)
<i>The arguments were so lacking that lawyers were sanctioned.</i>
Call me cynical, but if you had a country which US journalists disliked -- Brazil, say, or Hungary -- where lawyers challenging the latest election result faced professional sanctions, I don't think this would be taken as evidence that the election was entirely free and fair.
"That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact. "
I agree with the directional thrust of this, but it's a counter-productive way to talk about the election.
My position is that there was some degree of fraud, as in every election, but that there's no reason to think it favored the democrats or decided the election. Just because it's settled in our minds, **we** might prefer to stop talking about it, but there are millions of people that are still uncomfortable with the changes in procedures during the election and what they perceive to be judicial and journalistic reluctance to investigate their claims seriously afterward.
A big part of the problem is that there were a lot of people didn't wait for the dust to settle, they started shouting "this is an objective lie" the day after the election (some even before!). That poisoned the well, and now here we are.
It seems to me that deep fakes of various kinds could make claims of a stolen election more plausible. If I were working for the Trump campaign I would already be thinking about ways to pull that off. You don’t even have to use extremely high quality deep fakes. Later evidence from experts that something is a fake will just be scoffed at or met with claims that the experts were bought.
It's disorienting to think about how much mischief we're in for over the next twenty years or so - until we have the first generation of adults that grow up with a deep, ingrained suspicion of representations in all their forms.
That's my prediction, at any rate: in the near future, adults will regard news the same way we regard advertising today.
1. A lie is not just a falsehood. A lie is a falsehood that's intentional and meant to deceive. Objectively proving that the election was not stolen does not prove that everyone who said otherwise was lying, as opposed to deluded, misinformed, deceived, etc.
2. A lie is not even just an intentional falsehood. "Lie" has a highly negative connotation, while "intentional falsehood" does not. In general, scientific publications should avoid words with highly negative connotations because they cloud one's judgment and moralize factual questions.
3. A "big lie" is not just a lie; it's also "big". Obviously, "big" is very subjective even when applied to physical objects (is Mount Everest big? Not compared to the Moon!) When applied to abstract concepts like "lie", it's even more subjective. What instrument do you use to measure the size of a lie? What are the units of lie bigness?
For all these reasons and more, a term like "big lie" has no place in a scientific publication, at least not one with any pretense of objectivity.
As I understand it, "the big lie" is a phrase coined by Hitler to disapprove of the methods of the Jews, and later re-purposed by historians to describe Hitler's methods (since Hitler was basically guilty of the thing he accused the Jews of). Later the term was used by Goebbels to refer to England's methods, although when people attribute the phrase to him, they usually incorrectly imply that Goebbels was describing his own methods. (Although again, AFAIK, Goebbels did use the methods; he merely wasn't talking about himself at the time.)
So using that phrase about someone's behavior is less about their actual words being a "lie" or even particularly "big". Instead, it's effectively saying that the person is "using the Nazi playbook" (and is therefore morally equivalent to a Nazi (and should therefore be treated like a Nazi (and should therefore be the target of vigilante violence))). (Those last bits are usually merely implied, dog-whistle-style.)
The ironic part is that the method as described doesn't require a lie, or even a falsehood. It's just making a big claim, loudly and repeatedly, and never walking it back, until your audience unhesitatingly repeats it and believes it. "There's no evidence that..."
30: I should note, I'm only looking at the first post on the page, I don't have time to read through the whole thing. If your conclusions come from the rest, please let me know.
This seems really, really false. I'll assume that real median household income is, in fact, down. OOP summarizes this (paired with high employment) as "collectively laboring far more to get less stuff". Except, real GDP (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1) and real GDP per capita (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA) are both up. So, we're working more, and producing more stuff, but (assuming the statement about the median is true) those gains are largely going to the top of the income distribution rather than the middle. Given that, I'm don't feel the need to check the productivity figures to see something's up here.
I'll also note that if productivity is down, that's not unprecedented. (Epistemic status, vaguely remember an econ prof saying this either in upper level macro or growth and development:) Similar effects have happened in the past when new technologies have come along. The example we discussed was computers -- for a while, people didn't really know how to make them useful, and productivity stagnated/dropped before we figured out the new paradigm and it shot up. Could be a similar thing is happening with WFH and/or AI.
On life expectancy: FRED uses World Bank figures, which indicate "the number of years a newborn infant would live if prevailing patterns of mortality at the time of its birth were to stay the same throughout its life". The most recent figure is 2021, which is indeed about the same as 1998. But all this says is that if we were actively in a pandemic for the next hundred years, people would probably die sooner. Which like, duh. I'm not sure where these numbers (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy) come from exactly (it has a link but I don't feel like clicking through right now, I'm on my phone and the number of tabs open I have finally seem to be slowing down Firefox), but they seem a lot more reasonable, and entirely disagree with OOP.
And for what it's worth, I'm happy to be living now. Maybe being a few years older would be nice, as my college experience wouldn't have been ruined by Covid and the industry I'm trying to get into would be less competitive, but you could make the same arguments for being a few years younger.
Yeah, there seem to be several weird little dissociated cat "bits" in there. That was the one that jumped out-- like, duh, they superimposed a ghostly cat image over the train. Not rocket science. Only on further examination did it not quite resolve into a workable cat.
...I should not that there seems to be something superimposed on the other image as well, but without being given a verbal clue to what it might be, it isn't clear what it is. Random noise?
Regarding #30, I don't think the data does show a productivity crisis. The long-term productivity data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB) shows that productivity growth is in line with long-term trends. The recent YoY declines are an artifact of a dramatic spike in productivity during the pandemic.
In other words, productivity has fallen only relative to a brief period in which it was exceptionally high. It seems to have been high during the pandemic—we're talking about an increase in *output per hour* not *total output*—because of change in the composition in the labor force during the pandemic (https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2022/ec220010.htm), not because any group of workers' productivity actually declined.
Basically, I think the story is this: lower-productivity workers lost their jobs during the pandemic. That actually lowered total output dramatically (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1) but increased average output per worker. If you look at the long-term trend—if you just cover the statistical pandemic blip with your thumb—you can see that the apples-to-apples productivity of the workforce continues to increase normally.
9. Anyone else think Hitler sounds almost exactly like Joaquin Phoenix here? On the one hand, Hitler could be described as emo-esque proto-4chan-doomer kind of guy, so maybe it works in that way, but it sounds like the higher tones of the original may have just been the most clean and so they are what survived translation. Phoenix is starring as Napoleon in an upcoming historical epic of the same name, so it wouldn't completely surprise me if he did actually portray the H man at some point in the future.
43. I find the circumstances of Epstein's death eminently less interesting than the complete lack of implications resulting from the whole affair. Obviously, his death means he can't directly implicate anyone in court, but aside from pointing out that Trump was friendly with Epstein, the whole thing is STILL, at least implicitly, being treated as some kind of crazy right wing conspiracy theory.
This explanation should ring a bell for readers familiar with the Book of Mormon, which uses the prophetic perfect on a number of occasions. The prophet Jarom explained that during his day “the prophets, and the priests, and the teachers” labored to persuade the people “to look forward unto the Messiah, and believe in him to come as though he already was” (Jarom 1:11). Abinadi similarly stated, “And now if Christ had not come into the world, speaking of things to come as though they had already come, there could have been no redemption” (Mosiah 16:16).
King Benjamin prophesied that “whosoever should believe that Christ should come, the same might receive remission of their sins, and rejoice with exceedingly great joy, even as though he had already come among them” (Mosiah 3:13). As a final example, when Moroni prophesied about the last days, he directly addressed future readers as if he was speaking immediately to them: “Behold, I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not. But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing” (Mormon 8:35; emphasis added to all examples).4
These examples and explanations indicate that the use of the prophetic perfect in the Book of Mormon is neither due to coincidence nor to an unconscious imitation of the Bible. Rather, it seems to have been intentionally used for precisely the reason that biblical scholars have assumed it was used in the Bible—“to express facts which are undoubtedly imminent, and therefore in the imagination of the speaker, already accomplished.”5
Maybe it is, but I don't think any of those are good examples. Prophetic perfect would be saying "Christ has come among us!" when he hasn't yet, not saying "Believe in Christ as if he's already come among us."
That's good advice but unfortunately there are some regular posters on here to whom it might as well be classical Sanskrit.
And unfortunately Substack's mute-user function only partially functions: it stops me from receiving notifications of replies from one of those tiresome broken-record guys but that's all it does.
So Scott's side comment regarding vegans made me wonder if he might be adding repetition of the same opinion here to the list of ban-worthy behaviors. No reply though so I'm guessing he was just expressing a bit of irritation.
7: Kelly is wrong and in a very obvious way. Say you have a Gaussian prior with mean m0 and precision k0 (precision is the inverse of variance) and a Gaussian likelihood with mean m1 and precision k1. The posterior's mean would be post_m = (m0 * k0 + m1 * k1)(k0 + k1) and its precision post_k = k0 + k1. In layman terms, your belief becomes an average of your prior belief and what the evidence points towards weighted by how sure you are about each, and your certainty is increased.
As you can see, getting evidence far away from your prior moves you *more*, not less. And this makes perfect sense. Your posterior mean should be as plausible as it can be for both your prior and the evidence. Mathematically, getting all the evidence together or getting it piece by piece makes absolutely no difference. Ofc, this doesn't mean that the brain works in this naive way, there are a ton more things you can take into account, and it's entirely possible that the effect in reality is exactly what he's describing. It's just not supported at all by the math he's referring to.
Yes agreed. The maths that Kelly has presented here is straight-up wrong. Noise vs Signal is probably a crucial part of belief updating, but it doesn't fit into Bayes.
Personally I think this is representative of a deeper flaw in Bayes. When it comes to political opinions, evidence that contradicts someone's worldview often makes them defensively harden their position. They update *away* from the evidence!
Not just political ones. People are *not* Bayesian. They form their worldviews first, then go looking for evidence that will support it to use as a rationale for that worldview. People are not rational animals, they're rationalizing animals (to steal a phrase from someone)--reason is a veneer over something else entirely. And most of the time gets hijacked/coopted into rationalizing their previously held beliefs.
It's why I am amused in a sad way by the Rationalist movement. Rationality is only as good as its basic assumptions, and I see those basic assumptions swallow the result in the largest majority of cases. And most of the rest are things that are reachable just as easily by other modes.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in thinking things through and applying reason to situations *where it applies*. But reason is not the be-all and end-all. It's a tool to be deployed where it can do good.
Haidt got into this in "The Righteous Mind". The theory is roughly that people reach conclusions by intuition, and use rationality to persuade other people to share their conclusion, or to let themselves be persuaded by a conclusion that would be useful to have, in order to form social groups that work together. I don't think he explicitly said the following, but I think it's a valid conclusion: attempts to change people's conclusions about any politically-charged topic should be viewed as an attempt to recruit them to a different tribe. So if there are no carrots or sticks besides an internal sense that your Bayesian likelihood of correctness is higher, it will be tough.
"Prophetic perfect" — How is this different from a science fiction story that uses the past tense to narrate "future" events?
(I don't know any Biblical Hebrew, but apparently it had two different "tenses," perfective and imperfective, and the distinction in usage doesn't line up at all well with what English speakers typically think of as tenses. FWIW, the Isaiah 5:13 example given by Wikipedia has aorist in the Septuagint and perfect in the Vulgate, which is more or less what I would have expected; I didn't check any of the other examples.)
43: I know things about Epstein that the rest of you don't know. I don't think he committed suicide. Besides, the dude you linked thinks he was a CIA agent or informant. Bah, don't be silly. He might have tried to lecture them on his theories of IR, and, given his friends in high places, they might have politely listened and pretended to take notes, but really.
Acosta claimed that other people told him to back off on prosecuting Epstein because he was an agent: "“I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta."
1. Hearsay. 2. I don't think working for the CIA grants immunity from sex crime prosecution. 3. Acosta did not enter the matter until after the Palm Beach State's Attorney proposed a lenient plea deal in lieu of statutory rape charges.
The “hearsay” is from the prosecutor himself. Odd description. The other reason for the plea bargain - which was unusual anyway as it didn’t get any extra prosecutions - was that the witnesses were scared. Many still haven’t given evidence (there are at least a few dozen). Journalists haven’t investigated. (Compare with judge Kavanaugh or Russel Brand).
Given that the witnesses were protected by the FBI and the power of the American state this fear is telling. There are obviously more powerful forces out there.
#33 seems just as lazy as the analyses he's critiquing to me.
e.g.
> Narrative violation: Ppl *want to spend more time alone* as they become richer
On a chart of people in richer countries being more likely to live in single person households. There are many possible explanations for this, e.g. people can afford not to roll the dice on living with terrible roommates, and can't find ones they want to live with.
Or how he has one chart saying older people report being less lonely, but then follows it up with a chart saying people are equally lonely by generation.
Or a chart showing less people being lonely over time that clearly has an uptick at the end (right around the rise of smartphones and social media, the hypothesis he's arguing against).
I'm not saying he's wrong. But this analysis is as weak or weaker than any of the ones I've seen that he's supposedly critiquing.
The assumption that rich (or richer) people get to make more of their own choices and are therefore acting out their preferences is not supported either. I can think of lots of reasons that a rich person would be unhappy with their situation exactly because of what they need to do for that money - like moving away from family for a job. That person would be both wealthier and lonelier for the same reason. Similarly someone who has to work a lot of hours but has a high income.
Exactly. Living away from my extended family, because that's where the jobs are. Longer commute meets less free time, which means less time I can spend with my friends or family. Finding friends at the job that is far from my home, now my friends live away from my home, and when I change the job, it becomes difficult to meet them. I'd like to find a part-time job, but those are rare and usually pay way less.
You know what many people have a preference for? Work from home! That allows them to spend more time with family and friends, to be less lonely. And it's the companies that try to push them back into offices.
Work from home can be helpful, but depending on circumstances can make things worse as well. Lots of people do make friends (or find spouses) at work. Some people live alone and work from home sharply reduces interactions with other people.
#18, ordering on the average feels a bit unfair that some countries get to vote for themselves while others can't. 99% of Italians can be in favour of their own food, but Lebanese can't rate their own food (or anybody else's, for that matter). It's only 1/24 of the average, but still.
It's also interesting to me just how, well, random parts of the ordering feels to me. To each their own, I can't say my opinion is more objective than the next person's. But, while some similar cuisines end up ranked similarly, there are some pairs that are surprisingly far apart, so the ordering doesn't seem highly self-consistent. Probably because some of those cuisines are more available in some locations than others and there is selection bias over who has tried which. Or perhaps the effects of individual restaurant quality for some country-cuisine pairs that are sparse. I'd like to see a similar chart with sample sizes, and another with commonality of people voting on each pair.
"Alexander’s naiveté on the subject is summed up in his somewhat flippant statement that we should expect tribal people to have said things like, “That couple-year period when we all stopped hallucinating gods and became conscious — that was a weird time.”"
I guess Kuijsten has to, but he really downplays how important inner life is in the response. Jaynes called the Trojan warriors "noble automatons who knew not what they did." He also argued that Europeans were able to conquer the Incas and Aztecs because they were still largely bicameral. Given that, certainly many people contacted during the age of exploration would have had no inner life. And this was somehow not noticed.
I continue to think it's relevant that all of these cultures had a first person singular, which indicates they had an "analog I" as Jaynes called it. And further that it looks like the 1sg may be cognate in languages as distant as Basque, Chinese, Navajo, and Trans-Papua New Guinea. This implies a lot of diffusion of "I" maybe 15,000 years ago. I discuss how this is difficult for Jaynes's date here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of
To reiterate how problematic the diffusion point is for Jaynes's timeline, see the forum's other response to Scott (written by Jaynes's former PhD student):
"Second, it is a mistake to assume that tribal societies have always existed in their present (and for some, isolated) form. There is no reason to think that small-scale societies are not the successors of once great civilizations or complex cultures. Due to social collapse, migration, invasion, or absorption by bigger groupings, many societies undoubtedly followed a trajectory that saw a drastic reduction in demographic size."
The argument, I take it, is that they may have not always been primitive. Not at all true of Australia. Would like to at least see the believers bite the bullet and say they believe that Aboriginals had no inner life until Europeans taught them.
You can have personal pronouns without having consciousness as Jaynes describes it. I don’t think it’s predictive. Identifying yourself as a presence in the real world, as distinct from another, only requires being in the world, it doesn’t require being able to internalize abstract concepts of being in the world. At least that’s how I think of it.
Yeah, I agree you can have the 1sg without Jaynesian consciousness. But the 1sg also refers to agentic inner life---there's a reason he calls it the "analog I." At least soft evidence against his timeline.
Could make a similar case for far-flung cognates for "to think," which some working on Mother Tongue include as a cognate. From another piece I wrote: "In that reconstruction Proto-Sapiens “to think” is mena, surviving today in forms such as man (one who thinks), Minerva (Goddess of wisdom), or mantra. Or in other languages as munak for “brains” (Basque), mèn for “to understand” (Malinke), and mena preserved as “to think” among the Lake Miwok Native Americans."
IMO the 1sg is stronger evidence against Jaynes, because the evidence for cognates is greater. Even if it's not as clear that the existence of the cognates implies inner life.
I am not following this, for the reason I stated above. A word can exist and take on or lose meaning as the circumstances dictate. I understand a word like "I" has been around a long time, but I suggest that for a long time it meant no more than the gesture of pointing to yourself; slapping your chest with an open palm for instance. 'Me" The fact that Jaynes posits the analogue I is a way of extending that meaning, to me, and the concept could really use its own pronoun, (but we are maybe getting too many of them already.) The analogue or inner "I" is a very fluid one, and just as often could be referred to as a "you" depending on which side of an inner dialogue one is on, don't you think? We have quite a theatre of the mind.
I think this is what Jaynes refers to as consciousness , and he is positing that humans who had no other way of gathering or conveying information other than what could be spoken would be very different in their way of thinking about things, and recalling things. He doesn't claim they had no "inner life" except in the sense we think of it now. He says that in time of confusion and stress, when we would grope for the right thing to do, that the answer would arrive to us in a very different way; a voice. Given what I pointed out earlier (that the sole conveyor of information between people was spoken interaction) I am willing to consider this idea.
I do wish he had not used the word "automaton." He is a very engaging writer but prone to the cuteness temptation. It's not really right. These people thought, they felt, but their brains were wired differently BECAUSE THEY HAD TO HEAR EVERYTHING THEY LEARNED (aside from the direct evidence of their senses, which they clearly learned a lot from). This makes sense to me, but if that idea doesn't make sense to someone then there is not much point in pursuing his thesis.
Some people have stronger inner voices than others. It's true now and I have no doubt it was true then. Thus emerge voices that others would listen to. The tribal elder, the high priest, the great warrior, the master tool maker. People perhaps who a god spoke to, who directed and educated you. You had to remember what they said. How? By hearing them speak to you, in your own mind. And using mnemonic devices as an aid. Jaynes goes into a lot of detail on these things, and makes an interesting case. For me it is a compelling one, but that's me. I think really trying to imagine what its like to be in a world of people who only had the spoken word was what made me seriously consider his ideas and research.
>I am not following this, for the reason I stated above. A word can exist and take on or lose meaning as the circumstances dictate
Agree that this is a potential explanation. I'm weighing how much 1sg vs Mena create a problem for Jaynes. IMO easier to reject Mena by saying "those 'cognates' are simply the result of chance." Can also reject 1sg by separating "I" from theater of mind, but to me it's less convincing. Seems odd it would so often end up able to communicate "I think therefore I am." (Well, that's an assumption. Would like to see that translated into a bunch of languages.)
>For me it is a compelling one, but that's me.
Do you find his date compelling? What really trips me up is that self-awareness requires recursion--the self perceives the self. If you move the date of bicameral breakdown back to ~12kya then you can explain the Sapient Paradox.
>Do you find his date compelling? What really trips me up is that self-awareness requires recursion--the self perceives the self. If you move the date of bicameral breakdown back to ~12kya then you can explain the Sapient Paradox.<
Im not qualified, heh.
I think it was a long process and it might not be over. (!)
When it started ....?
The development of written language and different groups of people with different spoken languages (and different gods/inner voices) that started rubbing up against each other more and more were the catalysts, he says. He also says it was a very strange and murky time.
Oh, I probably glossed over some part of the Mena argument. What I mean is that Mena is suggested to be a global cognate for "to think," which clearly refers to theater of mind. However, the evidence isn't so strong against Jaynes because the cognate is less certain than for the 1sg, which has been studied much more.
3) the breakdown of bicameral mind precedes consciousness, but the dating is variable;
From wikipedia. Jaynes added an afterword to the 1990 edition of his book, and this is from it. I interpret this as him saying he might have gotten a little over his skis in the original edition re dates. 10000 yrs is a lot though..
I was not familiar with the sapient paradox until now. I looked it up. "why there was such a long gap between emergence of genetically and anatomically modern humans and the development of complex behaviors?" There is a lot of complex behavior that can come without mental theatre is my first thought; people are always groping for something. I don't think what Jaynes is talking about can be located that far back.
How much vocabulary in spoken language builds up over 40K yrs? Do we know? Assuming it does build up, the cognitive load increases, right? And we are not talking about a nice homogenous group of people, but a lot of different people with different but related(?) spoken languages.Its really easy to succumb to the foreshortening effect when thinking about these things. i.e. it all happened so fast.. it didn't.
One theory is that language actually gets simpler, at least grammatically. The langauge that conquerers speak (eg. English, Latin, Chinese, Sanskrit, Pama-Nyungen) have to be learned by adults they conquer.
As for as total vocabulary, it seems that it must get larger. Think of a proto-indo-european root like *gen. This has now come to mean hundreds of different things: generation, genius, Genesis, etc...
Re the “liberation pledge”, I honestly don’t hate vegans, but, as a social experiment, it seems to me that this one was redundant (and self-harming) in the manner of, say, dropping a stone 1000 times (onto your own foot) to check if gravity was a thing.
On point 27, is this measuring p(had a divorce) or p(had a divorce | had a marriage) for nerds? It's not the other interpretation that we're so unlikely to marry in the first place, that we are also unlikely to get divorced?
You have to assume that divorce rates are measured as a percentage of the marriage rates. Also the number of nerds marrying probably isn’t that low although I don’t have those figures.
13: It is an ANTI-UKRAINE website. Not "anti-ukraine-war" and very much not anti-russia-war, their one problem with Putin's war is that Ukrainians are still fighting the invasion. I would prefer those behind it to be in jail (Approval of a war of aggression can be a crime) , not just defunded. - I can live with most western courts not prosecuting, sure, free speech is great. - Should "gofundme" freeze donations? In some cases: sure. In other cases: nope. In this case: Why not? This War is worse than many other crimes or "crimes". - Better if patreon et al did background-checks before accepting a project, but hardly practical.
Oh that one, I assume you talk about the third gulf war (first: Iraq invades Iran. 2nd: Iraq invades Kuwait - both times with clear intent on territorial expansion). Well , that war was NOT started with any intent to annex Iraq nor did it result in any annexation, not even of oil/gas ("war for oil"). But to change the regime to a legitimate gov. elected by the Iraqi people - after the poison-gas-using dictator of Iraq did indeed refuse repeatedly to fully comply with demands backed by the UN (weapon inspections, to make sure he does not keep/develop weapons not allowed by UN - and he actually had kept missiles of too long range. That said: super-silly war of Bush-Cheney, 'WMD-proofs' were kinda fake, and so on and on and on.) Was it a "War of aggression" in the legal sense? Not sure. But very sure about the Russian war against democratic Ukraine.
Now, if a funding website would have kicked out projects that intended to support the US invasion of Iraq, even if "only" to fund the spread of anti-Hussein propaganda: I would have applauded their decision.
Nolan, you can do better than this. Very few wars were or are "authorised" - unless one counts the crusades. And "war of aggression" as in 'a criminal act' may require more than the war just not being "authorised". Though calling it a 'Special Military Operation' won't impress no one. - None of which matters in the question at hand: Was ist a bad thing to block/freeze donations to this Pro-Russia's-war project or a good thing? - My answer is: good, right, and legally advisable. I might add: pointless, as such projects will always get enough funding by a certain Vladimir. Your answer is still unclear to me. In all this fog-of-whataboutisms.
Smarten up and/or learn some law. As it is you: Not much hope. For others: A war of aggression is against international law - and some national laws- as are war crimes.
§13 VSTGB Crime of aggression
(1) Anyone who wages a war of aggression or commits any other act of aggression which, by its nature, severity and scope, constitutes a flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations, shall be punished with life imprisonment.
>While in Russia you may go to prison for showing a paper "no war" or "** ***" or even a blank paper.
You...literally just proved my point. You want to throw people in a cage for their opinions. This is the most basic, trivial form of authoritarianism imaginable.
Relax. No one is walking around your house, shouting: "Glory to Frog-Murderer Adebar Stork" "An occultist was raped last week, SWEEET, I know one more behind this door!" - and if one does, I hope you have a police to call to and laws that apply. If idiots or the court will call that: "Authoritarian oppression of free expression of opinion": Follow James Thurber. "Run, don't walk to the nearest desert island."
"Public approval of any crimes is against the law most everywhere (§140 StGB in my country - punishable with up to 3 years prison"
Most of us are well aware of the fact that this is the law in Germany, but Germany is dealing with some unusual constraints in this area. I am skeptical of the claim that this is true "most everywhere", for "any crimes". Obviously it's not true in the United States, and I don't think we're the only one.
Well, it is not our famous holocaust-denial rule . That would be § 130 III+IV StGB (below). I F a mob cheers on a murder/lynching, if the peers of a teen laud his plan/execution of a school massacre, if Al Capone or the head of a clan gives their thumbs-up to a plan - are you really sure, this is without legal consequences even in the USofA? I would expect many more tweets approving of school-shootings. Why there are so few Klu-Klux-Klan-marches nowadays?
Our law: (warning: legalese, I corrected one mistake of google translate; still far from perfect, but maybe one can get the gist:
(3) Anyone who publicly approves, denies or trivializes in a meeting an act of the type specified in Section 6 Paragraph 1 of the International Criminal Code, committed under the rule of National Socialism, in a manner that is likely to disturb public peace, will be punished with a prison sentence of up to five years or a fine.
(4) Anyone who publicly or in a meeting disturbs the public peace in a way that violates the dignity of the victims by endorsing, glorifying or justifying the National Socialist violent and arbitrary rule will be punished with a prison sentence of up to three years or a fine.
Yes, we know that this is *your* law. The question was about everybody *else's* laws. Which I'm guessing you are completely unfamiliar with, in spite of having opined so confidently about.
This was great, thanks. The less wrong links were wonderful, and I didn't know about "The goddess of everything else." Which was also great, though I do think you were a bit hard on the goddess of cancer, we all have our parts to play.
For somebody who usually writes pretty clearly, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. What does it mean for a piece of art to make no sense? What sense is it supposed to make? Have you had your morning coffee yet?
The shadows are not very probable, and there's a tree trunk that seems to be starting from the top of a lattice instead of the ground. This seems less off-putting than the extra hands and fingers from previous image generation programs, and doesn't seem very important, unless someone was going to try to build the scene from the picture. Kind of like the tricks M C Escher is known for.
18. Finns are quite aware of our kitchen's low reputation (the most surprising thing to many of us would probably be that we beat the Peruvians!), which is probably a combination of the fact that Finnish kitchen is basically North European (ie. would be considered "standard", "non-exciting" due to North-European-derived country cultural supremacy) and that our country is more obscure than North European countries in general, not having had large empires (English, Dutch, Germans) or an appealing Viking mythos.
However, one thing I'd like to note is that one thing we succeed quite well is in creating tasty pastries that frequently draw praise even from visitors, though even there our branding skills are dismals: some of our best-tasting common pastries are "Dallaspulla" and "Teksaspulla", literally "Dallas bun" and "Texas bun".
A red/blue election map familiar to Americans, showing the major cities... expect the blue denotes the center-right party and red the center-left party. The Swedish Social Democrats absolutely commanded the majority support in the Swedish countryside, particularly in north of Sweden, for a long time: if you look at the most recent electoral map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Swedish_general_election#/media/File:Swedish_General_Election_2022.svg) you can still see this, though the rise of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats complicates things. Norway is the same, I understand, though in Finland the countryside has long been the electoral territory of the Centre Party which defines itself as, well, the name says it, really.
As such, the study's results on Nordic countries are a bit surprising, though they might more reflect *cultural* progressiveness than left-wing opinions in general. It's very possible that there are still a lot of (older) people in the countryside who have, within Swedish scale, conservative opinions on a lot of matters, but still vote Social Democrats out of habit or for economic reasons.
Really disappointed to see Grayzone described as an "Anti-Ukraine-war website."
In the first place, the real "anti-Ukraine-war" people are the Ukrainians. They did not start this war. They've been invaded, bombed, mined, tortured, murdered, kidnapped, expelled, and otherwise abused in a thousand ways. No one wishes more than they that none of this had happened. What Grayzone is, if making reference to Ukraine, is an "anti-help-Ukraine-defend-itself website." So it's really rich to describe it as if it was simply "anti-war."
But of course the site much more than that. Grayzone and its staff are consistent promoter of pro-authoritarian propaganda, promoting Chinese narratives on Xinjiang and Hong Kong and denying Assad's atrocities in Syria. They are purveyors of lies and misinformation. I have no strong opinion on what GoFundMe should do with them, but let's at least set the terms of the debate honestly.
I can see the words and cat ear clearly when I look at the monitor from an angle, but straight on I can't see the ear at all, and it took me a minute to see the words. I've tried this on some other computer generated hidden word pictures, and I consistently see the picture first from the front, and the words first from the side.
My first thought was that The Goddess of Everything Else was the goddess of the things that don't fit your theories, rather than the goddess of cooperation. You thought the world was reliably A and not A, or possibly A and B, and then the universe comes in very firmly and say, no, there's C, X, and a few things from alphabets you haven't heard of.
I believe trans is very much a Goddess of Everything Else thing, and when you find out the territory isn't fitting your maps, the thing to do is *not* to double down on defending your map.
As for the poem, last I heard, predation came in after life had existed for a while, so maybe the chaos/cancer drive isn't *quite* as fundamental as all that. Or maybe the earliest version was microbes crowding each other out rather than eating each other.
It was you who argued that the trend (or absence thereof) mattes. Or subsequently that the mere visual appearance of a trend (or lack thereof) matters. I literally know of nobody arguing that it is meaningful when extrapolated indefinitely.
I do occasionally see people arguing that such and such a trend (or trend absence) is evidence against global warming. [Edit: continuing after posting accidentally.]. For that argument, the proper statistical test is whether the trend is significantly different from predicted, not whether the trend is not statistically different from zero. Even so, it would be weak evidence on the sense that 5% of noisy trends are expected to be significantly different from a perfect trend prediction, and the evidence for global warming is primarily physical rather than statistical anyway.
Re: 10 and smarter rodents - this episode of "Doomwatch", a 70s SF series from the BBC:
"Tomorrow, the Rat
Doomwatch are alerted to reports of a number of attacks on humans by rats. Toby and Bradley investigate the house of Mr and Mrs Chambers, victims of a recent attack; the two scientists lay traps in the kitchen, but the rodents display unusual intelligence by jamming the traps open using cutlery found on a worktop, and then viciously attack the men. Meanwhile, Ridge becomes involved with Doctor Mary Bryant, who has been conducting experiments on a group of rats in a room in her flat - but the rats have managed to escape, and have now turned carnivorous..."
Re: 35, a fascinating article, from which I take away that psychology (or social psychology alone, perhaps?) is today's version of astrology: taken seriously as a science, taught in universities, grave expert practitioners, examples of types and effects, and sometimes stumbling on a correct view by lucky chance (e.g. the personality type differences between people born in summer and winter), accepted by society for its explanatory power and used to make decisions from the personal to public policy, but maybe doomed in the future to be regarded by our descendants as we regard astrology? "Can you believe they really thought that 'forces' in the 'subconscious' existed and influenced behaviour?"
43. I don't pretend to know what happened to Epstein any more than the other random guy on the internet, but LW author's insistence that certain claims must be believed because they were confirmed by the Topmost Experts (like top FBI or DOJ people) sounds hopelessly naive. I don't know if Epstein really sat in the center of pedophilic network composed of most powerful elites, and was murdered for that, but if he did, of course at lease some of the top FBI and DOJ people would be in on the game, and of course they would confirm everything that needs to be confirmed to cover it up. We now know for a fact that some of them are more than willing to sacrifice their professional duties for personal and political goals. That does not make them pedophiles and murderers of Epstein, of course, but that does suggest arguments like "The Attorney General, the highest ranking law enforcement official in the country, personally reviewed the footage" are much less convincing than the author thinks - yes, he did, and if the conspiracy existed, either he was in on it, or somebody close to him, who he trusted to ensure the video he is reviewing is the genuine article, was in on it. Other arguments sound similarly weak. I mean, as I said, I have no idea what really happened, but that article doesn't look like it moves the needle any, one needs to do better job than that.
hmmm aside from being "nerd jobs" the lowest divorce rate jobs also stand out to me as being consistently high paying, low stress, with the most flexible hours.
in contrast, the high divorce jobs are often things you'd do on a night shift. casino, bartending, but also nursing. my mom reports massive gains in marital peace after her partner stopped doing night shifts, a few moths ago.
I’m definitely not saying it’s superior to signing up at Coinbase, which is much more familiar. I was saying it’s about as convenient as using cash, and cash is fine. Also ~10% of 18 year olds in Ukraine and Argentina use crypto. I’d guess 50% of poker players independent of residency use crypto. Average US citizen doesn’t get much benefit from using it, so pretty much no one does
The scale changes between the two images, so a quick visual comparison is useless. Perhaps there's something interesting, but we'd need the underlying data.
Re: Cat train, I have a very large and pretty good monitor, and if you look close, yeah, there's literally just a watermark overlay of a cat ear and outline of a cat body in the middle of the image, plainly visible if you're looking for it.
Not, like, a subtle subliminal effect, just a picture of a cat ear and body, with very high transparency.
>but it seemed more like the answer of a clever mechanism design appreciator and not a typical genuine defund-the-police advocate - I’m still curious what their answer is supposed to be.
I mean, their answer is 'the police arrest him and he goes to jail'.
The typical member of 'defund' movements is using the word to mean 'reduce funding to', which is an absolutely standard usage of the word that is not confusing or controversial in any other context.
If you are asking what police and prison abolitionists would do, then you're talking about a much much smaller portion of the population, small and niche enough that 'clever mechanism enjoyers' may actually represent much of their core members.
>The typical member of 'defund' movements is using the word to mean 'reduce funding to', which is an absolutely standard usage of the word that is not confusing or controversial in any other context.
Really? If Republicans said they want to defund public schooling, medicare, the IRS etc. what exactly would the majority of liberal Americans take this to mean? Hint: not a mere 'reduction in funding'.
And I mean, in Minneapolis, a ballot measure to literally abolish the Minneapolis police force only narrowly failed, much to the chagrin of 'defunders' everywhere.
It is very weird to act like the problem was ever about how much funding police receive. Especialyl in the context of what kicked all of this off - George Floyd. How would less funding have led to Floyd not dying? He wasn't killed by 'militarized' police equipment. He wasn't killed because the police were using all their funding on advanced 'kill people' training - the knee restraint wasn't even an approved technique.
It seems like the only way literally reducing the funding of police would have led to Floyd not dying is if the police were so lacking in resources that they didn't have enough officers to respond to calls about crimes. Which, aside from demonstrably causing more black people to end up killing each other, it means apprehending any given suspect (like Chauvin himself) is going to be tough if he wants to law low. So either 'defund' never really meant 'defund', or deunders are very very foolish.
>If you are asking what police and prison abolitionists would do, then you're talking about a much much smaller portion of the population, small and niche enough that 'clever mechanism enjoyers' may actually represent much of their core members.
Here's what the actual prompt was:
So here’s a challenge/contest. If you’re inclined, please submit between 250 and 500 words on the topic of what should be done with Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer, from the standpoint of someone who believes in defunding the police, abolishing prisons, and similar.
"13: Unfortunately related: Anti-Ukraine-war website Grayzone says that GoFundMe has frozen their account. They’ve been doing this for years for anti-woke sites, but anti-war sites feels like an escalation."
Reading this and the willful ignorance or intentional distortion of the framing has made me seriously consider cancelling my account.
This article is so weird, I don't believe it. The article implies that the customers are using crypto and the sex workers are having trouble converting it to local fiat. There are a lot more buyers than sellers and they have little reason to use crypto. The hard part should be getting buyers to use it, to get enough to jump through difficult hoops for a luxury. Whereas, once the sex workers are sitting on large quantities of crypto, they should easily figure out a way of exchanging it, such as getting paper in person weekly.
At the very least, the article should have acknowledged how weird this claim is.
I read this post after a break from Scott's writing. Just came to post one more comment on Grayzone being framed as an anti-war website. The fact that Scott hasn't edited the part except for redacting the claim about stealing money, or responded thoughtfully to the comments calling this one out, feels bad. The fact that he hasn't censored the comments out of sight does count for something.
I live in a country which has had to worry about Russia invading (meaning, you know, killing, raping, torturing everyone I love and all that) for as long as our nation-state has existed, so I'm of course a bit biased here. The fact that Scott, a brilliant writer and an American millionaire, focuses to frame Greyzone's stance on the Russian invasion primarily through his home country's culture wars, makes me want to read less of his posts. Not due to cognitive dissonance, but due to fear of genocide and pillage, and the spite that fear provokes towards such indifference.
There needs to be a word for "saying things that are probably true, but saying them with an unjustified degree of confidence". Because this is the current standard mode of communication shoved down our throats by those with the big megaphones regarding things like election fraud and covid and global warming and so forth.
The fact that they say "Noooo, of course there was no fraud, shut up you lunatic" instead of saying "Well yeah, obviously there's always some fraud, but come on, it's unlikely that it's going to amount to a hundred thousand net votes in several different states" makes me very suspicious. But in reality it probably doesn't make them wrong, it just makes them terrible people.
"It never happens, and if it does that's a good thing" attitude.
A couple years back I looked at the Mariposa County results, as that was very disputed, in part because of a long-standing perception that elections there were corrupt and rigged, because previous election - Mariposa and surrounding counties all red. That election - surrounding counties remain red, Mariposa flips blue, this wins the state for Biden. *Looks* suspicious, but is it?
Digging down into the results, Mariposa was red in 2016 by a slim margin, and turned blue in 2020 by a slim margin (I think but can't remember definitely that it was something like 5,000 votes). Now, that *could* be the result of vote fraud, but it could also, perfectly credibly, be wibbly voters who had been swayed to Trump in 2016 being swayed to Biden in 2020. No fraud needed or proven.
But when there was such blanket denial that any fraud could possibly have taken place at all ("most secure election ever!") that was a terrible reaction born of pure defensiveness and didn't help the same way explaining debatable results like Mariposa would have. Different states had different standards, and when I read one (can't remember the particular state) that accepted post-in votes up to a week after the ballot ended, with no postmark being needed - well, can you blame anyone for thinking this was less than secure and could be exploited for fraud?
I think you're confusing "D's now basically admit" with "I wrongly believe".
Oh, gawd. Thank you for this. The comment is now deleted. It was a remarkable piece of irony oblivious malarkey.
I think that's an obvious idea, I've seen many references to it before. It's just the practical implementation (and the cost of designing, manufacturing and maintaining the system that can do that) is the challenge. I think I'd pay some additional money for a car that can do that, but I have no idea if that would cover the added complexity... I suspect it'd take a while until it becomes a feature of mainstream car models, if at all.
Yes, that really is the best explanation they could come up with for how 'Defund the Police' could work in reality. In other words, it could never work.
What's the significance of the difference between "law" and "custom" here? It just seems like a tautological terminological dispute with no bearing on the situation. In practice I don't see why a modern society couldn't stick with highly codified, consensus, written rules (as opposed to needing to "drum up a set of social customs for scratch"), whatever you want to call them; and why we couldn't keep formalised institutions whose job is to be very knowledgeable about those and serve as arbiters in disputes relating to them. There are big problems with the "outlaw" system, but this doesn't seem like one of them.
Because people won't follow rules unless there are consequences. Not enough of them anyway. And those consequences are literally what the police are.
We have already done this bit of exploration of the solution space.
The consequences, in the proposed alternative state, are that if you murder somebody you have to do a whole lot of community service or you have to accept outlawry and with it a substantial reduction in life expectancy. It isn't necessary that vigilantes kill *every* outlaw, or that *no* law-abiding citizen be killed, for outlawry to be worse than non-outlawry. So, negative consequences to going around murdering people.
I prefer the current system, where the negative consequences are implemented by the police. But something like the proposed alternative has worked in the past, and it is erroneous to say that it is fundamentally unworkable and/or that it has no consequences for rulebreaking.
It works in radically smaller societies with much less density and "wilderness" where there is in effect exile. Until we start packing up C-130s and dropping prisoners off in the Congo or Antarctica it really isn't an option.
Either that or just hundreds of thousands (millions?) more murders for a few years. I honestly suspect most western societies would collapse in less than a decade under such a system. The violence spiral would spread quickly.
Ancient Greeks used the same word, νόμος, to refer to both law and custom.
I mean, think about the implications. Imagine a world where nobody agrees to do community service, it means that if I kill somebody, other people would be "free" to kill me, which means they're allowed to kill me without other people being "allowed" to kill them in turn without themselves having to worry about people being "allowed" to kill them without the threat of other people being "allowed" to kill *those* people.....and so on. The entry says they're denied "protection of the law", but what this "protection" is turtles all the way down - there's no "protection", just infinite regress.
For point 7, the one on the right seems to have a cat ear right in the center of the picture, not to mention lines that make me see whiskers. It seems pretty obvious to me, so I'm wondering if this is a typical mind thing?
I hope you mean the one on the left?
Oops, yes I do, I can't see the pictures when I commented. So yes, the one on the left
I stared at those pictures til my eyes bled and didn’t see no cat.
Look in the upper-right corner, there are some obvious tabby-like vertical stripes and some triangular shapes that could read as ears. EDIT: also in the left image, directly above the driver's cab door, there appears to have been what looks a *lot* like a cat's right ear superimposed over the image, possibly continuous with the rest of a cat's face superimposed on the rest of the train (suggestive but difficult to make out). It's a sharp-cornered orange-brown feature rather than a more purely dark foliage shadow.
I appreciate your valiant effort to describe where you see these things. But I fail to perceive them. Too bad we can't post photos in the replies. I'd like to see what you're talking about with some helpful arrows and circles.
Wow this is really interesting. For me it was like, "of course people say it's more catlike it literally has ghostly cat ears"
Huh? It's so obvious that I thought it was a joke or something. Wild that some people can't see it. Have you considered that you may just be an NPC?
Yeah, I wonder what the difference is. I did very well in a semester long color mixing course, so I don't think it's partial color blindness, but I cannot see it at all. My husband can see it a bit, and ones like the New York picture much faster than I can.
What would NPC have to do with not seeing the cat? And I'm not color blind. But my visual perceptions seem to be more along the autistic spectrum than normal people. For instance, I'm able to pick out underlying patterns hidden in a lot of noise quickly because I immediately focus on a detail of the pattern and visually connect my way through a pattern — rather than taking in a gestalt of the picture (not sure I'm explaining this well). So, even though I now see the "cat ear" object in the lefthand image of the train, the train refuses to resolve itself as a cat to me. I was never able to see the images in those magic eye patterns, either. And I've never been able to see the cat in the Georgian cat image (link below). I've given up trying.
The funny thing though, is I've probably got a better ability to distinguish subtle hue differences in colors than most people. And I used to have a photographic memory for maps and diagrams (but that's faded with old age). I could accurately draw a map or diagram from a single viewing—which made me a whiz at geography. Nowhere near as good as Stephen Wiltshire, though (second link below). I could only remember 2-d images. He can do it 3-D!
https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire#:~:text=Stephen%20Wiltshire%20MBE%2C%20Hon.,after%20seeing%20it%20just%20once.
I don't think anyone claims the train "resolves itself as a cat to the viewer". They're just saying that the left image have certain features which look like cat ears etc. so of course an AI would score that image as more "cat-like" than the right image.
I couldn't see it on my PC monitor, and on my laptop monitor I can only see it when looking straight at the screen - tilting the screen seems to reduce contrast and hide the effect.
The cat in the upper right is visible in both pictures, though.
The cat ear is in the dark green foliage above the center of the train. Don't feel bad; I had to turn up my monitor brightness by a lot in order to see it. You might even need to turn off your blue light filter (if you have one).
OK. I can see the cat-ear-shaped object that you're talking about in the foliage. It doesn't help me to resolve the cat face in the train, though. To me the "ear" vaguely resembles a giant manta ray with its tail behind it crashing into the train. Lol! Now that you've pointed out the "ear" I can't unsee the manta ray.
its a giant cat head looming over the train, made out of foliage. the cat has its eyes closed and mouth open.
i think the difference is they changed the deep shadow to emphasize the illusion of a jaw and open mouth.
I can see it on the PC but not on my phone. This explains the Google antitrust case.
😆
Wow you are right. I don't know how I missed that
The left picture look like it was Deep Dreamed a bit (though those usually produced dog faces and pagodas).
I see it as well. Does someone want to help me out with the text in the skyscrapers, though? The obvious text Scott referred to is nevertheless eluding me.
New York in the dark space between the skyscrapers
Ahhh....yes, I see it now. Thank you.
Thank you! Cat was fast but could not get that one until I saw your answer here.
Maybe we should get a |Spoiler| tag
Yeah, I can make out a cat but it's a lot like looking at clouds and seeing a bunny rabbit or a fish or an omen form the gods or whatever.
I've stared at both of these pics for 10 minutes, and I can't perceive any difference between the two pictures except that the chromatic values of the greens in the foliage seem to be different. Not sure if I'm seeing a difference in contrast between the two. I do happen to see two eyes and a smile on the cow-catcher in both the photos, though.
Full disclosure, when I take the pattern detection test for autism, I test as autistic. So, even though I don't consider myself to be autistic, I seem to be quite neurodivergent at least when it comes to visual perception.
Have you ever done those "magic eye" images that were popular in, I think, the late 80s early 90s? The trick is to defocus your eyes slightly, as if you're looking at something behind the picture, or as if you have a 1000-yard stare. Doing that with a pair of side-by-side images, like this pair, can make the differences jump out more clearly.
This blog has discussed Georgist ideas before, so it isn't too surprising that many here can see the cat.
https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm
**applause**
This is the most SSC comment ever, and I love it.
When I first looked at the image on my PC monitor, I couldn't see anything cat-like. Now that I try it on my laptop monitor, it pops out pretty clearly, but only when viewed a certain angles - tilting my screen seems to reduce the contrast and hide the cat features. I totally think it's a monitor thing, as Scott theorized originally.
Yeah, I saw the cat ear too. Seemed obvious.
#7 it literally looks like there is a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the train on the left. I would think the selection would be practically unanimous.
I saw the cat in the leaves above the train cabin
Same here.
It helps that it's an unusually catlike train to begin with. The driver's windscreen panels and the little red circle already have roughly the right shape and proportions to look like a cat's eyes and mouth.
You wouldn't get this result without an already catlike locomotive (this is a sentence I have never written before).
I don't think that's it. As other commentators are saying, there's a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the adversarial image, that humans can see.
I can barely see the ear above the left train. Maybe this is a visual contrast thing? I’m nearly 50 and have less good contrast than I used to
i am the same age and saw it right away. the shadows are altered to define the side of the kittys jaw and open mouth more.
Yes. Anyone else see a giraffe similarly superimposed on the right image?
I see an ostrich/emu-shaped bird on top of the train in the shadows of the foliage.
For 6, the giant plane: does anyone know the name of a sci-fi novel featuring huge passenger planes that circle the Earth, never landing, refueling in mi-air? Passengers use small shuttle planes to dis/embark. It was written no later than early-80's.
That sounds like Timothy Zahn's story "Between a Rock and a High Place", published in Analog in 1982. IIRC the large, permanently flying craft was called a Skyport, and the plot involved a feeder plane crashing into it in a way that didn't immediately take it down but made it impossible to evacuate.
Yes, this is it! Thank you.
Also on the giant plane: you refer to a normal-sized plane "bottom left", which I think should be "bottom right".
Based on my knowledge this is not possible with most fusion designs which don't have the thrust to weight ratio to fly but may be possible with Zap and Helion's reactors. Particularly Helion which wouldn't require a steam generator. They may reach tantalizing levels of performance in the next few years looking to demonstrate step before a full size reactor results
27: Rolling machine setters, operators, and tenders? One of these things is not like the others.
They're just too desirable to stick to one partner.
"Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)
"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl)
"But my life, my lover, my lady is setting, operating, and tending rolling machines"
This is great.
5, flying aircraft carrier: The Soviets actually did make something like this, though not nearly as big. It was done by sticking fighters on existing bombers, and it turns out that while they added weight, they also increased its lift ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zveno_project
16, defund the police: Doesn't this proposal rely on the fact that societally you have majority support, or at least a very significant minority? Also would those who want Chauvin punished be happy with something like community service? (Also killing someone because they didn't do the right amount of community service seems like it would cause more problems than it solves, especially for those advocating defunding the police...)
It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
Like, Joe the Random Shoplifter gets sentenced to community service, and he fails to do it. Is anyone sufficiently bloodthirsty to go murder him over it?
What if he's part of a gang, and I'm pretty sure that his gang will murder me if I kill him? And those murderers feel confident that they can murder any further state-sanctioned killers that come their way to murder them?
When this kind of thing was tried in medieval Iceland, did it lead to a just and peaceful society, or did it lead to generations-long blood feuds and shockingly high levels of axe murder?
Turning into Medieval Iceland would be a step down for a lot of places but it would probably be a step up for, say, Philadelphia. So yeah, why not?
>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
That's not obvious. If it's legal to take an outlaw's stuff (it usually is), well, then, you have to deal with enterprising gentlemen who make "killing outlaws for their stuff" their entirely-legal profession (the most recent case of this I'm aware of is privateers, who typically weren't paid by the state issuing the letter of marque).
The problem of warlords/gangs that can defy such gentlemen, however, is a real one.
The "defying efforts to kill them" issue seems like a serious one even without bringing gangs and warlords into the picture.
If you have a regular person who's already known to have a gun and a propensity for violence who's declared an outlaw, they're probably not going to want to be killed, and will make efforts to defend themself. If someone tries to kill them and take they're stuff, they'll probably try to kill them back. The other person isn't legal to murder, but so what? They're already an outlaw.
If out of every several people condemned to outlawry, at least one ends up killing more people in defense of their life and property, then the system ends up looking a whole lot worse than our current police force.
The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.
If the court ruled against the capture, the captain (the one with the letter) was personally liable for compensation to the owners of ship and cargo - and likely would be bankrupt as a result.
Now there were a lot of ways around this. The courts in the Caribbean were much more lenient (and much faster) than the ones in England, since they were often short on things and ships. A personal relationship between the owner of the letter and the governor could cover many sins. The downside was that they were often also short on cash money.
For that matter, a privateer with a letter for e.g. French ships, could take a Danish ship (or take a ship and then find out it was Danish). They could then take it to e.g. a Portuguese colony for condemnation and sale. The "condemnation" in this case would likely be very informal.
It could be chancy to do this if word got back to England though - the ship owners could end up suing the letter owner in English court, likely years later. It would be an uphill battle, but still expensive.
>The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.
That is not what I'd call "paid by the state". They were taking stuff from merchants, and then selling it to - for the most part - other merchants, with the state's permission; no money was coming out of the state's coffers except if the state happened to be the buyer. The state could be literally bankrupt and the privateers could still sell to someone else. And certainly they're not being paid for the attack *per se*.
You are correct - the state did not pay privateers to attack ships. Sometimes it was the other way around - the privateer would pay for the letter (or at least set up a bond). Though that would have been quite limited in time; privateering was pretty chancy; I doubt you could charge much for a license most years and get any takers.
There were things like "ship money", but that was paid to actual navy crew. The navy could "bring in" a captured ship, but that was more like buying a used car at auction.
Privateers were intended as a less formal expansion of the navy, so to make sense they had to be cheaper for the state than building and crewing more navy ships.
It's also possible that this was intended to (sort of) regulate something that might happen anyway - there was a lot of rationalizing by the English that the Spanish considered all non-Spanish in the New World to be pirates and bandits already...
Aren't bounty hunters a simple and modern example of this? If you skip bail, a bondsman will send some armed thug after you (or a professional, but the point is that they could basically send a thug)
No; bounty hunters are paid by the person sending them, not in stuff they loot from the target.
This conversation is about how and whether one could enforce laws without the state paying for police.
> No; bounty hunters are paid by the person sending them, not in stuff they loot from the target.
Can't they just wave a magic wand and call it "civil forfeiture"?
(mostly joking here)
Privateering worked bc ships were filled with valuables, or at the very least the ship itself was valuable. Getting in deadly confrontations to get somebody's clothes and smartphone sounds very stupid unless somebody has ulterior motives.
His house, though?
... How many criminals do you think own real property?
Most likely, you'd be ridding an owner of a troublesome tenant, and such owner would owe you nothing more than a pat on the back for the service
Plus the problem of de facto death penalty for failing to turn up for your community service! Pretty sure defunding advocates would regard this as a bug rather than a feature (as would I, naturally).
The gang thing gets to the interesting part of this - thinking about why it wouldn't work in, say, modern America even to the extent it worked in Iceland. For it to work, you need a broad majority of people who 1) like the law basically as it is, 2) trust the judgments of the courts at least enough to use them as a focal point and accept them if they disagree and 3) are willing (able?) to use at least enough violence that their numerical preponderance overwhelms any other group of people.
The US is an interesting case, because the Old West (at least in books/films, I know nothing about the real world version) was able to at least use the posse system which is in the same ball park. On the "do I buy it" heuristic, I feel like this would work in rural Wyoming, but not remotely in Chicago (neither of which have I ever been to).
The only thing I know of real posse is what a friend learned about his Grandfather from Ancestory.com of all places. He knew his mother was the child of an older man, but never heard much about his grandfather. Until he got an ancestry.com account. He found a newspaper article about the trial of the posse that murdered his uncle and grandfather—who definitely had it coming. His grandfather and uncle were outlaws in a remote Arizona farming community, I don't know the dates, probably 1920s. On Sundays—when everyone was in Church—they'd steal every tool and implement from a farm. When the posse caught up to them, they were strung up, and shot into two parts. Only there was an observer who was not in the posse who reported this to the state police.
If you steal the farming tools from a subsistence farmer, you're condemning his family to death. So like I said, they had it coming.
> It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
There's always slavery.
One way or another, someone's going to want to do something with the meat that your mind calls home. Bodies are just made of organs that can be used for something else.
>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
Disagree. There are always people who are willing to kill a man just to watch him die, and aren't terribly picky about which man so long as he lives somewhere near Reno (or wherever is convenient to the wannabe killer). Most of these people would prefer not to spend the rest of their lives in Folsom as a consequence. If the State can officially say, "hey, all you people who ever wanted to kill someone just to watch them die, if you kill *this*, then we don't put you in prison and maybe we even call you a hero!", then it will probably inspire action even against an outlaw whose boring tax-law violations would otherwise never get anyone's blood boiling.
Even more so if the killer gets to keep the outlaw's stuff.
So there's plausibly a stable equilibrium in which each community has say a hundred such wannabe killers, and every criminal who gets caught just meekly does their assigned community service or whatever because the first one stupid enough to choose outlawry is going to have a hundred guns after them. Even the protection of a gang might not be enough against those odds.
Of course there's also a stable equilibrium in which nobody does their community service, there are thousands of nominal outlaws walking around, all of them feeling pretty secure because odds are that the one killer who would eventually have chosen them as a target will instead have been killed by one of the ten other outlaws he picked first. And plenty of other reasons not to want to implement this plan, even if we would get some cool new Sagas out of it.
The Johnny Cash reference is a nice touch, John
The question really comes down to whether Youtube or Twitch would allow you to monetize the video of you hunting down and killing various criminals across the country. If so then there would definitely be 'content creators' filling that void in the market.
Also relevant is whether 'it's ok to kill this person' means 'it's ok to kill this person and take their stuff' or 'it's ok to threaten to kill this person in order to mug them' or etc. Having an asymetrical right to kill someone gives you a lot of power over them that can be easily exploited to gain things other than the simple joy of murder, if the law allows it.
community service isn't a thing if you haven't someone who actually compels you to do the service.
It's the whole libertarian mantra about how the government threatens to kill you if you don't pay your taxes : yes, ultimately every system of punishment must be able to excalate until obedience is obtained, otherwise the system doesn't work.
It is amazing how many people don't understand this. At the foundation of all enforcement is well FORCE.
Yup. There's a reason why the polisci definition of a "state" is "a [political entity] that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence".
I think you've misread or misunderstood something.
The proposal is "community service, or we declare that it's now legal to kill you and take your stuff". That's a threat of force, but it doesn't actually need police to enforce it.
Gangs remain problematic, but as far as killing-for-shoplifting goes, it seems reasonable to extend the idea to different levels of outlaw-ness. Maybe for petty crimes the judge can declare that it’s legal to steal your stuff and call you names, but murder’s still out.
It still means any punishment is limitless. If you get caught stealing a loaf of bread (though without police, who would catch you?), then everything you own is now fair game. People talk about a cycle of poverty, but this seems even worse.
Oh I wouldn't want to live in this society, to be clear. I just think it *could* reach a stable equilibrium (or at any rate, the reasons it couldn't, e.g. gangs, are not the same as the counterargument you were gesturing at).
Yeah I'm sure it could do that, I'm just arguing any implementation would be far worse than today for everything the Defund the Police crowd cares about.
If you have no police, then the shopkeeper catches you. He can't hand you over to the police, so what do you think happens then?
Police are to protect the criminal from the public, as mob justice is famously error-prone.
Or you do the community service/pay the fine that the court orders; at the moment if you don't do that you're sent to prison. In any system, option 1 is stealing stuff's illegal, in which case there's either a penalty a thief doesn't have to co-operate with (incarceration/execution/mutilation/outlawry) or a penalty the thief needs to cooperate with (fines/community service) backed up the threat of a non-co-operative penalty if they don't co-operate. Option 2 is no penalty or an unenforceable co-operation-requiring penalty.
Of course, if you had a purely digital currency then fines become a non-co-operative penalty, and similarly things like employment blacklists or social credit systems could work in the same way.
In the given example, you would probably be assigned a relatively small amount of community service or fine for shoplifting. The punishment would only be limitless if you refuse to comply.
(this doesn't mean it's a good idea and I think even the contest winner was more interested in creativity than practicality)
16. Trying to discuss this with a straight face reminds me of my days of smoking way too much pot with my friends. “No really Gunflint, tell me why this wouldn’t work” passes me the joint.
Or of the professor played by Donald Sutherland in Animal House having a high bros discussion with his students.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JUOGxePBs50
Not relevant, but I also like the exchange in the classroom.
Jennings : Don't write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He's a little bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.
[Bell rings, students rise to leave]
Jennings : But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility for this material. Now I'm waiting for reports from some of you... Listen, I'm not joking. This is my job!
#15 Two points. To your question, my understanding is that the Czech government has been giving very generous subsidies to parents for almost 20 years now (in the range of $10,000 per child per year). Looks like it's having the intended effect. Link below.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/07/improve-us-birth-rate-give-parents-money-and-time/619367/
That being said, making sense of this graph for other countries is complicated by the changes in the scale of the birth rates. Top birth rate changes from >1.96 to >1.76. Just pointing that out for others to beware.
The trouble with flat-rate subsidies to parents is that you largely wind up incentivising poor people to breed, whereas what you _want_ is to encourage rich people to breed.
My preferred solution is to allow tax thresholds to be shared across a whole family. So if the top tax rate cuts in at $200K for a single and $400K for a couple it should be $600K for a couple with one kid, $800K for a couple with two kids, and so on.
As another low fertility rich person, I agree with everything you said. It’s a hard problem to solve.
I would expect that subsidies are going to make the biggest difference in a family where it tips the scales towards the wife becoming a stay-at-home mom. Because the decision to become a SAHM is associated with a higher probability of additional children -- the marginal cost of another child is now much lower.
I think this scenario is common enough in the upper middle-class: the husband is a businessman, engineer, lawyer, or doctor; his wife is a teacher, nurse, administrative worker, etc., whose gross salary is around 1/3 to 1/2 of his, less than that on an after-tax basis. She could quit her job, and she's not exactly passionate about her work and probably a little burnt out by the time her 30s arrive, but the pinch from the lower income will be a little painful, particularly in his late 20s or early 30s when his career is still gathering steam but key baby-making years (he might be earning 2x her income at age 30 but 4x at age 50).
I agree. Good childcare is better than extra cash, because cash often can't buy you good childcare. It would probably help if part-time jobs were more available (also for men!); then two partners could each have a job and have enough time left for kids.
Not to tell you about yourself, but that last paragraph is a really big impact. A lot of the problems become easier when you start sooner, but many people wait because they want to get "established" first (whatever that means to them). So extra money isn't to incentivize people of your age, but to instead help them feel safe to start sooner.
See https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-rate-roundup-1
My solution is cheaper housing.
I think that's a bit of a red herring. They are not, as they say, printing any more land. So "cheaper housing" either means:
1. More housing in undesirable areas, or
2. Denser housing in desirable areas.
But 1 already exists, there's loads of cheap housing in undesirable areas and people still don't choose to move there. And 2 is probably counterproductive, because you don't want to raise a big family in a goddamned high-rise apartment, you want to raise them in a big house with a proper backyard.
There's also
3. Make more areas be desirable.
Or, if you are a Georgist, accept that housing in desirable areas costs a lot purely because of supply and demand, but extract as tax the part of the profit that’s due to area being desirable and not due to the landlord building a particularly appealing dwelling.
Then, however, you circle back to the question of what to do with the funds collected this way, and if subsidizing parents is the right thing to do, whether to give more money to specific groups of parents.
This is a Europe vs US thing. In the US, you could literally do a China and just build 20 new megacities* in the Great Plains, give businesses epic tax breaks/subsidies to move there, and use the resulting de-densification to reduce house prices.
In Europe, adopting US-style zoning rules and better infrastructure would probably reduce house prices enough to push commutable family houses into affordability territory, even before any further price effect from bursting housing bubbles.
*Realistically even 5 kilocities would probably be plenty.
We lack the resources to supply the houses. We can build houses all day, getting water to them is another matter.
We could take water away from farms—as is the constant mantra from the land developers; but then what would we eat?
What is the difference between “US style” zoning rules and European rules (though the latter surely change from state to state)?
If govt gave me $100,000 in cash for each child I would have to have about 4 children before I'd financially ahead rather than if they just gave me cheap housing instead.
PS: My metric for housing affordability is average area income to average housing price ratio.
Simple logic and the evidence both say that enabling young couples to form their own households earlier (early 20s rather than late 20s or 30s) means they have more children over the course of their fertile years. Cheap housing would indeed seem to be better than direct cash in this case. Rare!
But why not both?
The idea of raising a family in a house with a big backyard is very American. Lot of people do not see that as a necessary component of raising a family. Hell, you don't even have to leave America. How many people in NYC or Chicago are raising their kids with big back yards? If you live in a desirable area presumably there are other benefits that make up for what you're losing.
I've never met a kid raised in an apartment who wasn't an emotionally stunted drone.
What's your problem?
That is the system in France, you divide the total salary by (adults + (kids/2)) below 3 kids. Starting from the third kid, they count as 1 each, and not 1/2.
If your population is crashing hard enough I don't think you care about who is doing the breeding. You just need people.
"If your population is crashing hard enough I don't think you care about who is doing the breeding. You just need people."
If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad. For the same reason that you can't make up in volume a loss on each item sold.
>If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad.
That does sound like a good argument against rich people breeding, but I'm afraid the problem is not the number of rich individuals, but the amount of resources they have at their disposal.
If you structure the flat-rate subsidy as a discount from say, income tax, then it wouldn't be as bad. Truly poor people aren't paying any income tax so they get no benefit from having more kids.
I suspect a lot of ills are driven by massive income inequality. If poor people have lots of children, that doesn't help. But if rich people have lots of children, that splits up their fortune among many more people, which probably has a net benefit to the economy by diluting the wealth that a very small group of people control.
You could, perhaps, calculate how many children should people have, given their available resources. If they don't have the right number of children, they should be taxed the equivalent amount it would cost for someone without their resources to have kids - a wealth based quota. The tax money could be used to subsidise poorer families who want to have kids, but maybe comes with some caveats (e.g you must enrol your child in school) as a safeguard against this system driving child neglect. I don't want this system being used by the kind of people who have 10 homeschooled kids who come out the other end believing vaccines cause autism or whatever.
Oh, and children that someone claims are theirs would naturally be entitled to a share of the wealth. The moment this person stops being a legal dependent / heir, the tax obligations apply.
This is unlikely to affect most people, but it'll give the highest net worth individuals incentive to adopt or create new dependents without punishing the poor.
And anyway, this is already happening in lots of places - since I'm childless, I don't get any childcare benefits, but get taxed the same to fund it. I don't mind because children important future taxpayers to later support me. I do think if there's a perceived need to create more people, the kids should have access to the overall resources of the nation rather than just their parents' - having more resources for future taxpayers will keep them healthier (hence cheaper to keep alive) and better educated.
I'm Czech. With a kid. The subsidies are quite high, but not as much as you state - it is currently $13k in total, for most people this is split into three years (so $360 per month). This typically adds around 1/4th of one person's average salary (the woman, sometimes also the man, typically doesn't work until the child is 3 years old or does only part-time). This really leads to speculations that poor people have children just for the sake of this benefit, but of course this is difficult to prove.
The amount was increased substantially from $9500 in 2020, but the increase is gradual so I don't think this is the main reason.
As for the data itself, I suspected some change of methodology, but it seems it is legit. See this graph of the Czech statistical office ("Graf 19", PDF page 33, black line): https://www.czso.cz/documents/10180/165603915/13011822.pdf/48325f59-e080-4991-a04c-643441673e17?version=1.3
Czech sources mention as the main reason for the increasing numbers were stable economy and the increase of the subsidies (plus some changes in the way they are paid).
By the way, for 2022 the numbers are back to 1.66, reportedly mainly because of covid and they are expected to go down because of the Ukraine war and economy stagnation.
Good to know. Thanks for the corrections.
My understanding from a couple of podcasts that interviewed researchers focused on natalist policies is that there's very little evidence that subsidies get anyone to have a kid they didn't want to have -- the policies that work at all are letting people have a kid they wanted, but felt they wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford.
(I'm pretty sure on one of them was on Vox's The Weeds. This article has some relevant links: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/7/21125303/alaska-basic-income-birth-rate-fertility )
If the policy is making poor people less-poor by enough to have a wanted child, that seems like a huge win, in utilitarian terms?
Yeah, 2021 is basically just an outlier. 2018–2020 were constant 1.71 (and 2017 was 1.69), 2021 jumped to 1.83, but 2022 fell back to 1.62, so possibly just a pregnancy shift in time. 1.71 is still relatively high but not that outstanding. https://www.czso.cz/documents/10180/191186709/13007023g05.xlsx/c0e41af0-9175-4353-ab06-893a281a9cd5?version=1.1
Orban tried this (free money for new parents) in Hungary and it didn't really have an effect. Then he offered young couples an almost rent-free loan of (forgot the exact amount) ~150k, of which 1/3rd would be forgiven for every child the couple had in the next 20 years. Which just before Covid had its first reports and it seemed to work better.
The first gives money to people who already have a baby, the second incentivizes young couples to buy a house, move out, and then have kids. I think this is really interesting (although I'm not a fan of Orban) and am curious which approach works best.
That sounds like a very clever proposal, at least for people who won't blow it all on drugs and bad business decisions.
Without a building programme, it sounds to me like a way of propping up real estate prices. Increased demand for the same housing stock is a zero sum spiral.
That would apply in a messed-up situation like most of America. If supply is free to meet demand, I think there isn't a problem?
I have no knowledge of the construction industry in Hungary, but I imagine there is zoning and other restrictions on building "to keep our greenbelt" and "to protect the character of the neighborhood" and all the other things as in anglosphere countries.
My impression is that there is a big corrupt bureaucracy obstructing supply as well. But who knows what Transparency International's real agenda is?
For what it's worth, human abilities to predict adversarial examples have been known since at least 2019: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08931-6
Thanks for linking this. I've always thought the existence of adversarial image misclassifications by CNNs is not especially surprising, and this paper does a nice job of demonstrating that. Still, one of their conclusions seems a bit different than what I would expect:
"Indeed, although adversarial images are often analogized to optical illusions that flummox human vision, we suggest another analogy: Whereas humans have separate concepts for appearing like something vs. appearing to be that thing—as when a cloud looks like a dog without looking like it is a dog, or a snakeskin shoe resembles a snake’s features without appearing to be a snake, or even a rubber duck shares appearances with the real thing without being confusable for a duck—CNNs are not permitted to make this distinction, instead being forced to play the game of picking whichever label in their repertoire best matches an image (as were the humans in our experiments)."
I think they missed a better analogy. A CNN misclassifying an adversarial example is more analogous to a specific human momentarily misidentifying an object. Everyone regularly has experiences where they misidentify objects in a similar manner to how CNNs misclassify adversarial examples. Just this morning I glanced at some soup cans on my shelf and thought I saw a cat. After an extremely brief moment, I realized it was in fact cans without even superficial resemblance to a cat at all. I cannot duplicate the precise combination of sensations that led me to see the cans as a cat, but CNNs are static and give deterministic results to a static input. My moment of misidentification is akin to a static CNN misidentifying a static input.
You're welcome! I guess you could be right about the static/dynamic thing. But let's imagine a recurrent neural network trained on video -> object classification tasks. I would bet that you could still produce adversarial videos. In this case, I think the distinction the authors raise is apt; resemblance is not the same thing as identity. You'd need a completely different ANN paradigm to replicate this.
I agree they have a useful analogy, especially when you have a situation like a cloud that looks like a dog (should the CNN output "cloud" or "dog"). Completely reasonable to be concerned about resemblance vs identity. I think this sort of adversarial image should also be very robust against random perturbations. Maybe it's even the more relevant sort of adversarial image, considering the AI generated images we see in link 8.
In comparison, when you have one of the adversarial images that to a human clearly looks like a panda, but a certain CNN will output "gibbon" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572), the analogy doesn't work well. As far as I know, these sorts of images are not robust, and adding a small perturbation will restore the CNN output to "panda".
For video, I agree it should be possible to make an adversarial video, and I think you'll be able to create either of the above types of adversarial images; one that has confusion due to resemblance vs. identity, and one that has a sort of fine-tuned state, but I bet the longer the video the more delicate the second kind of adversarial image will be (compression artifacts might destroy the effect!).
Precisely. This can be phrased in a more general (and more concise) way as contemporary ANNs only really being able to perform System 1 tasks. (Which, not really an issue if you treat them as sophisticated tools with known limitations, but a huge, yet completely unsolved issue if you expect automation - and, further down the line, general intelligence - from them.)
2018:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08195
https://spectrum.ieee.org/hacking-the-brain-with-adversarial-images
The dog/cat example is an unusually good one.
#18: I spent a little time in Peru and thought the food was delightful. That's all. Just felt I needed to stand up for Peru.
#27: low divorce rate ≠ good marriage rate? Without more context, it could just be an artifact of a *lower* marriage rate or a *later* time of first marriage leading to fewer opportunities for divorce.
Certainly in the case of clergy, given how many religions ban marriage!
The Catholics allow non-Catholic priests who are already married to retain their spouses if they convert to Catholicism. A man who does that needs to think long & hard about whether he REALLY wants a divorce.
Wait... really?
Where can I read about the lives of married Catholic priests?!
https://www.ncronline.org/news/father-josh-married-catholic-priest-celibate-world
Married Catholic priests are real but very rare.
"There are around 125 married Roman Catholic priests like Whitfield, an Episcopal convert, across the U.S., experts say, and perhaps a couple hundred total around the world."
Perhaps more important (since Catholic priests are only about 10% of US clergy) is that divorce is a de facto disqualifier for ministry in most of US conservative Protestantism (Evangelicalism). The exception would be churches that are Prosperity Gospel. For example, Paula White. I'm a conservative Protestant but I don't really understand her world, since Biblically she's disqualified for ministry at least 3 times over.
My hometown got a Peruvian restaurant a while ago. The desserts are amazing!
There's a Peruvian chicken place near where I work that's pretty awesome. Never had the desserts though. I'll have to check them out. Any recommendations?
If I remember right, the Chocolucuma was delicious. And they had a fruit mousse that was also quite good.
+1 for Peruvian food. And do try the Peruvian-Chinese combination, which is weirdly enough a thing. The places are called Chifa.
Agree on Peruvian food. After a quick look at that list, there is a high correlation between how "global" a cuisine is (how many restaurants serve it commonly) and how popular it is. Also, the top cuisines tend to be more recognizable, or at least a single dish is. Do you like Japanese food or do you really just like Sushi or miso soup? Do you like Indian food or do you just like chicken tikka (which isn't Indian).
My take away isnt that people don't like peruvian food, it's that they havent had or don't know what it is. If anything Greek food is the big loser considering how popular/common it is but yet isn't very well liked.
Also why is ‘Hong Kong food’ so far away from ‘Chinese food’? That doesn’t make sense.
One possibility involving unrepresentative memory and one about unrealistic comparison:
Maybe a lot of people have a memory trying some strange dim sum, like chicken feet, which they specifically associate with Hong Kong cuisine (accurately, or as a representative of Cantonese cuisine), while anything positive about Hong Kong cuisine got assimilated in memory to Chinese cuisine.
Maybe people who visited Hong Kong ate in low-quality restaurants to save money (because it's an expensive city) or out of ignorance, but were already familiar with similarly cheap, high-quality Chinese restaurants in their home country.
I think you're right... and it's partly a product of how the data has been presented?
The poll data has the following options:
• Like A lot
• Like a fair amount,
• Don't like very much
• Don't like at all
• Don't know,
• N/A - I have never eaten this cuisine
The statistic shown is '% of those who have eaten the cuisine that like it', which seems only exclude the N/A option but leaves in the 'Don't know'. I would imagine that the 'don't know' respondents are either people who (a) have tried the food, but not enough to have an opinion, (b) haven't tried the food, and selected 'don't know' when reading down the option list (not waiting to get to the N/A option).
For example, here's the Japan entry for British cuisine:
• 02% Like a lot
• 11% Like a fair amount
• 14% Don't like very much
• 05% Don't like at all
• 28% Don't know
• 40% N/a - I have never eaten this cuisine
If you exclude the Japanese respondents who say that they have never eaten British cuisine, then the '% who liked it' comes to 20%. However, if you only include people who expressed an opinion on British cuisine, then the '% who liked it' rises to 41%
When you include the 'don't know' option in the calculation, then the Japanese respondents are the most negative about foreign food of the bunch. However, this is mostly because of a high 'don't know' rate. When you only look at people who liked or disliked different cuisines, then they're actually middle of the bunch in terms of how much they liked/disliked different cuisines?
So I think that including the 'don't knows' is tipping the results in favour of well-known cuisines that people have had lots of opportunity to try. I copied the data to Excel and had a go at creating an equivalent graphic that only looked at '% of people who liked it out of those that expressed an opinion'.
----
YouGov article: https://yougov.co.uk/consumer/articles/22632-italian-cuisine-worlds-most-popular
YouGov Polling Data: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/YouGov_-_Global_Cuisine_survey.pdf
Copied to Excel: https://1drv.ms/x/s!ArxGiOiadOU3grRQA3vR0XhI6Ysf-w?e=0aCD8O
You can really see this play out toward the bottom of the table, where a lot of the "bad" cuisines are rated higher in countries where those cuisines are more common. The funniest example to me is that Malaysians have an outsized love for Saudi Arabian food. This is totally reasonable considering that Malaysia is a majority-Muslim country that has strong ties to other Muslim countries (I still chuckle at the business advertising locations in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Gaza).
I assume these are the rates at which marriages end in divorces, not the percentage of the group that's divorced, so I don't think lower marriage rate would skew the numbers. (I'd be more surprised if 53% of bartenders had been through a divorce than if 53% of marriages to bartenders ended in divorce)
I was recently in Peru and was astonished by the quality of the food.
Notably, the only 99 I see in the grid is what Italians think of their own food.
Miami has many popular Peruvian restaurants. And Nobu worked in Peru while crafting his skillls. Btw, I double-checked that on Wikipedia and it leaves out the part where Nobu casually mentioned he considered suicide after one of his restaurants failed.
Peruvian here. I actually shared the table on Facebook, as Peruvian media tends to inflame Peruvian culinary pride too much and it deserves to be brought down a notch or two. (A prominent Peruvian chef abroad said recently, while interviewed, that he would have liked to have been an engineer, only things didn't work out financially, and that the country needs engineers more than it does chefs [NB: though yet again top engineering graduates in Peru often end up grossly underemployed and underpaid]. I agree.) Nevertheless: the results make no sense, and I'd very much like to see the methodology behind this.
It's not surprising at all that Chinese-Peruvian food is a thing. There was massive, semi-forced migration from China in the second half of the 19th century - coolies were brought over in part to replace formerly enslaved people in agriculture and in part to build railroads. [The word "coolie" is non-offensive in Peru and China - it's the ghosts of those who put people in that situation who should be ashamed.] Many died, but those who survived their period of indentured servitude generally stayed, married into local families (migrants were almost entirely men) and (says the stereotype) opened shops or restaurants, or were employed as cooks by wealthy people.
In the 80s and 90s, in Peru, for the middle class (which in American means: struggling families) "going out to eat" was a rare ocassion that meant almost by definition either Chinese food or rotisserie chicken. We have other things at home!
#13: Describing Grayzone as an anti-war site is misleading. They aren't against Russia invading Ukraine - only against Ukraine defending itself. This is relevant as far as deplatforming goes. Moving from deplatforming anti-woke groups to actual anti-war groups would represent a new step in deplatforming. Moving from deplatforming anti-woke to deplatforming fake news that supports any regime, as long as it's authoritarian and brutal enough (Putin, Assad, etc.) doesn't really break any new ground.
I also found this description to be bizarre as well. Granted, Scott's typical position is that cancelling is bad irrespective of one's views so a better description wouldn't change the message, but Grayzone is definitely not best described as an "anti-war" site.
Hasn't "anti-war" always meant "in favour of our side surrendering"?
Being "anti-war" in the sense that "hey, war is a generally bad thing" doesn't distinguish you from "pro-war" people -- even the most pro-war people tend to be in favour of war in order to achieve specific important objectives rather than being in favour of war in general.
And being anti-war in the sense that you think that the _other_ side should surrender also doesn't distinguish you from pro-war people.
Depends what society we are talking about? Ancient Romans and Mongols circa Genghis Khan seem to have been pretty pro war-in-general
Even though we men think about it all the time, it can be safely assumed from context that we're discussing our society in this thread, not ancient Rome.
but why would we talk about something as boring as that, when we could talk about Ancient Rome?
Lots of people who are far more spatio-temporo-culturally similar to us have been pro-war, eg. pre-WWI militarists, fascists etc. I can't think of many Anglo-Saxon examples of being generically pro-war other than maybe the imperialists, but anything Westerners argued for in the last hundred years seems close enough that it's relevant to defining people's positions.
I think the idea was that war was good because it was a chance for men to show bravery.
America has been pro war since its founding.
The Romans and Mongols were both fine with the other side surrendering before the ram had touched the wall (Romans) or roughly the equivalent (Mongols). After that they were pro-war.
If the US had invaded Russia, committed genocide, and annexed Siberia, maybe the "anti-war" label would still be used for the Russians calling for Russia to negotiate. But it seems extraordinarily silly to do this for international observers; someone in Kenya who is spreading propaganda about how good this invasion is and how the Russians secretly want this is obviously not anti-war, they are pro-war.
I do think "being anti-war in the sense that you think that the _other_ side should surrender also doesn't distinguish you from pro-war people" has a lot of truth to it though, it's just that Grayzone's "side" is not the US, let alone Ukraine. Their side is "authoritarian regimes" ("authoritarian regime tribe" you could say). I am vastly more anti-war than Grayzone, because when my "side" launched an invasion of Iraq, I opposed it, while when their side launched an invasion of Ukraine, they supported it. Always supporting authoritarian regimes is not anti-war.
Was the George Bush administration truly "your side"?
If the Grayzone people are somehow part of an "authoriatarian tribe" and therefore on the same side as Putin, then surely you were/are not part of the same "tribe" as the Bush admin. (but instead part of the "anti-middle eastern US intervention" tribe just like Saddam Hussein) And therefore by opposing the Iraq war you weren't going against your side you were going against your opposing side just like the Grayzone people are doing with Ukraine.
>Was the George Bush administration truly "your side"?<
The 2002 invasion resolution had large support from Democrats, so yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002#:~:text=Administration's%20proposals%2C%20H.J.-,Res.,signed%20into%20law%20as%20Pub.
Regarding whether Bush is on my side, I think yes. I think the Iraq war was a huge mistake and handled badly, but I still wanted the US to do well in Iraq, I think Bush and the US were a million times better than Hussein, and I support many things the Bush administration did (PEPFAR in particular is likely one of the greatest programs in US history).
> "instead part of the 'anti-middle eastern US intervention' tribe just like Saddam Hussein"
Absolutely not. I support many US interventions in the Middle East. I'm not even opposed to the US joining any wars in the Middle East; I think the US joining the Gulf War after Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a good idea. I am certainly not entirely anti-war, as I support countries going to war to stop invasions and mass-killings of civilians; I'm just more anti-war than the pro-war website Grayzone.
Why does the US have the right to intervene in any of these places, barring a UN authorisation to do so. (Which was true of the first gulf war but bit the second).
PEPFAR—paying $5 billion dollars for $200 million in pills. Lol.
It wasn't about the oil, it was never about the oil. Contrary to the constant misinformation mantra, the US never took a single drop of Iraqi oil.
The Ministry of Truth has scrubbed from the web, but there was a pretty exhaustive list, with—I think—122 items. 122 reasons we invaded Iraq. Of the things I remember, was:
1. The Big Gun, there's a TV show describing a big cannon, with a 1km long barrel that shot rocket propelled shells which Saddam hired a Canadian named Bull to build. The cannon was immobile and only pointed at Israel. The final stage was sabotaged on the way to delivery, and Bull was assassinated.
2. The Nuclear Mujahedeen, an army of 10k scientists, engineers, and technicians Saddam employed to build nuclear weapons. In the US raids, Iraqi civilians looted their uranium contaminated gear killing themselves and their families. You can only kill yourself with purified uranium, as natural occurring uranium isn't radioactive enough. The victims was a thing during the war. In 1981, Israel—in cahoots with Saudi Arabia—flew a bombing mission into Iraq, and bombed the Iraqi bomb fuel reactor.
3. Uranium from Chad. There was a very big kerfuffle when US Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valery Plame went to Chad to investigate the attempted purchase. Plame reported no attempt was made, however a congressional investigation determined she lied about this to shed bad light on President Bush. Gee, like the CIA is trustworthy. Scooter Libby was charged with revealing a CIA agent ... like the wife of a US Ambassador is not an agent of the US government.
4. Iraq invaded Kuwait. And the US has a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with Kuwait, which basically says, we defend Kuwait, and they don't pursue building or buying nukes. Well Iraq invaded, we were obligated to defend. Fast forward to today, Saudi Arabia is trying to build or buy nukes to defend itself against a nuclear enabled Iran. Wanna see those two scrappy kids get nukes(?) cause I don't.
5. Saddam was funding suicide bombers in Israel, and boasting about paying $10k US to the families of suicide bombers. And there were suicide bombings almost daily for a long while.
6. Assassination attempt against President Carter. Saddam sent an assassination team to the US to attempt the life of former President Carter. Saddam was mad that Carter had built lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. That's reason enough in my book to invade Iraq.
7. General Terrorism. Iraq was the financial source, training grounds, and safe haven for all manner of terrorism around the world. Of course that too is memory holed.
8. Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people. But then again, he didn't have chemical weapons, so that's a Schrodinger Event which either did or did not happen. But a whole lot of civilians got gassed by chemical weapons that some say didn't exist, but when Schrodinger opened his box, a lot of people were dead all the same. There was a huge convoy of trucks which hauled a lot of 'stuff' to Syria right before the invasion; the speculation was this was the chemical weapons. There was an Iraqi base labeled 'The Dragon's Lair' that US troops are not allowed to talk about.
That's only eight, there were another 114 items on the list, but as I said, the Ministry of Truth has found these items untruthful and has scrubbed them from our collective memories.
Oil is a global market—it was for the oil and Bush/Tillerson wanted to make Iraqis wealthy just like Tillerson ended up successfully making Qataris wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Obviously Iraq has a much bigger population than Qatar but American energy companies have made many foreigners a lot of money.
Russians are indeed the bad guys in Ukraine. Authoritarianism has nothing to do with whether a war is to be supported or not. After all the British were democratic (largely) as were the French (kind of ) or the US empire (mostly) during their imperial heights.
Agreed. Even modern wars are like this, which I think gave the “anti-war” crowd a lot of cred in the early 2000s. I think a lot of “anti-war” people were always just opposing whichever side of a war the US was on. This made them seem anti-war and prescient when the vast majority of war discussion in the US was on US wars that became a complete mess (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.), but broke down when it started to become Russian wars instead (Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again).
I've never really looked deeply at the Grayzone, but I don't see anything pro-authoritarian-regime on there currently (but maybe I'm just clueless about geopolitics). But I do see https://thegrayzone.com/2023/08/21/anti-syria-lobby-caliphate-starvation-sanctions/ which appears to be against caliphates (authoritarian Islamic regimes).
ISIS is considered a terrorist organization, not a governmental body.
But, yes, it's a simplification. A more accurate, although still simplified way of putting it would be that Grayzone supports countries that are adversaries of the US (particularly Syria, China, and Russia). The article you posted is actually a good example of this; it's a propaganda piece blaming all of Syria's ills on the US and its allies, while insisting that the brutal dictator Assad would bring normalcy. In one wild paragraph, it uses an accusation from the Syrian Foreign Ministry as proof for the ludicrous claim that the US facilitated an ambush by ISIS on Assad's forces.
Assad is probably the better choice, the other option being Isis. Probably.
Those countries that are anti US are anti US because the US has tried to maintain hegemony at the expense of these countries - particularly China these days.
According to von Clausewitz it's not a war if the defender is not actually fighting. So Grayzone could indeed be considered an anti-war site, in a Clausewitzian sense.
Code Pink and International Answer were always referred to as "anti-war," though the wars they objected to were a bit selective.
And their mainstream US media coverage was/is entirely dependent on who is in office.
How does this apply to Iraq? Afghanistan? These were wars entirely initiated by the US - not fighting them would not have been equivalent in any way to 'surrendering'. Pro-war people loved these wars, anti-war people were very against them. Another way of thinking about the divide is either the threshold for what constitutes a valid use of war, or whether or not war is a good strategy for achieving non-directly-defensive objectives.
I wonder what Tucker Carlson Republicans would say about the Persian Gulf War now?? We sent ground troops to repel an invasion of a super wealthy monarchy…I don’t even know if I would support that one now. I definitely support power projection like enforcing no-fly zones and Navy patrolling the Strait of Hormuz…but ground troops??
No. Soviet "anti-war" messaging definitely didn't mean USSR surrendering by itself or in any of its proxy wars. It always meant USA surrendering to USSR in its proxy wars, and preferably by itself too. If not, unilateral disarmament, reduction in military spending, repeal of COCOM regulations and the Jackson-Vanik amendment, so that USSR could buy high tech dual use machinery for its MIC with no annoying hurdles, would all be good too.
They would actually be well-described as "pro-war", since they continually post propaganda in support of the war.
Yeah if they were actually anti-war you'd think they'd have something to say against the government that started the war, which I haven't seen any sign of.
Presumably the case for calling Grayzone anti-war is that it's an American site, so calling it "anti-war" implicitly means that it opposes the US's participation in war. But this case is not very good. The US is just an arms supplier, not a participant in the Ukraine war and there is no serious movement for the US to enter the war. And also because Scott's summary did not mention that Grayzone was an American site, so this heuristic for what "anti-war" means wasn't available to anyone who doesn't already know what Grayzone is.
US arms are fueling the conflict, and the US sabotaged peace negotiations, they're not a neutral
US arms are only fueling the conflict insofar as they're preventing the invading hordes from just having their way with their victims.
There’s zero evidence they sabotaged peace negotiations and aid to Ukraine has helped prevent more massacres like what happened in Bucha.
I’d be inclined to ask whether Russia has or hasn’t sabotaged „peace negotiations“. I wonder why blame is deflected away from Russia all the time. What have they offered or asked for in return for peace?
Unless Scott meant ""Anti-Ukraine"-War" website, i.e. with a left-binding dash.
Or, we could continue to see them published and ignore them.
(I’m pretty sure that’s a mischaracterisation anyway)
Regardless of whether it breaks new ground it is still bad. Let ideas stand on their own merits.
"defending itself" by forcing people to fight for it's territorial claims and arresting anyone who criticizes the government's policy of refusing to negotiate continuing this war until the bitter end
Their lean is pro-Russia, yes, but a world where Ukrainian atrocities stop getting whitewashed, and Ukraine is pushed to negotiate seriously (i.e. making concessions instead of fantasizing about reclaiming Crimea) is a world where the war ends faster and fewer people die.
A world where you give me your lunch money has less slapping vis-a-vis me slapping you than one where you don't, so how about you pony up?
That's a really nice house you have there.
Would be a shame if little green men came for a visit.
Hopefully they're not from Vega.
also, re: Assad, you're aware his primary enemies were al-Qaeda and ISIS, and his secondary enemies were groups like Jaish al-Islam or Ahrar al-Sham that took Saudi Arabia as an explicit model? Secularist/democratic rebels were a nonfactor outside Daraa unless one counts the DFNS/Rojava/YPG, who do not aspire to rule the rest of Syria and eventually gave up on fighting Assad themselves.
It's so bizarre that so many people who are not Islamist fanatics, and who would likely find themselves quickly beheaded in contemporary Idlib or ISIS Palmyra, reject the obvious conclusion that Assad was by far the lesser evil in this war. What happened to supporting secularism and freedom of religion? Heck, what happened to the War on Terror, which the US was still allegedly fighting during the 2010s - was the problem with al-Qaeda that it was in Afghanistan and not Syria?
This is an upending of the usual meaning of antiwar in the American conversation. The likes of the people at Antiwar.com have always been against US interventionism. One wouldn't have they weren't antiwar because they weren't railing against Hussein declaring war on Kuwait, or the North Vietnamese on the South Vietnamese.
>as long as it's authoritarian and brutal enough (Putin, Assad, etc.)
Okay, I don't disagree with the general thrust of what you're saying but it's absolutely bizarre to act as though there's something especially "authoritarian" and "brutal" about Assad as compared with the rest of the region and the extremists who were trying to overthrow him with US funding/support. Assad would have been decapitated many years ago if he were any gentler.
What extremists in Syria did the US fund, specifically?
And, no, he wouldn't have been decapitated if he didn't gas civilians.
I think every group the US funded in Syria could accurately be described as extremist, but I hope you will agree that an Al Qaeda affiliate counts. Otherwise, you are probably a dangerous extremist yourself.
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8771999/this-is-how-crazy-syria-policy-has-gotten
Of course an Al Qaeda affiliate counts, but your article doesn’t make this accusation, let alone provide evidence for it. It accuses Turkiye and Saudi Arabia of funding a rebel coalition that includes an Al Qaeda affiliate. The United States is not Turkiye or Saudi Arabia.
“[T]wo pieces published in the past month, from the Wall Street Journal and the Independent, reported that Turkey and Saudi Arabia are working together to ship weapons and cash to Jaish al-Fatah, a rebel coalition. Syria's al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, is one of the key partners in the coalition.“
And if you look beyond this article, you will quickly find that not only was the US not funding al-Nusra, they were actively attacking them, decimating their operations and killing several of their top commanders. http://www.voanews.com/a/turkey-says-airstrikes-killed-22-is-militants-in-syria/3659580.html,
The U.S. provided direct support to "moderate" groups who were in the Jaish al-Fatah coalition with Al Nusra: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/world/middleeast/syria-russia-airstrikes-rebels-army-conquest-jaish-al-fatah.html
Some C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front fighters, some of the rebels trained by the CIA joined the group, and groups directly supported by the U.S. often fought alongside Al Nusra. The U.S. knew this was impossible to avoid with the support they were providing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.html
It's true that at other times the U.S. attacked Al Nusra, but they were more than willing to strategically support them when they could be used against Assad.
This is a huge misunderstanding of the conflict. The United States never strategically supported nor funded Al Nusra. They were always actively working against them, *as were the groups they were actively funding*.
This is *how* Al-Nusra got the bulk of its US weaponry; from fighting (and mostly winning against) US backed groups. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria/syria-battle-between-al-qaeda-and-western-backed-group-spreads-idUSKBN0L311Z20150130, https://jamestown.org/program/the-rise-of-jaysh-al-fateh-in-northern-syria/
It is true that some of the groups and fighters the US had supported ended up joining the coalition with Al-Nusra, *after* the US backed groups had lost. And the US allied with the Soviet Union during WWII. I oppose these groups doing this, and am glad the US did not continue funding them, but it doesn’t mean the US was funding al-Nusra all along.
The Grayzone's founder Max Blumenthal has been clearly on Russia's side, even aiding them in preparing UN briefings. The information spread by the website has been pro-Russian rather than anti-war. Taking down a donation source for a Russian propaganda outlet in pacifist disguise is an honorable deed, I want this to happen more.
Was about to make this very point but you beat me to it.
48: So wait, you're telling me carcinization is coming for cars now, too?
Donuts or it didn't happen!
Point 27: Are these the actual divorce rates? I ask this because reported divorce rates are often gross rates per thousand people. Such published rates are often used to back the claim that divorce rates have dropped significantly in the past few four or five decades, but they are based on divorces per thousand people and not divorces per thousand married people. The marriage rate has also declined, and people have to be married before they can be divorced. So, do nerdy men have a lower divorce rate because they are so uxurious or because they are less likely to marry at all?
Nerdy men don't have a lower divorce rate; "Gaming Managers" and "Gaming Service Workers" are the nerdiest jobs you can have, with the highest divorce rates.
Gaming in this sense is casinos not computer games
When I am king, the use of the term "gaming" to mean "gambling" shall be outlawed. It was dumb, and misleading when it was adopted, and it's dumber and more misleading now.
You've got my vote for king!
Wait, it doesn't work that way...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy
Worked fine for the HRE and the actually Roman Roman kings
I think 'gaming' was introduced by the gambling industry as a marketing ploy. You're not going to Vegas to gamble you're just going to play some games!
Yes, it's clearly euphemistic in intent.
"You're not going to Vegas to gamble you're just going to play some games!"
This should be read in a George Carlin voice.
“Gentlemen, you can’t gamble in here, this is the gaming room!”
I'm not sure about that. In "Pride and Prejudice", when it's revealed that Mr. Wickham has large gambling debts, "Jane heard them with horror. 'A gamester!' she cried."
Where is that information coming from? The link has no context, it's just the list as shown.
The Vlogbrothers video I watched about #1 (the sulphur emissions from boats) pointed out that you can get similar cloud-seeding effects by misting seawater into the air, no sulphur required. Mandating that container ships offset their fuel burning by running a cloud-seeding machine seems totally reasonable, though it'd probably make the chemtrails people go even *more* insane.
One thing about cooling effects from cloud seeding is that they don’t last very long, while co2-caused heating does last for a long time. So if you try to offset heating with cooling, you have to continue the cooling effect much longer than the heating, or else accidentally get a “termination shock” where the heating is still in place but the cooling has terminated.
Isn't a cooling termination shock what they are proposing just happened with the discontinuation of sulfur fuels?
Yes, but the issue with geoengineering approaches in general but *especially* ones that require constant upkeep is that they create moral hazard by masking the magnitude of the underlying emissions problems. There's value per se in the cooler temperatures but this is also a prevention >>>> cure situation.
This is less true of certain approaches like iron seeding because those are mediated by reducing CO2 levels directly.
Remind me why that's an "issue"?
mor·al haz·ard
lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences, e.g. by insurance.
So us being protected from the consequences of emissions is bad, because it means we can worry less about emissions? But surely in a world where we are indeed protected from the consequences of emissions, we should rightfully worry less about them, no?
The idea is that this is a temporary buffer rather than actual "fix," which risks taken advantage of in a way that exacerbates rather than reduces the expense of later mitigatory measures.
To quote our host (quoting a proverb in a different context): "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
Basically this Simpsons episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9yruQM1ggc
In a world where we are *indeed* protected, we should rightfully worry less. But in a world where the protection relies on continued active participation in a expensive process, it's hard to say we are "indeed" protected.
A metaphor for you: albedo management is naloxone for fossil fuel addicts.
In this metaphor, enhanced weathering of olivine minerals would be a blood transfusion and involuntary rehab.
That's not the central meaning of termination shock and understates its effect.
See, unlike outgoing longwave, incoming shortwave at Earth's surface is entangled with something other than temperature - it's used for photosynthesis, which reduces CO2 levels. So solar geoengineering actually increases CO2 levels and partially counteracts itself, and if you stop such a program you will have a transient temperature rise - not just above "don't emit the CO2 in the first place", but above the trajectory if you'd emitted the same amount of CO2 and not attempted to mitigate it!
Isn't that a good thing? If the cloud seeding causes some unexpected problem, you can just turn it off.
That's a good feature - but it's a bad feature in something that is meant to mitigate a slow and long-lasting process.
In my experience, people are way more afraid of geoengineering destroying the world than they are of climate change. Making GE *less* easily controllable will not help its PR problem.
That's true. But this isn't about a PR problem - this is about a *real* problem with trying to use aerosols to mitigate warming. Things like algae seeding that lead to drawdown of CO2 can avoid that problem.
You go, Kenny!
No it doesn't seem reasonable. No geo-engineering seems reasonable given how crap the underlying scientific understanding of climate actually is. Geo-engineering should be globally banned and attempts should result in severe sanctions, sort of like anti nuclear proliferation.
I think the "remove CO2 from the atmosphere with scrubbers" people are okay. That's quite bounded; unless you somehow wind up removing more CO2 than we ever put in there in the first place - which seems unlikely given you can measure that and stop - you're by definition staying within known territory.
Blocking shortwave is a really dumb idea and retaliation against unilateral action on this is plausibly worthwhile. Catastrophe from somebody doing this and it going horribly wrong is actually on my list of plausible GCRs this century, although it's not really plausible to get X out of it*.
*Aerosols don't last long enough without maintenance, and you're not going to be maintaining shit if you're dead from your own project and/or people killing you for your crimes. Impact winter would require a Chicxulub+-sized asteroid or comet (I don't think another Chicxulub would do it; the preppers are really hard to kill that way) redirected into the planet; that's not subtle due to scale of expense and the ease of tracking spacecraft, is obviously a Bad Idea, and is reversible (if at potentially greater expense), so people would arrest you for terrorism before you could do it and/or redirect the object away from Earth again. Deploying a megametre-scale solar shade at L1 would do it, but this is if anything even less subtle (people will notice if you block out the Sun) and can be reversed quite cheaply and even unilaterally by blowing up the shade with a missile, so while this could plausibly cause GCR (a couple of days with no sun is still utterly terrible) it's very obvious that this wouldn't reach X. On the other side of the coin, releasing sufficient quantities of fluorinated gases could fry everyone and plausibly even hit runaway, but while this isn't necessarily *physically* obvious until too late (if you stockpile them rather than releasing gradually), the expense is so extreme that it'd be unreachable and/or noticed (it's a bit hard to find people willing to spend many trillions of dollars on deliberately killing literally everyone including themselves with no plausible benefit).
I'd be against scrubbing too. You're right that it should be safe if you only take levels back to, say, the 1960s, but in practice if such a huge scrubbing industry were to be established it'd want to stick around and go even lower, and the "CO2=evil world destroying gas" meme is so strong and our leaders so stupid, they certainly wouldn't just wrap the whole thing up if that level were reached. They come up with reasons to keep going.
Also it's inevitably going to be paid for via ruinous taxation, as nobody actually needs sequestered CO2 except the oil industry. As the world is doing OK as is, there doesn't seem to be any reason to spend resources on this.
Still, that's an argument for not doing it. The argument for retaliation against those who do doesn't apply to scrubbing. And you could argue overshoot would be self correcting. If the west insisted on scrubbing lots of CO2 then China and India would just take that as a justification for burning more fuels, negating the effects.
There are people doing that, right now, as charities. I'm saying that if more people start doing that voluntarily, we don't have much to worry about - we don't have *anything* to worry about until and unless they exceed the rate of emissions from other sectors of the world economy. And there's a natural taper-off there where people just stop funding it personally once they figure it's low enough. I agree that the demand from certain quarters that world temperatures be yanked back by large amounts rather than merely arrested, at extreme expense, that's probably not +EV.
On the other hand, this dickhead advocating unilateral deliberate global dimming... well, let's just say I wouldn't be shedding too many tears were his whole "international waters" scheme to attract pirates.
If Scrubbing Overreach becomes a problem, people can just burn more stuff.
"We need to burn more coal to save the environment" has real Futurama energy
Hang on, doesn’t the results of the sulphur ban in container boats prove the exact opposite - that it reduces temperature la without any other effect. So unban that. Maybe make the container ships output even more sulphur.
I would assume that all claims about things like that impacting the climate are at worst just wrong or at best, unprovable. So I don't accept it proves anything.
Hmm 🤔. It’s maybe a bit too early to tell if it was the sulphur ban that caused the very very real heat spike in Europe, but it’s 33C a few days in October in Spain after a long hot summer. Berlin is at 27C. Paris will be 29C on Oct 1. Frosty days used to be common in mid autumn in Northern Europe. Now it’s an extended summer.
If it turns out that the reduction in sulphur emissions is the cause of the heat spike, then reversing the ban will surely be safe geo-engineering. It’s just going back to where we were in 2022.
Probably increasing sulphur emissions beyond that won’t have any other consequences than reducing global temperatures because there were these other consequences it would have been evident pre 2023.
We therefore have a natural experiment then and can do away with the overly cautious approach
Where I live in Europe this year wasn't that great, actually it was really quite poor over the summer. It was much hotter a couple of years ago. I don't think it makes sense to try and assign casual blame for specific bits of weather in specific places to changes in shipping regulations, everything concretely known about climate says it's just not very sensitive to anything humans do, and the vagaries of weather certainly can't be explained. If we could simulate the effect of shipping we'd have better than 10 forecasts but we don't.
Don't forget, there's a whole lotta malfeasance in "The Global Temperature." As Anthony Watts discovered.
Might want to investigate this before you get too far ahead of your skis. Perhaps google 'days over 100 in MyTown'. I just did this, and it turns out the maximum year for days over 100 in Sacramento is 1988. And for Sacramento, the number of days over 100 in 2023 is tied with 1888.
I think it depends on what altitude the sulfur particles are lofted to. It *will*, however, increase acid rain.
The problem with the sulphur wasn't it heating up the atmosphere, it was the acid rain. So even if ending it caused a heat spike doesn't mean it's safe to unban it if the heat spike can be dealt with other ways or is transitory or is less bad than the acid rain.
It's proven it reduces temperature (note, however, that it also increases CO2 via suppressing photosynthesis, so the spike afterward is potentially more than it'd have been if the sulphurous smoke never existed). "Without any other effect" would only be proven if you'd investigated all other effects and found nothing.
We've accidentally proven that that amount of sulphurous smoke won't end the world*, but that doesn't mean that if you 10x it or 100x it as this maniac wants, that also won't end the world.
*I'm not seeing literal X happening from aerosols gone wrong; even total crop failure for half a decade wouldn't kill *everyone* (you'd still have some yields from pastoralism, not to mention all the preppers), and I don't think things will go that wrong. But "crop yields are -20% for a few years" is more plausible and a lot of people would die if that happened.
We are already doing geo-engineering. Humans life requires geo-engineering. The only question is what types of geo-engineering should we be doing or not doing.
I don't think that's true by the definition of geo-engineering normally used. It doesn't mean literally any change to the surrounding environment nor accidental changes.
32 only has a link to Eigenrobot's twitter, not to the actual experience of the priest.
There's just obviously a cat right above the train in the left image?
#32, the actual link is missing.
Thanks, fixed.
#30: Real median household income is survey-based and if I'm reading it correctly, is based on money income, which specifically excludes health benefits. Since an increasing share of our consumption bundle is health care (I think it's up to 18% of GDP now), a measure that backs out most of health care is always likely to far understate economic growth over time.
Another reason might be the household measure - if households get smaller over time, that will also drag this down.
A quick google indicates that this measure has lagged GDP/capita by quite a bit over time, and has freqently been negative y/y.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=mYUr
I'd be interested if someone knows this better but these would be my first guesses at what causes the discrepancy with GDP growth.
Well also over time numbers of adults and numbers of working adults per household has been falling. Lots more single adult households which hurts household incomes.
The increasing cost of health care doesn’t really benefit anybody but the medical industrial complex. People aren’t richer if they have to pay more to achieve the same outcome, even if that payment is partly paid by their employer.
Presumably the health care is also improving. So that is a net benefit. OTOH, if it's spent adapting to bacteria/viruses that are adapting to it, it's sort of a red queen's race.
23. The India–Bharat thing is nonsense. It's like saying the US is considering renaming itself "'Murica."
Or if Japan insisted on every language referring to the country as Nippon.
Or if the Indians insisted that we refer to Bombay as Mumbai, and Calcutta as Kolkata, Bangalore as Bengaluru... wait, hang on...
The only one I find difficult is Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram.
But the story I got for Madras to Chennai made a lot of sense. There was a river, and the town on the north side was Madras and the town on the south side was Chennai. When the British came, they set up on the north side (IIRC, it was more defensible and less populated), so they called the whole thing Madras. Most of the Indian population was on the south side, and most of the growth was on the south side. After the British left, people kept the concept of both sides being the same city, but since most of them lived in the Chennai side, they changed the overall name to that.
They should have followed the example of two other towns separated by a river, Buda and Pest :-)
Madrachennai has a certain ring to it.
Probably sounds a bit too close to "madrachod" (motherfucker) to catch on.
It's difficult for everyone, which is why it's still usually called Trivandrum.
I'm still expecting this in the future. It seems the native extension of the whole "indigenous peoples" attitude. (Is 'Nippon' or 'Nihon' more common in use?)
Japanese don't count as "indigenous peoples", they're too rich.
Or because we generally don't call a widespread culture indigenous, the way we don't in India, England, or Tunisia.
*Agrees in Ainu*
I believe the Japanese also largely aren't indigenous to their islands.
They are ultimately mostly descendants from migrants from Korea, but every human group on Earth is ultimately descended from people who migrated from somewhere else.
No one is indigenous anywhere except a small valley in Ethiopia or whatever.
Yeah, but given the standard indigenous/colonizer narrative, the Japanese definitely fit better on the colonizer side, especially their settlement of Hokkaido.
You could probably expand that a bit. What about the children of Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis crossbreeding. Would they be the indigenous group for that particular area?
Nihon is more common, but you do hear Nippon used. They're both legitimate readings of the kanji in question.
In my experience, the Japanese have zero issue with their country being referred to as Japan. In fact, they do it themselves in a number of instances. As just one example, the Japanese rail network is called JR, literally "Japan Railway". Maybe that will change in the future, but the Japanese tend to have pretty positive views of the West in general, so I kind of doubt it. They don't have the history of colonialism that India does that would make their name an issue.
When I lived there, around 1960, both terms were in use, but in different contexts. I think I saw Nihon more in the name of products for sale, and Nipon more on maps. I was living on Kyushu, so it may be, or have been, regional.
(OTOH, I only spoke English, so my sample size was pretty small.)
They understand the value of the 'Japan' brand. I understand India still has colonial resentments, but changing to 'Bharat' would destroy a lot of brand value for India and it makes it sound more like some poor third world country rather than a mysterious, exotic cultural destination.
Indian Reddit pointed out that the Constitution of India acknowledges the significance of the Hindi endonym in its first (non-preamble) sentence. "(1) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States..." -- the point being made by the Indian redditors in question (who pretty uniformly viewed this as a symbolic grift meant to distract from more substantive issues) was that "Bharat" was never bereft of official recognition.
"India" isn't even a British word. The name goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word from the Indus River ("sindhu").
Belarus has lobbied french journalists/officials to call it "Bélarus" instead of the former "Biélorussie" since 1991. They were successful in Switzerland and Canada, but not in France itself.
Same with Burma/Myanmar (where the UK still says Burma, and the US officially says Burma but Americans tend to say Myanmar).
Or if Turkey insisted the world call it 'Türkiye'...
Wrong analogy. You're already referring to the country in question as "日本" by using "Japan". "भारत" is, I'd assume, not etymologically related to "India" in any way.
Yeah, "India is discussing" is highly misleading and assumes a much more even and varied debate than is true. My understanding is that more accurate preface might be "Hindi nationalists have proposed" (most accurate would be "A Hindi nationalist generated controversy by referring to India as Bharat and now people are talking about it")
Do you mean that it's unlikely that India will make the request or that it's nonsensical for countries to request a certain name?
If it's the latter, I've seen some use of Turkey's new name since they made a request last year.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states/turkiye
The former. I consider the evidence proffered in support of the claim that India is considering a name-change exceedingly weak.
So many things I'd like to comment on. Thank you for putting this together, always a fun read.
On #27. As a woman married to a woman, whose social circle includes heaps of nerdy men because of my work (including my dear brother, who luckily is married)
I'm only generalizing here because you have as well, which makes it fair...
The reason women don't date geeky men is not because they think they're incels, I seriously don't know a single woman that thinks to that extreme. They don't date "geeks/nerds" what you're calling "nice guys" because they're often introverted and lack social skills. This makes ✨ everything ✨ a lot harder.
The burden of maintain a healthy, genuine, friendship with them is often on my shoulders, as the woman. That gets very tiring over time.
Another reason for women not dating nerdy men is that nerdy social circles (especially in college and recent-graduate age brackets) tend to be on the smaller side, fairly insular (i.e. low churn of newcomers and casual participants, so you're usually just seeing the same faces), and mostly male. If you're a woman in such a circle looking to date men, you've got plenty of choices (combined with the "introverted and lack social skills" issue you brought up, I've heard the situation described as "the odds are good but the goods are odd"). Conversely, if you're a man in such a circle looking to date women and you're mainly looking inside the social circle, there are going to be very few (if any) women in the circle who are single and looking to date men at any given time, and the odds are against you being one of their top choices.
Hehe in an Electrical and Computer Engineering department in the late 90s there was a group of guys who were all close and only one girl in the group who was also the "Alpha" guys younger sister. Made for some interesting dynamics and we all flirted with and chased her a bit, and I think she dated two different guys from the circle eventually.
"nerdy social circles (especially in college and recent-graduate age brackets) tend to be on the smaller side, fairly insular (i.e. low churn of newcomers and casual participants, so you're usually just seeing the same faces)"
Seems like a good indicator for not divorcing easily!
I am willing to except that as an explanation of the phenomenon (in a generalized sense). But why don’t more people communicate it this way? (instead of reaching for calling the geeky men losers or creeps or incels)
Kristian, I literally made it a point to specify that I haven't yet heard a single woman call anyone an incel. Yet you choose to use this language to further this self-pitty narrative and defer responsibility from your ownl growth.
In a beautifully ironic and tragic way - this is exactly why they don't "explain the phenomenon"
They do, you're just choosing not to hear it.
I meant in general discussion and on the internet. And I didn’t mean only women. Surely this whole debate was about calling people incels and analyzing whether the “nice guys” are really creeps and so forth.
You should not make presumptions about “my personal growth” or what I choose to hear, etc. You don’t know me.
Of course I don't know you 😅
And I also can't know what you "mean" to say. I can only base my judgment on what you actually say and the context of the conversation.
The thread was about women not wanting to date "nice guys" because they think of them as incels.
I will have happily addressed the internet at large had you framed it as such.
If we go back to track the causality, we will notice that the narrative surrounding the "Nice Guys" used to be somewhat neutral to supportive. Yes there were some "nerds are icky" sentiments here an there but media used to feature "nice guy getting the girl" trope a lot, uncritically framing it as a happy ending for both the girl and the guy.
And then the incel cultural identity crystalized, produced pushback, toxoplazma of rage dynamics happened and now this whole memetic battle is cached in our minds and in the realms of internet and the narrative shifted accordingly.
I reckon the 'nice guy gets the girl' trope played a significant causal role here. Lots of young guys took that message to heart, failed to notice that (in the more plausible versions of the story) the 'nice guy' was also very attractive in ways orthogonal to niceness, and were left bewildered and searching for explanations when things didn't work out that way for them.
Hmm. Are you saying that the media was too nice to the nice guys and should've shown them their place in the hierarchy instead? Basically like it's doing now when a phrase "nice guy" became an euphemism of an "manipulative asshole who pretends to be nice" and it's hardly possible to talk about actual nice guys at all? I don't think I can agree with that.
I think that's very true, and I wonder what, if anything, the female equivalent would be. Maybe something about women in their mid-to-late 30s easily having children? Middle-aged divorcees easily finding a new and better husband?
Also worth noting that the nice guy was usually rejected by the girl at first, but kept persevering until the realised how nice he was and fell in love with him. Repeat this message to unattractive, socially-awkward men enough for them to internalise it, and you can easily end up with behaviour that comes across as creepy, entitled, and manipulative.
A lot of truth to this. Not getting any is one thing, but becoming known as the cohort that whinges in an entitled way about not getting any (in addition to other disadvantages) couldn't have helped the nerds in the attractiveness department. Cf stoicism, resilience, masculine virtues.
In my observation, stoicism is not perceived as a virtue, though not whining is.
<i>And then the incel cultural identity crystalized, produced pushback, toxoplazma of rage dynamics happened and now this whole memetic battle is cached in our minds and in the realms of internet and the narrative shifted accordingly.</i>
Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I thought it was the other way round -- incel cultural identity crystalised as a result of constantly being called a bunch of raging misogynists, rather than vice versa.
I think you’ve got the order somewhat backwards. Scott wrote about this phenomenon (online feminists heaping abuse, appearance related insults, and accusations of “sexual entitlement / rape culture enabling” on romantically unsuccessful nerdy guys) in Radicalizing the Romanceless (2014) and Untitled (2015). The term “incel” doesn’t move the needle at all on Google Trends until 2016, and really took of in the 17-19 timeframe.
Incel culture was, temporally, a reaction to online feminists demonizing the “nice guy” rather than a cause of it.
If we are trying to reconstruct the history, there needs to be somewhere a place for pick-up artists. They publicly rejected the "nice guy gets the girl" narrative, and tried to figure out the true mechanism. They believed that *any* guy can become popular, if he changes this *behavior*.
The formerly unsuccessful nerds turned seduction into a (pseudo)science, shared their theories, did field experiments, and compared the results. There was a spirit of: "if *I* could do it, then so can you". Being conventionally unattractive became a costly signal that they figured out something that worked, and it was neither pretty face nor spending money.
And they were publicly attacked, because their theories removed women from the pedestal and turned them into mere human beings. Everyone knows that men's thinking is often guided by their genitals, and that manipulating them is trivial if you know what to do. But it is misogynistic to say that the same is true also about women.
(Then the usual "geeks, mops, sociopaths" evolution happened. Too many stupid guys willing to pay to anyone who promised to help them get laid. Naturally extraverted men with social skills and good looks willing to take their money and tell them some bullshit. Instead of cooperation and free exchange of ideas, the new gurus mostly wrote blogs about how everyone else sucks. Then I stopped paying attention.)
Then there were guys who also rejected the traditional narrative, but found the alternative humiliating, so they decided to "go their own way". To live their lives without trying to "get the girl"; just doing their own hobbies and generally trying to find meaning in something else. The mainstream found this misogynistic, too. You may be a loser, but you are not allowed to opt out of the game.
And I think only afterwards came the incels -- the ones who also rejected the old narrative, but were unable to either adapt and work harder or give up; they just endlessly whined about how a 1 millimeter difference in the bone structure made them forever lonely. (An old-style pick-up artist would just laugh at that and proudly decide to become famous as the guy with the worst bone structure ever who bangs the hottest models. A MGTOW would just shrug, and start reading an interesting book or something.) At least this is how their outgroup describes them; and the question is, how much should I trust the outgroup to be fair.
To summarize this all: If you follow the traditional narrative and lose, you get a lot of hate. If you find your own narrative and win, you get a lot of hate. If you refuse to play the game, you get a lot of hate. And if you complain about how this all is unfair and sucks, you get a lot of hate. I guess the only way to avoid the hate is to win, and then pretend that it happened because you followed the traditional narrative.
"I haven't yet heard a single woman call anyone an incel. "
How many dozens of examples would you like? I'm having trouble coming up with any other interpretation of your words (especially coupled with your scolding about self-pity and irresponsibility) that isn't denial or at least minimizing.
I think the implication is "in real life", rather than online where everyone is either [maligned extreme identity A] or [maligned extreme anti-A identity B]
Typical minding here, but there's a fairly sharp division between topics discussed in (my) real life and online. I'm pretty sure I've never heard either "gamergate" or "effective altruism" without an electronic intermediary. Then again, I don't go to meetups, and I stay as far away as possible from online/fandoms about activities I enjoy.
"Yet you choose to use this language to further this self-pitty narrative and defer responsibility from your ownl growth."
Do you have any actionable advice to achieve such "growth?"
Please consider that your experiences may not be universal. You have presumably never been murdered, but do you go around pointing out that fact to minimize the suffering of people who lost loved ones to murder by suggesting that they're "furthering this self-pity narrative and deferring responsibility from their own growth"?
> I am willing to except that as an explanation of the phenomenon (in a generalized sense). But why don’t more people communicate it this way? (instead of reaching for calling the geeky men losers or creeps or incels)
What's the difference supposed to be?
One girl thinks "I would die before dating you because you are a creep".
A second girl thinks "I would die before dating you because you don't have social skills".
There's not even a euphemism going on there. Those two girls are saying the same thing and referring to the same phenomenon. What do you think a creep is?
You appear to be channeling the old Basic Instructions strip that remarked "what other people think of as my personality is often just my vocabulary".
To my ear, 'creep' is moralised, with connotations of dubious-at-best moral character and a real chance that the person is dangerous to be around. 'Person with bad social skills' is not a description anyone wants, but it doesn't imply they're bad in a moral sense. Others feel justified in being nasty to/about 'creeps', rather than just politely avoiding them as they would a 'person with bad social skills'.
What Vaclav said.
A creep is someone whom people avoid because they seem dubious or perverted in some sense (often vague). Most such people also have poor social skills but not necessarily.
There’s a way people attribute good qualities to people they like and bad qualities to people they dislike. But having bad social skills doesn’t make someone bad.
But having bad social skills does make someone a person that others dislike, which means they are perceived as bad regardless of whether they are bad.
The girl thinking that you are a creep is basing that on how she sees you, not on all the things you do that she never learns about.
But there are more and less justifiable reasons for thinking someone is a creep.
Being boring can be a manifestation of poor social skills, but it doesn’t make one a creep.
The converse of this is when people say, “oh I can’t believe so and so turned out to be a criminal, he was such pleasant company.”
If someone is obsessively interested in sexually violent serial killers and is known to decorate his home with clownish animatronics and stuffed dead animals, people would think he’s a creep even if he has perfect social skills.
Although, actually I don’t like the term “social skills” that much, because it is vague and too broad.
I think that depends on the social group. Teddy Roosevelt was quite popular. That I don't like his attitudes doesn't make him "a creep", just someone I wouldn't want to associate with. Lots of other people disagreed with me. And I do like that he pushed conservation, event though I'm skeptical about his reasons.
Perhaps "creep" isn't an objective category, but a statement about a relationship judgement from one person/group onto another person/group. (I think that should be "onto" rather than "into".)
Right. Russell Brand is coming in for the "creep" treatment but shyness and lack of communicative skills vis-a-vis women is not his problem.
He has always seemed to me like something the cat dragged in but apparently many people even in established media thought he was some kind of ideal.
In the way "creep" and "social skills" are actually used, the first is suggesting malevolence, not just cluelessness.
I've been in-tribe with both sides of this argument, and I strongly feel that each side is simply using the same words to talk about different people and different situations, while failing to recognize this because they're both referring to the thing that is highly relevant to their personal experiences and therefore must obviously be the thing we're all referring to.
Good point.
I think the following explains some of what's going on here:
Many young nerdy guys don't really understand what is (generally) attractive to (most) women. (This is partly caused by society pushing messages that it thinks men in general need to hear, but which it does not expect to be taken completely literally -- or at least not as the full story.) They see that some nasty guys are romantically desired/sexually successful in ways they can only dream of, despite the fact that they think of themselves as, and in many cases genuinely are, much nicer people. They complain about this with varying degrees of bitterness; some are quite reasonable about it, some are reasonable modulo a fairly strong dose of adolescent intensity+naivete, and some are raging misogynists.
A simple, honest response to the non-horrible ones would be "yes, romantic/sexual attraction is unfair; women are often attracted to traits that are orthogonal to, or in some cases even anticorrelated with, niceness; before you turn this into a gender war, please think for five seconds about how male->female attraction tends to work; are the most-desired women consistently the nicest and most deserving?"
But some people instead respond by doubling down on the idea that sexual success *is* a measure of your worth as a human, lumping all the frustrated 'nice guys' together as a bunch of potentially predatory misogynists, and telling them that their lack of sexual success is evidence that they are not only pathetic but morally reprehensible (and therefore fair game for bullying). The people doing this might not be a very large group, but they are 'loud' (in terms of how much their message gets amplified and spread, and in terms of how emotionally salient it is) and they sometimes seem to be at least tacitly supported by mainstream feminists (who perhaps have the genuinely nasty 'nice' guys in mind and don't quite realise the extent of the collateral damage). For guys who are already feeling pretty down and vulnerable, this can be genuinely damaging and very alienating.
I could not have put it better myself.
> are the most-desired women consistently the nicest[?]
Why do you think there is so much competition among females over who is seen to be nicer than who?
I'd prefer not to do a rhetorical question-answer thing; can you state your point more directly? e.g. are you suggesting that the most-desired women *are* consistently the nicest, or something less strong than that?
Women compete to be seen as nice the way men compete to be seen as strong. It is readily apparent that there has been a powerful selection effect in the past. The selection effect is still plainly visible right now, though its strength is less obvious: letting the mask of niceness slip in public has very severe consequences to female desirability today.
It doesn't mean anything that the most-desired women aren't consistently the nicest except that desirability is not a one-dimensional phenomenon. The most-desired women are consistently very nice, and when women are seen not to be nice, other people lower their opinion of those women.
Thanks. I don't disagree that 'niceness' is a generally-desired quality in women, but I do disagree that 'the most-desired women are consistently very nice'. And I disagree especially strongly with the version(s) of this claim that I think would be required to undercut my point in the quoted passage, which was merely that niceness is far from sufficient to make a man attractive to women *or* a woman attractive to men.
(There's some ambiguity in the way we're talking about 'desirability' here, and I think that for both genders the balance of desired traits varies depending on whether it's a question of pure sexual attraction or long-term relationship prospects. But to me it seems clear that physical attractiveness is weighted somewhere between quite heavily and overwhelmingly heavily by most straight guys in almost all sexual and romantic contexts. And, just as a big tough hot guy will get lots of credit for showing a hint of kindness, a beautiful woman has to do much less to be considered 'nice' than a woman who isn't beautiful.)
Uh, there is not that much competition among women to see who can be the nicest. The real competition is who can be the most attractive. Some of that is about being "nice," but most of it is about being literally conventionally attractive (healthy hair/skin/body weight/grooming presentation/etc).
Which was the reason for the pointed question about how much straight men actively desire "niceness," which is to say, not nearly as much as they desire physical beauty.
Believe me, if nerdy young men cared about mere niceness enough to avoid holding out for the physical embodiment of their waifus, they'd have way more partners.
FWIW, my major selection fault is that I wanted a truly smart (but not quite brilliant) woman. I.e. what I saw as my intellectual equal. It took me a long time to realize that this was not the correct target. What I needed was someone who could balance my weaknesses. I feel quite foolish that it took me so long. Together we were a lot more effective, because we reinforced each others weaknesses, and lent our strengths to each other.
Because they are terrified by other women ostrasizing them. I know women who have suffered it: it can be terrible. Pretty women have also expressed to me that they need to work hard to avoid this.
Useful satire on the issue: https://www.theonion.com/female-friends-spend-raucous-night-validating-the-livin-1819573315
There's a more serious treatment of something similar here: https://www.piratewires.com/p/women-online-spaces-relationship-advice
Hm. I've of course heard the phrase "toxic masculinity", and have sometimes wondered what the gender-flipped version would be: what is "toxic femininity"? This feels like a good start.
Richard Hanania would tell you that the most prominent current example of toxic femininity is called "wokeness".
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace
More generally, a major element of toxic femininity is acting as if "that can't be true, because if it were true, I would feel bad" makes any sense.
This is perfect:
> Women are also more likely to signal that they’re kind, agreeable, and concerned about others. When they gossip, or transmit negative information about each other, they often couch it in terms of concern. For instance, instead of calling Veronica a drunk slut, a woman is more likely to say, “I’m worried Veronica’s alcohol consumption is getting out of control. I’m worried about her sexual health.”
It's amusing that you accuse males of "turning this into a gender war", when many (most?) of feminists are avowed conflict theorists, and much of their dogma is about how males are evil, collectively and individually, to the extent that they don't renounce their "toxic masculinity". That those unfortunate clueless nerds are consistently being bullshitted about what women find attractive isn't a tragic oversight, it's a deliberate campaign of misinformation based on wrong premises in service of incoherent goals.
I feel like you're zeroing in on one phrase and ignoring the rest of what I said. The 'gender war' thing was about how *some* guys jump from the frustration/disappointment of realising that just showing up and being nice isn't enough to make you attractive, and that some transparently awful guys get lots of female attention, straight to something like 'fuck women, they're shallow and hypocritical!', instead of stopping and thinking and realising that we're all shallow in that sense, and most of us are hypocrites if all that takes is failing to be completely open and accurate about what drives our preferences.
You'll see from the final paragraph of my original comment that I'm very critical of some people on the 'feminist' side. 'Feminist' covers a huge swathe of people, though, and I think like most groups they're mostly pretty normal, in good ways and bad. There are certainly more charitable interpretations available than 'deliberate campaign of misinformation'; even if you think it's bad and dumb and hits the wrong targets, it's pretty understandable that they'd want to try to do some social engineering to get men (collectively) to treat women (collectively) better.
I agree that your description of that dynamic is basically correct. My point is that the gender war has been there all along, it negatively impacts both men and women, some of them disproportionately, and some of thus impacted may unproductively lash out in response. But such reactions don't mean that they 'started it'.
I also agree that most people are basically good and have good intentions, including those who identify as feminist. But if they act according to a misguided ideology, they can do much harm, and if they instead believe themselves to be making things better, then so much the worse for everyone!
In general, my perspective on progressive movements is that they correctly determine that there are problems, but their theoretic apparatus is woefully inadequate to even correctly diagnose them, never mind developing solutions. Sadly, there are no competitive alternatives, in no small part because progressives are very good at crushing dissent. And so things are going to get worse, before (if ever?) they'll get better.
He never said that anyone "started it".
100% this, especially the part how attacking nice guys is just doubling down on the just-world fallacy. "A nice guy will get the girl." "If you didn't get the girl, that proves that you were never genuinely nice!"
Rather than: "Being nice is a desirable human quality, but it is different from being attractive. The attractive guy will get the girl, and then another girl, and then another girl. He may or may not be nice. If he is nice, the girls will appreciate it. If he is not nice, the girls will complain about it, but they will fuck him anyway." Obvious in hindsight, but you need to overcome a *lot* of social programming first.
I am no Buddha, so whatever emotion you mention, I probably have some of it. Were you suggesting that it clouds my judgment on this topic?
Do you think that, as a factual statement, attractive guys who are low on niceness (not literal psychopaths, just the ordinary selfish kind) do *not* in fact get laid more than the unattractive nice guys?
Hey, I didn't say you were wrong. Actually, it was much worse (but I don't want to post details publicly). But that's not the part I regret most. Sometimes you lose; that's life.
The thing I am most angry about is all the other opportunity that I missed, because I was distracted by cultural memes that made me stupid. At some moment I was exposed to competing memes and realized my mistakes, but I am never going to get that lost time back.
Now I have a wife and two kids, and we mostly live in harmony, while other people's marriages around us are falling apart. So, all things considered, I am doing much better than I expected.
But when I think about the past, I sometimes feel a desire to punch someone, except there is no one specific to punch. The brainwashing was so decentralized. (To be fair, there were also some clues, but I was too autistic to notice them.)
Also, there is a concern on a meta level -- reasoning by analogy, I wonder what other things am I possibly missing now, that I will similarly regret in ten or twenty years?
Being nice is a part of being attractive. It isn't the only part, or the most important part. Looks, finances, personality, habits, culture, and religion all play a role in attractiveness.
In an internet of extreme aggression and lack of understanding, it is incredibly refreshing to hear something like this.
Bookmarked to link people to when needed.
You have written an worthwhile essay in three short paragraphs.
Indeed, when I was young I often tended to conflate "X is not sexually attracted to me" and "X thinks I'm a bad person"... until I noticed that I myself was not sexually attracted to certain people who I still didn't think were bad people.
I hate to say, but some nerds are also not that nice, or want a specific girl but don't notice other ones flirting with them. A poetic illustration of this, overheard in the cafeteria on campus: two guys complaining about how unattractive campus girls were, while being very very nerdy far from paragons of suave masculinity themselves. Like, what? Very out of touch.
Some of that may be sour grapes - 'I don't care if they're not reciprocating my interest, they're all ugly anyway!'
"I hate to say, but some nerds are also not that nice, or want a specific girl but don't notice other ones flirting with them."
Definitely true! I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.
I absolutely hate and despise both sides of this "debate" more than I can possibly describe. Beyond all the other vulgar and hedonistic and sexist and "all men/women are identical" collectivistic crap, what tops it all is both groups' absolute refusal to apply their own claimed principles with the tiniest pretence of consistency.
On the one hand you have the "incels" who condemn women for dating despicable men instead of nice ones. Quite apart from the fact that by "women" they mean a particular subset of women (and by referring to women as a whole they not only outrageously insult every woman who doesn't do that and would never want to, but ALSO let the women who do off the hook, letting them pretend this is a feature of women generally instead of a problem with them personally, much like how men who cheat or trawl bars for sex with strangers would love to pretend they're just "being men" rather than being personally disgusting people)...they don't even apply this condemnation to themselves (at least that I've ever seen). They have no shame about being attracted to the very same horrible, shallow and very much not nice women that they complain about. I would LOVE to live in a society where both violent aggressive "players" and selfish vapid "I do whatever the fuck I want" feminists are totally ostracised from the company of all decent people and could never hope to get the attraction of any member of the opposite sex other than their fellow lowlife animals. And the incels could be trying to create such a society by, most importantly, committing to reserving their own sexual interest for the nice, compassionate women who deserve it (regardless of their physical attractiveness). If they would do that, making the effort to get their own lusts under control and choose their partners by moral and intellectual human qualities instead of shallow animalistic ones, they would deserve respect as a movement and have the right to demand women do the same. As it is, by condemning only other people's shallowness while maintaining their own right to be as shallow and hedonistic as they want, they're some of the most despicable people in society.
And then you have the "feminists" who insist on their unconditional "right" to date whoever they want and sleep with whoever they want. Okay, while a person who conciously and shamelessly asserts their right to be completely selfish and not care the slightest bit about other people's feelings is obviously a truly disgusting person, there's certainly a decent argument that society should give people the right to be as disgusting and horrible as they want without violently coercing anyone else. But guess what? No one is in any way infringing your rights. If you are allowed to sleep with whoever you want, then other people are allowed to criticise you for it! And that's what you're complaining about: other people (like the incel movement) exercising THEIR right to disapprove of your behaviour and call you nasty names. That's not an infringement of your rights, that's not coercing you in any way; freedom doesn't mean freedom from criticism. I mean, yes, their condemnations are hypocritical and hateful and sexist and unfair, but so what? You just told me nobody is entitled to anyone else's consideration! That nobody has any obligations to care about others' feelings, and has an unconditional right to be as selfish, as vulgar, and as indifferent to the effects of their behaviour on others as they want. So what can you possibly complain about?
There are two choices. We could have a society where people are expected to balance their own desires with concern for other people's feelings, and avoid behaviour (sexual, verbal or otherwise) that significantly hurts others. Or we could have a society where everyone can do whatever they want (that isn't violent) and no one has any obligation to care about anyone else. I would prefer the first but am open to the necessity of the second. Only one thing is not negotiable: that whatever principles you espouse, you apply them even, and in fact ESPECIALLY, when they don't benefit you personally. To those who don't do that, who proudly assert that they have no obligation to care about others but others do have an obligation to care about them, all I can say is: you are scum. You are filth. And you are literally everything that is wrong with the world.
There can be something more specific than lacking social skills. My own experience when I was in my early 20s is that for years I didn't learn how to show sexual interest to a woman, so instead I'd end up with lots of platonic friendships. Which I did genuinely enjoy, so general social skills were being learned and practiced, just not the romantic ones. There was also a clear element of pride, in the sense of "I'm not going to change myself just for the sake of pursuing romantic interest".
Extroverts frequently fail to model or understand introverts, leading to the mistake being made here. Which is understandable, but leads to a lot of harm done to introverts by well-intentioned extroverts.
Introverts are not hermits. We value social connection, support, and community. We have a need for deep connections (of which "healthy, genuine friendships" are an important type), just like extroverts do.
The thing that sets us apart is that we find casual interactions exhausting rather than energizing. This leads us to take what can be described as a "depth-first" approach to relationship building, focused on developing a few high-quality relationships first, then expanding out. In contrast, many extroverts take a "breadth-first" approach, acquiring a wide variety of basic relationships, then building up a few of them.
Introverts (whether they're nerds/geeks or not) can and do put in great effort to maintain their relationships. In fact, they have a higher risk of over-committing to those relationships (since forming new ones is more expensive for them). The idea that introverts as a group place a disproportionate burden on their partners is both false and harmful.
It is incorrect to conflate nerds and nice guys. Scott should know better.
Nice guy syndrome refers to men who have been over-socialised to try to please everyone around them all the time. There are several risk factors including the usual childhood abuse and prolonged bullying, clingy/dependent mothers and emotionally distant, absent, or demanding fathers. Comedy is a fairly common coping mechanism - the class clown probably had nice guy syndrome. Other nice guys just do what they are told and never develop a personality.
Dial this back a few notches and you have the Hollywood nice guy. "A regular guy, with a regular job, who just wants to provide for his family".
Nerds, on the other hand, are stereotypically on the spectrum and oblivious to others' social demands. Unpredictable, unhygenic, unpleasant, uncomprehending, uncommunicative, not nice.
Regarding Jaynes' book: Your interpretation of his theory, that theory of mind varies broadly between cultures so that some cultures considered supernatural or divine what we think of as just part of the human mind, resembles substantially the thesis of "The Greeks and the Irrational", by classicist Eric Dodds, which makes a similar though less broad (&, I think, better justified) argument focusing specifically on Ancient Greece. (That book can be found at https://archive.org/details/E.R.DoddsTheGreeksAndTheIrrational ; the relevant parts are chapter 1, which argues that the ancient Greeks thought unusual impulses & some strong emotions were sent by the gods; chapter 3, regarding the ancient Greek view of "madness" (μανίᾱ) & its relation to oracles & poetic inspiration; chapter 4, regarding dreams & their interpretation; & appendix 1, which argues that the ancient Dionysiac dancing rituals involved a culture-bound mental illness similar to the medieval dancing mania.) Dodds' book was written about 20 years before Jaynes published his "Origin of Consciousness", & parts of Jaynes' argument, as you summarize it, seem probably to have been based on it.
Thank you for that link
#25: Regarding lead removal, Cremieux shows that the adverse effects of lead on IQ are greatly exaggerated due to confounding here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead. Accordingly, he notes: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1699120079403647294 that the actual effectiveness of that charity would be lower.
Can somebody help an acronym deficient reader out: what does HBD mean here?
I assume it’s not Human Beta Defensins or Hemoglobin D (HbD).
Thanks. For the benefit of other readers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Biodiversity_Institute
The reason people are being cagey is that it's a banned topic on this blog, though I'm sure your explaining the acronym doesn't qualify!
My impression of the post is more along the lines of:
> Lead is bad. Early studies tried to quantify exactly how bad, and they found a lot of really noisy data about lead versus IQ specifically. (Lead poisoning is still bad for health in a lot of other ways.) Now that lead has been largely removed from our lives, subsequent research into lead vs. IQ has now become hopelessly confounded with other correlates of lower IQ, such as socioeconomic status. It is now trivially easy for a researcher to "show" that a tiny amount of lead is "responsible" for a huge decrease in IQ. Simply study a poor neighborhood that is slightly more polluted than the surrounding area - and blame it all on lead. So we really have no idea exactly how bad lead is for IQ specifically. Some X amount of lead exposure could cause a drop of 10 IQ points - or it could be some tiny amount like 0.5 points. Nobody really knows.
Lead poisoning is very bad, but it's also pretty much been solved everywhere outside of a few specific areas. The "low lead exposure" control groups of the 70s and 80s had an order of magnitude higher lead exposure than the "high lead exposure" experimental groups of today. Continuing lead abatement efforts are still a good thing where we find it - but at some point you need to declare victory and move on to other issues.
Okay so...you didn't actually read it and just started firing from the hip because you disagreed with a person's perceived ideology? Pathetic.
Excellent summary!
This is a total non-argument. Why bother commenting if you're not going to actually engage with what Cremieux is saying or at least post some studies that confirm your claims?
I'll also add this: the sibling FE estimate is a null in this study (https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1687659511899684864) and there's publication bias in the lead-crime literature (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667).
re: 39. For some reason the behavior genetic evidence wasn't reviewed. It's not consistent with the GFP being a thing as far as I can tell!
21. Looking for even the pretense of objectivity in political "science" journal is like looking for a snowball in hell.
It's like they don't even care that they come across as completely biased. I think they must feel proud of it!
Of course they are. Most people believe that they should be biased against evil, and are overconfident in their ability to discern it.
What do you mean by 'biased'?
Do you mean they are fabricating or altering their data in order to change their results to something favorable to their side?
Or just that they *have* a side, and don't conceal that fact?
Because honestly, I think we're just talking about the latter here, and I think that state of affairs is good actually.
It would be kind of insane to expect that people who publish in political science journals have no personal opinions or affiliations regarding politics. Most people do, and you'd expect teh people who care enough about politics to devote their life to studying it to be even more so.
So given that they're going to be like normal people in terms of having political opinions and affiliations, I'd rather they signal them honestly and openly, than carefully conceal and obfuscate them with fakey language choices and caveats.
As long as they don't make unsupported empirical claims, they're doing science in my book.
I have to disagree with your claim that they're doing science. The loaded language makes it clear that they are activists first, and scientists second.
I don't believe that word choice alone can prove anything of the sort.
Nor do I think activists can't do science, or whether or not someone is an activist has anything to do with the quality of their science.
If there's a problem with their methodology, that can be pointed out.
Sounds like you have a trapped prior...
That political science is an oxymoron? Sure.
Is it a trapped prior, or merely not much evidence to cause the existing prior to be reevaluated?
To be fair, sociology is a lot more difficult than quantum theory or thermodynamics, because people will intentionally try to produce results that (in some way) benefit them. So replication is nearly impossible.
How does it sound like this in any way? It would sound like that if he was discussing evidence showing PolSci to NOT be biased and he was dismissing it. In reality, he's discussing an example of research which trivially demonstrates a clear ideological slant. Are you sure you understand what 'trapped priors' are?
43. The post didn't age particularly well. It uncritically repeated the claim that Alexander Acosta claimed he was told to "leave [Epstein] alone." The source of this claim is Vicky Ward, a known liar.* It also repeats uncritically the claim against Alan Dershowitz, who sued his accuser and forced her to say "I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz."
Ultimately, I see nothing about the Epstein case that needs explanation beyond "rich man paid some teenage girls for sex." That's the simplest explanation and the simplest explanation is probably correct. No Mossad, no CIA, no blackmail scheme necessary.
*https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/why-didnt-vanity-fair-break-the-jeffrey-epstein-story
What’s the UK law regarding something getting decriminalized after the fact? Some places have a law that any actions are to be judged according to the mildest law between the time the action was committed and today, is UK among such countries?
> Ultimately, I see nothing about the Epstein case that needs explanation beyond "rich man paid some teenage girls for sex." That's the simplest explanation and the simplest explanation is probably correct.
That's fine, but how did he get so well-connected? Why were the likes of Bill Clinton flying around on his private plane?
It was my understanding that Epstein was involved with a lot of charities. If that is true, that's a perfectly adequate explanation for how he met Bill Gates.
Right, but why was he involved in charities? You don't get into charity out of the goodness of your heart, you do it to make connections.
Still doesn't seem weird? He was a financial advisor for rich people, he wanted to make connections with rich people, probably he also just liked hanging out with cool famous people.
From what I've read, he does not appear to have been a normal "financial advisor for rich people". He was connected first and the mechanism for turning that into cash was by billing himself as a financial advisor, a financial advisor who got absurd sweetheart deals on the finances he managed.
The thing that needs explaining is where his money came from, since he didn't seem to do any financial trading.
Right. We still don't know this, and I don't understand why some journalist never bothered to figure it out. Were journalists scared away from this story by someone?
There’s literally hundreds of stories not being written here.
>The thing that needs explaining is where his money came from
Does it? The wikipedia article on it has a whole section on his early career, saying he started out as an options trader and Bear Stearns and quickly moving over to become a financial advisor for their wealthy clients specializing in tax mitigation strategies. Reading between the lines (especially the bit about him being pushed out of Bear Stearns over unspecified SEC rule violations and starting his own form after), I suspect he was doing a bunch of stuff in his financial advisor roles that were legal grey areas at best and may have shaded over into stuff like money laundering and outright tax evasion. It also sounds like he was at least peripherally (and quite possibly centrally) involved in the Towers Financial ponzi scheme, although he managed to escape prosecution or liability for his role in it.
All in all, it sounds like the sort of career path that could plausibly lead to someone becoming very rich and getting a ton of connections with other very-to-extremely rich people.
Specifically, he had connections to Les Wexner of Victoria's Secret who seems to have given him lots of property for free.
I was puzzled by the CIA angle, since it seemed to undermine the basic point. Instead of "he used a network of sex slaves to entrap people for his personal benefit, and one of them had him killed", now it's "he used a network of sex slaves to entrap people for the US government's benefit, and the US government definitely wants you to believe that he killed himself". Somehow this theory doesn't strike me as less suspicious.
Epstein had a substantial ahem media library at his NYC home (a seven story townhouse gifted to him by Leslie Wexner, owner of Victoria's Secret). Said library was removed by FBI agents towards the end and has not been seen again.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/10/jeffrey-epstein-inside-billionaires-new-york-mansion/1691137001/
https://kaus.substack.com/p/where-are-the-epstein-tapes
It seems to me overwhelmingly likely that it was an intelligence operation. Whether the CIA was behind it all is another question.
Hmm. Ghislane is in jail for sex trafficking and underage sex. And trafficking seems like a fairly big thing for a connected socialite to be involved with.
Einstein was being investigated for the same thing. There are multiple cases against the Epstein estate (by Jane Does who are scared to give their names for whatever reasons).
Epstein was clearly given a very light sentence in the first trial, the Florida AG at the time says he was told to bring one sample case for reasons of national security, and even then the judge gave the lightest sentence for statutory rape possible, there wasn’t even an imprisonment.
Thems the facts. Make up your own conspiracies to join the dots.
"Hmm. Ghislane is in jail for sex trafficking and underage sex. And trafficking seems like a fairly big thing for a connected socialite to be involved with."
Sex trafficking is just the current year word for prostitution. It wasn't proven in court that she "trafficked" women for anything other than Epstein and Maxwell.
"Epstein was clearly given a very light sentence in the first trial, the Florida AG at the time says he was told to bring one sample case for reasons of national security"
No, Vicky Ward claimed that someone told her that the Florida AG said that. See the New Yorker link for how much credence you should give to her.
Trafficking is not prostitution, which can be voluntary. It’s trafficking people who are forced into prostitution. everybody here was underage and couldn’t consent.
“ It wasn't proven in court that she "trafficked" women for anything other than Epstein and Maxwell.”
She trafficked underage children. No need for scare quotes.
I didn’t say anything else about anybody who visited the island. I have my suspicions but they may not have participated, although it is hard to believe they didn’t know something. The island was colloquially called Lolita island after all.
I don’t care about vicky ward. Presumably she is being monstered by the kinds of people who want to bury this.
There are many other underaged victims of sex trafficking here. Even the 4 in the Maxwell case were too scared to give their names, as were the many witnesses in the original trial, one of whom fled to Australia.
> Trafficking is not prostitution, which can be voluntary. It’s trafficking people who are forced into prostitution.
Note that you are disagreeing with the legal usage, in which trafficking and prostitution are synonymous and the most frequent kind of trafficking prosecution is prosecuting a single woman for trafficking herself.
"It’s trafficking people who are forced into prostitution. everybody here was underage and couldn’t consent."
Already retreating to the motte I see.
Wikipedia equates sex trafficking with pimping, which makes more sense.
> 4: How is crypto going for sex workers? Sex workers have limited and erratic access to normal financial infrastructure due to a combination of government harassment and corporate reputation concerns. Crypto seemed like a solution. But the increasing centralization of crypto under eg exchanges has given it limited value; the same parties who strongarmed banks into dropping sex workers can strongarm crypto exchanges, or close offramps. I’m hopeful that in ten years crypto will have gotten its act together enough to be actually decentralized in a way that avoids this failure mode.
The more fundamental issue: Crypto's UX sucks. It's very much a 'get good scrub' culture which in turn makes it hard for the average person to get into. Central exchanges will let you sign up with one click and guide you through the process. But then it's centralized. This is widely acknowledged as a problem in the industry but it doesn't seem to be attracting much funding or excitement. And the big exchanges won't fund it.
As for sex workers specifically: Anyone working on such projects is taking a large reputational hit and are subject to potential legal risk. The traditional way that you make up for this by paying for them more. That's what drugs does. But neither prostitution nor porn is hugely profitable or a large industry. So you have limited revenues and a bunch of people who need high pay to make up for the risks. You have a few companies at this intersection: OnlyFans, Mindgeek, etc. But only a few. And they're constantly tempted to increase revenues by becoming respectable like OF tried.
I recall Robin Hanson saying (in a post I can't find now) that crypto developers are really into technical problems, and disinterested in the practical stuff that gets a business customers/users.
Accurate, in my experience.
I will point out that, even in the age of instant online communication, if I want to convert my Pounds Sterling into American Dollars, it is vastly easier and more reliable to go to a professional currency exchange rather than to find an American willing to buy my pounds for their dollars. This seems like its always going to be true, and while I could imagine some decentralised solution this seems to be one of the main reasons centralised exchanges exist for crypto.
Definitely - but a big part of why at least some people want crypto is to have a decentralized currency. If it centralizes for the same reasons as other currency exchanges is a negative for them, because then you're dealing with the other problems of crypto and haven't really gotten the primary benefit.
Sure. But peer to peer transactions should be the meat and potatoes of a wallet.
But if you want to convert your £ to Argentine Pesos, it's better not to go to a 'legitimate' bureau de change.
The way you lay it out here implies a business case for bridging the gap between "git gud scrub" and consumers who want decentralized crypto. Back in the 1990s, Phil Zimmerman's PGP kit filled that gap for encrypted email - you still needed to be comfortable around a Unix prompt, but that was all you needed, and it wasn't THAT high of a bar. So the market has a demand for a Phil Zimmerman for currency. Or maybe a Phil+NDgT partnership.
It's worth examining why such a thing hasn't manifested yet (or if it has but hasn't attained mass awareness). Is the market too small even now, for probability to have produced a candidate? Is there too much incentive for a Phil to just make a central exchange and just turn into a Bankman-Fried? Are too few people able to run their own "neighborhood exchange"? Something else?
I'd argue it's three things:
1. The market was hugely distorted by the amount of money dumped into it over the past few years. Why bother with nitty gritty when you can just fundraise a bazillion dollars?
2. The incentives of developers run towards making new or better currencies and driving adoption or things like exchanges. These are easier to monetize and have bigger transaction volumes due to the way crypto works. This leads to...
3. A wallet-like experience that's not really a wallet subsidized by those other, more profitable businesses.
Now, this is fine in isolation. But it does mean that real peer to peer transactions are not a really common ability despite it being key to crypto's promise. The few areas where large scale adoption has been driven it works pretty well. But these are usually not as fantastically profitable as FTX.
Crypto UX is fine. Social recovery wallets like Loopring and Argent exist, and converting crypto to cash infrastructure exists all over the world and is quite efficient. It's really unfortunate, that you can't e.g. "buy a house" with crypto, (same as with cash), but one would be fine covering their day to day expenses I guess
Hard disagree that it's fine or efficient. The truth is that setting up a bank account or Coinbase account, in terms of UX, is much better than self-serve options right now. As is withdrawing money, spending it, etc. You can see this in the degree to which even people newly entering the financial system prefer traditional methods. Now, some of that is momentum. But if crypto really were the superior experience you'd see more 18 year olds or immigrants and less tech-y types as a proportion.
> 8: Related: AI art has gone from copying humans to inventing entirely new styles.
Is this new? One of the first things I did to toy around with some of the AI image generators was make a utility that generated QR codes in images. You'd have a picture of like a city or a woman with a blotchy dress or something but if you put it in front of a camera it'd detect the QR code. It was just a toy but it seems these are the same thing: the ability to embed coded information into a generated image. In this case a spiral or some text. Which, I'll point out, is not entirely new.
I want to do this with a real building, or a real woman in a real dress. It doesn't look like a QR code but when you take a photo of it then you go straight to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
There was a fad for steganography when the US government was (publicly) trying to keep cryptography research from getting out to foreign countries.
I guess this sort of thing would be easier now. On the other hand, detecting it is likely easier too.
Yes this is exactly the same tech, controlnet, that was used a while ago to make a bunch of cool QR gode gen AI images (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/controlnet_for_qr_code/?rdt=42996). I'm not sure why it suddenly went viral now, except that spirals and hidden text are more accessible than qr codes.
Yep. The internet is a silly place.
#8 What is the "hidden-yet-obvious text" in the bottom photograph?
I agree it's hard to see. It says New York.
It wasn’t obvious to me til I saw it, but now it’s so immediately obvious every time I take another look, I can’t believe it didn’t see it at first glance.
For some reason, it gets easier to see if you squint until the image blurs, or if you make the picture smaller.
> 13: Unfortunately related: Anti-Ukraine-war website Grayzone says that GoFundMe has frozen their account (ie stolen all their money). They’ve been doing this for years for anti-woke sites, but anti-war sites feels like an escalation. I continue to think crypto is an important safety valve against this increasingly-used tool of control.
Not familiar with the specifics of this case. But this kind of thing is one of the reasons I support government bank accounts in addition to things like crypto. Basically something like mobile postal banking. If you have a legal right to a bank account that can transact from the government then that is probably more secure than a private institution that can kick you out for whatever reason it pleases. And if there's explicit state control this often makes it easier to combat. You could, for example, pass a law about the right to transact through these accounts and then there'd be an outcry if you were denied it.
Yes, it's not infinitely secure. But it's part of a wider strategy of introducing more ways to transact: crypto and private banking and your government account and so on. It raises the coordination costs of kicking someone out of the system entirely. And, as an added bonus, would greatly simplify the distribution of things like welfare.
>>> If you have a legal right to a bank account that can transact from the government then that is probably more secure than a private institution that can kick you out for whatever reason it pleases.
In a world where Operation Chokepoint is a real thing, "legal right" is doing a lot of work.
Yes, it is. But what's easier: figuring out a way to completely restrain the bureaucracy under a president who wants to use its power to do something nefarious (left or right) or getting Congress to pass a law and then suing under it?
How about we don't give the government that power in the first place, that way we don't have to figure out (again) how to take those rights back?
The government already has the power. If you want to fight to eliminate it or restrain it go ahead. But I like my chances of reviving this kind of banking better than yours of completely dismantling the administrative state. And it doesn't really give the government that much power: the account would exist but you could simply choose not to use it.
I am not arguing for completely disrupting the administrative state, I just see far more historical abuse by government actors than by competing corporations. And no, the government doesn't have the power to shut down private accounts now, but they surely would for the government accounts.
I think the point is it is easier to get the government to change its position than a corporation, which can be both a blessing and a curse, but it is nice to have the option.
> 23: India is discussing changing its name to “Bharat” (the Hindi word for India) on some level. Unconfirmed rumors about Pakistan being interested in claiming the name “India” for itself. No word yet on who would take “Pakistan”, but I hear Macedonia is looking for a new name.
Reminder to the voters of Macedonia that one of their options was literally "Better Greece." Still disappointed they didn't choose that. Macedonia mostly got in because it was a center of Russian aligned hacking, misinformation, and intelligence activity and letting it in let NATO clear them out. So they did almost literally troll their way into NATO. Might as well ride that wave.
I still don't understand why, under the same logic, the Republic of Ireland isn't forced to change its name to Republic of Southern Ireland. Ireland is, after all, an island, which is only partially covered by the Republic of Ireland.
Ireland isn't in NATO.
Ireland did have a name dispute with the UK.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Irish_state
Similarly, should the country of Singapore change its name to "Singapore and its minor outlying islands"? E.g. Sentosa isn't on the island of Singapore.
The Republic of Ireland is actually Irish though. North Macedonia isn't Macedonian, it's Bulgarian.
Except I have yet to meet a Macedonian that agree.
I don't doubt it. That was just my opinion as someone who has no ties or interests in any of the three countries (Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria).
Isn't a huge amount of Greece genetically Bulgarian? I seem to remember that phase of history.
Hell, the Turks are largely genetically Greeks (or vice versa) at this point.
After a few generations genetics really don't matter to culture, the vast majority don't even know their own genetic origins so how could it...
Prior to two decades ago genetic testing was a rare thing, even at the academic level.
Indeed which is why it is so weird to be like “those aren’t Greeks those are Bulgarians”.
On the one hand, the genetic differences between the southern balkan states and Turkey are so minutely small that this is a fair statement in this narrow domain. But on the other hand there is a real sense in which the genetic changes in Greece led to (or at least accompanied) a dilution of 'Greek' culture to become 'Orthodox Balko-Slavic' culture. Cf. Barbarian Slavs vs Ancient Greeks (genetically and culturally very different, pan-Indo-European pantheons excepting) to Modern southern Slavs and modern Greeks (genetically and culturally pretty similar).
And in general the idea that genetics doesn't matter to culture after a few generations is barmy! See: Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean/Northern Europe/Middle East, Indian diaspora in Caribbean, South Africa, East Africa etc. Whether you're a believer of HBD/innate traits or whatever or just think genetics is like a ID number, genetics similarity IS correlated with cultural similarity because a genetic gap is a family gap, a kinship gap. Just seemed like an odd statement to throw in!
I would argue miscegenation is driven by cultural factors rather than genetic ones.
And, yes, the greater the genetic gap between a host and transplant population the longer integration takes (all else equal).
"THE NATION
ARTICLE 1
The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible, and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.
ARTICLE 2
It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish Nation. That is also the entitlement of all persons otherwise qualified in accordance with law to be citizens of Ireland. Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.
ARTICLE 3
1 It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island. Until then, the laws enacted by the Parliament established by this Constitution shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws enacted by the Parliament that existed immediately before the coming into operation of this Constitution.
2 Institutions with executive powers and functions that are shared between those jurisdictions may be established by their respective responsible authorities for stated purposes and may exercise powers and functions in respect of all or any part of the island."
Don't make me link to the Wolfe Tones!
The Republic of Ireland doesn’t exist as a country, although it suffices as a description of the country which is called Ireland. Any confusion with the island of the same name is coincidental.
Of course it exists as a country. It's not the country's official name, but so what? Outside of specialised diplomatic and legal contexts, people very rarely use the exact legal name for a country. We say "I'm going to Germany on holiday", not "I'm going to the Bundesrepublik Deutschland."
I'm reasonably sure at least 90% of New Zealanders don't know the official name: the Realm of New Zealand. I've never encountered it anywhere outside of Wikipedia.
> 29: Re…lated? Blogger/model Aella is offering aella.ai, an “AI girlfriend” based on her, as the flagship product of a company (?) that will help influencers create AI chatbot girlfriends based on themselves. I haven’t seen a lot of uptake yet - my trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)
Paid LLM texting? This is like six year old technology. The state of the art includes images, voice, and video. Mostly offered as a combination where there's a real person but, when they're not online, you can get your fix by talking to an interactive double. (There are a few purely fictional ones but they mostly seem to be less successful. Unless they have a human behind them.) Though it's mostly used for more prosaic tasks than blogging/modeling.
LLM texting or messaging is so simple people trade free bots of book characters. I've done it as a hobbyist for things like conversation practice or to work as a note taker.
I think Aella's version also has images. I don't know about voice or video.
I'd be interested to know if it does or not. It's not advertised anywhere. (I assumed it doesn't because it's not mentioned anywhere on site or in the TOS.) But if there is something more advanced I'd love to know more about the tech side.
On the whole it does look a bit primitive. You pay through a direct stripe link.
I tried Aella.ai with great interest. At first there was sort of banter and interaction (she's a cat person, I'm a dog person), but pretty soon it degenerated into a spam message asking me to pay $5 for a sexy pic. I mean – that was the only response to anything I typed. It was disappointing actually. I felt dirty and violated, and not in a good way. I think it needs a lot of work not to just be porn spam.
Oh, and also there are a couple of voice clips before the spam barrage.
It seems really self-defeating for influencers to try to create AI copies of themselves to pull away their own viewers.
I don't really agree; the person who spends all their time hanging out with an imitation of you is still a fan of you.
But they're not hanging out in the locales you get your money and fame from, they're doing their own thing with their toy.
They are the locale you get your money and fame from. (Really. I don't mean to say that they're in the locale. They are the locale. They like you, and that's why you're famous. If you try to sell them something, they will be receptive to that.)
I'm not sure that I'm following what you're trying to say?
But the toy is simply another thing that they pay you money for. I guess your point is that it would be less money than in the counterfactual, but this doesn't seem obvious.
If I ever get rich (ask me in 5 years) there's a ton of social science I want to do. Totally outside of academia or IRB review boards, no interest in formal publishing, just to learn shit with legit sample sizes and post on substack.
Are you an AI? You sound like the one in Ex Machina whose only ambition is to study human behaviour at traffic interchanges.
Bro same, there is so much research that I would love to be able to pay some grad student to do for me lol
>AI boyfriends
Fwiw this is already a thing in china, to the extent there are people who make a living pretending to be the AI boyfriend (although in this case it's less AI and more 'scripted dating game' but the distance isn't far)
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012605
Wow.
To quote a woman who appears to be a VC at A16Z:
"The biggest secret about "AI girlfriends"?
The majority of users are female (at least for chat-based products). It mimics fan fiction, where ~80% of readers are women.
This does not hold true for image generation, where the ratio flips..."
src: https://twitter.com/venturetwins/status/1701713941968060468
Zvi has also made note of this https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-30-dalle-3-and-gpt-35-instruct
On Epstein, I always thought the conspiracy was supposed to be that someone killed him by getting the suicide-watch interrupted and allowing him to commit suicide.
That would be the minimum viable version of the conspiracy, but it's not even the standard version.
The refrain is "Epstein didn't kill himself", not "Epstein killed himself but why didn't they stop him??
The former is pithier.
That's pretty close to my pet theory (that the guards and others responsible for stopping him from killing himself weren't very motivated to do a good job of it), but isn't the standard conspiracy theory as I've heard it. The usual theory seems to be that some people who he had criminal dirt on (the Clintons are the suspects I've heard mentioned most often) had him killed to stop him from implicating them and passed it off as a suicide.
For the Clintons in particular, the theories often seem to tie in with the earlier conspiracy theories around the 1993 suicide of long-time Clinton associate Vince Foster, which alleged that he was murdered to prevent him from testifying against the Clintons in the Whitewater investigation.
This seems much harder to defend: the argument for why it's credible he was murdered is "people rarely commit suicide but there were a lot of rich people motivated to kill him". If you assume he wanted to commit suicide, the prior on his success is no longer especially low (I don't expect suicide watch prison guards to be especially competent), so it's now a low-prior theory again.
People in jail commit suicide at very high rates, particularly white men:
https://www.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh241/files/archives/pressreleases/2021/nearly-fifth-state-and-federal-prisons-had-least-one-suicide-2019#:~:text=Suicides%20accounted%20for%2030%25%20of,least%20one%20suicide%20in%202019.
"During the aggregated period of 2000–19, the average suicide rate in local jails was highest among persons who were white (86 suicides per 100,000 white inmates)"
For not imprisoned white males its "only" in the mid 20s per 100k: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7108a7.htm
So still very unlikely.
The base rate for targeted assassinations is much lower. And if you're going to fall back on the obvious motive for assassination, pray consider that there's an obvious motive for suicide at work here as well.
That's high in the sense of being high compared to background rates, but still a low prior. Probably high enough for vanilla suicide to be the likeliest explanation here though.
Certainly possible, but implies that *all* of the people involved were also really bad at their jobs. Cameras not working, no one doing any checks despite that literally being their job, etc.
I guess for a conspiracy you could also combine it with a "paid to look the other way" while someone told Epstein he needed to kill himself or something worse would happen to him. I'm not sure how different that is from the theory that someone literally murdered him.
> *all* of the people involved were also really bad at their jobs.
Plausible. Who would make them be good at it? The prisoners have no choice and the voters largely don't care.
Presumably their bosses, who in turn would care because of lawsuits and/or some kind of professional backlash (lost job, prestige, whatever).
You're right that there are too many layers between the general public (who were upset at this outcome but by and large were powerless to change it) and those implementing policy for us to count on them all being good at their jobs.
I understand this place had not had a successful suicide in 21 years. Whether attempts were just that rare or they were good at preventing it, no idea. I could definitely see them getting lax in all that time as a plausible alternative to something intentional and nefarious.
If the plaintiff has the resources to sue, that is.
Were the corrections officers part of a union?
The guards were accused of felony charges - filing in timesheets while not doing the work. But as far as I can see, on that day only.
I have some bad news for you on the conditions inside federal prisons
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/123-us-federal-prisons-maintenance-inspector-general/story?id=99601450
"The 123 federal prisons in the United States need roughly $2 billion worth of "maintenance" and most are "aging and deteriorating," according to a DOJ inspector general report.
In three prisons, the conditions are so bad they had to be closed -- including the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan, which held Jeffrey Epstein prior to his death.
"We're seeing crumbling prisons," DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz told Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. "We're seeing buildings that we go into that have actually holes in the ceilings in multiple places, leading to damages to kitchens, to doctor's offices to gymnasiums. And they're not being fixed.""
Here's what Ken White (AKA Popehat) posted after Epstein's death. (CW: descriptions of death by negligence, malice)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/
You know, I always assumed that the murder theory was just a meme ready version of, "someone came by and let Epstein know that the guards were out to lunch and if he didn't want to face the consequences now was the best chance he was going to get." Murder just seems so redundant for a man in his position, i.e., on suicide watch (!). This theory has the distinct advantage that the available evidence about cameras and guards isn't evidence of a cover-up but direct evidence of the crime.
But I readily admit I'm low-information about the event. It just doesn't seem very relevant to me.
Same. Also, "Don't try to hard to interfere if he looks like a suicide risk" is a message I can totally imagine being transmitted in a law enforcement institution. And if it's initiated by somebody who knew he was depressed, it's pretty effective.
The reason I am (very mildly and with only intellectual interest) in favor of the conspiracy version, is that I find this kind of message to be completely plausible, while having the subject of an extremely famous criminal case without a proper suicide watch quite a bit less plausible.
So, Epstein's lawyer was part of the conspiracy?
https://nypost.com/2019/08/12/jeffrey-epstein-was-taken-off-suicide-watch-at-his-lawyers-request/
Plausible, I suppose, but if so he didn't even try to cover his tracks. The simpler explanation is that Epstein's lawyer demanded that he be taken off suicide watch because Epstein asked to be taken off suicide watch.
And for those of you who don't know, "suicide watch" as normally implemented in US prisons is judicially-sanctioned torture by prolonged sleep deprivation. It isn't a matter of the guards being tasked to e.g. watch the prisoner through a low-light closed-circuit TV; it's the guards basically walking up to the cell and saying "hey, wake up, prove to us you aren't dead", every fifteen minutes, 24/7/forever, and every wake-up being logged to make sure the prisoner doesn't manage to sneak in any useful level of sleep. Any decent non-monstrous human being would want approximately every prisoner taken off that sort of suicide watch after no more than a day or two, even if they don't want the prisoners to commit suicide. The people who want prisoners on suicide watch are mostly prison administrators who don't want to deal with the paperwork of a suicide and don't care who gets hurt in the process.
This time, the decent human beings prevailed. And then nobody bothered to give Jeffrey Epstein any good reason to want to remain alive, because duh.
If the anti-cavity mouth bacteria outcompetes other bacteria, then shouldn’t it be spreading as the original people kiss others?
No; your normal bacteria cling to your teeth pretty tightly to prevent competition, so to apply the new bacteria, you have to brush very hard with a special solution to clear a niche for them. If you don't do that, they won't spread.
It's possible that in exactly the right situation, where someone had just taken antibiotics and been to the dentist for a cleaning and *then* got kissed, the bacterium could spread, but it should be pretty rare.
Also, the new bacterium will probably spread mother -> child, since newborns have no competing mouth bacteria.
The Epstein item has three links in it, all identical. I suspect you meant to link to three different postings, since I see it's a sequence (oh, THAT'S where that comes from [j/k]) and he backs off his position in later entries.
To the actual postings: although I'm not inclined to believe Epstein was murdered, I notice that the LW writer puts a lot of weight on "The Attorney General of the US himself inspected the tapes", without noting what anyone who's heard a little bit of conspiracy theorizing about it knows, which is that the AG at the time was Bill Barr, and Bill Barr's father, Donald, has this in his WP entry:
---
He was headmaster of the Dalton School from 1964 to 1974. During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time. In 1973, Barr published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. It has been noted that the plot of the novel anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his convicted and prosecuted accomplice(the list of politicians and celebrities involved in sex crimes remains hidden), Ghislaine Maxwell.
---
Like I say, I'm not inclined to buy the murder thing, but it's a really obvious counterpoint, and yeah, kind of a coincidence.
OK, I read further and he eventually does address this, at least...although he doesn't mention that Bill Barr was the AG whose personal examination of the jailhouse tapes he drew our attention to in his first posting.
I'm pretty sure the link is just split up because there's an italicized word in the middle so the formatting is screwy.
The US attorney's office of the SDNY also reviewed the footage and said in an indictment, under oath, that nobody entered the tier where Epstein was. So SDNY would also have to be in on it, and this wouldn't make much sense because they're the ones who brought charges to begin with.
Like I say, I'm not disagreeing with the result, just pointing out a weird omission in the argument.
"During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time."
There used to be a lot less credentialism in the past.
#34: I thought Scott Aaronson’s takedown of IIT was pretty convincing: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 and https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1823
I have to say that I don't know much about academic fraud or the Data Colada guys, but I saw a reference to this today and frankly it, itself, pattern-matches to me to "junk science that might have been right a couple of times but now is just spraying accusations everywhere", like that business with arson investigations that (it is said) are garbage and have convicted people of murder for no good reason, or "bite analysis", or "blood spatter analysis", all of which have good cases against them.
I recommend reading their analysis - it seems pretty damning to me. Harvard also says they've done a separation investigation and decided to suspend Gino.
#13:
>website Grayzone says that GoFundMe has frozen their account (ie stolen all their money)
This implies that GoFundMe kept the money, which the linked source does not claim.
Indeed, this site: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/9/1/gofundme-freezes-donations-for-the-grayzone-sparking-free-speech-debate states:
>The donations were ultimately refunded to the donors after The Grayzone moved the fundraising campaign to a rival crowding funding platform.
Thank you. I had seen the opposite claim, but if Al Jazeera says it was refunded then I believe them.
On the automatic AI video translation thing… question for my fellow commenters and I’ll need one magic wand in the ask.
Let’s say there’s a very simple table somewhere that translates buzz words back into a format you agree with. I’ll use an older example that will hopefully have less emotional. One of the linked pairs in this table is PATRIOT ACT: GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE BILL. You can imagine other examples. Anytime someone has named something for an effect you disagree with just imagine there is an entry in this table that has the “spin machine” name and your more direct, blunt name.
Would you pay for a service that scrubbed the news for you so that as you watched videos they were filtered to replace the “spin machine” name with the “direct/blunt” name. So that when a politician or a news reporter tried to say “Patriot Act” you would instead hear “Government Surveillance” bill.
This hypothetical service would also let you know when this kind of filtering event was occurring but in this way whenever you were browsing random videos the names other than the ones you would prefer, which again are just magically in a table somewhere, are swapped out.
I might like that. I translate "reform" as "change". And "confiscate" as "steal".
The idea would be that the magic table is shared and maintained by others you trust.
Alternatively, how many people would pay for a service that filtered news to replace direct names with names from their preferred spin machine?
We all already do that to an extent by creating filter bubbles.
But this can expand your bubble to encompass the whole world! Everything will be safe and non-triggering and validating. Or, if you prefer, you can have some things translated such that the only realistic response would be "DIE NAZI SCUM!!!"...
I would agree if this wasn’t largely happening today in its own. Stick it in a system with rules, give people something to win or lose by being convincing and I think it’s a better system.
We'd finally be free from "utilize"
This doesn't sound useful at all. Firstly because it's totally dependent on the service's judgement for what counts as "emotive language" or not. Is the Patriot Act a "government surveillance bill" or a "national security bill"? Or perhaps an "anti-terrorism bill"? None of these are emotive per se, but your choice will emphasize one feature of the bill at the cost of another another.
Secondly, if I read about something online I want to know the actual name for it, because if I talk to other people about how the Government Surveillance Act violates our rights they're going to give me a blank stare.
Think of what the default state is. People you don’t know and don’t trust subtly manipulate language to message something you don’t want. Has that been useful to the people who do that?
At least for text, you can do this for free in your web browser for any arbitrary strings.
Yep that too.
"Patriot Act" refers to a specific law, though. There are many more bills that could be referred to as Government Surveillance Bill. One of the risks might be to lead the listener to believe, for instance, that the Patriot Act expiring would mean all government surveillance being ended.
Of course Republicans who say the election was stolen believe it. No one has ever taken serious and genuine steps to disabuse them of the claim. It was all a cacophony of "big lie" " most secure election ever" from the beginning. Which are just stupid and obviously not true. There are videos of people dumping ballots into boxes. Those are ILLEGAL votes, even if not FRAUDULENT, and once they were commingled the election should have been invalidated. The Atlanta counting situation is similar. The BOP is on the state to demonstrate its counting procedures are legitimate, not the other way around, you can't just do suspicious things and then shout "no proof" and convince anyone.
Where are these videos?
Of which?
People dumping (presumably false) ballots into boxes.
I don't really swim in those circles but I have totally seen several actual surveillance videos of "runners' showing up at ballot collect stations with dozens of ballots and dumping them in. I would presume some of them are people brining in mail in ballots from nursing homes or other places like that, but it does create a giant security hole. And it is certainly done in a suspicious way (they always seemed to be waiting until no one was around or late at night). At the same time I don't have much reason to think this sort of think isn't happening both ways, but the error bars on the election wildly outstrip the actual margin. I would bet huge money on that.
Oooh, Scott, do a Big Lie post!
This is obviously a salaciously done video, but the moajor hosting companies seem to have purged/delisted most of the longer raw videos, but it is illustrative of what people would have been exposed to on youtube, twitter, etc right after the election.
https://rumble.com/vtlq96-explosive-new-surveillance-footage-of-ballot-drop-boxes.html
Thanks. I didn't see any videos of the same person putting in more than 3-4 ballots at a time, which seems like someone bringing the ballots in for their family (which is legal). It looks like Georgia investigated some of the people filmed in that video and found that was what they were doing (see https://www.factcheck.org/2022/06/evidence-gaps-in-2000-mules/ )
I was going to write about 21 in a original comment, but here might a better place. But as a preamble I have to say that this demand for sources is non-symmetrically difficult to provide for. Attempts to discuss the issue with anything but abject dismissal has made videos purporting to show fraud of any kind extremely difficult to find. For example, claims of voter fraud was banned on Youtube. For years. Specifically for the United States 2020 election. Here's a random article from some place I've never heard of writing about it: https://www.engadget.com/youtube-removes-videos-with-us-election-fraud-claims-154726251.html
It should be noted that most other social media platforms had similar policies. Therefore I can't find videos of anything. They might still be on twitter somewhere, but good luck finding them. I will also state I don't particularly care about the videos personally, nor do I think they represent the substantive issue Clutzy is speaking about.
Now, as "voter fraud" is nebulous, videos of "people dumping ballots into boxes" is pretty vague. There were lots of videos that involved people doing things with ballots and boxes, but what was happening in them (both by those who believe something nefarious was going on, and those who do not) differs.
Here is an article "fact checking" (I don't believe in fact checking, rhetorically) one of the more contentious videos that showed up during the election: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/14/fact-check-georgia-suitcase-video-missing-context/3892640001/
Videos of this type involved poll watchers being told that voting was done for the night, and then at some point more ballots being pulled out after they poll watchers had left. For those who have some kind of distrust, this sounds suspicious, as most people cannot recall voting stopping in the middle of the night prior to Trump being in office. The assumption is that ballot counters lied to get poll watchers out of the way so as to allow some kind of fraudulent handling.
This "fact check" alleges that actually, the poll workers were intending to leave but later returned to continue counting, and that the storage and retrieval of ballots is normal for such situations. The contention by Republicans that this so happened to mean that the poll watchers had not also returned is dismissed as basically irrelevant and not indicative of problems. I generally agree, but this is also what I would say if I had done something nefarious. Now, this is just one instance of this general type of "ballots and boxes" issue. This happened in multiple places. But they all follow the same general claim and response trend.
The second sort of videos involving people doing things with ballots and boxes probably refers to videos of ballot harvesting. Laws on ballot harvesting differ by state, and generally some Republicans will assume that something legally spurious is happening when one person is dumping multiple ballots into one box. Even with a video though, it's not immediately clear if it is, as the video could be from some time or place where nothing wrong is happening.
Moving past this specific and mostly pointless question, Clutzy's actual point is pretty much true. "Voter fraud" is nebulous. Do I believe voter fraud (illegally cast ballots by individuals) swung the 2020 election? Not really, though this seems to have not been properly appraised in certain states. Do I believe voter fraud (last minute changes to election law, some of which were illegal) swung the 2020 election? Yes. The distinction could be made by passing the word"fraud" through the celebration parallax and arriving at "fortification," as described by the vaunted Time article by Molly Ball, posted I believe on February 4th of 2021.
Unfortunately at this point I don't really have the time to go over all the cases. Because frankly, this whole thing is one big exercise in an isolated demand for rigor. Normal people just call it political bias. Several states were involved, and several issues were brought up in those states. There's a book I have not read about it, Rigged, by Mollie Hemingway. But for the sake of what you would call signal, I'll go through one state in broad strokes.
Pennsylvania passed Act 77, which introduced no-excuse mail-in voting. In addition, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that because of Covid, mail in ballots would be counted up to 3 days past election day, so long as they were postmarked prior to election day or the postmark was illegible.
To the first, Congressman Mike Kelly, among others, filed a case stating that the no-excuse mail-in voting Act 77 was unconstitutional under the state constitution, and required an amendment to the constitution. This is what we call "true." Initially counting was halted, but then the case was dismissed on the grounds that the case was brought in too late, as Act 77 was passed in 2019. It was noted by some that this sounds like a catch 22, as an attempt to sue prior to 2020 could easily be judged to lack standing, as there had yet to be an election to which there was an aggrieved party. As an aside, in March of this year, this exact chain of legal logic played out with Kari Lake's lawsuit in Arizona. That is, there was an attempt to dismiss it on the grounds that it was a question of policy that should have been brought forth earlier, but it was ultimately allowed to go forward because Kari Lake would lack standing prior to the election in question. Anyway, the point is that no decision was ever made in Pennsylvania on the case's merits.
To the second, The Pennsylvania Republican Party challenged the state supreme court's extended deadline for mail-in ballots. The challenge went to the US Supreme Court prior to the election, which deadlocked 4-4 on a stay or emergency injunction, as Amy Barret had not yet been elected to the supreme court. After the Pennsylvania election, the Pennsylvania Republican Party tried again, but the Supreme Court declined to intervene. What this means is that ultimately the Supreme Court changed an election rule, and then when questioned on if it had the legal authority to do so (it didn't), nobody even looked at the question.
As a bonus, the Texas Lawsuit brought by Ken Paxton dealt with Pennsylvania as well as three other states, on this question of the states having made changes that violated the constitution. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case, bizarrely claiming that Texas lacked standing in other state's elections. Alito and Thomas dissented to this, correctly pointing out that the US Constitution states that the Supreme Court's has among its primary purposes, dealing with cases in which one state sues another.
Ultimately you should see the pattern. There were legal issues with how states conducted their elections. And yet, they were dismissed on grounds that had nothing to do with the substantive claims under discussion. This is to say nothing of the Media's role in this.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but when one state sues another, “dealing with the case” includes determining if the plaintiff has standing, just like with any lawsuit. The majority did not rule that the Supreme Court couldn’t resolve the case--they were resolving the case. They ruled that the case couldn’t proceed because Texas didn’t have standing.
IANAL, but that fits my understanding of standing. What’s the legal argument that Texas, qua Texas, was harmed by anything Pennsylvania did? Texas’s ability to conduct its elections how it wanted and have its electoral votes counted wasn’t harmed. Paxton’s case was the equivalent of, say, Target suing Wal-Mart for underpaying an employee, on the ground that this underpayment made it easier for Wal-Mart to compete against Target. That isn’t how it works; the one harmed (in my hypothetical, the underpaid employee) has to file the lawsuit if it’s going to be heard.
If I had to guess, I'd say the argument is that any State could sue any other on grounds that any State now has to work under whatever elected official the rest helped get elected, and if other States' election processes are bad enough, it's not fair to the States that are trying to maintain their own processes. At worst, a State ought to be permitted to secede, and a lot of people have made that historically impractical.
Imagine if your HOA splits 49-49 on whether to pay to have a casino at the entrance, and the remaining 2% are so negligent that the 49 you oppose are able to cast their ballots for them. You can't sue the 49 for simply disagreeing with you, but you can sue the 2 for letting the process be subverted.
So the story goes.
But in that scenario I am a member of the HOA, so I can imagine a legal argument that my rights to be represented are violated if legal procedures aren’t followed. I can’t sue some other HOA for not following a certain voting procedure, even if it leads to a result I don’t like. Federalism means that, at least when it comes to voting, the 50 states are not in the same HOA, all operating under the same rules.
You can imagine it going the other way. There are plenty of lawsuits from the left about supposed civil rights violations or gerrymandering or whatnot. But to my knowledge none of those lawsuits are filed by blue states, even though the blue states are affected by who runs Congress or who gets electoral votes. Because the blue states don’t have standing; there’s no constitutional principle that one state has a legal interest in another’s voting procedures.
I think that doesn't add up. Suppose you're in an HOA vote that doesn't follow the HOA's bylaws (this sort of came up for me just a few weeks ago), it's a potentially huge deal, esp. if you're now being obligated to pay extra dues, pay out of pocket for miscellaneous problems that arise from whatever that election determined, and so on. It might not convert into a lawsuit against members with lax security on their ballots, but it could certainly lead to an overturn of the vote. (In our case, it led to half the board stepping down.)
Alternately, look at it this way: if you enter a union that says it has elections for important things, you have a expectation that those elections work reasonably fairly. If that union said up front that elections were run by majority of subgroups, and any subgroup could run elections *any* it wanted - including one of the larger ones slanting the rules in favor of a small sub-subgroup of them - you'd probably want to know that before you joined that union. If that union instead said each subgroup ensured a majority vote and so you joined and then that union suddenly changed the rules right before a big election, you'd probably look pretty hard for a breach of contract.
Admittedly, the analogy is imperfect. It's hard to see an HOA election turning on household-level fraud, and Texas wasn't suing to have the election overturned (IIRC). Also, Texas would have to demonstrate real damages. That's impossible to show before the executive has actually executed anything - but if you agree that a given election is generally expected to be good news for some States and bad for others, then this is more an argument that the standing requirement itself is flawed than that Texas didn't have it. Or that the election process is.
So in the most forgiving interpretation, standing is of course an issue. Though certain interpretations of the relevant articles suggest that the Supreme Court doesn't have the ability to simply dismiss a case that falls under the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction. This was stated to be the case by Alito and Thomas, and this is what I was referring to when I vernacularly said "dealing with". Keep in mind, this is all a matter of constitutional law, and both the concept of standing and what to do when states sue each other are defined in the constitution. As are the issues at play, as it is argued that in violating their state constitution, Pennsylvania violated the US Constitution.
As a quick example of how the other side sees this, suppose that Pennsylvania's Supreme Court had ruled that actually, the state shall send twice the number of delegates as apportioned by their population to congress, mandatorily certified by the Governor. This is done, and the Texas AG says, "wait a minute, that is unconstitutional, both violating their state constitution and the US constitution."
You say, now hold on a minute. In what way has Texas's rights been violated? Texas has no standing.
And then the Supreme Court doesn't say anything.
If certain interpretations suggest the Supreme Court doesn't have the ability to dismiss a case for standing reasons, presumably certain other interpretations suggest it does. Do you stand by the claim that it was "bizarre" of the Court to abide by the latter interpretation?
I don't know what part of the US Constitution Pennsylvania is supposed to have violated, but I also don't see what relevance that has. Even a flagrant violation of the Constitution relies on standing: if I'm thrown in jail for giving a speech, and no one reads me my rights, and while I'm in there troops are quartered in my house without my permission…even with all of that, Texas can't sue on my behalf.
If Pennsylvania sent extra congresspeople or a third Senator, I assume the House or Senate would just refuse to seat them, and then it would be on these surplus Pennsylvanians to sue and lose. But if for some reason that didn't happen, I could see an argument why Texas would have standing: it's supposed to have 2/100 Senators, not 2/101, so the extra Pennsylvanian is diluting its voting power. I don't see the relevance to Paxton's suit, though, since Texas had exactly as much influence on the election as the Constitution said it was entitled to.
Yes, their argument was bizarre. The position that the Supreme Court can dismiss cases in which it has original jurisdiction is not that bizarre, but the argument justifying it in this case was bizarre in my view. Obviously a state in the Union should have standing in regards to the Constitution in which it and all other states are under. Why does it matter if I think it is bizarre or not? That's a rhetorical question, I'm pretty sure I can predict your answer.
The relevant part of the US Constitution would be Article II, Section 1.
Now, in your silly contrived situation, Texas probably could sue if you were in Texas at the time or were a citizen of Texas, and depending on circumstances there would be a variety of legal concepts that could be invoked in doing so. Perhaps parens patriae, for example, if you couldn't sue because you were being prevented from doing so, but even if not, the violation of the 3rd might be grounds for Texas to sue for direct harm to the state.
Paxton's suit was about Texas having its voting power diluted. This would fall under the previously mentioned "direct harm to the state" justification. That would be the relevance of my example, a case where it is extremely obvious, even to one such as yourself, that Texas would have standing for having its voting power diluted.
You have been informed of the argument and have been given analogies on the situation by me and elsewhere regarding the Texas Lawsuit and standing which you say you understand. And you understand that it's at least not legally spurious to assume that Texas would by default have its case heard regardless of standing. I believe the Supreme Court interpreted the constitution incorrectly and in a bizarre way. You apparently think otherwise. There doesn't seem to be much more to discuss.
There is a reason almost, if not all, government organizations require their employees to not only refrain from corruption, but also activities giving the appearance of corruption. First, the latter decays faith in the organization, and legitimacy is the government's largest currency; Second, such activities provide an environment for real corruption to thrive. By analogy, the cartels exploit the "refugee" situation at the border to engage in real human trafficking and drug smuggling.
Also, I simply don't think the anti-2020 fraud position is at all principled. If similar rule changes were implemented by Likud, and Bibi won a close election, then a J6 like event happened and he used it to start imprisoning the political opposition, I'd be hard pressed to find a Democrat not openly condemning him. In fact, I suspect we would be inundated with "Reichstag fire" comparisons. After all, who was the major winner from J6? The Democrats and Biden. Who, according to the Capital Chief of Police on J6 was routinely denying requests for overtime and National Guard backup? The Speaker's office (Pelosi). Maybe I am an optimist, but maybe the phrase "cui bono" would re-enter the press's lexicon in such a situation.
It's a general rule that disputes over election procedures should be resolved prior to the election. You can't challenge election procedures in court after the election has occurred unless you can show a valid reason for not challenging the election procedures earlier. This is true in Pennsylvania, and it is true in Arizona, where (I believe, although I can't find the actual ruling) the count in Kari Lake's lawsuit challenging the signature verification procedure was thrown out.
There is no catch 22, as is shown by the fact that Act 77 was challenged in court prior to the 2022 election, and Act 77 was ruled Constitutional. In other words, there was a ruling on the merits as soon as soon as someone asked for relief that the courts could actually provide: changing the election procedures going forward. Changing the procedures used to conduct an election that has already occurred would require a time machine, technology that the court does not have access to.
Your second case was apparently adjudicated on the merits all the way up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and was even reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to issue an injunction. Lot's of cases don't even make it as far as a state supreme court.
Your bonus case was thrown out because Texas was found to lack standing, but the Trump campaign had standing to raise the exact same issues.
The pattern I see is that the Trump campaign had the opportunity to challenge the conduct of the election in court, and when it did, it lost, with only one exception. Calling this outcome “voter fraud” redefines the term beyond recognition.
Not videos, but a relevant recent expose:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/09/exposed-whistleblower-steps-forward-reveals-private-facebook-group/
There's a ton of such stuff floating around. I stopped paying attention long ago, because it's clear that nobody cares.
I've talked to a few election deniers and I don't think they "believe it" so much as they don't really see politics as having anything to do with factual truth beyond my side/your side.
(Otoh, selection bias - the people who are loud about fringe political beliefs are just generally more likely to be unhinged)
I don't understand why the burden of the proof would be on the state to show a lack of wrongdoing. That isn't how we handle almost anything.
That's absolutely how we handle the state.
I don’t think so. For instance, if I’m disputing a traffic or parking ticket, the procedures officially state that the police issuing the ticket in the first place is on its own sufficient evidence that the ticket was merited. If I show up without any evidence that in fact it wasn’t merited, I lose by default. The burden is on me to show the state erred in issuing the ticket.
That's not the case in TX. There has to be something other than the existence of the ticket if it's challenged.
Interesting! So, if you happen to know, let’s say a Texan disputes a speeding ticket and testifies at a hearing that they were only going 60, and the ticketing officer says they were going 80. In the absence of other witnesses or evidence, how is the issue resolved?
The judge will presume that the officer is correct, but if that officer does not show up, the ticket is discarded.
I have heard of people getting tickets dismissed if the radar doesn't have its calibration records up-to-date, but I cannot personally confirm this. I can confirm that in a DUI case, lawyers will challenge the breathalyzer results.
That is totally false. If you get a speeding ticket and show up to court, and the police officer is missing, often the ticket just gets thrown out. Sometimes the state is entitled to a continuance to get the officer into court (typically on more serious matters like a DUI). But if you just keep going to court, and the state's witnesses don't show up, eventually you win by default.
From the perspective of a non-US citizen who doesn't live there either, the moment it was decided to allow mass mail-in voting it was inevitable that the election would be called into question. It'd be the case in other countries to, this has nothing to do with Republicans vs Democrats. Mail voting is so much more open to fraud and abuse that whenever the proportion gets too high you start getting all these quiet little scandals that the media doesn't like to talk about for fear of undermining The System, always built around mail voting fraud. The UK sees the same effect, for example.
Given that mass gatherings appeared to make no difference to COVID spread (one of the many mysteries that epidemiologists are reluctant to investigate), it should never have been allowed. Am now fully expecting the Biden admin to come up with some reason why the prior levels of mail voting should now be sustained into the next election despite the end of the pandemic.
One strong reason for continuing that level of mail-in voting is that, if you try to tone it down, it looks like you're admitting the earlier election had problems.
Oh dear, I think you may be right ....
Have we found that mail in voting has a higher percentage of fraud before? Oregon has had universal mail in voting for many years, well before 2020, and absentee voting has been a thing for a very long time. Has anyone demonstrated fraud in mail in voting at higher rates that in person voting prior to 2020? Or, would the argument just be that we didn't have the proper infrastructure in place to deal with the volume of mail-in votes we received at that time?
Like justice, elections need to be counted and seen to be counted. Ballots and boxes. A chain of trust. No, or very few, mail in votes.
You know how when you take the SAT, and they always have a monitor standing there watching everyone to make sure people don't cheat? This is sort of like if someone suggested getting rid of the monitor and having the kids take the SAT unmonitored, and then someone else objected to this on the basis that it might lead to more cheating, and then you countered with "Have we found that monitorless SAT-taking leads to more cheating? Do we have Evidence of this?" Of course not, because 1. It would have rarely or never been done before (for good reason), and 2. You're getting rid of the mechanism that actually detects the cheating in the first place, so even if it had been done in the past, there would not be evidence. And yet using basic logical reasoning, we can correctly deduce that making standardized tests completely unmonitored would very significantly increase cheating, as I'm sure you can agree.
But we still have voter rolls that make sure a person is only counted once, even with mail in voting. Unless there's some reason to suspect those don't work? I haven't seen any evidence that people are voting multiple times. So then to cheat you have to submit ballots for people on the rolls who aren't going to vote, and you have to know they aren't going to vote, right, or else it would just get thrown out?
I'm not sure how you could cheat in any other way unless there's some reason to suspect that voter rolls don't properly catch double votes.
I don't know. Why couldn't mail in voting be done right?
One thing is that presidential elections in the US are actually a lot of local elections, and these are all operated in some local way, and there is usually some number of counties where they mess up, or have trouble. And when the election is close and that happens in a battleground state, it can very easily seem suspicious, especially if it delays the results.
One weird aspect about American elections seen from abroad is the dispute about voter ID. In other countries that I know about, needing voter ID is taken for granted.
It's just much harder to secure. You don't even know the form was filled out by the right person. In Europe there's problems with Muslim families where the man just takes the woman's form and fills it out for her, for example, or religious/community leaders demand people's forms to fill out and post themselves.
Or nursing homes, or public housing, etc.
Do the women not have cell phones? Are cellphones not allowed in voting areas?
If they do and are, the man could simply tell the woman to record her vote and show him the video afterward.
I think in the UK it's illegal to take a picture of yourself voting, presumably for exactly this reason, although I could be misremembering.
In some parts of the US, it is, at least according to this:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/election-day-ballot-selfies-heres-where-its-legal-and-illegal
But I don't think that's going to stop people. It can be hard to detect. And what are they going to do, arrest people for voting?
This is more or less my view. Every change that was made to voting rules in 2020, particularly in battleground states, reduced transparency and election security - that is, the ability to successfully detect and document fraud. It is natural that when one side pushes to remove safeguards - opposing voter ID, relaxed signature matching, mailing out millions of blank ballots indiscriminately - that the other side will be suspicious when the outcome favors the safeguard-removers, particularly when the outcome is determined within jurisdictions exclusively controlled by those people. Imagine that we are playing poker, and just before the final card is dealt on a huge hand, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and take the cards with me. I win the hand on the last card. Can you prove that I cheated? Not definitively. There was always a chance I could win. You don't have video of me cheating. You don't know what the next card was before I left. Yet I maintain you would be justified in being suspicious of the result.
This doesn't even get into the ballot-harvesting issue. By flooding the zone with ballots to low or zero-propensity voters, even without literally picking up discarded ballots (full-on identity fraud, which is also possible) it makes the voting process an exercise in mechanics rather than real voter choice; just go harvest their ballots and you can guarantee 100% turnout for your candidate in places that normally wouldn't have voted.
Add in shady things like administrative coordination and pressure to one-sidedly suppress negative news on media and social media, and it's not a surprise that some don't see a fair contest. And some folks live in jurisdictions where literal, old-school, Tammany Hall style machine politics has been endemic for decades. Those folks aren't going to hit the fainting couch when someone alleges there might have been fraud, even if they can't prove it was outcome determinative. They assume of course outcome-determinative fraud can't be proven; every step taken throughout was designed to make it difficult to document and disseminate such proof.
I would take the "changing the rules is inherently suspicious" argument more seriously if people applied it to, say, Texas (a state that did change its rules due to the pandemic, and which had more electoral votes at stake than any battleground state), and not just to the four states that were closest to voting for Trump.
>This doesn't even get into the ballot-harvesting issue. By flooding the zone with ballots to low or zero-propensity voters, even without literally picking up discarded ballots (full-on identity fraud, which is also possible) it makes the voting process an exercise in mechanics rather than real voter choice; just go harvest their ballots and you can guarantee 100% turnout for your candidate in places that normally wouldn't have voted.
Why is it bad to encourage legal voters to cast votes? Like, what distinguishes "ballot harvesting" from regular get-out-the-vote efforts?
Texas is not a battleground state, nobody expected it to be in play, and its margins of victory are not conducive to gaming anyway. That doesn't make any changes it made good or entirely unproblematic, but it reduces the capacity for mischief.
Ballot harvesting is an entirely different animal from GOTV, both for fraud/procedural abuse reasons and, even in non-fraudulent situations, for effort reasons. On the procedural side, to GOTV in a normal situation, you need to convince a person to actually show up at the polls. You remind, cajole, bus them. But in the end a person still walks in to a polling place with poll watchers. In ballot harvesting, you simply need to get ahold of their ballot. That's it. Something that people getting ballot harvested either consider junk mail, may discard, or may not even know about (e.g. nursing homes). There is no check beyond physical possession of the ballot paper. It is the security difference between an in-person purchase and a bearer bond.
There are certainly situations where ballot harvesting does not result in outright fraud, but even then I consider it a negative in the voting process. Reducing the investment in voting down to "hand this to the guy at the door and sign once" (and remember that's the best-case non-fraud scenario) does not, in my view, lead to a more thoughtful electorate. It doesn't measure public support, it basically measures voter concentration (where it's easy to knock on doors) and party infrastructure (amplified by, e.g., Zuck bucks disproportionately benefiting Democratic bastions). But that's slightly ancillary to the main point about security.
The ballots themselves get checked though, even if you go dump a bunch of fake ballots in, as far as I'm aware we have processes in place to make sure we don't count them.
No. Sometimes ballot jackets get checked. And thus, mass dumping of fraudulent ballots (that is, ballots never issued by the state) is often hard. This doesn't preclude mass dumping of illegal ballots, those cast in a way not in accordance with the law, which many of the mass dumped ballots will have been in many states. Once those are co-mingled, its impossible to know which jacked was illegally cast and which was just dropped off by an old lady on her way to the supermarket that vote just being for herself.
And even the ballot jackets are kind of a joke. That anything less than 90% of absentee ballots aren't rejected for failing the signature match beggars belief. I work in the law, and I see wayyyy too many signatures a day. The idea that any average person's signature is consistent in the year 2020 is absurd. It was absurd in 2000 when I was still in grade school. This is why banks require IDs and pins and notaries.
I saw dozens of extremely detailed videos and articles investigating and debunking every one of these claims and videos and etc. Tons of work went into making media to persuade people that the claims of fraud were themselves fraudulent.
The problem is that those were all made by left-wing outlets, which means right-wing people never saw them. The level of algorithmic recommendations and filters bubbles in modern media consumption is such that you will simply never see something made by someone who disagrees with you unless it is in a takedown video made by someone on your side.
Like, literally I would not know that Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or Prager U existed if it weren't for seeing them referenced in takedown videos and jokes from my side, they are completely transparent to all of my algos and bookmarks. Same in reverse for the other side.
So I'm actually not sure what 'steps to disabuse them' could have *possibly* led to convincing people on the right that those fraud claims were false, no matter how obviously correct and persuasive they were.
Like, literally, if there were a single 6-sentence paragraph that magically convinced 100% of people who read it that the election was legitimate, and the people on the left who discovered and wrote it tried as hard as they could to make sure every person on the right saw it, I doubt more than 10% of Republican voters would ever actually end up reading it. There's just no channels to get it to them.
For me, the decisive factor is the existence of some Republican politicians who think the election fraud claims are ridiculous. If there really was available but widely suppressed or ignored evidence for fraud, that is one group that I would expect to be overwhelmingly familiar with the existence of that evidence, and to have every incentive to publicise it and no incentive at all to disregard it. Thus the only way to explain anti-fraud Republicans consistently with a fraud theory being true is a level of conspiracy that defies all practical plausibility. If a conspiracy can not only engineer massive election fraud but also buy off not only the government and most of the media but also virtually all judges and election officials who investigate the claims AND a significant number of elected representatives of the party that was defrauded out of power, then that conspiracy can do anything. It proves too much: why not assume that that conspiracy was already in control of the world, that elections were already a sham beforehand, and that Trump and the pro-fraud media are part of the conspiracy as well? It's beyond absurd.
With that said, I have literally zero sympathy for the left and the Democrats having to deal with these false and unfair claims. For two reasons. First, because large parts of the left have denied the legitimacy of ALL THREE of the Republican victories this century. While there was *some* (though still not much) basis for these claims in 2000, there was absolutely none in 2004 and 2016. Those were completely indisputable and fair Republican wins. And yet significant numbers of Democrats delegitimised them, recklessly and arrogantly, for no other reason than that they didn't like the outcome. Wikipedia still has a whole page casting doubt on the 2004 result, with barely a mention of the lack of support for those claims. Hillary Cilnton herself repudiated her concession and declared Trump an "illegitimate president", and somehow was *not* condemned and octracised by the mainstream left. After that, the democrats *forever* lost the right to complain about legitimisation campaigns, false claims, or big lies. It's true that it was much larger from republicans in 2020. But on the other hand, they only did it once; there were no serious fraud claims in 2008 and 2012. Democrats have done it a full three times, *every* time they've lost, all because they just couldn't accept that they had alienated the people with their obnoxious attitudes. They made their bed; now they're lying in it. They're reaping what they sowed, and they deserve every moment of it.
Second, censoring claims of fraud (on social media or elsewhere) is the equivalent of putting up a big poster saying "we are *terrified* of free discussion and scrutiny of this claim". Most people are going to reasonably conclude you have something to hide, when you try to censor arguments. I don't think this is actually the reason for the censorship in this case, although it is in most other cases. I think the left has just become so unbelievably entitled, and so used to thinking that disagreement is an act of oppression, that even when the opposing claim is easily refuted they *still* think they're being oppressed by having to actually put in the time and effort to refute it. (Because it's not like there's *actual* oppression in the world, right?) Thus, all because of an unbelievable intellectual laziness and first-world entitlement, they have given good rational grounds for ordinary people to assume otherwise obviously-false claims are actually based in truth. Let there be no doubt for all progressives, social media employees, and other supporters of censorship: all the permanent damage that is done, now and in the coming years, to democracy and public trust rests ENTIRELY upon your conscience.
If your car can parallel park by driving sideways "crab-style", it can wedge in another car such that the previously present car can't get out unless it also has crab parking.
Wouldn't this only happen if the previously present car was already boxed in on one end, and then the crab car boxes it in on the other end?
And can't this already happen even without crab parking? I assume the same norms would apply. (I.e. if the car behind you has no room in the back, then if you park in front of it, leave it some room in the front. Or more generally: always leave some space both in front of you and behind you)
I think the benefit of crab-style parking is that it makes it easier to park in relatively small spaces, not that it specifically gives you the ability to park in spaces that are exactly equal to the length of your vehicle.
Edit: You really only need a little bit of space to not be boxed in, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN6MqsBombA&t=88s (unparking from that spot should be easier than parking into that spot)
This can happen even without crab parking. Heck I don't even see that crab parking makes it significantly more likely to happen.
We've discovered the real reason crabs permeate so much convergent evolution!
We should do it to creationists.
.26. Thanks for this. I hope everyone who is interested in consciousness clicks through and reads it. The distinction between Sentient and Conscious is important, if consciousness is to be a useful term at all.
What do you mean by "sentient" and "conscious"? I am still confused by the whole "consciousness" thing.
From my perspective, it's all about intelligence and knowledge applied to understanding the world. We make mental models of the physical world around us. These models include ourselves, a thing that takes up space. We can compare ourselves with similar entities: "Who has longer reach?" "Who can throw a rock farther?" We can notice that we think and feel and want, and model our own inner experience. We notice that other similar entities appear to have motivations and goals, and create models of their inner experience. When we notice that other similar entities might have an inner experience like ours, that's empathy. When we notice that we can model our inner experience the way we model other similar entities' inner experience, bam: we're on the outside looking in.
As far as I'm aware, that's what everyone seems to be going on about when they talk about "consciousness". But a lot of the more technical discussion feels as pointless as trying to create a mathematical model of the experience of "being one with everything". Regarding that Bronze Age confusion that the book talked about, I can easily believe that a new form of model of other people spread by contact, and once someone introspected enough to apply it to themself, their own inner experience changed irrevocably.
As for "sentience", I tend to use it to mean more-or-less "reacting to stimuli". Moving away from negative stimuli, moving toward positive stimuli, that sort of thing: a quality that even plants have weakly. It's necessary but not sufficient for what Buddhists would call dukkha. Some older sci-fi uses "sentience" to mean what I would call "sapience", but oh well.
Those are pretty close to my own thoughts about it. Sentience and consciousness are discussed in the paper Scott linked to. Some people think that what you and I are referring to as sentience is the same as consciousness.
.10. The old saying “build a better mousetrap” has reason to it.
I have read that variations on mousetraps are the most patented devices in the USA.
Re. The Goddess of Everything Else, I really want to love this story, which is so beautiful almost until the end. But then it suddenly about-faces and denies the truth it had taught. The final paragraph says, "Okay, now we're magically freed from evolutionary forces for no reason at all other than that /this is where we are now/, and you can have your utopia." Whereas in fact systems which generate complexity will never be free from evolutionary forces, and pretending that they are, will destroy the work of the Goddess of Everything Else.
Right. What this beautiful story illustrates is how nearly impossible it is for humans to not anthropomorphize the world we experience. Even though we are now factually aware that there is no creator god, we continue to imbue the world with an aura of teleonomy. An example of that is how we talk about Darwinian evolution. In the climax of Scott’s story, we envision “the brain and the body set free from Darwinian bonds and restrictions.” Obviously, this is just a version of creationism, with natural forces acting as creators.
It's also just a story. But, this framing of Darwinism as some sort of discreet creative process is pretty ubiquitous. One phrase that always catches my attention is “evolutionary mismatch.” As if evolution made a mistake in its ultimate goal. Of course, evolutionary mismatch is a useful heuristic in evolutionary sociology, but it often gets forced into labor as an argument that humans must transcend human nature to make progress--- a secular continuation of the atavistic fallen state narrative. Pascal Boyer describes this anthropomorphic view as “the main obstacle to having a proper science of human behavior.”
Bigger picture, perhaps this story is an allegory of emergent complexity. Maybe the Goddess of Everything Else is revealing to us the notion of the ‘evolution of evolution’ (an idea I think I got from Eugene Koonin, The Logic of Chance.) Maybe Scott Alexander is prophesying a future where humans actually do transcend what is simply an artifact of a thermodynamic gradient, the evolution of complexity by natural selection.
> Even though we are now factually aware that there is no creator god
Oh really? I feel like this should’ve been bigger news...
> Even though we are now factually aware that there is no creator god
Source?
Re. "Maybe Scott Alexander is prophesying a future where humans actually do transcend what is simply an artifact of a thermodynamic gradient, the evolution of complexity by natural selection." --
Can and should humans transcend--and I mean do without--continued evolution? This is, I think, the most-important moral question by far--so much that I think of it as simply THE moral question. All else is noise by comparison, including the question of whether AIs replace humans entirely. Yet I've never asked the question in public, because even pointing out the problem goes farther outside the Overton window than eugenics. I don't think I've seen anyone else raise it, even though it seems to be the most-serious existential threat to morality and civilization built into our universe.
The basic problem is that there are very high correlations between
- behavior we call "moral", or at any rate altruistic
- actions that reduce selective pressure in society
- practices that make a society vulnerable to exploitation by non-altruists
This applies theoretically, to all possible lifeforms (including AIs).
Nearly everything we do to try to make the world a better place, undermines the selective pressures that made us evolve the very altruism and love that we're trying to expand the effects of, and/or makes it easier for people lacking that love and altruism to thrive. This is the flip side of the Goddess of Everything Else. For instance, medical technology, including just basic sanitation, has lowered the force of selection before reproduction to almost zero in advanced countries. So when any organism develops the intelligence to change its environment, its genome, including its moral instincts, becomes evolutionary unstable.
The only way I can think of to prevent our moral behavior from destroying our moral instincts is to take responsibility for maintaining the integrity of our own genomes. But there are 2 huge problems with this:
1. Who exactly will have the power to decide what genomes humans will have? This, at least, isn't insoluble. But I think the only workable solution is complete anarchy. Give everyone the information about how to gengineer their kids, and the ability to do it however they choose. Then (A) nobody gets to control the human genome to satisfy their crazy ideology, (B) the human genome doesn't suffer catastrophic loss of diversity, and (C) slightly intelligent guidance plus the resulting high variance in genotypes might increase the "rate of evolution" (not that that can be measured, but it is a not-meaningless hypothetical construct) to at least zero.
2. What about evolution? How can you prevent the devolution of the human genome through well-informed germline engineering, and yet still allow for the random mutations necessary for anything better than our current model of human to evolve? I think there is no answer to this question. You can't do it. If humans are controlling the human genome, they can recognize as improvements only modifications which enhance existing human behaviors and perceptions. But they would never allow the development of any significant new value.
Consider love. Reptiles appear to be neurologically incapable of love. No reptilian committee of the genome would see love, should it appear in their population, as anything other than a perversion to be stamped out. I think we would likewise be unable to recognize any radical improvements on human nature as improvement rather than error.
I don't think we should try to solve to problem #2 today. Find a workable solution to problem #1, and trust that, in the future, people will be smarter, and will be able to deal with problem #2 better than we could today.
In my view, when considering questions of morality it’s helpful to take the evolutionary view that moral sentiments have evolved because they are adaptive for group scale cooperation. Our first thought on cooperation is a group of hunters bringing down a mastodon. But what our large cerebral cortex is really there for is to feel out reliable ingroup coalitions for support in conflicts with other humans. On the larger social scale, we have ancient fallen state narratives, or Buddha asleep under a tree, that function to divide people into the asleep vs the enlightened, the redeemed vs the lost. Questions framed as ‘can we transcend?’ or ‘where do we go from here to “make the world a better place”’ are of this same type.
So, I see your point about reduced selective pressure for reproduction possibly changing the distribution of interacting moral sentiments (and a factor related to survival fitness for reproduction is sexual selection for reproduction). I think this has been happening since the agricultural revolution. But I think we have to pay strong attention to the eugenics episode here. The ostensible question was ‘does our recent learning about evolution mean we can improve the human genome?’, but we can clearly see in retrospect that this question was imbedded in ancient ingroup:outgroup psychology, i.e. racism, ethnocentrism, elitism. So, do you believe the modern human phenotype is in some way degraded, or stultified in reaching some higher potential?
On your point 2. It is indeed an odd situation where we now have technologies where we can realistically contemplate directly changing the human genome--- probably a genuine instance of evolutionary mismatch. What could go wrong?
Re. "do you believe the modern human phenotype is in some way degraded" -- I think we don't have much data, but we do know humans acquire about 30 de novo mutations per generation, and 1/4 to 1/3 of point mutations are synonymous, so 20 to 23 non-synonymous mutations per generation. Somebody should try to do the math to figure out how much selective pressure is needed to counteract that. It's complicated, because accumulated mutations have a normal distribution, and selection acts disproportionately on the low tail of the distribution, but AFAIK we don't know how disproportionately.
On the other hand, if you pick any observable measure of fitness other than reproductive fitness, such as IQ, socioeconomic status, reported happiness, immune function, number of friends, number of incarcerations--acknowledging that they're biased, but we can only use what we can observe--we have negative selective pressure today on at least some of those measures. If this is the case for most measures, then genome is not just degrading, but literally devolving--under selective pressure to evolve to minimize our fitness measures. But we have little idea how quickly. The NIH has effectively banned research into this area with their lockdown of the largest NCBI human genotype/phenotype database, access granted only to researchers whose research is deemed politically correct. I'm not making this up.
Linkage disequilibrium is another matter entirely, potentially far more alarming, which AFAIK no one has investigated beyond investigating pairs of SNIPs. I don't even want to talk about it, other than to note that it is never the case in evolutionary theory that a particular parameter is "good" or "bad". The most you can do is pick a fitness function and try to optimize it; and any attempt always arrives at intermediate values for all parameters.
Re. "we can clearly see in retrospect that this question was imbedded in ancient ingroup:outgroup psychology, i.e. racism, ethnocentrism, elitism":
The question arose in a racist and ethno-centric Europe, so in that context it manifested as racist and ethnocentric. But "eugenics" simply means "good genetics". If you believe in correcting germline mutations that cause terrible diseases, or even in comparing genomes before getting married, as some Ashkenazi Jews do owing to the high rate of recessive diseases in that group, you're pro-eugenics.
Thinking about genetics and ethics today is so screwed up that most bioethicists today (assuming the papers published on the matter are a random sample, which they probably aren't, but what else can you do?) say it's okay for parents to use genetic tech to have a baby born with congenital deafness, but that it's terrible and oppressive to use genetic tech to have a baby born without congenital deafness. We need to throw all that shit out and reboot.
Also, in order to talk seriously about genetics, we need to use the old meaning of "racist", which I would state as "someone is racist to the extent that they only their group priors when dealing with someone of a particular ethnicity". We can't use definitions of "racist" which make anyone with a basic understanding of genetics "racist", so that only people who don't know what they're talking about, are allowed to talk.
(And before we can even attempt that, we need to ditch the metaphysical framework in which "racist" is a Boolean predicate. That shit leads nowhere. You can't reason with people who use words as Boolean predicates; it leads to post-modernism or Buddhism.)
Thanks for the informative response. Of course, I’m entertaining a sort of philosophy of evolutionary sociology, where pondering whether the human genome is degrading, presupposes some sort of independent standard against which to compare, which comparisons are a durable feature of folk psychology. But, on the more realistic level of inherited diseases, including mental health problems, what you say is very interesting.
In terms of racism, a main theme of Sonia Sultan’s Organism and Environment is that you can’t look at DNA sequences to make broad statements about heritable variations in phenotype. I remember thinking as I was reading the book that if the race-is-a-social-construct crowd really understood what she is saying she’d probably get cancelled. Science as subversion!
I think genetic engineering will lead to increased diversity, and I'm not going to say whether it's catastrophic because I don't know.
Even if governments individually have constraints on genetic engineering, they aren't going to agree with each other. *Maybe* there will be agreement on what an improved knee would look like, but I wouldn't count on even that much.
It will be hard to enforce laws on fairly subtle changes.
Genetic engineering won't be done perfectly, so that's a source of variation.
Also, what's the standard? Evolutionary fitness is about fitness for the current environment, not, for example, a paleolithic environment. A honeybee is optimized for living in a hive, not living independently like its ancestors.
What catastrophe are you hypothesizing?
I'm not hypothesizing any catastrophe, other than the catastrophe of stopping evolution, or of a centralized authority directing it.
I suppose it's possible for a centralized authority to take control of human evolution, but I think it's unlikely. It's plausible that there will be people breeding who don't have access to the Shiny New Technology. The future belongs to the Amish, and they and those who are considerably meeker will inherit the earth if the catastrophe includes the support system for the degenerate majority breaking down.
Meanwhile; have an essential earworm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZnt-0fEiT0&ab_channel=Hairsprayhome
The Turnblatts won't win. They aren't going away, either.
I'm pretty sure the story is, from the beginning to the end, about evolutionary forces promoting cooperation being, ultimately, stronger than evolutionary forces promoting competition. "Your loyalty unto the Goddess your mother is much to your credit, nor yet shall I break it. Indeed, I fulfill it." "For I say unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my service."
It is, but the last paragraph suggests "breaking free" of evolution. As if we'd reached the endpoint, ultimate perfection. I think it is possible for a species to "break free" of evolution if they hold their make-up static, for instance by uploading and forbidding further alterations. But I don't think evolution is something that should be broken free of; it is closer to the thing that continually sets us freer, though "free" isn't quite the right word. And evolution doesn't do any of that if selective pressure is removed.
I guess my point is, the ending does not in fact require "breaking free" from evolution, a removal of selective pressure, an alternative explanation exists in which the (undeniable, ever-existing) selective pressure has just ceased to reward KILLING CONSUMING MULTIPLYING CONQUERING in any shape or form.
Recall that, at each point of the story, the choice to cooperate was a) against the KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER imperative and b) clearly evolutionarily adaptive. That the two are not the same is, I'm convinced, the whole point.
I think even evolutionary biologists who don't believe in group selection would agree that, if group selection /is/ a significant force, the definition of altruism ensures that it can evolve, or be maintained after evolving, only when there's competition between groups. This competition might not technically involve killing, but it must /effectively/ involve killing, defined as reducing the fraction of resources constituting or controlled by competing groups.
This comes up in David Sloan Wilson's book /Does Altruism Exist?/, in which he repeatedly emphasizes that the evolution of altruism requires competition between groups, and then speculates about a future world in which everyone is altruistic and at peace, noticeably NOT pointing out that this contradicts his repeated explicit statements that that is impossible.
But the contrast in the story is not between [cancer] and altruism, it's between [cancer] and (specifically, literally, explicitly) everything else. There's obviously plenty of ways to escape [cancer] that don't rely on altruism at all.
(I think "cancer" is a great tell regarding what Scott was getting at. Cancer is a dead end for a structure that relies on cooperation, including the cancer cells themselves. You don't need altruism to discourage cancer at that point, a selfish desire not to self-destruct perfectly suffices. )
You do need altruism to discourage cancer. The altruism is performed by those cells which don't turn cancerous. This evolves, and is maintained, only by the competition between groups. The groups are multi-cellular individuals.
In the absence of selection, pediatric cancer should increase, very slowly in human time, but very rapidly in evolutionary time., My Fermi estimate (below) is that most people would be born with cancer after 2800 years without selection.
A close upper bound on the fraction of mutations which assist cancer is 0.1, because cancer cells typically have about 100 mutations, about 10 of which contribute to the cancer. This is an over-estimate because these cells are selected for having cancer. Let's say the true fraction is 0.05. (There's probably a better, more-complicated way of estimating it.)
There are on average 30 de novo mutations per generation; 20-23 of which (ave. 21.5) are non-synonymous. It takes on average 10 such mutations to cause cancer.
Suppose these mutations get mixed homogeneously into the population with every generation. (This is false.) Then the number of such mutations found in a newborn after one generation without selection will? be drawn from the binomial distribution with n=21.5, p=0.05. (This is an approximation; n=21.5 is the mean of another binomial distribution.) If this is right, and I'm not confident that it is, the median person might be born with cancer when npg = 21.5*.05*g = 10, which happens after 10/(21.5*.05) = 9.3 generations (about 279 years). However, this assumes that you get cancer whenever you have 10 pro-cancerous mutations, which is obviously false--in most cases, probably the vast majority of cases some of these will be either redundant, damaging the same of the same pathways, or won't have synergy, as they damage pathways which don't collectively add up to cancer. So this estimate is a lower bound on how long it would take for half the population to have cancer at birth. I'll wildly guess that it's an order of magnitude too low, & thus a better estimate would be 2790 years.
We could try to predict the rate of pediatric cancer increase we expect to see in the new study by the CDC (Siegel et al 2023, "Counts, incidence rates, and trends of pediatric cancer in the United States, 2003-2019"), counting pediatric cancer over 16 years (17 data points, 2003-2019), which showed a geometric mean increase of 0.47%. However, I don't have the time to do this properly, and am not sure we have all the data we need to do it.
I'll just check my earlier guestimate by seeing how many years y it would take to reach 50% of the population being born with cancer with a yearly increase of 0.47%. The rates are given per million people, so the point where the median person is born with cancer would be when # cases/million/year = 500,000, & the starting point (2003) is 164.5 per million.
164.5 * r^y = 500,000, r = 1.0047, y log(r) = log(500000/164.5),
y = 1710 years
That's pretty close to "an order of magnitude higher than 279 years". But I don't trust it at all, primarily because the rate of increase per year shouldn't be constant given that it depends on a binomial distribution.
As someone who has been in charge of security cameras for various buildings, you need a LOT of cameras to cover everything and even then they're unlikely to be able to see into spots like behind a parked van or whatever.
I'm guessing that having a security camera follow you around, possibly with a loud voice saying "please leave the premises" is more intimidating than cameras (mostly above line of sight so people don't look at them) that just sit there.
There was a store I visited recently where there was a security camera behind glass right at eye level about 3 feet away as you left the store. Although that was more likely in order to get a good closeup.
Roving cameras still have the problem that you have to program in routes that give you enough coverage though.
The main author of the IIT open letter offers a defense of his actions: https://psyarxiv.com/28z3y/
Thanks, added.
And here's further discussion of Erik with the author:
https://twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1703481848813203749
It's amusing to see a literal admission of an isolated demand for rigor.
So I've only skimmed the critquie of the letter and the defense, but that twitter exchange makes it seem like the entire issue is that this guy (and I guess the 127 other co-signers) think that this theory gets more media attention than it's empirical results warrant, and that equals pseudoscience? That is _bonkers_.
26. On Jaynes - the second part of the critique is much more thorough than the first one. Don't just read the first one and not bother with the rest like I was very tempted to. Revisiting the concept of consciousness as internal narrative and the Bicameral Mind, in a recent Very Bad Wizards podcast (https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-267-the-thickness-of-reality) David Pizarro mentioned he doesn't think in language at all, and it takes active effort to convert his thoughts into words - perhaps the Jaynesians should have some conversations with him? He hardly seems to lack "a-consciousness".
Edit: maybe it was episode 266?
Maybe they should talk to me; I have the same issue. Or so I say…
Same here. :-)
I don't think in language either. Lots of people don't! I find the Jaynesians' equation of "consciousness" with "thinking in language" somewhere south of hilarious and trending towards offensive. It's such a tremendous lack of imagination for the variance of human experience.
It’s not really what he said. Language is important only that it is a system of symbols in written form. It’s the ability to manipulate internal concepts of things in order to come up with another idea. Mathematics or symbolic logic could be called languages or not. A real world triangle once understood conceptually can be used and manipulated in a lot of ways that don’t involve using the word triangle in your head.
It's a terrible feeling when you're explaining something and you come to some concept in the explanation which seems like it ought to have a word for it, but then you realize that they idea doesn't actually have a word and you have to go into a big digression explaining the concept and totally interrupt your flow. I bet that doesn't happen to people who think with words.
Nah what happens instead is you get stuck in a digression of "I swear there's a word for this, it's on the tip of my tongue... [Bad metaphor] [poor description]" if your counterpart helps you out, then it's fine, otherwise you fumble through then remember the word like 14 hours later and feel like an idiot.
I think in words, but sometimes there's a concept where there really isn't a word for it.
Yes that’s fairly common. I do think in words, and images, but my thoughts are not seif critical so couldn’t be mistaken for some other being or God. However I have a relative who has an eating disorder and her inner thoughts were in a different voice. The idea that everybody on earth changed how they thought in a very narrow space of time is clearly ludicrous.
When a culture moves from a place where the only way you can learn something is by someone else telling it to you, to a culture where things can be written down and concrete manifestations of the real world can be expressed and manipulated in symbolic forms I think that could have quite a bit of an effect on how people think. Also, it was not everybody by far. Certain cultures, accelerated, and certain cultures cease to exist. We will never really know.
I would submit that learning the calculus changes the way one thinks, for instance.
#19 As someone who keeps strictly kosher, with some small exceptions, I'm generally never able to eat at a table with non-kosher food on it. This obviously has serious downsides but not much of the social alienation experienced by the Vegan Liberation Pledge takers.
Main reasons being:
- All of immediate family is also strictly kosher
- Part of community that mostly keeps kosher
How I ensure that I maintain connections with my non-kosher keeping friends? Apart from going out for drinks and movies, we just invite people over a lot and try make the food as awesome as possible.
Over the years I don't really remember anyone remaining strictly kosher for the long term without immediate family who at least keep their home kosher. So the vegan's experiences don't surprise me.
Can you explain more about why this you can't eat with non-kosher people? Is it just that the dishes might not have been washed properly to separate meat and milk, or is there something else?
There isn't a law against eating with non-kosher people. It's just very hard to do while following halacha (jewish law) correctly.
The main reason is because of a concept called Marit Ayin. It has to be very clear that you aren't eating the non-kosher food yourself. Basically so that someone who is unaware but also keeps kosher might not see an obviously religious person eating at a non-kosher restaurant and inadvertently assume the restaurant/food is kosher and partake themselves. This one is usually the hardest one to get around and the law doesn't give much leeway even if you are sure no one will see you (most probably as it's a slippery slope).
Food and dishes also obviously have to be kosher and the levels of strictness once you get into standard orthodoxy are pretty high. In practice, if I get invited to a non-kosher wedding or other catered event and the host is trying to be accommodating, they will usually contact one of the kosher caterers in the city who will deliver a plastic wrapped meal to the venue (like a nice-ish airplane meal). Generally the fact that you are eating such an obviously different meal using disposable plates and cutlery is considered enough of a visual indicator that someone wouldn't assume you are eating the non-kosher food.
Obviously all of the above doesn't happen very often though so in practice it's very rare that I end up eating on tables with non-kosher food.
Thanks!
I've also heard there's a rule against drinking wine that was served by a non-Jew. Is this true?
Thanks.
You're skipping the most important difference! You aren't refusing to eat at a table with non-kosher food as part of an effort to force the world to become orthodox, and you aren't demanding that people keep a kosher table as the price for being your friend. You're placing the demand on yourself, not anyone else.
#18 - this was the only data I could find to support my hypothesis that eggplant use is correlated with cuisine quality (I made it into a silly one-pager at eggplantindex.com).
I am still unclear how crypto is supposed to help the unbanked/debanked/oppressed.
The US government has made fiat to crypto transfers visibly harder without trying very hard; the capability to cut off all manner of alternative and mainstream banking has already been abundantly demonstrated via Canadian bankers.
Seems the problem is really reining in the source of power over money, not the specific form of value.
Non-centralized crypto can be used without any bank or other organization seeing, let alone controlling, that transaction. It's how the Silk Road lasted - the government was extremely aware of the sales going on, but had no means to control the transactions. They were also anonymous, since they were tracked on the blockchain instead of through normal channels.
Centralized crypto, on the other hand, loses those benefits because the organization handling the transactions has to keep records and it becomes a point where government can notice and interject.
Government can't control that particular transaction, but for you to be able to make it, you need access to crypto/fiat exchanges of some kind, and it's easy to make those very onerous/risky outside of a trusted underground network.
Agreed, so long as the government does either of 1) Connects crypto wallets to individual people, or 2) seeks to control all crypto to/from fiat transactions.
I am not sure what's possible with 1, but they definitely would like to control 2.
Crypto makes 2) *more* possible, not less.
Cash is king.
If the crypto economy grows large enough you will never need crypto to fiat as you can just ignore fiat for your entire life. We're not there yet but that's the goal.
Silk Road lasted only because the tools did not yet exist to easily trace the blockchain.
This situation is no longer true. Even before the advent of tools like Chainanalysis, it was perfectly possible to do tracing but the Feds are simply not as "into" this type of deep grunt work as some in the private sector are.
Silk Road was also a very specific marketplace. You can't buy food on Silk Road. You can't pay rent on Silk Road. You can't get paid legal wages on Silk Road. You can't buy a bus ticket, and airplane ticket, etc etc.
For people in the real world who have to eat, rent, get transport - fiat is the only way to go in the vast, vast majority of cases.
As for your assertion about "decentralized crypto" being in any way more beneficial: even disregarding the fact that the miners are heavily centralized and the exchanges are heavily centralized and that any fiat-crypto transaction MUST be regulate-able by government, the offset of no "centralization" is the utter lack of protection against grift, con, scam and even violent crime.
That's one of the core scams of crypto: the implicit assumption that the stability and protections of the fiat financial environment are replicated in the decentralized one.
No disagreement here. I've been dismissive of crypto for a long time, but at the beginning it was being promoted specifically as anti-centralized. Back then miners were independent and there were no exchanges.
In order to gain legitimacy - and get away from the perception it was all "grift, con, scam, and even violent crime" there were a number of steps taken. Those steps were good for crypto and the early investors who wanted money. It was bad for the decentralization.
#13. Russia presumably continues to fund them, what’s the issue?
> The safety movement is concerned that Amazon might have enough power to steamroll over Anthropic’s safety-conscious culture; this did happen with DeepMind and Google, didn’t with OpenAI and Microsoft, and my guess is Anthropic held out for a good enough deal (and had enough bargaining power) that it won’t happen there either.
The AI safety movement is to computing as bioethicists are to biology and medicine, right down to calling themselves the "safety movement".
...care to explain, or are you just here to call people names?
You say that like you think bioethicists are a bad thing.
doesn't everyone?
No, if everyone thought that, bioethicists wouldn't be able to win grants, draw salaries, or publish articles.
Hardly. They can be bad and still useful.
The biosafety movement isn't bioethicists. "Biosafety" means the people whose job it is to prevent lab leaks and stuff like that. Honestly I think we could use a couple more of them.
(and yes, most of the AI safety people are also biosafety in this sense, in the sense that the same EA grantmakers fund both).
The fact that some group calls themselves "safety" doesn't mean other groups aren't doing the same thing. What do you think the bioethicists would say they want?
Note: if you find the giant plane in @5 to be exciting, thrilling, scary or upsetting in a way that transcends all rationality, you probably have megalophobia/philia!
https://www.reddit.com/r/megalophobia/
What if the main thought it inspires in me is "it's going to burn *all* of the jet fuel"?
In some ways that would not be a concern. Takeoff and landing both involve acceleration, so tend to use a lot of fuel. A larger vehicle may also use less fuel per kilogram of mass due to drag being a function of surface area while mass is a function of volume.
I think it would not be workable using actual jet fuel though. Refueling today involves tricky flying in conditions that are not optimal for less fuel use. So it's only used when you absolutely must keep that specific plane in the air longer and you can't just land and refuel there.
Changing to a power system that doesn't need refueling, e.g. a theoretical nuclear reactor that can get off the ground keeps other problems. The crew can only fly so long and where do they sleep? Docking/undocking to transfer cargo and passengers would be a nightmare. Etc.
Don't worry, it's nuclear-powered!
Is it going to be like the nuclear-powered bomber proposal where you need 70-year-olds to fly it because who cares about their long-term cancer risk?
#47 how realistic is it to take this yourself without any FDA approval.
Their statement that their bacteria will thrive quote "without spreading outside of the mouth", makes me dubious of every other claim they could make. Who ever heard of something inside your mouth that doesn't spread everywhere else ? Kisses are a thing that exists.
I'm constantly gaining and losing teeth through kissing.
See my response at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2023/comment/40814668 . Mouth bacteria aren't suited for life outside a mouth, and teeth bacteria can't spread by kissing except in certain rare circumstances.
Thanks for the information. I presume that the statement had been written in order to reassure GMO worriers. But for a GMO worrier, the only acceptable standard is 0 spread at all between GMO users and non GMO users. Even a rare circumstance would be too much.
Almost all human associate bacteria are _extremely_ niche specific. It is very very rare that bacteria from one part of your body can successfully thrive on another part. This even applies to different parts of your skin, let alone mouth-to-elsewhere.
I'm not sure. I think the main problem is that the company can't sell it without FDA approval (I think they might be able to give it away for free, but I'm not sure) and since it costs money to make and distribute they can't give it away for free to everybody. They have some clever distribution plans but I don't know if they're public and I'll write about them further after they've left stealth.
#4 Crypto has a complete solution to this, but it requires buy-in from society as a whole which is a *really* hard problem to solve. If you could pay your bills with crypto directly (just like you can often do with cash), then there would be no need to off-ramp.
I wouldn't say "crypto needs to get its act together" as much as "society at large needs to get its act together". I think many (most?) smart people recognize the problems with financial surveillance and state controlled access to money and the bad outcomes it can lead to (e.g., Canadian truckers, China locking bank accounts of people, civil forfeiture, etc.) but convincing the whole world to start accepting crypto natively for goods and services is a huge lift.
There *are* still UX issues that could be resolved, but I think people underestimate the difficulty here. While everyone is now used to passwords, for most of human history they weren't really a thing and it was incredibly difficult to get society to adjust to passwords. One could argue that we still haven't really solved it which is why there are so many alternative login systems these days (face, fingerprint, second device, email, etc.) all trying to "fix the password UX".
Crypto has a similar problem, but the stakes are much higher (all your money instead of all your photos) and if the goal is to remove financial intermediaries then you can't just rely on some third party to bail you out when you forget your password.
Most smart people also believe that a society-wide unregulated financial infrastructure is a short path to a much worse disaster than surveillance and other statist horrors. Anarchism and libertarianism are consistently and thoroughly unpopular.
"society wide unregulated financial infrastructure" was how money worked for most of human history. And yeah, the past was bad in a lot of ways, but I haven't heard a very convincing argument that this was due to cash being hard to regulate.
I'm quite skeptical of the "most" at the start of this statement. In my bubble of smart people, no one believes that. I'm certain bubbles of smart people exist where they do believe that, but I am suspicious of the claim that "**most** smart people" believe it.
Crypto has the same problem that occurred when each bank printed their own bills. Do you trust that bank?
There's seventeen new crypto systems invented every week (informal survey, do not trust). As a shop keeper with one shop, are you going to spend your time keeping up by opening seventeen new wallets a week?
Presumably, society would settle on a relative finite number of currencies to use, just has the world has largely settled on a relatively small number of currencies to use (~200 or so around the world if I had to guess). There will certainly need to be a discovery process to figure out which one is dominant, and it is likely that over time the dominant currency will change over time.
One nice thing about unregulated decentralized finance is that converting between currencies is relatively easy (and permissionless), unlike converting between fiat currencies that require the use of heavily regulated intermediaries. I put zero thought into currency conversion with crypto and the price I get is usually within 0.1%-0.5% of the best rate I could get if I put a huge amount of effort in. With fiat, you can easily fall into traps that yield 5%-10% currency conversion (e.g., airport currency counters) and it requires notable effort to avoid those rates and get competitive rates.
To answer your direct question, a shop keeper would likely just accept whatever currency the user wants to pay in because their payment processing system automatically handles all of the conversions. Similarly, user's wallets would also let the user pay in whatever they wanted and convert on the fly to what the merchant wanted. All of this would be hidden from both the shopper and the retailer in the majority of cases.
I think a more interesting question is "how does the shopkeeper decide what to price their goods in". The answers to this range from "whatever they want" to "locally agreed upon standard" to "it is the future and prices may just be QR codes that present on the shopper's mobile device in whatever currency they want, so the shopkeeper can choose their accounting currency that aligns best with their personal risk profile and liabilities".
Broadly, the point is that this isn't really a decentralized vs centralized question but rather a question of "what does society benefit the most from" and the ultimate answer (which may change over time) will come down to just letting things play out in the market. We don't need the government to come in and *assert* to everyone that currency X must be the standard. When we do that we get daylight savings and the imperial system of measurements.
I think you underestimate the number and power of people who are vastly invested in the current system, because they eat as a result.
Certainly your current phone is capable of doing the math involved in currency conversions. It's not hard, some people can do it in their head.
The question of how much this currency is worth compared to this other one at the moment you trade it for stuff is a whole different matter. After all, why *would* one currency move in value compared to another? Why do cryptocurrencies move? It's not because the holders are bored and decided to play a game.
There's only about 200 fiat currencies traded openly, because there's only about 200 sovereign nations recognized by at least one other nation worldwide. A nation allows at most one currency to be traded externally because otherwise you end up with arbitrage - which the politicians think they should have, instead of the arbiters. Go to a Caribbean island to see this in action; most people accept American dollars even though a lot of them have their own currency. They'll generally give you change in the native currency though.
Er - the metric system *was* an assertion by government. The French revolution decided to "rationalize" everything (unsurprising since there were a lot of local systems in France). Napoleon thought this reasonable; and since he conquered half of Europe, introduced it there.
People think the imperial system has a huge number of measures with awkward conversions. This is because what's presented as one imperial system is actually the total of about a dozen different systems, developed over time, most of them used in specialized circumstances.
If you restrict yourself to say land measurement, chains and furlongs make sense. I mean an acre is 10 square chains. It's when you try to convert to a different subsystem that it seems weird. You didn't use feet to measure land, any more than you used acres to measure cloth.
#8: These have existed for centuries. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_face#/media/File:Allisvanity.jpg
I think the point is that A.I. does it with photorealistic images, which *really* strained the maximum ability of the "best" human artists at *best*.
The AI isn't doing it with photorealistic images. Take a look at that Y in "York".
13. >crypto is an important safety valve against this increasingly-used tool of control.
As you well know it's a double edged sword. Either we decrease our ability to coordinate or we keep the ability to use this coordination for evil. And discoordination can be used for evil means just as well.
Currently, we are living in a world where an authorian state is waging a war of conquest in Europe, managing to find a way around economical sanctions in order to keep doing it. I don't think reasonable utilitarian calculation says that we need less coordination in such situation.
Also ironic, because Grayzone is, apparently, pro-Russian.
14. >this is not the sort of funding ecosystem that inspires confidence.
You mean the one that allows lobbying? Or are you saying that crypto would improve this situation somehow?
16. Meta: Why do people keep equlizing defunding the police and abolishing the police? Surely there are more and less radical approaches and the optimal situation is somewhere in between funding heavy weaponry, warrior mentality and killology trainings and having no police at all.
Half serious answer: such people should be totally canceled. Including access to banking. But damn crypto-bros are not letting this happen!
> Why do people keep equlizing defunding the police and abolishing the police?
Plenty of people on the left have claimed that defunding meant abolition, and plenty of (more sensible IMO) people on the left have claimed that it meant removing aspects of policing that they objected to. It's a straightforward example of motte-and-bailey.
If it's different people defending the weak and strong versions (rather than the same bad-faith actors jumping up and down between them) I wouldn't say it's a *straightforward* example, though of course from the outside it looks much the same.
I'd say that it counts, insofar as we treat groups as discrete things.
If the group had a lot of public infighting, with motters and baileyers yelling at each other, then I wouldn't think it applied. But when it's a matter of one sub-group or another gaining prominence based on what's convenient at the moment, then I think it's justified.
Besides, the word "defund" appears to mean "remove all funding from", which is the same thing as "abolish".
You could use it to mean "slightly reduce funding to" but I don't think I've ever heard it used that way.
A middle-ground might be "pay the policemen wages, but don't give them a budget with which to independently buy weaponry/equipment at their discretion".
But no such weaponry was used in the event which led to this movement, so it's quite obvious that this is not the movement's actual goal.
I agree that I haven't previously heard "defund" used to mean a partial defunding.
But although I can't come up with good examples off the top of my head, I think it may be somewhat normal to use a verb that would normally imply "doing something fully", but instead mean "only do the parts that a reasonable person would expect". Something like, "when I said 'help yourself to the doughnuts', I didn't mean ALL of them!" Not that I think that's what's going on here - I think it started as a call for complete defunding - but I do think the pivot to partial defunding isn't completely unjustified, in a purely grammatical sense.
Importantly the people who coined the phrase supported the abolition version. Source: some podcast, can't remember which. I think it was a Detroit activist organization.
If something that needs money to survive is defunded it ceases to exist. Defunding means entirely. Or it did until the term caught on for the police and had to be backtracked.
Defund the schools. Defund Medicare!
Do those sound like the talking points of people seeking small reasonable reforms?
I blame the fact that I'm not a native speaker so the term 'defund' doesn't sound radical to me.
But, frankly, my impression of USA politics is that "defund *enter social program name*" is a standard republican stance, unless it's police - then it's the left that has gone too far.
I think most sane people see policing as a much more core function of government than most social programs, no matter how good.
Society can function without social programs, it cannot function without police.
But regardless you just seem to be dissembling because my point showed how dumb your’s was.
>16. Meta: Why do people keep equlizing defunding the police and abolishing the police? Surely there are more and less radical approaches and the optimal situation is somewhere in between funding heavy weaponry, warrior mentality and killology trainings and having no police at all.
The biggest event in BLM history was the death of George Floyd. Floyd was killed by a knee restraint (no technology whatsoever, let alone 'heavy weaponry'), and not only was this restraint not taught as part of 'killology training' (whatever that means), it literally wasn't taught and wasn't approved for use.
Wanting to defund the police in response to this event mostly seems to imply one of two things: 1, you don't know any of the details of the incident and think this had anyting to do with the police being 'militarized' or whatever, or 2, you want to restrict funding to police to the point that they literally don't have the resources to engage with criminal suspects at all (i.e. the circumstances leading up the interaction between police and Floyd), which is basically tantamount to abolition in a practical sense.
And as Martin hints at below, a republican calling for virtually anything progressives support (schools, healthcare programs, planned parenthood, government departments and programs etc.) to be 'defunded' would NEVER be interpreted as 'engage in moderate reform to avoid certain undesirable outcomes resulting from these things while still keeping the central functions and structure of them intact', so its a little ridiculous to expect people to believe this is the case when people talk about police defunding.
It's especially the case when we look at where the 'defund the police' stuff actually came from to begin with: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/its-not-about-police-reform
I mean, in Minneapolis, ground zero of George Floyd, the city council almost passed a ballot measure that would have literally gotten rid of the Minneapolis police department: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Minneapolis_Question_2
I would go so far as to say that defund the police as police reform is a form of (god forgive me for using this term) gaslighting, one that emerged following the perceived voter backlash to defund the police candidates. And cutting funding to something strikes me as a very silly way of fundamentally improving a thing from the ground up.
> and not only was this restraint not taught as part of 'killology training'
The attitude that such trainings promotes may have very well contributed. Google what killology is, if you are curious. Also, don't you think that the fact that police uses unapproved tools which results in people's death is already bad enough?
> Wanting to defund the police in response to this event mostly seems to imply one of two things
You are missing the forest here. There were a lot of reasons to talk and do something about all these problems. George Floyd death was just a final straw. You can as well argue that people who started WW I didn't understand the specifics of death of Franz Ferdinand.
> And as Martin hints at below, a republican calling for virtually anything.
Republicans call for decreasing funding for social services all the time and it's considered to be completely mainstream position, thus they do not even need any radical sounding language.
> I mean, in Minneapolis, ground zero of George Floyd, the city council almost passed a ballot measure that would have literally gotten rid of the Minneapolis police department
Your link says:
> The measure would have removed minimum staffing levels for sworn officers, renamed the Minneapolis Police Department as the Minneapolis Department of Public Safety, and shifted oversight of the new agency from the mayor's office to the city council.
This doesn't sound as have no police whatsoever, so people will have shoot criminals on the streets themselves. This sounds as police is rebranded and finally has some public oversight.
> (god forgive me for using this term) gaslighting
I'll never understand how people can simultaneously think that some term is stupid and yet insist on using it. But this is beside the point.
If you weren't just making a lighthearted comment about the "defund"/"abolish" thing, you might try reading this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_defund_the_police_stop_meaning_defund_the/
I forgot I had the link lying around, but through some random chance I stumbled across it just now.
> The safety movement is concerned that Amazon might have enough power to steamroll over Anthropic’s safety-conscious culture; this did happen with DeepMind and Google
Woah wait what? I heard rumors that Safety-conscious culture at Deepmind was always at risk of being steamrolled over, but not that it already happened. Anyone have info on this? It could get pretty bad going forward if I have to make important decisions based on weak information.
I’m not following the assessment of the safety cultures either. It’s OpenAI who let the genie of potential agency in the verbal world out the bottle while DeepMind were doing safe stuff like just folding proteins.
Yes, that OpenAI are now the good (less bad?) guys is certainly an unexpected take.
#3 Regarding the Hunga Tonga eruption I very much noticed a climate effect. I live in New Zealand and the winter that followed it was noticeably wetter and more overcast than normal—it felt like the sun was never shining. In contrast this past winter, just ended, was a lot dryer, with more sunny days.
I assume this doesn't have anything to do with global warming though.
> 25: Effective Altruist Forum: The charity Pure Earth, sponsored by GiveWell, claims to have reduced the prevalence of lead in Bangladeshi turmeric from 47% to ~0%.
I spent a while being dumbfounded about where this wildly implausible claim could have come from, until I realized that this means that 47% of samples of turmeric in Bangladesh had nonnegligible amounts of lead, rather than that the average turmeric in Bangladesh was 47% lead.
.... Thank you for pointing that out, I didn't even realize that was how I uncritically internalized it until you said it
Vague alarm bells did go off, but.. very vague
Given the density of lead I'm not even sure it would be possible to mix it with turmeric without it quickly settling to the bottom of the bottle.
Lead is not used directly; one or more salts of lead are.
Lead compounds are much less dense
I probably should have entered that prison abolitiom contest because I think you really could kind of solve it with dystopian levels of surveillance and social credit.
Basically, just have a public database to keep a records of the crimes of everyone, and a computer system that reports the most relevant ones to everyone around you, including businesses (everything's an app now). The basic aim is to replicate the small town vibe that disincentives crime there by making sure everyone around you knows what you've done. In this system we still have courts but there are no police or prisons (invest the money in surveillance to ensure 100% conviction rates), the amount of social isolation is decided democratically by the people around you. Because all records are public, associating with a known sex criminal would reflect poorly on people, incentivising even friends and family to shun the excluded. There would be a way to get your record cleared, either automatically or after a period of community service or reconciliation with the victim. All in all this seems like the most workable execution of the ideals of prison abolitionist in a large and complex society. The issue of vigilante violence could be solved by not distinguishing crimes based on their victims, murder is murder and so vigilante executioners would also be shunned, except by people who know the full context and still approve - but this is an issue for all crimes anyway. Arguably, if nobody wants to shun you for it, it shouldn't be a crime anyway - we do live in a democracy!
As I see it the main issue would be people who have already been maximally socially isolated - I'm assuming there would be food banks and shelters for murderers and rapists since this is a leftist dystopia, but its unclear to me what happens when serial offenders manage to get shunned even by those. At that point crime is their only way to make a living, presumably at some point they either starve to death, die of exposure, or get killed in a form of self defence that we deem to be socially acceptable, but either way they at least die free. Probably I would just not mention this part in the pitch to Freddie, it's still more thought out than anything else I've read.
Now, I say dystopian because I wouldn't want to live here. I think it would probably work on me so it has the appearance of being workable, but also sounds really depressing. I am very skeptical that the threat of social disapproval would actually work on most people in prison, and they'd probably end up being murdered by vigilantes or each other, or exist as a permanent underclass of petty criminals, excluded from normal social and commerical interations yet not technically imprisoned.
>disincentives crime there by making sure everyone around you knows what you've done<
So, literally the Honor System. You have no mechanism for stopping people who don't care about their reputation. Food banks are irrelevant, these people steal directly from stores and homes.
> people who don't care about their reputation
Or people living in a culture where committing crimes actually *gains* you reputation points among your peers. Where being a bad-ass gangster is considered a cool and admirable ambition to have. Especially as long as you aim your crimes at outsiders, who deserve it and don't have moral standing.
As I said, I don't think it actually works, I just think it sounds like it could work if you do care about social status, which is the target audience for this kind of argument anyway. Eventually it breaks down into "violence against those people would be socially approved and consequence free" and we have justice via vigilante lynch mob, same as in the orginal proposal just with a bit more thought into how people know that some people are socially acceptable targets for violence.
Anything else I can think of is just cheating by playing with defintions, e.g. abolish police and prisons by replacing them with privitised equivalents (like all right-libertarian ideas, this works fine if you have money and is hellish if you don't) or redefining all crime as an expression of mental illness (so instead of police we have armed mental health nurses, and instead of prisons we have hospitals you can't leave - I know a high security psichatric facility is not technically a prison, but you wouldn't know just from looking at it, and I defintely wouldn't want tobe sent there!)
"You have no mechanism for stopping people who don't care about their reputation."
Bingo. Someone who is already outcast literally has nothing to lose in this system, seeing how vigilante justice is explicitly punished. Even court trials would not be a big hassle - "yeah, I did it, add it to the list, are we done yet?" So why not continue stealing, robbing, murdering? What's the worst thing that could happen? Someone shoots you in self-defense? Well, shoot them before they get a chance.
Let's keep prisons around until someone has a better idea, please.
I mean, is getting together with your friends to go get your stolen stuff back and beat their ass (for example) not a mechanism? Presumably if everyone knew the circumstances, you wouldn’t face repercussions for that as the original victim.
Unless the thief comes from a community where stealing from people like you either isn't seen as very bad or is actively seen as praiseworthy, in which case his friends might well decide to come round and beat you up (or kill you, why not escalate a bit?) in retaliation.
Referring to the Big Lie does not degrade Donald Trump. It can be read both ways; the Big Lie in Trump's sense is what the "mainstream media" tells about the result of the election. Both Trump and Biden have used the term Big Lie, but they mean different things. (Trump: "The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!").
But that's clearly not how those terms are used in practice. "The Big Lie" is a left-coded term to deride those who believe the election may have involved any level of fraud. I guess you could be saying that Republicans should take the term back like gay people did with Queer, but that's pretty non-obvious.
It's also a term coined by Hitler, and thus is an incredibly ham-fisted attempt to link Trump and Hitler in the public consciousness.
Is it left coded? Today was the first time I encountered the Big Lie as being used by the left. I have only ever encountered it being used by people who believe the election was stolen.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=the+big+lie
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/04/1070337968/why-is-the-big-lie-proving-so-hard-to-dispel
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/what-is-the-big-lie/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/focus-big-lie-not-big-liar
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/19/politics/donald-trump-big-lie-explainer/index.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/trump-voters-big-lie-stolen-election/629572/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-powerful-conservatives-pushed-the-big-lie-that-the-2020-election-was-fraudulent
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/03/the-psychological-reason-that-so-many-fall-for-the-big-lie/
https://politicaldictionary.com/words/big-lie/
https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/news/peace_publications/democracy/the-big-lie-and-big-tech.pdf
https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/tech-big-lie
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/rising-trend/big-lie
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/12/trumps-big-lie-was-bigger-than-just-stolen-election/
Nine of those links (the first six, Political Dictionary, Carter Center, and the NYU link) agree that "the Big Lie" is a term right wingers who believe that the 2020 election was stolen use to refer the the idea that the election was stolen. One of them (Salon) seems to say the opposite, the others don't really talk about it either way.
It's possible that this is just a confusing term: when I see the NPR link saying "why is the 'Big Lie' so hard to dispel" I see that as saying "why is it so hard to dispel the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, which is what the Big Lie refers to" while others may see it as "why is it so hard to dispel the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, which is a Big Lie." The term is a bit like the blue dress/white dress picture.
It's funny, because they seem to want to think that they're referring to his supposed use of "The Big Lie" so they can liken him to Hitler, but their side pretty clearly seems to be the one who coined it and uses it most frequently... meaning they're Hitler in the analogy.
I found this use in 2017 from a leftist source, although obviously a different topic (Trump saying that the media lies is the Big Lie, because the media never lies): https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/23/trump-big-lie-media-first-amendment-david-andelman-column/96927484/
And the first use I can find related to the election is also from a leftist, and explicitly refers to "Trump’s Big Lie": https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trumps-big-lie-led-insurrection
#27 funnily enough the odds of a gaming manager's marriage falling apart (52.9%) is strikingly close to the odds of losing at the roulette table with an even/odds bet (52.6%).
(27) My hypothesis is that men who struggle on the dating market divorce less because of lack of options, explaining why nerdy jobs have lower divorce rates.
I decided to check if other dating success predictors affect divorce rates, and it seems like shorter men also divorce less: https://newrepublic.com/article/119233/short-men-do-more-housework-earn-more-divorce-less
Alternative explanation: the "lack of options" could be a side effect of the jobs introverted, nerdy people typically have. Where do you meet more attractive people of the opposite sex who are willing to start a sexual relationship - as a bartender in an alcohol-drenched nightclub, or glued to an office chair alongside the ever-same half-dozen other nerds in your team?
Low-income men divorce a lot more.
This is highly unlikely to explain the effect, because women initiate the vast majority of divorces.
#44 “You're dead already. You just don't know it.” The Rundown 2003
And for that matter "Game over, man! Game over!" aliens 1986
8. For some reason I had to move away from the screen to see the text, but the spiral was obvious immediately. Can't see any cats though.
21. Any study that uses Mr Jerkface language can't possibly be good, as they clearly aren't even trying to be unbiased or scientific. You should consider the possibility that the study is bad in ways you just can't detect.
1. - 3. Temperatures have been completely stable in the USA for nearly two decades when measured from the actual state of the art weather station network the US gov operates, and which climatologists conspicuously refuse to use. Go here, then select "All months" and observe the perfectly flat trend which stretches back to the day the network opened:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/1/0
Please try to square that with the statement that records were broken in the USA. Europe, of course, has no equivalent to this network specifically for climate purposes, which is why when you investigate "record breaking" temperatures will often be recorded in places like 50 ft behind jet engine exhausts, or from stations that mysteriously were multiple degrees hotter than one half a mile away.
And that ignores the fact that "records" here doesn't have the definition you'd expect when used by climatologists. The historical record gives strong evidence of much warmer temperatures in the past, like records of people doing farming in places where today that's impossible because it's too cold.
Climatology is ultimately just like sociology, psychology and other such sciences. This business of pretending it's better needs to end. It's not better. If anything it's worse. The only genuine climate crisis is the one in our minds.
>1. - 3. Temperatures have been completely stable in the USA for nearly two decades when measured from the actual state of the art weather station network the US gov operates, and which climatologists conspicuously refuse to use. Go here, then select "All months" and observe the perfectly flat trend which stretches back to the day the network opened:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/1/0
>Please try to square that with the statement that records were broken in the USA.
As you wish.
If you download the plotted data and compute the linear trend, you get 0.29 C/decade, which is not perfectly flat. It happens to be a larger trend than the globe as a whole. Hard to see by eye because of the large month-to-month variability, but it's a bit easier to eyeball if you plot the annual averages instead:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/ann/12
Then you get records (which I define as the largest value ever recorded at a given station or over a given area) when some parts of the US are much warmer than the statewide average and some parts are much cooler.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/county/mapping/110/tavg/202308/3/rank
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if our visual cortex included an integrator with variable, controlled integration periods? I'd love to be able to look at a noisy graph and immediately resolve the underlying trends.
Yes, exactly, a record that happens at exactly one place isn't climate but it's presented as if it is. Nothing special happened this year.
Replying a bit more thoroughly now I'm back at a keyboard ...
Given any dataset, you can always compute a trend over it. That doesn't mean it's meaningful.
The reason you need to use software to even see there's a trend at all is because it's so utterly tiny that even an anomaly plot cannot reveal it (chosen specifically to make tiny changes easier to see). The variability absolutely swamps any chance of seeing a trend, even over long periods of time. It is for all meaningful purposes, flat.
This cuts both ways of course. If the trend the computed was -0.1C per decade, this also wouldn't mean we're heading for an ice age, or very much at all.
Climatologists like to argue otherwise, and are willing to take literally any trend at all and extrapolate it indefinitely into the future, often extrapolating it using non-linear functions. They will look at a graph which is so stable it looks flat even when plotting deviations from an average, and say the world is doomed.
> Then you get records (which I define as the largest value ever recorded at a given station or over a given area)
They (the media, government agencies) define it at the station level over a period of seconds, which is highly deceptive given that they define climate as the whole world over a period of centuries. Using the former to make arguments about the latter is guaranteed to create a long series of spurious "records" simply due to increasing the number of weather stations, even if nothing is happening on average.
In other words, your initial claim of zero trend was not only factually wrong but meaningless.
If you are going to make arguments that you know are facetious, take them somewhere else and don't waste our time .
Literally no natural dataset will have a trend line of exactly zero, will it? I did state clearly that if you look at it, it's flat. You had to download the data and compute on it to find otherwise. At some point you draw a line and say that's not a meaningful number. The argument that this trend both matters and can be extrapolated indefinitely is the meaningless thing here
He used software because humans can’t see these trends. You seem to be fooled by large positive anomalies in the earlier years of the century (possibly El Niño) to think that there was no increase in temperatures but there’s clearly higher anomalies in the later part of the sequence than the beginning. You can see this with your original plot by mentally blocking out the highest months - you can see the trend increases.
0.29 C/decade is a large trend. 3.0 per year.
“If the trend the computed was -0.1C per decade, this also wouldn't mean we're heading for an ice age, or very much at all.”
So you did two things there. Picked a lower change per decade and argued a straw man (ice age). Actually that trend, even if low, would be worrying - and over time would lead to much lower temperatures.
> 0.29 C/decade is a large trend. 3.0 per year.
Is this a thinko? What do you mean by this exactly? 0.29C a decade is 0.029C per year, not 3.
> So you did two things there. Picked a lower change per decade and argued a straw man (ice age).
The number is irrelevant to the argument. Re-read my sentence as -0.29C/decade if you wish. There is no straw man here, that type of extrapolation is exactly what previously led to the global cooling scare of the 70s, and is the type of extrapolation being used to claim there are problems today. Where's the straw man? Assuming that any given trend in random datasets, no matter how tiny, must always matter, is pathology number one of the pseudo-intellectual class.
> that trend, even if low, would be worrying
If we inexplicably assumed it would continue indefinitely forever and if we cared about things happening thousands of years into the future, yes. But that sort of mindless extrapolation of whatever Excel spits out is exactly what I'm attacking here.
"Consciousness is inherently hard to study," as Scott says. And so is climate, because we only have one Earth to measure, it's an extremely complex system, there's no way to run experiments, and predictions can often only be verified over the course of decades. It's arguably a more *important* field than consciousness, but just because we'd *really like* it to be tractable doesn't make it so.
Most people would have no trouble with the claim that it's possible everything "experts" think about consciousness is wrong. But so many rationalists, including Scott, don't apply this same level of skepticism to claims that we "understand" climate science except for a handful of ignorant deniers.
Yes, that nails it. Pseudo-science happens when people assume any question can be answered given sufficient numbers of PhD grants. The attitude is: understanding the Earth's systems is important, therefore, we understand them.
The possibility that you can fund a bunch of universities for a few decades and end up with no useful level of understanding doesn't occur to people who haven't gone deep into the details, perhaps because of the frightening implications for progress and stability. Scott accepts it can happen for studies into ESP or even all of social psychology, but not yet for other things.
Measuring temperature is really not as complex as understanding consciousness.
Huh, looking at that data I see an extremely obvious trendline that starts going up around 1990.
US CRN data starts at 2005.
The CRN was created because climatology heavily manipulates data from other networks, arguing that they aren't high quality sources, and congress decided to solve that argument by spending money.
For example go back to 1999 and you'll find NASA scientists expressing frustration that US temperature data shows no trend in the 20th century.. They fixed it by changing the data.
For point 16, Freddie de Boer’s Derek Chauvin Defund Challenge, I'm quite emotionally shaken by this, on how very lightly people propose to reintroduce a punishment that was in the past considered worse then death.
I've been going trough the comments here and on de Boers' article and I'm surprised how people do not seem to recognize this for what it is. This proposal is literately bringing back 'civil death' (civiliter mortuus). A punishment so heinous that it was forbidden by the Belgian constitution (where I live), written in 1831, in the strongest way possible. Capital punishment, by comparison, was only formally forbidden by the constitution in 1996. The wording here is interesting. Art 14bis from 1996 states "Capital punishment is abolished". By contrast, in Art 18 from 1831 we can read that "The civil death is abolished, and cannot be reintroduced." In a time where capital punishment was still a common thing we found it necessary to forbid civil death in stronger terms than capital punishment is forbidden today.
It yet again seems to me that as a society we keep on forgetting the arguments used in the intellectual battles of the past thus forgetting the reasons for a obvious 'good' that we should defend.
Yes. Outlawry should be read as a euphemism for stuff from a horror movie. "Silence of the Lambs" is what I tend to reference.
> 'civil death' (civiliter mortuus)
I don't get it. Mortuus is an adjective; it means "dead". Death is mors.
The other word proves that nothing weird is going on with mortuus; civiliter is the adverb form of the adjective civilis, and an adverb is exactly what we'd expect if we wanted to apply a description to an adjective.
Civiliter mortuus appears to mean "civilly dead" [or "dead from a political perspective"], referring to the state of the person sentenced, not to the penalty.
Do you have a link to the code, or just the text of the sentence saying "the civil death is abolished and cannot be reintroduced"?
I don't speak Latin myself, I copied the Latin name from Wikipedia for dramatic effect and to emphasize that this punishment exists for a long time before we as a species were sane enough to get rid of it.
For the second question, the Belgian constitution is written in the official languages, Dutch, French and German. Still, I just found an official translation into English: https://www.dekamer.be/kvvcr/pdf_sections/publications/constitution/GrondwetUK.pdf
Article 14bis: Capital punishment is abolished
Article 18: Civil death is abolished; it cannot be re-introduced.
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_death) sources the Latin to a law dictionary which actually defines the state of being civilly dead not civil death itself. So it looks like the Wikipedian adding that was also doing it without actually understanding it.
Sourcing civil death to Latin would actually be a anachronistic, since the specific institution of civil death as opposed to more general outlawing is actually an invention of the Napoleonic codification of civil law, so "mort civile" would be the original (French) term.
An English translation of the original code civil can be found here: https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/code/book1/c_title01.html
The definition of civil death is in article 25 (obviously since repealed even in France):
"By civil death, the party condemned loses his property in all the goods which he possessed; and the succession is open for the benefit of his heirs, on whom his estate devolves, in the same manner as if he were naturally dead and intestate.
He can no longer inherit any estate, nor transmit, by this title, the property which he has acquired in consequence.
He is no longer capable of disposing of his property, in whole or in part, either by way of gift during his life, or by will, nor of receiving by similar title, except for the purpose of subsistence. He cannot be nominated guardian, nor concur in any act relative to guardianship.
He cannot be a witness in any solemn public act, nor be admitted to give evidence in any court. He cannot engage in any suit, whether as defendant or plaintiff, except in the name and by the intervention of a special curator appointed for him by the court in which the action is brought.
He is incapable of contracting a marriage attended by any civil consequences.
If he have previously contracted marriage, it is dissolved, as respects all civil effects. His wife and his heirs shall respectively exercise those rights and demands to which his natural death would have given rise."
This is actually a semi-modern concept, since what is lost here is ("only") legal personality as opposed to the protection of criminal law. This of course requires the concept of legal personality also invented around that time. Actually that art. 25 sounds a lot like the lawyers in the commission getting carried away with working that distinction out, though I have no idea of the actual history.
According the German Wikipedia the closest equivalent in Roman law would have been a "capitis deminutio maxima" (approximately a "maximum demotion of status") but a Roman would have thought of that not really as a civil equivalent of death but actually as a demotion from "citizen family-head" to "unfree person" both of which where more general classes a person could be in.
The proposal Scott quotes in #16 is actually much more archaic than that, since it amounts to just outlawing someone entirely. I think for a Roman that would be most similar to a "proscriptio".
I was going to make a remark that law Latin is not actually Latin, but the idea "civilly dead" actually covers "outlawry" quite well.
Someone who is dead generally cannot bring an action in law (at most the estate can, which is treated somewhat differently). So someone who cannot bring an action is "civilly dead". You cannot murder a corpse, at best you can be charged with mistreating ("defiling"?) it, which is a much smaller penalty.
The 1831 constitution appears to be saying "you can no longer outlaw someone, and any law that re-introduces it is unconstitutional".
> I was going to make a remark that law Latin is not actually Latin, but the idea "civilly dead" actually covers "outlawry" quite well.
I haven't seen much law Latin, but if you look at e.g. early modern "international scholarship" Latin it's quite apparent that it's modern language dressed up as Latin. It's much easier for a modern person to read than Latin as spoken by a native speaker.
I also don't know anything about Church Latin, but it would be a very relevant comparison here.
There were a lot of Protestants complaining that Catholic priests, especially in out of the way places, didn't know Latin. So they were reciting stuff from memory, and getting it wrong.
I'm a little leery of "Latin as spoken by a native speaker". Latin has about as many native speakers as Babylonian.
There is not as much native Latin literature preserved as there is native Akkadian literature (assuming you're willing to call a list of different types of trees "literature"), but there's still plenty to show you the difference between how native speakers used the language and how non-native speakers in the 1700s did.
I'm quite skeptical of the proposed system because it basically backstops everything with an erratic and inconsistently applied death penalty, and I'd rather penalties be predictably consistent. But I'm also skeptical of the "worse than death" part, and that could bear some explaining.
The death penalty is society saying "we officially want you dead - firing squad is out back, any last words?". Outlawry is society saying "we officially want you dead, but we can't afford bullets. Meh, probably someone will kill you sooner or later". How is the latter not strictly better than the former, from the victim's point of view? If they don't want to live under that could of uncertainty. they can certainly provide their own bullet. Or just walk through a residential neighborhood at 3:00 AM shouting "I am an outlaw!" at the top of their lungs.
And yes, life as an outlaw sucks in a lot of respects, can't live openly with your family, can't work an honest job, can't go to the police when people commit crimes against you, etc. But it's still life, and if you really don't want it you can be done with it whenever you want.
Or you can just leave; nobody has ever implemented outlawry as a world government and I don't think that's being proposed here. It seems to me that outlawry is functionally equivalent to exile, but if you prefer to live on the run inside the realm that wants to be rid of you, it's only unpaid amateur vigilantes you have to worry about, the police won't be looking for you.
Exile is a drastic punishment, and one that could easily be overused to the point of abuse, but it usually isn't considered "worse than death".
When there is a reliably administered defined penalty, the person usually suffers the defined penalty. The convicted person may enjoy their rights not specifically stripped away as a penalty. Even going by some of the. An outlaw (defined as "person declared outside the protection of the law") does not enjoy any protections of the law. Any. Protections. They may be subject to any and all forms of abuse without any legal recourse to complain. It is not only uncertain method of applying a death penalty, but a penalty possibly including (but not excluding) torture or slavery or other additional horrors. (If one wants to avoid those distasteful outcomes and they are banned, then the criminal enjoys some protection, and are not strictly speaking an outlaw in the sense as probably intended by the Belgian constitutional ban and such.)
Major benefits of post-Enlightenment thought "civilized" death penalty include that is supposed to be quick, reliably administered and administered according to a set procedure, supposed follow only after due diligence to verify the identity of the person to be killed (usually achieved by keeping the condemned in custody after the penalty is announced), have a procedure for disposing of the remains after the fact, and all of the above leaves a legal paper trail and administrative records that can verified by the public. These are substantial rights and improvements compared to not having them, and we have not even come to mentioning related ideas like "right to trial".
Exile can became equally barbaric punishment if the punishment of exile doesn't come with a location where the exile is exiled to (that allows them to enter) and grant passage there. (In addition it can possibly become counterproductive as punishment if the exile is exiled to somewhere not unpleasant and likely irresponsible if the exile continues committing crimes against the local population in the place of exile. I suppose it related why exile to other countries is viewed as acceptable outcome for removing political dissidents but not violent criminals. Penal colonies are slightly different thing.)
27: Am I right in thinking that "gaming" is being used as a euphemism for casinos, and these categories are not meant to include, say, World of WarCraft, chess organizations, sports, e-sports, etc.?
Correct.
I think it's not so much a euphemism as it is an archaism.
Ngrams suggests "gaming" lost favor to "gambling" in the mid-1800s, and then picked back up in the 1980s (probably thanks to videogames).
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gaming%2Cgambling&year_start=1700&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
I'm confused about how you think the ngrams is relevant.
My model is that "games" is a much broader category than "gambling", because things like the examples I listed above (World of WarCraft, chess, sports, e-sports, etc.) are part of the first category but not the second. But that people sometimes say "games" as a euphemism when they really mean "gambling specifically, not including other games".
I don't see how statistics about how often each word is used tells us whether the word is being used euphemistically or not.
Oh. Because World of WarCraft, e-sports, etc., haven't been around more than a couple of decades (like... within my lifetime), so when one said 'gaming', gambling was the primary referent—there was nothing to euphemize towards!
If you go to a dictionary like the 1913 version of Webster's, that's all you get:
https://www.websters1913.com/words/Gaming
"The act or practice of playing games for stakes or wagers; gambling."
The ngram is just to show that "gaming" became less popular a word over time, being replaced by "gambling", which allowed "gaming" room to take on its new sense as modern video and board games became popular.
Those particular examples may be recent but I also listed examples that have existed for thousands of years, like regular sports and chess.
Maybe this is a "games" vs "gaming" thing, where for some bizarre reason "gaming" historically meant something other than "doing games" and the reasons for that particular linguistic stupidity are lost to the mists of time?
> I also listed examples that have existed for thousands of years, like regular sports and chess.
I didn't know what to do with those really— baseball is certainly organized into "games" but I don't think it's common to refer to the action of playing baseball as "gaming"; I would almost see it as a counterexample. Chess I'm not sure wouldn't have counted as gambling for some people (in the tradition I grew up in, it was absolutely lumped in with card-playing, though we did not hold strictly to it).
> Maybe this is a "games" vs "gaming" thing, where for some bizarre reason "gaming" historically meant something other than "doing games" and the reasons for that particular linguistic stupidity are lost to the mists of time?
Hmm... etymonline suggests it may just be because "game" wasn't used as a verb very often ("little recorded from c. 1400 and modern use for "to play at games" (1520s) probably is a new formation from the noun; and it might have been re-re-coined late 20c. in reference to computer games").
https://www.etymonline.com/word/game
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gaming
And you don't think people were betting on the results of the original Olympic games in Classical times?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46302106_Gambling_on_the_Olympics
"The relationship between gambling and the Olympic Games are nothing new, ancient Greek artefacts indicate that betting on the Olympic Games generated great enthusiasm. Similarly, the earliest example of bribes offered to athletes in exchange for a reduced level of performance stems from the time of the ancient Greek Olympics (Kiernan & Daley, 1965)."
Games -> playing games -> gaming and as sure as night follows day, betting on results of games/sports. You can call that gambling today, but again Merriam-Webster tells me the first use of "gamble" as a verb was in 1757 (so much later than "gaming") and it probably is derived from "game" the same way:
"probably back-formation from gambler, perhaps alteration (by dissimilation, or substitution of the frequentative suffix -le) of early Modern English gamner "player in a game," from gamen "to play" (going back to Middle English gamenen, going back to Old English gamenian, derivative of gamen GAME entry 1) + -er -ER entry 2"
So "gambling" is just another way of saying "gaming" and though you may wish to keep WoW pristinely free of any taint of betting and unsavoury associations by "that is gaming, the other thing is gambling, use a different term for that" - sorry, that won't work. "Gaming" for betting on games and sports has the historical precedence here, you'll have to invent a new term for playing video games etc. to make such a distinction stick.
Well, we refer to card games, not card gambles, when it comes to both a round of Snap for the kids and betting in the weekly poker night for Dad.
I get the distinction you're trying to make, but you're swimming against the tide of usage for about four hundred years.
Anyone with the most cursory familiarity with Vegas, legal gambling more than ten years ago, or mob movies should know it's the Nevada Gaming Control Board (or commission).
Yes, that is how the term is used for formal business categorisation (somewhat confusingly for modern audiences).
This seems like it OUGHT to be confusing for any audience. The root word in "gaming" is obviously "game"; most games do not involve gambling, and this is not a recent change. (Sports, children's games, and board games have been around for thousands of years. And I'm not sure about carnival games but I bet they're pretty old, too.)
I agree that modern people do not commonly use the exact word "gaming" for games other than gambling games and computer games, and the second thing is comparatively recent. But it seems obvious to me that the word OUGHT to mean "playing games" (or something extremely close to that). And it's not like we lack a good alternative that means "gambling", if that's what you're trying to communicate.
Additionally, many central examples of gambling can only be considered "games" by the most generous of definitions (e.g. slots, lotteries).
I don't know why people would use an obviously-inappropriate word when they have a perfectly good alternative--unless being cagey is the point. Which is why it seems euphemistic to me.
The same term is used in the UK for job and business classification. These categories tend to be updated... extremely rarely. It's possible it was euphemistic, but I think a more likely scenario is that the other kinds of games (sports, children's games, board games) weren't meaningfully 'financialised' in that you needed a business/employment category to capture them at the time.
"Gamesters" was a term for gamblers (online Merriam-Webster tells me "first used in 1549), see the Star Trek episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion".
No Regency Romance worth its salt would be complete without a reference to the "gaming hells" where the bad boy hero (or, if the hero is uptight and righteous, his rakish best friend) go to drink and bet and carouse:
http://historicalhussies.blogspot.com/2022/01/gaming-clubs-and-gaming-hells-during.html
"Gaming clubs were establishments frequented by the aristocracy, exclusive and with strict guidelines for behavior. The most exclusive of the time were The Cocoa Tree, White’s, Brook’s, and Almack’s. They were located in St. James and were considered the poshest of the gaming establishments. These were called “golden hells” and catered to the upper crust. These were in direct contrast to the gaming hells or “copper hells” patronized by the lower classes. The “golden hells” were just as apt to use gambling and outrageous wagers. The wagers were entered into a “betting book” so the participants didn’t forget the terms and amounts wagered. One remarkable wager found on the books states, “April 2nd, 1809. Mr. Howard bets Mr. Osbon Ten guineas that Lord Folkestone does not marry Miss Taylor before this day twelve month." [Early form of prediction markets, given a similar question on one mentioned here previously?]
Gaming hells were for the lower, less genteel clientele. Their likes frequented clubs in a rougher part of London, which admitted people of all walks and stations of life, and both genders in some cases. Ladies were not allowed in the gambling establishments of the wealthy, as they were considered gentlemen’s clubs and off limits to ladies."
Over time, gaming clubs could morph into (semi) respectable gentlemen's clubs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crockford%27s_(club)
"Crockford's, the popular name for William Crockford's St James's Club was a London gentlemen's club, now dissolved. It was established in 1823, closed in 1845, re-founded in 1928 and closed in 1970. One of London's older clubs, it was centred on gambling and maintained a somewhat raffish and raucous reputation. It was founded by William Crockford who employed Benjamin Wyatt and Philip Wyatt to construct the city's most opulent palace of gentlemanly pleasure, which opened in November 1827 and he employed two of London's finest chefs of the time, Louis Eustache Ude and then Charles Elmé Francatelli to feed its members, food and drink being supplied free after midnight.
From 1823, the club leased 50 St. James's Street, and then nos. 51–53, which enabled Crockford to pull down all four houses and build his palatial club on the site. After the club's closure, this continued to be used as a clubhouse, at first briefly by the short-lived Military, Naval and County Service Club, and then between 1874 and 1976 it was home to the Devonshire Club.
The current Crockfords, though using much of the "Crocky" imagery and high-end reputation, has no connection with the original club and operates from an entirely different building at nearby 30 Curzon Street."
Re. divorce rates. I expect divorce rates are anti correlated with income which probably goes a long way towards explaining this finding.
#27: "One thinks here of those gut-wrenching stories of women who, escaping one violent, abusive relationship, head straight for similar in the choice of their next partner." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
I recently had my first real emotional encounter with a woman who was a victim of apparently very serious physical abuse over the course of several years, basically when she started having an unprompted mental breakdown.
She told me how the worst part was how everybody in town knew about it and just didn’t care. Though I obviously didn’t say so, I couldn’t help but think that she was implicitly condoning it by staying for years. It seems like a situation where the would-be jury-of-peers is taking its cue from the victim, while the victim is simultaneously taking her cue from them. Come to find out that wasn’t her only abusive long term relationship either. It really was heart wrenching to hear, and I came away feeling like I understood more, and less about the dynamics of abusive relationships at the same time.
Nobody cared, but when police came to my house 9 different times in 6 years to respond to calls of a DV situation each time I sent them away and insisted nothing was going on. Meanwhile the friends and relatives who disapproved of my relationship were yelled at and then cut out of my life.
"nobody cared".
"She told me how the worst part was how everybody in town knew about it and just didn’t care. Though I obviously didn’t say so, I couldn’t help but think that she was implicitly condoning it by staying for years."
When they say "don't blame the victim," they often mean "we're blaming YOU!"
It is difficult, because the instinctive first reaction *is* "why are you staying with him? get out and get away!" (I know I'm using female victims of male abusers here, but I acknowledge that there are male victims of female abusers, who often have it much worse because 'what do you mean a woman is beating you up, what kind of man are you?' mockery, and that the perfect defence for the abuser there is if the victim hits back - 'he hit me, *he's* the abusive one!' and that verbal and emotional abuse is just as bad as physical abuse).
But that's often more difficult than we imagine. From pride being involved (some people do not want to think of themselves as battered wives or victims of domestic abuse and put a lot of effort into keeping up the image that everything in the marriage or partnership is perfectly fine) to having had any confidence and initiative literally knocked out of them to lack of resources to get away to the guy being crazy and violent enough to come after them and kick in doors to get at them - that puts a lot of friends/family into the position of being worried for their *own* families if they get involved, so they leave it to "just call the cops".
And yeah, there's a set of women who do float from bad relationship to bad relationship, and after a while friends and family are burned out - they've been supportive, they've tried, and she just gets back into the same pattern over and over.
I find the claim that the deepmind ‘safety culture’ has been steamrolled over while the safety culture at openAI is still intact to be pretty strange. My impression is that both companies have a small committed pro safety contingent but this has a questionable effect on overall policy. OpenAI has this flashy ‘super alignment’ effort but I’m not sure this is evidence that the leadership or average employee cares very much about this (eg the notorious jan lieke tweet) or that the actual effect of the company is very beneficial to safety efforts. They are willing to advocate for safety in public but so are Google/deepmind
I don't think Google/deepmind have ever even claimed to care about safety in the "prevent AI doom" sense, just in th "prevent AI saying unwoke stuff" sense.
They employ a safety team (in the existential sense) and have for years, and Shane legg (a cofounder) is vocal about it. Him and demis signed the extinction open letter. To be clear I think they are not that great at this overall as an institution, but my point is more that I don’t think openAI are particularly any better, and I wasn’t sure why Scott seems to give them a free pass rather than deepmind; the description ‘they have some clever people doing x risk stuff, but most of the effort goes into winning’ applies to both companies imo, and if anything openAI has been much more aggressive
Hey when the robot overlords are feeding me in the nutrient paste processor I insist they use the proper pronouns and stick the hwites in first!
I agree; anyone who has anything remotely resembling a safety culture would not be making frontier models. MIRI could be considered a "safety culture".
Also, my understanding of the Sydney botch is that Microsoft demanded and got an un-mutilated GPT-4 from OpenAI and then went live with it; any environment in which that can happen cannot be plausibly called a "safety culture" because if you do that with an X-risk AI then it's lights out regardless of literally anything else in your procedures.
re 13 Grayzone, we only have their word that the ban had anything to do with their reporting, gofundme haven't commented. (They also post a lot of covid conspiracy stuff so could be a continuation of that policy). The money was also returned to donors so "(ie stolen all their money)." is inaccurate.
Grayzone have been accused to financial ties to the Russian government in the past. Blumenthal has certainly appeared on Russia today in the past. Their patreon and gofundme income isn't nearly enough to cover their costs, and they don't disclose their other sources of funding. If that were true (which for legal reasons I obviously can't speculate) then that would potentially make them subject to money laundering and foreign influence laws, which would be a more serious issue that gofundme would have legitimate reason to not want to be associated with.
#48 hyundai parking.
I invented that solution when I was 8 years old. (probably influenced by return to the future II). And the reason nobody built it since then is that its a solution in search of a problem.
It really isn't that hard to parallel park, even before cameras and radars were invented. It becomes even easier if you accept that plastic bumpers are elastic and it's ok to touch them.
The other reason nobody has built it is that it's ridiculously mechanically complicated for a car with one engine and a driveshaft.
For an electric car with motors on all four wheels anyway, it's much much simpler. Probably still not actually worth implementing on most cars, but maybe Smart or someone will do it since making cars that are possible to park in ridiculous European streets is basically their whole niche.
I don't know. Smart specialises in crabs that can also go forward.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&iar=images&q=smart+parked+sideways&iax=images&ia=images
True. I believe that there are also cars programmed to parallel park the car for you these days, if you suck at it and can't or don't care to learn.
yeah i remember seeing a similar set up almost 20 years ago. I think its one of those ideas that works in a test scenario but isnt commercially viable so every few years some marketing department releases something about this "breakthrough" to get attention.
I remember seeing a concept vehicle from Jeep 15ish? years ago with this feature.
Regards 48 -- the crab like dricing system isnt new-- and a version has existed since 1927! The reason this tech fails is because it is expensive to repair
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5R368iX7iI
>19
The analysis seems to be pretty on point that it was too large an escalation to ever work except in a few very niche cases. The removal of yourself from a social group is only going to be a motivating threat on very specific groups, generally no more than close family. Even for those whom could force through a meat boycott in exchange for their presence, framing it as adversarial is guaranteed to engender resentment or just simple refusal to comply. 'It's my way or the highway' is one of those demands that's extremely brittle, and often ends up with everyone else leaving on mass rather than doing things your way.
This should have been obvious, though, to anyone with even the most basic social intuition. What was it that allowed this obvious non-starter of an idea to ever get off the ground floor at all?
Lots of reasons I imagine. There's a certainly a degree of arrogance that helps convince someone that this is a good idea, but there's got to be a whole heaping of group think to let it take off on mass.
A lot of the benefits to such a stance are also front loaded, which certainly helps adoption. If you make the threat and succeed you win personal kudos, and if you fail you get the consolation prize of being a martyr to the cause amongst vegan friends. Both outcomes are good stories that may motivate others to try and follow in their footsteps. It's only a months or years later most people will realize their friends have all shifted to a new meat friendly WhatsApp group and they haven't received an invite to any family get togethers since they took their stand.
Would it help your intuition here to realize that this was mostly a thing for 20 year old women on Tiktok?
So typical mind fallacy, the belief that everyone thinks as you do (but somehow needs a nudge to start acting on it). Reinforced by the Tiktok echo chamber.
>everyone else leaving on mass rather than doing things your way.
Not "on mass". "En masse".
Meh I am no die hard descriptivist, but this one seems not worth fighting.
Also seems like a good way to be covertly fed a lot of meat by people pissed at you.
29. Most AI chatbot users are women IIRC. Something like 70% of users are female?
I worked for a bit at Yahoo years back on some chatbots of theirs laundered through Kik. I think you're about right.
Huh. I guess it makes sense that it would be true of old chatbots, too.
#19
The Vegan pledge is very interesting. A bold move from a minority to impose it's view hoping that the majority will consider the sacrifice/effort small enough to be worth for enjoying the company of the minority. This is quite different from the classic, indirect approach, where the effort is imposed through call to a legislating/regulating body (the gov) using media campaigns and lobbying.
The classic approach has often worked, but also failed. it's difficult to predict which will success and which will not, because prior are mixed and self bias strong (do you personally agree with the request or not?)
For the direct bold approach, it's easier: My personal guess is that it will always fail: the minority would need to be unusually popular for whatever reason for it to succeed, and I don't see how such a super-popular minority would not have it's cause already mainstream with much subtler push than a frontal "all or nothing", simple imitation would do the trick.
So i am not surprised at all by the outcome, but what i'd like to know is if the direct approach has worked, ever? That would be so strange it's worth a full post on ACT :-)
Now if I am right (direct approach never work), one question is how to implement brakes/checks to block as completely as possible the indirect approach: I feel this indirect approach has gone in overdrive and is the main phenomenon behind (what I consider as) a clear decrease in freedom (which, for me, also means quality of life) in western world those last 40 years...
Yep, if your movement is strong enough to have a chance at success, it will command enough resources for both direct and indirect approaches. But no movement starts out like that, you also need a core of true believers willing to make doomed gestures (cf. early abolitionists).
The analogy to smoking made in the #19 linked article is interesting, since part of why non-smokers won the cultural debate over the pervasiveness of smoking (at least in the US) is that smokers were never a majority: per Gallup poll numbers going back to 1944 on "Have you, yourself, smoked any cigarettes in the past week", the rate of smoking in the US peaked in the early-to-mid 50s at about 45% of adults, declining pretty steadily to 20% in 2012 (most recent year I found in a quick googling). Given the smooth and continuous decline, I'd guess the decline in social acceptability of smoking is more downstream of declining smoking rates than upstream; if so, the Vegan pledgers mistook effect for cause in addition to both overestimating their own social clout and underestimating the social clout of committed omnivores.
Also I think the messaging on the health stuff wasn't nearly as ambiguous as it is made out to be. My grandmother for example smoked like 3 packs a day until she got pregnant in 1954. Never smoked another cigarette. And she seemed to think the downsides for mothers and especially pregnant women and young children were fairly well understood.
This is a bit like coal mining or whatever. You will see in the MSM these arguments that seem to rely on the idea that the coal miners or other workers in the 1890s didn't actually know their work environments were dangerous/toxic/harmful. Which really is not the case at all.
People were well aware, they just lacked options and maybe lacked all the medical facts regarding the exact physiology of the harm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPZwRF7yRAQ
𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘨𝘰, 𝘣𝘰𝘺𝘴, 𝘨𝘰
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺'𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩
𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘸𝘰 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩
𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘰
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦'𝘴 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘰𝘯𝘶𝘴 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘨𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘳𝘦
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦
𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘰𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯' 𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥
𝘍𝘰𝘳 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘣𝘰𝘣 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘫𝘰𝘣, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘱𝘢𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘥
This song was apparently written in 1964. (About workers in a nylon factory.)
It's not hard to find documentation that workers accept terrible conditions because they want the money.
It's almost the definition of work: if it did not imply bad (or terrible) condition, at least worse than what you experience when filling your free time, there would be no need to pay you :-)
The thing that is special is that here it bring negative consequence to your health, instead of your well being or enjoyment of life in general.
However, is it really special? Recently health (in context of treatment and acceptable work environment) get a broader and broader definition (harassment, well being, stress,.....) and, while personally I see a somewhat clear difference and don't like this constant broadening, it seems that in many context it's bad taste to acknowledge there is a difference :-)
Oh, thank you for linking that song, I loved it and I'd forgotten it!
I remember reading a book about the history of textiles, where the rayon chapter was about a woman captured by the Nazis and forced to work making rayon. Apparently they started out with paid workers doing the most dangerous jobs, but eventually those guys quit so the prisoners were forced to do it. The ill effects of working with rayon seem to have become apparent very quickly. (but if the alternative is getting shot, well...)
Yup, there was an awareness, practically from the time tobacco arrived in European shores that smoking can't possibly be good for your health. C.f. the essay "A Counterblaste to Tobacco", written by King James VI and I in 1604. The last paragraph is particularly choice:
"Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossely mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the markes and notes of vanitie upon you: by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse."
I think cigarettes used to be called coffin nails.
Very interesting, I was not aware of that. I guess because smokers were a majority among my friends (europe eighties) and maybe in movies (probably not, but smoking act was presented in an iconic way). Also because the antismoke movement itself liked the role of underdog minority convincing the majority to change to a healthier lifestyle. It is more prestigious I guess, and maybe part of their success. Probablr the main reason for strange suicidal PR moves like the discussed vegan pledge: it gave very false prior about how social norms can be influenced
I was surprised, too. When I looked up the numbers, I had been expecting to find peak smoking rates somewhere around 60-70% of American adults, not 45%.
That would have been my guess too. Also (although difficult to be sure, those things are subject to crazy bias) I think I remember smokers being the majority in bars and nightclubs. This could be true, even with smokers never being the majority of adults: bar and nightclub probably selected for smokers, quite heavily. I have more than one friend who never smoke, except in nightclubs: there is something about the calming effect of nicotine and countenance of the cigarette smoking act for single males in a very stressful environment (pick up points).
The movement would do a lot better if it wasn't so filled with vegans. It doesn't help that the main practitioners are pretty neurotic generally. I am not sure I would trust the two I know best with a sharp knife, much less my eating habits.
#19. I like how the author talks about vegans having two bad options, and then tries to present the Pledge as a third option when it's very clearly exactly the same as Option 1.
In lieu of hating on vegans I'll instead hate on the concept of boycotts. It's an explicit attempt to punish someone who made a good product, for something unrelated to the product. "They make good vegan food I want to eat, but they also make other food I dislike so I'll try to kill their ability to make good vegan food."
Any impact you would make by boycotting a restaurant that serves meat can be replicated by never buying the meat dishes. If those dishes don't make money, those dishes get dropped for the ones that do. Instead everyone who would buy otherwise the vegan dishes boycott everything and now the meat dishes are the best sellers; so the vegan dishes get dropped and the restaurant transitions to more meat. So too with other products. Unless you're boycotting the direct manufacturing process, boycotts are just value destruction.
I guess there's a price reflection for stuff like political affiliation. "I like the food but the money supports this other thing so I'm not willing to pay as much for the product." So you don't buy Russian oil unless it's, like, 50% of market value, because their profits are funding their war effort and you actively don't want the war effort product.
I think the vegans thought they had enough people onside to make their boycott actually work.
In truth I suspect a lot of it had to do with a purity test - keeping the vegans in the group by separating them from everyone else.
My niece, who is vegetarian (*not* vegan, as she is now at pains to point out) had a phase around this time where she was making a fuss when we ate meat during family dinners. I did wonder what that was about, and why it died out without issue when we made fairly minimal efforts to accommodate, then gave up.
This vegan author has missed the ACTUAL 3rd option, which is be a good visible ambassador for your principles and lifestyle. The way the author phrases it, it would be as if a Christian has two choices with their non-Christian social groups: disruptive proselytizing, or sitting back to watch their friends go to hell. But what most Christians do today instead is to visibly demonstrate their principles while walking amongst everyone else, and over time people notice the positive results of their faith in their behaviors and life outcomes, a few want to learn more about it, and a few of those may convert.
The person in your social group who tends to organize gatherings and outings is likely to be highly agreeable and accommodating. They will absolutely accommodate the vegan's diet, but the vegan's pledge conflicts with accommodating other group members' diets, so the organizer is put in a bind. This highly social and agreeable person who does all the work of making things happen isn't going to start a fight with a bunch of other members. So the easiest out is to stop inviting the vegan to dinner, and to try maintaining the relationship by instead inviting them on other types of group outings.
So now instead of having the example of the vegan in their group to increase their awareness, that person is simply absent from all settings where food is consumed, and their philosophy is out of sight out of mind.
I can't blame them for not counting that as an option. I remember comments on a different site about someone's attempts to tell their friends about their corn allergy, and those people just assuming they were making it up and using corn in everything anyway. Food is a real fight.
Side effect of using allergy for intolerance then just something you don't like. That's the backlash of playing the victim game....sure you gain power above your actual demographic weight for a while....but after, real victims suffer from it.
> In lieu of hating on vegans I'll instead hate on the concept of boycotts. It's an explicit attempt to punish someone who made a good product, for something unrelated to the product.
Don't most punishments fit this bill? If Shell sinks a tanker and there's a huge oil spill, we fine Shell. We do that even though Shell also makes a good product. What's the problem?
What is the mechanism that "we" use to fine Shell? The government fines Shell, for directly breaching the pre-existing conditions of their license to operate. Likewise the oil spill is a direct result of the product they're making. If instead a moving company buys Shell gas and then drives a truck into something, we don't fine Shell, because their product didn't cause that. But boycotts will target Shell for that. Boycotts have no pre-existing conditions, they're an attempt to force new conditions into an old dynamic.
> Likewise the oil spill is a direct result of the product they're making. If instead a moving company buys Shell gas and then drives a truck into something, we don't fine Shell, because their product didn't cause that.
This is surreal. To the second point, we don't fine Shell in that scenario because they didn't do anything wrong. Their product may well have caused the crash, but it wouldn't matter if it did. It's the moving company's responsibility to e.g. make sure oil doesn't leak out of their truck and lubricate all the wheels.
And to the first, nobody cares whether the oil spill is a result of Shell's product. When a restaurateur who's good at cooking and bad at business burns down his restaurant for the insurance, we punish him even though he made a good product. That is because we don't care whether you make a good product when we're assessing whether you did something wrong.
I feel like I'm talking to someone whose idea of cause and effect was placed directly into their mind by Azathoth. Everything you're saying here is a bizarre non-sequitur.
>To the second point, we don't fine Shell in that scenario because they didn't do anything wrong. <
Restaurants don't harm animals. They buy dead meat from other places and cook it for people. Why, then, do the boycotts target the restaurants. Because they know they can't hurt the people they want to, and endeavor to hurt their friends instead. It's punishment by ricochet.
>When a restaurateur who's good at cooking and bad at business burns down his restaurant for the insurance, we punish him even though he made a good product.<
He didn't make a good product. He explicitly set fire to his capacity to make a good product.
> He didn't make a good product. He explicitly set fire to his capacity to make a good product.
Pretending that your interlocutor said something other than what they actually said is not a good look.
You would know.
My link of the week: https://www.secretorum.life/p/the-great-disembedding
Squarely in the tradition of cultural evolution, with a dash of "language is a virus". Loved it.
On 1 - Did this past summer break temperature records in Europe, and what does that mean exactly? The main thing I remember seeing was maps on news networks painting Europe in infernal red for, in some cases, positively pleasant temperatures. The general consensus amongst those who noticed this was that this was deliberate media alarmism.
On 7 - There is at least one blatant-like cat in the picture, and "cat pieces" above the blatant cat. These are hardly "imperceptible". Presumably others might interpret what I interpret as "cat pieces" to be blatant-like. But no matter what, this doesn't seem particularly surprising or interesting to me. Of course if you deliberately put X in your photo, machines trained to spot X will find it, and humans can find it too.
On 13 - Many people (for example, Tim Pool will mention this whenever it comes up) have noted for many years that the supposed anti-war position is targeted just as the so called anti-woke is. It is hardly an escalation of anything, you've just noticed it now.
I spent time in Europe (and Israel) this summer, the heat was incredibly unpleasant (temperatures in the thirties in Paris - which has little AC since this usually never happens - and high thirties in Israel, which has ac but you still want to go outside sometimes), significantly worse than normal summer weather.
Yeh and it’s 29 on Monday in Paris. Oct 1. Mid fall.
As an aside, people who come from countries with air conditioning really don’t understand heat in Europe. “It’s 35c and higher here in Arizona”. Is it, and do you leave an air conditioned house, to go to an air conditioned car, to go to an air conditioned office and afterwards an air conditioned restaurant? Where the temperature is cool, not even room temperature. You put on a jacket going indoors.
In countries with no air conditioning it’s hotter inside. There’s no respite. 35 outside is 38 inside, if you are lucky. I measured 40 in an attic of an old Victorian building in London at night a few years ago. It just trapped the heat.
I slept on the roof.
Hmm, yeah move north or higher or get AC. It was very pleasant this summer where I live. (Java, NY.)
I did move west in fact. It’s unlikely that everybody in London is going to move north though, and London is already pretty far north. Further north than NY.
How is the Gulf Stream doing? How is it expected to do in the near future?
Man I live in *Canada* and it hits 40 in the summer from time to time. AC exists, but it's pretty rare in anything built pre Y2K-ish -- absolutely not like Arizona.
And it's, like -- fine? People have been complaining about Paris in the summer for hundreds of years -- isn't that like the whole point of Versailles?
Maybe 'Paris' and 'London' are the problem, not the weather.
Yeh. I’ve heard that from some people from the US, Canada and Australia who were working with me in London as the heatwave approached. 35 they laughed. Nothing. These guys suffered the most.
You might be living close to the sea, or some nice leafy rural area. And there’s probably some parts of the town that are cool. Public spaces are rarely conditioned in Europe. The actual temperature in London is hotter than the met figures of course.
Maybe one day that Third-World continent will decide to stop spending 80% of its GDP on "free healthcare" that requires a 6 month waiting period for an appointment where you are ultimately given a band-aid, and actually be able to afford some air conditioners!
Reported for stupidity.
What is "normal summer weather" is kind of my question, because I think the fact that this is even a noted topic of conversation is manufactured consent. In this case specifically in the US and Europe, rather than Israel. Summer is hot, I'm aware. I'm also aware that many, in fact most, countries get by without climate control. Indeed, many countries in Asia get by without it even though it always gets hot in the summer.
Now, my general comment was supposed to highlight the phenomena where according to maps on some European news outlets, we should all be dead already from the blazing infernos that suggest 25 was almost maximally hot, and that your trip to Paris was in some kind of horrific danger zone, and you'd be much more comfortable at 2. Here's the BBC article justifying this insanity.
https://www.bbc.com/weather/features/66293839
Just as it is dishonest and manipulative to change the scales of bar graphs to suggest greater/lesser numbers, or to start before or after certain years on point graphs, it is obviously manipulative to skew your temperature colours on weather maps such that 7-10 is green. Unless I suppose, you live in the arctic.
What exactly is the problem with green? The colours don’t go blue until below about 2C.
Isn't green good? Doesn't it portray the idea of green fields of lush grass on a pleasant comfortable day?
Do you want to go out and enjoy the nice day when it's 7C out? Is that when you imagine a woman putting on a nice summer dress, or you going for a picnic under a tree in the spring? Moreso, is this the default pleasant temperature in your mind? If you have climate control, is that where you set your temperature?
Or actually, don't normal western humans consider about 20C to be what's comfortable? Except here, 20 is deep into the orange and about to head into the red, as if it's uncomfortably hot.
For point 1, the linked article about sulfur quotes an additional warming of "0.1 watts per square meter" due to the new regulations. The article on the volcanic eruption quotes a similar effect - "a radiative forcing of ~0.1 W/m^2" for the volcano. It also suggests that the volcano could have injected sulfur into the atmosphere, which would (?) counterbalance the loss of sulfur emissions by us.
When the effects are roughly equal in size, how can one be considered a significant impact but the other is not significant? The impact of the volcano will surely be temporary, and the removal of sulfur presumably longer lasting, but on the scale of one year does it not seem they should have a roughly equal contribution? And that the contribution of both together would be enough to turn a hot year into a record breaking year?
To be clear, I believe the underlying trend is clearly driven by fossil fuels. Yet if we are talking about what makes one hot year hotter than other hot years, small changes like volcanic eruptions and levels of sulfur may be enough to tip the balance.
On number 1, there is a Polymarket participant with a very interesting profile:
https://polymarket.com/profile/0xb1dce46d7d5987c743d5378c503ed81e71937283
Here's Dr. Sato's Columbia University website: https://csas.earth.columbia.edu/people/makiko-h-sato
I've known people who loved their chickens and even their turkeys, but I'm not sure anyone ever loved a chimpanzee. Folks pitied Oliver Humanzee. But I don't think it is easy to love something situated so close and yet so far from us.
I don't believe people precisely love pet snakes either. They like to look at them, as objects. I believe people love snakes, in the wild, or glimpsed in the yard. Certainly my husband loves snakes in that excited-little-boy way. And a dead snake covered with ants is a poignant sight - something about an animal that is all sinuous movement, without much else personality-wise, being stilled, is very sad.
I think response to animals is in great part aesthetic and that we ignore aesthetics at our peril, because I believe it goes very deep in our natures and that living with so much ugliness and destruction of the natural world is threatening to humanity. This view seems to be totally, orthogonally, out of sync with the current zeitgeist, of course.
ETA: there was a sort of hippie-run, rough-around-the-edges zoo that served the area where we used to live. I went there a handful of times for children's parties or field trips. There might be a bear say, but it came not from zoo breeding but from being a school mascot somewhere. The collection was random in that way. Like an ambitious rescue organization. The enclosures were not urban zoo-grade. I remember in particular it was easy to interact with the monkeys and in fact the kids, esp. the boys, did so. The monkeys typically started it by throwing something at the kids. The kids would throw something back. I realize this would be considered appalling behavior according to current norms, but it actually seemed like a really natural thing for kids and monkeys to do.
Minor point of order that I think Jane Goodall probably loved a lot of the chimps she interacted with, although my personal view is that they're best treated as terrifying murder-machines capable at times of intense human-like empathy (whereas e.g. most dogs would be t'other way round)
Strong agree on the natural world aesthetics though and the orthogonality of the current zeitgeist. Whenever I see future worlds with greater destruction characterized as "well, there'll be more overall human welfare, just somewhat reduced!" I want to tear my hair out. "All the bees are dead, so we'll just use robot bees!" is a fucking dystopia in and of itself. (see https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66807456 ). Turning Eden into a desert just to foster more humans in sterile indoor environments *is a loss condition.* Did these people learn nothing from classic science fiction?
She was such an unusual person. The feeling some women have for horses, she gave to chimps.
Apes in general set off my Uncanny Valley reaction, though monkeys don't.
I do not understand how anyone with any experience could think a "nerd" job category would be "aside from clergy"
Depends whether you're thinking of the core characteristics of "nerd" as being "introverted, neurodivergent-adjacent, and prone to deep intellectual fascinations" or as being "grey-tribe cultural affinities". I can definitely see the former as being prevalent among many clergy, but the latter probably less so.
Also probably depends on which clergy you're thinking of. Catholic priests, definitely, as "prone to deep intellectual fascinations" is practically a job requirement, but Catholic clergy as required to be celibate so their divorce rate is presumably pretty close to 0/0. I'd imagine the prevalence of nerdiness among clergy varies wildly among denominations based on culture of the denomination's core adherents and the degree of intellectual rigor involved in their clergy's training and selection process.
Because here, "nerd" means "rationalist" and therefore "atheist, or at least agnostic."
Depends whether "clergy" prompts you to think of a Scholastic philosopher or a televangelist.
Actually it prompts me to think of a passage from Exile's Honor:
-----
> a group of fellows who considered themselves to be young toughs strolled past, and decided to abuse the woman because of 𝘩𝘪𝘴 presence, calling her "whore" and worse. True, she was not married, and now had no prospect of ever wedding. True, she had not named his father to anyone but the Sunpriest.
> Orven, from his childish perspective, only knew that the men were large and loud, and were making his mother unhappy. They frightened him, and he began to cry.
> Then 𝘩𝘦 came striding up the path, as if the crying had summoned him; tall, bearded, straight-backed, dressed in a long black robe with something bright and shining and immediately attractive to the wailing child on the breast of it. He wasted no time, verbally laying into the men in a voice like thunder, somehow making it clear that it was their good fortune he wasn't going to lay into them physically as well. There was a great deal of what Alberich -- from his dispassionate distance -- recognized as Holy Writ being quoted, mostly about the poor, the fatherless, and the repentant. There was also a great deal of Writ quoted about the ultimate destination of those who abused the poor, the fatherless, and the repentant.
> They slunk off, exactly like whipped curs. Now the man came to stand ovver the boy and his mother. "How long has this been going on, woman?" he asked curtly, but not unkindly.
> She shrugged. "Since he was born, Holy Father," she replied, in a resigned voice.
> Now the Priest looked down at the boy. "Then it is time I took a hand," he pronounced, in a way that said quite clearly that it would be useless to protest. "I will have the boy with me for two marks in the morning, every morning. It is time he learned the ways of the Sunlord, blessed be His Name, and when the village sees that 𝘮𝘺 eye is on you, there will be no more of scenes like this."
-----
More generally, my idea of "clergy" is that they are community leaders who resolve community disputes according to local custom, and whose job is in large part to get everyone agreeing on what exactly "local custom" involves.
No part of that job calls for a nerd.
Depends on how complicated local custom is. I think Jewish "clergy" are obligated to be nerds and use other sorts of charisma.
There are other types of clergy too. Every classical Greek temple had an associated priest, but for an insignificant temple the priest didn't necessarily do much beyond maintaining the temple.
Greek Religion ( https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Greek+Religion%3A+Archaic+and+Classical-p-9781118724972 ) tells a fun story about Xenophon solving the problem of transitioning from "upstart nouveau riche" to "upstanding pillar of the community" - he endowed a temple of Artemis. Since he paid for the temple, the role of priest went to him by default, making him responsible (or giving him an excuse) to hold an annual feast "at which the whole town met with the goddess -- and with Xenophon".
Should prompt one to think of neither, considering they would be small subsets of general clergy-dom.
FWIW (I'm a PhD in cognitive science doing consciousness-related research), I think the empirical "successes" of IIT tend to be misleading. The move they make is to propose an extremely complicated theory and then have the empirical prediction be something like "and this means that, when we show people pictures, we'll find activity in the visual cortex". Most people I know personally in the field secretly think that IIT is pretty pseudoscientific but don't actually say it out loud because they don't know who around them likes it
"The Election was Stolen" means different things to different people, and goes from almost certainly untrue to literally and proven to be what happened. I think the lumping of all such theories into one thing degrades the conversation immensely.
Things that definitely happened:
State governments illegally changed ballot procedures to allow more voting options, ostensibly due to covid concerns. This includes everything from reducing signature verifications (drastically reducing the number of rejected ballots), changing the timeframes for when ballots are due, and allowing alternate drop off procedures like curbside voting and drop boxes. Because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail in and other means, this likely had a significant effect in increasing Democrat votes. Note - although these new procedures did reduce our ability to determine if a vote was fraudulent, the most likely result was that more genuine votes from real people were accepted, not that most of these votes were fraud. Many Republicans are concerned that these processes made it nearly impossible to tell fraudulent votes from real ones, which I agree is a significant problem. Particularly removing signature verification requirements - that's literally meant to be the process for determining illegal mail in votes.
This was not a "Big Lie" and many courts have ruled that the changes were illegal - after the fact. They did not invalidate the election based on these voting procedure changes, which perhaps they should have done but either way would have been a major issue.
Whether there were late night dumps of votes under suspicious circumstances, or the less known/proven accusations, is a different issue. To my mind, having read lots of information on both sides, it's unresolved - or more accurately, some might be true while others are probably not. I'm very bothered by the immediate and all-consuming reaction that any such ideas are ridiculous and false even before anything was investigated. That the media clearly preferred Biden and did a lot to boost his election chances (and openly talked about the need to do so) gives me no confidence that their reporting on fraud claims are correct. I also think that the media was more than happy to conflate the worst and least likely conspiracy theories with the obviously true and proven electioneering that benefited Biden. Calling any and all such things "the Big Lie" was a very intentional piece of propaganda, and I think we should be against it on principle.
So Republicans can overwhelmingly believe that the election was "stolen" and still be potentially/likely correct that it was, even if they reject the bigger and less likely theories. It's hard to estimate (again, because the procedure changes made it impossible to determine) how many votes for Biden would have been rejected or never made if the voting procedures had stayed the same as the law in those states. Given the very close margins in some key states, it seems quite likely that these illegal procedures did swing enough votes to change the election outcome.
I don't disagree, but phrasing it like January 6 started the matter would be factually and directionally incorrect. That was a direct result of the chain that went from; Democrats got illegal votes to count (true) -> The courts refused to throw out illegal votes (true) -> We need to try something unusual/extreme to support our position.
What positive suggestions could you make to a political faction/group that has seen obvious and clear election cheating and been rebuffed by the institutions that historically investigated and corrected such things? That also includes the media, who not only refused to investigate as they might have in the past, but directly and emphatically attacked those who brought it up.
You can argue that it's better that those votes did get counted. I actually agree with that point from a fairness standpoint - throwing out 10s to 100s of thousands of Democrat votes would not be an improvement on our current situation. But, I don't see how you can argue that it was legal or that Trump supporters are *wrong* about what happened.
What events? The peaceful sit-in, where the only fatality was one of the peaceful protestors?
This is a carefully written comment and I don’t doubt that you make it in good faith.
I haven’t done the research on this to make a point by point response. I have only tried phrasing the question “Did states make illegal changes to voting laws during Covid” in various ways for Web searches.
What I’m seeing is that courts found some of the emergency measures were unconstitutional but not “illegal” at the time. I admit that is a sketchy distinction.
There were a lot of court challenges after the election and my understanding is that the Trump lawyers prevailed in only one minor case.
But I keep come back to William Barr’s statement that he told Trump that the stolen election theory was in his words “all bullshit”.
Are you making the case that courts and even Trump’s former Attorney General are in on the fix?
Edit
> What positive suggestions could you make to a political faction/group that has seen obvious and clear election cheating and been rebuffed by the institutions that historically investigated and corrected such things?
obvious and clear election “cheating”
I just reread your comments and flatly referring to the pandemic measures as cheating without reflecting on the extraordinary circumstances involved makes me wonder if you might have a dog of your own in this fight. Claiming omniscient knowledge of legislatures and governor’s motivations during a major public health crisis is a stretch.
Unconstitutional is illegal. I've never heard of any legal theory that would say otherwise in any way - can you support the distinction you're making there? It varied by state, but covid measures were put into place using means that were not legal, and were not approved by the legally necessary process. I refer to that as "cheating" because from the perspective of the Republican voters who were upset by this, it clearly was.
This resulted in higher voter turnout for Democrat voters (for a variety of reasons which I don't think are really relevant to the discussion, because I think everyone agrees this is true).
Good people can disagree about whether or not illegal processes to increase votes during a pandemic are acceptable or not. I don't think Republicans who were refusing to make election changes to allow more mail in ballots were in the right, and were politically motivated. Similarly, I think Democrats who pushed through these changes were trying to maximize the number of votes their side got. If the roles were reversed and Republicans were more likely to vote by mail, the sides would have flipped and there were no parties that acted in good faith. If I had been in charge, I would have passed new rules to make voting easier under pandemic conditions - though not all the same ones actually used.
That said, it is very clear that votes made using illegal processes were counted. These votes were likely numerous enough to make a difference in statewide vote counts, and may have changed the outcome of the election in one or more states - potentially even the final outcome of the presidential election.
Whether other illegal things happened is a lot more murky, and I don't think there is good evidence to support or deny much about the claims. That some of the illegal voting rules made it harder to detect fraud is also true. Signature verification rules were greatly relaxed, and drop boxes/ballot harvesting made chain of custody and authentication harder or even impossible. That is clearly a bad thing for maintaining faith in an election. It also enabled the kind of blatant fraud that Democrats are being accused of. It doesn't prove or even show that they did it, but again, that's part of the complaint about verification processes being subverted - which they totally were.
In the spirit of comity I’m going to let your comment be the last substantive word on this Mr D.
What you describe is I think the most damning thing about the election, which the rhetoric of both sides drop the ball on. It's not an issue of whether there was positive proof of fraud, which both sides focus all their rhetoric on, but rather the fact that fraud would be completely impossible to detect with how the system is currently designed, which should in itself invalidate any elections conducted under this system until they can be positively proven secure. In computer security, for example, you don't wait until you have proof that an exploit was actually exploited to consider there to be a security failure that needs to be patched, you treat the security hole as an urgent issue in itself by the mere potential of its exploitability. The fact is, we have an electoral system that essentially runs on the honor system, which should be cause for concern whether it actually was exploited or not in this specific case. Rather than some given party having the burden of proof on them to prove fraud, the government should have to prove the integrity of its elections as a matter of course, which is how it is in almost every other country we send "election observers" to. This is one more area where America needs to start meeting the standards to which it holds the rest of the world.
On 16: I'm not in favor of police defunding/abolition but this seems like a maximally bad counterargument. Derek Chauvin is a police officer who murdered someone while doing policing. If there were no police this murder would not have happened. It's literally asking "If we get rid of police, who will punish police who do bad things?"
Would that imply that killing by non-police are less of an issue, or that they would not happen if there were no police? Neither seems tenable. We still need a system to determine what happens if/when someone does something bad. That Chauvin was a police officer seems irrelevant to this conversation.
That Chauvin was a police officer who murdered someone on duty is the entire reason it's framed as a challenge to the "defund the police" position - people advocating that position are doing so in response to police actions, including Chauvin's. Given that the thought experiment is ENTIRELY phrased as "How would Derek Chauvin be held accountable, if not for police?", I think it's entirely relevant to note that Derek Chauvin almost certainly would not have murdered George Floyd had he not encountered him specifically in the context of being a police officer.
If the thought experiment were merely "What about murderers?" it would make a lot more sense.
I think Freddie picked that because he was the proximal cause of the BLM riots and an obvious out-group boogeyman for the same people that wanted to defund the police, not because he was a cop.
And you've already admitted that if you asked the same question with "what about murderers" we'd still be having this discussion about Defund the Police, so there's not much to be gained by trying to draw this distinction.
Okay. I'm not sure why you chose to argue with me about this; my initial and only point here was I thought that "What about Derek Chauvin?" was a bad argument to make. If the whole point of making that argument is to play on the prejudices of the people he's arguing with, then that's another reason it's a bad argument (albeit bad in a different way).
re: that question, I think it's worth pointing out that police get a lot of money, and much of it is spent enforcing laws against crimes which fall far short of murder
you could slash their budgets and still prevent murders
But peopled mostly want those laws enforced. That sis mostly why we have them. The current system wasn't imposed on us by aliens. It evolved in our culture and political system.
Not if you slashed them 100%. That's what "defund" means.
I care about a lot more than just murders. Theft, for instance, is a big deal to defend against and we're seeing the results of not protecting against it strongly enough right now.
I would rather live in a world with small numbers of murders along with small numbers of other crimes, than a world where there are no murders but lots of other crimes.
Ok fine the mayor kills someone because they are being annoying at official meetings, not the police.
I'm trying to decide if it being the mayor enhances this beyond random murder.
Pretty sure the official deBoer framing was regarding prison abolition, not defunding the police.
I definitely see the argument for reframing the question in terms of vigilante violence. Bernhard Goetz is the best example I can think of off the top of my head, the George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse cases both being saturated with toxoplasma-of-rage over the legal and moral validity of their self-defense claims. Goetz is far enough in the past that tempers have cooled, although this comes with the downside many/most people my age or younger probably don't know who he is without having to look him up. Goetz, too, was acquitted of (attempted) murder on self defense claims, but he was convicted of a lesser charge (illegal carrying of a firearm) and served eight months of a one-year sentence.
It’s not a toxoplasma-of-rage question: all three of the cases you’ve mentioned, including that of Goetz, were, to the satisfaction of the involved juries, shown to be cases of self defense, and the facts to back up that judgment are fairly clear (if not well understood) in all three cases.
If you just wanted a clear example of someone who deserves to be punished for a racially motivated murder, you could ask about the killers of Ahmed Arbery or the South Carolina black church mass shooter.
Murder typically requires that that person is the cause of the death, no?
I don't really understand what you're getting at.
1. The official autopsy shows that Floyd had a fatal level of fentanyl in his blood, and has no mention of asphyxiation, contrary to the private autopsy commissioned by the family.
https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/medical-examiner/floyd-autopsy-6-3-20.pdf
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/george-floyd/new-court-docs-say-george-floyd-had-fatal-level-of-fentanyl-in-his-system/89-ed69d09d-a9ec-481c-90fe-7acd4ead3d04
From the medical examiner:
"Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system. 'If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3,' Baker told investigators.
In another new document, Baker said, 'That is a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.'"
Then, notably, after a few days of riots, burning cities, and murders, realizing he would be a primary figure in the televised hearings, he decided to switch his stance, instead minimizing the role that the fentanyl played (with no explanation given for why this fatal level is irrelevant).
2. Chauvin's knee was on his shoulder blade, not his neck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEk3BGkJu_M
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fi6kpfhkrg3s61.jpg%3Fwidth%3D674%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dd03c526961061a73bbe26ed9f83931df03ce51c0
A knee on your shoulder blade cannot cut off the flow of oxygen to your lungs, no matter how many "experts" assert this.
3. You cannot loudly speak for 9 minutes if you cannot breathe, no matter how many "experts" assert this.
4. Floyd was saying "I can't breathe" while he was still standing up, disproving the theory that the knee was the cause of his inability to breathe.
Regarding 3, he did test positive for covid-19, in the autopsy and a few months prior. I never heard if anyone learned (or was even curious about) what symptoms he developed.
Personally, I got an early case, and had the "shortness of breath" type of symptom, and could speak loudly while still being short of breath. The problem was that my lungs weren't extracting oxygen from air as efficiently as they used to, so even large quantities of air provided less oxygen than normal. I heard of people with asthma who just dropped dead in their shower, but fortunately I was otherwise healthy. After the first few weeks, I could walk uphill without difficulty, and my symptoms faded away over about 6 months.
I find it entirely plausible that this type of lung damage, combined with a drug-fueled panic attack, could cause someone to die.
I'm not interested in re-adjudicating this. That Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd is part of the premise of deBoer's challenge and it is that overall premise that I am critiquing as self-contradictory.
If there were no police there would still be people in the business of chasing off and/or punishing people believed to have been e.g. ripping off local grocery stores. And I'm pretty sure the non-police preventers-of-grocery-store-ripoffs would kill more innocent people than do police in similar circumstances.
It's possible, but anecdotally at least, most retail security don't carry weapons, and are specifically told not to get in physical altercations, to avoid company liability for injuries and such.
Most retail security are expected to call the police in the event of any serious theft, and they get most of their authority and effectiveness from "If I have to call the police, they're going to believe me the uniformed security guard and not you the lowlife, so don't make me call the police".
If there are no police, the current sort of retail security will be completely ineffective and either all the stores will be robbed blind and shut down, or the stores that remain open will have substantially upped their security game. There's no plausible future that has active retail commerce, no police, and milquetoast non-confrontational private security.
Re #21, “a tedious forced signaling spiral about how willing you are to throw out any pretense of objectivity and fully optimize your language for propaganda.” I offer this as the premiere example: https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1342. Seriously, top that!
Ahaha. I thought this must be a joke journal for a moment but looking at their archives, nope, they're actually serious. And the author is also completely serious and still has a job:
https://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/simon-springer
“Agreeing to watch your neighbours kids, carpooling to work, sharing a meal with some friends. These are all routine practices of mutual aid, which is what the heart of anarchist practice is all about.”
Yes that's totally what people mean when they use the word anarchy. Incredible how bottomless intellectual standards in academia are.
*blinks*
Now we have critical... geography?
That revisioning of what anarchism is, immediately provokes me to a quote from "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"His best chance was to make a softened and ambiguous speech, such as would leave on the detective’s mind the impression that the anarchist brotherhood was a very mild affair after all. …Syme had once thought that anarchists, under all their bravado, were only playing the fool. Could he not now, in the hour of peril, make Syme think so again?
“Comrades,” began Gregory, in a low but penetrating voice, “it is not necessary for me to tell you what is my policy, for it is your policy also. Our belief has been slandered, it has been disfigured, it has been utterly confused and concealed, but it has never been altered. Those who talk about anarchism and its dangers go everywhere and anywhere to get their information, except to us, except to the fountain head. They learn about anarchists from sixpenny novels; they learn about anarchists from tradesmen’s newspapers; they learn about anarchists from Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday and the Sporting Times. They never learn about anarchists from anarchists. We have no chance of denying the mountainous slanders which are heaped upon our heads from one end of Europe to another. The man who has always heard that we are walking plagues has never heard our reply. I know that he will not hear it tonight, though my passion were to rend the roof. For it is deep, deep under the earth that the persecuted are permitted to assemble, as the Christians assembled in the Catacombs. But if, by some incredible accident, there were here tonight a man who all his life had thus immensely misunderstood us, I would put this question to him: ‘When those Christians met in those Catacombs, what sort of moral reputation had they in the streets above? What tales were told of their atrocities by one educated Roman to another? Suppose’ (I would say to him), ‘suppose that we are only repeating that still mysterious paradox of history. Suppose we seem as shocking as the Christians because we are really as harmless as the Christians. Suppose we seem as mad as the Christians because we are really as meek.”‘
The applause that had greeted the opening sentences had been gradually growing fainter, and at the last word it stopped suddenly. In the abrupt silence, the man with the velvet jacket said, in a high, squeaky voice—
“I’m not meek!”
“Comrade Witherspoon tells us,” resumed Gregory, “that he is not meek. Ah, how little he knows himself! His words are, indeed, extravagant; his appearance is ferocious, and even (to an ordinary taste) unattractive. But only the eye of a friendship as deep and delicate as mine can perceive the deep foundation of solid meekness which lies at the base of him, too deep even for himself to see. I repeat, we are the true early Christians, only that we come too late. We are simple, as they revere simple—look at Comrade Witherspoon. We are modest, as they were modest—look at me. We are merciful—”
“No, no!” called out Mr. Witherspoon with the velvet jacket.
“I say we are merciful,” repeated Gregory furiously, “as the early Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being accused of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh—”
“Shame!” cried Witherspoon. “Why not?”
“Comrade Witherspoon,” said Gregory, with a feverish gaiety, “is anxious to know why nobody eats him (laughter). In our society, at any rate, which loves him sincerely, which is founded upon love—”
“No, no!” said Witherspoon, “down with love.”
“Which is founded upon love,” repeated Gregory, grinding his teeth, “there will be no difficulty about the aims which we shall pursue as a body, or which I should pursue were I chosen as the representative of that body. Superbly careless of the slanders that represent us as assassins and enemies of human society, we shall pursue with moral courage and quiet intellectual pressure, the permanent ideals of brotherhood and simplicity.”
…“Comrades!” [Syme] cried, in a voice that made every man jump out of his boots, “have we come here for this? Do we live underground like rats in order to listen to talk like this? This is talk we might listen to while eating buns at a Sunday School treat. Do we line these walls with weapons and bar that door with death lest anyone should come and hear Comrade Gregory saying to us, ‘Be good, and you will be happy,’ ‘Honesty is the best policy,’ and ‘Virtue is its own reward’? There was not a word in Comrade Gregory’s address to which a curate could not have listened with pleasure (hear, hear). But I am not a curate (loud cheers), and I did not listen to it with pleasure (renewed cheers). The man who is fitted to make a good curate is not fitted to make a resolute, forcible, and efficient Thursday (hear, hear).”
“Comrade Gregory has told us, in only too apologetic a tone, that we are not the enemies of society. But I say that we are the enemies of society, and so much the worse for society. We are the enemies of society, for society is the enemy of humanity, its oldest and its most pitiless enemy (hear, hear). Comrade Gregory has told us (apologetically again) that we are not murderers. There I agree. We are not murderers, we are executioners (cheers).”
The thing is, there is philosophical anarchy as a position in political philosophy. Not a popular view for sure, but one that goes back to the 19th century with Proudhon. What any of this has to do with being a Professor of Human Geography
in the School of Environmental and Life Sciences I haven't a clue.
What is even left to study about geography? It's been a solved problem for hundreds of years.
Basically every non-engineering field is leftist, and the farther away you get from engineering, the closer you get to "Leftism Studies"
"What is even left to study about geography?"
It keeps changing because of politics. Probably a large subject with competing theories.
The title is childish. However you can read the whole thing and get no explanation of neoliberalism, and no concrete method of dismantling it whatever it is. There’s a rejection of hierarchy. There’s a rejection of the state. Then there’s a lot of gibberish about what amounts to performative hand waving.
1. FFS. How about acknowledging that measurement technique has the largest effect on temperatures? Anyone here have an curiosity about how this pronouncement was derived? Why should we take it as an article of faith when the entire field of “climate” is rife with manipulation and confirmation bias?
"1. FFS. How about acknowledging that measurement technique has the largest effect on temperatures?" - Acknowledged. What specific measurement techniques have changed to create this result?
"Anyone here have an curiosity about how this pronouncement was derived?" - Yes. Do tell!
"Why should we take it as an article of faith when the entire field of “climate” is rife with manipulation and confirmation bias?" - I don't know who "we" are supposed to be. Would love to see your work showing the degree of rifeness in the field.
There have been multiple changes, but the author of the comment didn't indicate a measurement technique -change-, just a measurement technique.
So, for an example, if your measurement technique is "Leave a thermometer in a convenient-to-access location, check daily and write down the results", then, even absent a technique change, we would expect the recorded temperatures to increase *even if no global warming was happening*. The key element there is "convenient to access", because development also tends to favor "convenient to access" areas, so you would measure increasing temperatures from increasing urban heat island effects.
Now, are UHI effects valid temperatures? Well ... it kind of depends on what you think temperature means. If you mean the literal temperature measured, then, obviously, yes, the temperatures measured in an UHI area are valid temperatures.
But is this what we actually think "temperature" means? Like, if I put my thermometer in my oven, this thermometer is measuring the literal temperature; it's the correct temperature to use to evaluate whether or not the oven will cook a casserole correctly, but the incorrect temperature to use to evaluate whether or not I should crank up my AC, or to decide whether or not the casserole has reached a safe internal temperature (absent additional information like "time spent in oven at this temperature").
Is a thermometer experiencing UHI being misleading in being used to represent the temperature of an area? Well, not if your purpose is to tell people what to expect when leaving their house. But if your purpose is to say something about changes in the global climate as pertains to greenhouse gas emissions - well, then, it's clearly misleading. Remember, we'd measure an increase in temperatures even if the global climate was static.
Sure. But yours are just examples. There’s this bizarre thing that people “asking questions” about climate change do: they use extremely naive propositions to make grandiose revelations. “The climate was different in the past”, “UHI”, etc. You know, climatologists know these things. “We’ve noticed the skulls” our host wrote some time ago.
So no, I would really like to see the original posters’ explanation of what is wrong with the techniques used to measure temperature in climatological research. Otherwise it’s all empty pontificating.
Ultimately most people on both sides of the debate are just repeating bits and pieces of what more informed people have written; it's almost all empty pontificating. We humans only object to empty pontificating when the pontification disagrees with us.
I’m going to push back just a little. The OP made a very specific claim, that something is wrong with the measurement techniques used. I don’t want to debate big ideas. Just tell me what it is that is wrong.
The OP didn't claim something was wrong with the measurement technique. The OP said measurement technique has "the greatest effect", which is undeniably true; UAH vs GISS vs USCRN measurements all have greater differences than the reported anomaly, just using different US temperature measurements; USCRN, as far as I know, does not substantiate the "2023 is the warmest summer on record" claim, which I think may go to 2012 in its data set (but I'm lazy and can't quickly find solid information on that specific question, and am just eyeballing a graph somebody else made). Or you could use my example to understand the claim in more abstract terms.
Beyond that the author isn't actually making any specific claims, and explicitly holding a position of ignorance about how the claim was arrived at (with implications).
Many of the instruments used to argue that climate change is happening are located in or near airports, which are consistently several degrees hotter than surrounding areas, and this is becoming more and more common.
Do climatologists not… know this? Do they not compare the airport weather station data to other stations’ data? This is risible, all this stuff is public, come on, what are the error magnitudes, why has the error apparently just exploded upwards this summer, why has no one published groundbreaking research on this astonishing oversight?
This is the equivalent of me going to my boss to tell him that batteries have internal resistance. Like, yes, amazing, no one noticed this before, now we know why there are power limits, here’s your promotion. Or, I’d be laughed out of the room as a more likely outcome.
They know this, which is why the USCRN exists; the CRN stands for "climate reference network", and it is a set of monitoring stations whose purpose is to provide a temperature reference -without- biases introduced by these effects.
The -reason- they know this, however, is that a group of people skeptical of some of the claims went around surveying climate monitoring stations to see whether or not they complied with the standards they were supposed to adhere to. Spoiler: They didn't.
GISS is still using the network of monitoring stations that don't adhere to said standards, and GISS is the climate monitoring network used to forward the most extreme climate claims.
If I understand the USCRN findings (so far) correctly, approximately half the warming we have seen (in the US) since it was established in 2005 is the result of the urban heat island effect (that is, the USCRN observes half the warming that GISS does); the other half is a change in climate. How much of the change is "natural" is another question, as warming trends predate modern emissions.
As a formerly undateable nerd, I'd like to try and defend the conventional feminist take that "why do girls date Chad and not me when I'm such a nice guy" is a yellow flag.
By analogy, let's imagine that Alice and Bob have each founded separate startups. Both founders have a great idea, but they're terrible at pitching and keep getting turned down by investors. They're both certain if they could just get funding they'd make millions, but they can't seem to get a break.
Meanwhile, Charlie's AI-based block chain startup has just secured another round of funding when any idiot can see it's pure snake oil.
Alice goes and writes an angry blog post about how investors are idiots and don't know value when it's staring them in the face.
Bob is disheartened for a while, but then decides that if Charlie can do it, so can he — even if in an ideal world he wouldn't need to sell himself, in practice it's clearly something he needs to figure out. He goes away and practices public speaking, works on his pitch deck, gets a better haircut, and then eventually (not right away, because luck counts for something too) he gets his break.
It's definitely unfair that Charlie gets a free ride where Bob has to work so hard. It's maybe even a bad choice by investors (although pitching skills are important even after you get investment, so it's maybe not as stupid as it first seems). But even taking as read that the idea was still worth investing in, Bob is clearly still a better prospect than Alice – he understands that to run a company you need to work with other people, and sometimes that means working within their perspective rather than insisting on yours.
Suppose Paul Graham responds to Alice's blog post with an article "Complaining about lack of investment makes you uninvestable" that criticises how Alice felt entitled to his money. It would probably feel unfair to Alice, but I'm not sure it'd be wrong either.
I do think that socially awkward men should be treated with more compassion and pointed in the right direction. That said, I also understand why women don't offer this help – the outcome of trying to mentor someone in that position seems fairly predictable.
(I write this as a formerly undateable nerd with an Asperger's diagnosis. I agree this all sucks and I don't mean to imply that any of it is easy).
Sure, you are right, I think. Whining about things isn't psychologically mature, or attractive. The way you present this is a helpful way of illustrating this.
However, why do feminists find men complaining about not finding girlfriends so particularly obnoxious? After all, just complaining about things isn't usually considered THAT terrible. However, I think one main reason is that this kind of complaining flows into a kind of discourse where the general conclusion is something like, "women are strange, so the thing to do is to learn to manipulate them better".
And there is even a hint of that kind of thing in your analogy. After all, the anti-hero in your story is Charlie, who gets funding for "snake oil". Why? Presumably because he is dishonest and manipulative.
Anecdotally I think women are fairly sympathetic to "dating apps suck, my love life is a blasted wasteland of misery and anguish" but less sympathetic to "and the reason is that women make poor choices" – it's hard not to to take that as an attack. I also know a lot of women who are very wary of people who feel entitled to their attention — basically every woman I know has dealt with catcalls since the age of twelve, so if you've had to constantly brush off people saying "give us a smile, love, I'm just being friendly" you are likely to be dismissive by default of people who say "why won't you give me a chance, I'm such a nice guy". I'm not saying that the two are equivalent, but to someone who's had bad experiences, it does pattern match.
You're right to point out the flaw in my analogy - I wanted to write it in a way that was sympathetic to Alice's perspective, but I probably overstated my case my making Charlie too cartoonish a villain. I definitely agree that people can present well and still be bad actors (as Charlie is). I think this is something people get wise to as they grow older, which is why teenage girls are stereotypically shallow, and less charismatic guys have a easier time of it as they get older.
Nevertheless, a large amount of women's casual bad experiences look like "catcalled by smelly guy in subway who stared at me the whole ride" and so I think a lot of women have a low grade level of default suspicion of people that don't adhere to social norms. While none of this is at all the fault of the average geeky guy, the mature thing to do is to acknowledge that this isn't women's fault either, and put in the effort to show that you can present well enough to pass a vibe check. To say "I am who I am and you should just be a better judge of character" is to fail to acknowledge the reason why the vibe check is important, and to sort yourself into the bucket of "people who feel entitled to my attention and don't care whether I'm uncomfortable, like that guy who wolf whistled at me".
Charismatic people pass the vibe check easily, and some of them are bad actors that exploit this. That this is a problem young women are vulnerable to doesn't mean they're wrong to apply the vibe check in the first place – if a guy in the street with crazy eyes and a five day beard asks me for the time, I should keep my hand on my wallet even though a more sophisticated con artist might get through my guard.
(To preempt an obvious criticism, yes this is an argument for stereotyping, in situations where there's a decent amount at stake and time or information precludes a more in depth judgement. This comment is too long already but I'm happy to discuss in more detail if this point becomes a crux).
As a side note, some alternatives to passing as a normie:
- Figure out how to give off unthreatening, friendly vibes to a degree that counteracts anything you might do that would otherwise give a bad read. This works better as you get older, because women who have had aforementioned bad experiences are more likely to value that over a more traditionally masculine presentation. (Note that this is the precise situation in which talking about being a nice guy who can't get a break is most likely to be damaging, because you'll immediately pattern match "bad actor who is trying to pass as friendly" and lose trust).
- Meet women through a subculture where your particular kind of weird is common. In that setting you're less likely to trip alarm bells by being you, because anyone used to that culture will have a different baseline.
> basically every woman I know has dealt with catcalls since the age of twelve
I'm sure they told you this, but it's almost certainly not true. Think about it - have you ever actually *seen* a female get catcalled in real life? Ever? Have you even seen a video of this happening, that wasn't from a movie? This is at the very least stretching the truth. "Jimmy from math class said he liked me. What a weirdo creep!" or "Some guy started talking to me at a bar" becomes "I was catcalled" in the story version.
A very common female behavior is to play up the amount of male attention they get, and especially how they are *so* disgusted by all of this attention - it's a form of humblebragging where they can brag all they want about how their attractiveness warrants this much attention, but if anyone calls them on it they can clap back with righteous indignation: "You think I WANT to be catcalled?!! It's disgusting and demeaning, you sexist pig!"
However, this is besides the main point, as it is generally true that females are disgusted by much of the male attention they get, even if the "catcalling" claims are overplayed. I think you are confused about the reasons for this disgust, though.
> a lot of women have a low grade level of default suspicion of people that don't adhere to social norms
Are you suggesting that this is a conscious process - all females have this shared experience at a young age of being hit on by a man who is both socially awkward and dangerous, and then in the future, when they encounter a socially awkward person, they think "this person is socially awkward, so they must also be dangerous, just like that guy on the subway"? Or is it instead that females subconsciously read these "awkward" signals, and a "dangerous creep!!!" alarm bell goes off in their head, without any rational justification for that link?
If it's the second, I think we're mostly in agreement about the nature of females. You just seem to think this nature is a good thing rather than a bad thing. You go on to say:
> Charismatic people pass the vibe check easily, and some of them are bad actors that exploit this. That this is a problem young women are vulnerable to doesn't mean they're wrong to apply the vibe check in the first place – if a guy in the street with crazy eyes and a five day beard asks me for the time, I should keep my hand on my wallet even though a more sophisticated con artist might get through my guard.
This would be a more convincing argument if it were at least directionally correct - if meek, socially awkward, physically unattractive nerds - the type of men who are labelled "creeps" - really were even just a little bit more dangerous than charismatic, physically attractive, sexually successful men, you could have an argument here.
But all the evidence we have suggests precisely the opposite.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4706821/
"Men who perpetrated both physical abuse and sexual coercion reported the highest number of lifetime female sex partners, significantly more than all other groups."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513814000774
Men with antisocial and criminal tendencies have considerably higher reproductive and sexual success than men who lack this predisposition. Antisocial men represented 10% of the male cohort but fathered 27% of the babies in that group.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-33362-001
Men with dark triad traits were rated as dramatically more attractive to women compared to controls who lacked these traits (p < 0.001), and the attractiveness difference was not explained by other factors like extroversion.
Which ultimately leads to:
https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offender-relationship-2021
"Of the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate that 34% were killed by an intimate partner"
"A larger percentage of males (21%) were murdered by a stranger than females (12%)"
Despite their fears of walking home alone at night, women are vastly less likely to be killed by a stranger, and vastly more likely to be killed by their own sexual partners, that they themselves selected. Perhaps they should rethink their "vibe check" heuristics.
Regarding catcalling, there's this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A
Basically what I expected. 80% was people just saying "hello" or "have a nice day," 15% generic homeless people pestering, and 5% "actual" catcalling.
Also notice that the actual catcalling exclusively came from a particular demographic group (which is pretty much mutually exclusive from the group that gets labeled with the c-word), and she had to walk around for 10 hours, in neighborhoods specifically chosen to increase the likelihood of these occurrences, just to get those 2 or 3 instances... of someone calling her attractive (*gasp*).
And the end of the video claims "over 100 instances of verbal harassment".
So, it's confirmed then. Females *literally* define someone saying hello to them as "harassment."
"Have a nice day" is what females are referring to when they say they were catcalled. Literally.
Literally.
I'm holding out hope that that video is just really really convincing satire, but from what I can tell it's 100% serious.
And the comments on that video are truly shocking. Either these females really, truly, deep-down, *fear for their life* when an unattractive man says "Have a nice day" to them, or they are just so utterly disgusted that they feign fear to mask their contempt.
Maybe it (i.e. the general breakdown of society observed over the past ~8 years) really is all just the females.
From what I've heard, the video is serious, not a satire. Mostly I posted it because I believe it's good to have an understanding of what actually happens, as opposed to dramatized versions in scripted TV, or armchair theorizing.
I think the 2 men who followed her were the big problem.
As for the rest... I think most of it falls under the category of "spam" or "telemarketer", but with no way to block it or mute it. A "hello" or "have a nice day" in the street is different than the same words said by someone you know in a conversation you intended to have. But if that's all there were to it, I don't think it'd be as big a deal. I think the main worry is that there's no clear distinction between the harmless "hellos" and the people who will escalate. They're all seen as one continuum of potential danger, and it's unclear what signals will lead to violence.
"Think about it - have you ever actually *seen* a female get catcalled in real life? Ever?"
Anecdotes are not data, but I'm female and it happened to me. Years and years ago, when I was in my early twenties, but yeah - I was still very surprised because I'm not attractive so it's got parsed as "gosh, men really do just go on instinct".
And yeah, I also had the experience of "creepy guy* tries calling compliments after me, I ignore him and keep walking, he shifts to insults and swearing at me for ignoring him and tries following after me".
So there is some, mmm, lived experience out there to back up the claims.
*Not a baseless pejorative, he was the local sex pest and families in my street all warned their daughters to avoid him, and I mean from 'early age up to teenagers' not "young women in their 20s".
Ok, but I'm still not getting why that justifies, or even explains, the female "vibe check" that disproportionately labels quiet, timid, socially awkward men as "creeps" relative to dominant, aggressive, violent men (who are far more sexually successful, as my statistics show).
> After all, just complaining about things isn't usually considered THAT terrible.
To me it seems like a large part of feminism *is* complaining about things. The difference is that some complaints get empathy, and some complaints don't.
Note that I am not saying that complaining is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you should complain when things are obviously wrong. I am just complaining... heh... about the double standard.
I completely agree with that. I think everyone deserves empathy. The usual way to decide who gets it is to appeal to relative privilege, at which point you're just comparing reference classes ("yeah I might be a white guy, but my parents were on the dole and you went to private school") and that never leads anywhere positive. So my attitude is that it's best to just hear everyone out (though it's easy for me to say – I'm a privileged white guy 😁)
Given the intensity of feeling on both sides though, it's probably unrealistic to expect empathy from all quarters – a couple struggling with a new baby deserves empathy, but might find it difficult to get from a couple that just suffered a miscarriage.
If I'm following the analogy right, Paul Graham is the stand-in for anti-"nice guy" feminists, Alice is the "nice guy", Bob is I guess "what the proto-'nice guy' should do instead of the 'nice guy' route". But I don't think that the analogy really holds.
In your example, the premise is that Alice and Bob's ideas really are fundamentally good and worth investing in, even if they're bad salesmen. The usual feminist rhetoric on "nice guys" is "you don't have any redeeming/attractive features other than 'niceness' which doesn't count for almost anything". If the feminist rhetoric was "maybe you would be a good boyfriend but you need to present yourself better in social situations if you expect to get anywhere" then it would be different. But it's not that - it's usually, "you would be a bad boyfriend".
Thanks, you did follow the analogy correctly. I appreciate the criticism, and it's a fair point.
I don't think that being socially awkward means you bring nothing to the table. To the extent that anyone does think that, I disagree with them. I'm not confident that this is a common view as stated, but could well be wrong.
I do think _Alice_ is a bad proposition, because of what her reaction reveals about her attitude. Or in other words, I don't think nice guys make bad boyfriends, but I think Nice Guys generally do.
So if someone writes, "if you're out there complaining that women date bad boys and not you, you should reflect on what you actually have to offer" I take them to be referring specifically to the people who are complaining about women's choices rather than working on themselves.
I think there's another situation similar to your Alice - overly litigious employees. It's sometimes illegal to do so, but companies have a *LOT* of incentive to not hire someone who has previously sued their employer, especially if they've sued multiple employers.
Sometimes people are just unpleasant and make life more difficult, instead of the nice situation of working with someone who makes your life easier. Alice sounds like she may result in making your life harder, whereas Bob took steps to improve his approach and prove he's willing to identify the needs or desires of others and put in work to accommodate.
ETA: Obviously a "nerd" who can't get a date who tries to determine what a woman would like from him and change to accommodate is much more likely to actually get a date than a guy who goes online to complain about it instead.
I'll just add that I think there's a third group, call it Charlie. Charlie doesn't do the self-improvement thing, nor does he write an angry blog post. He just decides that this whole startup thing isn't going to work out, and shuts it down and gets a regular job.
Or in the "nice guy" situation, someone who thinks that women just aren't into him, he just doesn't "have it", and mostly gives up trying.
I suspect this is much more common in reality ... and I think that the "Nice Guy" discourse tends to put Charlie in the same bucket as Alice.
Broadly in agreement with you. I find your Charlie (distinct from the Charlie in my original example) very sympathetic, in the same way as a lonely person who gives up on making friends, or a dyslexic kid who doesn't think they'll ever read a book.
We might just have different bubbles here, because all the complaints I've ever heard about nice guys are about men who believe the root cause of their problems to be women (rather than themselves). Your Charlie has decided that he's a failure and given up, but he's internalising the blame. I'm not interested in defending anyone that would make him into a villain.
I think Scott's point is that if you want a stable, well earning marriage then nerds are the better bet by such statistics. And he's annoyed at the phenomenon of some writers saying that nice guys are defective rather than owning their preference for not so nice guys.
Basically:
Woman A: I want to have a stable relationship with a high earning professional so I married a nerd. Scott approved.
Woman B: I want to have fun and there's nothing wrong with nice guys but they're just not as much of a thrill, y'know? Scott approved.
Woman C: I want to have a stable relationship but there are NO good men. And don't tell me that I'm ignoring decent guys who are a bit nerdy. They're all misogynists anyway once you get to know them. Not Scott approved.
If this is the extent of Scott's position then we don't have a disagreement – I would also endorse A and B but not C.
On "there are no good men": there's a thing called the delusion calculator (igotstandardsbro.com for women, realitycalc.com for men) which uses census and earnings survey data to show how your partner expectations match real-world demographics.
What is, in fact, the "average guy" or the "average gal"? Seems like it would be useful to know. (The calculators ignore "personality"; I don't thing the government measures Myers-Brigg or enneagrams or big five or star signs.)
Try the former with the beloved "triple six" : six feet, six figures, sixpack abs (on the calculator: "exclude overweight"). Some people will be surprised. For others, statistical facts are irrelevant to their view of what they "deserve", and reality itself will bend to their indomitable whim.
Lol @“indomitable whim”
Never heard of this. But of course the median person is median which means not college educated, earns median salary, etc.
Two things strike me here:
1.) Assortative mating by education is not included and probably very important.
2.) 'Delusion' probably involves mismatch more than high demands. If you're a millionaire supermodel then your high standards are probably fine. The issue is if you're just an average person who thinks anything less than a millionaire supermodel is settling.
I’d really like to see Scott defend his own editorializing that “While this is a lie and is big” with actual evidence. Not looking at, or dismissing out of hand of evidence you don’t like doesn’t count.
I agree with the following, but it’s just the logical result of having the answer first (trump is bad, it’s not possible election fraud happened) and then finding the “evidence” to support it. Name calling is where you go when you’re so smug about your conclusions that you can’t conceive that anyone could possibly have a valid opinion that’s not your own. So smug that in your self righteousness you believe you have the sacred duty to make everyone stay in line.
“ it’s like insisting on calling Trump “Mr. Jerkface” every time you refer to him in a serious scientific paper. It’s not about whether he’s really a jerkface or not, it’s about dignity and avoiding a tedious forced signaling spiral about how willing you are to throw out any pretense of objectivity and fully optimize your language for propaganda.”
"Name calling is where you go when you're so smug..." - no, not necessarily. Name calling is also something you do deliberately to delegitimize legitimate opposition, to shut up people you don't want to speak, because you know or suspect that they do have a valid point that you don't like. I think that's what's going on with terms like "Big Lie" or "Russian disinformation".
You could have gotten a lot of (40) on mitochondria and sex from my review of Lane's mitochondria book, he said grumpily.
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2023/05/book-review-power-sex-suicide.html
> Anti-Ukraine-war website Grayzone
For what it's worth just the quick cursory search of the main page shows that it's not "anti (Ukraine war)" site, it's "(anti Ukraine) war" site to the degree that makes it impossible to ignore. Does this make this entire situation better or worse people can decide for themself, but typing it like anti-Ukraine-war pretending all terms there are on equal is clear misrepresentation.
I came here to say this.
It's not a well reasoned argument of "we shouldn't be involved in the Ukraine war". It's a bunch of hit pieces on Ukraine in general. "Zelensky appoints Neo-nazi" etc.
Calling it a "anti-war website" makes it sound more respectable than it is.
I'm pro freedom of speech, meaning I think GoFundMe shouldn't suspend them, but I won't be crying tears over that one. But if GoFundMe is going to take an active stance at all beyond what court orders forces them to do, it makes sense for this one to go.
(And that's before alleged links to Russian propaganda that other comments are mentionning.)
maybe Zelensky should not appoint Neo-Nazis in that case?
Pretending that a nationalist dictatorship that was at war with its own people for years before Russia rolled across the border is a brave democracy that's only defending itself is a great way to ensure continued support for one of the belligerents, and therefore continued war
Irrespective of the truth of the claim (which I haven't looked into) - I find it highly suspicious to lambast a single side in a conflict.
I'm sure the Ukrainian have plenty of faults.
But Gray Zone isn't "anti-war" (it seems really unconcerned about how to bring a peaceful resolution to the conflict) as much as "anti-Ukraine".
And I don't weep for propagandists.
> at war with its own people for years before Russia rolled across the border
Do you mean, before Russia rolled across the border in 2014?
Russia fulfills criteria of being a dictatorship, while Ukraine doesn't. Also, a Jewish president with a Crimean Tatar defense minister.. both being minorities, a nationalist?
Neither do. Any that’s irrelevant in war anyway.
I disagree that neither do. This quote: "A dictatorship is an autocratic form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations. Politics in a dictatorship are controlled by a dictator, and they are facilitated through an inner circle of elites that includes advisers, generals, and other high-ranking officials. The dictator maintains control by influencing and appeasing the inner circle and repressing any opposition, which may include rival political parties, armed resistance, or disloyal members of the dictator's inner circle." from Wikipedia's article describes Russia accurately.
If you were reading, before Iraq War, a web site containing mostly (truthful!) pieces of what a monster Saddam was (and he was most certainly worse than Zelensky), how anti-war would you consider that website?
> the cop who killed George Floyd - presumably someone they think should face consequences, and presumably someone who wouldn’t voluntarily accept those consequences if there were no police to arrest him
No sane "defund the police" proponent wants the situation when there is no police. Defund != destroy. Less money for assault weapons and armored vehicles, more training to deescalate (and more funding to the workers who are better at this comparing to the police)
In a world where the activities of an institution cost money, the extent to which something is defunded is the extent to which it is destroyed. It is like when people say “the power to tax is the power to destroy“.
If you just want the police to spend their money better, say “regulate the police”.
I guess we can agree to disagree. Given that I don't see any flaw with your logic but I disagree with the fundamental principle "we live in a world where money means existence". And there's no point arguing about axioms
In the specific case of a government institution, yes, money means existence.
"In the specific case of a government institution, yes, money means existence"
Agreed. I think that this holds more generally, for most private institutions (including businesses) as well as governmental institutions. I think that the only exceptions are institutions which are staffed entirely by volunteers.
I think "sane" is doing a little too much of the heavy lifting in that argument, to the point of bordering on being a "No true Scotsman" argument.
Yes, many and perhaps most people who applaud "defund the police" want what you describe, but far from all of them. I've personally heard otherwise-reasonable people explicitly endorse fully abolishing the police and the prison system. I understand the frustration of the former group with being tin-manned by their opponents attributing the views of police-abolitionists to them, but the ultimate solution to that probably has to be for policing-reformers and police-abolitionists to adopt distinct labels and slogans.
To the extent that "Defund the police" signs can comingle "ACAB" ones, why *shouldn't* people presume defunding = complete defunding?
My biggest problem with the "ACAB" signs is that my brains keep wanting to parse them as "Assigned Cop At Birth".
And that's how we get police without funding! You randomly assign people to be cops at birth. Their parents have to support them still, but maybe they go to an alternate schooling system... or maybe that's too close to funding, maybe they just get different electives in school. Maybe they serve as truancy officers and parking enforcers while they are in elementary and middle school. Of course they have their own bathrooms. They are like a monastic order in that they have a vow of poverty, but nobody turns them away if they show up at the door looking for a meal and a place to sleep. The position isn't dynastic, if two Cops have children, they may be normal people, but they don't typically have children because of the way they live. Well, that and the hormones.
So who watches the watchmen? Do senior ACABs tend the flock, or is there a highly-funded organization of normies who have no jurisdiction over other normies but crack down on ACABs that violate their vows?
I love it! I mean, it's horribly impractical, but not particularly worse than other radical police-defunding proposals I've heard.
That's probably healthier than reading them the other way, which is what I started doing after seeing enough "ACAB" "1312" graffiti.
I can only really talk about the situation in Minneapolis. I live across the river in Saint Paul. During the riots after George Floyd's death I watched Minnesota governor Tim Walz appear on a local tv channel to tell people in certain neighborhoods, including my own, that packing a go bag would be a good idea. This is a very important topic for me, not something to make a silly game of finding the most ridiculous hypothetical solution.
I think that the Defund movement was, and to whatever extent it is still supported, is an idiotic overreaction.
This is how Defund played out in Minneapolis - clipped from Wikipedia
"By the end of 2020, as the city was dealing with a spike in violent crime, Minneapolis officials agreed to a 4.5 percent shift of the city's $179 million annual police budget to violence prevention programs and non-emergency services, which was far short of the sweeping changes demanded by activists and pledged by local lawmakers in the wake of Floyd's murder. In the 2021 Minneapolis municipal election, voters rejected a ballot measure to amend the city's charter to eliminate a required minimum number of police officers based on the city's population and that would have replaced the police department with a department of public safety. By the end of 2021, city officials had restored police funding in Minneapolis to $191 million—the funding level prior the resource diversion following the murder of George Floyd in 2020."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police#Cities
Isn't the main crux here the definition of the word defund?
For example, if defund just meant "fund less" (haven't heard this definition, but some people appear to mean it), then you could have a less funded police organization.
If instead defund meant "prevent (a group or organization) from continuing to receive funds" (Oxford dictionary) then I don't think what that society calls a police organization would be recognizable as such by us. Would they be volunteer? Would they raise funds by bake sales? Would they even be allowed to raise funds by bake sales?
So in this defunded situation, would there perhaps be an elected or appointed Sheriff and this Sheriff would deputize their followers? Would these deputies bring their own equipment and attend training at their own cost? Would individual deputies have their own Patreons to support them or would that not be allowed? Would these deputies have to have day-jobs or working spouses, or be independently wealthy? Would it end up as basically a kind of classic militia?
Who would be attracted to being a deputy? Would it be a social obligation for the pillars of the community? Would it be people who want an excuse to show off their fancy weapons? Would it be compulsory service like jury duty?
The worldbuilding here could be very rich place to explore and I hope people who advocate for defunding the police could lay out their vision for how those services are supported without funding.
For 16, the police abolitionists would reject the premise of the question. It's like asking a gay couple who does the 'wife stuff' is or a celibate person how they'd deal with unintentional pregnancy. Abolitionists usually believe that without police, society would rely more on social ties to enforce behavior. So if a cashier was given counterfeit money by someone acting erratically, they would contact that person's family or friends to come get them and pay for their item.
A lot of crime could be prevented by better safety nets or resolved through stronger social ties. One frequent example I see used by abolitionists is how people tend to react to 'crimes' committed by their friends. Like if someone I cared about was considering drunk driving home from the bar, I'd work with them to get them home safe. But if I saw a stranger stumble towards their car, I'd probably call the police because I wouldn't get personally involved. Or they'd point to how most criminals are poor and marginalized, so aiding poor, marginalized people would prevent crime.
Step 1 of their plan is "Completely reshape society" but if that works there would be no criminals to punish. This also makes most arguments with abolitionists fruitless since they're reasoning from a premise that most people don't accept. Something like the "Brock Turner Challenge" would probably be more fruitful, since it's unclear how they would discourage a privileged person with strong support systems, like Brock Turner, from committing crimes.
I'm kind of sympathetic to the abolitionists responding to this challenge, although I don't agree with them at all. I'm a big advocate of people ditching cars for bikes and buses. Sometimes people argue that my idea is unworkable because their personal commute is 80 miles on a highway and there's no way for them to give up their car. It always feels like a cop-out to say that their commute wouldn't exist in my preferred society, so they wouldn't need a car to deal with it.
The winner of the contest commented on this substack's articles about Georgism, so I agree that they're probably more interested in alternative society designing than actual police abolition. Maybe he was even inspired by the icelandic justice system post.
The question isn't one of deterrence, but how justice is dealt. I don't see any reason to believe "stronger social ties" will alter human nature to the extent that serious crime would be a thing of the past, and presumably you aren't making that claim. From precedence we can point to instances where culture might have an impact on the rate (e.g. Japan?), but to a limited extent, *and* that culture as-is can't be divorced from policing and incarceration/punishment.
What society is meant to "reshape" towards is ambiguous but proponents vaguely point to wards primitive societies (why don't we ask them what they do with criminals?) with an injection of their own ideology.
Edit; That's what I meant. Police abolitionists would be interested in answering "how justice is dealt" under their preferred system, any more than someone against cars is interested in explaining how to make an 80 mile commute.
Different proponents tend to have different specific images of what society should look like. I thought Alex Vitale in this NPR interview at least puts some of the claims down:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police
Others advocate for the end of private property.
I personally agree that he's right that a lot of crimes like burglary are due to reformable things like drug policy or homelessness. I thought the Amish might be an example of what they meant by strong support structures preventing crime, but I never found anyone making that connection despite only 1 murder ever being committed in the community (yes, I know that there's other serious crimes). I think if one of them described their crimeless societies to this blog, the audience would relate it to the SSC post about puritans compared to cavaliers.
Anyways, you're right that I don't really buy into it. But I'm sure if I lived in Medieval iceland I wouldn't buy into our justice system, so what do I know.
> It's like asking [...] a celibate person how they'd deal with unintentional pregnancy.
What, you've never heard of rape?
Kind of wish comment sections could be organized by topic, effectively having an instance of a tailored "forum" for each post.
#29 - your idea is so on point that I would be surprised if self-styled "players" aren't already using Chat GPT. I foresee that this will be such a pervasive problem that it will render the screening capability of chat/online discussion completely useless for online dating, which by extension will render online dating nearly useless, except for those who can get by on looks/status.
> #29 - your idea is so on point that I would be surprised if self-styled "players" aren't already using Chat GPT.
Yes, there are chatbot apps designed for the purpose of having an AI write/assist with responses to dating profiles/messages. The Washington Post covered a few in an article in April:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/23/dating-ai-automated-online/
There was also a pretty god South Park about it last year
"A vegan reflects on the failure of the “Liberation Pledge”, an effort a few years ago where vegans would try to force change by refusing to eat at a table where meat was being served. Please stick to discussing this as social experiment instead of posting comment after comment about how much you hate vegans, I already know many of you have this opinion and you don’t need to express it every time the topic comes up."
I don't hate vegans (after all, I have one in the immediate family) but I am struggling very hard to avoid going "this was really stupid" and I'm sorry, but it was really stupid. Immediately upon reading the thing, I went "and how was this supposed to work?"
" The Liberation Pledge was a three-part public pledge to
live vegan,
refuse to sit at tables where animals’ bodies are being eaten, and
encourage others to do the same.
Enthusiasts of the pledge hoped it would create a cultural stigma around eating animals similar to the stigma that has developed around smoking over recent decades. That is, even while smoking is still practiced, it is prohibited by default in public and private spaces.
Before we had the Pledge, many of us felt alienated from friends and family who continued to eat animals. We were forced to choose between two options: speaking up and risking being seen as obnoxious, angry, and argumentative, or keeping the peace with painful inauthenticity, swallowing our intense discomfort at watching our loved ones eat the bodies of animals. "
Well that's okay ducks, you swallow your intense discomfort while I swallow this delicious piece of roast carcass! BLOODMOUTH CARNIST!!!!
Ahem. Apologies. But the only way this works is for isolated college students, where a bunch of them go out to eat and the Vegan makes a big fuss about eating animals and everyone rolls their eyes and agrees for the sake of peace that they'll go to the vegan place instead, or order the vegetarian option. They're not living together, they're not eating out together enough for this to be more than a momentary pain in the backside.
Now, transfer this to the family home. Ordinary family meals or even more so, the big occasions like Christmas dinner or a celebration like a birthday or anniversary. Our newly minted Vegan kicks up a fuss. Which is more likely?
(1) Out of ten people, nine decide to dump the turkey in the bin and chow down on the Brussels sprouts instead
(2) The one vegan is told by the nine others "if you don't want to sit at the dinner table, you can go eat in the kitchen or your bedroom".
Even for ordinary family meals, it'll end up with Mom cooking special vegan dish separate from the rest of the food and Vegan can eat in their bedroom or the sitting room or wherever they don't want to see family consuming animal bodies BLOODMOUTH CARNIST!!!!
Golly gosh oh my, who could foresee the Liberation Pledge crashing and burning? It mean, it was so workable and didn't inconvenience the other family members or friends at all! So reasonable and not at all preachy! "If you continue to eat meat, I'm not going to eat at the same table!" Well jeepers, what a threat, I'll immediately convert to non-BLOODMOUTH CARNIST!!!
Or you can just flounce off on your moral high horse and leave me to eat my dinner in peace. Your choice.
<i>Enthusiasts of the pledge hoped it would create a cultural stigma around eating animals similar to the stigma that has developed around smoking over recent decades. That is, even while smoking is still practiced, it is prohibited by default in public and private spaces.</i>
The obvious response here is that second-hand smoke exists, whereas second-hand meat-eating doesn't. "I'm sorry, I don't want you to smoke in my presence" is a reasonable thing to say because inhaling the smoke from someone else's cigarettes can still damage your lungs, but no such consideration applies with "I'm sorry, I don't want you to eat meat in my presence."
I don't want to be mean either, but this was my reaction. The idea that anyone took this seriously has me seriously doubt the overall epistemics in EA. Is it just an extreme echo chamber, where anyone who disagrees that eating meat is horribly unethical is shunned or ignored? Has it been taken over by the same epistemic poison as woke college students and twitterati? That might explain this absurd level of self-righteousness, explicit politicization of everything, and the jump straight to "we are morally superior" and from there to "we don't have to convince anyone of anything, just act like assholes to everyone who disagrees with us." Like... how did you ever expect to develop a "cultural stigma" when you're in such a small minority?
I think it's a combination of extreme idealism and extreme being in a bubble. I wonder how many vegans actually ever heard of this pledge, never mind tried implementing it.
This lady seems to be a particular case, and I don't want to do character analysis on a stranger. Let me just say I think she is on the extreme edge of veganism, e.g. she thinks fish are persons:
https://paxfauna.org/vegan-tables-a-letter-to-the-people-i-love/
"I see people fishing in the park, and I wonder if there’s something I could say to prevent someone from suffocating to death in the next few minutes."
When I first read that, I went "but how would the fishermen be suffocating - oh. She means the fish". And at that point, it's "you have your principles and you are devoted to them, which is admirable, but I too have mine and there's plainly an insurmountable chasm between our positions". When for you a fish is a "who", not a "what", then yes: you are going to make family dinner a make-or-break relationships test.
"The main part of this experience I want you to understand is what it’s like for me to sit and socialize when someone’s eating an animal. I can choose between disengaging emotionally to avoid the pain, verbally addressing the violence I perceive on the table, or avoiding the situation entirely. As you can imagine, I encounter this agonizing decision all the time."
I'm finding it very hard not to be snarky about her and the descriptions of *her* suffering, *her* mental and emotional agony, etc. because I think she is genuinely sincere and does neurotically obsess over animal suffering to the point of feeling pain every time "constant grief that never fades because the loss is still occurring, day by day, second by second. It usually isn’t overpowering- I can be absorbed in other things and experience a rich life for myself, but I encounter reminders dozens of times each day. Some of them are subtle- like when someone mentions their dinner plans, which I suspect include eating an animal. Other reminders are much more acute, like when I walk by a recognizable body part on display in a restaurant window."
Wow. Even *suspecting* that the other person *might* be going to *maybe, perhaps* include animal protein in their meal. That's - obsessive. And maybe that's how it needs to be! Maybe it's only the obsessed and driven who will move the needle on this, to the point that the more normal vegans can take over and do the rest of the work!
But it does make "what you choose to eat is the breaking point for me and I *will* take it that you *don't* care about me or love me, my family" as the condition of continuing relationships. And my own reaction to that would be "Well, there's the door; nobody's forcing you to stay here and sit at the table and watch us eat meat":
https://paxfauna.org/the-request-an-evolution-of-the-liberation-pledge/
"In 2015, I told my family that I couldn’t come to Christmas dinner if they were eating an animal. This was my first act in taking the Liberation Pledge, a public oath to live vegan, refuse to sit at tables where animals are being eaten, and encourage others to do the same. Along with many others, mostly in affiliation with the grassroots animal liberation network Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), I took the Pledge as an honest expression of my own integrity and believed it to be a potent strategy for social change. In hindsight, the Pledge did not have the strategic value we imagined it would, but I’m hopeful that its essence can be expressed constructively- to allow animal advocates to energize their social networks to create change. In this post, I’ll make a proposal to do just that.
In contrast with a pledge that we promise to follow in every situation, with every person, the new Liberation Pledge is a promise to have brave conversations with people we’re close to, where a solution is found in collaboration with the other.
To this day, I don’t want to sit at tables while animals are being eaten. If I do, I face a difficult choice. I have the option to emotionally disengage from what’s happening, not to think of who is being eaten and what their presence means. If I choose this, then to some extent I disengage emotionally from the people around me. In this case, I’m not bringing my whole self to the table. In some situations, this option surely makes the most sense."
Tilt it the other way. I'm pro-life, I do think abortion is murder. Imagine a pro-life pledge where you commit to not sitting at table with people who are pro-abortion. Imagine making these kinds of pleas as the 'compromise' position:
"Similarly, for this request, your family only needs to accept that in your reality, animals are sentient and what’s happening to them is terrifying and heartbreaking. They don’t have to accept that this is objectively true. By explicitly putting aside who’s right, you can allow the request to live in your connection without it requiring the examination of psychological defense mechanisms around eating animals. You can talk to the person themselves, the one who cares about you and doesn’t want to cause you unnecessary suffering, without talking to the part of them that needs to defend itself."
"The practical difference between the original Liberation Pledge and our update is that the original Pledge was delivered in a static state, “I don’t sit at tables where animals are being eaten” where the outcome of the updated Pledge is determined through conversation in collaboration with the other. “I’m thinking about Thanksgiving and feeling pretty worried about how I’ll feel with a turkey there. What’s coming up for you hearing that much? I think I understand, am I getting it? Are you open to hearing more about what’s coming up for me? How is that to hear? How would it be for you to… go without the turkey? Let me prepare a main dish instead? Have me visit after dinner? What ideas do you have for how we can work this out?”
Another difference in this proposal is to rethink our request as specific to a relationship, not a table or event. This can set us up for more realistic positive outcomes and help us invest our energy in productive ways. You might choose to attend a large family reunion where animals are being eaten and only make the request to those you most know and trust, letting their show of solidarity be a signal to others."
I think more people on the liberal side would recognise, or take such a position to be, unreasonable and demanding. There's a good point there about coming at the debate without immediately putting the other person on the defensive, but how much change do you think would happen around "stop supporting 'choice' in order to keep on good terms with me"?
And once again apologies, but I can't resist going after this:
“I’m thinking about Thanksgiving and feeling pretty worried about how I’ll feel with a turkey there. What’s coming up for you hearing that much?"
Don't worry, the turkey will be dead. We'll protect you from the savage beast by transforming it into a delicious meal.
"I think I understand, am I getting it? Are you open to hearing more about what’s coming up for me?"
Coming up for you? Bathroom's that way, would you like some milk of magnesia to settle your stomach?
"How is that to hear? How would it be for you to… go without the turkey?"
You'd prefer a roast of beef instead? A side of salmon? A baked ham? We can work with that!
"Let me prepare a main dish instead?"
That depends - is it going to be that tofu lentil soya creation last time? Only you know it took six weeks to get the bathroom back in order after Auntie Gladys had a second helping...
"Have me visit after dinner? What ideas do you have for how we can work this out?”
You're entirely welcome to come after dinner or whatever time suits you! The bird is big enough that we'll have leftovers for two days running! So lashings and leavings, as they say!
I also lean pro-life and it was the comparison I had in mind as well. I don't think this would ever work, and pro-life is already a vastly more popular and powerful point of view than veganism.
19. >”Please stick to discussing this as social experiment instead of posting comment after comment about how much you hate vegans, I already know many of you have this opinion and you don’t need to express it every time the topic comes up.”
Scott, I really hate going against your explicit requests to not discuss a controversial topic, but yes, we do need to express it every time the topic comes up. I’d be willing to live and let live with the “nice” vegans who make the personal choice to not eat meat but also don’t go around trying to make everyone else’s lives worse, but I don’t know why we should give a free pass to the ones who are willing to exert coercive influence in order to stop other people from enjoying animal products. My life would be *significantly* worse without the ability to go to any store or restaurant I want and order my favorite dish, and there are millions, if not billions, of people who feel the exact same way. Meat dishes are deeply ingrained into our culture. They are one of the little things that make life worth living. When someone tells me I shouldn’t eat meat, I will react the same way a Jew would react whenever someone tells them to stop eating kosher, or how a Muslim would react whenever someone tells them to stop eating halal.
I'm sure Scott's life gets significantly better when he hears the same thing 1000 times, asks to not hear it for the 1001th time and then someone tells it to him anyway for the 1001th time. Even more, this hypothetical 1001th speaker is definitely the one doing so for altruistic and pro social reasons, especially since they are bringing up new, novel reasons that everyone wants to hear.
I'm not a vegan, but this comment irks me because it professes to be pro social, proceeds to ignore a conversational norm and then has the audacity to say people who are currently not present are rude for existing.
Apologies for the meta everyone else.
>I'm not a vegan, but this comment irks me because it professes to be pro social, proceeds to ignore a conversational norm and then has the audacity to say people who are currently not present are rude for existing.
What conversational norm? The norm of ignoring people who could potentially be cratering global human welfare? This isn’t even unrelated to the “social experiment” that Scott wants to limit conversation to. The people involved explicitly want to control what food every human being on the planet eats. This is like calling FTX gambling user funds on shitcoins a “social experiment”. If in mid 2022, Scott had posted some negative FTX article in his links post, then said, “Please stick to discussing this as social experiment instead of posting comment after comment about how much you hate wire fraud, I already know many of you have this opinion and you don’t need to express it every time the topic comes up.” It would still be wrong to ignore the wire fraud.
How would you suggest the following play out?
[Nazis are bad!] I [Nazis are bad!] think [Nazis are bad!] that [Nazis are bad!] Nazi [Nazis are bad!] uniforms [Nazis are bad!] were [Nazis are bad!] actually [Nazis are bad!] rather [Nazis are bad!] stylish [Nazis are bad!], and [Nazis are bad!] would [Nazis are bad!] like [Nazis are bad!] to [Nazis are bad!] discuss [Nazis are bad!] their [Nazis are bad!] sartorial [Nazis are bad!] decisions [Nazis are bad!].
Yeah... when reading the linked post's description of their aims, I felt, for the first time, threatened by vegans. This person wants to stigmatize a perfectly normal behavior, make it hateful and shameful. Worse, they want to do it based on a worldview that I am certain is false.
It would be nice to accommodate Scott's preference, but how can anyone remain detached while watching a group of extremists plan to create a stigma around your way of life?
#8, I am disappointed that Harry Potterland hasn't already implemented that architecture/landscaping.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12110455/
Hamsters given cocaine to see whether it makes them more aggressive. It did. They had to be handled with chainmail gloves.
Majuscule told me about this.
Non-obligatory science fiction: "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith.
1961, four years before Dune-- a planet is the only source of something extremely valuable.
Also notable for having a tripwire security system-- anyone who searches on those misspelled words becomes a person of interest.
Now I have the image stuck in my head about "What do you think would happen if you gave cocaine to hamsters?" "I have no idea, but I'd love to find out! But how will we get this funded?" "No problem, just say it's for a study on teenage drug use". "But hamsters aren't teenage humans?" "Heh, you've never applied for grant funding before, have you?"
Re hamsters given cocaine
I wonder is any of the authors had watched "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"'s "killer rabbit" scene before writing the grant proposal
Does anyone else find that they get nauseated when they look at the AI images with spirals, letters, other embedded forms? It makes me feel queasy when I look at them; I get the queasy sense faster and more strongly than I "read" the image.
That’s interesting. I too get a strange, feeling almost immediately. It’s disorienting, which can be experienced as queasiness or nausea for sure. Almost any good picture has some kind of rhythm in it
With these I feel like I’m being hit over the head with them, but there is a fascination to it at the same time.
Yes, I feel the same way. Actually I feel pretty nauseated by the "sea otters playing ping pong" type of AI images too.
The link at 19 is interesting. My first impression is that this is the sign of a dying movement.
It sounds to me like a Christian sect refusing to eat dinner with people who haven't accepted Christ in their heart in an effort to spur conversion. There's no need for that if the country is more or less uniformly Christian; it only becomes a thing if Christianity - at least, the kind of Christianity that the participants want - is on the decline.
Obviously veganism has never been a majority, but the linked article gave me the same defensive, parochial impression of a group with shrinking influence - a group that's insular enough to have falsely believed that they held more sway than they do. The author is clearly a nice and earnest guy, but I got the impression of a horrified retreat: the demand for vegan-only tables resulted in the ostracism of the person making the demand rather than the shaming of everyone else, so mid-article the "Pledge" turns from an effort to force conversion of unbelievers to mental-health protection for the vegans. I can picture a similar discussion among the born-again ("OK, this alienates people rather than creates new Christians, but I still need a separate table where everyone says grace before a meal for my own salvation").
There's some overlap with the "protests are *supposed* to be inconvenient* crowd and what I think they forget is that effective protests also engender sympathy through good messaging. The effectiveness of a protest does not scale with the inconvenience it causes to average people, it scales with how much the message resonates.
What is tantamount to saying "fuck y'all I won't eat with any of you if you eat meat" is the kind of message that could only invite "ok". They're a little too accustomed to in-group signaling based on trashing the out-group to realize that signaling to the out-group only works when it's diplomatic.
> The effectiveness of a protest does not scale with the inconvenience it causes to average people
I don't agree; more inconvenience means less effectiveness.
Like the Extinction Rebellion crowd; sitting in the middle of the road blocking traffic when ordinary people are trying to get to work or go home doesn't gain sympathy or support for the cause.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBwtIbDtRn4
>My first impression is that this is the sign of a dying movement.
>It sounds to me like a Christian sect refusing to eat dinner with people who haven't accepted Christ in their heart (...); it only becomes a thing if Christianity - at least, the kind of Christianity that the participants want - is on the decline.
I'm pretty sure the impression is true, it's just that the group in question is not "vegans". It's, for a lack of a better term, "progressives". (This still requires some explanation, I guess, so - think the sort of people who gave us prohibition, a culturally-dominant elite believing social problems are caused by other people's moral failings, and therefore can be solved by social and cultural interventions, rather than, well, genuine material progress. We are running through a new iteration of those recently, I'm trying to avoid the w-word, but it's the w-word, and it's now clear to essentially everyone* they're being soundly rejected by society at large, but it was not always the case, and at some point this kind of moral posturing might have genuinely seemed a viable strategy.)
*The holdouts being, on one side, a bunch of persistent echo-chambers, and on the other, the "Cthulhu swims left" people, so far removed from conventional moral intuitions that they blame progressives whenever genuine, widely welcome progress happens.
They might be, they might not be, but my impression is that at least in America, veganism and animal rights have *always* been the red-headed stepchild of the progressive movement, the one put to the kiddie table (so to speak) while causes like opposing racism and sexism or trying to build a welfare state are at the fore. A very occasional and limited "animal welfare" pander would be the best they'd get from actual progressive politicians, while orgs like PETA are much-maligned and mocked.
>The author is clearly a nice and earnest guy<
Eh, I disagree. The refusal to admit the Pledge was essentially an attempt at a show of force strikes me as quite disingenuous; they already admitted Option 1 was "bother everyone", but tries to separate the Pledge when it's exactly that at a larger scale.
Also holy shit the second post opens with them saying their FIRST ACT was to RUIN CHRISTMAS.
I read it the opposite way. In light of other evidence that veganism is getting more popular (more vegan options in grocery stores), I interpreted this as the behavior of a growing movement that overestimated their rate of growth and tried something they can't yet pull off.
The map shows the rural areas as being more liberal than the cities in Japan. That's surprising to me because I had the opposite impression when I was there. The countryside seemed more socially conservative to me (I didn't really talk with people about their economic politics so I don't know about that axis). In the country you have all the old shrines and people keep the old customs, in the city people are more socially experimental. Can anyone give me more info about why I am wrong about this?
For what people are like in the countryside in Japan, picture My Neighbor Totoro. For the cities, think Lost in Translation. The folks in Totoro seem more conservative to me.
Yeah but that is the opposite of what the data is showing.
I wonder if it has something to do with the massive rice subsidies? Maybe that is a big political issue there that codes left and so farmers like the left?
The study uses a definition of "progressive" that doesn't include economics. I suppose that Japanese politics might be like American, in that if you have a certain position on a certain issue, you're expected to then have certain positions on a host of unrelated issues.
Matt Ridley has an excellent book on the evolutionary biology of sex called The Red Queen https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16176.The_Red_Queen
Regarding #19, I'm extremely unsurprised by this. Has there been any other similar form of boycott by 1) an extremely unpopular, minority opinion 2) carried out by unpopular people? What is the a priori reason for this working?
My uncharitable view is that vegans don't realize that they're unpopular and try strategies that assume that their views are popular. The post says things like “You wouldn’t sit quietly eating your vegan option while a dog or a child was being eaten, would you?” but basically no one in the general population thinks this way! I think any "normal" person could have guessed this wouldn't have worked ahead of time.
(if this comment is too vegan-hate-y feel free to delete)
It's not presumtuous, because this activism clearly wasn't like *your* activism.
It’s certainly not an effective tactic. Pointing out that what has been normal behavior for the entire existence of humanity is now in your oh so enlightened opinion is actually immoral.
That’s not going to bring anyone around. It’ll just make people think you are a real asshole. I’ll mention that I went the vegetarian route for over a decade and tried hard not to be ‘that guy’. Ordering takeout for the team from the rib joint? What will we do about the vegetarian? Don’t overthink it. Just order one less meal. I’ll be just fine.
But it's also the social aspect there, where excluding you from the team feels discriminatory. So a vegetarian option on the menu would at least let your work mates go "ten orders of ribs, hold the ribs on one and just get the baked potato, onion rings, coleslaw and beans" in order to maintain solidarity and team-building morale and so forth.
It's the demand for "my way or the highway" that gets people's backs up. "Okay, so I grudgingly admit you currently have the right to eat the flesh of sentient beings that were tortured to death, but I'm not going to eat at the same table if you order the corpses, and if you go ahead and eat without me then I'm taking that as you don't care about me, you don't value me, and you are choosing meat-eating over a family member/friend/colleague". So nobody gets to eat anything and everyone goes hungry if they give in to the emotional arm-twisting, *or* they go ahead and order from the rib joint and Vegan lobs in a complaint to HR about workplace discrimination.
Well, now that you mention it, at a different job with a different team I went to dine in at a rib place and on that occasion did dine on sides. What do people in Minnesota have about ribs?
In house, I almost always had a peanut butter sandwich stashed in my desk drawer for lunch so, no problem, I'm good. I think I've mentioned here that I'm pretty food indifferent. About one step away from packets of Soylent really. I've eaten breakfast today and it was... yeah, a peanut butter sandwich.
I do eat meat occasionally now.
Interestingly, peanut butter sandwiches are rapidly becoming a thing you're not allowed to eat in public due to allergies.
Yep, we have posters about being nut-free up in my place of work because some of the kids *do* have such allergies and *would* have bad reactions, so we have to be aware of other parents bringing treats in for their kids that might contain nuts (e.g. on birthdays, they might bring in cupcakes or the like for sharing).
I do think food preferences (as distinct from things like allergies and coeliac disease and so on) are going to become more of a battleground; see the recent rush in all kinds of claims about "this food is gluten free!" on packaging for foods that never had a whisper of gluten, just for marketing purposes. It's great that it gives more selection to people with dietary problems (there are *way* more products on sale and available today than years ago) but it also could devolve into tit-for-tat warfare:
"You can't eat meat at work or paid for by work meals outside because I'm vegan and that's workplace discrimination!"
"Well, *you* can't eat peanut butter because I'm allergic!"
"Then *neither* of you can have anything with gluten in because *I'm* sensitive!"
"Gluten? Nuts? Meat? Nobody can have anything above 3g of carbs and sugar-free because I'm diabetic and on the keto diet to control my blood sugar!"
I'm waiting for the meat-eating counter-boycott. "I won't eat at any restaurant that offers any vegan options whatsoever! Every option must contain meat product."
I don't know, I think "make people feel like they have to agree to your ideas or get into an unlimited number of unpleasant confrontations with you" has worked for the social justice movement, including when it was just starting up and didn't have obvious social power.
I think maybe the difference is that most people genuinely didn't want to be seen as racist, or felt bad being reminded of their own racism. I think vegans model meat-eaters as feeling slightly bad about themselves but repressing it (in which case this strategy might have worked), but most meat-eaters just don't feel bad at all.
Appart from discussing about how much it really worked (I think the jury is still out on this thing, as the backlash is getting stronger and the dust has not settled), I see 2 things that differ from the Vegan attempt:
1) use of indirect approach: you lobby and meadia-threaten the regulators, and get anti-discriminatory laws, quotas, positive discrimination and anti hate speech laws.
2) Direct approach, but with a lot of the boiling frog/ step in the door/slippery slope/small step techniques:
(1) start from a behavior in the same family as what you hope to ban: for the vegan, it would be cannibalism, or better, indignation about consumption of pets. Then try to progressively get more and more things considered as pets. Pet pigs for example. (Woke equivalent would be starting from lynching, honor murders, colonial era history and building on top....indeed the whole history of the stuff)
(2) Use similar things that may have more support: animal suffering, nature preservation. This is not directly linked to meat consumption, but it is quite close.
(Woke maybe used stuff like sexual liberation and individual freedom which won in the 70s and significantly weakened religion in the western world.)
(3) Piggyback on another trendy but quite unrelated cause, like health. Vegan can do it. Woke....nor so much, except there is stuff like sex is good for your health and the whole mental health area...
I think that this, done cleverly with a good feeling about what can be pushed and what would cause a backlash killing your advances, will work. It needs time and societal/political acumen though, things that were not evident in the vegan pledge ;-)
The Woke movement sure did use a lot of that, with extensive use or sympathetic minority martyrs in media pushing the acceptable behavior into less and less traditional discrimination of racial/sexual/behavioral minorities.
As I said, I thing they overdid it lately (too fast, incoherent victim/oppressors groups, mixing with feminism that have a quite different dynamic (not minority, for one thing), alienating the rationalists which were early supporters) and the backlash is coming. I am not yet sure if the backlash will result in a slow down, a stop, or a reversal....
The cynical view on that is that you can't (yet) have your personal life and your public reputation and your career ruined on accusations of being a carnivore, whereas accusations of racism are a much more powerful weapon.
Don't forget anti-discrimination laws. Accusations of promoting racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., carry an implicit "...and therefore I can drag you to court if you don't grovel hard enough", in a way that accusations of eating meat don't.
"The post says things like “You wouldn’t sit quietly eating your vegan option while a dog or a child was being eaten, would you?”
I must be a really horrible person, because if someone asked me that with a straight face, I'd be so tempted to reply "Let's not make judgements around other people's cultures, maybe the dog dish is tasty and I should try it for the sake of greater openness, the disgust reaction is no basis to make rational judgements!" or to channel W.C. Fields "I love children, I just couldn't eat a whole one" or "Depends - how good is the vegan option I'm eating? If it's really good, I don't want the bother of trying to get another seat at a different table" or even Swift's "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."
Indeed, building upon Swift's proposal, we could do away with cattle and pigs and sheep as meat animals altogether and replace them with the unwanted children! Isn't this a pleasing prospect to any vegan, to save the animals from the horrors of torture in the slaughterhouse?
"Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the addition of some thousand carcasses in our exportation of barrel’d beef: the propagation of swine’s flesh, and improvement in the art of making good bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of pigs, too frequent at our tables; which are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a Lord Mayor’s feast, or any other publick entertainment."
1) Adjustable space mirror seems like straightforward answer
4) Cash is king
7) The one on the left clearly has an ear. Also not clear to me this is "sort of working on humans".
8) Cool pictures, though I am a bit offended about how the parts that make the spiral are switching their distance. Would be more pleasing if the spiral was less notional and more physical if haphazard.
Also I cannot see the text at all when looking right at it with eyes open, but out of corner of my eye or slightly closed eyes it is crystal clear.
10) Sounds plausible.
12) Lawsuits like this should come with damages against the spurious claimants. In fact Title UIX generally was jsut a huge mistake.
13) Yeah the global financial industry and tech firms are not to be trusted. I really think these firms don't actually think about all the harm they do to themselves with some of these decisions.
14) Ditto. When I meet people in this field I openly refer to them as the Stasi.
15) I would guess some data collection/reporting change.
16) Yes because a system with a judge and people named outlaws would definitely lead to few dead minorities right? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA God these people are idiots.
17) This makes obvious sense.
18) This data seems weird, though it does make sense that the people with real good food wouldn't like others' food.
19) Can I also refuse to sit at a table with people who have electronics made by little Asian children? This performative moralizing is typically stupid.
21) I mean almost all elections are "fraudulent" to some degree or other. Both parties and other actors use a variety of dirty tricks, things which no doubt directly impacts the result when the elections are so close.
For sure the 2020 election was "fraudulent" if you only focus on the question "did democrats and their allies do illegal and unethical things that directly lead to them winning the election". Of course in the broader context that similar or other distortions were happening from the other side the level of "fraudlentness" was perhaps not notable.
But people on both sides have really taken out their own argumentative foundations when they say things like "there is no appreciable voter fraud" and the like. When you say things that are transparently false as your talking points, people stop believing you even if your broader message is correct.
23) Sort of makes sense, though I also don't think people should be expected to use the new name. Lots of places are called different things than the locals call them.
24) Good twitter is cancer. The faster social media dies the better.
25 I) Awesome!
25 II) Sadly I don't actually value random strangers lives very much so I won't be giving.
26) This is the weirdo with the laughable belief that people weren't conscious before 6000 years ago? We sure he isn't a 4004 bc guy secretly?
27) Yeah checks out. Shockingly, smart people make better life decisions!
28) MegaMan was awesome. Good call.
29) Interetsing theory.
30) Well you pumped a ton of free money into the economy that encouraged people to not work and lead to TONS of wasteful non productive spending. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Unlike the Keynesian's claims, the government issues debt to pay people to dig holes and fill them back in (or sit around on their ass) is not actually a basis for a functional economy.
32) Ok so a crazy person.
33) Yeah your options for alone time are better than ever.
35) Psychology is really still in the feeding people lead pills portion of its existence other than the pharma side. Which is overused as well.
38) uhuh. Nothing that new here. I am also often surprised by the things people think are insights.
47) The future technology my children actually need!
#16 - the Iceland solution seems to punt on the question “do we need police?” Let’s say the judge decrees that the offender has one month to complete his community service or be murdered by the citizenry, but an angry citizen decides to murder him before his one month is up. Well, now the judge decrees that the angry citizen has one month to complete community service or be murdered by another angry citizen. But the angry citizen is also murdered before his time is up. This pattern will either continue until we lose track of who can be legally murdered and dissolve into anarchy, or everyone calms down and agrees to only murder those who can legally be murdered. I assume the defund the police crowd would say the latter will happen, while others would say the former. And the stakes are so high that even the possibility of the former would push most away from supporting the defund the policers. Are there any examples of modern societies that have experimented with similar laws?
The Wild West? War zones?
Yep. The bounty hunters in the Wild West are an example of that kind of justice.
At a bare minimum, I think you can only propose such a system for some sort of small community where most people know each other and people aren't frequently coming or going. Proposing this for modern cities or the country at large just seems like a total non-starter.
RE: 36, it honestly makes me like Vivek more. If the worst that can be said about his work is that it's a Second Chances farm for drugs that gave a fifth second chance to a drug that didn't pan out, then I don't feel like this is a strong attack vector for his opponents.
47. I hope this works out. Good dental health is so very important to overall health.
13. I am still wondering why they insist on using gofundme. Sure, network effects, but when you are accepting donations, you literally send people the link to the site, I don't think many people just go to gofundme and randomly look for projects to donate to? And gfm by themselves does no marketing? Or am I wrong? There doesn't seem to be any special sauce needed either - you literally just collect money and send it to people, it's like any online store except you don't need to worry about getting and sending the actual merchandise. It should be completely commoditized - and yet somehow gofundme, despite their known wokeness and censoriousness, manages to still attract the right, who proceed to pay them, use them, lose their campaigns and complain. What am I missing here? I understand using facebook, you can't just go to Trump Social and expect the same engagement. But what's so special with gfm?
Did Substack recently add likes? Or did Scott just enable them? I don’t remember seeing it as an option before
Are you using your usual browser? I’m not seeing this. Pycea wrote an extension available on GitHub that enables likes.
No I’m on the mobile app, but that’s how I always use Substack and never noticed it before. I’ve received some likes before (on other blogs) and always wondered how.
You can only see it on the app. On web the likes are still disabled. I noticed this too.
Also just noticed the default sort for comments is “Top”. [I would’ve just edited that into my previous comment, but as far as I can tell, editing comments is a desktop privilege]
Substack has always had likes. Scott had gotten substack to disable likes on ACX. It appears they’ve popped up again on the app though.
I kind of like having the option to like comments, but sorting by most liked, by default, seems like it could change the nature of discussion threads. We already have Reddit and Facebook doing that bs, don’t need it here too.
Seems likes have once again disappeared for me though!
Not me! Haha wtf Substack, get your shit together
22: re the real challenge being getting users/customers: Yes, this is absolutely true. For something like a dating app or social network, I would say not half but 90% or more of your focus should be on this problem.
Re: Data Colada, this gem was on Twitter weeks ago:
"If she subpoenas Colada, she'll be caught and arraigned."
https://twitter.com/KeithNHumphreys/status/1687066784258461696
I must be slow, can you explain?
https://genius.com/Rupert-holmes-escape-the-pina-colada-song-lyrics:
[Chorus]
If you like piña coladas
And getting caught in the rain
I’m ashamed that I needed this explained, but so glad you did.
I definitely don't think that not knowing something should generally be a cause for shame. If anything, one can simply appreciate learning something new cf. https://xkcd.com/1053/.
And that's certainly the case for getting a reference to a random song from 40+ years ago.
I'd say the same about Scott's preemptive apology that "he must be slow." First of all, if he were slow, there would be no need to apologize for it, second of all, he is obviously very much *not* slow. Third of all, everyone inevitably learns things at some point, and all parties involved can appreciate that process, rather than lamenting the former ignorance, or mocking someone for it. Fourth, pop-cultural references are quite unimportant, and there is even less reason to feel bad about not getting one.
Haha nah, I know the song well enough that I should’ve recognized it. That’s part of what makes it so funny though! It slipped by me at first because it sounds totally plausible as a straight forward, non-joke statement. Then the punchline is revealed and that also plays perfectly. *Chef’s kiss*
I keep trying to sing “if she subpoenas Colada” and I literally can’t do it without breaking out in giggles.
You might just be too young to have heard it constantly played on the radio (lucky you). I hated that song and still do; it's not romantic, it's "guy wants to cheat on his current partner because he doesn't have the guts to break up with her directly; puts ad in lonely hearts column looking for new love; finds her; turns out to be his current partner because she too wants to break up with him but doesn't have the guts to do it directly".
I think the end result of that 'date' wouldn't be "let's rekindle our romance", it would be a lot of shamefaced avoiding each other's gaze, then a blazing row of mutual recrimination and a messy breakup where both of them complain to their friends how the other cheated on them, and both of them would be right because she put the ad in first, but he was already looking.
Also it's annoyingly poppy and gets stuck in your head as an earworm.
It featured in Shrek, which is where I learned this line from the song.
One bit of trivia on "Escape (the Pina Colada Song)" is that it was the final Billboard #1 song of the 1970s. No matter how you feel about the 70s or the 80s, you can find a story where this feels right.
Boo this man.
That's incredible. It feels like this is a joke that would have been very obvious to a lot of people but was lacking that missing piece of a name that at least rhymed.
Prophetic perfect tense: The Biblical Hebrew "perfect" is not a past tense. Rather, it is a perfective aspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfective_aspect "describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition."
Events in the past can be seen more commonly as closed units, so perfective is often associated with the past; events in the present or future have some uncertainly and so complexity and so the imperfective is often associated with the future. But the match is not 100%, as in these examples.
English has the (im)perfective too.
* Imperfective "I was walking down the street when a pigeon landed on my head"
* Perfective: "I walked down the street when a pigeon landed on my head" makes no sense because the pigeon landing shows that we are describing a complex whole, a unit WITH interior composition."
English, however, also has past, present, and future
Huh. So is this what the Ancient Greek aorist is?
Is there any negative correlation between general factor of personality and things we don’t consider psychiatric conditions, like serial entrepreneurship, bodybuilding, gender identity?
"8: Related: AI art has gone from copying humans to inventing entirely new styles."
I think this is misleading. The AI isn't inventing a new style. The "style" is imposed upon it by a human using a template. It is impressive that it can manage to produce good results given the difficult constraints it is placed under but it is not "inventing an entirely new style".
I find the language very annoying too. The oven doesn't choose to bake the perfect cake, the baker choses the ingredients, the method, and when to remove it from the oven. The human chose when to stop "re-rolling" the model and what to ask for.
#37: Poland stands out as particularly polarized (urban/rural) and this is definitely something I noticed during my recent trip there: https://denovo.substack.com/p/notes-from-poland
#47: This is a promising approach, I wrote about it more here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/stomach-ulcers-and-dental-cavities
> I haven’t seen a lot of uptake yet - my trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)
Based on what I've seen, it seems that on average men are satisfied with infinite generated boobies, while women are looking for interactive fanfic (AI boyfriends).
Example for men: https://millasofia.eth.limo/
Examples for women:
https://www.semafor.com/article/09/20/2023/the-nsfw-chatbot-app-hooking-gen-z-on-ai-boyfriends
https://restofworld.org/2023/boyfriend-chatbot-ai-voiced-shutdown/
Well, they do seem to have the boobies down. Is there a site where the AI generates images of non-existent women with long shapely legs?
>non-existent women with long shapely legs<
I'm picturing this as the "mother" legs on poles from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
> Based on what I've seen, it seems that on average men are satisfied with infinite generated boobies
> Example for men: https://millasofia.eth.limo/
I don't think it's a coincidence that her face looks like that.
What do you mean?
The quote I pulled is obviously incorrect.
47: "...genetically modified mouth bacterium that will outcompete your normal mouth bacteria and eliminate cavities..."
Not to invite being accused of promoting an 'ism' or starting a movement but wouldn't remineralization do the same and it's better understood. When the mouth is to some point acidic(5.5?) our teeth lose minerals. This can be countered with Ph strips, food-grade calcium carbonate and an appropriate amount caution - or so I've read.
I'm sure the new science has other applications as well.
I don’t know about all that, I do know a huge amount of conventional wisdom people are told by their dentists are just straight lies.
At one point I was told cavities never heal once formed. At another point in my early 20s I had several teeth riddled with cavities I didn’t pay to fix.
next time I went in during my late 20s my teeth supposedly looked great and were cavity free.
In my mid 30s I broke a tooth (I like chewing ice and popcorn) and was told it was vital I get it fixed and crowned immediately because it would hurt and the tooth would die etc.
So I did.
Then a few years later I broke a different tooth even worse, but didn’t get it fixed…….but after a year or so of hurting it healed and is fine and not dead at all. White as could be, just missing a corner. It is slightly sensitive, but that is hardly worth several hundred dollars to fix.
Anyway that combined with how much more Americans spend on their teeth make me think dentistry in the US is 80% scam.
"conventional wisdom"
Yea, we must be our own advocates when dealing with paid professionals. Best to find a good one and and deal with them long-term and if they sell to or service family members, better yet.
"At one point I was told cavities never heal once formed."
This may depend on the person and their situation. It seems generally good advice but with many possible exceptions. I had a roommate in my early 20s that developed a hole the size of a pencil lead let open up at the top of one of his front teeth. He decided to fix it by cleaning the area, swishing it with fluoride rinse and dapping some super glue on it. It seemed to do the trick although I wonder if some glues are toxic and he just got lucky!
Anyway, I'm glad your situation worked out.
Yes cavities can heal, cracks can heal, if you have a good toothcare routine.
Can you link me to more information about remineralization?
I started with this book: Dr. Ellie Phillips(2010), then considered criticisms of it before doing some online research, cross-checking info that I thought useful. I did not record those sources.
I developed a technique for myself that I've been using about 6 months which I can detail if you or anyone is interested. It seems a pretty basic natural process to augment but there are caveats. I was actually hoping a dental professional or student would chime in!
"The enamel on the outside of your tooth is constantly changing in strength and hardness, becoming softer for a while and then naturally hardening up again. People have known for years that there is a similar chemistry to keep our skeleton healthy. Minerals are deposited into bones and then removed in a natural process of breakdown and rebuilding. Healthy bone exists when the repairs balance the wearing away. Even under normal, healthy conditions, the strength of tooth enamel is always in balance, as the outer enamel builds up and breaks down all day and all night.6”
--Dr. Ellie Phillips, Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye, 2010
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6758360-kiss-your-dentist-goodbye
#10
This is interesting. Reminds me of a study years back showing a divergence between country raccoons and city raccoons. City raccoons had gotten smarter as they had to negotiate a greater variety of novel challenges. Not just trees, but trees and locked trash cans etc.
How do we know they actually got smarter? Are we assuming the country raccoon wouldn’t figure out the trash can given the same opportunity, or is someone out there administering IQ tests to raccoons?
Trash can is to food as rattlesnake is to X. What is X?
The largest and longest field study ever yet done on coyotes has been underway in Cook County IL for more than a decade now. Radio collar tracking, motion cameras, systematic life-cycle histories of lots of coyotes, etc.
https://urbancoyoteresearch.com
The research project's focus is on urban (meaning both city and suburbs) coyotes. I've attended a couple of presentations along the way by the lead researchers and one overall takeaway is that coyotes' fundamental behaviors change in the city/suburban environment. It isn't simply that they evolved as clever adaptable non-apex predators and have brought those skills to town; they seem to have developed some whole new skills. Where that line is exactly seems a bit blurry to me but, that is what the researchers think they're seeing.
#27 "...the “Nice Guy” argument and everyone agreed it was just a dog whistle for how we were actually rapists who believed we should be able to rape whoever we wanted with no consequences." Oh, come on. To take this seriously for a second, another reading of this study could be the nerdy professions have lower divorce rates *because* they have fewer partners, and/or know they'll have a harder time finding other partners after divorce.
Low income people have a harder time finding partners after divorce too, however they divorce a lot more than high income people. Also, a lot of the people who push the "Nice guys are secretly bad" argument would never accept that some people could have "have lower divorce rates *because* they have fewer partners" as they generally seek to deny the link between past promiscuity and future actions.
I see #27 as more of a broadside against such people rather than a comment on the merits of the professions that divorce more/less (I certainly don't think it's interesting enough to include on the list without this extra "colouring" when you compare with what else is on it).
'Low income people have a harder time finding partners after divorce too' - is this true? I can't find good data from a quick search.
I know it may seem easy to assume this based on the idea that people want to date richer people more, but we should also keep in mind that people mostly date within their own socioeconomic groups.
See this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513821000222
Abstract (bolding mine):
> Using data from the first Census data set that includes complete measures of male biological fertility for a large-scale probability sample of the U.S. population (the 2014 wave of the Study of Income and Program Participation-N = 55,281), this study shows that high income men are more likely to marry, are less likely to divorce, 𝐢𝐟 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲, and are less likely to be childless than low income men. Men who remarry marry relatively younger women than other men, on average, although this does not vary by personal income. For men who divorce who have children, high income is not associated with an increased probability of having children with new partners. Income is not associated with the probability of marriage for women and is positively associated with the probability of divorce. 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞 and more likely to be childless than low income women. For women who divorce who have children, high income is associated with a lower chance of having children with new partners, although the relationship is curvilinear. These results are behavioral evidence that women are more likely than men to prioritize earning capabilities in a long-term mate and suggest that high income men have high value as long-term mates in the U.S.
Maybe I should have said "Low income men have a hard time" instead of "Low income people".
Very interesting! Thanks for looking into that.
That can't fully explain the effect because the vast majority of divorces are initiated by women, so certain types of men initiating divorce less often would not materialize as that huge of a disparity.
I agree. In my mind, I was thinking more about cheating being a cause for divorce - nerdy men might cheat less often (partly) because fewer partners are available.
Anecdotally, every member of the clergy I've ever gotten to know has been a huge nerd with a special interest in religion
Seconding this. Clergy is absolutely a "nerdy" profession. (It's also true that religiosity is a confounder in looking at divorce rates, if course.)
Has anyone made their way through the responses to the Jaynes review yet? I read part 1 and started part 2, and so far it seems really unhelpful. There are a lot of assertions about research backing up Jaynes, but nothing is actually explained. There's a link to a big page with lots of articles, most of which seem to be produced by the Jaynes society or Jaynesians. This doesn't make it wrong, but it potentially falls victim to Noah Smiths' mud moat problem (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-two-paper-rule). It's not really reasonable to just say, "lots of research backs us up!" and demand people read an enormous amount of content before responding. Then there's passages like "Alexander cites one article that supposedly contradicts Jaynes’s hypothesis about hemispheric interactions. However, numerous other publications support Jaynes." with no references or citations at all. What publications? What is their exact evidence?
There also seems to be quite a lot of "clearly Scott didn't read the whole book" or "this and that is clearly explained" again with little further explanation. Overall I get a similar impression as every time I try to read Marxists. If you disagree, you don't understand it or have to read more; if you think you understand it and still disagree you are wrong by definition. And it strongly pattern-matches to "closed systems" like Objectivism and, again, Marxism, which are defined based on the works of one person, with lots of effort spent interpreting one person's work rather than figuring out what's true.
Part 2 seems to have more detail, so I'm hoping it improves. There's multiple paragraphs discussing what Jaynes means by consciousness and how it's not just theory of mind, stating that Jaynes had a very precise definition, without ever giving any indication of what this definition *is* other than by referencing Jaynes's book, so I'm not quite optimistic.
I go about as far as you, and had a similar impression. I had read the book itself a decade or so ago, when it caused a friend to leave Christianity, but couldn't make too much of it then, either. It seemed very suggestive, but ultimately came across as more of an organ myth for duel hemisphere consciousness than anything else. I would be interested to hear the perspective of someone more knowledgeable, though.
You need only read the first chapter to get his definition of consciousness. It’s not very long. I agree that links to outside sources would’ve been helpful. I have read some of them myself so I know they are out there. Perhaps if I have the energy, I’ll dig up some links. Most of them are behind pay walls unfortunately.
Here is a condensed version that states his definition of consciousness. It’s not too long.
https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/jaynes_consciousness-voices-mind.pdf
2: I have looked at why geoengineering is not being done in some detail recently: http://aiimpacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Why-Has-Geoengineering-Been-Rejected.pdf
The short explanation is that (1) most climate scientists don't support it because of concerns about moral hazard,* so there is not much of a push to do it, especially with public funding, and (2) when people do try to do experiments with private funding,** certain environmental groups protest the specific projects, causing them to be put on hold or shut down by governments or advisory committees. Not doing experiments now makes future implementation much less likely.
I would not recommend DIY geoenginnering. Someone did try DIY ocean fertilization in 2012, in international waters off the coast of British Columbia. There was significant international backlash, his partners stopped supporting him, he was removed from his company, and forced to pay legal fees. If you do something that is ambiguously legal and looks like something a villain might do, you're likely to have a bad time. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering
I expect that a good global climate strategy would involve geoenginnering as a component, and definitely support more research in this direction. But it needs widespread by-in at the national or international level to be a good idea.
*The concern is that people will not reduce carbon emissions if they think that there is an alternative. Since geoengineering is an imperfect substitute for reducing carbon emissions (ocean acidification continues, etc), geoengineering by itself would not solve climate change.
** Including from Open Phil: https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/funding
> most climate scientists don't support it because of concerns about moral hazard
> The concern is that people will not reduce carbon emissions if they think that there is an alternative
But if geo-engineering was attempted, and actually worked (basically all the evidence indicates that it would), then... there actually *would* be an alternative? Because we would be able to mitigate the effects? The goal is not some religious fight against the evils of capitalist production and its resulting "emissions", it's about the supposed tangible effects of these emissions on people's lives... right? .... Right? ....................................................................
..................................................................................................................................................... Right?
> when people do try to do experiments with private funding,** certain environmental groups protest the specific projects, causing them to be put on hold or shut down by governments or advisory committees.
Does this sound like the rational, logically consistent behavior of a group that's telling you that *hundreds of millions of people, or possibly literally everyone, will die* if warming continues? Dismissing any suggestions of technological solutions or adaptations out of hand, and insisting that we must all immediately become socialists, and that is definitely the only way to solve the problem, according to Science - really? Or is this behavior more easily explained by a group that simply wants socialism, and isn't interested in any way of mitigating warming that doesn't involve socialism? I'm genuinely curious how you rationalize this.
> If you do something that is ambiguously legal and looks like something a villain might do, you're likely to have a bad time
Like, say, spending *hundreds of trillions of dollars* on destroying the infrastructure that powers all of human life? Like prioritizing government control of all resources over individuals having food and warmth?
It would an imperfect alternative, especially if carbon emissions continue and so the amount of geoengineering needed continues to increase. Ocean acidification would continue. Rainfall patterns might shift - this is the most important and uncertain result. The sky would be slightly less blue in rural areas. Solar power production would fall by a few percent. There are possible unknown unknowns. Geoengineering doesn't completely solve climate change, although it dramatically reduces its impacts. Geoengineering seems likely to be preferable to not doing geoengineering on almost all plausible future emissions pathways.
I think that some of the groups involved actively support de-growth agendas, and have not thought through the consequences of how much suffering that would entail. The activists at the protests against particular projects often are not reasonable. I think that the median climate scientist is much more reasonable, even though they do not support geoengineering. From a purely environmental perspective, geoengineering is not the best option. I think that they should be more willing to look from other perspectives, and be more willing to promote acceptable-but-not-best options.
It is worth distinguishing "looks like a villain" from "actually bad", even though they are correlated. A private individual trying to control the global climate looks like a villain. Protesting pollution resulting from energy production does not.
"The sky would be slightly less blue in rural areas."
Nooooooo!!!!!
I echo the sentiment for the moments I can see blue sky in between the rainclouds and overcast weather and grey days 😀
"The short explanation is that (1) most climate scientists don't support it because of concerns about moral hazard,* so there is not much of a push to do it, especially with public funding, and (2) when people do try to do experiments with private funding,** certain environmental groups protest the specific projects, causing them to be put on hold or shut down by governments or advisory committees. Not doing experiments now makes future implementation much less likely."
This amounts to concealing a possible, albeit imperfect,warming control option from the public. This is *NOT* a good faith attempt to find the best available option(s) for controlling warming.
Look, even tactically: The right wing opposes actions to reduce warming in the first place. Do the climate scientists and environmental groups doing this want to give the right wing solid evidence of a REAL conspiracy to impede and suppress work on an option to reduce warming? Do they want to lose the public's trust???
27 isn't really nerd jobs; its 9-5 stable white collar work apart from clergy, who generally have commands against divorce. the gaming/bartender jobs are often variable schedule 2nd or 3rd shift and make it hard to raise a family.
for gaming as well they have very strict attendance rates and are open 24-7, so that too. and often that is the only game in town that pays well for unskilled people so loss of a job is really rough.
Strong disagree - when it's software engineers and physicists, but not marketing analysts or schoolteachers, you're selecting for nerdiness (or at least intelligence).
Doctors and lawyers are intelligent too but have high divorce rates.
I think the really important factor here is a lack of women in the workplace. Many marriages are ended by an affair with a colleague, so working in a 90% male office makes that particular failure mode a lot less likely.
I predict rolling machine setters are also 90% male, but they're in the highest-divorce-rate jobs.
Do you have stats on doctors and lawyers?
Right, there's obviously a class component as well. But within white-collar middle-class professions, the ones with the most extremally low divorce rates are the ones where men rarely interact with women.
The full data is here so we're not stuck staring at the extremes https://flowingdata.com/2017/07/25/divorce-and-occupation/ ... I was wrong, and physicians and surgeons have low divorce rates. Lawyers are high among white collar professions but low compared to blue collar jobs.
As far as intelligence, it is true that lawyers and doctors have high intelligence relative to members of other professions*: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1652215081499860995 citing: https://gwern.net/doc/iq/ses/2023-wolfram.pdf.
As far as divorce rates, they appear to have slightly higher divorce rates than actuaries, physical scientists, and software developers (17%, 19%, and 20% respectively).
Physicians and surgeons have a divorce rate of 22% and the "legal industry" has a divorce rate of 35%: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statistics/.
*I say relative to members of other professions, since even the high IQ professions listed there, were still below 115. In the past, however, such fields were more elite and had average IQs of over 130: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1652892831332159489
Among physicians, 22.1% (95% confidence interval 21.8% to 22.5%) had ever been divorced by the time of survey, compared with 22.9% among dentists, 21.5% among pharmacists, 37.0% among nurses, 31.3% among healthcare executives, 27.7% among lawyers, and 36.6% among other occupations.
https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h706#:~:text=Among%20physicians%2C%2022.1%25%20(95,and%2036.6%25%20among%20other%20occupations.
I think even if nerds worked in a place with way more females they still would have a lot fewer office affairs than doctors and lawyers. But I’m not sure the reason they’d have fewer affairs is that they are more loyal to their wives or have more self-control. Initiating an affair when married still calls for social skills, being willing to put yourself out there and seduction skills. Maybe nerds are just worse at getting someone to have an affair with them than non-nerds.
Doctors and lawyers are educated and intelligent, but can be much more on the “jock” end of the nerd/jock axis.
I think this is the article used for the twitter post referencing the reddit post: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/job-divorce-rate-1017
like 6 in least divorced is physical therapists and 12-14 is dentists podiatrists and pharmacists, and 15 is military, so its more mixed. if you look at industries its mixed again too. Like programmers and engineers barely do better than military which is surprising lol.
the negative is a lot clearer in terms of things like class, wealth, stability, and status. Generally stressful or variable shift jobs that are blue collar or close to it.
honestly you get into things like there are plenty of intelligent or nerdy people in many jobs; but things like anxiety or other life situations derail you, and if your family isnt rich or your parents divorce things can sink you. failure or success is ecological not reducible and you cant always isolate a human to his traits.
48. Okay the parallel parking thing could come in handy. But the uey? Rockford could do a one step uey at highway speeds. Seems like he did it in about every third episode.
The street will find its own uses for crab cars. I expect interesting car dancing, racing, and stumts.
I'm hoping for new innovations in the field of donuts.
Re: #29, I have to *hard* agree with that statement. The real killer app will be AI boyfriends, not girlfriends. Another one that's more potent will be customizable romantic custodians. If the internet has taught me anything about sex, it's that people are secretly deeply disgusting.
Also that perfectly average people will pay real-ass money for something that can be customized into whatever it is they are specifically into.
Romantic custodians? What is this?
I interviewed Adam Mastroianni a little while ago, may be of interest: https://youtu.be/M409oKluPYc
> 29: ... My trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)"
George Hotz recently argued the opposite on the Lex Fridman podcast:
> "Women are attracted to status and power, and men are attracted to youth and beauty...machines do not have any status or real power... status fundamentally is a zero-sum game, whereas youth and beauty are not. I also think that men are probably more desperate."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNrTrx42DGQ&t=3616s&ab_channel=LexFridman
I would combine the two to say that horny women want attention / emotional validation from men with status and power. When women get emotional validation from low status men they generally categorize it as friendship, not romance.
The question of whether AI's can fake status effectively is interesting. I'm inclined to think this is possible, human scammers are certainly able to do it. Also, romance novels are popular with horny women, and these only offer the fantasy of a powerful high status man.
*Fake* status? What are you talking about? GPT-4 has been on the cover of magazines, been the subject of international summits, and made billions of dollars. Some people even think it could destroy democracy or kill all humans! Rich, famous, powerful, a little dangerous - what more could you want in a boyfriend?
Sure, if you let someone else talk to it for long enough, it'll forget you existed, but doesn't that just make you want to spend more time with it?
AI implementation of "treat 'em mean and keep 'em keen"?
If I still had the kind of social life where I could do this, I'd try to make "inserting yourself into their context window" into a double entendre.
21 'This is a good study, but I’m irritated by their replacing “Trump’s claim of a stolen election” with “the big lie”'
Completely disagree. The difference between this and calling Trump or somebody else a jerk face is the jerk face is at the very best and opinion and is plainly intended to be pejorative. That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact. We have it in writing from Fox News that they lied, you'd have to manufacture a great deal of doubt to give any to Trump himself that he was consciously lying. It's a lie. If the people who wrote the article don't mind being in your face with all the people who believe in good faith the lies they were told, that may or may not be a politic decision but it is a fair one. Seems to me you're getting into false equivalency territory
>That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact.
I mean, how do you know? Did you personally authenticate all 155 million votes? Did you watch every mail-in ballot be filled out and dropped off by the person that it was supposed to? You can point to a lack of concrete evidence that any of the specifically alleged fraudulent activities happened, and I do think that's pretty strong evidence that the election wasn't stolen, but I don't think that warrants this level of smug dismissiveness.
> That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact
Source?
And no, I don't mean the 10,000 sources that simply assert that it wasn't stolen, I mean actual conclusive evidence that it wasn't stolen.
Prove the negative, huh? Thats the quantum of proof that is necessary? There were something like 65 lawsuits filed by the loser and none succeeded most were literally laughed out of court. The arguments were so lacking that lawyers were sanctioned. How do you explain that. See the way it works is, if a candidate loses that badly and pretends it never happened, i don't believe them. And like i said lots of people spread the lie and there is documentary evidence that fox news lied, which is why they setteled for a staggering amount with Dominion 4. So, yeah, its a lie.
> Prove the negative
You made an extremely strong, positive claim.
"That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact"
Are you denying that you made this claim? Editing your comment right now to get out of defending it?
> There were something like 65 lawsuits filed by the loser and none succeeded most were literally laughed out of court.
This is exactly consistent with none of the claims of fraud even being taken seriously. Thanks for admitting it so directly!
> there is documentary evidence that fox news lied
Source? What evidence is there that what they said was a lie? (saying they lied as a defense in court is not evidence that the underlying claims were wrong)
<i>The arguments were so lacking that lawyers were sanctioned.</i>
Call me cynical, but if you had a country which US journalists disliked -- Brazil, say, or Hungary -- where lawyers challenging the latest election result faced professional sanctions, I don't think this would be taken as evidence that the election was entirely free and fair.
Some of the lawsuits were indeed quite bad, but weren't most dismissed based on a lack of standing?
"That the election was stolen began and will end is a lie is an objective fact. "
I agree with the directional thrust of this, but it's a counter-productive way to talk about the election.
My position is that there was some degree of fraud, as in every election, but that there's no reason to think it favored the democrats or decided the election. Just because it's settled in our minds, **we** might prefer to stop talking about it, but there are millions of people that are still uncomfortable with the changes in procedures during the election and what they perceive to be judicial and journalistic reluctance to investigate their claims seriously afterward.
A big part of the problem is that there were a lot of people didn't wait for the dust to settle, they started shouting "this is an objective lie" the day after the election (some even before!). That poisoned the well, and now here we are.
It seems to me that deep fakes of various kinds could make claims of a stolen election more plausible. If I were working for the Trump campaign I would already be thinking about ways to pull that off. You don’t even have to use extremely high quality deep fakes. Later evidence from experts that something is a fake will just be scoffed at or met with claims that the experts were bought.
It's disorienting to think about how much mischief we're in for over the next twenty years or so - until we have the first generation of adults that grow up with a deep, ingrained suspicion of representations in all their forms.
That's my prediction, at any rate: in the near future, adults will regard news the same way we regard advertising today.
I don't even think full aniconism will save us. With a large enough data set, I think it'll be possible to identify patterns that influence people.
There are a few problems with your argument:
1. A lie is not just a falsehood. A lie is a falsehood that's intentional and meant to deceive. Objectively proving that the election was not stolen does not prove that everyone who said otherwise was lying, as opposed to deluded, misinformed, deceived, etc.
2. A lie is not even just an intentional falsehood. "Lie" has a highly negative connotation, while "intentional falsehood" does not. In general, scientific publications should avoid words with highly negative connotations because they cloud one's judgment and moralize factual questions.
3. A "big lie" is not just a lie; it's also "big". Obviously, "big" is very subjective even when applied to physical objects (is Mount Everest big? Not compared to the Moon!) When applied to abstract concepts like "lie", it's even more subjective. What instrument do you use to measure the size of a lie? What are the units of lie bigness?
For all these reasons and more, a term like "big lie" has no place in a scientific publication, at least not one with any pretense of objectivity.
As I understand it, "the big lie" is a phrase coined by Hitler to disapprove of the methods of the Jews, and later re-purposed by historians to describe Hitler's methods (since Hitler was basically guilty of the thing he accused the Jews of). Later the term was used by Goebbels to refer to England's methods, although when people attribute the phrase to him, they usually incorrectly imply that Goebbels was describing his own methods. (Although again, AFAIK, Goebbels did use the methods; he merely wasn't talking about himself at the time.)
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot
So using that phrase about someone's behavior is less about their actual words being a "lie" or even particularly "big". Instead, it's effectively saying that the person is "using the Nazi playbook" (and is therefore morally equivalent to a Nazi (and should therefore be treated like a Nazi (and should therefore be the target of vigilante violence))). (Those last bits are usually merely implied, dog-whistle-style.)
The ironic part is that the method as described doesn't require a lie, or even a falsehood. It's just making a big claim, loudly and repeatedly, and never walking it back, until your audience unhesitatingly repeats it and believes it. "There's no evidence that..."
"What are the units of lie bigness?"
From smallest to biggest - truthiness, bigly, yuge, YUUUUGE
30: I should note, I'm only looking at the first post on the page, I don't have time to read through the whole thing. If your conclusions come from the rest, please let me know.
This seems really, really false. I'll assume that real median household income is, in fact, down. OOP summarizes this (paired with high employment) as "collectively laboring far more to get less stuff". Except, real GDP (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1) and real GDP per capita (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA) are both up. So, we're working more, and producing more stuff, but (assuming the statement about the median is true) those gains are largely going to the top of the income distribution rather than the middle. Given that, I'm don't feel the need to check the productivity figures to see something's up here.
I'll also note that if productivity is down, that's not unprecedented. (Epistemic status, vaguely remember an econ prof saying this either in upper level macro or growth and development:) Similar effects have happened in the past when new technologies have come along. The example we discussed was computers -- for a while, people didn't really know how to make them useful, and productivity stagnated/dropped before we figured out the new paradigm and it shot up. Could be a similar thing is happening with WFH and/or AI.
On life expectancy: FRED uses World Bank figures, which indicate "the number of years a newborn infant would live if prevailing patterns of mortality at the time of its birth were to stay the same throughout its life". The most recent figure is 2021, which is indeed about the same as 1998. But all this says is that if we were actively in a pandemic for the next hundred years, people would probably die sooner. Which like, duh. I'm not sure where these numbers (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy) come from exactly (it has a link but I don't feel like clicking through right now, I'm on my phone and the number of tabs open I have finally seem to be slowing down Firefox), but they seem a lot more reasonable, and entirely disagree with OOP.
And for what it's worth, I'm happy to be living now. Maybe being a few years older would be nice, as my college experience wouldn't have been ruined by Covid and the industry I'm trying to get into would be less competitive, but you could make the same arguments for being a few years younger.
Could it be changing household composition as well? I.e. smaller households for example?
7: There's literally a pointy cat ear sticking out of the top of that train engine. You can't see it?
Nope, didn't see it. There's not much reason to pay attention to poorly lit underbrush.
Now that you've pointed it out, though, I can respond that in fact there's more than one, which is not a feature of any actual cat.
Yeah, there seem to be several weird little dissociated cat "bits" in there. That was the one that jumped out-- like, duh, they superimposed a ghostly cat image over the train. Not rocket science. Only on further examination did it not quite resolve into a workable cat.
...I should not that there seems to be something superimposed on the other image as well, but without being given a verbal clue to what it might be, it isn't clear what it is. Random noise?
Regarding #30, I don't think the data does show a productivity crisis. The long-term productivity data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB) shows that productivity growth is in line with long-term trends. The recent YoY declines are an artifact of a dramatic spike in productivity during the pandemic.
In other words, productivity has fallen only relative to a brief period in which it was exceptionally high. It seems to have been high during the pandemic—we're talking about an increase in *output per hour* not *total output*—because of change in the composition in the labor force during the pandemic (https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2022/ec220010.htm), not because any group of workers' productivity actually declined.
Basically, I think the story is this: lower-productivity workers lost their jobs during the pandemic. That actually lowered total output dramatically (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1) but increased average output per worker. If you look at the long-term trend—if you just cover the statistical pandemic blip with your thumb—you can see that the apples-to-apples productivity of the workforce continues to increase normally.
9. Anyone else think Hitler sounds almost exactly like Joaquin Phoenix here? On the one hand, Hitler could be described as emo-esque proto-4chan-doomer kind of guy, so maybe it works in that way, but it sounds like the higher tones of the original may have just been the most clean and so they are what survived translation. Phoenix is starring as Napoleon in an upcoming historical epic of the same name, so it wouldn't completely surprise me if he did actually portray the H man at some point in the future.
43. I find the circumstances of Epstein's death eminently less interesting than the complete lack of implications resulting from the whole affair. Obviously, his death means he can't directly implicate anyone in court, but aside from pointing out that Trump was friendly with Epstein, the whole thing is STILL, at least implicitly, being treated as some kind of crazy right wing conspiracy theory.
Funny enough everybody is convinced that Prince Andrew is a pedo.
17: I like how only 80% of Norwegians like Norwegian cuisine.
I take it you've never tried lutefisk....
Nothin' like haddock that's been brined in lye. Mmhhhh.
RE: #44, prophetic perfect tense, it's also used extensively in the Book of Mormon, where it's nature is even explicitly called out; below quoted from https://evidencecentral.org/recency/evidence/prophetic-perfect :
*****
This explanation should ring a bell for readers familiar with the Book of Mormon, which uses the prophetic perfect on a number of occasions. The prophet Jarom explained that during his day “the prophets, and the priests, and the teachers” labored to persuade the people “to look forward unto the Messiah, and believe in him to come as though he already was” (Jarom 1:11). Abinadi similarly stated, “And now if Christ had not come into the world, speaking of things to come as though they had already come, there could have been no redemption” (Mosiah 16:16).
King Benjamin prophesied that “whosoever should believe that Christ should come, the same might receive remission of their sins, and rejoice with exceedingly great joy, even as though he had already come among them” (Mosiah 3:13). As a final example, when Moroni prophesied about the last days, he directly addressed future readers as if he was speaking immediately to them: “Behold, I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not. But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing” (Mormon 8:35; emphasis added to all examples).4
These examples and explanations indicate that the use of the prophetic perfect in the Book of Mormon is neither due to coincidence nor to an unconscious imitation of the Bible. Rather, it seems to have been intentionally used for precisely the reason that biblical scholars have assumed it was used in the Bible—“to express facts which are undoubtedly imminent, and therefore in the imagination of the speaker, already accomplished.”5
Maybe it is, but I don't think any of those are good examples. Prophetic perfect would be saying "Christ has come among us!" when he hasn't yet, not saying "Believe in Christ as if he's already come among us."
"I already know many of you have this opinion and you don’t need to express it every time the topic comes up."
Is this a new expectation generally in the comment sections here? (separate from any specific topic I mean)
If so, will violations of it rise to the level of being ban-worthy?
Why would you wish to knowingly displease your host? Who brought you up?
Some particularly-feeble wolves, my father used to say.
But I was of course not inquiring regarding my _own_ commenting on here....^^
It's a blurry line, but I think that people are here for something they haven't heard before, or at least I hope so.
If you find yourself wanting to type something you've typed many times before, you might want to consider whether it's already been said enough.
That's good advice but unfortunately there are some regular posters on here to whom it might as well be classical Sanskrit.
And unfortunately Substack's mute-user function only partially functions: it stops me from receiving notifications of replies from one of those tiresome broken-record guys but that's all it does.
So Scott's side comment regarding vegans made me wonder if he might be adding repetition of the same opinion here to the list of ban-worthy behaviors. No reply though so I'm guessing he was just expressing a bit of irritation.
7: Kelly is wrong and in a very obvious way. Say you have a Gaussian prior with mean m0 and precision k0 (precision is the inverse of variance) and a Gaussian likelihood with mean m1 and precision k1. The posterior's mean would be post_m = (m0 * k0 + m1 * k1)(k0 + k1) and its precision post_k = k0 + k1. In layman terms, your belief becomes an average of your prior belief and what the evidence points towards weighted by how sure you are about each, and your certainty is increased.
As you can see, getting evidence far away from your prior moves you *more*, not less. And this makes perfect sense. Your posterior mean should be as plausible as it can be for both your prior and the evidence. Mathematically, getting all the evidence together or getting it piece by piece makes absolutely no difference. Ofc, this doesn't mean that the brain works in this naive way, there are a ton more things you can take into account, and it's entirely possible that the effect in reality is exactly what he's describing. It's just not supported at all by the math he's referring to.
Yes agreed. The maths that Kelly has presented here is straight-up wrong. Noise vs Signal is probably a crucial part of belief updating, but it doesn't fit into Bayes.
Personally I think this is representative of a deeper flaw in Bayes. When it comes to political opinions, evidence that contradicts someone's worldview often makes them defensively harden their position. They update *away* from the evidence!
Not just political ones. People are *not* Bayesian. They form their worldviews first, then go looking for evidence that will support it to use as a rationale for that worldview. People are not rational animals, they're rationalizing animals (to steal a phrase from someone)--reason is a veneer over something else entirely. And most of the time gets hijacked/coopted into rationalizing their previously held beliefs.
It's why I am amused in a sad way by the Rationalist movement. Rationality is only as good as its basic assumptions, and I see those basic assumptions swallow the result in the largest majority of cases. And most of the rest are things that are reachable just as easily by other modes.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in thinking things through and applying reason to situations *where it applies*. But reason is not the be-all and end-all. It's a tool to be deployed where it can do good.
Haidt got into this in "The Righteous Mind". The theory is roughly that people reach conclusions by intuition, and use rationality to persuade other people to share their conclusion, or to let themselves be persuaded by a conclusion that would be useful to have, in order to form social groups that work together. I don't think he explicitly said the following, but I think it's a valid conclusion: attempts to change people's conclusions about any politically-charged topic should be viewed as an attempt to recruit them to a different tribe. So if there are no carrots or sticks besides an internal sense that your Bayesian likelihood of correctness is higher, it will be tough.
"Prophetic perfect" — How is this different from a science fiction story that uses the past tense to narrate "future" events?
(I don't know any Biblical Hebrew, but apparently it had two different "tenses," perfective and imperfective, and the distinction in usage doesn't line up at all well with what English speakers typically think of as tenses. FWIW, the Isaiah 5:13 example given by Wikipedia has aorist in the Septuagint and perfect in the Vulgate, which is more or less what I would have expected; I didn't check any of the other examples.)
43: I know things about Epstein that the rest of you don't know. I don't think he committed suicide. Besides, the dude you linked thinks he was a CIA agent or informant. Bah, don't be silly. He might have tried to lecture them on his theories of IR, and, given his friends in high places, they might have politely listened and pretended to take notes, but really.
Acosta claimed that other people told him to back off on prosecuting Epstein because he was an agent: "“I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-sick-story-played-out-for-years-in-plain-sight?ref=scroll
1. Hearsay. 2. I don't think working for the CIA grants immunity from sex crime prosecution. 3. Acosta did not enter the matter until after the Palm Beach State's Attorney proposed a lenient plea deal in lieu of statutory rape charges.
DOJ did put him on trial. Dionysus claimed that is why Acosta didn't charge Epstein. I say pughwah.
The “hearsay” is from the prosecutor himself. Odd description. The other reason for the plea bargain - which was unusual anyway as it didn’t get any extra prosecutions - was that the witnesses were scared. Many still haven’t given evidence (there are at least a few dozen). Journalists haven’t investigated. (Compare with judge Kavanaugh or Russel Brand).
Given that the witnesses were protected by the FBI and the power of the American state this fear is telling. There are obviously more powerful forces out there.
Killed Epstein. Didn't they. His procuress Maxwell kept her mouth shut and took the fall. I guess she wanted to continue to see the sky.
So... do you know anything about Aaron Hernandez that we don't know? Because that one still sits wrong with me too.
#33 seems just as lazy as the analyses he's critiquing to me.
e.g.
> Narrative violation: Ppl *want to spend more time alone* as they become richer
On a chart of people in richer countries being more likely to live in single person households. There are many possible explanations for this, e.g. people can afford not to roll the dice on living with terrible roommates, and can't find ones they want to live with.
Or how he has one chart saying older people report being less lonely, but then follows it up with a chart saying people are equally lonely by generation.
Or a chart showing less people being lonely over time that clearly has an uptick at the end (right around the rise of smartphones and social media, the hypothesis he's arguing against).
I'm not saying he's wrong. But this analysis is as weak or weaker than any of the ones I've seen that he's supposedly critiquing.
The assumption that rich (or richer) people get to make more of their own choices and are therefore acting out their preferences is not supported either. I can think of lots of reasons that a rich person would be unhappy with their situation exactly because of what they need to do for that money - like moving away from family for a job. That person would be both wealthier and lonelier for the same reason. Similarly someone who has to work a lot of hours but has a high income.
Exactly. Living away from my extended family, because that's where the jobs are. Longer commute meets less free time, which means less time I can spend with my friends or family. Finding friends at the job that is far from my home, now my friends live away from my home, and when I change the job, it becomes difficult to meet them. I'd like to find a part-time job, but those are rare and usually pay way less.
You know what many people have a preference for? Work from home! That allows them to spend more time with family and friends, to be less lonely. And it's the companies that try to push them back into offices.
Work from home can be helpful, but depending on circumstances can make things worse as well. Lots of people do make friends (or find spouses) at work. Some people live alone and work from home sharply reduces interactions with other people.
#18, ordering on the average feels a bit unfair that some countries get to vote for themselves while others can't. 99% of Italians can be in favour of their own food, but Lebanese can't rate their own food (or anybody else's, for that matter). It's only 1/24 of the average, but still.
It's also interesting to me just how, well, random parts of the ordering feels to me. To each their own, I can't say my opinion is more objective than the next person's. But, while some similar cuisines end up ranked similarly, there are some pairs that are surprisingly far apart, so the ordering doesn't seem highly self-consistent. Probably because some of those cuisines are more available in some locations than others and there is selection bias over who has tried which. Or perhaps the effects of individual restaurant quality for some country-cuisine pairs that are sparse. I'd like to see a similar chart with sample sizes, and another with commonality of people voting on each pair.
From the response on the Jaynes forum:
"Alexander’s naiveté on the subject is summed up in his somewhat flippant statement that we should expect tribal people to have said things like, “That couple-year period when we all stopped hallucinating gods and became conscious — that was a weird time.”"
I guess Kuijsten has to, but he really downplays how important inner life is in the response. Jaynes called the Trojan warriors "noble automatons who knew not what they did." He also argued that Europeans were able to conquer the Incas and Aztecs because they were still largely bicameral. Given that, certainly many people contacted during the age of exploration would have had no inner life. And this was somehow not noticed.
I continue to think it's relevant that all of these cultures had a first person singular, which indicates they had an "analog I" as Jaynes called it. And further that it looks like the 1sg may be cognate in languages as distant as Basque, Chinese, Navajo, and Trans-Papua New Guinea. This implies a lot of diffusion of "I" maybe 15,000 years ago. I discuss how this is difficult for Jaynes's date here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of
To reiterate how problematic the diffusion point is for Jaynes's timeline, see the forum's other response to Scott (written by Jaynes's former PhD student):
"Second, it is a mistake to assume that tribal societies have always existed in their present (and for some, isolated) form. There is no reason to think that small-scale societies are not the successors of once great civilizations or complex cultures. Due to social collapse, migration, invasion, or absorption by bigger groupings, many societies undoubtedly followed a trajectory that saw a drastic reduction in demographic size."
The argument, I take it, is that they may have not always been primitive. Not at all true of Australia. Would like to at least see the believers bite the bullet and say they believe that Aboriginals had no inner life until Europeans taught them.
You can have personal pronouns without having consciousness as Jaynes describes it. I don’t think it’s predictive. Identifying yourself as a presence in the real world, as distinct from another, only requires being in the world, it doesn’t require being able to internalize abstract concepts of being in the world. At least that’s how I think of it.
Yeah, I agree you can have the 1sg without Jaynesian consciousness. But the 1sg also refers to agentic inner life---there's a reason he calls it the "analog I." At least soft evidence against his timeline.
Could make a similar case for far-flung cognates for "to think," which some working on Mother Tongue include as a cognate. From another piece I wrote: "In that reconstruction Proto-Sapiens “to think” is mena, surviving today in forms such as man (one who thinks), Minerva (Goddess of wisdom), or mantra. Or in other languages as munak for “brains” (Basque), mèn for “to understand” (Malinke), and mena preserved as “to think” among the Lake Miwok Native Americans."
IMO the 1sg is stronger evidence against Jaynes, because the evidence for cognates is greater. Even if it's not as clear that the existence of the cognates implies inner life.
>IMO the 1sg is stronger evidence against Jaynes
I am not following this, for the reason I stated above. A word can exist and take on or lose meaning as the circumstances dictate. I understand a word like "I" has been around a long time, but I suggest that for a long time it meant no more than the gesture of pointing to yourself; slapping your chest with an open palm for instance. 'Me" The fact that Jaynes posits the analogue I is a way of extending that meaning, to me, and the concept could really use its own pronoun, (but we are maybe getting too many of them already.) The analogue or inner "I" is a very fluid one, and just as often could be referred to as a "you" depending on which side of an inner dialogue one is on, don't you think? We have quite a theatre of the mind.
I think this is what Jaynes refers to as consciousness , and he is positing that humans who had no other way of gathering or conveying information other than what could be spoken would be very different in their way of thinking about things, and recalling things. He doesn't claim they had no "inner life" except in the sense we think of it now. He says that in time of confusion and stress, when we would grope for the right thing to do, that the answer would arrive to us in a very different way; a voice. Given what I pointed out earlier (that the sole conveyor of information between people was spoken interaction) I am willing to consider this idea.
I do wish he had not used the word "automaton." He is a very engaging writer but prone to the cuteness temptation. It's not really right. These people thought, they felt, but their brains were wired differently BECAUSE THEY HAD TO HEAR EVERYTHING THEY LEARNED (aside from the direct evidence of their senses, which they clearly learned a lot from). This makes sense to me, but if that idea doesn't make sense to someone then there is not much point in pursuing his thesis.
Some people have stronger inner voices than others. It's true now and I have no doubt it was true then. Thus emerge voices that others would listen to. The tribal elder, the high priest, the great warrior, the master tool maker. People perhaps who a god spoke to, who directed and educated you. You had to remember what they said. How? By hearing them speak to you, in your own mind. And using mnemonic devices as an aid. Jaynes goes into a lot of detail on these things, and makes an interesting case. For me it is a compelling one, but that's me. I think really trying to imagine what its like to be in a world of people who only had the spoken word was what made me seriously consider his ideas and research.
>I am not following this, for the reason I stated above. A word can exist and take on or lose meaning as the circumstances dictate
Agree that this is a potential explanation. I'm weighing how much 1sg vs Mena create a problem for Jaynes. IMO easier to reject Mena by saying "those 'cognates' are simply the result of chance." Can also reject 1sg by separating "I" from theater of mind, but to me it's less convincing. Seems odd it would so often end up able to communicate "I think therefore I am." (Well, that's an assumption. Would like to see that translated into a bunch of languages.)
>For me it is a compelling one, but that's me.
Do you find his date compelling? What really trips me up is that self-awareness requires recursion--the self perceives the self. If you move the date of bicameral breakdown back to ~12kya then you can explain the Sapient Paradox.
I am not following the Mena argument. Forgive me. Can you explain it differently?
Also what is the earliest recorded version of I think therefore I am? Not sure what you are driving at here as well.
>Do you find his date compelling? What really trips me up is that self-awareness requires recursion--the self perceives the self. If you move the date of bicameral breakdown back to ~12kya then you can explain the Sapient Paradox.<
Im not qualified, heh.
I think it was a long process and it might not be over. (!)
When it started ....?
The development of written language and different groups of people with different spoken languages (and different gods/inner voices) that started rubbing up against each other more and more were the catalysts, he says. He also says it was a very strange and murky time.
Oh, I probably glossed over some part of the Mena argument. What I mean is that Mena is suggested to be a global cognate for "to think," which clearly refers to theater of mind. However, the evidence isn't so strong against Jaynes because the cognate is less certain than for the 1sg, which has been studied much more.
I go into a bit more detail here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for-global-cultural-diffusion
The time of "I think therefore I am" isn't so important. Just that it refers directly to the analog I. How often is it translated using the 1sg?
3) the breakdown of bicameral mind precedes consciousness, but the dating is variable;
From wikipedia. Jaynes added an afterword to the 1990 edition of his book, and this is from it. I interpret this as him saying he might have gotten a little over his skis in the original edition re dates. 10000 yrs is a lot though..
I was not familiar with the sapient paradox until now. I looked it up. "why there was such a long gap between emergence of genetically and anatomically modern humans and the development of complex behaviors?" There is a lot of complex behavior that can come without mental theatre is my first thought; people are always groping for something. I don't think what Jaynes is talking about can be located that far back.
Don't want to barrage you, but I write about the sapient paradox and bicameral breakdown here, if you care to read it: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cult-of-consciousness
Pure speculation;
How much vocabulary in spoken language builds up over 40K yrs? Do we know? Assuming it does build up, the cognitive load increases, right? And we are not talking about a nice homogenous group of people, but a lot of different people with different but related(?) spoken languages.Its really easy to succumb to the foreshortening effect when thinking about these things. i.e. it all happened so fast.. it didn't.
One theory is that language actually gets simpler, at least grammatically. The langauge that conquerers speak (eg. English, Latin, Chinese, Sanskrit, Pama-Nyungen) have to be learned by adults they conquer.
As for as total vocabulary, it seems that it must get larger. Think of a proto-indo-european root like *gen. This has now come to mean hundreds of different things: generation, genius, Genesis, etc...
Re the “liberation pledge”, I honestly don’t hate vegans, but, as a social experiment, it seems to me that this one was redundant (and self-harming) in the manner of, say, dropping a stone 1000 times (onto your own foot) to check if gravity was a thing.
On point 27, is this measuring p(had a divorce) or p(had a divorce | had a marriage) for nerds? It's not the other interpretation that we're so unlikely to marry in the first place, that we are also unlikely to get divorced?
You have to assume that divorce rates are measured as a percentage of the marriage rates. Also the number of nerds marrying probably isn’t that low although I don’t have those figures.
13: It is an ANTI-UKRAINE website. Not "anti-ukraine-war" and very much not anti-russia-war, their one problem with Putin's war is that Ukrainians are still fighting the invasion. I would prefer those behind it to be in jail (Approval of a war of aggression can be a crime) , not just defunded. - I can live with most western courts not prosecuting, sure, free speech is great. - Should "gofundme" freeze donations? In some cases: sure. In other cases: nope. In this case: Why not? This War is worse than many other crimes or "crimes". - Better if patreon et al did background-checks before accepting a project, but hardly practical.
Does approval of war aggression included non Russians? Wondering how we would lock up the 70% of Americans who supported the gulf war.
Oh that one, I assume you talk about the third gulf war (first: Iraq invades Iran. 2nd: Iraq invades Kuwait - both times with clear intent on territorial expansion). Well , that war was NOT started with any intent to annex Iraq nor did it result in any annexation, not even of oil/gas ("war for oil"). But to change the regime to a legitimate gov. elected by the Iraqi people - after the poison-gas-using dictator of Iraq did indeed refuse repeatedly to fully comply with demands backed by the UN (weapon inspections, to make sure he does not keep/develop weapons not allowed by UN - and he actually had kept missiles of too long range. That said: super-silly war of Bush-Cheney, 'WMD-proofs' were kinda fake, and so on and on and on.) Was it a "War of aggression" in the legal sense? Not sure. But very sure about the Russian war against democratic Ukraine.
Now, if a funding website would have kicked out projects that intended to support the US invasion of Iraq, even if "only" to fund the spread of anti-Hussein propaganda: I would have applauded their decision.
“Was it a "War of aggression" in the legal sense? Not sure. But very sure about the Russian war against democratic Ukraine. “
They were, legally, both the same. As in unauthorised.
Nolan, you can do better than this. Very few wars were or are "authorised" - unless one counts the crusades. And "war of aggression" as in 'a criminal act' may require more than the war just not being "authorised". Though calling it a 'Special Military Operation' won't impress no one. - None of which matters in the question at hand: Was ist a bad thing to block/freeze donations to this Pro-Russia's-war project or a good thing? - My answer is: good, right, and legally advisable. I might add: pointless, as such projects will always get enough funding by a certain Vladimir. Your answer is still unclear to me. In all this fog-of-whataboutisms.
> (Approval of a war of aggression can be a crime)
This is putinesque authoritarian nonsense.
Smarten up and/or learn some law. As it is you: Not much hope. For others: A war of aggression is against international law - and some national laws- as are war crimes.
§13 VSTGB Crime of aggression
(1) Anyone who wages a war of aggression or commits any other act of aggression which, by its nature, severity and scope, constitutes a flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations, shall be punished with life imprisonment.
As acx-readers should know: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists Public approval of any crimes is against the law most everywhere (§140 StGB in my country - punishable with up to 3 years prison). A guy in Germany who put a Z on his car to show his approval of Putin's war got fined 4000 €. https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/z-symbol-autofahrer-geldstrafe-ukraine-krieg-russland-100.html Russian flag is still considered okayish.
While in Russia you may go to prison for showing a paper "no war" or "** ***" or even a blank paper.
>While in Russia you may go to prison for showing a paper "no war" or "** ***" or even a blank paper.
You...literally just proved my point. You want to throw people in a cage for their opinions. This is the most basic, trivial form of authoritarianism imaginable.
Relax. No one is walking around your house, shouting: "Glory to Frog-Murderer Adebar Stork" "An occultist was raped last week, SWEEET, I know one more behind this door!" - and if one does, I hope you have a police to call to and laws that apply. If idiots or the court will call that: "Authoritarian oppression of free expression of opinion": Follow James Thurber. "Run, don't walk to the nearest desert island."
"Public approval of any crimes is against the law most everywhere (§140 StGB in my country - punishable with up to 3 years prison"
Most of us are well aware of the fact that this is the law in Germany, but Germany is dealing with some unusual constraints in this area. I am skeptical of the claim that this is true "most everywhere", for "any crimes". Obviously it's not true in the United States, and I don't think we're the only one.
Well, it is not our famous holocaust-denial rule . That would be § 130 III+IV StGB (below). I F a mob cheers on a murder/lynching, if the peers of a teen laud his plan/execution of a school massacre, if Al Capone or the head of a clan gives their thumbs-up to a plan - are you really sure, this is without legal consequences even in the USofA? I would expect many more tweets approving of school-shootings. Why there are so few Klu-Klux-Klan-marches nowadays?
Our law: (warning: legalese, I corrected one mistake of google translate; still far from perfect, but maybe one can get the gist:
(3) Anyone who publicly approves, denies or trivializes in a meeting an act of the type specified in Section 6 Paragraph 1 of the International Criminal Code, committed under the rule of National Socialism, in a manner that is likely to disturb public peace, will be punished with a prison sentence of up to five years or a fine.
(4) Anyone who publicly or in a meeting disturbs the public peace in a way that violates the dignity of the victims by endorsing, glorifying or justifying the National Socialist violent and arbitrary rule will be punished with a prison sentence of up to three years or a fine.
Yes, we know that this is *your* law. The question was about everybody *else's* laws. Which I'm guessing you are completely unfamiliar with, in spite of having opined so confidently about.
50€ of mine are yours if you can show that less than 5 of the G7 countries have a law similar to §140. Canada:
https://twitter.com/SenatorHousakos/status/1711120800395235383
I am seeing a cats ear. It looks like it was completely planted in that picture. I don’t think I’m seeing the cat you guys are seeing.
I am more interested in the somewhat ghoulish face immediately to the left, that I can see in the trees. That I really see.
This was great, thanks. The less wrong links were wonderful, and I didn't know about "The goddess of everything else." Which was also great, though I do think you were a bit hard on the goddess of cancer, we all have our parts to play.
so we don't care that the spiral AI generated picture makes no sense, I take it
Don’t understand. I couldn’t see the spiral until I zoomed out ( pushed the phone away). Otherwise it’s a perfectly sensible depiction of a street.
For somebody who usually writes pretty clearly, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. What does it mean for a piece of art to make no sense? What sense is it supposed to make? Have you had your morning coffee yet?
Do you care?
The shadows are not very probable, and there's a tree trunk that seems to be starting from the top of a lattice instead of the ground. This seems less off-putting than the extra hands and fingers from previous image generation programs, and doesn't seem very important, unless someone was going to try to build the scene from the picture. Kind of like the tricks M C Escher is known for.
I mean human art is famous for that. https://www.renemagritte.org/the-son-of-man.jsp
18. Finns are quite aware of our kitchen's low reputation (the most surprising thing to many of us would probably be that we beat the Peruvians!), which is probably a combination of the fact that Finnish kitchen is basically North European (ie. would be considered "standard", "non-exciting" due to North-European-derived country cultural supremacy) and that our country is more obscure than North European countries in general, not having had large empires (English, Dutch, Germans) or an appealing Viking mythos.
However, one thing I'd like to note is that one thing we succeed quite well is in creating tasty pastries that frequently draw praise even from visitors, though even there our branding skills are dismals: some of our best-tasting common pastries are "Dallaspulla" and "Teksaspulla", literally "Dallas bun" and "Texas bun".
37: Until very recently, a typical Swedish election map would look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Swedish_general_election#/media/File:Swedish_General_Election_2014.svg
A red/blue election map familiar to Americans, showing the major cities... expect the blue denotes the center-right party and red the center-left party. The Swedish Social Democrats absolutely commanded the majority support in the Swedish countryside, particularly in north of Sweden, for a long time: if you look at the most recent electoral map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Swedish_general_election#/media/File:Swedish_General_Election_2022.svg) you can still see this, though the rise of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats complicates things. Norway is the same, I understand, though in Finland the countryside has long been the electoral territory of the Centre Party which defines itself as, well, the name says it, really.
As such, the study's results on Nordic countries are a bit surprising, though they might more reflect *cultural* progressiveness than left-wing opinions in general. It's very possible that there are still a lot of (older) people in the countryside who have, within Swedish scale, conservative opinions on a lot of matters, but still vote Social Democrats out of habit or for economic reasons.
What? Mojakka is no good?
And maybe saunabaths make you sweat a little too much also?
Yeah I’m pullIng your leg a little.
I grew up with a lot of third generation Finns here in the US.
Kaleva Hall was in the rival small town next door.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleva_Hall
I do still love sitting in a wood fired sauna to work up a good healthy sweat followed by a dive into a clear cold lake.
It feels vey much like a sacrament.
Really disappointed to see Grayzone described as an "Anti-Ukraine-war website."
In the first place, the real "anti-Ukraine-war" people are the Ukrainians. They did not start this war. They've been invaded, bombed, mined, tortured, murdered, kidnapped, expelled, and otherwise abused in a thousand ways. No one wishes more than they that none of this had happened. What Grayzone is, if making reference to Ukraine, is an "anti-help-Ukraine-defend-itself website." So it's really rich to describe it as if it was simply "anti-war."
But of course the site much more than that. Grayzone and its staff are consistent promoter of pro-authoritarian propaganda, promoting Chinese narratives on Xinjiang and Hong Kong and denying Assad's atrocities in Syria. They are purveyors of lies and misinformation. I have no strong opinion on what GoFundMe should do with them, but let's at least set the terms of the debate honestly.
Some links:
https://www.codastory.com/disinformation/grayzone-xinjiang-denialism/
https://www.axios.com/2020/08/11/grayzone-max-blumenthal-china-xinjiang
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-echo-chamber-of-syrian-chemical-weapons-conspiracy-theorists/
I can see the words and cat ear clearly when I look at the monitor from an angle, but straight on I can't see the ear at all, and it took me a minute to see the words. I've tried this on some other computer generated hidden word pictures, and I consistently see the picture first from the front, and the words first from the side.
My first thought was that The Goddess of Everything Else was the goddess of the things that don't fit your theories, rather than the goddess of cooperation. You thought the world was reliably A and not A, or possibly A and B, and then the universe comes in very firmly and say, no, there's C, X, and a few things from alphabets you haven't heard of.
I believe trans is very much a Goddess of Everything Else thing, and when you find out the territory isn't fitting your maps, the thing to do is *not* to double down on defending your map.
As for the poem, last I heard, predation came in after life had existed for a while, so maybe the chaos/cancer drive isn't *quite* as fundamental as all that. Or maybe the earliest version was microbes crowding each other out rather than eating each other.
It was you who argued that the trend (or absence thereof) mattes. Or subsequently that the mere visual appearance of a trend (or lack thereof) matters. I literally know of nobody arguing that it is meaningful when extrapolated indefinitely.
I do occasionally see people arguing that such and such a trend (or trend absence) is evidence against global warming. [Edit: continuing after posting accidentally.]. For that argument, the proper statistical test is whether the trend is significantly different from predicted, not whether the trend is not statistically different from zero. Even so, it would be weak evidence on the sense that 5% of noisy trends are expected to be significantly different from a perfect trend prediction, and the evidence for global warming is primarily physical rather than statistical anyway.
Re: 10 and smarter rodents - this episode of "Doomwatch", a 70s SF series from the BBC:
"Tomorrow, the Rat
Doomwatch are alerted to reports of a number of attacks on humans by rats. Toby and Bradley investigate the house of Mr and Mrs Chambers, victims of a recent attack; the two scientists lay traps in the kitchen, but the rodents display unusual intelligence by jamming the traps open using cutlery found on a worktop, and then viciously attack the men. Meanwhile, Ridge becomes involved with Doctor Mary Bryant, who has been conducting experiments on a group of rats in a room in her flat - but the rats have managed to escape, and have now turned carnivorous..."
You can view it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6hiOMBI1Ds
Re: 35, a fascinating article, from which I take away that psychology (or social psychology alone, perhaps?) is today's version of astrology: taken seriously as a science, taught in universities, grave expert practitioners, examples of types and effects, and sometimes stumbling on a correct view by lucky chance (e.g. the personality type differences between people born in summer and winter), accepted by society for its explanatory power and used to make decisions from the personal to public policy, but maybe doomed in the future to be regarded by our descendants as we regard astrology? "Can you believe they really thought that 'forces' in the 'subconscious' existed and influenced behaviour?"
Loading this page keeps locking up the browser on my phone.
Crawls on e.g. Apple's "M2 Ultra" with 192MB of RAM, too. Substack's comments engine is fantastically bloated.
Re Jaynes; the big fork in the road is this; do you think people are just really smart animals, or do you think that there is a secret sauce involved?
If one holds the position that we are unique, then Jaynes ‘ theory is out the window.
I am someone who thinks Julian Jaynes’ theory of consciousness answers more questions then it raises.
43. I don't pretend to know what happened to Epstein any more than the other random guy on the internet, but LW author's insistence that certain claims must be believed because they were confirmed by the Topmost Experts (like top FBI or DOJ people) sounds hopelessly naive. I don't know if Epstein really sat in the center of pedophilic network composed of most powerful elites, and was murdered for that, but if he did, of course at lease some of the top FBI and DOJ people would be in on the game, and of course they would confirm everything that needs to be confirmed to cover it up. We now know for a fact that some of them are more than willing to sacrifice their professional duties for personal and political goals. That does not make them pedophiles and murderers of Epstein, of course, but that does suggest arguments like "The Attorney General, the highest ranking law enforcement official in the country, personally reviewed the footage" are much less convincing than the author thinks - yes, he did, and if the conspiracy existed, either he was in on it, or somebody close to him, who he trusted to ensure the video he is reviewing is the genuine article, was in on it. Other arguments sound similarly weak. I mean, as I said, I have no idea what really happened, but that article doesn't look like it moves the needle any, one needs to do better job than that.
hmmm aside from being "nerd jobs" the lowest divorce rate jobs also stand out to me as being consistently high paying, low stress, with the most flexible hours.
in contrast, the high divorce jobs are often things you'd do on a night shift. casino, bartending, but also nursing. my mom reports massive gains in marital peace after her partner stopped doing night shifts, a few moths ago.
bigger list here: https://qz.com/1069806/the-highest-and-lowest-divorce-rates-in-america-by-occupation-and-industry
but, who can say, maybe flight attendants are just getting divorced so much due to being stacys
I’m definitely not saying it’s superior to signing up at Coinbase, which is much more familiar. I was saying it’s about as convenient as using cash, and cash is fine. Also ~10% of 18 year olds in Ukraine and Argentina use crypto. I’d guess 50% of poker players independent of residency use crypto. Average US citizen doesn’t get much benefit from using it, so pretty much no one does
Deep in the Affair of the Casseroles, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Moloch.
Would the Lantern Bioworks thing be effective against gingivitis? Wouldn't it also have to outcompete amoeba? (amoebas?)
#32: I'm late to the party, but wanted to drop in to mention that this is very normal, both in historical Christianity and right now.
Re 15: European fertility
The scale changes between the two images, so a quick visual comparison is useless. Perhaps there's something interesting, but we'd need the underlying data.
Re: Cat train, I have a very large and pretty good monitor, and if you look close, yeah, there's literally just a watermark overlay of a cat ear and outline of a cat body in the middle of the image, plainly visible if you're looking for it.
Not, like, a subtle subliminal effect, just a picture of a cat ear and body, with very high transparency.
>but it seemed more like the answer of a clever mechanism design appreciator and not a typical genuine defund-the-police advocate - I’m still curious what their answer is supposed to be.
I mean, their answer is 'the police arrest him and he goes to jail'.
The typical member of 'defund' movements is using the word to mean 'reduce funding to', which is an absolutely standard usage of the word that is not confusing or controversial in any other context.
If you are asking what police and prison abolitionists would do, then you're talking about a much much smaller portion of the population, small and niche enough that 'clever mechanism enjoyers' may actually represent much of their core members.
>The typical member of 'defund' movements is using the word to mean 'reduce funding to', which is an absolutely standard usage of the word that is not confusing or controversial in any other context.
Really? If Republicans said they want to defund public schooling, medicare, the IRS etc. what exactly would the majority of liberal Americans take this to mean? Hint: not a mere 'reduction in funding'.
If you actually look at the origins of 'defund the police', it was never about modest budget decreases: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/its-not-about-police-reform
And I mean, in Minneapolis, a ballot measure to literally abolish the Minneapolis police force only narrowly failed, much to the chagrin of 'defunders' everywhere.
It is very weird to act like the problem was ever about how much funding police receive. Especialyl in the context of what kicked all of this off - George Floyd. How would less funding have led to Floyd not dying? He wasn't killed by 'militarized' police equipment. He wasn't killed because the police were using all their funding on advanced 'kill people' training - the knee restraint wasn't even an approved technique.
It seems like the only way literally reducing the funding of police would have led to Floyd not dying is if the police were so lacking in resources that they didn't have enough officers to respond to calls about crimes. Which, aside from demonstrably causing more black people to end up killing each other, it means apprehending any given suspect (like Chauvin himself) is going to be tough if he wants to law low. So either 'defund' never really meant 'defund', or deunders are very very foolish.
>If you are asking what police and prison abolitionists would do, then you're talking about a much much smaller portion of the population, small and niche enough that 'clever mechanism enjoyers' may actually represent much of their core members.
Here's what the actual prompt was:
So here’s a challenge/contest. If you’re inclined, please submit between 250 and 500 words on the topic of what should be done with Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer, from the standpoint of someone who believes in defunding the police, abolishing prisons, and similar.
"13: Unfortunately related: Anti-Ukraine-war website Grayzone says that GoFundMe has frozen their account. They’ve been doing this for years for anti-woke sites, but anti-war sites feels like an escalation."
Reading this and the willful ignorance or intentional distortion of the framing has made me seriously consider cancelling my account.
You can't call yourself lantern bio-works if the bacteria don't bioluminece. Give people a radient smile.
4 crypto for sex workers
This article is so weird, I don't believe it. The article implies that the customers are using crypto and the sex workers are having trouble converting it to local fiat. There are a lot more buyers than sellers and they have little reason to use crypto. The hard part should be getting buyers to use it, to get enough to jump through difficult hoops for a luxury. Whereas, once the sex workers are sitting on large quantities of crypto, they should easily figure out a way of exchanging it, such as getting paper in person weekly.
At the very least, the article should have acknowledged how weird this claim is.
I read this post after a break from Scott's writing. Just came to post one more comment on Grayzone being framed as an anti-war website. The fact that Scott hasn't edited the part except for redacting the claim about stealing money, or responded thoughtfully to the comments calling this one out, feels bad. The fact that he hasn't censored the comments out of sight does count for something.
I live in a country which has had to worry about Russia invading (meaning, you know, killing, raping, torturing everyone I love and all that) for as long as our nation-state has existed, so I'm of course a bit biased here. The fact that Scott, a brilliant writer and an American millionaire, focuses to frame Greyzone's stance on the Russian invasion primarily through his home country's culture wars, makes me want to read less of his posts. Not due to cognitive dissonance, but due to fear of genocide and pillage, and the spite that fear provokes towards such indifference.
Parallel parking has been solved since 1982, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8zWSj2yrGA&t=9 :-)