Scrooge actually said “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Yours would be “if they would take drugs, they had better do it and die, to decrease the drug taking population”.
Scrooge says “rather die” which is 19C for “would die anyway” but your original statement said the reversal of the laws would reduce the death rate. Which means that it was the law, not the determination of the drug users to die anyway that change the outcome.
Do you have any statistics as to how often that happens? Conversely, do you have any statistics with how often drug users saved my medical interventions get clean within X number of years?
I ask because you frame your position as being about "cost-benefit analysis." It's impossible to do that kind of analysis for this kind of problem without numbers. If you have the numbers, your position would be made much more persuasive by referring to them.
>"let's just create a new religious sect guys!" isn't it for a lot of obvious reasons. How do we actually accomplish this?
Yeah, I really wonder this too, because he specifically points to the downfall of "virtue" status games in favor of more people playing "success" / meritocratic status games as driving it.
But virtue status games are responsible for basically every mountain of skulls in our collective past! We should be *ecstatic* we're playing them much less.
And "success" status games are literally what's lifted billions out of poverty and given us our modern world. We should *definitely* be playing them at the expense of virtue and dominance games!
I really don't think queueing up more "virtue" games is going to go well.
I honestly think we're just in a rough patch and have to double down on "success" games until we get uterine replicators, or until we're all uploaded and reproduce digitally or something.
I think the "elite" Red Queens Race for good colleges is a big factor. In the US, at least, the arms race for Ivy schools ALREADY starts at "we need to get on the waiting list 6 months before birth to get precious Jayden into the right pre-school and then grind furiously and non-stop for 18 years, or their chances at getting into Harvard are *ruined!*"
What incentive would work in this world? This is difficult to fix at the Ivy level, which will always have many more applicants than spots and has no reason to participate, but the various states have R1 universities in them.
The state of California, for example, has the well-regarded UC system, and could guarantee spots to selected elite parents based on pretty simple criteria. Say both of you have a prestigious degree and/or have paid >$XXX,XXX amount in taxes to California over the years. Issue those parents a guaranteed non-transferrable slot in the UC system (inclusive of the good ones like UC Berkeley) to any of their kids as long as their kid scores above Y SAT / ACT score. Keep issuing slots for every $XXX,XXX in taxes they continue to pay.
You can extend this to ANY R1 university in any state, or more broadly to any state-controlled well-regarded university in any country, with whatever threshold makes sense. Poof! The educational arms race has had some of the pressure taken off of it, and elites (however you define them) are directly incentivized to have more kids.
The schools only have so many spots? Well legislate that you have to use some of those $XXX,XXX tax dollars to expand those universities then, this is a self-perpetuating system!
"the arms race for Ivy schools ALREADY starts at "we need to get on the waiting list 6 months before birth to get precious Jayden into the right pre-school and then grind furiously and non-stop for 18 years, or their chances at getting into Harvard are *ruined!*""
This is not a joke, because we've already had calls from prospective parents wanting to get their child on the waiting list for entry to our childcare centre, and the child has not been *conceived* yet.
And we're just a standard childcare centre in a small Irish town, not anywhere super-duper that is guaranteed to get your kids on the path to a place in Trinity or the likes.
This is all part of the problem of declining fertility - both parents have to work in order to have sufficient income for a good life; that means the mother has to return to work some time after the birth of the child; unless there is family who will do child-minding, or a guarantee of a place in a childcare centre, creche, or the likes, then the planning around "we're thinking of having a second/more child" goes "not yet, it's not doable".
I honestly don't know what the solution is. More room, yes, definitely makes a difference in reply to Nancy's query above. But the two-income trap in today's world, where if you want anything above 'just bumping along and heavily reliant on social welfare', either one parent must be earning a very high salary or both parents must work, means "someone else has to mind the kids".
And I don't think 'government child-rearing' is the answer.
Hmm, so the $XXX,XXX in taxes would substitute for some selectivity in the R1 university?
Very roughly speaking, I'm skeptical. It depends on how much of the selectivity is rank-ordered-status and how much is actual human capital. Humor me, and consider what happens if the system really is screening for human capital invested in the kid. If the kid _doesn't_ have that investment, then you are left with the same problem as DEI picks with insufficient preparation: It is to no one's advantage for a kid to get into a university that they flunk out of.
Now, if this is just a status game, and who gets picked is actually pretty arbitrary, then the graduation rates for these kids should be about the same as under the current system.
But if the schools really are preparation for jobs that have gotten more complex than in past years, and if the preparation for entry into the schools really are necessary for schools that are more complex than in past years, then the Red Queen's race is ultimately being driven by the complexity of the jobs, and bypassing this will be a problem.
> If the kid _doesn't_ have that investment, then you are left with the same problem as DEI picks with insufficient preparation: It is to no one's advantage for a kid to get into a university that they flunk out of.
I agree, actually - it's definitely something you want to tune for. And I did posit a "both of you have a prestigious degree" filter, with prestigious being either the degree or the institution, which is obviously a "human capital" filter. I mean, the whole idea is to incentivize more high human capital couples having more kids. But obviously states (or feds) would want to tune that as appropriate. Or maybe some R1's would have more stringent criteria than others, with Berkeley and UCLA and UVA harder to get into than Penn State, for example.
> But if the schools really are preparation for jobs that have gotten more complex than in past years, and if the preparation for entry into the schools really are necessary for schools that are more complex than in past years, then the Red Queen's race is ultimately being driven by the complexity of the jobs, and bypassing this will be a problem.
This I'm not worried about at all - I've dealt with lots of freshly-degreed new hires when I was in finance,and schools, even Ivies, don't do ANYTHING to prepare kids for complex jobs.
It's ALL signaling - but of course, those signals matter - somebody coming from an Ivy really is sharp enough to pick up what they need to over the next six months. But the schools sure aren't teaching any of those kids anything useful at all, they're just the stamp of approval indicating "this person went through this degree of filtering."
>It's ALL signaling - but of course, those signals matter - somebody coming from an Ivy really is sharp enough to pick up what they need to over the next six months. But the schools sure aren't teaching any of those kids anything useful at all, they're just the stamp of approval indicating "this person went through this degree of filtering."
That's fair (one caveat below), and the _pre_-university filtering would probably be covered by the requirement for
>both of you have a prestigious degree and/or have paid >$XXX,XXX amount in taxes to California over the years
plus the SAT score requirement. ( HBD caveat - to the extent that intelligence is genetic, the degree requirement on the parents is going to misfire on adopted kids, unless one checks their biological parents. )
One caveat about universities purely doing filtering: At least in STEMM fields, some of what they teach is actually useful. "Let's approximate this as a polynomial." is a reasonably common workplace statement.
Here's a speculation that popped to mind while reading Darigo's post: What if the population is becoming more autistic? -- autistic not in the original sense, but in the more modern usage where "autistic" people are introverted, heady, socially awkward, novelty-averse, anxiety-prone, attuned to abstract patterns . Most people I've known who fit that profile are either uninterested in sex or drawn to variant sexual identities and practices that are unlikely to produce children, so as more people fully or partially fit the autism profile, fertility would decrease.
Why would we be becoming more autistic? Dunno about possible purely biological causes, but what about the decreasing amount of in-person contact people have, and the increasing amount with electronic representations of real or imaginary people? Seems like that trend started when TV's moved into everybody's living room in I think the 50's. This is pure speculation, with many ways to check whether trends in this and that support it.
"And most law firm partners are also conservative on most issues except LGBTQ and abortion, that’s why the political viewpoints they single out for hiring bans are on the left, not the right"
Can you explain this? I found Woodgrains' clerkship-based explanation intuitive but it feels like it doesn't go all the way to explaining why this would be true.
"Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" views? Gay marriage doesn't really affect them or their multi-million/billion dollar clients, but taxation and the like certainly do. Big difference between "Yes, I'll draw up the pre-nup for your daughter's wedding to her girlfriend" and "Yes, I'll set up the foundation for your children so they can avoid estate taxes". That's why hiring someone who is happy to work on the latter is more likely than "In college, I was involved in the Tax The 1% Activist Movement because I firmly and fervently believe there should be no billionaires" type, even if both are happy to pin up the rainbow flags for Pride Month.
You have to remember who it is that big law firms represent - largely major corporations being accused of misconduct (sometimes by other corporations). I think if you looked at the partners of, e.g. plaintiff-side class action firms, you'd see a different set of folks.
This is almost diametrically opposed to my own experiences graduating from an Ivy League law school a few years back. Law is a notoriously left-leaning industry. Fedsoc members were actively discriminated against in law firm hiring, to the point where we were told to make two resumes and only give the "full" one to specifically pre-vetted employers who wouldn't just immediately trash our applications (we literally had a secret list of firms we passed around). Literally every right-of-center law firm partner I've ever met was eventually forced out and is now either at a boutique or in-house. And this is on top of the fact that there were no resources available for conservative-leaning public interest, no right-leaning career counselors to advise us, etc.
To the extent you've seen conservative lawyers tend to punch above their weight career-wise, it's probably because only the rock stars feel secure enough to be open about their politics, so they stand out more.
Huh? I thought traditionally far-right people were against teen pregnancy. “If you can’t support your child, keep your legs closed!” Or do you just want a whole bunch of children and don’t care if they grow up with poverty and crappy life prospects?
"and don’t care if they grow up with poverty" ... money makes one happy?—TIL. Parents who read to you and help you with your homework is what provides positive life prospects.
It's not that money makes you happy; it's that money can and does remove many sources of unhappiness. I'm certainly happier now, when a toothache meant, "Well this sucks, I'll have to go to the dentist and maybe pay $500 for a root canal, but no big deal, I can easily afford it" than I was when I was a poor grad student and a toothache meant "Oh shit oh shit I hope it's just a filling, not a root canal, how on earth am I gonna afford $500?!?"
As Michael Kelly alludes, "teen pregnancy" in common usage means pregnancies of unmarried high-school-age girls, not literally any pregnancy between the ages of 12 and 20. And traditionally far-right people believe that a young man of 18-19 at least *ought* to be able to support a wife and child with a Good Job at the Factory (mine, whatever), possibly with some help from their own parents.
>And traditionally far-right people believe that a young man of 18-19 at least _ought_ to be able to support a wife and child with a Good Job at the Factory (mine, whatever), possibly with some help from their own parents.
Hmm... Anyone have an estimate of what fraction of the population this would be realistic for, in the USA economy as it stands today? It isn't zero. I'd guess that it is a pretty small fraction, but I have only very fuzzy ideas of whether there are areas with low enough cost of living _and_ enough non-college-degree jobs to make this feasible.
There are sill a good number of non-college-degree jobs that will support a working-class family, but I think many of them are locked up by unions who hand them out on the basis of seniority. And for that matter, I think the conservatives were pretty much always ok with "if you're one of the minority who really ought to be going to college, sure, marry your college sweetheart when you're 22 rather than your high school sweetheart at 18".
But I think one of the more reasonable complaints of cultural conservatives is that modern society has made it needlessly difficult to pursue a life path that has traditionally lead to good results for a good many people, Of course, the liberals have a point about the conservatives sometimes trying to force that path on *everyone*.
> The right also believes that at 30 nature makes another attempt to reassert itself if the women is still childless
That matches my anecdotal observations, with a few women in their early 30s who swore they never wanted to have children ending up with two in quick succession, and not on accident.
No, definitely not a solution to dropping fertility rates. For that we will need something like artificial wombs and collective upbringing of children.
Most caregiver work is low status and low pay in the US, considered entry-level and often performed by immigrants (relevant just to showcase how undesirable these jobs are to most Americans).
Yeah, I vaguely recall that some Eastern European country (Albania? Romania?) actually ran the experiment with state-run collective upbringing on a large scale, with bad results... Anyone remember what happened better than this?
Worse than I knew-- what I read about was adequate physical care, but no contact with adults beyond the minimum for maintenance. In fact, the physical maintenance was way below adequate.
From one angle, the Romanian disaster was a result of just trying to maximize the number of people.
Science fiction: The dystopian Rissa Kerguellen novels by F. M. Busby, but much, much worse.
You raise a good point, in that it might be worth considering how much fertility decline is impacted by adult men not wanting children.
But I see at least one practical reason why the issue would be framed primarily as a women's choice issue - If a single woman wants to have a child, there's sperm donors for that. If a single man wants to have a child, there are surrogate pregnant mothers but that's probably harder to find and/or costlier to make use of than a sperm bank is. Basically, it's easier for a single woman to have a child as an unilateral decision than it is for a single man to have a child as an unilateral decision.
What does a sperm donation really cost?—a trip to a bar in a low cut top—sans bra.
I know a single mom who went this route, she's far from a ten. When you're rolling the genetic dice, payin' bank for gold plated dice doesn't help the roll. Besides, what kind of people donate to sperm banks?—a PhD in theoretical physics?—more likely an associates in 'trying to find myself.'
Her son is a nice kid, dotes on mom, has some business degree, does well selling mortgages, like north of $200k well.
I think it is a little bit of a 'just so' story; if we believe St. Jerome, what wealthy Roman widows (even Christian ones) were doing was *not* "oh dearie me, I will be forced to get re-married and then all my property goes to my husband, let me set up a scam with my local priest" but in fact, enjoying being merry widows with full control of their own money:
"Of all the ladies in Rome, the only ones that caused scandal were Paula and Melanium, who, despising their wealth and deserting their children, uplifted the cross of the Lord as a standard of religion. Had they frequented the baths, or chosen to use perfumes, or taken advantage of their wealth and position as widows to enjoy life and to be independent, they would have been saluted as ladies of high rank and saintliness."
- Yeah the monetary support of women is what I've heard the most about- it's traditionally thought that Jesus and the disciples were funded by wealthy women supporters. The Apostle Paul is thought to have supported himself by tentmaking, though that is an exception since tentmaking is silent work - he can preach while doing it. I haven't heard a lot about women being significant proselytizers.
-Observationally, young churches and cult movements are heavily skewed towards women. It's a common stereotype that the wife will bring the kids to church while the dad will stay home.
-It's mentioned in a caption in Ruxandra's post but it is worth repeating that Constantine's mother was a Christian. Constantine himself had some sort of experience before a battle, his conversion is rather famous
-Point against the use of historiographical data is that when Constantine made Christianity officially legal (not the official religion, that was Theodosius 70yrs later) only 10% of Romans were Christian.
-I think the elites thought Constantine was indulging too far into his own favorite cult when he started making Christianity more official and expected it to be a fad.
-Another point is that Constantine didn't convert to Christianity for political reasons - actually Christianity was fairly unpopular among the elite and the intelligentsia, who wanted to stick with the old religions. Christianity was mainly adopted by lower (though not destitute) classes.
Funny enough I've also been on an Early Christianity binge / biblical textual analysis. If anyone else is interested, Bart Ehrman is the rockstar secular scholar in this field (lost his faith over the problem of suffering).
If you squint you might see patterns of female/long-term/persuasive soft-power strategies working under the radar of male/short-term/coercive hard power strategies.
Scott, do you think you have moved politically to the right recently? That's what I am getting from here. At least, you have moved to the right on issues involving Jews and Israel and you seem more willing to directly link Hanania, Sailer, Greer, etcetera.
I would like to think I've always been willing to link good articles by right wing people when they happen.
I did decide not to link a terrible article trying to argue against race-mixing (even though I really wanted to argue against the article) because people would freak out and blame me for acknowledging its existence enough to argue about it. But aside from being fun to argue against it didn't really have any value, and I'd like to think I'm willing to take the flak when it's worth it.
Well in 1999 the Internet was mostly people who worked in an IT related field. Or in other words, it had a culture of autistic bluntness. I mean, two things changed, today not only IT workers use the Internet, but crucially, IT workers were also a smaller group with a definite kind of, huh, traits, or culture. Not simply maturity. I would say empathy levels were low, but intellectual rigor high. I don't really think we can have both the same time.
In 1999, the culture was also leaning towards classical liberalism--heavy emphasis on individualism, personal freedom, and personal responsibility (eg. RTFM). If you look at the Hackers Manifesto or the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, you might be overpowered by the smell of horses strong black coffee. The writer of the Declaration was the cofounder of the Electronic _Frontier_ Foundation.
But like you say that has been swallowed up by the mass influx of newbies. It's eternal September.
It's just a general sense I get from your links and so on, and just your overall commentary on the topic and the tone. In your Neo-reactionary FAQ you called Netanyahu crazy, and after 10/7 you said that the best outcome, even for Palestinian welfare, is for Israel to totally remove Hamas. These two statements aren't technically incompatible but they are Bayesian signals of something and of your System 1 reactions on the topic. You used to post about Dianne Feinstein and her husband wanting to shut down the speech of anti-Israel people. Now it seems that you are saying that left-wing antisemitism is a much more serious problem than you realized. I agree of course that strictly speaking this is separate from the issue of what's actually happening in the region, but it's a Bayesian signal of something.
I think that many of the things the Israeli right have said about the Palestinians have unfortunately been proven correct. 10-15 years ago, a lot of centrist liberals believed that if Netanyahu was replaced by a center-left guy, they could sign a two-state deal with the PA. I think recent events have disabused people of this notion. The Israeli right has always claimed that even if a Palestinian leader wanted to make peace, they would never do it because their society has too many extremists and they would get shot or something. I didn't believe this 10 years ago but now I do. I think that aside from the conflict, their early rollout of vaccines, their embrace of lab-grown meat, their embrace of reprotech and high TFRs, their targeting by woke, and the weakening influence of Evangelical Christians have endeared them more to rationalists.
I think you were more scared of being associated with the "HBD" crowd a while ago. Remember the parable of lightning? You beat around the bush quite a bit. Openly linking to Hanania and to Steve Sailer's substack is a huge vibe shift. Back in your SSC days you weren't so willing to post links to content by these more right-wing people. I mean, when you interacted with Yarvin it was to argue with him. Back on SSC were you linking articles by Steve Sailer and saying they were interesting? Granted, linking to substack is a lot better than linking to unz. I would not want to link to the un z.c om trash fire either. I put spaces to not link to it. I think that HBD type views have gotten more mainstream recently. Noah Smith is now interacting with I/o on twitter.
To be clear I view all of these "rightward shifts" as a positive development. I definitely support Israel and I definitely support open discussion of group differences. Of course I would love to wave a magic wand to remove Palestinian rejectionism and to increase black genotypic IQ to 100. I also think one can certainly make many legitimate criticisms of Israel. And one can certainly make many legitimate criticisms of the HBD crowd.
I think you might be collapsing everything into one left-right dimension too hard. I still believe it's bad that Hamas is committing terrorist attacks, bad that Israel is stealing land in the West Bank, bad that lots of Gazans are being killed, and also bad that people in Columbia seem to be spitting on Jews.
I agree that you have always thought all of these things. But there's a matter of context and emphasis. The Israeli right has always said that it the conflict was never about the creation of a Palestinian state but rather the destruction of Israel. 10 years ago this seemed dumb, and I didn't believe it, but I think in 2024 we can safely say that they were right. It's unfortunate that they are right.
Your view definitely is or at least codes as pro-Israel, and in Israel would be considered a center-left Zionist view. Virtually no one who codes as "pro-Palestine" acknowledge that Hamas is bad and that what's going on in the US campuses is bad. Many people who are pro-Israel are unhappy about the settlement enterprise and would rather Gazan civilians not die. You could go to Israel or to a pro-Israel gathering and say "it's bad that Gazan civilians are dying, and settlements are a bad idea" and no one would shun you. I wouldn't go to an encampment or go to the West Bank and say that it's bad Hamas commits terrorism and that there is a horrible antisemitism problem in Columbia.
I consider myself very pro-Israel and agree with your views. Everyone except Kahanist types thinks it's bad that lots of Gazan civilians are being killed, and would rather they not be. Yes I think that Israel needs to take out Hamas, but the fewer civilians are killed in the war the better. Israel should try and jail soldiers that commit war crimes.
Half of Israelis and most of Israel's international supporters (including me) oppose the settlement project. By "stealing land" do you mean just building settlements, or do you mean the ones that are on private Palestinian property are illegal under *Israeli* law? The vast majority of settlements are not on private Palestinian land. I'm not sure how the first one qualifies as "theft". Theft from whom? I don't think you can say "the Palestinians" collectively own Area C in any meaningful sense. To clarify I definitely think both are bad, though the second is obviously worse (and is prosecuted by Israel to some extent, see Amona, though not enough). I would say that the first is more akin to gerrymandering or illegal immigration (also bad) than theft. So again, I consider myself very pro-Israel and I don't find anything to disagree with among your opinions. I quibble with calling all settlement construction "theft" but I certainly agree that it's bad in any case. And I think Israel needs to defeat Hamas, but of course I agree that it's bad that civilians are dying.
It doesn't keep me up at night and I don't think Israel is the bad guy, but I do think it's a real concern and not just a PR concern. I don't doubt your sincerity about what happened to Jews in Arab countries. I also don't think that Arabs today should be morally culpable for this, and quite honestly in some sense it's a favor anyway. Good that Iraqi Jews got kicked out in the 1950s, if they had stayed they would be getting gassed by Saddam like the Kurds, shot by ISIS. Israel is a much more pleasant place to live than non-oily Arab countries *even if you're Arab* and certainly if you're Jewish.
Benny Morris was jailed for refusing to serve in the West Bank. He is one of Israel's pre-eminent historians. I really don't like at all what happened to this teacher, that's terrible. But I will say that unfortunately the free speech of teachers and public sector employees is often restricted in lots of strange ways, and I think you are over indexing on this. If you're a private citizen in Israel you can certainly say this. Israel generally has free speech. Oded Goldreich, who is a far-left Hadash guy, is a professor at Weizmann and was awarded the Israel Prize. Yes I'm sure people are called whores and paid shills. Those are stupid comments but that is not a restriction on freedom of speech. The first example was better. I think that there is more free speech in Israel than at Western pro-Palestinian protests, encampments, rallies, etc. Unfortunately, Western pro-Palestinian culture is not some good faith Arab guy writing about Israel on ACX. I wish it was.
Netanyahu is the head of government, not the head of state. That's a dumb map, but Netanyahu himself (I'm no fan) has come out against resettling Gaza. One shouldn't read too much into the map. I don't think the PLO is very sincere about peace, but the river to the sea map on their logo is not the reason. Their refusal to compromise on the "right of return" is more important. Yes, the Finance guy Smotrich is definitely a Kahanist type. These fuckers are 5% of the Israeli population and Netanyahu let them into the government. Disgraceful. Bad guy. I never said that Kahanist types were only a few bad apples. But I do think they are a minority, probably ~5% of the Israeli Jewish population, certainly at most 10%. Compare with ~75% of Palestinians who supported October 7. The analogue of Kahanism is far more mainstream on the other side.
Yes I think Israel should actually jail soldiers that commit war crimes and not just do it for the cameras. War crimes are bad. I definitely oppose the settlements. But I don't like the term "theft" because it's not accurate. Theft from whom? Who "owns" Area C? Can we go with "illegal immigration"? I also just wasn't sure what Scott meant. Does he mean when the IDF declares some area of the West Bank to be a security zone? Settlements? Settlements on private property?
Shalom and Salaam. I'll quote Scott Aaronson, if they put you in charge of the Palestinians and me in charge of Israel, I'm sure we could sign a two-state solution and then go eat some falafel. By the way I really like Egyptian falafel, but due to favism among Mizrahi Jews they don't have it in Israel.
Any left-right division is inherently arbitrary to some extent but it seems at best odd and at worst suspicious to insist on using one that puts the majority of US Democrats on the right-wing side.
" The Israeli right has always said that it the conflict was never about the creation of a Palestinian state but rather the destruction of Israel. 10 years ago this seemed dumb, and I didn't believe it, but I think in 2024 we can safely say that they were right. It's unfortunate that they are right."
This sort of thinking is both reductionist and EXTREMELY self-fulfilling. The conflict involves many millions of people, both within the territory in question and elsewhere in the world. What it is "about" is going to vary quite a lot from year to year and person to person. But to the extent that your read IS correct, consider the following thought-experiment:
Two large groups of people, call them Group A and Group B are living and in close proximity to each other. At time 0, a few people in both groups start whispering and muttering about how "we'll never be safe until that other group is gone." Most people within their group ignore them, but a few people from the other group overhear and start shouting about it. "Those people in Group A(B) want us gone! They'll do anything to get rid of us!" Now a few more people in Group A will take the Group A whisperers-and-mutterers seriously, which means more Group A-ers whispering-and-muttering, which means its easier for those in Group B to overhear and vice versa. The belief that everybody in an opposing group wants you dead and the only way you'll be safe is to kill them first can be a really strong positive feedback loop even if all that happens is talk. Adding even a little bit of real, tangible, violent action to the mix only makes it stronger.
I think in general this is a very difficult problem to solve. If you want to avoid the outcome where everybody tries their hardest to kill everybody else, you HAVE to act as though the other side has some reasonable people who are acting in good faith and want peace. But you can't do that TOO much because there certainly are *some* people on the other side who want you dead, and leaving yourself exposed will only make things worse.
I say in general, because it is emphatically NOT a hard problem in this case. I don't believe for a minute that every single Palestinian fervently wants Israel gone, but even if that were true, they clearly, OBVIOUSLY don't have the power to get that want. Not even close. There are countries outside Israel that want it gone--I'm skeptical they have the power to make that happen either--but absolutely nothing Israel does to the Palestinians within its borders will help them achieve that either. Every Palestinian civilian that the IDF kills is a net loss for Israel's existential security. Probably most Hamas members are too. To the extent that ANY rational security purpose is being served by the bloodbath in Gaza, it's Israel trading somewhat reduced risk of terrorist attacks for slightly *increased* risk to its existence as a nation. I think the only nation that poses a real and serious existential risk to Israel right now is Isreal itself: it could tear itself apart on this issue, it could alienate itself among the international community, it could completely warp its political landscape around the "demands" of the conflict: all of these are more threatening to the state than the wildest, most ambitious dreams of Hamas.
"Virtually no one who codes as "pro-Palestine" acknowledge that Hamas is bad and that what's going on in the US campuses is bad. "
How are you counting "virtually no one?" I've seen many people acknowledge that Hamas is bad while stridently opposing the violence being done to the Palestinian people. They don't talk about it a lot, but that should hardly be surprising. The IDF has killed upwards of 20 times as many people in the past year as Hamas has, and many of them far more recently. Far too often this sort of remark is really trying to insist that every sentence included a "both sides are bad" disclaimer, and while I think very few people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian think Hamas is good or right or morally justified, nobody has very much patience for pretending they are *equally* bad. If the Israeli government had sufficient concern for its reputation to want to merely be considered *as bad* as Hamas, it was perfectly free to stop after killing 2 or 3 thousand Palestinians, instead of 30 or 40 thousand.
As for acknowledging the situation on campuses, I think Scott's own commentary to the link explained it perfectly: most people simply don't know about it. I'd heard plenty of hand-wringing about campus protests being anti-Semitic from the right, and dismissed it the same way I dismiss most hand-wringing from the right: as a mix of selective reporting and exaggeration. I'm pretty shocked at the behaviour reported in the link, and I'll freely acknowledge it's bad and it shouldn't be happening. I've seen actual anti-Semitism only very occasional in the online spaces I frequent, and stood up to it when I've seen it. I've never seen it in the real world, despite spending a good portion of the past year on university campuses (albeit, Canadian ones). I know many people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and zero people who would engage in or even tolerate that sort of thing: hopefully more widespread knowledge and social pressure puts a stop to it.
I think as an empirical matter than killing Hamas terrorists is good and helps Israel. I agree, killing civilians is bad. I wonder if we can operationalize this. Do you want to predict how many Israeli civilians will be killed by Palestinian terrorists over the next N years? Do you think it will be more or fewer than have been killed in the last N years? Put N=5,10,15,20,25, whatever. We should make a prediction market and bet on it. Do you want to bet on if Israel continues to exist conditional on various events?
I don't believe for a minute that every single Palestinian wants Israel gone. Of course not! Have I ever said anything like that? But three-quarters of them supported October 7. There are Kahanists but there is nothing comparable.
I wouldn't code you as pro-Palestinian, just as left-wing and anti-war. You want a two-state solution and don't want Israel gone. You oppose October 7 strongly, you oppose Hamas, and you want a two-state solution. Quite honestly you'll find a higher proportion of Israeli Jews who share your view than Palestinians who share your view. Your view is fringe among Palestinians, but not among Israeli Jews.
I'm a bit puzzled why moderate pro-Israel types talk as if there's some other equilibrium outcome to the ongoing settlement expansion (supported by a plurality of Israelis according to polls, and this number is steadily growing; for demographic reasons the trajectory of Israeli politics is going steadily rightward) other than annexation of the West Bank and expulsion of the Palestinians there. So I'm less inclined to view Palestinian extremism as some crazy ex nihilo phenomenon rooted in mere religious fundamentalism. Even 5 years ago a resident of the West Bank would be reasonable to believe that even if they all embraced Gandhiesque pacifism, they would still eventually lose everything to the settler movement. There's still no point in fighting a war you're destined to lose, but any prospect for any peace other than total capitulation basically died with the Olmert government.
I think you're doing a kind of meaningless attempt to set a neutral point so that you can say everyone on one side of the point is one one side and vice versa. I don't think that's really meaningful. For example, if I said that anyone who was against Israel's current war was "pro-Hamas", that's . . . a thing I could do . . . but it would obviously be a lot of inflammatoriness for no gain.
Almost no one is saying this. Netanyahu would not say such a thing, and would never accuse Biden of being pro-Hamas.
Meanwhile there are plenty of people who believe that if you accept the existence of Israel in any borders, but you are a Zionist and that therefore you are bad. I think that these people are crazy, but they are actually right about the nature of the conflict.
Really at its core this “neutral point” is not so arbitrary. It’s by far the most natural and important dividing line. This principle - the one that Israel exists - is really the one that is most at stake. It’s not an arbitrary point. It passes the following empirical test. If most Palestinians became OK with the existence of Israel, the conflict would have been solved long ago.
In the same way I do think that the abortion debate is really about if life begins at conception. I think it’s a mistake to call people who really are OK with 12-week bans and that’s it “pro-life”, even if they are more pro-life than the median American. The principle really at the heart of the debate is the conception thing. You have 10-20% of Americans who really believe this. If everyone agreed that the conception thing was ridiculous, abortion would cease to be a relevant political issue. People would fight on the number of weeks but once you accept the principle that conceptionism is wrong it becomes a matter of science and not religion.
Once you accept the existence of Israel, the conflict becomes some kind of normal ethnic conflict / real estate dispute which can be settled in a negotiated deal by rational actors, and not a nationalist holy war. The PA’s admirable verbal commitment to the acceptance of Israel notwithstanding, we are really not at this point yet. All of this talk about the Palestinian “right of return”, which Palestinian negotiators have never conceded (not in 2000, 2008, 2014, 2015, whenever), is at the core of the conflict.
Again there is the asymmetry here. If conception people went away then abortion would cease to be an issue. People might have disagreements on T3 but that would all get worked out. If people who support T3 abortions went away, it wouldn’t solve the issue. The end of Palestinian rejectionism would very quickly lead to a dovish Israeli government signing a two-state solution with a dovish Palestinian government and the settlers getting outvoted. It’s the Second Intifada after all that ousted Barak and put Olmert in power, after Arafat failed to accept the Clinton parameters. The end of the settlement project and the end of the Gaza war would not lead to the end of Palestinian rejectionism, which doesn’t care at all about the Green Line. It’s not at all a coincidence that the conception people and the encampment people are both extremely uncompromising and willing to lose the election for their own political party.
If you disagree, let’s formulate some kind of empirical question and put a prediction market. I did make a lot of empirical claims here.
Are your views different from those of Yair Golan in any meaningful way? Meanwhile there are no influential Palestinian politicians or major political factions who have these views. So yes these are pro-Israel views. Any view that supports the continuation of the existence of Israel, the "Zionist entity", is pro-Israel. Palestinian and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
I very much appreciate your point of view. We've got to have some way of accepting current people rather than making the past the most important thing.
Would you be safe expressing your views about Israel under your own name in Palestine?
I see the situation as both Gaza and Israel having murderous leadership.
OK, "Palestinians and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity" is too strong of a phrase, I apologize for saying that. Most Palestinians think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
Yes there are people in the West - a few ACX commentators, Irish leftists, not encampment people - who are "pro-Palestinian" but not on board with destroying Israel. Quite honestly this is just LARPing, as it's not a position that anyone in the region really has. Meanwhile there are plenty of people in Israel, including major Zionist political parties like The Democrats, that agree with Scott's position.
The feminism analogy is bad. To make it better you have to consider a hypothetical. If US university campuses were full of people chanting that women should not have rights or should be allowed to vote, then you would be a feminist for disagreeing with them. If we got back to 1920's social norms, and you talked about male variability and about the excesses of MeToo, no one would call you anti-feminist.
Also if you are going to criticize some Israeli action, of course I'm not going to deflect and say that Palestinians also did some bad thing. This is an extremely dumb thing to do and it's a non sequitur. If someone talks about Dresden you don't go and say that Auschwitz was so much worse. Yes it was but that doesn't address the point, and civilians in Dresden didn't even know about the gas chambers. I am very different from the feminists you bring up.
> It sounds like you want to forcibly make Scott "Pro-Israel", by intentionally Motte-And-Baileying the "Pro-Israel" position so much that it becomes meaningless.
I'm not sure Motte and Bailey is the right frame here. To use an American example. When Trump first won the Republican primaries, a lot of senior GOP figures endorsed Clinton. Did they move left?
If you define "left" as a series of beliefs and policies no they didn't.
If you define "left" as a team that's opposed to the team called "right" they did.
And I think there is a reasonable case that when "left" is used by the man on the street they think of it in the sense of the second term. Why is solar power left wing? Surely cheap reliable off-the-grid energy fits the rugged individualism and rural localities of the archetypical right wing voter?
Bringing it back to Israel. Replace Trump with "October 11th was a mask off moment for the western pro-Palestine movement".
> You remind me of feminists who - when it suits them - insist that anyone who doesn't literally think that women are breeding mares Untermenschen designed by the creator god to be a slave half-species for men is a feminist.
Does "want to turn women into breeding mare untermenschen" and "everyone else" accurately describe the sides in the culture war over woman's issues in the west?
Does "want to end the existence of Israel as a Jewish state" and "everyone else" accurately describe the two sides of the culture war over support for Israel in the west? It ignores a lot of people in the middle, but I would argue its *much* closer to accurate than the preceding paragraph.
>I think that Israel's **founding** is a moral atrocity - which it is - but I think that enough time has passed that it's no longer morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling Israel
In your view, how much more morally atrocious would the current activities of the currently-existing Israel have to be before it became morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling it?
Settlements are more "illegal immigration" or "gerrymandering" (both bad, to be clear) than "theft". The ones on private Palestinian property are theft, yes, but that's a small minority of them. Not a fan of the settlements, but important to use words accurately.
If you are hoping for a two state solution, then "annexation" is probably the best word. They are an effort to shrink the borders of any potential Palestinian state by putting down enough people that it's easier to change where the border is than displace the settlers.
Often people call it "creeping annexation" because "annexation" has a specific meaning. But yeah, I generally agree.
I wouldn't say that they are actually an effort to "shrink the borders of any potential Palestinian state", more like an effort to prevent one entirely. It's a failed effort. While there has been expansion of existing settlements, creation of actually new settlements has all but stopped. There hasn't been and won't be nearly enough settlement construction to make a two-state solution unviable.
Fair point, I agree. It’s illegal immigration into the West Bank, backed by the Israeli government. As I said, I think that “theft” is also wrong though, at least for the vast majority of settlers who go to Area C but not Palestinian private property. I think that a stable and lasting two-state solution would be great, but I don’t think it’s meaningful to say that Area C is the collective property of the Palestinians. It’s not actually owned by the PA the way the US government owns US federal land.
Just picking up one little piece: I'm a bit surprised Scott hadn't picked up on the many stories from Jews about being personally harassed on campuses. It's not a big deal that he didn't, it's just possible that I was reading more frightened sources, or that he was more optimistic about universities.
One of the reasons for conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism, is the dishonesty, lies by omission, and worse that come out of anti-zionist circles.
If someone denies any Jewish connection to the land, mistranslates 'Yahud' to 'occupation forces', and consistently fails to analyze the conflict honestly, assuming they are antisemitic makes sense.
Usually they are just deranged 'anti-imperial' leftists borrowing narratives and terms from antisemites from the middle east, but at that point, what's the difference?
Do you think this is how Jews, Zionists, or potential Zionists should be treated?
"One of the essential obligations of a university is to provide a feeling of safety, in the most basic sense of the word: the feeling of being safe in one’s room, on one’s way to class or to study. After October 7, numerous students reported that they no longer felt safe. One student who had
moved into her dorm room in September, told us she placed a mezuzah on her doorway as required by ritual law, as traditional Jews have done for centuries. In October, people began banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to move out of the dorm. Visibly observant students, like ones who wear traditional head coverings, have been frequently met with extreme hostility. “On campus, my friends have been spit on, been called like terrible,
terrible names, a very close friend of mine was called, a lover of genocide and then a lover of baby killing. This was only a couple of days after October seventh.” A student told us she had been chased off campus with her brother one night. In many cases, episodes like these have led
to efforts to hide markers of Jewish identity: while some students felt that they could previously “wear our Jewish identity,” now they don’t want their peers to know that they are Jewish. The fear of consequences permeated the atmosphere of campus during these months. One student put
it this way: “If I walk on campus right now with my star out or kippah or say ‘am Yisrael chai’ “the people of Israel live,” a traditional song], I could start World War III.” Many Jewish students said they now avoid walking alone on campus.
Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls, while walking back to their dorms on Friday afternoon and when they were on their way to synagogue. There were also multiple reports of visibly Jewish individuals simply walking past 116th Street who have been followed, stalked, and subjected to ethnic slurs and hateful
statements, like “go back to Poland” and “I hope you guys suffer. You guys think it’s okay to kill innocent babies and bomb hospitals. Yes, Habibi, I’m talking to you,” and, when the hecklers saw that the student was filming them, one said to send the video “to all your Israelis.” Students also recounted finding jokes about Hitler written on communal dormitory whiteboards. Many students described walking down hallways as a painful daily routine.
This hateful rhetoric has often been accompanied by an unwillingness on the part of listeners to engage with Jewish and Israeli students in a wide variety of encounters that are held to be the bedrock of a university community: discussion, empathy, intellectual nuance, argument. Some
Jewish students found that whatever they said, their words were distorted. Some students were made to feel as though their support of Israel, or empathy for Israelis, was inseparable from support for the actions being carried out by the Israeli government. A student said, “There’s a lot
of times where Jewish students are made to justify the actions of Israel, for good and for bad. When you assume that someone’s religious beliefs mean they want a group of people dead, that is hurtful.” Another recounted feeling unable to criticize what’s going on Israel for fear that such discussion would be associated with support for the destruction of the state. Others feared that the assumption that all Jewish students were aligned politically was particularly dangerous for Jews of color, and they were especially concerned about the heightened presence of police on
campus. Still students spoke of what they perceive as the University’s failure to distinguish between different Jewish denominations, mindsets, and beliefs. Several students argued that the administration was only supportive of Zionist Jews. Others expressed their firm belief in the
inextricable connection between Zionism and Jewish identity."
These stories are very bad, whether or not they are "anti semitic". The definition of anti semitism doesn't influence how bad these stories are.
I agree, ideally there should be no special "antisemitism" task force. Certainly, universities shouldn't police the speech and action of their students for any kind of protected free speech, but should punish violations of university policy.
Still, conditional on the existence of all of the DEI bureaucracies and so on and the current state of US universities in 2024, I guess it's better to have one than not have one to expose how hypocritical these universities are. I strongly support removing all DEI, but harping about anti-Semitism is a good way to accomplish that. We have to operate within the system we have. Ideally we'd have more libertarian civil rights laws and free association, but given the ones we have it's appropriate to play the game a bit and sue Harvard for anti-Asian discrimination.
I agree we don't want Jews to be added to any DEI bureaucracy, and should try to dismantle DEI, but this "antisemitism task force" is not becoming an institutionalized and permanent part of the university, so it's not as much of a concern.
>I am skeptical that Columbia's anti-Semitism task force didn't also engage in these fallacious conflations, which are possibly designed to shut down dissent and debate
I am going to express my strong support for not treating Scott as emphasising that he thinks Israel has a right to exist (without pogroms!) as a change in his point of view. Unfortunately, it probably a sign of a broader "vibe shift" that it is so often topical for him to do so.
I am also strongly supportive of not treating "takes plausible arguments about very serious topics seriously" as right-coded.
As for the fact that you find his views somehow zionist or right coded, that may be all about you.
You have a point, but I don't think it's all about me. I do think that the more prominent far-left crazy people are, the more sanity becomes right-coded. And of course the prominence of far-right crazy people makes sanity more left-coded.
Yes, we agree about the extreme shifting around a fairly stable center, but your previous comments were about Scott's position changing when I would have thought it was more an illustration of the former phenomenon.
I'd rather say that it's the Israel-related cracks in the leftist-dominated establishment that incidentally lend the right some grudging veneer of respectability. However crazy the radicals are about sex/gender, for example, the establishment entirely has their back, so any dissent is misinformation/bigotry/Russian propaganda. Whereas there's a genuine split on the Hamas apologia, and so a legitimate space for calling out the crazy as such.
What's the terrible argument against race-mixing? Many "races" are already mixed, right? The "white race" was created by race mixing between steppe and farmer. Mexicans are a mix of White and Native, and even African Americans are a mixed population that is only ~75% African genetically on average. Someone like Skip Gates is already mixed, genetically half-white. Cory Booker has blue eyes. If you are talking about black-white mixing in the US context, at least one parent is already mixed, unless his parents came from Nigeria or Ghana or some place like that. Oh, and let's not forget race-mixing between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Ashkenazi Jews are a mix of Italian women and Israelite men. Ethiopians are a mix of East Africans and Middle Easterners. Brazil is a country full of race-mixing. There's already so much race-mixing. Like, on what timescale does this guy think race mixing is bad?
Forgive me if you don't want to engage here. I can only imagine what kind of person would argue against "race mixing". Not even interracial marriage, but calling it "race mixing". Some Neo-Nazi?
OK say that's true for some ways to measure genetic distance. Then what? Who cares? There are tribes of bushmen or whatever so an average pair of people is as distant as an Italian and a Japanese, and more than an Italian and a Spaniard. Should they have an identity crisis? Perhaps a child from this tribe is less related to his father than a random English guy is to a random German guy. What's wrong with genetic distance not lining up with paternity? Should adoption also be banned then?
Bushmen are genetically diverse, but morphologically they are very homogenous. Most genetic diversity is neutral and morphological traits like, skin color, height, facial features, and so on are under intense selection pressures. So they vary much less and reproductively isolated groups converge on a common phenotype relatively quickly. Bushmen don't generally have higher variance in their morphological phenotype then other people. Which is obvious if you've ever seen a group of Bushmen. Genetically they are extremely diverse, but they all look the same.
Humans are visual animals and appearance matters a lot. A person who looks racially different will always be naturally out-grouped, red haired people get out-grouped even by people almost genetically identical to them, same with dwarves.
It's also about culture. Black and white culture are quite distinct in the USA and a mixed race child of ambiguous phenotype will have to choose whether to assimilate more into the white or black culture. They will be alienated from friends and family on the opposite side of that cultural divide. The divide isn't insurmountable, but it is an issue.
I'm still an advocate of race-mixing in general on the grounds that it's the only way to deal with these issues in the long run, by converging the groups genetically and culturally. But, I understand why someone would be apprehensive about having kids that look very different from their cousins and other relatives.
IIRC I saw a rebuttal of that claim. Don't remember the details, but the argument might have been that so many genes are not strongly correlated with race that your child's similarly in terms of those genes outweighs the difference due to race-correlated genes.
But even if it's true that mixed race kids are further from you in DNA than other members of your race, who says that's bad? Most of us, if we had an adopted child or loving step-parent, would treat them as akin to a blood relative despite having no DNA in common (beyond the human baseline). For normal people, our degree of caring is based as much or more on social and moral factors as on common biological descent.
Scott can speak for himself and quite eloquently to boot, but post-10/6 I'm like, well, looks like we can't have peace, so I want my relatives to survive. I expect people with Palestinian relatives take the equal and opposite position. We'll see who wins.
Also, a lot of the far right is anti-Israel and explicitly antisemitic (mostly ultimately due to the prominence of Jews on the left over here from what I can tell).
I don't know about politics, but as you get older and settle down and have kids and all that jazz, you tend to trend more small-c conservative. Suddenly all the fuddy-duddy advice about being responsible and sensible seems less fuddy-duddy 😀
"If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain” is a quote attributed to Churchill but seems very likely he didn't say it, so probably our friend Anonymous again.
It’s important to note that WWI ended with maneuver warfare. The Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to take significant swathes of territory with relatively few casualties at least twice so far (in Kharkiv offensive and Kursk offensive), so maneuver warfare is not hopeless in this war.
Yes, maneuver and attrition warfare are two different tools that are used in concert. It's rare for any war to be purely one or the other. Even the first Gulf War against Iraq -- normally thought of as a brilliant maneuver war where the Coalition quickly achieved victory with large scale flanking maneuvers and deep attacks with smart weapons -- was preceded by intense bombing and shelling explicitly described by the general staff as an attrition campaign. Attrition opens up the opportunity for maneuver, and maneuver permits more effective attrition.
The current Ukraine conflict is in an attrition *phase*. It was in a maneuver phase for the first few months, when the incompetent Russian thrusts toward Kyiv and Kharkiv were thrown back. The reasons for the current phase are a lot more complex than just artillery vs air power. I would add a lot more factors like the age of the conflict -- since 2014 -- meaning that continuous and immensely deep fortifications (50 km in places) exist, political limits (Russia doesn't want to call a general mobilization, Ukraine doesn't want to annoy its Western friends), terrain (neither side can go around the fortified lines, the ground is difficult to attack through), and so forth. But it's only a phase. It can shift back into maneuver warfare again.
> when the incompetent Russian thrusts toward Kyiv and Kharkiv were thrown back
... and when Russians got the land bridge to Crimea, which is still under their control.
Agree about phases, and self-imposed political limits on *Russia only* - Ukraine pretty much gets everything (but with moderate delays - which make things harder for them).
Lay public were shocked by trench warfare between developed nations in the 21st century. Military professionals recognize that the conditions which led to the trenches of the western front in 1915-1918 were re-created in Ukraine:
1. Can't go around them: the Joint Ops Area is bounded naturally by coastlines and legally by national borders/limits on long range strikes beyond national borders, once the line of contact stabilizes neither side can easily turn the other's flanks and opening additional fronts has been below the threshold of large-scale combat ops (e.g. clandestine and special ops, info ops, international diplomacy, economic sanctions, etc.)
2. Can't go over them: both sides can effectively contest the airspace, so neither can launch vertical envelopments, air interdiction and close air support is risky, strategic bombing is done by long range standoff munitions (rockets, missiles and drones) instead of waves of manned aircraft.
3. Can't go through them: 21st century weapons defeat 21st century armour, but earthworks offer cheap protection, so defense is stronger than offense. Neither side can rapidly break through so many prepared lines of defense, although Russia seems able/willing to grind it out on the offense.
It's a weird premise, expecting a war to last just a few news cycles.
If I pick 17 assorted conflicts since World War II—Vietnam, the Soviet-Afghan War, the ongoing Syrian Civil War, others—the average duration is ~2,163 days, or nearly 6 years.
The median is 1,812 days (about 5 years), so most of these wars lasted at least half a decade. The standard deviation is around 1,954 days, so there's a lot of variance, and some wars last decades, even with bigger gaps in professional capabilities.
For instance:
The Vietnam War endured for 3,919 days (~11 years).
The Soviet-Afghan War lasted 3,342 days (~9 years).
US was in Afghanistan for arguably ~7,268 days (~20 years).
On the shorter end of the spectrum, we have conflicts like the Six-Day War in 1967 (6 days, per the name) and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (20 days). But these seem to be exceptions rather than the rule.
It's been 933 (awful) days so far, unless you extend back to 2014. Still relatively short compared to many historical conflicts. If you look at the high standard deviation and range of the durations, a 20 year conflict, while difficult to imagine, would not be unprecedented.
On 13, I see that the commenters on that tweet got it right; it's not one in a trillion, it's about one in a hundred million. (Once you fill in two, the other one will usually match.)
It's even worse than that, because of post-selection. Basically, there's thousands of possible vote tallies that are equally surprising / obviously doctored.
I dislike this kind of reasoning, since literally every possible percentage has the same probability- there are a hundred million possible outcomes and you will get exactly one of them. Statistically speaking a round number is no different to any other.
Now you can look at that and say they obviously fixed the percentages first and stupidly worked backwards to get the vote numbers, and you are certainly right. But the probabilistic argument isn't the right one to then make.
The chance that the vote is exactly 5150092 is 1 in 10058774.
Does that mean a vote is unlikely to be any specific number? Sure? But that doesn't mean its doctored. It has to be one number, after all.
Even glossing over the idea that the chance of at least 1 of a bunch of low-probability things happening is high already so you should expect to see some low-probability outcomes in real life.
Yes, but perfectly round numbers are something a human mind would like choose if asked to pick a percentage. I believe there is actually a science if this in forensic accounting, the kind of numbers humans make up when cooking books is not the same as numbers chosen at random.
I think everyone is in agreement. That such artificial-looking vote totals would crop up by random chance is very unlikely, but it's impossible to quantify exactly how unlikely because the class of "such artificial-looking vote totals" is not well defined.
I don't think that's what everyone is saying, but it is a good point that the situation is underspecified such that we could reasonably disagree about the probability of the observed outcome. Are we taking the total vote as a given, for one, and if not what the is the possible range of vote totals.
While people may disagree about what the complete set of artificial-looking vote percentages is, I think just about every version of that set would include round numbers with no decimals.
We could use Bayes theorem to get somewhat close to what I understand the situation is: calculating the probability that this is doctored , given it is a round number.
We probably align on the first probability P(Round Number∣Doctored) ~ 80%?
The second probability , the prior likelihood of it being doctored - I'm not sure since I haven't been following this election, but since popular opinion here online is that its doctored, lets say 20%? This number is ridiculously high compared to a probability I would give normal election being doctored. Let me know if theres a better estimate.
The Probability in the denominator, P(Round number) is a marginal probability:
So the existence of a round number here moves the probability of the election being doctored from 20% to 80% using this back-of-the-napkin calculation.
Still pretty damning, but we did use a high prior likelihood (20%) for this. Regardless , i think this approach is better than just saying the probability of a round number appearing is 1 in a trillion, which is just a weird underspecified claim.
20% may be too low: the country in question is a dictatorship and the dictator who "won" the election has been in power for 11 years now, and happened to be the handpicked successor of the previous dictator.
So what would be a reasonable probability in your opinion?
I'm not disputing the claim that the election is doctored, I'm just claiming the 'rounded number' statistic used as it is in the tweet is misleading and inflammatory.
How are you getting P(Round Number∣Not Doctored) = 0.05? That seems empirically and theoretically false. Taking your 1 in 10058774 and multiplying by all 1000 possible XX.X00..% values gives 0.0001; extending it to XX.XX00..% gives 0.001. Both of those suggest a movement from 20% to 99%+, provided I'm doing my math correctly. P(Round Number∣Doctored) = .8 also seems quite high- don't election doctors prefer to seem legitimate?
The probability that we get a round number, given that the vote totals were not doctored, is the 1 - in - 100 million chance that was discussed earlier.
Edit: The odds of an undoctored round number is actually closer to 1,000 / 10 million, since there are about 1000 round numbers that the percentages can coalesce around, and 10 million possible vote total results.
Yep, this is a clear case of a bad argument in service of an obviously correct idea that proponents of such ideas tend to be much less critical about. Just because in general it's obvious that P(glaring coincidence|funny business) > P(glaring coincidence|no funny business) it doesn't mean that it's easy to provide meaningful numbers.
Ok, bear with me for a second. Any particular set of (let's say) five cards is equally likely to be drawn, but some patterns (suited Ace through 10) can occur in fewer ways than other patterns (any five suited cards). Once you've drawn five cards, the probability that you have some specific set of five cards is 1. But the probability that you have a low value hand > flush > royal flush. Now, the way to flesh out the statistical argument is with conditional probabilities. Round numbers are "special" like flushes--they have to meet a condition to be included in the set, and there are fewer of them. If the outcome were random, the probability of one of these "special" outcomes occurring wouldn't be 0, but it would be very low. But there are lots of ways to designate special kinds of numbers, you might say, and you could probably find something interesting about any outcome if you tried hard enough. The relevant special property that round numbers have in this case is that humans like to use them much more than they like randomly selected rational numbers. Conditional on the numbers being selected by a human, the probability that they will be "round" at however many digits is much greater, and this gives evidence (not proof) that a human selected them. This conclusion requires probabilistic reasoning. If round numbers were more likely to occur by chance, a round outcome provides less evidence of a human interference.
I looked on the Wiki page which reports different numbers and percentages than those in the tweet. By no means a deep dive. Is there a source for the tweets data?
It's not even relevant, because it doesn't round like that. Dividing Edmundo's total by the overall total gives 44.19999%. Which rounds up to 44.2%. confirming my initial impression that it's a three digit percentage that inexplicably has four zeroes after it due to some kind of clerical error.
EDIT: oh my god i forgot how math works. It's 44.199998, which does round up to 44.20000 exactly.
RE #11: One upside to "vices" being supplied by big corporations instead of by random criminals is that they are much safer that way. Big corporations are beholden to regulation and public scrutiny that illegal manufacturers avoid -- not to mention they are simply much more competent at quality assurance. Sailer worries that "Costco ... [will sell] 100 grams of Coca-Cola brand cocaine party packs for $999", but at least they wont be laced with fentanyl.
Maybe, but in a legal, regulated, market they would have to be labelled as such and of a standard concentration. One of the big reasons so many people are dying of fentanyl overdoses is that the drug is very difficult to dilute appropriately. Corporations can easily solve that problem. Also, corporations are incentivized to provide a less risky substitute -- having your customers die isn't exactly good for business. (of course there is still a risk compensation concern here)
addicts may not be perfectly rational actors, but most of them don't have a death wish, and if there is a comparable substitute that has a much lower change of leading to overdose, they will choose that. For evidence of that claim, see this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30292493/ which finds drug users changing their use behavior based on positive results from fentanyl test strips.
It's totally possible that the positive effects of making safer substitutes available (greater safety for existing drug users) are outweighed by the negative effects (more people being drawn to drugs because of the greater safety); ultimately, it's an empirical question. However, I have a hard time believing that existing drug use would not get safer if safer substitutes were legally available.
I agree that "safer drugs" are not necessarily an unalloyed good. As I mentioned earlier, risk compensation could mean safer drugs actually end up causing more drug harm overall.
I will, however, maintain that the safety of drugs is an immensely important concern, one that was completely neglected in Sailer's article. Every year, tens of thousands of drug users overdose on uncertain mixes of drugs with uncertain concentrations. Some fraction of those users would still have overdosed even if safer alternatives were available, but many of them would not have. We do have empirical evidence that drug users will respond to information about safety (like that fentanyl test strips paper I cited).
I would also like to point out that a large part of the demand for fentanyl (relative to other opioids) is driven by criminalization itself -- the drug's high potency makes it easier to smuggle.
As for the "other issues around drugs" -- like criminality -- those are very real, but I would much rather prosecute people for those crimes specifically rather than for the victimless crime of drug use/possession. Also, I do believe that drug-related criminality would go down if we allowed legal production (and not just in the trivial sense of "drug crimes go away if drugs are legal"). Allowing legitimate producers to make drugs would undercut the cartels.
Under any regulatory regime remotely plausible in the real world, you won't need to "carefully check the label" to know whether your "party pack" contains fentanyl, any more than you need to carefully check the label to know if your cigarettes contain nicotine.
That any legal product containing fentanyl, will have "fentanyl" printed in great big letters front and center on the packaging, and with the Surgeon General's warning in a conspicuous black box, and it will be stored behind the counter with the cigarettes so you'll have to specifically ask the clerk for the fentanyl.
I agree that having relatively powerful drug cartels is not necessarily – in the abstract – among the worst things in the world.
Still, I doubt that people who actually had to live under the rule of such a cartel (or, worse, in a disputed area between two cartels) would agree. Recent Mexican history (or even more south) is horrific, as (again) vividly shown by Winslow.
I also beg to differ that the problem is “manageable” – drugs and cartels are stronger and more plentiful than in the past 50 years.
My crux is, I suppose, that I do not expect that addiction-caused “anti-social behavior” will not meaningfully rise if fentanyl becomes legal and cheaper (maybe with a few wrinkles to iron, such as banning its advertising).
It's only weed that has been decriminalized, and while no hard numbers exist it can be assumed it's the product with the lowest profit margin due to many reasons.
I wouldn’t say that criminalization is the problem and I think the timelines do not align so neatly. Here’s what I think happened.
The drugs [here, I’m talking “hard” drugs: heroin or crack] were the original problem (around 1975, at the start of the War on Drugs), so of curse they were criminalized. All this basically accomplished was raise the price, thus strengthening the cartels.
Cartels thus become more powerful – with deeper pockets to bribe authorities or hire gunmen and more credibility when they threaten.
This inflow of money made the cartels more attractive, but also more violent (the better pay for killers being at least of some help here). All of this is well underway by the 1990s, and the power of the cartels has barely stopped growing until then.
Looking at homicide statistics in Mexico is rather interesting: from the 1990s, the rate, while steadily shrinking, doesn’t go much under the US “peak” (~9 per 100k people) in the early 1990s.
The first real spike is between 2007 and 2014 (2010-2012 is particularly bloody, above 20 per 100k), rather before the first decriminalization experiments were underway. I apologize for quoting the same piece of evidence, but the process is very well described in Winslow’s “The Cartel”. This is because cartels are warring by this point using literal armies of mercenaries.
The figures of the past few years seem even more horrific (2018-2021 go near 30 per 100k), which could indeed be related to de-criminalization.
I’d like to clarify that I do not believe criminalization to be the problem. The problem is that people become addicts and then die.
I rather believe that criminalization did little to help, and had the additional harmful effect of helping drug cartels grow, organize themselves, and gain territory (in a very medieval sense – again, you can read “The Cartel” for the gory detail). In today’s world, the drugs will find a way, so trying to guide this way rather than fight it might be more productive.
It would also stop the 100k opiate deaths a year if it were legal and market price, the number one cause of death for people under 40, beating out car accidents now.
And what about the people who will club together to buy the party pack of coke, then lace it with the cheap fent because coke on its own don't got enough kick for them?
That's our problem: not the Platonic Form of the ideal drug user who, if only it were legal, would be rational and moderate in their drug use, but the people who take a mix of different drugs for the specific high and they've developed tolerance to one so they don't get the same kick anymore so they need to spice it up a little. Telling them "now be sure you don't take more than the maximum recommended units per day!" is going to be ignored and mocked.
Very candidly, I’m not confident in my own take, and this is why I phrased it as a question.
On principle, I ought to be aghast at this, but what the (pretty well-researched) Don Winslow trilogy about the cartels made crystal-clear to me is that, in the US, all drug interdiction has accomplished was to enrich the cartels, thereby making them more powerful, more capable, more attractive and therefore more violent.
Now I’m hearing about how cartels start attacking Europe (starting by corrupting and/or threatening the harbor workers into compliance…) thanks to their blood-soaked gains.
So I’m starting to re-estimate the value of disempowering them… and after all, outside the US, you can ban or regulate some forms of advertising on various grounds, and fentanyl would be a great candidate.
This was my pretty firm position until recently: the odds of the losses to society from a few more lives lost to drug abuse outweighing the gains from cutting off the cartels/mafia are so low that it is another brainer.
Upon reflection, I do still think that but with slightly higher odds of a higher social cost than I expected due to increased mental illness and less flagrant symptoms of use ("laziness", for want of a better word, and probably less pair bonding and children).
If they commit crimes they should be punished severely. But we don’t generally punish things that just make you more likely to commit other crimes. And people are free to wreck their own lives in a multitude of perfectly legal ways (including by the use of legal alcohol); I don’t see why this one way of ruining your life (opiate addiction) deserves special treatment.
It's the preference of opiate abusers to have pure drugs, while mine is simply to have fewer addicts. All the rest being equal, if the trade was "drug abuse becomes more dangerous, but less common" I would take that trade. As it is, I'm far from convinced that "better cocaine for the coke heads" is an unalloyed good for society.
I mentioned purity in the sense of drugs not having the harmful additives that they are currently regularly cut with, not in the sense that the drugs would be “better” for users.
I'm aware, that's why I wrote 'if the trade was "drug abuse becomes more dangerous, but less common" I would take that trade'.
I can rewrite my last sentence for you if it helps:
As it is, I remain unconvinced that "safer cocaine for the coke heads" is an unalloyed good for society, versus just being good for people who like cocaine.
Are you saying "I don't think it would be that harmful" or are you saying "I accept that millions would probably die of overdoses and millions more become suffering wretches but I don't really care"? I need to know what kind of disagreement we're having here.
First, I think many people could use opiates that were safe, pure, and cheap without destroying their lives or overdosing. And for those that do end up harming themselves—they consented to do this. No one forced them to use opiates. I’m not in a tizzy over people who choose to ruin their own lives in other ways (eg, spending their entire lives in their parent’s basements). As for the harms they may cause others—if it’s criminal harm, they should be prosecuted and punished. If it’s more emotional harm, well, we don’t prosecute people who cause other emotional harms to people (cheat on them, lie to them, etc.).
I’m not saying I don’t care at all about the suffering of opiate addicts. We should provide free addiction services if they want to get clean. But I simply can’t get too upset over a poor choice that a consenting adult makes.
Are there any stories that have happy endings where the fentanyl addict cleans up their act and lives a good life simply because they couldn't afford enough fentanyl to screw things up irreversibly?
I'm skeptical. I think "fentanyl addict" + "expensive fentanyl" mostly just leads to things like "fentanyl addict with an armed robbery conviction". But if the happily-ever-after version is actually a thing, just tax the stuff to a level slightly below what illegal dealers can afford to match.
> mostly just leads to things like "fentanyl addict with an armed robbery conviction".
So in a sensible world, the fentanyl addict gets put in prison, where they can't get fentanyl and they undergo a painful cold-turkey detox. When they eventually get out of prison in twenty years, we hope that they don't seek out fentanyl again.
The failure of prisons to be drug-proof is another "non-sensible world" problem.
Supply and demand curves slope upwards and downwards respectively
Life isn't made up of binaries, it's made up of sloping curves, curves that tend more towards the middle on average, by necessity.
Some people put off by the high price never become addicts, some addicts cut down a tiny bit, some dealers drop out of the market. It all averages out to the nice clean near normal demand curve.
The world isn't a binary of fentanyl fiends that will do anything to get their dose for the day and normal people who never do it. It's a continuum of severe addicts, addicts, near addicts, party users, party goers partaking, and normal people who would never partake. All groups; also, can slightly change their usage.
Empirically all goods are somewhat elastic and usually much more elastic than intuition expects.
I think the best solution for the drug crisis is multi-fold:
1, All drugs are available to adults in the pharmacy in generic packaging with standardized doses, quality monitored. No fancy trade names, no marketing, no advertising. Highly regulated with multiple manufacturers, at least ten. No collusion, back-room deals, or contracts, manufacturers compete with open market pricing to retailers, pharmacies get a fixed percentage of markup. No manufacturing consolidation, if consolidation would result in dominance or supplier shrinking, its barred.
2, Any unlicensed manufacturing, reselling, gifting, or distributing to minors results in heavy time. Need easy path to licensing to allow startups, and prevent regulatory capture.
3, Drug use on the streets, spinning out in the park, &c results in immediate arrest, mandatory 30 days drying out locked in rehab, no excuses. If you can keep it in your safely home, do whatever. Probably need to mandate safe trip resorts for psychedelics where you check into a closed facility and check out when you're good.
>One upside to "vices" being supplied by big corporations instead of by random criminals is that they are much safer that way. Big corporations are beholden to regulation and public scrutiny that illegal manufacturers avoid -- not to mention they are simply much more competent at quality assurance
This is a libertarian myth that will seemingly never die. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Americans who've died of perfectly legal opioids manufactured by 'big corporations'. The illegal fentanyl crisis is certainly bad, but the first 15 years of opioid deaths were mostly with legal ones that were simply misused.
Opioids are inherently dangerous, so just because a regulated company manufactures them with relatively high-quality standards, an addict can still take too many. Your company can have the best quality assurance in the world, but if you take too many to get high because you're an addict, death is unavoidable
This is all true. But the criminalization of these drugs stops people from accessing safer substitutes. As it explains in the article you linked, when the government cracked down on prescription opioids, this shifted people towards illicit drugs like heroin, and eventually fentanyl. I agree that opioids are inherently dangerous and I would rather live in a world where nobody engaged in self-destructive behaviors, but this is not the world we live in. In our current world I would much rather have a variety of safer substitutes available. Don't you think that fentanyl overdoses would drop if, say, Duragesic patches were readily available over the counter?
I agree that if you somehow only targeted hardcore addicts, and replaced their fentanyl with oxys, it would probably save some lives. But it's impossible to only target them. Making a legal substitute 'readily available over the counter' would widen the pool of people using them- not just the current addicts, but it would also make it easier for non-addicts to get started. I.e. let's make up a number and say that there are 1 million hardcore addicts in the US. If you make something 'readily available over the counter' now you've widened that pool to 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 million new addicts, who weren't using opioids before because it was difficult to get them.
Also- and I can tell everyone arguing this has never done hard drugs- you can't prevent people from doing fentanyl. Fentanyl just didn't exist in mass quantities before, its use wasn't 'caused' by the government. Once an addict has built up tolerance to the legal stuff, they'll move on to illegal fentanyl to get even higher. Opioids build strong tolerance, so after a few months of doing Government Regulated Opioid now it doesn't get you as high- but you can get fentanyl on the street to recreate that high. Plus, again, you've now widened the pool of addicts who want to do it. Make sense?
" Ruxandra Teslo has a review of the theory that aristocratic women drove the early adoption of Christianity. I’m waiting to read Rodney Stark’s The Rise Of Christianity before having an opinion, but saving this to come back to later."
rux read that on my recommendations (salzman). the thing with *the rise of christianity* is you can summarize it as simply an autocatalytic model for the growth of christianity driven by supply-side dynamics seeded by the jewish diaspora
Almost everyone in the New Testament was Jewish, especially Jesus, who liked to spend most of his time at the temple arguing about the true interpretation of scripture.
it's not my theory. did you read my comment? it's rodney starks' theory in *the rise of christianity*
he posits that the jewish diaspora was the core around which the christian religion grew all across the empire, and that hellenistic judaism became christianity (or more precisely hellenistic jews converted to christianity)
This seems to contradict the account in Acts, which repeatedly describes attempts to evangelise the Jewish diaspora as broadly unsuccessful. There are several chapters which basically follow the pattern: (a) Paul goes to a city, (b) he preaches in the synagogue, (c) the Jews reject him, (d) he preaches to Gentiles, who convert in great number.
There was a study a while ago that claimed Christianity spread faster in cities with large Jewish populations. Which makes sense. It was a Jewish cult that also started to take in gentile followers. The Christians document in the New Testament a lot of the internal conflict between Jews who wanted to keep Christianity a more Jewish religion demanding people follow Mosaic Law(Just less intensely then the Pharisees wanted), and people who thought it fine that the gentile converts abandoned most of the rules that weren't general moral requirements, but things peculiar to the Jews as a people.
Maybe, but early Christians didn't seem that literate and the New Testament presents the very early Christianity as a cult primarily among the lower classes of Jewish society, opposed to the priests.
Paul is the one exception, but he was a Pharisees originally and his elite status as a Pharisee and Roman citizen seems to have been why his version of Christianity became dominate. That and it being very pro-gentile.
It's hard to say if the later parts of the New Testament were written by Jews or gentiles, they both wrote in Greek.
one reason there is an assumption that the class origins of the christians was not very high (though i doubt it was very low either) is that the greek of the NT is supposedly rather common and unpolished. this was something mentioned by elite converts and pagan skeptics of the religion.
that being said, the religion spread in the cities, so that excludes the rural poor
By "later parts of the New Testament" do you mean chronologically later or later in canonical order? Traditionally Luke is the only non Jewish NT author.
I mean chronologically. My understanding is that everything other than the genuine Pauline epistles are after the First Jewish Roman War at the earliest. The traditional accounts of authorship are laughable and can’t be taken seriously.
He may be referring to the fact that the Roman Empire was 6-7% Jewish in belief, not ethnicity. That is, not Israelites. There’s a desire there for a world creating single God to believe in, but converting to Judaism is hard, while Christianity makes it easier.
I remember cautioning my brother against lambda school specifically because their placement rate was so high they had to be lying or kicking out anyone who they couldn’t place / thought wouldn’t be placeable.
6: I had a similar experience as someone who had children very early for my social class. People will ask me repeatedly if I'm really under 30, why the hell I would do that and so on. I even got stopped on the street occasionally and asked if I was allowed to have that baby, or where the parents where. And the age we had kids was average in our country in my own parents generation! Our own parents had kids at the same age and nobody thought that was weird.
#29 the "Greerhead Pledge" seems incredibly weak. There's four conditions: no marijuana, no Marvel movies, no tattoos and no rap music. If you're in the target market for this pledge then you're probably not interested in those things anyway, so it basically just lets you pledge not to do things that you're already not interested in, and give some guy called Greer the credit.
I don't think it has particularly valuable content, I just think it's an interesting form that someone else could potentially stick valuable content in elsewhere. I agree that one strong argument against it being a valuable form is that maybe nobody would do it if it were actually hard.
TBF to Greer, he talks at the link about some earlier version that said no NFL and got lots of people mad, so he must not be making it too easy.
I think I understand the reasoning behind abstention from rap, tattoos, and cannabis. What is the (I assume moral, not aesthetic) objection to Marvel movies? Are DC Movies or movies based on independent comics acceptable?
edit - I've looked into it and it appears to be a combination of DEI and low quality storytelling.
I am effectively already mostly following this pledge (I have seen ~3 marvel films, and only sometimes listen to Death Grips), and I'm not even politically aligned with Greer.
I'm following all four, does that make me a Greerhead? Are there benefits to that? Will a mysterious billionaire shower largesse upon me upon proof of Greerheadedness?
I'm just curious about the Marvel movies part. The other three I can see a plausible theory of direct or (mostly) indirect affiliation with people who will lead you astray in some manor.
Why Marvel specifically? If it's superhero movies/comics/shows you can say that directly. If it's culturally homogenous crap, then say that. If it's bad or culturally poor movies, then say that. "Marvel" seems like the wrong category boundary.
"If it's bad or culturally poor movies, then say that."
I am only watching the second season of the Rings of Power for the criticism, I swear! Which reminds me, gotta tune in to this week's episode and see what fresh hell awaits. We should be getting up to the siege of Eregion and poor Celebrimbor being turned into an Orc banner (though.. with the new, family-friendly, 'we only want a patch of land to call our own so we can settle down with our wives and kids' Orcs who don't wanna go to war today, will we still get that?) so I can't wait.
Comic-book superheroes in general are an extremely low-grade sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy, in which success comes if and only if you're bitten by a radioactive spider or whatever, and once you're one of the chosen few then you don't really have to *work* at anything, it just happens, and you get to go around beating up people you don't like and everybody will think you're awesome for it. I can see how that might lead people astray, in a world where success actually requires hard work and beating people up is usually a really bad use of your time that makes people mad at you.
Other forms of popular entertainment are not exactly devoid of wish-fulfillment, but e.g. Old School Star Wars gives us Leia (born a princess), Luke (lucky break but then had to really work at developing his skills), and Han (self-made man). And while their victories are usually achieved by violence, it's usually a far more strategic application of violence than the usual Final Superhero Boss Battle and there's the implication that they then want to settle down and do something productive rather than just find more people to beat up for the rest of their lives.
Sure, I can see that, but then "Marvel" is a subset of a larger category. He could call out wish fulfillment generally, or all superheroes (does he also mean DC?) or whatever actual category. Now, maybe he's just not that good at making such lists and is just pointing out the most popular to kind of shame people into living better. Okay, I guess, but that one in particular seems to undermine his list by being unhelpfully narrow.
I think it's pretty easy for non-geeks to forget that DC superhero movies are a thing that A: matters and B: are distinct from Marvel superhero movies. But yes, the list would have been better if that entry had been as broadly generic as the rest.
I guess my tastes make me unintentionally match some highly politicized internet rando's idea of what's good. Can't figure out whether to feel good or bad about it, I guess neutral will do.
Almost no one I personally know to my right manages to abide by it. I'm going to sound like Hanania for a bit, but you very much overestimate the general ability of the average right-winger to not consume media that hate them or is antithetical to their belief systems. I didn't know about the specific pledge, but I like it as it could become a good shortcut in conversations to the kind of attitudes it points to.
re: Gusev. The truth is that no one wants to talk with him because he's a known liar who distorts evidence in his favor because he's on a mission. Most of his engagement is in bad faith and he is also a malicious doxxer who actively attempts to bring harm unto others whom he dislikes. Any engagement is tiring. A quick glance at his articles confirms that they're practically devoid of content anyway. For example, the one you linked doesn't contain much in the way of good reasoning, but it does contain lots of senseless errors.
> IQ is much less heritable... than height
Where is this established? Nowhere, that's where! How does he claim to provide an upper-bound on how predictable things are? By suggesting that a given molecular heritability estimate is the upper-bound. For what reason? None except a quote from Yang et al. that doesn't actually say that the GREML estimate is an upper-bound on heritability. Since you can easily increase heritability with more liberal MAF filtering, this clearly isn't a quote that supplies evidence of bounding.
> IQ is... more confounded than height
Read his paragraphs. He doesn't understand the word "confounded" much less provide evidence for his point. To seemingly (but not actually) make his point, he cites Howe et al. for some reason, despite their findings being unreplicable (with good reason) and irrelevant.
> Genetic effects on IQ differ within families much more than for height
This has not been demonstrated to hold generally, assortative mating matters greatly here, and—keep this in mind for all comments comparing physical and psychological traits—measurement quality matters a great deal as well. There is no demonstration that what he's said is actually a finding, and it's not clear it has any relevance to the claim that height and IQ are dissimilar. The earlier statements don't seem to be relevant either, but oh well.
> IQ estimates are much more biased by participation than height
At the point where the comments are this irrelevant, you really just have to say "So what?" and hope an explanation comes. But it never will. At best, there'll be some handwringing about how this matters because of reasons amounting to assumption begging.
> The genetics of IQ is much more environmentally sensitive than height
The largest study of this took place at a conference not long ago and it showed effects on IQ scores but not on intelligence. Notice how the distinction hasn't been mentioned to this point in the article. Notice also how a comprehensive view of the literature on GxE for IQ and height hasn't been undertaken. I assume that's because it's generally not as supportive of the existence of any interaction as his selected citations seem to be.
> Unlike height, no one knows what IQ is actually measuring
In this section, you're treated to misunderstandings galore that I think you're aware of, so if you read this part, you should have probably doubted the rest too.
Or in a paragraph:
The idea that IQ is harder to predict can be met by saying 'Currently' and following that up with 'It's measured with error, measured very poorly in the largest datasets, and it's not been hit with a big GWAS yet.' The idea that IQ heritability is lower than for height can be met by saying 'This isn't relevant. The heritability of g is similar to the heritability of height, and no, it does not vary by continent; that is an artefact of selective citation practices.' The idea that the molecular heritability is a smaller fraction of the total heritability meets 'No one has shown this to be the case for the correct phenotype, in large, whole-genome data, and we do know the architectures differ such that the data almost-certainly matters a great deal.' The idea that the correlations are poorer within families meets 'This has no real relevance, it's just throwing things against the wall and hoping they stick. This is largely down to the predictable effects of assortative mating (the treatment of which he completely butchers and he has shown on Twitter he doesn't understand at all), as Young (the person he cited) has noted.' The idea that confounding by taking part in a study differs for these traits meets 'This has no relevance, it's just a fact about height and current measurements of IQ being differentiated in any way, not stating that the traits themselves are meaningfully differentiated. If we believe all correlations must be the same for traits to have similarity, then few traits are similar even when they clearly are. This ultimately has no bearing whatsoever on the subject at hand; it is a red herring.' The idea that IQ seems more interactive meets 'Not shown, not robustly replicable, and not relevant.'
It's an article intended to confuse by a person who intends to cause harm. Nothing more than that and much less than it seems to an uninformed reader.
Because he is clearly a bad faith crank on a mission, that's all I have to say about Gusev.
I agree there should be a presumption of crankishness for anyone making strong arguments against twin studies in 2024, but his arguments are superficially compelling and I hate dismissing superficially compelling arguments on a mere presumption rather than genuinely understanding what's going on and to what degree they're wrong. The things I'm most interested in are:
- Better understanding of the molecular heritability vs. direct heritability claims, and an analysis of why his interpretation of the Howe (2022) within-sibship GWAS estimates is wrong
- An analysis of why his interpretation of the Young (2022) family/population genetic correlations is wrong
- Better understanding of why, if height and IQ have basically similar structure, all of these methods more or less agree with the twin studies on height but disagree with them on IQ.
- I can't tell of this is the same thing Gusev is talking about, but better understanding of what's going on with https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6130754/ and whether we should trust their estimates more than twin studies (or at least similar to twin studies, such that we should land somewhere in the middle)
Keep in mind that I don't know what "MAF filtering" is, so your argument above isn't very helpful. What I'm requesting is something addressed to the average person with an undergrad level of genetics knowledge which handholds our way through the arguments at least as much as Gusev's own article does.
I appreciate that cranks enjoy their role more than other people enjoy debunking them and that this creates an unfair burden, but I think it's an unfair burden somebody has to take up, and since you're a genetics blogger I'm afraid this may be your job.
What struck me about that article was the unclear relationship between the predictive power of linear models on genomes, which do not work for genes that combine in complicated ways, and the greatest possible genomic influence. It is a huge leap to go from one to the other, and the analogy with height (which is the sum of things like growth hormone, leg length, torso length, neck length...) to intelligence (which is ???) did not bridge the gap with much clarity. I would like to see an explanation of why GWAS are treated as upper bounds and not the lower bounds they actually are.
I think I know less about this than you do, but I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that in real life gene x gene interaction effects only explain a tiny amount of variance and can usually be ignored.
Much of the research saying this using a molecular approach is on physiological traits like height, etc, I think. For twin studies, gene*gene can be "hidden" by shared-environmental effects and by assortative mating. Gene*gene increases the distance between correlations between MZs and correlations between DZs, but these other things decrease this distance, and so it might end up looking like everything is just additive genetics (i.e. rMZ = 2*rDZ). Still, it is quite common for MZ twins to be "too highly correlated", such that the model needs something more than just additive genetic effects to explain why their correlation is so much higher than that of DZ twins. Extended family designs (which also use correlations between the relatives of twins, such as their children, parents, spouses, etc), can disentangle shared environmental effects and assortative mating from other kinds of effects. But there are many other kinds of effects that have the same effect that gene*gene effects have, which is to specifically increase the similarity of MZ twins. Relaxing the equal environments assumption achieves this, for example. So do certain kinds of gene-environment interplay. So, in conclusion, I would say that what Concerned Citizen is saying could very well still be true.
Despite Gusev's waning, I still use height as my default model for how things work with polygenic traits, and I would be really surprised if there was a bunch of gene * gene interaction lurking in IQ genetics. At the very least, I would say that our prior should be on the additive numbers, and that's what we should be giving as our headline result until we get some evidence that g*g interaction exists.
Can you explain what you mean by the "too highly correlated" point?
Sure. If additive genetic effects are the only reason relatives resemble each other, then the correlation between monozygotic twins should be exactly twice that of dizygotic twins. If the correlation is higher than this, that is "too high" for the purely additive model. One of many ways to "fix" this is to add non-additive genetic effects, such as g*g, since these are more than twice as correlated between MZ twins as they are between DZ twins.
Two things that are not fixes, but rather the opposite, are: Assortative mating and effects of the family environment.
Assortative mating increases the genotypic similarity of DZ twins, since the genes they do not share now become more likely to "pull in the same direction". MZ twins, on the other hand, cannot get any more genotypically similar. There is heavy assortment on IQ and education. A purely additive model that incorporates a realistic degree of assortment on IQ (mates correlate ~.40 on it) would predict that MZs should be about 1.5 times as correlated as DZs, not 2 times. So, with this, real MZ-correlations (often >.80 for IQ) now seem more "too high" compared to DZ-correlations (typically ~.40).
Adding effects of the family environment also makes things worse (unless the equal environments assumption is very badly wrong), since both types of twins share family environments. Yet, there is increasing evidence, from e.g. molecular genetic studies, that family environments do contribute towards family resemblance on IQ and, perhaps moreso, on educational attainment.
Molecular heritability (SNP heritability, SNP h2) is estimating how much phenotypic variance is explained by all SNPs in a GWAS, using methods like GREML or LDSC. This is usually restricted to common SNPs (high MAF, minor allele frequency), partly because the methods aren't as reliable for very rare SNPs. SNP h2 estimates are typically only around half as large as twin h2 estimates, and that difference is sometimes called missing h2. SNP h2 estimates are in theory an upper bound for how much variance an additive predictor (a linear model) based on those very same SNPs can explain in an independent sample of the same population. If twin h2 estimates captured only additive genetic variance, they would be an upper bound for how much variance a linear model of all genetic variants can explain, but in practice twin h2 estimates capture some non-additive genetic components as well.
SNP h2 estimates aren't generally thought of as actual h2 estimates, because they only capture the contribution of common variants, and it's clear from comparisons to twin study h2 estimates that a lot is missing from SNP h2 estimates (no one thinks that the h2 of height is only 0.38).
Unlike twin h2 estimates, SNP h2 estimates generally come from unrelated samples collected for a GWAS, and the estimates can be inflated by indirect genetic effects (variants that are associated with the studied trait, after correcting for population stratification, but that aren't causal. For example, a variant that causes parents to read to their children may be associated with IQ or educational attainment in the child generation, without being causal in that generation)
A study design based only on sibling pairs, like the Howe study, only captures direct effects. I think it's true that indirect genetic effects contribute more to the total SNP h2 of traits like IQ and educational attainment, than to the SNP h2 of height. That also explains why the genetic correlations between population genetic effects (indirect effects) and direct genetic effects are lower for IQ and education than for height, as reported in Young 2022. However, I have never seen genetic correlations expressed as R2, and I assume that's just to make the numbers look smaller.
I haven't looked too closely at Relatedness disequilibrium regression, but I think that since it's using haplotypes shared among close relatives, it's better able to capture the effects of very rare variants, and perhaps some non-additive effects, and it probably isn't inflated by indirect genetic effects.
So the issues with GWAS based SNP h2 estimates are real, but that says more about the GWAS study design than about trait heritability. Twin h2 estimates have their issues as well, but my sense is that it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to convince yourself that an unbiased estimate for IQ would be lower than 0.3 (at least that's my takeaway from this post: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/twin-heritability-models-can-tell)
Given your status as a sort of influencer on these subjects, I find both the accusation of crankishness and your appearnt unfamiliarity with the points Sasha makes in that post kind of shocking.
He's a great science communicator, but his day job is doing cancer research and he's done no original work in behavioral genetics. The criticisms of twin heritability estimates he cites have been part of the scientific literature for decades.
Within behavioral genetics, people like Eric Turkheimer have been making simular arguments about the difficulty of addressing environmental confounding since the 80s. From the broader genetics community as a whole, which has often treated the BG with a great deal of suspicion for reasons that should now be obvious, heavyweights like Kempthorne and Lewontin weighed in making much the same point.
What's changed in the past few years is that genomic studies have become powerful enough to address these questions, the net result of which has been to vastly diminish estimates of the meaningful genetic causation of variance in psychological amd behavioral traits.
I'm all for amateurs educating themselves about science, but at the risk of being accused of making a "selective demand for rigor", the way to do that is by familiarizing yourself with the scientific literature, not by trying to absorb through osmosis knowledge of a topic as complex as human genetics from professional internet racists.
I said there was a presumption of crankishness for people trying to deny twin studies, which I think is true. In his post, Gusev accuses Robert Plomin of (basically) crankishness, so I don't think you can argue that he just represents some sort of completely normal consensus.
I'm familiar with Turkheimer and Lewontin, have gone over their arguments, and satisfied myself that they're either wrong or at least pitch things in a misleading way, such that I'm more confident taking eg Plomin and Deary's side. I think this is also true of the broader scholarly community. Gusev's arguments aren't exactly the same, as you can tell from the fact that he cites various forms of genetic study developed in the late 2010s where the main papers are from 2017 and 2022 respectively. I've never heard those arguments before, the papers are pretty complicated, and I think I did the right thing by linking his post, the comments on the post, his followup post, and asking people for their opinions instead of immediately trying to come to a conclusion. I have never been dishonest about the fact that I've taken genetics up to a med school level but am not a professional behavioral geneticist myself. I think this is a common level of understanding for science writers, who are not always themselves the greatest experts in their field, and I've tried to never write confidently about anything I didn't understand.
I feel like you're not just making a selective demand for rigor, but demanding I take someone at his word without asking any questions or trying to learn the whole story. Your last sentence suggests your ulterior motives here - as you should know, it's hard to generalize from within-race heritabilities in eg twin studies to between-race numbers - and makes me more comfortable dismissing you as a bad actor.
"In this model, Asians (Korea, Japan, etc) are having the most fertility issues because their societies are most collectivist, ie people more closely follow the gradient of what is vs. isn’t considered socially acceptable/high-status"
I have a post on how fertility rates for US born E. Asian women are exactly the same as existing rates back home when you adjust for intermarriage. If status were the main issue you'd expect to see considerable differences. Rather than cultural factors, I argue that low E.A fertility is the inevitable result of introducing sexual choice into societies with no history of it. This theory would explain why Japan, with it's minority tradition of love marriages has a higher fertility than SK, Taiwan, Singaporean Chinese...
American East Asians are also most likely to pursue high status lifestyle markers (including Ivy League education) so their low fertility is not in conflict with the model proposed.
24: the article doesn't state the name of the WhatsApp group, but I'm pretty sure it's talking about the leak of an Australian group called "Jewish Creatives and Academics". The group's messages didn't get much news coverage, but it was reported that the messages included quite a lot of Islamophobia. The group also badmouthed fellow Australian Jews who were not supportive of Israeli government actions, such as Antony Loewenstein, whom they called a "traitor". So from what's been reported, it appears to be more of a pro-Israeli government group, rather than a general Jewish group. I'm just adding this for clarity because the link doesn't mention it.
It's also worth explaining why NYT was even interested in the messages. Prior to that event, another Australian WhatsApp group called "Lawyers for Israel" succeeded in lobbying our public-owned broadcaster to fire a journalist who had re-tweeted a report on human rights in Gaza. The journalist, Antoinette Lattouf, is currently taking the broadcaster to court for firing her illegally.
I actually don't think that's an unreasonable statement. Considering the incredible volume of propaganda and many high-profile lies coming from the Israeli government I think it's sadly quite predictable that many would be skeptical. If she said they categorically didn't happen then I would be concerned.
Reporters should be skeptical of everyone's claims. But also, isn't it their job to try to get to the bottom of those claims? I mean, I don't know what the balance of evidence looks like on how many rapes were done on 10/7 (or afterward to hostages), but it seems like the sort of thing a journalistic organization should be trying to get to the bottom of--watch the available footage, talk to witnesses, look at whatever documentation is there, etc.
Among many others. The Israelis are *not*, not not not, going to put graphic videos of their own people being raped and mutilated on Youtube for everyone to gawk at, or have the traumatized survivors subject to journalistic inquisition, just because someone whines "Inquiring Minds Want to Know!" But they have shown some of those videos, privately, to reputable journalists. And not just the pro-Israeli journalists. AFIK, basically all of the responses have been either "I don't want to talk about it" or "it's worse than you can imagine".
The only people who aren't going to be convinced by that, are the ones who would insist that any video was faked and any eyewitnesses were lying anyway.
It doesn't matter what they believe, leaking their names to the public encourages radicals - or other radicals, depending on the group - to target them. A bunch of radicals fighting it out is the last thing we, as normal people reading the Times, would ever want. Why do they keep trying to provide it to us?
"The NYT claims she was adequately disciplined in private. If you don't trust them on that, you don't trust them enough to trust their reporting, so it's a moot point; just stop reading."
He's saying that because the NYT says appropriate punishment was given, that should be enough proof that it was. If you don't believe them when they say that, presumably that means you don't trust the NYT anyway and he suggests someone who feels that way should just not read the NYT.
I think we're agreeing: I also believe that it is a very bad idea to point activists on opposing sides out to each other, and that it works the same for each side. That said, I don't quite see AIPAC as prone to harassing or injuring anyone. A better example might be leaking the names of pro-Gazan activists to those employers who were promising not to hire people with those views a while ago. (This was mentioned in the news but I don't remember who vowed to do it).
The people I know of who lost jobs with law firms or communal organizations did not just express pro-Gazan views but specifically described the October 7 attacks as heroic resistance and those murdered, including children, old people, etc, as justified targets. Plenty of people who fully hate on the current Israeli government or even quesiton the legitimacy of the State still think treating the 10/7 attackers as heroes is a bridge too far. Compare: you probably shouldn't lose your US law firm job for, let's say, expressing interest in kinda-racist social science, but maybe you should for celebrating a Klan lynching as heroic.
I would tend to advise lenience for both people guilty of repeating some of the propaganda talking points coming out of the fringe in Israel, along with people guilty of sympathizing with Hamas or the KKK. In all cases the speakers are repeating things they were persuaded of by others: the original liars, who do not work at U.S. law firms.
The issue at hand is leaking details from a private WhatsApp group so people get harassed, the qualities and actions of the people involved are irrelevant.
The WSJ article says the NYT reporter joined the group long before the Lattouf affair, thus the affair cannot have been the original reason for interest in the messages unless theWSJ timeline is incorrect.
"While a group administrator indicated in the chat that it wasn’t intended for political debates, there were instances when chat group members veered into advocacy. That included discussions on how to bring comments made by pro-Palestinian activists to the attention of their employers or publishers, when they were deemed by members to be antisemitic. "
Someone tried to cancel them while they were trying to cancel someone else. It was a like a Mexican Cancel-Off, worthy of a Tarantino scene. I dunno...as someone who considers himself an old fashioned liberal, I shouldn't do this, but I kinda want them both to be canceled just for being a bunch of chowderheads.
Edit: that might be overly harsh. I'm sure it wasn't everyone in this group engaged in the attempted cancelations.
Any indication that it was actually specifically "pro-current Israeli government and its policies" rather than just Zionist (i.e., pro Israel's continued existence)?
Most Israelis and Zionists abroad are very critical of the gov't and completely orthogonally don't like continously hearing that our home should go up in flames by any means necessary
Is there some reason we can't have legalization for all drugs the same way we have for cigarettes, where they are illegal, but they have a lot of regulations making them inconvenient and costly. That seems like it's worked pretty well. Smoking is on the decline and smokers are far less inconvenient to others.
To me, the problem of drug gangs dwarfs pretty much every other problem around drug legalization. It seems insane to me to tell half the population of Latin America that we sure are sorry that ruthless gangsters are the de facto government of where they live, but it's worth it so people can't abuse drugs.
Ok, but if you make drugs illegal then you have a society where drug-selling gangsters are everywhere destroying it. That also seems unacceptable.
It also seems like it would probably be easier to arrest addicts for anti-social behavior than to arrest gangsters, since the gangsters are more organized.
Plans that create net benefit at the expense of horrible injustice for an unlucky 1% are something of a goldmine for rational improvements to society that for some reason haven't already been made...
Funnily enough, one of the most interesting things I've learned is that *that* sort of abuse of police power, is something most people would probably approve of! Because, as John Pfaff, Professor of Law at Fordham University found, those drug charges were being used as a way to get after domestic abusers & the like! See https://colemanhughes.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Ep.6-John-Pfaff.pdf, pages 5 & 6:
"COLEMAN HUGHES: What's the status of the hypothesis that the "war on drugs" is the main, or a main driver of mass incarceration? And this this hypothesis is, was most importantly popularized by Michelle Alexander's book "The New Jim Crow". So what's the status of her thesis?
JOHN PFAFF: Right. So, in terms of simple numbers, the percent of people in US prisons for drugs was around five percent or five or six percent in 1980. It peaks at around 20 percent in 1990. And then, since then has declined to around 15 percent today in the state systems. And so it was never the the dominant driver. Um, and it it's even more complicated than that for two reasons. One is that it's important to understand what we mean when we call someone as being prison for drugs. What that means is that is the most serious offense for which they were convicted. It doesn't tell us anything about what they're arrested for or why they went to prison in the first place. Right?
So you can imagine there, we know there's some number of cases--we don't know how many--right? If someone who's say gets arrested for domestic abuse, he has heroin on him at the time of the arrest. His partner won't testify against him. And so the DAs decide that rather than try to force through a difficult aggravated assault charge with an uncooperative victim, "We'll just charge, if you just plead guilty to the heroin, we won't charge you for the aggravated assault, but we're still going to demand prison time for the heroin because of the assault."
And so you show up in prison as a low-level nonviolent drug offender, but you're there because of that, either that contemporaneous violence or prior violence on your record that that we can't see. Um, and so some fraction of that 15% percent aren't really there for drugs. We just don't know what that is.
CH: Do you have any sense of where it might be?
JP: None.
CH: *None?*
JP: Whatsoever. The other, the other thing to realize also is that often times, it seems (indistinguishable word or two) some very pretextual about the use of drug cases. So if you look at that that that trend in in drugs, you know that spike in New York state, talking about '84 to '94 and then it starts to decline, that spike in drug cases correlates almost perfectly with the spike in violence that that came in the wake of crack markets.
And its decline comes basically at the time that violence started to decline, which suggests at some level we were using these drug cases as a way to get at violence. And you might object to to doing that, right? Either charge the person with homicide or not. Don't use the crack possession to get the person you might vaguely suspect is guilty of something more serious, but it's just that the the the story is still more intimately tied to violence.
What's particularly fascinating is over the 1990s and 2000s as violent crime has gone down as serious violence has gone down sharply, you'd think that that would be the time that we would focus even more on drugs, right? Because there's less violence, there's le-, we have more police, less violence, there's more resources to dedicate to these more discretionary offenses.
What we see actually is, at least when it comes to prison populations, the number of people admitted for drugs actually falls, the share of admissions goes down for drugs, and it goes up for violence. Violence's share of prison populations grows both in admissions and in total population. We actually concentrate much even more on violence as violence is going down than we do on drugs, which again points to something more pretextual about about drugs."
(i.e. so the police *were* using drugs as just a pretext to arrest people. They were using it as a way to "frame the guilty party" against murderers & wife-beaters they couldn't otherwise touch. It's the sort of thing a lot of people would probably independently re-invent if you described the situation to them, and they went, "Well, can't we just... you know... nail the guy on a technicality, if he's going to get off on a technicality? Like the IRS going after Al Capone, cause no one else could." -- it's the sort of plotline people cheer on, at least, in TV shows & detective novels & the like. The detective deciding to break the law in pursuit of what's right, not merely what's legal.
The downside being, of course, that in *real life* it gets the police used to taking the law into their own hands. To being able to arrest & charge anyone on whatever crimes they want to make up today. Vigilantism has downsides -- and that goes *double* for vigiliantism by the police.)
Punishing only a small minority of criminals is morally reprehensible to me too. Using it as a means for the cops to search for other crimes or imprison someone they believe is guilty of something else also feels very wrong (and a violation of at least the spirit of the 4th Amendment in the US).
My opinion on why the oregon decriminalization failed is basically that, along side decriminalization/legalization, you need much stronger laws/enforcement around drug-related anti-social behavior.
Get high all you want, but if your habit results in you making public places unpleasant for the rest of the public to be in, then you are going to be asked to leave and if you don't leave you are going to be put in jail.
This is sort of what you were talking about with smoking I think, in that smoking is totally legal.....as long as you doing it doesn't make non-smokers have to deal with your habit.
The practical issue is that most drugs harder than nicotine and marijuana have significantly more severe anti-social behaviors in at least a subset of users, and those behaviors make punishing through traditional legal means much more difficult.
I'll admit to not having a complete answer (and I'll even admit that it's at least possible that my idea is, for practical purposes, infeasible), but I am disappointed that Oregon gave up without trying anything at all beside allowing the drugs themselves.
Smoking in itself causes immediate anti-social behavior because of the smoke, while other drugs might or might not cause anti-social behavior, especially in the early stages of use.
Yeah...the tobacco smokers I encounter regularly tend to be pretty considerate about it, all things considered ("do you have a light?" is a very favourable outcome on the You Are Approached By A Shady Character At Night table). Designated geographic proximity, away from people, some level of self-awareness. But I can still remember how it was not that long ago, before the big marijuana decriminalization pushes when it wasn't usual to meet so many stoned people in public. And I mean like, absolutely baked, get-a-secondhand-high-from-proximity, fumbling with basic things like putting in a debit card PIN. Sometimes that even includes coworkers, which is frankly alarming in a job that occasionally involves operating heavy equipment and industrial machinery. Vapes also make it a more mobile vice: it's rare to see someone puffing a cig on the bus or indoors, but snapping off a pen is considered nbd pretty much anywhere...
Obviously there's some substitution effects - I'd rather have people taking pot than falling into alcoholism or worse - and these QOL impediments don't really justify jail or whatever...but it took countless years to get to the current social norms around tobacco smoking, and I guess I'm kinda just impatient to reach the same consensus with weed. Cause it really is a drag, if you'll excuse the pun. But it feels hard to criticize due to the inevitable "The War On Drugs/Prohibition didn't work!" talking points taking up so much rhetorical space. And if we can't even do a collective action on something mild like weed, there's not much hope for addressing fentanyl or whatever.
> along side decriminalization/legalization, you need much stronger laws/enforcement around drug-related anti-social behavior.
Exactly this. When you legalize drugs, you get a lot of anti-social but technically legal behavior from the drug users who are no longer trying to hide.
I don't care when people inject shit in their veins. But I get angry when they throw away the used needles on the playground where my children play. And what can I do about that, legally? Nothing. (Yes, I asked a lawyer.) Using the drugs is legal. Throwing the needle away on the playground it technically against some municipal rules... but good luck catching someone in the act or calling the cops, and the penalty is probably just a small fine anyway.
> smoking is totally legal.....as long as you doing it doesn't make non-smokers have to deal with your habit.
I remember a few times when I was waiting for a bus outside in the rain as a child, because some asshole was smoking in the bus stop shelter. And the cigarette butts used to be everywhere. So, the smokers were also annoying as fuck, but luckily it went out of fashion.
In places where laws have made cigarettes inconvenient and costly, the gangs now sell cigarettes. Here in Melbourne we've got some kind of cigarette-related gang war going on, every single tobacconist is selling black market cigarettes under the counter, and tobacconists keep getting firebombed overnight (for failing to pay protection money or for being part of the wrong syndicate or something).
I think there's all sorts of problems with the scenario where evil outlaw drug gangs are replaced by evil law-abiding multinational drug corporations. Either you heavily regulate the companies and leave a door open for the drug gangs to continue, or you completely deregulate them and you've got two thirds of the population hooked on super-heroin within five years.
Just one of the problems: what do you do about liability law? Ordinarily if you sell someone something dangerous and it kills them then you can get sued... but that's just an expected consequence of selling people heroin.
I don't think that's the problem here; for starters we don't have elected prosecutors. Courts aren't as draconian as I'd like, but that's not a recent change. And we're talking heavy organised crime here, not the sort of criminal that anyone finds sympathetic -- think mafia/triad types, not street gangs.
I always liked the principle behind Robin Hanson's "Store of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods", even if the implementation problems are obvious and largely insurmountable. There's a certain philosophical clarity to radical caveat emptor, and the selection effects could sometimes be positive too. Put those sociological assertions of "bad outcomes like addiction happen because of discrimination and bias!" to a real-world test.
Yes, I remembered the second from The Sequences but couldn't recall the first, thanks. Abbreviated URLs economize on space but are not the easiest for content recall. I am indeed willing to bite the bullet of Salt Of The Earth Soccer Mom Kicks Last Bucket as an acceptable downside: concentrated harms, diffuse benefits. Or as Eliezer also once wrote, shut up and multiply - torture vs dust specks. I also think his assessment of primary contributors to such outcomes is underbaked...it's certainly true that (say what we mean) low IQ and lack of skepticism contribute. But the brilliant iconoclast who dies to an overdose is a well-worn trope for a reason. Fundamentally, Drugs Are Fun, and they inflict sanity damage just like mental illness, which circumvents many types of defenses. Even the ad absurdum of lethal snake oil is easily solved by consumers keeling over - immediately making a follow-up purchase impossible, and sending a strong signal for competitors to sink said irresponsible whale-killer. Society would still capture the majority of benefits if the proposal was amended to Shops Of Ill-Advised Goods, Except Blatant Outright Fraud That Will Kill You Quickly (Please Patronize Our Death With Dignity Outlet For Such Goods Instead).
You’ve created a false dichotomy. The choice isn’t either leaving drugs to be distributed by drug gangs or by completely unregulated corporations. Alcohol used to be distributed by murderous bootleggers like Al Capone, and now it’s distributed by huge corporations, but we are still able to impose many regulations on it, and essentially no one gets their booze from bootleggers any more.
They’ve tried that with weed and it didn’t work - instead a lot more people picked up the habit. Smoking rates went down because it’s a highly visible and highly annoying habit, I don’t think it would work the same way with legalizing cocaine.
Smoking has also been legal for a lot longer than weed. It took time for people to learn that it was bad for you in a way that percolated. I would expect the same thing to happen to weed
I don't think cigarettes are a good comparison for marijuana or other drugs because of the distinct lack of positives to smoking. Without nicotine, how many people would smoke regularly? I'd wager a tiny fraction of the numbers that would consume marijuana or alcohol. Some people like the smell of tobacco, I'm one of them in fact, but it's going to be much smaller than the near universal pleasure of getting drunk or high.
And the downsides are more obvious and negative as well. Someone who smokes a pack a day will have worse long term outcomes and more noticeable unpleasant short term effects than someone consuming an equivalent amount of alcohol or marijuana.
Don't forget overdose deaths, which thanks to illegality / fentanyl are now the number 1 cause of death for people younger than 40, outpacing even car accidents, and killing about 100k people total yearly.
And it's totally voluntary - pure government policies, those 100k deaths could be eliminated basically tomorrow if you just legalized and sold standardized pharmaceutical opiate doses for the literal pennies each dose costs to manufacture.
But you know, nobody cares about the number one cause of death for people under 40 (which is entirely preventable and could be immediately prevented tomorrow.)
If America legalized and allowed them to be sold at 2x cost, it would save 100k lives a year. Sure, more people would be addicted, but that's their choice. And being illegal and expensive is the source of all the negative externalities anyways - if it's legal and cheap, who *cares* if people are addicted? That's up to them, and the health consequences of pharmaceutically pure opiates is basically "constipation." And more pople being addicted / constipated is worth saving 100k young people a year.
Yes. This is right, and I wish more people would see it. Although I have used the “overdoses are solely caused by opiates being illegal” argument before, and remember concluding that it turns out there are still many overdoses from people using legal opiates (ie which have standardized dosages), even though many are also likely caused by the black market.
It would also be a great help for people, like me, that live in constant pain from chronic health conditions that will never go away until the day I die. My doctors are more than happy to discuss all manner of surgical interventions and new treatments, but they wont even engage me on the subject of pain management at any level.
You are stating as fact your beliefs about an extremely complex hypothetical.
I would be amazed, regardless of your credentials, if you can confidently say that on net this policy change would save lives. Interventions often backfire in unpredictable ways, e.g., the classic scared straight example.
> Interventions often backfire in unpredictable ways, e.g., the classic scared straight example.
In fact, you're sitting on the other side of exactly such a backfiring intervention. After the "opioid crisis" and the government making it essentially impossible to get legal painkillers, they decided to further crack down on illegal opiates too.
That crackdown has basically made fentanyl and carfentanyl ubiquitous, because it's 100-1000x more potent by weight, so 1 kilo is like 100-1000kg of heroin. And a couple of milligrams over can OD you. This has led to overdose deaths 5x-ing, from 20k a year during the "opioid crisis" to 100k per year now.
This is a widely repeated myth. Over half of all deaths in the opioid crisis were from legally manufactured drugs made by highly regulated companies in the US. Oxycontin is a legal, regulated substance. It was famously made widely available and consequently hundreds of thousands of people died from overusing it. There could be not be a better refutation of your argument than just looking at the past 3 decades of opioid policy.
Like a lot of these online discussions, I see a lot of speculation from people who have clearly never done hard drugs. Addicts OD because they take too much, because they want to get Even Higher. I think you're imagining that an addict takes a Standard Dose, but it's infiltrated with fentanyl so they die. Yes, that does happen sometimes. But what also happens is that an addict takes Standard Dose, then they want to get even higher so they take 2 or 3 or 5x Standard Dose, and they overdose and die. Like alcohol, right? 6 beers is more fun than 2, and if you're an alcoholic, 16 shots of whiskey is even more fun. However even with a totally pure, regulated, unadulterated source of alcohol, you can die when you take too much.
Making the product pure, through a regulated legal process, doesn't prevent someone from taking too much of it. Which is where the very word 'overdose' comes from.
Your whole last paragraph is so wrong and so wrong depressing I can't even begin to debunk it. I guess start here and then imagine what happens if you replace the word 'alcohol' with 'oxycontin' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholism
> This is a widely repeated myth. Over half of all deaths in the opioid crisis were from legally manufactured drugs made by highly regulated companies in the US. Oxycontin is a legal, regulated substance. It was famously made widely available and consequently hundreds of thousands of people died from overusing it.
Actually during the opioid crisis, only 20k people a year were overdosing, It's since up 5x due to the prevalence of fentanyl and trying to crack down / restrict illegal opiates furtther after they made sure nobody can get legal painkillers.
So that crackdown has basically made fentanyl and carfentanyl ubiquitous, because it's 100-1000x more potent by weight, so 1 kilo is like 100-1000kg of heroin. And a couple of milligrams over can OD you.
So sure, maybe the incremental lives saved is ONLY 80k, at ~60 years lost per death. And substituting pharmaceutical heroin or oxies for alcohol is almost *certainly* a net win health wise - alcohol is a literal poison that destroys multiple systems in your body, opiate's main health side effect is constipation.
1. Some fentanyl deaths are because it's mixed into the drug supply chain of non-opioids (like cocaine). So a legalization process wouldn't do anything about that
2. As I explained above (and again, I can tell that none of you have real-life experience with hard drugs)- addicts build tolerance to opioids/heroin, and then go seeking a stronger high. Maybe Government Regulated Oxy gets an addict high for a few months, but tolerance builds fast, and a few months later now they're not getting anywhere near as high. So they'd seek out fentanyl on the street.
Fentanyl is now ubiquitous because of Chinese drug smuggling operations, not because the government 'created' the market. It just didn't exist in the 90s. Similar to how the legal weed market hasn't stamped out black market weed *at all*, you'd still have fentanyl if there was demand.
Plus, making opioids easier to get *vastly widens the number of people who'd do them*, a fact that's not in dispute given that *the last 30 years has decisively proved this*. So making Legal Oxy easier to get increases the number of addicts, they build tolerance, get bored, and seek out heroin or fentanyl. You've just made the problem worse.
1. I'm sure you won't be surprised that I advocate for legalizing cocaine too.
My policy suggestion is literally "legalize heroin and oxies and sell at cost or 2x cost." Either heroin or oxies (or fentanyl for that matter) costs literal pennies per dose from the manufacturers. Even the heaviest users would be fine on $5 a day. And if you remove the illegality, and if it costs pennies a dose, you have removed all the biggest negative externalities.
Incidentally, I fully agree that from an externality standpoint, "public nuisance" things should be heavily enforced and the police should do their jobs, but they should be doing that anyways.
> Fentanyl is now ubiquitous because of Chinese drug smuggling operations, not because the government 'created' the market.
China doesn't just spin up smuggling operations in a vacuum. The government definitely created that market, as a matter of specific policies enacted. First, they made legal opiates much harder to get in reaction to the Sackler "opiate crisis," driving people to the street. Then around 2015, they started cracking down on heroin, imports of which had risen to meet demand. That demand doesn't go away though, that's a market opportunity!
By cracking down harder on shipments of heroin from mexico, they left supply gap that the Chinese filled with fentanyl. Because fentanyl and carfentanyl is 100-1000 times stronger, it is correspondingly 100-1000x lower in volume for smuggling, and much harder to catch. When one kilo can feed the streets for a month, which would have required a thousand kilos of heroin, it's much harder to interdict. It's also cheaper! So all the drug dealers decided "hey, it's cheaper and I get more of my shipments through, let's just sell this stuff exclusively," and lo, the fentanyl epidemic was born out of US gov policies and straightforward supply / demand forces. They even come in convenient "fake oxy" form, with much Chinese fentanyl coming over in pre-pressed pills.
You can see that story here, note the 2015 peak in "heroin" and the sharp rise in fentanyl afterwards:
> So making Legal Oxy easier to get increases the number of addicts, they build tolerance, get bored, and seek out heroin or fentanyl. You've just made the problem worse.
Actually, pills and heroin kills 5x fewer people, directly reflected in the opiate deaths by opiate type here, with fentanyl taking off after the 2015 crackdowns:
Fentanyl is what kills everyone, because the strength on the street is impossible to know, and because of the chocolate chip cookie effect. When a few milligrams in the dosing either way can kill you, and when non-quality-controlled pill presses can leave local concentrations of fentanyl in the pills, it kills people. You ALSO see that in the second graph - fentanyl is about 5x as lethal as heroin or pills, and it's because of that tightness in dosing.
But if you legalize heroin and pills, and they cost pennies, many fewer young people will die - we'll be back to the ~20k or so young-person deaths per year (note that the heroin and oxy overdose trendlines are 5x less than the fentanyl, so even if they stayed flat on legalization and didn't improve at all, you would still save tens of thousands of incremental deaths a year).
Basically, all you folk saying "we need to crack down harder!!!" is exactly what the government has been TRYING for the last 20 years.
First, the government noticed that lots of people were getting legal prescriptions for pain pills. "That won't do, we should crack down," and lo, they cracked down on legal prescriptions, and made doctors loathe to pass out any pain medicine to anybody for fear of losing their licenses.
But people still have pain and / or addictions, so that drove people to the street, and there was a sharp rise in heroin deaths seen in graph 2 as people used to pills transitioned to unknown strength illegal street drugs. So the government decided again, "well we can't have *that,* we need to crack down even harder," and in 2015 sharply stepped up heroin interdiction from Mexico.
But cracking down doesn't remove demand. The demand was still there, and China could readily supply fentanyl, which was much more smuggleable, and cheaper! And do you KNOW how many containers come from China into US ports per year? About 20M. And how easy it is to hide a kilo or two in that logistics stream?
And that's when fentanyl deaths really took off, and now we're at 100k deaths a year, 5x higher than when we first started our "opiate crisis," and it's mostly thanks to the government "cracking down."
> Plus, making opioids easier to get *vastly widens the number of people who'd do them*, a fact that's not in dispute given that *the last 30 years has decisively proved this*.
You're right, I don't dispute this. If the government had just shut up and let the Sacklers make more millions, we would probably have 1M more people alive today. And sure, those are drug addicts! Who needs em?? Buncha deviants and ne'er do wells. And have you heard the music they like??
But addiction is temporary, and death is *permanent.*
A lot of that 1M people would have straightened up and gotten jobs and had kids. Actually, at the Sackler stage, a lot of those people *already* had jobs and kids and were doing fine. It was the crackdown that pushed them to illegal heroin, and then the interdiction crackdown that pushed them to fentanyl, and now we kill 100k young people a year, most of whom would eventually come out of it and be productive adults if they could get pharmaceutical and cheap doses of opiates, just so we can say we're tough and take crime seriously.
I don't care if more people get high legally, with much fewer negative health effects than alcohol. During the Sackler part of the story, those people were fine! Opiate deaths were *tiny.* They had jobs, they raised their kids.
It all starts falling apart when society decides that we'd better crack down, no *harder,* no harder than *that.* That's what's brought us to our current 5x young-people-death rate.
A lot of the incremental people getting addicted will come out of it, and we'll save 60-80k young lives per year, which is permanent, and with 60 years saved at a whack. That's worth a bunch of incremental people having pain relief and getting high or addicted. Adults should have a right to get high if they want to anyways, just like they have a right to get drunk if they want to.
Or you know, maybe we should crack down even HARDER harder, and just do a Duterte and call it "death penalty for any drug user," and give all police Judge Dredd style powers to directly execute whoever they feel like, as long as they throw a little baggie of drugs on top of the corpse afterwards. Would that be a better society, you think? Because that's about the only option we have on the "no, harder" scale after this. Because you can't stop or interdict a kilo a month coming in a stream of 2M containers a month, but you can legalize and sell pharmaceutical doses at cost.
'The government created the fentanyl market'- sure, and I'm sure that the big bad government created the market for crack before that. And heroin, and meth, and opium, and gin in the 18th century. It's a total copout and nonsense. They exist because human beings like doing these substances. Also, in the non-narcotic field for-profit companies create new markets *all the time*, so I can't imagine why you'd think the Chinese couldn't have introduced fentanyl and spun up demand that way.
I'll repeat what I said- maxing it easier to get oxys would increase the number of addicts, who'd then build tolerance, and would go on to score fentanyl on the street to get higher. (Do you really have experience with hard drugs if you don't know how opioid tolerance works?) Has making a legal weed market destroyed the black market, as libertarians predicted? Unfortunately no. You've spun up a story that the government made people go out and get fentanyl, but unfortunately that's just not true. There's always a market for a harder drug. Legions of addicts would be looking for their next, stronger high. No junkie is ever satisfied if something stronger exists out there.
Your contention that junkies will be happy with 'just' opioids and not go looking for something stronger after tolerance has set in is sadly wrong.
You don't need to crack down on drugs even harder, but it's OK for society to make it difficult and expensive to get narcotics, to prevent widespread addiction.
BTW, prescription (non-fentanyl) opioids account for about a third of all OD deaths. I agree that fentanyl is worse- that's why we shouldn't let people get started on the road to addiction in the first place, which will then lead to fentanyl usage
Although tobacco smoking is on the decline, it’s still much more common than other drug use. A recent study that got a lot of attention found that daily or near-daily cannabis use now exceeds daily or near-daily alcohol use in the United States (18 million vs 14 million). But it also noted “That is still not as high as for cigarettes. The 2022 NSDUH survey finds that 58.7% of PM cigarette smokers smoked ‘daily’—defined as ‘smoked one or more packs of cigarettes per day’ [8]. Therefore, there are more daily cigarette smokers than DND PM marijuana users (24.1 vs 17.7 million).” Note that this isn’t people who smoke one cigarette after dinner - this is pack-a-day smokers!
I don’t think it’s yet true that restrictions on tobacco are greater than on cannabis, and I don’t think it’s true that cigarette smokers are less inconvenience to others.
I didn't know about the Chersonesus park and it sounded really bad so looked for more details. A BBC article says that they built it in the ancient agricultural area adjacent to the polis itself, which still likely contains some archeological remains but it seems like the ruins of the city itself are unaffected. So it's a bit less horrible than implied in the Kyiv Independent article you've linked. https://www.bbc.com/russian/articles/czvx0xdpgxgo
I agree Russia is not stupid enough to build their tribute to an archaeological site on top of the site itself, and I was sort of going off of an assumption like this.
I don't know what you're talking about, but my hot take is that we should study as much as we can about the ruins of the Parthenon, then rebuild it. I feel the same way about re-coating the Pyramids in limestone and gold.
I have been this summer to the excellent Roman town of Merida in Spain. It declined significantly after the empire collapsed and wasn’t a major centre for Muslims or Christians thereafter. Therefore the modern town is the same size as the Roman town and has the amphitheater, theatre and circus are positioned exactly where they were relatively, and a Roman bridge that was on the edge of the Roman city is on the edge of modern Merida.
What was disappointing was the circus, and this is true of all Roman circuses. What’s left is just a field with a circular track. On the edge the seating is just raised grassy mounds. Grass if lucky. Otherwise, dirt.
Rebuilding these things is not a crime. Get in experts. Use the ancient materials. Build in the old fashion if you must. Bring back chariot races.
The roman amphitheatre of Verona is still in use for operas and other events, it's a really nice experience to go there for a show and much better than just walking around some unused ruins.
"I agree Russia is not stupid enough to build their tribute to an archaeological site on top of the site itself"
Oh, it most certainly quite capable of doing this, and it has less to do with stupidity, and more with corruption. Myriad mansions with giant garages holding Maybachs were built in prestigious areas by all involved. Who cares about ancient Greek artifacts when another Geländewagen can be bought from the kickbacks.
In Novgorod (famous for birch manuscripts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript#Old_Slavonic_script) they are now planning to build an archaeology museum on top of the archaeological site that is still being investigated. Supposedly, the investigation should have taken 4 to 5 years, but the archaeologists were told to dig faster in half that time.
Just hope it wouldn't be as ugly as the one in Chersonesus.
2: I found that article to be perhaps too confident, considering that genomics and evolutionary biology are not mature fields and we are still gathering data and trying to understand them. For the case of schizophrenia in particular, here is a different article arguing that only very weak positive selection would be required in order to to explain the current prevalence of schizophrenia under a cliff model (or a continuous version of the same). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763424001052 I'm not saying that either article is right, but it doesn't seem obvious to me how to distinguish between them. The citations and data presented for the claim that there is no balancing selection in schizophrenia do not seem overwhelmingly comprehensive.
That article is fascinating but I'm not sure I understand its explanation for schizophrenia being an omnigenic disorder. I thought things were only omnigenic if evolution was working so hard to minimize them that it was impossible to create a gene favoring them with more than a trivial effect (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/evolution-explains-polygenic-structure).
> Balancing selection occurs when selection coefficents differ by time or place (fluctuating selection), sex (sexually antagonistic selection), trait frequency (negative frequency-dep selection) or other alleles at the same locus (heterozygote advantage)
I'm no expert, but is different to clif-edged selection, which describes the relationship between fitness and the phenotypic value of a quantitative trait. Ditto for or any other type of fitness function that has a non-extremal optimum
I too am confused by this ... every autistic person I've ever encountered seemed to lack rationality.
A friend works Behavior Intervention in public schools. Which means he's assigned to guide a non-verbal autistic kid ... which really means he's there to help manage stressful events, foster communication with other kids, make sure the autistic kid eats lunch, and stop them from harming others or bolting out of the classroom and into traffic ... and change diapers.
Autism occurs on a spectrum, and your friend's experience is not representative of most people with autism. Many people with autism are very high functioning; e.g., Elon Musk claims that he has been diagnosed with autism. Google around and you'll find lists of scientists and mathematicians with diagnosed or apparent autism.
That said, there is no contradiction between having poor executive function (like the kids your friend supports) and being highly rational. Autism largely impacts how individuals interact with their environment, not how they manipulate abstractions internally.
I read the rest and seems like a nothingburger that was the *biggest* *thing* *in* *the* *world* to whoever might have been within 1 degree of the principals, but IDK shit about Hegel so maybe it's a bigger than I thought
can you (or anyone else) give me a rundown on this one? X is banned on my country and I'm curious but not to the point of setting up a VPN and risking a fine to read it
nitter.poast appears to be working, so if you replace the "x.com" portion of the url with "nitter.poast.org", it should work. (I think? I assume that gets around country locks, but I've never tried).
note that it will be slower to load and you may get hit with a "user has been rate limited" message, which you should be able to get around with a couple refreshes. Other than those things though, I actually prefer the nitter interface to the default x/twitter one by quite a lot
But if that doesn't work for you, I'm definitely not spending enough time to figure out what the hell it's about, sorry
Wow. I’m glad I’m not on Twitter so that I don’t have to read Hegel. I thought it was just philosophy grad students that Twitter was pushing too far and too deep into political Hegel, but maybe it goes further? (Or maybe these are all philosophy grad students?)
The Tickle v Giggle case is not actually very interesting. The court applied a pretty straightforward reading of the law - it bans discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and it’s unequivocal that Giggle discriminated against Tickle on the basis of his gender identity.
The question is what the law *should* say. It’s the Parliament’s job to change bad laws, not the courts.
Yes, it's her legal surname; pseudonymous lawsuits exist, but this isn't one. The full name of the case is "Roxanne Tickle v Giggle for Girls Pty Ltd & Anor", which is 30% less funny. (The second respondent is Sally Grover, founder of Giggle.)
If the case was, like, some gruesome violent crime, I would be upset. But it's in fact a very minor case: one person got discriminated against by one unimportant mobile app, and got $10k plus costs. This does not matter in the grand scheme of things, and therefore I am free to be amused by the name. Tickle and Giggle. Haha.
My impression was there wasn’t much dispute among legal experts about which way the case would turn out (though I admit I didn’t go super into the weeds). Indeed the judgement seems to consider itself a straightforward application of existing law:
“Those arguments failed, because the view propounded by the respondents conflicted with a long history of cases decided by courts going back over 30 years. Those cases establish that, on its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable.
The respondents’ views also conflicted with the clear Parliamentary intention to prohibit discrimination on the ground of gender identity in certain contexts, contained in amendments to the SDA that took effect over a decade ago, in 2013.”
This is the explanation I heard about the case, but it doesn't make sense at all because Giggle didn't discriminate against Tickle on the basis of their gender identity, they discriminated against Tickle on the basis of their sex. If Tickle had a male gender identity, they also would not have been allowed on the app, so it can't be discrimination on gender identity.
Legally, sex is changeable, and Tickle has a modified birth certificate saying he is female. It’s a legal fiction of course, but we’re dealing with a court, so legal fictions rule. Tickle is legally a woman so Giggle cannot have discriminated on the basis of sex. They discriminated on the basis that he is not the right kind of of woman e.g. the kind with ovaries.
But if Tickle is female in every legal sense, then how can they prove that it's discrimination? It can only be discrimination on these lines if you first acknowledge that Tickle is not female. There has to be some protected category that you are discriminating against, and Tickle is not a member of a different legal category than women who are allowed to use the app.
You mention Tracing Woodgrains one paragraph earlier who wrote an excellent substack piece documenting the profoundly terrible effect one person has had on the site, particularly in the curation of the “trusted sources” used to fashion these bios.
At a minimum consider every biography on the site with extreme skepticism.
I'd be willing to bet (this is a literal offer) that the details are mostly correct if we look into them more deeply; is this something you'd be interested in fleshing out more?
I interpret your post to say first that earlier versions of the article were less accusatory, second when he called up a journalist to argue that the Illuminati were real maybe he meant it metaphorically or something, and third that being arrested for illegal house parties isn't so bad.
None of these related to my key claim, which is that the article is true.
(except maybe the "Illuminati metaphorical" claim, but you provided no evidence for that except that it was theoretically possible, and most people I know who just think the elites suck have never left multiple voice mails on a journalist's email to complain about the Illuminati, in a way that that journalist described as weird and disturbing)
Or when it said an ex-partner accused him of abuse, it links to a newspaper with an interview with the ex-partner.
Looking through the rest of the article, this seems pretty typical for the level of evidence they give. I don't know what more you could want.
I agree that it looks like it was written with a negative slant towards Durek by emphasizing the weirdest things about him, but I also think everything it says is basically accurate.
I would agree a newspaper article with his Instagram saying, “I’m a reptile,” is reasonable evidence. My issue is that if he also had an Instagram that said, “just kidding,” no one would ever see it—it would be disallowed by WP guidelines unless printed in a different—and approved—journal. There’s no mechanism for individuals to defend themselves.
I suppose this was the wrong hill to die on. Dude is surely a scumbag, even if he’s also maligned by a powerful media campaign. If I left no doubts about WP, I failed. I regret only that I have but one comment thread to give and resign myself back to obscurity. 🫡
As my mom and her friends consume lots of those royals/celebs-gossip journals that cover several yards in the supermarket ("it's just for the cross-words"), and pretend each week to have uncovered new scandalous/intimate "facts" about princesses/Merkel's marriage/Helene Fischer (our German Dion/Swift) ... I found it hilarious to see an actual scandalous fact about a princess now covered in our local/national press - while those "investigative/expert"-journals had no clue. I agree with Scott, and take bets: wikipedia is not lying here. It "very rarely does", just as the NYT/WP/FOX rarely do. ;)
I'm a minor contributor to Wikipedia. The issues Trace outlines are very real and I've seen them firsthand in some strange places, like the decade+ war in the Talk page for Yogurt. I think the first thing anyone with a healthy level of skepticism about Wikipedia should do is to always take a quick peek and the Talk page and article history. While it is easy for a single person of cabal of like minded editors to do real damage to the site, its very hard to do so without leaving a ton of evidence of your actions for people that know how to navigate the "sausage making" pages on Wikipedia. There is also a tremendous amount of good information on the subjects there as well. Someone going out of their way to spend years suppressing certain information about a subject is a huge beacon to me that the concerned information is actually something worth reading, as well as their motivations for doing do. I consider the Wiki Talk pages to be among some of the funniest places I've ever visited on the internet, but you have to know how to read and follow them.
I mostly contribute to dry, technical articles about forensic accounting and fraud related topics. There are other culture/history topics I something feel like I can contribute too but make a point of avoiding. I had a history prof in college who had a sort of guideline for his own work: if anyone alive now had a grandparent alive during the event, avoid writing about it. I like that.
So this comment is just me repeating a thing I see Matt Yglesias mention a bunch, but, an important thing worth considering regarding Trump's policies vs Harris's is that Trump will likely be more able to *implement* his policies, because 1. the Republicans are likely to control Congress regardless of who wins the presidency, and 2. a big part of Trump's policies are *tariffs* which is something the president has a lot of authority to impose unilaterally.
...and as long as I'm just repeating points from Yglesias, I should point out that with Trump's proposed tariff policies, companies would be able to apply for exemptions, which, while obviously it's nice to have less tariffs, basically opens the door to a lot of corruption, winner-picking, and incumbent-favoring in the market, since Trump would have a lot of discretion over these and he's a pretty corrupt guy, and also small players would have a harder time getting these exemptions.
We don't have any evidence of Harris implementing every policy she ever mentions either, given that she hasn't been president before. But most politicians don't do that.
If we're going to say 'every bad policy Trump mentions won't happen, every bad policy Harris mentions will happen' then yeah your analysis will say that Trump does better on implemented policy. But that seems like pretty obviously motivated reasoning.
It's true that when Trump does stupid things for the economy the Democrats usually follow him there (don't join the TPP, tariffs, the notion of not taxing tips...), but Trump is more likely to enact his own ideas (more tariffs) than Harris (currently against more tariffs). If Trump wins and puts more tariffs in place no surprise if Dems keep them in place in the future but way less likely Harris puts them in place.
I think it's weird that you think Trump is unlikely to implement his "raise tariffs" policy when there is the precedent for his raising tariffs in his previous term and it is the primary thing he is calling for in his economic plan. If we were talking about one of his more outlandish thought bubbles for which there is no precedent I would agree with you.
Trump might have more power to implement his policies but he also has little incentive to actually do so, given that he’s not running for re-election. Harris on the other hand has another election to win so more of a push to get something done. What scares me about Harris is that she probably does believe in the Democrat policies being good. Trump doesn’t scare me as much because it’s obvious he only cares about winning and couldn’t care less about ideology.
In general, politics is thermostatic and looking like you're doing things is bad for your reelection chances (especially when she probably does know the actual effects on the economy would be bad, even if she still says the populist stuff). So this argument probably cuts the other way.
You don't think Trump's America First ideology is real? He's been talking about his America First-ish ideology his whole public life going back to at least the early '80s when he started appearing on television regularly. He's spoken passionately about many issues for decades. He used his own money for that full page ad to execute the Central Park 5 in the '80s. He's clearly a phony on issues like religion but really seems to care about what he thinks America should be and has always wanted to play a role in manifesting that vision.
I think Trump cares a lot about promoting his brand and making money but he doesn't strike me as someone particularly passionate about anything else, no. Harris is much more likely to be a true believer.
I think your point 1 is more correctly "Conditional on X being elected President, will they have both houses of Congress as well?" in that the Senate is quite likely to be R either way, but the House is more finely balanced right now.
What evidence do you have that Trump is corrupt? He's the only president in the past 100 years to not leave office wealthier than when he went in.
Like all the claims the Trumps are anti-Semitic fall apart when you see the list of Jewish charities their family has donated to heavily, or founded, or the number of government buildings and hospital wings in Israel named after them.
Or all the claims that he's racist, when his clubs were the first big name New England golf courses open to Jews and Blacks.
Trump was heavily fined in a storm of classic LAWFARE the NY governor had to go out and reassure other real estate developers they wouldn't be treated the same.
"New Yorkers who are businesspeople have nothing to worry about because they’re very different than Donald Trump"
So someone files patent applications in China. Friends have told me that due to corruption in the US Patent & Trademark office, Chinese patents are stronger. It turns out Google can just get anyone's patents overruled.
Kushner also wrote the hugely important Abraham Accords building a lasting relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And last I looked, Kushner is not, nor has ever been the President. Meanwhile Hunter Biden was convicted of fraud in DC with evidence from his laptop that 51 corrupt spies said was Russian influence—including the husband of Kamala's recent interviewer Dana Bash.
It turns out that one of the debate moderators was Kamala's sorority sister.
If we use the definition "having or showing a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain", his whole professional life has been corrupt. He didn't get rich by keeping his word to his business partners.
I'm sure he hoped his presidency would also profit him personally, it just didn't work out that way.
Also, the Harris 'price controls' have not been really been explained beyond those two words, which is something you can rightly be mad at her about, BUT.
The estimates that say they will destroy the economy forever are mostly based on just making up a potential policy that is huge and broad-reaching and stupid.
As opposed to eg. the price control laws that many states already have to prevent price gouging during natural disasters or etc., which are tightly limited in scope and don't seem to cause any large-scale damage.
I have no idea what your commentary on link 50 means. "One trans activist has a silly surname, therefore I should stop getting so bent out of shape about trans rights" or "an app which was sued by a trans activist has a silly name, therefore I should stop getting so bent out of shape about transgender issues" both seem like complete non sequiturs.
What does "take seriously" or "take too seriously" mean in this context?
Alice: "I think it's bad when convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are housed in women's prisons."
Bob: "Did you know a landmark ruling on a related issue in a separate country was called 'Tickle vs. Giggle'? Isn't that really dumb and silly?"
Alice: "Sure, that legal ruling has a funny name. That doesn't change my opinion that it's bad when convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are housed in women's prisons."
Again, I'm really not seeing the connection between these statements.
That should depend on her priorities (which are hers) and expected outcomes. If caring about the issue destroys her mentally and fails to achieve any measurable positive change to the issue itself, seems like she should agree she cared too much.
Maybe so. But why are we jumping to the conclusion that Alice cares too much about this issue on the basis that she cares about it at all, or on the basis that her opinion on this issue is not the maximally trans-inclusive one? It is entirely possible, even common, for people to be both gender-critical and to devote an appropriate amount of mental bandwidth to said cause.
I take it to be more on the side of "You have to believe this convicted murderer who, while incarcerated in a woman's prison because of a court case which forced 'if you identify as X you are X' ruling on the state government, got *two* women inmates pregnant is indeed a Real Woman and should not be put into a men's prison" advocates, then yeah - "Tickle versus Giggle is absurd, isn't it? Isn't it - weird?" is the right approach.
Weren't we told that mocking and making fun of the opposition and their stupid beliefs is how you win? (Re: religious belief and rationalism, at least) and if "gosh those people are weird" is being used as a winning strategy by Kamalalot, then why not use it for the extreme weirdo fringes as above?
And I wish that case above was a "come on that is a fake story" but it's all true.
"Minor’s removal from the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women comes just a year after the state reached a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey to house transgender inmates according to their gender identity, instead of their sex assigned at birth. The facility currently houses 27 transgender inmates, NJ Advance Media reported.
Sperrazza said “decisions related to an incarcerated person’s housing are made within the parameters of the settlement agreement which requires consideration of gender identity and the health and safety of the individual.”
The ACLU of New Jersey did not provide a response to NBC News’ requests for comment regarding Minor’s prison transfer.
Minor, who is serving a 30-year prison sentence for manslaughter, impregnated the fellow inmates earlier this year following consensual sexual relationships, Sperrazza confirmed. He added that even consensual sex between inmates is prohibited in the state.
...In a letter from Minor posted to the blog Justice 4 Demi, which often publishes videos and letters from her, she described her removal from Edna Mahan as punishment for having sex with two women.
“As a woman who is transgender I truly fear what lies ahead for me, its clear that staff have looked for some kind of security reason to kick me out of the only female correctional facility,” Minor wrote in the post, which was published Friday. “They have thrown me to the wolfs and expected for me just gave up, I am baffled and disgusted by this use power and I can only ask that the commissioner and governors office please send me back. I don’t deserve to be treated like this.”
I am quite happy to point and laugh and go "Tickle vs Giggle!" at the Justice 4 Demi set and all their fellow-travellers.
I'm not sure I got your position right, but do you think that "the inmate who impregnated two women should be considered a woman" is ridiculous?
For a biologist, sure, producing spermatozoa means they're a male (or an extremely rare hermaphrodite). But biologists are not the people who decide which bathrooms one can use, which sport competitions they can participate in, who they can marry and which prisons they should be put into. And I think these questions should preferably be decided in a way that minimizes social harm, and/or possibly maximizes some value we generally agree on. The decision could very well end up being "yes this one belongs in a men's prison", but the consensual inmate sex thing is not a sufficient harm to convince me of this. And I don't see what biologists have to do with this unless you believe prison is and should be as a low-key eugenical project. Which is probably not one of those values people generally agree on.
I thought generally Twitter activists don't "decide" anything, they just scream really loud or write letters? I have met some annoying people on their side of the fence, but let's not ignore the fact that most of the activists on the other side have an imaginary friend with a long history of convincing people it's okay to dictate how others should live their lives.
"do you think that "the inmate who impregnated two women should be considered a woman" is ridiculous?"
I had a whole spiel I was going to do, but let's skip it and cut to the chase:
Yes.
Yes, it's fucking ridiculous that a man with functioning reproductive system whose preference in sexual partners is women is allowed to call himself a woman and get into women's prison so he can be treated better and have a choice of women to fuck.
All the rest of it is bullshit. He's not suffering dysphoria, he's a murderous little animal who is rightfully in jail and wants to get as cushy a time as he can weasel out of the authorities, so if changing his name (which seems to be about as much transitioning as he has done) and claiming to be a real girl, yes I am! will do that for him, he'll do it.
But why should we care? It's one thing if they were trying to infiltrate a women's prison to rape with impunity (though honestly if prisons can't prevent rapes it's not Minor problem, pardon the pun). But if someone is gaming the system to be in supposedly a slightly more comfortable prison... they're still in prison.
(I'm not invested in prisons only being places for uncomfortable masturbation or not-by-preference-same-sex sex. Especially since we already have a category of people to whom this doesn't apply. And if I were, I'd probably call for conditions that rule out sex altogether (also solving the rape problem) rather than care about rare edge cases.)
I didn't and am not planning to research Minor specifically, so I can for the sake of the argument accept that you're right that they're obviously just gaming the system. Then placing them (him) in the women's prison was not one of the cases important for minimizing the harm. When it was decided that it's better to put trans people into prisons according to their preferred gender, they didn't mean them (him). But they probably weren't so dumb to fail to realize cheating will be happening, too, if women's prisons are generally better places. So the argument should have been that it's still worth it. (Details on how the decision was made can vary but clearly there should have been some people who found this convincing. And maybe this is wrong and disproving it will lead to better policies, but, again, the Minor case is hardly much of evidence for this, because it is a one.)
I think many transgendered people are very sincere. At bare minimum, I think they genuinely do identify more with the gender that is opposite their birth sex.
That being said... ANYTHING can be faked. Something being real doesn't mean there's no fake instances of it - for example, there's both real money and counterfeit money. Just because many transgendered people are sincere about it and have no ulterior motives doesn't mean that nobody is faking it.
I remember reading about a case where a biological male was arrested and tried for the raping of two women, began transitioning to female AFTER this arrest was made, and asked to be put in a women's prison.
I mean... is it POSSIBLE this individual is legitimately transgendered? Yes, but I think someone would have to be insanely naive to think it's not possible that someone could pretend to be transgendered in this particular instance. Pretty much any heterosexual man who identifies as a man would rather go to a prison with female inmates than a prison with male inmates. I mean... duh.
Well, yes, the sane system should weigh the (unjust) harm to transgendered people who are put in prisons of their birth sex against the harm caused by putting both genuine and not-filtered-out fake transgenders into their preferred prisons. Rape in particular is a concern, although the same can be said of transgenders placed in men's prisons.
No idea if putting self-professed transgenders into prisons of their preferred gender is a good decision on balance.
However, I don't think that "this will result in their punishment being lighter" should be given much weight here. Even if we're talking about people faking it. Either men's prisons are intentionally made worse than women's ones, which sounds like discrimination but if it's somehow justified then judges can simply give possibly-fake transgenders lengthier sentences in exchange for better prisons. Or it's the result of men being shitty to each other, in which case it's not the transgender's fault and it's not particularly unjust if they get to escape it. And if they end up being shitty to women then it's an argument against letting them, but it's already covered under "weighing the harms".
Having a good logo is important for corporate branding, but if a company spent $500m on making the perfect logo for its and $50 on quality assurance for their actual product, you would say they are taking their logo too seriously to the exclusion of much more important issues.
Same thing here. What Alice believes on this topic isn't the issue at question, the issue at question is what percent of conversation Alice steers towards this topic, what percent of her brain cycles are spent stewing and obsessing over it, and how much it drives her vote compared to other much more consequential issues.
Okay. I've seen little to suggest that a majority (or even significant portion) of gender-critical people are single-issue voters constantly discussing trans issues at the expense of all other political topics, but perhaps that advice is sensible for some gender-critical people out there, who knows.
It means it's a topic that generates cognitive dissonance and Scott is much happier if everyone just ignores it, and being able to mock this case because the names are silly (especially in juxtaposition) is one way to get people to ignore it.
What makes you think that people take these issues too seriously?
I mean, I don't get the impression that many people are single-issue voters on these issues (aside from abortion perhaps). My impression is most TERFs still vote for center-left and left of center parties even if/when they disagree with that party's stance on transgender issues, for example.
I also think these issues are at least somewhat important, in a few different areas (how much rights parents should have, who should be allowed to participate in women's sports, who should be housed in women's prisons, etc...). The decisions society makes here will have a real impact on many people's lives.
I don't see where these issues are any less important than, say, marijuna legalization, which many people are passionate about and which you treated with seriousness in 11.
"6: …and I found the above a good appetizer before reading It’s Embarrassing To Be A Stay At Home Mom, which argues (I think correctly) that the root cause of declining fertility is what society finds honorable vs. low-status"
Recently I've had the thought that because culture is so easily shareable, it tends to generate convergence between men and women. Traditionalists argue for a focus on stay-at-home moms over stay-at-home dads because (I correctly) you're much more likely to find women who want to take and pragmatically can benefit from taking the stay-at-home role than you can for men. But, you can't maintain this state as a central divide between the genders because the counterforces that create a convergence are too strong, and attempting to pry it apart generates political conflict that strengthens and concentrates the counterforces even more (hence "wokeness").
The solution is most likely a Scandinavia-style solution that supports parenting without trying to make it gendered.
I feel like "culture makes the genders more similar" is something that is basically never considered because people tend to focus on whether culture makes the genders more distinct or whether nature is the root of the gender differences. But while culture probably does generate lots of novel gender differences that don't exist in nature, on a relative scale culture massively "enlargens" people, and so the existing gender differences become smaller relative to the extent of people. (Though on an absolute/non-relative scale this does mean culture increases the gender differences.)
It's more that convergence is actively enforced. In modern culture, there is pretty much an ideal androgynous person(TM) and you're indirectly or even directly punished for deviating from that ideal. This ideal person is competitive, but never violent, they have some casual sex in their 20s and then settle down in their 30s, they are interested in tech but also socially capable, and so on. In almost all of these cases men and women naturally tend towards one side, but society pressures them to adopt the other as well - often even the parents themselves.
The idealness of this androgynous person doesn't arise from the enculturation into it, but rather from it being objectively ideal. For instance, avoiding violence is taught by parents and schools, but it's an objectively correct vitalizing lesson because the police enforce their monopoly on violence in greater society.
(And sure, society requires the police and military to function, but the healthy approach to making them function isn't to have boys develop appreciation for violence per se, but rather to have boys develop patriotism, hatred of gangsters/terrorists/rogue states/etc., and an appreciation for the might of the military and police.)
The trouble comes when people go decide that this androgynous person (tm) is too androgynous, and try to pry it apart into separate options for the genders. Because the androgynous person (tm) is simply objectively good advice, and so attempts to pry it apart generates pointless frustration and conflict.
I guess it depends on how you interpret it. Like yeah most people should have kids and need to make space for this, so given the usual timeline it's probably unwise to wait until after age 30 to begin with this (unless one has a backup plan? idk how reliable frozen eggs are).
But if the original comment was meant like, people fool around until early twenties, and then they seriously look for good partners until late twenties by which time they settle down - then that doesn't seem like a bad idea. Get a feeling for how relationships work before committing.
RenOS was saying society has a normative ideal. You replied that it's objectively ideal. But there's nothing objective about it, and a Darwinian standard (which is objectively how we evaluate traits in other species) cuts against it.
This is the theory I hear the most and which I used to believe, but the more experience I get the less reasonable it sounds. It goes against the theory of division of labor AND against the natural proclivities of just about everyone.
For example, my wife and I shared duties 50/50 on our first child according to this theory, but then we noticed that this makes her very unhappy. Not only for us, but we hear this from pretty much every single family that shared duties equally at first. So now, we still share duties, but more like 70/30, and I work (almost) full-time while she works part-time. Which incidentally is exactly what my parent's generation did by default but which was deemed sexist.
On competitiveness it's similar; Most women simply do not want a competitive job, they want a reliable, enjoyable job where they can easily leave for an arbitrary amount of time and then come back as if nothing changed.
On violence again; Most men actively enjoy violence, women don't. So the optimal is to give men a healthy outlet such as combat sports, and to generally not interfere with minor tussling between boys at school. Also, putting an average women in a job that requires violence is LARP at best and genuinely dangerous for everyone involved at worst.
On sex, again; Men do simply not have a time limit the way women have, so it is fine for them to settle down later in a way that is not for women. If a women finds her long-term partner with 30, then waits, say, 5 years to have her first child to make sure he is "the one", and then waits 3 years between each child, she will most likely barely manage to have 2 kids, with a substantial chance to only have a single child, and with later children having substantial likelihoods of major, debilitating disorders (literally orders of magnitude higher risk for down's, for example, than a "young" mother of 25). And btw this is always framed as being to the benefit of the men - he gets to "have fun" longer - but again in my experience this is simply not the case. A substantial number of male friends and acquaintances never casually dated at all (and not for lack of trying!) and simply had to wait until they found women willing to settle down with them. Women project their own experience here - they always have the option of casual dating - onto the average men, which is usually wrong when it comes to sexual issues.
I can continue this forever and ever. The people who fall for modern culture and become as androgynous as possible are absolutely miserable, which is well reflected in polls and studies of mental health issues, while fighting for your natural proclivities is hard, but rewards you with a happy live. Mind you, I'm not opposed to letting people decide for themselves nor do I deny that there is a minority on either side of any issue who are substantially different than the average for their sex. But we have to be realistic with what the average person of either sex is like, or we create a society that makes everyone unhappy (which we are well on the way).
> Most women simply do not want a competitive job, they want a reliable, enjoyable job where they can easily leave for an arbitrary amount of time and then come back as if nothing changed.
"Sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. … Women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. … Overall, higher levels of human development — including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth — were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated."
This is comparing sex differences across different national cultures in a handful of barely-sexually-differentiated traits that are taken to exist in all the cultures. However, my claim was about sex differences across the counterfactual of no culture in the number of traits that are highly and barely /not sexually differentiated, with the core of my claim being that culture creates more non-sexually-differentiated traits than sexually differentiated ones.
A counterfactual of no culture? Would that be if we were a non-social species like orangutans? Or if individual humans, with the evolutionary history of humans rather than orangutans, were then placed in solitary lives where they wouldn't absorb culture?
Haven’t the Scandinavia-style solutions in Scandinavia changed the fertility rate very modestly at best? I don’t think that would be likely to change outside of Scandinavia.
37. About rating news stories: My snap reaction, possibly unfair, is that I want my opinion heard and I don't want to bother if I'm in a lottery with a low probability of my opinion getting through. I'm not sure whether I understand the system, and if it's also a money lottery, that might make it more tempting.
39. I've been thinking for a while that the social justice left has been a bad influence on the right. I'm trying to put a finger on the exact nature of the bad influence, and it might be that the left made it clear that there are emotional and social rewards to being A Victim on the Attack. I *think* I started seeing more self-pity on the right about five years ago.
23. Maybe a gender difference at statistics? (I blame the author, ofc.) 50%/99% are NOT about the average citizen, but about those living below the poverty line! No person at 50% wealth would be below pov. line in the developed world. All poor+often low virtue (Bryan Caplan would say, and as I work with some of those, I agree). So, let us translate the math into IE: "Give to one of the poorest of the poor, though he is an IQ85 occasional substance abuser and will burn the money quick enough. Or give to a poor person who is one of the holiest persons ever, who lives poor due to being over-generous/ascetic and who will most likely use the funds to help others."
I assume, the percentages will be different then. Anyone with enough followers on X is welcome to re-run the experiment
You are welcome. Maybe you even live in a country where the poor are desperate. Those poor I meet in real life have a clear reason why they are poor; being 'unable to use any funds wisely' is one minor reason, but one shared by all of the 'poorer half ot the poor'. - Even in a country that does not hand out 7k plus each year to each poor person, I would a) stick to my choice to give to the amazingly virtuous "B" b) stick to my hypotheses that those unclear "percentages" elicited other results than my alternative would. (For the record: Yes, most men fail at basic statistics, too.) There will always be people who will give to "A" rather than "B", and I .... respect ... that choice. It is not mine, but fine. As long as that money is/was not mine (taxes).
I'm a man, and I came up on the side of virtue. Maybe this is my political leanings shining through, as I identify as conservative, but I think it should go to the one who deserves it more, not that needs it more.
I would be interested in running this again but by political identification instead of by gender, though the gender result is also interesting.
1 in 100 people doesn't live in poverty because they give every cent they can spare to charity.
The 99th percentile of virtue is a lot less virtuous than that.
Same on the other end, 1% of the US population is still 3.5 million people. They're not all poor because of drug habits and idiocy, life is just hard and any stick will have someone on the short end of it.
"33: New paper suggests that aspects of Bayesian decision making are not disturbed during autism. I’m suspicious that we don’t really know which aspects to measure. But I would have linked this paper if it confirmed my beliefs, so I guess I have to link the real paper that came out negative."
It seems to me that autists have an unusually weak focus on the backbone, or a focus on an unusually narrow part of the backbone, or maybe just a focus on a part of the backbone that non-autists aren't focusing on. Connection to autism symptoms:
1. Difficulty communicating: when referring to a thing, people tend to give vague descriptors and rely on the recipient to pick up an object that extends the most "energy" towards said descriptor. But if autists have a weak backbone connection, that interferes with the energy calibration.
2. Stimming and sensory symptoms: when people face something intense, trans-Bayesian decision theory says that this is a call to action (if the intense thing is some opportunity to be developed, then a call to develop it, and if the intense thing is a problem, then a call to solve or avoid it). But if autists have a weak connection to the backbone, then we lack the ability to do meaningful action, leading to ~random behavior (stimming) and being upset by the intense thing (sensory sensitivity).
3. Narrow interests: people with strong connection to the backbone can form interests that mirror the backbone, whereas people with lack of connection to the backbone will have ~random interests, possibly connected to whatever slivers of the backbone they encountered, or to some broken estimates of potential.
"if it’s illegal but tolerated, then it’s supplied by random criminals; if it’s legal, it’s supplied by big corporations. And big corporations are good at advertising and tend to get what they want."
That seems like kind of a big problem with modern capitalism! Maybe we should generalize and say that *anything* that's morally dubious and bad for health is in that category of decrimanilzed, legal, but tolerated. So if you want a gigantic bucket of soda and some lottery tickets, you'll have to get it from "your buddy who knows a guy" rather than having it pushed in your face constantly every time you stop to buy gas.
I'm being kinda facetious here but also kinda serious. I'm generally a libertarian, but I don't like how modern corporations use sophisticated advertising and pushy sales techniques to take advantage of everyone's worst impulses.
It does when rounded to 5 decimal digits. And it still does when rounded to 7 decimals!
You're also going at this from the wrong direction. 10058774 * 0.512 = 5150092.288, truncate or round to whole voters and you get 5150092, which is evidence for the hypothesis that the vote counts are made up based on desired percentages.
5150092/10058774 ~= 0.51199997136, which rounds to 0.5120000 at 7 digits of precision.
4445978/10058774 ~= 0.44199998926, which rounds to 0.4420000 at 7 digits of precision.
462704/10058774 ~= 0.04600003936, which rounds to 0.0460000 at 7 digits of precision.
The intuition is more or less that you shouldn't expect to see that level of accuracy. I assume without checking that the argument is the following:
The chance that a more or less arbitrary fraction would round to a number with 4 extra zeroes behind the comma is 1/10.000 (assuming the numbers are not made up). Since we see two of those (the third one is strongly correlated with the first two, so I ignore that) is (1/10.000)^2 = 1/100.000.000, so one in a hundred million chance of seeing fractions that accurate (again, assuming the numbers are not made up).
The number of 1 in a trillion is flawed (that would be (1/10.000)^3, which would take all three percentages into account ignoring correlation), as pointed out in an earlier comment by John R. Maine.
"24: Another day, another NYT doxxing scandal: an NYT reporter infiltrated a group chat of Jews talking about how they dealt with anti-Semitism. Then she shared the names of everyone in the group with someone who leaked it to anti-Israel activists. The activists proceeded to harass, stalk, threaten, and vandalize group members. NYT says that unspecified “disciplinary action” has been taken against the reporter, which apparently does not include firing her, demoting her, or any other effect observable in the physical world."
I wonder if you could set up some union-like parasite on NYT to undermine their doxxing. Like if people are hostile to NYT journalists UNLESS they join the Journalists Who Aren't Shitty To Those They Interview union, and if the union keeps track of bad behavior and pushes back (possibly kicking journalists who do bad stuff out of the union and thereby interfering with their options for interviewing), then maybe it could force the NYT to change their policies and such.
> 46: An unsympathetic portrayal of what went wrong with Lambda School (now BloomTech)
It would’ve been an exemplary piece of journalism if only the author avoided exposing his bias by criticizing Uber for breaking the law (yes, they did break the law, but the law was protecting mob-like monopolies, so who cares?) and criticizing DoorDash for… the author doesn’t spell it out but presumably for underpaying its drivers or something? But criticizing DoorDash for that is a basic misunderstanding of Econ 101 so it immediately makes me a bit suspicious.
Overall highly disappointed in Austen. The company seemed legit and I now regret having suggested it to a few people in the past.
Funny story I heard from a firsthand account (throwaway for obvious reasons):
The week before Rufus was announced they told the team what it was going to be named (not Rufus). The day before it was announced, Jeff Bezos made a last minute board meeting appearance in which he suggested they should rename it to Rufus. The reason for this is that Rufus was Amazon's first company dog, and so people there think about that instead of the naked mole rat. Anyways he might have drifted from his customer centric past.
> Anyways he might have drifted from his customer centric past.
I'm mad about Amazon's shipping policies.
In the beginning, Amazon let you specify what kind of shipping you wanted whenever you ordered anything, and the slowest available shipping was free if your order cost enough.
Then they introduced Amazon Prime, where all of the shipping policies were exactly the same, but if you were a Prime member, two-day shipping was always free.
Then they decided they were spending too much on shipping services that were able to provide delivery guarantees and they'd handle their own logistics.
And the result of that was that you're no longer allowed to buy faster shipping for important purchases, Prime membership means they pinky swear that in their hearts they intend for your packages to arrive within two days, and if it takes longer, you can suck it. All Amazon shipping is now officially best-effort.
This must depend a lot on location. I moved from Texas to California a year ago, and found that in Texas my Prime membership qualified for two day shipping on most things and next day for some things, while in California it was next day for most things, and 4 am for some things, and same day for many if I ordered in the morning.
But note that, while I am in fact mad about slow shipping, my actual complaint here is that Amazon doesn't offer any shipping speeds at all, just their best wishes that you'll receive your package(s) within a period that is satisfactory to you. If you want to pay for shipping guarantees, you can't, because Amazon doesn't offer those. This is something you can easily verify wherever you happen to be, regardless of how long deliveries usually take.
"Scott never watched Kim Possible, but Deiseach did," is not something I expected to learn. Also, Disney needs to reboot Kim Possible as a Star Wars show starring a teenage Princess Leia; they would barely need to change anything.
Have I explained my theory that Kim Possible is itself an action-heavy reboot of A Wrinkle In Time?
But your version at least gives us a much better merchandising opportunity for Naked Mole Rat plushies. As for Scott, his kids will be old enough for Kim Possible soon enough, so we just need to make sure Disney reruns the original in the right timeframe.
23. Why is the male/desperate result highlighted? IMO the important difference is that a much higher percentage of males prefer giving to more virtuous people rather than more needy people ( females choose needy over virtuous). I assume this is because males let rationality trump emotion more than women do.
It's highlighted because Twitter highlights the plurality answer on polls. This is usually what you want ("what's your favourite food?"), but not when the poll is split on a variable.
I suspect it’s less about rationality/emotion and more about instinctual favoring of resource allocation in an egalitarian or meritocratic manner. It’s pretty common for women’s situations to be better served by more egalitarian behavior and for men’s situations to favor more meritocratic.
>And the answer turns out to be: if it’s illegal but tolerated, then it’s supplied by random criminals; if it’s legal, it’s supplied by big corporations. And big corporations are good at advertising and tend to get what they want.
"2: Many personality differences are partly genetic. So why did evolution give different people genes for different personalities"
First, a disclaimer. I find this topic really fascinating! That people have very different personalities is an obvious observation, but the evolutionary reasons why this should be the case are far from obvious. So I found the link very interesting and wanted to write a quick response before going to work, but that means I read the article a bit too quickly and I hope I did not misunderstand some parts of it.
I think the article is really wonderful, an excellent summary of both the current methods and the most interesting results in genomic analyses of human personality data, a field that is difficult to present clearly! I fully agree with two of the authors' main conclusions, but I strongly disagree with the last one.
I think that B. Zietsch's conclusion that the dynamic equilibrium between mutation, selection, and drift is a major factor in explaining the genetic variation associated with human personality variation is fully justified by several lines of strong evidence. In my view, this is a settled question. I also agree with him that the life-history theory is not a likely explanation for human personality variation (in fact, that theory never made any sense, even if it is or may have been quite popular!)
But I strongly disagree with the idea that selection must be abandoned as a driving force in explaining personality differences between people. For me, it is based on the idea that selection means balancing selection, which in turns means the situation where you have two variants at the same locus, both maintained by selection. This kind of selection produces very specific patterns of genetic polymorphism, and it is quite easy to detect with genomic data. It was once thought to be potentially common, but current genomic data have convincingly shown that it is actually somewhere between fairly common and extremely rare.
So okay, I agree with the idea that this kind of balancing selection is not a good explanation for personality differences between people. But selection has several other forms: there is negative frequency-dependent selection, where it is advantageous to have a rare trait, trade-offs between different components of fitness, where some personality traits allow you to reproduce better but at the cost of reduced survival, fluctuating selection, where some personality traits will be advantageous in some environments but not others. All of these mechanisms are, in my opinion, quite likely for human personality, and they will not leave many footprints in the genomic data. So I think the rejection of selection as an explanation is not justified!
To me this makes more sense when looking at fitness of communities. In the event of external pressures it pays off to have diverse personalities in a group. So there is a tribe and the climate is getting worse over time. One group decides to travel far away while another group decides to stay. This diversity in opinions/personalities increases the probability that at least one group survives. Diversity is good in the animal kingdom: "Fast learning in free-foraging bumble bees is negatively correlated with lifetime resource collection" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-00389-0
In general I am highly sceptical of anyone having a strong opinion on this though. The game theory gets very complex in even slightly more complex societies than the most primitive hunter gatherer type. This really seems like a field that is still in its infancy and go in all directions as we learn more.
The fact that individuals can indeed select for groups does not change the fact that group selection is extremely uncommon.
This is not a personal opinion, but a really well-established result of evolutionary biology: group selection requires conditions that are almost never met. It is definitely not a likely or even a reasonable explanation for personality differences.
Group selection is an explanation that seems natural, probably because groups, like social aspects in general, are so important to us. For example, group selection has historically been a popular explanation for phenomena as diverse as the death by suicide of lemmings or the fact that ageing exists (it must be for the good of the species!). But in fact, individual selection ('normal' natural selection) is so much stronger than group selection that group selection almost never occurs. This is because individuals have usually a much higher rate of reproduction and death (= opportunity for selection) than groups.
Surely group cultures gave evolutionary advantages or disadvantages - Amish vs Shakers. I suppose this isn’t a permanent change to the genome, but it’s certainly an evolutionary advantage to a group to be pro natalist rather than anti natalist.
As I mention in my own comment on this link, this explanation is routinely given as the reason why sexual reproduction exists, despite the obviously greater efficiency of asexual reproduction. It is not at all unfamiliar or exotic.
All traits vary. This is what enables evolution to occur in the first place. We don't need to further explain the variation in a particular trait. As a particular trait, it is an example of a trait.
Sexual reproduction is indeed one of the very few cases where group selection could be a contributing mechanism: it works if species, which are largely isolated groups, have a higher extinction probability without sexual reproduction.
But for maintaining personality traits in humans, within a species, group selection is an extremely unlikely mechanism. You would need very weird demographic scenarios, where groups of people are both very isolated and frequently reproducing, ie splitting into several groups.
What do you mean? These are not separable concerns. Sexual reproduction is advantageous because it can take advantage of standing variation in the population. Without that variation, sexual reproduction would have no upside, but still plenty of downside, compared to budding. If you believe that sexual reproduction outcompetes budding, it's a necessary 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 for you to believe that the default state of traits is to exhibit variation.
And the only circumstance you need to maintain that variation is that there is no optimum strategy. An optimum gets fixed. But if athletes are optimally stronger than accountants, no level of strength is going to be fixed in the population unless the entire strategy of being an accountant (or an athlete) goes obsolete.
"What do you mean? These are not separable concerns. Sexual reproduction is advantageous because it can take advantage of standing variation in the population. Without that variation, sexual reproduction would have no upside, but still plenty of downside, compared to budding. If you believe that sexual reproduction outcompetes budding, it's a necessary 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 for you to believe that the default state of traits is to exhibit variation."
I think that I do not understand your point. The question is not whether there is variation: yes there is. The question is wether this variation is actively maintained by selection, rather than continuously injected by mutation and removed by selection).
"And the only circumstance you need to maintain that variation is that there is no optimum strategy. An optimum gets fixed. But if athletes are optimally stronger than accountants, no level of strength is going to be fixed in the population unless the entire strategy of being an accountant (or an athlete) goes obsolete." The question originally discussed is whether or not there is a selective mechanism that maintains variation. The author of the original link argues, wrongly in my opinion, that there is not. The next question in this thread was whether, if there is such a maintenance of variation, it is due to "ordinary" natural selection or group selection. I am not clear on what level you are arguing here.
Seems media has zero problem to identify with Tickle: "local-trans-woman-roxy-tickle-wins-her-human-rights-case" ... (Now all girls-only-websites must admit any trans-women to surf around. Cuz it's their f?=$&%g human rights, ya'know.)
> Many personality differences are partly genetic. So why did evolution give different people genes for different personalities, instead of everyone converging onto one optimal personality? The debate has focused on two theories. First, maybe there is an optimal personality, but evolution doesn’t move fast enough to get us there (this would be like disease risk or IQ, where some people just luck into having better genes than others). Second, maybe there are rock-paper-scissors personality types such that convergence is itself a non-optimal strategy (this would be like gender, where if everyone else is a woman, then your best strategy for getting mates easily is to be a man, and vice versa, so we naturally end up 50-50). A new review analyzes the evidence, and finds pretty decisively that it’s the first one (there are optimal personalities but evolution is too slow to get there).
This is... crazy. Personality is no different here than any other genetic trait. Why do traits vary from organism to organism? Because not all organisms are subject to the same circumstances; the variation is valuable in itself. This is why we have sexual reproduction.
Finding that there are optimal personalities is nothing but a signal that you shouldn't take that paper seriously.
"Personality is no different here than any other genetic trait. Why do traits vary from organism to organism? Because not all organisms are subject to the same circumstances; the variation is valuable in itself."
> but one of the better criticisms was that a lot of success in risky fields comes not from good risk intelligence, but from setting up heads-I-win-tails-you-lose style scams while pretending that your success comes from good risk intelligence
I think the most egregious example of this is when startups promise riches to their hires of the company goes big, thus justifying why they’re paying them less in cash. But in reality even among startups that do end up reaching an exit stage, 99% of early employees would still not earn life changing amounts of money. The startup *founders* would, perhaps the C-suite and certainly the VCs, but the employees will almost never get all that much, unless you hit the megalotto jackpot by working for the next OpenAI.
Some people like to justify this model by saying that they enjoy working for startups due to them having less bureaucracy, etc, but there’s still an element of dishonesty in the way startups market themselves.
How exactly does this work? Do founders promise a big share of the startup but then renege? Or do they honestly promise a certain share (let's say 0.1% of value), and then employees are overly optimistic and don't realize that this will be a small amount?
Investors often have liquidation preferences that make simple % ownership projections of gains for employees misleading.
For instance, a given Series might be guaranteed a 3x return before anyone after them in priority gets anything; iterated with higher multiples for earlier (riskies) investors and the pot may be empty before employees see anything.
Sometimes they’re not even promised “0.1%” but rather vague “shares numbers” and aren’t told what those correspond too. Some employees ask for a clarification at this stage, some don’t. The founders and VCs get the full financial picture, the employees are usually kept in the dark as much as possible.
Then there’s dilution and liquidation preferences, which tend to make any small share ~worthless by the time an exit happens.
Finally there’s a question of titles and expectations of growth: if you’re the very first employee and things go great, you’ll probably be in the C-suite eventually, right? Unfortunately that’s rarely the caae due to VC pressure to hire “professional” management once the company grows big. In fact, even the cofounders are usually kicked out of their roles at this point and only the CEO has a chance to stay - so if you’re offered to be a CTO cofounder, even that might be a significantly worse deal than starting out as CEO.
As far as I know stock offers are always in the form of "provided certain conditions are satisfied, the employee receives X many shares or options on Y date". The weakness of an offer of this type is that the company can create and distribute shares more-or-less at will.
Your 10,000 shares might be worth 0.1% ownership in the company, but the founders and the CEO (or whoever is really making the decisions) can set up the terms of a buyout to create 10^7 new shares, all owned by whoever is buying them out. Your share is diluted a hundredfold and no-one even bothers to ask if you want to sell. I don't know if its even legal to promise someone that they'll own a fixed percentage of a company.
Let me also share one. I was once very tired from illness and sort of hallucinating or dreaming half awake, and I was hallucinating in abstract concepts, not visuals. So I learned what abstract concepts feel like. One abstract concept was an endorsement of a kind of a paperclip maximizer. It is something like "turn everything into something", except remove the "everything" and "something" and the "we", there was no subject or object, only "turning-intoness". And it felt like stacking very transparent, almost invisible cubes. Pure logic or pure abstraction feels like... geometry.
> 41% of US adults believe that 3 or more children is ideal. The average preference is 2.7
There are clear economic factors influencing this figure.
> Preferences for large families continued to wane through the 1970s and 1980s, spanning three U.S. recessions, and reached a low of 28% in 1986. It has since fluctuated, but reached a recent high of 42% in 1997 amid a booming economy and a low of 33% in 2011 as the country was still recovering from the 2007 to 2009 recession.
Ehrlich has a lot to answer for.
> Gallup documented a particularly abrupt change between 1967 and its next measure in 1971, as the percentage favoring large families fell from 70% to 52%. This may have reflected public fears of a global population explosion, as detailed in the bestselling 1968 book "The Population Bomb."
Remember all this when people talk about low fertility being cultural, and not being shiftable by tax breaks and so on.
Regardless of the lack of success so far the difference between what couples want and achieve in number of offspring isn’t based on desire but on something else. Economic reality most likely. Possibly the housing crisis forces people to start much later than they otherwise would.
Also my mention of Ehrlich was an example of how extrapolating from now is a mugs game. I’m fairly sure in our future there’s a Substack equivalent writer writing “believe it or not there was a moral panic about the west running out of babies in the early 2020s”.
#6: This doesn't fit with the fact that some regions of the world are converging to developed (Europe, NA, EA) countries' fertility rates while staying at a lower Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP) level. It's already the case of Latin America (lower FLFP); MENA and India seem to be going in the same direction (fertility not so low yet, but even lower FLFP).
I think this still fits with the model, broadly understood.
People exposed to modernity gradually adopt the success-based status system.
People in poor countries who have adopted a success-based status system look at the lifestyle of the characters on TV and use that as their status baseline, they notice they are below baseline, this is unacceptable. They notice that they live in a socioeconomic system where having more children will make it harder for them to reach baseline. (This is usually directionally correct even in countries with crummy employment opportunities for women.) So they choose not to have more children.
> Pharaohs didn’t necessarily consummate their marriages, and their heirs would usually be born from unrelated concubines, so the risk of inbreeding was low.
Is this actually true? It's the opposite of the impression I got from reading The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, where e.g. Seqenenra Taa marries his full sister Ahhotep, to be followed by his son Ahmose (who marries his full sister, daughter of Seqenenra Taa and Ahhotep, Ahmose-Nefertari), who is succeeded by his own son Amenhotep, who is succeeded by someone unrelated because he never had any children, which is pretty easy to explain by reference to the fact that he had a total of two great-grandparents. But Amenhotep does follow family tradition by marrying his own full sister.
Egyptian kings did have a lot of concubines... but, as is true in every such culture, they had one wife with primary status, who held the fairly intuitive title of King's Great Wife. How often did the son of a concubine inherit ahead of a legitimate heir?
With the Pharoahs, the problem is that we're generalising about three millennia or so of history, traditionally in 31 dynasties. I'm pretty sure many Pharoahs failed to consummate their marriages and also many Pharoahs were succeeded by the sons of their sister-wives.
> Did you know: Malaysia not only has a king, but also a Deputy King.
Sounds pretty much identical to the position of "viceroy", a word which literally means "deputy king". And the wikipedia article says the deputy king performs the functions of a viceroy. What's to know?
1) The East Asian part of the argument is in fact the other way, as being a stay at home mom is essentially socially enforced in Japan, with women continuing to work after children viewed with suspicion in Korea and Japan.
2) Many countries have shifted to much lower TFR despite continuing low female labour force participation, such as South Asia and the Middle East.
3) Within Europe, birth rates are in fact anticorrelated with conservative social attitudes, as in less traditional views are associated with higher TFR (and no, this isn't because of immigration, the effect holds up when you exclude immigrants in France and Scandinavia).
I've actually struggled to find that data at all, let alone in a way that controls for age and actually realised TFR, in particular to ensure we're not just measuring people who have already had their kids (say older and/or more religious types, and there's not enough granularity to break that out that I've seen, hence the use of society wide figures being most useful).
1. Work opportunities for women are one way that fertility and success-based status can trade off against each other, but not the only one. Kids are expensive, especially if you have to pay for East Asian style cram schools.
2. Thanks to the internet and television, everyone nowadays gets exposed to the success-based status memeplex, rich or poor. Even in poor countries where wives can’t work, having more kids is not going to get you a bigger, cleaner, nicer house, which is now how you’re evaluating your worth as a person.
3. I think this supports the model, since social conservatism means you face a sharper tradeoff between material success and fertility. Progressive moms have the option to send the kids to daycare and continue working. Conservative moms probably drop out of the labor force once they have kids, taking a huge hit to lifetime earnings. (Also, purely guesswork, but I suspect southern European countries are more fucked up about success-based status competition; just thinking about Italians vs. Swedes and their respective attitudes towards designer handbags.)
By the way - kudos to Substack for fixing the comments section. It looks like I get to the actual comment these days when clicking in a link in the app. Most of the time.
These links are amongst the best I’ve ever seen. If I were Scott, I’d put them behind a paywall temporarily at least. I doubt if the hidden open thread is a big seller.
#13: I couldn't find a breakdown of the official (CNE) results by state or municipality, but if anyone is interested in a short analysis of the geographical patterns of the Venezuelan election results as per the opposition (PUD), here's a post I wrote a few weeks ago:
"En las primeras horas del 29 de julio de 2024, el Presidente del CNE anunció oralmente que el Presidente Nicolás Maduro había ganado la elección con 5 150 092 votos (51.2 %), seguido por Edmundo González con 4 445 978 votos (44.2 %), afirmando que se habían recibido resultados del 80 % de las mesas de votación. El 2 de agosto, el CNE confirmó al Presidente Maduro como ganador con 6 408 844 votos (51.95 %), seguido por González con 5 326 104 votos (43.18 %)"
The 5,150,092 votes figure was announced as a preliminary result on July 29, with only 80% of votes accounted for. It was only in August 2 that the CNE declared its official results (the ones you now see in Wikipedia). You can see search for July 29 tweets on X:
The numbers put out by the tweet were also in contemporaneous news reports. You should be able to find the news stories by plugging the numbers into google.
Regarding fertility, I think a better description is not about status but opportunity cost. Forget about balancing work and a career, until you have a kid and become a vampire (https://www.econtalk.org/l-a-paul-on-vampires-life-choices-and-transformation/) kids represent a significant cost on your future goals regardless of gender. The reason the ultra-rich are able to have more kids is that they can reduce the opportunity cost of having kids by hiring more help and can continue to live their current lifestyle (e.g. taking vacations, eating out) while the merely rich will see the biggest opportunity cost of having kids. This is related to the other issue about people who used to have 3 kids no only having 1. Since the opportunity cost of having kids in your 20s is higher people delay having kids until they are in their 30s and then have less time to have multiple kids.
I agree it's not really about status. In the case of Israel (as I infer from Nonzionism's post) I think of it more as a compatibility thing, where many of the activities that comprise someone's lifestyle require socializing with your peers. If your peers generally have three children, you have to choose between:
1.- Having more children (2 or 3) and lots of socializing with your peers through child-friendly activities.
2.- Having less children (0-1), reducing your opportunities of socializing with peers, and compensate with more childless (or one-child family) lifestyle activities.
>I think a better description is not about status but opportunity cost.
It doesn't make sense to see opportunity cost as the ends. Opportunity cost in service of what? Status. The ultra rich have more kids because they don't take a status hit to having more kids and they're comfortably at the top so they don't need more.
Utility is a better but still bad description because status depends on what others think but the opportunity costs are about your personal preferences. The opportunity cost is in terms of money and time. If you are a double income no kids couple and used to taking 2 international vacations a year and enjoying living in a city center, having a kid (or three) means you're going to need to move and you need to pay for an extra traveller on every trip (plus traveling with a child will reduce your value of these trips until you have vampire preferences).
>but the opportunity costs are about your personal preferences
Personal preferences are heavily influenced by cultural values that determine the markers of high and low status. Your travelling example proves the point, actually. The vibes around travel culture is very modern. People wouldn't get nearly as much utility from going on international vacations twice per year if they didn't feel like it was something that makes you a worldly cool open-minded person and that they owed it to their children to give them these worldly cool experiences.
I agree that culture shapes preferences but I think status is an over broad concept that explains less than normal uses of prefernce, time, or money. People like going on vacation because it is fun, we are (probably genetically) wired to enjoy new experiences, you get to eat different foods and see new things. People have wanted to travel since before writing, it just used to be prohibitively expensive and dangerous. My point is not that people think that they owe it to their kids to give them the experience, it is that they can no longer have the experience once they have kids.
>it was something that makes you a worldly cool open-minded person
>and that they owed it to their children to give them these worldly cool experiences.
were two points. I meant that a big part of the value of travelling is itself about status.
We have pretty different takes on travelling as a phenomenon. I don't think the value we attach to travelling today is really as primordial as all that. Going to Athens was a high status thing for Ancient Roman elites, but I think contemporary mass travel culture is different. Then again, low birthrate became a problem for Ancient Rome too...
Abraham and Jacob both have travel adventures, Gilgamesh has multiple travel adventures. The Odyssey is a big travel adventure. Yes travel is something high status people do but these stories are popular because the appeal to common people values. Sailors and soldiers were low status positions but people did it because of the thrill of adventure.
> It doesn't make sense to see opportunity cost as the ends. Opportunity cost in service of what? Status.
Disagree, there's a lot of opportunity costs associated with kids that aren't about status. The opportunity to sleep in on Saturday. The opportunity to have frequent nights out, or quiet nights at home. The opportunity to go to an art gallery or a museum or go on holidays to somewhere that kids will be bored. Basically, the opportunity cost of being able to spend any of the hours of life doing things that you actually want to do instead of things that you are obliged to do.
I'll happily trade some status for sleeping in 'til 8 on weekends.
I don't disagree that there are sacrifices involved. Those sacrifices are more burdensome now because they are in service to something (having children) that no longer has as much cultural cachet.
Before I had kids I thought this as well, now with them I think it entirely misses the point. Once you have children, your priorities change. Going on X vacations per year just isn't important for me anymore. How much I can do some arbitrary expensive hobby? I don't care either.
The status explanation is much better. You status in the larger culture is now much more dependent on how well you can subscribe to the childless lifestyle. Being well-travelled, for example. On the other hand in the past, having a large family itself was a sign of high status. Nowadays if anything it's the opposite, especially if you can't send them to violin practice.
That's what my comment on being a vampire is all about. The vampire concept is based on the idea that certain decisions you make result in your preferences changing (as if you were bitten by a vampire and became a cool nocturnal immortal). But that point that your priorities change doesn't negate my point since the "vampire" you doesn't get to vote on your decisions until after the "human" you already decides to become a vampire. My point is that while obviously society/culture/status shapes your preferences these have a smaller impact than the actual choices available and people's innate preferences.
> The middle of California has a bunch of Republican Mexicans, which is a demographic that is not well-represented in media. They are pro-gun, pro-Trump, pro-Christianity, and anti-immigrant, even though (or maybe because) they are very recent immigrants themselves. From our brief meal in a Republican Mexican diner, I can also say they appear to be aggressively hospitable, and will fill up your cup of coffee for your endless refill whether you want them to or not.
14. While it is the case that the Ptolemaic Pharoahs also married their sisters, the link refers to Bronze Age Pharoahs, who were about a thousand years before the Ptolemies.
Indeed, and the answer to question "Why did the Ptolemaic Pharoahs marry their sisters?" is "Because the ancient Pharoahs did". Also, the life of Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator shows that marrying your sister is hardly a guarantee that she won't produce heirs with others.
28: Bryan Caplan (and later Freddie deBoer) helped me get over the crushing sense of despair I'd had for years from being one of those gifted-child early academic bloomers who subsequently flunks out of college. Repeatedly, even! There are still some Frostian regrets for that ivory tower not climbed, and probably always will be...but I no longer feel like a complete fuckup failure who "deserves" better in life, who missed her only shot at getting a "real job", etc. It's not paranoid sour grapes if the Potemkin game really is corrupt and rigged! Been vindicating to see a slow raising of awareness among the general public that There's More To Life Than College and We Ought To Diversify Paths To Succes.
29: I keep wishing there were, like, equivalent liberal-coded versions of such Trad Pledges. There's clearly a market for such interventions (h/t any number of Scott's old essays on the plight of disaffected young men), and they do turn many lives around that might otherwise be lost to indolence and antisocial nihilism. It's a disservice to cede so much of that fertile territory to...I won't say cranks, but the good tends to come packaged with a lot of other unfortunate whackadoodle, precisely because it's a one-sided uncompetitive "market". The left affinity for <s>individuality</s> benign neglect would be admirable from a libertarian perspective if it wasn't so arbitrary. Although I do think a taboo on tattoos is silly in current_year - it's now a pretty low-risk baseline floor of openness-to-experience that tends to ensure people are at least not *boring*.
36: I don't buy the strong version of Doctorow's "Enshittification" hypothesis, but Amazon certainly fits the pattern. Fun and exciting to use in the 00s, workhorse merchant in the early 10s, black hole SEO nightmare experience at some indeterminate later point. The crappiness of the shopping funnel tends to be mirrored in the actual goods as well. I'm too old now to put up with unbranded Chinese crap and poorly-disguised dropship counterfeit goods even from actual brand sellers. Can't understand why anyone puts up with that mess anymore besides inertia. The world made a lot more sense when I first learned that AWS is where most of their "real" profits come from...
Ideally, yeah...but it's never had the level of reach where I'd compare it to Influencers(tm), even before SBF's unfortunate well-poisoning of that entire ideaspace. Reaching a more valuable crowd, perhaps, but I worry much less about the potential harm caused by adrift twentysomething MBAs versus the down-and-out crowd currently running cover for the populist horseshoe. Optimization of positive EV versus reversing the sign of negative EV, and all that. To contrast with 23, I feel like such pledges primarily serve to distribute +virtue rather than -desperation - a non-fiat currency that remains pretty illegible and hard to cultivate through government policy. (Easy to destroy via same though!)
Oh, that's a pretty good mirror! Fills dog-shaped holes, frequently comes bundled with differently-flavoured whackadoodle, punches above its weight class while being broadly unpopular. It's even largely mythologized and spread by the same channels. I think I didn't consider it because it's facially "just" about consumption choices, but the whackadoodle tends to form its own entire Moral Code that ends up functioning like a LibsOfTiktok Pledge. Peter Singer contains more than just veganism, but veganism contains a lot of Peter Singer...
"Although I do think a taboo on tattoos is silly in current_year - it's now a pretty low-risk baseline floor of openness-to-experience that tends to ensure people are at least not *boring*."
Well, I suppose I must own up to being dull and boring, because I have no tattoos, I want no tattoos, and I'll go into my coffin without tattoos 😁
If everyone is getting a crappy sleeve full of uninteresting black ink with bad art, how is that "gee this person must be so interesting and exciting"? Agreed, it's my upbringing and personal inclinations and way outdated attitudes on show here, but I think that tattoos are the province of the trashy; they're 'common' (as my mother would have said) and the kind of people I see going around with a lot of tattoos are not people I much like (that shitty brother-in-law of mine started getting midlife crisis tattoos and went for the full 'I'll get one more, and one more, and one more, and... ' route, and while I never liked him, it wasn't until he revealed his full shit-headedness that I went 'shoulda known - trashy people get trashy tattoos, trashy tattoos mean trashy person').
YMMV, of course, and if there are good tattoos done discreetly and not indiscriminately, then the person may be interesting. But my rule of thumb is: if you come from a cultural background of getting tattooing done, like the Maori, this is fine; if you're whitebread and getting tattoos all over every square inch, you're trashy.
I imagine you *could* call this guy "not boring" but uh. Yeah. Maybe more "dull and boring normie who wouldn't dream of getting face tats" would have been better here? Certainly he was open to experience, though: the experience of killing two women!
I'd go a little broader and say that they're a cultural signifier rather than a signifier of anything about an individual -- they just say that you're part of a particular culture. That culture might be Maori, or it might be professional sailor, or it might be trashy 2000s bar girl, or it might be career criminal, or it might be earnest inner-city vegan bartender.
My or your lack of tattoos says nothing about you or I as an individual except that we are not part of those particular cultures.
It's precisely because they're common , in both senses of the word, that I think they serve a useful signal...barberpole theory and all that (though I'll concede to Dr. Germ that, yes, the strength of such has been declining and in some communities is just table stakes now). Someone who's Too Good For Tattoos is probably too good for many other of life's interesting experiences. That's part of why I said "boring" rather than some other term of judgement; it's an antifragile metric of high variance. Sort of like how a super-straightedge person who's still an absolute teetotaler on their deathbed is virtuous, certainly, but also one wonders about the marginal benefit of a little horizon-broadening for Syr Inadventurous.
The trashiness of prison sleeves and (non-culturally-traditional) face tattoos also illustrates the point: here is a highly visible signal of probable poor judgement, aesthetic and otherwise! Other signals, like fashion choices or music playlists, are so often subconsciously influenced by What Will Other People Think Of Me? concerns...the decision to make a tattoo prominently visible thus has informational value, especially if it's a bold one, especially especially if it's a bad bold one. Something tastefully done, carefully curated, only visible if one gets to know someone better...also a good signal, in the opposite direction. Even moreso if it's a wild contrast with how that person generally presents. It always throws me for a loop to meet a mild-mannered inoffensive Nicest Person Ever, and then learn they actually have a full-body tattoo or something. To me, without loss of generality, that's a more interesting outcome than an equivalent nice person without the tattoo.
(Also, obligatory disclaimers: exception-that-proves-the-rule for your boringness; I have 3 out of 4 Back slots currently equipped with tattoos, so not unbiased, despite coming from a similar upbringing in this regard.)
But precisely because they are so common, they are not really a great signal of whether someone is “interesting” or not. Tons of boring people have tats (some certainly because it’s it’s a cheap and easy signal of being interesting that apparently works on folks such as yourself) and tons of interesting people don’t.
I have no moral compunction against tattooed people, I don’t particularly judge them (unless it’s like an obviously antisocial signal like that lizard person). I just genuinely find unadorned skin more attractive in almost all circumstances.
I mean...I wouldn't keep it as a heuristic if it didn't pass ongoing data verification? But it's been good for about 5 years now, across hundreds of people I've gotten to know well enough to test the hypothesis. Fully happy to concede it may be hyperlocalized phenomenon; I have no idea how hard I'd argue for generality. And nothing's dispositive, there are of course fakers who are actually just basic bitch bullshitters, as well as The Most Interesting Man In The World types who never happened to get a tattoo. Just small updates one way or another, penumbras and enumerations, but updates nonetheless.
If I had to enumerate it explicitly, always a fraught endeavor:
*Some evidence is worth a bigger update than a lack of evidence (best for implications at best)
*Filter for subpopulations that magnify signal strength; if they have a bunch of piercings, weirdly dyed hair, etc. then the tat is largely extraneous
**Ideal case is someone with...let's say "middle-class traditional values" who also has a tattoo, or other such apparent clashes
*Filter for aesthetic value of tattoo
**Downweight obvious-criminal tats (still "interesting" but probably not in a good way), culture-bound tats (about as meaningful as a yarmulke or whatever), offputtingly ugly ink (still probably not interesting in a good way, especially if it's "ironically bad")
**Upweight originality, deeply personal stuff, artwork I'd love to see on other canvases, etc
...I feel like it wouldn't be worthwhile doing such triangulation if I had better access to more usual channels of information. Catching subtext (I take people too literally), ability to map out relational graphs (voluntary associations are rich datasources), being part of bigger gossip networks, having more-general interests like sportball that give an "in" for easy icebreaking...these are all weak areas for me, so I gotta cobble together social intelligence from whatever I can get. Tattoos are one spoke of that, much as I'll admit it's inefficient. A subfield of Clothing Is A Social Weapon, which is also true, useful, and likewise often faked. (Though still surprised at the on-the-ground fruit there. Tats are optional, but everyone has to get dressed - at least put some bare minimum effort into it! Poor place to spend Weirdness Points...)
Disagreed on tattoos; in current_year they're *so* low-risk and yet still counter-culture coded that they provide minimal signaling value towards interestingness, bordering on being a signal of having minimal distinct personality that isn't determined by Tiktok's algorithm. This is not to say a lack of tattoos is itself a good signal, just that the signal value of tattoos has dropped precipitously. Except face tattoos which I still consider a strong signal of extreme, likely criminal, anti-sociality.
I liked that FdB post, but think they're not quite commensurate comparisons. Drinking Fort Point while computing on an iFruit is not a personality and tells me nearly nothing*; getting a beer can and the Serpens logo tattooed on one's body is not load-bearing in and of itself, but at least a supportive buttress or something, and tells me a few things. Permanency has a quality all its own. An actively negative (rather than merely disapproving) attitude towards tattoos I suspect is also correlated with being sour on broader extensions of bodily modification/autonomy and other forms of transhumanism...I found this post (https://tranquilfire.wordpress.com/2022/05/23/dont-forget-bodily-autonomy-a-plea-from-a-trans-critic-of-covid-policy/) a useful intuition pump outside of the specific historic battle lines, for example.
*besides the probable gender and/or occupation of the walled-garden inhabitant, which remains sociologically fascinating
6. Instead of having at least two kids, Korean society demands this of its K-pop stars:
"Are K-pop stars allowed to love?
The answer is still a resounding “no” in some quarters – with K-pop singer Karina from the group Aespa posting a handwritten apology online after her reported relationship drew outcry from many of her more fervent followers.
News of her relationship with actor Lee Jae-wook broke last week, confirmed by the agencies of both stars.
The response from fans across Asia was swift, and mixed – some expressed their support for the couple. But many others reacted with shock and fury.
Some outraged fans even sent a truck with an electronic billboard to the headquarters of Karina’s agency, according to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, which published a photo of the sign. “Do you not get enough love from your fans?” it read. “Why did you choose to betray your fans?”"
I had this exact same thought. Make KPOP starts have two kids?! They aren't even allowed to have a boyfriend! Matt Lakeman's KPOP article is a depressing if enlightening window into this world and South Korea in general.
Because at the end of the day it is. If a man wants a child, he always needs the full assent of a woman. A woman can, if she wants, just get a sperm donor, or a one night stand, and so on.
Likewise, in the case that a pregnancy occurs unexpectedly, it's 100% the decision of the woman. When it comes to children, men are effectively relegated to the role of advisor.
Yeah, but come on. Especially in the case of having one or two children instead of three children, you know in a lot of those cases a husband and wife have sat down together and carefully talked about their feelings. "How do you feel about another child?" "How do you feel about another child?"
Maybe the husband is only an "advisor" but in the context of a marriage that has already produced one child his advice is going to be taken very seriously and have great weight. If someone wanted to advance the theory that a lot of the reason women who do have children are having fewer of them is because their husbands are strongly arguing against having more, you could at least see the mechanism by which that could be a thing that happened.
Regarding Trump and Harris's terrible economic ideas, an important point is that the law gives the president a pretty wide amount of discretion in imposing bad tariffs but bad price controls need the assent of Congress. I mean, they'll probably find some justification for why not but I don't expect the courts to let that stand.
Conversely, anything that can be unilaterally imposed by one president can be unilaterally reversed by the next.
Plus random tariffs are also likely much less harmful than a new Federal price bureaucracy.
So you're left with a higher chance of a fleeting minor bad vs. a lower chance of a persistent major one.
The specific result would depend on actual numbers, but it seems likelier than not that Harris would be worse economically (that, of course, would then still need to be balanced against all the other ways in which Trump would be worse).
Very underrated point. Policies put in place by presidential fiat can just be removed by the next president four years later. When was the last time an economic policy passed by congress was repealed? The ACA was passed in 2010, 14 years ago, and Republicans have been campaigning on repealing it forever. It survived a SCOTUS challenge because of Roberts, despite what some people seem to think about Republicans controlling the SCOTUS forever now. It survived simultaneous Republican control of congress and the White House. And now Trump has "concepts of a plan" to replace it.
It's not going to happen, because the Republicans are bad at projecting political power. This is why I think voting Republican is generally the best route as a libertarian; even when they control the government, they are way worse at shoving their ideals on everyone than the Democrats. The same thing will happen to Trump if he wins; basically everyone in the fedgov except the people he directly appoints will hate him, and most of the institutions and policy wonks that know how to actually get things done are leftist.
I'm pretty I've head it argued that the Federal Trade Commission can do price controls. (Whether that stands up in court is another matter, of course.)
2. You do wonder if there are certain things like sociopathy that are only useful if not everyone has them, so the equilibrium tends to be for a small portion of the population to have them but not more than that. I'm sure the paper has addressed this.
3. Well, aristocratic women are driving the adoption of woke, so it wouldn't be surprising. But I could believe Salzman is right here.
5. I hate to give credit to anyone who calls his blog 'Nonzionism', but he seems to have a pretty good argument. And, as suggested in the comments, churches that are kind of cool could play that role to some degree here. The problem is the media attacks anything that sounds vaguely Christian, but if enough people ignore them this could gain its own momentum.
8. I've read that. Seems like it would depress the quality of conservative judges, but maybe it's so competitive to get to that point it doesn't really matter.
9. Ladies love bad boys, are you surprised?
11. This is one of the few arguments against legalization I have actually seen that makes actual sense.
13. I've heard (EDIT: apparently not from Sailer) who pointed out communist countries, with their ideology, tend not to have particularly good air forces, which are pretty elitist as only a few people get to be pilots and everyone else is supporting them. Apparently this is also true for rigging elections.
17. I've seen this movement toward prettier buildings gain speed. Unfortunately, it seems to be all far-right people or rationalists, neither of whom has any influence in architecture school, which is full of performatively left-leaning people like the rest of academia. The meme that pretty old-fashioned buildings=right, ugly blocky things=left seems firmly established, and I'm not sure what we can do about it, except elect Republicans (maybe once Trump is gone).
19. I think people would also enjoy the bit about Han Feizi (basically, the Chinese Machiavelli):
In the beginning of his essay Fei han (“Against Han Fei”), he says that he completely rejects Han Feizi’s views, on the basis of what he sees as a basic contradiction between his political theory and his action. Han Feizi argues that scholars (specifically ru or Confucian scholars) are useless, that they drain the resources of the state while contributing nothing to the maintenance of state power. For this reason, Han Feizi concludes they ought not to be employed by the state. Wang points out in this essay that Han Feizi himself is a scholar, and certainly takes his own advice and views to be of benefit to the state. If so, his claim of the uselessness of scholars is incorrect. Alternatively, if he is right about the uselessness of scholars, it follows that his own teachings must be useless, and therefore false.
21. Anyone think Musk had this coded in so he could get away with it?
24. Interestingly, for a long time in my life I assumed the NYT was part of the Jewish Conspiracy (or less facetiously the power structure); I guess there's been a changing of the guard?
26. No, I get it. It makes sense in lefty ideology. You gain moral value by being from an oppressed group. Oakland is poor and much more black, so it's more moral than Berkeley, which is full of rich white (and Asian) people.
28. Honestly the biggest anti-natalist effects on my life were (1) fear of divorce and having to work the rest of my life to support an ex-wife who hates me (2) fear of harassment accusations stopping my early romantic advances (3) general lack of charisma cementing the idea that I Am Not Attractive. I'm not blaming Bryan Caplan for failing to save me from that. Though I don't agree with him on immigration.
29. So, ah, DC is OK? Aren't they a little more conservative than Marvel?
32. I always assumed the same thing myself, but looks like real left-wing antisemitism is actually A Thing now, as the kids say?
35. I always assumed Satoshi Nakamoto was an American Japanophile (that's been a thing in nerd culture since at least the 80s), bitcoin isn't that popular in Japan. But the CIA owning bitcoin...well, they were apparently behind Abstract Expressionism and Mundo Nuevo (center-left Latin American literary magazine), doing that thing where they bolster the moderate left to defang the far left. Bitcoin could be something similar with the cypherpunks.
39. I love the blurry picture of Yarvin at the top. But he's right--something similar is probably driving the rise in parental estrangement. I get 'my parents kicked me out of the house for being gay', but 'my parents don't accept climate change'?
Finally, much as I dislike Kriss, this is pretty good:
"There’s a faction in the online Right that wants to build a Nordic-style social democracy, with strong labor unions, state control of industry, and a robust welfare state. (As Succession put it, “Medicare for All, abortions for none.”) So far, their plan to get there mostly seems to consist of writing long essays on Foucault. The monarchists, meanwhile, want a stratified, techno-feudal society of cyber-aristocrats and forelock-tugging digi-serfs. Some prefer Donald Trump to be their emperor, but by no means all. Plenty would be perfectly happy with Kamala Harris, as long as she uses the full power of the state to mercilessly crush all opposition. Yarvin, their intellectual godfather, is still formally endorsing Biden, despite his having dropped out. There’s a surprisingly influential faction of the American Right that wants to build a new political order based on Pindar’s Odes—a collection of lyric poems honoring the great athletes of the fifth century BC—and also eating raw eggs. A persistent current wants to turn the state into a minor facet of the Catholic Church. It’s true that less than a quarter of the country is actually Catholic, but maybe enough immigration from Latin America could yet transform the USA into the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There are even currents on the online Right who believe that the Caribbean was originally settled by white-skinned men from the North Pole, or possibly outer space. Others are outright neo-Nazis. That last group seems plain next to their neighbors. Unimaginative."
Though--the emancipatory aspect that makes the left worthwhile? Sure, but who says more emancipation is always good? That's you, as a leftist, talking. Plenty of people think hierarchy is good and people get away with too much stuff.
> I think it was Sailer who pointed out communist countries, with their ideology, tend not to have particularly good air forces, which are pretty elitist as only a few people get to be pilots and everyone else is supporting them.
That would not be a problem in the Soviet Union or most actually existing communist states. These countries hardly removed or wanted to remove hierarchies. Marxist Leninism - which is the version of communism that was implemented in Russia and its satellites - isn’t hostile to either hierarchies or differences in wage income (Lenin wrote a famous pamphlet condemning infantile leftism part of which condemned attitudes to hierarchy) which is why it produced pretty good engineers and cosmonauts, who were well compensated.
I've published a whole lot of stuff over the last third of a century, so maybe I did say that somewhere along the line. I just can't remember having an opinion one way or another on it.
For example, the Soviets ran their fighter jet procurement on a pretty similar basis to the U.S., with rival agencies like MiG and Gu competing for funding. My general impression was that the Soviet Union was generally poorer and more backward than the U.S., but in the things they really cared about like space, missiles, subs, and jets, they tended to be a formidable #2.
I don't buy the ideological explanation for this reason. When jet fighters were reasonably cheap and affordable, Communists had decent air forces. The MiG-15 and MiG-21 were competitive with western designs of the same era and could be cranked out in large numbers. But then jet fighters stopped being big dumb engines with wings and become ultra-expensive high tech marvels and Communists couldn't keep up.
And then of course there's the fact that the Russian Air force hasn't got any better after Russia officially disowned Communism. China on the other hand didn't officially disown Communism and its air force has become far better in the same period.
It was a joke. :) I am not a huge comic book guy but I imagine they're slightly if at all less woke than Marvel. If he's trying to bring back High Culture Batman is just as bad as Spiderman.
Re 3, I know a bit about Church history, and I'm surprised by the suggestion that there exists a "commonly accepted wisdom that aristocratic women were major and active drivers of Christianisation", because the history of the early church consists almost entirely of men. There is a reason why the theology of the first five Christian centuries is usually called "patristic".
The claim that there is such a consensus seems weak: it starts with Rodney Stark's "The Rise of Christianity", but that book itself (written by a sociologist) is described as a challenge to conventional wisdom, so it cannot also be the standard of conventional wisdom. It continues with a claim by Adolf Harnack in 1902, and then states "all subsequent works on the topic have been influenced by him", which may be true, but to be influenced by an earlier writer isn't to accept everything they say uncritically. We then have two sentences from Henry Chadwick, which don't equate to the claim that women were "the major drivers of Christianisation".
There are many places when one can find the claim "Maybe women had a bigger role than one would expect given the patriarchal nature of society at the time", and that claim is probably true. I remain unconvinced that anyone credible has seriously defended the stronger claim, so this seems like a storm in a tea-cup.
There are examples of high born Christian theologians having Christian mothers and pagan fathers. Augustine is one. Maybe there is an extrapolation from that.
For sure, one can point to individual women who were important, such as St Monica or St Helena, but that rather misses the forest for the trees. Also, in both those cases, they are mostly known for their more famous sons, which is a strange way to make the case. Similarly, Teslo refers to St Jerome's female correspondents, but it's clear from the argument itself that the truly significant person here is Jerome. You can't say that women played a pivotal role because they received letters from a man.
The pivotal role here, though, is that they supported those men (and in Monica's case, kept on trying to get Augustine to come to the Church until she succeeded). Without rich backers, goes the theory, the male Christian churchmen and writers and theologians would not have had the money or social protection to engage in their work.
"Throughout his epistles he shows himself to be surrounded by women and united with close ties; it is estimated that 40% of his epistles were addressed to someone of the female sex and, at the time, he was criticized for it.
Even in his time, Jerome noted Porphyry's accusation that the Christian communities were run by women and that the favor of the ladies decided who could accede to the dignity of the priesthood.
In Rome, Jerome was surrounded by a circle of well-born and well-educated women, including some from the noblest patrician families. Among these women were such as the widows Lea, Marcella, and Paula, and Paula's daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium. The resulting inclination of these women towards the monastic life, away from the indulgent lasciviousness in Rome, and his unsparing criticism of the secular clergy of Rome, brought a growing hostility against him among the Roman clergy and their supporters. Soon after the death of his patron Pope Damasus I on 10 December 384, Jerome was forced to leave his position at Rome after an inquiry was brought up by the Roman clergy into allegations that he had an improper relationship with the widow Paula. Still, his writings were highly regarded by women who were attempting to maintain vows of becoming consecrated virgins. His letters were widely read and distributed throughout the Christian empire and it is clear through his writing that he knew these virgin women were not his only audience."
Epistle 45 (the linked source for "he was criticised for writing to women"):
"After leaving Rome for the East, Jerome writes to Asella to refute the calumnies by which he had been assailed, especially as regards his intimacy with Paula and Eustochium. Written on board ship at Ostia, in August, 385 A.D.
"...It often happened that I found myself surrounded with virgins, and to some of these I expounded the divine books as best I could. Our studies brought about constant intercourse, this soon ripened into intimacy, and this, in turn, produced mutual confidence. If they have ever seen anything in my conduct unbecoming a Christian let them say so. Have I taken any one's money? Have I not disdained all gifts, whether small or great? Has the chink of any one's coin been heard in my hand? Has my language been equivocal, or my eye wanton? No; my sex is my one crime, and even on this score I am not assailed, save when there is a talk of Paula going to Jerusalem. Very well, then. They believed my accuser when he lied; why do they not believe him when he retracts? He is the same man now that he was then, and yet he who before declared me guilty now confesses that I am innocent. Surely a man's words under torture are more trustworthy than in moments of gayety, except, indeed, that people are prone to believe falsehoods designed to gratify their ears, or, worse still, stories which, till then uninvented, they have urged others to invent.
3. Before I became acquainted with the family of the saintly Paula, all Rome resounded with my praises. Almost every one concurred in judging me worthy of the episcopate. Damasus, of blessed memory, spoke no words but mine. Men called me holy, humble, eloquent.
Did I ever cross the threshold of a light woman? Was I ever fascinated by silk dresses, or glowing gems, or rouged faces, or display of gold? Of all the ladies in Rome but one had power to subdue me, and that one was Paula. She mourned and fasted, she was squalid with dirt, her eyes were dim from weeping. For whole nights she would pray to the Lord for mercy, and often the rising sun found her still at her prayers. The psalms were her only songs, the Gospel her whole speech, continence her one indulgence, fasting the staple of her life. The only woman who took my fancy was one whom I had not so much as seen at table. But when I began to revere, respect, and venerate her as her conspicuous chastity deserved, all my former virtues forsook me on the spot.
4. Oh! envy, that dost begin by tearing yourself! Oh! cunning malignity of Satan, that dost always persecute things holy! Of all the ladies in Rome, the only ones that caused scandal were Paula and Melanium, who, despising their wealth and deserting their children, uplifted the cross of the Lord as a standard of religion. Had they frequented the baths, or chosen to use perfumes, or taken advantage of their wealth and position as widows to enjoy life and to be independent, they would have been saluted as ladies of high rank and saintliness. As it is, of course, it is in order to appear beautiful that they put on sackcloth and ashes, and they endure fasting and filth merely to go down into the Gehenna of fire! As if they could not perish with the crowd whom the mob applauds! If it were Gentiles or Jews who thus assailed their mode of life, they would at least have the consolation of failing to please only those whom Christ Himself has failed to please. But, shameful to say, it is Christians who thus neglect the care of their own households, and, disregarding the beams in their own eyes, look for motes in those of their neighbors. They pull to pieces every profession of religion, and think that they have found a remedy for their own doom, if they can disprove the holiness of others, if they can detract from every one, if they can show that those who perish are many, and sinners, a great multitude."
Porphyry mentioned above was a philosopher who wrote a work "Against the Christians", known now by the fragments quoted in rebuttals of it, since the original work was ordered destroyed by the emperor:
"As quoted by Jerome, Porphyry mocked Paul and the early Christians while suggesting that the "magical arts" performed by Jesus of Nazareth and his followers were nothing special, done similarly by other figures of Greco-Roman history:[5]
He did it all for money; [...] (They were) poor and country-dwelling men, seeing that they used to have nothing; certain wonders were worked with magical arts. Not that it is unusual however to do wonders; for the magicians in Egypt also did wonders against Moses, Apollonius also did them, Apuleius also did them, and any number have done wonders. [They did wonders by magical arts] so that they might receive riches from rich and impressionable women, whom they had led astray."
Finding the bits about the influence of women in Christianity:
Paul conquered the whole world, from the Ocean to the Red Sea. Let some say, "He did it all for money"; for this Porphyry says, "(They were) poor and country-dwelling men, seeing that they used to have nothing; certain wonders were worked with magical arts. Not that it is unusual however to do wonders; for the magicians in Egypt also did wonders against Moses, Apollonius also did them, Apuleius also did them, and any number have done wonders." I concede, Porphyry, that they did wonders by magical arts, "so that they might receive riches from rich and impressionable women, whom they had led astray." For you say this --- (yet) why were they killed? why were they crucified?
58. Macarius, Apocriticus III: 5:
...Wherefore it seems to me that these cannot be the words of Christ, if indeed He handed down the rule of truth, but of some poor men who wished, as a result of such vain talking, to deprive the rich of their substance. At any rate, no longer ago than yesterday, reading these words to women of noble birth, "Sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven," they persuaded them to distribute to poor men all the substance and possession which they had, and, themselves entering into a state of want, to gather by begging, turning from a position of freedom to unseemly asking, and from prosperity to a pitiable character, and in the end, being compelled to go to the houses of the rich (which is the first thing, or rather the last thing, in disgrace and misfortune), and thus to lose their own belongings under the pretext of godliness, and to covet those of others under the force of want.
Accordingly, it seems to me that these are the words of some woman in distress.
...All this obscure nonsense in the Gospels ought to be offered to silly women, not to men. For if we were prepared to investigate such points more closely, we should discover thousands of obscure stories which do not contain a single word worth finding.
Jerome, Comm. in Isaiah. 3: 2:
Let us -- ourselves -- therefore also take care lest we be tax-collectors from the people; lest -- as the impious Porphyry says -- matrons and women be our senate, ruling in the churches and where the favour of women decides the steps [of promotion] of the priesthood."
Accordingly, it seems to me that these are the words of some woman in distress.
I'm afraid I don't understand what point you intend to make. What I see from the quotations is:
1) Jerome was friendly with many women, but other prominent Christians considered this scandalous, so he was clearly unusual in this respect.
2) Jerome specifically denied receiving financial support from these women. Now, if he denies it, it is because someone has made the accusation, so this could conceivably be evidence that he did, but it's very slender evidence.
3) An anti-Christian polemicist accused Christian communities of being run by and/or financially dependent on women, but again Jerome denies it. Again, we may suppose that the accusation has some basis in fact, and indeed that's consistent with other evidence, e.g. the references to women in Paul's letters, but again that only gets us the weak claim "Maybe women had a bigger role than one would expect given the patriarchal nature of society at the time."
PS The voices of the women themselves are strikingly absent. Nobody on either side seems to have thought it worth asking Paula for her account of what had happened.
Paula did found and support monastic settlements, and the view expressed by Porphyry echoes down throughout the ages: Christianity is a religion for women, it's feminine, it's female-dominated.
Well my point was that the mother of Augustine was Christian and the father pagan. Constantine too. And Tertullian.
Christianity did start with the lower classes, but it makes sense that as a pacifistic religion, compared to the plethora of militaristic mystery cults that mushroomed in the early empire, would appeal first to women as it became more popular amongst the higher classes
Glad to see my excellent colleague Luke Semrau quoted in the NPR kidney sales piece. Luke, like Scott, gave away a kidney to a random recipient, and he’s the expert on the issue of selling kidneys.
38: Speaking of, is there an updated reading list post-Sequences? Other than slatestarcodex and whatever cognitive psychology you can get your hands on, of course.
Secular Israeli with a kid here - I think the blog post is touching on a very important point but it has some nuance worth pointing out.
Israel is very Kid friendly, but many Israelis don’t like Charedim or other ultra-religious people and don’t hold them in high regard. However, adhering Jews do tend to have more kids for religious reasons (it is morally positive to have kids in Judaism, and morally negative to use contraception or do non-reproductive sexual things).
There are many many somewhat-adhering or highly-Judaism respecting popular figures and just everyday people, so the whole system (from gov incentives to how much grandparents want to do childcare) gets aligned with that, *and* the famous singer/movie star/tech mogul also has many kids.
I think what the blog post is missing is that Charedim are not the be-all end-all of Judaism, and many Israelis just respect and like Judaism.
This does provide another potential avenue for people wanting to raise TFR- don’t just focus on breeder communities - but make having kids morally good and socially desirable! Get Elon musk to talk about how many kids he has and how awesome that is and makes him a good founder. Have Christian institutions talk more about how having kids is a god-given directive.
Hi! Loved your post! I think your argument is good (and novel! I've never thought about it that way). However, I think your under-indexing on the important of the entire range (Secular -> Charedim) in being and seeing themselves as fundamentally of the same culture and people (Judaism) where Charedim model excellence in certain aspects that are broadly considered morally good (studiousness, child rearing, family loyalty, tailoring - which isn't directly Jewish but well fitting black suites/white shirts are high status in Western culture).
Or, put more simply - you might need a combination of sufficiently high status in-groupers modelling excellence in child bearing, while *also* making child-bearing part of your culture more widely.
Basically, It would be good if the president spoke about National Amishism and kids on TV - otherwise how would we know what is morally good?
IIUC, I'm somewhere between both of you. Charedim influence the parts of society as משכיל בינה described, but also, Israelis just love kids and have a government system that consistently supports bearing them (medically and financially). We can delve into the roots of this, but this is the just the honest, simplest explanation. most secular people I know also have 2-3 kids, even those who detest Charedim. It's deeply engrained in the culture.
One important factor is that it's a small country. This makes people happier in general as personal and career moves do not separate them from their friends and family (a factor also present in e.g. Denmark) - one is always a couple hours drive away from them at most. And regarding fertility specifically, it's substantially easier to raise kids when there are grandparents and aunts/uncles nearby who are happy to care for them from time to time. In fact, it has been said that Israel as a country "runs on grandparents".
"Have Christian institutions talk more about how having kids is a god-given directive."
Hollow Catholic laughter here. Yeah, our guys do that. and in return get called patriarchy-supporting, out-of-touch celibates, misogynists and monsters, you name it.
The 'ordinary Catholic in the street' (not necessarily in the pews) favours abortion rights:
"Catholics in the U.S., one of the country's largest single Christian groups, hold far more diverse views on abortion rights than the official teaching of their church.
While the Catholic Church itself holds that abortion is wrong and should not be legal, 6 in 10 U.S. adult Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a newly released profile of Catholicism by Pew Research.
Catholic opinion about abortion rights, according to the report, tends to align with political leanings: Fewer Catholic Republicans favor legal abortion than Catholic Democrats. And Pew says Hispanic Catholics, who make up one-third of the U.S. church, are slightly more in favor of legal abortion than white Catholics."
Look at "devout Catholics" Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden telling the bishops they're wrong about abortion.
So, yeah, be a Christian religious leader who talks about God wants you to have kids, and be ready to duck.
Ex-Catholic, can confirm. Back in Poland during my childhood, women were NOT happy with priests telling them to be fruitful and multiply! Almost everyone was at least nominally Catholic and most people would attend weekly Mass, but contraception and abortion were widely used.
"The priest doesn't have any children of his own, he has no idea what it's like to be a parent, and he's lecturing me about having (more) children? He can go [expletive] himself" is a sentiment I heard more than once in my childhood from my mom and her female friends.
Abortion is quite accessible in Israel (less than $1k or free in many cases, requires a committee with 99%+ approval rates, secret, doesn't require parental approval for under 18 for some cases, can be considered until week 24 of pregnancy, etc). Its not even a very common topic of discussion in most circles, and not at all an important point in country-wide politics usually.
I didn't even think about it when writing my comment!
In hard-core Judaism, the problematic act is having intercourse (or even just ejaculation) not in order to have kids. Abortions are controversial but AFAIK (not an expert) the fetus is not considered a full person and has fewer rights (eg, if the mother is at serious health risk, its religiously compatible to have an abortion).
However - having kids is considered desirable!
Maybe the Christian religious leaders should stop focusing so much on abortion and shift to saying "Hey, you do you, but make sure to have lots of kids!"
Yes, I am aware of the different Jewish theological position on when the foetus is considered alive, and why that is more tolerant of abortion being permissible.
However, the results of different Christian denominations giving in on contraception and abortion has not been to strengthen the "have lots of kids" position, but to weaken it. After all, if you say it's okay with God that you are not having kids by using contraception and abortion, it's harder to say "but God does want you to have lots of kids". And the secular bent of society also makes it much harder to tell people "yes, okay, we went with the Zeitgeist on divorce, and on contraception, and on abortion, but we're not in step with 'too many kids are bad for the planet' so stop contracepting and have four kids at minimum!" because you will be ignored, as we see with Catholics in American and in my own country of Ireland, and that's even where the Church has *not* given in on divorce etc. and we still have the official line that sex is for procreation, so the hard-core Judaic problematic non-fertile acts are problematic for us, too. But modern people have thrown off the shackles of the mediaeval past, so don't tell us masturbation is sinful!
I've commented on here before about the Anglican Church and how over the span of decades, you can see from Lambeth Conference to Lambeth Conference (the assembly of global Anglican bishops every ten years) how they gave in step by step on social issues like that. By 1930, though they were still "no remarriage in church for divorced", they were giving in on contraception, though that was only ever going to be for married people who already had kids and wanted to pause child-bearing for a while. Never going to be just for fun and for singles!
Then over time, "no divorce, no contraception, no abortion" got softened down in each case to "well maybe in very limited circumstances" to "well okay it's complicated" to "a lot of this is happening in society today so let's talk about it" to "no mention at all, it's just tacitly accepted, now let's talk about gay marriage".
How is Judaism and fertility doing outside of Israel? Have Jews in other countries followed the pattern of more secularisation affecting birth rate?
Thank you for the details. In Israel it doesn’t seem like abortion and contraception are tied to having less kids conceptually.
Re other countries, I’m pretty sure secular Jews in other countries don’t have more kids than people in the country (I think I saw somewhere that in the US, secular Jews have less kids than average americans, but Hebrew-speaking Jews have more)
Unrelated question: I'm an American voter with relatives in Israel. Do you have any suggestion on who/what organization can advise which is the best POTUS for Israel's security? I've tried AIPAC (they will only advise me on congressional races, which is a help, but I also need to choose the presidential candidate). I've asked ADL, but never heard back. I've tried google searches for endorsements from the Jerusalem Post, but didn't find one. Any suggestions?
Thats a very difficult question. Here is a long-winded but unhelpful analysis:
Having spoken to various people about this (industry leaders, military leaders, etc). I've also had a chance to speak to people who are part of the US security apparatus and part of the Republican party. the best that I can understand is:
- The Democratic apparatus courts antisemites too closely and may decide they are tired and want quiet more than Israel, however they are generally serious people who have independent learned opinions and will aim to do what they think is best for the party, the country and the world at each point in time - and that usually means supporting Israel but not giving it a free reign nor accepting too much negative news. But their policies are also many times bad and have very negative effects (Iran's nuclear program).
- Trump is mercurial and so is hard to model. Will he let Israel have weapons and no oversight? Will he align with Russia (which is bad for Israel)? What even are his motivations and strategy for the middle east? Will he hurt US's position in global politics which weakens Israel's security generally?
I've personally come away confused. It sounds like the Kamala would be the safer bet as the guess is she'll generally continue Biden's line and Trump is unpredictable (which means could be better but could be worse) but this probably isn't new information as this is a level of analysis you could have reached yourself by watching 10 minutes of any news cast.
As an aside, some polls suggest most Bibi supporters prefer Trump, but also many people think Bibi isn't a great example of helping Israel's security. You can find newspaper articles claiming both. The Israel equivalent of Fox News likes Trump, the Israel equivalent of Slate likes Kamala.
Bottom line is - While I can't vote in the US and so haven't spent too much time on this - I don't have answers or pointers for you, nor have I talked to anyone who came across as especially clear on analysis.
Many Thanks! Yeah, my impression is that _if_ Harris could be trusted to continue Biden's support for Israel's self-defense, she would be the better pick, _but_ she is also courting the antisemitic left. And Trump is just plain unpredictable. Grr. The only thing I can say for sure is that I'll be gritting my teeth on Election Day.
Israeli with about a decade of military experience and a degree in Midddle-Eastren history. I'll add a bit to what Gal said; but this is complicated. Take this with a grain of salt.
Generally, a lot of the consensus in the army (both active duty and reserve, which plays a very large part in it) is moving towards the thought that a war with Iran (and Hezbollah) is inevitable after October 7th, and the question is when. I tend to agree with this, and I can give an explanation, but it would be very, very long. Generally, I'd pick who you think would support Israel in doing this and be hawkish against Iran.
FYI, my political stance is complicated, but if Israeli politics is partisan across Yes-No Bibi, I'm basically Bipartisan.
You're welcome! Yeah, it is a difficult choice. If it helps, I think most Israelis lean towards Trump, but I think this is objectively complicated and I'm not sure I would trust the thought process of Israelis who aren't tightly following the election cycle as Americans... I think I hesitantly agree with them, but I have not given the matter a lot of thought at all.
Trump's rhetoric is definitely better in this regard, but he also has a record of not following through with concrete actions. It was in his presidency that Iran went from 4% uranium enrichment to near-bomb levels, as he withdrew from JCPOA (which limited enrichment for a period of 15 years) without replacing it with any other limits.
This is a valid point, though it's more nuanced I think - I think there are pros and cons to exiting the JCPOA. The true question is whether the US is willing to use military force against Iran, JCPOA or not - as otherwise there is no BATNA, thus leaving the agreement or waiting for it to end is a timing question and not a substance question. In the end, if the US isn't willing to stop Iran from having a bomb by force, the talks are just buying time (which is nice, but in a sense kicking the can down the road).
Sorry for criticizing your question instead of trying to answer, but a an Israeli my answer is strongly "please don't think about us when you vote!". First, I do not think that it is fair to other Americans for American jews to consider the interests of a specific other country. But more importantly, I worry about the image of American jews as loyal citizens. You should help us and we should help you, but you should not endanger your integration project for us any more than we endanger the sovereignty project for you.
Many Thanks! I do see your point, but, frankly, I see the two candidates as about evenly unpleasant in their effects on America. ('scuse the long delay. Helene came through here, and I was internetless for a couple of weeks.)
#2 Interesting research, but it starts from the premise that evolution is a dumb hill climber where purely random mutations result in a fitness hill climb. The evidence we have, however, suggests that evolution is likely not so simple as dumb random mutation hill climbers have a tendency to get stuck in local maximas and are not robust against environmental changes. In reality, evolved creatures are incredibly robust against environmental changes and they tend to avoid local maximas rather than climb to them.
That’s the kind of rhetoric that hit Scrooge a few bad nights sleep.
Scrooge actually said “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Yours would be “if they would take drugs, they had better do it and die, to decrease the drug taking population”.
Scrooge says “rather die” which is 19C for “would die anyway” but your original statement said the reversal of the laws would reduce the death rate. Which means that it was the law, not the determination of the drug users to die anyway that change the outcome.
Do you have any statistics as to how often that happens? Conversely, do you have any statistics with how often drug users saved my medical interventions get clean within X number of years?
I ask because you frame your position as being about "cost-benefit analysis." It's impossible to do that kind of analysis for this kind of problem without numbers. If you have the numbers, your position would be made much more persuasive by referring to them.
What would you estimate is the rate of people who have near-misses (ie overdoses that don't result in death) who eventually go on to die of overdose?
Is that the right number to talk about? What would the number have to be before you thought it was worth putting in some effort to save their lives?
>"let's just create a new religious sect guys!" isn't it for a lot of obvious reasons. How do we actually accomplish this?
Yeah, I really wonder this too, because he specifically points to the downfall of "virtue" status games in favor of more people playing "success" / meritocratic status games as driving it.
But virtue status games are responsible for basically every mountain of skulls in our collective past! We should be *ecstatic* we're playing them much less.
And "success" status games are literally what's lifted billions out of poverty and given us our modern world. We should *definitely* be playing them at the expense of virtue and dominance games!
I really don't think queueing up more "virtue" games is going to go well.
I honestly think we're just in a rough patch and have to double down on "success" games until we get uterine replicators, or until we're all uploaded and reproduce digitally or something.
Actually I do have one real idea on this front.
I think the "elite" Red Queens Race for good colleges is a big factor. In the US, at least, the arms race for Ivy schools ALREADY starts at "we need to get on the waiting list 6 months before birth to get precious Jayden into the right pre-school and then grind furiously and non-stop for 18 years, or their chances at getting into Harvard are *ruined!*"
What incentive would work in this world? This is difficult to fix at the Ivy level, which will always have many more applicants than spots and has no reason to participate, but the various states have R1 universities in them.
The state of California, for example, has the well-regarded UC system, and could guarantee spots to selected elite parents based on pretty simple criteria. Say both of you have a prestigious degree and/or have paid >$XXX,XXX amount in taxes to California over the years. Issue those parents a guaranteed non-transferrable slot in the UC system (inclusive of the good ones like UC Berkeley) to any of their kids as long as their kid scores above Y SAT / ACT score. Keep issuing slots for every $XXX,XXX in taxes they continue to pay.
You can extend this to ANY R1 university in any state, or more broadly to any state-controlled well-regarded university in any country, with whatever threshold makes sense. Poof! The educational arms race has had some of the pressure taken off of it, and elites (however you define them) are directly incentivized to have more kids.
The schools only have so many spots? Well legislate that you have to use some of those $XXX,XXX tax dollars to expand those universities then, this is a self-perpetuating system!
"the arms race for Ivy schools ALREADY starts at "we need to get on the waiting list 6 months before birth to get precious Jayden into the right pre-school and then grind furiously and non-stop for 18 years, or their chances at getting into Harvard are *ruined!*""
This is not a joke, because we've already had calls from prospective parents wanting to get their child on the waiting list for entry to our childcare centre, and the child has not been *conceived* yet.
And we're just a standard childcare centre in a small Irish town, not anywhere super-duper that is guaranteed to get your kids on the path to a place in Trinity or the likes.
This is all part of the problem of declining fertility - both parents have to work in order to have sufficient income for a good life; that means the mother has to return to work some time after the birth of the child; unless there is family who will do child-minding, or a guarantee of a place in a childcare centre, creche, or the likes, then the planning around "we're thinking of having a second/more child" goes "not yet, it's not doable".
I honestly don't know what the solution is. More room, yes, definitely makes a difference in reply to Nancy's query above. But the two-income trap in today's world, where if you want anything above 'just bumping along and heavily reliant on social welfare', either one parent must be earning a very high salary or both parents must work, means "someone else has to mind the kids".
And I don't think 'government child-rearing' is the answer.
Hmm, so the $XXX,XXX in taxes would substitute for some selectivity in the R1 university?
Very roughly speaking, I'm skeptical. It depends on how much of the selectivity is rank-ordered-status and how much is actual human capital. Humor me, and consider what happens if the system really is screening for human capital invested in the kid. If the kid _doesn't_ have that investment, then you are left with the same problem as DEI picks with insufficient preparation: It is to no one's advantage for a kid to get into a university that they flunk out of.
Now, if this is just a status game, and who gets picked is actually pretty arbitrary, then the graduation rates for these kids should be about the same as under the current system.
But if the schools really are preparation for jobs that have gotten more complex than in past years, and if the preparation for entry into the schools really are necessary for schools that are more complex than in past years, then the Red Queen's race is ultimately being driven by the complexity of the jobs, and bypassing this will be a problem.
> If the kid _doesn't_ have that investment, then you are left with the same problem as DEI picks with insufficient preparation: It is to no one's advantage for a kid to get into a university that they flunk out of.
I agree, actually - it's definitely something you want to tune for. And I did posit a "both of you have a prestigious degree" filter, with prestigious being either the degree or the institution, which is obviously a "human capital" filter. I mean, the whole idea is to incentivize more high human capital couples having more kids. But obviously states (or feds) would want to tune that as appropriate. Or maybe some R1's would have more stringent criteria than others, with Berkeley and UCLA and UVA harder to get into than Penn State, for example.
> But if the schools really are preparation for jobs that have gotten more complex than in past years, and if the preparation for entry into the schools really are necessary for schools that are more complex than in past years, then the Red Queen's race is ultimately being driven by the complexity of the jobs, and bypassing this will be a problem.
This I'm not worried about at all - I've dealt with lots of freshly-degreed new hires when I was in finance,and schools, even Ivies, don't do ANYTHING to prepare kids for complex jobs.
It's ALL signaling - but of course, those signals matter - somebody coming from an Ivy really is sharp enough to pick up what they need to over the next six months. But the schools sure aren't teaching any of those kids anything useful at all, they're just the stamp of approval indicating "this person went through this degree of filtering."
Many Thanks!
>It's ALL signaling - but of course, those signals matter - somebody coming from an Ivy really is sharp enough to pick up what they need to over the next six months. But the schools sure aren't teaching any of those kids anything useful at all, they're just the stamp of approval indicating "this person went through this degree of filtering."
That's fair (one caveat below), and the _pre_-university filtering would probably be covered by the requirement for
>both of you have a prestigious degree and/or have paid >$XXX,XXX amount in taxes to California over the years
plus the SAT score requirement. ( HBD caveat - to the extent that intelligence is genetic, the degree requirement on the parents is going to misfire on adopted kids, unless one checks their biological parents. )
One caveat about universities purely doing filtering: At least in STEMM fields, some of what they teach is actually useful. "Let's approximate this as a polynomial." is a reasonably common workplace statement.
I don't know what you're trying to say. Are you saying you'd be indifferent between losing 20 IQ points and gaining 20 IQ points?
>My counter nitpick is that maybe the optimal IQ in terms of preference is not optimal in terms of natural selection.
<mildSnark>
This reminds me of a book I have. It is titled "Why the Reckless Survive". It _should_ have been titled "Why the Genes of the Reckless Spread" :-)
</mildSnark>
He’s saying that the peasant is more successful in a Darwinian sense.
Here's a speculation that popped to mind while reading Darigo's post: What if the population is becoming more autistic? -- autistic not in the original sense, but in the more modern usage where "autistic" people are introverted, heady, socially awkward, novelty-averse, anxiety-prone, attuned to abstract patterns . Most people I've known who fit that profile are either uninterested in sex or drawn to variant sexual identities and practices that are unlikely to produce children, so as more people fully or partially fit the autism profile, fertility would decrease.
Why would we be becoming more autistic? Dunno about possible purely biological causes, but what about the decreasing amount of in-person contact people have, and the increasing amount with electronic representations of real or imaginary people? Seems like that trend started when TV's moved into everybody's living room in I think the 50's. This is pure speculation, with many ways to check whether trends in this and that support it.
"And most law firm partners are also conservative on most issues except LGBTQ and abortion, that’s why the political viewpoints they single out for hiring bans are on the left, not the right"
Can you explain this? I found Woodgrains' clerkship-based explanation intuitive but it feels like it doesn't go all the way to explaining why this would be true.
"Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" views? Gay marriage doesn't really affect them or their multi-million/billion dollar clients, but taxation and the like certainly do. Big difference between "Yes, I'll draw up the pre-nup for your daughter's wedding to her girlfriend" and "Yes, I'll set up the foundation for your children so they can avoid estate taxes". That's why hiring someone who is happy to work on the latter is more likely than "In college, I was involved in the Tax The 1% Activist Movement because I firmly and fervently believe there should be no billionaires" type, even if both are happy to pin up the rainbow flags for Pride Month.
You have to remember who it is that big law firms represent - largely major corporations being accused of misconduct (sometimes by other corporations). I think if you looked at the partners of, e.g. plaintiff-side class action firms, you'd see a different set of folks.
This is almost diametrically opposed to my own experiences graduating from an Ivy League law school a few years back. Law is a notoriously left-leaning industry. Fedsoc members were actively discriminated against in law firm hiring, to the point where we were told to make two resumes and only give the "full" one to specifically pre-vetted employers who wouldn't just immediately trash our applications (we literally had a secret list of firms we passed around). Literally every right-of-center law firm partner I've ever met was eventually forced out and is now either at a boutique or in-house. And this is on top of the fact that there were no resources available for conservative-leaning public interest, no right-leaning career counselors to advise us, etc.
To the extent you've seen conservative lawyers tend to punch above their weight career-wise, it's probably because only the rock stars feel secure enough to be open about their politics, so they stand out more.
Huh? I thought traditionally far-right people were against teen pregnancy. “If you can’t support your child, keep your legs closed!” Or do you just want a whole bunch of children and don’t care if they grow up with poverty and crappy life prospects?
there's a difference between 14 and 18.
"and don’t care if they grow up with poverty" ... money makes one happy?—TIL. Parents who read to you and help you with your homework is what provides positive life prospects.
It's not that money makes you happy; it's that money can and does remove many sources of unhappiness. I'm certainly happier now, when a toothache meant, "Well this sucks, I'll have to go to the dentist and maybe pay $500 for a root canal, but no big deal, I can easily afford it" than I was when I was a poor grad student and a toothache meant "Oh shit oh shit I hope it's just a filling, not a root canal, how on earth am I gonna afford $500?!?"
As Michael Kelly alludes, "teen pregnancy" in common usage means pregnancies of unmarried high-school-age girls, not literally any pregnancy between the ages of 12 and 20. And traditionally far-right people believe that a young man of 18-19 at least *ought* to be able to support a wife and child with a Good Job at the Factory (mine, whatever), possibly with some help from their own parents.
>And traditionally far-right people believe that a young man of 18-19 at least _ought_ to be able to support a wife and child with a Good Job at the Factory (mine, whatever), possibly with some help from their own parents.
Hmm... Anyone have an estimate of what fraction of the population this would be realistic for, in the USA economy as it stands today? It isn't zero. I'd guess that it is a pretty small fraction, but I have only very fuzzy ideas of whether there are areas with low enough cost of living _and_ enough non-college-degree jobs to make this feasible.
There are sill a good number of non-college-degree jobs that will support a working-class family, but I think many of them are locked up by unions who hand them out on the basis of seniority. And for that matter, I think the conservatives were pretty much always ok with "if you're one of the minority who really ought to be going to college, sure, marry your college sweetheart when you're 22 rather than your high school sweetheart at 18".
But I think one of the more reasonable complaints of cultural conservatives is that modern society has made it needlessly difficult to pursue a life path that has traditionally lead to good results for a good many people, Of course, the liberals have a point about the conservatives sometimes trying to force that path on *everyone*.
> The right also believes that at 30 nature makes another attempt to reassert itself if the women is still childless
That matches my anecdotal observations, with a few women in their early 30s who swore they never wanted to have children ending up with two in quick succession, and not on accident.
No, definitely not a solution to dropping fertility rates. For that we will need something like artificial wombs and collective upbringing of children.
Optional, not mandatory.
Is there any reason to think collective upbringing will work?
It will be a paid job, not looked down upon like SAHM now.
That's not the problem. Children attach to particular people.
Most caregiver work is low status and low pay in the US, considered entry-level and often performed by immigrants (relevant just to showcase how undesirable these jobs are to most Americans).
Kibbutzim seem to work.
Yeah, I vaguely recall that some Eastern European country (Albania? Romania?) actually ran the experiment with state-run collective upbringing on a large scale, with bad results... Anyone remember what happened better than this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s-1990s_Romanian_orphans_phenomenon
Worse than I knew-- what I read about was adequate physical care, but no contact with adults beyond the minimum for maintenance. In fact, the physical maintenance was way below adequate.
From one angle, the Romanian disaster was a result of just trying to maximize the number of people.
Science fiction: The dystopian Rissa Kerguellen novels by F. M. Busby, but much, much worse.
Again, why is it framed entirely as women's choice - what if their husbands did not want one?
You raise a good point, in that it might be worth considering how much fertility decline is impacted by adult men not wanting children.
But I see at least one practical reason why the issue would be framed primarily as a women's choice issue - If a single woman wants to have a child, there's sperm donors for that. If a single man wants to have a child, there are surrogate pregnant mothers but that's probably harder to find and/or costlier to make use of than a sperm bank is. Basically, it's easier for a single woman to have a child as an unilateral decision than it is for a single man to have a child as an unilateral decision.
What does a sperm donation really cost?—a trip to a bar in a low cut top—sans bra.
I know a single mom who went this route, she's far from a ten. When you're rolling the genetic dice, payin' bank for gold plated dice doesn't help the roll. Besides, what kind of people donate to sperm banks?—a PhD in theoretical physics?—more likely an associates in 'trying to find myself.'
Her son is a nice kid, dotes on mom, has some business degree, does well selling mortgages, like north of $200k well.
As I understand it, a lot of men who contribute to sperm banks are college students.
Re: #3 (the role of aristocratic women in the spread of early Christianity), the version of that theory I'm familiar with is a bit more, uh, materialist, than the one that Teslo argues against. https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/162371120846/so-if-my-historical-sources-are-telling-me-the
(The exact story in that post strikes me as slightly too cute to be true, but I do wonder whether something close to it could be right.)
Is that link from a very old Slatetarcodex links post?
That's not where *I* found it (I follow Balioc on Tumblr, and consider him the most underrated writer on this-part-of-the-internet), but a search confirms that it was indeed featured there: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/19/links-717-url-of-sandwich/#:~:text=Something%20I%20didn%E2%80%99t%20expect%20to%20see%20a%20serious%20argument%20for%20today%3A%20%E2%80%9CThe%20entire%20edifice%20of%20Western%20civilization%20%E2%80%93%20all%20the%20cultural%2C%20social%2C%20and%20philosophical%20structures%20that%20define%20the%20world%20in%20which%20we%20live%20today%20%E2%80%93%20can%20be%20traced%20back%20to%20a%20stupid%20loophole%20in%20Roman%20inheritance%20law.%E2%80%9D
I think it is a little bit of a 'just so' story; if we believe St. Jerome, what wealthy Roman widows (even Christian ones) were doing was *not* "oh dearie me, I will be forced to get re-married and then all my property goes to my husband, let me set up a scam with my local priest" but in fact, enjoying being merry widows with full control of their own money:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001045.htm
"Of all the ladies in Rome, the only ones that caused scandal were Paula and Melanium, who, despising their wealth and deserting their children, uplifted the cross of the Lord as a standard of religion. Had they frequented the baths, or chosen to use perfumes, or taken advantage of their wealth and position as widows to enjoy life and to be independent, they would have been saluted as ladies of high rank and saintliness."
- Yeah the monetary support of women is what I've heard the most about- it's traditionally thought that Jesus and the disciples were funded by wealthy women supporters. The Apostle Paul is thought to have supported himself by tentmaking, though that is an exception since tentmaking is silent work - he can preach while doing it. I haven't heard a lot about women being significant proselytizers.
-Observationally, young churches and cult movements are heavily skewed towards women. It's a common stereotype that the wife will bring the kids to church while the dad will stay home.
-It's mentioned in a caption in Ruxandra's post but it is worth repeating that Constantine's mother was a Christian. Constantine himself had some sort of experience before a battle, his conversion is rather famous
-Point against the use of historiographical data is that when Constantine made Christianity officially legal (not the official religion, that was Theodosius 70yrs later) only 10% of Romans were Christian.
-I think the elites thought Constantine was indulging too far into his own favorite cult when he started making Christianity more official and expected it to be a fad.
-Another point is that Constantine didn't convert to Christianity for political reasons - actually Christianity was fairly unpopular among the elite and the intelligentsia, who wanted to stick with the old religions. Christianity was mainly adopted by lower (though not destitute) classes.
Funny enough I've also been on an Early Christianity binge / biblical textual analysis. If anyone else is interested, Bart Ehrman is the rockstar secular scholar in this field (lost his faith over the problem of suffering).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfheSAcCsrE&t=3134s
What makes him quite remarkable is that he speaks with the passion of a pastor; "anti-evangelist" the apologetics crowd calls him.
John Psmith hypothesized that women add more mass to new hypertitious cascades than contemporary men: "The pattern is always the same: a few charismatic male leaders, and a large number of women making up the bulk of the support. Women are rarely moral entrepreneurs, but they act as something like the moral venture capitalists of the human race, wielding tremendous influence over which religions and revival movements succeed and which fail." https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-albigensian-crusade-by?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Edward Watts argues that Rome's pagan bureaucrats (all men) were too socially disorganized and too focused on short-term gains to realize that they were losing a bigger culture war. https://aeon.co/essays/pagan-complacency-and-the-birth-of-the-christian-roman-empire
If you squint you might see patterns of female/long-term/persuasive soft-power strategies working under the radar of male/short-term/coercive hard power strategies.
Really great set of links!
Scott, do you think you have moved politically to the right recently? That's what I am getting from here. At least, you have moved to the right on issues involving Jews and Israel and you seem more willing to directly link Hanania, Sailer, Greer, etcetera.
How have I moved to the right on Israel?
I would like to think I've always been willing to link good articles by right wing people when they happen.
I did decide not to link a terrible article trying to argue against race-mixing (even though I really wanted to argue against the article) because people would freak out and blame me for acknowledging its existence enough to argue about it. But aside from being fun to argue against it didn't really have any value, and I'd like to think I'm willing to take the flak when it's worth it.
Well in 1999 the Internet was mostly people who worked in an IT related field. Or in other words, it had a culture of autistic bluntness. I mean, two things changed, today not only IT workers use the Internet, but crucially, IT workers were also a smaller group with a definite kind of, huh, traits, or culture. Not simply maturity. I would say empathy levels were low, but intellectual rigor high. I don't really think we can have both the same time.
In 1999, the culture was also leaning towards classical liberalism--heavy emphasis on individualism, personal freedom, and personal responsibility (eg. RTFM). If you look at the Hackers Manifesto or the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, you might be overpowered by the smell of horses strong black coffee. The writer of the Declaration was the cofounder of the Electronic _Frontier_ Foundation.
But like you say that has been swallowed up by the mass influx of newbies. It's eternal September.
It's just a general sense I get from your links and so on, and just your overall commentary on the topic and the tone. In your Neo-reactionary FAQ you called Netanyahu crazy, and after 10/7 you said that the best outcome, even for Palestinian welfare, is for Israel to totally remove Hamas. These two statements aren't technically incompatible but they are Bayesian signals of something and of your System 1 reactions on the topic. You used to post about Dianne Feinstein and her husband wanting to shut down the speech of anti-Israel people. Now it seems that you are saying that left-wing antisemitism is a much more serious problem than you realized. I agree of course that strictly speaking this is separate from the issue of what's actually happening in the region, but it's a Bayesian signal of something.
I think that many of the things the Israeli right have said about the Palestinians have unfortunately been proven correct. 10-15 years ago, a lot of centrist liberals believed that if Netanyahu was replaced by a center-left guy, they could sign a two-state deal with the PA. I think recent events have disabused people of this notion. The Israeli right has always claimed that even if a Palestinian leader wanted to make peace, they would never do it because their society has too many extremists and they would get shot or something. I didn't believe this 10 years ago but now I do. I think that aside from the conflict, their early rollout of vaccines, their embrace of lab-grown meat, their embrace of reprotech and high TFRs, their targeting by woke, and the weakening influence of Evangelical Christians have endeared them more to rationalists.
I think you were more scared of being associated with the "HBD" crowd a while ago. Remember the parable of lightning? You beat around the bush quite a bit. Openly linking to Hanania and to Steve Sailer's substack is a huge vibe shift. Back in your SSC days you weren't so willing to post links to content by these more right-wing people. I mean, when you interacted with Yarvin it was to argue with him. Back on SSC were you linking articles by Steve Sailer and saying they were interesting? Granted, linking to substack is a lot better than linking to unz. I would not want to link to the un z.c om trash fire either. I put spaces to not link to it. I think that HBD type views have gotten more mainstream recently. Noah Smith is now interacting with I/o on twitter.
To be clear I view all of these "rightward shifts" as a positive development. I definitely support Israel and I definitely support open discussion of group differences. Of course I would love to wave a magic wand to remove Palestinian rejectionism and to increase black genotypic IQ to 100. I also think one can certainly make many legitimate criticisms of Israel. And one can certainly make many legitimate criticisms of the HBD crowd.
I think you might be collapsing everything into one left-right dimension too hard. I still believe it's bad that Hamas is committing terrorist attacks, bad that Israel is stealing land in the West Bank, bad that lots of Gazans are being killed, and also bad that people in Columbia seem to be spitting on Jews.
I agree that you have always thought all of these things. But there's a matter of context and emphasis. The Israeli right has always said that it the conflict was never about the creation of a Palestinian state but rather the destruction of Israel. 10 years ago this seemed dumb, and I didn't believe it, but I think in 2024 we can safely say that they were right. It's unfortunate that they are right.
Your view definitely is or at least codes as pro-Israel, and in Israel would be considered a center-left Zionist view. Virtually no one who codes as "pro-Palestine" acknowledge that Hamas is bad and that what's going on in the US campuses is bad. Many people who are pro-Israel are unhappy about the settlement enterprise and would rather Gazan civilians not die. You could go to Israel or to a pro-Israel gathering and say "it's bad that Gazan civilians are dying, and settlements are a bad idea" and no one would shun you. I wouldn't go to an encampment or go to the West Bank and say that it's bad Hamas commits terrorism and that there is a horrible antisemitism problem in Columbia.
I consider myself very pro-Israel and agree with your views. Everyone except Kahanist types thinks it's bad that lots of Gazan civilians are being killed, and would rather they not be. Yes I think that Israel needs to take out Hamas, but the fewer civilians are killed in the war the better. Israel should try and jail soldiers that commit war crimes.
Half of Israelis and most of Israel's international supporters (including me) oppose the settlement project. By "stealing land" do you mean just building settlements, or do you mean the ones that are on private Palestinian property are illegal under *Israeli* law? The vast majority of settlements are not on private Palestinian land. I'm not sure how the first one qualifies as "theft". Theft from whom? I don't think you can say "the Palestinians" collectively own Area C in any meaningful sense. To clarify I definitely think both are bad, though the second is obviously worse (and is prosecuted by Israel to some extent, see Amona, though not enough). I would say that the first is more akin to gerrymandering or illegal immigration (also bad) than theft. So again, I consider myself very pro-Israel and I don't find anything to disagree with among your opinions. I quibble with calling all settlement construction "theft" but I certainly agree that it's bad in any case. And I think Israel needs to defeat Hamas, but of course I agree that it's bad that civilians are dying.
It doesn't keep me up at night and I don't think Israel is the bad guy, but I do think it's a real concern and not just a PR concern. I don't doubt your sincerity about what happened to Jews in Arab countries. I also don't think that Arabs today should be morally culpable for this, and quite honestly in some sense it's a favor anyway. Good that Iraqi Jews got kicked out in the 1950s, if they had stayed they would be getting gassed by Saddam like the Kurds, shot by ISIS. Israel is a much more pleasant place to live than non-oily Arab countries *even if you're Arab* and certainly if you're Jewish.
Benny Morris was jailed for refusing to serve in the West Bank. He is one of Israel's pre-eminent historians. I really don't like at all what happened to this teacher, that's terrible. But I will say that unfortunately the free speech of teachers and public sector employees is often restricted in lots of strange ways, and I think you are over indexing on this. If you're a private citizen in Israel you can certainly say this. Israel generally has free speech. Oded Goldreich, who is a far-left Hadash guy, is a professor at Weizmann and was awarded the Israel Prize. Yes I'm sure people are called whores and paid shills. Those are stupid comments but that is not a restriction on freedom of speech. The first example was better. I think that there is more free speech in Israel than at Western pro-Palestinian protests, encampments, rallies, etc. Unfortunately, Western pro-Palestinian culture is not some good faith Arab guy writing about Israel on ACX. I wish it was.
Netanyahu is the head of government, not the head of state. That's a dumb map, but Netanyahu himself (I'm no fan) has come out against resettling Gaza. One shouldn't read too much into the map. I don't think the PLO is very sincere about peace, but the river to the sea map on their logo is not the reason. Their refusal to compromise on the "right of return" is more important. Yes, the Finance guy Smotrich is definitely a Kahanist type. These fuckers are 5% of the Israeli population and Netanyahu let them into the government. Disgraceful. Bad guy. I never said that Kahanist types were only a few bad apples. But I do think they are a minority, probably ~5% of the Israeli Jewish population, certainly at most 10%. Compare with ~75% of Palestinians who supported October 7. The analogue of Kahanism is far more mainstream on the other side.
Yes I think Israel should actually jail soldiers that commit war crimes and not just do it for the cameras. War crimes are bad. I definitely oppose the settlements. But I don't like the term "theft" because it's not accurate. Theft from whom? Who "owns" Area C? Can we go with "illegal immigration"? I also just wasn't sure what Scott meant. Does he mean when the IDF declares some area of the West Bank to be a security zone? Settlements? Settlements on private property?
Shalom and Salaam. I'll quote Scott Aaronson, if they put you in charge of the Palestinians and me in charge of Israel, I'm sure we could sign a two-state solution and then go eat some falafel. By the way I really like Egyptian falafel, but due to favism among Mizrahi Jews they don't have it in Israel.
Any left-right division is inherently arbitrary to some extent but it seems at best odd and at worst suspicious to insist on using one that puts the majority of US Democrats on the right-wing side.
Also somehow in many ways left and right switched sides! 20 years ago the following things were left-coded:
1) liking Russia
2) not trusting Big Pharma
3) not liking American imperialism
4) not liking free trade
" The Israeli right has always said that it the conflict was never about the creation of a Palestinian state but rather the destruction of Israel. 10 years ago this seemed dumb, and I didn't believe it, but I think in 2024 we can safely say that they were right. It's unfortunate that they are right."
This sort of thinking is both reductionist and EXTREMELY self-fulfilling. The conflict involves many millions of people, both within the territory in question and elsewhere in the world. What it is "about" is going to vary quite a lot from year to year and person to person. But to the extent that your read IS correct, consider the following thought-experiment:
Two large groups of people, call them Group A and Group B are living and in close proximity to each other. At time 0, a few people in both groups start whispering and muttering about how "we'll never be safe until that other group is gone." Most people within their group ignore them, but a few people from the other group overhear and start shouting about it. "Those people in Group A(B) want us gone! They'll do anything to get rid of us!" Now a few more people in Group A will take the Group A whisperers-and-mutterers seriously, which means more Group A-ers whispering-and-muttering, which means its easier for those in Group B to overhear and vice versa. The belief that everybody in an opposing group wants you dead and the only way you'll be safe is to kill them first can be a really strong positive feedback loop even if all that happens is talk. Adding even a little bit of real, tangible, violent action to the mix only makes it stronger.
I think in general this is a very difficult problem to solve. If you want to avoid the outcome where everybody tries their hardest to kill everybody else, you HAVE to act as though the other side has some reasonable people who are acting in good faith and want peace. But you can't do that TOO much because there certainly are *some* people on the other side who want you dead, and leaving yourself exposed will only make things worse.
I say in general, because it is emphatically NOT a hard problem in this case. I don't believe for a minute that every single Palestinian fervently wants Israel gone, but even if that were true, they clearly, OBVIOUSLY don't have the power to get that want. Not even close. There are countries outside Israel that want it gone--I'm skeptical they have the power to make that happen either--but absolutely nothing Israel does to the Palestinians within its borders will help them achieve that either. Every Palestinian civilian that the IDF kills is a net loss for Israel's existential security. Probably most Hamas members are too. To the extent that ANY rational security purpose is being served by the bloodbath in Gaza, it's Israel trading somewhat reduced risk of terrorist attacks for slightly *increased* risk to its existence as a nation. I think the only nation that poses a real and serious existential risk to Israel right now is Isreal itself: it could tear itself apart on this issue, it could alienate itself among the international community, it could completely warp its political landscape around the "demands" of the conflict: all of these are more threatening to the state than the wildest, most ambitious dreams of Hamas.
"Virtually no one who codes as "pro-Palestine" acknowledge that Hamas is bad and that what's going on in the US campuses is bad. "
How are you counting "virtually no one?" I've seen many people acknowledge that Hamas is bad while stridently opposing the violence being done to the Palestinian people. They don't talk about it a lot, but that should hardly be surprising. The IDF has killed upwards of 20 times as many people in the past year as Hamas has, and many of them far more recently. Far too often this sort of remark is really trying to insist that every sentence included a "both sides are bad" disclaimer, and while I think very few people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian think Hamas is good or right or morally justified, nobody has very much patience for pretending they are *equally* bad. If the Israeli government had sufficient concern for its reputation to want to merely be considered *as bad* as Hamas, it was perfectly free to stop after killing 2 or 3 thousand Palestinians, instead of 30 or 40 thousand.
As for acknowledging the situation on campuses, I think Scott's own commentary to the link explained it perfectly: most people simply don't know about it. I'd heard plenty of hand-wringing about campus protests being anti-Semitic from the right, and dismissed it the same way I dismiss most hand-wringing from the right: as a mix of selective reporting and exaggeration. I'm pretty shocked at the behaviour reported in the link, and I'll freely acknowledge it's bad and it shouldn't be happening. I've seen actual anti-Semitism only very occasional in the online spaces I frequent, and stood up to it when I've seen it. I've never seen it in the real world, despite spending a good portion of the past year on university campuses (albeit, Canadian ones). I know many people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and zero people who would engage in or even tolerate that sort of thing: hopefully more widespread knowledge and social pressure puts a stop to it.
I think as an empirical matter than killing Hamas terrorists is good and helps Israel. I agree, killing civilians is bad. I wonder if we can operationalize this. Do you want to predict how many Israeli civilians will be killed by Palestinian terrorists over the next N years? Do you think it will be more or fewer than have been killed in the last N years? Put N=5,10,15,20,25, whatever. We should make a prediction market and bet on it. Do you want to bet on if Israel continues to exist conditional on various events?
I don't believe for a minute that every single Palestinian wants Israel gone. Of course not! Have I ever said anything like that? But three-quarters of them supported October 7. There are Kahanists but there is nothing comparable.
I wouldn't code you as pro-Palestinian, just as left-wing and anti-war. You want a two-state solution and don't want Israel gone. You oppose October 7 strongly, you oppose Hamas, and you want a two-state solution. Quite honestly you'll find a higher proportion of Israeli Jews who share your view than Palestinians who share your view. Your view is fringe among Palestinians, but not among Israeli Jews.
I'm a bit puzzled why moderate pro-Israel types talk as if there's some other equilibrium outcome to the ongoing settlement expansion (supported by a plurality of Israelis according to polls, and this number is steadily growing; for demographic reasons the trajectory of Israeli politics is going steadily rightward) other than annexation of the West Bank and expulsion of the Palestinians there. So I'm less inclined to view Palestinian extremism as some crazy ex nihilo phenomenon rooted in mere religious fundamentalism. Even 5 years ago a resident of the West Bank would be reasonable to believe that even if they all embraced Gandhiesque pacifism, they would still eventually lose everything to the settler movement. There's still no point in fighting a war you're destined to lose, but any prospect for any peace other than total capitulation basically died with the Olmert government.
That’s nonsense, if they engaged in Gandhiesque pacifism, the settler movement would lose overwhelmingly in Israeli elections.
I think you're doing a kind of meaningless attempt to set a neutral point so that you can say everyone on one side of the point is one one side and vice versa. I don't think that's really meaningful. For example, if I said that anyone who was against Israel's current war was "pro-Hamas", that's . . . a thing I could do . . . but it would obviously be a lot of inflammatoriness for no gain.
Almost no one is saying this. Netanyahu would not say such a thing, and would never accuse Biden of being pro-Hamas.
Meanwhile there are plenty of people who believe that if you accept the existence of Israel in any borders, but you are a Zionist and that therefore you are bad. I think that these people are crazy, but they are actually right about the nature of the conflict.
Really at its core this “neutral point” is not so arbitrary. It’s by far the most natural and important dividing line. This principle - the one that Israel exists - is really the one that is most at stake. It’s not an arbitrary point. It passes the following empirical test. If most Palestinians became OK with the existence of Israel, the conflict would have been solved long ago.
In the same way I do think that the abortion debate is really about if life begins at conception. I think it’s a mistake to call people who really are OK with 12-week bans and that’s it “pro-life”, even if they are more pro-life than the median American. The principle really at the heart of the debate is the conception thing. You have 10-20% of Americans who really believe this. If everyone agreed that the conception thing was ridiculous, abortion would cease to be a relevant political issue. People would fight on the number of weeks but once you accept the principle that conceptionism is wrong it becomes a matter of science and not religion.
Once you accept the existence of Israel, the conflict becomes some kind of normal ethnic conflict / real estate dispute which can be settled in a negotiated deal by rational actors, and not a nationalist holy war. The PA’s admirable verbal commitment to the acceptance of Israel notwithstanding, we are really not at this point yet. All of this talk about the Palestinian “right of return”, which Palestinian negotiators have never conceded (not in 2000, 2008, 2014, 2015, whenever), is at the core of the conflict.
Again there is the asymmetry here. If conception people went away then abortion would cease to be an issue. People might have disagreements on T3 but that would all get worked out. If people who support T3 abortions went away, it wouldn’t solve the issue. The end of Palestinian rejectionism would very quickly lead to a dovish Israeli government signing a two-state solution with a dovish Palestinian government and the settlers getting outvoted. It’s the Second Intifada after all that ousted Barak and put Olmert in power, after Arafat failed to accept the Clinton parameters. The end of the settlement project and the end of the Gaza war would not lead to the end of Palestinian rejectionism, which doesn’t care at all about the Green Line. It’s not at all a coincidence that the conception people and the encampment people are both extremely uncompromising and willing to lose the election for their own political party.
If you disagree, let’s formulate some kind of empirical question and put a prediction market. I did make a lot of empirical claims here.
Are your views different from those of Yair Golan in any meaningful way? Meanwhile there are no influential Palestinian politicians or major political factions who have these views. So yes these are pro-Israel views. Any view that supports the continuation of the existence of Israel, the "Zionist entity", is pro-Israel. Palestinian and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
I very much appreciate your point of view. We've got to have some way of accepting current people rather than making the past the most important thing.
Would you be safe expressing your views about Israel under your own name in Palestine?
I see the situation as both Gaza and Israel having murderous leadership.
OK, "Palestinians and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity" is too strong of a phrase, I apologize for saying that. Most Palestinians think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
Yes there are people in the West - a few ACX commentators, Irish leftists, not encampment people - who are "pro-Palestinian" but not on board with destroying Israel. Quite honestly this is just LARPing, as it's not a position that anyone in the region really has. Meanwhile there are plenty of people in Israel, including major Zionist political parties like The Democrats, that agree with Scott's position.
The feminism analogy is bad. To make it better you have to consider a hypothetical. If US university campuses were full of people chanting that women should not have rights or should be allowed to vote, then you would be a feminist for disagreeing with them. If we got back to 1920's social norms, and you talked about male variability and about the excesses of MeToo, no one would call you anti-feminist.
Also if you are going to criticize some Israeli action, of course I'm not going to deflect and say that Palestinians also did some bad thing. This is an extremely dumb thing to do and it's a non sequitur. If someone talks about Dresden you don't go and say that Auschwitz was so much worse. Yes it was but that doesn't address the point, and civilians in Dresden didn't even know about the gas chambers. I am very different from the feminists you bring up.
> It sounds like you want to forcibly make Scott "Pro-Israel", by intentionally Motte-And-Baileying the "Pro-Israel" position so much that it becomes meaningless.
I'm not sure Motte and Bailey is the right frame here. To use an American example. When Trump first won the Republican primaries, a lot of senior GOP figures endorsed Clinton. Did they move left?
If you define "left" as a series of beliefs and policies no they didn't.
If you define "left" as a team that's opposed to the team called "right" they did.
And I think there is a reasonable case that when "left" is used by the man on the street they think of it in the sense of the second term. Why is solar power left wing? Surely cheap reliable off-the-grid energy fits the rugged individualism and rural localities of the archetypical right wing voter?
Bringing it back to Israel. Replace Trump with "October 11th was a mask off moment for the western pro-Palestine movement".
> You remind me of feminists who - when it suits them - insist that anyone who doesn't literally think that women are breeding mares Untermenschen designed by the creator god to be a slave half-species for men is a feminist.
Does "want to turn women into breeding mare untermenschen" and "everyone else" accurately describe the sides in the culture war over woman's issues in the west?
Does "want to end the existence of Israel as a Jewish state" and "everyone else" accurately describe the two sides of the culture war over support for Israel in the west? It ignores a lot of people in the middle, but I would argue its *much* closer to accurate than the preceding paragraph.
>I think that Israel's **founding** is a moral atrocity - which it is - but I think that enough time has passed that it's no longer morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling Israel
In your view, how much more morally atrocious would the current activities of the currently-existing Israel have to be before it became morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling it?
Settlements are more "illegal immigration" or "gerrymandering" (both bad, to be clear) than "theft". The ones on private Palestinian property are theft, yes, but that's a small minority of them. Not a fan of the settlements, but important to use words accurately.
If you are hoping for a two state solution, then "annexation" is probably the best word. They are an effort to shrink the borders of any potential Palestinian state by putting down enough people that it's easier to change where the border is than displace the settlers.
Often people call it "creeping annexation" because "annexation" has a specific meaning. But yeah, I generally agree.
I wouldn't say that they are actually an effort to "shrink the borders of any potential Palestinian state", more like an effort to prevent one entirely. It's a failed effort. While there has been expansion of existing settlements, creation of actually new settlements has all but stopped. There hasn't been and won't be nearly enough settlement construction to make a two-state solution unviable.
"illegal immigration" is misleading, because the settlers are backed by the Israeli government, not in spite of it.
Fair point, I agree. It’s illegal immigration into the West Bank, backed by the Israeli government. As I said, I think that “theft” is also wrong though, at least for the vast majority of settlers who go to Area C but not Palestinian private property. I think that a stable and lasting two-state solution would be great, but I don’t think it’s meaningful to say that Area C is the collective property of the Palestinians. It’s not actually owned by the PA the way the US government owns US federal land.
Just picking up one little piece: I'm a bit surprised Scott hadn't picked up on the many stories from Jews about being personally harassed on campuses. It's not a big deal that he didn't, it's just possible that I was reading more frightened sources, or that he was more optimistic about universities.
One of the reasons for conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism, is the dishonesty, lies by omission, and worse that come out of anti-zionist circles.
If someone denies any Jewish connection to the land, mistranslates 'Yahud' to 'occupation forces', and consistently fails to analyze the conflict honestly, assuming they are antisemitic makes sense.
Usually they are just deranged 'anti-imperial' leftists borrowing narratives and terms from antisemites from the middle east, but at that point, what's the difference?
Have you read the article?
Do you think this is how Jews, Zionists, or potential Zionists should be treated?
"One of the essential obligations of a university is to provide a feeling of safety, in the most basic sense of the word: the feeling of being safe in one’s room, on one’s way to class or to study. After October 7, numerous students reported that they no longer felt safe. One student who had
moved into her dorm room in September, told us she placed a mezuzah on her doorway as required by ritual law, as traditional Jews have done for centuries. In October, people began banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to move out of the dorm. Visibly observant students, like ones who wear traditional head coverings, have been frequently met with extreme hostility. “On campus, my friends have been spit on, been called like terrible,
terrible names, a very close friend of mine was called, a lover of genocide and then a lover of baby killing. This was only a couple of days after October seventh.” A student told us she had been chased off campus with her brother one night. In many cases, episodes like these have led
to efforts to hide markers of Jewish identity: while some students felt that they could previously “wear our Jewish identity,” now they don’t want their peers to know that they are Jewish. The fear of consequences permeated the atmosphere of campus during these months. One student put
it this way: “If I walk on campus right now with my star out or kippah or say ‘am Yisrael chai’ “the people of Israel live,” a traditional song], I could start World War III.” Many Jewish students said they now avoid walking alone on campus.
Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls, while walking back to their dorms on Friday afternoon and when they were on their way to synagogue. There were also multiple reports of visibly Jewish individuals simply walking past 116th Street who have been followed, stalked, and subjected to ethnic slurs and hateful
statements, like “go back to Poland” and “I hope you guys suffer. You guys think it’s okay to kill innocent babies and bomb hospitals. Yes, Habibi, I’m talking to you,” and, when the hecklers saw that the student was filming them, one said to send the video “to all your Israelis.” Students also recounted finding jokes about Hitler written on communal dormitory whiteboards. Many students described walking down hallways as a painful daily routine.
This hateful rhetoric has often been accompanied by an unwillingness on the part of listeners to engage with Jewish and Israeli students in a wide variety of encounters that are held to be the bedrock of a university community: discussion, empathy, intellectual nuance, argument. Some
Jewish students found that whatever they said, their words were distorted. Some students were made to feel as though their support of Israel, or empathy for Israelis, was inseparable from support for the actions being carried out by the Israeli government. A student said, “There’s a lot
of times where Jewish students are made to justify the actions of Israel, for good and for bad. When you assume that someone’s religious beliefs mean they want a group of people dead, that is hurtful.” Another recounted feeling unable to criticize what’s going on Israel for fear that such discussion would be associated with support for the destruction of the state. Others feared that the assumption that all Jewish students were aligned politically was particularly dangerous for Jews of color, and they were especially concerned about the heightened presence of police on
campus. Still students spoke of what they perceive as the University’s failure to distinguish between different Jewish denominations, mindsets, and beliefs. Several students argued that the administration was only supportive of Zionist Jews. Others expressed their firm belief in the
inextricable connection between Zionism and Jewish identity."
These stories are very bad, whether or not they are "anti semitic". The definition of anti semitism doesn't influence how bad these stories are.
I agree, ideally there should be no special "antisemitism" task force. Certainly, universities shouldn't police the speech and action of their students for any kind of protected free speech, but should punish violations of university policy.
Still, conditional on the existence of all of the DEI bureaucracies and so on and the current state of US universities in 2024, I guess it's better to have one than not have one to expose how hypocritical these universities are. I strongly support removing all DEI, but harping about anti-Semitism is a good way to accomplish that. We have to operate within the system we have. Ideally we'd have more libertarian civil rights laws and free association, but given the ones we have it's appropriate to play the game a bit and sue Harvard for anti-Asian discrimination.
I agree we don't want Jews to be added to any DEI bureaucracy, and should try to dismantle DEI, but this "antisemitism task force" is not becoming an institutionalized and permanent part of the university, so it's not as much of a concern.
>I am skeptical that Columbia's anti-Semitism task force didn't also engage in these fallacious conflations, which are possibly designed to shut down dissent and debate
"Possibly" is being very generous here.
I am going to express my strong support for not treating Scott as emphasising that he thinks Israel has a right to exist (without pogroms!) as a change in his point of view. Unfortunately, it probably a sign of a broader "vibe shift" that it is so often topical for him to do so.
I am also strongly supportive of not treating "takes plausible arguments about very serious topics seriously" as right-coded.
As for the fact that you find his views somehow zionist or right coded, that may be all about you.
You have a point, but I don't think it's all about me. I do think that the more prominent far-left crazy people are, the more sanity becomes right-coded. And of course the prominence of far-right crazy people makes sanity more left-coded.
Yes, we agree about the extreme shifting around a fairly stable center, but your previous comments were about Scott's position changing when I would have thought it was more an illustration of the former phenomenon.
I'd rather say that it's the Israel-related cracks in the leftist-dominated establishment that incidentally lend the right some grudging veneer of respectability. However crazy the radicals are about sex/gender, for example, the establishment entirely has their back, so any dissent is misinformation/bigotry/Russian propaganda. Whereas there's a genuine split on the Hamas apologia, and so a legitimate space for calling out the crazy as such.
What's the terrible argument against race-mixing? Many "races" are already mixed, right? The "white race" was created by race mixing between steppe and farmer. Mexicans are a mix of White and Native, and even African Americans are a mixed population that is only ~75% African genetically on average. Someone like Skip Gates is already mixed, genetically half-white. Cory Booker has blue eyes. If you are talking about black-white mixing in the US context, at least one parent is already mixed, unless his parents came from Nigeria or Ghana or some place like that. Oh, and let's not forget race-mixing between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Ashkenazi Jews are a mix of Italian women and Israelite men. Ethiopians are a mix of East Africans and Middle Easterners. Brazil is a country full of race-mixing. There's already so much race-mixing. Like, on what timescale does this guy think race mixing is bad?
Forgive me if you don't want to engage here. I can only imagine what kind of person would argue against "race mixing". Not even interracial marriage, but calling it "race mixing". Some Neo-Nazi?
OK say that's true for some ways to measure genetic distance. Then what? Who cares? There are tribes of bushmen or whatever so an average pair of people is as distant as an Italian and a Japanese, and more than an Italian and a Spaniard. Should they have an identity crisis? Perhaps a child from this tribe is less related to his father than a random English guy is to a random German guy. What's wrong with genetic distance not lining up with paternity? Should adoption also be banned then?
Bushmen are genetically diverse, but morphologically they are very homogenous. Most genetic diversity is neutral and morphological traits like, skin color, height, facial features, and so on are under intense selection pressures. So they vary much less and reproductively isolated groups converge on a common phenotype relatively quickly. Bushmen don't generally have higher variance in their morphological phenotype then other people. Which is obvious if you've ever seen a group of Bushmen. Genetically they are extremely diverse, but they all look the same.
Humans are visual animals and appearance matters a lot. A person who looks racially different will always be naturally out-grouped, red haired people get out-grouped even by people almost genetically identical to them, same with dwarves.
It's also about culture. Black and white culture are quite distinct in the USA and a mixed race child of ambiguous phenotype will have to choose whether to assimilate more into the white or black culture. They will be alienated from friends and family on the opposite side of that cultural divide. The divide isn't insurmountable, but it is an issue.
I'm still an advocate of race-mixing in general on the grounds that it's the only way to deal with these issues in the long run, by converging the groups genetically and culturally. But, I understand why someone would be apprehensive about having kids that look very different from their cousins and other relatives.
People tried your long term solution and the result is Latin America. How impressive.
IIRC I saw a rebuttal of that claim. Don't remember the details, but the argument might have been that so many genes are not strongly correlated with race that your child's similarly in terms of those genes outweighs the difference due to race-correlated genes.
But even if it's true that mixed race kids are further from you in DNA than other members of your race, who says that's bad? Most of us, if we had an adopted child or loving step-parent, would treat them as akin to a blood relative despite having no DNA in common (beyond the human baseline). For normal people, our degree of caring is based as much or more on social and moral factors as on common biological descent.
Not on Israel, Scott, but on other things. I wrote a long comment on your link #6, it's.... uh, it's quite something.
Without details, I'll just say I got the opposite impression (that Scott's moved pretty far to the left on these specific issues).
By "these specific issues", do you mean just issues concerning Israel and the Jews? Or do you mean both Jews/Israel issues and race/HBD/DEI issues?
The former.
You're all wrong. Scott secretly agrees with me on almost every issue.
Agreed, and more generally true, the obnoxiousness of his closing link commentary highlights that.
Banania is also a poor example to use, and Scott has been referencing/interacting with Sailer for many years now, that's not a change.
Scott can speak for himself and quite eloquently to boot, but post-10/6 I'm like, well, looks like we can't have peace, so I want my relatives to survive. I expect people with Palestinian relatives take the equal and opposite position. We'll see who wins.
Also, a lot of the far right is anti-Israel and explicitly antisemitic (mostly ultimately due to the prominence of Jews on the left over here from what I can tell).
I don't know about politics, but as you get older and settle down and have kids and all that jazz, you tend to trend more small-c conservative. Suddenly all the fuddy-duddy advice about being responsible and sensible seems less fuddy-duddy 😀
"If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain” is a quote attributed to Churchill but seems very likely he didn't say it, so probably our friend Anonymous again.
My understanding is that the earliest version of the quote was about republicanism rather than liberalism.
It’s important to note that WWI ended with maneuver warfare. The Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to take significant swathes of territory with relatively few casualties at least twice so far (in Kharkiv offensive and Kursk offensive), so maneuver warfare is not hopeless in this war.
Yes, maneuver and attrition warfare are two different tools that are used in concert. It's rare for any war to be purely one or the other. Even the first Gulf War against Iraq -- normally thought of as a brilliant maneuver war where the Coalition quickly achieved victory with large scale flanking maneuvers and deep attacks with smart weapons -- was preceded by intense bombing and shelling explicitly described by the general staff as an attrition campaign. Attrition opens up the opportunity for maneuver, and maneuver permits more effective attrition.
The current Ukraine conflict is in an attrition *phase*. It was in a maneuver phase for the first few months, when the incompetent Russian thrusts toward Kyiv and Kharkiv were thrown back. The reasons for the current phase are a lot more complex than just artillery vs air power. I would add a lot more factors like the age of the conflict -- since 2014 -- meaning that continuous and immensely deep fortifications (50 km in places) exist, political limits (Russia doesn't want to call a general mobilization, Ukraine doesn't want to annoy its Western friends), terrain (neither side can go around the fortified lines, the ground is difficult to attack through), and so forth. But it's only a phase. It can shift back into maneuver warfare again.
> when the incompetent Russian thrusts toward Kyiv and Kharkiv were thrown back
... and when Russians got the land bridge to Crimea, which is still under their control.
Agree about phases, and self-imposed political limits on *Russia only* - Ukraine pretty much gets everything (but with moderate delays - which make things harder for them).
Lay public were shocked by trench warfare between developed nations in the 21st century. Military professionals recognize that the conditions which led to the trenches of the western front in 1915-1918 were re-created in Ukraine:
1. Can't go around them: the Joint Ops Area is bounded naturally by coastlines and legally by national borders/limits on long range strikes beyond national borders, once the line of contact stabilizes neither side can easily turn the other's flanks and opening additional fronts has been below the threshold of large-scale combat ops (e.g. clandestine and special ops, info ops, international diplomacy, economic sanctions, etc.)
2. Can't go over them: both sides can effectively contest the airspace, so neither can launch vertical envelopments, air interdiction and close air support is risky, strategic bombing is done by long range standoff munitions (rockets, missiles and drones) instead of waves of manned aircraft.
3. Can't go through them: 21st century weapons defeat 21st century armour, but earthworks offer cheap protection, so defense is stronger than offense. Neither side can rapidly break through so many prepared lines of defense, although Russia seems able/willing to grind it out on the offense.
It's a weird premise, expecting a war to last just a few news cycles.
If I pick 17 assorted conflicts since World War II—Vietnam, the Soviet-Afghan War, the ongoing Syrian Civil War, others—the average duration is ~2,163 days, or nearly 6 years.
The median is 1,812 days (about 5 years), so most of these wars lasted at least half a decade. The standard deviation is around 1,954 days, so there's a lot of variance, and some wars last decades, even with bigger gaps in professional capabilities.
For instance:
The Vietnam War endured for 3,919 days (~11 years).
The Soviet-Afghan War lasted 3,342 days (~9 years).
US was in Afghanistan for arguably ~7,268 days (~20 years).
On the shorter end of the spectrum, we have conflicts like the Six-Day War in 1967 (6 days, per the name) and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (20 days). But these seem to be exceptions rather than the rule.
It's been 933 (awful) days so far, unless you extend back to 2014. Still relatively short compared to many historical conflicts. If you look at the high standard deviation and range of the durations, a 20 year conflict, while difficult to imagine, would not be unprecedented.
On 13, I see that the commenters on that tweet got it right; it's not one in a trillion, it's about one in a hundred million. (Once you fill in two, the other one will usually match.)
It's even worse than that, because of post-selection. Basically, there's thousands of possible vote tallies that are equally surprising / obviously doctored.
I dislike this kind of reasoning, since literally every possible percentage has the same probability- there are a hundred million possible outcomes and you will get exactly one of them. Statistically speaking a round number is no different to any other.
Now you can look at that and say they obviously fixed the percentages first and stupidly worked backwards to get the vote numbers, and you are certainly right. But the probabilistic argument isn't the right one to then make.
I agree with this.
The chance that the vote is exactly 5150092 is 1 in 10058774.
Does that mean a vote is unlikely to be any specific number? Sure? But that doesn't mean its doctored. It has to be one number, after all.
Even glossing over the idea that the chance of at least 1 of a bunch of low-probability things happening is high already so you should expect to see some low-probability outcomes in real life.
Yes, but perfectly round numbers are something a human mind would like choose if asked to pick a percentage. I believe there is actually a science if this in forensic accounting, the kind of numbers humans make up when cooking books is not the same as numbers chosen at random.
I think everyone is in agreement. That such artificial-looking vote totals would crop up by random chance is very unlikely, but it's impossible to quantify exactly how unlikely because the class of "such artificial-looking vote totals" is not well defined.
I don't think that's what everyone is saying, but it is a good point that the situation is underspecified such that we could reasonably disagree about the probability of the observed outcome. Are we taking the total vote as a given, for one, and if not what the is the possible range of vote totals.
While people may disagree about what the complete set of artificial-looking vote percentages is, I think just about every version of that set would include round numbers with no decimals.
We could use Bayes theorem to get somewhat close to what I understand the situation is: calculating the probability that this is doctored , given it is a round number.
P(Doctored∣Round Number)= ( P(Round Number∣Doctored)⋅P(Doctored) ) / P(Round Number)
We probably align on the first probability P(Round Number∣Doctored) ~ 80%?
The second probability , the prior likelihood of it being doctored - I'm not sure since I haven't been following this election, but since popular opinion here online is that its doctored, lets say 20%? This number is ridiculously high compared to a probability I would give normal election being doctored. Let me know if theres a better estimate.
The Probability in the denominator, P(Round number) is a marginal probability:
(P(Round Number∣Doctored)⋅P(Doctored) )+ (P(Round Number∣Not Doctored)⋅P(Not Doctored))
something like (0.80×0.20)+(0.05×0.80) = 0.20
That makes the equation ( 80% * 20% ) / 20% = 80%
So the existence of a round number here moves the probability of the election being doctored from 20% to 80% using this back-of-the-napkin calculation.
Still pretty damning, but we did use a high prior likelihood (20%) for this. Regardless , i think this approach is better than just saying the probability of a round number appearing is 1 in a trillion, which is just a weird underspecified claim.
20% may be too low: the country in question is a dictatorship and the dictator who "won" the election has been in power for 11 years now, and happened to be the handpicked successor of the previous dictator.
So what would be a reasonable probability in your opinion?
I'm not disputing the claim that the election is doctored, I'm just claiming the 'rounded number' statistic used as it is in the tweet is misleading and inflammatory.
How are you getting P(Round Number∣Not Doctored) = 0.05? That seems empirically and theoretically false. Taking your 1 in 10058774 and multiplying by all 1000 possible XX.X00..% values gives 0.0001; extending it to XX.XX00..% gives 0.001. Both of those suggest a movement from 20% to 99%+, provided I'm doing my math correctly. P(Round Number∣Doctored) = .8 also seems quite high- don't election doctors prefer to seem legitimate?
That's a good point, that number is rather unsubstantiated on my end. I'm happy to have more informed probabilities.
The probability that we get a round number, given that the vote totals were not doctored, is the 1 - in - 100 million chance that was discussed earlier.
So we end up with:
P(Round Number∣Doctored)⋅P(Doctored)
/
(P(Round Number∣Doctored)⋅P(Doctored) ) + (P(Round Number∣Not Doctored)⋅P(Not Doctored))
Where:
P(Round Number∣Not Doctored)⋅P(Not Doctored) ~= 0
and we get the result that the odds of a doctored vote total is approximately 100%. No need for any more contrarian sophistry.
Edit: The odds of an undoctored round number is actually closer to 1,000 / 10 million, since there are about 1000 round numbers that the percentages can coalesce around, and 10 million possible vote total results.
Yep, this is a clear case of a bad argument in service of an obviously correct idea that proponents of such ideas tend to be much less critical about. Just because in general it's obvious that P(glaring coincidence|funny business) > P(glaring coincidence|no funny business) it doesn't mean that it's easy to provide meaningful numbers.
Ok, bear with me for a second. Any particular set of (let's say) five cards is equally likely to be drawn, but some patterns (suited Ace through 10) can occur in fewer ways than other patterns (any five suited cards). Once you've drawn five cards, the probability that you have some specific set of five cards is 1. But the probability that you have a low value hand > flush > royal flush. Now, the way to flesh out the statistical argument is with conditional probabilities. Round numbers are "special" like flushes--they have to meet a condition to be included in the set, and there are fewer of them. If the outcome were random, the probability of one of these "special" outcomes occurring wouldn't be 0, but it would be very low. But there are lots of ways to designate special kinds of numbers, you might say, and you could probably find something interesting about any outcome if you tried hard enough. The relevant special property that round numbers have in this case is that humans like to use them much more than they like randomly selected rational numbers. Conditional on the numbers being selected by a human, the probability that they will be "round" at however many digits is much greater, and this gives evidence (not proof) that a human selected them. This conclusion requires probabilistic reasoning. If round numbers were more likely to occur by chance, a round outcome provides less evidence of a human interference.
I looked on the Wiki page which reports different numbers and percentages than those in the tweet. By no means a deep dive. Is there a source for the tweets data?
It's not even relevant, because it doesn't round like that. Dividing Edmundo's total by the overall total gives 44.19999%. Which rounds up to 44.2%. confirming my initial impression that it's a three digit percentage that inexplicably has four zeroes after it due to some kind of clerical error.
EDIT: oh my god i forgot how math works. It's 44.199998, which does round up to 44.20000 exactly.
I'm going to bed.
RE #11: One upside to "vices" being supplied by big corporations instead of by random criminals is that they are much safer that way. Big corporations are beholden to regulation and public scrutiny that illegal manufacturers avoid -- not to mention they are simply much more competent at quality assurance. Sailer worries that "Costco ... [will sell] 100 grams of Coca-Cola brand cocaine party packs for $999", but at least they wont be laced with fentanyl.
Maybe, but in a legal, regulated, market they would have to be labelled as such and of a standard concentration. One of the big reasons so many people are dying of fentanyl overdoses is that the drug is very difficult to dilute appropriately. Corporations can easily solve that problem. Also, corporations are incentivized to provide a less risky substitute -- having your customers die isn't exactly good for business. (of course there is still a risk compensation concern here)
addicts may not be perfectly rational actors, but most of them don't have a death wish, and if there is a comparable substitute that has a much lower change of leading to overdose, they will choose that. For evidence of that claim, see this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30292493/ which finds drug users changing their use behavior based on positive results from fentanyl test strips.
It's totally possible that the positive effects of making safer substitutes available (greater safety for existing drug users) are outweighed by the negative effects (more people being drawn to drugs because of the greater safety); ultimately, it's an empirical question. However, I have a hard time believing that existing drug use would not get safer if safer substitutes were legally available.
I agree that "safer drugs" are not necessarily an unalloyed good. As I mentioned earlier, risk compensation could mean safer drugs actually end up causing more drug harm overall.
I will, however, maintain that the safety of drugs is an immensely important concern, one that was completely neglected in Sailer's article. Every year, tens of thousands of drug users overdose on uncertain mixes of drugs with uncertain concentrations. Some fraction of those users would still have overdosed even if safer alternatives were available, but many of them would not have. We do have empirical evidence that drug users will respond to information about safety (like that fentanyl test strips paper I cited).
I would also like to point out that a large part of the demand for fentanyl (relative to other opioids) is driven by criminalization itself -- the drug's high potency makes it easier to smuggle.
As for the "other issues around drugs" -- like criminality -- those are very real, but I would much rather prosecute people for those crimes specifically rather than for the victimless crime of drug use/possession. Also, I do believe that drug-related criminality would go down if we allowed legal production (and not just in the trivial sense of "drug crimes go away if drugs are legal"). Allowing legitimate producers to make drugs would undercut the cartels.
Under any regulatory regime remotely plausible in the real world, you won't need to "carefully check the label" to know whether your "party pack" contains fentanyl, any more than you need to carefully check the label to know if your cigarettes contain nicotine.
That any legal product containing fentanyl, will have "fentanyl" printed in great big letters front and center on the packaging, and with the Surgeon General's warning in a conspicuous black box, and it will be stored behind the counter with the cigarettes so you'll have to specifically ask the clerk for the fentanyl.
Yeah but they'll also sell fentanyl for $9.99.
Wouldn’t it be worthwhile if it reduced the power of drug cartels and made them significantly less attractive?
I agree that having relatively powerful drug cartels is not necessarily – in the abstract – among the worst things in the world.
Still, I doubt that people who actually had to live under the rule of such a cartel (or, worse, in a disputed area between two cartels) would agree. Recent Mexican history (or even more south) is horrific, as (again) vividly shown by Winslow.
I also beg to differ that the problem is “manageable” – drugs and cartels are stronger and more plentiful than in the past 50 years.
My crux is, I suppose, that I do not expect that addiction-caused “anti-social behavior” will not meaningfully rise if fentanyl becomes legal and cheaper (maybe with a few wrinkles to iron, such as banning its advertising).
It's only weed that has been decriminalized, and while no hard numbers exist it can be assumed it's the product with the lowest profit margin due to many reasons.
I wouldn’t say that criminalization is the problem and I think the timelines do not align so neatly. Here’s what I think happened.
The drugs [here, I’m talking “hard” drugs: heroin or crack] were the original problem (around 1975, at the start of the War on Drugs), so of curse they were criminalized. All this basically accomplished was raise the price, thus strengthening the cartels.
Cartels thus become more powerful – with deeper pockets to bribe authorities or hire gunmen and more credibility when they threaten.
This inflow of money made the cartels more attractive, but also more violent (the better pay for killers being at least of some help here). All of this is well underway by the 1990s, and the power of the cartels has barely stopped growing until then.
Looking at homicide statistics in Mexico is rather interesting: from the 1990s, the rate, while steadily shrinking, doesn’t go much under the US “peak” (~9 per 100k people) in the early 1990s.
The first real spike is between 2007 and 2014 (2010-2012 is particularly bloody, above 20 per 100k), rather before the first decriminalization experiments were underway. I apologize for quoting the same piece of evidence, but the process is very well described in Winslow’s “The Cartel”. This is because cartels are warring by this point using literal armies of mercenaries.
The figures of the past few years seem even more horrific (2018-2021 go near 30 per 100k), which could indeed be related to de-criminalization.
I’d like to clarify that I do not believe criminalization to be the problem. The problem is that people become addicts and then die.
I rather believe that criminalization did little to help, and had the additional harmful effect of helping drug cartels grow, organize themselves, and gain territory (in a very medieval sense – again, you can read “The Cartel” for the gory detail). In today’s world, the drugs will find a way, so trying to guide this way rather than fight it might be more productive.
It would also stop the 100k opiate deaths a year if it were legal and market price, the number one cause of death for people under 40, beating out car accidents now.
And what about the people who will club together to buy the party pack of coke, then lace it with the cheap fent because coke on its own don't got enough kick for them?
That's our problem: not the Platonic Form of the ideal drug user who, if only it were legal, would be rational and moderate in their drug use, but the people who take a mix of different drugs for the specific high and they've developed tolerance to one so they don't get the same kick anymore so they need to spice it up a little. Telling them "now be sure you don't take more than the maximum recommended units per day!" is going to be ignored and mocked.
And replace them with cocaine overdoses? Great?
I want to believe this but I wish I had some more solid basis for actually picking a side here.
Very candidly, I’m not confident in my own take, and this is why I phrased it as a question.
On principle, I ought to be aghast at this, but what the (pretty well-researched) Don Winslow trilogy about the cartels made crystal-clear to me is that, in the US, all drug interdiction has accomplished was to enrich the cartels, thereby making them more powerful, more capable, more attractive and therefore more violent.
Now I’m hearing about how cartels start attacking Europe (starting by corrupting and/or threatening the harbor workers into compliance…) thanks to their blood-soaked gains.
So I’m starting to re-estimate the value of disempowering them… and after all, outside the US, you can ban or regulate some forms of advertising on various grounds, and fentanyl would be a great candidate.
This was my pretty firm position until recently: the odds of the losses to society from a few more lives lost to drug abuse outweighing the gains from cutting off the cartels/mafia are so low that it is another brainer.
Upon reflection, I do still think that but with slightly higher odds of a higher social cost than I expected due to increased mental illness and less flagrant symptoms of use ("laziness", for want of a better word, and probably less pair bonding and children).
You can also ban advertising of certain products in the US. For example, it's illegal to advertise cigarettes.
I got fentanyl in the hospital for about $9 a dose, before insurance.
So? If people want to use opiates, why should I care? And this way: 1. The money doesn’t go to a drug gang, 2. The dosage and purity are regulated
If they commit crimes they should be punished severely. But we don’t generally punish things that just make you more likely to commit other crimes. And people are free to wreck their own lives in a multitude of perfectly legal ways (including by the use of legal alcohol); I don’t see why this one way of ruining your life (opiate addiction) deserves special treatment.
Why should I care about #2?
It's the preference of opiate abusers to have pure drugs, while mine is simply to have fewer addicts. All the rest being equal, if the trade was "drug abuse becomes more dangerous, but less common" I would take that trade. As it is, I'm far from convinced that "better cocaine for the coke heads" is an unalloyed good for society.
I mentioned purity in the sense of drugs not having the harmful additives that they are currently regularly cut with, not in the sense that the drugs would be “better” for users.
I'm aware, that's why I wrote 'if the trade was "drug abuse becomes more dangerous, but less common" I would take that trade'.
I can rewrite my last sentence for you if it helps:
As it is, I remain unconvinced that "safer cocaine for the coke heads" is an unalloyed good for society, versus just being good for people who like cocaine.
Are you saying "I don't think it would be that harmful" or are you saying "I accept that millions would probably die of overdoses and millions more become suffering wretches but I don't really care"? I need to know what kind of disagreement we're having here.
First, I think many people could use opiates that were safe, pure, and cheap without destroying their lives or overdosing. And for those that do end up harming themselves—they consented to do this. No one forced them to use opiates. I’m not in a tizzy over people who choose to ruin their own lives in other ways (eg, spending their entire lives in their parent’s basements). As for the harms they may cause others—if it’s criminal harm, they should be prosecuted and punished. If it’s more emotional harm, well, we don’t prosecute people who cause other emotional harms to people (cheat on them, lie to them, etc.).
I’m not saying I don’t care at all about the suffering of opiate addicts. We should provide free addiction services if they want to get clean. But I simply can’t get too upset over a poor choice that a consenting adult makes.
Are there any stories that have happy endings where the fentanyl addict cleans up their act and lives a good life simply because they couldn't afford enough fentanyl to screw things up irreversibly?
I'm skeptical. I think "fentanyl addict" + "expensive fentanyl" mostly just leads to things like "fentanyl addict with an armed robbery conviction". But if the happily-ever-after version is actually a thing, just tax the stuff to a level slightly below what illegal dealers can afford to match.
> mostly just leads to things like "fentanyl addict with an armed robbery conviction".
So in a sensible world, the fentanyl addict gets put in prison, where they can't get fentanyl and they undergo a painful cold-turkey detox. When they eventually get out of prison in twenty years, we hope that they don't seek out fentanyl again.
The failure of prisons to be drug-proof is another "non-sensible world" problem.
Have you never heard of marginalism?
Supply and demand curves slope upwards and downwards respectively
Life isn't made up of binaries, it's made up of sloping curves, curves that tend more towards the middle on average, by necessity.
Some people put off by the high price never become addicts, some addicts cut down a tiny bit, some dealers drop out of the market. It all averages out to the nice clean near normal demand curve.
The world isn't a binary of fentanyl fiends that will do anything to get their dose for the day and normal people who never do it. It's a continuum of severe addicts, addicts, near addicts, party users, party goers partaking, and normal people who would never partake. All groups; also, can slightly change their usage.
Empirically all goods are somewhat elastic and usually much more elastic than intuition expects.
I think the best solution for the drug crisis is multi-fold:
1, All drugs are available to adults in the pharmacy in generic packaging with standardized doses, quality monitored. No fancy trade names, no marketing, no advertising. Highly regulated with multiple manufacturers, at least ten. No collusion, back-room deals, or contracts, manufacturers compete with open market pricing to retailers, pharmacies get a fixed percentage of markup. No manufacturing consolidation, if consolidation would result in dominance or supplier shrinking, its barred.
2, Any unlicensed manufacturing, reselling, gifting, or distributing to minors results in heavy time. Need easy path to licensing to allow startups, and prevent regulatory capture.
3, Drug use on the streets, spinning out in the park, &c results in immediate arrest, mandatory 30 days drying out locked in rehab, no excuses. If you can keep it in your safely home, do whatever. Probably need to mandate safe trip resorts for psychedelics where you check into a closed facility and check out when you're good.
Where are we going to find the resources to put 30% of the population in rehab?
We're currently paying $60k per year to house them in tents on the street. Death Row inmates cost less to house than that.
>One upside to "vices" being supplied by big corporations instead of by random criminals is that they are much safer that way. Big corporations are beholden to regulation and public scrutiny that illegal manufacturers avoid -- not to mention they are simply much more competent at quality assurance
This is a libertarian myth that will seemingly never die. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Americans who've died of perfectly legal opioids manufactured by 'big corporations'. The illegal fentanyl crisis is certainly bad, but the first 15 years of opioid deaths were mostly with legal ones that were simply misused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_States
Opioids are inherently dangerous, so just because a regulated company manufactures them with relatively high-quality standards, an addict can still take too many. Your company can have the best quality assurance in the world, but if you take too many to get high because you're an addict, death is unavoidable
This is all true. But the criminalization of these drugs stops people from accessing safer substitutes. As it explains in the article you linked, when the government cracked down on prescription opioids, this shifted people towards illicit drugs like heroin, and eventually fentanyl. I agree that opioids are inherently dangerous and I would rather live in a world where nobody engaged in self-destructive behaviors, but this is not the world we live in. In our current world I would much rather have a variety of safer substitutes available. Don't you think that fentanyl overdoses would drop if, say, Duragesic patches were readily available over the counter?
I agree that if you somehow only targeted hardcore addicts, and replaced their fentanyl with oxys, it would probably save some lives. But it's impossible to only target them. Making a legal substitute 'readily available over the counter' would widen the pool of people using them- not just the current addicts, but it would also make it easier for non-addicts to get started. I.e. let's make up a number and say that there are 1 million hardcore addicts in the US. If you make something 'readily available over the counter' now you've widened that pool to 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 million new addicts, who weren't using opioids before because it was difficult to get them.
Also- and I can tell everyone arguing this has never done hard drugs- you can't prevent people from doing fentanyl. Fentanyl just didn't exist in mass quantities before, its use wasn't 'caused' by the government. Once an addict has built up tolerance to the legal stuff, they'll move on to illegal fentanyl to get even higher. Opioids build strong tolerance, so after a few months of doing Government Regulated Opioid now it doesn't get you as high- but you can get fentanyl on the street to recreate that high. Plus, again, you've now widened the pool of addicts who want to do it. Make sense?
Drugs have become much more decriminalized in this recent years. That's not the same as legalized, but it's interesting.
Did drug overdose fatalities or homicides go down?
" Ruxandra Teslo has a review of the theory that aristocratic women drove the early adoption of Christianity. I’m waiting to read Rodney Stark’s The Rise Of Christianity before having an opinion, but saving this to come back to later."
rux read that on my recommendations (salzman). the thing with *the rise of christianity* is you can summarize it as simply an autocatalytic model for the growth of christianity driven by supply-side dynamics seeded by the jewish diaspora
Almost everyone in the New Testament was Jewish, especially Jesus, who liked to spend most of his time at the temple arguing about the true interpretation of scripture.
it's not my theory. did you read my comment? it's rodney starks' theory in *the rise of christianity*
he posits that the jewish diaspora was the core around which the christian religion grew all across the empire, and that hellenistic judaism became christianity (or more precisely hellenistic jews converted to christianity)
This seems to contradict the account in Acts, which repeatedly describes attempts to evangelise the Jewish diaspora as broadly unsuccessful. There are several chapters which basically follow the pattern: (a) Paul goes to a city, (b) he preaches in the synagogue, (c) the Jews reject him, (d) he preaches to Gentiles, who convert in great number.
1) the baseline is value above replacement
2) stark's thesis is a lot of the conversion of jews happened centuries after the acts of apostles
How did Paul finance his travel?
There was a study a while ago that claimed Christianity spread faster in cities with large Jewish populations. Which makes sense. It was a Jewish cult that also started to take in gentile followers. The Christians document in the New Testament a lot of the internal conflict between Jews who wanted to keep Christianity a more Jewish religion demanding people follow Mosaic Law(Just less intensely then the Pharisees wanted), and people who thought it fine that the gentile converts abandoned most of the rules that weren't general moral requirements, but things peculiar to the Jews as a people.
Maybe, but early Christians didn't seem that literate and the New Testament presents the very early Christianity as a cult primarily among the lower classes of Jewish society, opposed to the priests.
Paul is the one exception, but he was a Pharisees originally and his elite status as a Pharisee and Roman citizen seems to have been why his version of Christianity became dominate. That and it being very pro-gentile.
It's hard to say if the later parts of the New Testament were written by Jews or gentiles, they both wrote in Greek.
one reason there is an assumption that the class origins of the christians was not very high (though i doubt it was very low either) is that the greek of the NT is supposedly rather common and unpolished. this was something mentioned by elite converts and pagan skeptics of the religion.
that being said, the religion spread in the cities, so that excludes the rural poor
By "later parts of the New Testament" do you mean chronologically later or later in canonical order? Traditionally Luke is the only non Jewish NT author.
I mean chronologically. My understanding is that everything other than the genuine Pauline epistles are after the First Jewish Roman War at the earliest. The traditional accounts of authorship are laughable and can’t be taken seriously.
He may be referring to the fact that the Roman Empire was 6-7% Jewish in belief, not ethnicity. That is, not Israelites. There’s a desire there for a world creating single God to believe in, but converting to Judaism is hard, while Christianity makes it easier.
I think this is much closer to the mark. Christianity initially found favour among philo-Semitic Gentiles.
I remember cautioning my brother against lambda school specifically because their placement rate was so high they had to be lying or kicking out anyone who they couldn’t place / thought wouldn’t be placeable.
6: I had a similar experience as someone who had children very early for my social class. People will ask me repeatedly if I'm really under 30, why the hell I would do that and so on. I even got stopped on the street occasionally and asked if I was allowed to have that baby, or where the parents where. And the age we had kids was average in our country in my own parents generation! Our own parents had kids at the same age and nobody thought that was weird.
Thanks for sharing. Very sad.
#29 the "Greerhead Pledge" seems incredibly weak. There's four conditions: no marijuana, no Marvel movies, no tattoos and no rap music. If you're in the target market for this pledge then you're probably not interested in those things anyway, so it basically just lets you pledge not to do things that you're already not interested in, and give some guy called Greer the credit.
I don't think it has particularly valuable content, I just think it's an interesting form that someone else could potentially stick valuable content in elsewhere. I agree that one strong argument against it being a valuable form is that maybe nobody would do it if it were actually hard.
TBF to Greer, he talks at the link about some earlier version that said no NFL and got lots of people mad, so he must not be making it too easy.
No MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice? For those reasons, I'm out.
Can't touch that.
I think I understand the reasoning behind abstention from rap, tattoos, and cannabis. What is the (I assume moral, not aesthetic) objection to Marvel movies? Are DC Movies or movies based on independent comics acceptable?
edit - I've looked into it and it appears to be a combination of DEI and low quality storytelling.
I am effectively already mostly following this pledge (I have seen ~3 marvel films, and only sometimes listen to Death Grips), and I'm not even politically aligned with Greer.
I'm following all four, does that make me a Greerhead? Are there benefits to that? Will a mysterious billionaire shower largesse upon me upon proof of Greerheadedness?
You get to brag about it. I can't guarantee people will be impressed, but that is your problem to deal with.
No billionaire bux? Forget it then, I'll just crawl back under my rock!
I'm just curious about the Marvel movies part. The other three I can see a plausible theory of direct or (mostly) indirect affiliation with people who will lead you astray in some manor.
Why Marvel specifically? If it's superhero movies/comics/shows you can say that directly. If it's culturally homogenous crap, then say that. If it's bad or culturally poor movies, then say that. "Marvel" seems like the wrong category boundary.
"If it's bad or culturally poor movies, then say that."
I am only watching the second season of the Rings of Power for the criticism, I swear! Which reminds me, gotta tune in to this week's episode and see what fresh hell awaits. We should be getting up to the siege of Eregion and poor Celebrimbor being turned into an Orc banner (though.. with the new, family-friendly, 'we only want a patch of land to call our own so we can settle down with our wives and kids' Orcs who don't wanna go to war today, will we still get that?) so I can't wait.
Comic-book superheroes in general are an extremely low-grade sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy, in which success comes if and only if you're bitten by a radioactive spider or whatever, and once you're one of the chosen few then you don't really have to *work* at anything, it just happens, and you get to go around beating up people you don't like and everybody will think you're awesome for it. I can see how that might lead people astray, in a world where success actually requires hard work and beating people up is usually a really bad use of your time that makes people mad at you.
Other forms of popular entertainment are not exactly devoid of wish-fulfillment, but e.g. Old School Star Wars gives us Leia (born a princess), Luke (lucky break but then had to really work at developing his skills), and Han (self-made man). And while their victories are usually achieved by violence, it's usually a far more strategic application of violence than the usual Final Superhero Boss Battle and there's the implication that they then want to settle down and do something productive rather than just find more people to beat up for the rest of their lives.
And then there's Old School Star Trek.
Sure, I can see that, but then "Marvel" is a subset of a larger category. He could call out wish fulfillment generally, or all superheroes (does he also mean DC?) or whatever actual category. Now, maybe he's just not that good at making such lists and is just pointing out the most popular to kind of shame people into living better. Okay, I guess, but that one in particular seems to undermine his list by being unhelpfully narrow.
I think it's pretty easy for non-geeks to forget that DC superhero movies are a thing that A: matters and B: are distinct from Marvel superhero movies. But yes, the list would have been better if that entry had been as broadly generic as the rest.
I guess my tastes make me unintentionally match some highly politicized internet rando's idea of what's good. Can't figure out whether to feel good or bad about it, I guess neutral will do.
Almost no one I personally know to my right manages to abide by it. I'm going to sound like Hanania for a bit, but you very much overestimate the general ability of the average right-winger to not consume media that hate them or is antithetical to their belief systems. I didn't know about the specific pledge, but I like it as it could become a good shortcut in conversations to the kind of attitudes it points to.
re: Gusev. The truth is that no one wants to talk with him because he's a known liar who distorts evidence in his favor because he's on a mission. Most of his engagement is in bad faith and he is also a malicious doxxer who actively attempts to bring harm unto others whom he dislikes. Any engagement is tiring. A quick glance at his articles confirms that they're practically devoid of content anyway. For example, the one you linked doesn't contain much in the way of good reasoning, but it does contain lots of senseless errors.
> IQ is much less heritable... than height
Where is this established? Nowhere, that's where! How does he claim to provide an upper-bound on how predictable things are? By suggesting that a given molecular heritability estimate is the upper-bound. For what reason? None except a quote from Yang et al. that doesn't actually say that the GREML estimate is an upper-bound on heritability. Since you can easily increase heritability with more liberal MAF filtering, this clearly isn't a quote that supplies evidence of bounding.
> IQ is... more confounded than height
Read his paragraphs. He doesn't understand the word "confounded" much less provide evidence for his point. To seemingly (but not actually) make his point, he cites Howe et al. for some reason, despite their findings being unreplicable (with good reason) and irrelevant.
> Genetic effects on IQ differ within families much more than for height
This has not been demonstrated to hold generally, assortative mating matters greatly here, and—keep this in mind for all comments comparing physical and psychological traits—measurement quality matters a great deal as well. There is no demonstration that what he's said is actually a finding, and it's not clear it has any relevance to the claim that height and IQ are dissimilar. The earlier statements don't seem to be relevant either, but oh well.
> IQ estimates are much more biased by participation than height
At the point where the comments are this irrelevant, you really just have to say "So what?" and hope an explanation comes. But it never will. At best, there'll be some handwringing about how this matters because of reasons amounting to assumption begging.
> The genetics of IQ is much more environmentally sensitive than height
The largest study of this took place at a conference not long ago and it showed effects on IQ scores but not on intelligence. Notice how the distinction hasn't been mentioned to this point in the article. Notice also how a comprehensive view of the literature on GxE for IQ and height hasn't been undertaken. I assume that's because it's generally not as supportive of the existence of any interaction as his selected citations seem to be.
> Unlike height, no one knows what IQ is actually measuring
In this section, you're treated to misunderstandings galore that I think you're aware of, so if you read this part, you should have probably doubted the rest too.
Or in a paragraph:
The idea that IQ is harder to predict can be met by saying 'Currently' and following that up with 'It's measured with error, measured very poorly in the largest datasets, and it's not been hit with a big GWAS yet.' The idea that IQ heritability is lower than for height can be met by saying 'This isn't relevant. The heritability of g is similar to the heritability of height, and no, it does not vary by continent; that is an artefact of selective citation practices.' The idea that the molecular heritability is a smaller fraction of the total heritability meets 'No one has shown this to be the case for the correct phenotype, in large, whole-genome data, and we do know the architectures differ such that the data almost-certainly matters a great deal.' The idea that the correlations are poorer within families meets 'This has no real relevance, it's just throwing things against the wall and hoping they stick. This is largely down to the predictable effects of assortative mating (the treatment of which he completely butchers and he has shown on Twitter he doesn't understand at all), as Young (the person he cited) has noted.' The idea that confounding by taking part in a study differs for these traits meets 'This has no relevance, it's just a fact about height and current measurements of IQ being differentiated in any way, not stating that the traits themselves are meaningfully differentiated. If we believe all correlations must be the same for traits to have similarity, then few traits are similar even when they clearly are. This ultimately has no bearing whatsoever on the subject at hand; it is a red herring.' The idea that IQ seems more interactive meets 'Not shown, not robustly replicable, and not relevant.'
It's an article intended to confuse by a person who intends to cause harm. Nothing more than that and much less than it seems to an uninformed reader.
Because he is clearly a bad faith crank on a mission, that's all I have to say about Gusev.
I agree there should be a presumption of crankishness for anyone making strong arguments against twin studies in 2024, but his arguments are superficially compelling and I hate dismissing superficially compelling arguments on a mere presumption rather than genuinely understanding what's going on and to what degree they're wrong. The things I'm most interested in are:
- Better understanding of the molecular heritability vs. direct heritability claims, and an analysis of why his interpretation of the Howe (2022) within-sibship GWAS estimates is wrong
- An analysis of why his interpretation of the Young (2022) family/population genetic correlations is wrong
- Better understanding of why, if height and IQ have basically similar structure, all of these methods more or less agree with the twin studies on height but disagree with them on IQ.
- I can't tell of this is the same thing Gusev is talking about, but better understanding of what's going on with https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6130754/ and whether we should trust their estimates more than twin studies (or at least similar to twin studies, such that we should land somewhere in the middle)
Keep in mind that I don't know what "MAF filtering" is, so your argument above isn't very helpful. What I'm requesting is something addressed to the average person with an undergrad level of genetics knowledge which handholds our way through the arguments at least as much as Gusev's own article does.
I appreciate that cranks enjoy their role more than other people enjoy debunking them and that this creates an unfair burden, but I think it's an unfair burden somebody has to take up, and since you're a genetics blogger I'm afraid this may be your job.
That's fair. I'll DM you to get you in touch with the relevant person for a few of these and I'll have a post dealing with the rest soon.
What struck me about that article was the unclear relationship between the predictive power of linear models on genomes, which do not work for genes that combine in complicated ways, and the greatest possible genomic influence. It is a huge leap to go from one to the other, and the analogy with height (which is the sum of things like growth hormone, leg length, torso length, neck length...) to intelligence (which is ???) did not bridge the gap with much clarity. I would like to see an explanation of why GWAS are treated as upper bounds and not the lower bounds they actually are.
I think I know less about this than you do, but I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that in real life gene x gene interaction effects only explain a tiny amount of variance and can usually be ignored.
Much of the research saying this using a molecular approach is on physiological traits like height, etc, I think. For twin studies, gene*gene can be "hidden" by shared-environmental effects and by assortative mating. Gene*gene increases the distance between correlations between MZs and correlations between DZs, but these other things decrease this distance, and so it might end up looking like everything is just additive genetics (i.e. rMZ = 2*rDZ). Still, it is quite common for MZ twins to be "too highly correlated", such that the model needs something more than just additive genetic effects to explain why their correlation is so much higher than that of DZ twins. Extended family designs (which also use correlations between the relatives of twins, such as their children, parents, spouses, etc), can disentangle shared environmental effects and assortative mating from other kinds of effects. But there are many other kinds of effects that have the same effect that gene*gene effects have, which is to specifically increase the similarity of MZ twins. Relaxing the equal environments assumption achieves this, for example. So do certain kinds of gene-environment interplay. So, in conclusion, I would say that what Concerned Citizen is saying could very well still be true.
Despite Gusev's waning, I still use height as my default model for how things work with polygenic traits, and I would be really surprised if there was a bunch of gene * gene interaction lurking in IQ genetics. At the very least, I would say that our prior should be on the additive numbers, and that's what we should be giving as our headline result until we get some evidence that g*g interaction exists.
Can you explain what you mean by the "too highly correlated" point?
Sure. If additive genetic effects are the only reason relatives resemble each other, then the correlation between monozygotic twins should be exactly twice that of dizygotic twins. If the correlation is higher than this, that is "too high" for the purely additive model. One of many ways to "fix" this is to add non-additive genetic effects, such as g*g, since these are more than twice as correlated between MZ twins as they are between DZ twins.
Two things that are not fixes, but rather the opposite, are: Assortative mating and effects of the family environment.
Assortative mating increases the genotypic similarity of DZ twins, since the genes they do not share now become more likely to "pull in the same direction". MZ twins, on the other hand, cannot get any more genotypically similar. There is heavy assortment on IQ and education. A purely additive model that incorporates a realistic degree of assortment on IQ (mates correlate ~.40 on it) would predict that MZs should be about 1.5 times as correlated as DZs, not 2 times. So, with this, real MZ-correlations (often >.80 for IQ) now seem more "too high" compared to DZ-correlations (typically ~.40).
Adding effects of the family environment also makes things worse (unless the equal environments assumption is very badly wrong), since both types of twins share family environments. Yet, there is increasing evidence, from e.g. molecular genetic studies, that family environments do contribute towards family resemblance on IQ and, perhaps moreso, on educational attainment.
Molecular heritability (SNP heritability, SNP h2) is estimating how much phenotypic variance is explained by all SNPs in a GWAS, using methods like GREML or LDSC. This is usually restricted to common SNPs (high MAF, minor allele frequency), partly because the methods aren't as reliable for very rare SNPs. SNP h2 estimates are typically only around half as large as twin h2 estimates, and that difference is sometimes called missing h2. SNP h2 estimates are in theory an upper bound for how much variance an additive predictor (a linear model) based on those very same SNPs can explain in an independent sample of the same population. If twin h2 estimates captured only additive genetic variance, they would be an upper bound for how much variance a linear model of all genetic variants can explain, but in practice twin h2 estimates capture some non-additive genetic components as well.
SNP h2 estimates aren't generally thought of as actual h2 estimates, because they only capture the contribution of common variants, and it's clear from comparisons to twin study h2 estimates that a lot is missing from SNP h2 estimates (no one thinks that the h2 of height is only 0.38).
Unlike twin h2 estimates, SNP h2 estimates generally come from unrelated samples collected for a GWAS, and the estimates can be inflated by indirect genetic effects (variants that are associated with the studied trait, after correcting for population stratification, but that aren't causal. For example, a variant that causes parents to read to their children may be associated with IQ or educational attainment in the child generation, without being causal in that generation)
A study design based only on sibling pairs, like the Howe study, only captures direct effects. I think it's true that indirect genetic effects contribute more to the total SNP h2 of traits like IQ and educational attainment, than to the SNP h2 of height. That also explains why the genetic correlations between population genetic effects (indirect effects) and direct genetic effects are lower for IQ and education than for height, as reported in Young 2022. However, I have never seen genetic correlations expressed as R2, and I assume that's just to make the numbers look smaller.
I haven't looked too closely at Relatedness disequilibrium regression, but I think that since it's using haplotypes shared among close relatives, it's better able to capture the effects of very rare variants, and perhaps some non-additive effects, and it probably isn't inflated by indirect genetic effects.
So the issues with GWAS based SNP h2 estimates are real, but that says more about the GWAS study design than about trait heritability. Twin h2 estimates have their issues as well, but my sense is that it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to convince yourself that an unbiased estimate for IQ would be lower than 0.3 (at least that's my takeaway from this post: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/twin-heritability-models-can-tell)
Given your status as a sort of influencer on these subjects, I find both the accusation of crankishness and your appearnt unfamiliarity with the points Sasha makes in that post kind of shocking.
He's a great science communicator, but his day job is doing cancer research and he's done no original work in behavioral genetics. The criticisms of twin heritability estimates he cites have been part of the scientific literature for decades.
Within behavioral genetics, people like Eric Turkheimer have been making simular arguments about the difficulty of addressing environmental confounding since the 80s. From the broader genetics community as a whole, which has often treated the BG with a great deal of suspicion for reasons that should now be obvious, heavyweights like Kempthorne and Lewontin weighed in making much the same point.
What's changed in the past few years is that genomic studies have become powerful enough to address these questions, the net result of which has been to vastly diminish estimates of the meaningful genetic causation of variance in psychological amd behavioral traits.
I'm all for amateurs educating themselves about science, but at the risk of being accused of making a "selective demand for rigor", the way to do that is by familiarizing yourself with the scientific literature, not by trying to absorb through osmosis knowledge of a topic as complex as human genetics from professional internet racists.
I said there was a presumption of crankishness for people trying to deny twin studies, which I think is true. In his post, Gusev accuses Robert Plomin of (basically) crankishness, so I don't think you can argue that he just represents some sort of completely normal consensus.
I'm familiar with Turkheimer and Lewontin, have gone over their arguments, and satisfied myself that they're either wrong or at least pitch things in a misleading way, such that I'm more confident taking eg Plomin and Deary's side. I think this is also true of the broader scholarly community. Gusev's arguments aren't exactly the same, as you can tell from the fact that he cites various forms of genetic study developed in the late 2010s where the main papers are from 2017 and 2022 respectively. I've never heard those arguments before, the papers are pretty complicated, and I think I did the right thing by linking his post, the comments on the post, his followup post, and asking people for their opinions instead of immediately trying to come to a conclusion. I have never been dishonest about the fact that I've taken genetics up to a med school level but am not a professional behavioral geneticist myself. I think this is a common level of understanding for science writers, who are not always themselves the greatest experts in their field, and I've tried to never write confidently about anything I didn't understand.
I feel like you're not just making a selective demand for rigor, but demanding I take someone at his word without asking any questions or trying to learn the whole story. Your last sentence suggests your ulterior motives here - as you should know, it's hard to generalize from within-race heritabilities in eg twin studies to between-race numbers - and makes me more comfortable dismissing you as a bad actor.
"In this model, Asians (Korea, Japan, etc) are having the most fertility issues because their societies are most collectivist, ie people more closely follow the gradient of what is vs. isn’t considered socially acceptable/high-status"
I have a post on how fertility rates for US born E. Asian women are exactly the same as existing rates back home when you adjust for intermarriage. If status were the main issue you'd expect to see considerable differences. Rather than cultural factors, I argue that low E.A fertility is the inevitable result of introducing sexual choice into societies with no history of it. This theory would explain why Japan, with it's minority tradition of love marriages has a higher fertility than SK, Taiwan, Singaporean Chinese...
Malcolm Collins reviewed my work and found a study showing lower levels of sexual interest in among Asians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KvNX1WWRyg&t=92s .
American East Asians are also most likely to pursue high status lifestyle markers (including Ivy League education) so their low fertility is not in conflict with the model proposed.
why do you need to adjust for intermarriage?
24: the article doesn't state the name of the WhatsApp group, but I'm pretty sure it's talking about the leak of an Australian group called "Jewish Creatives and Academics". The group's messages didn't get much news coverage, but it was reported that the messages included quite a lot of Islamophobia. The group also badmouthed fellow Australian Jews who were not supportive of Israeli government actions, such as Antony Loewenstein, whom they called a "traitor". So from what's been reported, it appears to be more of a pro-Israeli government group, rather than a general Jewish group. I'm just adding this for clarity because the link doesn't mention it.
It's also worth explaining why NYT was even interested in the messages. Prior to that event, another Australian WhatsApp group called "Lawyers for Israel" succeeded in lobbying our public-owned broadcaster to fire a journalist who had re-tweeted a report on human rights in Gaza. The journalist, Antoinette Lattouf, is currently taking the broadcaster to court for firing her illegally.
That’s pretty much journalism, right?
I actually don't think that's an unreasonable statement. Considering the incredible volume of propaganda and many high-profile lies coming from the Israeli government I think it's sadly quite predictable that many would be skeptical. If she said they categorically didn't happen then I would be concerned.
Reporters should be skeptical of everyone's claims. But also, isn't it their job to try to get to the bottom of those claims? I mean, I don't know what the balance of evidence looks like on how many rapes were done on 10/7 (or afterward to hostages), but it seems like the sort of thing a journalistic organization should be trying to get to the bottom of--watch the available footage, talk to witnesses, look at whatever documentation is there, etc.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67629181
Among many others. The Israelis are *not*, not not not, going to put graphic videos of their own people being raped and mutilated on Youtube for everyone to gawk at, or have the traumatized survivors subject to journalistic inquisition, just because someone whines "Inquiring Minds Want to Know!" But they have shown some of those videos, privately, to reputable journalists. And not just the pro-Israeli journalists. AFIK, basically all of the responses have been either "I don't want to talk about it" or "it's worse than you can imagine".
The only people who aren't going to be convinced by that, are the ones who would insist that any video was faked and any eyewitnesses were lying anyway.
It doesn't matter what they believe, leaking their names to the public encourages radicals - or other radicals, depending on the group - to target them. A bunch of radicals fighting it out is the last thing we, as normal people reading the Times, would ever want. Why do they keep trying to provide it to us?
"The NYT claims she was adequately disciplined in private. If you don't trust them on that, you don't trust them enough to trust their reporting, so it's a moot point; just stop reading."
Don't understand this point.
He's saying that because the NYT says appropriate punishment was given, that should be enough proof that it was. If you don't believe them when they say that, presumably that means you don't trust the NYT anyway and he suggests someone who feels that way should just not read the NYT.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bounded-distrust
Should we follow this same procedure for police shootings?
Google "Knoll's law", the above comment is asserting the same logic.
There is a check on their reporting, which is that lies or omissions are likely to become public later due to competing reporting.
There is no check on their disciplinary process, and no reason to trust their claims about it at all.
The chat logs weren't posted in public. They were leaked precisely to activists likely to harass the users.
If I had access to some pro-Gazan message board, what's the journalistic purpose of me sending the entire contents to several staffers at AIPAC?
I think we're agreeing: I also believe that it is a very bad idea to point activists on opposing sides out to each other, and that it works the same for each side. That said, I don't quite see AIPAC as prone to harassing or injuring anyone. A better example might be leaking the names of pro-Gazan activists to those employers who were promising not to hire people with those views a while ago. (This was mentioned in the news but I don't remember who vowed to do it).
The people I know of who lost jobs with law firms or communal organizations did not just express pro-Gazan views but specifically described the October 7 attacks as heroic resistance and those murdered, including children, old people, etc, as justified targets. Plenty of people who fully hate on the current Israeli government or even quesiton the legitimacy of the State still think treating the 10/7 attackers as heroes is a bridge too far. Compare: you probably shouldn't lose your US law firm job for, let's say, expressing interest in kinda-racist social science, but maybe you should for celebrating a Klan lynching as heroic.
I would tend to advise lenience for both people guilty of repeating some of the propaganda talking points coming out of the fringe in Israel, along with people guilty of sympathizing with Hamas or the KKK. In all cases the speakers are repeating things they were persuaded of by others: the original liars, who do not work at U.S. law firms.
The issue at hand is leaking details from a private WhatsApp group so people get harassed, the qualities and actions of the people involved are irrelevant.
I agree, but it was characterized as an anti-semitism support group. I'm just pointing out that it wasn't.
The WSJ article says the NYT reporter joined the group long before the Lattouf affair, thus the affair cannot have been the original reason for interest in the messages unless theWSJ timeline is incorrect.
"While a group administrator indicated in the chat that it wasn’t intended for political debates, there were instances when chat group members veered into advocacy. That included discussions on how to bring comments made by pro-Palestinian activists to the attention of their employers or publishers, when they were deemed by members to be antisemitic. "
Someone tried to cancel them while they were trying to cancel someone else. It was a like a Mexican Cancel-Off, worthy of a Tarantino scene. I dunno...as someone who considers himself an old fashioned liberal, I shouldn't do this, but I kinda want them both to be canceled just for being a bunch of chowderheads.
Edit: that might be overly harsh. I'm sure it wasn't everyone in this group engaged in the attempted cancelations.
Any indication that it was actually specifically "pro-current Israeli government and its policies" rather than just Zionist (i.e., pro Israel's continued existence)?
Most Israelis and Zionists abroad are very critical of the gov't and completely orthogonally don't like continously hearing that our home should go up in flames by any means necessary
Is there some reason we can't have legalization for all drugs the same way we have for cigarettes, where they are illegal, but they have a lot of regulations making them inconvenient and costly. That seems like it's worked pretty well. Smoking is on the decline and smokers are far less inconvenient to others.
To me, the problem of drug gangs dwarfs pretty much every other problem around drug legalization. It seems insane to me to tell half the population of Latin America that we sure are sorry that ruthless gangsters are the de facto government of where they live, but it's worth it so people can't abuse drugs.
Ok, but if you make drugs illegal then you have a society where drug-selling gangsters are everywhere destroying it. That also seems unacceptable.
It also seems like it would probably be easier to arrest addicts for anti-social behavior than to arrest gangsters, since the gangsters are more organized.
Plans that create net benefit at the expense of horrible injustice for an unlucky 1% are something of a goldmine for rational improvements to society that for some reason haven't already been made...
They're not different, I was just being sarcastic in a not-so-productive way.
Funnily enough, one of the most interesting things I've learned is that *that* sort of abuse of police power, is something most people would probably approve of! Because, as John Pfaff, Professor of Law at Fordham University found, those drug charges were being used as a way to get after domestic abusers & the like! See https://colemanhughes.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Ep.6-John-Pfaff.pdf, pages 5 & 6:
"COLEMAN HUGHES: What's the status of the hypothesis that the "war on drugs" is the main, or a main driver of mass incarceration? And this this hypothesis is, was most importantly popularized by Michelle Alexander's book "The New Jim Crow". So what's the status of her thesis?
JOHN PFAFF: Right. So, in terms of simple numbers, the percent of people in US prisons for drugs was around five percent or five or six percent in 1980. It peaks at around 20 percent in 1990. And then, since then has declined to around 15 percent today in the state systems. And so it was never the the dominant driver. Um, and it it's even more complicated than that for two reasons. One is that it's important to understand what we mean when we call someone as being prison for drugs. What that means is that is the most serious offense for which they were convicted. It doesn't tell us anything about what they're arrested for or why they went to prison in the first place. Right?
So you can imagine there, we know there's some number of cases--we don't know how many--right? If someone who's say gets arrested for domestic abuse, he has heroin on him at the time of the arrest. His partner won't testify against him. And so the DAs decide that rather than try to force through a difficult aggravated assault charge with an uncooperative victim, "We'll just charge, if you just plead guilty to the heroin, we won't charge you for the aggravated assault, but we're still going to demand prison time for the heroin because of the assault."
And so you show up in prison as a low-level nonviolent drug offender, but you're there because of that, either that contemporaneous violence or prior violence on your record that that we can't see. Um, and so some fraction of that 15% percent aren't really there for drugs. We just don't know what that is.
CH: Do you have any sense of where it might be?
JP: None.
CH: *None?*
JP: Whatsoever. The other, the other thing to realize also is that often times, it seems (indistinguishable word or two) some very pretextual about the use of drug cases. So if you look at that that that trend in in drugs, you know that spike in New York state, talking about '84 to '94 and then it starts to decline, that spike in drug cases correlates almost perfectly with the spike in violence that that came in the wake of crack markets.
And its decline comes basically at the time that violence started to decline, which suggests at some level we were using these drug cases as a way to get at violence. And you might object to to doing that, right? Either charge the person with homicide or not. Don't use the crack possession to get the person you might vaguely suspect is guilty of something more serious, but it's just that the the the story is still more intimately tied to violence.
What's particularly fascinating is over the 1990s and 2000s as violent crime has gone down as serious violence has gone down sharply, you'd think that that would be the time that we would focus even more on drugs, right? Because there's less violence, there's le-, we have more police, less violence, there's more resources to dedicate to these more discretionary offenses.
What we see actually is, at least when it comes to prison populations, the number of people admitted for drugs actually falls, the share of admissions goes down for drugs, and it goes up for violence. Violence's share of prison populations grows both in admissions and in total population. We actually concentrate much even more on violence as violence is going down than we do on drugs, which again points to something more pretextual about about drugs."
(i.e. so the police *were* using drugs as just a pretext to arrest people. They were using it as a way to "frame the guilty party" against murderers & wife-beaters they couldn't otherwise touch. It's the sort of thing a lot of people would probably independently re-invent if you described the situation to them, and they went, "Well, can't we just... you know... nail the guy on a technicality, if he's going to get off on a technicality? Like the IRS going after Al Capone, cause no one else could." -- it's the sort of plotline people cheer on, at least, in TV shows & detective novels & the like. The detective deciding to break the law in pursuit of what's right, not merely what's legal.
The downside being, of course, that in *real life* it gets the police used to taking the law into their own hands. To being able to arrest & charge anyone on whatever crimes they want to make up today. Vigilantism has downsides -- and that goes *double* for vigiliantism by the police.)
Anyways, for more from Professor Pfaff about this, see https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/mass-incarceration-john-pfaff-locked-in ("Why you can’t blame mass incarceration on the war on drugs -- The standard liberal narrative about mass incarceration gets a lot wrong. A new book breaks through the myths")
Thank you, that was very interesting.
I've heard that the major cause of mass incarceration wasn't drugs, it's very long sentences that most people would agree was criminal.
Punishing only a small minority of criminals is morally reprehensible to me too. Using it as a means for the cops to search for other crimes or imprison someone they believe is guilty of something else also feels very wrong (and a violation of at least the spirit of the 4th Amendment in the US).
My opinion on why the oregon decriminalization failed is basically that, along side decriminalization/legalization, you need much stronger laws/enforcement around drug-related anti-social behavior.
Get high all you want, but if your habit results in you making public places unpleasant for the rest of the public to be in, then you are going to be asked to leave and if you don't leave you are going to be put in jail.
This is sort of what you were talking about with smoking I think, in that smoking is totally legal.....as long as you doing it doesn't make non-smokers have to deal with your habit.
The practical issue is that most drugs harder than nicotine and marijuana have significantly more severe anti-social behaviors in at least a subset of users, and those behaviors make punishing through traditional legal means much more difficult.
I'll admit to not having a complete answer (and I'll even admit that it's at least possible that my idea is, for practical purposes, infeasible), but I am disappointed that Oregon gave up without trying anything at all beside allowing the drugs themselves.
Smoking in itself causes immediate anti-social behavior because of the smoke, while other drugs might or might not cause anti-social behavior, especially in the early stages of use.
Yeah...the tobacco smokers I encounter regularly tend to be pretty considerate about it, all things considered ("do you have a light?" is a very favourable outcome on the You Are Approached By A Shady Character At Night table). Designated geographic proximity, away from people, some level of self-awareness. But I can still remember how it was not that long ago, before the big marijuana decriminalization pushes when it wasn't usual to meet so many stoned people in public. And I mean like, absolutely baked, get-a-secondhand-high-from-proximity, fumbling with basic things like putting in a debit card PIN. Sometimes that even includes coworkers, which is frankly alarming in a job that occasionally involves operating heavy equipment and industrial machinery. Vapes also make it a more mobile vice: it's rare to see someone puffing a cig on the bus or indoors, but snapping off a pen is considered nbd pretty much anywhere...
Obviously there's some substitution effects - I'd rather have people taking pot than falling into alcoholism or worse - and these QOL impediments don't really justify jail or whatever...but it took countless years to get to the current social norms around tobacco smoking, and I guess I'm kinda just impatient to reach the same consensus with weed. Cause it really is a drag, if you'll excuse the pun. But it feels hard to criticize due to the inevitable "The War On Drugs/Prohibition didn't work!" talking points taking up so much rhetorical space. And if we can't even do a collective action on something mild like weed, there's not much hope for addressing fentanyl or whatever.
> along side decriminalization/legalization, you need much stronger laws/enforcement around drug-related anti-social behavior.
Exactly this. When you legalize drugs, you get a lot of anti-social but technically legal behavior from the drug users who are no longer trying to hide.
I don't care when people inject shit in their veins. But I get angry when they throw away the used needles on the playground where my children play. And what can I do about that, legally? Nothing. (Yes, I asked a lawyer.) Using the drugs is legal. Throwing the needle away on the playground it technically against some municipal rules... but good luck catching someone in the act or calling the cops, and the penalty is probably just a small fine anyway.
> smoking is totally legal.....as long as you doing it doesn't make non-smokers have to deal with your habit.
I remember a few times when I was waiting for a bus outside in the rain as a child, because some asshole was smoking in the bus stop shelter. And the cigarette butts used to be everywhere. So, the smokers were also annoying as fuck, but luckily it went out of fashion.
In places where laws have made cigarettes inconvenient and costly, the gangs now sell cigarettes. Here in Melbourne we've got some kind of cigarette-related gang war going on, every single tobacconist is selling black market cigarettes under the counter, and tobacconists keep getting firebombed overnight (for failing to pay protection money or for being part of the wrong syndicate or something).
I think there's all sorts of problems with the scenario where evil outlaw drug gangs are replaced by evil law-abiding multinational drug corporations. Either you heavily regulate the companies and leave a door open for the drug gangs to continue, or you completely deregulate them and you've got two thirds of the population hooked on super-heroin within five years.
Just one of the problems: what do you do about liability law? Ordinarily if you sell someone something dangerous and it kills them then you can get sued... but that's just an expected consequence of selling people heroin.
I don't think that's the problem here; for starters we don't have elected prosecutors. Courts aren't as draconian as I'd like, but that's not a recent change. And we're talking heavy organised crime here, not the sort of criminal that anyone finds sympathetic -- think mafia/triad types, not street gangs.
I always liked the principle behind Robin Hanson's "Store of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods", even if the implementation problems are obvious and largely insurmountable. There's a certain philosophical clarity to radical caveat emptor, and the selection effects could sometimes be positive too. Put those sociological assertions of "bad outcomes like addiction happen because of discrimination and bias!" to a real-world test.
Are you referring to this? https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/paternalism_is_html Eliezer commented on that here https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/policy_debates_html
Yes, I remembered the second from The Sequences but couldn't recall the first, thanks. Abbreviated URLs economize on space but are not the easiest for content recall. I am indeed willing to bite the bullet of Salt Of The Earth Soccer Mom Kicks Last Bucket as an acceptable downside: concentrated harms, diffuse benefits. Or as Eliezer also once wrote, shut up and multiply - torture vs dust specks. I also think his assessment of primary contributors to such outcomes is underbaked...it's certainly true that (say what we mean) low IQ and lack of skepticism contribute. But the brilliant iconoclast who dies to an overdose is a well-worn trope for a reason. Fundamentally, Drugs Are Fun, and they inflict sanity damage just like mental illness, which circumvents many types of defenses. Even the ad absurdum of lethal snake oil is easily solved by consumers keeling over - immediately making a follow-up purchase impossible, and sending a strong signal for competitors to sink said irresponsible whale-killer. Society would still capture the majority of benefits if the proposal was amended to Shops Of Ill-Advised Goods, Except Blatant Outright Fraud That Will Kill You Quickly (Please Patronize Our Death With Dignity Outlet For Such Goods Instead).
Oh, is that the origin of the insufferable "politics is the mind killer" slogan? Or does he just like to tout it around?
This is the actual post of that title: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/politics_is_thehtml
Thank you!
You’ve created a false dichotomy. The choice isn’t either leaving drugs to be distributed by drug gangs or by completely unregulated corporations. Alcohol used to be distributed by murderous bootleggers like Al Capone, and now it’s distributed by huge corporations, but we are still able to impose many regulations on it, and essentially no one gets their booze from bootleggers any more.
They’ve tried that with weed and it didn’t work - instead a lot more people picked up the habit. Smoking rates went down because it’s a highly visible and highly annoying habit, I don’t think it would work the same way with legalizing cocaine.
Smoking has also been legal for a lot longer than weed. It took time for people to learn that it was bad for you in a way that percolated. I would expect the same thing to happen to weed
Yes it isn't close. Regularly smoking weed is way worse. And I say this as someone who's smoked a lot
I don't think cigarettes are a good comparison for marijuana or other drugs because of the distinct lack of positives to smoking. Without nicotine, how many people would smoke regularly? I'd wager a tiny fraction of the numbers that would consume marijuana or alcohol. Some people like the smell of tobacco, I'm one of them in fact, but it's going to be much smaller than the near universal pleasure of getting drunk or high.
And the downsides are more obvious and negative as well. Someone who smokes a pack a day will have worse long term outcomes and more noticeable unpleasant short term effects than someone consuming an equivalent amount of alcohol or marijuana.
Don't forget overdose deaths, which thanks to illegality / fentanyl are now the number 1 cause of death for people younger than 40, outpacing even car accidents, and killing about 100k people total yearly.
And it's totally voluntary - pure government policies, those 100k deaths could be eliminated basically tomorrow if you just legalized and sold standardized pharmaceutical opiate doses for the literal pennies each dose costs to manufacture.
But you know, nobody cares about the number one cause of death for people under 40 (which is entirely preventable and could be immediately prevented tomorrow.)
If America legalized and allowed them to be sold at 2x cost, it would save 100k lives a year. Sure, more people would be addicted, but that's their choice. And being illegal and expensive is the source of all the negative externalities anyways - if it's legal and cheap, who *cares* if people are addicted? That's up to them, and the health consequences of pharmaceutically pure opiates is basically "constipation." And more pople being addicted / constipated is worth saving 100k young people a year.
Yes. This is right, and I wish more people would see it. Although I have used the “overdoses are solely caused by opiates being illegal” argument before, and remember concluding that it turns out there are still many overdoses from people using legal opiates (ie which have standardized dosages), even though many are also likely caused by the black market.
It would also be a great help for people, like me, that live in constant pain from chronic health conditions that will never go away until the day I die. My doctors are more than happy to discuss all manner of surgical interventions and new treatments, but they wont even engage me on the subject of pain management at any level.
The best part of Scott's commentariat is running into alien moralities unironically endorsing repugnant conclusions. Fascinating.
You are stating as fact your beliefs about an extremely complex hypothetical.
I would be amazed, regardless of your credentials, if you can confidently say that on net this policy change would save lives. Interventions often backfire in unpredictable ways, e.g., the classic scared straight example.
> Interventions often backfire in unpredictable ways, e.g., the classic scared straight example.
In fact, you're sitting on the other side of exactly such a backfiring intervention. After the "opioid crisis" and the government making it essentially impossible to get legal painkillers, they decided to further crack down on illegal opiates too.
That crackdown has basically made fentanyl and carfentanyl ubiquitous, because it's 100-1000x more potent by weight, so 1 kilo is like 100-1000kg of heroin. And a couple of milligrams over can OD you. This has led to overdose deaths 5x-ing, from 20k a year during the "opioid crisis" to 100k per year now.
Overdose deaths by year graph:
https://imgur.com/a/PhOMAw4
This is a widely repeated myth. Over half of all deaths in the opioid crisis were from legally manufactured drugs made by highly regulated companies in the US. Oxycontin is a legal, regulated substance. It was famously made widely available and consequently hundreds of thousands of people died from overusing it. There could be not be a better refutation of your argument than just looking at the past 3 decades of opioid policy.
Like a lot of these online discussions, I see a lot of speculation from people who have clearly never done hard drugs. Addicts OD because they take too much, because they want to get Even Higher. I think you're imagining that an addict takes a Standard Dose, but it's infiltrated with fentanyl so they die. Yes, that does happen sometimes. But what also happens is that an addict takes Standard Dose, then they want to get even higher so they take 2 or 3 or 5x Standard Dose, and they overdose and die. Like alcohol, right? 6 beers is more fun than 2, and if you're an alcoholic, 16 shots of whiskey is even more fun. However even with a totally pure, regulated, unadulterated source of alcohol, you can die when you take too much.
Making the product pure, through a regulated legal process, doesn't prevent someone from taking too much of it. Which is where the very word 'overdose' comes from.
Your whole last paragraph is so wrong and so wrong depressing I can't even begin to debunk it. I guess start here and then imagine what happens if you replace the word 'alcohol' with 'oxycontin' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholism
> This is a widely repeated myth. Over half of all deaths in the opioid crisis were from legally manufactured drugs made by highly regulated companies in the US. Oxycontin is a legal, regulated substance. It was famously made widely available and consequently hundreds of thousands of people died from overusing it.
Actually during the opioid crisis, only 20k people a year were overdosing, It's since up 5x due to the prevalence of fentanyl and trying to crack down / restrict illegal opiates furtther after they made sure nobody can get legal painkillers.
Overdose deaths by year graph:
https://imgur.com/a/PhOMAw4
So that crackdown has basically made fentanyl and carfentanyl ubiquitous, because it's 100-1000x more potent by weight, so 1 kilo is like 100-1000kg of heroin. And a couple of milligrams over can OD you.
So sure, maybe the incremental lives saved is ONLY 80k, at ~60 years lost per death. And substituting pharmaceutical heroin or oxies for alcohol is almost *certainly* a net win health wise - alcohol is a literal poison that destroys multiple systems in your body, opiate's main health side effect is constipation.
1. Some fentanyl deaths are because it's mixed into the drug supply chain of non-opioids (like cocaine). So a legalization process wouldn't do anything about that
2. As I explained above (and again, I can tell that none of you have real-life experience with hard drugs)- addicts build tolerance to opioids/heroin, and then go seeking a stronger high. Maybe Government Regulated Oxy gets an addict high for a few months, but tolerance builds fast, and a few months later now they're not getting anywhere near as high. So they'd seek out fentanyl on the street.
Fentanyl is now ubiquitous because of Chinese drug smuggling operations, not because the government 'created' the market. It just didn't exist in the 90s. Similar to how the legal weed market hasn't stamped out black market weed *at all*, you'd still have fentanyl if there was demand.
Plus, making opioids easier to get *vastly widens the number of people who'd do them*, a fact that's not in dispute given that *the last 30 years has decisively proved this*. So making Legal Oxy easier to get increases the number of addicts, they build tolerance, get bored, and seek out heroin or fentanyl. You've just made the problem worse.
Chronic opioid use is also a poison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_use_disorder
1. I'm sure you won't be surprised that I advocate for legalizing cocaine too.
My policy suggestion is literally "legalize heroin and oxies and sell at cost or 2x cost." Either heroin or oxies (or fentanyl for that matter) costs literal pennies per dose from the manufacturers. Even the heaviest users would be fine on $5 a day. And if you remove the illegality, and if it costs pennies a dose, you have removed all the biggest negative externalities.
Incidentally, I fully agree that from an externality standpoint, "public nuisance" things should be heavily enforced and the police should do their jobs, but they should be doing that anyways.
> Fentanyl is now ubiquitous because of Chinese drug smuggling operations, not because the government 'created' the market.
China doesn't just spin up smuggling operations in a vacuum. The government definitely created that market, as a matter of specific policies enacted. First, they made legal opiates much harder to get in reaction to the Sackler "opiate crisis," driving people to the street. Then around 2015, they started cracking down on heroin, imports of which had risen to meet demand. That demand doesn't go away though, that's a market opportunity!
By cracking down harder on shipments of heroin from mexico, they left supply gap that the Chinese filled with fentanyl. Because fentanyl and carfentanyl is 100-1000 times stronger, it is correspondingly 100-1000x lower in volume for smuggling, and much harder to catch. When one kilo can feed the streets for a month, which would have required a thousand kilos of heroin, it's much harder to interdict. It's also cheaper! So all the drug dealers decided "hey, it's cheaper and I get more of my shipments through, let's just sell this stuff exclusively," and lo, the fentanyl epidemic was born out of US gov policies and straightforward supply / demand forces. They even come in convenient "fake oxy" form, with much Chinese fentanyl coming over in pre-pressed pills.
You can see that story here, note the 2015 peak in "heroin" and the sharp rise in fentanyl afterwards:
https://imgur.com/a/JhIhAZu
> So making Legal Oxy easier to get increases the number of addicts, they build tolerance, get bored, and seek out heroin or fentanyl. You've just made the problem worse.
Actually, pills and heroin kills 5x fewer people, directly reflected in the opiate deaths by opiate type here, with fentanyl taking off after the 2015 crackdowns:
https://imgur.com/a/ykdRmA2
Fentanyl is what kills everyone, because the strength on the street is impossible to know, and because of the chocolate chip cookie effect. When a few milligrams in the dosing either way can kill you, and when non-quality-controlled pill presses can leave local concentrations of fentanyl in the pills, it kills people. You ALSO see that in the second graph - fentanyl is about 5x as lethal as heroin or pills, and it's because of that tightness in dosing.
But if you legalize heroin and pills, and they cost pennies, many fewer young people will die - we'll be back to the ~20k or so young-person deaths per year (note that the heroin and oxy overdose trendlines are 5x less than the fentanyl, so even if they stayed flat on legalization and didn't improve at all, you would still save tens of thousands of incremental deaths a year).
Basically, all you folk saying "we need to crack down harder!!!" is exactly what the government has been TRYING for the last 20 years.
First, the government noticed that lots of people were getting legal prescriptions for pain pills. "That won't do, we should crack down," and lo, they cracked down on legal prescriptions, and made doctors loathe to pass out any pain medicine to anybody for fear of losing their licenses.
But people still have pain and / or addictions, so that drove people to the street, and there was a sharp rise in heroin deaths seen in graph 2 as people used to pills transitioned to unknown strength illegal street drugs. So the government decided again, "well we can't have *that,* we need to crack down even harder," and in 2015 sharply stepped up heroin interdiction from Mexico.
But cracking down doesn't remove demand. The demand was still there, and China could readily supply fentanyl, which was much more smuggleable, and cheaper! And do you KNOW how many containers come from China into US ports per year? About 20M. And how easy it is to hide a kilo or two in that logistics stream?
And that's when fentanyl deaths really took off, and now we're at 100k deaths a year, 5x higher than when we first started our "opiate crisis," and it's mostly thanks to the government "cracking down."
> Plus, making opioids easier to get *vastly widens the number of people who'd do them*, a fact that's not in dispute given that *the last 30 years has decisively proved this*.
You're right, I don't dispute this. If the government had just shut up and let the Sacklers make more millions, we would probably have 1M more people alive today. And sure, those are drug addicts! Who needs em?? Buncha deviants and ne'er do wells. And have you heard the music they like??
But addiction is temporary, and death is *permanent.*
A lot of that 1M people would have straightened up and gotten jobs and had kids. Actually, at the Sackler stage, a lot of those people *already* had jobs and kids and were doing fine. It was the crackdown that pushed them to illegal heroin, and then the interdiction crackdown that pushed them to fentanyl, and now we kill 100k young people a year, most of whom would eventually come out of it and be productive adults if they could get pharmaceutical and cheap doses of opiates, just so we can say we're tough and take crime seriously.
I don't care if more people get high legally, with much fewer negative health effects than alcohol. During the Sackler part of the story, those people were fine! Opiate deaths were *tiny.* They had jobs, they raised their kids.
It all starts falling apart when society decides that we'd better crack down, no *harder,* no harder than *that.* That's what's brought us to our current 5x young-people-death rate.
A lot of the incremental people getting addicted will come out of it, and we'll save 60-80k young lives per year, which is permanent, and with 60 years saved at a whack. That's worth a bunch of incremental people having pain relief and getting high or addicted. Adults should have a right to get high if they want to anyways, just like they have a right to get drunk if they want to.
Or you know, maybe we should crack down even HARDER harder, and just do a Duterte and call it "death penalty for any drug user," and give all police Judge Dredd style powers to directly execute whoever they feel like, as long as they throw a little baggie of drugs on top of the corpse afterwards. Would that be a better society, you think? Because that's about the only option we have on the "no, harder" scale after this. Because you can't stop or interdict a kilo a month coming in a stream of 2M containers a month, but you can legalize and sell pharmaceutical doses at cost.
'The government created the fentanyl market'- sure, and I'm sure that the big bad government created the market for crack before that. And heroin, and meth, and opium, and gin in the 18th century. It's a total copout and nonsense. They exist because human beings like doing these substances. Also, in the non-narcotic field for-profit companies create new markets *all the time*, so I can't imagine why you'd think the Chinese couldn't have introduced fentanyl and spun up demand that way.
I'll repeat what I said- maxing it easier to get oxys would increase the number of addicts, who'd then build tolerance, and would go on to score fentanyl on the street to get higher. (Do you really have experience with hard drugs if you don't know how opioid tolerance works?) Has making a legal weed market destroyed the black market, as libertarians predicted? Unfortunately no. You've spun up a story that the government made people go out and get fentanyl, but unfortunately that's just not true. There's always a market for a harder drug. Legions of addicts would be looking for their next, stronger high. No junkie is ever satisfied if something stronger exists out there.
Your contention that junkies will be happy with 'just' opioids and not go looking for something stronger after tolerance has set in is sadly wrong.
You don't need to crack down on drugs even harder, but it's OK for society to make it difficult and expensive to get narcotics, to prevent widespread addiction.
BTW, prescription (non-fentanyl) opioids account for about a third of all OD deaths. I agree that fentanyl is worse- that's why we shouldn't let people get started on the road to addiction in the first place, which will then lead to fentanyl usage
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6334822/table/T1/?report=objectonly
Although tobacco smoking is on the decline, it’s still much more common than other drug use. A recent study that got a lot of attention found that daily or near-daily cannabis use now exceeds daily or near-daily alcohol use in the United States (18 million vs 14 million). But it also noted “That is still not as high as for cigarettes. The 2022 NSDUH survey finds that 58.7% of PM cigarette smokers smoked ‘daily’—defined as ‘smoked one or more packs of cigarettes per day’ [8]. Therefore, there are more daily cigarette smokers than DND PM marijuana users (24.1 vs 17.7 million).” Note that this isn’t people who smoke one cigarette after dinner - this is pack-a-day smokers!
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.16519
I don’t think it’s yet true that restrictions on tobacco are greater than on cannabis, and I don’t think it’s true that cigarette smokers are less inconvenience to others.
I didn't know about the Chersonesus park and it sounded really bad so looked for more details. A BBC article says that they built it in the ancient agricultural area adjacent to the polis itself, which still likely contains some archeological remains but it seems like the ruins of the city itself are unaffected. So it's a bit less horrible than implied in the Kyiv Independent article you've linked. https://www.bbc.com/russian/articles/czvx0xdpgxgo
I agree Russia is not stupid enough to build their tribute to an archaeological site on top of the site itself, and I was sort of going off of an assumption like this.
I don't know what you're talking about, but my hot take is that we should study as much as we can about the ruins of the Parthenon, then rebuild it. I feel the same way about re-coating the Pyramids in limestone and gold.
Removing the original columns for storage will at least prevent them from further damage from the elements.
I have been this summer to the excellent Roman town of Merida in Spain. It declined significantly after the empire collapsed and wasn’t a major centre for Muslims or Christians thereafter. Therefore the modern town is the same size as the Roman town and has the amphitheater, theatre and circus are positioned exactly where they were relatively, and a Roman bridge that was on the edge of the Roman city is on the edge of modern Merida.
What was disappointing was the circus, and this is true of all Roman circuses. What’s left is just a field with a circular track. On the edge the seating is just raised grassy mounds. Grass if lucky. Otherwise, dirt.
Rebuilding these things is not a crime. Get in experts. Use the ancient materials. Build in the old fashion if you must. Bring back chariot races.
I'm with you on the rebuilding. Like in Rome were (he who must not be named) rebuilt many of the declining structures.
Are you talking about the same guy who built a major road on top of the forum?
We have some reconstructed and medievally-furnished castles in the UK and they're so much more interesting to visit than the ruins.
The roman amphitheatre of Verona is still in use for operas and other events, it's a really nice experience to go there for a show and much better than just walking around some unused ruins.
Yes, Merida in Spain is the same. I missed a concert though.
"re-coating the Pyramids in limestone and gold"
Now that is a platform I can get behind and this is the content I come here for!
I saw an estimate that restoring the pyramids could be done for around $12M, which honestly seems within reach of a good Kickstarter.
"I agree Russia is not stupid enough to build their tribute to an archaeological site on top of the site itself"
Oh, it most certainly quite capable of doing this, and it has less to do with stupidity, and more with corruption. Myriad mansions with giant garages holding Maybachs were built in prestigious areas by all involved. Who cares about ancient Greek artifacts when another Geländewagen can be bought from the kickbacks.
In Novgorod (famous for birch manuscripts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript#Old_Slavonic_script) they are now planning to build an archaeology museum on top of the archaeological site that is still being investigated. Supposedly, the investigation should have taken 4 to 5 years, but the archaeologists were told to dig faster in half that time.
Just hope it wouldn't be as ugly as the one in Chersonesus.
2: I found that article to be perhaps too confident, considering that genomics and evolutionary biology are not mature fields and we are still gathering data and trying to understand them. For the case of schizophrenia in particular, here is a different article arguing that only very weak positive selection would be required in order to to explain the current prevalence of schizophrenia under a cliff model (or a continuous version of the same). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763424001052 I'm not saying that either article is right, but it doesn't seem obvious to me how to distinguish between them. The citations and data presented for the claim that there is no balancing selection in schizophrenia do not seem overwhelmingly comprehensive.
That article is fascinating but I'm not sure I understand its explanation for schizophrenia being an omnigenic disorder. I thought things were only omnigenic if evolution was working so hard to minimize them that it was impossible to create a gene favoring them with more than a trivial effect (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/evolution-explains-polygenic-structure).
My guess is that schizophrenia is a combination of both mechanisms, but mostly the mutation-selection balance (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-653)
From Ruben Arslan's tweet thread:
> Balancing selection occurs when selection coefficents differ by time or place (fluctuating selection), sex (sexually antagonistic selection), trait frequency (negative frequency-dep selection) or other alleles at the same locus (heterozygote advantage)
I'm no expert, but is different to clif-edged selection, which describes the relationship between fitness and the phenotypic value of a quantitative trait. Ditto for or any other type of fitness function that has a non-extremal optimum
33. Can someone please explain what "aspects of Bayesian decision making are not disturbed during autism" means?
I too am confused by this ... every autistic person I've ever encountered seemed to lack rationality.
A friend works Behavior Intervention in public schools. Which means he's assigned to guide a non-verbal autistic kid ... which really means he's there to help manage stressful events, foster communication with other kids, make sure the autistic kid eats lunch, and stop them from harming others or bolting out of the classroom and into traffic ... and change diapers.
Autism occurs on a spectrum, and your friend's experience is not representative of most people with autism. Many people with autism are very high functioning; e.g., Elon Musk claims that he has been diagnosed with autism. Google around and you'll find lists of scientists and mathematicians with diagnosed or apparent autism.
That said, there is no contradiction between having poor executive function (like the kids your friend supports) and being highly rational. Autism largely impacts how individuals interact with their environment, not how they manipulate abstractions internally.
"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison."
It seems to be the same with autism.
I read just enough of the Hegelian E-girl thread to be very glad that I have no idea what the hell it's about.
I read the rest and seems like a nothingburger that was the *biggest* *thing* *in* *the* *world* to whoever might have been within 1 degree of the principals, but IDK shit about Hegel so maybe it's a bigger than I thought
can you (or anyone else) give me a rundown on this one? X is banned on my country and I'm curious but not to the point of setting up a VPN and risking a fine to read it
nitter.poast appears to be working, so if you replace the "x.com" portion of the url with "nitter.poast.org", it should work. (I think? I assume that gets around country locks, but I've never tried).
https://nitter.poast.org/sanjehorah/status/1820166653226725734
note that it will be slower to load and you may get hit with a "user has been rate limited" message, which you should be able to get around with a couple refreshes. Other than those things though, I actually prefer the nitter interface to the default x/twitter one by quite a lot
But if that doesn't work for you, I'm definitely not spending enough time to figure out what the hell it's about, sorry
Wow. I’m glad I’m not on Twitter so that I don’t have to read Hegel. I thought it was just philosophy grad students that Twitter was pushing too far and too deep into political Hegel, but maybe it goes further? (Or maybe these are all philosophy grad students?)
I'm not sure what makes someone an "e-girl", but long-time blogger Amod Lele recently posted a readable take on some of what this particular group may have been saying: https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2024/08/what-hegelian-e-girls-understand-and-ken-wilber-doesnt/
The Tickle v Giggle case is not actually very interesting. The court applied a pretty straightforward reading of the law - it bans discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and it’s unequivocal that Giggle discriminated against Tickle on the basis of his gender identity.
The question is what the law *should* say. It’s the Parliament’s job to change bad laws, not the courts.
Tickle is the complainant's surname (unsure if that's their legal surname). Giggle is the app.
Yes, it's her legal surname; pseudonymous lawsuits exist, but this isn't one. The full name of the case is "Roxanne Tickle v Giggle for Girls Pty Ltd & Anor", which is 30% less funny. (The second respondent is Sally Grover, founder of Giggle.)
If the case was, like, some gruesome violent crime, I would be upset. But it's in fact a very minor case: one person got discriminated against by one unimportant mobile app, and got $10k plus costs. This does not matter in the grand scheme of things, and therefore I am free to be amused by the name. Tickle and Giggle. Haha.
Three generations of Tickles is enough
That's not my reading of the case. If it were a straightforward application of the law then it wouldn't have been an important precedent.
You can read the judge's summary of his decision here https://fedcourt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/120622/Summary-Tickle-v-Giggle-for-Girls-Pty-Ltd-No-2-2024-FCA-960.pdf -- it appears that it settled several important previously-unsettled questions about how several previous laws should apply to questions of "sex" vs "gender identity" for which they were not written.
Also, Giggle didn't discriminate against Tickle on the basis of his gender identity (which was female), but on the basis of his sex (which was male).
My impression was there wasn’t much dispute among legal experts about which way the case would turn out (though I admit I didn’t go super into the weeds). Indeed the judgement seems to consider itself a straightforward application of existing law:
“Those arguments failed, because the view propounded by the respondents conflicted with a long history of cases decided by courts going back over 30 years. Those cases establish that, on its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable.
The respondents’ views also conflicted with the clear Parliamentary intention to prohibit discrimination on the ground of gender identity in certain contexts, contained in amendments to the SDA that took effect over a decade ago, in 2013.”
This is the explanation I heard about the case, but it doesn't make sense at all because Giggle didn't discriminate against Tickle on the basis of their gender identity, they discriminated against Tickle on the basis of their sex. If Tickle had a male gender identity, they also would not have been allowed on the app, so it can't be discrimination on gender identity.
Legally, sex is changeable, and Tickle has a modified birth certificate saying he is female. It’s a legal fiction of course, but we’re dealing with a court, so legal fictions rule. Tickle is legally a woman so Giggle cannot have discriminated on the basis of sex. They discriminated on the basis that he is not the right kind of of woman e.g. the kind with ovaries.
But if Tickle is female in every legal sense, then how can they prove that it's discrimination? It can only be discrimination on these lines if you first acknowledge that Tickle is not female. There has to be some protected category that you are discriminating against, and Tickle is not a member of a different legal category than women who are allowed to use the app.
Tickle is transgender. That is the category that is being discriminated against.
Number 9…really? A Wikipedia bio?
You mention Tracing Woodgrains one paragraph earlier who wrote an excellent substack piece documenting the profoundly terrible effect one person has had on the site, particularly in the curation of the “trusted sources” used to fashion these bios.
At a minimum consider every biography on the site with extreme skepticism.
I'd be willing to bet (this is a literal offer) that the details are mostly correct if we look into them more deeply; is this something you'd be interested in fleshing out more?
https://sethinthebox.substack.com/p/durek-verrett-and-wikipedia-vandalism?r=59wwu
I figured it was too much for a reply. Let me know what you hate about it.
I'm still not at all convinced.
I interpret your post to say first that earlier versions of the article were less accusatory, second when he called up a journalist to argue that the Illuminati were real maybe he meant it metaphorically or something, and third that being arrested for illegal house parties isn't so bad.
None of these related to my key claim, which is that the article is true.
(except maybe the "Illuminati metaphorical" claim, but you provided no evidence for that except that it was theoretically possible, and most people I know who just think the elites suck have never left multiple voice mails on a journalist's email to complain about the Illuminati, in a way that that journalist described as weird and disturbing)
So take what I consider the craziest thing about him - that he claimed to be a reptilian. If you read the sentence on Wikipedia, it cites this article ( https://www-nettavisen-no.translate.goog/livsstil/durek-verrett-erklarer-seg-selv-som-romvesen-og-gar-til-angrep-pa-5g-nettet/s/5-95-311994?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp ), which in turn includes the a screenshot of the Instagram post where he says this.
Or when it said an ex-partner accused him of abuse, it links to a newspaper with an interview with the ex-partner.
Looking through the rest of the article, this seems pretty typical for the level of evidence they give. I don't know what more you could want.
I agree that it looks like it was written with a negative slant towards Durek by emphasizing the weirdest things about him, but I also think everything it says is basically accurate.
I appreciate you taking the time.
I would agree a newspaper article with his Instagram saying, “I’m a reptile,” is reasonable evidence. My issue is that if he also had an Instagram that said, “just kidding,” no one would ever see it—it would be disallowed by WP guidelines unless printed in a different—and approved—journal. There’s no mechanism for individuals to defend themselves.
I suppose this was the wrong hill to die on. Dude is surely a scumbag, even if he’s also maligned by a powerful media campaign. If I left no doubts about WP, I failed. I regret only that I have but one comment thread to give and resign myself back to obscurity. 🫡
I've been wondering about mentioning that article here. Is it sound? It seems paranoid, but also tempting for me to believe.
An approximate quote from Penn: sometimes a magic trick can be explained by someone putting in more work than you can imagine.
As my mom and her friends consume lots of those royals/celebs-gossip journals that cover several yards in the supermarket ("it's just for the cross-words"), and pretend each week to have uncovered new scandalous/intimate "facts" about princesses/Merkel's marriage/Helene Fischer (our German Dion/Swift) ... I found it hilarious to see an actual scandalous fact about a princess now covered in our local/national press - while those "investigative/expert"-journals had no clue. I agree with Scott, and take bets: wikipedia is not lying here. It "very rarely does", just as the NYT/WP/FOX rarely do. ;)
I'm a minor contributor to Wikipedia. The issues Trace outlines are very real and I've seen them firsthand in some strange places, like the decade+ war in the Talk page for Yogurt. I think the first thing anyone with a healthy level of skepticism about Wikipedia should do is to always take a quick peek and the Talk page and article history. While it is easy for a single person of cabal of like minded editors to do real damage to the site, its very hard to do so without leaving a ton of evidence of your actions for people that know how to navigate the "sausage making" pages on Wikipedia. There is also a tremendous amount of good information on the subjects there as well. Someone going out of their way to spend years suppressing certain information about a subject is a huge beacon to me that the concerned information is actually something worth reading, as well as their motivations for doing do. I consider the Wiki Talk pages to be among some of the funniest places I've ever visited on the internet, but you have to know how to read and follow them.
Here's the beginning of the Yogurt article drama if anyone is interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yogurt/Archive_7 . 13 years and running now.
I’m also ankles deep in WP with a few edits under my belt. I love the site but it has big problems.
Here’s the reply I wrote to Scott. Maybe you have some feedback: https://open.substack.com/pub/sethinthebox/p/durek-verrett-and-wikipedia-vandalism?r=59wwu&utm_medium=ios
I mostly contribute to dry, technical articles about forensic accounting and fraud related topics. There are other culture/history topics I something feel like I can contribute too but make a point of avoiding. I had a history prof in college who had a sort of guideline for his own work: if anyone alive now had a grandparent alive during the event, avoid writing about it. I like that.
So this comment is just me repeating a thing I see Matt Yglesias mention a bunch, but, an important thing worth considering regarding Trump's policies vs Harris's is that Trump will likely be more able to *implement* his policies, because 1. the Republicans are likely to control Congress regardless of who wins the presidency, and 2. a big part of Trump's policies are *tariffs* which is something the president has a lot of authority to impose unilaterally.
...and as long as I'm just repeating points from Yglesias, I should point out that with Trump's proposed tariff policies, companies would be able to apply for exemptions, which, while obviously it's nice to have less tariffs, basically opens the door to a lot of corruption, winner-picking, and incumbent-favoring in the market, since Trump would have a lot of discretion over these and he's a pretty corrupt guy, and also small players would have a harder time getting these exemptions.
We don't have any evidence of Harris implementing every policy she ever mentions either, given that she hasn't been president before. But most politicians don't do that.
If we're going to say 'every bad policy Trump mentions won't happen, every bad policy Harris mentions will happen' then yeah your analysis will say that Trump does better on implemented policy. But that seems like pretty obviously motivated reasoning.
It's true that when Trump does stupid things for the economy the Democrats usually follow him there (don't join the TPP, tariffs, the notion of not taxing tips...), but Trump is more likely to enact his own ideas (more tariffs) than Harris (currently against more tariffs). If Trump wins and puts more tariffs in place no surprise if Dems keep them in place in the future but way less likely Harris puts them in place.
I think it's weird that you think Trump is unlikely to implement his "raise tariffs" policy when there is the precedent for his raising tariffs in his previous term and it is the primary thing he is calling for in his economic plan. If we were talking about one of his more outlandish thought bubbles for which there is no precedent I would agree with you.
Trump might have more power to implement his policies but he also has little incentive to actually do so, given that he’s not running for re-election. Harris on the other hand has another election to win so more of a push to get something done. What scares me about Harris is that she probably does believe in the Democrat policies being good. Trump doesn’t scare me as much because it’s obvious he only cares about winning and couldn’t care less about ideology.
In general, politics is thermostatic and looking like you're doing things is bad for your reelection chances (especially when she probably does know the actual effects on the economy would be bad, even if she still says the populist stuff). So this argument probably cuts the other way.
You don't think Trump's America First ideology is real? He's been talking about his America First-ish ideology his whole public life going back to at least the early '80s when he started appearing on television regularly. He's spoken passionately about many issues for decades. He used his own money for that full page ad to execute the Central Park 5 in the '80s. He's clearly a phony on issues like religion but really seems to care about what he thinks America should be and has always wanted to play a role in manifesting that vision.
I think Trump cares a lot about promoting his brand and making money but he doesn't strike me as someone particularly passionate about anything else, no. Harris is much more likely to be a true believer.
I think your point 1 is more correctly "Conditional on X being elected President, will they have both houses of Congress as well?" in that the Senate is quite likely to be R either way, but the House is more finely balanced right now.
What evidence do you have that Trump is corrupt? He's the only president in the past 100 years to not leave office wealthier than when he went in.
Like all the claims the Trumps are anti-Semitic fall apart when you see the list of Jewish charities their family has donated to heavily, or founded, or the number of government buildings and hospital wings in Israel named after them.
Or all the claims that he's racist, when his clubs were the first big name New England golf courses open to Jews and Blacks.
Trump was heavily fined in a storm of classic LAWFARE the NY governor had to go out and reassure other real estate developers they wouldn't be treated the same.
"New Yorkers who are businesspeople have nothing to worry about because they’re very different than Donald Trump"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/18/trump-verdict-new-york-business-governor-kathy-hochul
So someone files patent applications in China. Friends have told me that due to corruption in the US Patent & Trademark office, Chinese patents are stronger. It turns out Google can just get anyone's patents overruled.
Kushner also wrote the hugely important Abraham Accords building a lasting relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And last I looked, Kushner is not, nor has ever been the President. Meanwhile Hunter Biden was convicted of fraud in DC with evidence from his laptop that 51 corrupt spies said was Russian influence—including the husband of Kamala's recent interviewer Dana Bash.
It turns out that one of the debate moderators was Kamala's sorority sister.
If we use the definition "having or showing a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain", his whole professional life has been corrupt. He didn't get rich by keeping his word to his business partners.
I'm sure he hoped his presidency would also profit him personally, it just didn't work out that way.
Did he breach contracts either written or oral? Then sue him for breach of contract. Anything else is sour grapes whinging.
Also, the Harris 'price controls' have not been really been explained beyond those two words, which is something you can rightly be mad at her about, BUT.
The estimates that say they will destroy the economy forever are mostly based on just making up a potential policy that is huge and broad-reaching and stupid.
As opposed to eg. the price control laws that many states already have to prevent price gouging during natural disasters or etc., which are tightly limited in scope and don't seem to cause any large-scale damage.
Implementing price controls in response to inflation means a very broad scope.
I have no idea what your commentary on link 50 means. "One trans activist has a silly surname, therefore I should stop getting so bent out of shape about trans rights" or "an app which was sued by a trans activist has a silly name, therefore I should stop getting so bent out of shape about transgender issues" both seem like complete non sequiturs.
I think something being named "Tickle v Giggle" makes it hard to take it seriously, and I think people need extra saving throws against taking sex and gender issues too seriously. See Part 3 of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes for more.
What does "take seriously" or "take too seriously" mean in this context?
Alice: "I think it's bad when convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are housed in women's prisons."
Bob: "Did you know a landmark ruling on a related issue in a separate country was called 'Tickle vs. Giggle'? Isn't that really dumb and silly?"
Alice: "Sure, that legal ruling has a funny name. That doesn't change my opinion that it's bad when convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are housed in women's prisons."
Again, I'm really not seeing the connection between these statements.
It's not a question of how correct is Alice but of how much of her mental energy she should pour into caring, and what it will cost her.
What is the appropriate amount of mental energy that Alice ought to devote to this political issue?
That should depend on her priorities (which are hers) and expected outcomes. If caring about the issue destroys her mentally and fails to achieve any measurable positive change to the issue itself, seems like she should agree she cared too much.
Maybe so. But why are we jumping to the conclusion that Alice cares too much about this issue on the basis that she cares about it at all, or on the basis that her opinion on this issue is not the maximally trans-inclusive one? It is entirely possible, even common, for people to be both gender-critical and to devote an appropriate amount of mental bandwidth to said cause.
I take it to be more on the side of "You have to believe this convicted murderer who, while incarcerated in a woman's prison because of a court case which forced 'if you identify as X you are X' ruling on the state government, got *two* women inmates pregnant is indeed a Real Woman and should not be put into a men's prison" advocates, then yeah - "Tickle versus Giggle is absurd, isn't it? Isn't it - weird?" is the right approach.
Weren't we told that mocking and making fun of the opposition and their stupid beliefs is how you win? (Re: religious belief and rationalism, at least) and if "gosh those people are weird" is being used as a winning strategy by Kamalalot, then why not use it for the extreme weirdo fringes as above?
And I wish that case above was a "come on that is a fake story" but it's all true.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nj-trans-prisoner-impregnated-2-inmates-transferred-mens-facility-rcna38947
"Minor’s removal from the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women comes just a year after the state reached a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey to house transgender inmates according to their gender identity, instead of their sex assigned at birth. The facility currently houses 27 transgender inmates, NJ Advance Media reported.
Sperrazza said “decisions related to an incarcerated person’s housing are made within the parameters of the settlement agreement which requires consideration of gender identity and the health and safety of the individual.”
The ACLU of New Jersey did not provide a response to NBC News’ requests for comment regarding Minor’s prison transfer.
Minor, who is serving a 30-year prison sentence for manslaughter, impregnated the fellow inmates earlier this year following consensual sexual relationships, Sperrazza confirmed. He added that even consensual sex between inmates is prohibited in the state.
...In a letter from Minor posted to the blog Justice 4 Demi, which often publishes videos and letters from her, she described her removal from Edna Mahan as punishment for having sex with two women.
“As a woman who is transgender I truly fear what lies ahead for me, its clear that staff have looked for some kind of security reason to kick me out of the only female correctional facility,” Minor wrote in the post, which was published Friday. “They have thrown me to the wolfs and expected for me just gave up, I am baffled and disgusted by this use power and I can only ask that the commissioner and governors office please send me back. I don’t deserve to be treated like this.”
I am quite happy to point and laugh and go "Tickle vs Giggle!" at the Justice 4 Demi set and all their fellow-travellers.
I'm not sure I got your position right, but do you think that "the inmate who impregnated two women should be considered a woman" is ridiculous?
For a biologist, sure, producing spermatozoa means they're a male (or an extremely rare hermaphrodite). But biologists are not the people who decide which bathrooms one can use, which sport competitions they can participate in, who they can marry and which prisons they should be put into. And I think these questions should preferably be decided in a way that minimizes social harm, and/or possibly maximizes some value we generally agree on. The decision could very well end up being "yes this one belongs in a men's prison", but the consensual inmate sex thing is not a sufficient harm to convince me of this. And I don't see what biologists have to do with this unless you believe prison is and should be as a low-key eugenical project. Which is probably not one of those values people generally agree on.
I thought generally Twitter activists don't "decide" anything, they just scream really loud or write letters? I have met some annoying people on their side of the fence, but let's not ignore the fact that most of the activists on the other side have an imaginary friend with a long history of convincing people it's okay to dictate how others should live their lives.
"do you think that "the inmate who impregnated two women should be considered a woman" is ridiculous?"
I had a whole spiel I was going to do, but let's skip it and cut to the chase:
Yes.
Yes, it's fucking ridiculous that a man with functioning reproductive system whose preference in sexual partners is women is allowed to call himself a woman and get into women's prison so he can be treated better and have a choice of women to fuck.
All the rest of it is bullshit. He's not suffering dysphoria, he's a murderous little animal who is rightfully in jail and wants to get as cushy a time as he can weasel out of the authorities, so if changing his name (which seems to be about as much transitioning as he has done) and claiming to be a real girl, yes I am! will do that for him, he'll do it.
This comment section can be a strange and disappointing place, but you never disappoint. Keep up the good work, ta!
But why should we care? It's one thing if they were trying to infiltrate a women's prison to rape with impunity (though honestly if prisons can't prevent rapes it's not Minor problem, pardon the pun). But if someone is gaming the system to be in supposedly a slightly more comfortable prison... they're still in prison.
(I'm not invested in prisons only being places for uncomfortable masturbation or not-by-preference-same-sex sex. Especially since we already have a category of people to whom this doesn't apply. And if I were, I'd probably call for conditions that rule out sex altogether (also solving the rape problem) rather than care about rare edge cases.)
I didn't and am not planning to research Minor specifically, so I can for the sake of the argument accept that you're right that they're obviously just gaming the system. Then placing them (him) in the women's prison was not one of the cases important for minimizing the harm. When it was decided that it's better to put trans people into prisons according to their preferred gender, they didn't mean them (him). But they probably weren't so dumb to fail to realize cheating will be happening, too, if women's prisons are generally better places. So the argument should have been that it's still worth it. (Details on how the decision was made can vary but clearly there should have been some people who found this convincing. And maybe this is wrong and disproving it will lead to better policies, but, again, the Minor case is hardly much of evidence for this, because it is a one.)
<mildSnark>
>he's a murderous little animal
but, but, but... didn't the criminal justice system find him to be a _manslaughterous_ little animal, presumably by due process of law?
</mildSnark>
Thank you.
I think many transgendered people are very sincere. At bare minimum, I think they genuinely do identify more with the gender that is opposite their birth sex.
That being said... ANYTHING can be faked. Something being real doesn't mean there's no fake instances of it - for example, there's both real money and counterfeit money. Just because many transgendered people are sincere about it and have no ulterior motives doesn't mean that nobody is faking it.
I remember reading about a case where a biological male was arrested and tried for the raping of two women, began transitioning to female AFTER this arrest was made, and asked to be put in a women's prison.
I mean... is it POSSIBLE this individual is legitimately transgendered? Yes, but I think someone would have to be insanely naive to think it's not possible that someone could pretend to be transgendered in this particular instance. Pretty much any heterosexual man who identifies as a man would rather go to a prison with female inmates than a prison with male inmates. I mean... duh.
Well, yes, the sane system should weigh the (unjust) harm to transgendered people who are put in prisons of their birth sex against the harm caused by putting both genuine and not-filtered-out fake transgenders into their preferred prisons. Rape in particular is a concern, although the same can be said of transgenders placed in men's prisons.
No idea if putting self-professed transgenders into prisons of their preferred gender is a good decision on balance.
However, I don't think that "this will result in their punishment being lighter" should be given much weight here. Even if we're talking about people faking it. Either men's prisons are intentionally made worse than women's ones, which sounds like discrimination but if it's somehow justified then judges can simply give possibly-fake transgenders lengthier sentences in exchange for better prisons. Or it's the result of men being shitty to each other, in which case it's not the transgender's fault and it's not particularly unjust if they get to escape it. And if they end up being shitty to women then it's an argument against letting them, but it's already covered under "weighing the harms".
Having a good logo is important for corporate branding, but if a company spent $500m on making the perfect logo for its and $50 on quality assurance for their actual product, you would say they are taking their logo too seriously to the exclusion of much more important issues.
Same thing here. What Alice believes on this topic isn't the issue at question, the issue at question is what percent of conversation Alice steers towards this topic, what percent of her brain cycles are spent stewing and obsessing over it, and how much it drives her vote compared to other much more consequential issues.
Okay. I've seen little to suggest that a majority (or even significant portion) of gender-critical people are single-issue voters constantly discussing trans issues at the expense of all other political topics, but perhaps that advice is sensible for some gender-critical people out there, who knows.
As Scott says explicitly in the post he linked, the caution is directed at everyone on all sides of this issue who make it too much of their identity.
It means it's a topic that generates cognitive dissonance and Scott is much happier if everyone just ignores it, and being able to mock this case because the names are silly (especially in juxtaposition) is one way to get people to ignore it.
What makes you think that people take these issues too seriously?
I mean, I don't get the impression that many people are single-issue voters on these issues (aside from abortion perhaps). My impression is most TERFs still vote for center-left and left of center parties even if/when they disagree with that party's stance on transgender issues, for example.
I also think these issues are at least somewhat important, in a few different areas (how much rights parents should have, who should be allowed to participate in women's sports, who should be housed in women's prisons, etc...). The decisions society makes here will have a real impact on many people's lives.
I don't see where these issues are any less important than, say, marijuna legalization, which many people are passionate about and which you treated with seriousness in 11.
It's not 'X therefore you should do Y,' it's 'You should do Y, and maybe X will finally convince you to do it.'
"...considers himself to be a reptilian" was a plot twist.
I dunno, I literally at that line thought "oh, well sure".
I only pretend to be a reptilian UFO pilot from deep within the hollow earth when I'm on twitter.
By the time I got to that I was thinking “of course he does” in my internal Stephen Merchant voice.
"6: …and I found the above a good appetizer before reading It’s Embarrassing To Be A Stay At Home Mom, which argues (I think correctly) that the root cause of declining fertility is what society finds honorable vs. low-status"
Recently I've had the thought that because culture is so easily shareable, it tends to generate convergence between men and women. Traditionalists argue for a focus on stay-at-home moms over stay-at-home dads because (I correctly) you're much more likely to find women who want to take and pragmatically can benefit from taking the stay-at-home role than you can for men. But, you can't maintain this state as a central divide between the genders because the counterforces that create a convergence are too strong, and attempting to pry it apart generates political conflict that strengthens and concentrates the counterforces even more (hence "wokeness").
The solution is most likely a Scandinavia-style solution that supports parenting without trying to make it gendered.
I feel like "culture makes the genders more similar" is something that is basically never considered because people tend to focus on whether culture makes the genders more distinct or whether nature is the root of the gender differences. But while culture probably does generate lots of novel gender differences that don't exist in nature, on a relative scale culture massively "enlargens" people, and so the existing gender differences become smaller relative to the extent of people. (Though on an absolute/non-relative scale this does mean culture increases the gender differences.)
It's more that convergence is actively enforced. In modern culture, there is pretty much an ideal androgynous person(TM) and you're indirectly or even directly punished for deviating from that ideal. This ideal person is competitive, but never violent, they have some casual sex in their 20s and then settle down in their 30s, they are interested in tech but also socially capable, and so on. In almost all of these cases men and women naturally tend towards one side, but society pressures them to adopt the other as well - often even the parents themselves.
The idealness of this androgynous person doesn't arise from the enculturation into it, but rather from it being objectively ideal. For instance, avoiding violence is taught by parents and schools, but it's an objectively correct vitalizing lesson because the police enforce their monopoly on violence in greater society.
(And sure, society requires the police and military to function, but the healthy approach to making them function isn't to have boys develop appreciation for violence per se, but rather to have boys develop patriotism, hatred of gangsters/terrorists/rogue states/etc., and an appreciation for the might of the military and police.)
The trouble comes when people go decide that this androgynous person (tm) is too androgynous, and try to pry it apart into separate options for the genders. Because the androgynous person (tm) is simply objectively good advice, and so attempts to pry it apart generates pointless frustration and conflict.
It's not objectively ideal from a Darwinian perspective to wait until your 30s to settle down.
I guess it depends on how you interpret it. Like yeah most people should have kids and need to make space for this, so given the usual timeline it's probably unwise to wait until after age 30 to begin with this (unless one has a backup plan? idk how reliable frozen eggs are).
But if the original comment was meant like, people fool around until early twenties, and then they seriously look for good partners until late twenties by which time they settle down - then that doesn't seem like a bad idea. Get a feeling for how relationships work before committing.
RenOS was saying society has a normative ideal. You replied that it's objectively ideal. But there's nothing objective about it, and a Darwinian standard (which is objectively how we evaluate traits in other species) cuts against it.
This is the theory I hear the most and which I used to believe, but the more experience I get the less reasonable it sounds. It goes against the theory of division of labor AND against the natural proclivities of just about everyone.
For example, my wife and I shared duties 50/50 on our first child according to this theory, but then we noticed that this makes her very unhappy. Not only for us, but we hear this from pretty much every single family that shared duties equally at first. So now, we still share duties, but more like 70/30, and I work (almost) full-time while she works part-time. Which incidentally is exactly what my parent's generation did by default but which was deemed sexist.
On competitiveness it's similar; Most women simply do not want a competitive job, they want a reliable, enjoyable job where they can easily leave for an arbitrary amount of time and then come back as if nothing changed.
On violence again; Most men actively enjoy violence, women don't. So the optimal is to give men a healthy outlet such as combat sports, and to generally not interfere with minor tussling between boys at school. Also, putting an average women in a job that requires violence is LARP at best and genuinely dangerous for everyone involved at worst.
On sex, again; Men do simply not have a time limit the way women have, so it is fine for them to settle down later in a way that is not for women. If a women finds her long-term partner with 30, then waits, say, 5 years to have her first child to make sure he is "the one", and then waits 3 years between each child, she will most likely barely manage to have 2 kids, with a substantial chance to only have a single child, and with later children having substantial likelihoods of major, debilitating disorders (literally orders of magnitude higher risk for down's, for example, than a "young" mother of 25). And btw this is always framed as being to the benefit of the men - he gets to "have fun" longer - but again in my experience this is simply not the case. A substantial number of male friends and acquaintances never casually dated at all (and not for lack of trying!) and simply had to wait until they found women willing to settle down with them. Women project their own experience here - they always have the option of casual dating - onto the average men, which is usually wrong when it comes to sexual issues.
I can continue this forever and ever. The people who fall for modern culture and become as androgynous as possible are absolutely miserable, which is well reflected in polls and studies of mental health issues, while fighting for your natural proclivities is hard, but rewards you with a happy live. Mind you, I'm not opposed to letting people decide for themselves nor do I deny that there is a minority on either side of any issue who are substantially different than the average for their sex. But we have to be realistic with what the average person of either sex is like, or we create a society that makes everyone unhappy (which we are well on the way).
> Most women simply do not want a competitive job, they want a reliable, enjoyable job where they can easily leave for an arbitrary amount of time and then come back as if nothing changed.
Sounds pretty good to me as a man too.
Modern culture actually makes the genders LESS similar. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/klyde-the-barbarianhtml
I'm not convinced. What part of this post do you find most convincing?
"Sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. … Women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. … Overall, higher levels of human development — including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth — were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated."
This is comparing sex differences across different national cultures in a handful of barely-sexually-differentiated traits that are taken to exist in all the cultures. However, my claim was about sex differences across the counterfactual of no culture in the number of traits that are highly and barely /not sexually differentiated, with the core of my claim being that culture creates more non-sexually-differentiated traits than sexually differentiated ones.
A counterfactual of no culture? Would that be if we were a non-social species like orangutans? Or if individual humans, with the evolutionary history of humans rather than orangutans, were then placed in solitary lives where they wouldn't absorb culture?
Haven’t the Scandinavia-style solutions in Scandinavia changed the fertility rate very modestly at best? I don’t think that would be likely to change outside of Scandinavia.
37. About rating news stories: My snap reaction, possibly unfair, is that I want my opinion heard and I don't want to bother if I'm in a lottery with a low probability of my opinion getting through. I'm not sure whether I understand the system, and if it's also a money lottery, that might make it more tempting.
39. I've been thinking for a while that the social justice left has been a bad influence on the right. I'm trying to put a finger on the exact nature of the bad influence, and it might be that the left made it clear that there are emotional and social rewards to being A Victim on the Attack. I *think* I started seeing more self-pity on the right about five years ago.
41. https://www.metafilter.com/205235/Woof-Nate-Not-cool-man
For what it's worth (I haven't read the book), a bunch of people who think Silver has become a poker addict.
That link makes me glad I don't normally read metafilter.
I think rewarding victimhood is broad societal trend, and the social justice left were just the first to exploit it aggressively.
23. Maybe a gender difference at statistics? (I blame the author, ofc.) 50%/99% are NOT about the average citizen, but about those living below the poverty line! No person at 50% wealth would be below pov. line in the developed world. All poor+often low virtue (Bryan Caplan would say, and as I work with some of those, I agree). So, let us translate the math into IE: "Give to one of the poorest of the poor, though he is an IQ85 occasional substance abuser and will burn the money quick enough. Or give to a poor person who is one of the holiest persons ever, who lives poor due to being over-generous/ascetic and who will most likely use the funds to help others."
I assume, the percentages will be different then. Anyone with enough followers on X is welcome to re-run the experiment
You are welcome. Maybe you even live in a country where the poor are desperate. Those poor I meet in real life have a clear reason why they are poor; being 'unable to use any funds wisely' is one minor reason, but one shared by all of the 'poorer half ot the poor'. - Even in a country that does not hand out 7k plus each year to each poor person, I would a) stick to my choice to give to the amazingly virtuous "B" b) stick to my hypotheses that those unclear "percentages" elicited other results than my alternative would. (For the record: Yes, most men fail at basic statistics, too.) There will always be people who will give to "A" rather than "B", and I .... respect ... that choice. It is not mine, but fine. As long as that money is/was not mine (taxes).
I'm a man, and I came up on the side of virtue. Maybe this is my political leanings shining through, as I identify as conservative, but I think it should go to the one who deserves it more, not that needs it more.
I would be interested in running this again but by political identification instead of by gender, though the gender result is also interesting.
1 in 100 people doesn't live in poverty because they give every cent they can spare to charity.
The 99th percentile of virtue is a lot less virtuous than that.
Same on the other end, 1% of the US population is still 3.5 million people. They're not all poor because of drug habits and idiocy, life is just hard and any stick will have someone on the short end of it.
> No person at 50% wealth would be below pov. line in the developed world.
That’s hard to parse. Do you mean at the median income level (not wealth)?
"33: New paper suggests that aspects of Bayesian decision making are not disturbed during autism. I’m suspicious that we don’t really know which aspects to measure. But I would have linked this paper if it confirmed my beliefs, so I guess I have to link the real paper that came out negative."
Recently I've gotten the impression that it is specifically the trans-Bayesian aspects of decisionmaking that are disturbed by autism. In particular with the backbone conjecture: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BcrPdMipzqecg4JdQ/the-causal-backbone-conjecture
It seems to me that autists have an unusually weak focus on the backbone, or a focus on an unusually narrow part of the backbone, or maybe just a focus on a part of the backbone that non-autists aren't focusing on. Connection to autism symptoms:
1. Difficulty communicating: when referring to a thing, people tend to give vague descriptors and rely on the recipient to pick up an object that extends the most "energy" towards said descriptor. But if autists have a weak backbone connection, that interferes with the energy calibration.
2. Stimming and sensory symptoms: when people face something intense, trans-Bayesian decision theory says that this is a call to action (if the intense thing is some opportunity to be developed, then a call to develop it, and if the intense thing is a problem, then a call to solve or avoid it). But if autists have a weak connection to the backbone, then we lack the ability to do meaningful action, leading to ~random behavior (stimming) and being upset by the intense thing (sensory sensitivity).
3. Narrow interests: people with strong connection to the backbone can form interests that mirror the backbone, whereas people with lack of connection to the backbone will have ~random interests, possibly connected to whatever slivers of the backbone they encountered, or to some broken estimates of potential.
"if it’s illegal but tolerated, then it’s supplied by random criminals; if it’s legal, it’s supplied by big corporations. And big corporations are good at advertising and tend to get what they want."
That seems like kind of a big problem with modern capitalism! Maybe we should generalize and say that *anything* that's morally dubious and bad for health is in that category of decrimanilzed, legal, but tolerated. So if you want a gigantic bucket of soda and some lottery tickets, you'll have to get it from "your buddy who knows a guy" rather than having it pushed in your face constantly every time you stop to buy gas.
I'm being kinda facetious here but also kinda serious. I'm generally a libertarian, but I don't like how modern corporations use sophisticated advertising and pushy sales techniques to take advantage of everyone's worst impulses.
Alternatively: ban advertising.
You can ban specific advertising. Tobacco is an example.
But what do you define as advertising?
A similar but likely better approach is "tax it". This is often done already for e.g. cigarettes.
#13 is wrong. 5150092/10058774 does not equal exactly 51.2%.
It does when rounded to 5 decimal digits. And it still does when rounded to 7 decimals!
You're also going at this from the wrong direction. 10058774 * 0.512 = 5150092.288, truncate or round to whole voters and you get 5150092, which is evidence for the hypothesis that the vote counts are made up based on desired percentages.
5150092/10058774 ~= 0.51199997136, which rounds to 0.5120000 at 7 digits of precision.
4445978/10058774 ~= 0.44199998926, which rounds to 0.4420000 at 7 digits of precision.
462704/10058774 ~= 0.04600003936, which rounds to 0.0460000 at 7 digits of precision.
The intuition is more or less that you shouldn't expect to see that level of accuracy. I assume without checking that the argument is the following:
The chance that a more or less arbitrary fraction would round to a number with 4 extra zeroes behind the comma is 1/10.000 (assuming the numbers are not made up). Since we see two of those (the third one is strongly correlated with the first two, so I ignore that) is (1/10.000)^2 = 1/100.000.000, so one in a hundred million chance of seeing fractions that accurate (again, assuming the numbers are not made up).
The number of 1 in a trillion is flawed (that would be (1/10.000)^3, which would take all three percentages into account ignoring correlation), as pointed out in an earlier comment by John R. Maine.
Oh it turns out I fat-fingered the number when putting it into the calculator and got the wrong answer
"24: Another day, another NYT doxxing scandal: an NYT reporter infiltrated a group chat of Jews talking about how they dealt with anti-Semitism. Then she shared the names of everyone in the group with someone who leaked it to anti-Israel activists. The activists proceeded to harass, stalk, threaten, and vandalize group members. NYT says that unspecified “disciplinary action” has been taken against the reporter, which apparently does not include firing her, demoting her, or any other effect observable in the physical world."
I wonder if you could set up some union-like parasite on NYT to undermine their doxxing. Like if people are hostile to NYT journalists UNLESS they join the Journalists Who Aren't Shitty To Those They Interview union, and if the union keeps track of bad behavior and pushes back (possibly kicking journalists who do bad stuff out of the union and thereby interfering with their options for interviewing), then maybe it could force the NYT to change their policies and such.
> 46: An unsympathetic portrayal of what went wrong with Lambda School (now BloomTech)
It would’ve been an exemplary piece of journalism if only the author avoided exposing his bias by criticizing Uber for breaking the law (yes, they did break the law, but the law was protecting mob-like monopolies, so who cares?) and criticizing DoorDash for… the author doesn’t spell it out but presumably for underpaying its drivers or something? But criticizing DoorDash for that is a basic misunderstanding of Econ 101 so it immediately makes me a bit suspicious.
Overall highly disappointed in Austen. The company seemed legit and I now regret having suggested it to a few people in the past.
> Jeff Bezos would be turning in his grave
Funny story I heard from a firsthand account (throwaway for obvious reasons):
The week before Rufus was announced they told the team what it was going to be named (not Rufus). The day before it was announced, Jeff Bezos made a last minute board meeting appearance in which he suggested they should rename it to Rufus. The reason for this is that Rufus was Amazon's first company dog, and so people there think about that instead of the naked mole rat. Anyways he might have drifted from his customer centric past.
> Anyways he might have drifted from his customer centric past.
I'm mad about Amazon's shipping policies.
In the beginning, Amazon let you specify what kind of shipping you wanted whenever you ordered anything, and the slowest available shipping was free if your order cost enough.
Then they introduced Amazon Prime, where all of the shipping policies were exactly the same, but if you were a Prime member, two-day shipping was always free.
Then they decided they were spending too much on shipping services that were able to provide delivery guarantees and they'd handle their own logistics.
And the result of that was that you're no longer allowed to buy faster shipping for important purchases, Prime membership means they pinky swear that in their hearts they intend for your packages to arrive within two days, and if it takes longer, you can suck it. All Amazon shipping is now officially best-effort.
What in the hell?
This must depend a lot on location. I moved from Texas to California a year ago, and found that in Texas my Prime membership qualified for two day shipping on most things and next day for some things, while in California it was next day for most things, and 4 am for some things, and same day for many if I ordered in the morning.
I'm speaking from a California perspective.
But note that, while I am in fact mad about slow shipping, my actual complaint here is that Amazon doesn't offer any shipping speeds at all, just their best wishes that you'll receive your package(s) within a period that is satisfactory to you. If you want to pay for shipping guarantees, you can't, because Amazon doesn't offer those. This is something you can easily verify wherever you happen to be, regardless of how long deliveries usually take.
Interesting! It seems to me that there’s well over 80% (probably over 95%) reliability of me receiving my packages within the time stated.
I didn't know there was a naked mole rat named Rufus, but I think Amazon should lean into this.
Kim Possible! Ron's pet was a naked mole rat named Rufus 😁
Bezos and I are roughly the same generation, it turns out.
Voiced by Nancy "Bart Simpson" Cartwright, except for the one memorable occasion when it was Michael "Worf" Dorn.
"Scott never watched Kim Possible, but Deiseach did," is not something I expected to learn. Also, Disney needs to reboot Kim Possible as a Star Wars show starring a teenage Princess Leia; they would barely need to change anything.
Have I explained my theory that Kim Possible is itself an action-heavy reboot of A Wrinkle In Time?
But your version at least gives us a much better merchandising opportunity for Naked Mole Rat plushies. As for Scott, his kids will be old enough for Kim Possible soon enough, so we just need to make sure Disney reruns the original in the right timeframe.
23. Why is the male/desperate result highlighted? IMO the important difference is that a much higher percentage of males prefer giving to more virtuous people rather than more needy people ( females choose needy over virtuous). I assume this is because males let rationality trump emotion more than women do.
It's highlighted because Twitter highlights the plurality answer on polls. This is usually what you want ("what's your favourite food?"), but not when the poll is split on a variable.
Thanks!
I suspect it’s less about rationality/emotion and more about instinctual favoring of resource allocation in an egalitarian or meritocratic manner. It’s pretty common for women’s situations to be better served by more egalitarian behavior and for men’s situations to favor more meritocratic.
>And the answer turns out to be: if it’s illegal but tolerated, then it’s supplied by random criminals; if it’s legal, it’s supplied by big corporations. And big corporations are good at advertising and tend to get what they want.
It reminds me of something. Stolichnaya used to be just a boring Soviet vodka. And then MBA types came in and turned into that cool strawberry tasting fun looking thing that looks like something every 18 years old party girl wants: https://www.totalwine.com/spirits/vodka/flavored-vodka/strawberry/stoli-crushed-strawberry-vodka/p/191174750
So yes, there is evidence that they are good at making unhealthy things look cool and it is not a good thing.
Thanks for the link. I didn't know that gluten-free vodka is a thing.
2. Any evidence for what exactly that optimal personality is?
"2: Many personality differences are partly genetic. So why did evolution give different people genes for different personalities"
First, a disclaimer. I find this topic really fascinating! That people have very different personalities is an obvious observation, but the evolutionary reasons why this should be the case are far from obvious. So I found the link very interesting and wanted to write a quick response before going to work, but that means I read the article a bit too quickly and I hope I did not misunderstand some parts of it.
I think the article is really wonderful, an excellent summary of both the current methods and the most interesting results in genomic analyses of human personality data, a field that is difficult to present clearly! I fully agree with two of the authors' main conclusions, but I strongly disagree with the last one.
I think that B. Zietsch's conclusion that the dynamic equilibrium between mutation, selection, and drift is a major factor in explaining the genetic variation associated with human personality variation is fully justified by several lines of strong evidence. In my view, this is a settled question. I also agree with him that the life-history theory is not a likely explanation for human personality variation (in fact, that theory never made any sense, even if it is or may have been quite popular!)
But I strongly disagree with the idea that selection must be abandoned as a driving force in explaining personality differences between people. For me, it is based on the idea that selection means balancing selection, which in turns means the situation where you have two variants at the same locus, both maintained by selection. This kind of selection produces very specific patterns of genetic polymorphism, and it is quite easy to detect with genomic data. It was once thought to be potentially common, but current genomic data have convincingly shown that it is actually somewhere between fairly common and extremely rare.
So okay, I agree with the idea that this kind of balancing selection is not a good explanation for personality differences between people. But selection has several other forms: there is negative frequency-dependent selection, where it is advantageous to have a rare trait, trade-offs between different components of fitness, where some personality traits allow you to reproduce better but at the cost of reduced survival, fluctuating selection, where some personality traits will be advantageous in some environments but not others. All of these mechanisms are, in my opinion, quite likely for human personality, and they will not leave many footprints in the genomic data. So I think the rejection of selection as an explanation is not justified!
To me this makes more sense when looking at fitness of communities. In the event of external pressures it pays off to have diverse personalities in a group. So there is a tribe and the climate is getting worse over time. One group decides to travel far away while another group decides to stay. This diversity in opinions/personalities increases the probability that at least one group survives. Diversity is good in the animal kingdom: "Fast learning in free-foraging bumble bees is negatively correlated with lifetime resource collection" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-00389-0
It does make intuitive sense but group selection is notoriously a very rare mechanism, as it requires very specific conditions.
I believe that group selection works in practice but not in theory.
That would be interesting!
individuals can also select for groups.
In general I am highly sceptical of anyone having a strong opinion on this though. The game theory gets very complex in even slightly more complex societies than the most primitive hunter gatherer type. This really seems like a field that is still in its infancy and go in all directions as we learn more.
The fact that individuals can indeed select for groups does not change the fact that group selection is extremely uncommon.
This is not a personal opinion, but a really well-established result of evolutionary biology: group selection requires conditions that are almost never met. It is definitely not a likely or even a reasonable explanation for personality differences.
Group selection is an explanation that seems natural, probably because groups, like social aspects in general, are so important to us. For example, group selection has historically been a popular explanation for phenomena as diverse as the death by suicide of lemmings or the fact that ageing exists (it must be for the good of the species!). But in fact, individual selection ('normal' natural selection) is so much stronger than group selection that group selection almost never occurs. This is because individuals have usually a much higher rate of reproduction and death (= opportunity for selection) than groups.
Surely group cultures gave evolutionary advantages or disadvantages - Amish vs Shakers. I suppose this isn’t a permanent change to the genome, but it’s certainly an evolutionary advantage to a group to be pro natalist rather than anti natalist.
As I mention in my own comment on this link, this explanation is routinely given as the reason why sexual reproduction exists, despite the obviously greater efficiency of asexual reproduction. It is not at all unfamiliar or exotic.
All traits vary. This is what enables evolution to occur in the first place. We don't need to further explain the variation in a particular trait. As a particular trait, it is an example of a trait.
Sexual reproduction is indeed one of the very few cases where group selection could be a contributing mechanism: it works if species, which are largely isolated groups, have a higher extinction probability without sexual reproduction.
But for maintaining personality traits in humans, within a species, group selection is an extremely unlikely mechanism. You would need very weird demographic scenarios, where groups of people are both very isolated and frequently reproducing, ie splitting into several groups.
What do you mean? These are not separable concerns. Sexual reproduction is advantageous because it can take advantage of standing variation in the population. Without that variation, sexual reproduction would have no upside, but still plenty of downside, compared to budding. If you believe that sexual reproduction outcompetes budding, it's a necessary 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 for you to believe that the default state of traits is to exhibit variation.
And the only circumstance you need to maintain that variation is that there is no optimum strategy. An optimum gets fixed. But if athletes are optimally stronger than accountants, no level of strength is going to be fixed in the population unless the entire strategy of being an accountant (or an athlete) goes obsolete.
"What do you mean? These are not separable concerns. Sexual reproduction is advantageous because it can take advantage of standing variation in the population. Without that variation, sexual reproduction would have no upside, but still plenty of downside, compared to budding. If you believe that sexual reproduction outcompetes budding, it's a necessary 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 for you to believe that the default state of traits is to exhibit variation."
I think that I do not understand your point. The question is not whether there is variation: yes there is. The question is wether this variation is actively maintained by selection, rather than continuously injected by mutation and removed by selection).
"And the only circumstance you need to maintain that variation is that there is no optimum strategy. An optimum gets fixed. But if athletes are optimally stronger than accountants, no level of strength is going to be fixed in the population unless the entire strategy of being an accountant (or an athlete) goes obsolete." The question originally discussed is whether or not there is a selective mechanism that maintains variation. The author of the original link argues, wrongly in my opinion, that there is not. The next question in this thread was whether, if there is such a maintenance of variation, it is due to "ordinary" natural selection or group selection. I am not clear on what level you are arguing here.
50. That fine legal(ese) post made it kinda hard to get what giggle-tickle is about, esp if one misses the first footnote ;) Now decided in favor of R. Tickle (Very much pro-Tickle article, strangely hard to find a negative one on google) https://lismoreapp.com.au/NewsStory/tickle-vs-giggle-local-trans-woman-roxy-tickle-wins-her-human-rights-case/66dee932416db9002dadf4c4
Seems media has zero problem to identify with Tickle: "local-trans-woman-roxy-tickle-wins-her-human-rights-case" ... (Now all girls-only-websites must admit any trans-women to surf around. Cuz it's their f?=$&%g human rights, ya'know.)
The plaintiff's name is Roxanne Tickle, not "Trickle". This is relevant because tickles cause giggles.
Sometimes the law can be fickle.
oops, sorry, corrected - the infamous "trickle down effect" mislead some neuron
> Many personality differences are partly genetic. So why did evolution give different people genes for different personalities, instead of everyone converging onto one optimal personality? The debate has focused on two theories. First, maybe there is an optimal personality, but evolution doesn’t move fast enough to get us there (this would be like disease risk or IQ, where some people just luck into having better genes than others). Second, maybe there are rock-paper-scissors personality types such that convergence is itself a non-optimal strategy (this would be like gender, where if everyone else is a woman, then your best strategy for getting mates easily is to be a man, and vice versa, so we naturally end up 50-50). A new review analyzes the evidence, and finds pretty decisively that it’s the first one (there are optimal personalities but evolution is too slow to get there).
This is... crazy. Personality is no different here than any other genetic trait. Why do traits vary from organism to organism? Because not all organisms are subject to the same circumstances; the variation is valuable in itself. This is why we have sexual reproduction.
Finding that there are optimal personalities is nothing but a signal that you shouldn't take that paper seriously.
"Personality is no different here than any other genetic trait. Why do traits vary from organism to organism? Because not all organisms are subject to the same circumstances; the variation is valuable in itself."
I think this is false, or at least too broad. See Part II of https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
> but one of the better criticisms was that a lot of success in risky fields comes not from good risk intelligence, but from setting up heads-I-win-tails-you-lose style scams while pretending that your success comes from good risk intelligence
I think the most egregious example of this is when startups promise riches to their hires of the company goes big, thus justifying why they’re paying them less in cash. But in reality even among startups that do end up reaching an exit stage, 99% of early employees would still not earn life changing amounts of money. The startup *founders* would, perhaps the C-suite and certainly the VCs, but the employees will almost never get all that much, unless you hit the megalotto jackpot by working for the next OpenAI.
Some people like to justify this model by saying that they enjoy working for startups due to them having less bureaucracy, etc, but there’s still an element of dishonesty in the way startups market themselves.
How exactly does this work? Do founders promise a big share of the startup but then renege? Or do they honestly promise a certain share (let's say 0.1% of value), and then employees are overly optimistic and don't realize that this will be a small amount?
Investors often have liquidation preferences that make simple % ownership projections of gains for employees misleading.
For instance, a given Series might be guaranteed a 3x return before anyone after them in priority gets anything; iterated with higher multiples for earlier (riskies) investors and the pot may be empty before employees see anything.
Sometimes they’re not even promised “0.1%” but rather vague “shares numbers” and aren’t told what those correspond too. Some employees ask for a clarification at this stage, some don’t. The founders and VCs get the full financial picture, the employees are usually kept in the dark as much as possible.
Then there’s dilution and liquidation preferences, which tend to make any small share ~worthless by the time an exit happens.
Finally there’s a question of titles and expectations of growth: if you’re the very first employee and things go great, you’ll probably be in the C-suite eventually, right? Unfortunately that’s rarely the caae due to VC pressure to hire “professional” management once the company grows big. In fact, even the cofounders are usually kicked out of their roles at this point and only the CEO has a chance to stay - so if you’re offered to be a CTO cofounder, even that might be a significantly worse deal than starting out as CEO.
As far as I know stock offers are always in the form of "provided certain conditions are satisfied, the employee receives X many shares or options on Y date". The weakness of an offer of this type is that the company can create and distribute shares more-or-less at will.
Your 10,000 shares might be worth 0.1% ownership in the company, but the founders and the CEO (or whoever is really making the decisions) can set up the terms of a buyout to create 10^7 new shares, all owned by whoever is buying them out. Your share is diluted a hundredfold and no-one even bothers to ask if you want to sell. I don't know if its even legal to promise someone that they'll own a fixed percentage of a company.
> (unusual, colorful) life experiences
Let me also share one. I was once very tired from illness and sort of hallucinating or dreaming half awake, and I was hallucinating in abstract concepts, not visuals. So I learned what abstract concepts feel like. One abstract concept was an endorsement of a kind of a paperclip maximizer. It is something like "turn everything into something", except remove the "everything" and "something" and the "we", there was no subject or object, only "turning-intoness". And it felt like stacking very transparent, almost invisible cubes. Pure logic or pure abstraction feels like... geometry.
> 7 "The other 80% of the decline comes from women who do have children having fewer of them - the average 1976 woman with children had 3.3! "
And yet the desire for large enough families is there.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/236696/americans-theory-think-larger-families-ideal.aspx
> 41% of US adults believe that 3 or more children is ideal. The average preference is 2.7
There are clear economic factors influencing this figure.
> Preferences for large families continued to wane through the 1970s and 1980s, spanning three U.S. recessions, and reached a low of 28% in 1986. It has since fluctuated, but reached a recent high of 42% in 1997 amid a booming economy and a low of 33% in 2011 as the country was still recovering from the 2007 to 2009 recession.
Ehrlich has a lot to answer for.
> Gallup documented a particularly abrupt change between 1967 and its next measure in 1971, as the percentage favoring large families fell from 70% to 52%. This may have reflected public fears of a global population explosion, as detailed in the bestselling 1968 book "The Population Bomb."
Remember all this when people talk about low fertility being cultural, and not being shiftable by tax breaks and so on.
Regardless of the lack of success so far the difference between what couples want and achieve in number of offspring isn’t based on desire but on something else. Economic reality most likely. Possibly the housing crisis forces people to start much later than they otherwise would.
Also my mention of Ehrlich was an example of how extrapolating from now is a mugs game. I’m fairly sure in our future there’s a Substack equivalent writer writing “believe it or not there was a moral panic about the west running out of babies in the early 2020s”.
People's economic reality today is better than it has ever been at any point in history
That’s not an answer though, because we also have contraception.
#6: This doesn't fit with the fact that some regions of the world are converging to developed (Europe, NA, EA) countries' fertility rates while staying at a lower Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP) level. It's already the case of Latin America (lower FLFP); MENA and India seem to be going in the same direction (fertility not so low yet, but even lower FLFP).
I think this still fits with the model, broadly understood.
People exposed to modernity gradually adopt the success-based status system.
People in poor countries who have adopted a success-based status system look at the lifestyle of the characters on TV and use that as their status baseline, they notice they are below baseline, this is unacceptable. They notice that they live in a socioeconomic system where having more children will make it harder for them to reach baseline. (This is usually directionally correct even in countries with crummy employment opportunities for women.) So they choose not to have more children.
> Pharaohs didn’t necessarily consummate their marriages, and their heirs would usually be born from unrelated concubines, so the risk of inbreeding was low.
Is this actually true? It's the opposite of the impression I got from reading The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, where e.g. Seqenenra Taa marries his full sister Ahhotep, to be followed by his son Ahmose (who marries his full sister, daughter of Seqenenra Taa and Ahhotep, Ahmose-Nefertari), who is succeeded by his own son Amenhotep, who is succeeded by someone unrelated because he never had any children, which is pretty easy to explain by reference to the fact that he had a total of two great-grandparents. But Amenhotep does follow family tradition by marrying his own full sister.
Egyptian kings did have a lot of concubines... but, as is true in every such culture, they had one wife with primary status, who held the fairly intuitive title of King's Great Wife. How often did the son of a concubine inherit ahead of a legitimate heir?
With the Pharoahs, the problem is that we're generalising about three millennia or so of history, traditionally in 31 dynasties. I'm pretty sure many Pharoahs failed to consummate their marriages and also many Pharoahs were succeeded by the sons of their sister-wives.
> Did you know: Malaysia not only has a king, but also a Deputy King.
Sounds pretty much identical to the position of "viceroy", a word which literally means "deputy king". And the wikipedia article says the deputy king performs the functions of a viceroy. What's to know?
#6 doesn't really work as an explanation:
1) The East Asian part of the argument is in fact the other way, as being a stay at home mom is essentially socially enforced in Japan, with women continuing to work after children viewed with suspicion in Korea and Japan.
2) Many countries have shifted to much lower TFR despite continuing low female labour force participation, such as South Asia and the Middle East.
3) Within Europe, birth rates are in fact anticorrelated with conservative social attitudes, as in less traditional views are associated with higher TFR (and no, this isn't because of immigration, the effect holds up when you exclude immigrants in France and Scandinavia).
Is 3. actually true within countries?
I've actually struggled to find that data at all, let alone in a way that controls for age and actually realised TFR, in particular to ensure we're not just measuring people who have already had their kids (say older and/or more religious types, and there's not enough granularity to break that out that I've seen, hence the use of society wide figures being most useful).
I agree it's an interesting question!
1. Work opportunities for women are one way that fertility and success-based status can trade off against each other, but not the only one. Kids are expensive, especially if you have to pay for East Asian style cram schools.
2. Thanks to the internet and television, everyone nowadays gets exposed to the success-based status memeplex, rich or poor. Even in poor countries where wives can’t work, having more kids is not going to get you a bigger, cleaner, nicer house, which is now how you’re evaluating your worth as a person.
3. I think this supports the model, since social conservatism means you face a sharper tradeoff between material success and fertility. Progressive moms have the option to send the kids to daycare and continue working. Conservative moms probably drop out of the labor force once they have kids, taking a huge hit to lifetime earnings. (Also, purely guesswork, but I suspect southern European countries are more fucked up about success-based status competition; just thinking about Italians vs. Swedes and their respective attitudes towards designer handbags.)
Great stuff!! As good as Naked Capitalism and better in many ways.
By the way - kudos to Substack for fixing the comments section. It looks like I get to the actual comment these days when clicking in a link in the app. Most of the time.
These links are amongst the best I’ve ever seen. If I were Scott, I’d put them behind a paywall temporarily at least. I doubt if the hidden open thread is a big seller.
#13: I couldn't find a breakdown of the official (CNE) results by state or municipality, but if anyone is interested in a short analysis of the geographical patterns of the Venezuelan election results as per the opposition (PUD), here's a post I wrote a few weeks ago:
https://www.mangosorbananas.com/p/the-venezuelan-election-map-looking
13 : Any ideas as to why the numbers from the tweet differ from the one from wikipedia? There is no source I can check in the tweet.
From Spanish Wikipedia:
"En las primeras horas del 29 de julio de 2024, el Presidente del CNE anunció oralmente que el Presidente Nicolás Maduro había ganado la elección con 5 150 092 votos (51.2 %), seguido por Edmundo González con 4 445 978 votos (44.2 %), afirmando que se habían recibido resultados del 80 % de las mesas de votación. El 2 de agosto, el CNE confirmó al Presidente Maduro como ganador con 6 408 844 votos (51.95 %), seguido por González con 5 326 104 votos (43.18 %)"
The 5,150,092 votes figure was announced as a preliminary result on July 29, with only 80% of votes accounted for. It was only in August 2 that the CNE declared its official results (the ones you now see in Wikipedia). You can see search for July 29 tweets on X:
https://x.com/search?q=5150092%20venezuela&src=typed_query&f=top
Ah I see, thanks !
The numbers put out by the tweet were also in contemporaneous news reports. You should be able to find the news stories by plugging the numbers into google.
Regarding fertility, I think a better description is not about status but opportunity cost. Forget about balancing work and a career, until you have a kid and become a vampire (https://www.econtalk.org/l-a-paul-on-vampires-life-choices-and-transformation/) kids represent a significant cost on your future goals regardless of gender. The reason the ultra-rich are able to have more kids is that they can reduce the opportunity cost of having kids by hiring more help and can continue to live their current lifestyle (e.g. taking vacations, eating out) while the merely rich will see the biggest opportunity cost of having kids. This is related to the other issue about people who used to have 3 kids no only having 1. Since the opportunity cost of having kids in your 20s is higher people delay having kids until they are in their 30s and then have less time to have multiple kids.
I agree it's not really about status. In the case of Israel (as I infer from Nonzionism's post) I think of it more as a compatibility thing, where many of the activities that comprise someone's lifestyle require socializing with your peers. If your peers generally have three children, you have to choose between:
1.- Having more children (2 or 3) and lots of socializing with your peers through child-friendly activities.
2.- Having less children (0-1), reducing your opportunities of socializing with peers, and compensate with more childless (or one-child family) lifestyle activities.
Are you Israeli?I am, and It does not much my perception of Israeli society
This +100000
Thank you for saying this.
Any discussion of declining fertility that doesn’t prominently feature the words OPPORTUNITY COST misses the point.
>I think a better description is not about status but opportunity cost.
It doesn't make sense to see opportunity cost as the ends. Opportunity cost in service of what? Status. The ultra rich have more kids because they don't take a status hit to having more kids and they're comfortably at the top so they don't need more.
Utility is a better but still bad description because status depends on what others think but the opportunity costs are about your personal preferences. The opportunity cost is in terms of money and time. If you are a double income no kids couple and used to taking 2 international vacations a year and enjoying living in a city center, having a kid (or three) means you're going to need to move and you need to pay for an extra traveller on every trip (plus traveling with a child will reduce your value of these trips until you have vampire preferences).
>but the opportunity costs are about your personal preferences
Personal preferences are heavily influenced by cultural values that determine the markers of high and low status. Your travelling example proves the point, actually. The vibes around travel culture is very modern. People wouldn't get nearly as much utility from going on international vacations twice per year if they didn't feel like it was something that makes you a worldly cool open-minded person and that they owed it to their children to give them these worldly cool experiences.
I agree that culture shapes preferences but I think status is an over broad concept that explains less than normal uses of prefernce, time, or money. People like going on vacation because it is fun, we are (probably genetically) wired to enjoy new experiences, you get to eat different foods and see new things. People have wanted to travel since before writing, it just used to be prohibitively expensive and dangerous. My point is not that people think that they owe it to their kids to give them the experience, it is that they can no longer have the experience once they have kids.
Sorry I wasn't clear, these
>it was something that makes you a worldly cool open-minded person
>and that they owed it to their children to give them these worldly cool experiences.
were two points. I meant that a big part of the value of travelling is itself about status.
We have pretty different takes on travelling as a phenomenon. I don't think the value we attach to travelling today is really as primordial as all that. Going to Athens was a high status thing for Ancient Roman elites, but I think contemporary mass travel culture is different. Then again, low birthrate became a problem for Ancient Rome too...
Abraham and Jacob both have travel adventures, Gilgamesh has multiple travel adventures. The Odyssey is a big travel adventure. Yes travel is something high status people do but these stories are popular because the appeal to common people values. Sailors and soldiers were low status positions but people did it because of the thrill of adventure.
> It doesn't make sense to see opportunity cost as the ends. Opportunity cost in service of what? Status.
Disagree, there's a lot of opportunity costs associated with kids that aren't about status. The opportunity to sleep in on Saturday. The opportunity to have frequent nights out, or quiet nights at home. The opportunity to go to an art gallery or a museum or go on holidays to somewhere that kids will be bored. Basically, the opportunity cost of being able to spend any of the hours of life doing things that you actually want to do instead of things that you are obliged to do.
I'll happily trade some status for sleeping in 'til 8 on weekends.
I don't disagree that there are sacrifices involved. Those sacrifices are more burdensome now because they are in service to something (having children) that no longer has as much cultural cachet.
8 is your sleep in Melvin. Humble brag.
That's my fantasy sleep in. 7 is my actual sleep in that I get if I'm lucky.
Before I had kids I thought this as well, now with them I think it entirely misses the point. Once you have children, your priorities change. Going on X vacations per year just isn't important for me anymore. How much I can do some arbitrary expensive hobby? I don't care either.
The status explanation is much better. You status in the larger culture is now much more dependent on how well you can subscribe to the childless lifestyle. Being well-travelled, for example. On the other hand in the past, having a large family itself was a sign of high status. Nowadays if anything it's the opposite, especially if you can't send them to violin practice.
That's what my comment on being a vampire is all about. The vampire concept is based on the idea that certain decisions you make result in your preferences changing (as if you were bitten by a vampire and became a cool nocturnal immortal). But that point that your priorities change doesn't negate my point since the "vampire" you doesn't get to vote on your decisions until after the "human" you already decides to become a vampire. My point is that while obviously society/culture/status shapes your preferences these have a smaller impact than the actual choices available and people's innate preferences.
Gotta love those Republican Mexicans talks about.
> The middle of California has a bunch of Republican Mexicans, which is a demographic that is not well-represented in media. They are pro-gun, pro-Trump, pro-Christianity, and anti-immigrant, even though (or maybe because) they are very recent immigrants themselves. From our brief meal in a Republican Mexican diner, I can also say they appear to be aggressively hospitable, and will fill up your cup of coffee for your endless refill whether you want them to or not.
14. While it is the case that the Ptolemaic Pharoahs also married their sisters, the link refers to Bronze Age Pharoahs, who were about a thousand years before the Ptolemies.
Indeed, and the answer to question "Why did the Ptolemaic Pharoahs marry their sisters?" is "Because the ancient Pharoahs did". Also, the life of Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator shows that marrying your sister is hardly a guarantee that she won't produce heirs with others.
Exactly,
28: Bryan Caplan (and later Freddie deBoer) helped me get over the crushing sense of despair I'd had for years from being one of those gifted-child early academic bloomers who subsequently flunks out of college. Repeatedly, even! There are still some Frostian regrets for that ivory tower not climbed, and probably always will be...but I no longer feel like a complete fuckup failure who "deserves" better in life, who missed her only shot at getting a "real job", etc. It's not paranoid sour grapes if the Potemkin game really is corrupt and rigged! Been vindicating to see a slow raising of awareness among the general public that There's More To Life Than College and We Ought To Diversify Paths To Succes.
29: I keep wishing there were, like, equivalent liberal-coded versions of such Trad Pledges. There's clearly a market for such interventions (h/t any number of Scott's old essays on the plight of disaffected young men), and they do turn many lives around that might otherwise be lost to indolence and antisocial nihilism. It's a disservice to cede so much of that fertile territory to...I won't say cranks, but the good tends to come packaged with a lot of other unfortunate whackadoodle, precisely because it's a one-sided uncompetitive "market". The left affinity for <s>individuality</s> benign neglect would be admirable from a libertarian perspective if it wasn't so arbitrary. Although I do think a taboo on tattoos is silly in current_year - it's now a pretty low-risk baseline floor of openness-to-experience that tends to ensure people are at least not *boring*.
36: I don't buy the strong version of Doctorow's "Enshittification" hypothesis, but Amazon certainly fits the pattern. Fun and exciting to use in the 00s, workhorse merchant in the early 10s, black hole SEO nightmare experience at some indeterminate later point. The crappiness of the shopping funnel tends to be mirrored in the actual goods as well. I'm too old now to put up with unbranded Chinese crap and poorly-disguised dropship counterfeit goods even from actual brand sellers. Can't understand why anyone puts up with that mess anymore besides inertia. The world made a lot more sense when I first learned that AWS is where most of their "real" profits come from...
Ideally, yeah...but it's never had the level of reach where I'd compare it to Influencers(tm), even before SBF's unfortunate well-poisoning of that entire ideaspace. Reaching a more valuable crowd, perhaps, but I worry much less about the potential harm caused by adrift twentysomething MBAs versus the down-and-out crowd currently running cover for the populist horseshoe. Optimization of positive EV versus reversing the sign of negative EV, and all that. To contrast with 23, I feel like such pledges primarily serve to distribute +virtue rather than -desperation - a non-fiat currency that remains pretty illegible and hard to cultivate through government policy. (Easy to destroy via same though!)
Or just veganism.
Oh, that's a pretty good mirror! Fills dog-shaped holes, frequently comes bundled with differently-flavoured whackadoodle, punches above its weight class while being broadly unpopular. It's even largely mythologized and spread by the same channels. I think I didn't consider it because it's facially "just" about consumption choices, but the whackadoodle tends to form its own entire Moral Code that ends up functioning like a LibsOfTiktok Pledge. Peter Singer contains more than just veganism, but veganism contains a lot of Peter Singer...
"Although I do think a taboo on tattoos is silly in current_year - it's now a pretty low-risk baseline floor of openness-to-experience that tends to ensure people are at least not *boring*."
Well, I suppose I must own up to being dull and boring, because I have no tattoos, I want no tattoos, and I'll go into my coffin without tattoos 😁
If everyone is getting a crappy sleeve full of uninteresting black ink with bad art, how is that "gee this person must be so interesting and exciting"? Agreed, it's my upbringing and personal inclinations and way outdated attitudes on show here, but I think that tattoos are the province of the trashy; they're 'common' (as my mother would have said) and the kind of people I see going around with a lot of tattoos are not people I much like (that shitty brother-in-law of mine started getting midlife crisis tattoos and went for the full 'I'll get one more, and one more, and one more, and... ' route, and while I never liked him, it wasn't until he revealed his full shit-headedness that I went 'shoulda known - trashy people get trashy tattoos, trashy tattoos mean trashy person').
YMMV, of course, and if there are good tattoos done discreetly and not indiscriminately, then the person may be interesting. But my rule of thumb is: if you come from a cultural background of getting tattooing done, like the Maori, this is fine; if you're whitebread and getting tattoos all over every square inch, you're trashy.
I imagine you *could* call this guy "not boring" but uh. Yeah. Maybe more "dull and boring normie who wouldn't dream of getting face tats" would have been better here? Certainly he was open to experience, though: the experience of killing two women!
https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/face-tattooed-man-found-guilty-in-brutal-murders-of-2-florida-women/
I'd go a little broader and say that they're a cultural signifier rather than a signifier of anything about an individual -- they just say that you're part of a particular culture. That culture might be Maori, or it might be professional sailor, or it might be trashy 2000s bar girl, or it might be career criminal, or it might be earnest inner-city vegan bartender.
My or your lack of tattoos says nothing about you or I as an individual except that we are not part of those particular cultures.
It's precisely because they're common , in both senses of the word, that I think they serve a useful signal...barberpole theory and all that (though I'll concede to Dr. Germ that, yes, the strength of such has been declining and in some communities is just table stakes now). Someone who's Too Good For Tattoos is probably too good for many other of life's interesting experiences. That's part of why I said "boring" rather than some other term of judgement; it's an antifragile metric of high variance. Sort of like how a super-straightedge person who's still an absolute teetotaler on their deathbed is virtuous, certainly, but also one wonders about the marginal benefit of a little horizon-broadening for Syr Inadventurous.
The trashiness of prison sleeves and (non-culturally-traditional) face tattoos also illustrates the point: here is a highly visible signal of probable poor judgement, aesthetic and otherwise! Other signals, like fashion choices or music playlists, are so often subconsciously influenced by What Will Other People Think Of Me? concerns...the decision to make a tattoo prominently visible thus has informational value, especially if it's a bold one, especially especially if it's a bad bold one. Something tastefully done, carefully curated, only visible if one gets to know someone better...also a good signal, in the opposite direction. Even moreso if it's a wild contrast with how that person generally presents. It always throws me for a loop to meet a mild-mannered inoffensive Nicest Person Ever, and then learn they actually have a full-body tattoo or something. To me, without loss of generality, that's a more interesting outcome than an equivalent nice person without the tattoo.
(Also, obligatory disclaimers: exception-that-proves-the-rule for your boringness; I have 3 out of 4 Back slots currently equipped with tattoos, so not unbiased, despite coming from a similar upbringing in this regard.)
But precisely because they are so common, they are not really a great signal of whether someone is “interesting” or not. Tons of boring people have tats (some certainly because it’s it’s a cheap and easy signal of being interesting that apparently works on folks such as yourself) and tons of interesting people don’t.
I have no moral compunction against tattooed people, I don’t particularly judge them (unless it’s like an obviously antisocial signal like that lizard person). I just genuinely find unadorned skin more attractive in almost all circumstances.
I mean...I wouldn't keep it as a heuristic if it didn't pass ongoing data verification? But it's been good for about 5 years now, across hundreds of people I've gotten to know well enough to test the hypothesis. Fully happy to concede it may be hyperlocalized phenomenon; I have no idea how hard I'd argue for generality. And nothing's dispositive, there are of course fakers who are actually just basic bitch bullshitters, as well as The Most Interesting Man In The World types who never happened to get a tattoo. Just small updates one way or another, penumbras and enumerations, but updates nonetheless.
If I had to enumerate it explicitly, always a fraught endeavor:
*Some evidence is worth a bigger update than a lack of evidence (best for implications at best)
*Filter for subpopulations that magnify signal strength; if they have a bunch of piercings, weirdly dyed hair, etc. then the tat is largely extraneous
**Ideal case is someone with...let's say "middle-class traditional values" who also has a tattoo, or other such apparent clashes
*Filter for aesthetic value of tattoo
**Downweight obvious-criminal tats (still "interesting" but probably not in a good way), culture-bound tats (about as meaningful as a yarmulke or whatever), offputtingly ugly ink (still probably not interesting in a good way, especially if it's "ironically bad")
**Upweight originality, deeply personal stuff, artwork I'd love to see on other canvases, etc
...I feel like it wouldn't be worthwhile doing such triangulation if I had better access to more usual channels of information. Catching subtext (I take people too literally), ability to map out relational graphs (voluntary associations are rich datasources), being part of bigger gossip networks, having more-general interests like sportball that give an "in" for easy icebreaking...these are all weak areas for me, so I gotta cobble together social intelligence from whatever I can get. Tattoos are one spoke of that, much as I'll admit it's inefficient. A subfield of Clothing Is A Social Weapon, which is also true, useful, and likewise often faked. (Though still surprised at the on-the-ground fruit there. Tats are optional, but everyone has to get dressed - at least put some bare minimum effort into it! Poor place to spend Weirdness Points...)
Disagreed on tattoos; in current_year they're *so* low-risk and yet still counter-culture coded that they provide minimal signaling value towards interestingness, bordering on being a signal of having minimal distinct personality that isn't determined by Tiktok's algorithm. This is not to say a lack of tattoos is itself a good signal, just that the signal value of tattoos has dropped precipitously. Except face tattoos which I still consider a strong signal of extreme, likely criminal, anti-sociality.
See also comments like "IPA isn't a personality" or "a laptop isn't a personality" (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/your-personality-has-to-be-load-bearing).
I liked that FdB post, but think they're not quite commensurate comparisons. Drinking Fort Point while computing on an iFruit is not a personality and tells me nearly nothing*; getting a beer can and the Serpens logo tattooed on one's body is not load-bearing in and of itself, but at least a supportive buttress or something, and tells me a few things. Permanency has a quality all its own. An actively negative (rather than merely disapproving) attitude towards tattoos I suspect is also correlated with being sour on broader extensions of bodily modification/autonomy and other forms of transhumanism...I found this post (https://tranquilfire.wordpress.com/2022/05/23/dont-forget-bodily-autonomy-a-plea-from-a-trans-critic-of-covid-policy/) a useful intuition pump outside of the specific historic battle lines, for example.
*besides the probable gender and/or occupation of the walled-garden inhabitant, which remains sociologically fascinating
6. Instead of having at least two kids, Korean society demands this of its K-pop stars:
"Are K-pop stars allowed to love?
The answer is still a resounding “no” in some quarters – with K-pop singer Karina from the group Aespa posting a handwritten apology online after her reported relationship drew outcry from many of her more fervent followers.
News of her relationship with actor Lee Jae-wook broke last week, confirmed by the agencies of both stars.
The response from fans across Asia was swift, and mixed – some expressed their support for the couple. But many others reacted with shock and fury.
Some outraged fans even sent a truck with an electronic billboard to the headquarters of Karina’s agency, according to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, which published a photo of the sign. “Do you not get enough love from your fans?” it read. “Why did you choose to betray your fans?”"
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/07/asia/karina-aespa-kpop-apologizes-dating-intl-hnk/index.html
I had this exact same thought. Make KPOP starts have two kids?! They aren't even allowed to have a boyfriend! Matt Lakeman's KPOP article is a depressing if enlightening window into this world and South Korea in general.
https://mattlakeman.org/2020/09/06/a-deep-dive-into-k-pop/
Interesting! I remember Madonna and Prince having a not-very-convincing fake relationship for PR purposes.
>more women choosing not to have children. The other 80% of the decline comes from women who do have children having fewer of them
But why is it entirely framed as women's choice? What if their husbands do not want children or not more children? I am a guy and I stopped at one.
Because at the end of the day it is. If a man wants a child, he always needs the full assent of a woman. A woman can, if she wants, just get a sperm donor, or a one night stand, and so on.
Likewise, in the case that a pregnancy occurs unexpectedly, it's 100% the decision of the woman. When it comes to children, men are effectively relegated to the role of advisor.
Yeah, but come on. Especially in the case of having one or two children instead of three children, you know in a lot of those cases a husband and wife have sat down together and carefully talked about their feelings. "How do you feel about another child?" "How do you feel about another child?"
Maybe the husband is only an "advisor" but in the context of a marriage that has already produced one child his advice is going to be taken very seriously and have great weight. If someone wanted to advance the theory that a lot of the reason women who do have children are having fewer of them is because their husbands are strongly arguing against having more, you could at least see the mechanism by which that could be a thing that happened.
Regarding Trump and Harris's terrible economic ideas, an important point is that the law gives the president a pretty wide amount of discretion in imposing bad tariffs but bad price controls need the assent of Congress. I mean, they'll probably find some justification for why not but I don't expect the courts to let that stand.
Conversely, anything that can be unilaterally imposed by one president can be unilaterally reversed by the next.
Plus random tariffs are also likely much less harmful than a new Federal price bureaucracy.
So you're left with a higher chance of a fleeting minor bad vs. a lower chance of a persistent major one.
The specific result would depend on actual numbers, but it seems likelier than not that Harris would be worse economically (that, of course, would then still need to be balanced against all the other ways in which Trump would be worse).
Very underrated point. Policies put in place by presidential fiat can just be removed by the next president four years later. When was the last time an economic policy passed by congress was repealed? The ACA was passed in 2010, 14 years ago, and Republicans have been campaigning on repealing it forever. It survived a SCOTUS challenge because of Roberts, despite what some people seem to think about Republicans controlling the SCOTUS forever now. It survived simultaneous Republican control of congress and the White House. And now Trump has "concepts of a plan" to replace it.
It's not going to happen, because the Republicans are bad at projecting political power. This is why I think voting Republican is generally the best route as a libertarian; even when they control the government, they are way worse at shoving their ideals on everyone than the Democrats. The same thing will happen to Trump if he wins; basically everyone in the fedgov except the people he directly appoints will hate him, and most of the institutions and policy wonks that know how to actually get things done are leftist.
>It survived a SCOTUS challenge because of Roberts<
It actually survived three SCOTUS challenges, and won two.
I'm pretty I've head it argued that the Federal Trade Commission can do price controls. (Whether that stands up in court is another matter, of course.)
2. You do wonder if there are certain things like sociopathy that are only useful if not everyone has them, so the equilibrium tends to be for a small portion of the population to have them but not more than that. I'm sure the paper has addressed this.
3. Well, aristocratic women are driving the adoption of woke, so it wouldn't be surprising. But I could believe Salzman is right here.
5. I hate to give credit to anyone who calls his blog 'Nonzionism', but he seems to have a pretty good argument. And, as suggested in the comments, churches that are kind of cool could play that role to some degree here. The problem is the media attacks anything that sounds vaguely Christian, but if enough people ignore them this could gain its own momentum.
8. I've read that. Seems like it would depress the quality of conservative judges, but maybe it's so competitive to get to that point it doesn't really matter.
9. Ladies love bad boys, are you surprised?
11. This is one of the few arguments against legalization I have actually seen that makes actual sense.
13. I've heard (EDIT: apparently not from Sailer) who pointed out communist countries, with their ideology, tend not to have particularly good air forces, which are pretty elitist as only a few people get to be pilots and everyone else is supporting them. Apparently this is also true for rigging elections.
17. I've seen this movement toward prettier buildings gain speed. Unfortunately, it seems to be all far-right people or rationalists, neither of whom has any influence in architecture school, which is full of performatively left-leaning people like the rest of academia. The meme that pretty old-fashioned buildings=right, ugly blocky things=left seems firmly established, and I'm not sure what we can do about it, except elect Republicans (maybe once Trump is gone).
19. I think people would also enjoy the bit about Han Feizi (basically, the Chinese Machiavelli):
In the beginning of his essay Fei han (“Against Han Fei”), he says that he completely rejects Han Feizi’s views, on the basis of what he sees as a basic contradiction between his political theory and his action. Han Feizi argues that scholars (specifically ru or Confucian scholars) are useless, that they drain the resources of the state while contributing nothing to the maintenance of state power. For this reason, Han Feizi concludes they ought not to be employed by the state. Wang points out in this essay that Han Feizi himself is a scholar, and certainly takes his own advice and views to be of benefit to the state. If so, his claim of the uselessness of scholars is incorrect. Alternatively, if he is right about the uselessness of scholars, it follows that his own teachings must be useless, and therefore false.
21. Anyone think Musk had this coded in so he could get away with it?
24. Interestingly, for a long time in my life I assumed the NYT was part of the Jewish Conspiracy (or less facetiously the power structure); I guess there's been a changing of the guard?
26. No, I get it. It makes sense in lefty ideology. You gain moral value by being from an oppressed group. Oakland is poor and much more black, so it's more moral than Berkeley, which is full of rich white (and Asian) people.
28. Honestly the biggest anti-natalist effects on my life were (1) fear of divorce and having to work the rest of my life to support an ex-wife who hates me (2) fear of harassment accusations stopping my early romantic advances (3) general lack of charisma cementing the idea that I Am Not Attractive. I'm not blaming Bryan Caplan for failing to save me from that. Though I don't agree with him on immigration.
29. So, ah, DC is OK? Aren't they a little more conservative than Marvel?
32. I always assumed the same thing myself, but looks like real left-wing antisemitism is actually A Thing now, as the kids say?
35. I always assumed Satoshi Nakamoto was an American Japanophile (that's been a thing in nerd culture since at least the 80s), bitcoin isn't that popular in Japan. But the CIA owning bitcoin...well, they were apparently behind Abstract Expressionism and Mundo Nuevo (center-left Latin American literary magazine), doing that thing where they bolster the moderate left to defang the far left. Bitcoin could be something similar with the cypherpunks.
39. I love the blurry picture of Yarvin at the top. But he's right--something similar is probably driving the rise in parental estrangement. I get 'my parents kicked me out of the house for being gay', but 'my parents don't accept climate change'?
Finally, much as I dislike Kriss, this is pretty good:
"There’s a faction in the online Right that wants to build a Nordic-style social democracy, with strong labor unions, state control of industry, and a robust welfare state. (As Succession put it, “Medicare for All, abortions for none.”) So far, their plan to get there mostly seems to consist of writing long essays on Foucault. The monarchists, meanwhile, want a stratified, techno-feudal society of cyber-aristocrats and forelock-tugging digi-serfs. Some prefer Donald Trump to be their emperor, but by no means all. Plenty would be perfectly happy with Kamala Harris, as long as she uses the full power of the state to mercilessly crush all opposition. Yarvin, their intellectual godfather, is still formally endorsing Biden, despite his having dropped out. There’s a surprisingly influential faction of the American Right that wants to build a new political order based on Pindar’s Odes—a collection of lyric poems honoring the great athletes of the fifth century BC—and also eating raw eggs. A persistent current wants to turn the state into a minor facet of the Catholic Church. It’s true that less than a quarter of the country is actually Catholic, but maybe enough immigration from Latin America could yet transform the USA into the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There are even currents on the online Right who believe that the Caribbean was originally settled by white-skinned men from the North Pole, or possibly outer space. Others are outright neo-Nazis. That last group seems plain next to their neighbors. Unimaginative."
Though--the emancipatory aspect that makes the left worthwhile? Sure, but who says more emancipation is always good? That's you, as a leftist, talking. Plenty of people think hierarchy is good and people get away with too much stuff.
> I think it was Sailer who pointed out communist countries, with their ideology, tend not to have particularly good air forces, which are pretty elitist as only a few people get to be pilots and everyone else is supporting them.
That would not be a problem in the Soviet Union or most actually existing communist states. These countries hardly removed or wanted to remove hierarchies. Marxist Leninism - which is the version of communism that was implemented in Russia and its satellites - isn’t hostile to either hierarchies or differences in wage income (Lenin wrote a famous pamphlet condemning infantile leftism part of which condemned attitudes to hierarchy) which is why it produced pretty good engineers and cosmonauts, who were well compensated.
Growing up to become a cosmonaut was a state propaganda-approved youth aspiration, even.
" I think it was Sailer who pointed out communist countries, with their ideology, tend not to have particularly good air forces"
I don't recall having an opinion on that, one way or another.
Ok. I’m quoting the other guy, though.
Noted. I've edited the original comment.
Please accept my apologies.
I've published a whole lot of stuff over the last third of a century, so maybe I did say that somewhere along the line. I just can't remember having an opinion one way or another on it.
For example, the Soviets ran their fighter jet procurement on a pretty similar basis to the U.S., with rival agencies like MiG and Gu competing for funding. My general impression was that the Soviet Union was generally poorer and more backward than the U.S., but in the things they really cared about like space, missiles, subs, and jets, they tended to be a formidable #2.
> Plenty of people think hierarchy is good and people get away with too much stuff.
Hierarchy makes it harder to get away with stuff, or easier, depending on your rank.
North Korea's airforce were no slouches against the US during the Korean War.
Not that it changes the overall point WRT communist air forces, but weren't most of the MiG-15 pilots actually Soviet?
And Chinese, yes. Likewise in the Vietnam War.
I don't buy the ideological explanation for this reason. When jet fighters were reasonably cheap and affordable, Communists had decent air forces. The MiG-15 and MiG-21 were competitive with western designs of the same era and could be cranked out in large numbers. But then jet fighters stopped being big dumb engines with wings and become ultra-expensive high tech marvels and Communists couldn't keep up.
And then of course there's the fact that the Russian Air force hasn't got any better after Russia officially disowned Communism. China on the other hand didn't officially disown Communism and its air force has become far better in the same period.
>"29. So, ah, DC is OK? Aren't they a little more conservative than Marvel?"
Nah, their movies just suck enough that nobody needs to be actively shooed away from them for ideological reasons. /s
It was a joke. :) I am not a huge comic book guy but I imagine they're slightly if at all less woke than Marvel. If he's trying to bring back High Culture Batman is just as bad as Spiderman.
Re 3, I know a bit about Church history, and I'm surprised by the suggestion that there exists a "commonly accepted wisdom that aristocratic women were major and active drivers of Christianisation", because the history of the early church consists almost entirely of men. There is a reason why the theology of the first five Christian centuries is usually called "patristic".
The claim that there is such a consensus seems weak: it starts with Rodney Stark's "The Rise of Christianity", but that book itself (written by a sociologist) is described as a challenge to conventional wisdom, so it cannot also be the standard of conventional wisdom. It continues with a claim by Adolf Harnack in 1902, and then states "all subsequent works on the topic have been influenced by him", which may be true, but to be influenced by an earlier writer isn't to accept everything they say uncritically. We then have two sentences from Henry Chadwick, which don't equate to the claim that women were "the major drivers of Christianisation".
There are many places when one can find the claim "Maybe women had a bigger role than one would expect given the patriarchal nature of society at the time", and that claim is probably true. I remain unconvinced that anyone credible has seriously defended the stronger claim, so this seems like a storm in a tea-cup.
There are examples of high born Christian theologians having Christian mothers and pagan fathers. Augustine is one. Maybe there is an extrapolation from that.
For sure, one can point to individual women who were important, such as St Monica or St Helena, but that rather misses the forest for the trees. Also, in both those cases, they are mostly known for their more famous sons, which is a strange way to make the case. Similarly, Teslo refers to St Jerome's female correspondents, but it's clear from the argument itself that the truly significant person here is Jerome. You can't say that women played a pivotal role because they received letters from a man.
The pivotal role here, though, is that they supported those men (and in Monica's case, kept on trying to get Augustine to come to the Church until she succeeded). Without rich backers, goes the theory, the male Christian churchmen and writers and theologians would not have had the money or social protection to engage in their work.
Taking St. Jerome as an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome
"Throughout his epistles he shows himself to be surrounded by women and united with close ties; it is estimated that 40% of his epistles were addressed to someone of the female sex and, at the time, he was criticized for it.
Even in his time, Jerome noted Porphyry's accusation that the Christian communities were run by women and that the favor of the ladies decided who could accede to the dignity of the priesthood.
In Rome, Jerome was surrounded by a circle of well-born and well-educated women, including some from the noblest patrician families. Among these women were such as the widows Lea, Marcella, and Paula, and Paula's daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium. The resulting inclination of these women towards the monastic life, away from the indulgent lasciviousness in Rome, and his unsparing criticism of the secular clergy of Rome, brought a growing hostility against him among the Roman clergy and their supporters. Soon after the death of his patron Pope Damasus I on 10 December 384, Jerome was forced to leave his position at Rome after an inquiry was brought up by the Roman clergy into allegations that he had an improper relationship with the widow Paula. Still, his writings were highly regarded by women who were attempting to maintain vows of becoming consecrated virgins. His letters were widely read and distributed throughout the Christian empire and it is clear through his writing that he knew these virgin women were not his only audience."
Epistle 45 (the linked source for "he was criticised for writing to women"):
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001045.htm
"After leaving Rome for the East, Jerome writes to Asella to refute the calumnies by which he had been assailed, especially as regards his intimacy with Paula and Eustochium. Written on board ship at Ostia, in August, 385 A.D.
"...It often happened that I found myself surrounded with virgins, and to some of these I expounded the divine books as best I could. Our studies brought about constant intercourse, this soon ripened into intimacy, and this, in turn, produced mutual confidence. If they have ever seen anything in my conduct unbecoming a Christian let them say so. Have I taken any one's money? Have I not disdained all gifts, whether small or great? Has the chink of any one's coin been heard in my hand? Has my language been equivocal, or my eye wanton? No; my sex is my one crime, and even on this score I am not assailed, save when there is a talk of Paula going to Jerusalem. Very well, then. They believed my accuser when he lied; why do they not believe him when he retracts? He is the same man now that he was then, and yet he who before declared me guilty now confesses that I am innocent. Surely a man's words under torture are more trustworthy than in moments of gayety, except, indeed, that people are prone to believe falsehoods designed to gratify their ears, or, worse still, stories which, till then uninvented, they have urged others to invent.
3. Before I became acquainted with the family of the saintly Paula, all Rome resounded with my praises. Almost every one concurred in judging me worthy of the episcopate. Damasus, of blessed memory, spoke no words but mine. Men called me holy, humble, eloquent.
Did I ever cross the threshold of a light woman? Was I ever fascinated by silk dresses, or glowing gems, or rouged faces, or display of gold? Of all the ladies in Rome but one had power to subdue me, and that one was Paula. She mourned and fasted, she was squalid with dirt, her eyes were dim from weeping. For whole nights she would pray to the Lord for mercy, and often the rising sun found her still at her prayers. The psalms were her only songs, the Gospel her whole speech, continence her one indulgence, fasting the staple of her life. The only woman who took my fancy was one whom I had not so much as seen at table. But when I began to revere, respect, and venerate her as her conspicuous chastity deserved, all my former virtues forsook me on the spot.
4. Oh! envy, that dost begin by tearing yourself! Oh! cunning malignity of Satan, that dost always persecute things holy! Of all the ladies in Rome, the only ones that caused scandal were Paula and Melanium, who, despising their wealth and deserting their children, uplifted the cross of the Lord as a standard of religion. Had they frequented the baths, or chosen to use perfumes, or taken advantage of their wealth and position as widows to enjoy life and to be independent, they would have been saluted as ladies of high rank and saintliness. As it is, of course, it is in order to appear beautiful that they put on sackcloth and ashes, and they endure fasting and filth merely to go down into the Gehenna of fire! As if they could not perish with the crowd whom the mob applauds! If it were Gentiles or Jews who thus assailed their mode of life, they would at least have the consolation of failing to please only those whom Christ Himself has failed to please. But, shameful to say, it is Christians who thus neglect the care of their own households, and, disregarding the beams in their own eyes, look for motes in those of their neighbors. They pull to pieces every profession of religion, and think that they have found a remedy for their own doom, if they can disprove the holiness of others, if they can detract from every one, if they can show that those who perish are many, and sinners, a great multitude."
Porphyry mentioned above was a philosopher who wrote a work "Against the Christians", known now by the fragments quoted in rebuttals of it, since the original work was ordered destroyed by the emperor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Christians
"As quoted by Jerome, Porphyry mocked Paul and the early Christians while suggesting that the "magical arts" performed by Jesus of Nazareth and his followers were nothing special, done similarly by other figures of Greco-Roman history:[5]
He did it all for money; [...] (They were) poor and country-dwelling men, seeing that they used to have nothing; certain wonders were worked with magical arts. Not that it is unusual however to do wonders; for the magicians in Egypt also did wonders against Moses, Apollonius also did them, Apuleius also did them, and any number have done wonders. [They did wonders by magical arts] so that they might receive riches from rich and impressionable women, whom they had led astray."
Finding the bits about the influence of women in Christianity:
https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/porphyry_against_christians_02_fragments.htm
"4. Jerome, Tract on Psalm 81:
Paul conquered the whole world, from the Ocean to the Red Sea. Let some say, "He did it all for money"; for this Porphyry says, "(They were) poor and country-dwelling men, seeing that they used to have nothing; certain wonders were worked with magical arts. Not that it is unusual however to do wonders; for the magicians in Egypt also did wonders against Moses, Apollonius also did them, Apuleius also did them, and any number have done wonders." I concede, Porphyry, that they did wonders by magical arts, "so that they might receive riches from rich and impressionable women, whom they had led astray." For you say this --- (yet) why were they killed? why were they crucified?
58. Macarius, Apocriticus III: 5:
...Wherefore it seems to me that these cannot be the words of Christ, if indeed He handed down the rule of truth, but of some poor men who wished, as a result of such vain talking, to deprive the rich of their substance. At any rate, no longer ago than yesterday, reading these words to women of noble birth, "Sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven," they persuaded them to distribute to poor men all the substance and possession which they had, and, themselves entering into a state of want, to gather by begging, turning from a position of freedom to unseemly asking, and from prosperity to a pitiable character, and in the end, being compelled to go to the houses of the rich (which is the first thing, or rather the last thing, in disgrace and misfortune), and thus to lose their own belongings under the pretext of godliness, and to covet those of others under the force of want.
Accordingly, it seems to me that these are the words of some woman in distress.
...All this obscure nonsense in the Gospels ought to be offered to silly women, not to men. For if we were prepared to investigate such points more closely, we should discover thousands of obscure stories which do not contain a single word worth finding.
Jerome, Comm. in Isaiah. 3: 2:
Let us -- ourselves -- therefore also take care lest we be tax-collectors from the people; lest -- as the impious Porphyry says -- matrons and women be our senate, ruling in the churches and where the favour of women decides the steps [of promotion] of the priesthood."
Accordingly, it seems to me that these are the words of some woman in distress.
I'm afraid I don't understand what point you intend to make. What I see from the quotations is:
1) Jerome was friendly with many women, but other prominent Christians considered this scandalous, so he was clearly unusual in this respect.
2) Jerome specifically denied receiving financial support from these women. Now, if he denies it, it is because someone has made the accusation, so this could conceivably be evidence that he did, but it's very slender evidence.
3) An anti-Christian polemicist accused Christian communities of being run by and/or financially dependent on women, but again Jerome denies it. Again, we may suppose that the accusation has some basis in fact, and indeed that's consistent with other evidence, e.g. the references to women in Paul's letters, but again that only gets us the weak claim "Maybe women had a bigger role than one would expect given the patriarchal nature of society at the time."
PS The voices of the women themselves are strikingly absent. Nobody on either side seems to have thought it worth asking Paula for her account of what had happened.
Paula did found and support monastic settlements, and the view expressed by Porphyry echoes down throughout the ages: Christianity is a religion for women, it's feminine, it's female-dominated.
Well my point was that the mother of Augustine was Christian and the father pagan. Constantine too. And Tertullian.
Christianity did start with the lower classes, but it makes sense that as a pacifistic religion, compared to the plethora of militaristic mystery cults that mushroomed in the early empire, would appeal first to women as it became more popular amongst the higher classes
Glad to see my excellent colleague Luke Semrau quoted in the NPR kidney sales piece. Luke, like Scott, gave away a kidney to a random recipient, and he’s the expert on the issue of selling kidneys.
38: Speaking of, is there an updated reading list post-Sequences? Other than slatestarcodex and whatever cognitive psychology you can get your hands on, of course.
Secular Israeli with a kid here - I think the blog post is touching on a very important point but it has some nuance worth pointing out.
Israel is very Kid friendly, but many Israelis don’t like Charedim or other ultra-religious people and don’t hold them in high regard. However, adhering Jews do tend to have more kids for religious reasons (it is morally positive to have kids in Judaism, and morally negative to use contraception or do non-reproductive sexual things).
There are many many somewhat-adhering or highly-Judaism respecting popular figures and just everyday people, so the whole system (from gov incentives to how much grandparents want to do childcare) gets aligned with that, *and* the famous singer/movie star/tech mogul also has many kids.
I think what the blog post is missing is that Charedim are not the be-all end-all of Judaism, and many Israelis just respect and like Judaism.
This does provide another potential avenue for people wanting to raise TFR- don’t just focus on breeder communities - but make having kids morally good and socially desirable! Get Elon musk to talk about how many kids he has and how awesome that is and makes him a good founder. Have Christian institutions talk more about how having kids is a god-given directive.
Hi! Loved your post! I think your argument is good (and novel! I've never thought about it that way). However, I think your under-indexing on the important of the entire range (Secular -> Charedim) in being and seeing themselves as fundamentally of the same culture and people (Judaism) where Charedim model excellence in certain aspects that are broadly considered morally good (studiousness, child rearing, family loyalty, tailoring - which isn't directly Jewish but well fitting black suites/white shirts are high status in Western culture).
Or, put more simply - you might need a combination of sufficiently high status in-groupers modelling excellence in child bearing, while *also* making child-bearing part of your culture more widely.
Basically, It would be good if the president spoke about National Amishism and kids on TV - otherwise how would we know what is morally good?
(Israeli here)
IIUC, I'm somewhere between both of you. Charedim influence the parts of society as משכיל בינה described, but also, Israelis just love kids and have a government system that consistently supports bearing them (medically and financially). We can delve into the roots of this, but this is the just the honest, simplest explanation. most secular people I know also have 2-3 kids, even those who detest Charedim. It's deeply engrained in the culture.
One important factor is that it's a small country. This makes people happier in general as personal and career moves do not separate them from their friends and family (a factor also present in e.g. Denmark) - one is always a couple hours drive away from them at most. And regarding fertility specifically, it's substantially easier to raise kids when there are grandparents and aunts/uncles nearby who are happy to care for them from time to time. In fact, it has been said that Israel as a country "runs on grandparents".
You're absolutely right, and this is a prime factor both for me and my wife and many friends and family.
"Have Christian institutions talk more about how having kids is a god-given directive."
Hollow Catholic laughter here. Yeah, our guys do that. and in return get called patriarchy-supporting, out-of-touch celibates, misogynists and monsters, you name it.
The 'ordinary Catholic in the street' (not necessarily in the pews) favours abortion rights:
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/12/1244156165/abortion-catholics-pope-francis-church-pew-research
"Catholics in the U.S., one of the country's largest single Christian groups, hold far more diverse views on abortion rights than the official teaching of their church.
While the Catholic Church itself holds that abortion is wrong and should not be legal, 6 in 10 U.S. adult Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a newly released profile of Catholicism by Pew Research.
Catholic opinion about abortion rights, according to the report, tends to align with political leanings: Fewer Catholic Republicans favor legal abortion than Catholic Democrats. And Pew says Hispanic Catholics, who make up one-third of the U.S. church, are slightly more in favor of legal abortion than white Catholics."
Look at "devout Catholics" Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden telling the bishops they're wrong about abortion.
So, yeah, be a Christian religious leader who talks about God wants you to have kids, and be ready to duck.
Ex-Catholic, can confirm. Back in Poland during my childhood, women were NOT happy with priests telling them to be fruitful and multiply! Almost everyone was at least nominally Catholic and most people would attend weekly Mass, but contraception and abortion were widely used.
Genuine question: Why didn't they like it when priests said that?
(Btw, contraception and abortion are widely used in Israel too!)
"The priest doesn't have any children of his own, he has no idea what it's like to be a parent, and he's lecturing me about having (more) children? He can go [expletive] himself" is a sentiment I heard more than once in my childhood from my mom and her female friends.
Thank you. Makes sense actually, that would be really annoying.
Jewish Rabbis are in some communities required to be married, and generally expected to have kids.
Sounds like a potential solution to the problem then is having Christianity make Priests having kids a god-given directive!
So this is actually really interesting!
Abortion is quite accessible in Israel (less than $1k or free in many cases, requires a committee with 99%+ approval rates, secret, doesn't require parental approval for under 18 for some cases, can be considered until week 24 of pregnancy, etc). Its not even a very common topic of discussion in most circles, and not at all an important point in country-wide politics usually.
I didn't even think about it when writing my comment!
In hard-core Judaism, the problematic act is having intercourse (or even just ejaculation) not in order to have kids. Abortions are controversial but AFAIK (not an expert) the fetus is not considered a full person and has fewer rights (eg, if the mother is at serious health risk, its religiously compatible to have an abortion).
However - having kids is considered desirable!
Maybe the Christian religious leaders should stop focusing so much on abortion and shift to saying "Hey, you do you, but make sure to have lots of kids!"
Yes, I am aware of the different Jewish theological position on when the foetus is considered alive, and why that is more tolerant of abortion being permissible.
However, the results of different Christian denominations giving in on contraception and abortion has not been to strengthen the "have lots of kids" position, but to weaken it. After all, if you say it's okay with God that you are not having kids by using contraception and abortion, it's harder to say "but God does want you to have lots of kids". And the secular bent of society also makes it much harder to tell people "yes, okay, we went with the Zeitgeist on divorce, and on contraception, and on abortion, but we're not in step with 'too many kids are bad for the planet' so stop contracepting and have four kids at minimum!" because you will be ignored, as we see with Catholics in American and in my own country of Ireland, and that's even where the Church has *not* given in on divorce etc. and we still have the official line that sex is for procreation, so the hard-core Judaic problematic non-fertile acts are problematic for us, too. But modern people have thrown off the shackles of the mediaeval past, so don't tell us masturbation is sinful!
I've commented on here before about the Anglican Church and how over the span of decades, you can see from Lambeth Conference to Lambeth Conference (the assembly of global Anglican bishops every ten years) how they gave in step by step on social issues like that. By 1930, though they were still "no remarriage in church for divorced", they were giving in on contraception, though that was only ever going to be for married people who already had kids and wanted to pause child-bearing for a while. Never going to be just for fun and for singles!
Then over time, "no divorce, no contraception, no abortion" got softened down in each case to "well maybe in very limited circumstances" to "well okay it's complicated" to "a lot of this is happening in society today so let's talk about it" to "no mention at all, it's just tacitly accepted, now let's talk about gay marriage".
How is Judaism and fertility doing outside of Israel? Have Jews in other countries followed the pattern of more secularisation affecting birth rate?
Thank you for the details. In Israel it doesn’t seem like abortion and contraception are tied to having less kids conceptually.
Re other countries, I’m pretty sure secular Jews in other countries don’t have more kids than people in the country (I think I saw somewhere that in the US, secular Jews have less kids than average americans, but Hebrew-speaking Jews have more)
Unrelated question: I'm an American voter with relatives in Israel. Do you have any suggestion on who/what organization can advise which is the best POTUS for Israel's security? I've tried AIPAC (they will only advise me on congressional races, which is a help, but I also need to choose the presidential candidate). I've asked ADL, but never heard back. I've tried google searches for endorsements from the Jerusalem Post, but didn't find one. Any suggestions?
Thats a very difficult question. Here is a long-winded but unhelpful analysis:
Having spoken to various people about this (industry leaders, military leaders, etc). I've also had a chance to speak to people who are part of the US security apparatus and part of the Republican party. the best that I can understand is:
- The Democratic apparatus courts antisemites too closely and may decide they are tired and want quiet more than Israel, however they are generally serious people who have independent learned opinions and will aim to do what they think is best for the party, the country and the world at each point in time - and that usually means supporting Israel but not giving it a free reign nor accepting too much negative news. But their policies are also many times bad and have very negative effects (Iran's nuclear program).
- Trump is mercurial and so is hard to model. Will he let Israel have weapons and no oversight? Will he align with Russia (which is bad for Israel)? What even are his motivations and strategy for the middle east? Will he hurt US's position in global politics which weakens Israel's security generally?
I've personally come away confused. It sounds like the Kamala would be the safer bet as the guess is she'll generally continue Biden's line and Trump is unpredictable (which means could be better but could be worse) but this probably isn't new information as this is a level of analysis you could have reached yourself by watching 10 minutes of any news cast.
As an aside, some polls suggest most Bibi supporters prefer Trump, but also many people think Bibi isn't a great example of helping Israel's security. You can find newspaper articles claiming both. The Israel equivalent of Fox News likes Trump, the Israel equivalent of Slate likes Kamala.
Bottom line is - While I can't vote in the US and so haven't spent too much time on this - I don't have answers or pointers for you, nor have I talked to anyone who came across as especially clear on analysis.
Many Thanks! Yeah, my impression is that _if_ Harris could be trusted to continue Biden's support for Israel's self-defense, she would be the better pick, _but_ she is also courting the antisemitic left. And Trump is just plain unpredictable. Grr. The only thing I can say for sure is that I'll be gritting my teeth on Election Day.
Israeli with about a decade of military experience and a degree in Midddle-Eastren history. I'll add a bit to what Gal said; but this is complicated. Take this with a grain of salt.
Generally, a lot of the consensus in the army (both active duty and reserve, which plays a very large part in it) is moving towards the thought that a war with Iran (and Hezbollah) is inevitable after October 7th, and the question is when. I tend to agree with this, and I can give an explanation, but it would be very, very long. Generally, I'd pick who you think would support Israel in doing this and be hawkish against Iran.
FYI, my political stance is complicated, but if Israeli politics is partisan across Yes-No Bibi, I'm basically Bipartisan.
Many Thanks! This does sound nightmarish, but a nuclear Iran is even more nightmarish. Best of luck!
>Generally, I'd pick who you think would support Israel in doing this and be hawkish against Iran.
I wish I knew which of the two would be more reliable in this. :-(
You're welcome! Yeah, it is a difficult choice. If it helps, I think most Israelis lean towards Trump, but I think this is objectively complicated and I'm not sure I would trust the thought process of Israelis who aren't tightly following the election cycle as Americans... I think I hesitantly agree with them, but I have not given the matter a lot of thought at all.
Many Thanks!
Trump's rhetoric is definitely better in this regard, but he also has a record of not following through with concrete actions. It was in his presidency that Iran went from 4% uranium enrichment to near-bomb levels, as he withdrew from JCPOA (which limited enrichment for a period of 15 years) without replacing it with any other limits.
This is a valid point, though it's more nuanced I think - I think there are pros and cons to exiting the JCPOA. The true question is whether the US is willing to use military force against Iran, JCPOA or not - as otherwise there is no BATNA, thus leaving the agreement or waiting for it to end is a timing question and not a substance question. In the end, if the US isn't willing to stop Iran from having a bomb by force, the talks are just buying time (which is nice, but in a sense kicking the can down the road).
Sorry for criticizing your question instead of trying to answer, but a an Israeli my answer is strongly "please don't think about us when you vote!". First, I do not think that it is fair to other Americans for American jews to consider the interests of a specific other country. But more importantly, I worry about the image of American jews as loyal citizens. You should help us and we should help you, but you should not endanger your integration project for us any more than we endanger the sovereignty project for you.
Many Thanks! I do see your point, but, frankly, I see the two candidates as about evenly unpleasant in their effects on America. ('scuse the long delay. Helene came through here, and I was internetless for a couple of weeks.)
#2 Interesting research, but it starts from the premise that evolution is a dumb hill climber where purely random mutations result in a fitness hill climb. The evidence we have, however, suggests that evolution is likely not so simple as dumb random mutation hill climbers have a tendency to get stuck in local maximas and are not robust against environmental changes. In reality, evolved creatures are incredibly robust against environmental changes and they tend to avoid local maximas rather than climb to them.