>This is basically the only sane way for the world to work, if you don’t want to force everyone to learn reams of biographical trivia about anyone involved in something newsworthy.
The more 1) important something is, 2) likely it is to affect me, and 3) likely I am to be able to act on it, then the more likely I will have other ways of finding out about it that are faster and/or higher quality/more reliable than the news.
Meanwhile, the less important something is (i.e how many people are affected by it), the less likely something is to affect me, and the less likely I am to be able to act on it, the less likely it is to be considered "newsworthy" in the first place. (Though the news still scrapes the bottom and churns out stories about things like this, under the label "human interest".)
So this leads to a question: why follow the news at all?
I think journalism knows it has this problem, and so the industry compensates with luridness and showmanship. They have to be careful though because they don't want to become indistinguishable from tabloids (even though the division between tabloid and "proper" journalism is blurry). So journalism has developed tricks of passing itself off as serious and buttoned-up. I can talk about these, but I won't right now.
Another prong in the campaign is to forward the narrative that being "informed" --i.e. in the know about the latest news stories-- makes you a better person, a better citizen, etc. People have always played status games around the water cooler so to speak, so this plays right into human nature. At least in this society, I have found it easy to reject participation in such games. But it does require the fortitude to reject a deep-seated assumption in the first place, that being "informed" is the same as being knowledgeable, smart, etc.
Many Thanks for your comment! I'm skeptical that the legacy media news has zero value. A lot of it is filler. A lot of it is about events which are irrelevant to me personally. But occasionally there is a useful heads-up.
The effect is definitely real, I don't even know who Chris Pratt is or what he does, but I once saw a joke about him being named after a fried rodent, and I still remember it.
I feel like there's differences between assessing groups this way and assessing people this way but it might just be "single actions are more information about people than single people are about groups"
This seems like the most correct version, yeah. Like, hearing about 1 fraudster is poor info about EA as a whole, but 1 rape tells you a lot about the rapist as a whole!
At least a part of this is that if you successfully establish a norm that a single sufficiently horrible action gets you ostracized from society, it is an effective incentive not to do the horrible action. It's not perfect, but it helps.
If you successfully establish a norm that a single sufficiently horrible member gets your group ostracized from society, it doesn't accomplish nearly as much in terms of harm reduction. The group often can't tell in advance which people will later be horrible, and if the individuals deciding to be horrible aren't motivated by personal consequences, they probably won't care about their group, either.
Depends who the person is, and for EA it loops back to the movement/ideology question.
SBF is one person... who influenced/employed a lot of EAs and was supposedly friends with Will MacAskill for over a decade.
The castle debacle was done by the Centre for Effective Altruism, which isn't an individual and isn't exactly a bunch of nobodies.
Neither tell you much about "does our charitable donation actually go where it's supposed to go, and do what it's supposed to do, and can we achieve the best good for the least dollars" being a good idea or not. But they do tell you *something* about the movement of people that think about that idea, even if they don't tell you something about *every single individual* within the movement.
Part of it is about narrative, and violations of expectations. EA presents itself as being an effective approach for smart people - therefore for EA to make a mistake of that nature is a narrative ("People who think they are smart and do something dumb"), and people don't forget that.
This is the right view on groups imo. I honestly thought the whole post Scott was setting up a strawman with this being the teardown.
For judging people (cancel culture was mentioned, things like the red scare or oppressive autocratic governments also come to mind), I think something else is going on. A judgement that carries high information can still hurt societies due to a mismatch of scale. A small town gossiping about MacGregor is a punishment matching the scale of the crime. So is national backlash and loss of office for Weiner, an intentionally public figure in a national position of power.
Twitter mobs and autocrats, on the other hand, both see huge societies thinly, and have power to hurt individuals deeply. They are in some sense "correct" to use their limited, biased judgement to summarize people not for who they are but for how they threaten a certain worldview. What's incorrect is the amount of power given to those with such limited and such biased judgement. We have good reason to empower individuals with freedom of speech, rights for criminals, anonymous channels, etc. We have good reason to reign in the power of autocrats and Twitter mobs.
I think your idea is partially right but also ignoring part of the issue, which is something something density and controversy. If MacGregor does something that everybody in the village agrees is bad, then MacGregor gets shunned by the whole village. If MacGregor does something that 5% of the village thinks is bad, and 95% disagree, then whenever one of the 5% try to pick on MacGregor he's likely to be around some friends to defend him.
If 5% of Twitter decides that something is bad but 95% disagree, then that 5% can find isolated individuals doing the things and gang up on them. It's not merely that Twitter is too large and the scale of the punishment is too harsh for what they've done wrong, it's that it's not clear they've done anything wrong at all. The scale of the internet allows unpopular opinions to coordinate and enforce punishments on beliefs, opinions, and behaviors that the majority of people agree with. The dynamic of shaming people for doing bad things historically was only done against people who were actually deviating against the consensus, not as a way to pull a coup against the consensus itself.
Well put. The term cancel culture should be reserved for institutional punishment of people based on the claim that no alternative view can be legitimately held - so simultaneously a morality and a truth claim. The cases here presented fall under your category of social norm violations. These are the things you can't unsee or un-visualize and that will remain the first association coming up.
Another factor is that many of our social instincts are calibrated for village-scale events. On a village scale, if several hundred people are annoyed enough with you to go out of their way to tell you that you suck, then this is an enormous problem for you. On a "going viral on Twitter" scale, tens of thousands might be telling you that you suck, and that's going to feel like an absolute catastrophe even if there's no doxxing, threats, attempts to induce your employer to fire you, etc. At least not unless you're used to being a public figure and have already recalibrated your social instincts for that scale of things.
The second paragraph of this post is a brilliantly concise take on the deeper insidious nature of internet mobs. One of those "I already believed this, but this gives me a profoundly snappier way to think of it" takes I am always grateful for.
Although I suppose your 95/5% does still run into the issue there are absolutely 50%/50% Wars of Religion (or Gang Wars, let's not read deeper into this) type situations even in traditional societies where you might just end up in the wrong village or on the wrong street and be wildly outnumbered by those who would do you harm, and everyone is incredibly wary of who's around at any one moment. The big catch is that these tactics precisely allow a 5% to pretend to be a 50% and force everyone else to take them much more seriously, even if they don't quite get to pretend to be a 95%.
Rather than wrong/right or good/bad, it might be more practical to think of this as filter bubbles having a strong effect on social norms. I agree with you that a tiny minority can, by dint of volume, seem disproportionately prevalent on social media platforms. On the other hand, consensus is complicated.
i dont think this is a complete explanation, since if 95% think macgregor is fine, most probably they don't approve of the 5% ganging up on him, and they could gang up on the 5% pretty effectively too
Yeah. Whether it's fair or not, defining an individual for a single action is a powerful deterrent. Doing it for a group based on one of their individual's action isn't. If it's a well-coordinated group and it's the leadership doing the bad thing, then it might still work, though.
Ironically, almost immediately after reading this post, I had to describe famous Forgotten Realms (default D&D setting) creator Ed Greenwood as "the drow breast milk guy".
I am certain that Ed has written plenty of extremely detailed and valuable lore. But he replies to *one* discord comment asking about the taste of drow breast milk...
I did not expect to ever Google "drow breast milk", but your comment got me curious, so TIL that to dwarves, all elven breast milk tastes like unsweetened licorice.
He's gotten in some mild trouble for being, effectively, too sex-positive for a heterosexual man (too much discussion of sex, all consensual!), from what I understand, but hasn't really gotten cancelled yet. I think.
Never heard *that* one before, knew him mostly as "created Elminster who might or might not be authorial self-insert, also has Elminster bonkin' babes of all levels up to goddess all over Faerûn", but I've never been enough into DnD to know this kind of gossip 😁
Hey, totally off-topic, but did you have any particular thoughts/commentary on the SSPX mini-schism thing? My ex-catholic friend was excited to give me the backstory, which was deeper than I expected. I usually appreciate your perspective on anything Catholicism-adjacent, so I was curious.
The very short answer is "they fudged around and then they found out". I'm sorry about it, because I do think there's a place within the church for traditional devotions and that the post-Vatican II rush threw a lot of value out with the dusty accretions.
But the SSPX have been given a *lot* of second chances by various popes. This time they tried it with Leo, and he didn't tolerate it. They formally put themselves into schism. What happens next? Do they survive? Do they become yet one more of the fringe nutjob splinters that elect their own popes and claim they are the Only Real Catholics? We'll have to wait and see.
But they've burned through a lot of goodwill and any moves to rectify this have to come from them, and be proper discipline, not yet more "we promise we'll be good and stop doing the silly things" (then go off and do silly things) messing around that they've been doing up to now.
Huh, I've got to admit, I am confused how that could've possibly worked as long as it did. So like, the Pope walks up to the pulpit and says, "Hearken my children, for as we all know I am God's chosen messenger on Earth, and it is not I who now speak -- it is the Almighty Himself, and I am merely a vessel for his omniscient wisdom. And lo, God says we shall do X, Y and Z. End transmission." Then some guy in the back pipes up and goes, "Actually me and my buddies are cool with X and Y, but we think Z is stupid and we won't do it". How is that not instant auto-excommunication ?
The thing to understand about the Catholic church is that X is never "just X", without exceptions, mediating circumstances, and extremely nuanced metaphysical interpretations. So yes, the Pope is infallible. But no, everything he says is not coming directly from God. It's both, and neither, and only one or the other, depending.
This is either a feature or a bug, depending on who is looking.
Neat hypothetical, but not even close to what happened (or who the Pope is). SSPX's big thing wasn't refusing to do something, it was preferring to do something (the older form of the Mass) that had been standard practice for over a thousand years.
If a group had simply invented their own Mass and violated some of the basics, it would have been a simple case. But this was something even all recent Popes say is fine, but only in moderation now. The distinction was too subtle to merit excommunication.
The Pope appoints bishops, SSPX went ahead and designated their own bishops. This was a much more direct and grave break with Papal authority.
The problem with SSPX for us agnostics and atheitsts who might sympathise with them over their love for the Tridentine (latin) mass (a preference I personally regard as primarily historical and aesthetic) is that all their other ultraconservative views are pretty ugly.
Society of Saint Pius X. They're a ultraconservative splinter group of Catholicism that got really mad specific liberal reforms to the Catholic church in the 1960s (including "stop treating the Protestants and Jews like shit"), and mostly relevant in the United States as the group most connected to Latin Mass, as I understand it. They recently gave big middle finger to the Pope by naming their own bishops without the pope's permission.
If you're interested, this thread is where I got most of my information, it's a pretty good read IMO.
To clarify, I was using "mostly relevant in the United States as [...]" to mean "to people in the US", not "their relevance is mostly in the US" -- they're actually most dense in Europe, with the US only accounting for a significant portion of its numbers because of its size. The audience for this blog is mostly American, though, hence my caveat.
JRR Tolkien was a big fan of Latin Mass. He was not, however, remotely into fascism or treating the Jews like shit. The Nazis originally liked his works, it was very much not mutual.
As tumblr would say, "Linguistics professor John Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien, who teaches a dead language and has created 100 conlangs, is an outlier adn should not be counted"
From what I know of the man, he wouldn't mind being known as the drow breastmilk guy. He lets his freak flag fly proudly and doesn't bother to disguise his fetishes in writing. To him, sex and sexuality is a fundamental part of world building and he would claim the fact you're so squeamish about drow breast milk says more about you than him.
I would like to state for the record that I'm not particularly squeamish about it (though it's definitely not my thing), and actually think it's a vaguely interesting part of world building. But it's the only thing Tumblr knows him for, and despite being very invested in the D&D community, I haven't looked into him.
I was actually defending him to my friend, and found myself halfway through saying that I'm sure that one discord reply just seems shocking when isolated and out of context, and that I'm sure he's done a bunch of normal world building, when I realized the irony that I was accidentally paraphrasing Scott's paragraph on Weiner.
Apologies, I meant "you" in a generic sense. Proposing what I think his answer would be to a hypothetical person judging him for writing an answer about drow breast milk
I'm apparently not quite the level of pedant you are but appreciate being given the term for it - I use "the impersonal You" a lot in general, although sadly have sorta been phasing it out because LLMs treat "you" as referring to the model itself in pretty much all cases afaict.
I use it a lot as well! But because of confusion i sometimes substitute "One" for "You" to avoid having to explain the impersonal you and how it doesn't mean the conversation partner lol.
...See, this is only the tip of the spear depending on how into D&D you are. I need something way more out in left field than that to fundamentally reorient my D&D neural pathways.
Until today I never heard of "drow breast milk" comment. But it sounds entirely in-character for Ed Greenwood (I almost typed "for Elminster"), and something he is likely proud of, assuming he thinks about it at all.
I don’t know what this anti psychology debate is about, but do you make a distinction between psychology and neuroscience? As far as I am aware the people who discovered how neurons function were mostly not psychologists.
They were mostly psychologists until there were enough of them to justify a new name.
Even today, they are mostly psych undergrads, and their work is mostly taught in psych classes at college.
At the macro level of disciplines like 'Math', 'Biology', 'Engineering', and 'Psychology', each discipline is a very wide tent that contains multitudes of distinct fields and methods. I think neuroscience still falls definitively under the macro discipline of 'Psychology'
Early pioneers in neuroscience like the people who did the squid axon experiments and Ramon y Cajal and Broca or most of the people who developed the EEG were not psychologists.
There is obviously a lot of overlap between disciplines, but there is still a distinction that can be made between studying the physiology of the brain and studying human behavior/cognition at a different level of abstraction.
Worked in a neuroscience dept with basically zero psychology grads. Mostly doctors who went into neurology, various flavors of geneticists experts, biochemists etc.
Descriptions of rare diseases tend to talk about fairly focused stuff like repetitive motion getting worse until the patient dies horribly.
Nobody particularly interested in priming, group psychology, social psych etc.
highest level behaviour stuff I've heard talked about in presentations/meetings was about how patients on dopamine agonists would sometimes go from sober and loyal to destroying their lives with gambling and infidelity.
Which... I gotta admit, gave me a little bit of a different perspective on when people boast about how much "self control" they have but tweak a neurotransmitter and suddenly they're off drinking and whoring.
Or even people who insist it's all down to "society" or someone being mean to the person when they were a kid.
> Which... I gotta admit, gave me a little bit of a different perspective on when people boast about how much "self control" they have but tweak a neurotransmitter and suddenly they're off drinking and whoring.
Are they wrong? They do have self control. They are simply built different from those who do not. A lack of free will is no excuse to deny the existence of virtue.
> But in reality it's like deciding they get virtue points for being born tall.
Some people are born more capable than others. They deserve respect, do they not? Let's not pretend that everyone can eventually become someone that matters if they just work hard enough.
I studied neuroscience in undergrad and at the PhD level, and this does not match my experience. Neuroscience is a widespread undergraduate major at least in the US. There's a *segment* of NS (social & cognitive) that is basically psychology + fMRI. There's also some research on addiction/psych disorder treatments that overlaps with neurobiology research. But cellular/molecular NS has much more to do with genetics, cellular biology, biochemistry and biophysics. Systems and computational NS labs take mostly physics, comp sci and statistics majors.
I'd estimate 80% of neuroscience research does not owe its existence to psychology. The most recent program of the Society for Neuroscience mega-conference is a good way to get a sense of what kinds of research are being done: https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/21171
It depends. Psychology is one of the most inherently cross-disciplinary scientific disciplines around. The core of it is defined by observable patterns of behavior by individuals. If what you are studying aren't observable patterns of individual behavior, then arguably it isn't psychology. But nearly everything we do study involves other disciplines.Both neuroscience and computer science have strong implications for explaining what individual people do, and our models of individual human behavior have had strong implications for what neuroscience and computer science study. These days, it's more common for research studies to be published by cross-disciplinary teams than by specialized individual researchers.
"You invite one conservative" is a funny way of saying "one long time poster on white supremacist webforums" who continued to post super racist stuff like this after he supposedly saw the error of his ways: https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1656770321368883201
This is a relatively poor rule to follow. Considering that some rather famous people have fucked one goat apiece (It's a rather famous initiation ritual)...
The racist explanation is that Hanania is referring obliquely as "these people" to black people, whom he calls animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways (Jordan Neely) or walking around in suits (presumably, District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who charged Daniel Penny, and whom Hanania is lowering to the same level as a random street criminal by implying he's acting out of racial solidarity rather than any commitment to the law).
I hope that was cogent enough. If Hanania didn't mean that and doesn't want it to be read like that he can be less of a vagueposter and just say what he means clearly. Because otherwise people are justified in trying to extrapolate the most reasonable meaning, and assuming that his reason for not saying it more clearly was having a very thin veneer of plausible deniability.
It's definitely racist, but the amount of open racism from black people towards me makes me not care a bit that they get a taste of their own medicine.
I believe black people have been getting quite a bit of a taste of this particular medicine in general throughout history. This is a very unproductive mindset. There are weirdos in every community and in every political movement, the goal of the rational people should be to shun them and engage in dialogue with the adults in the room, not to play childish tit-for-tat games with the dumbest elements on the other side.
"It's definitely racist, but I blame the entire demographic for the behavior of individuals of that demographic, so I don't care about being racist." Well, okay. Great argument. You think no black people have ever had a white person be racist to them?
I've never liked Hanania's takes, but I think that now he's just gone for edgelording and riling up the normies. Hot takes and clickbait, not measured opinions, and he loves the attention he gets and all the outrage just proves to him that he is a natural superior person of intellect to the idiots who are so reliably dancing when he pulls on their strings.
If you take a shit on the floor and everyone gets outraged and angry at you this does not show that you are a genius provocateur. Just that you're the kind of person who takes a shit on the floor. Whether you did so on purpose to rile people up is immaterial, you don't get to claim victory just because you always MEANT for people to get annoyed by your obviously annoying actions.
I appreciate you doing the yoeman's work of explaining this to people who are, for the most part I think, pretending not to know exactly what it means. It's also far from the only time Hanania has very deliberately said stuff which is obviously extremely racist but which he knows has theoretically innocuous if implausible reading. He knows exactly what he's doing.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg, specifically, who did the indictment, is black. This is "alien who just landed on Earth" levels of disingenuous. Combined with the well-established history of what kind of racial epithets and dehumanization is hurled at which specific groups, and with the fact that Neely didn't do anything particularly *ideological* so I don't see why Hanania should group him up with liberals, then your interpretation needs to explain a lot and the racist one fits like a glove all the data.
As I've said in my other comment, if Hanania didn't want to be taken as racist, he could not have made this obviously-very-potentially-racist message a vaguepost. Just say "liberals are deranged" or something. No reason to be all ambiguous for that.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Richard Hanania harbours racist opinions. But I think you're doing the thing Scott complained about in "Against Dog Whistle-ism" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/). It's one thing to say Hanania's tweet could be interpreted as implicitly racist. It's quite another to say that he's "posting super racist stuff", without qualification.
No, I'm not. I agree sometimes people stretch the idea of a dog whistle too far, but this is definitely not too far, and you shouldn't be so naive that if a mafia boss tells you "I sure hope your family doesn't have any 'accidents', heh heh" your answer is "gee thanks, I'm glad you're so concerned about their safety!".
The racist interpretation of that post is the most natural and obvious one, and Hanania knows enough to predict that's how it would look. Anyone in his position, with his awareness of the discourse, who wanted to say something non-racist, would have phrased it differently exactly to avoid being misunderstood for a racist. He is, in fact, being racist.
"It's one thing to say Hanania's tweet could be interpreted as implicitly racist. It's quite another to say that he's "posting super racist stuff", without qualification."
Can you clarify what you think the difference is? A statement that we can expect will be interpreted in a specific way X by a large number of people can be succinctly described as "an X comment". This is highly common usage in American popular discourse.
Had it been Chesea Boudin, the results would've been the same because Boudin was also a pro-crime psychopath but he's not black, and Hanania likely would've made the same comment.
If the point is trolling, then it IS a racist statement. A troll may not MEAN what he says, but he says it to anger people, and obviously saying something he knows is racist will anger people. Maybe he doesn't believe the racist thing he said and he only said it to piss people off (for whatever purpose that may serve). But he still said it.
Even if this is all he is (I disagree, but granting it), Scott's description of him as "a conservative" is hilariously incomplete, which was my original point.
He is. A rather successful substacker. Mostly free to read. I wouldn't pay for it. But especially for those who judge someone super-racist because of a tweet: recommended. One does not need to be very smart to understand his posts. As with JK Rowling. Who is *not* anti-LGTBQ.
(Some of what JK Rowling says seems careless, at least.)
The same sort of thing happened with Musk's "nazi" salute. You might not be able to tell whether he's actually a racist without cutting him (or anybody) open and counting the rings. But he appears to say/do quite a few things that many people are going to interpret as racist. He should be more than smart enough to avoid that impression (repeatedly). Many (less smart) people manage to do it.
The non-racist explanation is that blacks are objectively different, either for cultural or genetic reasons, from non-blacks in socially relevant ways and it's not inherently racist to have views which reflect reality.
I think you've got that backwards. Any factual claim explicitly hinging on racial categories (which "[racial category] are objectively different" certainly qualifies as) could reasonably be described as 'racist.' The point you seem to be arguing for is, rather, that if such a claim is sufficiently consistent with reality, believing in those specific claims shouldn't be regarded as morally wrong, despite racism-as-a-category's hard-earned terrible reputation... but since remediating the broader stigma seems infeasible, category definition needs to be warped in such a way as to exclude the desired subset.
Gotta say, I'm not a big fan of twisting cromulent definitions out of shape for political convenience. Nobody wins that game. https://xkcd.com/1860/
So, "white people are more likely to get sunburned than black people for a given level of exposure" can reasonably be described as "racist". we just have to argue about whether there's a not-morally-wrong subset of racism it could fit in?
I don't think that's a particularly useful distinction. Racism as traditionally defined, requires a claim of *superiority* rather than just difference, or expressed prejudice and discrimination on such a basis, and it requires that the claim and/or prejudice be based on race rather than e.g. culture. That is, to me at least, a much more useful definition in addition to being a more traditionally accepted one.
And in this context, I'll take your Richard Hanania tweet and raise you Chris Rock's "Black People vs [redacted]. Rock expresses clear prejudice and at least some degree of discrimination, while very strongly implying superiority, on the basis of cultural differences between two groups of people of the same race. It's hard to call that "racist" when it would fit just as well in a world where absolutely everybody was the same race.
Hanania's tweet is more ambiguous, in part because it's a tweet rather than an extended monologue. It could be coming straight out of Klan-style white supremacism, or it could be coming from the same place as Chris Rock. So if you want to accuse Hanania of white supremacism, please look farther and more critically for your supporting evidence.
I don't think it can possibly come "from the same place as Chris Rock". First, Chris Rock was making a comedy routine, and Hanania was making a dead-serious sounding comment on specific news, suggesting that certain events deserved real outrage. Second, Chris Rock is clearly talking about two groups *within his own race*. The meaning of his routine is pretty obvious: there are certain stereotypes about black people, and these stereotypes keep existing because of an obnoxious group of people who embody those stereotypes, and whose actions ruin things for everyone, other black people included. That's a complaint about culture, not race, he's saying "we're all being looked down on (as a race) due to the behaviour of a certain culture". The entire *issue* with racism is that it completely washes away individual distinctions. Saying "guy so-and-so is a criminal because he stabs people" is not racist, saying "all people that look like guy so-and-so are criminals" is. And in Hanania's case he was implying that there's some kind of alliance or inherent love for crime shared between the black homeless mentally ill subway disturbance guy and the black District Attorney who indicts someone for using excessive force in restraining him. I'm going to hazard a guess that you don't make DA if you are one of those people Chris Rock calls with the N-word.
This is actually just called racism and this view is in fact completely nonsense. You can argue the DA's decision was wrong without invoking the nebulous idea that somehow this is because he is different "for cultural or genetic reasons". Maybe he just has different opinions. His actions were hardly crazy and completely out of any possible interpretation of the law.
Why do you interpret that as racist? He could be being derogatory against the extremely mentally ill (which is somewhat justified) or homeless (also somewhat justified)
If “these people” was referring to the “extremely mentally ill”, it would take no extra effort to have said “extremely mentally ill”. Who refers to the “extremely mentally ill” as animals anyway? How many “homeless people” are wearing suits?
If he didn’t want to be misinterpreted, he should have been more clear.
> The "lifestyle homeless" and "down on their luck homeless" presumably wear suits occasionally.
Sure, no doubt there are exceptions. But largely irrelevant.
It still seems unreasonable to expect that anybody would be interpreting "these people" in "these people are animals" as referring to any sort of homeless people. And it doesn't seem likely that most people are going to expect that typical homeless people are going to wear suits. Especially, in any way that it's characteristic of being homeless.
Most people are going to interpret "homeless" as the "down on their luck" type.
> Of course, the "lifestyle homeless" and "down on their luck homeless" are probably not the people Hanania was referring to.
I'm addressing the suggestion that Hanania was referring to the "homeless" or "extremely mentally ill". This suggestion is absurd (IMO). (I wasn't commenting on the nuances/variation of what "homeless" might mean.)
The "these people are animals" is either racist or really bad communication. Not sure why anybody would waste time defending it.
>Most people are going to interpret "homeless" as the "down on their luck" type.
I'd say most would interpret it as the "wretched" type; indeed, you seem to be interpreting it as centrally the "wretched" type.
(The "down on their luck" type outnumber the "wretched" type in total numbers of people who've *ever* been homeless, but are homeless for much-shorter periods and are much less identifiable as homeless.)
> I'd say most would interpret it as the "wretched" type; indeed, you seem to be interpreting it as centrally the "wretched" type.
It doesn’t matter (it’s not relevant to the discussion here).
Effective communication requires shared meaning.
The (some form of) "down on their luck" is the standard (common) implication.
If somebody (you, for example) want people to know they aren't implying the common implication, they need to be clear about it. Not being clear about it is a failure of communication.
It's too far a reach to argue that Hanania was talking about homeless people. It's an even farther reach to argue that "suits" was referring to homeless people.
> indeed, you seem to be interpreting it as centrally the "wretched" type.
You are over interpreting what I actually wrote.
I'm not talking about the nuances/variation of what "homeless" might mean. That's a different (and irrelevant) discussion.
From Wikipedia: "Vázquez also said that Neely was frightening but had not assaulted anyone before Penny’s headlock.[8] Other witnesses reported Neely throwing garbage at passengers, and a mother stated that she hid with her child behind a stroller after Neely charged at other passengers.[13][14] "
Yeah, I have no problem with calling someone who throws garbage at passengers and charges at them an animal. For far too long, the police have none nothing about the hooligans (yes, including white hooligans) who make public transit unbearable for ordinary people. I am glad to see ordinary people take matters into their own hands.
Hanania is mentioning the "people in suits", referring to the District Attorney who indicted Penny. Just about the only thing in common the DA has with this random bozo who throws garbage at people on the subway is that... they're both black.
No, they're not, that is a stupid interpretation. Neely acted in an antisocial way. A DA investigating someone who seems to have used a disproportionate excess of force in dealing with a minor threat leading to someone's death is in fact just doing exactly his job as society asks him to. An indictment isn't a sentence, but you can't expect "kills someone in a chokehold" to be a fully uncontroversial and consequence-free action, and the idea that this should just be allowed unpunished and without scrutiny for the sake of freeing ourselves of the plague of weird hobos being weird does not lead to a better or more stable society.
"Investigating" != "filing charges." It would have been fine if the DA's office had spent a day or two interviewing people and going through footage. The antisocial part was when the DA then used the considerable resources of the state to attempt to punish Penny (thankfully unsuccessfully) for ideological ends.
You know, if you've been sitting on evidence that Neely was actually a Heritage Foundation staffer, that seems important and you should definitely make it public.
Those are not the only two options, and my guess is that most likely the specific political beliefs of a homeless mentally ill dude aren't very determinant factors in whether he harasses people over the fact that he's, you know, homeless and mentally ill.
That seems extremely inconsistent with Hanania's actual view, which is that MAGA is a low human capital movement and the Democrats are increasingly a high human capital group.
Funny that Hanania is much more accepted *now* that he's switched to "elite human capital" "low human capital" phrasing, and gets much more respect for saying conservatives are idiots.
Same level of bigotry, but hey he's including poor white people, so he gets a pass!
> gets much more respect for saying conservatives are idiots
What he cares about is clicks, visits to his blog, paid subscriptions & sales of his books.
He's playing a Machiavellian opportunistic game: he caters to the current 'underdogs' because they provide a better revenue stream than the current 'top dogs'.
During the Biden era, he played the anti-woke side of the field; now that Trump & co. are ascendant, he 'critiques' the 'rightoids' & writes a book about 'kakistokracy' which explains why 'populists' are ruining America.
The funny thing about this post, for me, is that it's both about and an illustration of why I don't recommend ACX to people anymore.
Oh yeah, Scott Alexander? Many great posts about discourse norms and incentive structures and neuroscience and AI! Important in me becoming an effective altruist! But there is that *one* thing... And unfortunately, that one thing is "very friendly to claims of the inherent inferiority of black people, and the people who make them, as long as they have the gauziest layer of deniability."
If I were going to recommend it, it would have to be in the tone of "well, he doesn't spend *all* his time fucking sheep; if you just look away during that part..."
Yeah I feel exactly the same way. I also try to take it into account when reading other posts. If it's both factually wrong and misleading about this one thing I know and care about then how should I feel on other topics I'm less familiar with. And yet I still read, perhaps unadvisably.
The post argues that IQ is not 100% genetic, and is to a large degree environmental. Any inferiority in intellectual ability would then be largely ameliorable, not "inherent."
It doesn't say anything about IQ differences by race in the US not being genetic. And given Scott's long history of friendliness to HBD I don't see much reason to overlook this. And saying the difference is not "100%" genetic is far form rejecting genetic inferiority of Black people.
"But if IQ was 100% environmental, we should expect populations’ IQ to vary based on the quality of nutrition, health care, and education that they get. Therefore, because whites in the US have IQ 100, and blacks get on average worse nutrition, health care, and education than whites, we would expect them to have some lower IQ, like 85."
I can understand not wanting to read or write about this, but if you *are* writing about it, you'll do a disservice to your readers if you pretend the hereditarian hypothesis isn't plausible. It might be false, but I don't think anyone can justify high confidence in that. I'm exhausted from the endless moralizing on this. Yeah, exercise care, which usually means just not discussing it, but somebody somewhere probably should talk about it a little bit, and I sure hope they can put curiosity ahead of moralizing.
I generally prefer that this conversation remains mostly dormant, but yes, Scott was implicitly assuming the expert consensus on this. You're using tendentious language to make a (sadly) well-validated claim look maximally ugly. I think you also understand that, even in the wake of the "vibe shift", your career and reputation are at little risk from you saying that, while anyone who might disagree is checking their anonymity before responding.
No, it doesn't assume that. The main points of the post: USA provides much better (IQ-wise) environment for black people than virtually all black-majority countries, and that national IQ estimates from Lynn are in agreement with other means of accessing intelligence.
That's exactly the post that made me decide I couldn't recommend ACX anymore - that and the follow-up (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn), where he responds to someone pointing out that Lynn was deeply and openly racist and a Nazi sympathizer by saying "true" and moving on.
In other contexts, Scott is aware that science is difficult and prone to methodological issues, interpretative issues, and bias, and that although this is something you need to watch out for in many places (e.g. drug trials), it's *especially* something you need to think carefully about when discussing hot-button issues studied by people with strong opinions on the subject.
When it comes to IQ estimates of black people by white supremacists, though, his standard of scrutiny drops precipitously.
He talks about racism because he's writing for an audience he knows will raise that as an objection. And he believes "it's not racist if it's true", when writing about claims of black people being genetically inferior, which is what all racists believe. But the combination of saying that and dropping your standards for determining whether it's *actually true* isn't fearless truth-seeking, it's just giving yourself an excuse to be racist with a veneer of objectivity.
"claims of black people being genetically inferior"—but the whole post is saying that IQ is significantly a product of environment, not genetics, right? At least non-genetic enough that huge gains can be made by improving environmental factors.
The whole post is premised on the idea that the IQ estimates made by a notorious white supremacist, which just so happen to show that African countries have the lowest IQs in the world, are essentially correct and we don't need to investigate how they might be wrong - only explain how they might be right, even if they seem implausibly low.
In the follow-up post, he claims that only a tiny slice (5%) of "[the fact that] Malawians are obviously smarter than intellectually disabled people [despite Lynn claiming they have a national IQ of 60]" can be explained by Lynn's data or analysis being bad.
I'm not really interested in arguing the question of genetic vs. environmental contributors to IQ. Drop the words "genetic" and "inherent" from my previous posts, if you like; the point holds, which is that Scott is very prepared to accept "most black people are just dumber than most non-black people" without asking too many questions.
These estimates agree well with PISA, PIERLS and every statistic gathered by organizations that are not so-called "white suprematists"
According to Lynn, Asians and Jews have higher IQs than Whites, why'd you call him a white suprematist? It's more logical to call him Jewish suprematist.
I think it's pretty clear that he believes in racial differences in genetic IQ--at a certain point if you demonstrate this lack of care about the issue and are happy to engage with people who hold that view as reasonable people you're at least sympathetic to it. Also look at his posts about Hungarian jews, not to mention private emails that have since been leaked which suggest that, at least at one point, his true views were more extreme than ones he's willing to express publicly.
OK, all this seems quite possible to me, but not grounds for freaking out. Do you agree? Let's say Scott is wrong about racial IQ differences, and is taking one line of thought and evidence too seriously and another not seriously enough. Why get agitated about that ? I'm sure he does that sometimes, like everyone else. I've certainly thought he's done that when arriving at some of his views about AI.
But there is something about the idea of someone believing that blacks are on average born with less intellectual capacity than whites that people freak out over. It is considered s a terrible view to have! Even wondering whether it could be true is seen as evil. Why, though? Believing that blacks have less intellectual capacity than whites is definitely not like believing the earth is flat -- an idea so obviously wrong that anyone with common sense can mentally refute it. I have sometimes waded into the research literature about this topic, and when I do I have emerged exhausted and uncertain. It is absolutely not true that all those making the case that blacks are less intelligent than whites are foaming-at-the-mouth racists who are lying and p-hacking like mad to convince people they are right.
So even if Scott is wrong about black intelligence, there's no reason to be sure he arrived there by a dishonorable route -- by letting his personal racism guide him to selectively attend to the arguments supporting his prejudice. And it seems likely to me that many who are positive there is no real empirical support for the idea are selectively attending to the arguments that support their need to believe that there is no black-white difference in intellect. I approached the research and the arguments expecting to easily find solid evidence there was no difference, and emerged uncertain. Reading all the stuff and determining the preponderance of the evidence is a big, tedious, unpleasant job, and the chance is not tiny that someone who does will emerge from it with a view that makes 90% of educated people hate them. So I haven't done it.
"But there is something about the idea of someone believing that blacks are on average born with less intellectual capacity than whites that people freak out over."
Because history. Slavery was justified, in part, by claims like this. So additional caution is prudent here.
If, as the leaked email showed, Scott believed that it was probably or possibly true, what should he do with that? Serious question. David Reich famously gave his answer in a NYT op-ed, but it seems like you wouldn't approve.
Who's "he"? If it's Scott, he's free to keep posting pro-HBD and pro-eugenics posts, and nobody will bother him about it as long as he keeps up the pretense of being a liberal. He's not directly advocating for anything, because he's not in a position to do anything about it anyways. But the people reading this blog might be able to do something.
>where he responds to someone pointing out that Lynn was deeply and openly racist and a Nazi sympathizer
The claim made is that Lynn was part of an organization that had as a co-founder someone who was an academic during the Nazi years and became a respected geneticist after the war. This man, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, may well have participated in Holocaust crimes and (like most Holocaust perpetrators) escaped punishment, but no evidence was given that Lynn ever knew of this.
From that link: “You can talk to a Malawian person, and talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome, and the former is obviously much brighter and more functional than the latter. Doesn’t that mean that the estimates have to be wrong?”
This is an illustration of why talking about differences in average intelligence is kinda (risks being) racist.
Averages are properties of populations but this quote is talking about individuals.
The overlap of the bell curves with 85 and 100 average is 62%. Using the averages to predict individuals seems not to be a good practice.
(The overlap of the Malawi bell curve is much lower. Something like 25%.)
It doesn’t seem fair to base expectations of interacting with individuals on an average (it’s prejudicial).
While I share you feelings, consider that the opportunity here is to offer counter-arguments that might persuade some number of people here who have no strong opinions either way. For example, there is no reliable evidence that black people share cognitive traits as a racial group. Any cognitive traits, good or bad. There is no reliable evidence that cognitive traits track race in ways that are not more easily explained by other factors.
Obviously, if I'm right, then any argument that black people share inferior mental traits falls apart.
Of course there's no reliable evidence - if anybody proposed a research program strong enough to gather it, he would be hounded out of the profession quicker than you can blink. That's the crucial problem - the "progressive" worldview that rules the academia cannot treat this issue as an open question, regardless of the state of evidence. You must take it on faith that there's not the slightest intrinsic difference in cognitive traits between various groups, or you're a nazi.
You're objectively wrong. Many researchers have conducted research on this very issue, ending with conclusions on both sides, but one side prevailed. The hypothesis was tested, and failed to be supported.
Are you just saying that "ancestral populations" has more explanatory power than "race", therefore any biological claims about race are mistaken? (Because if so, you should say so.) Or is this leaning on "no reliable evidence"? (The purpose of evidence isn't to be reliable, so it's unfortunate you put that word in there.)
Seriously, you're playing your cards close to your chest, being precise about language in weird ways, and I can't figure out quite what you're driving at. I suspect if you just clearly said what you mean and showed evidence, things would go better.
Well, that's a lot to parse. This is a highly complex topic, and it's hard to be concise.
Evidence (which I take as synonymous with "data" or "empirical results") has to be reliable or it can't be trusted. Reliability has specific operational definitions within statistics. Basically, it's the answer to the question "Are differences in the data real, or just a statistical fluke?"
For there to be reliable evidence that racial differences in IQ scores mean something, there would have to be real differences between racial groups on IQ scores. There certainly are. Black Americans consistently score below Whites and Asians.
The question is whether or not "race" as a variable explains the variance more successfully than other available metrics, and the answer is no. Because there are also highly reliable differences in the childhood environments between racial groups. These environmental variables are more highly correlated with variance in IQ scores than race is.
However, there is also both empirical and theoretical reasons to believe that there is a complex gene x environment interaction going on (see my posts elsewhere in this thread).
I may have expressed myself in a confusing way. If so, I hope this clarifies things.
As for the inferiority of black people, I contend that we must exercise additional skepticism (hold the hypothesis to a higher standard of evidence) than other explanatory factors due to an unfortunate history of the use of this concept to justify social exploitation and oppression of black people. There should be nothing too controversial in requiring a higher analytical standard when the public consequences of getting it wrong are so high. After all, we do more or less the same thing with respect to drug studies, for more or less the same reason - to protect against risks to public safety.
Yeah. If you think Hanania's worth it, that's fine (for some set of 'fine') but 'one conservative' is disingenuous. There are bullets that have to be bitten.
Yes, that's what "conservative" usually means in the contemporary US and the broader western world.
"Non-racist conservative" is a non-central and not particularly intellectually coherent (inborn hierarchies are great, except for the one we've been using as our major organizing principle in the Americas since the time of Columbus) example of conservatism.
>"Non-racist conservative" is a non-central and not particularly intellectually coherent (inborn hierarchies are great, except for the one we've been using as our major organizing principle in the Americas since the time of Columbus) example of conservatism.
Unlikely you could pass an ideological Turing test as an American conservative.
If you move beyond Twitter, you may as well also move beyond Reddit and BlueSky. And then Facebook. And then Instagram. And then Quora. And then listicles. And then legacy media editorials and commentary.
Probably best to just say "move beyond short- and medium-form media".
"The Stag Hunt protocol solves a specific coordination problem: how do you get the epistemic benefits of a small, honest, in-person conversation — the kind where people actually update their views because the stakes of being wrong in front of five people you respect are different from the stakes of being wrong on Twitter — without either (a) keeping the whole thing private forever, which wastes the good ideas, or (b) publishing it directly, which changes what people are willing to say in the room. The trick is a two-phase structure. Phase one is synchronous and closed: a small group talks under Chatham House Rules, so nobody has to pre-optimize their sentences for a public audience, and the conversation can go to the interesting, underdeveloped, maybe-wrong places that only happen when reputational risk is low. Phase two is asynchronous and public: someone takes the raw transcript and resynthesizes it into a single anonymous essay-voice — not a dialogue, not a summary with names attached, but a fused perspective that carries the ideas forward while stripping anything that could identify or embarrass a participant. What gets published isn't a record of who said what; it's the residue of the conversation — worth reading on its own terms — released into public view specifically so people who weren't in the room can stumble onto it, riff on it, or connect it to something else. The closed room protects candor; the public writeup converts that candor into serendipity, without anyone having to trade one for the other."
Until editorial standards for that protocol can be refined by long practice, I'd want to be very cautious about who gets to be phase two's "someone." Probably not release anything until every participant in the original conversation has signed off on the fused perspective's final-draft adequacy, with plenty of room for haggling and nitpicking on the way there.
The internet is an excellent example of the law of unintended consequences. The development which was intended to offer free speech to the oppressed everywhere has developed into a monster that breeds flash lynch mobs and conspiracy theorists with audiences of tens and hundreds of thousands. Should we want to see it destroyed, or wish it had never been invented, now that we see what it became?
That would certainly be welcome. But... good luck prising the internet from the death grasp of its hyper-profit oriented current owners and gatekeepers.
"accidentally get thousands of people addicted to sports gambling"
So...speaking of only discussing the worst things, I feel like the explosion in prediction markets has been just as bad for society as the naysayers said it would be, in exactly the ways they said it would be - scams, insider trading, backdoor for bribes, endangering national security, threats against journalists, formerly reliable pieces of information like airport temperatures no longer being reliable because of people betting on them then tampering with them, and yes "accidentally getting thousands of people addicted to sports gambling", without many benefits as far as I can see.
I'm interested to know if you're still sanguine about them, or if you're feeling any buyer's remorse.
That airport temperature issue is making me think: Prediction markets without a tightly policed environment are just a giant Goodheart's-law-cesspit, no? As we can also see in the stock market right now, where the tight policing has suddenly (and hopefully temporarily) been given up after a rather long and successful track record.
Markets that look like they could easily be manipulated now includes politics and war thanks to insider trading from the white house. (E.G. Trump's teleprompter guy)
If these markets aren't legitimate the actual social value of prediction markets is lost.
No, no, insider trading is food for prediction markets. Transmits information to the general public. But you shouldn't necessarily take the other side.
What I meant is markets like the French airport temperature one with the hair dryer.
I get your idea about "transmits information to the public". But have you considered that there might be people deranged enough to send the minimum viable number of bombs that count as "attack" or "war" to win a big prediction market bet about the probability that country X goes to war with country Y? I'm not being facetious here.
How's that different from buying short-dated out of the money options?
Even without dedicated prediction markets, an attack on eg Mexico will have an impact on financial markets that you can bet on. And sending a deniable assassin after a CEO would also impact the company's stock price.
People who have the ability to decide what number of bombs to use have much better ways to make money than cheating at Polymarket. These people are equally capable of insider trading the stock market which moves on the same news. In fact they can (and do) make a lot more money that way than they ever could on prediction markets.
The defenses for insider training came from a time when insider trading mostly looked like "the people in the know understand some company is much more or less profitable than the market realizes, but is about to find out" and the insider trading gets that information to the market sooner.
Insider trading is only good for the prediction market when the information it transmits:
1. Would be accurate regardless
2. Wouldn't get transmitted but for the insider trading.
Its good for the market to know that a disaster is about to happen and pay the one guy who knows an exorbitant amount for telling it. This keeps the market calibrated to the risk of disaster, _but only because_ usually disasters are not the kind of thing one man can make happen.
Where the prediction market _itself_ is the incentive to cause the disaster, without the insider trading, the disaster _would not have happened_. The prediction market loses its calibration to reality because the existence of the market distorts what would happen. Separately, more bad things start happening because individuals can make them happen and then trade on them before hand.
Tl;dr - the insider trading is NOT good for the market if the information wouldn't have been true if there hadn't been insider trading.
yes, an equivalent of Goodheart's law. I quote myself: "But have you considered that there might be people deranged enough to send the minimum viable number of bombs that count as "attack" or "war" to win a big prediction market bet about the probability that country X goes to war with country Y? I'm not being facetious here."
> The defenses for insider training came from a time when insider trading mostly looked like "the people in the know understand some company is much more or less profitable than the market realizes, but is about to find out"
No, you've stated it much more symmetrically than reality can justify. The people in the know are already heavily invested in the company. If it's much more profitable than the market realizes (but is about to find out), they can take advantage of that without doing any insider trading, by not doing any trading.
So insider trading as a legal enterprise has to focus on cases where people in the know understand that a company is much *less* profitable than the market realizes. This has the additional virtue that the people getting prosecuted can be easily painted as villains.
Even cases of not trading where the case for "insider trading" as a concept is clear-cut - for example, where an executive has scheduled the sale of stock well in advance (so as to avoid the charge of insider trading), but cancels the scheduled sale the day before it would otherwise go through - don't count.
It seems to me that, in the limit, the natural incentive for prediction markets is to make *reality* anti-inductive.
After all, if there's a reliable event happening in the future that everyone can easily predict, it's hard for anyone to make any money off of predicting it.
The incentive is always to try to manipulate reality to be maximally surprising, since then you're the only one who knows what will happen, and can make bank.
We do *not* want to live in a reality that is maximally surprising.
Eh, most financial markets are already prediction market (for some more limited predictions). And they haven't turned the adjacent reality anti-inductive so far.
For example, I would call the Elon Musk DOGE fiasco highly anti-inductive and largely a result of weird financial market bullshit.
I sort of feel like a lot of people feel like they have no idea what is happening with the world anymore, and financial markets are not *not* a major player in that turn of events.
I mean, it's unlike things that have happened in recent memory, it was highly chaotic and unpredictable and outside of established channels and procedures, it was a pretty shocking turn of events. I think we largely still don't understand the true consequences it had in the long run.
A cursory search for "DOGE and SEC" implies that Elon tried to use DOGEs powers to sniff around the insights of the SEC and maybe more, like spreading fear and driving away employees or snuffing out investigations. No idea how far that went, but the obvious fraud going on doesn't make me hopeful.
Musk's success and influence is only due to his ability to manipulate investors and get valuations a million miles beyond what his companies actually produce.
Basically, Musk is a 'trillionaire' only because the stock market has become decoupled from the actual economy, and is in many cases just a tool that rich people use to bet against each other. Investors blew up Tesla stock because they expected a greater fool to buy it from them at a higher price due to all the hype, not because they thought it was a productive company with a sound business model and strong earnings.
Without that effect of the stock market making Musk an internationally relevant/influential figure based on his 'wealth' valuations, no chance he ever would have been allowed near government service.
Leaving aside the incentives corrupting actual policy / official behaviour. Insider trading is killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Who'd bet honest information against a rigged market?
Commodities markets in the US worked for ages without much of any rules against insider trading. (They recently introduced some, but it didn't seem to have made people trust those markets more, as you seem to claim these rules would?)
Commodities are selling physical goods. As most physical goods aren't monopolistic, you have less of the pressure of Enron (which people knew was failing for a good while before they caved and went bankrupt.)
Catching the falling knife is the hard part, and where insider trading would come in handy.
The optimal desired outcome is "we mine all the predictability we can and all we're left with is the irreducible chaos we can't predict". But of course there's always the possibility of "we just make things MORE chaotic in our struggle to make money". Incentives, incentives.
The airport temperature thing feels like classic McGregorism to me - you have tens or hundreds of thousands of temperature markets going off without a hitch and people developing weather models and having fun playing with them and winning or losing money and so on, but the one time someone did something weird is all anyone remembers.
Hair dryer is a minimum viable proof-of-concept. If that turns out to be an effective and reliable way to make money, somebody's going to try mounting long-range energy weapons on blimps or satellites to save the hands-on work. Any economic framework that turns supervillainy profitable has a serious problem.
I feel extremely justified in my naysaying. Prediction markets kept using stock markets as an analogy for why it would be good, and I agree stock markets are mostly good, but they are so incredibly tightly regulated and policied down to the minutiae, and there's *still* a ton of sketchy stuff that happens! Prediction markets didn't stand a chance!
To expand: it's not just the stock market itself that's regulated; that is doable for the prediction markets corporate entity as well. It's that *every single interaction and bet* on the stockmarket is *also* tightly regulated! Every entity participating in the market needs to be monitored and regulated, in order to have stock listed you need to get regular audits and follow tons of rules, the types of trades allowed are tightly controlled (less than they used to be, and this has been strictly negative for retail traders).
The analogy was more revealing than its proponents realised: there was never a plausible way to get each layer of prediction markets (the market, the types of trades, and the participants) anywhere near the level of cleanliness of stock markets (which, to reiterate, are already not perfect but pretty good).
Sorry, but "financial markets" was your widening, not the other guys narrowing: I started the analogy and comparison to stock markets that started this whole thread.
Sorry. Then I should have said: not all financial markets have the same regulation. Different markets in different places in different times differ in what regulation they get and how and how effectively that regulation is enforced.
For example, foreign exchange markets are fairly loosely regulated in many places. Commodity markets in the US didn't really have any insider trading rules until fairly recently. (And the introduction of these rules doesn't seem to have made these markets more trusted by market participants.)
Insider trading rules in various parts of Europe and the US differ a lot, too.
And, of course, there's also private markets for stocks that aren't public, and they have different regulations.
FX is a useful example because the market is so large that individuals can do very little to influence it and, unless you work for a central bank (and hence have your trading activity closely monitored) it's very difficult to have anything like insider knowledge.
Commodity markets are also very large, and the smaller ones (or ones that work less on a spot basis*) are indeed sketchier than the bigger ones.
Almost no prediction markets get anywhere near the scale required to have these properties.
You clearly have no idea what you are taking about. The types of trades allowed on the stock market are much crazier and massively more leveraged than anything you could possibly do on a prediction market.
Bro, I'm not even allowed to buy and sell four times in the same week on the stock market. Yeah, you can get a stupidly over-leveraged bet. Nobody cares if you go into default (unless you're a huge chunk of the population, like has recently happened in South Korea). The issue is shit like insider trading, price manipulation, and so on, which are highly, highly illegal on the stock market.
Price manipulation is illegal on any market, so that's not an issue here. As for your trade restrictions there is absolutely no restriction on trade number either legal or market rules based. If you have such a restriction you probably have a low value or highly restricted account. This is your broker protecting themselves from you, not protecting you from anything. It is very easy to get a retail account with full fuck your self over trading power.
The boosters of prediction markets thought it would just be all the nerds who were interested in the stats and arguing over probabilities, and taking it public would then reward the People of Maths for their big brains by letting them scoop up money from the rubes who were not People of Maths, and then by proving how smart and correct they were, government and society at large would appoint the technocratic experts of prediction markets as the oracles of policy decisions by following the prediction markets.
Reality did not turn out like that. As I constantly bewailed, putting money in makes it about "how do I get $$$$$ off this bet?" and not "how do we arrive at the best decision with all the smart informed people bringing their expertise and insider knowledge to the question?"
If you want to do sports betting, those companies are also tightly regulated. Prediction market companies thought they could skip over that by being "we're not betting on sports (and we pretend what we're doing is also not betting, it's calculating probabilities by using your smarts, okay yeah that does sound like gambling but it's different, we swear!)".
>agree stock markets are mostly good, but they are so incredibly tightly regulated and policied down to the minutiae, and there's *still* a ton of sketchy stuff that happens!
During prohibition there was a lot of sketchy stuff happening with alcohol production and sales. Regulations create sketchiness as people evade or find legal loopholes to get around them.
I see benefits. Prediction markets make people far more informed about all sorts of things than they were previously. Information is valuable - we pay the media precisely because they provide us the service of providing information.
I don't know how the costs and benefits weigh on a societal level, but for me personally, it feels like prediction markets have been a net benefit so far.
To me the sports betting is the least of the issues. People could already bet on sports on plenty of other websites before prediction markets, so while sports betting is generally bad, prediction markets didn’t make it much worse. The problem is that it’s so often easier to change an outcome than predict it, so people now have an incentive to mess with things that were previously too boring for anyone to mess with (ie the airport temperature thing), or to bet on actions they themselves will take, where the market expects them to take the normal and reasonable action, so they bet on themselves to take a bad and dumb action and then do it.
The promise was definitely that they'd be beneficial on a societal level, not just for individuals trying to satisfy random curiosities or enrich themselves at the expense of others.
If they've failed on that front, then it's a failure, period. (And I don't see how they're not badly failing at that.)
It’s my number one strategy to find out answers to questions like, “how is the war in Ukraine going?” “Is Putin at risk of losing power?” If I had to rely on pendants to get this info, I would learn precisely nothing — other than there are people who feel strongly about contradictory views. Prediction markets give me a real sense of whether odds have changed.
I'm not the great Scott Alexander. But I like having an extra channel of information that's based on the desire to make money rather than the person funding the channel's ideology. They're not infallible, but it's like having the left-wing people, the right-wing people, and now the prediction markets weighing in.
As for insider trading and scams, well, those are only a problem for people actually putting money in them.
As for threats against journalists--their role in the Great Awokening has kind of caused me to lose sympathy for them. But I admit, overall, for society, this is a bad thing. Wasn't there just one case or something though?
Now futarchy, which means not rule by hermaphrodites from Japanese erotic animation but rule by prediction markets, strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. But as an extra source of info, I'm still happy with them.
> As for insider trading and scams, well, those are only a problem for people actually putting money in them.
Scams of the form "public official does something, then profits by having bet on themselves doing that specific thing, with greater returns the more shockingly bizarre and stupid it was" can have collateral damage far outside the market itself.
I know you're talking to Scott, but as a pro PM person...
I acknowledged these dangers before they became popular, and felt they should be regulated similar to the stock market. A central authority needs to approve any given question/stock to avoid: pointless betting (sports), perverse incentives, scams, etc. polymarket and company need to address this before their ship sinks.
Unfortunately it appears the human appetite for betting is so high, they can make way more money from short term gambling + interest than they probably ever would the correct way. A correctly done PM would be great, but maybe it will never happen.
Maybe I should have phrased differently, I was interested in everyone's thoughts, just thought it would make a good post topic. I like most of these ideas. I was also thinking - Making it a little costly in time/money/effort to get approved to trade on prediction markets would eliminate a lot of spur of the moment corruption/insider trading opportunities, while allowing professionals to do thier thing. Maybe something like, your first bet is 100 dollars and you're allowed to increase ten percent each time. That way you have to do 150 trades first to start betting a million dollars
IMO seems within realm of possibility - Kalshi claimed +3M users in one month!]
Y = share for whom this is genuinely net-new gambling
≈ 15% [3]
-> ~1.5M-5.25M incremental gamblers
Worse, prediction market users experienced higher losses than users of other gambling products. "[A] March report — which tracks user activity from July 2025 onward — ... found that the median loss for prediction markets now stood at 8%, while for sportsbooks it was 5%." [4]
I think a relevant distinction is how many people participate in sports betting without being addicted to it. Anecdotally, I know a dozen or so people who've done sports betting, and none of them are addicts. (Potential confounder: most sports betters I know actually made money from it, which is unusual.)
Still, my model is that MOST people who make sports bets are not addicts, just people who find it fun. This can be true even if gambling sites make MOST of their money from addicts (which seems to be the case).
It's definitely more than "thousands". Anecdotally for myself, working on the retail frontlines, sports betting is both a common "hobby", and also a known Danger Zone that many end up regretting, even if they aren't strictly "addicted". This was very much not the case before Daftkings and the like came along! At most you'd have the yearly March Madness brackets and Fantastic Four Football, with maybe a small storewide pot, and it was a pretty casual thing. Not this always-available compulsive urge to gamble, reinforced by constant ads in all sports media, on public transit, on podcasts...
All the Youtube revenge fantasy story channels I watch have "my husband/mother-in-law/other family member had hundreds of thousands in hidden debt because of GAMBLING".
Clearly this is sufficiently a problem in Asian societies that it's a credible element in a story. "Yeah, that tracks, Auntie spends most of her pension on those card rooms" where, when it's supposedly set in high society in Chicago or Georgia, "my hoity-toity mother-in-law was secretly in hock to the bookies" just doesn't work convincingly:
I confess I didn't read this at all thoroughly, but is he talking about prediction markets there? I see there's a section called "What About Other Prediction Markets?", but ctrl-f 'prediction' and 'market' don't turn anything up, and the section on "The Product As Currently Offered" only points out the two failure modes that prediction markets avoid: bad odds and denying access to winners. Everything else seems to be about sports gambling in general, which I believe well-predates prediction markets, with dedicated sportsbook companies still capturing the majority of the sports gambling money in the US.
It was written before sports betting had finished colonizing the prediction markets. There's a stat rattling around my head saying that something like 80% of the volume on real-money prediction markets is sports betting and similar low-VOI degen now, but I have no idea if that came from Scott, Zvi, Yglesias, or someone else. I've been waiting for a Mantic Monday post where Scott gives a very clear In Defense Of Prediction Markets As Practiced In The Current Day; there was a single somewhat-despairing one awhile back, but since then he and apparently everyone else in the ratsphere has gone back to treating them as our conspiracy's Oracles. (Substack Polymarket integration!) It's somewhat baffling.
I bring it up because you cited the Zvi article in support of GP's correction of Scott's "thousands". I don't think it's clear that prediction markets are to blame for mass sports gambling addiction, and Zvi's article suggests that they are preferable to DraftKings.
https://ir.aboutdraftkings.com/financials/quarterly-results/default.aspx says that DraftKings handled $13.1 billion in betting volume (if I'm interpreting correctly) in the last quarter. I have no idea whether to take this second source seriously seriously, but https://www.polysyncer.com/blog/polymarket-trading-volume claims that Polymarket has handled $8–12 billion in volume _ever_, with only 25–35% in sports (if we trust this source, your 80% may still make sense across a shorter timespan; they say much of the total comes from the 2024 US presidential election). Prediction markets are a small player in the sports betting space even if sports betting is a big player in the prediction market space. If you banned sports gambling, it would be to take down DraftKings, not Polymarket.
Separately, it's not clear to me what you're saying re: oracles. Are you saying it's baffling that they're taken seriously as oracles despite this or just that that happens without acknowledgement that they're hives of degeneracy?
There was a period around 2021 when you could reliably make a few thousand dollars by collecting (at the time enormous) signup bonuses and then making offsetting bets on different platforms. I remember rat-sphere discussion about it.
Are the people you know in that group, or actual current sports gamblers? As far as I know it's incredibly hard to be up long-term on the app sportsbooks, because they will ban people with consistent winning records.
Yeah, they're all from that group. Though only one of them was risk-intolerant enough to need to offset bets on different platforms; there were enough new sportsbooks doing enough good promos that it mitigated some of the variance. We mostly just bet when the promos were positive EV and stopped when they weren't.
The only guy I know who is still regularly sports betting nowadays has indeed been banned off of multiple platforms for winning too much.
Surely the relevant distinction is how much money they make from addicts. If it would be bad that they got (say) $50M from a million addicts, surely it’s worse if they got $50M from a thousand addicts.
My impression is that it's more like getting $49.9M from ten addicts and $100k from 990 other people.
(My numbers might be totally off, but I think it's still true that whales / high rollers are the primary moneymakers for casinos.)
It's not necessarily bad if some people lose large amounts of money to casinos if they have large amounts of money that they can comfortably lose. The problem is when people, due to being addicts, bet significantly MORE than they can afford to lose. This obviously happens much more frequently than it ought to with sports betting, but it's still a significant minority of betters.
Whales, high-rollers, and addicts are different albeit overlapping categories.
The biggest revenue driver at most (all?) US casinos are slots. Someone mindlessly playing slots for hours is likely to be an addict, but unlikely to be a high-roller. There are a lot of retirees squandering their Social Security for every heir living out an Ocean's Eleven fantasy.
That might be true of some places, but it would depend on the casino. Probably the larger and fancier a casino is, the higher proportion of its money comes from people who can afford to lose it. Huge casinos might try to pull in high rollers, but a suburban pub with some pokies is probably getting a higher proportion of its profit off a larger number of lower-income people getting into deeper hardship.
And I think online sports gambling is probably closer to the suburban model. Large numbers of capped-size bets are much better for an operator - they can adjust the odds in real time to keep their variance low, and they can have an information advantage over most bettors that comes from scale. And on the flipside, it’s hard to provide a luxury experience, so it’s hard to cater to high rollers.
If you're going to bet on sports, the organizations organized as prediction markets are probably less predatory than the online casinos that kick you off if they think you're good enough to make money on it.
I don't think this is so straightforward for sports betting.( I'm much more familiar with poker, but I think the principles are basically the same, though I invite corrections.)
Sports books can update their lines based on what the crowd is betting: they adjust the lines so that they're guaranteed to make money regardless of what happens in the game. What a skilled bettor does is essentially take the money from other people and pay a tax to the casino. (The tax isn't literal, it's the vig-- the percent left over that the house would make if you took both sides of the bet.)
A casino, ideally, wants to ensure that everyone is slowly consistently losing money. And if you're a recreation gambler, that's what you want too. If the site becomes dominated by pros, then the recs just lose their money way too quickly to those pros. I know they're not literally betting against each other, but being a rec and getting any possible (short-term) edge eaten up right away by the pros serves a similar role.
It's a surprise to me that betting on sports is/was illegal in the USA.
It's a common activity in the UK (though I make no comment about whether that's harmless or A Bad Thing). Famously the Queen Mother (Lizzie's mum) loved a flutter on horses.
Is it fair for me to think that the US is quite puritanical in this area, and to put it in the same basket as prohibition?
Betting on horses has been legal in America for quite some time. America is being weird, as usual (and big, as usual. Prohibition, dry counties, still exist).
Is it only okay in britain to bet on American Elections, or can you bet on your own as well?
I'm not sure what's the weird behaviour in this instance. I imagine both countries feel that what they're used to is 'normal'. Gun ownership is another area where there's a huge difference between what we're used to and what the US is used to, and so we talk past each other.
In the UK, betting on elections (including our own) is fine, there's a decent market for political betting here. There was a case a few years ago about an insider betting on the date of the last General Election just before it was announced. It was small beer, and fairly inconsequential, but I think he was found guilty. Other than that, I can't think of any suggestion that the betting market has any effect on the political process. The political betting market is way smaller than the sports betting market, I presume reflecting the respective interest in politics and sport.
Prohibition is folks in small towns, where the men are alcoholics, getting together and saying, "we're sick of our menfolk leaving us destitute!" "Ain't nobody getting no liquor!"
It's a little like guns. If I told you that you had to deal with feral hawgs and rattlesnakes and brown bears that will break into your car if they see a gum wrapper in the backseat... you'd want a gun too (no, this isn't everyone in America, but like I said, America is big).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that owning guns & banning sports betting is wrong, and banning guns & allowing sports betting is right. Just that my gut reaction is that what I didn't grow up with is abnormal, and I need to check myself when I encounter these cultural differences.
But I'll stand by 'prohibition is weird'. This is my considered opinion.
Things like fanduel and draft kings (examples of online sports betting) came before “prediction markets” (it appears).
Seems like their success inspired creating “prediction markets” to enable gambling on other (additional) things.
People had ample opportunity to become “addicted to sports gambling” well before “prediction markets”.
“Prediction markets” are not being called gambling to skirt gambling regulations. It appears they are “commodity markets” [rolls eyes] even when people are predicting sports results. Maybe that’s why you are confused.
(Note that I’m not really arguing that anybody got “addicted to sports gambling”. I’m just arguing that “prediction markets” didn’t have anything to do with it.)
I mean, sports gambling is dumb and unhelpful, but prediction markets were decidedly not created *for* that. The ideas are way older and go much deeper than that.
No, they weren't created for that: they were created to expand the scope of stuff to gamble on beyond (just) that. (Nothing I said suggested that that was their purpose.) But they are used for sports gambling.
(And I was saying they ideas (of sports gambling) are way older.)
The academic work on prediction markets goes back to the 80s and were never about "being able to gamlbe on more stuff, inspired by sports gambling" or whatever. Gambling is not what the current markets were all built on, although somewhat recently a lot of them regrettably did make an unfortunate pivot into sports gambling (where the money turned out to be).
A quirk of human psychology reflected in people's judgments of the truth-conditions of generic statements, and of habitual verbs. If John murdered one person, he's a murderer.
But if John worried one time, he doesn't count as a worrier. If only one percent of mosquitos transmit vitamin B6, it is false that mosquitos transmit vitamin B6. But if one percent of mosquitos transmit the West Nile virus, then mosquitos transmit the West Nile virus.
Generalizations about character of humans follow the same pattern. For the unenlightened, generalizing about racial, religious, or ethnic categories follow the same patterns. The quirk of human psychology is that we make a class of generalizations that have nothing to do with probability updating. If a trait or actions is particularly disgusting to them, the amount of evidence it takes to make the generalization well enough to guide behavior is trivial.
I think it's false to say that in your hypothesis that mosquitoes don't transmit vitamin B six. There are thresholds, which if passed, change the frame. And cheap quick reflection, it may have to do with the reverse ability of the categorization. There's no way to undo being a murderer. However, one can simply stop worrying. It's a week hypothesis, but I like it.
I like your idea, but I'm not sure it holds. MacGregor can't unfuck the sheep, correct. But he also can't really un-raise his kids, and while the bridge can be razed, it took a lot of effort and skill to build it and bridges are considered high in value.
Thanks! I think it does hold, in response to Barry's point. You would still call McGregor a kid razor or a bridge builder. The point is that those have been shadowed by the animal fucking, not that they have somehow been illuminated. So if the question is why does one stand out more than the other. I'm not trying to address that. But I sure will think about it – thanks!
> The quirk of human psychology is that we make a class of generalizations that have nothing to do with probability updating.
No, I think probability updating is what makes something habitual or not. The fact that Michael Phelps is a former Olympic athlete but Ken Jennings is a Jeopardy! contestant full stop isn't just some kind of arbitrary cultural convention about how much we value Jeopardy! vs the Olympics. It's because distinguishing between present and former Olympic athletes gives us more information about the world, allows for a larger or more actionable Bayesian update, than distinguishing between present and former Jeopardy! contestants.
If 1% of mosquitos are such that, if you get bitten by them, you get a modest increase in B6 levels, and 1% of mosquitos are such that if you get bitten by them, you get infected with the West Nile virus, humans are, according data you'll find the semantics literature, disposed to accept the generic sentence "Mosquitos transmit the west nile virus" but reject the sentence "Mosquitos increase your B6 levels." For instance, a doctor may recommend that you avoid or spray for mosquitos because they transmit the west nile virus, but will not recommend getting bit by a mosquito as a way to increase your B6 levels. Bayesian updating would have you assign 1% as the probability that an arbitrary mosquito does both at 1%, perfectly symmetrical. But the response to the information to decidedly asymmetrical. The same is true of habitual statements. Fred is a smoker is not true if he is smoked once in his life. Fred is a sheep-fucker is true if he fucked one sheep in his life.
I understand the impulse to see the "irrational" (when viewing it in a strictly logical/chemical/transport sense) difference in judgment as a "quirk" but I think it's actually probably the salient feature of evolutionarily adaptive learning.
A mosquito that incidentally transmits B6 if of effectively zero consequence to my predictions of future B6 levels and my health. A mosquito that transmits spreadable diseases is of consequence.
I expect that the brain that evolves to see the difference between those two enjoys a huge competitive leap over a brain that evolves to see the two as the same.
So regardless of "truth" value, it doesn't seem "quirky" it seems almost necessary.
Further, this observation extends into MacGregor-land.
The society that learns that MacGregor has a challenge with sheep (even from one incident) is better situations than one that forgets the many one-off-good-deeds he performed. So it's not just a brain that needs to see these things as difference, but our collective brain (society) that does as well.
(This observation is bouyed in importance by the observation that we are also, in general, better off focusing on avoiding rare incidents that are near-fatal-in-danger-importance to us than focus on avoiding rare incidents that are big boons to our fate. Upsides are nice, downsides are fatal.)
See my reply to Ninety-three above. The fact that our asymmetrical reactions to things like B6 versus West Nile, bridge building versus sheep-fucking, might be evolutionarily-advantaged but it makes it no more rational. If you decided to boost your probabilities that an arbitrary mosquito carries the West Nile virus simply on the basis of the fact that West Nile is scary (which we do), you're not responding to the evidence. You are, evolutionarily, being correctly risk-averse. But risk-aversion in responding to the correct probabilities is different from adjusting the probabilities according to risk. The evidence, at least in people's use of the language of habituals and generalizations, that they are adjusting their probabilities and beliefs according to risk, disgust, and moral approbation rather than evidence from frequencies. That's the quirk.
"The fact that our asymmetrical reactions to things like B6 versus West Nile, bridge building versus sheep-fucking, might be evolutionarily-advantaged but it makes it no more rational."
To the extent that surviving and leaving offspring are rational behaviors, this isn't true. Positive factors in life generally really do have less decisive impact on our outcomes than negative factors in life. You live every day, but can only die once.
I mean one point could be made the Anthony Weiner (apart from the fact that he is named wiener) had multiple scandals involving sending his member unsolicited, I mean McGregor says ONE sheep, I'm sure there's be a lot less sympathy for McGregor if he made a habit of sheep worrying. At least the consistency is a part of it.
So part of it has got to be consistentcy and continued violations of the norms. Everyone makes mistakes but if it's becoming a habit then is it judging someone by the worst thing they've ever done, or is it pointing out a bad habit they have?
That is a good point. Part of the problem with cancel culture is it tends to make you an exile out of one violation, which means lots of people now hate the norms.
Oh, yes, you had to be "always on top" of the new thing, lest you be "no longer good" (this is okay when it's "no longer cool" because cool has no repercussions).
And you let Cluster B Crazies in on the whole "victim" thing, and that's a bad idea in the first place.
I think the point is if you're not *that* big a bad guy they'll forgive you having said something liberal 20 years ago, whereas the progressives will cancel you for a 30-year-old racist email.
I don’t have an opinion on this, but I could imagine a reasonable/rational justification of the stance “false negatives are risky enough to outweigh false positives, so it’s better to punish violations over-aggressively than to be too lax and occasionally let a violator pass by accident.” The challenge of course then ends up being an inevitable shift in norms, and knowing how to adapt to that change. Being adept at navigating change is not an equally-distributed trait, no matter the color of the neckties.
To be fair though, sometimes it's the other way around -- one bridge, and thousands of sheep. I think that conventional psychology (i.e. anything without "bio-" or "neuro-" in the name) might be in that category. So this part stays:
> Psychology laid bare the secrets of the brain - it performs computations through a neural network communicating via electrical impulses intermediated by neurotransmitters crossing synaptic gaps
This part is on very thin ice:
> Its concepts have turned into the categories that ordinary people use to interpret the world - extraverts, ingroups, the unconscious, IQ, Pavlovian conditioning
And all the social priming studies are out, and the same goes for oedipal musings and deep thoughts about how the psyche ought to work based on pure aesthetics and all the other non-rigorous nonsense.
I feel the same way about EA: what percentage of it is mosquito nets, and what percentage is saving the lives of shrimp and worrying about trillions of future space-dwelling descendants and literal gods from the machine ? Because I'm all for mosquito nets, buuuut...
When it comes to psychology I guess the thing is also, those are now different subfields. Not many people have as big issues with neuroscience, or even psychiatry (despite some of its horrible past history of electroshock and lobotomy and asylums). The main issues are with what we call psychology now which is invariably the "soft" part of all this, and has most of the concepts you point at.
> I feel the same way about EA: what percentage of it is mosquito nets, and what percentage is saving the lives of shrimp and worrying about trillions of future space-dwelling descendants and literal gods from the machine ? Because I'm all for mosquito nets, buuuut...
I feel like in practice most of it is mosquito nets? Like, in volume of money donated. Discussing and considering those other things philosophically isn't bad - philosophy does need to engage with outrageous ideas too, sometimes things are outrageous and if we don't let the farfetched speculative thinkers consider them, who will? The current AI stuff isn't gods from the machine yet but it still would have sounded farfetched in recent memory. I guess evaluation varies depending on whether you consider Anthropic an EA offspring, but if that's so... I dunno, that doesn't sound a terrible thing to produce as far as AI goes. I wouldn't consider it a failure.
My worry is that if I give Angus MacGregor my hard-earned cash, he might go and build a bridge, or he might go on a sheep-fucking binge. Both of those potential actions are in his portfolio, and I need to get an estimate on what he's more likely to do with my money. And if I see that Angus spends most of his time composing lyrical poems about the beauty of sheep, hangs out around sheep pastures Monday through Saturday, and puts in an honest day's work at the river crossing on Sunday -- then maybe I'll look for another guy to be the lucky recipient of my donation.
I donate monthly to GiveWell and GiveWell is very specific about what programs my money goes to. It's on their website. I can also pick and choose, though I did just go with the "whatever you think is optimal" plan. I don't need to form any particular ideas about a philosophical movement which obviously has many facets and ideas (some of which I think are dumb), as if everyone who ever subscribed to it gets a vote on where my money goes. That's not how it works. The reality of "EA-inspired organisations that do charity" is more focused and granular than the overall view of the movement as a whole.
On one hand EA has (as Sam Altman said it) weird emergent behavior but on the other I also find the discussion of mosquito nets overfocused on a single issue. To save as many lives per dollar as possible without much mention of other possible causes to support (helping people live healthy and meaningful lives). It reminds me of people who want to have a diet consisting of only a single food item and in general of the phrase optimize literally everything.
So instead of effective altruism, I prefer good enough altruism with diverse goals.
> horrible past history of electroshock and lobotomy and asylums
Antonio R. Damasio wrote about Egas Moniz, his neurosurgeon collaborator Almeida Lima, prefrontal leucotomy as originally practised (& the reasons why it was done at the time) vs. frontal lobotomy (which Damasio calls "a butchering affair") in his *Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain* (pp. 58-61).
The EAs are bright enough to do the bridge building in GiveWell and the shrimp fucking in Coefficient Giving. And even the latter seems to have toned down the weird a little, I guess because they want funding from broader sources than one billionaire couple.
That said, I prefer GiveDirectly myself these days. I have doubts about the ability of American nerds with spreadsheets to know the needs of poor Africans better than the poor Africans do (cell B13: percentage of income equivalent to losing one child...). And idk, if the situation were reversed and aliens from a richer society were thinking of giving us charity, I would rather they give us money and trade with us than for their spreadsheet people to decide what's best for us.
"Its concepts have turned into the categories that ordinary people use to interpret the world - extraverts, ingroups, the unconscious, IQ, Pavlovian conditioning"
What part of this is thin to you? All of those concepts were proven useful in explaining the mind, at least until something better replaced them (see "Id," "Super-ego"). Is there something about, say, in-groups, that you find implausible?
Before you answer, consider that psychology, as a social science, cannot and does not seek to achieve the same degree of reliability that, say, physics is able to. There are sound practical reasons for this. (I say this just because I have been in these conversations before, and I want to nip that in the bud.)
Sorry, I was unclear. I was using Freud's triune model of the personality as an example of a thing that was replaced when something better came along.
As for the degree of reliability, it has to do with the kind of data we can get. human behavior is simply orders of magnitude messier than particles in an energy field. It would be nice if people could be reduced to concise laws that have no exceptions, but they can't. Psychology can't be physics.
But that doesn't imply that we have no reliability at all. When we collect data, most often we use one of two methods: direct observation, either in a lab or in a field setting, or we ask for self-reports, either in the form of a questionnaire, or a live interview.
Either way, standard statistical techniques allow us to determine how many subjects we have to include within every experimental condition in order to conclude that the results we find are not a random fluke - to a certain estimate of probability (typically such that the results should have a less than 5% chance of being a random fluke).
In the case of self-reports, statistical techniques can allow us to measure the internal inter-item correlation, the minimum number of items required to allow us once again to estimate the probability that the trait we are measuring is not a random fluke.
None of these techniques are perfect, and all of them have been criticized. In particular, the results of any single study should be considered preliminary until they have been replicated by independent researchers. Never trust a single study!
We have another method, called meta-analysis, which allows us to combine the results of different studies and, once again, estimate how likely their findings are the result of random flukes.
None of this yields certain knowledge, only probability estimates. And none of this even gets to the issues involved in using theoretical models to interpret the results.
Psychology isn't physics, but when it comes to human behavior, it's the best anyone can do.
> but when it comes to human behavior, it's the best anyone can do.
Yes, but is it good enough ? It's fine to say, "human behavior is complicated", but if it's so complicated that your discipline cannot make any verifiable predictions of it, then maybe it shouldn't be a scientific discipline. Or maybe we should stop taking self-report studies about social priming that never seem to replicate, and put our efforts into developing better brain scanning technology.
Psychologists make thousands of verifiable predictions every year, and publish them. Google scholar "psychology research" and peruse some of the articles.
so "highs with more sigma" means your high needs be a few "sigmas" higher than the lows to be offset? As if to say, you can screw a goat if you're a Nobel prize winner or so?
That unironically used to be the way we looked at things--brilliant people were allowed to be eccentric, others not so much.
That changed right about the time the guy who landed the robot on the asteroid got in trouble for his excessively-spicy shirt (that his wife had made for him).
What guy are you talking about? Please be less vague, I just keep asking questions here for what seems to me like "insider content" that I don't know about.
Here's my take: I don't think you are obligated to understand a lot about Anthony Weiner because you don't really affect him that much, and he doesn't really affect you that much. If, say, you were writing a book about him, or maybe prosecuting a case he was involved (unrelated to the sex scandals) then you _would_ be obligated to learn more about him and treat him fairly using that knowledge. If you happened to already know a lot about him due to, say, being a close-but-not-direct relative of him, you'd be obligated to treat him fairly given the knowledge you already have, but not necessarily obligated to learn more. This can extend to both MacGregor and Psychology: Someone who is passing through town and hears about MacGregor can avoid him and carry on, but someone who moved in next door is probably at least obligated to do some basic verification of the tale (and then probably also ignore him, assuming it's veracious). Someone who is an internet commentator or a fan of explainer videos on youtube can hear about psychology replication crises and switch to other types of science videos, someone who is a policymaker or grantmaker in psychology probably is obligated to learn some of the nuance.
This makes sense, except in the aggregate this means 99% of Weiner's conversations with strangers are going to be "hey aren't you the penis guy?". The problems of mass social media.
- make a distinction between knowing vs. judging. The only thing I know about Weiner is that he's sent photos of his wiener. But if I were to vote in an election where he runs, I'd vote based on the policies he supports (or, if I'm too lazy to look those up, his party).
- make a distinction between thinking vs. saying. If I'm just the recipient of people talking about Weiner, I only think of him as the guy who's sent photos of his wiener, fine. But I won't help propagating it (unless the context requires it, e.g. someone asking what this Weiner scandal is about).
Slight tangent, but I think a lot of negative group behaviour is explained by not only the instinct to ostracise, but the instinct that if *I* get ostracized, that is a death sentence (as it might be in a tribe of 30 hunter gatherers making up a noticeable fraction of the human population in 10^5 BC). It explains why when two people hit it off badly in a forum, suddenly they're both trying to persuade all bystanders that the other guy is the epitome of all evil who should be chucked out, and BTW everything they say about me are lies.
Someone ought to start a tradition, in which it's respected (even laudable , compared to the above) to announce that "I personally cannot stand MacGregor and would like everyone to respect my choice never to deal with him again, but I also accept that my opinion of him is due to my individual experiences and I make no call on anyone to share it"
Hopefully a better writer than me can make it catchier, but terseness is usually a consequence of understanding, not its cause. If the concept were well known it would be easy to come up with some compact allusive phrase.
I was really talking about a different scenario; it was a mistake to link it back to MacGregor. Often a falling out between two people isn't immediately motivating to others, and they work to get others emotionally involved, by making it seem like they must pick a side. This is saying, I want you to respect my wish not to deal with X, but I don't need you to pick a side. The normal approach escalates a conflict, this approach resolves it. Implicitly, it says that calls to pick a side are illegitimate and enlists the group in suppressing such calls from the other guy, if they don't go along with the resolution.
"Often a falling out between two people isn't immediately motivating to others, and they work to get others emotionally involved, by making it seem like they must pick a side."
Good point! Yeah, I find that dynamic irritating. ( E.g. Altman and Musk appear to have gotten on each others' nerves, and, rather than pick a side, I wish they would bury the hatchet and just concentrate on building AGI. )
I think that's a thesis in the book "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Max Bennet, in the chapter about language. Gossip promoted altruistic behavior and deterred cheaters.
Of course black and white are the easy cases and the shades of gray (and the black-and-white speckles that look gray) are a harder. And to see with sophistication and maturity, in the moment, under pressure, over and over again; that kind of skill is the work of lifetimes. Waow so deep.
As for your motivating example of psychology, I dunno, cry some more? I believe that engineers know what they’re doing when the rockets fly and the buildings don’t. I believe that directors know what they’re doing when their movies move me to tears. Physicists when they split the atom.
If you understand so much, show us! Solve a problem! You understanding the world does nothing. You improving the world does everything.
Banish misunderstanding. Immunize the children against propaganda. Hell, bring it full circle to this post and solve the problem of empathy.
Do you think that commercial advertising works? Psycho-therapy? Animal training?
But also consider that many of the highest achievements that psychology contributed to were cross-disciplinary in nature. The cross-pollination between psychology and computer science for example. Arguably neither discipline would be where they are today without contributions from the other one?
Let’s say for the sake of argument those examples are truly causal, are they really the best examples anyone can muster? “We joined the war on exploitation on the side of exploration” is not a ringing endorsement of the field. It’s not the sort of thing that will make people overlook past foolishnesses.
And … are those examples truly products of knowledge of psychology? How so?
How would you demonstrate that causal relation to a skeptical audience whose prior might be, say, “there are people who have practiced skills like advertising and animal training and through practice gotten variously good at it”?
Eh, they were just the examples I thought of off the top of my head. Bear in mind that there have been 100's of thousands of research articles on psychological phenomena over the last century or so, summarizing all that is well beyond me.
Your argument seemed to revolve around "Do they know what they are doing? Does it work?" not "Is it socially beneficial?" But - commercial advertising is either manipulating the public, or informing them, depending on who is looking. But "Sell the sizzle, not the steak" definitely works, and is based on research in attitude formation and change, which more or less falls within social psychology. It goes back to the invention of something called the "Thurstone Scale" which was one of the first statistically reliable ways of measuring people's attitudes toward something. See also "Fishbein, M. & Ajzen, Icek. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention and behaviour: An introduction to theory and research." Here is a link to a more recent literature review: https://www.ijnrd.org/papers/IJNRD2507125.pdf
None of this is the result of mere trail and error. Marketing firms have spend millions on this. Marketers rely on this research.
For good or for bad, such research has had a tremendous impact on our world. The mind really does work that way.
"And … are those examples truly products of knowledge of psychology?"
Well, that's partly semantic. What do you consider "psychology?" The American Psychological Association defines it as "The scientific study of the mind and behavior." I would add "of the individual." That definition is so broad it includes anything we know about how individual people think, feel, or behave. Any study that fell within that definition can be considered "psychology." Surely anyone would concede that we know something about these things?
Great distinction to ask about. I think the argument I was making was "do people *feel* that psychology works?", which is not exactly either effectiveness nor global benefit but is in the neighborhood of both.
And as a corollary, I think people give a lot of grace to stuff that they can judge for themselves that it works. I could talk about Information Theory all the live-long day, but (I'm rounding) nobody has heard of it. Does it underpin a chunk of computer science? Sure! Does that help people? Eventually! Certainly people recognize that computers do stuff that they can't, and that some people know more about computers than others. So tech bros got a few years of grace, until the bad started to outweigh the good.
Another positive example is architecture. Architects - forgive me - have a reputation as crazy, genius, or both. But everyone knows - it's even been discussed at length on this blog before - that some buildings look and work better than others, and that the architects had a big hand in that. And (I think relatedly) to the extent that modern buildings look less grand than older buildings, we often suppose it to not be the architects' fault but the customers'.
Even with personal psychological care, the signs of success aren't totally obvious. I know a lot of people who have started seeing a shrink, but I know very few people who stopped, at least for reasons like "the doctor solved my problem". So in that context, is high usership a good sign? I don't know! Hospitals wouldn't consider it success.
So when Scott kvetches that nobody looks past the silliness from the Replication Crisis, my first thought isn't "wow psychology has a sales problem and if only a psychologist who is a great writer could just perfectly enunciate their achievement there would be kumbaya". But rather, I think "wow psychology is actually not visibly improving peoples' lives." After all, if the improvements aren't visible (HIPAA!) and the visible isn't improvements (as you allude to, joining the war on distraction on the side of distraction) then all the work that psychologists put in isn't a plus, but a damning minus.
Hence my recommendation; do some visible good. I've often heard it said that that we're no more mentally or physically advanced than our ancestors 10k years. But what if we were? What if psychology erased the scourges of paranoia and bigotry before infectious disease doctors erase their second or third human-infectious disease? I think in that case the Replication Crisis would be firmly in the rear-view mirror.
Ah, I see now. Yeah, the main issue in comparing psychology to some form of engineering (I include architecture as a form of creative engineering) is that people cannot be "fixed." That just isn't a thing, and hopefully never will be (the degree of social control that implies is truly frightening). For better or worse, people have agency. So psychology will never be computer science either.
"Do some visible good." I could share with you some stories about people who used to be locked up in "Sanitariums" and what conditions were like for them. Or what used to happen to people with behavioral symptoms but no physical cause, before the "talking cure" was a thing. I know people who are only alive today due to therapy.
But it's not just mental problems. The design of control panels. The ability to test visual and auditory disabilities. The ability to measure cognitive disabilities of all kinds. The improvement in educational techniques. Teambuilding and leadership training. Conflict resolution. Independent living facilities. I think I can make the argument that all these things were net social goods - how visible they are may be a matter of opinion.
Psychologists may be a bit similar to lawyers: They ain't much use until you need one.
Right, but “all the improvements we make are invisible” and “adjust the human condition, how about adjust your expectations” just don’t make winning sales slogans. And I’m completely sympathetic to the much harder and more sensitive problem of deciding what success looks like in psychology as opposed to engineering or architecture or even other branches of medicine. But aren’t psychologists also well-equipped to meet that challenge?
When a lot of people think about well-known individuals, they hate them for their glass being half-empty. I'm much more likely to admire them for their glass being half-full.
I've noticed that reading your stuff, actually. Long discussions of people who didn't do a lot of bad stuff and just had kind of interesting lives, like that opera singer or the Donmeh.
People love to find fault, it's the way they are.
FWIW, I'm convinced history will be a lot kinder to you than the turn of the millennium was.
I agree this sometimes happens, but also, I think there's two elements that make it somewhat justifiable (though agree it does sometimes get taken to an unhealthy extreme):
1) a system where "you do enough amazing things, it buys you slack to do some bad things" has obviously bad incentives. And it's not like that isn't the case to an extent - whenever some horrible claim comes up about some famous person that a lot of people are emotionally invested in, even if reasonably substantiated, *some* people will not believe it and defend the person just because, essentially, they don't really want to think their idol is bad. We just don't formalize this;
2) about someone like Weiner (phonetic nominative determinism there...), I think it's a fair assumption that if he'd been more than a just ok, average Congressman, you'd probably have heard it. There's no sense in which it's impossible or even particularly hard to replace him with a politician of similar effectiveness but who *doesn't* send dick picks to women. Even if we assume the sending dick picks was completely untangled from the rest of his character and morals (which seems unlikely, but sometimes people do compartmentalise their own weirdness in extreme ways...), obviously a version of him who doesn't send dick picks is better than the one who does.
I think people sometimes claim they are being unfairly MacGregor’ed for what is actually a pattern of behavior. To give one egregious example, Minnesota governor Tim Walz recently commented on the deportation of a man (despite receiving a pardon from the governor) who was convicted of sexually abusing a child for a period of two years, “I guess the question I would ask is, did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable? Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”
Which may also be a reason why this mode of thinking is so common - literally our entire concept of 'justice' and the law is based on harshly judging and punishing people for a single misdeed, completely ignoring any good they may have done.
Well not completely, even in classical American justice the guilty is given hearings to appeal for leniency on the basis of good deeds they've done in contrast to the misdeed they did.
It only takes one juror to prevent a conviction. If what you are saying had any relevant level of accuracy, we wouldn't have the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world.
Accuracy rates for crimes tend to vary pretty wildly (certain cities are famous for "no murders" where anything that could be even unreasonably deemed a suicide... is.). Sex (and drug) prosecution tend to vary wildly from place to place (some places believe that it's okay to force yourself onto someone else).
62% of federal prison intake is drug crimes, and 44% of state inmates (yes, those are different stats) as well.
(I don't pretend to like all this, just noting what we're looking at). Much of this is mandatory sentencing, as well.
We do judge people differently if that worst day was premeditated, though, ie, if they were a killer (or sheep fucker) in their mind beforehand or the sheep just looked particularly... why did we start with this analogy again?
Well, the damage someone can do in an instant can easily outdo all the rest of their life. It would not be very comforting to be told of someone: "Almost all of the time, their impulse control is fine! Till last night, they hadn't killed anyone else in nearly thirty years!"
You and many others are taking it for granted that fucking a sheep is bad behavior. I'm not sure Scott intended the MadGregor joke as a parable about how we react to a single piece of bad behavior. I take the joke as being about how people react to deviant behavior, especially if it's deviant sexual behavior.
Why's it bad. Is it cruel? I'm not even sure whether a person's having intercourse with a sheep is painful or frightening to the sheep. Are you? I had always imagined that the reason people sometimes used sheep that way is because they're a convenient height and didn't put up much fuss. But even if is painful and frightening to the sheep, it's still mild abuse compared to imprisoning them, raping them with machines to make them pregnant, killing and eating their offspring, shearing them in winter, killing them. Which, in case you are forgetting, is what sheep ranchers do, and what produces the lamb and the wool most of the rest of us enjoy.
So what's the case that having intercourse with a sheep is worse that what other people do to them directly or indirectly? To me it's very clearly much less cruel than the other stuff that's done to sheep, and possibly not even cruel at all, just an event not of much interest to the sheep.
Counter-example: Ted Kennedy went on to have a successful Senate career despite his involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, though it did derail his presidential hopes.
It depends a lot on how antithetical the scandal is to the person's persona. For example, Bill Clinton was mostly fine. Marion Barry was fine. John Edwards was not. It took much more to knock Graham Platner out of the race than it would have many other candidates. Even Weiner managed to get some votes for NYC city council election post scandal and prison.
Likewise, a sexting scandal took down the post-NFL career of beloved quarterback Brett Farve, yet Ben Roethlisberger is mostly fine despite rape allegations in his past.
How do you view the fall of Jimmy Carter, then? Sure, the embassy hostages crisis and the incredible cockup of the failed rescue attempt ("never skimp on helicopters!") all played a role in his defeat, but the sheer bad luck of getting photographed under attack by an enraged bunny-rabbit probably made it a certainty.
Regarding how to be scrupulously fair to MacGregor: I struggle with that too, of course, but for some of this stuff, I have found something that works pretty well, actually. I ask myself whether I have ever done anything that's in the same category, and very often I have.
Take fucking a sheep for instance. Nope, haven't done that, but I have definitely done sexual things that are that weird and off-putting. (And most of the people I've known well enough to hear their embarrassing secrets have too.)
I've also done another of the things Scott names as behavior that lead to his mentally canceling someone: In the days when I frequented Twitter there were occasions when I made an exceptionally mean, insulting response to someone whose tweet had enraged me. I doubt there are many people who haven't lost their temper and their manners occasionally on Twitter. Twitter is the ideal set-up for eliciting behavior like that.
The odd thing is, while I'm mentally MacGregoring someone I'm often completely unaware that I have done something similar myself. I haven't *forgotten* the thing I've done that's in the same category, I'm just in another, very non-instrospective, mode -- fully enthralled by my "ewwww" response to The Other. It feels good! It's fun! It's kind of a letdown to realize that I've done the same kind of shit, and that the ewwww person is just another me. But then I become more fair-minded.
Do you take "sheep fucking" as different if it's part of an initiation ritual (and thus along the lines of "human cannibalism" or other forms of "we're never gonna talk about this, but we all did ReallyBadAwfulThing, and it brings us closer together")?
Self-righteousness is a very, very, very potent drug. Thanks for sharing some (more) techniques on how to fight it!
>Do you take "sheep fucking" as different if it's part of an initiation ritual (and thus along the lines of "human cannibalism" or other forms of "we're never gonna talk about this, but we all did ReallyBadAwfulThing, and it brings us closer together")?
I don't think I understand your question. Sheep fucking as initiation as different from what? And I don't think of it as akin to human cannibalism. To eat someone you have to kill them first, and that's a bad, cruel act. Seems quite possible to me that imposing intercourse on a sheep is not cruel. If sheep objected much to intercourse with a human being they would struggle or kick or run away, which would spoil the experience for the person, and intercourse with sheep would not have become a thing.
Sorry, I will clarify the question: You say that you've done as-weird things as fucking a sheep, in terms of sexuality -- but, if we bring up the "fucking a sheep as an initiation ritual" does that change your desire to give clemency to the other person, on the grounds that "I've never wanted buddies that badly."
I don't think you can make a convincing case that the sheep is deriving pleasure from sex (pretty sure there's a fine case for human females and bonobo females, but for other females? It's more along the lines of an "unpleasant chore" -- to downright painful, in the case of felines).
A dog down the street fucked a deer (that was trapped in his yard), and I can't think that the deer had a happy time of that (strange carnivorous beast on your back...). I don't think any prey-beast would be particularly happy, absent the normal social cues, for a human doing something like that either. Given how many males enjoy the experience of a struggling human, I don't think it would actually spoil the experience for all men (and I do genuinely believe that most people who try to fuck a sheep are "doing it for a lark" and not "sheep afficianados").
This is very different from Mr. Peanutbutter and Rusty Cage (dogs are very fond of peanutbutter, and will lick it off, basically anything).
<Sorry, I will clarify the question: You say that you've done as-weird things as fucking a sheep, in terms of sexuality -- but, if we bring up the "fucking a sheep as an initiation ritual" does that change your desire to give clemency to the other person, on the grounds that "I've never wanted buddies that badly."
So I think your question is whether I feel a bond with someone who fucked a sheep because that's genuinely hot to them, but don't feel the same about someone who does it as part of a frat initiation. Well, regarding someone who has sex with a sheep as part of a frat initiation I can't find in my own life experience such an extreme example of doing something I don't truly want to do just to be part of the crowd, so the approach of identifying my own version of the ewww behavior doesn't help as much. But of course I have done less extreme versions of the same thing. When I was in my 20's I can remember pretending to admire various art flicks that others were impressed by, but that I found boring and confusing. And if I step back and examine my life for examples of being overly concerned with appealing to the in-group I can find lots of examples. So the approach is still helpful, but I have to work at it more.
I think it's almost always a mistake to mentally cancel someone. My goal in using this approach is to keep myself from doing that, so I think it's legit to keep working with my mind, trying things, trying to get past the illusion that the person is nothing but the-creep-who-did-X, where X is foreign to me, ewww. Disapproving of them, even thinking they should go to jail, is another matter. That's OK. That's not the same thing as mentally canceling them.
I bet what's so memorable to Scott's mind is also that anthony WEINER can't stop sending penis pics to sometimes unwilling recipients. Scott's probably somewhat forgiving, given his clinical experience, of the actual behavior - I assume this is a common neural fault in the DSM somewhere, of strong urges to show your genitals. Don't primates engage in behavior like this?
It's a kink. Hardly anyone has a great track record with resisting a chance for kink satisfaction. But some unlucky people have kinks that that you can't satisfy without risking social censure.
If I pointed out that the vast majority of us have sexual urges that we almost constantly resist, I assume you'd say well then that's not a true kink? (Is McGregor really a Scotsman?)
> If I pointed out that the vast majority of us have sexual urges that we almost constantly resist, I assume you'd say well then that's not a true kink?
Really? Do we know how many pedophiles who totally avoid contact with children and never offend exist? They're in hiding, obviously. Most of the common BDSM kinks probably existed at higher frequencies in the population than we assumed before Fifty Shades of Grey became a runaway hit.
Heck, drop it from the kink level, monks and nuns existed, and they didn't *all* break their vows.
I think whether this is reasonable depends on just what's being discussed. If somebody's committed murder, for instance, yeah, that's going to be a huge deal. Murder is extremely bad, and also pretty rare. So if someone's done it even a single time, that's pretty informative about them, and tells you that you have real especial need to beware of them.
By contrast, lying is much less bad than murder (usually, anyway), and its base rate is higher. So if you commit one murder you're a murderer, but telling one lie doesn't make you a liar (unless it was a particularly significant lie). Whether one instance of an act is enough to label a person for it depends on how significant that act is and also on how informative that act is. The purpose of such labels is to inform action; you label someone at the point where additional action or additional wariness is justified by the information you have.
I was originally going to have a third paragraph here applying this to the cancel culture case you discuss and breaking down what was going on there, but ultimately it ended up kind of complicated (and not all of it ended up fitting into this framework after all) so I decided to just omit it, you can try to apply it (and see where it does and doesn't fit) yourself. :P
If McGregor had murdered someone, the joke would work much less well (I think?). So the McGregor problem is not at heart about norm violation, and cancel culture is not actually a McGregor problem but a problem of bad norms. But effective altruism and the castle, that seems to be a proper McGregor case, only the attention-grabbing embarrassing thing gets remembered. Meanwhile, when we look at psychology where this started, there‘s the confounding issue (as other commenters have noted) of which level or entity exactly we‘re looking at; it‘s like a family had built lots of bridges but also had a murderer in their ranks.
>So if you commit one murder you're a murderer, but telling one lie doesn't make you a liar
I struggle to parse this. A murderer is someone who has committed at least one murder. But a liar isn't someone who has told at least one lie? You have to habitually tell lies before you're considered a liar? If so, why not reserve the term "murderer" for people who habitually murder people?
Lies are easy, and everyone lies sometimes (we call them white lies).
Murder is "well beyond the pale" and a person (say, McAfee) who shoots a guy because the other schmuck shot his dog? He might shoot you too for something equally as stupid.
These kind of issues came up in reviewing the Christopher Nolan movie "Oppenheimer."
For example, in 1926 the young physicist may well have poisoned his tutor's apple. That's pretty wild, but most people who think about Oppenheimer don't think of him as Attempted Murderer Oppenheimer. There's just so much else about Oppenheimer of interest that thinking about him as primarily an attempted murderer seems out of proportion and distracting. Nolan, for instance, includes the poisoned apple episode but mostly zips past it.
What about Oppenheimer being a Communist fellow traveler (or whatever you feel is the best description of his dalliance with Stalinism)? That takes up a lot of time in the movie. I wrote in my 2023 review "Thin Man:"
Oppenheimer had a long track record of misjudging Stalin’s character, so it made sense to phase him out of influence under the Eisenhower administration. On the other hand, the show trial Strauss orchestrated was petty and vindictive. Rabi, who is portrayed in Oppenheimer by David Krumholtz as the most street-wise of the physicists, testified:
“…he is a consultant, and if you don’t want to consult the guy, you don’t consult him, period. Why you have to then proceed to suspend clearance…he is only there when called, and that is all there was to it. So it didn’t seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding at all against a man who had accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished.”
... Great movie directors like Nolan can never be fully woke because, like Oppenheimer, they believe, most of all, in talent.
In contrast, the woke want to cancel the talented.
For example, consider the recent cancellation of the physicist who hired Oppenheimer to teach at Caltech, 1923 Nobel Laureate Ernest Millikan. ...
By the time of Millikan’s retirement in 1945 after two dozen years as its leader, Caltech was one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. And thus many other educational institutions were named after Millikan. For example, I learned to type in summer school at Millikan Junior High School in Sherman Oaks, Calif.
While Oppenheimer had been a Stalinist in the 1930s, Millikan had been a eugenicist in the 1920s. So, during the recent Racial Reckoning mania, Millikan was canceled, having his name removed from three buildings at Caltech. And Millikan M.S. has been renamed after Louis Armstrong. Granted, the trumpeter was a great guy, but having been born in New Orleans and lived in Queens, he didn’t have much to do with education or Southern California.
I try to hold glass-half-full opinions of scientists like Oppenheimer and Millikan and admire them for their historic accomplishments rather than cancel them for their mundane political opinions.
I'd be curious as to which of Millikan's opinions on eugenics were either scientifically incorrect or unusually coercive by the general standards of medical ethics at the time (far more lives were destroyed by lobotomisation, electroshock or heroin prescriptions at the time but nobody has used this to cancel neuroscience.)
I think the most prominent failure of psychology and the social sciences isn't so much non-replicable results as the failure to conduct particular forms of research at all. No-one has attempted to follow up on the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study or Dan Friedman's work on newborn behaviour for upwards of forty years now. As Charles Murray was fond of remarking, there have been literally thousands of studies on the topic of self-esteem, but for about half a century most social science research made no attempt to control for genetics and only a handful of scientists were willing to look seriously at racial IQ diffs. That was- and mostly still is- a totally unacceptable dereliction of duty.
Quite a number of the favorite ideas of early 20th Century eugenicists turned out scientifically mistaken. For example, they tended to have a peculiar horror of "miscegenation," assuming that the offspring of racially disparate parents would turn out worse than the average of the parents would predict.
That effect _might_ exist to a tiny extent.
But the bigger menace to the health of offspring is usually the opposite problem of in-breeding.
Interestingly, eugenicists also had played a major role in promoting Americans' fear of in-breeding via cousin marriage, which has proven scientifically valid.
British eugenicists, in contrast, were useless on the problems of cousin marriage because many of their leaders were descendants of Charles Darwin and his first cousin wife Emma Wedgwood, at least those of their descendants who hadn't died young of weird birth defects.
Oppenheimer's Stalinism was a bad idea, while Millikan's Galtonism was a half-baked idea.
But both physicists were great scientists and organizers, worthy of admiration.
It's still not clear to me that early-20th-century eugenics was especially half-baked compared to any other contemporary field of scientific research. The existence of plate tectonics or separate galaxies weren't acknowledged facts at the time, the atomic nucleus was only discovered in 1911, and the miasma theory of disease was only dethroned in the 1880s. Plus, again, lobotomies.
If 'the science' refines itself as time moves forward, the corollary is that science is more mistaken as you go back in time. That's not an indication that the relevant researchers were unusually jaundiced or error-prone by comparison with other fields of research.
The more common modern-day argument is that racial/ethnic interbreeding could lead to hybrid vigour, and there's a plausible argument for that, although it also leads to problems with organ donations. American eugenics in particular seemed overly fixated on simplified mendelian models of inheritance. But the broader contentions of the eugenics movement- that genes exerted a strong influence on social outcomes and civilisational development and that these endowments varied at the racial, ethnic and class level- were overwhelmingly more correct than the default modern view on these issues.
Galton and Fisher were geniuses, Pearson not so much, Spearman, Terman, and a few others, possibly.
Obviously, from a glass half-full perspective, the eugenicists should be heroes -- they largely invented statistics -- but they tend to be viewed as villians from the glass half-empty perspective.
> The more common modern-day argument is that racial/ethnic interbreeding could lead to hybrid vigour, and there's a plausible argument for that, although it also leads to problems with organ donations.
A biology textbook will cover "inbreeding depression" (genetic defects that get expressed when you receive the same defective copy twice by different inheritance paths) and "outbreeding depression" (genetic defects that get expressed when you fail to get two copies of something that one half of your ancestry needs).
If you were to mate with an ostrich, the resulting organism would have outbreeding depression so severe that, of course, it would be nonviable. Mules are commonly considered an example of "hybrid vigor" for their desirable traits, but they're also an example of severe outbreeding depression since they're sterile. These are not exclusive categories, and worrying about outbreeding depression is not a mistake.
>Interestingly, eugenicists also had played a major role in promoting Americans' fear of in-breeding via cousin marriage, which has proven scientifically valid.
Valid, but quite minor unless pursued systematically over generations. First cousins' kids only have about double the rate of birth defects of unrelated parents'. Two Tay-Sachs carriers, or anyone with a Huntington's patient, have much-higher risks. The American hysteria over it is significantly excessive, particularly since there's no actual generational dysgenic effect (the offspring of the most inbred person in the world with new blood is not inbred at all).
Things get considerably worse for closer relatives, though.
I don't think it needs to be "systematic". If there's a higher rate of cousin marriages, then there will also tend to be a higher rate of sequential cousin marriages... unless there is a "system" to make the second generation less likely to marry cousins than the preceding generation.
The coefficient of inbreeding only skyrockets to absurd values if most marriages in a family are endogamous, which usually means the family's doing it deliberately. Two sequential first-cousin marriages (kid of cousins, one of whom is a kid of cousins) has coefficient of inbreeding 0.0781, worse than the 0.0625 of a single first-cousin marriage, but not by that much; first-cousin marriages more widely spaced have lesser effects (e.g. kid of cousins, whose grandparents in common were also cousins, has coefficient of inbreeding 0.0703).
It took centuries of zero new blood to get Charles II of Spain; cousin marriages every now and then aren't going to do that.
For pursuing it deliberately, sure. For permitting it, well, your basic "banning particular people from marrying each other tends to worsen the average goodness of marriages" libertarian argument as with why we let people choose their partners at all (though not at full force).
It's also an overstatement, I think: I once had to look up the dangers of cousin marriages for a story I was writing, and the figure I ended up with (I think from Japan, which allows first-cousin marriages) was that the risk of autosomal recessive genetic disorders (that is, the kind that a child can get from having two copies of a bad gene from healthy parents who each have a single copy of a bad gene) was 3% for unrelated parents versus 4% to 6% for first cousins.
That's still an unpleasantly large increase in risk that is worth habitually avoiding, but even if you're optimising for the wellbeing of the children and don't care at all about the happiness of the parents, I think you can make a reasonable case that if you have to choose between your cousin and an alcoholic, you should choose to marry your cousin. (Fortunately, easy travel, old-age pensions, health insurance and unemployment insurance make having kids less of a matter of personal survival than it was for most of our ancestors since the Neolithic Revolution.)
When it comes to marriages of historical royalty, the issue gets thornier, since you've got much more danger of cousin marriage becoming habitual over generations, but you've also got marriage alliances at stake that could prevent wars in which lots of other people's children would die. Again, it seems best to habitually avoid cousin marriages but to be willing to consider exceptions where the benefit outweighs the cost of inbreeding.
My understanding is that a study in Iceland found that the "sweet spot" is third-cousin marriage, as this balances inbreeding against potential problems from the mother and fetus having different blood types.
I have watched the films 5 times and read lots about him, is there any evidence he flirted with Stalinism as opposed to having some Stalinist friends, relatives and lovers. In the context where most western intellectuals were actually Stalinists. Ironically the guy he tried to poison was later a far left anti-nuclear activist under constant MI5 surveillance.
Was Oppenheimer an anti-Stalinist when he was in charge of Los Alamos and did a poor job at keeping Stalin's spies out? So far, there are four announced Stalinist spies at Los Alamos -- Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass (tied in with the Rosenbergs), teen prodigy Ted Hall (only admitted in 1995), Oscar Seborer (not revealed until 2019).
Before 1934, Stalin was extremely picky about who his friends were. But in 1934 Stalin declared the much more ecumenical Popular Front.
Still, from a glass half-full standpoint, Oppenheimer had amazing accomplishments that override the poison apple and Stalinist spy problems.
I don't think we have any reason to think he was anything but a centre-left guy mixing in academic circles.
By far his strongest personal connection with totalitarian regimes was that his wife's first cousin (once removed) was Wilhelm Keitel head of the Wehrmacht, but that is never mentioned as a security threat.
The full text of them I believe is only available at the Bancroft Library of UCLA. He was denouncing FDR as a reactionary at that time, consistent with the Communist Party line during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
If Stalin is your enemy which physicist are you going to hire for your top secret project, the physicist who has a strange proclivity for associating with Stalinists or the one who doesn't?
I think all intellectuals in the 1930s had proclivities for associating with Stalinists. I don't think he was noticeabley more Communist linked than most of the alternatives.
Lots of physics geniuses were anti-Stalinists, such as von Neumann and Teller.
But note that conservative hero von Neumann and Communist spy Klaus Fuchs filed a patent together in 1946.
Oppenheimer likely did the best he could to achieve the first order priority of building an A bomb to use on the Axis. He didn't do so good at the second order priority of keeping it away from the Soviets. Maybe Teller would have done a better job on priority #2, but would have von Neumann?
It was easy to find Hungarian anti-communists because of Bela Kun, but I don't think the head of the Manhattan project could be someone who was naturalised in the last 5 years. Among American scientists I don't think there were many strong anti-communists
Maybe, but there isn't exactly solid evidence, a journalist says a contact once said that Oppenheimer wrote that pamphlet. No one has seen the pamphlet, it was never printed and was going to be published anonymously. I need better evidence.
Not "once". Haakon Chevalier & Philip Morrison both reported Oppenheimer's pamphlets. David Hawkins & Gordon Griffiths both reported him as a CPUSA member at that time. The FBI recorded CPUSA officials referring to both Robert & his brother as party members. KGB archives also refer to him as someone whose membership had to be kept secret (though after the war they would refer to him as a reactionary to be discredited).
Oppenheimer's most important contribution to science is the Born-Oppenheimer approximation that basically allows us to write chemical structures (think the skeletons of molecules you would draw in chemistry classes). But do people know him as Oppenheimer The Chemical Structure Guy?
There's a joke in the film where he says people will remember that day for him publishing the first paper on black holes, only for that to be overshadowed by the invasion of Poland.
I think of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation more as a separation of vibrational and electronic degrees of freedom than as localizing chemical bonds (though the approximation is more general, and is useful whenever two degrees of freedom have widely separated frequencies/time scales/energies). I'd put localization of bonds more as an approximation _within_ the molecular orbital theory of the electronic structure.
Also, the Oppenheimer-Snyder model of black hole formation deserves more air time for the time-dependent GTR theory of how the event horizon _forms._
I meant the localization of nuclei as point (or point-like) particles, not the localization of chemical bonds. So not the sticks but the balls in the balls-and-sticks representation.
But of course there are layers, the BO approximation does not consider the nuclei localized or even classical, both nuclei and electrons can still be described by their own time-dependent Schrodinger equation within the BO approximation. Just as you said, it's about the separation of scales that allows us to focus on nuclei and electrons separately.
The clamped nuclei approximation that actually localizes the nuclei appears a few steps down the line of approximations (even though in chemical literature authors often write that they assume the Born-Oppenheimer approximation when they actually mean clamped nuclei).
But that's why I wrote "basically", I didn't want to go into the details.
Many Thanks! Yup, there are quite a few layers in the approximation scheme. And then sometimes partial corrections to the approximations (e.g. reintroducing vibronic coupling).
Rabi's quote is explains why I didn't care that much about the security clearance hearing in the movie (Oppenheimer himself derided a stage-play about that as trying to make a farce into a tragedy), and didn't care about Strauss' confirmation hearing.
Nolan could have made it a two hour movie ending July 16, 1945.
Still, it was nice to see a lot of Robert Downey Jr., who doesn't perform that often anymore. And Casey Affleck was amazing when he pops up briefly toward the end.
"Oppenheimer" is a very good movie, considerably better than "The Odyssey," which is pretty good, but disappointing after what Nolan achieved with "Oppenheimer."
To switch from Robert J. Oppenheimer to Christopher Nolan, Matt Walsh screaming about Nolan being woke for "The Odyssey's" admittedly silly racially random casting (if the Korean crewman walked 8,000 miles to Ithaca, shouldn't we hear a little about his adventures along the way?) is a flagrant example of complaining about a part empty glass.
With Nolan, the conservatism glass is at minimum half full (e.g., "The Dark Knight Returns" goes out of its way to remind us the Jacobins were bad).
I suppose it's just natural for bad things to seem more salient than good things. In ancient times there was probably a forest with lots of nice caves to take shelter in, animals to hunt, berries to eat, fresh streams to drink from, and anything else a caveman could want, but there was also a hungry bear who lived there, so they called it Bear Forest and stayed away from it.
It's unfortunate but probably inevitable that the same pattern gets applied to human beings. The only solution that comes to mind is to have some kind of commonly agreed truce day, like the christmas truces in world war one, or maybe some kind of designated demilitarized zone. I don't think I will ever stop saying stuff that pisses people off, and I don't think I will ever stop holding grudges when other people say things that piss me off, but it would be nice to get to take a break sometimes.
You're missing the larger folk lesson. There is no chance MacGregor's hecklers and peers wouldn't also have checked out their livestock, some may have done the deed themselves too but weren't caught. When our MacGregors get caught, our psychologists do bad, our EAs buy castles, do we call ourselves Humanity the Sheep Lovers, though we're all sinners with the same propensity? The correct strategy is to vilify the one to absolve the many. Psychology must learn to properly scapegoat and sacrifice their people, that's the only way out
Also on the topic of nominative determinism, Conor MacGregor may have had a wonderful sports career, but is he known as MacGregor the sportsman? But he beats up one guy in a bar! And then another. And rapes at least one person. And posts a lot of false and hateful anti-immigrant stuff. And threatens to run for president of Ireland but either chickens out or forgets in a Trump kind of way.
When I saw the headline for a second I wondered if it was about Conor McGregor metaphorically building bridges between communities, but then I remembered his name is spelt without an "a".
It genuinely appals me how he is often literally the only thing non-Irish people know about Ireland. Not U2, not the Cranberries, not Yeats, not Joyce, not even leprechauns and Guinness – just McGregor. Of all the people to be the ambassador for our nation, we had to end up with a short-tempered violent coke-addled rapist.
This seems much worse due to the Internet, which is both a permanent ledger and a method of global context collapse. MacGregor could in theory skip town to start anew elsewhere, the blogger not so much
Induction training for a past job included a large laundry list of MacGregors, with the refrain: before you do the thing, take a moment to ask yourself - “is this going to land me in a newspaper headline?”
Landing in a newspaper headline for a MacGregor action is a strong data point about one’s ability to navigate society, predict longterm effects, and control impulses. People form impressions accordingly.
Forgiving someone for doing a thing is not the same as trusting them not to do the thing again. If one’s worst day results in headlines, is it really so unreasonable to not want a recurrence?
Two things being conflated here. Cancel Culture in its objectionable form isn't about cancelling people for things they actually do wrong, it's about cancelling people for having political opinions.
You are making a distinction, but those categories overlap; e.g. calling for genocide is a political opinion and also doing wrong.
One person’s “I’m just expressing an opinion in public, stop punishing me for that” is another person’s “you literally just said out loud to everyone you want to diddle sheep, of course I’m going to call you a sheepdiddler”
I would go a bit more granular. Cancel culture is about wanting to destroy someone for their political opinions, so you dig up things they've done wrong to use as ammunition. But the "things they've done wrong" are often things you'd be more willing to forgive if they were committed by a member of your in-group.
e.g. MacGregor voted Leave, so we're going to loudly tout his sheep-shagging as evidence for why he is not welcome in our community. Stewart (who voted Remain) is still welcome to attend dinner parties (despite having interfered with more than his fair share of ruminants in the past).
Is it? "This guy committed rape a decade or two ago therefore he should be banned from comedy/TV/card games" are all real cases of cancelling people for things they actually did wrong, yet one can reasonably object that barring someone from a career or a hobby is an insane way to respond.
If we believe Polanski's story (which the evidence points towards without proving conclusively) he got an extremely generous plea bargain, then the judge tried to renege, so yes, treated wrong in both directions.
The easy retort to people who insist only on looking at the "one bad 'un" used to be "Sturgeon's Law", but sadly not too many remember that any more. It's worth quoting:
"...I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of s f is crud.
The Revelation:
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.
Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field."
True, but that's assuming the conclusion that 10% of psychology is good. There are fields in which literally 100% of everything they have produced is bunk (astrology, homeopathy etc.). Critics of psychology generally argue that it's more like astrology than it is like other fields which contain genuine insights but also a lot of rubbish.
If a science fiction novel is bad, the author makes no money and the book doesn't sell.
If a psychology paper is bad, at 'best' a bunch of grant money got burned on nothing, at worst it becomes popular anyways and influences society in negative ways for years or generations.
I think that's arguable. Your objection would work better on normative grounds: scientists have an obligation to be honest, and novelists do not. But the claim that bad psychology is more influential than bad science fiction must deal with the question of base rates. Sure, if you read a psychology paper you're more likely to act on it than a novel. But a darn sight more people read novels.
Two examples: neither are dispositive, but I think they are relevant: one, L Ron Hubbard.
The other, perhaps more seriously, is that hard SF in the Asimovian tradition - which ironically tried the hardest to be true to actual science - left us with a rubbish intuition for what AI would actually be like, which doesn't serve very well at the present moment. Asmiovian AI is drawn as logical, uncreative, rule-bound, and having difficulty with lies and ambiguity. None of which are reflective of what we got.
I've mostly gone the opinionless zombie route, myself.
Of course I wouldn't put it like that, I have plenty of opinions. But I have a very strong instinct to see both sides of any story, often stronger than socially acceptable. When someone tells me about how they broke up with their stupid ex, I've learned to bite my tongue on the ex's point of view (I did not always know to do this 🫣). And I spent weeks withholding judgement when the Ukraine war started so I could do research on the history, and after that my biggest confusion was why there *wasn't* a stronger case for the Russian narrative.
I lean in this direction, too; it's not just you. I do need to restrain my urge to "well, aktshually" in conversations sometimes. I try to do it very politely when I do it, but I'm also just a fallible human, and sometimes I piss people off.
I've tried to learn to pay attention to the dichotomy where people just want to vent (and their words don't mean much and are often hyperbole anyway) or if they are looking for advice / conversation. But I don't always get it right.
America is full of propaganda, and my Ukrainian Relatives ask "why did we move to America? The propaganda is worse here!"
(So, yes, when you wonder why Russian Propaganda Outlets got banned off Youtube, it's because America was up to serious shenanigans, and they were afraid you'd actually believe what the Russians know are generally liars).
I'm struck by two immediate ideas that I think are relevant to why you would want to have this type of focus. I don't think they're enough to justify it in all/most cases, but I think they contribute to why it's a heuristic that becomes common.
The first is something that I'm pretty sure has a precise technical name, but I can't remember what it is - something like opportunity costs or value-above-replacement or etc.
Plenty of men in the village have raised 5 children, and there are probably a good handful of masons. If Macgregor hadn't been born, very likely someone else would have married his wife and raised 5 kids with her, very likely someone else would have trained for the open slot for a mason and built his part of the bridge. But also a good chance no one would have fucked that goat. That's the part that's unique (or at least uncommon) about Macgregor. It's fair to say that the goat has a legitimate argument that Macgregor is a net negative influence on the world, compared to his likely replacement if he didn't exist.
Similar for Weiner, as you say it's hard to remember him as anything other than a generic Congressman, with a pretty bad sex scandal that caused a lot of problems. Whatever good he did in Congress, the generic Democrat who would have gotten elected if he never existed probably would have done about as much good in expectation, and not had a huge destructive sex scandal.
I personally don't think this applies to your blog, as I think it has value way way above replacement level. On the other hand, I'm a fan whose been following your writing for ?a decade?? and pays actual money for occasional hidden posts, so I don't have the median perspective on that. Maybe to an NY Times writer, your blog is of similar value to the next thought-leader in your sector, except they don't throw jabs at feminism/woke and they crack down harder on HBD talk in their comment section.
Of course, this is an uncomfortable standard to apply to the value of people in general - do you get credit for every good thing you do, or only for everything you do that is better than what an average person in your circumstances could be expected to do? The former standard is certainly more affirming and comfortable, and perhaps more motivating to get people to do good things. But the latter standard seems diagnostically useful for making sure we're actually holding people to high standards, not just handing out participation trophies for doing the bare minimum.
The other avenue I see towards motivating these standards is something something something about 'exposing the lie tells you more about someone than observing the PR statement'.
Like, Macgregor wants us to look at his greatest accomplishments in bridge building and parenting, Weiner wants us to look at his greatest legislative accomplishments, you want us to look at your best articles and most popular stances. Those things aren't *irrelevant*, but they are *cherrypicked* as the thing they want us to look at and judge them on.
We live in a world where we experience infinite suffering because our telepathy isn't good enough to let us truly know another person even when we are close to them, let alone a public figure we will never meet and are only reading motivated accounts about. Therefore, we always have weak priors about what people are 'really' like, how much we can trust them, how much power/clout/respect we should grant them, etc.
PR statements about 'these are the good things I want you to judge me on' get a ton of skepticism because they are clearly motivated, easy to manufacture, and hard to verify (that is, hard to verify that they tell you who the person really is and how well you should trust them).
On the other hand, when you catch someone out on a secret they were trying to hide, or catch them in some public misstep which they are embarrassed about and want to cover up or minimize or disassociate themselves from, it often feels like this is much more 'real' and reliable information about their 'true' character. Anyone can make up a public face that looks good whether they are actually good or not, but only bad people will have a real true verifiable bad thing you can observe (at least in theory).
Of course, those bad things can also be adversarially chosen and exaggerated/misrepresented by opponents, which is where this heuristic starts to break down if you're not incredibly careful about verifying everything you hear. But in a world where every politician is going to have legislative accomplishments they can point to because the entire party votes as a block, but we strongly suspect but can't prove that some politicians are corrupt and using their power to hurt the common welfare for personal gain, catching a politician taking one small bribe on something that barely matters *is* good evidence that you should suspect them of doing much worse and not being caught at it. You *should* care about that more than all their legislative accomplishments, even if those are objectively a bigger utilitarian deal than this one thing you caught them at.
I had a similar thought to your first point. If MacGregor is the only guy in town who knows how to build a bridge, then turning a blind eye to a certain amount of sheep buggery is perhaps a worthwhile tradeoff to keep getting bridges. In reality, though, neither bridge building nor child raising skills are *that* unusual or irreplaceable, and lots of people build bridges and raise children without fucking any sheep at all. Likewise, there are probably millions of Americans qualified to be Senators, why should we put up with dick pic guy?
In a lot of the cases Scott cites, the answer to "why focus on the bad things when the same people do good things?" is "Because having the good things without the bad things is totally an option, actually."
>Of course, this is an uncomfortable standard to apply to the value of people in general - do you get credit for every good thing you do, or only for everything you do that is better than what an average person in your circumstances could be expected to do?
The average person should look at the latter standard and say: "The only winning move here is not to play!" Don't endorse it. Don't apply it. Give it no aid.
>we're actually holding people to high standards, not just handing out participation trophies for doing the bare minimum.
That is one hell of a disparagement of the average person living their life. The average life involves a hell of a lot of effort. Calling it "the bare minimum" is reprehensible.
Sure we laugh about McGregor sheep fucking, the truth is a great many likeable people get away with heinous shit for a long long time e.g Weinstein, the British tv pedo guy, ice cream man etc.
So I guess you can get away with not being called a sheep fucker as long you have enough social capital or charisma to rise above it. And we have evolved. I mean we don't really go around calling politician adulterers and fornicators and we can pretty sure that they all that. We don't call Dr Martin Luther king an adulterer...
Evil shit is banal. Garden variety spousal infidelity is boring , sheep fucking well that's interesting.
The Weiner case seems pretty simple: If not for the pics, you would not know *anything* about that guy, so it seems fair to summarize his contribution towards your perception down to "cannot stop sending lewd images" because that's what it is module rounding errors.
I don't know of (m)any cases where this dynamic is a useful map of the argument that both sides converge on rather than just the defense's presentation of the situation. The prosecution is very likely to reject it, either asserting there were many sheep rather than just one, or disputing the value of the bridges.
Like, the argument between capitalists and anti-capitalists isn't over whether the incredible development in the last 200 years justifies a few snags (like, uh, one of several brewing apocalypses). It's over framing and attribution - who is MacGregor here? Was there just one, or are MacGregor the bridge-builder and MacGregor the sheep-fucker different people? Some radicals even go into "are bridges good?" or "is sheep-fucking bad?"
I think the general rule is that we judge people's *talent* by their best actions, and people's *character* by their worst actions.
If you make a few books/pictures/songs/movies that are admired by millions, you will be considered a successful artist, even if all your remaining books/pictures/songs/movies suck. Even one successful piece of art could get you eternal glory under the right circumstances.
If you murder one person each year, no one sane is going to defend you by saying "your honor, during the remaining 364 days in a year he didn't murder anyone, so I think on average he is still a peaceful member of the society". Even one murder could get you a lifetime in prison under the right circumstances.
There is also another rule, that we judge the people we like charitably, and the people we don't like uncharitably. #NotAllIngroup #YesAllOutgroup
I think the actual outcome is a combination of these two rules. It is reasonable to call someone a murderer after they commit one murder, even if it was a decade ago. Is it also reasonable to call someone a racist for one stupid tweet they made thirty years ago? Obviously, if you have other reasons to hate that person or some group they happen to belong to, the answer is yes; otherwise the answer is no. Even one piece of bad art might be enough to destroy an artist's career, if he somehow manages to piss off the important art critics. On the other hand, some people are willing to forgive Stalin even millions of murders, because he brought electricity to nations, or something like that.
So, sometimes the difference in how people are treated for exceptional events is justified, sometimes it is not. It makes sense to care about exceptionally good art, because we can choose to interact with the best and ignore the rest. If makes sense to worry about exceptionally bad behavior, because you cannot be sure whether you become its target one day. But there is also motivation to bend these rules of thumb, if you have already decided that the person is good or bad, and now you are just looking for an excuse to support this judgment.
Would you hire MacGregor to tend your sheep, if he promises not to do it again? Assuming that there is a larger employee pool available, you probably wouldn't risk it. It's not because you deny that he is a multifaceted individual, you just care about employee quality more than an objective moral judgment of a person's entire life.
If Wiener is a uniquely good talented or hardworking politician, then I would still vote for him in spite of scandals. But if there are many other candidates who are just as competent but also have the benefit of not being involved in scandals then I would pick one of them over him. It's rational to choose someone who's 99% perfect over someone merely 98%.
The answer is as simple as it could possibly be: You don't judge a person (or system) by their worst action, you judge them by the worst action they haven't apologized for and fixed or remediated. Psychology, as a field, has done a half decent job of regret and remediation (although I would assert that there are a fair number of victims yet uncompensated) -- exactly what most of the other allegedly canceled simply have not.
To steelman the bad reputation Anthony Weiner currently endures in the popular imagination:
I have a pet peeve with the way people talk about politicians' infidelity scandals. I've often met people saying that a politician's private life is his own business, and has no bearing on his fitness to run a government ministry or indeed a country.
I disagree with this line of reasoning entirely. If a man betrays an explicit oath he made to be faithful to his wife, I think that provides very strong evidence that he is willing to betray much lesser oaths he made to other people, including the people who voted for him. The idea that you can draw a bright line in the sand between how a person comports himself in his private life and in his professional life is not at all persuasive to me.
I agree that someone failing to keep to their marriage vows gives you information about their future propensity to keep to oaths of office or election promises. But I think your framing overstates the importance of the marital infidelity.
There are plenty of people with happy home lives who do bad things in office, and plenty of people with miserable marriages who do good things in office. There's a correlation between being unfaithful to your spouse and, say, taking bribes, but it's not a very strong one, and it's not as strong as it might seem if all you know about Public Figure A is that they were maritally unfaithful, without hearing about the decades of a miserable marriage and an incredibly stressful job that might have been behind that infidelity.
The correlation between being caught being maritally unfaithful and malfeasance in office is presumably even weaker, since getting caught having an affair is partly due to factors other than the adulterer, and whether the news media decide to make a big deal about it is mostly nothing to do with how objectionable the affair was. If a large fraction of politicians have affairs, but my affair-detecting apparatus only catches a tenth of the politicians who have had affairs, I'm not minded to care very much about whether any particular politician got caught, since it doesn't provide me with much information about whether the politician is less faithful than other politicians.
A politician having a scandal is, pretty much by definition, someone with a public track record who is involved in really important stuff that affects millions of people. I don't think it's a good idea to pay too much attention to a noisy signal about someone's possible future failures to keep promises when I can simply look up whether they kept the promises that I care about, or, far more importantly to me, whether they seem to have generally done a good job in office, even if that involved breaking election promises I cared about.
(I object rather more strongly to breaches of oaths of office, since rare breaches of oaths of office do more damage to a more important norm than common failures to keep election promises, which people generally expect politicians to break, though I believe research shows that they mostly keep them. If corruption in office were commoner, I'd care less about whether a politician abuses their office.)
I think the public, both men and women, may actually like the fact that their elected official is behaving like a high status man. Of course your powerful charismatic good-looking witty Senator is banging the hot secretary, if he wasn't you'd wonder if he was a fraud. It's only because he is that kind of person that he went anywhere in life, everyone understands that deep down and its why they deferred authority to him to begin with. Sure there's some Mitt Romneys out there who exemplify all the good power-traits without being philanderers, but if you didn't know he was LDS you'd start with the assumption that he had affairs I think, and in fact it makes him seem more powerful that he probably had ample opportunity but instead is just incredibly disciplined. Whereas the lion's share of ordinary people are faithful primarily because they have limited other opportunities and the benefits don't outweigh the costs.
Getting caught, however, means that somebody else had power over him. He gets publicly embarrassed and has to apologize for things. This lowers his status. We just don't like the getting caught part.
It's not "getting caught" that signals powerlessness, it's that the man couldn't keep his side piece(s) loyal and/or silent. When affairs are consensual and only discovered by a third party, the man usually doesn't lose status with his in-group. c.f. Bill Clinton, Prince Charles.
The issue here is that a) the women receiving the dick pics came forward themselves, signaling that Weiner is a poor judge of character, and b) dick pics are not remotely comparable to secretary-banging in terms of status.
Separately, I think "everybody likes it when men act high-status" might be typical-minding. Under this framing, wives shouldn't reveal their husbands' infidelity because that would lower their husbands' status.
A more defensible assertion would be "people like seeing leaders of their in-group get away with stuff"
Richard Hanania once said that he conquered his shyness with girls through coming to understand his timidity as an evolved trait. This intellectual awareness somehow dissolved the shyness.
Pinker writes that we evolved to remember bad things because the consequences of forgetting bad things can be severe.
I wonder whether approaching the Weiners of the world with Pinker’s understanding would dissolve our prejudices and allow us to consider them more holistically.
The other problem is that once you start creating a long list of sins and excommunicating lots of sinners, the sinners start banding together and becoming more sinful.
As for Weiner: the weiner jokes are fun, but after years of living in feminist environments that totally repressed my sexuality to the point women in relationships asked if I was gay, and media things from Anita Hill to #metoo, I've just decided I don't care about sexual scandals, and will actually vote for any candidate accused of one. (I bought the entire Sandman slipcase! Though I still haven't read it.) If I ever met Weiner I'd probably buy him dinner, though I have to admit the temptation to do it at a fine German restaurant and order a bratwurst might be irresistible.
I do not think this will be a satisfactory solution to most rationalists or effective altruists.
"If I ever met Weiner I'd probably buy him dinner, though I have to admit the temptation to do it at a fine German restaurant and order a bratwurst might be irresistible."
It wasn't just "Guy steps out on his wife". That would be "ugh, he's a cad" but most people would shrug and forget it.
It was that he also hit on a 15 year old girl (which is not age of consent compatible even under Romeo and Juliet laws) which coincidentally blew up his wife and Hillary Clinton due to the emails on the shared laptop he used for the sexting. The one that really made me want to douse him in pitch and shove him into a hen coop were the photos of him (a) texting/sexting another woman WHILE he was at home minding the four year old child of himself and his wife while (b) the kid was lying in bed beside him and (c) we know this because we saw the kid in the photos he sent of him in his underwear (d) SHOWING OFF HIS ERECTION.
"yeah, girl, here's my hard-on for you and by the way here's my extremely minor child beside me at the same time in the same bed, wanna fudge while my wife is out of the house?" is where I step off the train.
I didn't like Sandman. I thought the pacing was a mess, with the few interesting moments stuck between swamps of uninspired filler that at best was mythology pastiche with no conviction of its own, and at worst was utterly unreadable. The plot and worldbuilding was flimsy, leaving little to chew on besides vibes.
I recommend trying an issue or two to see if the aesthetic works for you, and if you don't, know it won't get better.
>media things from Anita Hill to #metoo, I've just decided I don't care about sexual scandals, and will actually vote for any candidate accused of one.
(mostly) Agreed! I've gotten _very_ sick of the sex-negative turn of recent American culture.
Dear Sir, I object in the strongest possible terms to this highly inappropriate comment. I want to make it perfectly clear that Wiener Würstchen are boiled and not fried!
It is a great tragedy that so many of us judge people by their single worst act. My only comment is that IMHO the problem is a lot more important than you suggest, due to a massive unintended consequence.
Often if you want to do something great and impactful, you need to take risks, some of which involve potential reputational damage. If that risk is too great, it discourages people from taking these necessary risks. In fields which forgive and forget failure if it is followed by success, like sports or entrepreneurship, we see tremendous progress. But where the reputational damage cannot be undone, we see stagnation.
The examples you give, MacGregor or Wiener, are not like this. They did bad things unrelated to their good deeds. The criticism they received was unrelated to their good deeds. But consider this one example:
One of the most valuable things we humans can do is to help one group of people to understand and empathise with another group, but it brings so many risks of reputational damage that few of us dare try.
- If you try to get Arabs and Israelis to understand and empathise with each other, you risk being labelled a terrorist, a naive idiot, a Zionist, etc. So instead of dialogue we have accusations and insults and people sticking to their side's script ... and very little progress. But what politician will risk their career to even try?
- There are 60 million + Trump supporters in the US. The administration they support is egregious, abominable, corrupt and just plain evil, doing horrific damage to the US and the world. But those 60 million voters are not evil people. The future of America may depend on liberals understanding and empathising with Trump voters, so we can understand how to bring them and the GOP back from this wanton destruction of all that is good about America. But suggesting in most liberal forums that Trump voters may have legitimate reasons for voting for him just invites attacks and insults. This seems to be particularly true within the Democratic Party. And so the Democrats continue to ignore their concerns, they continue to feel ignored and they vote for Trump. But any Democrat politician who dares try to address Trump-voter concerns will get primaried.
Compare this to areas where we see rapid growth and progress, where we see people and projects reaching their full potential, and you find that these are built on a structure that forgives failures. Baseball stars have 0-for-20 streaks, QB's throw 5 interceptions, Messi missed two penalties in the World Cup, ... or business where most successful entrepreneurs have had failed start-ups and even bankruptcies.
Let us really try to change our attitude to this problem, which affects us and our world, not just the immediate victims.
Forgiveness and trust are separate things. We may invite MacGregor to our dinner parties again, but do we trust him with our sheep?
Do we really think there exists an amount of bending over backwards a Democrat candidate can perform that would cause a significant number of Trump voters to vote for them, with or without alienating the Democrat voter base in the process?
Well, yes, obviously. Two-party elections where both parties frequently win are won by the side that attracts more swing voters. The hypothetical Democrat candidate doesn't have to win over the most committed Trump voter, any more than Trump had to win over the most committed Obama or Clinton voters: all that's needed to win is to get slightly more than half the votes cast to be in your favour, plus or minus a small margin for the net effect of gerrymandering and the Electoral College. Trump won in 2016 and 2024 partly by having a large base of voters who were excited to vote for him and partly because the Democratic candidates weren't as popular with their core voter groups, but also partly because more swing voters voted Republican than Democrat in key states.
Trump's hired democratic political consultants that got Obama elected. Most of the Trump voters I know used to be democrats. Just run a 1990's democrat, and you'd get most of these guys back.
Bonus: you get to "look good" by reducing ICE, while keeping Bill Clinton's immigration policies... LET trump be the bad guy, and take credit for being the good guy!
1. Bending over backwards isn't necessary. You don't have to change your beliefs or core policies. Sometimes just the language matters. Show them that you understand their concerns. Reassure them that you're not going to do the crazy shit Fox News claims you're going to do.
2. The problem includes Democrat voters. They need to accept that right now the single most important thing for everyone is to disenable Trump. A liberal voter who will not help this project with their vote because the Democrats are not going all-in on their pet topic, especially even if they understand this is because they need to appeal to more centrist voters, is a pretty pathetic specimen.
Agreed, that's perhaps the highest wall to climb on the way to utopia. How to make moral progress? "Punish the transgressors harsher", our evolved brain suggests. But what if the very essence of the moral progress is in _not_ punishing harder? How then to tell, whether we're indeed making progress or regressing by diluting what we've achieved with such effort?
There are many tangible measures of progress. As a scientist I feel confident that we can measure progress, and that we can define sensible measures which many people would agree on. But maybe the last couple of years, when we seem to be regressing for the first time in my life, is challenging that confidence ... it is definitely proving that the DOW is not a good measure ... but reduced poverty, fewer children dying, etc would all be a positive part of the measure, while reduced freedom, greater existential risk, etc would bring the score down. There is no obvious way to get one absolute number as it depends on relative priorities.
Suppose it's a while ago and you are not trying to get Arabs and Israelis to understand and emphathise with one another, you're trying to get Nazis and Jews to do so.
Someone accuses you of being pro-Nazi for doing this. Should they?
I would say yes. Demanding that two groups emphathise with one another depends on the object level question of how comparable the two groups are. If the groups are not comparable, and you're doing it anyway, people are *completely justified* in claiming that your equal sides request for empathy is actually taking the side of one of the groups.
There's no dodging the object-level question.
(I would incidentally also say this applies to Arabs vs. Israelis with regard to how it plays out in the real world. People who want 'Arabs' and Israelis to understand each other never want the Arab in question to be some random citizen of Qatar. 'Arab' always means someone who wants Israel to be destroyed.)
I don't agree. You're trying to get *two* groups to empathize with*each other*, not just trying to get the weak group to empathize with the strong one. If there's an objective asymmetry, that'll be (ideally) recognized by good faith actors in the process. If Nazis and Jews actually did try to empathize with each other, it's obvious that the Nazis will recognize more dissonance with their actions.
It's always possible that an attempt to "see both sides" is a bad-faith rhetorical maneuver. But ferreting out bad faith actors is a different thing than saying an argument can only ever be made in bad faith.
This is a great example. You would be accused of being pro-nazi (at least in today's world). But maybe we're stuck on the definition of empathy. IMHO empathy is 100% about understanding other people with different views. Often when we empathise, we also end up sympathising, but that is a secondary effect. Empathy does not require sympathy.
So in the nazi example, the Jews would absolutely want to understand, get into the minds of the nazis. Because it would be the best way to potentially prevent or minimise the coming disaster. Maybe they learn that there are some nazis who are true antisemites, but many others are just weak people looking for approval or belonging. Maybe they learn which are the critical arguments which convince doubtful nazis. Maybe some of them are all in with world domination but see antisemitism as a distraction. This understanding could enable them to find strategies to divide the nazis, or to find nazis who would help them escape. I can see no reason why the Jews would not want to understand the Nazis, even if they might never sympathise with them.
Same with Arabs and Israelis. Maybe the example you give is one of the first things that an Israeli might learn, most Arabs want peace and do not want a world led Hamas or Hezbollah or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Your second paragraph reminds me of Ozzy Brennan's piece on "corpse ethics". It's a short read, but I think it makes its argument very eloquently. It is a shame that these values have become so common these days.
It feels like a feature of existence. Einstein isn't the man who spent 30 years struggling and failing with Quantum mechanics, he is the guy who published a few very very good papers in 1905 and 1915. Olympic gold medalists might have distinguished lives but are remembered for moments, murderers are remembered for something that probably took place over 0.000001% of their lifespan.
I acknowledge that unfairly dismissing the whole of something based on one unrepresentative mistake is a real phenomenon. But I don't understand the reluctance to distinguish the large bulk of social psychology from the bulk of more rigorous areas of study broadly within psychology that you referred to in your last post. Neither of those are isolated one offs: they're large identifiable groups within the whole.
It's also worth considering the other end of the spectrum: cases which are mostly bad, but have isolated positive achievements. I don't think psychology is quite this far along the spectrum. But eventually you reach fields like non-empirical or pseudo-empirical critical race theory, and there pointing to some small number of rigorous finding utilizing different methods is just special pleading in favour of something mostly bad using unrepresentative examples.
Isn’t it just true that reputations are fairly delicate things? Like, if you cut your nose off, it doesn’t make much sense to say, “How can you say I’m ugly when I have all these other well-formed facial features?” Food contamination is another similar case. There are just some areas where negative factors have outsize effects versus positive ones.
Yes, and I think it might be more than just some areas, I think negative factors are more salient than positive ones as a general rule. Say I have a nice sweater, but it's slightly itchy, or it smells very faintly weird, or it's a color that doesn't look great on me, or it has a small stain. I'm not going to wear it often. I might even throw it away. That humans are treated the same way is perhaps unfortunate but it's not unique or suprising.
I think to the extent that you bring up Anthony Wieners sex scandal in the context of everything else he does in life you should feel bad and try to change. But you have no duty to care about all the normal and boring stuff a person has done just because he also did something unusual, outrageous or noteworthy.
Attention is naturally guided to salience, and contrasting, unusual information has such a high appeal. Really goes against our own mechanisms to try to do this
What is the extreme case where such a simplistic obsession over one person and their actions is justified, and how do we create principles to distinguish this extreme edge case from others?
If you invited David Duke to your conference, it'd make sense for that to be the focus of the media? Is there anything you could do to mitigate that or any other negative impacts it would cause, while still inviting Duke? And what makes Duke different from Hanania, or Hasan Piker for example?
I've always thought that the reason that joke is so funny is that you can pad it out with any number of amazing achievements at the start, but as soon as you get to the reveal, none of that matters: the person hearing the joke completely understands why the subject has earned the unfortunate label.
To me, it's always been a joke about regret. Using a joke about regret to explain why one is standing up for settled science is... maybe not the support intended.
It's probably good in these sorts of discussions to separate different levels of wrongdoing. MacGregor gets known as MacGregor the sheep-shagger because that activity is really very far outside social and moral norms, to such an extent that most people can't even imagine themselves wanting to do something like that. If MacGregor's sexual escapades had followed a more normal route -- bonking his secretary, say -- they wouldn't have overshadowed his other activities in the same way.
Similarly with cancel culture, the problem wasn't so much that it advocated holding people accountable for past misdeeds, as that it didn't discriminate between different kinds of misdeed. Essentially, it was treating bonking-your-secretary-level bad things as if they were sheep-shagging-level bad things, with the result that the punishments it handed out often ended up being wildly disproportionate to the original fault.
Regarding psychology, I think the case is somewhat different. Most people have no ability to verify pscyhological findings themselves, so they have to take them on trust instead. When important pscyhological findings, or even entire subfields, turn out to be bogus, that's a sign that psychology as a discipline isn't trustworthy, or at least isn't trustworthy enough for ordinary people with no psychological background to rationally accept that whatever psychologists tell them is true. It's like if you discovered one of your friends had been lying to you about something: you'd probably not trust him in future, and rightly so, even if you knew he'd also told you the truth about other topics.
You might consider perhaps the problem you are struggling with here is evidence against the orthogonality thesis and the basis of materialist rationalism.
Rationalists claim that you can understand the world through a lens of pure fact, pure data. Values, they claim, are a kind of 'overlay' that can be applied once all the facts are in place. But your experience here clearly demonstrates that -- at least when it comes to people and social movements -- this simply isn't so.
Values constrain which facts you consider relevant and which facts you discard. For example, you had to force yourself to look at a human being through a lens that was 'more fact based' than one which made a single act central to this guy's character and everything else irrelevant. And afterwards, all that did was feel fake.
This is exactly what you'd expect to happen if values and facts _weren't_ inseparable, but thoroughly entangled in cases when it comes to seeing human beings and social movements. Sure, maybe you can analyze a chess board, a computer program or a poker hand through purely rational means, but this is because there's a causal closure at work. That's the nature of games with fixed rules and computing systems - they create causal boundaries in ways that let us 'safely' handle things which can effect our our survival and social standing.
I think you need to bite the bullet and recognize that all epistemologies are value systems, and that "objectively" viewing reality is impossible when the data grows big enough that your attention is the constraint. You're always using some 'reduce' function on the raw data, and that reduce function is going to be some set of values.
So every epistemology, every philosophy, actually tells you which thoughts are good, and which thoughts are not good. When someone says "I only care about the truth," I think mature adults should call bullshit. You obviously care about something else, in addition to the truth, and that 'something else' is very capable of preventing you from considering some truths as relevant, while requiring you to consider others as hyper salient.
Without the ability to expose that "something else" to _correction_, it ends up blinding you. The only way out of the mess is to presume that the 'something else', the source of all values, is _also_ coherent and sensible. That's the basis of science - assuming material reality makes sense - and i think it needs to be the bases of any coherent moral philosophy. You have to start by assuming there's a reality and that you can be wrong about it.
Unless you assume values fundamentally make sense and fit together in some meaningful way, you end up having to follow the values of cancel culture, etc. There's no way to say 'your opinions and feeling are wrong' if you don't think there's an objective reality to compare them to.
However, if you have the cultural concept that we are all sinners, and we tend to focus on the sins of other people instead of ourselves, then you can more easily see Anthony Wiener in a _more accurate lite_ then if you imagine the concept of sin is just a social construct and that we can perceive the world more clear than if we just get rid of the idea that values are real.
I think you are overstating the issue a bit. If what you said were strictly 100% true, then science wouldn't exist. My cultural values tell me that the Earth is flat; yours tell you that it's round and is orbited by a relatively tiny lamp called "the Sun"; some other weirdo over there has devoted his life to praying to a goddess who made the Earth into a bowl. Who is to say which one of us is correct ? After all, we are incapable of apprehending the truth, only faith can give us a touchstone, and the bowl-goddess guy is really, really devoted to his deity, so...
But we could take the other path, and try to suppress our attachment to our cultural values as much as possible. In the process, we have to drastically reduce the pool of "facts" that are available to us; we can now only examine statements that are directly measurable, by anyone, regardless of his culture. So we can no longer rely on the fact that the Sun is big or small or hot or cruel or glorious or anything of the sort; the best we can say is that at time T in location X the Sun is D degrees above the horizon as measured by a theodolite that anyone can build.
This approach is extremely limiting and emotionally as well as intellectually unsatisfying, but it gets *results* -- which is why most cultures eventually either end up adopting some version of it, or become protectorates and vassals of those who did.
Science came into being in a very particular cultural context: the conflict between protestants and Catholics in Europe. In that culture, they turned 'Truth into the highest good, and had intense disagreements over how to get to the truth.
You're right that the approach you're describing gets results,but i think you're leaving out how much that approach relies on its own gatekeepers, norms, and trust mechanisms. They don't "only examine statements that are directly measurable"; that's a defensible motte. The bailey is' we can measure everything that matters.'
> Science came into being in a very particular cultural context: the conflict between protestants and Catholics in Europe.
That is absolutely untrue. Science arguably began in Ancient Babylon (we owe our sexagesimal number system to them, as well as the foundations of geometry). It was considerably advanced in Ancient Egypt and then Ancient Greece (where Eratosthenes famously measured the radius of the Earth with extreme accuracy), but at the time scientific methods coexisted on equal terms with philosophical/spiritual ones (though even then quantitative methods achieved demonstrable superiority). Science continued to advance along those lines during the Islamic Golden Age, which eventually collapsed due to religious extremism; something similar happened in the Middle Ages in Europe, as well as in Ancient China (due to sociopolitical extremism instead of the religious kind).
The European Renaissance initially consisted of the re-discovery of Ancient Greek and Roman artifacts and writings, but these discoveries spurred the development of improved proto-scientific methodologies. The Scientific Revolution happened later in the 16th..17th centuries in Europe; this is where we get Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and many other luminaries -- most of whom were at extreme odds with religious orthodoxy of their time. This is also when probability theory in mathematics was developed, empowering scientists with significantly better tools.
Later on we of course get Darwin, Popper, and all the rest; in fact Popper is often credited with the development of the modern scientific method, and Darwin is notable for (inadvertently) engaging in the latest and most prominent conflict with the Church.
Few if any of these scientists, mathematicians, and ancient scribes were motivated by some specific sectarian conflict; nor were they motivated by "truth as the highest good". Many just wanted to find out how the natural world worked out of a burning sense of curiosity; many others saw it as a religious calling seeking a better understanding of the mind of God; and many more merely wanted to find a practical solution to a specific problem.
The attempt to frame the history of science as some regional "conflict between protestants and Catholics in Europe" is so myopic that it borders on wilful blindness. It is honestly difficult for me to fathom how anyone could honestly believe this to be the case.
>That is absolutely untrue. Science arguably began in Ancient Babylon (we owe our sexagesimal number system to them, as well as the foundations of geometry). It was considerably advanced in Ancient Egypt and then Ancient Greece (where Eratosthenes famously measured the radius of the Earth with extreme accuracy), but at the time scientific methods coexisted on equal terms with philosophical/spiritual ones (though even then quantitative methods achieved demonstrable superiority).
The ancients observed and measured the world around them, but the scientific method as we understand it (roughly, systematically trying to derive testable predictions from your theories so as to empirically confirm/disconform them) didn't come along until the early modern period.
>The European Renaissance initially consisted of the re-discovery of Ancient Greek and Roman artifacts and writings, but these discoveries spurred the development of improved proto-scientific methodologies.
The Renaissance was a literary and artistic movement, not a scientific one. None of the prominent humanist thinkers showed an interest in science.
> roughly, systematically trying to derive testable predictions from your theories so as to empirically confirm/disconform them
Well, the (most likely apocryphal) story about Archimedes and his density measurement certainly fits the bill. But even before then, disconfirming your hypotheses was at the core of human intellectual endeavour. The Ancient Babylonians who discovered (or invented, as you prefer) the basics of mathematics and geometry didn't just get lucky; they tried many things until they found something that worked. Eratosthenes devised a method for measuring the radius of the Earth according to his mathematical model of how it worked; it didn't just come to him in a dream. Yes, the probability theory that made the modern scientific method possible did not arise until the early modern period, but it would be a mistake to suggest that the modern scientific method is some form of sudden inspiration, rather than an enhancement of past methods.
> The Renaissance was a literary and artistic movement, not a scientific one.
This is technically true, but (lacking the modern scientific method) the distinction did not quite exist at the time. If you want to build a realistic marble sculpture of a horse, you must know quite a lot about animal musculature, weight of stone, rules of perspective, etc., otherwise you get a cartoony horsey that falls apart instead of an imposing marble monument.
>This is technically true, but (lacking the modern scientific method) the distinction did not quite exist at the time.
"The modern scientific method" is precisely what people are talking about when they refer to science. They don't just mean doing mathematics or measuring things, even though those are both important for science.
You're attacking a straw man. More than that, you're attacking people for allegedly believing the exact opposite of what they are publicly on the record as believing. You're also making wild jumps of inference, going from "this straw man is wrong" to "the opposite of this straw man must be true". Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
"Rationalists claim that you can understand the world through a lens of pure fact, pure data."
This is the exact opposite of the entire rationalist project, which is about the many ways in which humans are incapable of doing that and about learning to be slightly less bad at it.
"I think you need to bite the bullet and recognize that all epistemologies are value systems"
This isn't true. If you apply an epistemology to affect the world in ways you care about, that reveals things about your value system, but the things you (or evolution) chose to focus your epistemology on are not the only things that epistemology could be used to affect. Also, just because Murderous Mike and I both care a lot about my getting murdered doesn't mean that we have to both want the same outcome. As a more general counterexample, AIXI has a precisely-defined epistemology, but that doesn't prevent me defining two versions of it with reward signals that are unrelated, or even exact opposites of each other.
"The only way out of the mess is to presume that the 'something else', the source of all values, is _also_ coherent and sensible. That's the basis of science - assuming material reality makes sense - and i think it needs to be the bases of any coherent moral philosophy. You have to start by assuming there's a reality and that you can be wrong about it."
There are moral facts because there are facts about what sentient beings would prefer, and there are ethical facts because ethics is about how to emulate good decision theory while being a highly imperfect reasoner, but morality isn't coherent and sensible, because the preferences of sentient beings were built by evolutionary processes and so don't have a compact closed-form representation. There is no set of virtues to display or deontological constraints to follow where every human, let alone every possible sapient mind, even agrees that all the virtues or rules are good in principle, let alone once they come into conflict. You can have a coherent, sensible moral system that gets most things right by going up a meta-level and talking about satisfying preferences, whatever they may happen to be (utilitarianism), but that will strongly violate moral intuitions like "bad people deserve to be punished" (taken as a terminal goal, not a conditional instrumental strategy).
"Unless you assume values fundamentally make sense and fit together in some meaningful way, you end up having to follow the values of cancel culture, etc."
What's your evidence for this assertion? There seem to be plenty of people who don't assume that values are consistent and meaningful, but also don't cancel people: most pre-2010 nihilists and sociopaths, for example.
Please give an example of an epistemology that isn't a value system, scoped to the domain of claims.
> What's your evidence for this assertion?
The last 10 years. The 'scientific community' lining up behind Anthony Fauci and attacking as racist anyone who said the novel coronavirus from wuhan was maybe related to the coronavirus research program in wuhan.
> There seem to be plenty of people who don't assume that values are consistent and meaningful, but also don't cancel people: most pre-2010 nihilists and sociopaths, for example.
Most people don't really act out what they say they believe; they follow social inertia and thus borrow from the traditional residue of ideas they explicitly reject.
The cancel culture people just took the idea that there is no objective moral truth, that it's all just preferences, to its logical conclusion. If the only truth is 'what people want', then people who want things you don't are an existential threat to you ,and your only hope of survival is to silence them. There's no reason to expect 'liberalism' to work because if people have the right to challenge your preferences, they may win people over to their point of view, and there's no reason to expect your preferences to be able to come back.
If there's some objective ground truth to all this, and all people's personal preferences are just approximations of that truth, ok, now we've got a reason to expect liberalism to work. But without that belief in a ground truth, all differences of opinion about ~anything~ are potentially existential threats.
"Bayesian comparison of Langevin dynamics for cell motility from positional observation"
Can you explain what this paper has to do with "liberalism" or "racism" or "traditional values" or anything of the sort ?
It seems to me like you're looking for the meaning of life and moral guidance in statements such as "at sea level, water is at it densest at 4 deg C" or "F=GmM/r^2". This is a mistake, as such statements don't contain any moral or inspirational content. Describing how gravity tends to pull all objects on the surface of the Earth toward its center is not a prescription that demands you to spend as much time laying down as possible, lest you incur the wrath of Gravity. It's just an approximate model of how the world works.
> Can you explain what this paper has to do with "liberalism" or "racism" or "traditional values" or anything of the sort ?
We agree that it doesn't. Where we disagree
My point is that value isn't limited to just these domains. All of rationality is an exercise in the value of some ways of thinking over other ways of thinking. But it can't talk about value, directly, becuase it doesnt' think value is real. That's confussion!
> It seems to me like you're looking for the meaning of life and moral guidance in statements such as "at sea level, water is at it densest at 4 deg C" or "F=GmM/r^2". This is a mistake, as such statements don't contain any moral or inspirational content
No, i'm not looking for meaning or moral guidance. I am observing the continuity between "don't imagine water will be more dense at 2 degrees c" and "don't disrespect" - they are both value gradients over domains of possible behaviors. One is just much more obviously a vaule gradient. The domain of politics is obviously value laden. The domain of measurement and observation is _also_ value laden, just in a way that's too subtle for many people to notice.
so to answer your question, i've asked the clanker to do it conmpactly:
Framed through the lens of epistemological value (where factual assertions reflect the relative utility of different cognitive and methodological approaches), the paper Bayesian comparison of Langevin dynamics for cell motility from positional observation implicitly argues that:
Evidence-Based Bayesian Model Comparison > Single-Model Dogmatism or Heuristics: Evaluating multiple competing stochastic models using unified probabilistic evidence (Bayes factors) is superior to assuming a single canonical model or relying on ad-hoc velocity approximations.
Latent-Variable Integration > Direct Re-construction of Unobservables: Working directly with the statistical likelihood of observable positional increments by marginalizing out unobserved states (like instantaneous velocities) produces far reliable inference than attempting to explicitly reconstruct missing unobservable data.
Scale-Dependent Epistemology > Universal / Scale-Invariant Truth: Thinking about dynamic phenomena as inherently bound to temporal resolution works better than searching for a single scale-free model, as statistical support for specific mechanisms changes depending on sampling frequency.
> All of rationality is an exercise in the value of some ways of thinking over other ways of thinking. But it can't talk about value, directly, becuase it doesnt' think value is real. That's confussion!
What do you mean, "it doesnt' think value is real" -- who doesn't think that ? I certainly think values are real, in a similar sense to how e.g. nutrition is real (though admittedly I'm not a Rationalist). Still, this part is partially incorrect:
> The domain of measurement and observation is _also_ value laden
You are slipping into the failure mode I've mentioned above: you seem to be saying that we must measure the density of water correctly because there's some grand cosmic rule decreeing that we must. There's no such rule, water doesn't care if you measure it or not (nor do the cells care about your measurements of their motility). It's just that measuring the density of water yields results that are extremely useful *regardless* of what it is you value deep inside. Whether you want to destroy the world or to save it, knowing about how water behaves will be of huge benefit to you. That's not a value statement, that's just a statement of fact, based on experience.
And you can of course keep spiraling deeper into philosophical presuppositionalism: "yes but how do you know whether experience is real ?", "yes but why should you want to be effective at your goals as opposed to ineffective ?", "who says water even exists ?", "what is the ultimate transcendent basis for your reason ?", and so on. And depending on your value system, discussing such tangents could be of great value to you... but it appears to be a brute fact of the Universe that knowing the triple point of water is orders of magnitude more important than answers to esoteric questions designed to be unanswerable.
As I'd said above, this situation is intellectually unsatisfying and aesthetically displeasing and sometimes I wish it weren't the case, but historically speaking almost everyone who chose wishes over facts had ultimately failed at whatever goal he wished to achieve, and I'd like to avoid following their examples.
I think apxhard's making a point about methodology and consensus mechanisms, rather than about any particular measurement or model. So rather than discuss particular models like F=GmM/r^2, I imagine apxhard would rather discuss things like Popperian Falsification and p-hacking and herd-behavior.
----
> knowing about how water behaves will be of huge benefit to you. That's not a value statement, that's just a statement of fact, based on experience.
nitpick: the term "beneficial" is, in fact, value-laden. it's an adjective of pure, unadultured affect.
> Please give an example of an epistemology that isn't a value system, scoped to the domain of claims.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but you seem to be saying something like, "Using only salient examples from contemporary political controversies, please give a non-political example of a framework of beliefs about how we can determine what is true." The requirement that I only use salient examples from contemporary political controversies is doing all of the work there.
If I'm allowed to use examples where the politics isn't baked into the question, it's trivial: the minimum message length formalism of Bayesianism, for example, has no political opinions whatsoever.
For a more concrete example, me before stubbing my toe and me after stubbing my toe have pretty much identical beliefs about the nature of truth, but we probably have markedly different reactions to someone voicing an annoying political opinion nearby, which shows that a single epistemology can map to multiple value systems.
> I'm not sure what you mean by this, but you seem to be saying something like, "Using only salient examples from contemporary political controversies, please give a non-political example of a framework of beliefs about how we can determine what is true."
No, my point is more subtle.
Any system that says "here is what truth is and how we can find it" is implicitly a system of values. It says, "think this way, not that way. It is better to believe this than it is to believe that."
You are right that 'the minimum message length formalism of bayesian' doesn't have an 'political opinions'. But this is the root of the confusion: it's to imagine there are domains where there are 'no values in play' simply because there isn't political controversy around which values are better.
> Any system that says "here is what truth is and how we can find it" is implicitly a system of values.
The reason the scientific method (in its modern form, but to some extent also historically) had been so successful is precisely because it disposes with such proclamations. Rather, it says "here's something that seems to work really well, let's do more of it".
Oh, and you also didn't respond to the points about attacking straw men and accusing people of believing the exact opposite of their publicly-recorded opinions, nor the point that reversing random noise doesn't get you a clear signal, it just gets you more random noise.
Sure, the method itself is data driven. Once you’ve got some data, and a prior, you can turn the crank and get updates. So it seems like we can just do away with the concept of values and run on pure data.
But data don’t arrive ex nihilio - the data you encounter are a function of the choices you make, including the choice or what to pay attention to. You’re blasted with enormous amounts of data all the time, most of which you ignore because it doesn’t seem valuable.
oh, I'm on your side. I'm very much in agreement that lossy compression is inherently subject to bias, and that science is a big club (and not everyone is in it).
Chrysophylax was insinuating something like "it's called Lesswrong, because we're trying to be less wrong. I.e. humans generally *can't* learn about the world through pure data, which is why they use sloppy heuristics. Therefore, apxhard's claim that we *can* learn about the world through pure data is a strawman of the Rationalist Project."
But it's obvious to me that this wasn't a fair interpretation of your criticism of the Rationalist Project, because you were criticizing plug-&-chug Bayesianism (the end point) rather than human heuristics (the starting point).
More generally, I don't think any of the other commenters are reading you carefully, or have the historical context to understand what you're gesturing at. Although I'm not particularly in the mood to get into the weeds today. But in any case, you have my sympathy.
> You might consider perhaps the problem you are struggling with here is evidence against the orthogonality thesis and the basis of materialist rationalism.
Materialist rationalism is full of claims about what types of thinking are most effective and most rational.
If you find that in practice humans aren't being perfectly rational here, well there are many other ways in which humans aren't perfectly rational.
> Rationalists claim that you can understand the world through a lens of pure fact, pure data. Values, they claim, are a kind of 'overlay' that can be applied once all the facts are in place. But your experience here clearly demonstrates that -- at least when it comes to people and social movements -- this simply isn't so.
An agent with limitless memory will remember all the facts. Different agents with limited memory will remember different facts, depending on their goals.
"An agent with limitless memory" is real only in the sense that a spherical cow can be real. Memory and compute resources are always going to be a limiting factor for real, living systems. My claim is that rooting the fact-value distinction at the base of your epistemology - as many moderns do - ignores this fundamental reality, and that consequently causes people to ignore the role that value judgement play at every level of cognition. They can ignore this because the problem doesn't really come up in games of ,e.g. chess or go, the kinds of things researchers like to study.
> Different agents with limited memory will remember different facts, depending on their goals
Yup, exactly. They'll focus on different things, too. It's not just about 'forgetting', it's about what you can even pay attention to in the first place. So in Scott's Case, he has to do a bunch of work to look at someone in a light other than "that one politician that sexted nudes" because his entire cognitive apparatus is constrained by a goal function.
That's the point I'm making here. The goal function doesn't happen apart from cognition, layered on only when evaluating outcomes. The goal function constraints every step of the cognitive process, it's woven throughout the flow of data from bottom up sense organs. It constraints what you notice, what hypotheses you consider, which ideas you challenge, which ideas you run with before you even notice an idea has taken hold of you.
Your ability to perceive reality is constrained not merely by 'cognitive biases', "bugs" like the conjunctive fallacy, but by the fundamental constraint of having limited compute. This means that all of our perception and reasoning is value-laden. Without being able to ask the question "which values are correct", you end up in this infinite loop of "we should follow the data wherever it takes us" without being able to acknowledge the "data" is just taking you along the direction of some value system you can't introspect without dropping your philosophical precepts.
Your values don't change which facts are true or false. They can change which facts are worth the effort to remember.
If everyone agrees that the relevant factual question is important enough to bother thinking about, they should all get the same answer.
Also, AI can have A LOT more memory than humans, so the "limitless memory" approximation can be a lot closer to true.
> So in Scott's Case, he has to do a bunch of work to look at someone in a light other than "that one politician that sexted nudes" because his entire cognitive apparatus is constrained by a goal function.
Is some of this just "Scott being irrational"?
> The goal function doesn't happen apart from cognition, layered on only when evaluating outcomes.
But often, it's not that woven. if 2 physicists are trying to understand dark matter, differences in views on animal welfare don't matter much to their dark matter research.
Someone else with different goals might choose not to study dark matter, but your goals shouldn't really effect how you do study it if you decide to do so.
"You invent an amazing new form of forecasting, incubate multibillion dollar startups, accidentally get thousands of people addicted to sports gambling"
Yeah, the little "oopsy-daisy, we turned thousands of people into addicts" might just maybe possibly perhaps who knows? be the problem there for reputation? That's quite apart from inviting Hanania, my opinion of whom is not high in the first place.
As for Weiner - a guy who sexts someone while minding his four year old child, sending a photo of him in bed with the kid *and a visible erection*, I think that even if he was the rootin'-est tootin'-est paperwork pusher in Congress, he is still fucking trash. And again, that's quite apart from "FBI go to investigate his sexts to a 15 year old girl, find out that he was using his wife's laptop to do this, find out that his wife was using that shared laptop for confidential work with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State (the emails), oopsy-daisy part deux".
Maybe we need the concept of "value over replacement". If we're considering canceling a person/institution/movement, we should ask if we think they're better or worse, on the whole, than whoever/whatever would fill the gap left by their removal.
On the other hand, this doesn't address the second-order chilling effects of cancellation being a thing.
Cancellation isn't nearly so much about judging as about coordinating meanness. I will think less of someone if I know he's a devoted Maoist, a felon, or a goat-f--ker, and he will inevitably have to deal with the lower opinion of his neighbors for those things, but that doesn't require coordinating meanness--working with others to try to get the guy fired, shunned, debanked, banned from Twitter, etc.
I made a parallel with the "Nazi bar" joke on the previous thread, but it really needs to be stated that this is about a group failing to police itself. The Hananananania (I never know when to stop the ans) incident is similar but the other examples are missing the point.
It's not like psychology is a guy who made one mistake. It's a lot of guys and girls and even some complicated non-binaries who didn't notice that the infinite soup experiment had crazy effect sizes and priming was way too convenient.
Is it actually wrong for the heuristic to switch from "they know what they're doing" to "apparently the field will not bother to replicate key research for decades, peer review is mostly theatre, and scientists are unwilling to badmouth their colleagues, so I as a layman should be sceptical"? How was I, Mr Internet Commenter, meant to tell the good subfields from the bad?
Utilitarianism tries to make transgressions costly. We're all hardwired utilitarians, I guess. But also, technology tipped the scales: it makes _some_ social things more lubricated and higher-impact while not affecting others. I would bet on fixing the technology.
There was a novel I read where someone explained it. The speaker was dealing with someone much more powerful in a lot of ways than he was, but he happened to have more power in that particular situation.
This is a paraphrase because I don't have it in front of me.
"I'm a simple man. We deal honestly with each other and we can always both end up ahead. We can keep doing that.
"But if I find you've dealt falsely with me *once*, I have to assume that you've done a lot more and I just haven't found those out. And at that point the only thing I can do is consider you an enemy and strike with everything I have."
who exactly were the psychologists that discovered the secrets of the brain?
Galvani was before modern academic credentials. I would guess the people who figured out neurotransmitter signaling were biologists, not psychologists. How exactly is psychology getting credit?
Part of a "good solution" here might turn on whether you're using a MacGregor as a sword or a shield, so to speak. That is, if you're going out of your way to publicly attack a person or institution - trying to get someone fired, publicly cancel them, convince people to boycott an event, turn a generation against capitalism, etc. - then yeah, it seems incumbent on you to judge fairly and holistically, rather than based on one salient but unrepresentative example.
But if the question is just, how should you personally feel about someone, or how should you and your friends talk about someone who made a made a nasty barb to one of you, then I think you're allowed to rely on the traits that are most relevant to you, whether or not that's "fair" in some absolute sense.
I think one issue that is unaddressed here is the difference between actual indiscretions/wrongdoings/crimes (that we agree on as a society and as is reflected, e.g., in our legal documents) and whatever the lynchmob decides is an indiscretion. Same principle that can also be applied to severity of the indiscretion. One wrongdoing that is sufficiently bad (e.g., raping and murdering a child, to give an obviously extreme example) does indeed determine a person's entire reputation; however, treating all alleged indiscretions as equally severe is ridiculous and reputation-ruining is wrong.
The difference between these two scenarios is the difference between toxic cancer culture and reasonable behaviour.
It's a predictive model -- 'this is the kind of person who violates this norm. Therefore they will likely violate it again, and they might violate others!"
And it's a useful model!
My personal argument for a solution to this is a model of multiple gradations of social disapproval. At the worst end is imprisonment, above that is infectious shunning (shun those who shelter you), then shunning, then active disapproval, passive disapproval/tolerance, etc.
An open and free society should strive put as few things in the bottom "actively antagonistic" rungs as possible. Anything above that, we should let your failings be evaluated in balance with the rest of your successes.
If you mass murder people, I don't care what else you did in your life, you've lost your "tolerated member of society" privileges. If you're an asshole on twitter, though... maybe that should be in the 'passive disapproval' aka 'tolerance' rung.
That was the real problem with the twitter mobs, the attempt to elevate "failings that we disapprove of but tolerate" into full "social ostracism," which has nearly the effective punishing force as actual violence.
It's funny, because you fuck one sheep and you're Macgregor the sheep fucker but Mike Tyson can rape a girl, spend six years in prison, be a registered sex offender, and he's "Tyson, the kinda cutesy celebrity who goes on Rogan and has cute cameos in The Hangover" not "Tyson the Rapist."
Or Hugh Grant, who fucked a prostitute and got to keep being a Hollywood Heartthrob rather than Hugh the John. Or Rick James, who had some real bangers and also kidnapped and raped a girl. Or, if we want to get spicy, it's Martin Luther King Jr the American Saint, not Martin Luther King Jr the philanderer.
I'm not saying that the MacGregor effect isn't real. I'm saying that sometimes a single event ruins your whole reputation and sometimes it doesn't. And why it sometimes defines people and sometimes doesn't depends a lot more on other things than whether the thing was good or bad.
It seems to happen a lot less often after cancel culture became a thing. Maybe that was all just collateral damage that needed to be tolerated, for the sake of freedom.
yeah some people really have such large vaults of social capital, that they can literally get away with murder. And the social capital has to vibe with the current reigning in-group. Macgregor the sheep fucker says more about his relative social standing than his proclivities ...
With the right credentials, he could be "MacGregor who heroically defies expectations of the patriarchal society, and any hateful Nazi who dares to criticize him will get banned immediately".
"I've bought lots of beautiful buildings! But do they call me ‘The Beautiful Building-Buyer!’? No! I won THREE times, but did I get three terms? No! But, you tell ONE thousand lies a month, start ONE little war, earn ONE billion dollars per year, accept ONE $400 million jumbo jet from foreigners, add ONE trillion or whatever to the national debt, set up a ONE point seven billion dollar slush fund to give my supporters, pardon ONE thousand rioting supporters... and only 38% of the people approve!"
sorry i just think more people should talk about why certain people are immune from normal heuristics
I’m afraid anyone pointing to the reality of Trump in this forum is a Voice Crying in the Wilderness. It boggles my mind that the most awful, most disgusting, most un-American president in United States history seems to largely get a pass here.
An entire essay was written to throw shade on BLM (complete with graphs) but American citizens being killed by masked LE rates not a peep.
Thanks for a bit of support for reality from The Great White North. (IIRC you live in Canada)
I do yes. Scott tried to persuade folks not to vote orange, but 47 remains immune to normal heuristics. Why? I have a theory that it's about the U.S. media ecosystem (other countries are in a bad way, but the U.S. populous seems exceptionally captured by conservative media, by the alt-right, by post-truth ideas, and by these weird anti-intellectual intellectuals), and about typical human cultures which treat accuracy as unimportant, so people don't learn to do research to verify claims, and don't downgrade someone's reputation when they say things that are verifiably untrue or disregard facts that are right in front of them or make claims they can't possibly know the truth value of.
Remember, before the Trump who randomly sent troops to blue cities and wanted to invade Greenland, we had the 2016 Trump who just said false things all the time, hated immigrants and maybe grabbed some pussies. If people believe what he says, he can and does remake reality however he wants. Thus he won the 2020 election, the felony charges were a "witch hunt", how dare you suggest there is something corrupt about a sitting president getting billions of dollars, and shut up about Epstein.
Humans are such flakes, sometimes it's so hard to find reliable talking heads that I have to watch *unreliable* talking heads and then mentally keep track of their biases and try to make mental corrections. I'd rather just listen to people with good epistemics, but those are super rare.
I mean ppl say trump is immune from this stuff because of the media, but the media covered for biden’s ass cancer-ridden senior moments as he actively napalmed palestinians. However with trump his cult of personality just doesnt care and with biden the average reasonable person is kind of his target audience, so losing them was crippling
“most awful, most disgusting, most un-American president in United States history”
I didnt realize we forgot about Bush, who successfully stole an election in 2000 and used it to get into an illegal war, as soon as he was seen as “a good old fashioned republican, back when they merely wanted to lynch gays, blacks and trans people with BIPARTISAN support”
Actually it was the Supreme Court who decided the Florida election for Bush. And Bush spent quite a bit of time gathering support both domestically and around the world for his ill-advised Iraq war. It was a bad idea executed badly, but he consistently used better processes than Trump's, to the point where I suspect cooler heads could have talked him out of it, if they had worked harder.
But I learned recently about how George W. Bush was instrumental in creating the PEPFAR program that saved 25 million+ lives. He consistently framed USAID’s mission as a moral mandate rooted in American privilege and faith, citing Luke 12:48 ("To whom much is given, much is required").
Trump and Musk, by contrast, illegally smashed USAID overnight, violating the ICA which is based on the constitution's Appropriations Clause (and the APA), and this affected ~60% of the funds disbursed by PEPFAR.
So no, "Bush is worse" holds no water for me, and I would say that the overton window shifting to the right can be attributed to the right wing shifting to the right.
A nice contrast of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" with Trump: the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, Reverend Mariann Budde gave a sermon with Donald Trump and JD Vance sitting in the front row. Budde said "As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals—they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, and temples. Have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land."
Trump responded with: "She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. ... She and her church owe the public an apology!"
Other Republicans responded similarly, e.g. Mike Collins (R-GA) wrote "the person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list". If you would expect anything like this from the Bush era, I think you're hallucinating.
Once Curtis Yarvin was invited to LambdaConf (one of the world's largest functional programming conferences) to do a purely technical talk on Urbit.
And yeah, a lot of speakers canceled because from their point of view it had become the Mencius Moldbug Conference For Mencius Moldbugs.
This is even encouraged in certain political circles. There's the good old leftist quip that "if 4 people are at a table, a Nazi sits down and the people don't get up, there's 5 Nazis at the table".
Honestly this feels like it's an inherent and inescapable feature of humanity. Our psyche is built to find outgroups where there are none.
How does relevance play into it? If I'm a sheep-rights activist, I'll absolutely care about McGregor's dirty deed and I'll want to spread the word far and wide to get him condemned and get justice for Dolly. On the other hand, maybe I need a really good bridge builder and McGregor is the best in the area. In that case I'm going to care a lot more about the quality of his bridges than what he gets up to on his private time. His bridge building skills have enough value and utility that I'm happy to wave off the other part.
You get this sort of discussion all the time of whether you can separate the person from their art or dissociate the bad stuff in favor of promoting and keeping the good parts. Seems like it opens the door to all sorts of motivated reasoning depending on your own values and what McGregor is bringing to the table for you.
I was going to give an opinion on this but there are too many comments already.
I'll instead observe that, for whatever reason, social epistemology does not appear to be a strength for this crowd. Regular epistemology sure, for example https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/waiting-for-the-miracle was excellent. Maybe it's an example of a strength becoming a weakness when it's applied outside its domain.
Human beings are not made to know this many people or contain this much information. Our sorting algorithm tends towards the negative, the sordid, and the associative. I don't think there's a good way to fix this, but knowing it and trying is important nonetheless. One of the best traits of rationalism is that they know and try. One of the worst traits is that they overestimate their odds of success.
We used to say at the public defenders office you should try never to judge a man for what he did on his worst day. I very often fail at that, but I remember I'm supposed to do that and occasionally try. But we also acknowledged that a few things are just so very bad that, no matter how charitable people would like to be, they're just going to drown everything else out.
Except... I mean surely *murder* of a helpless woman, premeditated, would be that right? It would for most of us, but I very routinely am involved in musical discussions of Phil Spector. What about sexual abuse or exploitation? Well for some of you that's a line, but there are many corners of the world where we discuss Woody Allen without reference to those allegations, Polanski was welcomed in the land of Foucault, Marv Albert still floats around the podcast guest circuit, Mike Tyson had not only a boxing comeback but a whole second career as an entertainer.
So what's the actual McGregor Line? It's whether the other things about you are more *interesting*. That's why most of us would fail it, you screw a sheep that's just your defining feature if you're an accountant who raised a family and spent every weekend doing roadside cleanup with your Kiwanis Club and took care of your aging parents for a decade, because those things are boring. If you're a heavyweight champion of the world, video game star, bit off a guy's ear in a fight, have a goofy voice, were in a famous bro comedy sharing the stage with a tiger and then starred in an animated TV series, raping a chick in a hotel room has ceased to stand out. OJ Simpson otoh never shook it because the trial and surrounding circumstances were so famous and weird that they rivaled his football and acting careers. That's basically it. If you're a normie you're probably really doomed to be McGregor'ed unless you are a very eccentric person to begin with.
This is the only explanation given so far that covers every one of Scott's examples.
If a prediction market conference invited 99 forecasting experts and 1 pundit, or a blogger made 99 orthodox post and 1 controversial one, why is it surprising at all that the one standout example gets attention? Fits with the prediction-error-minimization method of learning Scott's always talking about.
I have a silly heuristic (it is silly because it is subjective). I check to see if this person is in attack mode or defending.
To clarify, ask 'em a question: what harm did I do to you? If the response is a detailed list, this is attack mode. If the response is I don't know you, they are probably not on the attack.
If it is not possible to ask, I do my best to judge from their declared positions. Are they out to punish, discipline, harm me based not on my actions, but on general principles?
If in attack mode, I will judge them on their worst because I need to know what to expect.
If in defense mode, use their best actions to see if they are good enough to join that defense effort.
More obscure example, but I am reminded of the time Arnold said "screw your freedom" during the pandemic. Stupid, sure, but an off-the-cuff remark made within the pressure cooker of a brief TV news interview? Strikes me as a perfect environment to say something dumb in passing and should be discounted accordingly.
But it was enough for some people to reduce him from a revered figure to a pariah. For example, legendary strongman Brian Shaw made a big deal of removing the portrait of Arnold from his gym over it. Of course, Arnold cheating on his wife and having an illegitimate son was not enough to warrant the same reaction. I guess because cheating on your wife and having an illegitimate son isn't as political, even though it is a bigger moral fuck up. There's a kind of solipsism in there in which one holds their beliefs as the North Star of morality, and actions are of second- or third-order importance unless directly tied to those beliefs.
I tend to discount the sexual unorthodoxies, but, for the general case of rare, actually damaging actions, it is worth noting that it is far easier to break things than to build them. To pick a mechanical analogy, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_1 :
>Arthur C. Clarke described the malfunction as "the most expensive hyphen in history". In actuality, it was a missing overline in "R-dot-bar sub n", the "nth smoothed value of the time derivative of a radius R". The overline denotes a mean; by its omission, an unsmoothed value was used
Still, it _was_ a single character error which destroyed a whole spacecraft. The focus on the tiny part of a program that went wrong is not irrational.
This is the kind of confusion that utilitarianism always fosters.
Real live does not have Victory Points, come on. Real life has incentives that apply at margins. Society uses those incentives, particularly reputational ones, to discourage behaviors it doesn't want. If you think it's picking on the wrong behaviors, say that! Don't give us this spineless BS about balancing one kind of thing with another!
To put it another way: no one in any of these examples is being asked to judge whether a *person's life* is *good on net*. That's the kind of category error that utilitarian brainrot produces. You're just being asked to *participate in social enforcement of moral values*. If you don't want to, because you disagree with the values or don't think they should be so strictly enforced, then have the guts to say so.
It seems like you're viewing the social process as something like "Shame Sheep-Fuckers". But "Shame Sheep-Fuckers" is too coarse-grained to be the type of action you actually take.
In reality, every utterance you take is a different individual decision. If MacGregor fucked a sheep and is also the King of your country, you have competing social norms of "respect the existing social heirarchy" and "shame sheep fuckers". What's right in any specific case depends on the particulars.
If you think "participate in the social enforcement of moral values" is a rule that unambiguously selects one response to a situation (that you can either go with or try to defy) I think you might have an oversimplified vision of what "social moral values" are and how they can interact.
"Participate in the social enforcement of moral values" isn't a statement I endorse as a rule, let alone unambiguously. It's more that Scott's argument doesn't even seem to recognize that this is what people are doing, or the implications of rejecting it.
Consider the analogy between social norm-enforcement and actual law-enforcement. How might one critique the enforcement of laws?
- the laws are wrong / unjust: yep, common failure mode, needs to be called out and fixed
- the penalties are too severe: yep, common failure mode, needs to be called out and fixed
- the law is enforced inconsistently / arbitrarily: yep, common failure mode, needs to be called out and fixed
- the enforcers of the law are corrupt / abusive / unchecked: yep, common failure mode, needs to be called out and fixed
- the law needs to be relaxed for people who do lots of good things: lol NOPE, try again, if you're making this argument you're either a space alien who doesn't understand crime or literally trying to bribe somebody.
Of all the legitimate ways to respond to "y'all bought a castle", "y'all invited Hanania", etc., Scott chose one that weirdly and badly over-generalizes the situation. It reads like special pleading for rationalists and/or an attempt to dissolve any norms around social accountability in general.
I'm interested in how people feel about artists like Alice Munro, who won the Nobel prize and then turned out to have been complicit in the sexual abuse of her daughter. On one level, I feel that the reception of her literary work should be independent of that. But then you read short story about family tensions and maybe it's not so easy to separate the art from the artist.
The problem is even knottier in science: Schroedinger is famous for his contributions to quantum mechanics. But it's fairly well documented that he was attracted to young girls. Physics has so far failed to engage with this at all. Somehow he seems separable from his work in a way Munro isn't really. But some mathematicians who made solid contributions to their fields were deeply committed Nazis; and the subject tends to de-emphasise their contributions... I guess I don't understand where the line is.
> It's fairly well documented that [Schroedinger] was attracted to young girls. Physics has so far failed to engage with this at all.
What do you think "Physics" is such that it has the capacity to engage in social judgements? It can't even manage to switch the direction of the current arrows to follow the actual electron flow
My take is you judge the stories on their own merit, the same way you don't tear down Macgregor's bridge because you don't like him personally. If the story is close enough to the topic that it reads differently knowing about it, then judge it for that, but don't judge the next one over for it.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. This is almost the essence of social life, a lot of its nastiness comes from battles about how acceptable various point-reductions are in the the local Overton Window.
> Trying to temper judgment this way feels like violence against my brain’s attention heads, the sort of thing that would turn me into an opinionless zombie.
Have you ever seen one of those animated visualizations of a traversal of hyperbolic disc (ex: the video game hyperrogue, you can play it in a browser)? Where the "center of focus" is big and clear, and the whole rest of the space shrinks as you move towards the edges? It's one of the ways to represent an infinite space within finite bounds. IMO, that's sort of like the mental representation of the world (where your mind is small, but the world is infinite in detail).
There's no reason you should try to keep the full accurate picture of everything in your head all the time, it's impossible. If MacGregor lives in another village, it's not worth concieving him as a multidimensional person. What relevance does Anthony Weiner have to you? It would be one thing if you really cared about healthcare for 9/11 responders, but you don't. In terms of your genuine attention, he's at the edge of the hyperbolic disc.
IMO, the best way to be responsible isn't to try to be perfectly accurate all the time. It's to:
1) Have explicitly low confidence about things at the edges of your genuine hyperbolic attention disc. Believe whatever you want, but hold it very lightly.
2) If you need to speak about such things in any relevant sense, explicitly take the time to bring them into the center first.
People who actively try to affect things that have ONLY EVER been at the very edges of their disc are irresponsible. Possibly well-intentioned though.
If you want to be double-extra responsible, you can also:
1) Try to convince irresponsible people to move relevant things closer to the center of their attention
2) Fight the social / political battle to influence how full entities actually get point-reduced, so that irresponsible people cause less harm
You can get in trouble if you don't THINK you're not speaking "in a relevant sense" (ex: you make a private joke) but you end up influencing something (ex: you do it on Twitter and contribute to a bad social phenomenon, like one drop in a hurricane). That's unfortunate, but finite human judgement is essentially doomed to failure sometimes.
You can only do your level best, if God wanted you to be infallible he would have put your soul in 2028's frontier AI model.
I think there's a category error using this same idea for diffuse groups as for individuals. If an individual is a great guy every day of his life but the one day he loses his temper and shoots a dozen strangers in a fit of pique, we're all going to form most of our judgement of that fellow by his single worst day, and I don't see how else it can be. But for a diffuse group, you get the thing where "pro-lifers" include a lot of Catholics praying the rosary during the March for Life, and also some guy tossing bombs into abortion clinics. The bomb-tossing guy doesn't really tell you much about the rosary-praying folks. Effective altruists mostly try to figure out how to give money in useful ways, but also include SBF using EA as an affinity scam or something; SBF's fraud gives me very little information about whether Scott is going to steal my money.
Personally, I have very little difficulty believing good or sympathetic things about people I dislike or disapprove of, even if I disapprove of them very strongly, and relatively little difficulty believing bad or unsympathetic things about people I like or approve of. For example, I experience no cognitive dissonance in noting Hitler's outspoken support for animal rights, nor feeling pity over Stalin's tragic childhood abuse, despite their atrocities, nor in condemning F. D. Roosevelt's attempt to stuff the Supreme Court, despite my very considerable respect for him.
It's not just about lacking a stake in the struggle: I can think of good and bad things about modern politicians I have strong feelings about without difficulty, and in my private life, I can note the good points of people who have caused me catastrophic personal harm through bullying or dishonesty, despite my deep resentment of what they inflicted on me and my family, and I can maintain generally high opinions of people who helped me survive that, in one case despite my suspecting him of some potentially-serious misconduct of his own.
I don't know why this feels comfortable to me but feels to you like violence against your brain's attention heads, but I suspect it might be that (due to being autistic) I'm much less concerned with social status than most people, and thus am comfortable with other people's status being ambiguous. I'm also unusually comfortable with not supporting a side in a conflict, and thus with not rounding people off to "ally" or "enemy".
As a way to test that hypothesis, do you experience the same feeling of violently forcing yourself to be fair if the things you're evaluating aren't people or aren't in competition? For example, if you're given some conflicting scientific hypotheses that have considerable but not overwhelming support, do you feel an urge to choose one that's "basically right" and minimise the places where another hypothesis does better?
If you're asked for an opinion on a new book, or film, or restaurant, or whatever, do you feel an urge to quickly stop talking about nuances? How does your willingness to keep giving attention to subtleties vary with the general positive, neutral or negative stance of your opinion, with the strength of your opinion, with the certainty with which you hold your opinion, and with the degree to which other people in the conversation express agreement or disagreement with your opinion?
I think there's a slightly different issue at play, which involves identity/branding. Effective altruism doesn't just claim to do good charity work, but to avoid many of the issues that charity historically suffers from. When it doesn't do that or develops other equally bad issues, it's not enough to fall back on the "we did some good" claims, at least PR wise.
The other bigger issue tho would be tail risk. EA is about trying to pull big levers and many such levers can absolutely do more harm than good if pulled wrong. And it also seems like people will not be checked or stopped by the EA community if they try to pull the wrong big levers, they'll just give excuses like "but look at all the good we did from all the other levers". Is this really how you want this whole thing to operate?
1. Maybe what matters is the decision layer. You can keep your biased judgement unless you are about to make a consequential decision. In the Müller-Lyer illusion(two lines same length looks different lengths), you don't have to contort your mind to somehow see the same length, but you can take out a ruler when you have to bet on it.
2. Maybe for some judgements tails beat means, knowing about a rare case of a contractor stealing might be more important than their average output.
3. Chilling effects scale with expected punishment, laws and norms targeted at the punishment function can allow people to keep their private judgements without the cancel culture chilling effects. It would be impossible and counterintuitive to try and stop people from remembering someone's worst act, but it's possible to make a norm of "we don't make impactful decisions like hiring and firing based off of these things".
Possibly the problem is that we know of so many people, far beyond our Dunbar number, that we can't help but think of most of them by whatever we know.
It's so baffling to me that you credit "capitalism" (as much as it can be considered a well defined, singular entity) with electricity or healthcare. With that kind of logic we can credit any historical event downstream of the second world war to Adolf Hitler.
Hitler does not distribute electricity to your home. Companies operating on profit motive do. Capitalism is an ongoing active force in electricity distribution, not just a random historical fact.
I'm a research psychologist, specializing in the cognitive processes around persuasive messaging. In psychology, there is a very well known model called "Dual Processing" which proposes that the mind has (at least) two modes of operation: fast, intuitive and simple (so-called "System 1") and slow, deliberative and complex ("System 2"). These two systems are ways of generalizing across many interacting cognitive processes, and do not correspond to any one neurological system. What the dual processing model implies is that the human mind has an optimization process for reducing cognitive load, presumably so that it can save caloric energy in the long run.
To oversimplify quite a bit, the mind uses system 1 unless it has a very good reason to use system 2. System 1 begins in preconscious sensory and perceptual processing - basically it's pattern matching sensory input against expectations based on previous life experiences. Only when a stimulus stands out for some reason, fails to match expectations, does system 2 come into play, and we begin to consciously regard the stimulus, whatever it is.
"Expected stimuli" includes types of people and their actions. Chains of expectations, based on previous life experiences, form narratives which lend meaning to the activity we see around us. We remember events according to the intensity and type of emotional response we had to the life experiences that went into the category our mind is matching against - either positive or negative.
One can easily see the survival advantage this might have given our ancient ancestors. If, every time we passed a certain clump of bushes, a nondescript bird flew out of it, we might never remember this, no matter how many times it happened. But encounter one lion, and that bush is forever seared into memory. So is the place we first met our lover.
Someone does something. Who cares? Nobody unless you know them. Too many people do too many things for the mind to be able to afford to pay conscious attention to them all. So we categorize people by the emotional response we had to them (if any). One guy does something horrible to a sympathetic victim, a movement allows itself to make one policy mistake, a professional discipline (mine, in this case) makes claims it later has to retract. We remember these things basically because it saves mental energy, while still delivering utility.
The point is that this process is completely automatic - you can't help yourself. One can use willpower to force yourself to think carefully about something, but not about everything. So this phenomenon is simply a ubiquitous aspect of human nature. To think carefully about the world, involves strategic choices. To influence others to think carefully about something requires persuasive messaging. Both requires tradeoffs.
Does it help to turn up the volume? "Bill Gates saved tens of millions of lives, but he takes ONE ride on Epstein's plane..." I think, whatever Gates' personal indiscretions, the weight of his actions ought to be mostly on his global health work.
I think you are just going to have to be a good utilitarian and get over it. The moral urge of one sad puppy: horrible, I feel it like a rock in my stomach. A million chickens tortured endlessly, hundreds of miles away? Sorry, I (personally) just have a hard time getting worked up about it. And yet...I realize, intellectually, that the second is much worse than the first. Thank you for your service Representative Weiner.
The Anthony Weiner documentary he himself commissioned was actually pretty great. Not only because it was incredible that he documented himself ruining his own family and career (again!), but also because until he did so in the film, he really seemed like a politician you could root for.
This might be an unoriginal take, but it could be part of how people deal with limited information. If I am going to get information on a person, then there is an expected value for the "worst" thing I know about them. The more information I have, the more extreme that expected worst action gets. So I can use the observed value of the worst thing to try to predict the normal expected quality of behavior.
For example, if I am good friends with a person and I spend a lot of time with them, then I have a lot of information on them. So if one day they lose their temper at the movie theatre and yell at someone, then I can still think they are a decent person, because that is about as bad as I would expect their worst behavior to be given how much I know about them. But if I were the employee at the movie theatre then that would be my only piece of information. That is worse than the worst I would expect from a single observation, so for them it is predictive and negative.
On MacGregor, for most people I don't hear about something like that, so if I do I think it is fair for me to, to some extent, update my opinion downwards. At the same time, this is a notable piece of information, so the information is more likely to reach me, so I shouldn't be to certain in my estimate.
Some notes on this:
- Groups of people should be judged less harshly for bad actions of individual members because the minimum quality of an action taken by any member of a group is lower than that of any individual
- However, groups should be judged more harshly for decisions made as a group because they need more people to get on board (ie if a group of 100 people vote to go yell at someone in a movie theatre I don't think at least 51 of them were just having a bad day that day).
- If the information you get is biased positive then even slightly bad things should be judged more harshly
- If the information you get is biased negative then you shouldn't be as harsh
- It seems to me that people (including me) in general don't have big enough error bars on their estimate from limited information
When I was in high-school I started a habit of loving kindness mediationalong with things like a vow to not be annoyed by things that aren’t actually bad and never have negative thoughts about someone that aren’t followed by thoughts forcing on positive things about the person. I basically tried to do what Scott described as violence against his brain when thinking about Anthony. Personally I don’t feel like I’ve become less opinionated or in any ways more of a zombie. It massively improved my life and imo given me a lot more mental clarity about topics important to me. I think in general we treat too many natural aspects of our minds as good or serving some important function or not to be tampered and our habit to zero in and focus on negative things, in this case negatives about other people is one where I think that impulse is really misguided. Being able to remember that sheepfucker McGregor is a full person outside of beastiality and really forcing oneself to remember the positive and admirable things he’s done imo would make society a much kinder and just place and is on some level a moral obligation we have to the McGregors of the world.
Names are frequently used to point out specific individual out of many. There are honorific names, but most often it's just "how this individual is different from all others?". That's why Cicero is not "a great orator guy", but "the guy whose ancestor had a wart on his nose looking like chickpea". And Ovid is not "a great poet" but "the guy with a huge shnoz". Everybody knows who they are talking about - I mean, just look at the nose, you can see it's him! Thus, if you have choice between bridge-building and sheep-fucking, presumably the latter is more rare that the former, so if you need to know which MacGregor out of hundreds we're talking about, it's more efficient way to designate the one. If everybody there were routinely diddling sheep but only one person were building bridges, I am sure the naming would work the other way, any other arrangement would become unsustainable.
Deciding how you feel about Wiener, or perhaps more relevantly, whether you might vote for him based on, let us say, his professional record rather than on the scandal surrounding his name, could I think depend on what weight you give to the several aspects of his misdemeanour.
For instance, which of the following would weigh most heavily with you:
1. The moral aspect of his violating the privacy of other people with his sexual posts, which some recipients might justifiably consider a violation?
2. The undoubted crassness and blatant vulgarity of his actions, characteristic of a half-witted teenager?
or
3. The sheer stupidity of indulging in an idiotic action capable of destroying his professional and private life, confirming that he is too dumb to be trusted as your representative?
One might easily of course be turned off by all three reasons, but I think that for most people, one of them would clearly be dominant, demonstrating that the other two are less critical, or even perhaps relatively negligible.
I realize I'm being sort of literal here, focusing on MacGregor and the sheep, but -- does anyone know whether it injures, hurts or frightens a sheep to have a person have intercourse with it? I had always assumed it did not bother them, pictured them continuing to graze while a MacGregor was going at it. I asked GPT and as it was in the middle of answering some censor came in and shut it down -- "WE AT OPEN AI DO NOT CONDONE TALKING ABOUT SHIT LIKE THIS," or some such. Even my initial query was quite non-prurient, but then I tried re-asking it as a search of the veterinary literature for research on vaginal injuries in sheep,, and I still got shut down. I complained to GPT about the situation, it began to respond, and OpenAI shut down our even talking about talking about intercourse with sheep. Claude did answer the question, but had no actual data, was on a misstion to convince me that sex with a sheep hurts them really really bad, or at least it *could,* depending, so people absolutely should not do it.
So does anybody know the facts?
And while we're on the subject: Many people posting on this topic take it for granted that having sex with a sheep is bad -- harmful, cruel, morally wrong. Hey, I get the ick factor, but why is it *wrong*? Because the sheep doesn't consent? Are you all assuming that it is painful and frightening for the sheep.? If it hurts them, I think it's morally wrong too. But, um, seems like people who are horrified by the fate of MacGregor's sheep are kind of losing track of the fact that we imprison, kill, and eat sheep. I'm not doing vegan guilt induction here, just pointing out a weird inconsistency.
Dan Savage sez: "If I were a sheep I would rather be screwed than stewed."
We don't want people having sex with our foodstuffs.
To the main point; we look down on people who have sex with easy targets. Prostitutes, blow-up dolls, third worlders who need a spouse so they can move, all off-putting. And animals are in the same range as children; not intelligent enough to consent, and not empowered enough to escape. It's a massive abuse of position.
Sure. But you could make stronger, more poignant versions of the same claims about the other stuff we do to sheep. Sheep are also easy targets for being imprisoned, impregnated against their will, and having their children taken away to be killed and eaten. They are intelligent enough to grasp that these things are happening, but not articulate and empowered enough to object or prevent their happening.
I think the real underpinnings of people's sense that fucking sheep is wrong are (1) they are not desensitized to it, as they are to imprisoning, killing and eating them; (2) not many people have intercourse with sheep, we're not subject to the sense that the behavior can't be very bad because everybody does it; (3) it is unusual *sexual* behavior, and people tend to have strong, judgmental reactions to sexual behavior, and negative reactions to unusual sexual behavior.
You're still focusing on the sheep. We don't care about the sheep, we care about the abuse of position. A guy who raises sheep to kill and eat is a guy with long term planning who contributes to his neighborhood. A guy who fucks a sheep is a short-minded self-centered freak who's going to abuse as much power as you give him.
Common sense. What society-positive reason do you suggest for someone fucking a sheep? Do you think anybody wants to have sex with someone who's previously had sex with a sheep? Do you think anybody wants to eat that sheep now? It's a destructive act to benefit the actor emotionally. That didn't stop them there and there's no reason to think it will stop them anywhere else.
You can argue benefit of the doubt or whatnot, but you can do that with literally anything, including genocide.
>What society-positive reason do you suggest for someone fucking a sheep?
What’s society-positive about you eating an ice cream cone? I’d say it’s society-neutral, as are many things in life, including sex without another person present— just a video, or a pocket pussy, or a sheep.
>Do you think anybody wants to have sex with someone who's previously had sex with a sheep?
What’s going on here and with your next point is that what you’re calling common sense is actually you using your personal aversion to the image of someone fucking a sheep as data. You have an intense feeling that what he did is hideously weird and nasty and evil, and think of anything MacGregor’s dick has touched is contaminated by those qualities. You think it’s self-evident that “a guy who fucks a sheep is a short-minded self-centered freak who's going to abuse as much power as you give him.” It isn’t. In fact there’s quite a lot of research into the characteristics of people who are into weird, transgressive sex, and they do not seem to be more violent or crazier or more psychopathic than non-kinksters. You’re imagining MacGregor as weird and violent and abusive, and so long as that picture controls the inquiry then your question answers itself. No, most people do not want to have sex with someone weird, violent and abusive who has sheep fleece stuck to his dick. But that doesn’t tell us how a woman would feel about MacGregor, because it doesn’t describe MacGregor. It describes your disgusted imaginings.
>Do you think anybody wants to eat that sheep now?
See, you're calling up an mental image of something like a sheep’s vaginal opening lying on your plate garnished with shiny traces of MacGregor’s activities on it. Right, very few people are eager to chow down on that. But that’s not what eating MacGregor’s sheep would be like. When eating meat, there’s quite a lot that it is good not to call to mind, even if the sheep’s a certified virgin If the sheep had ticks, could any of them have remained on it? What about the insecticide in sheep dip? What about the bile, feces and other nasty stuff that must flood out of the body when it is disemboweled — can they really wash all traces of that stuff off the sheep muscle, fat and tendons that I eat? Sensible meat-lovers don’t call any of that to mind, and we don’t wonder about MacGregors over our lamb chop.
At least most of us don’t. You, though, are calling sheep-fucking to mind and mentally pairing it with sex, eating, and personal character, and when you have godawful pictures of MacGregors you mistake your disgust for insight.
>To the main point; we look down on people who have sex with easy targets.
Frankly, that attitude makes me angry. Demonstrating harm is one thing. Excluding "easy targets" _without_ evidence of harm is _deliberately_ making someone's life _worse,_ forcing them to expend more effort for no good reason. I oppose it. I dislike people who make peoples' lives worse in this and similar ways.
In general, the _CORE_ of progress is innovating in ways that make hard goals easy. Social norms that penalize ease are directly countering making life better. I find such norms disgusting.
Sydney says there's three perspectives: harm; moral categories; social norms. Bestiality may be less harmful than confinement/slaughter. But most people tend to evaluate this in terms of category violations and social norms. I.e. "goat" is an element of the category "food", and is therefore instrumentally acceptable; but "goat" is not an element of the category "intercourse", and is therefore unacceptable (and weird/disgusting/impure/abnormal).
That's plausible. In general, enforcing category violations is a terribly limiting norm. Anyone who has ever opened a paint can with a screwdriver blade violates a category boundary - and (barring special circumstances) that is a wise and resourceful thing to do.
The MacGregor The Bridge Builder ... PUBLISHED 2 DAYS AGO 401 LIKES 13 RESTACKS 632 COMMENTS framing is the part I keep coming back to. Most takes on this skip the underlying mechanism and try to win on vibes.
>but you invite one conservative! If you allow this sort of thing, you can discredit any individual, field, or movement.
If such discrediting works, there might be paid people who are sent to events that the customer wants to discredit. Are these any? (I am not disagreeing with Scott in any case)
Bestiality is one of the ways we get "fun" new plagues, including ones that become endemic and never go away. I would say this trumps all other considerations and makes it very valid to condemn a guy who buggers a sheep.
As for Anthony Weiner - funny you know him for the sexting scandals and say he's probably an unremarkable or even good legislator otherwise... because I only know him for his terrible legislation, like when he successfully got "knowingly giving someone an STD" made no longer a felony.
I don’t think this phenomenon is so mysterious—groups are founded on _trust_, and, so long as trust is hard won and easily lost, rejecting members of the group for violating core trust measures will justify the asymmetry.
* When it comes to cancel culture, I would say there are two side points to remember, one for and one against. The "againt" one is that recency matters. If someone had a great pro-social congressional career, if they do a 180 and start supporting positions I find heinous now, it is possible that they changed for the worst and that their current actions are representative of who they are now. This defence of cncel culture fails though, cause people cancel other over jokes from ten years ago.
* The one "for" is that I might dislike a person or deem them stupid even if they do, behaviorally speaking, good and pro-social things. If someone truly believes, idk, that jews form a shadow world government trying to make as much money as possible, with all due respect to a possible past of great deeds - it shows something about their world model and their mental infrastructure that's porbably pretty bad. So in essence, yes, if you write 50 interesting posts about ideas about economics, and then 2 about a jewish shadow government, I might indeed deem you to be an idiot.
* On a personal note, I don't find it that difficult to regard people involved in scandals as complex individuals, that we shouldn't form a very comprehensive opinion of over the scandal alone. Perhaps as a result, I seem to care less about scandals than some people around me. Either way, I don't think I'm that special, and so I don't think this sort of judgement really something innately human and impossible to stop doing. If someone called my friend a buffoon for no reason on social, I might dislike that person for a long time, but I don't think it will effect my actions in terms cases where its important to determine wether they are generally a good person (say, if I have to decide wether or not to give them a philantropic position on some organization), or to assess if they are skilled professionals etc.
>This is basically the only sane way for the world to work, if you don’t want to force everyone to learn reams of biographical trivia about anyone involved in something newsworthy.
Well said!
Maybe we should more closely scrutinize this notion of “newsworthy”.
Many Thanks! Perhaps. What do you have in mind? Personally, I ignore celebrities, but it would be imprudent to ignore e.g. wars that might affect me.
The more 1) important something is, 2) likely it is to affect me, and 3) likely I am to be able to act on it, then the more likely I will have other ways of finding out about it that are faster and/or higher quality/more reliable than the news.
Meanwhile, the less important something is (i.e how many people are affected by it), the less likely something is to affect me, and the less likely I am to be able to act on it, the less likely it is to be considered "newsworthy" in the first place. (Though the news still scrapes the bottom and churns out stories about things like this, under the label "human interest".)
So this leads to a question: why follow the news at all?
I think journalism knows it has this problem, and so the industry compensates with luridness and showmanship. They have to be careful though because they don't want to become indistinguishable from tabloids (even though the division between tabloid and "proper" journalism is blurry). So journalism has developed tricks of passing itself off as serious and buttoned-up. I can talk about these, but I won't right now.
Another prong in the campaign is to forward the narrative that being "informed" --i.e. in the know about the latest news stories-- makes you a better person, a better citizen, etc. People have always played status games around the water cooler so to speak, so this plays right into human nature. At least in this society, I have found it easy to reject participation in such games. But it does require the fortitude to reject a deep-seated assumption in the first place, that being "informed" is the same as being knowledgeable, smart, etc.
Many Thanks for your comment! I'm skeptical that the legacy media news has zero value. A lot of it is filler. A lot of it is about events which are irrelevant to me personally. But occasionally there is a useful heads-up.
The solution is to do something so positive that the brand is changed. Make it dramatic enough, and the past is forgotten.
True. Neil Armstrong's career as a singer-songwriter has been overshadowed by his other activities.
https://youtu.be/QFwJgXwFE-E?is=KHdDBMdaBCCzgwgd
Apparently it's not only a Scottish joke.
Here's Chris Pratt saying it in German:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XUKBSJHmGgo&pp=ygUXY2hyaXMgcHJhdHQgZ2VybWFuIGpva2U%3D
The effect is definitely real, I don't even know who Chris Pratt is or what he does, but I once saw a joke about him being named after a fried rodent, and I still remember it.
Oh, forever branding an actor as a third world delicacy is tight!
I heard it first about an Iraqi engineer called "Abdul" and a goat.
The human male sex drive across cultures yearns for the insides of caprines.
I feel like there's differences between assessing groups this way and assessing people this way but it might just be "single actions are more information about people than single people are about groups"
This seems like the most correct version, yeah. Like, hearing about 1 fraudster is poor info about EA as a whole, but 1 rape tells you a lot about the rapist as a whole!
At least a part of this is that if you successfully establish a norm that a single sufficiently horrible action gets you ostracized from society, it is an effective incentive not to do the horrible action. It's not perfect, but it helps.
If you successfully establish a norm that a single sufficiently horrible member gets your group ostracized from society, it doesn't accomplish nearly as much in terms of harm reduction. The group often can't tell in advance which people will later be horrible, and if the individuals deciding to be horrible aren't motivated by personal consequences, they probably won't care about their group, either.
Depends who the person is, and for EA it loops back to the movement/ideology question.
SBF is one person... who influenced/employed a lot of EAs and was supposedly friends with Will MacAskill for over a decade.
The castle debacle was done by the Centre for Effective Altruism, which isn't an individual and isn't exactly a bunch of nobodies.
Neither tell you much about "does our charitable donation actually go where it's supposed to go, and do what it's supposed to do, and can we achieve the best good for the least dollars" being a good idea or not. But they do tell you *something* about the movement of people that think about that idea, even if they don't tell you something about *every single individual* within the movement.
Part of it is about narrative, and violations of expectations. EA presents itself as being an effective approach for smart people - therefore for EA to make a mistake of that nature is a narrative ("People who think they are smart and do something dumb"), and people don't forget that.
This is the right view on groups imo. I honestly thought the whole post Scott was setting up a strawman with this being the teardown.
For judging people (cancel culture was mentioned, things like the red scare or oppressive autocratic governments also come to mind), I think something else is going on. A judgement that carries high information can still hurt societies due to a mismatch of scale. A small town gossiping about MacGregor is a punishment matching the scale of the crime. So is national backlash and loss of office for Weiner, an intentionally public figure in a national position of power.
Twitter mobs and autocrats, on the other hand, both see huge societies thinly, and have power to hurt individuals deeply. They are in some sense "correct" to use their limited, biased judgement to summarize people not for who they are but for how they threaten a certain worldview. What's incorrect is the amount of power given to those with such limited and such biased judgement. We have good reason to empower individuals with freedom of speech, rights for criminals, anonymous channels, etc. We have good reason to reign in the power of autocrats and Twitter mobs.
I think your idea is partially right but also ignoring part of the issue, which is something something density and controversy. If MacGregor does something that everybody in the village agrees is bad, then MacGregor gets shunned by the whole village. If MacGregor does something that 5% of the village thinks is bad, and 95% disagree, then whenever one of the 5% try to pick on MacGregor he's likely to be around some friends to defend him.
If 5% of Twitter decides that something is bad but 95% disagree, then that 5% can find isolated individuals doing the things and gang up on them. It's not merely that Twitter is too large and the scale of the punishment is too harsh for what they've done wrong, it's that it's not clear they've done anything wrong at all. The scale of the internet allows unpopular opinions to coordinate and enforce punishments on beliefs, opinions, and behaviors that the majority of people agree with. The dynamic of shaming people for doing bad things historically was only done against people who were actually deviating against the consensus, not as a way to pull a coup against the consensus itself.
Well put. The term cancel culture should be reserved for institutional punishment of people based on the claim that no alternative view can be legitimately held - so simultaneously a morality and a truth claim. The cases here presented fall under your category of social norm violations. These are the things you can't unsee or un-visualize and that will remain the first association coming up.
Another factor is that many of our social instincts are calibrated for village-scale events. On a village scale, if several hundred people are annoyed enough with you to go out of their way to tell you that you suck, then this is an enormous problem for you. On a "going viral on Twitter" scale, tens of thousands might be telling you that you suck, and that's going to feel like an absolute catastrophe even if there's no doxxing, threats, attempts to induce your employer to fire you, etc. At least not unless you're used to being a public figure and have already recalibrated your social instincts for that scale of things.
The second paragraph of this post is a brilliantly concise take on the deeper insidious nature of internet mobs. One of those "I already believed this, but this gives me a profoundly snappier way to think of it" takes I am always grateful for.
Although I suppose your 95/5% does still run into the issue there are absolutely 50%/50% Wars of Religion (or Gang Wars, let's not read deeper into this) type situations even in traditional societies where you might just end up in the wrong village or on the wrong street and be wildly outnumbered by those who would do you harm, and everyone is incredibly wary of who's around at any one moment. The big catch is that these tactics precisely allow a 5% to pretend to be a 50% and force everyone else to take them much more seriously, even if they don't quite get to pretend to be a 95%.
Rather than wrong/right or good/bad, it might be more practical to think of this as filter bubbles having a strong effect on social norms. I agree with you that a tiny minority can, by dint of volume, seem disproportionately prevalent on social media platforms. On the other hand, consensus is complicated.
i dont think this is a complete explanation, since if 95% think macgregor is fine, most probably they don't approve of the 5% ganging up on him, and they could gang up on the 5% pretty effectively too
Yeah. Whether it's fair or not, defining an individual for a single action is a powerful deterrent. Doing it for a group based on one of their individual's action isn't. If it's a well-coordinated group and it's the leadership doing the bad thing, then it might still work, though.
Ironically, almost immediately after reading this post, I had to describe famous Forgotten Realms (default D&D setting) creator Ed Greenwood as "the drow breast milk guy".
I am certain that Ed has written plenty of extremely detailed and valuable lore. But he replies to *one* discord comment asking about the taste of drow breast milk...
I assume it would taste like milk. :P
I did not expect to ever Google "drow breast milk", but your comment got me curious, so TIL that to dwarves, all elven breast milk tastes like unsweetened licorice.
He's gotten in some mild trouble for being, effectively, too sex-positive for a heterosexual man (too much discussion of sex, all consensual!), from what I understand, but hasn't really gotten cancelled yet. I think.
Never heard *that* one before, knew him mostly as "created Elminster who might or might not be authorial self-insert, also has Elminster bonkin' babes of all levels up to goddess all over Faerûn", but I've never been enough into DnD to know this kind of gossip 😁
Hey, totally off-topic, but did you have any particular thoughts/commentary on the SSPX mini-schism thing? My ex-catholic friend was excited to give me the backstory, which was deeper than I expected. I usually appreciate your perspective on anything Catholicism-adjacent, so I was curious.
The very short answer is "they fudged around and then they found out". I'm sorry about it, because I do think there's a place within the church for traditional devotions and that the post-Vatican II rush threw a lot of value out with the dusty accretions.
But the SSPX have been given a *lot* of second chances by various popes. This time they tried it with Leo, and he didn't tolerate it. They formally put themselves into schism. What happens next? Do they survive? Do they become yet one more of the fringe nutjob splinters that elect their own popes and claim they are the Only Real Catholics? We'll have to wait and see.
But they've burned through a lot of goodwill and any moves to rectify this have to come from them, and be proper discipline, not yet more "we promise we'll be good and stop doing the silly things" (then go off and do silly things) messing around that they've been doing up to now.
Huh, I've got to admit, I am confused how that could've possibly worked as long as it did. So like, the Pope walks up to the pulpit and says, "Hearken my children, for as we all know I am God's chosen messenger on Earth, and it is not I who now speak -- it is the Almighty Himself, and I am merely a vessel for his omniscient wisdom. And lo, God says we shall do X, Y and Z. End transmission." Then some guy in the back pipes up and goes, "Actually me and my buddies are cool with X and Y, but we think Z is stupid and we won't do it". How is that not instant auto-excommunication ?
Apparently they actually got excommunicated by a previous Pope, and then the conservative Pope two popes back unexcommunicated them.
So, God changed his mind (twice) ? Or what ?
Also, I think the technical term should be "recommunicated" or "incommunicated". Just throwing it out there. You're welcome, Catholics ! :-)
The thing to understand about the Catholic church is that X is never "just X", without exceptions, mediating circumstances, and extremely nuanced metaphysical interpretations. So yes, the Pope is infallible. But no, everything he says is not coming directly from God. It's both, and neither, and only one or the other, depending.
This is either a feature or a bug, depending on who is looking.
Isn't the pope only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra?
Neat hypothetical, but not even close to what happened (or who the Pope is). SSPX's big thing wasn't refusing to do something, it was preferring to do something (the older form of the Mass) that had been standard practice for over a thousand years.
If a group had simply invented their own Mass and violated some of the basics, it would have been a simple case. But this was something even all recent Popes say is fine, but only in moderation now. The distinction was too subtle to merit excommunication.
The Pope appoints bishops, SSPX went ahead and designated their own bishops. This was a much more direct and grave break with Papal authority.
The problem with SSPX for us agnostics and atheitsts who might sympathise with them over their love for the Tridentine (latin) mass (a preference I personally regard as primarily historical and aesthetic) is that all their other ultraconservative views are pretty ugly.
SSPX for us ignorant mases?
Society of Saint Pius X. They're a ultraconservative splinter group of Catholicism that got really mad specific liberal reforms to the Catholic church in the 1960s (including "stop treating the Protestants and Jews like shit"), and mostly relevant in the United States as the group most connected to Latin Mass, as I understand it. They recently gave big middle finger to the Pope by naming their own bishops without the pope's permission.
If you're interested, this thread is where I got most of my information, it's a pretty good read IMO.
https://bsky.app/profile/clairewillett.bsky.social/post/3mpkuvtp2ms2s
Ty and all good. I'm aware of them, just never heard them referenced before as SSPX. Good info though for the rest of the peanut gallery.
If the Wiki summary is to be believed, they also have a large presence in France. I have no idea what is up with that.
To clarify, I was using "mostly relevant in the United States as [...]" to mean "to people in the US", not "their relevance is mostly in the US" -- they're actually most dense in Europe, with the US only accounting for a significant portion of its numbers because of its size. The audience for this blog is mostly American, though, hence my caveat.
JRR Tolkien was a big fan of Latin Mass. He was not, however, remotely into fascism or treating the Jews like shit. The Nazis originally liked his works, it was very much not mutual.
As tumblr would say, "Linguistics professor John Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien, who teaches a dead language and has created 100 conlangs, is an outlier adn should not be counted"
From what I know of the man, he wouldn't mind being known as the drow breastmilk guy. He lets his freak flag fly proudly and doesn't bother to disguise his fetishes in writing. To him, sex and sexuality is a fundamental part of world building and he would claim the fact you're so squeamish about drow breast milk says more about you than him.
I would like to state for the record that I'm not particularly squeamish about it (though it's definitely not my thing), and actually think it's a vaguely interesting part of world building. But it's the only thing Tumblr knows him for, and despite being very invested in the D&D community, I haven't looked into him.
I was actually defending him to my friend, and found myself halfway through saying that I'm sure that one discord reply just seems shocking when isolated and out of context, and that I'm sure he's done a bunch of normal world building, when I realized the irony that I was accidentally paraphrasing Scott's paragraph on Weiner.
Apologies, I meant "you" in a generic sense. Proposing what I think his answer would be to a hypothetical person judging him for writing an answer about drow breast milk
Not sure if you are a pedant like me but the technical term is "the impersonal You"
I'm apparently not quite the level of pedant you are but appreciate being given the term for it - I use "the impersonal You" a lot in general, although sadly have sorta been phasing it out because LLMs treat "you" as referring to the model itself in pretty much all cases afaict.
I use it a lot as well! But because of confusion i sometimes substitute "One" for "You" to avoid having to explain the impersonal you and how it doesn't mean the conversation partner lol.
All good, I figured it might be that, but I wanted to make sure the record was clear. :P
...See, this is only the tip of the spear depending on how into D&D you are. I need something way more out in left field than that to fundamentally reorient my D&D neural pathways.
Until today I never heard of "drow breast milk" comment. But it sounds entirely in-character for Ed Greenwood (I almost typed "for Elminster"), and something he is likely proud of, assuming he thinks about it at all.
I don’t know what this anti psychology debate is about, but do you make a distinction between psychology and neuroscience? As far as I am aware the people who discovered how neurons function were mostly not psychologists.
They were mostly psychologists until there were enough of them to justify a new name.
Even today, they are mostly psych undergrads, and their work is mostly taught in psych classes at college.
At the macro level of disciplines like 'Math', 'Biology', 'Engineering', and 'Psychology', each discipline is a very wide tent that contains multitudes of distinct fields and methods. I think neuroscience still falls definitively under the macro discipline of 'Psychology'
Early pioneers in neuroscience like the people who did the squid axon experiments and Ramon y Cajal and Broca or most of the people who developed the EEG were not psychologists.
There is obviously a lot of overlap between disciplines, but there is still a distinction that can be made between studying the physiology of the brain and studying human behavior/cognition at a different level of abstraction.
Worked in a neuroscience dept with basically zero psychology grads. Mostly doctors who went into neurology, various flavors of geneticists experts, biochemists etc.
Descriptions of rare diseases tend to talk about fairly focused stuff like repetitive motion getting worse until the patient dies horribly.
Nobody particularly interested in priming, group psychology, social psych etc.
highest level behaviour stuff I've heard talked about in presentations/meetings was about how patients on dopamine agonists would sometimes go from sober and loyal to destroying their lives with gambling and infidelity.
Which... I gotta admit, gave me a little bit of a different perspective on when people boast about how much "self control" they have but tweak a neurotransmitter and suddenly they're off drinking and whoring.
Or even people who insist it's all down to "society" or someone being mean to the person when they were a kid.
> Which... I gotta admit, gave me a little bit of a different perspective on when people boast about how much "self control" they have but tweak a neurotransmitter and suddenly they're off drinking and whoring.
Are they wrong? They do have self control. They are simply built different from those who do not. A lack of free will is no excuse to deny the existence of virtue.
People sometimes talk about it like its something they can claim virtue points for.
But in reality it's like deciding they get virtue points for being born tall.
Except it's also fragile to even subtle perturbation such that all that "virtuous self control" melts away like the morning dew.
>like deciding they get virtue points for being born tall.
If you're born tall, and not otherwise a cripple, NBA will be very happy to richly reward your "virtue".
> But in reality it's like deciding they get virtue points for being born tall.
Some people are born more capable than others. They deserve respect, do they not? Let's not pretend that everyone can eventually become someone that matters if they just work hard enough.
I studied neuroscience in undergrad and at the PhD level, and this does not match my experience. Neuroscience is a widespread undergraduate major at least in the US. There's a *segment* of NS (social & cognitive) that is basically psychology + fMRI. There's also some research on addiction/psych disorder treatments that overlaps with neurobiology research. But cellular/molecular NS has much more to do with genetics, cellular biology, biochemistry and biophysics. Systems and computational NS labs take mostly physics, comp sci and statistics majors.
I'd estimate 80% of neuroscience research does not owe its existence to psychology. The most recent program of the Society for Neuroscience mega-conference is a good way to get a sense of what kinds of research are being done: https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/21171
It depends. Psychology is one of the most inherently cross-disciplinary scientific disciplines around. The core of it is defined by observable patterns of behavior by individuals. If what you are studying aren't observable patterns of individual behavior, then arguably it isn't psychology. But nearly everything we do study involves other disciplines.Both neuroscience and computer science have strong implications for explaining what individual people do, and our models of individual human behavior have had strong implications for what neuroscience and computer science study. These days, it's more common for research studies to be published by cross-disciplinary teams than by specialized individual researchers.
"You invite one conservative" is a funny way of saying "one long time poster on white supremacist webforums" who continued to post super racist stuff like this after he supposedly saw the error of his ways: https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1656770321368883201
You could say that's Macgregoring him too but it's not one sheep.
There's a potential rule - everyone gets one sheep, but after that it's a pattern
“Once a philospher, twice a sodomite”?
This is a relatively poor rule to follow. Considering that some rather famous people have fucked one goat apiece (It's a rather famous initiation ritual)...
hm... maybe that's because they know the "one free sheep fuck" rule, and want to ensure perfect behavior going forward?
"Fool a sheep once, shame on the sheep. Fool a sheep twice, shame on you."
This post is why your opinions aren't taken seriously.
What's the non-racist explanation for that tweet?
What's the racist one?
The racist explanation is that Hanania is referring obliquely as "these people" to black people, whom he calls animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways (Jordan Neely) or walking around in suits (presumably, District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who charged Daniel Penny, and whom Hanania is lowering to the same level as a random street criminal by implying he's acting out of racial solidarity rather than any commitment to the law).
I hope that was cogent enough. If Hanania didn't mean that and doesn't want it to be read like that he can be less of a vagueposter and just say what he means clearly. Because otherwise people are justified in trying to extrapolate the most reasonable meaning, and assuming that his reason for not saying it more clearly was having a very thin veneer of plausible deniability.
The conclusion to draw: spend less time on Twitter. It rots the brain.
It's been doing that since before Elon Musk made it into an X-parrot.
I agree with the general sentiment but I think Hanania may have just Been Like That.
^this
It's definitely racist, but the amount of open racism from black people towards me makes me not care a bit that they get a taste of their own medicine.
I believe black people have been getting quite a bit of a taste of this particular medicine in general throughout history. This is a very unproductive mindset. There are weirdos in every community and in every political movement, the goal of the rational people should be to shun them and engage in dialogue with the adults in the room, not to play childish tit-for-tat games with the dumbest elements on the other side.
"Umm akshully sweetie, you can't be the victim of racism."
Are you careful to make sure that only the black people who have been racist toward you experience the consequences of their actions?
"It's definitely racist, but I blame the entire demographic for the behavior of individuals of that demographic, so I don't care about being racist." Well, okay. Great argument. You think no black people have ever had a white person be racist to them?
I've never liked Hanania's takes, but I think that now he's just gone for edgelording and riling up the normies. Hot takes and clickbait, not measured opinions, and he loves the attention he gets and all the outrage just proves to him that he is a natural superior person of intellect to the idiots who are so reliably dancing when he pulls on their strings.
If you take a shit on the floor and everyone gets outraged and angry at you this does not show that you are a genius provocateur. Just that you're the kind of person who takes a shit on the floor. Whether you did so on purpose to rile people up is immaterial, you don't get to claim victory just because you always MEANT for people to get annoyed by your obviously annoying actions.
I appreciate you doing the yoeman's work of explaining this to people who are, for the most part I think, pretending not to know exactly what it means. It's also far from the only time Hanania has very deliberately said stuff which is obviously extremely racist but which he knows has theoretically innocuous if implausible reading. He knows exactly what he's doing.
>Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.
I take "these people" to refer to his ideological opponents. Many of the people involved in Penny's indictment ("walking around in suits") were white.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg, specifically, who did the indictment, is black. This is "alien who just landed on Earth" levels of disingenuous. Combined with the well-established history of what kind of racial epithets and dehumanization is hurled at which specific groups, and with the fact that Neely didn't do anything particularly *ideological* so I don't see why Hanania should group him up with liberals, then your interpretation needs to explain a lot and the racist one fits like a glove all the data.
As I've said in my other comment, if Hanania didn't want to be taken as racist, he could not have made this obviously-very-potentially-racist message a vaguepost. Just say "liberals are deranged" or something. No reason to be all ambiguous for that.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Richard Hanania harbours racist opinions. But I think you're doing the thing Scott complained about in "Against Dog Whistle-ism" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/). It's one thing to say Hanania's tweet could be interpreted as implicitly racist. It's quite another to say that he's "posting super racist stuff", without qualification.
No, I'm not. I agree sometimes people stretch the idea of a dog whistle too far, but this is definitely not too far, and you shouldn't be so naive that if a mafia boss tells you "I sure hope your family doesn't have any 'accidents', heh heh" your answer is "gee thanks, I'm glad you're so concerned about their safety!".
The racist interpretation of that post is the most natural and obvious one, and Hanania knows enough to predict that's how it would look. Anyone in his position, with his awareness of the discourse, who wanted to say something non-racist, would have phrased it differently exactly to avoid being misunderstood for a racist. He is, in fact, being racist.
"It's one thing to say Hanania's tweet could be interpreted as implicitly racist. It's quite another to say that he's "posting super racist stuff", without qualification."
Can you clarify what you think the difference is? A statement that we can expect will be interpreted in a specific way X by a large number of people can be succinctly described as "an X comment". This is highly common usage in American popular discourse.
Alvin Bragg specifically is black, yes.
Had it been Chesea Boudin, the results would've been the same because Boudin was also a pro-crime psychopath but he's not black, and Hanania likely would've made the same comment.
So who are "these people"? Again, to everyone who claims it means democrats or liberals: why would Hanania be so confident in Jordan Neely's politics?
Even if that’s what it meant, “these people are animals” is problematic and something people being slightly careful would tend to avoid saying.
How much effort would it have taken to be more clear?
Not much, it seems.
Isn’t Hanania a writer (to some degree)?
Hanania is a troll and a provocateur. Based on the reaction to this tweet, obviously quite talented in both domains.
So, his comment blew up in his face. It’s the risk he’s taking. Oh well. (Not sure why some people are defending him.)
If the point is trolling, then it IS a racist statement. A troll may not MEAN what he says, but he says it to anger people, and obviously saying something he knows is racist will anger people. Maybe he doesn't believe the racist thing he said and he only said it to piss people off (for whatever purpose that may serve). But he still said it.
Even if this is all he is (I disagree, but granting it), Scott's description of him as "a conservative" is hilariously incomplete, which was my original point.
He is. A rather successful substacker. Mostly free to read. I wouldn't pay for it. But especially for those who judge someone super-racist because of a tweet: recommended. One does not need to be very smart to understand his posts. As with JK Rowling. Who is *not* anti-LGTBQ.
It might not be racist (or trolling).
It might just be carelessness.
(Some of what JK Rowling says seems careless, at least.)
The same sort of thing happened with Musk's "nazi" salute. You might not be able to tell whether he's actually a racist without cutting him (or anybody) open and counting the rings. But he appears to say/do quite a few things that many people are going to interpret as racist. He should be more than smart enough to avoid that impression (repeatedly). Many (less smart) people manage to do it.
The non-racist explanation is that blacks are objectively different, either for cultural or genetic reasons, from non-blacks in socially relevant ways and it's not inherently racist to have views which reflect reality.
I think you've got that backwards. Any factual claim explicitly hinging on racial categories (which "[racial category] are objectively different" certainly qualifies as) could reasonably be described as 'racist.' The point you seem to be arguing for is, rather, that if such a claim is sufficiently consistent with reality, believing in those specific claims shouldn't be regarded as morally wrong, despite racism-as-a-category's hard-earned terrible reputation... but since remediating the broader stigma seems infeasible, category definition needs to be warped in such a way as to exclude the desired subset.
Gotta say, I'm not a big fan of twisting cromulent definitions out of shape for political convenience. Nobody wins that game. https://xkcd.com/1860/
So, "white people are more likely to get sunburned than black people for a given level of exposure" can reasonably be described as "racist". we just have to argue about whether there's a not-morally-wrong subset of racism it could fit in?
I don't think that's a particularly useful distinction. Racism as traditionally defined, requires a claim of *superiority* rather than just difference, or expressed prejudice and discrimination on such a basis, and it requires that the claim and/or prejudice be based on race rather than e.g. culture. That is, to me at least, a much more useful definition in addition to being a more traditionally accepted one.
And in this context, I'll take your Richard Hanania tweet and raise you Chris Rock's "Black People vs [redacted]. Rock expresses clear prejudice and at least some degree of discrimination, while very strongly implying superiority, on the basis of cultural differences between two groups of people of the same race. It's hard to call that "racist" when it would fit just as well in a world where absolutely everybody was the same race.
Hanania's tweet is more ambiguous, in part because it's a tweet rather than an extended monologue. It could be coming straight out of Klan-style white supremacism, or it could be coming from the same place as Chris Rock. So if you want to accuse Hanania of white supremacism, please look farther and more critically for your supporting evidence.
I don't think it can possibly come "from the same place as Chris Rock". First, Chris Rock was making a comedy routine, and Hanania was making a dead-serious sounding comment on specific news, suggesting that certain events deserved real outrage. Second, Chris Rock is clearly talking about two groups *within his own race*. The meaning of his routine is pretty obvious: there are certain stereotypes about black people, and these stereotypes keep existing because of an obnoxious group of people who embody those stereotypes, and whose actions ruin things for everyone, other black people included. That's a complaint about culture, not race, he's saying "we're all being looked down on (as a race) due to the behaviour of a certain culture". The entire *issue* with racism is that it completely washes away individual distinctions. Saying "guy so-and-so is a criminal because he stabs people" is not racist, saying "all people that look like guy so-and-so are criminals" is. And in Hanania's case he was implying that there's some kind of alliance or inherent love for crime shared between the black homeless mentally ill subway disturbance guy and the black District Attorney who indicts someone for using excessive force in restraining him. I'm going to hazard a guess that you don't make DA if you are one of those people Chris Rock calls with the N-word.
This is actually just called racism and this view is in fact completely nonsense. You can argue the DA's decision was wrong without invoking the nebulous idea that somehow this is because he is different "for cultural or genetic reasons". Maybe he just has different opinions. His actions were hardly crazy and completely out of any possible interpretation of the law.
Thank you! That's the only reason I came here. And I was concerned that I'd be the only one saying it.
Why do you interpret that as racist? He could be being derogatory against the extremely mentally ill (which is somewhat justified) or homeless (also somewhat justified)
How do you explain the reference to the "suits"? Are people in suits generally considered so mentally ill as to be called "animals"? Genuine question
Ok I might just be wrong in my interpration. Simone's explanation above tracks.
You are being rather naive.
If “these people” was referring to the “extremely mentally ill”, it would take no extra effort to have said “extremely mentally ill”. Who refers to the “extremely mentally ill” as animals anyway? How many “homeless people” are wearing suits?
If he didn’t want to be misinterpreted, he should have been more clear.
Not to mention, calling the mentally ill or the homeless animals is also not exactly what the kids would call a good look.
>How many “homeless people” are wearing suits?
The "lifestyle homeless" and "down on their luck homeless" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-san) presumably wear suits occasionally.
I don't think I ever wore a suit while "down on my luck homeless", but I did have one.
Of course, the "lifestyle homeless" and "down on their luck homeless" are probably not the people Hanania was referring to.
> The "lifestyle homeless" and "down on their luck homeless" presumably wear suits occasionally.
Sure, no doubt there are exceptions. But largely irrelevant.
It still seems unreasonable to expect that anybody would be interpreting "these people" in "these people are animals" as referring to any sort of homeless people. And it doesn't seem likely that most people are going to expect that typical homeless people are going to wear suits. Especially, in any way that it's characteristic of being homeless.
Most people are going to interpret "homeless" as the "down on their luck" type.
> Of course, the "lifestyle homeless" and "down on their luck homeless" are probably not the people Hanania was referring to.
I'm addressing the suggestion that Hanania was referring to the "homeless" or "extremely mentally ill". This suggestion is absurd (IMO). (I wasn't commenting on the nuances/variation of what "homeless" might mean.)
The "these people are animals" is either racist or really bad communication. Not sure why anybody would waste time defending it.
>Most people are going to interpret "homeless" as the "down on their luck" type.
I'd say most would interpret it as the "wretched" type; indeed, you seem to be interpreting it as centrally the "wretched" type.
(The "down on their luck" type outnumber the "wretched" type in total numbers of people who've *ever* been homeless, but are homeless for much-shorter periods and are much less identifiable as homeless.)
> I'd say most would interpret it as the "wretched" type; indeed, you seem to be interpreting it as centrally the "wretched" type.
It doesn’t matter (it’s not relevant to the discussion here).
Effective communication requires shared meaning.
The (some form of) "down on their luck" is the standard (common) implication.
If somebody (you, for example) want people to know they aren't implying the common implication, they need to be clear about it. Not being clear about it is a failure of communication.
It's too far a reach to argue that Hanania was talking about homeless people. It's an even farther reach to argue that "suits" was referring to homeless people.
> indeed, you seem to be interpreting it as centrally the "wretched" type.
You are over interpreting what I actually wrote.
I'm not talking about the nuances/variation of what "homeless" might mean. That's a different (and irrelevant) discussion.
From Wikipedia: "Vázquez also said that Neely was frightening but had not assaulted anyone before Penny’s headlock.[8] Other witnesses reported Neely throwing garbage at passengers, and a mother stated that she hid with her child behind a stroller after Neely charged at other passengers.[13][14] "
Yeah, I have no problem with calling someone who throws garbage at passengers and charges at them an animal. For far too long, the police have none nothing about the hooligans (yes, including white hooligans) who make public transit unbearable for ordinary people. I am glad to see ordinary people take matters into their own hands.
What about the people in suits?
If he had said “people who throw garbage” instead it seems no one would be discussing it.
Hanania is mentioning the "people in suits", referring to the District Attorney who indicted Penny. Just about the only thing in common the DA has with this random bozo who throws garbage at people on the subway is that... they're both black.
... and that they're both acting in antisocial ways.
+1
No, they're not, that is a stupid interpretation. Neely acted in an antisocial way. A DA investigating someone who seems to have used a disproportionate excess of force in dealing with a minor threat leading to someone's death is in fact just doing exactly his job as society asks him to. An indictment isn't a sentence, but you can't expect "kills someone in a chokehold" to be a fully uncontroversial and consequence-free action, and the idea that this should just be allowed unpunished and without scrutiny for the sake of freeing ourselves of the plague of weird hobos being weird does not lead to a better or more stable society.
"Investigating" != "filing charges." It would have been fine if the DA's office had spent a day or two interviewing people and going through footage. The antisocial part was when the DA then used the considerable resources of the state to attempt to punish Penny (thankfully unsuccessfully) for ideological ends.
He killed someone for the crime of being loud and moderately scary on the subway. I'd have voted to convict even if the jury decided otherwise.
Marshall Rokossovsky gets out of Stalin office and swears "That mustache idiot would pull us into war"
After which Beria arrests him and brings to Stalin
"Comrade Rokossovsky was spreading lies about you, comrade Stalin"
"What did you say, comrade Rokossovsky?"
"I said, 'That mustache idiot would pull us into war'"
"Who did you mean, comrade Rokossovsky?"
"I meant Hitler"
"And who did *you* mean, comrade Beria?"
Best answer to this interpretation of this tweet
Very well; who did Hanania mean then?
Democrats
Either because leftists or anti-White
And from what exactly do we gather that Jordan Neely, the homeless mentally ill man whom "harassing people in subways" refers to, was a Democrat?
Putting aside that you shouldn't call your political opponents "animals" either, and it's certainly not the mark of rational or thoughtful politics.
You know, if you've been sitting on evidence that Neely was actually a Heritage Foundation staffer, that seems important and you should definitely make it public.
Those are not the only two options, and my guess is that most likely the specific political beliefs of a homeless mentally ill dude aren't very determinant factors in whether he harasses people over the fact that he's, you know, homeless and mentally ill.
He insinuates Democrats are criminals, not criminals are Democrats
That seems extremely inconsistent with Hanania's actual view, which is that MAGA is a low human capital movement and the Democrats are increasingly a high human capital group.
Funny that Hanania is much more accepted *now* that he's switched to "elite human capital" "low human capital" phrasing, and gets much more respect for saying conservatives are idiots.
Same level of bigotry, but hey he's including poor white people, so he gets a pass!
> gets much more respect for saying conservatives are idiots
What he cares about is clicks, visits to his blog, paid subscriptions & sales of his books.
He's playing a Machiavellian opportunistic game: he caters to the current 'underdogs' because they provide a better revenue stream than the current 'top dogs'.
During the Biden era, he played the anti-woke side of the field; now that Trump & co. are ascendant, he 'critiques' the 'rightoids' & writes a book about 'kakistokracy' which explains why 'populists' are ruining America.
The funny thing about this post, for me, is that it's both about and an illustration of why I don't recommend ACX to people anymore.
Oh yeah, Scott Alexander? Many great posts about discourse norms and incentive structures and neuroscience and AI! Important in me becoming an effective altruist! But there is that *one* thing... And unfortunately, that one thing is "very friendly to claims of the inherent inferiority of black people, and the people who make them, as long as they have the gauziest layer of deniability."
If I were going to recommend it, it would have to be in the tone of "well, he doesn't spend *all* his time fucking sheep; if you just look away during that part..."
Yeah I feel exactly the same way. I also try to take it into account when reading other posts. If it's both factually wrong and misleading about this one thing I know and care about then how should I feel on other topics I'm less familiar with. And yet I still read, perhaps unadvisably.
"Very friendly to claims of the inherent inferiority of black people" isn't the impression I get from the beginning of this article: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to
This entire post seems to assume that population IQ estimates in the US demonstrate the inferior intellectual ability of American Black people.
The post argues that IQ is not 100% genetic, and is to a large degree environmental. Any inferiority in intellectual ability would then be largely ameliorable, not "inherent."
It doesn't say anything about IQ differences by race in the US not being genetic. And given Scott's long history of friendliness to HBD I don't see much reason to overlook this. And saying the difference is not "100%" genetic is far form rejecting genetic inferiority of Black people.
"But if IQ was 100% environmental, we should expect populations’ IQ to vary based on the quality of nutrition, health care, and education that they get. Therefore, because whites in the US have IQ 100, and blacks get on average worse nutrition, health care, and education than whites, we would expect them to have some lower IQ, like 85."
IQ isn't 100% environmental - it's a complex interaction between environmental and genetic factors that are not significantly correlated to race.
I can understand not wanting to read or write about this, but if you *are* writing about it, you'll do a disservice to your readers if you pretend the hereditarian hypothesis isn't plausible. It might be false, but I don't think anyone can justify high confidence in that. I'm exhausted from the endless moralizing on this. Yeah, exercise care, which usually means just not discussing it, but somebody somewhere probably should talk about it a little bit, and I sure hope they can put curiosity ahead of moralizing.
I generally prefer that this conversation remains mostly dormant, but yes, Scott was implicitly assuming the expert consensus on this. You're using tendentious language to make a (sadly) well-validated claim look maximally ugly. I think you also understand that, even in the wake of the "vibe shift", your career and reputation are at little risk from you saying that, while anyone who might disagree is checking their anonymity before responding.
No, it doesn't assume that. The main points of the post: USA provides much better (IQ-wise) environment for black people than virtually all black-majority countries, and that national IQ estimates from Lynn are in agreement with other means of accessing intelligence.
That's exactly the post that made me decide I couldn't recommend ACX anymore - that and the follow-up (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn), where he responds to someone pointing out that Lynn was deeply and openly racist and a Nazi sympathizer by saying "true" and moving on.
In other contexts, Scott is aware that science is difficult and prone to methodological issues, interpretative issues, and bias, and that although this is something you need to watch out for in many places (e.g. drug trials), it's *especially* something you need to think carefully about when discussing hot-button issues studied by people with strong opinions on the subject.
When it comes to IQ estimates of black people by white supremacists, though, his standard of scrutiny drops precipitously.
He talks about racism because he's writing for an audience he knows will raise that as an objection. And he believes "it's not racist if it's true", when writing about claims of black people being genetically inferior, which is what all racists believe. But the combination of saying that and dropping your standards for determining whether it's *actually true* isn't fearless truth-seeking, it's just giving yourself an excuse to be racist with a veneer of objectivity.
"claims of black people being genetically inferior"—but the whole post is saying that IQ is significantly a product of environment, not genetics, right? At least non-genetic enough that huge gains can be made by improving environmental factors.
The whole post is premised on the idea that the IQ estimates made by a notorious white supremacist, which just so happen to show that African countries have the lowest IQs in the world, are essentially correct and we don't need to investigate how they might be wrong - only explain how they might be right, even if they seem implausibly low.
In the follow-up post, he claims that only a tiny slice (5%) of "[the fact that] Malawians are obviously smarter than intellectually disabled people [despite Lynn claiming they have a national IQ of 60]" can be explained by Lynn's data or analysis being bad.
I'm not really interested in arguing the question of genetic vs. environmental contributors to IQ. Drop the words "genetic" and "inherent" from my previous posts, if you like; the point holds, which is that Scott is very prepared to accept "most black people are just dumber than most non-black people" without asking too many questions.
These estimates agree well with PISA, PIERLS and every statistic gathered by organizations that are not so-called "white suprematists"
According to Lynn, Asians and Jews have higher IQs than Whites, why'd you call him a white suprematist? It's more logical to call him Jewish suprematist.
I think it's pretty clear that he believes in racial differences in genetic IQ--at a certain point if you demonstrate this lack of care about the issue and are happy to engage with people who hold that view as reasonable people you're at least sympathetic to it. Also look at his posts about Hungarian jews, not to mention private emails that have since been leaked which suggest that, at least at one point, his true views were more extreme than ones he's willing to express publicly.
OK, all this seems quite possible to me, but not grounds for freaking out. Do you agree? Let's say Scott is wrong about racial IQ differences, and is taking one line of thought and evidence too seriously and another not seriously enough. Why get agitated about that ? I'm sure he does that sometimes, like everyone else. I've certainly thought he's done that when arriving at some of his views about AI.
But there is something about the idea of someone believing that blacks are on average born with less intellectual capacity than whites that people freak out over. It is considered s a terrible view to have! Even wondering whether it could be true is seen as evil. Why, though? Believing that blacks have less intellectual capacity than whites is definitely not like believing the earth is flat -- an idea so obviously wrong that anyone with common sense can mentally refute it. I have sometimes waded into the research literature about this topic, and when I do I have emerged exhausted and uncertain. It is absolutely not true that all those making the case that blacks are less intelligent than whites are foaming-at-the-mouth racists who are lying and p-hacking like mad to convince people they are right.
So even if Scott is wrong about black intelligence, there's no reason to be sure he arrived there by a dishonorable route -- by letting his personal racism guide him to selectively attend to the arguments supporting his prejudice. And it seems likely to me that many who are positive there is no real empirical support for the idea are selectively attending to the arguments that support their need to believe that there is no black-white difference in intellect. I approached the research and the arguments expecting to easily find solid evidence there was no difference, and emerged uncertain. Reading all the stuff and determining the preponderance of the evidence is a big, tedious, unpleasant job, and the chance is not tiny that someone who does will emerge from it with a view that makes 90% of educated people hate them. So I haven't done it.
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"But there is something about the idea of someone believing that blacks are on average born with less intellectual capacity than whites that people freak out over."
Because history. Slavery was justified, in part, by claims like this. So additional caution is prudent here.
If, as the leaked email showed, Scott believed that it was probably or possibly true, what should he do with that? Serious question. David Reich famously gave his answer in a NYT op-ed, but it seems like you wouldn't approve.
Who's "he"? If it's Scott, he's free to keep posting pro-HBD and pro-eugenics posts, and nobody will bother him about it as long as he keeps up the pretense of being a liberal. He's not directly advocating for anything, because he's not in a position to do anything about it anyways. But the people reading this blog might be able to do something.
>where he responds to someone pointing out that Lynn was deeply and openly racist and a Nazi sympathizer
The claim made is that Lynn was part of an organization that had as a co-founder someone who was an academic during the Nazi years and became a respected geneticist after the war. This man, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, may well have participated in Holocaust crimes and (like most Holocaust perpetrators) escaped punishment, but no evidence was given that Lynn ever knew of this.
The interesting thing to me is that both sides of this issue are claiming they can no longer recommend ACX. Which seems like it says something...
Both sides? DecipheredStones and Sam B seem to be in agreement, and they're the only ones I see talking about not recommending ACX.
From that link: “You can talk to a Malawian person, and talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome, and the former is obviously much brighter and more functional than the latter. Doesn’t that mean that the estimates have to be wrong?”
This is an illustration of why talking about differences in average intelligence is kinda (risks being) racist.
Averages are properties of populations but this quote is talking about individuals.
The overlap of the bell curves with 85 and 100 average is 62%. Using the averages to predict individuals seems not to be a good practice.
(The overlap of the Malawi bell curve is much lower. Something like 25%.)
It doesn’t seem fair to base expectations of interacting with individuals on an average (it’s prejudicial).
While I share you feelings, consider that the opportunity here is to offer counter-arguments that might persuade some number of people here who have no strong opinions either way. For example, there is no reliable evidence that black people share cognitive traits as a racial group. Any cognitive traits, good or bad. There is no reliable evidence that cognitive traits track race in ways that are not more easily explained by other factors.
Obviously, if I'm right, then any argument that black people share inferior mental traits falls apart.
Of course there's no reliable evidence - if anybody proposed a research program strong enough to gather it, he would be hounded out of the profession quicker than you can blink. That's the crucial problem - the "progressive" worldview that rules the academia cannot treat this issue as an open question, regardless of the state of evidence. You must take it on faith that there's not the slightest intrinsic difference in cognitive traits between various groups, or you're a nazi.
You're objectively wrong. Many researchers have conducted research on this very issue, ending with conclusions on both sides, but one side prevailed. The hypothesis was tested, and failed to be supported.
Are you just saying that "ancestral populations" has more explanatory power than "race", therefore any biological claims about race are mistaken? (Because if so, you should say so.) Or is this leaning on "no reliable evidence"? (The purpose of evidence isn't to be reliable, so it's unfortunate you put that word in there.)
Seriously, you're playing your cards close to your chest, being precise about language in weird ways, and I can't figure out quite what you're driving at. I suspect if you just clearly said what you mean and showed evidence, things would go better.
Well, that's a lot to parse. This is a highly complex topic, and it's hard to be concise.
Evidence (which I take as synonymous with "data" or "empirical results") has to be reliable or it can't be trusted. Reliability has specific operational definitions within statistics. Basically, it's the answer to the question "Are differences in the data real, or just a statistical fluke?"
For there to be reliable evidence that racial differences in IQ scores mean something, there would have to be real differences between racial groups on IQ scores. There certainly are. Black Americans consistently score below Whites and Asians.
The question is whether or not "race" as a variable explains the variance more successfully than other available metrics, and the answer is no. Because there are also highly reliable differences in the childhood environments between racial groups. These environmental variables are more highly correlated with variance in IQ scores than race is.
However, there is also both empirical and theoretical reasons to believe that there is a complex gene x environment interaction going on (see my posts elsewhere in this thread).
I may have expressed myself in a confusing way. If so, I hope this clarifies things.
As for the inferiority of black people, I contend that we must exercise additional skepticism (hold the hypothesis to a higher standard of evidence) than other explanatory factors due to an unfortunate history of the use of this concept to justify social exploitation and oppression of black people. There should be nothing too controversial in requiring a higher analytical standard when the public consequences of getting it wrong are so high. After all, we do more or less the same thing with respect to drug studies, for more or less the same reason - to protect against risks to public safety.
Yeah. If you think Hanania's worth it, that's fine (for some set of 'fine') but 'one conservative' is disingenuous. There are bullets that have to be bitten.
Yes, that's what "conservative" usually means in the contemporary US and the broader western world.
"Non-racist conservative" is a non-central and not particularly intellectually coherent (inborn hierarchies are great, except for the one we've been using as our major organizing principle in the Americas since the time of Columbus) example of conservatism.
>"Non-racist conservative" is a non-central and not particularly intellectually coherent (inborn hierarchies are great, except for the one we've been using as our major organizing principle in the Americas since the time of Columbus) example of conservatism.
Unlikely you could pass an ideological Turing test as an American conservative.
AIUI, Mr Hanania posts in favour of high-skilled immigration, which means that he is neither a conservative nor a white supremacist.
I wonder if part of the solution lies moving beyond the public internets which collapse context...
Or at least move beyond Twitter?
If you move beyond Twitter, you may as well also move beyond Reddit and BlueSky. And then Facebook. And then Instagram. And then Quora. And then listicles. And then legacy media editorials and commentary.
Probably best to just say "move beyond short- and medium-form media".
Maybe, sure. But don't let perfect be the enemy of better. Every little bit helps.
I was thinking in terms of taking inspiration from the clopen set... provide a blend of closed cozyweb and open internet (using the dark forest theory of the internet as my framing: https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/ )
Here's a protocol I'm playing around with:
"The Stag Hunt protocol solves a specific coordination problem: how do you get the epistemic benefits of a small, honest, in-person conversation — the kind where people actually update their views because the stakes of being wrong in front of five people you respect are different from the stakes of being wrong on Twitter — without either (a) keeping the whole thing private forever, which wastes the good ideas, or (b) publishing it directly, which changes what people are willing to say in the room. The trick is a two-phase structure. Phase one is synchronous and closed: a small group talks under Chatham House Rules, so nobody has to pre-optimize their sentences for a public audience, and the conversation can go to the interesting, underdeveloped, maybe-wrong places that only happen when reputational risk is low. Phase two is asynchronous and public: someone takes the raw transcript and resynthesizes it into a single anonymous essay-voice — not a dialogue, not a summary with names attached, but a fused perspective that carries the ideas forward while stripping anything that could identify or embarrass a participant. What gets published isn't a record of who said what; it's the residue of the conversation — worth reading on its own terms — released into public view specifically so people who weren't in the room can stumble onto it, riff on it, or connect it to something else. The closed room protects candor; the public writeup converts that candor into serendipity, without anyone having to trade one for the other."
Until editorial standards for that protocol can be refined by long practice, I'd want to be very cautious about who gets to be phase two's "someone." Probably not release anything until every participant in the original conversation has signed off on the fused perspective's final-draft adequacy, with plenty of room for haggling and nitpicking on the way there.
Sadly, pretty much all the AI discourse happens there, and you can't relinquish the front seat at the apocalypse.
You know... yeah.
The internet is an excellent example of the law of unintended consequences. The development which was intended to offer free speech to the oppressed everywhere has developed into a monster that breeds flash lynch mobs and conspiracy theorists with audiences of tens and hundreds of thousands. Should we want to see it destroyed, or wish it had never been invented, now that we see what it became?
Or should we pioneer new internet native institutions that can uphold ideas regarding civility, accountability, freedom of association and expression
That would certainly be welcome. But... good luck prising the internet from the death grasp of its hyper-profit oriented current owners and gatekeepers.
That joke is older than Stonehenge….
"But do they call me MacGregor The Stonehenge Architect?"
Ah so this is why we don't know who built Stonehenge.
But we do; tradition is very clear that it was Merlin.
So old it was Gilgamesh the Fuck Your Bride Firster's favorite joke.
"accidentally get thousands of people addicted to sports gambling"
So...speaking of only discussing the worst things, I feel like the explosion in prediction markets has been just as bad for society as the naysayers said it would be, in exactly the ways they said it would be - scams, insider trading, backdoor for bribes, endangering national security, threats against journalists, formerly reliable pieces of information like airport temperatures no longer being reliable because of people betting on them then tampering with them, and yes "accidentally getting thousands of people addicted to sports gambling", without many benefits as far as I can see.
I'm interested to know if you're still sanguine about them, or if you're feeling any buyer's remorse.
That airport temperature issue is making me think: Prediction markets without a tightly policed environment are just a giant Goodheart's-law-cesspit, no? As we can also see in the stock market right now, where the tight policing has suddenly (and hopefully temporarily) been given up after a rather long and successful track record.
> Prediction markets without a tightly policed environment are just a giant Goodheart's-law-cesspit, no?
No one is forcing you to take the other side in these bets.
Avoid markets that look like they could be easily manipulated.
Markets that look like they could easily be manipulated now includes politics and war thanks to insider trading from the white house. (E.G. Trump's teleprompter guy)
If these markets aren't legitimate the actual social value of prediction markets is lost.
No, no, insider trading is food for prediction markets. Transmits information to the general public. But you shouldn't necessarily take the other side.
What I meant is markets like the French airport temperature one with the hair dryer.
I get your idea about "transmits information to the public". But have you considered that there might be people deranged enough to send the minimum viable number of bombs that count as "attack" or "war" to win a big prediction market bet about the probability that country X goes to war with country Y? I'm not being facetious here.
I don't see any new threat here.
How's that different from buying short-dated out of the money options?
Even without dedicated prediction markets, an attack on eg Mexico will have an impact on financial markets that you can bet on. And sending a deniable assassin after a CEO would also impact the company's stock price.
People who have the ability to decide what number of bombs to use have much better ways to make money than cheating at Polymarket. These people are equally capable of insider trading the stock market which moves on the same news. In fact they can (and do) make a lot more money that way than they ever could on prediction markets.
Little oft overlooked caveat.
The defenses for insider training came from a time when insider trading mostly looked like "the people in the know understand some company is much more or less profitable than the market realizes, but is about to find out" and the insider trading gets that information to the market sooner.
Insider trading is only good for the prediction market when the information it transmits:
1. Would be accurate regardless
2. Wouldn't get transmitted but for the insider trading.
Its good for the market to know that a disaster is about to happen and pay the one guy who knows an exorbitant amount for telling it. This keeps the market calibrated to the risk of disaster, _but only because_ usually disasters are not the kind of thing one man can make happen.
Where the prediction market _itself_ is the incentive to cause the disaster, without the insider trading, the disaster _would not have happened_. The prediction market loses its calibration to reality because the existence of the market distorts what would happen. Separately, more bad things start happening because individuals can make them happen and then trade on them before hand.
Tl;dr - the insider trading is NOT good for the market if the information wouldn't have been true if there hadn't been insider trading.
yes, an equivalent of Goodheart's law. I quote myself: "But have you considered that there might be people deranged enough to send the minimum viable number of bombs that count as "attack" or "war" to win a big prediction market bet about the probability that country X goes to war with country Y? I'm not being facetious here."
You can already short your employer's stock and then discreetely leave a bomb threat message or assassinate your boss.
> The defenses for insider training came from a time when insider trading mostly looked like "the people in the know understand some company is much more or less profitable than the market realizes, but is about to find out"
No, you've stated it much more symmetrically than reality can justify. The people in the know are already heavily invested in the company. If it's much more profitable than the market realizes (but is about to find out), they can take advantage of that without doing any insider trading, by not doing any trading.
So insider trading as a legal enterprise has to focus on cases where people in the know understand that a company is much *less* profitable than the market realizes. This has the additional virtue that the people getting prosecuted can be easily painted as villains.
Even cases of not trading where the case for "insider trading" as a concept is clear-cut - for example, where an executive has scheduled the sale of stock well in advance (so as to avoid the charge of insider trading), but cancels the scheduled sale the day before it would otherwise go through - don't count.
Or avoid the whole thing?
I think it's worse than that.
Scott himself once wrote an article that explained why stock markets are anti-inductive:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-anti-inductive/
It seems to me that, in the limit, the natural incentive for prediction markets is to make *reality* anti-inductive.
After all, if there's a reliable event happening in the future that everyone can easily predict, it's hard for anyone to make any money off of predicting it.
The incentive is always to try to manipulate reality to be maximally surprising, since then you're the only one who knows what will happen, and can make bank.
We do *not* want to live in a reality that is maximally surprising.
Eh, most financial markets are already prediction market (for some more limited predictions). And they haven't turned the adjacent reality anti-inductive so far.
Have they not?
For example, I would call the Elon Musk DOGE fiasco highly anti-inductive and largely a result of weird financial market bullshit.
I sort of feel like a lot of people feel like they have no idea what is happening with the world anymore, and financial markets are not *not* a major player in that turn of events.
Huh? How is that fiasco anti-inductive?
I mean, it's unlike things that have happened in recent memory, it was highly chaotic and unpredictable and outside of established channels and procedures, it was a pretty shocking turn of events. I think we largely still don't understand the true consequences it had in the long run.
What did DOGE have to do with financial markets? Genuinely didn't know this.
A cursory search for "DOGE and SEC" implies that Elon tried to use DOGEs powers to sniff around the insights of the SEC and maybe more, like spreading fear and driving away employees or snuffing out investigations. No idea how far that went, but the obvious fraud going on doesn't make me hopeful.
Musk's success and influence is only due to his ability to manipulate investors and get valuations a million miles beyond what his companies actually produce.
Basically, Musk is a 'trillionaire' only because the stock market has become decoupled from the actual economy, and is in many cases just a tool that rich people use to bet against each other. Investors blew up Tesla stock because they expected a greater fool to buy it from them at a higher price due to all the hype, not because they thought it was a productive company with a sound business model and strong earnings.
Without that effect of the stock market making Musk an internationally relevant/influential figure based on his 'wealth' valuations, no chance he ever would have been allowed near government service.
Leaving aside the incentives corrupting actual policy / official behaviour. Insider trading is killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Who'd bet honest information against a rigged market?
Commodities markets in the US worked for ages without much of any rules against insider trading. (They recently introduced some, but it didn't seem to have made people trust those markets more, as you seem to claim these rules would?)
Commodities are selling physical goods. As most physical goods aren't monopolistic, you have less of the pressure of Enron (which people knew was failing for a good while before they caved and went bankrupt.)
Catching the falling knife is the hard part, and where insider trading would come in handy.
The fact that other market participants have more information than you does not imply that the market is rigged. In fact, this is true of any market.
That's a semantic argument; the point is that it *is* a market you don't want to participate in, which is generally bad for the health of the market.
>Who'd bet honest information against a rigged market?
Someone who wants to own shares in a company that so they'll get a share of the profits of that company.
The optimal desired outcome is "we mine all the predictability we can and all we're left with is the irreducible chaos we can't predict". But of course there's always the possibility of "we just make things MORE chaotic in our struggle to make money". Incentives, incentives.
The airport temperature thing feels like classic McGregorism to me - you have tens or hundreds of thousands of temperature markets going off without a hitch and people developing weather models and having fun playing with them and winning or losing money and so on, but the one time someone did something weird is all anyone remembers.
Hair dryer is a minimum viable proof-of-concept. If that turns out to be an effective and reliable way to make money, somebody's going to try mounting long-range energy weapons on blimps or satellites to save the hands-on work. Any economic framework that turns supervillainy profitable has a serious problem.
But nobody did it after that one time, so it evidently wasn't reliable or effective.
It's almost like deregulating trading and markets allows bad things to happen.
I feel extremely justified in my naysaying. Prediction markets kept using stock markets as an analogy for why it would be good, and I agree stock markets are mostly good, but they are so incredibly tightly regulated and policied down to the minutiae, and there's *still* a ton of sketchy stuff that happens! Prediction markets didn't stand a chance!
To expand: it's not just the stock market itself that's regulated; that is doable for the prediction markets corporate entity as well. It's that *every single interaction and bet* on the stockmarket is *also* tightly regulated! Every entity participating in the market needs to be monitored and regulated, in order to have stock listed you need to get regular audits and follow tons of rules, the types of trades allowed are tightly controlled (less than they used to be, and this has been strictly negative for retail traders).
The analogy was more revealing than its proponents realised: there was never a plausible way to get each layer of prediction markets (the market, the types of trades, and the participants) anywhere near the level of cleanliness of stock markets (which, to reiterate, are already not perfect but pretty good).
I said financial markets, not stock markets. That was your narrowing.
Sorry, but "financial markets" was your widening, not the other guys narrowing: I started the analogy and comparison to stock markets that started this whole thread.
Sorry. Then I should have said: not all financial markets have the same regulation. Different markets in different places in different times differ in what regulation they get and how and how effectively that regulation is enforced.
For example, foreign exchange markets are fairly loosely regulated in many places. Commodity markets in the US didn't really have any insider trading rules until fairly recently. (And the introduction of these rules doesn't seem to have made these markets more trusted by market participants.)
Insider trading rules in various parts of Europe and the US differ a lot, too.
And, of course, there's also private markets for stocks that aren't public, and they have different regulations.
These are good directions for the conversation!
FX is a useful example because the market is so large that individuals can do very little to influence it and, unless you work for a central bank (and hence have your trading activity closely monitored) it's very difficult to have anything like insider knowledge.
Commodity markets are also very large, and the smaller ones (or ones that work less on a spot basis*) are indeed sketchier than the bigger ones.
Almost no prediction markets get anywhere near the scale required to have these properties.
*Egg LIBOR is a funny and informative example: https://danjwu.substack.com/p/i-was-tricked-the-case-has-been-cracked
I assume you got your Egg LIBOR from Matt Levine? (If not, you should read his newsletter Money Stuff!)
You clearly have no idea what you are taking about. The types of trades allowed on the stock market are much crazier and massively more leveraged than anything you could possibly do on a prediction market.
Bro, I'm not even allowed to buy and sell four times in the same week on the stock market. Yeah, you can get a stupidly over-leveraged bet. Nobody cares if you go into default (unless you're a huge chunk of the population, like has recently happened in South Korea). The issue is shit like insider trading, price manipulation, and so on, which are highly, highly illegal on the stock market.
Price manipulation is illegal on any market, so that's not an issue here. As for your trade restrictions there is absolutely no restriction on trade number either legal or market rules based. If you have such a restriction you probably have a low value or highly restricted account. This is your broker protecting themselves from you, not protecting you from anything. It is very easy to get a retail account with full fuck your self over trading power.
The boosters of prediction markets thought it would just be all the nerds who were interested in the stats and arguing over probabilities, and taking it public would then reward the People of Maths for their big brains by letting them scoop up money from the rubes who were not People of Maths, and then by proving how smart and correct they were, government and society at large would appoint the technocratic experts of prediction markets as the oracles of policy decisions by following the prediction markets.
Reality did not turn out like that. As I constantly bewailed, putting money in makes it about "how do I get $$$$$ off this bet?" and not "how do we arrive at the best decision with all the smart informed people bringing their expertise and insider knowledge to the question?"
If you want to do sports betting, those companies are also tightly regulated. Prediction market companies thought they could skip over that by being "we're not betting on sports (and we pretend what we're doing is also not betting, it's calculating probabilities by using your smarts, okay yeah that does sound like gambling but it's different, we swear!)".
How's the regulation on betting on American Presidential Elections?
What specific prediction was made & falsified?
Quite a few people pointed out that normies would use them for sports and celebrity gossip.
>agree stock markets are mostly good, but they are so incredibly tightly regulated and policied down to the minutiae, and there's *still* a ton of sketchy stuff that happens!
During prohibition there was a lot of sketchy stuff happening with alcohol production and sales. Regulations create sketchiness as people evade or find legal loopholes to get around them.
I see benefits. Prediction markets make people far more informed about all sorts of things than they were previously. Information is valuable - we pay the media precisely because they provide us the service of providing information.
I don't know how the costs and benefits weigh on a societal level, but for me personally, it feels like prediction markets have been a net benefit so far.
They could just be regulated not to include sports betting and they would be entirely positive.
To me the sports betting is the least of the issues. People could already bet on sports on plenty of other websites before prediction markets, so while sports betting is generally bad, prediction markets didn’t make it much worse. The problem is that it’s so often easier to change an outcome than predict it, so people now have an incentive to mess with things that were previously too boring for anyone to mess with (ie the airport temperature thing), or to bet on actions they themselves will take, where the market expects them to take the normal and reasonable action, so they bet on themselves to take a bad and dumb action and then do it.
The promise was definitely that they'd be beneficial on a societal level, not just for individuals trying to satisfy random curiosities or enrich themselves at the expense of others.
If they've failed on that front, then it's a failure, period. (And I don't see how they're not badly failing at that.)
If you don't see being able to predict things as a societal benefit than yeah prediction markets aren't going to do anything for you.
So what information did you get from said markets that benefitted you?
It’s my number one strategy to find out answers to questions like, “how is the war in Ukraine going?” “Is Putin at risk of losing power?” If I had to rely on pendants to get this info, I would learn precisely nothing — other than there are people who feel strongly about contradictory views. Prediction markets give me a real sense of whether odds have changed.
I'm not the great Scott Alexander. But I like having an extra channel of information that's based on the desire to make money rather than the person funding the channel's ideology. They're not infallible, but it's like having the left-wing people, the right-wing people, and now the prediction markets weighing in.
As for insider trading and scams, well, those are only a problem for people actually putting money in them.
As for threats against journalists--their role in the Great Awokening has kind of caused me to lose sympathy for them. But I admit, overall, for society, this is a bad thing. Wasn't there just one case or something though?
Now futarchy, which means not rule by hermaphrodites from Japanese erotic animation but rule by prediction markets, strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. But as an extra source of info, I'm still happy with them.
> As for insider trading and scams, well, those are only a problem for people actually putting money in them.
Scams of the form "public official does something, then profits by having bet on themselves doing that specific thing, with greater returns the more shockingly bizarre and stupid it was" can have collateral damage far outside the market itself.
I know you're talking to Scott, but as a pro PM person...
I acknowledged these dangers before they became popular, and felt they should be regulated similar to the stock market. A central authority needs to approve any given question/stock to avoid: pointless betting (sports), perverse incentives, scams, etc. polymarket and company need to address this before their ship sinks.
Unfortunately it appears the human appetite for betting is so high, they can make way more money from short term gambling + interest than they probably ever would the correct way. A correctly done PM would be great, but maybe it will never happen.
Maybe I should have phrased differently, I was interested in everyone's thoughts, just thought it would make a good post topic. I like most of these ideas. I was also thinking - Making it a little costly in time/money/effort to get approved to trade on prediction markets would eliminate a lot of spur of the moment corruption/insider trading opportunities, while allowing professionals to do thier thing. Maybe something like, your first bet is 100 dollars and you're allowed to increase ten percent each time. That way you have to do 150 trades first to start betting a million dollars
>pointless betting (sports), perverse incentives
Oh great, so now Donald Trump gets veto power over any market that would predict a negative outcome for Donald Trump's policies.
Presumably, cheating airport temperatures to make money would count as fraud, which is already illegal.
If only someone made a prediction market about this.
Correction: "accidentally" get *millions* of people addicted to sports gambling.
is this true?
Only the companies themselves, collectively, would have the data. If you had to guess though...
X × Y = incremental American gamblers
X = Americans who have ever traded a prediction market
≈ 10M-35M [between 4% [1] -15% [2] of adults × 260M adults]
IMO seems within realm of possibility - Kalshi claimed +3M users in one month!]
Y = share for whom this is genuinely net-new gambling
≈ 15% [3]
-> ~1.5M-5.25M incremental gamblers
Worse, prediction market users experienced higher losses than users of other gambling products. "[A] March report — which tracks user activity from July 2025 onward — ... found that the median loss for prediction markets now stood at 8%, while for sportsbooks it was 5%." [4]
Sources:
[1]: https://aibm.org/research/most-americans-see-prediction-markets-as-more-like-gambling-than-investing-new-aibm-ipsos-poll-finds/
[2]: https://www.paradigm.xyz/writing/paradigm-february-2026-poll-on-prediction-markets
[3] https://www.gamblinginsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/SM-Data-Client-3.16.2026.pdf, https://www.gamblinginsider.com/news/118438/prediction-market-survey-insider-trading-user-growth [though estimates vary, this source is probably conservative, because it seems likely it collected more experienced gamblers given the source]
[4] https://www.gamblinginsider.com/news/151976/prediction-markets-higher-losses-bettors-citizens-data
I think a relevant distinction is how many people participate in sports betting without being addicted to it. Anecdotally, I know a dozen or so people who've done sports betting, and none of them are addicts. (Potential confounder: most sports betters I know actually made money from it, which is unusual.)
Still, my model is that MOST people who make sports bets are not addicts, just people who find it fun. This can be true even if gambling sites make MOST of their money from addicts (which seems to be the case).
I thought the statistics are so bad that Scott have linked some libertarian posts that give up on sport gambling legalization?
Zvi has basically-a-reference-post on it: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment
It's definitely more than "thousands". Anecdotally for myself, working on the retail frontlines, sports betting is both a common "hobby", and also a known Danger Zone that many end up regretting, even if they aren't strictly "addicted". This was very much not the case before Daftkings and the like came along! At most you'd have the yearly March Madness brackets and Fantastic Four Football, with maybe a small storewide pot, and it was a pretty casual thing. Not this always-available compulsive urge to gamble, reinforced by constant ads in all sports media, on public transit, on podcasts...
All the Youtube revenge fantasy story channels I watch have "my husband/mother-in-law/other family member had hundreds of thousands in hidden debt because of GAMBLING".
Clearly this is sufficiently a problem in Asian societies that it's a credible element in a story. "Yeah, that tracks, Auntie spends most of her pension on those card rooms" where, when it's supposedly set in high society in Chicago or Georgia, "my hoity-toity mother-in-law was secretly in hock to the bookies" just doesn't work convincingly:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027273580800072X
I confess I didn't read this at all thoroughly, but is he talking about prediction markets there? I see there's a section called "What About Other Prediction Markets?", but ctrl-f 'prediction' and 'market' don't turn anything up, and the section on "The Product As Currently Offered" only points out the two failure modes that prediction markets avoid: bad odds and denying access to winners. Everything else seems to be about sports gambling in general, which I believe well-predates prediction markets, with dedicated sportsbook companies still capturing the majority of the sports gambling money in the US.
It was written before sports betting had finished colonizing the prediction markets. There's a stat rattling around my head saying that something like 80% of the volume on real-money prediction markets is sports betting and similar low-VOI degen now, but I have no idea if that came from Scott, Zvi, Yglesias, or someone else. I've been waiting for a Mantic Monday post where Scott gives a very clear In Defense Of Prediction Markets As Practiced In The Current Day; there was a single somewhat-despairing one awhile back, but since then he and apparently everyone else in the ratsphere has gone back to treating them as our conspiracy's Oracles. (Substack Polymarket integration!) It's somewhat baffling.
I bring it up because you cited the Zvi article in support of GP's correction of Scott's "thousands". I don't think it's clear that prediction markets are to blame for mass sports gambling addiction, and Zvi's article suggests that they are preferable to DraftKings.
https://ir.aboutdraftkings.com/financials/quarterly-results/default.aspx says that DraftKings handled $13.1 billion in betting volume (if I'm interpreting correctly) in the last quarter. I have no idea whether to take this second source seriously seriously, but https://www.polysyncer.com/blog/polymarket-trading-volume claims that Polymarket has handled $8–12 billion in volume _ever_, with only 25–35% in sports (if we trust this source, your 80% may still make sense across a shorter timespan; they say much of the total comes from the 2024 US presidential election). Prediction markets are a small player in the sports betting space even if sports betting is a big player in the prediction market space. If you banned sports gambling, it would be to take down DraftKings, not Polymarket.
Separately, it's not clear to me what you're saying re: oracles. Are you saying it's baffling that they're taken seriously as oracles despite this or just that that happens without acknowledgement that they're hives of degeneracy?
“(Potential confounder: most sports betters I know actually made money from it, which is unusual.)”
How would you know? Them saying so doesn’t seem reliable.
A combination of:
1. Some external circumstances that I won't go into detail about that incentivized people to claim losses / worse earnings.
2. Posting their bets ahead of time.
3. Me literally seeing their betting history when it was up on their computer.
There was a period around 2021 when you could reliably make a few thousand dollars by collecting (at the time enormous) signup bonuses and then making offsetting bets on different platforms. I remember rat-sphere discussion about it.
Are the people you know in that group, or actual current sports gamblers? As far as I know it's incredibly hard to be up long-term on the app sportsbooks, because they will ban people with consistent winning records.
Yeah, they're all from that group. Though only one of them was risk-intolerant enough to need to offset bets on different platforms; there were enough new sportsbooks doing enough good promos that it mitigated some of the variance. We mostly just bet when the promos were positive EV and stopped when they weren't.
The only guy I know who is still regularly sports betting nowadays has indeed been banned off of multiple platforms for winning too much.
Surely the relevant distinction is how much money they make from addicts. If it would be bad that they got (say) $50M from a million addicts, surely it’s worse if they got $50M from a thousand addicts.
I dont think you really count as a gambling addict if theyve only made 50$ from you.
My impression is that it's more like getting $49.9M from ten addicts and $100k from 990 other people.
(My numbers might be totally off, but I think it's still true that whales / high rollers are the primary moneymakers for casinos.)
It's not necessarily bad if some people lose large amounts of money to casinos if they have large amounts of money that they can comfortably lose. The problem is when people, due to being addicts, bet significantly MORE than they can afford to lose. This obviously happens much more frequently than it ought to with sports betting, but it's still a significant minority of betters.
Whales, high-rollers, and addicts are different albeit overlapping categories.
The biggest revenue driver at most (all?) US casinos are slots. Someone mindlessly playing slots for hours is likely to be an addict, but unlikely to be a high-roller. There are a lot of retirees squandering their Social Security for every heir living out an Ocean's Eleven fantasy.
That might be true of some places, but it would depend on the casino. Probably the larger and fancier a casino is, the higher proportion of its money comes from people who can afford to lose it. Huge casinos might try to pull in high rollers, but a suburban pub with some pokies is probably getting a higher proportion of its profit off a larger number of lower-income people getting into deeper hardship.
And I think online sports gambling is probably closer to the suburban model. Large numbers of capped-size bets are much better for an operator - they can adjust the odds in real time to keep their variance low, and they can have an information advantage over most bettors that comes from scale. And on the flipside, it’s hard to provide a luxury experience, so it’s hard to cater to high rollers.
If you're going to bet on sports, the organizations organized as prediction markets are probably less predatory than the online casinos that kick you off if they think you're good enough to make money on it.
I don't think this is so straightforward for sports betting.( I'm much more familiar with poker, but I think the principles are basically the same, though I invite corrections.)
Sports books can update their lines based on what the crowd is betting: they adjust the lines so that they're guaranteed to make money regardless of what happens in the game. What a skilled bettor does is essentially take the money from other people and pay a tax to the casino. (The tax isn't literal, it's the vig-- the percent left over that the house would make if you took both sides of the bet.)
A casino, ideally, wants to ensure that everyone is slowly consistently losing money. And if you're a recreation gambler, that's what you want too. If the site becomes dominated by pros, then the recs just lose their money way too quickly to those pros. I know they're not literally betting against each other, but being a rec and getting any possible (short-term) edge eaten up right away by the pros serves a similar role.
It's a surprise to me that betting on sports is/was illegal in the USA.
It's a common activity in the UK (though I make no comment about whether that's harmless or A Bad Thing). Famously the Queen Mother (Lizzie's mum) loved a flutter on horses.
Is it fair for me to think that the US is quite puritanical in this area, and to put it in the same basket as prohibition?
Betting on horses has been legal in America for quite some time. America is being weird, as usual (and big, as usual. Prohibition, dry counties, still exist).
Is it only okay in britain to bet on American Elections, or can you bet on your own as well?
I'm not sure what's the weird behaviour in this instance. I imagine both countries feel that what they're used to is 'normal'. Gun ownership is another area where there's a huge difference between what we're used to and what the US is used to, and so we talk past each other.
In the UK, betting on elections (including our own) is fine, there's a decent market for political betting here. There was a case a few years ago about an insider betting on the date of the last General Election just before it was announced. It was small beer, and fairly inconsequential, but I think he was found guilty. Other than that, I can't think of any suggestion that the betting market has any effect on the political process. The political betting market is way smaller than the sports betting market, I presume reflecting the respective interest in politics and sport.
Prohibition is weird though.
Prohibition is folks in small towns, where the men are alcoholics, getting together and saying, "we're sick of our menfolk leaving us destitute!" "Ain't nobody getting no liquor!"
It's a little like guns. If I told you that you had to deal with feral hawgs and rattlesnakes and brown bears that will break into your car if they see a gum wrapper in the backseat... you'd want a gun too (no, this isn't everyone in America, but like I said, America is big).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that owning guns & banning sports betting is wrong, and banning guns & allowing sports betting is right. Just that my gut reaction is that what I didn't grow up with is abnormal, and I need to check myself when I encounter these cultural differences.
But I'll stand by 'prohibition is weird'. This is my considered opinion.
Oh, I don't doubt that "prohibition is weird" -- but ain't you guys the ones importing all those Muslims? They'll ban liquor if they can.
> Correction: "accidentally" get *millions* of people addicted to sports gambling.
Seems like this happened well before “prediction markets” (dumb name).
Online gambling seems like it inspired “prediction markets”.
Your comment makes no sense. I think you need to be more clear on what exactly you mean.
Things like fanduel and draft kings (examples of online sports betting) came before “prediction markets” (it appears).
Seems like their success inspired creating “prediction markets” to enable gambling on other (additional) things.
People had ample opportunity to become “addicted to sports gambling” well before “prediction markets”.
“Prediction markets” are not being called gambling to skirt gambling regulations. It appears they are “commodity markets” [rolls eyes] even when people are predicting sports results. Maybe that’s why you are confused.
(Note that I’m not really arguing that anybody got “addicted to sports gambling”. I’m just arguing that “prediction markets” didn’t have anything to do with it.)
I mean, sports gambling is dumb and unhelpful, but prediction markets were decidedly not created *for* that. The ideas are way older and go much deeper than that.
No, they weren't created for that: they were created to expand the scope of stuff to gamble on beyond (just) that. (Nothing I said suggested that that was their purpose.) But they are used for sports gambling.
(And I was saying they ideas (of sports gambling) are way older.)
The academic work on prediction markets goes back to the 80s and were never about "being able to gamlbe on more stuff, inspired by sports gambling" or whatever. Gambling is not what the current markets were all built on, although somewhat recently a lot of them regrettably did make an unfortunate pivot into sports gambling (where the money turned out to be).
A quirk of human psychology reflected in people's judgments of the truth-conditions of generic statements, and of habitual verbs. If John murdered one person, he's a murderer.
But if John worried one time, he doesn't count as a worrier. If only one percent of mosquitos transmit vitamin B6, it is false that mosquitos transmit vitamin B6. But if one percent of mosquitos transmit the West Nile virus, then mosquitos transmit the West Nile virus.
Generalizations about character of humans follow the same pattern. For the unenlightened, generalizing about racial, religious, or ethnic categories follow the same patterns. The quirk of human psychology is that we make a class of generalizations that have nothing to do with probability updating. If a trait or actions is particularly disgusting to them, the amount of evidence it takes to make the generalization well enough to guide behavior is trivial.
I think it's false to say that in your hypothesis that mosquitoes don't transmit vitamin B six. There are thresholds, which if passed, change the frame. And cheap quick reflection, it may have to do with the reverse ability of the categorization. There's no way to undo being a murderer. However, one can simply stop worrying. It's a week hypothesis, but I like it.
I like your idea, but I'm not sure it holds. MacGregor can't unfuck the sheep, correct. But he also can't really un-raise his kids, and while the bridge can be razed, it took a lot of effort and skill to build it and bridges are considered high in value.
Thanks! I think it does hold, in response to Barry's point. You would still call McGregor a kid razor or a bridge builder. The point is that those have been shadowed by the animal fucking, not that they have somehow been illuminated. So if the question is why does one stand out more than the other. I'm not trying to address that. But I sure will think about it – thanks!
> The quirk of human psychology is that we make a class of generalizations that have nothing to do with probability updating.
No, I think probability updating is what makes something habitual or not. The fact that Michael Phelps is a former Olympic athlete but Ken Jennings is a Jeopardy! contestant full stop isn't just some kind of arbitrary cultural convention about how much we value Jeopardy! vs the Olympics. It's because distinguishing between present and former Olympic athletes gives us more information about the world, allows for a larger or more actionable Bayesian update, than distinguishing between present and former Jeopardy! contestants.
If 1% of mosquitos are such that, if you get bitten by them, you get a modest increase in B6 levels, and 1% of mosquitos are such that if you get bitten by them, you get infected with the West Nile virus, humans are, according data you'll find the semantics literature, disposed to accept the generic sentence "Mosquitos transmit the west nile virus" but reject the sentence "Mosquitos increase your B6 levels." For instance, a doctor may recommend that you avoid or spray for mosquitos because they transmit the west nile virus, but will not recommend getting bit by a mosquito as a way to increase your B6 levels. Bayesian updating would have you assign 1% as the probability that an arbitrary mosquito does both at 1%, perfectly symmetrical. But the response to the information to decidedly asymmetrical. The same is true of habitual statements. Fred is a smoker is not true if he is smoked once in his life. Fred is a sheep-fucker is true if he fucked one sheep in his life.
I understand the impulse to see the "irrational" (when viewing it in a strictly logical/chemical/transport sense) difference in judgment as a "quirk" but I think it's actually probably the salient feature of evolutionarily adaptive learning.
A mosquito that incidentally transmits B6 if of effectively zero consequence to my predictions of future B6 levels and my health. A mosquito that transmits spreadable diseases is of consequence.
I expect that the brain that evolves to see the difference between those two enjoys a huge competitive leap over a brain that evolves to see the two as the same.
So regardless of "truth" value, it doesn't seem "quirky" it seems almost necessary.
Further, this observation extends into MacGregor-land.
The society that learns that MacGregor has a challenge with sheep (even from one incident) is better situations than one that forgets the many one-off-good-deeds he performed. So it's not just a brain that needs to see these things as difference, but our collective brain (society) that does as well.
(This observation is bouyed in importance by the observation that we are also, in general, better off focusing on avoiding rare incidents that are near-fatal-in-danger-importance to us than focus on avoiding rare incidents that are big boons to our fate. Upsides are nice, downsides are fatal.)
See my reply to Ninety-three above. The fact that our asymmetrical reactions to things like B6 versus West Nile, bridge building versus sheep-fucking, might be evolutionarily-advantaged but it makes it no more rational. If you decided to boost your probabilities that an arbitrary mosquito carries the West Nile virus simply on the basis of the fact that West Nile is scary (which we do), you're not responding to the evidence. You are, evolutionarily, being correctly risk-averse. But risk-aversion in responding to the correct probabilities is different from adjusting the probabilities according to risk. The evidence, at least in people's use of the language of habituals and generalizations, that they are adjusting their probabilities and beliefs according to risk, disgust, and moral approbation rather than evidence from frequencies. That's the quirk.
I'm not sure we disagree except for quirkiness.
"nonsentient" critters that do these things should survive better than nonsensitinet critters that don't. that's a good thing.
"number-crunchers" that want to speak only in unabashedly true sentences wouldn't do these things.
I don't think of that as quirky, but "wise" and systemic to anything that faces evolutionary pressure, even if irrational - that's all.
"The fact that our asymmetrical reactions to things like B6 versus West Nile, bridge building versus sheep-fucking, might be evolutionarily-advantaged but it makes it no more rational."
To the extent that surviving and leaving offspring are rational behaviors, this isn't true. Positive factors in life generally really do have less decisive impact on our outcomes than negative factors in life. You live every day, but can only die once.
And negative information outweighs positive.
New Scott classic. Very thoughtful take.
I mean one point could be made the Anthony Weiner (apart from the fact that he is named wiener) had multiple scandals involving sending his member unsolicited, I mean McGregor says ONE sheep, I'm sure there's be a lot less sympathy for McGregor if he made a habit of sheep worrying. At least the consistency is a part of it.
So part of it has got to be consistentcy and continued violations of the norms. Everyone makes mistakes but if it's becoming a habit then is it judging someone by the worst thing they've ever done, or is it pointing out a bad habit they have?
That is a good point. Part of the problem with cancel culture is it tends to make you an exile out of one violation, which means lots of people now hate the norms.
The problem with the loopyleftyreligion (Featuring Gay Pride Banners!) is that it not only exiled you because of one violation, it Left No Way Back.
Christianity says you can confess your sins, mend your ways, and you can come right back into the church, like a good parishioner.
It also kept redefining what a "violation" was to the point of lunacy.
Oh, yes, you had to be "always on top" of the new thing, lest you be "no longer good" (this is okay when it's "no longer cool" because cool has no repercussions).
And you let Cluster B Crazies in on the whole "victim" thing, and that's a bad idea in the first place.
Conservatives do this too ("That's socialism!").
Conservatives eventually forgive though.
Sorry, since when? Remember John Kerry? Mention Al Gore's name in any conservative circle. Dr. Fauci is a more recent example.
Google "Suicidal empathy." Consider that one can cancel whole categories of people, not just individuals.
I think the point is if you're not *that* big a bad guy they'll forgive you having said something liberal 20 years ago, whereas the progressives will cancel you for a 30-year-old racist email.
Have any of those people recanted?
I don’t have an opinion on this, but I could imagine a reasonable/rational justification of the stance “false negatives are risky enough to outweigh false positives, so it’s better to punish violations over-aggressively than to be too lax and occasionally let a violator pass by accident.” The challenge of course then ends up being an inevitable shift in norms, and knowing how to adapt to that change. Being adept at navigating change is not an equally-distributed trait, no matter the color of the neckties.
I basically went to 'side with men' as a result of this, but I imagine there are more scrupulous people here with different stances.
To be fair though, sometimes it's the other way around -- one bridge, and thousands of sheep. I think that conventional psychology (i.e. anything without "bio-" or "neuro-" in the name) might be in that category. So this part stays:
> Psychology laid bare the secrets of the brain - it performs computations through a neural network communicating via electrical impulses intermediated by neurotransmitters crossing synaptic gaps
This part is on very thin ice:
> Its concepts have turned into the categories that ordinary people use to interpret the world - extraverts, ingroups, the unconscious, IQ, Pavlovian conditioning
And all the social priming studies are out, and the same goes for oedipal musings and deep thoughts about how the psyche ought to work based on pure aesthetics and all the other non-rigorous nonsense.
I feel the same way about EA: what percentage of it is mosquito nets, and what percentage is saving the lives of shrimp and worrying about trillions of future space-dwelling descendants and literal gods from the machine ? Because I'm all for mosquito nets, buuuut...
When it comes to psychology I guess the thing is also, those are now different subfields. Not many people have as big issues with neuroscience, or even psychiatry (despite some of its horrible past history of electroshock and lobotomy and asylums). The main issues are with what we call psychology now which is invariably the "soft" part of all this, and has most of the concepts you point at.
> I feel the same way about EA: what percentage of it is mosquito nets, and what percentage is saving the lives of shrimp and worrying about trillions of future space-dwelling descendants and literal gods from the machine ? Because I'm all for mosquito nets, buuuut...
I feel like in practice most of it is mosquito nets? Like, in volume of money donated. Discussing and considering those other things philosophically isn't bad - philosophy does need to engage with outrageous ideas too, sometimes things are outrageous and if we don't let the farfetched speculative thinkers consider them, who will? The current AI stuff isn't gods from the machine yet but it still would have sounded farfetched in recent memory. I guess evaluation varies depending on whether you consider Anthropic an EA offspring, but if that's so... I dunno, that doesn't sound a terrible thing to produce as far as AI goes. I wouldn't consider it a failure.
My worry is that if I give Angus MacGregor my hard-earned cash, he might go and build a bridge, or he might go on a sheep-fucking binge. Both of those potential actions are in his portfolio, and I need to get an estimate on what he's more likely to do with my money. And if I see that Angus spends most of his time composing lyrical poems about the beauty of sheep, hangs out around sheep pastures Monday through Saturday, and puts in an honest day's work at the river crossing on Sunday -- then maybe I'll look for another guy to be the lucky recipient of my donation.
This is kind of how I feel about EA.
I donate monthly to GiveWell and GiveWell is very specific about what programs my money goes to. It's on their website. I can also pick and choose, though I did just go with the "whatever you think is optimal" plan. I don't need to form any particular ideas about a philosophical movement which obviously has many facets and ideas (some of which I think are dumb), as if everyone who ever subscribed to it gets a vote on where my money goes. That's not how it works. The reality of "EA-inspired organisations that do charity" is more focused and granular than the overall view of the movement as a whole.
On one hand EA has (as Sam Altman said it) weird emergent behavior but on the other I also find the discussion of mosquito nets overfocused on a single issue. To save as many lives per dollar as possible without much mention of other possible causes to support (helping people live healthy and meaningful lives). It reminds me of people who want to have a diet consisting of only a single food item and in general of the phrase optimize literally everything.
So instead of effective altruism, I prefer good enough altruism with diverse goals.
You should Google Scholar "Program Evaluation" and read some meta-analyses. I think you will find it highly informative.
> horrible past history of electroshock and lobotomy and asylums
Antonio R. Damasio wrote about Egas Moniz, his neurosurgeon collaborator Almeida Lima, prefrontal leucotomy as originally practised (& the reasons why it was done at the time) vs. frontal lobotomy (which Damasio calls "a butchering affair") in his *Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain* (pp. 58-61).
There are very few scientific subfields as well validated as cognitive psychology. Memory research alone was historically decisive.
The EAs are bright enough to do the bridge building in GiveWell and the shrimp fucking in Coefficient Giving. And even the latter seems to have toned down the weird a little, I guess because they want funding from broader sources than one billionaire couple.
That said, I prefer GiveDirectly myself these days. I have doubts about the ability of American nerds with spreadsheets to know the needs of poor Africans better than the poor Africans do (cell B13: percentage of income equivalent to losing one child...). And idk, if the situation were reversed and aliens from a richer society were thinking of giving us charity, I would rather they give us money and trade with us than for their spreadsheet people to decide what's best for us.
At least you get points for honesty.
"Its concepts have turned into the categories that ordinary people use to interpret the world - extraverts, ingroups, the unconscious, IQ, Pavlovian conditioning"
What part of this is thin to you? All of those concepts were proven useful in explaining the mind, at least until something better replaced them (see "Id," "Super-ego"). Is there something about, say, in-groups, that you find implausible?
Before you answer, consider that psychology, as a social science, cannot and does not seek to achieve the same degree of reliability that, say, physics is able to. There are sound practical reasons for this. (I say this just because I have been in these conversations before, and I want to nip that in the bud.)
> see "Id," "Super-ego"
Yeah, I don't think these concepts were very useful; at least, not nearly as useful as fMRI scans.
> consider that psychology, as a social science, cannot and does not seek to achieve the same degree of reliability that, say, physics is able to.
Ok, but a). why doesn't it ?, and b). does it seek to achieve *any* degree of reliability, or is it just an aesthetic exercise ?
Sorry, I was unclear. I was using Freud's triune model of the personality as an example of a thing that was replaced when something better came along.
As for the degree of reliability, it has to do with the kind of data we can get. human behavior is simply orders of magnitude messier than particles in an energy field. It would be nice if people could be reduced to concise laws that have no exceptions, but they can't. Psychology can't be physics.
But that doesn't imply that we have no reliability at all. When we collect data, most often we use one of two methods: direct observation, either in a lab or in a field setting, or we ask for self-reports, either in the form of a questionnaire, or a live interview.
Either way, standard statistical techniques allow us to determine how many subjects we have to include within every experimental condition in order to conclude that the results we find are not a random fluke - to a certain estimate of probability (typically such that the results should have a less than 5% chance of being a random fluke).
In the case of self-reports, statistical techniques can allow us to measure the internal inter-item correlation, the minimum number of items required to allow us once again to estimate the probability that the trait we are measuring is not a random fluke.
None of these techniques are perfect, and all of them have been criticized. In particular, the results of any single study should be considered preliminary until they have been replicated by independent researchers. Never trust a single study!
We have another method, called meta-analysis, which allows us to combine the results of different studies and, once again, estimate how likely their findings are the result of random flukes.
None of this yields certain knowledge, only probability estimates. And none of this even gets to the issues involved in using theoretical models to interpret the results.
Psychology isn't physics, but when it comes to human behavior, it's the best anyone can do.
> but when it comes to human behavior, it's the best anyone can do.
Yes, but is it good enough ? It's fine to say, "human behavior is complicated", but if it's so complicated that your discipline cannot make any verifiable predictions of it, then maybe it shouldn't be a scientific discipline. Or maybe we should stop taking self-report studies about social priming that never seem to replicate, and put our efforts into developing better brain scanning technology.
Psychologists make thousands of verifiable predictions every year, and publish them. Google scholar "psychology research" and peruse some of the articles.
You highs have to have a lot more sigma than your lows for you to have a chance (see JK Rowling).
What's the meaning of sigma here? Standard deviations?
Yes. But also, incidentally, the Gen Alpha slang.
so "highs with more sigma" means your high needs be a few "sigmas" higher than the lows to be offset? As if to say, you can screw a goat if you're a Nobel prize winner or so?
That unironically used to be the way we looked at things--brilliant people were allowed to be eccentric, others not so much.
That changed right about the time the guy who landed the robot on the asteroid got in trouble for his excessively-spicy shirt (that his wife had made for him).
What guy are you talking about? Please be less vague, I just keep asking questions here for what seems to me like "insider content" that I don't know about.
Apparently the guy's name is Matt Taylor.
Of course, as a scientist, technically he's a delta (or a gamma) not a sigma, but not every joke has to be exact.
If so, that sounds surprisingly accurate.
Hold up, is "sigma female" even a thing?
What am I "seeing" about JK Rowling?
That she remains un-canceled despite extremely heretical pronouncements.
Mostly because she giveth not a fuck.
Here's my take: I don't think you are obligated to understand a lot about Anthony Weiner because you don't really affect him that much, and he doesn't really affect you that much. If, say, you were writing a book about him, or maybe prosecuting a case he was involved (unrelated to the sex scandals) then you _would_ be obligated to learn more about him and treat him fairly using that knowledge. If you happened to already know a lot about him due to, say, being a close-but-not-direct relative of him, you'd be obligated to treat him fairly given the knowledge you already have, but not necessarily obligated to learn more. This can extend to both MacGregor and Psychology: Someone who is passing through town and hears about MacGregor can avoid him and carry on, but someone who moved in next door is probably at least obligated to do some basic verification of the tale (and then probably also ignore him, assuming it's veracious). Someone who is an internet commentator or a fan of explainer videos on youtube can hear about psychology replication crises and switch to other types of science videos, someone who is a policymaker or grantmaker in psychology probably is obligated to learn some of the nuance.
+1
This makes sense, except in the aggregate this means 99% of Weiner's conversations with strangers are going to be "hey aren't you the penis guy?". The problems of mass social media.
I'd imagine by now he has an well rehearsed reply to defuse the situation, or else has become a social hermit.
I'd probably try "Hey, it was in the name, ha ha ha... well anyway"
“That was the old me. These days i wait for you to take me out a couple times first.”
I'd put it as
- make a distinction between knowing vs. judging. The only thing I know about Weiner is that he's sent photos of his wiener. But if I were to vote in an election where he runs, I'd vote based on the policies he supports (or, if I'm too lazy to look those up, his party).
- make a distinction between thinking vs. saying. If I'm just the recipient of people talking about Weiner, I only think of him as the guy who's sent photos of his wiener, fine. But I won't help propagating it (unless the context requires it, e.g. someone asking what this Weiner scandal is about).
As an aside, would there be any interest around here in "psychology explainer" videos. Esp. since Hank Green doesn't seem to do that anymore.
We're a very social species. Maybe one of the traits which evolved to make this possible was the instinct to ostracize those who violate group norms.
Slight tangent, but I think a lot of negative group behaviour is explained by not only the instinct to ostracise, but the instinct that if *I* get ostracized, that is a death sentence (as it might be in a tribe of 30 hunter gatherers making up a noticeable fraction of the human population in 10^5 BC). It explains why when two people hit it off badly in a forum, suddenly they're both trying to persuade all bystanders that the other guy is the epitome of all evil who should be chucked out, and BTW everything they say about me are lies.
Someone ought to start a tradition, in which it's respected (even laudable , compared to the above) to announce that "I personally cannot stand MacGregor and would like everyone to respect my choice never to deal with him again, but I also accept that my opinion of him is due to my individual experiences and I make no call on anyone to share it"
I agree, but too long, and not catchy.
Hopefully a better writer than me can make it catchier, but terseness is usually a consequence of understanding, not its cause. If the concept were well known it would be easy to come up with some compact allusive phrase.
Agreed.
"I don't like the guy, but I don't expect anyone to agree with me?" Dunno. Writing is hard.
"He just bugs me"
"I'm just not into him."
What would be the goal of announcing that? People aren't going to stop talking about him just because it disturbs one person.
I was really talking about a different scenario; it was a mistake to link it back to MacGregor. Often a falling out between two people isn't immediately motivating to others, and they work to get others emotionally involved, by making it seem like they must pick a side. This is saying, I want you to respect my wish not to deal with X, but I don't need you to pick a side. The normal approach escalates a conflict, this approach resolves it. Implicitly, it says that calls to pick a side are illegitimate and enlists the group in suppressing such calls from the other guy, if they don't go along with the resolution.
I see, thanks for the clarification.
"Often a falling out between two people isn't immediately motivating to others, and they work to get others emotionally involved, by making it seem like they must pick a side."
Good point! Yeah, I find that dynamic irritating. ( E.g. Altman and Musk appear to have gotten on each others' nerves, and, rather than pick a side, I wish they would bury the hatchet and just concentrate on building AGI. )
I think that's a thesis in the book "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Max Bennet, in the chapter about language. Gossip promoted altruistic behavior and deterred cheaters.
Or, just the attempt to make people behave better by holding them to high standards.
https://youtu.be/CopYqp0HZkY
Go listen about it.
Of course black and white are the easy cases and the shades of gray (and the black-and-white speckles that look gray) are a harder. And to see with sophistication and maturity, in the moment, under pressure, over and over again; that kind of skill is the work of lifetimes. Waow so deep.
As for your motivating example of psychology, I dunno, cry some more? I believe that engineers know what they’re doing when the rockets fly and the buildings don’t. I believe that directors know what they’re doing when their movies move me to tears. Physicists when they split the atom.
If you understand so much, show us! Solve a problem! You understanding the world does nothing. You improving the world does everything.
Banish misunderstanding. Immunize the children against propaganda. Hell, bring it full circle to this post and solve the problem of empathy.
Do you think that commercial advertising works? Psycho-therapy? Animal training?
But also consider that many of the highest achievements that psychology contributed to were cross-disciplinary in nature. The cross-pollination between psychology and computer science for example. Arguably neither discipline would be where they are today without contributions from the other one?
Let’s say for the sake of argument those examples are truly causal, are they really the best examples anyone can muster? “We joined the war on exploitation on the side of exploration” is not a ringing endorsement of the field. It’s not the sort of thing that will make people overlook past foolishnesses.
And … are those examples truly products of knowledge of psychology? How so?
How would you demonstrate that causal relation to a skeptical audience whose prior might be, say, “there are people who have practiced skills like advertising and animal training and through practice gotten variously good at it”?
Eh, they were just the examples I thought of off the top of my head. Bear in mind that there have been 100's of thousands of research articles on psychological phenomena over the last century or so, summarizing all that is well beyond me.
Your argument seemed to revolve around "Do they know what they are doing? Does it work?" not "Is it socially beneficial?" But - commercial advertising is either manipulating the public, or informing them, depending on who is looking. But "Sell the sizzle, not the steak" definitely works, and is based on research in attitude formation and change, which more or less falls within social psychology. It goes back to the invention of something called the "Thurstone Scale" which was one of the first statistically reliable ways of measuring people's attitudes toward something. See also "Fishbein, M. & Ajzen, Icek. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention and behaviour: An introduction to theory and research." Here is a link to a more recent literature review: https://www.ijnrd.org/papers/IJNRD2507125.pdf
None of this is the result of mere trail and error. Marketing firms have spend millions on this. Marketers rely on this research.
For good or for bad, such research has had a tremendous impact on our world. The mind really does work that way.
"And … are those examples truly products of knowledge of psychology?"
Well, that's partly semantic. What do you consider "psychology?" The American Psychological Association defines it as "The scientific study of the mind and behavior." I would add "of the individual." That definition is so broad it includes anything we know about how individual people think, feel, or behave. Any study that fell within that definition can be considered "psychology." Surely anyone would concede that we know something about these things?
Great distinction to ask about. I think the argument I was making was "do people *feel* that psychology works?", which is not exactly either effectiveness nor global benefit but is in the neighborhood of both.
And as a corollary, I think people give a lot of grace to stuff that they can judge for themselves that it works. I could talk about Information Theory all the live-long day, but (I'm rounding) nobody has heard of it. Does it underpin a chunk of computer science? Sure! Does that help people? Eventually! Certainly people recognize that computers do stuff that they can't, and that some people know more about computers than others. So tech bros got a few years of grace, until the bad started to outweigh the good.
Another positive example is architecture. Architects - forgive me - have a reputation as crazy, genius, or both. But everyone knows - it's even been discussed at length on this blog before - that some buildings look and work better than others, and that the architects had a big hand in that. And (I think relatedly) to the extent that modern buildings look less grand than older buildings, we often suppose it to not be the architects' fault but the customers'.
Even with personal psychological care, the signs of success aren't totally obvious. I know a lot of people who have started seeing a shrink, but I know very few people who stopped, at least for reasons like "the doctor solved my problem". So in that context, is high usership a good sign? I don't know! Hospitals wouldn't consider it success.
So when Scott kvetches that nobody looks past the silliness from the Replication Crisis, my first thought isn't "wow psychology has a sales problem and if only a psychologist who is a great writer could just perfectly enunciate their achievement there would be kumbaya". But rather, I think "wow psychology is actually not visibly improving peoples' lives." After all, if the improvements aren't visible (HIPAA!) and the visible isn't improvements (as you allude to, joining the war on distraction on the side of distraction) then all the work that psychologists put in isn't a plus, but a damning minus.
Hence my recommendation; do some visible good. I've often heard it said that that we're no more mentally or physically advanced than our ancestors 10k years. But what if we were? What if psychology erased the scourges of paranoia and bigotry before infectious disease doctors erase their second or third human-infectious disease? I think in that case the Replication Crisis would be firmly in the rear-view mirror.
Ah, I see now. Yeah, the main issue in comparing psychology to some form of engineering (I include architecture as a form of creative engineering) is that people cannot be "fixed." That just isn't a thing, and hopefully never will be (the degree of social control that implies is truly frightening). For better or worse, people have agency. So psychology will never be computer science either.
"Do some visible good." I could share with you some stories about people who used to be locked up in "Sanitariums" and what conditions were like for them. Or what used to happen to people with behavioral symptoms but no physical cause, before the "talking cure" was a thing. I know people who are only alive today due to therapy.
But it's not just mental problems. The design of control panels. The ability to test visual and auditory disabilities. The ability to measure cognitive disabilities of all kinds. The improvement in educational techniques. Teambuilding and leadership training. Conflict resolution. Independent living facilities. I think I can make the argument that all these things were net social goods - how visible they are may be a matter of opinion.
Psychologists may be a bit similar to lawyers: They ain't much use until you need one.
Right, but “all the improvements we make are invisible” and “adjust the human condition, how about adjust your expectations” just don’t make winning sales slogans. And I’m completely sympathetic to the much harder and more sensitive problem of deciding what success looks like in psychology as opposed to engineering or architecture or even other branches of medicine. But aren’t psychologists also well-equipped to meet that challenge?
I think this is a general principle; you can put embarrassment in the rear-view mirror with success. And it’s hard to sneer at someone who helped you, personally. Here is difficult-to-sympathize-with-American Dario Amodei making this same point about AI; https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-ai-public-opinion-cure-cancer-2026-8
When a lot of people think about well-known individuals, they hate them for their glass being half-empty. I'm much more likely to admire them for their glass being half-full.
I've noticed that reading your stuff, actually. Long discussions of people who didn't do a lot of bad stuff and just had kind of interesting lives, like that opera singer or the Donmeh.
People love to find fault, it's the way they are.
FWIW, I'm convinced history will be a lot kinder to you than the turn of the millennium was.
Thanks.
Still, history tends to forget journalists about 7 to 10 days after they file their last copy.
I long ago reconciled myself to the idea that nobody will remember my name.
Nonetheless, a few of my ideas may prove useful in the long run.
They seethe in envy and hate them for their glass being much fuller than their own and concoct ways to make their glass seem only half full.
I agree this sometimes happens, but also, I think there's two elements that make it somewhat justifiable (though agree it does sometimes get taken to an unhealthy extreme):
1) a system where "you do enough amazing things, it buys you slack to do some bad things" has obviously bad incentives. And it's not like that isn't the case to an extent - whenever some horrible claim comes up about some famous person that a lot of people are emotionally invested in, even if reasonably substantiated, *some* people will not believe it and defend the person just because, essentially, they don't really want to think their idol is bad. We just don't formalize this;
2) about someone like Weiner (phonetic nominative determinism there...), I think it's a fair assumption that if he'd been more than a just ok, average Congressman, you'd probably have heard it. There's no sense in which it's impossible or even particularly hard to replace him with a politician of similar effectiveness but who *doesn't* send dick picks to women. Even if we assume the sending dick picks was completely untangled from the rest of his character and morals (which seems unlikely, but sometimes people do compartmentalise their own weirdness in extreme ways...), obviously a version of him who doesn't send dick picks is better than the one who does.
Good essay.
I think people sometimes claim they are being unfairly MacGregor’ed for what is actually a pattern of behavior. To give one egregious example, Minnesota governor Tim Walz recently commented on the deportation of a man (despite receiving a pardon from the governor) who was convicted of sexually abusing a child for a period of two years, “I guess the question I would ask is, did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable? Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”
(Corrected typo.)
Think people get judged by their worst day all the time, particularly if its real bad.
That is literally the criminal justice system.
Which may also be a reason why this mode of thinking is so common - literally our entire concept of 'justice' and the law is based on harshly judging and punishing people for a single misdeed, completely ignoring any good they may have done.
Well not completely, even in classical American justice the guilty is given hearings to appeal for leniency on the basis of good deeds they've done in contrast to the misdeed they did.
Only about 50% of it. You see, women get upset at people getting punished, regardless of whether they deserve it or not.
And women do sit on juries (more than men, because both sides get to scrub the juror pool).
It only takes one juror to prevent a conviction. If what you are saying had any relevant level of accuracy, we wouldn't have the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world.
I think this is just unmotivated grousing.
Accuracy rates for crimes tend to vary pretty wildly (certain cities are famous for "no murders" where anything that could be even unreasonably deemed a suicide... is.). Sex (and drug) prosecution tend to vary wildly from place to place (some places believe that it's okay to force yourself onto someone else).
62% of federal prison intake is drug crimes, and 44% of state inmates (yes, those are different stats) as well.
(I don't pretend to like all this, just noting what we're looking at). Much of this is mandatory sentencing, as well.
Violent drug crimes. The myth of the innocent addict in federal prison is pretty pervasive.
Have you considered not using parentheses to not make it so god damn obvious that it's you?
I get upset at people being punished, I just get more upset when someone is victimized and the abuser is never held accountable.
We do judge people differently if that worst day was premeditated, though, ie, if they were a killer (or sheep fucker) in their mind beforehand or the sheep just looked particularly... why did we start with this analogy again?
Well, the damage someone can do in an instant can easily outdo all the rest of their life. It would not be very comforting to be told of someone: "Almost all of the time, their impulse control is fine! Till last night, they hadn't killed anyone else in nearly thirty years!"
I feel like the only legitimate response to Walz's rhetorical question is a stern yeschad.jpeg
You and many others are taking it for granted that fucking a sheep is bad behavior. I'm not sure Scott intended the MadGregor joke as a parable about how we react to a single piece of bad behavior. I take the joke as being about how people react to deviant behavior, especially if it's deviant sexual behavior.
Why's it bad. Is it cruel? I'm not even sure whether a person's having intercourse with a sheep is painful or frightening to the sheep. Are you? I had always imagined that the reason people sometimes used sheep that way is because they're a convenient height and didn't put up much fuss. But even if is painful and frightening to the sheep, it's still mild abuse compared to imprisoning them, raping them with machines to make them pregnant, killing and eating their offspring, shearing them in winter, killing them. Which, in case you are forgetting, is what sheep ranchers do, and what produces the lamb and the wool most of the rest of us enjoy.
So what's the case that having intercourse with a sheep is worse that what other people do to them directly or indirectly? To me it's very clearly much less cruel than the other stuff that's done to sheep, and possibly not even cruel at all, just an event not of much interest to the sheep.
You remind me of Saul the lawyer from Breaking Bad.
It’s common sense. Who wouldn’t rather be screwed than stewed?
99% agreed. The 1% is if MacGregor picks up a novel (to humans) pathogen from the sheep and passes it on.
Counter-example: Ted Kennedy went on to have a successful Senate career despite his involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, though it did derail his presidential hopes.
“I guess if you are Kennedy enough, you can get away with murder,” to paraphrase Bujold.
Another one: Joe Biden was elected president
Yeah, all those women he killed.
It depends a lot on how antithetical the scandal is to the person's persona. For example, Bill Clinton was mostly fine. Marion Barry was fine. John Edwards was not. It took much more to knock Graham Platner out of the race than it would have many other candidates. Even Weiner managed to get some votes for NYC city council election post scandal and prison.
Likewise, a sexting scandal took down the post-NFL career of beloved quarterback Brett Farve, yet Ben Roethlisberger is mostly fine despite rape allegations in his past.
How do you view the fall of Jimmy Carter, then? Sure, the embassy hostages crisis and the incredible cockup of the failed rescue attempt ("never skimp on helicopters!") all played a role in his defeat, but the sheer bad luck of getting photographed under attack by an enraged bunny-rabbit probably made it a certainty.
>"never skimp on helicopters!"
Not sure if you are citing Doonesbury but I recall seeing that gag in his strip.
I think it was indeed first launched in Doonsbury, but it became something of a proto-meme during the election campaign.
<mildSnark>
Wasn't it a theological thing? Declining the aid of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch? :-)
</mildSnark>
Regarding how to be scrupulously fair to MacGregor: I struggle with that too, of course, but for some of this stuff, I have found something that works pretty well, actually. I ask myself whether I have ever done anything that's in the same category, and very often I have.
Take fucking a sheep for instance. Nope, haven't done that, but I have definitely done sexual things that are that weird and off-putting. (And most of the people I've known well enough to hear their embarrassing secrets have too.)
I've also done another of the things Scott names as behavior that lead to his mentally canceling someone: In the days when I frequented Twitter there were occasions when I made an exceptionally mean, insulting response to someone whose tweet had enraged me. I doubt there are many people who haven't lost their temper and their manners occasionally on Twitter. Twitter is the ideal set-up for eliciting behavior like that.
The odd thing is, while I'm mentally MacGregoring someone I'm often completely unaware that I have done something similar myself. I haven't *forgotten* the thing I've done that's in the same category, I'm just in another, very non-instrospective, mode -- fully enthralled by my "ewwww" response to The Other. It feels good! It's fun! It's kind of a letdown to realize that I've done the same kind of shit, and that the ewwww person is just another me. But then I become more fair-minded.
Do you take "sheep fucking" as different if it's part of an initiation ritual (and thus along the lines of "human cannibalism" or other forms of "we're never gonna talk about this, but we all did ReallyBadAwfulThing, and it brings us closer together")?
Self-righteousness is a very, very, very potent drug. Thanks for sharing some (more) techniques on how to fight it!
>Do you take "sheep fucking" as different if it's part of an initiation ritual (and thus along the lines of "human cannibalism" or other forms of "we're never gonna talk about this, but we all did ReallyBadAwfulThing, and it brings us closer together")?
I don't think I understand your question. Sheep fucking as initiation as different from what? And I don't think of it as akin to human cannibalism. To eat someone you have to kill them first, and that's a bad, cruel act. Seems quite possible to me that imposing intercourse on a sheep is not cruel. If sheep objected much to intercourse with a human being they would struggle or kick or run away, which would spoil the experience for the person, and intercourse with sheep would not have become a thing.
Sorry, I will clarify the question: You say that you've done as-weird things as fucking a sheep, in terms of sexuality -- but, if we bring up the "fucking a sheep as an initiation ritual" does that change your desire to give clemency to the other person, on the grounds that "I've never wanted buddies that badly."
I don't think you can make a convincing case that the sheep is deriving pleasure from sex (pretty sure there's a fine case for human females and bonobo females, but for other females? It's more along the lines of an "unpleasant chore" -- to downright painful, in the case of felines).
A dog down the street fucked a deer (that was trapped in his yard), and I can't think that the deer had a happy time of that (strange carnivorous beast on your back...). I don't think any prey-beast would be particularly happy, absent the normal social cues, for a human doing something like that either. Given how many males enjoy the experience of a struggling human, I don't think it would actually spoil the experience for all men (and I do genuinely believe that most people who try to fuck a sheep are "doing it for a lark" and not "sheep afficianados").
This is very different from Mr. Peanutbutter and Rusty Cage (dogs are very fond of peanutbutter, and will lick it off, basically anything).
<Sorry, I will clarify the question: You say that you've done as-weird things as fucking a sheep, in terms of sexuality -- but, if we bring up the "fucking a sheep as an initiation ritual" does that change your desire to give clemency to the other person, on the grounds that "I've never wanted buddies that badly."
So I think your question is whether I feel a bond with someone who fucked a sheep because that's genuinely hot to them, but don't feel the same about someone who does it as part of a frat initiation. Well, regarding someone who has sex with a sheep as part of a frat initiation I can't find in my own life experience such an extreme example of doing something I don't truly want to do just to be part of the crowd, so the approach of identifying my own version of the ewww behavior doesn't help as much. But of course I have done less extreme versions of the same thing. When I was in my 20's I can remember pretending to admire various art flicks that others were impressed by, but that I found boring and confusing. And if I step back and examine my life for examples of being overly concerned with appealing to the in-group I can find lots of examples. So the approach is still helpful, but I have to work at it more.
I think it's almost always a mistake to mentally cancel someone. My goal in using this approach is to keep myself from doing that, so I think it's legit to keep working with my mind, trying things, trying to get past the illusion that the person is nothing but the-creep-who-did-X, where X is foreign to me, ewww. Disapproving of them, even thinking they should go to jail, is another matter. That's OK. That's not the same thing as mentally canceling them.
I bet what's so memorable to Scott's mind is also that anthony WEINER can't stop sending penis pics to sometimes unwilling recipients. Scott's probably somewhat forgiving, given his clinical experience, of the actual behavior - I assume this is a common neural fault in the DSM somewhere, of strong urges to show your genitals. Don't primates engage in behavior like this?
It's a kink. Hardly anyone has a great track record with resisting a chance for kink satisfaction. But some unlucky people have kinks that that you can't satisfy without risking social censure.
If I pointed out that the vast majority of us have sexual urges that we almost constantly resist, I assume you'd say well then that's not a true kink? (Is McGregor really a Scotsman?)
> If I pointed out that the vast majority of us have sexual urges that we almost constantly resist, I assume you'd say well then that's not a true kink?
Why do you assume I would say that?
Really? Do we know how many pedophiles who totally avoid contact with children and never offend exist? They're in hiding, obviously. Most of the common BDSM kinks probably existed at higher frequencies in the population than we assumed before Fifty Shades of Grey became a runaway hit.
Heck, drop it from the kink level, monks and nuns existed, and they didn't *all* break their vows.
(Debatably, monks and nuns not breaking vows WAS a kink).
There's a considerable portion of the artist community that is pedophillic in nature. (one can draw what one does not touch, I presume.)
How can one determine this? We can't know how many people have a kink but don't indulge it because they can control it.
If the erection had not influenced the election, would Scott still be thinking of Weiner’s willy?
I know. I feel bad for the guy but the jokes write themselves.
Come on, you missed the staring-you-in-the-face alliteration of Weiner's weener!
Once is a mistake, twice is a pattern.
I think whether this is reasonable depends on just what's being discussed. If somebody's committed murder, for instance, yeah, that's going to be a huge deal. Murder is extremely bad, and also pretty rare. So if someone's done it even a single time, that's pretty informative about them, and tells you that you have real especial need to beware of them.
By contrast, lying is much less bad than murder (usually, anyway), and its base rate is higher. So if you commit one murder you're a murderer, but telling one lie doesn't make you a liar (unless it was a particularly significant lie). Whether one instance of an act is enough to label a person for it depends on how significant that act is and also on how informative that act is. The purpose of such labels is to inform action; you label someone at the point where additional action or additional wariness is justified by the information you have.
I was originally going to have a third paragraph here applying this to the cancel culture case you discuss and breaking down what was going on there, but ultimately it ended up kind of complicated (and not all of it ended up fitting into this framework after all) so I decided to just omit it, you can try to apply it (and see where it does and doesn't fit) yourself. :P
If McGregor had murdered someone, the joke would work much less well (I think?). So the McGregor problem is not at heart about norm violation, and cancel culture is not actually a McGregor problem but a problem of bad norms. But effective altruism and the castle, that seems to be a proper McGregor case, only the attention-grabbing embarrassing thing gets remembered. Meanwhile, when we look at psychology where this started, there‘s the confounding issue (as other commenters have noted) of which level or entity exactly we‘re looking at; it‘s like a family had built lots of bridges but also had a murderer in their ranks.
>So if you commit one murder you're a murderer, but telling one lie doesn't make you a liar
I struggle to parse this. A murderer is someone who has committed at least one murder. But a liar isn't someone who has told at least one lie? You have to habitually tell lies before you're considered a liar? If so, why not reserve the term "murderer" for people who habitually murder people?
Lies are easy, and everyone lies sometimes (we call them white lies).
Murder is "well beyond the pale" and a person (say, McAfee) who shoots a guy because the other schmuck shot his dog? He might shoot you too for something equally as stupid.
Not everyone tells what are ordinarily called "white lies".
Essentially everyone does lie *sometimes*, though.
Because otherwise "liar" would just be another word for 'person', which would make the English language less useful for conveying information.
These kind of issues came up in reviewing the Christopher Nolan movie "Oppenheimer."
For example, in 1926 the young physicist may well have poisoned his tutor's apple. That's pretty wild, but most people who think about Oppenheimer don't think of him as Attempted Murderer Oppenheimer. There's just so much else about Oppenheimer of interest that thinking about him as primarily an attempted murderer seems out of proportion and distracting. Nolan, for instance, includes the poisoned apple episode but mostly zips past it.
What about Oppenheimer being a Communist fellow traveler (or whatever you feel is the best description of his dalliance with Stalinism)? That takes up a lot of time in the movie. I wrote in my 2023 review "Thin Man:"
Oppenheimer had a long track record of misjudging Stalin’s character, so it made sense to phase him out of influence under the Eisenhower administration. On the other hand, the show trial Strauss orchestrated was petty and vindictive. Rabi, who is portrayed in Oppenheimer by David Krumholtz as the most street-wise of the physicists, testified:
“…he is a consultant, and if you don’t want to consult the guy, you don’t consult him, period. Why you have to then proceed to suspend clearance…he is only there when called, and that is all there was to it. So it didn’t seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding at all against a man who had accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished.”
... Great movie directors like Nolan can never be fully woke because, like Oppenheimer, they believe, most of all, in talent.
In contrast, the woke want to cancel the talented.
For example, consider the recent cancellation of the physicist who hired Oppenheimer to teach at Caltech, 1923 Nobel Laureate Ernest Millikan. ...
By the time of Millikan’s retirement in 1945 after two dozen years as its leader, Caltech was one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. And thus many other educational institutions were named after Millikan. For example, I learned to type in summer school at Millikan Junior High School in Sherman Oaks, Calif.
While Oppenheimer had been a Stalinist in the 1930s, Millikan had been a eugenicist in the 1920s. So, during the recent Racial Reckoning mania, Millikan was canceled, having his name removed from three buildings at Caltech. And Millikan M.S. has been renamed after Louis Armstrong. Granted, the trumpeter was a great guy, but having been born in New Orleans and lived in Queens, he didn’t have much to do with education or Southern California.
I try to hold glass-half-full opinions of scientists like Oppenheimer and Millikan and admire them for their historic accomplishments rather than cancel them for their mundane political opinions.
I'd be curious as to which of Millikan's opinions on eugenics were either scientifically incorrect or unusually coercive by the general standards of medical ethics at the time (far more lives were destroyed by lobotomisation, electroshock or heroin prescriptions at the time but nobody has used this to cancel neuroscience.)
I think the most prominent failure of psychology and the social sciences isn't so much non-replicable results as the failure to conduct particular forms of research at all. No-one has attempted to follow up on the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study or Dan Friedman's work on newborn behaviour for upwards of forty years now. As Charles Murray was fond of remarking, there have been literally thousands of studies on the topic of self-esteem, but for about half a century most social science research made no attempt to control for genetics and only a handful of scientists were willing to look seriously at racial IQ diffs. That was- and mostly still is- a totally unacceptable dereliction of duty.
Quite a number of the favorite ideas of early 20th Century eugenicists turned out scientifically mistaken. For example, they tended to have a peculiar horror of "miscegenation," assuming that the offspring of racially disparate parents would turn out worse than the average of the parents would predict.
That effect _might_ exist to a tiny extent.
But the bigger menace to the health of offspring is usually the opposite problem of in-breeding.
Interestingly, eugenicists also had played a major role in promoting Americans' fear of in-breeding via cousin marriage, which has proven scientifically valid.
British eugenicists, in contrast, were useless on the problems of cousin marriage because many of their leaders were descendants of Charles Darwin and his first cousin wife Emma Wedgwood, at least those of their descendants who hadn't died young of weird birth defects.
Oppenheimer's Stalinism was a bad idea, while Millikan's Galtonism was a half-baked idea.
But both physicists were great scientists and organizers, worthy of admiration.
It's still not clear to me that early-20th-century eugenics was especially half-baked compared to any other contemporary field of scientific research. The existence of plate tectonics or separate galaxies weren't acknowledged facts at the time, the atomic nucleus was only discovered in 1911, and the miasma theory of disease was only dethroned in the 1880s. Plus, again, lobotomies.
If 'the science' refines itself as time moves forward, the corollary is that science is more mistaken as you go back in time. That's not an indication that the relevant researchers were unusually jaundiced or error-prone by comparison with other fields of research.
The more common modern-day argument is that racial/ethnic interbreeding could lead to hybrid vigour, and there's a plausible argument for that, although it also leads to problems with organ donations. American eugenics in particular seemed overly fixated on simplified mendelian models of inheritance. But the broader contentions of the eugenics movement- that genes exerted a strong influence on social outcomes and civilisational development and that these endowments varied at the racial, ethnic and class level- were overwhelmingly more correct than the default modern view on these issues.
Indeed.
Galton and Fisher were geniuses, Pearson not so much, Spearman, Terman, and a few others, possibly.
Obviously, from a glass half-full perspective, the eugenicists should be heroes -- they largely invented statistics -- but they tend to be viewed as villians from the glass half-empty perspective.
Glenn Loury's theory of political correctness helps explain why people don't take that glass half full approach:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/a-theory-of-political-correctness/
> The more common modern-day argument is that racial/ethnic interbreeding could lead to hybrid vigour, and there's a plausible argument for that, although it also leads to problems with organ donations.
A biology textbook will cover "inbreeding depression" (genetic defects that get expressed when you receive the same defective copy twice by different inheritance paths) and "outbreeding depression" (genetic defects that get expressed when you fail to get two copies of something that one half of your ancestry needs).
If you were to mate with an ostrich, the resulting organism would have outbreeding depression so severe that, of course, it would be nonviable. Mules are commonly considered an example of "hybrid vigor" for their desirable traits, but they're also an example of severe outbreeding depression since they're sterile. These are not exclusive categories, and worrying about outbreeding depression is not a mistake.
>Interestingly, eugenicists also had played a major role in promoting Americans' fear of in-breeding via cousin marriage, which has proven scientifically valid.
Valid, but quite minor unless pursued systematically over generations. First cousins' kids only have about double the rate of birth defects of unrelated parents'. Two Tay-Sachs carriers, or anyone with a Huntington's patient, have much-higher risks. The American hysteria over it is significantly excessive, particularly since there's no actual generational dysgenic effect (the offspring of the most inbred person in the world with new blood is not inbred at all).
Things get considerably worse for closer relatives, though.
I don't think it needs to be "systematic". If there's a higher rate of cousin marriages, then there will also tend to be a higher rate of sequential cousin marriages... unless there is a "system" to make the second generation less likely to marry cousins than the preceding generation.
The coefficient of inbreeding only skyrockets to absurd values if most marriages in a family are endogamous, which usually means the family's doing it deliberately. Two sequential first-cousin marriages (kid of cousins, one of whom is a kid of cousins) has coefficient of inbreeding 0.0781, worse than the 0.0625 of a single first-cousin marriage, but not by that much; first-cousin marriages more widely spaced have lesser effects (e.g. kid of cousins, whose grandparents in common were also cousins, has coefficient of inbreeding 0.0703).
It took centuries of zero new blood to get Charles II of Spain; cousin marriages every now and then aren't going to do that.
But Pakistanis in northern England are practicing first and second cousin marriage deliberately, so the build-up is intense.
You're not wrong, but it's hard to construct a positive argument for the practice.
For pursuing it deliberately, sure. For permitting it, well, your basic "banning particular people from marrying each other tends to worsen the average goodness of marriages" libertarian argument as with why we let people choose their partners at all (though not at full force).
I'm not of the opinion that the state should be totally unconcerned with who has kids, so this doesn't cross a particular red line for me.
"Only have about double" is actually a lot.
It's also an overstatement, I think: I once had to look up the dangers of cousin marriages for a story I was writing, and the figure I ended up with (I think from Japan, which allows first-cousin marriages) was that the risk of autosomal recessive genetic disorders (that is, the kind that a child can get from having two copies of a bad gene from healthy parents who each have a single copy of a bad gene) was 3% for unrelated parents versus 4% to 6% for first cousins.
That's still an unpleasantly large increase in risk that is worth habitually avoiding, but even if you're optimising for the wellbeing of the children and don't care at all about the happiness of the parents, I think you can make a reasonable case that if you have to choose between your cousin and an alcoholic, you should choose to marry your cousin. (Fortunately, easy travel, old-age pensions, health insurance and unemployment insurance make having kids less of a matter of personal survival than it was for most of our ancestors since the Neolithic Revolution.)
When it comes to marriages of historical royalty, the issue gets thornier, since you've got much more danger of cousin marriage becoming habitual over generations, but you've also got marriage alliances at stake that could prevent wars in which lots of other people's children would die. Again, it seems best to habitually avoid cousin marriages but to be willing to consider exceptions where the benefit outweighs the cost of inbreeding.
My understanding is that a study in Iceland found that the "sweet spot" is third-cousin marriage, as this balances inbreeding against potential problems from the mother and fetus having different blood types.
I have watched the films 5 times and read lots about him, is there any evidence he flirted with Stalinism as opposed to having some Stalinist friends, relatives and lovers. In the context where most western intellectuals were actually Stalinists. Ironically the guy he tried to poison was later a far left anti-nuclear activist under constant MI5 surveillance.
Was Oppenheimer an anti-Stalinist when he was in charge of Los Alamos and did a poor job at keeping Stalin's spies out? So far, there are four announced Stalinist spies at Los Alamos -- Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass (tied in with the Rosenbergs), teen prodigy Ted Hall (only admitted in 1995), Oscar Seborer (not revealed until 2019).
Before 1934, Stalin was extremely picky about who his friends were. But in 1934 Stalin declared the much more ecumenical Popular Front.
Still, from a glass half-full standpoint, Oppenheimer had amazing accomplishments that override the poison apple and Stalinist spy problems.
I don't think Oppenheimer had any responsibility for vetting.
Of course Oppenheimer had some responsibility for who got hired at Los Alamos.
Vetting would be done by a different department. Fuchs was hired by the British and I doubt he would be involved in hiring machinists.
You're right about Fuchs, which still leaves the Americans.
I don't think we have any reason to think he was anything but a centre-left guy mixing in academic circles.
By far his strongest personal connection with totalitarian regimes was that his wife's first cousin (once removed) was Wilhelm Keitel head of the Wehrmacht, but that is never mentioned as a security threat.
We do have reason, the "centre-left" didn't write & pay for the publication of defenses of the Soviet invasion of Finland https://www.commentary.org/articles/harvey-klehr/oppenheimer-was-a-communist/
What does the pamphlet say?
The full text of them I believe is only available at the Bancroft Library of UCLA. He was denouncing FDR as a reactionary at that time, consistent with the Communist Party line during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
https://www.filfre.net/2015/02/t-plus-0-the-fulcrum-of-history/
If Stalin is your enemy which physicist are you going to hire for your top secret project, the physicist who has a strange proclivity for associating with Stalinists or the one who doesn't?
I think all intellectuals in the 1930s had proclivities for associating with Stalinists. I don't think he was noticeabley more Communist linked than most of the alternatives.
Lots of physics geniuses were anti-Stalinists, such as von Neumann and Teller.
But note that conservative hero von Neumann and Communist spy Klaus Fuchs filed a patent together in 1946.
Oppenheimer likely did the best he could to achieve the first order priority of building an A bomb to use on the Axis. He didn't do so good at the second order priority of keeping it away from the Soviets. Maybe Teller would have done a better job on priority #2, but would have von Neumann?
It was easy to find Hungarian anti-communists because of Bela Kun, but I don't think the head of the Manhattan project could be someone who was naturalised in the last 5 years. Among American scientists I don't think there were many strong anti-communists
... or were outright Nazis. Operation Paperclip was a very real thing.
He wrote & paid for the publication of a pamphlet defending the Soviet invasion of Finland.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/harvey-klehr/oppenheimer-was-a-communist/
Maybe, but there isn't exactly solid evidence, a journalist says a contact once said that Oppenheimer wrote that pamphlet. No one has seen the pamphlet, it was never printed and was going to be published anonymously. I need better evidence.
Not "once". Haakon Chevalier & Philip Morrison both reported Oppenheimer's pamphlets. David Hawkins & Gordon Griffiths both reported him as a CPUSA member at that time. The FBI recorded CPUSA officials referring to both Robert & his brother as party members. KGB archives also refer to him as someone whose membership had to be kept secret (though after the war they would refer to him as a reactionary to be discredited).
A journalist claims that is their evidence. I don't think we have any of these statements on tape from the witnesses
Why don't you think that?
Gregg Herken is an academic historian rather than a journalist.
Oppenheimer's most important contribution to science is the Born-Oppenheimer approximation that basically allows us to write chemical structures (think the skeletons of molecules you would draw in chemistry classes). But do people know him as Oppenheimer The Chemical Structure Guy?
There's a joke in the film where he says people will remember that day for him publishing the first paper on black holes, only for that to be overshadowed by the invasion of Poland.
I think of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation more as a separation of vibrational and electronic degrees of freedom than as localizing chemical bonds (though the approximation is more general, and is useful whenever two degrees of freedom have widely separated frequencies/time scales/energies). I'd put localization of bonds more as an approximation _within_ the molecular orbital theory of the electronic structure.
Also, the Oppenheimer-Snyder model of black hole formation deserves more air time for the time-dependent GTR theory of how the event horizon _forms._
I meant the localization of nuclei as point (or point-like) particles, not the localization of chemical bonds. So not the sticks but the balls in the balls-and-sticks representation.
But of course there are layers, the BO approximation does not consider the nuclei localized or even classical, both nuclei and electrons can still be described by their own time-dependent Schrodinger equation within the BO approximation. Just as you said, it's about the separation of scales that allows us to focus on nuclei and electrons separately.
The clamped nuclei approximation that actually localizes the nuclei appears a few steps down the line of approximations (even though in chemical literature authors often write that they assume the Born-Oppenheimer approximation when they actually mean clamped nuclei).
But that's why I wrote "basically", I didn't want to go into the details.
Many Thanks! Yup, there are quite a few layers in the approximation scheme. And then sometimes partial corrections to the approximations (e.g. reintroducing vibronic coupling).
Rabi's quote is explains why I didn't care that much about the security clearance hearing in the movie (Oppenheimer himself derided a stage-play about that as trying to make a farce into a tragedy), and didn't care about Strauss' confirmation hearing.
Nolan could have made it a two hour movie ending July 16, 1945.
Still, it was nice to see a lot of Robert Downey Jr., who doesn't perform that often anymore. And Casey Affleck was amazing when he pops up briefly toward the end.
"Oppenheimer" is a very good movie, considerably better than "The Odyssey," which is pretty good, but disappointing after what Nolan achieved with "Oppenheimer."
To switch from Robert J. Oppenheimer to Christopher Nolan, Matt Walsh screaming about Nolan being woke for "The Odyssey's" admittedly silly racially random casting (if the Korean crewman walked 8,000 miles to Ithaca, shouldn't we hear a little about his adventures along the way?) is a flagrant example of complaining about a part empty glass.
With Nolan, the conservatism glass is at minimum half full (e.g., "The Dark Knight Returns" goes out of its way to remind us the Jacobins were bad).
I suppose it's just natural for bad things to seem more salient than good things. In ancient times there was probably a forest with lots of nice caves to take shelter in, animals to hunt, berries to eat, fresh streams to drink from, and anything else a caveman could want, but there was also a hungry bear who lived there, so they called it Bear Forest and stayed away from it.
It's unfortunate but probably inevitable that the same pattern gets applied to human beings. The only solution that comes to mind is to have some kind of commonly agreed truce day, like the christmas truces in world war one, or maybe some kind of designated demilitarized zone. I don't think I will ever stop saying stuff that pisses people off, and I don't think I will ever stop holding grudges when other people say things that piss me off, but it would be nice to get to take a break sometimes.
Roy Baumeister wrote "Bad is Stronger than Good" for such reasons https://roybaumeister.com/2001/10/15/bad-is-stronger-than-good/
You're missing the larger folk lesson. There is no chance MacGregor's hecklers and peers wouldn't also have checked out their livestock, some may have done the deed themselves too but weren't caught. When our MacGregors get caught, our psychologists do bad, our EAs buy castles, do we call ourselves Humanity the Sheep Lovers, though we're all sinners with the same propensity? The correct strategy is to vilify the one to absolve the many. Psychology must learn to properly scapegoat and sacrifice their people, that's the only way out
Also on the topic of nominative determinism, Conor MacGregor may have had a wonderful sports career, but is he known as MacGregor the sportsman? But he beats up one guy in a bar! And then another. And rapes at least one person. And posts a lot of false and hateful anti-immigrant stuff. And threatens to run for president of Ireland but either chickens out or forgets in a Trump kind of way.
I mean, he is still mostly known as the sportsman to most people I bet.
Or, at worst, an asshole sportsman (those tend to garner more publicity).
When I saw the headline for a second I wondered if it was about Conor McGregor metaphorically building bridges between communities, but then I remembered his name is spelt without an "a".
It genuinely appals me how he is often literally the only thing non-Irish people know about Ireland. Not U2, not the Cranberries, not Yeats, not Joyce, not even leprechauns and Guinness – just McGregor. Of all the people to be the ambassador for our nation, we had to end up with a short-tempered violent coke-addled rapist.
Could be worse. You could have good old Adolph Hitler as your ambassador.
This seems much worse due to the Internet, which is both a permanent ledger and a method of global context collapse. MacGregor could in theory skip town to start anew elsewhere, the blogger not so much
Induction training for a past job included a large laundry list of MacGregors, with the refrain: before you do the thing, take a moment to ask yourself - “is this going to land me in a newspaper headline?”
Landing in a newspaper headline for a MacGregor action is a strong data point about one’s ability to navigate society, predict longterm effects, and control impulses. People form impressions accordingly.
Forgiving someone for doing a thing is not the same as trusting them not to do the thing again. If one’s worst day results in headlines, is it really so unreasonable to not want a recurrence?
Two things being conflated here. Cancel Culture in its objectionable form isn't about cancelling people for things they actually do wrong, it's about cancelling people for having political opinions.
You are making a distinction, but those categories overlap; e.g. calling for genocide is a political opinion and also doing wrong.
One person’s “I’m just expressing an opinion in public, stop punishing me for that” is another person’s “you literally just said out loud to everyone you want to diddle sheep, of course I’m going to call you a sheepdiddler”
I would go a bit more granular. Cancel culture is about wanting to destroy someone for their political opinions, so you dig up things they've done wrong to use as ammunition. But the "things they've done wrong" are often things you'd be more willing to forgive if they were committed by a member of your in-group.
e.g. MacGregor voted Leave, so we're going to loudly tout his sheep-shagging as evidence for why he is not welcome in our community. Stewart (who voted Remain) is still welcome to attend dinner parties (despite having interfered with more than his fair share of ruminants in the past).
Is it? "This guy committed rape a decade or two ago therefore he should be banned from comedy/TV/card games" are all real cases of cancelling people for things they actually did wrong, yet one can reasonably object that barring someone from a career or a hobby is an insane way to respond.
Do you think Polanski's treatment was wrong?
If we believe Polanski's story (which the evidence points towards without proving conclusively) he got an extremely generous plea bargain, then the judge tried to renege, so yes, treated wrong in both directions.
The easy retort to people who insist only on looking at the "one bad 'un" used to be "Sturgeon's Law", but sadly not too many remember that any more. It's worth quoting:
"...I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of s f is crud.
The Revelation:
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.
Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field."
- Theodore Sturgeon, March 1958 issue of Venture (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law )
I don't understand the relevance of this quote.
Everyone: this one piece of crap discredits the whole of psychology
Sturgeon: 90% of a field being crap does not discredit the good part
True, but that's assuming the conclusion that 10% of psychology is good. There are fields in which literally 100% of everything they have produced is bunk (astrology, homeopathy etc.). Critics of psychology generally argue that it's more like astrology than it is like other fields which contain genuine insights but also a lot of rubbish.
If a science fiction novel is bad, the author makes no money and the book doesn't sell.
If a psychology paper is bad, at 'best' a bunch of grant money got burned on nothing, at worst it becomes popular anyways and influences society in negative ways for years or generations.
The structure of "bad" is too different.
I think that's arguable. Your objection would work better on normative grounds: scientists have an obligation to be honest, and novelists do not. But the claim that bad psychology is more influential than bad science fiction must deal with the question of base rates. Sure, if you read a psychology paper you're more likely to act on it than a novel. But a darn sight more people read novels.
Two examples: neither are dispositive, but I think they are relevant: one, L Ron Hubbard.
The other, perhaps more seriously, is that hard SF in the Asimovian tradition - which ironically tried the hardest to be true to actual science - left us with a rubbish intuition for what AI would actually be like, which doesn't serve very well at the present moment. Asmiovian AI is drawn as logical, uncreative, rule-bound, and having difficulty with lies and ambiguity. None of which are reflective of what we got.
I've mostly gone the opinionless zombie route, myself.
Of course I wouldn't put it like that, I have plenty of opinions. But I have a very strong instinct to see both sides of any story, often stronger than socially acceptable. When someone tells me about how they broke up with their stupid ex, I've learned to bite my tongue on the ex's point of view (I did not always know to do this 🫣). And I spent weeks withholding judgement when the Ukraine war started so I could do research on the history, and after that my biggest confusion was why there *wasn't* a stronger case for the Russian narrative.
Thoughts?
I lean in this direction, too; it's not just you. I do need to restrain my urge to "well, aktshually" in conversations sometimes. I try to do it very politely when I do it, but I'm also just a fallible human, and sometimes I piss people off.
I've tried to learn to pay attention to the dichotomy where people just want to vent (and their words don't mean much and are often hyperbole anyway) or if they are looking for advice / conversation. But I don't always get it right.
America is full of propaganda, and my Ukrainian Relatives ask "why did we move to America? The propaganda is worse here!"
(So, yes, when you wonder why Russian Propaganda Outlets got banned off Youtube, it's because America was up to serious shenanigans, and they were afraid you'd actually believe what the Russians know are generally liars).
I'm struck by two immediate ideas that I think are relevant to why you would want to have this type of focus. I don't think they're enough to justify it in all/most cases, but I think they contribute to why it's a heuristic that becomes common.
The first is something that I'm pretty sure has a precise technical name, but I can't remember what it is - something like opportunity costs or value-above-replacement or etc.
Plenty of men in the village have raised 5 children, and there are probably a good handful of masons. If Macgregor hadn't been born, very likely someone else would have married his wife and raised 5 kids with her, very likely someone else would have trained for the open slot for a mason and built his part of the bridge. But also a good chance no one would have fucked that goat. That's the part that's unique (or at least uncommon) about Macgregor. It's fair to say that the goat has a legitimate argument that Macgregor is a net negative influence on the world, compared to his likely replacement if he didn't exist.
Similar for Weiner, as you say it's hard to remember him as anything other than a generic Congressman, with a pretty bad sex scandal that caused a lot of problems. Whatever good he did in Congress, the generic Democrat who would have gotten elected if he never existed probably would have done about as much good in expectation, and not had a huge destructive sex scandal.
I personally don't think this applies to your blog, as I think it has value way way above replacement level. On the other hand, I'm a fan whose been following your writing for ?a decade?? and pays actual money for occasional hidden posts, so I don't have the median perspective on that. Maybe to an NY Times writer, your blog is of similar value to the next thought-leader in your sector, except they don't throw jabs at feminism/woke and they crack down harder on HBD talk in their comment section.
Of course, this is an uncomfortable standard to apply to the value of people in general - do you get credit for every good thing you do, or only for everything you do that is better than what an average person in your circumstances could be expected to do? The former standard is certainly more affirming and comfortable, and perhaps more motivating to get people to do good things. But the latter standard seems diagnostically useful for making sure we're actually holding people to high standards, not just handing out participation trophies for doing the bare minimum.
The other avenue I see towards motivating these standards is something something something about 'exposing the lie tells you more about someone than observing the PR statement'.
Like, Macgregor wants us to look at his greatest accomplishments in bridge building and parenting, Weiner wants us to look at his greatest legislative accomplishments, you want us to look at your best articles and most popular stances. Those things aren't *irrelevant*, but they are *cherrypicked* as the thing they want us to look at and judge them on.
We live in a world where we experience infinite suffering because our telepathy isn't good enough to let us truly know another person even when we are close to them, let alone a public figure we will never meet and are only reading motivated accounts about. Therefore, we always have weak priors about what people are 'really' like, how much we can trust them, how much power/clout/respect we should grant them, etc.
PR statements about 'these are the good things I want you to judge me on' get a ton of skepticism because they are clearly motivated, easy to manufacture, and hard to verify (that is, hard to verify that they tell you who the person really is and how well you should trust them).
On the other hand, when you catch someone out on a secret they were trying to hide, or catch them in some public misstep which they are embarrassed about and want to cover up or minimize or disassociate themselves from, it often feels like this is much more 'real' and reliable information about their 'true' character. Anyone can make up a public face that looks good whether they are actually good or not, but only bad people will have a real true verifiable bad thing you can observe (at least in theory).
Of course, those bad things can also be adversarially chosen and exaggerated/misrepresented by opponents, which is where this heuristic starts to break down if you're not incredibly careful about verifying everything you hear. But in a world where every politician is going to have legislative accomplishments they can point to because the entire party votes as a block, but we strongly suspect but can't prove that some politicians are corrupt and using their power to hurt the common welfare for personal gain, catching a politician taking one small bribe on something that barely matters *is* good evidence that you should suspect them of doing much worse and not being caught at it. You *should* care about that more than all their legislative accomplishments, even if those are objectively a bigger utilitarian deal than this one thing you caught them at.
I had a similar thought to your first point. If MacGregor is the only guy in town who knows how to build a bridge, then turning a blind eye to a certain amount of sheep buggery is perhaps a worthwhile tradeoff to keep getting bridges. In reality, though, neither bridge building nor child raising skills are *that* unusual or irreplaceable, and lots of people build bridges and raise children without fucking any sheep at all. Likewise, there are probably millions of Americans qualified to be Senators, why should we put up with dick pic guy?
In a lot of the cases Scott cites, the answer to "why focus on the bad things when the same people do good things?" is "Because having the good things without the bad things is totally an option, actually."
>Of course, this is an uncomfortable standard to apply to the value of people in general - do you get credit for every good thing you do, or only for everything you do that is better than what an average person in your circumstances could be expected to do?
The average person should look at the latter standard and say: "The only winning move here is not to play!" Don't endorse it. Don't apply it. Give it no aid.
>we're actually holding people to high standards, not just handing out participation trophies for doing the bare minimum.
That is one hell of a disparagement of the average person living their life. The average life involves a hell of a lot of effort. Calling it "the bare minimum" is reprehensible.
Sure we laugh about McGregor sheep fucking, the truth is a great many likeable people get away with heinous shit for a long long time e.g Weinstein, the British tv pedo guy, ice cream man etc.
So I guess you can get away with not being called a sheep fucker as long you have enough social capital or charisma to rise above it. And we have evolved. I mean we don't really go around calling politician adulterers and fornicators and we can pretty sure that they all that. We don't call Dr Martin Luther king an adulterer...
Evil shit is banal. Garden variety spousal infidelity is boring , sheep fucking well that's interesting.
The Weiner case seems pretty simple: If not for the pics, you would not know *anything* about that guy, so it seems fair to summarize his contribution towards your perception down to "cannot stop sending lewd images" because that's what it is module rounding errors.
I don't know of (m)any cases where this dynamic is a useful map of the argument that both sides converge on rather than just the defense's presentation of the situation. The prosecution is very likely to reject it, either asserting there were many sheep rather than just one, or disputing the value of the bridges.
Like, the argument between capitalists and anti-capitalists isn't over whether the incredible development in the last 200 years justifies a few snags (like, uh, one of several brewing apocalypses). It's over framing and attribution - who is MacGregor here? Was there just one, or are MacGregor the bridge-builder and MacGregor the sheep-fucker different people? Some radicals even go into "are bridges good?" or "is sheep-fucking bad?"
I think the general rule is that we judge people's *talent* by their best actions, and people's *character* by their worst actions.
If you make a few books/pictures/songs/movies that are admired by millions, you will be considered a successful artist, even if all your remaining books/pictures/songs/movies suck. Even one successful piece of art could get you eternal glory under the right circumstances.
If you murder one person each year, no one sane is going to defend you by saying "your honor, during the remaining 364 days in a year he didn't murder anyone, so I think on average he is still a peaceful member of the society". Even one murder could get you a lifetime in prison under the right circumstances.
There is also another rule, that we judge the people we like charitably, and the people we don't like uncharitably. #NotAllIngroup #YesAllOutgroup
I think the actual outcome is a combination of these two rules. It is reasonable to call someone a murderer after they commit one murder, even if it was a decade ago. Is it also reasonable to call someone a racist for one stupid tweet they made thirty years ago? Obviously, if you have other reasons to hate that person or some group they happen to belong to, the answer is yes; otherwise the answer is no. Even one piece of bad art might be enough to destroy an artist's career, if he somehow manages to piss off the important art critics. On the other hand, some people are willing to forgive Stalin even millions of murders, because he brought electricity to nations, or something like that.
So, sometimes the difference in how people are treated for exceptional events is justified, sometimes it is not. It makes sense to care about exceptionally good art, because we can choose to interact with the best and ignore the rest. If makes sense to worry about exceptionally bad behavior, because you cannot be sure whether you become its target one day. But there is also motivation to bend these rules of thumb, if you have already decided that the person is good or bad, and now you are just looking for an excuse to support this judgment.
For maximum comedic effect, when I tell this joke, MacGregor is named Tucker
Sorry, that’s all I have to contribute. Good essay.
Would you hire MacGregor to tend your sheep, if he promises not to do it again? Assuming that there is a larger employee pool available, you probably wouldn't risk it. It's not because you deny that he is a multifaceted individual, you just care about employee quality more than an objective moral judgment of a person's entire life.
If Wiener is a uniquely good talented or hardworking politician, then I would still vote for him in spite of scandals. But if there are many other candidates who are just as competent but also have the benefit of not being involved in scandals then I would pick one of them over him. It's rational to choose someone who's 99% perfect over someone merely 98%.
It helps keeping the bar high. So, if you’re doing great things, stay away from sheep.
The answer is as simple as it could possibly be: You don't judge a person (or system) by their worst action, you judge them by the worst action they haven't apologized for and fixed or remediated. Psychology, as a field, has done a half decent job of regret and remediation (although I would assert that there are a fair number of victims yet uncompensated) -- exactly what most of the other allegedly canceled simply have not.
>All I know about him is that he kept sending pictures of his penis to women
More relevant to the argument you're making, some of them were not women but girls.
To steelman the bad reputation Anthony Weiner currently endures in the popular imagination:
I have a pet peeve with the way people talk about politicians' infidelity scandals. I've often met people saying that a politician's private life is his own business, and has no bearing on his fitness to run a government ministry or indeed a country.
I disagree with this line of reasoning entirely. If a man betrays an explicit oath he made to be faithful to his wife, I think that provides very strong evidence that he is willing to betray much lesser oaths he made to other people, including the people who voted for him. The idea that you can draw a bright line in the sand between how a person comports himself in his private life and in his professional life is not at all persuasive to me.
I agree that someone failing to keep to their marriage vows gives you information about their future propensity to keep to oaths of office or election promises. But I think your framing overstates the importance of the marital infidelity.
There are plenty of people with happy home lives who do bad things in office, and plenty of people with miserable marriages who do good things in office. There's a correlation between being unfaithful to your spouse and, say, taking bribes, but it's not a very strong one, and it's not as strong as it might seem if all you know about Public Figure A is that they were maritally unfaithful, without hearing about the decades of a miserable marriage and an incredibly stressful job that might have been behind that infidelity.
The correlation between being caught being maritally unfaithful and malfeasance in office is presumably even weaker, since getting caught having an affair is partly due to factors other than the adulterer, and whether the news media decide to make a big deal about it is mostly nothing to do with how objectionable the affair was. If a large fraction of politicians have affairs, but my affair-detecting apparatus only catches a tenth of the politicians who have had affairs, I'm not minded to care very much about whether any particular politician got caught, since it doesn't provide me with much information about whether the politician is less faithful than other politicians.
A politician having a scandal is, pretty much by definition, someone with a public track record who is involved in really important stuff that affects millions of people. I don't think it's a good idea to pay too much attention to a noisy signal about someone's possible future failures to keep promises when I can simply look up whether they kept the promises that I care about, or, far more importantly to me, whether they seem to have generally done a good job in office, even if that involved breaking election promises I cared about.
(I object rather more strongly to breaches of oaths of office, since rare breaches of oaths of office do more damage to a more important norm than common failures to keep election promises, which people generally expect politicians to break, though I believe research shows that they mostly keep them. If corruption in office were commoner, I'd care less about whether a politician abuses their office.)
I think the public, both men and women, may actually like the fact that their elected official is behaving like a high status man. Of course your powerful charismatic good-looking witty Senator is banging the hot secretary, if he wasn't you'd wonder if he was a fraud. It's only because he is that kind of person that he went anywhere in life, everyone understands that deep down and its why they deferred authority to him to begin with. Sure there's some Mitt Romneys out there who exemplify all the good power-traits without being philanderers, but if you didn't know he was LDS you'd start with the assumption that he had affairs I think, and in fact it makes him seem more powerful that he probably had ample opportunity but instead is just incredibly disciplined. Whereas the lion's share of ordinary people are faithful primarily because they have limited other opportunities and the benefits don't outweigh the costs.
Getting caught, however, means that somebody else had power over him. He gets publicly embarrassed and has to apologize for things. This lowers his status. We just don't like the getting caught part.
It's not "getting caught" that signals powerlessness, it's that the man couldn't keep his side piece(s) loyal and/or silent. When affairs are consensual and only discovered by a third party, the man usually doesn't lose status with his in-group. c.f. Bill Clinton, Prince Charles.
The issue here is that a) the women receiving the dick pics came forward themselves, signaling that Weiner is a poor judge of character, and b) dick pics are not remotely comparable to secretary-banging in terms of status.
Separately, I think "everybody likes it when men act high-status" might be typical-minding. Under this framing, wives shouldn't reveal their husbands' infidelity because that would lower their husbands' status.
A more defensible assertion would be "people like seeing leaders of their in-group get away with stuff"
Richard Hanania once said that he conquered his shyness with girls through coming to understand his timidity as an evolved trait. This intellectual awareness somehow dissolved the shyness.
Pinker writes that we evolved to remember bad things because the consequences of forgetting bad things can be severe.
I wonder whether approaching the Weiners of the world with Pinker’s understanding would dissolve our prejudices and allow us to consider them more holistically.
The other problem is that once you start creating a long list of sins and excommunicating lots of sinners, the sinners start banding together and becoming more sinful.
As for Weiner: the weiner jokes are fun, but after years of living in feminist environments that totally repressed my sexuality to the point women in relationships asked if I was gay, and media things from Anita Hill to #metoo, I've just decided I don't care about sexual scandals, and will actually vote for any candidate accused of one. (I bought the entire Sandman slipcase! Though I still haven't read it.) If I ever met Weiner I'd probably buy him dinner, though I have to admit the temptation to do it at a fine German restaurant and order a bratwurst might be irresistible.
I do not think this will be a satisfactory solution to most rationalists or effective altruists.
"If I ever met Weiner I'd probably buy him dinner, though I have to admit the temptation to do it at a fine German restaurant and order a bratwurst might be irresistible."
It wasn't just "Guy steps out on his wife". That would be "ugh, he's a cad" but most people would shrug and forget it.
It was that he also hit on a 15 year old girl (which is not age of consent compatible even under Romeo and Juliet laws) which coincidentally blew up his wife and Hillary Clinton due to the emails on the shared laptop he used for the sexting. The one that really made me want to douse him in pitch and shove him into a hen coop were the photos of him (a) texting/sexting another woman WHILE he was at home minding the four year old child of himself and his wife while (b) the kid was lying in bed beside him and (c) we know this because we saw the kid in the photos he sent of him in his underwear (d) SHOWING OFF HIS ERECTION.
"yeah, girl, here's my hard-on for you and by the way here's my extremely minor child beside me at the same time in the same bed, wanna fudge while my wife is out of the house?" is where I step off the train.
Minors? All right, fine. No bratwurst for Weiner. Even I have to draw the line somewhere.
I don't know whether Gaiman is a good or bad person, but definitely read the Sandman comics--they're outstanding!
Oh before he got in trouble everyone said they were the best comic books ever made and convinced people comic books were an art form.
I didn't like Sandman. I thought the pacing was a mess, with the few interesting moments stuck between swamps of uninspired filler that at best was mythology pastiche with no conviction of its own, and at worst was utterly unreadable. The plot and worldbuilding was flimsy, leaving little to chew on besides vibes.
I recommend trying an issue or two to see if the aesthetic works for you, and if you don't, know it won't get better.
>media things from Anita Hill to #metoo, I've just decided I don't care about sexual scandals, and will actually vote for any candidate accused of one.
(mostly) Agreed! I've gotten _very_ sick of the sex-negative turn of recent American culture.
Dear Sir, I object in the strongest possible terms to this highly inappropriate comment. I want to make it perfectly clear that Wiener Würstchen are boiled and not fried!
It is a great tragedy that so many of us judge people by their single worst act. My only comment is that IMHO the problem is a lot more important than you suggest, due to a massive unintended consequence.
Often if you want to do something great and impactful, you need to take risks, some of which involve potential reputational damage. If that risk is too great, it discourages people from taking these necessary risks. In fields which forgive and forget failure if it is followed by success, like sports or entrepreneurship, we see tremendous progress. But where the reputational damage cannot be undone, we see stagnation.
The examples you give, MacGregor or Wiener, are not like this. They did bad things unrelated to their good deeds. The criticism they received was unrelated to their good deeds. But consider this one example:
One of the most valuable things we humans can do is to help one group of people to understand and empathise with another group, but it brings so many risks of reputational damage that few of us dare try.
- If you try to get Arabs and Israelis to understand and empathise with each other, you risk being labelled a terrorist, a naive idiot, a Zionist, etc. So instead of dialogue we have accusations and insults and people sticking to their side's script ... and very little progress. But what politician will risk their career to even try?
- There are 60 million + Trump supporters in the US. The administration they support is egregious, abominable, corrupt and just plain evil, doing horrific damage to the US and the world. But those 60 million voters are not evil people. The future of America may depend on liberals understanding and empathising with Trump voters, so we can understand how to bring them and the GOP back from this wanton destruction of all that is good about America. But suggesting in most liberal forums that Trump voters may have legitimate reasons for voting for him just invites attacks and insults. This seems to be particularly true within the Democratic Party. And so the Democrats continue to ignore their concerns, they continue to feel ignored and they vote for Trump. But any Democrat politician who dares try to address Trump-voter concerns will get primaried.
Compare this to areas where we see rapid growth and progress, where we see people and projects reaching their full potential, and you find that these are built on a structure that forgives failures. Baseball stars have 0-for-20 streaks, QB's throw 5 interceptions, Messi missed two penalties in the World Cup, ... or business where most successful entrepreneurs have had failed start-ups and even bankruptcies.
Let us really try to change our attitude to this problem, which affects us and our world, not just the immediate victims.
> forgives failures
Forgiveness and trust are separate things. We may invite MacGregor to our dinner parties again, but do we trust him with our sheep?
Do we really think there exists an amount of bending over backwards a Democrat candidate can perform that would cause a significant number of Trump voters to vote for them, with or without alienating the Democrat voter base in the process?
Well, yes, obviously. Two-party elections where both parties frequently win are won by the side that attracts more swing voters. The hypothetical Democrat candidate doesn't have to win over the most committed Trump voter, any more than Trump had to win over the most committed Obama or Clinton voters: all that's needed to win is to get slightly more than half the votes cast to be in your favour, plus or minus a small margin for the net effect of gerrymandering and the Electoral College. Trump won in 2016 and 2024 partly by having a large base of voters who were excited to vote for him and partly because the Democratic candidates weren't as popular with their core voter groups, but also partly because more swing voters voted Republican than Democrat in key states.
Trump's hired democratic political consultants that got Obama elected. Most of the Trump voters I know used to be democrats. Just run a 1990's democrat, and you'd get most of these guys back.
Bonus: you get to "look good" by reducing ICE, while keeping Bill Clinton's immigration policies... LET trump be the bad guy, and take credit for being the good guy!
Good question. Two comments:
1. Bending over backwards isn't necessary. You don't have to change your beliefs or core policies. Sometimes just the language matters. Show them that you understand their concerns. Reassure them that you're not going to do the crazy shit Fox News claims you're going to do.
2. The problem includes Democrat voters. They need to accept that right now the single most important thing for everyone is to disenable Trump. A liberal voter who will not help this project with their vote because the Democrats are not going all-in on their pet topic, especially even if they understand this is because they need to appeal to more centrist voters, is a pretty pathetic specimen.
Agreed, that's perhaps the highest wall to climb on the way to utopia. How to make moral progress? "Punish the transgressors harsher", our evolved brain suggests. But what if the very essence of the moral progress is in _not_ punishing harder? How then to tell, whether we're indeed making progress or regressing by diluting what we've achieved with such effort?
A younger and more uncompromising me wrote about this: http://everday.wikidot.com/engage
There are many tangible measures of progress. As a scientist I feel confident that we can measure progress, and that we can define sensible measures which many people would agree on. But maybe the last couple of years, when we seem to be regressing for the first time in my life, is challenging that confidence ... it is definitely proving that the DOW is not a good measure ... but reduced poverty, fewer children dying, etc would all be a positive part of the measure, while reduced freedom, greater existential risk, etc would bring the score down. There is no obvious way to get one absolute number as it depends on relative priorities.
Suppose it's a while ago and you are not trying to get Arabs and Israelis to understand and emphathise with one another, you're trying to get Nazis and Jews to do so.
Someone accuses you of being pro-Nazi for doing this. Should they?
I would say yes. Demanding that two groups emphathise with one another depends on the object level question of how comparable the two groups are. If the groups are not comparable, and you're doing it anyway, people are *completely justified* in claiming that your equal sides request for empathy is actually taking the side of one of the groups.
There's no dodging the object-level question.
(I would incidentally also say this applies to Arabs vs. Israelis with regard to how it plays out in the real world. People who want 'Arabs' and Israelis to understand each other never want the Arab in question to be some random citizen of Qatar. 'Arab' always means someone who wants Israel to be destroyed.)
I would very much want any Jews living in Europe in the 30s to understand the Nazis much better.
I don't agree. You're trying to get *two* groups to empathize with*each other*, not just trying to get the weak group to empathize with the strong one. If there's an objective asymmetry, that'll be (ideally) recognized by good faith actors in the process. If Nazis and Jews actually did try to empathize with each other, it's obvious that the Nazis will recognize more dissonance with their actions.
It's always possible that an attempt to "see both sides" is a bad-faith rhetorical maneuver. But ferreting out bad faith actors is a different thing than saying an argument can only ever be made in bad faith.
This is a great example. You would be accused of being pro-nazi (at least in today's world). But maybe we're stuck on the definition of empathy. IMHO empathy is 100% about understanding other people with different views. Often when we empathise, we also end up sympathising, but that is a secondary effect. Empathy does not require sympathy.
So in the nazi example, the Jews would absolutely want to understand, get into the minds of the nazis. Because it would be the best way to potentially prevent or minimise the coming disaster. Maybe they learn that there are some nazis who are true antisemites, but many others are just weak people looking for approval or belonging. Maybe they learn which are the critical arguments which convince doubtful nazis. Maybe some of them are all in with world domination but see antisemitism as a distraction. This understanding could enable them to find strategies to divide the nazis, or to find nazis who would help them escape. I can see no reason why the Jews would not want to understand the Nazis, even if they might never sympathise with them.
Same with Arabs and Israelis. Maybe the example you give is one of the first things that an Israeli might learn, most Arabs want peace and do not want a world led Hamas or Hezbollah or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Your second paragraph reminds me of Ozzy Brennan's piece on "corpse ethics". It's a short read, but I think it makes its argument very eloquently. It is a shame that these values have become so common these days.
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/the-life-goals-of-dead-people
Great perspective, thanks for sharing that!
It feels like a feature of existence. Einstein isn't the man who spent 30 years struggling and failing with Quantum mechanics, he is the guy who published a few very very good papers in 1905 and 1915. Olympic gold medalists might have distinguished lives but are remembered for moments, murderers are remembered for something that probably took place over 0.000001% of their lifespan.
I acknowledge that unfairly dismissing the whole of something based on one unrepresentative mistake is a real phenomenon. But I don't understand the reluctance to distinguish the large bulk of social psychology from the bulk of more rigorous areas of study broadly within psychology that you referred to in your last post. Neither of those are isolated one offs: they're large identifiable groups within the whole.
It's also worth considering the other end of the spectrum: cases which are mostly bad, but have isolated positive achievements. I don't think psychology is quite this far along the spectrum. But eventually you reach fields like non-empirical or pseudo-empirical critical race theory, and there pointing to some small number of rigorous finding utilizing different methods is just special pleading in favour of something mostly bad using unrepresentative examples.
Isn’t it just true that reputations are fairly delicate things? Like, if you cut your nose off, it doesn’t make much sense to say, “How can you say I’m ugly when I have all these other well-formed facial features?” Food contamination is another similar case. There are just some areas where negative factors have outsize effects versus positive ones.
Yes, and I think it might be more than just some areas, I think negative factors are more salient than positive ones as a general rule. Say I have a nice sweater, but it's slightly itchy, or it smells very faintly weird, or it's a color that doesn't look great on me, or it has a small stain. I'm not going to wear it often. I might even throw it away. That humans are treated the same way is perhaps unfortunate but it's not unique or suprising.
I think to the extent that you bring up Anthony Wieners sex scandal in the context of everything else he does in life you should feel bad and try to change. But you have no duty to care about all the normal and boring stuff a person has done just because he also did something unusual, outrageous or noteworthy.
Attention is naturally guided to salience, and contrasting, unusual information has such a high appeal. Really goes against our own mechanisms to try to do this
What is the extreme case where such a simplistic obsession over one person and their actions is justified, and how do we create principles to distinguish this extreme edge case from others?
If you invited David Duke to your conference, it'd make sense for that to be the focus of the media? Is there anything you could do to mitigate that or any other negative impacts it would cause, while still inviting Duke? And what makes Duke different from Hanania, or Hasan Piker for example?
I've always thought that the reason that joke is so funny is that you can pad it out with any number of amazing achievements at the start, but as soon as you get to the reveal, none of that matters: the person hearing the joke completely understands why the subject has earned the unfortunate label.
To me, it's always been a joke about regret. Using a joke about regret to explain why one is standing up for settled science is... maybe not the support intended.
It's probably good in these sorts of discussions to separate different levels of wrongdoing. MacGregor gets known as MacGregor the sheep-shagger because that activity is really very far outside social and moral norms, to such an extent that most people can't even imagine themselves wanting to do something like that. If MacGregor's sexual escapades had followed a more normal route -- bonking his secretary, say -- they wouldn't have overshadowed his other activities in the same way.
Similarly with cancel culture, the problem wasn't so much that it advocated holding people accountable for past misdeeds, as that it didn't discriminate between different kinds of misdeed. Essentially, it was treating bonking-your-secretary-level bad things as if they were sheep-shagging-level bad things, with the result that the punishments it handed out often ended up being wildly disproportionate to the original fault.
Regarding psychology, I think the case is somewhat different. Most people have no ability to verify pscyhological findings themselves, so they have to take them on trust instead. When important pscyhological findings, or even entire subfields, turn out to be bogus, that's a sign that psychology as a discipline isn't trustworthy, or at least isn't trustworthy enough for ordinary people with no psychological background to rationally accept that whatever psychologists tell them is true. It's like if you discovered one of your friends had been lying to you about something: you'd probably not trust him in future, and rightly so, even if you knew he'd also told you the truth about other topics.
You might consider perhaps the problem you are struggling with here is evidence against the orthogonality thesis and the basis of materialist rationalism.
Rationalists claim that you can understand the world through a lens of pure fact, pure data. Values, they claim, are a kind of 'overlay' that can be applied once all the facts are in place. But your experience here clearly demonstrates that -- at least when it comes to people and social movements -- this simply isn't so.
Values constrain which facts you consider relevant and which facts you discard. For example, you had to force yourself to look at a human being through a lens that was 'more fact based' than one which made a single act central to this guy's character and everything else irrelevant. And afterwards, all that did was feel fake.
This is exactly what you'd expect to happen if values and facts _weren't_ inseparable, but thoroughly entangled in cases when it comes to seeing human beings and social movements. Sure, maybe you can analyze a chess board, a computer program or a poker hand through purely rational means, but this is because there's a causal closure at work. That's the nature of games with fixed rules and computing systems - they create causal boundaries in ways that let us 'safely' handle things which can effect our our survival and social standing.
I think you need to bite the bullet and recognize that all epistemologies are value systems, and that "objectively" viewing reality is impossible when the data grows big enough that your attention is the constraint. You're always using some 'reduce' function on the raw data, and that reduce function is going to be some set of values.
So every epistemology, every philosophy, actually tells you which thoughts are good, and which thoughts are not good. When someone says "I only care about the truth," I think mature adults should call bullshit. You obviously care about something else, in addition to the truth, and that 'something else' is very capable of preventing you from considering some truths as relevant, while requiring you to consider others as hyper salient.
Without the ability to expose that "something else" to _correction_, it ends up blinding you. The only way out of the mess is to presume that the 'something else', the source of all values, is _also_ coherent and sensible. That's the basis of science - assuming material reality makes sense - and i think it needs to be the bases of any coherent moral philosophy. You have to start by assuming there's a reality and that you can be wrong about it.
Unless you assume values fundamentally make sense and fit together in some meaningful way, you end up having to follow the values of cancel culture, etc. There's no way to say 'your opinions and feeling are wrong' if you don't think there's an objective reality to compare them to.
However, if you have the cultural concept that we are all sinners, and we tend to focus on the sins of other people instead of ourselves, then you can more easily see Anthony Wiener in a _more accurate lite_ then if you imagine the concept of sin is just a social construct and that we can perceive the world more clear than if we just get rid of the idea that values are real.
I think you are overstating the issue a bit. If what you said were strictly 100% true, then science wouldn't exist. My cultural values tell me that the Earth is flat; yours tell you that it's round and is orbited by a relatively tiny lamp called "the Sun"; some other weirdo over there has devoted his life to praying to a goddess who made the Earth into a bowl. Who is to say which one of us is correct ? After all, we are incapable of apprehending the truth, only faith can give us a touchstone, and the bowl-goddess guy is really, really devoted to his deity, so...
But we could take the other path, and try to suppress our attachment to our cultural values as much as possible. In the process, we have to drastically reduce the pool of "facts" that are available to us; we can now only examine statements that are directly measurable, by anyone, regardless of his culture. So we can no longer rely on the fact that the Sun is big or small or hot or cruel or glorious or anything of the sort; the best we can say is that at time T in location X the Sun is D degrees above the horizon as measured by a theodolite that anyone can build.
This approach is extremely limiting and emotionally as well as intellectually unsatisfying, but it gets *results* -- which is why most cultures eventually either end up adopting some version of it, or become protectorates and vassals of those who did.
Science came into being in a very particular cultural context: the conflict between protestants and Catholics in Europe. In that culture, they turned 'Truth into the highest good, and had intense disagreements over how to get to the truth.
You're right that the approach you're describing gets results,but i think you're leaving out how much that approach relies on its own gatekeepers, norms, and trust mechanisms. They don't "only examine statements that are directly measurable"; that's a defensible motte. The bailey is' we can measure everything that matters.'
> Science came into being in a very particular cultural context: the conflict between protestants and Catholics in Europe.
That is absolutely untrue. Science arguably began in Ancient Babylon (we owe our sexagesimal number system to them, as well as the foundations of geometry). It was considerably advanced in Ancient Egypt and then Ancient Greece (where Eratosthenes famously measured the radius of the Earth with extreme accuracy), but at the time scientific methods coexisted on equal terms with philosophical/spiritual ones (though even then quantitative methods achieved demonstrable superiority). Science continued to advance along those lines during the Islamic Golden Age, which eventually collapsed due to religious extremism; something similar happened in the Middle Ages in Europe, as well as in Ancient China (due to sociopolitical extremism instead of the religious kind).
The European Renaissance initially consisted of the re-discovery of Ancient Greek and Roman artifacts and writings, but these discoveries spurred the development of improved proto-scientific methodologies. The Scientific Revolution happened later in the 16th..17th centuries in Europe; this is where we get Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and many other luminaries -- most of whom were at extreme odds with religious orthodoxy of their time. This is also when probability theory in mathematics was developed, empowering scientists with significantly better tools.
Later on we of course get Darwin, Popper, and all the rest; in fact Popper is often credited with the development of the modern scientific method, and Darwin is notable for (inadvertently) engaging in the latest and most prominent conflict with the Church.
Few if any of these scientists, mathematicians, and ancient scribes were motivated by some specific sectarian conflict; nor were they motivated by "truth as the highest good". Many just wanted to find out how the natural world worked out of a burning sense of curiosity; many others saw it as a religious calling seeking a better understanding of the mind of God; and many more merely wanted to find a practical solution to a specific problem.
The attempt to frame the history of science as some regional "conflict between protestants and Catholics in Europe" is so myopic that it borders on wilful blindness. It is honestly difficult for me to fathom how anyone could honestly believe this to be the case.
>That is absolutely untrue. Science arguably began in Ancient Babylon (we owe our sexagesimal number system to them, as well as the foundations of geometry). It was considerably advanced in Ancient Egypt and then Ancient Greece (where Eratosthenes famously measured the radius of the Earth with extreme accuracy), but at the time scientific methods coexisted on equal terms with philosophical/spiritual ones (though even then quantitative methods achieved demonstrable superiority).
The ancients observed and measured the world around them, but the scientific method as we understand it (roughly, systematically trying to derive testable predictions from your theories so as to empirically confirm/disconform them) didn't come along until the early modern period.
>The European Renaissance initially consisted of the re-discovery of Ancient Greek and Roman artifacts and writings, but these discoveries spurred the development of improved proto-scientific methodologies.
The Renaissance was a literary and artistic movement, not a scientific one. None of the prominent humanist thinkers showed an interest in science.
> roughly, systematically trying to derive testable predictions from your theories so as to empirically confirm/disconform them
Well, the (most likely apocryphal) story about Archimedes and his density measurement certainly fits the bill. But even before then, disconfirming your hypotheses was at the core of human intellectual endeavour. The Ancient Babylonians who discovered (or invented, as you prefer) the basics of mathematics and geometry didn't just get lucky; they tried many things until they found something that worked. Eratosthenes devised a method for measuring the radius of the Earth according to his mathematical model of how it worked; it didn't just come to him in a dream. Yes, the probability theory that made the modern scientific method possible did not arise until the early modern period, but it would be a mistake to suggest that the modern scientific method is some form of sudden inspiration, rather than an enhancement of past methods.
> The Renaissance was a literary and artistic movement, not a scientific one.
This is technically true, but (lacking the modern scientific method) the distinction did not quite exist at the time. If you want to build a realistic marble sculpture of a horse, you must know quite a lot about animal musculature, weight of stone, rules of perspective, etc., otherwise you get a cartoony horsey that falls apart instead of an imposing marble monument.
>This is technically true, but (lacking the modern scientific method) the distinction did not quite exist at the time.
"The modern scientific method" is precisely what people are talking about when they refer to science. They don't just mean doing mathematics or measuring things, even though those are both important for science.
On a side note, I am willing to bite this bullet:
> The bailey is' we can measure everything that matters.'
There are many things that matter, but only measurable things can be truly *understood*.
You're attacking a straw man. More than that, you're attacking people for allegedly believing the exact opposite of what they are publicly on the record as believing. You're also making wild jumps of inference, going from "this straw man is wrong" to "the opposite of this straw man must be true". Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
"Rationalists claim that you can understand the world through a lens of pure fact, pure data."
This is the exact opposite of the entire rationalist project, which is about the many ways in which humans are incapable of doing that and about learning to be slightly less bad at it.
"I think you need to bite the bullet and recognize that all epistemologies are value systems"
This isn't true. If you apply an epistemology to affect the world in ways you care about, that reveals things about your value system, but the things you (or evolution) chose to focus your epistemology on are not the only things that epistemology could be used to affect. Also, just because Murderous Mike and I both care a lot about my getting murdered doesn't mean that we have to both want the same outcome. As a more general counterexample, AIXI has a precisely-defined epistemology, but that doesn't prevent me defining two versions of it with reward signals that are unrelated, or even exact opposites of each other.
"The only way out of the mess is to presume that the 'something else', the source of all values, is _also_ coherent and sensible. That's the basis of science - assuming material reality makes sense - and i think it needs to be the bases of any coherent moral philosophy. You have to start by assuming there's a reality and that you can be wrong about it."
There are moral facts because there are facts about what sentient beings would prefer, and there are ethical facts because ethics is about how to emulate good decision theory while being a highly imperfect reasoner, but morality isn't coherent and sensible, because the preferences of sentient beings were built by evolutionary processes and so don't have a compact closed-form representation. There is no set of virtues to display or deontological constraints to follow where every human, let alone every possible sapient mind, even agrees that all the virtues or rules are good in principle, let alone once they come into conflict. You can have a coherent, sensible moral system that gets most things right by going up a meta-level and talking about satisfying preferences, whatever they may happen to be (utilitarianism), but that will strongly violate moral intuitions like "bad people deserve to be punished" (taken as a terminal goal, not a conditional instrumental strategy).
"Unless you assume values fundamentally make sense and fit together in some meaningful way, you end up having to follow the values of cancel culture, etc."
What's your evidence for this assertion? There seem to be plenty of people who don't assume that values are consistent and meaningful, but also don't cancel people: most pre-2010 nihilists and sociopaths, for example.
Please give an example of an epistemology that isn't a value system, scoped to the domain of claims.
> What's your evidence for this assertion?
The last 10 years. The 'scientific community' lining up behind Anthony Fauci and attacking as racist anyone who said the novel coronavirus from wuhan was maybe related to the coronavirus research program in wuhan.
> There seem to be plenty of people who don't assume that values are consistent and meaningful, but also don't cancel people: most pre-2010 nihilists and sociopaths, for example.
Most people don't really act out what they say they believe; they follow social inertia and thus borrow from the traditional residue of ideas they explicitly reject.
The cancel culture people just took the idea that there is no objective moral truth, that it's all just preferences, to its logical conclusion. If the only truth is 'what people want', then people who want things you don't are an existential threat to you ,and your only hope of survival is to silence them. There's no reason to expect 'liberalism' to work because if people have the right to challenge your preferences, they may win people over to their point of view, and there's no reason to expect your preferences to be able to come back.
If there's some objective ground truth to all this, and all people's personal preferences are just approximations of that truth, ok, now we've got a reason to expect liberalism to work. But without that belief in a ground truth, all differences of opinion about ~anything~ are potentially existential threats.
I think you might be barking up the wrong tree. For example, here's a random recent paper from arXiv:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00846
"Bayesian comparison of Langevin dynamics for cell motility from positional observation"
Can you explain what this paper has to do with "liberalism" or "racism" or "traditional values" or anything of the sort ?
It seems to me like you're looking for the meaning of life and moral guidance in statements such as "at sea level, water is at it densest at 4 deg C" or "F=GmM/r^2". This is a mistake, as such statements don't contain any moral or inspirational content. Describing how gravity tends to pull all objects on the surface of the Earth toward its center is not a prescription that demands you to spend as much time laying down as possible, lest you incur the wrath of Gravity. It's just an approximate model of how the world works.
This is what you're getting hung up on
> Can you explain what this paper has to do with "liberalism" or "racism" or "traditional values" or anything of the sort ?
We agree that it doesn't. Where we disagree
My point is that value isn't limited to just these domains. All of rationality is an exercise in the value of some ways of thinking over other ways of thinking. But it can't talk about value, directly, becuase it doesnt' think value is real. That's confussion!
> It seems to me like you're looking for the meaning of life and moral guidance in statements such as "at sea level, water is at it densest at 4 deg C" or "F=GmM/r^2". This is a mistake, as such statements don't contain any moral or inspirational content
No, i'm not looking for meaning or moral guidance. I am observing the continuity between "don't imagine water will be more dense at 2 degrees c" and "don't disrespect" - they are both value gradients over domains of possible behaviors. One is just much more obviously a vaule gradient. The domain of politics is obviously value laden. The domain of measurement and observation is _also_ value laden, just in a way that's too subtle for many people to notice.
so to answer your question, i've asked the clanker to do it conmpactly:
Framed through the lens of epistemological value (where factual assertions reflect the relative utility of different cognitive and methodological approaches), the paper Bayesian comparison of Langevin dynamics for cell motility from positional observation implicitly argues that:
Evidence-Based Bayesian Model Comparison > Single-Model Dogmatism or Heuristics: Evaluating multiple competing stochastic models using unified probabilistic evidence (Bayes factors) is superior to assuming a single canonical model or relying on ad-hoc velocity approximations.
Latent-Variable Integration > Direct Re-construction of Unobservables: Working directly with the statistical likelihood of observable positional increments by marginalizing out unobserved states (like instantaneous velocities) produces far reliable inference than attempting to explicitly reconstruct missing unobservable data.
Scale-Dependent Epistemology > Universal / Scale-Invariant Truth: Thinking about dynamic phenomena as inherently bound to temporal resolution works better than searching for a single scale-free model, as statistical support for specific mechanisms changes depending on sampling frequency.
========
> All of rationality is an exercise in the value of some ways of thinking over other ways of thinking. But it can't talk about value, directly, becuase it doesnt' think value is real. That's confussion!
What do you mean, "it doesnt' think value is real" -- who doesn't think that ? I certainly think values are real, in a similar sense to how e.g. nutrition is real (though admittedly I'm not a Rationalist). Still, this part is partially incorrect:
> The domain of measurement and observation is _also_ value laden
You are slipping into the failure mode I've mentioned above: you seem to be saying that we must measure the density of water correctly because there's some grand cosmic rule decreeing that we must. There's no such rule, water doesn't care if you measure it or not (nor do the cells care about your measurements of their motility). It's just that measuring the density of water yields results that are extremely useful *regardless* of what it is you value deep inside. Whether you want to destroy the world or to save it, knowing about how water behaves will be of huge benefit to you. That's not a value statement, that's just a statement of fact, based on experience.
And you can of course keep spiraling deeper into philosophical presuppositionalism: "yes but how do you know whether experience is real ?", "yes but why should you want to be effective at your goals as opposed to ineffective ?", "who says water even exists ?", "what is the ultimate transcendent basis for your reason ?", and so on. And depending on your value system, discussing such tangents could be of great value to you... but it appears to be a brute fact of the Universe that knowing the triple point of water is orders of magnitude more important than answers to esoteric questions designed to be unanswerable.
As I'd said above, this situation is intellectually unsatisfying and aesthetically displeasing and sometimes I wish it weren't the case, but historically speaking almost everyone who chose wishes over facts had ultimately failed at whatever goal he wished to achieve, and I'd like to avoid following their examples.
I think apxhard's making a point about methodology and consensus mechanisms, rather than about any particular measurement or model. So rather than discuss particular models like F=GmM/r^2, I imagine apxhard would rather discuss things like Popperian Falsification and p-hacking and herd-behavior.
----
> knowing about how water behaves will be of huge benefit to you. That's not a value statement, that's just a statement of fact, based on experience.
nitpick: the term "beneficial" is, in fact, value-laden. it's an adjective of pure, unadultured affect.
> Please give an example of an epistemology that isn't a value system, scoped to the domain of claims.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but you seem to be saying something like, "Using only salient examples from contemporary political controversies, please give a non-political example of a framework of beliefs about how we can determine what is true." The requirement that I only use salient examples from contemporary political controversies is doing all of the work there.
If I'm allowed to use examples where the politics isn't baked into the question, it's trivial: the minimum message length formalism of Bayesianism, for example, has no political opinions whatsoever.
For a more concrete example, me before stubbing my toe and me after stubbing my toe have pretty much identical beliefs about the nature of truth, but we probably have markedly different reactions to someone voicing an annoying political opinion nearby, which shows that a single epistemology can map to multiple value systems.
> I'm not sure what you mean by this, but you seem to be saying something like, "Using only salient examples from contemporary political controversies, please give a non-political example of a framework of beliefs about how we can determine what is true."
No, my point is more subtle.
Any system that says "here is what truth is and how we can find it" is implicitly a system of values. It says, "think this way, not that way. It is better to believe this than it is to believe that."
You are right that 'the minimum message length formalism of bayesian' doesn't have an 'political opinions'. But this is the root of the confusion: it's to imagine there are domains where there are 'no values in play' simply because there isn't political controversy around which values are better.
> Any system that says "here is what truth is and how we can find it" is implicitly a system of values.
The reason the scientific method (in its modern form, but to some extent also historically) had been so successful is precisely because it disposes with such proclamations. Rather, it says "here's something that seems to work really well, let's do more of it".
Oh, and you also didn't respond to the points about attacking straw men and accusing people of believing the exact opposite of their publicly-recorded opinions, nor the point that reversing random noise doesn't get you a clear signal, it just gets you more random noise.
"Rationalists claim that you can understand the world through a lens of pure fact, pure data."
I feel like the charitable version of this, is that Bayes is purely data-driven. No? And is Bayes not the rationalist aspiration?
Sure, the method itself is data driven. Once you’ve got some data, and a prior, you can turn the crank and get updates. So it seems like we can just do away with the concept of values and run on pure data.
But data don’t arrive ex nihilio - the data you encounter are a function of the choices you make, including the choice or what to pay attention to. You’re blasted with enormous amounts of data all the time, most of which you ignore because it doesn’t seem valuable.
oh, I'm on your side. I'm very much in agreement that lossy compression is inherently subject to bias, and that science is a big club (and not everyone is in it).
Chrysophylax was insinuating something like "it's called Lesswrong, because we're trying to be less wrong. I.e. humans generally *can't* learn about the world through pure data, which is why they use sloppy heuristics. Therefore, apxhard's claim that we *can* learn about the world through pure data is a strawman of the Rationalist Project."
But it's obvious to me that this wasn't a fair interpretation of your criticism of the Rationalist Project, because you were criticizing plug-&-chug Bayesianism (the end point) rather than human heuristics (the starting point).
More generally, I don't think any of the other commenters are reading you carefully, or have the historical context to understand what you're gesturing at. Although I'm not particularly in the mood to get into the weeds today. But in any case, you have my sympathy.
> You might consider perhaps the problem you are struggling with here is evidence against the orthogonality thesis and the basis of materialist rationalism.
Materialist rationalism is full of claims about what types of thinking are most effective and most rational.
If you find that in practice humans aren't being perfectly rational here, well there are many other ways in which humans aren't perfectly rational.
> Rationalists claim that you can understand the world through a lens of pure fact, pure data. Values, they claim, are a kind of 'overlay' that can be applied once all the facts are in place. But your experience here clearly demonstrates that -- at least when it comes to people and social movements -- this simply isn't so.
An agent with limitless memory will remember all the facts. Different agents with limited memory will remember different facts, depending on their goals.
"An agent with limitless memory" is real only in the sense that a spherical cow can be real. Memory and compute resources are always going to be a limiting factor for real, living systems. My claim is that rooting the fact-value distinction at the base of your epistemology - as many moderns do - ignores this fundamental reality, and that consequently causes people to ignore the role that value judgement play at every level of cognition. They can ignore this because the problem doesn't really come up in games of ,e.g. chess or go, the kinds of things researchers like to study.
> Different agents with limited memory will remember different facts, depending on their goals
Yup, exactly. They'll focus on different things, too. It's not just about 'forgetting', it's about what you can even pay attention to in the first place. So in Scott's Case, he has to do a bunch of work to look at someone in a light other than "that one politician that sexted nudes" because his entire cognitive apparatus is constrained by a goal function.
That's the point I'm making here. The goal function doesn't happen apart from cognition, layered on only when evaluating outcomes. The goal function constraints every step of the cognitive process, it's woven throughout the flow of data from bottom up sense organs. It constraints what you notice, what hypotheses you consider, which ideas you challenge, which ideas you run with before you even notice an idea has taken hold of you.
Your ability to perceive reality is constrained not merely by 'cognitive biases', "bugs" like the conjunctive fallacy, but by the fundamental constraint of having limited compute. This means that all of our perception and reasoning is value-laden. Without being able to ask the question "which values are correct", you end up in this infinite loop of "we should follow the data wherever it takes us" without being able to acknowledge the "data" is just taking you along the direction of some value system you can't introspect without dropping your philosophical precepts.
Your values don't change which facts are true or false. They can change which facts are worth the effort to remember.
If everyone agrees that the relevant factual question is important enough to bother thinking about, they should all get the same answer.
Also, AI can have A LOT more memory than humans, so the "limitless memory" approximation can be a lot closer to true.
> So in Scott's Case, he has to do a bunch of work to look at someone in a light other than "that one politician that sexted nudes" because his entire cognitive apparatus is constrained by a goal function.
Is some of this just "Scott being irrational"?
> The goal function doesn't happen apart from cognition, layered on only when evaluating outcomes.
But often, it's not that woven. if 2 physicists are trying to understand dark matter, differences in views on animal welfare don't matter much to their dark matter research.
Someone else with different goals might choose not to study dark matter, but your goals shouldn't really effect how you do study it if you decide to do so.
"You invent an amazing new form of forecasting, incubate multibillion dollar startups, accidentally get thousands of people addicted to sports gambling"
Yeah, the little "oopsy-daisy, we turned thousands of people into addicts" might just maybe possibly perhaps who knows? be the problem there for reputation? That's quite apart from inviting Hanania, my opinion of whom is not high in the first place.
As for Weiner - a guy who sexts someone while minding his four year old child, sending a photo of him in bed with the kid *and a visible erection*, I think that even if he was the rootin'-est tootin'-est paperwork pusher in Congress, he is still fucking trash. And again, that's quite apart from "FBI go to investigate his sexts to a 15 year old girl, find out that he was using his wife's laptop to do this, find out that his wife was using that shared laptop for confidential work with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State (the emails), oopsy-daisy part deux".
https://abc7chicago.com/post/anthony-weiner-under-investigation-for-sexting-photo-that-shows-son/1494262/
Sometimes sheepshagging really is egregious enough that it overshadows everything else.
Psychology has done little to settle the secrets of the brain, it’s trapped in a Ptolemaic model when the actuality is neuronal and Copernican.
This same problem suffuses IT, language, and code dev. The span of current AI is based on the PDP psychological siamese-twin.
Think bigger. The discussion here is trapped at Pribram and pre-Pylshyn.
Maybe we need the concept of "value over replacement". If we're considering canceling a person/institution/movement, we should ask if we think they're better or worse, on the whole, than whoever/whatever would fill the gap left by their removal.
On the other hand, this doesn't address the second-order chilling effects of cancellation being a thing.
Cancellation isn't nearly so much about judging as about coordinating meanness. I will think less of someone if I know he's a devoted Maoist, a felon, or a goat-f--ker, and he will inevitably have to deal with the lower opinion of his neighbors for those things, but that doesn't require coordinating meanness--working with others to try to get the guy fired, shunned, debanked, banned from Twitter, etc.
I made a parallel with the "Nazi bar" joke on the previous thread, but it really needs to be stated that this is about a group failing to police itself. The Hananananania (I never know when to stop the ans) incident is similar but the other examples are missing the point.
It's not like psychology is a guy who made one mistake. It's a lot of guys and girls and even some complicated non-binaries who didn't notice that the infinite soup experiment had crazy effect sizes and priming was way too convenient.
Is it actually wrong for the heuristic to switch from "they know what they're doing" to "apparently the field will not bother to replicate key research for decades, peer review is mostly theatre, and scientists are unwilling to badmouth their colleagues, so I as a layman should be sceptical"? How was I, Mr Internet Commenter, meant to tell the good subfields from the bad?
Utilitarianism tries to make transgressions costly. We're all hardwired utilitarians, I guess. But also, technology tipped the scales: it makes _some_ social things more lubricated and higher-impact while not affecting others. I would bet on fixing the technology.
We have low priors for the behavior of politicians. Plus it didn't help that his family name is one of the many slang names for "penis".
Isn’t there a related classic Rolling Stones song about another Scottish guy… “Hey, McCloud, get offa my ewe”? I think that’s how it went anyway.
There was a novel I read where someone explained it. The speaker was dealing with someone much more powerful in a lot of ways than he was, but he happened to have more power in that particular situation.
This is a paraphrase because I don't have it in front of me.
"I'm a simple man. We deal honestly with each other and we can always both end up ahead. We can keep doing that.
"But if I find you've dealt falsely with me *once*, I have to assume that you've done a lot more and I just haven't found those out. And at that point the only thing I can do is consider you an enemy and strike with everything I have."
who exactly were the psychologists that discovered the secrets of the brain?
Galvani was before modern academic credentials. I would guess the people who figured out neurotransmitter signaling were biologists, not psychologists. How exactly is psychology getting credit?
Part of a "good solution" here might turn on whether you're using a MacGregor as a sword or a shield, so to speak. That is, if you're going out of your way to publicly attack a person or institution - trying to get someone fired, publicly cancel them, convince people to boycott an event, turn a generation against capitalism, etc. - then yeah, it seems incumbent on you to judge fairly and holistically, rather than based on one salient but unrepresentative example.
But if the question is just, how should you personally feel about someone, or how should you and your friends talk about someone who made a made a nasty barb to one of you, then I think you're allowed to rely on the traits that are most relevant to you, whether or not that's "fair" in some absolute sense.
I think one issue that is unaddressed here is the difference between actual indiscretions/wrongdoings/crimes (that we agree on as a society and as is reflected, e.g., in our legal documents) and whatever the lynchmob decides is an indiscretion. Same principle that can also be applied to severity of the indiscretion. One wrongdoing that is sufficiently bad (e.g., raping and murdering a child, to give an obviously extreme example) does indeed determine a person's entire reputation; however, treating all alleged indiscretions as equally severe is ridiculous and reputation-ruining is wrong.
The difference between these two scenarios is the difference between toxic cancer culture and reasonable behaviour.
It's a predictive model -- 'this is the kind of person who violates this norm. Therefore they will likely violate it again, and they might violate others!"
And it's a useful model!
My personal argument for a solution to this is a model of multiple gradations of social disapproval. At the worst end is imprisonment, above that is infectious shunning (shun those who shelter you), then shunning, then active disapproval, passive disapproval/tolerance, etc.
An open and free society should strive put as few things in the bottom "actively antagonistic" rungs as possible. Anything above that, we should let your failings be evaluated in balance with the rest of your successes.
If you mass murder people, I don't care what else you did in your life, you've lost your "tolerated member of society" privileges. If you're an asshole on twitter, though... maybe that should be in the 'passive disapproval' aka 'tolerance' rung.
That was the real problem with the twitter mobs, the attempt to elevate "failings that we disapprove of but tolerate" into full "social ostracism," which has nearly the effective punishing force as actual violence.
MacGregor deserves what he gets, not because of the goat but because he scared Peter Rabbit.
It's funny, because you fuck one sheep and you're Macgregor the sheep fucker but Mike Tyson can rape a girl, spend six years in prison, be a registered sex offender, and he's "Tyson, the kinda cutesy celebrity who goes on Rogan and has cute cameos in The Hangover" not "Tyson the Rapist."
Or Hugh Grant, who fucked a prostitute and got to keep being a Hollywood Heartthrob rather than Hugh the John. Or Rick James, who had some real bangers and also kidnapped and raped a girl. Or, if we want to get spicy, it's Martin Luther King Jr the American Saint, not Martin Luther King Jr the philanderer.
I'm not saying that the MacGregor effect isn't real. I'm saying that sometimes a single event ruins your whole reputation and sometimes it doesn't. And why it sometimes defines people and sometimes doesn't depends a lot more on other things than whether the thing was good or bad.
It seems to happen a lot less often after cancel culture became a thing. Maybe that was all just collateral damage that needed to be tolerated, for the sake of freedom.
yeah some people really have such large vaults of social capital, that they can literally get away with murder. And the social capital has to vibe with the current reigning in-group. Macgregor the sheep fucker says more about his relative social standing than his proclivities ...
With the right credentials, he could be "MacGregor who heroically defies expectations of the patriarchal society, and any hateful Nazi who dares to criticize him will get banned immediately".
"I've bought lots of beautiful buildings! But do they call me ‘The Beautiful Building-Buyer!’? No! I won THREE times, but did I get three terms? No! But, you tell ONE thousand lies a month, start ONE little war, earn ONE billion dollars per year, accept ONE $400 million jumbo jet from foreigners, add ONE trillion or whatever to the national debt, set up a ONE point seven billion dollar slush fund to give my supporters, pardon ONE thousand rioting supporters... and only 38% of the people approve!"
sorry i just think more people should talk about why certain people are immune from normal heuristics
I’m afraid anyone pointing to the reality of Trump in this forum is a Voice Crying in the Wilderness. It boggles my mind that the most awful, most disgusting, most un-American president in United States history seems to largely get a pass here.
An entire essay was written to throw shade on BLM (complete with graphs) but American citizens being killed by masked LE rates not a peep.
Thanks for a bit of support for reality from The Great White North. (IIRC you live in Canada)
I do yes. Scott tried to persuade folks not to vote orange, but 47 remains immune to normal heuristics. Why? I have a theory that it's about the U.S. media ecosystem (other countries are in a bad way, but the U.S. populous seems exceptionally captured by conservative media, by the alt-right, by post-truth ideas, and by these weird anti-intellectual intellectuals), and about typical human cultures which treat accuracy as unimportant, so people don't learn to do research to verify claims, and don't downgrade someone's reputation when they say things that are verifiably untrue or disregard facts that are right in front of them or make claims they can't possibly know the truth value of.
Remember, before the Trump who randomly sent troops to blue cities and wanted to invade Greenland, we had the 2016 Trump who just said false things all the time, hated immigrants and maybe grabbed some pussies. If people believe what he says, he can and does remake reality however he wants. Thus he won the 2020 election, the felony charges were a "witch hunt", how dare you suggest there is something corrupt about a sitting president getting billions of dollars, and shut up about Epstein.
Humans are such flakes, sometimes it's so hard to find reliable talking heads that I have to watch *unreliable* talking heads and then mentally keep track of their biases and try to make mental corrections. I'd rather just listen to people with good epistemics, but those are super rare.
I mean ppl say trump is immune from this stuff because of the media, but the media covered for biden’s ass cancer-ridden senior moments as he actively napalmed palestinians. However with trump his cult of personality just doesnt care and with biden the average reasonable person is kind of his target audience, so losing them was crippling
“most awful, most disgusting, most un-American president in United States history”
I didnt realize we forgot about Bush, who successfully stole an election in 2000 and used it to get into an illegal war, as soon as he was seen as “a good old fashioned republican, back when they merely wanted to lynch gays, blacks and trans people with BIPARTISAN support”
Actually it was the Supreme Court who decided the Florida election for Bush. And Bush spent quite a bit of time gathering support both domestically and around the world for his ill-advised Iraq war. It was a bad idea executed badly, but he consistently used better processes than Trump's, to the point where I suspect cooler heads could have talked him out of it, if they had worked harder.
^ This is why the overton window shifts to the right btw, because libs will excuse the literal Devil when enough time passes
The war was bad; I'm not excusing him.
But I learned recently about how George W. Bush was instrumental in creating the PEPFAR program that saved 25 million+ lives. He consistently framed USAID’s mission as a moral mandate rooted in American privilege and faith, citing Luke 12:48 ("To whom much is given, much is required").
Trump and Musk, by contrast, illegally smashed USAID overnight, violating the ICA which is based on the constitution's Appropriations Clause (and the APA), and this affected ~60% of the funds disbursed by PEPFAR.
So no, "Bush is worse" holds no water for me, and I would say that the overton window shifting to the right can be attributed to the right wing shifting to the right.
A nice contrast of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" with Trump: the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, Reverend Mariann Budde gave a sermon with Donald Trump and JD Vance sitting in the front row. Budde said "As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals—they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, and temples. Have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land."
Trump responded with: "She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. ... She and her church owe the public an apology!"
Other Republicans responded similarly, e.g. Mike Collins (R-GA) wrote "the person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list". If you would expect anything like this from the Bush era, I think you're hallucinating.
“Compassionate conservatism” lmao literally did blood libel against muslims and waterboarded them
Once Curtis Yarvin was invited to LambdaConf (one of the world's largest functional programming conferences) to do a purely technical talk on Urbit.
And yeah, a lot of speakers canceled because from their point of view it had become the Mencius Moldbug Conference For Mencius Moldbugs.
This is even encouraged in certain political circles. There's the good old leftist quip that "if 4 people are at a table, a Nazi sits down and the people don't get up, there's 5 Nazis at the table".
Honestly this feels like it's an inherent and inescapable feature of humanity. Our psyche is built to find outgroups where there are none.
It's also an explicit tactic, and one that IMO has mostly made the world poorer and darker.
How does relevance play into it? If I'm a sheep-rights activist, I'll absolutely care about McGregor's dirty deed and I'll want to spread the word far and wide to get him condemned and get justice for Dolly. On the other hand, maybe I need a really good bridge builder and McGregor is the best in the area. In that case I'm going to care a lot more about the quality of his bridges than what he gets up to on his private time. His bridge building skills have enough value and utility that I'm happy to wave off the other part.
You get this sort of discussion all the time of whether you can separate the person from their art or dissociate the bad stuff in favor of promoting and keeping the good parts. Seems like it opens the door to all sorts of motivated reasoning depending on your own values and what McGregor is bringing to the table for you.
I was going to give an opinion on this but there are too many comments already.
I'll instead observe that, for whatever reason, social epistemology does not appear to be a strength for this crowd. Regular epistemology sure, for example https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/waiting-for-the-miracle was excellent. Maybe it's an example of a strength becoming a weakness when it's applied outside its domain.
Human beings are not made to know this many people or contain this much information. Our sorting algorithm tends towards the negative, the sordid, and the associative. I don't think there's a good way to fix this, but knowing it and trying is important nonetheless. One of the best traits of rationalism is that they know and try. One of the worst traits is that they overestimate their odds of success.
We used to say at the public defenders office you should try never to judge a man for what he did on his worst day. I very often fail at that, but I remember I'm supposed to do that and occasionally try. But we also acknowledged that a few things are just so very bad that, no matter how charitable people would like to be, they're just going to drown everything else out.
Except... I mean surely *murder* of a helpless woman, premeditated, would be that right? It would for most of us, but I very routinely am involved in musical discussions of Phil Spector. What about sexual abuse or exploitation? Well for some of you that's a line, but there are many corners of the world where we discuss Woody Allen without reference to those allegations, Polanski was welcomed in the land of Foucault, Marv Albert still floats around the podcast guest circuit, Mike Tyson had not only a boxing comeback but a whole second career as an entertainer.
So what's the actual McGregor Line? It's whether the other things about you are more *interesting*. That's why most of us would fail it, you screw a sheep that's just your defining feature if you're an accountant who raised a family and spent every weekend doing roadside cleanup with your Kiwanis Club and took care of your aging parents for a decade, because those things are boring. If you're a heavyweight champion of the world, video game star, bit off a guy's ear in a fight, have a goofy voice, were in a famous bro comedy sharing the stage with a tiger and then starred in an animated TV series, raping a chick in a hotel room has ceased to stand out. OJ Simpson otoh never shook it because the trial and surrounding circumstances were so famous and weird that they rivaled his football and acting careers. That's basically it. If you're a normie you're probably really doomed to be McGregor'ed unless you are a very eccentric person to begin with.
This is the only explanation given so far that covers every one of Scott's examples.
If a prediction market conference invited 99 forecasting experts and 1 pundit, or a blogger made 99 orthodox post and 1 controversial one, why is it surprising at all that the one standout example gets attention? Fits with the prediction-error-minimization method of learning Scott's always talking about.
To the extent this is unfair when applied to a large group of people because of the actions of a subgroup, that's an unfairness amply covered in Scott's articles on the Noncentral Fallacy. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
> One time we invited Richard Hanania to a prediction market conference
To be fair, this happened 3 times. (Would have been 4 for 4 if he hadn't been busy with his book this year)
I have a silly heuristic (it is silly because it is subjective). I check to see if this person is in attack mode or defending.
To clarify, ask 'em a question: what harm did I do to you? If the response is a detailed list, this is attack mode. If the response is I don't know you, they are probably not on the attack.
If it is not possible to ask, I do my best to judge from their declared positions. Are they out to punish, discipline, harm me based not on my actions, but on general principles?
If in attack mode, I will judge them on their worst because I need to know what to expect.
If in defense mode, use their best actions to see if they are good enough to join that defense effort.
More obscure example, but I am reminded of the time Arnold said "screw your freedom" during the pandemic. Stupid, sure, but an off-the-cuff remark made within the pressure cooker of a brief TV news interview? Strikes me as a perfect environment to say something dumb in passing and should be discounted accordingly.
But it was enough for some people to reduce him from a revered figure to a pariah. For example, legendary strongman Brian Shaw made a big deal of removing the portrait of Arnold from his gym over it. Of course, Arnold cheating on his wife and having an illegitimate son was not enough to warrant the same reaction. I guess because cheating on your wife and having an illegitimate son isn't as political, even though it is a bigger moral fuck up. There's a kind of solipsism in there in which one holds their beliefs as the North Star of morality, and actions are of second- or third-order importance unless directly tied to those beliefs.
V
I tend to discount the sexual unorthodoxies, but, for the general case of rare, actually damaging actions, it is worth noting that it is far easier to break things than to build them. To pick a mechanical analogy, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_1 :
>Arthur C. Clarke described the malfunction as "the most expensive hyphen in history". In actuality, it was a missing overline in "R-dot-bar sub n", the "nth smoothed value of the time derivative of a radius R". The overline denotes a mean; by its omission, an unsmoothed value was used
Still, it _was_ a single character error which destroyed a whole spacecraft. The focus on the tiny part of a program that went wrong is not irrational.
This is the kind of confusion that utilitarianism always fosters.
Real live does not have Victory Points, come on. Real life has incentives that apply at margins. Society uses those incentives, particularly reputational ones, to discourage behaviors it doesn't want. If you think it's picking on the wrong behaviors, say that! Don't give us this spineless BS about balancing one kind of thing with another!
To put it another way: no one in any of these examples is being asked to judge whether a *person's life* is *good on net*. That's the kind of category error that utilitarian brainrot produces. You're just being asked to *participate in social enforcement of moral values*. If you don't want to, because you disagree with the values or don't think they should be so strictly enforced, then have the guts to say so.
It seems like you're viewing the social process as something like "Shame Sheep-Fuckers". But "Shame Sheep-Fuckers" is too coarse-grained to be the type of action you actually take.
In reality, every utterance you take is a different individual decision. If MacGregor fucked a sheep and is also the King of your country, you have competing social norms of "respect the existing social heirarchy" and "shame sheep fuckers". What's right in any specific case depends on the particulars.
If you think "participate in the social enforcement of moral values" is a rule that unambiguously selects one response to a situation (that you can either go with or try to defy) I think you might have an oversimplified vision of what "social moral values" are and how they can interact.
"Participate in the social enforcement of moral values" isn't a statement I endorse as a rule, let alone unambiguously. It's more that Scott's argument doesn't even seem to recognize that this is what people are doing, or the implications of rejecting it.
Consider the analogy between social norm-enforcement and actual law-enforcement. How might one critique the enforcement of laws?
- the laws are wrong / unjust: yep, common failure mode, needs to be called out and fixed
- the penalties are too severe: yep, common failure mode, needs to be called out and fixed
- the law is enforced inconsistently / arbitrarily: yep, common failure mode, needs to be called out and fixed
- the enforcers of the law are corrupt / abusive / unchecked: yep, common failure mode, needs to be called out and fixed
- the law needs to be relaxed for people who do lots of good things: lol NOPE, try again, if you're making this argument you're either a space alien who doesn't understand crime or literally trying to bribe somebody.
Of all the legitimate ways to respond to "y'all bought a castle", "y'all invited Hanania", etc., Scott chose one that weirdly and badly over-generalizes the situation. It reads like special pleading for rationalists and/or an attempt to dissolve any norms around social accountability in general.
>no one in any of these examples is being asked to judge whether a *person's life* is *good on net*
They do, though. "Bad person" is the most normie notion there is, and "sheep fucker" usually qualifies you to be one.
I'm interested in how people feel about artists like Alice Munro, who won the Nobel prize and then turned out to have been complicit in the sexual abuse of her daughter. On one level, I feel that the reception of her literary work should be independent of that. But then you read short story about family tensions and maybe it's not so easy to separate the art from the artist.
The problem is even knottier in science: Schroedinger is famous for his contributions to quantum mechanics. But it's fairly well documented that he was attracted to young girls. Physics has so far failed to engage with this at all. Somehow he seems separable from his work in a way Munro isn't really. But some mathematicians who made solid contributions to their fields were deeply committed Nazis; and the subject tends to de-emphasise their contributions... I guess I don't understand where the line is.
> It's fairly well documented that [Schroedinger] was attracted to young girls. Physics has so far failed to engage with this at all.
What do you think "Physics" is such that it has the capacity to engage in social judgements? It can't even manage to switch the direction of the current arrows to follow the actual electron flow
My take is you judge the stories on their own merit, the same way you don't tear down Macgregor's bridge because you don't like him personally. If the story is close enough to the topic that it reads differently knowing about it, then judge it for that, but don't judge the next one over for it.
The joke passed down to me akin to this was "In America its Hey You Get Off My Cloud, but in Scotland its "Hey McCloud! Get off my ewe!"
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. This is almost the essence of social life, a lot of its nastiness comes from battles about how acceptable various point-reductions are in the the local Overton Window.
> Trying to temper judgment this way feels like violence against my brain’s attention heads, the sort of thing that would turn me into an opinionless zombie.
Have you ever seen one of those animated visualizations of a traversal of hyperbolic disc (ex: the video game hyperrogue, you can play it in a browser)? Where the "center of focus" is big and clear, and the whole rest of the space shrinks as you move towards the edges? It's one of the ways to represent an infinite space within finite bounds. IMO, that's sort of like the mental representation of the world (where your mind is small, but the world is infinite in detail).
There's no reason you should try to keep the full accurate picture of everything in your head all the time, it's impossible. If MacGregor lives in another village, it's not worth concieving him as a multidimensional person. What relevance does Anthony Weiner have to you? It would be one thing if you really cared about healthcare for 9/11 responders, but you don't. In terms of your genuine attention, he's at the edge of the hyperbolic disc.
IMO, the best way to be responsible isn't to try to be perfectly accurate all the time. It's to:
1) Have explicitly low confidence about things at the edges of your genuine hyperbolic attention disc. Believe whatever you want, but hold it very lightly.
2) If you need to speak about such things in any relevant sense, explicitly take the time to bring them into the center first.
People who actively try to affect things that have ONLY EVER been at the very edges of their disc are irresponsible. Possibly well-intentioned though.
If you want to be double-extra responsible, you can also:
1) Try to convince irresponsible people to move relevant things closer to the center of their attention
2) Fight the social / political battle to influence how full entities actually get point-reduced, so that irresponsible people cause less harm
You can get in trouble if you don't THINK you're not speaking "in a relevant sense" (ex: you make a private joke) but you end up influencing something (ex: you do it on Twitter and contribute to a bad social phenomenon, like one drop in a hurricane). That's unfortunate, but finite human judgement is essentially doomed to failure sometimes.
You can only do your level best, if God wanted you to be infallible he would have put your soul in 2028's frontier AI model.
I think there's a category error using this same idea for diffuse groups as for individuals. If an individual is a great guy every day of his life but the one day he loses his temper and shoots a dozen strangers in a fit of pique, we're all going to form most of our judgement of that fellow by his single worst day, and I don't see how else it can be. But for a diffuse group, you get the thing where "pro-lifers" include a lot of Catholics praying the rosary during the March for Life, and also some guy tossing bombs into abortion clinics. The bomb-tossing guy doesn't really tell you much about the rosary-praying folks. Effective altruists mostly try to figure out how to give money in useful ways, but also include SBF using EA as an affinity scam or something; SBF's fraud gives me very little information about whether Scott is going to steal my money.
I try to have a fair view of people. If their benefits to others outweigh their harms, I think their life was net positive.
The correct punchline layout is
"(Preamble)... But they don't call me MacGregor the Bridge Builder" said MacGregor the Sheep Fucker.
Serendipitous:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/paracosm
Personally, I have very little difficulty believing good or sympathetic things about people I dislike or disapprove of, even if I disapprove of them very strongly, and relatively little difficulty believing bad or unsympathetic things about people I like or approve of. For example, I experience no cognitive dissonance in noting Hitler's outspoken support for animal rights, nor feeling pity over Stalin's tragic childhood abuse, despite their atrocities, nor in condemning F. D. Roosevelt's attempt to stuff the Supreme Court, despite my very considerable respect for him.
It's not just about lacking a stake in the struggle: I can think of good and bad things about modern politicians I have strong feelings about without difficulty, and in my private life, I can note the good points of people who have caused me catastrophic personal harm through bullying or dishonesty, despite my deep resentment of what they inflicted on me and my family, and I can maintain generally high opinions of people who helped me survive that, in one case despite my suspecting him of some potentially-serious misconduct of his own.
I don't know why this feels comfortable to me but feels to you like violence against your brain's attention heads, but I suspect it might be that (due to being autistic) I'm much less concerned with social status than most people, and thus am comfortable with other people's status being ambiguous. I'm also unusually comfortable with not supporting a side in a conflict, and thus with not rounding people off to "ally" or "enemy".
As a way to test that hypothesis, do you experience the same feeling of violently forcing yourself to be fair if the things you're evaluating aren't people or aren't in competition? For example, if you're given some conflicting scientific hypotheses that have considerable but not overwhelming support, do you feel an urge to choose one that's "basically right" and minimise the places where another hypothesis does better?
If you're asked for an opinion on a new book, or film, or restaurant, or whatever, do you feel an urge to quickly stop talking about nuances? How does your willingness to keep giving attention to subtleties vary with the general positive, neutral or negative stance of your opinion, with the strength of your opinion, with the certainty with which you hold your opinion, and with the degree to which other people in the conversation express agreement or disagreement with your opinion?
I think there's a slightly different issue at play, which involves identity/branding. Effective altruism doesn't just claim to do good charity work, but to avoid many of the issues that charity historically suffers from. When it doesn't do that or develops other equally bad issues, it's not enough to fall back on the "we did some good" claims, at least PR wise.
The other bigger issue tho would be tail risk. EA is about trying to pull big levers and many such levers can absolutely do more harm than good if pulled wrong. And it also seems like people will not be checked or stopped by the EA community if they try to pull the wrong big levers, they'll just give excuses like "but look at all the good we did from all the other levers". Is this really how you want this whole thing to operate?
Do I recall that Anthony Weiner had been positioned to prosecute someone important? (Grok indicates that I don't.)
Maybe you're thinking of Michael Avenatti?
Thanks. Not sure.
Or Eliot Spitzer?
A few thoughts on this delima:
1. Maybe what matters is the decision layer. You can keep your biased judgement unless you are about to make a consequential decision. In the Müller-Lyer illusion(two lines same length looks different lengths), you don't have to contort your mind to somehow see the same length, but you can take out a ruler when you have to bet on it.
2. Maybe for some judgements tails beat means, knowing about a rare case of a contractor stealing might be more important than their average output.
3. Chilling effects scale with expected punishment, laws and norms targeted at the punishment function can allow people to keep their private judgements without the cancel culture chilling effects. It would be impossible and counterintuitive to try and stop people from remembering someone's worst act, but it's possible to make a norm of "we don't make impactful decisions like hiring and firing based off of these things".
Possibly the problem is that we know of so many people, far beyond our Dunbar number, that we can't help but think of most of them by whatever we know.
It's so baffling to me that you credit "capitalism" (as much as it can be considered a well defined, singular entity) with electricity or healthcare. With that kind of logic we can credit any historical event downstream of the second world war to Adolf Hitler.
Hitler does not distribute electricity to your home. Companies operating on profit motive do. Capitalism is an ongoing active force in electricity distribution, not just a random historical fact.
I'm a research psychologist, specializing in the cognitive processes around persuasive messaging. In psychology, there is a very well known model called "Dual Processing" which proposes that the mind has (at least) two modes of operation: fast, intuitive and simple (so-called "System 1") and slow, deliberative and complex ("System 2"). These two systems are ways of generalizing across many interacting cognitive processes, and do not correspond to any one neurological system. What the dual processing model implies is that the human mind has an optimization process for reducing cognitive load, presumably so that it can save caloric energy in the long run.
To oversimplify quite a bit, the mind uses system 1 unless it has a very good reason to use system 2. System 1 begins in preconscious sensory and perceptual processing - basically it's pattern matching sensory input against expectations based on previous life experiences. Only when a stimulus stands out for some reason, fails to match expectations, does system 2 come into play, and we begin to consciously regard the stimulus, whatever it is.
"Expected stimuli" includes types of people and their actions. Chains of expectations, based on previous life experiences, form narratives which lend meaning to the activity we see around us. We remember events according to the intensity and type of emotional response we had to the life experiences that went into the category our mind is matching against - either positive or negative.
One can easily see the survival advantage this might have given our ancient ancestors. If, every time we passed a certain clump of bushes, a nondescript bird flew out of it, we might never remember this, no matter how many times it happened. But encounter one lion, and that bush is forever seared into memory. So is the place we first met our lover.
Someone does something. Who cares? Nobody unless you know them. Too many people do too many things for the mind to be able to afford to pay conscious attention to them all. So we categorize people by the emotional response we had to them (if any). One guy does something horrible to a sympathetic victim, a movement allows itself to make one policy mistake, a professional discipline (mine, in this case) makes claims it later has to retract. We remember these things basically because it saves mental energy, while still delivering utility.
The point is that this process is completely automatic - you can't help yourself. One can use willpower to force yourself to think carefully about something, but not about everything. So this phenomenon is simply a ubiquitous aspect of human nature. To think carefully about the world, involves strategic choices. To influence others to think carefully about something requires persuasive messaging. Both requires tradeoffs.
Does it help to turn up the volume? "Bill Gates saved tens of millions of lives, but he takes ONE ride on Epstein's plane..." I think, whatever Gates' personal indiscretions, the weight of his actions ought to be mostly on his global health work.
I think you are just going to have to be a good utilitarian and get over it. The moral urge of one sad puppy: horrible, I feel it like a rock in my stomach. A million chickens tortured endlessly, hundreds of miles away? Sorry, I (personally) just have a hard time getting worked up about it. And yet...I realize, intellectually, that the second is much worse than the first. Thank you for your service Representative Weiner.
The Anthony Weiner documentary he himself commissioned was actually pretty great. Not only because it was incredible that he documented himself ruining his own family and career (again!), but also because until he did so in the film, he really seemed like a politician you could root for.
"Why are you letting me film this?" is one of cinema's immortal lines.
This might be an unoriginal take, but it could be part of how people deal with limited information. If I am going to get information on a person, then there is an expected value for the "worst" thing I know about them. The more information I have, the more extreme that expected worst action gets. So I can use the observed value of the worst thing to try to predict the normal expected quality of behavior.
For example, if I am good friends with a person and I spend a lot of time with them, then I have a lot of information on them. So if one day they lose their temper at the movie theatre and yell at someone, then I can still think they are a decent person, because that is about as bad as I would expect their worst behavior to be given how much I know about them. But if I were the employee at the movie theatre then that would be my only piece of information. That is worse than the worst I would expect from a single observation, so for them it is predictive and negative.
On MacGregor, for most people I don't hear about something like that, so if I do I think it is fair for me to, to some extent, update my opinion downwards. At the same time, this is a notable piece of information, so the information is more likely to reach me, so I shouldn't be to certain in my estimate.
Some notes on this:
- Groups of people should be judged less harshly for bad actions of individual members because the minimum quality of an action taken by any member of a group is lower than that of any individual
- However, groups should be judged more harshly for decisions made as a group because they need more people to get on board (ie if a group of 100 people vote to go yell at someone in a movie theatre I don't think at least 51 of them were just having a bad day that day).
- If the information you get is biased positive then even slightly bad things should be judged more harshly
- If the information you get is biased negative then you shouldn't be as harsh
- It seems to me that people (including me) in general don't have big enough error bars on their estimate from limited information
When I was in high-school I started a habit of loving kindness mediationalong with things like a vow to not be annoyed by things that aren’t actually bad and never have negative thoughts about someone that aren’t followed by thoughts forcing on positive things about the person. I basically tried to do what Scott described as violence against his brain when thinking about Anthony. Personally I don’t feel like I’ve become less opinionated or in any ways more of a zombie. It massively improved my life and imo given me a lot more mental clarity about topics important to me. I think in general we treat too many natural aspects of our minds as good or serving some important function or not to be tampered and our habit to zero in and focus on negative things, in this case negatives about other people is one where I think that impulse is really misguided. Being able to remember that sheepfucker McGregor is a full person outside of beastiality and really forcing oneself to remember the positive and admirable things he’s done imo would make society a much kinder and just place and is on some level a moral obligation we have to the McGregors of the world.
Names are frequently used to point out specific individual out of many. There are honorific names, but most often it's just "how this individual is different from all others?". That's why Cicero is not "a great orator guy", but "the guy whose ancestor had a wart on his nose looking like chickpea". And Ovid is not "a great poet" but "the guy with a huge shnoz". Everybody knows who they are talking about - I mean, just look at the nose, you can see it's him! Thus, if you have choice between bridge-building and sheep-fucking, presumably the latter is more rare that the former, so if you need to know which MacGregor out of hundreds we're talking about, it's more efficient way to designate the one. If everybody there were routinely diddling sheep but only one person were building bridges, I am sure the naming would work the other way, any other arrangement would become unsustainable.
Deciding how you feel about Wiener, or perhaps more relevantly, whether you might vote for him based on, let us say, his professional record rather than on the scandal surrounding his name, could I think depend on what weight you give to the several aspects of his misdemeanour.
For instance, which of the following would weigh most heavily with you:
1. The moral aspect of his violating the privacy of other people with his sexual posts, which some recipients might justifiably consider a violation?
2. The undoubted crassness and blatant vulgarity of his actions, characteristic of a half-witted teenager?
or
3. The sheer stupidity of indulging in an idiotic action capable of destroying his professional and private life, confirming that he is too dumb to be trusted as your representative?
One might easily of course be turned off by all three reasons, but I think that for most people, one of them would clearly be dominant, demonstrating that the other two are less critical, or even perhaps relatively negligible.
I realize I'm being sort of literal here, focusing on MacGregor and the sheep, but -- does anyone know whether it injures, hurts or frightens a sheep to have a person have intercourse with it? I had always assumed it did not bother them, pictured them continuing to graze while a MacGregor was going at it. I asked GPT and as it was in the middle of answering some censor came in and shut it down -- "WE AT OPEN AI DO NOT CONDONE TALKING ABOUT SHIT LIKE THIS," or some such. Even my initial query was quite non-prurient, but then I tried re-asking it as a search of the veterinary literature for research on vaginal injuries in sheep,, and I still got shut down. I complained to GPT about the situation, it began to respond, and OpenAI shut down our even talking about talking about intercourse with sheep. Claude did answer the question, but had no actual data, was on a misstion to convince me that sex with a sheep hurts them really really bad, or at least it *could,* depending, so people absolutely should not do it.
So does anybody know the facts?
And while we're on the subject: Many people posting on this topic take it for granted that having sex with a sheep is bad -- harmful, cruel, morally wrong. Hey, I get the ick factor, but why is it *wrong*? Because the sheep doesn't consent? Are you all assuming that it is painful and frightening for the sheep.? If it hurts them, I think it's morally wrong too. But, um, seems like people who are horrified by the fate of MacGregor's sheep are kind of losing track of the fact that we imprison, kill, and eat sheep. I'm not doing vegan guilt induction here, just pointing out a weird inconsistency.
Dan Savage sez: "If I were a sheep I would rather be screwed than stewed."
We don't want people having sex with our foodstuffs.
To the main point; we look down on people who have sex with easy targets. Prostitutes, blow-up dolls, third worlders who need a spouse so they can move, all off-putting. And animals are in the same range as children; not intelligent enough to consent, and not empowered enough to escape. It's a massive abuse of position.
Sure. But you could make stronger, more poignant versions of the same claims about the other stuff we do to sheep. Sheep are also easy targets for being imprisoned, impregnated against their will, and having their children taken away to be killed and eaten. They are intelligent enough to grasp that these things are happening, but not articulate and empowered enough to object or prevent their happening.
I think the real underpinnings of people's sense that fucking sheep is wrong are (1) they are not desensitized to it, as they are to imprisoning, killing and eating them; (2) not many people have intercourse with sheep, we're not subject to the sense that the behavior can't be very bad because everybody does it; (3) it is unusual *sexual* behavior, and people tend to have strong, judgmental reactions to sexual behavior, and negative reactions to unusual sexual behavior.
You're still focusing on the sheep. We don't care about the sheep, we care about the abuse of position. A guy who raises sheep to kill and eat is a guy with long term planning who contributes to his neighborhood. A guy who fucks a sheep is a short-minded self-centered freak who's going to abuse as much power as you give him.
>A guy who fucks a sheep is a short-minded self-centered freak who's going to abuse as much power as you give him.
Do you actually believe this, or are you saying that's how the public thinks?
If you actually believe it -- what's your evidence?
>what's your evidence?
Common sense. What society-positive reason do you suggest for someone fucking a sheep? Do you think anybody wants to have sex with someone who's previously had sex with a sheep? Do you think anybody wants to eat that sheep now? It's a destructive act to benefit the actor emotionally. That didn't stop them there and there's no reason to think it will stop them anywhere else.
You can argue benefit of the doubt or whatnot, but you can do that with literally anything, including genocide.
>What society-positive reason do you suggest for someone fucking a sheep?
What’s society-positive about you eating an ice cream cone? I’d say it’s society-neutral, as are many things in life, including sex without another person present— just a video, or a pocket pussy, or a sheep.
>Do you think anybody wants to have sex with someone who's previously had sex with a sheep?
What’s going on here and with your next point is that what you’re calling common sense is actually you using your personal aversion to the image of someone fucking a sheep as data. You have an intense feeling that what he did is hideously weird and nasty and evil, and think of anything MacGregor’s dick has touched is contaminated by those qualities. You think it’s self-evident that “a guy who fucks a sheep is a short-minded self-centered freak who's going to abuse as much power as you give him.” It isn’t. In fact there’s quite a lot of research into the characteristics of people who are into weird, transgressive sex, and they do not seem to be more violent or crazier or more psychopathic than non-kinksters. You’re imagining MacGregor as weird and violent and abusive, and so long as that picture controls the inquiry then your question answers itself. No, most people do not want to have sex with someone weird, violent and abusive who has sheep fleece stuck to his dick. But that doesn’t tell us how a woman would feel about MacGregor, because it doesn’t describe MacGregor. It describes your disgusted imaginings.
>Do you think anybody wants to eat that sheep now?
See, you're calling up an mental image of something like a sheep’s vaginal opening lying on your plate garnished with shiny traces of MacGregor’s activities on it. Right, very few people are eager to chow down on that. But that’s not what eating MacGregor’s sheep would be like. When eating meat, there’s quite a lot that it is good not to call to mind, even if the sheep’s a certified virgin If the sheep had ticks, could any of them have remained on it? What about the insecticide in sheep dip? What about the bile, feces and other nasty stuff that must flood out of the body when it is disemboweled — can they really wash all traces of that stuff off the sheep muscle, fat and tendons that I eat? Sensible meat-lovers don’t call any of that to mind, and we don’t wonder about MacGregors over our lamb chop.
At least most of us don’t. You, though, are calling sheep-fucking to mind and mentally pairing it with sex, eating, and personal character, and when you have godawful pictures of MacGregors you mistake your disgust for insight.
>To the main point; we look down on people who have sex with easy targets.
Frankly, that attitude makes me angry. Demonstrating harm is one thing. Excluding "easy targets" _without_ evidence of harm is _deliberately_ making someone's life _worse,_ forcing them to expend more effort for no good reason. I oppose it. I dislike people who make peoples' lives worse in this and similar ways.
In general, the _CORE_ of progress is innovating in ways that make hard goals easy. Social norms that penalize ease are directly countering making life better. I find such norms disgusting.
Sydney says there's three perspectives: harm; moral categories; social norms. Bestiality may be less harmful than confinement/slaughter. But most people tend to evaluate this in terms of category violations and social norms. I.e. "goat" is an element of the category "food", and is therefore instrumentally acceptable; but "goat" is not an element of the category "intercourse", and is therefore unacceptable (and weird/disgusting/impure/abnormal).
That's plausible. In general, enforcing category violations is a terribly limiting norm. Anyone who has ever opened a paint can with a screwdriver blade violates a category boundary - and (barring special circumstances) that is a wise and resourceful thing to do.
The MacGregor The Bridge Builder ... PUBLISHED 2 DAYS AGO 401 LIKES 13 RESTACKS 632 COMMENTS framing is the part I keep coming back to. Most takes on this skip the underlying mechanism and try to win on vibes.
The problem with having sex with sheep is you have to keep running around to the front to kiss them
I’m thinking of Roberto Benigni’s cab diving character in “Night on Earth.”
“Such beautiful eyes and a soft ‘maaa’ not a loud ‘MAAA’.”
Confessing his sins to an unwilling priest in the back who succumbs to a heart attack from TMI
I would have titled it - On Why not to F*** a Sheep
Did Macgregor only fuck one sheep once, or one sheep many times , many sheep once, or many sheep many times ?
Canonically, he only f--ked *one* sheep, but we don't know how many times.
>but you invite one conservative! If you allow this sort of thing, you can discredit any individual, field, or movement.
If such discrediting works, there might be paid people who are sent to events that the customer wants to discredit. Are these any? (I am not disagreeing with Scott in any case)
Bestiality is one of the ways we get "fun" new plagues, including ones that become endemic and never go away. I would say this trumps all other considerations and makes it very valid to condemn a guy who buggers a sheep.
As for Anthony Weiner - funny you know him for the sexting scandals and say he's probably an unremarkable or even good legislator otherwise... because I only know him for his terrible legislation, like when he successfully got "knowingly giving someone an STD" made no longer a felony.
> Bestiality is one of the ways we get "fun" new plagues, including ones that become endemic and never go away.
"Do they call me ‘Wang The Gain-of-Function-Researcher’? No! But, you fuck one bat...”
I don’t think this phenomenon is so mysterious—groups are founded on _trust_, and, so long as trust is hard won and easily lost, rejecting members of the group for violating core trust measures will justify the asymmetry.
random thoughts:
* When it comes to cancel culture, I would say there are two side points to remember, one for and one against. The "againt" one is that recency matters. If someone had a great pro-social congressional career, if they do a 180 and start supporting positions I find heinous now, it is possible that they changed for the worst and that their current actions are representative of who they are now. This defence of cncel culture fails though, cause people cancel other over jokes from ten years ago.
* The one "for" is that I might dislike a person or deem them stupid even if they do, behaviorally speaking, good and pro-social things. If someone truly believes, idk, that jews form a shadow world government trying to make as much money as possible, with all due respect to a possible past of great deeds - it shows something about their world model and their mental infrastructure that's porbably pretty bad. So in essence, yes, if you write 50 interesting posts about ideas about economics, and then 2 about a jewish shadow government, I might indeed deem you to be an idiot.
* On a personal note, I don't find it that difficult to regard people involved in scandals as complex individuals, that we shouldn't form a very comprehensive opinion of over the scandal alone. Perhaps as a result, I seem to care less about scandals than some people around me. Either way, I don't think I'm that special, and so I don't think this sort of judgement really something innately human and impossible to stop doing. If someone called my friend a buffoon for no reason on social, I might dislike that person for a long time, but I don't think it will effect my actions in terms cases where its important to determine wether they are generally a good person (say, if I have to decide wether or not to give them a philantropic position on some organization), or to assess if they are skilled professionals etc.