An RPG I played included a magic artifact which could make everyone in the world forget one thing. It could erase memories and written records, and confabulate plausible replacements that would prevent people from noticing the lacunae. The artifact couldn't stop people from re-deriving or re-inventing any knowledge they could easily re-derive or re-invent (so if you asked people to forget about war, they would probably start fighting each other again pretty quickly) and it couldn't remove physical evidence other than writing (so people would still have tanks, warplanes, etc). But it might help confabulate around these things (people might think the tanks were just for fancy parades).
First thing I thought of too. I think far too much of our current understanding of race is based on the last few hundred years. I think the concept of race would be reinvented, but I don’t think it would resemble what we have today. I don’t think it would be fireworks, either. It would just look really weird to outside observers used to our culturally embedded categories, the same way that moderns have an incredibly hard time understanding that ancients’ and medievals’ concept of race was very rudimentary, tribal, and doesn’t map to our own, or that until recently the Japanese had no separate words for blue/green.
My money would be on some sort of cultural racism/xenophobia, as opposed to today's largely ancestry-based conception of race.
We see it in the Ancient world, where people from Gaul to North Africa to the Black Sea could become latinised and enter the Roman ingroup, so long as they rejected their 'barbaric' culture in favour of 'civilised' roman culture.
I think this was also (at least nominally) the policy of Imperial Japan.
The idea of a duty to civilise the barbarians tends to be used to justify imperialism, so these ideas are often seen in expansionist states. Maybe the monkey's fist would give us another round of colonialist atrocities.
You see a current of this paradigm within American race relations (tangled up with ideas about class) whenever there's an outcry against posh schools not letting African-American students wear cornrows.
Actually, the ancients had a very distinct understanding of ancestry and tribal origin, although the modern notion of 'white' or 'black' wouldn't have made and sense.
The Latinisation of even the Italians was hotly contested, and a series of wars known as the Social Wars were fought over the matter. It wasn't until the reign of the emperor Claudius that citizenship was extended to provinces outside of Italy, and by that time even Rome itself had changed greatly. It is a common mistake by modern intellectuals, for example, to point to a particular Roman's provincial origin and claim that he was necessarily from that place originally. In reality, many Romans lived in the provinces as colonists.
The Romans were not interested in civilising barbarians. They extended some civic rights to those that they conquered, for the most part, but they had a very sophisticated gradation to the levels of citizenship and respect granted - and most of these concessions were nominal. Some scholars seem unable to separate the Roman concept of the 'gens' from their ethnic origin - probably a cultural influence from modern times. To the Romans, a 'gens' or 'clan' was as much a spiritual relation as a blood tie, and this why the practice of adoption took place.
They differentiated themselves, however, in multitudinous ways. The Romans drew a distinction between the *blood ties of families between their own classes,* to say nothing of what they thought of others. The difference between them and moderns is that they were more than willing to extend the same consideration to other ethnic groups indiscriminately, European, African, or otherwise, so long as they proved themselves weaker. The main thing was that those groups were inferior for having lost their battles, which is why they had a wide variety of slaves, but the Mary-Beardesque theories of ethnic integration are highly controversial.
What do you think would be different? To me, 19th-century conceptions of race (say white, yellow, brown, black & red) look rather similar to 21st-century clustering based on genomic data, so I'd expect people to rediscover the familiar races pretty quickly.
I don't understand what you mean by "white" not being a uniform category in the 19th century. Races aren't uniform categories according to modern genomic methods either; rather there are splits and admixture events at various time depths.
I think his point is that we would have a larger group of "races" if we wiped the slate clean. "White" would stop being considered the same group, and the current racial majority in the US would turn into a number of small groups (which could include Irish, Italian, Mediterranean, etc.). I'm not sure if I would expect that, or what Lambert is saying about in group/out group conceptions.
Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans weren't considered to be the same racial category as English, Scandinavian, Germans, and French. Nowadays we consider them all to fit into the same top-level racial category.
What I mean is, it's not necessarily obvious that we should group together all the people we consider "white" in the same category. People in the 19th century thought it was very important to note that Irish people came from different stock than British people, despite their similar skin tone.
Similarly, it's not obvious that an olive-skinned Arab person is "brown" while a Greek with the same skin tone is "white."
They'd certainly pick out noticeable genetic groups and skin tone differences and form various stereotypes based on them, but they probably wouldn't match up to the groups we use today.
If it's that great a paper, why not host it yourself? You have a blog, I seem to recall, and one assumes it supports 'uploading files'. Better than linking Sci-Hub links which use up its bandwidth & will break when it next changes its domain. Or here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/history/2012-fox.pdf Took all of a minute max to edit, add metadata, upload etc.
I only skimmed that paper, but it seems like they describe quite a lot of nuance in racial boundaries - while there was little de jure discrimination against whites from outside northern Europe, they give plenty of examples of discrimination by private citizens. (And even a few court cases that touched on the question, although they decided that European immigrants did count as white).
Yes, black-white segregation was much harsher than any intra-white divisions, but my point is that those other forms of discrimination *existed.* The question posed by the OP is "if you erased the concept of racial categories from everyone's memory, would people independently reinvent them or could they come up with some other division?" and my answer is "Yes, they would come up with other divisions, and we know that because we have evidence of people in history recognizing racial divisions that we don't today." It doesn't matter that those divisions didn't result in Jim Crow for Italians, it's just an existence proof.
This is just me vaguely remembering what I've read on the internet, so epistemic status is low confidence, but I thought I had read that (ignoring a few small, distantly-related groups like the Khoisan and the Australian Aborigines), if you tell a computer to divide all humans into just two clusters by analysing their genomes, it would split us into Sub-Saharan Africans and everyone else ... but if you expanded to three clusters, it would churn out Sub-Saharan Africans, [East Asian + Native Americans], and [Europeans + North Africans + South and West Asians]. Presumably if you keep increasing the number of clusters, at some point you would get something that maps reasonably well onto what we now call 'white'.
Everything up until that last sentence seems very plausible, though the last sentence might be true depending on how "reasonably well" you want it to map on.
Also, I think you have to get the computer to ignore the genomes of nearly everyone from Latin America, who have various complicated mixtures of European, American, and African ancestry.
Did 19th century conceptions include a "brown"? My impression is that whenever they ventured to include Hispanic or South Asian people into racial categories, they categorized them as "white".
I seem to remember someone on the internet who has one Mexican grandparent and whose wife is from India tried to work out whether they'd have been allowed to marry in the state where they live, pre-Loving vs Virginia. Alas I can't track it down. I think it was somebody on jirt-appreciation tumblr.
The answer turned out to be that every relevant court case established a different precident: Some would allow it on the basis that they're both white, some on the basis that neither of them are white. Some would prohibit it because he was white and she not and others vice-versa. In one year in the 20s, the courts made 3 contradictory rulings on the matter. Some cases took the caste and skin colour of the South Asian defendant into account.
The short answer is that they didn't put much thought into it. 1/4 genetically Mexican would count some years but not others, because Mexican is probably Native American or something. And 100% Indian is also borderline if your lawyer can convince the court that you're "high-caste." But all of this was pretty much made up as they went along.
I don't think it's about what categories they believed existed so much as what they bothered paying attention to. Like, Virginia's laws were very much about white supremacy as in white vs. black (and Native American because Walter Plecker can never be *sure* they aren't secretly part black). Other discrimination wasn't really the main target, probably just because there weren't a whole lot of other minorities in Virginia at the time. The letter of the law might have looked a bit different if they were confronted with a bunch of definitely non-white Caucasians.
Actually I was wrong. There were multiple conceptions of a brown race, but those were generally confused – either some subset of what we would recognize as the white race or the yellow race or a conglomeration of different races. I did find that Meyers Konversationslexikon (from the 1880s) split off the browns, referring to them as Dravidians and not including them in their white/black/yellow trichotomy, so I guess some people got it and some people didn't, even then (although this lexicon, on the other hand, had a rather confused idea of who belonged to the black race, including, among others, Australoids).
There was a Supreme Court case in which a Sikh man was ruled non-white because the Founding Fathers who wrote the original immigration law were ignorant of modern (per that era's SCOTUS) racial science and thus couldn't treat "caucasian" as an equivalent.
> To me, 19th-century conceptions of race (say white, yellow, brown, black & red) look rather similar to 21st-century clustering based on genomic data, so I'd expect people to rediscover the familiar races pretty quickly.
Except that the 19th-century conceptions of race were predominantly methods of identification for people in cultural outgroups. The culture of Africans from Africa and 19th-century Native Americans were very different from any kind of European culture, hence outgroup.
Today if you look at a random sampling of e.g. truck drivers in America, they'll be of all "races" and have more cultural similarity to each other than to people of the same "race" working on Wall Street.
Modern ideas about race are heavily North America-centric, and not something I've ever understood fully. Categories like 'white' or 'asian' only make sense in that particular geography - outside if it they're largely meaningless. For instance, there is very little similarity between an Englishman and a Ukrainian, historically or ancestrally (unless you go back to prehistoric times). The same goes for Indians, the Chinese, and Indonesians.
Previous understandings of categories were also not only cultural. The earliest conceptions of 'race' more closely resembled tribes or clans - what we would now categorize as an ethnic group. Mediaeval English texts wrote of the Scots and Welsh as races distinct from their own.
So I suppose I largely agree. One thing about the linguistic difference though: I've heard the same claim for the ancient Greeks/Romans, and in their case it isn't true. The Greeks had a word which denoted blue, grey, or green simultaneously, or a combination of them. Glaukopis Athena, for example, was either 'grey-eyed Athena' or 'green-eyed Athena' or even 'sea-grey-eyed Athena.' All of which make sense in ancient Greek, because they had no equivalent of aquamarine, for example, although it wasn't that they couldn't see the colour - they just lumped it under the same name. Same with 'purpura' in Latin, which was alternately purple, red, green, and black-and-red at times, but could also mean simply 'iridescent.'
It's not that you can't perceive colors you don't have a word for, but you (apparently) don't perceive them as well. Link from the top link in my search, since my first click was paywalled. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797618782181
"very rudimentary, tribal, and doesn’t map to our own," Doug Stanhope has a skit about britain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in3Ppk9NG9U "where ye from? across the street?!? **** across the street!"
You mean to stop the absolute fireworks show? I expect people would eventually switch to something else to hate each other about, but it would probably be a lot less inflammatory.
I'd suggest that simply whatever categories were invented to replace our current racial groups would have a lot less baggage attached, so less sticks to beat opponents with.
I guess that depends on whether the baggage is inherent to noticing out group differences or specifically built on perceived wrongs from the past.
I think it's both, but I'm not sure how much of either. I would like to think 90/10 wrongs from the past, but I fear it might be closer to 50/50 and we would reinvent the past wrongs given enough time in the new paradigm.
Wouldn't work. People would just re-derive race almost immediately (based on outward appearance as usual), or invent/intensify some other division to fight about (gender, language, sports team preference, etc.). Personally, I'd try to cheat, and remove some common logical fallacy, like e.g. false generalization. Not the knowledge about the mechanics of the fallacy, but the fallacious mode of reasoning itself.
Ideally, no, because I'd like to preserve *true* generalization via induction. That is to say, if you see a single swan that happens to be white, you would no longer be able to conclude that all swans are white (after my artifact-powered finger-snap, that is). However, if you see 100 swans and all are white, you would still be able to predict that the next swan you see is also highly likely to be white.
OK, I'm not so convinced that that type of absolute generalization is very prevalent outside the hard sciences. I think more often problems arise from bad particularization than from bad generalization, i.e. concluding from "Xs tend to Y" that "this X Ys".
I believe it has been repeatedly observed that when e.g. machine learning algorithms are tasked with figuring out e.g. which customers banks can trust to repay their loans, they independently invent something close enough to racism as makes no difference unless they are specifically constrained not to, and if they are constrained not to then we tend to notice them running up against the boundaries as they e.g. use zip codes or whatever else we forgot to tell them was a proxy for race. Since forgetting about race means forgetting that we're not supposed to be racist and not supposed to let our computers be racist, I'm pretty sure racism is going to be reinvented fairly quickly in this hypothetical.
The details might change, and if they cleave closer to reality that might be an improvement. But if forgetting about race means forgetting about racism, then it means forgetting hard-earned lessons about the bad things that happen if you put too much weight on even accurate racial generalizations, and I'd really rather not have to relearn those lessons the hard way.
I forget the details but the bit about zip codes was some algorithm used in the criminal justice system. Used to advise judges in parole or bail hearings by predicting recidivism rates. They stopped using it after it was alleged that it was being much harsher against people from majority black neighbourhoods.
There was a bunch of discussion in the SSC comments about it.
A quick google finds lots of discussion that neglects to link to primary sources, which is annoying as I don't have time to give this the attention it deserves. But here's a discussion at the MIT Technology Review (paywalled, but readable if you disable Javascript).
I expect this would kill a LOT of people. Current attitudes re: race have a lot of leftover baggage from the pre-Twitter era. If you started them over from scratch, social media would promptly refine them into maximally efficient hatred generators, and current race relations would look utopian by comparison.
I don't know what you meant by that, but I realize that picking religion is too nebulous. Do I mean just monotheistic religion, the idea of a creator, belief in supernatural entities, Platonism, or Cartesian dualism?
I am reminded of the passage from Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, when the Piraha ask Dan when they are going to finally meet Jesus. When he tells them that he has never met Jesus, they can't understand how he can believe in someone he has never met and dismiss the whole of Christianity as nonsense. So could it be that the original human condition is not Platonic? But would this hinder higher abstract reasoning?
(monkey's paw curls) congratulations, the religious people whose behavior you didn't like now get super into various kinds of extremist politics instead.
Well, let's start with - all bonds are now valueless. The global banking system, which was holding a whole lot of sovereign debt, immediately collapses; the rest of the financial system immediately follows. It gets pretty bad pretty fast, I think.
Definitely better, I cynically suspect it still doesn't help things. As an analogy, if you canceled everyone's mortgages, the banks that give mortgages go bankrupt, and now nobody can get a loan to buy a house - which is really bad for new buyers (and sellers looking for those buyers). Are there legitimate reasons people take out consumer debt? If so, now people can't, and that seems bad.
Or maybe consumer debt is categorically a bad decision, and the collapse of the industry is an unalloyed good. Honestly don't know for sure.
In the absence of mortgages, home prices would have to fall to the amount of cash savings available to the median buyer. Same for student loans, college tuition would go back to being an amount a savvy kid could earn in a summer.
I think house prices would crash, just like they did in 2008 - but I don't think it would sink anywhere near "the amount of cash savings available to the median buyer." All but the most motivated sellers would keep their prices much higher than that, and buyers would have to save up. Imo, the biggest impact would just be lowering the velocity of the housing market for a while.
On student loans, too, I think you're wildly optimistic. Prices would drastically lower - there would be ripping and tearing, colleges would liposuct their administrations and scale back extracurricular offerings, etc. But it definitely wouldn't scale back to what the *kid* can pay, it'd scale to what the median parent can pay. (Or worse, median parent of a kid not on financial aid.)
tl;dr I think you overestimate the flexibility of prices.
This would still be really bad. Suppose you're a homeowner considering selling. You bought your house for $1 million. Now the best offer you can get is $50,000. Do you still want to sell it?
Another situation: You're a construction company. The wages and raw materials to build a house cost $100,000. Most homeowners can pay less than $50,000. Do you keep building new housing?
Let's try a different tack. Instead of canceling debt, print it. All outstanding government bonds, when they mature, are paid with newly issued money instead of being rolled over. Everyone gets a one-time $250,000 check from the government in printed money, at the same time as we raise the prime rate to 25% so that everyone has the incentive to use the money to pay off their debts. Now none of the creditors fail because they got paid. You're also not punishing the people who didn't borrow profligately because they get the same amount of cash. There is a significant amount of short-term inflation, but since you're not continuing to print money and only doing it once, the value of the dollar quickly stabilizes. What then?
Let's see. All the big car companies are bankrupt, so everyone who owns stock in them, or their bonds, loses a big pile of money, and everyone who works for one loses his job, and everyone who used to work for one loses his pension. So, a lot of people are out of work, a lot of others are out of a pension and healthcare, and some others are out of significant chunks of their life savings.
We can repeat that for quite a lot of businesses, since there aren't that many that deal strictly in cash these days. We can assume Amazon and Apple abruptly become worth 1/4 to 1/10 what they used to be, which again means staggering layoffs, loss of 401(k) savings, presumably a screeching halt to a lot of technology innovation.
I looked it up about consumer debt in the United States stands at about $4 trilion, so you are in essence making $4 trillion in wealth vanish. That's about 1/4 of the GDP, I think. So maybe about the destructiveness of the Great Depression, I think.
It isn't directly destructive at all, because you just made a 4 trillion wealth transfer, not 4 trillion in wealth to disappear. I still think its long term consequences wouldn't be very helpful, and on a generational scale it isn't a very big wealth transfer anyways, but nothing got destroyed.
You basically need to think through what consumer debt actually is. It is reducing the consumption of certain people while being paid off (the debtors), and increasing the consumption of other people (the creditors), and when the debt is taken out it is an increase in the consumption of the people taking out the debt, and a corresponding decrease in the consumption of the creditor.
If you eliminate the debt, it just means that debtors have more money to spend suddenly, and the demand side of the GDP isn't hurt at all.
You're mistaken, because you've forgotten how the debt was acquired in the first place. I borrowed $35,000 to buy my care because the car was worth more to me than the $35,000. With the car I can get a better job, earn more money, et cetera and rapidly acquire much more than $35,000.
The car company sold me the car because the $35,000 was worth more to them than the car. So in the exchange genuine utility (and wealth) was created -- both partners in the exchange are better off. That's *why* free economic exchanges happen in the first place. People are different, and in different circumstances. I have a crapton of hay and no horse, you have a lot of horses but not much hay -- the marginal value of the horse is higher to me than you, and the marginal value of the hay his higher to you than to me. We exchange, and are both better off.
If you reverse $4 trillion of such transactions, you will make *all* of that acquired wealth and utility vanish. Not perhaps $4 trillion worth -- I will still have my stupid hay, you will still have the wretched extra horse -- but a truly large amount of value will have vanished.
Alright, time for round three -- forgive all student loans (in the United States, to keep the scope simple to reason about). What happens? Both in terms of immediate effects good & bad, and also in terms of how people's incentives respond to the event.
I guess there's two scenarios to consider: one where we "forget" about the student loans as per the original prompt (which perhaps might avoid the 'unfair to those who paid off their loans' issue people sometimes raise as objection) and one where we don't have a magic RPG mcguffin, we just elect Bernie Sanders and congress goes along with what he wants (or whatever).
If we interpret "forgive" in Scott's sense of "totally forget about", and assume this has similar consequences to "forgive and forbid" - lots of colleges go out of business. Luckily, this has mostly positive externalities. I'm on board.
Ooh, what about just making everyone forget about higher education?
Some post-high-school education will quickly be reinvented of course, but it will likely be unbundled from research and therefore much cheaper and more skill-focused (think vocational training). In the meantime hiring and "expertise" will have to get much more meritocratic which seems like a major plus.
Well, given that every debt is somebody else's asset, you would have also canceled most of the assets of the world, too. So, a significant impoverishment.
I wouldn't do this, but making people forget a cryptographic protocol would have severe implications. There are enough arbitrary parts that we probably wouldn't be able to reconstruct the protocol exactly, so while we would get usable substitutes, encrypted communications from the past will be gone. For instance, forgetting SHA-256 would kill Bitcoin.
So the argument is that bitcoin will make it profitable to capture "stranded" natural gas. Natural gas that is produced primarily as a side effect of... oil extraction? So the grand argument that Bitcoin is fine for the environment is that actually it helps increase the income of oil companies? Count me as unconvinced!
The main objection I know of to bitcoin’s energy use is that Proof of Work is completely unnecessary.
You could switch to something like Proof of Stake and save 90% of the energy usage.
Most of the energy spent on Bitcoin is completely wasted because we can’t coordinate a switch to a better technology. Your article, while interesting, doesn’t resolve the central issue that the energy expenditure is simply unnecessary to do the job.
Contra you: Proof of Work is important because it makes Bitcoin more secure, since essentially the only way to attack it is to do a 51% attack, which is way too expensive, whereas I think sufficiently rich people can attack Proof of Stake by just pouring money in. I think I read an article somewhere that compared this to how it's free to add a row to a database, but I can't find it now. Also, Bitcoin miners are investing in renewable energy.
I'd be tempted to make everyone forget an odious ideology (e.g. Naziism or Communism), but the downside of this is that it would also make everyone forget not just the tenants of the ideology, but also the historical experience of how monstrous those ideologies were when their adherents achieved large-scale political and military power. Without that experience, the risk of something like that ideology arising and achieving large-scale power again could actually be greater than had I never used the artifact.
Also, everyone forgetting that Communism or Naziism was ever a thing and confabulating plausible replacements for it would make utter nonsense of huge chunks of 20th century history.
What is the soviet baggage? There has been lots of countries with communism since the soviets and their "brand" of communism was different. But none of them worked and all of them destroyed lives. I think you still have the idea that the problem with communism was the way soviets implemented it. "If I did it, it would work" is the typical idea of anyone that still defends communism ideology nowadays.
But I want to know what I am missing: what is the soviet baggage? how does it impede new communism countries to success?
P.D.: I don't think you can assume anarchism is tied or close to communism necessarily, as communism needs and pretend to have a big government to control everything.
Considering that the first to suffer under communism are almost always the anarchists I think we can conclude there's a difference there certainly. Note the two traditions are so antagonistic that they staged a civil war within a civil war (tgere has to be a name for that, probably in German) in Spain.
There was an attempt in socialist Czechoslovakia in 1968 to create a "socialism with human face", which was crushed by Soviet army. It's hard to guess what could have happened in an alternative reality... would they get a better form of socialism? would it gradually revert back to its inhuman form? would it gradually revert back to capitalism? ...but it was an experiment that was not even allowed to happen. Many other potential experiments were probably not even tried, because it was obvious what would have happened.
(There is also a chance that these experiments would result in something even more horrible. Technically, fascism also started as an attempt to do "Marxism, but without Soviet Union as a boss". Then it inspired German national socialism, and then we got the gas chambers...)
Generaly, the problem with presence of strong Soviet Union was that it turned the quesion of socialism into a dichotomy: either you are with us, or you are against us (and then you are not a proper socialist, and if you are geographically close to us we will crush you). And the socialists in the West felt the need to defend Soviet Union even when her actions were morally undefensible, because criticizing Soviet Union would mean criticizing socialism itself.
And the reasons why Soviet Union was so screwed up might be inherent to socialism, or may be just a legacy or Romanov dynasty's Russia. The communist secret police was built as a copy of the czar's secret police; the Soviet Union as an empire oppressing various minorities was a successor of the Russian empire. This made the oppression inevitable from the very beginning, otherwise the empire would fall apart; and it contributed to Soviet Union treating surrounding socialist countries as its colonies.
So, maybe without Soviet Union, we would get multiple different flavors of socialism. Some of them possibly more humane. Or maybe not. At least we would know what is the consequence of socialism itself, and what is the Soviet/Russian historical legacy.
"or may be just a legacy or Romanov dynasty's Russia"
Well, to be historical accurate, tzars were not in power when the Revolution of October took place. The soviets made the coup against an elected government, as the last tzar renounced the power in January. So it is difficult to connect the bad things of the communist regime to Romanov's, which were, by the way, assassinated by the soviets, ordered by Lenin, even if they were not getting involved in the civil war.
Regarding the Spring of Prague, we should not forget that the regime was already communist, but you are right: it was under the Soviet influence. For sure they tried to transition to some regime with more freedom, some socialist state, and it was repressed by Warsaw Pact coalition that was, essentially, soviet. I can agree up to this point.
However, there have been other countries without that soviet influence and they have things in common: the economy tanks, the government has to become overcontrolling to "convince" the citizens to do what they are told, and a general lost of freedom. Which is fundamental to any regime that plans to control the economy in a top-down fashion. Examples: China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia... and you could say those were influenced by the Soviet Union (although hardly pressed by force). Then we can check Cuba or Venezuela. Common factors: lack of personal freedom (unless you belong to the party or you don't disagree with the government at all), useless economy, hyperinflation (remember that also happened in the Soviet Union since the very first year).
The key I think is: how could you manage to respect people freedom when you have to organize the economy from the state? I'm talking about coordinating everything, from the industry output to the coffee that gets distributed everywhere? How could you be free to decide what to buy, when and at what price if all that is set by the government from somewhere maybe far from your region? Also thinking you can set prices and it will work, and that's probably the biggest error of the idea: that price and value are the same thing and that offer and demand can be coordinated in a centralized way.
Regarding the last point, I concede that today it might be possible to some degree to estimate the demand and supply using computers or some AI software. But not sure it could be accurate enough to work.
I am still puzzled when people keep repeating the same argument: it didn't work but because they did it wrong... The same fear of letting the ideology go that made western socialists to look away and pretend it was going well.
Do you mean the Soviet inspiration? It would be a great tragedy to forget the example of glorious revolutions and societies of the past, but I'm confident that the workers would come to the same conclusions eventually.
Well, the workers of any communist country in History arrived to the conclusion that it is no good for them, as the government decided what they could keep of their own labor. And realized they were even more miserable under communism than before, as working harder/better and producing more didn't result in a better quality of life.
Did you hear that people living in communist countries tried desperately to run away and scape? And if they could, they overthrow the regime and tried to go back to something that gave them more freedom? Have you lived in any of such countries like North Corea, Cuba or Venezuela nowadays? Not like a rich 1st world tourist, but living there? Because people in those countries try to leave all the time risking their lives in the process... maybe they are idiots and you know better.
Surely you must realise that whatever your own feelings on the matter, the memory of Soviet oppression is one of the key things marring communism's reputation in the 21st century.
The objection from communists that I am sympathetic to is the one you made yourself elsewhere in this thread: "the Soviets were horrible for reasons unrelated to the root fact of their being communists, and their horribleness is unfairly reflecting on communism in a Hitler-ate-sugar-therefore-sugar-is-evil kind of way". I am not personally a communist but I find this complaint quite convincing.
But it is an entirely different matter to turn around and claim that "actually the Soviet Revolution was beautiful and inspiring, you guys are just wrong". Even setting aside the fact that I find this position morally horrid, surely you can see, as a practical matter, that the image that has stuck in people's minds (fairly or not) of the Soviets is one that is *harmful* to the “PR” of communism as an economic philosophy?
It's like if… suppose you are a devout Roman Catholic to the point that really, you think the Spanish Inquisition had its heart in the right place. You're allowed to believe that. And you're also allowed to believe that Catholicism was irrelevant to the Spanish Inquisition and it should all be blamed on the Spanish monarchy. But you are deluding yourself if you don't understand that it would *improve* Catholicism's reputation among non-Catholics, and thus potentially increase conversations, if the world forgot about the Inquisition.
I think this is helpful. One can imagine communism, untarnished, would be a useful idea to have around in our political discourse even if nobody actually tried to implement it seriously. It’s like a counterpoint to the equally utopian and flawed idea of ‘free markets’...
"since it's based on looking at the objective conditions of the worker under capitalism"
Do you mean it is based on thinking (without real experience) about XIX century aristocratic system. It seems someone already made that wish and people forgot the ideas from Marx were outdated even in his own time.
The idea of Marx are correct. If you disagree with something he said, you should quote him and show how he is only criticizing the 19th century "aristocratic system", as you have claimed.
Well, the views he had on how companies operated was based on aristocratic models of wealth. For example, the idea that the owner of a company, the capital, didn't add anything valuable to the production itself and only the workers were the ones doing so. He didn't consider that capital is not just inherited (as in aristocracy society, land owners and such) but also accumulated by working. And the fact that without a person creating the infrastructure, buying equipment and finding markets and customers, the product of labor is useless.
So claiming workers have to own the means of production is cool once the means of production are there, but useless if there are none. Thinking about land, it made sense that who works the land, owns the result (something that, by the way, never happened in any communist country in history). But he developed his work after the industrial revolution.
So, being a factory worker was useful and produced benefits AS LONG AS someone else invested money in building the factory, buying materials and machinery to start producing goods. He disregarded all this added value, and ignored the risk involved in investing all that money.
What is the result of work for a worker that assembly a car if there is no materials, no factory, no system and no distribution chain? Zero.
You've written a slightly long post there but I am not seeing any primary source quotes that show that Marx was "thinking (without real experience) about XIX century aristocratic system".
I did not make any claims about Marx here. RC-bit claimed that; "the ideas from Marx were outdated even in his own time". I don't even know which claims RC-bit is referring to, as RC-bit has never quoted Marx.
I remember Scott Alexander making a very similar point in one of the many SSC post on Socialism, can't actually remember which one though but it definitely feels like an inevitable ideology.
I'm honestly curious what flavour of Marxist you are, I'm assuming Leninist based on your name? The name does make you seem rather troll-y but I guess it's good to make your opinions explicit.
I agree that Rationalist spaces aren't very sympathetic to Marxist views, especially the more authoritarian strains of it. My own political views are somewhere in the region occupied by G. K. Chesterton, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky and Aneurin Bevan, which I guess is the "democratise the economy" strain of socialism. I don't trust corporations and definitely think they have too much power, but also don't think giving the government total control over everything is a great solution.
I'm a long term poster and older commenters know that my beliefs are sincere. I get accused of being a troll because most people aren't used to seeing Marxist views advocated for in Rationalist hangouts.
I think you seem troll-like because you never actually make an affirmative case for anything you claim. See upthread where you make a claim about marx (that he's correct and that communism is "based on looking at the objective conditions of the worker under capitalism") with no supporting arguments, but when someone disagrees you demand quotes from a primary source.
I've ultimately become convinced that you're sincere but no good at engaging with people on fair or convincing terms, though.
The Condition of the Working Class in England, the primary empirical source for Marx's analysis, is pretty thoroughly discredited in the 1958 Henderson and Challoner translation. Misquotations, errors of transcription, citing of sources from 20 or 40 years earlier, leaving out of inconvenient facts, and other errors abound.
Another analysis from Cambridge in the 1880s demonstrated that Marx manipulated information from the Blue Books he relied on, piecing together quotations from different sections or cutting them off when inconvenient for him, resulting in a conclusion that is entirely backwards. For a more general review, including that report, see https://www.amazon.com/Karl-Marx-Critical-Examination-Works/dp/1870116003
If this is the case, we can probably stop telling Scott to read Marx. Any writer who can observe the conditions of the worker under capitalism should suffice.
I would be extremely tempted to have the nation-state forgotten just to see what happened next and what kind of wild spin the magic spell would have to come up with to explain away the geopolitical status quo. Also, I would be secretly hoping that somehow we’d end up with loose feudalism.
I would agree with you about some version of feudalism. In my mental model of how societies work, it would be a matter of time to see cities behaving like small states (or even feuds). The problem I see with this is that the amount of fights and wars between close cities/towns would increase dramatically in the short term.
Not really responsive to the question—Somalia was dysfunctional before, its state collapsed in violence, and everybody has attempted to enforce the creation of a new state with no success.
Didn't we basically run this experiment already, until the rise of nationalism in the 18th century? And aren't we currently running it in most of Africa, except they didn't forget about nation states – the Lulubo or whoever just don't have any chance of creating one?
… No? What I’m talking about is curiosity whether it’s possible to support a modern world without the concept of the nation-state. Your suggestions just define the question away.
But is there any question that people would just reinvent it? Like how could you stop people from thinking "hey, why are we being ruled by those foreigners; let's create our own state instead"?
The premise of your question doesn’t seem sensible. The modern nation-state cares little for self-rule and frequently subjects large minorities to outside rule and justifies this on the basis of the absolute right of *states* to govern themselves (rather than, say, peoples)—consider for example the continual war in the U.S. against localism, and how legislative power increases in scope the farther away it is from the township level. I see no reason why it is natural to assume that the absence of the nation-state would create *more* foreign rule rather than less; that’s backwards. Colonialism only arose because the nation-state existed and viewed possessions of its people as its own possessions; such a relationship would not have been even considered sane in the ‘colonies’ of the ancient Greek polis.
No, the historical rule before the nation-state was the opposite of what you (apparently) assume.
But the premise of my question is what historically happened. E.g. the Greeks revolted against Ottoman rule, the Vietnamese revolted against French rule, the Finns somehow convinced the Soviets to free them, and so on, and these nations went from foreign rule to national rule, and the world thus moved from multinational empires to nation states.
Not sure how specific you're allowed to get, but with enough specificity surely it can flatout cancel some catastrophic x-risks? Or just generally improve society by about *gestures* this much?
Twitter, or perhaps some more broad segment of the social media world. I think many social networks do actually negatively impact the world, definitely think that about Twitter in particular.
I think it's also a very effective use of the item, removing something which is hard to reconstruct. A social media product whose user base forgets it all at once probably never recovers from the sudden loss of the network their product is built on and consists in.
And forgetting our reliance on social media--maybe it'll come back in some form but we and our politics won't have built the same relationship with it.
That a commitment to rationality is not a major tenet of all world religions.
Or, can we not use negatives as springboards to inject new beliefs because propositional logic? Do De Morgan's Laws work? How long of a proposition with how many conjunctions?
Does the user remember the fact and the use of the magical item? Can the user survey its effects without disturbing them? Can the user then "invent" the forgotten thing?
If the artifact works differently on "facts" and "beliefs" then it can probably be turned into a powerful oracle with the right proposition...
Maybe in a different direction, something beautiful but commonplace? Give people the joy of experiencing something for the first time. Sunrise, maybe. What chocolate tastes like. Something like that
I think sunrise, if I weren't expecting it, would be absolutely terrifying. Only when you know you're *not* about to burn to death is it possible to appreciate the beauty.
Wouldn't sunset be worse? I mean, at first sunrise is just pretty, nice big light in the sky. But sunset...its starts getting cold pretty fast, and it would take all the way until dawn to realize it wasn't going to all the way to absolute zero.
The belief that corporate (stock) ownership is purely an investment activity. Would be interesting to see if workers would be able to push towards a stakeholder ownership system.
This likely wouldn't impact the operations of most companies in any way, but the sudden question of "who owns this business?" would be an enormous boon to workers, users, and other stakeholders of the business.
Why would workers be better off having to own stock in the company they work for than in other companies? It seems like the main effect of a 'stakeholder' system would be to leave workers woefully under-diversified. I mean if I work at Ford, I'd rather just get paid in cash so I can by mutual funds than forced into buying Ford stock.
1. Skin-in-the game - I believe certain businesses and platforms would work better with an ownership system that appropriately compensates the contributions of its respective stakeholders.
2. Increased compensation - I never said ownership in lieu of monetary compensation. Salaries would be unchanged, but the question is who owns equity. Essentially, it's a boost to worker pay if they can negotiate for more.
3. It's not just about workers, but other stakeholders, like users. I personally think it's stupid that platforms are worth billions of dollars off the back of user contributions and network effects, yet users have no claim to ownership because of the systems we've inherited. I just wonder what might change if we forgot about those ownership paradigms.
If the typical value people deliver to Facebook exceeds the typical value Facebook delivers to them -- why does anyone use Facebook? That would seem to be a losing proposition of such obvious stupidity -- like paying $1 for a ticket to a lottery in which the maximum prize was 50 cents -- that hardly anybody could be expected to sign up for it voluntarily.
> If the typical value people deliver to Facebook exceeds the typical value Facebook delivers to them -- why does anyone use Facebook?
Tons of people buy lottery tickets and those are definitely negative EV (in dollars as well as utilons). People don't make optimal decisions all the time.
Optimal for who? By saying buying a lottery ticket is sub-optimal you're imposing a definition of optimal on the discussion. If optimal here is best return on investment then sure, lotteries are sub-optimal (unless you win I guess...). As lottery winners don't invest their winning by buying millions of lottery tickets though, indicating that perhaps this isn't a failure to understand return on investment, it appears possible there's another definition of optimal in play here. Maybe it's just convenience: lotteries are generally optimised for ease of purchase; sensible investment vehicles less so (which one comes with lots of warning about losing your funds that have to be read?). Maybe the optimisation is whatever thrill the purchaser gets from participating in gambling (an activity the majority of humans seem to enjoy). Maybe the optimisation is that the payback is so large as to be life-changing if it does happen.
It's hugely presumptuous to assume a decision someone else makes is sub-optimal without seeking to understand their optimum position. The "people play lotteries don't they" comment is not some great rebut to the fact people are broadly rational actors, but instead a rather tired and lazy analysis that assumes there is one optimal outcome for all. It's in effect a high modernist view, that we can optimise the lives of others through selecting what we see as the best outcome. How useful this would be as a mode of analysis probably depends on your priors around issues like the role of the state and individual autonomy, but as a result of that it's only going to be an accepted argument against rational actors in economic transactions by people who are inclined to believe people are not rational actors in the first place.
I believe, that similar to the way hedge funds have abused another hallmark of the mercantile era, nowadays dubbed the carried interest loophole, stock ownership is an inherited tradition that would not re-emerge as ubiquitously if all knowledge of it were previously erased.
Some form would certainly re-emerge, but due to the very different economics of the internet and modern business, I would hope that our society could develop more interesting and economically efficient ownership methods.
You're asserting that business ventures are no longer risky and no longer have the potential for catastrophic loss?
You're wrong on the facts anyway. Stock companies without explicit public interest and government approval were banned in Britain prior to 1825. So that era actually had a regime much closer to what an interventionist liberal would want: strict government control and no private stock corporations. It created a system of official corruption, corporate boards given out as favoritism, too big to fail companies, and imperialism. But that's another story.
Private joint stock corporations proliferated with the industrial revolution in the 19th century. And our modern norms about the stock market (retirement investing, fund dominance, retail buyers, modern style trading floors, etc) largely come from the 1970s.
If the value X gains from making a trade with me exceeds the value I gain from trading with them, would it be irrational to make that trade? I would think that the only thing that matters is whether I gain value or not, mutually beneficial trades are not cancelled out just because one party is gaining more than the other.
It is an interesting idea. However I believe there coul be downsides for the workers themselves. In particular, the amount of stocks would end up (probably) depend on when you join the company. It is not the same thing joining Microsoft when it was selling first versions of DOS, where the stock didn't even exist as such, but the equivalent would be just few dollars per stock, than today. So, at first the employee would get more stock than later. Otherwise, if you would get the same amount of stock no matter when you joined, nobody would start in any company until it was big. Basically it would be a net loss, working in startup, not knowing if it would survive and doing a lot of work. Why would you do that when you could join a big corporation that has thousands of dollars in revenue and an established business with high value stocks?
No system would be perfect, workers might have to assume greater risk, and some startups might struggle to get funded, but I think the process of discovering these pain points would be useful in developing a new system.
Who knows if it would work or be widely adopted, but I think hitting the refresh button would make space for creative and potentially better ownership models than the standard we've inherited.
As I mentioned in a different reply, I have no doubt that the current system of stock ownership would re-emerge, because situations with significant risk to investors or early employees might demand it.
However, I also believe that businesses or platforms might settle on other ownership systems, because the economics of their business would empower stakeholders to demand it.
My argument is simply that without the tradition of stock ownership, we might see a variety of ownership models emerge.
"workers might have to assume greater risk, and some startups might struggle to get funded"
This is interesting as I realized I was assuming the attitudes of workers would be the same as today: most of workers tend to be risk averse, in my opinion. Meaning that people tend to look for jobs with a fixed salary plus some fixed benefits. They do not consider on average getting less money in exchange for ownership, as they usually have the option to find a bigger company that offers a more stable income (at least, in principle).
But resetting this could potentially make workers assume that risk is tied to any job. That could evolve into a different system of ownership in which the default would be to have skin in the game as an employee. I like this idea...
Why on Earth would they? Salaries are set in order to make the total compensation be whatever it needs to be to attract the desired number and skill level of workers. If you add to non-salary compensation, total compensation goes up. Even if people magically forget enough for you to get away with this, it won't take the suits long to rederive "I bet we could lower salaries and still attract all the workers we need".
Salaries are set by the owners of the company. If suddenly we have no idea who the owners are, it's possible that workers could negotiate to retain their salaries and capture a greater share of ownership.
Think about it this way. If suddenly we had no idea who owned Amazon, and the company had to figure that out. Would Jeff Bezos still end up with 12%? It's certainly possible, but I don't believe there's a guarantee.
I also believe that if we were working from a blank slate, their thousands of factory workers and drivers would have a better opportunity to collectively organize and improve their total compensation.
Also, if they adopt a new form of ownership that more broadly represents the workers, would they still retain a ruthless profit-driven motive that compels workers to urinate in plastic bottles?
It's possible, but I feel it might lead to something different that people aren't currently exploring, due to default corporate structures.
If we suddenly had no idea who owned Amazon, who's figuring out who owns it? I don't see why it would be "the employees and no one else", heck it might not be any of the employees: if magic or an extremely improbable series of fires destroyed all records of Amazon's ownership then the only thing I can imagine happening is the messiest legal battle in history which is ultimately settled by the government (probably on terms very favourable to the government).
But suppose for the sake of argument that your thing happens and everyone currently working at Amazon sets up a new arrangement where they have the equity and higher total compensation. The next day the reformed Amazon wants to open a new warehouse and hire some workers for it. Why would they set salaries at this new warehouse according to any principle other than "let's pay them whatever it takes to recruit the number of workers we need and not a penny more"? Everyone at the company has equity now so every dollar they don't spend paying new employees goes straight into the pockets of the existing ones. All of their incentives point away from generosity and towards new, unrepresented workers peeing in bottles.
The problem with skin in the game is that it breaks down for large or even medium-sized companies. Suppose I work at a company with 100 employees where each employee contributes an equally valuable amount of labour. If I put my nose to the grindstone and work twice as hard as everyone else we now have 1% more value worth of my labour, my compensation is not going to meaningfully increase. This effect is only really relevant for tiny startups, which already do tend to offer equity-based compensation (usually because startups have more spare equity than cash).
I missed this and said something similar in another comment. I think it’s really interesting to wonder what ordering of ok to immoral we would come up with next time.
I'd be very tempted to make everyone forget American political parties. Everybody'd still have their political views, and they might form large coalitions, but the coalitions would be based on current views not historical contingencies.
If I'm allowed to not be subject to the effect myself, so I can observe the consequences, then I would have people forget about mortality. They would eventually rediscover it, of course, when it gradually became clear that nobody escapes aging and death. But it might take a while, years, maybe even decades.
Reason being, my working hypothesis is that if nobody had any awareness of mortality we would not be any happier, and it would be interesting to test that.
RE: "The Wizard and the Prophet" book review -- I really liked it, but does anyone else feel really weirded out by the feeling that "Wizard" and "Prophet" are going to start being little tribal markers in this community? I understand the sense in which they were meant in the book, but I really feel like those terms obscure more than they clarify and invite people to defend the honor of vague teams more than specific ideas and individuals.
Yeah. This leads to a possibly fruitful line of questioning: Do all labels tend to degenerate away from whatever clarification they once endowed, into defending the honor of vague teams? And if there are some labels which resist that tendency, or enforce that tendency even harder, what traits do they have in common which bring about that result?
My guess would be that labels that are constructed to pick out behaviors/approaches rather than personality traits are probably less likely to lead to this sort of splitting. For instance, if I drew a distinction about approaching a problem as an "expert" or a "layperson," most people will intuitively understand that they will need to play both roles at different times, depending on the context. If I make a distinction about "specialists' vs "synthesizers," I'm creating identity labels people will latch on to and want to push as a superior way to approach the world.
The pattern I usually see is that people like one label more than another, and so they filter thinkers/activists/whatevers into teams not only by who best fits each label's arbitrary criteria, but also *which one makes my team look good and the other team look bad*. It's really hard to resist this temptation once the flags have been planted.
I think that they're unlikely to get much traction as "de-growther" and "techno-optimist" (obviously this isn't as precise) cover a lot of the divide already.
These hyphenated terms aren't as snappy and memorable, however. Before that one post came along, people elsewhere on the Internet made do with "Republican" and "Democrat," you know, and yet "Red Tripe" and "Blue Tribe" sure have caught on like a house on fire.
Oh! Dear. I look quite the fool. I'd noticed the ‘typo’ in Anteros's post but somehow not in mine, and felt it wouldn't be polite to mention it. Good one!
I prefer the terms "Team R" and "Team D" since they attract the same sort of sloganeering loyalties that one so often sees in fans of a given athletic team.
To be fair, I have heard sports fans give me more grounded reasons why they cheer for a given sports team than what I hear from the average political junkie why they cheer for on party over the other.
Also, like sports rivals, Team R and Team D *need* each other. Not only does the rivalry keep the fans engaged, it also keeps the coalitions that make up Team R and Team D from disintegrating.
Take away Team R, and Team D would no longer have an excuse for not giving their supporters everything that they want. The same could be said for Team R.
I hope not. I already find the tribal marker terms used by the community a little annoying. For a community devoted to rationalism, the frequency with which in-group signaling is used by so many people here is rather disappointing.
in any case, I think use of community specific jargon has value beyond just signalling. Suppose that in the course of discussing whatever, it's relevant to reference Chesterton's Fence(or whatever). It's really handy and efficient that I can just say Chesterton's Fence with a high probability that it's understood, rather than spend an extra paragraph on a tangent to explain the concept before looping back to the point I was making. Having shared memes facilitates more effective conversations
Something I've been thinking about lately is how, when you're dealing with a motte and bailey argument, you have to remember not to throw out the motte with the bailey (assuming the motte is actually a reasonable, defensible position). In other words, just because a position is often held in bad faith, doesn't necessarily make it wrong, and it's still important to evaluate the motte position on its own terms. In fact, assuming motte and bailey arguers are rational, they will intentionally pick strong positions as their mottes, and it would give them too much power to automatically dismiss any position that is ever held in bad faith.
Yeah this makes sense to me - the fallacy (whether intentional or not) in a motte and bailey is conflating the two positions, right? So to counteract it, you have to assert that there is a distinction between them, and then you can accept only the motte (if you agree with it) rather than necessarily rejecting both.
Yeah. And like, the context here is I feel like sometimes strong arguments fail to make an impression because they end up getting abused as mottes in motte and bailey arguments. So like, a lot of MRA people refuse to listen to any feminist arguments at all because they have come to believe it is all in bad faith. And the thing is, they're not totally wrong! There's a lot of bad-faith arguing out there. But the core, solid feminist points are still often quite insightful and valid, and throwing them out is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And to flip it around, a lot of leftists are innately distrustful of any sort of market economics because they've come to believe that free markets are nothing more than a way to slip in reactionary conservatism through the back door. While this is true in many cases, it's not universally true, and it would be a terrible mistake to just reject markets entirely.
"And to flip it around, a lot of leftists are innately distrustful of any sort of market economics because they've come to believe that free markets are nothing more than a way to slip in reactionary conservatism through the back door. While this is true in many cases, it's not universally true, and it would be a terrible mistake to just reject markets entirely."
Actually a lot of leftists are innately distrustful of market economics because they've read a lot about markets and they know about the inherent problems of the market (and especially the market under capitalism).
There are many theories of Market Socialism, since it doesn't make any sense to centrally plan every lemonade stand. Different people want different things, and markets are pretty good for that. Of course, Markets look very different if the people that produce goods also own them.
Basing the entire economy and political system around markets has its problems, which is why no state has a truly free market devoid of subsidies and regulations. The real question is how the market should be run, how to ensure that the benefits are widely distributed, and how to factor in negative externalities. The only claim was that rejecting all the insights of market economics is counterproductive.
I agree with you that there are many important criticisms of markets, but if you reject them entirely you end up with total state planning of everything, which is basically the same as working for a massive corporation under capitalism, with no freedom and massive inefficiency, except you can't even quit your job since the state has a monopoly on everything.
Most socialist nations had some market elements (buying goods with currency), so a better understanding of markets (strengths as well as weaknesses) seems like it would be very useful to the left. The alternative is that people illegally set them up anyway, black markets and corruption thrive when central planning doesn't give people what they want.
FWIW, I think marxist analysis has important things to say about markets, and an understanding of markets that fails to take marxist ideas into account is probably missing some important pieces.
My observation isn't really pointed at sophisticated marxist thinkers with highly developed thoughts on how markets work under capitalism - it's more pointed at like, knee-jerk anti-market sentiment from people who are vaguely lefty but aren't actually knee-deep in the guts of marxist thought.
I'm going to have to agree with MarxBro here; the usual arguments against market economics - outside of the most extreme SJers, and people *that* extreme aren't actually especially common - have to do with inequality rather than social mores.
(My model for politics is as a space of dimension 3+. Economic left/right - socialism vs. Gilded Age. Social libertine/authoritarian - what level of freedom one should have in personal affairs. And, depending on the specific context, *at least* one cultural axis and sometimes more. The West at the moment can mostly be considered to have one cultural axis i.e. SJ vs. conservatism. For the record, I'm a fairly-solid leftist (though a bit less so than I used to be), a hardliner libertine, and a moderate on culture.)
Motte is usually chosen for being highly defendable, so probably not at all controversial. The problem is keeping it separate from the Bailey in everyone's minds. Good raiders loot the Bailey and ignore the motte.
If you're not simply raiding, maybe you should try to smash up the walkways that allow people to run out easily from the motte into the bailey. By which metaphor I mean to suggest making it clear what fallacies are involved in switching from one to the other.
I’m not sure if this is the place for post requests, but I’d really love a post on the medium to long term effects, or lack thereof, of MDMA on the brain.
I'd read that. Have you been to the MAPS site? I did a high dive into the MDMA research last summer and found that their reviews provided some of the best information available. https://maps.org/research/mdma
The key thing I took away from my reading was that MDMA causes short-term serotonin depletion, medium-term neuroadaptation, and if abused, long-term neurotoxicity. The neuroadaptation wears off after 3-5 weeks but the neurotoxicity permanently damages serotonergic nerve endings.
Short-term serotonin deficiency: After you force your brain to dump all its serotonin, it takes time to make more. This is why you feel depressed for a couple days when you come down.
Medium-term neuroadaptation: your brain responds to the serotonin overload by down-regulating receptors (essentially becoming less sensitive to serotonin for a while), and it takes about a month for your brain to normalize. This is why you may not feel like your normal self for a couple weeks.
Neurotoxicity: Pure uncontaminated MDMA can damage your nerve endings, possibly through oxidative damage, when used in a fashion that plenty of ravers consider "normal". I saw one research paper demonstrating that nerve endings grew back with a shortened and irregular branching pattern, but it seems that the brain never fully recovers. It's hard to find papers that control well for poly-drug-use, but the damage reputedly results in depression, verbal memory problems, and emotional dysregulation.
Bear in mind that most of the research was done on animals with doses that don't remotely resemble human recreational doses, and there's one infamous example of a study where they later discovered that they had mixed up the MDMA with meth amphetamine. This ironically obscures the truth of MDMA neurotoxicity because fans of the drug can easily point to a couple studies and say "The evidence against MDMA is bunk".
But there is evidence that MDMA overuse has long term negative impacts on human cognition. You just have to sift through a lot of papers to find it, and the results aren't always very clear-cut due to how the studies were designed (I mean, you can't experiment on people with drugs like you can experiment on rats, so it makes it hard to develop a truly well-controlled study that eliminates all the effects the of the other drugs MDMA users might take).
On the flip side, MAPS provides mounting evidence that a very moderate dose of MDMA is helpful for treating ptsd, anxiety, and other stuff.
Like most things, it also probably depends on your brain.
Thanks for the reply. I glanced at MAPS in the past but I couldn’t motivate myself to really delve into their writings because I worry they are biased. I’d love to know what the range is for doses and frequency of use that would cause long term damage. I’d love to do a deep dive as well but I don’t really know how to navigate the process of reading through different research and deciding what to trust.
I'd love to see someone write that up. I was just trying to pull up a couple papers for you but I'm having a hard time finding the stuff I read a few months ago.
If you're wondering how much MDMA it takes to damage a human brain, I had the same question last summer. I took it with some friends, twice in one day without measuring it (bad idea) and had such a terrible come-down that I was afraid I'd done something terrible to my brain. So I tried to find that information online and it turns out it's a really hard question to answer.
There are a lot of small studies with inconclusive results. There were some big studies that linked heavy MDMA use with long-lasting reduced performance on verbal memory tasks. But those studies never specified how much per night / how often the heavy users were taking, which seems to matter a lot. Instead, they generalized by putting people into broad categories like "took more than 30 doses in a year". And those people may have been using other drugs, drinking while doing MDMA, or other stuff that raises the likelihood of neurotoxicity.
MDMA is clearly not harmless. Research groups have done terrible things to monkeys just to prove that MDMA is not harmless.
When it comes to knowing where to draw the line, I would actually look at MAPS for a rough idea. Since they're sponsoring actual clinical trials, they are incentivized to use moderate-yet-effective doses with a low likelihood of toxicity. You might consider their dosage rates to be an upper limit. Here's a page describing a PTSD study: https://maps.org/research/mdma/ptsd/veterans
A shot at a reply: Race is vague, haplogroups are concrete. But sometimes the vagueness of race is useful - it can catch things, like similarity of appearance, which has social consequences and may not be fully captured in the genetic picture.
Haplogroups are based on either y chromosome or mitochondrial dna. It tracks descent along one line and therefore has no mixing. It sometimes reveals interesting history of single-sex migrations, and it sometimes shows very little resemblance to anything, because it reflects such a small fraction of ancestry.
"Race" doesn't really have a definition, but it probably comes from both parents and can be mixed.
Not completely. A haplogroup certainly has the possibility of indicating only very distant relationships between the tested subject and his ancestral 'grouping,' but this presupposes a particular genetic distance. Someone who is descendant primarily from one ethnic origin, for example, would still map onto a particular haplogroup, and that would correspond very closely to his given ancestry.
This is why haplogroups are meaningless for defining ancestry in the absence of autosomal DNA. We may expect to find a large number of men with Irish ancestry exhibiting the Y-group R1b - but say we find it in a Middle Easterner, with other Western European genetic markers. That indicates more information about his ancestry than would otherwise be the case - i.e., his fathers' side likely descending from Western Europe.
My maternal haplogroup is D4i2, which appears to most commonly be associated with northeast Asia and west coast indigenous Americans. I, and my mother, are white, of European ancestry, and have no recognizable non-European features or cultural heritage. Except, apparently, through a minute part of our ancestry that happens to go straight through the maternal line, as opposed to the vastly dominant part of our ancestry that does not happen to go through the maternal line.
Maternal haplogrouping for men is far more random, as it isn't a given whether you've inherited the MtDNA from your mother's mother or mother's father, and whether he/she inherited theirs from their mother's mother... etc. It only makes sense for women.
One: As far as I know, you're wrong. Maternal haplogroup (ie, from mitochondrial DNA) comes from your matrilineal line, full stop, regardless of your sex.
Two: If you could inherit your mitochondrial DNA from either maternal grandparent, I don't see what mechanism would prevent that from being true for women as well as men.
Three: It doesn't actually matter. The point of haplogroups is that it gets you an interesting insight into any one particular line of your ancestry in a way that would be washed out by lots of mixing of other genes in your "normal" DNA. Which particular line of your ancestry it is doesn't really matter. We don't care about our mother's line to ancient past except in as much as that's what we can actually tell about.
(My paternal haplogroup is boring because it's exactly what you'd expect from my ancestry).
One: MtDNA is passed down from mother to son, but it's a toss-up as to from what side of *her* family the DNA originates, since women receive a portion from both father and mother. You're correct that it's matrilineal - try to imagine that matrilineal line branching endlessly up your family tree. That's what the possibilities look like, and why MtDNA is useless for tracing direct ancestry in men.
Two: Not exactly sure what you're saying, but the reason is works for women is that the MtDNA can be compared to each female ancestor and thus the exact route the DNA took to *reach* her determined. Both women and men inherit maternal DNA, but only the woman inherits a portion from her father and well as her mother.
Three: Maybe it matters and maybe it doesn't. I suppose that depends on what your definition of value is - or curiosity.
PS: This is assuming you are talking about the genetic markers that enable us to trace maternal haplogroups; those are the tricky ones. Maternal autosomal DNA inheritance will be far more varied.
You're confusing mitochondrial DNA with the X chromosome.
Regardless of your sex, you got your mitochondrial DNA from your mother, who got it from her mother, and so on. Males do not pass on their mitochondrial DNA at all, not to any child. Mitochondrial DNA is fully separate from the nuclear DNA that you get from both parents.
As for nuclear DNA, you have several pairs (23 IIRC), and one of those pairs is the sex chromosomes, XX for females and XY for males. A male gets his Y from his father and his X from his mother, but with a female there's no telling which parent provided which X, so the X isn't very good for establishing maternal lineage.
They are very different. Race is based on the autosome, while haplogroups are based on ancestors who only contributed a tiny portion of one's autosome.
Does anyone know what's up with US lumber prices? There appear to be two competing narratives - it's about tariffs on Canadian lumber or it's about beetles that ate a load of trees due to climate change - and it's hard to work out from a distance what the facts actually are. (Also it's possibly pent up demand from the coronavirus slowdown of construction and moving house?)
You're in luck - WSJ's "The Journal" podcast just did an episode on it.. https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal?mod=podcasts_carousel has all the episodes, you're looking for the 4/29 one. I'll summarize below, but I highly recommend taking a listen yourself; the podcasts are very well-made and usually on topics this community would find interesting, this one's not an exception.
Per the podcast - short story, sawmills are the bottleneck. Lumber prices are up because of a housing boom which they can't keep up with, especially after scaling back production due to COVID. The crazy part is that while finished lumber prices are way *up*, the price of raw (unfinished, unprocessed) wood is way *down*, because there's a huge glut of pine trees in the Southeast which were planted because of government incentives programs from 30-ish years ago. All of those trees are now hitting the market at once, driving wood prices down.
Tariffs probably don't help, maybe they're pricing potential competitors out of the market, but with the prices where they are I maybe doubt it. But it's definitely not a supply issue, even if beetlekill pine is a thing.
How much time and investment does it take to start a lumbermill? Because cheap input and pricey output is precisely the sort of economic situation that ought to be quickly solved by new businesses entering the market. However, if it takes too long to set up new lumbermills such that the current prices will no longer be there by the time it's finished, then that wouldn't work.
Yeah, the podcast touches on this. I wasn't totally convinced - it seems like there is a genuine opportunity here - but their answer was something like, modern sawmills are highly technical and computerized (like most manufacturing nowadays), and assembling the gear *and especially talent* necessary to get started is a non-trivial endeavor, and by the time you would manage to get it started up, there is a risk the prices would be unfavorable and you'd be out your (sizable) initial investment.
Yes, I agree. I know semiconductor plant fabs are way more complicated (and are probably the most complicated capital good out there), but getting one up and running takes years. Furthermore, the bottleneck there is the human capital. You need highly experienced people to make a fab plant run. So, I imagine the problem with setting up a sawmill is similar, though less complicated.
The raw wood price thing must be pretty regional. I live in the PNW, and we literally-like-last-week harvested a Douglas fir stand on our property (and harvested several other stands last summer/fall) and are getting very high prices for them from the mills.
It's a variety of supply- and demand-side factors forming a kind of perfect storm. On the sawmill side, I believe the sawmills have been wearyof expanding or building new mills because they got burned pretty badly after the housing crash in 2007 and subsequent recession.
Tariffs and climate change? What? It's about global supply chain and manufacturing breakdown. Lumber is an international market and it's hard to move stuff around which leads to wood being incredibly cheap near where it's harvested and expensive as you get further away. America and Canada are wood producing nations so that's less of an issue for us. Unless you want, I don't know, Brazilwood. But that just pushes it one level up to lumber. Lumber is heavy and hard to transport so it'd be especially affected by small changes. It's one of the bulkier things you use in houses which means there's less spare capacity hanging around. Meanwhile, sawmills were hit by COVID like everything else.
And the market was pretty grim last year. That's scaring off people from entering. Yes, the price is up. But is it up permanently? Are we in a bubble? If we are and we return to the 2019 status quo, then sawmill profitability will return to low and declining (and be less than it is up north in Canada).
Interesting that what you describe in the US is completely different from where I am in the South of France. Lumber prices are the same as they were a year ago - nothing seems to have changed at all. The local sawmills look as busy as ever.
I'm not sure if the units make for an easy comparison, but we pay 300 euros per metre cubed (cash) for softwood, and 500 for oak.
Is lumber demand in the south of France like it is in the US? Do you have continual home building using lumber? I thought there was much less of that in Europe, both much less building of new homes in general, an a higher mix of stone and brickwork.
You're right that there isn't much wooden house-building in France. Modern eco-builders like to use wood, but that's probably less than 1% of new builds. I guess there's a certain amount used in roofing, flooring and renovation of wooden outbuildings, but nothing like the quantities in the US.
I think one of the big differences is that in rural France almost all the sawmills are tiny- mostly one man bands or at least very small outfits. But every other village has one and they double up as producers of firewood, so it's all very local.
I'm sure that the size of the businesses has made it easier for them to mostly carry on as normal through the long periods of lockdown.
The story I got from a fencing contractor was that COVID caused the lumber industry to miss a season of harvesting, which coupled with the increase in demand for home improvement stuff during lockdown made the supply chain a mess.
I know this violates a norm against unabashed bragging or something, but whatever:
I've recently found out that I write well (according to some people, anyway). I'm in undergrad, and at this point three professors have gone out of their way to tell me that my writing is head and shoulders above that of my peers. I literally did not know this until recently, since I've never had that sort of feedback mechanism. Is there anything I can or should, like, do with this information?
I have no desire to become an author, and I don't think I particularly love writing either, but of course it greatly depends on the subject matter. I feel like someone who is very good at math can put this talent to use in finance, economics, or many other fields. Someone who is good at programming can obviously put this to good use professionally. Someone who is very athletic can train for a specific sport. I feel like writing is something so general that there isn't an obvious way to leverage this as a strength, even if my professors are correct about me. Am I wrong about this, though? Is the answer just "write stuff?"
Writing has obvious leverage points, and but a lot depends on how you understand "author". Some careers that involve a lot of writing, or where the writing portion is particularly critical or influential
1. Consultant, Policy Analyst, Investment Analyst (broad cluster of careers where the job can be described as "research topic, write up analysis for others". Can be impactful, very well-compensated, or both)
2. Technical writer/Screenwriter: both fairly well-paid paths that combine skill at writing with something else (either tech or stories respectively) to produce a substantial salary
3. Journalist (Kelsey Piper being a local example of someone who turned being exceptionally good at writing into a viable and impactful career)
Thanks - option 1 is definitely most up my alley. Hoping to try working/interning at a think tank or in some other setting that allows for public policy analysis.
+1 for this idea. I've personally been shocked by how much I've been able to leverage my ability to research a topic and write impactful analysis into a remunerative career.
One potential caveat - you're ability to rise in this field at some point will start to rely on your public speaking skills. Writing a convincing analysis is great; the ability to both write a convincing analysis and then go brief someone on said analysis is better. If this is something you're not confident with, maybe take the time to do toastmasters or something to buff up these skills.
I'll second what somebody else already said about some sort of consultant or analyst position.
Also though, being good at writing usually just means you're good at thinking clearly and communicating, which positions you well for almost anything if you can just get a foot in the door.
Like most creative fields, getting paid well for writing is hard, even if you're good at it - because you're competing with people who like doing it, and people understand they don't need to pay as much to incentivize that work. Look at authors and academics; both crowded fields with bad median pay and volatile, reputation-based conditions for rising to the top. My advice: do not choose your career based on the fact that you have writing skills.
The good news is that writing is, as you say, a general skill. You can start doing whatever, and you will end up applying it; if nothing else, once you rise to management. (Frankly, coding is the same way, not that most people who are good at it know that.) Sorry if you were hoping for more concrete guidance, maybe other less cynical people can give specific pointers!
Yes, I suppose that there are two important dimensions here: talent and enjoyability. Even if I'm high on the former, the latter greatly increases the competition and decreases pay. Good to remember.
As an old guy with a mixed career in the rear-view mirror I cannot stress enough the importance of mechanical enjoyability.
For instance you might love the idea of being a journalist -- insightfully holding a mirror up to society -- but you'll struggle to maintain your commitment if the day-to-day tasks are not a good fit. Don't count on the exciting break-through moments to necessarily offset the countless hours on the phone, developing source relationships, pissing people off, organizing and editing under stressful deadlines, etc.
Sure, exploit your natural interests, skills, and talents, but aspire to be one of the lucky few who find enjoyment even in the grunt work.
As for writing, with fewer and fewer people becoming competent (thanks in part to social media), it'll further your advancement in just about any career area -- even if you discover you love nothing better than, say, planting trees.
Writing well is something that should be an important advantage in almost anything you do these days. It's hard to teach, so first of all, congratulations. I mean it.
You say "I have no desire to become an author"-- do you mean you have no desire to publish much of anything at all (whether fiction or blogposts or op-eds or anything in between), or that you have no desire to pursue it as a profession? If the former, then I think the one thing to keep in mind is that it can be useful to mention when applying to jobs, especially if you have evidence (e.g. high grades on a writing-intensive course). I don't know what profession you have in mind for yourself but writing skills are a big plus in huge swathes of profession possibilities these days (much more so than math and maybe more than programming in my view, though depends on the field of course).
If what you mean is that you don't want to be an author as a profession, I'd say that one of the best things about writing is that it can be a huge part of your life without it being your literal official title. Many many writers (not knowledgeable enough to say "most") start out pursuing other professions and become writers just because they discover they write well and like it. You might be surprised how often books are the result of "One day I just sat down and started writing". So what I would say is that if writing as a hobby or side interest remotely interests you, just try it out and see where it leads.
But even if not, good writing will get you far almost no matter what you do, even just in the sense of writing emails or reports or applications that have greater appeal. So enjoy!
Thank you very much. I really mean 'no desire to become a professional author.' I actually do have a very modest blog, which might lead somewhere and might just be a fun hobby. I do like writing, particularly when I feel I have something to say - just not enough for it to be the main thing I do day after day.
Great! Then I guess all I'll say is not to believe that there's such a big chasm between "lead somewhere" and "just a fun hobby." So, for example, I think people tend to overestimate the barrier of entry to formal published political writing (op-eds and the like) as opposed to more informal stuff (like blogposting), or the barrier of entry to writing a full-blown book. If you're a good writer, you can probably write a publishable book if you want to. Whether you do is another thing, but I think that's worth keeping in mind :)
Piping in to say this x1000. There is no measurable gap between "lead" somewhere and "just a fun hobby."
I felt the same way you did, Aaron - I got good scores on college writing assignments but had no desire to "be a writer."
I started blogging anonymously for fun in 2018 (mostly so that I'd stop annoying my friends at happy hour by talking about the same topic ad nauseam). I ended up publishing weekly on that blog for three years. Recently, I pivoted to writing a site under my name because now I enjoy writing so much that I think I DO want to be a writer—whole thing.
But always tug at the loose ends, particularly when you're younger. Even if you don't write for a living, public writing as an extended phenotype is extremely powerful.
What kind of writing is it? Fiction? Something else? Which aspect of your writing do they feel stands out? Are there specific authors they compare you to?
All research based. First prof commented on a review essay on the effects of immigration, second was in response to several short responses and a paper in a philosophy of mind class. Third was in response to a review of prize competitions (a la DARPA Grand Challenge) hosted by the federal government.
Perhaps you have a more general aptitude for communicating research and technical information, which happens to show through in your writing. You might consider a profession where it's advantageous to be a good communicator. Professorship is one option... any public-facing position with a company whose work is fairly technical... leadership positions where you are responsible for training new people.
I had the same feedback in school for my writing, and I found that I was good at all of the above. Training the newbies was one of my favorite duties in my last position, simply because I love figuring out new ways to explain important concepts to people with different backgrounds.
One relevant point is that most undergraduates are very bad at writing. What your professors tell you is evidence that you are substantially better than the average but not evidence that you are good relative to professional writers. You might be, but you also might be substantially better than your fellow students and substantially worse than people who make their living by their writing.
If so, what you want to look for is the sort of position where it is valuable to be a competent writer but not necessary to be more than that.
I like writing and reading. I used to think this meant I should work in a writing-adjacent career. However, I am now in medicine, which involves very little writing. I think it's harder to succeed in writing-heavy fields because they depend heavily on connections, whereas it's easier to make good money with less effort in STEM industries where skills can be measured more objectively. Just my 2c
> I feel like writing is something so general that there isn't an obvious way to leverage this as a strength ...
You just wrote something! And it's pretty clear and well written, tho not obviously "head and shoulders above" anyone, AFAICT.
But, as a programmer, I find writing to be enormously useful near constantly: emails, chat messages, documentation (both for other programmers and users), and even code comments. They _all_ benefit, and me and my 'audience' too, from being better written than not. I also think that my writing improved tremendously from all of that practice.
There's a 'rationality' concept of 'inferential distance': https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inferential-distance. Basically, it's the (or a) sequence of 'inferences' that need to be made by your audience to reach or understand your own belief/position. That's a very useful thing to keep in mind when talking to people, but also pretty ubiquitously useful when writing too. And the better you are at writing, the more easily you can help people bridge an inferential distance.
I agree with Keller's first suggestion about policy analysis etc. Writing skills are highly correlated with analytic skills (and it works both ways; teach kids to write better, make them practice, and their thinking also gets a lot clearer, leading to better math/science grades etc), so you'd probably be good at that. And if you find a field you're at least vaguely interested in and/or that aligns with your values, we tend to be come more interested the more we deeper we go.
Consulting is a big word w/many possible jobs/careers therein, but on average, people with consulting jobs report low job satisfaction even when they make great money. I suspect it's because everyone wants to call in the consultants, but no one wants to DO what the consultations recommend .....
I would say that superior writing skills will serve you well in almost any 'knowledge' profession. I had the same sort of feedback in high school and college, winning kudos and awards. But, after earning a PhD in mathematics and trying my hand at a few different jobs, I ended up making a decent and sustained go of it as a research consultant. And (this is the punch line) I often hear from my clients that they are happy to pay a premium for my analytic work because I can explain what I'm doing in clear and thoughtful prose.
If you're interested in a career in academia (or even just a PhD), writing is an invaluable skill that makes your papers much more likely to be accepted in a journal/conference. I won't tell you how many papers I've reviewed where the core idea seems to be sound and reasonable but the writing is so low-quality that it downgrades the paper a category and might even result in rejection. Same applies for grant proposals.
If you are a good writer, it does not matter what field you go into, you will stand out. This is especially true if it's a technical field like engineering or software development. I was very surprised in college, and later, that many engineers, who I always imagined to be among the smartest of people, are terrible writers. It seems we are dealing with two different, and not necessarily frequently intersecting, skills or intelligences. In Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, these would be the linguistic-verbal intelligence and the logical-mathematical intelligence.
Uh, in 10 years you will look back at this and laugh. A good engineer, banker, or whatever can be an asset in some very specific roles. A good engineer, banker, or whatever that can write well will be head-and-shoulders more valuable in a much wider range of roles. There are very few jobs in the modern economy that require an education* that doe not benefit from great communication skills.
*Not just credentials, but a real education, which does not need to come from a school.
1905 is often called the "Annus Mirabilis" because physics was revolutionized in a single year by Einstein publications. What field of study do you think is most likely to next see something similar in the future?
Not so much a field of study, but I expect 2025 to 2030 or so to finally become the year of space travel, when dropping $100k on a weekend in the low-earth orbit would become feasible.
I'd bet against that if I were a betting person. NASA currently paying $55 million per person on a Dragon launch. What are you expecting to change to bring that down literally 1000 fold in under a decade to make this profitable?
The big changes would be the extensive use of fully reusable spacecraft, and selling to new markets where customers aren't in the habit of writing blank checks for launch services. Long term, the price of travel to low Earth orbit should converge on something like the price of air travel from North America to Australia.
But, A: that's going to take more than 5-10 years and probably more than 5-10 Elon-years. And B: when you spend a weekend (or whatever) in Australia, you're staying in a hotel built of Australian materials delivered by truck, whereas every brick in the LEO Hilton will have to be delivered by spaceship. I do expect space tourism to be a regular thing by 2030, but not at a $100K/weekend price point.
I disagree; ground-to-ground will always be cheaper than ground-to-orbit. Ignoring relative prices of air vs. space travel, any reusable passenger orbiter is *also* a reusable super-fast intercontinental transit craft (via suborbital ballistic trajectory), and it will use much less fuel in that role (most of the delta-V expenditure in an orbiter is not in atmospheric exit, but in circularisation of the orbit).
Also, I'd be very hesitant to spend billions on an LEO hotel at the moment. MEO or higher, sure, but I very much doubt we're going to fix Kessler before it goes off (either naturally or via an ASAT exchange) and when it does everything in LEO is gone.
I don't think you've got the math right on this one. Orbit circularization and deorbit have roughly similar delta-V requirements, and both combined are pretty much a rounding error compared to reaching (near) orbit in the first place. The delta-V for launching onto a Los Angeles - Sydney suborbital trajectory is roughly 90% of that for launching from Cape Canaveral into Low Earth Orbit, circularizing, and returning to Earth.
The delta-V of gaining orbital speed is much more than that to reach 150 km (without any sideways speed). Actual launches gain a lot of the needed velocity *during* atmospheric escape (via thrusting diagonally), so the circularisation *phase* is only a little bit of the delta-V put into circularising (the numbers I've found are something like 10 km/s delta-V to reach LEO, which is, if I've done my maths correctly, about 7.5 km/s orbital speed, about 1.7 km/s GPE of going up 150 km, and the rest drag losses).
However, I did make a rather boneheaded error; I forgot that long-range suborbital trajectories still do need a lot of sideways speed, so while it should still be cheaper than orbit (particularly once you take into account hypersonic gliding on the downward leg) it won't be *that* much cheaper.
(My mention of Kessler in the previous post was badly phrased, incidentally; I should stress that I think it's fixable after it happens. However, that's not going to magically reassemble all the stuff destroyed, so I'd wait to build an LEO hotel until after it goes off and is fixed.)
Immunology, or more precisely immunotherapy. 100 years from now, when almost any form of cancer can be cured by reprogramming your T cells, people will look back at some event around about now and say "That was the moment!"
Of course, we don't recognize it now. Nobody did in 1905, either. Einstein notoriously won the Nobel in 1921 for the photoelectric effect, because people were still a little unsure about relativity.
If immunotherapy is our new general relativity, I would bet that the key moment is the discovery of checkpoint blockade rather than CAR T cells. If for no other reason than that we already saw a Nobel in medicine for checkpoint and most laymen would be hard-pressed to explain how a cell therapy and an inhibitory antibody are different.
That said, we will need to get a lot better at it. Right now everyone is scrambling to figure out why it either works perfectly or fails in particular patient combinations. I swear I've read 50+ metanalyses and papers looking for new biomarker combinations in the last year and so far nothing.
Some advancements in single cell sequencing that leads to surveillance with strong predictive power for particular therapies...but agree, I think we're missing a few pretty major pieces to complete the puzzle
Hey you're preaching to the choir about single cell sequencing, it's a hell of a tool. I'm doing a single nucleus based project myself.
That said, IMO you need to treat any kind of sequencing as hypothesis-generating rather than hypothesis-testing which I feel is a weakness in most of these papers and why I don't see much progress. Sequencing is uncovering pathways potentially involved with resistance but it's going to take a lot more work to figure out which ones are important and which of those we can do something about. There's a lot of money and eyeballs on the problem but it looks like we're still in the trial and error phase.
My -bet (not very strongly held) is that immunology and Immunotherapy are too complex for single insights to do that much, but I wouldn't mind being wrong.
Also, the term was originally used in a poem about the year 1666, that witnessed the London fire, as well as the plague. The term stuck because it also happened to be the year of many of Newton's big revolutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis
It's have to be something theoretical to fit in a single year. Both Einstein and Newton had all the data they needed before their anni mirabiles; their discoveries were neat models which explained a bunch of phenomena in one fell swoop.
AI usually gets mentioned in this type of questions. But I think it is more likely to see some new revolution with quantum computing. Even if we cannot make AI a reality, having some usable form of a quantum computer would unlock a lot of problems that we cannot solve right now.
Does anyone have theories explaining UFOs using the simulation hypothesis (more deeply than just saying "maybe they're artifacts of the simulation")? Probably any such explanation would still seem wildly implausible to me, but I'm just curious if it could work better than theories about extraterrestrials or secret government programs with super-advanced technology.
I'm skeptical that the simulation hypothesis has explanatory power over anaything, really. I don't think there's any reason to believe that inhabitants of a simulation would be able to find any evidence of that fact, within the simulation.
One example of where I think people get this wrong: It's sometimes said that the concept of our 3D space being chunked up into a discrete grid of Planck Lengths would be evidence that we're in a simulation, because that's kind of like pixelization. But that doesn't make sense even as an intuition. If you look at a simulation we've created, say The Sims, we can see pixels in their universe, but *they* can't. The Sims in the game have no concept that their world is pixelated, despite the fact that we can see it is. So, the fact of how we build the simulation did not leave any such artifact within the subjective reality of the simulated beings.
That's just one example, but I suspect it holds in general. I doubt there is any sort of artifact one could find within a simulation that could be said to be evidence of how that simulation was constructed.
I mean, taking your example of a video game, the characters in the video game have no knowledge of how their game is *rendered* to the simulation gods living in userspace heaven, but they could certainly observe how it is internally *modeled*, assuming that is the information generally available to them (speaking as a professional game developer here).
Case in point: "Hey Thorvald McLoincloth, have you ever noticed how we're only ever able to place things in piles of exactly 255, no matter how big, small, light, or heavy they are? Seems like a fundamental property of the universe. I think I'll write a research paper on it."
I think the leap comes from observing this mundane but weird fact about your universe, and then saying that a simulated world shouldn't have such a feature, which how would we know?
I think the sneaky problem with your example is that, in fact, the observation that your piles are always exactly in stacks of 255, is *not* evidence of being in a simulation, unless you happen to already know something about alien-god psychology and technological limitations. Otherwise the number 255 has no particular significance. Why would it look like anything other than a random physical constant to them, like e or the speed of light?
If they have binary digital computers. Analog computers are a thing, and it's possible that the Simulators would prefer them. For that matter, they might use balanced Ternary.
Even if they used analog computers (and of course they wouldn't – to the exclusion of digital computers) and 'balanced ternary', they'd still understand binary numbers and computation generally.
I don't have any reason to believe that our alien-god simulators have anything corresponding to what we know as "computers" or "binary". For all we know they live in a physics system completely unlike the one we live in.
Even in a universe with different physics, I would be shocked and surprised if computation didn't work exactly the same. A 'binary bit' is simply the quanta of information, and that doesn't seem to be dependent on any particular physics.
Have you ever met a ('professional') mathematician? _Nothing_ looks like a 'random physical constant' to them! It's all just shadows of the Platonic forms. But, _logically_, there's no real way to falsify the simulation hypothesis (or the existence of the 'supernatural' generally) – but there could be other evidence that's at least suggestive, like how natural selection implies that, overall, most traits or features of biological creatures are (or were) functional.
My favourite "things only going up to 255" fact is that in Switzerland it is illegal for a train to have precisely 256 axles, because it causes the machines that track their passage for the signals to fail to register them.
I don't know whether they've had the forethought to also ban 512, etc axled trains, but I hope so!
The discovery that spacetime is quantized would only be evidence of some more complex universe if you had a solid theory about how spacetime could *not* be quantized, or could at least not rule it out. But the only reason we are driven to even consider the idea is because continuous spacetime has severe mathematical problems, it leads to strange ultraviolet catastrophes that have to be swept under the dissatisfactory rug of renormalization.
I find it hard to believe that spacetime _is_ continuous, having studied math a good bit – The Real Numbers are _crazy_; continuity alone seems too weird to be manifest in our universe (tho a lot of things do _very_ closely approximate it).
For what it's worth, I don't think many quantum physicists think that space is "chunked up into a discrete grid of Planck Lengths". Any such chunking would require distinguished axes or distinguished shapes of sub-regions.
Instead, I think the idea is just that everything is made up of waves where the Planck length measures some characteristic pair of limitations, the way a standard deviation does for a noisy measurement. There's no edges, just blurs that get worse when you try to focus too closely.
Explaining something through appeal to a simulation is essentially the same thing as appealing to the supernatural or some god. You can explain absolutely anything that way, and in the absence of actual *evidence* for a simulation/the supernatural/some god, it's empty and untestable.
It's an explanation that is at the same time way too easy, and empirically empty.
Pretty sure we've already got better theories than "extraterrestrials or secret government programs". Namely, pretty much every UFO "sighting" when properly investigated turns out to be a mix of mistaken attribution, suggestion, and motivated storytelling, and the only overarching story is that humans are worse at observation than our brains think we are.
I've tried marijuana four times, and I've never had a good experience with it. Am I a non-responder, maybe? The first time I smoked was way back about 20 years ago. I took three or four hits off a pipe, and then suffered really bad depersonalization. More recently (now that it's legal in my state), I tried it three separate times with a vape pen. The first two times I was cautious and took a couple of small hits. I ended up feeling lethargic, my limbs felt heavy, and I had some "brain fog". There was no euphoria at all, and the overall experience was mildly unpleasant. This last time I tried it, I took one big hit off the vape pen, and the result was simply awful. I had a coughing fit so bad I thought I would vomit. After I stopped coughing, I experienced very rapid heartbeat (about 150 beats per minute) accompanied by paranoia and something just short of a panic attack. After I took a beta blocker (propranolol), my heart rate eventually dropped to about 120 bpm, but the paranoia and the panicky feeling persisted for about 3.5 hours. It was so horrible I seriously considered calling 911. Is there a class of people who simply can't tolerate marijuana, or am I doing something wrong?
I’ve had some bad experiences with it too. I think we are not a numerous group but we exist. I am a little grateful to it for making me too loopy to keep drinking alcohol on more than one occasion. I think it lowers my threshold for unpleasant auditory hallucinations. The best side of it, like a contact high (neighbors smoking) I get slightly relaxed but then grumpy and very hungry when it begins wearing off. I had good experiences with CBD-only water, for anxiety, but that was close to $40/gallon and I had to drink a lot of it.
One good part to legalization may be less pressure on those it really doesn’t work for.
I've heard claims that because marijuana was illegal, it was bred selectively to be as intense as possible. I don't know whether that might increase the odds of bad experiences, but you might want to research whether heirloom marijuana (does it exist?) is easier on people.
I've heard claims that are literally the exact opposite of this claim; that while weed was illegal, quality (measured here in terms of THC content) wasn't that important since you normally didn't have many different stands to choose from. You bought whatever the dealer had, so the dealer and his distribution networks didn't have any incentive to breed better weed.
It was only when legalization began that legitimate retailers would start selling multiple strands and the THC content arms race began. Now growers and sellers had to have the best product since there was other legitimate competition, so they had to start growing stronger weed as a marketing strategy.
Maybe both are, in different regions or something.
I heard the story about marijuana being bred for less subtle experience back in the 70s or 80s from a woman who said that dealer's would sample batches, and they were selecting for the strong stuff. She also thought they weren't the sort of people who appreciated subtle psychoactives.
Yeah, it's both, but it's more of a quality grading sorting thing – some people DO care about quality and will spend hundreds of dollars at a time and others just want to get high now for $10.
In the illegal market there is "indoor" and "outdoor" weed. Indoor weed is usually much stronger, as it is grown under controlled conditions, while outdoor weed is subjected to the elements and is grown on large scale farms in foreign countries. Virtually all legal weed is indoor weed, both for security reasons and to ensure the product has specific characteristics. I personally think there is room for a less expensive, less potent product in the legal market that could be the "Coors Light" of marijuana.
My anecdotal experiences with the legal dispensaries market lead me to believe that the typical strain is relatively immature -- clean, good taste, aroma, etc, but not pushed for excessive THC. Kind of like picking bananas while not fully ripe.
Flowers are considered nominally ripe when the trichomes become cloudy. Pushing the harvest past that presents growers with many new risks and challenges that are cheaper to avoid. I also think it's likely the growers short-shrift the labor-intensive job of proper curing -- which could substantially contribute to some of the jarring effects mentioned by the OP (like an anxiety-inducing Indica).
It – (illegal) marijuana – is a stratified market and there are various (rough) levels of quality.
The lowest grade stuff isn't very good and probably most closely matches what you describe, i.e. 'you buy whatever your dealer has'.
There's a grade above that – often literally described as 'mid grade', and it's more potent and more expensive.
But at the top is a grade that DOES match what Nancy described – the buyers are willing to pay a premium for quality and they will absolutely shop around among the dealers they know for the best stuff.
I'm pretty sure it's true that illegal weed in the US today is much stronger than (a) it was in the US in the 60s and (b) it is nowadays in countries like India where it is easier to grow.
In my experience, I met few people who had bad reaction to it. Some didn't feel good at all, others got lethargic without enjoying the experience, etc. So I think there are people that feel no effect or bad experiences, not by how they consume but just how their bodies deal with the substance.
And honestly, I don't see a bad point in that. In my country of origin hash (made out of marijuana oil) and weed are easy to get and quite cheap. And socially accepted. I've been smoking for long time (with periods of not smoking at all for few years, other periods smoking just occasionally and periods of smoking heavily and on a daily basis), and the truth is that the relaxing effects where you enjoy the moment were just at the beginning. After a while, it is more like lethargic feeling that leads to waste the time doing whatever passive activity you can do, like binge watching something. It is really easy to get attached to it and do it regularly, even if the enjoyment of it is not there anymore. Adiction basically.
My point is that being so easy and cheap to get, it is very easy to get addicted to it and being unable to do anything fulfilling in the free time. I guess if you think you would get benefit from it by lowering anxiety, you could try CBD. There are products that are essentially weed or hash but without thee THC, just the CBD. And they say it works well for low tolerance people.
Not trying to dispute your own experience but for many people (me included) cannabis actually makes them more active, not less. Possibly quite strain dependent.
"Four out of five respondents said that they use marijuana right before or after exercising. And those users spent more minutes per week exercising than users who didn’t mix the two." - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02529-0
I find that very plausible! I've found it to be helpful when, e.g. playing with very young children. Whereas 'sober' I might get frustrated because, e.g. the child only wants to play one game or do one thing, over and over, when high it's easier to not only tolerate, but actively enjoy, that kind of thing because of the ease of 'over-focusing' on (interesting) minutiae and then 'drifting sideways' to focus on something else.
It's _definitely_ strain dependent. I remember reading an interesting article about a teenager with autism (?) that only really liked one particular strain (and its effects were particularly functional/therapeutic).
If it's legal in your state, I'd suggest talking to a budtender at a large dispensary about your experiences with cannabis and ask if they have any suggestions. It may be that the mode of ingesting is related to your unpleasant time with it. I'm an occasional (like every 6 months) consumer so not an expert but AFAIK inhaling is going to cause a very rapid response. A mild edible might be better tolerated. Mild anything really, learn to walk before you go sprinting.
The setting you're in when you get high is also very important, especially if you have (totally understandable!) negative associations with cannabis. I'd suggest either, to the extent that it's possible with COVID restrictions, being around supportive friends or alone with a laptop full of cartoons / kung-fu movies. Just wherever you normally feel safe and comfortable.
I hope it works out! I really think cannabis can be useful for enhancing creativity and enjoyment of the world, at least a couple times a year anyhow.
Yes. Some people have a negative experience of / low tolerance for THC. Sounds like that's what's going on with you. I also have almost zero tolerance for THC. Like, I can handle a fraction the minimum other people take
You might try a far lower, and more controlled, dose. You can try gummies or tinctures with dosage statements on the label. Whatever the recommended dose, take an eighth and see what happens. I've also been told that a 50/50 CBD/THC ratio is more relaxing, although this never worked for me.
If I take one puff off a vape pen, all sounds are loud and overwhelming, my heart races, I have auditory hallucinations, and I feel like everything I say or hear echoes in my head, and my mind feels separated from my sluggish and lethargic body. There is nothing good about the experience.
I've only had one good experience with THC, and it was when I was just barely high. It is damn near impossible for me to reach that state without surpassing it, so I don't do THC.
I'm curious what your experience would be with CBD alone. Most people report minimal psychological effects, but I find it gives me a nice warm and fuzzy feeling. If our brains are similar, you might like it too.
While I wouldn't try to convince anyone they ought to learn to appreciate THC, I suspect much of the anxiety many people experience could be transformed with "practice."
The overwhelming sense of losing control of the mind's focus (which can lead to paranoia, etc) is eventually replaced with the discovery that THC can, in fact, greatly enhance focus in areas that are usually glossed over by habitual awareness patterns, providing new insights into music, exercise, etc. It's a bit like learning to control your dreams. Or like settling into one nice little spot at a big noisy carnival.
But I agree there may well be some who simply won't ever appreciate it.
Living in a major weed growing area, I've heard the same advice from dozens of people throughout my life. While I agree that mindset, experience, and desensitization are all relevant to people's experience with THC (and drugs in general), I just don't buy the idea that everyone has the potential to enjoy it if only they give it time/practice/chances. Perhaps the majority of people have that potential, but not one hundred percent of people.
It's not for fear of losing control; I've had some very wild trips on psychedelics where I kept my composure like a champ. I fight back when I'm attacked by enemies in my dreams and I'm happy on a roller coaster. Either it's a matter of sensitivity, or the qualitative experience is just different for me, and I doubt we know enough about the brain to say why. I'm about as likely to appreciate THC as I am to appreciate sleep paralysis.
It honestly doesn't feel like a huge loss. I love what CBD does for my brain.
I had some intense experiences early from marijuana, but I look back at them now as mostly failures of 'set and setting' – my friends with whom I had those experiences were much more experienced and probably didn't even know that I was basically having a 'bad trip'.
> The first two times I was cautious and took a couple of small hits. I ended up feeling lethargic, my limbs felt heavy, and I had some "brain fog". There was no euphoria at all, and the overall experience was mildly unpleasant.
If it's legal where you live, try to sample different varieties. The two main sub-species are sativa and indica. I like sativa strains for 'daytime' highs – they're more cerebral and, sometimes, even 'energizing'. Indica strains are more like what you describe – I like them for 'nighttime' highs.
I don't think I've ever felt euphoric from marijuana itself – 'energizing' sure (from specific strains), but any euphoria was probably because of the context, e.g. hanging out with friends at a concert or festival or party.
I get a rapid heartbeat frequently – that typically subsides on its own, and smoking/vaping/eating less helps. The vape pens you bought might be pretty strong – that's been my experience with a lot of them. Try just _one_ hit at a time if you're still interested.
Paranoia and even full blown panic attacks do happen, tho I don't think I've ever had a panic attack myself. (I did once _faint_, and injure myself by falling onto something – that was scary!) I know some people that have stopped using, or never really started, because of that kind of thing.
So, yes, there does seem to be a rough "class of people" that 'can't tolerate' marijuana.
But, if you're still interested in trying it again, attend to your 'set and setting'!
So the strains are stronger and a lot of people are showing up with mental and physical effects:
"Speaking to RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Dr Gerry McCarney, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Chair of the College's Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said there is growing concern over the situation - and its impact on young people in particular.
Dr McCarney said 309 people were admitted to psychiatric hospitals with a cannabis-related diagnosis in 2019, the latest figures available, a record level that is almost three times higher than in 2007.
The College, he said, believes the higher potency of cannabis now available in this country is to blame.
"We have been concerned for some time that the public discourse about cannabis is coming from one side. We want to put it out there what we are seeing in our clinics, because it's not harmless," Dr McCarney said.
"Anything over 10% THC is high potency cannabis. We frequently have strains available that are over 10%.
"We are seeing significant increases in anxiety, self-harming behaviour and suicidal ideation. It is worrying that as the THC [tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical which produces a high in cannabis] content increases we are seeing more of this.
"If you look back at the hospital admissions data you can see about a 300% increase into the hospitals. It's greater than admission for cocaine use or for heroin use.
"A young person from time to time will have begun from seven, eight, nine. The cannabis that people might remember from 20, 30 years ago is not the animal that's out there now," he said.
Dr McCarney's view was echoed by Dr Anne Doherty, a Clinical Liaison Psychiatrist at the Mater Hospital's emergency department.
Asked about the fact 877 people were admitted to general hospitals for medical treatment in 2019, a rate that is four times higher than in 2005, Dr Doherty said many suffer physical issues due to the strength of some strains of the drug.
"We frequently see people with heart palpitations or heart arrhythmia secondary to cannabis, we also see people with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which is a condition where people have unrelenting nausea or vomiting due to cannabis.
"In addition to that, in the emergency department we tend to see people who have their first episodes of drug-induced psychosis, which is a truly horrible condition and you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy," Dr Doherty said."
- increasing the expected payout for whiplash injuries would lead to the an increase in the number of people actually experiencing whiplash symptoms
- giving weight to victim impact statements in legal proceedings leads to victim's having a worse post-crime experience
- increasing the disability supports for students in universities (say, extra time on an exam if suffering from anxiety during the term) increases the prevalence of mental health issues among the student body
Yes to all. Can't say I have robust evidence, but it seems to fit both logically from my understanding of incentives, and anecdotally from seeing policy changes in an intentional community setting.
These all seem plausible, provided you think of the increase as increase in the observed phenomena, more than in the underlying facts. I've noticed that many people don't seem to notice certain experiences they're having, which has made me very suspicious of the numbers that are listed for "asymptomatic covid cases" - I suspect many of these people *have* symptoms, and just didn't *notice* them as symptoms. I think it's similarly plausible that some fraction of people have whiplash symptoms and don't notice them, have post-traumatic stress and don't notice it, and have mental health issues without noticing them, but that the supports you mention will help more people have an incentive to notice them. (This is the standard story of what happened with the concept of "sexual harassment" - before the invention of the term, women didn't have an organized concept for what was going on in the workplace, but once the term existed, they were able to label the things they had been experiencing all along.)
If you think that some of the harms of these things are just in the fact *that* people notice them, then these harms will be increased, but it seems very likely to me that the actual support that is received outweighs these harms. Furthermore, I think that in many cases, the subjective good or bad for the individual doesn't depend on them *noticing* what's going on. There's a reason people wear makeup that is often designed not to be noticed - it still makes people feel more attracted even if they don't notice it, and similarly, people who don't have the trained ear or trained palate to understand or notice that the music they are hearing or food they are eating is high quality usually still have a better experience when it is.
> These all seem plausible, provided you think of the increase as increase in the observed phenomena, more than in the underlying facts.
I think I want to go further than this though. Like in the example of conversion disorder mentioned in the linked comment, it was not the case that limbs sometimes stop working, and a certain psychological disposition would cause people to notice the fact. But rather than a certain psychological disposition would be the cause of the limbs not working. Similarly, I'm starting to wonder if other incentive structures can cause distress that would otherwise be entirely absent, not just not noticed (I figure that you can not notice distress that might still show up physiologically in some way, like high blood pressure or something).
Yeah, I think the big empirical question is how much of each of the two phenomena is there, and how much do the additional resources outweigh the additional distress.
So when writing research papers in high school and college there were two rules:
1. cite everything you use
2. you're not allowed to cite non-scholarly sources
Academic papers seem to follow these rules too, but the corollary of both of them put together is that if a good idea originates outside the academy it will rarely if ever enter the academy, right?
What is stopping researchers from just picking up good idea's from outside academia and writing their own paper on it (or running their own tests on it or whatever is appropriate for the situation)?
Exactly — nothing. In the worst case, the idea could be rederived and written up in a paper.
> 1. cite everything you use
Rather, you cite everything that you /formally/ use. You might draw inspiration and ways of thinking that end up influencing your work from basically anywhere, but which you couldn't possibly realise for citing.
> 2. you're not allowed to cite non-scholarly sources
This is good as a general rule for students, but in practice is far from strictly followed by academics. All sorts of things get referenced, even just for mild amusement at times. I can't think of any examples that I've seen where such a citation has brought into academia a good idea originating from outside of it, but my point is that it's not sufficiently close to a "rule" for this to be a problem. Indeed, if you write a paper that contains genuinely good and novel ideas, no one will really care if you have some weird citations: citing scholarly sources is an heuristic for good academia, not a goal itself.
Yeah, I relatively frequently see "personal communication" cited for things when no academic reference exists (and the author got it by talking to people). The fact that such a thing is allowed in academia means that basically anything can be cited. Now, you need to _justify_ such a citation, but if it's actually the appropriate source, that's not that hard.
Non-academic citations in a paper will generally be used for different things, and probably not for factual claims that are key to the paper, but for setting up the background, etc., I don't see why one couldn't or wouldn't.
2 isn't really a rule. In college and high school it sort of is, but it's more because teachers are using citations as a way of getting you to go out and engage with the literature. But even there, if you're a good student who has blown way past the minimum number of required scholarly citations, if you come to your teacher and say you want to reference an idea you heard in a podcast, most teachers aren't going to have a problem with that.
It's also worth noting there are really two types of academic citation. One is where you just assert some fact and then back it up with a citation. That looks like: "60% of weasels are blue in the summer (Smith 2019)." For this type of citation, I do think you really need a proper academic source. But the other type of citation is when you paraphrase or quote someone else in order to engage with their ideas. This might look like: "John Smith, in his book Weasels in Winter (2019), puts forth a view that weasels change color based on the current season. He is part of a literary movement that... (and so on)." This second style of citation, where you're actually engaged with something, is where you can slip in basically anything you want, and it definitely doesn't have to be a peer-reviewed academic source.
Yes, exactly. You can introduce an idea by citing basically anything. But just because you cite something doesn't mean people have to believe it or take it seriously.
Academic journals and books (ones in good standing, anyways) will be taken seriously and readers will expect little to no additional work in the text of the paper to substantiate a claim made by the source. If you cite something less rigorously reviewed (e.g. a random blog post from someone no one has ever heard of), people will be more skeptical of any claim, and you'll probably have to do most of the heavy lifting in the paper itself to justify any claims or ideas your taking from that post.
This! I've even seen people cite blog posts and wikipedia in this second way -- "We take inspiration from and further explore the ideas in [blog post]".
Probably a malicious academic could get away with claiming ownership of an idea they found from a blog post by avoiding citing it. But the culture in academia is (at least in part) such that not too many people would do that in the first place, and if they did and if someone found out, everyone else would publicly shame them for stealing the idea. It might even rise to the level of academic misconduct, depending on how implausibly deniably they took the idea.
Even in academic papers, you're allowed to cite non-scholarly sources if they are what created interest in a topic. What you can't do is cite non-scholarly sources in support of any specific claim.
Sorry, I meant college 'research' papers. Academic work you can cite whoever you want. I've seen papers in respected peer-reviewed journals that started with a quote from 'The Onion'.
I've seen one cite C.W. McCall in support of the claim that trucks often travel in ad-hoc convoys. At the college level, you're trying to teach students to apply a critical eye to the question, "yes Wikipedia is easy, but who really has the straight dope on this subject?". Once they graduate, the community starts trusting them to have applied the right level of skepticism in their choice of possibly non-academic sources.
Substack uses Stripe for payments, which _should_ support a lot of options besides credit cards, but I was also never able to figure out how to get it to accept non-credit card payments.
You don't have a debit card? They come free with bank accounts (tho there are typically strict limits for non-checking accounts, e.g. a handful of transactions per month). Do you also not plan on getting one of those? They're very useful! And your bank (if you have an account at one) might have some kind of 'virtual debit/credit card' feature that doesn't require you to request a physical card too.
You _might_ be able to get a 'prepaid debit/credit card' and be able to use that too.
It does seem like Substack only supports debit/credit card payment methods tho.
I would recommend against using a debit card for any online purchases (really, I literally don't use mine for anything). It's much more secure to buy one of those one time Visa cards and use that.
If your debit card information is stolen and used fraudulently it is _much, much harder_ to get your money back than it is with an actual credit card.
To respond to your point about the prepaid card, I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work. I don't think vendors can tell the difference. It will only be a problem if they try to automatically renew and you haven't updated the information to a new card so the card no longer works.
The payment processors can tell if a card is prepaid and they do 'discriminate' against them, e.g. consider them to be riskier payments, but I know merchants have some latitude about whether they'll accept them.
I think the credit card companies either disclose, to the payment processors, that cards are prepaid, or it's easy enough for the latter to 'reverse engineer' the card numbering system and tell themselves. I definitely don't think they're perfectly indistinguishable.
In the U.S. anyways, the consumer protections for debit and credit cards seem to be very similar. I haven't had any problems getting my money back from fraudulent purchases made with my debit card.
The 'don't use debit cards online' advice is I think very much out of date. I don't think there's any significant security advantage to using a credit card; not generally anyways.
There's a significant difference between "someone stole $4000 from your bank account, you can legally get it back" and "someone charged $4000 to your credit card, you will need to use a different card while we figure out that you do not need to pay it."
That's true, but I suspect _large_ fraudulent transactions are much rarer nowadays. Banks and other financial/payment companies seem to much better at flagging the obvious frauds (and it does seem to be fairly obvious to them). I've noticed that most of the stuff that does 'get thru' seems to small transactions that are pretty similar to legitimate ones.
But you might be right, implying that what you described is a significant advantage of using a credit card.
I'm still skeptical that it's that significant – today (even versus a few years ago).
But then, event a 'catastrophe' like my bank account being 'wiped out' wouldn't really be that much of an emergency – for me. But I also can't think of a single example of that happening to anyone I know; not in many years anyways. I'm not claiming it doesn't still happen, just that I _think_ it's rare, and much rarer than in the past.
One thing I've been questioning lately is why, despite all the knowledge we have about the various flaws of our respective brains, we still struggle to understand what our future selves will want. It turns out there are some workarounds to this problem, but that they're all unpalatable to most people for various reasons.
I've written about the problem and some possible solutions here and wanted to get your thoughts. What do you think of my arguments? https://davidteter.com/imagination
Cropping out is the first section that makes sense without the reader having already figured out your point.
I found myself reaching the end of each section, not having any clue what you were trying to say, then having to work backwards through the section to figure it out.
Perhaps it’s a personal preference thing, but I found you saved the point for last in each section, which left me in the dark.
Thank you for sharing this! My attempt in the first two sections was to share stories or examples that draw the reader in and demonstrate the phenomena I'm describing. How could I make my point clearer earlier while also allowing the reader to follow my longer-form argument?
I would describe your thesis as "The halo/horns effect cause people to over-estimate the goodness/badness of imagined future choices." (I only got through the first three sections, but the reader should understand your thesis within 500 words.)
In the first section, you presented two mysteries, "a sad man is happy to die," and "a successful man commits suicide, why?" At the end of the section, you reveal why. I think your goal was for the reader to, haven been given incomplete information, apply the halo/horns effects and generate false beliefs about the men. What happened for me, though, is I recognized I was being presented with a mystery, and suspended judgment until the end. At that point the reveal felt like you had left out necessary information, and were calling out the reader for being wrong – the inverse of a fair play whodunnit. This irritated me (xkcd: "poor communication isn't cleverness") until I realized you had done it intentionally as a rhetorical device and I scanned back through to figure out why.
It's common for news articles to engage in this 'present mystery', 'resolve mystery' device, so when I correctly recognized that device being used I didn't generate the halo effect mental state. Instead, I was annoyed at being 'called out' even though I didn't fall for the trick. This meant that when you pointed out my supposed error, you didn't gain any credibility (since I hadn't made one) and instead lost credibility (since my ignorance was your fault). This all happened subconsciously over perhaps 20 seconds. The negative experience was intensified since there was no payoff to the first section, no compelling explanation of why you had presented and resolved a mystery since it didn't easily tie back to your as-yet-unclear thesis. It's possible this is all due to the the section's mystery conceit not landing with me, but the section felt muddled.
Contrast the Cropping Out section, where you said, "imagine an apartment with vaulted ceilings and granite countertops" then said, "I bet you imagined wood floors too, you'll be surprised when it doesn't have them." Since I had imagined wood floors, I was surprised it didn't have them, and was pleasantly intrigued that you'd tricked me. You then a satisfying answer ('halo effect'), which you quickly tied back to your thesis.
The first section uses 500 words to attempt what Cropping Out does in 50 words. The first section seemed disordered, where was Cropping ticks the rhetorical boxes rapidly and in a sensible order.
A factual point: You use "Californians are as happy as Ohioans" as a factual example for your thesis. Essentially "Halo effect causes Ohioans to over-estimate the happiness they'll gain when they move to California."
This is dubious, though:
1. You would expect people to either be a little bit happier due to the benefits of sunsets but not as much happier as they expected. i.e. they correctly forecast the sunset benefit, but overestimated the other imagined benefits.
2. Or the people should be less happy, if the disappointment of not getting the imagined benefits overwhelm the sunset-benefit.
3. For people to be exactly as happy, it means the sunset-benefit must exactly match the imagined-benefit disappointment, which seems unlikely.
The halo effect could plausibly generate 1 or 2. Number 3 (no long term change due to moving) seems more likely to be the result of e.g. hedonic adaptation over the unlikely scenario that sunsets are exactly has beneficial as the halo effect is disappointing.
This is comprehensive and thoughtful feedback - a sincere thank you for taking the time to share it. It will improve my writing next time.
On the factual point, I think the surprising result is a mixture of two effects:
1) The joy of beautiful sunsets is offset by other annoyances, which makes you happier in some ways and less happy in others. It isn't a complete wash, but close enough to not show up as significant on a survey.
2) People in California eventually adapt to the beautiful sunsets via hedonic adaptation as you mentioned.
We're talking about average outcomes here, but there are some people who dream of moving to California, do so, and are (seemingly, at least) permanently happier. They marvel at the sunsets, don't mind paying extra taxes, etc.
I can't figure out if this cohort got lucky, has a more realistic imagination, or knows themselves better than the rest of us know ourselves. Probably it's some combination of the three.
Yes, it's kind of like trying to hum a song while another one is playing in the background. The present "drowns out" the future. With the music, we're aware that's taking place. When we imagine our various possible futures and try to choose among them, we think we're doing a great job of ignoring our present wants to focus on the future!
What do people think about the German federal election coming up later this year?
For those just tuning in, Merkel has chosen to retire this time round. Her party, the CDU(/CSU) has settled on Armin Laschet as its candidate after a rather lengthy search. Support for the CDU/CSU (and to a lesser extent their coalition partners the SPD) spiked at the the start of the pandemic and stayed high until early this year, when it cratered just as rapidly. Most of this support lost by the CDU went instead to the Greens, who have risen to first place in some recent polls.
How much of the CDU's recent poor performace is due to failures in the vaccination process (which they might be able to fix before September) and how much is that they have no good replacement for Merkel?
Might Annalena Baerbock become the first Green chancellor?
I'd also be curious to know how AfD is doing. They had been picking up seats the last few elections I had paid attention to, but as I understand it without the ability to form a coalition they're essentially still a protest vote.
I don't think they have much of an impact on the federal level. It's more of a New State thing, especially since there's also a lot of far-left voters and the CDU is disinclined to form a coalition with either of them, leading to things like the Thuringian Crisis.
The Greens (who in the past were known for heavy fighting between the "realo" and "fundi" wings) were a bunch of very good friends this time. They had two candidates, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, who are very good friends, everybody said that both candidates are totally fine, and they decided for Baerbock smoothly.
The conservative CDU/CSU would like to appear like that, but didn't. In Bavaria they have the CSU, which always did a little bit of their own thing, but when they tried to make one of their people chancellor (Strauß 1980, Stoiber 2002), they failed. It is said that Bavarian CSU chancellors aren't so welcome in the North, the CSU is a bit more right-wing than the CDU, and they talk in that funny dialect. Now, they have Markus Söder, who is pretty popular throughout the country, and is regarded as a good corona-manager (although the statistics in Bavaria is so-so), whereas the CDU wants Armit Laschet, who is not so popular, has a fame as a very bad corona-manager (he famously said at the beginning of the third wave: "We had all hoped it would go away in spring" -- well, he didn't listen to the scientists), and Laschet comes across as rather dumb; but make no mistake, he is not stupid, and has a very strong network from Catholic fraternities.
And one day after the Greens presented their candidate, CDU had to follow and grudgingly decided for Laschet. Immediately, their polls plummeted. And stay that way. https://dawum.de/Bundestag/Forsa/2021-05-05/ So indeed we might get a green chancellor in autumn. Whether they dare form a really left-wing coalition with social-democrat SPD and left-wing Linke, I kind of doubt that because there are many in the SPD who never wanted anything to do with the lefties who had their roots in the GDR communist party SED. But perhaps that is outgrown past, and SPD is not in a position to boast, being about to lose two third of their voters since 1998.
They might form a "traffic light" coalition with SPD and (neo-)liberal FDP. FDP always hated the Greens, but you can argue that they have more in common than both would admit (being rather upper-class parties). A coalition of Greens and CDU/CSU might be possible, they have that in Baden-Württemberg, but both might have to bend themselves pretty much to find a compromise.
The vaccinations, now they seem to get a bit faster. Many feel that the USA and UK have defected. The EU has exported 44 % of their vaccine production, where US und UK both exported 0 % and kept all for themselves. But it is also a bit the fault of the EU commission under Ursula von der Leyen, the former German defense minister. She got a bit into trouble for spending a lot of money on external consultants (McKinsey etc.) without much of anything to show for it, and before people ask too much, she was kicked upstairs. The EU is a dumping ground for politicians we're fed up with, because for long years in Europe they couldn't break anything. Now that they have the power to botch a vaccine ordering, people might learn that this kicking upstairs is not such a good idea any more.
This week, the supreme court judged thusly: A few years ago, we have added article 20a to the constitution, that the state must protect the basis of life also for future generations. The gouverment has promised to fulfill the Paris climate treaty until 2030, but not really done a lot about it, been like "well, let's see later how to do that", and if the coming generation has to do all the work of changing our way of life, it would limit their freedom too much. Som the gouvernment must act now, to reduce climate-changing emissions. The CDU said, yeah right, well, but we already decided to stop burning coal in 2038, and we don't really feel like changing that plan again. Not sure whether that will convince people.
Ceremonial gift giving--that related to holidays, birthdays, and life events like weddings and childbirth--is an idiotic custom that must die.
Proper etiquette demands that one accept a gift and act happy to receive it, regardless of whether it is wanted. Even if a gift is enjoyed, it is rare to impossible that the recipient should enjoy it enough that she would spontaneously buy it for herself. Even if the purchaser was exceedingly generous and bought something that the recipient could not afford--say, a fancy article of clothing--one could have doubtless used the same cash amount to purchase a piece of clothing that they liked more. Or, better yet, they could have used the money to pay rent, or bills, or stocks--something they deem worth buying. The best gift is cash: it is always exactly the item you want.
Gift giving is not an unselfish act. If it were, people would not buy you gifts when you repeatedly said you didn't want a gift. To buy someone a gift is to buy THEM: their affection or a continued relationship with them. Accepting a gift creates the expectation that you OWE the donor something--appreciation, love, continued engagement. People feel uneasy about giving cash gifts because it makes the nature of these transactions obvious.
95% of consumer products such as clothing or decorations are garbage, visual pollution. In choosing a gift, most people choose this pollution, only most people delude themselves into thinking they know someone's taste well enough to choose the ~1% of things that will surprise and delight them. Why shouldn't people think they're great gift givers, when it's rude to for any recipient to let the giver believe otherwise?
Or, gift givers buy that which the recipient loves too much. Thank you very much for buying me the sweets that will tempt me and make me feel like shit after I eat them. Thank you for buying the thing that is somewhat similar to the thing I own and like but have no use for.
A gift is an expectation of future gifts. When someone buys you a gift for your birthday or Christmas, they are creating an expectation that you will reciprocate. To not do so is to show that you don't care about your relationship as much as they do. To give someone a gift is to create an obligation for them, and the feeling of guilt if they do not fulfill that obligation.
Ah but that's exactly the point. Gift-giving is an annoying chore for both giver and recipient. By demonstrating a willingness to go through this annoying chore once or twice a year, you strengthen your relationship.
I think the chore/obligation parts are true, but there's also an element in some cases of trying to get the big win of giving something the recipient likes but wouldn't have thought of.
There are types of gifts to which this does not apply, and there are types of relationships to which none of these concerns are relevant.
Some examples:
1. Parents/Grandparents/other adults to children. Children cannot buy their own gifts (usually) and are often easy to shop for.
2. Gifts of time and attention, which can include handmade items that are both functional and sentimental.
Your concerns seem mostly about gifts between adults who can afford to buy their own material goods and better know their own preferences. I agree with most of your concerns in that regard.
I felt very smart a few years ago when I started blanketly declaring that the only gift I wanted was the freedom from obligation to buy other people gifts. This plan failed horribly, because it was impossible to get people who thought gifts are valuable always defected, bought me gifts and assumed I would as well. I've finally gotten people close to me to accept the deal of "Don't buy me any gift you wouldn't be happy with, and don't get offended if I politely decline the gift."
I just don't get it. Everyone I know has a disposable income. Buying someone a gift is making the assertion that you know what someone would like more than they would. In certain cases of information asymmetry , this is possible, but it's rare.
The one exception to this is kids - I love buying gifts for my nieces, nephews and god kids.
"I love buying gifts for my nieces, nephews and god kids"
Have you examined why you love doing this? Why do you think that you, an adult, can match the tastes of children/young people? Why are you helping inculcate in them the expectation and duty of giving and receiving gifts, when you yourself dislike being put under the obligation?
If you can extrapolate from "I love buying my niece a gift because..." to how other people think about gift-giving, then you can understand why they defect. There are occasions when it is a mandatory social activity that doesn't have any personal meaning, but other times it is "here is something I saw and thought you would like and it is a token of my regard and friendship".
The times I buy gifts for people and feel good about it are either when I discover some really cool thing that I'm pretty sure they don't know about (IE when I can leverage an information advantage) or when I'm traveling somewhere exotic and get to buy them something they don't know about or couldn't really get back at home (IE leveraging both an information advantage and a unique opportunity). Unfortunately - this just doesn't happen often enough for it to be the default mode of giving.
The times I'm medium to negative about buying gifts are when someone that I know has a disposable income sends me a list of stuff they want. In this case, I feel like it's just wasting everyone's time since this other person could easily have just gone and bought the thing themselves. Sure, I know that I'm getting them something they want, but only because they decided to not use their money to buy it.
I hate buying gifts when I'm just forced to guess someone's preferences and buy them something almost at random and hope they like it.
Kids get around the two above problems. They make it explicit what they want AND they don't having the disposable income to just it themselves. If my godson says "I want this video game" or my goddaughter wants a book, I know that the only way they have to get this thing is to have someone get it for them. This, for me, creates a positive experience.
I'd never thought about inculcating them into this cycle of obligation though... I'll need to think about that.
Well, it doesn't matter what the kids' tastes are, if they can't buy the things themselves. So you're adding value that way. (But yeah, they'd love cash, too.)
However, I think I can often predict better than a kid how much utility they'll get out of something. I now have many years of experience (having been a child, and a parent to children) knowing which types of toys look really cool but then kinda suck, and which will provide lasting fun. This is all calibrated by communicating with a specific child and learning their preferences, but my outside judgement as someone experienced with toy shopping adds value. Most kids just don't have the experience to make great decisions in this regard.
You would be very pleased with Chinese culture then. The etiquette on gifts is somewhat reversed from most Western cultures, as gifts are generally expected to be in the form of cash.
I understand the reasoning behind our gift-giving custom: you're supposed to be demonstrating the depth of your relationship by knowing what sort of item the other person wants. Ideally, you can even select an item they wouldn't even realize they wanted or needed. When it works, it really is more thoughtful and emotional than money. But since most people don't actually have that sort of deep emotional resonance it ends up being more wasteful than cash.
The point of gifts is not "efficient consumption", the point is you put time and effort in it, you show you know the person's taste, nudge them a bit in a certain direction, motivate them for a new hobby they may have picked up, etc. Sometimes you do know what a person would like but would never buy himself, cause you have no perfect self-knowledge and your closest friends know things about you, you don't.
To look at it from a "this is not a rational buy if I would buy something myself"-perspective is quite silly. Has all the articles on signalling, metis, etc, been for nothing? Starting a crusade against gifts seems to be a rather pointless enterprise, with as main consequence the destruction of the social status of the crusader.
As with all else, change starts with you. Stop giving presents to people and tell people you don't want presents. If they insist on handing you a gift, hand it right back to them with "I don't want this". Sure, it will be awkward and embarrassing and cause social discomfort the first few times, but eventually the message of "I only want the money" and "I have better things to do with my money and time than think of you" will sink in.
Gift giving is a custom. You don't have to be bound by customs unless you let yourself be so bound. Be sure *why* you don't like this custom (is it reluctance/resentment over spending money? dislike of feeling socially obligated by being a recipient?) and be clear to everyone who might actually or potentially give you gifts that you are a galaxy-brain who despises their common little trashy objects which their feeble little sheeple minds think serve as markers of affection or courtesy but which are meaningless consumer nonsense and you have *much* better taste than to like "garbage, visual pollution ...sweets that will tempt me and make me feel like shit after I eat them ...the thing I own and like but have no use for". That should get them to stop the practice quite soon, dear Lady Disdain.
My family and friends have long adopted this custom. I haven't had to do any Christmas shopping for many years. If I want to help out someone that needs it, I give cash.
For a person that you have a caring relationship with, but don't see on a daily basis, what you want is a gift that interweaves your lives together. It could be something that is slightly outside of their existing tastes in the direction of yours, or some everyday item with a distinctive decoration that will remind them it came from you every time they pick it up.
But your central point that gifts result in debt is one of the central points of David Graeber's book, "Debt: The First 5000 Years". If you have a friend you regularly go out for drinks with, then buying a round of drinks that *doesn't* exactly cancel out the last round someone bought is a good way to give an "objective" reason why you two have to go back out together again later.
Of course, for anyone that you *don't* want to have this kind of continuing relationship with, gifts are a bad idea.
This might be a bit of a stretch, but for me this is one of the biggest problems with EA, Universal benefits etc. It's great for the gift-givers (and that's not to be dismissed as irrelevant) but it has (mostly) hidden but deep negatives for the receivers. The soul-destroying social and psychological debt. The givers retain their power, their agency, and their self-image; the receivers lose a portion of all three.
I hope you don't mind me randomly attaching my rant to your comment. It's been waiting to pop out for a few weeks now, and saw an opportunity!
Argument in favour of giving things that people don't see the value of, like mosquito nets or supplements?
As for universal benefits, I think it can re-enforce a sense of being part of a society, rather than being indebted to it, although it may depend on the nature of the benefits.
Savvy people will leverage gifts for social status etc, leaving you in the dust in a few generations. Bribes are just gifts, and bribery works magic, just look at US political contributions and PAC. Those of us who are not fabulously wealthy are easy targets for gift giving. Just buy something they want, but cannot really rationalize spending the money on. This might be dinner at a nice restaurant, a $50 bouquet of flowers, a nice telescope, or a vintage Persian carpet. For people with average means, it is easy to find something they would like more of, but don't really have the disposable income to finance.
Gifts are positive sum within a culture of personal frugality. Suppose there is a luxury good that I would enjoy, but I am worried that it would be a waste of money, or may even be so frivolous as to lower my standing within my community. Suppose further that you have a similar luxury good in mind. If we wait for a socially-sanctioned gift-giving occasion, and then exchange these gifts with each other, we can maintain both to ourselves and others that our spending on the gift was a selfless act, while also enjoying the luxury good we wanted in the first place guilt-free.
"Even if a gift is enjoyed, it is rare to impossible that the recipient should enjoy it enough that she would spontaneously buy it for herself."
Counterexample: When I started out biking seriously, my father (who has done long-distance biking as long as I've been alive) gave me a number of bike-related stuff (a sturdy biking jersey, tools, etc.), and almost certainly did a better job picking them than I would have, since I didn't know which brands were high-quality, what tools were important to have, etc. yet. I had the money but not the knowledge, so the equivalent cash value would have been less useful than the gifts he actually gave me.
I imagine that this situation can be generalized and is not unique to me.
A gift is absolutely that. Anthropologists have extensively studied the gift economy in indigenous cultures and the purpose of a gift is to create an obligation and help prevent future conflict. It is based on the moral principle of reciprocity, which has been "hard-wired" into us through evolution.
If you analyze social institutions from the perspective of homo economicus only, you are likely to miss a lot of things. That kind of analysis is a great supplement, and a terrible replacement, to other forms of analysis.
Other people anticipated my thoughts as I wrote this preposterously long comment, so please forgive redundancies.
What underlies both condemnation of gifts as inefficient and praise for gifts as showing insight into the receiver’s taste is an assumption of material abundance. The reason that kids enjoy receiving gifts is that they can’t buy what they want for themselves; the reason that adults used to enjoy receiving gifts is that they, too, could not buy what they wanted for themselves. Our gift-giving customs seem irrational only because they developed in conditions of scarcity that some people no longer experience.
Those conditions are not so far away. I grew up in a very frugal family, and for years I lived on a graduate-student stipend that made it seem reasonable to put grocery items back on the shelves if my total for the week was going to come out over $25. I would look forward to Christmas and birthday gifts for months: “I really want a new pair of silver-colored earrings after I lost an earring this summer, but earrings are frivolous and I don’t really need them, I’ll just wear my gold-colored earrings or no earrings at all until Christmas….” Even if the resulting gift was not exactly what I would have picked out, gift-exchanges were permission to have and enjoy small luxuries that I didn’t feel free to buy for myself. And even though finding gifts for others was sometimes stressful, I felt good about shopping and spending in order to give, while buying similar things for myself would have felt irresponsible.
My husband, in contrast, is a programmer with a programmer’s salary. He hates receiving gifts because he has already bought himself everything he wants, so other people’s contributions are redundant or substandard. Our different attitudes have produced the following conversation approximately three times over the last six months: “I wish I had a blender for this.” “Sure, should I order the Wirecutter-recommended one on Amazon?” “No, we don’t really need a blender, we have a food processor and it does the same things, except for smoothies and blended drinks with ice in them.” “… you know how money we have, right?” “It’s ridiculous to have a blender AND a food processor. If you want to, you can buy me a blender for my birthday, and then I’ll enjoy it more.” If he does indeed give me a blender, then I can be specifically and vividly grateful every time I have a smoothie for breakfast, and it will be all the sweeter for the times that I set aside smoothies as a treat I could do without.
I can hear the protest: shouldn't people with limited resources especially appreciate efficiency? Why not just buy your small luxuries and let your friend buy his, rather than spending the same amount of money and hoping that your friend will both like what you picked out and refrain from saddling you with useless knick-knacks? When I started thinking about this, I thought that the benefits of the inefficient system involved the deferral itself, the small sacrifice of self-denial, the pleasure of suspense and anticipation. But the actual reason, I think, goes back to the crucial function of gift-giving as a symbolic reinforcement to bonds of goodwill and generosity.
If you live close to the edge of survival—say, as a forager or subsistence farmer—you probably rely on a gift-economy, or network of reciprocal altruism, because other people’s generosity is your only possible insurance against disaster. It often makes a lot more sense for such people to accumulate social capital by giving gifts, doing favors, giving parties or banquets for their neighbors than to try to save up (non-durable) resources for their future selves. (For this dynamic among premodern farmers, see e.g. https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/). Ceremonial gifts function as a symbolic reaffirmation of your participation in this larger gift-economy, signaling that you’re a good person to exchange favors with. Notably, you specifically do not want this reciprocal giving to be thought about in terms of efficiency or return on investment. How many days helping get your neighbor’s hay in before it rains is equivalent to the measure of grain he gave you when your rye spoiled and you thought you wouldn’t survive the winter? In a modern setting: you don’t want the neighbor who watches your kids when you work overtime to start calculating those hours of childcare and deciding that some snow shoveling and a lame Christmas mug isn’t worth it to her, and she doesn’t want you to back out of the relationship when she breaks her hip and a couple of hours of snow shoveling turns into reorganizing her whole home so she doesn’t have to walk upstairs. There can be real mutuality and reciprocity in such a relationship, but accounting is antithetical to it.
In my imagination, a gift economy is not just made up of reciprocal relationships between individuals, but a pattern of goodwill that assimilates new participants: the great social contract of casseroles. You bring a casserole to the couple with a new baby, not because they have helped or will help you in return, but because long ago somebody brought casseroles for you. In my church there’s a “moving” listserv that shows up to help people who are moving out of town and we may never see again, and people moving into town that we’ve never met before. It's the thing to do. You won’t be paid back, but you hope that people operating on the same logic will show up when you need them, too.
In sum, if anyone wants to recapture the logic of ceremonial gift-giving: 1) give enough away to charity that you feel a pinch in your discretionary spending and have to make decisions about what to do without or put off, and then make specific requests or obvious hints so that people can give you things you'll really appreciate; 2) reframe ceremonial giving, even of silly or unwanted gifts, as a token or down-payment or symbolic representation of how willing you would be to give to the people you love if they needed you. Even if you don’t appreciate the trashy objects that your tasteless relatives give you, we all need the generosity of others to get through times of suffering or crisis, and it’s good to affirm that generosity on a regular basis.
One of my friends says that when he was running out of money, the best thing he could do was feed people. He didn't get reciprocation from them, but he did get help from people who saw him being helpful.
This is an excellent comment and deserves being highlighted.
I share OP's dislike of gifts, although I have been in the same edge-of-survival mode as you: having enough for my needs, but so limited on my wants that I would count out in single dollars, one at a time, how much I could afford in a given month.
(I also remember one year getting a surprise when I gave a gift to each of my siblings and their spouses, only for them to give me one gift as a unit in return.)
I now dislike gifts like OP does, for two reasons: 1, because I am really stretched to my limit socially, and I can't keep track of what's needed where and when. 2, I also learned to live without, and generally only buy something when the old one breaks, and also don't throw things out unless I need to. And my wife grew up in much more deprivation than me and buys shit to compensate, so our house is full of useless things and I can't find the useful things under all the crap, and I can no more "just throw it out" than an alcoholic can "just not drink it" if you give him a gift of wine.
The problem with giving cash is that in reciprocal situations, it's equivalent to not giving anything. I give you $20, you give me $20, and no one actually gained anything.
I agree that many gifts do not have the same value to you as gift receiver as the money spent on it. I think though that deepening a relationship is a good reason to participate in gift giving and receiving. Giving activities rather than physical gifts are in my opinion often a good way to deepen relationships. You have an extra reason to get together, create new experiences and do an activity you might otherwise not do together. Some examples are going to dinner, visiting a theme park or museum, wall climbing or scuba diving.
Does anyone know of a good summary on the current state of desalination technology? I've loosely followed Israel's efforts building massive facilities in recent years. In 20 years, will humans be bringing water and agriculture to what is now costal desert (e.g., north Africa, Australia)? In my opinion, brining life to the desert appears more promising than seasteading plans.
I'm curious exactly where the balance lies in agriculture/water/desal. My field heavily intersects with water management in CA, a state which is both simultaneously very dry and also an agricultural powerhouse (largely thanks to incredibly ecologically irresponsible water use). I personally think that a _ton_ of the agricultural products that we grow here are not worth the use of our very limited water (and aren't economically valuable enough for something like desal), but some of our agricultural products are able to be grown in only a very few places around the world (ironically the most iconic of these is almonds, which have become a poster child for irresponsible agricultural water use yet are probably one of the few crops that would remain in the state under intelligent water management guidelines, thanks to difficulty of growing elsewhere and high value).
As far as I was aware though, desal on the scale large enough for even just household use in a state like CA (where about 30% of water use is municipal, even though there are 40 million people in the state) isn't really a thing, let alone enough to make up the agricultural uses, even if things like rice, alfalfa, and dairy cattle all moved out of the state. In other words, the problem wasn't price, but feasibility of scale (which...I suppose is really just another word for price, but I didn't think it made sense for household use either).
> Desalinated water typically costs about $2,000 an acre foot — roughly the amount of water a family of five uses in a year. The cost is about double that of water obtained from building a new reservoir or recycling wastewater, according to a 2013 study from the state Department of Water Resources.
> But desalination is expensive. A thousand gallons of freshwater from a desalination plant costs the average US consumer $2.50 to $5, Pankratz says, compared to $2 for conventional freshwater.
No one in a first-world country anywhere near an ocean will die from lack of water.
Is there a reason why bringing water and agriculture to coastal deserts is a better plan than just intensifying the use of existing land? I mean, it's better for entrepreneurs who buy up this land, but it's unclear why it would be better for the people who live there, unless it's just massively cheaper.
It feels like a part of the "carrying capacity of Earth" conversation. If we can cheaply, and that may simply mean within an order of magnitude, turn salt water into fresh water, then the carrying capacity issue of water is far less important. Upthread they are saying 25-100% increase in cost for desalinated water, which means absolutely feasible even with current technology.
It also means that some marginal land that happens to have some other valuable resource(s) and is near the ocean can be very habitable.
Have you heard of Metal-Organic Frameworks? I'm a bit of a layman, but I've watched a few intermediate-level explainer videos on YouTube and skimmed some scientific paper abstracts, and they seem quite promising, for both water collection and carbon capture.
Might not be what you are asking for in particular, but I have built and lived off of several different watermakers (reverse osmosis desalination) on small sailboats. The units I'm familiar with are small, and will give a few to a few hundred liters per hour, and can be powered by a 12V battery bank, charged from a few hundred watts of solar power. These smaller units are very far from cost effective, except in standalone off-grid type situations with limited storage capacity (such as on a small sailboat). Once the system is upp and running however, they require very little running costs if you just care for them properly (mostly by cleaning/changing the pre-filters and running them regularly, otherwise bacteria will grow in the membrane).
One technology that I keep hearing about being "just around the corner" is reverse osmosis membranes made from graphite, that supposedly will be possible to manufacture as a drop-in replacement and be many times more efficient (require lower pressure, thus increasing output with the same membrane and pump setup).
I'm not particularly read up on this, but would be happy to answer questions :)
Not so long ago, Scott posed some statistical questions and one of the solutions that came up was stratification.
I recently came across a python package all about causal statistics, DoWhy by microsoft, does these 'fancy' statistical things for you. There is also lots of background theory they provide, including many alternatives to stratification. Bunch of links:
* An online book that details the four main stages of DoWhy algorithm. https://causalinference.gitlab.io/book/ I think the most interesting section is estimation, e.g. it describes propensity models, stratification, amongst many other techniques. It is somewhat maths heavy, but it also has a lot of discussion and intuition too.
Can you say what makes you think it is not mathematically sound? Like I said, I only found this package recently and am yet to understand all the nuance. If you do find any holes, you should feed it back to the maintainers - it's an open source project!
Looking for recommendations of good newsletters that offer quality suggested purchases or reading, streaming, etc. Similar to Tim Ferriss 5 Bullet Friday or Reccommendo newsletter. Both of which always have great suggestion and recommendations.
Have you tried Ryan Holiday’s monthly reading list emails? Here’s his list of most-recommended books so you can see if it aligns with your tastes. https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list
I would also be remiss if I didn’t offer my own book notes as a suggestion. Only a dozen so far, but I post more every Tuesday. https://davidteter.com/book-notes
I am interested in getting someone on the economic left to steelman how a "worker ownership of the means of production" market socialism would work. I am not looking for a "public ownership of the means of production" political socialism steelman, unless you're admitting that 'worker ownership' is a motte for the 'public ownership' bailey.
I consider myself a supporter of the free market, but I can't deny that there would seem to be advantages to having worker ownership of their business, except that those advantages are outweighed by significant bad outcomes at edge cases, and the mechanisms to work around those bad outcomes either end up effectively with the imperfect market capitalism we have now or end up at "public ownership of the means of production" socialism with its far more serious problems.
So, we have a group of workers who want to start a business, and they pool their money to start it. This seems like it would be acceptable under both a free market and under worker-ownership market socialism. The first problem is that this seems limited in that for worker-ownership socialism the workers are limited in that they can only start a business with the money they have on hand, which would make it impossible to start a capital-intensive business and impossible for any worker that hasn't amassed a sum of money from helping to start such a business (and I suspect one of the drivers of inequality is that a lot of modern businesses require more of an investment of money to start). Any other mechanism for acquiring money ends up with someone other than the workers owning part of the business.
The second problem is what happens when an employee leaves the business. The most obvious answer is that the company pays out the value of the employee's share of the business; if I'm one of 10 employees all equally invested in the business, the company pays me 10% of the value of the business if I leave, which requires a substantial reserve for a small business. If I keep my share once I leave, the business is no longer employee owned and I still need a way to liquidate my ownership to turn it into something I can use (meaning my shares may end up even further from the workers). If I lose my share without reimbursement, then it is horrible if I die suddenly while employed, as my spouse and kids lose their support.
Likewise, mandating 'worker ownership' makes it hard to hire. Either new employees don't buy in to ownership of the company, in which case they either don't have the same ownership or get ownership without paying for it, or they do have to buy in, in which case it makes it impossible for people without money (such as people just entering the job market) to land a job. If we want to assume that all employees are equal in ownership (which sometimes seems to be assumed), then under current valuation it would take $150,000 to land a job at Walmart and $6,000,000 to land a job at Microsoft, and even at a tenth the value looks rather impossible to sustain.
Finally, there's what happens when the business is no longer viable. The problem with owning the business is owning the businesses debts, and I can't see a way to handle that without either stiffing any creditors or creating a situation where everyone heads to the exits once the business starts to have problems, even if they are potentially salvagable.
One of the reasons I think these scenarios don't get answered is that most socialist economic analysis of businesses under markets seem to assume a steady state, where the business has always existed and will always exist. In the real world, most of the important parts of the business are at the start and the end, and paying for the start and the end accounts for most of the 'surplus value'.
At the same time as we have to work out these issues at the business side, there becomes an issue of what to do for people that want to save money now that investing it isn't an option; you're not just taking away options for people as workers, but taking away options from people that want to invest as a way to save money for the future. If you're going to punish people that want to put 5% of their income from work away to save for retirement in order to stick it to the ultra-rich who can live off their investment income full time, this seems like a massive downside.
It's possible to imagine a system where businesses are strongly encouraged to offer their employees stock options (and with them a share of ownership), but this stretches 'worker ownership of the means of production' well out of what self-described socialists seem to be asking for.
I'm not on the left, so this may be unwelcome, but as I understand it wholly or partially worker-owned co-ops perform reasonably well. They and credit unions are also supposedly more stable in economic downturns but being less risky may entail loss of opportunities for growth.
Regardless, you might want to look into Mondragon and similar firms. Socialists tend to dislike them so again it's clearly not what they're looking for but it shows that worker-ownership can entail responsible and profitable management.
Mondragon is an interesting example, one that I'd never heard of, and certainly seems to be a good model to follow where possible. Three things stand out:
First, that Mondragon seems to be a federation of smaller companies, plus a financing body. It seems to me that one of the edge cases where co-ops wouldn't be possible would be the big companies, especially the heavy industrial companies that require massive amounts of capital. Boeing alone has almost twice Mondragon's employees and has six times the assets.
Second, it was interesting to note the wage regulations. One of the things I need to ask for feedback on in a later post is a theory dealing with how much of the rise in inequality is due to the sheer value of large b2b and especially b2g contracts and hence how much companies are willing to throw at employees that can bring them in (especially in the US). If Mondragon companies aren't competing in those areas, it might explain why they can get away with a low maximum salary.
Third, a lot of the criticisms seem to revolve around the differences between employees that are also owners and those that aren't. Having the two categories seems to be a good way to solve some of the issues I noted, but it does seem to push it away from the ideal 'worker ownership of the means of production'.
Yeah, I have no idea how appropriate this kind of ownership structure would be for large-scale manufacturing. That's completely outside of my experience and knowledge to the extent that I'm not even comfortable guessing.
The point about worker-owners in co-ops is related to TomP's answer about partnerships: you can't, or at least shouldn't, give every worker an ownership stake immediately on hiring if you intend for them to stay worker-owners past the IPO. Socialists may see it as arbitrary or oppressive, but it's essential to make sure that someone is capable and committed if you want them as a co-owner for the long haul.
I'm also not on the left, but widespread employee ownership is very common in high-skill, professional fields. Most hedge funds, law firms, consulting shops, boutique investment banks, and accounting firms are owned by widespread employee partnerships.
The model works well where there is 1) low-capital intensity, 2) revenue is directly driven by employee performance, and 3) employees are highly skilled and difficult to replace.
Ownership/partnership is typically not extended to all employees at the time of hire. It's often limited to upper management and tenured employees. The partnerships often help new partners to buy in with some financing scheme, granting ownership in lieu of cash bonus, or using a P/E multiple lower than the comparable market rate.
Unlike the tech model, where the goal usually is to IPO so all the early owners can sell their shared to the stock market, the partnership models can be sustainable for many generations. Retiring partners are bought out by existing/new partners and only active employees retain ownership.
This is good feedback, since it provides examples that some of these mechanisms that must exist for those "worker owned" companies that do exist (in this case, ownership transfer mechanisms) are possible. I can suppose that the management and tenured employees are close enough in status and have enough surplus money to both buy in and to buy out departing employees. The question is, does the mechanism scale?
Is there a way for these mechanisms to work for a more conventional small business (which would have trouble with the buy-out) or an entry-level job at Wal-Mart (which would have trouble with the buy-in)?
As an attorney, IMO law firms are almost universally poorly run. And a large part of this is that most people that make partner are bad at management. This also results in fracturing of the ownership group being incredibly common.
It also would not be competitive with traditional set ups if it wasn't essentially legally mandated by the state bar associations.
I've long thought along very similar lines and my tentative conclusion is that 'capitalism' is a nice 'fallback' for these schemes. As other commenters have already pointed out, there are pretty common business models that are at least similar, e.g. law firms. But it's relatively rare for businesses to be fully worker-owned, and it seems like that's for all of the reasons you already mentioned.
Interesting article from a co-op advocacy perspective. A couple of things that stood out to me.
First, a lot of their desirable characteristics are things not necessarily tied to cooperative work. Regardless of how the company is run, encouraging those should be something good management should do. It would be instructive to look at why more companies don't have at least some effective mechanism to get employee feedback, for example. Although there is a sense that if you make that a metric rather than a goal, corporate bureaucracy tends to satisfy itself with meeting the metric rather than improving the metric to meet the goal.
The second one is pertaining to size. "There is a preference for small size because democratic participation is easiest in face to face groups and becomes more difficult in large organizations. An optimum upper size limit is probably somewhere near 200 - 250." My guess would have been that the upper size limit would be closer to Dunbar's Number, but that isn't off by too much. The problem then becomes how you run an organization bigger than that by several orders of magnitude. Something like Wal-Mart you could probably break down into individual stores (though the central supply chain part is still going to be big). But Boeing is 140,000 employees, Airbus is 130,000 employees and I suspect that any organization able to build commercial airliners is going to be of at least the same order of magnitude in size (and this is a problem for idealistic communism as well; in order for your society to be able to produce the complex high-end items it needs, you will need large hierarchical organizations, and the biggest of those is going to be the one that supplies and runs your military).
Three, that a lot of the issues I mentioned in my original post show up. For example, both the issues with retiring employees and new employee buy-in show up in the discussion of the Pacific Northwest Plywood Co-ops: "Workers ready to retire discovered the value of their shares had jumped from an initial $1,000 - $2,000 to $25,000, $50,000 or even more; new young workers did not have the money to buy into the co-op, so retiring members found it easier to sell their shares to capitalist lumber companies that wanted to acquire their very profitable business."
Look into how credit unions work. Or look into REI. The fact is that worker-owned businesses, also known as cooperatives, have been around a long time and can work well. I think the pertinent question is: why aren't there more of these?
That really is an interesting question, a naive understanding of Marxism would suggest that without a capitalist extracting surplus value, capitalism itself should favour co-operatives that distribute surplus value among workers instead.
Possible reasons?
Co-ops aren't illegal, so it's not like Capitalists are using the full power of the state to stay in business (they're probably using some state power though).
A pro-Capitalist answer would argue that having a Capitalist in charge helps, and there are definitely benefits to having fewer people or even just one person to make quick decisions. Of course, there's no reason why workers in a co-op couldn't elect their own leaders to get those benefits, so I'm not too convinced by this argument, although it would have all the usual problems of democracy.
Worker run co-ops are obviously less willing than capitalist firms to downsize (preferring to cut hours and wages instead), and in light of that they may be less willing to hire new people. That could cause problems in fast moving industries, but on the other hand people with more job security are more likely to think long term rather than just extracting short term gain.
I think the real answer is that it's hard to get your hands on Capital if you're not already wealthy, and banks tend to be unwilling to lend to co-ops. This is probably some combination of legitimate concerns, unfamiliarity with co-ops, and pro-capitalist bias.
I think there's a couple of related problems that might tie into this. If you look at some of the examples cited above, you have co-ops that got their start as groups of skilled tradespeople.
1. The problem could be getting the right number of skilled tradespeople together that can pool enough capital evenly to start a business, especially if the cost of starting a business has gone up (such as insurance, legal costs, or even just purchasing a place to work).
2. The problem could be that the cost of starting a business in the skilled trades is rather high compared to other lines of work. I would wager that it would be easier to get enough tech entrepreneurial types together with the resources on hand to start a business, but those types of businesses seem to have no problem attracting venture capital.
3. The problem could be that trade workers have no interest in a co-op business when looking for a job; the benefits of working for a co-op are long term, while workers are looking at what a job offers in the short term (which is likely to be more objective and thus easy to comprehend). This might go hand in hand with a drop in job security; workers that are expecting poor job security are going to look at jobs as short term.
From the management side, the demand for skilled management (and others in similar areas such as business development) is high and the limited salaries in many co-op environments are such that the better ones will work for the places that can offer more pay.
I'm probably not far enough to the left to provide the answer you're looking for.
At some companies that I've worked for I've been paid not just in dollars, but also with stock in the company. Making this more common would be the easy way to make our society more like the one you describe.
If I were forced to come up with a framework to implement this, I think I would settle on "in addition to there being a minimum wage, there would also be a minimum stock grant." Given that it would be nice to have a market for stock outside of employees, I would also pick some minimum ratio for the voting power of employee controlled shares vs outsider controlled shares. The goal would be to balance the power of employees to sell their shares at a reasonable value when they leave with their ability to assert power as employee/owners. Within this tradeoff, it should also be possible for private equity to work; even if employees have to eventually be able to own the company, it should be possible for capitalists to buy an entire company (or set of companies), make radical changes, and earn a profit before rising employee ownership pushes them out.
With achievable regulatory changes you could have a system that has most of the desirable properties of our current system, but one in which employees had the chance to earn a share of the capital.
I welcome any point of view on the matter, as trying to work out a steelman by myself was getting frustrating and I appreciate what I've learned from the comments so far.
I agree that the stock option schema meets some of the needs, and unlike some of the examples of real world co-ops brought up by others in this thread, it's one that looks like it might work for a larger company (even if any given employee is not likely to be heard, the sheer number of low-level employees is going to give them some representation). The problem is, is it something you can implement for a very small business with low margins?
The biggest weakness with my scheme is that it casually assumed that every employer was publicly traded. Obviously that doesn't work for small businesses where the overhead of listing outweighs the benefits. However, issuing paper stock and paying dividends is relatively straightforward.
A restaurant is the type species of a small business with small margins. I think that the system would work exactly as intended for people following the dishwasher -> line chef -> sous chef -> head chef -> restaurant owner career track. At each stage they would earn more valuable capital that would give them both a seat at the table to learn about the next stage as well as an asset that can be leveraged into starting their own restaurant.
For waitstaff and other short term employees, there's a bigger problem. At the end of a summer working for, let's say McDonalds, they have not quite as much money as they would like, as well as a piece of paper entitling them to 1/500th of the profits of the McD's franchise on Water St. One option is that they can keep it. Every year, they'll get a check for between $100 and $500 that will slowly shrink as they get diluted out by more recent employees. The other option is that they can try to sell this piece of paper to someone. Candidates include current ownership, who knows what the value is but might not offer a fair price; the aforementioned ambitious sous chefs, who also know what the value is but might not be able to pay for it; and local banks, who might already hold some of this as loan collateral. None of these are great options but there's enough of a market there that the value of these stock grants would affect employee behavior and outlook, which is the stated policy goal.
The concern that this framework would be overly burdensome on small businesses is valid. I don't think it's fatal to the policy goal to exempt business smaller than 5 employees from the stock grant system entirely. It could be argued that business which are that small are already forced to give a significant seat at the table to employees because losing any one of them impairs their ability to operate.
I wouldn't advocate for a system like this. I don't think that it solves enough problems to justify all the machinery needed to keep it in place. However there is a smooth gradient between our current economic system and a quite radical labor control of capital system. I think you would have to be simultaneously neoliberal and communist to advocate for this sort of thing, but it's a coherent achievable position.
Note: "market socialism" is "socialism that utilizes (some kind of) market for resource allocation" not "socialism that works with the current rules".
The current rules make worker ownership untenable, obviously. Co-ops are unable to scale above craft level, since they can't survive its own success (while remaining co-ops), as workers have both perverse incentives to cash out of a co-op and the ability to do so easily. (This is a corollary of a general tendency for capital to concentrate in fewer in fewer hands, this kills the host society, you'd want to prevent this even if you really like the modern market, because it just won't last otherwise.)
So, a market socialism would necessarily enact new rules, and one of the obvious things to forgo is absentee ownership of capital. I don't think this implies or necessitates "public" ownership, as production could still be divided between distinct, separate and separately controlled corporations, including the exact same network of corporations as now. But if you do think it implies just that, then well, sure. (But don't call it "motte-and-bailey", that's implying a deception, while there aren't really many socialists claiming to like or support markets in the first place. Worker ownership of the means of production is the terminal goal, the means are contingent. And don't use it to make a motte-and-bailey on your own, where dismantling capitalism necessitates Soviet Russia. We hate Soviet Russia (well, most of us, tankies still exist), it clearly wasn't allowing much worker control of anything.)
My problem is that too many self described 'socialists' that argue at a bumper-sticker slogan level talk as if the only change their system will bring is that "workers will own the means of production". That most socialists want to abolish markets entirely I suspect charitably means that they haven't put much thought into what they are arguing when they talk about 'worker ownership' (hence the motte/bailey), and I would argue that abolishing markets entirely necessarily leads to 'public ownership' in practice (and thus why 'worker not public ownership' and 'abolish markets entirely' would be incompatible).
The ACX commentariat includes a lot of self-described socialists who argue at a much higher level and with a level of reason (such as your comment), and I thought it a good place to get a steelman argument, and I have been very pleased to have learned something from the responses. I agree that ending absentee ownership of stock does not constitute "public ownership of the means of production", and while it is a major imposition on the markets for labor and capital, it's still consistent with general market allocation of resources by society, so we've at least established that a 'worker owned market socialist' framework exists that might work.
The questions I had when I composed my original post are 'are the problems that I theorize a worker-owned business having to contend with the sorts of problems real worker-owned businesses have to address?' and 'are there means to address those problems?', because those are going to need to be addressed very thoroughly if all businesses are to be worker-owned. It's obvious that worker-ownership works properly in ideal cases, but If there are serious problems with it working for important classes of businesses, then there is a serious problem with mandating worker ownership, and the places to look are the edge cases (the biggest and the smallest).
If you are an advocate for market socialism, how do you get around the capital limits imposed by worker ownership and the risk and cost to the worker of the arrangement?
"But don't call it "motte-and-bailey", that's implying a deception, while there aren't really many socialists claiming to like or support markets in the first place."
Thinking on it (and the comment below yours), the one sign that I often see that seems to come with the type of argument I describe is the phrase 'surplus value'. A lot of the arguments that use that phrase, especially at a bumper-sticker slogan level, tend to make their appeal on the basis of 'support my ideology and we'll give you the surplus value that was stolen from your labor' and not mention anything about abolishing markets and/or private property and thus fundamentally transforming all of society. I can't see that sort of appeal as anything but deceptive.
I think the imagined system is one in which working for a business makes you a co-owner of it, entitled to a share of the profits as long as you work there, but not getting anything if you leave. Basically, ownership and employment are equivalent. This would be difficult to set up under our current legal system, it's unclear what happens when the business goes under.
However, I'm not certain that there'd be no way to invest in an economy of worker-owned co-ops (as long as you don't limit investment to merely buying stocks and shares) - as you point out, they need start up capital, so you could "invest" in loans to workers to finance expansion. Let's say this mostly happens via credit unions pooling savings, presumably there'd be low risk credit unions that make safe bets and then more risky credit unions that are the equivalent of our Venture Capitalists, lending money to entrepreneurs trying more risky bets in the hope of greater payoffs.
I had considered the loan idea, but unless you're structuring loans differently, I'm not clear that it isn't worse in some ways. As a worker, wouldn't you be on the hook to pay off the loan on fixed terms rather than just from the profits? And you still have 'surplus value' flowing away from your company to the financial institution.
It must work somehow since Mondragon seems to operate that way, as mentioned above, but perhaps that works since they are loaning to co-ops within their own network.
I agree that this does just seem like capitalism with extra steps, but the fact that it's a loan with a finite term would make it more tolerable, the only surplus value being extracted is interest on the loan. In the case of Mondragon they just lend the money from their credit union, it's no different to a business taking out a loan from a bank.
As for repayment, there's no reason why terms couldn't be flexible, since if the business goes under the investors are not going to get their money back. As for being "on the hook", my understanding of "limited liability" is that the owners of a business are not personally liable when the corporation goes insolvent, so as long as it's structured right, the worst case scenario is that the business gets liquidated and the workers become unemployed and have to find work elsewhere.
"The worst case scenario is that the business gets liquidated and the workers become unemployed and have to find work elsewhere."
Still, my understanding is that when a business is liquidated in bankruptcy, the money owed to workers is among the first debts to be paid off with whatever comes from the liquidation. If this remains, there is the potential for some painful financial shenanigans at the cost of people with savings that is loaned to the company. If you change this, it means the workers get less protections than under current law... which might be appropriate, given that they are now also owners.
Transferring money between two US bank accounts is free, either directly via your bank or through middlemen like PayPal. As far as I can tell, every service on the market that allows you to transfer across international borders and currencies costs 3-6% of the transfer. Why is this so much more expensive than transfers within a country? I struggle to imagine that it costs the money managers anywhere near that much to move some numbers around, so why hasn't competition between the many services driven prices down like it has for intracountry transfer?
My first theory is that there just aren't many international transfers so there isn't enough of a market to drive those kinds of competitive prices, and my second theory is that the pricing reflects some kind of regulatory compliance costs where governments require a lot of expensive paperwork in order to set up a service that's allowed to do international transfers at all. But that's all baseless speculation, I'd love to hear from someone who knows something about money transfers.
Yes, there's lots of 'anti-money-laundering' regulations around money transfers and 'same-country' banks can mostly meet them 'cheaply' as a lot of the regulations are about 'knowing your customer', which banks can satisfy pretty well for most of them.
But it's not true that same-country transfers are necessarily that much less expensive – to banks. It's probably more likely that it's just that the 'sticker price' is low and the banks (and PayPal) are eating those costs as a means of gaining marginal customers/business that _is_ profitable.
Made an account to comment because I was very unhappy with those rates. I found Wise (formerly Transferwise) which does international transfers usually cheaper than 0.5%.
Have you asked your bank about this? I transfer money internationally every week (for business) and am charged a flat fee ($5 to $20), not a percentage of the amount. That's for wire transfers. You can also write a paper check and mail it - that costs nothing but postage.
For sure if you're talking about small amounts (< $250) those fees are expensive, but for large amounts they're negligible.
...added: Obviously if you're transferring between currencies you're going to pay at minimum the bid/ask spread, but that's nowhere near 3% for pairs of major currencies. But it's certainly cheaper if you don't change currencies (most larger banks outside the US allow you to hold multiple currencies in your account).
I’ve been really disappointed with the guest book reviews. It’s unclear what level of editorial endorsement goes with them, and they look like normal posts. But the quality is...variable. I would not feel comfortable publishing some of them, and it makes me hesitate to recommend the site to people who read those books while they’re up on the front page.
Which one in particular do you think is bad and that you wouldn't "feel comfortable publishing"?
I haven't read them all yet, but I think I've skimmed at least the first few paragraphs of each one published so far and they all seem totally worth publishing.
AFAIK, the only "level of editorial endorsement" is 'these are worth publishing' (by Scott).
All of the reviews are prefaced with a disclaimer about them not having been written by Scott and being a part of a book review contest, so are you worried that the people you'd recommend this site to wouldn't read that?
And it seems perfectly fine for you to just not recommend the site to people. I'm not convinced that there's any (good) reason for Scott to do anything based on your vague concerns or complaints.
Oh I should put my cards on the table here -- the only one I did more than skim was Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. I felt the reviewer not only failed to understand the context of what he was reading, he also came off as incredibly smug and snarky. I think intentionally so. Whatever you think of the material presented in the book, Wright deserves better than anonymous snark. But I also felt the arguments presented in the review were weak and ill-considered.
I just read it. It seems fine. I'm very curious to learn more details about what you think the reviewer didn't understand or which arguments in particular were weak or "ill-considered". I thought it was a fairly breezy but still cogent criticism of (what I'm guessing) is in the book.
I think it's important to be able to distinguish between an emotional reaction as a result of a perceived attack on your values and the quality of the review. For example, I had a strong reaction to the Prophet and Wizard review, because it mischaracterized the conservation movement, but I recognize the review was well written and probably accurately reflected the ideas in the book.
Yes, this is probably fair. I recognize that's an element of it. I support the Nonzero Foundation on Patreon, listen to Bob Wright's podcasts, read his newsletter, and consider The Moral Animal one of the best books I've ever read. And that's partly how I know how much of reason is just the rationalization of an emotional response in the first place! There is some tribal defense element.
But it's also an awkward position of liking ACX, but having it be a place that publishes a review it doesn't seem to endorse in anyway. It muddies things, which I think is a fair general criticism of the reader-submitted review format. I think the solution that would satisfy everyone, except Scott, would be for him to engage with the pieces and give his own thoughts.
I felt the same. The snark didn't bother me much, but the arguments did seem weak. Particularly trying to shoehorn utilitarianism into it. Hilariously (and perhaps alarmingly), the reviewer has a PhD from Harvard (they linked to their blog at the end of the review).
FWIW I think there have been two really worthwhile book reviews so far: On the Natural Faculties, and Poverty and Progress. I think that Scott could've been choosier in which ones to publish, but those two I really appreciated reading.
I feel like, on the whole, most of the ones I've read are just way too long relative to how interesting the subject matter is. I know this is a weird complaint to leverage around here since Scott is basically that patron saint of writing really long sequences of text on subjects I'd otherwise not have cared about, but most of the reviews have just dragged on and on.
What are some fun online activities to do with a significant other on the other side of the world? Getting the obvious ones out of the way: Watching something together, playing online games, conversation, etc.
I've got a set of 4 tubes in my kitchen, and the ballast is failing. Sometimes I get lucky and all 4 are on if I precisely fiddle with them, for about 5 minutes. But usually just the inner two are lit, and the outer two are barely flickering.
I don't want to replace the ballast.[1] I have good reason to think it's not the bulbs, because I replaced the outer two bulbs and they worked for about a day and then went back to flicker, and rearranging the bulbs always leaves the outer two in dim/flicker.
How plug-and-play are those LED bulbs, especially with a suspect ballast? I see talk about "with ballast" or "direct wire" and it sounds like I have to choose to remove the ballast to use the second, and I don't want to mess with the ballast[1].
[1] Seriously, I don't to replace the ballast. It is behind the drywall in the ceiling and wasn't built to be maintained. The last time I tried this (on another fixture) I had to spend hours with my arms over my head dealing with wires and yanking things out and putting things back and while I got the whole thing to "work" I never managed to get it reattached. This is not the project for me. I have other things to do.
I just got a set of GE LED replacement bulbs from Lowe's that were in the clearance section, and they were as plug-and-play as they said on the packaging. I just took out the old bulbs and popped the new ones in and they worked fine. I'm not sure if it will help with a faulty ballast though, as the fixture hummed with traditional bulbs, and it still hums with the LEDs, so if there is an issue with the ballast, the LEDs will likely not help. However, if it is a current/voltage inconsistency issue with the ballast, I could see a case where the internal power-regulator on the LED bulb that lets it deal with multiple types of ballast/direct-wire type situations could potentially help smooth over the differences in the short term (though it may also shorten the lifespan of the bulb). I'm not an expert in this though, so my advice would be to buy it and see what happens. Best case, it fixes it, worst case, you were going to need to replace the ballast anyway.
If the ballast is going, unfortunately you will have to replace it. Unless you are a good electrician, it is best to have a professional do it. I am pretty handy and like to do DYI repairs, but I steer clear of electrical work.
My ideal utility function (whatever it is) has to explain why I'd gladly accept slightly worse outcomes for the benefit of having made the bad decisions myself freely (whatever that means). I get much more annoyed by equally bad outcomes when they are consequences of impositions I know I wouldn't have chosen.
Otoh, although injustice (whatever that means) also adds extra annoyance, that annoyance feels like a flaw and not part of that utility function. If God comes down and randomly gives some of my neighbours everything I've been wishing for, I'd be annoyed at the injustice but Ideal Dumbledork would not be, and I would never in good conscience prevent this from happening, whereas I may try to prevent someone from being lied/manipulated/forced to do something they don't want to even if I thought it would be slightly beneficial for them to do it. I'm not sure how much of this is just a reflection of a deeper intuition that holding freedom as a value in this way leads in the long run to a happier world, but it doesn't feel like it's only a means to an end.
I wonder, is this the other way around for other people? If someone's intuitions had injustice and freedom swapped, I'm not sure I'd have anything to say. Do you think many people would really prefer (after deep thought and with a straight face) a slightly less happy population but more just world, just because?
Why would you expect emotions to conform to a utility function? I would just treat emotions as inputs. If giving one person $1000 causes 20 people to have $100 worth of disutility due to jealousy, then the net utility is negative $1000.
I agree with your example there, and I don't have a clear idea of the structure of my thinking around these topics. But there's a distinction that feels important and I made poorly so far. When thinking about the freedom thought experiments, I perceive an intuition that there's a there there -- the same type of intuition that leads me to detect nonsense when I'm wrong about something and leads me to identify the nonsense. When thinking about the injustice thought experiments, what I perceive are feelings of annoyance, those you would treat as inputs, overlapped with intuitions on the contrary.
I don't know if there's a coherent utility function underlying those intuitions; probably there isn't. But I'd bet that if I dag deep enough and found there's no way to build a coherent utility function that fits my intuitions, then the intuitions would change. Sure, this is thinking backwards, but isn't this the best one can hope for in this area?
I think you're seeing hypotheticals that stretch reality to the point where your intuitions no longer apply. When we are upset about someone getting lied to, our intuition is picking up on a true thing - that most choices made upon lies are immediately or eventually going to turn out poorly.
Our priors are based on a lot of iterations of scenarios, but can be easily broken by a crafted hypothetical. It's not that hypothetical scenarios where the non-intuitive thing leads to a better outcome are impossible, but that even if they were true we should rightly question whether they resulted in an overall better reality.
For instance, even if lying brought about a better outcome in the initial hypothetical, the existence of the lie erodes trust and therefore future interactions are less likely to work well.
I don't know. There are plenty of hypotheticals I can think of that are pretty similar to reality and where there's no long-term change between the scenarios. Like, my government, who I already don't trust, now forbids me to, don't know, buy some drug, say, ritalin. Maybe they know better and the risks for me outweigh the benefits. Maybe I end up agreeing with them after more research next month. But even after agreeing with them, I cannot picture myself praising them for having blocked me from making my mistake. In extreme cases sure, but when it's close? No, let me make my bad choices. If you are someone close to me, that may be different, but that's because on some level I've freely given you the standing to choose on my behalf if you are sure I'm making a blunder.
You're actually agreeing with me (my fault for being unclear I'm sure). We have an intuition that choices freely made are better than choices under coercion, even if we might agree that [ban this drug] ended up being the better decision. I think that's because we have a lot of information from past experience that choices we made in the past tended to be better than choices forced upon us.
Maybe you are right. I wonder if I wouldn't have this intuition if I'd never experienced those situations. Or if I had the general feeling that the authorities were generally smarter and meant me well. I don't recall feeling much different in this regard when I was a kid even when I had no doubt that my parents and most teachers meant well and geeenerally knew better (though I did accept and understand the roles, I was never rebellious).
Elementary children tend to be very trusting, as in, do whatever the authority tells them, even if it's weird. That trust changes as the child gets older, to where they start to ask for proof or at least evidence that what they are being told to do makes sense. I think the difference is that as we get older and develop, we are also experiencing situations where authority figures make mistakes, choose poorly, act corruptly, or are just wrong about stuff. The most we experience that, the more we become skeptical and look out for our own needs instead of just accepting the authority figure's approach.
For kids in high trust environments, they may easily make it into adulthood before they have much reason to question adults. In low trust environments, like drug addicted criminal parents, kids rebel against all authority figures much more often.
Yeah, right. My point though was that eeven as a kid with not much of a rebellious personality, that respected his parents, and believed they had my best interest at heart, I still valued "making my own choices" as its own thing separate from the outcome. So maybe the instinct I'm talking about is about learning and play?
TLDR; yes, we can explain why I have these preferences -- previous experiences, evolution, favouring freedom, learning, truth vs deceit, etc. I can't justify those preferences. But currently, they feel deeply ingrained and not just a proxy for good happy outcomes, in a way that doesn't disappear when I inspect it. Unlike justice, which superficially feels like something I want but the more I look into it, the more my instincts tell me that it only matters as a means to an end. My instincts are probably being stupid, but I wondered if most other people have a similar sense but with things like justice.
I was rereading Book Review: The New Sultan because I remembered being dissatisfied with the discussion of populism at the end, when something jumped out at me:
>In the course of normal politics, culture, or almost anything else, the elites will always end out on top. This flirts with tautology - of course whoever ends up on top will be a member of the elite! - but on a deeper level it isn't - the populace and elites are different social classes and cultures, so this claim identifies a particular class/culture that always gets its way. The American equivalent might be pointing out that the winner of the Academy Awards is probably going to be from a coastal liberal secular background, and not an evangelical Protestant from Nebraska. Same for the Dean of Harvard, the editor of the New York Times, etc.
>The populace can try to protest this, but their efforts are doomed to failure. Maybe they can make their own movies (eg. The Passion Of The Christ), but for whatever reason these will never be as convincing or have the same sort of clout that the elite version does. Elites have enough advantages in power, connections, education, and maybe even genes (cf. the meritocracy debate) that in the natural course of events, they always come out on top. Trying to come up with a system where elites don't come out on top is an almost futile task, one where you will constantly be pumping against entropy.
"Hang on", I thought. "I remember it generated quite of bit of controversy at the time, but wasn't The Passion Of The Christ pretty critically acclaimed? Who won that year's Academy Awards anyway?" Thus began the dive.
Looking through the 77th Academy Awards (covering 2004), sure enough Passion didn't win any categories. It did score a perfectly respectable three nominations - Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Makeup - though I suppose one could argue that they're all in technical categories with a bit less cultural impact. (The counterargument being that anyone dismissing those while treating the Oscars with any level of respect is operating with a *very specific* calibration of elitism, but I digress.)
Best Picture that year went to Million Dollar Baby, which is a hard-to-describe non-boxing movie about boxers so I'd direct you towards Ebert's review for a summary. Best Director went to the director of the same, famed son of the Bay Area... Clint Eastwood. Best Actor went to Jamie Foxx whose background is almost working-class Texan to the point of caricature, and Best Actress went to Literal Nebraskan Hilary Swank.
Best Supporting Actor Morgan Freeman (Tennessee). Best Supporting Actress Cate Blanchett (Melbourne). Best Original Screenplay to two Frenchman and a New Yorker, ok maybe now we're getting somewhere, but Best Adapted Screenplay puts us back in Nebraska! (And Seattle, to be fair.) The last category before we hit Foreign Language Films in the listing is Best Animated Feature Film, which went to Brad Bird of Montana.
There is a selection filter in that movie stars are massively weighted towards people currently living in LA for obvious reasons - Hollywood *is* a physical place, after all - and I guess that could be enough to count as a 'coastal background' in a tautological sense. But I personally found the geographic diversity of the winners' birthplaces surprising, and checking the actual results of 2005 a compelling strike against the theory of elites v. the populace described. One could still argue the winners are disproportionately elites if "the elites" is an expanding group that steadily selects talent from non-elites, but this is decidedly different from a treatment where they're assumed to be separate, stable categories. Like most definitions of class.
(Alternatively, we could conclude that the Academy is actually pretty populist and is elevating talent with little apparent bias towards cultural factors. Maybe your posteriors for that ought to be noticeably higher than your priors five minutes ago, but I think I'd rather throw out this particular construction of class than accept that whole-cloth.)
Epistemological caveat: I deliberately chose to look at multiple categories of the 77th Awards, rather than pick a specific award and track it through time - I think the former is a better technique for capturing the sentiment at a given moment, while the latter might be instructive of a narrow slice of film awards but not really reflective of a 'culture' that exists at any particular time. I'm confident I'm not just cherry-picking here, since I haven't looked into competing metrics deeply enough to have data to throw out!
(The one exception being that I did glance at the list of NYT executive editors for the past century or so. I think there may be an argument to be made there, but IMO it's more reflective of NYC-specific dynamics and isn't exactly a model of (((class structure))) that Scott is talking about or wants to promote.)
But your Oscar technique is hugely "lumpy", in that four of those winners were all from one movie (Million Dollar Baby), so you're quadruple-counting that the voters really liked it; it won Best Picture, Director, Actress, and Supporting Actor. And I don't think people really know or care where the winners are _from_; in fact, I didn't even know that Blanchett was not English, let alone what state Hilary Swank is from. (This probably doesn't apply if someone's not from the Anglosphere, though.)
I am specifically responding to a description of "elites" from Scott's review, check the quoted section. Results from the 77th aren't enough to crack the motte, but it should indeed give pause to the idea this is a useful example of elitism.
Maybe it's less about who's making the movie than who's watching it. "Hard-to-describe non-boxing movie about boxers" sounds like some Grade A coastal elite bullshit.
...have you seen it? It'd be one thing if you have a neat heterodox take on the movie, but if you're speaking that confidently and all you have is my description (that is explicitly failing to describe it well!), I'm at a loss as to how to respond.
I lean towards the tautological version (they're elite because they're at the top), but with an added caveat and an additional thought about the consequences of having elites. If all of the most brilliant/talented/whatever people gravitate to a particular place, whether physical or just through connections, then the best way to succeed may shift to "be around that place." Sometimes that's learning a particular skill or set of skills that helped them succeed, like being really good at cinematography. That's usually a good thing, learning from past successes to build a better movie-making approach. Sometimes it's getting cozy with a famous/skilled insider, and skipping the hard work or being skilled yourself part. Jaden Smith comes to mind, but so does every super-attractive-but-bad-acting person who gets cast in movies, especially with people like Harvey Weinstein in the world.
The additional thought is that if the top 0.001% of the population all go to Hollywood to become part of the elite, that doesn't do a whole lot for the 99.999% of the population who cannot. Not will not, or choose not to, but literally never had a chance. An overly selective elite simply has too few slots to accommodate anything but a paltry few. Nebraska may send a couple of hometown superstars (assuming they got in by merit, see the above point...) but the rest of that town don't really change anything about their lives. Whatever negative emotions people feel about "elites" are still true even if a non-representative sample gets to move up.
At the risk of sounding like I'm moving Scott's goalposts for him, I think the key point here isn't about the individual people and where they come from, but about the *culture* of the coastal places and the amount of adaptation required. Literal Nebraskan Hilary Swank probably doesn't have the values or political views of the modal Nebraskan, but even if she did, would she feel comfortable expressing them in the same blaringly confident way that, say, Angelina Jolie expresses hers? My point of reference here is John Milius, one of the most talented filmmakers of the last 50 years or so, who was basically blacklisted for openly admitting he's a Republican who loves guns and Reagan and hates big government and has made much, much fewer films than either his talents or box office returns would argue for.
In other words, the elite *culture* keeps getting its way, and if you want to beat it you have to pump against entropy very heavily insofar as you need to form your own talent center to compete with it in Nebraska or wherever, and you have to make it more attractive than the existing one, and make it pump values in the opposite direction so that Geena Davis or whoever fells uncomfortable saying she likes Democrats, while the local talent pool angrily denounce abortion as baby-murder in their late-night show interview spots (for which you also need to create your own circuit of talk shows who will want to have such guests on, etc. etc.). This whole operation is *much* harder than just moving to LA, going to auditions and yelling about your liberal views, even though most people who try that one fail too.
Without going too deep in the weeds I'll just again point to Clint Eastwood as the doubly-salient counterexample, and refer towards the most iconic example of a Hollywood blacklist to demonstrate that ideological demands are *definitely* subject to change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
Similar to Mr. Doolittle's version though, recasting elitism as a cultural rather than classist structure might be more defensible but doesn't support a lot of the original complaints. Scott's speculating about genetic factors at the limit of nepotism, while cultural reversals can be expected to flip multiple times in a single human lifetime - the time scales here just can't be acting on the same pressures. It seems like the different formulations ought to be in direct conflict, but they share enough language that I think the incompatibilities go unnoticed. (And there are *definitely* bad-faith ideologues making money on that fact, but I don't think that's an issue in this instance.)
Semi-relevant: Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org) is basically trying to be Twitter, but more decentralized.
Also semi-relevant: Twitter got hacked last summer when a bunch of prominent accounts (and some less prominent ones) started running cryptocurrency scams. If not for this hack, I might have been an epic Twitter shitposter. Alas, I don't trust the company anymore.
I think Twitter is mechanically evil: the format itself invites people to indulge in a perpetual cycle of rage-reading and doom-scrolling. I think it makes people's lives worse on net, or at least it makes my life worse, and that comes from the medium of a Twitter post itself, regardless of whether the company is good or bad. So I'm not sure if Mastodon would be any better for me. I wish them luck though, somebody's got to figure this out. In the meantime, twitter delenda est.
I tried modafinil years ago and man, it gave me the worst dry mouth ever. I don't know if this is a common side effect, but it was intolerable. Also, it didn't seem to do much for me. I had a stronger effect from aniracetam.
Say parallel universes exist, that universes split up into alternate futures. A man plays Russian roulette. In some universes he loses and kills himself. In some universes he wins and survives. Since the man no longer lives in the universes where he lost, from the man's point of view he always wins at Russian roulette. Only the versions that wins are able to observe the outcome of the game. If the man plays ten thousand rounds of Russian roulette, this will start to seem really weird for the man. Like he's supernaturally lucky. But in most of the universes there are other observers than the man. In most of the universes those other observes will not see anything weird.
So let's say there is something that can kill all humans. Like nuclear war or a giant meteorite hitting Earth. From humanity's point of view these things never happen, because we are always observing from the universe where we didn't get killed. This means we might be strongly underestimating the probability of these things happening. We have not had a nuclear war (not counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in the more than 70 years with nuclear weapons, so nuclear war seems to have relatively low probability to us. But if parallel universes exists, nuclear war might be much more likely. Maybe nuclear war happens in 90 percent of the universes every year, and we are unable to observe it.
Even if a nuclear war would not kill all humans we could still be underestimating its probability. Say the universes split into two, one with nuclear war and one without. If the nuclear war only killed half of humanity, there would still be twice as many people in the universe without nuclear war. So the number of people that observed that a nuclear war had happened would be only half of the observers that observed that no nuclear war had happened.
I wonder if one can use this to prove that it likely that parallel universe are real. Say we went to other planets and noticed that they had many more massive meteorite impacts than Earth does (adjusted for the size of for the planets.) Like if we find lots of huge meteorite craters on Mars. That would suggest that Earth also gets hit by many large meteorites, but in other universes.
I also think, though I'm not sure, if there has been many cases where humanity did get close to a nuclear war, but then it didn't happen, it makes it more likely that parallel universes are real. A thought experiment: A director shows you a film he made. The film shows a man throwing three darts at a dartboard and failing to hit the bullseye. The director says he used one of two methods to make the film:
Method 1: He filmed the man throwing darts. The man tries his best to hit the bullseye. If the man succeeds with any of the darts, the director deletes the film and starts from scratch. This continues until the director gets a film where the man fails to hit the bullseye with all three darts.
Method 2. The director films the man only once no matter how the man throws. The man tries his best to hit the bullseye.
Your task is to try to guess which of the methods the director used.
Now, does it matter if in the film the man gets close to hitting the bullseye? I think it does. If the man gets really close to hitting the bullseye, you think that man is pretty good. It is likely he succeeded in hitting the bullseye earlier and those films where deleted. Therefore it is more likely the director used method 1. On the other hand if the man never gets close to hitting the bullseye, you'd think that man is pretty bad. It is unlikely he ever hit the bullseye. So the director might have used method 2. Or method 1, there is no way to be sure.
The thought experiment is supposed to be analogues to the nuclear war and parallel universe situation. The man hitting the bullseye is analogues to there being a nuclear war. The director using method 1 is analogous to parallel universes existing. We never observe the man hitting the bullseye, since those films were deleted, just like we never observe nuclear war because the people observing nuclear war got killed. The director using method 2 is analogues to parallel universes not existing. So if we observe that we often gets close to having nuclear war (analogues to the man almost hitting the bullseye), parallel universes are more like to exist.
You'd have to play it a lot more often than 10 times for this to be credible evidence. With one bullet in 6 slots, you'd have a slightly higher than 16% chance of surviving 10 games in a row.
I think the issue here is more fundamental than you're giving it credit for.
Statistical reasoning is useful for conditions of Knightian risk, where the outcomes of action (or inaction) are unknown but quantifiable. The introduction of unobservable alternative universes moves us into conditions of Knightian uncertainty where outcomes are unknown and unquantifiable. No statistical technique is going to be able to solve this problem because it's a problem that statistics are fundamentally unsuited to solve.
From this perspective, trying to determine the possibility of nuclear war is already something of a fool's errand even before you bring unobservable alternate universes into the equation. If you want to reason intelligently about this sort of thing you should use other intellectual tools like heuristics which have a better track record in conditions of Knightian uncertainty.
What do people feel about this slogan i'm toying with:
=================================
The most important political divide in America is not the red/blue divide.
It's the divide between people who think political polarization is the biggest threat we face, and people who think 'the other tribe' is the biggest threat we face.
I would need to hear more. In particular, I think that your alternative divide is probably very lopsided. It could still be most important though, depending on how you're thinking of "importance". Trivially, if you hate the reds and the blues equally, it could easily be the most important divide *to you*.
Ok, if length isn't an issue, I still think its a little too complex because you have so many ideas related to division running around in your sentence. Divide / polarization / other tribe, all in a compound sentence with some ambiguity in grammar that can't be resolved until the very end makes it a mentally taxing sentence to read.
So are you looking for like a mission statement or something like that for a project or a publication? Something that introduces your mission?
What about:
Some people think the other tribe is our worst problem. I think people looking at compatriots and seeing enemies is even worse.
You might be interested in Brett Weinstein's Unity project. It was an effort to put together a coalition of sensible people from the left and the right for a presidential campaign.
If you are a sports fan, find some good sabermetrics websites and forums. Reading Football Outsiders did more for me than 2 semesters of stats and probability.
I’m a long-time reader, sometimes commenter, and occasional meet-up go-er. I’ve got an announcement about a project I’m developing that may be of interest to your average SSC/ACX reader: https://spartacus.app/
It’s an online platform for creating or joining campaigns for collective action in adversarial situations - using concepts like Assurance Contracts to solve game-theoretic coordination problems. Think “Kickstarter,” but instead of crowdfunding products, it’s for safely recruiting and organizing participants for any project that requires a group effort, like workplace organizing, whistleblowing, open letters, direct action, formation of clubs or affinity groups, etc.
I know this is not an entirely novel concept - many of the underlying principles have been validated by other successful platforms like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Change.org, and The Point, (before it pivoted to become Groupon).
Unlike those other platforms, my focus will not be fundraising or self-expression, but the formation and enablement of group solidarity for specific collective actions in the real world. The aim is to increase the expected value of organizing around concealed preferences by lowering the courage requirements for taking action (from heroic to average) and reducing individual actors’ risks (from potentially catastrophic to marginal).
To preemptively address some common points of feedback:
--Spartacus will prohibit any campaign encouraging illegal actions or violence of any kind.
--The app will have several mechanisms built in to abate the risk of trolls, spammers, or bad faith actors sabotaging or gaming the system.
--The explicit political position of the app is one of J.S Mill style liberal pluralism, and it will be defended as such. Use cases will be ideologically agnostic. There will be no partisan bent, and both “blue” and “red” campaigns will be equally welcome, regardless of who it pisses off. That said, campaign curation will strike for balance to try to avoid the app taking on a partisan valence.
Project Status:
I’m currently looking to recruit people for proof of concept and beta testing.
I’d also love to connect with the following sorts of people in general:
--Anyone with a strong social science background who wants to be involved and/or offer input.
--Anyone who thinks they might be a potential user of the app, and/or has an idea for a good use case.
--Anyone who wants to support this project through signal boosting online.
--Anyone with a SWE background who has experience creating MVPs.
The $1,000 I put into Dogecoin back in 2014 are now worth $300,000. The problem: I just cannot remember the password I used to encrypt the wallet with those funds. More specifically, when I went to decrypt it back in February of this year, I confidently entered what I was sure was the password, and it didn't work.
By this point I have, via usage of btcrecover and hashcat, tried around 500 million possible passwords, which I generated with my own scripts and intuitions as to possible variations of the password I erroneously recall as being correct.
Does anyone here know of any method for jogging one's memory? I can't shake the feeling that it's the password I originally attempted, but with some kind of variation I added in a fit of misguided paranoia.
He tried a lot of different things, including hypnosis, none of which worked. Eventually there turned out to be a flaw in the security for the password.
At least you seem to have unlimited chances to try passwords. He was up against a system which doubled the wait time for each failed attempt to log in.
In an weird alternate reality, few unlucky people claiming to be the victims of alien abduction and experimentation before being returned to Earth are discovered to have been mirrored, all the way down to the molecular level. Their hearts are now on the other side and such, but more importantly, their biochemistry and that of all the bacteria in and on them have been flipped to the opposite chirality - they now burn l-glucose instead of regular glucose, their DNA winds the other way, etc.
With modern technology and biochemistry, can the necessary nutrients be synthesized to keep them alive? Are there any other major obstacles to surviving and living a normal lifespan? And how will the l-bacteria on them fare as they scatter into the world and try to compete?
I read a science fiction story in my youth with that exact plot, only instead of aliens it was a freak power plant related accident. I can't remember the title or author, but I remember that there were loving descriptions of relearning how to read and write and dealing with being left handed now.
I also read a science fiction story in my youth which had this as a plot point (which I am currently in), except this time it was about someone traveling into a four-dimensional world and coming back in the wrong orientation. In that story, the only problems the protagonist who suffered this issue got (after flipping this way a bunch of times) was that she no longer had a coherent sense of left/right, and that food tasted bad when she was in the wrong orientation, but otherwise she was fine.
Now that I've thought about it more, It was a big plot point that the man who got flipped was slowly starving and this was specifically introduce with the comparison that the right handed nutrients he needs to survive are "more expensive than plutonium." If any of the abductees in your scenario were carrying some food seeds in their pocket, it might make it much easier for them to survive.
They can be kept alive, though it won't be cheap (no economies of scale). If it's a one-off rather than a recurrent thing, though, most of them probably starve before the problem is discovered and can be addressed. It's not like you can tell that food is the wrong orientation for you just by looking at it (though meat IIRC won't taste right and your sense of smell will be significantly impaired).
The bacteria in them are probably not going to do very well (outside of their initial hosts), because they'll be unable to metabolise a lot of the stuff around them. A decent amount of stuff in metabolism actually is achiral (e.g. Krebs cycle minus citrate and malate), but it'd still be crippling to their ability to compete even if they're not outright blocked by lack of a vital nutrient.
(There are bacteria that can metabolise a decent amount of wrong-orientation stuff, and autotrophic bacteria that don't need to eat organic things, but human skin and gut flora TTBOMK aren't either - they're specialised for eating human dead skin or human food respectively.)
I've seen this sentiment a few times and even as someone who's generally anti-divorce I don't understand it at all.
Is this sympathy coming from their philanthropy and/or political donations or am I missing something specific to this case which makes their divorce particularly tragic? At least the Bezos divorce was vaguely sensationalistic: I don't see the hook to care here at all.
The Gates' kinda turned into a super-couple, where Melinda gradually became more and more prominent when Bill Gates name popped up. The merger of two of Gates' foundations was called the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, for example.
I think if you see Bill as some sort of super-functional superman, it's disheartening to see even he could not keep his marriage together. Assuming he's not the one who initiated the divorce (it would be weird if he did given the vast sums of money involved).
I guess it didn't occur to me that anyone would picture him as a superman. Elon Musk and even Jeff Bezos have that kind of cult of personality, but Bill Gates always struck me as kind of smaller-than-life as far as self-made tech billionaires go.
Eh. There's something to that. Musk and Bezos are trying to do space with their wealth. Gates is trying to fix Africa and education. It's human level and kind, the sort of thing you can see yourself doing if somehow you ended up with top 10 money.
He's a good egg, at least in his old age. It's too bad.
In a sane society, a popular young black writer with a publishing contract from a Big Five fantasizes gassing white people, might garner some social censure.
A lot of books are published each year. This probably isn't even the worst thing this house published that year. If you've only heard of someone because of some manufactured controversy, they probably aren't really popular.
All of that said, I'm not even convinced that this is bad. If this is an author writing about the black experience and this sort of disconnection and rage is common, maybe criticizing someone trying to start a conversation about it isn't the right move.
Saw some mention of it. Inclined to dismiss it as stupid guy being stupid because he's figured out that being provocative generates publicity which can then (he hopes) be turned into $$$$$. Free speech means, like it or lump it, allowing idiots to dribble in public.
This is an issue of common decency, not free speech. Apparently you aren't familiar with the concept, hence your religious invocation of free speech, like a Medieval Catholic waving a crucifix at the mention of Satan.
This reply is pretty uncharitable, given that Deiseach made an honest and direct response to your post. I'm not sure if you're trying to make some kind of systematic argument or just draw people's attention to something you think they don't know about, but I think it would be more productive to explain your point rather than dismissing someone else's without any context. Otherwise it's just discouraging conversation.
Common decency should be a given in all public discourse, but the principles of free speech do not require that "the listener shall not be shocked". Yes, it is wicked to speak of murdering people, but he can't be censored merely on the grounds of "I want to kill you all". That may fall under hate speech/hate crimes law which is another matter. I am most definitely not a lawyer, but a quick and cursory search on the topic https://billofrightsinstitute.org/resources/freedom-of-speech-general seems to indicate that the relevant precedents would be Brandenburg v. Ohio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio and Cohen v. California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen_v._California, and possibly/probably R.A.V. vs. St Paul
(1) Brandenburg v. Ohio - "The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"
(2) Cohen v. California - "The Court ultimately found that displaying a mere four-letter word was not sufficient justification to allow states to restrict free speech and that free speech can be restricted only under severe circumstances beyond offensiveness. The ruling set a precedent used in future cases concerning the power of states to regulate free speech in order to maintain public civility."
(3) R.A.V. vs. the City of St. Paul - "A criminal ordinance prohibiting the display of symbols that "arouse anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender" was unconstitutional. The law violated the First Amendment because it punished speech based on the ideas expressed".
The ordinance was invoked for a case of burning a cross on the lawn of an African-American family
From the article on RAV vs St. Paul (and hey, maybe the late Justice Scalia can be lumped in with me under mediaeval Catholics waving our crucifixes around?):
"The Court recognized two final principles of free speech jurisprudence. One of these described that when "the entire basis for the content discrimination consists entirely of the very reason the entire class of speech is proscribable, no significant danger of idea or viewpoint discrimination exists." As examples, Justice Scalia wrote,
A State may choose to prohibit only that obscenity which is the most patently offensive in its prurience — i.e., that which involves the most lascivious displays of sexual activity. But it may not prohibit, for example, only that obscenity which includes offensive political messages. And the Federal Government can criminalize only those threats of violence that are directed against the President, since the reasons why threats of violence are outside the First Amendment (protecting individuals from the fear of violence, from the disruption that fear engenders, and from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur) have special force when applied to the person of the President."
So did our guy threaten *the President* specifically as an example of "whiteys I dream about gassing"? 'Cos otherwise no joy on censoring him.
C'mon Substack, gimme the means to edit comments, I am a fribbling dotard (relatively speaking) and often forget to include pertinent points before I hit "post".
Can anyone recommend a nerd/rationalist friendly interior designer who is either based in the Bay Area or willing to do remote/online design?
I am looking to remake my home office into a space which better satisfies both my logistical and my psychological/aesthetic needs: a place where I can work more easily and feel more at home and at rest. I have an unusual, modernist-ish sense of what "at home and at rest" means and I would like someone who gets that, and who gets how engineers think generally, and who is skilled in the art of interior design, and specifically the art of designing spaces that are genuinely meant for ease and spiritual renewal and not for showing off on Instagram. I have no idea if SSC is a reasonable place to find such a person but I figure it can't hurt to try.
I know someone who did a lot of design work for "digital nomads" in Bali, completely remote. Her style is quite minimalist/ functional with a soft aesthetic. I really enjoyed my time in the villas she designed. Feel free to email me if you would like her info tayezz@gmail.com
Are there any notable improvements in nootropics/diy research? i love scott's nootropics surveys but /r/nootropics has been doing that for some time and it's pretty unsatisfying. i dream of being able to source actual research from stuff like this
my context is trying to do and randomized self-experiment with bodywork, and actually completed one finding that 50mg modafinil did not affect fitbit sleep metrics... but it would be so nice to have some real data on 9-me-bc, bpc-157, etc for stimulant tolerance, head-to-head esketamine vs arketamine, etc.
stuff i looked at
Person as Population: A Longitudinal View of Single-Subject Causal Inference for Analyzing Self-Tracked Health Data, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.03423.pdf
The Atlantic has a review of the 2018 book " Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower" by Tufts professor Michael Beckley. I found the article interesting reading, especially as I've been growing more concerned about China's power.
"The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes. Above all, Beckley pleads with readers not to focus on the headline numbers of gross domestic product. China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then—and it will not make China a superpower now, or so Beckley contends."
" American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”
When Chinese forces do train, Beckley argues, the exercises bear little resemblance to the challenges the People’s Liberation Army would face in a great-power conflict:
'PLA exercises remain heavily scripted (the red team almost always wins) … Most exercises involve a single service or branch, so troops lack the ability to conduct joint operations, and assessments are often nothing more than “subjective judgments based on visual observation rather than on detailed quantitative data” and are scored “based simply on whether a training program has been implemented rather than on whether the goals of the program have been achieved.'”
"Comparing China’s military spending to that of the United States, for example, doesn’t make much sense. The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats."
"As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises. How much was borrowed? Nobody knows, because everybody lies. What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?
China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places. China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital. More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out."
It makes me sleep better at night: on the other hand, just yesterday The Atlantic ran a piece by H. R. McMaster that was much more frightening in terms of China's power and goals for the 21st century.
One section helped me better understand the danger of China's "Belt and Road Initiative" where they loan developing countries money for infrastructure projects:
"In Sri Lanka, the longtime president and current prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, incurred debts far beyond what his nation could bear. He agreed to a series of high-interest loans to finance Chinese construction of a port, though there was no apparent need for one. Despite earlier assurances that the port would not be used for military purposes, a Chinese submarine docked there the same day as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Sri Lanka in 2014. In 2017, following the commercial failure of the port, Sri Lanka was forced to sign a 99-year lease to a Chinese state-owned enterprise in a debt-for-equity swap."
He also raised some serious concerns about Chinese theft of technology: even if they can't innovate as well as we can, what does it matter if they can just steal the fruits of our labors?
"Chinese cybertheft is responsible for what General Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security Agency, described as the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.” The Chinese Ministry of State Security used a hacking squad known as APT10 to target U.S. companies in the finance, telecommunications, consumer-electronics, and medical industries as well as NASA and Department of Defense research laboratories, extracting intellectual property and sensitive data."
Overall I'm feeling better about the USA's chances against China going forward, but still concerned. And I don't really know anything about China, just what I read in the papers. Any thoughts? Is China a Paper Tiger, or a real one?
In looking at the underlying studies, I couldn't quite tell how seriously I should take the results. On page 7 of study 1, it says that "The E484K version of B.1.526 did show a significant nearly 4-fold decrease in neutralization by vaccine-elicited antibodies but this represents a modest decrease in titer that is not expected to result in a significant decrease in the protection provided by vaccination and is not expected to result in an increased susceptibility to re-infection." One question I had about this is how to even interpret this four-fold impact, which seems high on its face but maybe isn't a big deal given how effective the vaccines are in the first place. That said, that is presumably a medical forum question so I wouldn't necessarily expect this thread to be bale to answer that one.
My bigger question, however, is around this quote, describing the sample used for the results, appearing on page 19 - " Neutralizing titers of serum samples from BNT162b2 vaccinated individuals (n=5) (left) and mRNA1273 vaccinated donors (n=3) (right) was measured. IC50 of neutralization of virus with D614G, B.1.1.7, B.1.351, B.1.526 is shown." If I am reading this right, that suggests that the sample size of vaccinated individuals was 5 Pfizer and 3 Moderna people. Am I crazy to think that this sample size is incredibly low?
Similarly, in the second study, page 8 references a 4.5-fold reduction in titer neutralization for vaccinated plasma, with a p score of 0.00005 (page 8), yet when I look at the description of Figure 5 on page 28, it suggests a sample size of 10.
TLDR - How should I think about appropriate sample sizes and how they translate into confidence in results and the attendant p scores associated with them?
>One question I had about this is how to even interpret this four-fold impact, which seems high on its face but maybe isn't a big deal given how effective the vaccines are in the first place.
If you are a petri dish full of blood worried about getting covid, it's fairly easy to interpret. But for humans, all it will give us is a vague idea of whether certain variants might plausibly escape certain forms of immunity. And neutralisation titres won't tell us anything about T-cell responses in humans that recovered from an actual covid infection.
I think Pfizer is about 7-fold less neutralising against B.1.351 as it is against wild type covid. Depsite this, it doesn't seem to have swamped Israel (where most infections continue to be B.1.1.7). So I'd not worry about a 4-fold reduction in neutralising titre. (IANAD, E, V, I or any other sort of professional in this field)
Since the byline of this blog on the publication list is "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.", I decided that it might be nice to have people summarize their favorite* topic** in the format "[obvious statement], all the rest is commentary."
I'll start by summarizing mathematics: "The axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice are consistent, all the rest is commentary."***
*I'm not going to police this at all. You can even write about your least favorite topic if you want to for some reason.
**I think you could also do this for ideologies or whatever.
***In an earlier version of this that I mentally drafted, it was "Peano arithmetic", and in general I am much less confident in the consistency of ZFC than in that of PA.
There are several concepts that we use that basically gerrymander thingspace and so degrade the discourse by causing us to have a bad ontology and thus worse beliefs; if they were forgotten, I would expect our ontology and thus our discourse and beliefs to improve significantly.
Here is a (probably extremely non-exhaustive) list of such things, in no particular order:
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, Tom DeMarco
Overview of an important book. The short version is that being busy all the time (efficient) means lack of ability to respond to changing conditions and a tremendous amount of effort spent on managing scarce attention.
The Biden administration just announced they will lift patent protection for the vaccines. I haven't followed the controversy but clearly the pharma companies resisted this. I don't really understand why the government didn't just pay them to do this a month ago -- Pfizer's market cap is up $22 billion since announcing the vaccine and the Biden administration is passing trillion dollar legislation these days. Can people explain what I'm getting wrong?
If I were a betting man, at least part of it would be spite towards companies which participated in Operation Warp Speed.
Even with the FDA and pharma companies deliberately delaying their planned announcements until after election day, getting the vaccines out in record time was an undeniable PR win for the Trump administration. Attacking the safety of the vaccines would be off-message and interfere with attempts to set up a vaccine passport system, but forcing the participating companies to eat multi-billion dollar losses for not waiting until Biden was installed doesn't interfere with any of their other goals.
Prof. Dotson presents a case how democracy has a hiccup when everyone becomes enamored with (perceived obvious) facts, thus everyone with an opposing facts is either misinformed or nebulous motives. Select quote midway from the essay:
"Scientism further fuels conspiracism by downplaying the fallibility of expert advice and the tentative nature of scientific knowledge. When mistakes or changes in expert advice are not openly discussed, a natural conclusion is that leaders aim to deceive. To put this more starkly, when Hanlon’s Razor — “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” — is no longer available, malicious intent becomes the only explanation."
This made be reconsider some opinions of mine I have been entertaining lately. The argument explains some behavior in one sees in public media. The part I found important myself, however, is that I certainly am not free of it. It is very easy to develop a (pseudo)-mental model of other people's opinions and behavior which allows me to say, they are in the wrong and I can explain why they are thinking so -- they either don't know about, are misinformed about, or because of some personal motivation ignore the obvious facts that I possess. While such state of matters could be true, the article nudged me to re-realize how with such attitude, one easily skips the part where to determine which facts are factual it is required to put them into a severe test.
"one easily skips the part where to determine which facts are factual it is required to put them into a severe test."
To elaborate, why is this part important? Just that I can explain the other people's actions is not the strong part of my model of them, because it is easy to provide many explanations that fit the picture. The model becomes strong only if the facts are actually factual.
(I hope Substack unlock the technology of "comment edit" button in their tech tree soon.)
In a live electrical wire, is the flow of electricity truly "continuous," or is it quantized/packetized? In other words, if we could slow down time--but not to such a degree that we could see events in Planck Time--and see the electrons moving through the wire, would they always be steadily crawling along, or at some point, would they appear to move in a jerky, stop-go-stop-go manner?
Similarly, are the operations inside of a computer processor continuous or packetized? If you could slow down time enough, would there be split seconds where your computer's processor wasn't actually doing calculations even though the machine was on and running a data-intensive program?
Why did the U.S. government violate so many of the treaties it signed with Indian tribes? Specifically, what official reasons did the U.S. most often give for doing so? Were the treaties commonly declared invalid because the tribes breached some clause in the agreement, or because the tribal governments that had signed them had collapsed, or what?
The U.S. government would have released some kind of written statement each time, and those statements should be in the National Archives. Has any historian ever explored this issue?
An RPG I played included a magic artifact which could make everyone in the world forget one thing. It could erase memories and written records, and confabulate plausible replacements that would prevent people from noticing the lacunae. The artifact couldn't stop people from re-deriving or re-inventing any knowledge they could easily re-derive or re-invent (so if you asked people to forget about war, they would probably start fighting each other again pretty quickly) and it couldn't remove physical evidence other than writing (so people would still have tanks, warplanes, etc). But it might help confabulate around these things (people might think the tanks were just for fancy parades).
What one thing would you use this artifact for?
What artifact? What are you talking about??
Race, just to see the resulting absolute fireworks show.
First thing I thought of too. I think far too much of our current understanding of race is based on the last few hundred years. I think the concept of race would be reinvented, but I don’t think it would resemble what we have today. I don’t think it would be fireworks, either. It would just look really weird to outside observers used to our culturally embedded categories, the same way that moderns have an incredibly hard time understanding that ancients’ and medievals’ concept of race was very rudimentary, tribal, and doesn’t map to our own, or that until recently the Japanese had no separate words for blue/green.
My money would be on some sort of cultural racism/xenophobia, as opposed to today's largely ancestry-based conception of race.
We see it in the Ancient world, where people from Gaul to North Africa to the Black Sea could become latinised and enter the Roman ingroup, so long as they rejected their 'barbaric' culture in favour of 'civilised' roman culture.
I think this was also (at least nominally) the policy of Imperial Japan.
The idea of a duty to civilise the barbarians tends to be used to justify imperialism, so these ideas are often seen in expansionist states. Maybe the monkey's fist would give us another round of colonialist atrocities.
You see a current of this paradigm within American race relations (tangled up with ideas about class) whenever there's an outcry against posh schools not letting African-American students wear cornrows.
Actually, the ancients had a very distinct understanding of ancestry and tribal origin, although the modern notion of 'white' or 'black' wouldn't have made and sense.
The Latinisation of even the Italians was hotly contested, and a series of wars known as the Social Wars were fought over the matter. It wasn't until the reign of the emperor Claudius that citizenship was extended to provinces outside of Italy, and by that time even Rome itself had changed greatly. It is a common mistake by modern intellectuals, for example, to point to a particular Roman's provincial origin and claim that he was necessarily from that place originally. In reality, many Romans lived in the provinces as colonists.
The Romans were not interested in civilising barbarians. They extended some civic rights to those that they conquered, for the most part, but they had a very sophisticated gradation to the levels of citizenship and respect granted - and most of these concessions were nominal. Some scholars seem unable to separate the Roman concept of the 'gens' from their ethnic origin - probably a cultural influence from modern times. To the Romans, a 'gens' or 'clan' was as much a spiritual relation as a blood tie, and this why the practice of adoption took place.
They differentiated themselves, however, in multitudinous ways. The Romans drew a distinction between the *blood ties of families between their own classes,* to say nothing of what they thought of others. The difference between them and moderns is that they were more than willing to extend the same consideration to other ethnic groups indiscriminately, European, African, or otherwise, so long as they proved themselves weaker. The main thing was that those groups were inferior for having lost their battles, which is why they had a wide variety of slaves, but the Mary-Beardesque theories of ethnic integration are highly controversial.
What do you think would be different? To me, 19th-century conceptions of race (say white, yellow, brown, black & red) look rather similar to 21st-century clustering based on genomic data, so I'd expect people to rediscover the familiar races pretty quickly.
"White" was not a unified category in the 19th century. Irish people faced significant discrimination.
IIRC Italians and Greeks got categorized separately as well ("swarthy" or olive skin tone).
I don't understand what you mean by "white" not being a uniform category in the 19th century. Races aren't uniform categories according to modern genomic methods either; rather there are splits and admixture events at various time depths.
I think his point is that we would have a larger group of "races" if we wiped the slate clean. "White" would stop being considered the same group, and the current racial majority in the US would turn into a number of small groups (which could include Irish, Italian, Mediterranean, etc.). I'm not sure if I would expect that, or what Lambert is saying about in group/out group conceptions.
Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans weren't considered to be the same racial category as English, Scandinavian, Germans, and French. Nowadays we consider them all to fit into the same top-level racial category.
What I mean is, it's not necessarily obvious that we should group together all the people we consider "white" in the same category. People in the 19th century thought it was very important to note that Irish people came from different stock than British people, despite their similar skin tone.
Similarly, it's not obvious that an olive-skinned Arab person is "brown" while a Greek with the same skin tone is "white."
They'd certainly pick out noticeable genetic groups and skin tone differences and form various stereotypes based on them, but they probably wouldn't match up to the groups we use today.
You recall incorrectly. The US had a de jure racial caste system, and European immigrants were always classified as white.
I wish I knew of an open-access version of this paper, which I've been linking to for years in response to such nonsense:
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666383?seq=1
If it's that great a paper, why not host it yourself? You have a blog, I seem to recall, and one assumes it supports 'uploading files'. Better than linking Sci-Hub links which use up its bandwidth & will break when it next changes its domain. Or here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/history/2012-fox.pdf Took all of a minute max to edit, add metadata, upload etc.
The legal classification and social classification didn't always line up.
I only skimmed that paper, but it seems like they describe quite a lot of nuance in racial boundaries - while there was little de jure discrimination against whites from outside northern Europe, they give plenty of examples of discrimination by private citizens. (And even a few court cases that touched on the question, although they decided that European immigrants did count as white).
Yes, black-white segregation was much harsher than any intra-white divisions, but my point is that those other forms of discrimination *existed.* The question posed by the OP is "if you erased the concept of racial categories from everyone's memory, would people independently reinvent them or could they come up with some other division?" and my answer is "Yes, they would come up with other divisions, and we know that because we have evidence of people in history recognizing racial divisions that we don't today." It doesn't matter that those divisions didn't result in Jim Crow for Italians, it's just an existence proof.
This is just me vaguely remembering what I've read on the internet, so epistemic status is low confidence, but I thought I had read that (ignoring a few small, distantly-related groups like the Khoisan and the Australian Aborigines), if you tell a computer to divide all humans into just two clusters by analysing their genomes, it would split us into Sub-Saharan Africans and everyone else ... but if you expanded to three clusters, it would churn out Sub-Saharan Africans, [East Asian + Native Americans], and [Europeans + North Africans + South and West Asians]. Presumably if you keep increasing the number of clusters, at some point you would get something that maps reasonably well onto what we now call 'white'.
Everything up until that last sentence seems very plausible, though the last sentence might be true depending on how "reasonably well" you want it to map on.
Also, I think you have to get the computer to ignore the genomes of nearly everyone from Latin America, who have various complicated mixtures of European, American, and African ancestry.
Yep, you can see the statue of the first Latin mayor of Tampa, if you visit. He was Sicilian.
Did 19th century conceptions include a "brown"? My impression is that whenever they ventured to include Hispanic or South Asian people into racial categories, they categorized them as "white".
I seem to remember someone on the internet who has one Mexican grandparent and whose wife is from India tried to work out whether they'd have been allowed to marry in the state where they live, pre-Loving vs Virginia. Alas I can't track it down. I think it was somebody on jirt-appreciation tumblr.
The answer turned out to be that every relevant court case established a different precident: Some would allow it on the basis that they're both white, some on the basis that neither of them are white. Some would prohibit it because he was white and she not and others vice-versa. In one year in the 20s, the courts made 3 contradictory rulings on the matter. Some cases took the caste and skin colour of the South Asian defendant into account.
That was me! Link here: https://psiloveyou.xyz/lovingly-married-in-virginia-5bbe68051d58
The short answer is that they didn't put much thought into it. 1/4 genetically Mexican would count some years but not others, because Mexican is probably Native American or something. And 100% Indian is also borderline if your lawyer can convince the court that you're "high-caste." But all of this was pretty much made up as they went along.
I don't think it's about what categories they believed existed so much as what they bothered paying attention to. Like, Virginia's laws were very much about white supremacy as in white vs. black (and Native American because Walter Plecker can never be *sure* they aren't secretly part black). Other discrimination wasn't really the main target, probably just because there weren't a whole lot of other minorities in Virginia at the time. The letter of the law might have looked a bit different if they were confronted with a bunch of definitely non-white Caucasians.
Actually I was wrong. There were multiple conceptions of a brown race, but those were generally confused – either some subset of what we would recognize as the white race or the yellow race or a conglomeration of different races. I did find that Meyers Konversationslexikon (from the 1880s) split off the browns, referring to them as Dravidians and not including them in their white/black/yellow trichotomy, so I guess some people got it and some people didn't, even then (although this lexicon, on the other hand, had a rather confused idea of who belonged to the black race, including, among others, Australoids).
There was a Supreme Court case in which a Sikh man was ruled non-white because the Founding Fathers who wrote the original immigration law were ignorant of modern (per that era's SCOTUS) racial science and thus couldn't treat "caucasian" as an equivalent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind
I highly doubt that "the Founding Fathers" wrote the "Naturalization Act of 1906," but am willing to be proved wrong.
> To me, 19th-century conceptions of race (say white, yellow, brown, black & red) look rather similar to 21st-century clustering based on genomic data, so I'd expect people to rediscover the familiar races pretty quickly.
Except that the 19th-century conceptions of race were predominantly methods of identification for people in cultural outgroups. The culture of Africans from Africa and 19th-century Native Americans were very different from any kind of European culture, hence outgroup.
Today if you look at a random sampling of e.g. truck drivers in America, they'll be of all "races" and have more cultural similarity to each other than to people of the same "race" working on Wall Street.
Modern ideas about race are heavily North America-centric, and not something I've ever understood fully. Categories like 'white' or 'asian' only make sense in that particular geography - outside if it they're largely meaningless. For instance, there is very little similarity between an Englishman and a Ukrainian, historically or ancestrally (unless you go back to prehistoric times). The same goes for Indians, the Chinese, and Indonesians.
Previous understandings of categories were also not only cultural. The earliest conceptions of 'race' more closely resembled tribes or clans - what we would now categorize as an ethnic group. Mediaeval English texts wrote of the Scots and Welsh as races distinct from their own.
So I suppose I largely agree. One thing about the linguistic difference though: I've heard the same claim for the ancient Greeks/Romans, and in their case it isn't true. The Greeks had a word which denoted blue, grey, or green simultaneously, or a combination of them. Glaukopis Athena, for example, was either 'grey-eyed Athena' or 'green-eyed Athena' or even 'sea-grey-eyed Athena.' All of which make sense in ancient Greek, because they had no equivalent of aquamarine, for example, although it wasn't that they couldn't see the colour - they just lumped it under the same name. Same with 'purpura' in Latin, which was alternately purple, red, green, and black-and-red at times, but could also mean simply 'iridescent.'
It's not that you can't perceive colors you don't have a word for, but you (apparently) don't perceive them as well. Link from the top link in my search, since my first click was paywalled. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797618782181
"very rudimentary, tribal, and doesn’t map to our own," Doug Stanhope has a skit about britain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in3Ppk9NG9U "where ye from? across the street?!? **** across the street!"
it is still here to some extent in europe
You mean to stop the absolute fireworks show? I expect people would eventually switch to something else to hate each other about, but it would probably be a lot less inflammatory.
What is the thought process that leads to you thinking it would be less inflammatory?
I'd suggest that simply whatever categories were invented to replace our current racial groups would have a lot less baggage attached, so less sticks to beat opponents with.
I guess that depends on whether the baggage is inherent to noticing out group differences or specifically built on perceived wrongs from the past.
I think it's both, but I'm not sure how much of either. I would like to think 90/10 wrongs from the past, but I fear it might be closer to 50/50 and we would reinvent the past wrongs given enough time in the new paradigm.
Wouldn't work. People would just re-derive race almost immediately (based on outward appearance as usual), or invent/intensify some other division to fight about (gender, language, sports team preference, etc.). Personally, I'd try to cheat, and remove some common logical fallacy, like e.g. false generalization. Not the knowledge about the mechanics of the fallacy, but the fallacious mode of reasoning itself.
Wouldn't you thus be removing induction and the whole basis for empirical knowledge?
Ideally, no, because I'd like to preserve *true* generalization via induction. That is to say, if you see a single swan that happens to be white, you would no longer be able to conclude that all swans are white (after my artifact-powered finger-snap, that is). However, if you see 100 swans and all are white, you would still be able to predict that the next swan you see is also highly likely to be white.
OK, I'm not so convinced that that type of absolute generalization is very prevalent outside the hard sciences. I think more often problems arise from bad particularization than from bad generalization, i.e. concluding from "Xs tend to Y" that "this X Ys".
I believe it has been repeatedly observed that when e.g. machine learning algorithms are tasked with figuring out e.g. which customers banks can trust to repay their loans, they independently invent something close enough to racism as makes no difference unless they are specifically constrained not to, and if they are constrained not to then we tend to notice them running up against the boundaries as they e.g. use zip codes or whatever else we forgot to tell them was a proxy for race. Since forgetting about race means forgetting that we're not supposed to be racist and not supposed to let our computers be racist, I'm pretty sure racism is going to be reinvented fairly quickly in this hypothetical.
The details might change, and if they cleave closer to reality that might be an improvement. But if forgetting about race means forgetting about racism, then it means forgetting hard-earned lessons about the bad things that happen if you put too much weight on even accurate racial generalizations, and I'd really rather not have to relearn those lessons the hard way.
Do you have any references for that claim?
I forget the details but the bit about zip codes was some algorithm used in the criminal justice system. Used to advise judges in parole or bail hearings by predicting recidivism rates. They stopped using it after it was alleged that it was being much harsher against people from majority black neighbourhoods.
There was a bunch of discussion in the SSC comments about it.
A quick google finds lots of discussion that neglects to link to primary sources, which is annoying as I don't have time to give this the attention it deserves. But here's a discussion at the MIT Technology Review (paywalled, but readable if you disable Javascript).
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/20/1009452/ai-has-exacerbated-racial-bias-in-housing-could-it-help-eliminate-it-instead/
I expect this would kill a LOT of people. Current attitudes re: race have a lot of leftover baggage from the pre-Twitter era. If you started them over from scratch, social media would promptly refine them into maximally efficient hatred generators, and current race relations would look utopian by comparison.
I don’t know what I would pick, but probably a lot of people would want me to choose whatever religion starts the most crusades/jihads.
I would also pick religion.
It's really going to suck when God wipes the world clean again.
I don't know what you meant by that, but I realize that picking religion is too nebulous. Do I mean just monotheistic religion, the idea of a creator, belief in supernatural entities, Platonism, or Cartesian dualism?
I am reminded of the passage from Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, when the Piraha ask Dan when they are going to finally meet Jesus. When he tells them that he has never met Jesus, they can't understand how he can believe in someone he has never met and dismiss the whole of Christianity as nonsense. So could it be that the original human condition is not Platonic? But would this hinder higher abstract reasoning?
(monkey's paw curls) congratulations, the religious people whose behavior you didn't like now get super into various kinds of extremist politics instead.
I would try and probably fail to rules lawyer this into a phrase that results in all global debts being cancelled, just to see what would happen.
Well, let's start with - all bonds are now valueless. The global banking system, which was holding a whole lot of sovereign debt, immediately collapses; the rest of the financial system immediately follows. It gets pretty bad pretty fast, I think.
Good point. For my next debt, cancel all consumer debt. What are the consequences, unintended and otherwise?
Wow, Did I seriously freudian slip "wish" --> "debt" somehow?
Definitely better, I cynically suspect it still doesn't help things. As an analogy, if you canceled everyone's mortgages, the banks that give mortgages go bankrupt, and now nobody can get a loan to buy a house - which is really bad for new buyers (and sellers looking for those buyers). Are there legitimate reasons people take out consumer debt? If so, now people can't, and that seems bad.
Or maybe consumer debt is categorically a bad decision, and the collapse of the industry is an unalloyed good. Honestly don't know for sure.
“which is really bad for new buyers”
In the absence of mortgages, home prices would have to fall to the amount of cash savings available to the median buyer. Same for student loans, college tuition would go back to being an amount a savvy kid could earn in a summer.
I think house prices would crash, just like they did in 2008 - but I don't think it would sink anywhere near "the amount of cash savings available to the median buyer." All but the most motivated sellers would keep their prices much higher than that, and buyers would have to save up. Imo, the biggest impact would just be lowering the velocity of the housing market for a while.
On student loans, too, I think you're wildly optimistic. Prices would drastically lower - there would be ripping and tearing, colleges would liposuct their administrations and scale back extracurricular offerings, etc. But it definitely wouldn't scale back to what the *kid* can pay, it'd scale to what the median parent can pay. (Or worse, median parent of a kid not on financial aid.)
tl;dr I think you overestimate the flexibility of prices.
"home prices would have to fall to the amount of cash savings available to the median buyer"
Why? That's not what land or home prices were before easy mortgage lending happened.
This would still be really bad. Suppose you're a homeowner considering selling. You bought your house for $1 million. Now the best offer you can get is $50,000. Do you still want to sell it?
Another situation: You're a construction company. The wages and raw materials to build a house cost $100,000. Most homeowners can pay less than $50,000. Do you keep building new housing?
Let's try a different tack. Instead of canceling debt, print it. All outstanding government bonds, when they mature, are paid with newly issued money instead of being rolled over. Everyone gets a one-time $250,000 check from the government in printed money, at the same time as we raise the prime rate to 25% so that everyone has the incentive to use the money to pay off their debts. Now none of the creditors fail because they got paid. You're also not punishing the people who didn't borrow profligately because they get the same amount of cash. There is a significant amount of short-term inflation, but since you're not continuing to print money and only doing it once, the value of the dollar quickly stabilizes. What then?
Let's see. All the big car companies are bankrupt, so everyone who owns stock in them, or their bonds, loses a big pile of money, and everyone who works for one loses his job, and everyone who used to work for one loses his pension. So, a lot of people are out of work, a lot of others are out of a pension and healthcare, and some others are out of significant chunks of their life savings.
We can repeat that for quite a lot of businesses, since there aren't that many that deal strictly in cash these days. We can assume Amazon and Apple abruptly become worth 1/4 to 1/10 what they used to be, which again means staggering layoffs, loss of 401(k) savings, presumably a screeching halt to a lot of technology innovation.
I looked it up about consumer debt in the United States stands at about $4 trilion, so you are in essence making $4 trillion in wealth vanish. That's about 1/4 of the GDP, I think. So maybe about the destructiveness of the Great Depression, I think.
It isn't directly destructive at all, because you just made a 4 trillion wealth transfer, not 4 trillion in wealth to disappear. I still think its long term consequences wouldn't be very helpful, and on a generational scale it isn't a very big wealth transfer anyways, but nothing got destroyed.
You basically need to think through what consumer debt actually is. It is reducing the consumption of certain people while being paid off (the debtors), and increasing the consumption of other people (the creditors), and when the debt is taken out it is an increase in the consumption of the people taking out the debt, and a corresponding decrease in the consumption of the creditor.
If you eliminate the debt, it just means that debtors have more money to spend suddenly, and the demand side of the GDP isn't hurt at all.
You're mistaken, because you've forgotten how the debt was acquired in the first place. I borrowed $35,000 to buy my care because the car was worth more to me than the $35,000. With the car I can get a better job, earn more money, et cetera and rapidly acquire much more than $35,000.
The car company sold me the car because the $35,000 was worth more to them than the car. So in the exchange genuine utility (and wealth) was created -- both partners in the exchange are better off. That's *why* free economic exchanges happen in the first place. People are different, and in different circumstances. I have a crapton of hay and no horse, you have a lot of horses but not much hay -- the marginal value of the horse is higher to me than you, and the marginal value of the hay his higher to you than to me. We exchange, and are both better off.
If you reverse $4 trillion of such transactions, you will make *all* of that acquired wealth and utility vanish. Not perhaps $4 trillion worth -- I will still have my stupid hay, you will still have the wretched extra horse -- but a truly large amount of value will have vanished.
Alright, time for round three -- forgive all student loans (in the United States, to keep the scope simple to reason about). What happens? Both in terms of immediate effects good & bad, and also in terms of how people's incentives respond to the event.
I guess there's two scenarios to consider: one where we "forget" about the student loans as per the original prompt (which perhaps might avoid the 'unfair to those who paid off their loans' issue people sometimes raise as objection) and one where we don't have a magic RPG mcguffin, we just elect Bernie Sanders and congress goes along with what he wants (or whatever).
One of the very few constraints on college cost disappears? Prices go up by insanity^2.
What's the mechanism? Also, which of the two scenarios (or both) does this happen in, and why?
If we interpret "forgive" in Scott's sense of "totally forget about", and assume this has similar consequences to "forgive and forbid" - lots of colleges go out of business. Luckily, this has mostly positive externalities. I'm on board.
Ooh, what about just making everyone forget about higher education?
Some post-high-school education will quickly be reinvented of course, but it will likely be unbundled from research and therefore much cheaper and more skill-focused (think vocational training). In the meantime hiring and "expertise" will have to get much more meritocratic which seems like a major plus.
Well, given that every debt is somebody else's asset, you would have also canceled most of the assets of the world, too. So, a significant impoverishment.
As set is just a fancy way of saying negative assets it should be net 0 impoverishment
I wouldn't do this, but making people forget a cryptographic protocol would have severe implications. There are enough arbitrary parts that we probably wouldn't be able to reconstruct the protocol exactly, so while we would get usable substitutes, encrypted communications from the past will be gone. For instance, forgetting SHA-256 would kill Bitcoin.
Given what an ecological blight Bitcoin is (https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocurrency-and-energy-consumption/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20University%20of,0.6%25%20of%20global%20electricity%20consumption.), making everyone forget the passwords to their wallets would end it, while still allowing the better technologies like proof-of-stake to survive.
Given that breathy, dramatic warnings about the climate impact of electricity use for mining crypto are severely overwrought and special pleading (https://www.aier.org/article/bitcoin-and-a-lesson-in-electricity-markets/), I'm going to say that would be kinda pointless.
So the argument is that bitcoin will make it profitable to capture "stranded" natural gas. Natural gas that is produced primarily as a side effect of... oil extraction? So the grand argument that Bitcoin is fine for the environment is that actually it helps increase the income of oil companies? Count me as unconvinced!
The main objection I know of to bitcoin’s energy use is that Proof of Work is completely unnecessary.
You could switch to something like Proof of Stake and save 90% of the energy usage.
Most of the energy spent on Bitcoin is completely wasted because we can’t coordinate a switch to a better technology. Your article, while interesting, doesn’t resolve the central issue that the energy expenditure is simply unnecessary to do the job.
Contra you: Proof of Work is important because it makes Bitcoin more secure, since essentially the only way to attack it is to do a 51% attack, which is way too expensive, whereas I think sufficiently rich people can attack Proof of Stake by just pouring money in. I think I read an article somewhere that compared this to how it's free to add a row to a database, but I can't find it now. Also, Bitcoin miners are investing in renewable energy.
I'd be tempted to make everyone forget an odious ideology (e.g. Naziism or Communism), but the downside of this is that it would also make everyone forget not just the tenants of the ideology, but also the historical experience of how monstrous those ideologies were when their adherents achieved large-scale political and military power. Without that experience, the risk of something like that ideology arising and achieving large-scale power again could actually be greater than had I never used the artifact.
Also, everyone forgetting that Communism or Naziism was ever a thing and confabulating plausible replacements for it would make utter nonsense of huge chunks of 20th century history.
Communism would be re-derived fairly quickly since it's based on looking at the objective conditions of the worker under capitalism.
Brilliant.
This might actually be great - forgetting anarchism/communism would give us the chance to try again without the soviet baggage.
What is the soviet baggage? There has been lots of countries with communism since the soviets and their "brand" of communism was different. But none of them worked and all of them destroyed lives. I think you still have the idea that the problem with communism was the way soviets implemented it. "If I did it, it would work" is the typical idea of anyone that still defends communism ideology nowadays.
But I want to know what I am missing: what is the soviet baggage? how does it impede new communism countries to success?
P.D.: I don't think you can assume anarchism is tied or close to communism necessarily, as communism needs and pretend to have a big government to control everything.
Considering that the first to suffer under communism are almost always the anarchists I think we can conclude there's a difference there certainly. Note the two traditions are so antagonistic that they staged a civil war within a civil war (tgere has to be a name for that, probably in German) in Spain.
Sorry. Wasn’t equating the two, but both are tarnished by history despite having interesting properties.
There was an attempt in socialist Czechoslovakia in 1968 to create a "socialism with human face", which was crushed by Soviet army. It's hard to guess what could have happened in an alternative reality... would they get a better form of socialism? would it gradually revert back to its inhuman form? would it gradually revert back to capitalism? ...but it was an experiment that was not even allowed to happen. Many other potential experiments were probably not even tried, because it was obvious what would have happened.
(There is also a chance that these experiments would result in something even more horrible. Technically, fascism also started as an attempt to do "Marxism, but without Soviet Union as a boss". Then it inspired German national socialism, and then we got the gas chambers...)
Generaly, the problem with presence of strong Soviet Union was that it turned the quesion of socialism into a dichotomy: either you are with us, or you are against us (and then you are not a proper socialist, and if you are geographically close to us we will crush you). And the socialists in the West felt the need to defend Soviet Union even when her actions were morally undefensible, because criticizing Soviet Union would mean criticizing socialism itself.
And the reasons why Soviet Union was so screwed up might be inherent to socialism, or may be just a legacy or Romanov dynasty's Russia. The communist secret police was built as a copy of the czar's secret police; the Soviet Union as an empire oppressing various minorities was a successor of the Russian empire. This made the oppression inevitable from the very beginning, otherwise the empire would fall apart; and it contributed to Soviet Union treating surrounding socialist countries as its colonies.
So, maybe without Soviet Union, we would get multiple different flavors of socialism. Some of them possibly more humane. Or maybe not. At least we would know what is the consequence of socialism itself, and what is the Soviet/Russian historical legacy.
"or may be just a legacy or Romanov dynasty's Russia"
Well, to be historical accurate, tzars were not in power when the Revolution of October took place. The soviets made the coup against an elected government, as the last tzar renounced the power in January. So it is difficult to connect the bad things of the communist regime to Romanov's, which were, by the way, assassinated by the soviets, ordered by Lenin, even if they were not getting involved in the civil war.
Regarding the Spring of Prague, we should not forget that the regime was already communist, but you are right: it was under the Soviet influence. For sure they tried to transition to some regime with more freedom, some socialist state, and it was repressed by Warsaw Pact coalition that was, essentially, soviet. I can agree up to this point.
However, there have been other countries without that soviet influence and they have things in common: the economy tanks, the government has to become overcontrolling to "convince" the citizens to do what they are told, and a general lost of freedom. Which is fundamental to any regime that plans to control the economy in a top-down fashion. Examples: China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia... and you could say those were influenced by the Soviet Union (although hardly pressed by force). Then we can check Cuba or Venezuela. Common factors: lack of personal freedom (unless you belong to the party or you don't disagree with the government at all), useless economy, hyperinflation (remember that also happened in the Soviet Union since the very first year).
The key I think is: how could you manage to respect people freedom when you have to organize the economy from the state? I'm talking about coordinating everything, from the industry output to the coffee that gets distributed everywhere? How could you be free to decide what to buy, when and at what price if all that is set by the government from somewhere maybe far from your region? Also thinking you can set prices and it will work, and that's probably the biggest error of the idea: that price and value are the same thing and that offer and demand can be coordinated in a centralized way.
Regarding the last point, I concede that today it might be possible to some degree to estimate the demand and supply using computers or some AI software. But not sure it could be accurate enough to work.
I am still puzzled when people keep repeating the same argument: it didn't work but because they did it wrong... The same fear of letting the ideology go that made western socialists to look away and pretend it was going well.
Do you mean the Soviet inspiration? It would be a great tragedy to forget the example of glorious revolutions and societies of the past, but I'm confident that the workers would come to the same conclusions eventually.
Well, the workers of any communist country in History arrived to the conclusion that it is no good for them, as the government decided what they could keep of their own labor. And realized they were even more miserable under communism than before, as working harder/better and producing more didn't result in a better quality of life.
Did you hear that people living in communist countries tried desperately to run away and scape? And if they could, they overthrow the regime and tried to go back to something that gave them more freedom? Have you lived in any of such countries like North Corea, Cuba or Venezuela nowadays? Not like a rich 1st world tourist, but living there? Because people in those countries try to leave all the time risking their lives in the process... maybe they are idiots and you know better.
The people of Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela all seem to be doing fine and support their government.
Surely you must realise that whatever your own feelings on the matter, the memory of Soviet oppression is one of the key things marring communism's reputation in the 21st century.
The objection from communists that I am sympathetic to is the one you made yourself elsewhere in this thread: "the Soviets were horrible for reasons unrelated to the root fact of their being communists, and their horribleness is unfairly reflecting on communism in a Hitler-ate-sugar-therefore-sugar-is-evil kind of way". I am not personally a communist but I find this complaint quite convincing.
But it is an entirely different matter to turn around and claim that "actually the Soviet Revolution was beautiful and inspiring, you guys are just wrong". Even setting aside the fact that I find this position morally horrid, surely you can see, as a practical matter, that the image that has stuck in people's minds (fairly or not) of the Soviets is one that is *harmful* to the “PR” of communism as an economic philosophy?
It's like if… suppose you are a devout Roman Catholic to the point that really, you think the Spanish Inquisition had its heart in the right place. You're allowed to believe that. And you're also allowed to believe that Catholicism was irrelevant to the Spanish Inquisition and it should all be blamed on the Spanish monarchy. But you are deluding yourself if you don't understand that it would *improve* Catholicism's reputation among non-Catholics, and thus potentially increase conversations, if the world forgot about the Inquisition.
The Soviet's liberation of millions is actually one of the main things boosting communism's reputation in the 21st century.
I think this is helpful. One can imagine communism, untarnished, would be a useful idea to have around in our political discourse even if nobody actually tried to implement it seriously. It’s like a counterpoint to the equally utopian and flawed idea of ‘free markets’...
"since it's based on looking at the objective conditions of the worker under capitalism"
Do you mean it is based on thinking (without real experience) about XIX century aristocratic system. It seems someone already made that wish and people forgot the ideas from Marx were outdated even in his own time.
The idea of Marx are correct. If you disagree with something he said, you should quote him and show how he is only criticizing the 19th century "aristocratic system", as you have claimed.
Well, the views he had on how companies operated was based on aristocratic models of wealth. For example, the idea that the owner of a company, the capital, didn't add anything valuable to the production itself and only the workers were the ones doing so. He didn't consider that capital is not just inherited (as in aristocracy society, land owners and such) but also accumulated by working. And the fact that without a person creating the infrastructure, buying equipment and finding markets and customers, the product of labor is useless.
So claiming workers have to own the means of production is cool once the means of production are there, but useless if there are none. Thinking about land, it made sense that who works the land, owns the result (something that, by the way, never happened in any communist country in history). But he developed his work after the industrial revolution.
So, being a factory worker was useful and produced benefits AS LONG AS someone else invested money in building the factory, buying materials and machinery to start producing goods. He disregarded all this added value, and ignored the risk involved in investing all that money.
What is the result of work for a worker that assembly a car if there is no materials, no factory, no system and no distribution chain? Zero.
You've written a slightly long post there but I am not seeing any primary source quotes that show that Marx was "thinking (without real experience) about XIX century aristocratic system".
You did not quote Marx in supporting him, so I fail to see why anyone need quote Marx while contradicting you.
I did not make any claims about Marx here. RC-bit claimed that; "the ideas from Marx were outdated even in his own time". I don't even know which claims RC-bit is referring to, as RC-bit has never quoted Marx.
I remember Scott Alexander making a very similar point in one of the many SSC post on Socialism, can't actually remember which one though but it definitely feels like an inevitable ideology.
I just want to thank you again for your dedication to the 'Marxbro' character, truly a masterclass of trolling
Poe's law I guess, I was assuming total sincerity but it's hard to tell the difference between a troll and a true believer!
I'm honestly curious what flavour of Marxist you are, I'm assuming Leninist based on your name? The name does make you seem rather troll-y but I guess it's good to make your opinions explicit.
I agree that Rationalist spaces aren't very sympathetic to Marxist views, especially the more authoritarian strains of it. My own political views are somewhere in the region occupied by G. K. Chesterton, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky and Aneurin Bevan, which I guess is the "democratise the economy" strain of socialism. I don't trust corporations and definitely think they have too much power, but also don't think giving the government total control over everything is a great solution.
I'm a long term poster and older commenters know that my beliefs are sincere. I get accused of being a troll because most people aren't used to seeing Marxist views advocated for in Rationalist hangouts.
;)
I think you seem troll-like because you never actually make an affirmative case for anything you claim. See upthread where you make a claim about marx (that he's correct and that communism is "based on looking at the objective conditions of the worker under capitalism") with no supporting arguments, but when someone disagrees you demand quotes from a primary source.
I've ultimately become convinced that you're sincere but no good at engaging with people on fair or convincing terms, though.
Magness argues that it was only because of the successful revolution in Russia that Marxism got more popular than other variants of socialism.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3578840
Marxism got more popular because it is correct.
Which core ideas? Enumerate them and why they are correct.
Who is the most popular Marxist writer on Substack?
Is that why Marx and Engels had to distort, fabricate, and take out of context, pretty much all of the "evidence" they claimed to have?
Such as?
The Condition of the Working Class in England, the primary empirical source for Marx's analysis, is pretty thoroughly discredited in the 1958 Henderson and Challoner translation. Misquotations, errors of transcription, citing of sources from 20 or 40 years earlier, leaving out of inconvenient facts, and other errors abound.
Another analysis from Cambridge in the 1880s demonstrated that Marx manipulated information from the Blue Books he relied on, piecing together quotations from different sections or cutting them off when inconvenient for him, resulting in a conclusion that is entirely backwards. For a more general review, including that report, see https://www.amazon.com/Karl-Marx-Critical-Examination-Works/dp/1870116003
If this is the case, we can probably stop telling Scott to read Marx. Any writer who can observe the conditions of the worker under capitalism should suffice.
You really shouldn't use the word "objective" when describing any sort of value judgment, such as worker conditions.
I would be extremely tempted to have the nation-state forgotten just to see what happened next and what kind of wild spin the magic spell would have to come up with to explain away the geopolitical status quo. Also, I would be secretly hoping that somehow we’d end up with loose feudalism.
I would agree with you about some version of feudalism. In my mental model of how societies work, it would be a matter of time to see cities behaving like small states (or even feuds). The problem I see with this is that the amount of fights and wars between close cities/towns would increase dramatically in the short term.
Check out Somalia (minus Somaliland).
Not really responsive to the question—Somalia was dysfunctional before, its state collapsed in violence, and everybody has attempted to enforce the creation of a new state with no success.
Didn't we basically run this experiment already, until the rise of nationalism in the 18th century? And aren't we currently running it in most of Africa, except they didn't forget about nation states – the Lulubo or whoever just don't have any chance of creating one?
… No? What I’m talking about is curiosity whether it’s possible to support a modern world without the concept of the nation-state. Your suggestions just define the question away.
But is there any question that people would just reinvent it? Like how could you stop people from thinking "hey, why are we being ruled by those foreigners; let's create our own state instead"?
The premise of your question doesn’t seem sensible. The modern nation-state cares little for self-rule and frequently subjects large minorities to outside rule and justifies this on the basis of the absolute right of *states* to govern themselves (rather than, say, peoples)—consider for example the continual war in the U.S. against localism, and how legislative power increases in scope the farther away it is from the township level. I see no reason why it is natural to assume that the absence of the nation-state would create *more* foreign rule rather than less; that’s backwards. Colonialism only arose because the nation-state existed and viewed possessions of its people as its own possessions; such a relationship would not have been even considered sane in the ‘colonies’ of the ancient Greek polis.
No, the historical rule before the nation-state was the opposite of what you (apparently) assume.
But the premise of my question is what historically happened. E.g. the Greeks revolted against Ottoman rule, the Vietnamese revolted against French rule, the Finns somehow convinced the Soviets to free them, and so on, and these nations went from foreign rule to national rule, and the world thus moved from multinational empires to nation states.
Note that I have no doubt that *states* would exist in some regard, but that is not the same thing.
Not sure how specific you're allowed to get, but with enough specificity surely it can flatout cancel some catastrophic x-risks? Or just generally improve society by about *gestures* this much?
Twitter, or perhaps some more broad segment of the social media world. I think many social networks do actually negatively impact the world, definitely think that about Twitter in particular.
I think it's also a very effective use of the item, removing something which is hard to reconstruct. A social media product whose user base forgets it all at once probably never recovers from the sudden loss of the network their product is built on and consists in.
And forgetting our reliance on social media--maybe it'll come back in some form but we and our politics won't have built the same relationship with it.
That a commitment to rationality is not a major tenet of all world religions.
Or, can we not use negatives as springboards to inject new beliefs because propositional logic? Do De Morgan's Laws work? How long of a proposition with how many conjunctions?
Does the user remember the fact and the use of the magical item? Can the user survey its effects without disturbing them? Can the user then "invent" the forgotten thing?
If the artifact works differently on "facts" and "beliefs" then it can probably be turned into a powerful oracle with the right proposition...
Maybe in a different direction, something beautiful but commonplace? Give people the joy of experiencing something for the first time. Sunrise, maybe. What chocolate tastes like. Something like that
Riffing on this a little, what it feels like to be hungry? How many people die of preventable disease every day? To push it in a more EA direction
I think sunrise, if I weren't expecting it, would be absolutely terrifying. Only when you know you're *not* about to burn to death is it possible to appreciate the beauty.
Wouldn't sunset be worse? I mean, at first sunrise is just pretty, nice big light in the sky. But sunset...its starts getting cold pretty fast, and it would take all the way until dawn to realize it wasn't going to all the way to absolute zero.
https://xkcd.com/1391/
And similarly: https://www.theonion.com/rotation-of-earth-plunges-entire-north-american-contine-1819568317
The belief that corporate (stock) ownership is purely an investment activity. Would be interesting to see if workers would be able to push towards a stakeholder ownership system.
This likely wouldn't impact the operations of most companies in any way, but the sudden question of "who owns this business?" would be an enormous boon to workers, users, and other stakeholders of the business.
Why would workers be better off having to own stock in the company they work for than in other companies? It seems like the main effect of a 'stakeholder' system would be to leave workers woefully under-diversified. I mean if I work at Ford, I'd rather just get paid in cash so I can by mutual funds than forced into buying Ford stock.
1. Skin-in-the game - I believe certain businesses and platforms would work better with an ownership system that appropriately compensates the contributions of its respective stakeholders.
2. Increased compensation - I never said ownership in lieu of monetary compensation. Salaries would be unchanged, but the question is who owns equity. Essentially, it's a boost to worker pay if they can negotiate for more.
3. It's not just about workers, but other stakeholders, like users. I personally think it's stupid that platforms are worth billions of dollars off the back of user contributions and network effects, yet users have no claim to ownership because of the systems we've inherited. I just wonder what might change if we forgot about those ownership paradigms.
If the typical value people deliver to Facebook exceeds the typical value Facebook delivers to them -- why does anyone use Facebook? That would seem to be a losing proposition of such obvious stupidity -- like paying $1 for a ticket to a lottery in which the maximum prize was 50 cents -- that hardly anybody could be expected to sign up for it voluntarily.
> If the typical value people deliver to Facebook exceeds the typical value Facebook delivers to them -- why does anyone use Facebook?
Tons of people buy lottery tickets and those are definitely negative EV (in dollars as well as utilons). People don't make optimal decisions all the time.
Optimal for who? By saying buying a lottery ticket is sub-optimal you're imposing a definition of optimal on the discussion. If optimal here is best return on investment then sure, lotteries are sub-optimal (unless you win I guess...). As lottery winners don't invest their winning by buying millions of lottery tickets though, indicating that perhaps this isn't a failure to understand return on investment, it appears possible there's another definition of optimal in play here. Maybe it's just convenience: lotteries are generally optimised for ease of purchase; sensible investment vehicles less so (which one comes with lots of warning about losing your funds that have to be read?). Maybe the optimisation is whatever thrill the purchaser gets from participating in gambling (an activity the majority of humans seem to enjoy). Maybe the optimisation is that the payback is so large as to be life-changing if it does happen.
It's hugely presumptuous to assume a decision someone else makes is sub-optimal without seeking to understand their optimum position. The "people play lotteries don't they" comment is not some great rebut to the fact people are broadly rational actors, but instead a rather tired and lazy analysis that assumes there is one optimal outcome for all. It's in effect a high modernist view, that we can optimise the lives of others through selecting what we see as the best outcome. How useful this would be as a mode of analysis probably depends on your priors around issues like the role of the state and individual autonomy, but as a result of that it's only going to be an accepted argument against rational actors in economic transactions by people who are inclined to believe people are not rational actors in the first place.
Silver_Swift has a great response to your question, but I just wanted to add something.
Our norms surrounding stock ownership are descended from an era where business ventures were much risker, with the potential for an unpredictable catastrophic loss. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/east-india-company
I believe, that similar to the way hedge funds have abused another hallmark of the mercantile era, nowadays dubbed the carried interest loophole, stock ownership is an inherited tradition that would not re-emerge as ubiquitously if all knowledge of it were previously erased.
Some form would certainly re-emerge, but due to the very different economics of the internet and modern business, I would hope that our society could develop more interesting and economically efficient ownership methods.
You're asserting that business ventures are no longer risky and no longer have the potential for catastrophic loss?
You're wrong on the facts anyway. Stock companies without explicit public interest and government approval were banned in Britain prior to 1825. So that era actually had a regime much closer to what an interventionist liberal would want: strict government control and no private stock corporations. It created a system of official corruption, corporate boards given out as favoritism, too big to fail companies, and imperialism. But that's another story.
Private joint stock corporations proliferated with the industrial revolution in the 19th century. And our modern norms about the stock market (retirement investing, fund dominance, retail buyers, modern style trading floors, etc) largely come from the 1970s.
You seem to be assuming that it is a zero-sum game. This is not a reasonable assumption.
Exactly this. Facebook benefits from its users but that doesn't mean those benefits cost the users anything.
If the value X gains from making a trade with me exceeds the value I gain from trading with them, would it be irrational to make that trade? I would think that the only thing that matters is whether I gain value or not, mutually beneficial trades are not cancelled out just because one party is gaining more than the other.
Results from the Ultimatum Game show that people do in fact reject trades where they would gain value because the counterparty would gain more.
It is an interesting idea. However I believe there coul be downsides for the workers themselves. In particular, the amount of stocks would end up (probably) depend on when you join the company. It is not the same thing joining Microsoft when it was selling first versions of DOS, where the stock didn't even exist as such, but the equivalent would be just few dollars per stock, than today. So, at first the employee would get more stock than later. Otherwise, if you would get the same amount of stock no matter when you joined, nobody would start in any company until it was big. Basically it would be a net loss, working in startup, not knowing if it would survive and doing a lot of work. Why would you do that when you could join a big corporation that has thousands of dollars in revenue and an established business with high value stocks?
No system would be perfect, workers might have to assume greater risk, and some startups might struggle to get funded, but I think the process of discovering these pain points would be useful in developing a new system.
Who knows if it would work or be widely adopted, but I think hitting the refresh button would make space for creative and potentially better ownership models than the standard we've inherited.
As I mentioned in a different reply, I have no doubt that the current system of stock ownership would re-emerge, because situations with significant risk to investors or early employees might demand it.
However, I also believe that businesses or platforms might settle on other ownership systems, because the economics of their business would empower stakeholders to demand it.
My argument is simply that without the tradition of stock ownership, we might see a variety of ownership models emerge.
"workers might have to assume greater risk, and some startups might struggle to get funded"
This is interesting as I realized I was assuming the attitudes of workers would be the same as today: most of workers tend to be risk averse, in my opinion. Meaning that people tend to look for jobs with a fixed salary plus some fixed benefits. They do not consider on average getting less money in exchange for ownership, as they usually have the option to find a bigger company that offers a more stable income (at least, in principle).
But resetting this could potentially make workers assume that risk is tied to any job. That could evolve into a different system of ownership in which the default would be to have skin in the game as an employee. I like this idea...
"Salaries would be unchanged"
Why on Earth would they? Salaries are set in order to make the total compensation be whatever it needs to be to attract the desired number and skill level of workers. If you add to non-salary compensation, total compensation goes up. Even if people magically forget enough for you to get away with this, it won't take the suits long to rederive "I bet we could lower salaries and still attract all the workers we need".
Salaries are set by the owners of the company. If suddenly we have no idea who the owners are, it's possible that workers could negotiate to retain their salaries and capture a greater share of ownership.
Think about it this way. If suddenly we had no idea who owned Amazon, and the company had to figure that out. Would Jeff Bezos still end up with 12%? It's certainly possible, but I don't believe there's a guarantee.
I also believe that if we were working from a blank slate, their thousands of factory workers and drivers would have a better opportunity to collectively organize and improve their total compensation.
Also, if they adopt a new form of ownership that more broadly represents the workers, would they still retain a ruthless profit-driven motive that compels workers to urinate in plastic bottles?
It's possible, but I feel it might lead to something different that people aren't currently exploring, due to default corporate structures.
If we suddenly had no idea who owned Amazon, who's figuring out who owns it? I don't see why it would be "the employees and no one else", heck it might not be any of the employees: if magic or an extremely improbable series of fires destroyed all records of Amazon's ownership then the only thing I can imagine happening is the messiest legal battle in history which is ultimately settled by the government (probably on terms very favourable to the government).
But suppose for the sake of argument that your thing happens and everyone currently working at Amazon sets up a new arrangement where they have the equity and higher total compensation. The next day the reformed Amazon wants to open a new warehouse and hire some workers for it. Why would they set salaries at this new warehouse according to any principle other than "let's pay them whatever it takes to recruit the number of workers we need and not a penny more"? Everyone at the company has equity now so every dollar they don't spend paying new employees goes straight into the pockets of the existing ones. All of their incentives point away from generosity and towards new, unrepresented workers peeing in bottles.
The problem with skin in the game is that it breaks down for large or even medium-sized companies. Suppose I work at a company with 100 employees where each employee contributes an equally valuable amount of labour. If I put my nose to the grindstone and work twice as hard as everyone else we now have 1% more value worth of my labour, my compensation is not going to meaningfully increase. This effect is only really relevant for tiny startups, which already do tend to offer equity-based compensation (usually because startups have more spare equity than cash).
Forget that drug use is unethical and illegal. Suddenly it's fine, and the world improves.
I missed this and said something similar in another comment. I think it’s really interesting to wonder what ordering of ok to immoral we would come up with next time.
I'd be very tempted to make everyone forget American political parties. Everybody'd still have their political views, and they might form large coalitions, but the coalitions would be based on current views not historical contingencies.
If I'm allowed to not be subject to the effect myself, so I can observe the consequences, then I would have people forget about mortality. They would eventually rediscover it, of course, when it gradually became clear that nobody escapes aging and death. But it might take a while, years, maybe even decades.
Reason being, my working hypothesis is that if nobody had any awareness of mortality we would not be any happier, and it would be interesting to test that.
rewrite the constitution
RE: "The Wizard and the Prophet" book review -- I really liked it, but does anyone else feel really weirded out by the feeling that "Wizard" and "Prophet" are going to start being little tribal markers in this community? I understand the sense in which they were meant in the book, but I really feel like those terms obscure more than they clarify and invite people to defend the honor of vague teams more than specific ideas and individuals.
Yeah. This leads to a possibly fruitful line of questioning: Do all labels tend to degenerate away from whatever clarification they once endowed, into defending the honor of vague teams? And if there are some labels which resist that tendency, or enforce that tendency even harder, what traits do they have in common which bring about that result?
My guess would be that labels that are constructed to pick out behaviors/approaches rather than personality traits are probably less likely to lead to this sort of splitting. For instance, if I drew a distinction about approaching a problem as an "expert" or a "layperson," most people will intuitively understand that they will need to play both roles at different times, depending on the context. If I make a distinction about "specialists' vs "synthesizers," I'm creating identity labels people will latch on to and want to push as a superior way to approach the world.
The pattern I usually see is that people like one label more than another, and so they filter thinkers/activists/whatevers into teams not only by who best fits each label's arbitrary criteria, but also *which one makes my team look good and the other team look bad*. It's really hard to resist this temptation once the flags have been planted.
If a tool is useful, it will also be misapplied.
I think that they're unlikely to get much traction as "de-growther" and "techno-optimist" (obviously this isn't as precise) cover a lot of the divide already.
These hyphenated terms aren't as snappy and memorable, however. Before that one post came along, people elsewhere on the Internet made do with "Republican" and "Democrat," you know, and yet "Red Tripe" and "Blue Tribe" sure have caught on like a house on fire.
Not sure "Red Tripe" has quite caught on yet. But give it time..
Oh, I just mean they've caught on within the SSC community and related circles.
There's a joke about a typo.
To be fair, Americans basically have to contend with tripe on the one hand and a strange tribe on the other hand, so... serendipity?
Oh! Dear. I look quite the fool. I'd noticed the ‘typo’ in Anteros's post but somehow not in mine, and felt it wouldn't be polite to mention it. Good one!
I prefer the terms "Team R" and "Team D" since they attract the same sort of sloganeering loyalties that one so often sees in fans of a given athletic team.
To be fair, I have heard sports fans give me more grounded reasons why they cheer for a given sports team than what I hear from the average political junkie why they cheer for on party over the other.
Also, like sports rivals, Team R and Team D *need* each other. Not only does the rivalry keep the fans engaged, it also keeps the coalitions that make up Team R and Team D from disintegrating.
Take away Team R, and Team D would no longer have an excuse for not giving their supporters everything that they want. The same could be said for Team R.
I hope not. I already find the tribal marker terms used by the community a little annoying. For a community devoted to rationalism, the frequency with which in-group signaling is used by so many people here is rather disappointing.
is in-group signalling necessarily irrational?
in any case, I think use of community specific jargon has value beyond just signalling. Suppose that in the course of discussing whatever, it's relevant to reference Chesterton's Fence(or whatever). It's really handy and efficient that I can just say Chesterton's Fence with a high probability that it's understood, rather than spend an extra paragraph on a tangent to explain the concept before looping back to the point I was making. Having shared memes facilitates more effective conversations
Something I've been thinking about lately is how, when you're dealing with a motte and bailey argument, you have to remember not to throw out the motte with the bailey (assuming the motte is actually a reasonable, defensible position). In other words, just because a position is often held in bad faith, doesn't necessarily make it wrong, and it's still important to evaluate the motte position on its own terms. In fact, assuming motte and bailey arguers are rational, they will intentionally pick strong positions as their mottes, and it would give them too much power to automatically dismiss any position that is ever held in bad faith.
Yeah this makes sense to me - the fallacy (whether intentional or not) in a motte and bailey is conflating the two positions, right? So to counteract it, you have to assert that there is a distinction between them, and then you can accept only the motte (if you agree with it) rather than necessarily rejecting both.
Yeah. And like, the context here is I feel like sometimes strong arguments fail to make an impression because they end up getting abused as mottes in motte and bailey arguments. So like, a lot of MRA people refuse to listen to any feminist arguments at all because they have come to believe it is all in bad faith. And the thing is, they're not totally wrong! There's a lot of bad-faith arguing out there. But the core, solid feminist points are still often quite insightful and valid, and throwing them out is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And to flip it around, a lot of leftists are innately distrustful of any sort of market economics because they've come to believe that free markets are nothing more than a way to slip in reactionary conservatism through the back door. While this is true in many cases, it's not universally true, and it would be a terrible mistake to just reject markets entirely.
"And to flip it around, a lot of leftists are innately distrustful of any sort of market economics because they've come to believe that free markets are nothing more than a way to slip in reactionary conservatism through the back door. While this is true in many cases, it's not universally true, and it would be a terrible mistake to just reject markets entirely."
Actually a lot of leftists are innately distrustful of market economics because they've read a lot about markets and they know about the inherent problems of the market (and especially the market under capitalism).
There are many theories of Market Socialism, since it doesn't make any sense to centrally plan every lemonade stand. Different people want different things, and markets are pretty good for that. Of course, Markets look very different if the people that produce goods also own them.
Basing the entire economy and political system around markets has its problems, which is why no state has a truly free market devoid of subsidies and regulations. The real question is how the market should be run, how to ensure that the benefits are widely distributed, and how to factor in negative externalities. The only claim was that rejecting all the insights of market economics is counterproductive.
"The only claim was that rejecting all the insights of market economics is counterproductive."
It's not counter-productive. What's actually counter-productive is rejecting all the insights of left-wing criticisms of markets.
I agree with you that there are many important criticisms of markets, but if you reject them entirely you end up with total state planning of everything, which is basically the same as working for a massive corporation under capitalism, with no freedom and massive inefficiency, except you can't even quit your job since the state has a monopoly on everything.
Most socialist nations had some market elements (buying goods with currency), so a better understanding of markets (strengths as well as weaknesses) seems like it would be very useful to the left. The alternative is that people illegally set them up anyway, black markets and corruption thrive when central planning doesn't give people what they want.
FWIW, I think marxist analysis has important things to say about markets, and an understanding of markets that fails to take marxist ideas into account is probably missing some important pieces.
My observation isn't really pointed at sophisticated marxist thinkers with highly developed thoughts on how markets work under capitalism - it's more pointed at like, knee-jerk anti-market sentiment from people who are vaguely lefty but aren't actually knee-deep in the guts of marxist thought.
I'm going to have to agree with MarxBro here; the usual arguments against market economics - outside of the most extreme SJers, and people *that* extreme aren't actually especially common - have to do with inequality rather than social mores.
(My model for politics is as a space of dimension 3+. Economic left/right - socialism vs. Gilded Age. Social libertine/authoritarian - what level of freedom one should have in personal affairs. And, depending on the specific context, *at least* one cultural axis and sometimes more. The West at the moment can mostly be considered to have one cultural axis i.e. SJ vs. conservatism. For the record, I'm a fairly-solid leftist (though a bit less so than I used to be), a hardliner libertine, and a moderate on culture.)
Motte is usually chosen for being highly defendable, so probably not at all controversial. The problem is keeping it separate from the Bailey in everyone's minds. Good raiders loot the Bailey and ignore the motte.
If you're not simply raiding, maybe you should try to smash up the walkways that allow people to run out easily from the motte into the bailey. By which metaphor I mean to suggest making it clear what fallacies are involved in switching from one to the other.
Scott,
I’m not sure if this is the place for post requests, but I’d really love a post on the medium to long term effects, or lack thereof, of MDMA on the brain.
also curious about this, most resources I see are about short term or DRUGS SCARY BAD
I'd read that. Have you been to the MAPS site? I did a high dive into the MDMA research last summer and found that their reviews provided some of the best information available. https://maps.org/research/mdma
The key thing I took away from my reading was that MDMA causes short-term serotonin depletion, medium-term neuroadaptation, and if abused, long-term neurotoxicity. The neuroadaptation wears off after 3-5 weeks but the neurotoxicity permanently damages serotonergic nerve endings.
Short-term serotonin deficiency: After you force your brain to dump all its serotonin, it takes time to make more. This is why you feel depressed for a couple days when you come down.
Medium-term neuroadaptation: your brain responds to the serotonin overload by down-regulating receptors (essentially becoming less sensitive to serotonin for a while), and it takes about a month for your brain to normalize. This is why you may not feel like your normal self for a couple weeks.
Neurotoxicity: Pure uncontaminated MDMA can damage your nerve endings, possibly through oxidative damage, when used in a fashion that plenty of ravers consider "normal". I saw one research paper demonstrating that nerve endings grew back with a shortened and irregular branching pattern, but it seems that the brain never fully recovers. It's hard to find papers that control well for poly-drug-use, but the damage reputedly results in depression, verbal memory problems, and emotional dysregulation.
Bear in mind that most of the research was done on animals with doses that don't remotely resemble human recreational doses, and there's one infamous example of a study where they later discovered that they had mixed up the MDMA with meth amphetamine. This ironically obscures the truth of MDMA neurotoxicity because fans of the drug can easily point to a couple studies and say "The evidence against MDMA is bunk".
But there is evidence that MDMA overuse has long term negative impacts on human cognition. You just have to sift through a lot of papers to find it, and the results aren't always very clear-cut due to how the studies were designed (I mean, you can't experiment on people with drugs like you can experiment on rats, so it makes it hard to develop a truly well-controlled study that eliminates all the effects the of the other drugs MDMA users might take).
On the flip side, MAPS provides mounting evidence that a very moderate dose of MDMA is helpful for treating ptsd, anxiety, and other stuff.
Like most things, it also probably depends on your brain.
Thanks for the reply. I glanced at MAPS in the past but I couldn’t motivate myself to really delve into their writings because I worry they are biased. I’d love to know what the range is for doses and frequency of use that would cause long term damage. I’d love to do a deep dive as well but I don’t really know how to navigate the process of reading through different research and deciding what to trust.
I'd love to see someone write that up. I was just trying to pull up a couple papers for you but I'm having a hard time finding the stuff I read a few months ago.
If you're wondering how much MDMA it takes to damage a human brain, I had the same question last summer. I took it with some friends, twice in one day without measuring it (bad idea) and had such a terrible come-down that I was afraid I'd done something terrible to my brain. So I tried to find that information online and it turns out it's a really hard question to answer.
There are a lot of small studies with inconclusive results. There were some big studies that linked heavy MDMA use with long-lasting reduced performance on verbal memory tasks. But those studies never specified how much per night / how often the heavy users were taking, which seems to matter a lot. Instead, they generalized by putting people into broad categories like "took more than 30 doses in a year". And those people may have been using other drugs, drinking while doing MDMA, or other stuff that raises the likelihood of neurotoxicity.
MDMA is clearly not harmless. Research groups have done terrible things to monkeys just to prove that MDMA is not harmless.
When it comes to knowing where to draw the line, I would actually look at MAPS for a rough idea. Since they're sponsoring actual clinical trials, they are incentivized to use moderate-yet-effective doses with a low likelihood of toxicity. You might consider their dosage rates to be an upper limit. Here's a page describing a PTSD study: https://maps.org/research/mdma/ptsd/veterans
Thanks. I’ll check that out.
What is the difference between haplogroups and race?
A shot at a reply: Race is vague, haplogroups are concrete. But sometimes the vagueness of race is useful - it can catch things, like similarity of appearance, which has social consequences and may not be fully captured in the genetic picture.
Haplogroups are based on either y chromosome or mitochondrial dna. It tracks descent along one line and therefore has no mixing. It sometimes reveals interesting history of single-sex migrations, and it sometimes shows very little resemblance to anything, because it reflects such a small fraction of ancestry.
"Race" doesn't really have a definition, but it probably comes from both parents and can be mixed.
Not completely. A haplogroup certainly has the possibility of indicating only very distant relationships between the tested subject and his ancestral 'grouping,' but this presupposes a particular genetic distance. Someone who is descendant primarily from one ethnic origin, for example, would still map onto a particular haplogroup, and that would correspond very closely to his given ancestry.
This is why haplogroups are meaningless for defining ancestry in the absence of autosomal DNA. We may expect to find a large number of men with Irish ancestry exhibiting the Y-group R1b - but say we find it in a Middle Easterner, with other Western European genetic markers. That indicates more information about his ancestry than would otherwise be the case - i.e., his fathers' side likely descending from Western Europe.
My maternal haplogroup is D4i2, which appears to most commonly be associated with northeast Asia and west coast indigenous Americans. I, and my mother, are white, of European ancestry, and have no recognizable non-European features or cultural heritage. Except, apparently, through a minute part of our ancestry that happens to go straight through the maternal line, as opposed to the vastly dominant part of our ancestry that does not happen to go through the maternal line.
Similarly, I'm in haplogroup R0 (Arabian), despite otherwise having 100% British Isles ancestry.
Maternal haplogrouping for men is far more random, as it isn't a given whether you've inherited the MtDNA from your mother's mother or mother's father, and whether he/she inherited theirs from their mother's mother... etc. It only makes sense for women.
Uh, what?
One: As far as I know, you're wrong. Maternal haplogroup (ie, from mitochondrial DNA) comes from your matrilineal line, full stop, regardless of your sex.
Two: If you could inherit your mitochondrial DNA from either maternal grandparent, I don't see what mechanism would prevent that from being true for women as well as men.
Three: It doesn't actually matter. The point of haplogroups is that it gets you an interesting insight into any one particular line of your ancestry in a way that would be washed out by lots of mixing of other genes in your "normal" DNA. Which particular line of your ancestry it is doesn't really matter. We don't care about our mother's line to ancient past except in as much as that's what we can actually tell about.
(My paternal haplogroup is boring because it's exactly what you'd expect from my ancestry).
One: MtDNA is passed down from mother to son, but it's a toss-up as to from what side of *her* family the DNA originates, since women receive a portion from both father and mother. You're correct that it's matrilineal - try to imagine that matrilineal line branching endlessly up your family tree. That's what the possibilities look like, and why MtDNA is useless for tracing direct ancestry in men.
Two: Not exactly sure what you're saying, but the reason is works for women is that the MtDNA can be compared to each female ancestor and thus the exact route the DNA took to *reach* her determined. Both women and men inherit maternal DNA, but only the woman inherits a portion from her father and well as her mother.
Three: Maybe it matters and maybe it doesn't. I suppose that depends on what your definition of value is - or curiosity.
PS: This is assuming you are talking about the genetic markers that enable us to trace maternal haplogroups; those are the tricky ones. Maternal autosomal DNA inheritance will be far more varied.
You're confusing mitochondrial DNA with the X chromosome.
Regardless of your sex, you got your mitochondrial DNA from your mother, who got it from her mother, and so on. Males do not pass on their mitochondrial DNA at all, not to any child. Mitochondrial DNA is fully separate from the nuclear DNA that you get from both parents.
As for nuclear DNA, you have several pairs (23 IIRC), and one of those pairs is the sex chromosomes, XX for females and XY for males. A male gets his Y from his father and his X from his mother, but with a female there's no telling which parent provided which X, so the X isn't very good for establishing maternal lineage.
Duh. That's what I get from posting late while I'm writing another paper.
You're right, I was confusing the two. Still, if you swap the terms out I sound ridiculously good.
They are very different. Race is based on the autosome, while haplogroups are based on ancestors who only contributed a tiny portion of one's autosome.
Does anyone know what's up with US lumber prices? There appear to be two competing narratives - it's about tariffs on Canadian lumber or it's about beetles that ate a load of trees due to climate change - and it's hard to work out from a distance what the facts actually are. (Also it's possibly pent up demand from the coronavirus slowdown of construction and moving house?)
You're in luck - WSJ's "The Journal" podcast just did an episode on it.. https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal?mod=podcasts_carousel has all the episodes, you're looking for the 4/29 one. I'll summarize below, but I highly recommend taking a listen yourself; the podcasts are very well-made and usually on topics this community would find interesting, this one's not an exception.
Per the podcast - short story, sawmills are the bottleneck. Lumber prices are up because of a housing boom which they can't keep up with, especially after scaling back production due to COVID. The crazy part is that while finished lumber prices are way *up*, the price of raw (unfinished, unprocessed) wood is way *down*, because there's a huge glut of pine trees in the Southeast which were planted because of government incentives programs from 30-ish years ago. All of those trees are now hitting the market at once, driving wood prices down.
Tariffs probably don't help, maybe they're pricing potential competitors out of the market, but with the prices where they are I maybe doubt it. But it's definitely not a supply issue, even if beetlekill pine is a thing.
How much time and investment does it take to start a lumbermill? Because cheap input and pricey output is precisely the sort of economic situation that ought to be quickly solved by new businesses entering the market. However, if it takes too long to set up new lumbermills such that the current prices will no longer be there by the time it's finished, then that wouldn't work.
Yeah, the podcast touches on this. I wasn't totally convinced - it seems like there is a genuine opportunity here - but their answer was something like, modern sawmills are highly technical and computerized (like most manufacturing nowadays), and assembling the gear *and especially talent* necessary to get started is a non-trivial endeavor, and by the time you would manage to get it started up, there is a risk the prices would be unfavorable and you'd be out your (sizable) initial investment.
Yes, I agree. I know semiconductor plant fabs are way more complicated (and are probably the most complicated capital good out there), but getting one up and running takes years. Furthermore, the bottleneck there is the human capital. You need highly experienced people to make a fab plant run. So, I imagine the problem with setting up a sawmill is similar, though less complicated.
The raw wood price thing must be pretty regional. I live in the PNW, and we literally-like-last-week harvested a Douglas fir stand on our property (and harvested several other stands last summer/fall) and are getting very high prices for them from the mills.
Odd Lots recently had a lumber trader on to explain what's going on: https://pca.st/episode/156e1613-c015-4135-bb50-88183e0f6567
It's a variety of supply- and demand-side factors forming a kind of perfect storm. On the sawmill side, I believe the sawmills have been wearyof expanding or building new mills because they got burned pretty badly after the housing crash in 2007 and subsequent recession.
Tariffs and climate change? What? It's about global supply chain and manufacturing breakdown. Lumber is an international market and it's hard to move stuff around which leads to wood being incredibly cheap near where it's harvested and expensive as you get further away. America and Canada are wood producing nations so that's less of an issue for us. Unless you want, I don't know, Brazilwood. But that just pushes it one level up to lumber. Lumber is heavy and hard to transport so it'd be especially affected by small changes. It's one of the bulkier things you use in houses which means there's less spare capacity hanging around. Meanwhile, sawmills were hit by COVID like everything else.
And the market was pretty grim last year. That's scaring off people from entering. Yes, the price is up. But is it up permanently? Are we in a bubble? If we are and we return to the 2019 status quo, then sawmill profitability will return to low and declining (and be less than it is up north in Canada).
Interesting that what you describe in the US is completely different from where I am in the South of France. Lumber prices are the same as they were a year ago - nothing seems to have changed at all. The local sawmills look as busy as ever.
I'm not sure if the units make for an easy comparison, but we pay 300 euros per metre cubed (cash) for softwood, and 500 for oak.
Is lumber demand in the south of France like it is in the US? Do you have continual home building using lumber? I thought there was much less of that in Europe, both much less building of new homes in general, an a higher mix of stone and brickwork.
You're right that there isn't much wooden house-building in France. Modern eco-builders like to use wood, but that's probably less than 1% of new builds. I guess there's a certain amount used in roofing, flooring and renovation of wooden outbuildings, but nothing like the quantities in the US.
I think one of the big differences is that in rural France almost all the sawmills are tiny- mostly one man bands or at least very small outfits. But every other village has one and they double up as producers of firewood, so it's all very local.
I'm sure that the size of the businesses has made it easier for them to mostly carry on as normal through the long periods of lockdown.
The story I got from a fencing contractor was that COVID caused the lumber industry to miss a season of harvesting, which coupled with the increase in demand for home improvement stuff during lockdown made the supply chain a mess.
I know this violates a norm against unabashed bragging or something, but whatever:
I've recently found out that I write well (according to some people, anyway). I'm in undergrad, and at this point three professors have gone out of their way to tell me that my writing is head and shoulders above that of my peers. I literally did not know this until recently, since I've never had that sort of feedback mechanism. Is there anything I can or should, like, do with this information?
I have no desire to become an author, and I don't think I particularly love writing either, but of course it greatly depends on the subject matter. I feel like someone who is very good at math can put this talent to use in finance, economics, or many other fields. Someone who is good at programming can obviously put this to good use professionally. Someone who is very athletic can train for a specific sport. I feel like writing is something so general that there isn't an obvious way to leverage this as a strength, even if my professors are correct about me. Am I wrong about this, though? Is the answer just "write stuff?"
If you enjoy it you, have a career it. If it doesn’t make you happy find something that does and write well when it’s called for.
Writing has obvious leverage points, and but a lot depends on how you understand "author". Some careers that involve a lot of writing, or where the writing portion is particularly critical or influential
1. Consultant, Policy Analyst, Investment Analyst (broad cluster of careers where the job can be described as "research topic, write up analysis for others". Can be impactful, very well-compensated, or both)
2. Technical writer/Screenwriter: both fairly well-paid paths that combine skill at writing with something else (either tech or stories respectively) to produce a substantial salary
3. Journalist (Kelsey Piper being a local example of someone who turned being exceptionally good at writing into a viable and impactful career)
Thanks - option 1 is definitely most up my alley. Hoping to try working/interning at a think tank or in some other setting that allows for public policy analysis.
+1 for this idea. I've personally been shocked by how much I've been able to leverage my ability to research a topic and write impactful analysis into a remunerative career.
One potential caveat - you're ability to rise in this field at some point will start to rely on your public speaking skills. Writing a convincing analysis is great; the ability to both write a convincing analysis and then go brief someone on said analysis is better. If this is something you're not confident with, maybe take the time to do toastmasters or something to buff up these skills.
I'll second what somebody else already said about some sort of consultant or analyst position.
Also though, being good at writing usually just means you're good at thinking clearly and communicating, which positions you well for almost anything if you can just get a foot in the door.
Like most creative fields, getting paid well for writing is hard, even if you're good at it - because you're competing with people who like doing it, and people understand they don't need to pay as much to incentivize that work. Look at authors and academics; both crowded fields with bad median pay and volatile, reputation-based conditions for rising to the top. My advice: do not choose your career based on the fact that you have writing skills.
The good news is that writing is, as you say, a general skill. You can start doing whatever, and you will end up applying it; if nothing else, once you rise to management. (Frankly, coding is the same way, not that most people who are good at it know that.) Sorry if you were hoping for more concrete guidance, maybe other less cynical people can give specific pointers!
Yes, I suppose that there are two important dimensions here: talent and enjoyability. Even if I'm high on the former, the latter greatly increases the competition and decreases pay. Good to remember.
As an old guy with a mixed career in the rear-view mirror I cannot stress enough the importance of mechanical enjoyability.
For instance you might love the idea of being a journalist -- insightfully holding a mirror up to society -- but you'll struggle to maintain your commitment if the day-to-day tasks are not a good fit. Don't count on the exciting break-through moments to necessarily offset the countless hours on the phone, developing source relationships, pissing people off, organizing and editing under stressful deadlines, etc.
Sure, exploit your natural interests, skills, and talents, but aspire to be one of the lucky few who find enjoyment even in the grunt work.
As for writing, with fewer and fewer people becoming competent (thanks in part to social media), it'll further your advancement in just about any career area -- even if you discover you love nothing better than, say, planting trees.
Writing well is something that should be an important advantage in almost anything you do these days. It's hard to teach, so first of all, congratulations. I mean it.
You say "I have no desire to become an author"-- do you mean you have no desire to publish much of anything at all (whether fiction or blogposts or op-eds or anything in between), or that you have no desire to pursue it as a profession? If the former, then I think the one thing to keep in mind is that it can be useful to mention when applying to jobs, especially if you have evidence (e.g. high grades on a writing-intensive course). I don't know what profession you have in mind for yourself but writing skills are a big plus in huge swathes of profession possibilities these days (much more so than math and maybe more than programming in my view, though depends on the field of course).
If what you mean is that you don't want to be an author as a profession, I'd say that one of the best things about writing is that it can be a huge part of your life without it being your literal official title. Many many writers (not knowledgeable enough to say "most") start out pursuing other professions and become writers just because they discover they write well and like it. You might be surprised how often books are the result of "One day I just sat down and started writing". So what I would say is that if writing as a hobby or side interest remotely interests you, just try it out and see where it leads.
But even if not, good writing will get you far almost no matter what you do, even just in the sense of writing emails or reports or applications that have greater appeal. So enjoy!
Thank you very much. I really mean 'no desire to become a professional author.' I actually do have a very modest blog, which might lead somewhere and might just be a fun hobby. I do like writing, particularly when I feel I have something to say - just not enough for it to be the main thing I do day after day.
Great! Then I guess all I'll say is not to believe that there's such a big chasm between "lead somewhere" and "just a fun hobby." So, for example, I think people tend to overestimate the barrier of entry to formal published political writing (op-eds and the like) as opposed to more informal stuff (like blogposting), or the barrier of entry to writing a full-blown book. If you're a good writer, you can probably write a publishable book if you want to. Whether you do is another thing, but I think that's worth keeping in mind :)
Best of luck!
Piping in to say this x1000. There is no measurable gap between "lead" somewhere and "just a fun hobby."
I felt the same way you did, Aaron - I got good scores on college writing assignments but had no desire to "be a writer."
I started blogging anonymously for fun in 2018 (mostly so that I'd stop annoying my friends at happy hour by talking about the same topic ad nauseam). I ended up publishing weekly on that blog for three years. Recently, I pivoted to writing a site under my name because now I enjoy writing so much that I think I DO want to be a writer—whole thing.
But always tug at the loose ends, particularly when you're younger. Even if you don't write for a living, public writing as an extended phenotype is extremely powerful.
What kind of writing is it? Fiction? Something else? Which aspect of your writing do they feel stands out? Are there specific authors they compare you to?
All research based. First prof commented on a review essay on the effects of immigration, second was in response to several short responses and a paper in a philosophy of mind class. Third was in response to a review of prize competitions (a la DARPA Grand Challenge) hosted by the federal government.
Perhaps you have a more general aptitude for communicating research and technical information, which happens to show through in your writing. You might consider a profession where it's advantageous to be a good communicator. Professorship is one option... any public-facing position with a company whose work is fairly technical... leadership positions where you are responsible for training new people.
I had the same feedback in school for my writing, and I found that I was good at all of the above. Training the newbies was one of my favorite duties in my last position, simply because I love figuring out new ways to explain important concepts to people with different backgrounds.
One relevant point is that most undergraduates are very bad at writing. What your professors tell you is evidence that you are substantially better than the average but not evidence that you are good relative to professional writers. You might be, but you also might be substantially better than your fellow students and substantially worse than people who make their living by their writing.
If so, what you want to look for is the sort of position where it is valuable to be a competent writer but not necessary to be more than that.
On a related note, I finished Salamander this morning and its great. Thank you for creating it!
I like writing and reading. I used to think this meant I should work in a writing-adjacent career. However, I am now in medicine, which involves very little writing. I think it's harder to succeed in writing-heavy fields because they depend heavily on connections, whereas it's easier to make good money with less effort in STEM industries where skills can be measured more objectively. Just my 2c
> I feel like writing is something so general that there isn't an obvious way to leverage this as a strength ...
You just wrote something! And it's pretty clear and well written, tho not obviously "head and shoulders above" anyone, AFAICT.
But, as a programmer, I find writing to be enormously useful near constantly: emails, chat messages, documentation (both for other programmers and users), and even code comments. They _all_ benefit, and me and my 'audience' too, from being better written than not. I also think that my writing improved tremendously from all of that practice.
There's a 'rationality' concept of 'inferential distance': https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inferential-distance. Basically, it's the (or a) sequence of 'inferences' that need to be made by your audience to reach or understand your own belief/position. That's a very useful thing to keep in mind when talking to people, but also pretty ubiquitously useful when writing too. And the better you are at writing, the more easily you can help people bridge an inferential distance.
I agree with Keller's first suggestion about policy analysis etc. Writing skills are highly correlated with analytic skills (and it works both ways; teach kids to write better, make them practice, and their thinking also gets a lot clearer, leading to better math/science grades etc), so you'd probably be good at that. And if you find a field you're at least vaguely interested in and/or that aligns with your values, we tend to be come more interested the more we deeper we go.
Consulting is a big word w/many possible jobs/careers therein, but on average, people with consulting jobs report low job satisfaction even when they make great money. I suspect it's because everyone wants to call in the consultants, but no one wants to DO what the consultations recommend .....
OMG why can I not edit to remove the idiocies I've written? More deeper indeed ...
Writing well is important in law, if you have any interest in it.
I would say that superior writing skills will serve you well in almost any 'knowledge' profession. I had the same sort of feedback in high school and college, winning kudos and awards. But, after earning a PhD in mathematics and trying my hand at a few different jobs, I ended up making a decent and sustained go of it as a research consultant. And (this is the punch line) I often hear from my clients that they are happy to pay a premium for my analytic work because I can explain what I'm doing in clear and thoughtful prose.
If you're interested in a career in academia (or even just a PhD), writing is an invaluable skill that makes your papers much more likely to be accepted in a journal/conference. I won't tell you how many papers I've reviewed where the core idea seems to be sound and reasonable but the writing is so low-quality that it downgrades the paper a category and might even result in rejection. Same applies for grant proposals.
If you are a good writer, it does not matter what field you go into, you will stand out. This is especially true if it's a technical field like engineering or software development. I was very surprised in college, and later, that many engineers, who I always imagined to be among the smartest of people, are terrible writers. It seems we are dealing with two different, and not necessarily frequently intersecting, skills or intelligences. In Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, these would be the linguistic-verbal intelligence and the logical-mathematical intelligence.
Uh, in 10 years you will look back at this and laugh. A good engineer, banker, or whatever can be an asset in some very specific roles. A good engineer, banker, or whatever that can write well will be head-and-shoulders more valuable in a much wider range of roles. There are very few jobs in the modern economy that require an education* that doe not benefit from great communication skills.
*Not just credentials, but a real education, which does not need to come from a school.
1905 is often called the "Annus Mirabilis" because physics was revolutionized in a single year by Einstein publications. What field of study do you think is most likely to next see something similar in the future?
Not so much a field of study, but I expect 2025 to 2030 or so to finally become the year of space travel, when dropping $100k on a weekend in the low-earth orbit would become feasible.
I'd bet against that if I were a betting person. NASA currently paying $55 million per person on a Dragon launch. What are you expecting to change to bring that down literally 1000 fold in under a decade to make this profitable?
The big changes would be the extensive use of fully reusable spacecraft, and selling to new markets where customers aren't in the habit of writing blank checks for launch services. Long term, the price of travel to low Earth orbit should converge on something like the price of air travel from North America to Australia.
But, A: that's going to take more than 5-10 years and probably more than 5-10 Elon-years. And B: when you spend a weekend (or whatever) in Australia, you're staying in a hotel built of Australian materials delivered by truck, whereas every brick in the LEO Hilton will have to be delivered by spaceship. I do expect space tourism to be a regular thing by 2030, but not at a $100K/weekend price point.
I disagree; ground-to-ground will always be cheaper than ground-to-orbit. Ignoring relative prices of air vs. space travel, any reusable passenger orbiter is *also* a reusable super-fast intercontinental transit craft (via suborbital ballistic trajectory), and it will use much less fuel in that role (most of the delta-V expenditure in an orbiter is not in atmospheric exit, but in circularisation of the orbit).
Also, I'd be very hesitant to spend billions on an LEO hotel at the moment. MEO or higher, sure, but I very much doubt we're going to fix Kessler before it goes off (either naturally or via an ASAT exchange) and when it does everything in LEO is gone.
I don't think you've got the math right on this one. Orbit circularization and deorbit have roughly similar delta-V requirements, and both combined are pretty much a rounding error compared to reaching (near) orbit in the first place. The delta-V for launching onto a Los Angeles - Sydney suborbital trajectory is roughly 90% of that for launching from Cape Canaveral into Low Earth Orbit, circularizing, and returning to Earth.
The delta-V of gaining orbital speed is much more than that to reach 150 km (without any sideways speed). Actual launches gain a lot of the needed velocity *during* atmospheric escape (via thrusting diagonally), so the circularisation *phase* is only a little bit of the delta-V put into circularising (the numbers I've found are something like 10 km/s delta-V to reach LEO, which is, if I've done my maths correctly, about 7.5 km/s orbital speed, about 1.7 km/s GPE of going up 150 km, and the rest drag losses).
However, I did make a rather boneheaded error; I forgot that long-range suborbital trajectories still do need a lot of sideways speed, so while it should still be cheaper than orbit (particularly once you take into account hypersonic gliding on the downward leg) it won't be *that* much cheaper.
(My mention of Kessler in the previous post was badly phrased, incidentally; I should stress that I think it's fixable after it happens. However, that's not going to magically reassemble all the stuff destroyed, so I'd wait to build an LEO hotel until after it goes off and is fixed.)
Immunology, or more precisely immunotherapy. 100 years from now, when almost any form of cancer can be cured by reprogramming your T cells, people will look back at some event around about now and say "That was the moment!"
Of course, we don't recognize it now. Nobody did in 1905, either. Einstein notoriously won the Nobel in 1921 for the photoelectric effect, because people were still a little unsure about relativity.
If immunotherapy is our new general relativity, I would bet that the key moment is the discovery of checkpoint blockade rather than CAR T cells. If for no other reason than that we already saw a Nobel in medicine for checkpoint and most laymen would be hard-pressed to explain how a cell therapy and an inhibitory antibody are different.
That said, we will need to get a lot better at it. Right now everyone is scrambling to figure out why it either works perfectly or fails in particular patient combinations. I swear I've read 50+ metanalyses and papers looking for new biomarker combinations in the last year and so far nothing.
Patient populations, not combinations.
Some advancements in single cell sequencing that leads to surveillance with strong predictive power for particular therapies...but agree, I think we're missing a few pretty major pieces to complete the puzzle
Hey you're preaching to the choir about single cell sequencing, it's a hell of a tool. I'm doing a single nucleus based project myself.
That said, IMO you need to treat any kind of sequencing as hypothesis-generating rather than hypothesis-testing which I feel is a weakness in most of these papers and why I don't see much progress. Sequencing is uncovering pathways potentially involved with resistance but it's going to take a lot more work to figure out which ones are important and which of those we can do something about. There's a lot of money and eyeballs on the problem but it looks like we're still in the trial and error phase.
My -bet (not very strongly held) is that immunology and Immunotherapy are too complex for single insights to do that much, but I wouldn't mind being wrong.
AI seems most amenable to a sudden change, at least that's what people keep telling me.
AI
Lidar archaeology has been one for the past few years: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/lasers-lidar-driving-revolution-archaeology
CRISPR and mRNA technology are two other natural candidates.
Also, the term was originally used in a poem about the year 1666, that witnessed the London fire, as well as the plague. The term stuck because it also happened to be the year of many of Newton's big revolutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis
It's have to be something theoretical to fit in a single year. Both Einstein and Newton had all the data they needed before their anni mirabiles; their discoveries were neat models which explained a bunch of phenomena in one fell swoop.
AI usually gets mentioned in this type of questions. But I think it is more likely to see some new revolution with quantum computing. Even if we cannot make AI a reality, having some usable form of a quantum computer would unlock a lot of problems that we cannot solve right now.
So yeah, my bet is Quantum Computing.
Does anyone have theories explaining UFOs using the simulation hypothesis (more deeply than just saying "maybe they're artifacts of the simulation")? Probably any such explanation would still seem wildly implausible to me, but I'm just curious if it could work better than theories about extraterrestrials or secret government programs with super-advanced technology.
I'm skeptical that the simulation hypothesis has explanatory power over anaything, really. I don't think there's any reason to believe that inhabitants of a simulation would be able to find any evidence of that fact, within the simulation.
One example of where I think people get this wrong: It's sometimes said that the concept of our 3D space being chunked up into a discrete grid of Planck Lengths would be evidence that we're in a simulation, because that's kind of like pixelization. But that doesn't make sense even as an intuition. If you look at a simulation we've created, say The Sims, we can see pixels in their universe, but *they* can't. The Sims in the game have no concept that their world is pixelated, despite the fact that we can see it is. So, the fact of how we build the simulation did not leave any such artifact within the subjective reality of the simulated beings.
That's just one example, but I suspect it holds in general. I doubt there is any sort of artifact one could find within a simulation that could be said to be evidence of how that simulation was constructed.
I mean, taking your example of a video game, the characters in the video game have no knowledge of how their game is *rendered* to the simulation gods living in userspace heaven, but they could certainly observe how it is internally *modeled*, assuming that is the information generally available to them (speaking as a professional game developer here).
Case in point: "Hey Thorvald McLoincloth, have you ever noticed how we're only ever able to place things in piles of exactly 255, no matter how big, small, light, or heavy they are? Seems like a fundamental property of the universe. I think I'll write a research paper on it."
I think the leap comes from observing this mundane but weird fact about your universe, and then saying that a simulated world shouldn't have such a feature, which how would we know?
I think the sneaky problem with your example is that, in fact, the observation that your piles are always exactly in stacks of 255, is *not* evidence of being in a simulation, unless you happen to already know something about alien-god psychology and technological limitations. Otherwise the number 255 has no particular significance. Why would it look like anything other than a random physical constant to them, like e or the speed of light?
They'll recognise binary if they have computers themselves.
Why should the computers of the simulated necessarily behave in any way that corresponds to the computers of the simulators?
Because either they're Universal Turing Machines, or we probably wouldn't call them computers.
If they have binary digital computers. Analog computers are a thing, and it's possible that the Simulators would prefer them. For that matter, they might use balanced Ternary.
Even if they used analog computers (and of course they wouldn't – to the exclusion of digital computers) and 'balanced ternary', they'd still understand binary numbers and computation generally.
I don't have any reason to believe that our alien-god simulators have anything corresponding to what we know as "computers" or "binary". For all we know they live in a physics system completely unlike the one we live in.
Even in a universe with different physics, I would be shocked and surprised if computation didn't work exactly the same. A 'binary bit' is simply the quanta of information, and that doesn't seem to be dependent on any particular physics.
Have you ever met a ('professional') mathematician? _Nothing_ looks like a 'random physical constant' to them! It's all just shadows of the Platonic forms. But, _logically_, there's no real way to falsify the simulation hypothesis (or the existence of the 'supernatural' generally) – but there could be other evidence that's at least suggestive, like how natural selection implies that, overall, most traits or features of biological creatures are (or were) functional.
I mean I agree, that's what the last sentence of my comment effectively says.
Oh you're right, sorry. I got myself in argument mode.
My favourite "things only going up to 255" fact is that in Switzerland it is illegal for a train to have precisely 256 axles, because it causes the machines that track their passage for the signals to fail to register them.
I don't know whether they've had the forethought to also ban 512, etc axled trains, but I hope so!
This is great. More please!
The discovery that spacetime is quantized would only be evidence of some more complex universe if you had a solid theory about how spacetime could *not* be quantized, or could at least not rule it out. But the only reason we are driven to even consider the idea is because continuous spacetime has severe mathematical problems, it leads to strange ultraviolet catastrophes that have to be swept under the dissatisfactory rug of renormalization.
I find it hard to believe that spacetime _is_ continuous, having studied math a good bit – The Real Numbers are _crazy_; continuity alone seems too weird to be manifest in our universe (tho a lot of things do _very_ closely approximate it).
For what it's worth, I don't think many quantum physicists think that space is "chunked up into a discrete grid of Planck Lengths". Any such chunking would require distinguished axes or distinguished shapes of sub-regions.
Instead, I think the idea is just that everything is made up of waves where the Planck length measures some characteristic pair of limitations, the way a standard deviation does for a noisy measurement. There's no edges, just blurs that get worse when you try to focus too closely.
Explaining something through appeal to a simulation is essentially the same thing as appealing to the supernatural or some god. You can explain absolutely anything that way, and in the absence of actual *evidence* for a simulation/the supernatural/some god, it's empty and untestable.
It's an explanation that is at the same time way too easy, and empirically empty.
Pretty sure we've already got better theories than "extraterrestrials or secret government programs". Namely, pretty much every UFO "sighting" when properly investigated turns out to be a mix of mistaken attribution, suggestion, and motivated storytelling, and the only overarching story is that humans are worse at observation than our brains think we are.
I've tried marijuana four times, and I've never had a good experience with it. Am I a non-responder, maybe? The first time I smoked was way back about 20 years ago. I took three or four hits off a pipe, and then suffered really bad depersonalization. More recently (now that it's legal in my state), I tried it three separate times with a vape pen. The first two times I was cautious and took a couple of small hits. I ended up feeling lethargic, my limbs felt heavy, and I had some "brain fog". There was no euphoria at all, and the overall experience was mildly unpleasant. This last time I tried it, I took one big hit off the vape pen, and the result was simply awful. I had a coughing fit so bad I thought I would vomit. After I stopped coughing, I experienced very rapid heartbeat (about 150 beats per minute) accompanied by paranoia and something just short of a panic attack. After I took a beta blocker (propranolol), my heart rate eventually dropped to about 120 bpm, but the paranoia and the panicky feeling persisted for about 3.5 hours. It was so horrible I seriously considered calling 911. Is there a class of people who simply can't tolerate marijuana, or am I doing something wrong?
I know people who have the same issues. You could try a strand with a higher percent cbd.
I’ve had some bad experiences with it too. I think we are not a numerous group but we exist. I am a little grateful to it for making me too loopy to keep drinking alcohol on more than one occasion. I think it lowers my threshold for unpleasant auditory hallucinations. The best side of it, like a contact high (neighbors smoking) I get slightly relaxed but then grumpy and very hungry when it begins wearing off. I had good experiences with CBD-only water, for anxiety, but that was close to $40/gallon and I had to drink a lot of it.
One good part to legalization may be less pressure on those it really doesn’t work for.
I've never liked the effects of marijuana.
I've heard claims that because marijuana was illegal, it was bred selectively to be as intense as possible. I don't know whether that might increase the odds of bad experiences, but you might want to research whether heirloom marijuana (does it exist?) is easier on people.
I've heard claims that are literally the exact opposite of this claim; that while weed was illegal, quality (measured here in terms of THC content) wasn't that important since you normally didn't have many different stands to choose from. You bought whatever the dealer had, so the dealer and his distribution networks didn't have any incentive to breed better weed.
It was only when legalization began that legitimate retailers would start selling multiple strands and the THC content arms race began. Now growers and sellers had to have the best product since there was other legitimate competition, so they had to start growing stronger weed as a marketing strategy.
Not sure which version of this story is accurate.
Maybe both are, in different regions or something.
I heard the story about marijuana being bred for less subtle experience back in the 70s or 80s from a woman who said that dealer's would sample batches, and they were selecting for the strong stuff. She also thought they weren't the sort of people who appreciated subtle psychoactives.
Yeah, it's both, but it's more of a quality grading sorting thing – some people DO care about quality and will spend hundreds of dollars at a time and others just want to get high now for $10.
In the illegal market there is "indoor" and "outdoor" weed. Indoor weed is usually much stronger, as it is grown under controlled conditions, while outdoor weed is subjected to the elements and is grown on large scale farms in foreign countries. Virtually all legal weed is indoor weed, both for security reasons and to ensure the product has specific characteristics. I personally think there is room for a less expensive, less potent product in the legal market that could be the "Coors Light" of marijuana.
My anecdotal experiences with the legal dispensaries market lead me to believe that the typical strain is relatively immature -- clean, good taste, aroma, etc, but not pushed for excessive THC. Kind of like picking bananas while not fully ripe.
Flowers are considered nominally ripe when the trichomes become cloudy. Pushing the harvest past that presents growers with many new risks and challenges that are cheaper to avoid. I also think it's likely the growers short-shrift the labor-intensive job of proper curing -- which could substantially contribute to some of the jarring effects mentioned by the OP (like an anxiety-inducing Indica).
It – (illegal) marijuana – is a stratified market and there are various (rough) levels of quality.
The lowest grade stuff isn't very good and probably most closely matches what you describe, i.e. 'you buy whatever your dealer has'.
There's a grade above that – often literally described as 'mid grade', and it's more potent and more expensive.
But at the top is a grade that DOES match what Nancy described – the buyers are willing to pay a premium for quality and they will absolutely shop around among the dealers they know for the best stuff.
I'm pretty sure it's true that illegal weed in the US today is much stronger than (a) it was in the US in the 60s and (b) it is nowadays in countries like India where it is easier to grow.
In my experience, I met few people who had bad reaction to it. Some didn't feel good at all, others got lethargic without enjoying the experience, etc. So I think there are people that feel no effect or bad experiences, not by how they consume but just how their bodies deal with the substance.
And honestly, I don't see a bad point in that. In my country of origin hash (made out of marijuana oil) and weed are easy to get and quite cheap. And socially accepted. I've been smoking for long time (with periods of not smoking at all for few years, other periods smoking just occasionally and periods of smoking heavily and on a daily basis), and the truth is that the relaxing effects where you enjoy the moment were just at the beginning. After a while, it is more like lethargic feeling that leads to waste the time doing whatever passive activity you can do, like binge watching something. It is really easy to get attached to it and do it regularly, even if the enjoyment of it is not there anymore. Adiction basically.
My point is that being so easy and cheap to get, it is very easy to get addicted to it and being unable to do anything fulfilling in the free time. I guess if you think you would get benefit from it by lowering anxiety, you could try CBD. There are products that are essentially weed or hash but without thee THC, just the CBD. And they say it works well for low tolerance people.
Not trying to dispute your own experience but for many people (me included) cannabis actually makes them more active, not less. Possibly quite strain dependent.
"Four out of five respondents said that they use marijuana right before or after exercising. And those users spent more minutes per week exercising than users who didn’t mix the two." - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02529-0
Maybe it just makes some people more tolerant of how boring it can be to exercise ....
I find that very plausible! I've found it to be helpful when, e.g. playing with very young children. Whereas 'sober' I might get frustrated because, e.g. the child only wants to play one game or do one thing, over and over, when high it's easier to not only tolerate, but actively enjoy, that kind of thing because of the ease of 'over-focusing' on (interesting) minutiae and then 'drifting sideways' to focus on something else.
It's _definitely_ strain dependent. I remember reading an interesting article about a teenager with autism (?) that only really liked one particular strain (and its effects were particularly functional/therapeutic).
If it's legal in your state, I'd suggest talking to a budtender at a large dispensary about your experiences with cannabis and ask if they have any suggestions. It may be that the mode of ingesting is related to your unpleasant time with it. I'm an occasional (like every 6 months) consumer so not an expert but AFAIK inhaling is going to cause a very rapid response. A mild edible might be better tolerated. Mild anything really, learn to walk before you go sprinting.
The setting you're in when you get high is also very important, especially if you have (totally understandable!) negative associations with cannabis. I'd suggest either, to the extent that it's possible with COVID restrictions, being around supportive friends or alone with a laptop full of cartoons / kung-fu movies. Just wherever you normally feel safe and comfortable.
I hope it works out! I really think cannabis can be useful for enhancing creativity and enjoyment of the world, at least a couple times a year anyhow.
Yes. Some people have a negative experience of / low tolerance for THC. Sounds like that's what's going on with you. I also have almost zero tolerance for THC. Like, I can handle a fraction the minimum other people take
You might try a far lower, and more controlled, dose. You can try gummies or tinctures with dosage statements on the label. Whatever the recommended dose, take an eighth and see what happens. I've also been told that a 50/50 CBD/THC ratio is more relaxing, although this never worked for me.
If I take one puff off a vape pen, all sounds are loud and overwhelming, my heart races, I have auditory hallucinations, and I feel like everything I say or hear echoes in my head, and my mind feels separated from my sluggish and lethargic body. There is nothing good about the experience.
I've only had one good experience with THC, and it was when I was just barely high. It is damn near impossible for me to reach that state without surpassing it, so I don't do THC.
I'm curious what your experience would be with CBD alone. Most people report minimal psychological effects, but I find it gives me a nice warm and fuzzy feeling. If our brains are similar, you might like it too.
While I wouldn't try to convince anyone they ought to learn to appreciate THC, I suspect much of the anxiety many people experience could be transformed with "practice."
The overwhelming sense of losing control of the mind's focus (which can lead to paranoia, etc) is eventually replaced with the discovery that THC can, in fact, greatly enhance focus in areas that are usually glossed over by habitual awareness patterns, providing new insights into music, exercise, etc. It's a bit like learning to control your dreams. Or like settling into one nice little spot at a big noisy carnival.
But I agree there may well be some who simply won't ever appreciate it.
Living in a major weed growing area, I've heard the same advice from dozens of people throughout my life. While I agree that mindset, experience, and desensitization are all relevant to people's experience with THC (and drugs in general), I just don't buy the idea that everyone has the potential to enjoy it if only they give it time/practice/chances. Perhaps the majority of people have that potential, but not one hundred percent of people.
It's not for fear of losing control; I've had some very wild trips on psychedelics where I kept my composure like a champ. I fight back when I'm attacked by enemies in my dreams and I'm happy on a roller coaster. Either it's a matter of sensitivity, or the qualitative experience is just different for me, and I doubt we know enough about the brain to say why. I'm about as likely to appreciate THC as I am to appreciate sleep paralysis.
It honestly doesn't feel like a huge loss. I love what CBD does for my brain.
I had some intense experiences early from marijuana, but I look back at them now as mostly failures of 'set and setting' – my friends with whom I had those experiences were much more experienced and probably didn't even know that I was basically having a 'bad trip'.
> The first two times I was cautious and took a couple of small hits. I ended up feeling lethargic, my limbs felt heavy, and I had some "brain fog". There was no euphoria at all, and the overall experience was mildly unpleasant.
If it's legal where you live, try to sample different varieties. The two main sub-species are sativa and indica. I like sativa strains for 'daytime' highs – they're more cerebral and, sometimes, even 'energizing'. Indica strains are more like what you describe – I like them for 'nighttime' highs.
I don't think I've ever felt euphoric from marijuana itself – 'energizing' sure (from specific strains), but any euphoria was probably because of the context, e.g. hanging out with friends at a concert or festival or party.
I get a rapid heartbeat frequently – that typically subsides on its own, and smoking/vaping/eating less helps. The vape pens you bought might be pretty strong – that's been my experience with a lot of them. Try just _one_ hit at a time if you're still interested.
Paranoia and even full blown panic attacks do happen, tho I don't think I've ever had a panic attack myself. (I did once _faint_, and injure myself by falling onto something – that was scary!) I know some people that have stopped using, or never really started, because of that kind of thing.
So, yes, there does seem to be a rough "class of people" that 'can't tolerate' marijuana.
But, if you're still interested in trying it again, attend to your 'set and setting'!
Can't advise you on this since I've never tried the stuff but here is some helpful advice from "The Mighty Boosh" comedy show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTVe9sGKloA
You and others in this thread may be interested in this news story today - Irish doctors warning "Doctors warn of effects of increased potency of cannabis on mental health" https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2021/0504/1213601-doctors-cannabis-warnings/
So the strains are stronger and a lot of people are showing up with mental and physical effects:
"Speaking to RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Dr Gerry McCarney, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Chair of the College's Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said there is growing concern over the situation - and its impact on young people in particular.
Dr McCarney said 309 people were admitted to psychiatric hospitals with a cannabis-related diagnosis in 2019, the latest figures available, a record level that is almost three times higher than in 2007.
The College, he said, believes the higher potency of cannabis now available in this country is to blame.
"We have been concerned for some time that the public discourse about cannabis is coming from one side. We want to put it out there what we are seeing in our clinics, because it's not harmless," Dr McCarney said.
"Anything over 10% THC is high potency cannabis. We frequently have strains available that are over 10%.
"We are seeing significant increases in anxiety, self-harming behaviour and suicidal ideation. It is worrying that as the THC [tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical which produces a high in cannabis] content increases we are seeing more of this.
"If you look back at the hospital admissions data you can see about a 300% increase into the hospitals. It's greater than admission for cocaine use or for heroin use.
"A young person from time to time will have begun from seven, eight, nine. The cannabis that people might remember from 20, 30 years ago is not the animal that's out there now," he said.
Dr McCarney's view was echoed by Dr Anne Doherty, a Clinical Liaison Psychiatrist at the Mater Hospital's emergency department.
Asked about the fact 877 people were admitted to general hospitals for medical treatment in 2019, a rate that is four times higher than in 2005, Dr Doherty said many suffer physical issues due to the strength of some strains of the drug.
"We frequently see people with heart palpitations or heart arrhythmia secondary to cannabis, we also see people with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which is a condition where people have unrelenting nausea or vomiting due to cannabis.
"In addition to that, in the emergency department we tend to see people who have their first episodes of drug-induced psychosis, which is a truly horrible condition and you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy," Dr Doherty said."
I asked Scott a question in the AMA --- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ask-me-anything?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxOTMwMzExNSwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzQ0MjQwNzUsIl8iOiJBR1ZPViIsImlhdCI6MTYyMDAyMzY0NSwiZXhwIjoxNjIwMDI3MjQ1LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItODkxMjAiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.BCfhjaQPCmY4xREa6LQGh3n-VAr7NMA15WATN5mm2n0#comment-1602370 --- about how incentives affect psychological experiences. I'm curious if anyone else has thoughts on this. To try and make it more concrete, I'm curious if anyone else believes that:
- increasing the expected payout for whiplash injuries would lead to the an increase in the number of people actually experiencing whiplash symptoms
- giving weight to victim impact statements in legal proceedings leads to victim's having a worse post-crime experience
- increasing the disability supports for students in universities (say, extra time on an exam if suffering from anxiety during the term) increases the prevalence of mental health issues among the student body
Yes to all. Can't say I have robust evidence, but it seems to fit both logically from my understanding of incentives, and anecdotally from seeing policy changes in an intentional community setting.
These all seem plausible, provided you think of the increase as increase in the observed phenomena, more than in the underlying facts. I've noticed that many people don't seem to notice certain experiences they're having, which has made me very suspicious of the numbers that are listed for "asymptomatic covid cases" - I suspect many of these people *have* symptoms, and just didn't *notice* them as symptoms. I think it's similarly plausible that some fraction of people have whiplash symptoms and don't notice them, have post-traumatic stress and don't notice it, and have mental health issues without noticing them, but that the supports you mention will help more people have an incentive to notice them. (This is the standard story of what happened with the concept of "sexual harassment" - before the invention of the term, women didn't have an organized concept for what was going on in the workplace, but once the term existed, they were able to label the things they had been experiencing all along.)
If you think that some of the harms of these things are just in the fact *that* people notice them, then these harms will be increased, but it seems very likely to me that the actual support that is received outweighs these harms. Furthermore, I think that in many cases, the subjective good or bad for the individual doesn't depend on them *noticing* what's going on. There's a reason people wear makeup that is often designed not to be noticed - it still makes people feel more attracted even if they don't notice it, and similarly, people who don't have the trained ear or trained palate to understand or notice that the music they are hearing or food they are eating is high quality usually still have a better experience when it is.
> These all seem plausible, provided you think of the increase as increase in the observed phenomena, more than in the underlying facts.
I think I want to go further than this though. Like in the example of conversion disorder mentioned in the linked comment, it was not the case that limbs sometimes stop working, and a certain psychological disposition would cause people to notice the fact. But rather than a certain psychological disposition would be the cause of the limbs not working. Similarly, I'm starting to wonder if other incentive structures can cause distress that would otherwise be entirely absent, not just not noticed (I figure that you can not notice distress that might still show up physiologically in some way, like high blood pressure or something).
Yeah, I think the big empirical question is how much of each of the two phenomena is there, and how much do the additional resources outweigh the additional distress.
...are you talking about actual increases in X (as opposed to increases in reporting of X)?
Yes
smoking
So when writing research papers in high school and college there were two rules:
1. cite everything you use
2. you're not allowed to cite non-scholarly sources
Academic papers seem to follow these rules too, but the corollary of both of them put together is that if a good idea originates outside the academy it will rarely if ever enter the academy, right?
What is stopping researchers from just picking up good idea's from outside academia and writing their own paper on it (or running their own tests on it or whatever is appropriate for the situation)?
Exactly — nothing. In the worst case, the idea could be rederived and written up in a paper.
> 1. cite everything you use
Rather, you cite everything that you /formally/ use. You might draw inspiration and ways of thinking that end up influencing your work from basically anywhere, but which you couldn't possibly realise for citing.
> 2. you're not allowed to cite non-scholarly sources
This is good as a general rule for students, but in practice is far from strictly followed by academics. All sorts of things get referenced, even just for mild amusement at times. I can't think of any examples that I've seen where such a citation has brought into academia a good idea originating from outside of it, but my point is that it's not sufficiently close to a "rule" for this to be a problem. Indeed, if you write a paper that contains genuinely good and novel ideas, no one will really care if you have some weird citations: citing scholarly sources is an heuristic for good academia, not a goal itself.
Yeah, I relatively frequently see "personal communication" cited for things when no academic reference exists (and the author got it by talking to people). The fact that such a thing is allowed in academia means that basically anything can be cited. Now, you need to _justify_ such a citation, but if it's actually the appropriate source, that's not that hard.
Non-academic citations in a paper will generally be used for different things, and probably not for factual claims that are key to the paper, but for setting up the background, etc., I don't see why one couldn't or wouldn't.
2 isn't really a rule. In college and high school it sort of is, but it's more because teachers are using citations as a way of getting you to go out and engage with the literature. But even there, if you're a good student who has blown way past the minimum number of required scholarly citations, if you come to your teacher and say you want to reference an idea you heard in a podcast, most teachers aren't going to have a problem with that.
It's also worth noting there are really two types of academic citation. One is where you just assert some fact and then back it up with a citation. That looks like: "60% of weasels are blue in the summer (Smith 2019)." For this type of citation, I do think you really need a proper academic source. But the other type of citation is when you paraphrase or quote someone else in order to engage with their ideas. This might look like: "John Smith, in his book Weasels in Winter (2019), puts forth a view that weasels change color based on the current season. He is part of a literary movement that... (and so on)." This second style of citation, where you're actually engaged with something, is where you can slip in basically anything you want, and it definitely doesn't have to be a peer-reviewed academic source.
Yes, exactly. You can introduce an idea by citing basically anything. But just because you cite something doesn't mean people have to believe it or take it seriously.
Academic journals and books (ones in good standing, anyways) will be taken seriously and readers will expect little to no additional work in the text of the paper to substantiate a claim made by the source. If you cite something less rigorously reviewed (e.g. a random blog post from someone no one has ever heard of), people will be more skeptical of any claim, and you'll probably have to do most of the heavy lifting in the paper itself to justify any claims or ideas your taking from that post.
This! I've even seen people cite blog posts and wikipedia in this second way -- "We take inspiration from and further explore the ideas in [blog post]".
Probably a malicious academic could get away with claiming ownership of an idea they found from a blog post by avoiding citing it. But the culture in academia is (at least in part) such that not too many people would do that in the first place, and if they did and if someone found out, everyone else would publicly shame them for stealing the idea. It might even rise to the level of academic misconduct, depending on how implausibly deniably they took the idea.
Even in academic papers, you're allowed to cite non-scholarly sources if they are what created interest in a topic. What you can't do is cite non-scholarly sources in support of any specific claim.
Sorry, I meant college 'research' papers. Academic work you can cite whoever you want. I've seen papers in respected peer-reviewed journals that started with a quote from 'The Onion'.
I've seen one cite C.W. McCall in support of the claim that trucks often travel in ad-hoc convoys. At the college level, you're trying to teach students to apply a critical eye to the question, "yes Wikipedia is easy, but who really has the straight dope on this subject?". Once they graduate, the community starts trusting them to have applied the right level of skepticism in their choice of possibly non-academic sources.
I would realy like to subscribe, but i dont have a credit card and i dont plan on getting one. Is there any other payment method?
Substack uses Stripe for payments, which _should_ support a lot of options besides credit cards, but I was also never able to figure out how to get it to accept non-credit card payments.
You don't have a debit card? They come free with bank accounts (tho there are typically strict limits for non-checking accounts, e.g. a handful of transactions per month). Do you also not plan on getting one of those? They're very useful! And your bank (if you have an account at one) might have some kind of 'virtual debit/credit card' feature that doesn't require you to request a physical card too.
You _might_ be able to get a 'prepaid debit/credit card' and be able to use that too.
It does seem like Substack only supports debit/credit card payment methods tho.
I would recommend against using a debit card for any online purchases (really, I literally don't use mine for anything). It's much more secure to buy one of those one time Visa cards and use that.
If your debit card information is stolen and used fraudulently it is _much, much harder_ to get your money back than it is with an actual credit card.
To respond to your point about the prepaid card, I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work. I don't think vendors can tell the difference. It will only be a problem if they try to automatically renew and you haven't updated the information to a new card so the card no longer works.
The payment processors can tell if a card is prepaid and they do 'discriminate' against them, e.g. consider them to be riskier payments, but I know merchants have some latitude about whether they'll accept them.
I think the credit card companies either disclose, to the payment processors, that cards are prepaid, or it's easy enough for the latter to 'reverse engineer' the card numbering system and tell themselves. I definitely don't think they're perfectly indistinguishable.
In the U.S. anyways, the consumer protections for debit and credit cards seem to be very similar. I haven't had any problems getting my money back from fraudulent purchases made with my debit card.
The 'don't use debit cards online' advice is I think very much out of date. I don't think there's any significant security advantage to using a credit card; not generally anyways.
There's a significant difference between "someone stole $4000 from your bank account, you can legally get it back" and "someone charged $4000 to your credit card, you will need to use a different card while we figure out that you do not need to pay it."
That's true, but I suspect _large_ fraudulent transactions are much rarer nowadays. Banks and other financial/payment companies seem to much better at flagging the obvious frauds (and it does seem to be fairly obvious to them). I've noticed that most of the stuff that does 'get thru' seems to small transactions that are pretty similar to legitimate ones.
But you might be right, implying that what you described is a significant advantage of using a credit card.
I'm still skeptical that it's that significant – today (even versus a few years ago).
But then, event a 'catastrophe' like my bank account being 'wiped out' wouldn't really be that much of an emergency – for me. But I also can't think of a single example of that happening to anyone I know; not in many years anyways. I'm not claiming it doesn't still happen, just that I _think_ it's rare, and much rarer than in the past.
One thing I've been questioning lately is why, despite all the knowledge we have about the various flaws of our respective brains, we still struggle to understand what our future selves will want. It turns out there are some workarounds to this problem, but that they're all unpalatable to most people for various reasons.
I've written about the problem and some possible solutions here and wanted to get your thoughts. What do you think of my arguments? https://davidteter.com/imagination
Cropping out is the first section that makes sense without the reader having already figured out your point.
I found myself reaching the end of each section, not having any clue what you were trying to say, then having to work backwards through the section to figure it out.
Perhaps it’s a personal preference thing, but I found you saved the point for last in each section, which left me in the dark.
Thank you for sharing this! My attempt in the first two sections was to share stories or examples that draw the reader in and demonstrate the phenomena I'm describing. How could I make my point clearer earlier while also allowing the reader to follow my longer-form argument?
I would describe your thesis as "The halo/horns effect cause people to over-estimate the goodness/badness of imagined future choices." (I only got through the first three sections, but the reader should understand your thesis within 500 words.)
In the first section, you presented two mysteries, "a sad man is happy to die," and "a successful man commits suicide, why?" At the end of the section, you reveal why. I think your goal was for the reader to, haven been given incomplete information, apply the halo/horns effects and generate false beliefs about the men. What happened for me, though, is I recognized I was being presented with a mystery, and suspended judgment until the end. At that point the reveal felt like you had left out necessary information, and were calling out the reader for being wrong – the inverse of a fair play whodunnit. This irritated me (xkcd: "poor communication isn't cleverness") until I realized you had done it intentionally as a rhetorical device and I scanned back through to figure out why.
It's common for news articles to engage in this 'present mystery', 'resolve mystery' device, so when I correctly recognized that device being used I didn't generate the halo effect mental state. Instead, I was annoyed at being 'called out' even though I didn't fall for the trick. This meant that when you pointed out my supposed error, you didn't gain any credibility (since I hadn't made one) and instead lost credibility (since my ignorance was your fault). This all happened subconsciously over perhaps 20 seconds. The negative experience was intensified since there was no payoff to the first section, no compelling explanation of why you had presented and resolved a mystery since it didn't easily tie back to your as-yet-unclear thesis. It's possible this is all due to the the section's mystery conceit not landing with me, but the section felt muddled.
Contrast the Cropping Out section, where you said, "imagine an apartment with vaulted ceilings and granite countertops" then said, "I bet you imagined wood floors too, you'll be surprised when it doesn't have them." Since I had imagined wood floors, I was surprised it didn't have them, and was pleasantly intrigued that you'd tricked me. You then a satisfying answer ('halo effect'), which you quickly tied back to your thesis.
The first section uses 500 words to attempt what Cropping Out does in 50 words. The first section seemed disordered, where was Cropping ticks the rhetorical boxes rapidly and in a sensible order.
A factual point: You use "Californians are as happy as Ohioans" as a factual example for your thesis. Essentially "Halo effect causes Ohioans to over-estimate the happiness they'll gain when they move to California."
This is dubious, though:
1. You would expect people to either be a little bit happier due to the benefits of sunsets but not as much happier as they expected. i.e. they correctly forecast the sunset benefit, but overestimated the other imagined benefits.
2. Or the people should be less happy, if the disappointment of not getting the imagined benefits overwhelm the sunset-benefit.
3. For people to be exactly as happy, it means the sunset-benefit must exactly match the imagined-benefit disappointment, which seems unlikely.
The halo effect could plausibly generate 1 or 2. Number 3 (no long term change due to moving) seems more likely to be the result of e.g. hedonic adaptation over the unlikely scenario that sunsets are exactly has beneficial as the halo effect is disappointing.
This is comprehensive and thoughtful feedback - a sincere thank you for taking the time to share it. It will improve my writing next time.
On the factual point, I think the surprising result is a mixture of two effects:
1) The joy of beautiful sunsets is offset by other annoyances, which makes you happier in some ways and less happy in others. It isn't a complete wash, but close enough to not show up as significant on a survey.
2) People in California eventually adapt to the beautiful sunsets via hedonic adaptation as you mentioned.
We're talking about average outcomes here, but there are some people who dream of moving to California, do so, and are (seemingly, at least) permanently happier. They marvel at the sunsets, don't mind paying extra taxes, etc.
I can't figure out if this cohort got lucky, has a more realistic imagination, or knows themselves better than the rest of us know ourselves. Probably it's some combination of the three.
Some people loathe winter. I wonder whether they're much more likely to be made permanently happier by moving to California.
My tentative answer is that the future self isn't vividly present because it's in the future.
Yes, it's kind of like trying to hum a song while another one is playing in the background. The present "drowns out" the future. With the music, we're aware that's taking place. When we imagine our various possible futures and try to choose among them, we think we're doing a great job of ignoring our present wants to focus on the future!
What do people think about the German federal election coming up later this year?
For those just tuning in, Merkel has chosen to retire this time round. Her party, the CDU(/CSU) has settled on Armin Laschet as its candidate after a rather lengthy search. Support for the CDU/CSU (and to a lesser extent their coalition partners the SPD) spiked at the the start of the pandemic and stayed high until early this year, when it cratered just as rapidly. Most of this support lost by the CDU went instead to the Greens, who have risen to first place in some recent polls.
How much of the CDU's recent poor performace is due to failures in the vaccination process (which they might be able to fix before September) and how much is that they have no good replacement for Merkel?
Might Annalena Baerbock become the first Green chancellor?
Where do the SPD, FDP and Linke fit in?
I'd also be curious to know how AfD is doing. They had been picking up seats the last few elections I had paid attention to, but as I understand it without the ability to form a coalition they're essentially still a protest vote.
I don't think they have much of an impact on the federal level. It's more of a New State thing, especially since there's also a lot of far-left voters and the CDU is disinclined to form a coalition with either of them, leading to things like the Thuringian Crisis.
I'm definitely interested in hearing more if anyone has knowledge or interesting thoughts about this!
The Greens (who in the past were known for heavy fighting between the "realo" and "fundi" wings) were a bunch of very good friends this time. They had two candidates, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, who are very good friends, everybody said that both candidates are totally fine, and they decided for Baerbock smoothly.
The conservative CDU/CSU would like to appear like that, but didn't. In Bavaria they have the CSU, which always did a little bit of their own thing, but when they tried to make one of their people chancellor (Strauß 1980, Stoiber 2002), they failed. It is said that Bavarian CSU chancellors aren't so welcome in the North, the CSU is a bit more right-wing than the CDU, and they talk in that funny dialect. Now, they have Markus Söder, who is pretty popular throughout the country, and is regarded as a good corona-manager (although the statistics in Bavaria is so-so), whereas the CDU wants Armit Laschet, who is not so popular, has a fame as a very bad corona-manager (he famously said at the beginning of the third wave: "We had all hoped it would go away in spring" -- well, he didn't listen to the scientists), and Laschet comes across as rather dumb; but make no mistake, he is not stupid, and has a very strong network from Catholic fraternities.
And one day after the Greens presented their candidate, CDU had to follow and grudgingly decided for Laschet. Immediately, their polls plummeted. And stay that way. https://dawum.de/Bundestag/Forsa/2021-05-05/ So indeed we might get a green chancellor in autumn. Whether they dare form a really left-wing coalition with social-democrat SPD and left-wing Linke, I kind of doubt that because there are many in the SPD who never wanted anything to do with the lefties who had their roots in the GDR communist party SED. But perhaps that is outgrown past, and SPD is not in a position to boast, being about to lose two third of their voters since 1998.
They might form a "traffic light" coalition with SPD and (neo-)liberal FDP. FDP always hated the Greens, but you can argue that they have more in common than both would admit (being rather upper-class parties). A coalition of Greens and CDU/CSU might be possible, they have that in Baden-Württemberg, but both might have to bend themselves pretty much to find a compromise.
The vaccinations, now they seem to get a bit faster. Many feel that the USA and UK have defected. The EU has exported 44 % of their vaccine production, where US und UK both exported 0 % and kept all for themselves. But it is also a bit the fault of the EU commission under Ursula von der Leyen, the former German defense minister. She got a bit into trouble for spending a lot of money on external consultants (McKinsey etc.) without much of anything to show for it, and before people ask too much, she was kicked upstairs. The EU is a dumping ground for politicians we're fed up with, because for long years in Europe they couldn't break anything. Now that they have the power to botch a vaccine ordering, people might learn that this kicking upstairs is not such a good idea any more.
This week, the supreme court judged thusly: A few years ago, we have added article 20a to the constitution, that the state must protect the basis of life also for future generations. The gouverment has promised to fulfill the Paris climate treaty until 2030, but not really done a lot about it, been like "well, let's see later how to do that", and if the coming generation has to do all the work of changing our way of life, it would limit their freedom too much. Som the gouvernment must act now, to reduce climate-changing emissions. The CDU said, yeah right, well, but we already decided to stop burning coal in 2038, and we don't really feel like changing that plan again. Not sure whether that will convince people.
Ceremonial gift giving--that related to holidays, birthdays, and life events like weddings and childbirth--is an idiotic custom that must die.
Proper etiquette demands that one accept a gift and act happy to receive it, regardless of whether it is wanted. Even if a gift is enjoyed, it is rare to impossible that the recipient should enjoy it enough that she would spontaneously buy it for herself. Even if the purchaser was exceedingly generous and bought something that the recipient could not afford--say, a fancy article of clothing--one could have doubtless used the same cash amount to purchase a piece of clothing that they liked more. Or, better yet, they could have used the money to pay rent, or bills, or stocks--something they deem worth buying. The best gift is cash: it is always exactly the item you want.
Gift giving is not an unselfish act. If it were, people would not buy you gifts when you repeatedly said you didn't want a gift. To buy someone a gift is to buy THEM: their affection or a continued relationship with them. Accepting a gift creates the expectation that you OWE the donor something--appreciation, love, continued engagement. People feel uneasy about giving cash gifts because it makes the nature of these transactions obvious.
95% of consumer products such as clothing or decorations are garbage, visual pollution. In choosing a gift, most people choose this pollution, only most people delude themselves into thinking they know someone's taste well enough to choose the ~1% of things that will surprise and delight them. Why shouldn't people think they're great gift givers, when it's rude to for any recipient to let the giver believe otherwise?
Or, gift givers buy that which the recipient loves too much. Thank you very much for buying me the sweets that will tempt me and make me feel like shit after I eat them. Thank you for buying the thing that is somewhat similar to the thing I own and like but have no use for.
A gift is an expectation of future gifts. When someone buys you a gift for your birthday or Christmas, they are creating an expectation that you will reciprocate. To not do so is to show that you don't care about your relationship as much as they do. To give someone a gift is to create an obligation for them, and the feeling of guilt if they do not fulfill that obligation.
Ah but that's exactly the point. Gift-giving is an annoying chore for both giver and recipient. By demonstrating a willingness to go through this annoying chore once or twice a year, you strengthen your relationship.
My parents and I buy each other gifts every year and I still hate their guts.
I think the chore/obligation parts are true, but there's also an element in some cases of trying to get the big win of giving something the recipient likes but wouldn't have thought of.
There are types of gifts to which this does not apply, and there are types of relationships to which none of these concerns are relevant.
Some examples:
1. Parents/Grandparents/other adults to children. Children cannot buy their own gifts (usually) and are often easy to shop for.
2. Gifts of time and attention, which can include handmade items that are both functional and sentimental.
Your concerns seem mostly about gifts between adults who can afford to buy their own material goods and better know their own preferences. I agree with most of your concerns in that regard.
I felt very smart a few years ago when I started blanketly declaring that the only gift I wanted was the freedom from obligation to buy other people gifts. This plan failed horribly, because it was impossible to get people who thought gifts are valuable always defected, bought me gifts and assumed I would as well. I've finally gotten people close to me to accept the deal of "Don't buy me any gift you wouldn't be happy with, and don't get offended if I politely decline the gift."
I just don't get it. Everyone I know has a disposable income. Buying someone a gift is making the assertion that you know what someone would like more than they would. In certain cases of information asymmetry , this is possible, but it's rare.
The one exception to this is kids - I love buying gifts for my nieces, nephews and god kids.
"I love buying gifts for my nieces, nephews and god kids"
Have you examined why you love doing this? Why do you think that you, an adult, can match the tastes of children/young people? Why are you helping inculcate in them the expectation and duty of giving and receiving gifts, when you yourself dislike being put under the obligation?
If you can extrapolate from "I love buying my niece a gift because..." to how other people think about gift-giving, then you can understand why they defect. There are occasions when it is a mandatory social activity that doesn't have any personal meaning, but other times it is "here is something I saw and thought you would like and it is a token of my regard and friendship".
The times I buy gifts for people and feel good about it are either when I discover some really cool thing that I'm pretty sure they don't know about (IE when I can leverage an information advantage) or when I'm traveling somewhere exotic and get to buy them something they don't know about or couldn't really get back at home (IE leveraging both an information advantage and a unique opportunity). Unfortunately - this just doesn't happen often enough for it to be the default mode of giving.
The times I'm medium to negative about buying gifts are when someone that I know has a disposable income sends me a list of stuff they want. In this case, I feel like it's just wasting everyone's time since this other person could easily have just gone and bought the thing themselves. Sure, I know that I'm getting them something they want, but only because they decided to not use their money to buy it.
I hate buying gifts when I'm just forced to guess someone's preferences and buy them something almost at random and hope they like it.
Kids get around the two above problems. They make it explicit what they want AND they don't having the disposable income to just it themselves. If my godson says "I want this video game" or my goddaughter wants a book, I know that the only way they have to get this thing is to have someone get it for them. This, for me, creates a positive experience.
I'd never thought about inculcating them into this cycle of obligation though... I'll need to think about that.
Are the people sending you lists doing bridal registries or what?
Well, it doesn't matter what the kids' tastes are, if they can't buy the things themselves. So you're adding value that way. (But yeah, they'd love cash, too.)
However, I think I can often predict better than a kid how much utility they'll get out of something. I now have many years of experience (having been a child, and a parent to children) knowing which types of toys look really cool but then kinda suck, and which will provide lasting fun. This is all calibrated by communicating with a specific child and learning their preferences, but my outside judgement as someone experienced with toy shopping adds value. Most kids just don't have the experience to make great decisions in this regard.
You would be very pleased with Chinese culture then. The etiquette on gifts is somewhat reversed from most Western cultures, as gifts are generally expected to be in the form of cash.
I understand the reasoning behind our gift-giving custom: you're supposed to be demonstrating the depth of your relationship by knowing what sort of item the other person wants. Ideally, you can even select an item they wouldn't even realize they wanted or needed. When it works, it really is more thoughtful and emotional than money. But since most people don't actually have that sort of deep emotional resonance it ends up being more wasteful than cash.
The point of gifts is not "efficient consumption", the point is you put time and effort in it, you show you know the person's taste, nudge them a bit in a certain direction, motivate them for a new hobby they may have picked up, etc. Sometimes you do know what a person would like but would never buy himself, cause you have no perfect self-knowledge and your closest friends know things about you, you don't.
To look at it from a "this is not a rational buy if I would buy something myself"-perspective is quite silly. Has all the articles on signalling, metis, etc, been for nothing? Starting a crusade against gifts seems to be a rather pointless enterprise, with as main consequence the destruction of the social status of the crusader.
As with all else, change starts with you. Stop giving presents to people and tell people you don't want presents. If they insist on handing you a gift, hand it right back to them with "I don't want this". Sure, it will be awkward and embarrassing and cause social discomfort the first few times, but eventually the message of "I only want the money" and "I have better things to do with my money and time than think of you" will sink in.
Gift giving is a custom. You don't have to be bound by customs unless you let yourself be so bound. Be sure *why* you don't like this custom (is it reluctance/resentment over spending money? dislike of feeling socially obligated by being a recipient?) and be clear to everyone who might actually or potentially give you gifts that you are a galaxy-brain who despises their common little trashy objects which their feeble little sheeple minds think serve as markers of affection or courtesy but which are meaningless consumer nonsense and you have *much* better taste than to like "garbage, visual pollution ...sweets that will tempt me and make me feel like shit after I eat them ...the thing I own and like but have no use for". That should get them to stop the practice quite soon, dear Lady Disdain.
Love this.
My family and friends have long adopted this custom. I haven't had to do any Christmas shopping for many years. If I want to help out someone that needs it, I give cash.
For a person that you have a caring relationship with, but don't see on a daily basis, what you want is a gift that interweaves your lives together. It could be something that is slightly outside of their existing tastes in the direction of yours, or some everyday item with a distinctive decoration that will remind them it came from you every time they pick it up.
But your central point that gifts result in debt is one of the central points of David Graeber's book, "Debt: The First 5000 Years". If you have a friend you regularly go out for drinks with, then buying a round of drinks that *doesn't* exactly cancel out the last round someone bought is a good way to give an "objective" reason why you two have to go back out together again later.
Of course, for anyone that you *don't* want to have this kind of continuing relationship with, gifts are a bad idea.
This might be a bit of a stretch, but for me this is one of the biggest problems with EA, Universal benefits etc. It's great for the gift-givers (and that's not to be dismissed as irrelevant) but it has (mostly) hidden but deep negatives for the receivers. The soul-destroying social and psychological debt. The givers retain their power, their agency, and their self-image; the receivers lose a portion of all three.
I hope you don't mind me randomly attaching my rant to your comment. It's been waiting to pop out for a few weeks now, and saw an opportunity!
Argument in favour of giving things that people don't see the value of, like mosquito nets or supplements?
As for universal benefits, I think it can re-enforce a sense of being part of a society, rather than being indebted to it, although it may depend on the nature of the benefits.
Savvy people will leverage gifts for social status etc, leaving you in the dust in a few generations. Bribes are just gifts, and bribery works magic, just look at US political contributions and PAC. Those of us who are not fabulously wealthy are easy targets for gift giving. Just buy something they want, but cannot really rationalize spending the money on. This might be dinner at a nice restaurant, a $50 bouquet of flowers, a nice telescope, or a vintage Persian carpet. For people with average means, it is easy to find something they would like more of, but don't really have the disposable income to finance.
Gifts are positive sum within a culture of personal frugality. Suppose there is a luxury good that I would enjoy, but I am worried that it would be a waste of money, or may even be so frivolous as to lower my standing within my community. Suppose further that you have a similar luxury good in mind. If we wait for a socially-sanctioned gift-giving occasion, and then exchange these gifts with each other, we can maintain both to ourselves and others that our spending on the gift was a selfless act, while also enjoying the luxury good we wanted in the first place guilt-free.
"Even if a gift is enjoyed, it is rare to impossible that the recipient should enjoy it enough that she would spontaneously buy it for herself."
Counterexample: When I started out biking seriously, my father (who has done long-distance biking as long as I've been alive) gave me a number of bike-related stuff (a sturdy biking jersey, tools, etc.), and almost certainly did a better job picking them than I would have, since I didn't know which brands were high-quality, what tools were important to have, etc. yet. I had the money but not the knowledge, so the equivalent cash value would have been less useful than the gifts he actually gave me.
I imagine that this situation can be generalized and is not unique to me.
A gift is absolutely that. Anthropologists have extensively studied the gift economy in indigenous cultures and the purpose of a gift is to create an obligation and help prevent future conflict. It is based on the moral principle of reciprocity, which has been "hard-wired" into us through evolution.
If you analyze social institutions from the perspective of homo economicus only, you are likely to miss a lot of things. That kind of analysis is a great supplement, and a terrible replacement, to other forms of analysis.
Other people anticipated my thoughts as I wrote this preposterously long comment, so please forgive redundancies.
What underlies both condemnation of gifts as inefficient and praise for gifts as showing insight into the receiver’s taste is an assumption of material abundance. The reason that kids enjoy receiving gifts is that they can’t buy what they want for themselves; the reason that adults used to enjoy receiving gifts is that they, too, could not buy what they wanted for themselves. Our gift-giving customs seem irrational only because they developed in conditions of scarcity that some people no longer experience.
Those conditions are not so far away. I grew up in a very frugal family, and for years I lived on a graduate-student stipend that made it seem reasonable to put grocery items back on the shelves if my total for the week was going to come out over $25. I would look forward to Christmas and birthday gifts for months: “I really want a new pair of silver-colored earrings after I lost an earring this summer, but earrings are frivolous and I don’t really need them, I’ll just wear my gold-colored earrings or no earrings at all until Christmas….” Even if the resulting gift was not exactly what I would have picked out, gift-exchanges were permission to have and enjoy small luxuries that I didn’t feel free to buy for myself. And even though finding gifts for others was sometimes stressful, I felt good about shopping and spending in order to give, while buying similar things for myself would have felt irresponsible.
My husband, in contrast, is a programmer with a programmer’s salary. He hates receiving gifts because he has already bought himself everything he wants, so other people’s contributions are redundant or substandard. Our different attitudes have produced the following conversation approximately three times over the last six months: “I wish I had a blender for this.” “Sure, should I order the Wirecutter-recommended one on Amazon?” “No, we don’t really need a blender, we have a food processor and it does the same things, except for smoothies and blended drinks with ice in them.” “… you know how money we have, right?” “It’s ridiculous to have a blender AND a food processor. If you want to, you can buy me a blender for my birthday, and then I’ll enjoy it more.” If he does indeed give me a blender, then I can be specifically and vividly grateful every time I have a smoothie for breakfast, and it will be all the sweeter for the times that I set aside smoothies as a treat I could do without.
I can hear the protest: shouldn't people with limited resources especially appreciate efficiency? Why not just buy your small luxuries and let your friend buy his, rather than spending the same amount of money and hoping that your friend will both like what you picked out and refrain from saddling you with useless knick-knacks? When I started thinking about this, I thought that the benefits of the inefficient system involved the deferral itself, the small sacrifice of self-denial, the pleasure of suspense and anticipation. But the actual reason, I think, goes back to the crucial function of gift-giving as a symbolic reinforcement to bonds of goodwill and generosity.
If you live close to the edge of survival—say, as a forager or subsistence farmer—you probably rely on a gift-economy, or network of reciprocal altruism, because other people’s generosity is your only possible insurance against disaster. It often makes a lot more sense for such people to accumulate social capital by giving gifts, doing favors, giving parties or banquets for their neighbors than to try to save up (non-durable) resources for their future selves. (For this dynamic among premodern farmers, see e.g. https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/). Ceremonial gifts function as a symbolic reaffirmation of your participation in this larger gift-economy, signaling that you’re a good person to exchange favors with. Notably, you specifically do not want this reciprocal giving to be thought about in terms of efficiency or return on investment. How many days helping get your neighbor’s hay in before it rains is equivalent to the measure of grain he gave you when your rye spoiled and you thought you wouldn’t survive the winter? In a modern setting: you don’t want the neighbor who watches your kids when you work overtime to start calculating those hours of childcare and deciding that some snow shoveling and a lame Christmas mug isn’t worth it to her, and she doesn’t want you to back out of the relationship when she breaks her hip and a couple of hours of snow shoveling turns into reorganizing her whole home so she doesn’t have to walk upstairs. There can be real mutuality and reciprocity in such a relationship, but accounting is antithetical to it.
In my imagination, a gift economy is not just made up of reciprocal relationships between individuals, but a pattern of goodwill that assimilates new participants: the great social contract of casseroles. You bring a casserole to the couple with a new baby, not because they have helped or will help you in return, but because long ago somebody brought casseroles for you. In my church there’s a “moving” listserv that shows up to help people who are moving out of town and we may never see again, and people moving into town that we’ve never met before. It's the thing to do. You won’t be paid back, but you hope that people operating on the same logic will show up when you need them, too.
In sum, if anyone wants to recapture the logic of ceremonial gift-giving: 1) give enough away to charity that you feel a pinch in your discretionary spending and have to make decisions about what to do without or put off, and then make specific requests or obvious hints so that people can give you things you'll really appreciate; 2) reframe ceremonial giving, even of silly or unwanted gifts, as a token or down-payment or symbolic representation of how willing you would be to give to the people you love if they needed you. Even if you don’t appreciate the trashy objects that your tasteless relatives give you, we all need the generosity of others to get through times of suffering or crisis, and it’s good to affirm that generosity on a regular basis.
One of my friends says that when he was running out of money, the best thing he could do was feed people. He didn't get reciprocation from them, but he did get help from people who saw him being helpful.
This is an excellent comment and deserves being highlighted.
I share OP's dislike of gifts, although I have been in the same edge-of-survival mode as you: having enough for my needs, but so limited on my wants that I would count out in single dollars, one at a time, how much I could afford in a given month.
(I also remember one year getting a surprise when I gave a gift to each of my siblings and their spouses, only for them to give me one gift as a unit in return.)
I now dislike gifts like OP does, for two reasons: 1, because I am really stretched to my limit socially, and I can't keep track of what's needed where and when. 2, I also learned to live without, and generally only buy something when the old one breaks, and also don't throw things out unless I need to. And my wife grew up in much more deprivation than me and buys shit to compensate, so our house is full of useless things and I can't find the useful things under all the crap, and I can no more "just throw it out" than an alcoholic can "just not drink it" if you give him a gift of wine.
Well said, thanks!
The problem with giving cash is that in reciprocal situations, it's equivalent to not giving anything. I give you $20, you give me $20, and no one actually gained anything.
I agree that many gifts do not have the same value to you as gift receiver as the money spent on it. I think though that deepening a relationship is a good reason to participate in gift giving and receiving. Giving activities rather than physical gifts are in my opinion often a good way to deepen relationships. You have an extra reason to get together, create new experiences and do an activity you might otherwise not do together. Some examples are going to dinner, visiting a theme park or museum, wall climbing or scuba diving.
Does anyone know of a good summary on the current state of desalination technology? I've loosely followed Israel's efforts building massive facilities in recent years. In 20 years, will humans be bringing water and agriculture to what is now costal desert (e.g., north Africa, Australia)? In my opinion, brining life to the desert appears more promising than seasteading plans.
Good comment, and explains why 'bringing life to the desert' isn't (with current technology/prices) going to happen.
I'm curious exactly where the balance lies in agriculture/water/desal. My field heavily intersects with water management in CA, a state which is both simultaneously very dry and also an agricultural powerhouse (largely thanks to incredibly ecologically irresponsible water use). I personally think that a _ton_ of the agricultural products that we grow here are not worth the use of our very limited water (and aren't economically valuable enough for something like desal), but some of our agricultural products are able to be grown in only a very few places around the world (ironically the most iconic of these is almonds, which have become a poster child for irresponsible agricultural water use yet are probably one of the few crops that would remain in the state under intelligent water management guidelines, thanks to difficulty of growing elsewhere and high value).
As far as I was aware though, desal on the scale large enough for even just household use in a state like CA (where about 30% of water use is municipal, even though there are 40 million people in the state) isn't really a thing, let alone enough to make up the agricultural uses, even if things like rice, alfalfa, and dairy cattle all moved out of the state. In other words, the problem wasn't price, but feasibility of scale (which...I suppose is really just another word for price, but I didn't think it made sense for household use either).
I vaguely remembered "$2000 to desalinate a person's annual water usage" and found these links
https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/05/29/nations-largest-ocean-desalination-plant-goes-up-near-san-diego-future-of-the-california-coast/
> Desalinated water typically costs about $2,000 an acre foot — roughly the amount of water a family of five uses in a year. The cost is about double that of water obtained from building a new reservoir or recycling wastewater, according to a 2013 study from the state Department of Water Resources.
and
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-15/desalination-expensive-energy-hog-improvements-are-way
> But desalination is expensive. A thousand gallons of freshwater from a desalination plant costs the average US consumer $2.50 to $5, Pankratz says, compared to $2 for conventional freshwater.
No one in a first-world country anywhere near an ocean will die from lack of water.
"Brining life" is a great typo here.
I laughed.
Is there a reason why bringing water and agriculture to coastal deserts is a better plan than just intensifying the use of existing land? I mean, it's better for entrepreneurs who buy up this land, but it's unclear why it would be better for the people who live there, unless it's just massively cheaper.
It feels like a part of the "carrying capacity of Earth" conversation. If we can cheaply, and that may simply mean within an order of magnitude, turn salt water into fresh water, then the carrying capacity issue of water is far less important. Upthread they are saying 25-100% increase in cost for desalinated water, which means absolutely feasible even with current technology.
It also means that some marginal land that happens to have some other valuable resource(s) and is near the ocean can be very habitable.
Have you heard of Metal-Organic Frameworks? I'm a bit of a layman, but I've watched a few intermediate-level explainer videos on YouTube and skimmed some scientific paper abstracts, and they seem quite promising, for both water collection and carbon capture.
Here's the video that first brought them to my attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6T3ICXWqjc
And here's a paper that gets a bit more technical: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.0c00678
Not sure if they'll scale to the same degree as industrial desalination, though.
Might not be what you are asking for in particular, but I have built and lived off of several different watermakers (reverse osmosis desalination) on small sailboats. The units I'm familiar with are small, and will give a few to a few hundred liters per hour, and can be powered by a 12V battery bank, charged from a few hundred watts of solar power. These smaller units are very far from cost effective, except in standalone off-grid type situations with limited storage capacity (such as on a small sailboat). Once the system is upp and running however, they require very little running costs if you just care for them properly (mostly by cleaning/changing the pre-filters and running them regularly, otherwise bacteria will grow in the membrane).
One technology that I keep hearing about being "just around the corner" is reverse osmosis membranes made from graphite, that supposedly will be possible to manufacture as a drop-in replacement and be many times more efficient (require lower pressure, thus increasing output with the same membrane and pump setup).
I'm not particularly read up on this, but would be happy to answer questions :)
Not so long ago, Scott posed some statistical questions and one of the solutions that came up was stratification.
I recently came across a python package all about causal statistics, DoWhy by microsoft, does these 'fancy' statistical things for you. There is also lots of background theory they provide, including many alternatives to stratification. Bunch of links:
* Homepage of their documentation, which has many links (e.g. examples of usage, background theory, etc.) https://microsoft.github.io/dowhy/readme.html
* An online book that details the four main stages of DoWhy algorithm. https://causalinference.gitlab.io/book/ I think the most interesting section is estimation, e.g. it describes propensity models, stratification, amongst many other techniques. It is somewhat maths heavy, but it also has a lot of discussion and intuition too.
This looks technically impressive, but I'm not sure if this is mathematically sound. (Sorry, this is half-baked.)
Can you say what makes you think it is not mathematically sound? Like I said, I only found this package recently and am yet to understand all the nuance. If you do find any holes, you should feed it back to the maintainers - it's an open source project!
Looking for recommendations of good newsletters that offer quality suggested purchases or reading, streaming, etc. Similar to Tim Ferriss 5 Bullet Friday or Reccommendo newsletter. Both of which always have great suggestion and recommendations.
Have you tried Ryan Holiday’s monthly reading list emails? Here’s his list of most-recommended books so you can see if it aligns with your tastes. https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list
I would also be remiss if I didn’t offer my own book notes as a suggestion. Only a dozen so far, but I post more every Tuesday. https://davidteter.com/book-notes
Thank you! I am on Ryan's email list and devour most of what he recommends. I will check out your list as well.
I am interested in getting someone on the economic left to steelman how a "worker ownership of the means of production" market socialism would work. I am not looking for a "public ownership of the means of production" political socialism steelman, unless you're admitting that 'worker ownership' is a motte for the 'public ownership' bailey.
I consider myself a supporter of the free market, but I can't deny that there would seem to be advantages to having worker ownership of their business, except that those advantages are outweighed by significant bad outcomes at edge cases, and the mechanisms to work around those bad outcomes either end up effectively with the imperfect market capitalism we have now or end up at "public ownership of the means of production" socialism with its far more serious problems.
So, we have a group of workers who want to start a business, and they pool their money to start it. This seems like it would be acceptable under both a free market and under worker-ownership market socialism. The first problem is that this seems limited in that for worker-ownership socialism the workers are limited in that they can only start a business with the money they have on hand, which would make it impossible to start a capital-intensive business and impossible for any worker that hasn't amassed a sum of money from helping to start such a business (and I suspect one of the drivers of inequality is that a lot of modern businesses require more of an investment of money to start). Any other mechanism for acquiring money ends up with someone other than the workers owning part of the business.
The second problem is what happens when an employee leaves the business. The most obvious answer is that the company pays out the value of the employee's share of the business; if I'm one of 10 employees all equally invested in the business, the company pays me 10% of the value of the business if I leave, which requires a substantial reserve for a small business. If I keep my share once I leave, the business is no longer employee owned and I still need a way to liquidate my ownership to turn it into something I can use (meaning my shares may end up even further from the workers). If I lose my share without reimbursement, then it is horrible if I die suddenly while employed, as my spouse and kids lose their support.
Likewise, mandating 'worker ownership' makes it hard to hire. Either new employees don't buy in to ownership of the company, in which case they either don't have the same ownership or get ownership without paying for it, or they do have to buy in, in which case it makes it impossible for people without money (such as people just entering the job market) to land a job. If we want to assume that all employees are equal in ownership (which sometimes seems to be assumed), then under current valuation it would take $150,000 to land a job at Walmart and $6,000,000 to land a job at Microsoft, and even at a tenth the value looks rather impossible to sustain.
Finally, there's what happens when the business is no longer viable. The problem with owning the business is owning the businesses debts, and I can't see a way to handle that without either stiffing any creditors or creating a situation where everyone heads to the exits once the business starts to have problems, even if they are potentially salvagable.
One of the reasons I think these scenarios don't get answered is that most socialist economic analysis of businesses under markets seem to assume a steady state, where the business has always existed and will always exist. In the real world, most of the important parts of the business are at the start and the end, and paying for the start and the end accounts for most of the 'surplus value'.
At the same time as we have to work out these issues at the business side, there becomes an issue of what to do for people that want to save money now that investing it isn't an option; you're not just taking away options for people as workers, but taking away options from people that want to invest as a way to save money for the future. If you're going to punish people that want to put 5% of their income from work away to save for retirement in order to stick it to the ultra-rich who can live off their investment income full time, this seems like a massive downside.
It's possible to imagine a system where businesses are strongly encouraged to offer their employees stock options (and with them a share of ownership), but this stretches 'worker ownership of the means of production' well out of what self-described socialists seem to be asking for.
I'm not on the left, so this may be unwelcome, but as I understand it wholly or partially worker-owned co-ops perform reasonably well. They and credit unions are also supposedly more stable in economic downturns but being less risky may entail loss of opportunities for growth.
Regardless, you might want to look into Mondragon and similar firms. Socialists tend to dislike them so again it's clearly not what they're looking for but it shows that worker-ownership can entail responsible and profitable management.
I appreciate the comment.
Mondragon is an interesting example, one that I'd never heard of, and certainly seems to be a good model to follow where possible. Three things stand out:
First, that Mondragon seems to be a federation of smaller companies, plus a financing body. It seems to me that one of the edge cases where co-ops wouldn't be possible would be the big companies, especially the heavy industrial companies that require massive amounts of capital. Boeing alone has almost twice Mondragon's employees and has six times the assets.
Second, it was interesting to note the wage regulations. One of the things I need to ask for feedback on in a later post is a theory dealing with how much of the rise in inequality is due to the sheer value of large b2b and especially b2g contracts and hence how much companies are willing to throw at employees that can bring them in (especially in the US). If Mondragon companies aren't competing in those areas, it might explain why they can get away with a low maximum salary.
Third, a lot of the criticisms seem to revolve around the differences between employees that are also owners and those that aren't. Having the two categories seems to be a good way to solve some of the issues I noted, but it does seem to push it away from the ideal 'worker ownership of the means of production'.
Yeah, I have no idea how appropriate this kind of ownership structure would be for large-scale manufacturing. That's completely outside of my experience and knowledge to the extent that I'm not even comfortable guessing.
The point about worker-owners in co-ops is related to TomP's answer about partnerships: you can't, or at least shouldn't, give every worker an ownership stake immediately on hiring if you intend for them to stay worker-owners past the IPO. Socialists may see it as arbitrary or oppressive, but it's essential to make sure that someone is capable and committed if you want them as a co-owner for the long haul.
I'm also not on the left, but widespread employee ownership is very common in high-skill, professional fields. Most hedge funds, law firms, consulting shops, boutique investment banks, and accounting firms are owned by widespread employee partnerships.
The model works well where there is 1) low-capital intensity, 2) revenue is directly driven by employee performance, and 3) employees are highly skilled and difficult to replace.
Ownership/partnership is typically not extended to all employees at the time of hire. It's often limited to upper management and tenured employees. The partnerships often help new partners to buy in with some financing scheme, granting ownership in lieu of cash bonus, or using a P/E multiple lower than the comparable market rate.
Unlike the tech model, where the goal usually is to IPO so all the early owners can sell their shared to the stock market, the partnership models can be sustainable for many generations. Retiring partners are bought out by existing/new partners and only active employees retain ownership.
This is good feedback, since it provides examples that some of these mechanisms that must exist for those "worker owned" companies that do exist (in this case, ownership transfer mechanisms) are possible. I can suppose that the management and tenured employees are close enough in status and have enough surplus money to both buy in and to buy out departing employees. The question is, does the mechanism scale?
Is there a way for these mechanisms to work for a more conventional small business (which would have trouble with the buy-out) or an entry-level job at Wal-Mart (which would have trouble with the buy-in)?
As an attorney, IMO law firms are almost universally poorly run. And a large part of this is that most people that make partner are bad at management. This also results in fracturing of the ownership group being incredibly common.
It also would not be competitive with traditional set ups if it wasn't essentially legally mandated by the state bar associations.
I've long thought along very similar lines and my tentative conclusion is that 'capitalism' is a nice 'fallback' for these schemes. As other commenters have already pointed out, there are pretty common business models that are at least similar, e.g. law firms. But it's relatively rare for businesses to be fully worker-owned, and it seems like that's for all of the reasons you already mentioned.
I thought this had some interesting points on worker co-ops success/failure: https://geo.coop/story/why-some-worker-co-ops-succeed-while-others-fail
Interesting article from a co-op advocacy perspective. A couple of things that stood out to me.
First, a lot of their desirable characteristics are things not necessarily tied to cooperative work. Regardless of how the company is run, encouraging those should be something good management should do. It would be instructive to look at why more companies don't have at least some effective mechanism to get employee feedback, for example. Although there is a sense that if you make that a metric rather than a goal, corporate bureaucracy tends to satisfy itself with meeting the metric rather than improving the metric to meet the goal.
The second one is pertaining to size. "There is a preference for small size because democratic participation is easiest in face to face groups and becomes more difficult in large organizations. An optimum upper size limit is probably somewhere near 200 - 250." My guess would have been that the upper size limit would be closer to Dunbar's Number, but that isn't off by too much. The problem then becomes how you run an organization bigger than that by several orders of magnitude. Something like Wal-Mart you could probably break down into individual stores (though the central supply chain part is still going to be big). But Boeing is 140,000 employees, Airbus is 130,000 employees and I suspect that any organization able to build commercial airliners is going to be of at least the same order of magnitude in size (and this is a problem for idealistic communism as well; in order for your society to be able to produce the complex high-end items it needs, you will need large hierarchical organizations, and the biggest of those is going to be the one that supplies and runs your military).
Three, that a lot of the issues I mentioned in my original post show up. For example, both the issues with retiring employees and new employee buy-in show up in the discussion of the Pacific Northwest Plywood Co-ops: "Workers ready to retire discovered the value of their shares had jumped from an initial $1,000 - $2,000 to $25,000, $50,000 or even more; new young workers did not have the money to buy into the co-op, so retiring members found it easier to sell their shares to capitalist lumber companies that wanted to acquire their very profitable business."
Look into how credit unions work. Or look into REI. The fact is that worker-owned businesses, also known as cooperatives, have been around a long time and can work well. I think the pertinent question is: why aren't there more of these?
That really is an interesting question, a naive understanding of Marxism would suggest that without a capitalist extracting surplus value, capitalism itself should favour co-operatives that distribute surplus value among workers instead.
Possible reasons?
Co-ops aren't illegal, so it's not like Capitalists are using the full power of the state to stay in business (they're probably using some state power though).
A pro-Capitalist answer would argue that having a Capitalist in charge helps, and there are definitely benefits to having fewer people or even just one person to make quick decisions. Of course, there's no reason why workers in a co-op couldn't elect their own leaders to get those benefits, so I'm not too convinced by this argument, although it would have all the usual problems of democracy.
Worker run co-ops are obviously less willing than capitalist firms to downsize (preferring to cut hours and wages instead), and in light of that they may be less willing to hire new people. That could cause problems in fast moving industries, but on the other hand people with more job security are more likely to think long term rather than just extracting short term gain.
I think the real answer is that it's hard to get your hands on Capital if you're not already wealthy, and banks tend to be unwilling to lend to co-ops. This is probably some combination of legitimate concerns, unfamiliarity with co-ops, and pro-capitalist bias.
I think there's a couple of related problems that might tie into this. If you look at some of the examples cited above, you have co-ops that got their start as groups of skilled tradespeople.
1. The problem could be getting the right number of skilled tradespeople together that can pool enough capital evenly to start a business, especially if the cost of starting a business has gone up (such as insurance, legal costs, or even just purchasing a place to work).
2. The problem could be that the cost of starting a business in the skilled trades is rather high compared to other lines of work. I would wager that it would be easier to get enough tech entrepreneurial types together with the resources on hand to start a business, but those types of businesses seem to have no problem attracting venture capital.
3. The problem could be that trade workers have no interest in a co-op business when looking for a job; the benefits of working for a co-op are long term, while workers are looking at what a job offers in the short term (which is likely to be more objective and thus easy to comprehend). This might go hand in hand with a drop in job security; workers that are expecting poor job security are going to look at jobs as short term.
From the management side, the demand for skilled management (and others in similar areas such as business development) is high and the limited salaries in many co-op environments are such that the better ones will work for the places that can offer more pay.
I'm probably not far enough to the left to provide the answer you're looking for.
At some companies that I've worked for I've been paid not just in dollars, but also with stock in the company. Making this more common would be the easy way to make our society more like the one you describe.
If I were forced to come up with a framework to implement this, I think I would settle on "in addition to there being a minimum wage, there would also be a minimum stock grant." Given that it would be nice to have a market for stock outside of employees, I would also pick some minimum ratio for the voting power of employee controlled shares vs outsider controlled shares. The goal would be to balance the power of employees to sell their shares at a reasonable value when they leave with their ability to assert power as employee/owners. Within this tradeoff, it should also be possible for private equity to work; even if employees have to eventually be able to own the company, it should be possible for capitalists to buy an entire company (or set of companies), make radical changes, and earn a profit before rising employee ownership pushes them out.
With achievable regulatory changes you could have a system that has most of the desirable properties of our current system, but one in which employees had the chance to earn a share of the capital.
I welcome any point of view on the matter, as trying to work out a steelman by myself was getting frustrating and I appreciate what I've learned from the comments so far.
I agree that the stock option schema meets some of the needs, and unlike some of the examples of real world co-ops brought up by others in this thread, it's one that looks like it might work for a larger company (even if any given employee is not likely to be heard, the sheer number of low-level employees is going to give them some representation). The problem is, is it something you can implement for a very small business with low margins?
The biggest weakness with my scheme is that it casually assumed that every employer was publicly traded. Obviously that doesn't work for small businesses where the overhead of listing outweighs the benefits. However, issuing paper stock and paying dividends is relatively straightforward.
A restaurant is the type species of a small business with small margins. I think that the system would work exactly as intended for people following the dishwasher -> line chef -> sous chef -> head chef -> restaurant owner career track. At each stage they would earn more valuable capital that would give them both a seat at the table to learn about the next stage as well as an asset that can be leveraged into starting their own restaurant.
For waitstaff and other short term employees, there's a bigger problem. At the end of a summer working for, let's say McDonalds, they have not quite as much money as they would like, as well as a piece of paper entitling them to 1/500th of the profits of the McD's franchise on Water St. One option is that they can keep it. Every year, they'll get a check for between $100 and $500 that will slowly shrink as they get diluted out by more recent employees. The other option is that they can try to sell this piece of paper to someone. Candidates include current ownership, who knows what the value is but might not offer a fair price; the aforementioned ambitious sous chefs, who also know what the value is but might not be able to pay for it; and local banks, who might already hold some of this as loan collateral. None of these are great options but there's enough of a market there that the value of these stock grants would affect employee behavior and outlook, which is the stated policy goal.
The concern that this framework would be overly burdensome on small businesses is valid. I don't think it's fatal to the policy goal to exempt business smaller than 5 employees from the stock grant system entirely. It could be argued that business which are that small are already forced to give a significant seat at the table to employees because losing any one of them impairs their ability to operate.
I wouldn't advocate for a system like this. I don't think that it solves enough problems to justify all the machinery needed to keep it in place. However there is a smooth gradient between our current economic system and a quite radical labor control of capital system. I think you would have to be simultaneously neoliberal and communist to advocate for this sort of thing, but it's a coherent achievable position.
Note: "market socialism" is "socialism that utilizes (some kind of) market for resource allocation" not "socialism that works with the current rules".
The current rules make worker ownership untenable, obviously. Co-ops are unable to scale above craft level, since they can't survive its own success (while remaining co-ops), as workers have both perverse incentives to cash out of a co-op and the ability to do so easily. (This is a corollary of a general tendency for capital to concentrate in fewer in fewer hands, this kills the host society, you'd want to prevent this even if you really like the modern market, because it just won't last otherwise.)
So, a market socialism would necessarily enact new rules, and one of the obvious things to forgo is absentee ownership of capital. I don't think this implies or necessitates "public" ownership, as production could still be divided between distinct, separate and separately controlled corporations, including the exact same network of corporations as now. But if you do think it implies just that, then well, sure. (But don't call it "motte-and-bailey", that's implying a deception, while there aren't really many socialists claiming to like or support markets in the first place. Worker ownership of the means of production is the terminal goal, the means are contingent. And don't use it to make a motte-and-bailey on your own, where dismantling capitalism necessitates Soviet Russia. We hate Soviet Russia (well, most of us, tankies still exist), it clearly wasn't allowing much worker control of anything.)
My problem is that too many self described 'socialists' that argue at a bumper-sticker slogan level talk as if the only change their system will bring is that "workers will own the means of production". That most socialists want to abolish markets entirely I suspect charitably means that they haven't put much thought into what they are arguing when they talk about 'worker ownership' (hence the motte/bailey), and I would argue that abolishing markets entirely necessarily leads to 'public ownership' in practice (and thus why 'worker not public ownership' and 'abolish markets entirely' would be incompatible).
The ACX commentariat includes a lot of self-described socialists who argue at a much higher level and with a level of reason (such as your comment), and I thought it a good place to get a steelman argument, and I have been very pleased to have learned something from the responses. I agree that ending absentee ownership of stock does not constitute "public ownership of the means of production", and while it is a major imposition on the markets for labor and capital, it's still consistent with general market allocation of resources by society, so we've at least established that a 'worker owned market socialist' framework exists that might work.
The questions I had when I composed my original post are 'are the problems that I theorize a worker-owned business having to contend with the sorts of problems real worker-owned businesses have to address?' and 'are there means to address those problems?', because those are going to need to be addressed very thoroughly if all businesses are to be worker-owned. It's obvious that worker-ownership works properly in ideal cases, but If there are serious problems with it working for important classes of businesses, then there is a serious problem with mandating worker ownership, and the places to look are the edge cases (the biggest and the smallest).
If you are an advocate for market socialism, how do you get around the capital limits imposed by worker ownership and the risk and cost to the worker of the arrangement?
"But don't call it "motte-and-bailey", that's implying a deception, while there aren't really many socialists claiming to like or support markets in the first place."
Thinking on it (and the comment below yours), the one sign that I often see that seems to come with the type of argument I describe is the phrase 'surplus value'. A lot of the arguments that use that phrase, especially at a bumper-sticker slogan level, tend to make their appeal on the basis of 'support my ideology and we'll give you the surplus value that was stolen from your labor' and not mention anything about abolishing markets and/or private property and thus fundamentally transforming all of society. I can't see that sort of appeal as anything but deceptive.
I think the imagined system is one in which working for a business makes you a co-owner of it, entitled to a share of the profits as long as you work there, but not getting anything if you leave. Basically, ownership and employment are equivalent. This would be difficult to set up under our current legal system, it's unclear what happens when the business goes under.
However, I'm not certain that there'd be no way to invest in an economy of worker-owned co-ops (as long as you don't limit investment to merely buying stocks and shares) - as you point out, they need start up capital, so you could "invest" in loans to workers to finance expansion. Let's say this mostly happens via credit unions pooling savings, presumably there'd be low risk credit unions that make safe bets and then more risky credit unions that are the equivalent of our Venture Capitalists, lending money to entrepreneurs trying more risky bets in the hope of greater payoffs.
I had considered the loan idea, but unless you're structuring loans differently, I'm not clear that it isn't worse in some ways. As a worker, wouldn't you be on the hook to pay off the loan on fixed terms rather than just from the profits? And you still have 'surplus value' flowing away from your company to the financial institution.
It must work somehow since Mondragon seems to operate that way, as mentioned above, but perhaps that works since they are loaning to co-ops within their own network.
I agree that this does just seem like capitalism with extra steps, but the fact that it's a loan with a finite term would make it more tolerable, the only surplus value being extracted is interest on the loan. In the case of Mondragon they just lend the money from their credit union, it's no different to a business taking out a loan from a bank.
As for repayment, there's no reason why terms couldn't be flexible, since if the business goes under the investors are not going to get their money back. As for being "on the hook", my understanding of "limited liability" is that the owners of a business are not personally liable when the corporation goes insolvent, so as long as it's structured right, the worst case scenario is that the business gets liquidated and the workers become unemployed and have to find work elsewhere.
"The worst case scenario is that the business gets liquidated and the workers become unemployed and have to find work elsewhere."
Still, my understanding is that when a business is liquidated in bankruptcy, the money owed to workers is among the first debts to be paid off with whatever comes from the liquidation. If this remains, there is the potential for some painful financial shenanigans at the cost of people with savings that is loaned to the company. If you change this, it means the workers get less protections than under current law... which might be appropriate, given that they are now also owners.
Transferring money between two US bank accounts is free, either directly via your bank or through middlemen like PayPal. As far as I can tell, every service on the market that allows you to transfer across international borders and currencies costs 3-6% of the transfer. Why is this so much more expensive than transfers within a country? I struggle to imagine that it costs the money managers anywhere near that much to move some numbers around, so why hasn't competition between the many services driven prices down like it has for intracountry transfer?
My first theory is that there just aren't many international transfers so there isn't enough of a market to drive those kinds of competitive prices, and my second theory is that the pricing reflects some kind of regulatory compliance costs where governments require a lot of expensive paperwork in order to set up a service that's allowed to do international transfers at all. But that's all baseless speculation, I'd love to hear from someone who knows something about money transfers.
Yes, there's lots of 'anti-money-laundering' regulations around money transfers and 'same-country' banks can mostly meet them 'cheaply' as a lot of the regulations are about 'knowing your customer', which banks can satisfy pretty well for most of them.
But it's not true that same-country transfers are necessarily that much less expensive – to banks. It's probably more likely that it's just that the 'sticker price' is low and the banks (and PayPal) are eating those costs as a means of gaining marginal customers/business that _is_ profitable.
Made an account to comment because I was very unhappy with those rates. I found Wise (formerly Transferwise) which does international transfers usually cheaper than 0.5%.
Have you asked your bank about this? I transfer money internationally every week (for business) and am charged a flat fee ($5 to $20), not a percentage of the amount. That's for wire transfers. You can also write a paper check and mail it - that costs nothing but postage.
For sure if you're talking about small amounts (< $250) those fees are expensive, but for large amounts they're negligible.
...added: Obviously if you're transferring between currencies you're going to pay at minimum the bid/ask spread, but that's nowhere near 3% for pairs of major currencies. But it's certainly cheaper if you don't change currencies (most larger banks outside the US allow you to hold multiple currencies in your account).
Probably needless to mention, crypto transfers.
I’ve been really disappointed with the guest book reviews. It’s unclear what level of editorial endorsement goes with them, and they look like normal posts. But the quality is...variable. I would not feel comfortable publishing some of them, and it makes me hesitate to recommend the site to people who read those books while they’re up on the front page.
Which one in particular do you think is bad and that you wouldn't "feel comfortable publishing"?
I haven't read them all yet, but I think I've skimmed at least the first few paragraphs of each one published so far and they all seem totally worth publishing.
AFAIK, the only "level of editorial endorsement" is 'these are worth publishing' (by Scott).
All of the reviews are prefaced with a disclaimer about them not having been written by Scott and being a part of a book review contest, so are you worried that the people you'd recommend this site to wouldn't read that?
And it seems perfectly fine for you to just not recommend the site to people. I'm not convinced that there's any (good) reason for Scott to do anything based on your vague concerns or complaints.
Oh I should put my cards on the table here -- the only one I did more than skim was Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. I felt the reviewer not only failed to understand the context of what he was reading, he also came off as incredibly smug and snarky. I think intentionally so. Whatever you think of the material presented in the book, Wright deserves better than anonymous snark. But I also felt the arguments presented in the review were weak and ill-considered.
Ah, that's the only one I *didn't* read!
That was my least favorite. The others I thought were solid.
Ahh! Thanks!
That's one I only skimmed!
---
I just read it. It seems fine. I'm very curious to learn more details about what you think the reviewer didn't understand or which arguments in particular were weak or "ill-considered". I thought it was a fairly breezy but still cogent criticism of (what I'm guessing) is in the book.
I think it's important to be able to distinguish between an emotional reaction as a result of a perceived attack on your values and the quality of the review. For example, I had a strong reaction to the Prophet and Wizard review, because it mischaracterized the conservation movement, but I recognize the review was well written and probably accurately reflected the ideas in the book.
Yes, this is probably fair. I recognize that's an element of it. I support the Nonzero Foundation on Patreon, listen to Bob Wright's podcasts, read his newsletter, and consider The Moral Animal one of the best books I've ever read. And that's partly how I know how much of reason is just the rationalization of an emotional response in the first place! There is some tribal defense element.
But it's also an awkward position of liking ACX, but having it be a place that publishes a review it doesn't seem to endorse in anyway. It muddies things, which I think is a fair general criticism of the reader-submitted review format. I think the solution that would satisfy everyone, except Scott, would be for him to engage with the pieces and give his own thoughts.
I felt the same. The snark didn't bother me much, but the arguments did seem weak. Particularly trying to shoehorn utilitarianism into it. Hilariously (and perhaps alarmingly), the reviewer has a PhD from Harvard (they linked to their blog at the end of the review).
FWIW I think there have been two really worthwhile book reviews so far: On the Natural Faculties, and Poverty and Progress. I think that Scott could've been choosier in which ones to publish, but those two I really appreciated reading.
I feel like, on the whole, most of the ones I've read are just way too long relative to how interesting the subject matter is. I know this is a weird complaint to leverage around here since Scott is basically that patron saint of writing really long sequences of text on subjects I'd otherwise not have cared about, but most of the reviews have just dragged on and on.
Writing long has a large payoff but a high bar. Scott is great not because he writes long, but because he constantly gets over the bar.
What are some fun online activities to do with a significant other on the other side of the world? Getting the obvious ones out of the way: Watching something together, playing online games, conversation, etc.
http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/
(reposting this from the last OT since it was done soon before this one opened)
How easy is it to substitute in LED bulbs for the long fluorescent tubes?
https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-Single-End-Double-End-Fluorescent-Replacement/dp/B08HPVR3TX
I've got a set of 4 tubes in my kitchen, and the ballast is failing. Sometimes I get lucky and all 4 are on if I precisely fiddle with them, for about 5 minutes. But usually just the inner two are lit, and the outer two are barely flickering.
I don't want to replace the ballast.[1] I have good reason to think it's not the bulbs, because I replaced the outer two bulbs and they worked for about a day and then went back to flicker, and rearranging the bulbs always leaves the outer two in dim/flicker.
How plug-and-play are those LED bulbs, especially with a suspect ballast? I see talk about "with ballast" or "direct wire" and it sounds like I have to choose to remove the ballast to use the second, and I don't want to mess with the ballast[1].
[1] Seriously, I don't to replace the ballast. It is behind the drywall in the ceiling and wasn't built to be maintained. The last time I tried this (on another fixture) I had to spend hours with my arms over my head dealing with wires and yanking things out and putting things back and while I got the whole thing to "work" I never managed to get it reattached. This is not the project for me. I have other things to do.
I just got a set of GE LED replacement bulbs from Lowe's that were in the clearance section, and they were as plug-and-play as they said on the packaging. I just took out the old bulbs and popped the new ones in and they worked fine. I'm not sure if it will help with a faulty ballast though, as the fixture hummed with traditional bulbs, and it still hums with the LEDs, so if there is an issue with the ballast, the LEDs will likely not help. However, if it is a current/voltage inconsistency issue with the ballast, I could see a case where the internal power-regulator on the LED bulb that lets it deal with multiple types of ballast/direct-wire type situations could potentially help smooth over the differences in the short term (though it may also shorten the lifespan of the bulb). I'm not an expert in this though, so my advice would be to buy it and see what happens. Best case, it fixes it, worst case, you were going to need to replace the ballast anyway.
If the ballast is going, unfortunately you will have to replace it. Unless you are a good electrician, it is best to have a professional do it. I am pretty handy and like to do DYI repairs, but I steer clear of electrical work.
My ideal utility function (whatever it is) has to explain why I'd gladly accept slightly worse outcomes for the benefit of having made the bad decisions myself freely (whatever that means). I get much more annoyed by equally bad outcomes when they are consequences of impositions I know I wouldn't have chosen.
Otoh, although injustice (whatever that means) also adds extra annoyance, that annoyance feels like a flaw and not part of that utility function. If God comes down and randomly gives some of my neighbours everything I've been wishing for, I'd be annoyed at the injustice but Ideal Dumbledork would not be, and I would never in good conscience prevent this from happening, whereas I may try to prevent someone from being lied/manipulated/forced to do something they don't want to even if I thought it would be slightly beneficial for them to do it. I'm not sure how much of this is just a reflection of a deeper intuition that holding freedom as a value in this way leads in the long run to a happier world, but it doesn't feel like it's only a means to an end.
I wonder, is this the other way around for other people? If someone's intuitions had injustice and freedom swapped, I'm not sure I'd have anything to say. Do you think many people would really prefer (after deep thought and with a straight face) a slightly less happy population but more just world, just because?
Why would you expect emotions to conform to a utility function? I would just treat emotions as inputs. If giving one person $1000 causes 20 people to have $100 worth of disutility due to jealousy, then the net utility is negative $1000.
I agree with your example there, and I don't have a clear idea of the structure of my thinking around these topics. But there's a distinction that feels important and I made poorly so far. When thinking about the freedom thought experiments, I perceive an intuition that there's a there there -- the same type of intuition that leads me to detect nonsense when I'm wrong about something and leads me to identify the nonsense. When thinking about the injustice thought experiments, what I perceive are feelings of annoyance, those you would treat as inputs, overlapped with intuitions on the contrary.
I don't know if there's a coherent utility function underlying those intuitions; probably there isn't. But I'd bet that if I dag deep enough and found there's no way to build a coherent utility function that fits my intuitions, then the intuitions would change. Sure, this is thinking backwards, but isn't this the best one can hope for in this area?
I think you're seeing hypotheticals that stretch reality to the point where your intuitions no longer apply. When we are upset about someone getting lied to, our intuition is picking up on a true thing - that most choices made upon lies are immediately or eventually going to turn out poorly.
Our priors are based on a lot of iterations of scenarios, but can be easily broken by a crafted hypothetical. It's not that hypothetical scenarios where the non-intuitive thing leads to a better outcome are impossible, but that even if they were true we should rightly question whether they resulted in an overall better reality.
For instance, even if lying brought about a better outcome in the initial hypothetical, the existence of the lie erodes trust and therefore future interactions are less likely to work well.
I don't know. There are plenty of hypotheticals I can think of that are pretty similar to reality and where there's no long-term change between the scenarios. Like, my government, who I already don't trust, now forbids me to, don't know, buy some drug, say, ritalin. Maybe they know better and the risks for me outweigh the benefits. Maybe I end up agreeing with them after more research next month. But even after agreeing with them, I cannot picture myself praising them for having blocked me from making my mistake. In extreme cases sure, but when it's close? No, let me make my bad choices. If you are someone close to me, that may be different, but that's because on some level I've freely given you the standing to choose on my behalf if you are sure I'm making a blunder.
You're actually agreeing with me (my fault for being unclear I'm sure). We have an intuition that choices freely made are better than choices under coercion, even if we might agree that [ban this drug] ended up being the better decision. I think that's because we have a lot of information from past experience that choices we made in the past tended to be better than choices forced upon us.
Maybe you are right. I wonder if I wouldn't have this intuition if I'd never experienced those situations. Or if I had the general feeling that the authorities were generally smarter and meant me well. I don't recall feeling much different in this regard when I was a kid even when I had no doubt that my parents and most teachers meant well and geeenerally knew better (though I did accept and understand the roles, I was never rebellious).
Elementary children tend to be very trusting, as in, do whatever the authority tells them, even if it's weird. That trust changes as the child gets older, to where they start to ask for proof or at least evidence that what they are being told to do makes sense. I think the difference is that as we get older and develop, we are also experiencing situations where authority figures make mistakes, choose poorly, act corruptly, or are just wrong about stuff. The most we experience that, the more we become skeptical and look out for our own needs instead of just accepting the authority figure's approach.
For kids in high trust environments, they may easily make it into adulthood before they have much reason to question adults. In low trust environments, like drug addicted criminal parents, kids rebel against all authority figures much more often.
Yeah, right. My point though was that eeven as a kid with not much of a rebellious personality, that respected his parents, and believed they had my best interest at heart, I still valued "making my own choices" as its own thing separate from the outcome. So maybe the instinct I'm talking about is about learning and play?
TLDR; yes, we can explain why I have these preferences -- previous experiences, evolution, favouring freedom, learning, truth vs deceit, etc. I can't justify those preferences. But currently, they feel deeply ingrained and not just a proxy for good happy outcomes, in a way that doesn't disappear when I inspect it. Unlike justice, which superficially feels like something I want but the more I look into it, the more my instincts tell me that it only matters as a means to an end. My instincts are probably being stupid, but I wondered if most other people have a similar sense but with things like justice.
I was rereading Book Review: The New Sultan because I remembered being dissatisfied with the discussion of populism at the end, when something jumped out at me:
>In the course of normal politics, culture, or almost anything else, the elites will always end out on top. This flirts with tautology - of course whoever ends up on top will be a member of the elite! - but on a deeper level it isn't - the populace and elites are different social classes and cultures, so this claim identifies a particular class/culture that always gets its way. The American equivalent might be pointing out that the winner of the Academy Awards is probably going to be from a coastal liberal secular background, and not an evangelical Protestant from Nebraska. Same for the Dean of Harvard, the editor of the New York Times, etc.
>The populace can try to protest this, but their efforts are doomed to failure. Maybe they can make their own movies (eg. The Passion Of The Christ), but for whatever reason these will never be as convincing or have the same sort of clout that the elite version does. Elites have enough advantages in power, connections, education, and maybe even genes (cf. the meritocracy debate) that in the natural course of events, they always come out on top. Trying to come up with a system where elites don't come out on top is an almost futile task, one where you will constantly be pumping against entropy.
"Hang on", I thought. "I remember it generated quite of bit of controversy at the time, but wasn't The Passion Of The Christ pretty critically acclaimed? Who won that year's Academy Awards anyway?" Thus began the dive.
Looking through the 77th Academy Awards (covering 2004), sure enough Passion didn't win any categories. It did score a perfectly respectable three nominations - Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Makeup - though I suppose one could argue that they're all in technical categories with a bit less cultural impact. (The counterargument being that anyone dismissing those while treating the Oscars with any level of respect is operating with a *very specific* calibration of elitism, but I digress.)
Best Picture that year went to Million Dollar Baby, which is a hard-to-describe non-boxing movie about boxers so I'd direct you towards Ebert's review for a summary. Best Director went to the director of the same, famed son of the Bay Area... Clint Eastwood. Best Actor went to Jamie Foxx whose background is almost working-class Texan to the point of caricature, and Best Actress went to Literal Nebraskan Hilary Swank.
Best Supporting Actor Morgan Freeman (Tennessee). Best Supporting Actress Cate Blanchett (Melbourne). Best Original Screenplay to two Frenchman and a New Yorker, ok maybe now we're getting somewhere, but Best Adapted Screenplay puts us back in Nebraska! (And Seattle, to be fair.) The last category before we hit Foreign Language Films in the listing is Best Animated Feature Film, which went to Brad Bird of Montana.
There is a selection filter in that movie stars are massively weighted towards people currently living in LA for obvious reasons - Hollywood *is* a physical place, after all - and I guess that could be enough to count as a 'coastal background' in a tautological sense. But I personally found the geographic diversity of the winners' birthplaces surprising, and checking the actual results of 2005 a compelling strike against the theory of elites v. the populace described. One could still argue the winners are disproportionately elites if "the elites" is an expanding group that steadily selects talent from non-elites, but this is decidedly different from a treatment where they're assumed to be separate, stable categories. Like most definitions of class.
(Alternatively, we could conclude that the Academy is actually pretty populist and is elevating talent with little apparent bias towards cultural factors. Maybe your posteriors for that ought to be noticeably higher than your priors five minutes ago, but I think I'd rather throw out this particular construction of class than accept that whole-cloth.)
Epistemological caveat: I deliberately chose to look at multiple categories of the 77th Awards, rather than pick a specific award and track it through time - I think the former is a better technique for capturing the sentiment at a given moment, while the latter might be instructive of a narrow slice of film awards but not really reflective of a 'culture' that exists at any particular time. I'm confident I'm not just cherry-picking here, since I haven't looked into competing metrics deeply enough to have data to throw out!
(The one exception being that I did glance at the list of NYT executive editors for the past century or so. I think there may be an argument to be made there, but IMO it's more reflective of NYC-specific dynamics and isn't exactly a model of (((class structure))) that Scott is talking about or wants to promote.)
But your Oscar technique is hugely "lumpy", in that four of those winners were all from one movie (Million Dollar Baby), so you're quadruple-counting that the voters really liked it; it won Best Picture, Director, Actress, and Supporting Actor. And I don't think people really know or care where the winners are _from_; in fact, I didn't even know that Blanchett was not English, let alone what state Hilary Swank is from. (This probably doesn't apply if someone's not from the Anglosphere, though.)
I am specifically responding to a description of "elites" from Scott's review, check the quoted section. Results from the 77th aren't enough to crack the motte, but it should indeed give pause to the idea this is a useful example of elitism.
Maybe it's less about who's making the movie than who's watching it. "Hard-to-describe non-boxing movie about boxers" sounds like some Grade A coastal elite bullshit.
...have you seen it? It'd be one thing if you have a neat heterodox take on the movie, but if you're speaking that confidently and all you have is my description (that is explicitly failing to describe it well!), I'm at a loss as to how to respond.
I have not seen it, no.
It's pretty good! I've heard it won a bunch of awards too
The novella it is based on is excellent and fairly short. I recommend it.
I lean towards the tautological version (they're elite because they're at the top), but with an added caveat and an additional thought about the consequences of having elites. If all of the most brilliant/talented/whatever people gravitate to a particular place, whether physical or just through connections, then the best way to succeed may shift to "be around that place." Sometimes that's learning a particular skill or set of skills that helped them succeed, like being really good at cinematography. That's usually a good thing, learning from past successes to build a better movie-making approach. Sometimes it's getting cozy with a famous/skilled insider, and skipping the hard work or being skilled yourself part. Jaden Smith comes to mind, but so does every super-attractive-but-bad-acting person who gets cast in movies, especially with people like Harvey Weinstein in the world.
The additional thought is that if the top 0.001% of the population all go to Hollywood to become part of the elite, that doesn't do a whole lot for the 99.999% of the population who cannot. Not will not, or choose not to, but literally never had a chance. An overly selective elite simply has too few slots to accommodate anything but a paltry few. Nebraska may send a couple of hometown superstars (assuming they got in by merit, see the above point...) but the rest of that town don't really change anything about their lives. Whatever negative emotions people feel about "elites" are still true even if a non-representative sample gets to move up.
At the risk of sounding like I'm moving Scott's goalposts for him, I think the key point here isn't about the individual people and where they come from, but about the *culture* of the coastal places and the amount of adaptation required. Literal Nebraskan Hilary Swank probably doesn't have the values or political views of the modal Nebraskan, but even if she did, would she feel comfortable expressing them in the same blaringly confident way that, say, Angelina Jolie expresses hers? My point of reference here is John Milius, one of the most talented filmmakers of the last 50 years or so, who was basically blacklisted for openly admitting he's a Republican who loves guns and Reagan and hates big government and has made much, much fewer films than either his talents or box office returns would argue for.
In other words, the elite *culture* keeps getting its way, and if you want to beat it you have to pump against entropy very heavily insofar as you need to form your own talent center to compete with it in Nebraska or wherever, and you have to make it more attractive than the existing one, and make it pump values in the opposite direction so that Geena Davis or whoever fells uncomfortable saying she likes Democrats, while the local talent pool angrily denounce abortion as baby-murder in their late-night show interview spots (for which you also need to create your own circuit of talk shows who will want to have such guests on, etc. etc.). This whole operation is *much* harder than just moving to LA, going to auditions and yelling about your liberal views, even though most people who try that one fail too.
Without going too deep in the weeds I'll just again point to Clint Eastwood as the doubly-salient counterexample, and refer towards the most iconic example of a Hollywood blacklist to demonstrate that ideological demands are *definitely* subject to change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
Similar to Mr. Doolittle's version though, recasting elitism as a cultural rather than classist structure might be more defensible but doesn't support a lot of the original complaints. Scott's speculating about genetic factors at the limit of nepotism, while cultural reversals can be expected to flip multiple times in a single human lifetime - the time scales here just can't be acting on the same pressures. It seems like the different formulations ought to be in direct conflict, but they share enough language that I think the incompatibilities go unnoticed. (And there are *definitely* bad-faith ideologues making money on that fact, but I don't think that's an issue in this instance.)
A bit of doggerel verse I composed after removing Twitter from my life.
"I stopped going to Twitter, because Twitter is hell,
A noisome place that draws me in and traps me in its smell,
It dirtied me, it wearied me, it ate away my soul,
A poison cup I could not sip without draining the bowl.
But when I went round Reddit, that splendid strange bazaar,
Where you can find most anything, whither near or far,
Its mighty stalls were teeming with content to the brim,
That kept linking to Twitter! And Twitter is a sin!
So I went in search of bloggers, an old and threatened breed,
That once was strong and teeming, brought low by Twitter feed,
And the blogs I found were interesting, and well written and wise,
But when I clicked their hyperlinks, Twitter met my eyes!
Everywhere I traveled, the story was the same,
I stopped a while at Facebook, but Twitter was its name,
I stalked some ancient forums, and Twitter beat me there,
The internet is Twitter now, and Twitter I won’t bear."
I enjoyed reading that. I've never suffered the misery of twitter, but know what you mean- there are plenty of other noisome places on the internet!
Semi-relevant: Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org) is basically trying to be Twitter, but more decentralized.
Also semi-relevant: Twitter got hacked last summer when a bunch of prominent accounts (and some less prominent ones) started running cryptocurrency scams. If not for this hack, I might have been an epic Twitter shitposter. Alas, I don't trust the company anymore.
I think Twitter is mechanically evil: the format itself invites people to indulge in a perpetual cycle of rage-reading and doom-scrolling. I think it makes people's lives worse on net, or at least it makes my life worse, and that comes from the medium of a Twitter post itself, regardless of whether the company is good or bad. So I'm not sure if Mastodon would be any better for me. I wish them luck though, somebody's got to figure this out. In the meantime, twitter delenda est.
Removed.
I tried modafinil years ago and man, it gave me the worst dry mouth ever. I don't know if this is a common side effect, but it was intolerable. Also, it didn't seem to do much for me. I had a stronger effect from aniracetam.
Say parallel universes exist, that universes split up into alternate futures. A man plays Russian roulette. In some universes he loses and kills himself. In some universes he wins and survives. Since the man no longer lives in the universes where he lost, from the man's point of view he always wins at Russian roulette. Only the versions that wins are able to observe the outcome of the game. If the man plays ten thousand rounds of Russian roulette, this will start to seem really weird for the man. Like he's supernaturally lucky. But in most of the universes there are other observers than the man. In most of the universes those other observes will not see anything weird.
So let's say there is something that can kill all humans. Like nuclear war or a giant meteorite hitting Earth. From humanity's point of view these things never happen, because we are always observing from the universe where we didn't get killed. This means we might be strongly underestimating the probability of these things happening. We have not had a nuclear war (not counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in the more than 70 years with nuclear weapons, so nuclear war seems to have relatively low probability to us. But if parallel universes exists, nuclear war might be much more likely. Maybe nuclear war happens in 90 percent of the universes every year, and we are unable to observe it.
Even if a nuclear war would not kill all humans we could still be underestimating its probability. Say the universes split into two, one with nuclear war and one without. If the nuclear war only killed half of humanity, there would still be twice as many people in the universe without nuclear war. So the number of people that observed that a nuclear war had happened would be only half of the observers that observed that no nuclear war had happened.
I wonder if one can use this to prove that it likely that parallel universe are real. Say we went to other planets and noticed that they had many more massive meteorite impacts than Earth does (adjusted for the size of for the planets.) Like if we find lots of huge meteorite craters on Mars. That would suggest that Earth also gets hit by many large meteorites, but in other universes.
I also think, though I'm not sure, if there has been many cases where humanity did get close to a nuclear war, but then it didn't happen, it makes it more likely that parallel universes are real. A thought experiment: A director shows you a film he made. The film shows a man throwing three darts at a dartboard and failing to hit the bullseye. The director says he used one of two methods to make the film:
Method 1: He filmed the man throwing darts. The man tries his best to hit the bullseye. If the man succeeds with any of the darts, the director deletes the film and starts from scratch. This continues until the director gets a film where the man fails to hit the bullseye with all three darts.
Method 2. The director films the man only once no matter how the man throws. The man tries his best to hit the bullseye.
Your task is to try to guess which of the methods the director used.
Now, does it matter if in the film the man gets close to hitting the bullseye? I think it does. If the man gets really close to hitting the bullseye, you think that man is pretty good. It is likely he succeeded in hitting the bullseye earlier and those films where deleted. Therefore it is more likely the director used method 1. On the other hand if the man never gets close to hitting the bullseye, you'd think that man is pretty bad. It is unlikely he ever hit the bullseye. So the director might have used method 2. Or method 1, there is no way to be sure.
The thought experiment is supposed to be analogues to the nuclear war and parallel universe situation. The man hitting the bullseye is analogues to there being a nuclear war. The director using method 1 is analogous to parallel universes existing. We never observe the man hitting the bullseye, since those films were deleted, just like we never observe nuclear war because the people observing nuclear war got killed. The director using method 2 is analogues to parallel universes not existing. So if we observe that we often gets close to having nuclear war (analogues to the man almost hitting the bullseye), parallel universes are more like to exist.
There has been several times we came close to nuclear war. Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
It's an interesting idea and puts me in mind of quantum immortality, (specifically of the book Anathema, it's pretty good!) I wonder if the same analysis applies to it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality#Analysis_of_real-world_feasibility
A guy could pre-register and then commit to doing Russian Roulette 10 times in a row.
I won't do it, and I am unlikely to be in the universe where he wins. But if he's right there will be an instance of him that does win.
You'd have to play it a lot more often than 10 times for this to be credible evidence. With one bullet in 6 slots, you'd have a slightly higher than 16% chance of surviving 10 games in a row.
Oops, I had my math flipped. I was thinking 5/6 chance of dying each time, not 1/6.
. . . This whole thing is kind of scary, in that it could memetically infect certain people into suicide. I think I have to drop it at this point.
I think the issue here is more fundamental than you're giving it credit for.
Statistical reasoning is useful for conditions of Knightian risk, where the outcomes of action (or inaction) are unknown but quantifiable. The introduction of unobservable alternative universes moves us into conditions of Knightian uncertainty where outcomes are unknown and unquantifiable. No statistical technique is going to be able to solve this problem because it's a problem that statistics are fundamentally unsuited to solve.
From this perspective, trying to determine the possibility of nuclear war is already something of a fool's errand even before you bring unobservable alternate universes into the equation. If you want to reason intelligently about this sort of thing you should use other intellectual tools like heuristics which have a better track record in conditions of Knightian uncertainty.
What do people feel about this slogan i'm toying with:
=================================
The most important political divide in America is not the red/blue divide.
It's the divide between people who think political polarization is the biggest threat we face, and people who think 'the other tribe' is the biggest threat we face.
I would need to hear more. In particular, I think that your alternative divide is probably very lopsided. It could still be most important though, depending on how you're thinking of "importance". Trivially, if you hate the reds and the blues equally, it could easily be the most important divide *to you*.
If you read Scott's book review of Eichmann in Jerusalem, you might reconsider polarization as a threat.
Hmmm, it is really a political divide when it's like 10% vs. 90%?
Where are these numbers coming from?
if the job of a slogan is to succinctly communicate an idea, this is objectively a bad slogan due to length and complexity.
yeah, 'slogan' probably is the wrong word to use
Ok, if length isn't an issue, I still think its a little too complex because you have so many ideas related to division running around in your sentence. Divide / polarization / other tribe, all in a compound sentence with some ambiguity in grammar that can't be resolved until the very end makes it a mentally taxing sentence to read.
So are you looking for like a mission statement or something like that for a project or a publication? Something that introduces your mission?
What about:
Some people think the other tribe is our worst problem. I think people looking at compatriots and seeing enemies is even worse.
YES this is much better, thank you :)
You might be interested in Brett Weinstein's Unity project. It was an effort to put together a coalition of sensible people from the left and the right for a presidential campaign.
Can anyone recommend a good online statistics course?
If you are a sports fan, find some good sabermetrics websites and forums. Reading Football Outsiders did more for me than 2 semesters of stats and probability.
Hi Everyone,
I’m a long-time reader, sometimes commenter, and occasional meet-up go-er. I’ve got an announcement about a project I’m developing that may be of interest to your average SSC/ACX reader: https://spartacus.app/
It’s an online platform for creating or joining campaigns for collective action in adversarial situations - using concepts like Assurance Contracts to solve game-theoretic coordination problems. Think “Kickstarter,” but instead of crowdfunding products, it’s for safely recruiting and organizing participants for any project that requires a group effort, like workplace organizing, whistleblowing, open letters, direct action, formation of clubs or affinity groups, etc.
You can also follow the newly created Twitter account at https://twitter.com/AppSpartacus.
I know this is not an entirely novel concept - many of the underlying principles have been validated by other successful platforms like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Change.org, and The Point, (before it pivoted to become Groupon).
Unlike those other platforms, my focus will not be fundraising or self-expression, but the formation and enablement of group solidarity for specific collective actions in the real world. The aim is to increase the expected value of organizing around concealed preferences by lowering the courage requirements for taking action (from heroic to average) and reducing individual actors’ risks (from potentially catastrophic to marginal).
To preemptively address some common points of feedback:
--Spartacus will prohibit any campaign encouraging illegal actions or violence of any kind.
--The app will have several mechanisms built in to abate the risk of trolls, spammers, or bad faith actors sabotaging or gaming the system.
--The explicit political position of the app is one of J.S Mill style liberal pluralism, and it will be defended as such. Use cases will be ideologically agnostic. There will be no partisan bent, and both “blue” and “red” campaigns will be equally welcome, regardless of who it pisses off. That said, campaign curation will strike for balance to try to avoid the app taking on a partisan valence.
Project Status:
I’m currently looking to recruit people for proof of concept and beta testing.
I’d also love to connect with the following sorts of people in general:
--Anyone with a strong social science background who wants to be involved and/or offer input.
--Anyone who thinks they might be a potential user of the app, and/or has an idea for a good use case.
--Anyone who wants to support this project through signal boosting online.
--Anyone with a SWE background who has experience creating MVPs.
If you’d like to participate, you can fill out this form: https://forms.gle/ECyUAUc54TtjMExz8
If you have questions, you can contact me in the thread, through the intake form on the site, or via Twitter @AppSpartacus
Thanks!
i have nothing substantial to add, but spartacus is a fantastic name for this project
this is a really neat idea
The $1,000 I put into Dogecoin back in 2014 are now worth $300,000. The problem: I just cannot remember the password I used to encrypt the wallet with those funds. More specifically, when I went to decrypt it back in February of this year, I confidently entered what I was sure was the password, and it didn't work.
By this point I have, via usage of btcrecover and hashcat, tried around 500 million possible passwords, which I generated with my own scripts and intuitions as to possible variations of the password I erroneously recall as being correct.
Does anyone here know of any method for jogging one's memory? I can't shake the feeling that it's the password I originally attempted, but with some kind of variation I added in a fit of misguided paranoia.
https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/
He tried a lot of different things, including hypnosis, none of which worked. Eventually there turned out to be a flaw in the security for the password.
At least you seem to have unlimited chances to try passwords. He was up against a system which doubled the wait time for each failed attempt to log in.
In an weird alternate reality, few unlucky people claiming to be the victims of alien abduction and experimentation before being returned to Earth are discovered to have been mirrored, all the way down to the molecular level. Their hearts are now on the other side and such, but more importantly, their biochemistry and that of all the bacteria in and on them have been flipped to the opposite chirality - they now burn l-glucose instead of regular glucose, their DNA winds the other way, etc.
With modern technology and biochemistry, can the necessary nutrients be synthesized to keep them alive? Are there any other major obstacles to surviving and living a normal lifespan? And how will the l-bacteria on them fare as they scatter into the world and try to compete?
I read a science fiction story in my youth with that exact plot, only instead of aliens it was a freak power plant related accident. I can't remember the title or author, but I remember that there were loving descriptions of relearning how to read and write and dealing with being left handed now.
I also read a science fiction story in my youth which had this as a plot point (which I am currently in), except this time it was about someone traveling into a four-dimensional world and coming back in the wrong orientation. In that story, the only problems the protagonist who suffered this issue got (after flipping this way a bunch of times) was that she no longer had a coherent sense of left/right, and that food tasted bad when she was in the wrong orientation, but otherwise she was fine.
Getting flipped happens in Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_ (a charming book), but I don't know whether it's the story being asked for.
Now that I've thought about it more, It was a big plot point that the man who got flipped was slowly starving and this was specifically introduce with the comparison that the right handed nutrients he needs to survive are "more expensive than plutonium." If any of the abductees in your scenario were carrying some food seeds in their pocket, it might make it much easier for them to survive.
They'd have to survive till harvest-- still quite a challenge.
They can be kept alive, though it won't be cheap (no economies of scale). If it's a one-off rather than a recurrent thing, though, most of them probably starve before the problem is discovered and can be addressed. It's not like you can tell that food is the wrong orientation for you just by looking at it (though meat IIRC won't taste right and your sense of smell will be significantly impaired).
The bacteria in them are probably not going to do very well (outside of their initial hosts), because they'll be unable to metabolise a lot of the stuff around them. A decent amount of stuff in metabolism actually is achiral (e.g. Krebs cycle minus citrate and malate), but it'd still be crippling to their ability to compete even if they're not outright blocked by lack of a vital nutrient.
(There are bacteria that can metabolise a decent amount of wrong-orientation stuff, and autotrophic bacteria that don't need to eat organic things, but human skin and gut flora TTBOMK aren't either - they're specialised for eating human dead skin or human food respectively.)
Bill and Melinda Gates are getting divorced. Without delving too deep into the details (because I am not privy to them), this makes me sad.
I've seen this sentiment a few times and even as someone who's generally anti-divorce I don't understand it at all.
Is this sympathy coming from their philanthropy and/or political donations or am I missing something specific to this case which makes their divorce particularly tragic? At least the Bezos divorce was vaguely sensationalistic: I don't see the hook to care here at all.
The Gates' kinda turned into a super-couple, where Melinda gradually became more and more prominent when Bill Gates name popped up. The merger of two of Gates' foundations was called the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, for example.
I think if you see Bill as some sort of super-functional superman, it's disheartening to see even he could not keep his marriage together. Assuming he's not the one who initiated the divorce (it would be weird if he did given the vast sums of money involved).
Thanks for the explanation.
I guess it didn't occur to me that anyone would picture him as a superman. Elon Musk and even Jeff Bezos have that kind of cult of personality, but Bill Gates always struck me as kind of smaller-than-life as far as self-made tech billionaires go.
Eh. There's something to that. Musk and Bezos are trying to do space with their wealth. Gates is trying to fix Africa and education. It's human level and kind, the sort of thing you can see yourself doing if somehow you ended up with top 10 money.
He's a good egg, at least in his old age. It's too bad.
Wondering how many people here have heard of Ben Philippe's "thought experiment" about gassing white people. If not, why not?
I hadn't heard about it. I just looked it up.
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/04/28/barnard-professor-triggers-free-speech-controversy-after-writing-about-detonating-and-gassing-white-people/
Why should I have heard of it?
In a sane society, a popular young black writer with a publishing contract from a Big Five fantasizes gassing white people, might garner some social censure.
Just saying.
A lot of books are published each year. This probably isn't even the worst thing this house published that year. If you've only heard of someone because of some manufactured controversy, they probably aren't really popular.
All of that said, I'm not even convinced that this is bad. If this is an author writing about the black experience and this sort of disconnection and rage is common, maybe criticizing someone trying to start a conversation about it isn't the right move.
Saw some mention of it. Inclined to dismiss it as stupid guy being stupid because he's figured out that being provocative generates publicity which can then (he hopes) be turned into $$$$$. Free speech means, like it or lump it, allowing idiots to dribble in public.
This is an issue of common decency, not free speech. Apparently you aren't familiar with the concept, hence your religious invocation of free speech, like a Medieval Catholic waving a crucifix at the mention of Satan.
This reply is pretty uncharitable, given that Deiseach made an honest and direct response to your post. I'm not sure if you're trying to make some kind of systematic argument or just draw people's attention to something you think they don't know about, but I think it would be more productive to explain your point rather than dismissing someone else's without any context. Otherwise it's just discouraging conversation.
Excuse you, I would be waving my blessed rosary beads, holy water (Easter water even better) and St. Benedict medal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Benedict_Medal at the Devil! 😈
Common decency should be a given in all public discourse, but the principles of free speech do not require that "the listener shall not be shocked". Yes, it is wicked to speak of murdering people, but he can't be censored merely on the grounds of "I want to kill you all". That may fall under hate speech/hate crimes law which is another matter. I am most definitely not a lawyer, but a quick and cursory search on the topic https://billofrightsinstitute.org/resources/freedom-of-speech-general seems to indicate that the relevant precedents would be Brandenburg v. Ohio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio and Cohen v. California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen_v._California, and possibly/probably R.A.V. vs. St Paul
(1) Brandenburg v. Ohio - "The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"
(2) Cohen v. California - "The Court ultimately found that displaying a mere four-letter word was not sufficient justification to allow states to restrict free speech and that free speech can be restricted only under severe circumstances beyond offensiveness. The ruling set a precedent used in future cases concerning the power of states to regulate free speech in order to maintain public civility."
(3) R.A.V. vs. the City of St. Paul - "A criminal ordinance prohibiting the display of symbols that "arouse anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender" was unconstitutional. The law violated the First Amendment because it punished speech based on the ideas expressed".
The ordinance was invoked for a case of burning a cross on the lawn of an African-American family
Forgot to give the link for RAV vs. St Paul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul
From the article on RAV vs St. Paul (and hey, maybe the late Justice Scalia can be lumped in with me under mediaeval Catholics waving our crucifixes around?):
"The Court recognized two final principles of free speech jurisprudence. One of these described that when "the entire basis for the content discrimination consists entirely of the very reason the entire class of speech is proscribable, no significant danger of idea or viewpoint discrimination exists." As examples, Justice Scalia wrote,
A State may choose to prohibit only that obscenity which is the most patently offensive in its prurience — i.e., that which involves the most lascivious displays of sexual activity. But it may not prohibit, for example, only that obscenity which includes offensive political messages. And the Federal Government can criminalize only those threats of violence that are directed against the President, since the reasons why threats of violence are outside the First Amendment (protecting individuals from the fear of violence, from the disruption that fear engenders, and from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur) have special force when applied to the person of the President."
So did our guy threaten *the President* specifically as an example of "whiteys I dream about gassing"? 'Cos otherwise no joy on censoring him.
C'mon Substack, gimme the means to edit comments, I am a fribbling dotard (relatively speaking) and often forget to include pertinent points before I hit "post".
Can anyone recommend a nerd/rationalist friendly interior designer who is either based in the Bay Area or willing to do remote/online design?
I am looking to remake my home office into a space which better satisfies both my logistical and my psychological/aesthetic needs: a place where I can work more easily and feel more at home and at rest. I have an unusual, modernist-ish sense of what "at home and at rest" means and I would like someone who gets that, and who gets how engineers think generally, and who is skilled in the art of interior design, and specifically the art of designing spaces that are genuinely meant for ease and spiritual renewal and not for showing off on Instagram. I have no idea if SSC is a reasonable place to find such a person but I figure it can't hurt to try.
I know someone who did a lot of design work for "digital nomads" in Bali, completely remote. Her style is quite minimalist/ functional with a soft aesthetic. I really enjoyed my time in the villas she designed. Feel free to email me if you would like her info tayezz@gmail.com
Are there any notable improvements in nootropics/diy research? i love scott's nootropics surveys but /r/nootropics has been doing that for some time and it's pretty unsatisfying. i dream of being able to source actual research from stuff like this
my context is trying to do and randomized self-experiment with bodywork, and actually completed one finding that 50mg modafinil did not affect fitbit sleep metrics... but it would be so nice to have some real data on 9-me-bc, bpc-157, etc for stimulant tolerance, head-to-head esketamine vs arketamine, etc.
stuff i looked at
Person as Population: A Longitudinal View of Single-Subject Causal Inference for Analyzing Self-Tracked Health Data, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.03423.pdf
The history and development of N-of-1 trials, 2017, https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/wp-data/uploads/2017/02/J-R-Soc-Med-2017-08-Mirza-330-340.pdf
The parametric G-formula for time-to-event data: towards intuition with a worked example,, 205, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4310506/
What’s your favorite self experiment?, 2019, https://forum.quantifiedself.com/t/whats-your-favorite-self-experiment/6416
CONSORT extension for reporting N-of-1 trials (CENT) 2015: Explanation and elaboration, 2015, https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h1793
How did you structure the experiment with bodywork?
The Atlantic has a review of the 2018 book " Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower" by Tufts professor Michael Beckley. I found the article interesting reading, especially as I've been growing more concerned about China's power.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/china-paper-dragon/618778/
Some highlights from the article:
"The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes. Above all, Beckley pleads with readers not to focus on the headline numbers of gross domestic product. China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then—and it will not make China a superpower now, or so Beckley contends."
" American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”
When Chinese forces do train, Beckley argues, the exercises bear little resemblance to the challenges the People’s Liberation Army would face in a great-power conflict:
'PLA exercises remain heavily scripted (the red team almost always wins) … Most exercises involve a single service or branch, so troops lack the ability to conduct joint operations, and assessments are often nothing more than “subjective judgments based on visual observation rather than on detailed quantitative data” and are scored “based simply on whether a training program has been implemented rather than on whether the goals of the program have been achieved.'”
"Comparing China’s military spending to that of the United States, for example, doesn’t make much sense. The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats."
"As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises. How much was borrowed? Nobody knows, because everybody lies. What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?
China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places. China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital. More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out."
It makes me sleep better at night: on the other hand, just yesterday The Atlantic ran a piece by H. R. McMaster that was much more frightening in terms of China's power and goals for the 21st century.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/mcmaster-china-strategy/609088/
One section helped me better understand the danger of China's "Belt and Road Initiative" where they loan developing countries money for infrastructure projects:
"In Sri Lanka, the longtime president and current prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, incurred debts far beyond what his nation could bear. He agreed to a series of high-interest loans to finance Chinese construction of a port, though there was no apparent need for one. Despite earlier assurances that the port would not be used for military purposes, a Chinese submarine docked there the same day as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Sri Lanka in 2014. In 2017, following the commercial failure of the port, Sri Lanka was forced to sign a 99-year lease to a Chinese state-owned enterprise in a debt-for-equity swap."
He also raised some serious concerns about Chinese theft of technology: even if they can't innovate as well as we can, what does it matter if they can just steal the fruits of our labors?
"Chinese cybertheft is responsible for what General Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security Agency, described as the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.” The Chinese Ministry of State Security used a hacking squad known as APT10 to target U.S. companies in the finance, telecommunications, consumer-electronics, and medical industries as well as NASA and Department of Defense research laboratories, extracting intellectual property and sensitive data."
Overall I'm feeling better about the USA's chances against China going forward, but still concerned. And I don't really know anything about China, just what I read in the papers. Any thoughts? Is China a Paper Tiger, or a real one?
Does anyone know where I can find a recording of “The Song of the Voluntary Army"?
http://www.shanghaidiaries.com/archives/2004/10/13/an_aggressive_american_wolf_in_dandong/
We desperately need to be a way to collapse replies to comments. Surely I can't be the only one who doesn't have time to read ALL the comments.
Click on the line to the left of the comments.
One area in which my lack of knowledge has always bothered me is understanding statistics that are embedded in reported study results.
Last week, the NYTimes ran an article about the COVID vaccines' effectiveness against a particular variant strain that has become prevalent in NY: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/health/covid-ny-variant-vaccine.html?action=click&module=Science%20%20Technology&pgtype=Homepage
The underlying studies that they reference are at the following links: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.24.436620v1.full.pdf and https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.14.431043v3.full.pdf
In looking at the underlying studies, I couldn't quite tell how seriously I should take the results. On page 7 of study 1, it says that "The E484K version of B.1.526 did show a significant nearly 4-fold decrease in neutralization by vaccine-elicited antibodies but this represents a modest decrease in titer that is not expected to result in a significant decrease in the protection provided by vaccination and is not expected to result in an increased susceptibility to re-infection." One question I had about this is how to even interpret this four-fold impact, which seems high on its face but maybe isn't a big deal given how effective the vaccines are in the first place. That said, that is presumably a medical forum question so I wouldn't necessarily expect this thread to be bale to answer that one.
My bigger question, however, is around this quote, describing the sample used for the results, appearing on page 19 - " Neutralizing titers of serum samples from BNT162b2 vaccinated individuals (n=5) (left) and mRNA1273 vaccinated donors (n=3) (right) was measured. IC50 of neutralization of virus with D614G, B.1.1.7, B.1.351, B.1.526 is shown." If I am reading this right, that suggests that the sample size of vaccinated individuals was 5 Pfizer and 3 Moderna people. Am I crazy to think that this sample size is incredibly low?
Similarly, in the second study, page 8 references a 4.5-fold reduction in titer neutralization for vaccinated plasma, with a p score of 0.00005 (page 8), yet when I look at the description of Figure 5 on page 28, it suggests a sample size of 10.
TLDR - How should I think about appropriate sample sizes and how they translate into confidence in results and the attendant p scores associated with them?
>One question I had about this is how to even interpret this four-fold impact, which seems high on its face but maybe isn't a big deal given how effective the vaccines are in the first place.
If you are a petri dish full of blood worried about getting covid, it's fairly easy to interpret. But for humans, all it will give us is a vague idea of whether certain variants might plausibly escape certain forms of immunity. And neutralisation titres won't tell us anything about T-cell responses in humans that recovered from an actual covid infection.
I think Pfizer is about 7-fold less neutralising against B.1.351 as it is against wild type covid. Depsite this, it doesn't seem to have swamped Israel (where most infections continue to be B.1.1.7). So I'd not worry about a 4-fold reduction in neutralising titre. (IANAD, E, V, I or any other sort of professional in this field)
Since the byline of this blog on the publication list is "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.", I decided that it might be nice to have people summarize their favorite* topic** in the format "[obvious statement], all the rest is commentary."
I'll start by summarizing mathematics: "The axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice are consistent, all the rest is commentary."***
*I'm not going to police this at all. You can even write about your least favorite topic if you want to for some reason.
**I think you could also do this for ideologies or whatever.
***In an earlier version of this that I mentally drafted, it was "Peano arithmetic", and in general I am much less confident in the consistency of ZFC than in that of PA.
There are several concepts that we use that basically gerrymander thingspace and so degrade the discourse by causing us to have a bad ontology and thus worse beliefs; if they were forgotten, I would expect our ontology and thus our discourse and beliefs to improve significantly.
Here is a (probably extremely non-exhaustive) list of such things, in no particular order:
- Oppression (in the woke sense)
- Original sin
- Neoliberalism
- Patriotic
- Bodies (as used to refer to "people")
- Heresy/heretic/etc
- Antichrist
- Science, technology (when used interchangeably)
- Being "good without God"
- Intellectual property
- Dialectical materialism
- Queer ecology
- Statism
- Gentile
- Kafir
Oops I meant to comment this as a reply to S.A. I'll do it now.
https://fs.blog/2021/05/slack/
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, Tom DeMarco
Overview of an important book. The short version is that being busy all the time (efficient) means lack of ability to respond to changing conditions and a tremendous amount of effort spent on managing scarce attention.
I quite enjoyed that! Very apt reading material while I lay in bed waiting for a rescheduled meeting to start
The Biden administration just announced they will lift patent protection for the vaccines. I haven't followed the controversy but clearly the pharma companies resisted this. I don't really understand why the government didn't just pay them to do this a month ago -- Pfizer's market cap is up $22 billion since announcing the vaccine and the Biden administration is passing trillion dollar legislation these days. Can people explain what I'm getting wrong?
If I were a betting man, at least part of it would be spite towards companies which participated in Operation Warp Speed.
Even with the FDA and pharma companies deliberately delaying their planned announcements until after election day, getting the vaccines out in record time was an undeniable PR win for the Trump administration. Attacking the safety of the vaccines would be off-message and interfere with attempts to set up a vaccine passport system, but forcing the participating companies to eat multi-billion dollar losses for not waiting until Biden was installed doesn't interfere with any of their other goals.
Is there an RSS feed for the site?
For the site, yes
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/feed
Substack also has its own RSS reader
https://reader.substack.com/inbox
"stories stay in your queue even after you’ve read them."
i find this to be *the* most important value of readers. what is the point of them without this?
Recommended article: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-danger-of-fact-ist-politics
Prof. Dotson presents a case how democracy has a hiccup when everyone becomes enamored with (perceived obvious) facts, thus everyone with an opposing facts is either misinformed or nebulous motives. Select quote midway from the essay:
"Scientism further fuels conspiracism by downplaying the fallibility of expert advice and the tentative nature of scientific knowledge. When mistakes or changes in expert advice are not openly discussed, a natural conclusion is that leaders aim to deceive. To put this more starkly, when Hanlon’s Razor — “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” — is no longer available, malicious intent becomes the only explanation."
This made be reconsider some opinions of mine I have been entertaining lately. The argument explains some behavior in one sees in public media. The part I found important myself, however, is that I certainly am not free of it. It is very easy to develop a (pseudo)-mental model of other people's opinions and behavior which allows me to say, they are in the wrong and I can explain why they are thinking so -- they either don't know about, are misinformed about, or because of some personal motivation ignore the obvious facts that I possess. While such state of matters could be true, the article nudged me to re-realize how with such attitude, one easily skips the part where to determine which facts are factual it is required to put them into a severe test.
Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/14/too-many-people-dare-call-it-conspiracy/
"one easily skips the part where to determine which facts are factual it is required to put them into a severe test."
To elaborate, why is this part important? Just that I can explain the other people's actions is not the strong part of my model of them, because it is easy to provide many explanations that fit the picture. The model becomes strong only if the facts are actually factual.
(I hope Substack unlock the technology of "comment edit" button in their tech tree soon.)
I've become suspicious when I hear someone attributing specific malign motives to millions of people they don't know and don't like.
In a live electrical wire, is the flow of electricity truly "continuous," or is it quantized/packetized? In other words, if we could slow down time--but not to such a degree that we could see events in Planck Time--and see the electrons moving through the wire, would they always be steadily crawling along, or at some point, would they appear to move in a jerky, stop-go-stop-go manner?
Similarly, are the operations inside of a computer processor continuous or packetized? If you could slow down time enough, would there be split seconds where your computer's processor wasn't actually doing calculations even though the machine was on and running a data-intensive program?
it is quantized by electrons. electrons will never stop moving
Why did the U.S. government violate so many of the treaties it signed with Indian tribes? Specifically, what official reasons did the U.S. most often give for doing so? Were the treaties commonly declared invalid because the tribes breached some clause in the agreement, or because the tribal governments that had signed them had collapsed, or what?
The U.S. government would have released some kind of written statement each time, and those statements should be in the National Archives. Has any historian ever explored this issue?