Trump is cruel, vindictive, selfish, dishonest with a capital D and has less knowledge of and respect for the US Constitution than a nihilist middle schooler.
I’m going entirely by the words that come out his own mouth. No media interpretation is necessary. He is clearly a vile entity. I wouldn’t want him for a coworker, team member or neighbor.
For me there was a button to show the comment. But I have no idea why it was ban worthy. It is about politics but I don't think there is a rule against politics in hidden open thread?
Would what be fair game? They've clearly found the secret name of this website. All curses should be directed at SlateStarCodex which is definitely the True Name. It'll totally work. No more investigation needed.
From what they said in 179, I take it something escalated to the point of jstr saying "go fuck yourself" and Deiseach saying "kill yourself" in reply. Scott seems more concerned with civility than with topic, so while I don't know the subject matter the insults are probably what he found objectionable.
The topic, to summarize very briefly, was that jstr alleged that Trump actually got more votes in California but Biden won through voter fraud, and then got really offended when Deiseach pointed out that this was a lie. It escalated from there. And yes, I imagine it was the reference to suicide rather than the subject matter that resulted in the ban.
Jstr - I didn’t see the exchange, but it has been my experience that when people post links like this and then label them “interesting”, etc, there is usually a hidden agenda to signal boost a conspiracy theory. To me (and possibly to Diesearch), this is a “tell”, which might explain her (over) reaction.
Now, I have no idea if this was your actual intent, and I’m trying to be charitable. I just offer this as a possible explanation.
Oh good. I feel the need to repent. I believe I applauded Deiseach in said thread, (For what to me was her wicked wit, and what to you was bile and venom.) I'm sorry. If I had something to say to you I should have said it directly. Let's all try and be more civil.
Look, jstr. You've posted a controversial article. You've intentionally steered clear of stating any opinion on any single part of it. "Interesting" does not count. Pointing out at least certain parts that you deem to be true, or false, does.
You've read it? OK. I hold that the statement "the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight" is incorrect and misleading. I hold that a lot of other points in that article are correct. In particular, I fully agree with the five paragraphs starting from "This is where people(...)". I don't possess enough verified information to assess the correctness of various other statements.
There. End of example. To the point, let me paste one paragraph from that article which perhaps offers a charitable interpretation of your own case:
> Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.
The charitable interpretation here would be that you're one of those who latches onto one absurd theory then another, while trying to put a concrete name on something very real (and quite well described in that Claremont review article). Clearly, the concept that 2020's California, of all places, had had the vote stolen to blue, is absolute peak absurd. And given how those Californians who cannot stand Democrat governance have started voting with their feet, that concept will become only more absurd in the years ahead.
The less charitable interpretation would be an assumption of bad faith from your side, that you are signal-boosting a peak-absurd thesis while being fully aware that it is peak-absurd, which contributes to muddying the waters and to discrediting the more clear-headed perspectives on that complex subject.
I don't know you, I don't want to judge which of these interpretations would hit the mark, and I don't profess to mindreading, but look at it this way. If presuming that something is rotten in the swamp of Denmark, and the false flags are as common as the psy-ops, what would be *your* judgement of someone who picks a peak-absurd thesis, and goes boosting it while persistently avoiding to express any of their own stances on it, and then gets pugnacious on someone who calls out that fact?
You're right. The "dupe or troll" is a false dichotomy, and I apologize for having put it forward.
I was trying to think of mental models which would be promoting a story as absurd as California being stolen-to-blue, and at the time I failed to think up anything besides those two categories. I had also been somewhat indisposed because you asked for banning Deiseach, so I didn't think about other categories as hard and long as I otherwise might have. (Deiseach is a long-standing commenter held in high esteem by a lot of the community, including myself)
The passages of that article that you quote here, I also agree with a hundred percent. (Likewise, I am not a US citizen) The part which has perhaps the most resonated with me was "They watched the press behave like animals for four years." Some tectonic shifts have started happening in the mainstream media starting cca. 2010, and it reached insane levels since. By now it feels surrealist to recall how NYT and CNN used to be actually decent news sources. (I can't say for MSNBC, WaPo and NPR, since I didn't really pay attention to them before)
That article is interesting, but it sorely needs citations. It asserts as fact numerous claims that I am skeptical of, so without further elaboration and support, I can only see it as "this is how Trumpists see the world" rather than "this is something true about the world".
The article has about a hundred sentences and about ten links. There's one statement ("/premise") per sentence in median. Let's simplify it to "approx. a hundred statements." If the demand for rigor is "one link per statement", then about nine tenths of that article fail at that criteria, yes.
Not that I know any media article which would meet such criteria; I'd even say that this "one tenth" is in the top quintile of published media articles. I assume your demand is more specific than that, but you haven't been more specific.
First, only some of those statements are empirical. E.g. "the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight" is an empirical statement, which incidentally I deem false.
Even for statements that are hypothetical and not empirical, they still have a given degree of plausibility. E.g. in the chain "a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries / had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper / the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs. Jeb Bush election", the third statement is evidently hypothetical not empirical. But I view it as very plausible.
Empirical statements can furthermore be easier or harder to truly verify. I haven't much dug into the controversy around Hunter Biden, whether it is empirically true, or false, or partially true, and which parts. I have no firm opinion on that. However, the Big Tech censorship campaign against those media who were publishing that information, is empirically true. In contrast, the stories about Russian prostitutes peeing on Trump, originated from US intel agencies, were circulated quite widely in mainstream media, empirically *without* obstruction from Big Tech.
You dismissively speak of worldviews based on false premises. First, it's obviously not a case of all the hundred premises being true nor all hundred being false. Whatever measure you take of a certain worldview, it cannot be a meaningful measure without establishing the relative importance of particular premises, and then combining it with how certain you are about the truthfulness of each premise (*). Also: corroboration.
That the basis of the Trump-getting-peed-on stories was empirically BS, is the lesser point here. The greater point is how Big Tech, Big Media and intel agencies work in concert and unison when it comes to influencing the electoral process. Whether this is something to be blasé about, or concerned about, may depend on your views of the previous centuries of human history.
(*) The meta-recursion here is that worldviews in effect "dictate" what is the relative importance of particular premises -- different worldviews assigning quite different importances to particular premises -- while at the same time being *shaped by* the product of the relative importance of particular premises and the degree of certainty for each one. That's why worldviews are inherently an *open-ended process*, and a quite fascinating one.
When enough people interpret your post the same way you have to wonder if it is you who made the mistake in expression rather than we who made the mistake in interpretation.
Conventionally if you are posting a link to an article whose thesis you do not endorse you would want to signpost it somehow. For example "this article is interesting, although I do not endorse its thesis." Posting the link with no commentary at all will be taken for endorsement of the contents of the link. Note that this is an empirical and pragmatic fact about the world, not a normative claim about the way people "should" interpret such posts.
If you don't like being seen as dishonest, one way you could avoid it is by making it clear from the outset what your beliefs are about the contents of links you post. Because I also suspect that for every one person who calls you out on it, there will be another ten who thought "this guy is full of it" but were too polite or conflict-averse to say anything.
> Perhaps I "made the mistake in expression"; but I know for a fact others "made the mistake in interpretation", because I know my own heart, while they don´t.
It may be that others did not understand the meaning you intended. That doesn't mean they made a mistake.
> Also, please note that I have always been (and always will be) courteous myself
You told someone to go fuck herself.
> If that isn´t enough to avoid "being seen as dishonest"
Why would it be? Courtesy, and extending others the benefit of the doubt, are virtues. But they're different virtues than honesty.
I feel like the punishment mostly comes from the shame and disgrace, not from the actual one day ban. Everyone who read this post will forever associate Deiseach with the person who told someone to kill themselves over an Internet argument. Even if there's 100% proof that she's sorry about it and won't do it again, that association is hard to shake.
You think so? I feel as though about half of all political disputes on Twitter devolve to that level of vitriol, and given the number of Twitter fights there are on a daily basis, that's a lot of death wishes, but no one really cares. If you ever look at David Simon's twitter account, I would estimate he tells a random person he hopes they die of disease about once every three days, for example.
True, but we are still subject to the Online Disinhibition Effect, same as anywhere else, I would say, so while I try not to be a jerk to people, I'm not going to get too bent out of shape if someone occasionally does blow their stack a bit, especially when it's someone whose comments are otherwise quite good.
It doesn't change my picture of her. (and I'm a newbie) She's a smart sharp tongued Irishman (woman). Who you (I) can't help loving. And her sharp tongue can lead to trouble. It's almost a stereo-type. I'm picturing Maureen O'Hara in "The Quite Man". Deiseach, please forgive me talking in the third person about you.
As one of the parties in the kerfuffle, I have resolved not to refight it or litigate it or do anything rather than serve out my ban. I've done so, and now I'm going to hold my tongue on the entire affair.
Which means I won't get into an exchange of views with you either, dionysus.
My girlfriend might want to convert to Judaism when we get married. I am a cultural Jew, am not strictly observant, and don't go to synagogue. She probably would also be a cultural Jew, not very observant, and not go to synagogue, I realize you don't need to officially convert to do this but it would be meaningful to us. Has anyone else been in a similar situation? Are there rabbis (presumably Reform) who will convert you no questions asked, or do you need to promise to go to their synagogue or follow halacha or something? Does anyone have any good ideas for next steps?
You might reach out to local Reconstructionist rabbis for advice on this, Reconstructionism being even less traditionalist than Reform. I don't know about the East Bay but there is a Reconstructionist congregation in San Francisco, Or Shalom. I have no personal connection to them, unfortunately.
I know of rabbis who would convert someone on the condition of a commitment to learn for a year, bathe in a mikvah at the end of the process, and make a broad commitment to tether one's fate to the fate of the Jewish people; I assume they'd be quite open as to the nature of the commitment and not require a commitment beyond cultural Judaism...I can ask around...
This is debatably true, not kind, and not necessary.
When someone expresses a preference that you don't share, barging into the conversation with "WELL ACTUALLY I BELIEVE X SO YOUR PREFECENCE IS STUPID" is a rude thing to do. This is extra true about preferences for religious practice and religious community membership, something people are sensitive about because everyone knows it's a topic that's ripe for conflict. It's extra extra true in contexts where there is a pressing reason to be especially kind instead, like when someone has just mentioned that they're getting married. You can see many examples of appropriate responses to this kind of announcement elsewhere in this thread.
You are being mean, and you are making this space worse. Please stop it.
"barging into the conversation", "You are being mean, and you are making this space worse. Please stop it."? This invokes memories of the process that transformed the internet from a fascinating forum for diverse intellectual debate and cultural celebration that expanded intellectual horizons into a collection of walled-off tribal circlejerks, when gadflies and devils advocates started being called trolls and concern trolls.
I'm personally interested in the response to "marxbro's" question because I'm kinda in a similar situation. I've found myself going periodically to a synagogue(an orthodox one) for the first time in my life. I've felt a bit guilty about it, as if I'm attending on false pretenses. I am completely irreligious, secular, and cosmopolitan and am quite certain I will remain so for life. But the rabbi insists that I'm still welcome, apparently concerned only with my blood. I don't consider it an identity issue so much as cultural curiosity, so maybe "cultural Jew" is apt description.
It's an intriguing question...if God doesn't exist, then why would she convert? (The topic actually came up with my rabbi too. My girlfriend isn't Jewish and he said that their position generally is that conversion isn't compulsory, actually being discouraged, and it's technically frowned upon to marry outside the faith). More important than this is the old universalism/cosmopolitanism v. particularism/communitarianism debate. Would his girlfriend's conversion be considered an indication of embracing communitarianism? Scott is one the few popular commentators left that, for lack of a better word(and I realize it's a horrible word), seems 'sane' to me. I feel comfortable including him in a relatively short list of role models. Whatever their motivations for doing this, it could help inform my own decisions going forward. If Scott's not comfortable answering that question and just ignores it, it's all good. But if he is, I'd certainly be curious about the answer. So you'll forgive me for disagreeing that our gadfly above is "making this space worse."
It's true, kind and necessary. I've not been rude or said any swear words.
Marriage shouldn't be a sacred cow either. It's strange to me that a community that says it upholds rationality and truth-seeking is now approaching religious conversion as something that is taboo to criticise.
i don't think this conversation needs to devolve... let me just say i think the response was to the line 'God doesn't exist', which without context could be taken as unkind, but in this context probably isn't. For example, if someone had a sincere belief in a religion, and wanted to convert, "god doesn't exist, so why bother" could seem a bit unkind. But in this context, I think we are assuming the conversion is (as Scott says) 'cultural', and there is no deity belief backing it (Scott has not explicitly said if the fiancé has a belief in god or not, which is why I posted asking if it was the case or not; since I assume the higher prior is they do not).
So if it is true that there is no deity belief backing the conversion, I agree it is a bit curious as to why there is such a strong desire, and why it would be meaningful.
So I can understand why C_B thought you were being unkind, but I think it mostly a misunderstanding, and his reply could also have been kinder.
Context or no, stating that 'God doesn't exist' doesn't come close to falling under the umbrella of 'criticizing religious conversion'. It's quite rude to those of us who either believe in God or are agnostic like myself
It's not rude to state a fact. I've not attacked anyone personally or said any nasty words. I'm just making a straightforward declaration of the truth: God doesn't exist.
Personally, I find this whole exercise pointless. If Scott doesn't believe in this religion, if his partner doesn't believe in this religion, it seems counter-intuitive to recommend conversion? Doesn't it seem hypo-critical to want to join a community if you don't share any of their core values?
Maybe I don't really understand this "culturally Jewish" thing - but wouldn't you have to at least go to synagogue, practice faith-based traditions or observe faith-based holidays to experience Jewish culture? (Or at the very least one of the above?)
Can you simply go to a meetup and meet other Jews? If the last is the case, why do you need a rabbi or to convert for that? It seems strange to want to associate with a group you have so little in common with, but let's not pretend this is a logical or consistent idea.
yes, unfortunately he has not given any follow up... it does seem curious. If indeed there is no religious component of the conversion, than why do it? would you go through a similar process with any other aspect of life you had such a mild affinity for? I'm hoping maybe something is being saved for a top level post.
It makes sense to me -- it's sort of like joining a fraternity. Is that so strange? Going through some sort of conversion ritual is a signal of commitment and promotes bonding among members.
Now, it is sort of hypocritical if you're joining a religion where most people are devout, and you're doing it just for social benefits while not actually believing like the fellow members. But I think more liberal strains of Judaism are not this way -- there aren't many liberal Jews who are all that devout, and it's more about preserving traditions as a family and a people. Being a committed atheist might still put you a bit outside the norm, but not nearly as much as it would in a Southern Baptist church.
Well, even if you had no malicious intent, it was kind of a yutzy way to phrase the question. You immediately place yourself in the position being the arbiter of the supposed truth (without the means to falsify your proposition). Then you follow it up with a clueless question about cultural Judaism — which, if you were sincere in your ignorance, you could easily have googled what it means. The subtext of your original question was that any self-identification or affiliation with Judaism is an act of superstition.
But I'm glad you explained yourself! If the real question you were positing was: "why get married at all, given that marriage is a superstitious ceremony derived from superstitious beliefs?" you should have asked that question first! — because it could have offended a wider range of people, and you wouldn't have given the impression that you were singling out cultural Jews as being uniquely superstitious.
I said quite straightforwardly that God doesn't exist. This is a criticism of all religions. I'm not a "yutz" and I phrased it the best I possibly could. I know what the word " cultural" means but I think it's being used as a magic wand to gloss over some pretty fundamentally irrational behaviours here. Like if one is merely a "cultural Jew" then why is a Rabbi needed at all?
Hmmm. I think you have a distorted view of what rationalism is. Let's take it back a step. My understanding is that rational belief requires that you be able to prove, either logically, mathematically, or scientifically that proposition is true — or in the case of science that it's likely to be true to the best evidence we have. Belief in things you can't prove are non-rational or arrational (not a common word, but I didn't coin it). Belief in things that can obviously be proved false are irrational.
Atheism like any other theism is an arrational belief — i.e. there's no experimental way to falsify either the God or no-God proposition. Attempts have been made to prove or disprove one position or the other, but they've all failed. (Although, supposedly Kurt Gödel was working on a logical/mathematical proof for the existence of God when he died — I would have liked to see it.) Anyway, you can have an opinion on whichever proposition you think *may* be true. As long as you admit that it's an opinion, that's an arrational belief. To posit either position as provable fact is an irrational belief.
As for our cultural affinities, these are aesthetic choices that we either make for ourselves or that we freely accept from our family and our community. Some have argued that there's a rational basis for aethetics. I don't believe this. However, I admit that's an arrational opinion on my part. But you can't really claim a cultural affinity is irrational. What rules of logic, math, or science does it violate? It's like one's taste in colors: You may like the color red more than you like the color blue, but you can't rationally argue one color is better than the other. Claiming someone is superstitious for liking the color blue more than the color red, is an irrational statement.
Well, whether a higher power exists is another debate. It's obvious (to me) that Scott doesn't think a higher power exists - so I just don't understand the viewpoint.
It seems illogical -but humans are not always rational actors. Maybe Scott is just nostalgic for his youth/family? In that case, I would just recommend to hang out with them more instead of this "dog-and-pony" show conversion.
Well, regardless of whether there is a higher power or not - (something I'm convinced is unknowable as stated, so I won't make a judgement either way) - I would phrase it more like "You just stated you don't believe in this religion. Why would you want someone to convert?".
I'm also not sure about this "culturally Jewish" thing. My "culturally Christian" friends at least go to church and keep the holidays even if they don't follow the teachings of the Bible to the T, and don't come across as downright hostile to the idea of a higher power, when they aren't seriously devout.
While I disagree with the tone, I think there is a valid point here. I would have questions too if someone told me "Here are all the ways 'my' religion is unimportant to me. It would be meaningful if my significant other would convert to this religion which I just stated I don't care about.". Why bother?
Or maybe just join the Reconstructionists. If I understand correctly, it's for people who don't believe in a higher power yet still want the feel of religion - maybe Scott would like that. I still don't think it matters if you don't practice, don't hold the core beliefs, don't celebrate the main holidays or don't go to the main religious institutes.
For reference, I would ask these same questions of any denomination of faith.
Prove that you're not a troll, then. You ask non-sensical or provocative questions and demand rational answers from us. You're like a five-year old, who keeps asking why? why? why?, but when we try to explain our reasoning to you, you ask why? why? why? again. At no point have you even made the slightest attempt to defend you statements with any sort of rational justification. Although I find your statements to be rather entertaining, evidently many others in this conversation don't. As for me, I can only keep throwing the frisbee to you so many times before I get bored with your game.
Marxbro isn't known for his kindness, but I'm pretty sure Scott is atheist so MB's phrasing doesn't strike me as something that would offend Scott. I too am curious about the purpose a conversion would serve.
If I could sum up what I say below, it would be that people are in touch with their roots, and that's meaningful to them.
I'll confess I don't completely understand "cultural" faith either, but at least with something like Judaism it seems like it's such a distinct culture, within the broader American culture (in this case), that being "culturally Jewish" makes some sense to me. Distinct holidays and traditions definitely contribute. Having unique rites of passage is certainly part of a culture as well, and those traditions aren't meaningless even if you might think that they're not "true."
I'm a Mormon, for instance, and while we've got a culture of our own (I've got ancestors who knew Joseph Smith and followed Brigham Young to Utah), Jewish culture is much more distinct, not to mention going MUCH farther back. Many Mormons I know are only in it because of the culture, and go along with the rest because there's no "Reform Mormonism" option. I think you see a similar thing with Catholicism and Islam. (For the record, I'm a believing-while-doubting Mormon, but that's more complicated than we need to get into here.)
If this is all about being in touch with your "roots" then I'm not sure why a prospective wife would want to convert - shouldn't she also be in touch with her "roots"?
There's the Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My impression is that it used to act as a second destination for people leaving the mainstream Latter-day Saint body, but increasingly it is indistinguishable from other liberal Christian churches and former Latter-day Saints rarely bother anymore.
Certainly there are individuals in the Church who attend services and activities while being lax in their personal observances or heterodox in their private beliefs, but as far as I can tell it's not a "thing" like it is in Catholicism or Judaism.
I'm not sure why, really. The Church leadership certainly has worked to discourage it for most of its history, but they seem to have been unusually successful at it compared to other religions. One thing that seems important is that many of the culture-specific rituals -- like the special rites of passage and special marriages -- are gate-kept strictly around both practice and belief by a clearly defined leadership structure.
Adding on that the Latter-day Saint leadership structure is surprisingly flat and centralized. For example, the smallest unit of the Church is the ward, lead by a bishop, of which there are about 30,000 worldwide. The selection of a new bishop is frequently done under the in-person supervision of one of the Twelve Apostles (the second-highest leadership body), and the selection is then submitted to the First Presidency (the highest), and I know from second-hand accounts that the First Presidency doesn't just rubber-stamp it and says no sometimes.
I wonder what criteria are used to select bishops?
Also, I have a very specific and vexing question about their authority. Do teenagers have to discuss sex with them? Is there some confessional function bishops fulfill? Is it all about Temple recommends*?
Let me explain: A fun fact about being an openly gay high school student in Salt Lake City in the '90s is that a everyone just assumes you were Mormon before you sucked dick, and it leads to hilarious misunderstandings.
From 9th grade on, four or five times a year, total strangers, unprompted, told me a story about a bishop who is the last person that should be listening to teenagers have to talk about their sexual development.
One was a bishop who asked Elizabeth's sister to "prove you haven't put balled up tissues in her bra." The others were The same, but longer.
Was I told those srories because that kind of thing happens a lot and is openly discussed—someone looked at me, said, "he looks pretty Mormon" and told the story as gossip?
Or was I told because that kind of thing almost never happens and is not discussed—someone looked me up specifically as the only non-lesbian in the GSA after Mike went to Evergreen Sophomore year, and told the story looking for advice or help?
Either way, as soon as I said, "actually, my parents are hippies and my family's Jewish," the person telling the story would just mutter "nevermind" or "my mistake," then never talk to me again.
(The only exception was a young man who asked how I could be Jewish and gay, then refused to let me demonstrate.)
Anyway, it was 20 years ago, I still don't know what happened, and I'm not sure closing all the schools for a year was a bad thing.
*The wedding thing gets a bad rap, but I love it. I wish more friends would ask me to wear the suit, do the photos and eat the cake—but read a book outside during the ceremony. Frankly, it's an improvement on other faiths.
"increasingly it is indistinguishable from other liberal Christian churches and former Latter-day Saints rarely bother anymore."
Yes, from what I've seen, all liberal religious traditions have a tendency to blend together at a certain point, and to blend with secular leftism, which is why they're all slowly evaporating. Because why bother? It's tough to be a passionate advocate for one's church if you think it's just a pretty good social club and not the one true path to salvation. It's especially difficult to pass these traditions down to one's children, and most people don't try that hard. It probably doesn't help that all sorts of social clubs and community organizations are doing very poorly these days.
Reform Judaism is evaporating too, but somewhat more slowly than Mainline Protestant churches. At some point it will probably be able to maintain its numbers on the basis of apostates from Orthodox Judaism, but currently Orthodox Judaism is only 20% of the total in the US, and that situation looks like it will flip, with Orthodox becoming the majority and most Reform Jews having recent family links to it.
"Certainly there are individuals in the Church who attend services and activities while being lax in their personal observances or heterodox in their private beliefs, but as far as I can tell it's not a "thing" like it is in Catholicism or Judaism."
Well, it's not as much a thing in Protestantism either, and the LDS was founded by Protestants and my sense is that culturally LDS is still more like a very weird and highly committed Protestant church than it is like Catholicism or Judaism.
I went to a Catholic HS, and I've observed for a while that Catholic high schools often have very marginally-attached Catholic alums still actively involved in them. My school's largest financial backer was like this -- he was an Italian-American who practically never attended Mass, but he sent all his basically unchurched kids there and I think for him the school was sort of an Italian thing -- a sense that Catholicism is on some level as inseparable from Italian-ness as pasta is. Which is an awful lot like cultural Judaism.
Evangelical private schools normally don't have this --"ex-vangelical" alums don't get involved in them, don't send their kids there or give them money.
First off, please prove that God doesn't exist. So far I have yet to come across any proof for or against the existence of God, but I'd be happy to hear if you have one.
We can discuss the question of what is the definition of a cultural Jew after you answer my first question. ;-)
By claiming the other side has the burden of proof in the God/no-God argument, you're abrogating your responsibility as self-proclaimed rationalist. The burden of proof is an irrational argument that both theists and atheists use against each other. It's irrational because if makes the fatal assumption if it can't be proved it isn't real. For instance, there's no proof for Hilbert's sixteenth problem. Could there be proof for it? Or is it unprovable? You can have an opinion, but to state it's either provable or unprovable is at best arrational. Placing the burden of proof on the side with the opposing opinion is definitely an irrational argument, though. "My opinion is correct because you can't prove your opinion!" See how absurd that sounds? As an agnostic, I don't have to prove anything. I can just say I don't have enough data to make a rational decision on the question. And I don't. Lol!
If it's "unprovable" then I'm not sure why you would want to convert to a religion in the first place. There are many things which are unprovable which I would also not worship. How are people even making the decision about which unprovable deity they want to worship?
Question: how uncompromising are you in your anti-religious views? Have you ever sat down with friends for a Christmas dinner? Or would you make a point of shunning them for them for paying lip service to Christian ceremony — even if they didn't really believe that Jesus was the Christ savior?
I was raised by atheists, but when I was kid we put up tree and gave presents. My parents didn't have any problem having fun on that holiday, even to the extent of going out caroling with our Christian neighbors. My parents did however make a point of telling me the truth about non-existence of Santa Claus when I was five. Oh boy! That caused a lot of outrage with my peers when I relayed that information to them!
I'm going to try and answer the question 'What do you mean by "cultural Jew"?'
My grandma taught Yiddish for 20 years and in the late 40s, she got her master's degree from a yeshiva; the subject of her dissertation was ”humanism and Judaism."
The late 40s was a time when a lot of American Jews doubted the literal truth of being a 'chosen people' but also felt personally connected to the worldwide Jewish diaspora.
I can't explain the feeling very well. (If my cousin ever actually scans that thesis, you should read it, because my grandmother could, and did.)
You can speak Yiddish and write about humanism and Judaism without a formal conversion or without seeking out a Rabbi on the matter. If it's simply about speaking a language then I'm sure there are plenty of helpful apps for that.
Well I have not yet found my grandmother's master's thesis, I can promise you that her essay in the January 18, 1991, issue of the Detroit Jewish News will be well worth your time:
I was referring to Scott's question. If this is simply about hanging out with people, speaking a language or taking part in holidays I don't know why a formal conversion would be required.
I don't think it's required, it's just, I can't think of any alternatives to a conversion for a newlywed who wants to adopt their spouse's irrelegious Judaism.
Cultural Jews: not a family, so you can't marry in; not a religion, so you can't convert; not an organization, so you can't sign up; not a philosophy, so you can't espouse it—it may be a group that's literally impossible to join. For a group so tolerant of others we founded the ACLU, we're not very welcoming!
Or maybe we're too Talmudic about the whole thing. Raised Catholic? Spouse mildly Protestant? Have a presbyterian wedding service and bam, you've switched religions and no one will ask you if you believe in God! (Plus, next time you have to go to Church, you'll enter feet first.)
My grandmother's FBI fill was inspiring. Sign one petition in the 50s to make sure the government's secret police spend time and money watching you, then be totally law abiding for seventy years.
J. Edgar Hoover was not Hitler and it would have been wrong to use violence against him——but wasting his time and money is a mitzvah.
There are large parts of Judaism as a religion that provide benefits even if you don't believe in God. Belonging to a captial-P People with its own history and its own rituals and values can be its own reward. Maintaining that belonging may require doing things that aren't 100% justified by evidence (though for Judaism believing in God is often not one of those things), but the rewards can be worth the costs.
I say this as a Christian who teaches at a Jewish school. My students generally come away feeling like part of something bigger and more meaningful than themselves, much more than I think their public-school counterparts do. And I suspect that the majority of them get this benefit despite not believing in God.
I'm not sure why "conversion" is needed for feeling "part" of something bigger than oneself. That's just having friends that you talk to once in a while.
The fact that nearly every culture and religion in history has some sort of initiation rites and/or selective criteria for group inclusion suggests that for most people "feeling a part of something bigger" is more than just "having friends you talk to once in while" and that you are the one who is missing something here.
There are large parts of Judaism as a religion that provide benefits even if you don't believe in every aspect of the religion*. Belonging to a captial-P People with its own history and its own rituals and values can be its own reward. Maintaining that belonging may require doing things that aren't 100% justified by evidence (though for Judaism believing in God is often not one of those things), but the rewards can be worth the costs.
*(and Judaism specifically is not actually big on orthodoxy of belief; there are many see the statistic elsewhere that a large % of active Reform Jews don't believe in God)
I am not Jewish but years ago I dated a guy for several years who was Jewish and we discussed conversion. Having looked a little way down the path, my contribution is this, take her to lots of holidays and see if the “wow” hits. Sometimes new converts fall in love with the tradition and want to go full tilt for a while. She would “probably” be non-observant, but joining a new community can make people feel unexpected things. Let yourself be ok with her falling in love with the tradition if that is what happens, and then see which conversion process feels right. That may be why Zohar commented “learn for a year.” Congratulations again to both of you!
Mazel tov! When my wife and I decided to get married, we wanted a non-religious ceremony presided over by a rabbi (parental pressure, of course, about the rabbi). We were younger then. Eventually we did find a rabbi who was willing to preside, with a suitably modified standard Jewish wedding. I'm sure you could find a rabbi who will agree to such a conversion, either among Reform or Reconstructionist congregations, or check out csjo.org, the home for Cultural and Secular Jewish Organizations. I help run a secular Jewish organization in the Detroit region, but we have no clergy--we do it all ourselves.
"Mazel tov to you two!" says your fellow cultural Jew! Seriously, mazel tov! Honestly, this brightened up my morning, which up until this point was one of those combos of (1) "woke up on the wrong side of the bed" and (2) "Oh noes! I need to rush out in the rain to put out the garbage cans that I was too lazy to put out last night!". In closing, congratulations once more!
Same here. I deleted my comment lower down, because the asker was pretty blunt about it. I feel like I'm missing something and am honestly curious about the desire.
From my point of view, if there's (presumably) no sincere belief in the basic tenants of the faith, little to no intention to observe it, and no desire to experience the rituals or community gained by attending synagogue...what is the "thing" that's being meaningfully converted?
Damn inability to edit the comments! I meant, I replied to someone who asked a question about this, but it was kind of rudely phrased.
For me, I just literally don't understand what it is that would be meaningful in a way that's different from a name change or one of the other marriage traditions.
My mom is Jewish and my dad was Catholic and I was raised Catholic. I have been told by many Jewish people including a Rabbi that I'm Jewish and it was implied that this is very meaningful for cultural reasons.
For all the unique and unusual things about you, this particular problem is well-known to the point of there being an entire subgenre of Jewish humor devoted to it.
As others have said, what you basically want is to find a Reform or Reconstructionist rabbi who you like and who’ll have dealt with dozens or hundreds of such couples in the past. That rabbi might want not only your fiancée but also you to learn more (I’d be curious how impressed they’ll be by the kabbalistic research you did for Unsong!). They’ll ask how you plan to raise your children. But for better or worse, there’s basically no extreme of unbelief or non-commitment for which you couldn’t find a Reform/Reconstructionist rabbi who’d seen even more and who’d work with you … *certainly* in the Bay Area! The conversion (and hence, the Judaism of your children) wouldn’t be recognized by the Orthodox, or for emigrating to Israel under the Law of Return, but most likely neither of those are pressing problems for you.
I think the Law of Return does apply if Wikipedia and my memory are both correct.
From Wikipedia:
"The law since 1970 applies to the following groups:
Those born Jews according to the orthodox interpretation; having a Jewish mother or maternal grandmother.
Those with Jewish ancestry – having a Jewish father or grandfather.
Converts to Judaism (Orthodox, Reform, or Conservative denominations—not secular—though Reform and Conservative conversions must take place outside the state, similar to civil marriages).
But Jews who have converted to another religion are not eligible to immigrate under the Law of Return, even though they are still Jews according to halakha.
Ah, right — the original idea of the Law of Return was that anyone Jewish enough for the Nazis to have murdered, should be Jewish enough for Israel to let in. And it does have clauses that apply even to those who the rabbinate wouldn’t consider Jewish once there, administer a Jewish wedding for, etc., which is a separate determination. In recent years, alas, the rabbinate has taken an increasingly severe line about who exactly is Jewish enough for them.
I am in a similar situation. I think basically the answer is you have to do some work to convert, but no substantial ongoing work is required. I would ask your local reform synagogue; I'm sure they've dealt with similar situations before.
We just took this class (https://www.centralsynagogue.org/engage/exploring_judaism), which is basically designed to convert non-Jewish spouses to Judaism. It was pretty long; I imagine lighter options are available? I haven't really checked though.
As a mostly-cultural Jew myself, I would strongly advise against your girlfriend doing this. There is no point in converting =religiously= to Judaism unless you intend to practice the Jewish religion. (Of whatever brand conducts your conversion; Orthodox don't recognize non-Orthodox conversions.) One may culturally affiliate with Judaism without being by religious standards a Jew. And the conversion would mean a formal disaffiliation with whatever one was before, which is a mighty serious step to take.
I appreciate your comment. Before I posted mine I had a much longer version which wouldn't post last night. As someone who had agreed to convert to Judaism "for" my then-boyfriend, but then we broke up, it unexpectedly started me on a path of religious grappling, where I began to question previously unexamined aspects of divinity, faith, God, tradition and everything else. I don't know much about Scott's girlfriend but there are a lot of ways to get to be an adult without ever having thought seriously about what it means to be religious or have or practice a religion, or have started out in something without learning much about it except political takes one disagrees with. My read of his comment was, he was putting the situation out there because they are at the beginning of thinking about it, and there may be a somewhat standard rejection of "God" in play, so going at it from the "God" side won't happen. But starting a learning process from the cultural side might, and can lead to the "God" side. If she starts a learning and participation process, it could end up a variety of ways, including with a faith-based "conversion" experience and intent to practice the religion. My mental model of religion is somewhat like an attractor, people can get gathered in. You are right, it's a big step to leave whatever you were before. When people couple up across religious differences, it automatically (unintentionally) makes people look a little harder about what it means to be on the team they're on as opposed to any other team. Some people don't want a partner of the same faith, that can be subtle. But I admire Scott and all the commenters for bringing it up and discussing it in "good faith." It's an important conversation. I've seen interfaith couples become miserable about various aspects and that's to be avoided, I think. I think neither partner knows where it's going when they first bring it up, there's the destination you think you have and then (not unusual for matters of faith or mystery) there is where that actually ends up. My relationship, we were terrible for each other and it's much better we didn't marry. But I still think about the religious angle and recently decided to start learning more about Judaism in religious terms (decades later). I encourage Scott and his girlfriend to let themselves have a process (and if they would, give us an update in six months)! Just my take on it.
There's a fantastic book I have not been able to find again (1998), autobiographical sketches of interfaith couples, many combinations of traditions, many different experiences, had one by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala I think, if anyone knows that book, please post.
This is good advice and something I have tried in the past. However, I have no security clearance or money to pay for the process of getting a security clearance at present, which is limiting this as an option at present.
Well, I have a CS bachelors degree but no real coding experience, as well as three associates degrees in networking, information systems, and computer support, but only a year of industry experience in random temp jobs. So I am flexible but not strong in anything in particular. My current job is very customer facing in a sense, so answering phones would be fine, but something in networking or in house support would be ideal. Thank you very much for the help in advance.
I don't know how to do that. I can define a range but I lack both a specific understanding of the industry and a specific narrow interest. What I'd prefer to be is a Linux sysadmin but I don't think I have enough experience for that right now.
You could try going for high level customer support. By that I don't mean answering the phones, but receiving bug reports, debugging them, and providing patches to customers.
In my experience most programmers hate the customer facing side of that, so you can do well for yourself if you take that role and free the team up to do other things.
Are you going for IT because you don't like coding, or just because you don't think you have the experience for it? Because you can probably get hired as a software developer with just a CS degree and whatever coding experience you got from college.
+1 to this. I started at Google straight out of college and they (as well as all the other FAANG's) still hire a ton of new grads. The pay is much better than you'd expect in IT and as long as you find some kinds of coding interesting there is probably a place for you.
If you're curious if you'd pass the interviews, I can give you a practice interview. I've given 80 interviews, historically mostly for new grad positions, so I can probably tell you around what your odds are Google at least.
Hi Dan, horning in here because my son is graduating in less than a year with a CS degree and I have no idea how to properly encourage him to do what is prudent/efficient. Any chance we could chat on Discord as well?
Check postings at your local universities. Especially if you have any kind of in. Get an in if you can. Universities value degrees and are often hiring IT personnel.
For an artistic project related to engineering ethics and the tribal values of engineers, I am interested in writings which are:
0. easily publicly accessible
1. of literary merit
2. either (a) postmortems of significant engineering failures or (b) statements of engineering values, or both.
Feynman's minority report on the Challenger disaster, with its ringing conclusion that "Nature cannot be fooled," is to me a classic example of both 2a and 2b. What other texts are good examples of these?
In this vein, Leveson and Turner's "An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents" might be worth checking out. It's available free from Stanford's website:
The middle section of Slide Rule, the autobiography of Nevil Shute. It recounts his experiences designing and building the airship R100, alongside the competing team who built the ill-fated R101. It's somewhat polemic regarding the public-sector-built R101 vs the R100, which was contracted to Armstrong-Vickers.
In the same vein, Shute's *Trustee from the Toolroom* stars a humble hobbyist machinist ("model engineer") who accidentally stumbles into situations where his practical problem-solving shows its worth. It's one of my favourites. Some supernatural weirdness too, but *No Highway* has related themes. And then *Ruined City* is about the moral side of being a good engineering businessman and makes me tear up every time.
Kipling has "The Bridge Builders" in prose and "The Sons of Martha" in verse, also possibly "Hymn of Breaking Strain". "Sons of Martha" was later adopted for the Canadian graduation ceremony for professional engineers, as a poetic codification of the ethical standards of the profession.
"Sons of Martha" and "Hymn of Breaking Strain" were definitely in my plans already, but I haven't read "The Bridge Builders," so thanks very much for that pointer!
Having participated in the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, read all the related materials and be weirded out/captivated. Professional engineers have a subtly different cultural role here than in the rest of the Anglosphere.
Doesn't fit criterion 1 as well, but the NTSB has a lot of good reports on significant engineering failures. For example, in their conclusion on the collapse of the FIU pedestrian bridge in Florida they deliver the incredible understated burn "To FIGG Bridge Engineers, Inc.: Train your staff on the proper use of Pc (the permanent net compressive force normal to the shear plane) when calculating nominal interface shear resistance."
Doesn't immediately read as ringing as Feynman, but then you realize that it essentially translates to "Your incompetence killed 6 people" passed through a
In the opposite direction, ie more literary and less statement of engineering values / post-mortem, is "The Mighty Task Is Done" by Joseph Strauss, chief engineer of the Golden Gate bridge: http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=3006
'The Boiler codes are written in blood.' I suggest you look up the explosion of the Sultana. This was a steamboat on the Mississippi that was carrying home 2300 Union POWs after the end of the war. The boiler exploded killing about 1800 passengers and crew. This was the accident that led to the adoption of codes for steam boilers, and thus the quote.
I would recommend looking at the story of William LeMessurier and the Citicorp Center. I learned about it in an Ethics of Engineering course, and it always stood out to me as an example of somebody faced with a difficult choice making what in hindsight was clearly the correct decision.
There's a bit about him choosing between silence, suicide and speaking up that made me understand the kind of gut-wrenching horror he must have felt at understanding the mistake he had made.
This is probably not the act thing you want, but there's a podcast called 'Well there's your problem' that looks at engineering disasters, and tackles them from a hard-left/socialist material analysis of history type view.
I won't give it a ringing endorsement as the best thing ever or always correct or fair, but I don't think I've ever heard a socialist engineering perspective anywhere else, and it throws up angles of discussion and analysis and ideas that I haven't seen presented elsewhere.
This may not be "literary" enough but there is an extremely large+influential set of writings from the 50s primarily about nuclear weapons but also about war in general, the most famous of which is probably the Einstein-Russell Manifesto https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/ . Lots more where that came from too and likely some book-length treatments, but I can't think of one offhand. Will edit if I think of one, I feel like I'm missing the obvious here.
The Navy has a database of After Action Reports that *should* be publicly accessible. (There were thousands of reports in it when I got out a decade ago; maybe a couple hundred were classified, most of those unnecessarily, so of course it's all hosted on the classified network. If you happen to have access, I guarantee you'll find a couple interesting engineering problems in it in half an hour. They'll be unclassified, too, though
Though of course getting permission to share unclassified information with people who could learn from it is practically impossible.
I used two of those reports as writing samples on job interviews for years. To be able to, I still had to call in a favor AND they made me black out a phone number, even though we had the same number on our ship's web site!
Don't forget Robert Heinlein! Most of his stories feature an engineer with a slide rule. I particularly enjoyed _The Door Into Summer_ where an engineer re-engineered his own failed state. Very dated, but a wonderful story.
Even if secularism as it’s popularly imagined is derived from particularly Christian ideas - which as an semi-Orthoprax atheist Jew I would contest - it’s just as much a counterculture against Christianity as it is against Judaism. It takes some real conspiratorial thinking to call a countercultural idea a closely-held psyops campaign by the culture its countering.
This reminds very, very much of Jacob Neusner's *A Rabbi Talks with Jesus*, which is a phenomenal book for a Jewish perspective Jesus' words on the Law and Israel.
I think she's also got the record for most non-permanent bans. She was once banned indefinitely but the commentariat complained enough to get her reinstated.
Feels to phonetic. If I'm right that's Gaelic, it's probably pronounced like "Claire" or "Michelle" or something that just leaves you wondering whether the spelling isn't some sort of elaborate joke on the English speaking world.
It's "Deiseach". I always assumed it was pronounced 'desh-ock', but looking it up there is an Irish surname with a fada (accent) over the first 'e', and that would make the pronunciation 'day-shock'.
I am a graduate student in Mathematics. Some of my fellow math grad students are applying for Machine Learning or Data Science jobs this coming year. Although they have taken online courses in these areas and are reasonably conversant in them, they are finding it difficult to get jobs or internships because they're often out-competed by Computer science or statistics students, who inevitably have more experience than them in these areas. What are some things that these math grad students could do to further bolster their profiles?
I'm not sure if it applies here, but the "you must have experience to get experience" catch-22 is real in a lot of fields - obviously people beat it sometimes but it's not nothing to make the jump from internship/projects to real work.
Yeah the nice thing about this stuff is except for very large data sets & deep neural networks (which require expensive infrastructure) you can generally just pick a problem and bang your head against it in public without costing anything but your time
Get together a portfolio of projects. Get more experience in those areas specifically. The issue is probably that their knowledge is too theoretical compared to the CompSci and Stats folks. They're afraid they'll have to train you too much.
This. Also the projects will be a more visible sign of competence/expertise/interest and make you stick out than just having taken the classes (which most applicants will have done at this point).
Generally the answer to this is "lower your expectations". In most cases I've seen, such people are picky about jobs and salaries, and can easily pick up work if they drop their ask. Once they do, they tend to rattle up the chain pretty quick.
Finding "data adjacent" jobs also works. Pick something that matches your skill set in a big company, then ask for a transfer to the area you actually want.
Context: I work at a FAANG and my team is currently trying to hire an ML expert. A big hurdle for many folks is that we also want someone with good programming/computer science skills. I interview a lot of folks who seem competent at ML but don't pass our bar for coding.
To be precise, I think we generally do 2 interviews focused on ML and 2 interviews focused on generic programming (think leetcode/hacker-rank style questions). They are weighted evenly, and performing poorly on both programming interviews would consistently sink your odds.
I would highly recommend getting a grounding in computer science if you/they haven't already. In particular, I'd say do 2-3 programming focused CS classes and an algorithms course.
This advice assumes that y'all are already getting to the interview stage. I'm less familiar with the resume optimization part of the game, but listing more experience, including your CS coursework, and linking to some coding hobby projects are all good ideas.
It's also worth mentioning that cold applications have an absolutely atrocious response rate. I had to apply to 57 internships my senior year to get 2 interviews (I got an offer from both). Referrals are huuuuge in terms of getting to the interview stage.
Thanks! This is a rather complete answer to my question. What is a good way to get referrals for companies if you don't have a lot of friends working in tech? I suppose this could be a problem for a lot of non-CS people entering tech.
@How to get referrals if you don't have many friends in tech: I don't have personal experience here, so take my advice with a grain of salt. I got a traditional undergrad CS degree, and a few of my buddies graduated before me.
You might try to take courses with folks you know are going to enter tech soon, or do projects with them. I haven't had success personally in deliberately cultivating networking contacts, but I've had great success by making friends in nerdy hobbies. Ex. I was referred to my current job because I played DnD with two folks at the company and referred to my last job because my wife (who I met as a fellow CS mentor) worked there.
I more meant to gesture at the terrible response rate for cold entry level applications as a way to say, 'Do not lose hope, it is a crap shoot even for great applicants and the only solution is to apply to tons of things.' Once you have a few years of experience, things get better.
I'll also mention that the experience of referrals leading to recruiting more of the same type of folks has been cited as a problem with the practice. I'm sympathetic to this, but as someone who does interviews I note that referred folks tend to be higher quality than typical. So it's hard to ignore the info that a referral supplies.
Lastly, it's worth mentioning that you 'really' don't want to burn bridges with people. While a good referral may not secure you the job, a bad referral will almost certainly tank your chances. For example, when someone who went to the same college as me applies, I'll get an email asking for a referral if I know them. I've personally only given one anti-referral (to someone who was flagrantly unethical when I worked with them), but I have good reason to believe the anti-referral is why they didn't get offered the position.
Focus on data science positions which are not just mislabeled ML engineering roles. Won't do as much to separate from the stats competitors, but will level the field relative to the comp sci folks.
I've recently committed to publishing microfiction weekly on substack - trying to get in the habit of publishing writing more regularly instead of letting it sit in a drawer! If anyone has any feedback it'd be greatly appreciated :)
I like it. It's paranoid in a topical way. I think at the heart of a lot of modernity is the question "just how much of the world is positive sum anyway? And how much is our ancestral killing ground?" That's what it invoked in me at least.
I have an acquaintance obsessed with the idea of emerging platforms like substack and the place of fiction within those (as opposed to the nonfiction it seems primarily designed for). Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
It's an interesting development. I'd say it mostly results from the challenges of traditional publishing, people are very into the thousand true fans concept and substack seems like a way to achieve that. They're definitely encouraging it as a platform for fiction too - hosting events etc, and there's a discord for supporting fiction authors.
Many are using it to serialise novels, but for me, the biggest block is that reading fiction on a computer is simply not that nice - hence I try to keep my work (on substack) very short.
Is the world converging toward illiberal democracy?
It seems that total dictatorships are increasingly being replaced by either unstable democracies or total paralysis-- revolutions in Algeria and Sudan finished off just about the last non-monarchic Arab countries spared the Arab Spring; multiple sub-Saharan African former autocracies are either in the process of reform (Ethiopia, Angola) or seeing major protests (Cameroon, Guinea); Eastern Europe has also been wracked by unprecedented and possibly regime-threatening protests (Belarus, Russia). Outside perennial-exception China, and perhaps the Gulf monarchies, it seems a bad time to be an absolute autocrat (the "Not Free" group on FreedomHouse.org, say, minus the ones that are unfree mostly because there is no central control, like Somalia and CAR). Even eSwatini is starting to see serious demonstrations. This seems to be the upside of the general trend against "establishment" politics nearly everywhere.
At the same time, many democracies have been becoming more "illiberal"-- meaning they don't stuff ballot boxes but do undermine other institutions considered central to "liberal democracy," e.g. courts, media, minority rights, etc. Apart from Trump's US this has become even clearer in e.g. India (recently demoted to "partly free" by FreedomHouse), Brazil, Israel.
At least this is my impression.
So can we consider this a general trend in global politics toward an all-or-nothing, norm-shattering, "free but not fair" kind of democracy, where the people maintain the ability to change regimes at the ballot box but give a green light to "their team" to pull out all the stops to win? I realize this is a somewhat poorly defined question but it's precisely because it's a very general, imprecise question that I'd be glad to hear the thoughts of this esteemed group.
I don't think a "top-down Cultural Revolution" is in any way an appropriate term for what is happening in the US and I honestly don't know what you're referring to.
I don't think calling Trump "illiberal" is even maligning him, it seems a deliberate thrust because he sees checks-and-balances like the courts and media (not to mention elections) as interfering with his agenda, which is true. When the man literally leads chants of "Lock them up" for both political opponents and journalists (including those who have never been accused of any crime), I don't think it's a stretch to call him an illiberal leader who is simply situated in a system that doesn't allow him to execute his illiberal tendencies, as was patently clear in the post-election fiasco.
Netanyahu is undoubtedly leagues from Trump and arguably Bolsonaro and Modi as well. And he's as establishment a politician as it gets. The fact that he's engaged in the same anti-media, anti-court, populist rhetoric despite it going entirely against his typical persona, is itself testament of the pull of this trend. And he did in fact try to do some illegal things, like essentially locking up the knesset when he didn't have a majority and appointing a justice minister against the law, but the courts stopped him.
Kudos and thanks for the thoughtful response and sorry if my responses were a little terse, I'm cruising through a lot of different arguments here and it's sometimes hard to differentiate the thoughtful critiques from the more stringent knee-jerk reactions.
I see Trump as more of a poor-man's Andrew Jackson - the big middle finger to the establishment with less effective reforms or even fundamental morality outside of spite.
I do think the West as a whole (Europe, CANZUK, the US) is experiencing it's own Cultural Revolution which is happening (and giving positive feedback to) a parallel illiberal curtailing of rights.
I think it began with the Bush years - economic instability + offshoring of manufacturing + removing of rights out of fear - but maybe it started long before. The evidence suggests the 70s and 80s, which matches the overall decline in living standards in the West.
I think trebuchet is likening SJ and SJ-aligned militias to the Red Guards, although I am not sure what "top-down" is referring to considering SJ is largely bottom-up.
There are definitely some parallels there (arts students suddenly have power, and go on a crusade/inquisition against cultural conservatives, demolishing monuments), although I don't recall hearing about any massacres.
You consider Black Lives Matter top-down? And vandalism of a handful of statues is "Cultural Revolution", once called (I forget by whom, paraphrasing) "The single greatest act of destruction of human capital in human history"?
Also, the ruling party as of six months ago was the Republican party, and last I checked the institutions of the courts are largely conservative-leaning (certainly since Trump) and Fox News is the most watched cable news channel in America. So in what way did Social Justice (itself a nebulous term) "take over all major institutions"?
You had me at "Revolt of the Public"! Looks amazing, added to my book list, thanks!
I recall being very skeptical once of the causal arrow from internet/social media to politics, but seeing these changes happen on such a global scale in such different contexts, and (seemingly) specific to the last decade or two begs for a global, reent cause, and it's hard to do better than the internet and social media. Plus the inordinate attention by the relevant figures (Trump, Netanyahu, etc.) and their followers to social media suggests it makes sense for that to be a big part of the story.
Interesting caveat: there doesn't seem (to me) to be a symmetry between Left and Right on this one, at least in the two contexts I know best, namely the US and Israel. No doubt major voices can be just as shrill and uncompromising on the Left, but they seem to be much less successful. Biden and Clinton, two centrists, won pretty thumpingly, the former more convincingly than the latter. And they had every possible reason and ability to pursue the demonization-and-inward-looking-politics strategy, but largely didn't. In Israel, there isn't much of an ideological Left left to speak of, much less any kind of radicalization-- in fact, the current government was enabled by the remnants of the ideological Left partnering with the center and anti-Netanyahu Right. So I wonder if there's some interesting way in which the two sides are filling different roles in this new environment, or perhaps the Left is just a little behind for idiosyncratic reasons.
Anyhow, thanks for this, definitely much to think about and looking forward to reading the book :)
"I think his position is that these mobs don't neatly align onto the traditional political spectrum"-- excellent, more points to him because I think this is an important point. In nearly any other period Trump would've been mostly been considered a Democrat or at least not called "a conservative".
So you're saying (or saying he would say) that the asymmetry comes from a kind of larger investment the left (broadly defined) has in the establishment. Could be, need to think it through, but a worthwhile insight to ponder, thanks!
I don't agree that the anti-establishment people are pulling out all the stops to win. That kind of framing actually seems to be a common establishment delusion, which causes them to worsen their bad behaviors (gatekeeping, anti-democracy, anti-free speech, etc), which in turn increases the disillusionment.
The world is mostly ran by supranational organizations and groups (i.e. Interparliamentary Union, Business Network for Hemispheric Integration, Americas Society, Business Roundtable, U.S> Council for Int Business, CFR/CCFR/PCIP, Le Cercle, Trilateral Commission, Chatnam House, Group of 30, WEF, European Roundtable of Industrialists, Open Russia Foundation, Japan Society, Rockefeller Foundation, Wellcome Foundation, Blackrock, insert *elite rich/dynastic wealth/group here*). The agenda is pretty simple. Increase wealth for the minority, deprive wealth for the majority. That's just the natural law of existence (maximizing operation). Reduce the fertility rates of natural-born populations, increase mass-immigration of lower-IQ populations to cause mass division, get high-IQ populations that further technological progress at bargain rates, decrease quality of life/intensify urbanization/decrease means of transportation/decrease meat/CO2-related measures, increase densification, increase asset prices, increase stock prices (from natural population growth), push further out into risk-yield curve (stock market, trading manipulation, sweeping deposits of banks/brokerage accounts/bail-ins), usage of controlled opposition (poisoning the well of conspiratorial-theoretical groups), mass-emotional rhetoric on democrat and republican side of debate, promote radicalism (on fringe groups) and ensure maximum control of groups, thoughts and discussions within educational institutions, on blogs, on social media. Gradually diminish human input/enslave humanity as capital/technological progress ensues with authoritarian state (i.e. drone strikes, disablement of participation in society for not 'behaving' or 'acting in accordance'). Your job as a low-IQ person with propensity for violence is to hurt other groups and reduce the attention of elites people. Your job as a high-IQ person with high-conscientiousness and low-propensity for depression is to create/contribute to immortality/transhumanistic/technological endeavors (i.e. space travel, transplanting minds, transplanting animals). Also all endeavors requires maximizing profits (so lobbying to make sure every human being needs one of this device or one of that medicine or one of that food). Education, politics, food, culture, everything in life is virtually controlled by the hands of few men with thousands acting underneath them; it's just a state of natural affairs that the best at deception (as an evolutionary-adaptive mechanism) becomes the head puppet, and the best conspirators/planners work in concerted effort above to keep their interests at bay. Whether one is in the middle class, or the working class, or the elite class -- all humans want to retain their privileges and rights. Unfortunately, not many people recognize this. Human desire is also practically infinite, and with limited accessible resources available to any particular point in time, it's a sort of game theoretical model playing out over time. Dolphins also have alliances. Human society or civilization is practically like a super-organism with division of labour for every high and low level endeavor naturally speaking.
Getting rid of governments and expanding borders is another part of their policy. Having mega-clusters / continental transnational centers has been a primary goal of the elite group for now; the means to do this is by making life more difficult and expensive using fiscal/monetary policies that eventually lead to crashes/deprivation of value (austerity measures) leading to digital wallets, ID-controlled neural-implants and various miscellaneous devices in the future. All jobs will always be within the economic centers and trains/hyper-speed railways will be the primary means of travelling (economic stratification of human value life); the non-compliant and the non-economically viable will be on the fringe or dependent on government subsidies and be a sort of local militia I suppose (underclass). Municipalities and state-level authority is gradually diminished by lessened funding and centralization of power is completed by people being unhappy and rioting, and or ad hoc justification of state power is utilized against planted agents inciting violence and/or removal of local authority to cause localized conflicts to cause smarter people to leave en masse; controlled creation of demographically stratified zones by desired inputs/outputs. Well anyways, there's little that people can do anything.
Wow. That's terrifying. Especially the bit where a global elite wishing to increase their wealth want to make potential consumers poorer, thus reducing the amount of wealth available to them. Or the cunning plan to simultaneously reduce the native population's wealth and birthrate, somehow missing the negative correlation between the two things. It's scary how incompetent this global elite seems to be...
Mind you, this might work for them. After all, North America and Australia have kept their native populations poor and small and the incoming elites there are doing OK. That is the sort of example you had in mind yes?
You don't agree that e.g. Trump pulled out all stops to win, including undermining the institutions of the media (which he explicitly attacked constantly) and the courts (which he attacked after it refused to acquiesce to his demands to overturn the elections), not to mention calling election officials to try to get them to change results? Modi in India and Bolsonaro in Brazil also seem to fit the description of "pulling out all the stops to win", each in their own way. And I can testify as an Israeli that that fits Netanyahu as well, though not in the explicitly illegal sense of Trump.
You make what looks to me to be a major elision here in confusing institutions (press and courts) with their current staff. By eliding the two, you avoid the need to demonstrate that professional journalism and politicised judiciaries are actually positive for democracy before you can argue attacks on them are anti-democratic. The importance of journalists (rather than free speech and media) and activist lawyers (rather than rule of law - and at least one of your examples seems to disregard that as well...) seems to be a truism often trotted out but not often defended. Probably because it's an item of faith for professional journalists...
I'm also sceptical of any argument that says group X has a key role in our political system, therefore they can't be challenged, however stupid the challenge. If it turns out the people are dissatisfied with the judiciary or those seeking to edit their access to news, why should the existing groups of people be given some charmed status?
I agree with you that free reporting and impartial courts are important. I'm perhaps less happy than you seem to be that these are actually what we have, and even if I were I would need a lot of convincing before agreeing a politician had no right to attack those running these institutions. Even if they're clearly an insane egotist who can't take losing an election.
IMO, there are rather strong forces in journalism that threaten it from within. We've seen that a bunch of journalists struck out when Substack came along and expressed that they were finally able to speak their mind, which suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. And these are not (just) right-wing journalists, as the most prominent ones are Glen Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias.
And impartial courts are not merely about external influence, but first and foremost about political neutrality. If the courts become political, they become unelected politicians, which is dictatorial.
Maybe I should clarify. I have plenty of criticisms of journalists and court systems, and indeed I think journalism today is veering heavily into some bad territories (though I think this is more a consequence of whatever the "ultimate" causes are here, rather than the cause of this shift, because journalism is just responding to changing incentives). I'll add that the supreme court in Israel recently did some incredibly anti-democratic things, on par with the worst of what Netanyahu did.
But I think it becomes clear very quickly that the leaders we're talking about are attacking the institutions themselves, not just current staff. You can see this in the way an organization or figure that is praised one moment is savaged the moment they so much as squeak against the leader. This happened with Fox in the US and a similar, striking parallel occurred in Israel, where ideological right-wing journalists who were previously seen as the paragons of the Right are now savaged pretty awfully because their ideology led them to question blind loyalty to Netanyahu. Similarly, it's a consensus view on the ideological Right in Israel (including among Netanyahu's supporters) that Netanyahu didn't really care about the courts, and indeed defended them from reform, right up until he was charged with corruption. So I think these are examples where it's the basic executive-checking function of these institutions that the leaders can't abide by, rather than just being about their being about problematic specific incarnations.
But my point is that leaders like Netanyahu attack individuals and decisions, but have not sought actual systematic changes to benefit themselves. If what you do is a public role then political criticism has to be expected, and it's down to the people to determine whether criticism is valid or not. It's where you have a leader such as Erdogan (sorry - can't add the accent on this device) actually redesigning the system that you might have a problem. I can't see someone refusing to compliantly accept a legal judgement or an adverse opinion without mouthing off as a major problem for democracy, although if that becomes a pattern I doubt I'd vote for the whinging idiot...
So I guess the question is whether trying to undermine these institutions and their legitimacy via rhetoric rather than actual systemic reforms is considered illiberal. I get the distinction you're making with e.g. Erdogan. But in that case would you say Trump wasn't illiberal, because he didn't really change the system?
As an aside, Netanyahu did *try* to challenge and change the system in all sorts of ways, e.g trying to shut down the operation of the knesset to prevent their passing laws against him, or his (brief) attempt to illegally install a Justice Minister against the rules, both efforts stopped by the Supreme Court, and he did actually try to change the system to have direct elections for PM even without a government. The fact that these attempts didn't work, because the man hasn't had a true majority for 2 years, doesn't necessarily indicate that the push wasn't toward illiberalism. But admittedly illiberalism isn't a well-defined term and we could have different understandings of the term.
I consider it far more radical to exempt the media and judges from criticism. It's not checks and balances if you put certain institutions with power above scrutiny and criticism.
Besides, it's hardly like Trump is the only one with criticism of those institutions. It's pretty clear to me that this kind of objection is very often a rationalization, where the real thing that people care about is the kind of criticism that he has, not criticism in general. If it was, you'd see criticism by the same people when protesters riot after a legal decision or when leftists critique the media, but this rarely happens.
And Trump seems to have stayed (just) within the law. He believes in fraud and asked election officials to find that fraud. This is different from asking them to falsify election results or overturn the results without cause.
The constant is that those who critique him exaggerate what he actually did, to the point of lying. He is accused of calling for a coup on Jan 6th, even though the best 'evidence' I've seen is based on him not speaking out (even though his actual statements asked for a peaceful demonstration). He is accused of asking election official to falsify the results, even though he is clearly convinced that fraud exists and begged for them to find it. He was accused of Russian shenanigans, which fell apart after an illegal investigation where the FBI broke the law (which apparently is gperfectly OK) didn't find anything actionable.
Actually pulling out all the stops to win involves much more than alternatively accusing the existing institutions and begging them, while obeying them. For example, actually having militia's under one's control (not imagined militias), using extralegal methods to coerce people (like a 'friendly discussion' in a black van), using the means you have to coerce people (delaying funds for people who oppose you, selective 'govern-to-rule,' etc), stuffing ballot boxes, etc, etc.
It's pretty strange/interesting that you point to a few politicians that are commonly part of a narrative, when for your argument, it seems more logical to point to Putin and Maduro.
As I mentioned above, I have plenty of criticism toward media and the courts, when relevant. But I think it's clear that the attacks on them from this generation of leaders has been much more fundamental. And just to be clear, Trump most certainly did not remain within the confines of the law when he called election officials and coaxed them (arguably threatened) to "find" votes that weren't there. You say "he is clearly convinced that fraud exists and begged for them to find it", but he actually asked them to just "find" the specific number of votes he was missing to win the election, without presenting any credible evidence of cheating. His lawyers also did try to overturn election results, not just to investigate fraud. This was not a case of genuinely believing the elections were stolen.
Putin and Maduro are definitely part of a similar phenomenon, but I was talking about established democracies (US, Israel, India, etc.) that turned "illiberal" rather than dictatorships like Russia or Venezuela turning that way. Never would imagine defending those horrific regimes.
Trump is spending most of his time arguing that he won by hundreds of thousands of votes, that it's easy to close the gap by which he lost by investigating some of the major wrongs he believes happened and that Raffensperger is not doing his job. He accused Raffensperger of not wanting accurate election results multiple times.
If you look at the entire conversation and without bad faith, then the most logical interpretation is that he believes that many votes were not counted and he was trying to bargain later on in the call, by telling the guy that he didn't need to find all the missing/bad votes, but just enough to result in what Trump believes is the legitimate outcome of the election.
You are interpreting it as him directing the guy to "'find' votes that weren't there," but it's really this latter part that would be damning, if Trump had actually said it, but it is actually something that you came up with. That is what I constantly see. The actually damning accusations are pretty much always interpretations made in bad faith, which go against the best evidence, which are presented as fact, as you do here.
> This was not a case of genuinely believing the elections were stolen.
I think that this is just an absurd claim that goes against all the evidence, like Trump constantly talking about how the election is stolen and latching on to every theory under the sun that would explain how.
From my perspective, your rationalized yourself into believing the exact opposite of the truth, where Trump is not a conspiracy thinker, but just a cynical dictator like Putin. Do you actually believe this? Do you look at all the things that Trump says and does and then truly believe that this is all an act? And if so, what is your evidence for this?
PS. I think that it is rather interesting how you hold up Israel as a country that turned illiberal due to Netanyahu, when they've been using foul play to appropriate Palestinian land for way longer than Netanyahu being in power & have had illiberal policies for a very long time (like racial policies).
Not only did I read the transcript, I remember listening to the call in full when it was released, because I'm that kind of person.
Getting into the weeds of the Trump-Raffensperger call is a bit of a detour for this thread, so I'll just make a couple points and leave it at that.
1. The president threatened Raffensperger, saying refusing to cooperate with his demands is "a criminal offense" and "is a big risk for you". That seems clearly illegal.
2. If the president tells an official to "find votes" when the court process found no fraud, and indeed the president's own team failed to present serious evidence of fraud to the courts, then that is absolutely an attempt at election fraud, *even if the president believes his own words*. He is subverting the system by which such claims are adjudicated.
3. The fact that the president repeatedly claims fraud doesn't mean he believes it. The fact that his own lawyers failed to produce meaningful evidence suggests that, at best, Trump didn't care whether the claims were true or not. Consider the fact that he has repeated many times the claim that his inauguration was the biggest ever, despite obvious, incontrovertible proof to the contrary. He is willing to repeat and insist on things that are patently untrue, even to him.
Lastly, not going to argue if you want to posit that Israel never was a liberal democracy. I've explained why I think Netanyahu has taken it in a clearly illiberal direction. But debating the history there is well beyond the point of this thread.
With regard to "The Media" (at least that bit that sides with ME) and "The Courts" (when they rule as I wish) being Unassailable, I regard in Exactly the same way I, a Protestant, or anyone whom I know who is Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, FSM or whatever, regards "Papal Infallibility."
I don't believe in it. Most especially if you make yourself a public opinion engine, you make yourself open to criticism as to your opinions. If you don't like that, perhaps you should sell shoes somewhere.
It's definitely not just your impression. This has been the tendency over roughly the last decade or so. Before that, there was a pretty clear and long-lasting trend towards liberal democracy, perhaps from 1975-2000. For example, the 90s saw a surge of re-democratization in sub-Saharian Africa.
There is a lot of debate whether this last decade is a trend or just a fluctuation. I would say that nobody has strong arguments for either side. We just don't know.
Data on this topic is super-hard to interpret, because it's really hard to define terms like "democracy" or "liberal". Some interesting links are:
Thanks! This is great-- I think partial, but has some of the examples on my mind (though I don't think description of the Maldives crisis in 2018 was a "coup", at least as far as I can tell)
Thanks for the comment! But for example, it seems to me that by and large much of the democratization from the 90s has continued when you look at total autocracies, rather than it being a receding wave. So for example, the Arab spring produced one democracy (Tunisia), one possibly budding democracy (Sudan), a couple movements in the right direction (Algeria, arguably Morocco and Jordan), and turned almost all the other military dictatorships into failed states (Libya, Syria, Yemen). That's just the Arab world. All of these aside from Morocco and Jordan were pretty much absolute dictatorships before Dec 2010. So it seems the model of total dictatorship has become untenable (maybe unless you have near-unlimited oil money). Similar thing seems to be happening in sub-Saharan Africa-- pretty much the whole continent is either democratic/democratizing (including illiberal democracies), a failed state, or has a very old leader, which suggests the reckoning may come when the leader dies or moves out of the way. I listed 4 exceptions to this rule at some point, and since then the president of Chad was killed and eSwatini started facing massive the biggest protests in recent memory. So I think what is often interpreted as a receding of the democratic wave is in fact the democracies becoming more illiberal (but, with few exceptions, not outright autocracies) while absolute dictatorships continuing their decline. What do you think?
Yes, I also perceive that the trend is not so much from democracies to absolute dictatorships, but rather from liberal to less liberal democracies. Though I have low trust in my own ability to recognize whether it's just an impression or a real trend.
There might be a perception bias. Countries moving to less liberal stance are criticized and make it to the news. Countries moving in the other direction are less noticed, unless it is a somewhat dramatic step as in Bhutan or in Ethiopia (which has backfired). For example, I think Qatar has become more liberal over the last years, mostly unnoticed. Even Saudi-Arabia and UAE have made some steps to give women more rights, installed local councils and stuff like this. I think that I wouldn't notice such small improvements most of the time, but would absolutely notice every small step that makes Poland or Slovenia less liberal.
So dictatorships taking steps toward liberalization doesn't necessarily contradict this general thrust, because they still remain generally illiberal. I'm trying to think what a "liberal dictatorship" would look like-- one where courts and media are fully independent, and rights fully respected, except the right to vote, or something? Not sure there's such a thing, though I'm open to hearing otherwise. So I'd say a dictatorship that's liberalizing is still moving to some extent toward illiberal democracy, it's just that it's doing so from the dictatorship end of the spectrum.
That said, I don't really see much of that happening. I don't know about Qatar but Saudi Arabia and UAE in my view haven't really liberalized at all, in a way SA has consolidated power and become more illiberal, e.g. with the Khashoggi murder. Letting women drive while locking up and torturing a woman who campaigned for it doesn't really seem like liberalizing to me.
I think there's a sort of political ratchet effect where the people in power can use that power to solidify their own position - by weakening institutions that threaten them, installing cronies in positions of power, corrupting formerly-impartial institutions - but then once they're out of power, all of those advantages flip back to the other side, and the system as a whole is at a new, less democratic equilibrium. There's always a temptation to do these kinds of shenanigans but ultimately politicians know it's short-sighted and they need to exercise restraint. But still, sometimes they don't - especially when there's a crisis and the perceived need for immediate solutions outweighs future concerns of "what will the other side do with this power?"
And then eventually the government takes too much power, the people get fed up, and you have demonstrations and ultimately revolution. Or a civil war.
So perhaps this process is always going on in democracies, and the appearance of a global trend is simply due to a) there being more democracies now than in the past and b) more media coverage in and about these places.
I've also noticed that journalists love to pursue the Grand Narrative and there's no Grander Narrative than the Cold War: Democracy vs. Authoritarianism. In particular, media interpretations of events in Russia's periphery seem to reduce every issue, no matter how complex, to an indicator of whether the country in question is moving towards the West or falling back under the Kremlin's influence. So we might be hearing a disproportionate number of stories about democratic progress and/or backsliding because that's the kind of stuff that generates clicks, even though this constant churn of democratic backsliding punctuated by occasional demonstrations/wars/Color Revolutions has actually been the norm for a hundred years or more.
Alternatively, the journalists might be right, and the authoritarian regimes of Russia and China may in fact be successfully exporting their model for illiberal societies. Victor Orban might have looked at Putin and said "yeah, that seems like a good deal" and we all know Trump openly envied the power of the world's most infamous dictators.
It could be that social media and the internet have eroded the power and influence of traditional journalists but what nobody realized was that the power and influence of journalists was actually keeping authoritarian tendencies in check, whereas social media actually magnifies, rather than counteracts, the power of authoritarian leaders. For all our critiques of the traditional media, maybe they were a Chesterton's fence all along, and tearing them down has paved the way for an Orwellian nightmare society.
Or not. I'm really not certain of any of these theories.
I'm skeptical about the "we're just hearing about things we didn't hear about before" explanation, just because my impression is that just about every country seems to be having a "biggest anti-government protest in its history" moment and that sounds like an objective measure. It could well be-- and I think this is getting closer to the issue-- that these protests happen *because* the news spreads wider and farther. But that still makes for a significant change.
The "ratchet effect" is interesting, it does seem like previously leaders were looking more for a way of courting the other side's voters, whereas now there's a kind of acceptance that 45% of each side is set in stone and the battle is for the remainder. Biden was almost a once-in-a-generation kind of opportunity to break this pattern-- popular guy, no serious negatives, tried to reach across the divide-- and yet the electoral change between 2016 and 2020 was pretty marginal. And I think that's related to what you're saying about grabbing on to power and trying to shut out the other group-- that used to be bad tactics, now it seems to pay off and indeed get support from the electorate.
I can't prove it but my hunch is that you'd get a similar picture if you accounted for population change (many of these regions, e.g. Eastern Europe, are hardly growing). But perhaps depends on the location.
Two core components of liberal democracy—individual rights and the popular will—are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.”
I do wonder, though...is money really more important in politics than it used to be? It seems to me the opposite is true. The big money in 2016 was overwhelmingly anti-Trump, which makes sense because the money was invested in establishment politics. Big money also worked against Sanders, and while he didn't win he did much better than people with much more money behind them.
But I'll definitely check out the book, seems very relevant. Thanks again!
Some of this is regimes that would prefer to be straight-up dictatorships, oligarchies, or whatnot, finding it pragmatically necessary to adopt at least the forms and pretense of democracy to survive. That should count as a partial win for democracy, as it shortens the distance to cover when future reformers are in a position to go for the real thing.
For sure, and that's part of what's interesting to me, this realization by the dictators that the previous model-- rig the vote, shoot the protesters-- doesn't seem to work that well in most places. So now they still aren't democrats, but they need to appeal to that 51% of the population to keep above the water, or say 40% plus a lot of shenanigans to make the playing field break in their favor. Erdogan seems a great example of this-- first playing the "illiberal" game, violating rights and locking up journalists but keeping ballot boxes untouched. Recently with the Istanbul mayoral race he actually annulled a vote, crossing the line into outright autocracy, and that blew up in his face.
Like you said, that may well be a partial win, though we need to see where it goes.
The question is which institutions to watch. I assume the most likely outcome for me is in a refugee camp on the war-torn frontier between the Amazon Conglomerate Ecosphere and the Holy Zuckerbergian Empire of Facebookia.
But shouldn't that imply the established elites becoming more entrenched? What we're seeing now is the reverse-- a lack of control, more than a surplus of it.
You bring up a very interesting point, one I hadn't thought of.
Thinking it over, the increasing authoritarianism we are seeing in recent years is not the response of a confident and self-assured elite, but of an elite that is paranoid, uncertain as to how to respond, and fearful of losing control.
Similarly (perhaps?), many of the countries that have seen the greatest decreases in terms of freedom in e.g. FreedomHouse.org have not been autocracies consolidating control (as in China or Turkey) but rather autocracies reacting brutally to a loss of control, e.g. Syria, Nicaragua, Venezuela. It's true that the people in these countries are less free now than ten years ago, but it's not because the autocracy is stronger. So I'm seeing a general principle of "Weaker autocracies" both in countries seeing positive reforms (Ethiopia, Angola, Sudan) and in those that have become more brutal while losing their grip on the country (arguably Russia also falls in this category). And that fits straight into the overall trend of "against establishment politics", where in the case of dictatorships, arguably the establishment may be something worth disrupting (though the brutal consequences and failed statehood may be too high a price to pay, depending on how one views these things).
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but there's an alternative hypothesis here which would see the same results. That is that the growth of illiberal democracy is not a trend in itself but the most likely current outcome of anti-establishment feeling taking concrete political form. In effect political upheaval that replaces an established political order will in at least two common scenarios currently tend towards illiberal democracy: populist, in the sense of non-elite, success in western democracies and popular uprisings which don't lead to civil war in autocracies.
To flesh that contention out slightly, the dominant paradigm in the political and media classes of western democracies is currently a free-market socially-permissive worldview which especially in its more cultish or transnational aspects is not necessarily widely accepted by the electorate. This is the package generally described as liberal in the context of modern politics. Reaction against perceived overreach by those promoting this, say the creation of a European state without explicit popular consent or trying to put someone into the presidency on the basis of it being their turn, may therefore cause a backlash which would be illiberal in that it opposes the existing liberal consensus. As more states develop illiberal elites to replace the liberal ones though, I would expect populism to go the other way and generally seek a more liberal form of democracy because that's the opposite to what the entrenched authority in the relevant countries are promoting against popular opinion in their turn.
Autocracies that shift to democracy seem currently to produce illiberal democracy as a matter of course as political parties seem to form on ethnic or religious lines rather than political groupings. This seems to be a useful rule of thumb, at least in any state that is not generally homogeneous. But this is a separate trend from populist movements in established democracies and should probably not be seen as part of the same process even if currently the end result looks similar if viewed on a scale of liberality. So rather than simply a trend towards illiberal democracy, we should perhaps posit at least two different trends at the moment producing similar outcomes, but which would be better recognised as separate phenomena.
Thanks for this. Two quick comments: First, when you say that the Western-world part of this is a reaction to "free-market socially-permissive worldview", isn't it strange then that the leaders who then take charge seem to be largely cut from that cloth? This analysis seems like it would speak more to the rise of a Ted Cruz than a Trump (similarly in Israel, Netanyahu doesn't really care about social issues and is known as a free-market guy, and religious parties haven't become stronger in recent years).
Second, I hear what you're saying about autocracies moving to democracy being naturally illiberal. I'm just not sure why they are moving at all. For decades, dictatorships seemed satisfied to just stay in place with total power, and now they seem to act as if the ground is shifting beneath them, which seems to be true.
But your comment also helped me realize that these dictatorships move just as often to anarchy and failed statehood (certainly in the Arab World) as to illiberal democracy, so you may be right that I'm wrong to put these trends in the same basket just because I think of "failed state" in the "less absolute dictatorship" category.
> a free-market socially-permissive worldview which especially in its more cultish or transnational aspects is not necessarily widely accepted by the electorate
If I had to guess at big drivers for populism's recent rise, I might choose:
1) The financial crisis and the slow recovery in most (all?) developed countries
2) (In Europe) The Euro (currency) crisis
3) (In Europe) The Syrian civil war and migrant crisis
4) maybe technological trends like people getting news from social media instead of traditional sources
Maybe the establishment runs more free-trade than the public, but if the economy was doing great I don't think it would be a major source of political discontent on it's own. But it was not doing great, for *years* and *years*, while people saw governments intervene to protect the banking sector. I think that poor response undermined people's confidence in the current system generally and made them more open to people with stories that sound good about who's to blame.
In some respects it's a bit similar to what happened after the Great Depression in many countries although not (yet) as severe. Ray Dalio has some interesting economic / political comparisons along those lines, talking about a long-term debt cycle ending in both cases and putting countries in difficult economic and political situations.
I need a crash course on Scandinavian politics over the last 30 years for boring reasons. Norway specifically but I’d like a solid understanding of all the Nordic countries. Anyone got any good resources?
Context: am Norwegian (by citizenship and language), but born and raised abroad in Texas so I mostly only follow American politics.
Eastern Orthodox Norwegian Texan. Looking forward for Larsiusprime to come out as polyamorous as well. Or something. (This comment is not meant to criticize any set of personal circumstances and choices. If I'm mocking anything, it's my own expectations and undercalibrated probabilistic intuitions.)
No pretty vanilla otherwise. I was raised church of Norway Lutheran (a parish of which exists in Houston, Norwegian language liturgy and all) and converted to EO in college. I do have Narcolepsy and Tourette’s if you’re looking for more statistically unlikely features, though the latter two weren’t exactly choices. (Though I suppose my mom’s nationality and my place of birth wasn’t either)
I mean I'm not about to start a political party just yet :P Mostly I'm just getting a lot of people messaging me in the wake of the context, including some folks from Norway given the connection was called out (hometown hero effect?) and I realize that I need to bone up on what the political landscape back in the old country is like so I don't horribly embarrass myself.
Already read them! Just wanting to back that up with someone who can tell me if Wikipedia is full of it or not, given my experience with wikipedia articles about contentious political topics I am already familiar with.
I've read and would recommend the book to non-Nordic people who are curious about the region, though I don't think it's a good resource for studying recent political developments in the region.
It focusses more on cultural differences between an average Western country and Nordic countries and specifically on a handful of most interesting cultural items in each of the 5 Nordic countires, so it's nowhere as extensive as I think OP would like.
I think even browsing Wikipedia would be better than the book.
Sidebar: I saw in another thread that you're Orthodox. Is Orthodoxy super tiny in Norway? I've always had the view (perhaps mistaken) that Norway had about 80% nominal membership in the Church of Norway with most of the rest in Protestantism, a super tiny Catholic community and essentially no Orthodox Christians. Am I close?
I've spent most of my life growing up in Texas, so I can't speak with authority about the presence of Orthodoxy in Norway. From what very very little direct experience I have, it seemed very rare (rarer than in Texas at least, where you can usually find a parish in most medium sized towns, or the one next over) -- there's a few Orthodox parishes in Norway, as well as a monastic community or two (including the one that publishes the Norwegian language Orthodox prayer book I use sometimes).
The parishes are mostly in the big cities from what I've seen. Last I was in Trondheim the Orthodox community there had to serve liturgies in a borrowed space from the Lutherans, but that was over a decade ago. That said, I'm hardly an expert on the subject -- most of my many visits to Norway were spent hanging out in the tiny coastal village where my mother grew up, not in the big cities where you'd expect to find exotic religious communities like this.
My guess is that Orthodoxy in Norway is centered around immigrant communities, Finns, and any recent converts from the state church, clustered in urban centers, or perhaps near the Russian and Finnish border.
But perhaps to your point -- here in Texas when people find out that I'm a) a Norwegian national and b) Eastern Orthodox they ask "Oh, are most Norwegians Orthodox" and the answer is, "definitely not, I'm just weird."
lol. Strangely I'm a convert to Orthodoxy and my godfather is a Texas native who now lives in.... Russia. Must be something about Orthodoxy that thrusts people into the worldwide sphere.
I'd love to visit Norway some day. My sole Scandanavian experiences so far are transferring planes in Helsinki on my way to Moscow.
If you can read Norwegian, you might find better sources about Norway specifically by asking around in Norwegian-speaking parts of internet. (If Skandinaviska is a real thing as they claim, maybe same strategy will work also for Swedish and Danish sources, too.)
For example, all the books written in English about Finnish political history tend to be short, often colored by English-speaking countries' perspectives, and there are not many of such books.
In lieu of specific recommendations, as a general strategy for history, what about looking up the Department of History / Political History / Politics at big-name Norwegian universities and what books they recommend or require in course curricula. Recently published large-scale history books (the ones with titles like "modern political history of [insert country]" also tend to have a chapter on the recent history. Some professors may even answer an email if you ask for reading recommendations.
If that is too academic, see if some Norwegian serious newspapers or magazines have internet archives with reasonable subscription price tag. What are the headlines and opinion pieces about? What were they about 30 years ago? I do something similar sometimes for fun with the one Finnish paper I subscribe: look up what they wrote when historic events unfolded, like when Berlin wall fell or news of Chernobyl accident started coming in.
As a longtime reader I am 97% grateful for this. My 3% reservation comes from the fact that comment section font size is for some reason larger than the post's, so every time I switch between post and comments I have to resize the page.
Does anyone know of an easy fix for this? It's probably clear that I'm not a technical person, so I'd appreciate a dumbed-down guide/pointer to one (say ELI18).
Given the first line of the pasted code that reads—
```
article div p {
```
—change it to—
```
article div p,
.comment .comment-body,
form.comment-input>textarea {
```
This doesn't enforce the font size everywhere you might want it (The "Post" button as I type this is still larger than the other comment UI) but it seems good enough to my sensibilities
I've quickly tested something that seems to work. Try to add that at then end of the "code" thing where you copy/paste the code (:
.comment-body p {
font: 12px/20px Verdana, sans-serif;
}
The idea here is to apply the same style that's applied to the article to the comments.
On a related note, I remember that SSC had a different style than the one it currently has, and it changed for me during 2021. The text was bigger, and the style more uniform. Does anyone else remember the same? Was it an extension that I forgot I had?
You can start playing with the font or font-size attributes, changing 12px to probably 10px. If you want to increase the comment font size to 12px, you probably need to add font-size: 12px; in one of the blocks (likely the one starting with table.comment-content tr td {).
I use the ACX Tweaks extension, which provides many improvements including to an option to use SSC-like styling. The comment font looks the same to me as the post font with it. This is an ACX-specific extension (the one you posted is just a stylesheet that can be plugged into a general-purpose extension).
Continuing a discussion of Benford's Law with regards to the election from the an earlier open thread:
Last November, I had some people around me start citing this as evidence of fraud, so I looked into it. I took one particular article that a conspiracy-claimer gave me that looked at data in Michigan and claimed it did not follow Benford's Law. I did an analysis in Excel and found that most states, for understandable reasons, keep the number of voters as their precincts roughly constant (I think about 1000 voters per vote site on election day).
Therefore, vote tallies for one candidate or another candidate are not at all randomly distributed and do not span even one order of magnitude. So if a several precincts in an area go 90% for D and 10% for R, then this all these sites will look very skewed, because 1 is supposed to be so much more common than a 9.
I showed this to my conspiracy-claiming friend, and asked him to apply it to data in another state that went 80/20 or 90/10 R. He didn't enjoy seeing that the same "anomaly" appeared in his preferred candidate's positive results.
The Benford Law hub-bub was fantastic for filtering out any fraud-claims put forth by self described datascientist/statisticians/etc. Anything said by anyone pushing it could basically be dismissed out of hand
AFAIK Benford's Law was used to demonstrate fraud in Russian elections. No idea if it was done correctly, but given high priors on (and other proofs of) Russian elections being fraudulent, it makes sense that people didn't scrutinize the proof that much back then and came to think of it as a good tool.
Not understanding the requirements necessary for Benford's law to hold is such an amateur mistake that you can pretty much assume anyone who claims to be an expert and making it, is either lying or incompetent and self-deluded
Please, less dismissal of evidence with snark/ad homin attacks. If you are not amateur, you *could* point out how Benfords law applied in Russia, but not the US.
It would be helpful if someone had pointed to the purported analysis that was used in Russia.
But the basic requirements for Benford's law to be relevant are that you have a dataset whose values span several orders of magnitude, and that should be basically scale-free within that range. Classic examples of things that *do* satisfy Benford's law are things like the population of urban areas and the area of river drainage basins. (Not coincidentally, these both grow by processes where the addition of new population/drainage area to an existing urban area/drainage basin is more likely when the existing population/drainage area is larger.)
Populations of municipalities often *don't* satisfy Benford's law, because in some nations/states, a region needs to reach a large minimum population before it can incorporate as a municipality, and regions with very high populations often get split into multiple municipalities, and these two features introduce a distinctive scale and prevent the numbers from spanning multiple orders of magnitude.
> It would be helpful if someone had pointed to the purported analysis that was used in Russia.
I can try to look for it if you're interested, but I don't think it's really relevant? I am inclined to agree with John johnson: if you claim to be a specialist, you should understand the limitations of the method. If it wasn't applicable in the US elections, Russian example is irrelevant.
There were several viral blogposts by Shpilkin after Russian election in 2016, but they are in Russian. I believe the same arguments were then presented by Kobak, Shpilkin and Pshenichnikov in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6059.pdf. It would be interesting to know what the current consensus on this is.
Is benford's law a viable way to detect (competently) falsified data nowadays?
It's the sort of thing you'd fall foul of before the computer age when you had to make up numbers out of your head but I'd expect modern electoral fraudsters to be using statistical software to make sure their fake numbers fit a realistic distribution.
I would suspect that software could do it, but people will still botch the implementation.
For example, RSA is borderline unbreakable if you implement it correctly, but people still get their RSA keys broken because of bad implementations. I don’t see any reason to expect that people making up fraud numbers for elections would not still screw up sometimes in a way that’s detectable by some rules like benford’s law.
1) the expansion of mail in voting (which has been provably less secure than traditional voting)
2) the lack of any verification procedures - there were distinct incidents in various parts of the country that gave me suspicions of fraud, and sadly it's a lot around those mail-in ballots. I don't think a signature match was too much to ask for, and it wasn't done in battleground states like Georgia (even if there was a recount, they just recounted the same bad ballots)
3) the expansion of "vote ferrying" - where third parties can 'help' you fill out or deliver your ballot (most notably in Nevada and Arizona)
4) all these measures passed by fiat, under misleading reasons or circumventing various democratic institutions
Now, that's not to say Joe Biden wouldn't have won anyways, or that all of his support was fabricated - but I have seen enough to question the results, even if I must acknowledge that I may never get answers to them. (And when they do attempt real audits, as in Maricopa AZ, so much obstruction happens it may never finish). There also is no method to change the president once certified, so Joe Biden is it, regardless of what you find now.
There are a few notes - I'm also not happy when Republicans cheat by making it harder to vote or when both sides gerrymander the elections to oblivion. I don't think this was the dominant factor in the last election. I also don't think attempts at "no ID" / no protection voting are the answer, and it seems to be very disingenuous when insecure voting laws get proposed as attempts at fixing these problems.
Florida, which now has some of the strictest controls on ballots really impressed me with their handling of the election and if everyone adopted their methods, I would have much fewer doubts and everyone would be better off. This conflicts with the idea of a "Union of States" - each responsible for their own, independent, voting system. So we'll see how this plays out with the attempts to federalize election rules.
So just a point of view from the other side who has been mistrusting elections since Jeb Bush won the presidency for George with "hanging chads". (Good job Florida for coming back from that and fixing the issues in their electoral system).
A new political scandal happened in The Netherlands. Before the elections, a documentary was shown by the national broadcaster about the leader of a political party called D66. This party is fairly progressive in the modern way (pro-EU, pro-migration, woke, very pro-euthanasia (not just for the terminally ill), focused on getting as many people as possible into a PMC lifestyle/career & backed primarily by young well educated people). The party considers itself centrist, which is quite defensible in the sense that their electorate has the most trust in government, so they are the most happy with the job that the government is currently doing. However, the establishment may of course not be centrist compared to society. The politician in question has been a secretary of state during the previous administration.
The national broadcaster is paid for by taxes, so they are under scrunity for (and regularly accused of) unfairly favoring certain political parties.
A politically incorrect news blog, GeenStijl (which means 'NoStyle'), requested all government documents related to this documentary, using the Dutch equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. The released documents suggests that the documentary makers were very eager to portray the politician in a favorable way. Note that the organization who made the documentary is led by someone who was campaign leader for the political party for 8 years.
The working title of the documentary was "Minister of Hope," which is not a very neutral title. The subject got the choice of the topic of the documentary and got to see a raw cut to make suggestions. Most debate between the makers and the politician's people seems to have centered around her not wearing a seat belt in the back seat during an important scene, that the makers didn't want to cut. The politician's helpers seemed very worried that this would turn into a scandal, as she was technically breaking the law. The makers of the documentary actually reached out to a CGI company to see if they could fake a seat belt, although later on, they denied every intending to actually go through with it, which doesn't seem very believable to me.
Some other requests were to remove a scene where she drank champagne during a trip to Niger (which is a very poor country), a petty comment about not being mentioned in a speech and complaints about members of parliament, which the politician's people argue is politicially incorrect behavior (as the executive is not democratically elected, but parliament is). The documentary makers seem to have accepted most of these request, even those that seemed purely aimed at protecting her image, by not showing some of her behavior.
The documentary seems to have been broadcast as close to the elections as was allowed, by the rules. The makers of the documentary told the politician that they were willing to discuss the timing of the broadcast. There's no explicit evidence that the polician desired this, although the emails suggest that the documentary makers were acceding to a request by the politician to broadcast the documentary as close to the elections as possible.
Interestingly, the documentary makers even suggested that the politician should lie about not having seen the documentary in advance, so she could distance herself from it.
The Liberal Party of Australia (economically right-wing, in a coalition with the rural/conservative Nationals) lost federal power in 2007 due to running ads for one of their flagship policies with taxpayer money. Now that they're back in, they've spent quite a bit of time gutting the ABC, the government broadcaster, because of its historic tendency toward the left (for reasons that are kind of obvious, left-wing journalists prefer to work for the government and right-wing ones for corporations). There's a general suspicion that the Liberals might be getting away with crap due to the muzzling of their most hostile news organisation.
They didn't say "leftist", and they probably shouldn't have said "left-wing". But in the big conflict between governments and corporations, which is one of the biggest issues that most contemporary liberal democracies face, the center-left tends to favor government power to regulate and the center-right tends to favor corporate anti-regulatory positions.
I'm talking about economic left/right (i.e. socialism vs. laissez-faire capitalism) here.
Socialists like the idea of the state running industries, and laissez-faire capitalists like the idea of industries being run for profit. The ABC is a state-run, taxpayer-funded media organisation, while the other media are commercial enterprises. As such, socialist journalists are ideologically attracted to the one media organisation run in a socialist manner over what they see as corporate stooges (while the reverse applies for right-wing journalists, who don't like socialism). This isn't a huge effect by itself, but the usual free-association dynamics of "X is full of Y-ists, therefore X acts in a Y-ist fashion, therefore Y-ists will be attracted to X" amplify it.
I don't follow European politics at all, let alone on the subject of euthanasia, beyond vaguely remembering that it is friendlier to the idea than e.g. the US -- so I can't comment on how contentious of an issue this is, or what the proposed policies look like. A possible motivation from a recipient's point of view can be adequately inferred from Scott's old post, https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/ -- to summarize very briefly, modern medicine will get you to old age, but death of old age is really not pretty. (Cf. also House Of God by Samuel Shem, or its review by Scott here https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/10/book-review-house-of-god/.) Obviously opinions will vary on what needs to be done about this.
The Dutch Association for a Voluntary End of Life, which has 167,000 members is actually in favor of something like that. They are in favor of people being able to get a suicide pill without any external checks or even an actual death wish, just to have it for when they feel the need.
There is a pretty strong support among the well-educated and well-off for people to be able to choose death when they have 'completed life' (which is the term that is commonly used). Note that research shows that a death wish is fairly strongly correlated with the poor and less educated, which results in the weird situation that the party most in favor, has a constituency that is relatively less likely to use it. This also calls to question the extent to which this death wish is due to being content with the life one has lived, rather than a desire to escape poor financial or other potentially transitory circumstances. In the latter case, one can question whether euthanasia is the proper solution, rather than improving the circumstances.
However, there is also a push for euthanasia for the mentally ill, which is much more contentious even among the well-educated establishment folks. There recently was an article in my paper about a young woman who appeared bipolar, rapidly switching between being very down and suicidal, to having fun and planning vacation trips, who killed herself with drugs supplied by volunteers for the Dutch Association for a Voluntary End of Life. This is currently being investigated for illegal assistance with suicide.
Interestingly, the Dutch Association for a Voluntary End of Life advises people to kill themselves with a certain compound that can just be ordered (although companies now seem to only want to supply large amounts to discourage suicide buyers), which they advertise as being fast and painless, but this woman seems to have died a slow and very painful death.
The proponents also try to pressure or even force doctors into helping with euthanasia (which is not prosecuted if done within certain rules, although no one who broke the rules was actually punished), which results in opposition by doctors who want to heal and not kill.
Anyway, party in question, D66, wants a law where people older than 75 can get euthanasia without being terminally ill, if they have a persistent death wish. However, in 2017 the person who then led the party said that they want to reduce the age limit when society is ready for it.
I realize that you're pretty clearly on the "anti" side of this argument, but I figure I'll ask this follow up. Most of what I read about suicide lays out the contagion effect pretty strongly. Anything that could make suicide easier or more popular seems like it will result in more suicide. Is there any pushback to these policies along the lines of "you're going to make more people kill themselves than might ?otherwise"
I'm not opposed to euthanasia for terminal patients who choose it willingly and persistently, but I'm against he slippery slope where before you know it, people are secretly getting drugs in their food and are getting forcibly held down because they resist the euthanasia (which actually happened). Or where young women with mental issues, given up or not adequately helped by a mental healthcare system that seems to not be very competent at all, are killed or assisted with their suicide. Especially with an elite that seems to, with the very best of intentions, push these women into a life that is ideologically optimal, but not so great for what the needs are of the average woman.
I'm also opposed to how the ratchet works (less by careful decision making and evaluating all the consequences of previous steps, but more by propaganda and other Foucaultian methods).
A key aspect of the propaganda is how certain important facts are not discussed or not given anywhere the attention that they merit, which in this case, includes the contagion effect. In so far that there's debate in the media, it seems to be focused on fickle people or social pressure, rather than behavioral contagion.
I’m a bit confused about the Deiseach ban / jstr warning. The comment with the “user was banned for this” note seems relatively tame compared to its sibling-comment thread, which does have a heated exchange between the two, and the “user was banned for this” comment doesn’t actually have any replies to it.
Was there another, even more heated exchange in the thread of the noted comment, which was deleted in the course of the ban? Or is the sibling-thread the focus of the ban? Or is there actually something really bad in the noted comment that I’m just too tired to notice?
Sorry, I didn't know that it told users which comment someone was banned for. I just remembered I needed to ban Deiseach and chose a semi-random comment of hers to click on to do it.
Not only does it say "user was banned for this," but, worse, when the ban expires, the comment is deleted. For example, the first ban you made is now an empty comment:
I spent a few days trying out a lot of different kinds of prompts, and although it's hard to compare directly to Dall-E without being able to try it, the results seem markedly worse than what OpenAI has shown- although still pretty incredible in their own right. One thing I can directly compare the results to are CLIP-based notebooks like the ones at https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ldc6oc/p_list_of_sitesprogramsprojects_that_use_openais/. CLIP is a model that OpenAI did release which just takes a text prompt and an image, and outputs a score for how closely the two match. A lot of clever people found out that you can use that to steer the generation of images when you combine it with an image encoder like VQ-VAE (which is the same one CogView uses) or the Dall-E image encoder (which OpenAI released instead of the transformer model). These image encoders are like really advanced image compression algorithms that store image data as coordinates in a latent space- and for whatever reason, it's a lot easier to train a transformer to make images in the compressed format rather than just a matrix of pixels.
Anyway, the results from CogView tend to be far more coherent and realistic than those from the CLIP models- though at the same time, oddly limited and dull. For example, if you give CogView a very simple prompt like "A businessman in an office", it can produce nearly photorealistic results, but if you try something slightly more complicated like "A photo of a cheetah in a cathedral", it's usually only able to produce images of a cheetah or a cathedral, and struggles to combine them. In contrast, the best CLIP-based notebooks can't approach coherent realism with any prompt, but seem able to understand and include elements from anything you can describe. So "A photo of a cheetah in a cathedral" produces images with clear elements of both cheetahs and cathedrals- and even really complex prompts like "A rendering of a golden steampunk robot that resembles a cheetah stalking through the ruins of a vast post-singularity city" will produce interesting results with recognizable elements. See the image at https://imgur.com/a/ESSM4OP for a comparison of CogView results at the top and results from a customized CLIP+VQ-VAE notebook at the bottom for the prompt "A photo of a cheetah in a cathedral".
Part of the difference may be due to the English-Chinese translation creating confusing prompts, though after a lot of experimentation with different translation services and phrasing, I don't think that's significant. It seems like CogView was trained on a far more limited set of images than CLIP- mostly stock photos (often with watermarks!) and historical photo archives, wheres CLIP definitely included things like drawings from DeviantArt, video game screenshots, and even pornography. I have to wonder if CogView's difficulty in generalizing is related in part to China's restrictions on free speech- it seems like the country's internet restrictions may have seriously limited how varied the model's training data could be.
(Also, here are some results from CLIP+VQ-VAE for "A rendering of a golden steampunk robot that resembles a cheetah stalking through the ruins of a vast post-singularity city": https://imgur.com/a/UEFDnOc )
I also played a bit with it, together with a native Chinese speaker. It's definitely not the translation. The system is apparently just bad at extrapolating.
Concerning the restriction on free speech: in the publicly available model, politically problematic captions are rejected. For example, we tried "unhappy Chinese people", which was rejected.
In priciple, filtering is understandable. You get bad news headlines if your AI generates Nazi symbols, or IS-like images of beheadings. But it's a reminder on what is considered a problematic caption in China.
The combination of extremely good results for a few specific prompts + terrible performance in novel prompts screams overfitting to me. I'd guess the network is severely overfit and just memorised the training set.
The colab.research.google.com page doesn't work for me. I tried pressing Ctrl+Enter in the "Image generation configuration" cell. First, it complained that the deep_translator package was missing, which I fixed by creating a code cell and executing !pip install deep_translator . Now it throws
/bin/bash: CogView/input.txt: No such file or directory
/bin/bash: CogView/scripts/input.txt: No such file or directory
Then trying to run the "Apply changes to text2image script and generate" cell also errors out.
Were you able to run the previous cells in order without errors first? The deep_translator package and Cogview should be installed in the "Install CogView & dependencies" cell. If that's not working, you might also try Runtime -> Factory Reset Runtime, then Runtime -> Run All.
I didn't realize I had to run the cells in order; I just run the one you linked to. After running them in order, it works.
This is what I got when asking for a "tiger with blue and green stripes": https://imgur.com/a/XkVvUh4 Not even a hint of blue or green, and not much of a tiger either unless you have very good imagination.
I’be been having lots of substack thoughts recently (haven’t we all) and I’ve heard a lot about syndicated fiction on the platform. Are there any good examples of this to start with?
I've written a blog post about freedom of speech, and I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts about it.
My main propositions are:
1. Social media censored pandemic stories that shouldn't have been censored - but some medical misinformation should be censored, and what/whether to censor should be decided by an accountable, democratic institution rather than a private media company
2. "Cancel culture" is not about free speech and does not threaten free speech
3. The primary threats to freedom of speech in the world are from authoritarian regimes and conservative groups
It would help if your examples of what your political opponents think didn't consist entirely of strawmen.
What relevance does a couple of young idiots arguing over whether rap counts as music have to the rest of the world? You can find loud young idiots disparaging each others choices in music everywhere, and it has no importance whatsoever. Reducing complicated and serious debates into depicting that anyone beyond the lizardman quotient of crazies thinks "black people shouldn't be allowed to protest" or "women are all bad at computers and math" is dehumanizing and insulting in and of itself. Nobody objects to "teaching about racism", the objection is that what is being taught and specifically being prohibited is in itself racist (and dehumanizing and insulting to religion, country, and culture). Using these uncharitable descriptions is dangerous misinformation (and if done deliberately, a lie).
"You don’t see lefties showing up at J.K. Rowling’s book signings to throw rocks at her fans." We see violence any time anyone vaguely right wing, heck, anyone who disagrees with progressive orthodoxy tries to speak on a college campus, often with the support of campus administrators. We see left-wing protests escalate into violence all the time.
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" is overly simplistic, but there is a point to it. Restrictions (both legal and social) on speech will always be used to protect those in power. In this case, that works by protecting the historically marginalized groups that overwhelmingly vote for the establishment in return for political favors. Those rules will be turned against members of marginalized groups as soon as they are no longer useful to the establishment; just look at the slurs used against members of marginalized groups that don't support the establishment.
None of the social rules and very few of the legal rules you describe as limiting speech protect those without a connection to power, and thus will it always be. If you believe the hollow promises of those in power that those rules will never be turned around against you, you are a fool. Only a robust and continuing determination for making speech as free as possible for everyone can work in the long term.
"It would help if your examples of what your political opponents think didn't consist entirely of strawmen."
I think you've overstated this criticism, but point taken. I think there are certainly people debating each of the topics I said they were debating, although perhaps my glosses of the opposing positions were uncharitable.
"We see violence any time anyone vaguely right wing, heck, anyone who disagrees with progressive orthodoxy tries to speak on a college campus, often with the support of campus administrators."
I've seen videos of conservative speakers, e.g. Ben Shapiro, speak on college campuses without violence.
"Restrictions (both legal and social) on speech will always be used to protect those in power. In this case, that works by protecting the historically marginalized groups that overwhelmingly vote for the establishment in return for political favors."
To use the example of Rowling, she was criticized for speech against trans people. Are you suggesting that trans people are "those in power" - that they're enough of a voting bloc that Rowling was socially criticized to - what - get trans people to vote for progressive political parties? That just doesn't seem to line up with the facts.
"If you believe the hollow promises of those in power that those rules will never be turned around against you, you are a fool."
You used to call a trans person a "transsexual". Now you are supposed to use the word "transgender" instead. This is not a law in my country of residence, but I follow it as a social rule anyway. I wonder how this social rule of substituting a less-preferred, older term for a more-preferred newer term is going to be turned around against me? What am I missing here?
What you said: "Republicans in 22 US states are pushing bans on teaching about racism". What the article says: "prompting lawmakers in 22 states to propose limits on how schools can talk about racial issues". Your phrasing of the issue is clear misinformation, even when compared to the article from a progressive-leaning source that you cited as evidence. And that's not addressing the elephant in the room, that what's being talked about is clearly dehumanizing and insulting to religion, country, and culture, but it's somehow acceptable... and it's not private speech, but speech compelled by the government.
"I've seen videos of conservative speakers, e.g. Ben Shapiro, speak on college campuses without violence." And I can find videos of pride parades without violence, except perhaps by the marchers. Your article cites someone throwing rocks at some event in Georgia as if it's some major story, despite the fact that it doesn't seem to show up in a Google search. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it's far easier for me to cite and find videos of the left using violence openly to suppress contrary opinion, such as the recent Wi Spa incident in California or the 2017 incident at Middlebury College.
I don't see why you keep citing Rowling. Yes, a female leftist self-made billionaire who had a massive following before the cancellation was able to survive being somewhat cancelled. And, yes, the LGBT lobby has power, because at the top it overlaps with the establishment and its members are useful political shock troops. Look at how all the major corporations dutifully put up the rainbow flag for pride month (except of course for their Middle Eastern subsidiaries). They wouldn't do that without a reason. And as for it turning back on you when you're no longer useful, we can already see that in action. If it came down to a choice, which do you think the establishment prefers, the ~20 million Americans that identify as LGBT, or the ~1 billion Chinese? You can see how they make that choice already.
And trans women don't enjoy being told they aren't women. The point is that Rowling's cancellation is at most a proportional response to her behavior, but probably not even that - Rowling's bullying has probably done more harm to trans people than her cancellation has done to her.
In a society that values freedom of expression, merely stating an opinion should not be grounds for cancellation. This is true even when the opinion is unpopular or the dreaded "offensive".
In the Faurisson affair, Noah Chomsky famously defended the free speech of a holocaust denier, whose views he disagreed with. This was noble.
To defend free speech is to defend the speech of those you disagree with. If you defend only the free speech of those you agree with, you do not value free speech.
Free speech means you will hear opinions you don't like, ones that make you mad. If you don't like it, tough. That's how it must work.
"Your article cites someone throwing rocks at some event in Georgia as if it's some major story, despite the fact that it doesn't seem to show up in a Google search."
Events in this Georgia are hard to google because you get overwhelmed with results from the other Georgia. I usually use "Tbilisi" as a keyword or sometimes search with the "site:.ge" parameter to get only results on Georgian internet domains.
To underscore my point, as a follow-up, the LGBTQ+ Pride event had to be canceled after a right-wing mob attacked 53 journalists - one of whom has died - and the offices of two NGOs. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57797467
"it's far easier for me to cite and find videos of the left using violence openly to suppress contrary opinion"
I would guess this is due to the sources you are paying attention to. Most sources agree that, even confined to the US, right-wing violence is much more common and severe than left-wing violence.
I need a high-profile example of someone who was "cancelled" for speech. Who else would you go for? Roseanne Barr? Michael Richards? So then your argument would be that Black Americans are the ones "in power"? Mel Gibson? So your argument would be that Jewish people are the ones "in power"? It seems like the intuitive explanation here - that people are "cancelled" for "punching down" - that is, attacking groups that aren't in power - requires fewer mental gymnastics to justify.
The data in that Post article do not justify the phrase "much more common and severe," e.g.:
"In August, a supporter of President Donald Trump was shot dead in Portland, Ore., by a suspected gunman who was a self-described antifa supporter. That killing was the only death last year attributed to far-left violence, the data shows. There were two deaths attributed to far-right attacks."
Ooookay, so we had one (1) death "attributed" (by whom? on what grounds?) to far-left violence, and two (2) "attributed" (by whom? on what grounds?) to far-right. Those are tiny little numbers, and while 2 is twice as big as 1, I'm pretty confident that difference is meaningless in numbers as tiny as these. Either way, you're about 10 times more likely to be killed by a bee sting as by "far-right" or "far-left" domestic terrorists, so based on the numbers alone a reasonable person would need some pretty strong additional arguments why either should be an issue of genuine concern, or give any useful insight into the broad ideological currents encompassing tens to hundreds of millions of Americans.
Furthermore:
"The Post focused its analysis primarily on far-right attacks since 2015 because they account for a clear majority of the rising domestic terrorism events and fatalities charted by the CSIS."
That is, the article *assumes* the very conclusion (that "far-right" attacks far outweigh "far-left") for which you are hoping to use it as a source. That is, this is an opinion and analysis piece, and does not function (or even intend to function) as an investigation for determining the fact at issue in your dispute.
I guess I did find the story about the attack in Tiblisi, I just assumed it wasn't what you were talking about because stories about the country of Georgia are not particularly relevant to free speech in the US. Someone in the US being attacked for being LGBT and the attackers not being vigorously prosecuted would be news, which is why it was surprising I hadn't heard of it. For that matter, it's easy to find the FBI going into full investigation mode for both obvious hoaxes and cases where the 'victim' is clearly mistaken. On the other hand, left wing attackers in the US not being prosecuted despite being caught red handed in assaults seems to be an everyday occurrence.
That also ties into why statistics about political terrorism in the US need to be taken with a grain of salt. As evidence, Members of Congress are fighting to get the attempted assassination of the Republican Congressional leadership designated as political terrorism and not suicide by cop by the FBI (and that wasn't just some nebulous assault planned with the help of an FBI informant busted in the planning stage, a Congressman was critically injured). If a political terrorist attack of that nature can be brushed aside, how bad is it when it comes to categorizing all the other violence we've seen over the past year?
Prof. Christakis was cancelled for objecting to oversensitivity to Halloween costumes, so presumably wearing a costume that might be offensive is "punching down". Is wearing blackface punching down? It's also hard to get further up than, say, the Governor of Virginia or the Prime Minister of Canada, so, presumably, their wearing blackface (or possibly Klan robes, in the case of VA's governor) should definitely be "punching down", and yet they are immune to cancellation. Making fun of Barack Obama is somehow "punching down", despite the obvious power he wields, but using racial slurs against Clarence Thomas or Tim Scott is not "punching down", because they're not progressive. And don't get me started for evidence of the same double standard with regards to sexual harassment and assault, because I could be here all day listing members of the establishment that got away with a lot more than just making a joke about 'dongles'.
If people are cancelled for "punching down", why is it only when the people being "punched down on" are those that support the establishment, and why are members of the establishment not cancelled for "punching down"? That's the real evidence that your "punching down" theory is incorrect, because we can find a lot of what should be obvious "punching down" that doesn't result in cancellation. After all, who determines who's down of who if not the establishment?
1. Your advocacy for government-regulated censorship is just a normative claim. There is no evidence that censorship was useful and effective at quashing harmful conspiracy; there is no evidence that government censorship would be better (more free, more effective, more accurate) than private. It doesn’t feel like you have thought about the arguments of any opponents.
2. Using ‘debate.org’ as evidence that whites are endemically racist skates closely to Poe’s Law.
3. Your arguments that most cancellations were basically justified is backed up by no evidence stronger than “I think.”
4. I quote you: “ My response to that is: you can’t just claim that anything you don’t like is “insulting” or “harmful” and then veto all speech about it. You have to actually establish the truth of the claim.” But you don’t follow your own rule earlier on in your own post. Indeed, you’re undermining your own argument in a way that makes it seem, again, that you haven’t thought about what your opponents’ positions or arguments are and you’ve learned most of your talking points from people you agree with who also don’t know what their opponents’ arguments are.
1. Yes, I suppose this is a normative claim. Just as a general principle, if a rule needs to be made in the public interest, it should be the public that makes the rule (through an elected body) rather than a private institution. The reason being that a) the public then gets to debate the rule, b) the public gets to know what the rule is, in advance of it being applied, c) when the rule is violated there's a built-in process with recognized legitimacy (e.g. courts) for arbitrating disputes and assigning penalties, if any, d) the rule at least has a chance of being made in the public interest rather than simply maximizing shareholder value.
Maybe I'm not aware, but are there any arguments that facebook is better at policing speech on its platform than the US government? From what I remember watching TV in the US, the FCC was reasonably good at providing a predictable set of rules for broadcast television that met the above criteria. I mean we all knew which words you couldn't say on television, right? Compare that to facebook, where people - or even whole groups - can get banned by AI for violating rules no one knows or understands.
I realize this puts me on the same side of the issue as Donald Trump, but given that so much public discourse happens on facebook and twitter, they have de facto control over what people see and hear and banning someone (or some piece of content, like the "plandemic" video) really does diminish their audience and reach to the point where, I believe, the process for deciding who or what gets banned does indeed merit at least some kind of public scrutiny. And yes, that goes for both sides of the political aisle.
2. The citation of debate.org was just to head off accusations that I was creating a straw man. That didn't work (see the above comment) but anyway... the claim isn't that whites are "endemically" racist but rather that white supremacist ideology is mainstream and embedded in US culture. The idea that White music is music but Black music is debatable is both a white supremacist idea and a mainstream idea in the US. Therefore (at least one piece of) white supremacist ideology is mainstream.
3. My argument is that cancellations are enforcement of pre-existing social norms against dehumanizing speech, bullying, breaking social taboos, etc., only applied using a progressive understanding of what it means to dehumanize, bully, etc. someone. So for example calling a trans woman "sir" is considered dehumanizing by the left. Cancellation is therefore the outcome of a contest between progressive social norms and conservative social norms, rather than an attack on the concept of free speech. Does this make them "justified"? I don't know - are we ever justified imposing a social penalty against someone who says something offensive? Is Scott justified in banning Deiseach for a day for suggesting her political opponent should commit suicide? If so, then the only question is where we draw the lines between offensive and acceptable speech for any given social context.
4. Yes, you're right, I'm begging the question here. It just seemed so obvious that claiming that rap music isn't music is insulting to Black culture that it didn't occur to me for even a moment that I might need to defend that position. This is why I've opened myself up to the type of critical feedback I assumed I'd get here.
I suppose I'd say, rap music is an important part of Black culture in the US, which many Black people identify with and which many people identify with Black culture, such that an insult to rap music is an insult to Black culture. Claiming that rap music isn't music is insulting because it entails the claim that rap music is deficient in one or more elements of what makes music music, and falsely claiming that something is deficient is an insult. Rap music is music because it does contain all of the elements of music. I have to admit I'm constructing this argument to support my intuition that calling something "not music" is an insult, though. The truth is, if I were listening to a piece of music that was really important to me - like the song "Black" by Pearl Jam - and someone said "hey, can you put on some real music" or "that's not music, that's just some guy whining" I would be deeply insulted - but of course, that would never happen, because see point 2 - White genres of music just aren't subject to this type of criticism.
1. You’re missing the drift. The claim that Facebook is a bad censor does not imply that a better censor is necessary or desirable.
2. It’s a straw man because there is zero evidence that you can generalize a poll of argumentative weirdos on a random website plucked from the electric aether to attitudes in U.S. or broadly Western society. ‘Rap music is not music’ is not an opinion seriously held by the mainstream U.S., and saying that it is shows willful blindness to the enormous, overwhelming, lasting popularity of rap and rap crossovers. Black-originated genres, not just rap but including rap, are visibly acclaimed by nearly everyone. Arguments that begin with bizarrrely denying this fact are nonstarters.
3. The naïve conclusion that ‘because some social norms are defensible, cancel culture is simply an argument of degree’ doesn’t hold water among people that believe in free speech as a value. The critical difference is between censoring people and society as a whole versus moderating a single venue that you operate privately. That is not a difference of degree, it is a difference in kind.
4. Notwithstanding that the claim that “‘rap music is not music’ is a widespread majority belief” is obviously wrong, your beliefs about its uniqueness are also wrong. Further claims of this kind about traditionally ‘white’ genres: “metal is not music.” “Noise rock is not music.” “Found sound is not music.” I also presume that you have never been to a party, of any kind, because I have definitely been told that, e.g., Neutral Milk Hotel is not “real music.” Arguments that various things that are not palatable to someone’s subjective taste are “not real music” are as common as dirt. But regardless, this is not topical: the proposition you need to defend is not whether the insult you’ve chosen is really insulting, but whether you have any justifiable grounds to decide for society as a whole whether insults should be censored. Given that you have shown quite effectively that you don’t have a solid grasp on what free-speech-as-value is, or even what is palatable to society and what is not (i.e. your idiosyncratic belief based on specious evidence that rap is somehow, even, controversial), I am greatly disinclined to trust your ideas about appropriate methods or ethics by which to moderate society.
Seems like there are a lot of assertions that are not backed by evidence, and that your understanding of the topic is limited. Frankly I think your piece is strong support for the position that the Left is the biggest threat to free speech in the U.S.
"to lie about a vaccine in a way that tarnishes the vaccine’s reputation and potentially harms millions of people is perfectly legal?"
No, it's not. 'Product disparagement -- also called commercial disparagement, product defamation, trade libel or slander of goods -- is a false statement about a product that hurts its maker. Victims of product disparagement can sue the perpetrators under both state product disparagement laws and the federal Lanham Act, the law that protects trademarks.'
"We’ve already decided that there is no compelling public interest in allowing people to tell harmful lies."
I think that is an overgeneralization and misrepresentation of reality. If your lies cause economic harm to another person then they may constitute a tort and you may have to compensate that person for their injury.
"The only difference is that the problem of medical misinformation is so new that the law hasn’t caught up with it yet."
Come on, medical misinformation is super old. The law easily covers it.
"I think we can agree that social media companies have no business banning speech on the basis that it “may” inflame racism. "
Why do you think that? This is a very important point.
"Governments need to step in and make laws about harmful medical misinformation – after a period of public debate and deliberation, of course – and issue guidelines for media companies to comply with them."
What the heck would these laws say? How would this improve the situation? As an abstraction I agree it would be (a little) better for Congress to make these decisions than Twitter, at least Congress has more ideological balance, but this is impractical. A more practical solution would be to say that these companies can't sensor speech at all because of the harm done to our democracy when unelected radical leftists employed at Twitter ban legitimate news that is bad for their preferred political party , as has already occurred (e.g. Hunter laptop) and will surely occur more and more.
"I would point to the debate over whether rap music is real music as evidence in favor of the claim that systemic racism and white supremacist ideology are still mainstream and deeply embedded in US culture."
**That sound is the death of all credibility**
"Let’s put aside the question of whether the musicality of rap is a legitimate debate topic and just agree that it’s insulting to Black culture to claim that rap isn’t real music."
Let's not, bro
Then you list some straw-men positions that are 'obviously wrong and bad and shouldn't be subject to debate' "Should Black people be allowed to protest? Should trans people be allowed into bathrooms?" mixed for some reason with "Should gay couples be allowed to adopt children? Are women naturally bad at math and computer stuff?"
Then you contrast that with things that are 'truly debatable' like "whether trans women should compete with cis women ... whether the racial achievement gap in academics in the US is a result of genes... whether trans kids should have access to irreversible medical procedures"
To any thinking person it should be clear that there is no principled difference between the first set and the second set of questions. These are just your personal preferences.
"none of these debates are actually stifled by cancel culture. You can find a diversity of opinions on these topics in the general public, and among scholars, and in the populations directly affected by the outcome of the debates."
Not true. Come on man, genetic racial differences??
"what people are actually getting canceled for reveals that in most cases the cancelee was violating one or more of the pre-established social norms about speech – they were insulting or dehumanizing someone’s culture or race or gender, or they were using a slur, or they were bullying a person or group, or they were violating some well-known and reasonable social taboo"
Evidence free? A guy lost his job for saying violent protest is counter-productive! Another person lost their job for saying college students should be able to make their own choices about Halloween costumes! The list goes on and on. Not to mention one guy's "well-known and reasonable social taboo" is another person's "radical leftist agitprop"
"You’re supposed to avoid saying hurtful things... you deserve a time-out"
So now everything I don't like is hurtful, so you can lose your job if you say it. And then some rando on the Internet can say you were insulting races and you deserved a time-out. What a brave new world we live in.
"laws or bills in 25 states by conservatives attempting to ban teachers from teaching about racism"
These law or bills are attempts to ban teachers from TEACHING students to BE racist.
"you can’t just claim that anything you don’t like is “insulting” or “harmful” and then veto all speech about it. You have to actually establish the truth of the claim. Like I said above, vague or theoretical harms (like “lab leak theory causes racism”) aren’t enough to censor lab leak speech – but kids dying of measles should be enough to censor anti-vax misinformation"
So the fact that a few kids died of measles is sufficient to establish as "fact" that all anti-vax claims are false?
"you need to prove it – and not just to yourself, or your church, or a mob, but to a legitimate, democratic institution entrusted with making determinations of truth, like a court of law or a legislative body. And the burden of proof should be high."
There is going to be a Court of Truth that decides what is true and what is not, and you will only be able to cancel people if they argue things that are "not true"? How could this go wrong??
"Liberal free speech just has an exploit built in, which is that it needs to have exceptions to prevent harmful speech, but these exceptions can always be taken advantage of by bad faith actors who want to censor opposing views by calling them harmful."
This is the Left's whole game. They would never give this up.
"You don’t see lefties showing up at J.K. Rowling’s book signings to throw rocks at her fans."
Thank God! But you do see violent leftists all over the country burning down family businesses, assaulting and murdering people, etc.
"I personally support freedom of speech – which should be obvious from this blog as a whole"
"Evidence free? A guy lost his job for saying violent protest is counter-productive! Another person lost their job for saying college students should be able to make their own choices about Halloween costumes! The list goes on and on. Not to mention one guy's "well-known and reasonable social taboo" is another person's "radical leftist agitprop""
Who are these people? I keep hearing about conservatives losing their job for just being Republicans, or for innocuous statements, but the only actual cases I can find turn out to be much more reasonable cases of people being fired for repeated hate speech. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place, but I'd like to see actual cases before condemning the left of being totalitarian bad faith actors.
I feel like every example is just like the links I posted. I'm legitimately surprised that you think most such cases are for repeated hate speech. Can you post some links of what you are talking about?
Christakis quit after students protested her email. Having read the email, I found that she was in the wrong and students had legitimate grievance against it.
While the students demanded her firing, it didn't happen. She voluntarily chose to quit because she didn't want to keep teaching in a school where she had angered so many of her students.
While I agree that Shor shouldn't have been fired, his tweet was also very tone-deaf and counter to the company's desired approach on the topic. He doesn't seem to have suffered from the firing, and appears to have immediately found new work in the same field.
I'll retract the "repeated" part of my statement, as that was based on my memories of how often it happened and in investigating further most cases I found were fired after a single racist incident rather than repeated. But a few cases (the first ones I found, not selected for any specific reason):
Justine Sacco was fired after making a racist tweet about AIDS and Africa
In the first two cases, people tried to defend it as a joke. In the latter two, people made justifications about being under stress or fear. In none of the cases were the actions acceptable, and they all turned out to be totally justified. Whenever someone mentions "Someone was fired over a joke" or "Someone was fired for some harmless venting", this is the sort of thing that comes to mind.
For every case of someone being genuinely fired over a misunderstanding (and the only one that clearly fits that description I've found is Emmanuel Cafferty from your first link. I am 100% in agreement that he is a victim) there are many more of genuinely racist behavior being pointed out where the people involved deserve all of the scorn they got. The ratio of innocent victims of misunderstanding being fired to racist assholes being fired seems very strongly slanted towards the latter, and I find it hard to take issue with the climate of "Say racist shit, get fired" given that it has an overall good track record.
I interpret your comment as a concession that you do not believe in free speech at all, and in fact you believe in severely punishing anyone who says something that you do not agree with.
It's remarkable how far you have watered down the adjective "racist." At one time it meant lynching, or discriminating in hiring, or in handing out mortgages. It would appear for you the word can now mean "is insufficiently respectful to racial minorities in speech" and that this is more than enough to justify a savage social retribution.
The similarity to Orwell's concept of crimethink is deeply troubling.
Additionally, I'm going to voice my opposition to several of your points. I'm not interested in debating these, as I am not remotely confident it can be done in a constructive manner and I don't expect to change your mind on them. Feel free to ignore everything below this line, I split this post into a separate reply so as to not mix it with the concrete request for evidence I posted in the other reply.
A) Lawsuits are a poor solution to issues of misinformation. A lawsuit takes immense amounts of time and money to prosecute, by which time a thousand more misinformation posts have been made
B) The Hunter Laptop story is such obvious bullshit that you listing it as a case of a legitimate news story that was censored is ludicrous. Absolutely nothing about that story was remotely credible
C) Genetic racial differences is not a valid debate that is being censored. While genetic differences between groups exist, genetic groups and social "races" are almost entirely different. Any genetic difference between social races beyond the basic skin color genes that those racial groups are based on would require a level of evidence far beyond what actually exists
D) Teachers aren't teaching students to be racist. CRT is not being taught in any sub-college classroom, and every single anti-CRT bill that I have read (in fairness, I haven't read all of them but the random ones I did read are very similar) is clearly intended to result in preventing teachers from teaching actual history
E) Approximately all anti-vax claims are false. This is not because a few kids died of measles, but because of extensive research done into anti-vax claims showing them all to be false
F) You do not see violent leftists all over the country burning down family businesses, assaulting and murdering people etc. There certainly exist murderers who are leftist, but leftism doesn't cause murder.
A) Sure, I guess. I also think a bad way to deal with misinformation is a government tribunal that censors all speech that's not PC
B) Really? Didn't it get admitted in the end? Didn't the FBI say they had an active investigation on it?
C) Not even going to get into it, but you have to admit this is not debated in public.
D) Right- and they shouldn't. If CRT is not taught in K-12 then a CRT ban there should be totally fine. I'll admit to not reading the bills but I'm super wary of Leftist government employees teaching my kindergartner about racism. That can only end badly. Have you read instances of what people are actually teaching right now? Try looking into FAIR, they have some examples. In my mind they are egregious leftist agitprop and neo-racism.
E) So then why did you bring up Measles and dead children if it was irrelevant? I agree with you about anti-vaxxers but come on. Maybe a better reaction would be linking to rebuttals automatically instead of just banning speech that a government tribunal decided was "not true" or "true but offensive"?
F) Were you living in a cave last year? I didn't argue that leftism "causes murder" but clearly the arson was caused by leftist agitprop and the assaults and murders were sort of tangential to that.
Yeah, I agree with the general feedback that this is pretty simplistic. Rather than piling on I'll put it this way: You appear to not imagine that power will be used in ways you don't approve of. You also don't appear to really understand your opponents' arguments. (Not just on the right, by the way.)
For example, you bring up the idea of corporations firing Nazis. Imagine instead a corporation firing everyone who supported the Democrats. Democrats are not Nazis but a corporation might easily be interested in doing that. They both fall under the category of 'firing someone for their politics'. Where do you draw the line? If it's genocidal totalitarian regimes do we include people who defend Communist genocides? That would mean firing university professors, journalists, and liberal politicians working right now. Would you be comfortable with that?
A lot of these arguments remind me of CiC Harris's quote: "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. [...] They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. [...] We cannot send a thousand bombers a time over Germany every time, as yet. But the time will come when we can do so."
You seem to advocate for speech restriction and cancel culture under the rather childish delusion that your side is going to censor and cancel everyone else and nobody is going to censor or cancel your side. This is simply not the case. It's not even the case right now and I suspect it will increasingly not be the case.
There was no Britain/USSR/USA in 1939 either (with Britain mostly on the defensive). This is a metaphor and I want to make it extremely clear I'm not calling woke Nazis. But the idea is just because you are not being (metaphorically) bombed doesn't mean the other side doesn't have (metaphorical) bombers or the capability to produce them. We'll see if the right does. But they have an awful lot of hard power if they want to.
"You appear to not imagine that power will be used in ways you don't approve of."
I think I gave several examples of power being used in ways I don't approve of. I listed Belarus diverting an airplane to arrest a journalist, Azerbaijan kidnapping a journalist from Tbilisi, China's imprisonment of family members of dissidents, Russia poisoning dissidents, Russian interference in US elections, China's use of economic power to stifle criticisms of its human rights violations, conservative attempts to ban books, and the (successful, by the way) attempt by far-right groups in Georgia to prevent an LGBTQ+ pride march.
But you think I'm not concerned enough with - what - the potential for conservatives to try to "cancel" liberal authors? That's rich given that my example - progressives canceling Rowling for transphobia - is a person who Christians literally campaigned against when they accused Harry Potter of promoting Satanism and witchcraft. Like, come on, the other side canceled the same exact person years ago - the Harry Potter series is apparently the most-challenged series in the US of the last 20 years - and now you're asking me to "imagine" it? I don't have to imagine it, I remember it.
When conservatives do it they're "defending" their "values" but when progressives do it it's "cancel culture" and (as someone said above) the "biggest threat to free speech in the US". Can't have it both ways.
My position is not to unilaterally disarm. If conservatives get to defend their values by banning books from school libraries then progressives get to defend ours by choosing not to read books by authors who don't share our values. But please, none of this whinging over how progressives are a "threat" to free speech when China can cancel a Hollywood actor for calling Taiwan a country. It's clear who and what the real threats are to freedom of speech.
"Imagine instead a corporation firing everyone who supported the Democrats."
In order to function, a society needs to be able to make a distinction between a political party and a hate group. No amount of free speech can salvage a society which has lost that ability.
"If it's genocidal totalitarian regimes do we include people who defend Communist genocides? That would mean firing university professors, journalists, and liberal politicians working right now."
I suspect we would not agree on what counts as "defending Communist genocides", but also, a modern Nazi is in favor of genocide, believing that genocide is the correct and righteous goal of Nazism, whereas a modern Communist believes - perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not - that genocide was a result of a terrible misapplication of Communist ideology and could be avoided in a future scenario. We need to be able to distinguish between "someone who hates me and wants me to die" and "someone who wants to help me but might kill me by accident" because those two ideologies are, let's say, problems with different solutions.
"I think I gave several examples of power being used in ways I don't approve of."
You listed those only as misapplications of your generally pro-speech control principles. In short, you assumed that there would be a body sympathetic to your aims who could allow your side to censor their side without getting censored yourself. My point is that will not be the case.
"But you think I'm not concerned enough with - what - the potential for conservatives to try to "cancel" liberal authors?"
My argument has nothing to do with conservatives. The fact you immediately went there (when I explicitly mentioned there are leftists who disagree) shows you're viewing this in a partisan manner. What I think you're not concerned with is that neutral principles might be good for you too. Universal freedoms work because the other side gets a vote too. Everyone thinks their speech is right and their opponents is wrong. The enemy does too and they have what I've been calling bombers.
"Can't have it both ways. [...] none of this whinging over how progressives are a "threat" to free speech"
You're putting words into my mouth. I suspect because you have trouble conceiving of a critic who isn't generic conservative. I'm not a conservative, by the way. Again, you are coming across as a partisan here. I'm not going to respond to most of it because it's mostly rambling about things I never said. In some cases stuff no one has said at all. No one, anywhere in this thread, has argued you can't decline to read anything you don't want to read. I checked. It's just a strawman.
"In order to function, a society needs to be able to make a distinction between a political party and a hate group. No amount of free speech can salvage a society which has lost that ability."
Plenty of societies function without hate speech standards. The US is one of them.
That said, I agree that societies can differentiate between a political party and a hate group. Those boundaries will not be solely drawn to the right, though. In countries where such standards exist then the far left gets caught up too. I'm trying to figure out if you're comfortable with that or not. Whether there's some neutral principle here.
Overall: You came here looking for criticism. You could stand to be a tad less hostile.
"a modern Communist believes - perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not - that genocide was a result of a terrible misapplication of Communist ideology"
Yes, plenty of Communist supporters (against historical consensus) believe things like the Holodomor was an accident. This is against historical consensus and is a recognized form of genocide denial.
For the record, I don't think that sort of belief is widespread on the left. But it does exist.
"You listed those only as misapplications of your generally pro-speech control principles. In short, you assumed that there would be a body sympathetic to your aims who could allow your side to censor their side without getting censored yourself."
I'm just confused now. I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about here.
"My argument has nothing to do with conservatives. The fact you immediately went there (when I explicitly mentioned there are leftists who disagree) shows you're viewing this in a partisan manner."
You said: "You seem to advocate for speech restriction and cancel culture under the rather childish delusion that your side is going to censor and cancel everyone else and nobody is going to censor or cancel your side." Who would censor or cancel "my side" if not conservatives? Those are the two sides. You told me that I should worry about my side being censored, and then I pointed out that my side already was being censored, and quite aggressively, and quite consistently throughout history. If we can't refer to the sides by name this discussion is going to get even more confusing than it already is.
"No one, anywhere in this thread, has argued you can't decline to read anything you don't want to read. I checked. It's just a strawman."
The example of cancel culture I've been using is the cancellation of J.K. Rowling over her transphobia. This is the most visible, most public, most covered case of cancellation, and was behind a lot of the publicity for the infamous open letter bemoaning cancel culture. When someone expresses opposition to cancel culture, one of the things they are expressing opposition to is the cancellation of J.K. Rowling.
Rowling's "cancellation" amounted to people saying "Rowling is a transphobe, let's not read her books anymore" and others saying "yes, I agree" and others directly addressing Rowling to tell her that she was a transphobe and they were very disappointed in her because that had ruined their enjoyment of her books.
That's it. That's cancel culture.
If you object to cancel culture, what you're objecting to is, literally, people deciding not to read Rowling's books because she's a transphobe.
Why - what did you think "cancel culture" was referring to?
"Who would censor or cancel "my side" if not conservatives? Those are the two sides."
Yeah, this is what I mean by you're acting like a partisan. There are far more than two sides. To take an example: Biden is using his new January 6th powers against certain environmentalist groups. In a simple dual model, this doesn't make sense. They're certainly not Republicans. But a simple dualistic model doesn't actually work very well.
"The example of cancel culture I've been using is the cancellation of J.K. Rowling over her transphobia. This is the most visible, most public, most covered case of cancellation, and was behind a lot of the publicity for the infamous open letter bemoaning cancel culture."
Really? That's not my impression at all. Looking at Google searches (unscientific) it looks like cancel culture got a huge spike during the Rowlings controversy but was much older. Possibly it's just the first example you became highly aware of. Or maybe I became aware of it earlier than most, I can't say.
But no, that's not how most people would define cancel culture. Wikipedia's definition (which at least qualifies as "common") is: "Cancel culture or call-out culture is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles." The line you're taking is a rather minority position. And you had to make a huge leap to the idea that being opposed to cancel culture means I want to put a gun to your head and force you to read Harry Potter.
The oldest case I can personally think of, I think, is Mel Gibson getting cancelled for his anti-Semitic rant. Of course it wasn't called "cancellation" back then, and also I don't remember a lot of people rushing to his defense. There were almost certainly other cases long before that which were maybe just not publicized. One of my points in the original piece was that cancel culture isn't actually new - it's just that the list of offenses for which one might be cancelled has grown because we've added more protected groups.
> Who would censor or cancel "my side" if not conservatives? Those are the two sides.
I'm not sure what you mean here. I'm fairly firmly in the leftist camp, I'm not totally a class reductionist, but I think the class and less on identity would be a net benefit for the left. I'm pretty sure this means I disagree with you on most of your claims here. That doesn't mean I'd try to cancel you, I guess, but there are more than just two sides. If you gave people who think like me censorship powers, I think you'd be unhappy with the result.
Moving to JK Rowling, lets go through some of the backlash she's faced and see how well it lines you with your definition of her cancelling:
-She's received harassment, rape threats and death threats. This is way beyond people "expressing their disappointment with her." (This is one collection of sources, I can find countless more if requested: https://twitter.com/dataracer117/status/1272737061703790592?lang=en)
-Honors that had been given to her based on her previous philanthropic work have been rescinded following pressure. This implies either that her speech was so harmful that it somehow negated all her previous charitable work, or that there's something screwy going on. I think this exceeds your description of her "cancellation."
-Companies that represented her professionally have been pressured to denounce her and those that haven't have faced financial repercussions. I think this exceeds your description of her "cancellation."
-She has been objectively slandered in publications (look into The Day being forced to retract an article that claimed she was equivalent to Wagner on Race). I think this exceeds your description of her "cancellation."
-People who still read her books or express a fondness for her writing have received harassments. I think this exceeds your description of her "cancellation."
Look - you can claim that her words have been so harmful that she deserves everything that happened to her. That's at least an intellectually honest position, but justifying it by ignoring the severity of hatred she's received over the last year or so is disingenuous and undercuts your argument. You're trying to defend something that either you don't understand or you're deluded about.
"She's received harassment, rape threats and death threats."
Well, this is just free speech, so by the standards of everyone else on this thread, we have no grounds whatsoever to complain about it. It must be allowed otherwise in some theoretical future someone else will come along and restrict your speech.
"Honors that had been given to her based on her previous philanthropic work have been rescinded following pressure."
An "honor" is just the free speech of an institution, and "pressure" also presumably just refers to free speech. So again we have no grounds to say this is wrong, according to everyone else on this thread.
"Companies that represented her professionally have been pressured to denounce her and those that haven't have faced financial repercussions."
Again, "pressure" is just speech. According to US Supreme Court precedent (e.g. Citizens United), money is also speech, which means that you can't restrict people from removing their money from companies in order to make a statement.
"She has been objectively slandered in publications"
But slander is just speech, and everyone here says that all speech must be free no matter what. If you're going to say that slander doesn't count as free speech, then we have a problem - who decides what counts as slander? According to several commenters on this thread, it is so implausible to make an objective determination about such a question that to even suggest that a democratic institution might be able to determine truth is worthy of derision and mockery (see the "Court of Truth" comment elsewhere).
"People who still read her books or express a fondness for her writing have received harassments."
But harassment is just speech, right? Unless they were physically assaulted - in which case, I agree that's wrong, and is already punishable by law.
"the severity of hatred she's received over the last year or so"
Wait, so now Rowling is allowed to say whatever she wants because of Free Speech, but people who disagree aren't even allowed to have the *emotions* they think are appropriate? I think regulating hatred was literally a plot point in 1984.
It's interesting that so many people are Free Speech Absolutists when it comes to criticizing nameless trans people but become Orwellian anti-speech fascists when it comes to criticizing people who are rich and famous.
There's clearly a double standard at play here. And I can't help but notice that the supposedly "neutral" rule is being applied completely in service to power - Rowling is inconceivably wealthy and trans people have to struggle to be given access to public toilets while facing a steadily-increasing murder rate. The hatred Rowling has directed against trans people gets them killed. The hatred directed against Rowling made Rowling sad.
And note that Rowling's speech was never restricted! She's still absolutely free (well, as free as you can be in the UK, which is less liberal than the US with speech laws) to say whatever she wants about trans people, and she has in fact doubled down repeatedly, issuing statement after statement about how trans people are dangerous predators, and even recently releasing a novel about a cross-dressing serial killer.
The whole debate over cancel culture is speech, on all sides. If you think the cancelers are going too far with their speech - through harassment, slander, boycotts, or whatever - then you aren't a free speech absolutist at all. You just think that, for whatever reason, insulting an NGO for including trans men under the rubric of "people who menstruate" is in bounds, but saying "I'm not going to buy from a company that supports J.K.Rowling because she's an asshole" is out of bounds. If that's the case, then what, exactly, is the neutral and universal standard that you are using to make that judgment that can never be abused or misapplied?
>>"You listed those only as misapplications of your generally pro-speech control principles. In short, you assumed that there would be a body sympathetic to your aims who could allow your side to censor their side without getting censored yourself."
>I'm just confused now. I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about here.
He's saying it's easy to be OK with cancel culture when the views causing cancellation are held by the outgroup (for you, conservatives). But what about in the future when the outgroup is in charge and trying to cancel expression of your cherished opinions? Would you still have the same opinion?
A better strategy is to find a neutral rule that everyone can stand behind. We already have one -- it is the concept of protecting the freedom of speech and expression, even speech and expression you disagree with.
"A better strategy is to find a neutral rule that everyone can stand behind. We already have one -- it is the concept of protecting the freedom of speech and expression, even speech and expression you disagree with."
My point is, this is a demonstrably false oversimplification. In my first section in my post, I listed a number of exceptions to this so-called "neutral rule", many of which require making a non-neutral determination of fact.
I'll just quote the relevant section:
"However, there have always been reasonable limitations on freedom of speech. Legally, my understanding is that I cannot use “free speech” to do any of the following activities (not an exhaustive list):
- plan or solicit a crime or act of terror
- tarnish the reputation of a private person with lies (libel or slander)
- reveal or transmit state secrets
- incite violence
- deceive someone into giving me their money or property (e.g. fraud)"
So because this thread has not gone off the rails enough, let's talk about Donald Trump. I would argue that he solicited crimes and terror *and* incited violence - not just about the January 6th insurrection, but also when he called for police to use more violence against suspects. Obviously there are people in my "outgroup" who would argue the opposite.
Your claim is that we should protect the freedom of speech and expression no matter what because this is a neutral rule that everyone can stand behind. But it isn't. Approximately half of our elected representatives thought that Trump should be punished for his speech. "People should be allowed to summon a mob to try to overthrow the government" is clearly not a rule that everyone can stand behind!
So is the solution really "just don't have a rule against inciting violence or soliciting crime"? I haven't seen anyone on this thread bite the bullet and argue in favor of abolishing existing restrictions on freedom of speech - in fact I'm not sure anyone has even acknowledged that such restrictions even exist.
No, instead, I'd argue that the solution - however imperfect - is to leave the determination up to democratic institutions. We had our vote to impeach. It didn't go exactly the way I wanted, but that's life. What's more important is that there was a pre-determined and transparent process for determining Trump's guilt or innocence, and that process was followed, thus heading off the need for people to escalate the conflict to violence, and confirming the legitimacy of our institutions.
In fact, the "neutral rule" we have is that some speech is against the law, and democratic institutions - a court, or in the case of impeachment, a legislature - enforce the law. It's not perfect, it sometimes gets things wrong, but it's also the best compromise measure we can come up with, because society is complex and full of tradeoffs.
The same logic applies to free speech norms enforced socially. It's not illegal for someone to say "KYS" in an argument - but it is against our social norms, and a community leader or moderator (in this case Scott) will enforce a penalty against someone for violating that norm. Similarly, if I started insulting you rather than addressing your points, the community norms would state that you and others would a) tell me that my comments were unhelpful and unwarranted and b) eventually shun and ostracize me. Every society always has norms of discourse. Pretending that you don't have these norms means they are not up for discussion and thereby favors the status quo. I think that's why it pings our "free speech alerts" when people challenge the speech of elites like Rowling but not when people challenge the speech of her mostly anonymous critics.
One of my points here is that rather than pretending that we don't have norms regulating our speech, we should acknowledge them and debate their boundaries. Here's what I said at the end of my introduction:
"Given that freedom of speech has limitations, and that in many cases the establishment and enforcement of these limitations is based on a political or social consensus, it is sometimes necessary to reevaluate these limitations and ensure that they’re serving our needs as a society."
Limitations on free speech *are* a given. There's no such thing as a society without limitations on speech. Which begs the question: why do so many people seem to believe that there is?
"Overall: You came here looking for criticism. You could stand to be a tad less hostile."
I apologize for seeming hostile - I assure you I do not intend hostility but for whatever reason I sometimes come off as hostile anyway. It's been a lifelong struggle to express my passion for debate in a way that doesn't alienate others and I thank you for engaging anyway.
Respond to your point about Cancel Culture, but first, a digression on music. I love electronic music. I think it's amazing how music has finally transcended the sounds that can be made by voices, vibrating strings, compressed air blown through small holes, and people hitting things; I think that it broadens the range of possibilities for what we call music.
I've also had around 15 years now of people instantly dismissing the tunes I love as not being "real" music since it doesn't involve artists actively playing their instruments during performance.
I could come to the conclusion that since a majority of the highest-grossing electronic artists happen to be from Europe, that this rejection of electronic music is evidence of a prevailing anti-European sentiment and therefore reject these critiques on their face as being racist (or biased, if you believe that there isn't a requisite power differential here for racism to apply. But that would be stupid. I would be ignoring the evidence they are presenting in favor of supposition I'm bringing to the table.
The truth of the matter is that people are relational. They don't consider the core concept of what music is and then apply it to new experiences, they just know what music sounds like, and stuff that falls outside that gets rejected. Sure, they're might be some anti-Europeans thrown into that mix, but writing off everyone because of that is... well, kind of ignorant. Instead, I've found that you can change people's mind about electronic music by showing them the stuff that most closely aligns to traditional music and using that as a jumping-off point to broaden their horizons. It's actually really cool doing that with friends and seeing what kind of stuff they eventually gravitate towards.
I worry that you're going to think I'm being flippant here, but did you read the negatives of the debate.org page? Again - there are some hardcore racists in there, but there's more people saying things like, "I think rap is an art form, but more aligned with poetry than traditional music" or "I listen to music to relax, and I don't find rap is relaxing" or "music requires a melody and I don't think rap has one." These aren't inherently racist arguments. They also aren't correct, in my opinion, but that doesn't matter so much. To claim that the arguments these people are making are all racist are requires you to dismiss the things people are saying in favor of the biases you perceive (or imagine) they hold.
I'm going to pre-empt what I think your counterargument would be here, "The specific critiques of rap music don't matter. Its so firmly tied to the African American Community that any attack on rap will be felt as a critique of the community and therefore cause harm. Since this harm is an inevitable result of the critique, the critique is racist."
I don't have a better way of saying this, but this is a problematic viewpoint that erases a large community of African Americans who don't like rap. I grew up in the south and went to a church that was approximately 95% African American and I have met no fiercer critics of rap than the little old ladies in that congregation. It was hilarious, and up until everyone agreed just not to talk about it, kept causing the priest to get in trouble (he'd try to integrate rap references in the sermon to appeal to the youths which would always cause the grandparent contingent to fire off)
I don't know if you see this, but claims like "Rap music represents the African American experience" are just as sweeping and potentially offense as some of the critiques being made by the critics of rap. People are people, individuals are individuals and any attempt to erase people's individuality is an assault on their intrinsic values as human beings.
This sweeping judgement also results in some pretty stupid edge-cases. A juggalo being told that Violent J and 2 Dope aren't making real music probably isn't facing downstream effects of racism, he's probably just run into someone who doesn't like ICP.
Now, I know it's a long digression, but I bring it up because of this specific sentence in your piece:
"Let’s put aside the question of whether the musicality of rap is a legitimate debate topic and just agree that it’s insulting to Black culture to claim that rap isn’t real music."
What if I don't put aside that it's a legitimate debate topic? I've already disproven your assertion that there's no "white" music genre that has its validity challenged (electronica) and hopefully pointed out that there are reasons people could dislike rap that aren't racist. Assuming general harm from these critiques implicitly assumes that there is a monolithic community of Black people that also doesn't exist.
The problem with cancel culture, or whatever the hell we should call this rising social trend, is that to muster the moral clarity that renders their actions acceptable, they rely on the kind of overly broad and controversial declarations of morality like the one you made above. Yes, social censure as a result of abhorrent opinions is potentially justified, but not every opinion derided as abhorrent actually is. A focus on using social censure broadly results in more and more nuance being lost in everyone's rush to "cancel."
I just wanted to say, I appreciate this comment, and I have been thinking about it for a long time because you have made a number of good points. At the very least you've convinced me that the example that I chose to be clear-cut and non-controversial turned out to be neither.
The one part of your reasoning I would disagree with is the idea that associating rap with Black culture is problematic or erasing Black people who don't like rap. Claiming that rap is part of Black culture is not the same as claiming that all Black people like rap or that there is a monolithic Black community.
Aside from that, here's why, despite your many good points, I am not quite convinced that it is not racist to claim that rap music isn't music:
"To claim that the arguments these people are making are all racist are requires you to dismiss the things people are saying in favor of the biases you perceive (or imagine) they hold."
First of all, I'm not saying the arguments themselves are racist. Saying "rap is more like poetry than music" isn't racist. In fact, I would agree with you that people "don't consider the core concept of what music is and then apply it to new experiences, they just know what music sounds like, and stuff that falls outside that gets rejected". But look - "they just know" is hand-waving away some process, right? I don't think we "just know" what music sounds like a priori. The type of music you were exposed to growing up shapes what you think of as music. In other words, what you accept and what you reject as music is in some sense a product of your culture.
But the idea that "things that are like things in my culture are valid examples of their categories, while things that are not like things in my culture are invalid examples of their categories" is like the definition of cultural prejudice or bias. Believing that something isn't music because it doesn't sound like the music that you personally have heard is clearly the application of a type of bias.
So I don't need to dismiss the things that people are saying in favor of biases I imagine they hold - instead, the things that people are saying are clear demonstrations of bias.
And (here's the controversial part, get ready) what we call prejudice or bias, when it is directed against Black Americans, is "racism" or "white supremacy". When it's directed against European Americans, it's just called prejudice or bias. I know that many people find that understanding of racism (aka racism = power + prejudice) unsatisfying or unfair, and I don't expect anyone reading this to adopt it immediately just because I've asserted it. I'm fully aware that many people find it absolutely outrageous that someone might assert that it is not possible to be racist against White Americans. I'm happy to debate the issue further or we can just leave it at "agree to disagree", but I hope anyone reading this at least understands that the definition of racism I have just explained is common and well-attested in progressive spaces, rather than something I've just made up or thought up on my own.
If we do apply that definition of racism, then the question becomes: is bias against rap music in fact directed at Black Americans, or just directed at something which is in some cases, coincidentally, associated with some but not all Black Americans? And that's where I agree that the case is much less clear-cut than I initially indicated. I would say that rap music is associated enough with Black Americans that almost everyone who claims that rap music isn't music will know in advance that what they are saying will be taken as an insult by many Black Americans and will be regarded by many as offensive to Black Americans. So I would argue that almost everyone who chooses to put forth that claim is in some sense deliberately and knowingly insulting and/or offending Black Americans.
Now, should they care? Every opinion is offensive to someone, right? To me, this is where the contest is - where progressives are saying "yes, they should care - people should go out of their way not to offend Black Americans", while the anti-PC types are saying "no, they shouldn't care - people can say what they want, and if someone gets offended they don't have to listen". I think claiming that there's some sizeable third contingent who is just blissfully unaware that this topic might risk offending people is a mistake.
And furthermore, all that is putting aside the fact that there are indeed, demonstrably, open racists who are openly promoting the "rap music is not music" trope specifically in order to demean Black people and argue for White supremacy. If your sincerely held, non-racist opinion just happens to coincide exactly with a known racist trope, I would argue that you have an affirmative duty to critically examine that opinion and its roots, just as part of a general commitment to not being racist. So at the very least, I would again say that people repeating this claim, while perhaps not racist, have failed at their duty to be non-racist. Which doesn't make them bad people - but which does obligate me to point out "hey, that thing you said sounded kinda racist - you might want to examine that opinion."
One last point: many Black Americans report dealing with insults to their race, culture, and person on a daily basis. I would not expect these individuals to have the level of patience that I have in confronting ideas that are perhaps not racist but also happen to coincide exactly with things that openly racist people use as racist attacks. Social censure is aimed at providing some kind of temporary respite from the constant barrage of racist messages that racists in our culture produce. In other words, if I have to expend effort to determine whether someone is a racist or just coincidentally shares opinions with racists, then generally it will be more efficient for an anti-racist social group to just censure that person and place the onus on them to, as we say, "do the work" themselves if they should wish to be included in our anti-racist social group. There's plenty of time for nuance when it isn't the validity of one of the products of your culture that's under the microscope.
I'm worried I don't have the skills at writing to express my (negative) response to your comment in a way that adequately reflects my positive respect for you as a person, so I'm going to make it explicit. I think your willingness to engage with ideas you clearly disagree with and the moral empathy that guides your actions and decision-making processes are highly admirable. I wish that the percentage of people who thought like you in this world were higher (although I do wish the number of people who arrived at your conclusions were lower).
That being said, I think I find your ideology terrifying. I'll clean up some of the original points in discussion then get to the crux of the issue.
>Claiming that rap is part of Black culture is not the same as claiming that all Black people like rap or that there is a monolithic Black community.
I don't think I understand this. If you are claiming that there is such a thing as an American (or global?) Black culture, that implies you're talking about a culture that all Black individuals are members of or at least affected by. Now, I agree that you can be part of a culture and reject certain elements of it*, but claiming that there is a Black culture necessarily implies the existence of a Black Community.
Unless, wait, are you claiming the Black subculture is a culture embraced by a smaller subset of the Black population in a way that doesn't necessarily correspond to their race, but has more to do with cultural signifiers?
>Believing that something isn't music because it doesn't sound like the music that you personally have heard is clearly the application of a type of bias.
This is true, and a good point. I think you're playing fast and lose with the definition of bias here, but after rewriting this section a few times, I still can't adequately express why. I'll concede its a type of bias, but still think that the bias has nothing to do with race and shouldn't be construed as racism.
We'll get to racism in a second, but first a digression into something you said in a separate reply:
>The truth is, if I were listening to a piece of music that was really important to me - like the song "Black" by Pearl Jam - and someone said "hey, can you put on some real music" or "that's not music, that's just some guy whining" I would be deeply insulted - but of course, that would never happen
I don't understand this. Not just because I don't personally care for Pearl Jam** but just because I can't imagine caring that much about what some yahoo says. If it's important to you, why would anyone else's opinion on it matter? This might just be a personal difference, but I don't see how someone diminishing something I like could be a personal insult.
This might be an unfair attack on you, and if so, I apologize, but I don't think it actually would deeply insult you. If I'm wrong, don't read the second footnote down below, but I get the feeling you're emotionally resilient to actually not give a fuck that some random dude thinks your music is crap. Them saying this might cause you not like that person, but I don't think you'd be deeply insulted. I think you're reframing what would have been (and still should be, imo) potential source of conflict into a concrete instance of harm. I think this is bad, because its going to dramatically increase the amount of claimed and perceived harm.
Anyway, on to the meat of the argument:
>what we call prejudice or bias, when it is directed against Black Americans, is "racism" or "white supremacy".
Not sure if you caught it, but I actually tried to be mindful of this viewpoint in my original post, saying, "... and therefore reject these critiques on their face as being racist (or biased, if you believe that there isn't a requisite power differential here for racism to apply.)"
That being said, I think it's wrongheaded to freely throw around definitions that are specific to a community that have general (and potentially conflicting) definitions outside that community. If we know that the majority of non-progressives see the definition of racist being "bias as a result of, or closely associated with, someone's ethnicity" then I feel like the onus should be on the people using a non-standard definition of that word to be exceedingly careful when using it so as to ensure people aren't confused about their specific meaning. Which, you were, so I guess we're at the point of "agree to disagree here."
Anyway, here is where you lose me and make me want to think about moving to a bunker somewhere. These are a collection of points that, to me, all correlate:
> everyone who claims that rap music isn't music will know in advance that what they are saying will be taken as an insult by many Black Americans and will be regarded by many as offensive to Black Americans.
>I think claiming that there's some sizeable third contingent who is just blissfully unaware that this topic might risk offending people is a mistake.
>If your sincerely held, non-racist opinion just happens to coincide exactly with a known racist trope, I would argue that you have an affirmative duty to critically examine that opinion and its roots, just as part of a general commitment to not being racist. So at the very least, I would again say that people repeating this claim, while perhaps not racist, have failed at their duty to be non-racist.
>I would not expect these individuals to have the level of patience that I have in confronting ideas that are perhaps not racist but also happen to coincide exactly with things that openly racist people use as racist attacks.
These all imply a worldview where the only thing that matters is the potentially unintended emotional responses people have. I don't think I'm exaggerating here when I say that you're advocating for a world where anything someone says or does should be hyper-analyzed not just for their intended response or motivation, but also for second-order outcomes or interpretations of those outcomes that random people think the acting party should have been aware of.
The best case scenario of this would be a world that routinely censures people for the crime of ignorance. The worst case scenario (and one I think we're trending to) is one where people will start using "felt harm is evidence of wrong-action" as weapons in games of status and power.
>Social censure is aimed at providing some kind of temporary respite from the constant barrage of racist messages that racists in our culture produce. In other words, if I have to expend effort to determine whether someone is a racist or just coincidentally shares opinions with racists, then generally it will be more efficient for an anti-racist social group to just censure that person and place the onus on them to, as we say, "do the work" themselves if they should wish to be included in our anti-racist social group.
This is perfectly acceptable if your social group is a minority (edit: I don't mean minority in reference to race here, I mean minority as in a smaller segment of overall society.) If I'm trying to join your subculture, you can freely ostracize me for not knowing how to talk and act in your group. But your group is winning. You're starting to have more and more influence in culture writ large; what happens when the "anti-racist social group" is now American society? What happens when someone who is saying these things they don't believe to be racist is now being censured by and excluded from all of culture?
>There's plenty of time for nuance when it isn't the validity of one of the products of your culture that's under the microscope.
I disagree. I kinda just think there's plenty of time for nuance.
*American culture is stereotyped to be associated with excessive consumption. The fact that there are a few aesthetic vegans scattered around doesn't negate that; they are a counter element of restraint in an otherwise prevailing culture of consumption, but their actions are still in response to that element of culture.
**Long boring personal anecdote time: I used to work on a ship. My room on that ship was 10'x10'x7' and I shared it with another guy. For a couple years we spent roughly 10 months or so a year living in that cramped space. This guy absolutely love bands like Phish, Grateful Dead, DMB, and Pearl Jam and would play them all the time. I, uh, don't. He also hated electronic music. Over the course of the two years, we said more unkind things about each other's preferred music than I can repeat, but if I'd be shocked if I number of times I said Jam Bands weren't real music wasn't at least in the triple digits. In one memorable occasion, he decided to use "Hard Sun" as our alarm sound and hid the phone, so in response I only talked to him in an insulting Eddie Vedder impression for 4 days. To this day he's one of my best friends. We'd shit on each other's music tastes constantly, but had enough respect for one another that there was never any deeper animosity.
"I'm worried I don't have the skills at writing to express my (negative) response to your comment in a way that adequately reflects my positive respect for you as a person..."
I appreciate that, and the respect is mutual. I've greatly enjoyed reading all of your comments.
However you've dissed Dave so I'm going to stop here. Hah, kidding. I'm tempted to respond with an anecdote of my own about how my reading of Atlas Shrugged convinced me that American-style individualism is bad and we need to focus more on mutual obligation and positive social duties and less on negative personal rights... anyway it's longish and not necessarily relevant so let me know if you're interested.
"These all imply a worldview where the only thing that matters is the potentially unintended emotional responses people have. I don't think I'm exaggerating here when I say that you're advocating for a world where anything someone says or does should be hyper-analyzed not just for their intended response or motivation, but also for second-order outcomes or interpretations of those outcomes that random people think the acting party should have been aware of."
I think what I'm saying is that we already live in a world in which unintended emotional responses matter and anything anyone says or does can potentially be hyper-analyzed for first- and second-order outcomes, and given that, we need to try to come to a consensus on how much these responses matter and on what types of outcomes we are willing to live with and what types of outcomes we think we need to prevent. If we're not willing to try to reach that consensus, we will be stuck in a series of irreconcilable conflicts any time people from two or more different subcultures or communities get together and try to have a discussion.
I think it used to be that it was very easy for your community to determine social norms about discourse, and individuals didn't belong to so many communities that these norms could become hard to keep track of, and it wasn't so common for a person to change communities so people generally got used to the norms in their communities. Imagine a time when all you had to keep track of was: appropriate speech for home, work, the bar, the street, and church. And if you did accidentally offend your co-worker, for example, you'd work it out because the relationship was durable and important - you'd have to see this person every work day for 20 or 30 years - and that vastly outweighed some off-hand comment you made or ill-considered opinion you offered. But now, if I say something offensive on twitter to a person I've never met and will never talk to again, they have no reason not to just respond by dunking on me or blocking me. And then instead of a robust social fabric, you have a series of self-curated bubbles, all with their own incompatible social norms around what can and cannot be said.
I don't think this situation is sustainable or good for society. And I'm specifically not saying that we need to impose new restrictions on freedom of speech. What I'm saying is that the boundaries of what we consider insulting and what we consider acceptable are currently being redefined and it is important that more people, collectively, participate in that redefinition, and in a positive way, so that we can come to a consensus that is more inclusive and maybe even starts to repair the social fabric a little. Even if our first stab at creating a principle that we can use to delineate insults from non-insults goes horribly wrong, like mine apparently has, that doesn't mean we can just abdicate the responsibility to create a principle, thereby leaving it to the most vocal and radical activists to balkanize the discourse with a set of self-serving, ad hoc speech codes.
But I think progressives have a decent set of principles for dealing with insults in discourse. It's something like:
- you should try not to insult people
- if someone tells you that something you said insulted them, listen to them and keep an open mind about it
- if you insult someone, even by accident, apologize and do better in the future
- when in doubt, minority/marginalized voices get priority in identifying things that are insulting
I've operated under those rules for quite a long time and I don't personally find it very onerous, but I guess ymmv.
"The worst case scenario (and one I think we're trending to) is one where people will start using "felt harm is evidence of wrong-action" as weapons in games of status and power."
Yeah, I agree that this is definitely happening, and there are other abuses along similar lines, but I'm not sure "people will abuse X as weapons in games of status and power" is a knockout argument against X. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people use their command of English spelling and grammar as weapons in games of status and power, and yet here I am following (more or less) the rules of English spelling and grammar.
There's a segment of the left that is remarkably un-self-critical and that doesn't allow any kind of debate whatsoever with a claim that something is insulting, and I think that's bad. But I also think it's bad to socially endorse endless debate about whether something is insulting, to the extent that it derails other discourse. There's a tradeoff between the two - it's not as straightforward as "just allow endless debate until everyone gets tired of it" because one thing we also see in leftist spaces is that these types of endless debates end up splintering communities and rendering activist groups completely ineffective as they become consumed with pedantic internecine quarrels, and also if you try to create a community in which one person goes around saying "what, I just think X is stupid, why can't I say that" literally all the time, everyone else will leave and start a new community without that person, which in effect is the same kind of ostracism as cancelation except without the need to find a new host for your discussion group.
Anyway, I think maybe I am making this seem a lot more exotic than I actually think it is. We've managed to have an entire conversation without insulting each other even as we've described different cultural preferences and political ideologies, and part of what we've been doing is anticipating what *might* insult the other person and either routing around it or disclaiming with something like "I don't intend this as an insult", both of which are totally normal politeness strategies. I think in almost any case, if someone takes the time and care to use these types of strategies, they won't insult others inadvertently, and if they do they'll be given the benefit of the doubt. I think most of the time when we're dealing with "unintended" insults it's a case where the person who said the insulting thing didn't care enough to show respect or take the time to be polite, and that lack of respect or concern compounds the insult.
So my take is, the worst case scenario is exactly what we have now, and the best case scenario is we all get a little better at being polite and respectful.
>I think what I'm saying is that we already live in a world in which unintended emotional responses matter and anything anyone says or does can potentially be hyper-analyzed for first- and second-order outcomes, and given that, we need to try to come to a consensus on how much these responses matter and on what types of outcomes we are willing to live with and what types of outcomes we think we need to prevent.
If what you are saying is true and we are already there, then we need to leave there and get back to "sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me."
But I suspect we are not there, because this is not how normal people behave in real life, with real social cues. People do give the benefit of the doubt in conversation. People do know how apply the principle of charity, at least some of the time. It's mostly online where people have forgotten this. We cannot let that online "I am offended by the worst possible interpretation of your statement" mindset into real life.
"I don't understand this. Not just because I don't personally care for Pearl Jam** but just because I can't imagine caring that much about what some yahoo says. If it's important to you, why would anyone else's opinion on it matter? This might just be a personal difference, but I don't see how someone diminishing something I like could be a personal insult."
There aren't a lot of things I care about enough to be offended when someone insults them, but there are some things. BTW I'm not crazy about Eddie Vedder's solo work or even most of Pearl Jam's stuff after the 90's. I suspect there are probably some things which you identify with enough to be insulted by someone insulting, but yeah, I could be making the typical mind fallacy right now.
"If we know that the majority of non-progressives see the definition of racist being "bias as a result of, or closely associated with, someone's ethnicity""
But we don't know that, right? In Against Murderism, Scott pointed out that there are at least three contested definitions of racism (belief, motive, consequences), and that the inability to nail down one of these definitions as canonical results in a lot of confusion and nonsense. I'm not sure it's so wrongheaded to try to operate from a fourth separate definition of racism, especially if it actually clarifies progressives' intentions when claiming "X is racist" and potentially resolves some of the confusion Scott identified in Against Murderism. If the definition of racism were actually clear-cut I think I'd agree with you, but since it's already contested, I say in for a penny, in for a pound.
This feels like a fully general argument against criticizing anything. My preference for books is a result of my cultural upbringing. If I say that Toni Morrison's Beloved wasn't my cup of tea, then that's clearly the application of a type of bias. And what we call prejudice or bias, when directed against Black Americans, is "racism" or "white supremacy".
Of course, some people say rap isn't music because they're racist, but I think you need to establish more than just the existence of cultural bias (which you can apply to any preference) and link it to a preference due to the actual race connection.
The other problem I think a lot of people have with cancellation is that it isn't just enforcing a norm of "don't be assholes to people", or at least not in a legible way, and a lot of time seems to be more about signaling than actually helping anyone.
Personally, I'm less concerned about cancelling Rowling or people who make racist Twitter posts (though we can have a whole different discussion on appropriate escalation), but at some point someone's going to take my earlier argument seriously and there's going to be backlash because a white person criticized a POC, even if race wasn't involved. Or maybe because they're using words in another language that sound a little too close to certain racial slurs.
Hell, if the right person tweeted about it, you could probably be cancelled for participating on a forum known to be sympathetic to misogynists and white supremacists. That's effectively how Scott was portrayed. Would they actually read your posts to see what you think? Why would that be necessary? They didn't need to read the story by Isabel Fall (a trans woman) before cancelling her for being a transphobic Neo-Nazi cis man. (I'm still angry about this one. The whole debacle caused her to untransition and stop writing.)
I'm sorry, that might have come across as overly harsh. I do think applying social pressure to assholes can be a useful thing. But I think a lot of cancellation happens not to help protect that, but to punish and be outraged and feel morally superior, using the flimsiest of excuses. And it doesn't help that the witch hunts pick up a lot of innocent young women in Salem.
"But remember, if someone insults your culture, you’re supposed to be able to tell them to cut it out, and society is supposed to be able to have your back."
I wonder if this rule also applies to men or whites or conservatives...
I mean, I could approve of the rule that people should be nice to each other. But if the rule only says that low-status people should be extra careful lest they somehow offend the feelings of the high-status ones, that's nothing new under the sun.
> I would point to the debate over whether rap music is real music as evidence in favor of the claim that systemic racism and white supremacist ideology are still mainstream and deeply embedded in US culture.
Let me state it then: rap is not real music. (I am certainly not an expert in music, this is just a strong statement of my preferences. And of my current state of rubes/bleggs (music/not music) training.)
Won't be easy to explain it by systemic American racism in my case, since 1. I am not from the US, and most of the authors and performers of rap I am forced to hear are whites, 2. I do not care about its origins. For that matter, jazz and blues genres also came from African Americans, didn't they? I'm not a huge fan but I definitely recognize them as music.
Even if I shared the illiberal premises behind this piece I think I'd want to know more about how democratic institutions are supposed to be held accountable when it comes to banning ideas. If the public has been prevented from even hearing an idea, how are they supposed to judge the reasonableness of banning it?
>A lot of the “debates” that people are getting “canceled” for having are like this one. Should gay couples be allowed to adopt children? Should Black people be allowed to protest? Should trans people be allowed into bathrooms? Are women naturally bad at math and computer stuff? Here’s a rule of thumb: if one of the two potential positions in your “debate” is dehumanizing and insulting, it’s not a good topic for debate.
This is a rather amusing paragraph, because the first and fourth are very arguable, and the third is somewhat.
There is a long history in psychology of suspecting that fathers and mothers perform different parenting roles, and that therefore single parents and same-sex couples are suboptimal raising environments. I'm not well-read enough to give a definitive review of the current state of this hypothesis, but I don't think it's in "totally debunked" territory. Obviously, if true this hypothesis supports systematically preferring opposite-sex couple (or mixed-sex polyamorous) adopters - not as an all-or-nothing thing, as an opposite-sex couple doing a Mary Ann Cotton scheme would clearly be worse than a non-evil gay couple, but as an explicit part of the heuristic - as presumably (and hopefully) the highest concern in the adoption system is not people's right to be parents but the child's right to the best home available.
The conservative position on sex differences in ability, at least in its intellectual form, isn't so much "women are stupid" or even "women can't be good at maths", but more "on a statistical level there are differences in aptitude and interest, with women being more interested in/better at some things and men more interested in/better at others, and therefore if sex ratio in something is not a perfect 50:50 this does not automatically imply that secret institutional sexism is responsible". That's... not especially dehumanising or insulting.
And as for the bathroom thing... well, I'm probably not the best person to argue this one, but basically there are two motives to sex-segregate bathrooms.
1) Putting urinals in the male and not the female bathroom since a penis helps substantially with physically using them. Sex-segregation isn't really super-essential for this, though, since you could just have a room of urinals labelled "urinals" and a room of stalls labelled "stalls".
2) Under the paradigm that there are two easily-distinguished sexes both of which are 100% heterosexual, it prevents people being leered at.
#2 doesn't cope very well with homosexuals or non-passing transsexuals (the former because sex-segregation doesn't stop them leering at people, and the latter because they're difficult to distinguish from someone breaking the rules). There are two easily-adjudicable solutions - hammer down the nails that stick out, or abandon the whole enterprise as ineffectual and just go with unisex bathrooms. Conservatism, as a general rule, tends to prioritise social cohesion over individual freedoms, hence taking the first option. (This is not a *mistake*, but rather *making a different tradeoff*; see the "Plays Well in Groups" section of Scott's "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" essay, or read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.)
>There are two easily-adjudicable solutions - hammer down the nails that stick out, or abandon the whole enterprise as ineffectual and just go with unisex bathrooms.
There's a third and even easier solution - accept that the status quo gives you 90% of what you're after, maybe clarify a few edge cases, and call it a win.
The problem is that "men can't go into the women's bathroom, but non-passing transwomen can" is not especially easy to adjudicate (it *can* be adjudicated, but it takes interrogation and documents; it's not trivially obvious the way it is with almost everyone else). Complicated rules that frequently need formal resolution are themselves a social cost; they expend time and reduce social cohesion.
Clarifying that edge case the *other* way is, well, exactly what the infamous bathroom bills generally do.
I'm in favour of unisex bathrooms myself (hence "not the best person to argue this one"), but I can spot the problem with "only if you're trans" (which isn't really "the status quo" so much as "the SJ demand").
The status quo(*) that I would count as a 90% win is that men couldn't go into the women's bathroom and that non-passing transwomen couldn't either. That works for everyone but the non-passing transwomen and the victims of lesbian women who use rest rooms for conspicuous leering, which is probably <<10% of the population.
The edge case that would need adjudicating if we were to stick with that rule is the marginally-passing transwoman who gets caught. If she got caught she wasn't passing, but if we say that absent severe aggravating factors it's only a civil infraction on par with a speeding ticket then we don't get the bit where people live in fear of being put on sex-offender registries for life if they slip up even once.
There's another edge case in the lesbian women who are so conspicuous in their leering that the straight women have a legitimate case for saying "get out of our rest room".
* OK, status quo ante; the issue is currently in flux and I don't want to dig into state-by-state bathroom laws.
(My first comment here: let's see how it works.) In my opinion, the issue with copyrighted code is very little compared to the fact that it spits out bad code. In my experience, it is frequently harder to spot a subtle mistake in code written by somebody else — or ourselves time ago — than to avoid making it in new code. Therefore, for a skilled programmer, reviewing code proposed by Copilot would be more effort and riskier than not using it at all.
True. It's easier [for humans] to read code than to write it.
If I were them I'd be focusing on using AI to do the reviewing. I'd be looking at diffs and commits and bug tracking to train up a model that can predict which parts of the codebase are likely to need changing.
There are two issues for me: a technical one and a moral one.
For the technical one, this gist https://gist.github.com/0xabad1dea/be18e11beb2e12433d93475d72016902 is on the front page of Hacker News, and show a few flaws. A larger and more abstract problem, Copilot seems too limited to output "smart" code, so for now it's mostly a boilerplate generator. You'll have to verify what it generates. I can't help but think of Yaron Minsky, who said that no matter how much they paid people, they couldn't get them to review correctly boilerplate code because it's not engaging at all. I think our industry already has the tool to rapidly produce a working MVP that's not perfect (see JS and NPM, Ruby, Python), but for now, what we need seems to be a way to make our systems more reliable (see the rise of static typing the last 10 years, distributed systems being more and more present, etc).
For the moral part, I can't help but see Copilot as an attempt to launder copyrighted code, especially GPL. Apparently they trained Copilot on all the code publicly visible Github, which doesn't sound okay to me, especially considering that now Microsoft owns Github.
I'd say either the tool isn't that good and it's mostly useless or even dangerous (suggesting bad code), or it's good and morally not okay (probably not enforceable by law, but I see this as a betrayal of some of the ideas behind free software).
I think the moral problem is contingent to the technical problem: as long as Copilot can only usefully produce boilerplate and trivial code, i.e. code where copyright does not really apply (it needs originality), then the moral problem is a no-issue. And I do not see AI products getting significantly better at this soon, I am convinced there is a qualitative step here that needs to happen.
Of course, somebody could coax Copilot into outputting code imitating some particular project in an attempt to launder the copyleft, but I would argue that in that case they are themselves infringing, using Copilot as a search engine.
Now, I think there is another side to this issue: if we consider the tasks of the parts in play, then GitHub is a giant source code, the code that trained Copilot is a compiler, and the trained neural network at the core of Copilot is its binary output. That means the neural network itself is subject to the copyleft of all code on GitHub, and it would apply if Microsoft were to try to distribute Copilot as a product. But as far as I know, they only provide it as software-as-a-service.
I think the Free Software Foundation and other actors dropped the ball when it comes to software-as-a-service. A few years ago, their only discourse was “it's evil, don't do it”, and then nothing. We need an update to copyleft licenses to prevent disloyal profiteering as saas, and we need guidelines for loyal saas providers, where our data is not held hostage, where we can migrate it, where we can internalize it and use the same software. It is a hard legal and technical problem, we cannot do it each in our corner. But nothing came.
> I think the moral problem is contingent to the technical problem: as long as Copilot can only usefully produce boilerplate and trivial code, i.e. code where copyright does not really apply (it needs originality), then the moral problem is a no-issue.
On one hand, I agree, on the other hand, when you see the emulation community that forbids anyone from having read the original console code, or some black-box implementations of some algorithms (perception hash comes to mind), I can't help but find what Copilot does deeply unfair. They present it as pair programming, and I don't think you can call something a black-box implementation if you're pairing with someone that read the code.
> That means the neural network itself is subject to the copyleft of all code on GitHub, and it would apply if Microsoft were to try to distribute Copilot as a product.
I've read lots on HN about this, and the general sentiment seems to be "training machine learning models on copyrighted data is okay", as apparently GPT-3 used a lot of copyrighted text. I honestly don't know if it's real or an extension of "when big corporations do it it's okay". In any case, I'm baffled that Github did this without consulting anyone, especially to probably sell it as a product after.
I agree with the part about the FSF and SaaS. I hoped to hear solutions from them during the Elastic debacle, but the only move was AWS forking it. On one hand open source has never been more popular, on the other hand I can't help but see a slow erosion of it by corporations. EEE seems to be alive and well, and we're in the second phase (cloud in general, proprietary extensions to VSCode comes to mind).
The impression I got from Twitter lawyers was that (1) data mining is usually protected by fair use, and (2) Copilot's generated chunks are small enough that they're unlikely to be considered infringing in the rare cases where it does spit out a piece of copyrighted code verbatim.
It's probably a permissible derivative work, according to current copyright law. However, it would be much better if they came out with Github Copilot GPL - only GPL2 code used to train the model, all generated code is licensed under GPL2.
Whether you call them TERFs or gender critical feminists, it seems they're far more successful in the UK than in the USA. So I was wondering if anyone have any theories as to why?
I think part of it is that the transgender activists went for a top down strategy: Convince politicians, change the law, hammer opponents into silence. While the other side went for a bottom up strategy of building grassroots support.
I also have an impression of transgender activists making some major blunders. For example they called a billboard saying "Woman. Noun. Adult human female" part of a hate campaign. That was an elephant trap and they walked right into it. Or calling J.K. Rowling a TERF. It doesn't even matter if she was or not, Rowling is a skilled writer with impeccable left wing credentials. It was only going to end one way, pick your battles and all that.
But there's also factors I'm not sure if they can be explained by which activist groups had better strategies. I see internal battles inside major left wing or progressive groups: The Guardian news paper, the Liberal Democrats, SNP, and Labour party. Does America lack an equivalent grass roots within left wing organisations? Or was it there but somehow defeated?
I'm mostly just brainstorming and trying to figure out why the UK looks like quite the outlier.
My naive theory is that Americans think of their 1st Amendment as a magical machine that works for them no matter what they do, whereas the Brits have no such safeguards in place and thus are more alert to encroachments on their Overton window. I'm not strongly invested in this theory either; it's too close to the trad "everything good is bad because it lets people get idle" ouroboros that clearly proves too much. But I have definitely seen the sort of "don't worry, it's all just students being crazy / writers being tribal / politicians being full of shit" and "get your own forum / university / newspaper" rhetoric in the US that has helped cede lots of fertile ground to the wokies; I think the First Amendment, for all its good, has helped underpin this rhetoric, which is why I've never heard it from Brits.
Something else that might have helped in Britain is all the other ways in which Labor has lost. Most people buy their political positions wholesale. If the lefties have gotten pie on their faces in one domain (e.g., Brexit and COVID vaccines), people will be more willing to reconsider their other ideas as well (be it gender or immigration or schooling). Even from a rational viewpoint, this isn't too bad epistemology, as some movements are plainly more honest than others.
Being British myself, the article you linked to is painfully American. Things like assigning high importance to taxpayer's money being wasted via the NHS and the way it keeps describing things as socialism, I can't remember when I last felt a such a big cultural gap between here and the USA.
That said. The idea that the NHS requires trasngender activists to push hard for full self-ID if they want gatekeeper free access to transitioning, while the USA medical establishment is incentivised to remove gatekeepers so it can sell stuff is worth considering.
The other part, that British socialists gave the TERF/GC side organising experience doesn't feel right. Do the American trade unions not have the same organising experience? Or the American LGBT rights movement? A lot of prominent campaigners against self-ID in the UK were veterans of the previous generation of LGBT activism. So the question remains, why did they organise in the UK but not the USA?
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> My naive theory is that Americans think of their 1st Amendment as a magical machine that works for them no matter what they do, whereas the Brits have no such safeguards in place and thus are more alert to encroachments on their Overton window.
A counterpoint to this would be gun control which is a firey hot argument in the USA but a non-issue in the UK. Gun rights activists are certainly hyper-vigilant to threats.
That said I wouldn't rule out the constitution as a possible factor. In America you can do activism by winning a court case saying the constitution means the government has to do what you want and that's usually final. In the UK if you do that the government can just change the law if it has a majority in parliament.
One possibility is that the transgender activist movement was Americanised and neglected the importance of having votes behind you, where as their opponents understood that in the UK votes are important.
But that still leaves the deeper question. Why was there an activist group opposing self-id in the UK but not the USA?
I think the labor movement was less powerful in the US, which is why our center-left party are called "Democratic" rather than "Labor" or "Social Democrat".
That's a fascinating question, but I guess I'd want to know if it's even true. But supposing that there is more acceptance of TERFs in England, perhaps it's because we Americans have a tradition of allowing self-invention? You can "go West", metaphorically, and start all over. I have also wondered if the TERF tradition in U.S. religious feminism (e.g., Rosemary Radford Reuther, Mary Daly) affects its acceptance by feminists who reject religion. Obviously I'm just speculating.
I've seen it claimed (can't remember where) that it's a result of the popular Mumsnet forum.
The articles I can by googling find mostly stick to the claim that Mumsnet is currently a center of the TERF/GC movement rather than addressing the direction of causation between 'TERF/GC popular in UK' and 'TERF/GC popular on Mumsnet'. But I can sketch a theory where the prior existence of Mumsnet meant that a demographic that would tend to lean towards TERF/GC politics was better organized than in other countries, exogenously causing the difference.
No idea if the facts support that on any level, though.
All I can say is that Mumsnet was influential long before trans issues became a big deal, as evidenced by the fact they got to interview prime ministerial candidates:
I get the impression that earlier waves of feminism were a bigger deal across the pond. They still remember suffragettes being force-fed in prison, here in the U.S western states granted suffrage because they were desperate to improve their sex ratio, and then politicians at the national level started trying to appeal to that constituency as well. There was a documentary series there called "Lefties" which contained an episode named "Angry Wimmin" (not a misspelling, they wanted to avoid having "men" in the word for women) about the politically-motivated lesbian separatists of the second wave of feminism. Many of the gender critical feminists objecting to currently debated changes for the trans are lesbians.
I think part of the difference is that feminism was always a partisan issue in the US, in a way it isn't in the UK. So got lumped into a general social liberal vs conservative split. Whereas in the UK you can have people on the left and right in other ways who are feminist. Which means when it comes to transgender (and other social justice) issues you have people who are well known feminists, but conservative on that issue.
The impression I have is that the "gender critical" movement is definitely by far strongest in the UK, but is also stronger in Australia and Ireland than in Canada or the US. I don't know as much about New Zealand, other English-speaking regions, or the non-English-speaking world. (As an academic philosopher, I am most aware of the debate within academic philosophy, and while I don't know all the relevant people involved in the debate, almost all the people on the gender critical side that I can think of either work in the UK or grew up in the UK or both, though I do know of one who grew up in Canada and works in the United States.)
Those would all serve as counterexamples to Mencius Moldbug's generalization that America is to the right of the rest of the first world because they all became American colonies after WW2, with their pre-existing rightist traditions wiped out.
My gut says that it is primarily that fundamentalists have a stronger hold on the US. I think it’s both because there are more of them per capita (but I could be wrong here, so please correct me), and because of the two party system.
To take a more extreme example of how the US sometimes sucks would be child marriage. From my brief reading of UK laws, the minimum age of marriage is 16/17 with parental consent. In the US, if you go to Massachusetts, a man could marry a 12 year old girl with parental consent and a judge’s ok.
So, why? Probably a few reasons besides this, but my best understanding is that the few extreme christians who take advantage of this would oppose whichever party so viscerally that it just isn’t worth it, since not that many people are going to vote for you just because you raised the age. Now, transgender rights have a few more avid proponents, but probably a lot more avid haters of it; everyone else I think has some degree of opinion on it but not to the point it’s the sole decider of their vote.
I don't think extreme Christian advocates of child marriage have that much political power in Massachusetts. Instead we just have lots of states which set their own marriage laws, and some of them retain very old laws.
I don’t think that they have enough power to get such a law passed, I think they just exert enough pressure to keep the age from getting raised. If not, why the heck haven’t we raised the age (considering it’s still used)?
I think that trans rights are basically a similar fight, in that you have liberal activists fighting against entrenched Christians who have the current laws on their side (except all groups involved here are much larger and more mainstream).
I agree that’s sometimes true, but this has multiple human rights organizations lobbying about it and has had at least one bill for changing it pass the Mass senate
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a judge today who'd allow marriage with a 12 year old, in which case the law doesn't *really* allow marriage with 12 year olds, so no one's bothered to change it.
I think this is possibly true, but the original source where I learned this claimed that most of these cases are rubber stamped. Now, I fact checked that source to be sure it was technically legal, and that raised my priors enough to think they probably did their research on the other topic. But obviously, how much do you trust me referencing a non-academic source? idk
To reference a more reliable source, at the least, age 14 (which is still quite objectionable imo) is still being practiced, and apparently not in trivially small numbers.
My theory is that race-based struggles are very different in countries other than the US (it's the legacy of the British Empire rather than the legacy of chattel slavery), so they are less controversial, and get less attention. As a result, there's more energy in gender conflicts, and the TERFs v Transgender Activists is clearly the most controversial debate in that area.
I think its a matter of how the political coalitions are subtly different in US vs UK. There's not more overall transphobia in the UK than US (see public opinion polls), but its not split as neatly down tribal lines so it seems more obvious.
There's a strong socially conservative evangelical strain in US politics, far more than in the UK, who have a lot of influence, and are anti trans, as well as anti many other things. In the UK there isn't as much of a consolidate social conservative grouping, and those issues (abortion, lgbt rights, etc) are less important in deciding political outcomes. This means that there are people who are otherwise in the liberal and feminist grouping in the UK who are vocally anti trans, in a way there is less of in the US, because being anti trans is a red tribe thing.
Historically this can probably be traced back to how feminism was less of a polarized issue in the UK than the US. There was a much wider uptake of feminism on the right in the UK in the second half of the 20th century (with Thatcher the most famous example but not the only one) in a way there wasn't in the US. UK social conservatives focused far less on "woman in the kitchen men at work" style appeals to traditional social values. (If you go back further many aristocratic women were vocal feminists.) This meant that there wasn't the same neat socially conservative/liberal split between the two main parties as there was in the US, at least on gender issues.
In the UK I've seen cases of left wing feminists being excommunicated only to be given a platform by the right. When Suzanne Moore was expelled from the guardian she wrote a couple of columns for the Spectator and one for Unherd. And I recall her getting support from their regular writers too.
Does the same happen when left wing feminists are excommunicated in the USA? If not that could be a big piece of the puzzle.
I'm not sure this can be a proper explanation. In the early 1980s, there was a coalition of anti-porn feminists and conservatives that got some major bills passed in Indianapolis, Canada, and elsewhere. That feels a lot like the same alliance that goes on with some of the current "gender critical" stuff (though the social conservatives that ally with it are anything but "gender critical" "radical feminists").
I think the concept of feminism is stronger/different over there. American feminism, at least since I've been following it (2000s) has been strongly associated with integrating women into the fold. The goal is for women to "become" one of the men (or, from a more utopian perspective for men and women both transition into fundamentally interchangeable entities). This means that there isn't a strong connection to women as a concept in most American feminist circles.
From this perspective, TERF ideology or even gender critical ideology doesn't really make sense. If you don't hold much value in womanhood, you don't see anything wrong with new groups coming into to occupy it, or other groups trying to abandon it.
From my read of UK feminists, they are much more emphatic in their defense of womanhood. They think its real and that it matters. From that perspective, well, some amount of TERF-dom is inevitable (although of course not everyone who thinks womanhood matters is going to be gender critical).
I've seen theories that this might be because there are more conservative feminists over there in a way that doesn't really exist here, but I'm not familiar enough with the UK to comment on this.
Repeating request from previous thread in hopes that Scott will see it:
Scott, I would be interested in an article about Neuro-Linguistic Processing (NLP, not to be confused with the computer science field of natural language processing). Wikipedia calls NLP "pseudoscientific" and "discredited" but it seems that they have some interesting ideas that are not more obviously bad than other subfields of psychology when taking into account the replication crisis and other systemic problems in the discipline.
Scott, I’d be interested in this too. I definitely got some value from reading “Using Your Brain for a Change” by Richard Bandler, back in the 1980s…I still use some of these techniques to this day.
It seems to me that NLP techniques are possibly orthogonal to more modern trends like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and MIindfulness.
Seems to me that NLP is a bag containing dozens of techniques... most likely, some of them work, and some of them don't. Plus there is some underlying theory, which I assume has been falsified.
It is nice to believe that whatever one human can do, anyone can do, as long as they properly observe and model their behavior... but if true, this should be simple to prove: turn hundred people into copies of someone famous, and when they all become famous, have them say "NLP works, my success is the proof" on TV.
It's kind of like hypnotism: if it worked, you'd expect to see the people who can do it really well running the world. Since I don't, I'm pretty confident it doesn't.
As I understand it, hypnotism does sort of work, but it doesn't have much to do with the Hollywood cliche of waving a pendulum in front of somebody to gain complete control over them.
Hypnotism does work, but using it nefariously is tricky since it mostly requires consent and most people don't want to give you all their money and spend their lives serving you. There are ways of abusing it given a sufficiently-gullible mark and enough time, and there are people who make a living abusing it, but there aren't enough hours in the day or enough suckers to pull off large-scale social takeover this way.
The Toronto CS reading group is about to form a splinter named The David Reading group. We'll shortly be reading/listening to "Debt: The First 5000 Years", and future books of interest include "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" as well as "The Dawn of Everything".
Our coordination platform is Slack, and our format for the short term is going to be a video conference, very probably bi-weekly, during which we discuss a chapter. We might end up switching to a Toronto meetup with an online component later on depending on how pandemic-related things develop here.
If this sounds interesting to any other readers here; drop me a comment and I'll add you to the relevant channels.
Too mad none of the Crooked Timber contributors are named "David", because then perhaps you could read their response to Debt. Although there is Daniel Davies...
To be fair, the group name is mostly a joke. All the books we're interested at the moment are written by Davids Graeber, Friedman and Wengrow respectively, so it's descriptive rather than restrictive although we'll see where it goes.
The Crooked Timber "seminar" on Debt (including the responses by Graeber, and the comments on all of them) is probably the relevant place. I think Graeber's meltdown occurred somewhere in the comments on his responses to their entries.
The whole episode made me interested enough to start reading the book, but I had such mixed feelings that I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
Probably - I don't remember exactly what it looked like, and whether it migrated to Twitter from the blog. But in the years since, many of the Crooked Timber people have expressed some sort of guilty feeling at having promoted Graeber and his work, after he revealed his fragility and incapability of proper citation or gratitude.
The former is what I was thinking of, although unfortunately the Crooked Timber CMS[?] has updated in the years since and mangled some of the posts, so that block-quotes just get replaced with "bq".
Does anyone have any good advice/resources for marketing random online publications? I have a few assorted things on the go that I'd like to sell once they're cleaned up, but I'm not sure that cleaning it up will be worth the work if I'll only sell like three copies of a $5 document.
If it helps to have specifics, the planned first one is an "Advent(ure) Calendar", i.e., a D&D advent calendar, with one fight a day. Naturally, I want this to be available no later than Black Friday. But I'd rather get my ducks in a row first.
In Ye Olden Days, I'd have said get your website cleaned up and SEO-friendly. But I think something like Kickstarter/IndieGogo/Whatever might be a place to start, with some strategic posts in the right subreddits letting interested people know. A D&D advent calendar sounds kind of amazing. My kids would love it.
Yeah, my website here is going to be DriveThruRPG, so SEO for Google isn't a real concern. Maybe a few subreddit posts, or groups that'd otherwise be interested, if I can do it without being too spammy.
FWIW, the rough draft of it is up on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/k6qlik/adventure_calendar_week_of_december_1st6th/ (that has links to all of it). A few of the fights are poorly balanced or just a bit too confusing, and of course it's not as convenient to use as a PDF would be (where everything's in one place). But feel free to use it with your kids if you like. And if you do, DM me any comments on Reddit - I realistically won't get them here, but I check there often enough.
Does anyone have experience with taking magnesium supplements to alter mood, fight depression, anxiety, etc.? I was inspired by a recent Hacker News link https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ stating that modern vegetables have little magnesium content due to depleted soil. The associated comments section https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654787 contained a number of people saying that supplementing it greatly reduced their depression and anxiety.
I've been taking them for about a week and a half now, and I have to say that I do already feel a marked difference, though of course placebo effect etc. etc. Everyone seems to say that gastrointestinal discomfort is a side effect, but I have had absolutely zero issues so far- maybe my magnesium levels were just really low! Would be curious to hear other peoples' experiences with magnesium supplementation, if any
Tl;dr, despite much greater care than an average supplementer, Gwern accidentally took too large a dose, with negative effects that would be difficult to notice without rigorous data collection.
I began taking it as part of a battery of other supplements around 6 months ago, so I can't specifically attribute any perceived changes to Magnesium per se, but I can say that taking Magnesium, D3, Zinc, B12 and fish oil I have noted semi-significant mental improvements.
Yes, I had meant to mention- on the old SSC there was a post by someone who claimed that taking B12 supplements basically cured her lifelong depression in a week, or something to that effect. I wonder if she was a vegetarian, as I find it hard to believe that a meat eater isn't getting enough in their diet
Whatever happened to judges requiring young men to join the military in exchange for a deferred sentence? (I think the practice has a specific name, which escapes me at the moment). This seemed to be a common practice in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc., and not just during active wartime. Seems like a win-win for society- we probably shouldn't really add to the US prison population if there's another outlet that would work better, and high-testosterone young men who are committing minor crimes are probably the same demographic as who makes up the average soldier- they are all typically not from great neighborhoods. The US always has issues with military recruitment, and lots of these guys could probably use some structure in their lives, so it seems like a net plus for society all around.
However, my impression is that judges don't hand out these type of deferred sentences anymore. Did it become passé? Was there a specific court case that prevented judicial drafting? Did those types of guys end up not being great soldiers? I'd be interested to hear what happened there
From what I heard, the military asked them to stop. Technological changes have created an emphasis on quality of soldiers over quantity. And even if they're from the same demographics, petty criminals are not going to be the same quality as men who actually choose to serve.
To expand on what Bullseye said below, it's also part of a general trend in the military. Once, not very long ago, Join The Military was a reasonably lucrative career open to anybody with a pulse. Many people, young men especially, had Join The Military as their Plan B or C, because it would always take anybody and would take care of you.
However, that isn't how the military operates anymore. The recruiters I know of (either first hand or through my family members in the military) bemoan the lack of good recruits, and turn away a lot of people who thought being in the military was as easy as showing up. So you have a lot fewer cases of things like judges forcing no-prospect minor criminals into the military, or families dumping their 18 year old sons at a recruiting station with a suitcase. It just doesn't work very well anymore
I wonder if this was more common when there was a lack of recruits around the mid 2000s? At that time, they drastically reduced the qualifications to join the military, including lowered test scores.
One of the things they learned from that experience was that it was not worth it to lower the standards so much, even if they didn't have enough candidates otherwise.
Interesting. While I understand that there are highly-skilled jobs in the military, my impression was that they also had a bunch that were basically just relatively unskilled. Like, all branches of the military need cooks, most need truck drivers, etc.- how high can the standards be for a cook?
An army chef (for example. The same holds true of other branches, but I am most familiar with army) is army first, chef second. They are required to complete the same boot camp as any other soldier. They are expected to be able to support operational and logistics tasks as well as physically cook food. Even if, in practice, the guy is just cooking the meals every day and never sees combat or gets assigned to any more complex tasks, they are expected to be ABLE to do so. You could reasonably argue that this is excessive, and there's nothing wrong with just hiring someone to be a cook without making them be a soldier too, but that's not how it is currently done (to my knowledge)
Surprisingly high. You've got to understand that the military has no static positions; every job in the military should be thought of as an onramp to a full career. Here's your average career path for a cook in the Coast Guard:
Enter into service as an SNCS - spend roughly 2 years peeling potatoes and assisting with prepwork and cleaning the galley.
After 1-2 years doing that, become a CS3. At this point you are actively planning and overseeing individual meals. You'll also begin learning how to set up purchase orders and planning out how to meet the crew's long-term dietary requirements.
2-4 years of doing that and you'll make CS2. You are either going to be fully responsible for a small galley (maybe serving between 6-12 people) or, if you work in a larger galley, you'll be overseeing a team of 5-10 SNFS and CS3s. You'll begin assisting with budget work and while you likely won't have purchase authority, you'll eventually be doing most of the logistical heavy-lifting. You should be able to put together a list of purchases that the guy who controls the money will be able to approve without having to second-guess your work.
2-4 years doing that and now you're a CS1. At this point, you will either be running a mid-sized galley (12-50 people) or leading a team at a large galley. You'll have direct purchasing authority that could go up into a few hundred thousand dollars annually and you'll be expected to be able to fully handle food logistics for your team. You'll likely have somewhere between 5-20 people who, in some way, report to you.
After that, they either generalize and become logisticians who oversee purchasing of everything, not just food, or are expected to run increasingly complex operations.
So, there isn't a position for a guy who's just going to hang around and peel potatoes for 5 years. If I can't look at a person entering as a cook and see myself trusting them with $100k in a decade or so, why would I want to recruit them?
> high-testosterone young men who are committing minor crimes are probably the same demographic as who makes up the average soldier- they are all typically not from great neighborhoods.
This actually isn't the case, at least not entirely. Sure, they're from the same demographic but the people who join the military are the people within those demographics that are trying to get out. I can say from firsthand experience that your average military recruit from a bad neighborhood is of much higher quality than their neighbors.
>The US always has issues with military recruitment
This definitely isn't the case. The army hit its recruiting targets every year from 2005-2018 (although they did drop required test scores during that period). The pandemic has thrown a wrench into this process, but in general the modern military seems to be getting all the people it needs. At least, that is, in terms of raw numbers. What the military increasingly wants is technical specialists (or people who test high enough to indicate they could be trained into technical specialists.) This group, unfortunately, doesn't include many otherwise convicts.
> Did those types of guys end up not being great soldiers?
In short, yes. We don't need overwhelming numbers of people in the military and, even if they don't actively continue their felonious behavior, it just requires more supervision to handle those types than it does someone who's motivated to be there.
I don't think this is often an option. You're automatically disqualified from service if you've ever committed a crime, ever taken a psychiatric drug, ever been to any kind of counseling other than relationship counseling. Waivers can be granted when there is enough of a need that the military can't fill its billets without granting waivers, but no judge has the power to force a branch of service to grant a waiver if they weren't already going to.
If this was allowed back in the draft era, it's because the military didn't have similar enlistment requirements to what it now has.
Has anyone else noticed an increased societal obsession with food spoilage? (I'm in the US).
Seems like the over the past ten years or so, many people have started believing that if you leave food on the counter for more than 15 minutes, it immediately turns into poison. And expiration dates are treated as if they were handed down by god. I work with an animal-rescue organization, and they routinely throw away unopened containers of food (both canned food and dry food) as soon as the expiration date passes. This policy makes me very sad, but I'm unable to change it. Back about 15 or 20 years ago, I just don't remember people being very worried about this kind of stuff. Myself, I barely think about it. My kitchen cupboard is filled with condiments that are labeled "refrigerate after opening". And I remember my dad (who absolutely HATED wasting food) searching through the back of the 'fridge for containers of old food, which he would proceed to eat. As far as I know, I've only had food poisoning once, and that was after eating in a dodgy-looking restaurant Moscow.
My gut says that this just reflects what seems to be a general trend towards covering liability. If you feed someone expired food and they get sick, you could be liable. I think this sort of liability blocking tends to filter into a lot of aspects of life, even where it doesn’t make sense.
But as a disclaimer, liability tends to be my pet Theory of Everything, so take me with a grain of salt.
I suspect that the USDA tends to be right about cheese; as someone who leaves cheese out not infrequently, I can say that uncooked cheese can get pretty weird after a couple of hours of being left out (I did get sick from this once as anecdotal evidence). But, cooked cheese doesn’t seem to have this issue as much, so whatever wrt pizza I guess, though it would make me cautious personally.
Also to note my apartment tends to be ~80 Fahrenheit which is probably particularly inhospitable to cheese.
Great blog post. Reminds me of arguments with my wife (who is quite paranoid about food safety), where she says to me, "Hey, YOU'RE the one with the background in science. You, of all people, should realize the dangers of eating old food. What are you, some sort of anti-vaxxer, as well?"
I think at this point "pro-science" is really very wrapped up in "defers to authority for a lot of people". That's to be expected, since most people aren't scientists so the most a lot of them are capable of is "here's this article from someone official; that settles everything forever".
I've been trying to show different predictable, basically mechanical reasons certain kinds of science can be expected to be wrong on a regular basis. Here the USDA can either be right, correctly communicate the information and perhaps at some point get in trouble. Or they can be wrong/not look into it at all and CYA. They are never not going to take the latter; there's no reason for them to.
This isn't a huge deal with pizza (you just throw out some edible food), but it's a really big deal with, say, FDA drug approvals.
I would guess it is due to some combination of a) the internet amplifying the perceived likelihood of unlikely outcomes relating to food safety; b) increasing safetyism; c) liability concerns; and d) the general trend you point out where people are more likely to outsource both conventional wisdom and personal judgment to outside authorities.
A cow-orker of mine came in one Monday and noticed leftover pizza from Friday's office meeting had been left out on the conference table all weekend. He said "I have an iron stomach" and had it for lunch - no problem ;-)
The amount of happy this anecdote makes me <i>can't be healthy</i>.
On a more serious note, I think this is the best argument for old pizza being safe; people do this constantly. If old pizza was dangerous even to a level we could reliably quantify, the cemeteries would burst with our dead.
I don't see this as strong evidence. Sure, if it were likely to kill you, we'd know. However, something many people do could easily give you, say, a 1 in 500 chance of spending a day or two vomiting and having diarrhea. Depending on your finances and the value of the food in question, it may not be worth it; and, for a restaurant, it's an easy way to gain a bad reputation. And, since you often don't know what food has given you a disease, people might keep doing it without realizing which of their eating or hygiene practices are too risky to be worth it.
(A note about your article: I've skimmed it. It seems like it's rambling with stories, railing against "deference to authority"—what it doesn't do is actually collect evidence from various sources about what risks possibly-spoiled meat carries, and how large (or how tiny) these risks are. For me, this sort of article is too much reading for too little substance.)
I think by and large the aim of the article and what you wanted out of the article are at odds. You hand-wave "deference to authority" as a worthwhile thing to write an article about - I don't agree; I think it's a fine thing to write an article about.
For what it's worth I think I did sufficient work here for that goal - I showed the USDA is using a general catch-all to promote a very extreme standard without justification. I defined a very narrow pizza concept and looked into each ingredient and, outside of the two ingredients that are for-sure fine in that situation, found very little to support their extreme demand or to overrule the massive amount of anecdata showing this isn't a very big deal.
I'm not responding to the "1 in 500 chance of food poisoning" argument because it's an isolated demand of rigor - you are OK positing a food poisoning chance and proceeding as if it's true, yet I've done 100 times that work and mine is not sufficiently supported.
"you are OK positing a food poisoning chance and proceeding as if it's true": I haven't assumed it was true, I said that a particular argument didn't disprove it.
I noticed it too, especially when I was confronted to US and UK cooking culture (I'm French). The only time I've ever heard about cross-contamination in France was when I was trained at McDonald's. Outside of that, I've always cut meat and vegetable on the same surface, cooked them after and never got food poisoning. Compare that to I think it was a Jamie Oliver cookbook, that starts talking about food safety, cross-contamination, that you should was everything during cooking to avoid cross-contamination. Same deal with raw chicken: I often eat pieces of not totally cooked chicken when cooking it, and I never had salmonella. On the other hand, Americans seem to believe that chicken is very dangerous. The thing the sibling comment mentioned about the overnight pizza is also very weird to me. I don't see how overnight pizza could carry any dangers, especially since overnight pizza is usually very "dry", and dry food stores well.
Maybe it's a cultural thing? I know that when fuzzy white mold develops on food I tend to cut and throw away that part but still eat the rest, and I've never had issues with it. Maybe it's a scale issue, and I'll be fine all my life but one in X persons that do that will die? I have no idea.
As an anecdote, the only two times I got food poisoning was when eating out in a "kebab", and when eating uncooked beans (I think people underestimate the danger of not properly cooked beans, especially compared to things like raw meat).
On the other hand, if you're talking about organizations, I understand that they follow the rules as closely as they can because you can get sued. When I worked at McDonald's, we had a special bin called the "traceability bin", where we throw away all things that have traceability information on them, so that if anything happens we can easily search through them. All the things that we used were on a timer, and when the timer expires they have to be thrown away. That seems reasonable in a restaurant.
Food is genuinely more dangerous in America (and, to a lesser extent, Canada) than in most of Europe. I'm an immigrant from North America to Europe, and I started looking into this when I realised that no one around me was particularly concerned about, say, rare hamburgers or eggs, and also that I didn't know anyone who had gotten food poisoning (whereas it was a fairly regular occurrence in North America) - that said, when it comes to formal stats, the methodologies aren't fully comparable between countries so it's hard to be confident and the differences may be overstated (albeit they do align with my personal experience).
> Same deal with raw chicken: I often eat pieces of not totally cooked chicken when cooking it, and I never had salmonella. On the other hand, Americans seem to believe that chicken is very dangerous
There's a pretty easy difference there. FDA allows rates of up to 20% of chickens in a farm to have salmonella, EU target levels are about 1% (https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/salmonella). I imagine most people aren't really aware of differing standards, so just classify foods as dangerous/safe by category
I haven't particularly noticed a change in recent years (except for the past year's increase in concern with hand-washing and sanitizing surfaces) but it's possible I've missed such a change.
But also, food has been growing more abundant and cheaper, which may be decreasing the pressure of thrift and conservation that push against whatever minor concerns about food poisoning there are.
(Also, I just had food poisoning a couple weeks ago - first illness I've had since the start of the pandemic. Would not recommend. I've had it about four times before, possibly once from old pasta sauce and once from home-baked cookies, but all other times almost certainly from restaurant food.)
My depression-era grandparents, who lived in a particularly poor area of the country, had food saving techniques that would probably make everyone on this substack cringe. They didn't really have enough food, so waste was not an option. They also didn't have electricity, let alone refrigeration, so food saving was going to be naturally different than today. As one more banal example, they would leave leftovers from breakfast or lunch on the kitchen table with an upside-down plate on it. Bread, meat, vegetables, whatever. Then it would be eaten at dinner. Based on habit over many years, this is also how they handled leftovers for the rest of their lives.
My grandmother kept an old coffee pot on the stovetop full of grease (mostly from cooking bacon). When she was cooking she would pour some of the grease into the pan she was using. The grease served the purpose that we might use cooking oil for today, but she would also deep fry chicken or potatoes in it. When she finished cooking she would pour the old grease back into the pot.
Damn, that IS pretty gross. But if that's the worst thing, then I doubt any of those habits would put them at extreme risk of food poisoning. Cancer, on the other hand...
Yeah, the cost of throwing out food is comparatively trivial for people in western developed countries. So even tiny chances of food poisoning are not worth it on the cost benefit analysis
Its a fairly logical cost benefit analysis. Food in the west is very cheap, the harms of getting food poisoning are proportionately very large. (1 dollar worth of food say, vs several hundred dollars in lost income and opportunity costs). So even when its excessive it makes sense to be risk averse.
I would say that at a certain level of brokeness this becomes a much bigger deal than you think - if you have just enough money to afford meals, losing food seems less trivial. I was never there a long time, but I've been that low before.
The more common problem for me in the past would have been something like "lessening the value of a rare treat", which is harder to quantify but seems important in my head.
Absolutely! I wonder if the growing fear of spoiled foods among Americans doesn't go along with the whole germaphobic obsession that has been developing in US over the past couple of decades. On the other hand, the germaphobia movement correlates fairly well with the marketing of cleaning products' germicidal properties. (For instance, instead of calling bleach bleach, it's being marketed as "germicidal bleach" — but bleach has always been germicidal!) Anyway, I'm pretty sure this has made everyone aware of that <gasp!> germs are everywhere! (Meanwhile we're putting selective pressure on pathogens to build up resistance to these products.)
As for the fear of food spoilage, the proximal causes certainly aren't obvious to me. But people seem to take those expiration dates as the gospel truth! And I find the expiration dates on canned foods to be ludicrous. As an aside, my grandfather purchased a huge batch of surplus Korean War B rations (purchased some time in the late 1950s, but they were KW surplus so they were pre-C rations). We would take them on camping trips. We were still eating those B rations well into the early 70s. None of us ever got food poisoning (although my grandfather warned us to check the integrity of the can before dining on those B rations). To this day I have special place in my comfort food memories for B rations.
But to *not* answer your question, I have no idea why the young'uns are so worried about food spoilage.
I don't think it's possible for pathogens to develop resistance to soap, alcohol, or bleach - these operate in a very simple way to destroy basically *everything* that lives.
Antibiotics work by very different mechanisms that are targeted to certain classes of bacteria, and work at extremely low concentrations, and resistance to those *is* possible (although there are some exceptions - for instance, I've heard that there are no known documentations of any strain of syphilis with any resistance to the mechanism by which penicillin works).
Don't take my word for it. Google it, bro! Bacteria have proven to be capable of adapting to conditions that are more extreme than most eukaryotes can deal with. With short reproductive cycle and genomes that favor high mutation rates, bacteria seem to be able to selectively adapt to all sorts of astounding conditions.
And I can't find a link to an actual scientific study, but it's been commonly know for years bacteria have adapted to living in the reactors of nuclear power plants. A popular media article will have to suffice...
I am looking for books or other media about innovations and development in the early history of plumbing (Roman and/or Medieval). Also information (possibly from same source) detailing methods and procedures used in building aqueducts. Ideally something with at least a partially visual component. Thanks!
I'm noticing that most of the disagreements in my life, both those I have personally with others and those I observe in popular culture, don't seem to be disagreements around conclusions but rather disagreements on severity.
IE, pick something controversial. I don't think that mentioning January 6th as being bad is too controversial for an open thread. I don't run into anyone claiming that Jan 6 was good, but I see endless reams of disagreements over precisely how bad it was, ranging from it being a meaningless riot to it literally almost being the downfall of American democracy. (Please don't debate this in this thread, this isn't what this post is about.).
I don't know how to settle these kinds of disagreements. If I'm disagreeing with someone on a factual matter, it gets resolved by us going to primary sources we trust and finding out what the truth of the matter is. If I'm debating theoretical outcomes with someone (IE, what would happen if we did X or Y), we each propose models and then try to figure out who's model will most likely be realistic. I might not always come to an agreement, but I've at least got known pathways to try and find a resolution.
Severity arguments, on the other hand, seem unresolvable. We can both materially agree on every fact of the matter, yet still vehemently disagree on outcomes. Furthermore, these arguments end up being self propagating ("Well, if it wasn't such a big deal, than why is everyone talking about it?") Does anyone have a good strategy for how to approach these kinds of issues productively?
I suppose if you imagine a counterfactual in which the rioters were successful in their aims and Trump received another term, his fans would treat it as the triumph of democracy over a stolen election a la the "Color Revolutions" we sometimes see in other countries. Then it would be "severe" as in impactful, but good. Since it failed, it can't really be regarded as both good and impactful.
I think this is where utilitarianism comes to the rescue.
As you point out, the statement "January 6th was bad" is pretty incontrovertible. But the question you are interested in settling is "how bad was it?" The only way to meaningfully answer this is with the follow up question: "compared to what?"
For sure, this approach will not settle the issue (people will disagree on the relative badness of things), but it will give you a principled way to approach the question. Additionally (and this is one of the things I like about utilitarianism), it forces you to focus on actual harm and ignore all of those "is bad for symbolic reasons" arguments that only serve to confuse people.
So, how bad was January 6th? In hindsight, maybe better than the Charlottesville riot but worse than the Kavanaugh apointment to the Supreme Court. (I'm not sure whether I'd agree with this range, but it sort of sounds plausible).
I don't think you have to completely sell people on Utilitarianism for this to be effective. If you can convince someone to marginally move towards utilitarianism, i.e., convince them that some utilitarian consideration is important to assess the importance of the severity.
I myself am not sold on utilitarianism, but I people should be more utilitarian on the margin.
The problem with that is that the controversial things tend to be long term effects, that we can't easily measure just now. So we agree that the number of deaths on Jan 6th was small. But if the consequence of that is that more and worse incidents like it happen in the future, then it will have much bigger negative effects. So we end up in an argument about the relative probabilities of different future outcomes, which will rely on beliefs about the way politics functions that are probably controversial. People who are arguing it is bad tend to be implicitly saying it will have large negative long term effects, or that it will have those unless a countervailing force prevents it.
Talking the discussion to the utility plane does will not by itself solve the problem, but it helps by taking the disagreement to factual grounds. In the Jan 6th example, we might have different priors about the long-run effects of the capitol attack, but at least we have clarity on what it is that we disagree on, and we can look for evidence that may help us update those priors towards some point of agreement.
Again, of course this will not solve the problem, but I think it is more likely to be fertile ground for discussion.
Proposition: I am 90% confident that making Buffalo Hat Guy Speaker of the House would be no worse than any randomly selected Democrat (or Republican were they in majority.)
I've noticed the same problem and would also be interested in a solution to better discussing these issues. I think the problem is far more widespread than is generally recognized.
In fact, I think it encompasses almost all disagreements. We tend to try to convert severity disagreements into factual disagreements (the source of the "believe the science" rhetoric, among other political memes), but at core most are still severity disagreements. Immigration, for instance, is a good example. Conservatives (or, very few) are not in favor of 0 immigration, and Liberals (or again, very few) are not in favor of completely open borders. We want to find the right number of immigrants to allow in, and the right process for doing so. That's not a fact-based disagreement, but severity. One side arguing for X and the other side arguing for X+/- 50% isn't really much of a disagreement in principles, but it's one of our major political debates.
Even really big issues that seem completely fact based, like abortion, are mostly severity debates. The two most coherent positions - "no abortion ever" and "abortion should always be allowed regardless of timing" are actually both minority positions. Not even a plurality likes either position. What people seem to want is abortions allowed if early enough in the pregnancy, but not later. Recent laws and the current push is about defining when that line should be drawn (fetal heartbeat, pain, viability, etc.). It's a severity debate for most people.
I think a key in helping these discussions is moving away from charged rhetoric and calling your opponents evil/Literally Hitler when trying to figure out solutions. Recent Woke condemnations of American society are so broad that it's hard not to feel personally attacked by them. Similarly, for arguing in favor of better regulation, the left gets called Socialists and accused of all the evils of Socialist countries. Recognizing racism past and present is important, and that's obvious for both the left and the right. Having regulations is also important for a smooth running society, and is recognized by the left and the right. The fact that we hype rage about these and most other topics is not beneficial to running a good society.
There's something I don't understand. You say that you can easily debate theoretical outcomes with someone, but you have a hard time debating the severity of something. Aren't those the same thing? To continue with your example, if someone is saying that Jan 6 is the downfall of American democracy, how do they justify this? Do they usually point to sources saying that for example, people lost confidence in democracy a lot after the event?
I think what I'm getting at is, if judging the severity of something is judging its consequences, I don't see how it's that different from discussing the theoretical outcomes, which you seem able to do. Maybe that's a problem of people dropping all rational arguments when it comes to severity because the problem isn't framed in a way that a rational response is required?
Or maybe it's an expression of the fact that it's really hard, in general, to see what influenced what. For example, is it as hard for you to discuss recent events and their influence than it is to discuss old events?
I agree that these are similiar debates, but experientially they play out very differently.
Let's take "Would there still be slavery in the South if the confederacy had won?" as the theoretical debate (just had this one with a friend recently). The conclusion we eventually came to was, "It would have stuck around for a while, but probably wouldn't be around today." The way that we tested this claim was by looking at other slaveholding nations and seeing what happened with them and then imagining a theoretical slave-holding state in the eras of anti-imperialism, communism, and anti-apartheidism. We eventually both agreed that the system would have been too unstable to have made it through the 20th century. So, in this theoretical outcome debate, we imagined a change and then worked through the result of that change based on other verifiable information.
Sure, this might be an artifact of not being able to ascertain historical consensus around recent events, but it still feels different. When we debated going into Iraq, there were two camps - one thought it was a good idea, the other didn't. Both could make compelling arguments as to why they were correct.
Following your example, I think a difference is in the moral values of the people participating. I assume (and may be wrong) that both you and your friend consider slavery wrong, while for Iraq, some considered it wrong and some considered it right. For example, people that value the influence of the US a lot and believe that the US is generally doing the right thing may agree more easily with going into Iraq than other people. If that's correct, then the hard thing about debates about severity may be that they happen because they're a way to have a debates of opinion, which are different from debates about facts.
I argue that these arguments are inherently unresolvable, as the question "how bad is it?" automatically brings up emotional associations, as per Jonathan Haidt's "Elephant and Rider" model (in which logic provides direction but emotion provides impetus, and thought without emotion is impossible). It's been discussed previously that different people have imaginations of different intensities, and I suspect that the same is true of emotions- that some people feel emotions more intensely than other people, or that one person might be sensitive to happiness but not much to anger, and another person might be the reverse.
Obviously, to resolve any disagreement at all you have to be extremely reasonable yourself, and have and extremely reasonable dance partner.
Then, for these disagreements, you just want to start asking questions. Why was it so bad? What other situations would you compare it to? Why was it worse than situation x? Why to you rank value y so highly?
At the end, you'll probably come out with a better understanding of the person, and hopefully your own fundamental values. But obviously these questions are extremely nebulous, so it's not like refuting a fact.
I think this impression might come from a bubble in which most of the people you talk to agree with you about facts, so severity is the only thing left to talk about.
For perspective, the latest Reuters poll says 35% of Republicans believe the Jan 6th thing was a false flag attack carried out by left-wing activists. So there's plenty of disagreement about the facts out there, if you go looking for it.
We're living in a very tribal time, facts and truth are less important, many times, than holding up the flag for your side. By holding up the flag I mean showing support for your side. I was reading a Quillette piece yesterday, "Truth, Polarization, and the Nature of Our Beliefs". which I couldn't finish because I felt like the title should be, "Why can't Republicans agree with what I'm saying?" I could point out a number of Democratic 'flags'; trust science, black lives matter, pro-choice, any good word about Trump. Where to not show support for your side, (I'm assuming you lean more left) invites the wrath of the left. If a topic to debate is very important to you, then I would recommend first trying to understand the other's side of the debate. Listening first. And then trying to explain why the topic is so important to you and your reasons. It's probably impossible to have that type of debate online. One on one in a bar or coffee shop. (If the topic is not important to you, then why debate it?) (Jan 6th is not that important to me, I'm glad more people weren't killed or injured, and full marks to the Republicans who supported the impeachment vote, I hope some survive the wrath of the right.)
I think you have to taboo words like 'severity', and ask the other person what they actually mean in concrete terms.
Are they saying this event is morally very evil in it's own right? Are they saying they predict it to have consequentialist outcomes that are very bad, an could they spell out precisely what several of them could be with probability ratings? Ar they saying this thing isn't that bad but it could only happen in a system where the rot has already set in, and if so can they talk more about what the rot is and what it could lead to as they see it? Etc.
You can't have a good conversation about 'how bad is this thing, 1-10' because something can be bad in many ways and for many reasons, and if you're talking about different senses of 'bad' then you're talking past each other. Taboo those words and get at how you are both judging severity here, and what assumptions underlay that judgement.
Every political movement in history has been convinced that they are rationally and impartially assessing the evidence and coming to the correct beliefs based on that. And that everyone else is motivated by emotion and ideology. So I'm a tad sceptical of "no but we really mean it this time it is definitely true for us and not every other past example"
This is more of a concrete tactic than an overall strategy, but I’ll throw it out there. For the sake of an example, I’ll use Jan 6.
When someone thinks Jan 6 is worse than I do, I bring out examples of times the capitol was bombed/invaded in the past. Most of them were quickly forgotten and had no real impact.
When I have to argue the other side, I use a similar tactic. Basically it’s just [bring up relevant examples]->justify that they’re similar->show that their fallout corresponds to your opinion of degree of severity.
And if the examples you find seem to have more/less severe impact than you thought, adjust your own opinion accordingly.
The this lists a few besides the war of 1812, including bombings in the mid-late 1900s. Obviously, groups blowing up a bomb in a capitol building is a bit different, but the lower similarity is made up for imo by the fact that we have almost 0 memory of any of them.
The most similar events seem like the Puerto Rico Independence shooters, and the Weather Underground and ARU bombings. I would note that those all had much fewer people involved, didnt target any congresspeople in particular, and had no clear objective beyond making a statement. But that's me making assumptions about what would have happened if the rioters had actually reached the representatives.
While I’d be happy to explain further how I think they relate, the OP specifically requested we not debate this here, so if you want to continue this discussion in another thread, that’s fine, but I’d rather not do so here
Yeah I'd recommend removing it, as it discloses the author's identity that he has pointedly not disclosed in even his own blog, and also undercuts his effort to unravel his research in a series of smaller posts.
I found that vaguely terrifying. If he's correct, it legitimately seems like the inevitable result of rising obesity is either accepting a generally fat human race or invasive brain-chemistry altering drugs becoming widespread.
Good point. Here's how I see the difference: anti-depressants are corrective. Something is wrong with the brain chemistry of the afflicted individual and anti-depressants serve to return the person back to "normal."
This feels different than the kind of solution I think Slime Mold is pointing at. We'd be looking for some kind of intervention that either makes food less enticing or (more realistically) takes the normal Lipostat level of most of the population and knocks it down X percent. Sure, this might bring it in line with where it was one hundred years ago, but this feels different than anti-depressants.
I'm less confident about this than I was before your post though. Thanks for broadening my opinion on this.
I think the part where I disagree with you is the "normal" level of lipostat. If it makes people obese, I wouldn't consider it normal, and I would consider it a failure of the body to do its job to help us be healthy. Your point about making food less enticing makes me wonder if advertising is playing some role here. Maybe your brain is tricked into thinking that it needs some food or more food to be satisfied? I'm not sure about how to test this hypothesis though.
See Scott's review of "The Hungry Brain" back on SSC.
Short version: junk food is designed to be supernaturally delicious and subnaturally satisfying, because the manufacturers get money from you eating huge quantities of it. All food manufacturers have this incentive, but processed food can be better-optimised for these criteria because the manufacturer has more degrees of freedom.
Oh, I thought it was very hopeful. With an apology for stealing the authors thunder, I think part 3 will hypothesize that we started chemically screwing with ourselves back sometime in the 70's. And if we can start focusing on what those chemicals might be, rather than other stuff (diet, exercise, etc... not that those aren't important to health but that they don't explain the world-wide fat problem.) Then maybe we can all shed some of these extra pounds... or at least stop our descendants ingesting said chemicals.
I've definitely been wondering about this. But if this is the proper explanation, then it seems like there would at least be anecdotal cases of "I took antibiotics for (strep throat/gonorrhea/whatever) and then suddenly gained 30 points in the next few months".
Have you read the slime mold's posts? The list of chemicals has to be something that we started using ~1970 (could be earlier) And it has to be used with food. (If it's in the air or water, there would be more wide spread signs in the animal and human populations not exposed to our diet.) Unfortunately the number of new chemicals we started using around then is vast. (plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, hormones, anti-biotics...) And it could be a combo of things. plants with fertilizer X stored in plastic jars made for Y. Or more than one 'thing', chemical. One commenter on the slime mold's site mentioned microwaves. Heating up something in plastic dishes in the microwave activates some hormone? It's a big list, but as is often said, sometimes science is first asking the right question. (Well and someone has to hear/act on your question... this idea is not new.)
> If he's correct, it legitimately seems like the inevitable result of rising obesity is either accepting a generally fat human race or invasive brain-chemistry altering drugs becoming widespread.
Climate change and soil erosion will lead to famines and will eventually curb the behaviours that permit obesity to flourish with few short-term downsides.
Thanks for the articles, they were really interesting. A few things that I'd like to see explored:
- Different types of sugar/fat. I've seen some people argue that it's the fructose that's making us fat or the saturated fat.
- Stress, either directly or eating as a coping mechanism.
I'm sure they won't be the explanation or even an explanation, but it would be nice to have them ruled out.
From a more personal point of view, as an obese person, I feel at a loss about what to do. I've read and learned a lot about nutrition the last few years, and there hasn't been any positive impact on my body weight. If anything, that's the opposite. I feel like a lot of this is due to low self-discipline, but I don't see how to solve this. As a person, it's easy to tell myself "I should do more X" or "I should be more Y", but at the same time I can't imagine this being useful advice if I gave it to someone else.
Is the increase in obesity in the general population in the United States entirely correlated with cohorts of obese children reaching adulthood, or have people born before 1960 undergone similar changes in adult obesity? Have recent cohorts of children from the period with less increase "made up" the lost increase in obesity in adulthood, or have they stabilized as well? Are there similar trends in childhood obesity in other countries, possibly with different years?
Have you considered using a CGM? I found the freestyle libre to be incredibly useful at losing weight. It turned out that some of the conventional advice on nutrition didn’t work that way for me. I did a lot of experimentation with different foods and within a few weeks discovered what foods worked with my body chemistry. For example, I had usually tried to keep a mostly vegetarian/Mediterranean diet. Turns out my optimal energy and blood sugar is with a Keto style diet. Meat and veggies. Not hard to do once you get used to it and doesn’t leave you hungry. It’s very helpful to have real time data, as well as the charts that show trends etc.
Technically you need a prescription but target sold it to me anyway. Later my doc agreed to write the prescription since it had such obvious results on weight.
These are very interesting, but some of these results I just don’t believe. I simply don’t believe more people get more exercise now than they did 20 years ago. It strikes me as lies from self-reported data.
What I also found weird is statements like "you think sugar is bad? Look at this tribe. It has a lot of sugar but is not fat". It's possible that that tribe has a genetic or lifestyle factor that precludes it from getting fat on sugar, and hence this fact may not be true for the global population. I don't know if an attempt was made to establish a control group
Yeah. It seems to me impossible that tribe could get as much sugar as an obese America and also that they would ever walk/exercise as little as an American. I just can’t believe it. «This tribe eats a lot of honey and gets some refined sugar fro, trade » strikes me as so far from an American.
I'm a non-mexican Latin American who went to the US for grad school and recently moved to Mexico City for work. Anybody based in Mexico City who'd be interested in starting a community/hang-out-group here?
Inspired by another person in this thread talking about looking for CS work
My eldest son is now legally an adult and looking to leave the nest, so to speak, in the near future. He's a CS major currently working on an internship that has been heavily hinted will turn into a full-time offer upon graduation next June and where he has been promised a significant raise once he goes back to school in the Fall to keep working part-time. It's a systems analyst role and it appears he does a lot of debugging.
I am a math/stats/MBA combo who dabbled in computers for fun - I know enough FORTRAN to be dangerous - but who otherwise has no idea how to advise him in terms of the various subspecialties of CS or even what sort of experience would be best from a monetary, personal fulfillment or combo thereof. In short, I'm out of my depth. It's possible systems analyst work is a dead-end specialty, or it could be a great start for a kid who is barely 18 making his way into CS.
Some details on #1 Son: He aced the SAT at age 15 (1580/1600) and I've struggled to keep him challenged ever since. I'm not looking for miraculous omniscience so yes, proper guidance will be dependent upon his interests but I still want to help him avoid pitfalls that may frustrate him 3 or 5 or 10 years from now. He's generally interested in computers, programming and solving complex puzzle-type things. He's also quiet and introverted but not autistic (with all the positives and negatives that connotes - I do have another son heavily on the spectrum).
Any general advice that can help him out? or further questions I can answer to help me help him?
Also, if it matters: I'm first-generation college. My grandfather came over from the Old Country and his family was super duper poor. My Dad worked the line for 40 years and retired - still alive and kicking at age 93. I majored in chemical engineering but haven't used it one day in my life because I went to Carnegie-Mellon for a Ph.D. program and realized I hated it, so I dropped out after a year. But I chose the path I did because I looked up (ca. 1990, and with zero guidance from family and others) what paid the most and hey, chemical engineering was # 1, so that was a sensible thing to major in, right? Not the greatest process in retrospect and I'm trying to figure out how to save him from several years of wasted grief as well.
This might not be the answer you're looking for, but from your description it sounds like he's doing great professionally. If he's getting a good degree, has a good job while he's pursuing said degree and looks on track to graduate on time with a steady job, he's ahead of 95% of his peers. If he later decides not to stick with that, he's still got a degree and some quality work experience. This still puts him ahead of around 90% of his peers. Maybe make sure that he keeps a good balance between work, education and personal life, but other than that I think he's on track for success.
For specific advice, make sure he understands personal finance. Makes sure he understands what living alone (or with non-familial roommates) entails. Make sure he knows how to spot red flags in potential girlfriends/boyfriends that will inevitably cause a bunch of heartbreak down the line. In short - make sure the basic dad stuff is handled and that he knows he can always come to you for professional advice.
Agreed. I hit all financial topics and personal finance super duper hard - they can all spit off financial tips and tricks, budgeting, the dangers/opportunities involving debt, investment options, asset allocation, etc.
Romance... well yeah. If anyone has the secret sauce there I'm all ears.
If he wants to crank out money as fast as possible, Wall Street always wants smart people and will pay whatever's necessary to get them. Demanding hours and lots of stress but at his stage of life, I would've done fine with that.
Not sure he has the kind of smarts they're looking for. My roommate in MBA - I went to Ohio State - had to beg JPMorgan for a job in the late 90s because he wasn't from one of the platinum tier MBA programs. Maybe it's different now, but it seems like the kind of thing where you need the connections and the pedigree. Regretfully, my son will have neither. Do you have any info to the contrary?
The market for "Wall Street MBA" and "Wall Street Programmer" are very different markets. Based on word of mouth, if you're capable of writing code, it's much less a connections-game.
Like I said, I don't have any specific experience with Wall Street except the things I hear through word of mouth. The market for entry-level programmers is pretty hot; however, most companies are trying really hard to not hire someone who is going to waste their time for 6 months before being fired. This means they're far more worried about bad hires than turning away someone who is a good hire. This means he'll probably have to apply to a bunch of places and try to get lucky. Use job boards to find the names of companies, but go directly to their websites to apply. Don't be afraid to ask questions before an interview about the content of the interview. Most companies are happy to tell you what you'll be expected to know or do during an interview. My other tip is that contracting firms are way more likely to take a risk on people, especially smaller ones.
Wow, turned out I had more general advice than I thought I did.
Just so we understand, post-MBA investment banking jobs are much less competitive (but also less lucrative) these days. Though I think it would still be a struggle to go into that path from Ohio State, but if you were in maybe a 30th-ranked MBA program, you could probably have a shot getting in anywhere (even if something like Citi would be a much easier leap than Goldman or JPM).
Pre-MBA investment banking is still very elite and competitive and basically required if you ever want to get into private equity and almost required to get into hedge funds. Basically, all doors in business and finance are open to you if you start out in investment banking at an elite firm, but odds are very high you're coming from a very elite undergrad already.
I think the problem is what qualifies as a "good degree". CS is a good degree, sure, but he didn't go to Stanford or MIT or even a Duke or Swathmore. It's a school probably 80% of this board have never even heard of, although it is a private school well-known in my neck of the woods due to a well-established arts program.
Basic Dad stuff is hard because my Father was a typical working class Dad: Work hard, work long and put bread on the table. During times when he was on strike, things could get lean but I never starved. Conversely, I don't think I've had any conversations with my Dad about collegiate stuff other than "study hard" convos in high school.
I do hit personal finance super duper hard primarily because I'm an MBA who is super duper numerate. When it comes to financial strategy and maximizing financial returns, I'm the guy so I preach that gospel everywhere and to anyone who will listen. Even my youngest child can spit off financial adages so it's nice to get confirmation there.
I apologize if this is off-topic, but I'd love to hear some general financial advice, or perhaps be referred some good resources. Context: I'm in grad school, and looking to enter the job market in the next couple of years.
I'm happy to help on the financial advice side, assuming you don't mean related to the job search specifically (i.e. choosing one concentration over another). Ask here or we can figure out a private forum. I'm on Telegram for example if you'd like to reach out there.
I suppose I can ask you my questions here itself, so that other readers may also potentially benefit from them. I will potentially be joining the workforce in a year or so, and maybe buying a house half a decade down the line or something. I have some savings, but not substantial by any means. What are some things that I can do to supplement my income/save more money so as to be able to make myself more financially secure in a time frame of 5-10 years?
1) Eliminate all debt that you can including student loan debt, if possible. If not, eliminate all high-cost debt that doesn't increase your net worth
2) Have a budget. Doesn't need to be hyper detailed, but you should know how much you can spend each month, how much you plan to save and (if applicable) your charitable giving target
3) Focus with laser-like intensity on what you needs vs wants. You probably want to live without roommates, but generally speaking living at home or with 2-3 others will result in much lower living costs, allowing you to save substantially more than solo living. Eating out is a luxury; brown bag everything you can. Minimize transportation costs via public transportation or an older, reliable vehicle as appropriate. Examples can be multiplied - I think you get the idea but feel free to ask follow up questions.
4) Create an emergency fund so that when things happen - and they will - you don't go into high-interest debt. Depending on where you live and if you have family backstopping you, I'd set anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 as an initial goal.
5) Once you have all the above, save money aggressively. A down payment on a home will be (in the USA) at least 5% if not 10%.
6) Find outside work that you enjoy (or at least tolerate) to supplement your activities. This one is harder to give specific advice on since it will depend on your chosen career, but unless you're in an all-encompassing profession you should have some opportunities to take on side work that will generate income to increase your down payment stash.
7) Look into opening a Fidelity, Schwab or (my pick) Vanguard brokerage account. Pick a split between stocks and bonds you feel comfortable with (e.g. 80% stocks, 20% bonds) and put that portion of what you invest in a low-cost total market stock fund coupled with a low-cost total bond fund. Your total expense ratio should be at or under 0.05% (not a typo). If not, keep looking.
8) As you make more money, and you will probably have enormous increases in the first few years out of school, tag 80-90% of the increased pay to saving/giving with the balance towards spending. Your life will be a lot more modest in the short run while your financial independence will grow by leaps and bounds. If that's too high, pick the highest percentage you can tolerate without making your life miserable. But recall that the hedonic treadmill (Google it if needed!) is a thing and after basic needs are met, the marginal return on high-cost spending is disappointingly slim.
Good luck! If this is helpful and you have follow on questions, feel free. This is a (very) stripped down version of what I walk people through on a regular basis and it has helped many people's lives tremendously. I hope it does for you too.
I wouldn't presume to give advice, but I can tell you that I was in your son's position not too long ago and landing an entry level SDE job at a FAANG company directly out of college has worked out well for me. Getting invited to interview requires some luck, but the interview itself is highly formulaic and preparing for it is simple (but not easy!) with resources like Cracking the Coding Interview.
There are downsides: stress, overwork, and the frustrations that come with working in a corporate bureaucracy chief among them. It's a highly-systematized environment which can be frustrating, but it's good if you're the type of person who performs well on standardized tests (provided that you have enough interpersonal intelligence to stay in the good graces of the people who have power over your advancement).
The upside is optionality. BigTech Cos are huge, so if you don't like the first team you land on then you can just transfer after a year and work on something completely different without changing companies. And if you decide you don't like the company, just open your LinkedIn inbox and accept an invitation from one of the many recruiters who will cold email you based purely on your current position.
As far as picking a sub-specialty, I wouldn't worry about it yet unless your son already feels drawn to a particular area and is willing to get a master's degree. Most big companies hire recent CS grads as generalists (usually called SDE or SWE - software development engineer or software engineer) with the expectation that a minority of them will eventually specialize and change titles. If your son is interested in Machine Learning/AI then it'd help to pick up some relevant coursework: probability, statistics, Linear Algebra, etc. Some job postings for Machine Learning Engineers do require a graduate degree in a related field, but I know several engineers who don't have any formal training in AI/ML and have picked up the required knowledge on the job.
If he hasn't gone to a big name college, does this effectively eliminate FAANGs? It's a local small private Midwest school - a good school but if you're not from the Midwest I'd bet heavily that you've never heard of it. He wasn't even old enough to drive when he started college so he's been living at home while studying.
If my Google-Fu is accurate, I'm guessing you're in your late 20s right now and started something new in 2021?
Definitely doesn't eliminate it as an option, though I suspect it will make getting the initial interview harder than if he were at a school like Stanford or MIT. I wasn't involved with the university recruiting programs when I worked at a FAANG co., but AFAICT their resume-harvesting process is semi-automated and is biased towards U.S. schools with prestigious computer science departments. I attended a not-very-prestigious state school and landed my interview by uploading a resume to my university's job portal.
As to your other questions, 1) your Google-Fu is accurate :) and 2) most of the big tech companies have a main campus in the Bay Area with engineering hubs in Seattle, New York, and Boston. Some have new campuses starting to pop up in the South, e.g., Austin, Atlanta, Miami, but there are relatively few positions there compared to the Bay Area. There's always the possibility that remote work will actually stick, but most companies are saying (at least publicly) that everyone's coming back into the office this fall so I wouldn't count on it.
I'll share the in-the-office feedback. I shared the possibility of moving to Silicon Valley last night with him and he was demonstrably unenthused - we have a pretty close family and he has no interest in being (from my analysis) further than driving distance away. He might change his tune based on the challenges and rewards.
Since nobody else in this thread has mentioned it yet, I feel I should point out that getting a job at a FAANG-or-similar is less to do with your education/pedigree and more to do with your ability to ace the very specific and peculiar interview process that all these companies use.
Basically, you need to be able to look comfortable while solving the sorts of problems you'll find on leetcode.com. Spending a few months cranking through leetcode is the best interview prep you can get.
Also, since someone else mentioned Wall Street I'll just add my two cents here, that FAANG is a much better deal than Wall Street these days; you'll get treated better and probably make more money.
You can probably make do with out the premium, or only paying for one month after a few months spent on the free version. The only feature it seems to add that is actually useful is being able to see well documented solutions, but many of the others (debugger and autocomplete in particular) won't be helpful for most coding interviews.
Agreed that you probably don't need premium, I got by with the free plan just fine. I'd also recommend checking out interviewing.io. The mock interviews that I did on that platform were probably the single best investment I made the last time that I was preparing to run the FAANG interview gauntlet. (I don't get any sort of referral kickbacks and I'm not associated with them in any way - just a very satisfied customer).
I went to a terrible school and ended up working at one of those companies for over 2 years. It wasn't right out of school, but was a decade into my career. The problem at these places is that though they are prestigious and pay well, the work is frequently unsatisfying and the internal culture is toxic if you aren't willing to stand up and shout all the left-wing shibboleths.
Not at all. Many immigrants who studied in a no-name college abroad end up working at FAANGs. Generally as long as you have some tech-ish bachelor degree or higher, education isn't a barrier to get into FAANGs, much less into most other companies. There's some fancy research-oriented organisations which are really hard to get into without a good masters or phd (DeepMind comes to, ahem, mind), but those are rare exceptions.
Nope. I went to a well-reputed but non-elite state college (Cal Poly SLO), and I've worked for a FAANG company (Google) as well as a couple non-FAANG big tech companies (Microsoft and Adobe) and I regularly get cold-contacted by FAANG recruiters on LinkedIn.
Microsoft's a very solid place to start, especially if your son would be willing to relocate to the Seattle area where Microsoft is headquartered. Their pay is competitive with FAANG and other Big Tech companies, they do a ton of hiring for college interns and recent graduates, and the culture is very supportive of talented junior employees in a way that fosters professional development.
But overall, any big tech job he can get an entry-level position at is going to be a big boost to opportunities at other tech jobs. One big tech job (FAANG or otherwise) on your resume is a much stronger signal to tech recruiters than a degree from an elite university.
Amazon is the only FAANG/Big-Tech company I'd recommend against. I don't have personal experience with them, but they have a reputation for having a very cutthroat culture and a management style based on firing a few engineers every year to encourage the others.
Google used to be snobby about degrees (both advanced degrees and degrees from top-tier universities) when hiring, largely driven by the founders and a lot of the early employees having graduate degrees from Stanford and ideas about the importance of that getting baked into the company's culture. They made a conscious decision to move away from that (something like 10-15 years ago now) because they did analysis on data from employee performance ratings vs various hiring characteristics and they realized that filtering on advanced degrees and elite universities was leaving $100 bills on the street.
Follow up question I just thought of: Does FAANG work require moving to Silicon Valley? He might be willing to do that but I suspect he would not initially be enthused by the idea.
Definitely doesn't require it. Facebook has allowed permanent remote work. All FAANGs have large hubs outside Silicon Valley, generally at least Seattle area + New York as well as a smattering of smaller offices.
You'll probably make more money and advance your career faster by moving to Silicon Valley, but entry level salary + stock is 190k at Google. You don't really need to move up the ladder to be comfortable.
We live in a VLCOL area. $190k would be close to top 1% money in our neck of the woods. Not that he wouldn't want to advance but if that's the size of the prize, it's certainly worth encouraging. Nothing ventured and all that.
Landing a permanent-remote position at a FAANG as a fresh-out-of-education junior SWE is likely to be tricky unless you're somehow ultra-talented (or a member of a politically-favoured minority). Chances are better if you're willing to move to California, or at least to Seattle/Austin/etc.
Hard to say what qualifies as ultra-talented. My guess is top 1% isn't remotely qualifying, and since the only objective measure he's had is that SAT a few years back he might be OK but he is a white male with no minority status.
My hope is that if it doesn't work for FAANG these reco's will make it easier to get a lucrative job with satisfying work, perhaps locally. Time will tell.
There's a difference between "permanent-remote" which I agree requires being top-top-top-tier talent, and working in a satellite office, which is easy enough. The bigger limitation is whether the work available in the satellite office would match his skillset.
Thinking about this a bit, it sounds like you've done a good job and raised a good son. If you've reached the point where you're unsure of what the right next step is maybe just tell him and let him figure it out for himself. If he learns how to make and take responsibility for his mistakes he'll be miles ahead of many in his generation.
Thanks for the encouragement. I don't want to be a helicopter parent but I could have used some guidance - really any guidance - when I was 18-25. I stumbled into my MBA and it was absolutely life changing, proving that it's better to be lucky than to be good sometimes I guess. I'd like to save him half a decade of his life if I can, but maybe that's the worry all parents have. C'est la vie.
In terms of the company size, I think I agree with the people saying that if you can get into FAANGs it's a very good first career step. Even if you don't like the culture or atmosphere working in a huge company or whatever, a year or two of e.g. Google experience is enough to get almost any other company to at least look at your resume. And for someone who's good at math and good at studying, getting into one of those should be straightforward: as other people said, leetcode.com * few months of work usually do the trick, and neither myself no other people I spoke to used the premium version.
In terms of the specialization area, I think it's pretty hard to get into a truly dead-end job in CS. Maaaaybe things like QA/testing automation, SRE and certain areas of web development (over specialization on front-end, anything to do with PHP) are suboptimal for long-term growth. But none of them is truly dead-end, and most importantly I can't think of any reason why a fresh college grad with a CS diploma would choose to go into any of those, these are the areas usually popular among the people switching to IT from other careers.
Arguably the most popular and definitely most hyped jobs now are those associated with machine learning. At least they often top the lists of most-sought-after professions and everyone I talk to wants to get into this area (I've been through this stage myself as well). This includes any job titles with the words Machine Learning in it, as well as Data Scientist (in many cases, but different organizations can call very different things DS). It's a really interesting area with very, very good perspectives. It generally involves somewhat more math than your regular software development - some times a whole ton more - and, dare I say, often is a liiittle bit closer to research and a liiiitle bit further from engineering in terms of day-to-day work. Which can be an upside or a downside depending on the personal preferences.
Then there's your regular bread-and-butter software engineer, or what is usually called back end engineer. It's probably the closest thing to how people from outside of the industry imagine work in CS. It's a 100% engineering job, and most companies that have any developers will have this role. Also plenty of room for growth, though like with any other tech role, after a certain point you'll have to transition into management to continue to grow. Maybe one can argue that here it happens a little bit earlier than in the ML roles, where there's a little bit more opportunities to be a rock-star individual contributor. But in any case you have to be at least 4-5 years into the career and probably in the top quartile or so before you hit this ceiling.
Finally, full-stack web development. Choose this and you'll never ever have any shred of a trouble finding a job, literally everyone needs one of those. Otherwise very similar to back-end and overlaps with it a lot, just in addition you get to work with user interfaces and all the front-end craziness.
Roles which are further removed from the computers and closer to people, such as Product Management, Business Analysis and such, are probably good in many ways but necessarily not as a starting position for someone with a CS degree and introverted. If he later decides that's what he likes, he can always "rise through the ranks" or convert to one those pretty easily.
DevOps is extremely useful as a secondary specialization, but in my opinion not a good pick as the first and primary one, for someone who can help it (and from what you say looks like your son definitely can).
There's also a bunch of narrow specializations I don't know much about - information security, IoT, physics simulation and many others. I don't know much about those besides the obvious fact that there's lower demand but also lower competition. The rumor has it that infosec is in high demand because it's difficult, boring, and few people are good at it.
And of course this is by no means an exhaustive list or official classification, just a summary of what I've been exposed to over 4 years.
Thinking about future prospects and jobs. Originally wanted to major in philosophy, have carved out a somewhat passable math degree. There's a lot of pressure to go into CS, or CS adjacent positions. Are there still paths which pay me *a* wage to live without going into CS? Like, I'll do it if I have to, but the thought of grinding on something I've barely had any talent for as well as something I'm not even interested in for the next decade or so depresses me.
There are some professions where employers want you to have a degree but don't care which subject. Somebody at your school should know recruiters for those jobs.
Many jobs as per Bullseye's assertion just want someone with a bachelor's degree because it shows a degree of talent and potential. I find this to be unfair to those on the lower end of the income spectrum but it is what it is, which means that any degree you choose to get will give you a leg up for a wide variety of positions. STEM degrees if you like any of those will do even more, since if I'm being honest I was more likely to interview, say, a mathematics or engineering major for an open position than someone who majored in a softer subject. Even at that a person's ability to think critically swamped everything, so getting past the no degree hurdle is a big one especially at larger organizations that slap "degree required" on just about every position.
if you hate CS, don't do CS. I majored in chemical engineering because I thought it was remunerative. And it is. But I hated it. Never used all that time agonizing in lab for 5 years - should have focused on my passions combined with a dollop of "hey, I think I can get work doing this".
Without knowing you well, I'd say get a math degree and minor in philosophy. Or double major if it won't stress you out. You'll have something that looks impressive on paper and your quality of life will be much, much better.
On the subject of preserving books, my father just died and left behind a literal warehouse of old books, and I'd like some advice on what to do with the nice and rare-looking ones beyond taking them to Half-Price. My family needs to get rid of them as the storage is expensive and we just lost our main income source. We've already come across a complete set of the Arabian Nights (already sold) and no telling what else might be in this pile. He had a LibraryThing account and I might make it public. If anyone wants me to look out for any particular genre or title, I will.
My condolences. When my mom died a few years ago, (maybe 1/2 a room full of books), we picked through what we wanted, offered up the rest to friends and family... I then took many boxes down to the nearby used book store. They took about 1/2 of those. The leftovers went to the curb on trash day. It's sad because I figure 1/2 those books on the curb could have found a home. I'm not sure what to do with a warehouse of books? Find some person to go through them, pick out what they can sell on consignment and pitch the rest?
I am a compulsive book buyer. If you are interested and can give me access to any kind of list I will make a fair offer for what is likely to be a bulk purchase.
There's a LibraryThing list which should be mostly accurate, though again we've already sold some of them, and the collection is very large and very disorganized so i can't give a guarantee of any particular book. Is there a particular genre or subject i should keep an eye out for? Also I'd like an idea of the shipping distance- I'm in Texas, where roughly are you?
Related, but probably not helpful to you: My local library takes book donations all year then has a yearly sale over several days of the thousands of donations since they won't take more than a few of those donations for themselves. My understanding is that it is a significant fundraiser for them and well worth the effort. In addition, the library keeps 20-30 linear feet of books for sale on a set of shelves set aside for that purpose throughout the year. I've found some wonderful books at that sale and I understand there are many estate donations that make up a significant portion of the book sale. I've arrived at the point where I must give up an equal amount of shelf space each year to make room for the new ones. Perhaps this is just a small town thing but how handy for whoever gets my estate!
Gah, I kept checking my email for the latest post all last night and I still missed it.
I'm trying to perfect my understanding and develop better concept handles for the Myers-Briggs/FFM behavioral traits. I'm relying a lot on personal experience and social interactions, but the resources that feel most helpful and true to life are coming from the Wikipedia pages Facet(psychology) and Personality Disorder
16personalities.com is marginally useful but I'm growing dissatisfied with it. There's an Oxford Handbook that looks useful and an article on the Evolutionary psychology by Christopher Seemann but both are paywalled.
Psychetypes by Malone takes a rather philosophical approach-- all the types are ways of being normal, but very different ideas about time and space create different types.
For some people, boundaries are very important and for others, things blend into each other.
What's the most important thing about time? Moments of the past or future possibilities or the present or an evenly spaced progression.
Anyone have recommendations for where I can find an online book club or discussion group with good books, smart people and minimal trolls? Preferably reasonably sized.
If you are fine with social justice restrictions and left bias, TPC (the philosophy *cafe*) has a good selection of people who are very into philosophical discussion with several active reading groups. Can't say I've found anything really up to par in terms of discussion outside of that, though.
Did Ancient Egyptians use scarabs holding bioluminescent goo as lamps?
Wiki, bioluminescence: Before the development of the safety lamp for use in coal mines, dried fish skins were used in Britain and Europe as a weak source of light.[2] This experimental form of illumination avoided the necessity of using candles which risked sparking explosions of firedamp.[3] Another safe source of illumination in mines was bottles containing fireflies.[4] In 1920, the American zoologist E. Newton Harvey published a monograph, The Nature of Animal Light, summarizing early work on bioluminescence. Harvey notes that Aristotle mentions light produced by dead fish and flesh, and that both Aristotle and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History) mention light from damp wood. He also records that Robert Boyle experimented on these light sources, and showed that both they and the glowworm require air for light to be produced. Harvey notes that in 1753, J. Baker identified the flagellate Noctiluca "as a luminous animal" "just visible to the naked eye",[5] and in 1854 Johann Florian Heller (1813–1871) identified strands (hyphae) of fungi as the source of light in dead wood.[6]
Wiki, religious significance of scarabs:
In ancient Egyptian religion, the god Ra is seen as the star Sirius, when the star came to the Horizon in the south 15 thousand years ago. Beetles of the family Scarabaeidae (dung beetle) roll dung into a ball.[a] Because of its symbolically similar action, the scarab was seen as a reflection the precession cycle of the star Sirus , and as representing the idea of rebirth or regeneration on its swing in the south as it was viewed.
So. I suggest that if you needed a flashlight or nightlight in Ancient Egypt, you took your scarab amulet and scooped up some glowing goop on the end of it. Why bother with a scoop?
'Tell the Court it shines-
. . .and stinks, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight'
-said Walter Raleigh, and an awful lot of bioluminescent stuff does look like you'd want to avoid grabbing it with bare hands.
Pro: scarabs are repeatedly described as 'ceremonial'. 'Ceremonial' beer mugs, weapons, armor, pictures of naked ladies and so forth are routinely found to have some obvious practical use the archeologist who called them 'ceremonial' should have spotted.
Con: Well, SOMETHING the ancient Egyptians did had to be actually ceremonial, and it's not like I can point to useful prongs or spoony depressions for holding goo in any scarab I've seen pictured.
Comments from anyone who knows something about the subject welcome.
Well, this is an interesting rabbit hole. I started looking into Wikipedia, and the distribution of bioluminescence among organisms is fascinating. It appears in all sorts of "weird" creatures. Also, no plants or mammals have it, yet the feature is likely an example of convergent evolution.
Story about bioluminscent dung beetles suspected from tunnells in dinosaur dung that match the tunnels dug through modern poop by modern dung beetles. So maybe the scarab dung beetles themselves glowed like click-beetles, or like beetle larvae- glowworms. A glowing beetle would make a good light all by itself.
I wonder if the ancient interest in dung beetles has to do with how easy they are to anthropomorphize. In reading about some of their activities[1] I could imagine early biologists creating memes about them, especially because of the taboo subject of poop. It would be easy to make a parable about spending a whole life finding importance in rolling balls that, when you zoom out, turn out to be shit.
Also, the length of Ancient Egyptian civilization is hard to contemplate. Even though their scientific institutions were primitive, they must have approximated modern competence in a few narrow domains due to two thousand years of study. I wouldn't be surprised if Ancient Egyptians knew more about dung beetles than we do today.
It seems to me that billionaires now occupy the same space in the left's cultural consciousness that illegal immigrants once occupied on the right. I wanted to post about that here, but I kept wanting to be able to include images and links which sucks on substack comments, so I posted it here instead: https://chadnauseam.substack.com/p/immigrants-the-right-billionaires
Hmm, I'm under-impressed by billionaires as a group, though that's not the first label I'd use for them. But at the same time, 90% of everything is crap, and that includes the arguments and political tactics of my allies as well as of my opponents. I could certainly see "billionaires" becoming a popular scapegoat, well beyond relevancy, much as "immigrants" have been. (In my experience, those scapegoating them often omit to include the adjective "illegal", and sometimes explicitly target all immigrants.)
Bottom line: I'm not sure whether you are onto something or not. And recently what I see from the US left is most often based on categories other than wealth. Perhaps criticism of growing wealth inequality, and the people on the right side of it, is more merited than scapegoating?
It's an interesting thought, but what's also interesting is that the right seems to dislike billionaires as well.
Kind of related: in my experience, a lot of objection to immigration by the right was just ignorance. I say that as a Republican myself; there definitely was a lot of fear and misunderstanding. I was at a county convention way back, probably 2004 or so, where I helped strike some stupid anti-immigrant language from the county party platform (I haven't been very active since that; very discouraging.)
There are some legitimate concerns, of course. I'm pretty opposed to H-1B visas, but not so much because they drive wages down in tech jobs (which they do) but because I found out how much my friends on H-1Bs were making, and how much power the companies had over their lives. I like immigration in principle, but very much don't like illegal immigration, because of the human costs involved and the damage it does to the rule of law.
Point being: the issues are complex, and the dumb simple answers our parties reach for are largely why our country is so nuts right now.
How would you replace H-1Bs? There's currently no other path to permanent residency, let alone citizenship, for those coming to the country to work, at least AFAIK.
And since I'm posting anyway - can you provide evidence for H-1B's driving down wages in tech jobs? It's logical that increased supply would do this in the presence of constant demand, but that supply also includes people eager to work for US/multi-national companies while remaining in their countries of citizenship, not to mention the option of outsourcing to entirely foreign companies.
What I've see when H1-Bs were harder to get, is that companies increased the size of their offshore operations, rather than increasing what they paid their American tech staff.
Simple answer to replacing H-1Bs is just to loosen up legal immigration. This is obviously very simplistic, and doesn't take into account the incentives for H-1B hiring, which is that large companies who can afford the paperwork can import workers at a lower wage, who are dependent on the company for a path to permanent residence. Without those incentives, maybe the jobs people would immigrate here for would be less available. But my main objection is that H-1B visas are very much like indentured servitude. It benefits companies like Amazon, Disney, Microsoft, Salesforce more than it benefits workers here (In the US) or workers migrating here. I think I want MORE visas for workers, but not tied so much to employment for one company.
You make a really good point about offshore operations expanding. But in my experience, you get a better product from someone onshore. Besides the basics like communication issues and working across time zones, there are cultural nuances, even in software development, that don't translate well. I know many developers, analysts, whatever in other countries who are much better technically, but who don't speak English well or don't understand our clients' needs well. But I know many who came here to the US and did very well. I certainly don't mean that in a jingoistic way, just a very realistic way. I've consulted for clients in other countries where the project didn't go as well because I didn't understand the culture or language (Japan and China in particular, for me.)
I helped ramp up offshore teams for large tech companies in the Philippines and India. The team in the Philippines lasted a year, which was hard and sad. The India team is still trundling along doing OK, but for that company, the big projects go to US teams, leaving the India team with the scraps and never quite getting up to speed. I guess they've got jobs and that company has a pool of resources to take those scraps, but it feels like a lost opportunity. Maybe if we could have more of them here in the US temporarily that team could be more effective? But then you get back to pay scales, and it's difficult to go back to India pay after even H-1B pay in the US, I guess.
I think the effect of H-1B on wages is probably difficult to measure, but I'll look for some evidence. I'm guilty of something I complain of a lot, taking my assumptions as truth here. I'm sure I've read something showing the effect on wages, but can't bring it to mind. All I can remember are anecdotes from acquaintances "training their replacements." So I'll look harder at that. I could see it even having a positive effect on wages: if you can pay some people 1/3 as much as others, you can keep pay high for your locals. But that kind of feels disgusting to me.
My pet proposal for replacing H-1B visas would be to create a work visa category with the following requirements:
1. Visa applicant (if from a non-visa-waiver country) passes a basic background check, similar the the current requirements for a business or tourist visa.
2. Visa applicant or a third party sponsor pays a fee at the time of application comparable to the current cost of sponsoring an H-1B visa in filing+attorney's fees (quick googling suggests this is somewhere in the $5-10k range).
Once the visa is granted, the visa holder has unlimited right to work in the US, same as a citizen or permanent resident, for the duration of the visa. However, they are subject to an additional payroll tax (probably around 5%) in addition to other applicable taxes. The first $X of this payroll tax go towards refunding the fee to the visa holder (if they paid their own fee) or their sponsor until the entire fee has been refunded.
These visas would either be unlimited or capped at a much higher level than the current H-1B limit.
The intent here is to be as close as possible to a Pareto improvement over the current H-1B system, hopefully making it an easier sell politically than just opening up the borders (as my libertarian heart is tempted to prefer). Employer sponsors would pay about the same as they did under the old system in up-front fees, with less delay and uncertainty than under the old system as to when and whether a visa will be granted. Visa applicants also get less delay and uncertainty, without being tethered to a particular employer and with a much better opportunity to command market wages for their skills. The up-front fee replaces credentials and bureaucratic review for filtering for visa-seekers with high-demand high-value job skills, and the payroll tax retains a modest amount of protectionism for US citizens in a hopefully less-burdensome and arbitrary form than the current H-1B system.
Be aware, that with this post you are a victim to the same pattern you are critisizing: providing a punchy argument for the narrative instead of detailed cost benefit analysis. "Billionaires are left scapegoats just as imigrants are right scapegoats" does sound plausible at a first glance. But is it justified? that depends on whether left hatred for billionaires is more justified than rights hatered for immigrants, which you haven't thoroughly checked.
I agree that lefts antipathy for the billionaires is probably neurologically similar to rights antipathy of immigrants. This is an interesting observation about ingroup/outgroup thinking. But if one group is actually much more responsible for problems of the country, this similarity isn't very important.
Also, I believe politicians are constantly saying things akin to: “We know what we need to do, but it’s electorally unpopular, so we can’t do it”. Its a standard partisanship point. We, the good guys, know what to do, but the other party brainwashed the huge part of the population so they won't agree to do what have to be done!
> But is it justified? that depends on whether left hatred for billionaires is more justified than rights hatered for immigrants, which you haven't thoroughly checked.
This is a good point, and I tried to be honest about it in my post. I think part of the problem is, no matter how negative the effect of X is, once they're known to have a certain deleterious effect then there's room to blame completely unrelated problems on X too. I think we're going to see this with the problem of the ascending price of housing. It's turning into an issue that'll be really important for a large proportion, and I'm already seeing arguments like "this is caused by [foreign?] rich people speculating and raising the price, like bitcoin" in my friend group and things like this. This is a classic case I'm trying to describe where the most promising solution is really unpopular, so politicians (and people who would be negatively effected by the actual solution) are incentivized to blame something out of their control.
Is willpower consistent across domains? I'm interested in both people's individual experiences and scholarly research.
The research I've seen has been all over the place on this question - on the one hand, certain measurements of willpower seem to be broadly predictive of 'good things' - health, relationship stability, career progression, academic achievement, etc. On the other hand, that might be missing individual details in the aggregate (i.e., overall, people with good self-control have better outcomes across everything, but within-individual relationships between, say, working hard and resisting junk food might be much weaker).
My willpower varies between domains. For example, avoiding junk food is easy, while keeping a daily meditation practice is hard. But the variations are within an overall good band.
Despite the marshmallow test not replicating, I suspect there is a common factor in willpower. For example, people who smoke also don't exercise; people who can't stop binging TV shows are often late for work.
I also suspect w is highly polygenic. Some OCD traits may help with rule-following, but that may require some self-awareness and design thinking to create practical rules for yourself.
Yeah agree with this exactly. I find certain willpower tasks easy — junk food, exercising — and certain ones nearly impossible (not procrastinating at work, stopping at one drink if people suggest another.) But I suspect what you’re saying about variations within a band is true. I may be disappointed in myself for my procrastination control, but maybe that’s relative to my other willpower abilities — I still may be in the 80th percentile there or something.
FWIW, I find it easier to NOT do something, preferably not do it ever, than to DO something, particularly if we're talking about something done multiple times. I don't think it's a personal bias in favor of inaction though - I think it's just easier for me to redefine something as "not food" or "not OK to say" or whatever, than to get around to doing whatever it is every <expletive> day. Even if the task is a one-of, procrastinating is easy, though it will generally get done eventually.
I don't think it's domain-specific for me, except to the extent that some actions require more effort than others, or tend to need to be done while less functional than normal. But "no" is definitely easier than "yes".
Is that a difference in willpower across domains, or just the fact that you find certain activities to be more tempting than others? I find it hard to resist a nice cup of tea in the afternoon, but very easy to resist eating metal filings.
Does anyone here stay in Seattle ? Wanted opinions on good neighborhoods to move to.
me: mid 20s tech male that likes people and extroverted, but still decidedly nerdy. Want to avoid monocultures.
Want in neighborhood : walkable/bikeable, dense, close to commute, within 50 minutes commute to Bellevue, and it should have a happening location closeby.
Want to avoid: suburbia. rampant homelessness
What sounds good: Wallingford, Northern capitol hill (below volunteer park)
Possible but don't know enough: Capitol hill proper (Near Cal anderson), UDistrict (south side) , Fremont (closer to wallingford) (I'm clearly trying to have access to the 520)
I lived in that area several years. Fremont/Wallingford would be my first pick, but ideally 3+ blocks away from Aurora or Stone way. Ballard is very cool, but hard to commute out of. Greenlake/Phinney Ridge/Greenwood would be my second pick. That's a great place to just walk and look at people's overgrown beautiful gardens, it's very authentic feeling. I think Capitol Hill is overpriced, but obviously others disagree. Avoid the UDistrict like the plague though, especially if homelessness bothers you.
Also, remember that a mile from the Burke-Gilman can look very bikeable, but if it's a mile directly up a steep hill, you'll be a sad sweaty person when you get home.
Thanks for the recommendation. The part of staying clear of stoneway and Aurora in particular.
Will keep that in mind. I'll mostly get an e-bike for the really steep hills, but it's reassuring to hear that Wallingford / fremont are good otherwise
The homeless population in Ballard has exploded in the past year, on top of the commuting challenges. Eastlake is an oft-overlooked choice, depending on your definition of "closeby" for happeningness.
Yeats' "The Second Coming" is (deservedly) one of the most widely quoted poems in the English language. However, George Orwell made an interesting observation about it in his essay on Yeats:
"[Yeats] is too big a man to share the illusions of Liberalism, and as early as 1920 he foretells in a justly famous passage (‘The Second Coming’) the kind of world that we have actually moved into. But he appears to welcome the coming age, which is to be ‘hierarchical, masculine, harsh, surgical’, and is influenced both by Ezra Pound and by various Italian Fascist writers. He describes the new civilization which he hopes and believes will arrive: ‘an aristocratic civilization in its most completed form, every detail of life hierarchical, every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few men’s hands, all dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God dependent on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality made law.’"
That is, at least in Orwell's view, seemingly plausible on some cursory further research, Yeats thought that all that stuff about the center not holding and the falcon not hearing the falconer was a *good* thing, worthy of celebration. (The titular Second Coming that these events presumably herald is usually indeed considered thus by Christians, though of course Yeats' views were hardly typical/orthodox.) Yeats looked forward to the destruction of supposedly soulless modern industrial, democratic society, followed by the cyclical return of a more primitive, spiritually vital one. I wonder how many of the people, often with center to left political views, who portentously quote "The Second Coming" whenever politics is contentious (which is to say, almost always) realize this. (I suspect that Yeats would be quoted less often if more people realized that he, like many writers in the 1920s-1930s, was an extreme reactionary who at least flirted with fascism.)
It's slightly more complicated than that. Yeats flirted with a lot of stuff for the sake of artistic inspiration and how much he actually believed it is hard to make out (was Bowie, in his Thin White Duke phase, Actually A Fascist?)
Came from Anglo-Irish Protestant stock. Rather disillusioned with the aftermath of the Easter Rising and the establishment of the Irish state, which was too Catholic-influenced and small-minded for him, see his poem "September 1913":
"What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave."
In reaction to de Valera etc. he moved towards the Irish version of what could be roughly called Fascism, the Blueshirts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshirts who mostly got into scuffles with the remainder of the (old) IRA and sent volunteers to fight on Franco's side in the Spanish Civil War, as Irish leftists were also heading out to fight on the Republican side.
But he was also a member of the government, the upper house of the Senate, as seen in his poem from 1926 "Among School Children":
"I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man."
In the 1930s he had his flirtation with Fascism - of the Irish kind - but honestly? He would have been as disillusioned with General Eoin O'Duffy had he managed to come to any sort of political power as he was with the rest of the aspiring middle-class Catholic establishment. Yeats yearned for the idealistic return of the Ascendancy, the Anglo-Irish ruling caste.
What Yeats actually believed is pretty clear from his book "A Vision", his involvement with the magical order The Golden Dawn, and his automatic writing workings with his wife. While his magical/mystical inclinations helped his writing, I don't think he was into the woo only for the artistic inspiration. Some critics, perhaps embarrassed, have downplayed that aspect of his life (incorrectly in my opinion).
Can you link to Scott's posts on this subject you are referring to? I have asked him many questions about Marxism, and criticised his reading of Marx heavily, and he rarely (if ever) responds.
Suppose that betting markets (which Scott has suggested) aren't a good way to finance investigative journalism, what might be?
I'm imagining some combination of substack, kickstarter, and gofundme, and some way of combining investigative journalists (dare I call it a newspaper?), but it would be hard. Are there investigative journalists who are so respected that they could attract funding from people who don't agree with their politics? How do you structure a pipeline for new investigative journalists?
What does investigative journalism cost, anyway? It's not just the cost for the articles you get, it's also the cost of articles that don't pan out (how often does that happen?) and legal protection.
The main problem with investigative journalism is how long it takes. Assume each investigation will take a team of 2 or 3 reporters 3-6 months and you're looking at a cost of, what, roughly $100k per report?
So, if we just want to keep funding this, we need to find a way to make it possible either for a good piece of investigative journalism to earn a lump sum of $100k every half year or so, or (does some math) it to have subscribers paying around $21k a month.
The first one option is surprisingly easy, but doesn't scale very well, and that's just having all investigative journalists moving towards writing books instead of writing newspaper articles. Or maybe they still write the articles, but as loss-leaders for the books they're trying to get folks to buy. This is already pretty common, but would need to become moreso. There's also probably an upper-limit to how many investigative books your average consumer will buy, but this will remain a viable option for the top-crust of investigative journalists for a good while.
The second option is, in my opinion, more interesting. The chattering class tells me that Glen Greenwald makes between $80-$160k per month on substack. This kind of money could, conceivably, fund several associated teams of investigative journalists. Assuming they could optimize the process and had good sourcing, they could probably commit to one quality investigation a month, which would be worth it by my money. I wouldn't be shocked if we see something along these lines pop up in the next couple of years.
The third option is to have investigative journalism just supported by a surrounding network of content, but we've tried that and it doesn't look like its working.
Is it true that the quality of Stephen King's writing is now much worse than it was at its peak? I've only read some of his early work, like Different Seasons and Skeleton Crew.
If it's true he's gotten worse, then what was King's last truly great book?
Asking for help. This will be rambly and neurotic.
I am a 30 year old woman. After a long period of hesitation and anxiety about it, after months-long obsessive research into the discourse around covid and vaccines, which made me feel confused, frustrated, and terrified, I got vaccinated (Pfizer) on the 4th of July (incidentally, my birthday). I was never that much worried about covid, and I'm currently leading a rather hermitic lifestyle, so it never registered as too much of a danger; I guess my main motivation to get vaccinated was "to get it over with", because I couldn't stop obsessing over it for months, feeling tormented about whether to vaccinate or not. Of course, protecting others was also a factor, as was the feeling that if I am to get vaccinated one day, I'd rather do it sooner, so that it wouldn't haunt me anymore.
By "obsessing over it"--I mean, I was following the discourse, and trying to make sense of it, researching the contrarian voices, exposing myself to all the vax-skeptical arguments; and I ended up in a very uncomfortable state of "I really don't know what is going on, and I suspect that nobody really knows what is going on (because the issue is super complex and we have too little data), and people who are certain that they know what is the right thing to do seem to be ideologues and not to be fully trusted; and the health authorities are clearly feeding the public skewed and simplistic data in order to get them to buy into the narrative, and their sensemaking is distorted (but that doesn't mean they are all bad or that their narrative is false)". And just a state of uncertainty and anger and frustration at the state of the discourse, and helplessness and confusion in face of all the chaos.
I scheduled the appointment, but then canceled it the same morning (I had canceled about 15 appointments already in the previous weeks), but in the end I went anyway, feeling like if I don't go, I let myself be controlled by my fear. Either way, to get vaccinated or to not get vaccinated felt like a neurotic decision. I was afraid to not get vaccinated, but also to get vaccinated--imagining that very bad things will happen either way, and that trying to prevent them by avoiding danger would just misfire.
More background: I struggle long term with depression, anxiety, including health anxiety, and especially fears about fertility (premature ovarian failure); I have OCD-ish and paranoid tendencies at times. I've been diagnosed with ASD, if that's a helpful information. Obviously, with the fertility-related talk about the vaccine--the period dysregulation that many women are reporting (and that the CDC is blatantly denying exists--note this bit in particular broke me and made me cynical about the trustworthiness of the CDC (that is not to say they are completely untrustworthy, but that they are not as trustworthy as they certainly should be)), the Japanese LNPs biodistribution/pharmacokinetics study, the fact that everybody is saying "there is no evidence of damage to fertility and no plausible mechanism of damage to fertility" (when there is little evidence either way, and when there, it seems to me, certainly are some such hypothetical mechanisms), and then there's the reported long term vaccine side effects--this made me very afraid to get vaccinated. But I guess I was hoping if I do get vaccinated, if I am brave, the fear will dissolve.
Anyway, so I went. I wasn't fully okay with it, but at first it felt manageable. After a few hours, I had a severe anxiety attack, intense dread, suicidal ideation, convinced I have damaged myself; I started hyperventilating, my blood flow was increased etc. which threw me into an even bigger anxiety, because I heard you're not supposed to overexert yourself after getting vaccinated. Now I worry that because of the increased blood flow, the LNPs from the vaccine could have reached my ovaries more quickly and in greater concentration, that the mRNA will be expressed by ovarian cells, and they will get destroyed by my immune system, leading to tissue damage; or that the LNPs are somehow toxic themselves. I worry that this will cause POF. I worry my anxiety will make my immune system dysregulated, leading to an autoimmune-induced POF. I worry that I will get bad side effects from the vaccine.
Ever since I got vaccinated and this initial anxiety attack, the anxiety and depression haven't left me, save for several hours every day (usually later in the afternoon), when I tend to calm down and it feels like my fears are unsubstantiated. But I wake up depressed, and spend the majority of the day unable to think about anything else, in acute fear that I have damaged myself, that bad things will happen, and that I destroyed my life: infertility is my greatest fear (as you probably noticed), but also long term side effects from the vaccine (autoimmune, neurological), cancer. I keep worrying that the anxiety attack after I got vaccinated only made everything worse, and that even if the majority of people are okay and nothing bad happens to them, I will be one of the people who will get damaged by it.
Everybody around me is saying that I am overreacting, and that my fear is not appropriate to the situation. I truly can't tell anymore; it feels like all this could be true, that there really aren't good long term data about the safety of the vaccine, that there might be a plausible mechanism for damage (that I don't really see addressed anywhere), etc. It seems like I can't really be sure that things will be okay.
I can't stop thinking about this what if. I have no idea how to resolve it; one way of dealing with the uncertainties of life is simply to not think about them, to convince oneself that all will be well; but it seems to me this would be deluding myself into thinking that they are not real dangers. But bad things could happen. All the horrible things that I am worried about could become true. How does one cope with that? As I said, it seems to me, the majority of people go by simply not thinking about these possibilities, and so unbothered by the uncertainty of life. But it seems uncertainty can throw me into a state of acute danger; I can so vividly imagine things going badly. And I don't know how to become okay with it. It seems like if I were to become okay with it, I would have to stop caring about these things that I worry are in danger, I would have to become someone else, with different values.
I know that because of my severe anxiety and depression, my view of reality is probably very distorted. I can see how my current acute fears (worrying about vaccines causing infertility, or cancer) reflect my long term, chronic fears (worrying about fertility, or cancer): I can see how my anxiety is excellently skilled in picking up on patterns and links and connections in all the chaos and uncertainty, and constructing plausible (sounding) scenarios for how the things that I am worried about the most might realize. But still, I can't help but feel that the threat is real, that bad things will or could really happen, that there is no guarantee things will be okay, that everything could crumble. I should also maybe mention that one of the things that is an important factor in my state is the fact that in a month, my partner, with whom I've been long distance for almost half a year, is scheduled to finally arrive. So, just as something absolutely wonderful, that I've been looking forward to for so long, is about to happen, I am terrified that everything will fall apart.
This is a community whose sensemaking I generally trust. It would help me very much if I could get some more perspective, some more feedback, maybe some advice, if any of you have previously dealt with similar issues, and have found a way to resolve them, or to alleviate them. Some resources, words of wisdom, reality checks. (But please be kind.)
You should see a mental health professional. The issues you describe sound too severe and complex for even the very smart people here to provide effective advice. This is absolutely interfering with your day to day life, and a good healthcare provider will have the tools and experience to help you improve things.
I don't know which one you got, so it's hard to comment on it. But the original fears of blood clots (which seem to have happened more to women) are not being reported so much, I imagine because most countries backed off on the AstraZeneca vaccine.
"Now I worry that because of the increased blood flow, the LNPs from the vaccine could have reached my ovaries more quickly and in greater concentration, that the mRNA will be expressed by ovarian cells, and they will get destroyed by my immune system, leading to tissue damage; or that the LNPs are somehow toxic themselves."
In your case, therefore, this is classical "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". You are a naturally anxious person who knows just enough to work themselves up into a frenzy because of course the very worst thing will happen! (this is your anxiety and depression speaking).
There is nothing to suggest that vaccination affects fertility, there is nothing to suggest this is going to happen to you. You already know your mental state is irrational and untrustworthy. As suggested elsewhere, try and get mental health counselling to help you.
I have similar issues although not as severe as you have described. I have been hyperfocused on coronavirus since last February. I've been keeping a daily spreadsheet of case counts in my city and country. When it started I would take anxiety naps, sleeping 12-16 hours/day sometimes, because sleep was the only time my mind wasn't fixated on all the terrible things that could happen if I got Covid. I was a grocery washer. During our first wave - before we knew the virus was airborne rather than spread by fomites - my family bought flour and baked bread rather than buying bread from the shop that could be contaminated.
I have allergies and my biggest fear with getting vaccinated was anaphylaxis. You absolutely can give yourself psychosomatic symptoms - my blood pressure shot up, even after my second shot, even after the first shot hadn't killed me.
So aside from sympathy, I'll share advice about what works for me.
1. This too shall pass. Give it time. Try not to make any major decisions under stress as a snap judgment, but other than that, just experience the anxiety and understand that it will get a bit better as you get further away from the precipitating event. After the first few weeks of pandemic, my anxiety naps got shorter and less frequent.
2. Positive visualization. I believe this is an intervention which Scott has previously mentioned as working but which people don't really take seriously. It works for me. I used to get up in the middle of the night to check if my son was still breathing. I told myself I was being selfish - there was nothing wrong with him, and I was risking waking him up, just to soothe my own anxiety. Eventually I started doing things like visualizing what he would look like at his high school graduation, or how much fun it would be running a D&D campaign for him when he was old enough, or - and this might not be for everyone - him holding my hand at my deathbed. I just trained my brain not to always think about and dwell on the worst case scenario. Now I'm much more relaxed (although if I happen to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I still go and check to make sure he's breathing).
3. Use rational methods to understand what you know and reason from uncertainty. Try to think clearly about what counts as evidence for a claim and what doesn't. Part of this for me was quantifying everything - making risk assessments and comparing risk ratios. Part of this was keeping track of case counts and other stats - I'm on day 505 of my spreadsheet as of today. Part of this was making predictions about how the pandemic would go in my country - e.g. when schools would close/reopen, etc. Part of this was reading studies by actual scientists, rather than media reports on them. Don't fall prey to intellectual nihilism - "nobody really knows anything" - because there actually is a lot of knowledge out there and there actually are a lot of people who can interpret that knowledge correctly. I don't trust the CDC very much at all, but "the CDC is not very trustworthy" isn't really evidence that any particular claim they make is incorrect. Find sources you do trust - I regard Scott and Zvi as reliable sources of information about coronavirus in the blogosphere, and The Atlantic as a reliable source in the media (in particular Zeynep Tufekci and Ed Yong). And most of all, understand that you are absolutely correct that the world is chaotic and everything absolutely could fall apart at any minute - but the great thing about humanity is that we're built to thrive under those conditions. You absolutely do have to accept a baseline level of risk, and that's just life, and the best thing you can do is practice making decisions that take the risk into account without overestimating the risk or letting it derail your plans or dominate your life.
For example, as a rule of thumb, if you're spending 50% of your time worrying about a vaccine side effect with an incidence of 1 in 100,000 - that's obviously disproportionate, and when you put it into numbers it becomes obvious just how disproportionate it is. Another consideration is that you have to recognize the difference between productive worry - that is, concern about an actionable risk which results in a plan to mitigate that risk - and unproductive worry, which is concern about a risk that you have no control over or do not intend to ameliorate.
4. Find something productive to do. You could follow my route and focus your anxiety into keeping a weekly journal about all information related to covid in your area. Or you could, like, learn a new hobby. I've recently ordered a Raspberry Pi robotics kit and I'm going to teach myself how to use it, as soon as I finish arguing about politics on the internet. It'll be any day now.
Thank you very much for your response, I really, really appreciate it. One thing that is a problem in my case is this: I really don't want to delude myself, to convince myself things are okay when I can't really know.
So, for example positive visualization therefore feels like it would be a kind of self-delusion, wishful thinking; and the OCD part of me is worried I will just jinx everything by imagining it to be that way! And of course, on some level I believe that regardless of what the actual statistics are, I am somehow special in that bad things happening to me is more likely, a much more immediate threat. Even though cognitively I see that I have no reason for this, it simply feels true, and overwhelmingly so.
It seems like unless I can be *certain* that things are okay, then the very possibility, however rationally unlikely, of there being something wrong is perceived as great and looming. Again, I can see how this is irrational, but it still feels true, same as e.g. I can see that my magical thinking is irrational, but that doesn't really change the fact that the thoughts are super convincing, on an emotional level.
How to modulate the fear with reason? It seems they are disconnected, existing simultaneously on two different levels, so that there is a dissociated state. Rationally, I see how my thoughts and feelings are distorted and inappropriate; but they *feel so true*.
You took the vaccine, and suffered no vaccine attributable negative events right?
Side effects happen, but are quite rare as we can tell from significant efforts at sue willing the side effects experienced by the hundred million plus people who have taken the vaccine.
The Japanese study probably doesn’t relate at all to infertility. If it did, we probably would’ve noticed decreased conception or increased miscarriage rates. But people watching those for vaccines haven’t.
> LNPs from the vaccine could have reached my ovaries more quickly and in greater concentration, that the mRNA will be expressed by ovarian cells
I don’t think there’s any chance you’ve been rendered infertile lol. Even if this was true, which there’s not any evidence for, it would affect a proportion of the eggs, and other ones would be fine. (Women have many eggs as backups! One is flushed every period, and many fail to mature when implanted)
From reading your post I have the sense you've seen allegations by Bret Weinstein, Steve Kirsch and/or Theresa Lawrie. I put up a LW thread on the allegations here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr
The claim that the concentration of LNP (lipid nanoparticles) is highest in the ovaries after 48 hours appears to be not only false, but a "pants on fire" kind of lie: the linked source shows the concentration as being 259 times higher at the injection site, and 170 times higher in the liver.
The chart showing the concentration as being highest in the ovaries simply leaves out the data for the injection site, for the liver, and for the spleen (which also shows over 10x higher concentration than the ovaries).
Notably there's the issue of base rate neglect: suppose that a million people get the vaccine on July 1. What's the chance that a few of those million people would develop a serious symptom if they had *not* taken the vaccine? It's a very high probability, right? So one cannot simply assume that all serious side effects were caused by the vaccine, but that's precisely what Steve S, Bret W and Theresa L have done.
(to be clear, I do have the impression that one or more of the vaccines have a relatively high rate of "significant" but not very dangerous side effects, such as temporary Covid-like symptoms. For example, a coworker of mine had strong Covid-like symptoms starting about 12 hours after getting the Pfizer vaccine; symptoms lasted about 24 hours.)
People in the US are generally significantly richer than those in most European countries (e.g. see tables of median income like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median). But I don't have a good understanding of what this actually means. Does anyone have any (anec)data about what the medianish American does with the 5-35% of their income that a comparable French/German/British person lacks? My vague impression (as a Briton who hasn't lived in the US) is some of the gap comes from working more, having bigger houses, and better healthcare (e.g. more frequent doctor visits). But probably someone has better insights. Also interested in the same question regarding the handful of European countries that are richer than/on part with the US (Norway and Switzerland are the main ones I think).
A huge part of it is house size. Average house size in the US is 2300 sq ft, average in the UK is 729 sq ft. That is a ridiculous gap, and housing costs in the US are where a lot of the income gets sunk.
Is rationalism actually a good way to model the world? Is it better to assign only True/False/Unknown to propositions, and thus avoid being wrong when events you have assigned low probability to happen?
More directly: the point in life is not to minimize the amount you are wrong (at least not for most people). The goal is to achieve things. Probabilities is really useful if you want to make plans to achieve things.
I've learned more from being wrong than any life-coaching course or self-help book. The trick is is to admit that you're wrong and recalibrate your strategy.
But what sort of things are you trying to achieve? If you're trying to achieve a comfortable retirement before you die, I suppose you can assume that maximizing the diversity of your investment portfolio will protect you against the historical economic and political fluctuations we've seen in the past 70 years. But "past performance is no guarantee of future results." And suddenly an unexpected epidemic or natural disaster comes along.
Or you could spend your life planning for the worst case scenarios like the end of 21st Century civilization. But then if those scenarios never come to pass where will you be? In
some home-made bunker at the end of a dead-end road in Idaho?
Sorry, but I can't see how probabilities can guide your future life decisions.
As for probabilities, If you're trying to become something culturally worthwhile, like a famous musician or a famous author, the chances of that are vanishingly slim.
My entire life has been guided by improbable coincidences and being in the right place at the right time. All the planning I did had little impact on where I ended up. Luckily, even the most negative of these happenstances ended up being positive in the long run.
Tempo: Ahhh! Glad you followed through and put this up at the top level! I was going to wait until the next open thread, because this open thread has gotten pretty full. But I'll be happy to respond with my thoughts...
My answer is that *certain* questions are amenable to rational analysis. But there are huge number of questions that seem (at least to poor humble me) not answerable through any form of rational analysis that I've encountered (I'm not saying that there isn't a rational way to tackle these questions—at least at the meta-level—but that I haven't myself found them amenable to rational analysis). For instance, aesthetics is a subject that rational analysis can help us understand. I may be stereotyping my ACT audience here (and if I am, I apologize), but this group doesn't sound like group that's particularly interested in aesthetic questions. However, for me the question of why I perceive such diverse things, such as a work of visual art, a musical composition, a living creature, an astronomical object, or a another human being as beautiful has been an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember. There are pseudo-mystical psychological explanations (Jung), and various evolutionary just-so stories (evolutionary psychology), and various neoplatonist theories about why we respond to something with such an ineffable character as beauty. Many of you on ACT might not give two shits about beauty, but beauty has given me so much pleasure over the course of my life, that I want to understand why I respond the way I do when I'm in the presence of it (whatever it is!). I have not been able to develop a rational way to test any of the theories I've heard (or theories I've developed on my own). The best I can say is that certain combinations of color and form are beautiful to me. But I can't predict what I'll find to beautiful. I've run my hypotheses through various Gedankenexperiments, but all those have led me to dead ends. Would an intelligent land crab find a human woman to beautiful the way I find certain human women to be beautiful? I doubt it. But an intelligent land crab might find a brilliant sunset beautiful the way I find it beautiful. And an intelligent land crab with a high-powered telescope might find the Crab Nebula to beautiful the way I find it beautiful. But I might not see the intelligent land crab's mate as beautiful (unless she/he had a shell with rainbow colors). ;-)
So, I find rationalism limited in its usefulness to problems that don't concern the physical world.
Full disclosure. I am a mystic who was raised in an atheist household who has a firm grounding in the sciences and the scientific method. But when I put on my rationalist hat, I what would be called a Critical Rationalist — i.e. I am a Popperian when it comes to my understanding of knowledge and what is knowable. Unlike Scott, I am not Bayesian. Although I find Scott's way of approaching problems to be a useful tool, I don't think Bayesianism is the be-all and end-all of rational inquiry. And although I like to frame my mystical inquiries in a rationalist framework of questions (if only properly categorize them), I don't find that rationalism yields any useful answers for me. Finally, although I may sound like an Aristotelian when I respond to things like the god/no-god question, for heaven's/no-heaven's sake don't call me one!
New post up over on "History for Atheists" about Hitler's religious beliefs (or lack of them). Read it not so much for the political argy-bargy but for things I had never heard of previously, like the World Ice Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre
"Hörbiger had various responses to the criticism that he received. If it was pointed out to him that his assertions did not work mathematically, he responded: "Calculation can only lead you astray." If it was pointed out that there existed photographic evidence that the Milky Way was composed of millions of stars, he responded that the pictures had been faked by "reactionary" astronomers. He responded in a similar way when it was pointed out that the surface temperature of the Moon had been measured in excess of 100 °C in the daytime, writing to rocket expert Willy Ley: "Either you believe in me and learn, or you will be treated as the enemy."
Dang! I should have done a book review of _The Morning of the Magicians_ by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier for Scott's book review contest! It's the ultimate Illuminati conspiracy theory book! I read it as teenager, and it led me down all sorts of rabbit holes of investigation — like the Hörbiger hollow earth theory — and that Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler's personal photographer before WWII, was an occultist (he very likely was) who trained Hitler in his hand gestures which were used to hypnotize his audiences with his orations. But my take on Hitler is that he was talented sociopath who could adapt his spiel to whomever he was trying to bamboozle. The most likely explanation is that he didn't have any core beliefs beyond his own ambition. But a significant number of his followers had all sorts of pagan, occult, and pseudoscientific beliefs. And Hitler seemed to have an either or open mind to investigating them or a willingness to indulge his most loyal followers in their eccentricities. Why else would have authorized a crackpot expedition to Tibet in 1938? — which was the homeland of the swastika symbol which he consciously appropriated as his party's symbol.
The new Tesla Model S Plaid accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in 1.98 seconds. If you put the car in reverse and jammed your foot on the gas pedal, would it accelerate backwards at the same rate?
I ask this because my own car is a clunky gas-powered vehicle with an automatic transmission, and it only has one gear setting when I put it in reverse mode. If I put it in reverse and jam on the gas pedal, it would accelerate backwards at a slow rate, and the 0 to 60 figure might be 20 seconds.
However, I've heard that electric cars like the Tesla Model S only use one gear. If that's the case, then shouldn't their forward and reverse acceleration rates be the same?
Not sure about Tesla specifically, but generally electric motors are often not symmetrical, they can be optimized for one direction of rotation. And then there's aerodynamics of course.
The answer is Tesla could make it roughly the same (ignoring differences in aerodynamics), but don't for safety reasons. I cannot think of much in the hardware that would only work in one direction. There might need to be firmware changes to the motor drive hardware.
Given the large overlap between Republicans and anti-vaxxers, Covid will kill proportionally more Republicans. Will those numbers be large enough to affect future elections? If so, would the Republicans realize this and change tactics?
Unlikely, given that last I saw, the best guess IFR for Covid is about 0.5%. While that's a humanitarian disaster at a population level, it's of only marginal electoral significance even if every single Republican and zero Democrats were to catch Covid.
And it's not going to be 100% Republican and 0% Democrat, for several reasons:
1. The correlation with anti-vaxxing and partisanship, while remarkable, isn't anywhere near 100%. Pre-covid anti-vaxxers actually leaned slightly Democratic (12% of Dems and 10% of Reps in a 2015 Pew survey), and as of June 21 (KFF Vaccine Monitor poll) 88% of Democrats, 65% of Independents, and 54% of Republicans self-report as already vaccinated or planning to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
2. Regardless of party ID, 85% of people 65 and older are already vaccinated. Vaccine refusers skew younger, presumably healthier, and less likely to die if infected.
3. Vaccination rates are high enough that even vaccine refusers will be partially protected by herd immunity: they're less likely to be exposed to Covid, and Covid outbreaks will burn out faster, because many people around them will be immune.
4. A lot of people already caught Covid, and many of those already died, before the vaccine was widely available. These deaths (and the natural immunities among the survivors) were not skewed by partisan trends in vaccine hesitancy, although they likely were (slightly) skewed by partisan trends in lockdown policies and voluntary risk mitigation behavior.
5. I expect partisan anti-vaxxers are clustered in warmer climates and more rural areas, both of which tend to be less vulnerable to Covid outbreaks.
Re: the relation between warmer climates and lower infection rates is provably false by the outbreaks in Brazil and India. Likewise population density seems to be a questionable variable. There's no conclusive evidence that there's a negative correlation between population density and the spread of the virus. Rural India is seeing a higher death rate than urban India (although the actual infection rate is hard to gauge, the stats from rural India are probably significantly undercounting the actual percentage infected).
Also in regards to herd immunity. The overall vaccination rate (and the seropositive rate due to previous infections) of a particular country may be high enough for herd immunity to *theoretically* kick in (depending on the R0 number you select, which is another hairy question). But let's say you have a region of that country with population that has a particularly low vaccination rate and a low seropositive rate. The virus could wreck havoc with that population before a it burns itself out and finally runs up against the higher vaccinated / seropositive populations. Herd immunity calculations assume a uniform distribution of vaccinated + seropositive subjects. Your mileage may vary in the real world. Just sayin...
I was using "herd immunity" in the looser continuous sense, not the more common binary sense of whether or not there's enough immunity to drive R below 1 with no special social/behavior precautions taken to reduce contagion. If R0 is 3.0 and half the population is immune, then effective R will be 1.5 and outbreaks will spread proportionally more slowly and will burn itself out much faster than had only 10-20% of the population had prior immunity.
Similarly, I don't think Brazil and India conclusively disprove lower infection rates with warmer climates. There's a ton of other confounding variables going on with those countries as well, and the noise from the confounders make the existence of a couple countries with warm climates and widespread Covid infection rates only very weak evidence against warm climates protecting against Covid spread on the margins. It's only strong evidence against a hypothetical claim (which I was not making) that Covid can't have widespread outbreaks in warm climates.
That said, the evidence in favor of Covid being marginally less prone to spread is fairly weak. We know that other droplet- or aerosol-spread respiratory viruses (most notably colds and the flu) are seasonal, spreading more readily in cold weather, which suggests a prior in favor of Covid working the same way. And data from the US and Europe does seem to show a seasonal correlation with bigger waves of spread in winter and early spring, but that's massively confounded by the initial wave of the pandemic hitting in March 2020, lockdown fatigue setting in later in the year, and more contagious variants emerging.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has behaved in some very unexpected ways. IMHO many of the experts (but not all of the experts) have latched on to pat explanations and narratives to explain away observed anomalies rather than seeing them as potential questions worth investigating.
Be that as it may, even though SARS-CoV-2 might share the same aerosol transmission vector as influenza, it's nothing like the flu! The mutational patterns of CoVs are quite distinct from flu viruses. Influenza is highly tolerant to transposon-based insertional mutations, and they swap "chunks" of their genome around, and that creates a rapid antigenic drift. This is one of the commonly *accepted* reasons for the flu's tendency to follow a cycle of seasonal waves.
And before you think that the flu has to stick to a seasonal cycle, the great H1N1 pandemic of 1918-19 wasn't really seasonal. In the British Isles the first wave peaked June 1918, and the second wave started during a warm September of that same year and continued into November. The 3rd wave didn't start until February 1919 and it peaked in March of that year. This pattern does not match the behavior of the flu viruses we've seen over the past half century or more. No one seems to have remarked upon why the pattern of H1N1 pandemic doesn't match the current patterns. But back to Coronaviruses...
CoVs, or at least the β-CoVs that I've read up on, have remarkably stable genomes. And because of their stability, SARS-CoV-2 wasn't expected to follow the cyclic flu pattern — at least some epidemiologists early on suggested we'd see a more "random" pattern of outbreaks. And they seem to have been proven right. As for SARS-CoV-2's genomic stability, since the start of the pandemic there have only been a couple of dozen point mutations in an RNA strand that has approx 30K potential locations for mutations to occur. And the same mutations have been repeated over and over again in different variants (but in different combinations). Almost all of the mutations have been restricted to the S1 and S2 segments of the spike protein — S2 being the "the stalk, and the location of the infamous Furin cleavage site (FCS), and S1 being "the head", and the location of the receptor-binding domain (RBD). BTW: one of the surprises to the virology community was how a seemingly minor mutation to the FCS could make the virus so much more contagious. Their original models assumed that it was mutations to the RBD that would make the virus more contagious. Changes to the FCS weren't seen as something that could make the virus more contagious. Here are some COVID questions to chew on...
--> An interesting question that no one has really discussed is why the rest of the SARS-CoV-2 genome is so frigging stable. We understand that there are selective pressures on the spike proteins — because that's how the virus propagates itself. But why are the mutations (which are supposed to be the result of a random process) mostly clustered on the spike?
--> Another interesting question is why did the flu season not happen in 2020 and it also seems to be stifled in southern hemisphere right now in 2021. The pat explanation is that masking and behavior changes have stopped the flu in its tracks. But the flu has also not been seen in countries which weren't having major COVID-19 outbreaks and/or weren't promoting masking behaviors. There's a poorly understood phenomenon called viral interference. It seems like that might be an interesting avenue of research for a some PhD candidate hungry for a thesis subject.
--> And let's talk about the R0 value — err values. Even early on in the epidemic, before any the mutations that made it more contagious came along, the estimated R0 values were ALL OVER THE PLACE. Some countries saw estimated R0's of 1.5, others as high as 6.0. The pat explanation was that the wide differences were due to masking behaviors and such. But there were a few studies that saw a inverse relationship between the frequencies of certain HLA proteins in given populations and R0 values seen in the first wave of the epidemic. But the HLA theory may have been blown out of the water because the epidemic is now hitting countries (like Vietnam) who breezed through the first wave of the pandemic.
--> Another interesting anomaly is the differing behaviors of the B.1.1.7 (Alpha, British) variant, and the B.1.617.2 (Delta, Indian) variant. The initial NERVTAG report that sounded the B.1.1.7 alarm, quoted in vitro studies that suggested that B.1.1.7 was 50-70 percent than contagious than the variants it was replacing. What's interesting, but no one seems to have remarked upon, is that the predicted B.1.1.7 surge turned out to a dud in the UK — even though it virtually replaced all the other variants in the UK (!). By March of this year >95% of all the cases were B.1.1.7, but it didn't create a new surge. And it didn't take off as expected among the non-vaxxed population when the UK loosened up its masking requirements. On the other hand, B.1.617.2 (which in vitro studies showed is 70 to 80 percent more contagious than B.1.1.7) is behaving like predicted, and it's taking off like gang busters among the unvaxxed population in the UK (and it's starting the same pattern in the US). Anyway, no one seems to have been able to explain why B.1.1.7 was such a dud. In fact no one seems to care.
If I haven't bored you to death with my COVID-19 passion we can discuss why I think herd immunity is a mirage that will be always beyond our reach. But I'm going to bed now. Good night.
Note that due to high rates of vaccination among the elderly, the IFR (infection fatality rate) must be far below 0.5% by now (and yeah, as you mentioned, anti-vaxxers often live in less vulnerable locations so they have more luxury to take Covid less seriously).
I think you're confusing of CFR (case fatality rate) with IFR (infection fatality rate). CFR is the number of deaths per identified cases. And post-vax CFR rates would definitely be reduced, because the cases would generally be much less severe for the vaxxed elderly.
IFR is mortality as a percentage is the overall infection rate in a population. While CFR's are easy to determine if the public health authorities keep track of the hospital stats, IFR's are more difficult to assess. It's assumed that there are more infections above those that are reported and hospitalized. So, IFR's require that studies be done to see what percentage of the population show up as seropositive.
The IFR shouldn't change much when vaccination rates are low, because the majority of the infections would be among the unvaxxed. IFR’s might begin to trend down when the majority of the population is vaccinated, though, because the infection numbers between unvaxxed and vaxxed will start to even out. Example: Say 90% of population is fully vaccinated with a 90% effective vaccine, theoretically, 50 percent of the new infections would be from the remaining unvaxxed population and 50 percent from the vaxxed population (10 percent unvaxxed = 10 percent vaxxed who have breakthrough infections). Because the vaxxed will have better outcomes for their infections, in that scenario the IFR for vaxxed infections would be very low, while unvaxxed would have higher IFRs. So overall IFR for all infections be lower. Clear as mud? ;-)
NB: I’ll admit I’m unclear whether epidemiologist are only interested in raw IFRs of unvaxxed populations for their models. Or whether they incorporate the vaxxed IFRs into their modeling. I assume they do, but…
> The IFR shouldn't change much when vaccination rates are low, because the majority of the infections would be among the unvaxxed.
In areas where vaccination rates are relatively low, they still tend to be pretty high *among the elderly*. If we had a disagreement here, I am not sure what it was about.
The reason behind the project is simple, discussion feel like a mess in internet right now due to various forums sort discussion like blog posts, social media are flooded with new content day by day. And people are constantly distracted.
The place like ACT open thread for people to discuss wide variety of discussion in one single place seems lacking.
In the meanwhile we are hard to find a dedicated, persistent place built for public discussion with specific topic. These place's discussion almost will seem like a mess due to everyone is posting but no one is organizing( not mod did like reddit, but to organize, group same discussion in same group..etc)
I wish to toggle these situation with Pnyx, with a graph-oriented discussion tool.
Wish to hear your feedbacks and look forward to discuss here.
The site I would like to see is a hierarchical/graph-based "evidence clearinghouse" where big claims are built out of smaller claims, and the smaller claims are backed by evidence.
e.g. let's take the claim "lipid nanoparticles from the Covid vaccine (?) are most concentrated in the ovaries 48 hours after vaccine administration". Various comments and evidences for and against, as well as criticisms of the claim itself, can be offered:
1. Criticisms of claim:
- "This claim doesn't specify which vaccine it is talking about".
- "This claim is ambiguous. Is it a claim about the concentration in ovaries relative to other body parts, or is it a claim about when concentration peaks in the ovaries?"
The chart showing the concentration as being highest in the ovaries simply leaves out the data for the injection site, for the liver, and for the spleen (which has over 10x higher concentration than the ovaries)."
Maybe like StackOverflow, "bad" claims could be "closed" in favor of better replacement claims (e.g. a better replacement claim would be "48 hours after administration of the Pfizer vaccine, lipid nanoparticles containing vaccine particles are more concentrated in the ovaries than in any other organ".
You can imagine other types of information attached to claims, such as "related claims", and sources to show who is popularizing it or where it came from.
So of course, a bigger claim like "Covid mRNA vaccines are dangerous" would be built out of smaller ones like "it goes to your ovaries" and "VAERS deaths OMG OMg" but importantly, subclaims must be litigated independently - you don't argue about the ovaries issue on the higher-level claim.
Hmm, I guess I site like this should make it super easy to break things apart into linked/related claims, as for example "concentration is 259 times higher at the injection site" can be treated as a separate claim, and should be treated separately if someone wants to argue against it, but then it needs to be linked to the "ovaries" claim in an way that is intuitive to users...
Let's say I wanted to manufacture an organic compound that is currently made through an industrial chemical process (imagining metoprolol or some common medication). Is there any sort of library of enzymes and their functions people know of that you could search to try and develop a biosynthetic pathway?
Or (seems much less likely) is there any work being done into designing enzymes to do specific reactions?
I have recently started medication for ADHD (Brand name Vyvanse, chemical name Lisdexamfetamine). I have found it to be enormously helpful with productivity. However, I am wary of negative side effects. To that end, I have kept track of my resting heart rate before and after the medication with a smart-watch.
I found that my resting heart rate in the weeks prior to starting to take the drug was 54.7 bpm, and in the weeks while taking the drug it was 61.4, a difference of 6.7 bpm. I performed a t-test using scipy, and found that this was significant with a p-value of 0.01.
Is this something I should be worried about? I have heard that higher heart rates are associated with higher general mortality. My layman's look at studies suggests that this effect only exists at heart rates above 75 bpm.
For context, I am a mostly healthy 25 year old man, with reasonably good cardio fitness (regularly runs 5km in ~30 minutes).
I’m not a doctor but a resting heart rate of less than 62 seems fine to me. If your rate goes below 60 bpm, technically you are experiencing bradycardia, which I understand to be just fine for active individual.
My heart rate runs below 60 a lot but I log a lot of miles on my touring bicycle. Again, not a medical professional so if I the slight bump in heart rate worries you, it might be a good idea to run your concern by your regular doctor. If for nothing else to ease your anxiety.
Trump is cruel, vindictive, selfish, dishonest with a capital D and has less knowledge of and respect for the US Constitution than a nihilist middle schooler.
That’s all I need to know about him.
I’m going entirely by the words that come out his own mouth. No media interpretation is necessary. He is clearly a vile entity. I wouldn’t want him for a coworker, team member or neighbor.
This is awesome.
It's great, but hard to listen to without looking at the words, because the music is just as loud as the lyrics.
I'm curious what the exchange was that got one user banned and one other user warned. Are we non-subscribers allowed to know what it was?
The exchange appears to have been removed, so I'm gonna go with no.
For me there was a button to show the comment. But I have no idea why it was ban worthy. It is about politics but I don't think there is a rule against politics in hidden open thread?
There was some name calling further down so I guess Scott picked an arbitrary comment to ban from.
Clearly they tried to figure out the True Name of this blog.
That's easy, it will always be slatestarcodex
Of course it will be...
No, the real True Name is s***d314.
Hey Scott, since you've abandoned pseudonymity: is this fair game again?
Would what be fair game? They've clearly found the secret name of this website. All curses should be directed at SlateStarCodex which is definitely the True Name. It'll totally work. No more investigation needed.
sneed314
From what they said in 179, I take it something escalated to the point of jstr saying "go fuck yourself" and Deiseach saying "kill yourself" in reply. Scott seems more concerned with civility than with topic, so while I don't know the subject matter the insults are probably what he found objectionable.
The topic, to summarize very briefly, was that jstr alleged that Trump actually got more votes in California but Biden won through voter fraud, and then got really offended when Deiseach pointed out that this was a lie. It escalated from there. And yes, I imagine it was the reference to suicide rather than the subject matter that resulted in the ban.
Jstr - I didn’t see the exchange, but it has been my experience that when people post links like this and then label them “interesting”, etc, there is usually a hidden agenda to signal boost a conspiracy theory. To me (and possibly to Diesearch), this is a “tell”, which might explain her (over) reaction.
Now, I have no idea if this was your actual intent, and I’m trying to be charitable. I just offer this as a possible explanation.
Oh good. I feel the need to repent. I believe I applauded Deiseach in said thread, (For what to me was her wicked wit, and what to you was bile and venom.) I'm sorry. If I had something to say to you I should have said it directly. Let's all try and be more civil.
Look, jstr. You've posted a controversial article. You've intentionally steered clear of stating any opinion on any single part of it. "Interesting" does not count. Pointing out at least certain parts that you deem to be true, or false, does.
As example, let me post a link to a recent controversial article. https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-disillusionment-of-the-deplorables/ . I recommend you to actually read it.
You've read it? OK. I hold that the statement "the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight" is incorrect and misleading. I hold that a lot of other points in that article are correct. In particular, I fully agree with the five paragraphs starting from "This is where people(...)". I don't possess enough verified information to assess the correctness of various other statements.
There. End of example. To the point, let me paste one paragraph from that article which perhaps offers a charitable interpretation of your own case:
> Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.
The charitable interpretation here would be that you're one of those who latches onto one absurd theory then another, while trying to put a concrete name on something very real (and quite well described in that Claremont review article). Clearly, the concept that 2020's California, of all places, had had the vote stolen to blue, is absolute peak absurd. And given how those Californians who cannot stand Democrat governance have started voting with their feet, that concept will become only more absurd in the years ahead.
The less charitable interpretation would be an assumption of bad faith from your side, that you are signal-boosting a peak-absurd thesis while being fully aware that it is peak-absurd, which contributes to muddying the waters and to discrediting the more clear-headed perspectives on that complex subject.
I don't know you, I don't want to judge which of these interpretations would hit the mark, and I don't profess to mindreading, but look at it this way. If presuming that something is rotten in the swamp of Denmark, and the false flags are as common as the psy-ops, what would be *your* judgement of someone who picks a peak-absurd thesis, and goes boosting it while persistently avoiding to express any of their own stances on it, and then gets pugnacious on someone who calls out that fact?
You're right. The "dupe or troll" is a false dichotomy, and I apologize for having put it forward.
I was trying to think of mental models which would be promoting a story as absurd as California being stolen-to-blue, and at the time I failed to think up anything besides those two categories. I had also been somewhat indisposed because you asked for banning Deiseach, so I didn't think about other categories as hard and long as I otherwise might have. (Deiseach is a long-standing commenter held in high esteem by a lot of the community, including myself)
The passages of that article that you quote here, I also agree with a hundred percent. (Likewise, I am not a US citizen) The part which has perhaps the most resonated with me was "They watched the press behave like animals for four years." Some tectonic shifts have started happening in the mainstream media starting cca. 2010, and it reached insane levels since. By now it feels surrealist to recall how NYT and CNN used to be actually decent news sources. (I can't say for MSNBC, WaPo and NPR, since I didn't really pay attention to them before)
That article is interesting, but it sorely needs citations. It asserts as fact numerous claims that I am skeptical of, so without further elaboration and support, I can only see it as "this is how Trumpists see the world" rather than "this is something true about the world".
That being said, learning how Trumpists see the world is still very useful and interesting, even if it is based on false premises.
The article has about a hundred sentences and about ten links. There's one statement ("/premise") per sentence in median. Let's simplify it to "approx. a hundred statements." If the demand for rigor is "one link per statement", then about nine tenths of that article fail at that criteria, yes.
Not that I know any media article which would meet such criteria; I'd even say that this "one tenth" is in the top quintile of published media articles. I assume your demand is more specific than that, but you haven't been more specific.
First, only some of those statements are empirical. E.g. "the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight" is an empirical statement, which incidentally I deem false.
Even for statements that are hypothetical and not empirical, they still have a given degree of plausibility. E.g. in the chain "a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries / had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper / the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs. Jeb Bush election", the third statement is evidently hypothetical not empirical. But I view it as very plausible.
Empirical statements can furthermore be easier or harder to truly verify. I haven't much dug into the controversy around Hunter Biden, whether it is empirically true, or false, or partially true, and which parts. I have no firm opinion on that. However, the Big Tech censorship campaign against those media who were publishing that information, is empirically true. In contrast, the stories about Russian prostitutes peeing on Trump, originated from US intel agencies, were circulated quite widely in mainstream media, empirically *without* obstruction from Big Tech.
You dismissively speak of worldviews based on false premises. First, it's obviously not a case of all the hundred premises being true nor all hundred being false. Whatever measure you take of a certain worldview, it cannot be a meaningful measure without establishing the relative importance of particular premises, and then combining it with how certain you are about the truthfulness of each premise (*). Also: corroboration.
That the basis of the Trump-getting-peed-on stories was empirically BS, is the lesser point here. The greater point is how Big Tech, Big Media and intel agencies work in concert and unison when it comes to influencing the electoral process. Whether this is something to be blasé about, or concerned about, may depend on your views of the previous centuries of human history.
(*) The meta-recursion here is that worldviews in effect "dictate" what is the relative importance of particular premises -- different worldviews assigning quite different importances to particular premises -- while at the same time being *shaped by* the product of the relative importance of particular premises and the degree of certainty for each one. That's why worldviews are inherently an *open-ended process*, and a quite fascinating one.
When enough people interpret your post the same way you have to wonder if it is you who made the mistake in expression rather than we who made the mistake in interpretation.
Conventionally if you are posting a link to an article whose thesis you do not endorse you would want to signpost it somehow. For example "this article is interesting, although I do not endorse its thesis." Posting the link with no commentary at all will be taken for endorsement of the contents of the link. Note that this is an empirical and pragmatic fact about the world, not a normative claim about the way people "should" interpret such posts.
If you don't like being seen as dishonest, one way you could avoid it is by making it clear from the outset what your beliefs are about the contents of links you post. Because I also suspect that for every one person who calls you out on it, there will be another ten who thought "this guy is full of it" but were too polite or conflict-averse to say anything.
> Perhaps I "made the mistake in expression"; but I know for a fact others "made the mistake in interpretation", because I know my own heart, while they don´t.
It may be that others did not understand the meaning you intended. That doesn't mean they made a mistake.
> Also, please note that I have always been (and always will be) courteous myself
You told someone to go fuck herself.
> If that isn´t enough to avoid "being seen as dishonest"
Why would it be? Courtesy, and extending others the benefit of the doubt, are virtues. But they're different virtues than honesty.
Does that mean Deiseach got banned? That'd be a bummer; she (I think the correct pronoun) was one of the better regular commenters here.
For a day. Many of the bans here have been for one day. Long enough to get the point across, not *really* disrupting your participation.
mesage 2
XXX edit
Yes, she's a woman.
I feel like the punishment mostly comes from the shame and disgrace, not from the actual one day ban. Everyone who read this post will forever associate Deiseach with the person who told someone to kill themselves over an Internet argument. Even if there's 100% proof that she's sorry about it and won't do it again, that association is hard to shake.
You think so? I feel as though about half of all political disputes on Twitter devolve to that level of vitriol, and given the number of Twitter fights there are on a daily basis, that's a lot of death wishes, but no one really cares. If you ever look at David Simon's twitter account, I would estimate he tells a random person he hopes they die of disease about once every three days, for example.
That's true, but ACX is supposed to be better than Twitter, and it is. The day ACX remotely resembles Twitter, I'm leaving.
True, but we are still subject to the Online Disinhibition Effect, same as anywhere else, I would say, so while I try not to be a jerk to people, I'm not going to get too bent out of shape if someone occasionally does blow their stack a bit, especially when it's someone whose comments are otherwise quite good.
It doesn't change my picture of her. (and I'm a newbie) She's a smart sharp tongued Irishman (woman). Who you (I) can't help loving. And her sharp tongue can lead to trouble. It's almost a stereo-type. I'm picturing Maureen O'Hara in "The Quite Man". Deiseach, please forgive me talking in the third person about you.
As one of the parties in the kerfuffle, I have resolved not to refight it or litigate it or do anything rather than serve out my ban. I've done so, and now I'm going to hold my tongue on the entire affair.
Which means I won't get into an exchange of views with you either, dionysus.
My girlfriend might want to convert to Judaism when we get married. I am a cultural Jew, am not strictly observant, and don't go to synagogue. She probably would also be a cultural Jew, not very observant, and not go to synagogue, I realize you don't need to officially convert to do this but it would be meaningful to us. Has anyone else been in a similar situation? Are there rabbis (presumably Reform) who will convert you no questions asked, or do you need to promise to go to their synagogue or follow halacha or something? Does anyone have any good ideas for next steps?
You might reach out to local Reconstructionist rabbis for advice on this, Reconstructionism being even less traditionalist than Reform. I don't know about the East Bay but there is a Reconstructionist congregation in San Francisco, Or Shalom. I have no personal connection to them, unfortunately.
Also, mazel tov on your impending marriage! May it bring you both great joy.
Ultra-traditionalist Judaism might be more hospitable for polyamory, seeing as how many wives King Solomon had :)
I know of rabbis who would convert someone on the condition of a commitment to learn for a year, bathe in a mikvah at the end of the process, and make a broad commitment to tether one's fate to the fate of the Jewish people; I assume they'd be quite open as to the nature of the commitment and not require a commitment beyond cultural Judaism...I can ask around...
I passed on your question to some colleagues and if anyone has a lead I'm happy to connect you.
Why?
God doesn't exist so there's no real reason to convert, as far as I can tell. What do you mean by "cultural Jew"?
This is debatably true, not kind, and not necessary.
When someone expresses a preference that you don't share, barging into the conversation with "WELL ACTUALLY I BELIEVE X SO YOUR PREFECENCE IS STUPID" is a rude thing to do. This is extra true about preferences for religious practice and religious community membership, something people are sensitive about because everyone knows it's a topic that's ripe for conflict. It's extra extra true in contexts where there is a pressing reason to be especially kind instead, like when someone has just mentioned that they're getting married. You can see many examples of appropriate responses to this kind of announcement elsewhere in this thread.
You are being mean, and you are making this space worse. Please stop it.
Well said
+1
agree, but i think OP was just trying to figure out if there is any meta-physical belief driving the conversion, or if it is entirely cultural.
-1
"barging into the conversation", "You are being mean, and you are making this space worse. Please stop it."? This invokes memories of the process that transformed the internet from a fascinating forum for diverse intellectual debate and cultural celebration that expanded intellectual horizons into a collection of walled-off tribal circlejerks, when gadflies and devils advocates started being called trolls and concern trolls.
I'm personally interested in the response to "marxbro's" question because I'm kinda in a similar situation. I've found myself going periodically to a synagogue(an orthodox one) for the first time in my life. I've felt a bit guilty about it, as if I'm attending on false pretenses. I am completely irreligious, secular, and cosmopolitan and am quite certain I will remain so for life. But the rabbi insists that I'm still welcome, apparently concerned only with my blood. I don't consider it an identity issue so much as cultural curiosity, so maybe "cultural Jew" is apt description.
It's an intriguing question...if God doesn't exist, then why would she convert? (The topic actually came up with my rabbi too. My girlfriend isn't Jewish and he said that their position generally is that conversion isn't compulsory, actually being discouraged, and it's technically frowned upon to marry outside the faith). More important than this is the old universalism/cosmopolitanism v. particularism/communitarianism debate. Would his girlfriend's conversion be considered an indication of embracing communitarianism? Scott is one the few popular commentators left that, for lack of a better word(and I realize it's a horrible word), seems 'sane' to me. I feel comfortable including him in a relatively short list of role models. Whatever their motivations for doing this, it could help inform my own decisions going forward. If Scott's not comfortable answering that question and just ignores it, it's all good. But if he is, I'd certainly be curious about the answer. So you'll forgive me for disagreeing that our gadfly above is "making this space worse."
It's true, kind and necessary. I've not been rude or said any swear words.
Marriage shouldn't be a sacred cow either. It's strange to me that a community that says it upholds rationality and truth-seeking is now approaching religious conversion as something that is taboo to criticise.
i don't think this conversation needs to devolve... let me just say i think the response was to the line 'God doesn't exist', which without context could be taken as unkind, but in this context probably isn't. For example, if someone had a sincere belief in a religion, and wanted to convert, "god doesn't exist, so why bother" could seem a bit unkind. But in this context, I think we are assuming the conversion is (as Scott says) 'cultural', and there is no deity belief backing it (Scott has not explicitly said if the fiancé has a belief in god or not, which is why I posted asking if it was the case or not; since I assume the higher prior is they do not).
So if it is true that there is no deity belief backing the conversion, I agree it is a bit curious as to why there is such a strong desire, and why it would be meaningful.
So I can understand why C_B thought you were being unkind, but I think it mostly a misunderstanding, and his reply could also have been kinder.
Context or no, stating that 'God doesn't exist' doesn't come close to falling under the umbrella of 'criticizing religious conversion'. It's quite rude to those of us who either believe in God or are agnostic like myself
It's not rude to state a fact. I've not attacked anyone personally or said any nasty words. I'm just making a straightforward declaration of the truth: God doesn't exist.
Personally, I find this whole exercise pointless. If Scott doesn't believe in this religion, if his partner doesn't believe in this religion, it seems counter-intuitive to recommend conversion? Doesn't it seem hypo-critical to want to join a community if you don't share any of their core values?
Maybe I don't really understand this "culturally Jewish" thing - but wouldn't you have to at least go to synagogue, practice faith-based traditions or observe faith-based holidays to experience Jewish culture? (Or at the very least one of the above?)
Can you simply go to a meetup and meet other Jews? If the last is the case, why do you need a rabbi or to convert for that? It seems strange to want to associate with a group you have so little in common with, but let's not pretend this is a logical or consistent idea.
yes, unfortunately he has not given any follow up... it does seem curious. If indeed there is no religious component of the conversion, than why do it? would you go through a similar process with any other aspect of life you had such a mild affinity for? I'm hoping maybe something is being saved for a top level post.
It makes sense to me -- it's sort of like joining a fraternity. Is that so strange? Going through some sort of conversion ritual is a signal of commitment and promotes bonding among members.
Now, it is sort of hypocritical if you're joining a religion where most people are devout, and you're doing it just for social benefits while not actually believing like the fellow members. But I think more liberal strains of Judaism are not this way -- there aren't many liberal Jews who are all that devout, and it's more about preserving traditions as a family and a people. Being a committed atheist might still put you a bit outside the norm, but not nearly as much as it would in a Southern Baptist church.
Well, even if you had no malicious intent, it was kind of a yutzy way to phrase the question. You immediately place yourself in the position being the arbiter of the supposed truth (without the means to falsify your proposition). Then you follow it up with a clueless question about cultural Judaism — which, if you were sincere in your ignorance, you could easily have googled what it means. The subtext of your original question was that any self-identification or affiliation with Judaism is an act of superstition.
But I'm glad you explained yourself! If the real question you were positing was: "why get married at all, given that marriage is a superstitious ceremony derived from superstitious beliefs?" you should have asked that question first! — because it could have offended a wider range of people, and you wouldn't have given the impression that you were singling out cultural Jews as being uniquely superstitious.
I said quite straightforwardly that God doesn't exist. This is a criticism of all religions. I'm not a "yutz" and I phrased it the best I possibly could. I know what the word " cultural" means but I think it's being used as a magic wand to gloss over some pretty fundamentally irrational behaviours here. Like if one is merely a "cultural Jew" then why is a Rabbi needed at all?
Hmmm. I think you have a distorted view of what rationalism is. Let's take it back a step. My understanding is that rational belief requires that you be able to prove, either logically, mathematically, or scientifically that proposition is true — or in the case of science that it's likely to be true to the best evidence we have. Belief in things you can't prove are non-rational or arrational (not a common word, but I didn't coin it). Belief in things that can obviously be proved false are irrational.
Atheism like any other theism is an arrational belief — i.e. there's no experimental way to falsify either the God or no-God proposition. Attempts have been made to prove or disprove one position or the other, but they've all failed. (Although, supposedly Kurt Gödel was working on a logical/mathematical proof for the existence of God when he died — I would have liked to see it.) Anyway, you can have an opinion on whichever proposition you think *may* be true. As long as you admit that it's an opinion, that's an arrational belief. To posit either position as provable fact is an irrational belief.
As for our cultural affinities, these are aesthetic choices that we either make for ourselves or that we freely accept from our family and our community. Some have argued that there's a rational basis for aethetics. I don't believe this. However, I admit that's an arrational opinion on my part. But you can't really claim a cultural affinity is irrational. What rules of logic, math, or science does it violate? It's like one's taste in colors: You may like the color red more than you like the color blue, but you can't rationally argue one color is better than the other. Claiming someone is superstitious for liking the color blue more than the color red, is an irrational statement.
Well, whether a higher power exists is another debate. It's obvious (to me) that Scott doesn't think a higher power exists - so I just don't understand the viewpoint.
It seems illogical -but humans are not always rational actors. Maybe Scott is just nostalgic for his youth/family? In that case, I would just recommend to hang out with them more instead of this "dog-and-pony" show conversion.
Well, regardless of whether there is a higher power or not - (something I'm convinced is unknowable as stated, so I won't make a judgement either way) - I would phrase it more like "You just stated you don't believe in this religion. Why would you want someone to convert?".
I'm also not sure about this "culturally Jewish" thing. My "culturally Christian" friends at least go to church and keep the holidays even if they don't follow the teachings of the Bible to the T, and don't come across as downright hostile to the idea of a higher power, when they aren't seriously devout.
While I disagree with the tone, I think there is a valid point here. I would have questions too if someone told me "Here are all the ways 'my' religion is unimportant to me. It would be meaningful if my significant other would convert to this religion which I just stated I don't care about.". Why bother?
Or maybe just join the Reconstructionists. If I understand correctly, it's for people who don't believe in a higher power yet still want the feel of religion - maybe Scott would like that. I still don't think it matters if you don't practice, don't hold the core beliefs, don't celebrate the main holidays or don't go to the main religious institutes.
For reference, I would ask these same questions of any denomination of faith.
This is a good post, but:
DON'T FEED MARXBRO THEY ARE A TROLL
Why not? It's fun to tease him. Lol!
I'm not a troll.
Prove that you're not a troll, then. You ask non-sensical or provocative questions and demand rational answers from us. You're like a five-year old, who keeps asking why? why? why?, but when we try to explain our reasoning to you, you ask why? why? why? again. At no point have you even made the slightest attempt to defend you statements with any sort of rational justification. Although I find your statements to be rather entertaining, evidently many others in this conversation don't. As for me, I can only keep throwing the frisbee to you so many times before I get bored with your game.
They're not provocative questions at all.
Marxbro isn't known for his kindness, but I'm pretty sure Scott is atheist so MB's phrasing doesn't strike me as something that would offend Scott. I too am curious about the purpose a conversion would serve.
If I could sum up what I say below, it would be that people are in touch with their roots, and that's meaningful to them.
I'll confess I don't completely understand "cultural" faith either, but at least with something like Judaism it seems like it's such a distinct culture, within the broader American culture (in this case), that being "culturally Jewish" makes some sense to me. Distinct holidays and traditions definitely contribute. Having unique rites of passage is certainly part of a culture as well, and those traditions aren't meaningless even if you might think that they're not "true."
I'm a Mormon, for instance, and while we've got a culture of our own (I've got ancestors who knew Joseph Smith and followed Brigham Young to Utah), Jewish culture is much more distinct, not to mention going MUCH farther back. Many Mormons I know are only in it because of the culture, and go along with the rest because there's no "Reform Mormonism" option. I think you see a similar thing with Catholicism and Islam. (For the record, I'm a believing-while-doubting Mormon, but that's more complicated than we need to get into here.)
If this is all about being in touch with your "roots" then I'm not sure why a prospective wife would want to convert - shouldn't she also be in touch with her "roots"?
Is Reform Mormonism a niche waiting to be filled?
There's the Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My impression is that it used to act as a second destination for people leaving the mainstream Latter-day Saint body, but increasingly it is indistinguishable from other liberal Christian churches and former Latter-day Saints rarely bother anymore.
Certainly there are individuals in the Church who attend services and activities while being lax in their personal observances or heterodox in their private beliefs, but as far as I can tell it's not a "thing" like it is in Catholicism or Judaism.
I'm not sure why, really. The Church leadership certainly has worked to discourage it for most of its history, but they seem to have been unusually successful at it compared to other religions. One thing that seems important is that many of the culture-specific rituals -- like the special rites of passage and special marriages -- are gate-kept strictly around both practice and belief by a clearly defined leadership structure.
Adding on that the Latter-day Saint leadership structure is surprisingly flat and centralized. For example, the smallest unit of the Church is the ward, lead by a bishop, of which there are about 30,000 worldwide. The selection of a new bishop is frequently done under the in-person supervision of one of the Twelve Apostles (the second-highest leadership body), and the selection is then submitted to the First Presidency (the highest), and I know from second-hand accounts that the First Presidency doesn't just rubber-stamp it and says no sometimes.
I wonder what criteria are used to select bishops?
Also, I have a very specific and vexing question about their authority. Do teenagers have to discuss sex with them? Is there some confessional function bishops fulfill? Is it all about Temple recommends*?
Let me explain: A fun fact about being an openly gay high school student in Salt Lake City in the '90s is that a everyone just assumes you were Mormon before you sucked dick, and it leads to hilarious misunderstandings.
From 9th grade on, four or five times a year, total strangers, unprompted, told me a story about a bishop who is the last person that should be listening to teenagers have to talk about their sexual development.
One was a bishop who asked Elizabeth's sister to "prove you haven't put balled up tissues in her bra." The others were The same, but longer.
Was I told those srories because that kind of thing happens a lot and is openly discussed—someone looked at me, said, "he looks pretty Mormon" and told the story as gossip?
Or was I told because that kind of thing almost never happens and is not discussed—someone looked me up specifically as the only non-lesbian in the GSA after Mike went to Evergreen Sophomore year, and told the story looking for advice or help?
Either way, as soon as I said, "actually, my parents are hippies and my family's Jewish," the person telling the story would just mutter "nevermind" or "my mistake," then never talk to me again.
(The only exception was a young man who asked how I could be Jewish and gay, then refused to let me demonstrate.)
Anyway, it was 20 years ago, I still don't know what happened, and I'm not sure closing all the schools for a year was a bad thing.
*The wedding thing gets a bad rap, but I love it. I wish more friends would ask me to wear the suit, do the photos and eat the cake—but read a book outside during the ceremony. Frankly, it's an improvement on other faiths.
Thanks, I've learned some things here.
"increasingly it is indistinguishable from other liberal Christian churches and former Latter-day Saints rarely bother anymore."
Yes, from what I've seen, all liberal religious traditions have a tendency to blend together at a certain point, and to blend with secular leftism, which is why they're all slowly evaporating. Because why bother? It's tough to be a passionate advocate for one's church if you think it's just a pretty good social club and not the one true path to salvation. It's especially difficult to pass these traditions down to one's children, and most people don't try that hard. It probably doesn't help that all sorts of social clubs and community organizations are doing very poorly these days.
Reform Judaism is evaporating too, but somewhat more slowly than Mainline Protestant churches. At some point it will probably be able to maintain its numbers on the basis of apostates from Orthodox Judaism, but currently Orthodox Judaism is only 20% of the total in the US, and that situation looks like it will flip, with Orthodox becoming the majority and most Reform Jews having recent family links to it.
"Certainly there are individuals in the Church who attend services and activities while being lax in their personal observances or heterodox in their private beliefs, but as far as I can tell it's not a "thing" like it is in Catholicism or Judaism."
Well, it's not as much a thing in Protestantism either, and the LDS was founded by Protestants and my sense is that culturally LDS is still more like a very weird and highly committed Protestant church than it is like Catholicism or Judaism.
I went to a Catholic HS, and I've observed for a while that Catholic high schools often have very marginally-attached Catholic alums still actively involved in them. My school's largest financial backer was like this -- he was an Italian-American who practically never attended Mass, but he sent all his basically unchurched kids there and I think for him the school was sort of an Italian thing -- a sense that Catholicism is on some level as inseparable from Italian-ness as pasta is. Which is an awful lot like cultural Judaism.
Evangelical private schools normally don't have this --"ex-vangelical" alums don't get involved in them, don't send their kids there or give them money.
First off, please prove that God doesn't exist. So far I have yet to come across any proof for or against the existence of God, but I'd be happy to hear if you have one.
We can discuss the question of what is the definition of a cultural Jew after you answer my first question. ;-)
The burden of proof is on the god-believers to present proof that a God exists.
By claiming the other side has the burden of proof in the God/no-God argument, you're abrogating your responsibility as self-proclaimed rationalist. The burden of proof is an irrational argument that both theists and atheists use against each other. It's irrational because if makes the fatal assumption if it can't be proved it isn't real. For instance, there's no proof for Hilbert's sixteenth problem. Could there be proof for it? Or is it unprovable? You can have an opinion, but to state it's either provable or unprovable is at best arrational. Placing the burden of proof on the side with the opposing opinion is definitely an irrational argument, though. "My opinion is correct because you can't prove your opinion!" See how absurd that sounds? As an agnostic, I don't have to prove anything. I can just say I don't have enough data to make a rational decision on the question. And I don't. Lol!
If it's "unprovable" then I'm not sure why you would want to convert to a religion in the first place. There are many things which are unprovable which I would also not worship. How are people even making the decision about which unprovable deity they want to worship?
Question: how uncompromising are you in your anti-religious views? Have you ever sat down with friends for a Christmas dinner? Or would you make a point of shunning them for them for paying lip service to Christian ceremony — even if they didn't really believe that Jesus was the Christ savior?
I was raised by atheists, but when I was kid we put up tree and gave presents. My parents didn't have any problem having fun on that holiday, even to the extent of going out caroling with our Christian neighbors. My parents did however make a point of telling me the truth about non-existence of Santa Claus when I was five. Oh boy! That caused a lot of outrage with my peers when I relayed that information to them!
I'm going to try and answer the question 'What do you mean by "cultural Jew"?'
My grandma taught Yiddish for 20 years and in the late 40s, she got her master's degree from a yeshiva; the subject of her dissertation was ”humanism and Judaism."
The late 40s was a time when a lot of American Jews doubted the literal truth of being a 'chosen people' but also felt personally connected to the worldwide Jewish diaspora.
I can't explain the feeling very well. (If my cousin ever actually scans that thesis, you should read it, because my grandmother could, and did.)
I wish there were an edit function so I could tack this joke into my post: I'm a-theological: arguments about the existence of god don't exist.
You can speak Yiddish and write about humanism and Judaism without a formal conversion or without seeking out a Rabbi on the matter. If it's simply about speaking a language then I'm sure there are plenty of helpful apps for that.
Well I have not yet found my grandmother's master's thesis, I can promise you that her essay in the January 18, 1991, issue of the Detroit Jewish News will be well worth your time:
https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/djnews/djn.1991.01.18.001/74
Also, I apologize if I gave you the impression that my grandmother was a Rabbi. She was a communist.
I was referring to Scott's question. If this is simply about hanging out with people, speaking a language or taking part in holidays I don't know why a formal conversion would be required.
Glad to hear she was a communist.
I don't think it's required, it's just, I can't think of any alternatives to a conversion for a newlywed who wants to adopt their spouse's irrelegious Judaism.
Cultural Jews: not a family, so you can't marry in; not a religion, so you can't convert; not an organization, so you can't sign up; not a philosophy, so you can't espouse it—it may be a group that's literally impossible to join. For a group so tolerant of others we founded the ACLU, we're not very welcoming!
Or maybe we're too Talmudic about the whole thing. Raised Catholic? Spouse mildly Protestant? Have a presbyterian wedding service and bam, you've switched religions and no one will ask you if you believe in God! (Plus, next time you have to go to Church, you'll enter feet first.)
My grandmother's FBI fill was inspiring. Sign one petition in the 50s to make sure the government's secret police spend time and money watching you, then be totally law abiding for seventy years.
J. Edgar Hoover was not Hitler and it would have been wrong to use violence against him——but wasting his time and money is a mitzvah.
There are large parts of Judaism as a religion that provide benefits even if you don't believe in God. Belonging to a captial-P People with its own history and its own rituals and values can be its own reward. Maintaining that belonging may require doing things that aren't 100% justified by evidence (though for Judaism believing in God is often not one of those things), but the rewards can be worth the costs.
I say this as a Christian who teaches at a Jewish school. My students generally come away feeling like part of something bigger and more meaningful than themselves, much more than I think their public-school counterparts do. And I suspect that the majority of them get this benefit despite not believing in God.
I'm not sure why "conversion" is needed for feeling "part" of something bigger than oneself. That's just having friends that you talk to once in a while.
The fact that nearly every culture and religion in history has some sort of initiation rites and/or selective criteria for group inclusion suggests that for most people "feeling a part of something bigger" is more than just "having friends you talk to once in while" and that you are the one who is missing something here.
I don't know why there would be an "initiation" for someone who doesn't actually believe in the religion anyway.
There are large parts of Judaism as a religion that provide benefits even if you don't believe in every aspect of the religion*. Belonging to a captial-P People with its own history and its own rituals and values can be its own reward. Maintaining that belonging may require doing things that aren't 100% justified by evidence (though for Judaism believing in God is often not one of those things), but the rewards can be worth the costs.
*(and Judaism specifically is not actually big on orthodoxy of belief; there are many see the statistic elsewhere that a large % of active Reform Jews don't believe in God)
Came across this quote from Karl Marx. Thought you'd get a chuckle out of it...
"'atheism' ... reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man."
-- Karl Marx, Letter to Engels, 30 November 1842
Oh this is great, congratulations on your upcoming wedding!
I am not Jewish but years ago I dated a guy for several years who was Jewish and we discussed conversion. Having looked a little way down the path, my contribution is this, take her to lots of holidays and see if the “wow” hits. Sometimes new converts fall in love with the tradition and want to go full tilt for a while. She would “probably” be non-observant, but joining a new community can make people feel unexpected things. Let yourself be ok with her falling in love with the tradition if that is what happens, and then see which conversion process feels right. That may be why Zohar commented “learn for a year.” Congratulations again to both of you!
Mazel tov! When my wife and I decided to get married, we wanted a non-religious ceremony presided over by a rabbi (parental pressure, of course, about the rabbi). We were younger then. Eventually we did find a rabbi who was willing to preside, with a suitably modified standard Jewish wedding. I'm sure you could find a rabbi who will agree to such a conversion, either among Reform or Reconstructionist congregations, or check out csjo.org, the home for Cultural and Secular Jewish Organizations. I help run a secular Jewish organization in the Detroit region, but we have no clergy--we do it all ourselves.
"Mazel tov to you two!" says your fellow cultural Jew! Seriously, mazel tov! Honestly, this brightened up my morning, which up until this point was one of those combos of (1) "woke up on the wrong side of the bed" and (2) "Oh noes! I need to rush out in the rain to put out the garbage cans that I was too lazy to put out last night!". In closing, congratulations once more!
Congratulations on the wedding!
The conversion should be substantive and centered around learning. A "good" Reform Jew knows all the commandments they decide not to follow. I suggest going through a torah cycle, reading a portion each week. Here is a good book for that: https://www.amazon.com/Etz-Hayim-Commentary-David-Lieber/dp/0827607121/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=torah+in+english+etz&qid=1626088761&s=books&sr=1-5
Also, any of the books by Joseph Telushkin are terrific introductions.
would love to hear more about the reasoning behind this is you are willing, and what makes it meaningful
Same here. I deleted my comment lower down, because the asker was pretty blunt about it. I feel like I'm missing something and am honestly curious about the desire.
From my point of view, if there's (presumably) no sincere belief in the basic tenants of the faith, little to no intention to observe it, and no desire to experience the rituals or community gained by attending synagogue...what is the "thing" that's being meaningfully converted?
Oh and congratulations to Scott!
Damn inability to edit the comments! I meant, I replied to someone who asked a question about this, but it was kind of rudely phrased.
For me, I just literally don't understand what it is that would be meaningful in a way that's different from a name change or one of the other marriage traditions.
*if* you are willing ( not 'is' )
My mom is Jewish and my dad was Catholic and I was raised Catholic. I have been told by many Jewish people including a Rabbi that I'm Jewish and it was implied that this is very meaningful for cultural reasons.
I don't have any substantive advice but congrats to the two of you!
Mazel tov Scott!! I’m so happy for you.
For all the unique and unusual things about you, this particular problem is well-known to the point of there being an entire subgenre of Jewish humor devoted to it.
As others have said, what you basically want is to find a Reform or Reconstructionist rabbi who you like and who’ll have dealt with dozens or hundreds of such couples in the past. That rabbi might want not only your fiancée but also you to learn more (I’d be curious how impressed they’ll be by the kabbalistic research you did for Unsong!). They’ll ask how you plan to raise your children. But for better or worse, there’s basically no extreme of unbelief or non-commitment for which you couldn’t find a Reform/Reconstructionist rabbi who’d seen even more and who’d work with you … *certainly* in the Bay Area! The conversion (and hence, the Judaism of your children) wouldn’t be recognized by the Orthodox, or for emigrating to Israel under the Law of Return, but most likely neither of those are pressing problems for you.
I think the Law of Return does apply if Wikipedia and my memory are both correct.
From Wikipedia:
"The law since 1970 applies to the following groups:
Those born Jews according to the orthodox interpretation; having a Jewish mother or maternal grandmother.
Those with Jewish ancestry – having a Jewish father or grandfather.
Converts to Judaism (Orthodox, Reform, or Conservative denominations—not secular—though Reform and Conservative conversions must take place outside the state, similar to civil marriages).
But Jews who have converted to another religion are not eligible to immigrate under the Law of Return, even though they are still Jews according to halakha.
Ah, right — the original idea of the Law of Return was that anyone Jewish enough for the Nazis to have murdered, should be Jewish enough for Israel to let in. And it does have clauses that apply even to those who the rabbinate wouldn’t consider Jewish once there, administer a Jewish wedding for, etc., which is a separate determination. In recent years, alas, the rabbinate has taken an increasingly severe line about who exactly is Jewish enough for them.
I am in a similar situation. I think basically the answer is you have to do some work to convert, but no substantial ongoing work is required. I would ask your local reform synagogue; I'm sure they've dealt with similar situations before.
We just took this class (https://www.centralsynagogue.org/engage/exploring_judaism), which is basically designed to convert non-Jewish spouses to Judaism. It was pretty long; I imagine lighter options are available? I haven't really checked though.
Is there a meta physical belief driving the conversion desire?
As a mostly-cultural Jew myself, I would strongly advise against your girlfriend doing this. There is no point in converting =religiously= to Judaism unless you intend to practice the Jewish religion. (Of whatever brand conducts your conversion; Orthodox don't recognize non-Orthodox conversions.) One may culturally affiliate with Judaism without being by religious standards a Jew. And the conversion would mean a formal disaffiliation with whatever one was before, which is a mighty serious step to take.
I appreciate your comment. Before I posted mine I had a much longer version which wouldn't post last night. As someone who had agreed to convert to Judaism "for" my then-boyfriend, but then we broke up, it unexpectedly started me on a path of religious grappling, where I began to question previously unexamined aspects of divinity, faith, God, tradition and everything else. I don't know much about Scott's girlfriend but there are a lot of ways to get to be an adult without ever having thought seriously about what it means to be religious or have or practice a religion, or have started out in something without learning much about it except political takes one disagrees with. My read of his comment was, he was putting the situation out there because they are at the beginning of thinking about it, and there may be a somewhat standard rejection of "God" in play, so going at it from the "God" side won't happen. But starting a learning process from the cultural side might, and can lead to the "God" side. If she starts a learning and participation process, it could end up a variety of ways, including with a faith-based "conversion" experience and intent to practice the religion. My mental model of religion is somewhat like an attractor, people can get gathered in. You are right, it's a big step to leave whatever you were before. When people couple up across religious differences, it automatically (unintentionally) makes people look a little harder about what it means to be on the team they're on as opposed to any other team. Some people don't want a partner of the same faith, that can be subtle. But I admire Scott and all the commenters for bringing it up and discussing it in "good faith." It's an important conversation. I've seen interfaith couples become miserable about various aspects and that's to be avoided, I think. I think neither partner knows where it's going when they first bring it up, there's the destination you think you have and then (not unusual for matters of faith or mystery) there is where that actually ends up. My relationship, we were terrible for each other and it's much better we didn't marry. But I still think about the religious angle and recently decided to start learning more about Judaism in religious terms (decades later). I encourage Scott and his girlfriend to let themselves have a process (and if they would, give us an update in six months)! Just my take on it.
There's a fantastic book I have not been able to find again (1998), autobiographical sketches of interfaith couples, many combinations of traditions, many different experiences, had one by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala I think, if anyone knows that book, please post.
Currently looking for my first real entry level IT job (preferably remote) after my knee exploded during work training. Any pro tips?
This is good advice and something I have tried in the past. However, I have no security clearance or money to pay for the process of getting a security clearance at present, which is limiting this as an option at present.
What sort of IT? I've got a lot of experience in hiring remotely etc and happy to help how I can.
Well, I have a CS bachelors degree but no real coding experience, as well as three associates degrees in networking, information systems, and computer support, but only a year of industry experience in random temp jobs. So I am flexible but not strong in anything in particular. My current job is very customer facing in a sense, so answering phones would be fine, but something in networking or in house support would be ideal. Thank you very much for the help in advance.
I should have led with that: what type of position are you looking for and what are your salary expectations etc? Any particular industry?
40-60k would be terrific. And I am unsure. I don't even have a good feel for the topology of the industry to be honest.
Well, you'll need to do that first: pick a type of job you want to do and think you're well suited for.
I don't know how to do that. I can define a range but I lack both a specific understanding of the industry and a specific narrow interest. What I'd prefer to be is a Linux sysadmin but I don't think I have enough experience for that right now.
You could try going for high level customer support. By that I don't mean answering the phones, but receiving bug reports, debugging them, and providing patches to customers.
In my experience most programmers hate the customer facing side of that, so you can do well for yourself if you take that role and free the team up to do other things.
Are you going for IT because you don't like coding, or just because you don't think you have the experience for it? Because you can probably get hired as a software developer with just a CS degree and whatever coding experience you got from college.
Lack of experience mostly. Though there are certainly types of coding I am not fond of. I will look into it, thank you.
+1 to this. I started at Google straight out of college and they (as well as all the other FAANG's) still hire a ton of new grads. The pay is much better than you'd expect in IT and as long as you find some kinds of coding interesting there is probably a place for you.
If you're curious if you'd pass the interviews, I can give you a practice interview. I've given 80 interviews, historically mostly for new grad positions, so I can probably tell you around what your odds are Google at least.
Can't hurt I suppose. My discord handle is Ruby Gogh#3876 if you want to hit me up there.
Hi Dan, horning in here because my son is graduating in less than a year with a CS degree and I have no idea how to properly encourage him to do what is prudent/efficient. Any chance we could chat on Discord as well?
Check postings at your local universities. Especially if you have any kind of in. Get an in if you can. Universities value degrees and are often hiring IT personnel.
For an artistic project related to engineering ethics and the tribal values of engineers, I am interested in writings which are:
0. easily publicly accessible
1. of literary merit
2. either (a) postmortems of significant engineering failures or (b) statements of engineering values, or both.
Feynman's minority report on the Challenger disaster, with its ringing conclusion that "Nature cannot be fooled," is to me a classic example of both 2a and 2b. What other texts are good examples of these?
You might look into literature (as in actual literature) written by engineers or scientists. It bleeds through a lot in my experience.
Any specific recommendations of that kind of literature?
In this vein, Leveson and Turner's "An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents" might be worth checking out. It's available free from Stanford's website:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/therac-25.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjRp5L17d3xAhUDRTABHdM_ADAQFjAAegQIAxAC&usg=AOvVaw3ThXt5sAnljLPJ4xYaaiVF&cshid=1626104294987
Perhaps Dan Luu:
https://danluu.com/postmortem-lessons/
https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems
Nice sourcebook, thanks (and the substance jibes with my own experiences).
The middle section of Slide Rule, the autobiography of Nevil Shute. It recounts his experiences designing and building the airship R100, alongside the competing team who built the ill-fated R101. It's somewhat polemic regarding the public-sector-built R101 vs the R100, which was contracted to Armstrong-Vickers.
Neat, thanks!
In the same vein, Shute's *Trustee from the Toolroom* stars a humble hobbyist machinist ("model engineer") who accidentally stumbles into situations where his practical problem-solving shows its worth. It's one of my favourites. Some supernatural weirdness too, but *No Highway* has related themes. And then *Ruined City* is about the moral side of being a good engineering businessman and makes me tear up every time.
Kipling has "The Bridge Builders" in prose and "The Sons of Martha" in verse, also possibly "Hymn of Breaking Strain". "Sons of Martha" was later adopted for the Canadian graduation ceremony for professional engineers, as a poetic codification of the ethical standards of the profession.
"Sons of Martha" and "Hymn of Breaking Strain" were definitely in my plans already, but I haven't read "The Bridge Builders," so thanks very much for that pointer!
Having participated in the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, read all the related materials and be weirded out/captivated. Professional engineers have a subtly different cultural role here than in the rest of the Anglosphere.
"To Engineer is Human: the role of failure in successful design" by Henry Petroski.
_Cryptonomicon_ by Neal Stephenson
Also, less directly: _Anathem_ by Neal Stephenson
Have you read any Henry Petroski? "The Pencil" and "To Engineer is Human" come to mind.
Doesn't fit criterion 1 as well, but the NTSB has a lot of good reports on significant engineering failures. For example, in their conclusion on the collapse of the FIU pedestrian bridge in Florida they deliver the incredible understated burn "To FIGG Bridge Engineers, Inc.: Train your staff on the proper use of Pc (the permanent net compressive force normal to the shear plane) when calculating nominal interface shear resistance."
Doesn't immediately read as ringing as Feynman, but then you realize that it essentially translates to "Your incompetence killed 6 people" passed through a
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2019-HWY18MH009-BMG-abstract.pdf
*passed through a filter of precise engineering language. Curse you, lack of edit button.
In the opposite direction, ie more literary and less statement of engineering values / post-mortem, is "The Mighty Task Is Done" by Joseph Strauss, chief engineer of the Golden Gate bridge: http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=3006
'The Boiler codes are written in blood.' I suggest you look up the explosion of the Sultana. This was a steamboat on the Mississippi that was carrying home 2300 Union POWs after the end of the war. The boiler exploded killing about 1800 passengers and crew. This was the accident that led to the adoption of codes for steam boilers, and thus the quote.
I would recommend looking at the story of William LeMessurier and the Citicorp Center. I learned about it in an Ethics of Engineering course, and it always stood out to me as an example of somebody faced with a difficult choice making what in hindsight was clearly the correct decision.
There's a case study available here: https://www.theaiatrust.com/whitepapers/ethics/LeMessurier-Stands-Tall_A-Case-Study-in-Professional-Ethics.pdf
and a New Yorker article here: https://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm
And him explaining the whole incident to the MIT engineering colloquium (look at about 35:45 to skip a lot of engineering discussion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-7IlAdAtg
There's a bit about him choosing between silence, suicide and speaking up that made me understand the kind of gut-wrenching horror he must have felt at understanding the mistake he had made.
This is probably not the act thing you want, but there's a podcast called 'Well there's your problem' that looks at engineering disasters, and tackles them from a hard-left/socialist material analysis of history type view.
I won't give it a ringing endorsement as the best thing ever or always correct or fair, but I don't think I've ever heard a socialist engineering perspective anywhere else, and it throws up angles of discussion and analysis and ideas that I haven't seen presented elsewhere.
This may not be "literary" enough but there is an extremely large+influential set of writings from the 50s primarily about nuclear weapons but also about war in general, the most famous of which is probably the Einstein-Russell Manifesto https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/ . Lots more where that came from too and likely some book-length treatments, but I can't think of one offhand. Will edit if I think of one, I feel like I'm missing the obvious here.
The Navy has a database of After Action Reports that *should* be publicly accessible. (There were thousands of reports in it when I got out a decade ago; maybe a couple hundred were classified, most of those unnecessarily, so of course it's all hosted on the classified network. If you happen to have access, I guarantee you'll find a couple interesting engineering problems in it in half an hour. They'll be unclassified, too, though
Though of course getting permission to share unclassified information with people who could learn from it is practically impossible.
I used two of those reports as writing samples on job interviews for years. To be able to, I still had to call in a favor AND they made me black out a phone number, even though we had the same number on our ship's web site!
Don't forget Robert Heinlein! Most of his stories feature an engineer with a slide rule. I particularly enjoyed _The Door Into Summer_ where an engineer re-engineered his own failed state. Very dated, but a wonderful story.
I am writing a series in defense of the Law, in general, and Jewish law, in particular, against the critique from Paul and Buddhism. Here's the introduction https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/secularism-as-christian-psy-op
I enjoyed reading the post!
thanks!
Part 1 is here, paywalled (sry) https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/defending-the-law-part-1 and part 2 is here, free and open: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/defending-the-law-part-2
I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian and this is an interesting perspective, thanks for writing it
I appreciate it!
Even if secularism as it’s popularly imagined is derived from particularly Christian ideas - which as an semi-Orthoprax atheist Jew I would contest - it’s just as much a counterculture against Christianity as it is against Judaism. It takes some real conspiratorial thinking to call a countercultural idea a closely-held psyops campaign by the culture its countering.
This reminds very, very much of Jacob Neusner's *A Rabbi Talks with Jesus*, which is a phenomenal book for a Jewish perspective Jesus' words on the Law and Israel.
What is dieseach?
She's a cranky but well loved long-standing commenter.
I think she's also got the record for most non-permanent bans. She was once banned indefinitely but the commentariat complained enough to get her reinstated.
Where is the list of bans these days? How long did she get?
The ACX comment policy / register of bans is here, but it doesn't look like it's added this one: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans
The old register at SSC has since been taken down, but IIRC the 'indefinite' ban was the first one back in June 2016 and lasted 2 months.
Thanks, good to know.
Indulge my curiosity, people. How does one pronounce Dieseach? I gather this is some kind of Gaelic name? Celtic?
I believe it's pronounced something like the pair of English words "Day shock", though I may be wrong about that one.
Feels to phonetic. If I'm right that's Gaelic, it's probably pronounced like "Claire" or "Michelle" or something that just leaves you wondering whether the spelling isn't some sort of elaborate joke on the English speaking world.
"too phonetic."
It's "Deiseach". I always assumed it was pronounced 'desh-ock', but looking it up there is an Irish surname with a fada (accent) over the first 'e', and that would make the pronunciation 'day-shock'.
What is dieseach
Long time commenter on ACX and its predecessor blog.
Thank-you.
I am a graduate student in Mathematics. Some of my fellow math grad students are applying for Machine Learning or Data Science jobs this coming year. Although they have taken online courses in these areas and are reasonably conversant in them, they are finding it difficult to get jobs or internships because they're often out-competed by Computer science or statistics students, who inevitably have more experience than them in these areas. What are some things that these math grad students could do to further bolster their profiles?
What precludes “simply get more experience”?
I'm not sure if it applies here, but the "you must have experience to get experience" catch-22 is real in a lot of fields - obviously people beat it sometimes but it's not nothing to make the jump from internship/projects to real work.
Yeah the nice thing about this stuff is except for very large data sets & deep neural networks (which require expensive infrastructure) you can generally just pick a problem and bang your head against it in public without costing anything but your time
Get together a portfolio of projects. Get more experience in those areas specifically. The issue is probably that their knowledge is too theoretical compared to the CompSci and Stats folks. They're afraid they'll have to train you too much.
They're afraid that if they train you too much, you'll move somewhere else before they recoup their investment into you.
Also that you just might be untrainable. You might be a brilliant mathematician and absolutely awful at machine learning.
This. Also the projects will be a more visible sign of competence/expertise/interest and make you stick out than just having taken the classes (which most applicants will have done at this point).
I'm not at all qualified to answer this, but perhaps doing well in a few Kaggle contests would help? It's an easily distilled metric for the resume.
GitHub portfolio, contributions to open source projects?
There are very good online courses in ML (e.g. Andrew Ng on Coursera is a classic) - take them and really get into the practical coding exercises.
There are also good applied ML courses in many universities now, they can take that in their university.
Also, they can go interview in a few places, see what places are looking for, and when they get a reject ask for feedback.
Generally the answer to this is "lower your expectations". In most cases I've seen, such people are picky about jobs and salaries, and can easily pick up work if they drop their ask. Once they do, they tend to rattle up the chain pretty quick.
Finding "data adjacent" jobs also works. Pick something that matches your skill set in a big company, then ask for a transfer to the area you actually want.
Optimize your breakfast and write about it
https://www.ethanrosenthal.com/2020/08/25/optimal-peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwiches/
Thanks, sounds like you had a lot of fun!
Context: I work at a FAANG and my team is currently trying to hire an ML expert. A big hurdle for many folks is that we also want someone with good programming/computer science skills. I interview a lot of folks who seem competent at ML but don't pass our bar for coding.
To be precise, I think we generally do 2 interviews focused on ML and 2 interviews focused on generic programming (think leetcode/hacker-rank style questions). They are weighted evenly, and performing poorly on both programming interviews would consistently sink your odds.
I would highly recommend getting a grounding in computer science if you/they haven't already. In particular, I'd say do 2-3 programming focused CS classes and an algorithms course.
This advice assumes that y'all are already getting to the interview stage. I'm less familiar with the resume optimization part of the game, but listing more experience, including your CS coursework, and linking to some coding hobby projects are all good ideas.
It's also worth mentioning that cold applications have an absolutely atrocious response rate. I had to apply to 57 internships my senior year to get 2 interviews (I got an offer from both). Referrals are huuuuge in terms of getting to the interview stage.
Thanks! This is a rather complete answer to my question. What is a good way to get referrals for companies if you don't have a lot of friends working in tech? I suppose this could be a problem for a lot of non-CS people entering tech.
@How to get referrals if you don't have many friends in tech: I don't have personal experience here, so take my advice with a grain of salt. I got a traditional undergrad CS degree, and a few of my buddies graduated before me.
You might try to take courses with folks you know are going to enter tech soon, or do projects with them. I haven't had success personally in deliberately cultivating networking contacts, but I've had great success by making friends in nerdy hobbies. Ex. I was referred to my current job because I played DnD with two folks at the company and referred to my last job because my wife (who I met as a fellow CS mentor) worked there.
I more meant to gesture at the terrible response rate for cold entry level applications as a way to say, 'Do not lose hope, it is a crap shoot even for great applicants and the only solution is to apply to tons of things.' Once you have a few years of experience, things get better.
I'll also mention that the experience of referrals leading to recruiting more of the same type of folks has been cited as a problem with the practice. I'm sympathetic to this, but as someone who does interviews I note that referred folks tend to be higher quality than typical. So it's hard to ignore the info that a referral supplies.
Lastly, it's worth mentioning that you 'really' don't want to burn bridges with people. While a good referral may not secure you the job, a bad referral will almost certainly tank your chances. For example, when someone who went to the same college as me applies, I'll get an email asking for a referral if I know them. I've personally only given one anti-referral (to someone who was flagrantly unethical when I worked with them), but I have good reason to believe the anti-referral is why they didn't get offered the position.
Thanks for your help!
No problem! I'll also mention that I'm happy to do practice interviews with Effective Altruist aligned folks as a small way to help.
Thanks Dan!
Focus on data science positions which are not just mislabeled ML engineering roles. Won't do as much to separate from the stats competitors, but will level the field relative to the comp sci folks.
I've recently committed to publishing microfiction weekly on substack - trying to get in the habit of publishing writing more regularly instead of letting it sit in a drawer! If anyone has any feedback it'd be greatly appreciated :)
https://difficultbodies.substack.com/p/toe-farm
I like it. It's paranoid in a topical way. I think at the heart of a lot of modernity is the question "just how much of the world is positive sum anyway? And how much is our ancestral killing ground?" That's what it invoked in me at least.
Thanks Alephwyr, very generous :)
I have an acquaintance obsessed with the idea of emerging platforms like substack and the place of fiction within those (as opposed to the nonfiction it seems primarily designed for). Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
It's an interesting development. I'd say it mostly results from the challenges of traditional publishing, people are very into the thousand true fans concept and substack seems like a way to achieve that. They're definitely encouraging it as a platform for fiction too - hosting events etc, and there's a discord for supporting fiction authors.
Many are using it to serialise novels, but for me, the biggest block is that reading fiction on a computer is simply not that nice - hence I try to keep my work (on substack) very short.
Is the world converging toward illiberal democracy?
It seems that total dictatorships are increasingly being replaced by either unstable democracies or total paralysis-- revolutions in Algeria and Sudan finished off just about the last non-monarchic Arab countries spared the Arab Spring; multiple sub-Saharan African former autocracies are either in the process of reform (Ethiopia, Angola) or seeing major protests (Cameroon, Guinea); Eastern Europe has also been wracked by unprecedented and possibly regime-threatening protests (Belarus, Russia). Outside perennial-exception China, and perhaps the Gulf monarchies, it seems a bad time to be an absolute autocrat (the "Not Free" group on FreedomHouse.org, say, minus the ones that are unfree mostly because there is no central control, like Somalia and CAR). Even eSwatini is starting to see serious demonstrations. This seems to be the upside of the general trend against "establishment" politics nearly everywhere.
At the same time, many democracies have been becoming more "illiberal"-- meaning they don't stuff ballot boxes but do undermine other institutions considered central to "liberal democracy," e.g. courts, media, minority rights, etc. Apart from Trump's US this has become even clearer in e.g. India (recently demoted to "partly free" by FreedomHouse), Brazil, Israel.
At least this is my impression.
So can we consider this a general trend in global politics toward an all-or-nothing, norm-shattering, "free but not fair" kind of democracy, where the people maintain the ability to change regimes at the ballot box but give a green light to "their team" to pull out all the stops to win? I realize this is a somewhat poorly defined question but it's precisely because it's a very general, imprecise question that I'd be glad to hear the thoughts of this esteemed group.
I don't think a "top-down Cultural Revolution" is in any way an appropriate term for what is happening in the US and I honestly don't know what you're referring to.
I don't think calling Trump "illiberal" is even maligning him, it seems a deliberate thrust because he sees checks-and-balances like the courts and media (not to mention elections) as interfering with his agenda, which is true. When the man literally leads chants of "Lock them up" for both political opponents and journalists (including those who have never been accused of any crime), I don't think it's a stretch to call him an illiberal leader who is simply situated in a system that doesn't allow him to execute his illiberal tendencies, as was patently clear in the post-election fiasco.
Netanyahu is undoubtedly leagues from Trump and arguably Bolsonaro and Modi as well. And he's as establishment a politician as it gets. The fact that he's engaged in the same anti-media, anti-court, populist rhetoric despite it going entirely against his typical persona, is itself testament of the pull of this trend. And he did in fact try to do some illegal things, like essentially locking up the knesset when he didn't have a majority and appointing a justice minister against the law, but the courts stopped him.
Kudos and thanks for the thoughtful response and sorry if my responses were a little terse, I'm cruising through a lot of different arguments here and it's sometimes hard to differentiate the thoughtful critiques from the more stringent knee-jerk reactions.
I see Trump as more of a poor-man's Andrew Jackson - the big middle finger to the establishment with less effective reforms or even fundamental morality outside of spite.
I do think the West as a whole (Europe, CANZUK, the US) is experiencing it's own Cultural Revolution which is happening (and giving positive feedback to) a parallel illiberal curtailing of rights.
I think it began with the Bush years - economic instability + offshoring of manufacturing + removing of rights out of fear - but maybe it started long before. The evidence suggests the 70s and 80s, which matches the overall decline in living standards in the West.
I get what you're saying here, but I don't think Trump and his bone spurs belong in the same sentence as Andrew Jackson.
I think trebuchet is likening SJ and SJ-aligned militias to the Red Guards, although I am not sure what "top-down" is referring to considering SJ is largely bottom-up.
There are definitely some parallels there (arts students suddenly have power, and go on a crusade/inquisition against cultural conservatives, demolishing monuments), although I don't recall hearing about any massacres.
What important bad things has BLM achieved so far?
You consider Black Lives Matter top-down? And vandalism of a handful of statues is "Cultural Revolution", once called (I forget by whom, paraphrasing) "The single greatest act of destruction of human capital in human history"?
Also, the ruling party as of six months ago was the Republican party, and last I checked the institutions of the courts are largely conservative-leaning (certainly since Trump) and Fox News is the most watched cable news channel in America. So in what way did Social Justice (itself a nebulous term) "take over all major institutions"?
+1 on the Martin Gurri recommendation.
Need to steal a copy of this book.
You had me at "Revolt of the Public"! Looks amazing, added to my book list, thanks!
I recall being very skeptical once of the causal arrow from internet/social media to politics, but seeing these changes happen on such a global scale in such different contexts, and (seemingly) specific to the last decade or two begs for a global, reent cause, and it's hard to do better than the internet and social media. Plus the inordinate attention by the relevant figures (Trump, Netanyahu, etc.) and their followers to social media suggests it makes sense for that to be a big part of the story.
Interesting caveat: there doesn't seem (to me) to be a symmetry between Left and Right on this one, at least in the two contexts I know best, namely the US and Israel. No doubt major voices can be just as shrill and uncompromising on the Left, but they seem to be much less successful. Biden and Clinton, two centrists, won pretty thumpingly, the former more convincingly than the latter. And they had every possible reason and ability to pursue the demonization-and-inward-looking-politics strategy, but largely didn't. In Israel, there isn't much of an ideological Left left to speak of, much less any kind of radicalization-- in fact, the current government was enabled by the remnants of the ideological Left partnering with the center and anti-Netanyahu Right. So I wonder if there's some interesting way in which the two sides are filling different roles in this new environment, or perhaps the Left is just a little behind for idiosyncratic reasons.
Anyhow, thanks for this, definitely much to think about and looking forward to reading the book :)
"I think his position is that these mobs don't neatly align onto the traditional political spectrum"-- excellent, more points to him because I think this is an important point. In nearly any other period Trump would've been mostly been considered a Democrat or at least not called "a conservative".
So you're saying (or saying he would say) that the asymmetry comes from a kind of larger investment the left (broadly defined) has in the establishment. Could be, need to think it through, but a worthwhile insight to ponder, thanks!
I don't agree that the anti-establishment people are pulling out all the stops to win. That kind of framing actually seems to be a common establishment delusion, which causes them to worsen their bad behaviors (gatekeeping, anti-democracy, anti-free speech, etc), which in turn increases the disillusionment.
The world is mostly ran by supranational organizations and groups (i.e. Interparliamentary Union, Business Network for Hemispheric Integration, Americas Society, Business Roundtable, U.S> Council for Int Business, CFR/CCFR/PCIP, Le Cercle, Trilateral Commission, Chatnam House, Group of 30, WEF, European Roundtable of Industrialists, Open Russia Foundation, Japan Society, Rockefeller Foundation, Wellcome Foundation, Blackrock, insert *elite rich/dynastic wealth/group here*). The agenda is pretty simple. Increase wealth for the minority, deprive wealth for the majority. That's just the natural law of existence (maximizing operation). Reduce the fertility rates of natural-born populations, increase mass-immigration of lower-IQ populations to cause mass division, get high-IQ populations that further technological progress at bargain rates, decrease quality of life/intensify urbanization/decrease means of transportation/decrease meat/CO2-related measures, increase densification, increase asset prices, increase stock prices (from natural population growth), push further out into risk-yield curve (stock market, trading manipulation, sweeping deposits of banks/brokerage accounts/bail-ins), usage of controlled opposition (poisoning the well of conspiratorial-theoretical groups), mass-emotional rhetoric on democrat and republican side of debate, promote radicalism (on fringe groups) and ensure maximum control of groups, thoughts and discussions within educational institutions, on blogs, on social media. Gradually diminish human input/enslave humanity as capital/technological progress ensues with authoritarian state (i.e. drone strikes, disablement of participation in society for not 'behaving' or 'acting in accordance'). Your job as a low-IQ person with propensity for violence is to hurt other groups and reduce the attention of elites people. Your job as a high-IQ person with high-conscientiousness and low-propensity for depression is to create/contribute to immortality/transhumanistic/technological endeavors (i.e. space travel, transplanting minds, transplanting animals). Also all endeavors requires maximizing profits (so lobbying to make sure every human being needs one of this device or one of that medicine or one of that food). Education, politics, food, culture, everything in life is virtually controlled by the hands of few men with thousands acting underneath them; it's just a state of natural affairs that the best at deception (as an evolutionary-adaptive mechanism) becomes the head puppet, and the best conspirators/planners work in concerted effort above to keep their interests at bay. Whether one is in the middle class, or the working class, or the elite class -- all humans want to retain their privileges and rights. Unfortunately, not many people recognize this. Human desire is also practically infinite, and with limited accessible resources available to any particular point in time, it's a sort of game theoretical model playing out over time. Dolphins also have alliances. Human society or civilization is practically like a super-organism with division of labour for every high and low level endeavor naturally speaking.
Getting rid of governments and expanding borders is another part of their policy. Having mega-clusters / continental transnational centers has been a primary goal of the elite group for now; the means to do this is by making life more difficult and expensive using fiscal/monetary policies that eventually lead to crashes/deprivation of value (austerity measures) leading to digital wallets, ID-controlled neural-implants and various miscellaneous devices in the future. All jobs will always be within the economic centers and trains/hyper-speed railways will be the primary means of travelling (economic stratification of human value life); the non-compliant and the non-economically viable will be on the fringe or dependent on government subsidies and be a sort of local militia I suppose (underclass). Municipalities and state-level authority is gradually diminished by lessened funding and centralization of power is completed by people being unhappy and rioting, and or ad hoc justification of state power is utilized against planted agents inciting violence and/or removal of local authority to cause localized conflicts to cause smarter people to leave en masse; controlled creation of demographically stratified zones by desired inputs/outputs. Well anyways, there's little that people can do anything.
Wow. That's terrifying. Especially the bit where a global elite wishing to increase their wealth want to make potential consumers poorer, thus reducing the amount of wealth available to them. Or the cunning plan to simultaneously reduce the native population's wealth and birthrate, somehow missing the negative correlation between the two things. It's scary how incompetent this global elite seems to be...
Mind you, this might work for them. After all, North America and Australia have kept their native populations poor and small and the incoming elites there are doing OK. That is the sort of example you had in mind yes?
Do they also have a sinister plan to destroy anyone who uses paragraph breaks?
You don't agree that e.g. Trump pulled out all stops to win, including undermining the institutions of the media (which he explicitly attacked constantly) and the courts (which he attacked after it refused to acquiesce to his demands to overturn the elections), not to mention calling election officials to try to get them to change results? Modi in India and Bolsonaro in Brazil also seem to fit the description of "pulling out all the stops to win", each in their own way. And I can testify as an Israeli that that fits Netanyahu as well, though not in the explicitly illegal sense of Trump.
You make what looks to me to be a major elision here in confusing institutions (press and courts) with their current staff. By eliding the two, you avoid the need to demonstrate that professional journalism and politicised judiciaries are actually positive for democracy before you can argue attacks on them are anti-democratic. The importance of journalists (rather than free speech and media) and activist lawyers (rather than rule of law - and at least one of your examples seems to disregard that as well...) seems to be a truism often trotted out but not often defended. Probably because it's an item of faith for professional journalists...
I'm also sceptical of any argument that says group X has a key role in our political system, therefore they can't be challenged, however stupid the challenge. If it turns out the people are dissatisfied with the judiciary or those seeking to edit their access to news, why should the existing groups of people be given some charmed status?
I agree with you that free reporting and impartial courts are important. I'm perhaps less happy than you seem to be that these are actually what we have, and even if I were I would need a lot of convincing before agreeing a politician had no right to attack those running these institutions. Even if they're clearly an insane egotist who can't take losing an election.
IMO, there are rather strong forces in journalism that threaten it from within. We've seen that a bunch of journalists struck out when Substack came along and expressed that they were finally able to speak their mind, which suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. And these are not (just) right-wing journalists, as the most prominent ones are Glen Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias.
And impartial courts are not merely about external influence, but first and foremost about political neutrality. If the courts become political, they become unelected politicians, which is dictatorial.
Maybe I should clarify. I have plenty of criticisms of journalists and court systems, and indeed I think journalism today is veering heavily into some bad territories (though I think this is more a consequence of whatever the "ultimate" causes are here, rather than the cause of this shift, because journalism is just responding to changing incentives). I'll add that the supreme court in Israel recently did some incredibly anti-democratic things, on par with the worst of what Netanyahu did.
But I think it becomes clear very quickly that the leaders we're talking about are attacking the institutions themselves, not just current staff. You can see this in the way an organization or figure that is praised one moment is savaged the moment they so much as squeak against the leader. This happened with Fox in the US and a similar, striking parallel occurred in Israel, where ideological right-wing journalists who were previously seen as the paragons of the Right are now savaged pretty awfully because their ideology led them to question blind loyalty to Netanyahu. Similarly, it's a consensus view on the ideological Right in Israel (including among Netanyahu's supporters) that Netanyahu didn't really care about the courts, and indeed defended them from reform, right up until he was charged with corruption. So I think these are examples where it's the basic executive-checking function of these institutions that the leaders can't abide by, rather than just being about their being about problematic specific incarnations.
But my point is that leaders like Netanyahu attack individuals and decisions, but have not sought actual systematic changes to benefit themselves. If what you do is a public role then political criticism has to be expected, and it's down to the people to determine whether criticism is valid or not. It's where you have a leader such as Erdogan (sorry - can't add the accent on this device) actually redesigning the system that you might have a problem. I can't see someone refusing to compliantly accept a legal judgement or an adverse opinion without mouthing off as a major problem for democracy, although if that becomes a pattern I doubt I'd vote for the whinging idiot...
So I guess the question is whether trying to undermine these institutions and their legitimacy via rhetoric rather than actual systemic reforms is considered illiberal. I get the distinction you're making with e.g. Erdogan. But in that case would you say Trump wasn't illiberal, because he didn't really change the system?
As an aside, Netanyahu did *try* to challenge and change the system in all sorts of ways, e.g trying to shut down the operation of the knesset to prevent their passing laws against him, or his (brief) attempt to illegally install a Justice Minister against the rules, both efforts stopped by the Supreme Court, and he did actually try to change the system to have direct elections for PM even without a government. The fact that these attempts didn't work, because the man hasn't had a true majority for 2 years, doesn't necessarily indicate that the push wasn't toward illiberalism. But admittedly illiberalism isn't a well-defined term and we could have different understandings of the term.
I consider it far more radical to exempt the media and judges from criticism. It's not checks and balances if you put certain institutions with power above scrutiny and criticism.
Besides, it's hardly like Trump is the only one with criticism of those institutions. It's pretty clear to me that this kind of objection is very often a rationalization, where the real thing that people care about is the kind of criticism that he has, not criticism in general. If it was, you'd see criticism by the same people when protesters riot after a legal decision or when leftists critique the media, but this rarely happens.
And Trump seems to have stayed (just) within the law. He believes in fraud and asked election officials to find that fraud. This is different from asking them to falsify election results or overturn the results without cause.
The constant is that those who critique him exaggerate what he actually did, to the point of lying. He is accused of calling for a coup on Jan 6th, even though the best 'evidence' I've seen is based on him not speaking out (even though his actual statements asked for a peaceful demonstration). He is accused of asking election official to falsify the results, even though he is clearly convinced that fraud exists and begged for them to find it. He was accused of Russian shenanigans, which fell apart after an illegal investigation where the FBI broke the law (which apparently is gperfectly OK) didn't find anything actionable.
Actually pulling out all the stops to win involves much more than alternatively accusing the existing institutions and begging them, while obeying them. For example, actually having militia's under one's control (not imagined militias), using extralegal methods to coerce people (like a 'friendly discussion' in a black van), using the means you have to coerce people (delaying funds for people who oppose you, selective 'govern-to-rule,' etc), stuffing ballot boxes, etc, etc.
It's pretty strange/interesting that you point to a few politicians that are commonly part of a narrative, when for your argument, it seems more logical to point to Putin and Maduro.
As I mentioned above, I have plenty of criticism toward media and the courts, when relevant. But I think it's clear that the attacks on them from this generation of leaders has been much more fundamental. And just to be clear, Trump most certainly did not remain within the confines of the law when he called election officials and coaxed them (arguably threatened) to "find" votes that weren't there. You say "he is clearly convinced that fraud exists and begged for them to find it", but he actually asked them to just "find" the specific number of votes he was missing to win the election, without presenting any credible evidence of cheating. His lawyers also did try to overturn election results, not just to investigate fraud. This was not a case of genuinely believing the elections were stolen.
Putin and Maduro are definitely part of a similar phenomenon, but I was talking about established democracies (US, Israel, India, etc.) that turned "illiberal" rather than dictatorships like Russia or Venezuela turning that way. Never would imagine defending those horrific regimes.
Have you actually read the full transcript of the Trump call with Raffensperger? You can find it here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html
Trump is spending most of his time arguing that he won by hundreds of thousands of votes, that it's easy to close the gap by which he lost by investigating some of the major wrongs he believes happened and that Raffensperger is not doing his job. He accused Raffensperger of not wanting accurate election results multiple times.
If you look at the entire conversation and without bad faith, then the most logical interpretation is that he believes that many votes were not counted and he was trying to bargain later on in the call, by telling the guy that he didn't need to find all the missing/bad votes, but just enough to result in what Trump believes is the legitimate outcome of the election.
You are interpreting it as him directing the guy to "'find' votes that weren't there," but it's really this latter part that would be damning, if Trump had actually said it, but it is actually something that you came up with. That is what I constantly see. The actually damning accusations are pretty much always interpretations made in bad faith, which go against the best evidence, which are presented as fact, as you do here.
> This was not a case of genuinely believing the elections were stolen.
I think that this is just an absurd claim that goes against all the evidence, like Trump constantly talking about how the election is stolen and latching on to every theory under the sun that would explain how.
From my perspective, your rationalized yourself into believing the exact opposite of the truth, where Trump is not a conspiracy thinker, but just a cynical dictator like Putin. Do you actually believe this? Do you look at all the things that Trump says and does and then truly believe that this is all an act? And if so, what is your evidence for this?
PS. I think that it is rather interesting how you hold up Israel as a country that turned illiberal due to Netanyahu, when they've been using foul play to appropriate Palestinian land for way longer than Netanyahu being in power & have had illiberal policies for a very long time (like racial policies).
Not only did I read the transcript, I remember listening to the call in full when it was released, because I'm that kind of person.
Getting into the weeds of the Trump-Raffensperger call is a bit of a detour for this thread, so I'll just make a couple points and leave it at that.
1. The president threatened Raffensperger, saying refusing to cooperate with his demands is "a criminal offense" and "is a big risk for you". That seems clearly illegal.
2. If the president tells an official to "find votes" when the court process found no fraud, and indeed the president's own team failed to present serious evidence of fraud to the courts, then that is absolutely an attempt at election fraud, *even if the president believes his own words*. He is subverting the system by which such claims are adjudicated.
3. The fact that the president repeatedly claims fraud doesn't mean he believes it. The fact that his own lawyers failed to produce meaningful evidence suggests that, at best, Trump didn't care whether the claims were true or not. Consider the fact that he has repeated many times the claim that his inauguration was the biggest ever, despite obvious, incontrovertible proof to the contrary. He is willing to repeat and insist on things that are patently untrue, even to him.
Lastly, not going to argue if you want to posit that Israel never was a liberal democracy. I've explained why I think Netanyahu has taken it in a clearly illiberal direction. But debating the history there is well beyond the point of this thread.
With regard to "The Media" (at least that bit that sides with ME) and "The Courts" (when they rule as I wish) being Unassailable, I regard in Exactly the same way I, a Protestant, or anyone whom I know who is Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, FSM or whatever, regards "Papal Infallibility."
I don't believe in it. Most especially if you make yourself a public opinion engine, you make yourself open to criticism as to your opinions. If you don't like that, perhaps you should sell shoes somewhere.
I never argued for Media or court infallibility and stated that I don't believe either is unassailable, so not sure what the idea is here.
It's definitely not just your impression. This has been the tendency over roughly the last decade or so. Before that, there was a pretty clear and long-lasting trend towards liberal democracy, perhaps from 1975-2000. For example, the 90s saw a surge of re-democratization in sub-Saharian Africa.
There is a lot of debate whether this last decade is a trend or just a fluctuation. I would say that nobody has strong arguments for either side. We just don't know.
Data on this topic is super-hard to interpret, because it's really hard to define terms like "democracy" or "liberal". Some interesting links are:
https://ourworldindata.org/democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waves_of_democracy
Also interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_democracy#Democracy_in_the_21st_century
Thanks! This is great-- I think partial, but has some of the examples on my mind (though I don't think description of the Maldives crisis in 2018 was a "coup", at least as far as I can tell)
Thanks for the comment! But for example, it seems to me that by and large much of the democratization from the 90s has continued when you look at total autocracies, rather than it being a receding wave. So for example, the Arab spring produced one democracy (Tunisia), one possibly budding democracy (Sudan), a couple movements in the right direction (Algeria, arguably Morocco and Jordan), and turned almost all the other military dictatorships into failed states (Libya, Syria, Yemen). That's just the Arab world. All of these aside from Morocco and Jordan were pretty much absolute dictatorships before Dec 2010. So it seems the model of total dictatorship has become untenable (maybe unless you have near-unlimited oil money). Similar thing seems to be happening in sub-Saharan Africa-- pretty much the whole continent is either democratic/democratizing (including illiberal democracies), a failed state, or has a very old leader, which suggests the reckoning may come when the leader dies or moves out of the way. I listed 4 exceptions to this rule at some point, and since then the president of Chad was killed and eSwatini started facing massive the biggest protests in recent memory. So I think what is often interpreted as a receding of the democratic wave is in fact the democracies becoming more illiberal (but, with few exceptions, not outright autocracies) while absolute dictatorships continuing their decline. What do you think?
Yes, I also perceive that the trend is not so much from democracies to absolute dictatorships, but rather from liberal to less liberal democracies. Though I have low trust in my own ability to recognize whether it's just an impression or a real trend.
There might be a perception bias. Countries moving to less liberal stance are criticized and make it to the news. Countries moving in the other direction are less noticed, unless it is a somewhat dramatic step as in Bhutan or in Ethiopia (which has backfired). For example, I think Qatar has become more liberal over the last years, mostly unnoticed. Even Saudi-Arabia and UAE have made some steps to give women more rights, installed local councils and stuff like this. I think that I wouldn't notice such small improvements most of the time, but would absolutely notice every small step that makes Poland or Slovenia less liberal.
So dictatorships taking steps toward liberalization doesn't necessarily contradict this general thrust, because they still remain generally illiberal. I'm trying to think what a "liberal dictatorship" would look like-- one where courts and media are fully independent, and rights fully respected, except the right to vote, or something? Not sure there's such a thing, though I'm open to hearing otherwise. So I'd say a dictatorship that's liberalizing is still moving to some extent toward illiberal democracy, it's just that it's doing so from the dictatorship end of the spectrum.
That said, I don't really see much of that happening. I don't know about Qatar but Saudi Arabia and UAE in my view haven't really liberalized at all, in a way SA has consolidated power and become more illiberal, e.g. with the Khashoggi murder. Letting women drive while locking up and torturing a woman who campaigned for it doesn't really seem like liberalizing to me.
That's my impression, too.
I think there's a sort of political ratchet effect where the people in power can use that power to solidify their own position - by weakening institutions that threaten them, installing cronies in positions of power, corrupting formerly-impartial institutions - but then once they're out of power, all of those advantages flip back to the other side, and the system as a whole is at a new, less democratic equilibrium. There's always a temptation to do these kinds of shenanigans but ultimately politicians know it's short-sighted and they need to exercise restraint. But still, sometimes they don't - especially when there's a crisis and the perceived need for immediate solutions outweighs future concerns of "what will the other side do with this power?"
And then eventually the government takes too much power, the people get fed up, and you have demonstrations and ultimately revolution. Or a civil war.
So perhaps this process is always going on in democracies, and the appearance of a global trend is simply due to a) there being more democracies now than in the past and b) more media coverage in and about these places.
I've also noticed that journalists love to pursue the Grand Narrative and there's no Grander Narrative than the Cold War: Democracy vs. Authoritarianism. In particular, media interpretations of events in Russia's periphery seem to reduce every issue, no matter how complex, to an indicator of whether the country in question is moving towards the West or falling back under the Kremlin's influence. So we might be hearing a disproportionate number of stories about democratic progress and/or backsliding because that's the kind of stuff that generates clicks, even though this constant churn of democratic backsliding punctuated by occasional demonstrations/wars/Color Revolutions has actually been the norm for a hundred years or more.
Alternatively, the journalists might be right, and the authoritarian regimes of Russia and China may in fact be successfully exporting their model for illiberal societies. Victor Orban might have looked at Putin and said "yeah, that seems like a good deal" and we all know Trump openly envied the power of the world's most infamous dictators.
It could be that social media and the internet have eroded the power and influence of traditional journalists but what nobody realized was that the power and influence of journalists was actually keeping authoritarian tendencies in check, whereas social media actually magnifies, rather than counteracts, the power of authoritarian leaders. For all our critiques of the traditional media, maybe they were a Chesterton's fence all along, and tearing them down has paved the way for an Orwellian nightmare society.
Or not. I'm really not certain of any of these theories.
Thanks for the comment!
I'm skeptical about the "we're just hearing about things we didn't hear about before" explanation, just because my impression is that just about every country seems to be having a "biggest anti-government protest in its history" moment and that sounds like an objective measure. It could well be-- and I think this is getting closer to the issue-- that these protests happen *because* the news spreads wider and farther. But that still makes for a significant change.
The "ratchet effect" is interesting, it does seem like previously leaders were looking more for a way of courting the other side's voters, whereas now there's a kind of acceptance that 45% of each side is set in stone and the battle is for the remainder. Biden was almost a once-in-a-generation kind of opportunity to break this pattern-- popular guy, no serious negatives, tried to reach across the divide-- and yet the electoral change between 2016 and 2020 was pretty marginal. And I think that's related to what you're saying about grabbing on to power and trying to shut out the other group-- that used to be bad tactics, now it seems to pay off and indeed get support from the electorate.
World population has increased. "Biggest X in history" if defined by number of members is not actually especially surprising.
I can't prove it but my hunch is that you'd get a similar picture if you accounted for population change (many of these regions, e.g. Eastern Europe, are hardly growing). But perhaps depends on the location.
from: https://www.yaschamounk.com/books
Two core components of liberal democracy—individual rights and the popular will—are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.”
Thanks!
I do wonder, though...is money really more important in politics than it used to be? It seems to me the opposite is true. The big money in 2016 was overwhelmingly anti-Trump, which makes sense because the money was invested in establishment politics. Big money also worked against Sanders, and while he didn't win he did much better than people with much more money behind them.
But I'll definitely check out the book, seems very relevant. Thanks again!
Some of this is regimes that would prefer to be straight-up dictatorships, oligarchies, or whatnot, finding it pragmatically necessary to adopt at least the forms and pretense of democracy to survive. That should count as a partial win for democracy, as it shortens the distance to cover when future reformers are in a position to go for the real thing.
For sure, and that's part of what's interesting to me, this realization by the dictators that the previous model-- rig the vote, shoot the protesters-- doesn't seem to work that well in most places. So now they still aren't democrats, but they need to appeal to that 51% of the population to keep above the water, or say 40% plus a lot of shenanigans to make the playing field break in their favor. Erdogan seems a great example of this-- first playing the "illiberal" game, violating rights and locking up journalists but keeping ballot boxes untouched. Recently with the Istanbul mayoral race he actually annulled a vote, crossing the line into outright autocracy, and that blew up in his face.
Like you said, that may well be a partial win, though we need to see where it goes.
Look at The Iron Law of Oligarchy and its corollary, The Iron Law of Institutions.
What we are seeing is a reversion to the mean.
The question is which institutions to watch. I assume the most likely outcome for me is in a refugee camp on the war-torn frontier between the Amazon Conglomerate Ecosphere and the Holy Zuckerbergian Empire of Facebookia.
But shouldn't that imply the established elites becoming more entrenched? What we're seeing now is the reverse-- a lack of control, more than a surplus of it.
You bring up a very interesting point, one I hadn't thought of.
Thinking it over, the increasing authoritarianism we are seeing in recent years is not the response of a confident and self-assured elite, but of an elite that is paranoid, uncertain as to how to respond, and fearful of losing control.
Thanks! That's what I feel, yes.
Similarly (perhaps?), many of the countries that have seen the greatest decreases in terms of freedom in e.g. FreedomHouse.org have not been autocracies consolidating control (as in China or Turkey) but rather autocracies reacting brutally to a loss of control, e.g. Syria, Nicaragua, Venezuela. It's true that the people in these countries are less free now than ten years ago, but it's not because the autocracy is stronger. So I'm seeing a general principle of "Weaker autocracies" both in countries seeing positive reforms (Ethiopia, Angola, Sudan) and in those that have become more brutal while losing their grip on the country (arguably Russia also falls in this category). And that fits straight into the overall trend of "against establishment politics", where in the case of dictatorships, arguably the establishment may be something worth disrupting (though the brutal consequences and failed statehood may be too high a price to pay, depending on how one views these things).
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but there's an alternative hypothesis here which would see the same results. That is that the growth of illiberal democracy is not a trend in itself but the most likely current outcome of anti-establishment feeling taking concrete political form. In effect political upheaval that replaces an established political order will in at least two common scenarios currently tend towards illiberal democracy: populist, in the sense of non-elite, success in western democracies and popular uprisings which don't lead to civil war in autocracies.
To flesh that contention out slightly, the dominant paradigm in the political and media classes of western democracies is currently a free-market socially-permissive worldview which especially in its more cultish or transnational aspects is not necessarily widely accepted by the electorate. This is the package generally described as liberal in the context of modern politics. Reaction against perceived overreach by those promoting this, say the creation of a European state without explicit popular consent or trying to put someone into the presidency on the basis of it being their turn, may therefore cause a backlash which would be illiberal in that it opposes the existing liberal consensus. As more states develop illiberal elites to replace the liberal ones though, I would expect populism to go the other way and generally seek a more liberal form of democracy because that's the opposite to what the entrenched authority in the relevant countries are promoting against popular opinion in their turn.
Autocracies that shift to democracy seem currently to produce illiberal democracy as a matter of course as political parties seem to form on ethnic or religious lines rather than political groupings. This seems to be a useful rule of thumb, at least in any state that is not generally homogeneous. But this is a separate trend from populist movements in established democracies and should probably not be seen as part of the same process even if currently the end result looks similar if viewed on a scale of liberality. So rather than simply a trend towards illiberal democracy, we should perhaps posit at least two different trends at the moment producing similar outcomes, but which would be better recognised as separate phenomena.
Thanks for this. Two quick comments: First, when you say that the Western-world part of this is a reaction to "free-market socially-permissive worldview", isn't it strange then that the leaders who then take charge seem to be largely cut from that cloth? This analysis seems like it would speak more to the rise of a Ted Cruz than a Trump (similarly in Israel, Netanyahu doesn't really care about social issues and is known as a free-market guy, and religious parties haven't become stronger in recent years).
Second, I hear what you're saying about autocracies moving to democracy being naturally illiberal. I'm just not sure why they are moving at all. For decades, dictatorships seemed satisfied to just stay in place with total power, and now they seem to act as if the ground is shifting beneath them, which seems to be true.
But your comment also helped me realize that these dictatorships move just as often to anarchy and failed statehood (certainly in the Arab World) as to illiberal democracy, so you may be right that I'm wrong to put these trends in the same basket just because I think of "failed state" in the "less absolute dictatorship" category.
> a free-market socially-permissive worldview which especially in its more cultish or transnational aspects is not necessarily widely accepted by the electorate
If I had to guess at big drivers for populism's recent rise, I might choose:
1) The financial crisis and the slow recovery in most (all?) developed countries
2) (In Europe) The Euro (currency) crisis
3) (In Europe) The Syrian civil war and migrant crisis
4) maybe technological trends like people getting news from social media instead of traditional sources
Maybe the establishment runs more free-trade than the public, but if the economy was doing great I don't think it would be a major source of political discontent on it's own. But it was not doing great, for *years* and *years*, while people saw governments intervene to protect the banking sector. I think that poor response undermined people's confidence in the current system generally and made them more open to people with stories that sound good about who's to blame.
In some respects it's a bit similar to what happened after the Great Depression in many countries although not (yet) as severe. Ray Dalio has some interesting economic / political comparisons along those lines, talking about a long-term debt cycle ending in both cases and putting countries in difficult economic and political situations.
I need a crash course on Scandinavian politics over the last 30 years for boring reasons. Norway specifically but I’d like a solid understanding of all the Nordic countries. Anyone got any good resources?
Context: am Norwegian (by citizenship and language), but born and raised abroad in Texas so I mostly only follow American politics.
‘Hey, I remember reading somewhere recently about somebody Norwegian-Texan…’
Is it for something about Georgism? :)
Eastern Orthodox Norwegian Texan. Looking forward for Larsiusprime to come out as polyamorous as well. Or something. (This comment is not meant to criticize any set of personal circumstances and choices. If I'm mocking anything, it's my own expectations and undercalibrated probabilistic intuitions.)
No pretty vanilla otherwise. I was raised church of Norway Lutheran (a parish of which exists in Houston, Norwegian language liturgy and all) and converted to EO in college. I do have Narcolepsy and Tourette’s if you’re looking for more statistically unlikely features, though the latter two weren’t exactly choices. (Though I suppose my mom’s nationality and my place of birth wasn’t either)
I mean I'm not about to start a political party just yet :P Mostly I'm just getting a lot of people messaging me in the wake of the context, including some folks from Norway given the connection was called out (hometown hero effect?) and I realize that I need to bone up on what the political landscape back in the old country is like so I don't horribly embarrass myself.
contest not context
my kingdom for an edit button
Have you considered wikipedia? E.g., reading the articles on the political parties, like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Party_(Norway) ? Or at least the newer sections?
Already read them! Just wanting to back that up with someone who can tell me if Wikipedia is full of it or not, given my experience with wikipedia articles about contentious political topics I am already familiar with.
There's a book called The Almost Nearly Perfect People.
I've read and would recommend the book to non-Nordic people who are curious about the region, though I don't think it's a good resource for studying recent political developments in the region.
It focusses more on cultural differences between an average Western country and Nordic countries and specifically on a handful of most interesting cultural items in each of the 5 Nordic countires, so it's nowhere as extensive as I think OP would like.
I think even browsing Wikipedia would be better than the book.
Sidebar: I saw in another thread that you're Orthodox. Is Orthodoxy super tiny in Norway? I've always had the view (perhaps mistaken) that Norway had about 80% nominal membership in the Church of Norway with most of the rest in Protestantism, a super tiny Catholic community and essentially no Orthodox Christians. Am I close?
I've spent most of my life growing up in Texas, so I can't speak with authority about the presence of Orthodoxy in Norway. From what very very little direct experience I have, it seemed very rare (rarer than in Texas at least, where you can usually find a parish in most medium sized towns, or the one next over) -- there's a few Orthodox parishes in Norway, as well as a monastic community or two (including the one that publishes the Norwegian language Orthodox prayer book I use sometimes).
The parishes are mostly in the big cities from what I've seen. Last I was in Trondheim the Orthodox community there had to serve liturgies in a borrowed space from the Lutherans, but that was over a decade ago. That said, I'm hardly an expert on the subject -- most of my many visits to Norway were spent hanging out in the tiny coastal village where my mother grew up, not in the big cities where you'd expect to find exotic religious communities like this.
My guess is that Orthodoxy in Norway is centered around immigrant communities, Finns, and any recent converts from the state church, clustered in urban centers, or perhaps near the Russian and Finnish border.
But perhaps to your point -- here in Texas when people find out that I'm a) a Norwegian national and b) Eastern Orthodox they ask "Oh, are most Norwegians Orthodox" and the answer is, "definitely not, I'm just weird."
lol. Strangely I'm a convert to Orthodoxy and my godfather is a Texas native who now lives in.... Russia. Must be something about Orthodoxy that thrusts people into the worldwide sphere.
I'd love to visit Norway some day. My sole Scandanavian experiences so far are transferring planes in Helsinki on my way to Moscow.
If you can read Norwegian, you might find better sources about Norway specifically by asking around in Norwegian-speaking parts of internet. (If Skandinaviska is a real thing as they claim, maybe same strategy will work also for Swedish and Danish sources, too.)
For example, all the books written in English about Finnish political history tend to be short, often colored by English-speaking countries' perspectives, and there are not many of such books.
In lieu of specific recommendations, as a general strategy for history, what about looking up the Department of History / Political History / Politics at big-name Norwegian universities and what books they recommend or require in course curricula. Recently published large-scale history books (the ones with titles like "modern political history of [insert country]" also tend to have a chapter on the recent history. Some professors may even answer an email if you ask for reading recommendations.
If that is too academic, see if some Norwegian serious newspapers or magazines have internet archives with reasonable subscription price tag. What are the headlines and opinion pieces about? What were they about 30 years ago? I do something similar sometimes for fun with the one Finnish paper I subscribe: look up what they wrote when historic events unfolded, like when Berlin wall fell or news of Chernobyl accident started coming in.
Applied Divinity Studies has a great Chrome extension that lets ACX look like SSC, instead of the uniform Substack aesthetic everywhere else: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/slatestarsubstack/
As a longtime reader I am 97% grateful for this. My 3% reservation comes from the fact that comment section font size is for some reason larger than the post's, so every time I switch between post and comments I have to resize the page.
Does anyone know of an easy fix for this? It's probably clear that I'm not a technical person, so I'd appreciate a dumbed-down guide/pointer to one (say ELI18).
Given the first line of the pasted code that reads—
```
article div p {
```
—change it to—
```
article div p,
.comment .comment-body,
form.comment-input>textarea {
```
This doesn't enforce the font size everywhere you might want it (The "Post" button as I type this is still larger than the other comment UI) but it seems good enough to my sensibilities
I've quickly tested something that seems to work. Try to add that at then end of the "code" thing where you copy/paste the code (:
.comment-body p {
font: 12px/20px Verdana, sans-serif;
}
The idea here is to apply the same style that's applied to the article to the comments.
On a related note, I remember that SSC had a different style than the one it currently has, and it changed for me during 2021. The text was bigger, and the style more uniform. Does anyone else remember the same? Was it an extension that I forgot I had?
It seems the original SSC styling was lost when Scott deleted it.
You can start playing with the font or font-size attributes, changing 12px to probably 10px. If you want to increase the comment font size to 12px, you probably need to add font-size: 12px; in one of the blocks (likely the one starting with table.comment-content tr td {).
I use the ACX Tweaks extension, which provides many improvements including to an option to use SSC-like styling. The comment font looks the same to me as the post font with it. This is an ACX-specific extension (the one you posted is just a stylesheet that can be plugged into a general-purpose extension).
Website (recent releases are no longer, but it has a description and bug tracker): https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/acx-tweaks/
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acx-tweaks/jdpghojhfigbpoeiadalafcmohaekglf
Continuing a discussion of Benford's Law with regards to the election from the an earlier open thread:
Last November, I had some people around me start citing this as evidence of fraud, so I looked into it. I took one particular article that a conspiracy-claimer gave me that looked at data in Michigan and claimed it did not follow Benford's Law. I did an analysis in Excel and found that most states, for understandable reasons, keep the number of voters as their precincts roughly constant (I think about 1000 voters per vote site on election day).
Therefore, vote tallies for one candidate or another candidate are not at all randomly distributed and do not span even one order of magnitude. So if a several precincts in an area go 90% for D and 10% for R, then this all these sites will look very skewed, because 1 is supposed to be so much more common than a 9.
I showed this to my conspiracy-claiming friend, and asked him to apply it to data in another state that went 80/20 or 90/10 R. He didn't enjoy seeing that the same "anomaly" appeared in his preferred candidate's positive results.
It didn't change his mind, of course.
The Benford Law hub-bub was fantastic for filtering out any fraud-claims put forth by self described datascientist/statisticians/etc. Anything said by anyone pushing it could basically be dismissed out of hand
AFAIK Benford's Law was used to demonstrate fraud in Russian elections. No idea if it was done correctly, but given high priors on (and other proofs of) Russian elections being fraudulent, it makes sense that people didn't scrutinize the proof that much back then and came to think of it as a good tool.
Not understanding the requirements necessary for Benford's law to hold is such an amateur mistake that you can pretty much assume anyone who claims to be an expert and making it, is either lying or incompetent and self-deluded
Please, less dismissal of evidence with snark/ad homin attacks. If you are not amateur, you *could* point out how Benfords law applied in Russia, but not the US.
It would be helpful if someone had pointed to the purported analysis that was used in Russia.
But the basic requirements for Benford's law to be relevant are that you have a dataset whose values span several orders of magnitude, and that should be basically scale-free within that range. Classic examples of things that *do* satisfy Benford's law are things like the population of urban areas and the area of river drainage basins. (Not coincidentally, these both grow by processes where the addition of new population/drainage area to an existing urban area/drainage basin is more likely when the existing population/drainage area is larger.)
Populations of municipalities often *don't* satisfy Benford's law, because in some nations/states, a region needs to reach a large minimum population before it can incorporate as a municipality, and regions with very high populations often get split into multiple municipalities, and these two features introduce a distinctive scale and prevent the numbers from spanning multiple orders of magnitude.
> It would be helpful if someone had pointed to the purported analysis that was used in Russia.
I can try to look for it if you're interested, but I don't think it's really relevant? I am inclined to agree with John johnson: if you claim to be a specialist, you should understand the limitations of the method. If it wasn't applicable in the US elections, Russian example is irrelevant.
There were several viral blogposts by Shpilkin after Russian election in 2016, but they are in Russian. I believe the same arguments were then presented by Kobak, Shpilkin and Pshenichnikov in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6059.pdf. It would be interesting to know what the current consensus on this is.
Is benford's law a viable way to detect (competently) falsified data nowadays?
It's the sort of thing you'd fall foul of before the computer age when you had to make up numbers out of your head but I'd expect modern electoral fraudsters to be using statistical software to make sure their fake numbers fit a realistic distribution.
If the fraudsters have the power to falsify all the numbers in any way they wish without setting other alarms, I agree.
I would suspect that software could do it, but people will still botch the implementation.
For example, RSA is borderline unbreakable if you implement it correctly, but people still get their RSA keys broken because of bad implementations. I don’t see any reason to expect that people making up fraud numbers for elections would not still screw up sometimes in a way that’s detectable by some rules like benford’s law.
So my issue with that election was 3 fold.
1) the expansion of mail in voting (which has been provably less secure than traditional voting)
2) the lack of any verification procedures - there were distinct incidents in various parts of the country that gave me suspicions of fraud, and sadly it's a lot around those mail-in ballots. I don't think a signature match was too much to ask for, and it wasn't done in battleground states like Georgia (even if there was a recount, they just recounted the same bad ballots)
3) the expansion of "vote ferrying" - where third parties can 'help' you fill out or deliver your ballot (most notably in Nevada and Arizona)
4) all these measures passed by fiat, under misleading reasons or circumventing various democratic institutions
Now, that's not to say Joe Biden wouldn't have won anyways, or that all of his support was fabricated - but I have seen enough to question the results, even if I must acknowledge that I may never get answers to them. (And when they do attempt real audits, as in Maricopa AZ, so much obstruction happens it may never finish). There also is no method to change the president once certified, so Joe Biden is it, regardless of what you find now.
There are a few notes - I'm also not happy when Republicans cheat by making it harder to vote or when both sides gerrymander the elections to oblivion. I don't think this was the dominant factor in the last election. I also don't think attempts at "no ID" / no protection voting are the answer, and it seems to be very disingenuous when insecure voting laws get proposed as attempts at fixing these problems.
Florida, which now has some of the strictest controls on ballots really impressed me with their handling of the election and if everyone adopted their methods, I would have much fewer doubts and everyone would be better off. This conflicts with the idea of a "Union of States" - each responsible for their own, independent, voting system. So we'll see how this plays out with the attempts to federalize election rules.
So just a point of view from the other side who has been mistrusting elections since Jeb Bush won the presidency for George with "hanging chads". (Good job Florida for coming back from that and fixing the issues in their electoral system).
The only "real audits" are the ones that think the ballots are made of bamboo in China?
A new political scandal happened in The Netherlands. Before the elections, a documentary was shown by the national broadcaster about the leader of a political party called D66. This party is fairly progressive in the modern way (pro-EU, pro-migration, woke, very pro-euthanasia (not just for the terminally ill), focused on getting as many people as possible into a PMC lifestyle/career & backed primarily by young well educated people). The party considers itself centrist, which is quite defensible in the sense that their electorate has the most trust in government, so they are the most happy with the job that the government is currently doing. However, the establishment may of course not be centrist compared to society. The politician in question has been a secretary of state during the previous administration.
The national broadcaster is paid for by taxes, so they are under scrunity for (and regularly accused of) unfairly favoring certain political parties.
A politically incorrect news blog, GeenStijl (which means 'NoStyle'), requested all government documents related to this documentary, using the Dutch equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. The released documents suggests that the documentary makers were very eager to portray the politician in a favorable way. Note that the organization who made the documentary is led by someone who was campaign leader for the political party for 8 years.
The working title of the documentary was "Minister of Hope," which is not a very neutral title. The subject got the choice of the topic of the documentary and got to see a raw cut to make suggestions. Most debate between the makers and the politician's people seems to have centered around her not wearing a seat belt in the back seat during an important scene, that the makers didn't want to cut. The politician's helpers seemed very worried that this would turn into a scandal, as she was technically breaking the law. The makers of the documentary actually reached out to a CGI company to see if they could fake a seat belt, although later on, they denied every intending to actually go through with it, which doesn't seem very believable to me.
Some other requests were to remove a scene where she drank champagne during a trip to Niger (which is a very poor country), a petty comment about not being mentioned in a speech and complaints about members of parliament, which the politician's people argue is politicially incorrect behavior (as the executive is not democratically elected, but parliament is). The documentary makers seem to have accepted most of these request, even those that seemed purely aimed at protecting her image, by not showing some of her behavior.
The documentary seems to have been broadcast as close to the elections as was allowed, by the rules. The makers of the documentary told the politician that they were willing to discuss the timing of the broadcast. There's no explicit evidence that the polician desired this, although the emails suggest that the documentary makers were acceding to a request by the politician to broadcast the documentary as close to the elections as possible.
Interestingly, the documentary makers even suggested that the politician should lie about not having seen the documentary in advance, so she could distance herself from it.
The Liberal Party of Australia (economically right-wing, in a coalition with the rural/conservative Nationals) lost federal power in 2007 due to running ads for one of their flagship policies with taxpayer money. Now that they're back in, they've spent quite a bit of time gutting the ABC, the government broadcaster, because of its historic tendency toward the left (for reasons that are kind of obvious, left-wing journalists prefer to work for the government and right-wing ones for corporations). There's a general suspicion that the Liberals might be getting away with crap due to the muzzling of their most hostile news organisation.
Can you break down those obvious reasons for leftist journalists to align themselves with state power?
They didn't say "leftist", and they probably shouldn't have said "left-wing". But in the big conflict between governments and corporations, which is one of the biggest issues that most contemporary liberal democracies face, the center-left tends to favor government power to regulate and the center-right tends to favor corporate anti-regulatory positions.
I'm talking about economic left/right (i.e. socialism vs. laissez-faire capitalism) here.
Socialists like the idea of the state running industries, and laissez-faire capitalists like the idea of industries being run for profit. The ABC is a state-run, taxpayer-funded media organisation, while the other media are commercial enterprises. As such, socialist journalists are ideologically attracted to the one media organisation run in a socialist manner over what they see as corporate stooges (while the reverse applies for right-wing journalists, who don't like socialism). This isn't a huge effect by itself, but the usual free-association dynamics of "X is full of Y-ists, therefore X acts in a Y-ist fashion, therefore Y-ists will be attracted to X" amplify it.
"very pro-euthanasia (not just for the terminally ill)"
What? Is this a thing in European politics? Who are the proposed recipients of this policy and what's the constituency for it?
I don't follow European politics at all, let alone on the subject of euthanasia, beyond vaguely remembering that it is friendlier to the idea than e.g. the US -- so I can't comment on how contentious of an issue this is, or what the proposed policies look like. A possible motivation from a recipient's point of view can be adequately inferred from Scott's old post, https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/ -- to summarize very briefly, modern medicine will get you to old age, but death of old age is really not pretty. (Cf. also House Of God by Samuel Shem, or its review by Scott here https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/10/book-review-house-of-god/.) Obviously opinions will vary on what needs to be done about this.
Ah... So it's mostly age-related and focused around quality of life? Ok, that makes way more sense.
I don't know why, but I was picturing Futurama-style suicide booths.
The Dutch Association for a Voluntary End of Life, which has 167,000 members is actually in favor of something like that. They are in favor of people being able to get a suicide pill without any external checks or even an actual death wish, just to have it for when they feel the need.
There is a pretty strong support among the well-educated and well-off for people to be able to choose death when they have 'completed life' (which is the term that is commonly used). Note that research shows that a death wish is fairly strongly correlated with the poor and less educated, which results in the weird situation that the party most in favor, has a constituency that is relatively less likely to use it. This also calls to question the extent to which this death wish is due to being content with the life one has lived, rather than a desire to escape poor financial or other potentially transitory circumstances. In the latter case, one can question whether euthanasia is the proper solution, rather than improving the circumstances.
However, there is also a push for euthanasia for the mentally ill, which is much more contentious even among the well-educated establishment folks. There recently was an article in my paper about a young woman who appeared bipolar, rapidly switching between being very down and suicidal, to having fun and planning vacation trips, who killed herself with drugs supplied by volunteers for the Dutch Association for a Voluntary End of Life. This is currently being investigated for illegal assistance with suicide.
Interestingly, the Dutch Association for a Voluntary End of Life advises people to kill themselves with a certain compound that can just be ordered (although companies now seem to only want to supply large amounts to discourage suicide buyers), which they advertise as being fast and painless, but this woman seems to have died a slow and very painful death.
The proponents also try to pressure or even force doctors into helping with euthanasia (which is not prosecuted if done within certain rules, although no one who broke the rules was actually punished), which results in opposition by doctors who want to heal and not kill.
Anyway, party in question, D66, wants a law where people older than 75 can get euthanasia without being terminally ill, if they have a persistent death wish. However, in 2017 the person who then led the party said that they want to reduce the age limit when society is ready for it.
Huh...
I realize that you're pretty clearly on the "anti" side of this argument, but I figure I'll ask this follow up. Most of what I read about suicide lays out the contagion effect pretty strongly. Anything that could make suicide easier or more popular seems like it will result in more suicide. Is there any pushback to these policies along the lines of "you're going to make more people kill themselves than might ?otherwise"
I'm not opposed to euthanasia for terminal patients who choose it willingly and persistently, but I'm against he slippery slope where before you know it, people are secretly getting drugs in their food and are getting forcibly held down because they resist the euthanasia (which actually happened). Or where young women with mental issues, given up or not adequately helped by a mental healthcare system that seems to not be very competent at all, are killed or assisted with their suicide. Especially with an elite that seems to, with the very best of intentions, push these women into a life that is ideologically optimal, but not so great for what the needs are of the average woman.
I'm also opposed to how the ratchet works (less by careful decision making and evaluating all the consequences of previous steps, but more by propaganda and other Foucaultian methods).
A key aspect of the propaganda is how certain important facts are not discussed or not given anywhere the attention that they merit, which in this case, includes the contagion effect. In so far that there's debate in the media, it seems to be focused on fickle people or social pressure, rather than behavioral contagion.
I think it's a think in Dutch politics specifically.
I’m a bit confused about the Deiseach ban / jstr warning. The comment with the “user was banned for this” note seems relatively tame compared to its sibling-comment thread, which does have a heated exchange between the two, and the “user was banned for this” comment doesn’t actually have any replies to it.
Was there another, even more heated exchange in the thread of the noted comment, which was deleted in the course of the ban? Or is the sibling-thread the focus of the ban? Or is there actually something really bad in the noted comment that I’m just too tired to notice?
Sorry, I didn't know that it told users which comment someone was banned for. I just remembered I needed to ban Deiseach and chose a semi-random comment of hers to click on to do it.
Not only does it say "user was banned for this," but, worse, when the ban expires, the comment is deleted. For example, the first ban you made is now an empty comment:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-174#comment-2082976
So, a bit more than a month ago, a Chinese team announced a neural network called CogView (https://paperswithcode.com/paper/cogview-mastering-text-to-image-generation) that was a serious attempt to replicate OpenAI's incredible text-to-image model Dall-E (https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/). Unlike OpenAI (and in yet another name-related irony for the company), the Chinese team actually released their full model to the public, and you can try it online at https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1ahsm15makBon5DZMy64a76TTWePBBp5l?authuser=1#scrollTo=3KIVmduRWAkl - the model only accepts text prompts in Chinese, but that notebook automatically translates prompts from English.
I spent a few days trying out a lot of different kinds of prompts, and although it's hard to compare directly to Dall-E without being able to try it, the results seem markedly worse than what OpenAI has shown- although still pretty incredible in their own right. One thing I can directly compare the results to are CLIP-based notebooks like the ones at https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ldc6oc/p_list_of_sitesprogramsprojects_that_use_openais/. CLIP is a model that OpenAI did release which just takes a text prompt and an image, and outputs a score for how closely the two match. A lot of clever people found out that you can use that to steer the generation of images when you combine it with an image encoder like VQ-VAE (which is the same one CogView uses) or the Dall-E image encoder (which OpenAI released instead of the transformer model). These image encoders are like really advanced image compression algorithms that store image data as coordinates in a latent space- and for whatever reason, it's a lot easier to train a transformer to make images in the compressed format rather than just a matrix of pixels.
Anyway, the results from CogView tend to be far more coherent and realistic than those from the CLIP models- though at the same time, oddly limited and dull. For example, if you give CogView a very simple prompt like "A businessman in an office", it can produce nearly photorealistic results, but if you try something slightly more complicated like "A photo of a cheetah in a cathedral", it's usually only able to produce images of a cheetah or a cathedral, and struggles to combine them. In contrast, the best CLIP-based notebooks can't approach coherent realism with any prompt, but seem able to understand and include elements from anything you can describe. So "A photo of a cheetah in a cathedral" produces images with clear elements of both cheetahs and cathedrals- and even really complex prompts like "A rendering of a golden steampunk robot that resembles a cheetah stalking through the ruins of a vast post-singularity city" will produce interesting results with recognizable elements. See the image at https://imgur.com/a/ESSM4OP for a comparison of CogView results at the top and results from a customized CLIP+VQ-VAE notebook at the bottom for the prompt "A photo of a cheetah in a cathedral".
Part of the difference may be due to the English-Chinese translation creating confusing prompts, though after a lot of experimentation with different translation services and phrasing, I don't think that's significant. It seems like CogView was trained on a far more limited set of images than CLIP- mostly stock photos (often with watermarks!) and historical photo archives, wheres CLIP definitely included things like drawings from DeviantArt, video game screenshots, and even pornography. I have to wonder if CogView's difficulty in generalizing is related in part to China's restrictions on free speech- it seems like the country's internet restrictions may have seriously limited how varied the model's training data could be.
(Also, here are some results from CLIP+VQ-VAE for "A rendering of a golden steampunk robot that resembles a cheetah stalking through the ruins of a vast post-singularity city": https://imgur.com/a/UEFDnOc )
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Much appreciated!
I also played a bit with it, together with a native Chinese speaker. It's definitely not the translation. The system is apparently just bad at extrapolating.
Concerning the restriction on free speech: in the publicly available model, politically problematic captions are rejected. For example, we tried "unhappy Chinese people", which was rejected.
In priciple, filtering is understandable. You get bad news headlines if your AI generates Nazi symbols, or IS-like images of beheadings. But it's a reminder on what is considered a problematic caption in China.
The combination of extremely good results for a few specific prompts + terrible performance in novel prompts screams overfitting to me. I'd guess the network is severely overfit and just memorised the training set.
"DALL-E." That's brilliant.
The colab.research.google.com page doesn't work for me. I tried pressing Ctrl+Enter in the "Image generation configuration" cell. First, it complained that the deep_translator package was missing, which I fixed by creating a code cell and executing !pip install deep_translator . Now it throws
/bin/bash: CogView/input.txt: No such file or directory
/bin/bash: CogView/scripts/input.txt: No such file or directory
Then trying to run the "Apply changes to text2image script and generate" cell also errors out.
How did you get it to work?
Were you able to run the previous cells in order without errors first? The deep_translator package and Cogview should be installed in the "Install CogView & dependencies" cell. If that's not working, you might also try Runtime -> Factory Reset Runtime, then Runtime -> Run All.
I didn't realize I had to run the cells in order; I just run the one you linked to. After running them in order, it works.
This is what I got when asking for a "tiger with blue and green stripes": https://imgur.com/a/XkVvUh4 Not even a hint of blue or green, and not much of a tiger either unless you have very good imagination.
Then I just asked for a "tiger" and got (half the face of) one: https://imgur.com/a/MjlvraS
How can I participate in any survey?
There'll almost definitely be a link to the survey(s) as a post, and probably links in subsequent open threads as well.
A low tech substitute for a report function would be to have a Google form people could submit replies to
I’be been having lots of substack thoughts recently (haven’t we all) and I’ve heard a lot about syndicated fiction on the platform. Are there any good examples of this to start with?
I've written a blog post about freedom of speech, and I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts about it.
My main propositions are:
1. Social media censored pandemic stories that shouldn't have been censored - but some medical misinformation should be censored, and what/whether to censor should be decided by an accountable, democratic institution rather than a private media company
2. "Cancel culture" is not about free speech and does not threaten free speech
3. The primary threats to freedom of speech in the world are from authoritarian regimes and conservative groups
https://peripateticpedagogue.wordpress.com/2021/07/02/the-contested-boundaries-of-freedom-of-speech/
It would help if your examples of what your political opponents think didn't consist entirely of strawmen.
What relevance does a couple of young idiots arguing over whether rap counts as music have to the rest of the world? You can find loud young idiots disparaging each others choices in music everywhere, and it has no importance whatsoever. Reducing complicated and serious debates into depicting that anyone beyond the lizardman quotient of crazies thinks "black people shouldn't be allowed to protest" or "women are all bad at computers and math" is dehumanizing and insulting in and of itself. Nobody objects to "teaching about racism", the objection is that what is being taught and specifically being prohibited is in itself racist (and dehumanizing and insulting to religion, country, and culture). Using these uncharitable descriptions is dangerous misinformation (and if done deliberately, a lie).
"You don’t see lefties showing up at J.K. Rowling’s book signings to throw rocks at her fans." We see violence any time anyone vaguely right wing, heck, anyone who disagrees with progressive orthodoxy tries to speak on a college campus, often with the support of campus administrators. We see left-wing protests escalate into violence all the time.
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" is overly simplistic, but there is a point to it. Restrictions (both legal and social) on speech will always be used to protect those in power. In this case, that works by protecting the historically marginalized groups that overwhelmingly vote for the establishment in return for political favors. Those rules will be turned against members of marginalized groups as soon as they are no longer useful to the establishment; just look at the slurs used against members of marginalized groups that don't support the establishment.
None of the social rules and very few of the legal rules you describe as limiting speech protect those without a connection to power, and thus will it always be. If you believe the hollow promises of those in power that those rules will never be turned around against you, you are a fool. Only a robust and continuing determination for making speech as free as possible for everyone can work in the long term.
"It would help if your examples of what your political opponents think didn't consist entirely of strawmen."
I think you've overstated this criticism, but point taken. I think there are certainly people debating each of the topics I said they were debating, although perhaps my glosses of the opposing positions were uncharitable.
"Nobody objects to "teaching about racism""
Republicans in 22 US states are pushing bans on teaching about racism in K-12 schools, falsely labelling any discussions of race as "critical race theory", and campaigning to get teachers and administrators fired for teaching about racism. Here's an article about it: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-battles-are-driving-frustrated-exhausted-educators-out-n1273595
"We see violence any time anyone vaguely right wing, heck, anyone who disagrees with progressive orthodoxy tries to speak on a college campus, often with the support of campus administrators."
I've seen videos of conservative speakers, e.g. Ben Shapiro, speak on college campuses without violence.
"Restrictions (both legal and social) on speech will always be used to protect those in power. In this case, that works by protecting the historically marginalized groups that overwhelmingly vote for the establishment in return for political favors."
To use the example of Rowling, she was criticized for speech against trans people. Are you suggesting that trans people are "those in power" - that they're enough of a voting bloc that Rowling was socially criticized to - what - get trans people to vote for progressive political parties? That just doesn't seem to line up with the facts.
"If you believe the hollow promises of those in power that those rules will never be turned around against you, you are a fool."
You used to call a trans person a "transsexual". Now you are supposed to use the word "transgender" instead. This is not a law in my country of residence, but I follow it as a social rule anyway. I wonder how this social rule of substituting a less-preferred, older term for a more-preferred newer term is going to be turned around against me? What am I missing here?
What you said: "Republicans in 22 US states are pushing bans on teaching about racism". What the article says: "prompting lawmakers in 22 states to propose limits on how schools can talk about racial issues". Your phrasing of the issue is clear misinformation, even when compared to the article from a progressive-leaning source that you cited as evidence. And that's not addressing the elephant in the room, that what's being talked about is clearly dehumanizing and insulting to religion, country, and culture, but it's somehow acceptable... and it's not private speech, but speech compelled by the government.
"I've seen videos of conservative speakers, e.g. Ben Shapiro, speak on college campuses without violence." And I can find videos of pride parades without violence, except perhaps by the marchers. Your article cites someone throwing rocks at some event in Georgia as if it's some major story, despite the fact that it doesn't seem to show up in a Google search. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it's far easier for me to cite and find videos of the left using violence openly to suppress contrary opinion, such as the recent Wi Spa incident in California or the 2017 incident at Middlebury College.
I don't see why you keep citing Rowling. Yes, a female leftist self-made billionaire who had a massive following before the cancellation was able to survive being somewhat cancelled. And, yes, the LGBT lobby has power, because at the top it overlaps with the establishment and its members are useful political shock troops. Look at how all the major corporations dutifully put up the rainbow flag for pride month (except of course for their Middle Eastern subsidiaries). They wouldn't do that without a reason. And as for it turning back on you when you're no longer useful, we can already see that in action. If it came down to a choice, which do you think the establishment prefers, the ~20 million Americans that identify as LGBT, or the ~1 billion Chinese? You can see how they make that choice already.
And trans women don't enjoy being told they aren't women. The point is that Rowling's cancellation is at most a proportional response to her behavior, but probably not even that - Rowling's bullying has probably done more harm to trans people than her cancellation has done to her.
In a society that values freedom of expression, merely stating an opinion should not be grounds for cancellation. This is true even when the opinion is unpopular or the dreaded "offensive".
In the Faurisson affair, Noah Chomsky famously defended the free speech of a holocaust denier, whose views he disagreed with. This was noble.
To defend free speech is to defend the speech of those you disagree with. If you defend only the free speech of those you agree with, you do not value free speech.
Free speech means you will hear opinions you don't like, ones that make you mad. If you don't like it, tough. That's how it must work.
"Your article cites someone throwing rocks at some event in Georgia as if it's some major story, despite the fact that it doesn't seem to show up in a Google search."
Events in this Georgia are hard to google because you get overwhelmed with results from the other Georgia. I usually use "Tbilisi" as a keyword or sometimes search with the "site:.ge" parameter to get only results on Georgian internet domains.
In this case, however, just googling the relevant sentence ("They did it again yesterday, throwing stones, bottles, and eggs at attendees of a documentary about Pride 2019") got me this as a first result: https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-pride-lgbt-tbilisi-protest-arrests-ultra-nationalists/31337575.html
To underscore my point, as a follow-up, the LGBTQ+ Pride event had to be canceled after a right-wing mob attacked 53 journalists - one of whom has died - and the offices of two NGOs. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57797467
"it's far easier for me to cite and find videos of the left using violence openly to suppress contrary opinion"
I would guess this is due to the sources you are paying attention to. Most sources agree that, even confined to the US, right-wing violence is much more common and severe than left-wing violence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/domestic-terrorism-data/
"I don't see why you keep citing Rowling."
I need a high-profile example of someone who was "cancelled" for speech. Who else would you go for? Roseanne Barr? Michael Richards? So then your argument would be that Black Americans are the ones "in power"? Mel Gibson? So your argument would be that Jewish people are the ones "in power"? It seems like the intuitive explanation here - that people are "cancelled" for "punching down" - that is, attacking groups that aren't in power - requires fewer mental gymnastics to justify.
The data in that Post article do not justify the phrase "much more common and severe," e.g.:
"In August, a supporter of President Donald Trump was shot dead in Portland, Ore., by a suspected gunman who was a self-described antifa supporter. That killing was the only death last year attributed to far-left violence, the data shows. There were two deaths attributed to far-right attacks."
Ooookay, so we had one (1) death "attributed" (by whom? on what grounds?) to far-left violence, and two (2) "attributed" (by whom? on what grounds?) to far-right. Those are tiny little numbers, and while 2 is twice as big as 1, I'm pretty confident that difference is meaningless in numbers as tiny as these. Either way, you're about 10 times more likely to be killed by a bee sting as by "far-right" or "far-left" domestic terrorists, so based on the numbers alone a reasonable person would need some pretty strong additional arguments why either should be an issue of genuine concern, or give any useful insight into the broad ideological currents encompassing tens to hundreds of millions of Americans.
Furthermore:
"The Post focused its analysis primarily on far-right attacks since 2015 because they account for a clear majority of the rising domestic terrorism events and fatalities charted by the CSIS."
That is, the article *assumes* the very conclusion (that "far-right" attacks far outweigh "far-left") for which you are hoping to use it as a source. That is, this is an opinion and analysis piece, and does not function (or even intend to function) as an investigation for determining the fact at issue in your dispute.
I guess I did find the story about the attack in Tiblisi, I just assumed it wasn't what you were talking about because stories about the country of Georgia are not particularly relevant to free speech in the US. Someone in the US being attacked for being LGBT and the attackers not being vigorously prosecuted would be news, which is why it was surprising I hadn't heard of it. For that matter, it's easy to find the FBI going into full investigation mode for both obvious hoaxes and cases where the 'victim' is clearly mistaken. On the other hand, left wing attackers in the US not being prosecuted despite being caught red handed in assaults seems to be an everyday occurrence.
That also ties into why statistics about political terrorism in the US need to be taken with a grain of salt. As evidence, Members of Congress are fighting to get the attempted assassination of the Republican Congressional leadership designated as political terrorism and not suicide by cop by the FBI (and that wasn't just some nebulous assault planned with the help of an FBI informant busted in the planning stage, a Congressman was critically injured). If a political terrorist attack of that nature can be brushed aside, how bad is it when it comes to categorizing all the other violence we've seen over the past year?
Prof. Christakis was cancelled for objecting to oversensitivity to Halloween costumes, so presumably wearing a costume that might be offensive is "punching down". Is wearing blackface punching down? It's also hard to get further up than, say, the Governor of Virginia or the Prime Minister of Canada, so, presumably, their wearing blackface (or possibly Klan robes, in the case of VA's governor) should definitely be "punching down", and yet they are immune to cancellation. Making fun of Barack Obama is somehow "punching down", despite the obvious power he wields, but using racial slurs against Clarence Thomas or Tim Scott is not "punching down", because they're not progressive. And don't get me started for evidence of the same double standard with regards to sexual harassment and assault, because I could be here all day listing members of the establishment that got away with a lot more than just making a joke about 'dongles'.
If people are cancelled for "punching down", why is it only when the people being "punched down on" are those that support the establishment, and why are members of the establishment not cancelled for "punching down"? That's the real evidence that your "punching down" theory is incorrect, because we can find a lot of what should be obvious "punching down" that doesn't result in cancellation. After all, who determines who's down of who if not the establishment?
Flatly, I think there’s a lot to improve.
1. Your advocacy for government-regulated censorship is just a normative claim. There is no evidence that censorship was useful and effective at quashing harmful conspiracy; there is no evidence that government censorship would be better (more free, more effective, more accurate) than private. It doesn’t feel like you have thought about the arguments of any opponents.
2. Using ‘debate.org’ as evidence that whites are endemically racist skates closely to Poe’s Law.
3. Your arguments that most cancellations were basically justified is backed up by no evidence stronger than “I think.”
4. I quote you: “ My response to that is: you can’t just claim that anything you don’t like is “insulting” or “harmful” and then veto all speech about it. You have to actually establish the truth of the claim.” But you don’t follow your own rule earlier on in your own post. Indeed, you’re undermining your own argument in a way that makes it seem, again, that you haven’t thought about what your opponents’ positions or arguments are and you’ve learned most of your talking points from people you agree with who also don’t know what their opponents’ arguments are.
Thanks for the comments.
1. Yes, I suppose this is a normative claim. Just as a general principle, if a rule needs to be made in the public interest, it should be the public that makes the rule (through an elected body) rather than a private institution. The reason being that a) the public then gets to debate the rule, b) the public gets to know what the rule is, in advance of it being applied, c) when the rule is violated there's a built-in process with recognized legitimacy (e.g. courts) for arbitrating disputes and assigning penalties, if any, d) the rule at least has a chance of being made in the public interest rather than simply maximizing shareholder value.
Maybe I'm not aware, but are there any arguments that facebook is better at policing speech on its platform than the US government? From what I remember watching TV in the US, the FCC was reasonably good at providing a predictable set of rules for broadcast television that met the above criteria. I mean we all knew which words you couldn't say on television, right? Compare that to facebook, where people - or even whole groups - can get banned by AI for violating rules no one knows or understands.
I realize this puts me on the same side of the issue as Donald Trump, but given that so much public discourse happens on facebook and twitter, they have de facto control over what people see and hear and banning someone (or some piece of content, like the "plandemic" video) really does diminish their audience and reach to the point where, I believe, the process for deciding who or what gets banned does indeed merit at least some kind of public scrutiny. And yes, that goes for both sides of the political aisle.
2. The citation of debate.org was just to head off accusations that I was creating a straw man. That didn't work (see the above comment) but anyway... the claim isn't that whites are "endemically" racist but rather that white supremacist ideology is mainstream and embedded in US culture. The idea that White music is music but Black music is debatable is both a white supremacist idea and a mainstream idea in the US. Therefore (at least one piece of) white supremacist ideology is mainstream.
3. My argument is that cancellations are enforcement of pre-existing social norms against dehumanizing speech, bullying, breaking social taboos, etc., only applied using a progressive understanding of what it means to dehumanize, bully, etc. someone. So for example calling a trans woman "sir" is considered dehumanizing by the left. Cancellation is therefore the outcome of a contest between progressive social norms and conservative social norms, rather than an attack on the concept of free speech. Does this make them "justified"? I don't know - are we ever justified imposing a social penalty against someone who says something offensive? Is Scott justified in banning Deiseach for a day for suggesting her political opponent should commit suicide? If so, then the only question is where we draw the lines between offensive and acceptable speech for any given social context.
4. Yes, you're right, I'm begging the question here. It just seemed so obvious that claiming that rap music isn't music is insulting to Black culture that it didn't occur to me for even a moment that I might need to defend that position. This is why I've opened myself up to the type of critical feedback I assumed I'd get here.
I suppose I'd say, rap music is an important part of Black culture in the US, which many Black people identify with and which many people identify with Black culture, such that an insult to rap music is an insult to Black culture. Claiming that rap music isn't music is insulting because it entails the claim that rap music is deficient in one or more elements of what makes music music, and falsely claiming that something is deficient is an insult. Rap music is music because it does contain all of the elements of music. I have to admit I'm constructing this argument to support my intuition that calling something "not music" is an insult, though. The truth is, if I were listening to a piece of music that was really important to me - like the song "Black" by Pearl Jam - and someone said "hey, can you put on some real music" or "that's not music, that's just some guy whining" I would be deeply insulted - but of course, that would never happen, because see point 2 - White genres of music just aren't subject to this type of criticism.
1. You’re missing the drift. The claim that Facebook is a bad censor does not imply that a better censor is necessary or desirable.
2. It’s a straw man because there is zero evidence that you can generalize a poll of argumentative weirdos on a random website plucked from the electric aether to attitudes in U.S. or broadly Western society. ‘Rap music is not music’ is not an opinion seriously held by the mainstream U.S., and saying that it is shows willful blindness to the enormous, overwhelming, lasting popularity of rap and rap crossovers. Black-originated genres, not just rap but including rap, are visibly acclaimed by nearly everyone. Arguments that begin with bizarrrely denying this fact are nonstarters.
3. The naïve conclusion that ‘because some social norms are defensible, cancel culture is simply an argument of degree’ doesn’t hold water among people that believe in free speech as a value. The critical difference is between censoring people and society as a whole versus moderating a single venue that you operate privately. That is not a difference of degree, it is a difference in kind.
4. Notwithstanding that the claim that “‘rap music is not music’ is a widespread majority belief” is obviously wrong, your beliefs about its uniqueness are also wrong. Further claims of this kind about traditionally ‘white’ genres: “metal is not music.” “Noise rock is not music.” “Found sound is not music.” I also presume that you have never been to a party, of any kind, because I have definitely been told that, e.g., Neutral Milk Hotel is not “real music.” Arguments that various things that are not palatable to someone’s subjective taste are “not real music” are as common as dirt. But regardless, this is not topical: the proposition you need to defend is not whether the insult you’ve chosen is really insulting, but whether you have any justifiable grounds to decide for society as a whole whether insults should be censored. Given that you have shown quite effectively that you don’t have a solid grasp on what free-speech-as-value is, or even what is palatable to society and what is not (i.e. your idiosyncratic belief based on specious evidence that rap is somehow, even, controversial), I am greatly disinclined to trust your ideas about appropriate methods or ethics by which to moderate society.
Seems like there are a lot of assertions that are not backed by evidence, and that your understanding of the topic is limited. Frankly I think your piece is strong support for the position that the Left is the biggest threat to free speech in the U.S.
"to lie about a vaccine in a way that tarnishes the vaccine’s reputation and potentially harms millions of people is perfectly legal?"
No, it's not. 'Product disparagement -- also called commercial disparagement, product defamation, trade libel or slander of goods -- is a false statement about a product that hurts its maker. Victims of product disparagement can sue the perpetrators under both state product disparagement laws and the federal Lanham Act, the law that protects trademarks.'
"We’ve already decided that there is no compelling public interest in allowing people to tell harmful lies."
I think that is an overgeneralization and misrepresentation of reality. If your lies cause economic harm to another person then they may constitute a tort and you may have to compensate that person for their injury.
"The only difference is that the problem of medical misinformation is so new that the law hasn’t caught up with it yet."
Come on, medical misinformation is super old. The law easily covers it.
"I think we can agree that social media companies have no business banning speech on the basis that it “may” inflame racism. "
Why do you think that? This is a very important point.
"Governments need to step in and make laws about harmful medical misinformation – after a period of public debate and deliberation, of course – and issue guidelines for media companies to comply with them."
What the heck would these laws say? How would this improve the situation? As an abstraction I agree it would be (a little) better for Congress to make these decisions than Twitter, at least Congress has more ideological balance, but this is impractical. A more practical solution would be to say that these companies can't sensor speech at all because of the harm done to our democracy when unelected radical leftists employed at Twitter ban legitimate news that is bad for their preferred political party , as has already occurred (e.g. Hunter laptop) and will surely occur more and more.
"I would point to the debate over whether rap music is real music as evidence in favor of the claim that systemic racism and white supremacist ideology are still mainstream and deeply embedded in US culture."
**That sound is the death of all credibility**
"Let’s put aside the question of whether the musicality of rap is a legitimate debate topic and just agree that it’s insulting to Black culture to claim that rap isn’t real music."
Let's not, bro
Then you list some straw-men positions that are 'obviously wrong and bad and shouldn't be subject to debate' "Should Black people be allowed to protest? Should trans people be allowed into bathrooms?" mixed for some reason with "Should gay couples be allowed to adopt children? Are women naturally bad at math and computer stuff?"
Then you contrast that with things that are 'truly debatable' like "whether trans women should compete with cis women ... whether the racial achievement gap in academics in the US is a result of genes... whether trans kids should have access to irreversible medical procedures"
To any thinking person it should be clear that there is no principled difference between the first set and the second set of questions. These are just your personal preferences.
"none of these debates are actually stifled by cancel culture. You can find a diversity of opinions on these topics in the general public, and among scholars, and in the populations directly affected by the outcome of the debates."
Not true. Come on man, genetic racial differences??
"what people are actually getting canceled for reveals that in most cases the cancelee was violating one or more of the pre-established social norms about speech – they were insulting or dehumanizing someone’s culture or race or gender, or they were using a slur, or they were bullying a person or group, or they were violating some well-known and reasonable social taboo"
Evidence free? A guy lost his job for saying violent protest is counter-productive! Another person lost their job for saying college students should be able to make their own choices about Halloween costumes! The list goes on and on. Not to mention one guy's "well-known and reasonable social taboo" is another person's "radical leftist agitprop"
"You’re supposed to avoid saying hurtful things... you deserve a time-out"
So now everything I don't like is hurtful, so you can lose your job if you say it. And then some rando on the Internet can say you were insulting races and you deserved a time-out. What a brave new world we live in.
"laws or bills in 25 states by conservatives attempting to ban teachers from teaching about racism"
These law or bills are attempts to ban teachers from TEACHING students to BE racist.
"you can’t just claim that anything you don’t like is “insulting” or “harmful” and then veto all speech about it. You have to actually establish the truth of the claim. Like I said above, vague or theoretical harms (like “lab leak theory causes racism”) aren’t enough to censor lab leak speech – but kids dying of measles should be enough to censor anti-vax misinformation"
So the fact that a few kids died of measles is sufficient to establish as "fact" that all anti-vax claims are false?
"you need to prove it – and not just to yourself, or your church, or a mob, but to a legitimate, democratic institution entrusted with making determinations of truth, like a court of law or a legislative body. And the burden of proof should be high."
There is going to be a Court of Truth that decides what is true and what is not, and you will only be able to cancel people if they argue things that are "not true"? How could this go wrong??
"Liberal free speech just has an exploit built in, which is that it needs to have exceptions to prevent harmful speech, but these exceptions can always be taken advantage of by bad faith actors who want to censor opposing views by calling them harmful."
This is the Left's whole game. They would never give this up.
"You don’t see lefties showing up at J.K. Rowling’s book signings to throw rocks at her fans."
Thank God! But you do see violent leftists all over the country burning down family businesses, assaulting and murdering people, etc.
"I personally support freedom of speech – which should be obvious from this blog as a whole"
It's not obvious
"Evidence free? A guy lost his job for saying violent protest is counter-productive! Another person lost their job for saying college students should be able to make their own choices about Halloween costumes! The list goes on and on. Not to mention one guy's "well-known and reasonable social taboo" is another person's "radical leftist agitprop""
Who are these people? I keep hearing about conservatives losing their job for just being Republicans, or for innocuous statements, but the only actual cases I can find turn out to be much more reasonable cases of people being fired for repeated hate speech. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place, but I'd like to see actual cases before condemning the left of being totalitarian bad faith actors.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ (David Shor)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-halloween-email-led-to-a-campus-firestorm--and-a-troubling-lesson-about-self-censorship/2016/10/28/70e55732-9b97-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html (Erika Christakis)
I feel like every example is just like the links I posted. I'm legitimately surprised that you think most such cases are for repeated hate speech. Can you post some links of what you are talking about?
Christakis quit after students protested her email. Having read the email, I found that she was in the wrong and students had legitimate grievance against it.
While the students demanded her firing, it didn't happen. She voluntarily chose to quit because she didn't want to keep teaching in a school where she had angered so many of her students.
While I agree that Shor shouldn't have been fired, his tweet was also very tone-deaf and counter to the company's desired approach on the topic. He doesn't seem to have suffered from the firing, and appears to have immediately found new work in the same field.
I'll retract the "repeated" part of my statement, as that was based on my memories of how often it happened and in investigating further most cases I found were fired after a single racist incident rather than repeated. But a few cases (the first ones I found, not selected for any specific reason):
Justine Sacco was fired after making a racist tweet about AIDS and Africa
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/pr-exec-fired-racist-tweet-aids-africa-apology
A group of HSBC bankers were fired after making a fake ISIS video
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/hsbc-staff-fired-mock-isis-execution-video-n387851
Amy Cooper was fired after calling the cops on a black man who asked her to leash her dog
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/nyregion/amy-cooper-dog-central-park.html
Three officers were fired after making racist remarks caught on tape
https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/25/883358818/wilmington-n-c-police-fires-three-officers-over-racist-comments-caught-on-tape
In the first two cases, people tried to defend it as a joke. In the latter two, people made justifications about being under stress or fear. In none of the cases were the actions acceptable, and they all turned out to be totally justified. Whenever someone mentions "Someone was fired over a joke" or "Someone was fired for some harmless venting", this is the sort of thing that comes to mind.
For every case of someone being genuinely fired over a misunderstanding (and the only one that clearly fits that description I've found is Emmanuel Cafferty from your first link. I am 100% in agreement that he is a victim) there are many more of genuinely racist behavior being pointed out where the people involved deserve all of the scorn they got. The ratio of innocent victims of misunderstanding being fired to racist assholes being fired seems very strongly slanted towards the latter, and I find it hard to take issue with the climate of "Say racist shit, get fired" given that it has an overall good track record.
I interpret your comment as a concession that you do not believe in free speech at all, and in fact you believe in severely punishing anyone who says something that you do not agree with.
Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I interpret from your posts that you are totally okay with being wrong about everything
It's remarkable how far you have watered down the adjective "racist." At one time it meant lynching, or discriminating in hiring, or in handing out mortgages. It would appear for you the word can now mean "is insufficiently respectful to racial minorities in speech" and that this is more than enough to justify a savage social retribution.
The similarity to Orwell's concept of crimethink is deeply troubling.
Additionally, I'm going to voice my opposition to several of your points. I'm not interested in debating these, as I am not remotely confident it can be done in a constructive manner and I don't expect to change your mind on them. Feel free to ignore everything below this line, I split this post into a separate reply so as to not mix it with the concrete request for evidence I posted in the other reply.
A) Lawsuits are a poor solution to issues of misinformation. A lawsuit takes immense amounts of time and money to prosecute, by which time a thousand more misinformation posts have been made
B) The Hunter Laptop story is such obvious bullshit that you listing it as a case of a legitimate news story that was censored is ludicrous. Absolutely nothing about that story was remotely credible
C) Genetic racial differences is not a valid debate that is being censored. While genetic differences between groups exist, genetic groups and social "races" are almost entirely different. Any genetic difference between social races beyond the basic skin color genes that those racial groups are based on would require a level of evidence far beyond what actually exists
D) Teachers aren't teaching students to be racist. CRT is not being taught in any sub-college classroom, and every single anti-CRT bill that I have read (in fairness, I haven't read all of them but the random ones I did read are very similar) is clearly intended to result in preventing teachers from teaching actual history
E) Approximately all anti-vax claims are false. This is not because a few kids died of measles, but because of extensive research done into anti-vax claims showing them all to be false
F) You do not see violent leftists all over the country burning down family businesses, assaulting and murdering people etc. There certainly exist murderers who are leftist, but leftism doesn't cause murder.
A) Sure, I guess. I also think a bad way to deal with misinformation is a government tribunal that censors all speech that's not PC
B) Really? Didn't it get admitted in the end? Didn't the FBI say they had an active investigation on it?
C) Not even going to get into it, but you have to admit this is not debated in public.
D) Right- and they shouldn't. If CRT is not taught in K-12 then a CRT ban there should be totally fine. I'll admit to not reading the bills but I'm super wary of Leftist government employees teaching my kindergartner about racism. That can only end badly. Have you read instances of what people are actually teaching right now? Try looking into FAIR, they have some examples. In my mind they are egregious leftist agitprop and neo-racism.
E) So then why did you bring up Measles and dead children if it was irrelevant? I agree with you about anti-vaxxers but come on. Maybe a better reaction would be linking to rebuttals automatically instead of just banning speech that a government tribunal decided was "not true" or "true but offensive"?
F) Were you living in a cave last year? I didn't argue that leftism "causes murder" but clearly the arson was caused by leftist agitprop and the assaults and murders were sort of tangential to that.
Yeah, I agree with the general feedback that this is pretty simplistic. Rather than piling on I'll put it this way: You appear to not imagine that power will be used in ways you don't approve of. You also don't appear to really understand your opponents' arguments. (Not just on the right, by the way.)
For example, you bring up the idea of corporations firing Nazis. Imagine instead a corporation firing everyone who supported the Democrats. Democrats are not Nazis but a corporation might easily be interested in doing that. They both fall under the category of 'firing someone for their politics'. Where do you draw the line? If it's genocidal totalitarian regimes do we include people who defend Communist genocides? That would mean firing university professors, journalists, and liberal politicians working right now. Would you be comfortable with that?
A lot of these arguments remind me of CiC Harris's quote: "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. [...] They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. [...] We cannot send a thousand bombers a time over Germany every time, as yet. But the time will come when we can do so."
You seem to advocate for speech restriction and cancel culture under the rather childish delusion that your side is going to censor and cancel everyone else and nobody is going to censor or cancel your side. This is simply not the case. It's not even the case right now and I suspect it will increasingly not be the case.
"It's not even the case right now"
Internationally outside academia, maybe. Not in the First World. There is no Britain/USSR/USA of the right.
There was no Britain/USSR/USA in 1939 either (with Britain mostly on the defensive). This is a metaphor and I want to make it extremely clear I'm not calling woke Nazis. But the idea is just because you are not being (metaphorically) bombed doesn't mean the other side doesn't have (metaphorical) bombers or the capability to produce them. We'll see if the right does. But they have an awful lot of hard power if they want to.
"You appear to not imagine that power will be used in ways you don't approve of."
I think I gave several examples of power being used in ways I don't approve of. I listed Belarus diverting an airplane to arrest a journalist, Azerbaijan kidnapping a journalist from Tbilisi, China's imprisonment of family members of dissidents, Russia poisoning dissidents, Russian interference in US elections, China's use of economic power to stifle criticisms of its human rights violations, conservative attempts to ban books, and the (successful, by the way) attempt by far-right groups in Georgia to prevent an LGBTQ+ pride march.
But you think I'm not concerned enough with - what - the potential for conservatives to try to "cancel" liberal authors? That's rich given that my example - progressives canceling Rowling for transphobia - is a person who Christians literally campaigned against when they accused Harry Potter of promoting Satanism and witchcraft. Like, come on, the other side canceled the same exact person years ago - the Harry Potter series is apparently the most-challenged series in the US of the last 20 years - and now you're asking me to "imagine" it? I don't have to imagine it, I remember it.
When conservatives do it they're "defending" their "values" but when progressives do it it's "cancel culture" and (as someone said above) the "biggest threat to free speech in the US". Can't have it both ways.
My position is not to unilaterally disarm. If conservatives get to defend their values by banning books from school libraries then progressives get to defend ours by choosing not to read books by authors who don't share our values. But please, none of this whinging over how progressives are a "threat" to free speech when China can cancel a Hollywood actor for calling Taiwan a country. It's clear who and what the real threats are to freedom of speech.
"Imagine instead a corporation firing everyone who supported the Democrats."
In order to function, a society needs to be able to make a distinction between a political party and a hate group. No amount of free speech can salvage a society which has lost that ability.
"If it's genocidal totalitarian regimes do we include people who defend Communist genocides? That would mean firing university professors, journalists, and liberal politicians working right now."
I suspect we would not agree on what counts as "defending Communist genocides", but also, a modern Nazi is in favor of genocide, believing that genocide is the correct and righteous goal of Nazism, whereas a modern Communist believes - perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not - that genocide was a result of a terrible misapplication of Communist ideology and could be avoided in a future scenario. We need to be able to distinguish between "someone who hates me and wants me to die" and "someone who wants to help me but might kill me by accident" because those two ideologies are, let's say, problems with different solutions.
"I think I gave several examples of power being used in ways I don't approve of."
You listed those only as misapplications of your generally pro-speech control principles. In short, you assumed that there would be a body sympathetic to your aims who could allow your side to censor their side without getting censored yourself. My point is that will not be the case.
"But you think I'm not concerned enough with - what - the potential for conservatives to try to "cancel" liberal authors?"
My argument has nothing to do with conservatives. The fact you immediately went there (when I explicitly mentioned there are leftists who disagree) shows you're viewing this in a partisan manner. What I think you're not concerned with is that neutral principles might be good for you too. Universal freedoms work because the other side gets a vote too. Everyone thinks their speech is right and their opponents is wrong. The enemy does too and they have what I've been calling bombers.
"Can't have it both ways. [...] none of this whinging over how progressives are a "threat" to free speech"
You're putting words into my mouth. I suspect because you have trouble conceiving of a critic who isn't generic conservative. I'm not a conservative, by the way. Again, you are coming across as a partisan here. I'm not going to respond to most of it because it's mostly rambling about things I never said. In some cases stuff no one has said at all. No one, anywhere in this thread, has argued you can't decline to read anything you don't want to read. I checked. It's just a strawman.
"In order to function, a society needs to be able to make a distinction between a political party and a hate group. No amount of free speech can salvage a society which has lost that ability."
Plenty of societies function without hate speech standards. The US is one of them.
That said, I agree that societies can differentiate between a political party and a hate group. Those boundaries will not be solely drawn to the right, though. In countries where such standards exist then the far left gets caught up too. I'm trying to figure out if you're comfortable with that or not. Whether there's some neutral principle here.
Overall: You came here looking for criticism. You could stand to be a tad less hostile.
"a modern Communist believes - perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not - that genocide was a result of a terrible misapplication of Communist ideology"
Yes, plenty of Communist supporters (against historical consensus) believe things like the Holodomor was an accident. This is against historical consensus and is a recognized form of genocide denial.
For the record, I don't think that sort of belief is widespread on the left. But it does exist.
"You listed those only as misapplications of your generally pro-speech control principles. In short, you assumed that there would be a body sympathetic to your aims who could allow your side to censor their side without getting censored yourself."
I'm just confused now. I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about here.
"My argument has nothing to do with conservatives. The fact you immediately went there (when I explicitly mentioned there are leftists who disagree) shows you're viewing this in a partisan manner."
You said: "You seem to advocate for speech restriction and cancel culture under the rather childish delusion that your side is going to censor and cancel everyone else and nobody is going to censor or cancel your side." Who would censor or cancel "my side" if not conservatives? Those are the two sides. You told me that I should worry about my side being censored, and then I pointed out that my side already was being censored, and quite aggressively, and quite consistently throughout history. If we can't refer to the sides by name this discussion is going to get even more confusing than it already is.
"No one, anywhere in this thread, has argued you can't decline to read anything you don't want to read. I checked. It's just a strawman."
The example of cancel culture I've been using is the cancellation of J.K. Rowling over her transphobia. This is the most visible, most public, most covered case of cancellation, and was behind a lot of the publicity for the infamous open letter bemoaning cancel culture. When someone expresses opposition to cancel culture, one of the things they are expressing opposition to is the cancellation of J.K. Rowling.
Rowling's "cancellation" amounted to people saying "Rowling is a transphobe, let's not read her books anymore" and others saying "yes, I agree" and others directly addressing Rowling to tell her that she was a transphobe and they were very disappointed in her because that had ruined their enjoyment of her books.
That's it. That's cancel culture.
If you object to cancel culture, what you're objecting to is, literally, people deciding not to read Rowling's books because she's a transphobe.
Why - what did you think "cancel culture" was referring to?
Edit: typos.
"Who would censor or cancel "my side" if not conservatives? Those are the two sides."
Yeah, this is what I mean by you're acting like a partisan. There are far more than two sides. To take an example: Biden is using his new January 6th powers against certain environmentalist groups. In a simple dual model, this doesn't make sense. They're certainly not Republicans. But a simple dualistic model doesn't actually work very well.
"The example of cancel culture I've been using is the cancellation of J.K. Rowling over her transphobia. This is the most visible, most public, most covered case of cancellation, and was behind a lot of the publicity for the infamous open letter bemoaning cancel culture."
Really? That's not my impression at all. Looking at Google searches (unscientific) it looks like cancel culture got a huge spike during the Rowlings controversy but was much older. Possibly it's just the first example you became highly aware of. Or maybe I became aware of it earlier than most, I can't say.
But no, that's not how most people would define cancel culture. Wikipedia's definition (which at least qualifies as "common") is: "Cancel culture or call-out culture is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles." The line you're taking is a rather minority position. And you had to make a huge leap to the idea that being opposed to cancel culture means I want to put a gun to your head and force you to read Harry Potter.
The oldest case I can personally think of, I think, is Mel Gibson getting cancelled for his anti-Semitic rant. Of course it wasn't called "cancellation" back then, and also I don't remember a lot of people rushing to his defense. There were almost certainly other cases long before that which were maybe just not publicized. One of my points in the original piece was that cancel culture isn't actually new - it's just that the list of offenses for which one might be cancelled has grown because we've added more protected groups.
> Who would censor or cancel "my side" if not conservatives? Those are the two sides.
I'm not sure what you mean here. I'm fairly firmly in the leftist camp, I'm not totally a class reductionist, but I think the class and less on identity would be a net benefit for the left. I'm pretty sure this means I disagree with you on most of your claims here. That doesn't mean I'd try to cancel you, I guess, but there are more than just two sides. If you gave people who think like me censorship powers, I think you'd be unhappy with the result.
Moving to JK Rowling, lets go through some of the backlash she's faced and see how well it lines you with your definition of her cancelling:
-She's received harassment, rape threats and death threats. This is way beyond people "expressing their disappointment with her." (This is one collection of sources, I can find countless more if requested: https://twitter.com/dataracer117/status/1272737061703790592?lang=en)
-Honors that had been given to her based on her previous philanthropic work have been rescinded following pressure. This implies either that her speech was so harmful that it somehow negated all her previous charitable work, or that there's something screwy going on. I think this exceeds your description of her "cancellation."
-Companies that represented her professionally have been pressured to denounce her and those that haven't have faced financial repercussions. I think this exceeds your description of her "cancellation."
-She has been objectively slandered in publications (look into The Day being forced to retract an article that claimed she was equivalent to Wagner on Race). I think this exceeds your description of her "cancellation."
-People who still read her books or express a fondness for her writing have received harassments. I think this exceeds your description of her "cancellation."
Look - you can claim that her words have been so harmful that she deserves everything that happened to her. That's at least an intellectually honest position, but justifying it by ignoring the severity of hatred she's received over the last year or so is disingenuous and undercuts your argument. You're trying to defend something that either you don't understand or you're deluded about.
"She's received harassment, rape threats and death threats."
Well, this is just free speech, so by the standards of everyone else on this thread, we have no grounds whatsoever to complain about it. It must be allowed otherwise in some theoretical future someone else will come along and restrict your speech.
"Honors that had been given to her based on her previous philanthropic work have been rescinded following pressure."
An "honor" is just the free speech of an institution, and "pressure" also presumably just refers to free speech. So again we have no grounds to say this is wrong, according to everyone else on this thread.
"Companies that represented her professionally have been pressured to denounce her and those that haven't have faced financial repercussions."
Again, "pressure" is just speech. According to US Supreme Court precedent (e.g. Citizens United), money is also speech, which means that you can't restrict people from removing their money from companies in order to make a statement.
"She has been objectively slandered in publications"
But slander is just speech, and everyone here says that all speech must be free no matter what. If you're going to say that slander doesn't count as free speech, then we have a problem - who decides what counts as slander? According to several commenters on this thread, it is so implausible to make an objective determination about such a question that to even suggest that a democratic institution might be able to determine truth is worthy of derision and mockery (see the "Court of Truth" comment elsewhere).
"People who still read her books or express a fondness for her writing have received harassments."
But harassment is just speech, right? Unless they were physically assaulted - in which case, I agree that's wrong, and is already punishable by law.
"the severity of hatred she's received over the last year or so"
Wait, so now Rowling is allowed to say whatever she wants because of Free Speech, but people who disagree aren't even allowed to have the *emotions* they think are appropriate? I think regulating hatred was literally a plot point in 1984.
It's interesting that so many people are Free Speech Absolutists when it comes to criticizing nameless trans people but become Orwellian anti-speech fascists when it comes to criticizing people who are rich and famous.
There's clearly a double standard at play here. And I can't help but notice that the supposedly "neutral" rule is being applied completely in service to power - Rowling is inconceivably wealthy and trans people have to struggle to be given access to public toilets while facing a steadily-increasing murder rate. The hatred Rowling has directed against trans people gets them killed. The hatred directed against Rowling made Rowling sad.
And note that Rowling's speech was never restricted! She's still absolutely free (well, as free as you can be in the UK, which is less liberal than the US with speech laws) to say whatever she wants about trans people, and she has in fact doubled down repeatedly, issuing statement after statement about how trans people are dangerous predators, and even recently releasing a novel about a cross-dressing serial killer.
The whole debate over cancel culture is speech, on all sides. If you think the cancelers are going too far with their speech - through harassment, slander, boycotts, or whatever - then you aren't a free speech absolutist at all. You just think that, for whatever reason, insulting an NGO for including trans men under the rubric of "people who menstruate" is in bounds, but saying "I'm not going to buy from a company that supports J.K.Rowling because she's an asshole" is out of bounds. If that's the case, then what, exactly, is the neutral and universal standard that you are using to make that judgment that can never be abused or misapplied?
>>"You listed those only as misapplications of your generally pro-speech control principles. In short, you assumed that there would be a body sympathetic to your aims who could allow your side to censor their side without getting censored yourself."
>I'm just confused now. I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about here.
He's saying it's easy to be OK with cancel culture when the views causing cancellation are held by the outgroup (for you, conservatives). But what about in the future when the outgroup is in charge and trying to cancel expression of your cherished opinions? Would you still have the same opinion?
A better strategy is to find a neutral rule that everyone can stand behind. We already have one -- it is the concept of protecting the freedom of speech and expression, even speech and expression you disagree with.
"A better strategy is to find a neutral rule that everyone can stand behind. We already have one -- it is the concept of protecting the freedom of speech and expression, even speech and expression you disagree with."
My point is, this is a demonstrably false oversimplification. In my first section in my post, I listed a number of exceptions to this so-called "neutral rule", many of which require making a non-neutral determination of fact.
I'll just quote the relevant section:
"However, there have always been reasonable limitations on freedom of speech. Legally, my understanding is that I cannot use “free speech” to do any of the following activities (not an exhaustive list):
- plan or solicit a crime or act of terror
- tarnish the reputation of a private person with lies (libel or slander)
- reveal or transmit state secrets
- incite violence
- deceive someone into giving me their money or property (e.g. fraud)"
So because this thread has not gone off the rails enough, let's talk about Donald Trump. I would argue that he solicited crimes and terror *and* incited violence - not just about the January 6th insurrection, but also when he called for police to use more violence against suspects. Obviously there are people in my "outgroup" who would argue the opposite.
Your claim is that we should protect the freedom of speech and expression no matter what because this is a neutral rule that everyone can stand behind. But it isn't. Approximately half of our elected representatives thought that Trump should be punished for his speech. "People should be allowed to summon a mob to try to overthrow the government" is clearly not a rule that everyone can stand behind!
So is the solution really "just don't have a rule against inciting violence or soliciting crime"? I haven't seen anyone on this thread bite the bullet and argue in favor of abolishing existing restrictions on freedom of speech - in fact I'm not sure anyone has even acknowledged that such restrictions even exist.
No, instead, I'd argue that the solution - however imperfect - is to leave the determination up to democratic institutions. We had our vote to impeach. It didn't go exactly the way I wanted, but that's life. What's more important is that there was a pre-determined and transparent process for determining Trump's guilt or innocence, and that process was followed, thus heading off the need for people to escalate the conflict to violence, and confirming the legitimacy of our institutions.
In fact, the "neutral rule" we have is that some speech is against the law, and democratic institutions - a court, or in the case of impeachment, a legislature - enforce the law. It's not perfect, it sometimes gets things wrong, but it's also the best compromise measure we can come up with, because society is complex and full of tradeoffs.
The same logic applies to free speech norms enforced socially. It's not illegal for someone to say "KYS" in an argument - but it is against our social norms, and a community leader or moderator (in this case Scott) will enforce a penalty against someone for violating that norm. Similarly, if I started insulting you rather than addressing your points, the community norms would state that you and others would a) tell me that my comments were unhelpful and unwarranted and b) eventually shun and ostracize me. Every society always has norms of discourse. Pretending that you don't have these norms means they are not up for discussion and thereby favors the status quo. I think that's why it pings our "free speech alerts" when people challenge the speech of elites like Rowling but not when people challenge the speech of her mostly anonymous critics.
One of my points here is that rather than pretending that we don't have norms regulating our speech, we should acknowledge them and debate their boundaries. Here's what I said at the end of my introduction:
"Given that freedom of speech has limitations, and that in many cases the establishment and enforcement of these limitations is based on a political or social consensus, it is sometimes necessary to reevaluate these limitations and ensure that they’re serving our needs as a society."
Limitations on free speech *are* a given. There's no such thing as a society without limitations on speech. Which begs the question: why do so many people seem to believe that there is?
"Overall: You came here looking for criticism. You could stand to be a tad less hostile."
I apologize for seeming hostile - I assure you I do not intend hostility but for whatever reason I sometimes come off as hostile anyway. It's been a lifelong struggle to express my passion for debate in a way that doesn't alienate others and I thank you for engaging anyway.
No problem. I have the same issues at times.
Respond to your point about Cancel Culture, but first, a digression on music. I love electronic music. I think it's amazing how music has finally transcended the sounds that can be made by voices, vibrating strings, compressed air blown through small holes, and people hitting things; I think that it broadens the range of possibilities for what we call music.
I've also had around 15 years now of people instantly dismissing the tunes I love as not being "real" music since it doesn't involve artists actively playing their instruments during performance.
I could come to the conclusion that since a majority of the highest-grossing electronic artists happen to be from Europe, that this rejection of electronic music is evidence of a prevailing anti-European sentiment and therefore reject these critiques on their face as being racist (or biased, if you believe that there isn't a requisite power differential here for racism to apply. But that would be stupid. I would be ignoring the evidence they are presenting in favor of supposition I'm bringing to the table.
The truth of the matter is that people are relational. They don't consider the core concept of what music is and then apply it to new experiences, they just know what music sounds like, and stuff that falls outside that gets rejected. Sure, they're might be some anti-Europeans thrown into that mix, but writing off everyone because of that is... well, kind of ignorant. Instead, I've found that you can change people's mind about electronic music by showing them the stuff that most closely aligns to traditional music and using that as a jumping-off point to broaden their horizons. It's actually really cool doing that with friends and seeing what kind of stuff they eventually gravitate towards.
I worry that you're going to think I'm being flippant here, but did you read the negatives of the debate.org page? Again - there are some hardcore racists in there, but there's more people saying things like, "I think rap is an art form, but more aligned with poetry than traditional music" or "I listen to music to relax, and I don't find rap is relaxing" or "music requires a melody and I don't think rap has one." These aren't inherently racist arguments. They also aren't correct, in my opinion, but that doesn't matter so much. To claim that the arguments these people are making are all racist are requires you to dismiss the things people are saying in favor of the biases you perceive (or imagine) they hold.
I'm going to pre-empt what I think your counterargument would be here, "The specific critiques of rap music don't matter. Its so firmly tied to the African American Community that any attack on rap will be felt as a critique of the community and therefore cause harm. Since this harm is an inevitable result of the critique, the critique is racist."
I don't have a better way of saying this, but this is a problematic viewpoint that erases a large community of African Americans who don't like rap. I grew up in the south and went to a church that was approximately 95% African American and I have met no fiercer critics of rap than the little old ladies in that congregation. It was hilarious, and up until everyone agreed just not to talk about it, kept causing the priest to get in trouble (he'd try to integrate rap references in the sermon to appeal to the youths which would always cause the grandparent contingent to fire off)
I don't know if you see this, but claims like "Rap music represents the African American experience" are just as sweeping and potentially offense as some of the critiques being made by the critics of rap. People are people, individuals are individuals and any attempt to erase people's individuality is an assault on their intrinsic values as human beings.
This sweeping judgement also results in some pretty stupid edge-cases. A juggalo being told that Violent J and 2 Dope aren't making real music probably isn't facing downstream effects of racism, he's probably just run into someone who doesn't like ICP.
Now, I know it's a long digression, but I bring it up because of this specific sentence in your piece:
"Let’s put aside the question of whether the musicality of rap is a legitimate debate topic and just agree that it’s insulting to Black culture to claim that rap isn’t real music."
What if I don't put aside that it's a legitimate debate topic? I've already disproven your assertion that there's no "white" music genre that has its validity challenged (electronica) and hopefully pointed out that there are reasons people could dislike rap that aren't racist. Assuming general harm from these critiques implicitly assumes that there is a monolithic community of Black people that also doesn't exist.
The problem with cancel culture, or whatever the hell we should call this rising social trend, is that to muster the moral clarity that renders their actions acceptable, they rely on the kind of overly broad and controversial declarations of morality like the one you made above. Yes, social censure as a result of abhorrent opinions is potentially justified, but not every opinion derided as abhorrent actually is. A focus on using social censure broadly results in more and more nuance being lost in everyone's rush to "cancel."
Synths are one of the worst things to happen to music.
Sounds like we've got an Anti-European over here. (sarcasm, of course)
American thrash metal > Nordic black metal
I just wanted to say, I appreciate this comment, and I have been thinking about it for a long time because you have made a number of good points. At the very least you've convinced me that the example that I chose to be clear-cut and non-controversial turned out to be neither.
The one part of your reasoning I would disagree with is the idea that associating rap with Black culture is problematic or erasing Black people who don't like rap. Claiming that rap is part of Black culture is not the same as claiming that all Black people like rap or that there is a monolithic Black community.
Aside from that, here's why, despite your many good points, I am not quite convinced that it is not racist to claim that rap music isn't music:
"To claim that the arguments these people are making are all racist are requires you to dismiss the things people are saying in favor of the biases you perceive (or imagine) they hold."
First of all, I'm not saying the arguments themselves are racist. Saying "rap is more like poetry than music" isn't racist. In fact, I would agree with you that people "don't consider the core concept of what music is and then apply it to new experiences, they just know what music sounds like, and stuff that falls outside that gets rejected". But look - "they just know" is hand-waving away some process, right? I don't think we "just know" what music sounds like a priori. The type of music you were exposed to growing up shapes what you think of as music. In other words, what you accept and what you reject as music is in some sense a product of your culture.
But the idea that "things that are like things in my culture are valid examples of their categories, while things that are not like things in my culture are invalid examples of their categories" is like the definition of cultural prejudice or bias. Believing that something isn't music because it doesn't sound like the music that you personally have heard is clearly the application of a type of bias.
So I don't need to dismiss the things that people are saying in favor of biases I imagine they hold - instead, the things that people are saying are clear demonstrations of bias.
And (here's the controversial part, get ready) what we call prejudice or bias, when it is directed against Black Americans, is "racism" or "white supremacy". When it's directed against European Americans, it's just called prejudice or bias. I know that many people find that understanding of racism (aka racism = power + prejudice) unsatisfying or unfair, and I don't expect anyone reading this to adopt it immediately just because I've asserted it. I'm fully aware that many people find it absolutely outrageous that someone might assert that it is not possible to be racist against White Americans. I'm happy to debate the issue further or we can just leave it at "agree to disagree", but I hope anyone reading this at least understands that the definition of racism I have just explained is common and well-attested in progressive spaces, rather than something I've just made up or thought up on my own.
If we do apply that definition of racism, then the question becomes: is bias against rap music in fact directed at Black Americans, or just directed at something which is in some cases, coincidentally, associated with some but not all Black Americans? And that's where I agree that the case is much less clear-cut than I initially indicated. I would say that rap music is associated enough with Black Americans that almost everyone who claims that rap music isn't music will know in advance that what they are saying will be taken as an insult by many Black Americans and will be regarded by many as offensive to Black Americans. So I would argue that almost everyone who chooses to put forth that claim is in some sense deliberately and knowingly insulting and/or offending Black Americans.
Now, should they care? Every opinion is offensive to someone, right? To me, this is where the contest is - where progressives are saying "yes, they should care - people should go out of their way not to offend Black Americans", while the anti-PC types are saying "no, they shouldn't care - people can say what they want, and if someone gets offended they don't have to listen". I think claiming that there's some sizeable third contingent who is just blissfully unaware that this topic might risk offending people is a mistake.
And furthermore, all that is putting aside the fact that there are indeed, demonstrably, open racists who are openly promoting the "rap music is not music" trope specifically in order to demean Black people and argue for White supremacy. If your sincerely held, non-racist opinion just happens to coincide exactly with a known racist trope, I would argue that you have an affirmative duty to critically examine that opinion and its roots, just as part of a general commitment to not being racist. So at the very least, I would again say that people repeating this claim, while perhaps not racist, have failed at their duty to be non-racist. Which doesn't make them bad people - but which does obligate me to point out "hey, that thing you said sounded kinda racist - you might want to examine that opinion."
One last point: many Black Americans report dealing with insults to their race, culture, and person on a daily basis. I would not expect these individuals to have the level of patience that I have in confronting ideas that are perhaps not racist but also happen to coincide exactly with things that openly racist people use as racist attacks. Social censure is aimed at providing some kind of temporary respite from the constant barrage of racist messages that racists in our culture produce. In other words, if I have to expend effort to determine whether someone is a racist or just coincidentally shares opinions with racists, then generally it will be more efficient for an anti-racist social group to just censure that person and place the onus on them to, as we say, "do the work" themselves if they should wish to be included in our anti-racist social group. There's plenty of time for nuance when it isn't the validity of one of the products of your culture that's under the microscope.
I'm worried I don't have the skills at writing to express my (negative) response to your comment in a way that adequately reflects my positive respect for you as a person, so I'm going to make it explicit. I think your willingness to engage with ideas you clearly disagree with and the moral empathy that guides your actions and decision-making processes are highly admirable. I wish that the percentage of people who thought like you in this world were higher (although I do wish the number of people who arrived at your conclusions were lower).
That being said, I think I find your ideology terrifying. I'll clean up some of the original points in discussion then get to the crux of the issue.
>Claiming that rap is part of Black culture is not the same as claiming that all Black people like rap or that there is a monolithic Black community.
I don't think I understand this. If you are claiming that there is such a thing as an American (or global?) Black culture, that implies you're talking about a culture that all Black individuals are members of or at least affected by. Now, I agree that you can be part of a culture and reject certain elements of it*, but claiming that there is a Black culture necessarily implies the existence of a Black Community.
Unless, wait, are you claiming the Black subculture is a culture embraced by a smaller subset of the Black population in a way that doesn't necessarily correspond to their race, but has more to do with cultural signifiers?
>Believing that something isn't music because it doesn't sound like the music that you personally have heard is clearly the application of a type of bias.
This is true, and a good point. I think you're playing fast and lose with the definition of bias here, but after rewriting this section a few times, I still can't adequately express why. I'll concede its a type of bias, but still think that the bias has nothing to do with race and shouldn't be construed as racism.
We'll get to racism in a second, but first a digression into something you said in a separate reply:
>The truth is, if I were listening to a piece of music that was really important to me - like the song "Black" by Pearl Jam - and someone said "hey, can you put on some real music" or "that's not music, that's just some guy whining" I would be deeply insulted - but of course, that would never happen
I don't understand this. Not just because I don't personally care for Pearl Jam** but just because I can't imagine caring that much about what some yahoo says. If it's important to you, why would anyone else's opinion on it matter? This might just be a personal difference, but I don't see how someone diminishing something I like could be a personal insult.
This might be an unfair attack on you, and if so, I apologize, but I don't think it actually would deeply insult you. If I'm wrong, don't read the second footnote down below, but I get the feeling you're emotionally resilient to actually not give a fuck that some random dude thinks your music is crap. Them saying this might cause you not like that person, but I don't think you'd be deeply insulted. I think you're reframing what would have been (and still should be, imo) potential source of conflict into a concrete instance of harm. I think this is bad, because its going to dramatically increase the amount of claimed and perceived harm.
Anyway, on to the meat of the argument:
>what we call prejudice or bias, when it is directed against Black Americans, is "racism" or "white supremacy".
Not sure if you caught it, but I actually tried to be mindful of this viewpoint in my original post, saying, "... and therefore reject these critiques on their face as being racist (or biased, if you believe that there isn't a requisite power differential here for racism to apply.)"
That being said, I think it's wrongheaded to freely throw around definitions that are specific to a community that have general (and potentially conflicting) definitions outside that community. If we know that the majority of non-progressives see the definition of racist being "bias as a result of, or closely associated with, someone's ethnicity" then I feel like the onus should be on the people using a non-standard definition of that word to be exceedingly careful when using it so as to ensure people aren't confused about their specific meaning. Which, you were, so I guess we're at the point of "agree to disagree here."
Anyway, here is where you lose me and make me want to think about moving to a bunker somewhere. These are a collection of points that, to me, all correlate:
> everyone who claims that rap music isn't music will know in advance that what they are saying will be taken as an insult by many Black Americans and will be regarded by many as offensive to Black Americans.
>I think claiming that there's some sizeable third contingent who is just blissfully unaware that this topic might risk offending people is a mistake.
>If your sincerely held, non-racist opinion just happens to coincide exactly with a known racist trope, I would argue that you have an affirmative duty to critically examine that opinion and its roots, just as part of a general commitment to not being racist. So at the very least, I would again say that people repeating this claim, while perhaps not racist, have failed at their duty to be non-racist.
>I would not expect these individuals to have the level of patience that I have in confronting ideas that are perhaps not racist but also happen to coincide exactly with things that openly racist people use as racist attacks.
These all imply a worldview where the only thing that matters is the potentially unintended emotional responses people have. I don't think I'm exaggerating here when I say that you're advocating for a world where anything someone says or does should be hyper-analyzed not just for their intended response or motivation, but also for second-order outcomes or interpretations of those outcomes that random people think the acting party should have been aware of.
The best case scenario of this would be a world that routinely censures people for the crime of ignorance. The worst case scenario (and one I think we're trending to) is one where people will start using "felt harm is evidence of wrong-action" as weapons in games of status and power.
>Social censure is aimed at providing some kind of temporary respite from the constant barrage of racist messages that racists in our culture produce. In other words, if I have to expend effort to determine whether someone is a racist or just coincidentally shares opinions with racists, then generally it will be more efficient for an anti-racist social group to just censure that person and place the onus on them to, as we say, "do the work" themselves if they should wish to be included in our anti-racist social group.
This is perfectly acceptable if your social group is a minority (edit: I don't mean minority in reference to race here, I mean minority as in a smaller segment of overall society.) If I'm trying to join your subculture, you can freely ostracize me for not knowing how to talk and act in your group. But your group is winning. You're starting to have more and more influence in culture writ large; what happens when the "anti-racist social group" is now American society? What happens when someone who is saying these things they don't believe to be racist is now being censured by and excluded from all of culture?
>There's plenty of time for nuance when it isn't the validity of one of the products of your culture that's under the microscope.
I disagree. I kinda just think there's plenty of time for nuance.
*American culture is stereotyped to be associated with excessive consumption. The fact that there are a few aesthetic vegans scattered around doesn't negate that; they are a counter element of restraint in an otherwise prevailing culture of consumption, but their actions are still in response to that element of culture.
**Long boring personal anecdote time: I used to work on a ship. My room on that ship was 10'x10'x7' and I shared it with another guy. For a couple years we spent roughly 10 months or so a year living in that cramped space. This guy absolutely love bands like Phish, Grateful Dead, DMB, and Pearl Jam and would play them all the time. I, uh, don't. He also hated electronic music. Over the course of the two years, we said more unkind things about each other's preferred music than I can repeat, but if I'd be shocked if I number of times I said Jam Bands weren't real music wasn't at least in the triple digits. In one memorable occasion, he decided to use "Hard Sun" as our alarm sound and hid the phone, so in response I only talked to him in an insulting Eddie Vedder impression for 4 days. To this day he's one of my best friends. We'd shit on each other's music tastes constantly, but had enough respect for one another that there was never any deeper animosity.
In retrospect, this post is too long. Sorry for not being more concise.
No, it's fine, I think I'm in the middle of writing a longer one.
"I'm worried I don't have the skills at writing to express my (negative) response to your comment in a way that adequately reflects my positive respect for you as a person..."
I appreciate that, and the respect is mutual. I've greatly enjoyed reading all of your comments.
However you've dissed Dave so I'm going to stop here. Hah, kidding. I'm tempted to respond with an anecdote of my own about how my reading of Atlas Shrugged convinced me that American-style individualism is bad and we need to focus more on mutual obligation and positive social duties and less on negative personal rights... anyway it's longish and not necessarily relevant so let me know if you're interested.
"These all imply a worldview where the only thing that matters is the potentially unintended emotional responses people have. I don't think I'm exaggerating here when I say that you're advocating for a world where anything someone says or does should be hyper-analyzed not just for their intended response or motivation, but also for second-order outcomes or interpretations of those outcomes that random people think the acting party should have been aware of."
I think what I'm saying is that we already live in a world in which unintended emotional responses matter and anything anyone says or does can potentially be hyper-analyzed for first- and second-order outcomes, and given that, we need to try to come to a consensus on how much these responses matter and on what types of outcomes we are willing to live with and what types of outcomes we think we need to prevent. If we're not willing to try to reach that consensus, we will be stuck in a series of irreconcilable conflicts any time people from two or more different subcultures or communities get together and try to have a discussion.
I think it used to be that it was very easy for your community to determine social norms about discourse, and individuals didn't belong to so many communities that these norms could become hard to keep track of, and it wasn't so common for a person to change communities so people generally got used to the norms in their communities. Imagine a time when all you had to keep track of was: appropriate speech for home, work, the bar, the street, and church. And if you did accidentally offend your co-worker, for example, you'd work it out because the relationship was durable and important - you'd have to see this person every work day for 20 or 30 years - and that vastly outweighed some off-hand comment you made or ill-considered opinion you offered. But now, if I say something offensive on twitter to a person I've never met and will never talk to again, they have no reason not to just respond by dunking on me or blocking me. And then instead of a robust social fabric, you have a series of self-curated bubbles, all with their own incompatible social norms around what can and cannot be said.
I don't think this situation is sustainable or good for society. And I'm specifically not saying that we need to impose new restrictions on freedom of speech. What I'm saying is that the boundaries of what we consider insulting and what we consider acceptable are currently being redefined and it is important that more people, collectively, participate in that redefinition, and in a positive way, so that we can come to a consensus that is more inclusive and maybe even starts to repair the social fabric a little. Even if our first stab at creating a principle that we can use to delineate insults from non-insults goes horribly wrong, like mine apparently has, that doesn't mean we can just abdicate the responsibility to create a principle, thereby leaving it to the most vocal and radical activists to balkanize the discourse with a set of self-serving, ad hoc speech codes.
But I think progressives have a decent set of principles for dealing with insults in discourse. It's something like:
- you should try not to insult people
- if someone tells you that something you said insulted them, listen to them and keep an open mind about it
- if you insult someone, even by accident, apologize and do better in the future
- when in doubt, minority/marginalized voices get priority in identifying things that are insulting
I've operated under those rules for quite a long time and I don't personally find it very onerous, but I guess ymmv.
"The worst case scenario (and one I think we're trending to) is one where people will start using "felt harm is evidence of wrong-action" as weapons in games of status and power."
Yeah, I agree that this is definitely happening, and there are other abuses along similar lines, but I'm not sure "people will abuse X as weapons in games of status and power" is a knockout argument against X. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people use their command of English spelling and grammar as weapons in games of status and power, and yet here I am following (more or less) the rules of English spelling and grammar.
There's a segment of the left that is remarkably un-self-critical and that doesn't allow any kind of debate whatsoever with a claim that something is insulting, and I think that's bad. But I also think it's bad to socially endorse endless debate about whether something is insulting, to the extent that it derails other discourse. There's a tradeoff between the two - it's not as straightforward as "just allow endless debate until everyone gets tired of it" because one thing we also see in leftist spaces is that these types of endless debates end up splintering communities and rendering activist groups completely ineffective as they become consumed with pedantic internecine quarrels, and also if you try to create a community in which one person goes around saying "what, I just think X is stupid, why can't I say that" literally all the time, everyone else will leave and start a new community without that person, which in effect is the same kind of ostracism as cancelation except without the need to find a new host for your discussion group.
Anyway, I think maybe I am making this seem a lot more exotic than I actually think it is. We've managed to have an entire conversation without insulting each other even as we've described different cultural preferences and political ideologies, and part of what we've been doing is anticipating what *might* insult the other person and either routing around it or disclaiming with something like "I don't intend this as an insult", both of which are totally normal politeness strategies. I think in almost any case, if someone takes the time and care to use these types of strategies, they won't insult others inadvertently, and if they do they'll be given the benefit of the doubt. I think most of the time when we're dealing with "unintended" insults it's a case where the person who said the insulting thing didn't care enough to show respect or take the time to be polite, and that lack of respect or concern compounds the insult.
So my take is, the worst case scenario is exactly what we have now, and the best case scenario is we all get a little better at being polite and respectful.
>I think what I'm saying is that we already live in a world in which unintended emotional responses matter and anything anyone says or does can potentially be hyper-analyzed for first- and second-order outcomes, and given that, we need to try to come to a consensus on how much these responses matter and on what types of outcomes we are willing to live with and what types of outcomes we think we need to prevent.
If what you are saying is true and we are already there, then we need to leave there and get back to "sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me."
But I suspect we are not there, because this is not how normal people behave in real life, with real social cues. People do give the benefit of the doubt in conversation. People do know how apply the principle of charity, at least some of the time. It's mostly online where people have forgotten this. We cannot let that online "I am offended by the worst possible interpretation of your statement" mindset into real life.
"I don't understand this. Not just because I don't personally care for Pearl Jam** but just because I can't imagine caring that much about what some yahoo says. If it's important to you, why would anyone else's opinion on it matter? This might just be a personal difference, but I don't see how someone diminishing something I like could be a personal insult."
There aren't a lot of things I care about enough to be offended when someone insults them, but there are some things. BTW I'm not crazy about Eddie Vedder's solo work or even most of Pearl Jam's stuff after the 90's. I suspect there are probably some things which you identify with enough to be insulted by someone insulting, but yeah, I could be making the typical mind fallacy right now.
"If we know that the majority of non-progressives see the definition of racist being "bias as a result of, or closely associated with, someone's ethnicity""
But we don't know that, right? In Against Murderism, Scott pointed out that there are at least three contested definitions of racism (belief, motive, consequences), and that the inability to nail down one of these definitions as canonical results in a lot of confusion and nonsense. I'm not sure it's so wrongheaded to try to operate from a fourth separate definition of racism, especially if it actually clarifies progressives' intentions when claiming "X is racist" and potentially resolves some of the confusion Scott identified in Against Murderism. If the definition of racism were actually clear-cut I think I'd agree with you, but since it's already contested, I say in for a penny, in for a pound.
This feels like a fully general argument against criticizing anything. My preference for books is a result of my cultural upbringing. If I say that Toni Morrison's Beloved wasn't my cup of tea, then that's clearly the application of a type of bias. And what we call prejudice or bias, when directed against Black Americans, is "racism" or "white supremacy".
Of course, some people say rap isn't music because they're racist, but I think you need to establish more than just the existence of cultural bias (which you can apply to any preference) and link it to a preference due to the actual race connection.
The other problem I think a lot of people have with cancellation is that it isn't just enforcing a norm of "don't be assholes to people", or at least not in a legible way, and a lot of time seems to be more about signaling than actually helping anyone.
Personally, I'm less concerned about cancelling Rowling or people who make racist Twitter posts (though we can have a whole different discussion on appropriate escalation), but at some point someone's going to take my earlier argument seriously and there's going to be backlash because a white person criticized a POC, even if race wasn't involved. Or maybe because they're using words in another language that sound a little too close to certain racial slurs.
Hell, if the right person tweeted about it, you could probably be cancelled for participating on a forum known to be sympathetic to misogynists and white supremacists. That's effectively how Scott was portrayed. Would they actually read your posts to see what you think? Why would that be necessary? They didn't need to read the story by Isabel Fall (a trans woman) before cancelling her for being a transphobic Neo-Nazi cis man. (I'm still angry about this one. The whole debacle caused her to untransition and stop writing.)
I'm sorry, that might have come across as overly harsh. I do think applying social pressure to assholes can be a useful thing. But I think a lot of cancellation happens not to help protect that, but to punish and be outraged and feel morally superior, using the flimsiest of excuses. And it doesn't help that the witch hunts pick up a lot of innocent young women in Salem.
"But remember, if someone insults your culture, you’re supposed to be able to tell them to cut it out, and society is supposed to be able to have your back."
I wonder if this rule also applies to men or whites or conservatives...
I mean, I could approve of the rule that people should be nice to each other. But if the rule only says that low-status people should be extra careful lest they somehow offend the feelings of the high-status ones, that's nothing new under the sun.
> I would point to the debate over whether rap music is real music as evidence in favor of the claim that systemic racism and white supremacist ideology are still mainstream and deeply embedded in US culture.
Let me state it then: rap is not real music. (I am certainly not an expert in music, this is just a strong statement of my preferences. And of my current state of rubes/bleggs (music/not music) training.)
Won't be easy to explain it by systemic American racism in my case, since 1. I am not from the US, and most of the authors and performers of rap I am forced to hear are whites, 2. I do not care about its origins. For that matter, jazz and blues genres also came from African Americans, didn't they? I'm not a huge fan but I definitely recognize them as music.
Even if I shared the illiberal premises behind this piece I think I'd want to know more about how democratic institutions are supposed to be held accountable when it comes to banning ideas. If the public has been prevented from even hearing an idea, how are they supposed to judge the reasonableness of banning it?
>A lot of the “debates” that people are getting “canceled” for having are like this one. Should gay couples be allowed to adopt children? Should Black people be allowed to protest? Should trans people be allowed into bathrooms? Are women naturally bad at math and computer stuff? Here’s a rule of thumb: if one of the two potential positions in your “debate” is dehumanizing and insulting, it’s not a good topic for debate.
This is a rather amusing paragraph, because the first and fourth are very arguable, and the third is somewhat.
There is a long history in psychology of suspecting that fathers and mothers perform different parenting roles, and that therefore single parents and same-sex couples are suboptimal raising environments. I'm not well-read enough to give a definitive review of the current state of this hypothesis, but I don't think it's in "totally debunked" territory. Obviously, if true this hypothesis supports systematically preferring opposite-sex couple (or mixed-sex polyamorous) adopters - not as an all-or-nothing thing, as an opposite-sex couple doing a Mary Ann Cotton scheme would clearly be worse than a non-evil gay couple, but as an explicit part of the heuristic - as presumably (and hopefully) the highest concern in the adoption system is not people's right to be parents but the child's right to the best home available.
The conservative position on sex differences in ability, at least in its intellectual form, isn't so much "women are stupid" or even "women can't be good at maths", but more "on a statistical level there are differences in aptitude and interest, with women being more interested in/better at some things and men more interested in/better at others, and therefore if sex ratio in something is not a perfect 50:50 this does not automatically imply that secret institutional sexism is responsible". That's... not especially dehumanising or insulting.
And as for the bathroom thing... well, I'm probably not the best person to argue this one, but basically there are two motives to sex-segregate bathrooms.
1) Putting urinals in the male and not the female bathroom since a penis helps substantially with physically using them. Sex-segregation isn't really super-essential for this, though, since you could just have a room of urinals labelled "urinals" and a room of stalls labelled "stalls".
2) Under the paradigm that there are two easily-distinguished sexes both of which are 100% heterosexual, it prevents people being leered at.
#2 doesn't cope very well with homosexuals or non-passing transsexuals (the former because sex-segregation doesn't stop them leering at people, and the latter because they're difficult to distinguish from someone breaking the rules). There are two easily-adjudicable solutions - hammer down the nails that stick out, or abandon the whole enterprise as ineffectual and just go with unisex bathrooms. Conservatism, as a general rule, tends to prioritise social cohesion over individual freedoms, hence taking the first option. (This is not a *mistake*, but rather *making a different tradeoff*; see the "Plays Well in Groups" section of Scott's "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" essay, or read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.)
>There are two easily-adjudicable solutions - hammer down the nails that stick out, or abandon the whole enterprise as ineffectual and just go with unisex bathrooms.
There's a third and even easier solution - accept that the status quo gives you 90% of what you're after, maybe clarify a few edge cases, and call it a win.
The problem is that "men can't go into the women's bathroom, but non-passing transwomen can" is not especially easy to adjudicate (it *can* be adjudicated, but it takes interrogation and documents; it's not trivially obvious the way it is with almost everyone else). Complicated rules that frequently need formal resolution are themselves a social cost; they expend time and reduce social cohesion.
Clarifying that edge case the *other* way is, well, exactly what the infamous bathroom bills generally do.
I'm in favour of unisex bathrooms myself (hence "not the best person to argue this one"), but I can spot the problem with "only if you're trans" (which isn't really "the status quo" so much as "the SJ demand").
The status quo(*) that I would count as a 90% win is that men couldn't go into the women's bathroom and that non-passing transwomen couldn't either. That works for everyone but the non-passing transwomen and the victims of lesbian women who use rest rooms for conspicuous leering, which is probably <<10% of the population.
The edge case that would need adjudicating if we were to stick with that rule is the marginally-passing transwoman who gets caught. If she got caught she wasn't passing, but if we say that absent severe aggravating factors it's only a civil infraction on par with a speeding ticket then we don't get the bit where people live in fear of being put on sex-offender registries for life if they slip up even once.
There's another edge case in the lesbian women who are so conspicuous in their leering that the straight women have a legitimate case for saying "get out of our rest room".
* OK, status quo ante; the issue is currently in flux and I don't want to dig into state-by-state bathroom laws.
Okay, I misunderstood you and I apologise. I consider that to fall under the category of "hammer down the nails that stick out", though.
What do people think about Github Copilot? Too liable to spit out chunks of copyrighted code verbatim?
(My first comment here: let's see how it works.) In my opinion, the issue with copyrighted code is very little compared to the fact that it spits out bad code. In my experience, it is frequently harder to spot a subtle mistake in code written by somebody else — or ourselves time ago — than to avoid making it in new code. Therefore, for a skilled programmer, reviewing code proposed by Copilot would be more effort and riskier than not using it at all.
True. It's easier [for humans] to read code than to write it.
If I were them I'd be focusing on using AI to do the reviewing. I'd be looking at diffs and commits and bug tracking to train up a model that can predict which parts of the codebase are likely to need changing.
There are two issues for me: a technical one and a moral one.
For the technical one, this gist https://gist.github.com/0xabad1dea/be18e11beb2e12433d93475d72016902 is on the front page of Hacker News, and show a few flaws. A larger and more abstract problem, Copilot seems too limited to output "smart" code, so for now it's mostly a boilerplate generator. You'll have to verify what it generates. I can't help but think of Yaron Minsky, who said that no matter how much they paid people, they couldn't get them to review correctly boilerplate code because it's not engaging at all. I think our industry already has the tool to rapidly produce a working MVP that's not perfect (see JS and NPM, Ruby, Python), but for now, what we need seems to be a way to make our systems more reliable (see the rise of static typing the last 10 years, distributed systems being more and more present, etc).
For the moral part, I can't help but see Copilot as an attempt to launder copyrighted code, especially GPL. Apparently they trained Copilot on all the code publicly visible Github, which doesn't sound okay to me, especially considering that now Microsoft owns Github.
I'd say either the tool isn't that good and it's mostly useless or even dangerous (suggesting bad code), or it's good and morally not okay (probably not enforceable by law, but I see this as a betrayal of some of the ideas behind free software).
I think the moral problem is contingent to the technical problem: as long as Copilot can only usefully produce boilerplate and trivial code, i.e. code where copyright does not really apply (it needs originality), then the moral problem is a no-issue. And I do not see AI products getting significantly better at this soon, I am convinced there is a qualitative step here that needs to happen.
Of course, somebody could coax Copilot into outputting code imitating some particular project in an attempt to launder the copyleft, but I would argue that in that case they are themselves infringing, using Copilot as a search engine.
Now, I think there is another side to this issue: if we consider the tasks of the parts in play, then GitHub is a giant source code, the code that trained Copilot is a compiler, and the trained neural network at the core of Copilot is its binary output. That means the neural network itself is subject to the copyleft of all code on GitHub, and it would apply if Microsoft were to try to distribute Copilot as a product. But as far as I know, they only provide it as software-as-a-service.
I think the Free Software Foundation and other actors dropped the ball when it comes to software-as-a-service. A few years ago, their only discourse was “it's evil, don't do it”, and then nothing. We need an update to copyleft licenses to prevent disloyal profiteering as saas, and we need guidelines for loyal saas providers, where our data is not held hostage, where we can migrate it, where we can internalize it and use the same software. It is a hard legal and technical problem, we cannot do it each in our corner. But nothing came.
> I think the moral problem is contingent to the technical problem: as long as Copilot can only usefully produce boilerplate and trivial code, i.e. code where copyright does not really apply (it needs originality), then the moral problem is a no-issue.
On one hand, I agree, on the other hand, when you see the emulation community that forbids anyone from having read the original console code, or some black-box implementations of some algorithms (perception hash comes to mind), I can't help but find what Copilot does deeply unfair. They present it as pair programming, and I don't think you can call something a black-box implementation if you're pairing with someone that read the code.
> That means the neural network itself is subject to the copyleft of all code on GitHub, and it would apply if Microsoft were to try to distribute Copilot as a product.
I've read lots on HN about this, and the general sentiment seems to be "training machine learning models on copyrighted data is okay", as apparently GPT-3 used a lot of copyrighted text. I honestly don't know if it's real or an extension of "when big corporations do it it's okay". In any case, I'm baffled that Github did this without consulting anyone, especially to probably sell it as a product after.
I agree with the part about the FSF and SaaS. I hoped to hear solutions from them during the Elastic debacle, but the only move was AWS forking it. On one hand open source has never been more popular, on the other hand I can't help but see a slow erosion of it by corporations. EEE seems to be alive and well, and we're in the second phase (cloud in general, proprietary extensions to VSCode comes to mind).
The impression I got from Twitter lawyers was that (1) data mining is usually protected by fair use, and (2) Copilot's generated chunks are small enough that they're unlikely to be considered infringing in the rare cases where it does spit out a piece of copyrighted code verbatim.
It's probably a permissible derivative work, according to current copyright law. However, it would be much better if they came out with Github Copilot GPL - only GPL2 code used to train the model, all generated code is licensed under GPL2.
Whether you call them TERFs or gender critical feminists, it seems they're far more successful in the UK than in the USA. So I was wondering if anyone have any theories as to why?
I think part of it is that the transgender activists went for a top down strategy: Convince politicians, change the law, hammer opponents into silence. While the other side went for a bottom up strategy of building grassroots support.
I also have an impression of transgender activists making some major blunders. For example they called a billboard saying "Woman. Noun. Adult human female" part of a hate campaign. That was an elephant trap and they walked right into it. Or calling J.K. Rowling a TERF. It doesn't even matter if she was or not, Rowling is a skilled writer with impeccable left wing credentials. It was only going to end one way, pick your battles and all that.
But there's also factors I'm not sure if they can be explained by which activist groups had better strategies. I see internal battles inside major left wing or progressive groups: The Guardian news paper, the Liberal Democrats, SNP, and Labour party. Does America lack an equivalent grass roots within left wing organisations? Or was it there but somehow defeated?
I'm mostly just brainstorming and trying to figure out why the UK looks like quite the outlier.
[Full disclosure: never been to Britain.]
Aaron Sibarium has a theory, too: https://freebeacon.com/culture/in-the-uk-resistance-to-transgender-activism-is-fueled-by-socialized-medicine-and-feminist-wine-moms/ . It's currently his pinned tweet, so it's more than a passing opinion column. I'm personally not sure as I have never seen any "competing for scarce NHS resources" messaging before Sibarium, but I haven't been paying attention to the UK conflict much.
My naive theory is that Americans think of their 1st Amendment as a magical machine that works for them no matter what they do, whereas the Brits have no such safeguards in place and thus are more alert to encroachments on their Overton window. I'm not strongly invested in this theory either; it's too close to the trad "everything good is bad because it lets people get idle" ouroboros that clearly proves too much. But I have definitely seen the sort of "don't worry, it's all just students being crazy / writers being tribal / politicians being full of shit" and "get your own forum / university / newspaper" rhetoric in the US that has helped cede lots of fertile ground to the wokies; I think the First Amendment, for all its good, has helped underpin this rhetoric, which is why I've never heard it from Brits.
Something else that might have helped in Britain is all the other ways in which Labor has lost. Most people buy their political positions wholesale. If the lefties have gotten pie on their faces in one domain (e.g., Brexit and COVID vaccines), people will be more willing to reconsider their other ideas as well (be it gender or immigration or schooling). Even from a rational viewpoint, this isn't too bad epistemology, as some movements are plainly more honest than others.
Being British myself, the article you linked to is painfully American. Things like assigning high importance to taxpayer's money being wasted via the NHS and the way it keeps describing things as socialism, I can't remember when I last felt a such a big cultural gap between here and the USA.
That said. The idea that the NHS requires trasngender activists to push hard for full self-ID if they want gatekeeper free access to transitioning, while the USA medical establishment is incentivised to remove gatekeepers so it can sell stuff is worth considering.
The other part, that British socialists gave the TERF/GC side organising experience doesn't feel right. Do the American trade unions not have the same organising experience? Or the American LGBT rights movement? A lot of prominent campaigners against self-ID in the UK were veterans of the previous generation of LGBT activism. So the question remains, why did they organise in the UK but not the USA?
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> My naive theory is that Americans think of their 1st Amendment as a magical machine that works for them no matter what they do, whereas the Brits have no such safeguards in place and thus are more alert to encroachments on their Overton window.
A counterpoint to this would be gun control which is a firey hot argument in the USA but a non-issue in the UK. Gun rights activists are certainly hyper-vigilant to threats.
That said I wouldn't rule out the constitution as a possible factor. In America you can do activism by winning a court case saying the constitution means the government has to do what you want and that's usually final. In the UK if you do that the government can just change the law if it has a majority in parliament.
One possibility is that the transgender activist movement was Americanised and neglected the importance of having votes behind you, where as their opponents understood that in the UK votes are important.
But that still leaves the deeper question. Why was there an activist group opposing self-id in the UK but not the USA?
I think the labor movement was less powerful in the US, which is why our center-left party are called "Democratic" rather than "Labor" or "Social Democrat".
That's a fascinating question, but I guess I'd want to know if it's even true. But supposing that there is more acceptance of TERFs in England, perhaps it's because we Americans have a tradition of allowing self-invention? You can "go West", metaphorically, and start all over. I have also wondered if the TERF tradition in U.S. religious feminism (e.g., Rosemary Radford Reuther, Mary Daly) affects its acceptance by feminists who reject religion. Obviously I'm just speculating.
I've seen it claimed (can't remember where) that it's a result of the popular Mumsnet forum.
The articles I can by googling find mostly stick to the claim that Mumsnet is currently a center of the TERF/GC movement rather than addressing the direction of causation between 'TERF/GC popular in UK' and 'TERF/GC popular on Mumsnet'. But I can sketch a theory where the prior existence of Mumsnet meant that a demographic that would tend to lean towards TERF/GC politics was better organized than in other countries, exogenously causing the difference.
No idea if the facts support that on any level, though.
All I can say is that Mumsnet was influential long before trans issues became a big deal, as evidenced by the fact they got to interview prime ministerial candidates:
https://www.theguardian.com/global/blog/2009/nov/19/david-cameron-mumsnet-webchat
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/5-things-learned-jeremy-corbyns-10529943
I get the impression that earlier waves of feminism were a bigger deal across the pond. They still remember suffragettes being force-fed in prison, here in the U.S western states granted suffrage because they were desperate to improve their sex ratio, and then politicians at the national level started trying to appeal to that constituency as well. There was a documentary series there called "Lefties" which contained an episode named "Angry Wimmin" (not a misspelling, they wanted to avoid having "men" in the word for women) about the politically-motivated lesbian separatists of the second wave of feminism. Many of the gender critical feminists objecting to currently debated changes for the trans are lesbians.
I think part of the difference is that feminism was always a partisan issue in the US, in a way it isn't in the UK. So got lumped into a general social liberal vs conservative split. Whereas in the UK you can have people on the left and right in other ways who are feminist. Which means when it comes to transgender (and other social justice) issues you have people who are well known feminists, but conservative on that issue.
The impression I have is that the "gender critical" movement is definitely by far strongest in the UK, but is also stronger in Australia and Ireland than in Canada or the US. I don't know as much about New Zealand, other English-speaking regions, or the non-English-speaking world. (As an academic philosopher, I am most aware of the debate within academic philosophy, and while I don't know all the relevant people involved in the debate, almost all the people on the gender critical side that I can think of either work in the UK or grew up in the UK or both, though I do know of one who grew up in Canada and works in the United States.)
Those would all serve as counterexamples to Mencius Moldbug's generalization that America is to the right of the rest of the first world because they all became American colonies after WW2, with their pre-existing rightist traditions wiped out.
My gut says that it is primarily that fundamentalists have a stronger hold on the US. I think it’s both because there are more of them per capita (but I could be wrong here, so please correct me), and because of the two party system.
To take a more extreme example of how the US sometimes sucks would be child marriage. From my brief reading of UK laws, the minimum age of marriage is 16/17 with parental consent. In the US, if you go to Massachusetts, a man could marry a 12 year old girl with parental consent and a judge’s ok.
So, why? Probably a few reasons besides this, but my best understanding is that the few extreme christians who take advantage of this would oppose whichever party so viscerally that it just isn’t worth it, since not that many people are going to vote for you just because you raised the age. Now, transgender rights have a few more avid proponents, but probably a lot more avid haters of it; everyone else I think has some degree of opinion on it but not to the point it’s the sole decider of their vote.
I don't think extreme Christian advocates of child marriage have that much political power in Massachusetts. Instead we just have lots of states which set their own marriage laws, and some of them retain very old laws.
I don’t think that they have enough power to get such a law passed, I think they just exert enough pressure to keep the age from getting raised. If not, why the heck haven’t we raised the age (considering it’s still used)?
I think that trans rights are basically a similar fight, in that you have liberal activists fighting against entrenched Christians who have the current laws on their side (except all groups involved here are much larger and more mainstream).
Lots of old laws stay on the books simply because no legislator has bothered to change them.
I agree that’s sometimes true, but this has multiple human rights organizations lobbying about it and has had at least one bill for changing it pass the Mass senate
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a judge today who'd allow marriage with a 12 year old, in which case the law doesn't *really* allow marriage with 12 year olds, so no one's bothered to change it.
I think this is possibly true, but the original source where I learned this claimed that most of these cases are rubber stamped. Now, I fact checked that source to be sure it was technically legal, and that raised my priors enough to think they probably did their research on the other topic. But obviously, how much do you trust me referencing a non-academic source? idk
https://capecodwomenforchange.com/our-priority-legislation-bills-filed-in-the-ma-state-legislature-that-will-impact-women/child-marriage-fact-sheet/
To reference a more reliable source, at the least, age 14 (which is still quite objectionable imo) is still being practiced, and apparently not in trivially small numbers.
Well, this certainly lowers my opinion of Massachusetts judges.
My theory is that race-based struggles are very different in countries other than the US (it's the legacy of the British Empire rather than the legacy of chattel slavery), so they are less controversial, and get less attention. As a result, there's more energy in gender conflicts, and the TERFs v Transgender Activists is clearly the most controversial debate in that area.
This theory would predict that feminism was also a larger topic of discussion in the UK than the US in the 1990s and 2000s, right?
I think its a matter of how the political coalitions are subtly different in US vs UK. There's not more overall transphobia in the UK than US (see public opinion polls), but its not split as neatly down tribal lines so it seems more obvious.
There's a strong socially conservative evangelical strain in US politics, far more than in the UK, who have a lot of influence, and are anti trans, as well as anti many other things. In the UK there isn't as much of a consolidate social conservative grouping, and those issues (abortion, lgbt rights, etc) are less important in deciding political outcomes. This means that there are people who are otherwise in the liberal and feminist grouping in the UK who are vocally anti trans, in a way there is less of in the US, because being anti trans is a red tribe thing.
Historically this can probably be traced back to how feminism was less of a polarized issue in the UK than the US. There was a much wider uptake of feminism on the right in the UK in the second half of the 20th century (with Thatcher the most famous example but not the only one) in a way there wasn't in the US. UK social conservatives focused far less on "woman in the kitchen men at work" style appeals to traditional social values. (If you go back further many aristocratic women were vocal feminists.) This meant that there wasn't the same neat socially conservative/liberal split between the two main parties as there was in the US, at least on gender issues.
This feels plausible.
In the UK I've seen cases of left wing feminists being excommunicated only to be given a platform by the right. When Suzanne Moore was expelled from the guardian she wrote a couple of columns for the Spectator and one for Unherd. And I recall her getting support from their regular writers too.
Does the same happen when left wing feminists are excommunicated in the USA? If not that could be a big piece of the puzzle.
Out of all the explanations here this seems like the best one.
In what ways was Thatcher a feminist? My vague impression was that she cared little about the issue.
I'm not sure this can be a proper explanation. In the early 1980s, there was a coalition of anti-porn feminists and conservatives that got some major bills passed in Indianapolis, Canada, and elsewhere. That feels a lot like the same alliance that goes on with some of the current "gender critical" stuff (though the social conservatives that ally with it are anything but "gender critical" "radical feminists").
I think the concept of feminism is stronger/different over there. American feminism, at least since I've been following it (2000s) has been strongly associated with integrating women into the fold. The goal is for women to "become" one of the men (or, from a more utopian perspective for men and women both transition into fundamentally interchangeable entities). This means that there isn't a strong connection to women as a concept in most American feminist circles.
From this perspective, TERF ideology or even gender critical ideology doesn't really make sense. If you don't hold much value in womanhood, you don't see anything wrong with new groups coming into to occupy it, or other groups trying to abandon it.
From my read of UK feminists, they are much more emphatic in their defense of womanhood. They think its real and that it matters. From that perspective, well, some amount of TERF-dom is inevitable (although of course not everyone who thinks womanhood matters is going to be gender critical).
I've seen theories that this might be because there are more conservative feminists over there in a way that doesn't really exist here, but I'm not familiar enough with the UK to comment on this.
But does this not just move the question up a level, why is the conception of feminism different?
Repeating request from previous thread in hopes that Scott will see it:
Scott, I would be interested in an article about Neuro-Linguistic Processing (NLP, not to be confused with the computer science field of natural language processing). Wikipedia calls NLP "pseudoscientific" and "discredited" but it seems that they have some interesting ideas that are not more obviously bad than other subfields of psychology when taking into account the replication crisis and other systemic problems in the discipline.
Scott, I’d be interested in this too. I definitely got some value from reading “Using Your Brain for a Change” by Richard Bandler, back in the 1980s…I still use some of these techniques to this day.
It seems to me that NLP techniques are possibly orthogonal to more modern trends like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and MIindfulness.
Seems to me that NLP is a bag containing dozens of techniques... most likely, some of them work, and some of them don't. Plus there is some underlying theory, which I assume has been falsified.
It is nice to believe that whatever one human can do, anyone can do, as long as they properly observe and model their behavior... but if true, this should be simple to prove: turn hundred people into copies of someone famous, and when they all become famous, have them say "NLP works, my success is the proof" on TV.
Yeah, this is my argument as well.
It's kind of like hypnotism: if it worked, you'd expect to see the people who can do it really well running the world. Since I don't, I'm pretty confident it doesn't.
As I understand it, hypnotism does sort of work, but it doesn't have much to do with the Hollywood cliche of waving a pendulum in front of somebody to gain complete control over them.
Hypnotism does work, but using it nefariously is tricky since it mostly requires consent and most people don't want to give you all their money and spend their lives serving you. There are ways of abusing it given a sufficiently-gullible mark and enough time, and there are people who make a living abusing it, but there aren't enough hours in the day or enough suckers to pull off large-scale social takeover this way.
The Toronto CS reading group is about to form a splinter named The David Reading group. We'll shortly be reading/listening to "Debt: The First 5000 Years", and future books of interest include "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" as well as "The Dawn of Everything".
Our coordination platform is Slack, and our format for the short term is going to be a video conference, very probably bi-weekly, during which we discuss a chapter. We might end up switching to a Toronto meetup with an online component later on depending on how pandemic-related things develop here.
If this sounds interesting to any other readers here; drop me a comment and I'll add you to the relevant channels.
Too mad none of the Crooked Timber contributors are named "David", because then perhaps you could read their response to Debt. Although there is Daniel Davies...
To be fair, the group name is mostly a joke. All the books we're interested at the moment are written by Davids Graeber, Friedman and Wengrow respectively, so it's descriptive rather than restrictive although we'll see where it goes.
I'm not familiar with Crooked Timber, but a cursory google of their comments on Graeber points me to https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/ and https://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/
Do you consider those worthwhile responses? Anything other links off the top of your head that fit the description?
Any* other links. My kingdom for an edit button sometimes :/
The Crooked Timber "seminar" on Debt (including the responses by Graeber, and the comments on all of them) is probably the relevant place. I think Graeber's meltdown occurred somewhere in the comments on his responses to their entries.
The whole episode made me interested enough to start reading the book, but I had such mixed feelings that I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
Huh. I think I found it.
By "meltdown", were you referring to the punch-up between Graeber and Henry Farrell? This looks like some prime academic acrimony.
Probably - I don't remember exactly what it looked like, and whether it migrated to Twitter from the blog. But in the years since, many of the Crooked Timber people have expressed some sort of guilty feeling at having promoted Graeber and his work, after he revealed his fragility and incapability of proper citation or gratitude.
The former is what I was thinking of, although unfortunately the Crooked Timber CMS[?] has updated in the years since and mangled some of the posts, so that block-quotes just get replaced with "bq".
Does anyone have any good advice/resources for marketing random online publications? I have a few assorted things on the go that I'd like to sell once they're cleaned up, but I'm not sure that cleaning it up will be worth the work if I'll only sell like three copies of a $5 document.
If it helps to have specifics, the planned first one is an "Advent(ure) Calendar", i.e., a D&D advent calendar, with one fight a day. Naturally, I want this to be available no later than Black Friday. But I'd rather get my ducks in a row first.
In Ye Olden Days, I'd have said get your website cleaned up and SEO-friendly. But I think something like Kickstarter/IndieGogo/Whatever might be a place to start, with some strategic posts in the right subreddits letting interested people know. A D&D advent calendar sounds kind of amazing. My kids would love it.
Yeah, my website here is going to be DriveThruRPG, so SEO for Google isn't a real concern. Maybe a few subreddit posts, or groups that'd otherwise be interested, if I can do it without being too spammy.
FWIW, the rough draft of it is up on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/k6qlik/adventure_calendar_week_of_december_1st6th/ (that has links to all of it). A few of the fights are poorly balanced or just a bit too confusing, and of course it's not as convenient to use as a PDF would be (where everything's in one place). But feel free to use it with your kids if you like. And if you do, DM me any comments on Reddit - I realistically won't get them here, but I check there often enough.
Chesterton's fence: the real version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxpbU3Ke6DI (video not mine)
I don't care what chesterton has to say about it, im destroying this fence.
This is a newly constructed fence, rather than one that has been there long enough nobody remembers why it was built.
Does anyone have experience with taking magnesium supplements to alter mood, fight depression, anxiety, etc.? I was inspired by a recent Hacker News link https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ stating that modern vegetables have little magnesium content due to depleted soil. The associated comments section https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654787 contained a number of people saying that supplementing it greatly reduced their depression and anxiety.
I've been taking them for about a week and a half now, and I have to say that I do already feel a marked difference, though of course placebo effect etc. etc. Everyone seems to say that gastrointestinal discomfort is a side effect, but I have had absolutely zero issues so far- maybe my magnesium levels were just really low! Would be curious to hear other peoples' experiences with magnesium supplementation, if any
Examine claims strong evidence of a weak effect: https://examine.com/supplements/magnesium/
Anecdotally, I've heard this claimed before. This is a good Scott-question.
Gwern did blinded self-experiments: https://www.gwern.net/nootropics/Magnesium
Tl;dr, despite much greater care than an average supplementer, Gwern accidentally took too large a dose, with negative effects that would be difficult to notice without rigorous data collection.
My SO claims she notices a difference, I never did.
Mostly take it because it also addresses cramps to some degree.
I began taking it as part of a battery of other supplements around 6 months ago, so I can't specifically attribute any perceived changes to Magnesium per se, but I can say that taking Magnesium, D3, Zinc, B12 and fish oil I have noted semi-significant mental improvements.
Yes, I had meant to mention- on the old SSC there was a post by someone who claimed that taking B12 supplements basically cured her lifelong depression in a week, or something to that effect. I wonder if she was a vegetarian, as I find it hard to believe that a meat eater isn't getting enough in their diet
You're talking about Neike, correct? Yeah, her posts were what made me add it to my list.
Whatever happened to judges requiring young men to join the military in exchange for a deferred sentence? (I think the practice has a specific name, which escapes me at the moment). This seemed to be a common practice in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc., and not just during active wartime. Seems like a win-win for society- we probably shouldn't really add to the US prison population if there's another outlet that would work better, and high-testosterone young men who are committing minor crimes are probably the same demographic as who makes up the average soldier- they are all typically not from great neighborhoods. The US always has issues with military recruitment, and lots of these guys could probably use some structure in their lives, so it seems like a net plus for society all around.
However, my impression is that judges don't hand out these type of deferred sentences anymore. Did it become passé? Was there a specific court case that prevented judicial drafting? Did those types of guys end up not being great soldiers? I'd be interested to hear what happened there
From what I heard, the military asked them to stop. Technological changes have created an emphasis on quality of soldiers over quantity. And even if they're from the same demographics, petty criminals are not going to be the same quality as men who actually choose to serve.
To expand on what Bullseye said below, it's also part of a general trend in the military. Once, not very long ago, Join The Military was a reasonably lucrative career open to anybody with a pulse. Many people, young men especially, had Join The Military as their Plan B or C, because it would always take anybody and would take care of you.
However, that isn't how the military operates anymore. The recruiters I know of (either first hand or through my family members in the military) bemoan the lack of good recruits, and turn away a lot of people who thought being in the military was as easy as showing up. So you have a lot fewer cases of things like judges forcing no-prospect minor criminals into the military, or families dumping their 18 year old sons at a recruiting station with a suitcase. It just doesn't work very well anymore
I wonder if this was more common when there was a lack of recruits around the mid 2000s? At that time, they drastically reduced the qualifications to join the military, including lowered test scores.
One of the things they learned from that experience was that it was not worth it to lower the standards so much, even if they didn't have enough candidates otherwise.
Interesting. While I understand that there are highly-skilled jobs in the military, my impression was that they also had a bunch that were basically just relatively unskilled. Like, all branches of the military need cooks, most need truck drivers, etc.- how high can the standards be for a cook?
An army chef (for example. The same holds true of other branches, but I am most familiar with army) is army first, chef second. They are required to complete the same boot camp as any other soldier. They are expected to be able to support operational and logistics tasks as well as physically cook food. Even if, in practice, the guy is just cooking the meals every day and never sees combat or gets assigned to any more complex tasks, they are expected to be ABLE to do so. You could reasonably argue that this is excessive, and there's nothing wrong with just hiring someone to be a cook without making them be a soldier too, but that's not how it is currently done (to my knowledge)
Surprisingly high. You've got to understand that the military has no static positions; every job in the military should be thought of as an onramp to a full career. Here's your average career path for a cook in the Coast Guard:
Enter into service as an SNCS - spend roughly 2 years peeling potatoes and assisting with prepwork and cleaning the galley.
After 1-2 years doing that, become a CS3. At this point you are actively planning and overseeing individual meals. You'll also begin learning how to set up purchase orders and planning out how to meet the crew's long-term dietary requirements.
2-4 years of doing that and you'll make CS2. You are either going to be fully responsible for a small galley (maybe serving between 6-12 people) or, if you work in a larger galley, you'll be overseeing a team of 5-10 SNFS and CS3s. You'll begin assisting with budget work and while you likely won't have purchase authority, you'll eventually be doing most of the logistical heavy-lifting. You should be able to put together a list of purchases that the guy who controls the money will be able to approve without having to second-guess your work.
2-4 years doing that and now you're a CS1. At this point, you will either be running a mid-sized galley (12-50 people) or leading a team at a large galley. You'll have direct purchasing authority that could go up into a few hundred thousand dollars annually and you'll be expected to be able to fully handle food logistics for your team. You'll likely have somewhere between 5-20 people who, in some way, report to you.
After that, they either generalize and become logisticians who oversee purchasing of everything, not just food, or are expected to run increasingly complex operations.
So, there isn't a position for a guy who's just going to hang around and peel potatoes for 5 years. If I can't look at a person entering as a cook and see myself trusting them with $100k in a decade or so, why would I want to recruit them?
Going through your question:
> high-testosterone young men who are committing minor crimes are probably the same demographic as who makes up the average soldier- they are all typically not from great neighborhoods.
This actually isn't the case, at least not entirely. Sure, they're from the same demographic but the people who join the military are the people within those demographics that are trying to get out. I can say from firsthand experience that your average military recruit from a bad neighborhood is of much higher quality than their neighbors.
>The US always has issues with military recruitment
This definitely isn't the case. The army hit its recruiting targets every year from 2005-2018 (although they did drop required test scores during that period). The pandemic has thrown a wrench into this process, but in general the modern military seems to be getting all the people it needs. At least, that is, in terms of raw numbers. What the military increasingly wants is technical specialists (or people who test high enough to indicate they could be trained into technical specialists.) This group, unfortunately, doesn't include many otherwise convicts.
> Did those types of guys end up not being great soldiers?
In short, yes. We don't need overwhelming numbers of people in the military and, even if they don't actively continue their felonious behavior, it just requires more supervision to handle those types than it does someone who's motivated to be there.
I don't think this is often an option. You're automatically disqualified from service if you've ever committed a crime, ever taken a psychiatric drug, ever been to any kind of counseling other than relationship counseling. Waivers can be granted when there is enough of a need that the military can't fill its billets without granting waivers, but no judge has the power to force a branch of service to grant a waiver if they weren't already going to.
If this was allowed back in the draft era, it's because the military didn't have similar enlistment requirements to what it now has.
Has anyone else noticed an increased societal obsession with food spoilage? (I'm in the US).
Seems like the over the past ten years or so, many people have started believing that if you leave food on the counter for more than 15 minutes, it immediately turns into poison. And expiration dates are treated as if they were handed down by god. I work with an animal-rescue organization, and they routinely throw away unopened containers of food (both canned food and dry food) as soon as the expiration date passes. This policy makes me very sad, but I'm unable to change it. Back about 15 or 20 years ago, I just don't remember people being very worried about this kind of stuff. Myself, I barely think about it. My kitchen cupboard is filled with condiments that are labeled "refrigerate after opening". And I remember my dad (who absolutely HATED wasting food) searching through the back of the 'fridge for containers of old food, which he would proceed to eat. As far as I know, I've only had food poisoning once, and that was after eating in a dodgy-looking restaurant Moscow.
My gut says that this just reflects what seems to be a general trend towards covering liability. If you feed someone expired food and they get sick, you could be liable. I think this sort of liability blocking tends to filter into a lot of aspects of life, even where it doesn’t make sense.
But as a disclaimer, liability tends to be my pet Theory of Everything, so take me with a grain of salt.
Before I read Mystik's comment, I was going to write, "We should probably blame the lawyers. (I'm a lawyer.)
*cough* https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/overnight-pizza-and-the-consistent *cough*
I suspect that the USDA tends to be right about cheese; as someone who leaves cheese out not infrequently, I can say that uncooked cheese can get pretty weird after a couple of hours of being left out (I did get sick from this once as anecdotal evidence). But, cooked cheese doesn’t seem to have this issue as much, so whatever wrt pizza I guess, though it would make me cautious personally.
Also to note my apartment tends to be ~80 Fahrenheit which is probably particularly inhospitable to cheese.
Are you talking about soft cheese (relatively fragile) or hard cheese?
Great blog post. Reminds me of arguments with my wife (who is quite paranoid about food safety), where she says to me, "Hey, YOU'RE the one with the background in science. You, of all people, should realize the dangers of eating old food. What are you, some sort of anti-vaxxer, as well?"
I think at this point "pro-science" is really very wrapped up in "defers to authority for a lot of people". That's to be expected, since most people aren't scientists so the most a lot of them are capable of is "here's this article from someone official; that settles everything forever".
I've been trying to show different predictable, basically mechanical reasons certain kinds of science can be expected to be wrong on a regular basis. Here the USDA can either be right, correctly communicate the information and perhaps at some point get in trouble. Or they can be wrong/not look into it at all and CYA. They are never not going to take the latter; there's no reason for them to.
This isn't a huge deal with pizza (you just throw out some edible food), but it's a really big deal with, say, FDA drug approvals.
I would guess it is due to some combination of a) the internet amplifying the perceived likelihood of unlikely outcomes relating to food safety; b) increasing safetyism; c) liability concerns; and d) the general trend you point out where people are more likely to outsource both conventional wisdom and personal judgment to outside authorities.
A cow-orker of mine came in one Monday and noticed leftover pizza from Friday's office meeting had been left out on the conference table all weekend. He said "I have an iron stomach" and had it for lunch - no problem ;-)
The amount of happy this anecdote makes me <i>can't be healthy</i>.
On a more serious note, I think this is the best argument for old pizza being safe; people do this constantly. If old pizza was dangerous even to a level we could reliably quantify, the cemeteries would burst with our dead.
I don't see this as strong evidence. Sure, if it were likely to kill you, we'd know. However, something many people do could easily give you, say, a 1 in 500 chance of spending a day or two vomiting and having diarrhea. Depending on your finances and the value of the food in question, it may not be worth it; and, for a restaurant, it's an easy way to gain a bad reputation. And, since you often don't know what food has given you a disease, people might keep doing it without realizing which of their eating or hygiene practices are too risky to be worth it.
(A note about your article: I've skimmed it. It seems like it's rambling with stories, railing against "deference to authority"—what it doesn't do is actually collect evidence from various sources about what risks possibly-spoiled meat carries, and how large (or how tiny) these risks are. For me, this sort of article is too much reading for too little substance.)
I think by and large the aim of the article and what you wanted out of the article are at odds. You hand-wave "deference to authority" as a worthwhile thing to write an article about - I don't agree; I think it's a fine thing to write an article about.
For what it's worth I think I did sufficient work here for that goal - I showed the USDA is using a general catch-all to promote a very extreme standard without justification. I defined a very narrow pizza concept and looked into each ingredient and, outside of the two ingredients that are for-sure fine in that situation, found very little to support their extreme demand or to overrule the massive amount of anecdata showing this isn't a very big deal.
I'm not responding to the "1 in 500 chance of food poisoning" argument because it's an isolated demand of rigor - you are OK positing a food poisoning chance and proceeding as if it's true, yet I've done 100 times that work and mine is not sufficiently supported.
"you are OK positing a food poisoning chance and proceeding as if it's true": I haven't assumed it was true, I said that a particular argument didn't disprove it.
I noticed it too, especially when I was confronted to US and UK cooking culture (I'm French). The only time I've ever heard about cross-contamination in France was when I was trained at McDonald's. Outside of that, I've always cut meat and vegetable on the same surface, cooked them after and never got food poisoning. Compare that to I think it was a Jamie Oliver cookbook, that starts talking about food safety, cross-contamination, that you should was everything during cooking to avoid cross-contamination. Same deal with raw chicken: I often eat pieces of not totally cooked chicken when cooking it, and I never had salmonella. On the other hand, Americans seem to believe that chicken is very dangerous. The thing the sibling comment mentioned about the overnight pizza is also very weird to me. I don't see how overnight pizza could carry any dangers, especially since overnight pizza is usually very "dry", and dry food stores well.
Maybe it's a cultural thing? I know that when fuzzy white mold develops on food I tend to cut and throw away that part but still eat the rest, and I've never had issues with it. Maybe it's a scale issue, and I'll be fine all my life but one in X persons that do that will die? I have no idea.
As an anecdote, the only two times I got food poisoning was when eating out in a "kebab", and when eating uncooked beans (I think people underestimate the danger of not properly cooked beans, especially compared to things like raw meat).
On the other hand, if you're talking about organizations, I understand that they follow the rules as closely as they can because you can get sued. When I worked at McDonald's, we had a special bin called the "traceability bin", where we throw away all things that have traceability information on them, so that if anything happens we can easily search through them. All the things that we used were on a timer, and when the timer expires they have to be thrown away. That seems reasonable in a restaurant.
Food is genuinely more dangerous in America (and, to a lesser extent, Canada) than in most of Europe. I'm an immigrant from North America to Europe, and I started looking into this when I realised that no one around me was particularly concerned about, say, rare hamburgers or eggs, and also that I didn't know anyone who had gotten food poisoning (whereas it was a fairly regular occurrence in North America) - that said, when it comes to formal stats, the methodologies aren't fully comparable between countries so it's hard to be confident and the differences may be overstated (albeit they do align with my personal experience).
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the-us-ambassador-is-telling-chlorinated-porkies-about-food-poisoning_uk_5c7fb34ae4b020b54d809fad
Thanks, that explains some things.
> Same deal with raw chicken: I often eat pieces of not totally cooked chicken when cooking it, and I never had salmonella. On the other hand, Americans seem to believe that chicken is very dangerous
There's a pretty easy difference there. FDA allows rates of up to 20% of chickens in a farm to have salmonella, EU target levels are about 1% (https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/salmonella). I imagine most people aren't really aware of differing standards, so just classify foods as dangerous/safe by category
Thanks for the info, that's something I didn't know. That explains why Americans are more careful around chicken.
I haven't particularly noticed a change in recent years (except for the past year's increase in concern with hand-washing and sanitizing surfaces) but it's possible I've missed such a change.
But also, food has been growing more abundant and cheaper, which may be decreasing the pressure of thrift and conservation that push against whatever minor concerns about food poisoning there are.
(Also, I just had food poisoning a couple weeks ago - first illness I've had since the start of the pandemic. Would not recommend. I've had it about four times before, possibly once from old pasta sauce and once from home-baked cookies, but all other times almost certainly from restaurant food.)
My depression-era grandparents, who lived in a particularly poor area of the country, had food saving techniques that would probably make everyone on this substack cringe. They didn't really have enough food, so waste was not an option. They also didn't have electricity, let alone refrigeration, so food saving was going to be naturally different than today. As one more banal example, they would leave leftovers from breakfast or lunch on the kitchen table with an upside-down plate on it. Bread, meat, vegetables, whatever. Then it would be eaten at dinner. Based on habit over many years, this is also how they handled leftovers for the rest of their lives.
I'm curious, which of their food-saving techniques would seem the most disgusting to us?
My grandmother kept an old coffee pot on the stovetop full of grease (mostly from cooking bacon). When she was cooking she would pour some of the grease into the pan she was using. The grease served the purpose that we might use cooking oil for today, but she would also deep fry chicken or potatoes in it. When she finished cooking she would pour the old grease back into the pot.
Damn, that IS pretty gross. But if that's the worst thing, then I doubt any of those habits would put them at extreme risk of food poisoning. Cancer, on the other hand...
Yeah, the cost of throwing out food is comparatively trivial for people in western developed countries. So even tiny chances of food poisoning are not worth it on the cost benefit analysis
Its a fairly logical cost benefit analysis. Food in the west is very cheap, the harms of getting food poisoning are proportionately very large. (1 dollar worth of food say, vs several hundred dollars in lost income and opportunity costs). So even when its excessive it makes sense to be risk averse.
I would say that at a certain level of brokeness this becomes a much bigger deal than you think - if you have just enough money to afford meals, losing food seems less trivial. I was never there a long time, but I've been that low before.
The more common problem for me in the past would have been something like "lessening the value of a rare treat", which is harder to quantify but seems important in my head.
Absolutely! I wonder if the growing fear of spoiled foods among Americans doesn't go along with the whole germaphobic obsession that has been developing in US over the past couple of decades. On the other hand, the germaphobia movement correlates fairly well with the marketing of cleaning products' germicidal properties. (For instance, instead of calling bleach bleach, it's being marketed as "germicidal bleach" — but bleach has always been germicidal!) Anyway, I'm pretty sure this has made everyone aware of that <gasp!> germs are everywhere! (Meanwhile we're putting selective pressure on pathogens to build up resistance to these products.)
As for the fear of food spoilage, the proximal causes certainly aren't obvious to me. But people seem to take those expiration dates as the gospel truth! And I find the expiration dates on canned foods to be ludicrous. As an aside, my grandfather purchased a huge batch of surplus Korean War B rations (purchased some time in the late 1950s, but they were KW surplus so they were pre-C rations). We would take them on camping trips. We were still eating those B rations well into the early 70s. None of us ever got food poisoning (although my grandfather warned us to check the integrity of the can before dining on those B rations). To this day I have special place in my comfort food memories for B rations.
But to *not* answer your question, I have no idea why the young'uns are so worried about food spoilage.
I don't think it's possible for pathogens to develop resistance to soap, alcohol, or bleach - these operate in a very simple way to destroy basically *everything* that lives.
Antibiotics work by very different mechanisms that are targeted to certain classes of bacteria, and work at extremely low concentrations, and resistance to those *is* possible (although there are some exceptions - for instance, I've heard that there are no known documentations of any strain of syphilis with any resistance to the mechanism by which penicillin works).
Don't take my word for it. Google it, bro! Bacteria have proven to be capable of adapting to conditions that are more extreme than most eukaryotes can deal with. With short reproductive cycle and genomes that favor high mutation rates, bacteria seem to be able to selectively adapt to all sorts of astounding conditions.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366732/
And I can't find a link to an actual scientific study, but it's been commonly know for years bacteria have adapted to living in the reactors of nuclear power plants. A popular media article will have to suffice...
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Bacteria-found-in-Hanford-waste-1145677.php
I am looking for books or other media about innovations and development in the early history of plumbing (Roman and/or Medieval). Also information (possibly from same source) detailing methods and procedures used in building aqueducts. Ideally something with at least a partially visual component. Thanks!
Severity Arguments
I'm noticing that most of the disagreements in my life, both those I have personally with others and those I observe in popular culture, don't seem to be disagreements around conclusions but rather disagreements on severity.
IE, pick something controversial. I don't think that mentioning January 6th as being bad is too controversial for an open thread. I don't run into anyone claiming that Jan 6 was good, but I see endless reams of disagreements over precisely how bad it was, ranging from it being a meaningless riot to it literally almost being the downfall of American democracy. (Please don't debate this in this thread, this isn't what this post is about.).
I don't know how to settle these kinds of disagreements. If I'm disagreeing with someone on a factual matter, it gets resolved by us going to primary sources we trust and finding out what the truth of the matter is. If I'm debating theoretical outcomes with someone (IE, what would happen if we did X or Y), we each propose models and then try to figure out who's model will most likely be realistic. I might not always come to an agreement, but I've at least got known pathways to try and find a resolution.
Severity arguments, on the other hand, seem unresolvable. We can both materially agree on every fact of the matter, yet still vehemently disagree on outcomes. Furthermore, these arguments end up being self propagating ("Well, if it wasn't such a big deal, than why is everyone talking about it?") Does anyone have a good strategy for how to approach these kinds of issues productively?
I suppose if you imagine a counterfactual in which the rioters were successful in their aims and Trump received another term, his fans would treat it as the triumph of democracy over a stolen election a la the "Color Revolutions" we sometimes see in other countries. Then it would be "severe" as in impactful, but good. Since it failed, it can't really be regarded as both good and impactful.
I think this is where utilitarianism comes to the rescue.
As you point out, the statement "January 6th was bad" is pretty incontrovertible. But the question you are interested in settling is "how bad was it?" The only way to meaningfully answer this is with the follow up question: "compared to what?"
For sure, this approach will not settle the issue (people will disagree on the relative badness of things), but it will give you a principled way to approach the question. Additionally (and this is one of the things I like about utilitarianism), it forces you to focus on actual harm and ignore all of those "is bad for symbolic reasons" arguments that only serve to confuse people.
So, how bad was January 6th? In hindsight, maybe better than the Charlottesville riot but worse than the Kavanaugh apointment to the Supreme Court. (I'm not sure whether I'd agree with this range, but it sort of sounds plausible).
Right, I think I generally agree with your argument and its conclusion. But, how do you convince everyone you're talking with to become Utilitarian?
Sorry if that sounds flippant, I'm just trying to think of a good approach the next time I get dragged into one of these discussions.
I don't think you have to completely sell people on Utilitarianism for this to be effective. If you can convince someone to marginally move towards utilitarianism, i.e., convince them that some utilitarian consideration is important to assess the importance of the severity.
I myself am not sold on utilitarianism, but I people should be more utilitarian on the margin.
The problem with that is that the controversial things tend to be long term effects, that we can't easily measure just now. So we agree that the number of deaths on Jan 6th was small. But if the consequence of that is that more and worse incidents like it happen in the future, then it will have much bigger negative effects. So we end up in an argument about the relative probabilities of different future outcomes, which will rely on beliefs about the way politics functions that are probably controversial. People who are arguing it is bad tend to be implicitly saying it will have large negative long term effects, or that it will have those unless a countervailing force prevents it.
Talking the discussion to the utility plane does will not by itself solve the problem, but it helps by taking the disagreement to factual grounds. In the Jan 6th example, we might have different priors about the long-run effects of the capitol attack, but at least we have clarity on what it is that we disagree on, and we can look for evidence that may help us update those priors towards some point of agreement.
Again, of course this will not solve the problem, but I think it is more likely to be fertile ground for discussion.
Proposition: I am 90% confident that making Buffalo Hat Guy Speaker of the House would be no worse than any randomly selected Democrat (or Republican were they in majority.)
I've noticed the same problem and would also be interested in a solution to better discussing these issues. I think the problem is far more widespread than is generally recognized.
In fact, I think it encompasses almost all disagreements. We tend to try to convert severity disagreements into factual disagreements (the source of the "believe the science" rhetoric, among other political memes), but at core most are still severity disagreements. Immigration, for instance, is a good example. Conservatives (or, very few) are not in favor of 0 immigration, and Liberals (or again, very few) are not in favor of completely open borders. We want to find the right number of immigrants to allow in, and the right process for doing so. That's not a fact-based disagreement, but severity. One side arguing for X and the other side arguing for X+/- 50% isn't really much of a disagreement in principles, but it's one of our major political debates.
Even really big issues that seem completely fact based, like abortion, are mostly severity debates. The two most coherent positions - "no abortion ever" and "abortion should always be allowed regardless of timing" are actually both minority positions. Not even a plurality likes either position. What people seem to want is abortions allowed if early enough in the pregnancy, but not later. Recent laws and the current push is about defining when that line should be drawn (fetal heartbeat, pain, viability, etc.). It's a severity debate for most people.
I think a key in helping these discussions is moving away from charged rhetoric and calling your opponents evil/Literally Hitler when trying to figure out solutions. Recent Woke condemnations of American society are so broad that it's hard not to feel personally attacked by them. Similarly, for arguing in favor of better regulation, the left gets called Socialists and accused of all the evils of Socialist countries. Recognizing racism past and present is important, and that's obvious for both the left and the right. Having regulations is also important for a smooth running society, and is recognized by the left and the right. The fact that we hype rage about these and most other topics is not beneficial to running a good society.
There's something I don't understand. You say that you can easily debate theoretical outcomes with someone, but you have a hard time debating the severity of something. Aren't those the same thing? To continue with your example, if someone is saying that Jan 6 is the downfall of American democracy, how do they justify this? Do they usually point to sources saying that for example, people lost confidence in democracy a lot after the event?
I think what I'm getting at is, if judging the severity of something is judging its consequences, I don't see how it's that different from discussing the theoretical outcomes, which you seem able to do. Maybe that's a problem of people dropping all rational arguments when it comes to severity because the problem isn't framed in a way that a rational response is required?
Or maybe it's an expression of the fact that it's really hard, in general, to see what influenced what. For example, is it as hard for you to discuss recent events and their influence than it is to discuss old events?
I agree that these are similiar debates, but experientially they play out very differently.
Let's take "Would there still be slavery in the South if the confederacy had won?" as the theoretical debate (just had this one with a friend recently). The conclusion we eventually came to was, "It would have stuck around for a while, but probably wouldn't be around today." The way that we tested this claim was by looking at other slaveholding nations and seeing what happened with them and then imagining a theoretical slave-holding state in the eras of anti-imperialism, communism, and anti-apartheidism. We eventually both agreed that the system would have been too unstable to have made it through the 20th century. So, in this theoretical outcome debate, we imagined a change and then worked through the result of that change based on other verifiable information.
Sure, this might be an artifact of not being able to ascertain historical consensus around recent events, but it still feels different. When we debated going into Iraq, there were two camps - one thought it was a good idea, the other didn't. Both could make compelling arguments as to why they were correct.
Following your example, I think a difference is in the moral values of the people participating. I assume (and may be wrong) that both you and your friend consider slavery wrong, while for Iraq, some considered it wrong and some considered it right. For example, people that value the influence of the US a lot and believe that the US is generally doing the right thing may agree more easily with going into Iraq than other people. If that's correct, then the hard thing about debates about severity may be that they happen because they're a way to have a debates of opinion, which are different from debates about facts.
I argue that these arguments are inherently unresolvable, as the question "how bad is it?" automatically brings up emotional associations, as per Jonathan Haidt's "Elephant and Rider" model (in which logic provides direction but emotion provides impetus, and thought without emotion is impossible). It's been discussed previously that different people have imaginations of different intensities, and I suspect that the same is true of emotions- that some people feel emotions more intensely than other people, or that one person might be sensitive to happiness but not much to anger, and another person might be the reverse.
Obviously, to resolve any disagreement at all you have to be extremely reasonable yourself, and have and extremely reasonable dance partner.
Then, for these disagreements, you just want to start asking questions. Why was it so bad? What other situations would you compare it to? Why was it worse than situation x? Why to you rank value y so highly?
At the end, you'll probably come out with a better understanding of the person, and hopefully your own fundamental values. But obviously these questions are extremely nebulous, so it's not like refuting a fact.
I think this impression might come from a bubble in which most of the people you talk to agree with you about facts, so severity is the only thing left to talk about.
For perspective, the latest Reuters poll says 35% of Republicans believe the Jan 6th thing was a false flag attack carried out by left-wing activists. So there's plenty of disagreement about the facts out there, if you go looking for it.
We're living in a very tribal time, facts and truth are less important, many times, than holding up the flag for your side. By holding up the flag I mean showing support for your side. I was reading a Quillette piece yesterday, "Truth, Polarization, and the Nature of Our Beliefs". which I couldn't finish because I felt like the title should be, "Why can't Republicans agree with what I'm saying?" I could point out a number of Democratic 'flags'; trust science, black lives matter, pro-choice, any good word about Trump. Where to not show support for your side, (I'm assuming you lean more left) invites the wrath of the left. If a topic to debate is very important to you, then I would recommend first trying to understand the other's side of the debate. Listening first. And then trying to explain why the topic is so important to you and your reasons. It's probably impossible to have that type of debate online. One on one in a bar or coffee shop. (If the topic is not important to you, then why debate it?) (Jan 6th is not that important to me, I'm glad more people weren't killed or injured, and full marks to the Republicans who supported the impeachment vote, I hope some survive the wrath of the right.)
I think you have to taboo words like 'severity', and ask the other person what they actually mean in concrete terms.
Are they saying this event is morally very evil in it's own right? Are they saying they predict it to have consequentialist outcomes that are very bad, an could they spell out precisely what several of them could be with probability ratings? Ar they saying this thing isn't that bad but it could only happen in a system where the rot has already set in, and if so can they talk more about what the rot is and what it could lead to as they see it? Etc.
You can't have a good conversation about 'how bad is this thing, 1-10' because something can be bad in many ways and for many reasons, and if you're talking about different senses of 'bad' then you're talking past each other. Taboo those words and get at how you are both judging severity here, and what assumptions underlay that judgement.
Perhaps you should join the anti-polar party: https://www.protopiac.com/post/join-the-anti-polar-party
This appears to be the No Labels Organization plus Rationalist coding.
Every political movement in history has been convinced that they are rationally and impartially assessing the evidence and coming to the correct beliefs based on that. And that everyone else is motivated by emotion and ideology. So I'm a tad sceptical of "no but we really mean it this time it is definitely true for us and not every other past example"
This is more of a concrete tactic than an overall strategy, but I’ll throw it out there. For the sake of an example, I’ll use Jan 6.
When someone thinks Jan 6 is worse than I do, I bring out examples of times the capitol was bombed/invaded in the past. Most of them were quickly forgotten and had no real impact.
When I have to argue the other side, I use a similar tactic. Basically it’s just [bring up relevant examples]->justify that they’re similar->show that their fallout corresponds to your opinion of degree of severity.
And if the examples you find seem to have more/less severe impact than you thought, adjust your own opinion accordingly.
The only example i can think of is the war of 1812, which doesnt seem similar enough.
https://www.history.com/news/us-capitol-building-violence-fires
The this lists a few besides the war of 1812, including bombings in the mid-late 1900s. Obviously, groups blowing up a bomb in a capitol building is a bit different, but the lower similarity is made up for imo by the fact that we have almost 0 memory of any of them.
The most similar events seem like the Puerto Rico Independence shooters, and the Weather Underground and ARU bombings. I would note that those all had much fewer people involved, didnt target any congresspeople in particular, and had no clear objective beyond making a statement. But that's me making assumptions about what would have happened if the rioters had actually reached the representatives.
While I’d be happy to explain further how I think they relate, the OP specifically requested we not debate this here, so if you want to continue this discussion in another thread, that’s fine, but I’d rather not do so here
I like this strategy. Thank you.
You're welcome, glad to be of help
I'd like to plug Slime Mold Time Mold's recent post on Obesity-
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ and https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-part-ii-current-theories-of-obesity-are-inadequate/
Amazing read, and helped me process my weight loss process too.
Part III is up:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/13/a-chemical-hunger-part-iii-environmental-contaminants/
Yes, I'm eagerly anticipating part 3 of that series. There's also some discussion here (though most of the comments are of low quality): https://www.metafilter.com/192025/A-riddle-sauted-in-a-mystery-deglazed-with-an-enigma
Yeah I'd recommend removing it, as it discloses the author's identity that he has pointedly not disclosed in even his own blog, and also undercuts his effort to unravel his research in a series of smaller posts.
I found that vaguely terrifying. If he's correct, it legitimately seems like the inevitable result of rising obesity is either accepting a generally fat human race or invasive brain-chemistry altering drugs becoming widespread.
It's probably still better than dieting and exercising at the cost of your mental health, only to regain all of those pounds within a year
> invasive brain-chemistry altering drugs becoming widespread
Isn't it already the case, in the form of antidepressants? They seem to be a net positive from what I understand.
invasive brain chemistry altering drugs have been widespread since the Sumerians invented beer.
I agree, the difference in my mind was "drugs prescribed by doctors to" vs "drugs people self administer".
Not sure that antidepressants are a net positive. Robert Whitaker has published on this subject (see his book, "Anatomy of an Epidemic"). See also this article, for just one example of possible long-term adverse effects: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mad-in-america/201106/now-antidepressant-induced-chronic-depression-has-name-tardive-dysphoria
Thanks, that was an interesting read.
Good point. Here's how I see the difference: anti-depressants are corrective. Something is wrong with the brain chemistry of the afflicted individual and anti-depressants serve to return the person back to "normal."
This feels different than the kind of solution I think Slime Mold is pointing at. We'd be looking for some kind of intervention that either makes food less enticing or (more realistically) takes the normal Lipostat level of most of the population and knocks it down X percent. Sure, this might bring it in line with where it was one hundred years ago, but this feels different than anti-depressants.
I'm less confident about this than I was before your post though. Thanks for broadening my opinion on this.
I think the part where I disagree with you is the "normal" level of lipostat. If it makes people obese, I wouldn't consider it normal, and I would consider it a failure of the body to do its job to help us be healthy. Your point about making food less enticing makes me wonder if advertising is playing some role here. Maybe your brain is tricked into thinking that it needs some food or more food to be satisfied? I'm not sure about how to test this hypothesis though.
> Thanks for broadening my opinion on this.
You're welcome, thanks for having an open mind.
See Scott's review of "The Hungry Brain" back on SSC.
Short version: junk food is designed to be supernaturally delicious and subnaturally satisfying, because the manufacturers get money from you eating huge quantities of it. All food manufacturers have this incentive, but processed food can be better-optimised for these criteria because the manufacturer has more degrees of freedom.
Oh, I thought it was very hopeful. With an apology for stealing the authors thunder, I think part 3 will hypothesize that we started chemically screwing with ourselves back sometime in the 70's. And if we can start focusing on what those chemicals might be, rather than other stuff (diet, exercise, etc... not that those aren't important to health but that they don't explain the world-wide fat problem.) Then maybe we can all shed some of these extra pounds... or at least stop our descendants ingesting said chemicals.
If it's a chemical like CFCs or tetraethyl lead, this would be great news. If it's a chemical like CO2, this would be terrible news.
I've definitely been wondering about this. But if this is the proper explanation, then it seems like there would at least be anecdotal cases of "I took antibiotics for (strep throat/gonorrhea/whatever) and then suddenly gained 30 points in the next few months".
Have you read the slime mold's posts? The list of chemicals has to be something that we started using ~1970 (could be earlier) And it has to be used with food. (If it's in the air or water, there would be more wide spread signs in the animal and human populations not exposed to our diet.) Unfortunately the number of new chemicals we started using around then is vast. (plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, hormones, anti-biotics...) And it could be a combo of things. plants with fertilizer X stored in plastic jars made for Y. Or more than one 'thing', chemical. One commenter on the slime mold's site mentioned microwaves. Heating up something in plastic dishes in the microwave activates some hormone? It's a big list, but as is often said, sometimes science is first asking the right question. (Well and someone has to hear/act on your question... this idea is not new.)
> If he's correct, it legitimately seems like the inevitable result of rising obesity is either accepting a generally fat human race or invasive brain-chemistry altering drugs becoming widespread.
Climate change and soil erosion will lead to famines and will eventually curb the behaviours that permit obesity to flourish with few short-term downsides.
Thanks for the articles, they were really interesting. A few things that I'd like to see explored:
- Different types of sugar/fat. I've seen some people argue that it's the fructose that's making us fat or the saturated fat.
- Stress, either directly or eating as a coping mechanism.
I'm sure they won't be the explanation or even an explanation, but it would be nice to have them ruled out.
From a more personal point of view, as an obese person, I feel at a loss about what to do. I've read and learned a lot about nutrition the last few years, and there hasn't been any positive impact on my body weight. If anything, that's the opposite. I feel like a lot of this is due to low self-discipline, but I don't see how to solve this. As a person, it's easy to tell myself "I should do more X" or "I should be more Y", but at the same time I can't imagine this being useful advice if I gave it to someone else.
I would also be interested in hearing more about childhood obesity. It looks like childhood obesity in the United States increased very quickly from 1976 to 2003, and has nearly stopped increasing since then: https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/stories/how-childhood-obesity-rates-have-changed-over-time/
Is the increase in obesity in the general population in the United States entirely correlated with cohorts of obese children reaching adulthood, or have people born before 1960 undergone similar changes in adult obesity? Have recent cohorts of children from the period with less increase "made up" the lost increase in obesity in adulthood, or have they stabilized as well? Are there similar trends in childhood obesity in other countries, possibly with different years?
Have you considered using a CGM? I found the freestyle libre to be incredibly useful at losing weight. It turned out that some of the conventional advice on nutrition didn’t work that way for me. I did a lot of experimentation with different foods and within a few weeks discovered what foods worked with my body chemistry. For example, I had usually tried to keep a mostly vegetarian/Mediterranean diet. Turns out my optimal energy and blood sugar is with a Keto style diet. Meat and veggies. Not hard to do once you get used to it and doesn’t leave you hungry. It’s very helpful to have real time data, as well as the charts that show trends etc.
Technically you need a prescription but target sold it to me anyway. Later my doc agreed to write the prescription since it had such obvious results on weight.
Good luck.
These are very interesting, but some of these results I just don’t believe. I simply don’t believe more people get more exercise now than they did 20 years ago. It strikes me as lies from self-reported data.
What I also found weird is statements like "you think sugar is bad? Look at this tribe. It has a lot of sugar but is not fat". It's possible that that tribe has a genetic or lifestyle factor that precludes it from getting fat on sugar, and hence this fact may not be true for the global population. I don't know if an attempt was made to establish a control group
Yeah. It seems to me impossible that tribe could get as much sugar as an obese America and also that they would ever walk/exercise as little as an American. I just can’t believe it. «This tribe eats a lot of honey and gets some refined sugar fro, trade » strikes me as so far from an American.
I'm a non-mexican Latin American who went to the US for grad school and recently moved to Mexico City for work. Anybody based in Mexico City who'd be interested in starting a community/hang-out-group here?
Inspired by another person in this thread talking about looking for CS work
My eldest son is now legally an adult and looking to leave the nest, so to speak, in the near future. He's a CS major currently working on an internship that has been heavily hinted will turn into a full-time offer upon graduation next June and where he has been promised a significant raise once he goes back to school in the Fall to keep working part-time. It's a systems analyst role and it appears he does a lot of debugging.
I am a math/stats/MBA combo who dabbled in computers for fun - I know enough FORTRAN to be dangerous - but who otherwise has no idea how to advise him in terms of the various subspecialties of CS or even what sort of experience would be best from a monetary, personal fulfillment or combo thereof. In short, I'm out of my depth. It's possible systems analyst work is a dead-end specialty, or it could be a great start for a kid who is barely 18 making his way into CS.
Some details on #1 Son: He aced the SAT at age 15 (1580/1600) and I've struggled to keep him challenged ever since. I'm not looking for miraculous omniscience so yes, proper guidance will be dependent upon his interests but I still want to help him avoid pitfalls that may frustrate him 3 or 5 or 10 years from now. He's generally interested in computers, programming and solving complex puzzle-type things. He's also quiet and introverted but not autistic (with all the positives and negatives that connotes - I do have another son heavily on the spectrum).
Any general advice that can help him out? or further questions I can answer to help me help him?
Also, if it matters: I'm first-generation college. My grandfather came over from the Old Country and his family was super duper poor. My Dad worked the line for 40 years and retired - still alive and kicking at age 93. I majored in chemical engineering but haven't used it one day in my life because I went to Carnegie-Mellon for a Ph.D. program and realized I hated it, so I dropped out after a year. But I chose the path I did because I looked up (ca. 1990, and with zero guidance from family and others) what paid the most and hey, chemical engineering was # 1, so that was a sensible thing to major in, right? Not the greatest process in retrospect and I'm trying to figure out how to save him from several years of wasted grief as well.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
This might not be the answer you're looking for, but from your description it sounds like he's doing great professionally. If he's getting a good degree, has a good job while he's pursuing said degree and looks on track to graduate on time with a steady job, he's ahead of 95% of his peers. If he later decides not to stick with that, he's still got a degree and some quality work experience. This still puts him ahead of around 90% of his peers. Maybe make sure that he keeps a good balance between work, education and personal life, but other than that I think he's on track for success.
For specific advice, make sure he understands personal finance. Makes sure he understands what living alone (or with non-familial roommates) entails. Make sure he knows how to spot red flags in potential girlfriends/boyfriends that will inevitably cause a bunch of heartbreak down the line. In short - make sure the basic dad stuff is handled and that he knows he can always come to you for professional advice.
+1 for personal finance. But haven't met anyone that hasn't learned romantic lessons the hard way.
Agreed. I hit all financial topics and personal finance super duper hard - they can all spit off financial tips and tricks, budgeting, the dangers/opportunities involving debt, investment options, asset allocation, etc.
Romance... well yeah. If anyone has the secret sauce there I'm all ears.
If he wants to crank out money as fast as possible, Wall Street always wants smart people and will pay whatever's necessary to get them. Demanding hours and lots of stress but at his stage of life, I would've done fine with that.
Not sure he has the kind of smarts they're looking for. My roommate in MBA - I went to Ohio State - had to beg JPMorgan for a job in the late 90s because he wasn't from one of the platinum tier MBA programs. Maybe it's different now, but it seems like the kind of thing where you need the connections and the pedigree. Regretfully, my son will have neither. Do you have any info to the contrary?
The market for "Wall Street MBA" and "Wall Street Programmer" are very different markets. Based on word of mouth, if you're capable of writing code, it's much less a connections-game.
Any specific advice on this? I believe he's capable but he's also a teenager with few connections and a small private school background.
Like I said, I don't have any specific experience with Wall Street except the things I hear through word of mouth. The market for entry-level programmers is pretty hot; however, most companies are trying really hard to not hire someone who is going to waste their time for 6 months before being fired. This means they're far more worried about bad hires than turning away someone who is a good hire. This means he'll probably have to apply to a bunch of places and try to get lucky. Use job boards to find the names of companies, but go directly to their websites to apply. Don't be afraid to ask questions before an interview about the content of the interview. Most companies are happy to tell you what you'll be expected to know or do during an interview. My other tip is that contracting firms are way more likely to take a risk on people, especially smaller ones.
Wow, turned out I had more general advice than I thought I did.
OCaml to get a job at Jane Street
Just so we understand, post-MBA investment banking jobs are much less competitive (but also less lucrative) these days. Though I think it would still be a struggle to go into that path from Ohio State, but if you were in maybe a 30th-ranked MBA program, you could probably have a shot getting in anywhere (even if something like Citi would be a much easier leap than Goldman or JPM).
Pre-MBA investment banking is still very elite and competitive and basically required if you ever want to get into private equity and almost required to get into hedge funds. Basically, all doors in business and finance are open to you if you start out in investment banking at an elite firm, but odds are very high you're coming from a very elite undergrad already.
I think the problem is what qualifies as a "good degree". CS is a good degree, sure, but he didn't go to Stanford or MIT or even a Duke or Swathmore. It's a school probably 80% of this board have never even heard of, although it is a private school well-known in my neck of the woods due to a well-established arts program.
Basic Dad stuff is hard because my Father was a typical working class Dad: Work hard, work long and put bread on the table. During times when he was on strike, things could get lean but I never starved. Conversely, I don't think I've had any conversations with my Dad about collegiate stuff other than "study hard" convos in high school.
I do hit personal finance super duper hard primarily because I'm an MBA who is super duper numerate. When it comes to financial strategy and maximizing financial returns, I'm the guy so I preach that gospel everywhere and to anyone who will listen. Even my youngest child can spit off financial adages so it's nice to get confirmation there.
I apologize if this is off-topic, but I'd love to hear some general financial advice, or perhaps be referred some good resources. Context: I'm in grad school, and looking to enter the job market in the next couple of years.
I'm happy to help on the financial advice side, assuming you don't mean related to the job search specifically (i.e. choosing one concentration over another). Ask here or we can figure out a private forum. I'm on Telegram for example if you'd like to reach out there.
I suppose I can ask you my questions here itself, so that other readers may also potentially benefit from them. I will potentially be joining the workforce in a year or so, and maybe buying a house half a decade down the line or something. I have some savings, but not substantial by any means. What are some things that I can do to supplement my income/save more money so as to be able to make myself more financially secure in a time frame of 5-10 years?
1) Eliminate all debt that you can including student loan debt, if possible. If not, eliminate all high-cost debt that doesn't increase your net worth
2) Have a budget. Doesn't need to be hyper detailed, but you should know how much you can spend each month, how much you plan to save and (if applicable) your charitable giving target
3) Focus with laser-like intensity on what you needs vs wants. You probably want to live without roommates, but generally speaking living at home or with 2-3 others will result in much lower living costs, allowing you to save substantially more than solo living. Eating out is a luxury; brown bag everything you can. Minimize transportation costs via public transportation or an older, reliable vehicle as appropriate. Examples can be multiplied - I think you get the idea but feel free to ask follow up questions.
4) Create an emergency fund so that when things happen - and they will - you don't go into high-interest debt. Depending on where you live and if you have family backstopping you, I'd set anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 as an initial goal.
5) Once you have all the above, save money aggressively. A down payment on a home will be (in the USA) at least 5% if not 10%.
6) Find outside work that you enjoy (or at least tolerate) to supplement your activities. This one is harder to give specific advice on since it will depend on your chosen career, but unless you're in an all-encompassing profession you should have some opportunities to take on side work that will generate income to increase your down payment stash.
7) Look into opening a Fidelity, Schwab or (my pick) Vanguard brokerage account. Pick a split between stocks and bonds you feel comfortable with (e.g. 80% stocks, 20% bonds) and put that portion of what you invest in a low-cost total market stock fund coupled with a low-cost total bond fund. Your total expense ratio should be at or under 0.05% (not a typo). If not, keep looking.
8) As you make more money, and you will probably have enormous increases in the first few years out of school, tag 80-90% of the increased pay to saving/giving with the balance towards spending. Your life will be a lot more modest in the short run while your financial independence will grow by leaps and bounds. If that's too high, pick the highest percentage you can tolerate without making your life miserable. But recall that the hedonic treadmill (Google it if needed!) is a thing and after basic needs are met, the marginal return on high-cost spending is disappointingly slim.
Good luck! If this is helpful and you have follow on questions, feel free. This is a (very) stripped down version of what I walk people through on a regular basis and it has helped many people's lives tremendously. I hope it does for you too.
I wouldn't presume to give advice, but I can tell you that I was in your son's position not too long ago and landing an entry level SDE job at a FAANG company directly out of college has worked out well for me. Getting invited to interview requires some luck, but the interview itself is highly formulaic and preparing for it is simple (but not easy!) with resources like Cracking the Coding Interview.
There are downsides: stress, overwork, and the frustrations that come with working in a corporate bureaucracy chief among them. It's a highly-systematized environment which can be frustrating, but it's good if you're the type of person who performs well on standardized tests (provided that you have enough interpersonal intelligence to stay in the good graces of the people who have power over your advancement).
The upside is optionality. BigTech Cos are huge, so if you don't like the first team you land on then you can just transfer after a year and work on something completely different without changing companies. And if you decide you don't like the company, just open your LinkedIn inbox and accept an invitation from one of the many recruiters who will cold email you based purely on your current position.
As far as picking a sub-specialty, I wouldn't worry about it yet unless your son already feels drawn to a particular area and is willing to get a master's degree. Most big companies hire recent CS grads as generalists (usually called SDE or SWE - software development engineer or software engineer) with the expectation that a minority of them will eventually specialize and change titles. If your son is interested in Machine Learning/AI then it'd help to pick up some relevant coursework: probability, statistics, Linear Algebra, etc. Some job postings for Machine Learning Engineers do require a graduate degree in a related field, but I know several engineers who don't have any formal training in AI/ML and have picked up the required knowledge on the job.
If he hasn't gone to a big name college, does this effectively eliminate FAANGs? It's a local small private Midwest school - a good school but if you're not from the Midwest I'd bet heavily that you've never heard of it. He wasn't even old enough to drive when he started college so he's been living at home while studying.
If my Google-Fu is accurate, I'm guessing you're in your late 20s right now and started something new in 2021?
Definitely doesn't eliminate it as an option, though I suspect it will make getting the initial interview harder than if he were at a school like Stanford or MIT. I wasn't involved with the university recruiting programs when I worked at a FAANG co., but AFAICT their resume-harvesting process is semi-automated and is biased towards U.S. schools with prestigious computer science departments. I attended a not-very-prestigious state school and landed my interview by uploading a resume to my university's job portal.
As to your other questions, 1) your Google-Fu is accurate :) and 2) most of the big tech companies have a main campus in the Bay Area with engineering hubs in Seattle, New York, and Boston. Some have new campuses starting to pop up in the South, e.g., Austin, Atlanta, Miami, but there are relatively few positions there compared to the Bay Area. There's always the possibility that remote work will actually stick, but most companies are saying (at least publicly) that everyone's coming back into the office this fall so I wouldn't count on it.
I'll share the in-the-office feedback. I shared the possibility of moving to Silicon Valley last night with him and he was demonstrably unenthused - we have a pretty close family and he has no interest in being (from my analysis) further than driving distance away. He might change his tune based on the challenges and rewards.
Since nobody else in this thread has mentioned it yet, I feel I should point out that getting a job at a FAANG-or-similar is less to do with your education/pedigree and more to do with your ability to ace the very specific and peculiar interview process that all these companies use.
Basically, you need to be able to look comfortable while solving the sorts of problems you'll find on leetcode.com. Spending a few months cranking through leetcode is the best interview prep you can get.
Also, since someone else mentioned Wall Street I'll just add my two cents here, that FAANG is a much better deal than Wall Street these days; you'll get treated better and probably make more money.
I want to thank you for the leetcode.com referral as I wasn't aware of it and it looks good.
$35/month though... ouch. Truly worth it if it works of course but that seems steep.
You can probably make do with out the premium, or only paying for one month after a few months spent on the free version. The only feature it seems to add that is actually useful is being able to see well documented solutions, but many of the others (debugger and autocomplete in particular) won't be helpful for most coding interviews.
Agreed that you probably don't need premium, I got by with the free plan just fine. I'd also recommend checking out interviewing.io. The mock interviews that I did on that platform were probably the single best investment I made the last time that I was preparing to run the FAANG interview gauntlet. (I don't get any sort of referral kickbacks and I'm not associated with them in any way - just a very satisfied customer).
Leetcode would be worth it at 10x the price.
I went to a terrible school and ended up working at one of those companies for over 2 years. It wasn't right out of school, but was a decade into my career. The problem at these places is that though they are prestigious and pay well, the work is frequently unsatisfying and the internal culture is toxic if you aren't willing to stand up and shout all the left-wing shibboleths.
I don't think it's necessarily a life-long goal for my son but it's undeniably true that if you've worked at a FAANG, a lot of doors open.
The quote I used to throw around was that no one ever got fired hiring the guy who went to Harvard. Today it's the CS guy who worked at a FAANG.
Not at all. Many immigrants who studied in a no-name college abroad end up working at FAANGs. Generally as long as you have some tech-ish bachelor degree or higher, education isn't a barrier to get into FAANGs, much less into most other companies. There's some fancy research-oriented organisations which are really hard to get into without a good masters or phd (DeepMind comes to, ahem, mind), but those are rare exceptions.
Nope. I went to a well-reputed but non-elite state college (Cal Poly SLO), and I've worked for a FAANG company (Google) as well as a couple non-FAANG big tech companies (Microsoft and Adobe) and I regularly get cold-contacted by FAANG recruiters on LinkedIn.
Microsoft's a very solid place to start, especially if your son would be willing to relocate to the Seattle area where Microsoft is headquartered. Their pay is competitive with FAANG and other Big Tech companies, they do a ton of hiring for college interns and recent graduates, and the culture is very supportive of talented junior employees in a way that fosters professional development.
But overall, any big tech job he can get an entry-level position at is going to be a big boost to opportunities at other tech jobs. One big tech job (FAANG or otherwise) on your resume is a much stronger signal to tech recruiters than a degree from an elite university.
Amazon is the only FAANG/Big-Tech company I'd recommend against. I don't have personal experience with them, but they have a reputation for having a very cutthroat culture and a management style based on firing a few engineers every year to encourage the others.
Absolutely not. Out of any set of institutions that pays you like FAANG does, none care less than them about what school you went to.
Google used to be snobby about degrees (both advanced degrees and degrees from top-tier universities) when hiring, largely driven by the founders and a lot of the early employees having graduate degrees from Stanford and ideas about the importance of that getting baked into the company's culture. They made a conscious decision to move away from that (something like 10-15 years ago now) because they did analysis on data from employee performance ratings vs various hiring characteristics and they realized that filtering on advanced degrees and elite universities was leaving $100 bills on the street.
Follow up question I just thought of: Does FAANG work require moving to Silicon Valley? He might be willing to do that but I suspect he would not initially be enthused by the idea.
Definitely doesn't require it. Facebook has allowed permanent remote work. All FAANGs have large hubs outside Silicon Valley, generally at least Seattle area + New York as well as a smattering of smaller offices.
You'll probably make more money and advance your career faster by moving to Silicon Valley, but entry level salary + stock is 190k at Google. You don't really need to move up the ladder to be comfortable.
We live in a VLCOL area. $190k would be close to top 1% money in our neck of the woods. Not that he wouldn't want to advance but if that's the size of the prize, it's certainly worth encouraging. Nothing ventured and all that.
Landing a permanent-remote position at a FAANG as a fresh-out-of-education junior SWE is likely to be tricky unless you're somehow ultra-talented (or a member of a politically-favoured minority). Chances are better if you're willing to move to California, or at least to Seattle/Austin/etc.
Hard to say what qualifies as ultra-talented. My guess is top 1% isn't remotely qualifying, and since the only objective measure he's had is that SAT a few years back he might be OK but he is a white male with no minority status.
My hope is that if it doesn't work for FAANG these reco's will make it easier to get a lucrative job with satisfying work, perhaps locally. Time will tell.
There's a difference between "permanent-remote" which I agree requires being top-top-top-tier talent, and working in a satellite office, which is easy enough. The bigger limitation is whether the work available in the satellite office would match his skillset.
Thinking about this a bit, it sounds like you've done a good job and raised a good son. If you've reached the point where you're unsure of what the right next step is maybe just tell him and let him figure it out for himself. If he learns how to make and take responsibility for his mistakes he'll be miles ahead of many in his generation.
Thanks for the encouragement. I don't want to be a helicopter parent but I could have used some guidance - really any guidance - when I was 18-25. I stumbled into my MBA and it was absolutely life changing, proving that it's better to be lucky than to be good sometimes I guess. I'd like to save him half a decade of his life if I can, but maybe that's the worry all parents have. C'est la vie.
In terms of the company size, I think I agree with the people saying that if you can get into FAANGs it's a very good first career step. Even if you don't like the culture or atmosphere working in a huge company or whatever, a year or two of e.g. Google experience is enough to get almost any other company to at least look at your resume. And for someone who's good at math and good at studying, getting into one of those should be straightforward: as other people said, leetcode.com * few months of work usually do the trick, and neither myself no other people I spoke to used the premium version.
In terms of the specialization area, I think it's pretty hard to get into a truly dead-end job in CS. Maaaaybe things like QA/testing automation, SRE and certain areas of web development (over specialization on front-end, anything to do with PHP) are suboptimal for long-term growth. But none of them is truly dead-end, and most importantly I can't think of any reason why a fresh college grad with a CS diploma would choose to go into any of those, these are the areas usually popular among the people switching to IT from other careers.
Arguably the most popular and definitely most hyped jobs now are those associated with machine learning. At least they often top the lists of most-sought-after professions and everyone I talk to wants to get into this area (I've been through this stage myself as well). This includes any job titles with the words Machine Learning in it, as well as Data Scientist (in many cases, but different organizations can call very different things DS). It's a really interesting area with very, very good perspectives. It generally involves somewhat more math than your regular software development - some times a whole ton more - and, dare I say, often is a liiittle bit closer to research and a liiiitle bit further from engineering in terms of day-to-day work. Which can be an upside or a downside depending on the personal preferences.
Then there's your regular bread-and-butter software engineer, or what is usually called back end engineer. It's probably the closest thing to how people from outside of the industry imagine work in CS. It's a 100% engineering job, and most companies that have any developers will have this role. Also plenty of room for growth, though like with any other tech role, after a certain point you'll have to transition into management to continue to grow. Maybe one can argue that here it happens a little bit earlier than in the ML roles, where there's a little bit more opportunities to be a rock-star individual contributor. But in any case you have to be at least 4-5 years into the career and probably in the top quartile or so before you hit this ceiling.
Finally, full-stack web development. Choose this and you'll never ever have any shred of a trouble finding a job, literally everyone needs one of those. Otherwise very similar to back-end and overlaps with it a lot, just in addition you get to work with user interfaces and all the front-end craziness.
Roles which are further removed from the computers and closer to people, such as Product Management, Business Analysis and such, are probably good in many ways but necessarily not as a starting position for someone with a CS degree and introverted. If he later decides that's what he likes, he can always "rise through the ranks" or convert to one those pretty easily.
DevOps is extremely useful as a secondary specialization, but in my opinion not a good pick as the first and primary one, for someone who can help it (and from what you say looks like your son definitely can).
There's also a bunch of narrow specializations I don't know much about - information security, IoT, physics simulation and many others. I don't know much about those besides the obvious fact that there's lower demand but also lower competition. The rumor has it that infosec is in high demand because it's difficult, boring, and few people are good at it.
And of course this is by no means an exhaustive list or official classification, just a summary of what I've been exposed to over 4 years.
Thinking about future prospects and jobs. Originally wanted to major in philosophy, have carved out a somewhat passable math degree. There's a lot of pressure to go into CS, or CS adjacent positions. Are there still paths which pay me *a* wage to live without going into CS? Like, I'll do it if I have to, but the thought of grinding on something I've barely had any talent for as well as something I'm not even interested in for the next decade or so depresses me.
There are some professions where employers want you to have a degree but don't care which subject. Somebody at your school should know recruiters for those jobs.
Many jobs as per Bullseye's assertion just want someone with a bachelor's degree because it shows a degree of talent and potential. I find this to be unfair to those on the lower end of the income spectrum but it is what it is, which means that any degree you choose to get will give you a leg up for a wide variety of positions. STEM degrees if you like any of those will do even more, since if I'm being honest I was more likely to interview, say, a mathematics or engineering major for an open position than someone who majored in a softer subject. Even at that a person's ability to think critically swamped everything, so getting past the no degree hurdle is a big one especially at larger organizations that slap "degree required" on just about every position.
if you hate CS, don't do CS. I majored in chemical engineering because I thought it was remunerative. And it is. But I hated it. Never used all that time agonizing in lab for 5 years - should have focused on my passions combined with a dollop of "hey, I think I can get work doing this".
Without knowing you well, I'd say get a math degree and minor in philosophy. Or double major if it won't stress you out. You'll have something that looks impressive on paper and your quality of life will be much, much better.
On the subject of preserving books, my father just died and left behind a literal warehouse of old books, and I'd like some advice on what to do with the nice and rare-looking ones beyond taking them to Half-Price. My family needs to get rid of them as the storage is expensive and we just lost our main income source. We've already come across a complete set of the Arabian Nights (already sold) and no telling what else might be in this pile. He had a LibraryThing account and I might make it public. If anyone wants me to look out for any particular genre or title, I will.
I don't have any advice about the books, but I do want to offer my condolences.
My condolences. When my mom died a few years ago, (maybe 1/2 a room full of books), we picked through what we wanted, offered up the rest to friends and family... I then took many boxes down to the nearby used book store. They took about 1/2 of those. The leftovers went to the curb on trash day. It's sad because I figure 1/2 those books on the curb could have found a home. I'm not sure what to do with a warehouse of books? Find some person to go through them, pick out what they can sell on consignment and pitch the rest?
I am a compulsive book buyer. If you are interested and can give me access to any kind of list I will make a fair offer for what is likely to be a bulk purchase.
There's a LibraryThing list which should be mostly accurate, though again we've already sold some of them, and the collection is very large and very disorganized so i can't give a guarantee of any particular book. Is there a particular genre or subject i should keep an eye out for? Also I'd like an idea of the shipping distance- I'm in Texas, where roughly are you?
Related, but probably not helpful to you: My local library takes book donations all year then has a yearly sale over several days of the thousands of donations since they won't take more than a few of those donations for themselves. My understanding is that it is a significant fundraiser for them and well worth the effort. In addition, the library keeps 20-30 linear feet of books for sale on a set of shelves set aside for that purpose throughout the year. I've found some wonderful books at that sale and I understand there are many estate donations that make up a significant portion of the book sale. I've arrived at the point where I must give up an equal amount of shelf space each year to make room for the new ones. Perhaps this is just a small town thing but how handy for whoever gets my estate!
Gah, I kept checking my email for the latest post all last night and I still missed it.
I'm trying to perfect my understanding and develop better concept handles for the Myers-Briggs/FFM behavioral traits. I'm relying a lot on personal experience and social interactions, but the resources that feel most helpful and true to life are coming from the Wikipedia pages Facet(psychology) and Personality Disorder
16personalities.com is marginally useful but I'm growing dissatisfied with it. There's an Oxford Handbook that looks useful and an article on the Evolutionary psychology by Christopher Seemann but both are paywalled.
Psychetypes by Malone takes a rather philosophical approach-- all the types are ways of being normal, but very different ideas about time and space create different types.
For some people, boundaries are very important and for others, things blend into each other.
What's the most important thing about time? Moments of the past or future possibilities or the present or an evenly spaced progression.
Anyone have recommendations for where I can find an online book club or discussion group with good books, smart people and minimal trolls? Preferably reasonably sized.
There's a philosophy Discord known as the Union that has lots of different reading groups. The one i went to only had two other people.
If you are fine with social justice restrictions and left bias, TPC (the philosophy *cafe*) has a good selection of people who are very into philosophical discussion with several active reading groups. Can't say I've found anything really up to par in terms of discussion outside of that, though.
Did Ancient Egyptians use scarabs holding bioluminescent goo as lamps?
Wiki, bioluminescence: Before the development of the safety lamp for use in coal mines, dried fish skins were used in Britain and Europe as a weak source of light.[2] This experimental form of illumination avoided the necessity of using candles which risked sparking explosions of firedamp.[3] Another safe source of illumination in mines was bottles containing fireflies.[4] In 1920, the American zoologist E. Newton Harvey published a monograph, The Nature of Animal Light, summarizing early work on bioluminescence. Harvey notes that Aristotle mentions light produced by dead fish and flesh, and that both Aristotle and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History) mention light from damp wood. He also records that Robert Boyle experimented on these light sources, and showed that both they and the glowworm require air for light to be produced. Harvey notes that in 1753, J. Baker identified the flagellate Noctiluca "as a luminous animal" "just visible to the naked eye",[5] and in 1854 Johann Florian Heller (1813–1871) identified strands (hyphae) of fungi as the source of light in dead wood.[6]
Wiki, religious significance of scarabs:
In ancient Egyptian religion, the god Ra is seen as the star Sirius, when the star came to the Horizon in the south 15 thousand years ago. Beetles of the family Scarabaeidae (dung beetle) roll dung into a ball.[a] Because of its symbolically similar action, the scarab was seen as a reflection the precession cycle of the star Sirus , and as representing the idea of rebirth or regeneration on its swing in the south as it was viewed.
So. I suggest that if you needed a flashlight or nightlight in Ancient Egypt, you took your scarab amulet and scooped up some glowing goop on the end of it. Why bother with a scoop?
'Tell the Court it shines-
. . .and stinks, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight'
-said Walter Raleigh, and an awful lot of bioluminescent stuff does look like you'd want to avoid grabbing it with bare hands.
Pro: scarabs are repeatedly described as 'ceremonial'. 'Ceremonial' beer mugs, weapons, armor, pictures of naked ladies and so forth are routinely found to have some obvious practical use the archeologist who called them 'ceremonial' should have spotted.
Con: Well, SOMETHING the ancient Egyptians did had to be actually ceremonial, and it's not like I can point to useful prongs or spoony depressions for holding goo in any scarab I've seen pictured.
Comments from anyone who knows something about the subject welcome.
Well, this is an interesting rabbit hole. I started looking into Wikipedia, and the distribution of bioluminescence among organisms is fascinating. It appears in all sorts of "weird" creatures. Also, no plants or mammals have it, yet the feature is likely an example of convergent evolution.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160504152006.htm-
Story about bioluminscent dung beetles suspected from tunnells in dinosaur dung that match the tunnels dug through modern poop by modern dung beetles. So maybe the scarab dung beetles themselves glowed like click-beetles, or like beetle larvae- glowworms. A glowing beetle would make a good light all by itself.
Interesting. Some other special powers I just learned about: 'Of all nocturnal animals, only dung beetles can hold their course using polarized moonlight' https://earthsky.org/earth/dung-beetles-use-the-milky-way-to-navigate-at-night/ and 'Scientists have discovered that African dung beetles can use the Milky Way to help them navigate at night.' https://earthsky.org/earth/dung-beetles-use-the-milky-way-to-navigate-at-night/
I wonder if the ancient interest in dung beetles has to do with how easy they are to anthropomorphize. In reading about some of their activities[1] I could imagine early biologists creating memes about them, especially because of the taboo subject of poop. It would be easy to make a parable about spending a whole life finding importance in rolling balls that, when you zoom out, turn out to be shit.
Also, the length of Ancient Egyptian civilization is hard to contemplate. Even though their scientific institutions were primitive, they must have approximated modern competence in a few narrow domains due to two thousand years of study. I wouldn't be surprised if Ancient Egyptians knew more about dung beetles than we do today.
[1] https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/dung-beetle
It seems to me that billionaires now occupy the same space in the left's cultural consciousness that illegal immigrants once occupied on the right. I wanted to post about that here, but I kept wanting to be able to include images and links which sucks on substack comments, so I posted it here instead: https://chadnauseam.substack.com/p/immigrants-the-right-billionaires
Hey Chad, I'm not the most critical of readers in the world, but I thought your post was good!
Haha, thanks, that's nice feedback to hear.
Hmm, I'm under-impressed by billionaires as a group, though that's not the first label I'd use for them. But at the same time, 90% of everything is crap, and that includes the arguments and political tactics of my allies as well as of my opponents. I could certainly see "billionaires" becoming a popular scapegoat, well beyond relevancy, much as "immigrants" have been. (In my experience, those scapegoating them often omit to include the adjective "illegal", and sometimes explicitly target all immigrants.)
Bottom line: I'm not sure whether you are onto something or not. And recently what I see from the US left is most often based on categories other than wealth. Perhaps criticism of growing wealth inequality, and the people on the right side of it, is more merited than scapegoating?
It's an interesting thought, but what's also interesting is that the right seems to dislike billionaires as well.
Kind of related: in my experience, a lot of objection to immigration by the right was just ignorance. I say that as a Republican myself; there definitely was a lot of fear and misunderstanding. I was at a county convention way back, probably 2004 or so, where I helped strike some stupid anti-immigrant language from the county party platform (I haven't been very active since that; very discouraging.)
There are some legitimate concerns, of course. I'm pretty opposed to H-1B visas, but not so much because they drive wages down in tech jobs (which they do) but because I found out how much my friends on H-1Bs were making, and how much power the companies had over their lives. I like immigration in principle, but very much don't like illegal immigration, because of the human costs involved and the damage it does to the rule of law.
Point being: the issues are complex, and the dumb simple answers our parties reach for are largely why our country is so nuts right now.
How would you replace H-1Bs? There's currently no other path to permanent residency, let alone citizenship, for those coming to the country to work, at least AFAIK.
And since I'm posting anyway - can you provide evidence for H-1B's driving down wages in tech jobs? It's logical that increased supply would do this in the presence of constant demand, but that supply also includes people eager to work for US/multi-national companies while remaining in their countries of citizenship, not to mention the option of outsourcing to entirely foreign companies.
What I've see when H1-Bs were harder to get, is that companies increased the size of their offshore operations, rather than increasing what they paid their American tech staff.
Simple answer to replacing H-1Bs is just to loosen up legal immigration. This is obviously very simplistic, and doesn't take into account the incentives for H-1B hiring, which is that large companies who can afford the paperwork can import workers at a lower wage, who are dependent on the company for a path to permanent residence. Without those incentives, maybe the jobs people would immigrate here for would be less available. But my main objection is that H-1B visas are very much like indentured servitude. It benefits companies like Amazon, Disney, Microsoft, Salesforce more than it benefits workers here (In the US) or workers migrating here. I think I want MORE visas for workers, but not tied so much to employment for one company.
You make a really good point about offshore operations expanding. But in my experience, you get a better product from someone onshore. Besides the basics like communication issues and working across time zones, there are cultural nuances, even in software development, that don't translate well. I know many developers, analysts, whatever in other countries who are much better technically, but who don't speak English well or don't understand our clients' needs well. But I know many who came here to the US and did very well. I certainly don't mean that in a jingoistic way, just a very realistic way. I've consulted for clients in other countries where the project didn't go as well because I didn't understand the culture or language (Japan and China in particular, for me.)
I helped ramp up offshore teams for large tech companies in the Philippines and India. The team in the Philippines lasted a year, which was hard and sad. The India team is still trundling along doing OK, but for that company, the big projects go to US teams, leaving the India team with the scraps and never quite getting up to speed. I guess they've got jobs and that company has a pool of resources to take those scraps, but it feels like a lost opportunity. Maybe if we could have more of them here in the US temporarily that team could be more effective? But then you get back to pay scales, and it's difficult to go back to India pay after even H-1B pay in the US, I guess.
I think the effect of H-1B on wages is probably difficult to measure, but I'll look for some evidence. I'm guilty of something I complain of a lot, taking my assumptions as truth here. I'm sure I've read something showing the effect on wages, but can't bring it to mind. All I can remember are anecdotes from acquaintances "training their replacements." So I'll look harder at that. I could see it even having a positive effect on wages: if you can pay some people 1/3 as much as others, you can keep pay high for your locals. But that kind of feels disgusting to me.
My pet proposal for replacing H-1B visas would be to create a work visa category with the following requirements:
1. Visa applicant (if from a non-visa-waiver country) passes a basic background check, similar the the current requirements for a business or tourist visa.
2. Visa applicant or a third party sponsor pays a fee at the time of application comparable to the current cost of sponsoring an H-1B visa in filing+attorney's fees (quick googling suggests this is somewhere in the $5-10k range).
Once the visa is granted, the visa holder has unlimited right to work in the US, same as a citizen or permanent resident, for the duration of the visa. However, they are subject to an additional payroll tax (probably around 5%) in addition to other applicable taxes. The first $X of this payroll tax go towards refunding the fee to the visa holder (if they paid their own fee) or their sponsor until the entire fee has been refunded.
These visas would either be unlimited or capped at a much higher level than the current H-1B limit.
The intent here is to be as close as possible to a Pareto improvement over the current H-1B system, hopefully making it an easier sell politically than just opening up the borders (as my libertarian heart is tempted to prefer). Employer sponsors would pay about the same as they did under the old system in up-front fees, with less delay and uncertainty than under the old system as to when and whether a visa will be granted. Visa applicants also get less delay and uncertainty, without being tethered to a particular employer and with a much better opportunity to command market wages for their skills. The up-front fee replaces credentials and bureaucratic review for filtering for visa-seekers with high-demand high-value job skills, and the payroll tax retains a modest amount of protectionism for US citizens in a hopefully less-burdensome and arbitrary form than the current H-1B system.
Be aware, that with this post you are a victim to the same pattern you are critisizing: providing a punchy argument for the narrative instead of detailed cost benefit analysis. "Billionaires are left scapegoats just as imigrants are right scapegoats" does sound plausible at a first glance. But is it justified? that depends on whether left hatred for billionaires is more justified than rights hatered for immigrants, which you haven't thoroughly checked.
I agree that lefts antipathy for the billionaires is probably neurologically similar to rights antipathy of immigrants. This is an interesting observation about ingroup/outgroup thinking. But if one group is actually much more responsible for problems of the country, this similarity isn't very important.
Also, I believe politicians are constantly saying things akin to: “We know what we need to do, but it’s electorally unpopular, so we can’t do it”. Its a standard partisanship point. We, the good guys, know what to do, but the other party brainwashed the huge part of the population so they won't agree to do what have to be done!
> But is it justified? that depends on whether left hatred for billionaires is more justified than rights hatered for immigrants, which you haven't thoroughly checked.
This is a good point, and I tried to be honest about it in my post. I think part of the problem is, no matter how negative the effect of X is, once they're known to have a certain deleterious effect then there's room to blame completely unrelated problems on X too. I think we're going to see this with the problem of the ascending price of housing. It's turning into an issue that'll be really important for a large proportion, and I'm already seeing arguments like "this is caused by [foreign?] rich people speculating and raising the price, like bitcoin" in my friend group and things like this. This is a classic case I'm trying to describe where the most promising solution is really unpopular, so politicians (and people who would be negatively effected by the actual solution) are incentivized to blame something out of their control.
Is willpower consistent across domains? I'm interested in both people's individual experiences and scholarly research.
The research I've seen has been all over the place on this question - on the one hand, certain measurements of willpower seem to be broadly predictive of 'good things' - health, relationship stability, career progression, academic achievement, etc. On the other hand, that might be missing individual details in the aggregate (i.e., overall, people with good self-control have better outcomes across everything, but within-individual relationships between, say, working hard and resisting junk food might be much weaker).
Examples:
Domain-agnostic: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17437199.2016.1266275
Domain-specific: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5625007/
My willpower varies between domains. For example, avoiding junk food is easy, while keeping a daily meditation practice is hard. But the variations are within an overall good band.
Despite the marshmallow test not replicating, I suspect there is a common factor in willpower. For example, people who smoke also don't exercise; people who can't stop binging TV shows are often late for work.
I also suspect w is highly polygenic. Some OCD traits may help with rule-following, but that may require some self-awareness and design thinking to create practical rules for yourself.
Yeah agree with this exactly. I find certain willpower tasks easy — junk food, exercising — and certain ones nearly impossible (not procrastinating at work, stopping at one drink if people suggest another.) But I suspect what you’re saying about variations within a band is true. I may be disappointed in myself for my procrastination control, but maybe that’s relative to my other willpower abilities — I still may be in the 80th percentile there or something.
FWIW, I find it easier to NOT do something, preferably not do it ever, than to DO something, particularly if we're talking about something done multiple times. I don't think it's a personal bias in favor of inaction though - I think it's just easier for me to redefine something as "not food" or "not OK to say" or whatever, than to get around to doing whatever it is every <expletive> day. Even if the task is a one-of, procrastinating is easy, though it will generally get done eventually.
I don't think it's domain-specific for me, except to the extent that some actions require more effort than others, or tend to need to be done while less functional than normal. But "no" is definitely easier than "yes".
Is that a difference in willpower across domains, or just the fact that you find certain activities to be more tempting than others? I find it hard to resist a nice cup of tea in the afternoon, but very easy to resist eating metal filings.
Hmm, yeah. The two concepts could be continuous with each other.
Does anyone here stay in Seattle ? Wanted opinions on good neighborhoods to move to.
me: mid 20s tech male that likes people and extroverted, but still decidedly nerdy. Want to avoid monocultures.
Want in neighborhood : walkable/bikeable, dense, close to commute, within 50 minutes commute to Bellevue, and it should have a happening location closeby.
Want to avoid: suburbia. rampant homelessness
What sounds good: Wallingford, Northern capitol hill (below volunteer park)
Possible but don't know enough: Capitol hill proper (Near Cal anderson), UDistrict (south side) , Fremont (closer to wallingford) (I'm clearly trying to have access to the 520)
Greenlake is very nice. It's very walkable and is right near both I-5 and a soon to be opening light rail station.
I lived in that area several years. Fremont/Wallingford would be my first pick, but ideally 3+ blocks away from Aurora or Stone way. Ballard is very cool, but hard to commute out of. Greenlake/Phinney Ridge/Greenwood would be my second pick. That's a great place to just walk and look at people's overgrown beautiful gardens, it's very authentic feeling. I think Capitol Hill is overpriced, but obviously others disagree. Avoid the UDistrict like the plague though, especially if homelessness bothers you.
Also, remember that a mile from the Burke-Gilman can look very bikeable, but if it's a mile directly up a steep hill, you'll be a sad sweaty person when you get home.
Thanks for the recommendation. The part of staying clear of stoneway and Aurora in particular.
Will keep that in mind. I'll mostly get an e-bike for the really steep hills, but it's reassuring to hear that Wallingford / fremont are good otherwise
The homeless population in Ballard has exploded in the past year, on top of the commuting challenges. Eastlake is an oft-overlooked choice, depending on your definition of "closeby" for happeningness.
I believe there is a community house with https://www.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/ (but im not sure if it is recently departed?)
Yeats' "The Second Coming" is (deservedly) one of the most widely quoted poems in the English language. However, George Orwell made an interesting observation about it in his essay on Yeats:
"[Yeats] is too big a man to share the illusions of Liberalism, and as early as 1920 he foretells in a justly famous passage (‘The Second Coming’) the kind of world that we have actually moved into. But he appears to welcome the coming age, which is to be ‘hierarchical, masculine, harsh, surgical’, and is influenced both by Ezra Pound and by various Italian Fascist writers. He describes the new civilization which he hopes and believes will arrive: ‘an aristocratic civilization in its most completed form, every detail of life hierarchical, every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few men’s hands, all dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God dependent on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality made law.’"
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/w-b-yeats/
That is, at least in Orwell's view, seemingly plausible on some cursory further research, Yeats thought that all that stuff about the center not holding and the falcon not hearing the falconer was a *good* thing, worthy of celebration. (The titular Second Coming that these events presumably herald is usually indeed considered thus by Christians, though of course Yeats' views were hardly typical/orthodox.) Yeats looked forward to the destruction of supposedly soulless modern industrial, democratic society, followed by the cyclical return of a more primitive, spiritually vital one. I wonder how many of the people, often with center to left political views, who portentously quote "The Second Coming" whenever politics is contentious (which is to say, almost always) realize this. (I suspect that Yeats would be quoted less often if more people realized that he, like many writers in the 1920s-1930s, was an extreme reactionary who at least flirted with fascism.)
So *that's* the rough beast? It's a good thing Yeats left it vague in the poem.
It's slightly more complicated than that. Yeats flirted with a lot of stuff for the sake of artistic inspiration and how much he actually believed it is hard to make out (was Bowie, in his Thin White Duke phase, Actually A Fascist?)
Came from Anglo-Irish Protestant stock. Rather disillusioned with the aftermath of the Easter Rising and the establishment of the Irish state, which was too Catholic-influenced and small-minded for him, see his poem "September 1913":
"What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave."
In reaction to de Valera etc. he moved towards the Irish version of what could be roughly called Fascism, the Blueshirts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshirts who mostly got into scuffles with the remainder of the (old) IRA and sent volunteers to fight on Franco's side in the Spanish Civil War, as Irish leftists were also heading out to fight on the Republican side.
But he was also a member of the government, the upper house of the Senate, as seen in his poem from 1926 "Among School Children":
"I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man."
In the 1930s he had his flirtation with Fascism - of the Irish kind - but honestly? He would have been as disillusioned with General Eoin O'Duffy had he managed to come to any sort of political power as he was with the rest of the aspiring middle-class Catholic establishment. Yeats yearned for the idealistic return of the Ascendancy, the Anglo-Irish ruling caste.
There's a good essay by Seamus Deane from 1981 here https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n10/seamus-deane/blueshirt?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F he's rather harder on Yeats than I would be, but that's because I don't think Yeats had any interest in Mussolini or Hitler. His concerns were, at the end of the day, local. The Jews, for example, weren't even on the radar.
And another good article from 2015 by Roy Foster: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/philosophy-and-a-little-passion-roy-foster-on-wb-yeats-and-politics-1.2241504
And the original version of plus his essay on, the Three Marching Songs for the putative Blueshirt party from 1934 (he later revised and reordered these poems): https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=45&issue=3&page=13
And if anyone is interested, here are the final versions (printed in "Last Poems" of 1939) of those Three Marching Songs:
THREE MARCHING SONGS
I
Remember all those renowned generations,
They left their bodies to fatten the wolves,
They left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,
Fled to far countries, or sheltered themselves
In cavern, crevice, or hole,
Defending Ireland’s soul.
Be still, be still, what can be said?
My father sang that song,
But time amends old wrong,
All that is finished, let it fade.
Remember all those renowned generations,
Remember all that have sunk in their blood,
Remember all that have died on the scaffold,
Remember all that have fled, that have stood,
Stood, took death like a tune
On an old tambourine.
Be still, be still, what can be said?
My father sang that song,
But time amends old wrong,
And all that’s finished, let it fade.
Fail, and that history turns into rubbish,
All that great past to a trouble of fools;
Those that come after shall mock at O’Donnell,
Mock at the memory of both O’Neills,
Mock Emmet, mock Parnell,
All the renown that fell.
Be still, be still, what can be said?
My father sang that song,
but time amends old wrong,
And all that’s finished, let it fade.
II
The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,
The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,
Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,,
Troy backed its Helen; Troy died and adored;
Great nations blossom above;
A slave bows down to a slave.
What marches through the mountain pass?
No, no, my son, not yet;
That is an airy spot,
And no man knows what treads the grass.
We know what rascal might has defiled,
The lofty innocence that it has slain,
Were we not born in the peasant’s cot
Where men forgive if the belly gain?
More dread the life that we live,
How can the mind forgive?
What marches down the mountain pass?
No, no, my son, not yet;
That is an airy spot,
And no man knows what treads the grass.
What if there’s nothing up there at the top?
Where are the captains that govern mankind?
What tears down a tree that has nothing within it?
A blast of the wind, O a marching wind,
March wind, and any old tune.
March, march, and how does it run?
What marches down the mountain pass?
No, no, my son, not yet;
That is an airy spot,
And no man knows what treads the grass.
III
Grandfather sang it under the gallows:
‘Hear, gentlemen, ladies, and all mankind:
Money is good and a girl might be better,
But good strong blows are delights to the mind.’
There, standing on the cart,
He sang it from his heart.
Robbers had taken his old tambourine,
But he took down the moon
And rattled out a tune;
Robbers had taken his old tambourine.
‘A girl I had, but she followed another,
Money I had, and it went in the night,
Strong drink I had, and it brought me to sorrow,
But a good strong cause and blows are delight.’
All there caught up the tune:
‘Oh, on, my darling man.’
Robbers had taken his old tambourine,
But he took down the moon
And rattled out a tune;
Robbers had taken his old tambourine.
‘Money is good and a girl might be better,
No matter what happens and who takes the fall,
But a good strong cause’ — the rope gave a jerk there,
No more sang he, for his throat was too small;
But he kicked before he died,
He did it out of pride.
Robbers had taken his old tambourine,
But he took down the moon
And rattled out a tune;
Robbers had taken his old tambourine.
What Yeats actually believed is pretty clear from his book "A Vision", his involvement with the magical order The Golden Dawn, and his automatic writing workings with his wife. While his magical/mystical inclinations helped his writing, I don't think he was into the woo only for the artistic inspiration. Some critics, perhaps embarrassed, have downplayed that aspect of his life (incorrectly in my opinion).
In multiple threads Scott as well as other people expressed a position that marxist framework assumes too much without providing enough evidence.
What kind of evidence, in principle, do you think is required to take marxist framework seriously?
It depends on what do you mean by marxist framework
And on what particular position we're talking about.
I would assume the category of surplus value, M-C-M', class struggle and control over the means of production, etc.
Can you link to Scott's posts on this subject you are referring to? I have asked him many questions about Marxism, and criticised his reading of Marx heavily, and he rarely (if ever) responds.
Suppose that betting markets (which Scott has suggested) aren't a good way to finance investigative journalism, what might be?
I'm imagining some combination of substack, kickstarter, and gofundme, and some way of combining investigative journalists (dare I call it a newspaper?), but it would be hard. Are there investigative journalists who are so respected that they could attract funding from people who don't agree with their politics? How do you structure a pipeline for new investigative journalists?
What does investigative journalism cost, anyway? It's not just the cost for the articles you get, it's also the cost of articles that don't pan out (how often does that happen?) and legal protection.
The main problem with investigative journalism is how long it takes. Assume each investigation will take a team of 2 or 3 reporters 3-6 months and you're looking at a cost of, what, roughly $100k per report?
So, if we just want to keep funding this, we need to find a way to make it possible either for a good piece of investigative journalism to earn a lump sum of $100k every half year or so, or (does some math) it to have subscribers paying around $21k a month.
The first one option is surprisingly easy, but doesn't scale very well, and that's just having all investigative journalists moving towards writing books instead of writing newspaper articles. Or maybe they still write the articles, but as loss-leaders for the books they're trying to get folks to buy. This is already pretty common, but would need to become moreso. There's also probably an upper-limit to how many investigative books your average consumer will buy, but this will remain a viable option for the top-crust of investigative journalists for a good while.
The second option is, in my opinion, more interesting. The chattering class tells me that Glen Greenwald makes between $80-$160k per month on substack. This kind of money could, conceivably, fund several associated teams of investigative journalists. Assuming they could optimize the process and had good sourcing, they could probably commit to one quality investigation a month, which would be worth it by my money. I wouldn't be shocked if we see something along these lines pop up in the next couple of years.
The third option is to have investigative journalism just supported by a surrounding network of content, but we've tried that and it doesn't look like its working.
Is it true that the quality of Stephen King's writing is now much worse than it was at its peak? I've only read some of his early work, like Different Seasons and Skeleton Crew.
If it's true he's gotten worse, then what was King's last truly great book?
Asking for help. This will be rambly and neurotic.
I am a 30 year old woman. After a long period of hesitation and anxiety about it, after months-long obsessive research into the discourse around covid and vaccines, which made me feel confused, frustrated, and terrified, I got vaccinated (Pfizer) on the 4th of July (incidentally, my birthday). I was never that much worried about covid, and I'm currently leading a rather hermitic lifestyle, so it never registered as too much of a danger; I guess my main motivation to get vaccinated was "to get it over with", because I couldn't stop obsessing over it for months, feeling tormented about whether to vaccinate or not. Of course, protecting others was also a factor, as was the feeling that if I am to get vaccinated one day, I'd rather do it sooner, so that it wouldn't haunt me anymore.
By "obsessing over it"--I mean, I was following the discourse, and trying to make sense of it, researching the contrarian voices, exposing myself to all the vax-skeptical arguments; and I ended up in a very uncomfortable state of "I really don't know what is going on, and I suspect that nobody really knows what is going on (because the issue is super complex and we have too little data), and people who are certain that they know what is the right thing to do seem to be ideologues and not to be fully trusted; and the health authorities are clearly feeding the public skewed and simplistic data in order to get them to buy into the narrative, and their sensemaking is distorted (but that doesn't mean they are all bad or that their narrative is false)". And just a state of uncertainty and anger and frustration at the state of the discourse, and helplessness and confusion in face of all the chaos.
I scheduled the appointment, but then canceled it the same morning (I had canceled about 15 appointments already in the previous weeks), but in the end I went anyway, feeling like if I don't go, I let myself be controlled by my fear. Either way, to get vaccinated or to not get vaccinated felt like a neurotic decision. I was afraid to not get vaccinated, but also to get vaccinated--imagining that very bad things will happen either way, and that trying to prevent them by avoiding danger would just misfire.
More background: I struggle long term with depression, anxiety, including health anxiety, and especially fears about fertility (premature ovarian failure); I have OCD-ish and paranoid tendencies at times. I've been diagnosed with ASD, if that's a helpful information. Obviously, with the fertility-related talk about the vaccine--the period dysregulation that many women are reporting (and that the CDC is blatantly denying exists--note this bit in particular broke me and made me cynical about the trustworthiness of the CDC (that is not to say they are completely untrustworthy, but that they are not as trustworthy as they certainly should be)), the Japanese LNPs biodistribution/pharmacokinetics study, the fact that everybody is saying "there is no evidence of damage to fertility and no plausible mechanism of damage to fertility" (when there is little evidence either way, and when there, it seems to me, certainly are some such hypothetical mechanisms), and then there's the reported long term vaccine side effects--this made me very afraid to get vaccinated. But I guess I was hoping if I do get vaccinated, if I am brave, the fear will dissolve.
Anyway, so I went. I wasn't fully okay with it, but at first it felt manageable. After a few hours, I had a severe anxiety attack, intense dread, suicidal ideation, convinced I have damaged myself; I started hyperventilating, my blood flow was increased etc. which threw me into an even bigger anxiety, because I heard you're not supposed to overexert yourself after getting vaccinated. Now I worry that because of the increased blood flow, the LNPs from the vaccine could have reached my ovaries more quickly and in greater concentration, that the mRNA will be expressed by ovarian cells, and they will get destroyed by my immune system, leading to tissue damage; or that the LNPs are somehow toxic themselves. I worry that this will cause POF. I worry my anxiety will make my immune system dysregulated, leading to an autoimmune-induced POF. I worry that I will get bad side effects from the vaccine.
Ever since I got vaccinated and this initial anxiety attack, the anxiety and depression haven't left me, save for several hours every day (usually later in the afternoon), when I tend to calm down and it feels like my fears are unsubstantiated. But I wake up depressed, and spend the majority of the day unable to think about anything else, in acute fear that I have damaged myself, that bad things will happen, and that I destroyed my life: infertility is my greatest fear (as you probably noticed), but also long term side effects from the vaccine (autoimmune, neurological), cancer. I keep worrying that the anxiety attack after I got vaccinated only made everything worse, and that even if the majority of people are okay and nothing bad happens to them, I will be one of the people who will get damaged by it.
Everybody around me is saying that I am overreacting, and that my fear is not appropriate to the situation. I truly can't tell anymore; it feels like all this could be true, that there really aren't good long term data about the safety of the vaccine, that there might be a plausible mechanism for damage (that I don't really see addressed anywhere), etc. It seems like I can't really be sure that things will be okay.
I can't stop thinking about this what if. I have no idea how to resolve it; one way of dealing with the uncertainties of life is simply to not think about them, to convince oneself that all will be well; but it seems to me this would be deluding myself into thinking that they are not real dangers. But bad things could happen. All the horrible things that I am worried about could become true. How does one cope with that? As I said, it seems to me, the majority of people go by simply not thinking about these possibilities, and so unbothered by the uncertainty of life. But it seems uncertainty can throw me into a state of acute danger; I can so vividly imagine things going badly. And I don't know how to become okay with it. It seems like if I were to become okay with it, I would have to stop caring about these things that I worry are in danger, I would have to become someone else, with different values.
I know that because of my severe anxiety and depression, my view of reality is probably very distorted. I can see how my current acute fears (worrying about vaccines causing infertility, or cancer) reflect my long term, chronic fears (worrying about fertility, or cancer): I can see how my anxiety is excellently skilled in picking up on patterns and links and connections in all the chaos and uncertainty, and constructing plausible (sounding) scenarios for how the things that I am worried about the most might realize. But still, I can't help but feel that the threat is real, that bad things will or could really happen, that there is no guarantee things will be okay, that everything could crumble. I should also maybe mention that one of the things that is an important factor in my state is the fact that in a month, my partner, with whom I've been long distance for almost half a year, is scheduled to finally arrive. So, just as something absolutely wonderful, that I've been looking forward to for so long, is about to happen, I am terrified that everything will fall apart.
This is a community whose sensemaking I generally trust. It would help me very much if I could get some more perspective, some more feedback, maybe some advice, if any of you have previously dealt with similar issues, and have found a way to resolve them, or to alleviate them. Some resources, words of wisdom, reality checks. (But please be kind.)
Thank you very much.
You should see a mental health professional. The issues you describe sound too severe and complex for even the very smart people here to provide effective advice. This is absolutely interfering with your day to day life, and a good healthcare provider will have the tools and experience to help you improve things.
Okay. After much vacillating, I got the two-dose Pfizer vaccine and had some of the listed side-effects https://www2.hse.ie/screening-and-vaccinations/covid-19-vaccine/pfizer-biontech/side-effects/. Mostly I was lacking in energy and very tired for about three to four days afterwards.
I don't know which one you got, so it's hard to comment on it. But the original fears of blood clots (which seem to have happened more to women) are not being reported so much, I imagine because most countries backed off on the AstraZeneca vaccine.
"Now I worry that because of the increased blood flow, the LNPs from the vaccine could have reached my ovaries more quickly and in greater concentration, that the mRNA will be expressed by ovarian cells, and they will get destroyed by my immune system, leading to tissue damage; or that the LNPs are somehow toxic themselves."
Short answer? No.
Longer answer? Everything I can find out about the risk is (a) health authorities in various countries saying it doesn't have any effect (b) one paper about the effect on female fertility due to Covid-19 itself, not any vaccines, and which is ongoing which means NO RESULTS YET https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/11/2/e045524 (c) one article about the possible effect on male fertility, again from contracting the disease itself and not from vaccines https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20210129/covid19-reduces-fertility-in-men-study-suggests
In your case, therefore, this is classical "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". You are a naturally anxious person who knows just enough to work themselves up into a frenzy because of course the very worst thing will happen! (this is your anxiety and depression speaking).
There is nothing to suggest that vaccination affects fertility, there is nothing to suggest this is going to happen to you. You already know your mental state is irrational and untrustworthy. As suggested elsewhere, try and get mental health counselling to help you.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read and reply. I *really* appreciate it, in spite of the brevity of this my response here.
I have similar issues although not as severe as you have described. I have been hyperfocused on coronavirus since last February. I've been keeping a daily spreadsheet of case counts in my city and country. When it started I would take anxiety naps, sleeping 12-16 hours/day sometimes, because sleep was the only time my mind wasn't fixated on all the terrible things that could happen if I got Covid. I was a grocery washer. During our first wave - before we knew the virus was airborne rather than spread by fomites - my family bought flour and baked bread rather than buying bread from the shop that could be contaminated.
I have allergies and my biggest fear with getting vaccinated was anaphylaxis. You absolutely can give yourself psychosomatic symptoms - my blood pressure shot up, even after my second shot, even after the first shot hadn't killed me.
So aside from sympathy, I'll share advice about what works for me.
1. This too shall pass. Give it time. Try not to make any major decisions under stress as a snap judgment, but other than that, just experience the anxiety and understand that it will get a bit better as you get further away from the precipitating event. After the first few weeks of pandemic, my anxiety naps got shorter and less frequent.
2. Positive visualization. I believe this is an intervention which Scott has previously mentioned as working but which people don't really take seriously. It works for me. I used to get up in the middle of the night to check if my son was still breathing. I told myself I was being selfish - there was nothing wrong with him, and I was risking waking him up, just to soothe my own anxiety. Eventually I started doing things like visualizing what he would look like at his high school graduation, or how much fun it would be running a D&D campaign for him when he was old enough, or - and this might not be for everyone - him holding my hand at my deathbed. I just trained my brain not to always think about and dwell on the worst case scenario. Now I'm much more relaxed (although if I happen to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I still go and check to make sure he's breathing).
3. Use rational methods to understand what you know and reason from uncertainty. Try to think clearly about what counts as evidence for a claim and what doesn't. Part of this for me was quantifying everything - making risk assessments and comparing risk ratios. Part of this was keeping track of case counts and other stats - I'm on day 505 of my spreadsheet as of today. Part of this was making predictions about how the pandemic would go in my country - e.g. when schools would close/reopen, etc. Part of this was reading studies by actual scientists, rather than media reports on them. Don't fall prey to intellectual nihilism - "nobody really knows anything" - because there actually is a lot of knowledge out there and there actually are a lot of people who can interpret that knowledge correctly. I don't trust the CDC very much at all, but "the CDC is not very trustworthy" isn't really evidence that any particular claim they make is incorrect. Find sources you do trust - I regard Scott and Zvi as reliable sources of information about coronavirus in the blogosphere, and The Atlantic as a reliable source in the media (in particular Zeynep Tufekci and Ed Yong). And most of all, understand that you are absolutely correct that the world is chaotic and everything absolutely could fall apart at any minute - but the great thing about humanity is that we're built to thrive under those conditions. You absolutely do have to accept a baseline level of risk, and that's just life, and the best thing you can do is practice making decisions that take the risk into account without overestimating the risk or letting it derail your plans or dominate your life.
For example, as a rule of thumb, if you're spending 50% of your time worrying about a vaccine side effect with an incidence of 1 in 100,000 - that's obviously disproportionate, and when you put it into numbers it becomes obvious just how disproportionate it is. Another consideration is that you have to recognize the difference between productive worry - that is, concern about an actionable risk which results in a plan to mitigate that risk - and unproductive worry, which is concern about a risk that you have no control over or do not intend to ameliorate.
4. Find something productive to do. You could follow my route and focus your anxiety into keeping a weekly journal about all information related to covid in your area. Or you could, like, learn a new hobby. I've recently ordered a Raspberry Pi robotics kit and I'm going to teach myself how to use it, as soon as I finish arguing about politics on the internet. It'll be any day now.
Hope some of this helps!
Thank you very much for your response, I really, really appreciate it. One thing that is a problem in my case is this: I really don't want to delude myself, to convince myself things are okay when I can't really know.
So, for example positive visualization therefore feels like it would be a kind of self-delusion, wishful thinking; and the OCD part of me is worried I will just jinx everything by imagining it to be that way! And of course, on some level I believe that regardless of what the actual statistics are, I am somehow special in that bad things happening to me is more likely, a much more immediate threat. Even though cognitively I see that I have no reason for this, it simply feels true, and overwhelmingly so.
It seems like unless I can be *certain* that things are okay, then the very possibility, however rationally unlikely, of there being something wrong is perceived as great and looming. Again, I can see how this is irrational, but it still feels true, same as e.g. I can see that my magical thinking is irrational, but that doesn't really change the fact that the thoughts are super convincing, on an emotional level.
How to modulate the fear with reason? It seems they are disconnected, existing simultaneously on two different levels, so that there is a dissociated state. Rationally, I see how my thoughts and feelings are distorted and inappropriate; but they *feel so true*.
You took the vaccine, and suffered no vaccine attributable negative events right?
Side effects happen, but are quite rare as we can tell from significant efforts at sue willing the side effects experienced by the hundred million plus people who have taken the vaccine.
The Japanese study probably doesn’t relate at all to infertility. If it did, we probably would’ve noticed decreased conception or increased miscarriage rates. But people watching those for vaccines haven’t.
> LNPs from the vaccine could have reached my ovaries more quickly and in greater concentration, that the mRNA will be expressed by ovarian cells
I don’t think there’s any chance you’ve been rendered infertile lol. Even if this was true, which there’s not any evidence for, it would affect a proportion of the eggs, and other ones would be fine. (Women have many eggs as backups! One is flushed every period, and many fail to mature when implanted)
Thank you very much for taking the time to read and reply. Truly: reading replies like yours (sanity checks) really helps.
From reading your post I have the sense you've seen allegations by Bret Weinstein, Steve Kirsch and/or Theresa Lawrie. I put up a LW thread on the allegations here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr
You prompted me to look for info about the ovaries issue, and I immediately found this: https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/covid-19-vaccines-dont-affect-ovaries-or-fertility-in-general-the-vaccines-are-highly-effective-at-preventing-illness-and-death/
The claim that the concentration of LNP (lipid nanoparticles) is highest in the ovaries after 48 hours appears to be not only false, but a "pants on fire" kind of lie: the linked source shows the concentration as being 259 times higher at the injection site, and 170 times higher in the liver.
The chart showing the concentration as being highest in the ovaries simply leaves out the data for the injection site, for the liver, and for the spleen (which also shows over 10x higher concentration than the ovaries).
Some other key criticisms of mine are in this comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr?commentId=Ct3pvsqWhQhsYGcAo
Notably there's the issue of base rate neglect: suppose that a million people get the vaccine on July 1. What's the chance that a few of those million people would develop a serious symptom if they had *not* taken the vaccine? It's a very high probability, right? So one cannot simply assume that all serious side effects were caused by the vaccine, but that's precisely what Steve S, Bret W and Theresa L have done.
(to be clear, I do have the impression that one or more of the vaccines have a relatively high rate of "significant" but not very dangerous side effects, such as temporary Covid-like symptoms. For example, a coworker of mine had strong Covid-like symptoms starting about 12 hours after getting the Pfizer vaccine; symptoms lasted about 24 hours.)
People in the US are generally significantly richer than those in most European countries (e.g. see tables of median income like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median). But I don't have a good understanding of what this actually means. Does anyone have any (anec)data about what the medianish American does with the 5-35% of their income that a comparable French/German/British person lacks? My vague impression (as a Briton who hasn't lived in the US) is some of the gap comes from working more, having bigger houses, and better healthcare (e.g. more frequent doctor visits). But probably someone has better insights. Also interested in the same question regarding the handful of European countries that are richer than/on part with the US (Norway and Switzerland are the main ones I think).
A huge part of it is house size. Average house size in the US is 2300 sq ft, average in the UK is 729 sq ft. That is a ridiculous gap, and housing costs in the US are where a lot of the income gets sunk.
Housing costs, sure; also I know there is higher spending on health care, and would hypothesize more spending on cars.
Is rationalism actually a good way to model the world? Is it better to assign only True/False/Unknown to propositions, and thus avoid being wrong when events you have assigned low probability to happen?
Scott has written on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/06/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-pop-bayesianism/
More directly: the point in life is not to minimize the amount you are wrong (at least not for most people). The goal is to achieve things. Probabilities is really useful if you want to make plans to achieve things.
I've learned more from being wrong than any life-coaching course or self-help book. The trick is is to admit that you're wrong and recalibrate your strategy.
But what sort of things are you trying to achieve? If you're trying to achieve a comfortable retirement before you die, I suppose you can assume that maximizing the diversity of your investment portfolio will protect you against the historical economic and political fluctuations we've seen in the past 70 years. But "past performance is no guarantee of future results." And suddenly an unexpected epidemic or natural disaster comes along.
Or you could spend your life planning for the worst case scenarios like the end of 21st Century civilization. But then if those scenarios never come to pass where will you be? In
some home-made bunker at the end of a dead-end road in Idaho?
Sorry, but I can't see how probabilities can guide your future life decisions.
As for probabilities, If you're trying to become something culturally worthwhile, like a famous musician or a famous author, the chances of that are vanishingly slim.
My entire life has been guided by improbable coincidences and being in the right place at the right time. All the planning I did had little impact on where I ended up. Luckily, even the most negative of these happenstances ended up being positive in the long run.
Tempo: Ahhh! Glad you followed through and put this up at the top level! I was going to wait until the next open thread, because this open thread has gotten pretty full. But I'll be happy to respond with my thoughts...
My answer is that *certain* questions are amenable to rational analysis. But there are huge number of questions that seem (at least to poor humble me) not answerable through any form of rational analysis that I've encountered (I'm not saying that there isn't a rational way to tackle these questions—at least at the meta-level—but that I haven't myself found them amenable to rational analysis). For instance, aesthetics is a subject that rational analysis can help us understand. I may be stereotyping my ACT audience here (and if I am, I apologize), but this group doesn't sound like group that's particularly interested in aesthetic questions. However, for me the question of why I perceive such diverse things, such as a work of visual art, a musical composition, a living creature, an astronomical object, or a another human being as beautiful has been an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember. There are pseudo-mystical psychological explanations (Jung), and various evolutionary just-so stories (evolutionary psychology), and various neoplatonist theories about why we respond to something with such an ineffable character as beauty. Many of you on ACT might not give two shits about beauty, but beauty has given me so much pleasure over the course of my life, that I want to understand why I respond the way I do when I'm in the presence of it (whatever it is!). I have not been able to develop a rational way to test any of the theories I've heard (or theories I've developed on my own). The best I can say is that certain combinations of color and form are beautiful to me. But I can't predict what I'll find to beautiful. I've run my hypotheses through various Gedankenexperiments, but all those have led me to dead ends. Would an intelligent land crab find a human woman to beautiful the way I find certain human women to be beautiful? I doubt it. But an intelligent land crab might find a brilliant sunset beautiful the way I find it beautiful. And an intelligent land crab with a high-powered telescope might find the Crab Nebula to beautiful the way I find it beautiful. But I might not see the intelligent land crab's mate as beautiful (unless she/he had a shell with rainbow colors). ;-)
So, I find rationalism limited in its usefulness to problems that don't concern the physical world.
Full disclosure. I am a mystic who was raised in an atheist household who has a firm grounding in the sciences and the scientific method. But when I put on my rationalist hat, I what would be called a Critical Rationalist — i.e. I am a Popperian when it comes to my understanding of knowledge and what is knowable. Unlike Scott, I am not Bayesian. Although I find Scott's way of approaching problems to be a useful tool, I don't think Bayesianism is the be-all and end-all of rational inquiry. And although I like to frame my mystical inquiries in a rationalist framework of questions (if only properly categorize them), I don't find that rationalism yields any useful answers for me. Finally, although I may sound like an Aristotelian when I respond to things like the god/no-god question, for heaven's/no-heaven's sake don't call me one!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/06/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-pop-bayesianism/
New post up over on "History for Atheists" about Hitler's religious beliefs (or lack of them). Read it not so much for the political argy-bargy but for things I had never heard of previously, like the World Ice Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre
"Hörbiger had various responses to the criticism that he received. If it was pointed out to him that his assertions did not work mathematically, he responded: "Calculation can only lead you astray." If it was pointed out that there existed photographic evidence that the Milky Way was composed of millions of stars, he responded that the pictures had been faked by "reactionary" astronomers. He responded in a similar way when it was pointed out that the surface temperature of the Moon had been measured in excess of 100 °C in the daytime, writing to rocket expert Willy Ley: "Either you believe in me and learn, or you will be treated as the enemy."
Link to post: https://historyforatheists.com/2021/07/hitler-atheist-pagan-or-christian/
Dang! I should have done a book review of _The Morning of the Magicians_ by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier for Scott's book review contest! It's the ultimate Illuminati conspiracy theory book! I read it as teenager, and it led me down all sorts of rabbit holes of investigation — like the Hörbiger hollow earth theory — and that Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler's personal photographer before WWII, was an occultist (he very likely was) who trained Hitler in his hand gestures which were used to hypnotize his audiences with his orations. But my take on Hitler is that he was talented sociopath who could adapt his spiel to whomever he was trying to bamboozle. The most likely explanation is that he didn't have any core beliefs beyond his own ambition. But a significant number of his followers had all sorts of pagan, occult, and pseudoscientific beliefs. And Hitler seemed to have an either or open mind to investigating them or a willingness to indulge his most loyal followers in their eccentricities. Why else would have authorized a crackpot expedition to Tibet in 1938? — which was the homeland of the swastika symbol which he consciously appropriated as his party's symbol.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2679618/Hitlers-call-arms-How-Fuhrer-photographer-help-practice-extreme-hand-gestures-body-language.html
https://tricycle.org/magazine/hitler-and-himalayas-ss-mission-tibet-1938-39/
The new Tesla Model S Plaid accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in 1.98 seconds. If you put the car in reverse and jammed your foot on the gas pedal, would it accelerate backwards at the same rate?
I ask this because my own car is a clunky gas-powered vehicle with an automatic transmission, and it only has one gear setting when I put it in reverse mode. If I put it in reverse and jam on the gas pedal, it would accelerate backwards at a slow rate, and the 0 to 60 figure might be 20 seconds.
However, I've heard that electric cars like the Tesla Model S only use one gear. If that's the case, then shouldn't their forward and reverse acceleration rates be the same?
Not sure about Tesla specifically, but generally electric motors are often not symmetrical, they can be optimized for one direction of rotation. And then there's aerodynamics of course.
The answer is Tesla could make it roughly the same (ignoring differences in aerodynamics), but don't for safety reasons. I cannot think of much in the hardware that would only work in one direction. There might need to be firmware changes to the motor drive hardware.
Given the large overlap between Republicans and anti-vaxxers, Covid will kill proportionally more Republicans. Will those numbers be large enough to affect future elections? If so, would the Republicans realize this and change tactics?
Unlikely, given that last I saw, the best guess IFR for Covid is about 0.5%. While that's a humanitarian disaster at a population level, it's of only marginal electoral significance even if every single Republican and zero Democrats were to catch Covid.
And it's not going to be 100% Republican and 0% Democrat, for several reasons:
1. The correlation with anti-vaxxing and partisanship, while remarkable, isn't anywhere near 100%. Pre-covid anti-vaxxers actually leaned slightly Democratic (12% of Dems and 10% of Reps in a 2015 Pew survey), and as of June 21 (KFF Vaccine Monitor poll) 88% of Democrats, 65% of Independents, and 54% of Republicans self-report as already vaccinated or planning to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
2. Regardless of party ID, 85% of people 65 and older are already vaccinated. Vaccine refusers skew younger, presumably healthier, and less likely to die if infected.
3. Vaccination rates are high enough that even vaccine refusers will be partially protected by herd immunity: they're less likely to be exposed to Covid, and Covid outbreaks will burn out faster, because many people around them will be immune.
4. A lot of people already caught Covid, and many of those already died, before the vaccine was widely available. These deaths (and the natural immunities among the survivors) were not skewed by partisan trends in vaccine hesitancy, although they likely were (slightly) skewed by partisan trends in lockdown policies and voluntary risk mitigation behavior.
5. I expect partisan anti-vaxxers are clustered in warmer climates and more rural areas, both of which tend to be less vulnerable to Covid outbreaks.
Re: the relation between warmer climates and lower infection rates is provably false by the outbreaks in Brazil and India. Likewise population density seems to be a questionable variable. There's no conclusive evidence that there's a negative correlation between population density and the spread of the virus. Rural India is seeing a higher death rate than urban India (although the actual infection rate is hard to gauge, the stats from rural India are probably significantly undercounting the actual percentage infected).
Also in regards to herd immunity. The overall vaccination rate (and the seropositive rate due to previous infections) of a particular country may be high enough for herd immunity to *theoretically* kick in (depending on the R0 number you select, which is another hairy question). But let's say you have a region of that country with population that has a particularly low vaccination rate and a low seropositive rate. The virus could wreck havoc with that population before a it burns itself out and finally runs up against the higher vaccinated / seropositive populations. Herd immunity calculations assume a uniform distribution of vaccinated + seropositive subjects. Your mileage may vary in the real world. Just sayin...
I was using "herd immunity" in the looser continuous sense, not the more common binary sense of whether or not there's enough immunity to drive R below 1 with no special social/behavior precautions taken to reduce contagion. If R0 is 3.0 and half the population is immune, then effective R will be 1.5 and outbreaks will spread proportionally more slowly and will burn itself out much faster than had only 10-20% of the population had prior immunity.
Similarly, I don't think Brazil and India conclusively disprove lower infection rates with warmer climates. There's a ton of other confounding variables going on with those countries as well, and the noise from the confounders make the existence of a couple countries with warm climates and widespread Covid infection rates only very weak evidence against warm climates protecting against Covid spread on the margins. It's only strong evidence against a hypothetical claim (which I was not making) that Covid can't have widespread outbreaks in warm climates.
That said, the evidence in favor of Covid being marginally less prone to spread is fairly weak. We know that other droplet- or aerosol-spread respiratory viruses (most notably colds and the flu) are seasonal, spreading more readily in cold weather, which suggests a prior in favor of Covid working the same way. And data from the US and Europe does seem to show a seasonal correlation with bigger waves of spread in winter and early spring, but that's massively confounded by the initial wave of the pandemic hitting in March 2020, lockdown fatigue setting in later in the year, and more contagious variants emerging.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has behaved in some very unexpected ways. IMHO many of the experts (but not all of the experts) have latched on to pat explanations and narratives to explain away observed anomalies rather than seeing them as potential questions worth investigating.
Be that as it may, even though SARS-CoV-2 might share the same aerosol transmission vector as influenza, it's nothing like the flu! The mutational patterns of CoVs are quite distinct from flu viruses. Influenza is highly tolerant to transposon-based insertional mutations, and they swap "chunks" of their genome around, and that creates a rapid antigenic drift. This is one of the commonly *accepted* reasons for the flu's tendency to follow a cycle of seasonal waves.
And before you think that the flu has to stick to a seasonal cycle, the great H1N1 pandemic of 1918-19 wasn't really seasonal. In the British Isles the first wave peaked June 1918, and the second wave started during a warm September of that same year and continued into November. The 3rd wave didn't start until February 1919 and it peaked in March of that year. This pattern does not match the behavior of the flu viruses we've seen over the past half century or more. No one seems to have remarked upon why the pattern of H1N1 pandemic doesn't match the current patterns. But back to Coronaviruses...
CoVs, or at least the β-CoVs that I've read up on, have remarkably stable genomes. And because of their stability, SARS-CoV-2 wasn't expected to follow the cyclic flu pattern — at least some epidemiologists early on suggested we'd see a more "random" pattern of outbreaks. And they seem to have been proven right. As for SARS-CoV-2's genomic stability, since the start of the pandemic there have only been a couple of dozen point mutations in an RNA strand that has approx 30K potential locations for mutations to occur. And the same mutations have been repeated over and over again in different variants (but in different combinations). Almost all of the mutations have been restricted to the S1 and S2 segments of the spike protein — S2 being the "the stalk, and the location of the infamous Furin cleavage site (FCS), and S1 being "the head", and the location of the receptor-binding domain (RBD). BTW: one of the surprises to the virology community was how a seemingly minor mutation to the FCS could make the virus so much more contagious. Their original models assumed that it was mutations to the RBD that would make the virus more contagious. Changes to the FCS weren't seen as something that could make the virus more contagious. Here are some COVID questions to chew on...
--> An interesting question that no one has really discussed is why the rest of the SARS-CoV-2 genome is so frigging stable. We understand that there are selective pressures on the spike proteins — because that's how the virus propagates itself. But why are the mutations (which are supposed to be the result of a random process) mostly clustered on the spike?
--> Another interesting question is why did the flu season not happen in 2020 and it also seems to be stifled in southern hemisphere right now in 2021. The pat explanation is that masking and behavior changes have stopped the flu in its tracks. But the flu has also not been seen in countries which weren't having major COVID-19 outbreaks and/or weren't promoting masking behaviors. There's a poorly understood phenomenon called viral interference. It seems like that might be an interesting avenue of research for a some PhD candidate hungry for a thesis subject.
--> And let's talk about the R0 value — err values. Even early on in the epidemic, before any the mutations that made it more contagious came along, the estimated R0 values were ALL OVER THE PLACE. Some countries saw estimated R0's of 1.5, others as high as 6.0. The pat explanation was that the wide differences were due to masking behaviors and such. But there were a few studies that saw a inverse relationship between the frequencies of certain HLA proteins in given populations and R0 values seen in the first wave of the epidemic. But the HLA theory may have been blown out of the water because the epidemic is now hitting countries (like Vietnam) who breezed through the first wave of the pandemic.
--> Another interesting anomaly is the differing behaviors of the B.1.1.7 (Alpha, British) variant, and the B.1.617.2 (Delta, Indian) variant. The initial NERVTAG report that sounded the B.1.1.7 alarm, quoted in vitro studies that suggested that B.1.1.7 was 50-70 percent than contagious than the variants it was replacing. What's interesting, but no one seems to have remarked upon, is that the predicted B.1.1.7 surge turned out to a dud in the UK — even though it virtually replaced all the other variants in the UK (!). By March of this year >95% of all the cases were B.1.1.7, but it didn't create a new surge. And it didn't take off as expected among the non-vaxxed population when the UK loosened up its masking requirements. On the other hand, B.1.617.2 (which in vitro studies showed is 70 to 80 percent more contagious than B.1.1.7) is behaving like predicted, and it's taking off like gang busters among the unvaxxed population in the UK (and it's starting the same pattern in the US). Anyway, no one seems to have been able to explain why B.1.1.7 was such a dud. In fact no one seems to care.
If I haven't bored you to death with my COVID-19 passion we can discuss why I think herd immunity is a mirage that will be always beyond our reach. But I'm going to bed now. Good night.
Note that due to high rates of vaccination among the elderly, the IFR (infection fatality rate) must be far below 0.5% by now (and yeah, as you mentioned, anti-vaxxers often live in less vulnerable locations so they have more luxury to take Covid less seriously).
I think you're confusing of CFR (case fatality rate) with IFR (infection fatality rate). CFR is the number of deaths per identified cases. And post-vax CFR rates would definitely be reduced, because the cases would generally be much less severe for the vaxxed elderly.
IFR is mortality as a percentage is the overall infection rate in a population. While CFR's are easy to determine if the public health authorities keep track of the hospital stats, IFR's are more difficult to assess. It's assumed that there are more infections above those that are reported and hospitalized. So, IFR's require that studies be done to see what percentage of the population show up as seropositive.
The IFR shouldn't change much when vaccination rates are low, because the majority of the infections would be among the unvaxxed. IFR’s might begin to trend down when the majority of the population is vaccinated, though, because the infection numbers between unvaxxed and vaxxed will start to even out. Example: Say 90% of population is fully vaccinated with a 90% effective vaccine, theoretically, 50 percent of the new infections would be from the remaining unvaxxed population and 50 percent from the vaxxed population (10 percent unvaxxed = 10 percent vaxxed who have breakthrough infections). Because the vaxxed will have better outcomes for their infections, in that scenario the IFR for vaxxed infections would be very low, while unvaxxed would have higher IFRs. So overall IFR for all infections be lower. Clear as mud? ;-)
NB: I’ll admit I’m unclear whether epidemiologist are only interested in raw IFRs of unvaxxed populations for their models. Or whether they incorporate the vaxxed IFRs into their modeling. I assume they do, but…
I said IFR and meant IFR. The CFR is not relevant to OP's question.
Whatever.
> The IFR shouldn't change much when vaccination rates are low, because the majority of the infections would be among the unvaxxed.
In areas where vaccination rates are relatively low, they still tend to be pretty high *among the elderly*. If we had a disagreement here, I am not sure what it was about.
First time attend this wonderful thread, thanks Scott Alexander.
The post is mainly for asking feedback about the discussion tool I am building.
Pnyx: https://www.usepnyx.com
The reason behind the project is simple, discussion feel like a mess in internet right now due to various forums sort discussion like blog posts, social media are flooded with new content day by day. And people are constantly distracted.
The place like ACT open thread for people to discuss wide variety of discussion in one single place seems lacking.
In the meanwhile we are hard to find a dedicated, persistent place built for public discussion with specific topic. These place's discussion almost will seem like a mess due to everyone is posting but no one is organizing( not mod did like reddit, but to organize, group same discussion in same group..etc)
I wish to toggle these situation with Pnyx, with a graph-oriented discussion tool.
Wish to hear your feedbacks and look forward to discuss here.
The site I would like to see is a hierarchical/graph-based "evidence clearinghouse" where big claims are built out of smaller claims, and the smaller claims are backed by evidence.
e.g. let's take the claim "lipid nanoparticles from the Covid vaccine (?) are most concentrated in the ovaries 48 hours after vaccine administration". Various comments and evidences for and against, as well as criticisms of the claim itself, can be offered:
1. Criticisms of claim:
- "This claim doesn't specify which vaccine it is talking about".
- "This claim is ambiguous. Is it a claim about the concentration in ovaries relative to other body parts, or is it a claim about when concentration peaks in the ovaries?"
2. Evidence for: https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/
3. Evidence against / debunk: "The claim that the concentration of LNP (lipid nanoparticles) is highest in the ovaries after 48 hours appears to be not only false, but a "pants on fire" kind of lie: the following source shows the concentration as being 259 times higher at the injection site, and 170 times higher in the liver. https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/covid-19-vaccines-dont-affect-ovaries-or-fertility-in-general-the-vaccines-are-highly-effective-at-preventing-illness-and-death/
The chart showing the concentration as being highest in the ovaries simply leaves out the data for the injection site, for the liver, and for the spleen (which has over 10x higher concentration than the ovaries)."
Maybe like StackOverflow, "bad" claims could be "closed" in favor of better replacement claims (e.g. a better replacement claim would be "48 hours after administration of the Pfizer vaccine, lipid nanoparticles containing vaccine particles are more concentrated in the ovaries than in any other organ".
You can imagine other types of information attached to claims, such as "related claims", and sources to show who is popularizing it or where it came from.
So of course, a bigger claim like "Covid mRNA vaccines are dangerous" would be built out of smaller ones like "it goes to your ovaries" and "VAERS deaths OMG OMg" but importantly, subclaims must be litigated independently - you don't argue about the ovaries issue on the higher-level claim.
Hmm, I guess I site like this should make it super easy to break things apart into linked/related claims, as for example "concentration is 259 times higher at the injection site" can be treated as a separate claim, and should be treated separately if someone wants to argue against it, but then it needs to be linked to the "ovaries" claim in an way that is intuitive to users...
Let's say I wanted to manufacture an organic compound that is currently made through an industrial chemical process (imagining metoprolol or some common medication). Is there any sort of library of enzymes and their functions people know of that you could search to try and develop a biosynthetic pathway?
Or (seems much less likely) is there any work being done into designing enzymes to do specific reactions?
I have recently started medication for ADHD (Brand name Vyvanse, chemical name Lisdexamfetamine). I have found it to be enormously helpful with productivity. However, I am wary of negative side effects. To that end, I have kept track of my resting heart rate before and after the medication with a smart-watch.
I found that my resting heart rate in the weeks prior to starting to take the drug was 54.7 bpm, and in the weeks while taking the drug it was 61.4, a difference of 6.7 bpm. I performed a t-test using scipy, and found that this was significant with a p-value of 0.01.
Is this something I should be worried about? I have heard that higher heart rates are associated with higher general mortality. My layman's look at studies suggests that this effect only exists at heart rates above 75 bpm.
For context, I am a mostly healthy 25 year old man, with reasonably good cardio fitness (regularly runs 5km in ~30 minutes).
I’m not a doctor but a resting heart rate of less than 62 seems fine to me. If your rate goes below 60 bpm, technically you are experiencing bradycardia, which I understand to be just fine for active individual.
My heart rate runs below 60 a lot but I log a lot of miles on my touring bicycle. Again, not a medical professional so if I the slight bump in heart rate worries you, it might be a good idea to run your concern by your regular doctor. If for nothing else to ease your anxiety.