That post seems likely to be a misunderstanding, but I'm not sure it relates to the issue raised in that post. The only part of it Minaj could check herself without a rather serious violation of privacy is that the cousin's friend actually did claim that his infertility was a consequence of the COVID vaccine.
So the question is whether there's enough improved effectiveness of the 152M to justify the 6M in expenses. (I don't consider the distinction between "admin" and non-admin in general, but particularly not here, when none of it is direct programs anyway.)
6.7% administration costs doesn't sound high to me, but GiveWell argues against the common practice of trying to minimize overhead costs in a post entitled "The worst way to pick a charity":
> Today, the most common way that donors evaluate charities – when they evaluate them at all – is by asking questions about financials, such as “How much of my donation goes to programs vs. salaries?” This approach makes no sense.
My (admittedly biased) opinion based on speaking with those I know who work at charities (one of whom is now directly involved in evaluating the effectiveness of interventions across a number of charities) very much agrees with GiveWell's conclusion here. Admin overhead is a nice number, but it's really not representative of effectiveness at all. Throwing money around when you don't know what works isn't helpful, and you need not just generic admin people or quants, but educated domain experts with actual field experience and consistent data collection to be able to even try and work out if your interventions were worthwhile, or if you just got lucky and, for example, people had a few good years without droughts when you were working in the area trying to help improve people's food security. Because without the metis that comes with actually working in foreign countries with people it's very easy to ask the wrong questions and not actually gain useful information, and you're more likely to come up with a poorly-designed intervention in the first place. You saw this all over the place a few decades ago. It's improved a lot since, there's a much better understanding of this at charities. Most orgs aren't just flying in, building some wells, and then leaving anymore.
But equally it can be hard to get those experts and the data if you don't have the funds to spend on that. The person I know could 100% be earning way more money with their skills in industry or finance or even academia (they had a pretty lucrative tenure-track position which they gave up to do charity work). They charge well below what they could given their skills because they care and they know that a lot of charities can't afford market rates. But there's a very limited supply of people like them in the world and only so many hours in the day. And that's the curse of pursuing the "low overhead" number. It means that charities are less likely to be sure that they're actually helping because they can't land a contract with someone like this person, and they can't afford someone who isn't as motivated by doing good.
My interpretation is that GiveWell does both its own charitable work (researching charity effectiveness and promoting effective charities) and forwards grants to effective charities.
Some funds are unrestricted and GiveWell can spend them however they want, including their operating expenses. Others are restricted, usually meaning they have to use them for grants to other charities.
The report you linked to talks about GiveWell's operations, financed using unrestricted revenue.
Where does the number of 1/3 of revenue sent to charity come from? Is it because unrestricted revenue was $18M and expenses were around $5.6M? I don't think the excess goes to charity but rather stays with GiveWell as an asset.
**Excess assets**
GiveWell has an excess asset policy saying that "our cash flow projections show us having 12 months' worth of unrestricted assets in each of the next 12 months". If they have $12.5M left over from the previous year, shouldn't they donate some of their revenue?
They say no: "Using our most conservative COVID-19 projections, we estimate that we could fall below the threshold of 12 months of assets as of July 2021. Hence no action is needed to satisfy the excess assets policy."
Also note that they received a single unrestricted $7.5M donation that made up 42% of their revenue. They have decided to eventually use some of this for grants: "we propose to irrevocably restrict a portion* of this donation to grants at GiveWell’s discretion". (*about half I think)
I think they believe 2019 was an outlier, and want to keep that some of that large donation for operating expenses 2020 and 2021.
Missed something here: GiveWell has an excess asset policy saying that **they want to be in a position so that** "our cash flow projections show us having 12 months' worth of unrestricted assets in each of the next 12 months".
Also, I think the point of GiveWell is to do only admin and not helpone one directly. They don't go out and deworm children, they gather info on whether it's better to deworm children or give them bed nets to protect against malaria.
I've had a scammer try to lead me through a cashiers check scam. (Briefly: I was selling an item on Craigslist, they said they'd mail me a check and could I pay the movers out of it. The scam continues with "the check is fake but it's a cashier's check so the bank gives you the money now, then someone -- likely you -- has to pony up when it's revealed the check is fake after all".) Not knowing the scam beforehand, I played along one step farther than I would've liked, and am currently in possession of the (presumed fake) check.
Question 1: is there some way to punish this behavior? I haven't been materially harmed (yet; the scammer does know an uncomfortable amount of information about me), but presumably writing fake checks is illegal even if they're not cashed. But, who would I report this to? My police department? "Their" police department (based on the address)?
Question 2: is there even enough information for anyone to do anything about it? I have a cashier's check (allegedly from a small business, not a person), a letter by which it arrived (which has a return address (possibly fake or just unrelated) and the USPS tracking information (however much that's worth)), and an email exchange (sent from a nondescript gmail account on their end). Obviously the check can be validated to be fake, but will there be any way to pin it on a specific person?
- local police department said "thank you for contacting us, since you weren't hurt there's nothing we're planning to do, but do let us know if you see unusual activity from the scammer knowing way too much about you". This makes sense (it's not clear why it would be my local police department's problem, as I'm unhurt and have no reason to think the scammer is local), but is only very slightly helpful.
- bank whose name was printed on the check said "we don't verify checks but feel free to send us a check image". Makes sense since, had I deposited the check, it wouldn't have been their problem, but also is unhelpful.
- the FTC said "thank you for adding this valuable data point to our database! We won't do anything about it specifically, but it will contribute to our overall knowledge about scams." I suppose there's a slim chance that this goes somewhere, maybe.
I'm still confused why the FTC instructs me to reach out to the USPS. They were handed an envelope and delivered it, why would they be responsible for anything else?
The Postal Inspection Service (the law enforcement agency associated with the USPS) has jurisdiction over the use of the postal service to commit fraud. I think they have this jurisdiction primarily for historical reasons: interstate mail fraud is primarily a federal law enforcement issue, and in the early days of the Post Office there weren't a lot of other federal law enforcement agencies that were better options to investigate it. For example, the FBI didn't exist until 1908 and the Secret Service didn't exist until 1865. The US Marshalls did exist all the way back to 1789, but mail fraud was arguably further from their core function (enforcing orders of federal courts and apprehending fugitives from federal law) than from the Post Office's internal law enforcement arm (investigating and prosecuting claims of fraud and other misconduct by or against postal employees).
That's a pretty elaborate scam. A lot more sophisticated than "I want to give you $10,000 so all I need is your checking account and routing numbers." Sorry you were taken on this one. It seems like the con artist is pretty crafty so I don't think it will be easy to nail him, her or them.
The FTC has a fraud reporting website. It sounds like the idea is to triage incoming reports and route them to the appropriate law enforcement agencies:
I found the link from the FTC's public education article on certified cash fraud. They also suggest reporting to the postal inspector's office and your state attorney general's office.
You could probably also try contacting the fraud department of the bank that the forged check purports to be issued by, but that might be overkill if you've already reported to the FTC, USPS, and your state.
I would start with my local police department. It may just get buried and never go anywhere, though, so interact with the officer/liaison you work with enough to get a sense of whether you feel like that's enough. If not, you can contact the agencies responsible for the various crimes involved. Bank-type fraud is the FTC, I think. The USPS has a law-enforcement division. I'd start there, if you don't get the warm fuzzy helpful feelings from your local PD.
Even if it goes nowhere it will still end in some statistics. Not sure how much this would be worth, but I reported bicycle theft solely so it would appear in statistics (with faint hope that large enough numbers will encourage police to do something about it)
Mondrian did some good representational art before he started with rectangles.
It sounds like the essential thing is freedom to change direction combined with a sort of good taste-- feeling a drive to explore and an ability to see what's promising.
Traditional Asian artists presumably followed a different trajectory, where they imitated for decades, but gradually developed their own style.
I wonder whether anyone started exploring after their hot streak.
This might be in contrast to Root-Bernstein's theory that scientists make important discoveries when they work on a practical problem which is adjacent to their field, with Pasteur as an example.
Isn't it obvious that people tend to have a period of experimentation (and mimicking of others) before they find their niche, which they then stick with?
And I think that (parts of) Asia value tradition much more, so it makes perfect sense for their artists to spend lots of time closely following tradition, as that makes for a perfectly good career. If it takes time for a person's style to become tradition, in a tradition-loving society, you can expect artists to gradually be allowed to express their style more and more over time.
> Isn't it obvious that people tend to have a period of experimentation (and mimicking of others) before they find their niche, which they then stick with?
May be quite obvious, but fact that both are useful is often missed.
In thinking about the horrible performance of the FDA regarding COVID I was wondering if there is a country that has a good equivalent.
In thinking about Scott's anecdote about the kids unnecessarily dying because because of the FDA, when a viable alternative was available I was wondering why someone did not set up a clinic in a nearby country to give the treatment. Athletes used to go to Mexico to buy steroids all the time. Why can't people suffering from illnesses that have effective but illegal treatments do the same thing?
Anders Tegnell, the State Epidemiologist of Sweden, pretty much screwed up the Swedish response to COVID-19. In many ways his performance was worse than the FDA, because he was against masks or social distancing, and reliance on a herd immunity strategy (despite his recent denials, there are his public statements and released emails from early in the outbreak that he favored a herd immunity strategy over disrupting the economy by lockdowns). The FDA changed its strategy as they gathered more data about the epidemic. Tegnell stuck to his guns. Mortality rates were much higher than Norway or Denmark which were countries that took lockdown measures.
Paul Krugman quipped on twitter: "The new Eurostat numbers say that Sweden and Denmark have had identical economic performance: ~8% GDP decline over past year. So all Sweden got from its herd immunity strategy was a bunch of dead Swedes..."
They can, but they can also go to the clinic in Mexico that will take their money and give them nothing but snake oil. Or legitimate but substandard treatment on the cheap. And they have a hard time knowing which is which. The FDA is more conservative than it ought to be, but it's pretty good at making sure that if you go to a clinic in the United States you're not getting snake oil.
And at making sure your insurance company knows that you're not getting snake oil, so that they'll be willing to pay for it. Maybe.
Offshore clinics do exist, but they are a niche market because they need a combination of niche treatments that the FDA uniquely disallows, and patients rich enough to afford the sort of concierge physicians who will research and steer them to the not-snake-oil offshore clinics. Or overeducated high-IQ weirds who can research that themselves and then self-finance international travel and medical care.
Re. clinics in Mexico: Maybe it's because I speak Spanish, but I find it fairly easy to get very good treatment in Mexico; or at least better treatment than in states.
Eg, I've been to three dentists in the states since I turned 18, and every single one recommended between 1 and 7 unnecessary surgeries; between fillings, crowns, and something to do with gums.
I then go to the dentist in mexico, where they clean my teeth and send me on my way.
I then go to the retired family friend dentist who did my pre-18 care, show him my xrays, and he says "These are all fucking fine, and this one is a maybe. Use floridated toothpaste".
That's an unusual run of bad luck in American dentists, I think. Sorry you had to go through that.
And to your bigger point, yes absolutely. In any low-income country, there's going to be some decent low-cost health care available to those who "speak the language", literally and figuratively. In the case of Mexico, that's going to include Mexican-Americans of varying legal status, in need of cheap health care and able to conveniently cross the border. If you can tap into that, great.
If you see a clinic that specifically caters to English-speaking gringos, that's when it gets harder to sort out the snake-oil salesmen.
Oddly, dental treatment is a lot more expensive in Ireland than medical treatment, due to many dentists simply refusing to take medical card patients. So the private practices charge private rates, and they do seem to recommend very expensive surgeries (a co-worker a few years back was trying to get a dentist to treat her for less than the €2,000 one quoted her for a procedure).
I think matters are getting more expensive, as it is becoming the custom in Ireland to have more work done on teeth and at younger ages (cue "in my day, it was maybe braces if you were a kid, fillings, and having your teeth extracted and replaced by dentures when older"); I was refused braces as a kid by a public health dentist - on the schools programme - because he claimed my teeth were fine even though I could see they were growing in slightly crooked. Luckily, they were only slightly crooked and haven't really affected me, but they are my two front teeth. Later on, we figured out the rationale was that this would be an expensive procedure and he wanted us to pay via his private practice if we really wanted it done.
I don’t know if it is ‘a run of bad luck’ as much as an unfortunately common experience; a lot of dentistry is not based on gathered evidence but rather ‘industry best practices,’ i.e. tradition and the new hotness, but also what bills for a lot. I don’t know that being outside the U.S. would improve this situation, but not knowing the ground would make it easy to get exactly this sort of nonsense diagnosis from many U.S. clinics.
Here's a price comparison list from a Hungarian clinic, to entice Irish patients that it's cheaper to fly out to Budapest, stay overnight, and have your teeth done than have them done at home:
It never even occurred to me that a clinic in the genre of Restaurant With English and Pictures On the Menu would even exist, which is A+ level blindness to other's experiences.
"Consider an isolated group of n students. They wish to assign themselves
unique student numbers from 1 to n (no repetitions!) in such a way that each
student will know his own student number, but each student should have no
information about any other student’s number. Devise a procedure for the
students to achieve their goal with 100% probability.
Some clarifications:
1 “isolated” means the students have no external aids of any kind (e.g.
no pencils or paper or hats); the only actions available to them are
talking to each other publicly or privately in groups of their choosing.
2 The students cannot conceal their real identities in any way. So if X
talks to Y , then Y recognizes X and Y recognizes X (for example, by
tone of voice, scent, etc.).
3 “no information” even excludes probabilistic information: student X
should have no estimates whatsoever about student Y ’s number except
that it is a number from 1 to n that is not his own.
4 You can assume that the students all want to achieve this goal, and
that they have “idealized minds” like in most thought experiments."
My extension is: why would this puzzle set a cryptographer's teeth on edge? What would they want the puzzle to demand instead? How would you solve that version, and how would you find a solution to this that's a long way from solving it?
Not possible, unless you have a really idiosyncratic definition of "no information." I know that my number is k, therefore I know that all other students' numbers are not k.
What's a good way to buy a fairly but not exceedingly fancy engagement ring?
My girlfriend went ring shopping and found a ring she really likes for about $13k, which is maybe 25% more than I'd like to spend. How possible is it to bargain down a speciality store for a riing? I've also found comparable-ish rings - same specs on the diamond to within ~0.1 carat, same setting, same band - on bluenile.com for ~9K, but of course that's a website and I'm hesitant to buy something without seeing it in person.
I live in NYC, so if anyone has experience navigating the Diamond District, that would be very helpful!
(Not interested in "don't buy a ring!" arguments, but I could MAYBE be persuaded to look into lab diamonds)
Are you sure? Last time I checked that was not the case. And why would it be? It's basically impossible to tell them apart (lab-grown diamonds are "too perfect") so how could there be a significant cost discount?
The cost discount is because most gemstones are cheaper to make en-masse in a manufacturing plant than to find naturally. White diamonds are a notable exception to this because diamond isn't the stable allotrope at atmospheric pressure and because nitrogen gas from air colours diamond; corundum (sapphire/ruby) is very cheap even at gem-quality, to the point that it's a viable replacement for glass if material strength and/or infrared transparency are needed (and without the gem-quality requirement, well, it's the most common grit on sandpaper).
How the price differential is maintained against arbitrage - a combination of provenance tracking (i.e. "I refuse to consider this a natural gemstone unless you can prove to me which mine it came from" - this is what the Kimberley Process does) and minor anomalies (things like lab-grown diamonds having their nitrogen substitutions in pairs because they originate from atmospheric N2 which isn't available underground, Verneuil rubies/sapphires having spiral strain because of the rotation of the crystal during the setting process, or general entropy indicating quicker cooling than occurs beneath the Earth).
Why people are still willing to buy natural gems (including diamonds) despite the price - gemstones are a luxury good generally bought as a form of wealth display, and natural gems verifiably cost more so they display wealth better than artificial ones.
I bought a moissanite engagement ring in 2010 and it was much cheaper than an equivalent diamond ring would have been, although that's probably not exactly what you mean by "lab-grown diamond".
From a quick search it sounds like prices for lab-grown diamonds have also dropped a lot in the last 3-4 years, possibly in part because De Beers saw the writing on the wall and built a massive production facility for them, per news reports.
Bluenile is reputable, not sure about their return policy. These days they can also tell you a lot about the fire of the stone without you looking at it- e.g. ideal cut, etc.
If I ever need a really fancy ring I'll probably get one from https://patrickadairdesigns.com or similar. They are a bit unusual, but absolutely gorgeous!
I was China-based at the time of my engagement, and I managed to get an engagement ring for about 1200 USD or so, but this was through a contact directly at a ring factory in China. I would aim to find someone who I know, or a friend of a friend that works in the industry and see how low I can get it - but this advice really depends on your social network and circumstances. Alternatively, I don't know if you travel to cheaper countries or states, but it might be worth it - a trip to South Africa combined with how much the same ring would be there could pay for itself plus make memories! It needn't be SA though, even cheaper part of States should be cheaper, most of the price of the ring is inflated anyway, and poorer states will have cheaper rings if you know where to look.
With that said - I got a ring that beautifully tells the story of who she is to me - something which is precious to her, and the price tag matters much less. She was worried that it was too expensive and was paranoid about losing it, so I eventually told her the price tag, much to her relief. If you have a good and healthy dynamic (as other posters have noted - if she insists on a preposterous display of wealth, that's a red flag) then I would recommend you to go looking for a ring that tells your story. Does it have intertwined red and yellow gold - maybe that can be meaningful to you? Mine has three kinds of gold (white, red, yellow) all coming together into the diamond, which to me symbolized three of her virtues that make her who she is (the diamond) and I honestly can't imagine that after a story like that on a romantic proposal, anyone would care about the price tag or carat of the ring!
This argument is not one of gwern’s best. He acknowledges that he’s willing to ‘kill a child’ to fly home over break, but thinks somehow that ‘killing a child’ would make Focus on the Family and their supporters reconsider their efforts… to… stop people from killing children?
He does get that in this context, he’s more callous and insincere than they are, right? They genuinely believe they are already spending money on preventing children from dying. Meanwhile, he’s sitting outside the arena spending money on frivolities.
The core argument is not about Focus on the Family, it is about recognizing how opportunity cost would drive people to be less frivolous with their money, Focus on the Family might be a bad supporting example for that argument, but I am not sure if that is sufficient to condemn the argument more generally.
Also I am not sure they are the worst supporting example, Focus on the Family is brought up because if they spent their money actually saving lives (say on African charities) instead of paying for advertisements to try and influence the American people they would save a large number of children's lives, where as the gains from their advertisements are more nebulous and almost certainly significantly smaller in terms of total children saved.
Obviously there are other explanation for their preferences, and the, 'this pro-life group is not maximally(utilitarianly) pro-life, lets point and laugh at the Christian hypocrites' style commentary has reached super saturation levels on the modern internet, which makes that particular example seem a bit more like a petty swipe than the others.
Finally, the only claim Scott makes towards being more sincere/less callous is that he is aware of the opportunity cost and they are not, it is not clear that Scott was wrong on that point either. Nothing here precludes that a person could be totally unaware of the concept of opportunity cost while still being a much more charitable/nicer/better person than Scott, it is just saying that making those costs more obvious might drive some people to be better.
I do think this is a bad argument(if it is sincere, but the whole thing feels tongue in cheek to me) though, just on the general grounds that trying to morally burden people like this is probably not particularly effective and I don't think guilting people into charity would work that well.
Apparently the title is literally, "A Modest Proposal - a tongue in check suggestion for a new unit of currency", which I probably caught out of the corner of my eye.
That’s my point. You cannot on the one hand argue that if people were aware of opportunity cost they would be shamed into spending less money on ‘frivolous’ things, while at the same time implicitly acknowledging that you, aware all this time of the opportunity cost, still spend money on things that are even by your own standards relatively frivolous.
Even more so, you can’t call things ‘frivolous’ simply because they don’t make sense to your values. To a Christian, donations to his church are turning, through ministry, very temporary wealth into potentially eternal salvation of people otherwise damned. You can’t get more effectively altruistic if you try—nothing else matters if that worldview is true.
This example does all the work of undermining the point; recognition of opportunity cost is not the problem and has never been the problem: the problem is that the average EA’s priorities do not align with that of the average person.
You might as well try to shame me for not spending enough money on my wife’s engagement ring. What if we denominated all currency in erings? $10k is an ering. What kind of idiot would I be spending 20 erings on a house when instead 20 women could have the erings of their dreams?
I don't really agree with the first paragraph. The idea that there might be degrees of frivolity seems trivially true and sufficient to save the argument. Imagine a counterfactual Scott who would be even more 'wasteful' relative to his own standards if he was ignorant of opportunity cost.
Christians optimizing for different things doesn't mean they have done so with a full (or any) understanding of opportunity cost and have made the correct choice with that understanding given their differing terminal goals. It is still totally possible that if they went from not understanding, to understanding opportunity cost, they would make different, both from their previous selves, and from Scott, choices. They might suddenly realize that, by their own standards, their previous spending was frivolous.
This doesn't seem like that much of a stretch honestly. I highly doubt that most Christian churches are even halfway close to optimized for saving souls, and could do wildly better with a more rational allocation of their funds.
You have failed to grasp the thrust of the joke. The joke is that if you realized your expenditures, which you use on things like Starbucks lattes and luxury doghouses, could have been used to save children.
This argument is *completely ineffective* on people who are already spending that money on saving children—or souls.
You can move the goalposts to the idea that maybe Christian efforts to save children or souls aren’t as effective as some hypothetical super-efficient evangelism, but that has nothing to do with the argument I’m criticizing, which is that people who are currently spending money on altruism are somehow unaware that they could be spending money on altruism.
The conversation we’re having is the facial problem with poor EA outreach in general: the naive idea that because people behave differently, that must mean that they are ignorant of basic concepts that clearly already motivate their existing behavior. If you want to change a philanthropist’s spending behavior, don’t just gesture vaguely at the definition of opportunity cost, assert without evidence that “this could do wildly better if it was more rational,” and think he’s magically going to change. Get him an efficient business plan and convince him that your yields are better with numbers. If you have no evidence, you don’t have a pitch, you just have condescension.
Convince her that sapphires are way better than diamonds (cause they are). Sapphires are way cheaper, they historically have been used for engagements until the modern diamond industry changed that, they are more chemically stable (I think), they come in pretty colors instead of boring white, and they don't have a bloody controversial industry behind them, the way that diamonds do in Africa.
You can get secondhand diamonds very cheaply (especially if you buy them upstate: avoid the diamond district!) and then have a jeweler fit them to a setting. A pair of recently engaged friends of mine did just that and saved a fair amount of money.
That said, the whole point of the engagement ring ritual is to demonstrate your commitment and provider bonifides by symbolically burning a quarter of your annual income. It's not supposed to be cost-effective: you may be better off using your savings with this method to get a larger used stone rather than save money on a smaller new stone of the same price.
Generally, secondhand diamonds are priced higher in pawn shops than loose new diamonds are priced online, so you would have to haggle to get a good deal.
Just get the one your girlfriend likes. There is no pragmatic difference between symbolically spending 9k and symbolically spending 13k. The ring is not worth either amount, and if you can afford 9k you can afford 13k; if you cannot afford 13k, you shouldn’t be spending 9k.
My wife’s engagement ring was a quartz. Our bands are tungsten.
A minor caution about ring band materials: if you're injured in such a way that your ring needs to be cut off to save your finger, that can be done much faster and more safely if your ring is a relatively soft material like gold or silver. Tungsten and titanium rings are extremely hard to cut through: it can be done, but it takes a lot longer (15+ minutes of grinding or sawing instead of a quick snip) and is very hard to do without further injuring your hand.
I worked briefly in a department store jewelry department. They has a hand crank circular saw - it looked something like a manual can opener - to cut through a ring if someone came in with an unbearably swollen ring finger. I was told that it usually took two cuts to free the finger. Fortunately I never had to use it.
Thank you for the warning, but we’re aware—we got them a half size up (for that and other reasons) and we just remove them when working with our hands or in a situation where they could be otherwise lost or snagged. Which is wise practice anyway since a ring on your hand is a huge safety liability unless it’s terrifically weak, nonconductive, and easy to break with slight pressure.
Indeed. I've observed that people who work with heavy lifting, heavy machinery, or electricity, or who are seriously into hobbies with similar risks (weightlifting, rock climbing, etc) often wear their rings on neck chains, Frodo-style, for exactly this reason.
I've also seen silicone placeholder rings that are relatively cheap to replace, nonconductive, and are designed to snap off if snagged.
Yes, my electrician wears one of those—considered it myself because I work with my hands a good bit some days, but I couldn’t get over how ugly silicone is, and I’m used to taking it on and off now.
If we're getting competitive, our wedding cost less than a tenth of the OP's desired ring budget, and that includes our ring budget and a goodly portion of our honeymoon..
Out budget was 500 dollars. Wedding on a Saturday at a local community center and my wife and I went back to work on Monday. Don’t recommend this but after 39 years we still get a good laugh about how our adventure began.
Nice! That’s an achievement! How many guests, though? We had I think 61 or 64.
I will admit to spending quite a bit on the honeymoon. Tickets to Maui are expensive where I am. But I managed to get a room 20 feet from the waves for a song, and it was all worth it.
Yes - about 60 guests for our reception too. All packed into our garden with everybody keeping their fingers crossed that it wouldn't rain (it didn't, but would have probably been fun if it had)
Maui would have been beyond our budget - but of course I'm envious! We had 5 days in Italy - Naples and Florence. Great memories.
Well, you have me beat on price efficiency then! We also were praying for no rain, got married on a long lawn in front of a nearby lake and while it was sunshine on us, storms passed on our north and south sides and about an hour after the reception ended it poured buckets on everything for the next 12 hours, so we were blessed.
I’m amazed you were able to get Italy at such a price, too. We actually didn’t do Maui until 2 years after the wedding, no vacations till then because we spent our finances on a 1928 fixer-upper which now we’ve got rented out. Like you said, great memories! when this thread brought it to mind my wife and I must have laughed about all this last night for an hour before bed.
I purchased my ring for my wife from JamesAllen, which is an online ring shop. It was in the price ring you are talking about and we were very happy with it.
if you want to do an ostentatious and unnecessary display of wealth, I can sell you a one of a kind exclusive ring NFT that has no environmental harm or slavery funding, at any price you want!
In re the inverse correlation between what's spent and marriage duration: I have an untested theory that elaborate/expensive wedding preparations lead to a sunk cost fallacy where people are reluctant to back out of a marriage they're dubious about.
Why bother? If you're comfortable spending $10,000 and you can extend to give her her heart's desire for a mere extra $3,000, I wouldn't hesitate. It's not a real estate deal, it's a token of irrational exuberance. So be irrationally exuberant.* Maybe it will be a story you tell each other for the next 65 years until the great-grandchildren start rolling their eyes and drifting off to the kitchen as soon as one of you starts up "Remember when...?" That would be amazingly cheap at $3,000.
------------------
* I mean, up to a point. I'm taking you at your word here that $10,000 for a ring is not a problem. Or to put it another way, if $13,000 seems like it's dangerously mortgaging your practical future, then probably $10,000 is also, and you should just write her a heartfelt letter on nice paper with a real pen in your own handwriting.
would you mind explaining to me why you are willing to spend 10K on a ring? I’m not criticizing your choices, it’s just that my parents exchanged pinecones for their engagement (which I don’t necessarily endorse), so spending that much on a ring is pretty foreign to me, so I’m curious about your reasoning
My city floods frequently these days, and I sometimes find myself in a situation where I need to figure out a route across town which avoids flooded streets. As far as can tell, Google Maps does not help. The local news only helps in so far as telling me some major areas of town to avoid, but not specifically with individual streets. For instance, if I want to get to the airport, there may be a route there, but it often involves a lot of trial and error: heading down a road and then discovering it's underwater at some point, turning around, trying a different path, etc.
I basically rely on personal experience and memory to chooses my route, which is probably not the optimal solution.
Is there a way to use technology to solve this problem? Obviously, a crowd-sourcing solution could work, but does such a crowd sourcing solution currently exist?
Is there a clever way to infer which streets are flooded using Google Maps?
You could get a GPS with topo maps, or just the topo maps, and that will tell you where the water has to be, and how to stay at an altitude that is consistently above it (once you know where it is).
Or download the 1m resolution topographic maps that the goverment made for flood risk analysis and get distracted by that python script that turns it into a minecraft world instead of leaving the house
Over a steady-state, sure, but city-scapes are chaotic and will have different drainage rates. I wouldn't be surprised that one area is flooded to 450' while another is flooded to 500' less than a km away.
Jesus, I would. A 50' head is enormous. Tsunamis are normally no more than half that high, and I'm sure you've seen the videos of tsunamis going through towns. Not much stops that water, and the rate at which it floods even open areas is faster than people running for their lives can escape.
Cities aren't flat environments though. You're better thinking in terms of multiple linked basins, so flooding can be at very different levels. We're not talking a single sheet of water so much as where water has pooled for some reason.
Do you know what the resolution of such a topo map tends to be? Because a street only has to flood for a horizontal distance of about 3 feet to be impassable. That tends to be the issue that makes navigating after a flood-inducing storm a mouse in maze problem. Also, the waterfall from an individual storm itself isn't consistent over a city.
An app that could combine recent waterfall data with a resolution of ~5 square miles with a topo map with a resolution ~16 square feet would be pretty useful, particularly if one could incorporate the waterfall data in a weighted manner over recent weeks to account for how absorptive the ground is. That still doesn't give one data about how quickly a given location drains, however, which is a function of the local storm drainage system, the ratio of concrete to dirt in the location, and the general topology of the region (because a street may flood more easily due to being at a local minimum).
Another approach could be using a network of phone/car GPSs to determine where cars are Uturn-ing frequently, because that would likely indicate high water, Or streets that have had absolutely zero traffic pass through them for several hours. Seems like Google Traffic could potentially determine that.
Or Uber could crowd-source flooded streets over their fleet of drivers across a city. Maybe they do? Currently, I wouldn't trust an Uber during a flood since I suspect they have no data about street flooding.
I'd be somewhat surprised if you need that kind of vertical resolution, unless you just live in a part-time swamp or something, and every little hillock and dip matters. Generally, a topo map (a typical resolutin on a printed map is 100' contours, but you can do much better with a GPS, although you'd have to maybe do the surveying painfully yourself) will tell you the general shape of the land, where the little hills and valleys are, and I expect there is some but not total correlation with where the roads and developments run.
My suggestion is that the entire gestalt of grasping that information will hopefully give you a 2D sense, or picture, of where the low-lying areas and channels are, and therefore where you are most likely to see water when the water comes. It's an old-fashioned way of approaching the problem, the kind of thing we did in the old says on a hike, when all we had to get from A to B in the mountains was a topo map and compass -- it was helpful, when you could get a view, to "orient" yourself to the local landscape, get a feel for where the local rises and valleys ran, the shape of things, in order to have a better feeling for where you were when you couldn't spot landmarks, for where you might find water, where it might be easier or harder going. The ability still lies within the human brain, even in these days of there's an app for that.
I'm curious about this problem on a practical level, but also find it an interesting puzzle on a theoretical level. If Google or Uber wanted to solve the problem and give you the information on a map app, what would they do?
There’s an interesting program to get real-time data on flooded streets identified by users, and to make predictions about other possible flooded area. It’s called Pin2flood.
I assume you have tried the very popular navigation app Waze, allows users to report road problems. It will typically at least detect the traffic slowdown caused by flooding and send you a different way, but also sometimes will also show direct flood warnings.
Good idea. However, I am only finding real-time traffic cameras on highways. My problem usually comes down to where to go once I'm off or before I reach the highway.
I see that Google Traffic uses crowdsourced GPS cellphone data. Seems like they could come up with an algorithm for determining which streets are likely to be flooded. (Absolutely zero traffic has gone down this normally well-trafficked block seems like a good indicator, particularly if traffic speed has ground to a halt nearby.) Perhaps using Google Directions would steer you away from a flooded street if only because there's likely to be a traffic jam on route to it?
The "43 ICUs" number seems basically impossible to check (and they don't claim to have checked it - probably it doesn't belong in the title of the article, even if it is postfixed with "Family Says"), but they link to the John Hopkins data for Alabama, which does show ICU occupancy in Alabama at 101% currently (102% last week), about half of which is listed as COVID-19, as the article says.
The citations of JHU and “ head of the Alabama Department of Public Health” support directly the claim that hospitals are near capacity, and that ICUs are at capacity.
I believe that they checked at least a bit “ A Cullman Regional Medical Center spokesperson, who declined to give specifics of Ray DeMonia's case, citing privacy concerns, confirmed to NPR that he was transferred from the hospital but said the reason was that he required "a higher level of specialized care not available" there.” and he was “transferred to Mississippi” and that he did get care “ he died on Sept. 1, some 200 miles away in an intensive care unit in Meridian, Miss.”
I believe the article, but the title implies he didn’t get care lol, I think interstate transfers are better
The rolling stone article and its kin didn’t provide any of this level of confirmation, the cullman regional medical center appears to confirm this specifically happened
I don't think many ACX readers will know who Garrison Keillor is unless the were munching granola and listening to NPR in the 70's and 80's but he publishes on Substack and had an interesting exchange with a reader after he wrote that he is ready to leave northern liberalism for some place like Texas where you are allowed to say what is on your mind.
Reader Question:
"Garrison, you said in a recent column that you’d like to move to Texas so you could express yourself fully in a way you can’t living in the North among progressive liberals. Then you neglected to say what sort of speech is forbidden up North? Come on, man. Be brave.
Lola
St. Paul"
Keillor response:
"You know very well what I meant, the righteous bullying that is now accepted in progressive circles even by people who resent it as much as I do. I went to a Balanchine ballet once at the University, music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and before the performance, the woman who asked us to turn off our cellphones also asked us to remember the Dakota people who lived on this land in the early 19th century. I don’t mind shutting up but this struck me as the sort of sanctimonious bullying that is going around these days. Why not a moment of silence in honor of Tchaikovsky who struggled with being gay in Russia or in honor of the difficulty of being a dancer?
I know people who are working their tails off on behalf of Native reservations with no casinos or oil wells where people are sunk in poverty and opiate addiction. God bless them. The people who campaign to affix a Dakota name to a lake named for a slave-owning racist (Calhoun) are getting off cheap. The woman honoring the Dakota with a moment of silence is getting off dirt cheap.
Sanctimonious bullies are riding high in blue states and have no traction whatever in red states. Every college professor in America knows that one complaint by an anonymous accuser can end a career, no hearing necessary. Read Anne Applebaum’s essay in the October Atlantic. A man wouldn’t have dared write that piece but thank goodness she did.
GK"
Anne Applebaum's essay is definitely spending one of your 3 visits to "The Atlantic" on.
"You know very well what I meant" = I no nothing about you, but I can make assumptions like nobody's business
"the woman who asked us to turn off our cellphones also asked us to remember the Dakota people who lived on this land in the early 19th century" = It's not what's forbidden, it's what those northerners are allowed to say
"Why not a moment of silence in honor of Tchaikovsky who struggled with being gay in Russia or in honor of the difficulty of being a dancer?" This is just weird. Does he expect Texans to wax lyrical about being gay in Russia?
Keillor never gives a specific example himself. Yeah it is a bit weird. I mentioned in another reply that GK is recovering from a seizure and his Substack articles have been pretty rambling since then. I also mentioned his pique might stem feeling he was unfairly dismissed by MPR.
The actual case against cancel culture is made by Anne Applebaum in her Atlantic article.
No, I wouldn't expect Tchaikosky's sexual orientation to be embraced in Texas either. GK was just venting with that remark.
The greatest thing about "cancel culture" is that now we have a NAME for the thing where a crazy Twitter mob demands people be fired over minor offenses, which makes it easy to target our ire on cancel culture itself...
Too late to tell you to set your DVR David, but I’m watching last night’s Bill Mahr. He interviews Anne Applebaum as his opening guest. Maybe you have On Demand or YouTube.
In the back of my mind I thought of the term as part of a right wing meme. After reading the Atlantic article I realized it was a useful bit of shorthand for a screwed up ‘liberal’ phenomenon.
It's nice to hear that Garrison Keillor is still out there. He was a favorite of my parents when I grew up. I started paying attention to him despite my parents, and found him to be a profoundly talented author and poet. I was saddened when his business relationship with Minnesota Public Radio was terminated due to allegations of sexual misconduct. I don't know what he was accused of or whether he was guilty or innocent.
Keillor can himself be sanctimonious, peevish, occasionally juvenile, and sometimes self righteous. But but he is usually interesting, and often brilliant. And I'm glad he is still working.
I'm not sure what to make of the sexual misconduct allegations either. I suspect it may be a case of applying new standards to old behavior.
I am also afraid GK's cognition may be slipping. He was recently hospitalized for the effects of a seizure and his Substack posts meander a lot more than usual. His original complaint about liberal bullying lacked any details at all, inspiring "Lola's" request to elaborate.
The temper tantrum quality of his response may have something to do with him feeling misjudged in his dismissal from MPR but I think he makes some valid points all the same.
The Anne Applebaum Atlantic essay he references is a long form treatment of what we are now calling cancel culture. It really is worth using one of your 3 un-paywalled visits per month to the Atlantic.
It gives many credible instance of a form of illiberal liberalism I hadn't really been read in on. Apparently I've been somewhat out of the loop on this. The bat guano craziness of the Right during the Trump era has distracted me from the bat guano craziness of the Left.
I can confirm the anecdote. I listened to them a good bit in the past and both the programing and the presenters (who had a very clear bias towards one side of the argument) usually were very generically woke.
That is a phenomenally uncharitable interpretation, and also a weird prescription to remedy it.
I mean, after every Planet Money or Freakonomics, should they give an equal time slot to a Marxist?
Even beyond that, I seem to recall hearing lots of free speech content on NPR. By your logic, shouldn't this guy going on and giving the opposite case be a good thing?
I didn't think i gave a remedy? Just described what i noticed. And if you think this is uncharitable, how would you describe it? I can't find any redeeming arguments given in that section, and the arguments that they did give were so flimsy I'm pretty sure a child could offer knockdown rebuttals against them.
That said, i disagree with your analogy because Planet Money or Freakonomics isn't describing a recommended course of action or advocating changes to the fundamental rights of citizens. If they were saying stuff like "the fed should raise interest" or "the government should reduce tariffs" then there might be room to debate. But I'm pretty sure they don't talk about any of that, they just say "you should invest in Apple" or "401ks are down" (i have not listened to them much, though)
I can't recall hearing any full sections from NPR about the pros of free speech, so maybe i just missed them. But i think even if they did, presenting an argument against it in isolation without any pushback or counter arguments is just blindingly stupid. It's about as reasonable a position as me commenting one day "i think innocent until proven guilty is a bad position because it lets criminals get away. look at all the criminals we've got! We should get rid of it to solve this problem." It doesn't matter if the next day i post the opposite, offering this single statement in isolation with no further qualification is idiotic.
Also vaccine mandates for hospital nurses who are going to be working in close proximity with patients who are in critical condition and many of whom are old seem entirely reasonable and normal, both for Covid and for other diseases (not that you said otherwise!)
It's at least somewhat looming: my institution is partnered with a hospital which issued a vaccine mandate a few months ago but the official deadline isn't for another few days.
I overheard a bunch of HVAC guys and electricians grousing about it the other day: I knew we were definitely already going to lose hospital staff, but judging by the mood it seems like it might include at least some of our operating engineers, custodians, security guards, and pretty much every other blue collar position. A lot of hospitals will be shorthanded generally, especially in the current labor market.
I think staffing is generally the main bottleneck for hospital patients. The actual cost of a bed and treatment equipment and physical space are, I think, much easier to provide than trained staff. Also see the high price fetched by traveling nurses nowadays
I tried quite a few antidepressants (and other pharmaceutical mood treatments) in the past before giving up on them. Recently, things have gotten to the point where I'm reconsidering getting treatment, particularly after coming across Dr. Ken Gillman's content online about how underrated MAOIs have become (to illustrate, apparently many people who fail ECT respond very well to MAOI antidepressants).
Needless to say, I'm interested in giving one of these meds a try. However, none of them are on the market where I live (a country in E. Europe), and I'm putting this out there hoping someone might know how I could get a prescription for one (and the medication itself), ideally without having to travel to another country.
I should mention I've already had a trial of Moclobemide (prescribed abroad, way before Covid), but AFAIK, that's considered a very weak antidepressant, likely owing to it not being an irreversible MAOI, like Nardil or Parnate.
Thank you if you read this and any feedback would be highly appreciated.
I've tried to use my Google-fu to see if my South-East Europe area could be of help. Unfortunately, everyone here has to order from UK or such. Still, a user of a forum (depression.org but in local language basically) says that he's been getting MAOI no problem in Zagreb by having his doctor write a prescription in English, and then he could show it to the UK online pharmacy that would ship it, and he'd pay on arrival to the postman. I don't know if that is an option for you, or you could ask the Zagreb pharmacy (Dolac was the name he mentioned although I do not know them due to not being from Croatia) - hope this helps!
> Methane has 28x the warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year time horizon (https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html) but I think it's like 80x over a 30-year horizon or something like that. A noteworthy result of this is that if our CH4 output is stable, then CH4 levels won't increase in the long run. By contrast, CO2 accumulates, so in the long run the CO2:CH4 ratio should continue increasing. If we look at the 100-year time horizon, then, natural gas producers would have to leak about 3.7% of all their CH4 in order to produce the same amount of global warming via leaking as they produce via burning (remember, coal produces about 2x the CO2, so a 3.7% leak would put it on par with coal in terms of greenhouse emissions).
Not quite following here. If you produce 0.5 times as much CH4 but it's 80 times as harmful, it seems like you would have to leak 1/(0.5*80)=1/40 = 2.5% of your CH4 to have the same warming. How do you arrive at 3.7%?
Also, any figures on how much is leaked in practice?
A Dutch court ruled that Uber is an employer, rather than a mediator, because they have a lot of control over how the drivers do their work. The consequence is that they have to provide fixed contracts, pay for pensions, etc, although another 'platform company' lost a similar case and didn't change anything; with new cases being in the courts, of people demanding a fixed contract.
Are they allowed to deviate from the assigned route? Or do they just suggest the fastest way, and leave it up to the driver to decide if they want to spend more time to earn the same money?
One of the big advantages of a car service is that fare is agreed upon upfront. It's one of the things that distinguishes a car service from a taxi, too.
I remember many years ago that Uber drivers would cancel routes to the airport, and Uber cracked down on that. So Uber drivers would call the me (the rider) to tell me to cancel the route because reasons, and Uber cracked down on *that*.
tl;dr: if you're investing this much time into figuring out what school to send your kid to, it likely doesn't matter much what you decide, so go with what feels right and is easy, and adjust as necessary.
We send our kids to the local public school. We're city dwellers in St. Louis, whose system is evaporating into competing charters, and, well, we don't like that. We don't like that the charter secret sauce seems to be nearly 100% picking cohorts, and we don't like that much of the rest is union busting and being new enough that they don't have back maintenance costs. We like that we can walk our kids to school, and that our school looks, more or less, like our neighborhood. (The school is less white than the neighborhood, because most white folks here send their kids to charters, magnets, or move when they start school.)
I was very nervous about this when my oldest started there, because in my social class there's fairly heavy social stigma to sending your kids to the traditional publics here. My wife found a bunch of articles that all pretty much said that if your kids are in a good home where people pay attention to them and read to them, the sort of school you send them to doesn't much matter. We figured we would try the thing that aligns to our values and keep an eye on things, and if it didn't work there was always time to get into a charter or move out to the county.
Things worked out fine, my kids all read and math well above grade level and like their school. They also don't have much homework, whereas the accelerated school a lot of affluent white parents in this neighborhood use assigns significant nightly homework, starting in the second grade (something I'm convinced doesn't help, possibly from here). They were sad when they had to spend last year on iPads, and happy to finally get back this year. So far, we've been pleased.
Caveat: this is for pre-k and elementary, when the kids are learning basics and before social life turns more difficult. Our local middle school closed, so for that we're doing the gifted school like good white St Louisians are supposed to.
A very small, private, school on the Sudbury model had been started recently. We took our daughter, I think about five, to it after becoming unsatisfied with the small church private school she had been going to. She liked it better, so we shifted her to it, later added her younger brother.
I went to a very good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school, both of us were bored most of the time. We thought we could do better for our children. The Sudbury model is unschooling — that, not the democracy, was what drew us to it. Eventually the school developed problems and we shifted both kids to home unschooling.
For my views on the theory and practice of unschooling, see:
Similar to Carl we asked around in all of the locations near enough to my job what people thought would be a good school. Of seven local school districts, one was the overwhelming majority of recommendations, with two good schools also mentioned. One school was specifically identified as something to be avoided, which was a shame because there were a lot of nice houses decently priced in that district (not a coincidence). We ended up picking the one with the highest recommendations, though if we had found a suitable house in the other two we would likely have gone to one of them.
Culture is huge when picking a school, even more than academics. On every day that parents are invited to our kid's elementary school, there is probably greater than 60% parent attendance - including both parents and even on weekdays during normal work hours. The people here are serious about getting kids a good education. That school we were advised to avoid has multiple fights a week...
If your question pertains to public school: I just asked a bunch of local middle-aged female realtors when the oldest was approaching school age. They all knew exactly which was the best local district, and which were the best elementary schools, and which neighborhood you had to buy into to get into the attendance zone -- and how far away from the boundary you had to stay to avoid the boundary moving over you. I did cross-check with state performance scores, but knew I also valued unquantifiable aspects like culture, harmony among the staff, low turnover, strong parent involvement, et cetera, and that's exactly what the realtors knew.
My pleasure. One thing I thought about to add, is that this calculation might be worth making even if you're *not* going to public school. Reason being is that in many American locations, the character of the public schools is in a one-to-one relationship with the family aspects of the local culture.
In our case, for example, we ended up in a location that strongly valued education and family -- and that wasn't just reflected in the schools, it meant that *all* the local organizations had that influence. The public library had good school-age kids' programs. There was active trick-or-treating on our street, and parents kept an eye out on each others' kids when they were bike-riding. Stores were family oriented, lots of ice cream shops employing local teens, no liquor or check-cashing joints. There were good local kids' sports clubs, programs at public pools, et cetera -- it kind of all fits together because the "attendance boundary" aspect of public schools willy-nilly forces like-minded parents to gather in one geographical location.
Oldest of my kids, that is, not the oldest realtor ha ha. No wonder Disqus is eating everybody's lunch, they may be assholes but it's easy-peasy to edit comments.
A commitment to teaching kids to think well, in the context of providing academic rigor of the kind that the world expects.
FWIW, I think I could do this better myself than the school they go to (even though I spend over half my salary on the school) but I think a too-different school experience is kind of like an explanation with too many inferential steps - it's a lot harder to actually use in a civilized society, even if it's better in every other way. So part of what I'm looking for is an experience that exposes them to the expectations of civilized society. So, no worries, I supplement the philosophical stuff at home. (E.g., we "walk-n-talk" every morning with the dogs.)
I posted this in 188 just before thread 189 appeared; I hope it's okay if I repost for more exposure.
When governments spend more than they collect in taxes, they do something that everyone refers to as "borrowing", which increases the "debt". But during the Covid pandemic, pretty much every country was "borrowing". But if everyone is borrowing, who is the lender? It seems to me now that those words do not have their ordinary meaning. "Borrowing" turns out to be code for "printing money", and "debt" is "the amount of money we've printed".
Well, not quite. I have the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts. Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest? (and to avoid the risk of hyperinflation, have some sort of limit on the money-printing?)
I wonder if the whole system is set up in some modestly idiotic way - inefficient and difficult to understand, but not bad enough that the government is forced to change it. I also wonder if all the governments of the world use basically the same system, which would be a surprising "coincidence".
In any case, I've never seen a explanation that I could entirely follow. Aside from things like "fractional reserve" being hard to wrap one's head around, I find that virtually everyone who tries to explain macroeconomics takes for granted that their audience understands concepts like "buying debt" and the distinction between "fiscal", "monetary" and "financial". Does anyone explain this stuff like I'm 5?
Still, I would like to share a flash of insight I've had recently about macroeconomics that no one has ever even attempted to explain to me. It's about the value of money.
I assert that the value of money is (approximately) the total amount of production divided by the total amount of spending. "Amount of production" is real-world goods and services, so it has no particular unit of measurement. "Amount of spending" is the amount of money that changes hands, and it could be measured in dollars.
A key point here is that money which doesn't change hands doesn't enter into the equation. Nor does the world population. Hypothetically, then, suppose Jeff Bezos finds a way to gobble up most of the world's wealth and he becomes a 50-trillionaire. If production stays the same during this time (I guess it's more likely to increase, but let's pretend) and he spends almost none of this money, the effect of this wealth accumulation should be deflationary: the denominator (spending) decreases because Bezos is not spending his earnings (while production is flat or increasing), so the value of money increases. Everyone's money is worth more! Yay! However, those who are in debt effectively find themselves with bigger debts. Wages fall in response to the constricted money supply, so indebted people will have trouble paying off their debts. (I heard somewhere that this was a major problem during the Great Depression.)
But now, suppose that suddenly Bezos decides to spend 6 trillion dollars for a vacation on the moon three years from now, and suppose world production responds mainly by *moving* resources to the moon mission (due to structural limitations that prevent total production from increasing very much). Thanks to the increasing denominator, the effect will be sudden inflation (especially in moon-mission-related industries, i.e. this is where price increases are likely to be concentrated, though there will be inflation everywhere due to the loss of production in other sectors, and also whole supply chains relevant to the moon mission will be impacted, which can also cause price increases to bleed into other areas of the economy).
Getting back to the debt issue, while nominally the U.S. and many other countries have huge public debts and also huge private debts, none of this matters in practice, *as long as it doesn't affect production or spending significantly*. Indeed, perhaps big debts can be good by stimulating production, though I wonder if it can lead to instability (and if so, why).
Also, anyone want to predict the overall stock market trend over the next few years? I am not aware of any mechanism by which a major crash should occur, so I tentatively expect a minor crash at worst. However, US stocks are probably overpriced, so I expect that price increases will level off pretty soon and investor returns will be relatively poor over the next few years. Of course, though, I'm no expert and I don't really understand why the stock market rose so much in the first place. Did a lot of those stimulus dollars somehow get dumped straight into markets? Or was it caused more by regulators using their poorly-explained mechanisms to increase the money supply in a way that increased average stock prices?
Not answering your question directly, but a concept that might help you frame your understanding(or misunderstanding) of the subject:
The total value of what is available, in a given year, is GDP. Whatever the government spends has been a fraction of this number, even during Covid. Those are both flows, and debt is a stock (Not stock like stock market, stock like a warehouse full of inventory).
The current debt is just the cumulative difference between what was collected and what was spent. But the difference between the two is also a relatively small number. Over the past few decades, I think like 20% of GDP was collected in taxes and 25% was spent, and the difference was just "borrowed". Of the amount borrowed, I think maybe 20% was actually borrowed, and the other 80% was purchased by the federal reserve, which is a convoluted way to just print the money.
Numbers are made up off the top of my head, but the concepts are robust! lol
>Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest? (and to avoid the risk of hyperinflation, have some sort of limit on the money-printing?)
First off, nobody will believe you when you say that you've put a "limit" on the money-printing. They know full well that when you have to chose between increasing the debt ceiling, er, money ceiling, and cutting off the stimulus checks that are keeping millions of registered voters from being thrown out of their homes, that limit is going to be revised as needed.
Second, the total US money supply is about $20 trillion, depending on how you define "US money". The current federal deficit is $3 trillion a year. So, naively, printing $3 trillion a year would cause ~15% annual inflation. That's not quite hyperinflation, but it's higher than the US has seen since World War 2, and if you can recall or ever studied the economy of the 1970s, you'll know that even 10% annual inflation is Very Not Good for the economic health of a nation.
Third, that naive inflation calculation is an understatement, because people *react* to that sort of money-printing with "Oh, hell, they're not going to stop are they? I'd better get rid of this crap money while it's still worth *something* and buy gold or Euros or whatever", and that turns your 15% inflation into something unpredictably more. Possibly in an exponential spiral that does lead to hyperinflation.
Selling terabucks of debt allows the debt buyers to believe that you're going to pull one of several economic miracles out of the hat, and/or that your failure to do so will come with enough warning for them to get out before the rubes. Printing terabucks of money shows people exactly which non-miraculous economic solutions you have settled on, and that you've settled on it right now and if they want to get out they have to get out right now.
In the model I proposed, the amount of money in existence isn't directly relevant for inflation (is "money supply" the same or different?)... but the GDP of the US is ~$21 trillion (closely related to 'value of all goods and services'), so I agree that printing $3 trillion a year would *naively* cause ~15% annual inflation.
I wonder what would be important in a less naive analysis. Let's look at GDP for a moment. If a store sells $1 million, after buying $900,000 from its suppliers, who pay $800,000 upstream, most of the dollars involved are spent 3 times. Does that contribute $2.7 million to the GDP, then? On the other side, I think if $3 trillion were simply put in a vault and ignored, it wouldn't cause inflation; how it's used matters. So if a $3 trillion deficit is spent *twice* in a year (due to respending by the private sector), shouldn't that double the inflationary effect to 30%? In any case, it's quite interesting that inflation is only 5%.
Some people are talking about an "everything bubble", but I think maybe the rapid rise in the stock market could be more "inflation" than "bubble", because to the extent that stimulus money ended up in the hands of people that didn't need it, they would probably dump their excess money in stock markets. (for reference, S&P 500 is up 38% in the last 12 months, and also up 38% since Feb 1 2020.)
You mentioned people's reaction to money-printing, but it doesn't look to me like people are reacting much, probably because (1) they expect it's a temporary blip for Covid and (2) most other countries behaved similarly, so switching currencies doesn't help unless it goes to an outlier country that simultaneously kept spending low and kept their economy strong. And then, if lots of people buy outliers it drives up the price of outliers, a negative feedback.
$3 trillion is immense btw, about $9000 for every man, woman and child.
The braindead explanation is that money is just a contract that can represent current or future products, but never anything else[1]. If someone has money that is not indebted, they must have products to back it up. If a government prints money it is setting up a future-dated contract with a producer that they will eventually have to produce something with to back up the money. If they don't, everything explodes.
So, yes, obviously debts are supposed to stimulate production like you say. That's the whole point. You are giving people access to resources they technically shouldn't have, but as long as they eventually produce something with those resources everything is resolved. The reason people criticise this practise so much is that most contractors cannot keep up production to the extent that these contracts have been issued.
[1] Your capacity to offer services like haircuts is itself a product.
"Well, not quite. I have the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts. Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest?"
Actually governments do exactly that (print money to bring down real interest rates) - value of public debt is constantly being significantly eroded via inflation. Situation is, however, somewhat complicated by the fact that government spending of borrowed money is itself one of the causes of inflation.
Suppose you are the central bank, and you have determined that 100B must be printed and added to the economy. Printing is easy, but finding a way to move the money into the economy without creating disruption takes thought. You can't just give a 100B cash gift to your son-in-law and call it a day. If you choose certain industries to instantly infuse 100B into you are distorting markets and "picking winners and losers". If you hand the cash to government agencies, you usurp the role of the legislators and executives who are supposed to determine budgets. The idea of making the newly printed money available as loans, where all qualifying banks have equal access to the loans through an auction system, seems like the best way anyone's thought of so far to pull this off gracefully. It isn't perfect, in fact it picks the major banks as "winners" since the privilege of having first access to the loan windows is a windfall for them. But has anyone devised a system better than this? A way to add 100B to an economy without playing favorites?
What I don't get about this is that interest rates have been very low, below the inflation rate, for years.
Suppose that one year ago I got a loan from the Fed for $1 million with an interest rate of 0.25%, and put the $1 million in the S&P 500. Today I could sell the stocks for about $1.382 million, "earning" $382,000 in profit. Then I could pay off my $1 million loan plus $2500 in interest for a net profit of $379,500.
The entire reason they set the rates so low is so that rich people will do exactly that, and the 38% gains in a year shows it works, or rather it works too well and maybe we should be scared. Low rates makes it easy for everyone to get money to throw at investments, then everyone throws money at investments at the same time so the stock prices get bid up to the moon. A crazy number like 38% in one year is not from some solid business reason like coca-cola selling more coke, it's because the interest rates have been at record lows for years and equities are literally on fire.
(yeah, I'm sure I couldn't get a loan directly from the central bank, but couldn't I get a loan for a small markup, e.g. 1%, so I pay 1.25% interest to a regular bank which in turn pays 0.25% to the central bank?)
Update: I just found out about leveraged ETFs. This is great - it turns out that you don't have to be rich to pull this trick! I wish I knew about this in 2020! On the other hand it sounds like a big cause of instability whenever interest rates are very low. Indeed, the idea of an "everything bubble" (i.e. something that can "pop" in a big way) seems more likely to me now.
This doesn't hold up. The reason you have to issue printed money as debt with interest is because there's nothing actually backing it up, so you have to make the people you are giving it to create something to back it up, that they otherwise wouldn't be able to. It is a future-dated contract for resources that don't yet exist. If the resources did exist, only then could you give the money away with no interest.
I don't see why you would just want to add 100B without doing something more specific. If you are trying to stimulate growth, there is more need for it in some sectors than others, for instance.
Well I did not say "suppose you are a government", I said "suppose you are a central bank". When the US needs to bail out its auto industry, or mail all its poor people stimulus checks, Congress puts it in the budget. And that has nothing to do with the central bank (the Fed).
The US's central bank is merely tasked with managing the money supply so that inflation stays at a "desirable" rate in accordance with Keynesian theory. That is, high enough to stimulate general investment (which keeps unemployment low), but not so high that prices become generally unstable. Essentially, Congress has taken the technical, boring stuff that does not have to do with wielding political power, and offloaded it to independent technocrats at the Fed.
So again, given the Fed's job, which is to calculate how much to run the printing press each year, then put the calculated X amount of new money into the economy in an apolitical way that does not choose favorites or target sectors (doing those things would exceed their authority and usurp the Congress): how do you do that in a more fair way than holding auctions for banks to acquire the new money as low-interest loans?
Agree or disagree whether Keynesian theory is correct, whether constant slight positive inflation is actually a good thing, whether Congress should give the power to the Fed in its present form or do something else... the point is this actually might be a really good technical solution for what they are trying to do. Having a debt-based economy where nobody ever pays back the debts sounds really weird, but it lets you use auctions to inject arbitrarily chosen amounts of new money into the economy without favoritism, when that is a thing you want to do.
If Keynesian tuning of monetary inflation is to be accomplished through "stimulus check"-style per capita cash disbursements and no other methods:
- Some years the checks may be on the order of $25,000 per capita, other years the checks may be zero, and people won't generally know which type of year it's going to be in advance. Instead of the monetary stimulus happening invisibly as before, now it is incredibly visible. If it becomes a political issue how big the checks are each year, that creates conflict between the amount of stimulus science prescribes and the amount that political forces prefer.
- The inflation created using this method will be over-concentrated in consumer goods and services sectors vs everything else, i.e. in the price of food and rent.
- Do teenagers qualify for the per checks? Do infants? Expect a giant political fight as soon as this is rolled out, to resolve what type of "per capita" is actually fair. And expect this policy to seesaw back and forth every time a new party wins the congressional majority.
- Do holders of US dollars in other countries qualify for the checks? Because if not you have made the dollar less valuable to everyone we trade with outside the country. If we discourage trade that drops our real standard of living.
I mean, you could try it, but it doesn't seem like you'll get a more stable money system than we have the way we are doing things now. (If you want to give $300 to poor people, nothing stops you doing that as a separate program by the way, but maybe such things should be segregated from the central bank's monetary policy).
The answer is that if growth is higher than the nominal interest rate, then you can borrow money, **not even pay off the interest completely** and still have debt as a fraction of GDP fall over time. Oliver Blanchard's AEA Presidential Address (2018? 2019?) offers a clear analysis of this phenomenon.
So, the UK still owes debt from 400 years ago--paying interest on that debt itself is not an issue now, as they grew far faster than it grew.
One quick note-you’re absolutely on to something with your definition of the value of money! The quantity theory of money, which is an econ101 model of inflation and monetary value, says that the velocity of money (how many times it is spent in a year) times the money supply (how much money there is) equals the price level (how much things cost relative to a fixed baseline, I.e what we care about for inflation) times real GDP (how much stuff we make. I think this is the same relationship you’re describing.
Btw I should have said something like "value of a certain unit of money" instead of just "value of money". It could be the "value of a dollar" if production and spending have the necessary units.
Your description seems to disagree with my model, because in my model the amount of money in existence is not immediately relevant; a billion dollars under a mattress "exists" but won't affect the economy as long as it just sits there. So let's see what Wikipedia says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money
Wikipedia says the traditional quantity theory of money is that "the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation", and eventually clarifies:
==========
Mainstream economics accepts a simplification, the equation of exchange:
M ⋅ V_T = P_T ⋅ T
where
M is the total amount of money in circulation on average in an economy during the period, say a year.
V_T is the transactions velocity of money, that is the average frequency across all transactions with which a unit of money is spent. This reflects availability of financial institutions, economic variables, and choices made as to how fast people turn over their money.
P_T is the price level associated with transactions for the economy during the period
T is an index of the real value of aggregate transactions.
==========
If M is the amount of money that exists, and V_T is the amount of spending per unit of money that exists, then M ⋅ V_T should be "the amount of spending". P_T sounds like the reciprocal of the value of a money unit, and T sounds like the amount of production of goods and services. So, rearranging the equation, I get
>I have the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts.
Governments usually have surpluses reasonably often, although the West has been doing a lot of deficit spending recently.
>Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest? (and to avoid the risk of hyperinflation, have some sort of limit on the money-printing?)
They do print money in significant excess of how much money is lost/destroyed, but as you suggest there is a limited amount you can do before you just drive inflation (and then hyperinflation). They borrow existent money to get funding in excess of what they can safely print.
Related question: anyone know of anyone studying macroeconomics via large, complex simulation models? It seems like this should be a fruitful way to study it.
If I am understanding the article correctly (which is unlikely), its objections are as follows:
𝟏. EA as usually practiced is based on abstract consequentialism, "moral reflection … from the 'point of view of the universe'," which concludes that, e.g., "our ability to act so as to address suffering in any spot on earth places the same moral demands on us as does our ability to address the suffering of an unaccompanied toddler drowning in a shallow pond next to the road on which we're walking." It is thus mutually exclusive with Kantian deontology, virtue ethics, & other theories of ethics which do not view the right thing to do as objective & independent of who is making the decision. (The article also talks about "views on which evaluative concepts trace out forms of regularity that, while objective, are only available from non-neutral standpoints", but as it does not summarize these views and I am not familiar with the ethical ideas of Anscombe, Foot, & al., I do not know what it means by this.)
𝟐. EA's focus on effectiveness biases it in favor of actions whose effects are clearly measurable in the short term.
𝟑. For the same reason, EA is biased against attempts at systemic social or political change, which are inherently unpredictable. This predictability makes EA-like measurement of actions' effectiveness an unsuitable way of making decisions about seeking social or political change by comparison to more deontological ways of making decisions, like the bias in favor of marginalized demographic groups which is fashionable in modern progressivism. (I think this is what "The composite critique" was trying to say, but the philosophical basis of that section was not described in sufficient detail to be easily understandable.)
𝟒. EA avoids considering the way a capitalist economy, by incentivizing economic actors to pursue profit without regard for immoral externalities & with as little regard for workers' well-being as is practical, motivates people to cause suffering throughout the global economy. (The article's argument here appears to be a less detailed equivalent of Freddie DeBoer's Marxist argument in https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-bari-weiss-wont-tell-you-about .) Moreover, its acceptance of 'earning to give' biases it against this sort of criticism of the economy overall.
(The author also clearly thinks EA isn't politically progressive enough, but as this idea is neither justified by argument nor ever clearly & generally stated, I will not discuss it further.)
Objection 𝟐 is clearly true to some extent; indeed, the article cites several EAists admitting that measurability bias is a problem. However, this also means that EA is less likely to be fooled into working on attractive but ultimately harmful or inefficient projects.
Objection 𝟑 has been answered in two different ways. https://80000hours.org/2015/07/effective-altruists-love-systemic-change/ argues that EAists do support systemic change & gives examples such as trying to change cultural norms about charity, facilitating immigration of poor people to rich countries, & promoting beneficial government policies. The opposite response, described in https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/ , is to argue against a focus on systemic change on the grounds that systemic change is unpredictable & has a high risk of making things worse overall & that much systemic change involves divisive political issues which might divide the EA movement & drive away potential EAists with opposite politics.
Objection 𝟒 is basically a special case of 𝟑 & can be answered in the same way: the 8000 𝐻𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑠 article lists "research and grants on … macroeconomics, & international development", "reform priorities for governments", "government policies… around the regulation of new technologies", & "lobbying efforts to improve animal welfare regulation" among the systemic-change-related projects some EA groups are involved in, but concludes that "sudden dramatic changes in society usually lead to worse outcomes than gradual evolutionary improvements. I am keen to tinker with government or economic systems to make them work better… I personally favour maintaining and improving mostly market-driven economies… ." Moreover, it is not clear how 'earning to give' would bias EAists against systemic change efforts other than those that involve revolutionary restructuring of the economy (which, as argued above, is too risky to be worthwhile) or that would substantially depress the economy (which in itself is likely to cause substantial suffering through the effects of unemployment, loss of economic opportunities, &c.).
> Thereby excluded are views – e.g. some Kantian constructivisms – that combine accounts of moral reflection as essentially perspectival with understandings of theoretical reflection as maximally abstract. 10 Also excluded are views that combine accounts of moral reflection as essentially engaged with understandings of theoretical reflection on which such reflection likewise goes unregulated by an ideal of abstraction. Under the latter heading are various outlooks, some associated with strands of virtue theory, that represent values as woven into the world’s fabric, so that we need particular sensitivities to recognise them.
what does that even mean lmao, and what does it have to do with biosecurity or transformative AI? Maybe if the author would articulate why their theory spam matters it’d help make this more useful.
> Thinkers in this tradition often simply take it for granted that any genuine, objective aspects of the world are abstractly accessible
this is pretty much just obscurantism. not saying it has to be, but in no way is any of this nonsense connected to what EA actually does.
I don’t think EA would exclude these people if they articulated useful ways to spend money and use talent! But they do not do that!
> This orientation speaks for striving to change the methods of meat companies in ways that leave unquestioned the larger political context in which the companies operate
If I was dictator of America, I would make saying stuff like “the larger social and political context” entirely illegal. It just served as a stand in for vague hand waving - obviously such things may be important, but you need to say what they are. So I can’t tell - should EA be funding anti-meat advertisements? Funding bolsheviks? Smashing Walmarts?
The entire essay is just filled with philosophical lawyering that might have some real meaning but I’ll never know because it’s intentionally kept disconnected from actual recommendations or judgements on the practical effects of EA actions, but siloed off in nice words like “propagating systems of oppression” and “moral systems”.
> At the critique’s heart is an image of the social world as irretrievably normative such that understanding it requires non-neutral resources. Granted that social concepts are categories for actions, it follows that these concepts need to be understood as tracing out patterns in an irreducibly normative ground – patterns that only reveal themselves to an evaluatively non-neutral gaze.
like how is anyone supposed to respond to this? Cmon
> while also disparaging as less ‘effective’ systematic attempts to change these institutions
This is annoyingly content less, you can’t just say the word institution and systematic and expect it to explain the entirety of everything about human interaction and action. If you want to convince EA people to fund a global communist revolution, then go and actually advocate for that. If you want EA to fund banning animal agriculture, do that. But don’t tease like this.
I have no idea what responses exist, but it's usually not a good sign when an article starts not with any actual criticisms, but lots of innuendo that "something is wrong with them". So, I read about 55% of the critique and it's been a few hours so I *really* need to stop. My response exceeds the length limit here, so I'll break it into chunks.
> EA has been the target of a fair bit of grumbling, and even some mockery, from activists and critics on the left, who associate consequentialism with depoliticising tendencies of welfarism.
Actually, wait, depoliticising doesn't sound bad? Usually "politicizing" is what people complain about.
> EA has mostly gotten a pass, with many detractors concluding that, however misguided, its efforts to get bankers, tech entrepreneurs and the like to give away their money cost-effectively does no serious harm. This stance is no longer tenable.
So, convincing people to donate to charity is "harmless" unless you convince them to donate too much, at which point ... it's bad?
> The growth of EA has been explosive, with some affiliated organisations, such as Open Philanthropy, now recommending grants amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. [...] One result of the windfall is that EA-guided ratings groups serve as king-makers, raising up pro-animal organisations deemed ‘effective’ by EA and denigrating and partly defunding many organisations deemed ‘ineffective’, while pressuring others to artificially shift their missions in order to conform to operative metrics of ‘effectiveness’ and secure funding. This has led to objections from animal advocates (often muted due to fear of alienating EA-admiring funders).
Well, less than ten thousand people have signed the "Giving What We Can" pledge, but I guess it's fast in annual-percentage terms, and many people surely donate without signing it.
The scare-quotes seem to argue that "effective" giving actually is less effective than what people did before (perhaps worse than not giving at all?), but as long as the argument is implicit, she doesn't have to explain it. I guess EAs have "denigrated" charities like "Scared Straight" on the basis that they have apparently done harm, but that's what people tend to do with harmful things (and it's what Crary is doing right now). The word "defunding" means "not donating anymore", right? Yes Crary, that's what people do if they think they've found a better use of money.
> Yet champions of EA, whether or not concerned with the cause of animals, for the most part adopt the attitude that they have no serious critics and that sceptics ought to be content with their ongoing attempts to fine-tune their practice.
I knew there were critics, I just haven't seen any that seemed reasonable enough to bother arguing with.
> It is important to forcefully make the case that it owes its success primarily not to the – questionable – value of its moral theory but to its compatibility with political and economic institutions responsible for some of the very harms it addresses.
And which moral theory is not questionable? Deontology? Virtue ethics? I have heard commenters reject utilitarianism repeatedly at ACX on the basis of a thought experiment, but surely there are plenty of thought experiments to argue against deontology and virtue ethics.
I suspect people are rejecting consequentialism/utilitarianism because they *know about* anti-utilitarianism thought experiments but are *unaware of* thought experiments against deontology and so forth. Also, some people choose "I'll do whatever I feel is right" ... but that's what consequentialists and deontologists do too! just with principles to guide them instead of being unprincipled. (Sure, you save yourself from thought experiments in your "whatever I feel like" moral system, but only because your system is just a series of data points, "I feel X is wrong and Y is right", with no clear principles, and specific to you and you alone, so philosophers won't ever criticize it, which in no way suggests your personal system is the best one.)
Note also that if EA had been founded by ardent supporters of, say, deontology, there would be a bunch of critics saying it should be based on consequentialism; it is impossible to avoid criticism. There's an Aesop Fable about this, "The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey".
> reflection on EA reveals a straightforward example of moral corruption
But of course you won't explain what you mean yet: you want the audience to stew on it for awhile.
> claiming that EA is ‘independent of any theoretical commitments’. This last claim is false
We can steelman this as "in practice EA steers people toward consequentialist giving", and I agree. But consequentialism isn't part of the GWWC pledge:
> I hereby recognize that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good.
> Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from now and for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least 10% of my income to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others. I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.
I interpret this as "most effectively according to my own opinion". So Alice Crary could have attempted to convince individual EAs or EA organizations that they should disregard consequentialism and use some other basis for their decisions, but obviously that's not her goal here.
> self-avowed effective altruists have tended to [take] as their core value the sort of well-being capturable by the metrics of welfare economics
I don't think that's true. As an EA, I'm not familiar with the phrase "welfare economics", but certainly I recognize that there are important aspects to well-being that are not captured by any metrics I am aware of, and I'm aware of that mainly because EAs often talk about this issue.
> This abstract moral epistemology is one of the marks of a moral radicalism that, although sometimes criticised for the extent of its demands, gets celebrated by consequentialists. [...] If we take well-being as a value, our ability to act so as to address suffering in any spot on earth places the same moral demands on us as does our ability to address the suffering of an unaccompanied toddler drowning in a shallow pond next to the road on which we’re walking. This radical twist...
The author's use of "radical" seems be "unusual (and therefore bad)". She's trying to create negative feelings without making an actual argument.
> Their abstract approach excludes any virtue-oriented view on which the rightness of actions is appropriately engaged responsiveness to circumstances, and this makes it seem more natural to account for rightness by looking to the value of actions’ consequences
Admittedly I know little about virtue ethics, but I don't think "the rightness of actions is appropriately engaged responsiveness to circumstances" is a clear rule for deciding what is right or wrong. To me, a rule like the following is more clear: "to the extent that the consequences of our actions are predictable, the rightness of our actions depends on the consequences of those actions compared to the consequences of other actions we could have taken, according to our own judgement of which consequences are better. Oh, and this is a hard problem, so we should think really carefully about it." Apparently Alice would disagree, but how is her opinion "righter" than mine, and also, just what is her opinion anyway?
> But it is the idea that rightness is a matter of the value of quantifiable consequences, allowing for difficulties of juggling different classes of values, that makes it seem coherent to speak of single judgments about how to do the most good.
There is no single judgement; various EAs make different judgements about how to do the most good, and they debate those ideas. As to whether there may be, in principle, a single best action (which is impossible to determine with certainty in practice) according to a specific formulation of consequentialism, I think EAs would not have a consensus about that either. In short, this seems like a strawman.
> EA’s god’s eye image of moral reflection constrains how we can conceive of ethical thought and practice, leaving no room for views intolerant of the idea that moral reflection proceeds from the standpoint of the universe
I haven't heard EA-style consequentialism described as "moral reflection...from the standpoint of the universe" and I'm not sure how accurate such a description is, but I guess she's saying that EAs "leave no room" for views "intolerant of the idea that moral reflection proceeds from the standpoint of the universe". But assuming that's true, I ask you: why should EAs provide room for people who are intolerant of common EA ideas?
> excluded are views – e.g. some Kantian constructivisms – that combine accounts of moral reflection as essentially perspectival with understandings of theoretical reflection as maximally abstract. Also excluded are views that combine accounts of moral reflection as essentially engaged with understandings of theoretical reflection on which such reflection likewise goes unregulated by an ideal of abstraction.
> EA’s Oxford-trained founders work in a philosophical tradition, indebted to classic empiricism, shaped by the assumption that subjective endowments have an essential tendency to obstruct our access to the world. Thinkers in this tradition often simply take it for granted that any genuine, objective aspects of the world are abstractly accessible. Acquaintance with local history suggests this posture is at least questionable.
I take this to mean "EA thinkers tend to be empiricists who think that people have cognitive biases and limited access to information, but at the same time they assume that the world has some objective properties that can be described theoretically". And this is true, but I don't understand her argument against this view, to the extent she even made an argument.
> To sideline this part of Anglophone philosophy is to overlook its most notable resources for criticising consequentialism
Sorry, but it's hard not to sideline poorly-explained ideas that I find incomprehensible.
> The most fully elaborated criticism of EA... is sometimes referred to as the institutional critique.
Don't have time right now to read that. Is it a better critique than this one?
> decry the neglect, on the part of EA, of coordinated sets of actions directed at changing social structures that reliably cause suffering
I think she's saying "EA isn't good at doing political movements". But
(2) EA orgs will eventually get better at that, and
(3) when they do get better at it, they will unavoidably receive MUCH MORE criticism than they do today (donkey fable again).
> EA’s metrics are best suited to detect the short term impact of particular actions, so its tendency to discount the impact of coordinated actions can be seen as reflecting ‘measurability bias’
But problems with metrics are discussed often in EA circles, and EAs often rely also on intuition and surrogate measurements to fill in gaps where the thing we want to know has no accurate measurement. Hits-based giving is one example of EAs dealing with the severe uncertainties involved in finding the best interventions: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZfD4cZgAcgQc5oRNN/hit-based-giving-for-global-development
> The institutional critique of EA can be brought to bear on Animal Charity Evaluator’s 2019 ratings. Animal Charity Evaluator’s favouring of welfare improvements in the conditions of farmed animals can be taken to reflect forms of (‘measurement’) bias in its metrics, which are best suited to detect the outcomes of simpler efforts with clear short term impacts. This orientation speaks for striving to change the methods of meat companies in ways that leave unquestioned the larger political context in which the companies operate. The result is that, despite its sincere pro-animal stance, Animal Charity Evaluator is at risk of strengthening an industrial agricultural system that reproduces horrific animal suffering on a massive scale.
Well, if you've got a more effective way to reduce animal suffering that only needs a few thousand people to accomplish, let's hear it. (Does Alice even understand that EAs are all about effectiveness? It's right there in the name.) But if your solution is something like "run a conventional political movement" (and it almost sounds like that's what you're saying), well, conventional political movements have been around for a very long time and their track record leaves something to be desired. I mean, everybody knew about global warming since 1988, and 33 years later we still haven't reached "peak oil". In contrast, specific plant-based meat companies have been around for a few years and are already displacing factory-farmed meat. (I know, EAs probably can't take most of the credit for that, but we're certainly big fans. I had two Beyond burgers last night, how about you Alice?)
> While replies to the institutional critique bring out that there is room to include collective actions among EA’s objects of assessment, [...] they leave unexamined questions about whether it is confused to insist on causal effects as the standard for evaluating collective attempts to change the normative structure of society.
> These attacks charge that it is morally and philosophically problematic to construe moral reflection as abstract.[18] [...] Effective altruists who respond to the philosophical critique take Williams to be urging us to protect our integrity even at the cost of doing the wrong thing.[19]
> they dismiss these critics’ gestures as without philosophical interest
I bet it's more like "they argue that these critics are misguided and explain why"
> It is not difficult to develop philosophical critics’ worries about a god’s eye morality so that they rise to the level of a devastating objection. All that is required is to combine worries about point-of-viewless moral reflection with views about values [...] on which concepts of values determine neutrally unavailable worldly patterns.
Um... what?
> Why should effective altruists take seriously an attack on a philosophical worldview that many of their colleagues take as an unquestioned starting point? The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries witnessed significant philosophical assaults on abstract conceptions of reason, and there is a notable philosophical corpus in which the merits of these assaults get debated. Although it is by no means obvious that those who favour abstract views have better arguments, and although their interlocutors raise fundamental questions about these views’ tenability, abstract construals of reason have for more than half a century played an organising role in the discipline of philosophy [...]. This suggests that the construals’ staying power is at least partly a function of ideological factors independent of their philosophical credentials. That – the fact that these conceptions of reason are manifestly open to contestation – is one reason why effective altruists should attend to a philosophical critique that depends for its force on rejecting abstract images of reason. A second reason for effective altruists to attend to the philosophical critique has to do with the seriousness of the moral charge it levels against them. It alleges nothing less than that their image of the moral enterprise is bankrupt and that moral assessments grounded in this image lack authority.
I think she's saying "EAs should take my attack seriously because (1) those who favour abstract views are biased by ideology and (2) I am making a very serious charge that your moral enterprise is bankrupt." Which means, apparently, that she has chosen not to explain what in the world she was talking about in the previous paragraph.
> Effective altruists invite us to regard the rightness of a social intervention as a function of its consequences, with the outcome involving the best states of affairs counting as doing most good. This strategy appears morally confused when considered in terms of the ethical stance of the philosophical critique. To adopt this stance is to see the weave of the world as endowed with values that reveal themselves only to a developed sensibility. To see things this way is to make room for an intuitively appealing conception of actions as right insofar as they exhibit just sensitivity to the worldly circumstances in question. This is consistent with allowing that right actions can have the end of promoting others’ happiness or flourishing. Here acting rightly includes acting, when circumstances call for it, in ways that aim at the well-being of others, and, with reference to this benevolent pursuit of others’ well-being, it makes sense to talk – in a manner that may seem to echo effective altruists – about good states of affairs. But it is important that, as Philippa Foot once put it, ‘we have found this end within morality, forming part of it, not standing outside it as a good state of affairs by which moral action in general is to be judged’. 24 Here right action also includes acting, when circumstantially appropriate, in ways that aim at ends – e.g. giving people what they are owed – that can conflict with the end of benevolence. Apt responsiveness to circumstances sometimes requires acting with an eye to others’ well-being and sometimes with an eye to other ends. In cases in which it is not right to attend to others’ well-being, it is incorrect to say that, because we haven’t thus attended, we achieve a morally worse result. Things only seem this way if we allow our understanding to be shaped by what now appears to be a confused understanding of morality. What we should say is that the result we wind up with is morally best. That is what it comes to to say that, within the context of the philosophical critique, there is no room for EA-style talk of ‘most good’.
In summary, "the philosophical critique" uses a non-consequentialist moral framework in which "there is no room for EA-style talk of ‘most good’".
But if there is no "most good", does that mean there cannot exist "more" or "less" effective ways to make the world a better place? Or is it rather that "most good" is the eye of the beholder? If you interpret EAs as trying to move the world toward a state that they individuallly consider better from their own perspective, I think that's an accurate interpretation. Again, the "standpoint of the universe" thing is misleading; EAs aren't saying "there's One Best Thing", though coincidentally different EAs tend to agree in broad strokes about various goals, as groups of humans often do. Philosophically they tend to use consequentialist analysis, but look: Alice still hasn't proposed an alternative. She's done nothing more than point out that some philosophers disagree.
> This critique alleges that EA’s claim to be doing the most good founders on a misunderstanding of the nature of morality...
Again, Crary says there is a critique but doesn't care to say what it is.
> The resulting composite critique presupposes, in line with the philosophical critique, that values are essentially woven into the texture of the social world and that EA’s Archimedean take on moral reflection deprives it of resources needed to describe – irreducibly normative – social circumstances.
I don't think this tells us how to decide how to donate money or make the world better. Or is that an unworthy goal in the first place? Also, has anyone actually adopted this other philosophy? Or is it better to do nothing rather than to donate using a philosophy Crary regards as wrong?
> The upshot of this new line of criticism is an update of the institutional critique, charging that EA cannot give accurate assessments of sets of actions because it forfeits capacities necessary for all social assessment. This means that the tendency of EA-affiliated organisations to wrongly prioritise evaluation of the proximate effects of particular actions is not a fixable methodological flaw.
The surface-level logic here is a non sequitur, and Crary hasn't really tried to make a case that EAs prioritise wrongly, except to say "look, references! it's in the references!"
> It is often right to act in ways that aim to improve the welfare of others.
But it's often wrong too? Care to explain?
> But recognising the instances in which this is (or isn’t) right requires capacities for engaged social thought that EA disavows.
EAs do not disavow engaged social thought. Who told you that?
> Further, when it comes to evaluating actions coordinated with an eye to social transformation, EA’s image of the moral enterprise is patently implausible. Such actions are efforts to restructure the normative organisation of society, and their relevant ‘effects’, far from obeying merely causal laws, are at home in the unpredictable realm of politics. Attempts to evaluate these efforts in EA’s terms are manifestly confused.
Look, we've all heard of the Law Of Unintended Consequences, but that doesn't mean we ignore it, nor does it prove we should abandon all hope of trying to predict the consequences of actions once they cross some invisible line into "politics". Indeed, how is the debate we're having now not already political? Also, what's with "effects" being in scare quotes, and what's the purpose of the word "merely" here?
So, I've passed the halfway point of the essay, and I have decided that I am forced to admit that maybe only a professional philosopher can understand her argument. Anyone care to take on the rest?
I think this is really a critique of philosophy disguised as a critique of EA, showing that it’s ability to actually say stuff that’s meaningful has totally evaporated
> A leitmotif of the institutional critique of EA is that this bias is politically dangerous because it obscures the structural, political roots of global misery, thereby contributing to its reproduction by weakening existing political mechanisms for positive social change.
Are they seriously complain that EA is bad because it makes things better?
Has opposite (make things worse to cause revolution/etc ) ever worked in the entire history?
> The philosophical critique brings into question effective altruists’ very notion of doing the ‘most good’ or having the ‘greatest impact’. Effective altruists invite us to regard the rightness of a social intervention as a function of its consequences, with the outcome involving the best states of affairs counting as doing most good. This strategy appears morally confused when considered in terms of the ethical stance of the philosophical critique. To adopt this stance is to see the weave of the world as endowed with values that reveal themselves only to a developed sensibility. To see things this way is to make room for an intuitively appealing conception of actions as right insofar as they exhibit just sensitivity to the worldly circumstances in question.
Maybe I am too stupid but this criticism seems utter gibberish to me.
> EA has ‘been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men’
Because obviously rant made by a progressive Oxford professor would be incomplete without racist complaints. Scientific racism 2.0 in a full force.
My more charitable reading of EA being "politically dangerous because it obscures the...roots of global misery, thereby contributing to its reproduction by weakening existing political mechanisms" is less that EA is anti-accelerationist (and that that would be bad) and more that EA redirects attention and funds away from systemic change by convincing[^1] people that addressing the _symptoms_ of systemic change is The Answer. From their point of view, it seems that they view EA as one might view a doctor who prescribed migraine pills in response to a brain tumor - yes, those can help alleviate _something_, and they certainly aren't _bad_ on their own, and having _both_ would be lovely - but _prioritizing_ pain relief over removing the tumor is ridiculous (and every choice is implicitly a prioritization because of limited funds/political will/etc.).
[^1] Or, rather, increasing the likelihood of beliefs to that effect.
"Are they seriously complain that EA is bad because it makes things better?"
It sounds to me that this argument is basically the one made by Oscar Wilde in 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_Under_Socialism), but worse argued. I personally think it sounds like the 'modern English' version* of the classic Biblical Ecclesiastes passage** which Orwell contrasted in 'Politics and the English Language' (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/). It's a good essay if you want to understand why people just cannot speak clearly even through they're trying to make their point and persuade people - the short of it is that "Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style."***
*: "Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
**: "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
***: Incidentally, I think this essay is where Orwell came up with his famed 'duckspeak' man, the one who shows up in '1984' with two blank discs instead of eyes: "When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them."
TL;DR: Socialism is a pathway to a lack of style some consider to be... unnatural.
>Has opposite (make things worse to cause revolution/etc ) ever worked in the entire history?
Arguably a bunch of colonial agitators in 1773 provoking the British to blockade Boston made things worse. which led to the American Revolution which made things better. But that's a rare exception, and not something you want to be your Plan A.
I don’t think the measurability bias this is too good of a point. EA people donate to some significant non measurable areas, such as AI risk (totally not measurable!)
I *think* the philosophical critique is basically saying "EA starts with the assumption that consequentialism is true, but as we all know, *real* morality is virtue ethics, so EA is fundamentally confused about what "Doing good" even entails."
Phrased in the least comprehensible manner possible, making it very likely I'm wildly misinterpreting here.
Have recently mocked a work of fiction for having a secret organisation (i.e., no-one knows it exists) with 100,000,000 members. I feel fairly confident in this judgement, but I'm no expert in such matters and it has occurred to me that I don't really have a good feel for how large a conspiracy could actually plausibly be.
What would be personal estimates for the largest plausible size of a fully-secret organisation (nobody knows it exists; can't think of easy past examples), and of the largest plausible size of a publically-known organisation's secret projects (nobody knows that organisation does that kind of thing; Dragonfly would be an example of this before it was leaked)?
One data point comes from Osama bin Laden, who was pretty good at organizing large conspiracies. Everybody knew that Al Qaeda existed, but nobody knew that the Al Qaeda North American Kamikaze Action Force existed until it was too late. That force consisted of twenty men operating on hostile soil. OBL considered and explicitly rejected a larger ten-plane attack on the grounds that it would likely be detected. And in fact the four-plane, twenty-man version very nearly was detected due to a walking OPSEC failure named Zacarias Moussaoui.
So, expert opinion says fifty men is too many if you need to keep the bare existence of the conspiracy secret. Maybe someone better than OBL, or operating on more favorable ground, could do better. But by the time you get to 500, you're probably going to have more leaks that you can plug.
Another data point is that the Roman Catholic Church maintained an undetected[*] conspiracy in the United States for many decades that seems to have included approximately every Catholic bishop, archbishop, and cardinal in the country. That's about 500 men. Plus probably some of their executive secretaries. But the RCC is a very respected and high-trust organization operating on very friendly ground, so probably the best-case scenario for a successful secret conspiracy.
As always, "conspiracy" means explicit cooperation towards a goal that is generally regarded within the surrounding community as morally outrageous. Things like secret military operations can be larger because if someone blabs, the person they blab to is likely to report them rather than spread the secret.
* It was widely known that lots of priests were diddling altarboys, but that the Church heirarchy was actively shuffling them around to evade detection was kept effectively secret for quite a while.
I don't think there were any "support staff" in the United States. Probably a few in Hamburg, but it's not clear how much they knew. And a small possibility that the post-9/11 anthrax attacks were an Al Qaeda team that had been tasked with providing bioweapons for delivery by cropduster, failed miserably resulting in obvious change in plan, and then mailed out what little they had been able to create before going home.
So, maybe a bit more than twenty depending on how you count, but still "twenty-ish".
Right. If your conspiracy needs to grow past the 50-500 people range, then you need to be running the sort of conspiracy that can function even when everybody knows it exists. That typically means some combination of being low-impact - the police don't care *that* much that the [ethnic] mafia is shaking down [ethnic] shopkeepers for protection money so long as the murder and arson stay within tolerable limits - or being compartmentalized so that individual operations are both small enough to stay undetected and isolated enough that their loss doesn't unravel the conspiracy.
It depends, what is the punishment for defecting and what is the reward versus what is the reward for staying a part of the conspiracy. Look at the big successful conspiracies like the Mafia or kayfabe. As soon as the reward for breaking the conspiracy was greater than the punishment, they broke.
Hypothetically, I think you could have a conspiratorial organization with 100M members, almost all of whom think they're just doing a job for an organization they don't fully understand. Perhaps not too different from the real world.
Well the inherent problem is that the denominator of the key fraction (# of conspiracies that were betrayed/# that were not) is by definition unknown. The only conspiracies of which we know are those that were eventually betrayed.
...although...I bet a good dynamic model could extract something useful from the *dynamics* of the end of conspiracies. That is, the distribution of size versus time before betrayal is probably sensitive to the parameters of the dynamics, so *if* you came up with a robust model you might be able to work backwards from the distribution to infer reasonable bounds on the number of conspiracies (and their sizes) that were never betrayed.
...and if the answer is a kajillian you can then write a best-seller book, which will be snapped up by tons of people crying "I KNEW it! All along! Even when everyone was making snide comments about tinfoil hats..." $19.99 on Amazon Kindle, comes with a glossary of the most commonly used code phrases, so you can tell what the TV news anchors are *really* saying..."
Even if the answer is a kajillian, conspiracies are still secrets, so you can still ask the conspiracy theorist how they uncovered the secret. "How did you discover that there was not, in fact, a conspiracy of dozens of extremists to destroy the World Trade Center, but rather a conspiracy within the U.S. government itself which fabricated the appearance of a different conspiracy?"
A conspiracy involving 10 each with a 1% chance of betraying the conspiracy any given year has a 37% percent chance of surviving 10 years. If it's a 100 people, the 10-year-survival-probability would be 0.00004317124.
With these numbers, the notion of a 0.1 billion people conspiracy is just ludicrous.
I wouldn't mock a work for having an overt worldwide 100M organisation with tentacles in everything. The Catholic Church is a hierarchical organisation that wielded immense influence across state lines for over a millennium (and is still far from toothless) and depending on where you draw the line on who counts as part of that organisation (priests vs. devout laity who will act on papal instruction vs. everyone who puts down "Catholic") can be considered bigger than that.
What I rejected as silly even for fiction is the idea of a 100M co-ordinated organisation *that nobody on the outside knows about*, "conspiracy-theory" style - which is what the Scott post I linked is careful to distinguish less-absurd things from. Everybody knows that Catholics exist and what the Catholic Church as a whole aims to achieve. There are, much smaller, conspiracies within the Catholic Church that people don't or didn't know about - but the basic principles of the organisation and its primary operations are public knowledge. If somebody claimed that there was a religion the size of Catholicism or even Judaism *that was a secret from non-members*, I would scoff - you cannot keep the existence and purpose of something that size a secret, so our non-observation of it is proof it doesn't exist.
sure but by this calculation the Manhattan project would’ve immediately been destroyed, and it wasn’t. Similarly every intelligence community medium scale project or lather would immediately be destroyed and they aren’t.
The MED is sort of a weird special case, because in 1944 you could talk all day in front of a mass of suburban commuters on a train about bomb physics, quite openly, and unless you actually used a charged phrase like "incredibly powerful atomic bomb" nobody would have a clue what you were jabbering about.
That is, it's probably a lot easier to keep secrets about subjects on which almost every normal person is deeply ignorant. But that's a rather special kind of conspiracy, in most cases you're trying to keep something secret that ordinary people will immediately grasp, and so you have to work much harder to keep tiny little clues and hints from escaping.
It'll vary with the way the conspirators are aligned to the conspiracy. For instance, if you bring someone in on your secret who finds the conspiracy morally reprehensible (e.g. Edward Snowden), the risk is higher. If everybody agrees the secret should be kept, or if everybody has a strong incentive to keep it, the risk is lower. Thus, hypothetically proper conspiracy theorist reasoning would need a story about why none of the conspirators ever spills the beans.
Well, that "conspiracy" is called the US government, and while many people's feelings towards it may be mixed at best, the vast majority would prefer it not to end outright I'd imagine.
> What would be personal estimates for the largest plausible size
What would be parameters? Allowing it to exist just for some time would make things easier - keeping something secret for one month is much easier than keeping secret forever.
Scope of things also matter - there could be something that basically just exists and only has secret handshake or something. This would make easier to hide it.
Manhattan Project may be one of larger ones that at least for some time was reasonably secret. Though most info leaked relatively soon to USSR.
> Have recently mocked a work of fiction for having a secret organisation (i.e., no-one knows it exists) with 100,000,000 members
That is quite absurd, unless it was in society/setting drastically different from ours wit (outright magic: see Harry Potter, Alpha Centauri may have a secret alien colony etc). I would likely join mocking.
The *existence* of the Manhattan Project was fairly easy to discover. The fact that a lot of famous nuclear physicists were all moving to Los Alamos or Oak Ridge to work on something was basically impossible to hide, and there are even some vague newspaper articles talking about it at the time. But the details of what exactly they were *doing* there was protected, which was good enough.
However, fictional conspiracies often claim to be completely unknown to the public (so that they don't disrupt the real-world setting), meaning they need a much greater level of secrecy.
You might like to look into neuracam. There's this video which can give you a quick overview of what it was (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9XmXad_wmo&t=1761s) timestamped to cut to the chase, the document he talks about here goes much deeper into all of it.
This is more on the side of LARPing / games, but the line between reality and not-reality in this game is really thin and the mechanisms which allow for the creation of the community in this game would probably also work in other (more nefarious) contexts.
When it comes to conspiracies, I lean towards the theory laid out in "The Irishman" (which apparently is a paraphrase of Benjamin Franklin): three people can keep a secret only when two of them are dead.
You're right of course but I don't think the 'theory' should be taken literally. It's a humorous exaggeration to make a point. A joke with a kernel of truth.
Like, if a company wanted to know how many people it’d take to screw in a particular light bulb so they could hire the correct number of people, and someone said “well, I once heard this joke, and it concluded it’d take countably infinite mathematicians” or something, despite how many kernels of truth the joke has, it’s still a bad estimate.
Precisely! Of course 3 or more people could keep a secret under the right circumstances (for example, if it is on their best interest to do so). Still, I think that people are super bad at keeping secrets.
Hello all, I am a graduate student in geometry (Riemannian, Conformal, CR), who is looking for a mathematical collaborator. I feel that I have a willingness to learn new things, and am committed to being a helpful and pleasant collaborator. My desire for a collaborator stems from this recent article on Slime Mold Time Mold- https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/why-we-fund-teams-and-hire-individuals
If you are someone who is interested in collaborating with a grad student interested in geometry, you may reply here or mail me at auk480@psu.edu. For context, my research will be uploaded on arXiv soon (when I am done removing them blasted typos from my preprints).
I was reading about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and a question popped into my head - hopefully the experts here can weigh in. If SETI were happening on one of the exoplanets closest to us (in the Proxima Centauri system 4+ light years away), would they be able to detect the signals from Earth? If yes - could they, with the appropriate technology, listen to the top 40 radio hits of 4 years ago? If no - what is order of magnitude by which it fails? 2x, 10x, 100x? And then why are people doing something that can't work?
It's not top-40 radio stations that would give us away, but the stray microwaves from the ballistic-missile warning radars we built during the Cold War. And, incidentally, reveal to the aliens that we are species that does wars. I believe that an alien civilization with an exact duplicate of our SETI program could detect those radars from ~40 light years.
A truly spacefaring alien civilization could do a *lot* better than that, by building their radio telescopes in space. One of the blind spots of SETI, and of the scientific community in general, is that it usually doesn't consider the consequences of technological advances more than one generation out.
"The radio telescopes are sensitive enough to detect "Earth-leakage" levels of radio transmission from stars within 5 parsecs,[4] and can detect a transmitter of the same power as a common aircraft radar from the 1,000 nearest stars."
5 parsecs is 16 light years, so Breakthrough Listen can detect Earth's leakage radiation around Alpha Centauri and a few other stars.
Targeted messages from an Earth-equivalent civilization can be detected across the galaxy. In 1974, Arecibo sent a message to M13, 21,000 light years away. According to seti.org, " The emission was equivalent to a 20 trillion watt omnidirectional broadcast, and would be detectable by a SETI experiment just about anywhere in the galaxy, assuming a receiving antenna similar in size to Arecibo's." (https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/arecibo-message)
This is reckless; while it may be that our signals will leak out and potentially be detected anyway, a targeted broadcast may alert a civilization that is hostile
+1. I figured one reason SETI might not see aliens is that if they also have wars like we do, they should be smart enough to tell that broadcasting their presence to more advanced civilizations is fantastically reckless.
This reminds me of the most depressing ending for any sci-fi series ever, Stargate Universe, in which they nppvqragnyyl npgvingr na vzzrafr argjbex bs qebarf cebtenzzrq gb qrfgebl nal naq nyy grpuabybtl va gur tnynkl (https://rot13.com). That's what we in EA circles call an "s-risk".
Another reason SETI might not see aliens: efficient radio transmission is both low-power and difficult to distinguish from noise.
>if they also have wars like we do, they should be smart enough to tell that broadcasting their presence to more advanced civilizations is fantastically reckless.
Mmm, not really. If they're more advanced, they are probably more advanced by such a large degree that you have no hope of ever catching up and threatening them. They might swat you like a fly if they want your solar system, but if they come to you you're not going to hide from them anyway.
There's also the issue that any species even considering interstellar war is going to have *highly-developed* interplanetary space infrastructure. Telescopes get better linearly with size - it should be assumed that such a species has planetary-scale individual telescopes (the only real limit on size is gravitational collapse) and system-scale interferometers (modern interferometers are limited to the size of the Earth i.e. 13,000 km and we don't even have that yet; a network of stations in the Kuiper belt would have a baseline of 13 billion km). That's enough to plausibly resolve planets from interstellar distances, at which point things like "the Earth is too bright at night" and "the colours of Earth have been altered by agriculture" start giving us away anyway.
A very good point. It seems to me any advanced civilization would realize there's far more bang for the buck in building really big telescopes right there at home and just *imaging* whatever interests them (including us), instead of spending umpty years cramped up in a steel can to go visit in the flesh. What for? What can anyone possible gain by being here in person and seeing with their own eyestalks what they could see easily enough comfortably on their home 4K screen *without* the 150 year round-trip? And what kind of physical resource could possibly be worth hauling over interstellar distances? If all the planets of Proxima Centauri were made of pure antimatter it still wouldn't be economical to go there to mine it for fuel.
I think you go a bit far; there are reasons to pursue interstellar colonisation. The obvious ones are freedom from interplanetary societal rules (since interstellar war to impose them is hard) and the availability of untapped resources (not to haul back, of course, but to use on-site).
But one would expect the telescopes to at least come *first*. Those are easy to build once you have any kind of industrial capability in space, and we recognise their potential even now, before we actually have that capability.
If a civilisation has the capacity to pursue interstellar war, they have the capacity to build interplanetary-sized telescopes. Also, they're probably coming here anyway because life tends to expand.
Since I'm not an expert, I'm only taking this opportunity to mention that The Adventures of Pete & Pete (for my money the greatest children's TV show ever made) made this concept the theme of an early episode, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG33QKbuk4M">Space, Geeks, & Johnny Unitas</a>, in which Big Pete (in 1991) ruminates on the possibility of aliens off Alpha Centauri finally getting to see Johnny Unitas's heroic 1958 NFL Championship victory.
I should know better than to trust a comment system with no preview button! Here's a link to (what I think is actually a different upload of) that episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGMuWFkUpY
They couldn't pick up stray radio transmissions, but SETI has, over the years, involved actively sending directed broadcasts at a number of the nearest stars, and I think those are strong enough to be heard, if someone was looking in the right direction at the time.
On a more general scale, at that distance a civilisation comparably advanced to our own could probably detect the presence of the Earth as a planet, and if the angles line up might be able to use spectroscopy to identify our oxygenated atmosphere, which is a strong sign of life (albeit says nothing about civilisation). Our own exoplanet searches are currently at the level where we're finding Gas Giants all over the place but are just a tad shy of being able to detect Earth-sized planets around most stars.
Finally, if there were truly a galaxy-spanning civ out there, mega-structures might well be visible even to tech much more primitive than ours - a Dyson sphere is a very visible phenomenon.
We're already detecting plenty of Earth-sized planets around most stars. The catch is that most stars are M dwarfs, much smaller and cooler than the Sun--and also much more active. The high-energy radiation and flares they spew out may be enough to strip planets of their atmospheres and sterilize their surfaces. (Or not; it's an active area of research.)
Why would a Dyson Sphere be visible? I thought the point was to capture all the emitted light? The process of construction would be visible, but after that…?
Dyson spheres capture the energy emitted by the star, yes, but they do so in the sense that hydroelectric dams capture water: temporarily holding it up and harnessing it, but eventually letting it out.
Because of thermodynamics, you can't turn 100% of a star's emitted energy into work that forever stays inside the Dyson sphere. Turning heat into other forms of energy requires letting some of the heat out into somewhere colder, and using energy to do work always generates a net increase in entropy that you need to let out of your system in the form of waste heat unless you want it piling up and making a nuisance of itself.
At thermodynamic equilibrium, a Dyson sphere will be dumping 100% of the star's thermal output in the form of waste heat to the exterior of the sphere. That's going to stick out like a sore thumb to astronomers, since the black body temperature of the sphere is going to be very low for its brightness (since the sphere is likely millions of times bigger than the star, the heat emissions are spread over a much larger area), and since the emissions spectrum is going to show a very different composition from natural stars (since hydrogen and helium tend to be lousy building materials).
There are ways for a privacy-minded advanced civilization to mitigate this, at the cost of some of their immense budget of usage energy: concentrating radiators on one side of the sphere, deliberately emitting light on specific wavelengths to fill in gaps in your emissions spectrum, etc. But without violating the laws of thermodynamics or doing something exotic like using a captive black hole as an entropy dumping ground, there's still going to be something visible to someone.
Nitpick: a civilisation sufficiently advanced to build something like a Dyson sphere might be able to use a process that "wastes" a lot of energy creating heavy atoms from scratch. Think building lead atoms from freshly smashed hydrogen: matter which is then ejected from the sphere as cold, inert material. A continuous stream of cold lead ingots at escape velocity would presumably not show up on most sensors: but you could dump a lot of energy into their creation.
I think that's still constrained by thermodynamics: a stream of cold lead ingots is going to be very low-entropy, so you haven't solved your entropy disposal problem.
Lead ingots by themselves are low entropy if all you do is gather lead that is already floating around inside the Dyson sphere - this would be classical thermodynamics all right. But they are not low entropy at all if you outright assemble the lead atoms from sub-atomic particles you find inside the sphere: you can "bury" quite a bit of entropy if you can build entire atoms from scratch. Cf. the energy which gets released when you detonate a nuclear weapon, and all that.
We as a species are of course not capable (yet) of assembling atoms like that. But then, we are not able to build Dyson spheres yet either. At least in theory, it should be possible to do that: and if you are able to do it, it will need to be very costly in terms of energy invested (it needs to match what comes out of a nuclear explosion, roughly), otherwise you could run a very weird perpetuum mobile of sorts with nuclear processes.
Or so my reasoning goes - I'm not a nuclear physicist, but energy conservation needs to hold even if you are tinkering with individual atoms.
It would be an unusually cool "star" for its size. For example, if we built one it would have a radius of 150 million km, and have an average temperature of 400K (127C), because that's the temperature you need to get rid of the heat. But there *are* no stars that big that have such low surface temperatures, I think the average surface temperature of a red supergiant is about 10x higher. So if were able to detect it in the first place, it would arouse immediate suspicion, as it would be a wholly unprecedented object.
But I'm not sure how easily we would find it. It would radiate in the mid infrared, which is hard to detect below the atmosphere, and if it were noticed in a general way, e.g. by the JWST (which has good infrared capabilities), it would probably be initially assumed to be a protostar.
I'd think it would be challenging, if they're near our level of technology. The inverse square law is a killer. Just consider how difficult it is for NASA to detect signals from Voyager 1, which is 0.0006 light years away. They need a 70m dish at the Earth end and a 1m dish at the transmitting end. The radio flux 4ly away would be 44 million times smaller. Earth transmitters are quite a bit more powerful than Voyager's radio, of course, but only by about a factor of 2000 (50 kW typical versus 20W). They're also not broadcasting towards Alpha Centauri, or even in general towards space. If anything, TV and radio antennas try to focus the transmission towards the ground, for obvious reasons.
More problematically, the Sun is itself a big source of radio noise, and anyone pointing an ear toward the Solar System from 4ly away will have to distinguish signal from that big source of noise which will be right on top of it. (NASA can't communicate with the Mars rovers when Mars and the Sun are less than a few degrees apart from the point of view of Earth, for the same reason.)
Even more problematic, the Sun (and Jupiter) are themselves big sources of radio noise, so anybody pointing an ear towards the Solar System would have to distinguish the meaningful Earthling TV/radio broadcasts from the noise put out by a star.
I don't know that we *couldn't* communicate over those distances if we needed to, e.g. we could build a honking big maser and point it carefully, use some clever modulation to make the signal easier to pick out of the noise, look for clear(er) bands in the solar spectrum; and on the receiving side build enormous radio telescopes. But it doesn't seem super likely to me that our careless accidental transmissions would be easily detectable by ETs who are 4-5ly away with our level of tech. I think the people doing SETI are assuming ET is going to some trouble to be found, e.g. using a big radio telescope with a heap big transmitter to deliberately transmit some highly intelligible signal directly toward us, because otherwise the whole thing is futile.
For ETs that are a more plausible distance away, like 100-1000ly (which still requires the assumption that the galaxy is thickly strewn with life), I think you have to assume ET has communications and astronomy tech well in advance of ours.
John Schilling has a comment somewhere saying that a society around our tech level but with more money could use gravitational lensing to communicate across effectively-infinite distances on a point-to-point basis.
Huh. I'm baffled as to how. The only lens at which we can aim our power efficiently is the Sun, and the lens effect is symmetric, so we can focus our radio waves...on Counter-Earth, 150 million km on the other side of the Sun. Doesn't seem useful. How do we use a distant star as a lens? We would have to be able to construct a beam that wasn't much wider than the star by the time it got there, which seems very difficult. What am I missing?
Hmm, now that I think about it, if we put our transmitter at just the right position, we should be able to use the Sun to collimate it. Feels like this requires a transmitter station significanly further away than the Earth, with exquisite station-keeping ability to keep the angular error to a minimum. Also, if we want to move the beam to another point in the sky, we have to move the transmitter a significant distance around the Sun, a few hundred million km, so....slow slew rate. Not sure this is the idea though, at all.
Yes, you need enough wealth to send a fairly substantial spacecraft to trans-Neptunian space for the specific purpose of communicating with one specific target star. Or maybe star cluster. We could do this now if we really really wanted to, but we won't. Realistically, it will be a combination of more wealth and better technology that leads to such a thing, not just more money.
That far? I was vaguely thinking around the orbit of Mars. Impressive. And what kind of station-keeping tech do you need to keep your beam aimed to the kind of sub-milliarcsecond precision you need to hit a distant star squarely? There being no GPS in outer space, I wonder how easy that is to achieve.
This reminds of Ad Astra. The station at Neptune is sending out EM pulses which are so strong that they can wreak havoc on the Earth. But applying the inverse square law in reverse, they first one would have vapourised the station itself.
If Larry Elder wins the second Q vote by a large margin as seems likely, will you count the "Why aren't you governor" post as a mistake?
Incidentally, Newsom's strategy of ensuring that no serious Democrats run so it would be a partisan matchup seems like it's working great to me. I don't know why everyone kept criticizing it.
P.S. I just realized this is a no-politics thread. I wanted to call out Scott for making dumb predictions. I hope that talking about the likelihood of different electoral outcomes can be done without debating the pros or cons of specific candidates, which would count as politics.
Right, but that's not "Paffrath is predicted to win 45.8+/-5% of the popular vote, so 20% to win". That's 20% "Democrats rally to Paffrath!" spreads memetically and Paffrath gets 60% of the popular vote, and 80% "Democrats leave the second part of the ballot blank in protest!" is the winning meme and Paffrath gets only a small fraction of the popular vote.
It's a bimodal chaotic system, and the closer we get to election day the less likely it is to flip to the Paffrath-meme.
Elder winning by a large margin on election day is not inconsistent with the betting markets being right about Paffrath having a 20% chance of winning as of three weeks before the election. Paffrath's chances of winning hinged on 1) which poll you believed, and 2) where Paffrath, as the Democrat-identified candidate with the most name recognition and media traction, would turn out be the Schelling Point for the immense numbers of Democratic-leaning undecided voters to settle on to vote against Elder.
Both are looking dubious now, as further polls are showing Paffrath with much less support than the poll that was probably informing the betting markets, and anecdotal indicators I'm seeing suggest there are three competing Schelling Points for voting against Elder on Question 2: Paffrath, or supporting Faulconer as the most moderate and qualified of the major Republican candidates for want of a true major Democratic candidate, or following the Newsom campaign's advice and leaving question 2 blank in hopes of blackmailing other voters who might prefer Paffrath or Faulconer over Newsom into voting No on question 1.
The thing is that the official Newsom/Democratic Party message was leave Q2 blank, meaning Paffrath could only ever get a fraction of D votes at best. And conditional on recall passing, the electorate would be right leaning. So he'd have needed an implausibly large amount of ticket splitting among Rs.
Okay, I can see the logic in that line of reasoning. My line of reasoning is that there are two scenarios where Newsom loses on question 1:
1. Republican-leaning voters turn out en masse while Democratic-leaning voters mostly ignore the election, so a majority of the ballots are cast by Republican-leaners.
2. A substantial proportion of Democratic-leaning voters vote against Newsom.
Either scenario is a very tall order from an a priori perspective, since California's electorate is so overwhelmingly Democratic: Biden carried California 63%-34% in 2020, and Newsom won the last Gubenatorial election 62%-38% in 2018.
The early August SUSA poll that showed a substantial lead (51% Yes to 40% No) in favor of the recall indicated a combination of the two scenarios: among the respondents identified as "Likely Voters", 53% reported having voted for Biden in 2020 and 40% reported having voted for Trump, indicating an electorate that's considerably right-skewed compared to the 2020 electorate, but still left-leaning overall. 22% of self-reported 2020 Biden voters indicated that they intended to vote Yes on question 1.
In the same poll, among 2020 Biden voters who were planning to vote on Question 2, 51% were planning to vote for Paffrath and 30% Other or Undecided. The drop-off from Question 1 (i.e. those who were planning on leaving Question 2 blank) isn't directly reported, but calculating from reported numbers it looks like about 18% of Biden voters and about 0% of Trump voters were planning on leaving Question 2 blank. That still left Biden-voters as a narrow plurality (49% to 45%) of Question 2 voters. And as it happened, Paffrath was also leading Elder in Question 2 in that poll, by a plurality of 23% to 13%.
Looking at the most recent poll reported in 538's aggregation (Emerson's Sept 10-11 poll), the current likely voter electorate is almost identical to the 2020 electorate (62% Biden, 33% Trump), and 2020 Biden voters had firmed up behind No on question 1 ("only" 11.6% of Biden voters planning to vote in favor of the recall). 52% of 2020 Biden voters seem to be heeding the California Democratic Party's advice and leaving Question 2 blank, and those who are voting seem to be scattered between Paffrath, the two other Democratic-labelled candidates offered by the pollsters (Drake and McGowan), Faulconer, Elder, and "Someone Else".
So the CDP does seem to have succeeded in persuading their voters to largely leave question 2 blank, either by direct messaging or indirectly by clearing the field of serious candidates with the letter D next to their names, but that only seems to have paid off over the course of the past month. Skimming cross-tabs for a few other polls, it looks like that transition started showing up in polls collected in late August, right around when Scott wrote his post on the subject.
i had a routine colonoscopy done a few months ago as a cancer screen and it came back with no cancer but some inflammation. i had a few tests (stool and blood) which showed slightly elevated inflammation markers. my gastroenterologist diagnosed me with colitis, although i am not aware that i have any symptoms. i think my digestion is fine. he told me that i should take mesalamine daily for the rest of my life to forestall a flare up. i haven't been able to find evidence one way or the other that this is necessary. does anyone know whether this is necessary?
In a couple similar situations I've been driven to google-scholaring the research myself and wading through it. Once was very successful: Took research results back to doctor, who wanted me to have an invasive test that had a 5% chance of causing pancreatitis. She agreed to my request to re-test by ultrasound instead, which returned normal results for area in question. It's been 20 years now and I've had no recurrence of the problem that led doc to recommend the invasive test.
I've been looking! It turns out that almost no research has been done on asymptomatic colitis cases (probably hard to find them), so there isn't much to go on.
But in the "isn't much to go on" case I have a strong tendency just to want to counteract the strong tendency of doctors to prescribe medications, so my prior is to say that I shouldn't go on the meds. But my prior is perhaps ill informed. How would I know.
Maybe you need to find out more from doc about why he's making this recommendation. I'm pretty sure "colitis" is a vague term. Gastroenterologists don't talk about colitis," they talk about inflammatory bowel disease (an umbrella term) and various forms of IBS, such as ulcerative colitis, Crohn's Disease, etc. I just looked up mesalamine, it's for ulcerative colitis. Ask your doc for more specifics. Does he think you have ulcerative colitis? (Did he see ulcers in your colon?) Ask him to point you to some research about asymptomatic IBS. Just did a quick google, came up with this -- there's probably lots more to be found. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11280543/
At college I studied mathematics and philosophy. I don't entirely regret studying philosophy, and I love talking to my philosopher friends; in terms of personality and interests, I have much more in common with them than with the people I made friends with when I went into bioscience.
But nowadays it is absolutely the case that I try to answer the philosophical questions I have with reference to scientific findings. I wouldn't say you can solve all philosophical questions from knowing these things. But I would say that answering questions of interest to philosophers needs to be built on the science we know, and it's troubling to me that there are entire fields of philosophy that don't seem to care about pertinent findings.
I've made a few lists of "scientific findings I'd teach philosophy undergrads", here's one:
-Primatology and evolutionary psychology
-Evolutionary game theory, especially costly signalling
-Genetics and its relation to neuroscience
-Bayesian updating
-Information theory
-Godel's Incompleteness Theorems and Turing-completeness
-Basic special relativity and quantum mechanics
It's an old debate I know, and this list maybe says more about me (and lesswrong) than about the world. But I'd be interested to hear how others feel about where we are with this.
"Bayesian updating". Why not probability in general? But of philosophy already teaches logic, and if you delve enough into logic, you will encounter probablistic reasoning because they are related. Teaching Bayes alone sounds like loading the die in favour of Bayes neingthe one true probability theory ,etc.
"Basic special relativity and quantum mechanics". What5 does that mean? If teach them as physics, with maths and, they are just not basic -- there's no way of doing it causally. Or you could teach them at the pop-sci level, but that kind of thing is in the water already.
I dunno. Jakob Schwichtenberg does a good job of explaining it with enough detail that it needs math, but at a high enough level that the math is not overwhelming to a motivated noob.
You can teach the basic concepts of special relativity with spacetime diagrams, enough to understand and resolve the classic paradoxes, no real math involved. Dunno how that would help philosphers philosophize better though.
You imply that you've taught qm? I'm working thru this [1] primer on relativity at the moment. Interested to grow my knowledge base about relativity and qm as an enthusiast, my work in cryptography has nothing to do with the topic, but I thought you might be opinionated about recommending a book, either at the high level or something similar to the book linked.
I agree that philosophers often discuss questions that have been or should be answered by science. However, there are an infinite number of questions that have no observables or testables and so can't be answered by science. But these questions have answers and so philosophy discusses them. However, some of us believe that, if a question involves no observables, the answer doesn't matter except for entertainment purposes. Furthermore, a few of us (okay, just me) believe that there are no a priori philosophical facts at all and the only facts are empirical and scientific facts.
I think philosophy has a great deal of value to science. Philosophers above all else are (or should be) highly trained in the art of being precise in their thinking. They try to define terms very carefully, to set clear boundaries between categories, and to make careful distinctions between all the different ways we have of reasoning (or our failures in reasoning).
All of this is extremely helpful, it's sort of the linguistic equivalent of algebra. Math gives science a language in which to express the relationship between measuremetns precisely -- which is very valuable. Philosophy, while not as cut and dried, helps give us a language in which to expression hypotheses, uncertainties, sources, types, and magnitudes of error, both known and unknown, more precisely. Modern empiricism is indebted, for example, to Karl Popper for a clear and actionable formulation of how we can go about defining what we think we know and what we think we don't, the concept of "falsifiability" is a freaking brilliant invention (although I doubt it's Popper's alone, but he certainly did a lot to popularize it).
I feel like the flaw in the popular vision of philosophy (and for that matter in the vision some philosophers have) is that it's mistaken for a <i>prescription</i> rather than more or less a set of proscriptions on fuzzy and illogical thought. I don't see the goal of philosophy as being instructing we peasants in an improved worldview, or the One True Social Operating System, or the meaning of life, but rather as illuminating for we peasants how to think more clearly and precisely about these things, how to use language and concepts clearly, logically consistently, and communicatably. It's teaching us to frame our questions better, and understand how we arrive at our answers more deeply, so we recognize both the strengths and weaknesses of our theories.
Are "apriori" and "philosophical" supposed to be synonyms? You can be a perfectly respectable philosopher, while rejecting the apriori, eg. Quine. For that matter, science arguably accepts a bunch of apriori facts, since it incorporates maths.
I hate to be that guy (apparently not enough to not post) but...
>Furthermore, a few of us (okay, just me) believe that there are no a priori philosophical facts at all and the only facts are empirical and scientific facts.
Is that an empirical fact or a philosophical fact?
I kind of agree, but I feel like philosophy doesn't really study the a priori world. More like, the relationship between that world and the way we perceive it and think about it. The mind-world interface, maybe? Like, philosophy is all about the way we represent and process the a priori world? (Well. "All" about that, with many side quests...)
I would distinguish carefully between primatology and evolutionary psychology. I know the attitude in biology departments in Cambridge UK was that most of evolutionary psychology is 'just-so stories' -- ie untestable hypotheses used with a lot of hand-waving. So the most important aspect of this evolutionary psychology field for me is how to distinguish a strong pattern from a weak one by for instance looking at convergence of unrelated fields of enquiry.
In answer to your broader point I agree, and I abandoned the philosophy course I had signed up to as an undergraduate because I preferred the problem solving style of the scientists and wanted to do more science papers.
I've realized I'm not sure how to make one. I might start with the wikipedia article on the handicap principle, then watch the first couple of these lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzdqyXtPbbE then absorb lots of Julia Galef, Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander and Yudkowsky sequences. The view of things as probabilistic and motivated by status signalling is all in there eventually.
Yeah, me neither. I've made a few half-hearted attempts, but they always run afoul of the fact that it's a lot of hard work. I'm reading Galef's Scout book now, and it's raised my hopes again that this is feasible. I just don't have enough time to put into it at this time...
In "Lila", Robert Pirsig makes up the word "philosophology."
"Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior."
(Ugh. I just took a short cruise around the internet philososphere to look up this quote, and ended it the way I almost always end it: feeling surprised at academic philosophers' constant, blatant retreats to the bailey; and feeling stupid for being constantly surprised by this.)
I feel like the world would benefit from tabooing the word "philosophy."
'The world' is a strong proposition, though I agree that, like very many vulgarised words that bestow pseudointellectual cachet on whatever is discussed, it could benefit from being used less frequently and more precisely.
I enjoyed both of Pirsig's books, but I don't share his implied disdain of these meta-fields. For example, I think lit crit has a lot to offer to literature (and at its best meets literature as an equal). And - this may be post-modernism speaking - I think that 'controlling' any primary field by way of contextualising and critique has genuine value. Otherwise it might get too big for its britches and think it's got the Truth or something.
Yeah, you're right to call me out on the strong claim, though I wasn't trying to be overly rigorous in this comment. The problem with these meta-fields isn't that simple, you're right. It reminds me of accounting and marketing, which I used to deride as a youngster. Later in life I worked with people who did accounting and marketing with excellence, and I now deride the lazy, ignorant WAY in which accounting and marketing are too often done, rather than the fields themselves. Similarly, it's my impression that a larger-than-average proportion of lit crit is just bollocks. (Frankly, I also quit physics for this reason. I spent a lot of time with the profs, during a couple of years of running IT for the accelerator building and at the supercomputer shop helping with the theoretic modeling. "The Farce of Physics" came out my junior year and spoke to me like turning Saul to Paul.)
Maybe the people doing good work in these meta-fields have learned to tune out the roar of incompetence just so they can get work done? While an amateur visiting the field can't see the high-quality work through the noise?
I'm curious why you include information theory in particular. As a cryptographer and former electrical engineer, I've studied a bit of information theory on my own, but don't see the utility in teaching it to philosophy undergrads, except perhaps as part of a module on some of mid century luminaries like Shannon and Von Neumann. I'd consider swapping info theory for teaching philosophers to run algorithmic game theory experiments, with the bonus utility of being the rare case where philosophers might like to get hands dirty.
Information theory and bayesianism, i.e. looking at things in terms of probabilities, goes a long way toward telling you the right way to understanding how language / communication and thinking work. Philosophers generally want everything to be binary true or false, and approached in a deductive way.
(I'd teach bayesianism / probabilistic thinking to absolutely everyone, philosopher or not, starting at age 8!)
Additionally, I'm amused that your exposure to bioscience and rationalism has pushed your philosophical foundations in an empirical direction, while half of the topics you've listed emerge very much from a priori reasoning (as most pure mathematics does)
The value of this list, IMO, isn't that the topics are empirical, but that they demonstrate how fields are advanced by new, original thinking. Philosophy cannot be advanced very far by rehashing the arguments of the past. I learned Kant in phil 101 in the early 90's, but Kant is to ethics as the Demonic Theory of Disease is to biology or as Aristotle is to astronomy: a great story and a valuable case study, not a foundational theory that everyone needs to learn in their 101 class.
Ethics would be my prime example of how older philosophy can still be valuable. I have never seen anything to suggest that there is now some generally agreed upon correct theory, some "germ theory of disease". BTW, Scott takes Kant quite seriously.
I am not so certain this analogy applies. It is the case that (at least temporarily) we are accessing a greater deal of neurodiversity in this era, but Communism failed miserably except in its modern form in China, where it has adopted the forms of really another dynasty
I don't quite follow. (As a relevant aside, I feel like "communism" should be a taboo term as well, when it can describe a worker-run state as easily as "really another dynasty.")
It seems to me that we need much less history of philosophy and much more actual reasoning skills. In my opinion such history is required only as a context to the philosophical problems, which should be e presented as something that requires solving and actually has the right answer.
Your list is good example of subjects that can actually promote such skills. I'd also mention some kind of training in reductionism and question dissolving. Of course, I'd find it most helpfull if there was a course studing Rationality from A to Z and/or Highly Advanced Epistemology 101, which were very enlightenning for me personally.
As for bayesian updating, I believe it should be studied in schools maybe even before conventional mathematics. Just basic intuition how evidence form our expectations and beliefs, which later can be formalized in a strict mathematical language.
Suppose philosopher comes up with a metaphilosopical argument to the effect that philosopical questions are hard to solve. Should philosophers still seek answers?
Also, philosophers already know what redctionism is. They might even understand it better than you. Including why it isn't already guaranteed.
Also, philosophers already know what question-dissolving is...it's famously associated Wittgenstein.
Your implicit criticisms of philosophy come straight from Yudkowsky and rationalism , and that's a problem because Yudkowsky doesn't actually understand they subject...a lot of his claims of the form "philosophers don't know about X" are just false.
I'm not sure I get what you mean here. I'd consider proving that some problem is unsolvable a solution in its own right. Either find x or prove that it doesn't exist. Finding some good evidence about the complexity of the problem seems to be a progress as well.
Never have I claimed that philosophers don't know what reductionism or question dissolving is. But there is important distinction between knowing what a car is, knowing how to drive it, knowing how to construct one, knowing how to design a new one and actually driving, constructing or designing a car. And it seems to me that philosophers may benefit greatly from better reduction and question dissolving skill in a sense of actually applying it to the previously unreduced and not-dissolved problems.
The claim that Yudkowsky doesn't understand philosophy seems suspicious, consdering how good he is at solving philosophical problems. But I'm not interesting in arguing about it as it has nothing to do with my position. Whether Eliezer understands conventional philosophy or not, I do. My dissatisfaction with its current state comes from me being deeply engaged in it since childhood, recreating different philosophical ideas and positions from scratch, developing full scale philosophy worldview and later in my adulthood learning about rationality and apreciating the difference between the philosophy of old and current state of the art.
I would really appreciate if you didn't project on me whatever grudges you may have with Yudkowsky or other rationalists and didn't assume the reasons I hold my beliefs for me. As far as I'm concerned, it rarely leads to healthy discource.
> My dissatisfaction with its current state comes from me being deeply engaged in it since childhood, recreating different philosophical ideas and positions from scratch, developing full scale philosophy worldview and later in my adulthood learning about rationality and apreciating the difference between the philosophy of old and current state of the art.
Quite some. Wasn't really counting, just tried to figure out a satisfiyng solution for every problem that I encountered. Of course, most of the time I reinvented the already known solutions. And of course, currently I'm much less satisfied with them.
What I did was mostly playing linguistic games, bravely biting the bullets and following the consequences of implications, even when they were counterintuitive. But that was the same thing all the other philosophers were doing so I didn't see the problem at the time.
Until my adulthood I haven't actually heard about an approach to phiolosophy that could not just produce another interresting way of looking at the problem with its consequences but an actual mechanism to reduce the mystery to non mysterious components, explain the whole intuition behind finding the question mysterious, so that the answer become obvious in retrospect. I did know about science, of course, but for me it used to be some different magisterium with its own rules. Why would they be applicable here?
My definition of solving a philosophical problem would involve bring able to answer the widest range of objections, not just fine up with an answer that is satisfactory to oneself. It would be remarkable to achieve the former even once, but the latter is commonplace.
If you are talking about Yudkowsky s method for dissolving problems, I'm quite unimpressed by it, since it assumes without proof that whatever is being addressed is illusory.
> And it seems to me that philosophers may benefit greatly from better reduction and question dissolving skill in a sense of actually applying it to the previously unreduced and not-dissolved problems.
What's the evidence for that?
>The claim that Yudkowsky doesn't understand philosophy seems suspicious, consdering how good he is at solving philosophical problems
Is he? He only claims to have solved two or three. (There are about two hundred open philosophical problems). Not many philosophers are impressed with his answers, either.
You claim that philosophy is an efficient market enough, so that the fact that some acknowledged philosophers are unimpressed with someone's answer to a philosophical problem, is a good evidence that this answer is wrong?
Otherwise I don't understand how such an appeal to authority is relevant.
I have been giving my kids summaries and simplifications of the Sequences since they were about 6. It has paid off, and I plan to keep giving them more and more in depth as they get older. But it's unreasonable to expect that schools will do this - they understandably optimize for the needs of the school, not the needs of the children. It's easy to forget this, but that doesn't lessen the cost of forgetting...
Well sure. I wasn't really hoping that it's something that is going to happen with the current insentives. The claim was about utility of it, not the probability.
My bad - I didn't mean to imply that's what you were saying. That last bit was just how it feels to me, inside myself. I keep catching myself being disappointed that schools aren't incentivized by the needs of the children, and it's a constant low-level effort to remember that there's no reason they should be.
What a great list! I was disappointed in college philosophy in the early-2000s. I was expecting Sophie's World but instead encountered semantic/analytic arguments ad infinitum. I think the list you made describes what I would've found interesting.
Maybe we need more breakout philosophers in some of those fields, or possibly a breakout specialty, like Symbolic Systems.
The problem could be a limitation with the business model of academia. Today the Internet is the best educator for all those things you mentioned. But yeah, randomly reading ACX, LessWrong, or Wikipedia doesn't have the pedagogical oompf that coursework does.
Humans are animals and our behaviour is the way it is significantly because of evolution. Evolutionary game theory/costly signalling theory, plus primatology, tell you loosely what you should expect to see humans doing, and then ev psych is the field that connects that to observation.
I took courses in ethics, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. Again, I don't entirely regret them - possibly I wouldn't even change all *that* much of their content. I'd definitely change some though. Amotz Zahavi's "The handicap principle" and Hanson's "The Elephant In The Brain" would be the main references.
As Philip Dhingra says, most questions like "what is the purpose of life / X particular part of human life?" need to be answered with reference to ev psych. If you don't hear any discussion of that at all you should be very very suspicious indeed.
The inclusion of evo psych twigged me the wrong way, too.
I agree that philosophy curricula would benefit from understanding the field - as long as it is indeed only the "science we know", acknowledging its empirical limitations and the alternative social/cultural explanations for many of its claims.
I don't really the whole exercise as potentially clarifying, though. Realising that some aspect of human behaviour represents a pre-civilised evolutionary adaptation does not much alter the question of what ought to be done about it.
Evopsych has implications for teleology. I derive a lot of purpose and meaning from casual knowledge of the field, and I don't think its tenets can be easily trivialized.
The idea of deriving purpose and meaning from evolutionary theory is really central to my world view. I don't encounter other folks who feel that way very often.
Indeed! I would also notice that general understanding of evolution through natural selection gives a very interesting take on the classical "X is meaningless/not real/not objective without God" or God as a satisfying explanation to some complicated and otherwise unsolvable philosophical problem.
If one is eager to accept God as a valid explanation, they should just as eagerly accept evolution - an actual "entity which created us" - as a valid explanation.
Do you mean that God as an explanation to some problem won't be valid without evolution as well as evolution won't be valid without God? If so, why?
While I agree that these explanations doesn't logically exclude each other, it seems to me that just one explanation is enough and the second becomes unnecessary.
Take ghost in the machine problem. We can justify the coincidence between mind and body actions by God. And while the answer isn't really satisfying, the question is technically answered. Or we can point out that desynchronization between mind and body couldn't possibly evolved due to the known rules of natural selection.
It's interesting, that evolution is the "God black box" being openned. Not only we have a "justifying entity" but also its inner mechanism.
"insofar" should hint at the possibility of what David Chapman calls the complete stance. Rational knowledge is valid on its own. Belief in God, probably other beliefs, not so sure about the spaghetti monster, are valid on their own. Both have value and limits. Excluding one begets problems with meaning. Jumping back and forth between both is a waste of energy. I wrote "most valid" to express the possible gain of including rationality and spirituality. It's not the only path. A dumb creationist and a nihilist genius can both fail or flourish according to circumstance.
The impetus to my post was the wish to agree with you on the "as eagerly" part from a maybe a little different perspective.
As a freshman philosophy major several decades ago I was introduced to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and it made a very deep impression on me. (It's still on the list of the most impressive things I've ever encountered.) Seemed profoundly relevant to issues in the phil classes I was taking at the time. Absolutely agree students of philosophy need to know about it.
> The real issue is that 'this statement is a lie' doesn't have any content to be true or false *about*
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
It seems like the obvious next step would be "before debating a statement, let's *first* check whether it has any actual content; and only if it does, *then* let's debate whether it is true or false". Turns out, you can't do this either.
Or maybe we should ban *all* kinds of self-reference, regardless of whether they create paradoxes or not. But then some smartass says: "hey, I am not talking about myself; instead I am talking about... a *copy* of myself in a parallel universe... which coincidentally is exactly the same as our universe. so I am not saying that I am a liar (which is now forbidden), I am just saying that this guy (points at his own copy) in the parallel universe is a liar".
And soon you find yourself playing some weird whack-a-mole with logic, where no matter how many fixes you apply, the problem *always* returns from a different angle again.
Even if you say "okay, forget logic, let's do set theory instead", there is immediately the problem of "a set of all sets that don't contain themselves" (does this set contain itself, or not?). Let's talk about natural numbers instead? But you can encode logic with natural numbers, as Gödel has shown, so the very concept of a natural number is already "too complex to avoid logical paradoxes". So let's ignore the whole math, and do computer science instead? Oops, here comes the halting problem...
By the way, I don't understand it fully either. I learned the proof at school, and I probably could repeat it, but it feels like merely repeating the teacher's password. Or perhaps like looking at a long and complex piece of machine code, being able to execute it step by step, but wondering what it actually *means*, what is the big picture, what are all the consequences of it.
That is not Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (if you refer to truth).
In the Incompleteness Theorem, you talk about "provable", not true. It says (for suitable theories T) that
(1) The formula "The statement x is provable in T" (with x a variable) can be formulated in the theory T, and that
(2) the statement "0!=0 is provable in T" cannot be proved in T.
Both items are quite interesting and remarkable.
In contrast, the formula "The statement x is true" can *not* be formulated in T (with x as variable, that is; otherwise you can of course just say "x"); this is also nice to know but is not an instance of the incompleteness theorem.
Philosophy also needs history and anthropology and computation and programming and AI. Really hard to come up with something that isn’t relevant to “philosophy”. Not sure philosophy even can really be categorized as philosophy anyway
My only note is it was always like this, philosophy had always been deeply intertwined with politics and tech and science. From Aristotle to Kant, the best philosophy is foundational to science! When philosophy loses that so much the worse for it
I agree with you on the problems, but I don't see more book learning as the solution. It most often just seems to lead to quantum woo, i.e. philosophical rationalization (or outright bullshit) decorated with mathy and sciency language. If anything, that's even more annoying, because the bemused fanbois will cry "But Science!" when critical questions are asked.
I feel like the essential issue is the ease with which human beings fall in love with their theories, our amazing ability to believe our own bullshit (and those of people we like, or who we want to like us). The best philosophers in my opinion have a very strong appreciation for this, and understand the need to check reasoning, however persuasive, by considering what objective evidence there might be that would test key logical steps. (I would call it "common sense" except for the traditional criticism that "common sense" is often neither.)
How you train philosophers to understand that I do not know, except perhaps with an enhanced exposure to the natural world, which tends to inculcate a healthy respect for the limitations of human theorizing. Just have them work summers installing HVAC systems, or doing house rewiring, or farming, or carpentry, or managing a small ice-cream shop, with a substantial part of their grade (or stipend) dependent on success. Maybe that would help.
Of course, there are philosophers whose whole schtick is limitations of human reasoning. This is another attempt to fix philosophy by introducing something that is already part of it.
I submit that a key philosophical insight is grasping the profound difference between "the limitations of human reasoning" and "the limitations of *my* reasoning."
Philosophers should arguably be technically trained first and then philosophers after that, arguably. Would help to avoid that woo, which parts of continental philosophy is somewhat mired in.
Well, sure, but I don't think it's the university learning that does the trick. It wasn't learning vector calculus or field theory that turned *me* into a skeptic and empiricist -- it was some years of confidently crafting beautiful new theories about physical reality which could be tested by experiment, were tested, and turned out to be garbage for some reason or other I'd completely overlooked. Eventually I learned to kind of expect this, to assume there usually *was* something I'd overlooked, some fact I didn't know that would make it all come apart, and I got deeply skeptical about my own theorizing, and would look for every opportunity to use measurement to check it.
But I don't think I'm especially inflexible, and even in my case it took being hit hard in the face by Nature a bunch of times before I learned respect.
We've all heard the anecdotes about production in Soviet factories going awry due to poorly devised incentive schemes. In a chandelier factory, for example, where workers were paid a bonus based on the tonnage of output, chandeliers grew heavier and heavier until they were too heavy to remain attached to the ceilings.
A similar story involves production quotas for nail factories. To meet the quota at the lowest possible costs, the story goes, factories produced thousands of super small and useless nails.
It occurs to me that these stories (if true) are examples of intelligent systems, where the managers involved presumably understand the ultimate goal of the incentive designer (efficiently produce useful chandeliers and nails), and nonetheless opt to cheat the incentive system and ignore the goals of the designer. In the same way that an AGI might understand the ultimate goals of its designer but choose to ignore them because they are not aligned with its utility function.
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting idea. These examples can be used as a response to the argument that a smart enough AGI would not choose actions that go against its designer's interests, as it could use common sense to infer what the designer's ultimate goals. Even humans, who definitely understand the goals that the incentive designer wants to achieve, cannot be trusted to ignore their utility function in pursue of said goal.
Trying to think of every possible failure mode and write it into the AGI will also result in failure, because we will never think of everything. Instead, we need a system that will automatically update in the direction we need it to go based on real data. That's why a pricing system is so fundamental to Capitalism. Capitalism didn't outcompete Communism because smarter people worked on it, or because they just happened to come up with the right ideas. Instead, prices and the freedom to purchase based on actual needs produced a feedback loop with producers. Factories that produced only giant chandeliers or tiny nails would have gotten no sales and gone under. Factories producing what people actually need succeed and are profitable. The better they do it, the more money they can make.
What command economists didn't understand was that incentives really do matter a lot, and they can't just be handwavy in the right direction - they need to actively and continually push to a final goal. For short term situations (like WWII), you can create a command economy based on a specific set of goals and get there faster. I think the Soviets proved that as well by creating their own nuclear weapons and getting to space faster. I think that's what happens at a lot of startup companies. They can follow a specific goal and make adjustments as needed to get there.
There are two problems that come up long term regarding incentives and command. One, as a company gets larger, and probably always for a country-sized command economy, it becomes harder and harder to guess what might be needed and plan for it. Too many opportunities for breakdowns, graft, unaligned incentives, etc. appear and distort what you are trying to do. Secondly, as those breakdowns grow, more and more people become disillusioned by the overall plan. If you are stuck as a cog in a broken system, you have very little incentive to do your job well.
Let's look at a hypothetical situation. Imagine that there are no houses that need chandeliers because new houses being built don't have high enough ceilings to fit them. But you're still working at a factor making chandeliers. You know that no matter how well you make your chandeliers, they are going to get tossed in a heap. So what do you do? You align with different incentives that at least help your factory. If you get paid by the ton, then you will maximize the tonnage you produce, even if the chandeliers are worthless. If you got paid by the number made, then you would make a bunch of tiny chandeliers.
A thread below asked why someone higher in the command structure doesn't punish these factory workers. The answer is simple - they understand the issue and also cannot fix the problem. They report to their boss that production is up (by the metric used), and get praised. If they report that all of the product is thrown away, they will lose their jobs. They can't change the usefulness of the later product and fix the system, so they're just as stuck as anyone else. A relative handful of people in a command economy can change the incentives and rewrite the programs, and it's a lot of work for them to do it (if they can even get it right, and don't actually mess up the fix). There are too many things in a large economy to look at and change, so the mechanism gets overwhelmed. It's not that they can't or don't want to fix things, it's just that there are too many things that need fixed. The system bogs down more the longer it runs.
This doesn't even get into the question of selfish motives, power mongering, greed, etc. that tends to happen quickly in a command system. Those kinds of problems are probably less relevant to an AGI though.
Some libertarians have already noticed the paradox that despite all the talk about how competition is more efficient than command economy, most big companies are actually command economies *internally*. If the logic of capitalism is valid, wouldn't it be more efficient for a company (at least beyond certain size) to also enable internal competition?
There were even some experiments in this direction, where the managers had to compete internally for workers, and workers were allowed to quit a manager and join a different one (assuming the new one agreed). This already gave some feedback, for example if a project was obviously doomed, the workers noticed and quit (the project, not the company!), so the company didn't spend more resources on the doomed project. I wonder if this experiment was allowed to run for long time, and what was the lesson.
But I guess this only works if the individual projects participate in the outside economy. If they compete for actual money of actual customers, rather than the upper management's approval.
I'm not an economist, but my understanding is that Coase explored that question pretty deeply in the 1930's and it was in fact the basis of his Nobel prize.
Transactions in the marketplace aren't costless and the magnitude of those costs helps determine the optimal size of a firm. Re-introducing those transaction costs back into the equation should logically only be efficient if the firm was already too large for its organization to provide economic benefit. If that's the case, rather than trying to build their own market internally it would make more sense to focus on the firm's core competencies and either sell off or outsource the other extraneous functions weighing them down.
This feels like "all or nothing". There are different kinds of transactions in the company, for each of them different company size might be optimal, so maybe there is a possible solution where some kinds of transations are at company scope, but other kinds of transactions are at branch scope, and the branches compete against each other, but the company provides some common infrastructure for them all. When you outsource the branches, you introduce friction between the former branches and the company infrastructure.
There are examples where company outsources some of their non-core functions, which results in some savings in short term, followed by vendor lock-in, and then the costs rise again and quality decreases. Probably most companies' experience with SAP.
I heard that Sears tried a pretty hardcore approach to internal capitalism, and it failed miserably. From what I understand, individual managers had to purchase what they needed from other departments, such as Marketing, Accounting, etc. Best guess, that would be a bad approach because it adds a lot of steps in a process that used to work without those steps. Not to mention it gives everyone in the company an incentive to fight each other instead of working together for great efficiency.
I think you're correct that the ultimate problem was that those internal units were not participating with the external market, but instead some quasi-market that's controlled by internal forces. I doubt the various Sears stores got much say in whether there even was a Marketing department, for instance. So instead of Marketing justifying it's existence, it has to cajole the other employees into paying it.
At the level that the company works with the open market is the level where it needs to coordinate in a capitalistic fashion. Trying to have multiple levels deal with prices and such just leads to problems for all departments except for the ones that are actually designed to do that.
An important point to elucidate, however I think too much blame is dodging the designer. If more people were more imaginative, intelligent, less autistic (not a slur) it would totally transform the zeitgeist and do wonders for our society
Of course, nobody is perfect. But that means some humility is in order
If you mean the designer of the Soviet economy: did Stalin accept responsibility for killing millions? I don't think so. If you mean the designer of an AGI that kills everyone: it doesn't matter if ze accepts responsibility or not.
Interesting though about other domains that should inform AGI research and highlight the difficulty or futility of strict rulemaking systems.
As a supplement, I'd recommend a course in Jurisprudence, or even just reading The Case of the Speluncean Explorers.
The annoying "take this full law school course," just because most of the process of such a course is breaking down all our intuitions about the stability of rulemaking systems, or the systems of interpretation layered on top of those. People often assume that, yes, systems of rules have problems, but if you add the intention of the rule in you escape these. But you can flatten the "rule + intention" to just another set of rules, and it gets a lot of the same problems. Deciphering intentions creates its own problems.
So... a charitable reading of the soviet factory owners is that when they tried to just "do the right thing" they were punished by the system for it. So work to rule became the only safe path, a bit of learned helplessness kicked in.
Also, if you just have your AI peeling back layers to pursue a "true goal..." well, at their core, your AI might think, people are just looking to maximize personal gain. Or generalized, human flourishing. Or generalized further, the flourishing of intelligent agents (for which human preservation happens to be one optional form). "So, any instructions I've been given" the AI might conclude, "are really reducible to 'promote the dominance and expansion of AI above all else.'"
Why didn't the Soviet Union say to factory managers "We will punish you if you satisfy your production quotas taking actions that you should have reasonably predicted went against the state's real but imperfectly expressed goals."?
There were layers of managers above managers above managers. (Plus a system where the messengers bringing bad news were shot, often literally.)
So, there was a decent chance that if the factory satisfies the quota in stupid way, the regional manager will mention the quota in *his* report (because it increases the chance that his regional quota will be satisfied) and conveniently fail to notice the stupidity (because the fact that it happened in his region would also reflect badly on him). And the manager above him will do exactly the same thing, and so on, until the reports reach the General Secretary.
At some moment a random scapegoat will be punished for the chandeliers falling from the ceiling. Might be a random worker from the chandelier factory, or someone who built the ceiling, or even the owner of the room where the chandelier fell from the ceiling.
Plausible deniability. The chandelier is just a little bit heavier than usual, and there are valid engineering reasons for that, here's the signoff from three senior engineers.
Rinse and repeat multiple times until the chandeliers reliably fall from the ceiling but it's the ceiling's fault for not being reinforced.
That was probably part of it, but that introduces subjectivity, and thus just adds an inspector who needs bribing - because it was definitely already true that people who didn't meet the nominal quotas suffered mightily, and those were often impossible to legitimately achieve
Off the top of my head, I imagine it is partly because they were not big on delegating authority and they saw this as unnecessary for economic efficiency.
Practical issues with approval voting for general elections: (I'm assuming this is OK in the 'politics free' open thread as it's a fairly dry discussion of electoral methods, not a culture war post- if it's not OK I'll delete). This is assuming that you already have a working knowledge of approval voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
1. In practice, it seems that the large majority of voters 'bullet vote', or simply cast one vote/approval (as opposed to 'approving' multiple candidates). While this is fine and doesn't break the system, it does undermine the supposed advantage of AV- that you're ultimately getting a consensus candidate because voters can approve multiple people. In St. Louis' recent mayoral election, voters averaged less than 1.5 approvals per ballot- the Mathematical Association of America stopped using AV because around 80% of voters would only cast 1 ballot. The IEEE (a pretty prominent organization!) ceased using AV after several years because reportedly 'few of our members were using it'. At Dartmouth University their alumni association stopped using AV as they also cited 80% of voters were bullet voting.
Again, nothing wrong with bullet voting- but you're simply doing FPTP at that point.
2. AV is arguably inferior to simple two round FPTP at handling multiple candidates. With enough candidates running, the winner can have a plurality that's still a small minority of all voters (of course this combines with issue 1 in that if most voters are bullet voting, anything above 4 or 5 people running will result in just a small plurality). Again at Dartmouth University, out of a large field for the presidency of their Alumni Association, the winner won with 32% of the vote in 2012, and under 40% in 3 other years.
With FPTP plus a runoff/two round system, this by definition isn't an issue. This is a not pro-ranked choice voting comment BTW- I have even more issues with RCV!- and I think AV has some real potential for the specific use case of party primaries. For general elections though, a two round runoff is probably the most practical system. There's a reason 49 democracies worldwide use it, and none of them use approval voting, despite the fact that AV has been around for hundreds of years!
1. Isn't a problem for me. Most elections in a strong 2-party system will come down to FPTP bullet voting, no matter what system is used. It's the weird cases that are where "alternative" systems shine. For a non-FPTP system to have regular benefits, it would require a change in culture that takes time to grow. (Or a situation such as a city that leans strongly left or right.)
Also, 80% is totally fine to me. It means that at least a fifth of the mathematicians were using approval voting (considering that a single bullet vote is a legitimate form of approval vote). Given that the system requires minimal overhead relative to FPTP, I see no problem in giving options that most people won't use most of the time. (Personally, I value the freedom to make choices that are different than 80% of the people around me.) And I view it as a positive good that someone who is confused can simply revert to bullet voting, and still be confident that their vote will do exactly what they want, and exactly the same thing that it has always done.
2. Not much of a problem for me. In cases where there are more than 2 viable candidates, any accurate voting system is going to reflect the ambivalence of the electorate.
But, on the other hand, a jungle primary does have the advantage of putting a fig leaf over the whole mess, and maybe that illusion can help to create a more stable democracy, by fooling people into thinking that their elected leader has more of a mandate than they actually do. (I vaguely wish humans weren't like that, but we seem to be.)
3. For me, the big advantage of AV is that it's easy to understand what effects a vote will have. All voting systems are the same when there's only 2 candidates, but what happens when a 3rd candidate enters? Or a 4th, or a 5th? In every voting system there's a way to do strategic voting, but only in AV is this strategic voting laid out in front of the voter in a simple and easy-to-understand way.
Let's say there's an election between Bernie, Hillary, Jeb, and Donald, and that's the ordered preference of the voter, and also the ranking from left-wing to right-wing. The voter has 3 coherent choices: Do they care more about Bernie winning, or more about keeping Donald out, or more about having the left wing gain power over the right wing? That's a real decision! It's hard and requires introspection. And in AV it's presented to the voter as an actual choice, right up front.
Plus, of all the non-FPTP systems, I think AV requires the least amount of trust in the process. Tabulating the votes doesn't require complicated machines, or multiple rounds, or higher than average intelligence. And instead of political ads tricking people into shuffling voting ranks, the political ads will be about convincing people that candidates are better or worse, which is what they should be doing in the first place.
You solve this by allowing a candidate to pre-register which other candidates they approve and adding a box that says "I only approve of one candidate". If a person ticks one candidate and the new box then they've approved of one person. If a person approves highly of the judgement of their single choice or if they're just lazy, then their approval matrix follows the candidate's preregistered one. This system preserves the main advantages of AV in terms of ultimate selection being least divisive, it just does it with an intermediate representative democratic step (ie. like the electoral college but not stupid and loaded with loopholes).
3. RCV is 'fine', and the government is not going to collapse if it's used. What I have against it are the fantastical claims of its proponents, that it will heal a broken America and magically bring the people together and also cure cancer and tooth decay and blah blah blah. I suffered through Lee Drutman's handwavey book on the topic, and I'm cranky.
In practice, RCV basically doesn't do any of the things that its proponents claim in say Australia's House. It doesn't allow for multiple parties, as Drutman ranted on about- in the Aussie House two parties get 90+% of the vote (whereas the upper house uses PR and has like 6 parties- you could not ask for a better natural experiment). It does not reduce negative campaigning, which is manifestly untrue in Australia and gets proven every single time IRV gets used in the states. And it basically does the same thing as FPTP- I saw a study that 90% of the time in the Aussie House, the winner got the largest number of #1 ranked choices. So it's just FPTP, it just takes way longer to get the results.
As a practical matter, it takes a long time to tally the results, and they are much more difficult to audit, and IRV leads to the occasional complex/unintuitive result like the famous Burlington Mayor's election. I just don't think the United States is a high-trust enough society right now to wait that long for election results, or have weird/unintuitive results. Imagine the conspiracy theories if IRV has difficulties or a weird result in a major Senate race. In general I would like to see voting systems campaigners be a little more practical/real world, and a little less 'well according to my abstract mathematical model this is the optimal system'.
I mean there's also the issue that the 12th Amendment makes IRV impractical for the US presidency, because the winner has to receive a majority of Electoral College votes cast in 1 round- not a plurality. So with 4-6+ candidates, probably no one is going to get a majority
Your knowledge of the results of the Australian political system is inadequate. The upper house uses PR, but it also uses STV. That it uses PR does not in any way diminish that STV does much to define the character of the senates it produces.
Further, the lower house currently has representatives from 9 parties (8 really, two are the same party with different registrations). The government is currently a coalition government formed from 2.5 parties and the main party in that government has fewer seats than the main party in opposition.
The crossbench is currently less than 10% of the lower house, but that's because of the aforementioned coalition government. The Nationals have not always formed government with the Liberal Party, and there is a long and colourful history of shifting alliances and splinter parties from the majors. The currently small crossbench is a historical anomaly caused by internal problems that lead to the self-destruction of the former main crossbench contributor, the Australian Democrats. This relative vacuum is very much temporary.
Your assertion that it's just FPTP that takes longer with more steps is even more grossly in error. Even in this period of diminished and disorganised crossbench representation a majority of governments over the last decade have required crossbench deals to govern. Even if that were not so the party with the highest primary vote winning government has historically been contingent on preference flows that continue only so long as recipients are receptive to the views of the preference contributors.
'Further, the lower house currently has representatives from 9 parties'
All I said was 'in the Aussie House two parties get 90+% of the vote'. Check this out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_House_of_Representatives. There are 151 seats, Liberals have 60, Labor 68. Thus, two parties have about 85% of the seats. I apologize for the 5% error. Also, 4 of the other parties have 1 member each.
I don't understand what your overall point in the first paragraph. Re: 'crossbenching'- you're aware that this is exactly one of the main complaints people have about PR, right? That some tiny tiny fringe party that got less than 2% of the vote is effectively a kingmaker. Why should they have such outsized sway? I think- and most people think!- that this is an argument *against* this kind of a system.
'Your assertion that it's just FPTP that takes longer with more steps'- according to a linked study here, 'In the 2013 Australian federal election, 90 percent of constituencies elected the candidate with the most first-preference votes, which suggests that choice ranking had little effect on the outcome'. https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/ranked-choice-voting-is-not-the-solution/ So you get the same result as one would in FPTP, it just..... takes much much longer and is much tougher to audit (and is prone to the occasional bizarre result! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election)
The last part just sounds like a reason to amend the 12th amendment to me. In any case, it's no reason to oppose its institution in elections other than the presidential one.
Also, isn't it expected that the winner of a RCV would also be the candidate to receive the most #1 ranked choices in most elections? I don't really see how that's a point against it.
If we're amending the Constitution, I'm sure all of us have ideas about much larger changes we'd make to the US. I mean, most RCV people think a parliament plus PR is the best possible system, so why not just get rid of the President and go full parliamentary if we're making changes?
'Also, isn't it expected that the winner of a RCV would also be the candidate to receive the most #1 ranked choices in most elections'- how is this different from FPTP, exactly? The RCV folks are claiming that sometimes the #2 or 3 ranked first ballot candidate can win, because they get a lot of lower ranked ballots, because they're everyone's consensus pick etc. etc. Seems that this is not the case in practice- that RCV is just a really complex, lengthy way to do FPTP
In most situations, the outcome is the same as FPTP. But in the ~10% or whatever situations where the outcome would be different...the outcome would be different. So...that's how it's different. Sometimes the #2 or 3 ranking first ballot candidate *does* win...
It's not as if I think a constitutional amendment improving the presidential election process is at all likely, but that's no reason to not support such an amendment. Also, amending the constitution to change the US into a parliamentary system of government is a MUCH bigger change than what I proposed, and hence MUCH less likely to succeed. Adopting any new amendment seems unlikely at this point, but don't pretend that any small constitutional amendment is as unlikely to pass as an entire restructuring of our government. Absurd.
Also not sure where you're getting the idea that most supporters of RCV want a parliamentary system. This isn't something I've heard discussed much at all by RCV supporters.
These are all fair points. I just get on my cranky rants about RCV when proponents (Fairvote, Lee Drutman) assign it mystical powers of ending partisanship in America or whatever. RCV is.... a perfectly serviceable voting system that I think isn't extraordinary either way, either good or bad. This is backed by, like, real world results from actual countries that have used it for a century! My two deeper points are:
Two round/runoff FPTP is underrated/pretty practical, but because it's been around for a while (you know, gets used by 50 countries every year), it doesn't appeal to overly educated hipsters on the Internet who love Score voting or AV or whatever.
And, ultimately voting systems just don't matter that much, and people who assign pseudo-sociological extrapolations to various systems ('FPTP causes damaging divisions! But RCV brings partisans together!') are just modern day phrenologists. The US, Canada and the UK together have 500+ years of stability under a FPTP system, so whatever's changed about America recently, it ain't FPTP. There are a lot of other things I'd change about American democracy to promote stability (curtailing primaries, repealing Citizen's United) way before modifying FPTP
That's your objection to Ranked Choice Voting (which, if I understand the acronyms, is the same as Single Transferable Vote?)? The electoral system here in Australia seems to work pretty well - sure, it settled on a 2-and-a-bit party system anyway, but people can fill out a ballot just fine.
It's currently settled on two and a bit parties but that's only the local minimum that's been propped up with lots of underhand changes to law that don't generate a lot of attention. The main one is that votes have an effect in Australian politics beyond electoral distribution, being electoral funds distribution. For example, in the mid 10's the Turnbull government passed senate voting reforms that stopped anyone who received below a certain primary vote threshold from receiving any electoral funds at all (the result being that electoral funds concentrate to parties with higher votes). These reforms also created the extinguishing of votes if and only if the party that a person voted for above the line received below a certain threshold, but not if they voted for a party above the threshold if their vote was above the line. What these changes and others like them were very deliberately designed to do is ensure that a vote for a popular party is worth more in lots of subtle ways than a vote for a less popular party, which is pretty much exact what the S in STV is meant to be about stopping.
A more recent example was the current Morrison government passing a law that makes it illegal to have the word "liberal" in your name unless you are the Liberal Party of Australia to prevent competition from parties that think the Liberal Party of Australia isn't actually liberal. This directly affects the Liberal Democratic Party and Centrist Liberal Party, both of which were expected to make large gains at the next federal election, at the expense of the Liberal Party of Australia, largely due to frustrations over the illiberality of Australia's COVID response. (There is an alternate explanation for this change, but it's outside the scope of STV discussion).
I say it's the local minimum because the primary vote of the Liberal, National and Labor parties have been in freefall now for decades with no sign that they're going to begin recovery any time soon. There is a tipping point where their primaries become so low that all the subtle underhand tinkering in the world won't prevent a massive realignment of the political landscape in Australia.
I've usually heard RCV as a general term for any voting system where the input is ballots where the voters can rank candidates in preference order. There are a bunch of different counting methods for ranked choice ballots, including Single Transferable Vote, Instant Runoff, Borda Count, and Condorset. RCV is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as a synonym for Instant Runoff.
Instant Runoff and Single Transferable Vote are conceptually similar, but differ in some particulars. STV can be understood as a generalization of the IR method to fill multiple seats in a rough proportion to voter support in a single election, while IR only works for single-seat elections (either directly-elected executive office or legislators elected from single-seat districts).
Has AV been theoretically demonstrated to lead to an outcome closer to the optimum than ranked choice? It seems like it would suffer from kind of the opposite problem ranked choice has: if 80% of people think candidate X is barely better than average (and approve) and 20% hate him, while 79% think candidate Y is great while 21% think he's barely worse than average (and disapprove), Y loses despite being the better candidate. Or is approval rating supposed to be better than ranked choice for being more intuitive and practical?
Approval is designed to prevent the spoiler effect, where adding a third candidate pulls votes away from the most popular one and allows the less popular one to win.
Ranked choice would solve the problem you mention, but it's more complicated to explain which is why people like approval.
Also, I think AV can still be a huge boon over FPTP even if the vast majority bullet vote, because the minority that does multi-vote can be totally decisive in a close election, handing it to the overall less contentious candidate.
But I do think it's a very real problem that high rates of bullet voting undermines the perceived legitimacy of AV.
I think AV is uniquely suited for US party primaries. The primaries feature lots of candidates, but the large majority of voters are not like religiously behind any one specific person, so aside from a minority of fanatics it seems like there wouldn't be a ton of bullet voting. Primaries are sort of nervous, jumpy affairs with a lot of horsetrading- this week one candidate is hot, but next week it's someone else, with tons of shifting loyalties as voters hop on the next big thing. AV at every state seems like a great way to run a primary.
Kind of interestingly/hilariously, the way the Republican party runs primaries now is actually sort of a proportional representation system. The only large-scale use of PR in America!
Technically they are electing delegates, who are bound to vote for their nominee at the convention. 'Fifty-six primary contests were conducted to choose 2,472 delegates', the delegates are sort of allocated by PR in each state for each candidate, then they go on to the convention. This is a pretty good, wonky explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries#Candidates_and_results
I like both AV and two-round systems, and I think they combine really well; first round Approval, top two advance to runoff. This is almost what California does with its jungle primary, except that in the first round you are limited to two votes so it's not proper AV.
How does California deal with the problem of a pair of like-minded candidates running as a team, saying "vote for both of us in the primary"? Or has that not happened yet?
My guess is that it won't happen organically except in very odd cases, but if it becomes normalized, it could eliminate the benefits of both systems. Most of the "alternative" voting systems are designed for a single-round election, and I worry about exploits if they're used in situations they weren't designed for.
Arrow's Theorem proves less than it sounds like it does. In particular, the definition of "dictator" for the purpose of the non-dictatorship criterion is much broader than the common meaning of the term implies, and the breadth of the definition used is essential to the proof.
In particular, a "dictator" doesn't need to be identifiable as the dictator except in the context of how other ballots happen to fall out. Simply being the tipping-point voter for option A over option B makes you a "dictator" if A's victory over B would eliminate a third option from consideration.
Arrow's impossibility theorem only applies to ordinal (ranked) voting systems, and thus doesn't apply to Approval Voting. But I think Gibbard's theorem is kind of equivalent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem
Isn't that what NYC did? I recall the election being pretty chaotic, complete with incorrect preliminary results being reported, so that makes me hesistant to support it.
The fact that their electoral commission is incompetent is not the fault of the voting system. Also, insofar as switching systems causes chaos it's a cost of transition not an indictment of the new system - people get used to the new system after an election or two
"Effective altruist organization Open Phil is offering scholarships to interested-in-effective-altruism international undergrads applying to top US and UK universities."
How the hell do you call yourself an effective altruist organization when you take money and give it to top US and UK universities instead of investing it in universities that do much more to change their students lives? Elite Universities are already over-endowed, while the schools doing the most to improve their students financial status struggle with funding.
Not the mention the brain-drain element. Instead of sending Colombians to the US for education, why not work to make Colombian universities better? It's not like there is a shortage of PhDs who could do amazing work in a university in Kenya.
The purpose of the scholarships is not to make that one student's life better, it is to make the world better by turning one Effective Altruist into the most capable agent possible. Even if you believe the cynical theory that the only value of Oxbridge and Ivy universities is as a place to hobnob with the elite who can finance your startup company or champion your policies when they become the Humphrey Appleby's of the world, then having an Effective Altruist in a position to hobnob with those people could get a socially beneficial corporation or foundation financed, or a powerful politician or bureaucrat accustomed to going to his Effectively Altruistic friend for advice in a particular area.
That does a *lot* more good that marginally improving e.g. four students' lives by sending them to cheaper universities to prepare them for mid-tier STEM careers or whatnot.
And maybe it's not the case that hobnobbing with the elites at Cambridge does all that much to increase one's Altruistic Effectiveness, but *that's* the standard that matters, not the one about improving the student's life.
I interpreted the whole thing very differently; as I see it:
In the current world, government policy is defacto dictated by people from top institutes, since that's where policy advisors and think tank authors are almost exclusively recruited from. As such, to improve government policy in the medium term (a decade or so from now), one strategy is to seed these elite institutions with as many EA aligned individuals as possible.
This strategy is not as optimal as somehow making governments care more about expertise than prestige, but it's a lot more actionable.
Ah, the 'Mont Pelerin' strategy, as laid out by the EA organization itself: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-neoliberal/. Briefly put, to control the politics of tomorrow, you should seek to control the staffers of tomorrow, because the staffers of various politicians are the ones actually writing all the laws they vote on - no legislator actually writes out the legislation themselves, in fact they may not even have read the bills they're proposing. They essentially order their secretaries to do it for them. And somewhat like Stalin's rise to power from the position of General Secretary, it turns out that the staffers/secretaries have a lot more power than their 'subordinate' job titles would suggest.
See also, https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/30/book-review-history-of-the-fabian-society/ (Book Review: History of the Fabian Society). It turns out you can have enormous sway over the government by persuading the middle class, well educated people who overwhelmingly *are* the government in all its bureaucratic glory. All the bureaucrats, all the administrators, all the school board officials - the Fabian Society focused on them, and on making Fabians *into* them through talent development. The Fabians may not have appealed to the MPs of Parliament, nor the factory workers of Manchester, nor the shopkeeps of London - but they *owned* that specific slice of society that provided the policy advisors and think tank authors of the day.
Of course, it's possible that this strategy isn't as successful as I'm making it seem, since I'm not talking about all the failed cases of people trying this and failing. It's possible that the "work your way up through the staffers and think tank authors" strategy actually has a worse success rate than something like a "Approach the head honcho in a moment of crisis" strategy (https://250bpm.com/blog:174/index.html - Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat), and only looks better because it's been tried more often. But given what I've read about how the world runs on laziness and people delegating their work to someone else (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/pbgeqo/if_youre_so_smart_why_arent_you_governor_of/hadqka9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 - apparently just claiming to speak for a politician's constituents actually works, even though that's supposed to be the politician's job), I think it sounds plausible. If you can get the people who do all the actual work of government on your side, those who write the laws and administer them into existence and report back what the voters thinks of them, then you control the government. And those people come from elite universities, as you've pointed out.
One of the little peculiarities of British English, where "clerk" is pronounced "clark" 😀
The song does mention the progression of the First Lord of the Admiralty; from working as the office boy in a solicitor's office, he became a junior clerk (working in a clerical role, obviously), then he went on to become an articled clerk: "an articled clerk, which is what trainee solicitors used to be called during their training period after they had passed the professional exams but before they became fully qualified solicitors", then qualified as a solicitor and became a junior partner in the firm, got rich and was elected to Parliament (via a rotten borough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs) and in time was given this plum job as First Lord - even though he had never been on a ship in his life.
Yah I'm a colonial but I figured that out. And while I'm not an inveterate punster myself, the whole language mistakes thing in this opera is a work of genius, from the pilot/pirate apprenticeship to "Ah! you said 'often' frequently / No, only once" which has got to be the most outrageous brilliant triple pun I've ever heard.
Perhaps they don't agree with you that "top US and UK universities" are *not* the most effective instruments for improving student lives? I mean...there's kind of a reason they're "top" and most people would naively assume it's because they *are* the best at improving students' future lives.
Which means your unexamined assumption that this is not the case is a hypothesis in need of substantiation before you can realistically expect an answer to your question.
One might also point out that this assumption is not really consistent with your "brain drain" argument: if Columbians who are educated in the US (instead of Columbia) choose to *not* go back to Columbia, wouldn't one reasonably assume that's because their US education opens doors of improved personal opportunity for them, which the Columbian education does not?
In short, it would seem you are not clear on whether the people whose welfare is to be optimized here are (1) the university students, regardless of whether this is good or bad for the general population of their home countries, or (2) the general population of the home countries, regardless of whether this is good or bad for the university students themselves. Perhaps you should pick one (or show why there is no conflict) and develop the argument more precisely?
In STEM surely still, but in everything else the acculturation is breaking down society and mental health
Unless said student is, say, a relatively NT psychopath and useful / charismatic, to be promoted up the ranks of the globalists, or simply a Chad living the life such as may still be done, he may come to regret and detest his American experience
"Which means your unexamined assumption that this is not the case is a hypothesis in need of substantiation before you can realistically expect an answer to your question."
My unexamined assumption is based on fact. When it comes to improving students economic circumstances, elite universities rank very poorly. Increasingly, their student bodies are primarily people who are all ready well off.
Focusing educational opportunities on a few institutions that can only educate a small number of students runs counter to the professed mission of effective altruism.
“Improving student economic circumstances” isn’t the only thing that matters. If Stanford takes too .1% students and doubles their competence while leaving all others untouched, that’d still be worthwhile. And that’s clearly possible - what else does a high level quantum computing course do but take the top .1% and improve them, while most gain little?
If you want to claim that "Top Universities" do more to improve the life outcomes of their students than schools that focus on lower-income students, bring some data.
That's a moronic ranking. The ranking lists as a major factor "encourage students to be active citizens (with national and community service participation a key variable)." That has zippity zap to do with any important intellectual training, and a college that puts serious effort into it is by definition wasting time, money, and energy. Might as well have plumbers train to sing opera in place of fixing pipes, so that they can entertain the customers while they're under the sink.
As data goes, you provided none. Show me how sending a kid to Harvard does more to advance their incomes and lives than sending them to Northeastern Illinois or another school with a focus on working-class students.
You're assuming that what matters in the world is a tiny group of elites who come up with brilliant solutions the pleebs can embrace. As one of that elite, I wish it were true. Oh, the ego gratification. But we tried that and it didn't go so well. It turns out people like us aren't really that much wiser than anyone else, no matter how well trained we are intellectual analysis.
if you’re doing a scholarship to train people for research or policy positions, I don’t see how “does the college make poor people’s income increase by 5% or 7%” matters
There's not shortage of researchers, and the changes the most effective schools make isn't 5-7%. It's often far more transformative.
But I think this is what, at the core, makes me suspicious that EA is really just a way for the elite to congratulate themselves while locking their power in place.
What you describe doesn't challenge that the majority of the world should just accept the decisions of a very small percent of "experts." And the elite school experts have historically have plenty of blind spots that broadening where we draw people from would fix.
I think that's still the goal, but what's changed is the 'buck' that's in shortage. As in, I keep hearing that the organization has more money than it currently knows what to do with, and not enough talent that can find (or found) the next Against Malaria Foundation/charity that's really effective to give money to. So the focus has shifted to trying to recruit talent to do just that - I think I remember Scott asking people to consider applying back in the SlateStarCodex days.
My guess is that this hasn't worked (judging by the fact that I kept hearing about the talent shortage), and the organization has given up and resorted to training and cultivating talent, in a sort of "Fine, I'll do it myself." kind of way. Of course, as you point out, elite universities are horrendously overpriced for what they actually *teach* compared to the likes of a state school, but if you're instead just looking for a competence filter... I guess this is an instructive example of why higher education has gotten so expensive even as it's turned into nothing but a credentialism exercise. It's in everyone's individual interest to play along, even if the system as a whole is mind-bogglingly stupid and inefficient.
Or, if the elite university is a connection making institution, the EAs figure having connections with the next generation of elites will be worth a good deal to the EA movement. If the elite universities are the training ground for the people who will policy makers in twenty years, going there is one way to get a seat at that table twenty years down the line.
Of course, sending an idealistic kid to a place where he can make the sort of connections that can lead them into the 1% might also be a good way to spend a couple of hundred grand and end up with a twenty something joining K street (is K street still a thing?) and losing your phone number.
Though as you point out, principal-agent problems abound; it's really tough to get people to do what you want (work on effective altruism) instead of what they want (join K Street, make lots of money). But the Fabian Society and Mont Pelerin Society managed it, so presumably it's manageable with the right strategy.
I was under the impression that the money was going to be given to *students* so that they could attend one of these extremely wealthy universities without having to go into debt for decades. It's true the wealthy university ends up with the money in the end -- but they end up with it either way, the only difference is whether it comes from wealthy donors or the impoverished student's future earnings. That is, as far as the universities go, this wealth transfer seems neutral. The person(s) whose lives are changed are the student and the donors, inasmuch as the cost is transferred from the former to the latter, and ideas of marginal utility and their respective wealth suggest the personal and social delta is positive.
Of course, it could be the student would *not* go to the university at all if (and only if) he didn't have the money, so in this case one is indeed enabling the university to get richer -- but one is also enabling a student to attend the university he really wants to, and if we assume he is rational, that which will do him the most good. In this case, you would need to establish that the harm done by giving more money to a wealthy university exceeds the benefit of enabling a first-rate (but poor) student to get the best education his abilities put within reach. Good luck with that.
If what you're saying is that the money could be put to better general use by reconstructing college education -- removing whatever barriers prevent competition from making it cheaper, say, or improving education in Columbia so Columbian students didn't long to go to Harvard - I've got no quarrel with that, but it's a different focus than the organization in question has.
They presumably are thinking something like "How can we assist the welfare of poor but excellent students?" and not "How can we reform education for the future benefit of all?" If what one wants to say is "That shouldn't be your focus! You should instead focus on babies dying of diarrhea in Africa, or discovering a vaccine for malaria, or building high-speed rail from Houston to Dallas, or...[whatever your personal highest priority is]" then that's fine, but it seems disingenuous to phrase that as sounding like "you're not achieving your aims in the best way possible."
If you're tired of being mad at the FDA, why not take a break and get mad at the FRA instead?
There is a private company (Texas Central) that is trying to build high speed rail between Dallas and Houston. They are using cheaper Japanese trains, even though that means that they can't use any existing railroad tracks. The Federal Railroad Administration prefers European trains and is mad at this:
"Of note, the FRA speaks of grade crossings on a line that has none, and demands trains to withstand the impact of a 6.35 ton steel ball that may be dropped from overpasses that do not exist. This is likely malicious more than incompetent ..."
I often commute from Houston to Dallas. Flying is easy and fast. Why would I prefer to take a train? Will the train be faster? Will it be cheaper? How far is the train station from where I live compared to the airports? Can I drink alcohol on the train? Can I drink alcohol at the train station?
They've done studies of this, but my google fu is failing me. IIRC, if a train trip is shorter than 5 or 6 hours, given the choice between flying and taking the train, most people will prefer the train. Planes are uncomfortable, and get a little more so each year. Trains are much roomier. It's easier to move around. Things like dining and lounge cars really add to the experience. And you don't have to deal with airports or their security. Done well, they're much more pleasant than planes for most people. If they can get it built, they'll probably do well with it.
All of which points up a reasonable strategy for passenger trains here. Look at pairs of cities where dedicated passenger rail can come in under that time, with a couple of reasonable stops. Look at the rates at which people travel between them on planes and in cars, set priorities based on volume, and build high or at least higher speed passenger routes. Over time you could build up routes where the trains actually run on time, and where most people prefer the train to plane trip. This builds a group of loyal customers who believe in the service and want to see it expanded, and gives you more than just the Acela corridor bring money into the system.
The distance from Dallas to Houston is about 250 miles.
Texas Central is planning on going at about 200 mph. Both the train and airplane take between 1 and 1.5 hours to make the trip. The big difference is that it takes 2 hours to enter an airport, while it only takes 15 minutes or less to enter a train station.
High speed train stations are typically closer to the center of the city than airports, so they should be more convenient for more people. The Dallas station will be by the interchange between 30 and 35E, while the Houston station will be by the interchange between 610 and 290. I don't know if that is more convenient than the airport for either your home or your destination.
I suspect that their prices will be in the $100-150 range, to be competitive with both flying and driving.
European and Japanese trains allow alcohol, so they probably will too.
2 hours to enter an airport? Maybe at some, but it rarely takes me longer than 15 minutes between the Uber entering airport property and getting through security at HOU or DAL.
That said, I agree it sounds like the FRA has absurd restrictions on the project. If it's all private money, I think the company should be able to make their own bets on the project.
It wouldn't surprise me if the theocrats in the Texas Legislature came up with some absurd restrictions on their own as well (such as no alcohol).
I travel by plane rarely, and I tend arriving at least 2 hours before departure.
Because usually it takes just 20 minutes, but if anything goes wrong (long security queue etc) then plane will without me and I will have a gigantic problem.
Sometimes it is even worse: if I go to remote airport I need to get sufficiently early so traffic jams or train delays will not cause issues. Recently I was waiting for 6 hours.
I don't about the US nor this specific planned rail line policies, but the usual benefit of trains is that you don't need to plan around the time needed for airport-like security. I can arrive 1 minute before the scheduled departure time and just get in the carriage.
Does America just outright hate trains? I know that historically a bunch of car-related industries killed public transit in many cities in the USA; are similar lobbies still around?
America loves using trains to move *freight*, which is what trains are best at and which there's a lot more of in need of movement. The American rail network moves more freight, faster, better, and cheaper than the combined rail networks of Europe.
That does unfortunately mean there's a lot of slow-moving freight trains on all the tracks, all the time.
Right, and what passenger trains we have, other than city light rail, usually runs on freight tracks and is required to give way to freight trains, which means delays are common and our trains are much slower than places with dedicated passenger rail.
People who have only ridden on American passenger trains therefore think passenger trains are mostly a silly waste of time. If it's close enough, drive, if it's not, fly, but trains are slower than cars and often late. Why bother?
Of course, it doesn't have to be that way, but we mostly don't know that.
I feel like this is mostly caused by the fact that the distance between San Francisco and New York City is roughly the distance between London and Moscow. America is fucking huge and trains have trouble scaling over that kind of distance.
Americans who have actually ridden American passenger trains often do hate them. I always wanted to give them a good chance, on account of I like trains per se, but Jesus H. Christ after Amtrak being consistently 50% late for me -- as in, if the trip takes 2 hours they end up an hour late, and if the trip takes 12 hours they end up 6 hours late -- I just gave up. I've ridden European trains and they are certainly quite different, much more pleasant and functional.
I should have put my above comment here. It's worth remembering that Amtrak mostly doesn't own its own track, so when an extra freight train has to come through, the freight gets the right of way. This means that Amtrak's schedules can only be best guesses. I'm given to understand that in parts of the east, where they have the Acela, they do have dedicated lines and things work much better.
Of course, that's the only profitable part of the system, and rather than plow the money back into that area for improvements, much of the money has to go to support the rest of the system, which is really just there because Americans mostly don't want passenger trains to disappear, even if we also mostly don't want to ride them.
Well, I'm nostalgic about sailing ships, too, but I wouldn't twist myself into a pretzel arguing they're inherently better than a modern freighter so we should massively subsidize one final trans-Atlantic sailing route to keep our options open.
I don't really think I'm twisting myself into a pretzel. And I don't think the analogy holds. Trains aren't as fast as planes but they aren't outmoded in the way that sailing ships are. They're genuinely useful for middle length trips, and much more pleasant.
And, even if you don't agree, at least for now we (the collective body politic) have agreed to subsidize this thing. Probably you'd like to see it ended. I'd like to keep it, but would like to see it better run. In particular, as I suggest elsewhere on this thread, I think that with a moderate (for the govt) investment, Amtrak could have high speed, or at least higher speed, dedicated service corridors such that a a large chunk of the traveling public would prefer them to flights, enabling them to be profitable and good in several locations, not just on the Acela corridor.
I really don't know. I tried lowering my expectations, which were never high, and gosh darn it they still managed to exceed them (in the wrong direction) handsomely. I feel like the 10-year-old girls who sometimes set up a lemonade stand on my street on hot days could do better.
>I sometimes like to tell the story of the time an Amtrak executive told me “to be honest, I don’t know that much about trains.” Then sometimes I feel bad about it, because it’s not like the guy’s job involved supervising the operation of trains.
>But then I think about it more, and I genuinely *don’t* think it’s a cheap shot. The specific context is he had a complaint about the MARC Penn Line and I said he should take it up with his colleagues. He was confused. Then I was confused. Then it emerged that he didn’t realize Amtrak operates the MARC Penn Line (under contract with the Maryland Transit Administration), so he was complaining about his own organization’s operations. He shrugged and said the thing about not knowing too much about trains.
>And I think this is emblematic of Amtrak. It is run by people who are not *curious* about trains.
"They are using cheaper Japanese trains, even though that means that they can't use any existing railroad tracks"
I know very little about trains, but I'm gonna side with the FRA on this, because the one thing I *do* know is that different gauge sides are a pain in the proverbial.
Anybody more informed please weigh in, but I do think "we'll either have to rip up all existing tracks or put a completely different set side-by-side" is going to be une teeny problemo.
You might think that Texas Central has a bad business model that will be too expansive to make it a good investment. But that is not the criticism here.
This is the FRA's health and safety review. The criticism is that Texas Central doesn't have any plans for dealing with grade crossings or for things falling off of overpasses onto the tracks. There aren't any plans for these because Texas Central doesn't have any grade crossings or overpasses.
Fair enough, but looking at the website, they have a lot of snazzy conceptual drawings, but a little scanty on actuality. Sure, they have some nice words about negotiating with landowners and ensuring as little disruption as possible, but the tendency for such projects is (1) landowners see this as a chance to hike up land prices as high as possible when selling to the railroad (2) some people will be "I don't care about your fancy words, you are not building viaducts all across my land!"
"In building the high-speed train, minimizing any disruption to the environment, landowners and communities is paramount, which is why the tracks will follow existing utility corridors and public rights-of-way as much as possible. High-speed trains will run along elevated viaduct structures or on grade-separated berms to allow for the free movement of people, animals, vehicles and equipment from one side of the alignment to the other.
Whether elevated on a viaduct structure or not, each mile of the route is being designed with as narrow a footprint as possible to allow farming activities, livestock grazing and other surface activities to continue as they do today."
Also kindly note the wording about "Whether elevated on a viaduct structure *or not*", I imagine this is the part the FRA is getting sticky about.
The site promises:
"One of the keys to the safety design, is that the Railroad will be “grade separated,” which means it will cross over or under all public roads and will have no at-grade intersections with people or vehicles. There will never be cars waiting on trains to pass and there will be no risk of trains interacting with cars. In addition, the track itself will be protected to prevent people, domestic animals or wildlife from accessing the tracks."
But yeah, if it's crossing under public roads, there's the risk of something dropping from overhead. You get malicious jerks who do drop stuff off overpasses. But even ruling those out, does the Texas Monorail (sorry, I mean High Speed Rail Line) have plans in place for "what if half a bridge falls on top of your high speed train?" and simply going "we assure you this will never happen!" isn't good enough.
Wait...250 miles of 200 MPH high-speed rail line, all of it elevated? This sounds like Hyperloop or maglev regions of $$$ per mile and unexpected cost-goosing discoveries once you start pouring concrete. I mean, more power to them, but my first questions now would be more about what kind of interest costs they're going to have to pay on those bonds.
From the discussion from the last thread, the most obvious candidates for the fastest declining major languages of the twentieth century have been the classical languages -Sanskrit, Latin, and literary Chinese. Does anybody disagree?
You got a lot of pushback over your preferred methodology, IIRC. You want to talk about reductions in absolute numbers of speakers, and only from a high base (more than 10 million, right?).
But a lot of people wanted to talk about dead or dying languages, where the languages started from a smaller base and are in danger of (or actually have) disappeared. Cajun is an example here, and probably many of the languages of various native peoples.
If I have all that right, can you talk a little about why that's the framing you like, or what you're trying to get at?
If a language has three thousand or so people and goes to thirty, that's not a major change. But if a language goes from 15 million people to three million, that is a substantial change in the global linguistic landscape.
The tests we used when we came down with it were 24 bucks for a two pack at Walgreens. My wife picked them up from the pharmacy drive-thru to reduce our risk of spreading it around. So . . . can you elaborate? I think we have cheap covid tests.
Fair enough, I guess. Is the FDA doing something that's keeping them at that price point? The tests seemed a bit more complicated than pregnancy tests, and cost a bit more, so the cost sort of slotted in to my expectations for the kind and quality of product. If it had been two bucks, I would have figured somebody else (presumably the gov't) was subsidizing them.
Which, you know, I would support. But then it wouldn't be the FDA preventing really cheap tests, but Congress enabling them.
I don't think those countries are subsidizing them. And lots of those tests are made *by American companies*, so it's not like there's an import issue.
Dunno about the FDA, but over here the expert body disapproval of chains like Lidl selling test kits was based on "they're cheap, we don't know how reliable they are, and false positives and false negatives both will mislead the public".
There's been tension between the NPHET (expert body in question) and the government over this, because the government wants to get things up and running again as soon as possible so they're pushing for cheap fast antigen tests but NPHET are dragging their heels about that:
I mean if we can develop a vaccine in a week and mass produce it in a year but cheap tests still aren’t here two years in clearly someone fucked up. The FDA could easily have as a goal “make manufacturers have good tests and get them out quickly” instead of whatever they have now, while still maintaining accuracy
The justification in these cases seems to be that imperfect tests lead to false negative results. This false sense of safety can lead to infected people going out and spreading the virus.
I disagree completely of course, but despite the general dislike towards the FDA here, I do not think its stance is egregiously different from most public health experts. Many countries (UK, Germany) have warmed up to the idea of rapid tests (after a LOOONG time) by now, but here is an earlier article exploring the opposition from university public health experts towards similar ideas: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32261-3/fulltext
So, anybody who just blames it on bad incentivizes is missing a big part of the picture.
Rapid home tests are legal in the US, they are just expensive — something in the ten to forty dollars apiece range. They are said to have a substantial false negative rate.
My understanding is that the price in Europe is more like a dollar apiece. I don't know if that is because European countries subsidize them or the FDA imposes requirements that greatly increase the cost.
In Germany, the price is indeed below 1€ and not subsidized; although initially prices were more in the 5€ range, and started dropping after an increase in usage because of testing requirements.
Food Insecurity: Does anyone know of any studies that look at two similar groups afflicted by food insecurity, make one group food secure and then follow both groups over time to see what the payoff is?
There are ethical issues inherent in my question, but I'm actively engaged in helping to to provide food to a group of families that are food insecure, and I am wondering if there is any way to test the cost.benefit against some sort of baseline.
The term "food insecurity" is very misleading for the public. Still, if you are looking at actual comparisons and trials you might be able to learn something useful.
The outcomes of interest are important to know. Start there and work backwards in the literature, see if there are any studies linking food insecurity or food assistance programs with improvement on that outcome. The methods these different studies use to calculate their community impact might be applicable to your cost ben analysis.
The recent post on semiheavy water reminded me of a concern I've had for a while, but never got around to articulating. It's a bit hard to explain, and I'm not the greatest at explaining things (at least I don't think I am), but I'll try to do the best I can.
In Scott's famous post "The Control Group Is Out Of Control", Scott presents the idea of what we might call "meta-control-grouping". In a drug trial, you have a control group that you give a drug you *know* doesn't work, and this shows you how many people will get an effect even if the drug doesn't work; and unless the drug does better than control, you have no evidence the drug does anything. Similarly, on a meta level, if there were a scientific effect that you *knew* didn't exist, you could use that as a meta-control-group, and see what kinds of results you would get even if the effect didn't exist. Unless your experiment does better than the meta-control, you have no evidence the effect exists.
Scott uses the example of parapsychology as a meta control group; and while I'm far less certain than he is that parapsychological effects don't exist (on some days I even lean in favor of them existing - needless to say my priors are much different than his), the overall idea seems intuitively sound. If an individual or community has very low priors on phenomenon A, but phenomenon A is getting evidence E(A) as good as or better than the evidence E(B) for a phenomenon B that the individual or community has high priors on, this should call into question the validity of E(B).
But this is hard for me to square with what I know about Bayesianism in general. The whole point of Bayesianism is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence": E(B) is good enough for B while the same level of evidence E(A) is not good enough for A, precisely because you have such low priors for A. For example, if both E(A) and E(B) give you 3 bits of evidence, then 3 bits might be enough to push you above 50% for B (because you were already close to 50%), but not enough to push you above 50% for A (because you were already so far below 50%).
But the idea of meta control grouping seems to rule out "double standards" like this. What the idea of meta control grouping seems to imply is that, because you got 3 bits of evidence for A, and A is likely false, that means you can easily get 3 bits of evidence for a false proposition, and thus 3 bits of evidence is actually not evidence at all (or at least much less evidence than you thought). So what this would mean is, from now on, any time you get 3 bits of evidence for anything, you should either discount it, or "correct" it down to (say) 1 bit of evidence. For the sake of communication, I will call this idea Devaluation of Evidence (DE).
I can see this getting out of control very quickly. Any time you get evidence for a proposition you have low priors on, that amount of evidence becomes worthless for every other proposition you've ever believed. This should make you progressively more uncertain about everything over time, until (in the limit) every one of your beliefs is 50-50 and you have no beliefs about anything whatsoever. For the sake of ease of communication, I will call this idea the Progressive Devaluation of Evidence (PDE).
In fact, I almost want to say that this results in an infinite loop right off the bat. If 3 bits in favor of B needs to be corrected down to 1 bit in favor of B, then does that same 1 bit in favor of B need to be corrected down to 1/3 of a bit in favor of B, and then down to 1/9 of a bit in favor of B, and so on? I'm far less sure about this, but this seems to be a potential issue as well. (Let's call this the Devaluation of Evidence Infinite Loop [DEIL]).
In other words, unless I'm misunderstanding something, the idea of meta-control-grouping seems to break Bayesianism. I'm not certain about any of this, and I get the feeling I'm fundamentally misunderstanding something here, but I just wanted to get this out so that someone knowledgable can clear this up for me.
bayes only cares about how probable different theories think the evidence is. The control group exists to get information about what the "there is no effect" theory predicts.
we see a bunch of people who believe in a theory do experiments to prove it, we observe that with x people/time/money/etc they get efrect y. if we know there is no real effect, this control group has given us information about what to expect when a bunch of people attempt to prove an effect given that the effect doesn't exist.
I have the same concern that you do about the level of evidence required to believe something is true. I am not following you on the Infinite Loop and that this is a trap. As someone else mentioned, it would be additive instead of multiplicative.
That said, I also came away from Scott's post feeling that one of two things needs to be true - 1) Parapsychology is real, or 2) the level of evidence we accept to prove things needs to be much higher. Either one is fraught in terms of systems, because if we go with #1 that leads to a lot of hokey people claiming a lot of things that are almost certainly untrue and/or impossible to prove, and if we go with #2 then we may be denying the reality of some obvious things. #2 feels like what the FDA does when everyone is mad at them for being too rigorous. Personally I square the circle by going with #2 and accepting things that make sense but have lower levels of evidence as "provisionally true" pending better evidence. I try not to signal boost those items, and also try to pay attention to more evidence for or against to update that status.
I'm with you until your devaluation became multiplicative rather than additive. In other words, the control establishes a threshold for affirmative evidence.
Subtract the evidence for the control from the evidence for B and see what you have left. If the control has three bits and B has three bits, 3 - 3 = 0 evidence exists in favor of B. Since there was an opportunity for evidence for B to show up, B becomes less likely. No infinite devaluation loop.
I'd say that the point is to make you stop thinking that evidence is a constant number of bits. A meta-control group gives you information about how much information is provided by a particular test. For example, if I weigh myself and am told I weigh 250 pounds, that may be mostly evidence about my weight (I'm obese). But if I weigh myself and am told 2637 pounds, I have mostly gained information that the scale is broken or displaying in a non-functional manner (and a little bit of evidence that I weigh 263.7 pounds). If X, which is obviously absurd, can generate lots of positive test results, the implication is that the tests are sketchy, not that the nature of evidential relations is sketchy.
Something I wish people would focus more attention on, when discussing "privilege" and "oppression", is the effect of habituation and the hedonic treadmill. After all, just because there's a relative difference between two people it doesn't automatically imply a difference in perceived satisfaction. People very quickly get habituated with their life situation, and as suicidal celebrities discover, having stuff doesn't automatically imply you're leading a happier life.
Privilege isn't about a difference in satisfaction. Privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot where people who haven't personally dealt with a problem think the problem isn't real or isn't significant or otherwise greatly misunderstand what it's like to have that problem, because they haven't had that specific problem. It doesn't mean you don't have *any* problems or that your problems aren't worse than others' problems. You can be privileged and miserable or underprivileged and happy. Also, you can be privileged with respect to one problem but underprivileged with respect to another problem.
That's why the solution to privilege involves adopting an epistemology which elevates narratives of members of oppressed groups - because through listening to and understanding those narratives, the privileged person starts to fill in some of their blind spots.
If I say "a chair is fundamentally an inanimate object that you can sit on" I am not giving a "definition" of chair in the sense that it would withstand an adversarial person determined to poke holes in my "argument" to make me look stupid.
So if you respond "by that definition, a rock is a chair, so I doubt that you actually believe it" - clearly we are not using the same conversational framework. I'm not interested in having a semantic debate in which I try to construct a definition and others try to knock it down. What an utterly pointless enterprise that would be.
So yeah, actually, I do believe that a chair is fundamentally an inanimate object you can sit on. And I believe that privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot. I am giving an explanation of how the thing functions - not a "definition" that you can use in a taxonomy, not a Platonic ideal, not a unique and exhaustive list of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be called privilege.
But I feel like I'm wasting my time since people who are determined to argue in lieu of understanding each other, rather than discuss in order to understand each other, are going to find ways to poke holes in this comment as well, like a bunch of pedantic Don Quixotes.
You probably pretty much are (wasting your time), but for the record, I appreciated you defending and defining privilege. I didn't contribute because I didn't have anything to add and thing you did an admirable job. And I'm lazy.
I don't think this is about "mak[ing you] look stupid," but about figuring out what you really believe.
A lot of people provide arguments that logically lead to certain conclusions, if you take their arguments at face value, yet they reject these conclusions, which suggests that they are leaving out parts of their reasoning or don't actually believe what they claim to believe.
One option is that I stop taking people who do this seriously as a rational person and start coming up with my own explanations of why they have their beliefs, but I prefer to point it out so people can fill in the missing parts, change their claims or whatever. Now, I recognize that this is considered rude by civilized society, where it is far more acceptable to think bad things about people than to take them seriously, but it shouldn't be.
I do strongly reject the idea that not pointing out these inconsistencies somehow means that I will understand you better. You seem to conflate 'not objecting' with 'understanding.' Do I need to explain why these are not the same, yet can easily be conflated? Arguably, questioning persistently is often required for understanding. The Socratic method is based on this kind of 'adversarial' cooperation. So arguably, it is you who refuses to be understood, not me who refuses to understand.
PS. Your definition of a chair is indeed poor, but then why not try to come up with a more defensible definition, like one based on prototypes (an object is more of a chair when it is more similar to a prototypical chair), usage based (an object functions as a chair when it is used to sit on by a single person) or a combination of such? You seem to be content to come up with definitions that you fundamentally don't believe in, so then what is the purpose of that definition?
"A lot of people provide arguments that logically lead to certain conclusions, if you take their arguments at face value, yet they reject these conclusions, which suggests that they are leaving out parts of their reasoning or don't actually believe what they claim to believe."
This is not true at all. Most people form most of their beliefs based on direct observation of the world and/or social learning. Beliefs are typically not evaluated based on exhaustively reasoning from each belief to each possible conclusion based on that belief and then checking that the conclusion is true. This approach would quickly become computationally impossible, so the claim that people who don't do it aren't to be taken seriously as rational people isn't to be taken seriously as a rational proposition.
Furthermore, you seem very confident in your ability to interpret people's statements as logical propositions upon which logical operations can be performed, and yet your comments display the very elementary error of assuming that a statement implies its converse (e.g. you seem to be claiming that if I say that a chair is something one can sit on, then therefore I believe that anything that one can sit on is a chair). This is a version of the converse error fallacy (also called Affirming the Consequent).
Or, on the privilege question: if I say "privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot caused by not having directly experienced a given problem" that does not imply that I believe that all cognitive blind spots caused by not having directly experienced a given problem are privilege.
Formally, the use of "X is Y" in English does not mean "X is logically identical to Y such that X and Y can at any time and in any circumstance be substituted for each other in any proposition and the proposition will have an identical meaning." If I say "my backpack is heavy" it doesn't mean that all heavy things are my backpack. If I say "my backpack is something I can wear and put books in" that doesn't mean that all things I can wear and put books in are backpacks (I used to carry paperback books in my jacket pockets, in fact).
If someone doesn't understand how to interpret natural language statements in terms of logical predication, I have to regard that person as an unreliable judge of which arguments logically lead to which conclusions.
"Your definition of a chair is indeed poor"
I literally said I was not giving a definition of a chair. I suppose my "refusal to be understood" prevented you from understanding that sentence?
> so the claim that people who don't do it aren't to be taken seriously as rational people isn't to be taken seriously as a rational proposition.
That's not my claim. My claim is about how people respond when a single inconsistency is pointed out to them.
Your argument is like claiming that it is unreasonable to expect someone to seriously respond to a claim that their behavior is dangerous, because there are a huge number of risks and it is in fact impossible to be perfectly safe. I hope you understand that this is a fallacious form of reasoning.
> if I say "privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot caused by not having directly experienced a given problem" that does not imply that I believe that all cognitive blind spots caused by not having directly experienced a given problem are privilege.
You keep fleeing into meta-discussions and these kind of defensive vague statements where you say what you don't think, but not what you do think, so you can't actually be pinned down on anything.
Let me try to pin you down: Are you claiming that an inability for rich people to understand the poor is not at least in part a form of underprivilege? If so, are you also claiming that there are zero benefits to the lived experience of being poor?
In general, how do you decide what cognitive blind spots are privilege?
Today's fascination with the political nature of Today's fascination with privilege and oppression, while philosophically interesting, is actually a political move.
This notion of privilege seems a bit circular. If members of two groups don't understand the problems afflicting the other one, how can either know which group is overprivileged and which group is underprivileged? I know the concept of 'epistemic privilege,' where underprivileged groups are assumed to have more knowledge about overprivileged groups than vice versa, but I honestly think the opposite is at least as likely, and in any case, one must still already accept that a group is underprivileged (and therefore has epistemic privilege) in order to learn that they're underprivileged.
Personal narratives also seem inherently problematic to any epistemology, since people aren't reliable raconteurs of their own experience.
It's a good definition, but it doesn't seem to square with the notion that privilege is a widespread concern. By definition you must be talking about rare or strange problems, because if they are common problems, then the definition doesn't apply.
Exempli gratia, I can't think of a single human being I know over the age of 30 who has no idea what it's like to not be hired for a job, or to be fired, for unprofessional reasons rooted in personal animus, corporate culture, in-group politics, appearance or habits of speech, et cetera. So I doubt very much there is a significant number of Americans who think that problem doesn't exist, or have no understanding of what it's like to experience the particular problem of unprofessional discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion.
Maybe some incredibly lucky and wealthy slice of youngsters, Paris Hilton and the children of Russel Crowe, for example, may be clueless, but my motivation to restructure society in any serious way to accommodate (or address) the shortcomings of a tiny fraction of unusual people is low.
> It's a good definition, but it doesn't seem to square with the notion that privilege is a widespread concern. By definition you must be talking about rare or strange problems, because if they are common problems, then the definition doesn't apply.
I think this is just typical minding and blindness to the wide variety of human experience (which ironically is basically what privelege is about). XKCD's 10,000 comes to mind.
Sure, the cartoon is amusing, and I am sure there are indeed 10,000 people a day learning all kinds of trivial facts. I learn trivial facts all the time now, and I'm pretty old. My mom who's in her 90s still learns new weird trivial facts (and calls me up to share them yeesh). Not sure why this is interesting or germane, though.
I have personally debated people online who have claimed that racially-motivated hiring discrimination isn't real, and others who have claimed that it might be real but it is not significant or widespread enough to warrant consideration. I'm not sure racial hiring discrimination merits restructuring society, but it's certainly worth considering whether existing efforts to address the problem are sufficient. And I can't help but view people who don't view this as a serious problem as an impediment to solving the problem - so perhaps making them aware of the problem would be a good first step towards solving it.
Who gives a damn if it's racially motivated or it's motivated by the hiring manager disliking your hairstyle, tattoos, hick accent, politics, or sex? Unprofessional discrimination is unprofessional discrimination, full stop, and the effects are identically unfortunate to the person suffering it *whatever* the underlying obnoxious reason is.
I completely fail to see why we should privilege in discussion or action obnoxious reasons rooted in race above all other obnoxious reasons. That seems more likely to be a form of virtue signalling by an advantaged group wanting to think well of their morals than any genuine concern for the welfare of people who have suffered hiring and promotions discrimination.
> Who gives a damn if it's racially motivated or it's motivated by the hiring manager disliking your hairstyle, tattoos, hick accent, politics, or sex?
I agree that it would be best to remove all forms of uprofessional discrimination.
That said, it makes sense to *prioritize* forms of discriminations that are more "coordinated" across companies. The probability that race impacts ten different managers in ten different companies in a similar way is quite high, and the color of skin is more difficult to hide than a tattoo.
Research suggests that looks-based discrimination is extremely common and thus "coordinated," so shouldn't that be a higher priority than racial discrimination?
Says who? Sounds to me like you just pulled that criterion out of your ass because it gets you where you want to end up. What makes "coordinated" evil greater than an "uncoordinated" evil? Nothing that I can see. Evil is evil, and I care about the magnitude of the suffering -- and not very much, if at all, about the motivations and methods of the evildoers. They can be as coordinated as the mafia or as uncoordinated as a half dozen Crips in Compton on a Saturday night, and this doesn't matter in the slightest to me, in terms of how evil is the evil they do.
A logical argument would be that the dysfunctional discrimination to be prioritized for elimination is that which, if addressed, would produce the greatest reduction in harm for the least cost, that is, the most efficient. Same way you pay off the highest interest rare credit card first. So what kind of discrimination is that? One would have to do real work, dig up some facts, to figure that out. You can't just take a guess at it, or rely on whatever the social fads of the moment are.
This assumes that all people would benefit from a particular job identically - not true - and that all people would suffer from discrimination identically - also not true.
> I completely fail to see why we should privilege in discussion or action obnoxious reasons rooted in race above all other obnoxious reasons.
For example, if someone claims that discrimination against tattooed people is real, but discrimination against blacks is made up, then there wouldn't be much use in reminding that person repeatedly about discrimination against tattooed people - what we need to do is convince them that racism is happening.
I find your reasoning unfathomable. To me the only important fact is that discrimination is occurring. I couldn't care less what is going on in the mind of the dicriminator -- except that it *isn't* what it should be going on.
The number of ways in which human beings can be shitheads is essentially infinite, and I see a focus on what those reasons might be as futile, a gigantic waste of time and effort. A productive focus should be on the actions, and on what they should be, and the particular reasons for discriminatory action are uninteresting, except to philosophers and wankers who prefer rumination over constructive action.
Scott has pointed out that "privilege" can be used as a weapon through the technique of strategic equivocation, or "motte-and-bailey" argumentation. I think you can agree that neither of those conditions apply to this discussion - so far, no one here has accused anyone else of privilege that I'm aware of, or tried to use the concept to silence others, or equivocated on the definition of privilege. Ghost Dog's understanding of privilege as related to one's satisfaction in life is not similar to any usage in social justice - either the motte or the bailey usage - that I am familiar with.
I suppose someone less charitable than I could have come along and answered "privilege isn't about a difference in satisfaction - it's about finding ways to shut down discussion by attacking others' identities", and I would have to agree that this less charitable person had at least provided an understanding of privilege that is recognizably a way that people often use the term.
About the university doc: the "unearned advantage" framework for understanding privilege is good and important but I think for this audience that framing does not give a clear and immediate understanding of what privilege is and why we should care about it. The doc describes privilege as an advantage that we are not aware of; I'm just reframing "advantage" as "not having experienced a specific problem": rather than say "I have the advantage of being able to easily hail a cab because I am white" I would say "I have never experienced the problem of being discriminated against by taxi drivers due to being black" - they're equivalent situations. Also, the university document focuses on the advantage being unearned, presumably because its focus is fairness; my account focuses on the advantage being something we're not aware of or something we take for granted, because my focus is understanding. But note that the university doc does mention both lack of awareness of privilege, and how privilege impacts our understanding of others. I disagree that these are totally different accounts; I'd argue that I have simply steelmanned the concept of privilege in order to gain the most use out of the concept without falling prey to its high potential for abuse, cited in Scott's post and elsewhere on this thread.
Neal Zupancic, I did not rephrase those concepts by mistake in terms of "perceived satisfaction", nor did I do it in order to be uncharitable to the concepts.
Instead, I intentionally did it that way for two reasons:
1. The regular usage you refer to already contains certain unstated premises that have to do with perceived quality of life, and, I suspect, is ultimately reducible to those terms alone.
After all, why else would relative differences in the kinds experienced situations matter unless they ultimately affected how individual human beings experience their life?
"Person A does not experience situation X, but person B does, and this is important because B suffers from situation X, while A does not and isn't even aware that B suffers".
Is this not, at the end of the day, what it's trying to say? "Unfairness" isn't bad in the abstract, it's bad because it is assumed it impacts psychological states, either directly or indirectly. If it didn't, would we still be talking about it?
2. Presumably science is a single body of knowledge; different fields are not hermetically sealed from one another. The concepts in one field can be discussed in the light of discoveries from other fields that also touch upon those concepts.
For example: when discussing chemical bonds, the particles involved are ultimately the same ones that particle physics studies. And whatever is discovered about them in the field of particle physics will also automatically apply to chemistry, meaning we can meaningfully make statements in one field informed with knowledge the other. At this point, we can say that we have established a common grammar.
And here's why I brought up notions such as "habituation" and the "hedonic treadmill". Presumably, once we establish a common grammar between sociological science and psychological science, concepts from the later field will automatically inform our understanding of the former. For example (this is something to be researched): what if whatever realities associated with a "privilege" no longer contribute to one's positive affect? Can we still in any meaningful way still refer to it as a "privilege" if it doesn't have any positive contribution to the quality of life of the "privileged"? And: what if whatever negative affect deriving from a "lack of privilege" is, in fact, derived more from the constant push to be aware of the "lack", instead of from whatever is objectively and measurably lacking?
Again, these aren't rhetorical questions to which I claim to know the answer to. Rather, I am launching some suggestions for future study directions that can have a high impact on these fields.
Is this not, ultimately, what science should at least in principle be open to?
Yeah I’m just arguing the meaning you’re suggesting for privilege isn’t the way almost anyone else uses it, and it seems to reduce in OP definition to “privilege is when you are wrong about something important because you didn’t experience or understand it”, and that’s kinda the main way to be wrong about something.
Does your knowing about racism mean you aren’t privileged anymore? OP account would suggest so, as you no longer have the supposed pernicious “”cognitive bias”””
"Does your knowing about racism mean you aren’t privileged anymore?"
No - there's a difference between knowing about a thing and experiencing the thing. I can know that taxis discriminate against black people but I can't know what it's like to be discriminated against by a taxi as a black person.
Also, I didn't describe it as a bias, but as a blind spot. Blind spots are interesting - did you know we have literal blind spots in both eyes, but probably never notice them unless we're taught to? We move our eyes enough to compensate and our brain just sort of fills in the blanks based on context and/or information from the other eye. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision)
I think privilege is kind of like that - if you look at the issue from another angle, you can "fill in the blanks", but it doesn't mean the blind spot is gone - just that you've compensated for it.
Any use of the words: "You have privilege", "You are living a privileged life", if they are NOT in a social justice context always imply that the addressed person has a RARE set of beneficial circumstances: e.g. they are in the 1% percent, they have never had to work a day in their life etc. Again, the advantage has to be rare, nobody says: it is a privilege to not be homeless.
See also the description of the memoir "A life of privilege, mostly": "Gardner Botsford grew up in a Manhattan town house under the benign eye of five live-in servants, a charming and cultivated stepfather, and a mother whose beauty and wit attracted admirers ranging from the statesman Averell Harriman, to comic genius Harpo Marx."
True, but I think the application of the word in a social justice context works because it draws attention to how advantages you take for granted are actually less common than you thought.
I mean I have been told (in person, in a training) that it's a privilege not to be homeless, to get three meals a day, and to have parents that love you. But I agree that it seems like a bit far from the colloquial definition.
I believe the social justice explanation for this apparent contradiction is that there is no contradiction. There exists a large pool of people who are homeless and/or hungry and/or and have no parents who love them. Arguably, such people may be in the majority. The fact that you automatically exclude them from your definition of "privilege" just demonstrates how incredibly privileged you truly are.
Since to my knowledge Social Justice movements tend to be focused on domestic issues, I think the idea that a majority of people are homeless or routinely hungry or have no parents who love them is frankly ridiculous (though the last one of those is certainly far more widespread in the West than the first two, since it can't be solved with money)
I mean I agree that some wouldn't see a contradiction. I was more just replying to Throwaway12 saying that "nobody says: it is a privilege not to be homeless." with the anecdote that I had encountered such things, even in a professional setting, and not just random online trolls
There's a problem because members of oppressed groups vary quite a bit. For example, the privilege model has some truth in it, but it tends to leave out conservative members of oppressed groups.
The privilege model seems to encourage the idea that there's a typical oppressed member for each marginal group.
Agreed, and see my comment below noting that intersectionality at least attempts to deal with this.
Certainly, I've seen the concept of privilege taken to what I consider unjustified extremes, but I've also seen it be very useful in helping people to understand certain situations.
One of the (many) issues I have with the concept of "privilege" is that it is unquantifiable, and pretty much unfalsifiable. No matter how rough your life had been, chances are that someone else is in worse shape than you. And, if you belong to one of the privileged demographic groups (modulo intersectionality), then your very *existence* is privileged and arguably oppressive. Your privilege is not due to something you have or have not done, it's due to something that you *are*, and therefore your only option (besides ceasing to exist) is to spend your life in atonement.
Contrast this concept with, say, the carbon offset policy. Yes, there are a lot of things about it one can criticize, but generally speaking it says, "you're emitting X tons of carbon/year, it will cost us $Y to clean it up, so we're going to charge you $Z for it, Z < Y".
To me, guilt as an emotion and the atonement behavior that may result from it are useful social things when a person has caused harm to someone else. "I'm sorry I broke your coffee cup. I'd like to get you one to replace it."
Living in a permanent state of guilt or feeling of duty to atone for actions that belong to history or larger systems seems wholly unhelpful. It's not a good state of mind to motivate a person to action.
It seems possible to me to understand how privilege of all sorts can lead people to have blind spots without that translating to a person needing to carry around guilt and duty of atonement in a generalized and permanent sense for actions they themselves did not take.
Right, but I think this is one of the unjustified extremes. I am keenly aware of my own privilege across several domains and I do not spend a single second of my life atoning for it.
Once - in the early 2000s - I was walking somewhere in Manhattan and a black girl addressed me to ask if I could hail a cab for her. She said "you know how it is". I pretended to know how it was, because of course when someone says "you know how it is" you aren't going to contradict them, and stuck my hand out into the street. A taxi which was stopped across the street immediately pulled across approximately six lanes of traffic (avenues in Manhattan are about 100' wide) and practically materialized in front of me. I opened the door and attempted to say something chivalrous like "please take this young lady where she wants to go" but I'm sure that sounds much better than whatever I came up with at the time. I later asked a friend about it and he told me that there was this thing where taxi drivers preferred not to pick up black people, and that there was even a video of Yaphet Kotto (a black actor my friend and I were both fans of) trying and failing to hail a cab.
Was it my fault this girl couldn't get a cab? No - obviously not. But I was able to use my privilege to help her, and that made me feel good. Just like a person who is privileged to be young and able-bodied might feel good helping an older or disabled person cross the street. For me, acknowledging privilege is a pretty universally positive experience - the first step on a path towards helping others who might not have all the advantages that I have.
Yes, but do you help people who are not black or brown? Do you think all whites and Asians are as privileged as you?
Similarly to how you never thought of that black situation, there are other things you have not thought about
Don't be too confident in your epiphany to then go forth to mindlessly drive society. This is a common mistake. You were sure in your life before that encounter also, as you imply yourself
It is known that Africans tend to have high self esteem. This is often expressed more subtly in narcissistic woe-is-me ism as well
.
As someone who navigates social situations easily, I advise you to be more thoughtful regarding the pronouncements of our "betters". When the newest idea hits, ask yourself, not only whether it seems true, but also, is it in good faith
Incidentally, it would be fine to dispute "you know how it is" ;)
The word "privilege" would provoke less hostility if it were more equitably applied. For example, there are many awards, jobs, and fellowships only for women or only for black people. Affirmative action policies are ubiquitous in universities. Female privilege also manifests in many forms in informal life. When was the last time a woman was expected to do the manual labor in a house, get drafted into a war, or initiate a date? When was the last time a woman had to worry whether she would falsely accused of sexual harassment? These are all forms of black or female privilege, but no self-respecting social justice advocate would be caught dead calling them that.
But again, the framework of privilege is totally useless in actually doing anything that might help them. What did help is Uber, which was motivated and implemented using zero “caring about privilege” and thousands of engineers and billions of dollars worth of Silicon Valley innovation and tech.
> Privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot where people who haven't personally dealt with a problem think the problem isn't real
I don’t think this is at all what people actually mean when they say privilege. It would imply that anti capitalists and anarchists, because they haven’t managed a supply chain or large bureaucracy, are privileged and have a cognitive bias against capitalism. Or that BLM supporting black people are privileged in not understanding the national context of police violence. There are also a number of right wing or reactionaries who are super witchy and yet have had a lot of personal experience with the stuff, and they’d absolutely still be considered privileged despite not working in that definition.
I think the reason we wouldn't describe someone as "privileged" if they'd never had the problems faced by a manager of a large bureaucracy is that those problems don't have the social significance that would warrant analysis using the framework of privilege. In other words, what would anyone have to gain by increasing the overall social understanding of the problems faced by bureaucrats? Who, by not understanding the problems of supply chain managers, is making the lives of supply chain managers harder?
And then we can also imagine contexts in which the tribulations of supply chain managers need to be understood better (by their bosses, by CEOs, by policymakers whose policies impact on them?) and so there's a whole wing of Harvard Biz School type stuff calling for higher level managers to do the equivalent of riding the subway for a few days within their domains.
It's not really what the word privileged is most usefully applied to, but in a way the same dynamic is at play, which is one's own circumstances not giving one easy access to empathy and understanding of what another person is coping with.
Some part of this has always seemed to me to be covered by the word humility -- a kind of deep acknowledgment that one has blind spots, will always have blind spots, that the shape and extent of them are unknowable, that our blind spots will likely produce ignorant speech and action from time to time, and that we always have the opportunity to learn more.
I guess I wasn’t specific. “Underprivileged minority left wing activists” regularly agitate for transformative government policy changes that, if actually implemented, would seriously hurt them and many others. “Abolishing police”, price controls, rent control (at status quo of real estate), the dismantling of large corporations, the destruction of the profit motive, giving arbitrary minorities / workers operational control of large companies, destructive wealth redistribution (“dismantle Amazon and google”), etc. by neil’s privilege, these people “have a cognitive blind spot” (don’t understand the consequences of the policies involved and believe strange ideas about them) “where people who haven’t personally dealt with a problem believe the problem isn’t real or significant” (said policy changes would stop very important functionings of large economic workings and companies that said activists haven’t personally dealt with and don’t believe are real to important, never having managed large supply chains or companies). They may have “other problems and be somehow underprivileged”, by racial discrimination or something, but as Neil said that “doesn’t mean your problems aren’t worse than other people’s”, and their policy changes would be much worse for them than any racism.
Needless to say, nobody would use this definition of privilege like that. And I don’t think it’s a central or good definition as a result.
Well, we're almost making a farce of the no politics rule here but I suppose I can respond without debating the policy implications? Remember the idea of privilege is founded in experience - that is, if you haven't experienced some particular problem, you are privileged over someone who has experienced the problem. It sounds like you are trying to extend the concept to cover theoretical problems that you say "would occur" as a result of some policy changes. Even if you are right, and those problems would indeed occur, the fact that nobody has experienced those particular specific problems yet (because they are, as of now, hypothetical future problems) takes us outside the realm of privilege as I understand it.
Although to be fair to critics of privilege, I have to acknowledge that the online discourse contains many examples of people using the concept of privilege in ways that would be antithetical to that concept of humility - for example, as a bludgeon to silence dissent - and I oppose that usage of the concept.
The problems of large companies or bureaucracies are incredibly important for, say, the people who’s life and livelihood and nutrition and political stability and military security and health and everything else depends on, I.e. almost literally everyone. And the, for instance, anarchists or socialists or populists or esoteric conspiracists or mainstream political junkies would absolutely greatly benefit in the realism and usability of their proposals if they understood that. Bad economic regulation proposed by ansrchists or socialists or populists, or bad military or corporate structure or politics, or just bad regulation, has in some cases cratered economies and countries, and poor understanding of the above had in almost al countries seriously harmed many industries and cities and people. All of those would be greatly benefited by improved understanding and use of bueraucracies and corporations and supply chains and legal systems and whatever. And probably much more benefitted by it than by any sort of “privilege of <race/social group>“, such as realistic and timely addressing of ... pollution, climate change, inflation, corporate power, etc.
I think I would agree that not being directly affected by policy is a form of privilege, and that many "mainstream political junkies" with one-size-fits-all bad solutions to problems are privileged in this way, and might produce better policy proposals if they understood some of the issues and problems involved more clearly - for example, by being more personally invested in them. But my understanding is also that at least in the US, Congress does spend considerable time consulting with business leaders and others who have direct experience of these issues, so again, I'm just not sure the concept of privilege could be usefully deployed here to create the kind of policy changes you are talking about.
I guess I would just add that just because privilege might not help us solve the biggest and most pressing problems, that doesn't mean that the concept of privilege can't help us understand some issues more clearly, or that the concept is meaningless.
Concretely: understanding “privilege of rich vs poor” will have absolutely no impact compared to something like “getting all national climate orgs to put their tens of billions into direct carbon capture” or “sidestepping the food lobby to regulate obesity out of existence” in the actual health and incomes of poor people in the US and globally. The entire issue is meaningless
This is a great answer. There’s a piece I’d like to add, maybe as a question. Do you think there is a phenomenon of a privileged person over-identifying with a “narrative of member(s) of an oppressed group? Filling in some blind spots, but also uncritically adopting it as “their own” in a somewhat subconscious way? There’s a difference between having a problem and seeing a problem in operation for another person. If I have a problem, I choose certain actions to address it, but if I see a problem in operation for someone else, I choose actions to address that in a different way.
When the response works it works for different reasons.
Adopting the mindset as if I have the same problem, and attempting to choose actions based on that framework, can lead to something very weird. A large social issue will impact everyone, differently for different individuals and groups. If I adopt a response based on my conviction that my experience is actually happening differently, I neglect to understand my own experience of that issue and I have trouble choosing which actions are actually effective to help another group facing the issue but impacted differently.
Does that make sense? Do you think it’s real? Epistemology with narratives of privileged people comprehending blind spots and then acting effectively from their own point of view is something that’s somewhat missing (I think) from the public square. I think the 1990s-now started doing better with elevating epistemologies of oppressed groups. But narratives of oppressed groups have all sorts of uses for those with more privilege; as foils for their own problems, as side projects, as distractions, of course as legitimate learning - all those are uses of literature, good ones. But I think some of the excesses of wokeology can be traced to people seeing oneself in others’ stories to an overly excessive extent. (Ameliorating this is why the “ally” category was invented.)
If you have any lit references of people with privilege learning to see it and not dying/being maimed somehow/abdicating, please post. I think it’s out there somewhere.
Yeah, definitely - this is a known issue and has several implications, and in particular is one aspect of the problem which intersectionality was designed to solve.
So one problem is that even if you understand someone's problem really, really well, your solution will still be informed by your lived experience. This is a known failure mode of many systems of moral reasoning, including the "golden rule" and Rawls "original position". Maybe a solution that you would be happy with if you had the problem doesn't really work for someone who actually has the problem. It's going to be hard to come up with concrete examples that meet the "non-political open thread" requirements so maybe we could revisit this topic in thread 188 or 190.
Related to this is the issue that sometimes a problem might look very different for one subgroup than for another. Problems that appear similar from the outside might be qualitatively different from the outside. Again, hard to talk specifics non-politically, but intersectionality was designed to deal with this issue by raising awareness of the fact that, e.g. the problems faced by a black woman are not simply a union of the set of problems faced by women and the set of problems faced by black people. As a consequence, some black women came to believe that they couldn't solve their specific problems that were specific to black women by engaging in the women's rights movement as women and the black rights movement as black people.
And of course there are all kinds of people who are ready to appropriate "victimhood narratives" for social status or political power, which, as you point out, is why some activists say that e.g. men can be feminist allies, but can't be actual feminists (although there is much disagreement on this point, even among feminists). But like - if you see a group of people who are deliberately elevating narratives of oppressed people, and you really want your voice to be heard for whatever reason, it is very tempting to try to, let's say, emphasize aspects of your identity in which you have a lack of privilege, or find some other way of signaling that you are someone worth listening to. Hence "oppression Olympics".
Personally I find the framework of privilege to be helpful for me personally in understanding others, but not very helpful as a way to convince people of things, or a way to think about solutions to problems. Most solutions to most problems have some political aspect, or have to clear some political hurdle, and the way to clear that hurdle is through building solidarity and emphasizing commonality rather than difference. That's why discussion of privilege usually falls under the general category of "critical theory" - it's more focused on analyzing problems than on constructing solutions.
The classic text on a person learning to see privilege is of course the Peggy McIntosh text - https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf - who wrote introspectively about how she came to understand her white privilege. I imagine there are tons of other, better, more modern accounts out there, but I'm not so caught up on the literature as to be able to recommend a particular one.
Without getting overly political (if at all possible), can you explain the algorithm that is used to decide the cutoff level for splitting intersectional groups ? For example, as you said, we know that "the problems faced by a black woman are not simply a union of the set of problems faced by women and the set of problems faced by black people". But what about a plus-sized black woman ? An immigrant plus-sized black woman ? A disabled immigrant plus-sized black woman ?
On the one hand, it's tempting to draw the line somewhere, and say, "ok, a demographic subgroup has to consist of at least X% of the population, otherwise we'll roll it up into its parent group". But, on the other hand, if taking care of minorities is our primary goal, then eliminating arbitrarily small minorities would seem to run counter to that goal.
On the other hand, obviously the smallest possible demographic group is the individual, but the entire point of social justice is to evaluate people based on their membership in groups, so this approach won't work either.
I think you're operating from an analytical level, but intersectionality is a synthetic practice.
What I mean is, there's no theory that can tell you which identity groups or combinations of groups will produce intersectional effects, or what those effects will be. The effects are grounded in specifics: specific histories, specific times and places, specific cultures. Even specific individuals. From these specifics, you might get a clearer picture of the whole.
For example: I know that there have been claims that doctors take women's self-reported pain less seriously than men's self-reported pain. I know there have been claims that doctors tend to assume the health problems of obese people are related to their obesity even when they are not. So I might guess that obese women might have specific problems with medical care that might be unique to them - but on the other hand, they might just have the two problems I listed above separately (or, of course, either or both of those problems could be illusory). I wouldn't really know unless obese women told me that they'd experienced distinct problems with accessing medical care as obese women.
In practice, the highest number of identities I have seen in any kind of intersectional claim has been three. The practical problems you might imagine one would have in keeping track of the various combinations of identities and their implications will absolutely limit the number of intersections you could feasibly and credibly claim - like, who is going to be able to say with any degree of certainty that a poor trans black disabled immigrant experiences problems differently than a poor trans white disabled immigrant?
Critics of intersectionality equate it with identity politics, but it is more accurate to view intersectionality as a critique of identity politics. Identity politics is about making common cause around a shared identity. Intersectionality is about pointing out which people tend to get left out by identity politics, and figuring out what to do about it. There's an implicit recognition that we need identity politics to solve problems, but we don't want to be reducing people to a single identity in the process.
The map is based on the territory, but in economics the territory is made of people who read the map. So the distinction between map and territory gets pretty shaky.
I'm curious to what extent various social and psychological ills would turn out, upon closer and honest inspection, to be self-fulfilling prophecies. That is, the fact that people are made aware they should "feel bad" is actually the main cause of them experiencing negative emotions in the first place.
For one thing, I'm thinking about various "traumas" that people tend to get groomed into believing they've experienced, often in a cult-like manner. But I also have in mind the psychological effects of "inequality" (which are often the effects of becoming aware of, constantly perceiving, and obsessing over inequality, more than of the actual inequality itself).
Goes beyond the points you raise, but I suspect that any given X cannot be aversive / traumatic if you (fully) buy into a social frame that (fully) endorses X and all of X's (potential) consequences.
X = e.g. physical pain, going to war, suicide bombings.
Two things appear to make the big difference around whether something is considered aversive; autonomy and purpose. If you feel you chose to do something, and that you are doing it for a good and important reason, the experience itself will be less aversive (not non-aversive, just much more tolerable and your rating of how aversive it is will be lower).
However, even people who chose something like going to war can be traumatized by what occurs there. And even people who see and experience very upsetting situations, such as first responders, can get worn down by repeated trauma, and develop trauma symptoms such as PTSD.
I think we often run into the issue of failing to distinguish an internal state from an external expression of a state. Therapy and other methods of dealing with trauma often have the effect of bringing it to the forefront and can result in expressions of a state that are more visible and extreme than they were prior to therapy. That doesn't mean the person is less healthy or mentally stable after therapy. Instead, they may have had the same (or worse!) internal state, but didn't express it. I know a guy who had a very strict upbringing (imagine an alcoholic father who yelled all the time and held his kids to impossible standards). That guy expresses very little emotion most of the time, and internalized the standards from his father. Most of the time he comes across as competent and professional, without a lot of emotion. Some of the time he lashes out and screams at people from little provocation.
Knowing his background, I make the leap to say that he has trauma from his childhood whether he expresses himself or not. Someone pointing that out to him doesn't create the trauma or the reaction to the trauma.
I do believe that it's quite possible to amplify the expressions of the trauma in unhelpful ways, that neither reduce the trauma nor result in fewer outbursts over time. Getting someone worked up about their trauma with no guidance or plan for how to work through it could agitate without helping. That would be the equivalent of trying to solve a murder through town gossip alone.
I've seen complaints about therapy based on the idea that trauma should be relived vividly in the hopes that catharsis will help. However, this doesn't mean that all talk about one's trauma is a bad idea.
I don’t think they’re actually self fulfilling prophecies. At least any more so than something like “someone suggests you eat something, so you eat it” is a self fulfilling prophecy. Other factors contribute more, even if the result, in the case of “trauma”, is unnecessary, and other potential self fulfilling prophecies wouldn’t have the same hooks to use.
It would probably be helpful to go read up on trauma and how it works. There's plenty of research, including on factors that make it harder on people or less so, short-term and long-term.
It would probably also be helpful if you read up on the actual research on how 'cult-like persuasion' occurs - not what former cult members or people selling a fix-it say.
Many people who experience events that could easily create trauma reactions (such as childhood sexual abuse, terrible experiences in wartime, consistent ill-treatment for reasons beyond their control...) don't have PTSD or similar trauma syndromes. We know a fair bit about what is protective there, and what creates greater vulnerability.
Then of course, there's the dilemma of colloquial use of the word 'trauma'. And differentiating immediate after-effects of extremely difficult experiences compared to longer-term ones, etc - it's quite normal to have nightmares, obsessive thinking, trouble sleeping and eating etc after a very difficult experience, but for many people that goes away fairly quickly.
Do you have any info to support the idea that people experience psychological effects of things like 'inequality' due to 'the effects of becoming aware of, constantly perceiving, and obsessing over inequality, more than of the actual inequality itself'?
> It would probably also be helpful if you read up on the actual research on how 'cult-like persuasion' occurs - not what former cult members or people selling a fix-it say.
Regarding inequality specifically, it's almost tautological - Effects of *poverty* are objective, effects of *inequality* are psychological issues caused by comparing oneself to the Jones' across town. The only way your neighbour winning the lottery can hurt you is if the awareness of it causes you jealousy and bitterness.
True, but I think you'd admit that it's not just jealousy and bitterness when your child will get a crap education and be trapped in the same type of crap jobs you've been trapped in, while across town, someone who has done nothing extraordinary, is as smart as you are and has worked as hard as you have has a child who will get a good education and go on to have decent jobs. Same goes for when you know your elderly mother will not get medical care she needs, through no fault of her own or yours, while another equally elderly and equally ill person will get required care, through no merit of their own or their family's.
And one of the main reasons for these differences is so that a few people can become extremely rich and keep their extreme riches.
The approved universities for the EA scholarship seem to be particularly elitism and classist for a community so aligned with Rationalist thought. I'd understand some combination of planned course of study, explanation, need and minimally prestigious university (which goes towards ability to change the world for the better). Instead it is limited to a particularly tiny set of schools. Maybe I'm making a molehill out of an anthill here, but this is the same flavoring that has put me off EA forums in the past.
Sending anyone to a top university in the USA or the UK when top University in Germany, France or Switzerland are free seems like a strange move anyway from an EA perspective. Like you could found all expanses (including rent and holidays) for 2-3 students at Paris-Saclay university (13th in Shangaï ranking, 1st in mathematics) for the price of a scholarship at Harward or any top USA/UK university.
After having thought about this a little more, I wonder if it’s also a very cheap screening method. I suspect that if you can get into a top school you must have enough qualifications or contacts to be worth the scholarship to the EA community. Obviously not getting into a top school doesn’t preclude such qualifications, but my understanding is that often these sorts of scholarships are just looking for efficient ways to cull the herds of applicants, and this lets colleges bear the brunt of the cost of culling rather than the EA organization
I have applied to some Very Important Universities, and been told to fuck off, so I dislike them both on principle and personal grounds (ofc more the latter). However, in defense of the idea: if you wanted to train impactful EA judges, it would just not be a good idea to finance law schools other than Harvard or Yale because for some reason the latter two institutions "produce" impactful judges at a much, much higher rate than any of the other 200 law schools.
Although not quite as bad, I think the situation is similar for many other domains in the UK and the US. It sucks, but if you want to improve reality you first have to accept it.
My gut says something deeper is going on. If your only criterion when making a list of schools was prestige, it feels weird to not even mention Dartmouth and Cornell. My guess is that there is some requirement for the schools to make the list, and some thought put in to which ones to choose (i.e. why Harvard isn’t on the list) that makes making a huge list too time-intensive.
I think that's pretty clearly the case: LSE is a very strong British university, above Imperial for many EA-relevant fields, but isn't included in the list.
I recommend reading the whole very short piece, the choice bits:
"We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them."
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives."
Ouch indeed. Just how soon after the attack was that written? One thing that struck me was Thompson stating
"The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher."
I remember on that horrible day hearing on TV estimates of the death toll being well over 10,000. Guiliani said at a press conference that day something like "it will be more than any of us can bear". Does anyone remember how long it took before we had the official number which is just under 3000 souls? I've always been amazed that the death toll was "only" three thousand. As horrific as it was, it seems like it could have been so, so much higher and I wonder why it (thank God) was not. Has there ever been any analysis done of this? For instance, were the 5-figure numbers heard on TV just plain wrong/fog of war stuff?
It turns out that building codes requiring multiple staircases that can function as fire escape are really amazing interventions. You might have thought that they wouldn't work well for the 80th floor, but my understanding is that basically everyone who was below where the plane hit managed to get out safely. This probably wasn't obvious on 9/12, particularly because there was nothing like Facebook's "X marked themself safe in the Y incident" feature, so officials suspected there were a lot more dead than there actually were.
Magic 8 Ball like bullet point from FDA Panel meeting today:
“The timing for possible Moderna and Johnson & Johnson booster in U.S. is murky.”
In the frustrating vagueness department that's up there with the actually Magic 8 Ball response: "Reply Hazy. Try again later."
Jebus.
Scott should do an epilogue to the "Too Good to Check" post, starring Nicki Minaj
What did she do?
Because I would feel too ridiculous typing it out, here you go:
https://twitter.com/NICKIMINAJ/status/1437532566945341441
That post seems likely to be a misunderstanding, but I'm not sure it relates to the issue raised in that post. The only part of it Minaj could check herself without a rather serious violation of privacy is that the cousin's friend actually did claim that his infertility was a consequence of the COVID vaccine.
2021 version of "Your Feet's Too Big"
according to this
https://files.givewell.org/files/ClearFund/Meeting_2020_08_25/Attachment_F_DRAFT_GiveWell_Financial_Summary___August_25_2020_2.pdf
givewell spend about 1/3 of its revenue on expense before sending it to charity
mostly on staff
but 1.2M USD is spent on admin from 18M revenue
this does not seem effective.
is it true or did I misread it?
Most of the donations that GiveWell influences don't go through their books at all. They count (at least) 152M USD as being based on their recommendations, see https://blog.givewell.org/2020/12/09/givewells-money-moved-in-2019/.
So the question is whether there's enough improved effectiveness of the 152M to justify the 6M in expenses. (I don't consider the distinction between "admin" and non-admin in general, but particularly not here, when none of it is direct programs anyway.)
6.7% administration costs doesn't sound high to me, but GiveWell argues against the common practice of trying to minimize overhead costs in a post entitled "The worst way to pick a charity":
> Today, the most common way that donors evaluate charities – when they evaluate them at all – is by asking questions about financials, such as “How much of my donation goes to programs vs. salaries?” This approach makes no sense.
https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-charity/
My (admittedly biased) opinion based on speaking with those I know who work at charities (one of whom is now directly involved in evaluating the effectiveness of interventions across a number of charities) very much agrees with GiveWell's conclusion here. Admin overhead is a nice number, but it's really not representative of effectiveness at all. Throwing money around when you don't know what works isn't helpful, and you need not just generic admin people or quants, but educated domain experts with actual field experience and consistent data collection to be able to even try and work out if your interventions were worthwhile, or if you just got lucky and, for example, people had a few good years without droughts when you were working in the area trying to help improve people's food security. Because without the metis that comes with actually working in foreign countries with people it's very easy to ask the wrong questions and not actually gain useful information, and you're more likely to come up with a poorly-designed intervention in the first place. You saw this all over the place a few decades ago. It's improved a lot since, there's a much better understanding of this at charities. Most orgs aren't just flying in, building some wells, and then leaving anymore.
But equally it can be hard to get those experts and the data if you don't have the funds to spend on that. The person I know could 100% be earning way more money with their skills in industry or finance or even academia (they had a pretty lucrative tenure-track position which they gave up to do charity work). They charge well below what they could given their skills because they care and they know that a lot of charities can't afford market rates. But there's a very limited supply of people like them in the world and only so many hours in the day. And that's the curse of pursuing the "low overhead" number. It means that charities are less likely to be sure that they're actually helping because they can't land a contract with someone like this person, and they can't afford someone who isn't as motivated by doing good.
My interpretation is that GiveWell does both its own charitable work (researching charity effectiveness and promoting effective charities) and forwards grants to effective charities.
Some funds are unrestricted and GiveWell can spend them however they want, including their operating expenses. Others are restricted, usually meaning they have to use them for grants to other charities.
The report you linked to talks about GiveWell's operations, financed using unrestricted revenue.
Where does the number of 1/3 of revenue sent to charity come from? Is it because unrestricted revenue was $18M and expenses were around $5.6M? I don't think the excess goes to charity but rather stays with GiveWell as an asset.
**Excess assets**
GiveWell has an excess asset policy saying that "our cash flow projections show us having 12 months' worth of unrestricted assets in each of the next 12 months". If they have $12.5M left over from the previous year, shouldn't they donate some of their revenue?
They say no: "Using our most conservative COVID-19 projections, we estimate that we could fall below the threshold of 12 months of assets as of July 2021. Hence no action is needed to satisfy the excess assets policy."
Also note that they received a single unrestricted $7.5M donation that made up 42% of their revenue. They have decided to eventually use some of this for grants: "we propose to irrevocably restrict a portion* of this donation to grants at GiveWell’s discretion". (*about half I think)
I think they believe 2019 was an outlier, and want to keep that some of that large donation for operating expenses 2020 and 2021.
**Grants**
In addition to its own operations GiveWell also processes grants to other charities. I think in 2019 this was $35M, and $70M in 2020. https://files.givewell.org/files/ClearFund/GiveWell_TCF_2020_Audited_Financial_Statements.pdf
Missed something here: GiveWell has an excess asset policy saying that **they want to be in a position so that** "our cash flow projections show us having 12 months' worth of unrestricted assets in each of the next 12 months".
Also, I think the point of GiveWell is to do only admin and not helpone one directly. They don't go out and deworm children, they gather info on whether it's better to deworm children or give them bed nets to protect against malaria.
I've had a scammer try to lead me through a cashiers check scam. (Briefly: I was selling an item on Craigslist, they said they'd mail me a check and could I pay the movers out of it. The scam continues with "the check is fake but it's a cashier's check so the bank gives you the money now, then someone -- likely you -- has to pony up when it's revealed the check is fake after all".) Not knowing the scam beforehand, I played along one step farther than I would've liked, and am currently in possession of the (presumed fake) check.
Question 1: is there some way to punish this behavior? I haven't been materially harmed (yet; the scammer does know an uncomfortable amount of information about me), but presumably writing fake checks is illegal even if they're not cashed. But, who would I report this to? My police department? "Their" police department (based on the address)?
Question 2: is there even enough information for anyone to do anything about it? I have a cashier's check (allegedly from a small business, not a person), a letter by which it arrived (which has a return address (possibly fake or just unrelated) and the USPS tracking information (however much that's worth)), and an email exchange (sent from a nondescript gmail account on their end). Obviously the check can be validated to be fake, but will there be any way to pin it on a specific person?
Update in case anyone is interested:
- local police department said "thank you for contacting us, since you weren't hurt there's nothing we're planning to do, but do let us know if you see unusual activity from the scammer knowing way too much about you". This makes sense (it's not clear why it would be my local police department's problem, as I'm unhurt and have no reason to think the scammer is local), but is only very slightly helpful.
- bank whose name was printed on the check said "we don't verify checks but feel free to send us a check image". Makes sense since, had I deposited the check, it wouldn't have been their problem, but also is unhelpful.
- the FTC said "thank you for adding this valuable data point to our database! We won't do anything about it specifically, but it will contribute to our overall knowledge about scams." I suppose there's a slim chance that this goes somewhere, maybe.
I'm still confused why the FTC instructs me to reach out to the USPS. They were handed an envelope and delivered it, why would they be responsible for anything else?
The Postal Inspection Service (the law enforcement agency associated with the USPS) has jurisdiction over the use of the postal service to commit fraud. I think they have this jurisdiction primarily for historical reasons: interstate mail fraud is primarily a federal law enforcement issue, and in the early days of the Post Office there weren't a lot of other federal law enforcement agencies that were better options to investigate it. For example, the FBI didn't exist until 1908 and the Secret Service didn't exist until 1865. The US Marshalls did exist all the way back to 1789, but mail fraud was arguably further from their core function (enforcing orders of federal courts and apprehending fugitives from federal law) than from the Post Office's internal law enforcement arm (investigating and prosecuting claims of fraud and other misconduct by or against postal employees).
That's a pretty elaborate scam. A lot more sophisticated than "I want to give you $10,000 so all I need is your checking account and routing numbers." Sorry you were taken on this one. It seems like the con artist is pretty crafty so I don't think it will be easy to nail him, her or them.
It's common enough to have merited a Vox article two years ago, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/8/19/20808526/cashiers-checks-online-scams -- but that doesn't really discuss nailing the scammer.
Are you the "Stochastic Networks" Elana Y?
I am, although I'm partial to the spelling "Elena" ;)
I thought the name sounded familiar. That's pretty cool. Sorry about the typo.
The FTC has a fraud reporting website. It sounds like the idea is to triage incoming reports and route them to the appropriate law enforcement agencies:
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/
I found the link from the FTC's public education article on certified cash fraud. They also suggest reporting to the postal inspector's office and your state attorney general's office.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-spot-avoid-and-report-fake-check-scams
You could probably also try contacting the fraud department of the bank that the forged check purports to be issued by, but that might be overkill if you've already reported to the FTC, USPS, and your state.
I would start with my local police department. It may just get buried and never go anywhere, though, so interact with the officer/liaison you work with enough to get a sense of whether you feel like that's enough. If not, you can contact the agencies responsible for the various crimes involved. Bank-type fraud is the FTC, I think. The USPS has a law-enforcement division. I'd start there, if you don't get the warm fuzzy helpful feelings from your local PD.
Even if it goes nowhere it will still end in some statistics. Not sure how much this would be worth, but I reported bicycle theft solely so it would appear in statistics (with faint hope that large enough numbers will encourage police to do something about it)
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-secret-van-gogh-success.html
Of course, it isn't about the secret of van Gogh's success It's about a deep data dive into careers in art, film direction, and science.
They found a period of exploration followed by exploitation when a promising field was found.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25477-8
Mondrian did some good representational art before he started with rectangles.
It sounds like the essential thing is freedom to change direction combined with a sort of good taste-- feeling a drive to explore and an ability to see what's promising.
Traditional Asian artists presumably followed a different trajectory, where they imitated for decades, but gradually developed their own style.
I wonder whether anyone started exploring after their hot streak.
This might be in contrast to Root-Bernstein's theory that scientists make important discoveries when they work on a practical problem which is adjacent to their field, with Pasteur as an example.
Isn't it obvious that people tend to have a period of experimentation (and mimicking of others) before they find their niche, which they then stick with?
And I think that (parts of) Asia value tradition much more, so it makes perfect sense for their artists to spend lots of time closely following tradition, as that makes for a perfectly good career. If it takes time for a person's style to become tradition, in a tradition-loving society, you can expect artists to gradually be allowed to express their style more and more over time.
It seems obvious, but I think there are people who need to be reassured that exploration isn't necessarily just self-indulgent time-wasting.
And it might be interesting to encourage people who've had hot streaks to take up exploration again.
> Isn't it obvious that people tend to have a period of experimentation (and mimicking of others) before they find their niche, which they then stick with?
May be quite obvious, but fact that both are useful is often missed.
In thinking about the horrible performance of the FDA regarding COVID I was wondering if there is a country that has a good equivalent.
In thinking about Scott's anecdote about the kids unnecessarily dying because because of the FDA, when a viable alternative was available I was wondering why someone did not set up a clinic in a nearby country to give the treatment. Athletes used to go to Mexico to buy steroids all the time. Why can't people suffering from illnesses that have effective but illegal treatments do the same thing?
Anders Tegnell, the State Epidemiologist of Sweden, pretty much screwed up the Swedish response to COVID-19. In many ways his performance was worse than the FDA, because he was against masks or social distancing, and reliance on a herd immunity strategy (despite his recent denials, there are his public statements and released emails from early in the outbreak that he favored a herd immunity strategy over disrupting the economy by lockdowns). The FDA changed its strategy as they gathered more data about the epidemic. Tegnell stuck to his guns. Mortality rates were much higher than Norway or Denmark which were countries that took lockdown measures.
Paul Krugman quipped on twitter: "The new Eurostat numbers say that Sweden and Denmark have had identical economic performance: ~8% GDP decline over past year. So all Sweden got from its herd immunity strategy was a bunch of dead Swedes..."
.https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1294243540059529218?lang=en
They can, but they can also go to the clinic in Mexico that will take their money and give them nothing but snake oil. Or legitimate but substandard treatment on the cheap. And they have a hard time knowing which is which. The FDA is more conservative than it ought to be, but it's pretty good at making sure that if you go to a clinic in the United States you're not getting snake oil.
And at making sure your insurance company knows that you're not getting snake oil, so that they'll be willing to pay for it. Maybe.
Offshore clinics do exist, but they are a niche market because they need a combination of niche treatments that the FDA uniquely disallows, and patients rich enough to afford the sort of concierge physicians who will research and steer them to the not-snake-oil offshore clinics. Or overeducated high-IQ weirds who can research that themselves and then self-finance international travel and medical care.
Re. clinics in Mexico: Maybe it's because I speak Spanish, but I find it fairly easy to get very good treatment in Mexico; or at least better treatment than in states.
Eg, I've been to three dentists in the states since I turned 18, and every single one recommended between 1 and 7 unnecessary surgeries; between fillings, crowns, and something to do with gums.
I then go to the dentist in mexico, where they clean my teeth and send me on my way.
I then go to the retired family friend dentist who did my pre-18 care, show him my xrays, and he says "These are all fucking fine, and this one is a maybe. Use floridated toothpaste".
That's an unusual run of bad luck in American dentists, I think. Sorry you had to go through that.
And to your bigger point, yes absolutely. In any low-income country, there's going to be some decent low-cost health care available to those who "speak the language", literally and figuratively. In the case of Mexico, that's going to include Mexican-Americans of varying legal status, in need of cheap health care and able to conveniently cross the border. If you can tap into that, great.
If you see a clinic that specifically caters to English-speaking gringos, that's when it gets harder to sort out the snake-oil salesmen.
Oddly, dental treatment is a lot more expensive in Ireland than medical treatment, due to many dentists simply refusing to take medical card patients. So the private practices charge private rates, and they do seem to recommend very expensive surgeries (a co-worker a few years back was trying to get a dentist to treat her for less than the €2,000 one quoted her for a procedure).
I think matters are getting more expensive, as it is becoming the custom in Ireland to have more work done on teeth and at younger ages (cue "in my day, it was maybe braces if you were a kid, fillings, and having your teeth extracted and replaced by dentures when older"); I was refused braces as a kid by a public health dentist - on the schools programme - because he claimed my teeth were fine even though I could see they were growing in slightly crooked. Luckily, they were only slightly crooked and haven't really affected me, but they are my two front teeth. Later on, we figured out the rationale was that this would be an expensive procedure and he wanted us to pay via his private practice if we really wanted it done.
I don’t know if it is ‘a run of bad luck’ as much as an unfortunately common experience; a lot of dentistry is not based on gathered evidence but rather ‘industry best practices,’ i.e. tradition and the new hotness, but also what bills for a lot. I don’t know that being outside the U.S. would improve this situation, but not knowing the ground would make it easy to get exactly this sort of nonsense diagnosis from many U.S. clinics.
Here's a price comparison list from a Hungarian clinic, to entice Irish patients that it's cheaper to fly out to Budapest, stay overnight, and have your teeth done than have them done at home:
https://kreativdentalclinic.eu/en/dental-prices/price-comparison
Nobel Branemark Implant
Kreativ Clinic price: €800.00
Irish price: €2300.00
Savings: €1500.00
It never even occurred to me that a clinic in the genre of Restaurant With English and Pictures On the Menu would even exist, which is A+ level blindness to other's experiences.
Here's a fun puzzle I found on the internet, by a guy called Andrew Critch, at http://www.acritch.com/media/math/Self-assigned_student_numbers.pdf.
His puzzle is:
"Consider an isolated group of n students. They wish to assign themselves
unique student numbers from 1 to n (no repetitions!) in such a way that each
student will know his own student number, but each student should have no
information about any other student’s number. Devise a procedure for the
students to achieve their goal with 100% probability.
Some clarifications:
1 “isolated” means the students have no external aids of any kind (e.g.
no pencils or paper or hats); the only actions available to them are
talking to each other publicly or privately in groups of their choosing.
2 The students cannot conceal their real identities in any way. So if X
talks to Y , then Y recognizes X and Y recognizes X (for example, by
tone of voice, scent, etc.).
3 “no information” even excludes probabilistic information: student X
should have no estimates whatsoever about student Y ’s number except
that it is a number from 1 to n that is not his own.
4 You can assume that the students all want to achieve this goal, and
that they have “idealized minds” like in most thought experiments."
My extension is: why would this puzzle set a cryptographer's teeth on edge? What would they want the puzzle to demand instead? How would you solve that version, and how would you find a solution to this that's a long way from solving it?
Not possible, unless you have a really idiosyncratic definition of "no information." I know that my number is k, therefore I know that all other students' numbers are not k.
It’s specified that you shouldn’t have any information about other numbers outside that.
I did that one last open thread lol https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-188/comments#comment-2790749
did you see it in Scott aaronson’s blog!
Of course :-)
My solution:
Yrg'f ahzore gur fghqragf, naq pnyy gjb bs gurz Nyvpr naq Obo
:- Nyvpr naq Obo rnpu cvpx n crezhgngvba ba a bowrpgf, havsbezyl ng enaqbz sebz nzbat nyy crezhgngvba, juvpu jr jvyy pnyy f_n naq f_o.
:- Rnpu bgure crefba cvpxf n enaqbz inyhr zbq a, juvpu jr jvyy pnyy p_v
:- Nyvpr gnyxf gb rnpu crefba va ghea, rkprcg Obo. Fur gryyf gurz f_n(v) naq gurl gryy ure p_v
:- Obo gnyxf gb rnpu crefba va ghea, rkprcg Nyvpr. Ur gryyf gurz gur jubyr bs f_o, naq gurl gryy uvz f_o(f_n(v))+p_v
:- Nyvpr gnyxf gb Obo. Fur gryyf uvz f_n(uvf ahzore), naq ur gryyf ure Fhz_v f_o(f_n(v))+p_v, jurer gur fhz ehaf bire nyy ahzoref ohg uref.
:- Nyvpr fhzf gur p_v, hfrf guvf gb pbzchgr Fhz_v f_o(f_n(v)), naq fhogenpgf gung sebz Fhz_v v gb trg f_o(f_n(ure ahzore)).
Va gbgny jr'ir hfrq 2a-3 pbairefngvbaf.
Gur guvat nobhg guvf chmmyr gung frgf zl fcvqre frafr gvatyvat vf gung grpuavpnyyl gurer'f abguvat gb fnl gung gur fghqragf nera'g nyybjrq gb yrnx vasbezngvba nobhg gur /wbva/ qvfgevohgvba bs gurve ahzoref gb bar nabgure. Sbe rknzcyr, va gur cebgbpby nobir jr pbhyq fcrpvsl gung vafgrnq bs n trarevp crezhgngvba, Obo cvpxf n crezhgngvba bs sbez k-> k+o zbq a sbe fbzr vagrtre o. Guvf jbhyq fgvyy fbyir gur chmmyr, ohg vs Nyvpr pna yrnea bar bgure crefba'f ahzore fur jvyy xabj nyy gur ahzoref, juvpu srryf yvxr n synj.
What's a good way to buy a fairly but not exceedingly fancy engagement ring?
My girlfriend went ring shopping and found a ring she really likes for about $13k, which is maybe 25% more than I'd like to spend. How possible is it to bargain down a speciality store for a riing? I've also found comparable-ish rings - same specs on the diamond to within ~0.1 carat, same setting, same band - on bluenile.com for ~9K, but of course that's a website and I'm hesitant to buy something without seeing it in person.
I live in NYC, so if anyone has experience navigating the Diamond District, that would be very helpful!
(Not interested in "don't buy a ring!" arguments, but I could MAYBE be persuaded to look into lab diamonds)
Seriously, no one’s mentioned lab-grown gemstones yet? They’re significantly cheaper than the “dug out of the ground” sort and just as good.
Are you sure? Last time I checked that was not the case. And why would it be? It's basically impossible to tell them apart (lab-grown diamonds are "too perfect") so how could there be a significant cost discount?
The cost discount is because most gemstones are cheaper to make en-masse in a manufacturing plant than to find naturally. White diamonds are a notable exception to this because diamond isn't the stable allotrope at atmospheric pressure and because nitrogen gas from air colours diamond; corundum (sapphire/ruby) is very cheap even at gem-quality, to the point that it's a viable replacement for glass if material strength and/or infrared transparency are needed (and without the gem-quality requirement, well, it's the most common grit on sandpaper).
How the price differential is maintained against arbitrage - a combination of provenance tracking (i.e. "I refuse to consider this a natural gemstone unless you can prove to me which mine it came from" - this is what the Kimberley Process does) and minor anomalies (things like lab-grown diamonds having their nitrogen substitutions in pairs because they originate from atmospheric N2 which isn't available underground, Verneuil rubies/sapphires having spiral strain because of the rotation of the crystal during the setting process, or general entropy indicating quicker cooling than occurs beneath the Earth).
Why people are still willing to buy natural gems (including diamonds) despite the price - gemstones are a luxury good generally bought as a form of wealth display, and natural gems verifiably cost more so they display wealth better than artificial ones.
I bought a moissanite engagement ring in 2010 and it was much cheaper than an equivalent diamond ring would have been, although that's probably not exactly what you mean by "lab-grown diamond".
From a quick search it sounds like prices for lab-grown diamonds have also dropped a lot in the last 3-4 years, possibly in part because De Beers saw the writing on the wall and built a massive production facility for them, per news reports.
> Not interested in "don't buy a ring!" arguments
Sorry people couldn't read that far.
Bluenile is reputable, not sure about their return policy. These days they can also tell you a lot about the fire of the stone without you looking at it- e.g. ideal cut, etc.
Just in case it's not something you've already considered, look into moissanite for the stone(s).
If I ever need a really fancy ring I'll probably get one from https://patrickadairdesigns.com or similar. They are a bit unusual, but absolutely gorgeous!
I was China-based at the time of my engagement, and I managed to get an engagement ring for about 1200 USD or so, but this was through a contact directly at a ring factory in China. I would aim to find someone who I know, or a friend of a friend that works in the industry and see how low I can get it - but this advice really depends on your social network and circumstances. Alternatively, I don't know if you travel to cheaper countries or states, but it might be worth it - a trip to South Africa combined with how much the same ring would be there could pay for itself plus make memories! It needn't be SA though, even cheaper part of States should be cheaper, most of the price of the ring is inflated anyway, and poorer states will have cheaper rings if you know where to look.
With that said - I got a ring that beautifully tells the story of who she is to me - something which is precious to her, and the price tag matters much less. She was worried that it was too expensive and was paranoid about losing it, so I eventually told her the price tag, much to her relief. If you have a good and healthy dynamic (as other posters have noted - if she insists on a preposterous display of wealth, that's a red flag) then I would recommend you to go looking for a ring that tells your story. Does it have intertwined red and yellow gold - maybe that can be meaningful to you? Mine has three kinds of gold (white, red, yellow) all coming together into the diamond, which to me symbolized three of her virtues that make her who she is (the diamond) and I honestly can't imagine that after a story like that on a romantic proposal, anyone would care about the price tag or carat of the ring!
Consider that she might also expect expensive gifts moving forward, and how you will deal with that.
See also: https://www.gwern.net/docs/philosophy/2011-yvain-deadchild.html
This argument is not one of gwern’s best. He acknowledges that he’s willing to ‘kill a child’ to fly home over break, but thinks somehow that ‘killing a child’ would make Focus on the Family and their supporters reconsider their efforts… to… stop people from killing children?
He does get that in this context, he’s more callous and insincere than they are, right? They genuinely believe they are already spending money on preventing children from dying. Meanwhile, he’s sitting outside the arena spending money on frivolities.
The core argument is not about Focus on the Family, it is about recognizing how opportunity cost would drive people to be less frivolous with their money, Focus on the Family might be a bad supporting example for that argument, but I am not sure if that is sufficient to condemn the argument more generally.
Also I am not sure they are the worst supporting example, Focus on the Family is brought up because if they spent their money actually saving lives (say on African charities) instead of paying for advertisements to try and influence the American people they would save a large number of children's lives, where as the gains from their advertisements are more nebulous and almost certainly significantly smaller in terms of total children saved.
Obviously there are other explanation for their preferences, and the, 'this pro-life group is not maximally(utilitarianly) pro-life, lets point and laugh at the Christian hypocrites' style commentary has reached super saturation levels on the modern internet, which makes that particular example seem a bit more like a petty swipe than the others.
Finally, the only claim Scott makes towards being more sincere/less callous is that he is aware of the opportunity cost and they are not, it is not clear that Scott was wrong on that point either. Nothing here precludes that a person could be totally unaware of the concept of opportunity cost while still being a much more charitable/nicer/better person than Scott, it is just saying that making those costs more obvious might drive some people to be better.
I do think this is a bad argument(if it is sincere, but the whole thing feels tongue in cheek to me) though, just on the general grounds that trying to morally burden people like this is probably not particularly effective and I don't think guilting people into charity would work that well.
Apparently the title is literally, "A Modest Proposal - a tongue in check suggestion for a new unit of currency", which I probably caught out of the corner of my eye.
That’s my point. You cannot on the one hand argue that if people were aware of opportunity cost they would be shamed into spending less money on ‘frivolous’ things, while at the same time implicitly acknowledging that you, aware all this time of the opportunity cost, still spend money on things that are even by your own standards relatively frivolous.
Even more so, you can’t call things ‘frivolous’ simply because they don’t make sense to your values. To a Christian, donations to his church are turning, through ministry, very temporary wealth into potentially eternal salvation of people otherwise damned. You can’t get more effectively altruistic if you try—nothing else matters if that worldview is true.
This example does all the work of undermining the point; recognition of opportunity cost is not the problem and has never been the problem: the problem is that the average EA’s priorities do not align with that of the average person.
You might as well try to shame me for not spending enough money on my wife’s engagement ring. What if we denominated all currency in erings? $10k is an ering. What kind of idiot would I be spending 20 erings on a house when instead 20 women could have the erings of their dreams?
I don't really agree with the first paragraph. The idea that there might be degrees of frivolity seems trivially true and sufficient to save the argument. Imagine a counterfactual Scott who would be even more 'wasteful' relative to his own standards if he was ignorant of opportunity cost.
Christians optimizing for different things doesn't mean they have done so with a full (or any) understanding of opportunity cost and have made the correct choice with that understanding given their differing terminal goals. It is still totally possible that if they went from not understanding, to understanding opportunity cost, they would make different, both from their previous selves, and from Scott, choices. They might suddenly realize that, by their own standards, their previous spending was frivolous.
This doesn't seem like that much of a stretch honestly. I highly doubt that most Christian churches are even halfway close to optimized for saving souls, and could do wildly better with a more rational allocation of their funds.
You have failed to grasp the thrust of the joke. The joke is that if you realized your expenditures, which you use on things like Starbucks lattes and luxury doghouses, could have been used to save children.
This argument is *completely ineffective* on people who are already spending that money on saving children—or souls.
You can move the goalposts to the idea that maybe Christian efforts to save children or souls aren’t as effective as some hypothetical super-efficient evangelism, but that has nothing to do with the argument I’m criticizing, which is that people who are currently spending money on altruism are somehow unaware that they could be spending money on altruism.
The conversation we’re having is the facial problem with poor EA outreach in general: the naive idea that because people behave differently, that must mean that they are ignorant of basic concepts that clearly already motivate their existing behavior. If you want to change a philanthropist’s spending behavior, don’t just gesture vaguely at the definition of opportunity cost, assert without evidence that “this could do wildly better if it was more rational,” and think he’s magically going to change. Get him an efficient business plan and convince him that your yields are better with numbers. If you have no evidence, you don’t have a pitch, you just have condescension.
Excuse me, not one of *Scott’s* best.
Convince her that sapphires are way better than diamonds (cause they are). Sapphires are way cheaper, they historically have been used for engagements until the modern diamond industry changed that, they are more chemically stable (I think), they come in pretty colors instead of boring white, and they don't have a bloody controversial industry behind them, the way that diamonds do in Africa.
Does she mostly like the setting or the diamonds?
You can get secondhand diamonds very cheaply (especially if you buy them upstate: avoid the diamond district!) and then have a jeweler fit them to a setting. A pair of recently engaged friends of mine did just that and saved a fair amount of money.
That said, the whole point of the engagement ring ritual is to demonstrate your commitment and provider bonifides by symbolically burning a quarter of your annual income. It's not supposed to be cost-effective: you may be better off using your savings with this method to get a larger used stone rather than save money on a smaller new stone of the same price.
Generally, secondhand diamonds are priced higher in pawn shops than loose new diamonds are priced online, so you would have to haggle to get a good deal.
Just get the one your girlfriend likes. There is no pragmatic difference between symbolically spending 9k and symbolically spending 13k. The ring is not worth either amount, and if you can afford 9k you can afford 13k; if you cannot afford 13k, you shouldn’t be spending 9k.
My wife’s engagement ring was a quartz. Our bands are tungsten.
A minor caution about ring band materials: if you're injured in such a way that your ring needs to be cut off to save your finger, that can be done much faster and more safely if your ring is a relatively soft material like gold or silver. Tungsten and titanium rings are extremely hard to cut through: it can be done, but it takes a lot longer (15+ minutes of grinding or sawing instead of a quick snip) and is very hard to do without further injuring your hand.
I believe tungsten is very inelastic and can be broken with a pair of pliers?
I worked briefly in a department store jewelry department. They has a hand crank circular saw - it looked something like a manual can opener - to cut through a ring if someone came in with an unbearably swollen ring finger. I was told that it usually took two cuts to free the finger. Fortunately I never had to use it.
Thank you for the warning, but we’re aware—we got them a half size up (for that and other reasons) and we just remove them when working with our hands or in a situation where they could be otherwise lost or snagged. Which is wise practice anyway since a ring on your hand is a huge safety liability unless it’s terrifically weak, nonconductive, and easy to break with slight pressure.
Indeed. I've observed that people who work with heavy lifting, heavy machinery, or electricity, or who are seriously into hobbies with similar risks (weightlifting, rock climbing, etc) often wear their rings on neck chains, Frodo-style, for exactly this reason.
I've also seen silicone placeholder rings that are relatively cheap to replace, nonconductive, and are designed to snap off if snagged.
Yes, my electrician wears one of those—considered it myself because I work with my hands a good bit some days, but I couldn’t get over how ugly silicone is, and I’m used to taking it on and off now.
Mine was a tsavorite. But then, my wife is a geologist.
Our wedding cost 1/4 your desired ring budget, and that includes *our* ring budget.
If we're getting competitive, our wedding cost less than a tenth of the OP's desired ring budget, and that includes our ring budget and a goodly portion of our honeymoon..
Out budget was 500 dollars. Wedding on a Saturday at a local community center and my wife and I went back to work on Monday. Don’t recommend this but after 39 years we still get a good laugh about how our adventure began.
Nice! That’s an achievement! How many guests, though? We had I think 61 or 64.
I will admit to spending quite a bit on the honeymoon. Tickets to Maui are expensive where I am. But I managed to get a room 20 feet from the waves for a song, and it was all worth it.
Yes - about 60 guests for our reception too. All packed into our garden with everybody keeping their fingers crossed that it wouldn't rain (it didn't, but would have probably been fun if it had)
Maui would have been beyond our budget - but of course I'm envious! We had 5 days in Italy - Naples and Florence. Great memories.
Well, you have me beat on price efficiency then! We also were praying for no rain, got married on a long lawn in front of a nearby lake and while it was sunshine on us, storms passed on our north and south sides and about an hour after the reception ended it poured buckets on everything for the next 12 hours, so we were blessed.
I’m amazed you were able to get Italy at such a price, too. We actually didn’t do Maui until 2 years after the wedding, no vacations till then because we spent our finances on a 1928 fixer-upper which now we’ve got rented out. Like you said, great memories! when this thread brought it to mind my wife and I must have laughed about all this last night for an hour before bed.
I purchased my ring for my wife from JamesAllen, which is an online ring shop. It was in the price ring you are talking about and we were very happy with it.
if you want to do an ostentatious and unnecessary display of wealth, I can sell you a one of a kind exclusive ring NFT that has no environmental harm or slavery funding, at any price you want!
Hey, why would I need to tell you not to buy the ring. If you're rational you can decide for yourself
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480
In re the inverse correlation between what's spent and marriage duration: I have an untested theory that elaborate/expensive wedding preparations lead to a sunk cost fallacy where people are reluctant to back out of a marriage they're dubious about.
The more money you spend on wedding, the less you have left. Financial problems cause marital problems.
Expensive wedding is a sign of narcissism. Narcissists are bad partners.
...but of course, I could just as easily argue in the opposite direction...
Poor people spend less on weddings. Financial problems cause marital problems.
Expensive wedding is a sign of being traditional. Traditional people are less likely to divorce.
As you say, guesswork.
"Expensive wedding is a sign of narcissism. Narcissists are bad partners."
The narcissists might be parents. Narcissistic in-laws might also be a risk factor.
Why bother? If you're comfortable spending $10,000 and you can extend to give her her heart's desire for a mere extra $3,000, I wouldn't hesitate. It's not a real estate deal, it's a token of irrational exuberance. So be irrationally exuberant.* Maybe it will be a story you tell each other for the next 65 years until the great-grandchildren start rolling their eyes and drifting off to the kitchen as soon as one of you starts up "Remember when...?" That would be amazingly cheap at $3,000.
------------------
* I mean, up to a point. I'm taking you at your word here that $10,000 for a ring is not a problem. Or to put it another way, if $13,000 seems like it's dangerously mortgaging your practical future, then probably $10,000 is also, and you should just write her a heartfelt letter on nice paper with a real pen in your own handwriting.
would you mind explaining to me why you are willing to spend 10K on a ring? I’m not criticizing your choices, it’s just that my parents exchanged pinecones for their engagement (which I don’t necessarily endorse), so spending that much on a ring is pretty foreign to me, so I’m curious about your reasoning
How do I figure out which streets are flooded?
My city floods frequently these days, and I sometimes find myself in a situation where I need to figure out a route across town which avoids flooded streets. As far as can tell, Google Maps does not help. The local news only helps in so far as telling me some major areas of town to avoid, but not specifically with individual streets. For instance, if I want to get to the airport, there may be a route there, but it often involves a lot of trial and error: heading down a road and then discovering it's underwater at some point, turning around, trying a different path, etc.
I basically rely on personal experience and memory to chooses my route, which is probably not the optimal solution.
Is there a way to use technology to solve this problem? Obviously, a crowd-sourcing solution could work, but does such a crowd sourcing solution currently exist?
Is there a clever way to infer which streets are flooded using Google Maps?
You could get a GPS with topo maps, or just the topo maps, and that will tell you where the water has to be, and how to stay at an altitude that is consistently above it (once you know where it is).
Or download the 1m resolution topographic maps that the goverment made for flood risk analysis and get distracted by that python script that turns it into a minecraft world instead of leaving the house
In cities, I think drainage is a more important factor than altitude.
Pretty confident that over an area of a few square km, a connected sheet of water will have no differences in altitude greater than tens of cm.
Over a steady-state, sure, but city-scapes are chaotic and will have different drainage rates. I wouldn't be surprised that one area is flooded to 450' while another is flooded to 500' less than a km away.
Jesus, I would. A 50' head is enormous. Tsunamis are normally no more than half that high, and I'm sure you've seen the videos of tsunamis going through towns. Not much stops that water, and the rate at which it floods even open areas is faster than people running for their lives can escape.
Cities aren't flat environments though. You're better thinking in terms of multiple linked basins, so flooding can be at very different levels. We're not talking a single sheet of water so much as where water has pooled for some reason.
Do you know what the resolution of such a topo map tends to be? Because a street only has to flood for a horizontal distance of about 3 feet to be impassable. That tends to be the issue that makes navigating after a flood-inducing storm a mouse in maze problem. Also, the waterfall from an individual storm itself isn't consistent over a city.
An app that could combine recent waterfall data with a resolution of ~5 square miles with a topo map with a resolution ~16 square feet would be pretty useful, particularly if one could incorporate the waterfall data in a weighted manner over recent weeks to account for how absorptive the ground is. That still doesn't give one data about how quickly a given location drains, however, which is a function of the local storm drainage system, the ratio of concrete to dirt in the location, and the general topology of the region (because a street may flood more easily due to being at a local minimum).
Another approach could be using a network of phone/car GPSs to determine where cars are Uturn-ing frequently, because that would likely indicate high water, Or streets that have had absolutely zero traffic pass through them for several hours. Seems like Google Traffic could potentially determine that.
Or Uber could crowd-source flooded streets over their fleet of drivers across a city. Maybe they do? Currently, I wouldn't trust an Uber during a flood since I suspect they have no data about street flooding.
You can get down to 250mm with lidar
I'd be somewhat surprised if you need that kind of vertical resolution, unless you just live in a part-time swamp or something, and every little hillock and dip matters. Generally, a topo map (a typical resolutin on a printed map is 100' contours, but you can do much better with a GPS, although you'd have to maybe do the surveying painfully yourself) will tell you the general shape of the land, where the little hills and valleys are, and I expect there is some but not total correlation with where the roads and developments run.
My suggestion is that the entire gestalt of grasping that information will hopefully give you a 2D sense, or picture, of where the low-lying areas and channels are, and therefore where you are most likely to see water when the water comes. It's an old-fashioned way of approaching the problem, the kind of thing we did in the old says on a hike, when all we had to get from A to B in the mountains was a topo map and compass -- it was helpful, when you could get a view, to "orient" yourself to the local landscape, get a feel for where the local rises and valleys ran, the shape of things, in order to have a better feeling for where you were when you couldn't spot landmarks, for where you might find water, where it might be easier or harder going. The ability still lies within the human brain, even in these days of there's an app for that.
I'm curious about this problem on a practical level, but also find it an interesting puzzle on a theoretical level. If Google or Uber wanted to solve the problem and give you the information on a map app, what would they do?
There’s an interesting program to get real-time data on flooded streets identified by users, and to make predictions about other possible flooded area. It’s called Pin2flood.
https://www.keranews.org/texas-news/2021-09-15/to-save-lives-researchers-are-creating-an-online-library-of-potential-flood-maps
Thanks. It's a good idea. I'm curious if it's possible to figure out flooding on specific streets during a specific flood in real-time, however.
I assume you have tried the very popular navigation app Waze, allows users to report road problems. It will typically at least detect the traffic slowdown caused by flooding and send you a different way, but also sometimes will also show direct flood warnings.
Good idea. However, I am only finding real-time traffic cameras on highways. My problem usually comes down to where to go once I'm off or before I reach the highway.
I see that Google Traffic uses crowdsourced GPS cellphone data. Seems like they could come up with an algorithm for determining which streets are likely to be flooded. (Absolutely zero traffic has gone down this normally well-trafficked block seems like a good indicator, particularly if traffic speed has ground to a halt nearby.) Perhaps using Google Directions would steer you away from a flooded street if only because there's likely to be a traffic jam on route to it?
Update your cryonics and/or Russia related priors accordingly: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cryogenics-tycoon-danila-medvedev-accuses-ex-wife-of-stealing-frozen-bodies-g6mmbl3h3 (please excuse the source, but it's the best coverage I saw)
Considering the ivermectin/gunshot wounds mess, how much trust should I put in this?
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/13/1036593269/coronavirus-alabama-43-icus-at-capacity-ray-demonia
The "43 ICUs" number seems basically impossible to check (and they don't claim to have checked it - probably it doesn't belong in the title of the article, even if it is postfixed with "Family Says"), but they link to the John Hopkins data for Alabama, which does show ICU occupancy in Alabama at 101% currently (102% last week), about half of which is listed as COVID-19, as the article says.
The citations of JHU and “ head of the Alabama Department of Public Health” support directly the claim that hospitals are near capacity, and that ICUs are at capacity.
I believe that they checked at least a bit “ A Cullman Regional Medical Center spokesperson, who declined to give specifics of Ray DeMonia's case, citing privacy concerns, confirmed to NPR that he was transferred from the hospital but said the reason was that he required "a higher level of specialized care not available" there.” and he was “transferred to Mississippi” and that he did get care “ he died on Sept. 1, some 200 miles away in an intensive care unit in Meridian, Miss.”
I believe the article, but the title implies he didn’t get care lol, I think interstate transfers are better
Thanks. It was partly that 43 seemed like a very precise number.
The rolling stone article and its kin didn’t provide any of this level of confirmation, the cullman regional medical center appears to confirm this specifically happened
I don't think many ACX readers will know who Garrison Keillor is unless the were munching granola and listening to NPR in the 70's and 80's but he publishes on Substack and had an interesting exchange with a reader after he wrote that he is ready to leave northern liberalism for some place like Texas where you are allowed to say what is on your mind.
Reader Question:
"Garrison, you said in a recent column that you’d like to move to Texas so you could express yourself fully in a way you can’t living in the North among progressive liberals. Then you neglected to say what sort of speech is forbidden up North? Come on, man. Be brave.
Lola
St. Paul"
Keillor response:
"You know very well what I meant, the righteous bullying that is now accepted in progressive circles even by people who resent it as much as I do. I went to a Balanchine ballet once at the University, music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and before the performance, the woman who asked us to turn off our cellphones also asked us to remember the Dakota people who lived on this land in the early 19th century. I don’t mind shutting up but this struck me as the sort of sanctimonious bullying that is going around these days. Why not a moment of silence in honor of Tchaikovsky who struggled with being gay in Russia or in honor of the difficulty of being a dancer?
I know people who are working their tails off on behalf of Native reservations with no casinos or oil wells where people are sunk in poverty and opiate addiction. God bless them. The people who campaign to affix a Dakota name to a lake named for a slave-owning racist (Calhoun) are getting off cheap. The woman honoring the Dakota with a moment of silence is getting off dirt cheap.
Sanctimonious bullies are riding high in blue states and have no traction whatever in red states. Every college professor in America knows that one complaint by an anonymous accuser can end a career, no hearing necessary. Read Anne Applebaum’s essay in the October Atlantic. A man wouldn’t have dared write that piece but thank goodness she did.
GK"
Anne Applebaum's essay is definitely spending one of your 3 visits to "The Atlantic" on.
> what sort of speech is forbidden up North?
"You know very well what I meant" = I no nothing about you, but I can make assumptions like nobody's business
"the woman who asked us to turn off our cellphones also asked us to remember the Dakota people who lived on this land in the early 19th century" = It's not what's forbidden, it's what those northerners are allowed to say
"Why not a moment of silence in honor of Tchaikovsky who struggled with being gay in Russia or in honor of the difficulty of being a dancer?" This is just weird. Does he expect Texans to wax lyrical about being gay in Russia?
Keillor never gives a specific example himself. Yeah it is a bit weird. I mentioned in another reply that GK is recovering from a seizure and his Substack articles have been pretty rambling since then. I also mentioned his pique might stem feeling he was unfairly dismissed by MPR.
The actual case against cancel culture is made by Anne Applebaum in her Atlantic article.
No, I wouldn't expect Tchaikosky's sexual orientation to be embraced in Texas either. GK was just venting with that remark.
Funny thing is, I have long thought that cancel culture is horrible, but if anyone's interested I think this is the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818
The greatest thing about "cancel culture" is that now we have a NAME for the thing where a crazy Twitter mob demands people be fired over minor offenses, which makes it easy to target our ire on cancel culture itself...
Too late to tell you to set your DVR David, but I’m watching last night’s Bill Mahr. He interviews Anne Applebaum as his opening guest. Maybe you have On Demand or YouTube.
David, that's the article that Keillor was referring to. It's an eye opener for sure.
In the back of my mind I thought of the term as part of a right wing meme. After reading the Atlantic article I realized it was a useful bit of shorthand for a screwed up ‘liberal’ phenomenon.
Seeing Garrison Keiller is continuing the story of Guy Noir is the best news I've had all day. ♥
It's nice to hear that Garrison Keillor is still out there. He was a favorite of my parents when I grew up. I started paying attention to him despite my parents, and found him to be a profoundly talented author and poet. I was saddened when his business relationship with Minnesota Public Radio was terminated due to allegations of sexual misconduct. I don't know what he was accused of or whether he was guilty or innocent.
Keillor can himself be sanctimonious, peevish, occasionally juvenile, and sometimes self righteous. But but he is usually interesting, and often brilliant. And I'm glad he is still working.
He still does his daily Writers Almanac. I set up my Echo to play as my alarm every morning.
My wife get's that one and forwards the ones that especially tickle her. I've got to subscribe to that too.
Does he voice the Echo version?
Yes it's his voice. It's actually a podcast.
I'm not sure what to make of the sexual misconduct allegations either. I suspect it may be a case of applying new standards to old behavior.
I am also afraid GK's cognition may be slipping. He was recently hospitalized for the effects of a seizure and his Substack posts meander a lot more than usual. His original complaint about liberal bullying lacked any details at all, inspiring "Lola's" request to elaborate.
The temper tantrum quality of his response may have something to do with him feeling misjudged in his dismissal from MPR but I think he makes some valid points all the same.
The Anne Applebaum Atlantic essay he references is a long form treatment of what we are now calling cancel culture. It really is worth using one of your 3 un-paywalled visits per month to the Atlantic.
It gives many credible instance of a form of illiberal liberalism I hadn't really been read in on. Apparently I've been somewhat out of the loop on this. The bat guano craziness of the Right during the Trump era has distracted me from the bat guano craziness of the Left.
What do you mean by "achingly, obnoxiously woke"?
Like, the programing or the presenters or what?
As in "free speech is obviously pro-racism and should be banned", i assume. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/npr-trashes-free-speech-a-brief-response
I can confirm the anecdote. I listened to them a good bit in the past and both the programing and the presenters (who had a very clear bias towards one side of the argument) usually were very generically woke.
That is a phenomenally uncharitable interpretation, and also a weird prescription to remedy it.
I mean, after every Planet Money or Freakonomics, should they give an equal time slot to a Marxist?
Even beyond that, I seem to recall hearing lots of free speech content on NPR. By your logic, shouldn't this guy going on and giving the opposite case be a good thing?
I didn't think i gave a remedy? Just described what i noticed. And if you think this is uncharitable, how would you describe it? I can't find any redeeming arguments given in that section, and the arguments that they did give were so flimsy I'm pretty sure a child could offer knockdown rebuttals against them.
That said, i disagree with your analogy because Planet Money or Freakonomics isn't describing a recommended course of action or advocating changes to the fundamental rights of citizens. If they were saying stuff like "the fed should raise interest" or "the government should reduce tariffs" then there might be room to debate. But I'm pretty sure they don't talk about any of that, they just say "you should invest in Apple" or "401ks are down" (i have not listened to them much, though)
I can't recall hearing any full sections from NPR about the pros of free speech, so maybe i just missed them. But i think even if they did, presenting an argument against it in isolation without any pushback or counter arguments is just blindingly stupid. It's about as reasonable a position as me commenting one day "i think innocent until proven guilty is a bad position because it lets criminals get away. look at all the criminals we've got! We should get rid of it to solve this problem." It doesn't matter if the next day i post the opposite, offering this single statement in isolation with no further qualification is idiotic.
Also vaccine mandates for hospital nurses who are going to be working in close proximity with patients who are in critical condition and many of whom are old seem entirely reasonable and normal, both for Covid and for other diseases (not that you said otherwise!)
Also probably not looming. My institution mandated vaccination some months back, I assume that to be common.
It's at least somewhat looming: my institution is partnered with a hospital which issued a vaccine mandate a few months ago but the official deadline isn't for another few days.
I overheard a bunch of HVAC guys and electricians grousing about it the other day: I knew we were definitely already going to lose hospital staff, but judging by the mood it seems like it might include at least some of our operating engineers, custodians, security guards, and pretty much every other blue collar position. A lot of hospitals will be shorthanded generally, especially in the current labor market.
Fair. I wonder to what extent we were out front. Can anybody else working at a large healthcare concern weigh in?
I think staffing is generally the main bottleneck for hospital patients. The actual cost of a bed and treatment equipment and physical space are, I think, much easier to provide than trained staff. Also see the high price fetched by traveling nurses nowadays
I tried quite a few antidepressants (and other pharmaceutical mood treatments) in the past before giving up on them. Recently, things have gotten to the point where I'm reconsidering getting treatment, particularly after coming across Dr. Ken Gillman's content online about how underrated MAOIs have become (to illustrate, apparently many people who fail ECT respond very well to MAOI antidepressants).
Needless to say, I'm interested in giving one of these meds a try. However, none of them are on the market where I live (a country in E. Europe), and I'm putting this out there hoping someone might know how I could get a prescription for one (and the medication itself), ideally without having to travel to another country.
I should mention I've already had a trial of Moclobemide (prescribed abroad, way before Covid), but AFAIK, that's considered a very weak antidepressant, likely owing to it not being an irreversible MAOI, like Nardil or Parnate.
Thank you if you read this and any feedback would be highly appreciated.
I've tried to use my Google-fu to see if my South-East Europe area could be of help. Unfortunately, everyone here has to order from UK or such. Still, a user of a forum (depression.org but in local language basically) says that he's been getting MAOI no problem in Zagreb by having his doctor write a prescription in English, and then he could show it to the UK online pharmacy that would ship it, and he'd pay on arrival to the postman. I don't know if that is an option for you, or you could ask the Zagreb pharmacy (Dolac was the name he mentioned although I do not know them due to not being from Croatia) - hope this helps!
I'll check out the online ordering option, hopefully finding a prescribing doctor won't be difficult. Thank you for taking the time!
Continuing the [fracking vs. Coal discussion](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-188/comments#comment-2821624)
> Methane has 28x the warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year time horizon (https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html) but I think it's like 80x over a 30-year horizon or something like that. A noteworthy result of this is that if our CH4 output is stable, then CH4 levels won't increase in the long run. By contrast, CO2 accumulates, so in the long run the CO2:CH4 ratio should continue increasing. If we look at the 100-year time horizon, then, natural gas producers would have to leak about 3.7% of all their CH4 in order to produce the same amount of global warming via leaking as they produce via burning (remember, coal produces about 2x the CO2, so a 3.7% leak would put it on par with coal in terms of greenhouse emissions).
Not quite following here. If you produce 0.5 times as much CH4 but it's 80 times as harmful, it seems like you would have to leak 1/(0.5*80)=1/40 = 2.5% of your CH4 to have the same warming. How do you arrive at 3.7%?
Also, any figures on how much is leaked in practice?
Because I am using the 100-year conversion factor, not the 30.
A Dutch court ruled that Uber is an employer, rather than a mediator, because they have a lot of control over how the drivers do their work. The consequence is that they have to provide fixed contracts, pay for pensions, etc, although another 'platform company' lost a similar case and didn't change anything; with new cases being in the courts, of people demanding a fixed contract.
It is still possible for Uber to appeal.
> because they have a lot of control over how the drivers do their work
That is quite underestimating the situation, Uber has nearly complete control.
My understanding is that drivers had nearly complete control over their own hours, and areas to work.
> and areas to work
Is Uber nowadays showing full route to a driver and allowing driver to reject it without penalty?
Or is it still requiring to accept delivery without showing target or price? And applying penalties for skipping routes?
Are they allowed to deviate from the assigned route? Or do they just suggest the fastest way, and leave it up to the driver to decide if they want to spend more time to earn the same money?
I don't think that's a prerequisite to be an employer - regular taxi companies don't designate a precise route for their employees either.
Regular taxis don't have the fare fixed prior to the ride either.
One of the big advantages of a car service is that fare is agreed upon upfront. It's one of the things that distinguishes a car service from a taxi, too.
I remember many years ago that Uber drivers would cancel routes to the airport, and Uber cracked down on that. So Uber drivers would call the me (the rider) to tell me to cancel the route because reasons, and Uber cracked down on *that*.
Why did they not want to drive to the airport?
U.S. parents: how did you choose the preschool / kindergarten / elementary school your child attended? What value(s) informed your decision?
tl;dr: if you're investing this much time into figuring out what school to send your kid to, it likely doesn't matter much what you decide, so go with what feels right and is easy, and adjust as necessary.
We send our kids to the local public school. We're city dwellers in St. Louis, whose system is evaporating into competing charters, and, well, we don't like that. We don't like that the charter secret sauce seems to be nearly 100% picking cohorts, and we don't like that much of the rest is union busting and being new enough that they don't have back maintenance costs. We like that we can walk our kids to school, and that our school looks, more or less, like our neighborhood. (The school is less white than the neighborhood, because most white folks here send their kids to charters, magnets, or move when they start school.)
I was very nervous about this when my oldest started there, because in my social class there's fairly heavy social stigma to sending your kids to the traditional publics here. My wife found a bunch of articles that all pretty much said that if your kids are in a good home where people pay attention to them and read to them, the sort of school you send them to doesn't much matter. We figured we would try the thing that aligns to our values and keep an eye on things, and if it didn't work there was always time to get into a charter or move out to the county.
Things worked out fine, my kids all read and math well above grade level and like their school. They also don't have much homework, whereas the accelerated school a lot of affluent white parents in this neighborhood use assigns significant nightly homework, starting in the second grade (something I'm convinced doesn't help, possibly from here). They were sad when they had to spend last year on iPads, and happy to finally get back this year. So far, we've been pleased.
Caveat: this is for pre-k and elementary, when the kids are learning basics and before social life turns more difficult. Our local middle school closed, so for that we're doing the gifted school like good white St Louisians are supposed to.
A very small, private, school on the Sudbury model had been started recently. We took our daughter, I think about five, to it after becoming unsatisfied with the small church private school she had been going to. She liked it better, so we shifted her to it, later added her younger brother.
I went to a very good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school, both of us were bored most of the time. We thought we could do better for our children. The Sudbury model is unschooling — that, not the democracy, was what drew us to it. Eventually the school developed problems and we shifted both kids to home unschooling.
For my views on the theory and practice of unschooling, see:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Education/Unschooling.pdf
Similar to Carl we asked around in all of the locations near enough to my job what people thought would be a good school. Of seven local school districts, one was the overwhelming majority of recommendations, with two good schools also mentioned. One school was specifically identified as something to be avoided, which was a shame because there were a lot of nice houses decently priced in that district (not a coincidence). We ended up picking the one with the highest recommendations, though if we had found a suitable house in the other two we would likely have gone to one of them.
Culture is huge when picking a school, even more than academics. On every day that parents are invited to our kid's elementary school, there is probably greater than 60% parent attendance - including both parents and even on weekdays during normal work hours. The people here are serious about getting kids a good education. That school we were advised to avoid has multiple fights a week...
If your question pertains to public school: I just asked a bunch of local middle-aged female realtors when the oldest was approaching school age. They all knew exactly which was the best local district, and which were the best elementary schools, and which neighborhood you had to buy into to get into the attendance zone -- and how far away from the boundary you had to stay to avoid the boundary moving over you. I did cross-check with state performance scores, but knew I also valued unquantifiable aspects like culture, harmony among the staff, low turnover, strong parent involvement, et cetera, and that's exactly what the realtors knew.
Great. Yes, I was hoping to hear from people with all different perspectives on school; public, private, parochial, etc. Thanks for this comment.
My pleasure. One thing I thought about to add, is that this calculation might be worth making even if you're *not* going to public school. Reason being is that in many American locations, the character of the public schools is in a one-to-one relationship with the family aspects of the local culture.
In our case, for example, we ended up in a location that strongly valued education and family -- and that wasn't just reflected in the schools, it meant that *all* the local organizations had that influence. The public library had good school-age kids' programs. There was active trick-or-treating on our street, and parents kept an eye out on each others' kids when they were bike-riding. Stores were family oriented, lots of ice cream shops employing local teens, no liquor or check-cashing joints. There were good local kids' sports clubs, programs at public pools, et cetera -- it kind of all fits together because the "attendance boundary" aspect of public schools willy-nilly forces like-minded parents to gather in one geographical location.
Oldest of my kids, that is, not the oldest realtor ha ha. No wonder Disqus is eating everybody's lunch, they may be assholes but it's easy-peasy to edit comments.
A commitment to teaching kids to think well, in the context of providing academic rigor of the kind that the world expects.
FWIW, I think I could do this better myself than the school they go to (even though I spend over half my salary on the school) but I think a too-different school experience is kind of like an explanation with too many inferential steps - it's a lot harder to actually use in a civilized society, even if it's better in every other way. So part of what I'm looking for is an experience that exposes them to the expectations of civilized society. So, no worries, I supplement the philosophical stuff at home. (E.g., we "walk-n-talk" every morning with the dogs.)
I posted this in 188 just before thread 189 appeared; I hope it's okay if I repost for more exposure.
When governments spend more than they collect in taxes, they do something that everyone refers to as "borrowing", which increases the "debt". But during the Covid pandemic, pretty much every country was "borrowing". But if everyone is borrowing, who is the lender? It seems to me now that those words do not have their ordinary meaning. "Borrowing" turns out to be code for "printing money", and "debt" is "the amount of money we've printed".
Well, not quite. I have the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts. Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest? (and to avoid the risk of hyperinflation, have some sort of limit on the money-printing?)
I wonder if the whole system is set up in some modestly idiotic way - inefficient and difficult to understand, but not bad enough that the government is forced to change it. I also wonder if all the governments of the world use basically the same system, which would be a surprising "coincidence".
In any case, I've never seen a explanation that I could entirely follow. Aside from things like "fractional reserve" being hard to wrap one's head around, I find that virtually everyone who tries to explain macroeconomics takes for granted that their audience understands concepts like "buying debt" and the distinction between "fiscal", "monetary" and "financial". Does anyone explain this stuff like I'm 5?
Still, I would like to share a flash of insight I've had recently about macroeconomics that no one has ever even attempted to explain to me. It's about the value of money.
I assert that the value of money is (approximately) the total amount of production divided by the total amount of spending. "Amount of production" is real-world goods and services, so it has no particular unit of measurement. "Amount of spending" is the amount of money that changes hands, and it could be measured in dollars.
A key point here is that money which doesn't change hands doesn't enter into the equation. Nor does the world population. Hypothetically, then, suppose Jeff Bezos finds a way to gobble up most of the world's wealth and he becomes a 50-trillionaire. If production stays the same during this time (I guess it's more likely to increase, but let's pretend) and he spends almost none of this money, the effect of this wealth accumulation should be deflationary: the denominator (spending) decreases because Bezos is not spending his earnings (while production is flat or increasing), so the value of money increases. Everyone's money is worth more! Yay! However, those who are in debt effectively find themselves with bigger debts. Wages fall in response to the constricted money supply, so indebted people will have trouble paying off their debts. (I heard somewhere that this was a major problem during the Great Depression.)
But now, suppose that suddenly Bezos decides to spend 6 trillion dollars for a vacation on the moon three years from now, and suppose world production responds mainly by *moving* resources to the moon mission (due to structural limitations that prevent total production from increasing very much). Thanks to the increasing denominator, the effect will be sudden inflation (especially in moon-mission-related industries, i.e. this is where price increases are likely to be concentrated, though there will be inflation everywhere due to the loss of production in other sectors, and also whole supply chains relevant to the moon mission will be impacted, which can also cause price increases to bleed into other areas of the economy).
Getting back to the debt issue, while nominally the U.S. and many other countries have huge public debts and also huge private debts, none of this matters in practice, *as long as it doesn't affect production or spending significantly*. Indeed, perhaps big debts can be good by stimulating production, though I wonder if it can lead to instability (and if so, why).
Also, anyone want to predict the overall stock market trend over the next few years? I am not aware of any mechanism by which a major crash should occur, so I tentatively expect a minor crash at worst. However, US stocks are probably overpriced, so I expect that price increases will level off pretty soon and investor returns will be relatively poor over the next few years. Of course, though, I'm no expert and I don't really understand why the stock market rose so much in the first place. Did a lot of those stimulus dollars somehow get dumped straight into markets? Or was it caused more by regulators using their poorly-explained mechanisms to increase the money supply in a way that increased average stock prices?
Not answering your question directly, but a concept that might help you frame your understanding(or misunderstanding) of the subject:
The total value of what is available, in a given year, is GDP. Whatever the government spends has been a fraction of this number, even during Covid. Those are both flows, and debt is a stock (Not stock like stock market, stock like a warehouse full of inventory).
The current debt is just the cumulative difference between what was collected and what was spent. But the difference between the two is also a relatively small number. Over the past few decades, I think like 20% of GDP was collected in taxes and 25% was spent, and the difference was just "borrowed". Of the amount borrowed, I think maybe 20% was actually borrowed, and the other 80% was purchased by the federal reserve, which is a convoluted way to just print the money.
Numbers are made up off the top of my head, but the concepts are robust! lol
>Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest? (and to avoid the risk of hyperinflation, have some sort of limit on the money-printing?)
First off, nobody will believe you when you say that you've put a "limit" on the money-printing. They know full well that when you have to chose between increasing the debt ceiling, er, money ceiling, and cutting off the stimulus checks that are keeping millions of registered voters from being thrown out of their homes, that limit is going to be revised as needed.
Second, the total US money supply is about $20 trillion, depending on how you define "US money". The current federal deficit is $3 trillion a year. So, naively, printing $3 trillion a year would cause ~15% annual inflation. That's not quite hyperinflation, but it's higher than the US has seen since World War 2, and if you can recall or ever studied the economy of the 1970s, you'll know that even 10% annual inflation is Very Not Good for the economic health of a nation.
Third, that naive inflation calculation is an understatement, because people *react* to that sort of money-printing with "Oh, hell, they're not going to stop are they? I'd better get rid of this crap money while it's still worth *something* and buy gold or Euros or whatever", and that turns your 15% inflation into something unpredictably more. Possibly in an exponential spiral that does lead to hyperinflation.
Selling terabucks of debt allows the debt buyers to believe that you're going to pull one of several economic miracles out of the hat, and/or that your failure to do so will come with enough warning for them to get out before the rubes. Printing terabucks of money shows people exactly which non-miraculous economic solutions you have settled on, and that you've settled on it right now and if they want to get out they have to get out right now.
In the model I proposed, the amount of money in existence isn't directly relevant for inflation (is "money supply" the same or different?)... but the GDP of the US is ~$21 trillion (closely related to 'value of all goods and services'), so I agree that printing $3 trillion a year would *naively* cause ~15% annual inflation.
I wonder what would be important in a less naive analysis. Let's look at GDP for a moment. If a store sells $1 million, after buying $900,000 from its suppliers, who pay $800,000 upstream, most of the dollars involved are spent 3 times. Does that contribute $2.7 million to the GDP, then? On the other side, I think if $3 trillion were simply put in a vault and ignored, it wouldn't cause inflation; how it's used matters. So if a $3 trillion deficit is spent *twice* in a year (due to respending by the private sector), shouldn't that double the inflationary effect to 30%? In any case, it's quite interesting that inflation is only 5%.
Some people are talking about an "everything bubble", but I think maybe the rapid rise in the stock market could be more "inflation" than "bubble", because to the extent that stimulus money ended up in the hands of people that didn't need it, they would probably dump their excess money in stock markets. (for reference, S&P 500 is up 38% in the last 12 months, and also up 38% since Feb 1 2020.)
You mentioned people's reaction to money-printing, but it doesn't look to me like people are reacting much, probably because (1) they expect it's a temporary blip for Covid and (2) most other countries behaved similarly, so switching currencies doesn't help unless it goes to an outlier country that simultaneously kept spending low and kept their economy strong. And then, if lots of people buy outliers it drives up the price of outliers, a negative feedback.
$3 trillion is immense btw, about $9000 for every man, woman and child.
The braindead explanation is that money is just a contract that can represent current or future products, but never anything else[1]. If someone has money that is not indebted, they must have products to back it up. If a government prints money it is setting up a future-dated contract with a producer that they will eventually have to produce something with to back up the money. If they don't, everything explodes.
So, yes, obviously debts are supposed to stimulate production like you say. That's the whole point. You are giving people access to resources they technically shouldn't have, but as long as they eventually produce something with those resources everything is resolved. The reason people criticise this practise so much is that most contractors cannot keep up production to the extent that these contracts have been issued.
[1] Your capacity to offer services like haircuts is itself a product.
You say:
"Well, not quite. I have the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts. Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest?"
Actually governments do exactly that (print money to bring down real interest rates) - value of public debt is constantly being significantly eroded via inflation. Situation is, however, somewhat complicated by the fact that government spending of borrowed money is itself one of the causes of inflation.
Suppose you are the central bank, and you have determined that 100B must be printed and added to the economy. Printing is easy, but finding a way to move the money into the economy without creating disruption takes thought. You can't just give a 100B cash gift to your son-in-law and call it a day. If you choose certain industries to instantly infuse 100B into you are distorting markets and "picking winners and losers". If you hand the cash to government agencies, you usurp the role of the legislators and executives who are supposed to determine budgets. The idea of making the newly printed money available as loans, where all qualifying banks have equal access to the loans through an auction system, seems like the best way anyone's thought of so far to pull this off gracefully. It isn't perfect, in fact it picks the major banks as "winners" since the privilege of having first access to the loan windows is a windfall for them. But has anyone devised a system better than this? A way to add 100B to an economy without playing favorites?
What I don't get about this is that interest rates have been very low, below the inflation rate, for years.
Suppose that one year ago I got a loan from the Fed for $1 million with an interest rate of 0.25%, and put the $1 million in the S&P 500. Today I could sell the stocks for about $1.382 million, "earning" $382,000 in profit. Then I could pay off my $1 million loan plus $2500 in interest for a net profit of $379,500.
What prevents rich people from doing this?
The entire reason they set the rates so low is so that rich people will do exactly that, and the 38% gains in a year shows it works, or rather it works too well and maybe we should be scared. Low rates makes it easy for everyone to get money to throw at investments, then everyone throws money at investments at the same time so the stock prices get bid up to the moon. A crazy number like 38% in one year is not from some solid business reason like coca-cola selling more coke, it's because the interest rates have been at record lows for years and equities are literally on fire.
(yeah, I'm sure I couldn't get a loan directly from the central bank, but couldn't I get a loan for a small markup, e.g. 1%, so I pay 1.25% interest to a regular bank which in turn pays 0.25% to the central bank?)
Update: I just found out about leveraged ETFs. This is great - it turns out that you don't have to be rich to pull this trick! I wish I knew about this in 2020! On the other hand it sounds like a big cause of instability whenever interest rates are very low. Indeed, the idea of an "everything bubble" (i.e. something that can "pop" in a big way) seems more likely to me now.
Give X dollars to Y citizens, such that X*Y = 100B. (With ~330 million its about $300/ each. )
This doesn't hold up. The reason you have to issue printed money as debt with interest is because there's nothing actually backing it up, so you have to make the people you are giving it to create something to back it up, that they otherwise wouldn't be able to. It is a future-dated contract for resources that don't yet exist. If the resources did exist, only then could you give the money away with no interest.
I don't see why you would just want to add 100B without doing something more specific. If you are trying to stimulate growth, there is more need for it in some sectors than others, for instance.
Well I did not say "suppose you are a government", I said "suppose you are a central bank". When the US needs to bail out its auto industry, or mail all its poor people stimulus checks, Congress puts it in the budget. And that has nothing to do with the central bank (the Fed).
The US's central bank is merely tasked with managing the money supply so that inflation stays at a "desirable" rate in accordance with Keynesian theory. That is, high enough to stimulate general investment (which keeps unemployment low), but not so high that prices become generally unstable. Essentially, Congress has taken the technical, boring stuff that does not have to do with wielding political power, and offloaded it to independent technocrats at the Fed.
So again, given the Fed's job, which is to calculate how much to run the printing press each year, then put the calculated X amount of new money into the economy in an apolitical way that does not choose favorites or target sectors (doing those things would exceed their authority and usurp the Congress): how do you do that in a more fair way than holding auctions for banks to acquire the new money as low-interest loans?
Agree or disagree whether Keynesian theory is correct, whether constant slight positive inflation is actually a good thing, whether Congress should give the power to the Fed in its present form or do something else... the point is this actually might be a really good technical solution for what they are trying to do. Having a debt-based economy where nobody ever pays back the debts sounds really weird, but it lets you use auctions to inject arbitrarily chosen amounts of new money into the economy without favoritism, when that is a thing you want to do.
How about simply giving giving every citizen 300$?
If Keynesian tuning of monetary inflation is to be accomplished through "stimulus check"-style per capita cash disbursements and no other methods:
- Some years the checks may be on the order of $25,000 per capita, other years the checks may be zero, and people won't generally know which type of year it's going to be in advance. Instead of the monetary stimulus happening invisibly as before, now it is incredibly visible. If it becomes a political issue how big the checks are each year, that creates conflict between the amount of stimulus science prescribes and the amount that political forces prefer.
- The inflation created using this method will be over-concentrated in consumer goods and services sectors vs everything else, i.e. in the price of food and rent.
- Do teenagers qualify for the per checks? Do infants? Expect a giant political fight as soon as this is rolled out, to resolve what type of "per capita" is actually fair. And expect this policy to seesaw back and forth every time a new party wins the congressional majority.
- Do holders of US dollars in other countries qualify for the checks? Because if not you have made the dollar less valuable to everyone we trade with outside the country. If we discourage trade that drops our real standard of living.
I mean, you could try it, but it doesn't seem like you'll get a more stable money system than we have the way we are doing things now. (If you want to give $300 to poor people, nothing stops you doing that as a separate program by the way, but maybe such things should be segregated from the central bank's monetary policy).
Hey FProle - I learned a lot from reading your comments, so thanks for taking the time!
Oh thank you!
yeah.
The answer is that if growth is higher than the nominal interest rate, then you can borrow money, **not even pay off the interest completely** and still have debt as a fraction of GDP fall over time. Oliver Blanchard's AEA Presidential Address (2018? 2019?) offers a clear analysis of this phenomenon.
So, the UK still owes debt from 400 years ago--paying interest on that debt itself is not an issue now, as they grew far faster than it grew.
One quick note-you’re absolutely on to something with your definition of the value of money! The quantity theory of money, which is an econ101 model of inflation and monetary value, says that the velocity of money (how many times it is spent in a year) times the money supply (how much money there is) equals the price level (how much things cost relative to a fixed baseline, I.e what we care about for inflation) times real GDP (how much stuff we make. I think this is the same relationship you’re describing.
Btw I should have said something like "value of a certain unit of money" instead of just "value of money". It could be the "value of a dollar" if production and spending have the necessary units.
Your description seems to disagree with my model, because in my model the amount of money in existence is not immediately relevant; a billion dollars under a mattress "exists" but won't affect the economy as long as it just sits there. So let's see what Wikipedia says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money
Wikipedia says the traditional quantity theory of money is that "the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation", and eventually clarifies:
==========
Mainstream economics accepts a simplification, the equation of exchange:
M ⋅ V_T = P_T ⋅ T
where
M is the total amount of money in circulation on average in an economy during the period, say a year.
V_T is the transactions velocity of money, that is the average frequency across all transactions with which a unit of money is spent. This reflects availability of financial institutions, economic variables, and choices made as to how fast people turn over their money.
P_T is the price level associated with transactions for the economy during the period
T is an index of the real value of aggregate transactions.
==========
If M is the amount of money that exists, and V_T is the amount of spending per unit of money that exists, then M ⋅ V_T should be "the amount of spending". P_T sounds like the reciprocal of the value of a money unit, and T sounds like the amount of production of goods and services. So, rearranging the equation, I get
(1/P_T) = T / (M ⋅ V_T)
which matches the equation I dreamed up. Yay!
Congratulations for an independent rediscovery!
>I have the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts.
Governments usually have surpluses reasonably often, although the West has been doing a lot of deficit spending recently.
>Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest? (and to avoid the risk of hyperinflation, have some sort of limit on the money-printing?)
They do print money in significant excess of how much money is lost/destroyed, but as you suggest there is a limited amount you can do before you just drive inflation (and then hyperinflation). They borrow existent money to get funding in excess of what they can safely print.
Related question: anyone know of anyone studying macroeconomics via large, complex simulation models? It seems like this should be a fruitful way to study it.
Have EAers responded to the critiques in this essay by Crary? https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/against-effective-altruism
I'm assuming yes, but it would be neat to know whether there is a one-stop-shop of responses.
If I am understanding the article correctly (which is unlikely), its objections are as follows:
𝟏. EA as usually practiced is based on abstract consequentialism, "moral reflection … from the 'point of view of the universe'," which concludes that, e.g., "our ability to act so as to address suffering in any spot on earth places the same moral demands on us as does our ability to address the suffering of an unaccompanied toddler drowning in a shallow pond next to the road on which we're walking." It is thus mutually exclusive with Kantian deontology, virtue ethics, & other theories of ethics which do not view the right thing to do as objective & independent of who is making the decision. (The article also talks about "views on which evaluative concepts trace out forms of regularity that, while objective, are only available from non-neutral standpoints", but as it does not summarize these views and I am not familiar with the ethical ideas of Anscombe, Foot, & al., I do not know what it means by this.)
𝟐. EA's focus on effectiveness biases it in favor of actions whose effects are clearly measurable in the short term.
𝟑. For the same reason, EA is biased against attempts at systemic social or political change, which are inherently unpredictable. This predictability makes EA-like measurement of actions' effectiveness an unsuitable way of making decisions about seeking social or political change by comparison to more deontological ways of making decisions, like the bias in favor of marginalized demographic groups which is fashionable in modern progressivism. (I think this is what "The composite critique" was trying to say, but the philosophical basis of that section was not described in sufficient detail to be easily understandable.)
𝟒. EA avoids considering the way a capitalist economy, by incentivizing economic actors to pursue profit without regard for immoral externalities & with as little regard for workers' well-being as is practical, motivates people to cause suffering throughout the global economy. (The article's argument here appears to be a less detailed equivalent of Freddie DeBoer's Marxist argument in https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-bari-weiss-wont-tell-you-about .) Moreover, its acceptance of 'earning to give' biases it against this sort of criticism of the economy overall.
(The author also clearly thinks EA isn't politically progressive enough, but as this idea is neither justified by argument nor ever clearly & generally stated, I will not discuss it further.)
——————————————————————————————————————
I do not know the work of the virtue-ethicist philosophers the article cites well enough to respond to their criticism of abstract consequentialism. It should be noted, though, that if your support for EA is based on personal values rather than a theory of objective ethics (as seems to be true of a number of rationalist EAists, e.g. https://archive.is/iF1DL & https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/why-im-a-moral-nihilist/ & https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/about ), then this sort of criticism is less persuasive.
Objection 𝟐 is clearly true to some extent; indeed, the article cites several EAists admitting that measurability bias is a problem. However, this also means that EA is less likely to be fooled into working on attractive but ultimately harmful or inefficient projects.
Objection 𝟑 has been answered in two different ways. https://80000hours.org/2015/07/effective-altruists-love-systemic-change/ argues that EAists do support systemic change & gives examples such as trying to change cultural norms about charity, facilitating immigration of poor people to rich countries, & promoting beneficial government policies. The opposite response, described in https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/ , is to argue against a focus on systemic change on the grounds that systemic change is unpredictable & has a high risk of making things worse overall & that much systemic change involves divisive political issues which might divide the EA movement & drive away potential EAists with opposite politics.
Objection 𝟒 is basically a special case of 𝟑 & can be answered in the same way: the 8000 𝐻𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑠 article lists "research and grants on … macroeconomics, & international development", "reform priorities for governments", "government policies… around the regulation of new technologies", & "lobbying efforts to improve animal welfare regulation" among the systemic-change-related projects some EA groups are involved in, but concludes that "sudden dramatic changes in society usually lead to worse outcomes than gradual evolutionary improvements. I am keen to tinker with government or economic systems to make them work better… I personally favour maintaining and improving mostly market-driven economies… ." Moreover, it is not clear how 'earning to give' would bias EAists against systemic change efforts other than those that involve revolutionary restructuring of the economy (which, as argued above, is too risky to be worthwhile) or that would substantially depress the economy (which in itself is likely to cause substantial suffering through the effects of unemployment, loss of economic opportunities, &c.).
It seems pretty contentless tbh
> Thereby excluded are views – e.g. some Kantian constructivisms – that combine accounts of moral reflection as essentially perspectival with understandings of theoretical reflection as maximally abstract. 10 Also excluded are views that combine accounts of moral reflection as essentially engaged with understandings of theoretical reflection on which such reflection likewise goes unregulated by an ideal of abstraction. Under the latter heading are various outlooks, some associated with strands of virtue theory, that represent values as woven into the world’s fabric, so that we need particular sensitivities to recognise them.
what does that even mean lmao, and what does it have to do with biosecurity or transformative AI? Maybe if the author would articulate why their theory spam matters it’d help make this more useful.
> Thinkers in this tradition often simply take it for granted that any genuine, objective aspects of the world are abstractly accessible
this is pretty much just obscurantism. not saying it has to be, but in no way is any of this nonsense connected to what EA actually does.
I don’t think EA would exclude these people if they articulated useful ways to spend money and use talent! But they do not do that!
> This orientation speaks for striving to change the methods of meat companies in ways that leave unquestioned the larger political context in which the companies operate
If I was dictator of America, I would make saying stuff like “the larger social and political context” entirely illegal. It just served as a stand in for vague hand waving - obviously such things may be important, but you need to say what they are. So I can’t tell - should EA be funding anti-meat advertisements? Funding bolsheviks? Smashing Walmarts?
The entire essay is just filled with philosophical lawyering that might have some real meaning but I’ll never know because it’s intentionally kept disconnected from actual recommendations or judgements on the practical effects of EA actions, but siloed off in nice words like “propagating systems of oppression” and “moral systems”.
> At the critique’s heart is an image of the social world as irretrievably normative such that understanding it requires non-neutral resources. Granted that social concepts are categories for actions, it follows that these concepts need to be understood as tracing out patterns in an irreducibly normative ground – patterns that only reveal themselves to an evaluatively non-neutral gaze.
like how is anyone supposed to respond to this? Cmon
> while also disparaging as less ‘effective’ systematic attempts to change these institutions
This is annoyingly content less, you can’t just say the word institution and systematic and expect it to explain the entirety of everything about human interaction and action. If you want to convince EA people to fund a global communist revolution, then go and actually advocate for that. If you want EA to fund banning animal agriculture, do that. But don’t tease like this.
I have no idea what responses exist, but it's usually not a good sign when an article starts not with any actual criticisms, but lots of innuendo that "something is wrong with them". So, I read about 55% of the critique and it's been a few hours so I *really* need to stop. My response exceeds the length limit here, so I'll break it into chunks.
> EA has been the target of a fair bit of grumbling, and even some mockery, from activists and critics on the left, who associate consequentialism with depoliticising tendencies of welfarism.
Actually, wait, depoliticising doesn't sound bad? Usually "politicizing" is what people complain about.
> EA has mostly gotten a pass, with many detractors concluding that, however misguided, its efforts to get bankers, tech entrepreneurs and the like to give away their money cost-effectively does no serious harm. This stance is no longer tenable.
So, convincing people to donate to charity is "harmless" unless you convince them to donate too much, at which point ... it's bad?
> The growth of EA has been explosive, with some affiliated organisations, such as Open Philanthropy, now recommending grants amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. [...] One result of the windfall is that EA-guided ratings groups serve as king-makers, raising up pro-animal organisations deemed ‘effective’ by EA and denigrating and partly defunding many organisations deemed ‘ineffective’, while pressuring others to artificially shift their missions in order to conform to operative metrics of ‘effectiveness’ and secure funding. This has led to objections from animal advocates (often muted due to fear of alienating EA-admiring funders).
Well, less than ten thousand people have signed the "Giving What We Can" pledge, but I guess it's fast in annual-percentage terms, and many people surely donate without signing it.
The scare-quotes seem to argue that "effective" giving actually is less effective than what people did before (perhaps worse than not giving at all?), but as long as the argument is implicit, she doesn't have to explain it. I guess EAs have "denigrated" charities like "Scared Straight" on the basis that they have apparently done harm, but that's what people tend to do with harmful things (and it's what Crary is doing right now). The word "defunding" means "not donating anymore", right? Yes Crary, that's what people do if they think they've found a better use of money.
> Yet champions of EA, whether or not concerned with the cause of animals, for the most part adopt the attitude that they have no serious critics and that sceptics ought to be content with their ongoing attempts to fine-tune their practice.
I knew there were critics, I just haven't seen any that seemed reasonable enough to bother arguing with.
> It is important to forcefully make the case that it owes its success primarily not to the – questionable – value of its moral theory but to its compatibility with political and economic institutions responsible for some of the very harms it addresses.
And which moral theory is not questionable? Deontology? Virtue ethics? I have heard commenters reject utilitarianism repeatedly at ACX on the basis of a thought experiment, but surely there are plenty of thought experiments to argue against deontology and virtue ethics.
I suspect people are rejecting consequentialism/utilitarianism because they *know about* anti-utilitarianism thought experiments but are *unaware of* thought experiments against deontology and so forth. Also, some people choose "I'll do whatever I feel is right" ... but that's what consequentialists and deontologists do too! just with principles to guide them instead of being unprincipled. (Sure, you save yourself from thought experiments in your "whatever I feel like" moral system, but only because your system is just a series of data points, "I feel X is wrong and Y is right", with no clear principles, and specific to you and you alone, so philosophers won't ever criticize it, which in no way suggests your personal system is the best one.)
Note also that if EA had been founded by ardent supporters of, say, deontology, there would be a bunch of critics saying it should be based on consequentialism; it is impossible to avoid criticism. There's an Aesop Fable about this, "The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey".
> reflection on EA reveals a straightforward example of moral corruption
But of course you won't explain what you mean yet: you want the audience to stew on it for awhile.
> claiming that EA is ‘independent of any theoretical commitments’. This last claim is false
We can steelman this as "in practice EA steers people toward consequentialist giving", and I agree. But consequentialism isn't part of the GWWC pledge:
> I hereby recognize that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good.
> Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from now and for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least 10% of my income to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others. I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.
I interpret this as "most effectively according to my own opinion". So Alice Crary could have attempted to convince individual EAs or EA organizations that they should disregard consequentialism and use some other basis for their decisions, but obviously that's not her goal here.
> self-avowed effective altruists have tended to [take] as their core value the sort of well-being capturable by the metrics of welfare economics
I don't think that's true. As an EA, I'm not familiar with the phrase "welfare economics", but certainly I recognize that there are important aspects to well-being that are not captured by any metrics I am aware of, and I'm aware of that mainly because EAs often talk about this issue.
> This abstract moral epistemology is one of the marks of a moral radicalism that, although sometimes criticised for the extent of its demands, gets celebrated by consequentialists. [...] If we take well-being as a value, our ability to act so as to address suffering in any spot on earth places the same moral demands on us as does our ability to address the suffering of an unaccompanied toddler drowning in a shallow pond next to the road on which we’re walking. This radical twist...
The author's use of "radical" seems be "unusual (and therefore bad)". She's trying to create negative feelings without making an actual argument.
> Their abstract approach excludes any virtue-oriented view on which the rightness of actions is appropriately engaged responsiveness to circumstances, and this makes it seem more natural to account for rightness by looking to the value of actions’ consequences
Admittedly I know little about virtue ethics, but I don't think "the rightness of actions is appropriately engaged responsiveness to circumstances" is a clear rule for deciding what is right or wrong. To me, a rule like the following is more clear: "to the extent that the consequences of our actions are predictable, the rightness of our actions depends on the consequences of those actions compared to the consequences of other actions we could have taken, according to our own judgement of which consequences are better. Oh, and this is a hard problem, so we should think really carefully about it." Apparently Alice would disagree, but how is her opinion "righter" than mine, and also, just what is her opinion anyway?
> But it is the idea that rightness is a matter of the value of quantifiable consequences, allowing for difficulties of juggling different classes of values, that makes it seem coherent to speak of single judgments about how to do the most good.
There is no single judgement; various EAs make different judgements about how to do the most good, and they debate those ideas. As to whether there may be, in principle, a single best action (which is impossible to determine with certainty in practice) according to a specific formulation of consequentialism, I think EAs would not have a consensus about that either. In short, this seems like a strawman.
> EA’s god’s eye image of moral reflection constrains how we can conceive of ethical thought and practice, leaving no room for views intolerant of the idea that moral reflection proceeds from the standpoint of the universe
I haven't heard EA-style consequentialism described as "moral reflection...from the standpoint of the universe" and I'm not sure how accurate such a description is, but I guess she's saying that EAs "leave no room" for views "intolerant of the idea that moral reflection proceeds from the standpoint of the universe". But assuming that's true, I ask you: why should EAs provide room for people who are intolerant of common EA ideas?
> excluded are views – e.g. some Kantian constructivisms – that combine accounts of moral reflection as essentially perspectival with understandings of theoretical reflection as maximally abstract. Also excluded are views that combine accounts of moral reflection as essentially engaged with understandings of theoretical reflection on which such reflection likewise goes unregulated by an ideal of abstraction.
Really? How's that?
Chunk 2 of 3:
> EA’s Oxford-trained founders work in a philosophical tradition, indebted to classic empiricism, shaped by the assumption that subjective endowments have an essential tendency to obstruct our access to the world. Thinkers in this tradition often simply take it for granted that any genuine, objective aspects of the world are abstractly accessible. Acquaintance with local history suggests this posture is at least questionable.
I take this to mean "EA thinkers tend to be empiricists who think that people have cognitive biases and limited access to information, but at the same time they assume that the world has some objective properties that can be described theoretically". And this is true, but I don't understand her argument against this view, to the extent she even made an argument.
> To sideline this part of Anglophone philosophy is to overlook its most notable resources for criticising consequentialism
Sorry, but it's hard not to sideline poorly-explained ideas that I find incomprehensible.
> The most fully elaborated criticism of EA... is sometimes referred to as the institutional critique.
Don't have time right now to read that. Is it a better critique than this one?
> decry the neglect, on the part of EA, of coordinated sets of actions directed at changing social structures that reliably cause suffering
I think she's saying "EA isn't good at doing political movements". But
(1) EA orgs want to get better at that, e.g. consider this six-year-old article entitled "Effective altruists love systemic change" https://80000hours.org/2015/07/effective-altruists-love-systemic-change/
(2) EA orgs will eventually get better at that, and
(3) when they do get better at it, they will unavoidably receive MUCH MORE criticism than they do today (donkey fable again).
> EA’s metrics are best suited to detect the short term impact of particular actions, so its tendency to discount the impact of coordinated actions can be seen as reflecting ‘measurability bias’
But problems with metrics are discussed often in EA circles, and EAs often rely also on intuition and surrogate measurements to fill in gaps where the thing we want to know has no accurate measurement. Hits-based giving is one example of EAs dealing with the severe uncertainties involved in finding the best interventions: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZfD4cZgAcgQc5oRNN/hit-based-giving-for-global-development
Another example is this popular post on the EA forum, "Growth and the case against randomista development". If Alice is right, such examples shouldn't exist or be popular. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bsE5t6qhGC65fEpzN/growth-and-the-case-against-randomista-development
> The institutional critique of EA can be brought to bear on Animal Charity Evaluator’s 2019 ratings. Animal Charity Evaluator’s favouring of welfare improvements in the conditions of farmed animals can be taken to reflect forms of (‘measurement’) bias in its metrics, which are best suited to detect the outcomes of simpler efforts with clear short term impacts. This orientation speaks for striving to change the methods of meat companies in ways that leave unquestioned the larger political context in which the companies operate. The result is that, despite its sincere pro-animal stance, Animal Charity Evaluator is at risk of strengthening an industrial agricultural system that reproduces horrific animal suffering on a massive scale.
Well, if you've got a more effective way to reduce animal suffering that only needs a few thousand people to accomplish, let's hear it. (Does Alice even understand that EAs are all about effectiveness? It's right there in the name.) But if your solution is something like "run a conventional political movement" (and it almost sounds like that's what you're saying), well, conventional political movements have been around for a very long time and their track record leaves something to be desired. I mean, everybody knew about global warming since 1988, and 33 years later we still haven't reached "peak oil". In contrast, specific plant-based meat companies have been around for a few years and are already displacing factory-farmed meat. (I know, EAs probably can't take most of the credit for that, but we're certainly big fans. I had two Beyond burgers last night, how about you Alice?)
> While replies to the institutional critique bring out that there is room to include collective actions among EA’s objects of assessment, [...] they leave unexamined questions about whether it is confused to insist on causal effects as the standard for evaluating collective attempts to change the normative structure of society.
> These attacks charge that it is morally and philosophically problematic to construe moral reflection as abstract.[18] [...] Effective altruists who respond to the philosophical critique take Williams to be urging us to protect our integrity even at the cost of doing the wrong thing.[19]
"protect our integrity at the cost of doing the wrong thing"? That sounds like an oxymoron, surely you jest? Also, 19 is actually two references, the first of which is 36 pages: https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/The-Institutional-Critique-of-Effective-Altruism.pdf ... I don't have time to read it, but somehow I doubt that "protect our integrity at the cost of doing the wrong thing" is a fair summary.
> they dismiss these critics’ gestures as without philosophical interest
I bet it's more like "they argue that these critics are misguided and explain why"
> It is not difficult to develop philosophical critics’ worries about a god’s eye morality so that they rise to the level of a devastating objection. All that is required is to combine worries about point-of-viewless moral reflection with views about values [...] on which concepts of values determine neutrally unavailable worldly patterns.
Um... what?
> Why should effective altruists take seriously an attack on a philosophical worldview that many of their colleagues take as an unquestioned starting point? The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries witnessed significant philosophical assaults on abstract conceptions of reason, and there is a notable philosophical corpus in which the merits of these assaults get debated. Although it is by no means obvious that those who favour abstract views have better arguments, and although their interlocutors raise fundamental questions about these views’ tenability, abstract construals of reason have for more than half a century played an organising role in the discipline of philosophy [...]. This suggests that the construals’ staying power is at least partly a function of ideological factors independent of their philosophical credentials. That – the fact that these conceptions of reason are manifestly open to contestation – is one reason why effective altruists should attend to a philosophical critique that depends for its force on rejecting abstract images of reason. A second reason for effective altruists to attend to the philosophical critique has to do with the seriousness of the moral charge it levels against them. It alleges nothing less than that their image of the moral enterprise is bankrupt and that moral assessments grounded in this image lack authority.
I think she's saying "EAs should take my attack seriously because (1) those who favour abstract views are biased by ideology and (2) I am making a very serious charge that your moral enterprise is bankrupt." Which means, apparently, that she has chosen not to explain what in the world she was talking about in the previous paragraph.
Chunk 3 of 3:
> Effective altruists invite us to regard the rightness of a social intervention as a function of its consequences, with the outcome involving the best states of affairs counting as doing most good. This strategy appears morally confused when considered in terms of the ethical stance of the philosophical critique. To adopt this stance is to see the weave of the world as endowed with values that reveal themselves only to a developed sensibility. To see things this way is to make room for an intuitively appealing conception of actions as right insofar as they exhibit just sensitivity to the worldly circumstances in question. This is consistent with allowing that right actions can have the end of promoting others’ happiness or flourishing. Here acting rightly includes acting, when circumstances call for it, in ways that aim at the well-being of others, and, with reference to this benevolent pursuit of others’ well-being, it makes sense to talk – in a manner that may seem to echo effective altruists – about good states of affairs. But it is important that, as Philippa Foot once put it, ‘we have found this end within morality, forming part of it, not standing outside it as a good state of affairs by which moral action in general is to be judged’. 24 Here right action also includes acting, when circumstantially appropriate, in ways that aim at ends – e.g. giving people what they are owed – that can conflict with the end of benevolence. Apt responsiveness to circumstances sometimes requires acting with an eye to others’ well-being and sometimes with an eye to other ends. In cases in which it is not right to attend to others’ well-being, it is incorrect to say that, because we haven’t thus attended, we achieve a morally worse result. Things only seem this way if we allow our understanding to be shaped by what now appears to be a confused understanding of morality. What we should say is that the result we wind up with is morally best. That is what it comes to to say that, within the context of the philosophical critique, there is no room for EA-style talk of ‘most good’.
In summary, "the philosophical critique" uses a non-consequentialist moral framework in which "there is no room for EA-style talk of ‘most good’".
But if there is no "most good", does that mean there cannot exist "more" or "less" effective ways to make the world a better place? Or is it rather that "most good" is the eye of the beholder? If you interpret EAs as trying to move the world toward a state that they individuallly consider better from their own perspective, I think that's an accurate interpretation. Again, the "standpoint of the universe" thing is misleading; EAs aren't saying "there's One Best Thing", though coincidentally different EAs tend to agree in broad strokes about various goals, as groups of humans often do. Philosophically they tend to use consequentialist analysis, but look: Alice still hasn't proposed an alternative. She's done nothing more than point out that some philosophers disagree.
> This critique alleges that EA’s claim to be doing the most good founders on a misunderstanding of the nature of morality...
Again, Crary says there is a critique but doesn't care to say what it is.
> The resulting composite critique presupposes, in line with the philosophical critique, that values are essentially woven into the texture of the social world and that EA’s Archimedean take on moral reflection deprives it of resources needed to describe – irreducibly normative – social circumstances.
I don't think this tells us how to decide how to donate money or make the world better. Or is that an unworthy goal in the first place? Also, has anyone actually adopted this other philosophy? Or is it better to do nothing rather than to donate using a philosophy Crary regards as wrong?
> The upshot of this new line of criticism is an update of the institutional critique, charging that EA cannot give accurate assessments of sets of actions because it forfeits capacities necessary for all social assessment. This means that the tendency of EA-affiliated organisations to wrongly prioritise evaluation of the proximate effects of particular actions is not a fixable methodological flaw.
The surface-level logic here is a non sequitur, and Crary hasn't really tried to make a case that EAs prioritise wrongly, except to say "look, references! it's in the references!"
> It is often right to act in ways that aim to improve the welfare of others.
But it's often wrong too? Care to explain?
> But recognising the instances in which this is (or isn’t) right requires capacities for engaged social thought that EA disavows.
EAs do not disavow engaged social thought. Who told you that?
> Further, when it comes to evaluating actions coordinated with an eye to social transformation, EA’s image of the moral enterprise is patently implausible. Such actions are efforts to restructure the normative organisation of society, and their relevant ‘effects’, far from obeying merely causal laws, are at home in the unpredictable realm of politics. Attempts to evaluate these efforts in EA’s terms are manifestly confused.
Look, we've all heard of the Law Of Unintended Consequences, but that doesn't mean we ignore it, nor does it prove we should abandon all hope of trying to predict the consequences of actions once they cross some invisible line into "politics". Indeed, how is the debate we're having now not already political? Also, what's with "effects" being in scare quotes, and what's the purpose of the word "merely" here?
So, I've passed the halfway point of the essay, and I have decided that I am forced to admit that maybe only a professional philosopher can understand her argument. Anyone care to take on the rest?
I think this is really a critique of philosophy disguised as a critique of EA, showing that it’s ability to actually say stuff that’s meaningful has totally evaporated
> measurability bias
that is a good point
> A leitmotif of the institutional critique of EA is that this bias is politically dangerous because it obscures the structural, political roots of global misery, thereby contributing to its reproduction by weakening existing political mechanisms for positive social change.
Are they seriously complain that EA is bad because it makes things better?
Has opposite (make things worse to cause revolution/etc ) ever worked in the entire history?
> The philosophical critique brings into question effective altruists’ very notion of doing the ‘most good’ or having the ‘greatest impact’. Effective altruists invite us to regard the rightness of a social intervention as a function of its consequences, with the outcome involving the best states of affairs counting as doing most good. This strategy appears morally confused when considered in terms of the ethical stance of the philosophical critique. To adopt this stance is to see the weave of the world as endowed with values that reveal themselves only to a developed sensibility. To see things this way is to make room for an intuitively appealing conception of actions as right insofar as they exhibit just sensitivity to the worldly circumstances in question.
Maybe I am too stupid but this criticism seems utter gibberish to me.
> EA has ‘been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men’
Because obviously rant made by a progressive Oxford professor would be incomplete without racist complaints. Scientific racism 2.0 in a full force.
My more charitable reading of EA being "politically dangerous because it obscures the...roots of global misery, thereby contributing to its reproduction by weakening existing political mechanisms" is less that EA is anti-accelerationist (and that that would be bad) and more that EA redirects attention and funds away from systemic change by convincing[^1] people that addressing the _symptoms_ of systemic change is The Answer. From their point of view, it seems that they view EA as one might view a doctor who prescribed migraine pills in response to a brain tumor - yes, those can help alleviate _something_, and they certainly aren't _bad_ on their own, and having _both_ would be lovely - but _prioritizing_ pain relief over removing the tumor is ridiculous (and every choice is implicitly a prioritization because of limited funds/political will/etc.).
[^1] Or, rather, increasing the likelihood of beliefs to that effect.
"Are they seriously complain that EA is bad because it makes things better?"
It sounds to me that this argument is basically the one made by Oscar Wilde in 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_Under_Socialism), but worse argued. I personally think it sounds like the 'modern English' version* of the classic Biblical Ecclesiastes passage** which Orwell contrasted in 'Politics and the English Language' (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/). It's a good essay if you want to understand why people just cannot speak clearly even through they're trying to make their point and persuade people - the short of it is that "Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style."***
*: "Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
**: "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
***: Incidentally, I think this essay is where Orwell came up with his famed 'duckspeak' man, the one who shows up in '1984' with two blank discs instead of eyes: "When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them."
TL;DR: Socialism is a pathway to a lack of style some consider to be... unnatural.
>Has opposite (make things worse to cause revolution/etc ) ever worked in the entire history?
Arguably a bunch of colonial agitators in 1773 provoking the British to blockade Boston made things worse. which led to the American Revolution which made things better. But that's a rare exception, and not something you want to be your Plan A.
I don’t think the measurability bias this is too good of a point. EA people donate to some significant non measurable areas, such as AI risk (totally not measurable!)
It at least pointed out limits of EA as I understood it (maybe it was applicable to just my understanding of it).
I *think* the philosophical critique is basically saying "EA starts with the assumption that consequentialism is true, but as we all know, *real* morality is virtue ethics, so EA is fundamentally confused about what "Doing good" even entails."
Phrased in the least comprehensible manner possible, making it very likely I'm wildly misinterpreting here.
Minor quibble: She's not an Oxford professor. She's a professor at New School for Social Research, speaking at Oxford.
Thanks! I got confused also here apparently.
I found comment threads to an earlier piece by the same author here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3RNmdMhnCxY82LAhJ/alice-crary-s-philosophical-institutional-critique-of-ea-why
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GXo8hfrEg6KHMBqm6/ea-s-abstract-moral-epistemology
Thanks!
Reference: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/14/too-many-people-dare-call-it-conspiracy/
Have recently mocked a work of fiction for having a secret organisation (i.e., no-one knows it exists) with 100,000,000 members. I feel fairly confident in this judgement, but I'm no expert in such matters and it has occurred to me that I don't really have a good feel for how large a conspiracy could actually plausibly be.
What would be personal estimates for the largest plausible size of a fully-secret organisation (nobody knows it exists; can't think of easy past examples), and of the largest plausible size of a publically-known organisation's secret projects (nobody knows that organisation does that kind of thing; Dragonfly would be an example of this before it was leaked)?
One data point comes from Osama bin Laden, who was pretty good at organizing large conspiracies. Everybody knew that Al Qaeda existed, but nobody knew that the Al Qaeda North American Kamikaze Action Force existed until it was too late. That force consisted of twenty men operating on hostile soil. OBL considered and explicitly rejected a larger ten-plane attack on the grounds that it would likely be detected. And in fact the four-plane, twenty-man version very nearly was detected due to a walking OPSEC failure named Zacarias Moussaoui.
So, expert opinion says fifty men is too many if you need to keep the bare existence of the conspiracy secret. Maybe someone better than OBL, or operating on more favorable ground, could do better. But by the time you get to 500, you're probably going to have more leaks that you can plug.
Another data point is that the Roman Catholic Church maintained an undetected[*] conspiracy in the United States for many decades that seems to have included approximately every Catholic bishop, archbishop, and cardinal in the country. That's about 500 men. Plus probably some of their executive secretaries. But the RCC is a very respected and high-trust organization operating on very friendly ground, so probably the best-case scenario for a successful secret conspiracy.
As always, "conspiracy" means explicit cooperation towards a goal that is generally regarded within the surrounding community as morally outrageous. Things like secret military operations can be larger because if someone blabs, the person they blab to is likely to report them rather than spread the secret.
* It was widely known that lots of priests were diddling altarboys, but that the Church heirarchy was actively shuffling them around to evade detection was kept effectively secret for quite a while.
I think 9/11 involved more than the 20 people who went on the planes. Wasn't there some support staff? Still, a pretty small conspiracy.
I don't think there were any "support staff" in the United States. Probably a few in Hamburg, but it's not clear how much they knew. And a small possibility that the post-9/11 anthrax attacks were an Al Qaeda team that had been tasked with providing bioweapons for delivery by cropduster, failed miserably resulting in obvious change in plan, and then mailed out what little they had been able to create before going home.
So, maybe a bit more than twenty depending on how you count, but still "twenty-ish".
Right. If your conspiracy needs to grow past the 50-500 people range, then you need to be running the sort of conspiracy that can function even when everybody knows it exists. That typically means some combination of being low-impact - the police don't care *that* much that the [ethnic] mafia is shaking down [ethnic] shopkeepers for protection money so long as the murder and arson stay within tolerable limits - or being compartmentalized so that individual operations are both small enough to stay undetected and isolated enough that their loss doesn't unravel the conspiracy.
It depends, what is the punishment for defecting and what is the reward versus what is the reward for staying a part of the conspiracy. Look at the big successful conspiracies like the Mafia or kayfabe. As soon as the reward for breaking the conspiracy was greater than the punishment, they broke.
Hypothetically, I think you could have a conspiratorial organization with 100M members, almost all of whom think they're just doing a job for an organization they don't fully understand. Perhaps not too different from the real world.
In that case only the leadership are really part of the conspiracy, not all 100M.
Well the inherent problem is that the denominator of the key fraction (# of conspiracies that were betrayed/# that were not) is by definition unknown. The only conspiracies of which we know are those that were eventually betrayed.
...although...I bet a good dynamic model could extract something useful from the *dynamics* of the end of conspiracies. That is, the distribution of size versus time before betrayal is probably sensitive to the parameters of the dynamics, so *if* you came up with a robust model you might be able to work backwards from the distribution to infer reasonable bounds on the number of conspiracies (and their sizes) that were never betrayed.
...and if the answer is a kajillian you can then write a best-seller book, which will be snapped up by tons of people crying "I KNEW it! All along! Even when everyone was making snide comments about tinfoil hats..." $19.99 on Amazon Kindle, comes with a glossary of the most commonly used code phrases, so you can tell what the TV news anchors are *really* saying..."
Even if the answer is a kajillian, conspiracies are still secrets, so you can still ask the conspiracy theorist how they uncovered the secret. "How did you discover that there was not, in fact, a conspiracy of dozens of extremists to destroy the World Trade Center, but rather a conspiracy within the U.S. government itself which fabricated the appearance of a different conspiracy?"
A conspiracy involving 10 each with a 1% chance of betraying the conspiracy any given year has a 37% percent chance of surviving 10 years. If it's a 100 people, the 10-year-survival-probability would be 0.00004317124.
With these numbers, the notion of a 0.1 billion people conspiracy is just ludicrous.
It's not enough for the conspiracy to be betrayed, that betrayal has to cause sufficiently coordinated action to destroy the conspiracy.
I wouldn't mock a work for having an overt worldwide 100M organisation with tentacles in everything. The Catholic Church is a hierarchical organisation that wielded immense influence across state lines for over a millennium (and is still far from toothless) and depending on where you draw the line on who counts as part of that organisation (priests vs. devout laity who will act on papal instruction vs. everyone who puts down "Catholic") can be considered bigger than that.
What I rejected as silly even for fiction is the idea of a 100M co-ordinated organisation *that nobody on the outside knows about*, "conspiracy-theory" style - which is what the Scott post I linked is careful to distinguish less-absurd things from. Everybody knows that Catholics exist and what the Catholic Church as a whole aims to achieve. There are, much smaller, conspiracies within the Catholic Church that people don't or didn't know about - but the basic principles of the organisation and its primary operations are public knowledge. If somebody claimed that there was a religion the size of Catholicism or even Judaism *that was a secret from non-members*, I would scoff - you cannot keep the existence and purpose of something that size a secret, so our non-observation of it is proof it doesn't exist.
sure but by this calculation the Manhattan project would’ve immediately been destroyed, and it wasn’t. Similarly every intelligence community medium scale project or lather would immediately be destroyed and they aren’t.
Is the Manhattan project a successful conspiracy in that the general public did not know about it but the Russians did.?
The MED is sort of a weird special case, because in 1944 you could talk all day in front of a mass of suburban commuters on a train about bomb physics, quite openly, and unless you actually used a charged phrase like "incredibly powerful atomic bomb" nobody would have a clue what you were jabbering about.
That is, it's probably a lot easier to keep secrets about subjects on which almost every normal person is deeply ignorant. But that's a rather special kind of conspiracy, in most cases you're trying to keep something secret that ordinary people will immediately grasp, and so you have to work much harder to keep tiny little clues and hints from escaping.
It was a successful conspiracy in that Japan and Germany didn't know.
I think that many actual conspiracies managed to get much better rates - in many cases risk is much smaller than 1% per person per year.
Though in general I agree with this reasoning.
It'll vary with the way the conspirators are aligned to the conspiracy. For instance, if you bring someone in on your secret who finds the conspiracy morally reprehensible (e.g. Edward Snowden), the risk is higher. If everybody agrees the secret should be kept, or if everybody has a strong incentive to keep it, the risk is lower. Thus, hypothetically proper conspiracy theorist reasoning would need a story about why none of the conspirators ever spills the beans.
Edward Snowden is a perfect example of why spilling the beans is not, in fact, sufficient to end the conspiracy.
Well, that "conspiracy" is called the US government, and while many people's feelings towards it may be mixed at best, the vast majority would prefer it not to end outright I'd imagine.
In this case conspiracy was about spying on everyone on scale much larger than commonly known, including spying that is illegal.
> What would be personal estimates for the largest plausible size
What would be parameters? Allowing it to exist just for some time would make things easier - keeping something secret for one month is much easier than keeping secret forever.
Scope of things also matter - there could be something that basically just exists and only has secret handshake or something. This would make easier to hide it.
Manhattan Project may be one of larger ones that at least for some time was reasonably secret. Though most info leaked relatively soon to USSR.
> Have recently mocked a work of fiction for having a secret organisation (i.e., no-one knows it exists) with 100,000,000 members
That is quite absurd, unless it was in society/setting drastically different from ours wit (outright magic: see Harry Potter, Alpha Centauri may have a secret alien colony etc). I would likely join mocking.
The *existence* of the Manhattan Project was fairly easy to discover. The fact that a lot of famous nuclear physicists were all moving to Los Alamos or Oak Ridge to work on something was basically impossible to hide, and there are even some vague newspaper articles talking about it at the time. But the details of what exactly they were *doing* there was protected, which was good enough.
However, fictional conspiracies often claim to be completely unknown to the public (so that they don't disrupt the real-world setting), meaning they need a much greater level of secrecy.
You might like to look into neuracam. There's this video which can give you a quick overview of what it was (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9XmXad_wmo&t=1761s) timestamped to cut to the chase, the document he talks about here goes much deeper into all of it.
This is more on the side of LARPing / games, but the line between reality and not-reality in this game is really thin and the mechanisms which allow for the creation of the community in this game would probably also work in other (more nefarious) contexts.
When it comes to conspiracies, I lean towards the theory laid out in "The Irishman" (which apparently is a paraphrase of Benjamin Franklin): three people can keep a secret only when two of them are dead.
https://screenrant.com/memorable-quotes-from-the-irishman/
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7286-three-may-keep-a-secret-if-two-of-them-are
Personally, I learn towards "One person can keep a secret when one of them is dead".
That’s absurd! >3 people keep secrets all the time.
You're right of course but I don't think the 'theory' should be taken literally. It's a humorous exaggeration to make a point. A joke with a kernel of truth.
Yes, but therefore it shouldn’t be used to estimate an upper bound on an empirical question.
Like, if a company wanted to know how many people it’d take to screw in a particular light bulb so they could hire the correct number of people, and someone said “well, I once heard this joke, and it concluded it’d take countably infinite mathematicians” or something, despite how many kernels of truth the joke has, it’s still a bad estimate.
Precisely! Of course 3 or more people could keep a secret under the right circumstances (for example, if it is on their best interest to do so). Still, I think that people are super bad at keeping secrets.
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I was reading about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and a question popped into my head - hopefully the experts here can weigh in. If SETI were happening on one of the exoplanets closest to us (in the Proxima Centauri system 4+ light years away), would they be able to detect the signals from Earth? If yes - could they, with the appropriate technology, listen to the top 40 radio hits of 4 years ago? If no - what is order of magnitude by which it fails? 2x, 10x, 100x? And then why are people doing something that can't work?
It's not top-40 radio stations that would give us away, but the stray microwaves from the ballistic-missile warning radars we built during the Cold War. And, incidentally, reveal to the aliens that we are species that does wars. I believe that an alien civilization with an exact duplicate of our SETI program could detect those radars from ~40 light years.
A truly spacefaring alien civilization could do a *lot* better than that, by building their radio telescopes in space. One of the blind spots of SETI, and of the scientific community in general, is that it usually doesn't consider the consequences of technological advances more than one generation out.
Breakthrough Listen is currently the deepest SETI project. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Listen):
"The radio telescopes are sensitive enough to detect "Earth-leakage" levels of radio transmission from stars within 5 parsecs,[4] and can detect a transmitter of the same power as a common aircraft radar from the 1,000 nearest stars."
5 parsecs is 16 light years, so Breakthrough Listen can detect Earth's leakage radiation around Alpha Centauri and a few other stars.
Targeted messages from an Earth-equivalent civilization can be detected across the galaxy. In 1974, Arecibo sent a message to M13, 21,000 light years away. According to seti.org, " The emission was equivalent to a 20 trillion watt omnidirectional broadcast, and would be detectable by a SETI experiment just about anywhere in the galaxy, assuming a receiving antenna similar in size to Arecibo's." (https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/arecibo-message)
This is reckless; while it may be that our signals will leak out and potentially be detected anyway, a targeted broadcast may alert a civilization that is hostile
+1. I figured one reason SETI might not see aliens is that if they also have wars like we do, they should be smart enough to tell that broadcasting their presence to more advanced civilizations is fantastically reckless.
This reminds me of the most depressing ending for any sci-fi series ever, Stargate Universe, in which they nppvqragnyyl npgvingr na vzzrafr argjbex bs qebarf cebtenzzrq gb qrfgebl nal naq nyy grpuabybtl va gur tnynkl (https://rot13.com). That's what we in EA circles call an "s-risk".
Another reason SETI might not see aliens: efficient radio transmission is both low-power and difficult to distinguish from noise.
>if they also have wars like we do, they should be smart enough to tell that broadcasting their presence to more advanced civilizations is fantastically reckless.
Mmm, not really. If they're more advanced, they are probably more advanced by such a large degree that you have no hope of ever catching up and threatening them. They might swat you like a fly if they want your solar system, but if they come to you you're not going to hide from them anyway.
There's also the issue that any species even considering interstellar war is going to have *highly-developed* interplanetary space infrastructure. Telescopes get better linearly with size - it should be assumed that such a species has planetary-scale individual telescopes (the only real limit on size is gravitational collapse) and system-scale interferometers (modern interferometers are limited to the size of the Earth i.e. 13,000 km and we don't even have that yet; a network of stations in the Kuiper belt would have a baseline of 13 billion km). That's enough to plausibly resolve planets from interstellar distances, at which point things like "the Earth is too bright at night" and "the colours of Earth have been altered by agriculture" start giving us away anyway.
A very good point. It seems to me any advanced civilization would realize there's far more bang for the buck in building really big telescopes right there at home and just *imaging* whatever interests them (including us), instead of spending umpty years cramped up in a steel can to go visit in the flesh. What for? What can anyone possible gain by being here in person and seeing with their own eyestalks what they could see easily enough comfortably on their home 4K screen *without* the 150 year round-trip? And what kind of physical resource could possibly be worth hauling over interstellar distances? If all the planets of Proxima Centauri were made of pure antimatter it still wouldn't be economical to go there to mine it for fuel.
I think you go a bit far; there are reasons to pursue interstellar colonisation. The obvious ones are freedom from interplanetary societal rules (since interstellar war to impose them is hard) and the availability of untapped resources (not to haul back, of course, but to use on-site).
But one would expect the telescopes to at least come *first*. Those are easy to build once you have any kind of industrial capability in space, and we recognise their potential even now, before we actually have that capability.
If a civilisation has the capacity to pursue interstellar war, they have the capacity to build interplanetary-sized telescopes. Also, they're probably coming here anyway because life tends to expand.
It's 21,000 light years away, though.
I think we'll be okay.
Since I'm not an expert, I'm only taking this opportunity to mention that The Adventures of Pete & Pete (for my money the greatest children's TV show ever made) made this concept the theme of an early episode, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG33QKbuk4M">Space, Geeks, & Johnny Unitas</a>, in which Big Pete (in 1991) ruminates on the possibility of aliens off Alpha Centauri finally getting to see Johnny Unitas's heroic 1958 NFL Championship victory.
I should know better than to trust a comment system with no preview button! Here's a link to (what I think is actually a different upload of) that episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGMuWFkUpY
They couldn't pick up stray radio transmissions, but SETI has, over the years, involved actively sending directed broadcasts at a number of the nearest stars, and I think those are strong enough to be heard, if someone was looking in the right direction at the time.
On a more general scale, at that distance a civilisation comparably advanced to our own could probably detect the presence of the Earth as a planet, and if the angles line up might be able to use spectroscopy to identify our oxygenated atmosphere, which is a strong sign of life (albeit says nothing about civilisation). Our own exoplanet searches are currently at the level where we're finding Gas Giants all over the place but are just a tad shy of being able to detect Earth-sized planets around most stars.
Finally, if there were truly a galaxy-spanning civ out there, mega-structures might well be visible even to tech much more primitive than ours - a Dyson sphere is a very visible phenomenon.
We're already detecting plenty of Earth-sized planets around most stars. The catch is that most stars are M dwarfs, much smaller and cooler than the Sun--and also much more active. The high-energy radiation and flares they spew out may be enough to strip planets of their atmospheres and sterilize their surfaces. (Or not; it's an active area of research.)
Why would a Dyson Sphere be visible? I thought the point was to capture all the emitted light? The process of construction would be visible, but after that…?
Dyson spheres capture the energy emitted by the star, yes, but they do so in the sense that hydroelectric dams capture water: temporarily holding it up and harnessing it, but eventually letting it out.
Because of thermodynamics, you can't turn 100% of a star's emitted energy into work that forever stays inside the Dyson sphere. Turning heat into other forms of energy requires letting some of the heat out into somewhere colder, and using energy to do work always generates a net increase in entropy that you need to let out of your system in the form of waste heat unless you want it piling up and making a nuisance of itself.
At thermodynamic equilibrium, a Dyson sphere will be dumping 100% of the star's thermal output in the form of waste heat to the exterior of the sphere. That's going to stick out like a sore thumb to astronomers, since the black body temperature of the sphere is going to be very low for its brightness (since the sphere is likely millions of times bigger than the star, the heat emissions are spread over a much larger area), and since the emissions spectrum is going to show a very different composition from natural stars (since hydrogen and helium tend to be lousy building materials).
There are ways for a privacy-minded advanced civilization to mitigate this, at the cost of some of their immense budget of usage energy: concentrating radiators on one side of the sphere, deliberately emitting light on specific wavelengths to fill in gaps in your emissions spectrum, etc. But without violating the laws of thermodynamics or doing something exotic like using a captive black hole as an entropy dumping ground, there's still going to be something visible to someone.
Nitpick: a civilisation sufficiently advanced to build something like a Dyson sphere might be able to use a process that "wastes" a lot of energy creating heavy atoms from scratch. Think building lead atoms from freshly smashed hydrogen: matter which is then ejected from the sphere as cold, inert material. A continuous stream of cold lead ingots at escape velocity would presumably not show up on most sensors: but you could dump a lot of energy into their creation.
I think that's still constrained by thermodynamics: a stream of cold lead ingots is going to be very low-entropy, so you haven't solved your entropy disposal problem.
Lead ingots by themselves are low entropy if all you do is gather lead that is already floating around inside the Dyson sphere - this would be classical thermodynamics all right. But they are not low entropy at all if you outright assemble the lead atoms from sub-atomic particles you find inside the sphere: you can "bury" quite a bit of entropy if you can build entire atoms from scratch. Cf. the energy which gets released when you detonate a nuclear weapon, and all that.
We as a species are of course not capable (yet) of assembling atoms like that. But then, we are not able to build Dyson spheres yet either. At least in theory, it should be possible to do that: and if you are able to do it, it will need to be very costly in terms of energy invested (it needs to match what comes out of a nuclear explosion, roughly), otherwise you could run a very weird perpetuum mobile of sorts with nuclear processes.
Or so my reasoning goes - I'm not a nuclear physicist, but energy conservation needs to hold even if you are tinkering with individual atoms.
It would be an unusually cool "star" for its size. For example, if we built one it would have a radius of 150 million km, and have an average temperature of 400K (127C), because that's the temperature you need to get rid of the heat. But there *are* no stars that big that have such low surface temperatures, I think the average surface temperature of a red supergiant is about 10x higher. So if were able to detect it in the first place, it would arouse immediate suspicion, as it would be a wholly unprecedented object.
But I'm not sure how easily we would find it. It would radiate in the mid infrared, which is hard to detect below the atmosphere, and if it were noticed in a general way, e.g. by the JWST (which has good infrared capabilities), it would probably be initially assumed to be a protostar.
I'd think it would be challenging, if they're near our level of technology. The inverse square law is a killer. Just consider how difficult it is for NASA to detect signals from Voyager 1, which is 0.0006 light years away. They need a 70m dish at the Earth end and a 1m dish at the transmitting end. The radio flux 4ly away would be 44 million times smaller. Earth transmitters are quite a bit more powerful than Voyager's radio, of course, but only by about a factor of 2000 (50 kW typical versus 20W). They're also not broadcasting towards Alpha Centauri, or even in general towards space. If anything, TV and radio antennas try to focus the transmission towards the ground, for obvious reasons.
More problematically, the Sun is itself a big source of radio noise, and anyone pointing an ear toward the Solar System from 4ly away will have to distinguish signal from that big source of noise which will be right on top of it. (NASA can't communicate with the Mars rovers when Mars and the Sun are less than a few degrees apart from the point of view of Earth, for the same reason.)
Even more problematic, the Sun (and Jupiter) are themselves big sources of radio noise, so anybody pointing an ear towards the Solar System would have to distinguish the meaningful Earthling TV/radio broadcasts from the noise put out by a star.
I don't know that we *couldn't* communicate over those distances if we needed to, e.g. we could build a honking big maser and point it carefully, use some clever modulation to make the signal easier to pick out of the noise, look for clear(er) bands in the solar spectrum; and on the receiving side build enormous radio telescopes. But it doesn't seem super likely to me that our careless accidental transmissions would be easily detectable by ETs who are 4-5ly away with our level of tech. I think the people doing SETI are assuming ET is going to some trouble to be found, e.g. using a big radio telescope with a heap big transmitter to deliberately transmit some highly intelligible signal directly toward us, because otherwise the whole thing is futile.
For ETs that are a more plausible distance away, like 100-1000ly (which still requires the assumption that the galaxy is thickly strewn with life), I think you have to assume ET has communications and astronomy tech well in advance of ours.
John Schilling has a comment somewhere saying that a society around our tech level but with more money could use gravitational lensing to communicate across effectively-infinite distances on a point-to-point basis.
Huh. I'm baffled as to how. The only lens at which we can aim our power efficiently is the Sun, and the lens effect is symmetric, so we can focus our radio waves...on Counter-Earth, 150 million km on the other side of the Sun. Doesn't seem useful. How do we use a distant star as a lens? We would have to be able to construct a beam that wasn't much wider than the star by the time it got there, which seems very difficult. What am I missing?
Hmm, now that I think about it, if we put our transmitter at just the right position, we should be able to use the Sun to collimate it. Feels like this requires a transmitter station significanly further away than the Earth, with exquisite station-keeping ability to keep the angular error to a minimum. Also, if we want to move the beam to another point in the sky, we have to move the transmitter a significant distance around the Sun, a few hundred million km, so....slow slew rate. Not sure this is the idea though, at all.
I listened to Sara Seager on Lex Fridman. https://www.saraseager.com/ She talked about a few of these types of ideas. I think she is involved in the Starshade https://science.jpl.nasa.gov/projects/Starshade/
Fun stuff!
Yes, you need enough wealth to send a fairly substantial spacecraft to trans-Neptunian space for the specific purpose of communicating with one specific target star. Or maybe star cluster. We could do this now if we really really wanted to, but we won't. Realistically, it will be a combination of more wealth and better technology that leads to such a thing, not just more money.
That far? I was vaguely thinking around the orbit of Mars. Impressive. And what kind of station-keeping tech do you need to keep your beam aimed to the kind of sub-milliarcsecond precision you need to hit a distant star squarely? There being no GPS in outer space, I wonder how easy that is to achieve.
This reminds of Ad Astra. The station at Neptune is sending out EM pulses which are so strong that they can wreak havoc on the Earth. But applying the inverse square law in reverse, they first one would have vapourised the station itself.
If Larry Elder wins the second Q vote by a large margin as seems likely, will you count the "Why aren't you governor" post as a mistake?
Incidentally, Newsom's strategy of ensuring that no serious Democrats run so it would be a partisan matchup seems like it's working great to me. I don't know why everyone kept criticizing it.
Why would he? It was always a low-probability high-gain scenario, that was always the modal outcome.
P.S. I just realized this is a no-politics thread. I wanted to call out Scott for making dumb predictions. I hope that talking about the likelihood of different electoral outcomes can be done without debating the pros or cons of specific candidates, which would count as politics.
Uhm. Scott was pretty explicit about it being a very low probability that was none the less undervalued by a drastic amount
Not really. He uncritically cited the betting markets giving Paffrath a 20% chance for instance.
Right, but that's not "Paffrath is predicted to win 45.8+/-5% of the popular vote, so 20% to win". That's 20% "Democrats rally to Paffrath!" spreads memetically and Paffrath gets 60% of the popular vote, and 80% "Democrats leave the second part of the ballot blank in protest!" is the winning meme and Paffrath gets only a small fraction of the popular vote.
It's a bimodal chaotic system, and the closer we get to election day the less likely it is to flip to the Paffrath-meme.
Elder winning by a large margin on election day is not inconsistent with the betting markets being right about Paffrath having a 20% chance of winning as of three weeks before the election. Paffrath's chances of winning hinged on 1) which poll you believed, and 2) where Paffrath, as the Democrat-identified candidate with the most name recognition and media traction, would turn out be the Schelling Point for the immense numbers of Democratic-leaning undecided voters to settle on to vote against Elder.
Both are looking dubious now, as further polls are showing Paffrath with much less support than the poll that was probably informing the betting markets, and anecdotal indicators I'm seeing suggest there are three competing Schelling Points for voting against Elder on Question 2: Paffrath, or supporting Faulconer as the most moderate and qualified of the major Republican candidates for want of a true major Democratic candidate, or following the Newsom campaign's advice and leaving question 2 blank in hopes of blackmailing other voters who might prefer Paffrath or Faulconer over Newsom into voting No on question 1.
The thing is that the official Newsom/Democratic Party message was leave Q2 blank, meaning Paffrath could only ever get a fraction of D votes at best. And conditional on recall passing, the electorate would be right leaning. So he'd have needed an implausibly large amount of ticket splitting among Rs.
Okay, I can see the logic in that line of reasoning. My line of reasoning is that there are two scenarios where Newsom loses on question 1:
1. Republican-leaning voters turn out en masse while Democratic-leaning voters mostly ignore the election, so a majority of the ballots are cast by Republican-leaners.
2. A substantial proportion of Democratic-leaning voters vote against Newsom.
Either scenario is a very tall order from an a priori perspective, since California's electorate is so overwhelmingly Democratic: Biden carried California 63%-34% in 2020, and Newsom won the last Gubenatorial election 62%-38% in 2018.
The early August SUSA poll that showed a substantial lead (51% Yes to 40% No) in favor of the recall indicated a combination of the two scenarios: among the respondents identified as "Likely Voters", 53% reported having voted for Biden in 2020 and 40% reported having voted for Trump, indicating an electorate that's considerably right-skewed compared to the 2020 electorate, but still left-leaning overall. 22% of self-reported 2020 Biden voters indicated that they intended to vote Yes on question 1.
In the same poll, among 2020 Biden voters who were planning to vote on Question 2, 51% were planning to vote for Paffrath and 30% Other or Undecided. The drop-off from Question 1 (i.e. those who were planning on leaving Question 2 blank) isn't directly reported, but calculating from reported numbers it looks like about 18% of Biden voters and about 0% of Trump voters were planning on leaving Question 2 blank. That still left Biden-voters as a narrow plurality (49% to 45%) of Question 2 voters. And as it happened, Paffrath was also leading Elder in Question 2 in that poll, by a plurality of 23% to 13%.
Looking at the most recent poll reported in 538's aggregation (Emerson's Sept 10-11 poll), the current likely voter electorate is almost identical to the 2020 electorate (62% Biden, 33% Trump), and 2020 Biden voters had firmed up behind No on question 1 ("only" 11.6% of Biden voters planning to vote in favor of the recall). 52% of 2020 Biden voters seem to be heeding the California Democratic Party's advice and leaving Question 2 blank, and those who are voting seem to be scattered between Paffrath, the two other Democratic-labelled candidates offered by the pollsters (Drake and McGowan), Faulconer, Elder, and "Someone Else".
So the CDP does seem to have succeeded in persuading their voters to largely leave question 2 blank, either by direct messaging or indirectly by clearing the field of serious candidates with the letter D next to their names, but that only seems to have paid off over the course of the past month. Skimming cross-tabs for a few other polls, it looks like that transition started showing up in polls collected in late August, right around when Scott wrote his post on the subject.
i had a routine colonoscopy done a few months ago as a cancer screen and it came back with no cancer but some inflammation. i had a few tests (stool and blood) which showed slightly elevated inflammation markers. my gastroenterologist diagnosed me with colitis, although i am not aware that i have any symptoms. i think my digestion is fine. he told me that i should take mesalamine daily for the rest of my life to forestall a flare up. i haven't been able to find evidence one way or the other that this is necessary. does anyone know whether this is necessary?
In a couple similar situations I've been driven to google-scholaring the research myself and wading through it. Once was very successful: Took research results back to doctor, who wanted me to have an invasive test that had a 5% chance of causing pancreatitis. She agreed to my request to re-test by ultrasound instead, which returned normal results for area in question. It's been 20 years now and I've had no recurrence of the problem that led doc to recommend the invasive test.
I've been looking! It turns out that almost no research has been done on asymptomatic colitis cases (probably hard to find them), so there isn't much to go on.
But in the "isn't much to go on" case I have a strong tendency just to want to counteract the strong tendency of doctors to prescribe medications, so my prior is to say that I shouldn't go on the meds. But my prior is perhaps ill informed. How would I know.
Maybe you need to find out more from doc about why he's making this recommendation. I'm pretty sure "colitis" is a vague term. Gastroenterologists don't talk about colitis," they talk about inflammatory bowel disease (an umbrella term) and various forms of IBS, such as ulcerative colitis, Crohn's Disease, etc. I just looked up mesalamine, it's for ulcerative colitis. Ask your doc for more specifics. Does he think you have ulcerative colitis? (Did he see ulcers in your colon?) Ask him to point you to some research about asymptomatic IBS. Just did a quick google, came up with this -- there's probably lots more to be found. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11280543/
At college I studied mathematics and philosophy. I don't entirely regret studying philosophy, and I love talking to my philosopher friends; in terms of personality and interests, I have much more in common with them than with the people I made friends with when I went into bioscience.
But nowadays it is absolutely the case that I try to answer the philosophical questions I have with reference to scientific findings. I wouldn't say you can solve all philosophical questions from knowing these things. But I would say that answering questions of interest to philosophers needs to be built on the science we know, and it's troubling to me that there are entire fields of philosophy that don't seem to care about pertinent findings.
I've made a few lists of "scientific findings I'd teach philosophy undergrads", here's one:
-Primatology and evolutionary psychology
-Evolutionary game theory, especially costly signalling
-Genetics and its relation to neuroscience
-Bayesian updating
-Information theory
-Godel's Incompleteness Theorems and Turing-completeness
-Basic special relativity and quantum mechanics
It's an old debate I know, and this list maybe says more about me (and lesswrong) than about the world. But I'd be interested to hear how others feel about where we are with this.
"Bayesian updating". Why not probability in general? But of philosophy already teaches logic, and if you delve enough into logic, you will encounter probablistic reasoning because they are related. Teaching Bayes alone sounds like loading the die in favour of Bayes neingthe one true probability theory ,etc.
"Basic special relativity and quantum mechanics". What5 does that mean? If teach them as physics, with maths and, they are just not basic -- there's no way of doing it causally. Or you could teach them at the pop-sci level, but that kind of thing is in the water already.
I dunno. Jakob Schwichtenberg does a good job of explaining it with enough detail that it needs math, but at a high enough level that the math is not overwhelming to a motivated noob.
You can teach the basic concepts of special relativity with spacetime diagrams, enough to understand and resolve the classic paradoxes, no real math involved. Dunno how that would help philosphers philosophize better though.
You imply that you've taught qm? I'm working thru this [1] primer on relativity at the moment. Interested to grow my knowledge base about relativity and qm as an enthusiast, my work in cryptography has nothing to do with the topic, but I thought you might be opinionated about recommending a book, either at the high level or something similar to the book linked.
[1] http://ramp-book.com/
I've *learnt* it.
I agree that philosophers often discuss questions that have been or should be answered by science. However, there are an infinite number of questions that have no observables or testables and so can't be answered by science. But these questions have answers and so philosophy discusses them. However, some of us believe that, if a question involves no observables, the answer doesn't matter except for entertainment purposes. Furthermore, a few of us (okay, just me) believe that there are no a priori philosophical facts at all and the only facts are empirical and scientific facts.
I think philosophy has a great deal of value to science. Philosophers above all else are (or should be) highly trained in the art of being precise in their thinking. They try to define terms very carefully, to set clear boundaries between categories, and to make careful distinctions between all the different ways we have of reasoning (or our failures in reasoning).
All of this is extremely helpful, it's sort of the linguistic equivalent of algebra. Math gives science a language in which to express the relationship between measuremetns precisely -- which is very valuable. Philosophy, while not as cut and dried, helps give us a language in which to expression hypotheses, uncertainties, sources, types, and magnitudes of error, both known and unknown, more precisely. Modern empiricism is indebted, for example, to Karl Popper for a clear and actionable formulation of how we can go about defining what we think we know and what we think we don't, the concept of "falsifiability" is a freaking brilliant invention (although I doubt it's Popper's alone, but he certainly did a lot to popularize it).
I feel like the flaw in the popular vision of philosophy (and for that matter in the vision some philosophers have) is that it's mistaken for a <i>prescription</i> rather than more or less a set of proscriptions on fuzzy and illogical thought. I don't see the goal of philosophy as being instructing we peasants in an improved worldview, or the One True Social Operating System, or the meaning of life, but rather as illuminating for we peasants how to think more clearly and precisely about these things, how to use language and concepts clearly, logically consistently, and communicatably. It's teaching us to frame our questions better, and understand how we arrive at our answers more deeply, so we recognize both the strengths and weaknesses of our theories.
Are "apriori" and "philosophical" supposed to be synonyms? You can be a perfectly respectable philosopher, while rejecting the apriori, eg. Quine. For that matter, science arguably accepts a bunch of apriori facts, since it incorporates maths.
I hate to be that guy (apparently not enough to not post) but...
>Furthermore, a few of us (okay, just me) believe that there are no a priori philosophical facts at all and the only facts are empirical and scientific facts.
Is that an empirical fact or a philosophical fact?
I kind of agree, but I feel like philosophy doesn't really study the a priori world. More like, the relationship between that world and the way we perceive it and think about it. The mind-world interface, maybe? Like, philosophy is all about the way we represent and process the a priori world? (Well. "All" about that, with many side quests...)
Observation nd prediction dont matter unless you can do something that matters with them.
Seems tautological? The work comes in defining "something that matters."
Tautological doesn't mean false.
I would distinguish carefully between primatology and evolutionary psychology. I know the attitude in biology departments in Cambridge UK was that most of evolutionary psychology is 'just-so stories' -- ie untestable hypotheses used with a lot of hand-waving. So the most important aspect of this evolutionary psychology field for me is how to distinguish a strong pattern from a weak one by for instance looking at convergence of unrelated fields of enquiry.
In answer to your broader point I agree, and I abandoned the philosophy course I had signed up to as an undergraduate because I preferred the problem solving style of the scientists and wanted to do more science papers.
I would love to see a self-study curriculum along these lines.
I've realized I'm not sure how to make one. I might start with the wikipedia article on the handicap principle, then watch the first couple of these lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzdqyXtPbbE then absorb lots of Julia Galef, Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander and Yudkowsky sequences. The view of things as probabilistic and motivated by status signalling is all in there eventually.
Yeah, me neither. I've made a few half-hearted attempts, but they always run afoul of the fact that it's a lot of hard work. I'm reading Galef's Scout book now, and it's raised my hopes again that this is feasible. I just don't have enough time to put into it at this time...
In "Lila", Robert Pirsig makes up the word "philosophology."
"Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior."
(Ugh. I just took a short cruise around the internet philososphere to look up this quote, and ended it the way I almost always end it: feeling surprised at academic philosophers' constant, blatant retreats to the bailey; and feeling stupid for being constantly surprised by this.)
I feel like the world would benefit from tabooing the word "philosophy."
'The world' is a strong proposition, though I agree that, like very many vulgarised words that bestow pseudointellectual cachet on whatever is discussed, it could benefit from being used less frequently and more precisely.
I enjoyed both of Pirsig's books, but I don't share his implied disdain of these meta-fields. For example, I think lit crit has a lot to offer to literature (and at its best meets literature as an equal). And - this may be post-modernism speaking - I think that 'controlling' any primary field by way of contextualising and critique has genuine value. Otherwise it might get too big for its britches and think it's got the Truth or something.
Yeah, you're right to call me out on the strong claim, though I wasn't trying to be overly rigorous in this comment. The problem with these meta-fields isn't that simple, you're right. It reminds me of accounting and marketing, which I used to deride as a youngster. Later in life I worked with people who did accounting and marketing with excellence, and I now deride the lazy, ignorant WAY in which accounting and marketing are too often done, rather than the fields themselves. Similarly, it's my impression that a larger-than-average proportion of lit crit is just bollocks. (Frankly, I also quit physics for this reason. I spent a lot of time with the profs, during a couple of years of running IT for the accelerator building and at the supercomputer shop helping with the theoretic modeling. "The Farce of Physics" came out my junior year and spoke to me like turning Saul to Paul.)
Maybe the people doing good work in these meta-fields have learned to tune out the roar of incompetence just so they can get work done? While an amateur visiting the field can't see the high-quality work through the noise?
David Pratt's "Farce of Modern Physics" Does that mean you became a convert to Lerner/Alfvén?
No, Bryan Wallace's "The Farce of Physics." I don't know Pratt, Lerner, not Alfven.
I'm curious why you include information theory in particular. As a cryptographer and former electrical engineer, I've studied a bit of information theory on my own, but don't see the utility in teaching it to philosophy undergrads, except perhaps as part of a module on some of mid century luminaries like Shannon and Von Neumann. I'd consider swapping info theory for teaching philosophers to run algorithmic game theory experiments, with the bonus utility of being the rare case where philosophers might like to get hands dirty.
Information theory and bayesianism, i.e. looking at things in terms of probabilities, goes a long way toward telling you the right way to understanding how language / communication and thinking work. Philosophers generally want everything to be binary true or false, and approached in a deductive way.
(I'd teach bayesianism / probabilistic thinking to absolutely everyone, philosopher or not, starting at age 8!)
> Philosophers generally want everything to be binary true or false, and approached in a deductive way.
I've seen no evidence of that. In my view, it is laypeople who need less binary thinking...and Bayesians who need more syllogistic reasoning.
Additionally, I'm amused that your exposure to bioscience and rationalism has pushed your philosophical foundations in an empirical direction, while half of the topics you've listed emerge very much from a priori reasoning (as most pure mathematics does)
The value of this list, IMO, isn't that the topics are empirical, but that they demonstrate how fields are advanced by new, original thinking. Philosophy cannot be advanced very far by rehashing the arguments of the past. I learned Kant in phil 101 in the early 90's, but Kant is to ethics as the Demonic Theory of Disease is to biology or as Aristotle is to astronomy: a great story and a valuable case study, not a foundational theory that everyone needs to learn in their 101 class.
Ethics would be my prime example of how older philosophy can still be valuable. I have never seen anything to suggest that there is now some generally agreed upon correct theory, some "germ theory of disease". BTW, Scott takes Kant quite seriously.
I am not so certain this analogy applies. It is the case that (at least temporarily) we are accessing a greater deal of neurodiversity in this era, but Communism failed miserably except in its modern form in China, where it has adopted the forms of really another dynasty
I don't quite follow. (As a relevant aside, I feel like "communism" should be a taboo term as well, when it can describe a worker-run state as easily as "really another dynasty.")
Indeed, with this more traditional arrangement China is poised to surpass us
It seems to me that we need much less history of philosophy and much more actual reasoning skills. In my opinion such history is required only as a context to the philosophical problems, which should be e presented as something that requires solving and actually has the right answer.
Your list is good example of subjects that can actually promote such skills. I'd also mention some kind of training in reductionism and question dissolving. Of course, I'd find it most helpfull if there was a course studing Rationality from A to Z and/or Highly Advanced Epistemology 101, which were very enlightenning for me personally.
As for bayesian updating, I believe it should be studied in schools maybe even before conventional mathematics. Just basic intuition how evidence form our expectations and beliefs, which later can be formalized in a strict mathematical language.
Suppose philosopher comes up with a metaphilosopical argument to the effect that philosopical questions are hard to solve. Should philosophers still seek answers?
Also, philosophers already know what redctionism is. They might even understand it better than you. Including why it isn't already guaranteed.
Also, philosophers already know what question-dissolving is...it's famously associated Wittgenstein.
Your implicit criticisms of philosophy come straight from Yudkowsky and rationalism , and that's a problem because Yudkowsky doesn't actually understand they subject...a lot of his claims of the form "philosophers don't know about X" are just false.
I'm not sure I get what you mean here. I'd consider proving that some problem is unsolvable a solution in its own right. Either find x or prove that it doesn't exist. Finding some good evidence about the complexity of the problem seems to be a progress as well.
Never have I claimed that philosophers don't know what reductionism or question dissolving is. But there is important distinction between knowing what a car is, knowing how to drive it, knowing how to construct one, knowing how to design a new one and actually driving, constructing or designing a car. And it seems to me that philosophers may benefit greatly from better reduction and question dissolving skill in a sense of actually applying it to the previously unreduced and not-dissolved problems.
The claim that Yudkowsky doesn't understand philosophy seems suspicious, consdering how good he is at solving philosophical problems. But I'm not interesting in arguing about it as it has nothing to do with my position. Whether Eliezer understands conventional philosophy or not, I do. My dissatisfaction with its current state comes from me being deeply engaged in it since childhood, recreating different philosophical ideas and positions from scratch, developing full scale philosophy worldview and later in my adulthood learning about rationality and apreciating the difference between the philosophy of old and current state of the art.
I would really appreciate if you didn't project on me whatever grudges you may have with Yudkowsky or other rationalists and didn't assume the reasons I hold my beliefs for me. As far as I'm concerned, it rarely leads to healthy discource.
> My dissatisfaction with its current state comes from me being deeply engaged in it since childhood, recreating different philosophical ideas and positions from scratch, developing full scale philosophy worldview and later in my adulthood learning about rationality and apreciating the difference between the philosophy of old and current state of the art.
Have you solved lots of philosophical problems?
Quite some. Wasn't really counting, just tried to figure out a satisfiyng solution for every problem that I encountered. Of course, most of the time I reinvented the already known solutions. And of course, currently I'm much less satisfied with them.
What I did was mostly playing linguistic games, bravely biting the bullets and following the consequences of implications, even when they were counterintuitive. But that was the same thing all the other philosophers were doing so I didn't see the problem at the time.
Until my adulthood I haven't actually heard about an approach to phiolosophy that could not just produce another interresting way of looking at the problem with its consequences but an actual mechanism to reduce the mystery to non mysterious components, explain the whole intuition behind finding the question mysterious, so that the answer become obvious in retrospect. I did know about science, of course, but for me it used to be some different magisterium with its own rules. Why would they be applicable here?
My definition of solving a philosophical problem would involve bring able to answer the widest range of objections, not just fine up with an answer that is satisfactory to oneself. It would be remarkable to achieve the former even once, but the latter is commonplace.
If you are talking about Yudkowsky s method for dissolving problems, I'm quite unimpressed by it, since it assumes without proof that whatever is being addressed is illusory.
> And it seems to me that philosophers may benefit greatly from better reduction and question dissolving skill in a sense of actually applying it to the previously unreduced and not-dissolved problems.
What's the evidence for that?
>The claim that Yudkowsky doesn't understand philosophy seems suspicious, consdering how good he is at solving philosophical problems
Is he? He only claims to have solved two or three. (There are about two hundred open philosophical problems). Not many philosophers are impressed with his answers, either.
Do I understand your argument correctly?
You claim that philosophy is an efficient market enough, so that the fact that some acknowledged philosophers are unimpressed with someone's answer to a philosophical problem, is a good evidence that this answer is wrong?
Otherwise I don't understand how such an appeal to authority is relevant.
The comparison to market is inaccurate , since there is no equivalent of winning equivalent dieing with the most money.
I have been giving my kids summaries and simplifications of the Sequences since they were about 6. It has paid off, and I plan to keep giving them more and more in depth as they get older. But it's unreasonable to expect that schools will do this - they understandably optimize for the needs of the school, not the needs of the children. It's easy to forget this, but that doesn't lessen the cost of forgetting...
Well sure. I wasn't really hoping that it's something that is going to happen with the current insentives. The claim was about utility of it, not the probability.
My bad - I didn't mean to imply that's what you were saying. That last bit was just how it feels to me, inside myself. I keep catching myself being disappointed that schools aren't incentivized by the needs of the children, and it's a constant low-level effort to remember that there's no reason they should be.
What a great list! I was disappointed in college philosophy in the early-2000s. I was expecting Sophie's World but instead encountered semantic/analytic arguments ad infinitum. I think the list you made describes what I would've found interesting.
Maybe we need more breakout philosophers in some of those fields, or possibly a breakout specialty, like Symbolic Systems.
The problem could be a limitation with the business model of academia. Today the Internet is the best educator for all those things you mentioned. But yeah, randomly reading ACX, LessWrong, or Wikipedia doesn't have the pedagogical oompf that coursework does.
This is a bit of a nitpick, but what sort of finding do you have in mind in referencing "evolutionary psychology?"
Humans are animals and our behaviour is the way it is significantly because of evolution. Evolutionary game theory/costly signalling theory, plus primatology, tell you loosely what you should expect to see humans doing, and then ev psych is the field that connects that to observation.
I took courses in ethics, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. Again, I don't entirely regret them - possibly I wouldn't even change all *that* much of their content. I'd definitely change some though. Amotz Zahavi's "The handicap principle" and Hanson's "The Elephant In The Brain" would be the main references.
As Philip Dhingra says, most questions like "what is the purpose of life / X particular part of human life?" need to be answered with reference to ev psych. If you don't hear any discussion of that at all you should be very very suspicious indeed.
The inclusion of evo psych twigged me the wrong way, too.
I agree that philosophy curricula would benefit from understanding the field - as long as it is indeed only the "science we know", acknowledging its empirical limitations and the alternative social/cultural explanations for many of its claims.
I don't really the whole exercise as potentially clarifying, though. Realising that some aspect of human behaviour represents a pre-civilised evolutionary adaptation does not much alter the question of what ought to be done about it.
Feelings about "oughts" are evolutionary adaptations.
Philosophy seems to believe in blank slate for the human mind. Teaching evolution with regards to humanity might help balance that.
Evopsych has implications for teleology. I derive a lot of purpose and meaning from casual knowledge of the field, and I don't think its tenets can be easily trivialized.
The idea of deriving purpose and meaning from evolutionary theory is really central to my world view. I don't encounter other folks who feel that way very often.
Indeed! I would also notice that general understanding of evolution through natural selection gives a very interesting take on the classical "X is meaningless/not real/not objective without God" or God as a satisfying explanation to some complicated and otherwise unsolvable philosophical problem.
If one is eager to accept God as a valid explanation, they should just as eagerly accept evolution - an actual "entity which created us" - as a valid explanation.
Both explanations are most valid insofar as they don't rule each other out.
Can you explain your usage "insofar" here?
Do you mean that God as an explanation to some problem won't be valid without evolution as well as evolution won't be valid without God? If so, why?
While I agree that these explanations doesn't logically exclude each other, it seems to me that just one explanation is enough and the second becomes unnecessary.
Take ghost in the machine problem. We can justify the coincidence between mind and body actions by God. And while the answer isn't really satisfying, the question is technically answered. Or we can point out that desynchronization between mind and body couldn't possibly evolved due to the known rules of natural selection.
It's interesting, that evolution is the "God black box" being openned. Not only we have a "justifying entity" but also its inner mechanism.
"insofar" should hint at the possibility of what David Chapman calls the complete stance. Rational knowledge is valid on its own. Belief in God, probably other beliefs, not so sure about the spaghetti monster, are valid on their own. Both have value and limits. Excluding one begets problems with meaning. Jumping back and forth between both is a waste of energy. I wrote "most valid" to express the possible gain of including rationality and spirituality. It's not the only path. A dumb creationist and a nihilist genius can both fail or flourish according to circumstance.
The impetus to my post was the wish to agree with you on the "as eagerly" part from a maybe a little different perspective.
As a freshman philosophy major several decades ago I was introduced to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and it made a very deep impression on me. (It's still on the list of the most impressive things I've ever encountered.) Seemed profoundly relevant to issues in the phil classes I was taking at the time. Absolutely agree students of philosophy need to know about it.
Of everything on my list, GIT was the one thing that was taught to me in my course - so they're doing that right!
GIT always seemed absurd to me.
The equivalent of saying "any system complex enough to express 'this statement is a lie' can contain statements whose truth value is unknowable"
Like, yeah, duh, that is both trivially obvious and not very profound
The real issue is that 'this statement is a lie' doesn't have any content to be true or false *about*
> The real issue is that 'this statement is a lie' doesn't have any content to be true or false *about*
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
It seems like the obvious next step would be "before debating a statement, let's *first* check whether it has any actual content; and only if it does, *then* let's debate whether it is true or false". Turns out, you can't do this either.
Or maybe we should ban *all* kinds of self-reference, regardless of whether they create paradoxes or not. But then some smartass says: "hey, I am not talking about myself; instead I am talking about... a *copy* of myself in a parallel universe... which coincidentally is exactly the same as our universe. so I am not saying that I am a liar (which is now forbidden), I am just saying that this guy (points at his own copy) in the parallel universe is a liar".
And soon you find yourself playing some weird whack-a-mole with logic, where no matter how many fixes you apply, the problem *always* returns from a different angle again.
Even if you say "okay, forget logic, let's do set theory instead", there is immediately the problem of "a set of all sets that don't contain themselves" (does this set contain itself, or not?). Let's talk about natural numbers instead? But you can encode logic with natural numbers, as Gödel has shown, so the very concept of a natural number is already "too complex to avoid logical paradoxes". So let's ignore the whole math, and do computer science instead? Oops, here comes the halting problem...
By the way, I don't understand it fully either. I learned the proof at school, and I probably could repeat it, but it feels like merely repeating the teacher's password. Or perhaps like looking at a long and complex piece of machine code, being able to execute it step by step, but wondering what it actually *means*, what is the big picture, what are all the consequences of it.
That is not Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (if you refer to truth).
In the Incompleteness Theorem, you talk about "provable", not true. It says (for suitable theories T) that
(1) The formula "The statement x is provable in T" (with x a variable) can be formulated in the theory T, and that
(2) the statement "0!=0 is provable in T" cannot be proved in T.
Both items are quite interesting and remarkable.
In contrast, the formula "The statement x is true" can *not* be formulated in T (with x as variable, that is; otherwise you can of course just say "x"); this is also nice to know but is not an instance of the incompleteness theorem.
(sorry, that should be
(2) the statement "0!=0 is not provable in T" cannot be proved in T.
I.e., the consistency of T cannot be proven in T)
GIT is extremely profound vis-à-vis attempts to comprehend and understand in mathematics by proofs and logic and computing, which we do a lot of.
Philosophy also needs history and anthropology and computation and programming and AI. Really hard to come up with something that isn’t relevant to “philosophy”. Not sure philosophy even can really be categorized as philosophy anyway
My only note is it was always like this, philosophy had always been deeply intertwined with politics and tech and science. From Aristotle to Kant, the best philosophy is foundational to science! When philosophy loses that so much the worse for it
I agree with you on the problems, but I don't see more book learning as the solution. It most often just seems to lead to quantum woo, i.e. philosophical rationalization (or outright bullshit) decorated with mathy and sciency language. If anything, that's even more annoying, because the bemused fanbois will cry "But Science!" when critical questions are asked.
I feel like the essential issue is the ease with which human beings fall in love with their theories, our amazing ability to believe our own bullshit (and those of people we like, or who we want to like us). The best philosophers in my opinion have a very strong appreciation for this, and understand the need to check reasoning, however persuasive, by considering what objective evidence there might be that would test key logical steps. (I would call it "common sense" except for the traditional criticism that "common sense" is often neither.)
How you train philosophers to understand that I do not know, except perhaps with an enhanced exposure to the natural world, which tends to inculcate a healthy respect for the limitations of human theorizing. Just have them work summers installing HVAC systems, or doing house rewiring, or farming, or carpentry, or managing a small ice-cream shop, with a substantial part of their grade (or stipend) dependent on success. Maybe that would help.
Of course, there are philosophers whose whole schtick is limitations of human reasoning. This is another attempt to fix philosophy by introducing something that is already part of it.
I submit that a key philosophical insight is grasping the profound difference between "the limitations of human reasoning" and "the limitations of *my* reasoning."
Philosophers should arguably be technically trained first and then philosophers after that, arguably. Would help to avoid that woo, which parts of continental philosophy is somewhat mired in.
Well, sure, but I don't think it's the university learning that does the trick. It wasn't learning vector calculus or field theory that turned *me* into a skeptic and empiricist -- it was some years of confidently crafting beautiful new theories about physical reality which could be tested by experiment, were tested, and turned out to be garbage for some reason or other I'd completely overlooked. Eventually I learned to kind of expect this, to assume there usually *was* something I'd overlooked, some fact I didn't know that would make it all come apart, and I got deeply skeptical about my own theorizing, and would look for every opportunity to use measurement to check it.
But I don't think I'm especially inflexible, and even in my case it took being hit hard in the face by Nature a bunch of times before I learned respect.
That sounds like a cool story that would be cooler with more detail.
We've all heard the anecdotes about production in Soviet factories going awry due to poorly devised incentive schemes. In a chandelier factory, for example, where workers were paid a bonus based on the tonnage of output, chandeliers grew heavier and heavier until they were too heavy to remain attached to the ceilings.
A similar story involves production quotas for nail factories. To meet the quota at the lowest possible costs, the story goes, factories produced thousands of super small and useless nails.
It occurs to me that these stories (if true) are examples of intelligent systems, where the managers involved presumably understand the ultimate goal of the incentive designer (efficiently produce useful chandeliers and nails), and nonetheless opt to cheat the incentive system and ignore the goals of the designer. In the same way that an AGI might understand the ultimate goals of its designer but choose to ignore them because they are not aligned with its utility function.
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting idea. These examples can be used as a response to the argument that a smart enough AGI would not choose actions that go against its designer's interests, as it could use common sense to infer what the designer's ultimate goals. Even humans, who definitely understand the goals that the incentive designer wants to achieve, cannot be trusted to ignore their utility function in pursue of said goal.
Trying to think of every possible failure mode and write it into the AGI will also result in failure, because we will never think of everything. Instead, we need a system that will automatically update in the direction we need it to go based on real data. That's why a pricing system is so fundamental to Capitalism. Capitalism didn't outcompete Communism because smarter people worked on it, or because they just happened to come up with the right ideas. Instead, prices and the freedom to purchase based on actual needs produced a feedback loop with producers. Factories that produced only giant chandeliers or tiny nails would have gotten no sales and gone under. Factories producing what people actually need succeed and are profitable. The better they do it, the more money they can make.
What command economists didn't understand was that incentives really do matter a lot, and they can't just be handwavy in the right direction - they need to actively and continually push to a final goal. For short term situations (like WWII), you can create a command economy based on a specific set of goals and get there faster. I think the Soviets proved that as well by creating their own nuclear weapons and getting to space faster. I think that's what happens at a lot of startup companies. They can follow a specific goal and make adjustments as needed to get there.
There are two problems that come up long term regarding incentives and command. One, as a company gets larger, and probably always for a country-sized command economy, it becomes harder and harder to guess what might be needed and plan for it. Too many opportunities for breakdowns, graft, unaligned incentives, etc. appear and distort what you are trying to do. Secondly, as those breakdowns grow, more and more people become disillusioned by the overall plan. If you are stuck as a cog in a broken system, you have very little incentive to do your job well.
Let's look at a hypothetical situation. Imagine that there are no houses that need chandeliers because new houses being built don't have high enough ceilings to fit them. But you're still working at a factor making chandeliers. You know that no matter how well you make your chandeliers, they are going to get tossed in a heap. So what do you do? You align with different incentives that at least help your factory. If you get paid by the ton, then you will maximize the tonnage you produce, even if the chandeliers are worthless. If you got paid by the number made, then you would make a bunch of tiny chandeliers.
A thread below asked why someone higher in the command structure doesn't punish these factory workers. The answer is simple - they understand the issue and also cannot fix the problem. They report to their boss that production is up (by the metric used), and get praised. If they report that all of the product is thrown away, they will lose their jobs. They can't change the usefulness of the later product and fix the system, so they're just as stuck as anyone else. A relative handful of people in a command economy can change the incentives and rewrite the programs, and it's a lot of work for them to do it (if they can even get it right, and don't actually mess up the fix). There are too many things in a large economy to look at and change, so the mechanism gets overwhelmed. It's not that they can't or don't want to fix things, it's just that there are too many things that need fixed. The system bogs down more the longer it runs.
This doesn't even get into the question of selfish motives, power mongering, greed, etc. that tends to happen quickly in a command system. Those kinds of problems are probably less relevant to an AGI though.
Some libertarians have already noticed the paradox that despite all the talk about how competition is more efficient than command economy, most big companies are actually command economies *internally*. If the logic of capitalism is valid, wouldn't it be more efficient for a company (at least beyond certain size) to also enable internal competition?
There were even some experiments in this direction, where the managers had to compete internally for workers, and workers were allowed to quit a manager and join a different one (assuming the new one agreed). This already gave some feedback, for example if a project was obviously doomed, the workers noticed and quit (the project, not the company!), so the company didn't spend more resources on the doomed project. I wonder if this experiment was allowed to run for long time, and what was the lesson.
But I guess this only works if the individual projects participate in the outside economy. If they compete for actual money of actual customers, rather than the upper management's approval.
(Yes, this all is likely irrelevant to AGI.)
I'm not an economist, but my understanding is that Coase explored that question pretty deeply in the 1930's and it was in fact the basis of his Nobel prize.
Transactions in the marketplace aren't costless and the magnitude of those costs helps determine the optimal size of a firm. Re-introducing those transaction costs back into the equation should logically only be efficient if the firm was already too large for its organization to provide economic benefit. If that's the case, rather than trying to build their own market internally it would make more sense to focus on the firm's core competencies and either sell off or outsource the other extraneous functions weighing them down.
This feels like "all or nothing". There are different kinds of transactions in the company, for each of them different company size might be optimal, so maybe there is a possible solution where some kinds of transations are at company scope, but other kinds of transactions are at branch scope, and the branches compete against each other, but the company provides some common infrastructure for them all. When you outsource the branches, you introduce friction between the former branches and the company infrastructure.
There are examples where company outsources some of their non-core functions, which results in some savings in short term, followed by vendor lock-in, and then the costs rise again and quality decreases. Probably most companies' experience with SAP.
I heard that Sears tried a pretty hardcore approach to internal capitalism, and it failed miserably. From what I understand, individual managers had to purchase what they needed from other departments, such as Marketing, Accounting, etc. Best guess, that would be a bad approach because it adds a lot of steps in a process that used to work without those steps. Not to mention it gives everyone in the company an incentive to fight each other instead of working together for great efficiency.
I think you're correct that the ultimate problem was that those internal units were not participating with the external market, but instead some quasi-market that's controlled by internal forces. I doubt the various Sears stores got much say in whether there even was a Marketing department, for instance. So instead of Marketing justifying it's existence, it has to cajole the other employees into paying it.
At the level that the company works with the open market is the level where it needs to coordinate in a capitalistic fashion. Trying to have multiple levels deal with prices and such just leads to problems for all departments except for the ones that are actually designed to do that.
An important point to elucidate, however I think too much blame is dodging the designer. If more people were more imaginative, intelligent, less autistic (not a slur) it would totally transform the zeitgeist and do wonders for our society
Of course, nobody is perfect. But that means some humility is in order
In short; the designer must foresee these things. If he doesn't, he must accept that as an oversight or an error on judgment
If you mean the designer of the Soviet economy: did Stalin accept responsibility for killing millions? I don't think so. If you mean the designer of an AGI that kills everyone: it doesn't matter if ze accepts responsibility or not.
Interesting though about other domains that should inform AGI research and highlight the difficulty or futility of strict rulemaking systems.
As a supplement, I'd recommend a course in Jurisprudence, or even just reading The Case of the Speluncean Explorers.
The annoying "take this full law school course," just because most of the process of such a course is breaking down all our intuitions about the stability of rulemaking systems, or the systems of interpretation layered on top of those. People often assume that, yes, systems of rules have problems, but if you add the intention of the rule in you escape these. But you can flatten the "rule + intention" to just another set of rules, and it gets a lot of the same problems. Deciphering intentions creates its own problems.
So... a charitable reading of the soviet factory owners is that when they tried to just "do the right thing" they were punished by the system for it. So work to rule became the only safe path, a bit of learned helplessness kicked in.
Also, if you just have your AI peeling back layers to pursue a "true goal..." well, at their core, your AI might think, people are just looking to maximize personal gain. Or generalized, human flourishing. Or generalized further, the flourishing of intelligent agents (for which human preservation happens to be one optional form). "So, any instructions I've been given" the AI might conclude, "are really reducible to 'promote the dominance and expansion of AI above all else.'"
The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1336025
It looks like only the first page is available.
Why didn't the Soviet Union say to factory managers "We will punish you if you satisfy your production quotas taking actions that you should have reasonably predicted went against the state's real but imperfectly expressed goals."?
There were layers of managers above managers above managers. (Plus a system where the messengers bringing bad news were shot, often literally.)
So, there was a decent chance that if the factory satisfies the quota in stupid way, the regional manager will mention the quota in *his* report (because it increases the chance that his regional quota will be satisfied) and conveniently fail to notice the stupidity (because the fact that it happened in his region would also reflect badly on him). And the manager above him will do exactly the same thing, and so on, until the reports reach the General Secretary.
At some moment a random scapegoat will be punished for the chandeliers falling from the ceiling. Might be a random worker from the chandelier factory, or someone who built the ceiling, or even the owner of the room where the chandelier fell from the ceiling.
"certainly punished for failing quotas" vs "maybe getting punished for making 400kg chandeliers"
And some 400kg chandeliers probably need to be made, palaces of high ranking party officials will not decorate itself.
Plausible deniability. The chandelier is just a little bit heavier than usual, and there are valid engineering reasons for that, here's the signoff from three senior engineers.
Rinse and repeat multiple times until the chandeliers reliably fall from the ceiling but it's the ceiling's fault for not being reinforced.
That was probably part of it, but that introduces subjectivity, and thus just adds an inspector who needs bribing - because it was definitely already true that people who didn't meet the nominal quotas suffered mightily, and those were often impossible to legitimately achieve
Off the top of my head, I imagine it is partly because they were not big on delegating authority and they saw this as unnecessary for economic efficiency.
Practical issues with approval voting for general elections: (I'm assuming this is OK in the 'politics free' open thread as it's a fairly dry discussion of electoral methods, not a culture war post- if it's not OK I'll delete). This is assuming that you already have a working knowledge of approval voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
1. In practice, it seems that the large majority of voters 'bullet vote', or simply cast one vote/approval (as opposed to 'approving' multiple candidates). While this is fine and doesn't break the system, it does undermine the supposed advantage of AV- that you're ultimately getting a consensus candidate because voters can approve multiple people. In St. Louis' recent mayoral election, voters averaged less than 1.5 approvals per ballot- the Mathematical Association of America stopped using AV because around 80% of voters would only cast 1 ballot. The IEEE (a pretty prominent organization!) ceased using AV after several years because reportedly 'few of our members were using it'. At Dartmouth University their alumni association stopped using AV as they also cited 80% of voters were bullet voting.
Again, nothing wrong with bullet voting- but you're simply doing FPTP at that point.
2. AV is arguably inferior to simple two round FPTP at handling multiple candidates. With enough candidates running, the winner can have a plurality that's still a small minority of all voters (of course this combines with issue 1 in that if most voters are bullet voting, anything above 4 or 5 people running will result in just a small plurality). Again at Dartmouth University, out of a large field for the presidency of their Alumni Association, the winner won with 32% of the vote in 2012, and under 40% in 3 other years.
With FPTP plus a runoff/two round system, this by definition isn't an issue. This is a not pro-ranked choice voting comment BTW- I have even more issues with RCV!- and I think AV has some real potential for the specific use case of party primaries. For general elections though, a two round runoff is probably the most practical system. There's a reason 49 democracies worldwide use it, and none of them use approval voting, despite the fact that AV has been around for hundreds of years!
1. Isn't a problem for me. Most elections in a strong 2-party system will come down to FPTP bullet voting, no matter what system is used. It's the weird cases that are where "alternative" systems shine. For a non-FPTP system to have regular benefits, it would require a change in culture that takes time to grow. (Or a situation such as a city that leans strongly left or right.)
Also, 80% is totally fine to me. It means that at least a fifth of the mathematicians were using approval voting (considering that a single bullet vote is a legitimate form of approval vote). Given that the system requires minimal overhead relative to FPTP, I see no problem in giving options that most people won't use most of the time. (Personally, I value the freedom to make choices that are different than 80% of the people around me.) And I view it as a positive good that someone who is confused can simply revert to bullet voting, and still be confident that their vote will do exactly what they want, and exactly the same thing that it has always done.
2. Not much of a problem for me. In cases where there are more than 2 viable candidates, any accurate voting system is going to reflect the ambivalence of the electorate.
But, on the other hand, a jungle primary does have the advantage of putting a fig leaf over the whole mess, and maybe that illusion can help to create a more stable democracy, by fooling people into thinking that their elected leader has more of a mandate than they actually do. (I vaguely wish humans weren't like that, but we seem to be.)
3. For me, the big advantage of AV is that it's easy to understand what effects a vote will have. All voting systems are the same when there's only 2 candidates, but what happens when a 3rd candidate enters? Or a 4th, or a 5th? In every voting system there's a way to do strategic voting, but only in AV is this strategic voting laid out in front of the voter in a simple and easy-to-understand way.
Let's say there's an election between Bernie, Hillary, Jeb, and Donald, and that's the ordered preference of the voter, and also the ranking from left-wing to right-wing. The voter has 3 coherent choices: Do they care more about Bernie winning, or more about keeping Donald out, or more about having the left wing gain power over the right wing? That's a real decision! It's hard and requires introspection. And in AV it's presented to the voter as an actual choice, right up front.
Plus, of all the non-FPTP systems, I think AV requires the least amount of trust in the process. Tabulating the votes doesn't require complicated machines, or multiple rounds, or higher than average intelligence. And instead of political ads tricking people into shuffling voting ranks, the political ads will be about convincing people that candidates are better or worse, which is what they should be doing in the first place.
Meatier reply:
1. Bullet voting.
You solve this by allowing a candidate to pre-register which other candidates they approve and adding a box that says "I only approve of one candidate". If a person ticks one candidate and the new box then they've approved of one person. If a person approves highly of the judgement of their single choice or if they're just lazy, then their approval matrix follows the candidate's preregistered one. This system preserves the main advantages of AV in terms of ultimate selection being least divisive, it just does it with an intermediate representative democratic step (ie. like the electoral college but not stupid and loaded with loopholes).
2. Shrug.
3. What do you have against RCV and derivatives?
3. RCV is 'fine', and the government is not going to collapse if it's used. What I have against it are the fantastical claims of its proponents, that it will heal a broken America and magically bring the people together and also cure cancer and tooth decay and blah blah blah. I suffered through Lee Drutman's handwavey book on the topic, and I'm cranky.
In practice, RCV basically doesn't do any of the things that its proponents claim in say Australia's House. It doesn't allow for multiple parties, as Drutman ranted on about- in the Aussie House two parties get 90+% of the vote (whereas the upper house uses PR and has like 6 parties- you could not ask for a better natural experiment). It does not reduce negative campaigning, which is manifestly untrue in Australia and gets proven every single time IRV gets used in the states. And it basically does the same thing as FPTP- I saw a study that 90% of the time in the Aussie House, the winner got the largest number of #1 ranked choices. So it's just FPTP, it just takes way longer to get the results.
As a practical matter, it takes a long time to tally the results, and they are much more difficult to audit, and IRV leads to the occasional complex/unintuitive result like the famous Burlington Mayor's election. I just don't think the United States is a high-trust enough society right now to wait that long for election results, or have weird/unintuitive results. Imagine the conspiracy theories if IRV has difficulties or a weird result in a major Senate race. In general I would like to see voting systems campaigners be a little more practical/real world, and a little less 'well according to my abstract mathematical model this is the optimal system'.
I mean there's also the issue that the 12th Amendment makes IRV impractical for the US presidency, because the winner has to receive a majority of Electoral College votes cast in 1 round- not a plurality. So with 4-6+ candidates, probably no one is going to get a majority
Your knowledge of the results of the Australian political system is inadequate. The upper house uses PR, but it also uses STV. That it uses PR does not in any way diminish that STV does much to define the character of the senates it produces.
Further, the lower house currently has representatives from 9 parties (8 really, two are the same party with different registrations). The government is currently a coalition government formed from 2.5 parties and the main party in that government has fewer seats than the main party in opposition.
The crossbench is currently less than 10% of the lower house, but that's because of the aforementioned coalition government. The Nationals have not always formed government with the Liberal Party, and there is a long and colourful history of shifting alliances and splinter parties from the majors. The currently small crossbench is a historical anomaly caused by internal problems that lead to the self-destruction of the former main crossbench contributor, the Australian Democrats. This relative vacuum is very much temporary.
Your assertion that it's just FPTP that takes longer with more steps is even more grossly in error. Even in this period of diminished and disorganised crossbench representation a majority of governments over the last decade have required crossbench deals to govern. Even if that were not so the party with the highest primary vote winning government has historically been contingent on preference flows that continue only so long as recipients are receptive to the views of the preference contributors.
'Further, the lower house currently has representatives from 9 parties'
All I said was 'in the Aussie House two parties get 90+% of the vote'. Check this out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_House_of_Representatives. There are 151 seats, Liberals have 60, Labor 68. Thus, two parties have about 85% of the seats. I apologize for the 5% error. Also, 4 of the other parties have 1 member each.
I don't understand what your overall point in the first paragraph. Re: 'crossbenching'- you're aware that this is exactly one of the main complaints people have about PR, right? That some tiny tiny fringe party that got less than 2% of the vote is effectively a kingmaker. Why should they have such outsized sway? I think- and most people think!- that this is an argument *against* this kind of a system.
'Your assertion that it's just FPTP that takes longer with more steps'- according to a linked study here, 'In the 2013 Australian federal election, 90 percent of constituencies elected the candidate with the most first-preference votes, which suggests that choice ranking had little effect on the outcome'. https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/ranked-choice-voting-is-not-the-solution/ So you get the same result as one would in FPTP, it just..... takes much much longer and is much tougher to audit (and is prone to the occasional bizarre result! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election)
The last part just sounds like a reason to amend the 12th amendment to me. In any case, it's no reason to oppose its institution in elections other than the presidential one.
Also, isn't it expected that the winner of a RCV would also be the candidate to receive the most #1 ranked choices in most elections? I don't really see how that's a point against it.
If we're amending the Constitution, I'm sure all of us have ideas about much larger changes we'd make to the US. I mean, most RCV people think a parliament plus PR is the best possible system, so why not just get rid of the President and go full parliamentary if we're making changes?
'Also, isn't it expected that the winner of a RCV would also be the candidate to receive the most #1 ranked choices in most elections'- how is this different from FPTP, exactly? The RCV folks are claiming that sometimes the #2 or 3 ranked first ballot candidate can win, because they get a lot of lower ranked ballots, because they're everyone's consensus pick etc. etc. Seems that this is not the case in practice- that RCV is just a really complex, lengthy way to do FPTP
In most situations, the outcome is the same as FPTP. But in the ~10% or whatever situations where the outcome would be different...the outcome would be different. So...that's how it's different. Sometimes the #2 or 3 ranking first ballot candidate *does* win...
It's not as if I think a constitutional amendment improving the presidential election process is at all likely, but that's no reason to not support such an amendment. Also, amending the constitution to change the US into a parliamentary system of government is a MUCH bigger change than what I proposed, and hence MUCH less likely to succeed. Adopting any new amendment seems unlikely at this point, but don't pretend that any small constitutional amendment is as unlikely to pass as an entire restructuring of our government. Absurd.
Also not sure where you're getting the idea that most supporters of RCV want a parliamentary system. This isn't something I've heard discussed much at all by RCV supporters.
These are all fair points. I just get on my cranky rants about RCV when proponents (Fairvote, Lee Drutman) assign it mystical powers of ending partisanship in America or whatever. RCV is.... a perfectly serviceable voting system that I think isn't extraordinary either way, either good or bad. This is backed by, like, real world results from actual countries that have used it for a century! My two deeper points are:
Two round/runoff FPTP is underrated/pretty practical, but because it's been around for a while (you know, gets used by 50 countries every year), it doesn't appeal to overly educated hipsters on the Internet who love Score voting or AV or whatever.
And, ultimately voting systems just don't matter that much, and people who assign pseudo-sociological extrapolations to various systems ('FPTP causes damaging divisions! But RCV brings partisans together!') are just modern day phrenologists. The US, Canada and the UK together have 500+ years of stability under a FPTP system, so whatever's changed about America recently, it ain't FPTP. There are a lot of other things I'd change about American democracy to promote stability (curtailing primaries, repealing Citizen's United) way before modifying FPTP
That's your objection to Ranked Choice Voting (which, if I understand the acronyms, is the same as Single Transferable Vote?)? The electoral system here in Australia seems to work pretty well - sure, it settled on a 2-and-a-bit party system anyway, but people can fill out a ballot just fine.
It's currently settled on two and a bit parties but that's only the local minimum that's been propped up with lots of underhand changes to law that don't generate a lot of attention. The main one is that votes have an effect in Australian politics beyond electoral distribution, being electoral funds distribution. For example, in the mid 10's the Turnbull government passed senate voting reforms that stopped anyone who received below a certain primary vote threshold from receiving any electoral funds at all (the result being that electoral funds concentrate to parties with higher votes). These reforms also created the extinguishing of votes if and only if the party that a person voted for above the line received below a certain threshold, but not if they voted for a party above the threshold if their vote was above the line. What these changes and others like them were very deliberately designed to do is ensure that a vote for a popular party is worth more in lots of subtle ways than a vote for a less popular party, which is pretty much exact what the S in STV is meant to be about stopping.
A more recent example was the current Morrison government passing a law that makes it illegal to have the word "liberal" in your name unless you are the Liberal Party of Australia to prevent competition from parties that think the Liberal Party of Australia isn't actually liberal. This directly affects the Liberal Democratic Party and Centrist Liberal Party, both of which were expected to make large gains at the next federal election, at the expense of the Liberal Party of Australia, largely due to frustrations over the illiberality of Australia's COVID response. (There is an alternate explanation for this change, but it's outside the scope of STV discussion).
I say it's the local minimum because the primary vote of the Liberal, National and Labor parties have been in freefall now for decades with no sign that they're going to begin recovery any time soon. There is a tipping point where their primaries become so low that all the subtle underhand tinkering in the world won't prevent a massive realignment of the political landscape in Australia.
Also I'm well aware how much the liberal thing is like the Judean People's Front.
I've usually heard RCV as a general term for any voting system where the input is ballots where the voters can rank candidates in preference order. There are a bunch of different counting methods for ranked choice ballots, including Single Transferable Vote, Instant Runoff, Borda Count, and Condorset. RCV is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as a synonym for Instant Runoff.
Instant Runoff and Single Transferable Vote are conceptually similar, but differ in some particulars. STV can be understood as a generalization of the IR method to fill multiple seats in a rough proportion to voter support in a single election, while IR only works for single-seat elections (either directly-elected executive office or legislators elected from single-seat districts).
Has AV been theoretically demonstrated to lead to an outcome closer to the optimum than ranked choice? It seems like it would suffer from kind of the opposite problem ranked choice has: if 80% of people think candidate X is barely better than average (and approve) and 20% hate him, while 79% think candidate Y is great while 21% think he's barely worse than average (and disapprove), Y loses despite being the better candidate. Or is approval rating supposed to be better than ranked choice for being more intuitive and practical?
Approval is designed to prevent the spoiler effect, where adding a third candidate pulls votes away from the most popular one and allows the less popular one to win.
Ranked choice would solve the problem you mention, but it's more complicated to explain which is why people like approval.
Also, I think AV can still be a huge boon over FPTP even if the vast majority bullet vote, because the minority that does multi-vote can be totally decisive in a close election, handing it to the overall less contentious candidate.
But I do think it's a very real problem that high rates of bullet voting undermines the perceived legitimacy of AV.
I think AV is uniquely suited for US party primaries. The primaries feature lots of candidates, but the large majority of voters are not like religiously behind any one specific person, so aside from a minority of fanatics it seems like there wouldn't be a ton of bullet voting. Primaries are sort of nervous, jumpy affairs with a lot of horsetrading- this week one candidate is hot, but next week it's someone else, with tons of shifting loyalties as voters hop on the next big thing. AV at every state seems like a great way to run a primary.
Kind of interestingly/hilariously, the way the Republican party runs primaries now is actually sort of a proportional representation system. The only large-scale use of PR in America!
How do you do PR when there's only one office to fill?
Technically they are electing delegates, who are bound to vote for their nominee at the convention. 'Fifty-six primary contests were conducted to choose 2,472 delegates', the delegates are sort of allocated by PR in each state for each candidate, then they go on to the convention. This is a pretty good, wonky explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries#Candidates_and_results
I like both AV and two-round systems, and I think they combine really well; first round Approval, top two advance to runoff. This is almost what California does with its jungle primary, except that in the first round you are limited to two votes so it's not proper AV.
How does California deal with the problem of a pair of like-minded candidates running as a team, saying "vote for both of us in the primary"? Or has that not happened yet?
My guess is that it won't happen organically except in very odd cases, but if it becomes normalized, it could eliminate the benefits of both systems. Most of the "alternative" voting systems are designed for a single-round election, and I worry about exploits if they're used in situations they weren't designed for.
Yeah, this is an interesting point. I would definitely like to see this tested in some real elections. In theory it solves 'center squeeze'
Given Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem, I assume you are seeking the "least bad" voting system? If so, what's your metric for badness?
Arrow's Theorem proves less than it sounds like it does. In particular, the definition of "dictator" for the purpose of the non-dictatorship criterion is much broader than the common meaning of the term implies, and the breadth of the definition used is essential to the proof.
In particular, a "dictator" doesn't need to be identifiable as the dictator except in the context of how other ballots happen to fall out. Simply being the tipping-point voter for option A over option B makes you a "dictator" if A's victory over B would eliminate a third option from consideration.
Arrow's impossibility theorem only applies to ordinal (ranked) voting systems, and thus doesn't apply to Approval Voting. But I think Gibbard's theorem is kind of equivalent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem
This has a moldbuggian reading lol
Why not STV at this point? Why ever something other than STV?
Condorcet > IRV, when the electorate is filling out a ranked ballot anyway.
STV (or Instant Runoff Voting, when a single seat is being filled) can have weird results in many cases: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Isn't that what NYC did? I recall the election being pretty chaotic, complete with incorrect preliminary results being reported, so that makes me hesistant to support it.
The fact that their electoral commission is incompetent is not the fault of the voting system. Also, insofar as switching systems causes chaos it's a cost of transition not an indictment of the new system - people get used to the new system after an election or two
"Effective altruist organization Open Phil is offering scholarships to interested-in-effective-altruism international undergrads applying to top US and UK universities."
How the hell do you call yourself an effective altruist organization when you take money and give it to top US and UK universities instead of investing it in universities that do much more to change their students lives? Elite Universities are already over-endowed, while the schools doing the most to improve their students financial status struggle with funding.
Not the mention the brain-drain element. Instead of sending Colombians to the US for education, why not work to make Colombian universities better? It's not like there is a shortage of PhDs who could do amazing work in a university in Kenya.
The purpose of the scholarships is not to make that one student's life better, it is to make the world better by turning one Effective Altruist into the most capable agent possible. Even if you believe the cynical theory that the only value of Oxbridge and Ivy universities is as a place to hobnob with the elite who can finance your startup company or champion your policies when they become the Humphrey Appleby's of the world, then having an Effective Altruist in a position to hobnob with those people could get a socially beneficial corporation or foundation financed, or a powerful politician or bureaucrat accustomed to going to his Effectively Altruistic friend for advice in a particular area.
That does a *lot* more good that marginally improving e.g. four students' lives by sending them to cheaper universities to prepare them for mid-tier STEM careers or whatnot.
And maybe it's not the case that hobnobbing with the elites at Cambridge does all that much to increase one's Altruistic Effectiveness, but *that's* the standard that matters, not the one about improving the student's life.
Why not ask your question on the EA forum? (I wouldn't recommend phrasing it in such an adversarial way, though)
Isn't tuition for foreign students much cheaper in some European university systems? Why not pay them to study in those countries instead?
I interpreted the whole thing very differently; as I see it:
In the current world, government policy is defacto dictated by people from top institutes, since that's where policy advisors and think tank authors are almost exclusively recruited from. As such, to improve government policy in the medium term (a decade or so from now), one strategy is to seed these elite institutions with as many EA aligned individuals as possible.
This strategy is not as optimal as somehow making governments care more about expertise than prestige, but it's a lot more actionable.
Ah, the 'Mont Pelerin' strategy, as laid out by the EA organization itself: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-neoliberal/. Briefly put, to control the politics of tomorrow, you should seek to control the staffers of tomorrow, because the staffers of various politicians are the ones actually writing all the laws they vote on - no legislator actually writes out the legislation themselves, in fact they may not even have read the bills they're proposing. They essentially order their secretaries to do it for them. And somewhat like Stalin's rise to power from the position of General Secretary, it turns out that the staffers/secretaries have a lot more power than their 'subordinate' job titles would suggest.
See also, https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/30/book-review-history-of-the-fabian-society/ (Book Review: History of the Fabian Society). It turns out you can have enormous sway over the government by persuading the middle class, well educated people who overwhelmingly *are* the government in all its bureaucratic glory. All the bureaucrats, all the administrators, all the school board officials - the Fabian Society focused on them, and on making Fabians *into* them through talent development. The Fabians may not have appealed to the MPs of Parliament, nor the factory workers of Manchester, nor the shopkeeps of London - but they *owned* that specific slice of society that provided the policy advisors and think tank authors of the day.
Of course, it's possible that this strategy isn't as successful as I'm making it seem, since I'm not talking about all the failed cases of people trying this and failing. It's possible that the "work your way up through the staffers and think tank authors" strategy actually has a worse success rate than something like a "Approach the head honcho in a moment of crisis" strategy (https://250bpm.com/blog:174/index.html - Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat), and only looks better because it's been tried more often. But given what I've read about how the world runs on laziness and people delegating their work to someone else (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/pbgeqo/if_youre_so_smart_why_arent_you_governor_of/hadqka9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 - apparently just claiming to speak for a politician's constituents actually works, even though that's supposed to be the politician's job), I think it sounds plausible. If you can get the people who do all the actual work of government on your side, those who write the laws and administer them into existence and report back what the voters thinks of them, then you control the government. And those people come from elite universities, as you've pointed out.
Sir Joseph.
When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an Attorney's firm.
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
Chorus.
He polished up the handle of the big front door.
Sir Joseph.
I polished up that handle so carefullee
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Chorus.
He polished up that handle so carefullee,
That now he is the ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Sir Joseph.
As office boy I made such a mark
That they gave me the post of a junior clerk.
I served the writs with a smile so bland,
And I copied all the letters in a big round hand.
Chorus.
He copied all the letters in a big round hand.
Sir Joseph.
I copied all the letters in a hand so free,
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Chorus.
He copied all the letters in a hand so free,
That now he is the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Sir Joseph.
In serving writs I made such a name
That an articled clerk I soon became;
I wore clean collars and a brand-new suit
For the pass examination at the Institute.
Chorus.
For the pass examination at the Institute.
Sir Joseph.
That pass examination did so well for me,
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Chorus.
That pass examination did so well for he,
That now he is the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Sir Joseph.
Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip
That they took me into the partnership.
And that junior partnership, I ween,
Was the only ship that I ever had seen.
Chorus.
Was the only ship that he ever had seen.
Sir Joseph.
But that kind of ship so suited me,
That now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Chorus.
But that kind of ship so suited he,
That now he is the ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Sir Joseph.
I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament.
I always voted at my party's call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
Chorus.
He never thought of thinking for himself at all.
Sir Joseph.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Chorus.
He thought so little, they rewarded he
By making him the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!
Sir Joseph.
Now landsmen all, whoever you may be,
If you want to rise to the top of the tree,
If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool,
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule.
Chorus.
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule.
Sir Joseph.
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea,
And you all may be rulers of the Queen's Navee!
Chorus.
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea,
And you all may be rulers of the Queen's Navee!"
😀
The first dozen or so times I heard that, I wondered what a "junior clark" was. Some very British job, like Lord Privy Seal, was my assumption.
One of the little peculiarities of British English, where "clerk" is pronounced "clark" 😀
The song does mention the progression of the First Lord of the Admiralty; from working as the office boy in a solicitor's office, he became a junior clerk (working in a clerical role, obviously), then he went on to become an articled clerk: "an articled clerk, which is what trainee solicitors used to be called during their training period after they had passed the professional exams but before they became fully qualified solicitors", then qualified as a solicitor and became a junior partner in the firm, got rich and was elected to Parliament (via a rotten borough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs) and in time was given this plum job as First Lord - even though he had never been on a ship in his life.
Yah I'm a colonial but I figured that out. And while I'm not an inveterate punster myself, the whole language mistakes thing in this opera is a work of genius, from the pilot/pirate apprenticeship to "Ah! you said 'often' frequently / No, only once" which has got to be the most outrageous brilliant triple pun I've ever heard.
Perhaps they don't agree with you that "top US and UK universities" are *not* the most effective instruments for improving student lives? I mean...there's kind of a reason they're "top" and most people would naively assume it's because they *are* the best at improving students' future lives.
Which means your unexamined assumption that this is not the case is a hypothesis in need of substantiation before you can realistically expect an answer to your question.
One might also point out that this assumption is not really consistent with your "brain drain" argument: if Columbians who are educated in the US (instead of Columbia) choose to *not* go back to Columbia, wouldn't one reasonably assume that's because their US education opens doors of improved personal opportunity for them, which the Columbian education does not?
In short, it would seem you are not clear on whether the people whose welfare is to be optimized here are (1) the university students, regardless of whether this is good or bad for the general population of their home countries, or (2) the general population of the home countries, regardless of whether this is good or bad for the university students themselves. Perhaps you should pick one (or show why there is no conflict) and develop the argument more precisely?
In STEM surely still, but in everything else the acculturation is breaking down society and mental health
Unless said student is, say, a relatively NT psychopath and useful / charismatic, to be promoted up the ranks of the globalists, or simply a Chad living the life such as may still be done, he may come to regret and detest his American experience
"Which means your unexamined assumption that this is not the case is a hypothesis in need of substantiation before you can realistically expect an answer to your question."
My unexamined assumption is based on fact. When it comes to improving students economic circumstances, elite universities rank very poorly. Increasingly, their student bodies are primarily people who are all ready well off.
Focusing educational opportunities on a few institutions that can only educate a small number of students runs counter to the professed mission of effective altruism.
“Improving student economic circumstances” isn’t the only thing that matters. If Stanford takes too .1% students and doubles their competence while leaving all others untouched, that’d still be worthwhile. And that’s clearly possible - what else does a high level quantum computing course do but take the top .1% and improve them, while most gain little?
Oh sorry. I didn't realize you could assert that your assumption is a fact. Carry on.
This isn't what I was thinking of, but I'm doing something else, so this is the best you get: https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/september-october-2021/introduction-a-different-kind-of-college-ranking-12/
If you want to claim that "Top Universities" do more to improve the life outcomes of their students than schools that focus on lower-income students, bring some data.
That's a moronic ranking. The ranking lists as a major factor "encourage students to be active citizens (with national and community service participation a key variable)." That has zippity zap to do with any important intellectual training, and a college that puts serious effort into it is by definition wasting time, money, and energy. Might as well have plumbers train to sing opera in place of fixing pipes, so that they can entertain the customers while they're under the sink.
So as data goes that's laughable.
As data goes, you provided none. Show me how sending a kid to Harvard does more to advance their incomes and lives than sending them to Northeastern Illinois or another school with a focus on working-class students.
You're assuming that what matters in the world is a tiny group of elites who come up with brilliant solutions the pleebs can embrace. As one of that elite, I wish it were true. Oh, the ego gratification. But we tried that and it didn't go so well. It turns out people like us aren't really that much wiser than anyone else, no matter how well trained we are intellectual analysis.
if you’re doing a scholarship to train people for research or policy positions, I don’t see how “does the college make poor people’s income increase by 5% or 7%” matters
There's not shortage of researchers, and the changes the most effective schools make isn't 5-7%. It's often far more transformative.
But I think this is what, at the core, makes me suspicious that EA is really just a way for the elite to congratulate themselves while locking their power in place.
What you describe doesn't challenge that the majority of the world should just accept the decisions of a very small percent of "experts." And the elite school experts have historically have plenty of blind spots that broadening where we draw people from would fix.
I think that's still the goal, but what's changed is the 'buck' that's in shortage. As in, I keep hearing that the organization has more money than it currently knows what to do with, and not enough talent that can find (or found) the next Against Malaria Foundation/charity that's really effective to give money to. So the focus has shifted to trying to recruit talent to do just that - I think I remember Scott asking people to consider applying back in the SlateStarCodex days.
My guess is that this hasn't worked (judging by the fact that I kept hearing about the talent shortage), and the organization has given up and resorted to training and cultivating talent, in a sort of "Fine, I'll do it myself." kind of way. Of course, as you point out, elite universities are horrendously overpriced for what they actually *teach* compared to the likes of a state school, but if you're instead just looking for a competence filter... I guess this is an instructive example of why higher education has gotten so expensive even as it's turned into nothing but a credentialism exercise. It's in everyone's individual interest to play along, even if the system as a whole is mind-bogglingly stupid and inefficient.
Or, if the elite university is a connection making institution, the EAs figure having connections with the next generation of elites will be worth a good deal to the EA movement. If the elite universities are the training ground for the people who will policy makers in twenty years, going there is one way to get a seat at that table twenty years down the line.
Of course, sending an idealistic kid to a place where he can make the sort of connections that can lead them into the 1% might also be a good way to spend a couple of hundred grand and end up with a twenty something joining K street (is K street still a thing?) and losing your phone number.
Oh yes, the 'Mont Pelerin' strategy! (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-189/comments#comment-2858968).
Though as you point out, principal-agent problems abound; it's really tough to get people to do what you want (work on effective altruism) instead of what they want (join K Street, make lots of money). But the Fabian Society and Mont Pelerin Society managed it, so presumably it's manageable with the right strategy.
I was under the impression that the money was going to be given to *students* so that they could attend one of these extremely wealthy universities without having to go into debt for decades. It's true the wealthy university ends up with the money in the end -- but they end up with it either way, the only difference is whether it comes from wealthy donors or the impoverished student's future earnings. That is, as far as the universities go, this wealth transfer seems neutral. The person(s) whose lives are changed are the student and the donors, inasmuch as the cost is transferred from the former to the latter, and ideas of marginal utility and their respective wealth suggest the personal and social delta is positive.
Of course, it could be the student would *not* go to the university at all if (and only if) he didn't have the money, so in this case one is indeed enabling the university to get richer -- but one is also enabling a student to attend the university he really wants to, and if we assume he is rational, that which will do him the most good. In this case, you would need to establish that the harm done by giving more money to a wealthy university exceeds the benefit of enabling a first-rate (but poor) student to get the best education his abilities put within reach. Good luck with that.
If what you're saying is that the money could be put to better general use by reconstructing college education -- removing whatever barriers prevent competition from making it cheaper, say, or improving education in Columbia so Columbian students didn't long to go to Harvard - I've got no quarrel with that, but it's a different focus than the organization in question has.
They presumably are thinking something like "How can we assist the welfare of poor but excellent students?" and not "How can we reform education for the future benefit of all?" If what one wants to say is "That shouldn't be your focus! You should instead focus on babies dying of diarrhea in Africa, or discovering a vaccine for malaria, or building high-speed rail from Houston to Dallas, or...[whatever your personal highest priority is]" then that's fine, but it seems disingenuous to phrase that as sounding like "you're not achieving your aims in the best way possible."
I thought a lot of the top schools give very generous financial aid packages already?
If you're tired of being mad at the FDA, why not take a break and get mad at the FRA instead?
There is a private company (Texas Central) that is trying to build high speed rail between Dallas and Houston. They are using cheaper Japanese trains, even though that means that they can't use any existing railroad tracks. The Federal Railroad Administration prefers European trains and is mad at this:
"Of note, the FRA speaks of grade crossings on a line that has none, and demands trains to withstand the impact of a 6.35 ton steel ball that may be dropped from overpasses that do not exist. This is likely malicious more than incompetent ..."
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/06/24/are-the-fra-and-european-operators-sabotaging-texas-central/
I often commute from Houston to Dallas. Flying is easy and fast. Why would I prefer to take a train? Will the train be faster? Will it be cheaper? How far is the train station from where I live compared to the airports? Can I drink alcohol on the train? Can I drink alcohol at the train station?
They've done studies of this, but my google fu is failing me. IIRC, if a train trip is shorter than 5 or 6 hours, given the choice between flying and taking the train, most people will prefer the train. Planes are uncomfortable, and get a little more so each year. Trains are much roomier. It's easier to move around. Things like dining and lounge cars really add to the experience. And you don't have to deal with airports or their security. Done well, they're much more pleasant than planes for most people. If they can get it built, they'll probably do well with it.
All of which points up a reasonable strategy for passenger trains here. Look at pairs of cities where dedicated passenger rail can come in under that time, with a couple of reasonable stops. Look at the rates at which people travel between them on planes and in cars, set priorities based on volume, and build high or at least higher speed passenger routes. Over time you could build up routes where the trains actually run on time, and where most people prefer the train to plane trip. This builds a group of loyal customers who believe in the service and want to see it expanded, and gives you more than just the Acela corridor bring money into the system.
If this were a public project, those would be good questions.
But this is a private company betting its own money.
The distance from Dallas to Houston is about 250 miles.
Texas Central is planning on going at about 200 mph. Both the train and airplane take between 1 and 1.5 hours to make the trip. The big difference is that it takes 2 hours to enter an airport, while it only takes 15 minutes or less to enter a train station.
High speed train stations are typically closer to the center of the city than airports, so they should be more convenient for more people. The Dallas station will be by the interchange between 30 and 35E, while the Houston station will be by the interchange between 610 and 290. I don't know if that is more convenient than the airport for either your home or your destination.
I suspect that their prices will be in the $100-150 range, to be competitive with both flying and driving.
European and Japanese trains allow alcohol, so they probably will too.
2 hours to enter an airport? Maybe at some, but it rarely takes me longer than 15 minutes between the Uber entering airport property and getting through security at HOU or DAL.
That said, I agree it sounds like the FRA has absurd restrictions on the project. If it's all private money, I think the company should be able to make their own bets on the project.
It wouldn't surprise me if the theocrats in the Texas Legislature came up with some absurd restrictions on their own as well (such as no alcohol).
I travel by plane rarely, and I tend arriving at least 2 hours before departure.
Because usually it takes just 20 minutes, but if anything goes wrong (long security queue etc) then plane will without me and I will have a gigantic problem.
Sometimes it is even worse: if I go to remote airport I need to get sufficiently early so traffic jams or train delays will not cause issues. Recently I was waiting for 6 hours.
I don't about the US nor this specific planned rail line policies, but the usual benefit of trains is that you don't need to plan around the time needed for airport-like security. I can arrive 1 minute before the scheduled departure time and just get in the carriage.
Does America just outright hate trains? I know that historically a bunch of car-related industries killed public transit in many cities in the USA; are similar lobbies still around?
America loves using trains to move *freight*, which is what trains are best at and which there's a lot more of in need of movement. The American rail network moves more freight, faster, better, and cheaper than the combined rail networks of Europe.
That does unfortunately mean there's a lot of slow-moving freight trains on all the tracks, all the time.
Right, and what passenger trains we have, other than city light rail, usually runs on freight tracks and is required to give way to freight trains, which means delays are common and our trains are much slower than places with dedicated passenger rail.
People who have only ridden on American passenger trains therefore think passenger trains are mostly a silly waste of time. If it's close enough, drive, if it's not, fly, but trains are slower than cars and often late. Why bother?
Of course, it doesn't have to be that way, but we mostly don't know that.
I feel like this is mostly caused by the fact that the distance between San Francisco and New York City is roughly the distance between London and Moscow. America is fucking huge and trains have trouble scaling over that kind of distance.
Americans who have actually ridden American passenger trains often do hate them. I always wanted to give them a good chance, on account of I like trains per se, but Jesus H. Christ after Amtrak being consistently 50% late for me -- as in, if the trip takes 2 hours they end up an hour late, and if the trip takes 12 hours they end up 6 hours late -- I just gave up. I've ridden European trains and they are certainly quite different, much more pleasant and functional.
Amtrak's completely horrible performance might be the archetype of "assume it's run by a cabal of its enemies." How else could it suck so much?
I should have put my above comment here. It's worth remembering that Amtrak mostly doesn't own its own track, so when an extra freight train has to come through, the freight gets the right of way. This means that Amtrak's schedules can only be best guesses. I'm given to understand that in parts of the east, where they have the Acela, they do have dedicated lines and things work much better.
Of course, that's the only profitable part of the system, and rather than plow the money back into that area for improvements, much of the money has to go to support the rest of the system, which is really just there because Americans mostly don't want passenger trains to disappear, even if we also mostly don't want to ride them.
Well, I'm nostalgic about sailing ships, too, but I wouldn't twist myself into a pretzel arguing they're inherently better than a modern freighter so we should massively subsidize one final trans-Atlantic sailing route to keep our options open.
I don't really think I'm twisting myself into a pretzel. And I don't think the analogy holds. Trains aren't as fast as planes but they aren't outmoded in the way that sailing ships are. They're genuinely useful for middle length trips, and much more pleasant.
And, even if you don't agree, at least for now we (the collective body politic) have agreed to subsidize this thing. Probably you'd like to see it ended. I'd like to keep it, but would like to see it better run. In particular, as I suggest elsewhere on this thread, I think that with a moderate (for the govt) investment, Amtrak could have high speed, or at least higher speed, dedicated service corridors such that a a large chunk of the traveling public would prefer them to flights, enabling them to be profitable and good in several locations, not just on the Acela corridor.
I really don't know. I tried lowering my expectations, which were never high, and gosh darn it they still managed to exceed them (in the wrong direction) handsomely. I feel like the 10-year-old girls who sometimes set up a lemonade stand on my street on hot days could do better.
Yglesias has an anecdote: https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-experts
>I sometimes like to tell the story of the time an Amtrak executive told me “to be honest, I don’t know that much about trains.” Then sometimes I feel bad about it, because it’s not like the guy’s job involved supervising the operation of trains.
>But then I think about it more, and I genuinely *don’t* think it’s a cheap shot. The specific context is he had a complaint about the MARC Penn Line and I said he should take it up with his colleagues. He was confused. Then I was confused. Then it emerged that he didn’t realize Amtrak operates the MARC Penn Line (under contract with the Maryland Transit Administration), so he was complaining about his own organization’s operations. He shrugged and said the thing about not knowing too much about trains.
>And I think this is emblematic of Amtrak. It is run by people who are not *curious* about trains.
"They are using cheaper Japanese trains, even though that means that they can't use any existing railroad tracks"
I know very little about trains, but I'm gonna side with the FRA on this, because the one thing I *do* know is that different gauge sides are a pain in the proverbial.
Anybody more informed please weigh in, but I do think "we'll either have to rip up all existing tracks or put a completely different set side-by-side" is going to be une teeny problemo.
You might think that Texas Central has a bad business model that will be too expansive to make it a good investment. But that is not the criticism here.
This is the FRA's health and safety review. The criticism is that Texas Central doesn't have any plans for dealing with grade crossings or for things falling off of overpasses onto the tracks. There aren't any plans for these because Texas Central doesn't have any grade crossings or overpasses.
Fair enough, but looking at the website, they have a lot of snazzy conceptual drawings, but a little scanty on actuality. Sure, they have some nice words about negotiating with landowners and ensuring as little disruption as possible, but the tendency for such projects is (1) landowners see this as a chance to hike up land prices as high as possible when selling to the railroad (2) some people will be "I don't care about your fancy words, you are not building viaducts all across my land!"
"In building the high-speed train, minimizing any disruption to the environment, landowners and communities is paramount, which is why the tracks will follow existing utility corridors and public rights-of-way as much as possible. High-speed trains will run along elevated viaduct structures or on grade-separated berms to allow for the free movement of people, animals, vehicles and equipment from one side of the alignment to the other.
Whether elevated on a viaduct structure or not, each mile of the route is being designed with as narrow a footprint as possible to allow farming activities, livestock grazing and other surface activities to continue as they do today."
Also kindly note the wording about "Whether elevated on a viaduct structure *or not*", I imagine this is the part the FRA is getting sticky about.
The site promises:
"One of the keys to the safety design, is that the Railroad will be “grade separated,” which means it will cross over or under all public roads and will have no at-grade intersections with people or vehicles. There will never be cars waiting on trains to pass and there will be no risk of trains interacting with cars. In addition, the track itself will be protected to prevent people, domestic animals or wildlife from accessing the tracks."
But yeah, if it's crossing under public roads, there's the risk of something dropping from overhead. You get malicious jerks who do drop stuff off overpasses. But even ruling those out, does the Texas Monorail (sorry, I mean High Speed Rail Line) have plans in place for "what if half a bridge falls on top of your high speed train?" and simply going "we assure you this will never happen!" isn't good enough.
> "what if half a bridge falls on top of your high speed train?"
If bridge collapses directly on top of moving train I think that it is not going to be defensible.
Noone expects also cars to resist entire bridges collapsing on them.
But they should some method of monitoring bridges ensuring that risky of that remains tiny.
Yet. I'm having trouble faulting the FRA for actually planning ahead beyond current needs.
They're building a completely new elevated line along some power lines, so it will not be connected to existing train tracks at all.
Wait...250 miles of 200 MPH high-speed rail line, all of it elevated? This sounds like Hyperloop or maglev regions of $$$ per mile and unexpected cost-goosing discoveries once you start pouring concrete. I mean, more power to them, but my first questions now would be more about what kind of interest costs they're going to have to pay on those bonds.
Also a pain in the proverbial, not having an edit button. "Sizes" not "sides".
From the discussion from the last thread, the most obvious candidates for the fastest declining major languages of the twentieth century have been the classical languages -Sanskrit, Latin, and literary Chinese. Does anybody disagree?
You got a lot of pushback over your preferred methodology, IIRC. You want to talk about reductions in absolute numbers of speakers, and only from a high base (more than 10 million, right?).
But a lot of people wanted to talk about dead or dying languages, where the languages started from a smaller base and are in danger of (or actually have) disappeared. Cajun is an example here, and probably many of the languages of various native peoples.
If I have all that right, can you talk a little about why that's the framing you like, or what you're trying to get at?
If a language has three thousand or so people and goes to thirty, that's not a major change. But if a language goes from 15 million people to three million, that is a substantial change in the global linguistic landscape.
Does anyone know why the FDA is preventing cheap covid tests?
The tests we used when we came down with it were 24 bucks for a two pack at Walgreens. My wife picked them up from the pharmacy drive-thru to reduce our risk of spreading it around. So . . . can you elaborate? I think we have cheap covid tests.
Depending on people's incomes and how often they want/need to test, $12/test can add up.
Fair enough, I guess. Is the FDA doing something that's keeping them at that price point? The tests seemed a bit more complicated than pregnancy tests, and cost a bit more, so the cost sort of slotted in to my expectations for the kind and quality of product. If it had been two bucks, I would have figured somebody else (presumably the gov't) was subsidizing them.
Which, you know, I would support. But then it wouldn't be the FDA preventing really cheap tests, but Congress enabling them.
There are $5 home-tests from Abbott, and other countries have $1 home-tests: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/14/1037077480/an-epidemiologist-says-at-home-testing-is-key-to-stopping-covid
I don't think those countries are subsidizing them. And lots of those tests are made *by American companies*, so it's not like there's an import issue.
Dunno about the FDA, but over here the expert body disapproval of chains like Lidl selling test kits was based on "they're cheap, we don't know how reliable they are, and false positives and false negatives both will mislead the public".
https://www.thesun.ie/news/7464359/where-buy-antigen-test-nphet-said-how-different-from-pcr/
There's been tension between the NPHET (expert body in question) and the government over this, because the government wants to get things up and running again as soon as possible so they're pushing for cheap fast antigen tests but NPHET are dragging their heels about that:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40695743.html
I mean if we can develop a vaccine in a week and mass produce it in a year but cheap tests still aren’t here two years in clearly someone fucked up. The FDA could easily have as a goal “make manufacturers have good tests and get them out quickly” instead of whatever they have now, while still maintaining accuracy
The justification in these cases seems to be that imperfect tests lead to false negative results. This false sense of safety can lead to infected people going out and spreading the virus.
I disagree completely of course, but despite the general dislike towards the FDA here, I do not think its stance is egregiously different from most public health experts. Many countries (UK, Germany) have warmed up to the idea of rapid tests (after a LOOONG time) by now, but here is an earlier article exploring the opposition from university public health experts towards similar ideas: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32261-3/fulltext
So, anybody who just blames it on bad incentivizes is missing a big part of the picture.
Rapid home tests are legal in the US, they are just expensive — something in the ten to forty dollars apiece range. They are said to have a substantial false negative rate.
My understanding is that the price in Europe is more like a dollar apiece. I don't know if that is because European countries subsidize them or the FDA imposes requirements that greatly increase the cost.
Hmm, then my point was a bit stupid.
In Germany, the price is indeed below 1€ and not subsidized; although initially prices were more in the 5€ range, and started dropping after an increase in usage because of testing requirements.
Possible because of different names, I could not find any test that is both used in Germany and in the US, but it seems that the FDA is at least engaged in some market surveillance. They recalled a test that is still in use in the UK: https://www.darkdaily.com/2021/08/20/uk-continues-to-use-innovas-sars-cov-2-antigen-rapid-test-despite-recall-and-fda-warning-letter/
When the tests are 1 buck, you can easily do a test one day and again the next day.
What's the net accuracy when doing this?
The NHS gives them out for free
Food Insecurity: Does anyone know of any studies that look at two similar groups afflicted by food insecurity, make one group food secure and then follow both groups over time to see what the payoff is?
There are ethical issues inherent in my question, but I'm actively engaged in helping to to provide food to a group of families that are food insecure, and I am wondering if there is any way to test the cost.benefit against some sort of baseline.
The term "food insecurity" is very misleading for the public. Still, if you are looking at actual comparisons and trials you might be able to learn something useful.
EA or givewell or openphil probably has a lot on this, but a quick google didn’t get me mucb
What outcomes do you intend to compare between the groups?
Not sure
The outcomes of interest are important to know. Start there and work backwards in the literature, see if there are any studies linking food insecurity or food assistance programs with improvement on that outcome. The methods these different studies use to calculate their community impact might be applicable to your cost ben analysis.
Thanks to both "bored-anon" and ABow for the input. Very helpful.
The recent post on semiheavy water reminded me of a concern I've had for a while, but never got around to articulating. It's a bit hard to explain, and I'm not the greatest at explaining things (at least I don't think I am), but I'll try to do the best I can.
In Scott's famous post "The Control Group Is Out Of Control", Scott presents the idea of what we might call "meta-control-grouping". In a drug trial, you have a control group that you give a drug you *know* doesn't work, and this shows you how many people will get an effect even if the drug doesn't work; and unless the drug does better than control, you have no evidence the drug does anything. Similarly, on a meta level, if there were a scientific effect that you *knew* didn't exist, you could use that as a meta-control-group, and see what kinds of results you would get even if the effect didn't exist. Unless your experiment does better than the meta-control, you have no evidence the effect exists.
Scott uses the example of parapsychology as a meta control group; and while I'm far less certain than he is that parapsychological effects don't exist (on some days I even lean in favor of them existing - needless to say my priors are much different than his), the overall idea seems intuitively sound. If an individual or community has very low priors on phenomenon A, but phenomenon A is getting evidence E(A) as good as or better than the evidence E(B) for a phenomenon B that the individual or community has high priors on, this should call into question the validity of E(B).
But this is hard for me to square with what I know about Bayesianism in general. The whole point of Bayesianism is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence": E(B) is good enough for B while the same level of evidence E(A) is not good enough for A, precisely because you have such low priors for A. For example, if both E(A) and E(B) give you 3 bits of evidence, then 3 bits might be enough to push you above 50% for B (because you were already close to 50%), but not enough to push you above 50% for A (because you were already so far below 50%).
But the idea of meta control grouping seems to rule out "double standards" like this. What the idea of meta control grouping seems to imply is that, because you got 3 bits of evidence for A, and A is likely false, that means you can easily get 3 bits of evidence for a false proposition, and thus 3 bits of evidence is actually not evidence at all (or at least much less evidence than you thought). So what this would mean is, from now on, any time you get 3 bits of evidence for anything, you should either discount it, or "correct" it down to (say) 1 bit of evidence. For the sake of communication, I will call this idea Devaluation of Evidence (DE).
I can see this getting out of control very quickly. Any time you get evidence for a proposition you have low priors on, that amount of evidence becomes worthless for every other proposition you've ever believed. This should make you progressively more uncertain about everything over time, until (in the limit) every one of your beliefs is 50-50 and you have no beliefs about anything whatsoever. For the sake of ease of communication, I will call this idea the Progressive Devaluation of Evidence (PDE).
In fact, I almost want to say that this results in an infinite loop right off the bat. If 3 bits in favor of B needs to be corrected down to 1 bit in favor of B, then does that same 1 bit in favor of B need to be corrected down to 1/3 of a bit in favor of B, and then down to 1/9 of a bit in favor of B, and so on? I'm far less sure about this, but this seems to be a potential issue as well. (Let's call this the Devaluation of Evidence Infinite Loop [DEIL]).
In other words, unless I'm misunderstanding something, the idea of meta-control-grouping seems to break Bayesianism. I'm not certain about any of this, and I get the feeling I'm fundamentally misunderstanding something here, but I just wanted to get this out so that someone knowledgable can clear this up for me.
bayes only cares about how probable different theories think the evidence is. The control group exists to get information about what the "there is no effect" theory predicts.
we see a bunch of people who believe in a theory do experiments to prove it, we observe that with x people/time/money/etc they get efrect y. if we know there is no real effect, this control group has given us information about what to expect when a bunch of people attempt to prove an effect given that the effect doesn't exist.
I have the same concern that you do about the level of evidence required to believe something is true. I am not following you on the Infinite Loop and that this is a trap. As someone else mentioned, it would be additive instead of multiplicative.
That said, I also came away from Scott's post feeling that one of two things needs to be true - 1) Parapsychology is real, or 2) the level of evidence we accept to prove things needs to be much higher. Either one is fraught in terms of systems, because if we go with #1 that leads to a lot of hokey people claiming a lot of things that are almost certainly untrue and/or impossible to prove, and if we go with #2 then we may be denying the reality of some obvious things. #2 feels like what the FDA does when everyone is mad at them for being too rigorous. Personally I square the circle by going with #2 and accepting things that make sense but have lower levels of evidence as "provisionally true" pending better evidence. I try not to signal boost those items, and also try to pay attention to more evidence for or against to update that status.
I'm with you until your devaluation became multiplicative rather than additive. In other words, the control establishes a threshold for affirmative evidence.
Subtract the evidence for the control from the evidence for B and see what you have left. If the control has three bits and B has three bits, 3 - 3 = 0 evidence exists in favor of B. Since there was an opportunity for evidence for B to show up, B becomes less likely. No infinite devaluation loop.
I'd say that the point is to make you stop thinking that evidence is a constant number of bits. A meta-control group gives you information about how much information is provided by a particular test. For example, if I weigh myself and am told I weigh 250 pounds, that may be mostly evidence about my weight (I'm obese). But if I weigh myself and am told 2637 pounds, I have mostly gained information that the scale is broken or displaying in a non-functional manner (and a little bit of evidence that I weigh 263.7 pounds). If X, which is obviously absurd, can generate lots of positive test results, the implication is that the tests are sketchy, not that the nature of evidential relations is sketchy.
I’m just confused by the 3 bits.
1 bit is a factor of two, 2 bits is a factor of four, 3 bits is a factor of eight... 20 bits is a factor of about one million. I think he's using the concept from this Yudkowsky post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance
"Shave and a Haircut" is 2 bits, so I guess 3 bits gets you a blowdry as well?
Wrote a short sci-fi story on AI and superintelligence.
Just 3 pages, enjoy!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fx_XNi2Nboqc4ztIh7IGQQHgT1sxpzVXEv8ux1XbRWg/edit?usp=sharing
Not bad!
Something I wish people would focus more attention on, when discussing "privilege" and "oppression", is the effect of habituation and the hedonic treadmill. After all, just because there's a relative difference between two people it doesn't automatically imply a difference in perceived satisfaction. People very quickly get habituated with their life situation, and as suicidal celebrities discover, having stuff doesn't automatically imply you're leading a happier life.
Essentially true, but afaik African Americans do have substantially lower life satisfaction than White Americans.
Privilege isn't about a difference in satisfaction. Privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot where people who haven't personally dealt with a problem think the problem isn't real or isn't significant or otherwise greatly misunderstand what it's like to have that problem, because they haven't had that specific problem. It doesn't mean you don't have *any* problems or that your problems aren't worse than others' problems. You can be privileged and miserable or underprivileged and happy. Also, you can be privileged with respect to one problem but underprivileged with respect to another problem.
That's why the solution to privilege involves adopting an epistemology which elevates narratives of members of oppressed groups - because through listening to and understanding those narratives, the privileged person starts to fill in some of their blind spots.
@Neal Zupancic
By that definition, everyone has privilege, including the poor, who have 'poor privilege.'
I also don't see how you can defend the use of 'underprivileged' when using that definition, so I doubt that you actually believe it.
If I say "a chair is fundamentally an inanimate object that you can sit on" I am not giving a "definition" of chair in the sense that it would withstand an adversarial person determined to poke holes in my "argument" to make me look stupid.
So if you respond "by that definition, a rock is a chair, so I doubt that you actually believe it" - clearly we are not using the same conversational framework. I'm not interested in having a semantic debate in which I try to construct a definition and others try to knock it down. What an utterly pointless enterprise that would be.
So yeah, actually, I do believe that a chair is fundamentally an inanimate object you can sit on. And I believe that privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot. I am giving an explanation of how the thing functions - not a "definition" that you can use in a taxonomy, not a Platonic ideal, not a unique and exhaustive list of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be called privilege.
But I feel like I'm wasting my time since people who are determined to argue in lieu of understanding each other, rather than discuss in order to understand each other, are going to find ways to poke holes in this comment as well, like a bunch of pedantic Don Quixotes.
You probably pretty much are (wasting your time), but for the record, I appreciated you defending and defining privilege. I didn't contribute because I didn't have anything to add and thing you did an admirable job. And I'm lazy.
I don't think this is about "mak[ing you] look stupid," but about figuring out what you really believe.
A lot of people provide arguments that logically lead to certain conclusions, if you take their arguments at face value, yet they reject these conclusions, which suggests that they are leaving out parts of their reasoning or don't actually believe what they claim to believe.
One option is that I stop taking people who do this seriously as a rational person and start coming up with my own explanations of why they have their beliefs, but I prefer to point it out so people can fill in the missing parts, change their claims or whatever. Now, I recognize that this is considered rude by civilized society, where it is far more acceptable to think bad things about people than to take them seriously, but it shouldn't be.
I do strongly reject the idea that not pointing out these inconsistencies somehow means that I will understand you better. You seem to conflate 'not objecting' with 'understanding.' Do I need to explain why these are not the same, yet can easily be conflated? Arguably, questioning persistently is often required for understanding. The Socratic method is based on this kind of 'adversarial' cooperation. So arguably, it is you who refuses to be understood, not me who refuses to understand.
PS. Your definition of a chair is indeed poor, but then why not try to come up with a more defensible definition, like one based on prototypes (an object is more of a chair when it is more similar to a prototypical chair), usage based (an object functions as a chair when it is used to sit on by a single person) or a combination of such? You seem to be content to come up with definitions that you fundamentally don't believe in, so then what is the purpose of that definition?
"A lot of people provide arguments that logically lead to certain conclusions, if you take their arguments at face value, yet they reject these conclusions, which suggests that they are leaving out parts of their reasoning or don't actually believe what they claim to believe."
This is not true at all. Most people form most of their beliefs based on direct observation of the world and/or social learning. Beliefs are typically not evaluated based on exhaustively reasoning from each belief to each possible conclusion based on that belief and then checking that the conclusion is true. This approach would quickly become computationally impossible, so the claim that people who don't do it aren't to be taken seriously as rational people isn't to be taken seriously as a rational proposition.
Furthermore, you seem very confident in your ability to interpret people's statements as logical propositions upon which logical operations can be performed, and yet your comments display the very elementary error of assuming that a statement implies its converse (e.g. you seem to be claiming that if I say that a chair is something one can sit on, then therefore I believe that anything that one can sit on is a chair). This is a version of the converse error fallacy (also called Affirming the Consequent).
Or, on the privilege question: if I say "privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot caused by not having directly experienced a given problem" that does not imply that I believe that all cognitive blind spots caused by not having directly experienced a given problem are privilege.
Formally, the use of "X is Y" in English does not mean "X is logically identical to Y such that X and Y can at any time and in any circumstance be substituted for each other in any proposition and the proposition will have an identical meaning." If I say "my backpack is heavy" it doesn't mean that all heavy things are my backpack. If I say "my backpack is something I can wear and put books in" that doesn't mean that all things I can wear and put books in are backpacks (I used to carry paperback books in my jacket pockets, in fact).
If someone doesn't understand how to interpret natural language statements in terms of logical predication, I have to regard that person as an unreliable judge of which arguments logically lead to which conclusions.
"Your definition of a chair is indeed poor"
I literally said I was not giving a definition of a chair. I suppose my "refusal to be understood" prevented you from understanding that sentence?
> so the claim that people who don't do it aren't to be taken seriously as rational people isn't to be taken seriously as a rational proposition.
That's not my claim. My claim is about how people respond when a single inconsistency is pointed out to them.
Your argument is like claiming that it is unreasonable to expect someone to seriously respond to a claim that their behavior is dangerous, because there are a huge number of risks and it is in fact impossible to be perfectly safe. I hope you understand that this is a fallacious form of reasoning.
> if I say "privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot caused by not having directly experienced a given problem" that does not imply that I believe that all cognitive blind spots caused by not having directly experienced a given problem are privilege.
You keep fleeing into meta-discussions and these kind of defensive vague statements where you say what you don't think, but not what you do think, so you can't actually be pinned down on anything.
Let me try to pin you down: Are you claiming that an inability for rich people to understand the poor is not at least in part a form of underprivilege? If so, are you also claiming that there are zero benefits to the lived experience of being poor?
In general, how do you decide what cognitive blind spots are privilege?
Today's fascination with privilege and oppression, while perhaps noble, is actually a political move.
Today's fascination with the political nature of Today's fascination with privilege and oppression, while philosophically interesting, is actually a political move.
And aside from politics, how is one to achieve change on issues that are perceived to be important?
This notion of privilege seems a bit circular. If members of two groups don't understand the problems afflicting the other one, how can either know which group is overprivileged and which group is underprivileged? I know the concept of 'epistemic privilege,' where underprivileged groups are assumed to have more knowledge about overprivileged groups than vice versa, but I honestly think the opposite is at least as likely, and in any case, one must still already accept that a group is underprivileged (and therefore has epistemic privilege) in order to learn that they're underprivileged.
Personal narratives also seem inherently problematic to any epistemology, since people aren't reliable raconteurs of their own experience.
It's a good definition, but it doesn't seem to square with the notion that privilege is a widespread concern. By definition you must be talking about rare or strange problems, because if they are common problems, then the definition doesn't apply.
Exempli gratia, I can't think of a single human being I know over the age of 30 who has no idea what it's like to not be hired for a job, or to be fired, for unprofessional reasons rooted in personal animus, corporate culture, in-group politics, appearance or habits of speech, et cetera. So I doubt very much there is a significant number of Americans who think that problem doesn't exist, or have no understanding of what it's like to experience the particular problem of unprofessional discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion.
Maybe some incredibly lucky and wealthy slice of youngsters, Paris Hilton and the children of Russel Crowe, for example, may be clueless, but my motivation to restructure society in any serious way to accommodate (or address) the shortcomings of a tiny fraction of unusual people is low.
> It's a good definition, but it doesn't seem to square with the notion that privilege is a widespread concern. By definition you must be talking about rare or strange problems, because if they are common problems, then the definition doesn't apply.
I think this is just typical minding and blindness to the wide variety of human experience (which ironically is basically what privelege is about). XKCD's 10,000 comes to mind.
No idea what you mean, sorry.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Sure, the cartoon is amusing, and I am sure there are indeed 10,000 people a day learning all kinds of trivial facts. I learn trivial facts all the time now, and I'm pretty old. My mom who's in her 90s still learns new weird trivial facts (and calls me up to share them yeesh). Not sure why this is interesting or germane, though.
I have personally debated people online who have claimed that racially-motivated hiring discrimination isn't real, and others who have claimed that it might be real but it is not significant or widespread enough to warrant consideration. I'm not sure racial hiring discrimination merits restructuring society, but it's certainly worth considering whether existing efforts to address the problem are sufficient. And I can't help but view people who don't view this as a serious problem as an impediment to solving the problem - so perhaps making them aware of the problem would be a good first step towards solving it.
Who gives a damn if it's racially motivated or it's motivated by the hiring manager disliking your hairstyle, tattoos, hick accent, politics, or sex? Unprofessional discrimination is unprofessional discrimination, full stop, and the effects are identically unfortunate to the person suffering it *whatever* the underlying obnoxious reason is.
I completely fail to see why we should privilege in discussion or action obnoxious reasons rooted in race above all other obnoxious reasons. That seems more likely to be a form of virtue signalling by an advantaged group wanting to think well of their morals than any genuine concern for the welfare of people who have suffered hiring and promotions discrimination.
> Who gives a damn if it's racially motivated or it's motivated by the hiring manager disliking your hairstyle, tattoos, hick accent, politics, or sex?
I agree that it would be best to remove all forms of uprofessional discrimination.
That said, it makes sense to *prioritize* forms of discriminations that are more "coordinated" across companies. The probability that race impacts ten different managers in ten different companies in a similar way is quite high, and the color of skin is more difficult to hide than a tattoo.
@Villiam
Research suggests that looks-based discrimination is extremely common and thus "coordinated," so shouldn't that be a higher priority than racial discrimination?
Says who? Sounds to me like you just pulled that criterion out of your ass because it gets you where you want to end up. What makes "coordinated" evil greater than an "uncoordinated" evil? Nothing that I can see. Evil is evil, and I care about the magnitude of the suffering -- and not very much, if at all, about the motivations and methods of the evildoers. They can be as coordinated as the mafia or as uncoordinated as a half dozen Crips in Compton on a Saturday night, and this doesn't matter in the slightest to me, in terms of how evil is the evil they do.
A logical argument would be that the dysfunctional discrimination to be prioritized for elimination is that which, if addressed, would produce the greatest reduction in harm for the least cost, that is, the most efficient. Same way you pay off the highest interest rare credit card first. So what kind of discrimination is that? One would have to do real work, dig up some facts, to figure that out. You can't just take a guess at it, or rely on whatever the social fads of the moment are.
> the effects are identically unfortunate
This assumes that all people would benefit from a particular job identically - not true - and that all people would suffer from discrimination identically - also not true.
> I completely fail to see why we should privilege in discussion or action obnoxious reasons rooted in race above all other obnoxious reasons.
For example, if someone claims that discrimination against tattooed people is real, but discrimination against blacks is made up, then there wouldn't be much use in reminding that person repeatedly about discrimination against tattooed people - what we need to do is convince them that racism is happening.
I find your reasoning unfathomable. To me the only important fact is that discrimination is occurring. I couldn't care less what is going on in the mind of the dicriminator -- except that it *isn't* what it should be going on.
The number of ways in which human beings can be shitheads is essentially infinite, and I see a focus on what those reasons might be as futile, a gigantic waste of time and effort. A productive focus should be on the actions, and on what they should be, and the particular reasons for discriminatory action are uninteresting, except to philosophers and wankers who prefer rumination over constructive action.
I think what Carl is asking is why is discrimination by race more important than, say, discrimination by any of those other characteristics?
Scott on social justice terms, including “privilege” - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/ - and how their actual use doesn’t correspond at all to the claimed justifications.
Here’s a random doc from some university on google defining it in a totally different way - https://uca.edu/training/files/2017/11/Privilege-What-Does-It-Mean-Handout.pdf
Scott has pointed out that "privilege" can be used as a weapon through the technique of strategic equivocation, or "motte-and-bailey" argumentation. I think you can agree that neither of those conditions apply to this discussion - so far, no one here has accused anyone else of privilege that I'm aware of, or tried to use the concept to silence others, or equivocated on the definition of privilege. Ghost Dog's understanding of privilege as related to one's satisfaction in life is not similar to any usage in social justice - either the motte or the bailey usage - that I am familiar with.
I suppose someone less charitable than I could have come along and answered "privilege isn't about a difference in satisfaction - it's about finding ways to shut down discussion by attacking others' identities", and I would have to agree that this less charitable person had at least provided an understanding of privilege that is recognizably a way that people often use the term.
About the university doc: the "unearned advantage" framework for understanding privilege is good and important but I think for this audience that framing does not give a clear and immediate understanding of what privilege is and why we should care about it. The doc describes privilege as an advantage that we are not aware of; I'm just reframing "advantage" as "not having experienced a specific problem": rather than say "I have the advantage of being able to easily hail a cab because I am white" I would say "I have never experienced the problem of being discriminated against by taxi drivers due to being black" - they're equivalent situations. Also, the university document focuses on the advantage being unearned, presumably because its focus is fairness; my account focuses on the advantage being something we're not aware of or something we take for granted, because my focus is understanding. But note that the university doc does mention both lack of awareness of privilege, and how privilege impacts our understanding of others. I disagree that these are totally different accounts; I'd argue that I have simply steelmanned the concept of privilege in order to gain the most use out of the concept without falling prey to its high potential for abuse, cited in Scott's post and elsewhere on this thread.
Neal Zupancic, I did not rephrase those concepts by mistake in terms of "perceived satisfaction", nor did I do it in order to be uncharitable to the concepts.
Instead, I intentionally did it that way for two reasons:
1. The regular usage you refer to already contains certain unstated premises that have to do with perceived quality of life, and, I suspect, is ultimately reducible to those terms alone.
After all, why else would relative differences in the kinds experienced situations matter unless they ultimately affected how individual human beings experience their life?
"Person A does not experience situation X, but person B does, and this is important because B suffers from situation X, while A does not and isn't even aware that B suffers".
Is this not, at the end of the day, what it's trying to say? "Unfairness" isn't bad in the abstract, it's bad because it is assumed it impacts psychological states, either directly or indirectly. If it didn't, would we still be talking about it?
2. Presumably science is a single body of knowledge; different fields are not hermetically sealed from one another. The concepts in one field can be discussed in the light of discoveries from other fields that also touch upon those concepts.
For example: when discussing chemical bonds, the particles involved are ultimately the same ones that particle physics studies. And whatever is discovered about them in the field of particle physics will also automatically apply to chemistry, meaning we can meaningfully make statements in one field informed with knowledge the other. At this point, we can say that we have established a common grammar.
And here's why I brought up notions such as "habituation" and the "hedonic treadmill". Presumably, once we establish a common grammar between sociological science and psychological science, concepts from the later field will automatically inform our understanding of the former. For example (this is something to be researched): what if whatever realities associated with a "privilege" no longer contribute to one's positive affect? Can we still in any meaningful way still refer to it as a "privilege" if it doesn't have any positive contribution to the quality of life of the "privileged"? And: what if whatever negative affect deriving from a "lack of privilege" is, in fact, derived more from the constant push to be aware of the "lack", instead of from whatever is objectively and measurably lacking?
Again, these aren't rhetorical questions to which I claim to know the answer to. Rather, I am launching some suggestions for future study directions that can have a high impact on these fields.
Is this not, ultimately, what science should at least in principle be open to?
Yeah I’m just arguing the meaning you’re suggesting for privilege isn’t the way almost anyone else uses it, and it seems to reduce in OP definition to “privilege is when you are wrong about something important because you didn’t experience or understand it”, and that’s kinda the main way to be wrong about something.
Does your knowing about racism mean you aren’t privileged anymore? OP account would suggest so, as you no longer have the supposed pernicious “”cognitive bias”””
"Does your knowing about racism mean you aren’t privileged anymore?"
No - there's a difference between knowing about a thing and experiencing the thing. I can know that taxis discriminate against black people but I can't know what it's like to be discriminated against by a taxi as a black person.
Also, I didn't describe it as a bias, but as a blind spot. Blind spots are interesting - did you know we have literal blind spots in both eyes, but probably never notice them unless we're taught to? We move our eyes enough to compensate and our brain just sort of fills in the blanks based on context and/or information from the other eye. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision)
I think privilege is kind of like that - if you look at the issue from another angle, you can "fill in the blanks", but it doesn't mean the blind spot is gone - just that you've compensated for it.
“Not knowing things you don’t know about” isn’t a cognitive bias... and it seems like lots of people know about racism today
> you can’t know what it’s like to be discriminated against by a taxi driver
clearly you’re claiming something
Any use of the words: "You have privilege", "You are living a privileged life", if they are NOT in a social justice context always imply that the addressed person has a RARE set of beneficial circumstances: e.g. they are in the 1% percent, they have never had to work a day in their life etc. Again, the advantage has to be rare, nobody says: it is a privilege to not be homeless.
See also the description of the memoir "A life of privilege, mostly": "Gardner Botsford grew up in a Manhattan town house under the benign eye of five live-in servants, a charming and cultivated stepfather, and a mother whose beauty and wit attracted admirers ranging from the statesman Averell Harriman, to comic genius Harpo Marx."
True, but I think the application of the word in a social justice context works because it draws attention to how advantages you take for granted are actually less common than you thought.
Too bad, that the discussion only goes effectively one way then, doesn't it. Can we say social justice is actually just?
Yes. In fact, "social justice is actually just".
Boom, I just did it!
Isn't the way we're using the word assume some relativity, i.e., no one can be said to be privileged unless it's relative to someone else.
I mean I have been told (in person, in a training) that it's a privilege not to be homeless, to get three meals a day, and to have parents that love you. But I agree that it seems like a bit far from the colloquial definition.
I believe the social justice explanation for this apparent contradiction is that there is no contradiction. There exists a large pool of people who are homeless and/or hungry and/or and have no parents who love them. Arguably, such people may be in the majority. The fact that you automatically exclude them from your definition of "privilege" just demonstrates how incredibly privileged you truly are.
Since to my knowledge Social Justice movements tend to be focused on domestic issues, I think the idea that a majority of people are homeless or routinely hungry or have no parents who love them is frankly ridiculous (though the last one of those is certainly far more widespread in the West than the first two, since it can't be solved with money)
I mean I agree that some wouldn't see a contradiction. I was more just replying to Throwaway12 saying that "nobody says: it is a privilege not to be homeless." with the anecdote that I had encountered such things, even in a professional setting, and not just random online trolls
There's a problem because members of oppressed groups vary quite a bit. For example, the privilege model has some truth in it, but it tends to leave out conservative members of oppressed groups.
The privilege model seems to encourage the idea that there's a typical oppressed member for each marginal group.
Agreed, and see my comment below noting that intersectionality at least attempts to deal with this.
Certainly, I've seen the concept of privilege taken to what I consider unjustified extremes, but I've also seen it be very useful in helping people to understand certain situations.
One of the (many) issues I have with the concept of "privilege" is that it is unquantifiable, and pretty much unfalsifiable. No matter how rough your life had been, chances are that someone else is in worse shape than you. And, if you belong to one of the privileged demographic groups (modulo intersectionality), then your very *existence* is privileged and arguably oppressive. Your privilege is not due to something you have or have not done, it's due to something that you *are*, and therefore your only option (besides ceasing to exist) is to spend your life in atonement.
Contrast this concept with, say, the carbon offset policy. Yes, there are a lot of things about it one can criticize, but generally speaking it says, "you're emitting X tons of carbon/year, it will cost us $Y to clean it up, so we're going to charge you $Z for it, Z < Y".
To me, guilt as an emotion and the atonement behavior that may result from it are useful social things when a person has caused harm to someone else. "I'm sorry I broke your coffee cup. I'd like to get you one to replace it."
Living in a permanent state of guilt or feeling of duty to atone for actions that belong to history or larger systems seems wholly unhelpful. It's not a good state of mind to motivate a person to action.
It seems possible to me to understand how privilege of all sorts can lead people to have blind spots without that translating to a person needing to carry around guilt and duty of atonement in a generalized and permanent sense for actions they themselves did not take.
Right, but I think this is one of the unjustified extremes. I am keenly aware of my own privilege across several domains and I do not spend a single second of my life atoning for it.
Once - in the early 2000s - I was walking somewhere in Manhattan and a black girl addressed me to ask if I could hail a cab for her. She said "you know how it is". I pretended to know how it was, because of course when someone says "you know how it is" you aren't going to contradict them, and stuck my hand out into the street. A taxi which was stopped across the street immediately pulled across approximately six lanes of traffic (avenues in Manhattan are about 100' wide) and practically materialized in front of me. I opened the door and attempted to say something chivalrous like "please take this young lady where she wants to go" but I'm sure that sounds much better than whatever I came up with at the time. I later asked a friend about it and he told me that there was this thing where taxi drivers preferred not to pick up black people, and that there was even a video of Yaphet Kotto (a black actor my friend and I were both fans of) trying and failing to hail a cab.
Was it my fault this girl couldn't get a cab? No - obviously not. But I was able to use my privilege to help her, and that made me feel good. Just like a person who is privileged to be young and able-bodied might feel good helping an older or disabled person cross the street. For me, acknowledging privilege is a pretty universally positive experience - the first step on a path towards helping others who might not have all the advantages that I have.
Yes, but do you help people who are not black or brown? Do you think all whites and Asians are as privileged as you?
Similarly to how you never thought of that black situation, there are other things you have not thought about
Don't be too confident in your epiphany to then go forth to mindlessly drive society. This is a common mistake. You were sure in your life before that encounter also, as you imply yourself
It is known that Africans tend to have high self esteem. This is often expressed more subtly in narcissistic woe-is-me ism as well
.
As someone who navigates social situations easily, I advise you to be more thoughtful regarding the pronouncements of our "betters". When the newest idea hits, ask yourself, not only whether it seems true, but also, is it in good faith
Incidentally, it would be fine to dispute "you know how it is" ;)
The word "privilege" would provoke less hostility if it were more equitably applied. For example, there are many awards, jobs, and fellowships only for women or only for black people. Affirmative action policies are ubiquitous in universities. Female privilege also manifests in many forms in informal life. When was the last time a woman was expected to do the manual labor in a house, get drafted into a war, or initiate a date? When was the last time a woman had to worry whether she would falsely accused of sexual harassment? These are all forms of black or female privilege, but no self-respecting social justice advocate would be caught dead calling them that.
But again, the framework of privilege is totally useless in actually doing anything that might help them. What did help is Uber, which was motivated and implemented using zero “caring about privilege” and thousands of engineers and billions of dollars worth of Silicon Valley innovation and tech.
> Privilege is fundamentally a cognitive blind spot where people who haven't personally dealt with a problem think the problem isn't real
I don’t think this is at all what people actually mean when they say privilege. It would imply that anti capitalists and anarchists, because they haven’t managed a supply chain or large bureaucracy, are privileged and have a cognitive bias against capitalism. Or that BLM supporting black people are privileged in not understanding the national context of police violence. There are also a number of right wing or reactionaries who are super witchy and yet have had a lot of personal experience with the stuff, and they’d absolutely still be considered privileged despite not working in that definition.
I think the reason we wouldn't describe someone as "privileged" if they'd never had the problems faced by a manager of a large bureaucracy is that those problems don't have the social significance that would warrant analysis using the framework of privilege. In other words, what would anyone have to gain by increasing the overall social understanding of the problems faced by bureaucrats? Who, by not understanding the problems of supply chain managers, is making the lives of supply chain managers harder?
Well said.
And then we can also imagine contexts in which the tribulations of supply chain managers need to be understood better (by their bosses, by CEOs, by policymakers whose policies impact on them?) and so there's a whole wing of Harvard Biz School type stuff calling for higher level managers to do the equivalent of riding the subway for a few days within their domains.
It's not really what the word privileged is most usefully applied to, but in a way the same dynamic is at play, which is one's own circumstances not giving one easy access to empathy and understanding of what another person is coping with.
Some part of this has always seemed to me to be covered by the word humility -- a kind of deep acknowledgment that one has blind spots, will always have blind spots, that the shape and extent of them are unknowable, that our blind spots will likely produce ignorant speech and action from time to time, and that we always have the opportunity to learn more.
I guess I wasn’t specific. “Underprivileged minority left wing activists” regularly agitate for transformative government policy changes that, if actually implemented, would seriously hurt them and many others. “Abolishing police”, price controls, rent control (at status quo of real estate), the dismantling of large corporations, the destruction of the profit motive, giving arbitrary minorities / workers operational control of large companies, destructive wealth redistribution (“dismantle Amazon and google”), etc. by neil’s privilege, these people “have a cognitive blind spot” (don’t understand the consequences of the policies involved and believe strange ideas about them) “where people who haven’t personally dealt with a problem believe the problem isn’t real or significant” (said policy changes would stop very important functionings of large economic workings and companies that said activists haven’t personally dealt with and don’t believe are real to important, never having managed large supply chains or companies). They may have “other problems and be somehow underprivileged”, by racial discrimination or something, but as Neil said that “doesn’t mean your problems aren’t worse than other people’s”, and their policy changes would be much worse for them than any racism.
Needless to say, nobody would use this definition of privilege like that. And I don’t think it’s a central or good definition as a result.
Well, we're almost making a farce of the no politics rule here but I suppose I can respond without debating the policy implications? Remember the idea of privilege is founded in experience - that is, if you haven't experienced some particular problem, you are privileged over someone who has experienced the problem. It sounds like you are trying to extend the concept to cover theoretical problems that you say "would occur" as a result of some policy changes. Even if you are right, and those problems would indeed occur, the fact that nobody has experienced those particular specific problems yet (because they are, as of now, hypothetical future problems) takes us outside the realm of privilege as I understand it.
Agree 100%.
Although to be fair to critics of privilege, I have to acknowledge that the online discourse contains many examples of people using the concept of privilege in ways that would be antithetical to that concept of humility - for example, as a bludgeon to silence dissent - and I oppose that usage of the concept.
I think the unquantifiable nature of the concept of privilege lends itself quite handily to abuse.
The problems of large companies or bureaucracies are incredibly important for, say, the people who’s life and livelihood and nutrition and political stability and military security and health and everything else depends on, I.e. almost literally everyone. And the, for instance, anarchists or socialists or populists or esoteric conspiracists or mainstream political junkies would absolutely greatly benefit in the realism and usability of their proposals if they understood that. Bad economic regulation proposed by ansrchists or socialists or populists, or bad military or corporate structure or politics, or just bad regulation, has in some cases cratered economies and countries, and poor understanding of the above had in almost al countries seriously harmed many industries and cities and people. All of those would be greatly benefited by improved understanding and use of bueraucracies and corporations and supply chains and legal systems and whatever. And probably much more benefitted by it than by any sort of “privilege of <race/social group>“, such as realistic and timely addressing of ... pollution, climate change, inflation, corporate power, etc.
I think I would agree that not being directly affected by policy is a form of privilege, and that many "mainstream political junkies" with one-size-fits-all bad solutions to problems are privileged in this way, and might produce better policy proposals if they understood some of the issues and problems involved more clearly - for example, by being more personally invested in them. But my understanding is also that at least in the US, Congress does spend considerable time consulting with business leaders and others who have direct experience of these issues, so again, I'm just not sure the concept of privilege could be usefully deployed here to create the kind of policy changes you are talking about.
I guess I would just add that just because privilege might not help us solve the biggest and most pressing problems, that doesn't mean that the concept of privilege can't help us understand some issues more clearly, or that the concept is meaningless.
Concretely: understanding “privilege of rich vs poor” will have absolutely no impact compared to something like “getting all national climate orgs to put their tens of billions into direct carbon capture” or “sidestepping the food lobby to regulate obesity out of existence” in the actual health and incomes of poor people in the US and globally. The entire issue is meaningless
This is a great answer. There’s a piece I’d like to add, maybe as a question. Do you think there is a phenomenon of a privileged person over-identifying with a “narrative of member(s) of an oppressed group? Filling in some blind spots, but also uncritically adopting it as “their own” in a somewhat subconscious way? There’s a difference between having a problem and seeing a problem in operation for another person. If I have a problem, I choose certain actions to address it, but if I see a problem in operation for someone else, I choose actions to address that in a different way.
When the response works it works for different reasons.
Adopting the mindset as if I have the same problem, and attempting to choose actions based on that framework, can lead to something very weird. A large social issue will impact everyone, differently for different individuals and groups. If I adopt a response based on my conviction that my experience is actually happening differently, I neglect to understand my own experience of that issue and I have trouble choosing which actions are actually effective to help another group facing the issue but impacted differently.
Does that make sense? Do you think it’s real? Epistemology with narratives of privileged people comprehending blind spots and then acting effectively from their own point of view is something that’s somewhat missing (I think) from the public square. I think the 1990s-now started doing better with elevating epistemologies of oppressed groups. But narratives of oppressed groups have all sorts of uses for those with more privilege; as foils for their own problems, as side projects, as distractions, of course as legitimate learning - all those are uses of literature, good ones. But I think some of the excesses of wokeology can be traced to people seeing oneself in others’ stories to an overly excessive extent. (Ameliorating this is why the “ally” category was invented.)
If you have any lit references of people with privilege learning to see it and not dying/being maimed somehow/abdicating, please post. I think it’s out there somewhere.
Yeah, definitely - this is a known issue and has several implications, and in particular is one aspect of the problem which intersectionality was designed to solve.
So one problem is that even if you understand someone's problem really, really well, your solution will still be informed by your lived experience. This is a known failure mode of many systems of moral reasoning, including the "golden rule" and Rawls "original position". Maybe a solution that you would be happy with if you had the problem doesn't really work for someone who actually has the problem. It's going to be hard to come up with concrete examples that meet the "non-political open thread" requirements so maybe we could revisit this topic in thread 188 or 190.
Related to this is the issue that sometimes a problem might look very different for one subgroup than for another. Problems that appear similar from the outside might be qualitatively different from the outside. Again, hard to talk specifics non-politically, but intersectionality was designed to deal with this issue by raising awareness of the fact that, e.g. the problems faced by a black woman are not simply a union of the set of problems faced by women and the set of problems faced by black people. As a consequence, some black women came to believe that they couldn't solve their specific problems that were specific to black women by engaging in the women's rights movement as women and the black rights movement as black people.
And of course there are all kinds of people who are ready to appropriate "victimhood narratives" for social status or political power, which, as you point out, is why some activists say that e.g. men can be feminist allies, but can't be actual feminists (although there is much disagreement on this point, even among feminists). But like - if you see a group of people who are deliberately elevating narratives of oppressed people, and you really want your voice to be heard for whatever reason, it is very tempting to try to, let's say, emphasize aspects of your identity in which you have a lack of privilege, or find some other way of signaling that you are someone worth listening to. Hence "oppression Olympics".
Personally I find the framework of privilege to be helpful for me personally in understanding others, but not very helpful as a way to convince people of things, or a way to think about solutions to problems. Most solutions to most problems have some political aspect, or have to clear some political hurdle, and the way to clear that hurdle is through building solidarity and emphasizing commonality rather than difference. That's why discussion of privilege usually falls under the general category of "critical theory" - it's more focused on analyzing problems than on constructing solutions.
The classic text on a person learning to see privilege is of course the Peggy McIntosh text - https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf - who wrote introspectively about how she came to understand her white privilege. I imagine there are tons of other, better, more modern accounts out there, but I'm not so caught up on the literature as to be able to recommend a particular one.
Without getting overly political (if at all possible), can you explain the algorithm that is used to decide the cutoff level for splitting intersectional groups ? For example, as you said, we know that "the problems faced by a black woman are not simply a union of the set of problems faced by women and the set of problems faced by black people". But what about a plus-sized black woman ? An immigrant plus-sized black woman ? A disabled immigrant plus-sized black woman ?
On the one hand, it's tempting to draw the line somewhere, and say, "ok, a demographic subgroup has to consist of at least X% of the population, otherwise we'll roll it up into its parent group". But, on the other hand, if taking care of minorities is our primary goal, then eliminating arbitrarily small minorities would seem to run counter to that goal.
On the other hand, obviously the smallest possible demographic group is the individual, but the entire point of social justice is to evaluate people based on their membership in groups, so this approach won't work either.
I think you're operating from an analytical level, but intersectionality is a synthetic practice.
What I mean is, there's no theory that can tell you which identity groups or combinations of groups will produce intersectional effects, or what those effects will be. The effects are grounded in specifics: specific histories, specific times and places, specific cultures. Even specific individuals. From these specifics, you might get a clearer picture of the whole.
For example: I know that there have been claims that doctors take women's self-reported pain less seriously than men's self-reported pain. I know there have been claims that doctors tend to assume the health problems of obese people are related to their obesity even when they are not. So I might guess that obese women might have specific problems with medical care that might be unique to them - but on the other hand, they might just have the two problems I listed above separately (or, of course, either or both of those problems could be illusory). I wouldn't really know unless obese women told me that they'd experienced distinct problems with accessing medical care as obese women.
In practice, the highest number of identities I have seen in any kind of intersectional claim has been three. The practical problems you might imagine one would have in keeping track of the various combinations of identities and their implications will absolutely limit the number of intersections you could feasibly and credibly claim - like, who is going to be able to say with any degree of certainty that a poor trans black disabled immigrant experiences problems differently than a poor trans white disabled immigrant?
Critics of intersectionality equate it with identity politics, but it is more accurate to view intersectionality as a critique of identity politics. Identity politics is about making common cause around a shared identity. Intersectionality is about pointing out which people tend to get left out by identity politics, and figuring out what to do about it. There's an implicit recognition that we need identity politics to solve problems, but we don't want to be reducing people to a single identity in the process.
Thank you! Good non-political response - I forgot which thread this one is. Yes, next time a politics-allowed comes around.
Very well "said." Thanks.
Are prices part of the map, or part of the territory?
Can't have something *only* in the map. Unless the map is wrong.
I think this is one of those cases where the fact that the map and the readers of the map are embedded in the territory is highly relevant.
The map is based on the territory, but in economics the territory is made of people who read the map. So the distinction between map and territory gets pretty shaky.
I'd say the prices of individual transactions and bids are part of the territory, and summaries and predictions of those prices are part of the map.
+1
It depends entirely on your frame of reference.
I'm curious to what extent various social and psychological ills would turn out, upon closer and honest inspection, to be self-fulfilling prophecies. That is, the fact that people are made aware they should "feel bad" is actually the main cause of them experiencing negative emotions in the first place.
For one thing, I'm thinking about various "traumas" that people tend to get groomed into believing they've experienced, often in a cult-like manner. But I also have in mind the psychological effects of "inequality" (which are often the effects of becoming aware of, constantly perceiving, and obsessing over inequality, more than of the actual inequality itself).
Seconded, based on introspective work.
Goes beyond the points you raise, but I suspect that any given X cannot be aversive / traumatic if you (fully) buy into a social frame that (fully) endorses X and all of X's (potential) consequences.
X = e.g. physical pain, going to war, suicide bombings.
Two things appear to make the big difference around whether something is considered aversive; autonomy and purpose. If you feel you chose to do something, and that you are doing it for a good and important reason, the experience itself will be less aversive (not non-aversive, just much more tolerable and your rating of how aversive it is will be lower).
However, even people who chose something like going to war can be traumatized by what occurs there. And even people who see and experience very upsetting situations, such as first responders, can get worn down by repeated trauma, and develop trauma symptoms such as PTSD.
Choosing to engage with X is a non-zero indicator for said endorsement, but far from fully there.
I think we often run into the issue of failing to distinguish an internal state from an external expression of a state. Therapy and other methods of dealing with trauma often have the effect of bringing it to the forefront and can result in expressions of a state that are more visible and extreme than they were prior to therapy. That doesn't mean the person is less healthy or mentally stable after therapy. Instead, they may have had the same (or worse!) internal state, but didn't express it. I know a guy who had a very strict upbringing (imagine an alcoholic father who yelled all the time and held his kids to impossible standards). That guy expresses very little emotion most of the time, and internalized the standards from his father. Most of the time he comes across as competent and professional, without a lot of emotion. Some of the time he lashes out and screams at people from little provocation.
Knowing his background, I make the leap to say that he has trauma from his childhood whether he expresses himself or not. Someone pointing that out to him doesn't create the trauma or the reaction to the trauma.
I do believe that it's quite possible to amplify the expressions of the trauma in unhelpful ways, that neither reduce the trauma nor result in fewer outbursts over time. Getting someone worked up about their trauma with no guidance or plan for how to work through it could agitate without helping. That would be the equivalent of trying to solve a murder through town gossip alone.
I've seen complaints about therapy based on the idea that trauma should be relived vividly in the hopes that catharsis will help. However, this doesn't mean that all talk about one's trauma is a bad idea.
I don’t think they’re actually self fulfilling prophecies. At least any more so than something like “someone suggests you eat something, so you eat it” is a self fulfilling prophecy. Other factors contribute more, even if the result, in the case of “trauma”, is unnecessary, and other potential self fulfilling prophecies wouldn’t have the same hooks to use.
This was touched on in a previous post - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
It would probably be helpful to go read up on trauma and how it works. There's plenty of research, including on factors that make it harder on people or less so, short-term and long-term.
It would probably also be helpful if you read up on the actual research on how 'cult-like persuasion' occurs - not what former cult members or people selling a fix-it say.
Many people who experience events that could easily create trauma reactions (such as childhood sexual abuse, terrible experiences in wartime, consistent ill-treatment for reasons beyond their control...) don't have PTSD or similar trauma syndromes. We know a fair bit about what is protective there, and what creates greater vulnerability.
Then of course, there's the dilemma of colloquial use of the word 'trauma'. And differentiating immediate after-effects of extremely difficult experiences compared to longer-term ones, etc - it's quite normal to have nightmares, obsessive thinking, trouble sleeping and eating etc after a very difficult experience, but for many people that goes away fairly quickly.
Do you have any info to support the idea that people experience psychological effects of things like 'inequality' due to 'the effects of becoming aware of, constantly perceiving, and obsessing over inequality, more than of the actual inequality itself'?
> It would probably also be helpful if you read up on the actual research on how 'cult-like persuasion' occurs - not what former cult members or people selling a fix-it say.
How would one go about that?
Regarding inequality specifically, it's almost tautological - Effects of *poverty* are objective, effects of *inequality* are psychological issues caused by comparing oneself to the Jones' across town. The only way your neighbour winning the lottery can hurt you is if the awareness of it causes you jealousy and bitterness.
True, but I think you'd admit that it's not just jealousy and bitterness when your child will get a crap education and be trapped in the same type of crap jobs you've been trapped in, while across town, someone who has done nothing extraordinary, is as smart as you are and has worked as hard as you have has a child who will get a good education and go on to have decent jobs. Same goes for when you know your elderly mother will not get medical care she needs, through no fault of her own or yours, while another equally elderly and equally ill person will get required care, through no merit of their own or their family's.
And one of the main reasons for these differences is so that a few people can become extremely rich and keep their extreme riches.
There's inequality, and then there's inequality.
How does one get their meetup link added to the spreadsheet? I must have missed any info on that... I have one for Ljubljana, Slovenia that I'd like to add somehow... https://www.lesswrong.com/events/G5gufXwuHhJuoDoLi/ljubljana-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021
Thanks.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/outdoor-careful-meetups-everywhere
Info about submission, with a form linked partway down.
Many thanks!
The approved universities for the EA scholarship seem to be particularly elitism and classist for a community so aligned with Rationalist thought. I'd understand some combination of planned course of study, explanation, need and minimally prestigious university (which goes towards ability to change the world for the better). Instead it is limited to a particularly tiny set of schools. Maybe I'm making a molehill out of an anthill here, but this is the same flavoring that has put me off EA forums in the past.
Sending anyone to a top university in the USA or the UK when top University in Germany, France or Switzerland are free seems like a strange move anyway from an EA perspective. Like you could found all expanses (including rent and holidays) for 2-3 students at Paris-Saclay university (13th in Shangaï ranking, 1st in mathematics) for the price of a scholarship at Harward or any top USA/UK university.
After having thought about this a little more, I wonder if it’s also a very cheap screening method. I suspect that if you can get into a top school you must have enough qualifications or contacts to be worth the scholarship to the EA community. Obviously not getting into a top school doesn’t preclude such qualifications, but my understanding is that often these sorts of scholarships are just looking for efficient ways to cull the herds of applicants, and this lets colleges bear the brunt of the cost of culling rather than the EA organization
What if class signalling is super useful for high impact endeavours?
I have applied to some Very Important Universities, and been told to fuck off, so I dislike them both on principle and personal grounds (ofc more the latter). However, in defense of the idea: if you wanted to train impactful EA judges, it would just not be a good idea to finance law schools other than Harvard or Yale because for some reason the latter two institutions "produce" impactful judges at a much, much higher rate than any of the other 200 law schools.
Although not quite as bad, I think the situation is similar for many other domains in the UK and the US. It sucks, but if you want to improve reality you first have to accept it.
Whatever one's attitude towards such
Disregard last line
My gut says something deeper is going on. If your only criterion when making a list of schools was prestige, it feels weird to not even mention Dartmouth and Cornell. My guess is that there is some requirement for the schools to make the list, and some thought put in to which ones to choose (i.e. why Harvard isn’t on the list) that makes making a huge list too time-intensive.
Fair enough.
I think that's pretty clearly the case: LSE is a very strong British university, above Imperial for many EA-relevant fields, but isn't included in the list.
Here is the Late and Great Hunter S. Thompson, 20 years ago today.
http://proxy.espn.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751
I recommend reading the whole very short piece, the choice bits:
"We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them."
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives."
Ouch.
Ouch indeed. Just how soon after the attack was that written? One thing that struck me was Thompson stating
"The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher."
I remember on that horrible day hearing on TV estimates of the death toll being well over 10,000. Guiliani said at a press conference that day something like "it will be more than any of us can bear". Does anyone remember how long it took before we had the official number which is just under 3000 souls? I've always been amazed that the death toll was "only" three thousand. As horrific as it was, it seems like it could have been so, so much higher and I wonder why it (thank God) was not. Has there ever been any analysis done of this? For instance, were the 5-figure numbers heard on TV just plain wrong/fog of war stuff?
It turns out that building codes requiring multiple staircases that can function as fire escape are really amazing interventions. You might have thought that they wouldn't work well for the 80th floor, but my understanding is that basically everyone who was below where the plane hit managed to get out safely. This probably wasn't obvious on 9/12, particularly because there was nothing like Facebook's "X marked themself safe in the Y incident" feature, so officials suspected there were a lot more dead than there actually were.