On the Guardians Against Pandemics front, a big point in their favor is that if you ask them to please refund your contribution, they're prompt and polite about it. (I hadn't noticed the significance of ActBlue on first reading, but the commentariat here convinced me to at least withdraw my money until they explained themselves at length on that topic.)
Here's GAP responding to an email of "please refund my money, I realized I have no idea how you plan to be bipartisan if you're going through ActBlue, and really don't want to fund this becoming a partisan issue":
"There is good reason to use ActBlue now just as a practicality. We are raising right now for Democratic candidates because Democrats are in control of both Houses at the moment, so many of our asks are directed towards Democrats. We are likely to use WinRed to solicit Republican PAC donations in the future as the chambers flip and we have asks for Republican members such as restrictions on GOF research."
I don't know to what extent ActBlue and WinRed would be in favor of an organization trying to use them both simultaneously, but it seems somewhat reasonable.
Somewhere in one of these open threads I recall a discussion about the spectrum of human personalities and proclivities. I am not sure but I think it was in relationship to an” on the spectrum” discussion of “being”, or “personality,” or “proclivity” or …. (You pick a word.)
The consensus seems to be that the world was richer for having multiple sorts of all of those things.
Given that, does not it make much more sense to have a pantheon of gods? So that all kinds of people will have someone to look up to?
The more Elemental of us might identify with Mars for instance and He might even speak to us.
Those of us perhaps more Murcureal in temperament, would listen to… Well, you know.
I guess I am trying to start a discussion about whether the world would be in a better place if they were more gods to choose from.
But only if they shared some of our qualities and deficiencies in order to make them easier to identify with.
Our present gods are largely ideals, aspirations, that have fallen into the hands of lawyers poets and politicians since they were invented. They would be welcome to the pantheon.
We could all go about our business secure in the knowledge that there was a God who was a little better than you but” bent” kind of the way you are. It strikes me as a healthier relationship to the world.
Suppose that early in 2020, Moderna decided that damn the ethics boards, they were going to do a challenge trial. At what point in the plan would they be stopped? Are vaccines regulated enough that the police could come by and arrest the people running the trial, or would they make it to the step of getting stonewalled by the FDA because their study didn't follow proper procedure?
And I'd expect that any doctor involved in deliberately infecting people with a known-lethal pathogen would be in danger of losing their medical license.
What if they'd found a country willing to allow it? If (say) the Brazilian medical regulators allow it and allow doctors who take part to continue practicing medicine, there wouldn't be any legal repercussions, right? Would US/UK/EU regulators have been willing to accept data from that kind of study? Would they have penalized Moderna for doing it?
I can't say for sure, but I strongly doubt that the FDA would accept data from a trial conducted by protocols it wouldn't have approved domestically. You can do your clinical trials in Brazil or wherever, but you have to do them to US standards to count.
I think it's great that the Biden Administration is promoting Covid vaccinations, and has encouraged pop stars to reach out to their fans. And given the threat that Covid poses to Baby Boomers, why not recruit ACDC into the effort? Still, I'm taken aback by a headline in today's New York Times:
"A C.D.C. panel is meeting to decide who should get Pfizer boosters."
This is a random place to post this but you're all smart.
I just moved into a place and the basement briefly floods when it rains hard (which it has a few times since I moved in). I don't particularly care because the sump pump gets 95% of it out and only leaves small puddles. I never actually spend any time in the basement except to switch my laundry.
But a week ago I left a guitar case down there, and I went down today and found it dotted everywhere with yellow-y mold, which seemed like alarmingly fast growth. There is also mold on the basement walls which I previously just ignored.
I live on the first floor, right above the basement. Does this seem like a concerning situation?
Thanks for the response -- sorry about your books. Yeah nothing of real value for me, the guitar case probably cost $10. I'm more wondering about the air quality upstairs where I live above the basement -- if it's leaking upwards. I guess I can probably get something to measure that.
A damp basement by itself shouldn’t be a problem on the first floor. I don’t know what the weather is like where you are but where I am in a smallish Minnesota city that sort of thing is taken in stride, especially if the basement itself isn’t being used as living space.
I have been living in the US for 6 years and am sick and and tired of this stupid imperial system. I love almost everything else about living here.
<vent>
Fahrenheit must be the dumbest unit ever invented, based on (horse?) body temperature. Inches are barely better and have been defined using metric since the 50s anyway. It would be better if things were 0.625" but the whole odd numerator thing is sooooo stupid.
</vent>
Does anybody know of any movements trying to accelerate metric adoption in the US? I want to join, or start my own, for the sake of my grandkids. Enough is enough.
Fahrenheit is the one good part of imperial units!
Metric has a good argument for stuff like length and weight where it's useful to be able to convert between feet and miles. But nobody ever multiplies temperatures like that.
Setting your temperature scale to 1/273.16th the triple point of water is just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit. At least Fahrenheit has the advantage of doing a much better job of handling the range of normal temperatures that humans care about. The weather is usually between 0-99F, but Celesius leaves have the scale untouched while forcing cold places to resort to confusing negatives more often.
IMO, the mark of someone who is thoughtful about metric is if they're willing to consider the merits of Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit has the nice property that I hardly ever care about the last digit unless I'm making candy. It just so happens that the tens digit maps to about the limit of what I can perceive.
I can get on-board with the metric system, but I draw the line at temperature. Celsius does not share the advantages that metric has over Imperial, which are primarily about conversion. Fahrenheit gives you nice ten-unit temperature bands that give you useful information: 20's are fridgid, 30's are cold, 40's are chilly, 50's are cool, 60's are fair, 70's are warm, 80's are hot, 90's are scorching. There's enough granularity that you never need to get into decimals to make a meaningful distinction. You don't have to deal with negatives. Anything above 100 or below 0, well, once the temperature reaches those numbers, who cares? Get inside before you hurt yourself.
The only advantage that celsius has in everyday use is at the water freezing point. So what? Just remember that water freezes at 32 and you're done.
Celcius is no different here and has the added benefit that 1 degree celcius = 1 degree Kelvin (SI unit) and that water boils at 100 which is a nice multiple of 10 like everything should be decimal.
If you grew up with Celcius, the states map to 0-5 is cold, 5-10 is chilly, 10-20 is cool, 20-25 is fair, 25-30 is warm, 30-35 is hot, 35+ is schorching etc, again it depends on how humid or dry the air is. The point is that there is no difference in cognitive load mapping the celcius values to "feeling states" than there is with Fahrenheit. This is probably more a case of perceived switching cost.
Celcius *is* different here because for any given number of significant figures Farenheit is twice as precise.
Saying the temperature today is "in the 80s (F)" is twice as precise as saying it's "in the 30s" Celcius, to the point that I can't imagine the latter is a useful thing people say, whereas with Farenheit this is the completely normal way to talk about day-to-day temperature.
Yes, of course you can get that precision back by saying "it's between 25 and 30 (C) today", but that's a lot less convenient. Trading day-to-day convenience in exchange for (*checks notes*) easier conversion to Kelvin doesn't seem like a good trade to me.
In northern Minnesota 0 is chilly, -10 is remember your gloves, -20 is “is the ice thick enough to drive on?”, -30 is “did you plug your block heater in?”, -50 is “huh, this is interesting”
I was watching some stuff by British comic theater company Mischief Theatre on YouTube a few days ago and they mentioned that they ordered a breakable vase for one of their shows from an American company and specified the size in inches. They got sent a teeny little vase because the company figured Mischief was really using centimeters.
Thank you. US Customary and Imperial we're standardized separately, by the US and Britain respectively, decades after the former declared independence from the latter. There's a bunch of overlap because both are based on the older and looser English Customary standards, which in turn were largely an attempt to rationalize several competing industry standards relative to one another.
The big difference, as you note, is in liquid measurements. The US picked the wine industry's traditional gallon, and the British picked the ale industry's traditional gallon.
When I was a kid some distance signs on the highway featured km along with miles. Then one year all those signs were gone. I think we're going the other way. Sorry.
If you took part in a vaccine trial, do they eventually tell you if you got the placebo? Seems like that'd be important to know if you're deciding whether to get the shot again.
Does anyone else feel mildly annoyed when the run into the word ‘nonplussed’ in print? It currently has two completely different meanings and I usually have to try to use context or information about the author’s age and continent of residence to get at their intended meaning.
Or in a similar vein, how about the word ‘bemused’?
I guess I should add that normally this wouldn’t bug me enough to actually put it online but my cat kept waking me up last night with her new trick of giving me a facial massage when she needs attention.
Yes, the newer meaning of nonplussed is an abomination, but we live in an age where people will post things online using the word "are" instead of "our" or say "should of" instead of "should have" or even "should've," so I have pretty much given up hope.
I am a lifelong teetotaler, but if something is going to push me to drink it is likely to be this sort of thing..
The other word I mentioned 'bemused' is another one that throws me for a loop. The dictionary definition I learned was 'confused or muddled'. Now the meaning is changing to something like 'amused'.
There is this common pattern in philanthropy, more often seen in left-wing stuff, where when someone wants to do X, instead of raising money and then doing X with it, they raise money to lobby the government to spend money on X.
An example: I once lived in Madison, WI, where it is both quite left-wing and very cold in the winter. There was a fairly large homeless population and one or two of them would die of exposure every winter. I knew some folks who were trying to raise money for a warming shelter so the homeless folks could sleep there at night instead of freezing to death on the streets. Their plan was to collect money and hire a lobbyist to try and get the city government to build a warming shelter. They had this whole plan worked out, which land they could use, how much it would cost, how it would fit into the city budget. I talked with them in the square for a while and told them that it looked like they money they planned to raise was more than enough for the downpayment for the building. Hadn't crossed their mind, and they weren't interested. They were comfortable in the world of lobbying the city, and construction or building things weren't things they knew how to do.
This "Guarding Against Pandemics" thing has this in *spades*. Set aside the avowed Democratic partisanship: the only thing they can think of to do with the money they collect is to give it to politicians. How about they offer some more funding to the Seattle Flu Study? I've had some arguments with Trevor Bedford, but he personally has done more good against COVID than the entire CDC, especially early in 2020. I'll bet he sure could use some funding to hire a couple more techs. Or maybe GAP could spin up similar tracking groups in other US cities. That sure seems like it would be more use than re-electing Elizabeth fucking Warren.
If they could raise enough money for a down payment, they were 5x short on startup costs, and/or would need to find a continuing source of income for maintenance and debt service.
Leveraging the city government to pay for it would be cheaper.
Plus what Very Wrong says about needing community and political buy-in.
You're just ignoring the costs of the government paying for it.
Option 1:
Raise $1M from donors, spend it on $1M of homeless services.
Option 2:
Raise $1M from donors, spend it on $1M of government lobbying, with probability p, government taxes $5M from citizens and spends it on $5M of homeless services.
From the donors' perspective, as long as p>20%, Option 2 is a good deal. Suppose p=40%. Then they leverage, in expectation, their $1 donation into $2 of homeless services. They have also leveraged $3 of *total spending* into $2 of homeless services, because 60% of the time their donations are completely wasted and the other 40% of the time their donations are spent on lobbying that directly produces nothing.
If GAP spends 60K on an ad buy to try and pass a sales tax in Colorado, then the exact same analysis applies. It is *always* more wasteful, because ads don't produce anything. At most they can redirect money to a different use.-
Ads can produce knowledge in the mind of their viewer, which can have value. Different uses of money have differential value. If the new use of money is more productive than the old use of the same money, value is created.
Imagine I run a small manufacturing business where my workers spend a lot of time stripping wires with a standard pliers-style stripper/cutter. Then one day, I see an ad for a much more efficient automatic self-adjusting wire stripper*. I learn of the existence of a better tool and recognize it could save my workers substantial amounts of time. I purchase them for the shop, increase my throughput, expand my business, and lower costs to consumers. Value is created, dependent on an ad.
This is not to say all or even most ads are like this - in fact I would say most are fighting for a bigger slice of a zero-sum pie of consumer spending on relatively elastic goods. But they can occasionally produce value.
*: These are a real tool that I learned about in the past few years and they radically improve the task of stripping wires. Would recommend.
There's no real issue with lack of structure that building a structure solves. Because the public (by which I mean "businesses and landowners") hates homeless people, and pays men with guns to come and destroy homeless encampments. In places that don't do this (eg: Rio, Kigali), those homeless encampments get gradually upgraded into normal neighborhoods.
what? the issue is probably more “building codes” than ... that, I don’t see under what law it’d be illegal to build a few story building with tiny rooms for homeless to sleep in (again aside from building codes that say the rooms have to be big and satisfy thousands of other constraints). But if you did make a building, and put the people in them, that’s not an encampment it’s a building and they no longer break laws.
Build a homeless encampment in, say, a church you purchased precisely for that purpose, and you will find yourself harassed by the state at the behest of businesses and landowners. You will find them pulling all your permits, double-checking the standard of accommodation, bringing up fire risks or COVID order violations or lack of mandated parking spaces or structural maintenance issues, in an attempt to condemn the shelter. You will find the municipality passing ordinances saying that you're not allowed to house more than N unrelated people in the same structure, or saying that your structure isn't in the zoning plan, or whatever. They will find a way, and men with guns will be dispatched, and the homeless will be extirpated.
The only way around that in the long run is to get some kind political buy-in from liberals, which is a barely-there thing anyway, because capital exerts strong pressure to kick them out, to let another city deal with the problem.
Ordinary people (not just "capital") don't like the homeless because they commit a great deal of crime. Ideally we'd punish the crime, but we as a society have decided we have "too many people in prison," so lots of people go for the next best option: thus these zoning laws, though there's more than just this going on there. Try to build anything at all in some cities and a horde of activists will try to shut you down.
Note that some of this is just extremely mentally ill people being mentally ill in ways that impinge on the neighbors, sometimes including assault, indecent exposure, vandalism, etc. And even pretty compassionate people don't really like being assaulted on the street by a crazy person.
Okay, it's a casual game and I haven't even played the trial version yet, but somebody seems to have made a game around the "is it ethical/utilitarian to steal and then give the money to charity?" question 😀
How dangerous, really, is vaping (I'm speaking here of nicotine, not THC vapes ginned up in someone's garage)? I know the Brits have more or less decided it's not a big deal, but in the States it's being treated like a stepping stone to chasing the dragon in a trap house. Does anyone have any feel or knowledge for what (if any) the actual scientific consensus on this is, or even if there is one?
From a mental health perspective I think it's worse than smoking. Cigarettes force you to be outside and douse you with with a lingering smell which is basically a scarlet letter these days.
On the other hand, vaping is extremely convenient and discrete which encourages people to do it all day, and in settings where they wouldn't otherwise smoke (e.g. work, school).
So I think that one's addiction severity and associated mental health toll are likely to be less significant if they stuck exclusively to smoking.
90%-99.9% less destructive, depending on how you react to the ability to craft your own dosing of nicotine; Keep it at cigarette exposure levels and it's nearly harmless.
The US is treating it this way for a few reasons: 1) Cigarette companies have been court-ordered to produce anti-nicotine ads, and the cigarette companies which don't run a successful vape juice company conveniently found they could use to cast extreme FUD on vaping without mentioning cigarettes.
2) Teen vaping went way way up, and then some idiot in a THC-vape-garage created the lipid pneumonia crisis with a brief obsession with the adulterant vitamin E acetate, which the cigarette companies successfully used to lobby liberals and the government to exacerbating their anti-vape FUD.
We invented a cigarette that basically causes no cancer or COPD/emphysema. Instead of pressuring all smokers to switch over that day, we adapted a decades-long quest to protect the tobacco industry's profits, by fighting this scourge. My friends and coworkers who still use cigarettes, when asked why they don't vape instead, reply with "I already tried quitting, but I'm not interested at the moment" or "It's just not the same", but most go with "Vaping is terrible for you too!".
Based on the timing of the "vape lung" panic (I think I remember there being a big wave of stories around Jan-Feb 2020), I'm tempted to speculate it was aggregated by misdiagnosis of early Covid cases before anyone in the US was really looking for it.
At most, this would be a minor contributing factor, though: it looks like the actual "Vape Lung" reported case count peaked in September 2019, which is way too soon for Covid.
Though teen vaping really does seem like a scary problem. Especially because they're anything but responsible with their dosing. Being able to smoke IN SCHOOL is a huge draw for kids, and it's my understanding that it reversed a lot of the progress made in combating nicotine addiction in children. I think that regardless of mortality-related consequences, intense substance dependence in children deserves a lot of
22 year old here. Lots of kids have (correctly) put together the assessment that cigarettes = poor health + feel good, while nicotine vapes = feel good. This stuff was rampant at my school. Any kid with at least an inkling of rebellion in their soul would hit a vape when offered. There's still a good bit of stigma around smoking, but I think kids have been more willing to bum a cigarette then in the pre vaping era.
It's still not great. Nicotine itself apparently can harden your arteries, making heart attacks more likely. It also increases your heart rate and blood pressure on a short timescale, again which increases your chance of having a heart attack while using. Overall it seems like the risks are minor but present. Not sure of any info on the lungs.
You do that every time you breath pure, fresh air. It's the dose that matters, and how do you sort the actual risk-vs-dose profile of straight nicotine out of all the FUD?
Scott, I’m guessing if you’re “squeezing in” Amsterdam, you don’t have a lot of time there. But I think you’d really enjoy the Ritman Library, if it’s open while you’re in town. It’s full of Rosicrucian and Neoplatonic mystic texts collected by the eccentric millionaire who invented the airline beverage cart.
Other top recommendations off the tourist beaten track are the eco projects at De Ceuvel in Amsterdam Noord, story nights (if they’re doing them) at Mezrab, and whatever is going on at Mediamatic. Best view of the city is from the cafe on the roof of the public library near Centraal Station. If you have a chance, grab a rijsttafel at Kartika on Overtoom, or some Surinamese food at Ram’s Roti on Van Galenstraat. We used to live in Amsterdam and these are the places we would take our visitors, and that we miss.
Let's get away from arguing for a bit, here's a nice dance piece from last night's dance competition show (Chinese only, for the English subtitles you'll have to watch the full Episode 6):
It is rather lovely, isn't it? The show is probably chock-full of propaganda, it's certainly chock-full of advertising (which is highly amusing), and probably scripted to the last degree, but it's also good fun and very good at hooking your attention as to what next week's episode will be.
i interpreted this as a dance about a student that was eager to play the instrument but the mentor wanted him to learn the small things, the student eventually starts following the mentor at first with uncertainty of his actions but he improves and eventually the mentor and student are moving together until the end, he receives the instrument and the mentor leaves him because he is ready to do it alone. that was beautiful
GAP is using a payment processor that *REQUIRES* all of it's customers to be partisan. Either they are lying to us or lying to ActBlue. Either way, they're lying.
I think that's an unfair characterisation, I think they just went with something that was convenient.
I agree that the thumping mentions of "Democrat, Democrat, Democrat" in all the website stuff wouldn't encourage me, were I a Republican or other, to think that this wanted me to be involved with them; a cross-party appeal would do better, surely, if you want Congress to keep the funding in the budget?
Though I am amused by taxing weed in Denver to let the university have a research programme; that's a harmless kind of pork barrel project that will provide academic jobs and while I don't imagine they'll have any luck re: researching masks that people who do NOT want to wear masks of ANY kind will wear, it won't do any harm, either.
Other people further down make a more detailed case that this is strictly to fund mainstream Democrats. I will merely point out that there is no way they went with ActBlue except it's Democratic signaling. They *cannot* contribute to Republicans without losing ActBlue, so why would they go with a payment processor that cuts off their ability to work with the other side?
Because it's not a problem. They have no intention to do so.
I think this is very hopeful. If you were allergic to peanuts, and I knew it, and the most convenient sandwiches for me to buy to sell to people were PB&J, and I put up a sign that said "safe for people with peanut allergies", would that be "just went with something that was convenient", or would I be intentionally and knowingly misleading you to do something you would consider harmful?
I haven't been able to find that particular requirement anywhere in the terms and conditions, could you quote it please? The FAQ https://support.actblue.com/campaigns/faq/can-i-use-actblue/ says "If you’re a ... 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, the first requirement is that you’re a Democrat or working for progressive causes." -- "progressive causes" seems like weaselly language that could describe anything and everything, but in particular I'd need to be convinced that pandemic preparedness doesn't apply.
Would it change your mind at all to know that progressives have developed their own alternative ecosystem because they consider it too restrictive on what it permits? That it stifles challenges to the Democratic mainstream and alternative lefts like the Greens and the DSA?
The knowledge that there is an alternative ecosystem for funding progressive causes probably won't change my mind materially, no; there are many cases where multiple parallel ecosystems exist.
A substantiated claim that it stifles challenges to the Democratic mainstream and alternative lefts may change my mind about whether you are, in fact, *REQUIRED* to be partisan to use it. (Emphasis from OP.)
Then you are too credulous to understand politics.
I can point out multiple people on the left and right who claim to have been stifled by it. I can point out people who've been kicked off who claim it was because they didn't support the Democratic mainstream. I can point out entire ecosystems developed on the left and right because they consider it to not permit things outside the Democratic mainstream.
I can't point out a place where they explicitly say that's their policy because they won't say that. They will (as the policy you've read notes) have an official policy that's broad enough to allow such discrimination then do it in effect. This is the way things like this work.
I do hope you apply this standard consistently. For example, when Democrats claim the Republicans are racist I fully expect you to immediately demand them to produce direct statement in the party platform about racial inferiority. This isn't just sniping: you may well be that person. But I've been dealing with isolated demands for rigor on this claim all day.
More importantly, all that's necessary to prove they're lying about being non-partisan is to point to the policy you've found. They say you must be a Democrat or working for Democratic causes. Not that you only use ActBlue to raise from Democrats. That you yourself are one. Using ActBlue therefore definitionally means they're partisan and against Republicans.
The diatribe would be more convincing if instead of saying you *can* point to various things, you actually *did* point to at least one of them. Note I'm not accusing you of lying, nor claiming that you're wrong.
I agree that part of "progressive causes" not being well-defined is that just about anything can be defined to *not* be progressive, too.
I mostly don't hang out in circles where Democrats claim Republicans are racist, but yes, that's definitely wording to which I would object; are you implying you would not?
Note that I never made any claims about whether or not "they" (I presume you mean GAP?) are lying; I agree that if they actually wanted to position themselves as nonpartisan, they could've done approximately infinitely better. I asked whether soliciting donations through ActBlue *REQUIRES* GAP to be "Democratic" as opposed to merely "progressive." Like I said, evidence that ActBlue does not fund causes that are progressive but non-Democratic would convince me that the use of *REQUIRES* is justified.
I'm sorry, but I've been having this conversation about six times over in six places today. Mostly in bad faith. I take it you are trying to be hyper-rational. Fine, I can do that. I'll ask my question more directly: Your belief, if you are rational in a scientific sense, should be falsifiable. What evidence would falsify it?
"This brief post gives some background on Guarding Against Pandemics (GAP), which does non-partisan political advocacy"
You cannot use ActBlue and be non-partisan. "Progressive causes" cannot apply to "anything and everything". You can't use ActBlue to promote gun rights and pro-life campaigns.
So they either lied to ActBlue, are lying to donors, or are so deep in Team Blue that they lie to themselves that "Democrat" and "non-partisan" are the same thing.
I'm not surprised the Effective Altruism has been co-opted to outright lie about Democratic PACs to trick people into donating money to left-wing groups, because rationalists are completely blind to deliberate deception, but I am disappointed.
It's absolutely true, and necessary to establish why a partisan group flying partisan flags funding for 1 party managed to trick Rationalists into thinking it's non-partisan.
That you had to run straight to the moderation policy and not an argument makes clear that you're not claiming it's untrue based on facts, but because you don't like it and want it banned. This is another common failure of Rationalists - the conflation of Nice and True.
yeah man these Democrat voting center-left wing rationalists are sure dullard idiots getting tricked into donating to democratic causes aligned with their rationalist interests. big trick!
Congratulations, you found the exception. I don't care.
Nitpicking statements for technical precision is exactly the category of linguistic obstruction that resulted in the unnecessarily complicated and needlessly demanding and verbose language found within the legal profession until the late 20th century. This kind of lexical chicanery hampers communicative effort, increases mistrust, and causes many potentially productive discussions to be abandoned by traversing blind alleys of argument over whether a particular point was sufficiently qualified or hedged to be precisely accurate. Futhermore, your decision to immediately claim a violation of the rules (but in actuality only the rule 'I don't like what you have to say') isn't an attempt to produce a counterargument in a genuine discussion. It is merely a cheap ploy intended to put your target on the defensive, waste their time and preferably goad them into something actually reportable. I am not going to waste any additional chronological resources on this unproductive avenue of discussion, as the interaction with you has, at this point, produced only negative value and further interaction with you will, as best one can determine, result in a waste of the aforementioned chronological resources.
(Note I'm not Ben Cosman.) I'm genuinely curious -- is there any conversation that wouldn't waste chronological resources that could have been inspired from your comment asserting that rationalists are blind to deception? If yes, can you please give an example? If no, why did you post the comment in the first place?
I regret not discussing COVID more with rationalists in February.
Can't go back though.
Anyone want to preregister a prediction for Evergrande?
So... what will VOO open at on 4 October? And how can we think through this?
COVID dropped it something like 30% in two weeks, then it rebounded as quickly.
Is the implosion of the Chinese economy twice as bad as COVID, half as bad, or not at all bad?
I feel like March 2020 markets were pricing in the collapse of the global economy, to include China, so I'm going with less bad. I don't have strong intuitions on how much though. 65% chance of 400 to 350 by the opening on 4 October?
Some chance this will be contained in China. I'd say 10% but I'm really just guessing. There are lots of ways that economy is tied to the rest of the world, and a lot of ways it's isolated. There are a ton of people with more expertise than me who can game how that shakes out, my intuitions are really shaky here.
My prediction is that it'll be really bad for the Chinese economy but not have much effect on the global economy - between the pandemic and China's diplomatic stance, the West has already begun to reduce its dependence on trade with China. Here in Australia we might suffer more thanks to just how much of our exports is raw materials to China.
I don't know enough about stock markets to predict a specific price or anything, though.
The end of day rebound looks good for you, or at least the over under of say around 400. Hard to believe "it's fine, we'll pay people in parking lots" is really a satisfying answer in a place this overbuilt, but it will be if everyone closes their eyes and wishes real hard that we didn't see anything here.
I'd push back on the explanation that powerful people can simply dictate economic outcomes... except that it might be truer in China than anywhere else.
That being said while I bet against individual black swans I believe generally in the importance of black swans. The extent of my preparation is a lot of tuna and water bottles.
FDA's advisory committee voted fairly heavily against approving third booster shots, the whole thing was 8 hours long and so I only listened to segments of it.
My Layman (familiar with statistics, unfamiliar with medicine) understanding of the state of the vaccines seemed to conform to the kinds of discussions and assumptions the meeting members had.
1) Vax effectiveness at lowering transmission rate reduces over time
2) Vax effectiveness at lowering severe outcomes (hospitalization/death) holds
3) Risk of Myocarditis is taken as credible but uncertainty exists around how large it is. Other risks of repeated doses were mentioned in some of the presentations but did not feature as prominently.
My tentative thought: A younger individual with 2 shots is already protected against adverse outcomes how much more they benefit from a third shot would be the change in the infection rate between the third and weakened second dose and then multiplied by the hospitalization and/or death risk which is going to be very small number. The committee wasn't comfortable in assuming the trade off between that and Myocarditis favored the third jab.
Did anyone watch or hear about this meeting? Am I missing something?
Overall I very pessimistic:
Other observations:
1. Anti-Vax or Vax Hesitant seem to be either using the raw trends in vaccinations and infections to argue not so subtly that vaccines are causing infections, or pointing to some countries like Israel which did not have their deaths/hospitalizations as front-loaded in 2020. The market for per-capita break downs is much smaller than the market for bullying and moral grandstanding.
2. Vaccination rates and lockdown intensities being positively correlated. A lot of people, myself included, got vaccinated despite not being particularly susceptible to the virus out of a hope that it would hasten a return to normalcy. Blaming the unvaccinated who represent on a per-capita basis a larger portion of the most severe outcomes is reasonable but it looks like there are sufficient number of people in positions of influence to maintain the social patterns of 2020 even in areas with >90% vaccination rates. Even if you imposed vaccination universally at gunpoint, the people who either go by covid case rates or insist that deaths must be prevented *at all costs* will probably have their way.
This is really too much for me. I've been a big fan of Scott's for a long time, but this uncritical endorsement of a group that is obviously lying about its intent is the last straw. I am cancelling my subscription.
I think lying is a harsh assessment. It's a function of the bubble they live in, where looking for a relatively easy way to handle payments for a PAC is via a Democrat-only source. At least one of the people involved in this, going by the 'about' page, graduated from what is presumably a 'conservative' university (the school is associated with this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_Schar) and while that doesn't indicate any sort of alignment, it does show that they're not "shilling for the Democrat Party" in disguise.
It's simply "guy who lives, works with and knows people in a Blue bubble lives, works with, and knows people in a Blue bubble who set up groups that use Blue systems without really questioning that". Presumably, if there's a non-partisan organisation out there that does the same work as ActBlue, they would consider using it - if they knew about it.
Doesn't make them or Scott liars, just ordinary people who, like fish, don't question the water they swim in.
"Aren't supposed to be" is a nice idea, and for something like this I agree it is absolutely vital not to be partisan.
But EA *started off* in precisely this Blue bubble; the recent to-do on here about funding for attending universities is because the EA people all came from those universities (Oxbridge) and that's their automatic default for "where to go to meet like-minded people who are interested in these causes".
Look, I'm not American, so I can't claim to be Red Tribe *exactly* as Scott has defined it, but I'm rural peasant in my immediate ancestry. Part of my scepticism about EA endeavours was precisely because I could recognise it was Not For The Likes Of You, even if they all started off with the most pure of intentions. They were all nice, college-educated, middle to upper middle class, progressively-inclined, urban types. Why do you think I laughed my socks off, back in the days of the Vegan Menu War?
It would be lovely if they broadened their horizons beyond the Bay Area or similar enclaves, and I hope they do, but let's face it: even on here, there are not a whole heap of people who can recite tales of living in Red Tribe/non-middle class circumstances (there are some of us who have the "no running water in the house when I was a kid" experience, sure, but we're not the target market for these sorts of endeavours, even if they are trying to give grants so you can attend a posh uni).
That's why I'm pushing back on the part about "They are LIARS who are DELIBERATELY LYING", because I don't think it's that, I think it's just blindness. When I was young, I would know more people who went to Redemptorist missions than went to university. That's a function of the bubble *I* lived in.
We're *all* living in our own bubbles, and that's the good I get out of this place - that at least our bubbles touch and I get glimpses of a different bubble.
I vehemently hope the GAP people get the idea of finding another means of processing donations that is not tied to one particular political party, but I don't believe that immediate accusations of deliberate deception will bring that about. I know that if somebody accused me of being a liar and fraud, I would not be very inclined to examine their case.
I don't even care about the payment processor to be honest. You know that they're partisan because they are only funding Democrats. But even further up than that, you know they're partisan because their position is that Congress needs to "take a stronger line" and that "pandemic preparedness" is even remotely relevant to the outcomes we experienced over the past year.
That entire frame work is not compatible with red-tribe thinking. The fact that they promise to also donate to any hypothetical Republicans who adopt such a framework is irrelevant hogwash.
Imagine I started an organization in Ireland dedicated to unifying the Island under Catholic Republican rule. And someone came along and said, "Gee, that sounds pretty partisan!" and I was all "Au contrare! We will happily welcome any Protestants or Loyalists who also support the bright and glorious future of a free Republican Catholic Ireland!"
Like, no - that's not how it works. "Non-partisan" has an actual meaning and "open to Democrats and Republicans Who Agree With Democrats" ain't it.
I think Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen might like to discuss that point:
"To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country — these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissentions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter —these were my means."
Hey I don't know anything about Ireland - I'm just attempting to speak your language here!
Ultimately you aren't non-partisan if your group consists entirely of one-party, but you loudly declare you might, hypothetically, be open to recruiting members of the other party provided they agree with your party on the issues you deem important.
I would argue that there was a point in time in which "questioning the water he's swimming in" was Scott's entire MO. It's certainly what caused *me* to start taking interest in his writing, at the very least.
it is remarkably difficult to not do catastrophically and absurdly stupid things some of the time. Even if Scott did a serious moral error, everyone does that, and that’s not a great reason to declare someone universally bad. Dunno whether this was that even
I agree. As far as I can tell Scott was misled, by the group or someone associated with it. It happens. I will be interested to see if he retracts his previous statement.
I'm not declaring him universally bad. Just declaring that my pool of "donate to writers who will improve the world in ways I desire" money can be better deployed elsewhere.
Had to look up who that was and immediate results get me *very* disapproving articles about him and Covid, and Wikipedia tells me he is an author of spy novels/thrillers.
Yes. The mainstream hates him regarding Covid because he calls out their nonsense.
"Calling out their nonsense" is what Scott used to do - but has since decided he's more comfortable confirming it. That's fine - but I don't need Scott for that, I can just get an NYT subscription if that's what I'm into.
If you're a big fan of Scott's you'll know that should he find some half-reasonable evidence that what you say is true, he'd think about it, write about it, and if appropriate put a note on his mistakes page confessing to endorsing something without sufficient critical assessment.
Anyhow, I'll miss your comments if you stay gone, GoneAnon.
Planned obsolescence has always been unsustainable in my mind, but I'm starting to think that it might actually be an existential threat. A lot of economic statistics seems like a sham when you consider the incentives: reduce the lifetime of a product by 5%, and lo and behold, growth in that sector went up 5%! A simplistic take, but I think the basic idea is right.
Clearly this relationship establishes strong negative feedback loops pushing planned obsolescence throughout the economy to make numbers look good, but a lot of it it is a mirage, and the bill will come due. The waste is already prodigious, and while recycling could mitigate some of that, manufacturers are not incentivized to make their products easy to disassemble, recyclable, or repairable. Since they are not responsible for the full product lifecycle, disposal has become a large negative externality that governments "handle" poorly by just shipping that crap overseas. The policy incentives towards planned obsolescence are so strong that I can't imagine any politician having the courage to stop this freight train.
Some positive signs though: the right to repair movement is gaining steam, and this provides some incentives to engineer products to let users extend their life. I don't think it will be enough though, and like any growing movement, I fear it will probably end up being coopted by some political actors for other ends, or otherwise politically neutered.
Existential threat to what? You, your country, or humanity? I don't think it can be an existential threat to humanity, because there are high-level legal controls that can be deployed against it and if this becomes anywhere near existential in danger countries stand to benefit greatly from implementing those controls (Australia has a version of this where retail products get an automatic legally-enforced warranty for a specified lifetime; the lifetimes we have right now aren't especially long, but increasing them is obviously plausible).
Waste also only temporarily ties up most kinds of resources; if the price of raw materials goes up enough, what was landfill becomes a mine (for a particularly-gruesome example, Chisso dumped so much mercury in Minamata Bay that they ended up mining the sediment to reclaim it). Consumables like fossil and nuclear fuels obviously don't have this guarantee, but solar's getting so cheap these days that that's not especially relevant.
In a competitive market, planned obsolescence faces an insurmountable coordination problem. If GM makes shitty cars that wear out in five years, whether they do it on purpose or by accident, they'll progressively lose customers to Datsun and Honda, whose cars last ten years instead. And that is in fact what happened in the 01970s. If Samsung glues their phones shut so you can't replace the battery when it wears out, but Ulefone and Huawei don't, Samsung will progressively lose customers to Ulefone and Huawei, unless there's some other compensating disadvantage. (Apple of course can glue their phones shut with impunity because "intellectual property" laws grant them a monopoly in their market.)
E-waste disposal is not a large negative externality; it's an insignificantly small one. USAns produce 2 kg of garbage per day per person. A 200-gram cellphone every two years works out to 300 milligrams per day, an 0.02% increase in the waste stream. The waste from a single demolished building occupies as much landfill space as the cellphones of an entire city. People ship e-waste overseas either because someone overseas is willing to buy it or to keep basically fraudulent promises about recycling.
Unless you're talking about people junking Teslas and John Deere tractors?
Coordination often happens in competitive markets without even trying - if there are a small number of players. If Apple starts marking up their phone prices, Samsung might decide that increasing their prices on par with Apple's instead of lowering them to undercut Apple is a better decision - all things considered. It's a repeated game, and nobody really wants to sit on the margin where they have undercut all the other players in the market and but aren't making that much for themselves. Finding a new niche or branding strategy is often a lot more effective than undercutting competitors - you ideally want a market where you don't have competitors.
And yeah exact same economics applies to making long-lasting phones.
I realize I should amend that those aren't what I mean by "competitive markets"; those are uncompetitive markets. That's why I included that qualification in my comment above.
How do you explain the dematerialization effects if you assume so much planned obsolescence? We use less materials to make a lot more stuff nowadays and that seems like the definition of a sustainable trend to me.
I'll use some made up numbers to address your specific question: if you use 30% less material but make them unrepairable in half the time so that you're churning out twice as many units in the same time frame (planned obsolescence), that's a less sustainable trend.
My understanding on the literature though is that at least the US economy is using less tons of materials per year now than in the 1990s or the 1960s. This would indicate that while your scenario is technically possible it is not occurring.
Cars are not more durable. Crumple zones are an important safety enhancement that has saved lives but even small collisions become a write off. Cars in the past were built like tanks, so you might not survive but your car probably would.
Cars are not more durable? Ahahahahahahahaha did you know cars used to only have 5 digit odometers because it was considered a miracle if I car hit 100,000 miles.
My old Vette has 250,000 on its original engine and drivetrain (has had clutches replaced and the current clutch is on its way south). Until recently, it had its original alternator (awaiting a rebuild) and it either had its original lower radiator hose, or someone went to the trouble of finding an original date-coded GM radiator hose.
Local machine shop says I am not going to get more than another 200,000 out of that motor, plus a thousand or so drag strip passes. I know, anecdote is not data, but the old timers tell me that a old American car will last forever, as long as you don't wreck it and maintain it properly.
Ahahahhaah Vega, Pinto, Chevette. They screwed up the rust proofing on the Vega so bad they came pre-rusted.
“ It wasn't uncommon for rusted Vega front fenders to need replacing after only one or two seasons driving in the salted slop of northeastern winters. Even in states like California or Arizona where rust was almost unknown, Vega owners would see corrosion eating away at their cars.
The engine also had a barely adequate cooling system that combined with the delicate engine block for horrible results. When the engine got hot, which wasn't uncommon, the cylinders distorted and the piston rings wore off the exposed silica that was meant to provide a tough wall surface. Then, at best, the cars burned more oil. At worst, the distortion compromised the head gasket, caused the coolant to leak and eventually killed the engine.”
Planned obsolescence is possibly bad, but not all obsolescence is "planned" insomuch as "accounted for". Clearly, as you point out elsewhere, there is a distinct problem with appliances breaking much faster than they used to. As others point out: there are reasons for this beyond just being shoddy. But then there are technologies like cellphones and laptops. These are going to be obsolete/inoperable after a few years (2-3 years, usually) for a couple of reasons, no matter how well engineered they are. First: Lithium batteries generally only last about 1000 charge cycles. Assuming you charge your battery every night, that puts it as lasting about 3 years. Second: communication protocols and processing expectations change quite regularly. These are not software changes, but hardware changes, and that is why your invincible Nokia phone from 2002 is going to not work at all (no matter what battery is in it) in a year. The network it used is simply going to be gone. The only option to the mythical Nokia phone user is to buy a new phone, and this is before considering the fact that they already have been limited on features that were added over the last 20 years.
Now I support the right to repair movement and desire for companies to make their products less opaque, but that's not going to change the fact that progress in technology is expensive, and regular obsolescence is a feature, not a bug, to a society that values pushing the limits of technology. Development of new silicon is an iterative process, and a very expensive one. Having the ability to make faster, smarter, better, more efficient hardware comes at the cost of having a lot of turnover on the consumer end. If the majority of devices lasted 5 years, we'd see slower technologic growth, simply because nobody could afford to push the boundary because their revenue is consumer limited.
> But then there are technologies like cellphones and laptops. These are going to be obsolete/inoperable after a few years (2-3 years, usually) for a couple of reasons, no matter how well engineered they are. First: Lithium batteries generally only last about 1000 charge cycles. Assuming you charge your battery every night, that puts it as lasting about 3 years.
I recently had the guy across the street replace the battery in my phone. Normally I'd do it myself, but this phone was a little hard to open, and I was worried I'd order the wrong model of battery.
As for obsolete silicon, well, Moore's Law is over now. So until we get a new fabrication technology to replace photolithography, we aren't going to see the kind of constant rapid improvement we saw in the 01955-02010 period. We've been stuck at 3 GHz since 02005, and PC memory size has gone from, say, 1 GiB to 64 GiB in that time, which is a doubling every 2⅔ years. More recently it's more like a doubling every 4 years.
Communications protocols don't need to change regularly. We're having this conversation over IPv4, which has only changed a little bit since 01983. Wi-Fi can give you many more bits per second now, but an Apple toilet-seat iBook from 01999 can still negotiate an 802.11b connection with a modern Wi-Fi access point (just at slower speeds), and my Sun-3/60 from 01988 is perfectly capable of plugging into the Ethernet port in a modern home router, as long as you have a 10BaseT transceiver plugged into its AUI port. Cellphone networks are only different because you don't get to choose a different FCC if you don't like the FCC you have, but actually 2G GSM remains in service in most of the world, so your old Nokia phone will still work fine most places. Here in Argentina we still don't have 3G coverage in substantial parts of the country. The 3G spectrum is planned to be reassigned to 4G and 5G four years from now, but 2G will remain in the 850MHz band: https://www.argentina.gob.ar/sites/default/files/informe_consulta_publica_de_espectro_02.pdf
The vast majority of what we do with computers is not "pushing the limits of technology." Right now, for example, I'm typing a textual message on a keyboard; it's being represented in UTF-8 (invented 01992, ubiquitous in Plan9 that year) and rendered on the screen with word-wrap in a proportional font, like on the Macintosh in 01984 or Smalltalk-76 in 01976. Substack's shitty user interface is a lot less responsive on this 64-bit 2GHz AMD A10 than a Mac Plus was in 01990, noticeably lagging behind my typing. The only limit being pushed is the Wi-Fi signal strength (and a USB dongle would take care of that) and how shitty Substack's software can be and still work at all.
> First: Lithium batteries generally only last about 1000 charge cycles. Assuming you charge your battery every night, that puts it as lasting about 3 years.
There is no reason batteries can't be replaced. That used to be the norm.
> The only option to the mythical Nokia phone user is to buy a new phone, and this is before considering the fact that they already have been limited on features that were added over the last 20 years.
The phone modem can be modular. A 20 year old computer can in principle be put on a 5G network with a USB attachment. There are simply no incentives to design things this way, because this sort of obsolescence is incentivized.
> If the majority of devices lasted 5 years, we'd see slower technologic growth, simply because nobody could afford to push the boundary because their revenue is consumer limited.
I disagree. Do you think there is some necessity to go through all of the 250nm to 180nm to 130nm to 100nm stages ... that we went through? Silicon process could have just skipped some of the stages due to the lower demand.
The slower economic growth would have been seen as the bigger problem I expect.
No, it couldn't. Silicon is heavily process dependent. That means it's really difficult, and expensive, to skip steps. I'd go so far as to say that "skipping steps is impossible" in the sense that even if you never saw production of a stage, somebody would have had to make chips at that stage. And... silicon is very expensive to develop. The only reason it progresses is because manufacturers "know" they can recoup costs measured in billions for each new step of technology. Trying to skip steps would reserve technology for the elite and the government, because nobody could afford the chips being produced.
Are you claiming that if a targeted strike took out all existing 7nm, 10nm, and 14nm fabs, and we had only 20nm fabs left, we'd have to rebuild them all in the exact same order, going through 14nm, to 10nm to 7nm, and we couldn't skip from 20nm to 10nm or 7nm?
I strongly suspect that if you hit our silicon fabs tomorrow while people were working them, taking out everything below 20nm, the loss of knowledge would set us back to 35nm or worse. It isn't just about knowing how to do it, there's a lot of the process which is an art. Much like artists of yore, you need to do studies (small test runs) of a design before you can ramp up to mass production. It depends on many factors, including having stability in the impurities in the materials used. This is why when fabs get hit by earthquakes or hurricanes it takes years to get back to full scale production.
I agree there's a lot of practical knowledge in this domain. That still doesn't entail you can't skip steps. The challenges of 15nm probably share some overlap with 10 and 7nm, but not all because sometimes the technology shifts dramatically to get to the next step and some of those tricks are no longer useful. So I still don't see how it follows that you couldn't skip 15nm to 10nm on the same timeline. It wouldn't necessarily be a neat "skip every other shrinkage", but it's not impossible as you were implying.
"Do you think there is some necessity to go through all of the 250nm to 180nm to 130nm to 100nm stages ... that we went through? Silicon process could have just skipped some of the stages due to the lower demand."
So you'd want them to go from 20nm to 15nm and be able to make things that are lot faster and use a lot less energy but just...not? And wait till they get to 10nm or 5nm? Why?
I believe I've listed many of the harmful systemic reasons in this thread behind revising this constant churn. In a world in which this churn is not incentivized, the economics of going to 15nm as fast as possible just wouldn't make sense because products would last longer, so the investment in the fab wouldn't pay off. They'd skip to 10nm or 7nm along the same timeline we experienced in the world of churn. The point being that "progress" wouldn't slow in some absolute sense, we'd just skip steps along the way.
To add to the ecological reasons for silicon specifically, silicon manufacturing is a dirty process, and the less of it we need the better.
"Clearly, as you point out elsewhere, there is a distinct problem with appliances breaking much faster than they used to"
Is it that or is it that things don't break more often it's just that appliances prices have fallen by between 50% and 70% while the price or repairs has remain constant, so it's often cheaper to just replace it?
Partially it is growing labor costs, but many things simply cannot be repaired anymore. See batteries that begin to be impossible to replace, even in some laptops.
Isn't some of this nonreplaceability due to other design factors, though? Don't get me wrong: I like the ability to replace batteries, in the abstract. I used my Lumia Windows Phone until this past March, replacing the battery when it needed it, until it finally failed in a way where it wouldn't charge the new one.
I ended up replacing it with an iPhone, which doesn't have a replaceable battery--something which annoyed me. However, what it does have is a much higher tolerance for immersion, which I found out when I dropped my few-week-old phone in the water. Having a tightly-sealed case factory sealed with adhesive dramatically helps with something like that, and reduces both assembly cost and phone size.
So there's more of a tradeoff there than just "planned obsolescence".
> a much higher tolerance for immersion, ... Having a tightly-sealed case factory sealed with adhesive dramatically helps with something like that
The standard solution to this is O-rings with grease, squished tightly into a groove with a screw thread which itself does not bridge the seal (so the thread doesn't create a leakage path). Things built that way can survive immersed in seawater for many years without losing the ability to open them. If that's too much weight, sealing the case with soft silicone instead of something like epoxy still permits no water ingress, and is actually more resistant to impact-induced leaks rather than less.
But Apple doesn't want you to open the case, because that reduces their bargaining power relative to their customers, which means they can't extract as much of their customers' money.
Planned obsolescence only works like that if nobody notices or cares. Reducing the quality of a product in a noticeable way will generally shift the demand curve downwards. And deliberately reducing durability also tends to have a negative impact on your brand image once word gets around.
Product disposal as an externality is already partially internalized: local governments generally charge residents in part based on volume of trash produced (e.g. offering different rates for different trash can sizes), so if this is priced accordingly the cost of product waste is internalized to the end user (who can pass it back to the producer by taking disposal into account when assessing the value of a prospective purchase). The problem is that recycling of marginal materials is heavily subsidized and poorly handled (e.g. shipping overseas to vendors who dump unprofitable "recyclables" in a river), and the obvious fix is to limit free recycling pickup to materials that actually have scrap value (mostly aluminum, steel, clear glass, and clean cardboard).
Also, I doubt consumer durables are a significant part of the waste stream. My household waste stream seems to be dominated by soiled diapers, cat litter, food and beverage containers, boxes and packing material, and waste paper. We don't often need to discard electronics, appliances, etc, and when we do they usually go to a local private junkyard that takes e-waste for free and will pay scrap metal value for non-ewaste appliances.
A better fix is to not offer free recycling; instead, let different recyclers bid on your recyclables, and award them to whoever is willing to pay the most for them, as you are doing with the private junkyard. Anything that nobody is willing to pay for (for example, most steel) you can pay the landfill to accept. Free recycling is mostly a scam.
There are things in the municipal solid waste stream you don't see much of in your household waste stream. Demolition rubble, for example, is a significant percentage of it. Medical waste poses special problems, and commonly hospitals run their own incinerators for this reason.
> Planned obsolescence only works like that if nobody notices or cares.
In looking at the landscape, few people seem to know or care about many such things. Industries that plan for obsolescence are adopting the tactics of the fashion industry which has perfected this sort of churn.
> Reducing the quality of a product in a noticeable way will generally shift the demand curve downwards.
They just reduce price to compensate. Sticker price tends to matter more because disposal and long-term sustainability isn't factored in.
> Product disposal as an externality is already partially internalized: local governments generally charge residents in part based on volume of trash produced (e.g. offering different rates for different trash can sizes), so if this is priced accordingly the cost of product waste is internalized to the end user (who can pass it back to the producer by taking disposal into account when assessing the value of a prospective purchase).
The cost of disposal is often years after the purchase. I'm not sure this is an effective feedback loop to internalize this consideration.
> Also, I doubt consumer durables are a significant part of the waste stream.
It's increasing. Look at cellphone churn. But my point wasn't specifically about electronics, merely that that's where I most recently noticed the trend increasing. Household appliances are now breaking down within 2-3 years rather than the 10+ years that used to be the norm. Repairing them has absurd labour costs, and the manufacturers often don't even keep inventory on parts for more than a few years (LG and Samsung are terrible at this here in Canada).
There has been a strong trend towards disposal culture driven by planned obsolescence, and political and economic incentives are strongly aligned with that trend, and the only countervailing force I've seen to oppose it is the right to repair and a growing awareness of the first world's ecological impact (but that hasn't amounted to much yet aside from Twitter memes shaming excessive packaging).
The fashion industry is a special case, because the customers want something new — you can't prove you are up to date on fashion by wearing last year's clothes. Beyond that case, I think planned obsolescence is mostly mythical. Firms could make products that lasted longer, but at a cost. When it is worth the cost, they do.
Most industries are not monopolies, and customers value durability along with other characteristics of the products they buy.
"Reducing the quality of a product in a noticeable way will generally shift the demand curve downwards."
"They just reduce price to compensate. "
Think through the logic of that. They make light bulbs that last one year instead of two. To reduce price to compensate they cut the price in half. They are now selling twice as many bulbs at half the price, so their revenue is the same as before. They are producing twice as many bulbs, so their costs are twice what they were before. That does not look like a sensible policy.
> customers value durability along with other characteristics of the products they buy
The problem is that it is really hard to judge durability when I buy things.
As result, even people caring about it cannot really reward producers making good things. It is a bit better in some specialized areas where high-quality durable products remain in production.
If you compare the inflation adjusted price of a microwave or a stove or a refrigerator from an era of "greater durability" to today's standard prices, I have at least concluded that the equivalent thing is commercial grade equipment. If I buy a Viking stove, I expect it to last a lot longer than a GE, but I pay about the 1960 equivalent percentage of my income for it, which is painfully high. On the other hand, repair services, parts availability and such mean that it will last *far* longer. I make the tradeoff I make, but consumers do have choices that 1) advertise durability and repairability and 2) do not choose to spend the money to go that direction on average.
Planned obsolesce as a way to increase profits is mostly a myth, as far as I've seen. It's based on the (false) idea that prices are primarily a matter of the cost of producing the good itself. So by increasing the demand for production it increases profits.
However, product lifetime planning is definitely a thing. The idea is that engineering a product to last longer than its lifespan is a waste of resources. If a computer is going to be used for, on average, three years, investing in making it last longer than three years is a waste. The classic example of this are tanks in World War 2. Civilian cars were designed to last for decades. Tanks were designed to last only a few years. This way they could make more tanks more quickly. And besides, after a few years either the tank would be destroyed in combat or the war would be over.
You can usually increase product lifespan. The question is whether people will pay higher prices for a product that lasts longer. Clothes is another classic example: if clothes are only going to be worn for a season why make them sturdy enough to last longer?
Cartels/monopolies are an exception. The article repeatedly points out that unmet market demand meant there was constant attempts at defection which the cartel punished. This is one of many tools monopolies use to increase profits.
> Firms could make products that lasted longer, but at a cost. When it is worth the cost, they do.
This is what I've been saying isn't it? That the incentives to produce lower cost, lower quality goods establish negative feedback loops in economic policies that incentivize further this planned obsolescence to drive growth. It's exactly what the Phoebus cartel pioneered.
One of the checks on these feedback loops would be factoring the full lifecycle of goods, including all negative externalities like the environmental costs. This would incentivize more durable products, but these checks and balances don't exist, so we have a runaway train scenario.
So when you say they do that "when it is worth the cost", I'm saying it would be worth the cost if they had actually pay the true costs.
Appliances used to last longer but they also used to cost a lot more. I don't think planned obsolescence is giving the manufacturers a free lunch, they're just picking a different point on the price:durability curve.
I'm not sure appliances used to last longer. They used to break down and get fixed.
The issue now is with prices so much lower the gap between "have a guy come out and fix it" and "buy a new one" has shrunk.
If it's 1975 and a low end dishwasher is an inflation adjusted $1500 then it if breaks and it's $25 for the guy to come out and another $25 to fix it you're going to fix it. If your $489 Whirlpool breaks and it's $150 for the guy to come out and look at it and nother $150 in parts and labor to fix it then you're just going to buy a new one.
Looking at it another way -- if you buy a Viking stove, you're much more likely to get it fixed and it's closer to the inflation adjusted price than the models you'd typically see in Home Depot. You can go similar commercial grade for things like refrigerators and dish washers and then you get a bigger repair industry since the commercial type equipment is repaired much more frequently.
> The issue now is with prices so much lower the gap between "have a guy come out and fix it" and "buy a new one" has shrunk.
Very likely a big factor. Do you think the cost for the dishwasher parts have fallen at the same rate as the cost of the dishwasher itself? I doubt it very much, and this is a tactic I'd expect to see in a system geared towards planned obsolescence.
I recently had cause to fix some LG and Samsung appliances and learned they now only stock parts for 2 years. How long do you think you could get parts for that 1975 dishwasher?
It's not just cost vs durability. There's a four-way trade-off between cost, performance, durability, and energy/water efficiency. In the US at least, the government has mandated substantial improvements in energy and water efficiency for major appliances, and as you note prices have gone down, so some combination of performance and durability needs to suffer. This has been offset to a degree by technological improvements, but often not completely.
And in areas like HVAC where efficiency improvements are driven more by consumer demand than by regulatory fiat (i.e. where buyers are actively shopping on efficiency over and above the regulatory minima because the energy costs are understood to be a substantial fraction of TCO), demand for durability has gone down because end-of-life is influenced by technological improvements: e.g. replacing a decade-old air conditioner with a new unit is often a rational decision, even if the old unit is in perfect working order, because the energy savings of the new unit are enough to justify the cost of replacement.
I disagree. They used to cost a lot more because their construction and the materials that were mined required a lot of labour. Automation and economies of scale have solved that problem.
Frankly, they still should cost a lot more because the product lifecycle is not factored into the price, as I described above, and this has led to all sorts of perverse incentives.
There are a number of economic studies that show we use fewer pounds of materials in modern production for almost everything than we used to. You're right that those materials also cost less, but we're still using less of them, so they shouldn't necessarily cost more than they used to.
I don't see this as a big problem. Calling it an existential threat baffles me. The market can handle this just fine: if e.g. all dishwasher manufacturers start doing planned obsolesce on dishwashers, someone will make a dishwasher that's pay-per-use ("dishes as a service") and the problem is solved. This only gets easier as the economy becomes more app-driven.
Dishwashers already implement planned obsolescence. It's already happened in all of your goods, and the fact that you haven't even noticed is exactly the insidious nature of the problem, and the incentives are structured to continue this trend.
Suggesting dishes-as-a-service would somehow solve the problem completely ignores the reality of human behaviour. As-a-service endeavours virtually all fail because ownership is important, services are expensive, and availability is insufficient (is that service going to work in rural areas?).
Finally, capitalists and free market enthusiasts decry socialism and government social programs as "digging holes and filling them back up", but planned obsolescence is basically the same thing, just the capitalists reap the rewards. This is building an economy that people's livelihood depends upon on a house of cards, in addition to wasting valuable natural resources that are improperly priced because the full lifecycle costs are not factored into the price of goods.
You haven't established that. In 1975 appliances were 3x more expensive so if something broke (and it broke) it was repaired. Now the cost of repairs similar in inflation adjusted terms but appliances prices 1/3 of what they were things just get replaced.
Maybe I was unclear, I know this is a problem with dishwashers already. Sure, ownership matters, services are expensive and availability is insufficient. Still, this puts a cap on how bad the planned obsolesce can get. Maybe I made to strong of a claim when I said that the market will handle it "just fine", the market will handle it in a less then ideal way but the market puts limits on how bad the problem can get.
My thesis is that the problem is already unsustainably bad, that there's still room for it to get even worse, and that the economic upheaval that will follow trying to correct course almost certainly be disastrous. Maybe this is just a pessimistic week for me.
Two ideas popular in blue-tribe spaces are cities and economic equality. Aren't these in conflict? Cities concentrate wealth. We live in them because the connections and specializations they afford make us more productive and therefore richer. We live in them because to do so is a desirable luxury, and we're rich enough to afford it.
It seems to me that a serious program of economic equality would be devastating to city dwellers. I mean, the city itself is a luxury. The express purpose of taxing the rich, who city-dwellers are, is to inhibit luxury. And it seems like it would do that. Tall buildings aren't cheap. Elevators aren't cheap. Subways aren't cheap. With incomes driven towards those in rural Iowa, you couldn't have those things. With the resources of rural Iowa, you're going to have the material conditions and lifestyle of rural Iowa.
So why are the people calling for this the ones currently living in New York and not Iowa? What gives?
A comment I haven't seen in this thread that I think is worth noting is that there currently seems to be a substantial population of people who live in rural areas who like living in rural area/choose to live in rural areas and this population seems to exceed the number of good rural jobs.
If cities truly became a source of economic inequality you'd expect people in rural areas to have a stark choice - live in a rural location & have less money or move to an urban location and have more money. And once that started happening, I'd expect to see rural jobs pay more as there was a shortage of workers.
This is of course disruptive to people currently in rural areas, but almost any form of progress has this effect - there were disruptions as American went from farming to manufacturing and manufacturing to information. But at least for the first transition the benefits well outweighed the costs.
All that said, I do think theres a certain effect where people writing about their imagination of the future tend to be from cities and imagine city-centric futures. But I don't think that's incompatible with equality, just incompatible with non-urban futures.
I wouldn't expect to see rural jobs pay more, because rural jobs don't have nearly the top-line productivity that urban jobs do. A Google engineer, by virtue of working at Google scale, could be personally responsible for tens of millions in revenue. It is no trouble to pay him a few hundred grand. A rural business may barely clear that in a year. It would not be sustainable if it had to pay all that to one IT guy.
That said, in rural areas you can also have a very comfortable standard of living on an amount of money that would not be sufficient to share a studio apartment in a major city.
So assuming this was true - that all urban jobs were going to pay more than all rural jobs (even after accounting for cost of living), I'd expect nearly everyone to take the urban jobs, resulting in only highly profitable companies existing in rural areas. And to be clear - I think with a lot of large scale farming and other work that can only be done in rural areas I definitely think there would be some high paying rural jobs, just not as many as there are currently people in rural areas.
Now I don't think that'll actually happen, both because some people prefer to live in rural areas even if they're paid less and because I think were very far from a world in which all urban jobs look like Google engineers rather than average working class jobs. But from an equality point of view, I think that if we solved the issue of income inequality in cities but not between cities and rural areas then I would expect some sort of rearrangement. I don't think that's going to happen, but back to your original point, don't think there's any intrinsic economic inequality between cities and rural areas.
1. It's not necessarily true that "the express purpose of taxing the rich is to inhibit luxury". You might instead want to do it because you want to give money to the not-so-rich, and the rich have some money you can take for that purpose.
It's true that people calling loudly for high taxes on rich people sometimes motivate it by complaining about the luxurious lives the rich lead. But in my experience the people they're usually complaining about are billionaires or at least many-million-aires, and no realistically feasible level of taxation is going to stop those people being able to afford luxuries on the level of "living in a city".
2. I don't think any halfway-reasonable person, whether leftish or rightish, wants everyone having incomes at the rural-Iowa level. (At least, not according to my notion of what incomes in rural Iowa are like; I've never actually lived there and could be wrong.) Even if it's true that increasing taxation would bring everyone to that level -- I don't actually see any reason to think it is -- people advocating higher taxes don't think it would, so asking "why do they want everyone living like rural Iowans?" doesn't make any sense; they don't want that.
3. The US median household income is something like $48k/year. The US _mean_ household income (which will serve as a naive estimate of what everyone might get in some hypothetical world where _complete_ uniformity of income was somehow enforced, though approximately 0% of people calling for higher taxes actually want that) is I think more like $60k/year. The median household income in NYC is about $58k/year. So it doesn't seem to be clear that even complete equalization would mean that no one could afford to live in a city.
I don't mean everyone would live as rural Iowans do today. But I do mean that in the new world, each rural Iowan and each New Yorker would have roughly the same take home pay. And isn't that a big problem for New York? Cities are expensive. If they don't also come with higher earnings, won't it be pretty unfavorable to live in one?
This seems like an entirely different argument from the one you were making before ("with incomes driven towards those in rural Iowa, you couldn't have those things"). I think the new one is better.
I think Furrfu may be right that cities aren't fundamentally more expensive -- the difference in housing costs isn't because it's more expensive to provide housing (etc.) in cities, it's because more people _want_ to live in cities. And that may be partly because of those higher incomes. So if incomes became much more equal, then cities might be in less demand -- but that would mean that the cost of city housing would drop, perhaps very drastically. So if you're suggesting a process like more equality -> city incomes much lower -> cities super-expensive relative to not-cities without main attraction of cities -> everyone leaves the cities -> cities die, I don't think that's right. It's ... -> cities super-expensive -> less demand for city living -> city housing prices go way down -> more demand for city living, and eventually an equilibrium is reached. If (1) cities are more expensive almost entirely because of high demand and (2) the high demand is almost entirely because of better pay for city jobs, then what will happen is that cities will stop being more expensive to live in than not-cities. If it turns out that other things make them more desirable living places (e.g., easier access to culture, social venues, shops, entertainment, etc.) then they will still be more expensive but not by nearly so much as now.
I don't see anything to worry much about here. (At least, not in terms of making things worse _on the whole_. People who have a lot of money tied up in city housing might find this an unappealing prospect.)
Especially as (I repeat) basically no one is actually looking to equalize incomes completely, and most likely there will always be some jobs that are paid say 10x as much as others, and most likely those will always tend to be in cities.
Right, housing in cities is more expensive because cities make people rich, so richer people bid up the price of housing. Land in Iowa averages about US$2 per square meter; with a 20-story high-rise, that averages out to US$0.10 per square meter. Land in Manhattan isn't inherently very different from land in Iowa, and anyway you don't have to pay the manufacturing costs for the land in either place; unlike Palm Jumeirah, it occurred naturally.
There are some other things in cities that are more expensive than in rural areas. Taco Bell food, for example, costs two or three times as much. That's because Taco Bell in Manhattan has to compete in the labor market with much richer opportunities than Taco Bell in Pella (Baumol's concern), and in Manhattan their workers have to compete with stockbrokers for housing (George's concern), so Taco Bell has to pay their workers more in Manhattan.
But most goods and services in Pella, let alone in the middle of the corn fields, are enormously more expensive than in Manhattan. Transportation, sushi, machining, refrigeration, electricity, plumbing, Ethiopian food, fashionable clothing, Broadway musicals, poetry readings, welding, airlifts to the hospital, and so on.
It's not so much that Pella has an abundance of good sushi available for the buying in restaurants and the price is just too high; it's that if you want good sushi at all, you have to have it shipped in from elsewhere packed in dry ice.
People don't value cash per se, they value what cash can buy, which is leisure time, access to interesting activities, power and influence, security. But people value a different mix of those things, which is why some people spend their free time gardening and others go on cruises or skydive. It seems reasonable to assume that the total utility of city and country dwellers is pretty much equal these days, as otherwise there would be a massive flow in one direction or the other.
As a crude approximation, we might say people who live in the city value cash more than, say, free time or peace and quiet at night, and people who live in the country are the opposite. That is, the marginal utility of cash is higher for those in the city, and a forceable transfer of cash from city to country on utilitarian grounds would be totally brain-dead, as you would be taking a resource from those who value it more and giving it to those who value it less, just the opposite of what would maximize utility across the board.
So I would say the actual goal here is probably rather different: the wealthy urbanites have a local problem, which is the poor and criminal urbanites. Under normal circumstances, they would have to solve that problem themselves, because the country doesn't give much of a shit about it, not suffering from it directly. However, if the city can persuade the country that it *is* a national (or at least state-wide) problem, then the city can get the country to shoulder at least some of the costs of solving the problem.
The thing missing from your analysis above I think is whether the urban wealthy have to spend more or less money in ways they dislike in the presence of wealth-transfer taxes. If the answer is they have to spend *less* -- because what they lose in taxes is more than made up for in, say, less spending on security guards, gated communities, big police forces and a massive judicial system, special education programs, drug rehab -- then this is a win, even from the purely financial point of view.
<i>It seems reasonable to assume that the total utility of city and country dwellers is pretty much equal these days, as otherwise there would be a massive flow in one direction or the other.</i>
There is in fact a massive flow in one direction: toward the cities. Just a couple of years ago we passed 50% of the population living in cities for the first time in history. So it's not reasonable to assume that.
It gets floated periodically that people in HCOL metros are "not actually rich," despite high incomes, because those incomes can barely cover crappy homes. And every time it's met with derision and scorn. Tax structures that give HCOL dwellers credit for this, like SALT and MID, are widely considered regressive and unjust. So I do think we value cash per se from an inequality perspective.
The latter part of your perspective is interesting. But I do wonder whether the net effect would be _everyone_ in the cities making transfer payments to everyone outside them.
One thing that cash offers is the ability to purchase lots more of things that cost about the same everywhere. For instance cell phones, which are not produced locally in New York City or anywhere in Iowa, have a cash cost about the same in either place. Also, Amazon.com orders are going to cost about the same regardless of where they are being shipped, so having more cash is a huge benefit on the types of things you can get sent to you from a warehouse.
Where cash doesn't matter as much are local goods, which have to compete on pricing up goods that cannot be outsourced, especially land but also very much labor. And between land and labor, just about everything in a city costs much more than it does in rural areas. Again, not things sent to a city, but things found in the city.
>Tax structures that give HCOL dwellers credit for this, like SALT and MID, are widely considered regressive and unjust.
I don't think this is true. In particular, when the Republicans limited SALT a few years back, that was widely viewed in blue spaces as a blue state tax and a red way to injure blue states and cities.
Just to nitpick slightly... there isn't quite a balance between those who choose a rural life and those who prefer the joys of urban living. The last I heard, about a million people a week move from the countryside to the city (worldwide). In 2008 for the first time in history half of humanity lived in urban environments and this will reach 80% around 2050.
My guess is that many of the problems of city living have been solved or ameliorated and the attractions remain the same. Think cholera, crime and congestion for the former, and work, wealth and sex for the latter.
Note that the 80% figure counts suburban environments as “urban”, as well as counting small towns.
But even when you distinguish those things, in places like the United States and Europe, people are still moving from rural areas and small towns to big cities, medium cities, and their suburbs. People’s location is sticky, and people will usually be located at somewhere like an average of where they would actually have their own best quality of life given current preferences and social and technological conditions, and where they would have given the conditions of several decades ago.
Cities concentrate wealth *geographically* but not *socially*. I know people who live in cities in 20-square-meter apartments that don't even have their own bathrooms, but who nevertheless have immediate access to world-class health care and transportation.
Let's look at the transportation question more closely. Living in a city I don't even need a car; I can get by with public transit and the occasional taxi. Everyone I know who lives in the country has at least one pickup truck and one car; more typically they have one broken truck, one working truck, two or three broken cars, and one working car. Most of the transportation in Buenos Aires, a city of 3 million people, is provided by 18,000 buses (about 20 seats each, though holding closer to 50 people at rush hour) and 37,000 taxis. That's about 6 people per public transportation seat, not counting Uber, Didi, and the comparatively small train system; compare to 8 private transportation seats per person in the countryside. Most people in Buenos Aires don't have private cars, but there are about 1.3 million total cars (mostly private), so if we did a more careful breakdown it might turn out that 1 million people have 5 million seats of private transportation (5 seats per person), and the other 2 million people share the half-million seats of public transportation (0.25 seats per person, 4 people per seat). You can see that the city requires much less capital per person to provide much more service.
The same thing is true of refrigerators (my apartment doesn't need one because I have a grocery store a block away which is full of them), medical care, insulation (my apartment only has a single 3-by-3-meter wall exposed to the outside air, dramatically reducing my air conditioning needs), welding equipment (every farmhouse I've ever seen has multiple welding rigs), fancy food (if you want it in the country you'd better learn to make it), electric service (a friend of mine who lives in the country is looking at having two electric poles installed to provide power to part of his property, while my building has a single power drop to provide power to 40 apartments), sewing machines, books, and so on. Tall buildings *are* cheap. An elevator may seem expensive, but the elevator in my building belongs to all 40 of those apartments, so it is actually cheap. A bus might seem expensive, but Buenos Aires has one bus per 170 people.
In the country you have to provide everything yourself, which means massive overinvestment in capital equipment that lies idle 99% of the time, while simultaneously making do with extremely inadequate equipment; that's a recipe for the material poverty you mention ("incomes...in rural Iowa"), with the consequence that all but the richest people pretty much have to live in large family groups that own those resources collectively. In the city you don't have to own anything you don't want; you can pay its owner to use it briefly when you need it.
So, contrary to your assertion, city-dwellers don't live in the city as a luxury which makes them poorer due to its heavy expenses. On the contrary: they are rich because the city gives them so much. Poor people leave the country to move to the city to stop being poor, as they have for centuries, and nowadays it mostly works, thanks to modern sewage treatment. The reason there aren't subways in rural Iowa is that above-ground train tracks are cheaper, and those are all over rural Iowa. (Have you ever actually *been* to rural Iowa?) But because Iowa, including Des Moines, has 22 people per square kilometer and Manhattan has 29000 people per square kilometer, Iowa would need something like 36 to 1300 times as much train track per person to provide the same level of service, depending on how you define it, so if you live in rural Iowa, you need a car. And a pickup.
What the country gives you is independence and self-sufficiency, at the level of the family group. The city gives you independence and self-sufficiency *from* your family group, which is great if you're gay and they're fundies, or if you just like dancing in a miniskirt. But it takes away your independence from *the government*, which you come to depend on to maintain the roads, operate the subways, and keep nightclub bouncers from raping you.
Thanks for this perspective. It seems plausible, but for the productive US cities, the housing cost premium is so huge that commodities like energy and manufactured goods like cars or refrigerators are trivial in comparison. We're talking single digit thousands vs. millions. It seems like if you have the same income either way, you're much better off vying for factory output than for space.
I don't agree that they're trivial in comparison. People typically spend about a third of their income on housing (half in the most expensive cities) and the remaining two-thirds or half on commodities like energy and manufactured goods. (Savings are valuable only because they are eventually spent on goods and services that are consumed; the miser's lump of gold in a hole in the ground was worthless.) Getting 10 times as much for your money when it comes to everything besides housing, plus a much wider range of job opportunities, is enough of a draw that people constantly move to cities.
Well said, I'd only add that historically cities have also been great for improving the economic status of family units at least as much as they have individuals, which is why you have tenement buildings that made the Lower East Side of New York the densest area on earth in the mid 1800s (1,100 people / acre).
No family would willingly live there if not for the opportunities available compared to rural poverty
Right, the cities afford better opportunities, which is what draws people to them under a regime of inequality. What happens when urban opportunities are the same as rural?
I don't think the objective of "reducing economic inequality" is to somehow prohibit residents of the Lower East Side from applying to work as anything other than a farmer or homemaker, much less prohibit them from taking the bus or ordering Chinese food, so urban opportunities will still be better even if massive transfer payments to the rural poor compensate for the inequality on a nominal-dollar basis.
In addition to what zrezzed said, it's quite common for people in general to have multiple desires that, when you're near the pareto frontier, are in tension with each other, so that you can work towards both, but the amount that you prioritize one vs the other matters.
While the conveniences of a city may feel like a luxury, an overall increase in the quality of life of a society will be cheaper if investments are made in a more dense area.
A tall apartment building isn’t cheap, but it’s less resource intensive than providing an equal number of single family housing for an equal number of people. The same goes for subways: urban transportation is far less resource intensive than suburban / rural transportation of the same number of people / quantify of goods (though, the real-world costs may not reflect this for independent reasons).
Also, how does improved wealth distribution drive incomes towards those in rural Iowa? Your whole argument seems to assume that, but I’m not sure how that follows.
My understanding is that the goal is all Americans get the same or very similar take-home pay. I suspect most people are thinking about this at the level of their own metro area, where the people in the trailer parks and the people in the mansions would all converge into sensible middle class housing. Seems reasonable. But there are also stark differences in earnings and costs _across_ regions, and I'm interested in how those would play out. Since population density is so tied up with wealth, wouldn't we also converge into a national median of density / metro area size?
>My understanding is that the goal is all Americans get the same or very similar take-home pay.
This is not the goal*. The goal is for the top chunk of earners and owners to pay more into the common till, so that the bottom chunk of earners can get things like healthcare, child care, housing and transportation for free or at reduced rates. You might think of it like this. The goal is to lower the ceiling a bit and raise the floor, such that, absent drug abuse or mental illness, the floor is what is today considered lower middle class.
*They're are indeed some lefties for whom equality of outcome is the goal, but those people are well to the left of AOC and Uncle Bernie, who are well to the left of the bulk of the party.
(note, that's out of date. It's even worse now.) A "meaningful change" could still result in some being far wealthier than others.
Assuming we changed nothing about population density distribution, and we did make a significant (positive) change to that chart, wouldn't the vast majority of people (excepting a few at the top) have a better overall quality of life?
I'm confident the answer is yes, thus refuting your original point that a desire for cities is in conflict with the desire for greater equity.
Due to generating so much concentrated (geographically) economic activity, cities attract a nuisance underclass that is rationally hoping to catch some of the spillover. This underclass needs to be dealt with, so cities naturally have higher levels of publix services like police.
Eventually the upper class in cities have the utopian idea of eliminating this underclass by making them better. Thus things like schools and wealth redistribution programs become fashionable. The thought being "if only these people were educated" or "if only these people had money" they would stop being such a public nuisance.
Don't forget there's a certain self-interest that develops, too. A fairly large chunk of the modern urban workforce actually works in government, schools, police forces, public order and safety and wealth-distribution systems. Most of the high-paying top jobs for the public sector are held by city dwellers, even if the sector itself services the country.
The cynical but predictive answer is that the people calling for leveling don't expect to be the ones leveled.
Truly wealthy big business owners like those at the Met Gala often have the ability to structure their incomes to avoid the full brunt of redistributive tax schemes. The people who get stuck with the bill are the labor aristocrats of the professional class and the petite bourgeoisie, both of which are pools of potential nouveau riche rivals. Depleting the resources available to your future competition so that they can be given to a lumpenproletarian underclass which can never directly threaten you is a brilliant move, assuming you don't mind having more of a smaller pie as opposed to less of a larger one.
Scott, the PAC uses ActBlue. ActBlue is explicitly a Democratic non-profit technology company that is set up to help the Democratic Party and left wing groups win. Part of the process of getting on ActBlue is a verification process that you are helping Democrats win elections or are otherwise a left wing, partisan group. It is a complete torpedo to any kind of non-partisan credentials. They have claimed they are going to find an alternative for Republicans but the fact they don't know about the Republican alternative (WinRed) is ridiculous on its face.
I don't mind if you want to endorse political causes. But you should be explicit about the partisan nature of what you're endorsing.
What's the current status of EA-type charities in regards to this right now? If I'm giving there, what should my priors be in terms of how much effort I put in to make sure it's not just steal DNC contributions?
I'm not an Effective Altruist and I don't know any in real life. You should probably ask someone more familiar with the matter. I'm a Social Enterpriser and SEs don't solicit donations almost by definition.
But I do know there's a lot of this in the political world. People who use the flows of money following a major news cycle to fund whatever political cause they support. They see it as a sort of noble lie where they're helping the money of low information people get to where it "really should" go.
But it's worth pointing out that there's a sharp political divide about the response to this pandemic. So you're unlikely going to see an analogous conservative movement unless a group like the Lincoln Project organizes something outside aegis of the GQP.
Using ActBlue precludes reaching out across the aisle even to COVID-concerned Republicans. It's planting a donkey flag and scribbling "non-partisan" on it.
I don't mind if Scott wants to say he thinks we should give our money to Democrats. Scott endorsed beating Trump and I didn't mind that. What I mind is being lied to. If Scott wants to say, "Democrats are better for pandemic preparedness so I support Democrats," that's totally fine with me. It's the lying about being non-partisan I object to.
I don't object to the endorsement, as I've said. I object to laundering the objective lie that this is a non-partisan organization. I think it's perfectly defensible for Scott to say he thinks that supporting these particular politicians and the Democratic Party is the best way to prepare for the pandemic. I don't think it's defensible to say that they're a non-partisan organization.
"Donations to the PAC would go towards supporting candidates who are champions for pandemic preparedness in Congress, like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Anna Eshoo, and in state and local offices. "
Given Warren's track record (opposing the idea of paying more money to buy more vaccines) I think it's arguable that they're not even advancing pandemic preparedness. This seems like an exercise in fundraising for generic Democrats who happen to say the words "Pandemic preparedness" rather than effective policy positions.
(There were also several excellent non-partisan options they passed up. They are clearly Democratic partisans. Which is fine! I really don't mind you endorsing liberal causes. But I would prefer you not entertain their claims they're non-partisan.)
In an effort to put every resource to use against humanity, Skynet orders its machines to modify several dozen biplanes from a WWI aviation museum to fight against the humans. The biplanes can be piloted by obsolete, damaged Terminators that nonetheless have perfect reflexes and flying skills.
What armaments (if any) do the biplanes get?
In what military role(s) are they used?
If employed in combat, what tactics do the biplanes use?
Assume the humans still have some planes of their own, like in Terminator Salvation.
That's the smartest answer. The humans might get wise to the ruse and avoid shooting at the biplanes, though. Maybe the biplanes should fire on the humans on the ground to provoke a response.
Reconnaissance? You can't put missiles on a biplane - even if it could carry the weight, it doesn't have the radar or electronics to fire them at anything. Using them for bombing would only be possible with small bombs, with little accuracy, and only in places where nobody is shooting back - like, even a soldier with a rifle can be a threat to a low flying biplane. And using machine guns against modern jets would require the jet to basically just let you get in range.
It has *one* potential advantage in that wood and canvas don't reflect radar well and thus it'll be fairly stealthy, but what can you *do* with that stealth?
About the only use I can think of is to use them for scouting. Fly over enemy lines, look around (with your eyes, because you have no sensors) and hope that the humans think Skynet couldn't be stupid enough to fly a biplane over the futuristic battlefield of 20XX.
Putting a Terminator in a biplane is probably a waste of a Terminator - even if it's obsolete and 100% expendable, it would probably be smarter to put the Terminator in a car and use it as a suicide bomber or something. Or just, like, recycle it as scrap metal.
How does Skynet do maintenance on extremely obsolete machines? If one of them needs new piston rings, from where does Skynet get them? And if Skynet can command their manufacture, why not build brand-new drones instead, which can have Terminator brains just pre-wired into them, but which can be made smaller and lighter, giving them better loiter time -- the dominant value here is presumably aerial reconaissance, just as it was in WW1.
The most efficient value of those biplanes by Skynet is negative. Their canvas/wood/glue construction is now too aged and weak to fly. It is literally not worth Skynet's time to feed them into a furnace to make steel or concrete.
Honestly, why Skynet didn't just spent all it's energy after the initial nuking just grabbing for orbit, then high orbit, and then expanding into space and the resources there is one of the many many holes in the story.
It could have just Gone High, drop a nuke whenever it sees a large city or a blast furnace, and then ever bothered thinking about how to fight humans again.
So you've probably heard about how at-home rapid covid test kits are like under a dollar in eg Germany, but more like $30 in the US, a ~2000% price hike. I work at a (US) pharmacy/conenience store, and though the price is absurdly high, it's still not enough to match the supply and demand.
For starters, they've put up the extra barrier of putting all the tests behind the pharmacy counter where you have to be specifically ask the pharmacist for it -- it's not advetised and out on a shelf in the open. You can't just see it, grab it, and pay for it at the register like most non-prescription medicine.
But despite the lack of advertising, a third of the calls I get these days are "Do you have any at-home covid-tests left?" And 95% of the time I tell them no. Because the crazy high prices + medical bureaucracy obstacles + being completely unadvertised and hidden *still* does not match supply and demand; we restock every Saturday, and by Sunday afternoon the Covid tests are gone again.
Idk how much they'd cost if the price was the only thing doing the allocating, but it would be much more than the current cost. So yeah, unless my pharmacy/region/state is atypical, the situation is even worse than the pricetag makes it look.
(Also, there's an appointment-only, results-in-days, free-at-the-point-of-sale covid test at the pharmacy, but most people who are disappointed to find we're out of the rapid tests aren't interested in that.)
Question -- in Germany and other places with cheap rapid tests, is the pricetag doing all of the work of matching supply and demand? Or do they have it just as bad, with the actual price hidden in non-monetary forms? Are they merely "cheap", or actually plentiful?
(PS: The nice thing about only using price to allocate stuff is that higher prices increases the incentive to jump in and produce more; that's not the case with the "beauracracy + hiding + luck of whoever's first in line" methods of allocation. But on the other hand, testing for covid is mostly illegal in the US, so higher prices wouldn't increase supply anyway, so I guess the point is moot.)
I'm from Germany but haven't bought any of the rapid tests myself, so I don't have any first-hand experience with the situation. From what I understand, you can use these tests to test yourself, but they aren't considered accurate enough to fulfill a condition of having to get a validated test for the bureaucracies.
This random German article from June (https://www.24hamburg.de/niedersachsen/sind-die-deutschen-test-muffel-aldi-und-lidl-bleiben-auf-selbsttests-sitzen-zr-90790469.html), which I haven't fact-checked, claims that the supermarket self tests used to be sold at 5€ (vs. bought by them at >=3€), but demand at that price eventually ran out (e.g. because these tests aren't considered validated, or because other tests are subsidized, or because the stores overestimated demand and bought too much, or something), so now stores like Aldi and Lidl are selling them at a loss at 0.8€ to get rid of them.
Ultimately this scenario sounds consistent with the philosophy of "let people try to profit from disaster, and supply and demand will equilibrate at an acceptable price; forbid people from trying to profit from disaster, and that won't happen", but that sufficiently fits my preconceptions that I'd want to find more reporting before truly updating on that.
In any case, whether at 0.8€, 3€, or 5€, all those prices are a far cry from the prices in the U.S..
Perhaps this varies across regions in the US. But I have bought a two pack of rapid test in North Carolina and Texas for $24 and they were sitting right at the checkout counter of the pharmacy (Walgreens).
That's still not as cheap as Germany and they do occasionally run out and limit you to buying 4 packs at a time, but I have not had any problem getting them. We used some this week to test my kids who are in school before my parents who are in their 70's came to visit.
In the UK these are free, easily ordered online, mass used, and haven't had any supply issues (other than a short hiccup after they were first made available).
I cannot give you a super informed report on how it is in Germany only my experience. Every time we have needed one we did not have any problem, they are just available at the pharmacy. I also haven't heard of anyone complaining of being unable to buy one since a long time ago (6 months maybe?). I think that a big reason for this is that it is easy to get tested for free in a center so actually self-testing is more of a hassle and cost you money. In my case, I have several testing centers within minutes walk from my place (I do live in the center of a big city though) and it is very easy to get tested: you get an appointment within the day, it usually does not take more than 5-10 minutes once you get there, and you receive the result by mail shortly after.
Presumably those are PCR tests (which have extremely high sensitivity and specificity), rather than the rapid at-home antigen tests (which are supposed to be sensitive enough to detect most currently contagious people, but not a lot of other PCR positive people).
A new sarbecovirus was just discovered in horseshoe bats from Laos. The RBD of its spike protein is only 2 amino acids divergent from the original Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strain. And it binds to ACE2 receptors just as efficiently.
So there is nothing "uniquely adapted" or unnatural about SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. you don't need a lab running GoF experiments or splicing genomes to create this virus). If you're a Leaker, though, you might say this was one of the genomes that was on listed on the WIV spreadsheet that was taken down, and it leaked from the WIV! Well, you'd still have the timeline issue to work around. And now that we have a virus found in a wild bat population that is very very similar the Wuhan nCoV we really don't need a lab leak to explain anything.
I see people mentioning "lab leak" and "wet market" as contradictory options. Why? The most logical explanation that fits all known facts is that someone working at the lab tried to make a little extra money by breaking a few safety rules and selling the dead bats at the wet market.
They would have been tinkering with just a few virues in the Wuhan lab. In nature, there are literally hundreds of thousands of viruses that infect mammals. They are constantly mutating. A pandemic is exactly what we would expect in a biological system where billions of humans are constantly interacting across the entire planet. Sadly I think we will never know, and it is a fun line of inquiry, but I do believe China should be considered innocent until proven guilty.
I don't think anyone ever argued that SARS CoV-2 *required* gain-of-function experiments. Almost by definition, anything that can happen in a GoF experiment can happen naturally, if you've got humans and animals living in close proximity and you wait long enough. But, A: GoF experiments increase the probability that what you get will be highly infectious in humans. And, B: COVID-19 first appeared very close to a virology lab doing research on animals of a sort known to carry a close relative of SARS CoV-2, very near the red herring that is a seafood market known to *not* have sold any of the sorts of animals known to carry a close relative of SARS CoV-2(*), and nowhere near the natural habitat of any of the sorts of animals known to carry a close relative of SARS CoV-2.
If you discover a close relative of SARS CoV-2 in a species of animal that lives anywhere near Wuhan, or that was sold at any market in Wuhan, that should change everyone's priors on this. Otherwise, SARS CoV-2 related viruses in bats in Laos don't really add anything to the discussion. Yes, it's possible that such a bat-virus could have turned into Actual SARS CoV-2, whether naturally or through GoF research. The question is still, why Wuhan? Was there ever a Laotian horseshoe bat within a hundred kilometers of Wuhan?
* Yes, I see several people trying to change the subject to SARS CoV-1, or to "coronaviruses".
But, yes, initially the claims were made that the WIV was performing GoF procedures on similar Coronaviruses to SARS-CoV-2. The trouble with that theory is, if they were, they were failing badly at their attempts, because SARS-CoV-2 has been running its own GoF experiment in human populations for the past 20 months, and the original Type A strain seems pretty lame compared to B.1.617.2 (aka Delta). Likewise, there were a few experts (including David Baltimore) who initially said it looked like the virus's genome had been manipulated to give it the Furin Cleavage Site (FCS). But further digging pretty much discredited that theory except with conspiracy theorists. The thing is, the FCS came as a total surprise to all the Coronavirus researchers. No one had ever considered that the FCS could make a Coronavirus more contagious. If we look at the genome of BANAL-20-52, the newly discovered CoV that is 97% homologous to SARS-CoV2, we do not see that mutation. Nor do we see it any known CoVs. So the evil Chinese scientists would have to had (a) advanced theoretical knowledge of the FCS, and (b) have been shitty at running GoF processes.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Obviously [whatever turned a bat virus into SARS CoV-2 prime] + half a billion human infections over twenty months, will produce a virus better adapted to human transmission than just [whatever turned a bat virus into SARS CoV-2 prime]. But that doesn't tell us what the first step was. Until we find the proximate animal host and immediate viral ancestor of SARS CoV-2, we have no way of knowing whether the distance between that and Actual SARS CoV-2 was a single random mutation, or a shitty GoF program's worth of mutation and selection, or something requiring a comprehensive and well-run GoF program.
And even the minimal version is still consistent with purely natural evolution of a virus that some researcher brought from rural Yunnan to downtown Wuhan for study and then didn't keep contained, which has always been on the table in the non-lunatic-fringe versions of the lab leak hypothesis.
Or somebody brought home the Laotian virus and decided to play around with it in the lab. And then oopsies, an accident happened.
I'm not wedded to the lab leak hypothesis, and coincidences do happen, but that there just so happened to be a lab working on these viruses where the outbreak happened does tilt more towards "we know accidents happen and things that shouldn't do get released" than plain "it was something naturally occurring in the wild and just happened by complete chance to turn up there first".
So why did the initial cases cluster around a wet market selling a variety of live exotic animals, with most of them having traceable ties to the wet market? If it's too much of a coincidence that they were 14 km from the WIV, surely it's too much of a coincidence that they were 0 km from a wet market, the same type that SARS-CoV-1 came from.
The fact that anyone realistically imagines human experimenters could come up with more strange and weird surprises than Nature herself is what needs explaining to me. My go-to hypothesis, that H. sapiens is the most egoistical creature conceivable, quails before this one.
It's as if the first European explorer to see a giraffe or echidna said "OK, who's been conducting a secret bizarre breeding program to create this? Couldn't have happened naturally! Look at the freaking neck/spines/weird mating habits..."
Yes, and the other plausible and popular version is one where the human experimenters took a strange weird surprise that Nature came up with, and put it in an evolutionary environment optimized for generating particularly interesting (to humans) new surprises.
Unless you are a Wuhan lab worker with inside information you may never know how this went down.
I have to admit the straight forward way John Stuart put it has a lot of emotional appeal though.
“There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh, I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the . . . chocolate factory!”
Or maybe it was just a diseased bat in the wet market. The creepiness of bat meat for sale in an open market gives that one some emotional heft too.
Bats are not a foodstuff in China, but bat guano (specifically Horseshoe bat guano for certain respiratory ailments) is used in Chinese traditional medicine (CTM).
We need a lab leak to explain why, out of all the places Covid could have appeared, it just happened to appear not in Laos but very close to a lab doing experiments, including gain of function experiments, on bat viruses.
What hypothesis would you invoke to explain why, out of all the places SARS-CoV-2 could have appeared, it just happened to appear not around the Wuhan lab but directly inside a wet market with a wide variety of exotic live animals, the same type of wet market that SARS-CoV-1 originated from?
It's also worth reiterating that "wild animal" farming is a $7-$10 billion business in Hubei Province and that Wuhan is major transshipment center for these "products" that get sent out to wet markets all over the China. There are a half-dozen abattoirs within walking distance of that market, and a bunch of companies involved in meat packing and in the CTM supply business are centered in that district of Wuhan. Coincidence?
Despite the scandal (or pseudo-scandal) of the "coverup" at WIV. The Chinese authorities saw that that particular wet market as a focus for the outbreak, and they shut down that wet market first. And, whether on purpose, or just out of bureaucratic overreaction destroyed all the evidence (i.e. animals) associated with wet market. Of course, they've always been defensive about (and protective of) this industry...
This would hold weight if we still thought that the virus appeared "directly inside a wet market," which we do not. Certainly there was spread at the market, but at presence the balance of evidence indicates that the virus was carried there by someone (or someones) already infected, not that the virus originated there. This is the conclusion reached by the Chinese CDC, and the CDC's position is that while the virus spread there *it was not the source of the initial outbreak.* All of this is pretty old information; that CDC study dates from last May. You can find it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-rules-out-animal-market-and-lab-as-coronavirus-origin-11590517508
It's honestly a bit concerning to see "the virus originated in the market" trumpeted as fact in mid-September of 2021. There is virtually no evidence for this position besides the fact that a large number of initial cases had links to the market (though a significant number did *not*), and good evidence against it (no infected animal has ever been found there and the data are better explained by a superspreader event than a patient 0 situation). Again, this is all pretty old information.
Being old information is no guarantee of correctness. I'm well aware that many of the earliest cases, including the earliest known case, had no known connection to the wet market. I even address it in a comment below. Also, I've written two analyses of the lab leak hypothesis back when I gave it higher credence than I do now, so it's not like I'm unaware of the evidence:
I can't access the WSJ article. As for the AP News article, it does say:
"The Huanan Seafood Market had a cluster of cases at the start of the outbreak and was initially suspected as the place where people first became infected. The discovery of earlier cases has all but ruled out that theory"
"Many of the early cases were associated with the Huanan market, but a similar number of cases were associated with other markets and some were not associated with any markets. Transmission within the wider community in December could account for cases not associated with the Huanan market which, together with the presence of early cases not associated with that market, could suggest that the Huanan market was not the original source of the outbreak. Other milder cases that were not identified, however, could provide the link between the Huanan market and early cases without an apparent link to the market. No firm conclusion therefore about the role of the Huanan market in the origin of the outbreak, or how the infection was introduced into the market, can currently be drawn"
This is pretty close to what I said below, which I'll copy here:
"Why, out of all places he [patient 0 and/or the superspreader] could have visited to start an outbreak, did he happen to visit a wet market? Why not a regular supermarket, a library, a convention center, a train station, a concert hall? Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it is a pretty big coincidence. I think it's a much bigger coincidence than the outbreak happening on the other side of a big city from the WIV.
I think that even though the earliest discovered case had no known connection with the wet market, that doesn't mean much. As powerful as Chinese surveillance is, it doesn't know about every contact every citizen has had. It's easily possible the November 17 guy caught it from the guy sitting next to him on the subway, who worked at the wet market but had an asymptomatic case of COVID-19."
"Decide how much you weight you put on geographic coincidences. Do you put a lot of weight on them? Then the coincidence of the early cases being clustered around (and often from inside) the wet market is much stronger than the coincidence that the cases were in the same city as the WIV; therefore, you should favor the zoonotic hypothesis. Do you put almost no weight on geographic coincidences? Then you should fall back on the prior, which is that the overwhelming majority of novel viruses are zoonotic in origin, and that this one probably is too."
"no infected animal has ever been found there"
Similarly, no infected human has ever been found at the WIV, or anywhere close.
Good points, all. But please note my response to your earlier response. It really needn't have been that wet market (although the Chinese authorities seemed to initially regard that as the focal point). That district also happens to be the district of Wuhan that as heavy grouping of businesses involved in Hubei's animal trade, meat packing, and Chinese Traditional Medicine.
I think you may be placing too much weight on a single coincidence. As Scott points out in one post, the latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza encodes the speed of light to 7 decimal places (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/). Coincidences happen, especially when everyone is looking for them.
And I'm not sure how big of a coincidence the virology lab is. Wuhan is one of the largest cities in China. If you live in a large city, there's a pretty decent chance you live near a virology lab. There happens to be one 6 km from where I live. It makes sense that a Chinese virology lab would be studying SARS; it's a novel virus that caused an outbreak in China back in 2002. It also makes sense that the first COVID cluster would be detected in a large city. High population density makes infecting a cluster more likely (and cluster is what tipped us off! The first few individuals with flu-like symptoms didn't raise suspicion of a novel virus.). A large city is also more likely to have the hospitals, equipment, and expertise to test for novel viruses.
My naive prior is that Disasters Caused By X are more likely to occur near Labs for the Study of X. Because a) you want to put your lab near the thing you're studying, and b) places threatened by X have incentivizes to research anti-X measures. None is accusing the Caltech Seismology Lab of causing earthquakes, despite (what I presume is) a strong correlation between distance-to-nearest-seismology-lab and earthquakes-per-year. I think the term for that is "common cause fallacy" or something.
Does this apply to virology? Sincere question, I have no idea. When picking a place for your BSL4 facility, I assume control & safety are much more important than biodiversity or whatever. I wouldn't expect Bethesda, MD to be naturally fertile ground for zoonosis despite housing the NIH HQ.
My understanding is that it does not apply to this case, that the researchers in the Wuhan lab were getting their bats and/or vat viruses from a cave a considerable distance away.
Two things. First, the WIV is definitely not within walking distance to the wet market. In fact, it's on the other side of the city, 14 km away. Walking that distance would take 3 hours 30 minutes. Second, I don't know if the research at WIV even counts as "gain of function". In a 2017 study (https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698), WIV researchers added spike proteins from novel bat viruses which are hard to cultivate, into an existing bat virus (WIV1) that’s easy to cultivate, to see if the spike proteins can infect humans. If you look at their Figure 7, it seems like the original WIV1 is just as infectious (in fact, maybe slightly more infectious) than the chimeric viruses, so no function was gained. That said, it’s theoretically possible that the chimeric viruses could have turned out to be much more infectious than WIV1, so it’s not a huge stretch to categorize this type of research as “gain of function”.
1. You're reinforcing my point, not detracting from it when you say there's no plausible connection between the pyramid and the speed of light. If there were a connection, it wouldn't be a coincidence. That would ruin my point. But really weird coincidences do happen! A lot! Especially when people go looking for them.
Coincidences and correlations increase the chance that there's a connection. But you need to be careful how much weight you put on this evidence. Part of why so many people believe debunked conspiracy theories (eg. Illuminati, 9/11 conspiracies, etc) is that they can all point to these weird coincidences. We have a tendency to overestimate how unlikely coincidences are.
2. There's a very plausible connection between the pyramid and the speed of light - or at least the people who discovered this fact believe there is. It's part of the ancient astronauts theory: the belief that ancient aliens visited Earth and built the pyramids and various other famous constructions. Of course, the speed of light thing isn't their only evidence. They have dozens of reasons why it's implausible that humans built the pyramids and why aliens must have.
What's interesting to me is pyramid/speed-of-light thing was only discovered after ancient astronaut proponents were already convinced of their theory for other reasons. So to them, this is just further proof for their theory. To me, this shows you can often find a 1-in-a-million chance coincidence if you go looking for them.
But can you imagine how stupid I would sound trying to explain that to an ancient astronaut theorist? The pyramid is at 29.9792° N, and the speed of light is 299,792 km/s, and the best retort I can come up with against this new evidence is, "well, uh, it really is just a coincidence". To them, my explanation is going to seem really weak.
A lot of people were looking for theories on the origin of COVID. They found several sets of coincidences, supporting several different theories. I'm worried we're overestimating the strength of these as evidence. To you, saying the nearby virology institute might just be a coincidence probably sounds weak. Someone else in this thread is arguing that it's too coincidental that the first cluster occurred at a wet market that sells exotic animals. To them, saying it might just be a coincident probably sounds weak. But at least one of these things is a coincidence.
> Consider "it's just a coincidence that I was caught on a security camera climbing out the window of the house at the same time the silverware disappeared. Coincidences happen."
Not part of my argument but kind of amusing: this is very close to the premise of The Shawshank Redemption, and in that (fictional) movie, it did turn out to be a coincidence.
there are a lot of labs doing coronavirus research! and the population of Laos is a lot smaller than the population of China (and medical surveillance gets worse as you get farther away from high tech pop centers).
I don’t know if lab leak or not! probably worth assuming either is possible or something like that
But the lab leak hypothesis doesn't explain why all the initial cluster of cases surrounded Huanan wet market (were live animals known to harbor CoVs were sold) and that was 13 km away (as the Horseshoe bat flies) from Wuhan Institute of Virology.
I don't think there is good evidence for a lab leak (at least, not yet), but the Huanan wet market isn't where COVID is thought to have originated. China's first known case occurred on November 17th, several weeks before the cluster at the market. It's thought that someone with COVID just visited the market, initiating the outbreak there.
Why, out of all places he could have visited to start an outbreak, did he happen to visit a wet market? Why not a regular supermarket, a library, a convention center, a train station, a concert hall? Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it is a pretty big coincidence. I think it's a much bigger coincidence than the outbreak happening on the other side of a big city from the WIV.
I think that even though the earliest discovered case had no known connection with the wet market, that doesn't mean much. As powerful as Chinese surveillance is, it doesn't know about every contact every citizen has had. It's easily possible the November 17 guy caught it from the guy sitting next to him on the subway, who worked at the wet market but had an asymptomatic case of COVID-19.
On a meta level, I find it amusing that one person in this thread thinks it's a suspicious coincidence that there's a virology lab in Wuhan studying SARS, and another person thinks it's a suspicious coincidence that the first cluster was at a wet market that sells exotic animals.
I'm not sure what to do with that information, but I guess at least one of those two things must be a coincidence.
The real coincidence is why did two completely different lines of contact between bats and humans both independently start a pandemic of indistinguishable viruses within a week or two of each other ?!
the key plot point that we know definitively is that the closest extant relative of SARS-COV-2 was housed at the WIV. Does this nullify the purpose of debating which geographical coincidence is more important?
Here's one thing you could do with the information: decide how much you weight you put on geographic coincidences. Do you put a lot of weight on them? Then the coincidence of the early cases being clustered around (and often from inside) the wet market is much stronger than the coincidence that the cases were in the same city as the WIV; therefore, you should favor the zoonotic hypothesis. Do you put almost no weight on geographic coincidences? Then you should fall back on the prior, which is that the overwhelming majority of novel viruses are zoonotic in origin, and that this one probably is too.
Neither of these things has to be a coincidence; we could suppose that the lab improperly disposed of specimens, and one of those specimens turned up in a wet market. Say, an irresponsible staff member sold some dead bats to a wet market.
I believe (though I'm willing to be corrected) that, yes, Patient 0 is presumed to have contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus on November 17th and he ended up in the hospital on December 1st — which would correspond to the incubation period for a serious illness from COVID-19.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but too bad Substack doesn't allow us to post images (unless I missing a trick here). But scroll down to Figure 1 in this non-paywalled PDF of this Cell paper "The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review" (https://t.co/lXR89QhOtJ?amp=1).
It shows the outbreak starting north of the Yangtze river, and about 8 miles from the WIV. Of course, it could have been a lab employee who was shopping at the market who spread it (which is the narrative the Mike Pompeo and the Murdoch media were pushing), but then you've got some other timeline problems deal with...
The timeline problem that the Leakers have to overcome is this — first presented by virologist Robert Garry on an episode of TWIV (but not very clearly)...
Given that: PCR analysis from patients between Dec 2019 and Feb 2020 show there were 2 variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in the Wuhan area by early December: Type A and Type B. Patients were getting ill with both types in December...
And given that the genomic analysis suggest that Type B diverged from Type A some time mid-October...
And given that: the first verified patient who was subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19 showed up at a Wuhan hospital with unusual and severe pneumonia-like symptoms on 1 Dec 2019...
So, if you think the lab leak happened, what week did it happen? Make it work within the context of the genome data for the A and B strains, and the time when people started showing up hospitals.
If the leak happened 2nd week of Nov (a la Pompeo and the Murdoch newspapers), which was 2 weeks before the first case showed up in a Wuhan hospital on Dec 1, then how do we explain the fact that the virus had been floating around and mutating since October per the A & B variant genome divergence? Why weren't people getting sick earlier?
The most likely answer is that the virus was of zoonotic origin spreading in some yet to be determined animal population that was also sold live in the wet markets. And both A & B versions jumped to humans around the same time in mid November.
Of course, the lab could have leaked both strains A & B as nefarious epidemiological experiment. There are people who WANT to believe that. Or two clueless lab workers, one carrying the A strain and the other carrying the B strain, could have done their shopping at the Huanan wet market and spread it from there, but they would have a couple of weeks to spread it elsewhere in Wuhan. Why weren't they infecting people on their commuter route to WIV?
It may be worth noting here that the identification of "Patient Zero" in any new disease epidemiology is...fraught. Gaetan Dugas was widely considered "Patient Zero" in the arrival of AIDS to the United States, which was thought to happen circa 1980 -- the disease was first recognized in 1981. However, later testing of blood samples showed that AIDS reached New York City no later than 1971, from Haiti where it was already present in the late 60s. In Africa it's been traced back to at least the late 1950s.
It would not surprise me to find that eventually SARS-CoV-2 is traced back well before 2019.
It's interesting. I don't find it surprising it's hard to identify patient zero. We're looking for someone who had flu-like symptoms or possibly no symptoms weeks (or possibly months) before we even knew COVID existed. And even when we find earlier cases, it's almost impossible to prove that case was the first.
I'd point out though that HIV has a much longer life cycle than COVID. You can be infected with HIV and infect someone else a decade later. By contrast, COVID patients are contagious for a median of 8 days after symptoms start. COVID has to spread to new hosts much faster than HIV. HIV also often doesn't show much symptoms for ~10 years, which would have made it hard to detect before we knew of its existence.
What tipped us off for COVID was a cluster of about 44 hospitalizations with pneumonia in one area. Before we knew about COVID, mild symptoms or asymptomatic cases wouldn't have been detected. A couple hospitalizations of elderly people with flu-like symptoms wouldn't have been detected. And even 44 hospitalizations wouldn't have been detected if they were spread out enough geographically.
So a decent number of people had to be infected before we could detect it. On the flip side, once the epidemic starts growing exponentially, it won't be long until you get a large enough cluster that it gets detected. So I think when it could have started depends on how long the number of cases could have remained small in any geographic area.
China *always* does this. It's in the culture of the CCP. They always have something to hide, whether it's petty corruption, incompetence, popular discontent, or someone sleeping with someone else's wife. Even if by some miracle there's nothing to hide, you can never be too careful, right? Why let foreigners snoop around looking for dirt?
Why? As far as I know China, like many dictatorial regimes (Soviet Union, Middle Eastern countries, etc.) aggressively hides *everything*. If it might be remotely related to anything they don't want people to know, or might eventually decide they don't want people to know, it gets classified. People get disappeared. Yesterday's high-ranking official is now just an empty spot in a photograph, and if you know what's good for you, don't ask nosy questions. So if a WIV worker was sick in fall of 2019--kidnap her and her family, scrub website mentions, threaten anyone asking. Doesn't matter if she clearly got sick later than other known cases. Doesn't matter if she never worked with bats or coronaviruses. Doesn't matter if antibody testing showed she never had COVID. It might possibly, theoretically be embarrassing, so cover it up.
Your general point is absolutely right, but not this:
"So if a WIV worker was sick in fall of 2019--kidnap her and her family, scrub website mentions, threaten anyone asking. "
China isn't North Korea, yet. I doubt they'd do anything unless there was already a rumor of an epidemic, and even then, they won't do anything other than invite her to "drink tea" with the local police to ask her politely not to spread rumors...you know, because we don't want to inconvenience you even more, right?
I was unclear. I wasn't saying they would disappear anyone who ever got sick. But once it became clear there was a pandemic spreading that other countries might be affected, and some people suspected it came out of the WIV (intentionally or not) by Spring of 2020, I suspect they would quickly start tying up loose ends like an obsessive in a shoe factory.
"embarrassing the regime" is illegal in these sorts of places. The Chinese are more honest than most, in that it's actually black letter passed legislation, instead of just one of those things everyone is supposed to know.
That's all very well, but in reality masks on toddlers (2-4 range) is 100% controlled by what mask (if any) the toddler can be convinced not to immediately rip off.
I know there are exceptions, but I really haven't seen much trouble with my kids or their friends. Kids are just more adaptable than grownups, and this has been normal for a pretty big chunk of their lives.
My grandson goes to a preschool ages 2 -5. These kids wear their masks. He's 4 and has 0 reticence about the mask. I see no resistance at all. In all other things he has a good portion of 4 year old rebelliousness and questioning. This he just accepts as part of life it seems.
I want to piggy-back off of this. I have a 2.5-year-old. He doesn't mind putting on a mask anymore (although he absolutely did mind when we first introduced the concept). He asks for help putting it back on after it falls off one ear. He even is willing to put it on when it's wet.
The problem I have is that he still drools (which is why the mask is wet). He's done teething, I think he just hasn't figured out that drooling is a thing you can stop doing. I hear saliva is a solvent, and I can't imagine human skin is designed to have saliva sitting against it for hours on end?? We have 5 months until his daycare starts requiring him to mask up all the time, so I'm hoping that he grows out of the drooling by then (or, with rather less hope, that masks can come off kids by then), because I'm not looking forward to the alternative.
>>I hear saliva is a solvent, and I can't imagine human skin is designed to have saliva sitting against it for hours on end??
I don't recall any historical cases of toddlers dissolving their faces after insufficient wiping by vigilant caregivers, so I don't think this is something you need to fear.
I'd worry more about lack of social skills from not interacting with people with half their face visible--but even there, kids are resilient.
I'm aware my kid's face won't literally fall off. I would expect skin rashes, particularly because saliva-in-mask doesn't dry nearly as quickly as regular drooling.
I teach about 700 K - 5 graders, and have a 2 year old daughter.
Daughter is willing to try... for about 30 seconds. Fortunately nobody has made a big deal about this, and most of the kids in the 2-3 range seem to also not wear masks in public very much. We will apparently not be flying any time soon.
In K-1, all the kids wear them, or at least pretend to, or at least pull them back up when requested (and then pull them back down as I walk away... repeat every 10 minutes all day long). A decent number chew on them, which doesn't seem very sanitary. Sometimes they step on them and then put them back on. They also get clay dust and paint on them during class. Most of this seems unproductive, even if properly worn, clean masks are a good idea.
There is a lot of social media discourse that this is overkill. I’m unsure - is it overkill or is it really a reasonable grounded-in-science approach ?
I sense that cloth masks are already suboptimal in a huge way and I’m skeptical of anything less than N95 or equivalent that’s also not fitted well - so even vaccinated adults wearing cloth masks to me seems only a step above virtue signaling. Am I totally off base here ?
Aaron Collins, who is an engineer who studies aerosols, does regular reviews of masks on Youtube using a set of lab equipment he happens to own. He's said that any mask is better than none, but he thinks the KF94 are the all around better than N95, because they're tested on a variety of facial sizes and an in a range of motions. The original N95 standard didn't require such a range of tests to be certified.
Covid really doesn’t do much to kids, and now that vaccines have been available for a while masking isn’t as important. it’s probably dumb. and ideally like some dude in 2020 would’ve done challenge trials to find the most efficient mask and a good way of doing whole building filtering and ventilation and actually gotten something that works out there by March and then made a killing selling it, instead of this shit where we still don’t know how well masks work. but whatever it’s not that bad in the greater scheme of things...
You say this stuff so self-assuredly! I wish I could sound as expert as you do. ;-)
As to your remark that COVID-19 "really doesn't do much to kids" — hmmm. Where are you getting your information from? I guess I'll need some links to studies before I take your expert word on this — especially since the long-term post COVID-19 convalescent studies are only starting to be done.
isn’t that the expert consensus? “maybe the long term stuff we don’t know about is bad in children even though the disease itself isn’t” ... maybe, but how long do we mask kids for? as I said though I genuinely do not care beyond liking reading studies and arguing online. I’m more than happy to keep having lockdowns and masks forever or whatever, genuinely, I do not care beyond scientific accuracy and stuff. But masks for kids seems remarkably low value compared to anything else at all
I hear many many people, each so self-assured, saying that the delta variant, either has close to no effect on children, or has a very big effect, much bigger than the original variant, and is responsible for killing lots of children, or causing them to have long-term effects like reduction in brain size, etc. Which is right? I wish I knew. Does anyone know?
It's only the consensus among one subgroup of experts. But I can see how you might get that impression if you're only relying on subset of MSM sources.
Some experts have used the following paper to say there's not much risk for kids ("See, only three percent have symptom that last more than 12 weeks!"). Personally I wouldn't want to wish a "mild" case of COVID-19 on anyone, but especially kids. But depending on whether you're reassured or worried by the results of this paper, here you are...
Some of the long-term cognitive effects of COVID-19 seem to be related to brain damage. Why would you want to risk having kids develop long-term cognitive deficits — even if the data is not yet definitive that they occur...
But we *do* know how well masks in work in theory and practice. And in the past 15 months there have been a hella lot of studies and our knowledge has evolved.
Depends on the mask. There was a lot of discussions on DSL about this (just for 1 example: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4412.msg150848.html#msg150848), and the consensus based on a number of studies seemed to be that cloth masks were either useless of nearly equivalent. Only N95s or similar did anything.
to be clear I mean an integrated understanding of how each specific kind of mask affects Covid transmission in each specific kind of circumstance. There’s just not that much data on that and it’s hard to know. There is a lot of knowledge about how well masks work for particle filtering though. And I do agree that we do know masks are useful and N95s are extremely good cloth is probably still good, but it’s ridiculous that that needs qualifications instead of “ten thousand person RCT challenge trial with closely monitored everything”
Different experts, different plans. The good news if you're a policy maker is you can find some expert, dumbass or otherwise, who will support your position.
This is probably too broad/general of a question to get answered, but (as an American) I've been fascinated recently by how parliamentary systems work. So- do major laws get passed easier in a parliamentary country than in America? I just finished reading a comparative political systems book, so I know that most democracies that aren't the US are either unicameral, or the second house/parliament is much weaker- so they can't veto legislation a la the US Senate. And by definition you can't really have divided government between the prime minister and the parliament- right? Because the PM is the leader of the largest plurality party (right?)
So- do other 1st world democracies who use a parliamentary system pass major/sweeping legislation more easily than we do here in the US, with its multiple veto points? Obviously here one has to clear the House, the Senate filibuster, and then get the President to sign it. Is the rest of the developed world just clearly much more efficient at legislating than America? Is it an obviously better system?
One argument why this *wouldn't* be the case if that, with multiple parties, even having the largest plurality in the parliament doesn't mean the other parties want to pass your laws. But Britain should be exempt from this, with their Westminster system where the PM has a majority in the House of Commons and the opposition parties basically have zero power (right?)
This comment is particularly designed for Richard Gadsen (spelling?), who always has excellent comparative politics knowledge and is also I believe British
What comparative political systems book? I’ve never thought of reading that subject before, but it seems like a cool read. Closest I’ve come is Fukuyama Political Order/Decay
In Australia, we have an almost two party system (despite instant runoff voting). There's a Labor party on the left and a permanent Liberal/National coalition on the right (think city/country conservatives). A handful of seats wind up occupied by minor parties and independents. We have a House and a Senate.
After any particular election, one of the two major parties may or may not have an absolute majority in the House. If they do, they form a government. If not, someone needs to get enough in-principle support from the minor parties and independents to make a majority. If the party forming government also has a majority in the Senate then they're in luck, otherwise they're going to need to do some horse trading to get support there too.
In practice, though, bills are decided on by the party in power. Exactly what goes on behind closed doors to get these bills written is not known to the public. If the party in power controls both houses then their bills are a fait accompli, if not then they may need to make a deal with either the other major party or the minor parties and independents to get support. MPs are heavily whipped since they are preselected for their seats by the party, any MP who fails to vote with his party will find himself out of his seat next election.
In theory, then, if a party has a majority in both houses it could pass whatever crazy legislation it liked (within the bounds of the Constitution). In practice they usually don't because they would be kicked out at the next election and their crazy legislation reversed. Party preselection plus compulsory voting tend to produce dull and unimaginative almost-centrists anyway so there are few truly controversial issues in play most of the time.
>In practice they usually don't because they would be kicked out at the next election and their crazy legislation reversed.
Case in point: when Howard finally got full control back in 04 he pushed through WorkChoices (union-busting, basically), and then used taxpayer money to run an ad campaign saying it was a good thing. He promptly lost the 07 election on a 5.4% swing, including losing his own seat.
The need to form a coalition holding the majority of seats in a Parliament forces enough compromise to moderate major, destabilizing policy swings in practice. Usually you'll end up with a centrist party in charge in coalition with some fringier parties, and the centrist party isn't going to do radical policy shifts. This isn't a rock-solid guarantee of course.
There sometimes is gridlock especially in countries with low % thresholds for entering Parliament. If the biggest party needs to court a bunch of weird third parties running on single issues to get to 51% they might not be able to satisfy enough of them. You can have elections where no party can form a coalition - it's called a hung parliament - and you get minority rule, which is considered exceptionally weak and unstable.
Good comment, thanks. Also, another question- is the Prime Minister always the leader of the largest party? Or, does the coalition formed after the election sometimes select the PM? Because the latter really insulates him/her from populism & celebrity candidates (I think this is a good thing), even if it's less stable
The coalition selects the PM. Basically it usually functions as a position appointed by Parliament and exactly who ends up where is usually an important part of Parliamentary bargaining. This is also what a vote of no confidence is. Basically, they all vote on whether they'd agree to appoint someone else (non-specifically). The PM can either then resign or try and fight it out.
I believe it's the leader of the majority coalition if there is one. If not, then I think it's the incumbent PM who gets first opportunity to try to form a minority government, followed by the leaders of the parliamentary parties in order of size.
There are two recent precedent:
2017: No party had a majority. The incumbent PM, Theresa May, who was also the leader of the plurality party, formed a minority government. She promptly cut a deal with the DUP where they'd back May on votes of confidence and passing appropriations bills (giving her a de facto majority on those issues) in exchange for some specific policy concessions, but they pointedly did not join the government.
2010: the third-largest party entered negotiations separately with the two larger parties immediately after the election. They cut a deal with the largest party, and the leader of the second-largest party (who was also the incumbent PM) resigned while the leader of the largest party (also leader of coalition) was appointed in his place
Yes, unitary Parliamentary systems are more subject to vast changes. The least constrained one is Great Britain where there is no equivalent of constitutional review and the Queen is unusually weak. Theoretically the House of Commons could pass a law selling the Welsh into slavery and there's nothing that could be done to stop that. Now, I'm not saying they would. But there's no Bill of Rights under which the Welsh could sue. The House of Lords could only delay it. The Queen could theoretically veto it but she hasn't vetoed anything in centuries. Etc.
The main disadvantage of Parliamentary systems is that governments are less stable. Parliamentary systems sometimes just don't have governments for years. If a party can't find a majority then they just don't have a President, Secretary of State equivalent, etc. And those wild swings can be really, really wild. Entire industries can be nationalized and denationalized in a matter of a few years. This in turn tends to create a stronger administrative state and stronger party systems where individuals and politicians tend to have less power than bureaucratic organizations like parties and bureaucracies.
Basically, the Parliamentary system was formed by a bunch of aristocrats who thought central control by an administrative state was a great thing and that veto points were just a bunch of unruly peasants. And I am not exaggerating there. They were literally formed by various dukes and earls and kings. If you agree with them (and really fight through your self-conception as a popular democracy loving American to see if you do) then it's a better system. If you want local rule, non-aristocratic politicians, the need for extremely broad consensus for vast changes, and individual level democratic control of towns and states then it's a worse system.
In short, American gridlock is a feature, not a bug. Likewise, the power of lower class individuals to resist the dictates of the Harvard set is a feature, not a bug. Serious restrictions on what the government can do is a feature too. As is the ability of alternative power centers to shut down the entire government.
As an immigrant from Canada to the UK, the incredible power of the House of Commons (and, more recently, the PM themselves) struck me. One key element of the House of Commons is that there's no independent regional power - in Canada, provinces, municipalities, and (to a lesser extent) native reservations have self-governing power that can't be immediately overruled by the federal government.
Yeah, when I say they could sell all the Welsh into slavery I am not being hyperbolic. In all seriousness, the House of Commons could reinstitute slavery if it wanted to with a majority vote tomorrow. This is considered a key feature of the system (see Bagehot). Whether you consider that a good or a bad thing largely has to do with how much you want veto points and local control vs a centralized system.
Of course, it's worth pointing out such an evil result wouldn't occur because the House of Commons couldn't muster enough support. But that's the only reason.
Also, as you and Aribturam alluded, there are no checks and balances in the British system. The legislature is the executive. The courts (at least pre-EU, and I am not certain about today) could not rule on the constitutionality of an Act of Parliament (Parliament was assumed to have deemed each of its acts to be constitutional).
One upshot is that Parliament has to own what it dies. They can't pass a grandstanding bill and then wait for the executive to neuter it or the courts to declare it unconstitutional.
I have often wondered how much of what we see in the US is grandstanding while knowing that one of the many checks built into the system will kill it? Some of the bills that get introduced in Congress are pretty crazy and/or knowingly unworkable. I find it illustrative that the GOP voted for some huge number of ACA repeals while their bills couldn't go anywhere, but weren't able to pass any ACA repeal with control of Congress and the president.
Makes sense, and I agree with all of this. Seeing as lots of American electoral hipsters complain about how many veto points the US system has, I was just curious how broad/sweeping legislation works or gets passed in practice in other democracies. I think Neal's comment above really nails it- with multiple parties and no one party getting an outright majority, you have to stitch together a coalition broad enough that sweeping bills probably don't get passed.
The more I research it the more I like the American system*. I wish the Senate was a bit more representative, but in general the 'cooling saucer' idea is a really good one! Score one for the founders. I'd actually like to make the Senate *more* of a cooling saucer & less populist, possibly by restricting who's allowed to run for each party's office (like each party comes up with a list of 3-5 candidates, or the state legislature has to approve them, or something).
(I guess if you really hate presidential systems, you could argue for a system where the House selects the Prime Minister, a la Westminster. But, still have a separately elected Senate on a staggered schedule from the House. It'd be weird, and I'm not recommending it. But I do really like the Senate/cooling saucer idea, and if I could only fight for one I'd ditch having a President in favor of just the bicameral/'second house is insulated from populist pressures' idea)
Agreed that the Senate should be more representative.
One of the issues with the "cooling saucer" thing is that it produces executive overreach. Prime example is the Senate wouldn't extend the eviction moratorium, so Biden did it anyway. Not to pick on the Democrats, both parties do this. Deploying troops without a declaration of war is another example.
There are situations when the government arguably needs to respond to events in real time - act much more quickly than the process of drafting, amending, and passing legislation can possibly allow for. In all of these situations the executive branch tends to just assume whatever powers it needs. Problem is it's a ratchet effect - once the executive assumes a power, there's a precedent, so the power is there for both sides, forever. Some exceptions occur, e.g. if the courts strike down an executive overreach (like the eviction moratorium) but in a battle between executive and courts the executive usually wins in the long run (see FDR, or Trump's Muslim bans) since it has more tools at its disposal.
One might think this is fine since the executive is directly elected so it's democratically accountable, and this is true to an extent, but actually most of the executive branch consists of appointed bureaucrats with limited accountability to anyone. This is what people originally meant by "deep state" - not a conspiracy, but just a mass of bureaucrats serving both parties who have a lot of power to make and implement (or not implement) policy according to their own preferences.
A parliamentary system is not a panacea but I think there's something to be said for the entire government transparently having the power to govern and then being held more or less directly accountable for how they use that power. In the US, the "checks and balances" often lead to kludgy workarounds where power is used in a less transparent and less accountable way.
Also - divided government in the US means that the minority party has both the incentive and the means to sabotage the ruling party, which gives the appearance of a) incompetent/malicious government and b) a failure of the ruling party's policies. Right now, the Democrats need to coordinate the House, Senate, and WH around an infrastructure package in which all of the policies have majority support in polls but which are being blocked by special interests in the Democratic party (like Manchin and his coal miners or whatever) and the fact that if the entire thing sinks, the Republicans will reap massive political benefits, despite their constituents clearly wanting and needing infrastructure and despite Trump having made a campaign promise to do an infrastructure package, which he never followed through on. This isn't specifically the fault of the Senate - even in a parliamentary system, there might be a "coal miners party" that would oppose green infrastructure bills - but at least the parliamentary system doesn't provide specific mechanisms, like the filibuster, for opposition parties to obstruct the course of government until the public gets tired of gridlock and predictably responds by punishing the ruling party and rewarding the obstructionist party. Again both parties do this, because it's a matter of the incentive structure of government rather than personal morality, although the Republicans are more ruthless, disciplined, and open about obstructionism while Democrats are more likely to cooperate when Republicans are in charge (this isn't necessarily praise - e.g. progressives often wish the Democrats would fight fire with fire and obstruct Republican rule a lot more).
So it's not necessarily about speed or efficiency, but about perverse incentives - the incentives towards unaccountable overreach by the executive, and towards sabotage and obstruction by the legislature - both of which feed into each other. The government should perhaps be deliberative, but it shouldn't be at war with itself.
Yeah, I hear this. I'm very familiar with the American system's faults, trust me :) To argue against executive overreach being a huge deal, it's worth noting that the US President is actually pretty weak by international presidential standards. (In Brazil he/she can pass an 'emergency' decree on I think almost any topic that automatically becomes law for 60 days unless Congress overrules them.) Anyways, courts can always strike down executive powers.
My response to the transparency argument is that most regular voters are not attentive enough, or frankly intelligent enough, to process exactly what laws have been passed most of the time. So I'm less concerned with 'who do I hold accountable for x problem'. In practice in between thermostatic public opinion and our dumb midterm elections (I'd prefer the House be elected for 4 years), voters are automatically going to vote out the incumbent party no matter what- they're not carefully analyzing each party's policy record, voters are just vaguely against whoever's in power now. (Some poly sci research now indicates that politicians start out popular and become unpopular when they try to pass laws- like any laws- basically when they try to do anything).
With 4 year House terms we'd move closer to a parliamentary system- you're electing the President & the more populist House of the common people in one fell swoop. As ticket splitting has declined, they'd almost certainly be from the same party. In my ideal system, a less populist Senate that can't be primaried by random celebrity demagogues would serve as the cooling saucer etc.
I am still really interested in how parliamentary countries pass major legislation, but I guess I need to carefully the politics in a few for an election cycle to see how compromises get hammered out etc.
Executive overreach is a result not of a slower legislature, but a legislature that does not punish executive overreach, combined with other potential sources of corrective power not having official standing. Congress has repeatedly failed to legislate around overreach and directly encouraged it when Congress couldn't pass legislation to achieve the ends of the president's party. If Congress were as jealous of legislative powers as the founders expected them to be the president would be easy to keep at heel.
As to divided government giving the minority "incentive and means to sabotage the ruling party", that is really strange way of interpreting protecting the minority. The reason one wants a republican form of government is to keep every election becoming "Ok, your team is in power, go nuts and do whatever." If you can't write an infrastructure bill that a majority of representatives likes, then you probably are not doing a good job at that. What the polls say is rather besides the point; it isn't as though those being polled have read any of the bills, and if they are unhappy they need to unelect their representatives.
Humans have tried more absolute forms of government where whatever group is in power can do more or less whatever they want. That's the most common form of government in history. It is also pretty awful in what it produces and highly detrimental to human flourishing compared to a republican government that doesn't do much.
They actually thought of that too. Originally the Senate was not directly elected until 1913. Senators were instead appointed by the state governments.
It was sustained pressure by the Progressives (as in the 19th century movement) and Democrats that ultimately changed it. They felt they couldn't get their program through without a more popularly elected/populist Senate. And that the system was rigged against them through such undemocratic features.
Yeah I know :) I'd prefer a limited or preselected primary (the way every other democracy operates!) Primaries are sort of the original sin of the American political system, I doubt we can get rid of them altogether, but we should give the parties as much power as possible to rig them while still appearing democratic. Demagogues are bad! (Actually I feel the same way about presidential primaries....)
TLDR, are all of the other 1st world parliamentary democracies wisely passing important major legislation and governing super-effectively, while the sclerotic US can't pass anything and is stuck in endless gridlock due to separation of powers, two basically equal houses, the filibuster, midterms which basically guarantee divided government, etc. etc.
This is a moonshot, but is anyone here a member of the Aro gTér? I'm trying to get ahold of their meditation course (https://aromeditation.org) , but I received no email after signup, and haven't found a working email to contact them either.
I'm interested in them because David Chapman, creator of Meaningness, among other things, is a member.
I was doing some deep diving into inflation yesterday and while explaining it to my wife this morning kind of realized how absurd it all is. After going through some of the glaring problems with "CPI" as measured by the government she sensibly asked "why don't they change it to better reflect reality" and I said that if they did it would invalidate the prior data points (unless you could go back and reliably recompute them) but perhaps, more importantly, there is a giant system that is indexed to the value as it is currently constructed. So the CPI we have today is "real" insofar as it's part of this whole made-up system. So "real" inflation is something you should calculate yourself based on your own inputs.
A little bit of fun history of economic thought, the definition of "inflation" changed a bit over the 20th century. The early definition was basically "printing more money (than you have gold/silver to back it up.)" So the government engaged in inflation, printing more money, then prices tended to go up as there was more money than there was before chasing goods that presumably are not much more available than before.
The later definition is essentially "A sustained increase of all [most] prices." So the government prints more money, then measures prices going up and call that inflation. This is kind of necessary if you don't have anything to measure government money printing against, e.g. how much gold they hold. On the other hand, it gets really hard to track all the different sorts of goods and services people spend money on, really hard to line up local vs regional vs national changes in prices, hard to line up different sets of goods for various economic classes, and similar problems.
Another important question is whether prices are moving because of supply and demand changes or changes in the money supply. In theory if all prices go up you know it is money that is increasing, but in practice it is entirely possible that, for example, many prices should be decreasing slightly due to increased output, so a low inflation rate might be because prices and money supply are steady or because prices are dropping while more money is being printed. This case highlights the difference between the two definitions of inflation. In the first definition you just look at the printing money action so you could have steady prices and printing money, but in the second case you measure prices only so you don't pay attention to the money supply.
It's weird. Inflation is different by region, economic class, all manner of things, but we like to cite a national number. The "basket of goods" used to estimate the price level is mostly filled with things you could fight about. There are other ways of measuring inflation that center around proportions of income spent on various things, but those are not without controversy either. In general, it isn't always clear which of the two definitions people are using at any given moment.
One would think that the entire purpose of having a national average meaure of inflation is to help people decide if the local inflation they're experiencing is reflective of broad national trends, or is just something specific to their situation. Id est, it would make no sense to have a national measure (of any kind) that *exactly* reflected what almost everybody experienced, because it would convey no new information. If your local inflation differs significantly from the national measurement -- that tells you something useful.
Presumably it's also useful to have this big average measure so that decisions don't get drive by anecdotal data, e.g. Senator Foo experiences a surge in his local inflation for some random reason, extrapolates infinitely, as people like to do, and so decides this is the new #1 national problem. Or conversely, Senator Bar experience local deflation and is baffled by how everybody can be bitching about inflation, it must be some conspiracy or fake news by The Opposition Party, and can be dismissed.
Since measures of inflation have becomes somewhat of a "grade" on the "scorecard" by which people evaluate the success or failure of politicians, it does seem to be a case of perverse incentives that this "grade" is calculated by -- the government. In a more rational world, the government would pay some private consortium for an annual inflation estimate, and by statute part of their remuneration would consist of bonuses for having predicted the price of some basket of goods to within x% over y years.
But they have changed it to better reflect reality, multiple times. Look at the data sets they offer: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/data.htm
There's CPI-U, which is the most widely used series, but there's also chained CPI-U (incorporating some improvements). You can also see that there's a discontinued old version of CPI-U. To make the new and the old versions of CPI-U comparable, they also offer R-CPI-U-RS, which uses the modern CPI-U computation methods and extends them retroactively back to 1978: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/research-series/
It's hard to visualize or make sense of highly multidimensional data, but the BLS does publish average price level estimates for a number of expenditure categories.
CPI is mostly ok as is though it is very off and some ways and much overused. You shouldn't make liberal quote of CPI without a good understanding of its constituent data points. The fed prefers PCE (and specifically CORE PCE) for what it is worth. Major reforms of CPI would be hard for obvious political reasons
At this point it is fairly difficult to change (although the Boskin commission did a bit in the 90's) for the reasons you outline. Why professional investors pay attention to CPI and related indices at all is astonishing.
That is interesting. I am not surprised by the claim that HUD is skirting rules about disclosure, but I think the article doesn't really present evidence that it is not following the local rules (which may or may not be good.) The bit about using rates and arguing that they are disproportional is worthless, sloppy statistical analysis masquerading as science. Actually doing the footwork to find out what disclosures were made and when, and whether that was in compliance with local rules would be very damning to HUD, and I hope someone does that.
I thought this would get more discussion, but I think it has a problem of not fitting cliche's.
It isn't "Ooh, though awful capitalists", but it doesn't appeal to the right wing because it's government failing to take adequate care of people rather than about the government invading people's rights.
It is also entirely useless unless you live somewhere where your entire house will be put underwater. I went through this not too long ago in the Catskills of New York and we decided not to buy it.
As far as we could tell in our most catastrophic scenario our basement would be completely flooded which of course is where all the expensive important things are like heaters and water filters etc. Federal flood insurance does not cover that.
For a variety of reasons, the HUD inventory of housing is non-representative of the entire housing market. So their sales stats will not look like the regular market. Most of the "awfulness" of the HUD sales is explainable by that, and the rest by HUD buyers being credulous/inexperienced.
I am not convinced by a smattering of anecdotes that HUD is failing to perform their legally-obligated notifications.
That's one of my objections to the piece; that it is mostly a couple of anecdotes.
The primary one is that their methodology in their allegedly statistical segment is Very Bad (see comment about how HUID housing is not representative of the entire market), and they then turn around and use this to imply things about their anecdotes.
Recent international news has discussed the formation of an alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with its first major activity being the development of a new class of nuclear-powered submarines for the Australian navy. This deserves some kabbalistic analysis.
The notarikon for this alliance is AUKUS, pronounced like "Orcus", the Roman god of the underworld later and better known as Pluto. Project Pluto was a 1960s US project to develop a nuclear-powered ... aircraft.
But Project Pluto was kabbalistically unbalanced: it focused on developing aircraft, whereas Pluto is a god of the underworld. The fuel for its nuclear engines was similarly unbalanced: uranium is mined from deep within the earth, whereas Uranus is a god of the sky. To find balance we can look astronomically, between Pluto and Uranus, or physically between earth and sky, to find Neptune, god of the sea, and the submarines that will be developed for Project Orcus.
Further correspondence can be found in Project Pluto, based in the northern hemisphere, developing craft to travel over the surface, while Project Orcus, based in the southern hemisphere, develops craft to travel under it. This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Hadn't heard about this. Am glad; it was always very silly that we were planning on building more diesel subs when they're so massively inferior to nuclear.
Is anyone else suddenly finding the google spreadsheet for meetups doesn't work? I've been checking for info on the Oxford/London meetups about twice a week for a while, as I'll probably go to whichever of those is more convenient, and now the times have been announced, I've gone to the spreadsheet to double-check the locations as I can't quite remember them exactly, and both they and maybe something like 75% of the total rows seem to have vanished? Is this something obscene happening on my end, or has something odd gone on, perhaps related to the changes to google docs/drive happening about now?
I'd be happy with any location that's warm or where people speak English, preferably both (Singapore, Sydney, San Francisco)
A natural way forward for me would be a wet lab scientist at a pharma or biotech company, but I'm open to alternatives too: consulting, data science, field application scientist jobs, shooting Tinder profile photos for Bay Area programmers, or working on any interesting problems that could use my skills.
There is BioTech in SF but my understanding is that Boston is the big player there. No idea about Sydney or SF. Also, if you're looking for Russian expat communities there's more on the East Coast.
I'd suggest you define what you want a bit more. Going anywhere to do anything is nice and all but it makes it hard to give help. Also, keep in mind you'll need to go through an immigration process in most of those places if you want to actually work.
Does anyone have advice for people who have political opinions far different from most of their friends and family? How do you navigate this situation? Do you just shut up and let your opinions fester inside, not let anyone know your true beliefs? This seems somewhat torturous to me. Do you try to actively argue with people? This also seems torturous, and likely to end up with everyone misunderstanding me and my positions. People don't seem to understand the nuances of positions outside the Overton window. They tend to think I'm more of an extremist than I really am, or think I'm stupid, or just plain old not like me and not want to be around me.
I've got a cousin I'm fond of. We talk about family, about our jobs, sports, stuff we like to do. We avoid most political topics, and when we broach them, we broach them very gently. Works fine.
It probably depends on how far outside of normal your opinions are.
Depends how strong the opinions are and how much fallout you are willing to tolerate. If it's shutting up while Great-Uncle Phil goes on about the latest conspiracy theory, if you only see Phil at funerals and weddings, it's not worth starting a fight. If it's someone you interact with every day, it may be too much hassle always pretending you don't believe what you believe.
I regularly see posts on social media for American Thanksgiving about "if you are going home to where you will be amongst abusive/prejudiced family members, here are Ten Ways To Cope" (usually for LGBT themes but often enough other progressive themes) and I always think "if it's that big of a hassle, why not stay where you are and not go to the family gathering?" I realise that shutting up is stressful, but it's that or stick to your principles and not go into a hostile environment.
Particularly when so many comments on those kinds of posts are all about "And I challenged my sexist/racist/horrible family" which draw applause from others. I understand that yeah, you're gay, this is your girlfriend, you don't want to listen to Aunt Phyllis lecturing you as to why this is wrong. But equally, from the point of view of the rest of the family, they're all there to have a big traditional meal, catch up together, and have a good time, and they are fed-up of your scowling face lecturing them why they should all be vegans or the latest progressive talking points.
Pick your battle. How important is X topic to you? How willing are you to burn bridges over it?
I am contrarian and love dialogue, but as a cishet white male I realized that has become a trope, so I avoid engaging too-authentically on political subjects except with close friends or family I know trust my intentions.
I think a lot about that. I don't resent it entirely because it does force me to be a little more self-aware. But it does make me sad to have to filter my thoughts which seems, less intimate and more prosaic.
Jeeze, the way you put it, I think it'd bother me a whole lot. You're making it sound like because of factors you cannot control, being white, male, and straight, your opinion matters less and you need to shut up more. I don't often think like that these days, but if I did, I think I'd be quite resentful.
I restrain myself to position statements; and only go in hard if people engage.
But, if people engage, I will escalate until they quit, we agree, or they physically Assult me; in which case we smoothly transition into "competition in the free market of ideas", ie, I wrastle you.
The people I'm close with know I'm opinionated and like to wrestle, so It's a bit of an in group meme people can joke about.
or if you do, discuss politics tangential to the big issues - maybe you really like regenerative agriculture and dislike big ag and you can have fun commiserating about that. or maybe you can all agree that the big corporations have too much control and harm, and use that to introduce and color your ideas and beliefs without approaching your larger ideas
and you can use that to get them in a way or have someplace to build on with the politics or ideas you really want or believe
are you left vs right fam or right vs left fam or something else?
I don’t really mean agreeing, but just going around or switching topics to find something to get a hold on. (To leftist) “yeah alienation sucks and technology is removing the best parts of life” or (to rightist) “man those big corporations sure are poisoning the water and ruining the economy and your favorite tools” and “those corporate leftists really hate the people’s love for nature and traditional customs don’t they”. (as you might tell, you can have ideas that crosscut through both right and left, and then pick ones that’ll work)
in general this stuff isn’t a big battleground of a vs b, but more of planting little ideas and growing them with motivations and good stories and watching your little seedlings fight for soil/soul space and sunlight, work on little ideas and things and they can build up to big ones with fine
Do not discuss politics (or religion) at home. At some places this is a social norm; I can understand why.
My friends have different political opinions, so I can't be simultaneously far from all of them. The ones further from me would probably consider me a brainwashed moron, but the advantage is that then they would also avoid discussing politics with me, so at least the burden of avoidance wouldn't be one-sided. The ones closer to me would probably consider me confused or a heretic, and they might try to fix me, which might actually be more annoying. My solution is to not discuss politics with people, and whatever they say, just nod and try to change topic.
My advantage is that for each political opinion separately, I probably have a friend who agrees with this specific opinion; they would just consider my other opinions crazy. So it's not like I have an unsatisfied burning need to say something specific.
Some of my friends do not talk politics, and I am not sure whether they are using the same algorithm as me, or maybe they are just too naive and assume that I agree with them on everything (because to most people their beliefs feel like "the obvious thing that anyone reasonable would agree with"). Either option is okay for me.
I never discuss politics at work. I generally try to keep my work separate from... everything else.
I have been reading the diary of Samuel Pepys, a 17th century naval bureaucrat who kept a detailed daily account of his life that has survived and is quite interesting. The first volume covers the year of the restoration, when Charles II was brought back to be king. Once it happens it seems to be massively popular, with no serious attempt to reverse it by putting Cromwell's son back in power or setting up a republic. But in the months leading up to the restoration it is unclear what will happen. It feels as though everyone is trying to figure out what everyone else is in favor of, hence which way to jump, without committing himself.
Presumably that was the result of the same pattern of behavior you are describing, not limited to "at home."
I'm sure you've found it already, but in case other people haven't, there's a great site that published the diary entries day by day, like a blog. It's heavily hyperlinked and annotated, so for example, it's easy to track down the 290 days in which Monk (sic) was mentioned, or see what Ralph Josselin wrote in his diary, or stumble across a string of comments discussing the method of determining whether a woman is a maid by tying a string around her head, with reference to Soranus of Ephesus among others. The site is closing in on finishing its 2nd decade-long round, now, but all the comments and information are still preserved.
Actually they were all trying to figure out what George Monck, the future Duke of Albemarle thought.
George Monck had started marching south before the diary started. He and his allies had basically seized control of the country by 1660. Theoretically he was supporting Parliament against John Lambert but Lambert's forces largely defected. Lambert was basically done as a political force by the time Pepys was writing. He would try to seize control of the country but unsuccessfully. Albemarle would enter London unopposed in February after seizing control of most of the country.
While theoretically Albemarle supported Parliament there was no delusion among contemporary actors that Albemarle and his army effectively controlled the country. He also made a bunch of hugely contradictory statements so no one knew what he thought. Few thought his immediate position was tenable. That he could just remain in power as a military dictator. Ultimately (and for reasons that are still debated) he created the political settlement that would create the Restoration.
Pepys would be particularly loathe and uncertain about all this because his loyalty to Sandwich made Monck a political rival.
Pepys make the importance of Monck clear, but presumably Monck's decision in part hinged on what he thought all the other players, including his own officers and soldiers, wanted.
No doubt. However, there was a huge sense that Monck was the key player. Political actors tried to bribe his son with candy to learn what he thought. Multiple maids were bribed to listen to him speaking to his wife in bed to decide what he'd do. Etc. This became even more fevered as several revolts failed to become significant because his forces remained loyal and/or the rebels were beaten in the field. Meanwhile Monck basically refused to tell people what he intended to do.
Monck was already talking with Charles II and the Royalists during the early parts of Pepys diary. (I believe he began in March or February? With some Royalist underground contacts from 1659.) Pepys just didn't know this.
I generally don't talk openly about politics except to my girlfriend who shares the same values. Friends, family and coworkers get as few of my political opinions as possible. Social media is right out.
American politics has become increasingly totalitarian and repressive over the last decade. It's been the case for several years that voicing dissent is a serious risk to your employment. Now with the unprecedented cooperation between the Biden-Harris regime and tech companies over censoring "misinformation" as well as the seizure of control represented by the vaccine mandate, the federal government has taken the steps to formalize that system of blacklisting and disenfranchisement. I predict that prior to November of 2024, it will be illegal or effectively illegal for any company to employ an individual who has stated "extreme" political views online.
This is an important moment of time to find like-minded people and prepare but not on the indexed internet.
Man, I wish I lived in the US you lived in where liberals exercise complete control over all walks of life,
instead of the US I live in where conservatives control 1.5 of the branches of government despite not winning a majority in any national election in any branch of government for 20 years
and where I will be instantly fired if I so much as think about unionizing
and where the largest, most popular news network is wildly conservative
and where the most visible social media influencers (Shapiro, Rogan, Carlson, etc.) are conservative
and where a bunch of states just banned teaching CRT in the classroom with language so broad it includes mentioning that racism even exists and suffered no repercussion what so ever,
and where you can be a gat dang ethnonationalist on twitter and it's totally fine.
Not to be too hard on you or to condescend, but I think you should broaden your sources to people that don't agree with you, or at least don't maximally agree with your worst predictions about who things are goin'.
The mandates in 1777, 1867, 1900 (This one involved dudes going door to door and physically forcing you to take the smallpox vaccine in some places), 1905, 1928, and 1970 didn't result in the US degenerating into a totalitarian vaccinocracy or something.
>despite not winning a majority in any national election in any branch of government for 20 years
This isn't quite right. The Republicans won the majority of house votes in 2016 and 2010. And both the presidential and house vote in 2004. The long dominance of the Democratic voters during a period where we've usually not held either the White House or the House of Representatives is certainly an ugly fact about American Democracy, but it's not *quite* as stark as you suggest.
> the largest, most popular news network is wildly conservative
> the most visible social media influencers (Shapiro, Rogan, Carlson, etc.) are conservative
Not sure if this isn't evidence for the contrary. I mean, if population is roughly 50% liberal and 50% conservative, but you have 10× more liberal news networks and 10× more liberal influencers... that would mean that the conservative news networks get 10× more viewers per network, and the conservative influencers get 10× more viewers per influencer.
> and where you can be a gat dang ethnonationalist on twitter and it's totally fine.
> and where you can be a gat dang ethnonationalist on twitter and it's totally fine.
it seems out of place to put a “you will not be put in jail for being a Twitter nazi” in your list of complaints about how conservatives have power. Twitter (slowly) does ban far right people, but nothing more will happen. The CRT bans are pretty dumb, freeze peach will overturn some probably and the remainder won’t make any difference.
I think he's trying to broaden *your* sources. And for what it's worth, I agree more with him than you. That is, your experience is far less familiar than what Boberto is describing among people I know.
Amazon may be 'liberal', whatever that really means, but it's very much an enemy of socialism. Its management hates unions and it hates paying taxes.
From your CNBC link:
"Sanders and Warren were the top two presidential recipients among Amazon workers, even though those two candidates were the biggest advocates for breaking up Big Tech."
Seems like those worker donations are a cry for help, to me.
In today's corporate America, you can get a job as a professional spotter of racists, you can demand single-sex bathrooms, you can call a co-worker "Literal Hitler" because he insisted that there are only twenty six genders and everyone knows that there are at least twenty eight, plus genders not discovered yet. You can debate endlessly subjects of interest to todays audiences, such as many LGTBQXYZPDQ can dance on the head of a pin. None of this affects the ability of rich people to make more money.
What you cannot do is to discuss changing the way the economic pie is sliced.
I don't possess your venom for sexual and gender non-conformists and activists who stick up for them in public life, but it's absolutely true that major corporations have co-opted their causes to make themselves look good at no significant cost. Which sometimes leads to darkly funny results - like honest-to-goodness small-time queer vendors no longer being able to afford booth fees at Pride festivals because corporate competition jacked up prices.
And your conclusion is right on the money, so to speak.
IDK, I don't see this world at all. Where I am, the Overton window is strictly controlled by the left. You're much more in danger of losing your job if you say anything borderline conservative at work or on social media. Yeah, you can say what you want if you have an independent source of income (or if your income depends on you being inflammatory). But who has that? Only a very very small subset of people, who have to make their whole life and career revolve around being inflammatory. I don't want that. I just want to be my authentic self.
Your arguments would matter if the political landscape was homogoneous, but it isn't. The political distribution of America is bimodal, and most people are in a bubble.
If you are an academic or white collar professional (presumably the majority of this blog, though there was one LEO at the meetup I went to), the left wields significant practical and cultural power over your life, and expressing an opinion contrarian to the current narrative (right now, focused on identity/grievance politics) - even if you broadly agree with their values - can be harmful to your reputation.
Hang on a sec. Reread the post the one you're replying to is replying to. There may be some other debate Nah's arguments don't matter to - I do agree with your point about bubbles - but in the one that was actually going on I think they're pretty directly relevant, and correct, as a rebuttal.
> I predict that prior to November of 2024, it will be illegal or effectively illegal for any company to employ an individual who has stated "extreme" political views online.
In Communist Czechoslovakia, people with wrong opinions were still allowed to do some low-status manual jobs, especially if those were dangerous for health. It doesn't seem credible to me that USA would get further than that within three years.
The greatest pressure will be on jobs where you influence people: teachers, journalists, bloggers. (In case of bloggers, the pressure will be on the infrastructure they use.) Or the jobs too many people compete for.
And there will remain some small opportunities for the actual extremists. It's just that when you are neither orthodox nor extremist, you will be pushed out of the mainstream opportunities... and then you can either join the extremists (and in the eyes of the public come out as one of them), or move to somewhere unimportant.
In the US those kinds of dirty jobs either pay well, and are thus in high demand, or are primarily done by illegal immigrants and as such eschew the sort of documentation requirements necessary to enforce a blacklist. As such I would expect such a blacklist to affect oil riggers while avoiding meat packers, to use those jobs as synecdoches.
Depending on how you define that boundary I think we're broadly in agreement.
Did you explore politics with your girlfriend before the relationship solidified? Your personalities are similar enough in relevant ways that it makes sense that you two would have similar politics? Or was it luck?
I knew that I wanted to settle down so I deliberately sought out women with similar values and life goals. My goal there wasn't political per se but just to minimize the risk of divorce and generally head off future conflict about finances, family size and childrearing, etc.
(Not to imply that she doesn't have a lot of other positive qualities, because she absolutely does, but this is the most directly relevant to the topic at hand. It's also important to note she wasn't the first woman I had found who had similar goals and values, but rather was so interesting when I met her that I stopped looking.)
Early on in our relationship there was an incident where she was "warned" about me
Anyway, long comment short she didn't care and, while she isn't politically engaged at all, broadly agrees on both the underlying values which motivate my politics and on the practical upshots of them for daily life.
Don't expect to be able to both regularly express opinions that anger or distress people and to keep their friendship. People want to be friends with people they enjoy being around.
In particular, don't confuse "it is not reasonable for people to be angered or distressed by this opinion" with "people will not be angered or distressed by this opinion" - this is an area where there's no substitute for empiricism.
Which you value more - challenging things you disagree with, or not losing friends over it - is a decision you'll have to make for yourself, but I would suggest framing it in those terms.
I've gotten into more trouble from voting for the wrong party (and I almost never tell anyone) than from expressing the wrong opinions (which I do more often), so I think the danger lies mostly in.being identified as belonging to the out-group, which means extreme opinions as such aren't that much of a problem, but shibboleth opinions that identify one as a part of the out-group are.
I try to only talk politics with people who show signs of crimethink, moving slowly outwards from the edges of the Overton window to keep things safe. It's hard to shut up when people are saying stupid stuff tho, so when there's like an NPC political conversation going on, I tend to just leave the room.
I've managed to lose most of my friends over the past few years due to politics. "Speak truth when no one else will" is great until it conflicts with the values of other people.
It could be worse. In the 1640s people killed each other over the question of whether praying to the saints worked or not. Good think we're not as stupidly but murderously frivolous as those medieval nitwits -- today we only fight over things that are *really* important.
> "Speak truth when no one else will" is great until it conflicts with the values of other people.
If you see expressing your political opinions in those terms, I'm afraid I think you're doomed from the start.
My counter-slogan would "Say what you think is true when other people who disagree with you are saying what they think is true, but keep in mind the possibility that actually it's you and not they who is making a mistake".
And even that will often alienate people, of course.
that sucks. it’s really sad that people give up friends over politics at all - I remember Scott’s story about the nazi he knew online when he was younger, and IMO you should be willing to tolerate literally anything that’s not a concrete action, as what one actually does and knows does and embodies much more than any political statements AND it’s good to be close to propel at that extremes so you can really understand and learn from why they do that.
How much does whose company you enjoy depend on shared political (or other) opinions?
I know some people who have political opinions kinda close to me, but they are insufferable assholes. On the other hand, I know people who are fans of homeopathy or conspiracy theories, but who are fun to be around as long as they don't start talking about that one specific topic (and they know that I disagree with them on that topic, so most of the time they try to avoid it in my presence).
Suppose a high-school kid were to say to you that the reason he only has friends of the same race or religion is because he doesn't seen any reason he shouldn't limit his friends to people whose company he enjoys. Would that be perfectly OK? Would there be no counsel to the contrary that you give him?
People should limit their friends to people whose company they enjoy. People should enjoy the company of people who disagree with them if their company is in other ways enjoyable. If anything, they should prefer the company of those who disagree with them, ceteris paribus, since they are more likely to learn from them.
I'm afraid I disagree with this on several grounds.
Firstly, and most importantly, "there is a moral obligation to enjoy X" is obviously wrong, for all values of X, so your entire argument isn't just wrong, it's an example of a category of arguments all members of which are wrong.
Secondly, "am I likely to learn things from this person?" is a lousy proxy for "will I enjoy spending time with this person?".
Thirdly, "does this person regularly express opinions which offend or distress me in my presence?" (which, note, is a much narrower question than "do I disagree with this person?", not to say a better-defined one) is a lousy proxy for "how often am I going to learn things from this person?".
I suspect you're using this as a short-hand for “if you only hear the opinions of people whose views on ideological issues you share, you are more likely to end up with blind spots in your views on those issues”, which is true, but there are plenty of ways of lower-cost ways hearing opinions without befriending them.
Plus, I think that people whose ideas about morality strike me as a bit wrong are more likely to actually be right, and I'm more likely to have blind spots that they can productively challenge, than people whose ideas about morality strike me as massively wrong, and who will probably mostly challenge me about things I'm right and they're wrong about. And, as an added bonus, they're less likely to offend or distress me.
I've seen some people express the opinion that there's a moral obligation not to be friends with bad people, in order to discourage them. I don't agree with that (although there can be moral obligations to condemn and oppose certain behaviours in your friends, obviously). If I found out one of my friends was a serial killer, I imagine I wouldn't want to go on being friends with them, but if for some bizarre reason I did then, provided I did everything in my power to get them convicted and punished and to get justice for their victims, I'd tentatively defend doing so (although I admit it's not a counterfactual I've thought about much). But I also don't think there is ever a moral obligation to be friends with someone – especially not with someone who regularly, knowingly does things that distress you.
I said nothing about a moral obligation. I should keep my weight down, but that is not a moral obligation.
Not did I say that "am I likely to learn things from this person?" is a good proxy for "will I enjoy spending time with this person?" It is a benefit from spending time with someone, hence a reason to do so.
given you enjoy their company and we’re friends with them for other reasons ofc. but “being a meanie in political views” doesn’t make one enjoy their company in the ten other areas any less
I think you're factually wrong here, or at least generalising inaccurately from your own experience - I think a lot of people do find being around people expressing views that anger or offend them unpleasant.
well those people are wrong! being offended is absolutely a choice, you can just not care. offense is usually taken on behalf of others, and if you actually follow the chain of offense you find it’s made of ethereal spider silk that seems to twinkle out to every vulnerable minority but ends nowhere. no matter if someone thinks the }*]^s minor ethnic group should be permanently #*]^\^ed or thinks that the *}*{^ basic institution we all depend on are racist and should be }*]*]*ed, you can literally just ignore it and keep doing the thing you like doing with that person. (most people for most of history, and to a much, much lesser extent much of the planet today not in the fifty states and Western Europe, are extremely racist - and categorically being unable to relate to most of them is a mistake). being unable to interact with a bad human being isn’t innate. “People find being around people who offend or anger them” is tautologically true, offending is unpleasant by the construction of the word - but the offense itself can just be shrugged off and you can just like the person otherwise. The original discussion wasn’t about “being around people while they express mean and not nice views”, but about “breaking off friendship with people who do that”, which is very bad, while not talking about the mean things is merely quite bad
I used throwaway pseudonymous accounts on social media to explore and work through my political intuitions. I interacted with diverse communities, and got to have a close look at both their legitimate points and their blind spots and biases. This satisfied my need to express myself, and also allowed me to test out various Overton cruising speeds. I ended up being disappointed in everything that's currently on offer throughout the political spectrum, while at the same time not bothered by partially agreeing with everyone when they get something right. Because my views have gotten more subtle and in many ways more extreme, but also non-partisan, I no longer find myself in the "us-vs-them" frame in political discussions, and can approach them in a detached manner, while pressing as few "confirmation bias" buttons as possible.
So, the Covid situation here in England (and I think the rest of the UK) is starting to get scary again (hospitals seem to be under much strain as cases are rising ahead of a likely new wave). With vaccination numbers stalled far short of herd immunity levels, and with the government insisting on relaxing security measures, I'm personally suspecting we're back to a strategy of achieving (the required difference in numbers for) herd immunity by means of infections.
So... I don't want to be that guy, but might this mean it's worth rethinking meetups here?
If the vaccinations aren't enough to stop the epidemic, or even to protect the vaccinated people themselves, then there is indeed not much we can do to prevent the outcome where almost everyone gets infected, short of maintaining strict restrictions forever. Continuing to isolate ourselves, then, only serves to delay the inevitable by a few months, which is hardly worth it.
If vaccinations are effective at preventing infection, and the epidemic is now mostly spreading among unvaccinated people, then there is little risk for a vaccinated person in attending a meetup, even if case counts in the area are high.
The bottom line: IMO once vaccinated, it's time to resume our normal lives, whatever probability of infection this results in.
"Vaccinations aren't enough to stop the epidemic" != "almost everyone gets infected". For any vaccine that isn't literally perfect, there will be some people whose behavior is sufficiently high-risk that they're liable to become infected even if they are vaccinated, e.g. bear week attendees. And, conversely, some people whose behavior is sufficiently low-risk that they are unlikely to be infected even if they are not vaccinated. The epidemic ends when enough people have been vaccinated, *and* enough of the high-risk population has been infected.
The open question is whether "high-risk population" is 2%, 20%, or 80% of the general population. But "vaccines fail, so everybody gets infected!" is sloppy thinking; please don't do that.
That's a middle between the vaccines being completely effective and the vaccines being completely ineffective. But it still holds that however many people would get infected if we returned to our normal lives *will* eventually get infected (unless we maintain strict restrictions forever), so there is no point in isolating ourselves unless there is severe strain on the healthcare system.
I agree with the conclusion, but "many" and "almost everyone" are two very different things. 20% of the still-uninfected population is "many". So is 80%.
The figures I'm seeing online show UK infection rates falling steeply for about the past week, rising steeply before that. Hospital case rates presumably lag that, since someone whose infection was detected a week ago and was hospitalized is probably still hospitalized.
There was an earlier peak, followed by a drop, about two months ago. Current infection rates are less than 2/3 of the July peak.
Case numbers are indeed momentarily falling; but nobody expects that to last any significant amount of time as schools have already opened and universities are about to. A considerable wave is being expected. And hospitals are reportedly already near the limits of what they can bear - https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/hospital-strain-test-uks-vaccine-based-winter-covid-plan-2021-09-15/ was the first example I found online, but there are several others.
I suppose the evolution of the situation in the coming weeks might clarify things somewhat, but those meetups are in about a month and it's possible that things might by then be considerably riskier without data being conclusive yet (since it often only is after the fact). How possible? I don't know. As said elsewhere, if I could quantify things I'd be making much stronger statements. I just feel this is a discussion that should be had.
Maybe I can frame my concerns more clearly as a question: under what conditions (say, in terms of numbers in a couple of weeks) would it be better to just cancel those meetups? I wouldn't expect a reasonable choice for those to be unlikely to take place, so I'd rather those conditions be discussed now than in a month when it's easier to just justify keeping things as they are whatever the numbers happen to be at the time.
Not sure how this squares with the sort of news above... My guess is either the problem is not uniformly distributed across hospitals or across the UK? Maybe there's something other than Covid keeping them busy? But hospitals are certainly claiming to be at their limit...
The only parts of the Reuters article above that suggests that the health system is strained right now are these:
'But many doctors already feel overburdened [...] "Our hospitals and GP (doctor) practices are already overstretched," Dr Chaand Nagpaul chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) council, told Reuters.'
These are very vague and non-specific. I'm pretty sure you can always find many doctors who feel overburdened. All the rest of the article is speculation about what may happen in the future.
If you don't trust doctors in the front lines to tell you how things are (I've certainly heard from a few local hospitals claiming they're worse than a year ago), are you willing to take the government's scientific advisor's models seriously?
Cases are slightly rising round here, but I think that's because of the kids are all back to school, so you generally get a rise in *all* infections when that happens.
Whether or not it's a new wave, it's a bit early to tell yet.
Well yes but actually no. Admittedly I was thinking of numbers in my local area and carelessly extrapolating nationally. Yet the recent decrease is shy enough that it should be reasonable to expect it to no longer be true when current infections due to opening of schools and universities are known. Basically holidays infections seem to be decreasing, but we're at the onset of school ones, plus extra strain from flu season.
I don't dispute that the outdoor factor decreases risk. But the estimates Scott previously made still had it at a reasonable level (if I recall correctly the recommendation was for those attending to be wary of their risk budget for that week) and this is bound to update on that in the direction of higher risk. Quantification is hard and I haven't done it, which is why I'm not stating this must be cancelled. Still it seems serious enough that there should be some discussion, which I haven't seen.
And yes, as you say, a lot of this is down to personal perceptions. Seeing the almost complete lack of care around me (except for a minimum commitment to plausible deniability) my perception is that there's real potential for a bad outcome not that long before a possible new lockdown.
Fair enough. My sense is that further lockdowns are extremely unlikely - during the whole of the recent wave there wasn’t a hint of reneging on the ‘lockdowns are over’ message and any subsequent wave is likely to have even fewer cases and and even Lower mortality rate. Of course I’m also hoping these things happen..
I'm far less optimistic, given Summer waves have been generally milder, don't have the added strain of flu et al, and there hasn't been that huge a leap in vaccination numbers over the Summer. Of course I'm rather hoping your things will happen instead, but so far see no sign of them.
I'm reminding myself of how many times I've been wrong about the course of the pandemic..... but this time I'm expecting to be absolutely spot-on! I guess we'll see - fingers crossed.
I want to try to come up with names for things--names that, as soon as you hear them, you immediately understand what the name is referring to, and wonder why no one gave it a name before:
singularity FOMO
the great leap whoreward
rent seeking license
divine right of parents
the principle of "The kleptocrat is dead. Long live the kleptocrat."
I like 'singularity FOMO' - the others listed here don't really work for me, except as a divinely anointed parent I can identify with #4. I need time & caffeine to come up with a few more, but quite like some recent neologisms like coronacoaster, sewciopath, underthinker, etc.
How should one’s own goals be balanced with those of others in persuasion? In particular, how much should we trust others’ ability to protect & advocate for themselves when we are being persuasive?
First, some groundwork: I think that a true *win* in any negotiation is one in which both sides agree that the deal made is the best possible "free" choice for them. Persuasion is guiding someone to realize that the logical best choice is one that you prefer. (This definition can certainly be poked apart, but my main aim is to establish that I'm not interested in "wins" by coersion (eg. guilt, threats, ultimatums). These are essentially cheating — maybe you get what you want, but you would have lost if you were limited to using Reason as your weapon.)
Often, I’ve found that persuasion really comes down to understanding the other side as much as possible, to find a deal that both sides agree is better than no deal. So good persuasion shouldn’t really have a “sucker.” (Although it can certainly still appear that way from the outside, and either party may, in hindsight, decide that the deal wasn’t as good as it seemed. I think this is non-ideal, but is ultimately fine.)
If we can agree on the above, then here's a short scenario:
In a group project with a tight deadline, one member mentions that she would prefer to skip one of the final meetings — she cites multiple personal reasons: her grandpa recently died and she’s packing to leave town for his funeral, her dad just got out of the hospital, her thesis work just started this week… she’s got a lot going on. But she adds, “I suppose I can meet tonight for an hour if it'll help.” Even with everything going on, it would still be preferable for the group to have her at the meeting, and it would be false to say that things will be all the same without her. You reply that “if it’s too much for you then please let us know, but otherwise if you can do it, I’d love for us to meet for an hour! It would be more productive.” You end up meeting, the friend enjoys the meeting and is glad she ultimately attended, saying that it was a welcome distraction from the stresses of her personal life. Except…
The thing is, it worked out in this case, but it might not have. It’s entirely possible for a person to not be a good advocate for themselves, and put others’ needs before their own too heavily. An alternative view might be that one could have “read the hints,” and intuited that she didn’t really have the bandwidth for a meeting. It would also be truthful to say, "Actually, it’s fine; we do want you here and it would help, but it seems like you're dealing with a lot and we can still get a lot done without you."
I realize there’s not really a single “right” answer for this, but I’m confused regarding how/when to ask for things and assert one’s own needs/desires, if you can’t always trust others to have proper boundaries and value their own needs as important. At some point, I figure there's a necessity to assume that each person is ultimately the authority on their own internal needs/wants/desires. (Actually, to assume responsibility for someone else's calculus of what they can handle seems incredibly arrogant and paternalistic.) At the same time, there certainly is some validity to intuiting when what someone actually wants vs what they claim are misaligned; certainly, an excuse of, “Well, they said they were fine” can be plain wrong. (Just look at any consent / sexual harassment issues for evidence.)
I don’t know if there’s a resolution to be found here, but this seems like an unresolved question. Do we account for others’ needs in a world where people frequently don’t state what they want, or even realize/acknowledge it to themselves? And if so, when / how?
"Actually, it’s fine; we do want you here and it would help, but it seems like you're dealing with a lot and we can still get a lot done without you."
I think this is the best answer you could have given. IMO you are overthinking this. Unless you are on a tight deadline for a Manhattan Project, planning a D-Day invasion or zeroing in on the cure for cancer, human decency is always the trump card.
For better or worse, you are expected to wisely compare your co-worker's situation to your work situation and make the correct decision. If the work situation is not so important, it is correct to decline her offer to meet for an hour. But if the Continental Congress is about to vote down the Declaration of Independence, it may be correct to ask her to ride 70 miles in a thunderstorm despite cancer to make the saving vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_Rodney#American_Revolution
If they’re not going to their spouse’s funeral to finish the group project, maybe do them a solid and let them off the hook. Otherwise, hold them to it, as it’s just more honest and simpler for everyone. It really just depends. Maybe in Japan or Tutsi tribesmen or something you need to ask ten times to REALLY mean it and skipping one of them is rude, or maybe even asking at all is rude for the Inuit and one must negotiate entirely in subtext and hints.
If you'd like to know how an ordinary person does it, I would base it on my personal knowledge of the individual. Does she have a track record of not advocating for herself? Does she rarely say no to anything? Does she apologize for things she shouldn't? Or does say no to things just fine?
I would also give weight to her facial expression and voice when she makes the equivocal request.
If, hypothetically, this really happened to you, you probably read the person just fine. I wouldn't extract a general principle but would simply continue to "read."
It's paternalistic to Assume Responsibility for someone's needs, but it's not paternalistic to say, "Goodness, you're dealing with a lot, NO don't worry about me/my workload, go take care of yourself." Avoiding paternalism is important, but not the only important thing, and shouldn't be allowed to banish *all* sense of a limited but real duty of care for those we interact with. The type of person who won't tell you honestly when they truly need to skip out of a duty of some kind is generally the type who has too strong a sense of their duty of care for those around them--so that makes it even more appropriate, in their case, to reciprocate.
I think the answer turns on how reliable your empathy is, how well you know the person in question, how much you care about their comfort, and how much slack there is available to try to protect them from themselves.
As to your statement: "Actually, to assume responsibility for someone else's calculus of what they can handle seems incredibly arrogant and paternalistic," sure, that's true most of the time. Until it becomes clear that their judgement on a particular issue is compromised - by stress, emotion, or some knot in their psychological timber. People looking out for one another at those times isn't such a bad thing.
Hell no. That way lies madness. A person who does not put in the time or effort to state plainly and precisely what he wants when directly asked is making a request of a favor --- a request to read his mind, or pleasantly surprise him, or make decisions for him. If you're trying to get into his or her pants, or you are in loco parentis to someone not yet (or no longer) a fully competent adult, you can certainly decide to grant the favor. But nobody else is under any reasonable obligation to do so. Any regime which presumes otherwise is ipso facto a miserable plantation with the poor bastards who have to read others' minds as the designated slaves, and should be burned to the ground and the ashes mixed with lye and dogshit to discourage even visiting the burial site.
All right, if it's laborious for you, don't do it. It's not laborious for everybody. And I don't think anyone brought up the idea of the government imposing it. That, frankly, would be weird.
Fine with me in your personal life. But you better not expect people to be knocking themselves out trying to figure out your internal state in the workplace -- not if you work for me. It's hard enough getting a job done that requires massive cooperation among disparate points of view without someone coming it the princess and expecting all the rest of us to psychoanalyze him before we decide whether to meet on Thursday at 1pm or Friday at 9am.
If you can't figure out how to represent yourself clearly for those kinds of quotidian workplace issues, you can expect to be out the door pretty promptly around here. I've got no time for that, and I've never yet met talent that is *so* talented it can't be replaced by someone just as good but who can communicate clearly to the team as needed without emotional drama.
You think absolutely *all* talents are fungible? I disagree. I'm more than happy to put up with minor quirks and idiosyncrasies in coworkers if they bring something unique to the table. No, I wouldn't want to have to psychoanalyze every word they say but very smart people tend to have their own way if doing things.
Perhaps you are talking about something more detrimental than mere quirkiness but there are a lot of personality types and I think it's worth the effort accommodate as many as I can.
Again and again I come back to the Iris Murdoch throw away line, "We are all so very different."
The vast majority certainly are. However, the hassle of replacing somebody with somebody else similarily qualified but less annoying to interact with is non-negligible, so I'd guess the dergee of said annoyance is usually the deciding factor.
I realize the last bit is phrased deliberately harshly to mirror Carl Pham's comment, I don't know exactly to what degree.
As long as you literally mean "*putting work into* understanding the other person's POV", then fine, I guess. Or maybe not, unless you know of some magical way to accurately judge whether they put work in. Otherwise - and if there's any expectation of *getting it right* - I strongly disagree.
Basically: autism spectrum.
(which iirc from the surveys is quite over represented here.)
While there are autistic people who learned to be really good at this sort of thing, many are not. They often put massive amounts of work in and still end up with some major blindspots when it comes to others' POV.
At least that's what it's like for me, and I'm significantly above average in these kinds of skills compared to the (not that many) others with ASD I've met.
I've been recently pondering about the (Sci-Fi?) possibility of consciousness synchronicity: Can we humans "sync" our consciousness to other human or animal consciousnesses?
For example, if you're wondering what's the cognitive qualia of your cat sitting calmly in its litter box, and you'd like to know what it "thinks" like, you'd have some cognitive tool to help you get into that cognitive state, hence "sync" your consciousness with that of your cat.
Or, think of a flying bird: We humans sometimes wonder what it "feels" like to fly like a bird. Maybe we can have a tool that can help us get into a bird cognitive state, so that we can know what it "thinks" like.
Or, think of your partner. If only we could think like they do!
What I'm having in mind is some NeuroFeedback tool (which I hear can help some people) that can record cognitive states and then train you to "sync" with these states. Or some equivalent to NeuraLink that can send the right pulses to "sync" you with a pre-recorded cognitive state (i.e. consciousness).
Yes, we don't know what consciousness is, but I guess someone ever thought of this idea despite that? I couldn't find a resource that uses that term (except for lots of Jung's Synchronicity resources, which is completely unrelated). Do you know of some interesting resources that discuss this idea?
it’s pretty meaningless, you already can, like, understand your friend seeing something or enjoying food, and that’s already a “state of consciousness”, and beyond that there’s nothing extra to sync or to download that isn’t already done
I know this is a rationalist group but...there are many exercises/meditations designed to achieve just this in both Western esoterc and magic schools and also in eastern Tantra. As to their efficacy, experientially or otherwise, I will reserve comment.
How would you ever know it's working correctly? How would you know that it's telling you what it's like to be a bird, a not what it's like to be a human who's having neural impulses form a bird fed into his brain?
I just thought of something in light of debates over whether the drug price-setting thing in Congress will upset drug development. Could a pharma company cut a deal with some random country to offer drugs for sale only there in the advent of such rules, and then only offer the drugs for sale there?
The issue is mostly that the USA is a huge and rich market - nothing stops a company selling to everyone-but-the-US, but their profits will be much lower that the current status quo.
A more reasonable reform might look at *why* developing drugs (or even making a new factory to manufacture out-of-patent generics) is so ludicrously expensive, and reforming the FDA to fix that
Also, I found out about this extremely rad mecha from the 1960s that the US government created to do maintenance on a potential nuclear-powered bomber. 11 feet high, 80 tons, and capable of picking up an egg without breaking it in one talon and balancing it on a spoon held by the other talon:
I want to make a simple game based on text and clickable images and maybe some simple animations. I want to have a working prototype up in a day and I want it to be playable on a website I created. Kingdom of Loathing is a good example of the style I'm going for (but the game will of course be a lot simpler).
What framework/engine should I use? I'm a decent programmer but I know little of game design. I want to use something that is "living" with an active community, that is close to programming (no-code stuff just doesn't work IMO, I want to version control with git), and that gets me going as fast as possible so that I can get a prototype working ASAP. My devenv is Ubuntu if that matters.
I have googled around but most tips for getting started with simple games talk about platformers and arcade-like games, which is not what I'm going for. Right now my best idea is either to use the LÖVE framework, but I'm unsure on how relevant Lua still is, or to use GameMaker Studio, but it isn't free and seem a bit more complex than what I need. I thought about just doing it in python but that doesn't seem to be recommended and Pygame looks dead. I looked into Interactive Fiction stuff but it seems too simple, with little room for game logic beyond branching the story.
Help and suggestions from anyone with experience would be very appreciated!
Question: Can this be a series of different web pages, with maybe a few cookies and minimal JavaScript for flags and animations? CSS can also animate. That's at least easy enough to prototype and lay out the game for now
just have a single webpage (your username will be 100x on a website what it’s be for a downloadable game) and code it in JS + html or js + canvas. Js is awesome and you can hack your own stuff together and it’ll work or use one of a million different libraries
pyglet is the best python library for gamedev but it's newish and idk how you would make it playable on the web. given how simple you want the game to be id probably just use vanilla javascript
I post this largely because I like to boost knowledge of his amazingly hilarious USENIX posts whenever I get the chance. Seriously, if you are interested in technical matters and have anything remotely approaching a sense of humor, read his stuff.
Examples from this one piece:
"Precisely 37 hours later, he
called me on the phone. I asked him how everything was going, and he made
a haunting, elegiac noise, like a foghorn calling out for its mate. I asked him
to describe his first day, and he said that his entire existence revolved around
bleating things: bleating goats that wanted to be fed, and bleating crows that
wanted to steal the food that he gave the bleating goats, and bleating farm
machines that were composed of spinning metal blades and had no discernable purpose besides enrolling you in the “Hook Hand of the Month” club. "
"Ostensibly, CSS files allow you to separate the definition of your content from the definition of how that content
looks—using CSS, you can specify the layout for your HTML
tags, as well as the fonts and the color schemes used by those
tags. Sadly, the relationship between CSS and HTML is the
same relationship that links the instructions for building your
IKEA bed, and the unassembled, spiteful wooden planks that
purportedly contain latent bed structures"
The fourth and seventh errors represent uncaught JavaScript
exceptions. In a rational universe, a single uncaught exception would terminate a program, and if a program continued
to execute after throwing such an exception, we would know
that Ragnarok is here and Odin is not happy. In the browser
world, ignoring uncaught exceptions is called “Wednesday, and
all days not called ‘Wednesday.’”
You would be sad if you
went to the hospital to have your appendix removed, and the
surgeon opened you up, and she said, “I DIDN’T EXPECT
YOUR LIVER TO HAVE GILLS,” and then she proceeded with
her original surgical plan, despite the fact that you’re apparently
a mer-person. Being a mer-person should have non-ignorable
No, it's way faster than most dynamic languages (the popular ones, please don't reply talking about LuaJIT), doesn't fall into the "use OO for everything" trap, and is usually pleasant to use. If you want static typing there are options too. There are also lots of game framworks/libraries out there, though I don't know them.
JavaScript is a lot better than it used to be, although it still has some quirks from its history. If you really can't stand those quirks, you could use Typescript, but that makes it a little more annoying to set up your build process. Pure JS is fine for learning the ropes.
As the saying goes, there are languages everyone complains about, and there are languages nobody uses.
The changes I have seen. Teaching languages when I started out were Scheme and Pascal. Burning through quite an array of other entries as the landscape changes.
A lot of them are very well suited in their intended domains but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Lisp.
I've only ever seen Twine dismissively sneered at (in large part precisely for the "no-code" design he wants to avoid), followed by pointing in the direction of Ren'Py. (Can't tell how well Ren'Py works with the web, though.)
It would be awesome if someone created Ren'JS - something like Ren'Py, except with JavaScript, that would natively export for web, but would also have an option to create a desktop app (something like Electron, only much faster).
After investigation: It looks like Twine can do everything I want. I think I will try it out seriously. I still worry that I will push the boundaries of it, but I guess that's a learning experience. Thanks!
Something like the effect of the Russian flu of 1889. Lots of evidence that it was the origin of one of our current cold viruses (also a coronavirus). Kids weren't much affected, so they survived multiple exposures and grew up immune to serious illness, or so goes some readings of that event. Of course when we start vaccinating kids we may disrupt this trajectory.
That's interesting. I hadn't paid much attention to pre-1919 epidemics. This paper throws out the suggestion (in passing) that some common cold viruses are possibly a less deadly variant of the (possible) Coronavirus that (possibly) caused the Russian Flu...
My understanding is that immunity to common cold CoVs is not lasting, though. Somewhere in my long list of Coronavirus links is a paper that says the same four types of common cold CoVs recirculate through the population in 3 to 4 year cycles as immunity wanes.
But will the kids ever grow out of vaccines? Seems like they'll still be getting their shots in their 70s, and the steady state will be one more vaccine we all need every year.
Some additional WFH and telemedicine. Hopefully, no guarantees, a reasonable response to the next pandemic with much faster and more universal deployment of vaccines.
When covid appeared, my prediction was that it is not much different from other cold viruses which we get infected now and then. Sometimes they cause serious problems in elderly and immunocompromised but otherwise is not a big deal. Except that SARS-CoV-2 is a new type that practically no one had immunity before therefore it caused severe disease in elderly and occasionally in younger people too (as per normal distribution). Once most people will have had exposure by infection or vaccine, it will be about the same as other cold viruses.
So far I have been 100% right about this. What would happen on political and social level was not part of my prediction.
Probably in the past coronaviruses have killed proportionally even more people. It is speculated that some common cold viruses caused Russian flu in the past.
I heard from someone who is in the infant child care business that babies who, during the pandemic, were at the developmental stage that they'd ordinarily be learning speech and facial expressions, have been falling behind, not speaking yet, etc. It's possible we may have some degree of a "lost generation", or at least one that is developmentally behind the curve.
My prediction for blue states in the US, and probably for Australia and New Zealand as well: COVID-19 will become endemic, always evolving into new variants that can escape immune protection. Since the risk is always present, it will always be used as an excuse for authoritarian control of society. As such, it will lead to the inauguration of a new age of feudalism, with an elite class of bureaucrats, administrators, and scientists forever telling the underclass what they can or can't do. Mask rules, travel bans, and immunity passports (or test requirements), at the very least, are here to stay; in universities, bans on social gatherings are here to stay as well. The unvaccinated will become untouchables, and form an identity around their unvaccinated status that will become a source of social and political tension.
The new age of feudalism, built upon a stark and increasing economic inequality that the pandemic didn't create but sharply exacerbated, will see the delegitimization of liberal democracy and a return to either oligarchic republicanism (think America in 1790) or despotism (think Putin's Russia). The new nobles will be the tech industry workers, landlords, bankers, and, some other participants in the knowledge economy; the new clergy will be journalists, public health experts, and university professors, who will enforce the ideological orthodoxy; the new peasants are service industry and gig workers, who will pay increasingly high rents to the nobles (for housing) and increasingly high dues to the clergy (for a university education and for medical care) while their own jobs become increasingly precarious.
I don't think your feudalism analogy works. Feudalism was a series of interlocking obligations. Yes, peasants had obligations to their lords, but lords also had obligations to their peasants. The dystopian hellscape you envision isn't a good match. Maybe pick another name?
I think it's possible that the growing inequality may cause changes in the system, but I don't see it taking the form you suggest here. This is a democracy. If enough people get mad about the haves and the have-nots, we'll have some democratic levelling and move on.
In general, nothing is ever is good as it seems, and nothing is ever as bad as it seems. IMO, of course. Your mileage may vary.
Agreed. I think we are at the end of liberal democracies, post-ww2 style. It's stability came from consumerism, the increase of material well being for all...this has ended, together with the increase of individual freedom for the masses that came associated with it. New feudalism may be what will happen, but i go for something like of new puritanism. Control do not rely only on force (police budget and headcount evolution in Western countries would be interesting to check for the last 20y) and fear (terrorism, pandemies), it uses guilt a lot. Ecology and sanitarism has a huge "repent from your sins, live an ascetic life" feel. Consumerism has it's bad side, but compared to other ways mass control has been achieved, it is (was :'-( ) a blessing...
> Ecology and sanitarism has a huge "repent from your sins, live an ascetic life" feel.
Good point. It's impressive how lots of things about ecology don't make sense. Most of the people that I talk to about ecology have no idea about the "real" impact of the changes they do and mostly do them to "try to help", regardless of reality.
The relationship between beef production both on greenhouse gas emissions and on water usage are hot-button topics for which there's a lot of contradictory studies which seemed to be pushed by pro-beef and the anti-meat agendas.
For instance, a lot of the anti-beef water usage studies assume that steers are just eating a diet of pure corn meal in the feedlots and the studies calculate the water usage needed to produce the corn kernels. However, in reality, the steers get fed silage, which is the entire corn plant chopped up and left to sit until partially fermented. When you add the whole corn plant into the equation, the water usage gets much diluted because steers are consuming the whole maize plant and not just corn kernels.
As to greenhouse gases, UC Davis aggies are leading the charge to claim that beef is getting a bad rap about its methane output...
There was a Swedish study done a few years back that claimed that if you added up the carbon footprint of manufacturing the batteries for electric cars, it would take 3 to 4 years of (Swedish) commuting to before electric cars became carbon neutral compared to gasoline cars. This caused all sorts of outrage, and a bunch of studies were published that said otherwise. What was annoying about *all* these studies, the original and the responses, was it was hard to be sure whether they actually had a good handle on the carbon costs of all the manufacturing inputs.
But we do no that lithium extraction is an environmentally nasty. But that's generally considered to be a local problem vs the presumed worldwide problem of CO2 emissions.
Plastic bag vs cotton tote bags is a big one, most people have no idea of the resources needed to make a cotton tote bag. It's very popular for companies that want to look "green" to give some very often, and they are usually low quality and don't last long.
Another commenter alluded to this, that many have figured out how to live pretty well without dealing too closely with other people. Then when they leave the cave, the unruliness and disobedient nature of others is disturbing to them. Hence the tantrums and demands in public.
One stop on this slippery slope was about 20 years ago when cell phones began to proliferate. People could ignore each other. It was socially acceptable to ignore someone passing within two feet of you, if you were "on the phone." Headphones did this too. Once "permission to ignore" was established, it spread. A formative experience of people who reached adulthood before this stuff was the awkwardness of lines; how to interact with groups of strangers brought together for very little purpose. If possible now I make small talk in those situations (unless I'm staring at my phone) to let people either a) remember how it used to be or b) see what might exist. Meeting strangers in person!
This stuff runs deep. I still have impulses to be polite to the voice on the automated system, because it's a human voice. If I speak sharply to it, it feels rude. I'm not sure the younger generations are developing those feedback loops. I do know the hours of computer gaming which some young people have had in the last 1.5 years have shown them widespread ruthless bullying, often without referees. Not in person, little supervision, little accountability - so many Enders fighting their real/pretend wars. Getting them to cooperate on anything IRL will be peculiar. I think this is one of the many influences on China's recent decision making it illegal for kids to play video games outside of certain hours. There hasn't yet been a generation raised with so much machine interaction and so much less human interaction. I'm not sure it's all bad, but I know there are things being traded away.
> I do know the hours of computer gaming which some young people have had in the last 1.5 years have shown them widespread ruthless bullying, often without referees. Not in person, little supervision, little accountability - so many Enders fighting their real/pretend wars. Getting them to cooperate on anything IRL will be peculiar.
This is not so different from what many people lived through in middle/high school. Maybe we're going to get an increase in school shootings?
I agree it's similar to what many people went through in middle/high school. There is something different about it happening when each of the involved parties is alone in their home while the bullying operates digitally and is delivered into what was once the safe(r) space of one's home/room/etc.
Also, it isn't geographically determined anymore - not necessarily anyway - or age/grade separated. A 10-year-old may be on a server with a 25-year old and a 17-year-old, for example, with none of them ever having seen each other. When the older ones start in with all the slurs and insults on the younger one(s) - and they do - and the younger one(s) pull out every grade-school tactic to little effect - it "hits different," to use a kid-ism. It's more like going to the mall and getting harassed by a group of college kids.
Maybe this has been an experience of online gamers for while and now more younger people are involved during the day due to school closures. I don't know. The lack of counterbalance of positive or even neutral IRL interaction seems to play a part as well.
The bullying/school shooting connection was somewhat debunked. This seems different though. There is a youth counterpart to the adult digital/media political siloing.
> The bullying/school shooting connection was somewhat debunked.
Was it? Everything that I can find online says that between 50% to 80%+ of school shooters were bullied. That may be just correlation and not causation, but the two are linked I think.
Biggest effect will probably be an acceleration of the mRNA technology, in vaccines and other treatments. I'm not really expecting a big societal effect after another year or so has passed.
At the very least, some activities that used to be common would now be more rare and/or expensive. Movie theaters will probably go out of business altogether; dine-in restaurants will become more "upscale" and more expensive; international non-business travel will once again become something that you have to plan for years in advance, as opposed to something you can do on a whim. Mass gatherings such as concerts will likewise become less frequent, and attending one will be seen as somewhat risque. Masks will be normalized in places such as grocery stores and mass transit (analogous to the Asian model).
I agree that some activities will probably become more rare and expensive, but those are likely the ones already on their way out. Visit a smaller city or especially a rural area, people are eating at dine in restaurants just as much as before the pandemic. Maybe not in your area, but quite a few places. No masks, no vaccine requirements. Despite a growing number of COVID cases in my state and locally, less than 2% of the ER admits are related to COVID.
I think a large percentage of movie theaters will go out of business, but this will only be an acceleration by about 5 or 10 years of a trend that was already established by the conjunction of post-Golden Age television being a better storytelling medium than feature-length film, the growing availability and cheapness of home theater systems, the rise of video games as another competitor to films, and the growing focus of Hollywood on expanding franchises of a single genre of film.
I think fancy restaurants will become fancier, but I don't think the rise of fast casual over the past decade or two is going to stop. I do think that outdoor dining will become more strongly established in places where it hadn't been before.
I think international travel will become more of a hassle, but not one that you plan longer in advance - if anything, people will be *less* likely to plan things long in advance that are susceptible to major forms of disruption.
Concerts may well become less frequent - and if so, this will have further impacts on the music industry, where musical artists tend to rely on recordings as loss-leaders for concerts these days, now that streaming has cut artist payments drastically from where they were on vinyl and CD.
That's *already* not fully true now for vaccinated people, let alone in 30 years -- since getting vaccinated I've been to about the same amount of dine-in restaurants and international non-business travel as I did in the same amount of time in 2019.
Things that are going to return to 2019 level are the ones which in retrospect didn't even make much sense before the pandemic, e.g. going to the office almost every day including those when I just spend the whole time behind a computer and don't actually interact with anybody in person.
Socially, I don't think it will have very much effect, honestly. Just based on what i've seen in the past people tend to forget things very quickly except as neat little historical artefacts. People are already forgetting lessons learned from ww2 which was way more impactful than covid.
Systemically, there might be some change in how we design research or prepare for pandemics, but again not much changed after the Spanish Flu that wasn't already naturally evolving in society anyway.
Well, I'll take an extreme position, and say probably no effect at all. The death tole isn't high enough to create any great economic disruption. The temporary effects of lockdowns seem to pass quickly. The bad news is there's evidence that we don't develop long-term immunities to Coronaviruses. Unless the epidemiological the theory that lethal viruses eventually mutate into less lethal variants is correct, I predict that we'll continue to have outbreaks for the foreseeable future. There's clearly going to be a large numbers of unvaccinated people going forward. And new mutants may find new ways to get around vaccinated immunity (as well as convalescent immunity). I suspect that annual or even semi-annual boosters will in the cards for us. I don't think we're ever going to wipe out SARS-CoV-2 like we did smallpox and polio. Also, I think herd immunity is a mirage for the previous reasons I stated.
I think that in North America and Europe, at least, all the public debate over vaccination, masks, and lockdowns/restrictions has primed the population for thinking in more collectivist terms. As in, it's not just about my own risk profile but also the ripple effect of potential transmission, the impact of the pandemic on the broader economy, the good of society, etc.
There is plenty of resistance to that very idea, too, but I think so far the pro-collectivist side has won out. If the effect persists and proves somewhat generalised, then draconian energy taxes and other austerity measures to fight climate change might become a little more politically palatable in the West. That could have a profound effect on how the next few decades go.
I suspect that LSD causes analysis of details and the patterns that come out of them.
I am ignorant, but these are my impressions.
At high doses, its failure is in amplifying pure noise. Hallucinations. Raising the noise floor so high, that noise almost seems meaningful, vivid, and patterned. Meaningful information is lost, drowned out. It becomes hard to tell hot from cold, it takes more time for the difference to have an perceivable effect even when one focuses on it. The noise drowns out what your filters would normally let through.
If your failure is in not noticing broader detail, this is a tool that may help give that perspective. An example: I don't clean as much as I should, if I liked my health very much. Dirt and dust stands out to an incredible degree. I could see it before, but now it is obvious and needs attention.
If there is some broader pattern that you've mistakenly failed to seem, some set of details that form a pattern, those patterns will look more interesting.
Noise will look more interesting, too, and patterns of noise will stand out more readily. But that is for your consciousness to sort out.
If you are good at discarding noise, amplifying your attention to details is a tool worth wonder, terrible fear, and awe.
And yet, these things are terrifying. People lose their reason over it. Their reason!
I'd like to hope to aspire to something vaguely scientific and rational, in the structure of its method.
People seem to get lost in psychedelics. If I seem hopelessly lost, or if I'm not making any sense, I'd appreciate the signal...
I can't say I've ever "lost my reason" while tripping on high doses of Psilocybe mushrooms or LSD. I was always rational in that I was was observing, categorizing, and evaluating my experiences. Your mileage may very well vary though. I had one acquaintance who was institutionalized, and I was told the diagnosis of was schizophrenia after a what my friends described as him having had a bad trip. Anecdotal I admit. But it seems reasonable that psychedelics may not be safe for everyone.
It's hard for me to appreciate how much I should be reassured by this, but I appreciate the two anecdotes.
I remember hearing about the Dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, which Wikipedia seems thoroughly unimpressed with.
I'd be curious whether there is genuinely interesting connection to be made between the biological pathways that psychedelics abuse, and the development of schizophrenia, or if that is coincidence.
This might sound a dull idea to a psychologist. Probably, I should learn more psychology if I'm afraid of the unknown mechanisms that cause schizophrenia.
Furthermore, I want to affirm that you are making sense. I would say that extreme discomfort to unfiltered qualia is a common experience especially in the early phase of the psychedelic experience. That's why they recommend having a guide accompany you on your trip — they can distract you on to some other course of perception. And I always associated the "unfiltered noise" with the early phase of a trip. I found that getting up, stretching, a change of environment, focusing on an activity that requires mind/body coordination, were the methods I used to get past the initial discomfort. I never bought into the Timothy Leary philosophy of sitting quietly in a room, listening to music, and staring at candles. To me that was a recipe for downward spirals into introspection. I always followed Ken Kesey's method of tripping by going out to play with the non-trippers. Learning how to interact normally with people while reality melts around you is a useful life skill to develop. ;-)
If you can't figure out how to get past the initial stage of jangled qualia, I'd suggest you not continue to trip. Finally, I want to also warn you that getting trapped in an existentially nihilistic psychological space is much more dangerous than any teeth-grinding annoyance of unfiltered sense perception. The only advice I can give you if you fall into one of those spaces if remember that is well-spring of magic within you that you can access if you allow yourself believe.
Thank you. I've had very much fun and love with psychedelics.
Some of it has been overwhelming and scary, but nothing far beyond uncomfortable, and mostly due to THC edibles making me anxious.
I wouldn't say I've had anything but good trips, despite a few intense peaks here and there.
I think the advice you give is good, about avoiding traps and bad thought spaces. It takes conscious effort and notice, to get out of a negative thought pattern. It's worth pointing out, because of how easy it is to get out of, once you bother.
I'm still afraid. I feel like I should have a lot of respect for these substances.
The chemistry I'm made of is so far beyond my capacity to analyze it, so delicate and intricate, it should fill me with fear to poke the thing at all.
But there's a lot of ways in which we poke the system, and the system finds it very interesting, when it sees past potential harm.
(And the typos are quite alright! I must have made a lot of them, too. I apologize if mine make it hard to read)
Hey, I tripped at least 150 times over a four-year period. I got a lot out the experience. Although Aldous Huxley was right that it opens the doors of perception, after a point I noticed I wasn't opening any new doors. So I stopped. Maybe I could have opened some other doors with some other substances, but I never got those opportunities. Long term effects? Well, reality is little more tenuous than it used to be — some of the siddhis I experienced/learned from psychedelics have stayed with me. More importantly I've learned how to trust my intuition. And I've learned how to tune into subtler aspects of my senses. And best of all the people who don't know my history think that I'm a normal person!
But did you achieve what Cary Grant supposedly did with his 100 sessions of LSD therapy and become more attractive to women?
I have to say that learning that bit about his experience really was kind of depressing for the rest of us guys who aren't... well, Cary Grant good looking. :)
Screwed up my concluding sentence. It should have read: The only advice I can give you if you fall into one of those spaces is to remember that there is well-spring of magic within you that you can access if you allow yourself believe.
Poultry used to suffer from small losses caused by a herpes-like virus. In 1970, a safe and effective vaccine was introduced, but it was "leaky", i.e. it could not "stop the spread". After close to 100% of chickens were vaccinated, the virus promptly evolved so that it spreads in, yet otherwise does not harm, vaccinated chickens. However, it now kills between 80 and 100% of unvaccinated chickens, a disastrous increase. For that reason, chickens are normally vaxxed “in ovo”.
This is called “Marek’s Disease”.
Have we ever vaxxed a whole population with a leaky vaccine against a rapidly mutating pathogen? Is the Marek’s Disease mutation a central outcome, or an outlier? If I were an epidemiologist, should I investigate this? Would it benefit me to not investigate this further?
My (uneasy) peace with this scenario is currently over the near-universal vaccination; I'm expecting it to not be sufficiently universal (partly because of anti-vaxxers, but mostly because of reservoirs like rural India that will be very hard to eradicate). On the other hand, it's not immediately clear that the argument "rural India will be producing a lot of variants that aren't subject to the Marek's disease dynamic" invalidates the "we do have a large vaccinated population that could sustain it," so I would be very very interested if you came up with a reason for why I don't need to be pathetically grateful to the sizeable unvaccinated population in the US.
(I guess the other place this could break would be if actually R0 < 1 among the vaccinated, but even if that's true now, I don't see why it would have to stay true.)
I'm interested if anyone knows what the relevant differences are between measles and Delta covid - I had thought that measles had a higher R0 than even Delta covid, and the mRNA vaccines we have for Delta covid are comparably effective to the measles vaccine, but yet people say that we can't get "herd immunity" through vaccination for Delta covid, even though they say we have it for measles. Is one of my claims here incorrect? Or is there something else relevant that I'm missing? Is it just that no one thinks we will get vaccine coverage comparable to the measles vaccine until several years (or decades?) from now?
All of your claims are correct. But one of your claims is "people say we can't get herd immunity for vaccination for Delta covid". It is true that people say this. It may be that they are wrong.
More precisely, people say we can't get herd immunity for *current* vaccines *alone* for Delta covid. It's possible we can get it with a combination of vaccinations and natural infections (or, in principle, with updated vaccines, but there's no way the Powers That Be are going to allow any fast enough to matter)
Immunity from COVID likely wanes faster than Measles (after either vaccination or infection). IIRC with other (normal cold) coronaviruses the average person will likely be infected with the same strain several times in their lifetime as immunity fades and is boosted again and COVID may well prove similar. Measles immunity is quite long lived (maybe even lifetime for most people).
> I had thought that measles had a higher R0 than even Delta covid
Yes, though that's the R0 of delta COVID *in the summer*, and if its seasonality is the same as that of earlier COVID variants (as opposed to delta having evolved specifically to be more resistant to summer conditions) it's possible that in the winter it'll end up even more contagious than measles.
> the mRNA vaccines we have for Delta covid are comparably effective to the measles vaccine
Not quite -- ~50% against infection, ~70% against symptomatic infection, ~90% against hospitalization, ~95% against death, whereas measles vaccines are ~93% effective against infection.
(I still think a Marek’s Disease scenario for COVID is unlikely though.)
Is “unlikely” doing a lot of work here? SARS-CoV-2 is novel, but otherwise closely related to common respiratory illnesses. If the danger is in its novelty, how would we expect it to behave when no longer novel, e.g. after vaccination or infection?
a) short-term morbidity and mortality in line with other respiratory illnesses
b) long tail in line with other respiratory illnesses
c) new variants arising periodically, able to break though infection protection, yet unable to break through the “severe” protection of the immune system. In line with other respiratory illnesses.
The data we have is consistent with this hypothesis, but does not yet prove it. Each new bit of evidence we uncover appears to not contradict this hypothesis.
How should public health react? Should it assume the hypothesis is true until proven false (the European approach), or that it’s false until there is “enough” evidence to declare it true, which can of course continue indefinitely (the North American approach)? Both “follow the Science”. Power sets the null hypothesis, and the standard of proof to refute it.
Let’s get back to Marek’s disease. All ingredients for a disastrous outcome are there:
- a rapidly mutating pathogen
- a leaky vaccine (R0 of Delta = 5 or 6, VE(infection) = 50%, R0(vaccinated) = 6*.5 = 3 > 1)
- near universal vaccination
We have a potential disastrous outcome (evolving variant with 100% mortality in unvaxxed population) that has already happened in the real world, by playing sorcerer's apprentice with a chicken virus. Why would we consider this unlikely in humans, or rather “false until there is enough evidence to declare it true”? Why not follow the precautionary principle? Why not even study this, now that we have clearly decided to play sorcerer’s apprentice with a respiratory virus?
I only said "unlikely" not "negligible" and didn't draw any policy conclusions. In any event, after recovering from COVID people stop shedding virus, unlike with herpesviruses, so there's that
"In our first experiment, we infected 8-d-old chicks with five strains of MDV chosen to span the virulence spectrum defined by Witter and colleagues [21,29]. The viral strains varied from the less virulent HPRS-B14, which killed 60% of unvaccinated birds over 2 mo, to the highly lethal Md5 and 675A, which killed all unvaccinated birds in 10 d (Fig 1, top panels)".
The subject of reincarnation came up on the previous open thread, along with a great discussion of differences between Hindu and Buddhist (post Shakyamuni Buddhist) concepts of reincarnation. So, I'm curious how many people out there have memories of past lives? And, if you consider yourself to be a rationalist, how do you explain/dismiss/workaround those memories?
Full disclosure. I'm a member of "the secret club" below. As someone who was raised an atheist and who has a excellent grounding in the sciences and the scientific method, I assumed that my past-life memories were "false memories", and that they were artifacts of my 3+ years of heavy psychedelic experimentation — until I had to confront something that made me doubt this pat explanation...
My ex-girlfriend, a tenured professor of sociology, who is Jewish (and who also has past-life Holocaust memories), and her younger brother, who was fascinated by our stories, ended up just going out and asking their friends and acquaintances whether they had past life memories — and specifically memories of WWII and the Holocaust. Last I heard they had about 20 people who were born between 1958 and 1961 who had some pretty horrific past life memories. Of course, this would never qualify as a scientific inquiry, but I found that number to be higher than I would have guessed. (And what's interesting to me, is it seems like it takes average of about 15 years to reincarnate, at least after traumatic experiences).
I did my own informal survey while living in Hong Kong of my Chinese coworkers and friends (in my own age group), although some were reticent to talk about this subject, a few admitted that they had some unpleasant memories about WWII that they should have been too young to have.
Granted, my generation grew up on WWII movies and documentaries. So this phenomenon may just be a side effect of our cultural inculcation and our active imaginations. But I thought I'd put it out to the general rationalist masses and see if anyone has any sort of past life memories — not necessarily Holocaust or traumatic WWII memories.
No need to share specific details if you're uncomfortable doing so. And if you don't have these memories, please be polite to those of us who do. Thanks!
> So, I'm curious how many people out there have memories of past lives?
I don't have any of those memories personally.
> And, if you consider yourself to be a rationalist, how do you explain/dismiss/workaround those memories?
It's one of these things that exist, that I don't experience, and that I can't explain. To give an analogy: I'm colorblind. There are some colors that I can't experience compared to most of the population. And there's probably no way that I could experience them. We understand colorblindness well, but still can't explain to colorblind people what they are missing. I feel the same about many of those things, like people.
I'll throw in one odd event. It could have been something vivid from my imagination, it could have been a past life, it could have been Bonewitz' "network" which holds everyone's memories, and sometimes a living person finds something that resonates.
I visiting someone who had a hat collection, and the idea was for visitors to try them out for the fun of it.
I put on the tricorn, and I was delighted. This is surprising. I dislike hats. I don't like the feeling of an edge applying pressure to my head. If I want to keep my head warm, I wear a scarf or a hood.
I think of revolutionary American era clothes as one of the less interesting periods, and that applies to both male and female clothing. Give me medieval and renaissance, please.
Still, there I was with the tricorn. It felt like picking up on a young man with his first tricorn hat. I don't think most people realize that might be a significant moment, but it really could be.
Are you always reborn as a person speaking the same language, or do you have memories in which you understand whatever language you spoke in the previous life, and if so does that help you understand the other language in your present life? For example, if a native English speaker remembered the Second World War from a previous life, would he necessarily always remember it as an English-speaking person or could he have been a Russian-speaking person, and if the latter would that mean he understand some Russian now without having studied it?
I have no past life memories. To the best of my knowledge, no one I know does either. Only one person has ever told me they believed in reincarnation, and she told me she was a new soul.
It seems like a lot of people who report past life memories have been recycled into the same culture. But I have past life memories of either being a rabbi and/or some sort (Jewish) scholar and of dying in a concentration camp. I got recycled into a WASA (White Anglo Saxon Atheist) family (thus my name). My past life memories started manifesting themselves in the weeks following a very bizarre trip where I fell asleep after taking a big dose of magic mushrooms and I went through a what seemed to be a Bardo state, but one with a non-Buddhist twist of seeing myself as being part of a larger higher-dimensional pattern of consciousness with presences in multiple times and places.
The earliest memories I have are of the New Kingdom Egypt. I was a priestess who served in the temple of Bast. I remember several lives of being a scribe and holding minor administrative positions (I have dreams of writing in Egyptian script on papyrus). I get the impression that I was reincarnating with a group of people, and we had some sort of multigenerational project we were working on (sort of similar to what the tulkus in Tibet are doing). I hung around the Mediterranean after the collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms. I remember some lives in Greece, Asia minor, and Alexandria (or maybe that's one life where I traveled a lot?). I have no memories of any lives lived in the Roman Empire or medieval Europe. At some point I had at least one life living among a tribe up in Siberia. I have memories of being a shaman, and I think I was a woman, but I can't place the exact time period because we had no contact with any historical culture I can identify. I spent quite a few lives recycling in Central Asia and western China. I have distinct memories of joyful times riding on the steppes on horseback under a bright blue sky, and I think I was a nomad of the Mongol or Turkic variety. There's a big gap, and then I have memories of 17th and 18th Century Europe. I remember being a merchant in some sort of city with houses densely packed by a river. Not London, something more central European. I remember a dying in a nasty plague. I suspect I was well-educated and male in all those lives. And I get the distinct impression that I was not Christian in any of those lives. So I think I was reincarnating in the central European Jewish communities — maybe all the way up until I died during WWII.
So there you go. You can take it all with a grain of salt. Sometimes I believe these memories are real, and sometimes I just think they're false memories. But my friend the sociologist remembers me and I remember her from our last lives. But that could just be a folie a deux...
I think the thing about this that stops most of us rationalists cold is that we can't see the mechanism for reincarnation. But if Elon Musk is right about us *already* living in an advanced virtual reality multi-player online game, then dying and coming back into the game as a new character would be how reincarnation (and past life memories) could be happening.
I have no memories of any past lives but took an interest in this subject a few years ago due to a mystical experience I had that tested my materialist view of the Universe.
There are some pretty compelling accounts at UVA of small children remembering details of past lives they could not otherwise know. (Google The Case of James Leininger for one that seem pretty compelling).
"Many Lives, Many Masters" was written by an originally skeptical Head of Psychiatry at the University of Miami and is a compelling introduction to this phenomenon.
I was less interested in the question of whether reincarnation really happens, but rather I was more curious how rationalists would deal with having memories that seem to be from past lives — so many people have them, I figure the rationalists must have them, too. Or maybe it takes a certain flexible mindset to allow for these types of memories to come to the surface. I'm an ultra-rationalist when it comes to scientific questions, but like you I have had a bunch of non-scientific mystical stuff happen to me over the years. The scientific method (however you define it) can only take you so far. Ultimately experiments need to be reproducible to be science, and there need to be a theory to explain why they're reproducible. For me, past life memories could very well be false memories. Heck, as I've gotten older I've come to realize how my memories become distorted over time. So I really don't *trust* my regular memories. Why should I trust my past life memories? I'm agnostic about their truth, but I can't deny I have them.
On the other hand, I have memories of dying, too. Somehow that lifts the angst that I know I'm going to die off my shoulders. After all, I've died hundreds of times. It's no big deal to do it one more time...
A rationalist might otherwise dismiss their memories, if they had them, as false or delusional or cryptomnesia because they can't see a possible mechanism, so I was trying to remove that obstacle.
Collecting stories like yours may be as close as we can come to "evidence" while still holding a general skepticism about unsubstantiated claims. Not everything can be verified by a double-blind study in a lab, and being open to that means we might consider possibilities instead of dismiss out of hand.
Have you tried to figure out whether there are any ways of testing whether these are real memories? If you have a lot of them, I would think that some would provide details you could write down and then check against information sources you had never looked at. Most obviously, do your Egyptian memories include any information on the language?
You suspect you were male in all those lives, but the first one was a priestess. Is "all those lives" a later subset?
Most of the cases that Dr Ian Stevenson (from the perceptual studies group at UVA) documented did not include language transfer between incarnations. However there were a couple of cases of kids who did have language skills that they seemed to have carried forward. But I would tend to dismiss these because they seem to be anecdotal. But the volume of anecdotal evidence the that Stevenson acquired suggests that memory of past lives is not an uncommon phenomenon.
I had a friend who had an advanced degree in psychology and who worked with kids who said she'd ask 3 or 4 year olds "who they used to be", and she got some interesting answers that made her a believer in reincarnation. The reason she did this is that she as a child 8 or 9 remembered that her four year old sister would go on on about how "When I was a old man, I did <such and such>." By five, her sister had gone through that brain change where most people forget their toddler memories. And as an adult her sister didn't remember these episodes, but it piqued my psychologist friend's curiosity.
Full disclosure, I asked my 3 year old stepson who he was before and he didn't answer.
"But the volume of anecdotal evidence the that Stevenson acquired suggests that memory of past lives is not an uncommon phenomenon."
It suggests that the belief in memory of past lives is not an uncommon phenomenon. That the belief is true is one explanation but not the only one, which is why I suggested looking for tests of the belief.
This appears to be far more of a democratic PAC (it gets funded through actblue, objectively partisan), and focuses on pushing a single issue of pandemic preparedness by... pushing candidates with a range of positions that don't necessarily prioritize pandemic preparedness? I think your promotion of this PAC is pretty disingenuous as you describe it as a lobbying group whereas the whole point of raising from individual donors here is specifically to donate direct cash to candidates.
Further, per them
"Thanks for taking the time to read through, Larks! Some of these questions are better answered via the upcoming Q&A on October 12, so we highly encourage you to intend if you are interested in contributing. Responding briefly to your other questions:
Since this is a new PAC, we are currently soliciting for a small pool of biosecurity champions that at the moment are Democratic. The ActBlue account accepting donations reflects this, but as we grow, we will broaden the ways we solicit for Republican candidates. We can share more on the considerations behind this choice at the Q&A. "
It is clear that their priority is supporting Democrats rather than those who are the most focused on fighting pandemics from either party.
At the very least, I think that a disclaimer is warranted that the PAC is limited to only contribute to Democrats due to its affiliation with Actblue, and as such may not be able to prioritize candidates who are the most suited to take on future pandemics if they are Republicans.
If that's so, it's a mistake. One thing you want and need cross-party support on is preventing pandemics, and if from the get-go you are set up to only solicit and contribute to the Democratic party, maybe have a re-think about why that is so (why did you end up getting tied-up with fundraising software from a company that "enables left-leaning nonprofits, Democratic candidates, and progressive groups" to raise money but not anyone from the other side of the fence? There may be a set of assumptions and even simply "this is the most convenient for our bunch since we already know people involved" going on there, but it also fences off your PAC into "this little group, all others keep out".
ActBlue is explicitly a tool of the establishment Democratic Party establishment. They don't even let on progressives if they're too outside of what the establishment wants.
I was super excited about the "Guarding Against Pandemics" thing, because obviously they're gonna support comprehensive test/trace/isolate programs and rapid vaccine development, because, everyone knows, those are the things that stop pandemics. But it seems like the actual thing that "Guarding Against Pandemics" is going to use your money for is.... donating to Elizabeth Warren?
"Donations to the PAC would go towards supporting candidates who are champions for pandemic preparedness in Congress, like Senator Elizabeth Warren"
Whose plans for protecting against the covid pandemic are well publicized and.... underwhelmingly involve just giving people money to feel better as they die of the pandemic. Both links were written early on in the pandemic, right around when the first US death was identified:
Plan: free healthcare treatment for covid, free time off from work, stimulus money. These are perhaps good ideas, but they don't... "guard against a pandemic".
Which was a few days later, involved even MORE free money, and almost nothing about actually stopping the pandemic. There was this one thing though:
"In addition, the lack of widespread testing in the United States—especially in comparison to South Korea and other countries—is a disgrace. According to the CDC’s last released data, our country has tested fewer than 2,000 people in a population of over 300 million. If we hope to control this outbreak, the Administration must immediately allocate funds from the recent emergency supplemental appropriation to state and local health departments and hospitals to rapidly stand up testing capacity nationwide. Additionally, to the extent that volume constraints at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention limit testing kit distribution or technical assistance to labs developing their own tests, it is critical to temporarily increase their capacity. "
Which is (emotionally) great! We should've had a massive nationwide ramp up in testing. But read that last part. She honestly thought it was the CDC's "volume constraints" and funding were what was holding back "lots of testing," not, well, all the rules (no you can't do your own tests without approval, and also well, we contaminated the first 180k with our incompetence) they (and the FDA) put in place. This is at the heart of so many of her misunderstandings of how things work: it's SimCity thinking: "well the CDC controls diseases right?, so if we just increase their resources and funding, they'll control the disease better!" When they were - particularly early on in the pandemic, when she wrote this - part of the problem!
But as we now know, the vaccines are the real pandemic harm-reducer. (if you take them, anyway) So the real heartbreaking part of her plan is this:
"And we should aim to build up our national scientific capacity, including the ability to bring vaccines to market, by committing $200 billion to vaccine development efforts..."
Oh, man, now I see why GAP is supporting her - she was advocating for rapid vaccine development even in the early days of the pandemic, what foresightedness! I apologize for not believing in her! Let's read the rest of this inspiring paragraph:
"...over the coming years. This will require guaranteed purchases of an eventual coronavirus vaccine after the current crisis passes"
Oh. Oh..... She doesn't mean 200 billion for a covid vaccine to end the pandemic. She means after we're done counting the millions of bodies, we can invent a vaccine. Because she, like almost everyone else, assumed that by any "realistic" FDA timeline, there was no way they would get a covid vaccine in time (she probably guessed 5-7 years) - despite the moderna vaccine already existing at this time. Because just like her understanding of the CDC, the FDA-as-it-was is baked into her idea of what Governmental Pandemic Preparation was. Which is * the * problem, and means that supporting her as the solution to "guarding against pandemics" is ludicrous. "Guarding against the next pandemic" means radically (perhaps even abolishing and reinventing) the CDC and FDA and our entire public health mentality. It means A) having a test/trace/isolate plan (and one that isn't immediately hamstrung by the CDC and FDA) ready to go and B) having as rapid a vaccine FDA regulatory approval (because development was NOT the critical path!) plan based on cost/benefit weighing the severity of the pandemic against the risk of side effects from the vaccine. It does not mean "200B for vaccines after the pandemic is over" and "lots of stimulus".
If "donating to Elizabeth Warren" is "guarding against the pandemic" and this is/was her plans... then you're killing me. I * wanted * to like this. I desperately want a real Guarding Against Pandemics, because this pandemic (and the next one) really are the most critical goals in our society, and I desperately want a way that I can help. But this..... come on.
Give me a Guarding Against Pandemics that takes your donations, writes up a Pandemic Manifesto that calls for reforming the CDC to focus exclusively on widescale contagious diseases with corporate/hospital/lab/local/state integration of test/trace/isolate strategies and reforming the FDA to enable rapid approval of treatments in proportion to the threat of a pandemic, and only donates to senators/congresspeople who publicly sign the manifesto and support bills in congress that effect that.
Pandemic preparedness seems to be an executive branch implementation issue. There have been many clowns in this pandemic but the legislature hasn’t been uniquely dysfunctional so the need for a PAC also seems unclear and probably more than a bit opportunistic.
well, I guess I'd be fine a PAC that said "we need to reform the CDC/FDA so they do X Y and Z that will stop the pandemic, therefore we shall donate to pols who publicly support legislation to do that" but yeah...
> Donations to the PAC would go towards supporting candidates who are champions for pandemic preparedness in Congress, like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Anna Eshoo, and in state and local offices.
Warren isn't my favorite candidate either, but presumably the PAC mentioned her as an example because it's identified that she's more inclined than other reps (or more likely to be persuaded?) to allocate federal funds for pandemic preparedness, even if it's not reflected on her website.
So if we donate to "Guarding Against Pandemics", our money will be divided among politicians belonging to the Democratic party, in proportion to the number of times they use the word "pandemic" in their speeches? Either they don't understand how lobbying works, or they think we don't understand how lobbying works.
Right, I only focused on Warren because she was the only one I could find who actually had lots of verbiage written about what her idea of pandemic preparedness was. Which I think is the point: "Pandemic preparedness" is obviously by definition a good thing, but what exact policies that entails matters a great deal, especially since we're in the middle of a pandemic where we can judge their efficacy. I am worried by the "support pols who support pandemic preparedness" instead of "state what the most effective pandemic preparedness measures would be, then support pols who support them." Again, I am perfectly fine with any kind of assertion that I'm reading too much into this, or reacting to an early draft, or any number of other things where I'm wrong - I desperately would like something like this to work - but too many people (Warren especially) act like just putting money into the Pandemic Preparedness Bucket actually does that, when it's extremely obvious that we spent lots of time/money/thought on Pandemic Preparedness before this one, and it didn't work so well.
A question. I read online a lot of different thoughtful commentators from across the political spectrum - from Marxists to traditional liberals to Reaganite conservatives to libertarians to religious conservatives. And I've regularly congratulated myself on my open-mindedness and willingness to learn from all sides ... but then I noticed that I'm actually a lot less open-minded than I've been giving myself credit for, because every single one of the people I read regularly shares my dislike of the various "identitarian" movements that are so much in the news nowadays.
So I would like to "steelman" identitarianism, and in pursuit of that I'm hoping for suggestions of a thoughtful online writer I could read who supports such movements - by "thoughtful", I mean someone who is prepared to take seriously and respond carefully and rationally to the various critiques that people make of them. A small example: Matt Bruenig's critique of what he calls "identitarian deference" (https://mattbruenig.com/2013/02/26/what-does-identitarian-deference-require/). Does anyone know someone who has responded from the "identitarian" side to Bruenig's critique - perhaps by demonstrating that no such "deference" takes place at all (which would surprise me, since there are a lot of apparent examples of it), or who accepts that it does take place, but argues that Bruenig's criticisms of it are mistaken.
Please note, I am NOT looking for books to read from such perspectives: I've already read quite a number of those, including various of the Critical Race Theory classics. I'm more interested in a current online writer who is in the business of engaging seriously with and responding to critiques like Bruenig's when they occur. Any suggestions?
One of the central points of the whole thing is that this mode of knowledge production, the one you call "rational" and "thoughtful," is the heart of the system to be dismantled.
Kwame Anthony Appiah works on it from the point of view of dissolving the identity categories. He's somewhat online.
I think identitarian deference/politics began as a counterpoint to (real and/or imagined) institutions. Trying to split it off and evolve a coherent system that doesn't legitimize multiple forms of discrimination is either impossible or nearly so. Using ID like a browser attachment in the context of existing unequal systems, can work to transfer small amounts of privilege to small numbers of people with oppressed identities. Is that a priori good? Does it work longterm without unacceptable side effects? How effective is it for those it affects? Not sure...
I read some of the Breunig article. His mistake may be trying to evolve the coherent system.
This isn't quite what you're looking for (not a single writer), but as someone who was previously more aligned with SJ/identitatian politics and now finds myself agreeing more with skeptical positions, socialjusticethoughtfulness.tumblr.com is a place I consistently find good (if often lukewarm -- probably a benefit?) snippets of discussion.
I don't actually read TNR, but here is an example of him pointing out a distinction between some figures often lumped together, and crediting a critic on the other side for being one of the few to also note that:
In the SSC meetup I attended, someone mentioned how the world is finally done with leaded gasoline. Seeing how we have known about the damaging effects of lead on cognitive development and IQ for a while now, I was surprised that this took so long. Anybody has a good explanation for this? Is it something like a Tobacco companies denying the harms caused by their products and lobbying in its behalf? Perhaps the problem is diffuse enough that I doesn't get political traction and democracy ends up ignoring it?
Are you aware that "done" means that finally in the very last place of Earth it has been forbidden? I think it was Algeria, but among the last few, there was also North Korea.
It just takes a lot of time from "it's forbidden in rich industrialized countries who can afford it easily" to "it has been forbidden in the last hellhole where people are literally dying from starvation".
It's a bit like Polio. Vaccines have been developed in the 50s, the last cases in the Western world have been eradicated in the 90s, but there are still 30-150 cases per year in Afghanistan and Pakistan because things are just difficult in such countries.
I understand that. Still it seems like an unreasonably long time to adopt what seems to be a home-run public policy. Unless there is something I am missing.
I browsed a bit through wikipedia, and you might be missing one bit: old cars needed lead to work properly. Manufacturers needed to adapt the car engines so that they could deal with lead-free gasoline.
The first laws in that direction was for example in 1975 in the US: new car models were mandated to have catalytic converters so that they can operate with less lead. Then the amount of lead was gradually reduce. Technical innovations in the next two decades (both for the gasoline and for the cars) allowed to also use lead-free gas with older cars, and lead-gas was finally banned in the mid-90s, or in 2000 in the last EU countries.
It remained a bit longer in countries with old cars, which couldn't easily afford motor upgrades for old vehicles that were still in use. But by 2011-2014, it was forbidden everywhere except for 5-6 countries.
I don't think we need to resort to sinister company policies. It was a technological/political/economical development, and this just takes time.
Many of the last holdouts were Arab states that had purchased large stocks of leaded gasoline several decades ago, and were just using it up. They weren't still adding tetraethyl lead to newly refined gasoline, from my understanding.
i was thinking more like sugar, exercise, social media use... people celebrate their addictions to these things, and thrust them upon their children without a second thought.
There's still a bunch of researchers denying that there's a correlation — but I suspect that's because a lot researchers have invested in other pet theories of why violent crime has dropped to pre-1960 levels.
Likewise, I don't think anyone noticed the correlation until the generation that grew up post-leaded gasoline and post-lead paint started reaching their mid-teens without showing the recidivism that the previous two generations showed. So there was probably a twenty-year lag before researchers started noticing the correlation.
YHWH save me from meta-analyses! Gaak! They find there's publication bias in the pro-lead theories but they don't do an evaluation of the competing theories. There needs to be meta-meta-analysis! ;-)
You can still buy oil additives containing lead like "Restore", some of which is also processed through the exhaust and into the environment - because it's cheap and effective, and people demand it. By the same token, if people weren't demanding tobacco, the lobbyists wouldn't have had any funding to lobby with.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here, but probably the percentage of cars on the road today that require leaded gasoline to run properly are less than one percent? Or is it an order of magnitude smaller? — 0.1 percent?
His claim is that while newer cars don’t require leaded gasoline, people believe cars still benefit from leaded gasoline, so people demand lead additives and the market supplies them.
For the record in a few minutes of searching I found plenty of “lead substitutes” but nothing that obviously contains lead.
I should have mentioned, I'd heard the tragedy of Thomas Midgley Jr, who gave us freon and leaded gas and the pulley mobility system that ultimately killed him.
I was puzzled because I haven't heard an engine knock outside of old movies, so why are people buying this stuff now...
Old cars that still need it and performance superstitions are my best guesses now.
Read the gasoline FAQ (I linked above). Gasoline produces more mechanical energy(higher efficiency) when higher compression is used in the engine. This requires anti-knock agents(TE-Lead, MTBE, Ethanol, Toluene, etc.). This is why high performance engines generally use premium gasoline. Octane rating is a measure of knock resistance...
The advantage of lead was that it was very effective per volume. Ethanol has very little effect and thus requires replacing much of the gasoline with a much lower energy-density substance.
Low-level lead exposure and children's intelligence from recent epidemiological studies in the U.S.A. and other countries to progress in reducing lead exposure and screening in the U.S.A — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9388360/
The lead IQ impact has been well studied, that's why homes require disclosures in a lot of states if they were built when lead paint was popular.
The environmental-lead causing broader-negative-social-outcomes (commonly "the lead crime hypothesis") is probably the theory you're more specifically interested in. Kevin Drum has written about it extensively. The wikipedia article on the lead-crime hypothesis is not a bad entry point, providing a good overview of the history of the research:
Someday, I want to write a whole thing about the important of sorting information properly.
Reddit, for example, sorts information by votes.
Votes have the problem of bringing up the uncontroversial, things are are easy to vote for.
That's the subtle, and incredibly important problem with votes. People will vote more on things that they understand, and less on things that they don't.
As a result, when voting is used to sort, it mistakenly surfaces the uncontroversial or already well known, and buries anything complex or interesting beyond obvious approval.
There is incredible harm in this. Much of social media amplifies based on votes, and I suspect this to be a cause of disinformation — think the Flat Earth — caused by an improper sorting of information that buries the wrong ideas, and amplifies things it shouldn't.
The Internet is very efficient, even small kinks in the way we've laid out or systems can amplify to cause societal effects.
There is incredible harm in this, and it pains me how little intention is paid to how information is presented. Everywhere you look, you will see mistakes. Lists that are not sorted, or where the sorting makes no sense at all (most chronologies!).
Lists instead of hierarchical, or hierarchical instead of lists. Even simple questions like these.
More broadly, poorly search, poor filtering, or poor sorting.
In the places I visit, hot takes tend to get a lot of likes and are often reshared, so I'm skeptical about the idea that uncontroversial things tend to win. (Though, there is popular uncontroversial stuff as well.)
It seems like this assumption is better converted into questions: When do uncontroversial ideas win? When do controversial ideas win?
Also consider: controversial to whom? Partisan hot takes are often uncontroversial within the tribe and controversial outside it.
The place where I observe the vote-as-visibility mechanism going wrong is Reddit. I have a lot of love for Reddit, I think its comment system beats this one, and there is reason in its structure for the death it has imparted on every forum that is now a sub-reddit.
In reddit, what I see is that hot takes gather both upvotes and downvotes, so they are properly classified as controversial, and downranked for people who are not looking for controversial things (it is an option they offer).
In systems that only allow upvotes, I find that hot takes are a problem. That is because they're easy to upvote by their partisans.
They seem obviously true to someone at first glance, and obviously wrong to someone else.
However, that's where the mistake is. If there is only an option to upvote, this removes the moderating effect of people who see the idea as obviously wrong.
I suspect the places where you see more hot takes do not use downvotes in the way I think they should.
--
I think controversial ideas, of the sort I'm interested in, will still have a failure in looking obvious to some group of people, but they will have a little less opposition in looking obviously wrong, because if they are true, they ought to be in aggregate more convincing.
If good ideas fail to rise above bad ideas, the failure to sort may be due to rethoric, but the basic principle that we can agree on controversy through rough consensus, I think, can be observed in much broader spaces that discussion forums.
Because of that, I trust that votes work to resolve controversy.
--
That's why I believe the way Reddit has of sorting information does vastly more good to discourse and truth than the way Facebook or Twitter has of sorting information.
You will see misinformation on Reddit, but you will see less of it than on Facebook, I think, as an aggregate.
That is important signal.
My point is that Reddit errs. I believe the system that it has is deeply imperfect, and it pains me greatly that most other systems we use to share and discuss information are doing worse still.
(To clarify a detail: I think that controversial ideas appearing obvious at all to anyone is either a mistake, or very rare because unlikely. It pains me when systems either apply a careless votes because something is divisive, or fail to apply any votes because it is too subtle. Neither those things signal value, they are accidental. Amplifying noise carelessly can cause harm, and I suspect results in disinformation.)
Another way too look at this, is that a controversial comment could be seen as measurable on two axes.
How divisive it is, and how agreeable it is.
I want to give controversy reasonable time to resolve itself as agreeable, or disagreeable.
If it fails to do so in reasonable time, then it should be hidden as a divisive comment that fails to show insight.
Someone reading it might be polarized, but they would not be surprised or convinced very much, more often than not.
These controversial comments, I would sort very far down. The meaning and intent, there, is to amplify civil discourse that resolves itself into consensus.
So help me if I see another person wasting their hours, scrolling through endless pages of text, spending too much effort to find whatever they're looking for. Or finding the wrong thing.
You do realise that you can sort comments on here by New as well as by Chronological? I've read your series of comments and I have absolutely no idea what you want. You think information is sorted badly, but then you go off on a sorting mechanism that makes sense to *you* and is what *you* want, but I don't understand how it is supposed to work.
You think upvotes versus downvotes sieve out "this is a controversial comment" and then you want controversial comments sorted further by how interesting, how agreeable, how subtle they are?
I have no idea what you want from information, apart from "I can't find things that tickle my particular set of interests, so everywhere should cater to me".
The fact that this comment section is part of a chronology, instead of something that doesn't replace old by new senselessly, discourages having interesting ideas there.
If we spend enough detail to make any interesting point in this kind of a comment section, it will be lost by the time the next thread rolls around. Its relevance overriden by the chronology. This discourages having detailed, intricate ideas, and it wastes time among people who probably are on average, not very much dumber than I am.
This, to me, is upsetting. You, dear reader, would be systematically wasting your time, if you had an interesting reply. It would be lost, soon.
(Let me temper this with a small bit of positivity: Substack comments do have hierarchy. They do not have meaningful sorting or search, but this could have been a long list as if in a chat room. That, I think, illustrates how much worse things can be when you don't sort them properly. I would not want to scroll through Substack comments if they did not have hierarchy)
An improvement would be a way to make it easier to skip long thread, so that they're less bothersome as they become longer.
Frequently I see long substack threads, and that gives them undue importance in an unsorted list. That makes them hard to scroll past.
Reddit has solved this by hiding comments that nest too deep, unless a (Load more) element is clicked on. This is a positive and easy improvement for Substack to make, so that we don't have to cause pain by nesting things deeply and adding more details.
If information were better sorted, you could add as much detail as you want without bothering anyone.
Wikipedia scale. You can hold millions, or dozens of millions, or more and more articles on a Wikipedia without more articles bothering anyone, or making it more annoying to use.
This comment section does not scale like that. It punishes detail.
See, how easy it would be to prove my point by adding details. That would be annoying.
The response to that annoyance should be anger directed towards improvement. I'm upset at the lack of interest, not enough to be senselessly disruptive, but almost enough to be tempted to illustrate my point until its importance makes itself obvious.
Then all I have to say is, you have bored me with this set of comments. How can I skip ever reading anything by you again, since I don't find it interesting, relevant, or informative?
Watching a BBC One show on PBS, “The Indian Doctor” from 2010. A child is presenting symptoms of smallpox. The doctor advises quarantine, facial coverings and people staying 6 feet apart. Set in Wales circa 1962 so I guess no metric system yet.
Thanks for boosting Guarding Against Pandemics, they're really doing some good work! Especially with their focus on the risks of engineered pathogens (which are really quite scary).
Looking at the Guarding Against Pandemic site, I'm glad that their goals seem pretty sensible and concrete in terms of what they're trying to pay for (although it seems like a tall order to make vaccines in advance, since how exactly would we know which ones will cause a pandemic?
But also, I see little acknowledgement of how much the failures in response were political and regulatory, and NOT lack of resources, or talent, or knowledge or capacity? And how GAP plans to address those issues?
"although it seems like a tall order to make vaccines in advance, since how exactly would we know which ones will cause a pandemic?"
Well, we could do a survey of all the zoonotic viruses to figure out which ones might have pandemic potential, and run them all through an aggressive gain-of-function research program to see what they might turn into in 5-10 years if left to their own devices, and then develop vaccines in advance for those pathogens. That could actually be useful, if done right. If.
"(although it seems like a tall order to make vaccines in advance, since how exactly would we know which ones will cause a pandemic?"
Well, there is a lot you can do to enable the rapid development of vaccines (and their approval) ahead of time that don't require knowing the disease you want to stop, particularly in the case of the new mRNA vaccines, which can be "programmed" against the disease you want to stop pretty quickly - see the covid one that was created literally in January 2020.
"But also, I see little acknowledgement of how much the failures in response were political and regulatory, and NOT lack of resources, or talent, or knowledge or capacity? And how GAP plans to address those issues?"
You are precisely correct here! They don't! And the whole "we'll donate to Elizabeth Warren" is worrisome, because she explicitly does not seem to (when you read her plans) acknowledge or recognize the political (other than Trump being bad - ok ,yeah, we noticed) and regulatory failures.
I read some of their concrete proposals here - which Scott's link doesn't give (his link speaks in generalities as far as actual policy/spending goals goes): https://www.againstpandemics.org/
Yeah, I found that part too, and while I do like the high level ideas, I get worried (as you pointed out) that the political/regulatory issues aren't highlighted. For example: "More tests" is great, but when they talk about it, they talk about "It took months to manufacture and distribute enough COVID-19 tests, and the tests were not nearly as reliable as they could be." No, labs were ready and willing to give tons of covid tests, but they were prevented from doing so by the CDC and FDA, and there are all kinds of new far-more-rapid tests that are still not approved in the US.
"We need to develop tests for possible pathogens in advance, and be ready to scale them up and distribute them immediately."
Okay, and this sounds great on the surface, but... "We" already have a massive, nation-spanning testing network that runs thousands of tests a day for thousands of conditions, diseases and reasons, and tons of which already HAVE lab platforms that can be quickly (see: covid19 testing in early 2020) repurposed for new pathogens. I think they have definitely have identified some buzzwords that are associated with better outcomes (tests! vaccines!) but they don't seem to understand that the CDC and FDA were largely stumbling blocks, and petitioning Warren (or whoever), who just wants to increase their funding, isn't going to fix it. And for parts where the CDC could be involved in setting up a nationwide network of contact tracing - where is the 'trace' part of their proposal, anyway?
I'm just sorry, there isn't a plan for Guarding Against Pandemics that just ignores the fact that our previous, already-in-place plan to Guard Against Pandemics - the CDC (it's literally in their name!) - failed so miserably. You can't just say "we'll persuade senators to support Pandemic Preparation" because they did before this one too! They heavily funded orgs like the CDC and FDA! They have to be reformed. You have to show that you/we are going to do something different this time.
There's a fantasy trope of having old Greek/Norse/whatever gods exist as powerful (but not omnipotent) entities in the world (e.g. American Gods, Dresden Files or Everworld). Does anyone know of a fantasy universe that does this and also has Jesus as an existing God on the same level as the other gods?
The Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne. Jesus is one god of many, if apparently fairly powerful because he gets so much worship. He's acquainted with the MC and a fairly chill guy.
The universe of the shows Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Young Hercules has the Greek, Norse, and Hindu gods as well as the Jewish and Christian G-d. There are also two Jesus-like figures. The first one has the ability to raise others from the dead through prayer while he is alive. After he dies he seems to attain divine status but we don’t see much of him because he’s a pacifist and doesn’t participate in the war between his dad and the Greek gods. The second Jesus-like figure is Xena’s magically conceived daughter who has no special powers herself, but Xena is granted the ability to kill the Greek gods in order to protect her.
Haven't watched any of this, but there's a Japanese manga adapted as an anime series about Buddha and Christ living together as room mates in modern Tokyo:
SM Stirling's "The Change" series does this. However, the gods don't really begin to show up until book IV in the series. All the books are great reads about a world were something puts the kibosh on high-energy physics, civilization comes tumbling down, and the survivors have to create pre-industrial societies with a Twentieth Century knowledge base.
In 1722 William Wollaston discovered that the natural religion of mankind, discoverable without reliance on divine revelation, was adherence to truth and devotion to reason. His rationalist magnum opus anticipated Kant’s Categorical Imperative, described and defended what we would now call the libertarian non-aggression principle, and provided the writers of the Declaration of Independence with their “purſuit of happineſs”. Why haven't you ever heard of him?
Because everybody and their dog during the Enlightenment was coming up with the same thing, e.g. Thomas Jefferson's project of cutting out all the miracles etc. from the Gospel and what was left was the 'real' ethical teaching of Christ:
"Influenced by the British Unitarian Joseph Priestley, Jefferson set his prodigious intellect and energy on the historical figure at the center of the Christian faith: Jesus of Nazareth. Jefferson became convinced that Jesus' message had been obscured and corrupted by the apostle Paul, the Gospel writers and Protestant reformers. While president, Jefferson took a razor to the Bible, cutting out portions of the Gospels that involved miracles and retaining his parables and ethical teachings. The resulting volume, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, affirmed his conviction that Jesus was not divine, but "a Teacher of Common Sense," primarily concerned with morality and ethical conduct.
Years later, Jefferson drew from the New Testaments in Greek, Latin, French and English to create The Life and Morals of Jesus, commonly known as the "Jefferson Bible." Based on this work, he acknowledged to a close friend, "I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." For Jefferson, it was the moral message of Jesus, not claims of his birth, death and resurrection, that lay at the center of the Christian faith."
Wollaston was not standing out from the herd with this notion, so he was simply too commonplace to be remembered.
I admit I never heard of him, but thanks for the the write up! Very interesting.
As to why I haven't heard of him? Well, there are probably hundreds of 18th Century philosophers who have faded into obscurity. Not because their ideas were necessarily false, but just because their ideas never caught on. Heck, I'm old enough to see a that a bunch of Twentieth Century philosophers and great thinkers are starting to fade into obscurity.
BTW: Reading your review, it seems like you're trying to pigeonhole him as a pro-libertarian, proto-anarcho-capitalist. That's like classifying Thomas Paine as a proto-Marxist. I think this is a mistake because it forces 18th Century thinkers into 20th Century categories — categories which would be alien to 18th Century thought.
Transparency is as important an idea to society, as open-source was to software.
I could write pages upon pages about this. I have the, maybe radical, idea that anything not private ought to be published, so that it can be examined and have its inefficiencies removed.
Anything that works well, will work better when people can looks at the parts under the light of Sun.
Now, to have an interesting idea that can turn into policy, you have to define it in relation to its negative space. Where does the idea stop?
What people do as individuals, and not as members of any organization, that is out of the purview of Transparency as a societal tool.
We care about systems that are bigger than a single person. We want to let sunlight into those, we want to make sure they're efficient, and that they're the best systems they can be.
I want anything than any organization bigger than a person does, to be public. Anything an individual does as themselves, should be eligible for strong privacy.
That will bring Good to society, the likes of which Open Source has brought to Software.
I would very much like to see more data being gathered on the effectiveness of Transparency!
We are very far from that ideal, but if true the impact of that insight on on how we build societies and structures is enormous.
Or maybe I am being foolish by thinking that there is such a big improvement to be had, with such a simple idea.
Back during the Bush administration, there was a big fight about keeping advice from various industry experts who were brought in to advise about something or other private. I wasn't a big fan of Bush in general (though I did vote for him the first time and this might have been early enough I was still in his corner), but I thought their defense of this policy was pretty good. The claim was that wanted people's candid advice, and if people knew their advice was going to be public, then they would be afraid to give any advice that might not be popular or could hurt their company's image or bottom line.
All of which is to say, people need privacy to tell unpopular truths. You might say that if enough people spoke up for unpopular truths in public they might not stay unpopular, but it's a lot to ask someone to start that sort of process. So I think private consultations and negotiations have their place.
I've heard arguments that greater transparency is what contributes to partisan polarization. If politicians are able to negotiate in a back room, then members of different parties can make some requests, and then give them up in a compromise, and then make a public announcement that says what each side can deliver to their people, with no mention of what they asked for that the other side got them to cave on. But in a transparent system, every move in the negotiation is public, and then partisans threaten to primary their people who cave on even extreme demands, which makes compromise difficult.
How do you guard against the panopticon/chilling effect? Say I work in a company and we decide to make recordings of all of our meetings public in the kind of radical transparency you are suggesting, aren't I then incentivised to alter what I say based on the reactions of the potential audience? Same as why so many corporate statements are extremely bland, the disincentive for controversy is higher than the incentive for honesty
I suspect the most immediate case against transparency to be selfish in nature.
If I have secrets, then I have a competitive advantage.
I think the mistake lies in the competitiveness. Building societies to be less cooperative, is a mistake and a misunderstanding of society. We got there by cooperating, by being, quite literally, prosocial.
I think the selfish case against more transparency is not prosocial, and we should ignore it when the goal is to make society more efficient.
We've already won. Society is not very much about who gets to survive, anymore. Now we get to improve lives, by being more efficient about everything we do.
So we should cooperate more. A little like Open-source does.
Cooperation and competition are often two sides of the same complex strategy. A group of people cooperates in order to collectively crush other individuals or groups. As the external danger increases, more people are willing to forgive each other their previous sins, and join forces against the external enemy. As the external danger decreases, individuals and smaller groups switch to infighting, because now it is profitable.
Transparency is a tool the powerful use against the powerless. NSA knows all kinds of things about you, you are not even allowed to know what exactly NSA knows about you. Google collects all kinds of information about you, what web pages you watch (all pages you visit from Google search, all pages containing Google ads, all pages using Google captcha, etc.), where you walk (if you have an Android phone), your correspondence (even if you don't use Gmail, they still have it if the other party does); in return, you get personalized advertisement, but you definitely don't get the same kind of information about e.g. the top managers of Google.
So I'd say less like open source, more like malware that sends your credit card number to its authors but never the other way round.
Or I might be as the fool bringing the theory of everything that they just though up to the Physicists.
Wrong by overwhelming ignorance.
Bleh. Ban me if so.
It seems, from where I'm standing, that some ideas are too annoying to have an RCT about. How do you even being to collect observational data on these, I'm not sure.
Maybe I've already been proven wrong and a thousand time, and I'm ignorant.
In which case, I have a whole other interesting piece of my thought I'd like the world to hear about recognizing the important of organizing information properly.
Few things are as important in this world. Google understood this, and they are brilliant for it.
Easy criticism of Substack to be had, senseless unsorted lists and chronologies applied in the wrong places. Incorrect and wasteful, most of it.
Or, said in another way, I think sharing ideas works, even when these ideas are about the detailed internals of systems.
I don't mind all the guts being visible, as long as they don't belong to individuals. Individuals are imperfect, and don't deserve to stand under scrutiny.
But you can build good enough systems out of imperfect people.
And systems deserve very much, very careful, scrutiny,
I'm always amused at the whining about the NRA in their role as a pressure group (as opposed to internal complaints about mismanagement). They're one of the few effective lobbying groups which isn't trying to rent-seek or obtain money by theft, fraud, or taxation. They just want to be left alone. There aren't many other examples. NORML comes to mind, I suppose.
I mean, they just want to be left alone assumes that the drastic difference in gun ownership between our country and most of our peers doesn't have any negative externality. The people complaining about the NRA are working from a different assumption.
If a group of classic car enthusiasts got together and formed a very successful lobbying group that stopped and then reversed the phasing out of leaded gas, such that the US still used leaded gas despite the rest of the world having long since abandoned it, you could reasonably describe that group as just wanting to be left alone. But that wouldn't be a neutral description of objective reality.
I use money. It's my incentive to actually finish a book that when I do I get my money back. Occasionally I'll find give bucks in a book I long ago abandoned.
I got a gold bookmark for Christmas a long time ago. It's the worst. Used as intended, it clips onto one page like a paperclip, and damages the paper in the process. Used as a simple bookmark, it slides right out.
I think I have to roll back on what I posted earlier in this thread:
I thought I was qualified to utter my opinions on ways and requirements deaf / hearing impaired persons communicate, since I am married to a person coming from a family with hereditary hearing problems (ca. 50% deaf / hearing impaired to varying extends, 50% hearing „normally“ / my wife is not impaired, so she didn’t pass it on to our sons).
Since I am not very close with my wife’s wider family, I have to admit that I have no real insight into their personal lives.
However, her sister’s hearing capabilities are measured at about 10% and she’s got a MA in Mechanical Engineering working for Siemens and a deaf cousin working as Electrical Engineer for Tesla, built my impression that learning to read / write in German and English is not an unsurmountable challenge (most family members are quite successful in their professional lives).
On family gatherings, some of them communicate among each others in German sign language, but I’m usually not aware of that, since they all can communicate vocally (reading lips, hearing aids) and do so with „illiterates“ like me almost seamlessly, and I have no grab whatsoever of their cultural nuances. Those 60 and younger all went to special schools (fully financed by the German health system) to prepare them for a successful professional career, however mostly intended for a vocational level. When my father-in-law and his siblings grew up in the 1930s and 1940s there was no support of this kind, actually they feared persecution for being considered „unwertes Leben“ and kept as low a profile as possible.
Due to issues mentioned in this thread, I had a long conversation with my sister-in-law and I have to change my position:
Sign language on screen is very useful for them, it’s like hearing, and reading costs more attention.
She also made clear to me that the minor inconveniences I feel about wearing a mask due to current covid restrictions are neglectable compared to her problems with lip reading, reading / displaying facial expression and muffled sounds.
Sign language can also fail badly with jargon, and there were a few instances I heard of in tabloids (so probably very uncommon) of sign language signers just totally faking it next to serious politicians
There is a large misallocation of resources to ASL translators (and the infliction of these translater streams on the broader audience of non-ASL viewers) that is indicative of the special inefficiency of the modern bureaucratic state. It is close to peak modern stupidity.
This is like that thing where people on the left complain that people on the right only care about fetuses, because they never support programs to help mothers and babies, and then people on the right splutteringly reply with an array of charities working on those issues.
You haven't heard of it because it's boring and doesn't make the news, but that doesn't mean people aren't working on it.
>and frankly I bet if these groups got a little too noisy about "hey, instead of fighting about voter ID let's just get everyone ID and call it a day"
I should be clear. Those groups are working on ID *because* they believe voter ID rules are a form of voter suppression. They're not at all in conflict with the larger goal of trying to fight or roll back these laws. It's a both/and thing. Republicans want to keep marginalized people -especially people of color - from voting by passing voter id laws that make it harder for them to vote.* We do two things to fight back. One, we try to fight the laws. In the courts, and in the court of public opinion. Two, we try to identify the voters affected, and get them ids. The two aren't in conflict.
*I know, you don't agree with this framing, but this if from the left POV.
Please, allow me (as an alien) to throw in my thoughts/questions:
a) Here in Germany you MUST have a „Personalausweis“ (or a passport), a proof of identity, that you show to police, community offices, voting, banks, on trains and busses, etc., even to UPS, post office, and so on.
You MUST renew it every 10 years (for ca.30 €), but it's also your passport within Schengen countries. —This is NOT controversial in the German society.
b) The German federal government / states started programs to allow you to follow up on multiple administrative procedures online, e.g. vehicle registration, driver’s license, tax returns, school inscription, pet registration, applying for public child care services, etc. on local, state and federal levels.
The basis for this is your tax ID, and if you don’t have one, you can get one by means of your Personalausweis. —This IS controversial, because this is supposed to allow the government to combine all records of your societal activities (some say, it doesn’t make a difference, because the NSA, Google, Facebook and the BND, ... can do that anyway).
Some European countries (e.g. in the Baltics) implemented that (and even more) already.
What I don't understand is, are there problems with a) in the US or are there concerns with b) in the US?
In America, there is no single id. Most Americans have a driver's license, but a lot (in absolute terms) don't. Driver's license tends to be the main form of id required in these laws. A lot of poorer urban folks don't drive, so they might let their license lapse and not realize it, or just not bother. Older people in assisted living might not need to or be able to drive anymore. Native Americans living on reservations might have different requirements since the reservations have a level of autonomy from the surrounding gov't. College students might not take a car to school since life is so campus focused (I didn't, for example).
These people might have other forms of id, but often these forms aren't considered valid to vote with. For example, some tribes issue tribal ids, which North Dakota opted not to allow (Native Americans tend to vote Democrat). A lot of those poor urbanites might live in public housing and have a photo id from the housing agency. Alabama doesn't let you to use that to vote (Poor urbanites tend to vote Democrat). Quite a few places won't let you use your student id (Students, when they bother, tend to vote Democrat).
Instead, you've got to get to a DMV. Not a huge ask. Easy for me, just take some paid time and drop a few bucks for a fee. But DMVs don't tend to run 8 - 4, and if you're taking the bus it might be a half day off work. If you're poor, it's probably unpaid time. If you're on a reservation it may be a long drive and only open a couple of days a week. If you're a student, you probably don't bother. (Then again, you likely don't vote. I didn't.) It still not a *huge* ask, but it's also not nothing. A lot of us think it's too much, especially since it's disproportionally applied to people in our coalition.
And those old folks? They've probably never shown id to vote in their lives. It wasn't a common ask until recently. So now the have to get family or friends to come by and take them to the DMV. Maybe they don't get around well. Maybe they need a wheelchair. Maybe they have trouble toileting themselves and are too embarrassed/afraid to get out away from supports. Maybe a lot of things.
A universal id, along with universal voter registration would be great, and would eliminate this as an issue, but I don't see how we (the US) get there from here. I don't think there's any Republican support for universal id, let alone universal registration.
I thought there were some attempts to make a universal national ID in the 1990s, but privacy advocates across the political spectrum killed it, which made it very hard to advocate for easier IDs within states.
Probably for the same reason some people hate subtitles and prefer the dubbed version of a TV show or movie, while others are happy to read the subtitles. Also, probably because "it's always been done that way" and getting rid of the sign language interpreter, particularly nowadays, would be perceived negatively as discrimination, ableism, and forcing deaf people to adapt to hearing people mores instead of catering equally to the needs and preferences of the deaf.
Technical point: ASL is a different language from English. It's possible to be fluent (perhaps natively) in ASL and have no grasp of the English language. In that case, reading would not be possible.
ASL is a real language, created by deaf people for deaf people. For many (most?) people who have been deaf from infancy, it doesn't have to be taught, it is just assimilated from other signers without conscious effort, like you assimilated your mother tongue. Yes, deaf people more or less have to learn written English to get by in a hearing society, but it is not a native tongue for them.
Written english is also not a native tongue for native english speakers, no? I mean, it's maybe easier because you can sound-out words some of the time, and the grammar of written english is probably much closer to spoken english than ASL, but it's not like reading comes naturally to most people.
I'm just going off Wikipedia here, but it seems there have been a number of attempts at creating a written standard, none of which has caught on, leaving ASL speakers unable to communicate with each other in writing in their primary language. I find this a bit surprising, given that there has been a large number of ASL speakers surrounded by writing for so long. I'd kinda expect them to at least just write ASL with English words the way the Japanese do with Chinese characters or something.
Not 100% sure of this, but: learning to read is much harder if one cannot associate sounds to the symbols. Because of that, many people who are deaf from birth never learn to read, even fairly smart ones. Imagine yourself trying to learn a written foreign language with a different alphabet, but without ever hearing a word of the spoken version.
This is accurate. There is a significant cohort of deaf people whose English literacy is poor and for whom ASL is the primary language. They, too, must be informed in emergencies.
the question isn’t about emergencies, but a much larger array of TV broadcasts. And the cost of a human ASL translator is much more than that of closed captioning, hence it being weird to have one but not the other. I don’t think the benefit is worth it. Probably as many people don’t speak English as are deaf + can’t read, and there aren’t other language captions on every broadcast
Fair cop, I should have followed OP and written 'major announcements' and not 'emergencies'. I suppose the recent hurricane-related stuff stuck in my mind.
And another cursory search suggests that professional ASL interpreters get paid somewhere on the order of $100/hr, so the cost for a couple hours' broadcast is probably not catastrophic in the grand scheme of things.
I am pretty sure that your point will not hold up, e.g. nobody spoke ancient Egypt at the time the Rosetta stone was discovered, archeologists and linguists can read it now
Much harder does not mean impossible. Deciphering ancient languages presumably takes from several years to several careers of effort by quite intelligent people.
I WAS NOT implying that deciphering hieroglyphs was easy,
I was trying to say that the vocal representation of a term has no relation to its contextual meaning, so when you understand the meaning of a character sequence in the intended context it’s quite irrelevant how it is pronounced.
Examples:
Picture of an apple: => a p p l e (the character sequence means ‚Apple‘)
H a n d y => the character sequence means something along ‚useful‘ …
H a n d y => the character sequence means „mobile phone“ auf Deutsch
(same pronunciation)
g h o t i => means nothing, the pronunciation is „fish“ (attributed to G.B. Shaw)
gh as in enough
o as in women
ti as in nation
Conclusion: The sequence of characters AND the context carry the meaning not the sounds.
Would you prefer if all TV were silent and subtitled in hieroglyphics? Sure, we could all learn to read ancient Egyptian, but that's clearly harder than just having the broadcast be in English or whatever your native language is.
I think it's simply a misguided way to provide authenticity, as the sign language interpretation is basically intended to provide the content of the speech to the live "audience", but they think they should also provide the version of the speech that was "said" in ASL.
Which opens the questions if that is more helpful that closed captioning to e.g. deaf persons of hispanic or french descent (to mention only two groups) not familiar with ASL because they use another sign language.
However, I think it is still more useful than showing a braille version ...
I think the only reasonable way to understand it is that it's trendy. It just doesn't make any sense from a communications standpoint. Here in Malta the COVID press briefings are conducted in Maltese and simultaneously translated to MSL, which is spoken by a couple of hundred people, and there are no closed captions, so the hundreds (I'm just guessing here) who are hard of hearing but don't understand MSL don't know what's going on, and neither do the 100k or so who prefer English, which is also an official language.
I remember when we used to worry about security theater from the TSA becoming normalized.*
I wonder at a meta institutional level what could be done to improve policy calibration, especially after the salience of a recent emergency has passed.
* I've thought a lot about Schneier's argument that cockpit door hardening and making passengers willing to fight back were the main two mitigations that really mattered. Maybe threat sharing among agencies, but not TSA lines or rapiscan, which consistently fail to detect mock threats in tests.
I had a crazy idea early in the pandemic that it might be possible to play one threat off against another, using each new Biggest Threat Ever as an excuse to defuse the prior ones that are
clearly NOT (any longer) The Biggest Threat Ever and hence worth cannibalizing resources from to fight the new problem. You’d need some institution to have been keeping a list and preparing the way, drafting suitable legislation in advance so it’s ready to go in a “never let a crisis go to waste” fashion - maybe call this institution the Diminishing Returns Foundation?
…although it’s also possible covid and TSA were *uniquely* suited for this sort of tradeoff and we’ll never get the same chance again.
My thinking on that included that the existing TSA was ESPECIALLY BAD for covid risk. A competent executive might have pointed out that TSA inspectors and lines were - and still are - a massive single point of failure with regard to pandemic risk. Nowhere else in the airport are people who are all just about to travel to *different places* legally required to congregate together in one massive group and interact with the same few people (the pat down people) and pass through the same small semi-enclosed area (the scanners). We should have suspended all that stuff as an “emergency measure” to improve covid safety! Or we could at least have *replaced* some of the useless spot-checking for weapons with similarly useless spot-checking for diseases. Replace the magnetic wands with forehead temperature scanners! Replace “sorry, we need to hand-search your luggage” with “sorry, we need to swab your nose”, that sort of thing.
Oh well, maybe that’s an idea for the *next* pandemic…sigh.
A forlorn hope I'm afraid, in a country where the state of national emergency declared by President Carter in response to the Iranian hostage crisis is still in effect.
I'm too young to have ever flown prior to the TSA security theater. But say what you will about the TSA, at least it doesn't impact your everyday life in a 24/7 fashion, the way the covid safety theater does.
Man those were the days. It was perfectly reasonable to get to the airport 20 minutes before the flight departed. Did I mention real food, on every flight? Half-empty overhead compartmens (and consequently far more rapid boarding/exiting) because the only thing people brought in the cabin were purses, a book and jacket, maybe a backpack if you were a kid? (You checked your 3 suitcases, of course.) Or how about 6" of space between your knees and the seat in front of you? Or the fact that about 1/2 of the time you'd have the row to yourself, and nobody knew what the 3rd seat was for because it sure wasn't ever occupied. Maybe for an evacuation flightin the Third World?
There are surely many reasons for this, but the difference between flying in 1981 and 2021 is enough to strongly discourage any notion of progress in human affairs. It used to be a pleasant and effective transportation option, instead of an ordeal the only redeeming feature of which is its brevity relative to any other option.
Other than the "20 minutes before the flight departed", those don't sound like they have anything to do with the TSA, rather it's that people would rather fly cheaply than fly comfortably. You have to take into account that in 2021 you can fly for peanuts compared to what it costed in 1981. And if you'd still rather fly comfortably there's still the option of flying in business class.
Pre TSA travel was the glory days of air travel. Closest analogy to it might be the convenience of boarding a train with the customer service of an Uber. Before TSA, flight attendants treated you like a customer where now they feel empowered to enforce policy after policy.
I am probably a weird case. I had the peculiar experience of being held by St. Louis police for about an hour while they talked about "grave national security concerns" (before eventually releasing me with no explanation). So... I have some weird salience issues over post-9/11 security theater to work through.
I also might not appreciate how much covid restrictions are affecting people who live in different areas and have different hobbies. It's been pretty minor for me. How do covid regulations impact you? Are you in school, or a parent with school age kids? Curious to get some more representative examples.
I'm in school right now and it feels completely as it did prior to covid. We just have to wear masks inside, not outside, which everyone follows. No real difference there, and we'd all rather wear masks than go online bc someone tested positive.
I was prohibited from so much as touching another human being for about six months. No, that's not an exaggeration. I could look at them from six feet away, if I made the approved gestures of obesiance. I'm still kind of peeved about that. Also reminded of how little I have in common with most of humanity, and how little most of humanity cares about people like me.
Remember the stage early on of recalibrating to discern people's moods and emotions when only their eyes and forehead were visible? Can't tell if they're smiling.
Similar to trebuchet, with a desk job in a large progressive city. I've been working from home for a year and a half, which sucks, and is way harder than working from the office. Turns out that working on a team is much easier when you can spontaneously share knowledge with each other. Who knew? Then also, I saw absolutely no friends for a year, outside of occasional zoom game nights, as well as no family.
Then there are more minor inconveniences, which are still really really annoying, like having to wear a mask, which I find makes it slightly annoyingly hard to breathe, and fogs up my glasses all the time, especially in the winter. Then also, I just really hate having to live with things that I think are irrational, and not being able to fight against any of it without being branded an evil outgroup republican. All of the focus on surface sanitization is entirely pointless, because covid does not transmit via surfaces. And I'm not convinced that wearing masks is helping anyone anymore, due to the fact that vaccinated people can still spread covid, meaning there's nothing we can do to prevent this virus from eventually becoming endemic.
Oh, and I guess I forgot to mention, but I do worry about the world my future self and future children will inhabit, that all of this creep of lockdowns and restrictions will become a part of the culture that many don't like, but no one can actually do anything to get rid of, and no one can argue against without getting branded as the outgroup. I feel we're enabling rampant germaphobia to unhealthy levels (with regards to society's psychological state at large), and that may never go away.=
Leave the cities if you want. Life out here in the rural areas is pretty close to 2019, even in a purple state. Official pronouncements (that aren't followed) aside, in most places you wouldn't know there was a pandemic going on in my area.
Where I live, the pediatrician is now saying that, for an unvaccinated (under 12) kid, a case of covid is presumed to yield immunity from reinfection - for 90 days. The health department is saying some kids are catching Delta over and over with minimal effective development of immunity. I bring this up because I too thought about "getting it over with" before Nature took its course and I caught it without trying. If getting significantly ill several times a year is the price to pay, I just don't know. Whether it's risk factors or some predisposition, I don't know, but myself and the kids have all had it now, two of us being vaccine breakthrough cases.
I hope the pandemic preparedness folks invest in research on the genetics of disease response. That's a (somewhat) missing piece right now I think.
I thought the standard claim was that an infection yields something like 80-90% immunity, much like a vaccination. I think many of us had been taught as children that immunity was usually perfect, but it sounds like it really isn't, for almost anything. But if an infectious agent is rare enough in the environment, then 90% immunity is good enough to feel like perfect immunity. But for things that circulate widely, it isn't.
Is there a reason to believe that these people have the slightest idea what they are talking about? "Is a doctor of some sort" counts for very little in that regard; there are doctors telling people to skip the vaccine and take ivermectin. "Is a local health department bureaucrat" counts for even less.
> government bans you from seeing your social circle for a year
Wow where was that!?
Big changes for me were, I basically just had groceries delivered. Still saw my friends. Didn't have to wear a mask outside. I was around strangers less often, but mostly that was elective. We streamed a lot of movies and got a lot of great takeout and played a lot of board games. If no pandemic, I might have taken up swimming? But not too much was really forced on me.
I think I was undeservedly lucky, maybe the 5th percentile of people in terms of life impacts.
The parents I know with young school kids had to completely rethink every hour of their time, they were given few if any good options. I know I wasn't the typical experience, and still curious to hear about others.
If you object to lockdowns it seems to me like you ought to be in favor of measures to stop future pandemics before they get to the point where governments feel that lockdowns are necessary.
There are no such measures though, aside from early, neigh on prescient travel bans that are enforced with a competency level and severity no government is capable of. Imagine those people swimming the Rio Grande being littered with machine gun fire, and you have merely imagined one of the least horrifying measures needed.
That's not going to work. Lockdowns are now the accepted and expected FIRST line of defense against pandemics, to be implemented in parallel with, not instead of, other measures. The only thing that's going to stop lockdowns, is lack of recognition of pandemics.
So if you object to lockdowns, start by looking at things that might raise pandemic false alarms and work on that.
That's nonsense though. Nobody's going to seriously propose lockdowns in the US for a disease that hasn't had any known cases inside the country. Any intervention that keeps things to the level of the proto-pandemics of the last couple decades (Swine Flu, Ebola, SARS 1, etc) will prevent lockdowns in the US (and probably in most other countries that aren't directly affected.
What's your proposed intervention for preventing there from being literally any cases inside the US? Note that GAP is a US-centric organization, and the US government has little ability to stamp out disease outbreaks overseas. Are you expecting blanket travel bans, including on returning US citizens, as soon as a potential pandemic emerges overseas?
Also note that during the 2014 Ebola scare, it took only a handful of cases in US hospitals and none from community transmission, to drive substantial public demand for dramatic interventions. At that time, that meant travel bans and quarantines, but both of those have since been deprecated in favor of lockdowns.
The arbitrary feeling threshold is the issue though. For example Victoria AU has averaged less than one covid death per month for like the last 11 months, but still treats adults like pre-teen children, with curfews and a 3 mile travel limit. There is no level of preparedness that will get to that level of safety without that level of lockdown. One possible downside to a greater feeling of preparedness is that society and/or those in charge might insist on locking down even earlier and more strictly.
We in the first world place such a high value on human life because we can afford to, now, and the safer we get the more ruckus is raised whenever anyone dies from a cause not directly attributable to their own volition, and sometimes even causes that are. Perhaps a little danger and death is necessary to sustain the levels of freedom that many people alive now deem necessary. The next generation will no doubt draw the line in a different area based on the tolerance for risk they've grown accustomed to. I wouldn't want my child's number to be drawn, but I also wouldn't want them to grow up in a society without risk, in a world full of it.
It's difficult discuss this in generalities because different jurisdictions vary a fair bit in their approach. My impression is that Australia and to a lesser extent California have been a bit excessive in their restrictions, while some US states have been extremely lax. It's worth noting that I don't think the US federal government has instituted any lockdowns or mask mandates at all.
Well, is that what that PAC is all about? Are they generally trying to stop pandemics before it gets to lockdown level? Or are they including lockdowns and mask mandates as a part of their platform?
Well based on taking two minutes to follow the link Scott posted it's pretty easy to see that their main focus is getting more government funding for research- no mention of mandates.
> Will embryo selection likely be regarded as right-wing or left-wing?
I used to think that whether an issue gets polarized or not depends on its core attributes and the underlying governing philosophies of the parties. Now I think it's much more up to chance.
"On Deaf Ears" by Edwards shifted my views a lot here, I think it's mostly down to whether or not prominent party figures happen to decide to push something as a position.
Newt Gingrich supporting a moon base is a good example of this, him adopting a position on an issue that has limited prior political associations tended to sort people, and you had a lot of left-leaning pro-NASA types arguing against it. Arguably Trump had a similar impact on immigration. Previously business folks on the right supported more, union supporters on the left were against it, so there were muddled lines where it wasn't a clean right/left issue. It's become more aligned with party identification now.
So my read is.. it will gain a political association once and not until some prominent politician makes a big deal out of it, and that will galvanize support on the other side for it.
Actually - addenda... this doesn't always work. Both parties dislike China, and maybe more relevantly, the tech industry. People love frankenstein stories, and that fear of change probably transcends party politics. So most likely everyone will oppose it for different reasons and its unregulated survival will depend on it flying under the radar as an obscure medical procedure for as long as possible.
I second this, sans the addendum. This will become plausible, someone important will come out for or against it in a big way, and it will get its political valence from that. Twenty years later, the idea that there was a time when that valence wasn't locked in to the true values of the respective political coalitions will sound crazy.
My guess is a fairly small subset of religious conservatives (mostly a small number of Catholics) are currently opposed to IVF. Obviously they would also be opposed to PGT-P. I would expect the Catholic Church in the next fifty years to be strongly opposed to PGT-P, but there are obviously lots of things the Catholic Church is opposed to that many Catholics does anyway.
I don't think PGT-P will be very common in the short term, due to the obvious complications and costs over making babies the natural way. But I think it's very likely that anyone pursuing IVF for fertility reasons will say, "Well, of course we want to screen for sickle cell anemia" which is a pretty short and slippery slope to "Of course we want to screen for any genes related to breast cancer or autism" to "Of course we want to add on 15 IQ points."
There's obviously an entirely reasonable left-wing, pro-equality argument that PGT-P should be banned because of what would happen if 1st world countries genetically engineer their babies and people from other countries don't. But is that going to stop your typical Blue Tribe members from looking out for their own kids? Of course not. People in the Blue Tribe put their kids in private schools, pay for sports teams and music lessons, game the college admissions process, and so on. They're not going to pass up PGT-P.
Parents are wired to want to raise their genetic offspring. Fertile couples can elect to use genius donor sperm in order to have a baby of superior intelligence, but nobody does this. I think parents would have some sense that their PGT-P children were not fully their genetic offspring. The kids would engage in some behavior that seemed foreign (as all new generations do), and parents would write about how they didn't understand their alien children and nobody would want to have an inhuman PGPT baby.
But it's still all the parents' genes. It's analogous to rolling a hundred D20s and picking the five-highest scoring ones rather than just rolling five and getting what you get.
> There's obviously an entirely reasonable left-wing, pro-equality argument that PGT-P should be banned because of what would happen if 1st world countries genetically engineer their babies and people from other countries don't.
I would have thought the obvious left-wing reason to be against this is more about pro-diversity than long-term advantages for more eugenicist countries. Parents are going to want conventionally-attractive, neurotypical children and this is bad news if you value the existence of other kinds of people unto itself. A potential extinction ("genocide"?) of autism is the most-talked-about such scenario but not, by far, the only example.
Myself — I'm all for self-applied transhumanism on adults. If we discover pills that make you smarter, and a grown adult chooses to take it, more power to them. But I think it would be a moral tragedy if unusual people of all stripes ceased to be born.
I even think — though it is unfashionable to say so — that the slow extinction of "stupid" people is morally abominable. I don't mean people who have trouble functioning, but just the kind of brain that doesn't do very well at school or with numbers, doesn't have a very reliable memory — but all enough to get by and have a fulfilling, simple life — well, dammit, those are lives well worth living, and from a human point of view different from a straight-A student's *or* a neurodivergent eccentric genius, and the somewhat cavalier way we talk about "adding 15 I.Q. points" to the whole population makes me quite uncomfortable.
This seems absurd. Liberals don't currently endorse smart people intentionally marrying dumb people in order to increase equality of intellect. Far more likely Liberals would endorse donating money to help 3rd world countries genetically engineer their own offspring.
There's a real debate about this with respect to Down's babies. They are aborted in such high numbers that the community of existing patients fear the support they have enjoyed will disappear because of the diminished numbers -- and perhaps in part because those who might otherwise donate time and money will think, consciously or not, that adults with Down's only exist because of their parents' selfish or idiotic choice. People definitely feel differentially generous towards conditions that appear to have a greater element of choice in coming about.
It's unfortunately not even the case that aborting all the Down's babies will eventually drive Down's out of existence, since as far as we know most of it is just genetic accident during development, it has little to no heritable component.
"Extinction" is an odd way of putting it, since you are talking not about killing anyone but about changes such that person A is born instead of person B. Why is it a bad thing if more smart people and fewer stupid people are born?
Suppose some social change results in fewer black/white marriages. Would you say that is bad because it reduces the number of mulattoes? Suppose some social change results in more black/white marriages. Would you say that is bad because it results in the extinction of both pure white and pure black populations? Either of those makes as much sense as objecting to a change that reduces the number of low intelligence people.
I don't think "extinction" is the wrong way of putting it, even if it's (intentionally) a mite inflammatory… It's the term we'd use for some rare animal breed which no longer has enough of a breeding population, and where the last specimens are slowly dying off in zoos. Extinction doesn't have to mean instant mass killing.
Until such a time as we find a cure for aging or other immortality method, proposing to encourage the birth of a given type of person, over that of a different type of person, is in the long run going to lead to the "extinction" of the latter type, even if you never lay a finger on its currently-alive representative. If I'm a eugenicist dictator and I order the mass sterilization of [X group], I think it would be obvious that I'm working towards the extinction of that group, and that this is morally abominable. If I'm a slightly subtler dictator, and I simply make it illegal for [X group] to procreate (but don't physically prevent them from doing so, merely fine/jail them if they do and get caught), I am still doing the same thing, just with more subtlety.
As to your comparisons, the key issue is whether the point of view/subjective experience of people differs significantly based on race, abstracting away nurture-related confounders. I don't really believe so. If I somehow did (if I thought how a black person thinks and how a white person thinks *inherently* differed) then yes, I would find it inherently valuable to try and keep every variation extant.
Again though, I don't think it's the case… but it's definitely the case for such groups as autistic people, Deaf people, colourblind people, lower-I.Q.-than-average people, strongly synesthetic people, or, even say, transgender people — all things which I expect that, if it were a publicised option, enough parents might choose to screen for in their kids that what few still are born would not be enough for the traits to remain in the human gene pool for very long, even if their births were never made illegal.
"Low" intelligence or low school success may travel with other traits that are socially valuable - sales skill, childcare, cooking, and stand-up comedy come to mind. Dancing. Various types of performance. The IQ scale is one dimension of it.
Also, considering mental skill across generations, the repetitive, non-thought-focused types of work anchor human culture and much of spirituality. People who gravitate toward these "holding it down" type jobs will be less interested in putting forth the products of their thought. I have a suspicion that some technical skills are going to be based in this type of thing rather than intelligence or brain RPMs. Selecting away from the tinkering farmer types will produce fewer mathematicians and engineers downstream - I think. Creating generations of anxious poets has probably never been the goal.
Not that being anxious is bad, or being a poet is bad, or even being an anxious poet. I have a foot in that camp. So I know there are other important ways to be.
I agree with this. I don't even think concern about overall homogenisation needs to be ideological. We'll be able to 'add 15 IQ points' by slotting in the most reliable SNPs long before we understand the exact mechanism and tradeoffs, which could cause a lot of damage if there's a stampede to do it. And while g does mean a hell of a lot, it isn't quite everything.
There can't be much of a stampede to use this particular method, since it only works if you are already doing IVF, which only a small fraction of the population are doing. I think someone already pointed out why 15 points of IQ is a large exaggeration — it's based on the IQ distribution of the entire population, not of the children of a given couple. And different couples will have different things they want to optimize for.
The underlying assumption seems to be that the distribution of characteristics that comes out of random selection of embryos is somehow morally superior to the distribution that comes out of a few percent of the population selecting which of a small number of embryos they prefer to implant. That strikes me as bizarre.
Well, it's hardly bizarre. There's no trolley problem without a lever.
And I imagine if greater intelligence were reliably on offer, uterine lavage ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6503331/ ) or some other method of in-vivo embryo retrieval for testing/manipulation might well become popular.
But my concern in this case is less strictly with morality than with the unintended consequences of reducing diversity.
Yes, it's ethical to give them out in first world countries before developed countries; if you withhold vaccines from the US until they get sent across the globe, that's not exactly helping people or saving any lives. But it's stupid to be giving out booster shots in richer countries when so many people across the world still have no access to the vaccines and America doesn't seem to remotely care about stopping the spread of covid globally and sending vaccines to poorer nations. We could be doing much more to invest in vaccine policy to help this pandemic end and instead we're giving our citizens three doses.
I think it's absurd to be giving out booster doses to Americans when 57% of people in the world still haven't gotten a single dose. (But I don't think that giving out vaccines to developed countries first was wrong.)
On the Guardians Against Pandemics front, a big point in their favor is that if you ask them to please refund your contribution, they're prompt and polite about it. (I hadn't noticed the significance of ActBlue on first reading, but the commentariat here convinced me to at least withdraw my money until they explained themselves at length on that topic.)
Here's GAP responding to an email of "please refund my money, I realized I have no idea how you plan to be bipartisan if you're going through ActBlue, and really don't want to fund this becoming a partisan issue":
"There is good reason to use ActBlue now just as a practicality. We are raising right now for Democratic candidates because Democrats are in control of both Houses at the moment, so many of our asks are directed towards Democrats. We are likely to use WinRed to solicit Republican PAC donations in the future as the chambers flip and we have asks for Republican members such as restrictions on GOF research."
I don't know to what extent ActBlue and WinRed would be in favor of an organization trying to use them both simultaneously, but it seems somewhat reasonable.
How to get paranoid people to take a vaccine? Speak to their paranoia: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/09/28/nolte-data-confirms-trump-counties-dying-to-own-the-libs/
Somewhere in one of these open threads I recall a discussion about the spectrum of human personalities and proclivities. I am not sure but I think it was in relationship to an” on the spectrum” discussion of “being”, or “personality,” or “proclivity” or …. (You pick a word.)
The consensus seems to be that the world was richer for having multiple sorts of all of those things.
Given that, does not it make much more sense to have a pantheon of gods? So that all kinds of people will have someone to look up to?
The more Elemental of us might identify with Mars for instance and He might even speak to us.
Those of us perhaps more Murcureal in temperament, would listen to… Well, you know.
I guess I am trying to start a discussion about whether the world would be in a better place if they were more gods to choose from.
But only if they shared some of our qualities and deficiencies in order to make them easier to identify with.
Our present gods are largely ideals, aspirations, that have fallen into the hands of lawyers poets and politicians since they were invented. They would be welcome to the pantheon.
We could all go about our business secure in the knowledge that there was a God who was a little better than you but” bent” kind of the way you are. It strikes me as a healthier relationship to the world.
Mercurial… sorry.
Also the tremendous power they enjoyed to your benefit if you were in good with one
It would be like having a BFF somewhere in the ether.No stress as long as you treat them right
I want to admit that that hotlink was a complete accident on my part but turns out to be very pertinent. A Freudian slip
Suppose that early in 2020, Moderna decided that damn the ethics boards, they were going to do a challenge trial. At what point in the plan would they be stopped? Are vaccines regulated enough that the police could come by and arrest the people running the trial, or would they make it to the step of getting stonewalled by the FDA because their study didn't follow proper procedure?
Most likely they'd be forced to back down by a PR nightmare rather than formal channels.
And I'd expect that any doctor involved in deliberately infecting people with a known-lethal pathogen would be in danger of losing their medical license.
What if they'd found a country willing to allow it? If (say) the Brazilian medical regulators allow it and allow doctors who take part to continue practicing medicine, there wouldn't be any legal repercussions, right? Would US/UK/EU regulators have been willing to accept data from that kind of study? Would they have penalized Moderna for doing it?
I can't say for sure, but I strongly doubt that the FDA would accept data from a trial conducted by protocols it wouldn't have approved domestically. You can do your clinical trials in Brazil or wherever, but you have to do them to US standards to count.
I think it's great that the Biden Administration is promoting Covid vaccinations, and has encouraged pop stars to reach out to their fans. And given the threat that Covid poses to Baby Boomers, why not recruit ACDC into the effort? Still, I'm taken aback by a headline in today's New York Times:
"A C.D.C. panel is meeting to decide who should get Pfizer boosters."
This is a random place to post this but you're all smart.
I just moved into a place and the basement briefly floods when it rains hard (which it has a few times since I moved in). I don't particularly care because the sump pump gets 95% of it out and only leaves small puddles. I never actually spend any time in the basement except to switch my laundry.
But a week ago I left a guitar case down there, and I went down today and found it dotted everywhere with yellow-y mold, which seemed like alarmingly fast growth. There is also mold on the basement walls which I previously just ignored.
I live on the first floor, right above the basement. Does this seem like a concerning situation?
Yes it is a problem if you store anything of value - like your guitar case - down there.
Our basement doesn’t need a sump. It’s the only one in our neighborhood that doesn’t, a fact we are careful not to mention at block parties.
It is pretty humid down there though and we had to discard a couple thousand stored books before we got a humidifier.
They developed mold and I couldn’t read them without sneezing. You probably should get a humidifier for your basement too.
I hope you actually got a dehumidifier.
Yeah, we sure did
rip books. Hope there weren’t any old ones that are now lost to time!
Thanks for the response -- sorry about your books. Yeah nothing of real value for me, the guitar case probably cost $10. I'm more wondering about the air quality upstairs where I live above the basement -- if it's leaking upwards. I guess I can probably get something to measure that.
A damp basement by itself shouldn’t be a problem on the first floor. I don’t know what the weather is like where you are but where I am in a smallish Minnesota city that sort of thing is taken in stride, especially if the basement itself isn’t being used as living space.
Next up, in the triumphal parade that culminates in Satya Yuga! (by which I mean my blog):
Alexander the Great was Aristotle's Greatest Achievement:
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/alexander-the-great-was-aristotles
I have been living in the US for 6 years and am sick and and tired of this stupid imperial system. I love almost everything else about living here.
<vent>
Fahrenheit must be the dumbest unit ever invented, based on (horse?) body temperature. Inches are barely better and have been defined using metric since the 50s anyway. It would be better if things were 0.625" but the whole odd numerator thing is sooooo stupid.
</vent>
Does anybody know of any movements trying to accelerate metric adoption in the US? I want to join, or start my own, for the sake of my grandkids. Enough is enough.
Fahrenheit is the one good part of imperial units!
Metric has a good argument for stuff like length and weight where it's useful to be able to convert between feet and miles. But nobody ever multiplies temperatures like that.
Setting your temperature scale to 1/273.16th the triple point of water is just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit. At least Fahrenheit has the advantage of doing a much better job of handling the range of normal temperatures that humans care about. The weather is usually between 0-99F, but Celesius leaves have the scale untouched while forcing cold places to resort to confusing negatives more often.
IMO, the mark of someone who is thoughtful about metric is if they're willing to consider the merits of Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit has the nice property that I hardly ever care about the last digit unless I'm making candy. It just so happens that the tens digit maps to about the limit of what I can perceive.
If negatives are confusing there is truly no hope.
It's a lot easier for people to intuitively understand the difference between 17 and 27 than it is 7 and -3.
What's your reference for this statement?
I can get on-board with the metric system, but I draw the line at temperature. Celsius does not share the advantages that metric has over Imperial, which are primarily about conversion. Fahrenheit gives you nice ten-unit temperature bands that give you useful information: 20's are fridgid, 30's are cold, 40's are chilly, 50's are cool, 60's are fair, 70's are warm, 80's are hot, 90's are scorching. There's enough granularity that you never need to get into decimals to make a meaningful distinction. You don't have to deal with negatives. Anything above 100 or below 0, well, once the temperature reaches those numbers, who cares? Get inside before you hurt yourself.
The only advantage that celsius has in everyday use is at the water freezing point. So what? Just remember that water freezes at 32 and you're done.
Celcius is no different here and has the added benefit that 1 degree celcius = 1 degree Kelvin (SI unit) and that water boils at 100 which is a nice multiple of 10 like everything should be decimal.
If you grew up with Celcius, the states map to 0-5 is cold, 5-10 is chilly, 10-20 is cool, 20-25 is fair, 25-30 is warm, 30-35 is hot, 35+ is schorching etc, again it depends on how humid or dry the air is. The point is that there is no difference in cognitive load mapping the celcius values to "feeling states" than there is with Fahrenheit. This is probably more a case of perceived switching cost.
Celcius *is* different here because for any given number of significant figures Farenheit is twice as precise.
Saying the temperature today is "in the 80s (F)" is twice as precise as saying it's "in the 30s" Celcius, to the point that I can't imagine the latter is a useful thing people say, whereas with Farenheit this is the completely normal way to talk about day-to-day temperature.
Yes, of course you can get that precision back by saying "it's between 25 and 30 (C) today", but that's a lot less convenient. Trading day-to-day convenience in exchange for (*checks notes*) easier conversion to Kelvin doesn't seem like a good trade to me.
😂
In northern Minnesota 0 is chilly, -10 is remember your gloves, -20 is “is the ice thick enough to drive on?”, -30 is “did you plug your block heater in?”, -50 is “huh, this is interesting”
Exactly - it's highly subjective from person to person and also location dependent based on humidity.
I only buy bottles of soda... is there a problem i am unaware of?
There are only 2 kinds of countries, those that use the metric system and those that have been to the moon...
That reminds me, both NASA and SpaceX have gone full metric since then.
yes, and neither has been back...
Full-ish. It's one thing to use metric going forward but if you want to make use of NASA's troves of historical data, brace yourself for the slugs.
I was watching some stuff by British comic theater company Mischief Theatre on YouTube a few days ago and they mentioned that they ordered a breakable vase for one of their shows from an American company and specified the size in inches. They got sent a teeny little vase because the company figured Mischief was really using centimeters.
*US Customary System.
A real pint is more than half a litre
Doesn't make it less dumb
Thank you. US Customary and Imperial we're standardized separately, by the US and Britain respectively, decades after the former declared independence from the latter. There's a bunch of overlap because both are based on the older and looser English Customary standards, which in turn were largely an attempt to rationalize several competing industry standards relative to one another.
The big difference, as you note, is in liquid measurements. The US picked the wine industry's traditional gallon, and the British picked the ale industry's traditional gallon.
We tried to ease the country into it in the 70's. There was just too much pushback and or indifference from the public for it to gain traction.
A base 10 system would be a lot easier, I agree.
Have a pint of beer and shrug. That's what I did. ;)
I'm going to drink 500ml of beer and figure out how to fix this situation. Everyone is in a "my vote won't move the needle" mindset.
When I was a kid some distance signs on the highway featured km along with miles. Then one year all those signs were gone. I think we're going the other way. Sorry.
If you took part in a vaccine trial, do they eventually tell you if you got the placebo? Seems like that'd be important to know if you're deciding whether to get the shot again.
They all were given the vaccine because after the vaccine demonstrated efficacy it's considered unethical to withhold it from the control group.
Ah, ok. Thanks.
Does anyone else feel mildly annoyed when the run into the word ‘nonplussed’ in print? It currently has two completely different meanings and I usually have to try to use context or information about the author’s age and continent of residence to get at their intended meaning.
Or in a similar vein, how about the word ‘bemused’?
I guess I should add that normally this wouldn’t bug me enough to actually put it online but my cat kept waking me up last night with her new trick of giving me a facial massage when she needs attention.
I’m just a bit ‘techy’ today.
Go look up "peruse" and you'll stop being bothered by nonplussed.
Yes, the newer meaning of nonplussed is an abomination, but we live in an age where people will post things online using the word "are" instead of "our" or say "should of" instead of "should have" or even "should've," so I have pretty much given up hope.
I am a lifelong teetotaler, but if something is going to push me to drink it is likely to be this sort of thing..
The other word I mentioned 'bemused' is another one that throws me for a loop. The dictionary definition I learned was 'confused or muddled'. Now the meaning is changing to something like 'amused'.
I didn't know "nonplussed" had two meanings, so thank you, I learned something today.
I live in the UK, which might be why. A blog post I found says it's a North American thing?
Also, did you maybe mean "tetchy", or am I missing something?
Yes the newer meaning is mainly North American.
I did mean tetchy. OED lists both spelling. :)
There is this common pattern in philanthropy, more often seen in left-wing stuff, where when someone wants to do X, instead of raising money and then doing X with it, they raise money to lobby the government to spend money on X.
An example: I once lived in Madison, WI, where it is both quite left-wing and very cold in the winter. There was a fairly large homeless population and one or two of them would die of exposure every winter. I knew some folks who were trying to raise money for a warming shelter so the homeless folks could sleep there at night instead of freezing to death on the streets. Their plan was to collect money and hire a lobbyist to try and get the city government to build a warming shelter. They had this whole plan worked out, which land they could use, how much it would cost, how it would fit into the city budget. I talked with them in the square for a while and told them that it looked like they money they planned to raise was more than enough for the downpayment for the building. Hadn't crossed their mind, and they weren't interested. They were comfortable in the world of lobbying the city, and construction or building things weren't things they knew how to do.
This "Guarding Against Pandemics" thing has this in *spades*. Set aside the avowed Democratic partisanship: the only thing they can think of to do with the money they collect is to give it to politicians. How about they offer some more funding to the Seattle Flu Study? I've had some arguments with Trevor Bedford, but he personally has done more good against COVID than the entire CDC, especially early in 2020. I'll bet he sure could use some funding to hire a couple more techs. Or maybe GAP could spin up similar tracking groups in other US cities. That sure seems like it would be more use than re-electing Elizabeth fucking Warren.
If they could raise enough money for a down payment, they were 5x short on startup costs, and/or would need to find a continuing source of income for maintenance and debt service.
Leveraging the city government to pay for it would be cheaper.
Plus what Very Wrong says about needing community and political buy-in.
You're just ignoring the costs of the government paying for it.
Option 1:
Raise $1M from donors, spend it on $1M of homeless services.
Option 2:
Raise $1M from donors, spend it on $1M of government lobbying, with probability p, government taxes $5M from citizens and spends it on $5M of homeless services.
From the donors' perspective, as long as p>20%, Option 2 is a good deal. Suppose p=40%. Then they leverage, in expectation, their $1 donation into $2 of homeless services. They have also leveraged $3 of *total spending* into $2 of homeless services, because 60% of the time their donations are completely wasted and the other 40% of the time their donations are spent on lobbying that directly produces nothing.
If GAP spends 60K on an ad buy to try and pass a sales tax in Colorado, then the exact same analysis applies. It is *always* more wasteful, because ads don't produce anything. At most they can redirect money to a different use.-
Ads can produce knowledge in the mind of their viewer, which can have value. Different uses of money have differential value. If the new use of money is more productive than the old use of the same money, value is created.
Imagine I run a small manufacturing business where my workers spend a lot of time stripping wires with a standard pliers-style stripper/cutter. Then one day, I see an ad for a much more efficient automatic self-adjusting wire stripper*. I learn of the existence of a better tool and recognize it could save my workers substantial amounts of time. I purchase them for the shop, increase my throughput, expand my business, and lower costs to consumers. Value is created, dependent on an ad.
This is not to say all or even most ads are like this - in fact I would say most are fighting for a bigger slice of a zero-sum pie of consumer spending on relatively elastic goods. But they can occasionally produce value.
*: These are a real tool that I learned about in the past few years and they radically improve the task of stripping wires. Would recommend.
There's no real issue with lack of structure that building a structure solves. Because the public (by which I mean "businesses and landowners") hates homeless people, and pays men with guns to come and destroy homeless encampments. In places that don't do this (eg: Rio, Kigali), those homeless encampments get gradually upgraded into normal neighborhoods.
what? the issue is probably more “building codes” than ... that, I don’t see under what law it’d be illegal to build a few story building with tiny rooms for homeless to sleep in (again aside from building codes that say the rooms have to be big and satisfy thousands of other constraints). But if you did make a building, and put the people in them, that’s not an encampment it’s a building and they no longer break laws.
Build a homeless encampment in, say, a church you purchased precisely for that purpose, and you will find yourself harassed by the state at the behest of businesses and landowners. You will find them pulling all your permits, double-checking the standard of accommodation, bringing up fire risks or COVID order violations or lack of mandated parking spaces or structural maintenance issues, in an attempt to condemn the shelter. You will find the municipality passing ordinances saying that you're not allowed to house more than N unrelated people in the same structure, or saying that your structure isn't in the zoning plan, or whatever. They will find a way, and men with guns will be dispatched, and the homeless will be extirpated.
The only way around that in the long run is to get some kind political buy-in from liberals, which is a barely-there thing anyway, because capital exerts strong pressure to kick them out, to let another city deal with the problem.
Ordinary people (not just "capital") don't like the homeless because they commit a great deal of crime. Ideally we'd punish the crime, but we as a society have decided we have "too many people in prison," so lots of people go for the next best option: thus these zoning laws, though there's more than just this going on there. Try to build anything at all in some cities and a horde of activists will try to shut you down.
Is that true? Like, real crime, or vagrancy? I thought people don't like them because they're dirty and frequently beg, which is off-putting.
Note that some of this is just extremely mentally ill people being mentally ill in ways that impinge on the neighbors, sometimes including assault, indecent exposure, vandalism, etc. And even pretty compassionate people don't really like being assaulted on the street by a crazy person.
and why do they do that
Did the shelter get built?
Not while I was there. I think the Salvation Army opened one on its own later.
Okay, it's a casual game and I haven't even played the trial version yet, but somebody seems to have made a game around the "is it ethical/utilitarian to steal and then give the money to charity?" question 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEbgagpzVhM&t=4s
How dangerous, really, is vaping (I'm speaking here of nicotine, not THC vapes ginned up in someone's garage)? I know the Brits have more or less decided it's not a big deal, but in the States it's being treated like a stepping stone to chasing the dragon in a trap house. Does anyone have any feel or knowledge for what (if any) the actual scientific consensus on this is, or even if there is one?
From a mental health perspective I think it's worse than smoking. Cigarettes force you to be outside and douse you with with a lingering smell which is basically a scarlet letter these days.
On the other hand, vaping is extremely convenient and discrete which encourages people to do it all day, and in settings where they wouldn't otherwise smoke (e.g. work, school).
So I think that one's addiction severity and associated mental health toll are likely to be less significant if they stuck exclusively to smoking.
https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/youth-tobacco-use/index.html
90%-99.9% less destructive, depending on how you react to the ability to craft your own dosing of nicotine; Keep it at cigarette exposure levels and it's nearly harmless.
The US is treating it this way for a few reasons: 1) Cigarette companies have been court-ordered to produce anti-nicotine ads, and the cigarette companies which don't run a successful vape juice company conveniently found they could use to cast extreme FUD on vaping without mentioning cigarettes.
2) Teen vaping went way way up, and then some idiot in a THC-vape-garage created the lipid pneumonia crisis with a brief obsession with the adulterant vitamin E acetate, which the cigarette companies successfully used to lobby liberals and the government to exacerbating their anti-vape FUD.
We invented a cigarette that basically causes no cancer or COPD/emphysema. Instead of pressuring all smokers to switch over that day, we adapted a decades-long quest to protect the tobacco industry's profits, by fighting this scourge. My friends and coworkers who still use cigarettes, when asked why they don't vape instead, reply with "I already tried quitting, but I'm not interested at the moment" or "It's just not the same", but most go with "Vaping is terrible for you too!".
This is your brain on neoliberalism.
Based on the timing of the "vape lung" panic (I think I remember there being a big wave of stories around Jan-Feb 2020), I'm tempted to speculate it was aggregated by misdiagnosis of early Covid cases before anyone in the US was really looking for it.
At most, this would be a minor contributing factor, though: it looks like the actual "Vape Lung" reported case count peaked in September 2019, which is way too soon for Covid.
Though teen vaping really does seem like a scary problem. Especially because they're anything but responsible with their dosing. Being able to smoke IN SCHOOL is a huge draw for kids, and it's my understanding that it reversed a lot of the progress made in combating nicotine addiction in children. I think that regardless of mortality-related consequences, intense substance dependence in children deserves a lot of
weight in the moral calculus.
Can any youths weigh in on this one?
22 year old here. Lots of kids have (correctly) put together the assessment that cigarettes = poor health + feel good, while nicotine vapes = feel good. This stuff was rampant at my school. Any kid with at least an inkling of rebellion in their soul would hit a vape when offered. There's still a good bit of stigma around smoking, but I think kids have been more willing to bum a cigarette then in the pre vaping era.
why is nicotine any worse than alcohol or caffeine or addys
We still get "Scientists discover [inconsequential trace amounts of toxin] Chemical X in vaping fluid" propaganda articles on the regular.
It's still not great. Nicotine itself apparently can harden your arteries, making heart attacks more likely. It also increases your heart rate and blood pressure on a short timescale, again which increases your chance of having a heart attack while using. Overall it seems like the risks are minor but present. Not sure of any info on the lungs.
Obviously cigarettes do that too and much more.
Less bad that smoking, but still bad. You're still filling your lungs with poison, just a milder one.
You do that every time you breath pure, fresh air. It's the dose that matters, and how do you sort the actual risk-vs-dose profile of straight nicotine out of all the FUD?
We already have a harder line, it just got ignored.
Scott, I’m guessing if you’re “squeezing in” Amsterdam, you don’t have a lot of time there. But I think you’d really enjoy the Ritman Library, if it’s open while you’re in town. It’s full of Rosicrucian and Neoplatonic mystic texts collected by the eccentric millionaire who invented the airline beverage cart.
Other top recommendations off the tourist beaten track are the eco projects at De Ceuvel in Amsterdam Noord, story nights (if they’re doing them) at Mezrab, and whatever is going on at Mediamatic. Best view of the city is from the cafe on the roof of the public library near Centraal Station. If you have a chance, grab a rijsttafel at Kartika on Overtoom, or some Surinamese food at Ram’s Roti on Van Galenstraat. We used to live in Amsterdam and these are the places we would take our visitors, and that we miss.
Throw New York and Munich in there and you can all talk about pop music.
Let's get away from arguing for a bit, here's a nice dance piece from last night's dance competition show (Chinese only, for the English subtitles you'll have to watch the full Episode 6):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTitVOttxC8
That's spectacular!
It is rather lovely, isn't it? The show is probably chock-full of propaganda, it's certainly chock-full of advertising (which is highly amusing), and probably scripted to the last degree, but it's also good fun and very good at hooking your attention as to what next week's episode will be.
From the comments:
Natasha M
2 days ago
i interpreted this as a dance about a student that was eager to play the instrument but the mentor wanted him to learn the small things, the student eventually starts following the mentor at first with uncertainty of his actions but he improves and eventually the mentor and student are moving together until the end, he receives the instrument and the mentor leaves him because he is ready to do it alone. that was beautiful
It is that, and I think it is also about the meeting of cultures (East and West) and one learning from the other.
This dancer, Zyko, has done a dance to "Ne Me Quitte Pas"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DDjFjnMrz8
I enjoyed this!
Glad you liked it, it was just a good artistic dance piece
GAP is using a payment processor that *REQUIRES* all of it's customers to be partisan. Either they are lying to us or lying to ActBlue. Either way, they're lying.
I think that's an unfair characterisation, I think they just went with something that was convenient.
I agree that the thumping mentions of "Democrat, Democrat, Democrat" in all the website stuff wouldn't encourage me, were I a Republican or other, to think that this wanted me to be involved with them; a cross-party appeal would do better, surely, if you want Congress to keep the funding in the budget?
Though I am amused by taxing weed in Denver to let the university have a research programme; that's a harmless kind of pork barrel project that will provide academic jobs and while I don't imagine they'll have any luck re: researching masks that people who do NOT want to wear masks of ANY kind will wear, it won't do any harm, either.
Other people further down make a more detailed case that this is strictly to fund mainstream Democrats. I will merely point out that there is no way they went with ActBlue except it's Democratic signaling. They *cannot* contribute to Republicans without losing ActBlue, so why would they go with a payment processor that cuts off their ability to work with the other side?
Because it's not a problem. They have no intention to do so.
I think this is very hopeful. If you were allergic to peanuts, and I knew it, and the most convenient sandwiches for me to buy to sell to people were PB&J, and I put up a sign that said "safe for people with peanut allergies", would that be "just went with something that was convenient", or would I be intentionally and knowingly misleading you to do something you would consider harmful?
I haven't been able to find that particular requirement anywhere in the terms and conditions, could you quote it please? The FAQ https://support.actblue.com/campaigns/faq/can-i-use-actblue/ says "If you’re a ... 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, the first requirement is that you’re a Democrat or working for progressive causes." -- "progressive causes" seems like weaselly language that could describe anything and everything, but in particular I'd need to be convinced that pandemic preparedness doesn't apply.
Would it change your mind at all to know that progressives have developed their own alternative ecosystem because they consider it too restrictive on what it permits? That it stifles challenges to the Democratic mainstream and alternative lefts like the Greens and the DSA?
The knowledge that there is an alternative ecosystem for funding progressive causes probably won't change my mind materially, no; there are many cases where multiple parallel ecosystems exist.
A substantiated claim that it stifles challenges to the Democratic mainstream and alternative lefts may change my mind about whether you are, in fact, *REQUIRED* to be partisan to use it. (Emphasis from OP.)
Then you are too credulous to understand politics.
I can point out multiple people on the left and right who claim to have been stifled by it. I can point out people who've been kicked off who claim it was because they didn't support the Democratic mainstream. I can point out entire ecosystems developed on the left and right because they consider it to not permit things outside the Democratic mainstream.
I can't point out a place where they explicitly say that's their policy because they won't say that. They will (as the policy you've read notes) have an official policy that's broad enough to allow such discrimination then do it in effect. This is the way things like this work.
I do hope you apply this standard consistently. For example, when Democrats claim the Republicans are racist I fully expect you to immediately demand them to produce direct statement in the party platform about racial inferiority. This isn't just sniping: you may well be that person. But I've been dealing with isolated demands for rigor on this claim all day.
More importantly, all that's necessary to prove they're lying about being non-partisan is to point to the policy you've found. They say you must be a Democrat or working for Democratic causes. Not that you only use ActBlue to raise from Democrats. That you yourself are one. Using ActBlue therefore definitionally means they're partisan and against Republicans.
The diatribe would be more convincing if instead of saying you *can* point to various things, you actually *did* point to at least one of them. Note I'm not accusing you of lying, nor claiming that you're wrong.
I agree that part of "progressive causes" not being well-defined is that just about anything can be defined to *not* be progressive, too.
I mostly don't hang out in circles where Democrats claim Republicans are racist, but yes, that's definitely wording to which I would object; are you implying you would not?
Note that I never made any claims about whether or not "they" (I presume you mean GAP?) are lying; I agree that if they actually wanted to position themselves as nonpartisan, they could've done approximately infinitely better. I asked whether soliciting donations through ActBlue *REQUIRES* GAP to be "Democratic" as opposed to merely "progressive." Like I said, evidence that ActBlue does not fund causes that are progressive but non-Democratic would convince me that the use of *REQUIRES* is justified.
I'm sorry, but I've been having this conversation about six times over in six places today. Mostly in bad faith. I take it you are trying to be hyper-rational. Fine, I can do that. I'll ask my question more directly: Your belief, if you are rational in a scientific sense, should be falsifiable. What evidence would falsify it?
"This brief post gives some background on Guarding Against Pandemics (GAP), which does non-partisan political advocacy"
You cannot use ActBlue and be non-partisan. "Progressive causes" cannot apply to "anything and everything". You can't use ActBlue to promote gun rights and pro-life campaigns.
So they either lied to ActBlue, are lying to donors, or are so deep in Team Blue that they lie to themselves that "Democrat" and "non-partisan" are the same thing.
Regardless, they cannot be trusted.
I'm not surprised the Effective Altruism has been co-opted to outright lie about Democratic PACs to trick people into donating money to left-wing groups, because rationalists are completely blind to deliberate deception, but I am disappointed.
re "rationalists are completely blind to deliberate deception": negative stereotypes have no place here as they are neither true nor kind (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/)
It's absolutely true, and necessary to establish why a partisan group flying partisan flags funding for 1 party managed to trick Rationalists into thinking it's non-partisan.
That you had to run straight to the moderation policy and not an argument makes clear that you're not claiming it's untrue based on facts, but because you don't like it and want it banned. This is another common failure of Rationalists - the conflation of Nice and True.
yeah man these Democrat voting center-left wing rationalists are sure dullard idiots getting tricked into donating to democratic causes aligned with their rationalist interests. big trick!
actually they’re just being reasonable
Congratulations, you found the exception. I don't care.
Nitpicking statements for technical precision is exactly the category of linguistic obstruction that resulted in the unnecessarily complicated and needlessly demanding and verbose language found within the legal profession until the late 20th century. This kind of lexical chicanery hampers communicative effort, increases mistrust, and causes many potentially productive discussions to be abandoned by traversing blind alleys of argument over whether a particular point was sufficiently qualified or hedged to be precisely accurate. Futhermore, your decision to immediately claim a violation of the rules (but in actuality only the rule 'I don't like what you have to say') isn't an attempt to produce a counterargument in a genuine discussion. It is merely a cheap ploy intended to put your target on the defensive, waste their time and preferably goad them into something actually reportable. I am not going to waste any additional chronological resources on this unproductive avenue of discussion, as the interaction with you has, at this point, produced only negative value and further interaction with you will, as best one can determine, result in a waste of the aforementioned chronological resources.
(Note I'm not Ben Cosman.) I'm genuinely curious -- is there any conversation that wouldn't waste chronological resources that could have been inspired from your comment asserting that rationalists are blind to deception? If yes, can you please give an example? If no, why did you post the comment in the first place?
I regret not discussing COVID more with rationalists in February.
Can't go back though.
Anyone want to preregister a prediction for Evergrande?
So... what will VOO open at on 4 October? And how can we think through this?
COVID dropped it something like 30% in two weeks, then it rebounded as quickly.
Is the implosion of the Chinese economy twice as bad as COVID, half as bad, or not at all bad?
I feel like March 2020 markets were pricing in the collapse of the global economy, to include China, so I'm going with less bad. I don't have strong intuitions on how much though. 65% chance of 400 to 350 by the opening on 4 October?
Some chance this will be contained in China. I'd say 10% but I'm really just guessing. There are lots of ways that economy is tied to the rest of the world, and a lot of ways it's isolated. There are a ton of people with more expertise than me who can game how that shakes out, my intuitions are really shaky here.
My prediction is that it'll be really bad for the Chinese economy but not have much effect on the global economy - between the pandemic and China's diplomatic stance, the West has already begun to reduce its dependence on trade with China. Here in Australia we might suffer more thanks to just how much of our exports is raw materials to China.
I don't know enough about stock markets to predict a specific price or anything, though.
Pre-registered prediction: S&P at 4400 on October 4. Money is fake and powerful people don't want the world economy to collapse.
Thanks for jumping in!
The end of day rebound looks good for you, or at least the over under of say around 400. Hard to believe "it's fine, we'll pay people in parking lots" is really a satisfying answer in a place this overbuilt, but it will be if everyone closes their eyes and wishes real hard that we didn't see anything here.
I'd push back on the explanation that powerful people can simply dictate economic outcomes... except that it might be truer in China than anywhere else.
That being said while I bet against individual black swans I believe generally in the importance of black swans. The extent of my preparation is a lot of tuna and water bottles.
FDA's advisory committee voted fairly heavily against approving third booster shots, the whole thing was 8 hours long and so I only listened to segments of it.
https://youtu.be/WFph7-6t34M
My Layman (familiar with statistics, unfamiliar with medicine) understanding of the state of the vaccines seemed to conform to the kinds of discussions and assumptions the meeting members had.
1) Vax effectiveness at lowering transmission rate reduces over time
2) Vax effectiveness at lowering severe outcomes (hospitalization/death) holds
3) Risk of Myocarditis is taken as credible but uncertainty exists around how large it is. Other risks of repeated doses were mentioned in some of the presentations but did not feature as prominently.
My tentative thought: A younger individual with 2 shots is already protected against adverse outcomes how much more they benefit from a third shot would be the change in the infection rate between the third and weakened second dose and then multiplied by the hospitalization and/or death risk which is going to be very small number. The committee wasn't comfortable in assuming the trade off between that and Myocarditis favored the third jab.
Did anyone watch or hear about this meeting? Am I missing something?
Overall I very pessimistic:
Other observations:
1. Anti-Vax or Vax Hesitant seem to be either using the raw trends in vaccinations and infections to argue not so subtly that vaccines are causing infections, or pointing to some countries like Israel which did not have their deaths/hospitalizations as front-loaded in 2020. The market for per-capita break downs is much smaller than the market for bullying and moral grandstanding.
2. Vaccination rates and lockdown intensities being positively correlated. A lot of people, myself included, got vaccinated despite not being particularly susceptible to the virus out of a hope that it would hasten a return to normalcy. Blaming the unvaccinated who represent on a per-capita basis a larger portion of the most severe outcomes is reasonable but it looks like there are sufficient number of people in positions of influence to maintain the social patterns of 2020 even in areas with >90% vaccination rates. Even if you imposed vaccination universally at gunpoint, the people who either go by covid case rates or insist that deaths must be prevented *at all costs* will probably have their way.
This is really too much for me. I've been a big fan of Scott's for a long time, but this uncritical endorsement of a group that is obviously lying about its intent is the last straw. I am cancelling my subscription.
I think lying is a harsh assessment. It's a function of the bubble they live in, where looking for a relatively easy way to handle payments for a PAC is via a Democrat-only source. At least one of the people involved in this, going by the 'about' page, graduated from what is presumably a 'conservative' university (the school is associated with this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_Schar) and while that doesn't indicate any sort of alignment, it does show that they're not "shilling for the Democrat Party" in disguise.
It's simply "guy who lives, works with and knows people in a Blue bubble lives, works with, and knows people in a Blue bubble who set up groups that use Blue systems without really questioning that". Presumably, if there's a non-partisan organisation out there that does the same work as ActBlue, they would consider using it - if they knew about it.
Doesn't make them or Scott liars, just ordinary people who, like fish, don't question the water they swim in.
The EA people *aren't* supposed to be in a Blue bubble. Neither is Scott. You can't trust someone just because they start by lying to themselves.
"Aren't supposed to be" is a nice idea, and for something like this I agree it is absolutely vital not to be partisan.
But EA *started off* in precisely this Blue bubble; the recent to-do on here about funding for attending universities is because the EA people all came from those universities (Oxbridge) and that's their automatic default for "where to go to meet like-minded people who are interested in these causes".
Look, I'm not American, so I can't claim to be Red Tribe *exactly* as Scott has defined it, but I'm rural peasant in my immediate ancestry. Part of my scepticism about EA endeavours was precisely because I could recognise it was Not For The Likes Of You, even if they all started off with the most pure of intentions. They were all nice, college-educated, middle to upper middle class, progressively-inclined, urban types. Why do you think I laughed my socks off, back in the days of the Vegan Menu War?
It would be lovely if they broadened their horizons beyond the Bay Area or similar enclaves, and I hope they do, but let's face it: even on here, there are not a whole heap of people who can recite tales of living in Red Tribe/non-middle class circumstances (there are some of us who have the "no running water in the house when I was a kid" experience, sure, but we're not the target market for these sorts of endeavours, even if they are trying to give grants so you can attend a posh uni).
That's why I'm pushing back on the part about "They are LIARS who are DELIBERATELY LYING", because I don't think it's that, I think it's just blindness. When I was young, I would know more people who went to Redemptorist missions than went to university. That's a function of the bubble *I* lived in.
We're *all* living in our own bubbles, and that's the good I get out of this place - that at least our bubbles touch and I get glimpses of a different bubble.
I vehemently hope the GAP people get the idea of finding another means of processing donations that is not tied to one particular political party, but I don't believe that immediate accusations of deliberate deception will bring that about. I know that if somebody accused me of being a liar and fraud, I would not be very inclined to examine their case.
I don't even care about the payment processor to be honest. You know that they're partisan because they are only funding Democrats. But even further up than that, you know they're partisan because their position is that Congress needs to "take a stronger line" and that "pandemic preparedness" is even remotely relevant to the outcomes we experienced over the past year.
That entire frame work is not compatible with red-tribe thinking. The fact that they promise to also donate to any hypothetical Republicans who adopt such a framework is irrelevant hogwash.
Imagine I started an organization in Ireland dedicated to unifying the Island under Catholic Republican rule. And someone came along and said, "Gee, that sounds pretty partisan!" and I was all "Au contrare! We will happily welcome any Protestants or Loyalists who also support the bright and glorious future of a free Republican Catholic Ireland!"
Like, no - that's not how it works. "Non-partisan" has an actual meaning and "open to Democrats and Republicans Who Agree With Democrats" ain't it.
I think Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen might like to discuss that point:
"To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country — these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissentions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter —these were my means."
Hey I don't know anything about Ireland - I'm just attempting to speak your language here!
Ultimately you aren't non-partisan if your group consists entirely of one-party, but you loudly declare you might, hypothetically, be open to recruiting members of the other party provided they agree with your party on the issues you deem important.
I would argue that there was a point in time in which "questioning the water he's swimming in" was Scott's entire MO. It's certainly what caused *me* to start taking interest in his writing, at the very least.
it is remarkably difficult to not do catastrophically and absurdly stupid things some of the time. Even if Scott did a serious moral error, everyone does that, and that’s not a great reason to declare someone universally bad. Dunno whether this was that even
I agree. As far as I can tell Scott was misled, by the group or someone associated with it. It happens. I will be interested to see if he retracts his previous statement.
I'm not declaring him universally bad. Just declaring that my pool of "donate to writers who will improve the world in ways I desire" money can be better deployed elsewhere.
If you don't mind sharing -- where is elsewhere?
Alex Berenson, for one.
Had to look up who that was and immediate results get me *very* disapproving articles about him and Covid, and Wikipedia tells me he is an author of spy novels/thrillers.
Is that the guy you mean?
Curiously, he’s not the only guy to pivot from writing novels to being a Covid crank
Yes. The mainstream hates him regarding Covid because he calls out their nonsense.
"Calling out their nonsense" is what Scott used to do - but has since decided he's more comfortable confirming it. That's fine - but I don't need Scott for that, I can just get an NYT subscription if that's what I'm into.
If you're a big fan of Scott's you'll know that should he find some half-reasonable evidence that what you say is true, he'd think about it, write about it, and if appropriate put a note on his mistakes page confessing to endorsing something without sufficient critical assessment.
Anyhow, I'll miss your comments if you stay gone, GoneAnon.
I hardly ever even comment here! I comment a lot on DSL and that will not change. Also I'll keep reading Scott, just no longer giving him money.
I'm honestly not trying to make a big deal out of this... just want him to be aware and provide feedback.
Fair cop - I guess it's your commenting at DSL that I notice.
Could you explain why you think they're obviously lying about their intent?
I hadn't heard of term before so currently have no view either way.
The details have been hashed out more than sufficiently below. They are lying about being non-partisan.
Nominative determinism watch: Alex Murdaugh
Planned obsolescence has always been unsustainable in my mind, but I'm starting to think that it might actually be an existential threat. A lot of economic statistics seems like a sham when you consider the incentives: reduce the lifetime of a product by 5%, and lo and behold, growth in that sector went up 5%! A simplistic take, but I think the basic idea is right.
Clearly this relationship establishes strong negative feedback loops pushing planned obsolescence throughout the economy to make numbers look good, but a lot of it it is a mirage, and the bill will come due. The waste is already prodigious, and while recycling could mitigate some of that, manufacturers are not incentivized to make their products easy to disassemble, recyclable, or repairable. Since they are not responsible for the full product lifecycle, disposal has become a large negative externality that governments "handle" poorly by just shipping that crap overseas. The policy incentives towards planned obsolescence are so strong that I can't imagine any politician having the courage to stop this freight train.
Some positive signs though: the right to repair movement is gaining steam, and this provides some incentives to engineer products to let users extend their life. I don't think it will be enough though, and like any growing movement, I fear it will probably end up being coopted by some political actors for other ends, or otherwise politically neutered.
Existential threat to what? You, your country, or humanity? I don't think it can be an existential threat to humanity, because there are high-level legal controls that can be deployed against it and if this becomes anywhere near existential in danger countries stand to benefit greatly from implementing those controls (Australia has a version of this where retail products get an automatic legally-enforced warranty for a specified lifetime; the lifetimes we have right now aren't especially long, but increasing them is obviously plausible).
Waste also only temporarily ties up most kinds of resources; if the price of raw materials goes up enough, what was landfill becomes a mine (for a particularly-gruesome example, Chisso dumped so much mercury in Minamata Bay that they ended up mining the sediment to reclaim it). Consumables like fossil and nuclear fuels obviously don't have this guarantee, but solar's getting so cheap these days that that's not especially relevant.
In a competitive market, planned obsolescence faces an insurmountable coordination problem. If GM makes shitty cars that wear out in five years, whether they do it on purpose or by accident, they'll progressively lose customers to Datsun and Honda, whose cars last ten years instead. And that is in fact what happened in the 01970s. If Samsung glues their phones shut so you can't replace the battery when it wears out, but Ulefone and Huawei don't, Samsung will progressively lose customers to Ulefone and Huawei, unless there's some other compensating disadvantage. (Apple of course can glue their phones shut with impunity because "intellectual property" laws grant them a monopoly in their market.)
E-waste disposal is not a large negative externality; it's an insignificantly small one. USAns produce 2 kg of garbage per day per person. A 200-gram cellphone every two years works out to 300 milligrams per day, an 0.02% increase in the waste stream. The waste from a single demolished building occupies as much landfill space as the cellphones of an entire city. People ship e-waste overseas either because someone overseas is willing to buy it or to keep basically fraudulent promises about recycling.
Unless you're talking about people junking Teslas and John Deere tractors?
Coordination often happens in competitive markets without even trying - if there are a small number of players. If Apple starts marking up their phone prices, Samsung might decide that increasing their prices on par with Apple's instead of lowering them to undercut Apple is a better decision - all things considered. It's a repeated game, and nobody really wants to sit on the margin where they have undercut all the other players in the market and but aren't making that much for themselves. Finding a new niche or branding strategy is often a lot more effective than undercutting competitors - you ideally want a market where you don't have competitors.
And yeah exact same economics applies to making long-lasting phones.
I realize I should amend that those aren't what I mean by "competitive markets"; those are uncompetitive markets. That's why I included that qualification in my comment above.
Yes, that is true. That's how GM's cars were so shitty until the 01970s.
How do you explain the dematerialization effects if you assume so much planned obsolescence? We use less materials to make a lot more stuff nowadays and that seems like the definition of a sustainable trend to me.
I'll use some made up numbers to address your specific question: if you use 30% less material but make them unrepairable in half the time so that you're churning out twice as many units in the same time frame (planned obsolescence), that's a less sustainable trend.
My understanding on the literature though is that at least the US economy is using less tons of materials per year now than in the 1990s or the 1960s. This would indicate that while your scenario is technically possible it is not occurring.
See the papers referenced in: https://reason.com/2019/10/09/the-economy-keeps-growing-but-americans-are-using-less-steel-paper-fertilizer-and-energy/
How do you explain how cars are so vastly more reliable and durable than they were 40 years ago?
Cars are not more durable. Crumple zones are an important safety enhancement that has saved lives but even small collisions become a write off. Cars in the past were built like tanks, so you might not survive but your car probably would.
Sorry if I was being a but rude. May I ask roughly how old you are? Your car comment makes me think you’re in your 20s.
Cars are not more durable? Ahahahahahahahaha did you know cars used to only have 5 digit odometers because it was considered a miracle if I car hit 100,000 miles.
My old Vette has 250,000 on its original engine and drivetrain (has had clutches replaced and the current clutch is on its way south). Until recently, it had its original alternator (awaiting a rebuild) and it either had its original lower radiator hose, or someone went to the trouble of finding an original date-coded GM radiator hose.
Local machine shop says I am not going to get more than another 200,000 out of that motor, plus a thousand or so drag strip passes. I know, anecdote is not data, but the old timers tell me that a old American car will last forever, as long as you don't wreck it and maintain it properly.
Ahahahhaah Vega, Pinto, Chevette. They screwed up the rust proofing on the Vega so bad they came pre-rusted.
“ It wasn't uncommon for rusted Vega front fenders to need replacing after only one or two seasons driving in the salted slop of northeastern winters. Even in states like California or Arizona where rust was almost unknown, Vega owners would see corrosion eating away at their cars.
The engine also had a barely adequate cooling system that combined with the delicate engine block for horrible results. When the engine got hot, which wasn't uncommon, the cylinders distorted and the piston rings wore off the exposed silica that was meant to provide a tough wall surface. Then, at best, the cars burned more oil. At worst, the distortion compromised the head gasket, caused the coolant to leak and eventually killed the engine.”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a6424/how-the-chevy-vega-almost-destroyed-gm/
If the only older American cars made were the Vega, Pinto and Chevette, you would have a point.
Planned obsolescence is possibly bad, but not all obsolescence is "planned" insomuch as "accounted for". Clearly, as you point out elsewhere, there is a distinct problem with appliances breaking much faster than they used to. As others point out: there are reasons for this beyond just being shoddy. But then there are technologies like cellphones and laptops. These are going to be obsolete/inoperable after a few years (2-3 years, usually) for a couple of reasons, no matter how well engineered they are. First: Lithium batteries generally only last about 1000 charge cycles. Assuming you charge your battery every night, that puts it as lasting about 3 years. Second: communication protocols and processing expectations change quite regularly. These are not software changes, but hardware changes, and that is why your invincible Nokia phone from 2002 is going to not work at all (no matter what battery is in it) in a year. The network it used is simply going to be gone. The only option to the mythical Nokia phone user is to buy a new phone, and this is before considering the fact that they already have been limited on features that were added over the last 20 years.
Now I support the right to repair movement and desire for companies to make their products less opaque, but that's not going to change the fact that progress in technology is expensive, and regular obsolescence is a feature, not a bug, to a society that values pushing the limits of technology. Development of new silicon is an iterative process, and a very expensive one. Having the ability to make faster, smarter, better, more efficient hardware comes at the cost of having a lot of turnover on the consumer end. If the majority of devices lasted 5 years, we'd see slower technologic growth, simply because nobody could afford to push the boundary because their revenue is consumer limited.
> But then there are technologies like cellphones and laptops. These are going to be obsolete/inoperable after a few years (2-3 years, usually) for a couple of reasons, no matter how well engineered they are. First: Lithium batteries generally only last about 1000 charge cycles. Assuming you charge your battery every night, that puts it as lasting about 3 years.
I recently had the guy across the street replace the battery in my phone. Normally I'd do it myself, but this phone was a little hard to open, and I was worried I'd order the wrong model of battery.
As for obsolete silicon, well, Moore's Law is over now. So until we get a new fabrication technology to replace photolithography, we aren't going to see the kind of constant rapid improvement we saw in the 01955-02010 period. We've been stuck at 3 GHz since 02005, and PC memory size has gone from, say, 1 GiB to 64 GiB in that time, which is a doubling every 2⅔ years. More recently it's more like a doubling every 4 years.
Communications protocols don't need to change regularly. We're having this conversation over IPv4, which has only changed a little bit since 01983. Wi-Fi can give you many more bits per second now, but an Apple toilet-seat iBook from 01999 can still negotiate an 802.11b connection with a modern Wi-Fi access point (just at slower speeds), and my Sun-3/60 from 01988 is perfectly capable of plugging into the Ethernet port in a modern home router, as long as you have a 10BaseT transceiver plugged into its AUI port. Cellphone networks are only different because you don't get to choose a different FCC if you don't like the FCC you have, but actually 2G GSM remains in service in most of the world, so your old Nokia phone will still work fine most places. Here in Argentina we still don't have 3G coverage in substantial parts of the country. The 3G spectrum is planned to be reassigned to 4G and 5G four years from now, but 2G will remain in the 850MHz band: https://www.argentina.gob.ar/sites/default/files/informe_consulta_publica_de_espectro_02.pdf
The vast majority of what we do with computers is not "pushing the limits of technology." Right now, for example, I'm typing a textual message on a keyboard; it's being represented in UTF-8 (invented 01992, ubiquitous in Plan9 that year) and rendered on the screen with word-wrap in a proportional font, like on the Macintosh in 01984 or Smalltalk-76 in 01976. Substack's shitty user interface is a lot less responsive on this 64-bit 2GHz AMD A10 than a Mac Plus was in 01990, noticeably lagging behind my typing. The only limit being pushed is the Wi-Fi signal strength (and a USB dongle would take care of that) and how shitty Substack's software can be and still work at all.
> First: Lithium batteries generally only last about 1000 charge cycles. Assuming you charge your battery every night, that puts it as lasting about 3 years.
There is no reason batteries can't be replaced. That used to be the norm.
> The only option to the mythical Nokia phone user is to buy a new phone, and this is before considering the fact that they already have been limited on features that were added over the last 20 years.
The phone modem can be modular. A 20 year old computer can in principle be put on a 5G network with a USB attachment. There are simply no incentives to design things this way, because this sort of obsolescence is incentivized.
> If the majority of devices lasted 5 years, we'd see slower technologic growth, simply because nobody could afford to push the boundary because their revenue is consumer limited.
I disagree. Do you think there is some necessity to go through all of the 250nm to 180nm to 130nm to 100nm stages ... that we went through? Silicon process could have just skipped some of the stages due to the lower demand.
The slower economic growth would have been seen as the bigger problem I expect.
No, it couldn't. Silicon is heavily process dependent. That means it's really difficult, and expensive, to skip steps. I'd go so far as to say that "skipping steps is impossible" in the sense that even if you never saw production of a stage, somebody would have had to make chips at that stage. And... silicon is very expensive to develop. The only reason it progresses is because manufacturers "know" they can recoup costs measured in billions for each new step of technology. Trying to skip steps would reserve technology for the elite and the government, because nobody could afford the chips being produced.
Are you claiming that if a targeted strike took out all existing 7nm, 10nm, and 14nm fabs, and we had only 20nm fabs left, we'd have to rebuild them all in the exact same order, going through 14nm, to 10nm to 7nm, and we couldn't skip from 20nm to 10nm or 7nm?
I strongly suspect that if you hit our silicon fabs tomorrow while people were working them, taking out everything below 20nm, the loss of knowledge would set us back to 35nm or worse. It isn't just about knowing how to do it, there's a lot of the process which is an art. Much like artists of yore, you need to do studies (small test runs) of a design before you can ramp up to mass production. It depends on many factors, including having stability in the impurities in the materials used. This is why when fabs get hit by earthquakes or hurricanes it takes years to get back to full scale production.
I agree there's a lot of practical knowledge in this domain. That still doesn't entail you can't skip steps. The challenges of 15nm probably share some overlap with 10 and 7nm, but not all because sometimes the technology shifts dramatically to get to the next step and some of those tricks are no longer useful. So I still don't see how it follows that you couldn't skip 15nm to 10nm on the same timeline. It wouldn't necessarily be a neat "skip every other shrinkage", but it's not impossible as you were implying.
"Do you think there is some necessity to go through all of the 250nm to 180nm to 130nm to 100nm stages ... that we went through? Silicon process could have just skipped some of the stages due to the lower demand."
So you'd want them to go from 20nm to 15nm and be able to make things that are lot faster and use a lot less energy but just...not? And wait till they get to 10nm or 5nm? Why?
I believe I've listed many of the harmful systemic reasons in this thread behind revising this constant churn. In a world in which this churn is not incentivized, the economics of going to 15nm as fast as possible just wouldn't make sense because products would last longer, so the investment in the fab wouldn't pay off. They'd skip to 10nm or 7nm along the same timeline we experienced in the world of churn. The point being that "progress" wouldn't slow in some absolute sense, we'd just skip steps along the way.
To add to the ecological reasons for silicon specifically, silicon manufacturing is a dirty process, and the less of it we need the better.
"Clearly, as you point out elsewhere, there is a distinct problem with appliances breaking much faster than they used to"
Is it that or is it that things don't break more often it's just that appliances prices have fallen by between 50% and 70% while the price or repairs has remain constant, so it's often cheaper to just replace it?
Partially it is growing labor costs, but many things simply cannot be repaired anymore. See batteries that begin to be impossible to replace, even in some laptops.
See lamps with impossible to replace LED bulbs.
Isn't some of this nonreplaceability due to other design factors, though? Don't get me wrong: I like the ability to replace batteries, in the abstract. I used my Lumia Windows Phone until this past March, replacing the battery when it needed it, until it finally failed in a way where it wouldn't charge the new one.
I ended up replacing it with an iPhone, which doesn't have a replaceable battery--something which annoyed me. However, what it does have is a much higher tolerance for immersion, which I found out when I dropped my few-week-old phone in the water. Having a tightly-sealed case factory sealed with adhesive dramatically helps with something like that, and reduces both assembly cost and phone size.
So there's more of a tradeoff there than just "planned obsolescence".
> a much higher tolerance for immersion, ... Having a tightly-sealed case factory sealed with adhesive dramatically helps with something like that
The standard solution to this is O-rings with grease, squished tightly into a groove with a screw thread which itself does not bridge the seal (so the thread doesn't create a leakage path). Things built that way can survive immersed in seawater for many years without losing the ability to open them. If that's too much weight, sealing the case with soft silicone instead of something like epoxy still permits no water ingress, and is actually more resistant to impact-induced leaks rather than less.
But Apple doesn't want you to open the case, because that reduces their bargaining power relative to their customers, which means they can't extract as much of their customers' money.
What’s the price of the laptop? If your $150 Chrome book needs a $50 battery you’re probably just going to toss it.
Planned obsolescence only works like that if nobody notices or cares. Reducing the quality of a product in a noticeable way will generally shift the demand curve downwards. And deliberately reducing durability also tends to have a negative impact on your brand image once word gets around.
Product disposal as an externality is already partially internalized: local governments generally charge residents in part based on volume of trash produced (e.g. offering different rates for different trash can sizes), so if this is priced accordingly the cost of product waste is internalized to the end user (who can pass it back to the producer by taking disposal into account when assessing the value of a prospective purchase). The problem is that recycling of marginal materials is heavily subsidized and poorly handled (e.g. shipping overseas to vendors who dump unprofitable "recyclables" in a river), and the obvious fix is to limit free recycling pickup to materials that actually have scrap value (mostly aluminum, steel, clear glass, and clean cardboard).
Also, I doubt consumer durables are a significant part of the waste stream. My household waste stream seems to be dominated by soiled diapers, cat litter, food and beverage containers, boxes and packing material, and waste paper. We don't often need to discard electronics, appliances, etc, and when we do they usually go to a local private junkyard that takes e-waste for free and will pay scrap metal value for non-ewaste appliances.
A better fix is to not offer free recycling; instead, let different recyclers bid on your recyclables, and award them to whoever is willing to pay the most for them, as you are doing with the private junkyard. Anything that nobody is willing to pay for (for example, most steel) you can pay the landfill to accept. Free recycling is mostly a scam.
There are things in the municipal solid waste stream you don't see much of in your household waste stream. Demolition rubble, for example, is a significant percentage of it. Medical waste poses special problems, and commonly hospitals run their own incinerators for this reason.
> Planned obsolescence only works like that if nobody notices or cares.
In looking at the landscape, few people seem to know or care about many such things. Industries that plan for obsolescence are adopting the tactics of the fashion industry which has perfected this sort of churn.
> Reducing the quality of a product in a noticeable way will generally shift the demand curve downwards.
They just reduce price to compensate. Sticker price tends to matter more because disposal and long-term sustainability isn't factored in.
> Product disposal as an externality is already partially internalized: local governments generally charge residents in part based on volume of trash produced (e.g. offering different rates for different trash can sizes), so if this is priced accordingly the cost of product waste is internalized to the end user (who can pass it back to the producer by taking disposal into account when assessing the value of a prospective purchase).
The cost of disposal is often years after the purchase. I'm not sure this is an effective feedback loop to internalize this consideration.
> Also, I doubt consumer durables are a significant part of the waste stream.
It's increasing. Look at cellphone churn. But my point wasn't specifically about electronics, merely that that's where I most recently noticed the trend increasing. Household appliances are now breaking down within 2-3 years rather than the 10+ years that used to be the norm. Repairing them has absurd labour costs, and the manufacturers often don't even keep inventory on parts for more than a few years (LG and Samsung are terrible at this here in Canada).
There has been a strong trend towards disposal culture driven by planned obsolescence, and political and economic incentives are strongly aligned with that trend, and the only countervailing force I've seen to oppose it is the right to repair and a growing awareness of the first world's ecological impact (but that hasn't amounted to much yet aside from Twitter memes shaming excessive packaging).
The fashion industry is a special case, because the customers want something new — you can't prove you are up to date on fashion by wearing last year's clothes. Beyond that case, I think planned obsolescence is mostly mythical. Firms could make products that lasted longer, but at a cost. When it is worth the cost, they do.
Most industries are not monopolies, and customers value durability along with other characteristics of the products they buy.
"Reducing the quality of a product in a noticeable way will generally shift the demand curve downwards."
"They just reduce price to compensate. "
Think through the logic of that. They make light bulbs that last one year instead of two. To reduce price to compensate they cut the price in half. They are now selling twice as many bulbs at half the price, so their revenue is the same as before. They are producing twice as many bulbs, so their costs are twice what they were before. That does not look like a sensible policy.
> customers value durability along with other characteristics of the products they buy
The problem is that it is really hard to judge durability when I buy things.
As result, even people caring about it cannot really reward producers making good things. It is a bit better in some specialized areas where high-quality durable products remain in production.
If you compare the inflation adjusted price of a microwave or a stove or a refrigerator from an era of "greater durability" to today's standard prices, I have at least concluded that the equivalent thing is commercial grade equipment. If I buy a Viking stove, I expect it to last a lot longer than a GE, but I pay about the 1960 equivalent percentage of my income for it, which is painfully high. On the other hand, repair services, parts availability and such mean that it will last *far* longer. I make the tradeoff I make, but consumers do have choices that 1) advertise durability and repairability and 2) do not choose to spend the money to go that direction on average.
This isn't really true. There's numerous methods products use to signal product lifespans. Warranties are a classic one. Expiration dates are another.
Planned obsolesce as a way to increase profits is mostly a myth, as far as I've seen. It's based on the (false) idea that prices are primarily a matter of the cost of producing the good itself. So by increasing the demand for production it increases profits.
However, product lifetime planning is definitely a thing. The idea is that engineering a product to last longer than its lifespan is a waste of resources. If a computer is going to be used for, on average, three years, investing in making it last longer than three years is a waste. The classic example of this are tanks in World War 2. Civilian cars were designed to last for decades. Tanks were designed to last only a few years. This way they could make more tanks more quickly. And besides, after a few years either the tank would be destroyed in combat or the war would be over.
You can usually increase product lifespan. The question is whether people will pay higher prices for a product that lasts longer. Clothes is another classic example: if clothes are only going to be worn for a season why make them sturdy enough to last longer?
> Planned obsolesce as a way to increase profits is mostly a myth, as far as I've seen.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
Cartels/monopolies are an exception. The article repeatedly points out that unmet market demand meant there was constant attempts at defection which the cartel punished. This is one of many tools monopolies use to increase profits.
> That does not look like a sensible policy.
Exactly, which is why they don't reduce the price by half, but maybe 10%. You don't see the decrease in durability upfront, so it's a hidden cost.
Light bulbs are a good example, because the cartel of light bulb manufacturers actually invented planned obsolescence back in the early 20th century:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
> Firms could make products that lasted longer, but at a cost. When it is worth the cost, they do.
This is what I've been saying isn't it? That the incentives to produce lower cost, lower quality goods establish negative feedback loops in economic policies that incentivize further this planned obsolescence to drive growth. It's exactly what the Phoebus cartel pioneered.
One of the checks on these feedback loops would be factoring the full lifecycle of goods, including all negative externalities like the environmental costs. This would incentivize more durable products, but these checks and balances don't exist, so we have a runaway train scenario.
So when you say they do that "when it is worth the cost", I'm saying it would be worth the cost if they had actually pay the true costs.
Appliances used to last longer but they also used to cost a lot more. I don't think planned obsolescence is giving the manufacturers a free lunch, they're just picking a different point on the price:durability curve.
I'm not sure appliances used to last longer. They used to break down and get fixed.
The issue now is with prices so much lower the gap between "have a guy come out and fix it" and "buy a new one" has shrunk.
If it's 1975 and a low end dishwasher is an inflation adjusted $1500 then it if breaks and it's $25 for the guy to come out and another $25 to fix it you're going to fix it. If your $489 Whirlpool breaks and it's $150 for the guy to come out and look at it and nother $150 in parts and labor to fix it then you're just going to buy a new one.
Looking at it another way -- if you buy a Viking stove, you're much more likely to get it fixed and it's closer to the inflation adjusted price than the models you'd typically see in Home Depot. You can go similar commercial grade for things like refrigerators and dish washers and then you get a bigger repair industry since the commercial type equipment is repaired much more frequently.
> The issue now is with prices so much lower the gap between "have a guy come out and fix it" and "buy a new one" has shrunk.
Very likely a big factor. Do you think the cost for the dishwasher parts have fallen at the same rate as the cost of the dishwasher itself? I doubt it very much, and this is a tactic I'd expect to see in a system geared towards planned obsolescence.
I recently had cause to fix some LG and Samsung appliances and learned they now only stock parts for 2 years. How long do you think you could get parts for that 1975 dishwasher?
Check out:
https://www.thepeoplehistory.com/70selectrical.html
A Kenmore dishwasher in 1978 was $279.95 or $1,225 adjusted for inflation. Today an equivalent Kenmore dishwasher is $405 - less than 1/3 the price.
I just want to say I appreciate you linking to actual evidence to back up your claims.
It's not just cost vs durability. There's a four-way trade-off between cost, performance, durability, and energy/water efficiency. In the US at least, the government has mandated substantial improvements in energy and water efficiency for major appliances, and as you note prices have gone down, so some combination of performance and durability needs to suffer. This has been offset to a degree by technological improvements, but often not completely.
And in areas like HVAC where efficiency improvements are driven more by consumer demand than by regulatory fiat (i.e. where buyers are actively shopping on efficiency over and above the regulatory minima because the energy costs are understood to be a substantial fraction of TCO), demand for durability has gone down because end-of-life is influenced by technological improvements: e.g. replacing a decade-old air conditioner with a new unit is often a rational decision, even if the old unit is in perfect working order, because the energy savings of the new unit are enough to justify the cost of replacement.
I disagree. They used to cost a lot more because their construction and the materials that were mined required a lot of labour. Automation and economies of scale have solved that problem.
Frankly, they still should cost a lot more because the product lifecycle is not factored into the price, as I described above, and this has led to all sorts of perverse incentives.
There are a number of economic studies that show we use fewer pounds of materials in modern production for almost everything than we used to. You're right that those materials also cost less, but we're still using less of them, so they shouldn't necessarily cost more than they used to.
I don't see this as a big problem. Calling it an existential threat baffles me. The market can handle this just fine: if e.g. all dishwasher manufacturers start doing planned obsolesce on dishwashers, someone will make a dishwasher that's pay-per-use ("dishes as a service") and the problem is solved. This only gets easier as the economy becomes more app-driven.
Dishwashers already implement planned obsolescence. It's already happened in all of your goods, and the fact that you haven't even noticed is exactly the insidious nature of the problem, and the incentives are structured to continue this trend.
Suggesting dishes-as-a-service would somehow solve the problem completely ignores the reality of human behaviour. As-a-service endeavours virtually all fail because ownership is important, services are expensive, and availability is insufficient (is that service going to work in rural areas?).
Finally, capitalists and free market enthusiasts decry socialism and government social programs as "digging holes and filling them back up", but planned obsolescence is basically the same thing, just the capitalists reap the rewards. This is building an economy that people's livelihood depends upon on a house of cards, in addition to wasting valuable natural resources that are improperly priced because the full lifecycle costs are not factored into the price of goods.
"Dishwashers already implement planned obsolescence."
You haven't established that. In 1975 appliances were 3x more expensive so if something broke (and it broke) it was repaired. Now the cost of repairs similar in inflation adjusted terms but appliances prices 1/3 of what they were things just get replaced.
Maybe I was unclear, I know this is a problem with dishwashers already. Sure, ownership matters, services are expensive and availability is insufficient. Still, this puts a cap on how bad the planned obsolesce can get. Maybe I made to strong of a claim when I said that the market will handle it "just fine", the market will handle it in a less then ideal way but the market puts limits on how bad the problem can get.
My thesis is that the problem is already unsustainably bad, that there's still room for it to get even worse, and that the economic upheaval that will follow trying to correct course almost certainly be disastrous. Maybe this is just a pessimistic week for me.
Two ideas popular in blue-tribe spaces are cities and economic equality. Aren't these in conflict? Cities concentrate wealth. We live in them because the connections and specializations they afford make us more productive and therefore richer. We live in them because to do so is a desirable luxury, and we're rich enough to afford it.
It seems to me that a serious program of economic equality would be devastating to city dwellers. I mean, the city itself is a luxury. The express purpose of taxing the rich, who city-dwellers are, is to inhibit luxury. And it seems like it would do that. Tall buildings aren't cheap. Elevators aren't cheap. Subways aren't cheap. With incomes driven towards those in rural Iowa, you couldn't have those things. With the resources of rural Iowa, you're going to have the material conditions and lifestyle of rural Iowa.
So why are the people calling for this the ones currently living in New York and not Iowa? What gives?
A comment I haven't seen in this thread that I think is worth noting is that there currently seems to be a substantial population of people who live in rural areas who like living in rural area/choose to live in rural areas and this population seems to exceed the number of good rural jobs.
If cities truly became a source of economic inequality you'd expect people in rural areas to have a stark choice - live in a rural location & have less money or move to an urban location and have more money. And once that started happening, I'd expect to see rural jobs pay more as there was a shortage of workers.
This is of course disruptive to people currently in rural areas, but almost any form of progress has this effect - there were disruptions as American went from farming to manufacturing and manufacturing to information. But at least for the first transition the benefits well outweighed the costs.
All that said, I do think theres a certain effect where people writing about their imagination of the future tend to be from cities and imagine city-centric futures. But I don't think that's incompatible with equality, just incompatible with non-urban futures.
I wouldn't expect to see rural jobs pay more, because rural jobs don't have nearly the top-line productivity that urban jobs do. A Google engineer, by virtue of working at Google scale, could be personally responsible for tens of millions in revenue. It is no trouble to pay him a few hundred grand. A rural business may barely clear that in a year. It would not be sustainable if it had to pay all that to one IT guy.
That said, in rural areas you can also have a very comfortable standard of living on an amount of money that would not be sufficient to share a studio apartment in a major city.
So assuming this was true - that all urban jobs were going to pay more than all rural jobs (even after accounting for cost of living), I'd expect nearly everyone to take the urban jobs, resulting in only highly profitable companies existing in rural areas. And to be clear - I think with a lot of large scale farming and other work that can only be done in rural areas I definitely think there would be some high paying rural jobs, just not as many as there are currently people in rural areas.
Now I don't think that'll actually happen, both because some people prefer to live in rural areas even if they're paid less and because I think were very far from a world in which all urban jobs look like Google engineers rather than average working class jobs. But from an equality point of view, I think that if we solved the issue of income inequality in cities but not between cities and rural areas then I would expect some sort of rearrangement. I don't think that's going to happen, but back to your original point, don't think there's any intrinsic economic inequality between cities and rural areas.
1. It's not necessarily true that "the express purpose of taxing the rich is to inhibit luxury". You might instead want to do it because you want to give money to the not-so-rich, and the rich have some money you can take for that purpose.
It's true that people calling loudly for high taxes on rich people sometimes motivate it by complaining about the luxurious lives the rich lead. But in my experience the people they're usually complaining about are billionaires or at least many-million-aires, and no realistically feasible level of taxation is going to stop those people being able to afford luxuries on the level of "living in a city".
2. I don't think any halfway-reasonable person, whether leftish or rightish, wants everyone having incomes at the rural-Iowa level. (At least, not according to my notion of what incomes in rural Iowa are like; I've never actually lived there and could be wrong.) Even if it's true that increasing taxation would bring everyone to that level -- I don't actually see any reason to think it is -- people advocating higher taxes don't think it would, so asking "why do they want everyone living like rural Iowans?" doesn't make any sense; they don't want that.
3. The US median household income is something like $48k/year. The US _mean_ household income (which will serve as a naive estimate of what everyone might get in some hypothetical world where _complete_ uniformity of income was somehow enforced, though approximately 0% of people calling for higher taxes actually want that) is I think more like $60k/year. The median household income in NYC is about $58k/year. So it doesn't seem to be clear that even complete equalization would mean that no one could afford to live in a city.
I don't mean everyone would live as rural Iowans do today. But I do mean that in the new world, each rural Iowan and each New Yorker would have roughly the same take home pay. And isn't that a big problem for New York? Cities are expensive. If they don't also come with higher earnings, won't it be pretty unfavorable to live in one?
This seems like an entirely different argument from the one you were making before ("with incomes driven towards those in rural Iowa, you couldn't have those things"). I think the new one is better.
I think Furrfu may be right that cities aren't fundamentally more expensive -- the difference in housing costs isn't because it's more expensive to provide housing (etc.) in cities, it's because more people _want_ to live in cities. And that may be partly because of those higher incomes. So if incomes became much more equal, then cities might be in less demand -- but that would mean that the cost of city housing would drop, perhaps very drastically. So if you're suggesting a process like more equality -> city incomes much lower -> cities super-expensive relative to not-cities without main attraction of cities -> everyone leaves the cities -> cities die, I don't think that's right. It's ... -> cities super-expensive -> less demand for city living -> city housing prices go way down -> more demand for city living, and eventually an equilibrium is reached. If (1) cities are more expensive almost entirely because of high demand and (2) the high demand is almost entirely because of better pay for city jobs, then what will happen is that cities will stop being more expensive to live in than not-cities. If it turns out that other things make them more desirable living places (e.g., easier access to culture, social venues, shops, entertainment, etc.) then they will still be more expensive but not by nearly so much as now.
I don't see anything to worry much about here. (At least, not in terms of making things worse _on the whole_. People who have a lot of money tied up in city housing might find this an unappealing prospect.)
Especially as (I repeat) basically no one is actually looking to equalize incomes completely, and most likely there will always be some jobs that are paid say 10x as much as others, and most likely those will always tend to be in cities.
Right, housing in cities is more expensive because cities make people rich, so richer people bid up the price of housing. Land in Iowa averages about US$2 per square meter; with a 20-story high-rise, that averages out to US$0.10 per square meter. Land in Manhattan isn't inherently very different from land in Iowa, and anyway you don't have to pay the manufacturing costs for the land in either place; unlike Palm Jumeirah, it occurred naturally.
There are some other things in cities that are more expensive than in rural areas. Taco Bell food, for example, costs two or three times as much. That's because Taco Bell in Manhattan has to compete in the labor market with much richer opportunities than Taco Bell in Pella (Baumol's concern), and in Manhattan their workers have to compete with stockbrokers for housing (George's concern), so Taco Bell has to pay their workers more in Manhattan.
But most goods and services in Pella, let alone in the middle of the corn fields, are enormously more expensive than in Manhattan. Transportation, sushi, machining, refrigeration, electricity, plumbing, Ethiopian food, fashionable clothing, Broadway musicals, poetry readings, welding, airlifts to the hospital, and so on.
It's not so much that Pella has an abundance of good sushi available for the buying in restaurants and the price is just too high; it's that if you want good sushi at all, you have to have it shipped in from elsewhere packed in dry ice.
People don't value cash per se, they value what cash can buy, which is leisure time, access to interesting activities, power and influence, security. But people value a different mix of those things, which is why some people spend their free time gardening and others go on cruises or skydive. It seems reasonable to assume that the total utility of city and country dwellers is pretty much equal these days, as otherwise there would be a massive flow in one direction or the other.
As a crude approximation, we might say people who live in the city value cash more than, say, free time or peace and quiet at night, and people who live in the country are the opposite. That is, the marginal utility of cash is higher for those in the city, and a forceable transfer of cash from city to country on utilitarian grounds would be totally brain-dead, as you would be taking a resource from those who value it more and giving it to those who value it less, just the opposite of what would maximize utility across the board.
So I would say the actual goal here is probably rather different: the wealthy urbanites have a local problem, which is the poor and criminal urbanites. Under normal circumstances, they would have to solve that problem themselves, because the country doesn't give much of a shit about it, not suffering from it directly. However, if the city can persuade the country that it *is* a national (or at least state-wide) problem, then the city can get the country to shoulder at least some of the costs of solving the problem.
The thing missing from your analysis above I think is whether the urban wealthy have to spend more or less money in ways they dislike in the presence of wealth-transfer taxes. If the answer is they have to spend *less* -- because what they lose in taxes is more than made up for in, say, less spending on security guards, gated communities, big police forces and a massive judicial system, special education programs, drug rehab -- then this is a win, even from the purely financial point of view.
<i>It seems reasonable to assume that the total utility of city and country dwellers is pretty much equal these days, as otherwise there would be a massive flow in one direction or the other.</i>
There is in fact a massive flow in one direction: toward the cities. Just a couple of years ago we passed 50% of the population living in cities for the first time in history. So it's not reasonable to assume that.
It gets floated periodically that people in HCOL metros are "not actually rich," despite high incomes, because those incomes can barely cover crappy homes. And every time it's met with derision and scorn. Tax structures that give HCOL dwellers credit for this, like SALT and MID, are widely considered regressive and unjust. So I do think we value cash per se from an inequality perspective.
The latter part of your perspective is interesting. But I do wonder whether the net effect would be _everyone_ in the cities making transfer payments to everyone outside them.
One thing that cash offers is the ability to purchase lots more of things that cost about the same everywhere. For instance cell phones, which are not produced locally in New York City or anywhere in Iowa, have a cash cost about the same in either place. Also, Amazon.com orders are going to cost about the same regardless of where they are being shipped, so having more cash is a huge benefit on the types of things you can get sent to you from a warehouse.
Where cash doesn't matter as much are local goods, which have to compete on pricing up goods that cannot be outsourced, especially land but also very much labor. And between land and labor, just about everything in a city costs much more than it does in rural areas. Again, not things sent to a city, but things found in the city.
>Tax structures that give HCOL dwellers credit for this, like SALT and MID, are widely considered regressive and unjust.
I don't think this is true. In particular, when the Republicans limited SALT a few years back, that was widely viewed in blue spaces as a blue state tax and a red way to injure blue states and cities.
Just to nitpick slightly... there isn't quite a balance between those who choose a rural life and those who prefer the joys of urban living. The last I heard, about a million people a week move from the countryside to the city (worldwide). In 2008 for the first time in history half of humanity lived in urban environments and this will reach 80% around 2050.
My guess is that many of the problems of city living have been solved or ameliorated and the attractions remain the same. Think cholera, crime and congestion for the former, and work, wealth and sex for the latter.
Note that the 80% figure counts suburban environments as “urban”, as well as counting small towns.
But even when you distinguish those things, in places like the United States and Europe, people are still moving from rural areas and small towns to big cities, medium cities, and their suburbs. People’s location is sticky, and people will usually be located at somewhere like an average of where they would actually have their own best quality of life given current preferences and social and technological conditions, and where they would have given the conditions of several decades ago.
Cities concentrate wealth *geographically* but not *socially*. I know people who live in cities in 20-square-meter apartments that don't even have their own bathrooms, but who nevertheless have immediate access to world-class health care and transportation.
Let's look at the transportation question more closely. Living in a city I don't even need a car; I can get by with public transit and the occasional taxi. Everyone I know who lives in the country has at least one pickup truck and one car; more typically they have one broken truck, one working truck, two or three broken cars, and one working car. Most of the transportation in Buenos Aires, a city of 3 million people, is provided by 18,000 buses (about 20 seats each, though holding closer to 50 people at rush hour) and 37,000 taxis. That's about 6 people per public transportation seat, not counting Uber, Didi, and the comparatively small train system; compare to 8 private transportation seats per person in the countryside. Most people in Buenos Aires don't have private cars, but there are about 1.3 million total cars (mostly private), so if we did a more careful breakdown it might turn out that 1 million people have 5 million seats of private transportation (5 seats per person), and the other 2 million people share the half-million seats of public transportation (0.25 seats per person, 4 people per seat). You can see that the city requires much less capital per person to provide much more service.
The same thing is true of refrigerators (my apartment doesn't need one because I have a grocery store a block away which is full of them), medical care, insulation (my apartment only has a single 3-by-3-meter wall exposed to the outside air, dramatically reducing my air conditioning needs), welding equipment (every farmhouse I've ever seen has multiple welding rigs), fancy food (if you want it in the country you'd better learn to make it), electric service (a friend of mine who lives in the country is looking at having two electric poles installed to provide power to part of his property, while my building has a single power drop to provide power to 40 apartments), sewing machines, books, and so on. Tall buildings *are* cheap. An elevator may seem expensive, but the elevator in my building belongs to all 40 of those apartments, so it is actually cheap. A bus might seem expensive, but Buenos Aires has one bus per 170 people.
In the country you have to provide everything yourself, which means massive overinvestment in capital equipment that lies idle 99% of the time, while simultaneously making do with extremely inadequate equipment; that's a recipe for the material poverty you mention ("incomes...in rural Iowa"), with the consequence that all but the richest people pretty much have to live in large family groups that own those resources collectively. In the city you don't have to own anything you don't want; you can pay its owner to use it briefly when you need it.
So, contrary to your assertion, city-dwellers don't live in the city as a luxury which makes them poorer due to its heavy expenses. On the contrary: they are rich because the city gives them so much. Poor people leave the country to move to the city to stop being poor, as they have for centuries, and nowadays it mostly works, thanks to modern sewage treatment. The reason there aren't subways in rural Iowa is that above-ground train tracks are cheaper, and those are all over rural Iowa. (Have you ever actually *been* to rural Iowa?) But because Iowa, including Des Moines, has 22 people per square kilometer and Manhattan has 29000 people per square kilometer, Iowa would need something like 36 to 1300 times as much train track per person to provide the same level of service, depending on how you define it, so if you live in rural Iowa, you need a car. And a pickup.
What the country gives you is independence and self-sufficiency, at the level of the family group. The city gives you independence and self-sufficiency *from* your family group, which is great if you're gay and they're fundies, or if you just like dancing in a miniskirt. But it takes away your independence from *the government*, which you come to depend on to maintain the roads, operate the subways, and keep nightclub bouncers from raping you.
I lived much of my life in rural Iowa. It's fine, provided that, as you alluded, you gotta be able to make your own entertainment.
I am good at occupying myself, too good, in fact, so rural Iowa suited me just dandy.
Thanks for this perspective. It seems plausible, but for the productive US cities, the housing cost premium is so huge that commodities like energy and manufactured goods like cars or refrigerators are trivial in comparison. We're talking single digit thousands vs. millions. It seems like if you have the same income either way, you're much better off vying for factory output than for space.
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I don't agree that they're trivial in comparison. People typically spend about a third of their income on housing (half in the most expensive cities) and the remaining two-thirds or half on commodities like energy and manufactured goods. (Savings are valuable only because they are eventually spent on goods and services that are consumed; the miser's lump of gold in a hole in the ground was worthless.) Getting 10 times as much for your money when it comes to everything besides housing, plus a much wider range of job opportunities, is enough of a draw that people constantly move to cities.
Well said, I'd only add that historically cities have also been great for improving the economic status of family units at least as much as they have individuals, which is why you have tenement buildings that made the Lower East Side of New York the densest area on earth in the mid 1800s (1,100 people / acre).
No family would willingly live there if not for the opportunities available compared to rural poverty
Right, the cities afford better opportunities, which is what draws people to them under a regime of inequality. What happens when urban opportunities are the same as rural?
I don't think the objective of "reducing economic inequality" is to somehow prohibit residents of the Lower East Side from applying to work as anything other than a farmer or homemaker, much less prohibit them from taking the bus or ordering Chinese food, so urban opportunities will still be better even if massive transfer payments to the rural poor compensate for the inequality on a nominal-dollar basis.
In addition to what zrezzed said, it's quite common for people in general to have multiple desires that, when you're near the pareto frontier, are in tension with each other, so that you can work towards both, but the amount that you prioritize one vs the other matters.
I don’t think they are in conflict at all.
While the conveniences of a city may feel like a luxury, an overall increase in the quality of life of a society will be cheaper if investments are made in a more dense area.
A tall apartment building isn’t cheap, but it’s less resource intensive than providing an equal number of single family housing for an equal number of people. The same goes for subways: urban transportation is far less resource intensive than suburban / rural transportation of the same number of people / quantify of goods (though, the real-world costs may not reflect this for independent reasons).
Also, how does improved wealth distribution drive incomes towards those in rural Iowa? Your whole argument seems to assume that, but I’m not sure how that follows.
My understanding is that the goal is all Americans get the same or very similar take-home pay. I suspect most people are thinking about this at the level of their own metro area, where the people in the trailer parks and the people in the mansions would all converge into sensible middle class housing. Seems reasonable. But there are also stark differences in earnings and costs _across_ regions, and I'm interested in how those would play out. Since population density is so tied up with wealth, wouldn't we also converge into a national median of density / metro area size?
>My understanding is that the goal is all Americans get the same or very similar take-home pay.
This is not the goal*. The goal is for the top chunk of earners and owners to pay more into the common till, so that the bottom chunk of earners can get things like healthcare, child care, housing and transportation for free or at reduced rates. You might think of it like this. The goal is to lower the ceiling a bit and raise the floor, such that, absent drug abuse or mental illness, the floor is what is today considered lower middle class.
*They're are indeed some lefties for whom equality of outcome is the goal, but those people are well to the left of AOC and Uncle Bernie, who are well to the left of the bulk of the party.
Or maybe not. I read a Freddie piece today which says that even actual Marx didn't expect to eliminate inequality. Ditto modern actual Marxists.
TIL.
> the goal is all Americans get the same or very similar take-home pay.
I don't think so. The goal is a meaningful change to the shape of this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Wealth_distribution_by_percentile_in_the_United_States.png
(note, that's out of date. It's even worse now.) A "meaningful change" could still result in some being far wealthier than others.
Assuming we changed nothing about population density distribution, and we did make a significant (positive) change to that chart, wouldn't the vast majority of people (excepting a few at the top) have a better overall quality of life?
I'm confident the answer is yes, thus refuting your original point that a desire for cities is in conflict with the desire for greater equity.
Due to generating so much concentrated (geographically) economic activity, cities attract a nuisance underclass that is rationally hoping to catch some of the spillover. This underclass needs to be dealt with, so cities naturally have higher levels of publix services like police.
Eventually the upper class in cities have the utopian idea of eliminating this underclass by making them better. Thus things like schools and wealth redistribution programs become fashionable. The thought being "if only these people were educated" or "if only these people had money" they would stop being such a public nuisance.
Don't forget there's a certain self-interest that develops, too. A fairly large chunk of the modern urban workforce actually works in government, schools, police forces, public order and safety and wealth-distribution systems. Most of the high-paying top jobs for the public sector are held by city dwellers, even if the sector itself services the country.
The cynical but predictive answer is that the people calling for leveling don't expect to be the ones leveled.
Truly wealthy big business owners like those at the Met Gala often have the ability to structure their incomes to avoid the full brunt of redistributive tax schemes. The people who get stuck with the bill are the labor aristocrats of the professional class and the petite bourgeoisie, both of which are pools of potential nouveau riche rivals. Depleting the resources available to your future competition so that they can be given to a lumpenproletarian underclass which can never directly threaten you is a brilliant move, assuming you don't mind having more of a smaller pie as opposed to less of a larger one.
Scott, the PAC uses ActBlue. ActBlue is explicitly a Democratic non-profit technology company that is set up to help the Democratic Party and left wing groups win. Part of the process of getting on ActBlue is a verification process that you are helping Democrats win elections or are otherwise a left wing, partisan group. It is a complete torpedo to any kind of non-partisan credentials. They have claimed they are going to find an alternative for Republicans but the fact they don't know about the Republican alternative (WinRed) is ridiculous on its face.
I don't mind if you want to endorse political causes. But you should be explicit about the partisan nature of what you're endorsing.
What's the current status of EA-type charities in regards to this right now? If I'm giving there, what should my priors be in terms of how much effort I put in to make sure it's not just steal DNC contributions?
I'm not an Effective Altruist and I don't know any in real life. You should probably ask someone more familiar with the matter. I'm a Social Enterpriser and SEs don't solicit donations almost by definition.
But I do know there's a lot of this in the political world. People who use the flows of money following a major news cycle to fund whatever political cause they support. They see it as a sort of noble lie where they're helping the money of low information people get to where it "really should" go.
*stealth not steal
But it's worth pointing out that there's a sharp political divide about the response to this pandemic. So you're unlikely going to see an analogous conservative movement unless a group like the Lincoln Project organizes something outside aegis of the GQP.
Using ActBlue precludes reaching out across the aisle even to COVID-concerned Republicans. It's planting a donkey flag and scribbling "non-partisan" on it.
I don't mind if Scott wants to say he thinks we should give our money to Democrats. Scott endorsed beating Trump and I didn't mind that. What I mind is being lied to. If Scott wants to say, "Democrats are better for pandemic preparedness so I support Democrats," that's totally fine with me. It's the lying about being non-partisan I object to.
Is there an equivalent Republican pac that's fighting for harder measures against future pandemics that could also be promoted?
If not, it seems like saying 'if you want to fight future pandemics, here is the only pac you can donate to to do that' is pretty reasonable.
I don't object to the endorsement, as I've said. I object to laundering the objective lie that this is a non-partisan organization. I think it's perfectly defensible for Scott to say he thinks that supporting these particular politicians and the Democratic Party is the best way to prepare for the pandemic. I don't think it's defensible to say that they're a non-partisan organization.
"Donations to the PAC would go towards supporting candidates who are champions for pandemic preparedness in Congress, like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Anna Eshoo, and in state and local offices. "
Given Warren's track record (opposing the idea of paying more money to buy more vaccines) I think it's arguable that they're not even advancing pandemic preparedness. This seems like an exercise in fundraising for generic Democrats who happen to say the words "Pandemic preparedness" rather than effective policy positions.
(There were also several excellent non-partisan options they passed up. They are clearly Democratic partisans. Which is fine! I really don't mind you endorsing liberal causes. But I would prefer you not entertain their claims they're non-partisan.)
In an effort to put every resource to use against humanity, Skynet orders its machines to modify several dozen biplanes from a WWI aviation museum to fight against the humans. The biplanes can be piloted by obsolete, damaged Terminators that nonetheless have perfect reflexes and flying skills.
What armaments (if any) do the biplanes get?
In what military role(s) are they used?
If employed in combat, what tactics do the biplanes use?
Assume the humans still have some planes of their own, like in Terminator Salvation.
I'd be surprised if they could even get the weight of a Terminator off the ground.
https://www.overtdefense.com/2020/10/05/azerbaijan-reportedly-convert-ancient-an-2-biplanes-into-drones/
AA bait
That's the smartest answer. The humans might get wise to the ruse and avoid shooting at the biplanes, though. Maybe the biplanes should fire on the humans on the ground to provoke a response.
Reconnaissance? You can't put missiles on a biplane - even if it could carry the weight, it doesn't have the radar or electronics to fire them at anything. Using them for bombing would only be possible with small bombs, with little accuracy, and only in places where nobody is shooting back - like, even a soldier with a rifle can be a threat to a low flying biplane. And using machine guns against modern jets would require the jet to basically just let you get in range.
It has *one* potential advantage in that wood and canvas don't reflect radar well and thus it'll be fairly stealthy, but what can you *do* with that stealth?
About the only use I can think of is to use them for scouting. Fly over enemy lines, look around (with your eyes, because you have no sensors) and hope that the humans think Skynet couldn't be stupid enough to fly a biplane over the futuristic battlefield of 20XX.
Putting a Terminator in a biplane is probably a waste of a Terminator - even if it's obsolete and 100% expendable, it would probably be smarter to put the Terminator in a car and use it as a suicide bomber or something. Or just, like, recycle it as scrap metal.
How does Skynet do maintenance on extremely obsolete machines? If one of them needs new piston rings, from where does Skynet get them? And if Skynet can command their manufacture, why not build brand-new drones instead, which can have Terminator brains just pre-wired into them, but which can be made smaller and lighter, giving them better loiter time -- the dominant value here is presumably aerial reconaissance, just as it was in WW1.
The plan would be to fly them until they broke.
The most efficient value of those biplanes by Skynet is negative. Their canvas/wood/glue construction is now too aged and weak to fly. It is literally not worth Skynet's time to feed them into a furnace to make steel or concrete.
Honestly, why Skynet didn't just spent all it's energy after the initial nuking just grabbing for orbit, then high orbit, and then expanding into space and the resources there is one of the many many holes in the story.
It could have just Gone High, drop a nuke whenever it sees a large city or a blast furnace, and then ever bothered thinking about how to fight humans again.
Assume that the human museum curators took good care of the planes, and they're still flyable.
So you've probably heard about how at-home rapid covid test kits are like under a dollar in eg Germany, but more like $30 in the US, a ~2000% price hike. I work at a (US) pharmacy/conenience store, and though the price is absurdly high, it's still not enough to match the supply and demand.
For starters, they've put up the extra barrier of putting all the tests behind the pharmacy counter where you have to be specifically ask the pharmacist for it -- it's not advetised and out on a shelf in the open. You can't just see it, grab it, and pay for it at the register like most non-prescription medicine.
But despite the lack of advertising, a third of the calls I get these days are "Do you have any at-home covid-tests left?" And 95% of the time I tell them no. Because the crazy high prices + medical bureaucracy obstacles + being completely unadvertised and hidden *still* does not match supply and demand; we restock every Saturday, and by Sunday afternoon the Covid tests are gone again.
Idk how much they'd cost if the price was the only thing doing the allocating, but it would be much more than the current cost. So yeah, unless my pharmacy/region/state is atypical, the situation is even worse than the pricetag makes it look.
(Also, there's an appointment-only, results-in-days, free-at-the-point-of-sale covid test at the pharmacy, but most people who are disappointed to find we're out of the rapid tests aren't interested in that.)
Question -- in Germany and other places with cheap rapid tests, is the pricetag doing all of the work of matching supply and demand? Or do they have it just as bad, with the actual price hidden in non-monetary forms? Are they merely "cheap", or actually plentiful?
(PS: The nice thing about only using price to allocate stuff is that higher prices increases the incentive to jump in and produce more; that's not the case with the "beauracracy + hiding + luck of whoever's first in line" methods of allocation. But on the other hand, testing for covid is mostly illegal in the US, so higher prices wouldn't increase supply anyway, so I guess the point is moot.)
I'm from Germany but haven't bought any of the rapid tests myself, so I don't have any first-hand experience with the situation. From what I understand, you can use these tests to test yourself, but they aren't considered accurate enough to fulfill a condition of having to get a validated test for the bureaucracies.
These validated tests (PCR and antigen tests) are currently being subsidized so citizens can get them for free, but this will end at some point in October (FAQ by the German government: https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/coronavirus/nationale-teststrategie/faq-schnelltests.html).
This random German article from June (https://www.24hamburg.de/niedersachsen/sind-die-deutschen-test-muffel-aldi-und-lidl-bleiben-auf-selbsttests-sitzen-zr-90790469.html), which I haven't fact-checked, claims that the supermarket self tests used to be sold at 5€ (vs. bought by them at >=3€), but demand at that price eventually ran out (e.g. because these tests aren't considered validated, or because other tests are subsidized, or because the stores overestimated demand and bought too much, or something), so now stores like Aldi and Lidl are selling them at a loss at 0.8€ to get rid of them.
Ultimately this scenario sounds consistent with the philosophy of "let people try to profit from disaster, and supply and demand will equilibrate at an acceptable price; forbid people from trying to profit from disaster, and that won't happen", but that sufficiently fits my preconceptions that I'd want to find more reporting before truly updating on that.
In any case, whether at 0.8€, 3€, or 5€, all those prices are a far cry from the prices in the U.S..
Perhaps this varies across regions in the US. But I have bought a two pack of rapid test in North Carolina and Texas for $24 and they were sitting right at the checkout counter of the pharmacy (Walgreens).
That's still not as cheap as Germany and they do occasionally run out and limit you to buying 4 packs at a time, but I have not had any problem getting them. We used some this week to test my kids who are in school before my parents who are in their 70's came to visit.
Ditto on the availability in Missouri, except we did curbside because we (correctly!) suspected we had covid.
In the UK these are free, easily ordered online, mass used, and haven't had any supply issues (other than a short hiccup after they were first made available).
I cannot give you a super informed report on how it is in Germany only my experience. Every time we have needed one we did not have any problem, they are just available at the pharmacy. I also haven't heard of anyone complaining of being unable to buy one since a long time ago (6 months maybe?). I think that a big reason for this is that it is easy to get tested for free in a center so actually self-testing is more of a hassle and cost you money. In my case, I have several testing centers within minutes walk from my place (I do live in the center of a big city though) and it is very easy to get tested: you get an appointment within the day, it usually does not take more than 5-10 minutes once you get there, and you receive the result by mail shortly after.
In Poland there are some tests (of quality unknown to me) in supermarkets. 20 PLN (5 USD) . See for example https://www.lidl-sklep.pl/p/szybki-test-serologiczny-na-covid-19/p100331170 (online version of Lidl).
AFAIK there is no problem to get them. I have no idea about quality of such test.
Tests necessary to cross some borders that are certified cost from 100-200 PLN (25-50 USD) for an antigen test.
Presumably those are PCR tests (which have extremely high sensitivity and specificity), rather than the rapid at-home antigen tests (which are supposed to be sensitive enough to detect most currently contagious people, but not a lot of other PCR positive people).
A new sarbecovirus was just discovered in horseshoe bats from Laos. The RBD of its spike protein is only 2 amino acids divergent from the original Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strain. And it binds to ACE2 receptors just as efficiently.
So there is nothing "uniquely adapted" or unnatural about SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. you don't need a lab running GoF experiments or splicing genomes to create this virus). If you're a Leaker, though, you might say this was one of the genomes that was on listed on the WIV spreadsheet that was taken down, and it leaked from the WIV! Well, you'd still have the timeline issue to work around. And now that we have a virus found in a wild bat population that is very very similar the Wuhan nCoV we really don't need a lab leak to explain anything.
https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09ca-d494-4a7c-a65b-9eec9c0a06b8.pdf?c=1631900665
I see people mentioning "lab leak" and "wet market" as contradictory options. Why? The most logical explanation that fits all known facts is that someone working at the lab tried to make a little extra money by breaking a few safety rules and selling the dead bats at the wet market.
I you want to combine both then "virus leaked, infected person was shopping in wet market and infected other"
Selling the dead bats from lab at the wet market is NOT the most logical or probable option.
They would have been tinkering with just a few virues in the Wuhan lab. In nature, there are literally hundreds of thousands of viruses that infect mammals. They are constantly mutating. A pandemic is exactly what we would expect in a biological system where billions of humans are constantly interacting across the entire planet. Sadly I think we will never know, and it is a fun line of inquiry, but I do believe China should be considered innocent until proven guilty.
I don't think anyone ever argued that SARS CoV-2 *required* gain-of-function experiments. Almost by definition, anything that can happen in a GoF experiment can happen naturally, if you've got humans and animals living in close proximity and you wait long enough. But, A: GoF experiments increase the probability that what you get will be highly infectious in humans. And, B: COVID-19 first appeared very close to a virology lab doing research on animals of a sort known to carry a close relative of SARS CoV-2, very near the red herring that is a seafood market known to *not* have sold any of the sorts of animals known to carry a close relative of SARS CoV-2(*), and nowhere near the natural habitat of any of the sorts of animals known to carry a close relative of SARS CoV-2.
If you discover a close relative of SARS CoV-2 in a species of animal that lives anywhere near Wuhan, or that was sold at any market in Wuhan, that should change everyone's priors on this. Otherwise, SARS CoV-2 related viruses in bats in Laos don't really add anything to the discussion. Yes, it's possible that such a bat-virus could have turned into Actual SARS CoV-2, whether naturally or through GoF research. The question is still, why Wuhan? Was there ever a Laotian horseshoe bat within a hundred kilometers of Wuhan?
* Yes, I see several people trying to change the subject to SARS CoV-1, or to "coronaviruses".
But, yes, initially the claims were made that the WIV was performing GoF procedures on similar Coronaviruses to SARS-CoV-2. The trouble with that theory is, if they were, they were failing badly at their attempts, because SARS-CoV-2 has been running its own GoF experiment in human populations for the past 20 months, and the original Type A strain seems pretty lame compared to B.1.617.2 (aka Delta). Likewise, there were a few experts (including David Baltimore) who initially said it looked like the virus's genome had been manipulated to give it the Furin Cleavage Site (FCS). But further digging pretty much discredited that theory except with conspiracy theorists. The thing is, the FCS came as a total surprise to all the Coronavirus researchers. No one had ever considered that the FCS could make a Coronavirus more contagious. If we look at the genome of BANAL-20-52, the newly discovered CoV that is 97% homologous to SARS-CoV2, we do not see that mutation. Nor do we see it any known CoVs. So the evil Chinese scientists would have to had (a) advanced theoretical knowledge of the FCS, and (b) have been shitty at running GoF processes.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Obviously [whatever turned a bat virus into SARS CoV-2 prime] + half a billion human infections over twenty months, will produce a virus better adapted to human transmission than just [whatever turned a bat virus into SARS CoV-2 prime]. But that doesn't tell us what the first step was. Until we find the proximate animal host and immediate viral ancestor of SARS CoV-2, we have no way of knowing whether the distance between that and Actual SARS CoV-2 was a single random mutation, or a shitty GoF program's worth of mutation and selection, or something requiring a comprehensive and well-run GoF program.
And even the minimal version is still consistent with purely natural evolution of a virus that some researcher brought from rural Yunnan to downtown Wuhan for study and then didn't keep contained, which has always been on the table in the non-lunatic-fringe versions of the lab leak hypothesis.
Or somebody brought home the Laotian virus and decided to play around with it in the lab. And then oopsies, an accident happened.
I'm not wedded to the lab leak hypothesis, and coincidences do happen, but that there just so happened to be a lab working on these viruses where the outbreak happened does tilt more towards "we know accidents happen and things that shouldn't do get released" than plain "it was something naturally occurring in the wild and just happened by complete chance to turn up there first".
So why did the initial cases cluster around a wet market selling a variety of live exotic animals, with most of them having traceable ties to the wet market? If it's too much of a coincidence that they were 14 km from the WIV, surely it's too much of a coincidence that they were 0 km from a wet market, the same type that SARS-CoV-1 came from.
The fact that anyone realistically imagines human experimenters could come up with more strange and weird surprises than Nature herself is what needs explaining to me. My go-to hypothesis, that H. sapiens is the most egoistical creature conceivable, quails before this one.
It's as if the first European explorer to see a giraffe or echidna said "OK, who's been conducting a secret bizarre breeding program to create this? Couldn't have happened naturally! Look at the freaking neck/spines/weird mating habits..."
I find it at least plausible that the lab was studying a natural virus, and it got out by accident.
I think that's the most plausible and popular version of the lab leak hypothesis right now.
Yes, and the other plausible and popular version is one where the human experimenters took a strange weird surprise that Nature came up with, and put it in an evolutionary environment optimized for generating particularly interesting (to humans) new surprises.
Unless you are a Wuhan lab worker with inside information you may never know how this went down.
I have to admit the straight forward way John Stuart put it has a lot of emotional appeal though.
“There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh, I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the . . . chocolate factory!”
Or maybe it was just a diseased bat in the wet market. The creepiness of bat meat for sale in an open market gives that one some emotional heft too.
Bats are not a foodstuff in China, but bat guano (specifically Horseshoe bat guano for certain respiratory ailments) is used in Chinese traditional medicine (CTM).
Again we run into that we are all so very different thing. Interesting information. Thanks.
We need a lab leak to explain why, out of all the places Covid could have appeared, it just happened to appear not in Laos but very close to a lab doing experiments, including gain of function experiments, on bat viruses.
What hypothesis would you invoke to explain why, out of all the places SARS-CoV-2 could have appeared, it just happened to appear not around the Wuhan lab but directly inside a wet market with a wide variety of exotic live animals, the same type of wet market that SARS-CoV-1 originated from?
It's also worth reiterating that "wild animal" farming is a $7-$10 billion business in Hubei Province and that Wuhan is major transshipment center for these "products" that get sent out to wet markets all over the China. There are a half-dozen abattoirs within walking distance of that market, and a bunch of companies involved in meat packing and in the CTM supply business are centered in that district of Wuhan. Coincidence?
Despite the scandal (or pseudo-scandal) of the "coverup" at WIV. The Chinese authorities saw that that particular wet market as a focus for the outbreak, and they shut down that wet market first. And, whether on purpose, or just out of bureaucratic overreaction destroyed all the evidence (i.e. animals) associated with wet market. Of course, they've always been defensive about (and protective of) this industry...
This would hold weight if we still thought that the virus appeared "directly inside a wet market," which we do not. Certainly there was spread at the market, but at presence the balance of evidence indicates that the virus was carried there by someone (or someones) already infected, not that the virus originated there. This is the conclusion reached by the Chinese CDC, and the CDC's position is that while the virus spread there *it was not the source of the initial outbreak.* All of this is pretty old information; that CDC study dates from last May. You can find it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-rules-out-animal-market-and-lab-as-coronavirus-origin-11590517508
The WHO's study in January also concluded that the virus did not likely originate at the market, and that transmission there was person to person, not from an infected animal: https://apnews.com/article/who-coronavirus-experts-learned-in-wuhan-86549d1189f3d174273a26e39d177d05
It's honestly a bit concerning to see "the virus originated in the market" trumpeted as fact in mid-September of 2021. There is virtually no evidence for this position besides the fact that a large number of initial cases had links to the market (though a significant number did *not*), and good evidence against it (no infected animal has ever been found there and the data are better explained by a superspreader event than a patient 0 situation). Again, this is all pretty old information.
Being old information is no guarantee of correctness. I'm well aware that many of the earliest cases, including the earliest known case, had no known connection to the wet market. I even address it in a comment below. Also, I've written two analyses of the lab leak hypothesis back when I gave it higher credence than I do now, so it's not like I'm unaware of the evidence:
https://medium.com/@pseudodionysus/did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab-a-critical-examination-208f0eff7c3
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-187
I can't access the WSJ article. As for the AP News article, it does say:
"The Huanan Seafood Market had a cluster of cases at the start of the outbreak and was initially suspected as the place where people first became infected. The discovery of earlier cases has all but ruled out that theory"
However, this is not what the WHO report says (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part):
"Many of the early cases were associated with the Huanan market, but a similar number of cases were associated with other markets and some were not associated with any markets. Transmission within the wider community in December could account for cases not associated with the Huanan market which, together with the presence of early cases not associated with that market, could suggest that the Huanan market was not the original source of the outbreak. Other milder cases that were not identified, however, could provide the link between the Huanan market and early cases without an apparent link to the market. No firm conclusion therefore about the role of the Huanan market in the origin of the outbreak, or how the infection was introduced into the market, can currently be drawn"
This is pretty close to what I said below, which I'll copy here:
"Why, out of all places he [patient 0 and/or the superspreader] could have visited to start an outbreak, did he happen to visit a wet market? Why not a regular supermarket, a library, a convention center, a train station, a concert hall? Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it is a pretty big coincidence. I think it's a much bigger coincidence than the outbreak happening on the other side of a big city from the WIV.
I think that even though the earliest discovered case had no known connection with the wet market, that doesn't mean much. As powerful as Chinese surveillance is, it doesn't know about every contact every citizen has had. It's easily possible the November 17 guy caught it from the guy sitting next to him on the subway, who worked at the wet market but had an asymptomatic case of COVID-19."
"Decide how much you weight you put on geographic coincidences. Do you put a lot of weight on them? Then the coincidence of the early cases being clustered around (and often from inside) the wet market is much stronger than the coincidence that the cases were in the same city as the WIV; therefore, you should favor the zoonotic hypothesis. Do you put almost no weight on geographic coincidences? Then you should fall back on the prior, which is that the overwhelming majority of novel viruses are zoonotic in origin, and that this one probably is too."
"no infected animal has ever been found there"
Similarly, no infected human has ever been found at the WIV, or anywhere close.
Good points, all. But please note my response to your earlier response. It really needn't have been that wet market (although the Chinese authorities seemed to initially regard that as the focal point). That district also happens to be the district of Wuhan that as heavy grouping of businesses involved in Hubei's animal trade, meat packing, and Chinese Traditional Medicine.
(This is not to say the virus definitely originated in a lab. It *is* to say it pretty certainly didn't originate at the wet market).
I think you may be placing too much weight on a single coincidence. As Scott points out in one post, the latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza encodes the speed of light to 7 decimal places (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/). Coincidences happen, especially when everyone is looking for them.
And I'm not sure how big of a coincidence the virology lab is. Wuhan is one of the largest cities in China. If you live in a large city, there's a pretty decent chance you live near a virology lab. There happens to be one 6 km from where I live. It makes sense that a Chinese virology lab would be studying SARS; it's a novel virus that caused an outbreak in China back in 2002. It also makes sense that the first COVID cluster would be detected in a large city. High population density makes infecting a cluster more likely (and cluster is what tipped us off! The first few individuals with flu-like symptoms didn't raise suspicion of a novel virus.). A large city is also more likely to have the hospitals, equipment, and expertise to test for novel viruses.
My naive prior is that Disasters Caused By X are more likely to occur near Labs for the Study of X. Because a) you want to put your lab near the thing you're studying, and b) places threatened by X have incentivizes to research anti-X measures. None is accusing the Caltech Seismology Lab of causing earthquakes, despite (what I presume is) a strong correlation between distance-to-nearest-seismology-lab and earthquakes-per-year. I think the term for that is "common cause fallacy" or something.
Does this apply to virology? Sincere question, I have no idea. When picking a place for your BSL4 facility, I assume control & safety are much more important than biodiversity or whatever. I wouldn't expect Bethesda, MD to be naturally fertile ground for zoonosis despite housing the NIH HQ.
My understanding is that it does not apply to this case, that the researchers in the Wuhan lab were getting their bats and/or vat viruses from a cave a considerable distance away.
Two things. First, the WIV is definitely not within walking distance to the wet market. In fact, it's on the other side of the city, 14 km away. Walking that distance would take 3 hours 30 minutes. Second, I don't know if the research at WIV even counts as "gain of function". In a 2017 study (https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698), WIV researchers added spike proteins from novel bat viruses which are hard to cultivate, into an existing bat virus (WIV1) that’s easy to cultivate, to see if the spike proteins can infect humans. If you look at their Figure 7, it seems like the original WIV1 is just as infectious (in fact, maybe slightly more infectious) than the chimeric viruses, so no function was gained. That said, it’s theoretically possible that the chimeric viruses could have turned out to be much more infectious than WIV1, so it’s not a huge stretch to categorize this type of research as “gain of function”.
Two things.
1. You're reinforcing my point, not detracting from it when you say there's no plausible connection between the pyramid and the speed of light. If there were a connection, it wouldn't be a coincidence. That would ruin my point. But really weird coincidences do happen! A lot! Especially when people go looking for them.
Coincidences and correlations increase the chance that there's a connection. But you need to be careful how much weight you put on this evidence. Part of why so many people believe debunked conspiracy theories (eg. Illuminati, 9/11 conspiracies, etc) is that they can all point to these weird coincidences. We have a tendency to overestimate how unlikely coincidences are.
2. There's a very plausible connection between the pyramid and the speed of light - or at least the people who discovered this fact believe there is. It's part of the ancient astronauts theory: the belief that ancient aliens visited Earth and built the pyramids and various other famous constructions. Of course, the speed of light thing isn't their only evidence. They have dozens of reasons why it's implausible that humans built the pyramids and why aliens must have.
What's interesting to me is pyramid/speed-of-light thing was only discovered after ancient astronaut proponents were already convinced of their theory for other reasons. So to them, this is just further proof for their theory. To me, this shows you can often find a 1-in-a-million chance coincidence if you go looking for them.
But can you imagine how stupid I would sound trying to explain that to an ancient astronaut theorist? The pyramid is at 29.9792° N, and the speed of light is 299,792 km/s, and the best retort I can come up with against this new evidence is, "well, uh, it really is just a coincidence". To them, my explanation is going to seem really weak.
A lot of people were looking for theories on the origin of COVID. They found several sets of coincidences, supporting several different theories. I'm worried we're overestimating the strength of these as evidence. To you, saying the nearby virology institute might just be a coincidence probably sounds weak. Someone else in this thread is arguing that it's too coincidental that the first cluster occurred at a wet market that sells exotic animals. To them, saying it might just be a coincident probably sounds weak. But at least one of these things is a coincidence.
> Consider "it's just a coincidence that I was caught on a security camera climbing out the window of the house at the same time the silverware disappeared. Coincidences happen."
Not part of my argument but kind of amusing: this is very close to the premise of The Shawshank Redemption, and in that (fictional) movie, it did turn out to be a coincidence.
there are a lot of labs doing coronavirus research! and the population of Laos is a lot smaller than the population of China (and medical surveillance gets worse as you get farther away from high tech pop centers).
I don’t know if lab leak or not! probably worth assuming either is possible or something like that
But the lab leak hypothesis doesn't explain why all the initial cluster of cases surrounded Huanan wet market (were live animals known to harbor CoVs were sold) and that was 13 km away (as the Horseshoe bat flies) from Wuhan Institute of Virology.
I don't think there is good evidence for a lab leak (at least, not yet), but the Huanan wet market isn't where COVID is thought to have originated. China's first known case occurred on November 17th, several weeks before the cluster at the market. It's thought that someone with COVID just visited the market, initiating the outbreak there.
Why, out of all places he could have visited to start an outbreak, did he happen to visit a wet market? Why not a regular supermarket, a library, a convention center, a train station, a concert hall? Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it is a pretty big coincidence. I think it's a much bigger coincidence than the outbreak happening on the other side of a big city from the WIV.
I think that even though the earliest discovered case had no known connection with the wet market, that doesn't mean much. As powerful as Chinese surveillance is, it doesn't know about every contact every citizen has had. It's easily possible the November 17 guy caught it from the guy sitting next to him on the subway, who worked at the wet market but had an asymptomatic case of COVID-19.
They did not sell bats at the wet market. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
On a meta level, I find it amusing that one person in this thread thinks it's a suspicious coincidence that there's a virology lab in Wuhan studying SARS, and another person thinks it's a suspicious coincidence that the first cluster was at a wet market that sells exotic animals.
I'm not sure what to do with that information, but I guess at least one of those two things must be a coincidence.
The real coincidence is why did two completely different lines of contact between bats and humans both independently start a pandemic of indistinguishable viruses within a week or two of each other ?!
the key plot point that we know definitively is that the closest extant relative of SARS-COV-2 was housed at the WIV. Does this nullify the purpose of debating which geographical coincidence is more important?
Here's one thing you could do with the information: decide how much you weight you put on geographic coincidences. Do you put a lot of weight on them? Then the coincidence of the early cases being clustered around (and often from inside) the wet market is much stronger than the coincidence that the cases were in the same city as the WIV; therefore, you should favor the zoonotic hypothesis. Do you put almost no weight on geographic coincidences? Then you should fall back on the prior, which is that the overwhelming majority of novel viruses are zoonotic in origin, and that this one probably is too.
Neither of these things has to be a coincidence; we could suppose that the lab improperly disposed of specimens, and one of those specimens turned up in a wet market. Say, an irresponsible staff member sold some dead bats to a wet market.
I believe (though I'm willing to be corrected) that, yes, Patient 0 is presumed to have contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus on November 17th and he ended up in the hospital on December 1st — which would correspond to the incubation period for a serious illness from COVID-19.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but too bad Substack doesn't allow us to post images (unless I missing a trick here). But scroll down to Figure 1 in this non-paywalled PDF of this Cell paper "The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review" (https://t.co/lXR89QhOtJ?amp=1).
It shows the outbreak starting north of the Yangtze river, and about 8 miles from the WIV. Of course, it could have been a lab employee who was shopping at the market who spread it (which is the narrative the Mike Pompeo and the Murdoch media were pushing), but then you've got some other timeline problems deal with...
The timeline problem that the Leakers have to overcome is this — first presented by virologist Robert Garry on an episode of TWIV (but not very clearly)...
Given that: PCR analysis from patients between Dec 2019 and Feb 2020 show there were 2 variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in the Wuhan area by early December: Type A and Type B. Patients were getting ill with both types in December...
And given that the genomic analysis suggest that Type B diverged from Type A some time mid-October...
And given that: the first verified patient who was subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19 showed up at a Wuhan hospital with unusual and severe pneumonia-like symptoms on 1 Dec 2019...
So, if you think the lab leak happened, what week did it happen? Make it work within the context of the genome data for the A and B strains, and the time when people started showing up hospitals.
If the leak happened 2nd week of Nov (a la Pompeo and the Murdoch newspapers), which was 2 weeks before the first case showed up in a Wuhan hospital on Dec 1, then how do we explain the fact that the virus had been floating around and mutating since October per the A & B variant genome divergence? Why weren't people getting sick earlier?
The most likely answer is that the virus was of zoonotic origin spreading in some yet to be determined animal population that was also sold live in the wet markets. And both A & B versions jumped to humans around the same time in mid November.
Of course, the lab could have leaked both strains A & B as nefarious epidemiological experiment. There are people who WANT to believe that. Or two clueless lab workers, one carrying the A strain and the other carrying the B strain, could have done their shopping at the Huanan wet market and spread it from there, but they would have a couple of weeks to spread it elsewhere in Wuhan. Why weren't they infecting people on their commuter route to WIV?
It may be worth noting here that the identification of "Patient Zero" in any new disease epidemiology is...fraught. Gaetan Dugas was widely considered "Patient Zero" in the arrival of AIDS to the United States, which was thought to happen circa 1980 -- the disease was first recognized in 1981. However, later testing of blood samples showed that AIDS reached New York City no later than 1971, from Haiti where it was already present in the late 60s. In Africa it's been traced back to at least the late 1950s.
It would not surprise me to find that eventually SARS-CoV-2 is traced back well before 2019.
It's interesting. I don't find it surprising it's hard to identify patient zero. We're looking for someone who had flu-like symptoms or possibly no symptoms weeks (or possibly months) before we even knew COVID existed. And even when we find earlier cases, it's almost impossible to prove that case was the first.
I'd point out though that HIV has a much longer life cycle than COVID. You can be infected with HIV and infect someone else a decade later. By contrast, COVID patients are contagious for a median of 8 days after symptoms start. COVID has to spread to new hosts much faster than HIV. HIV also often doesn't show much symptoms for ~10 years, which would have made it hard to detect before we knew of its existence.
What tipped us off for COVID was a cluster of about 44 hospitalizations with pneumonia in one area. Before we knew about COVID, mild symptoms or asymptomatic cases wouldn't have been detected. A couple hospitalizations of elderly people with flu-like symptoms wouldn't have been detected. And even 44 hospitalizations wouldn't have been detected if they were spread out enough geographically.
So a decent number of people had to be infected before we could detect it. On the flip side, once the epidemic starts growing exponentially, it won't be long until you get a large enough cluster that it gets detected. So I think when it could have started depends on how long the number of cases could have remained small in any geographic area.
China *always* does this. It's in the culture of the CCP. They always have something to hide, whether it's petty corruption, incompetence, popular discontent, or someone sleeping with someone else's wife. Even if by some miracle there's nothing to hide, you can never be too careful, right? Why let foreigners snoop around looking for dirt?
Why? As far as I know China, like many dictatorial regimes (Soviet Union, Middle Eastern countries, etc.) aggressively hides *everything*. If it might be remotely related to anything they don't want people to know, or might eventually decide they don't want people to know, it gets classified. People get disappeared. Yesterday's high-ranking official is now just an empty spot in a photograph, and if you know what's good for you, don't ask nosy questions. So if a WIV worker was sick in fall of 2019--kidnap her and her family, scrub website mentions, threaten anyone asking. Doesn't matter if she clearly got sick later than other known cases. Doesn't matter if she never worked with bats or coronaviruses. Doesn't matter if antibody testing showed she never had COVID. It might possibly, theoretically be embarrassing, so cover it up.
Your general point is absolutely right, but not this:
"So if a WIV worker was sick in fall of 2019--kidnap her and her family, scrub website mentions, threaten anyone asking. "
China isn't North Korea, yet. I doubt they'd do anything unless there was already a rumor of an epidemic, and even then, they won't do anything other than invite her to "drink tea" with the local police to ask her politely not to spread rumors...you know, because we don't want to inconvenience you even more, right?
I was unclear. I wasn't saying they would disappear anyone who ever got sick. But once it became clear there was a pandemic spreading that other countries might be affected, and some people suspected it came out of the WIV (intentionally or not) by Spring of 2020, I suspect they would quickly start tying up loose ends like an obsessive in a shoe factory.
True, but they were tying from September 2019. That makes it look quite differently.
"embarrassing the regime" is illegal in these sorts of places. The Chinese are more honest than most, in that it's actually black letter passed legislation, instead of just one of those things everyone is supposed to know.
Does NYC really have an indoor rule requiring toddlers to mask up?
Reference https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1439610789728382983?s=21
New Mexico does. Whoever thinks 2-4 year los can wear masks in an effective way has clearly never spent time with children in that age range.
Here's a review by an aerosol engineer of the best masks for kids...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE5Uo3F2TdU
That's all very well, but in reality masks on toddlers (2-4 range) is 100% controlled by what mask (if any) the toddler can be convinced not to immediately rip off.
I know there are exceptions, but I really haven't seen much trouble with my kids or their friends. Kids are just more adaptable than grownups, and this has been normal for a pretty big chunk of their lives.
My grandson goes to a preschool ages 2 -5. These kids wear their masks. He's 4 and has 0 reticence about the mask. I see no resistance at all. In all other things he has a good portion of 4 year old rebelliousness and questioning. This he just accepts as part of life it seems.
I want to piggy-back off of this. I have a 2.5-year-old. He doesn't mind putting on a mask anymore (although he absolutely did mind when we first introduced the concept). He asks for help putting it back on after it falls off one ear. He even is willing to put it on when it's wet.
The problem I have is that he still drools (which is why the mask is wet). He's done teething, I think he just hasn't figured out that drooling is a thing you can stop doing. I hear saliva is a solvent, and I can't imagine human skin is designed to have saliva sitting against it for hours on end?? We have 5 months until his daycare starts requiring him to mask up all the time, so I'm hoping that he grows out of the drooling by then (or, with rather less hope, that masks can come off kids by then), because I'm not looking forward to the alternative.
>>I hear saliva is a solvent, and I can't imagine human skin is designed to have saliva sitting against it for hours on end??
I don't recall any historical cases of toddlers dissolving their faces after insufficient wiping by vigilant caregivers, so I don't think this is something you need to fear.
I'd worry more about lack of social skills from not interacting with people with half their face visible--but even there, kids are resilient.
I'm aware my kid's face won't literally fall off. I would expect skin rashes, particularly because saliva-in-mask doesn't dry nearly as quickly as regular drooling.
I teach about 700 K - 5 graders, and have a 2 year old daughter.
Daughter is willing to try... for about 30 seconds. Fortunately nobody has made a big deal about this, and most of the kids in the 2-3 range seem to also not wear masks in public very much. We will apparently not be flying any time soon.
In K-1, all the kids wear them, or at least pretend to, or at least pull them back up when requested (and then pull them back down as I walk away... repeat every 10 minutes all day long). A decent number chew on them, which doesn't seem very sanitary. Sometimes they step on them and then put them back on. They also get clay dust and paint on them during class. Most of this seems unproductive, even if properly worn, clean masks are a good idea.
700 K -5 graders? How do you accomplish that?
I like imagining that you are worried he is claiming to teach seven hundred thousand 'negative fifth' graders
Six 45 minute classes a day (one for each grade level) on a six day rotation. So I see each of them roughly every week and a half.
It appears so:
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-series-universal-mask-requirements-protect-new-yorkers-amid-rise
There is a lot of social media discourse that this is overkill. I’m unsure - is it overkill or is it really a reasonable grounded-in-science approach ?
I sense that cloth masks are already suboptimal in a huge way and I’m skeptical of anything less than N95 or equivalent that’s also not fitted well - so even vaccinated adults wearing cloth masks to me seems only a step above virtue signaling. Am I totally off base here ?
Aaron Collins, who is an engineer who studies aerosols, does regular reviews of masks on Youtube using a set of lab equipment he happens to own. He's said that any mask is better than none, but he thinks the KF94 are the all around better than N95, because they're tested on a variety of facial sizes and an in a range of motions. The original N95 standard didn't require such a range of tests to be certified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu0GkjOpOj0
Covid really doesn’t do much to kids, and now that vaccines have been available for a while masking isn’t as important. it’s probably dumb. and ideally like some dude in 2020 would’ve done challenge trials to find the most efficient mask and a good way of doing whole building filtering and ventilation and actually gotten something that works out there by March and then made a killing selling it, instead of this shit where we still don’t know how well masks work. but whatever it’s not that bad in the greater scheme of things...
You say this stuff so self-assuredly! I wish I could sound as expert as you do. ;-)
As to your remark that COVID-19 "really doesn't do much to kids" — hmmm. Where are you getting your information from? I guess I'll need some links to studies before I take your expert word on this — especially since the long-term post COVID-19 convalescent studies are only starting to be done.
isn’t that the expert consensus? “maybe the long term stuff we don’t know about is bad in children even though the disease itself isn’t” ... maybe, but how long do we mask kids for? as I said though I genuinely do not care beyond liking reading studies and arguing online. I’m more than happy to keep having lockdowns and masks forever or whatever, genuinely, I do not care beyond scientific accuracy and stuff. But masks for kids seems remarkably low value compared to anything else at all
I hear many many people, each so self-assured, saying that the delta variant, either has close to no effect on children, or has a very big effect, much bigger than the original variant, and is responsible for killing lots of children, or causing them to have long-term effects like reduction in brain size, etc. Which is right? I wish I knew. Does anyone know?
It's only the consensus among one subgroup of experts. But I can see how you might get that impression if you're only relying on subset of MSM sources.
Some experts have used the following paper to say there's not much risk for kids ("See, only three percent have symptom that last more than 12 weeks!"). Personally I wouldn't want to wish a "mild" case of COVID-19 on anyone, but especially kids. But depending on whether you're reassured or worried by the results of this paper, here you are...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782164
This study is a little bit scarier...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/
Some of the long-term cognitive effects of COVID-19 seem to be related to brain damage. Why would you want to risk having kids develop long-term cognitive deficits — even if the data is not yet definitive that they occur...
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-hidden-long-term-cognitive-effects-of-covid-2020100821133
But we *do* know how well masks in work in theory and practice. And in the past 15 months there have been a hella lot of studies and our knowledge has evolved.
Yes. It has evolved. Its veered far into the "masks are ineffective" direction.
Depends on the mask. There was a lot of discussions on DSL about this (just for 1 example: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4412.msg150848.html#msg150848), and the consensus based on a number of studies seemed to be that cloth masks were either useless of nearly equivalent. Only N95s or similar did anything.
to be clear I mean an integrated understanding of how each specific kind of mask affects Covid transmission in each specific kind of circumstance. There’s just not that much data on that and it’s hard to know. There is a lot of knowledge about how well masks work for particle filtering though. And I do agree that we do know masks are useful and N95s are extremely good cloth is probably still good, but it’s ridiculous that that needs qualifications instead of “ten thousand person RCT challenge trial with closely monitored everything”
Lots of good links to actual studies from <gasp> an MSM site. If you're a Bayesian type of rationalist, there's a lot priors here...
https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-here-are-49-scientific-studies-that-explain-why-they-do/
My opinion is that none of the experts actually have a plan and that they're grasping at straws.
Different experts, different plans. The good news if you're a policy maker is you can find some expert, dumbass or otherwise, who will support your position.
"Something must be done. This is something."
Management's got to manage and they should.
This is probably too broad/general of a question to get answered, but (as an American) I've been fascinated recently by how parliamentary systems work. So- do major laws get passed easier in a parliamentary country than in America? I just finished reading a comparative political systems book, so I know that most democracies that aren't the US are either unicameral, or the second house/parliament is much weaker- so they can't veto legislation a la the US Senate. And by definition you can't really have divided government between the prime minister and the parliament- right? Because the PM is the leader of the largest plurality party (right?)
So- do other 1st world democracies who use a parliamentary system pass major/sweeping legislation more easily than we do here in the US, with its multiple veto points? Obviously here one has to clear the House, the Senate filibuster, and then get the President to sign it. Is the rest of the developed world just clearly much more efficient at legislating than America? Is it an obviously better system?
One argument why this *wouldn't* be the case if that, with multiple parties, even having the largest plurality in the parliament doesn't mean the other parties want to pass your laws. But Britain should be exempt from this, with their Westminster system where the PM has a majority in the House of Commons and the opposition parties basically have zero power (right?)
This comment is particularly designed for Richard Gadsen (spelling?), who always has excellent comparative politics knowledge and is also I believe British
What comparative political systems book? I’ve never thought of reading that subject before, but it seems like a cool read. Closest I’ve come is Fukuyama Political Order/Decay
In Australia, we have an almost two party system (despite instant runoff voting). There's a Labor party on the left and a permanent Liberal/National coalition on the right (think city/country conservatives). A handful of seats wind up occupied by minor parties and independents. We have a House and a Senate.
After any particular election, one of the two major parties may or may not have an absolute majority in the House. If they do, they form a government. If not, someone needs to get enough in-principle support from the minor parties and independents to make a majority. If the party forming government also has a majority in the Senate then they're in luck, otherwise they're going to need to do some horse trading to get support there too.
In practice, though, bills are decided on by the party in power. Exactly what goes on behind closed doors to get these bills written is not known to the public. If the party in power controls both houses then their bills are a fait accompli, if not then they may need to make a deal with either the other major party or the minor parties and independents to get support. MPs are heavily whipped since they are preselected for their seats by the party, any MP who fails to vote with his party will find himself out of his seat next election.
In theory, then, if a party has a majority in both houses it could pass whatever crazy legislation it liked (within the bounds of the Constitution). In practice they usually don't because they would be kicked out at the next election and their crazy legislation reversed. Party preselection plus compulsory voting tend to produce dull and unimaginative almost-centrists anyway so there are few truly controversial issues in play most of the time.
>In practice they usually don't because they would be kicked out at the next election and their crazy legislation reversed.
Case in point: when Howard finally got full control back in 04 he pushed through WorkChoices (union-busting, basically), and then used taxpayer money to run an ad campaign saying it was a good thing. He promptly lost the 07 election on a 5.4% swing, including losing his own seat.
The need to form a coalition holding the majority of seats in a Parliament forces enough compromise to moderate major, destabilizing policy swings in practice. Usually you'll end up with a centrist party in charge in coalition with some fringier parties, and the centrist party isn't going to do radical policy shifts. This isn't a rock-solid guarantee of course.
There sometimes is gridlock especially in countries with low % thresholds for entering Parliament. If the biggest party needs to court a bunch of weird third parties running on single issues to get to 51% they might not be able to satisfy enough of them. You can have elections where no party can form a coalition - it's called a hung parliament - and you get minority rule, which is considered exceptionally weak and unstable.
Good comment, thanks. Also, another question- is the Prime Minister always the leader of the largest party? Or, does the coalition formed after the election sometimes select the PM? Because the latter really insulates him/her from populism & celebrity candidates (I think this is a good thing), even if it's less stable
The coalition selects the PM. Basically it usually functions as a position appointed by Parliament and exactly who ends up where is usually an important part of Parliamentary bargaining. This is also what a vote of no confidence is. Basically, they all vote on whether they'd agree to appoint someone else (non-specifically). The PM can either then resign or try and fight it out.
I believe it's the leader of the majority coalition if there is one. If not, then I think it's the incumbent PM who gets first opportunity to try to form a minority government, followed by the leaders of the parliamentary parties in order of size.
There are two recent precedent:
2017: No party had a majority. The incumbent PM, Theresa May, who was also the leader of the plurality party, formed a minority government. She promptly cut a deal with the DUP where they'd back May on votes of confidence and passing appropriations bills (giving her a de facto majority on those issues) in exchange for some specific policy concessions, but they pointedly did not join the government.
2010: the third-largest party entered negotiations separately with the two larger parties immediately after the election. They cut a deal with the largest party, and the leader of the second-largest party (who was also the incumbent PM) resigned while the leader of the largest party (also leader of coalition) was appointed in his place
Yes, unitary Parliamentary systems are more subject to vast changes. The least constrained one is Great Britain where there is no equivalent of constitutional review and the Queen is unusually weak. Theoretically the House of Commons could pass a law selling the Welsh into slavery and there's nothing that could be done to stop that. Now, I'm not saying they would. But there's no Bill of Rights under which the Welsh could sue. The House of Lords could only delay it. The Queen could theoretically veto it but she hasn't vetoed anything in centuries. Etc.
The main disadvantage of Parliamentary systems is that governments are less stable. Parliamentary systems sometimes just don't have governments for years. If a party can't find a majority then they just don't have a President, Secretary of State equivalent, etc. And those wild swings can be really, really wild. Entire industries can be nationalized and denationalized in a matter of a few years. This in turn tends to create a stronger administrative state and stronger party systems where individuals and politicians tend to have less power than bureaucratic organizations like parties and bureaucracies.
Basically, the Parliamentary system was formed by a bunch of aristocrats who thought central control by an administrative state was a great thing and that veto points were just a bunch of unruly peasants. And I am not exaggerating there. They were literally formed by various dukes and earls and kings. If you agree with them (and really fight through your self-conception as a popular democracy loving American to see if you do) then it's a better system. If you want local rule, non-aristocratic politicians, the need for extremely broad consensus for vast changes, and individual level democratic control of towns and states then it's a worse system.
In short, American gridlock is a feature, not a bug. Likewise, the power of lower class individuals to resist the dictates of the Harvard set is a feature, not a bug. Serious restrictions on what the government can do is a feature too. As is the ability of alternative power centers to shut down the entire government.
As an immigrant from Canada to the UK, the incredible power of the House of Commons (and, more recently, the PM themselves) struck me. One key element of the House of Commons is that there's no independent regional power - in Canada, provinces, municipalities, and (to a lesser extent) native reservations have self-governing power that can't be immediately overruled by the federal government.
Yeah, when I say they could sell all the Welsh into slavery I am not being hyperbolic. In all seriousness, the House of Commons could reinstitute slavery if it wanted to with a majority vote tomorrow. This is considered a key feature of the system (see Bagehot). Whether you consider that a good or a bad thing largely has to do with how much you want veto points and local control vs a centralized system.
Of course, it's worth pointing out such an evil result wouldn't occur because the House of Commons couldn't muster enough support. But that's the only reason.
Also, as you and Aribturam alluded, there are no checks and balances in the British system. The legislature is the executive. The courts (at least pre-EU, and I am not certain about today) could not rule on the constitutionality of an Act of Parliament (Parliament was assumed to have deemed each of its acts to be constitutional).
One upshot is that Parliament has to own what it dies. They can't pass a grandstanding bill and then wait for the executive to neuter it or the courts to declare it unconstitutional.
I have often wondered how much of what we see in the US is grandstanding while knowing that one of the many checks built into the system will kill it? Some of the bills that get introduced in Congress are pretty crazy and/or knowingly unworkable. I find it illustrative that the GOP voted for some huge number of ACA repeals while their bills couldn't go anywhere, but weren't able to pass any ACA repeal with control of Congress and the president.
Makes sense, and I agree with all of this. Seeing as lots of American electoral hipsters complain about how many veto points the US system has, I was just curious how broad/sweeping legislation works or gets passed in practice in other democracies. I think Neal's comment above really nails it- with multiple parties and no one party getting an outright majority, you have to stitch together a coalition broad enough that sweeping bills probably don't get passed.
The more I research it the more I like the American system*. I wish the Senate was a bit more representative, but in general the 'cooling saucer' idea is a really good one! Score one for the founders. I'd actually like to make the Senate *more* of a cooling saucer & less populist, possibly by restricting who's allowed to run for each party's office (like each party comes up with a list of 3-5 candidates, or the state legislature has to approve them, or something).
(I guess if you really hate presidential systems, you could argue for a system where the House selects the Prime Minister, a la Westminster. But, still have a separately elected Senate on a staggered schedule from the House. It'd be weird, and I'm not recommending it. But I do really like the Senate/cooling saucer idea, and if I could only fight for one I'd ditch having a President in favor of just the bicameral/'second house is insulated from populist pressures' idea)
Agreed that the Senate should be more representative.
One of the issues with the "cooling saucer" thing is that it produces executive overreach. Prime example is the Senate wouldn't extend the eviction moratorium, so Biden did it anyway. Not to pick on the Democrats, both parties do this. Deploying troops without a declaration of war is another example.
There are situations when the government arguably needs to respond to events in real time - act much more quickly than the process of drafting, amending, and passing legislation can possibly allow for. In all of these situations the executive branch tends to just assume whatever powers it needs. Problem is it's a ratchet effect - once the executive assumes a power, there's a precedent, so the power is there for both sides, forever. Some exceptions occur, e.g. if the courts strike down an executive overreach (like the eviction moratorium) but in a battle between executive and courts the executive usually wins in the long run (see FDR, or Trump's Muslim bans) since it has more tools at its disposal.
One might think this is fine since the executive is directly elected so it's democratically accountable, and this is true to an extent, but actually most of the executive branch consists of appointed bureaucrats with limited accountability to anyone. This is what people originally meant by "deep state" - not a conspiracy, but just a mass of bureaucrats serving both parties who have a lot of power to make and implement (or not implement) policy according to their own preferences.
A parliamentary system is not a panacea but I think there's something to be said for the entire government transparently having the power to govern and then being held more or less directly accountable for how they use that power. In the US, the "checks and balances" often lead to kludgy workarounds where power is used in a less transparent and less accountable way.
Also - divided government in the US means that the minority party has both the incentive and the means to sabotage the ruling party, which gives the appearance of a) incompetent/malicious government and b) a failure of the ruling party's policies. Right now, the Democrats need to coordinate the House, Senate, and WH around an infrastructure package in which all of the policies have majority support in polls but which are being blocked by special interests in the Democratic party (like Manchin and his coal miners or whatever) and the fact that if the entire thing sinks, the Republicans will reap massive political benefits, despite their constituents clearly wanting and needing infrastructure and despite Trump having made a campaign promise to do an infrastructure package, which he never followed through on. This isn't specifically the fault of the Senate - even in a parliamentary system, there might be a "coal miners party" that would oppose green infrastructure bills - but at least the parliamentary system doesn't provide specific mechanisms, like the filibuster, for opposition parties to obstruct the course of government until the public gets tired of gridlock and predictably responds by punishing the ruling party and rewarding the obstructionist party. Again both parties do this, because it's a matter of the incentive structure of government rather than personal morality, although the Republicans are more ruthless, disciplined, and open about obstructionism while Democrats are more likely to cooperate when Republicans are in charge (this isn't necessarily praise - e.g. progressives often wish the Democrats would fight fire with fire and obstruct Republican rule a lot more).
So it's not necessarily about speed or efficiency, but about perverse incentives - the incentives towards unaccountable overreach by the executive, and towards sabotage and obstruction by the legislature - both of which feed into each other. The government should perhaps be deliberative, but it shouldn't be at war with itself.
Yeah, I hear this. I'm very familiar with the American system's faults, trust me :) To argue against executive overreach being a huge deal, it's worth noting that the US President is actually pretty weak by international presidential standards. (In Brazil he/she can pass an 'emergency' decree on I think almost any topic that automatically becomes law for 60 days unless Congress overrules them.) Anyways, courts can always strike down executive powers.
My response to the transparency argument is that most regular voters are not attentive enough, or frankly intelligent enough, to process exactly what laws have been passed most of the time. So I'm less concerned with 'who do I hold accountable for x problem'. In practice in between thermostatic public opinion and our dumb midterm elections (I'd prefer the House be elected for 4 years), voters are automatically going to vote out the incumbent party no matter what- they're not carefully analyzing each party's policy record, voters are just vaguely against whoever's in power now. (Some poly sci research now indicates that politicians start out popular and become unpopular when they try to pass laws- like any laws- basically when they try to do anything).
With 4 year House terms we'd move closer to a parliamentary system- you're electing the President & the more populist House of the common people in one fell swoop. As ticket splitting has declined, they'd almost certainly be from the same party. In my ideal system, a less populist Senate that can't be primaried by random celebrity demagogues would serve as the cooling saucer etc.
I am still really interested in how parliamentary countries pass major legislation, but I guess I need to carefully the politics in a few for an election cycle to see how compromises get hammered out etc.
It is possible that politicians get less popular because they try to pass some really revolting laws, and so the system is working well :)
Very possible, considering that we live in a de facto oligarchy.
Executive overreach is a result not of a slower legislature, but a legislature that does not punish executive overreach, combined with other potential sources of corrective power not having official standing. Congress has repeatedly failed to legislate around overreach and directly encouraged it when Congress couldn't pass legislation to achieve the ends of the president's party. If Congress were as jealous of legislative powers as the founders expected them to be the president would be easy to keep at heel.
As to divided government giving the minority "incentive and means to sabotage the ruling party", that is really strange way of interpreting protecting the minority. The reason one wants a republican form of government is to keep every election becoming "Ok, your team is in power, go nuts and do whatever." If you can't write an infrastructure bill that a majority of representatives likes, then you probably are not doing a good job at that. What the polls say is rather besides the point; it isn't as though those being polled have read any of the bills, and if they are unhappy they need to unelect their representatives.
Humans have tried more absolute forms of government where whatever group is in power can do more or less whatever they want. That's the most common form of government in history. It is also pretty awful in what it produces and highly detrimental to human flourishing compared to a republican government that doesn't do much.
They actually thought of that too. Originally the Senate was not directly elected until 1913. Senators were instead appointed by the state governments.
It was sustained pressure by the Progressives (as in the 19th century movement) and Democrats that ultimately changed it. They felt they couldn't get their program through without a more popularly elected/populist Senate. And that the system was rigged against them through such undemocratic features.
Yeah I know :) I'd prefer a limited or preselected primary (the way every other democracy operates!) Primaries are sort of the original sin of the American political system, I doubt we can get rid of them altogether, but we should give the parties as much power as possible to rig them while still appearing democratic. Demagogues are bad! (Actually I feel the same way about presidential primaries....)
TLDR, are all of the other 1st world parliamentary democracies wisely passing important major legislation and governing super-effectively, while the sclerotic US can't pass anything and is stuck in endless gridlock due to separation of powers, two basically equal houses, the filibuster, midterms which basically guarantee divided government, etc. etc.
Tldr sort of
This is a moonshot, but is anyone here a member of the Aro gTér? I'm trying to get ahold of their meditation course (https://aromeditation.org) , but I received no email after signup, and haven't found a working email to contact them either.
I'm interested in them because David Chapman, creator of Meaningness, among other things, is a member.
I was doing some deep diving into inflation yesterday and while explaining it to my wife this morning kind of realized how absurd it all is. After going through some of the glaring problems with "CPI" as measured by the government she sensibly asked "why don't they change it to better reflect reality" and I said that if they did it would invalidate the prior data points (unless you could go back and reliably recompute them) but perhaps, more importantly, there is a giant system that is indexed to the value as it is currently constructed. So the CPI we have today is "real" insofar as it's part of this whole made-up system. So "real" inflation is something you should calculate yourself based on your own inputs.
A little bit of fun history of economic thought, the definition of "inflation" changed a bit over the 20th century. The early definition was basically "printing more money (than you have gold/silver to back it up.)" So the government engaged in inflation, printing more money, then prices tended to go up as there was more money than there was before chasing goods that presumably are not much more available than before.
The later definition is essentially "A sustained increase of all [most] prices." So the government prints more money, then measures prices going up and call that inflation. This is kind of necessary if you don't have anything to measure government money printing against, e.g. how much gold they hold. On the other hand, it gets really hard to track all the different sorts of goods and services people spend money on, really hard to line up local vs regional vs national changes in prices, hard to line up different sets of goods for various economic classes, and similar problems.
Another important question is whether prices are moving because of supply and demand changes or changes in the money supply. In theory if all prices go up you know it is money that is increasing, but in practice it is entirely possible that, for example, many prices should be decreasing slightly due to increased output, so a low inflation rate might be because prices and money supply are steady or because prices are dropping while more money is being printed. This case highlights the difference between the two definitions of inflation. In the first definition you just look at the printing money action so you could have steady prices and printing money, but in the second case you measure prices only so you don't pay attention to the money supply.
It's weird. Inflation is different by region, economic class, all manner of things, but we like to cite a national number. The "basket of goods" used to estimate the price level is mostly filled with things you could fight about. There are other ways of measuring inflation that center around proportions of income spent on various things, but those are not without controversy either. In general, it isn't always clear which of the two definitions people are using at any given moment.
One would think that the entire purpose of having a national average meaure of inflation is to help people decide if the local inflation they're experiencing is reflective of broad national trends, or is just something specific to their situation. Id est, it would make no sense to have a national measure (of any kind) that *exactly* reflected what almost everybody experienced, because it would convey no new information. If your local inflation differs significantly from the national measurement -- that tells you something useful.
Presumably it's also useful to have this big average measure so that decisions don't get drive by anecdotal data, e.g. Senator Foo experiences a surge in his local inflation for some random reason, extrapolates infinitely, as people like to do, and so decides this is the new #1 national problem. Or conversely, Senator Bar experience local deflation and is baffled by how everybody can be bitching about inflation, it must be some conspiracy or fake news by The Opposition Party, and can be dismissed.
Since measures of inflation have becomes somewhat of a "grade" on the "scorecard" by which people evaluate the success or failure of politicians, it does seem to be a case of perverse incentives that this "grade" is calculated by -- the government. In a more rational world, the government would pay some private consortium for an annual inflation estimate, and by statute part of their remuneration would consist of bonuses for having predicted the price of some basket of goods to within x% over y years.
Measuring inflation isn't just about local vs. national, it's also supposed to track changes for the whole nation over time.
It ball parks the situation well enough
But they have changed it to better reflect reality, multiple times. Look at the data sets they offer: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/data.htm
There's CPI-U, which is the most widely used series, but there's also chained CPI-U (incorporating some improvements). You can also see that there's a discontinued old version of CPI-U. To make the new and the old versions of CPI-U comparable, they also offer R-CPI-U-RS, which uses the modern CPI-U computation methods and extends them retroactively back to 1978: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/research-series/
I wonder what inflation would look like as a vector in bundle-of-goods-space rather than a scalar
It's hard to visualize or make sense of highly multidimensional data, but the BLS does publish average price level estimates for a number of expenditure categories.
You can see the big list of categories used in the CPI here: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm
For example, here's a graph of the CPI for Coffee:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SEFP01
CPI is mostly ok as is though it is very off and some ways and much overused. You shouldn't make liberal quote of CPI without a good understanding of its constituent data points. The fed prefers PCE (and specifically CORE PCE) for what it is worth. Major reforms of CPI would be hard for obvious political reasons
it’s probably quite hard to do a good CPI especially a good one for every purpose tbh
and it probably works okay as it is
At this point it is fairly difficult to change (although the Boskin commission did a bit in the 90's) for the reasons you outline. Why professional investors pay attention to CPI and related indices at all is astonishing.
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/13/1033993846/the-federal-government-sells-flood-prone-homes-to-often-unsuspecting-buyers-npr-
HUD is doing a worse job of telling buyers about flood risk than banks are required to do.
That is interesting. I am not surprised by the claim that HUD is skirting rules about disclosure, but I think the article doesn't really present evidence that it is not following the local rules (which may or may not be good.) The bit about using rates and arguing that they are disproportional is worthless, sloppy statistical analysis masquerading as science. Actually doing the footwork to find out what disclosures were made and when, and whether that was in compliance with local rules would be very damning to HUD, and I hope someone does that.
I thought this would get more discussion, but I think it has a problem of not fitting cliche's.
It isn't "Ooh, though awful capitalists", but it doesn't appeal to the right wing because it's government failing to take adequate care of people rather than about the government invading people's rights.
Maybe most people are just not familiar (I am not) with what HUD "tells" people about floor risks. In some maps they draw?
It sounds like (some?) banks are required to tell individual buyers about flood risk, it's not just publishing maps.
Federal flood insurance is not priced according to actual risk. This should change.
It is also entirely useless unless you live somewhere where your entire house will be put underwater. I went through this not too long ago in the Catskills of New York and we decided not to buy it.
As far as we could tell in our most catastrophic scenario our basement would be completely flooded which of course is where all the expensive important things are like heaters and water filters etc. Federal flood insurance does not cover that.
I do not see why federal (or private, for that matter), should not cover basement flooding, so long as the risk assessments are up to date.
Same reason any insurance doesn't cover things, I presume - they don't like paying out
The issue is why flooded basements cannot be a profitable line of business like fire or automobile accidents
(and, implicitly, they assume that some buyers won't read the fine print and will pay for useless insurance)
For a variety of reasons, the HUD inventory of housing is non-representative of the entire housing market. So their sales stats will not look like the regular market. Most of the "awfulness" of the HUD sales is explainable by that, and the rest by HUD buyers being credulous/inexperienced.
Do you think HUD should be obliged to inform buyers about flood risk?
I am not convinced by a smattering of anecdotes that HUD is failing to perform their legally-obligated notifications.
That's one of my objections to the piece; that it is mostly a couple of anecdotes.
The primary one is that their methodology in their allegedly statistical segment is Very Bad (see comment about how HUID housing is not representative of the entire market), and they then turn around and use this to imply things about their anecdotes.
Certainly in New York State it’s an absolute law that you need to be informed if you are in a floodplain.
Recent international news has discussed the formation of an alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with its first major activity being the development of a new class of nuclear-powered submarines for the Australian navy. This deserves some kabbalistic analysis.
The notarikon for this alliance is AUKUS, pronounced like "Orcus", the Roman god of the underworld later and better known as Pluto. Project Pluto was a 1960s US project to develop a nuclear-powered ... aircraft.
But Project Pluto was kabbalistically unbalanced: it focused on developing aircraft, whereas Pluto is a god of the underworld. The fuel for its nuclear engines was similarly unbalanced: uranium is mined from deep within the earth, whereas Uranus is a god of the sky. To find balance we can look astronomically, between Pluto and Uranus, or physically between earth and sky, to find Neptune, god of the sea, and the submarines that will be developed for Project Orcus.
Further correspondence can be found in Project Pluto, based in the northern hemisphere, developing craft to travel over the surface, while Project Orcus, based in the southern hemisphere, develops craft to travel under it. This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Hadn't heard about this. Am glad; it was always very silly that we were planning on building more diesel subs when they're so massively inferior to nuclear.
Is anyone else suddenly finding the google spreadsheet for meetups doesn't work? I've been checking for info on the Oxford/London meetups about twice a week for a while, as I'll probably go to whichever of those is more convenient, and now the times have been announced, I've gone to the spreadsheet to double-check the locations as I can't quite remember them exactly, and both they and maybe something like 75% of the total rows seem to have vanished? Is this something obscene happening on my end, or has something odd gone on, perhaps related to the changes to google docs/drive happening about now?
It seems to work for me. At least both Oxford and London are there.
Thanks - have tried again and it's fine. Not sure what was going on there.
Fresh PhD graduate here! I'm looking for job opportunities or paid projects.
Apart from working on my academic topic, molecular biology, I also:
run a photography freelance business (https://www.see-elegance.com)
organize a dating advice group (https://discord.gg/rz4PVuK)
and play around with data using Python (https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/comments/owutig/oc_i_learned_programming_so_i_could_graph_inas/)
Remote work is a possibility, but I would prefer to move abroad. I'm a Russian citizen.
Here's the CV I'm sending out to recruiters: https://docdro.id/wiaLOTe
Let me know if you need any other info.
Where are you looking to move and what kind of work?
I'd be happy with any location that's warm or where people speak English, preferably both (Singapore, Sydney, San Francisco)
A natural way forward for me would be a wet lab scientist at a pharma or biotech company, but I'm open to alternatives too: consulting, data science, field application scientist jobs, shooting Tinder profile photos for Bay Area programmers, or working on any interesting problems that could use my skills.
Have you got anything that would fit?
There is BioTech in SF but my understanding is that Boston is the big player there. No idea about Sydney or SF. Also, if you're looking for Russian expat communities there's more on the East Coast.
I'd suggest you define what you want a bit more. Going anywhere to do anything is nice and all but it makes it hard to give help. Also, keep in mind you'll need to go through an immigration process in most of those places if you want to actually work.
Does anyone have advice for people who have political opinions far different from most of their friends and family? How do you navigate this situation? Do you just shut up and let your opinions fester inside, not let anyone know your true beliefs? This seems somewhat torturous to me. Do you try to actively argue with people? This also seems torturous, and likely to end up with everyone misunderstanding me and my positions. People don't seem to understand the nuances of positions outside the Overton window. They tend to think I'm more of an extremist than I really am, or think I'm stupid, or just plain old not like me and not want to be around me.
For me it's a mix of:
a) Don't care too much about wanting to spread your opinions
b) Don't be friends with people who don't care to understand your opinions
c) Don't care too much about people who misunderstand your opinions
I've got a cousin I'm fond of. We talk about family, about our jobs, sports, stuff we like to do. We avoid most political topics, and when we broach them, we broach them very gently. Works fine.
It probably depends on how far outside of normal your opinions are.
Depends how strong the opinions are and how much fallout you are willing to tolerate. If it's shutting up while Great-Uncle Phil goes on about the latest conspiracy theory, if you only see Phil at funerals and weddings, it's not worth starting a fight. If it's someone you interact with every day, it may be too much hassle always pretending you don't believe what you believe.
I regularly see posts on social media for American Thanksgiving about "if you are going home to where you will be amongst abusive/prejudiced family members, here are Ten Ways To Cope" (usually for LGBT themes but often enough other progressive themes) and I always think "if it's that big of a hassle, why not stay where you are and not go to the family gathering?" I realise that shutting up is stressful, but it's that or stick to your principles and not go into a hostile environment.
Particularly when so many comments on those kinds of posts are all about "And I challenged my sexist/racist/horrible family" which draw applause from others. I understand that yeah, you're gay, this is your girlfriend, you don't want to listen to Aunt Phyllis lecturing you as to why this is wrong. But equally, from the point of view of the rest of the family, they're all there to have a big traditional meal, catch up together, and have a good time, and they are fed-up of your scowling face lecturing them why they should all be vegans or the latest progressive talking points.
Pick your battle. How important is X topic to you? How willing are you to burn bridges over it?
I am contrarian and love dialogue, but as a cishet white male I realized that has become a trope, so I avoid engaging too-authentically on political subjects except with close friends or family I know trust my intentions.
I think a lot about that. I don't resent it entirely because it does force me to be a little more self-aware. But it does make me sad to have to filter my thoughts which seems, less intimate and more prosaic.
Jeeze, the way you put it, I think it'd bother me a whole lot. You're making it sound like because of factors you cannot control, being white, male, and straight, your opinion matters less and you need to shut up more. I don't often think like that these days, but if I did, I think I'd be quite resentful.
I restrain myself to position statements; and only go in hard if people engage.
But, if people engage, I will escalate until they quit, we agree, or they physically Assult me; in which case we smoothly transition into "competition in the free market of ideas", ie, I wrastle you.
The people I'm close with know I'm opinionated and like to wrestle, so It's a bit of an in group meme people can joke about.
I want you to know I appreciate this method of discourse, and you.
you can just not discuss it
or if you do, discuss politics tangential to the big issues - maybe you really like regenerative agriculture and dislike big ag and you can have fun commiserating about that. or maybe you can all agree that the big corporations have too much control and harm, and use that to introduce and color your ideas and beliefs without approaching your larger ideas
and you can use that to get them in a way or have someplace to build on with the politics or ideas you really want or believe
are you left vs right fam or right vs left fam or something else?
I can usually find someplace where I can express, if not agreement, close enough to hide behind, when I'm required to
I don’t really mean agreeing, but just going around or switching topics to find something to get a hold on. (To leftist) “yeah alienation sucks and technology is removing the best parts of life” or (to rightist) “man those big corporations sure are poisoning the water and ruining the economy and your favorite tools” and “those corporate leftists really hate the people’s love for nature and traditional customs don’t they”. (as you might tell, you can have ideas that crosscut through both right and left, and then pick ones that’ll work)
in general this stuff isn’t a big battleground of a vs b, but more of planting little ideas and growing them with motivations and good stories and watching your little seedlings fight for soil/soul space and sunlight, work on little ideas and things and they can build up to big ones with fine
I no longer discuss politics "in public" or with uncurated groups of friends and acquaintances; at least not under my own face.
I will do so pseudonymously, but much less than I used to
It's not worth the heartburn
Do not discuss politics (or religion) at home. At some places this is a social norm; I can understand why.
My friends have different political opinions, so I can't be simultaneously far from all of them. The ones further from me would probably consider me a brainwashed moron, but the advantage is that then they would also avoid discussing politics with me, so at least the burden of avoidance wouldn't be one-sided. The ones closer to me would probably consider me confused or a heretic, and they might try to fix me, which might actually be more annoying. My solution is to not discuss politics with people, and whatever they say, just nod and try to change topic.
My advantage is that for each political opinion separately, I probably have a friend who agrees with this specific opinion; they would just consider my other opinions crazy. So it's not like I have an unsatisfied burning need to say something specific.
Some of my friends do not talk politics, and I am not sure whether they are using the same algorithm as me, or maybe they are just too naive and assume that I agree with them on everything (because to most people their beliefs feel like "the obvious thing that anyone reasonable would agree with"). Either option is okay for me.
I never discuss politics at work. I generally try to keep my work separate from... everything else.
I have been reading the diary of Samuel Pepys, a 17th century naval bureaucrat who kept a detailed daily account of his life that has survived and is quite interesting. The first volume covers the year of the restoration, when Charles II was brought back to be king. Once it happens it seems to be massively popular, with no serious attempt to reverse it by putting Cromwell's son back in power or setting up a republic. But in the months leading up to the restoration it is unclear what will happen. It feels as though everyone is trying to figure out what everyone else is in favor of, hence which way to jump, without committing himself.
Presumably that was the result of the same pattern of behavior you are describing, not limited to "at home."
I'm sure you've found it already, but in case other people haven't, there's a great site that published the diary entries day by day, like a blog. It's heavily hyperlinked and annotated, so for example, it's easy to track down the 290 days in which Monk (sic) was mentioned, or see what Ralph Josselin wrote in his diary, or stumble across a string of comments discussing the method of determining whether a woman is a maid by tying a string around her head, with reference to Soranus of Ephesus among others. The site is closing in on finishing its 2nd decade-long round, now, but all the comments and information are still preserved.
https://www.pepysdiary.com/
Actually they were all trying to figure out what George Monck, the future Duke of Albemarle thought.
George Monck had started marching south before the diary started. He and his allies had basically seized control of the country by 1660. Theoretically he was supporting Parliament against John Lambert but Lambert's forces largely defected. Lambert was basically done as a political force by the time Pepys was writing. He would try to seize control of the country but unsuccessfully. Albemarle would enter London unopposed in February after seizing control of most of the country.
While theoretically Albemarle supported Parliament there was no delusion among contemporary actors that Albemarle and his army effectively controlled the country. He also made a bunch of hugely contradictory statements so no one knew what he thought. Few thought his immediate position was tenable. That he could just remain in power as a military dictator. Ultimately (and for reasons that are still debated) he created the political settlement that would create the Restoration.
Pepys would be particularly loathe and uncertain about all this because his loyalty to Sandwich made Monck a political rival.
Pepys make the importance of Monck clear, but presumably Monck's decision in part hinged on what he thought all the other players, including his own officers and soldiers, wanted.
No doubt. However, there was a huge sense that Monck was the key player. Political actors tried to bribe his son with candy to learn what he thought. Multiple maids were bribed to listen to him speaking to his wife in bed to decide what he'd do. Etc. This became even more fevered as several revolts failed to become significant because his forces remained loyal and/or the rebels were beaten in the field. Meanwhile Monck basically refused to tell people what he intended to do.
Monck was already talking with Charles II and the Royalists during the early parts of Pepys diary. (I believe he began in March or February? With some Royalist underground contacts from 1659.) Pepys just didn't know this.
I generally don't talk openly about politics except to my girlfriend who shares the same values. Friends, family and coworkers get as few of my political opinions as possible. Social media is right out.
American politics has become increasingly totalitarian and repressive over the last decade. It's been the case for several years that voicing dissent is a serious risk to your employment. Now with the unprecedented cooperation between the Biden-Harris regime and tech companies over censoring "misinformation" as well as the seizure of control represented by the vaccine mandate, the federal government has taken the steps to formalize that system of blacklisting and disenfranchisement. I predict that prior to November of 2024, it will be illegal or effectively illegal for any company to employ an individual who has stated "extreme" political views online.
This is an important moment of time to find like-minded people and prepare but not on the indexed internet.
Man, I wish I lived in the US you lived in where liberals exercise complete control over all walks of life,
instead of the US I live in where conservatives control 1.5 of the branches of government despite not winning a majority in any national election in any branch of government for 20 years
and where I will be instantly fired if I so much as think about unionizing
and where the largest, most popular news network is wildly conservative
and where the most visible social media influencers (Shapiro, Rogan, Carlson, etc.) are conservative
and where a bunch of states just banned teaching CRT in the classroom with language so broad it includes mentioning that racism even exists and suffered no repercussion what so ever,
and where you can be a gat dang ethnonationalist on twitter and it's totally fine.
Not to be too hard on you or to condescend, but I think you should broaden your sources to people that don't agree with you, or at least don't maximally agree with your worst predictions about who things are goin'.
The mandates in 1777, 1867, 1900 (This one involved dudes going door to door and physically forcing you to take the smallpox vaccine in some places), 1905, 1928, and 1970 didn't result in the US degenerating into a totalitarian vaccinocracy or something.
>despite not winning a majority in any national election in any branch of government for 20 years
This isn't quite right. The Republicans won the majority of house votes in 2016 and 2010. And both the presidential and house vote in 2004. The long dominance of the Democratic voters during a period where we've usually not held either the White House or the House of Representatives is certainly an ugly fact about American Democracy, but it's not *quite* as stark as you suggest.
> the largest, most popular news network is wildly conservative
> the most visible social media influencers (Shapiro, Rogan, Carlson, etc.) are conservative
Not sure if this isn't evidence for the contrary. I mean, if population is roughly 50% liberal and 50% conservative, but you have 10× more liberal news networks and 10× more liberal influencers... that would mean that the conservative news networks get 10× more viewers per network, and the conservative influencers get 10× more viewers per influencer.
> and where you can be a gat dang ethnonationalist on twitter and it's totally fine.
Or a communist, or an ISIS recruiter...
An excellent take. It's sad that not one of the respondents is arguing on the merits.
> and where you can be a gat dang ethnonationalist on twitter and it's totally fine.
it seems out of place to put a “you will not be put in jail for being a Twitter nazi” in your list of complaints about how conservatives have power. Twitter (slowly) does ban far right people, but nothing more will happen. The CRT bans are pretty dumb, freeze peach will overturn some probably and the remainder won’t make any difference.
I think he's trying to broaden *your* sources. And for what it's worth, I agree more with him than you. That is, your experience is far less familiar than what Boberto is describing among people I know.
"and where I will be instantly fired if I so much as think about unionizing"
What, you work for Amazon?
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/976141488/high-stakes-at-a-warehouse-amazon-fights-against-alabama-union-drive
Which is also impeccably liberal, going by this ranking:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/most-liberal-tech-companies-ranked-by-employee-donations.html
Ultimately, it's not so much conservative versus liberal as it is "what puts money in our pockets".
So your point is that even the most liberal companies are overwhelmingly conservative? I agree.
Amazon may be 'liberal', whatever that really means, but it's very much an enemy of socialism. Its management hates unions and it hates paying taxes.
From your CNBC link:
"Sanders and Warren were the top two presidential recipients among Amazon workers, even though those two candidates were the biggest advocates for breaking up Big Tech."
Seems like those worker donations are a cry for help, to me.
In today's corporate America, you can get a job as a professional spotter of racists, you can demand single-sex bathrooms, you can call a co-worker "Literal Hitler" because he insisted that there are only twenty six genders and everyone knows that there are at least twenty eight, plus genders not discovered yet. You can debate endlessly subjects of interest to todays audiences, such as many LGTBQXYZPDQ can dance on the head of a pin. None of this affects the ability of rich people to make more money.
What you cannot do is to discuss changing the way the economic pie is sliced.
I don't possess your venom for sexual and gender non-conformists and activists who stick up for them in public life, but it's absolutely true that major corporations have co-opted their causes to make themselves look good at no significant cost. Which sometimes leads to darkly funny results - like honest-to-goodness small-time queer vendors no longer being able to afford booth fees at Pride festivals because corporate competition jacked up prices.
And your conclusion is right on the money, so to speak.
IDK, I don't see this world at all. Where I am, the Overton window is strictly controlled by the left. You're much more in danger of losing your job if you say anything borderline conservative at work or on social media. Yeah, you can say what you want if you have an independent source of income (or if your income depends on you being inflammatory). But who has that? Only a very very small subset of people, who have to make their whole life and career revolve around being inflammatory. I don't want that. I just want to be my authentic self.
Your arguments would matter if the political landscape was homogoneous, but it isn't. The political distribution of America is bimodal, and most people are in a bubble.
If you are an academic or white collar professional (presumably the majority of this blog, though there was one LEO at the meetup I went to), the left wields significant practical and cultural power over your life, and expressing an opinion contrarian to the current narrative (right now, focused on identity/grievance politics) - even if you broadly agree with their values - can be harmful to your reputation.
Hang on a sec. Reread the post the one you're replying to is replying to. There may be some other debate Nah's arguments don't matter to - I do agree with your point about bubbles - but in the one that was actually going on I think they're pretty directly relevant, and correct, as a rebuttal.
+
> I predict that prior to November of 2024, it will be illegal or effectively illegal for any company to employ an individual who has stated "extreme" political views online.
In Communist Czechoslovakia, people with wrong opinions were still allowed to do some low-status manual jobs, especially if those were dangerous for health. It doesn't seem credible to me that USA would get further than that within three years.
The greatest pressure will be on jobs where you influence people: teachers, journalists, bloggers. (In case of bloggers, the pressure will be on the infrastructure they use.) Or the jobs too many people compete for.
And there will remain some small opportunities for the actual extremists. It's just that when you are neither orthodox nor extremist, you will be pushed out of the mainstream opportunities... and then you can either join the extremists (and in the eyes of the public come out as one of them), or move to somewhere unimportant.
In the US those kinds of dirty jobs either pay well, and are thus in high demand, or are primarily done by illegal immigrants and as such eschew the sort of documentation requirements necessary to enforce a blacklist. As such I would expect such a blacklist to affect oil riggers while avoiding meat packers, to use those jobs as synecdoches.
Depending on how you define that boundary I think we're broadly in agreement.
Is there any way for you to register this prediction?
Did you explore politics with your girlfriend before the relationship solidified? Your personalities are similar enough in relevant ways that it makes sense that you two would have similar politics? Or was it luck?
Partially similar personalities, partially luck.
I knew that I wanted to settle down so I deliberately sought out women with similar values and life goals. My goal there wasn't political per se but just to minimize the risk of divorce and generally head off future conflict about finances, family size and childrearing, etc.
(Not to imply that she doesn't have a lot of other positive qualities, because she absolutely does, but this is the most directly relevant to the topic at hand. It's also important to note she wasn't the first woman I had found who had similar goals and values, but rather was so interesting when I met her that I stopped looking.)
Early on in our relationship there was an incident where she was "warned" about me
Oops, submitted early.
Anyway, long comment short she didn't care and, while she isn't politically engaged at all, broadly agrees on both the underlying values which motivate my politics and on the practical upshots of them for daily life.
Don't expect to be able to both regularly express opinions that anger or distress people and to keep their friendship. People want to be friends with people they enjoy being around.
In particular, don't confuse "it is not reasonable for people to be angered or distressed by this opinion" with "people will not be angered or distressed by this opinion" - this is an area where there's no substitute for empiricism.
Which you value more - challenging things you disagree with, or not losing friends over it - is a decision you'll have to make for yourself, but I would suggest framing it in those terms.
brings to mind the old saying, "do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?"
I'd say "do you want to be happy or do you want other people to know you're right", except that biting your tongue too much may make you unhappy too.
I agree with you. It’s tough though to not express ones opinion when other people are doing so freely - perhaps because they’re in the majority.
I've gotten into more trouble from voting for the wrong party (and I almost never tell anyone) than from expressing the wrong opinions (which I do more often), so I think the danger lies mostly in.being identified as belonging to the out-group, which means extreme opinions as such aren't that much of a problem, but shibboleth opinions that identify one as a part of the out-group are.
I try to only talk politics with people who show signs of crimethink, moving slowly outwards from the edges of the Overton window to keep things safe. It's hard to shut up when people are saying stupid stuff tho, so when there's like an NPC political conversation going on, I tend to just leave the room.
I've managed to lose most of my friends over the past few years due to politics. "Speak truth when no one else will" is great until it conflicts with the values of other people.
It could be worse. In the 1640s people killed each other over the question of whether praying to the saints worked or not. Good think we're not as stupidly but murderously frivolous as those medieval nitwits -- today we only fight over things that are *really* important.
> "Speak truth when no one else will" is great until it conflicts with the values of other people.
If you see expressing your political opinions in those terms, I'm afraid I think you're doomed from the start.
My counter-slogan would "Say what you think is true when other people who disagree with you are saying what they think is true, but keep in mind the possibility that actually it's you and not they who is making a mistake".
And even that will often alienate people, of course.
that sucks. it’s really sad that people give up friends over politics at all - I remember Scott’s story about the nazi he knew online when he was younger, and IMO you should be willing to tolerate literally anything that’s not a concrete action, as what one actually does and knows does and embodies much more than any political statements AND it’s good to be close to propel at that extremes so you can really understand and learn from why they do that.
Why "should" - why shouldn't people limit their friends to those people whose company they enjoy?
How much does whose company you enjoy depend on shared political (or other) opinions?
I know some people who have political opinions kinda close to me, but they are insufferable assholes. On the other hand, I know people who are fans of homeopathy or conspiracy theories, but who are fun to be around as long as they don't start talking about that one specific topic (and they know that I disagree with them on that topic, so most of the time they try to avoid it in my presence).
Suppose a high-school kid were to say to you that the reason he only has friends of the same race or religion is because he doesn't seen any reason he shouldn't limit his friends to people whose company he enjoys. Would that be perfectly OK? Would there be no counsel to the contrary that you give him?
People should limit their friends to people whose company they enjoy. People should enjoy the company of people who disagree with them if their company is in other ways enjoyable. If anything, they should prefer the company of those who disagree with them, ceteris paribus, since they are more likely to learn from them.
I'm afraid I disagree with this on several grounds.
Firstly, and most importantly, "there is a moral obligation to enjoy X" is obviously wrong, for all values of X, so your entire argument isn't just wrong, it's an example of a category of arguments all members of which are wrong.
Secondly, "am I likely to learn things from this person?" is a lousy proxy for "will I enjoy spending time with this person?".
Thirdly, "does this person regularly express opinions which offend or distress me in my presence?" (which, note, is a much narrower question than "do I disagree with this person?", not to say a better-defined one) is a lousy proxy for "how often am I going to learn things from this person?".
I suspect you're using this as a short-hand for “if you only hear the opinions of people whose views on ideological issues you share, you are more likely to end up with blind spots in your views on those issues”, which is true, but there are plenty of ways of lower-cost ways hearing opinions without befriending them.
Plus, I think that people whose ideas about morality strike me as a bit wrong are more likely to actually be right, and I'm more likely to have blind spots that they can productively challenge, than people whose ideas about morality strike me as massively wrong, and who will probably mostly challenge me about things I'm right and they're wrong about. And, as an added bonus, they're less likely to offend or distress me.
I've seen some people express the opinion that there's a moral obligation not to be friends with bad people, in order to discourage them. I don't agree with that (although there can be moral obligations to condemn and oppose certain behaviours in your friends, obviously). If I found out one of my friends was a serial killer, I imagine I wouldn't want to go on being friends with them, but if for some bizarre reason I did then, provided I did everything in my power to get them convicted and punished and to get justice for their victims, I'd tentatively defend doing so (although I admit it's not a counterfactual I've thought about much). But I also don't think there is ever a moral obligation to be friends with someone – especially not with someone who regularly, knowingly does things that distress you.
I said nothing about a moral obligation. I should keep my weight down, but that is not a moral obligation.
Not did I say that "am I likely to learn things from this person?" is a good proxy for "will I enjoy spending time with this person?" It is a benefit from spending time with someone, hence a reason to do so.
given you enjoy their company and we’re friends with them for other reasons ofc. but “being a meanie in political views” doesn’t make one enjoy their company in the ten other areas any less
I think you're factually wrong here, or at least generalising inaccurately from your own experience - I think a lot of people do find being around people expressing views that anger or offend them unpleasant.
well those people are wrong! being offended is absolutely a choice, you can just not care. offense is usually taken on behalf of others, and if you actually follow the chain of offense you find it’s made of ethereal spider silk that seems to twinkle out to every vulnerable minority but ends nowhere. no matter if someone thinks the }*]^s minor ethnic group should be permanently #*]^\^ed or thinks that the *}*{^ basic institution we all depend on are racist and should be }*]*]*ed, you can literally just ignore it and keep doing the thing you like doing with that person. (most people for most of history, and to a much, much lesser extent much of the planet today not in the fifty states and Western Europe, are extremely racist - and categorically being unable to relate to most of them is a mistake). being unable to interact with a bad human being isn’t innate. “People find being around people who offend or anger them” is tautologically true, offending is unpleasant by the construction of the word - but the offense itself can just be shrugged off and you can just like the person otherwise. The original discussion wasn’t about “being around people while they express mean and not nice views”, but about “breaking off friendship with people who do that”, which is very bad, while not talking about the mean things is merely quite bad
I used throwaway pseudonymous accounts on social media to explore and work through my political intuitions. I interacted with diverse communities, and got to have a close look at both their legitimate points and their blind spots and biases. This satisfied my need to express myself, and also allowed me to test out various Overton cruising speeds. I ended up being disappointed in everything that's currently on offer throughout the political spectrum, while at the same time not bothered by partially agreeing with everyone when they get something right. Because my views have gotten more subtle and in many ways more extreme, but also non-partisan, I no longer find myself in the "us-vs-them" frame in political discussions, and can approach them in a detached manner, while pressing as few "confirmation bias" buttons as possible.
So, the Covid situation here in England (and I think the rest of the UK) is starting to get scary again (hospitals seem to be under much strain as cases are rising ahead of a likely new wave). With vaccination numbers stalled far short of herd immunity levels, and with the government insisting on relaxing security measures, I'm personally suspecting we're back to a strategy of achieving (the required difference in numbers for) herd immunity by means of infections.
So... I don't want to be that guy, but might this mean it's worth rethinking meetups here?
If the vaccinations aren't enough to stop the epidemic, or even to protect the vaccinated people themselves, then there is indeed not much we can do to prevent the outcome where almost everyone gets infected, short of maintaining strict restrictions forever. Continuing to isolate ourselves, then, only serves to delay the inevitable by a few months, which is hardly worth it.
If vaccinations are effective at preventing infection, and the epidemic is now mostly spreading among unvaccinated people, then there is little risk for a vaccinated person in attending a meetup, even if case counts in the area are high.
The bottom line: IMO once vaccinated, it's time to resume our normal lives, whatever probability of infection this results in.
"Vaccinations aren't enough to stop the epidemic" != "almost everyone gets infected". For any vaccine that isn't literally perfect, there will be some people whose behavior is sufficiently high-risk that they're liable to become infected even if they are vaccinated, e.g. bear week attendees. And, conversely, some people whose behavior is sufficiently low-risk that they are unlikely to be infected even if they are not vaccinated. The epidemic ends when enough people have been vaccinated, *and* enough of the high-risk population has been infected.
The open question is whether "high-risk population" is 2%, 20%, or 80% of the general population. But "vaccines fail, so everybody gets infected!" is sloppy thinking; please don't do that.
That's a middle between the vaccines being completely effective and the vaccines being completely ineffective. But it still holds that however many people would get infected if we returned to our normal lives *will* eventually get infected (unless we maintain strict restrictions forever), so there is no point in isolating ourselves unless there is severe strain on the healthcare system.
I agree with the conclusion, but "many" and "almost everyone" are two very different things. 20% of the still-uninfected population is "many". So is 80%.
The figures I'm seeing online show UK infection rates falling steeply for about the past week, rising steeply before that. Hospital case rates presumably lag that, since someone whose infection was detected a week ago and was hospitalized is probably still hospitalized.
There was an earlier peak, followed by a drop, about two months ago. Current infection rates are less than 2/3 of the July peak.
Case numbers are indeed momentarily falling; but nobody expects that to last any significant amount of time as schools have already opened and universities are about to. A considerable wave is being expected. And hospitals are reportedly already near the limits of what they can bear - https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/hospital-strain-test-uks-vaccine-based-winter-covid-plan-2021-09-15/ was the first example I found online, but there are several others.
I suppose the evolution of the situation in the coming weeks might clarify things somewhat, but those meetups are in about a month and it's possible that things might by then be considerably riskier without data being conclusive yet (since it often only is after the fact). How possible? I don't know. As said elsewhere, if I could quantify things I'd be making much stronger statements. I just feel this is a discussion that should be had.
Maybe I can frame my concerns more clearly as a question: under what conditions (say, in terms of numbers in a couple of weeks) would it be better to just cancel those meetups? I wouldn't expect a reasonable choice for those to be unlikely to take place, so I'd rather those conditions be discussed now than in a month when it's easier to just justify keeping things as they are whatever the numbers happen to be at the time.
The number of COVID hospital patients in the UK is 22% of its winter peak, so it can't be anywhere near its limits. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=2020-03-01..latest&Metric=Hospital+patients&Relative+to+Population=true&country=~GBR
Not sure how this squares with the sort of news above... My guess is either the problem is not uniformly distributed across hospitals or across the UK? Maybe there's something other than Covid keeping them busy? But hospitals are certainly claiming to be at their limit...
The only parts of the Reuters article above that suggests that the health system is strained right now are these:
'But many doctors already feel overburdened [...] "Our hospitals and GP (doctor) practices are already overstretched," Dr Chaand Nagpaul chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) council, told Reuters.'
These are very vague and non-specific. I'm pretty sure you can always find many doctors who feel overburdened. All the rest of the article is speculation about what may happen in the future.
If you don't trust doctors in the front lines to tell you how things are (I've certainly heard from a few local hospitals claiming they're worse than a year ago), are you willing to take the government's scientific advisor's models seriously?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/14/bring-in-measures-soon-or-risk-7000-daily-covid-cases-sage-warns
Cases are slightly rising round here, but I think that's because of the kids are all back to school, so you generally get a rise in *all* infections when that happens.
Whether or not it's a new wave, it's a bit early to tell yet.
When you say cases are rising, don’t you mean they’re falling? And have been for ten days?
Yes, we all have different perceptions of risk but for an outdoor meet-up of vaccinated people, Covid would be way down on my list of concerns.
Well yes but actually no. Admittedly I was thinking of numbers in my local area and carelessly extrapolating nationally. Yet the recent decrease is shy enough that it should be reasonable to expect it to no longer be true when current infections due to opening of schools and universities are known. Basically holidays infections seem to be decreasing, but we're at the onset of school ones, plus extra strain from flu season.
I don't dispute that the outdoor factor decreases risk. But the estimates Scott previously made still had it at a reasonable level (if I recall correctly the recommendation was for those attending to be wary of their risk budget for that week) and this is bound to update on that in the direction of higher risk. Quantification is hard and I haven't done it, which is why I'm not stating this must be cancelled. Still it seems serious enough that there should be some discussion, which I haven't seen.
And yes, as you say, a lot of this is down to personal perceptions. Seeing the almost complete lack of care around me (except for a minimum commitment to plausible deniability) my perception is that there's real potential for a bad outcome not that long before a possible new lockdown.
Fair enough. My sense is that further lockdowns are extremely unlikely - during the whole of the recent wave there wasn’t a hint of reneging on the ‘lockdowns are over’ message and any subsequent wave is likely to have even fewer cases and and even Lower mortality rate. Of course I’m also hoping these things happen..
I'm far less optimistic, given Summer waves have been generally milder, don't have the added strain of flu et al, and there hasn't been that huge a leap in vaccination numbers over the Summer. Of course I'm rather hoping your things will happen instead, but so far see no sign of them.
I'm reminding myself of how many times I've been wrong about the course of the pandemic..... but this time I'm expecting to be absolutely spot-on! I guess we'll see - fingers crossed.
Do you perhaps mean we should have meetups *more* often so as to reach herd immunity faster?
I mean, there are more efficient ways to get infected, if that's what you're after.
Sun sets at 17.49 in Edinburgh on Sun 24 Oct, just so you know for an outdoor meetup
I want to try to come up with names for things--names that, as soon as you hear them, you immediately understand what the name is referring to, and wonder why no one gave it a name before:
singularity FOMO
the great leap whoreward
rent seeking license
divine right of parents
the principle of "The kleptocrat is dead. Long live the kleptocrat."
Can you come up with any good ones?
the central bank of you
intergenerational Ponzi game
the tapeworm of the financial services industry
superstition fund
the end is visible in the rearview mirror
the financial weapons of mass destruction
the invisible hand of the death grip
fractional reserve god
Intergenerational Ponzi scheme is pretty good.
I don't understand any of them.
I am understanding (I think) only the third one.
I like 'singularity FOMO' - the others listed here don't really work for me, except as a divinely anointed parent I can identify with #4. I need time & caffeine to come up with a few more, but quite like some recent neologisms like coronacoaster, sewciopath, underthinker, etc.
Sewciopath?
How should one’s own goals be balanced with those of others in persuasion? In particular, how much should we trust others’ ability to protect & advocate for themselves when we are being persuasive?
First, some groundwork: I think that a true *win* in any negotiation is one in which both sides agree that the deal made is the best possible "free" choice for them. Persuasion is guiding someone to realize that the logical best choice is one that you prefer. (This definition can certainly be poked apart, but my main aim is to establish that I'm not interested in "wins" by coersion (eg. guilt, threats, ultimatums). These are essentially cheating — maybe you get what you want, but you would have lost if you were limited to using Reason as your weapon.)
Often, I’ve found that persuasion really comes down to understanding the other side as much as possible, to find a deal that both sides agree is better than no deal. So good persuasion shouldn’t really have a “sucker.” (Although it can certainly still appear that way from the outside, and either party may, in hindsight, decide that the deal wasn’t as good as it seemed. I think this is non-ideal, but is ultimately fine.)
If we can agree on the above, then here's a short scenario:
In a group project with a tight deadline, one member mentions that she would prefer to skip one of the final meetings — she cites multiple personal reasons: her grandpa recently died and she’s packing to leave town for his funeral, her dad just got out of the hospital, her thesis work just started this week… she’s got a lot going on. But she adds, “I suppose I can meet tonight for an hour if it'll help.” Even with everything going on, it would still be preferable for the group to have her at the meeting, and it would be false to say that things will be all the same without her. You reply that “if it’s too much for you then please let us know, but otherwise if you can do it, I’d love for us to meet for an hour! It would be more productive.” You end up meeting, the friend enjoys the meeting and is glad she ultimately attended, saying that it was a welcome distraction from the stresses of her personal life. Except…
The thing is, it worked out in this case, but it might not have. It’s entirely possible for a person to not be a good advocate for themselves, and put others’ needs before their own too heavily. An alternative view might be that one could have “read the hints,” and intuited that she didn’t really have the bandwidth for a meeting. It would also be truthful to say, "Actually, it’s fine; we do want you here and it would help, but it seems like you're dealing with a lot and we can still get a lot done without you."
I realize there’s not really a single “right” answer for this, but I’m confused regarding how/when to ask for things and assert one’s own needs/desires, if you can’t always trust others to have proper boundaries and value their own needs as important. At some point, I figure there's a necessity to assume that each person is ultimately the authority on their own internal needs/wants/desires. (Actually, to assume responsibility for someone else's calculus of what they can handle seems incredibly arrogant and paternalistic.) At the same time, there certainly is some validity to intuiting when what someone actually wants vs what they claim are misaligned; certainly, an excuse of, “Well, they said they were fine” can be plain wrong. (Just look at any consent / sexual harassment issues for evidence.)
I don’t know if there’s a resolution to be found here, but this seems like an unresolved question. Do we account for others’ needs in a world where people frequently don’t state what they want, or even realize/acknowledge it to themselves? And if so, when / how?
"Actually, it’s fine; we do want you here and it would help, but it seems like you're dealing with a lot and we can still get a lot done without you."
I think this is the best answer you could have given. IMO you are overthinking this. Unless you are on a tight deadline for a Manhattan Project, planning a D-Day invasion or zeroing in on the cure for cancer, human decency is always the trump card.
For better or worse, you are expected to wisely compare your co-worker's situation to your work situation and make the correct decision. If the work situation is not so important, it is correct to decline her offer to meet for an hour. But if the Continental Congress is about to vote down the Declaration of Independence, it may be correct to ask her to ride 70 miles in a thunderstorm despite cancer to make the saving vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_Rodney#American_Revolution
If they’re not going to their spouse’s funeral to finish the group project, maybe do them a solid and let them off the hook. Otherwise, hold them to it, as it’s just more honest and simpler for everyone. It really just depends. Maybe in Japan or Tutsi tribesmen or something you need to ask ten times to REALLY mean it and skipping one of them is rude, or maybe even asking at all is rude for the Inuit and one must negotiate entirely in subtext and hints.
If you'd like to know how an ordinary person does it, I would base it on my personal knowledge of the individual. Does she have a track record of not advocating for herself? Does she rarely say no to anything? Does she apologize for things she shouldn't? Or does say no to things just fine?
I would also give weight to her facial expression and voice when she makes the equivocal request.
If, hypothetically, this really happened to you, you probably read the person just fine. I wouldn't extract a general principle but would simply continue to "read."
It's paternalistic to Assume Responsibility for someone's needs, but it's not paternalistic to say, "Goodness, you're dealing with a lot, NO don't worry about me/my workload, go take care of yourself." Avoiding paternalism is important, but not the only important thing, and shouldn't be allowed to banish *all* sense of a limited but real duty of care for those we interact with. The type of person who won't tell you honestly when they truly need to skip out of a duty of some kind is generally the type who has too strong a sense of their duty of care for those around them--so that makes it even more appropriate, in their case, to reciprocate.
Reminds me of this old thing:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/askers-vs-guessers/340891/
I think the answer turns on how reliable your empathy is, how well you know the person in question, how much you care about their comfort, and how much slack there is available to try to protect them from themselves.
As to your statement: "Actually, to assume responsibility for someone else's calculus of what they can handle seems incredibly arrogant and paternalistic," sure, that's true most of the time. Until it becomes clear that their judgement on a particular issue is compromised - by stress, emotion, or some knot in their psychological timber. People looking out for one another at those times isn't such a bad thing.
Hell no. That way lies madness. A person who does not put in the time or effort to state plainly and precisely what he wants when directly asked is making a request of a favor --- a request to read his mind, or pleasantly surprise him, or make decisions for him. If you're trying to get into his or her pants, or you are in loco parentis to someone not yet (or no longer) a fully competent adult, you can certainly decide to grant the favor. But nobody else is under any reasonable obligation to do so. Any regime which presumes otherwise is ipso facto a miserable plantation with the poor bastards who have to read others' minds as the designated slaves, and should be burned to the ground and the ashes mixed with lye and dogshit to discourage even visiting the burial site.
All right, if it's laborious for you, don't do it. It's not laborious for everybody. And I don't think anyone brought up the idea of the government imposing it. That, frankly, would be weird.
Fine with me in your personal life. But you better not expect people to be knocking themselves out trying to figure out your internal state in the workplace -- not if you work for me. It's hard enough getting a job done that requires massive cooperation among disparate points of view without someone coming it the princess and expecting all the rest of us to psychoanalyze him before we decide whether to meet on Thursday at 1pm or Friday at 9am.
If you can't figure out how to represent yourself clearly for those kinds of quotidian workplace issues, you can expect to be out the door pretty promptly around here. I've got no time for that, and I've never yet met talent that is *so* talented it can't be replaced by someone just as good but who can communicate clearly to the team as needed without emotional drama.
You think absolutely *all* talents are fungible? I disagree. I'm more than happy to put up with minor quirks and idiosyncrasies in coworkers if they bring something unique to the table. No, I wouldn't want to have to psychoanalyze every word they say but very smart people tend to have their own way if doing things.
Perhaps you are talking about something more detrimental than mere quirkiness but there are a lot of personality types and I think it's worth the effort accommodate as many as I can.
Again and again I come back to the Iris Murdoch throw away line, "We are all so very different."
The vast majority certainly are. However, the hassle of replacing somebody with somebody else similarily qualified but less annoying to interact with is non-negligible, so I'd guess the dergee of said annoyance is usually the deciding factor.
Well, perhaps so. But if someone is pulling rabbits out of a hat for me I’m not going to show her the door because she is not assertive enough.
I realize the last bit is phrased deliberately harshly to mirror Carl Pham's comment, I don't know exactly to what degree.
As long as you literally mean "*putting work into* understanding the other person's POV", then fine, I guess. Or maybe not, unless you know of some magical way to accurately judge whether they put work in. Otherwise - and if there's any expectation of *getting it right* - I strongly disagree.
Basically: autism spectrum.
(which iirc from the surveys is quite over represented here.)
While there are autistic people who learned to be really good at this sort of thing, many are not. They often put massive amounts of work in and still end up with some major blindspots when it comes to others' POV.
At least that's what it's like for me, and I'm significantly above average in these kinds of skills compared to the (not that many) others with ASD I've met.
I've been recently pondering about the (Sci-Fi?) possibility of consciousness synchronicity: Can we humans "sync" our consciousness to other human or animal consciousnesses?
For example, if you're wondering what's the cognitive qualia of your cat sitting calmly in its litter box, and you'd like to know what it "thinks" like, you'd have some cognitive tool to help you get into that cognitive state, hence "sync" your consciousness with that of your cat.
Or, think of a flying bird: We humans sometimes wonder what it "feels" like to fly like a bird. Maybe we can have a tool that can help us get into a bird cognitive state, so that we can know what it "thinks" like.
Or, think of your partner. If only we could think like they do!
What I'm having in mind is some NeuroFeedback tool (which I hear can help some people) that can record cognitive states and then train you to "sync" with these states. Or some equivalent to NeuraLink that can send the right pulses to "sync" you with a pre-recorded cognitive state (i.e. consciousness).
Yes, we don't know what consciousness is, but I guess someone ever thought of this idea despite that? I couldn't find a resource that uses that term (except for lots of Jung's Synchronicity resources, which is completely unrelated). Do you know of some interesting resources that discuss this idea?
it’s pretty meaningless, you already can, like, understand your friend seeing something or enjoying food, and that’s already a “state of consciousness”, and beyond that there’s nothing extra to sync or to download that isn’t already done
I know this is a rationalist group but...there are many exercises/meditations designed to achieve just this in both Western esoterc and magic schools and also in eastern Tantra. As to their efficacy, experientially or otherwise, I will reserve comment.
How would you ever know it's working correctly? How would you know that it's telling you what it's like to be a bird, a not what it's like to be a human who's having neural impulses form a bird fed into his brain?
How did you do your avatar there? I like the effect!
I just thought of something in light of debates over whether the drug price-setting thing in Congress will upset drug development. Could a pharma company cut a deal with some random country to offer drugs for sale only there in the advent of such rules, and then only offer the drugs for sale there?
The issue is mostly that the USA is a huge and rich market - nothing stops a company selling to everyone-but-the-US, but their profits will be much lower that the current status quo.
A more reasonable reform might look at *why* developing drugs (or even making a new factory to manufacture out-of-patent generics) is so ludicrously expensive, and reforming the FDA to fix that
Also, I found out about this extremely rad mecha from the 1960s that the US government created to do maintenance on a potential nuclear-powered bomber. 11 feet high, 80 tons, and capable of picking up an egg without breaking it in one talon and balancing it on a spoon held by the other talon:
https://twitter.com/atomicanalyst/status/1438899335161339906?s=12&
I want to make a simple game based on text and clickable images and maybe some simple animations. I want to have a working prototype up in a day and I want it to be playable on a website I created. Kingdom of Loathing is a good example of the style I'm going for (but the game will of course be a lot simpler).
What framework/engine should I use? I'm a decent programmer but I know little of game design. I want to use something that is "living" with an active community, that is close to programming (no-code stuff just doesn't work IMO, I want to version control with git), and that gets me going as fast as possible so that I can get a prototype working ASAP. My devenv is Ubuntu if that matters.
I have googled around but most tips for getting started with simple games talk about platformers and arcade-like games, which is not what I'm going for. Right now my best idea is either to use the LÖVE framework, but I'm unsure on how relevant Lua still is, or to use GameMaker Studio, but it isn't free and seem a bit more complex than what I need. I thought about just doing it in python but that doesn't seem to be recommended and Pygame looks dead. I looked into Interactive Fiction stuff but it seems too simple, with little room for game logic beyond branching the story.
Help and suggestions from anyone with experience would be very appreciated!
Just nipping in here to recommend the follow-up game, West of Loathing, available now very cheap on Steam and elsewhere (unsolicited testimonial);
http://westofloathing.com/
Question: Can this be a series of different web pages, with maybe a few cookies and minimal JavaScript for flags and animations? CSS can also animate. That's at least easy enough to prototype and lay out the game for now
I need to have a pretty big game state (think hitpoints, inventory, places visited, etc. in KoL), so I don't think that will work.
just have a single webpage (your username will be 100x on a website what it’s be for a downloadable game) and code it in JS + html or js + canvas. Js is awesome and you can hack your own stuff together and it’ll work or use one of a million different libraries
I would consider HTML + JS for easy sharing on web. Without frameworks.
Though maybe there is sane and reliable way to compile Python to JS? But I would check this before making most of the project.
I guess the JS crowd is in majority here. I'll checkout RenPy but I'll probably end up in JS then. Thanks!
pyglet is the best python library for gamedev but it's newish and idk how you would make it playable on the web. given how simple you want the game to be id probably just use vanilla javascript
Isn't Javascript horrible? Or have I just fallen for the propaganda?
Allow me to supply you with James Mickens' perspective on Javascript at http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/towashitallaway.pdf . (Don't let this deter you from using it if you want to. I assume some of this stuff is no longer relevant.)
I post this largely because I like to boost knowledge of his amazingly hilarious USENIX posts whenever I get the chance. Seriously, if you are interested in technical matters and have anything remotely approaching a sense of humor, read his stuff.
Examples from this one piece:
"Precisely 37 hours later, he
called me on the phone. I asked him how everything was going, and he made
a haunting, elegiac noise, like a foghorn calling out for its mate. I asked him
to describe his first day, and he said that his entire existence revolved around
bleating things: bleating goats that wanted to be fed, and bleating crows that
wanted to steal the food that he gave the bleating goats, and bleating farm
machines that were composed of spinning metal blades and had no discernable purpose besides enrolling you in the “Hook Hand of the Month” club. "
"Ostensibly, CSS files allow you to separate the definition of your content from the definition of how that content
looks—using CSS, you can specify the layout for your HTML
tags, as well as the fonts and the color schemes used by those
tags. Sadly, the relationship between CSS and HTML is the
same relationship that links the instructions for building your
IKEA bed, and the unassembled, spiteful wooden planks that
purportedly contain latent bed structures"
The fourth and seventh errors represent uncaught JavaScript
exceptions. In a rational universe, a single uncaught exception would terminate a program, and if a program continued
to execute after throwing such an exception, we would know
that Ragnarok is here and Odin is not happy. In the browser
world, ignoring uncaught exceptions is called “Wednesday, and
all days not called ‘Wednesday.’”
You would be sad if you
went to the hospital to have your appendix removed, and the
surgeon opened you up, and she said, “I DIDN’T EXPECT
YOUR LIVER TO HAVE GILLS,” and then she proceeded with
her original surgical plan, despite the fact that you’re apparently
a mer-person. Being a mer-person should have non-ignorable
ramifications in the material universe.
I sincerely apologize for the lack of formatting in that post. There really were paragraphs in what I posted, I swear.
No, it's way faster than most dynamic languages (the popular ones, please don't reply talking about LuaJIT), doesn't fall into the "use OO for everything" trap, and is usually pleasant to use. If you want static typing there are options too. There are also lots of game framworks/libraries out there, though I don't know them.
JavaScript has many annoying quirks but the dynamic ness of it is extremely nice
JavaScript has some irritating parts (you can add text and number and it will not throw exception, you can substract number from text - the same).
But overall it is fine to use, not really horrible. It is not a COBOL.
Ok, so I'm coming up on JavaScript. Still, doesn'tit make more sense to use a dedicated game/IF framework if that's what I want to make?
Depends on how complex it will be and how well it matches framework. Personally I quite dislike frameworks in general, but some like them.
JavaScript is a lot better than it used to be, although it still has some quirks from its history. If you really can't stand those quirks, you could use Typescript, but that makes it a little more annoying to set up your build process. Pure JS is fine for learning the ropes.
As the saying goes, there are languages everyone complains about, and there are languages nobody uses.
The changes I have seen. Teaching languages when I started out were Scheme and Pascal. Burning through quite an array of other entries as the landscape changes.
A lot of them are very well suited in their intended domains but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Lisp.
I haven't used it myself, but I believe this is basically the exact use case for Twine.
I've only ever seen Twine dismissively sneered at (in large part precisely for the "no-code" design he wants to avoid), followed by pointing in the direction of Ren'Py. (Can't tell how well Ren'Py works with the web, though.)
It would be awesome if someone created Ren'JS - something like Ren'Py, except with JavaScript, that would natively export for web, but would also have an option to create a desktop app (something like Electron, only much faster).
Oh no, I'd just decided on trying Twine. I'll guess I'll try Ren'Py first then. :/
Can I do images and animation in Twine? Maybe I should just download it and play with it a bit, but it looks to IF to really suit my need.
After investigation: It looks like Twine can do everything I want. I think I will try it out seriously. I still worry that I will push the boundaries of it, but I guess that's a learning experience. Thanks!
You’ll learn a lot more just coding directly than any no code tool lol.
I don't want to learn, I want to make a game as fast as possible. No-code just doesn't work IME, so that's why I want to avoid it.
What long term effects do you think the COVID-19 pandemic will have on world history within the next 30 years?
Something like the effect of the Russian flu of 1889. Lots of evidence that it was the origin of one of our current cold viruses (also a coronavirus). Kids weren't much affected, so they survived multiple exposures and grew up immune to serious illness, or so goes some readings of that event. Of course when we start vaccinating kids we may disrupt this trajectory.
That's interesting. I hadn't paid much attention to pre-1919 epidemics. This paper throws out the suggestion (in passing) that some common cold viruses are possibly a less deadly variant of the (possible) Coronavirus that (possibly) caused the Russian Flu...
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13889
Exactly, there's this paper and other, more speculative, ones along the same lines.
Either way they end up immune but getting immunity earlier gives more time for the adults they might have infected to get vaccinated.
My understanding is that immunity to common cold CoVs is not lasting, though. Somewhere in my long list of Coronavirus links is a paper that says the same four types of common cold CoVs recirculate through the population in 3 to 4 year cycles as immunity wanes.
But will the kids ever grow out of vaccines? Seems like they'll still be getting their shots in their 70s, and the steady state will be one more vaccine we all need every year.
The reproductive rate of 1.8 pre-pandemic will not recover from the pandemic drop. I think it's at 1.6 now.
Some additional WFH and telemedicine. Hopefully, no guarantees, a reasonable response to the next pandemic with much faster and more universal deployment of vaccines.
When covid appeared, my prediction was that it is not much different from other cold viruses which we get infected now and then. Sometimes they cause serious problems in elderly and immunocompromised but otherwise is not a big deal. Except that SARS-CoV-2 is a new type that practically no one had immunity before therefore it caused severe disease in elderly and occasionally in younger people too (as per normal distribution). Once most people will have had exposure by infection or vaccine, it will be about the same as other cold viruses.
So far I have been 100% right about this. What would happen on political and social level was not part of my prediction.
> not much different from other cold viruses
... except I don't think any of the common cold viruses kill 4.5 million people over an 20-month period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic
Probably in the past coronaviruses have killed proportionally even more people. It is speculated that some common cold viruses caused Russian flu in the past.
None.
I heard from someone who is in the infant child care business that babies who, during the pandemic, were at the developmental stage that they'd ordinarily be learning speech and facial expressions, have been falling behind, not speaking yet, etc. It's possible we may have some degree of a "lost generation", or at least one that is developmentally behind the curve.
My prediction for blue states in the US, and probably for Australia and New Zealand as well: COVID-19 will become endemic, always evolving into new variants that can escape immune protection. Since the risk is always present, it will always be used as an excuse for authoritarian control of society. As such, it will lead to the inauguration of a new age of feudalism, with an elite class of bureaucrats, administrators, and scientists forever telling the underclass what they can or can't do. Mask rules, travel bans, and immunity passports (or test requirements), at the very least, are here to stay; in universities, bans on social gatherings are here to stay as well. The unvaccinated will become untouchables, and form an identity around their unvaccinated status that will become a source of social and political tension.
The new age of feudalism, built upon a stark and increasing economic inequality that the pandemic didn't create but sharply exacerbated, will see the delegitimization of liberal democracy and a return to either oligarchic republicanism (think America in 1790) or despotism (think Putin's Russia). The new nobles will be the tech industry workers, landlords, bankers, and, some other participants in the knowledge economy; the new clergy will be journalists, public health experts, and university professors, who will enforce the ideological orthodoxy; the new peasants are service industry and gig workers, who will pay increasingly high rents to the nobles (for housing) and increasingly high dues to the clergy (for a university education and for medical care) while their own jobs become increasingly precarious.
I don't think your feudalism analogy works. Feudalism was a series of interlocking obligations. Yes, peasants had obligations to their lords, but lords also had obligations to their peasants. The dystopian hellscape you envision isn't a good match. Maybe pick another name?
I think it's possible that the growing inequality may cause changes in the system, but I don't see it taking the form you suggest here. This is a democracy. If enough people get mad about the haves and the have-nots, we'll have some democratic levelling and move on.
In general, nothing is ever is good as it seems, and nothing is ever as bad as it seems. IMO, of course. Your mileage may vary.
Agreed. I think we are at the end of liberal democracies, post-ww2 style. It's stability came from consumerism, the increase of material well being for all...this has ended, together with the increase of individual freedom for the masses that came associated with it. New feudalism may be what will happen, but i go for something like of new puritanism. Control do not rely only on force (police budget and headcount evolution in Western countries would be interesting to check for the last 20y) and fear (terrorism, pandemies), it uses guilt a lot. Ecology and sanitarism has a huge "repent from your sins, live an ascetic life" feel. Consumerism has it's bad side, but compared to other ways mass control has been achieved, it is (was :'-( ) a blessing...
> Ecology and sanitarism has a huge "repent from your sins, live an ascetic life" feel.
Good point. It's impressive how lots of things about ecology don't make sense. Most of the people that I talk to about ecology have no idea about the "real" impact of the changes they do and mostly do them to "try to help", regardless of reality.
Could you share an example?
The relationship between beef production both on greenhouse gas emissions and on water usage are hot-button topics for which there's a lot of contradictory studies which seemed to be pushed by pro-beef and the anti-meat agendas.
For instance, a lot of the anti-beef water usage studies assume that steers are just eating a diet of pure corn meal in the feedlots and the studies calculate the water usage needed to produce the corn kernels. However, in reality, the steers get fed silage, which is the entire corn plant chopped up and left to sit until partially fermented. When you add the whole corn plant into the equation, the water usage gets much diluted because steers are consuming the whole maize plant and not just corn kernels.
As to greenhouse gases, UC Davis aggies are leading the charge to claim that beef is getting a bad rap about its methane output...
https://clear.ucdavis.edu/news/methane-cows-and-climate-change-california-dairys-path-climate-neutrality
There was a Swedish study done a few years back that claimed that if you added up the carbon footprint of manufacturing the batteries for electric cars, it would take 3 to 4 years of (Swedish) commuting to before electric cars became carbon neutral compared to gasoline cars. This caused all sorts of outrage, and a bunch of studies were published that said otherwise. What was annoying about *all* these studies, the original and the responses, was it was hard to be sure whether they actually had a good handle on the carbon costs of all the manufacturing inputs.
But we do no that lithium extraction is an environmentally nasty. But that's generally considered to be a local problem vs the presumed worldwide problem of CO2 emissions.
Plastic bag vs cotton tote bags is a big one, most people have no idea of the resources needed to make a cotton tote bag. It's very popular for companies that want to look "green" to give some very often, and they are usually low quality and don't last long.
Yeah, totally agree. My dad is a polymer chemist and told me about this. Same thing actually with plastic cups vs porcelain.
I agree with both of you. That is all.
Another commenter alluded to this, that many have figured out how to live pretty well without dealing too closely with other people. Then when they leave the cave, the unruliness and disobedient nature of others is disturbing to them. Hence the tantrums and demands in public.
One stop on this slippery slope was about 20 years ago when cell phones began to proliferate. People could ignore each other. It was socially acceptable to ignore someone passing within two feet of you, if you were "on the phone." Headphones did this too. Once "permission to ignore" was established, it spread. A formative experience of people who reached adulthood before this stuff was the awkwardness of lines; how to interact with groups of strangers brought together for very little purpose. If possible now I make small talk in those situations (unless I'm staring at my phone) to let people either a) remember how it used to be or b) see what might exist. Meeting strangers in person!
This stuff runs deep. I still have impulses to be polite to the voice on the automated system, because it's a human voice. If I speak sharply to it, it feels rude. I'm not sure the younger generations are developing those feedback loops. I do know the hours of computer gaming which some young people have had in the last 1.5 years have shown them widespread ruthless bullying, often without referees. Not in person, little supervision, little accountability - so many Enders fighting their real/pretend wars. Getting them to cooperate on anything IRL will be peculiar. I think this is one of the many influences on China's recent decision making it illegal for kids to play video games outside of certain hours. There hasn't yet been a generation raised with so much machine interaction and so much less human interaction. I'm not sure it's all bad, but I know there are things being traded away.
> I do know the hours of computer gaming which some young people have had in the last 1.5 years have shown them widespread ruthless bullying, often without referees. Not in person, little supervision, little accountability - so many Enders fighting their real/pretend wars. Getting them to cooperate on anything IRL will be peculiar.
This is not so different from what many people lived through in middle/high school. Maybe we're going to get an increase in school shootings?
I agree it's similar to what many people went through in middle/high school. There is something different about it happening when each of the involved parties is alone in their home while the bullying operates digitally and is delivered into what was once the safe(r) space of one's home/room/etc.
Also, it isn't geographically determined anymore - not necessarily anyway - or age/grade separated. A 10-year-old may be on a server with a 25-year old and a 17-year-old, for example, with none of them ever having seen each other. When the older ones start in with all the slurs and insults on the younger one(s) - and they do - and the younger one(s) pull out every grade-school tactic to little effect - it "hits different," to use a kid-ism. It's more like going to the mall and getting harassed by a group of college kids.
Maybe this has been an experience of online gamers for while and now more younger people are involved during the day due to school closures. I don't know. The lack of counterbalance of positive or even neutral IRL interaction seems to play a part as well.
The bullying/school shooting connection was somewhat debunked. This seems different though. There is a youth counterpart to the adult digital/media political siloing.
> The bullying/school shooting connection was somewhat debunked.
Was it? Everything that I can find online says that between 50% to 80%+ of school shooters were bullied. That may be just correlation and not causation, but the two are linked I think.
There is also the possibility that between 50% and 80% of *all* school kids are bullied. In such case the correlation would be zero.
Official statistics are at around 20% https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019054.pdf. There is certainly a correlation.
Biggest effect will probably be an acceleration of the mRNA technology, in vaccines and other treatments. I'm not really expecting a big societal effect after another year or so has passed.
At the very least, some activities that used to be common would now be more rare and/or expensive. Movie theaters will probably go out of business altogether; dine-in restaurants will become more "upscale" and more expensive; international non-business travel will once again become something that you have to plan for years in advance, as opposed to something you can do on a whim. Mass gatherings such as concerts will likewise become less frequent, and attending one will be seen as somewhat risque. Masks will be normalized in places such as grocery stores and mass transit (analogous to the Asian model).
I agree that some activities will probably become more rare and expensive, but those are likely the ones already on their way out. Visit a smaller city or especially a rural area, people are eating at dine in restaurants just as much as before the pandemic. Maybe not in your area, but quite a few places. No masks, no vaccine requirements. Despite a growing number of COVID cases in my state and locally, less than 2% of the ER admits are related to COVID.
I think a large percentage of movie theaters will go out of business, but this will only be an acceleration by about 5 or 10 years of a trend that was already established by the conjunction of post-Golden Age television being a better storytelling medium than feature-length film, the growing availability and cheapness of home theater systems, the rise of video games as another competitor to films, and the growing focus of Hollywood on expanding franchises of a single genre of film.
I think fancy restaurants will become fancier, but I don't think the rise of fast casual over the past decade or two is going to stop. I do think that outdoor dining will become more strongly established in places where it hadn't been before.
I think international travel will become more of a hassle, but not one that you plan longer in advance - if anything, people will be *less* likely to plan things long in advance that are susceptible to major forms of disruption.
Concerts may well become less frequent - and if so, this will have further impacts on the music industry, where musical artists tend to rely on recordings as loss-leaders for concerts these days, now that streaming has cut artist payments drastically from where they were on vinyl and CD.
That's *already* not fully true now for vaccinated people, let alone in 30 years -- since getting vaccinated I've been to about the same amount of dine-in restaurants and international non-business travel as I did in the same amount of time in 2019.
Things that are going to return to 2019 level are the ones which in retrospect didn't even make much sense before the pandemic, e.g. going to the office almost every day including those when I just spend the whole time behind a computer and don't actually interact with anybody in person.
I live overseas, and the travel bans are still having a huge effect on my life. Many countries are still off-limits.
Socially, I don't think it will have very much effect, honestly. Just based on what i've seen in the past people tend to forget things very quickly except as neat little historical artefacts. People are already forgetting lessons learned from ww2 which was way more impactful than covid.
Systemically, there might be some change in how we design research or prepare for pandemics, but again not much changed after the Spanish Flu that wasn't already naturally evolving in society anyway.
Well, I'll take an extreme position, and say probably no effect at all. The death tole isn't high enough to create any great economic disruption. The temporary effects of lockdowns seem to pass quickly. The bad news is there's evidence that we don't develop long-term immunities to Coronaviruses. Unless the epidemiological the theory that lethal viruses eventually mutate into less lethal variants is correct, I predict that we'll continue to have outbreaks for the foreseeable future. There's clearly going to be a large numbers of unvaccinated people going forward. And new mutants may find new ways to get around vaccinated immunity (as well as convalescent immunity). I suspect that annual or even semi-annual boosters will in the cards for us. I don't think we're ever going to wipe out SARS-CoV-2 like we did smallpox and polio. Also, I think herd immunity is a mirage for the previous reasons I stated.
I think that in North America and Europe, at least, all the public debate over vaccination, masks, and lockdowns/restrictions has primed the population for thinking in more collectivist terms. As in, it's not just about my own risk profile but also the ripple effect of potential transmission, the impact of the pandemic on the broader economy, the good of society, etc.
There is plenty of resistance to that very idea, too, but I think so far the pro-collectivist side has won out. If the effect persists and proves somewhat generalised, then draconian energy taxes and other austerity measures to fight climate change might become a little more politically palatable in the West. That could have a profound effect on how the next few decades go.
I suspect that LSD causes analysis of details and the patterns that come out of them.
I am ignorant, but these are my impressions.
At high doses, its failure is in amplifying pure noise. Hallucinations. Raising the noise floor so high, that noise almost seems meaningful, vivid, and patterned. Meaningful information is lost, drowned out. It becomes hard to tell hot from cold, it takes more time for the difference to have an perceivable effect even when one focuses on it. The noise drowns out what your filters would normally let through.
If your failure is in not noticing broader detail, this is a tool that may help give that perspective. An example: I don't clean as much as I should, if I liked my health very much. Dirt and dust stands out to an incredible degree. I could see it before, but now it is obvious and needs attention.
If there is some broader pattern that you've mistakenly failed to seem, some set of details that form a pattern, those patterns will look more interesting.
Noise will look more interesting, too, and patterns of noise will stand out more readily. But that is for your consciousness to sort out.
If you are good at discarding noise, amplifying your attention to details is a tool worth wonder, terrible fear, and awe.
And yet, these things are terrifying. People lose their reason over it. Their reason!
I'd like to hope to aspire to something vaguely scientific and rational, in the structure of its method.
People seem to get lost in psychedelics. If I seem hopelessly lost, or if I'm not making any sense, I'd appreciate the signal...
I can't say I've ever "lost my reason" while tripping on high doses of Psilocybe mushrooms or LSD. I was always rational in that I was was observing, categorizing, and evaluating my experiences. Your mileage may very well vary though. I had one acquaintance who was institutionalized, and I was told the diagnosis of was schizophrenia after a what my friends described as him having had a bad trip. Anecdotal I admit. But it seems reasonable that psychedelics may not be safe for everyone.
It's hard for me to appreciate how much I should be reassured by this, but I appreciate the two anecdotes.
I remember hearing about the Dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, which Wikipedia seems thoroughly unimpressed with.
I'd be curious whether there is genuinely interesting connection to be made between the biological pathways that psychedelics abuse, and the development of schizophrenia, or if that is coincidence.
This might sound a dull idea to a psychologist. Probably, I should learn more psychology if I'm afraid of the unknown mechanisms that cause schizophrenia.
Furthermore, I want to affirm that you are making sense. I would say that extreme discomfort to unfiltered qualia is a common experience especially in the early phase of the psychedelic experience. That's why they recommend having a guide accompany you on your trip — they can distract you on to some other course of perception. And I always associated the "unfiltered noise" with the early phase of a trip. I found that getting up, stretching, a change of environment, focusing on an activity that requires mind/body coordination, were the methods I used to get past the initial discomfort. I never bought into the Timothy Leary philosophy of sitting quietly in a room, listening to music, and staring at candles. To me that was a recipe for downward spirals into introspection. I always followed Ken Kesey's method of tripping by going out to play with the non-trippers. Learning how to interact normally with people while reality melts around you is a useful life skill to develop. ;-)
If you can't figure out how to get past the initial stage of jangled qualia, I'd suggest you not continue to trip. Finally, I want to also warn you that getting trapped in an existentially nihilistic psychological space is much more dangerous than any teeth-grinding annoyance of unfiltered sense perception. The only advice I can give you if you fall into one of those spaces if remember that is well-spring of magic within you that you can access if you allow yourself believe.
Thank you. I've had very much fun and love with psychedelics.
Some of it has been overwhelming and scary, but nothing far beyond uncomfortable, and mostly due to THC edibles making me anxious.
I wouldn't say I've had anything but good trips, despite a few intense peaks here and there.
I think the advice you give is good, about avoiding traps and bad thought spaces. It takes conscious effort and notice, to get out of a negative thought pattern. It's worth pointing out, because of how easy it is to get out of, once you bother.
I'm still afraid. I feel like I should have a lot of respect for these substances.
The chemistry I'm made of is so far beyond my capacity to analyze it, so delicate and intricate, it should fill me with fear to poke the thing at all.
But there's a lot of ways in which we poke the system, and the system finds it very interesting, when it sees past potential harm.
(And the typos are quite alright! I must have made a lot of them, too. I apologize if mine make it hard to read)
Hey, I tripped at least 150 times over a four-year period. I got a lot out the experience. Although Aldous Huxley was right that it opens the doors of perception, after a point I noticed I wasn't opening any new doors. So I stopped. Maybe I could have opened some other doors with some other substances, but I never got those opportunities. Long term effects? Well, reality is little more tenuous than it used to be — some of the siddhis I experienced/learned from psychedelics have stayed with me. More importantly I've learned how to trust my intuition. And I've learned how to tune into subtler aspects of my senses. And best of all the people who don't know my history think that I'm a normal person!
But did you achieve what Cary Grant supposedly did with his 100 sessions of LSD therapy and become more attractive to women?
I have to say that learning that bit about his experience really was kind of depressing for the rest of us guys who aren't... well, Cary Grant good looking. :)
Screwed up my concluding sentence. It should have read: The only advice I can give you if you fall into one of those spaces is to remember that there is well-spring of magic within you that you can access if you allow yourself believe.
Poultry used to suffer from small losses caused by a herpes-like virus. In 1970, a safe and effective vaccine was introduced, but it was "leaky", i.e. it could not "stop the spread". After close to 100% of chickens were vaccinated, the virus promptly evolved so that it spreads in, yet otherwise does not harm, vaccinated chickens. However, it now kills between 80 and 100% of unvaccinated chickens, a disastrous increase. For that reason, chickens are normally vaxxed “in ovo”.
This is called “Marek’s Disease”.
Have we ever vaxxed a whole population with a leaky vaccine against a rapidly mutating pathogen? Is the Marek’s Disease mutation a central outcome, or an outlier? If I were an epidemiologist, should I investigate this? Would it benefit me to not investigate this further?
My (uneasy) peace with this scenario is currently over the near-universal vaccination; I'm expecting it to not be sufficiently universal (partly because of anti-vaxxers, but mostly because of reservoirs like rural India that will be very hard to eradicate). On the other hand, it's not immediately clear that the argument "rural India will be producing a lot of variants that aren't subject to the Marek's disease dynamic" invalidates the "we do have a large vaccinated population that could sustain it," so I would be very very interested if you came up with a reason for why I don't need to be pathetically grateful to the sizeable unvaccinated population in the US.
(I guess the other place this could break would be if actually R0 < 1 among the vaccinated, but even if that's true now, I don't see why it would have to stay true.)
I'm interested if anyone knows what the relevant differences are between measles and Delta covid - I had thought that measles had a higher R0 than even Delta covid, and the mRNA vaccines we have for Delta covid are comparably effective to the measles vaccine, but yet people say that we can't get "herd immunity" through vaccination for Delta covid, even though they say we have it for measles. Is one of my claims here incorrect? Or is there something else relevant that I'm missing? Is it just that no one thinks we will get vaccine coverage comparable to the measles vaccine until several years (or decades?) from now?
All of your claims are correct. But one of your claims is "people say we can't get herd immunity for vaccination for Delta covid". It is true that people say this. It may be that they are wrong.
More precisely, people say we can't get herd immunity for *current* vaccines *alone* for Delta covid. It's possible we can get it with a combination of vaccinations and natural infections (or, in principle, with updated vaccines, but there's no way the Powers That Be are going to allow any fast enough to matter)
Immunity from COVID likely wanes faster than Measles (after either vaccination or infection). IIRC with other (normal cold) coronaviruses the average person will likely be infected with the same strain several times in their lifetime as immunity fades and is boosted again and COVID may well prove similar. Measles immunity is quite long lived (maybe even lifetime for most people).
> I had thought that measles had a higher R0 than even Delta covid
Yes, though that's the R0 of delta COVID *in the summer*, and if its seasonality is the same as that of earlier COVID variants (as opposed to delta having evolved specifically to be more resistant to summer conditions) it's possible that in the winter it'll end up even more contagious than measles.
> the mRNA vaccines we have for Delta covid are comparably effective to the measles vaccine
Not quite -- ~50% against infection, ~70% against symptomatic infection, ~90% against hospitalization, ~95% against death, whereas measles vaccines are ~93% effective against infection.
(I still think a Marek’s Disease scenario for COVID is unlikely though.)
Is “unlikely” doing a lot of work here? SARS-CoV-2 is novel, but otherwise closely related to common respiratory illnesses. If the danger is in its novelty, how would we expect it to behave when no longer novel, e.g. after vaccination or infection?
a) short-term morbidity and mortality in line with other respiratory illnesses
b) long tail in line with other respiratory illnesses
c) new variants arising periodically, able to break though infection protection, yet unable to break through the “severe” protection of the immune system. In line with other respiratory illnesses.
The data we have is consistent with this hypothesis, but does not yet prove it. Each new bit of evidence we uncover appears to not contradict this hypothesis.
How should public health react? Should it assume the hypothesis is true until proven false (the European approach), or that it’s false until there is “enough” evidence to declare it true, which can of course continue indefinitely (the North American approach)? Both “follow the Science”. Power sets the null hypothesis, and the standard of proof to refute it.
Let’s get back to Marek’s disease. All ingredients for a disastrous outcome are there:
- a rapidly mutating pathogen
- a leaky vaccine (R0 of Delta = 5 or 6, VE(infection) = 50%, R0(vaccinated) = 6*.5 = 3 > 1)
- near universal vaccination
We have a potential disastrous outcome (evolving variant with 100% mortality in unvaxxed population) that has already happened in the real world, by playing sorcerer's apprentice with a chicken virus. Why would we consider this unlikely in humans, or rather “false until there is enough evidence to declare it true”? Why not follow the precautionary principle? Why not even study this, now that we have clearly decided to play sorcerer’s apprentice with a respiratory virus?
I only said "unlikely" not "negligible" and didn't draw any policy conclusions. In any event, after recovering from COVID people stop shedding virus, unlike with herpesviruses, so there's that
What is your source for the level of mortality of unvaxed chickens? That doesn't match my information.
In 2015 there were several pop-sci articles on this which seem to derive from a PLOS Biology study titled "Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198#sec002 ). To quote the "Results" section:
"In our first experiment, we infected 8-d-old chicks with five strains of MDV chosen to span the virulence spectrum defined by Witter and colleagues [21,29]. The viral strains varied from the less virulent HPRS-B14, which killed 60% of unvaccinated birds over 2 mo, to the highly lethal Md5 and 675A, which killed all unvaccinated birds in 10 d (Fig 1, top panels)".
The subject of reincarnation came up on the previous open thread, along with a great discussion of differences between Hindu and Buddhist (post Shakyamuni Buddhist) concepts of reincarnation. So, I'm curious how many people out there have memories of past lives? And, if you consider yourself to be a rationalist, how do you explain/dismiss/workaround those memories?
Full disclosure. I'm a member of "the secret club" below. As someone who was raised an atheist and who has a excellent grounding in the sciences and the scientific method, I assumed that my past-life memories were "false memories", and that they were artifacts of my 3+ years of heavy psychedelic experimentation — until I had to confront something that made me doubt this pat explanation...
https://www.aish.com/sp/so/Ive-Been-Here-Before-Holocaust-and-Reincarnation.html
My ex-girlfriend, a tenured professor of sociology, who is Jewish (and who also has past-life Holocaust memories), and her younger brother, who was fascinated by our stories, ended up just going out and asking their friends and acquaintances whether they had past life memories — and specifically memories of WWII and the Holocaust. Last I heard they had about 20 people who were born between 1958 and 1961 who had some pretty horrific past life memories. Of course, this would never qualify as a scientific inquiry, but I found that number to be higher than I would have guessed. (And what's interesting to me, is it seems like it takes average of about 15 years to reincarnate, at least after traumatic experiences).
I did my own informal survey while living in Hong Kong of my Chinese coworkers and friends (in my own age group), although some were reticent to talk about this subject, a few admitted that they had some unpleasant memories about WWII that they should have been too young to have.
Granted, my generation grew up on WWII movies and documentaries. So this phenomenon may just be a side effect of our cultural inculcation and our active imaginations. But I thought I'd put it out to the general rationalist masses and see if anyone has any sort of past life memories — not necessarily Holocaust or traumatic WWII memories.
No need to share specific details if you're uncomfortable doing so. And if you don't have these memories, please be polite to those of us who do. Thanks!
> So, I'm curious how many people out there have memories of past lives?
I don't have any of those memories personally.
> And, if you consider yourself to be a rationalist, how do you explain/dismiss/workaround those memories?
It's one of these things that exist, that I don't experience, and that I can't explain. To give an analogy: I'm colorblind. There are some colors that I can't experience compared to most of the population. And there's probably no way that I could experience them. We understand colorblindness well, but still can't explain to colorblind people what they are missing. I feel the same about many of those things, like people.
I'll throw in one odd event. It could have been something vivid from my imagination, it could have been a past life, it could have been Bonewitz' "network" which holds everyone's memories, and sometimes a living person finds something that resonates.
I visiting someone who had a hat collection, and the idea was for visitors to try them out for the fun of it.
I put on the tricorn, and I was delighted. This is surprising. I dislike hats. I don't like the feeling of an edge applying pressure to my head. If I want to keep my head warm, I wear a scarf or a hood.
I think of revolutionary American era clothes as one of the less interesting periods, and that applies to both male and female clothing. Give me medieval and renaissance, please.
Still, there I was with the tricorn. It felt like picking up on a young man with his first tricorn hat. I don't think most people realize that might be a significant moment, but it really could be.
I've never had any other experience like that.
Are you always reborn as a person speaking the same language, or do you have memories in which you understand whatever language you spoke in the previous life, and if so does that help you understand the other language in your present life? For example, if a native English speaker remembered the Second World War from a previous life, would he necessarily always remember it as an English-speaking person or could he have been a Russian-speaking person, and if the latter would that mean he understand some Russian now without having studied it?
I have no past life memories. To the best of my knowledge, no one I know does either. Only one person has ever told me they believed in reincarnation, and she told me she was a new soul.
are the past lives only of cultures you are close to in lineage and time, and thus have greater exposure to?
It seems like a lot of people who report past life memories have been recycled into the same culture. But I have past life memories of either being a rabbi and/or some sort (Jewish) scholar and of dying in a concentration camp. I got recycled into a WASA (White Anglo Saxon Atheist) family (thus my name). My past life memories started manifesting themselves in the weeks following a very bizarre trip where I fell asleep after taking a big dose of magic mushrooms and I went through a what seemed to be a Bardo state, but one with a non-Buddhist twist of seeing myself as being part of a larger higher-dimensional pattern of consciousness with presences in multiple times and places.
The earliest memories I have are of the New Kingdom Egypt. I was a priestess who served in the temple of Bast. I remember several lives of being a scribe and holding minor administrative positions (I have dreams of writing in Egyptian script on papyrus). I get the impression that I was reincarnating with a group of people, and we had some sort of multigenerational project we were working on (sort of similar to what the tulkus in Tibet are doing). I hung around the Mediterranean after the collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms. I remember some lives in Greece, Asia minor, and Alexandria (or maybe that's one life where I traveled a lot?). I have no memories of any lives lived in the Roman Empire or medieval Europe. At some point I had at least one life living among a tribe up in Siberia. I have memories of being a shaman, and I think I was a woman, but I can't place the exact time period because we had no contact with any historical culture I can identify. I spent quite a few lives recycling in Central Asia and western China. I have distinct memories of joyful times riding on the steppes on horseback under a bright blue sky, and I think I was a nomad of the Mongol or Turkic variety. There's a big gap, and then I have memories of 17th and 18th Century Europe. I remember being a merchant in some sort of city with houses densely packed by a river. Not London, something more central European. I remember a dying in a nasty plague. I suspect I was well-educated and male in all those lives. And I get the distinct impression that I was not Christian in any of those lives. So I think I was reincarnating in the central European Jewish communities — maybe all the way up until I died during WWII.
So there you go. You can take it all with a grain of salt. Sometimes I believe these memories are real, and sometimes I just think they're false memories. But my friend the sociologist remembers me and I remember her from our last lives. But that could just be a folie a deux...
I think the thing about this that stops most of us rationalists cold is that we can't see the mechanism for reincarnation. But if Elon Musk is right about us *already* living in an advanced virtual reality multi-player online game, then dying and coming back into the game as a new character would be how reincarnation (and past life memories) could be happening.
I have no memories of any past lives but took an interest in this subject a few years ago due to a mystical experience I had that tested my materialist view of the Universe.
There are some pretty compelling accounts at UVA of small children remembering details of past lives they could not otherwise know. (Google The Case of James Leininger for one that seem pretty compelling).
"Many Lives, Many Masters" was written by an originally skeptical Head of Psychiatry at the University of Miami and is a compelling introduction to this phenomenon.
I was less interested in the question of whether reincarnation really happens, but rather I was more curious how rationalists would deal with having memories that seem to be from past lives — so many people have them, I figure the rationalists must have them, too. Or maybe it takes a certain flexible mindset to allow for these types of memories to come to the surface. I'm an ultra-rationalist when it comes to scientific questions, but like you I have had a bunch of non-scientific mystical stuff happen to me over the years. The scientific method (however you define it) can only take you so far. Ultimately experiments need to be reproducible to be science, and there need to be a theory to explain why they're reproducible. For me, past life memories could very well be false memories. Heck, as I've gotten older I've come to realize how my memories become distorted over time. So I really don't *trust* my regular memories. Why should I trust my past life memories? I'm agnostic about their truth, but I can't deny I have them.
On the other hand, I have memories of dying, too. Somehow that lifts the angst that I know I'm going to die off my shoulders. After all, I've died hundreds of times. It's no big deal to do it one more time...
A rationalist might otherwise dismiss their memories, if they had them, as false or delusional or cryptomnesia because they can't see a possible mechanism, so I was trying to remove that obstacle.
Collecting stories like yours may be as close as we can come to "evidence" while still holding a general skepticism about unsubstantiated claims. Not everything can be verified by a double-blind study in a lab, and being open to that means we might consider possibilities instead of dismiss out of hand.
Grain of salt, or something stronger... where can I get those shrooms you're on? 🧙🏼♂️
Have you tried to figure out whether there are any ways of testing whether these are real memories? If you have a lot of them, I would think that some would provide details you could write down and then check against information sources you had never looked at. Most obviously, do your Egyptian memories include any information on the language?
You suspect you were male in all those lives, but the first one was a priestess. Is "all those lives" a later subset?
Even if language doesn't carry over, how accurate do the details of clothing and technology seem to be?
Most of the cases that Dr Ian Stevenson (from the perceptual studies group at UVA) documented did not include language transfer between incarnations. However there were a couple of cases of kids who did have language skills that they seemed to have carried forward. But I would tend to dismiss these because they seem to be anecdotal. But the volume of anecdotal evidence the that Stevenson acquired suggests that memory of past lives is not an uncommon phenomenon.
I had a friend who had an advanced degree in psychology and who worked with kids who said she'd ask 3 or 4 year olds "who they used to be", and she got some interesting answers that made her a believer in reincarnation. The reason she did this is that she as a child 8 or 9 remembered that her four year old sister would go on on about how "When I was a old man, I did <such and such>." By five, her sister had gone through that brain change where most people forget their toddler memories. And as an adult her sister didn't remember these episodes, but it piqued my psychologist friend's curiosity.
Full disclosure, I asked my 3 year old stepson who he was before and he didn't answer.
"But the volume of anecdotal evidence the that Stevenson acquired suggests that memory of past lives is not an uncommon phenomenon."
It suggests that the belief in memory of past lives is not an uncommon phenomenon. That the belief is true is one explanation but not the only one, which is why I suggested looking for tests of the belief.
This appears to be far more of a democratic PAC (it gets funded through actblue, objectively partisan), and focuses on pushing a single issue of pandemic preparedness by... pushing candidates with a range of positions that don't necessarily prioritize pandemic preparedness? I think your promotion of this PAC is pretty disingenuous as you describe it as a lobbying group whereas the whole point of raising from individual donors here is specifically to donate direct cash to candidates.
Further, per them
"Thanks for taking the time to read through, Larks! Some of these questions are better answered via the upcoming Q&A on October 12, so we highly encourage you to intend if you are interested in contributing. Responding briefly to your other questions:
Since this is a new PAC, we are currently soliciting for a small pool of biosecurity champions that at the moment are Democratic. The ActBlue account accepting donations reflects this, but as we grow, we will broaden the ways we solicit for Republican candidates. We can share more on the considerations behind this choice at the Q&A. "
It is clear that their priority is supporting Democrats rather than those who are the most focused on fighting pandemics from either party.
"but as we grow, we will broaden the ways we solicit for Republican candidates."
As soon as they do, ActBlue will dump them. That's not what ActBlue is for.
At the very least, I think that a disclaimer is warranted that the PAC is limited to only contribute to Democrats due to its affiliation with Actblue, and as such may not be able to prioritize candidates who are the most suited to take on future pandemics if they are Republicans.
If that's so, it's a mistake. One thing you want and need cross-party support on is preventing pandemics, and if from the get-go you are set up to only solicit and contribute to the Democratic party, maybe have a re-think about why that is so (why did you end up getting tied-up with fundraising software from a company that "enables left-leaning nonprofits, Democratic candidates, and progressive groups" to raise money but not anyone from the other side of the fence? There may be a set of assumptions and even simply "this is the most convenient for our bunch since we already know people involved" going on there, but it also fences off your PAC into "this little group, all others keep out".
seems like ActBlue is leaving a lot of money on the table by not quetly releasing ActRed
ActBlue is explicitly a tool of the establishment Democratic Party establishment. They don't even let on progressives if they're too outside of what the establishment wants.
I was super excited about the "Guarding Against Pandemics" thing, because obviously they're gonna support comprehensive test/trace/isolate programs and rapid vaccine development, because, everyone knows, those are the things that stop pandemics. But it seems like the actual thing that "Guarding Against Pandemics" is going to use your money for is.... donating to Elizabeth Warren?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Btm562wDNEuWXj9Gk/guarding-against-pandemics#What_would_my_donation_pay_for_and_why_does_that_matter_
"Donations to the PAC would go towards supporting candidates who are champions for pandemic preparedness in Congress, like Senator Elizabeth Warren"
Whose plans for protecting against the covid pandemic are well publicized and.... underwhelmingly involve just giving people money to feel better as they die of the pandemic. Both links were written early on in the pandemic, right around when the first US death was identified:
https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/protecting-from-coronavirus
Plan: free healthcare treatment for covid, free time off from work, stimulus money. These are perhaps good ideas, but they don't... "guard against a pandemic".
https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/updated-plan-address-coronavirus
Which was a few days later, involved even MORE free money, and almost nothing about actually stopping the pandemic. There was this one thing though:
"In addition, the lack of widespread testing in the United States—especially in comparison to South Korea and other countries—is a disgrace. According to the CDC’s last released data, our country has tested fewer than 2,000 people in a population of over 300 million. If we hope to control this outbreak, the Administration must immediately allocate funds from the recent emergency supplemental appropriation to state and local health departments and hospitals to rapidly stand up testing capacity nationwide. Additionally, to the extent that volume constraints at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention limit testing kit distribution or technical assistance to labs developing their own tests, it is critical to temporarily increase their capacity. "
Which is (emotionally) great! We should've had a massive nationwide ramp up in testing. But read that last part. She honestly thought it was the CDC's "volume constraints" and funding were what was holding back "lots of testing," not, well, all the rules (no you can't do your own tests without approval, and also well, we contaminated the first 180k with our incompetence) they (and the FDA) put in place. This is at the heart of so many of her misunderstandings of how things work: it's SimCity thinking: "well the CDC controls diseases right?, so if we just increase their resources and funding, they'll control the disease better!" When they were - particularly early on in the pandemic, when she wrote this - part of the problem!
But as we now know, the vaccines are the real pandemic harm-reducer. (if you take them, anyway) So the real heartbreaking part of her plan is this:
"And we should aim to build up our national scientific capacity, including the ability to bring vaccines to market, by committing $200 billion to vaccine development efforts..."
Oh, man, now I see why GAP is supporting her - she was advocating for rapid vaccine development even in the early days of the pandemic, what foresightedness! I apologize for not believing in her! Let's read the rest of this inspiring paragraph:
"...over the coming years. This will require guaranteed purchases of an eventual coronavirus vaccine after the current crisis passes"
Oh. Oh..... She doesn't mean 200 billion for a covid vaccine to end the pandemic. She means after we're done counting the millions of bodies, we can invent a vaccine. Because she, like almost everyone else, assumed that by any "realistic" FDA timeline, there was no way they would get a covid vaccine in time (she probably guessed 5-7 years) - despite the moderna vaccine already existing at this time. Because just like her understanding of the CDC, the FDA-as-it-was is baked into her idea of what Governmental Pandemic Preparation was. Which is * the * problem, and means that supporting her as the solution to "guarding against pandemics" is ludicrous. "Guarding against the next pandemic" means radically (perhaps even abolishing and reinventing) the CDC and FDA and our entire public health mentality. It means A) having a test/trace/isolate plan (and one that isn't immediately hamstrung by the CDC and FDA) ready to go and B) having as rapid a vaccine FDA regulatory approval (because development was NOT the critical path!) plan based on cost/benefit weighing the severity of the pandemic against the risk of side effects from the vaccine. It does not mean "200B for vaccines after the pandemic is over" and "lots of stimulus".
If "donating to Elizabeth Warren" is "guarding against the pandemic" and this is/was her plans... then you're killing me. I * wanted * to like this. I desperately want a real Guarding Against Pandemics, because this pandemic (and the next one) really are the most critical goals in our society, and I desperately want a way that I can help. But this..... come on.
Give me a Guarding Against Pandemics that takes your donations, writes up a Pandemic Manifesto that calls for reforming the CDC to focus exclusively on widescale contagious diseases with corporate/hospital/lab/local/state integration of test/trace/isolate strategies and reforming the FDA to enable rapid approval of treatments in proportion to the threat of a pandemic, and only donates to senators/congresspeople who publicly sign the manifesto and support bills in congress that effect that.
Pandemic preparedness seems to be an executive branch implementation issue. There have been many clowns in this pandemic but the legislature hasn’t been uniquely dysfunctional so the need for a PAC also seems unclear and probably more than a bit opportunistic.
In-theory, it can be done by Congress as well. Allocating funds for, and directing the creation of specific stockpiles, standards, etc.
well, I guess I'd be fine a PAC that said "we need to reform the CDC/FDA so they do X Y and Z that will stop the pandemic, therefore we shall donate to pols who publicly support legislation to do that" but yeah...
The full quote from their post:
> Donations to the PAC would go towards supporting candidates who are champions for pandemic preparedness in Congress, like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Anna Eshoo, and in state and local offices.
Warren isn't my favorite candidate either, but presumably the PAC mentioned her as an example because it's identified that she's more inclined than other reps (or more likely to be persuaded?) to allocate federal funds for pandemic preparedness, even if it's not reflected on her website.
So if we donate to "Guarding Against Pandemics", our money will be divided among politicians belonging to the Democratic party, in proportion to the number of times they use the word "pandemic" in their speeches? Either they don't understand how lobbying works, or they think we don't understand how lobbying works.
Lobbying works via legislative subsidy:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27644332
Per the website they are only fundraising for Democrats
Right, I only focused on Warren because she was the only one I could find who actually had lots of verbiage written about what her idea of pandemic preparedness was. Which I think is the point: "Pandemic preparedness" is obviously by definition a good thing, but what exact policies that entails matters a great deal, especially since we're in the middle of a pandemic where we can judge their efficacy. I am worried by the "support pols who support pandemic preparedness" instead of "state what the most effective pandemic preparedness measures would be, then support pols who support them." Again, I am perfectly fine with any kind of assertion that I'm reading too much into this, or reacting to an early draft, or any number of other things where I'm wrong - I desperately would like something like this to work - but too many people (Warren especially) act like just putting money into the Pandemic Preparedness Bucket actually does that, when it's extremely obvious that we spent lots of time/money/thought on Pandemic Preparedness before this one, and it didn't work so well.
A question. I read online a lot of different thoughtful commentators from across the political spectrum - from Marxists to traditional liberals to Reaganite conservatives to libertarians to religious conservatives. And I've regularly congratulated myself on my open-mindedness and willingness to learn from all sides ... but then I noticed that I'm actually a lot less open-minded than I've been giving myself credit for, because every single one of the people I read regularly shares my dislike of the various "identitarian" movements that are so much in the news nowadays.
So I would like to "steelman" identitarianism, and in pursuit of that I'm hoping for suggestions of a thoughtful online writer I could read who supports such movements - by "thoughtful", I mean someone who is prepared to take seriously and respond carefully and rationally to the various critiques that people make of them. A small example: Matt Bruenig's critique of what he calls "identitarian deference" (https://mattbruenig.com/2013/02/26/what-does-identitarian-deference-require/). Does anyone know someone who has responded from the "identitarian" side to Bruenig's critique - perhaps by demonstrating that no such "deference" takes place at all (which would surprise me, since there are a lot of apparent examples of it), or who accepts that it does take place, but argues that Bruenig's criticisms of it are mistaken.
Please note, I am NOT looking for books to read from such perspectives: I've already read quite a number of those, including various of the Critical Race Theory classics. I'm more interested in a current online writer who is in the business of engaging seriously with and responding to critiques like Bruenig's when they occur. Any suggestions?
One of the central points of the whole thing is that this mode of knowledge production, the one you call "rational" and "thoughtful," is the heart of the system to be dismantled.
Kwame Anthony Appiah works on it from the point of view of dissolving the identity categories. He's somewhat online.
I think identitarian deference/politics began as a counterpoint to (real and/or imagined) institutions. Trying to split it off and evolve a coherent system that doesn't legitimize multiple forms of discrimination is either impossible or nearly so. Using ID like a browser attachment in the context of existing unequal systems, can work to transfer small amounts of privilege to small numbers of people with oppressed identities. Is that a priori good? Does it work longterm without unacceptable side effects? How effective is it for those it affects? Not sure...
I read some of the Breunig article. His mistake may be trying to evolve the coherent system.
This isn't quite what you're looking for (not a single writer), but as someone who was previously more aligned with SJ/identitatian politics and now finds myself agreeing more with skeptical positions, socialjusticethoughtfulness.tumblr.com is a place I consistently find good (if often lukewarm -- probably a benefit?) snippets of discussion.
One person I know who has engaged that sort of debate from the other side is Osita Nwanevu of The New Republic.
I don't actually read TNR, but here is an example of him pointing out a distinction between some figures often lumped together, and crediting a critic on the other side for being one of the few to also note that:
https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1417187983992700932
In the SSC meetup I attended, someone mentioned how the world is finally done with leaded gasoline. Seeing how we have known about the damaging effects of lead on cognitive development and IQ for a while now, I was surprised that this took so long. Anybody has a good explanation for this? Is it something like a Tobacco companies denying the harms caused by their products and lobbying in its behalf? Perhaps the problem is diffuse enough that I doesn't get political traction and democracy ends up ignoring it?
Aviation gasoline is still leaded.
Yeah, but this in not really a big problem as people face little exposure to aircraft fumes.
Avgas is specifically used in piston engine aircraft, and jet fuel is not leased.
s:
https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/ https://www.smgov.net/uploadedFiles/Departments/Airport/News_and_Litigation/Friends%20of%20the%20Earth%20Report%20Regarding%20Lead%20Fuel.pdf
it probably should’ve been removed from use earlier ... lead is pretty sucky.
Are you aware that "done" means that finally in the very last place of Earth it has been forbidden? I think it was Algeria, but among the last few, there was also North Korea.
It just takes a lot of time from "it's forbidden in rich industrialized countries who can afford it easily" to "it has been forbidden in the last hellhole where people are literally dying from starvation".
It's a bit like Polio. Vaccines have been developed in the 50s, the last cases in the Western world have been eradicated in the 90s, but there are still 30-150 cases per year in Afghanistan and Pakistan because things are just difficult in such countries.
I understand that. Still it seems like an unreasonably long time to adopt what seems to be a home-run public policy. Unless there is something I am missing.
I browsed a bit through wikipedia, and you might be missing one bit: old cars needed lead to work properly. Manufacturers needed to adapt the car engines so that they could deal with lead-free gasoline.
The first laws in that direction was for example in 1975 in the US: new car models were mandated to have catalytic converters so that they can operate with less lead. Then the amount of lead was gradually reduce. Technical innovations in the next two decades (both for the gasoline and for the cars) allowed to also use lead-free gas with older cars, and lead-gas was finally banned in the mid-90s, or in 2000 in the last EU countries.
It remained a bit longer in countries with old cars, which couldn't easily afford motor upgrades for old vehicles that were still in use. But by 2011-2014, it was forbidden everywhere except for 5-6 countries.
I don't think we need to resort to sinister company policies. It was a technological/political/economical development, and this just takes time.
Many of the last holdouts were Arab states that had purchased large stocks of leaded gasoline several decades ago, and were just using it up. They weren't still adding tetraethyl lead to newly refined gasoline, from my understanding.
isn't there a long list of such things that nobody seems to care about? (ok, not nobody, but not enough to actually cause any change)
Such list is exactly what I'm after. Obviously home run public policies (or close to home run) that don't get implemented.
I imagine the delay in implementation is explained in many cases by political inertia, but I'd like to learn a little bit more.
i was thinking more like sugar, exercise, social media use... people celebrate their addictions to these things, and thrust them upon their children without a second thought.
Correlation is not causation, but I found Kevin Drum's arguments to be pretty persuasive.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
There's still a bunch of researchers denying that there's a correlation — but I suspect that's because a lot researchers have invested in other pet theories of why violent crime has dropped to pre-1960 levels.
Likewise, I don't think anyone noticed the correlation until the generation that grew up post-leaded gasoline and post-lead paint started reaching their mid-teens without showing the recidivism that the previous two generations showed. So there was probably a twenty-year lag before researchers started noticing the correlation.
Recent research on it has been revised.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_774797_smxx.pdf
YHWH save me from meta-analyses! Gaak! They find there's publication bias in the pro-lead theories but they don't do an evaluation of the competing theories. There needs to be meta-meta-analysis! ;-)
You can still buy oil additives containing lead like "Restore", some of which is also processed through the exhaust and into the environment - because it's cheap and effective, and people demand it. By the same token, if people weren't demanding tobacco, the lobbyists wouldn't have had any funding to lobby with.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here, but probably the percentage of cars on the road today that require leaded gasoline to run properly are less than one percent? Or is it an order of magnitude smaller? — 0.1 percent?
His claim is that while newer cars don’t require leaded gasoline, people believe cars still benefit from leaded gasoline, so people demand lead additives and the market supplies them.
For the record in a few minutes of searching I found plenty of “lead substitutes” but nothing that obviously contains lead.
> cheap and effective
Ok, wondering "effective at what?" led me to this discussion about the struggles of classic car owners:
https://www.classiccars4sale.net/classic-car-how-to-guides/restoration/a-guide-to-unleaded-additives
It's because lead is an anti-knock agent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiknock_agent
A much more detailed discussion is in "The Gasoline FAQ." It really contains a wealth of information.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/autos/gasoline-faq/part1/
That's an important clarification, thanks.
I should have mentioned, I'd heard the tragedy of Thomas Midgley Jr, who gave us freon and leaded gas and the pulley mobility system that ultimately killed him.
I was puzzled because I haven't heard an engine knock outside of old movies, so why are people buying this stuff now...
Old cars that still need it and performance superstitions are my best guesses now.
Read the gasoline FAQ (I linked above). Gasoline produces more mechanical energy(higher efficiency) when higher compression is used in the engine. This requires anti-knock agents(TE-Lead, MTBE, Ethanol, Toluene, etc.). This is why high performance engines generally use premium gasoline. Octane rating is a measure of knock resistance...
The advantage of lead was that it was very effective per volume. Ethanol has very little effect and thus requires replacing much of the gasoline with a much lower energy-density substance.
Thanks, fascinating!
Low-level lead exposure, intelligence and academic achievement: a long-term follow-up study — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1437425/
Low-level lead exposure and children's intelligence from recent epidemiological studies in the U.S.A. and other countries to progress in reducing lead exposure and screening in the U.S.A — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9388360/
Lead exposure is associated with functional and microstructural changes in the healthy human brain — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34312468/
The lead IQ impact has been well studied, that's why homes require disclosures in a lot of states if they were built when lead paint was popular.
The environmental-lead causing broader-negative-social-outcomes (commonly "the lead crime hypothesis") is probably the theory you're more specifically interested in. Kevin Drum has written about it extensively. The wikipedia article on the lead-crime hypothesis is not a bad entry point, providing a good overview of the history of the research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
Someday, I want to write a whole thing about the important of sorting information properly.
Reddit, for example, sorts information by votes.
Votes have the problem of bringing up the uncontroversial, things are are easy to vote for.
That's the subtle, and incredibly important problem with votes. People will vote more on things that they understand, and less on things that they don't.
As a result, when voting is used to sort, it mistakenly surfaces the uncontroversial or already well known, and buries anything complex or interesting beyond obvious approval.
There is incredible harm in this. Much of social media amplifies based on votes, and I suspect this to be a cause of disinformation — think the Flat Earth — caused by an improper sorting of information that buries the wrong ideas, and amplifies things it shouldn't.
The Internet is very efficient, even small kinks in the way we've laid out or systems can amplify to cause societal effects.
There is incredible harm in this, and it pains me how little intention is paid to how information is presented. Everywhere you look, you will see mistakes. Lists that are not sorted, or where the sorting makes no sense at all (most chronologies!).
Lists instead of hierarchical, or hierarchical instead of lists. Even simple questions like these.
More broadly, poorly search, poor filtering, or poor sorting.
In the places I visit, hot takes tend to get a lot of likes and are often reshared, so I'm skeptical about the idea that uncontroversial things tend to win. (Though, there is popular uncontroversial stuff as well.)
It seems like this assumption is better converted into questions: When do uncontroversial ideas win? When do controversial ideas win?
Also consider: controversial to whom? Partisan hot takes are often uncontroversial within the tribe and controversial outside it.
The place where I observe the vote-as-visibility mechanism going wrong is Reddit. I have a lot of love for Reddit, I think its comment system beats this one, and there is reason in its structure for the death it has imparted on every forum that is now a sub-reddit.
In reddit, what I see is that hot takes gather both upvotes and downvotes, so they are properly classified as controversial, and downranked for people who are not looking for controversial things (it is an option they offer).
In systems that only allow upvotes, I find that hot takes are a problem. That is because they're easy to upvote by their partisans.
They seem obviously true to someone at first glance, and obviously wrong to someone else.
However, that's where the mistake is. If there is only an option to upvote, this removes the moderating effect of people who see the idea as obviously wrong.
I suspect the places where you see more hot takes do not use downvotes in the way I think they should.
--
I think controversial ideas, of the sort I'm interested in, will still have a failure in looking obvious to some group of people, but they will have a little less opposition in looking obviously wrong, because if they are true, they ought to be in aggregate more convincing.
If good ideas fail to rise above bad ideas, the failure to sort may be due to rethoric, but the basic principle that we can agree on controversy through rough consensus, I think, can be observed in much broader spaces that discussion forums.
Because of that, I trust that votes work to resolve controversy.
--
That's why I believe the way Reddit has of sorting information does vastly more good to discourse and truth than the way Facebook or Twitter has of sorting information.
You will see misinformation on Reddit, but you will see less of it than on Facebook, I think, as an aggregate.
That is important signal.
My point is that Reddit errs. I believe the system that it has is deeply imperfect, and it pains me greatly that most other systems we use to share and discuss information are doing worse still.
(To clarify a detail: I think that controversial ideas appearing obvious at all to anyone is either a mistake, or very rare because unlikely. It pains me when systems either apply a careless votes because something is divisive, or fail to apply any votes because it is too subtle. Neither those things signal value, they are accidental. Amplifying noise carelessly can cause harm, and I suspect results in disinformation.)
Another way too look at this, is that a controversial comment could be seen as measurable on two axes.
How divisive it is, and how agreeable it is.
I want to give controversy reasonable time to resolve itself as agreeable, or disagreeable.
If it fails to do so in reasonable time, then it should be hidden as a divisive comment that fails to show insight.
Someone reading it might be polarized, but they would not be surprised or convinced very much, more often than not.
These controversial comments, I would sort very far down. The meaning and intent, there, is to amplify civil discourse that resolves itself into consensus.
(A comment that receives no reply, I think should be sorted on at least these two axes:
How interesting it is, and how subtle it is.
Both comments that are very subtle, and that are uninteresting, will gather fewer votes and fewer replies.
The opposite of this effect is "Bike-shedding". The less intricate and obvious an idea is, the more people comment on it.
I think both axes are more important than we've acknowledged in the systems we built, and the way they organize information.)
(And I will be savoring that irony with the seasoning of self-doubt)
So help me if I see another person wasting their hours, scrolling through endless pages of text, spending too much effort to find whatever they're looking for. Or finding the wrong thing.
There is reason to be a whole lot more upset.
Look at this very Substack! A list of mail, and a list of articles.
That's the shape this way of organizing ideas has, one long list sorted by time.
Scott writes in a chronology!
As if discussing news, or events that are only temporally relevant. Ideas that you would want to look up by date.
Where is the sense in that?
You do realise that you can sort comments on here by New as well as by Chronological? I've read your series of comments and I have absolutely no idea what you want. You think information is sorted badly, but then you go off on a sorting mechanism that makes sense to *you* and is what *you* want, but I don't understand how it is supposed to work.
You think upvotes versus downvotes sieve out "this is a controversial comment" and then you want controversial comments sorted further by how interesting, how agreeable, how subtle they are?
I have no idea what you want from information, apart from "I can't find things that tickle my particular set of interests, so everywhere should cater to me".
The fact that this comment section is part of a chronology, instead of something that doesn't replace old by new senselessly, discourages having interesting ideas there.
If we spend enough detail to make any interesting point in this kind of a comment section, it will be lost by the time the next thread rolls around. Its relevance overriden by the chronology. This discourages having detailed, intricate ideas, and it wastes time among people who probably are on average, not very much dumber than I am.
This, to me, is upsetting. You, dear reader, would be systematically wasting your time, if you had an interesting reply. It would be lost, soon.
I hate this.
(Let me temper this with a small bit of positivity: Substack comments do have hierarchy. They do not have meaningful sorting or search, but this could have been a long list as if in a chat room. That, I think, illustrates how much worse things can be when you don't sort them properly. I would not want to scroll through Substack comments if they did not have hierarchy)
An improvement would be a way to make it easier to skip long thread, so that they're less bothersome as they become longer.
Frequently I see long substack threads, and that gives them undue importance in an unsorted list. That makes them hard to scroll past.
Reddit has solved this by hiding comments that nest too deep, unless a (Load more) element is clicked on. This is a positive and easy improvement for Substack to make, so that we don't have to cause pain by nesting things deeply and adding more details.
If information were better sorted, you could add as much detail as you want without bothering anyone.
Wikipedia scale. You can hold millions, or dozens of millions, or more and more articles on a Wikipedia without more articles bothering anyone, or making it more annoying to use.
This comment section does not scale like that. It punishes detail.
See, how easy it would be to prove my point by adding details. That would be annoying.
The response to that annoyance should be anger directed towards improvement. I'm upset at the lack of interest, not enough to be senselessly disruptive, but almost enough to be tempted to illustrate my point until its importance makes itself obvious.
Then all I have to say is, you have bored me with this set of comments. How can I skip ever reading anything by you again, since I don't find it interesting, relevant, or informative?
Watching a BBC One show on PBS, “The Indian Doctor” from 2010. A child is presenting symptoms of smallpox. The doctor advises quarantine, facial coverings and people staying 6 feet apart. Set in Wales circa 1962 so I guess no metric system yet.
This is pretty creepy.
Oh boy. An attempt at faith healing and roll credits. A cliff hanger.
Thanks.
I wish there was a way to use the knowledge, talent and experience of Bill Gates too.
Thanks for boosting Guarding Against Pandemics, they're really doing some good work! Especially with their focus on the risks of engineered pathogens (which are really quite scary).
I think the Nucleic Acid Observatory (https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02678) should definitely get funded as a first step.
1. “Stronger” is a red flag for me. What we needed was “smarter” actions that passed cost benefit tests.
Looking at the Guarding Against Pandemic site, I'm glad that their goals seem pretty sensible and concrete in terms of what they're trying to pay for (although it seems like a tall order to make vaccines in advance, since how exactly would we know which ones will cause a pandemic?
But also, I see little acknowledgement of how much the failures in response were political and regulatory, and NOT lack of resources, or talent, or knowledge or capacity? And how GAP plans to address those issues?
"although it seems like a tall order to make vaccines in advance, since how exactly would we know which ones will cause a pandemic?"
Well, we could do a survey of all the zoonotic viruses to figure out which ones might have pandemic potential, and run them all through an aggressive gain-of-function research program to see what they might turn into in 5-10 years if left to their own devices, and then develop vaccines in advance for those pathogens. That could actually be useful, if done right. If.
The number of viruses that are, or could be, zoonotic probably has at least 6 digits.
We're gonna need a bigger wet lab.
Ha well done
That sounds like a terrible idea.
Expecting sarcasm to be understood is also a terrible idea.
Agreed. Though, their goals seem to be "donating to Elizabeth Warren":
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Btm562wDNEuWXj9Gk/guarding-against-pandemics#What_would_my_donation_pay_for_and_why_does_that_matter_
"(although it seems like a tall order to make vaccines in advance, since how exactly would we know which ones will cause a pandemic?"
Well, there is a lot you can do to enable the rapid development of vaccines (and their approval) ahead of time that don't require knowing the disease you want to stop, particularly in the case of the new mRNA vaccines, which can be "programmed" against the disease you want to stop pretty quickly - see the covid one that was created literally in January 2020.
"But also, I see little acknowledgement of how much the failures in response were political and regulatory, and NOT lack of resources, or talent, or knowledge or capacity? And how GAP plans to address those issues?"
You are precisely correct here! They don't! And the whole "we'll donate to Elizabeth Warren" is worrisome, because she explicitly does not seem to (when you read her plans) acknowledge or recognize the political (other than Trump being bad - ok ,yeah, we noticed) and regulatory failures.
I read some of their concrete proposals here - which Scott's link doesn't give (his link speaks in generalities as far as actual policy/spending goals goes): https://www.againstpandemics.org/
Yeah, I found that part too, and while I do like the high level ideas, I get worried (as you pointed out) that the political/regulatory issues aren't highlighted. For example: "More tests" is great, but when they talk about it, they talk about "It took months to manufacture and distribute enough COVID-19 tests, and the tests were not nearly as reliable as they could be." No, labs were ready and willing to give tons of covid tests, but they were prevented from doing so by the CDC and FDA, and there are all kinds of new far-more-rapid tests that are still not approved in the US.
"We need to develop tests for possible pathogens in advance, and be ready to scale them up and distribute them immediately."
Okay, and this sounds great on the surface, but... "We" already have a massive, nation-spanning testing network that runs thousands of tests a day for thousands of conditions, diseases and reasons, and tons of which already HAVE lab platforms that can be quickly (see: covid19 testing in early 2020) repurposed for new pathogens. I think they have definitely have identified some buzzwords that are associated with better outcomes (tests! vaccines!) but they don't seem to understand that the CDC and FDA were largely stumbling blocks, and petitioning Warren (or whoever), who just wants to increase their funding, isn't going to fix it. And for parts where the CDC could be involved in setting up a nationwide network of contact tracing - where is the 'trace' part of their proposal, anyway?
I'm just sorry, there isn't a plan for Guarding Against Pandemics that just ignores the fact that our previous, already-in-place plan to Guard Against Pandemics - the CDC (it's literally in their name!) - failed so miserably. You can't just say "we'll persuade senators to support Pandemic Preparation" because they did before this one too! They heavily funded orgs like the CDC and FDA! They have to be reformed. You have to show that you/we are going to do something different this time.
There's a fantasy trope of having old Greek/Norse/whatever gods exist as powerful (but not omnipotent) entities in the world (e.g. American Gods, Dresden Files or Everworld). Does anyone know of a fantasy universe that does this and also has Jesus as an existing God on the same level as the other gods?
The Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne. Jesus is one god of many, if apparently fairly powerful because he gets so much worship. He's acquainted with the MC and a fairly chill guy.
The universe of the shows Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Young Hercules has the Greek, Norse, and Hindu gods as well as the Jewish and Christian G-d. There are also two Jesus-like figures. The first one has the ability to raise others from the dead through prayer while he is alive. After he dies he seems to attain divine status but we don’t see much of him because he’s a pacifist and doesn’t participate in the war between his dad and the Greek gods. The second Jesus-like figure is Xena’s magically conceived daughter who has no special powers herself, but Xena is granted the ability to kill the Greek gods in order to protect her.
Battlestar Galactica?
Wait Battlestar Galactica has Jesus?
Haven't watched any of this, but there's a Japanese manga adapted as an anime series about Buddha and Christ living together as room mates in modern Tokyo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Young_Men
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrvVVreWE6w
south park
love it, though that works because Jesus is portrayed as a weedy hippy nobody listens to, so less powerful than Cartman
SM Stirling's "The Change" series does this. However, the gods don't really begin to show up until book IV in the series. All the books are great reads about a world were something puts the kibosh on high-energy physics, civilization comes tumbling down, and the survivors have to create pre-industrial societies with a Twentieth Century knowledge base.
There's a very good comic called "Second Coming" that's about Jesus coming back and rooming with a super-hero.
I remember one of the Rick Riordan (think percy jackson sequel series) books does this. IIRC jesus and thor play basketball at some point
American Gods has that, though we don't actually see him. (At least in the book; I never saw the show.)
In 1722 William Wollaston discovered that the natural religion of mankind, discoverable without reliance on divine revelation, was adherence to truth and devotion to reason. His rationalist magnum opus anticipated Kant’s Categorical Imperative, described and defended what we would now call the libertarian non-aggression principle, and provided the writers of the Declaration of Independence with their “purſuit of happineſs”. Why haven't you ever heard of him?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P75rzmpJ62E2Qfr3A/truth-reason-the-true-religion
Because everybody and their dog during the Enlightenment was coming up with the same thing, e.g. Thomas Jefferson's project of cutting out all the miracles etc. from the Gospel and what was left was the 'real' ethical teaching of Christ:
"Influenced by the British Unitarian Joseph Priestley, Jefferson set his prodigious intellect and energy on the historical figure at the center of the Christian faith: Jesus of Nazareth. Jefferson became convinced that Jesus' message had been obscured and corrupted by the apostle Paul, the Gospel writers and Protestant reformers. While president, Jefferson took a razor to the Bible, cutting out portions of the Gospels that involved miracles and retaining his parables and ethical teachings. The resulting volume, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, affirmed his conviction that Jesus was not divine, but "a Teacher of Common Sense," primarily concerned with morality and ethical conduct.
Years later, Jefferson drew from the New Testaments in Greek, Latin, French and English to create The Life and Morals of Jesus, commonly known as the "Jefferson Bible." Based on this work, he acknowledged to a close friend, "I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." For Jefferson, it was the moral message of Jesus, not claims of his birth, death and resurrection, that lay at the center of the Christian faith."
Wollaston was not standing out from the herd with this notion, so he was simply too commonplace to be remembered.
gonna enjoy the five hundred? :)
I’ll read this one later today hopefully. I kinda liked the other review today (the checklist manifesto), disliking it only for being way too short.
'discovered' as in 'wrote a book claiming' - just another philosopher purfuing hif happinefs
I like the attempt to render the earlier ‘s’es here.
I admit I never heard of him, but thanks for the the write up! Very interesting.
As to why I haven't heard of him? Well, there are probably hundreds of 18th Century philosophers who have faded into obscurity. Not because their ideas were necessarily false, but just because their ideas never caught on. Heck, I'm old enough to see a that a bunch of Twentieth Century philosophers and great thinkers are starting to fade into obscurity.
BTW: Reading your review, it seems like you're trying to pigeonhole him as a pro-libertarian, proto-anarcho-capitalist. That's like classifying Thomas Paine as a proto-Marxist. I think this is a mistake because it forces 18th Century thinkers into 20th Century categories — categories which would be alien to 18th Century thought.
Transparency is as important an idea to society, as open-source was to software.
I could write pages upon pages about this. I have the, maybe radical, idea that anything not private ought to be published, so that it can be examined and have its inefficiencies removed.
Anything that works well, will work better when people can looks at the parts under the light of Sun.
Now, to have an interesting idea that can turn into policy, you have to define it in relation to its negative space. Where does the idea stop?
What people do as individuals, and not as members of any organization, that is out of the purview of Transparency as a societal tool.
We care about systems that are bigger than a single person. We want to let sunlight into those, we want to make sure they're efficient, and that they're the best systems they can be.
I want anything than any organization bigger than a person does, to be public. Anything an individual does as themselves, should be eligible for strong privacy.
That will bring Good to society, the likes of which Open Source has brought to Software.
I would very much like to see more data being gathered on the effectiveness of Transparency!
We are very far from that ideal, but if true the impact of that insight on on how we build societies and structures is enormous.
Or maybe I am being foolish by thinking that there is such a big improvement to be had, with such a simple idea.
But I'd look into that.
Back during the Bush administration, there was a big fight about keeping advice from various industry experts who were brought in to advise about something or other private. I wasn't a big fan of Bush in general (though I did vote for him the first time and this might have been early enough I was still in his corner), but I thought their defense of this policy was pretty good. The claim was that wanted people's candid advice, and if people knew their advice was going to be public, then they would be afraid to give any advice that might not be popular or could hurt their company's image or bottom line.
All of which is to say, people need privacy to tell unpopular truths. You might say that if enough people spoke up for unpopular truths in public they might not stay unpopular, but it's a lot to ask someone to start that sort of process. So I think private consultations and negotiations have their place.
I've heard arguments that greater transparency is what contributes to partisan polarization. If politicians are able to negotiate in a back room, then members of different parties can make some requests, and then give them up in a compromise, and then make a public announcement that says what each side can deliver to their people, with no mention of what they asked for that the other side got them to cave on. But in a transparent system, every move in the negotiation is public, and then partisans threaten to primary their people who cave on even extreme demands, which makes compromise difficult.
How do you guard against the panopticon/chilling effect? Say I work in a company and we decide to make recordings of all of our meetings public in the kind of radical transparency you are suggesting, aren't I then incentivised to alter what I say based on the reactions of the potential audience? Same as why so many corporate statements are extremely bland, the disincentive for controversy is higher than the incentive for honesty
I suspect the most immediate case against transparency to be selfish in nature.
If I have secrets, then I have a competitive advantage.
I think the mistake lies in the competitiveness. Building societies to be less cooperative, is a mistake and a misunderstanding of society. We got there by cooperating, by being, quite literally, prosocial.
I think the selfish case against more transparency is not prosocial, and we should ignore it when the goal is to make society more efficient.
We've already won. Society is not very much about who gets to survive, anymore. Now we get to improve lives, by being more efficient about everything we do.
So we should cooperate more. A little like Open-source does.
Cooperation and competition are often two sides of the same complex strategy. A group of people cooperates in order to collectively crush other individuals or groups. As the external danger increases, more people are willing to forgive each other their previous sins, and join forces against the external enemy. As the external danger decreases, individuals and smaller groups switch to infighting, because now it is profitable.
Transparency is a tool the powerful use against the powerless. NSA knows all kinds of things about you, you are not even allowed to know what exactly NSA knows about you. Google collects all kinds of information about you, what web pages you watch (all pages you visit from Google search, all pages containing Google ads, all pages using Google captcha, etc.), where you walk (if you have an Android phone), your correspondence (even if you don't use Gmail, they still have it if the other party does); in return, you get personalized advertisement, but you definitely don't get the same kind of information about e.g. the top managers of Google.
So I'd say less like open source, more like malware that sends your credit card number to its authors but never the other way round.
Or I might be as the fool bringing the theory of everything that they just though up to the Physicists.
Wrong by overwhelming ignorance.
Bleh. Ban me if so.
It seems, from where I'm standing, that some ideas are too annoying to have an RCT about. How do you even being to collect observational data on these, I'm not sure.
Maybe I've already been proven wrong and a thousand time, and I'm ignorant.
In which case, I have a whole other interesting piece of my thought I'd like the world to hear about recognizing the important of organizing information properly.
Few things are as important in this world. Google understood this, and they are brilliant for it.
Easy criticism of Substack to be had, senseless unsorted lists and chronologies applied in the wrong places. Incorrect and wasteful, most of it.
Or, said in another way, I think sharing ideas works, even when these ideas are about the detailed internals of systems.
I don't mind all the guts being visible, as long as they don't belong to individuals. Individuals are imperfect, and don't deserve to stand under scrutiny.
But you can build good enough systems out of imperfect people.
And systems deserve very much, very careful, scrutiny,
I'm always amused at the whining about the NRA in their role as a pressure group (as opposed to internal complaints about mismanagement). They're one of the few effective lobbying groups which isn't trying to rent-seek or obtain money by theft, fraud, or taxation. They just want to be left alone. There aren't many other examples. NORML comes to mind, I suppose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Organization_for_the_Reform_of_Marijuana_Laws
I mean, they just want to be left alone assumes that the drastic difference in gun ownership between our country and most of our peers doesn't have any negative externality. The people complaining about the NRA are working from a different assumption.
If a group of classic car enthusiasts got together and formed a very successful lobbying group that stopped and then reversed the phasing out of leaded gas, such that the US still used leaded gas despite the rest of the world having long since abandoned it, you could reasonably describe that group as just wanting to be left alone. But that wouldn't be a neutral description of objective reality.
I wrote 100 tweets in critical tribute to Martin Buber and his concept of I-Thou: https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1437420726865338375
Finally, we can measure things in tweets!!!
Love it! You seem to have read all the books that have been sitting unread on my philosophy shelf and it’s inspiring.
Minor life tip: receipts are excellent bookmarks
The big box of business cards my employers give me when I start a new job make nifty bookmarks.
I tend to use British Rail tickets
I use money. It's my incentive to actually finish a book that when I do I get my money back. Occasionally I'll find give bucks in a book I long ago abandoned.
I got a gold bookmark for Christmas a long time ago. It's the worst. Used as intended, it clips onto one page like a paperclip, and damages the paper in the process. Used as a simple bookmark, it slides right out.
as long as you don't mind leaching endocrine disruptors into your body.
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-public/cashiers-may-face-special-risks-bpa
it's thermal paper, not ink
I think I have to roll back on what I posted earlier in this thread:
I thought I was qualified to utter my opinions on ways and requirements deaf / hearing impaired persons communicate, since I am married to a person coming from a family with hereditary hearing problems (ca. 50% deaf / hearing impaired to varying extends, 50% hearing „normally“ / my wife is not impaired, so she didn’t pass it on to our sons).
Since I am not very close with my wife’s wider family, I have to admit that I have no real insight into their personal lives.
However, her sister’s hearing capabilities are measured at about 10% and she’s got a MA in Mechanical Engineering working for Siemens and a deaf cousin working as Electrical Engineer for Tesla, built my impression that learning to read / write in German and English is not an unsurmountable challenge (most family members are quite successful in their professional lives).
On family gatherings, some of them communicate among each others in German sign language, but I’m usually not aware of that, since they all can communicate vocally (reading lips, hearing aids) and do so with „illiterates“ like me almost seamlessly, and I have no grab whatsoever of their cultural nuances. Those 60 and younger all went to special schools (fully financed by the German health system) to prepare them for a successful professional career, however mostly intended for a vocational level. When my father-in-law and his siblings grew up in the 1930s and 1940s there was no support of this kind, actually they feared persecution for being considered „unwertes Leben“ and kept as low a profile as possible.
Due to issues mentioned in this thread, I had a long conversation with my sister-in-law and I have to change my position:
Sign language on screen is very useful for them, it’s like hearing, and reading costs more attention.
She also made clear to me that the minor inconveniences I feel about wearing a mask due to current covid restrictions are neglectable compared to her problems with lip reading, reading / displaying facial expression and muffled sounds.
thanks for posting an update, the summary helps :)
Because they're live (or were at first), and closed captioning is written after something has been recorded for rebroadcast, would be my guess.
live closed captioning is possible by humans, but we have ML speech to text closed captioning available and it works fine
it can fail pretty badly with jargon, and for something like a policy announcement getting a word wrong in the wrong place could be catastrophic...
Sign language can also fail badly with jargon, and there were a few instances I heard of in tabloids (so probably very uncommon) of sign language signers just totally faking it next to serious politicians
There is a large misallocation of resources to ASL translators (and the infliction of these translater streams on the broader audience of non-ASL viewers) that is indicative of the special inefficiency of the modern bureaucratic state. It is close to peak modern stupidity.
https://www.voteriders.org/
https://www.spreadthevote.org/
https://www.campusvoteproject.org/student-id-as-voter-id
This is like that thing where people on the left complain that people on the right only care about fetuses, because they never support programs to help mothers and babies, and then people on the right splutteringly reply with an array of charities working on those issues.
You haven't heard of it because it's boring and doesn't make the news, but that doesn't mean people aren't working on it.
>and frankly I bet if these groups got a little too noisy about "hey, instead of fighting about voter ID let's just get everyone ID and call it a day"
I should be clear. Those groups are working on ID *because* they believe voter ID rules are a form of voter suppression. They're not at all in conflict with the larger goal of trying to fight or roll back these laws. It's a both/and thing. Republicans want to keep marginalized people -especially people of color - from voting by passing voter id laws that make it harder for them to vote.* We do two things to fight back. One, we try to fight the laws. In the courts, and in the court of public opinion. Two, we try to identify the voters affected, and get them ids. The two aren't in conflict.
*I know, you don't agree with this framing, but this if from the left POV.
Please, allow me (as an alien) to throw in my thoughts/questions:
a) Here in Germany you MUST have a „Personalausweis“ (or a passport), a proof of identity, that you show to police, community offices, voting, banks, on trains and busses, etc., even to UPS, post office, and so on.
You MUST renew it every 10 years (for ca.30 €), but it's also your passport within Schengen countries. —This is NOT controversial in the German society.
b) The German federal government / states started programs to allow you to follow up on multiple administrative procedures online, e.g. vehicle registration, driver’s license, tax returns, school inscription, pet registration, applying for public child care services, etc. on local, state and federal levels.
The basis for this is your tax ID, and if you don’t have one, you can get one by means of your Personalausweis. —This IS controversial, because this is supposed to allow the government to combine all records of your societal activities (some say, it doesn’t make a difference, because the NSA, Google, Facebook and the BND, ... can do that anyway).
Some European countries (e.g. in the Baltics) implemented that (and even more) already.
What I don't understand is, are there problems with a) in the US or are there concerns with b) in the US?
In America, there is no single id. Most Americans have a driver's license, but a lot (in absolute terms) don't. Driver's license tends to be the main form of id required in these laws. A lot of poorer urban folks don't drive, so they might let their license lapse and not realize it, or just not bother. Older people in assisted living might not need to or be able to drive anymore. Native Americans living on reservations might have different requirements since the reservations have a level of autonomy from the surrounding gov't. College students might not take a car to school since life is so campus focused (I didn't, for example).
These people might have other forms of id, but often these forms aren't considered valid to vote with. For example, some tribes issue tribal ids, which North Dakota opted not to allow (Native Americans tend to vote Democrat). A lot of those poor urbanites might live in public housing and have a photo id from the housing agency. Alabama doesn't let you to use that to vote (Poor urbanites tend to vote Democrat). Quite a few places won't let you use your student id (Students, when they bother, tend to vote Democrat).
Instead, you've got to get to a DMV. Not a huge ask. Easy for me, just take some paid time and drop a few bucks for a fee. But DMVs don't tend to run 8 - 4, and if you're taking the bus it might be a half day off work. If you're poor, it's probably unpaid time. If you're on a reservation it may be a long drive and only open a couple of days a week. If you're a student, you probably don't bother. (Then again, you likely don't vote. I didn't.) It still not a *huge* ask, but it's also not nothing. A lot of us think it's too much, especially since it's disproportionally applied to people in our coalition.
And those old folks? They've probably never shown id to vote in their lives. It wasn't a common ask until recently. So now the have to get family or friends to come by and take them to the DMV. Maybe they don't get around well. Maybe they need a wheelchair. Maybe they have trouble toileting themselves and are too embarrassed/afraid to get out away from supports. Maybe a lot of things.
A universal id, along with universal voter registration would be great, and would eliminate this as an issue, but I don't see how we (the US) get there from here. I don't think there's any Republican support for universal id, let alone universal registration.
I thought there were some attempts to make a universal national ID in the 1990s, but privacy advocates across the political spectrum killed it, which made it very hard to advocate for easier IDs within states.
Probably for the same reason some people hate subtitles and prefer the dubbed version of a TV show or movie, while others are happy to read the subtitles. Also, probably because "it's always been done that way" and getting rid of the sign language interpreter, particularly nowadays, would be perceived negatively as discrimination, ableism, and forcing deaf people to adapt to hearing people mores instead of catering equally to the needs and preferences of the deaf.
Technical point: ASL is a different language from English. It's possible to be fluent (perhaps natively) in ASL and have no grasp of the English language. In that case, reading would not be possible.
is this a real situation? surely teaching how to read English text would be much better than teaching ASL. how many people does this apply to?
ASL is a real language, created by deaf people for deaf people. For many (most?) people who have been deaf from infancy, it doesn't have to be taught, it is just assimilated from other signers without conscious effort, like you assimilated your mother tongue. Yes, deaf people more or less have to learn written English to get by in a hearing society, but it is not a native tongue for them.
Written english is also not a native tongue for native english speakers, no? I mean, it's maybe easier because you can sound-out words some of the time, and the grammar of written english is probably much closer to spoken english than ASL, but it's not like reading comes naturally to most people.
Also, it seems that most ASL speakers are illitterate even in their own language, so closed captioning in ASL wouldn't be of much use.
Is there such a thing as written ASL?
I'm just going off Wikipedia here, but it seems there have been a number of attempts at creating a written standard, none of which has caught on, leaving ASL speakers unable to communicate with each other in writing in their primary language. I find this a bit surprising, given that there has been a large number of ASL speakers surrounded by writing for so long. I'd kinda expect them to at least just write ASL with English words the way the Japanese do with Chinese characters or something.
Not 100% sure of this, but: learning to read is much harder if one cannot associate sounds to the symbols. Because of that, many people who are deaf from birth never learn to read, even fairly smart ones. Imagine yourself trying to learn a written foreign language with a different alphabet, but without ever hearing a word of the spoken version.
This is accurate. There is a significant cohort of deaf people whose English literacy is poor and for whom ASL is the primary language. They, too, must be informed in emergencies.
See, e.g. https://sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1080/10810730.2012.743633
the question isn’t about emergencies, but a much larger array of TV broadcasts. And the cost of a human ASL translator is much more than that of closed captioning, hence it being weird to have one but not the other. I don’t think the benefit is worth it. Probably as many people don’t speak English as are deaf + can’t read, and there aren’t other language captions on every broadcast
Fair cop, I should have followed OP and written 'major announcements' and not 'emergencies'. I suppose the recent hurricane-related stuff stuck in my mind.
I do know that many American gubernatorial broadcasts include feeds with translated Spanish audio as well as Spanish captions. See https://governor.nc.gov/news/press-releases/2021/04/26/broadcast-information-governor-cooper-give-state-state-address-tonight-7pm for a completely random example. Spanish, in the US, covers the most relevant non-English case.
And another cursory search suggests that professional ASL interpreters get paid somewhere on the order of $100/hr, so the cost for a couple hours' broadcast is probably not catastrophic in the grand scheme of things.
I am pretty sure that your point will not hold up, e.g. nobody spoke ancient Egypt at the time the Rosetta stone was discovered, archeologists and linguists can read it now
Much harder does not mean impossible. Deciphering ancient languages presumably takes from several years to several careers of effort by quite intelligent people.
I WAS NOT implying that deciphering hieroglyphs was easy,
I was trying to say that the vocal representation of a term has no relation to its contextual meaning, so when you understand the meaning of a character sequence in the intended context it’s quite irrelevant how it is pronounced.
Examples:
Picture of an apple: => a p p l e (the character sequence means ‚Apple‘)
H a n d y => the character sequence means something along ‚useful‘ …
H a n d y => the character sequence means „mobile phone“ auf Deutsch
(same pronunciation)
g h o t i => means nothing, the pronunciation is „fish“ (attributed to G.B. Shaw)
gh as in enough
o as in women
ti as in nation
Conclusion: The sequence of characters AND the context carry the meaning not the sounds.
Would you prefer if all TV were silent and subtitled in hieroglyphics? Sure, we could all learn to read ancient Egyptian, but that's clearly harder than just having the broadcast be in English or whatever your native language is.
Thumps up for that joke :-)
I think it's simply a misguided way to provide authenticity, as the sign language interpretation is basically intended to provide the content of the speech to the live "audience", but they think they should also provide the version of the speech that was "said" in ASL.
Which opens the questions if that is more helpful that closed captioning to e.g. deaf persons of hispanic or french descent (to mention only two groups) not familiar with ASL because they use another sign language.
However, I think it is still more useful than showing a braille version ...
Do you think Deaf people in the United States of French descent are more likely to understand signed ASL or to read written English?
... more helpful than ...
... showing a braille version on the TV screen ...
DAMN, I hate having no Edit button
I think the only reasonable way to understand it is that it's trendy. It just doesn't make any sense from a communications standpoint. Here in Malta the COVID press briefings are conducted in Maltese and simultaneously translated to MSL, which is spoken by a couple of hundred people, and there are no closed captions, so the hundreds (I'm just guessing here) who are hard of hearing but don't understand MSL don't know what's going on, and neither do the 100k or so who prefer English, which is also an official language.
https://twitter.com/dergazetteur/status/1432065475257774084
Seems you are not the only one asking this question, that is from the German Federal Election triell
Too Management consulting firms have hiring programs for PhD’s. There are worse ways to spend a couple of years getting acquainted with industry.
I remember when we used to worry about security theater from the TSA becoming normalized.*
I wonder at a meta institutional level what could be done to improve policy calibration, especially after the salience of a recent emergency has passed.
* I've thought a lot about Schneier's argument that cockpit door hardening and making passengers willing to fight back were the main two mitigations that really mattered. Maybe threat sharing among agencies, but not TSA lines or rapiscan, which consistently fail to detect mock threats in tests.
I had a crazy idea early in the pandemic that it might be possible to play one threat off against another, using each new Biggest Threat Ever as an excuse to defuse the prior ones that are
clearly NOT (any longer) The Biggest Threat Ever and hence worth cannibalizing resources from to fight the new problem. You’d need some institution to have been keeping a list and preparing the way, drafting suitable legislation in advance so it’s ready to go in a “never let a crisis go to waste” fashion - maybe call this institution the Diminishing Returns Foundation?
…although it’s also possible covid and TSA were *uniquely* suited for this sort of tradeoff and we’ll never get the same chance again.
My thinking on that included that the existing TSA was ESPECIALLY BAD for covid risk. A competent executive might have pointed out that TSA inspectors and lines were - and still are - a massive single point of failure with regard to pandemic risk. Nowhere else in the airport are people who are all just about to travel to *different places* legally required to congregate together in one massive group and interact with the same few people (the pat down people) and pass through the same small semi-enclosed area (the scanners). We should have suspended all that stuff as an “emergency measure” to improve covid safety! Or we could at least have *replaced* some of the useless spot-checking for weapons with similarly useless spot-checking for diseases. Replace the magnetic wands with forehead temperature scanners! Replace “sorry, we need to hand-search your luggage” with “sorry, we need to swab your nose”, that sort of thing.
Oh well, maybe that’s an idea for the *next* pandemic…sigh.
A forlorn hope I'm afraid, in a country where the state of national emergency declared by President Carter in response to the Iranian hostage crisis is still in effect.
> My thinking on that included that the existing TSA was ESPECIALLY BAD for covid risk.
This is a really great wedge and now I'm sad nobody seized on it!
I'm too young to have ever flown prior to the TSA security theater. But say what you will about the TSA, at least it doesn't impact your everyday life in a 24/7 fashion, the way the covid safety theater does.
Man those were the days. It was perfectly reasonable to get to the airport 20 minutes before the flight departed. Did I mention real food, on every flight? Half-empty overhead compartmens (and consequently far more rapid boarding/exiting) because the only thing people brought in the cabin were purses, a book and jacket, maybe a backpack if you were a kid? (You checked your 3 suitcases, of course.) Or how about 6" of space between your knees and the seat in front of you? Or the fact that about 1/2 of the time you'd have the row to yourself, and nobody knew what the 3rd seat was for because it sure wasn't ever occupied. Maybe for an evacuation flightin the Third World?
There are surely many reasons for this, but the difference between flying in 1981 and 2021 is enough to strongly discourage any notion of progress in human affairs. It used to be a pleasant and effective transportation option, instead of an ordeal the only redeeming feature of which is its brevity relative to any other option.
Other than the "20 minutes before the flight departed", those don't sound like they have anything to do with the TSA, rather it's that people would rather fly cheaply than fly comfortably. You have to take into account that in 2021 you can fly for peanuts compared to what it costed in 1981. And if you'd still rather fly comfortably there's still the option of flying in business class.
Pre TSA travel was the glory days of air travel. Closest analogy to it might be the convenience of boarding a train with the customer service of an Uber. Before TSA, flight attendants treated you like a customer where now they feel empowered to enforce policy after policy.
I am probably a weird case. I had the peculiar experience of being held by St. Louis police for about an hour while they talked about "grave national security concerns" (before eventually releasing me with no explanation). So... I have some weird salience issues over post-9/11 security theater to work through.
I also might not appreciate how much covid restrictions are affecting people who live in different areas and have different hobbies. It's been pretty minor for me. How do covid regulations impact you? Are you in school, or a parent with school age kids? Curious to get some more representative examples.
I'm in school right now and it feels completely as it did prior to covid. We just have to wear masks inside, not outside, which everyone follows. No real difference there, and we'd all rather wear masks than go online bc someone tested positive.
I was prohibited from so much as touching another human being for about six months. No, that's not an exaggeration. I could look at them from six feet away, if I made the approved gestures of obesiance. I'm still kind of peeved about that. Also reminded of how little I have in common with most of humanity, and how little most of humanity cares about people like me.
Remember the stage early on of recalibrating to discern people's moods and emotions when only their eyes and forehead were visible? Can't tell if they're smiling.
Similar to trebuchet, with a desk job in a large progressive city. I've been working from home for a year and a half, which sucks, and is way harder than working from the office. Turns out that working on a team is much easier when you can spontaneously share knowledge with each other. Who knew? Then also, I saw absolutely no friends for a year, outside of occasional zoom game nights, as well as no family.
Then there are more minor inconveniences, which are still really really annoying, like having to wear a mask, which I find makes it slightly annoyingly hard to breathe, and fogs up my glasses all the time, especially in the winter. Then also, I just really hate having to live with things that I think are irrational, and not being able to fight against any of it without being branded an evil outgroup republican. All of the focus on surface sanitization is entirely pointless, because covid does not transmit via surfaces. And I'm not convinced that wearing masks is helping anyone anymore, due to the fact that vaccinated people can still spread covid, meaning there's nothing we can do to prevent this virus from eventually becoming endemic.
Oh, and I guess I forgot to mention, but I do worry about the world my future self and future children will inhabit, that all of this creep of lockdowns and restrictions will become a part of the culture that many don't like, but no one can actually do anything to get rid of, and no one can argue against without getting branded as the outgroup. I feel we're enabling rampant germaphobia to unhealthy levels (with regards to society's psychological state at large), and that may never go away.=
Leave the cities if you want. Life out here in the rural areas is pretty close to 2019, even in a purple state. Official pronouncements (that aren't followed) aside, in most places you wouldn't know there was a pandemic going on in my area.
Where I live, the pediatrician is now saying that, for an unvaccinated (under 12) kid, a case of covid is presumed to yield immunity from reinfection - for 90 days. The health department is saying some kids are catching Delta over and over with minimal effective development of immunity. I bring this up because I too thought about "getting it over with" before Nature took its course and I caught it without trying. If getting significantly ill several times a year is the price to pay, I just don't know. Whether it's risk factors or some predisposition, I don't know, but myself and the kids have all had it now, two of us being vaccine breakthrough cases.
I hope the pandemic preparedness folks invest in research on the genetics of disease response. That's a (somewhat) missing piece right now I think.
I thought the standard claim was that an infection yields something like 80-90% immunity, much like a vaccination. I think many of us had been taught as children that immunity was usually perfect, but it sounds like it really isn't, for almost anything. But if an infectious agent is rare enough in the environment, then 90% immunity is good enough to feel like perfect immunity. But for things that circulate widely, it isn't.
Is there a reason to believe that these people have the slightest idea what they are talking about? "Is a doctor of some sort" counts for very little in that regard; there are doctors telling people to skip the vaccine and take ivermectin. "Is a local health department bureaucrat" counts for even less.
> government bans you from seeing your social circle for a year
Wow where was that!?
Big changes for me were, I basically just had groceries delivered. Still saw my friends. Didn't have to wear a mask outside. I was around strangers less often, but mostly that was elective. We streamed a lot of movies and got a lot of great takeout and played a lot of board games. If no pandemic, I might have taken up swimming? But not too much was really forced on me.
I think I was undeservedly lucky, maybe the 5th percentile of people in terms of life impacts.
The parents I know with young school kids had to completely rethink every hour of their time, they were given few if any good options. I know I wasn't the typical experience, and still curious to hear about others.
If you object to lockdowns it seems to me like you ought to be in favor of measures to stop future pandemics before they get to the point where governments feel that lockdowns are necessary.
There are no such measures though, aside from early, neigh on prescient travel bans that are enforced with a competency level and severity no government is capable of. Imagine those people swimming the Rio Grande being littered with machine gun fire, and you have merely imagined one of the least horrifying measures needed.
That's not going to work. Lockdowns are now the accepted and expected FIRST line of defense against pandemics, to be implemented in parallel with, not instead of, other measures. The only thing that's going to stop lockdowns, is lack of recognition of pandemics.
So if you object to lockdowns, start by looking at things that might raise pandemic false alarms and work on that.
That's nonsense though. Nobody's going to seriously propose lockdowns in the US for a disease that hasn't had any known cases inside the country. Any intervention that keeps things to the level of the proto-pandemics of the last couple decades (Swine Flu, Ebola, SARS 1, etc) will prevent lockdowns in the US (and probably in most other countries that aren't directly affected.
What's your proposed intervention for preventing there from being literally any cases inside the US? Note that GAP is a US-centric organization, and the US government has little ability to stamp out disease outbreaks overseas. Are you expecting blanket travel bans, including on returning US citizens, as soon as a potential pandemic emerges overseas?
Also note that during the 2014 Ebola scare, it took only a handful of cases in US hospitals and none from community transmission, to drive substantial public demand for dramatic interventions. At that time, that meant travel bans and quarantines, but both of those have since been deprecated in favor of lockdowns.
"Guarantee," huh? That implies you'd be willing to compensate me if your guarantee ends up falsified.
The arbitrary feeling threshold is the issue though. For example Victoria AU has averaged less than one covid death per month for like the last 11 months, but still treats adults like pre-teen children, with curfews and a 3 mile travel limit. There is no level of preparedness that will get to that level of safety without that level of lockdown. One possible downside to a greater feeling of preparedness is that society and/or those in charge might insist on locking down even earlier and more strictly.
We in the first world place such a high value on human life because we can afford to, now, and the safer we get the more ruckus is raised whenever anyone dies from a cause not directly attributable to their own volition, and sometimes even causes that are. Perhaps a little danger and death is necessary to sustain the levels of freedom that many people alive now deem necessary. The next generation will no doubt draw the line in a different area based on the tolerance for risk they've grown accustomed to. I wouldn't want my child's number to be drawn, but I also wouldn't want them to grow up in a society without risk, in a world full of it.
It's difficult discuss this in generalities because different jurisdictions vary a fair bit in their approach. My impression is that Australia and to a lesser extent California have been a bit excessive in their restrictions, while some US states have been extremely lax. It's worth noting that I don't think the US federal government has instituted any lockdowns or mask mandates at all.
Well, is that what that PAC is all about? Are they generally trying to stop pandemics before it gets to lockdown level? Or are they including lockdowns and mask mandates as a part of their platform?
Well based on taking two minutes to follow the link Scott posted it's pretty easy to see that their main focus is getting more government funding for research- no mention of mandates.
What're you basing that on?
> Will embryo selection likely be regarded as right-wing or left-wing?
I used to think that whether an issue gets polarized or not depends on its core attributes and the underlying governing philosophies of the parties. Now I think it's much more up to chance.
"On Deaf Ears" by Edwards shifted my views a lot here, I think it's mostly down to whether or not prominent party figures happen to decide to push something as a position.
Newt Gingrich supporting a moon base is a good example of this, him adopting a position on an issue that has limited prior political associations tended to sort people, and you had a lot of left-leaning pro-NASA types arguing against it. Arguably Trump had a similar impact on immigration. Previously business folks on the right supported more, union supporters on the left were against it, so there were muddled lines where it wasn't a clean right/left issue. It's become more aligned with party identification now.
So my read is.. it will gain a political association once and not until some prominent politician makes a big deal out of it, and that will galvanize support on the other side for it.
Actually - addenda... this doesn't always work. Both parties dislike China, and maybe more relevantly, the tech industry. People love frankenstein stories, and that fear of change probably transcends party politics. So most likely everyone will oppose it for different reasons and its unregulated survival will depend on it flying under the radar as an obscure medical procedure for as long as possible.
I second this, sans the addendum. This will become plausible, someone important will come out for or against it in a big way, and it will get its political valence from that. Twenty years later, the idea that there was a time when that valence wasn't locked in to the true values of the respective political coalitions will sound crazy.
My guess is a fairly small subset of religious conservatives (mostly a small number of Catholics) are currently opposed to IVF. Obviously they would also be opposed to PGT-P. I would expect the Catholic Church in the next fifty years to be strongly opposed to PGT-P, but there are obviously lots of things the Catholic Church is opposed to that many Catholics does anyway.
I don't think PGT-P will be very common in the short term, due to the obvious complications and costs over making babies the natural way. But I think it's very likely that anyone pursuing IVF for fertility reasons will say, "Well, of course we want to screen for sickle cell anemia" which is a pretty short and slippery slope to "Of course we want to screen for any genes related to breast cancer or autism" to "Of course we want to add on 15 IQ points."
There's obviously an entirely reasonable left-wing, pro-equality argument that PGT-P should be banned because of what would happen if 1st world countries genetically engineer their babies and people from other countries don't. But is that going to stop your typical Blue Tribe members from looking out for their own kids? Of course not. People in the Blue Tribe put their kids in private schools, pay for sports teams and music lessons, game the college admissions process, and so on. They're not going to pass up PGT-P.
Parents are wired to want to raise their genetic offspring. Fertile couples can elect to use genius donor sperm in order to have a baby of superior intelligence, but nobody does this. I think parents would have some sense that their PGT-P children were not fully their genetic offspring. The kids would engage in some behavior that seemed foreign (as all new generations do), and parents would write about how they didn't understand their alien children and nobody would want to have an inhuman PGPT baby.
But it's still all the parents' genes. It's analogous to rolling a hundred D20s and picking the five-highest scoring ones rather than just rolling five and getting what you get.
> There's obviously an entirely reasonable left-wing, pro-equality argument that PGT-P should be banned because of what would happen if 1st world countries genetically engineer their babies and people from other countries don't.
I would have thought the obvious left-wing reason to be against this is more about pro-diversity than long-term advantages for more eugenicist countries. Parents are going to want conventionally-attractive, neurotypical children and this is bad news if you value the existence of other kinds of people unto itself. A potential extinction ("genocide"?) of autism is the most-talked-about such scenario but not, by far, the only example.
Myself — I'm all for self-applied transhumanism on adults. If we discover pills that make you smarter, and a grown adult chooses to take it, more power to them. But I think it would be a moral tragedy if unusual people of all stripes ceased to be born.
I even think — though it is unfashionable to say so — that the slow extinction of "stupid" people is morally abominable. I don't mean people who have trouble functioning, but just the kind of brain that doesn't do very well at school or with numbers, doesn't have a very reliable memory — but all enough to get by and have a fulfilling, simple life — well, dammit, those are lives well worth living, and from a human point of view different from a straight-A student's *or* a neurodivergent eccentric genius, and the somewhat cavalier way we talk about "adding 15 I.Q. points" to the whole population makes me quite uncomfortable.
This seems absurd. Liberals don't currently endorse smart people intentionally marrying dumb people in order to increase equality of intellect. Far more likely Liberals would endorse donating money to help 3rd world countries genetically engineer their own offspring.
There's a real debate about this with respect to Down's babies. They are aborted in such high numbers that the community of existing patients fear the support they have enjoyed will disappear because of the diminished numbers -- and perhaps in part because those who might otherwise donate time and money will think, consciously or not, that adults with Down's only exist because of their parents' selfish or idiotic choice. People definitely feel differentially generous towards conditions that appear to have a greater element of choice in coming about.
It's unfortunately not even the case that aborting all the Down's babies will eventually drive Down's out of existence, since as far as we know most of it is just genetic accident during development, it has little to no heritable component.
"Extinction" is an odd way of putting it, since you are talking not about killing anyone but about changes such that person A is born instead of person B. Why is it a bad thing if more smart people and fewer stupid people are born?
Suppose some social change results in fewer black/white marriages. Would you say that is bad because it reduces the number of mulattoes? Suppose some social change results in more black/white marriages. Would you say that is bad because it results in the extinction of both pure white and pure black populations? Either of those makes as much sense as objecting to a change that reduces the number of low intelligence people.
I don't think "extinction" is the wrong way of putting it, even if it's (intentionally) a mite inflammatory… It's the term we'd use for some rare animal breed which no longer has enough of a breeding population, and where the last specimens are slowly dying off in zoos. Extinction doesn't have to mean instant mass killing.
Until such a time as we find a cure for aging or other immortality method, proposing to encourage the birth of a given type of person, over that of a different type of person, is in the long run going to lead to the "extinction" of the latter type, even if you never lay a finger on its currently-alive representative. If I'm a eugenicist dictator and I order the mass sterilization of [X group], I think it would be obvious that I'm working towards the extinction of that group, and that this is morally abominable. If I'm a slightly subtler dictator, and I simply make it illegal for [X group] to procreate (but don't physically prevent them from doing so, merely fine/jail them if they do and get caught), I am still doing the same thing, just with more subtlety.
As to your comparisons, the key issue is whether the point of view/subjective experience of people differs significantly based on race, abstracting away nurture-related confounders. I don't really believe so. If I somehow did (if I thought how a black person thinks and how a white person thinks *inherently* differed) then yes, I would find it inherently valuable to try and keep every variation extant.
Again though, I don't think it's the case… but it's definitely the case for such groups as autistic people, Deaf people, colourblind people, lower-I.Q.-than-average people, strongly synesthetic people, or, even say, transgender people — all things which I expect that, if it were a publicised option, enough parents might choose to screen for in their kids that what few still are born would not be enough for the traits to remain in the human gene pool for very long, even if their births were never made illegal.
"Low" intelligence or low school success may travel with other traits that are socially valuable - sales skill, childcare, cooking, and stand-up comedy come to mind. Dancing. Various types of performance. The IQ scale is one dimension of it.
Also, considering mental skill across generations, the repetitive, non-thought-focused types of work anchor human culture and much of spirituality. People who gravitate toward these "holding it down" type jobs will be less interested in putting forth the products of their thought. I have a suspicion that some technical skills are going to be based in this type of thing rather than intelligence or brain RPMs. Selecting away from the tinkering farmer types will produce fewer mathematicians and engineers downstream - I think. Creating generations of anxious poets has probably never been the goal.
Not that being anxious is bad, or being a poet is bad, or even being an anxious poet. I have a foot in that camp. So I know there are other important ways to be.
I agree with this. I don't even think concern about overall homogenisation needs to be ideological. We'll be able to 'add 15 IQ points' by slotting in the most reliable SNPs long before we understand the exact mechanism and tradeoffs, which could cause a lot of damage if there's a stampede to do it. And while g does mean a hell of a lot, it isn't quite everything.
There can't be much of a stampede to use this particular method, since it only works if you are already doing IVF, which only a small fraction of the population are doing. I think someone already pointed out why 15 points of IQ is a large exaggeration — it's based on the IQ distribution of the entire population, not of the children of a given couple. And different couples will have different things they want to optimize for.
The underlying assumption seems to be that the distribution of characteristics that comes out of random selection of embryos is somehow morally superior to the distribution that comes out of a few percent of the population selecting which of a small number of embryos they prefer to implant. That strikes me as bizarre.
Well, it's hardly bizarre. There's no trolley problem without a lever.
And I imagine if greater intelligence were reliably on offer, uterine lavage ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6503331/ ) or some other method of in-vivo embryo retrieval for testing/manipulation might well become popular.
But my concern in this case is less strictly with morality than with the unintended consequences of reducing diversity.
It isn't clear you are reducing diversity. If people select for a relatively rare characteristic, the result is to increase diversity.
Yes, it's ethical to give them out in first world countries before developed countries; if you withhold vaccines from the US until they get sent across the globe, that's not exactly helping people or saving any lives. But it's stupid to be giving out booster shots in richer countries when so many people across the world still have no access to the vaccines and America doesn't seem to remotely care about stopping the spread of covid globally and sending vaccines to poorer nations. We could be doing much more to invest in vaccine policy to help this pandemic end and instead we're giving our citizens three doses.
I think it's absurd to be giving out booster doses to Americans when 57% of people in the world still haven't gotten a single dose. (But I don't think that giving out vaccines to developed countries first was wrong.)