While reading How The West Was Won on SSC (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-194-londonoxford-meetups) I thought: In what sense do egalitarian gender norms work better, and what is the evidence of that? Maybe it's a successfully-spreading meme, but so are infinity false religions. It seems to contribute to unsustainably-low levels of fertility in a lot of countries, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that women are happier now than many decades ago when gender norms were less-egalitarian in the US -- surveys say the contrary.
Egalitarian gender norms are an adaptation to a contemporary capitalist society, just as, say, patriarchal gender norms were an adaptation to a then-contemporary feudal society. (In short, things changed. Patriarchal households tied to land were long phased out in favor of small, mobile nuclear families. Technology freed women from housework, most people from hard labor, and rising demand for white-collar and care work opened a lot of job opportunities for women. Society probably still needed the war - men going to fight, women replacing them as laborers, phasing out of domestic service - to give up the old entrenched norms. But once the floodgates were open, switching to the new local maximum was inevitable.)
You may be assuming and expecting some kind of linear march of progress rather than opportunistic adaptation here, but I don't think that was ever the point. The new norms are not supposed to be universally better, it's not important whether they work better for the individuals (well, it is important for the individuals, but their preferences are just one of many inputs to the system), and they'd not even be the first or the most pressing example of unsustainability in modern society (cough, climate, cough), nor the only cause for it (eg. when it comes to low fertility, at least urbanization and precarity seem to be more important culprits). From that point of view, the "evidence" for their superiority is simply tautological - they spread and supplanted earlier norms, QED.
Before ~1920, upper middle class women had servants to do the work. After ~1960, they had electric appliances instead. So there were only a few decades where they had a lot of work to do.
The article is only stating that the collection of values normally associated with "western society" are not inherently "western". So each "meme" as you call it, only needs to outcompete its absence/opposite in order to arise and spread across cultures and become a permanent fixture of the dominant western-culture-sphere, over the course of several centuries.
With medicine, literally "just working" to cure people is how scientific medicine outcompeted traditional/folk medicine.
Egalitarian gender norms need only "work" in the sense that they spread and maintain hold on societies more strongly than the "traditional" gender norms they replaced. As for why egalitarianism would spread and maintain hold - well, democracy spread, which gives various groups far more concrete power to push for and defend equal rights and stuff.
Since falling fertility rates haven't actually reduced them below replacement until long after "western culture" solidified into its current shape, it's not a factor in the rise of egalitarianism to its "fundamental part of western culture" status. Likewise, happiness surveys aren't really relevant to the formation of the western societal shape either - I imagine industrialization would have been quite miserable for the people manning the factories. (I won't get into my objections about trying to apply generation happiness surveys to women's equality movements instead of the myriad other technological/societal paradigm shifts occurring in the same decades and centuries, as well as the whole matter with the hedonic treadmill and I can't even find rich data that would say less-egalitarian generations were "happier" or "sadder".)
I'm interested in making a distinction between "superiority at spreading itself" and "superiority at producing utility". What is the evidence of the latter?
Seconding Friedman here: just proclaiming this kind of vagary without elaboration looks an awful lot like some kind of attempt at chucking a political bomb into a room and running.
Any recommendations for good and relevant discord discussion servers? The one linked to from this substack is run by pompous losers and has nothing to do with Scott or the blog.
I keep reading all these "principled stances" against getting vaccinated within this community, mainly on Data Secret Lox.. There's this new thing where they compare themselves to Muhammad Ali, because Ali took a principled stance against the Vietnam War.
I get that there are some anti-vaxxers ("niggers", according to their own sense of victimhood, going by the Muhammad Ali analogy) who are smart and have looked at stats and discovered that things aren't quite as cut and dry as the broadcast news presents it.
I don't think the typical anti-vaxxer is someone who understand stats and who has looked at the numbers. I think the typical one is more like Kyrie Irving of the Celtics, former Flat Earther, who never saw a conspiracy theory he didn't like.
I don't think anyone on DSL has compared themselves to Muhammad Ali, and I can't find any such instance in a general search or a thorough look through the main COVID-related threads. Perhaps you have a citation you'd like to share on that. But I'm very confident that no one on DSL has referred to themselves, or anyone else, using the N-word in this context. You are tilting at straw men, putting words in your opponents' mouths that you have chosen to make them look foolish or arrogant, and you should be ashamed to do that in any remotely rational discussion forum.
Also, with your snide little attack coming so soon after those of "JohnS" (no relation) and "Sleazy E", I can't help wondering if I'm not seeing the start of an attempt to divide the SSC diaspora into the Good and Virtuous Liberals of ACX and the Damn Dirty Conservatives of DSL and Discord. Please don't do that. I'm rather tired of having the few places I can feel at home and speak my mind be deliberately marginalized, or having myself made unwelcome in them or being insulted for participating in them. And I will probably react poorly to having that happen here. This is Scott's forum; if he wants to isolate it from DSL he can, and if he wants the denizens of DSL to stay away he need only ask. From him, I'll take that as a polite request. From you lot, I'll take it as an attack.
You have my reasons for posting the above backwards. First, my post which mentions DSL came before not after the others around it which you mention.
Second, my intention was to post about how "anti-vaxxers comparing themselves to Muhammad Ali is a growing meme within the anti-vax movement" after seeing the above-linked Charles Barkley clip in which he addresses the Ali comparison directly. The comparison started with anti-vaxxers hailing Kyrie Irving as a hero for refusing to get vaxxed even though the Brooklynn Nets won't let him play unless he does.
Then I remembered the Ali comparison is also being made by anti-vaxxers on DSL, although they don't bother to mention Kyrie Irving.
The payoff of my above post is the Charles Barkley clip. Watch it.
The exchange I saw about it is on the thread "Oct 11 Links: Things Happen, in the World" on Oct 13, 10:29:37 pm.
One person is telling the other how they should refine the Ali paraphrase in their caption to make the "anti-vaxxer" analogy with "n-word" punchier.
You can argue it is only one person who is making the analogy in earnest while the other is merely offering editing advice. Perhaps my OP is unfair in making it sound like there's a bunch of anti-vaxxers on DSL who
are comparing themselves to Ali, when it is perhaps just one. (Note that nobody there challenges him in making the analogy, even though it appears as a caption on every comment he makes.)
It would be an incredible coincidence if the Ali comparison on the DSL Covid Skeptic Thread (again, in the poster's caption) sprung into being independent of the Ali-Kyrie meme being shared by anti-vaxxers on social media.
I enjoyed watching Charles Barkley rip into how ludicrous it is for anyone to compare themselves to Ali.
My opinion of DSL is it has its Good, Bad and Ugly to it. I've participated on it plenty, not always constructively. I'm under a current self-ban because the abortion topic got me a bit heated, but I'll likely post there in the future at some point.
There are some posters there I dislike, not all of whom are right-wingers, but on the whole there's more I like than dislike. I do agree with John S that the mods are quicker to ban those on the left than those on the right. A simple explanation for that could be this: since the majority of DSL members are (seemingly) on the right, and since mods tend to only ban posts that have been reported, if people overall are more likely to report a post that they find politically or culturally disagreeable, but each member is unlikely to report posts at a high rate, then the mere fact of the right outnumbering the left means posts by those on the left are more likely to be reported.
I thought the last post which I got banned for, which happened to be a response to you, although I meant nothing personal in it, wasn't particularly fair. True, I used a significant amount of vulgar language and was clearly angry, but I also had a legitimate point to make and made it. It wasn't kind, but it was necessary and true. I was heated because, for one, the subject was whether abortion should be legal, which tends to be a fraught topic, and, yes, I felt beset by right-wing social conservatives who had many crass things to say about The Texas Abortion Ban in a strong tone of shadenfreude.
Sorry for my inability to write coherently. The sentence: "I thought the last post which I got banned for, which happened to be a response to you, although I meant nothing personal in it, wasn't particularly fair." should read "I thought the last banning I got wasn't particularly fair."
"I don't think anyone on DSL has compared themselves to Muhammad Ali, and I can't find any such instance in a general search or a thorough look through the main COVID-related threads."
One user there has a caption "No Taliban ever called me an anti-vaxxer", which is obviously an allusion to Ali's famous statement about the Viet Cong (can google "no viet cong ever called me").
DSL is what it is - 8chan where the users have college degrees. As an example, last week some posters were throwing around homophobic slurs like it was another day at the office.
"which is obviously an allusion to Ali's famous statement about the Viet Cong"
Stealing a good line from someone isn't comparing himself to that someone. One of my most quoted lines is modeled on a line by Bertrand Russell. I wasn't comparing myself to Russell.
Thank you for making it clear that it was DSL you were slandering. Your initial statement about it was wildly false. Either you are deliberately lying or your own views are so biased that you consider any forum that permits people to say things that outrage you as being hard right.
David, I was a regular poster there until Scott opened this page, and I second @JohnS's characterization as hard right. (I don't know about 8chan, but that's because I'm too old/lame to know what the chans are(were?)) I peak in from time to time when things get slow over here, and it's certainly gone further in that direction since I was a regular. Probably a number of people like me left when this place opened.
Do you define "hard right" as permitting hard right speech, consisting mostly of hard right speech, or forbidding anything inconsistent with hard right speech? DSL fits the first definition but neither of the others.
Also, does the "hard" in hard right mean "views extreme enough to be held by only a small minority of people right of center" or do you have a much broader definition? I wouldn't, for example, describe someone opposed to legal abortion and gun control as "hard right" on that basis, but it's clearly a right of center position.
I think it seems like mostly, or at least the plurality. More than the views and whether or not they're hard right, for me, is the sneering contempt for the left that's frequently on display and never called out, at least by the mods, at least when I was there a lot.
@Cassander pushed back on me about this right before I left, saying that if I saw stuff like that I should report it. Thing is, I had *just* reported something along those line, and it was the left poster who was banned, not the right. If memory serves I called attention to that and my comment to him was that we couldn't report *him*, he was the moderator.*
Now, none of this is to say that there's anything wrong with any of that. I was (and am) happy to acknowledge Scott's right to his reign of terror and I'm happy to acknowledge @Cassander's right to his. These are their establishments, I'm a guest, and if I'm not happy with the atmosphere I can leave. I found DSL a congenial enough place to visit while Scott was dark, and I still visit from time to time. But I don't think there's any question that it's a rightwing place maintained and moderated by rightwing folks. I'm surprised to see you argue otherwise, to be honest.
*to close the circle, he said that I could and should report him if I thought he was out of line and the other mods would look, but that just seems silly to me
No, I don't generally lie, and there's no reason for me to do so. The vast majority of people on that board are rightwing, and there are extreme threads and doomposting about race and other social issues. It's an echo chamber, and the mods are constantly on the warpath against the few left-leaning posters there.
I can believe that you don't deliberately lie, but an alternative is that your definition of "hard right" covers almost everything that disagrees with current left of center orthodoxy. Let me test that:
Is anyone who believes that some of the m/f employment differences are due to innate differences, such as a tighter IQ distribution for women, hard right?
Is anyone who disapproves of attempts to cancel people for having at some point in the past said something now considered wrong to say hard right?
Is anyone who views the modern academic world as largely an ideological monoculture with considerable pressure on both students and faculty not to disagree with left of center orthodoxy hard right?
Is anybody who thinks climate change should not be expected to produce a catastrophe hard right?
I can probably think of more, but those should do it.
You're cherry-picking specific viewpoints. I've seen posters in there advocating for laws against sodomy, most are anti-choice, explain away 1/6 with whataboutisms, try to leverage HBD (dubiously) on policy proposals, and make other posts that clearly identify their rightist tendencies. And my original post was a warning (emphasis) that those are the kind of views that are generally allowed there, not that they should be illegal or anything.
> Is anyone who disapproves of attempts to cancel people for having at some point in the past said something now considered wrong to say hard right?
That forum is as "cancel culture" as it gets, as far as their banning policies. #irony The right would be cancelling anyone they could if given the chance, as another poster pointed out with examples.
> Is anyone who views the modern academic world as largely an ideological monoculture with considerable pressure on both students and faculty not to disagree with left of center orthodoxy hard right?
Making the assumption that the "monoculture" extends across all personnel and disciplines is unrealistic, and is probably driven by anecdata. Those on the right would be significantly more likely to hold this view than others, though I see plenty of centrists who are critical of speech codes/etc in universities, i.e. milder and more rational expressions of the sentiment.
> Is anybody who thinks climate change should not be expected to produce a catastrophe hard right?
Just looking around, there does seem to be greater resistance (in polls) among republicans to climate change policy. If anyone thinks that CC won't eventually affect and produce new migration patterns, they've got their head in the sand, imo.
Can you define what you mean by "extreme"? Many posters on DSL are skeptical of current orthodoxies, in particular things like cancellation. Does that qualify?
I'm vaccinated and pro vaccines in general but I'm also against forcing others into vaccination regardless of their reasoning. I don't think it has to be a purely probability or stats based reason. It is simply enough for me that I value personal agency about one's own body above the collective. There are also confounding problems with requiring or mandating vaccination since some people will choose not to be vaccinated because they are wary of anything that is being forced upon them. Is that strictly rational? Nope. But that doesn't mean I believe I have the right to force a vaccination for someone. Generally I find that the approach of sharing why I am vaccinated is a better place to start a conversation with someone who is not vaccinated.
There are a number of different criticisms of the vaccine mandates by different people on different bases. The simplest is that, on the best available (Israeli) evidence, previous infection provides more protection than vaccination, hence there is no justification for requiring someone previously infected to be vaccinated.
Beyond that, the effect of vaccination on death rates is clear, on infection rates is not. We have just been discussing, and in various ways criticizing, an article that found no relation between vaccination rates and infection rates in cross county or international data. That's a puzzle. One possible explanation is that the protection provided by vaccination after a few months is weak enough to be balanced by the fact that people are less cautious after they have been vaccinated, resulting in little effect on infection rate. I don't know if that explanation is true, but there is clearly a puzzle, and its solution is relevant to whether vaccine mandates are justified on other than paternalistic grounds.
1. (in specific) COVID isn't as deadly as Typhoid (Disclaimer: I don't personally know whether or not this is true) and refusing to get vaccinated isn't the same as being an asymptomatic carrier- you're essentially making a slippery-slope argument here.
2. (in general) Caving to this violation of personal freedom and choice creates a dangerous precedent that the government can assume control over our own bodies in the name of public health, which has the potential to be abused. You can argue this is ALSO a slippery-slope argument, given the already-extant vaccine mandates, but this is the argument I frequently see.
I think it could be summarized by saying "always err on the side of not forcing people to do something." That does leave situations where we need to discuss particulars, like rates of infection, severity of the disease/sickness, and so on.
Typhoid Mary can and should be fired from her kitchen job. She was apparently unwilling to clean herself in any way, despite multiple attempts to ask her to do so and the fact that she was a cook, directly touching people's food. I'm not a fan of locking her away for the rest of her life, but despite being told repeatedly that she was infecting people with a deadly disease, she continued to do so without taking any precautions or informing her employers of the issue. I'm pretty sure she would run into several laws that would result in significant jail time based on at least indifference to the harm she was causing, and quite possibly intentional inflection of harm. Firing her is the better approach, or even barring her from working in certain industries - food service being her preferred job and obviously a problem.
A general mandate on penalty of being barred from society, to everyone, is asking too much. A specific mandate for specific reasons - as you say, medical personnel, makes a lot more sense.
Even within that, I think that there should be room for discussion about the specific efficacy of what's being required. Otherwise we could end up in a situation where a very small benefit is mandated even if it has fairly large complications. Right now, it looks like the vaccine is more likely to cause health complications in small children (5-11) than it is to reduce COVID problems in their age group. That is almost entirely because children in that age group have extremely low risk from COVID, which means the very small risk of complications from the vaccine are comparable and probably greater than what's trying to be avoided by using the vaccine in the first place. For that reason, I am completely against mandated vaccines for small children, and anyone who thinks we should be forcing it are flat out wrong to do so. Similarly, young adults who are not vaccinated are less likely to get sick or spread the disease than older adults who are vaccinated. I get why that may be a tricky thing to navigate, but there's a lot to be said for not forcing a 20-year-old in a non-medical field to get vaccinated. I am especially unsympathetic to the group who would also refuse to accept previous infection as an alternative (yes, I do understand that proof and documentation may be more difficult, but we're talking about forcing someone to undergo medical treatment they don't want to get, that's a very high bar for me).
On their website, Harvard brags about having a 98% graduation rate. This means that a Harvard acceptance letter signals an at least 98% chance of having whatever intellectual qualities are signaled by a Harvard diploma (I suppose it also signals being able to fund a Harvard education, I have no idea how many people turn down an acceptance letter for lack of tuition money). Under the signaling theory of education, does it represent a market failure that acceptance letters are not treated as nearly equivalent to degrees?
I'm surprised that as little as 2% fail to graduate, just for medical reasons. This is just an estimate though. Any thoughts about the proportion likely to resign because of illness or injury?
I guess it depends what we think the degree is signalling. If what it's supposed to signal is having learned a bunch of stuff, or having made a bunch of professional and social connections, or just have been willing to work hard at doing what you're told for four years, the acceptance letter wouldn't signal any of those I think.
With a 98% graduation rate, the letter absolutely does signal willingness to work hard; I agree that it doesn't imply the subject matter knowledge or, more importantly, the social network that 4 years at Harvard gives you. (More important because the subject matter knowledge gained at Harvard isn't much different from that at any number of less prestigious universities, implying that the premium of a Harvard degree relates to the thing it is uniquely good at, the network.)
Whether a 98% graduation rate signals willingness to work hard depends on whether you have to work hard to graduate. My guess is that the logic goes the other way around. If the graduation rate is 98% that means you don't have to be willing to work hard to graduate, because it is very unlikely that their selection mechanism is so good that no more than 2% of the students either are or at some point become unwilling to work hard.
I graduated and didn't work hard, with the exception of one or two classes, and I think they were ones I could have avoided if necessary. But that was a long time ago.
I would like to see the exact claim about their graduation rate. 98% seems particularly high, if we're measuring the number of people who attended in the first year, and subsequently graduated. 98% seems more in line with the number of people who got passing grades on their final year courses. Of course, if you don't intend to pass the final year, you might as well drop out early. So it would be natural that only 2% of people in the final year would fail. If this is correct, then a harvard degree still has high signalling value, over a mere acceptance letter. First because it shows that you are able to stick to something for 4 years, what is important to employers. Second, because many people who dropped out did so because they wouldn't have been able to graduate had they tried.
I did a little poking around online, and it sound like they're using the standard "graduation rate" metric: the percentage of "first time, first year" freshmen who graduate within six years of matriculation to a four-year program.
The standard explanation is that Harvard aggressively selects both on the basis of academic preparedness and aptitude and on the basis of strong signals that the applicant has a aggressively overachieving temperament. Even so, 98% seems startlingly high: over the course of 4-6 years, I'd expect more than 2% of even the most rigorously vetted student body to drop out for various reasons (health crisis, sudden change in financial or family situation, deciding to drop out to found Microsoft, etc).
I suspect it also involves a certain amount of willingness to compromise on Harvard's part - generous leave policies, accepting transfer credits when necessary, etc.
Just a note that we are having a realspace South Bay SSC/ACX/DSL meetup this Sunday. We had them pretty regularly before the pandemic, then stopped, then had one a few months ago, then stopped because infection rates were going up. They have now come down, to about a third of their peak in Santa Clara County, so we decided to do another one. For details:
Surprisal party: a party where you invite someone over and everyone tries to keep them slightly on edge, so that they continually don't know what to expect.
If Elon Musk turned $10 billion worth of his Tesla shares into U.S. dollars, and then he secretly burned all the money and never told anyone about it, what effect would his action have on the economy and on the dollar's value?
Very similar question: what happens when someone has money they never spend? Say a billionaire just never spends most of their money. How does this affect the economy? Does it make other people poorer because they're hoarding the money? Does it make other people richer through deflation?
In general, billionaires have enormous amounts of assets but relatively little actual money. So it depends what you mean by "never spends most of their money".
If it means they keep reinvesting profits in their businesses, it makes the businesses' other shareholders, employees, and suppliers better off, and in most cases it makes the customers better off as well. There are also second-order effects, both positive and negative, but in a well functioning market it should be net positive unless there are large uncontrolled externalities (pollution, etc) tipping the scale.
For a billionaire to instead cash out and buy massive yachts and other consumption assets would be a boon to the luxury shipbuilding industry and its employees and suppliers, but would bid productive capacity away from building consumption or capital goods for others, and sould be a net negative relative to reinvesting because reinvesting expands the total ability of the economy to produce goods and services while consumption does not.
If you mean the billionaire let's the productive capacity underlying their assets stand idle, then that's a substantial loss to the rest of society, because less productive capacity in use means less can be produced.
If you mean they suddenly sell all their assets, build a big pile of cash, and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck, then that's probably going to be a net negative in the short term. The sell-off would bid down asset prices in general, discouraging investment and crowding out investment in new production. In the long run, the deflationary effects would mitigate most of the negatives. The final cost would probably be about the cost of printing the money in the pile (about 5 cents per bill, IIRC) as consumption spending, plus the second-order effects of the short-term disruption from the sell-off.
"No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while! And I like to dive around in my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And Toss it up and let it hit me on the head!" -S. McDuck
Richer through deflation. The person earned those dollars through providing goods and services (or someone did at some point in the past). They are now voluntarily destroying the chance to redeem those dollars for goods and services. They basically did the work/provided the service to earn the money for free.
Hoarding money an only make people poorer through opportunity costs. That is, the only way someone having a billion dollars stuffed under their mattress makes you poorer is through the fact the money could be better deployed. Unless we're in some extreme scenario where the person is a terrorist whose blown up the US government's ability to print new bills and hoarded literally all the dollars in a cave.
Money needs to flow through or be invested the economy to make the economy work. If we all saved to the best of our ability then the economy would retract or collapse, and in fact overall savings might decline. This is the paradox of thrift.
A Keynesian I see. You're arguing to the extreme. An extreme I specifically mentioned. If everyone in the world saved 100% of their money, sure. If one specific person burned a billion dollars it would be different in two ways. Firstly, it wouldn't be anywhere near all the money in circulation. Secondly, they wouldn't be saving it to spend later but would actually be deflating the currency by removing even the future ability to spend.
Basically, the person is destroying their own ability to consume. This is suboptimal since investing it would be better. But it wouldn't actually make you poorer other than the sense that society as a whole gets richer when wealth is gained by anyone. It'd make you richer by increasing the value of your dollars, if slightly. Unless that's your point: I'm assuming we see dollars as a slightly depreciating asset but you could argue we should instead be discounting from the stock market rate.
I’m not anything. Most economics is ideological, the worst being libertarianism or Austrian. It’s all a cargo cult. Nor is the paradox of thrift (one of the few things that’s true and obvious).
However it’s pretty clear to me that one man’s consumption is another man’s income.
That statement itself implies you'r is ideological, though no more or less ideological than an Austrian. (Libertarianism isn't an economic system to begin with.)
What do you think about Says Law then?
Since you think stimulating consumption is the main driver of economic growth, can you imagine a hypothetical economy where consumption is minimized in exchange for high investment and most people are employed on that basis? (As has actually happened.)
There are currently about $2,000 billion worth of physical US dollars in circulation. Assuming nobody noticed Elon's money-bonfire, and assuming the banking industry is running as close to the reserve-ratio limit as it feels comfortable so the supply of higher-order money (M1, M2, and M3) is reduced proportionately, the gross fiscal result would be 0.5% deflation over the dollar economy.
If so, that's *probably* enough to be noticed over normal inflationary noise, meaning the Treasury prints an extra $10 billion in cash next year, sells it to bankers who have noticed and are hurting from the shortage, and collects $10G in seigniorage for the US government. Which reduces the US national debt by a whopping 0.037%
Meanwhile, the bit where Elon sells $10 billion in TSLA will *definitely* be noticed, and will probably cause a lot of people to reason, "Elon is dumping Tesla - he must know something we don't!", and then go watch the last act of "Trading Places" to see how much fun that would be.
The destruction of the money would mean very little. The government controls how many dollars are in the economy, so if you destroy enough dollars to make a difference, they'll just make more.
It's roughly equivalent if the government notices the plume of money-smoke and prints another $10B to compensate. If they never notice or never print replacement money, it's very roughly equivalent to a ~$10B gift to everyone on Earth in proportion to how many US dollars they have at the time.
Imagine two governments. Government A collects taxes, literal green paper, which it puts in literal buckets, and then uses the money it has collected to spend on fiscal outlays.
Government B claims to be following the system, but after they collect the taxes, they go burn them in secret, print an equal amount of new money, and spend the newly printed money.
I fail to see any meaningful distinction between how those two systems work in practice, so I would guess that in the grand scheme of things you're right. However, if you had a government that spend it "tax" dollars on one set of priorities, and its "print" dollars on another set for some arbitrary reason, then I could imagine a scenario where, due to the governments own methods for allocating money.
For example, if a government spend most of its "tax revenues" on, say, redistributing wealth to lower-income people, but spend most of its "money printing" revenues on just sort of goosing the banking system, I could imagine that you'd have very different effects between destroying money and paying taxes. Those effects wouldn't come from any fundamental difference between taxation and money destruction -- they would be an artifact of the government's arbitrary spending choices.
I think the effect would not be due to the destruction of the money, as such, but rather knock-on effects from Musk dumping $10 billion worth of shares onto the market. Some people would panic over "does this mean Tesla, etc. are all going bust?" and there would be more panic selling. Some people would take the opportunity to buy up all the now-cheaper shares, expecting the panic to be short-lived and the real value to bounce back. Lots of speculation over possible factory closures, job losses, etc.
As to "burning a whole stack of money", the KLF/K Foundation did this back in 1994:
The sixth IPCC report is now out. I have looked over all of it and read some bits of interest to me.
One issue that has been discussed here is drought. The fourth report claimed that climate change was increasing it, the fifth retracted that claim. The sixth has a nice map dividing the world into forty-five regions. In fifteen of them, it shows drought increasing, in one decreasing. In only two of the fifteen does it show moderate confidence of human contribution to the increase.
So at the moment, if you accept what that map shows, the claim that climate change has increased drought is true but not very true, supported for two out of forty-five regions. One of the two is the western North America, where many of us live.
There is, however, a serious problem with the report. They are defining drought by soil moisture. But one of the effects of increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, mentioned in the report, is a decreased need of plants for water. If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent drought has increased by their definition, decreased by the measure relevant to us — how well plants grow.
The report does not provide the information that would be needed to redraw the map defining drought by plant growth instead of soil moisture, but it does report, with strong confidence, that over the past two or three decades global plant growth has increased. That suggests that average drought has decreased, the opposite of what the IPCC report shows.
> If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent
OK, so I was going to write an annoyed (and annoying) response that you just gave some hypothetical numbers instead of looking for the real values. But then I tried looking for the real values and it’s annoyingly hard to find any clear numbers, so please accept my counter-factual apology.
It’s ridiculous, I just read an entire meta-analysis about the effect of enhanced CO2 concentrations to plant’s drought response, that managed to *never* mention *how much* those concentrations were enhanced.
(To be fair, they talked in terms of effect sizes, which I guess would be appropriate to compare different kinds of experiments, since it’s a meta-analysis after all. But they *did* use percentages to about how much water was removed, so I’m still angry at them.)
That said, what number I saw in a few studies seemed to be about doubling CO2 concentrations. And IIUC, the current CO2 concentration increase (relative to pre-industrial times) is about an order of magnitude lower.
But now that I think about it, even if your thought-experiment numbers happened to be the right ones, I’m not sure your criticism is fair. If the soil was half as humid (or ten times less humid) in an area for a long time, it doesn’t seem wrong to say “there’s a drought”, even if there plants grow more for any other reason.
I agree that just “counting droughts” is not the only thing we need to decide if climate is getting better or worse, but their definition of “drought” doesn’t seem unreasonable, even if there are other reasonable definitions, and it does seem relevant, even if other definitions might be relevant as well.
+1 on your overall comment. DF hypothetically has a point depending on what the numbers are *but* one does need actual numbers for the argument to be relevant. Alas I haven't seen any estimates for these numbers either. (Then again, drought was never my main concern re: AGW).
> I just read an entire meta-analysis about the effect of enhanced CO2 concentrations to plant’s drought response, that managed to *never* mention *how much* those concentrations were enhanced.
> the current CO2 concentration increase (relative to pre-industrial times) is about an order of magnitude lower.
Pre-industrial CO2 is about 280ppm and we're at 415ppm. So actually we're almost halfway to doubling CO2 on a linear scale — more if you add effects of methane etc., or if you use a logarithmic scale; it's fair to do both of those, just don't forget to subtract the effects of anthropogenic aerosols and adjust for land-use changes ;).
> even if there plants grow more for any other reason.
Sorry, bad phrasing there. I meant something like “even if plants there grow more for other reasons, like CO2 concentrations rising”.
In other words, just because plants grow more because CO2 is rising (or because of extra fertilizer, or changing which plants grow where, or genetic engineering, or shining more light on them using orbital mirrors or whatever) doesn’t have anything to do with *drought*.
> There is, however, a serious problem with the report. They are defining drought by soil moisture.
You dropped a few adjectives. The map on page 12 specifically and explicitly deals with "agricultural and ecological drought", with the former being heavily driven by soil moisture. Chapter 8 might have more of what you're looking for, but for a start here's the simple version from the glossary of terms:
> Drought:
A period of abnormally dry weather long enough to cause a serious hydrological imbalance. Drought is a relative term (see Box 3-3), therefore any discussion in terms of precipitation deficit must refer to the particular precipitation-related activity that is under discussion. For example, shortage of precipitation during the growing season impinges on crop production or ecosystem function in general (due to soil moisture drought, also termed agricultural drought), and during the runoff and percolation season primarily affects water supplies (hydrological drought). Storage changes in soil moisture and groundwater are also affected by increases in actual evapotranspiration in addition to reductions in precipitation. A period with an abnormal precipitation deficit is defined as a meteorological drought. A megadrought is a very lengthy and pervasive drought, lasting much longer than normal, usually a decade or more.
The figure you posted is from the main report, every page of which has: "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute." The map I have posted (elsewhere) is from the summary for policy makers, which does not have that restriction.
I am not sure what your point is. As I said, on that map they were defining drought by soil moisture. It is true that less soil moisture, below some point, leads to less crop production, all else held equal.
But all else is not held equal, because CO2 concentration is increasing and it is well established that that reduces the water requirements for plants. Did you find anything in the report which included that in their conclusions about drought? I didn't. Do you agree that it has to be included if drought is to provide the information we want to know if crops or other plants will grow badly? Do you disagree with my conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition?
I didn't suggest that they were misrepresenting drought by their definition but that their definition was the wrong one for their purposes for a reason they should have been aware of, since the reduction in water use is discussed in a slightly different context elsewhere in the full report.
> As I said, on that map they were defining drought by soil moisture.
And as I said, that is a misleading erasure of specificity. They are explicitly discussing *agricultural and ecological drought* - it's in bold for Christ's sake, and the discussion reiterates "this type of drought" - which incorporate soil moisture, water balance, and certain atmospheric criteria. More details are available in Chapter 8; FAQ 8.3 on page 8-121 might be a good start.
> But all else is not held equal, because CO2 concentration is increasing and it is well established that that reduces the water requirements for plants. Did you find anything in the report which included that in their conclusions about drought? I didn't.
Look at the upper-right corner of the figure I linked. Yes, it's safe to say it comes up.
>Do you agree that it has to be included if drought is to provide the information we want to know if crops or other plants will grow badly? Do you disagree with my conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition?
>I didn't suggest that they were misrepresenting drought by their definition but that their definition was the wrong one for their purposes for a reason they should have been aware of, since the reduction in water use is discussed in a slightly different context elsewhere in the full report.
Drought isn't about plants. It's about water. Even agricultural drought is about how agriculture interact with hydrology, rather than fixating on plants themselves as the end metric. There are any number of climatic impacts that affect plant growth, and it is not the responsibility of any particular measure to give you the combination you desire. "[M]y conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition" isn't a meaningful critique.
>The figure you posted is from the main report, every page of which has: "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute." The map I have posted (elsewhere) is from the summary for policy makers, which does not have that restriction.
"The report is better and interesting, but it's almost 4000 pages, so as a practical matter you glance over most of it and read bits of particular interest to you." You did pick this topic for discussion because it is of particular interest to you, yes? If you were first confining yourself to the 41-page policymaker summary, you have an odd way of making that clear.
“They are explicitly discussing *agricultural and ecological drought*”
Yes. And the argument I am making is about how one ought to define agricultural and ecological drought — by the effect on plants not by the amount of water in the soil. The latter is used as a proxy for the former and I have pointed out why, by itself, it is a poor proxy.
“Look at the upper-right corner of the figure I linked. Yes, it's safe to say it comes up.”
It comes up as something that affects plant growth and water efficiency. I already said that they recognized the effect in the report. On the figure that feeds into evapotransportation which affects soil moisture — using less water leaves more in the soil. Nowhere on that figure is there any suggestion that, because CO2 increases water efficiency, plants can grow in less moist soil, hence the definition of agricultural drought ought to take account of that effect.
Are you claiming that either that figure or something else in the report does make that point, or are you disagreeing with the claim that greater water use efficiency means a plant can grow in less moist soil?
You disagree with my claim that agricultural and ecological drought ought to be defined by the effect on plants. The report is supposed to be telling people things that matter to them. We don’t eat soil moisture, nor do other animals.
Two possibilities:
1. It did not occur to the authors of the Summary that the need of plants for water was relevant to drought in the sense important for agriculture and ecology. That seems unlikely, since the report mentions the effect of CO2 on water efficiency, but not impossible.
2. It did occur to them and they chose to use a definition of drought which they knew would overstate it so far as what mattered to people in order to make the effects of climate change look worse than their models implied. That would fit other features of the Summary.
“If you were first confining yourself to the 41-page policymaker summary, you have an odd way of making that clear.”
I was not confining myself to the summary, I was avoiding actual quotes from the rest of the report after noticing that the report said not to do them. You either did not notice or chose to ignore the restriction. I have webbed the drought map on my blog and FB because it was in the summary, have not webbed things from the rest of the report, merely commented on them.
> And the argument I am making is about how one ought to define agricultural and ecological drought — by the effect on plants not by the amount of water in the soil.
I find your argument thoroughly unconvincing, and any proposition that takes it as a given can be dismissed out of hand. That's going to result in me eliding a few lines of your comment, but if you think there is a part I ought to revisit feel free to let me know and I can give it more attention.
>The latter is used as a proxy for the former and I have pointed out why, by itself, it is a poor proxy.
Its use as a "proxy" is downstream of the data as presented, which is properly taken as a single influencing factor. Your assertion that it is "poor" appears to begin and end with the fact that it does not already incorporate your preferred *other* influencing factor - while explicitly refusing to quantify said influence, mind. This might be understandable if you thought soil moisture and atmospheric CO2 were literally the only two ecological factors influencing plant growth, but we'll get to that in a moment.
> The report is supposed to be telling people things that matter to them. We don’t eat soil moisture, nor do other animals.
Dismissible out of hand on the substance as per above, but I do want to call out how indefensible the "nor other animals" bit is as a rhetorical flourish. Including it while ignoring that *plants* do indeed eat soil moisture seems to imply either that humans don't eat plants or - my preferred read - that you think the report ought to be prepared as though it will be read by non-human animals. It's a cute image, to be sure.
> Two possibilities:
Nice false dichotomy. Here's mine:
1. It did not occur to you that the influence of anthropogenic aerosols on sunlight was relevant to drought in the sense important for agriculture and ecology. That seems unlikely, since Scott specifically brought up global dimming in a post on climate change less than a week before your root comment, but not impossible.
2. It did occur to you and you chose a definition of drought which you knew would overlook the exclusion in order to make a narrow definition look worse than a full examination of the models would imply. That would fit other features of your comments.
The obvious resolution is that, while not denying their impact on the relevant policymaker goals†, aerosols were not relevant to the specific metric you wanted to discuss. I'll leave the extrapolation to a similar dichotomy as an exercise for the reader.
† They're discussed a few times in the Summary and extensively in Chapter █ of the IPCC report, for the interested.
> You either did not notice or chose to ignore the restriction.
Certainly, I chose to ignore it much as I would be perfectly comfortable citing research preprints when not doing formal work. Do you hold that the proper ethical line here is that it is fine to direct people to read the additional chapters, but one is obligated to ignore their specific contents when discussing the report? Does that even extend to tables and figures that bear the same label, but are explicitly referenced in the text of the Summary itself?
If so: I'll be happy to give you my email address if you please CC me on your message to the IPCC informing them that they were forbidden by order of the IPCC from citing or distributing the IPCC report in the IPCC Summary on the IPCC website.
" Do you hold that the proper ethical line here is that it is fine to direct people to read the additional chapters, but one is obligated to ignore their specific contents when discussing the report?"
I think it is courteous not to quote text whose authors have asked you not to quote it.
It did not occur to me that sunlight dimming was relevant, and I do not know whether it is important enough so that it should have been included. Perhaps it is. I think there is a serious problem with an approach that shows many areas of increasing drought, only one of decreasing, for a period over which global plant growth was increasing.
Apparently you do not.
Plants are important to us primarily because they feed both us and other animals, some of which we eat or make use of in other ways. People worry about drought not because they are afraid the ground will be too dry under them but because they are afraid crops won't grow. It is deceptive to tell people "drought is increasing" when, so far as you know, the ability of the environment to support plant growth is increasing.
I have not read an IPCC report. Is it worth the effort to make the attempt?
I have heard that the "Summary for Policymakers" is typically more sensationalist than would be suggested by the research which makes up the bulk of the report. Can you comment?
My take is that the SPM accurately reflects the findings of the rest of the report, which accurately reflects the scientific research. But there is an entire side of the political spectrum devoted to slogans like "IPCC Is Alarmist". Given that the consensus of humans-causing-global-warming is "only" 88%-97% (https://dpiepgrass.medium.com/scrutinizing-the-consensus-numbers-70faf9200a0c), and given that over 100,000 scientific papers have been written on climate change, the absolute number of peer-reviewed papers opposed to the consensus is quite large, more than enough for a persuasive Small-World Fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/StxoR4EqAYB3duRjK/trust-and-the-small-world-fallacy).
I think the summary tries to present information in ways that make climate change seem scary. They tell you that the proportion of level 4 and level 5 Tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes) is increasing, don't tell you (but the report does) that the total number of tropical cyclones is projected to decrease. The proportion of high end ones is increasing because there will be fewer low end ones. The models are ambiguous as to whether the number of high end cyclones is increasing a little, decreasing a little, or staying about the same.
The report is better and interesting, but it's almost 4000 pages, so as a practical matter you glance over most of it and read bits of particular interest to you.
I find your views on climate change very interesting and very different to mine. Do you only comment here, or do you have a blog where I can read in more detail?
I have a blog. One of the things I have commented on over the years is climate, but there are many others. The blog, Ideas, is: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
You can use the search window at the top left to search for terms such as "climate" or "warming." My basic view is that climate change has positive and negative effects and we do not know whether the net is positive or negative. That was also my view of population growth about fifty years ago, when it occupied the same cultural niche, the ongoing catastrophe that something drastic had to be done about, that climate change occupies now.
Cheers. I've been reading your comments over the last couple of open threads. It's a viewpoint I've never seen before, but you seem to have the arguments to back it up.
> does report, with strong confidence, that over the past two or three decades global plant growth has increased. That suggests that average drought has decreased, the opposite of what the IPCC report shows
It does not necessarily is so simple
1) it is possible that plan growth is fueled by nonrenewable water - for example melting glaciers can provide temporary increase of water amount. We continue to pump water out of aquifers, at scale far larger than replenishment.
2) Dams store massive amount of water, to the point that large scale dam building projects are taken in consideration when modelling sea level. And for example Lake Mead has very low water levels, failing for a long time. Large reservoirs used for irrigation can cushion such drought and delay effects.
3) It is entirely possible that some areas are greener (say, plants instead of glacier) while total drought area increases
4) plan type could change despite drought (say, forest instead of wetland)
"If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent"
Sure, but are those close to the correct numbers? It would seem that the effect could be large enough to offset this particular effect of reduced soil moisture, or it might not be. The conclusion we draw depends heavily on whether this is in fact the case, and not at all on whether it plausibly could be given certain assumptions.
I don't see how global plant growth increasing necessarily suggests that average drought has decreased. Drought is a local phenomenon, and it's perfectly possible for drought to be increasing in some areas while plant growth increases substantially in others. As with the first point, we can't draw a conclusion without knowing the actual number.
One might also wonder if drought has any other important local consequences unrelated to global plant growth, e.g. on fish or other aquatic life, on dams and reservoirs, hydropower, and so on.
At best, one might be able to conclude that decreased rainfall or increased evaporation in certain areas is offset to some degree by reduced moisture requirements in plants, with no apparent certainty about the degree, and no apparent effect on any other systems affected by soil moisture or the upstream causes of reduced soil moisture.
"Sure, but are those close to the correct numbers?"
I don't know. My point was to show why what the IPCC was doing gave the wrong answer, not what the right answer is.
They are defining drought by soil moisture, not dam level or streamflow or ... . The only relevance of that that I can see is for plant growth. I note as a definition of drought:
1 : a period of dryness especially when prolonged
specifically : one that causes extensive damage to crops or prevents their successful growth
I agree that we don't know for sure whether drought is increasing or decreasing. But the IPCC shows increasing in fifteen regions, decreasing in one. If that is correct, one would expect global vegetation to be declining, although one can, as you say, imagine circumstances in which it wasn't.
Do you disagree with the claim that if global vegetation has been increasing for the past twenty or thirty years that is evidence — not proof, but evidence — that drought has on the average been declining? Do you disagree with the claim that what the IPCC is measuring does not tell us where drought is increasing or decreasing, if drought is defined by its effect on plant growth?
I think the focus on crops misses some of the picture - for the record, my preferred source of English definitions (wiktionary) makes no reference to crops. There are large areas of California where crops are not grown, but drought is increasing (as measured by rainfall vs historical norms), which has the substantial negative effect of increased wildfire risk.
I'm not your interlocutor, but I would agree that increase in vegetation growth is, as you say, evidence but not proof that globally drought may be declining. However, I would say it's weak evidence. From my perspective, drought should be relatively simple to measure, ie, rainfall vs historical average, and both soil moisture content and global vegetation growth are simply lagging indicators.
The IPCC isn't measuring drought by rainfall, which is expected to increase with climate change, with more heavy rains, but by soil moisture. I can't see why that would be important other than the effect on plants, including both crop yield and vulnerability to fire. Why do you want to use a definition of drought that isn't relevant to us instead of one that is?
I had the impression that “drought” means a general lack of humidity, not of rainfall. For example, it doesn’t sound right to me to say that a swamp is experiencing drought as long as it doesn’t get any less wet, even if there is no rain at all for decades.
It doesn’t even need to be a swamp: if a large area is lush with life due to plentiful water (maybe there are springs, or it’s a river delta or something), and the humidity does not decrease over time, I don’t think I’d ask about rainfall before deciding it not suffering drought.
Conversely, if rainfall did not decrease in an area, but the humidity available for life reduced a lot (maybe the flow of a river reduced a lot), then I might call it a drought.
I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m only halfheartedly contradicting you, but looking at a couple of sources they seem to agree that rainfall is not the central element of droughts, but something like “is life negatively affected by less water than usual for the area”.
"We developed the world’s first solar powered reverse osmosis without batteries. The best thing: it works 24 hours a day."
Why those qualifiers? What is the advantage over a simple system of solar desal? Working 24 hours a day is a worthless gimick. Why not just use the morning solar for desal and the afternoon solar for other purposes? Much more efficient than this. Batteries are expensive. Using them to power desal at night is ridiculous. But using any power storage to power desal at night is equally ridiculous.
Why aren't simple things like solar+desal widely used? Why aren't solar and desal used alone much more widely? Not for any reasons this addresses.
My guess is that it has a small segment of the market that it makes sense for. A brief scan of the website suggests that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to install, putting it well out of reach for most homes/small businesses. At the same time, solar + waste energy + waves can only feasibly most so much seawater without a huge footprint. So this likely doesn't scale as well as just pumping water does.
Within their niche, this does seem like a good approach.
Some IQ thoughts (Not a humble brag, I swear): I'm taking advantage of covid distance learning to get a cs degree, and have some observations.
I don't buy any text books, I don't study, and I play videogames during lectures.
I still usually get As, and in my non-math classes I am disappointed by a less than 99% correct assignment.
I've been put into groups with people that also get A's, and in each case but one, I do all the work because it's been faster for me to just finish the assignment than try to explain what is going on to my group mates.
I have all A's for my classes other than discreet mathematics so far (In college, I didn't give a shit during highschool), and I repeat: I have never studied at all, even once (except for discreet mathematics, holy shit.). I have 0 hours studying on the clock.
This has made me even more of a socialist.
It's bullshit that some people can just be born strong, social, or smart; and reap rewards for something they didn't earn and that can't be learned, and Grades are a dumb way of rating performance.
There are people in my classes who have way lower grades than me that I KNOW could perform at my level or better, they just do badly in school.
I'm not sure how to square this circle. Every day, it becomes clearer to me that nobody deserves anything, and any success you have is a product of your history or your capacity; and if your capacity is determined by your genes and upbringing, you didn't actually earn it and have no reason to be more proud of being smart than a trust fund kid has of being rich.
Sorry, edit: AF was not aimed at youngsters initially, though the school curriculum does often include it. Gulag Archipelago is not YA literature in any sense, and is more or less autobiographical.
I'm very curious where marxbro1917 is coming from, and what is the story of someone who reads ACX and is an unreconstructed Marxist-Leninist.
I recommended Animal Farm as a gentle introduction before taking on The Gulag Archipelago as I didn't know if his tolerance for horror was as high as that of a Marxist.
Given my experience of capitalism includes people doing back breaking labor for rates of pay that allowed to purchase approximately One (1) pair of shoes every 2.5 years, as long as they grew most of their non-staple calories themselves and built their own houses, I think I'm good.
I mean, If we're comparing "Horrors of X economic system", Let's add the famines in India and Bangladesh, The 4 million deaths a year from India alone, and a couple decades of the triangle trade.
Yeah..... if that is the measure of nastiness that you are used to, then you are not ready to read about the crimes of the USSR in The Gulag Archipelago.
While reading How The West Was Won on SSC (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-194-londonoxford-meetups) I thought: In what sense do egalitarian gender norms work better, and what is the evidence of that? Maybe it's a successfully-spreading meme, but so are infinity false religions. It seems to contribute to unsustainably-low levels of fertility in a lot of countries, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that women are happier now than many decades ago when gender norms were less-egalitarian in the US -- surveys say the contrary.
Egalitarian gender norms are an adaptation to a contemporary capitalist society, just as, say, patriarchal gender norms were an adaptation to a then-contemporary feudal society. (In short, things changed. Patriarchal households tied to land were long phased out in favor of small, mobile nuclear families. Technology freed women from housework, most people from hard labor, and rising demand for white-collar and care work opened a lot of job opportunities for women. Society probably still needed the war - men going to fight, women replacing them as laborers, phasing out of domestic service - to give up the old entrenched norms. But once the floodgates were open, switching to the new local maximum was inevitable.)
You may be assuming and expecting some kind of linear march of progress rather than opportunistic adaptation here, but I don't think that was ever the point. The new norms are not supposed to be universally better, it's not important whether they work better for the individuals (well, it is important for the individuals, but their preferences are just one of many inputs to the system), and they'd not even be the first or the most pressing example of unsustainability in modern society (cough, climate, cough), nor the only cause for it (eg. when it comes to low fertility, at least urbanization and precarity seem to be more important culprits). From that point of view, the "evidence" for their superiority is simply tautological - they spread and supplanted earlier norms, QED.
Not only is there less housework to do, but lower child mortality means less pressure for women to produce large numbers of children.
Before ~1920, upper middle class women had servants to do the work. After ~1960, they had electric appliances instead. So there were only a few decades where they had a lot of work to do.
Not everyone is upper middle class.
I think you meant to link https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
The article is only stating that the collection of values normally associated with "western society" are not inherently "western". So each "meme" as you call it, only needs to outcompete its absence/opposite in order to arise and spread across cultures and become a permanent fixture of the dominant western-culture-sphere, over the course of several centuries.
With medicine, literally "just working" to cure people is how scientific medicine outcompeted traditional/folk medicine.
Egalitarian gender norms need only "work" in the sense that they spread and maintain hold on societies more strongly than the "traditional" gender norms they replaced. As for why egalitarianism would spread and maintain hold - well, democracy spread, which gives various groups far more concrete power to push for and defend equal rights and stuff.
Since falling fertility rates haven't actually reduced them below replacement until long after "western culture" solidified into its current shape, it's not a factor in the rise of egalitarianism to its "fundamental part of western culture" status. Likewise, happiness surveys aren't really relevant to the formation of the western societal shape either - I imagine industrialization would have been quite miserable for the people manning the factories. (I won't get into my objections about trying to apply generation happiness surveys to women's equality movements instead of the myriad other technological/societal paradigm shifts occurring in the same decades and centuries, as well as the whole matter with the hedonic treadmill and I can't even find rich data that would say less-egalitarian generations were "happier" or "sadder".)
I'm interested in making a distinction between "superiority at spreading itself" and "superiority at producing utility". What is the evidence of the latter?
Some advice: that forum that is linked from the main page is for the hard right only, and the mods intend to keep it that way.
Seconding Friedman here: just proclaiming this kind of vagary without elaboration looks an awful lot like some kind of attempt at chucking a political bomb into a room and running.
What forum are you talking about?
Any recommendations for good and relevant discord discussion servers? The one linked to from this substack is run by pompous losers and has nothing to do with Scott or the blog.
I keep reading all these "principled stances" against getting vaccinated within this community, mainly on Data Secret Lox.. There's this new thing where they compare themselves to Muhammad Ali, because Ali took a principled stance against the Vietnam War.
I get that there are some anti-vaxxers ("niggers", according to their own sense of victimhood, going by the Muhammad Ali analogy) who are smart and have looked at stats and discovered that things aren't quite as cut and dry as the broadcast news presents it.
I don't think the typical anti-vaxxer is someone who understand stats and who has looked at the numbers. I think the typical one is more like Kyrie Irving of the Celtics, former Flat Earther, who never saw a conspiracy theory he didn't like.
If this great clip from Charles Barkley doesn't convince the Flat Earther/Anti-vaxxers, I don't know what will: https://twitter.com/JimmyTraina/status/1450627000234823681
I don't think anyone on DSL has compared themselves to Muhammad Ali, and I can't find any such instance in a general search or a thorough look through the main COVID-related threads. Perhaps you have a citation you'd like to share on that. But I'm very confident that no one on DSL has referred to themselves, or anyone else, using the N-word in this context. You are tilting at straw men, putting words in your opponents' mouths that you have chosen to make them look foolish or arrogant, and you should be ashamed to do that in any remotely rational discussion forum.
Also, with your snide little attack coming so soon after those of "JohnS" (no relation) and "Sleazy E", I can't help wondering if I'm not seeing the start of an attempt to divide the SSC diaspora into the Good and Virtuous Liberals of ACX and the Damn Dirty Conservatives of DSL and Discord. Please don't do that. I'm rather tired of having the few places I can feel at home and speak my mind be deliberately marginalized, or having myself made unwelcome in them or being insulted for participating in them. And I will probably react poorly to having that happen here. This is Scott's forum; if he wants to isolate it from DSL he can, and if he wants the denizens of DSL to stay away he need only ask. From him, I'll take that as a polite request. From you lot, I'll take it as an attack.
You have my reasons for posting the above backwards. First, my post which mentions DSL came before not after the others around it which you mention.
Second, my intention was to post about how "anti-vaxxers comparing themselves to Muhammad Ali is a growing meme within the anti-vax movement" after seeing the above-linked Charles Barkley clip in which he addresses the Ali comparison directly. The comparison started with anti-vaxxers hailing Kyrie Irving as a hero for refusing to get vaxxed even though the Brooklynn Nets won't let him play unless he does.
Then I remembered the Ali comparison is also being made by anti-vaxxers on DSL, although they don't bother to mention Kyrie Irving.
The payoff of my above post is the Charles Barkley clip. Watch it.
>Then I remembered the Ali comparison is also being made by anti-vaxxers on DSL
Name two.
The exchange I saw about it is on the thread "Oct 11 Links: Things Happen, in the World" on Oct 13, 10:29:37 pm.
One person is telling the other how they should refine the Ali paraphrase in their caption to make the "anti-vaxxer" analogy with "n-word" punchier.
You can argue it is only one person who is making the analogy in earnest while the other is merely offering editing advice. Perhaps my OP is unfair in making it sound like there's a bunch of anti-vaxxers on DSL who
are comparing themselves to Ali, when it is perhaps just one. (Note that nobody there challenges him in making the analogy, even though it appears as a caption on every comment he makes.)
My larger point is that comparing Kyrie Irving to Ali is highly memed on social media: https://twitter.com/brokentraditi0n/status/1448345956618022914
It would be an incredible coincidence if the Ali comparison on the DSL Covid Skeptic Thread (again, in the poster's caption) sprung into being independent of the Ali-Kyrie meme being shared by anti-vaxxers on social media.
I enjoyed watching Charles Barkley rip into how ludicrous it is for anyone to compare themselves to Ali.
My opinion of DSL is it has its Good, Bad and Ugly to it. I've participated on it plenty, not always constructively. I'm under a current self-ban because the abortion topic got me a bit heated, but I'll likely post there in the future at some point.
There are some posters there I dislike, not all of whom are right-wingers, but on the whole there's more I like than dislike. I do agree with John S that the mods are quicker to ban those on the left than those on the right. A simple explanation for that could be this: since the majority of DSL members are (seemingly) on the right, and since mods tend to only ban posts that have been reported, if people overall are more likely to report a post that they find politically or culturally disagreeable, but each member is unlikely to report posts at a high rate, then the mere fact of the right outnumbering the left means posts by those on the left are more likely to be reported.
I thought the last post which I got banned for, which happened to be a response to you, although I meant nothing personal in it, wasn't particularly fair. True, I used a significant amount of vulgar language and was clearly angry, but I also had a legitimate point to make and made it. It wasn't kind, but it was necessary and true. I was heated because, for one, the subject was whether abortion should be legal, which tends to be a fraught topic, and, yes, I felt beset by right-wing social conservatives who had many crass things to say about The Texas Abortion Ban in a strong tone of shadenfreude.
Sorry for my inability to write coherently. The sentence: "I thought the last post which I got banned for, which happened to be a response to you, although I meant nothing personal in it, wasn't particularly fair." should read "I thought the last banning I got wasn't particularly fair."
Correction: I said above that my last ban was a response to you, but I double checked and it turns out it was to someone else.
"I don't think anyone on DSL has compared themselves to Muhammad Ali, and I can't find any such instance in a general search or a thorough look through the main COVID-related threads."
One user there has a caption "No Taliban ever called me an anti-vaxxer", which is obviously an allusion to Ali's famous statement about the Viet Cong (can google "no viet cong ever called me").
DSL is what it is - 8chan where the users have college degrees. As an example, last week some posters were throwing around homophobic slurs like it was another day at the office.
This sounds an awful lot like the kind of out-of-context guilt by association that tarred SSC.
"which is obviously an allusion to Ali's famous statement about the Viet Cong"
Stealing a good line from someone isn't comparing himself to that someone. One of my most quoted lines is modeled on a line by Bertrand Russell. I wasn't comparing myself to Russell.
Thank you for making it clear that it was DSL you were slandering. Your initial statement about it was wildly false. Either you are deliberately lying or your own views are so biased that you consider any forum that permits people to say things that outrage you as being hard right.
David, I was a regular poster there until Scott opened this page, and I second @JohnS's characterization as hard right. (I don't know about 8chan, but that's because I'm too old/lame to know what the chans are(were?)) I peak in from time to time when things get slow over here, and it's certainly gone further in that direction since I was a regular. Probably a number of people like me left when this place opened.
Do you define "hard right" as permitting hard right speech, consisting mostly of hard right speech, or forbidding anything inconsistent with hard right speech? DSL fits the first definition but neither of the others.
Also, does the "hard" in hard right mean "views extreme enough to be held by only a small minority of people right of center" or do you have a much broader definition? I wouldn't, for example, describe someone opposed to legal abortion and gun control as "hard right" on that basis, but it's clearly a right of center position.
I think it seems like mostly, or at least the plurality. More than the views and whether or not they're hard right, for me, is the sneering contempt for the left that's frequently on display and never called out, at least by the mods, at least when I was there a lot.
@Cassander pushed back on me about this right before I left, saying that if I saw stuff like that I should report it. Thing is, I had *just* reported something along those line, and it was the left poster who was banned, not the right. If memory serves I called attention to that and my comment to him was that we couldn't report *him*, he was the moderator.*
Now, none of this is to say that there's anything wrong with any of that. I was (and am) happy to acknowledge Scott's right to his reign of terror and I'm happy to acknowledge @Cassander's right to his. These are their establishments, I'm a guest, and if I'm not happy with the atmosphere I can leave. I found DSL a congenial enough place to visit while Scott was dark, and I still visit from time to time. But I don't think there's any question that it's a rightwing place maintained and moderated by rightwing folks. I'm surprised to see you argue otherwise, to be honest.
*to close the circle, he said that I could and should report him if I thought he was out of line and the other mods would look, but that just seems silly to me
No, I don't generally lie, and there's no reason for me to do so. The vast majority of people on that board are rightwing, and there are extreme threads and doomposting about race and other social issues. It's an echo chamber, and the mods are constantly on the warpath against the few left-leaning posters there.
I can believe that you don't deliberately lie, but an alternative is that your definition of "hard right" covers almost everything that disagrees with current left of center orthodoxy. Let me test that:
Is anyone who believes that some of the m/f employment differences are due to innate differences, such as a tighter IQ distribution for women, hard right?
Is anyone who disapproves of attempts to cancel people for having at some point in the past said something now considered wrong to say hard right?
Is anyone who views the modern academic world as largely an ideological monoculture with considerable pressure on both students and faculty not to disagree with left of center orthodoxy hard right?
Is anybody who thinks climate change should not be expected to produce a catastrophe hard right?
I can probably think of more, but those should do it.
You're cherry-picking specific viewpoints. I've seen posters in there advocating for laws against sodomy, most are anti-choice, explain away 1/6 with whataboutisms, try to leverage HBD (dubiously) on policy proposals, and make other posts that clearly identify their rightist tendencies. And my original post was a warning (emphasis) that those are the kind of views that are generally allowed there, not that they should be illegal or anything.
> Is anyone who disapproves of attempts to cancel people for having at some point in the past said something now considered wrong to say hard right?
That forum is as "cancel culture" as it gets, as far as their banning policies. #irony The right would be cancelling anyone they could if given the chance, as another poster pointed out with examples.
> Is anyone who views the modern academic world as largely an ideological monoculture with considerable pressure on both students and faculty not to disagree with left of center orthodoxy hard right?
Making the assumption that the "monoculture" extends across all personnel and disciplines is unrealistic, and is probably driven by anecdata. Those on the right would be significantly more likely to hold this view than others, though I see plenty of centrists who are critical of speech codes/etc in universities, i.e. milder and more rational expressions of the sentiment.
> Is anybody who thinks climate change should not be expected to produce a catastrophe hard right?
Just looking around, there does seem to be greater resistance (in polls) among republicans to climate change policy. If anyone thinks that CC won't eventually affect and produce new migration patterns, they've got their head in the sand, imo.
I think taking evidence from that board is bound to produce outliers, tbh. Most of the posters are extreme, and they tend to influence one another.
Can you define what you mean by "extreme"? Many posters on DSL are skeptical of current orthodoxies, in particular things like cancellation. Does that qualify?
"I ain't got no quarrel with them coronaviruses" won't work, since (unlike the Viet Cong) the coronaviruses are in your neighborhood.
I'm vaccinated and pro vaccines in general but I'm also against forcing others into vaccination regardless of their reasoning. I don't think it has to be a purely probability or stats based reason. It is simply enough for me that I value personal agency about one's own body above the collective. There are also confounding problems with requiring or mandating vaccination since some people will choose not to be vaccinated because they are wary of anything that is being forced upon them. Is that strictly rational? Nope. But that doesn't mean I believe I have the right to force a vaccination for someone. Generally I find that the approach of sharing why I am vaccinated is a better place to start a conversation with someone who is not vaccinated.
There are a number of different criticisms of the vaccine mandates by different people on different bases. The simplest is that, on the best available (Israeli) evidence, previous infection provides more protection than vaccination, hence there is no justification for requiring someone previously infected to be vaccinated.
Beyond that, the effect of vaccination on death rates is clear, on infection rates is not. We have just been discussing, and in various ways criticizing, an article that found no relation between vaccination rates and infection rates in cross county or international data. That's a puzzle. One possible explanation is that the protection provided by vaccination after a few months is weak enough to be balanced by the fact that people are less cautious after they have been vaccinated, resulting in little effect on infection rate. I don't know if that explanation is true, but there is clearly a puzzle, and its solution is relevant to whether vaccine mandates are justified on other than paternalistic grounds.
The counterargument is along the lines of:
1. (in specific) COVID isn't as deadly as Typhoid (Disclaimer: I don't personally know whether or not this is true) and refusing to get vaccinated isn't the same as being an asymptomatic carrier- you're essentially making a slippery-slope argument here.
2. (in general) Caving to this violation of personal freedom and choice creates a dangerous precedent that the government can assume control over our own bodies in the name of public health, which has the potential to be abused. You can argue this is ALSO a slippery-slope argument, given the already-extant vaccine mandates, but this is the argument I frequently see.
I think it could be summarized by saying "always err on the side of not forcing people to do something." That does leave situations where we need to discuss particulars, like rates of infection, severity of the disease/sickness, and so on.
Typhoid Mary can and should be fired from her kitchen job. She was apparently unwilling to clean herself in any way, despite multiple attempts to ask her to do so and the fact that she was a cook, directly touching people's food. I'm not a fan of locking her away for the rest of her life, but despite being told repeatedly that she was infecting people with a deadly disease, she continued to do so without taking any precautions or informing her employers of the issue. I'm pretty sure she would run into several laws that would result in significant jail time based on at least indifference to the harm she was causing, and quite possibly intentional inflection of harm. Firing her is the better approach, or even barring her from working in certain industries - food service being her preferred job and obviously a problem.
A general mandate on penalty of being barred from society, to everyone, is asking too much. A specific mandate for specific reasons - as you say, medical personnel, makes a lot more sense.
Even within that, I think that there should be room for discussion about the specific efficacy of what's being required. Otherwise we could end up in a situation where a very small benefit is mandated even if it has fairly large complications. Right now, it looks like the vaccine is more likely to cause health complications in small children (5-11) than it is to reduce COVID problems in their age group. That is almost entirely because children in that age group have extremely low risk from COVID, which means the very small risk of complications from the vaccine are comparable and probably greater than what's trying to be avoided by using the vaccine in the first place. For that reason, I am completely against mandated vaccines for small children, and anyone who thinks we should be forcing it are flat out wrong to do so. Similarly, young adults who are not vaccinated are less likely to get sick or spread the disease than older adults who are vaccinated. I get why that may be a tricky thing to navigate, but there's a lot to be said for not forcing a 20-year-old in a non-medical field to get vaccinated. I am especially unsympathetic to the group who would also refuse to accept previous infection as an alternative (yes, I do understand that proof and documentation may be more difficult, but we're talking about forcing someone to undergo medical treatment they don't want to get, that's a very high bar for me).
On their website, Harvard brags about having a 98% graduation rate. This means that a Harvard acceptance letter signals an at least 98% chance of having whatever intellectual qualities are signaled by a Harvard diploma (I suppose it also signals being able to fund a Harvard education, I have no idea how many people turn down an acceptance letter for lack of tuition money). Under the signaling theory of education, does it represent a market failure that acceptance letters are not treated as nearly equivalent to degrees?
I'm surprised that as little as 2% fail to graduate, just for medical reasons. This is just an estimate though. Any thoughts about the proportion likely to resign because of illness or injury?
I guess it depends what we think the degree is signalling. If what it's supposed to signal is having learned a bunch of stuff, or having made a bunch of professional and social connections, or just have been willing to work hard at doing what you're told for four years, the acceptance letter wouldn't signal any of those I think.
With a 98% graduation rate, the letter absolutely does signal willingness to work hard; I agree that it doesn't imply the subject matter knowledge or, more importantly, the social network that 4 years at Harvard gives you. (More important because the subject matter knowledge gained at Harvard isn't much different from that at any number of less prestigious universities, implying that the premium of a Harvard degree relates to the thing it is uniquely good at, the network.)
Whether a 98% graduation rate signals willingness to work hard depends on whether you have to work hard to graduate. My guess is that the logic goes the other way around. If the graduation rate is 98% that means you don't have to be willing to work hard to graduate, because it is very unlikely that their selection mechanism is so good that no more than 2% of the students either are or at some point become unwilling to work hard.
I graduated and didn't work hard, with the exception of one or two classes, and I think they were ones I could have avoided if necessary. But that was a long time ago.
To clarify, did you graduate from Harvard?
Yes. In 1965.
I would like to see the exact claim about their graduation rate. 98% seems particularly high, if we're measuring the number of people who attended in the first year, and subsequently graduated. 98% seems more in line with the number of people who got passing grades on their final year courses. Of course, if you don't intend to pass the final year, you might as well drop out early. So it would be natural that only 2% of people in the final year would fail. If this is correct, then a harvard degree still has high signalling value, over a mere acceptance letter. First because it shows that you are able to stick to something for 4 years, what is important to employers. Second, because many people who dropped out did so because they wouldn't have been able to graduate had they tried.
I did a little poking around online, and it sound like they're using the standard "graduation rate" metric: the percentage of "first time, first year" freshmen who graduate within six years of matriculation to a four-year program.
The standard explanation is that Harvard aggressively selects both on the basis of academic preparedness and aptitude and on the basis of strong signals that the applicant has a aggressively overachieving temperament. Even so, 98% seems startlingly high: over the course of 4-6 years, I'd expect more than 2% of even the most rigorously vetted student body to drop out for various reasons (health crisis, sudden change in financial or family situation, deciding to drop out to found Microsoft, etc).
I suspect it also involves a certain amount of willingness to compromise on Harvard's part - generous leave policies, accepting transfer credits when necessary, etc.
Just a note that we are having a realspace South Bay SSC/ACX/DSL meetup this Sunday. We had them pretty regularly before the pandemic, then stopped, then had one a few months ago, then stopped because infection rates were going up. They have now come down, to about a third of their peak in Santa Clara County, so we decided to do another one. For details:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html
Surprisal party: a party where you invite someone over and everyone tries to keep them slightly on edge, so that they continually don't know what to expect.
Could invite a ‘blanket party’ in retaliation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanket_party
If Elon Musk turned $10 billion worth of his Tesla shares into U.S. dollars, and then he secretly burned all the money and never told anyone about it, what effect would his action have on the economy and on the dollar's value?
Very similar question: what happens when someone has money they never spend? Say a billionaire just never spends most of their money. How does this affect the economy? Does it make other people poorer because they're hoarding the money? Does it make other people richer through deflation?
In general, billionaires have enormous amounts of assets but relatively little actual money. So it depends what you mean by "never spends most of their money".
If it means they keep reinvesting profits in their businesses, it makes the businesses' other shareholders, employees, and suppliers better off, and in most cases it makes the customers better off as well. There are also second-order effects, both positive and negative, but in a well functioning market it should be net positive unless there are large uncontrolled externalities (pollution, etc) tipping the scale.
For a billionaire to instead cash out and buy massive yachts and other consumption assets would be a boon to the luxury shipbuilding industry and its employees and suppliers, but would bid productive capacity away from building consumption or capital goods for others, and sould be a net negative relative to reinvesting because reinvesting expands the total ability of the economy to produce goods and services while consumption does not.
If you mean the billionaire let's the productive capacity underlying their assets stand idle, then that's a substantial loss to the rest of society, because less productive capacity in use means less can be produced.
If you mean they suddenly sell all their assets, build a big pile of cash, and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck, then that's probably going to be a net negative in the short term. The sell-off would bid down asset prices in general, discouraging investment and crowding out investment in new production. In the long run, the deflationary effects would mitigate most of the negatives. The final cost would probably be about the cost of printing the money in the pile (about 5 cents per bill, IIRC) as consumption spending, plus the second-order effects of the short-term disruption from the sell-off.
https://live.staticflickr.com/8008/7412969740_453a9c7a7e_b.jpg
"No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while! And I like to dive around in my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And Toss it up and let it hit me on the head!" -S. McDuck
Richer through deflation. The person earned those dollars through providing goods and services (or someone did at some point in the past). They are now voluntarily destroying the chance to redeem those dollars for goods and services. They basically did the work/provided the service to earn the money for free.
Hoarding money an only make people poorer through opportunity costs. That is, the only way someone having a billion dollars stuffed under their mattress makes you poorer is through the fact the money could be better deployed. Unless we're in some extreme scenario where the person is a terrorist whose blown up the US government's ability to print new bills and hoarded literally all the dollars in a cave.
Money needs to flow through or be invested the economy to make the economy work. If we all saved to the best of our ability then the economy would retract or collapse, and in fact overall savings might decline. This is the paradox of thrift.
A Keynesian I see. You're arguing to the extreme. An extreme I specifically mentioned. If everyone in the world saved 100% of their money, sure. If one specific person burned a billion dollars it would be different in two ways. Firstly, it wouldn't be anywhere near all the money in circulation. Secondly, they wouldn't be saving it to spend later but would actually be deflating the currency by removing even the future ability to spend.
Basically, the person is destroying their own ability to consume. This is suboptimal since investing it would be better. But it wouldn't actually make you poorer other than the sense that society as a whole gets richer when wealth is gained by anyone. It'd make you richer by increasing the value of your dollars, if slightly. Unless that's your point: I'm assuming we see dollars as a slightly depreciating asset but you could argue we should instead be discounting from the stock market rate.
I’m not anything. Most economics is ideological, the worst being libertarianism or Austrian. It’s all a cargo cult. Nor is the paradox of thrift (one of the few things that’s true and obvious).
However it’s pretty clear to me that one man’s consumption is another man’s income.
That statement itself implies you'r is ideological, though no more or less ideological than an Austrian. (Libertarianism isn't an economic system to begin with.)
What do you think about Says Law then?
Since you think stimulating consumption is the main driver of economic growth, can you imagine a hypothetical economy where consumption is minimized in exchange for high investment and most people are employed on that basis? (As has actually happened.)
It makes people poorer. Money is like manure, its only good if you spread it around
There are currently about $2,000 billion worth of physical US dollars in circulation. Assuming nobody noticed Elon's money-bonfire, and assuming the banking industry is running as close to the reserve-ratio limit as it feels comfortable so the supply of higher-order money (M1, M2, and M3) is reduced proportionately, the gross fiscal result would be 0.5% deflation over the dollar economy.
If so, that's *probably* enough to be noticed over normal inflationary noise, meaning the Treasury prints an extra $10 billion in cash next year, sells it to bankers who have noticed and are hurting from the shortage, and collects $10G in seigniorage for the US government. Which reduces the US national debt by a whopping 0.037%
Meanwhile, the bit where Elon sells $10 billion in TSLA will *definitely* be noticed, and will probably cause a lot of people to reason, "Elon is dumping Tesla - he must know something we don't!", and then go watch the last act of "Trading Places" to see how much fun that would be.
Gotta get some of those FCOJ futures
The destruction of the money would mean very little. The government controls how many dollars are in the economy, so if you destroy enough dollars to make a difference, they'll just make more.
My (probably oversimplified) understanding is that burning $10B is roughly equivalent to voluntarily paying an extra $10B in taxes.
It's roughly equivalent if the government notices the plume of money-smoke and prints another $10B to compensate. If they never notice or never print replacement money, it's very roughly equivalent to a ~$10B gift to everyone on Earth in proportion to how many US dollars they have at the time.
Imagine two governments. Government A collects taxes, literal green paper, which it puts in literal buckets, and then uses the money it has collected to spend on fiscal outlays.
Government B claims to be following the system, but after they collect the taxes, they go burn them in secret, print an equal amount of new money, and spend the newly printed money.
I fail to see any meaningful distinction between how those two systems work in practice, so I would guess that in the grand scheme of things you're right. However, if you had a government that spend it "tax" dollars on one set of priorities, and its "print" dollars on another set for some arbitrary reason, then I could imagine a scenario where, due to the governments own methods for allocating money.
For example, if a government spend most of its "tax revenues" on, say, redistributing wealth to lower-income people, but spend most of its "money printing" revenues on just sort of goosing the banking system, I could imagine that you'd have very different effects between destroying money and paying taxes. Those effects wouldn't come from any fundamental difference between taxation and money destruction -- they would be an artifact of the government's arbitrary spending choices.
I think the effect would not be due to the destruction of the money, as such, but rather knock-on effects from Musk dumping $10 billion worth of shares onto the market. Some people would panic over "does this mean Tesla, etc. are all going bust?" and there would be more panic selling. Some people would take the opportunity to buy up all the now-cheaper shares, expecting the panic to be short-lived and the real value to bounce back. Lots of speculation over possible factory closures, job losses, etc.
As to "burning a whole stack of money", the KLF/K Foundation did this back in 1994:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Quid
Okay, talking of The KLF is making me all nostalgic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5oHL3zBDg&t=1s
The sixth IPCC report is now out. I have looked over all of it and read some bits of interest to me.
One issue that has been discussed here is drought. The fourth report claimed that climate change was increasing it, the fifth retracted that claim. The sixth has a nice map dividing the world into forty-five regions. In fifteen of them, it shows drought increasing, in one decreasing. In only two of the fifteen does it show moderate confidence of human contribution to the increase.
So at the moment, if you accept what that map shows, the claim that climate change has increased drought is true but not very true, supported for two out of forty-five regions. One of the two is the western North America, where many of us live.
There is, however, a serious problem with the report. They are defining drought by soil moisture. But one of the effects of increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, mentioned in the report, is a decreased need of plants for water. If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent drought has increased by their definition, decreased by the measure relevant to us — how well plants grow.
The report does not provide the information that would be needed to redraw the map defining drought by plant growth instead of soil moisture, but it does report, with strong confidence, that over the past two or three decades global plant growth has increased. That suggests that average drought has decreased, the opposite of what the IPCC report shows.
> If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent
OK, so I was going to write an annoyed (and annoying) response that you just gave some hypothetical numbers instead of looking for the real values. But then I tried looking for the real values and it’s annoyingly hard to find any clear numbers, so please accept my counter-factual apology.
It’s ridiculous, I just read an entire meta-analysis about the effect of enhanced CO2 concentrations to plant’s drought response, that managed to *never* mention *how much* those concentrations were enhanced.
(To be fair, they talked in terms of effect sizes, which I guess would be appropriate to compare different kinds of experiments, since it’s a meta-analysis after all. But they *did* use percentages to about how much water was removed, so I’m still angry at them.)
That said, what number I saw in a few studies seemed to be about doubling CO2 concentrations. And IIUC, the current CO2 concentration increase (relative to pre-industrial times) is about an order of magnitude lower.
But now that I think about it, even if your thought-experiment numbers happened to be the right ones, I’m not sure your criticism is fair. If the soil was half as humid (or ten times less humid) in an area for a long time, it doesn’t seem wrong to say “there’s a drought”, even if there plants grow more for any other reason.
I agree that just “counting droughts” is not the only thing we need to decide if climate is getting better or worse, but their definition of “drought” doesn’t seem unreasonable, even if there are other reasonable definitions, and it does seem relevant, even if other definitions might be relevant as well.
+1 on your overall comment. DF hypothetically has a point depending on what the numbers are *but* one does need actual numbers for the argument to be relevant. Alas I haven't seen any estimates for these numbers either. (Then again, drought was never my main concern re: AGW).
> I just read an entire meta-analysis about the effect of enhanced CO2 concentrations to plant’s drought response, that managed to *never* mention *how much* those concentrations were enhanced.
Maybe because "everyone knows" you just look at the Keeling Curve or the Law Dome CO2 data. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ghgs-lawdome-2000yr-CO2-asof2010.svg (Or "historical CO2 levels" in Google images & pick the shortest time frame)
> the current CO2 concentration increase (relative to pre-industrial times) is about an order of magnitude lower.
Pre-industrial CO2 is about 280ppm and we're at 415ppm. So actually we're almost halfway to doubling CO2 on a linear scale — more if you add effects of methane etc., or if you use a logarithmic scale; it's fair to do both of those, just don't forget to subtract the effects of anthropogenic aerosols and adjust for land-use changes ;).
> even if there plants grow more for any other reason.
Sorry, bad phrasing there. I meant something like “even if plants there grow more for other reasons, like CO2 concentrations rising”.
In other words, just because plants grow more because CO2 is rising (or because of extra fertilizer, or changing which plants grow where, or genetic engineering, or shining more light on them using orbital mirrors or whatever) doesn’t have anything to do with *drought*.
> There is, however, a serious problem with the report. They are defining drought by soil moisture.
You dropped a few adjectives. The map on page 12 specifically and explicitly deals with "agricultural and ecological drought", with the former being heavily driven by soil moisture. Chapter 8 might have more of what you're looking for, but for a start here's the simple version from the glossary of terms:
> Drought:
A period of abnormally dry weather long enough to cause a serious hydrological imbalance. Drought is a relative term (see Box 3-3), therefore any discussion in terms of precipitation deficit must refer to the particular precipitation-related activity that is under discussion. For example, shortage of precipitation during the growing season impinges on crop production or ecosystem function in general (due to soil moisture drought, also termed agricultural drought), and during the runoff and percolation season primarily affects water supplies (hydrological drought). Storage changes in soil moisture and groundwater are also affected by increases in actual evapotranspiration in addition to reductions in precipitation. A period with an abnormal precipitation deficit is defined as a meteorological drought. A megadrought is a very lengthy and pervasive drought, lasting much longer than normal, usually a decade or more.
And here's Figure 8.6 snipped for convenience:
https://imgur.com/a/a1P76I4
The figure you posted is from the main report, every page of which has: "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute." The map I have posted (elsewhere) is from the summary for policy makers, which does not have that restriction.
I am not sure what your point is. As I said, on that map they were defining drought by soil moisture. It is true that less soil moisture, below some point, leads to less crop production, all else held equal.
But all else is not held equal, because CO2 concentration is increasing and it is well established that that reduces the water requirements for plants. Did you find anything in the report which included that in their conclusions about drought? I didn't. Do you agree that it has to be included if drought is to provide the information we want to know if crops or other plants will grow badly? Do you disagree with my conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition?
I didn't suggest that they were misrepresenting drought by their definition but that their definition was the wrong one for their purposes for a reason they should have been aware of, since the reduction in water use is discussed in a slightly different context elsewhere in the full report.
> As I said, on that map they were defining drought by soil moisture.
And as I said, that is a misleading erasure of specificity. They are explicitly discussing *agricultural and ecological drought* - it's in bold for Christ's sake, and the discussion reiterates "this type of drought" - which incorporate soil moisture, water balance, and certain atmospheric criteria. More details are available in Chapter 8; FAQ 8.3 on page 8-121 might be a good start.
> But all else is not held equal, because CO2 concentration is increasing and it is well established that that reduces the water requirements for plants. Did you find anything in the report which included that in their conclusions about drought? I didn't.
Look at the upper-right corner of the figure I linked. Yes, it's safe to say it comes up.
>Do you agree that it has to be included if drought is to provide the information we want to know if crops or other plants will grow badly? Do you disagree with my conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition?
>I didn't suggest that they were misrepresenting drought by their definition but that their definition was the wrong one for their purposes for a reason they should have been aware of, since the reduction in water use is discussed in a slightly different context elsewhere in the full report.
Drought isn't about plants. It's about water. Even agricultural drought is about how agriculture interact with hydrology, rather than fixating on plants themselves as the end metric. There are any number of climatic impacts that affect plant growth, and it is not the responsibility of any particular measure to give you the combination you desire. "[M]y conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition" isn't a meaningful critique.
>The figure you posted is from the main report, every page of which has: "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute." The map I have posted (elsewhere) is from the summary for policy makers, which does not have that restriction.
"The report is better and interesting, but it's almost 4000 pages, so as a practical matter you glance over most of it and read bits of particular interest to you." You did pick this topic for discussion because it is of particular interest to you, yes? If you were first confining yourself to the 41-page policymaker summary, you have an odd way of making that clear.
“They are explicitly discussing *agricultural and ecological drought*”
Yes. And the argument I am making is about how one ought to define agricultural and ecological drought — by the effect on plants not by the amount of water in the soil. The latter is used as a proxy for the former and I have pointed out why, by itself, it is a poor proxy.
“Look at the upper-right corner of the figure I linked. Yes, it's safe to say it comes up.”
It comes up as something that affects plant growth and water efficiency. I already said that they recognized the effect in the report. On the figure that feeds into evapotransportation which affects soil moisture — using less water leaves more in the soil. Nowhere on that figure is there any suggestion that, because CO2 increases water efficiency, plants can grow in less moist soil, hence the definition of agricultural drought ought to take account of that effect.
Are you claiming that either that figure or something else in the report does make that point, or are you disagreeing with the claim that greater water use efficiency means a plant can grow in less moist soil?
You disagree with my claim that agricultural and ecological drought ought to be defined by the effect on plants. The report is supposed to be telling people things that matter to them. We don’t eat soil moisture, nor do other animals.
Two possibilities:
1. It did not occur to the authors of the Summary that the need of plants for water was relevant to drought in the sense important for agriculture and ecology. That seems unlikely, since the report mentions the effect of CO2 on water efficiency, but not impossible.
2. It did occur to them and they chose to use a definition of drought which they knew would overstate it so far as what mattered to people in order to make the effects of climate change look worse than their models implied. That would fit other features of the Summary.
“If you were first confining yourself to the 41-page policymaker summary, you have an odd way of making that clear.”
I was not confining myself to the summary, I was avoiding actual quotes from the rest of the report after noticing that the report said not to do them. You either did not notice or chose to ignore the restriction. I have webbed the drought map on my blog and FB because it was in the summary, have not webbed things from the rest of the report, merely commented on them.
> And the argument I am making is about how one ought to define agricultural and ecological drought — by the effect on plants not by the amount of water in the soil.
I find your argument thoroughly unconvincing, and any proposition that takes it as a given can be dismissed out of hand. That's going to result in me eliding a few lines of your comment, but if you think there is a part I ought to revisit feel free to let me know and I can give it more attention.
>The latter is used as a proxy for the former and I have pointed out why, by itself, it is a poor proxy.
Its use as a "proxy" is downstream of the data as presented, which is properly taken as a single influencing factor. Your assertion that it is "poor" appears to begin and end with the fact that it does not already incorporate your preferred *other* influencing factor - while explicitly refusing to quantify said influence, mind. This might be understandable if you thought soil moisture and atmospheric CO2 were literally the only two ecological factors influencing plant growth, but we'll get to that in a moment.
> The report is supposed to be telling people things that matter to them. We don’t eat soil moisture, nor do other animals.
Dismissible out of hand on the substance as per above, but I do want to call out how indefensible the "nor other animals" bit is as a rhetorical flourish. Including it while ignoring that *plants* do indeed eat soil moisture seems to imply either that humans don't eat plants or - my preferred read - that you think the report ought to be prepared as though it will be read by non-human animals. It's a cute image, to be sure.
> Two possibilities:
Nice false dichotomy. Here's mine:
1. It did not occur to you that the influence of anthropogenic aerosols on sunlight was relevant to drought in the sense important for agriculture and ecology. That seems unlikely, since Scott specifically brought up global dimming in a post on climate change less than a week before your root comment, but not impossible.
2. It did occur to you and you chose a definition of drought which you knew would overlook the exclusion in order to make a narrow definition look worse than a full examination of the models would imply. That would fit other features of your comments.
The obvious resolution is that, while not denying their impact on the relevant policymaker goals†, aerosols were not relevant to the specific metric you wanted to discuss. I'll leave the extrapolation to a similar dichotomy as an exercise for the reader.
† They're discussed a few times in the Summary and extensively in Chapter █ of the IPCC report, for the interested.
> You either did not notice or chose to ignore the restriction.
Certainly, I chose to ignore it much as I would be perfectly comfortable citing research preprints when not doing formal work. Do you hold that the proper ethical line here is that it is fine to direct people to read the additional chapters, but one is obligated to ignore their specific contents when discussing the report? Does that even extend to tables and figures that bear the same label, but are explicitly referenced in the text of the Summary itself?
If so: I'll be happy to give you my email address if you please CC me on your message to the IPCC informing them that they were forbidden by order of the IPCC from citing or distributing the IPCC report in the IPCC Summary on the IPCC website.
" Do you hold that the proper ethical line here is that it is fine to direct people to read the additional chapters, but one is obligated to ignore their specific contents when discussing the report?"
I think it is courteous not to quote text whose authors have asked you not to quote it.
It did not occur to me that sunlight dimming was relevant, and I do not know whether it is important enough so that it should have been included. Perhaps it is. I think there is a serious problem with an approach that shows many areas of increasing drought, only one of decreasing, for a period over which global plant growth was increasing.
Apparently you do not.
Plants are important to us primarily because they feed both us and other animals, some of which we eat or make use of in other ways. People worry about drought not because they are afraid the ground will be too dry under them but because they are afraid crops won't grow. It is deceptive to tell people "drought is increasing" when, so far as you know, the ability of the environment to support plant growth is increasing.
I have not read an IPCC report. Is it worth the effort to make the attempt?
I have heard that the "Summary for Policymakers" is typically more sensationalist than would be suggested by the research which makes up the bulk of the report. Can you comment?
My take is that the SPM accurately reflects the findings of the rest of the report, which accurately reflects the scientific research. But there is an entire side of the political spectrum devoted to slogans like "IPCC Is Alarmist". Given that the consensus of humans-causing-global-warming is "only" 88%-97% (https://dpiepgrass.medium.com/scrutinizing-the-consensus-numbers-70faf9200a0c), and given that over 100,000 scientific papers have been written on climate change, the absolute number of peer-reviewed papers opposed to the consensus is quite large, more than enough for a persuasive Small-World Fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/StxoR4EqAYB3duRjK/trust-and-the-small-world-fallacy).
I think the summary tries to present information in ways that make climate change seem scary. They tell you that the proportion of level 4 and level 5 Tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes) is increasing, don't tell you (but the report does) that the total number of tropical cyclones is projected to decrease. The proportion of high end ones is increasing because there will be fewer low end ones. The models are ambiguous as to whether the number of high end cyclones is increasing a little, decreasing a little, or staying about the same.
The report is better and interesting, but it's almost 4000 pages, so as a practical matter you glance over most of it and read bits of particular interest to you.
The timing matters. If there's less rain for an extended period before there's enough added CO2 to reduce plants' need for water, there's a problem.
They are describing the current drought level. The CO2 is already there — that is presumably why the planet has greened.
I find your views on climate change very interesting and very different to mine. Do you only comment here, or do you have a blog where I can read in more detail?
I have a blog. One of the things I have commented on over the years is climate, but there are many others. The blog, Ideas, is: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
You can use the search window at the top left to search for terms such as "climate" or "warming." My basic view is that climate change has positive and negative effects and we do not know whether the net is positive or negative. That was also my view of population growth about fifty years ago, when it occupied the same cultural niche, the ongoing catastrophe that something drastic had to be done about, that climate change occupies now.
Cheers. I've been reading your comments over the last couple of open threads. It's a viewpoint I've never seen before, but you seem to have the arguments to back it up.
> does report, with strong confidence, that over the past two or three decades global plant growth has increased. That suggests that average drought has decreased, the opposite of what the IPCC report shows
It does not necessarily is so simple
1) it is possible that plan growth is fueled by nonrenewable water - for example melting glaciers can provide temporary increase of water amount. We continue to pump water out of aquifers, at scale far larger than replenishment.
2) Dams store massive amount of water, to the point that large scale dam building projects are taken in consideration when modelling sea level. And for example Lake Mead has very low water levels, failing for a long time. Large reservoirs used for irrigation can cushion such drought and delay effects.
3) It is entirely possible that some areas are greener (say, plants instead of glacier) while total drought area increases
4) plan type could change despite drought (say, forest instead of wetland)
"If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent"
Sure, but are those close to the correct numbers? It would seem that the effect could be large enough to offset this particular effect of reduced soil moisture, or it might not be. The conclusion we draw depends heavily on whether this is in fact the case, and not at all on whether it plausibly could be given certain assumptions.
I don't see how global plant growth increasing necessarily suggests that average drought has decreased. Drought is a local phenomenon, and it's perfectly possible for drought to be increasing in some areas while plant growth increases substantially in others. As with the first point, we can't draw a conclusion without knowing the actual number.
One might also wonder if drought has any other important local consequences unrelated to global plant growth, e.g. on fish or other aquatic life, on dams and reservoirs, hydropower, and so on.
At best, one might be able to conclude that decreased rainfall or increased evaporation in certain areas is offset to some degree by reduced moisture requirements in plants, with no apparent certainty about the degree, and no apparent effect on any other systems affected by soil moisture or the upstream causes of reduced soil moisture.
"Sure, but are those close to the correct numbers?"
I don't know. My point was to show why what the IPCC was doing gave the wrong answer, not what the right answer is.
They are defining drought by soil moisture, not dam level or streamflow or ... . The only relevance of that that I can see is for plant growth. I note as a definition of drought:
1 : a period of dryness especially when prolonged
specifically : one that causes extensive damage to crops or prevents their successful growth
I agree that we don't know for sure whether drought is increasing or decreasing. But the IPCC shows increasing in fifteen regions, decreasing in one. If that is correct, one would expect global vegetation to be declining, although one can, as you say, imagine circumstances in which it wasn't.
Do you disagree with the claim that if global vegetation has been increasing for the past twenty or thirty years that is evidence — not proof, but evidence — that drought has on the average been declining? Do you disagree with the claim that what the IPCC is measuring does not tell us where drought is increasing or decreasing, if drought is defined by its effect on plant growth?
I think the focus on crops misses some of the picture - for the record, my preferred source of English definitions (wiktionary) makes no reference to crops. There are large areas of California where crops are not grown, but drought is increasing (as measured by rainfall vs historical norms), which has the substantial negative effect of increased wildfire risk.
I'm not your interlocutor, but I would agree that increase in vegetation growth is, as you say, evidence but not proof that globally drought may be declining. However, I would say it's weak evidence. From my perspective, drought should be relatively simple to measure, ie, rainfall vs historical average, and both soil moisture content and global vegetation growth are simply lagging indicators.
The IPCC isn't measuring drought by rainfall, which is expected to increase with climate change, with more heavy rains, but by soil moisture. I can't see why that would be important other than the effect on plants, including both crop yield and vulnerability to fire. Why do you want to use a definition of drought that isn't relevant to us instead of one that is?
I had the impression that “drought” means a general lack of humidity, not of rainfall. For example, it doesn’t sound right to me to say that a swamp is experiencing drought as long as it doesn’t get any less wet, even if there is no rain at all for decades.
It doesn’t even need to be a swamp: if a large area is lush with life due to plentiful water (maybe there are springs, or it’s a river delta or something), and the humidity does not decrease over time, I don’t think I’d ask about rainfall before deciding it not suffering drought.
Conversely, if rainfall did not decrease in an area, but the humidity available for life reduced a lot (maybe the flow of a river reduced a lot), then I might call it a drought.
I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m only halfheartedly contradicting you, but looking at a couple of sources they seem to agree that rainfall is not the central element of droughts, but something like “is life negatively affected by less water than usual for the area”.
Any criticisms of this gravity-based desalination system? Why isn't the design widely used?
https://www.elementalwatermakers.com/solutions/solar-desalination-gravity/
What is the point?
"We developed the world’s first solar powered reverse osmosis without batteries. The best thing: it works 24 hours a day."
Why those qualifiers? What is the advantage over a simple system of solar desal? Working 24 hours a day is a worthless gimick. Why not just use the morning solar for desal and the afternoon solar for other purposes? Much more efficient than this. Batteries are expensive. Using them to power desal at night is ridiculous. But using any power storage to power desal at night is equally ridiculous.
Why aren't simple things like solar+desal widely used? Why aren't solar and desal used alone much more widely? Not for any reasons this addresses.
Looks more or less isomorphic to renewable power + pumped hydro storage + reverse osmosis.
Might be decent if there's 90m tall cliffs or you're on a a pointy volcanic island. Less so for a big flat delta or the Maldives.
My guess is that it has a small segment of the market that it makes sense for. A brief scan of the website suggests that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to install, putting it well out of reach for most homes/small businesses. At the same time, solar + waste energy + waves can only feasibly most so much seawater without a huge footprint. So this likely doesn't scale as well as just pumping water does.
Within their niche, this does seem like a good approach.
Some IQ thoughts (Not a humble brag, I swear): I'm taking advantage of covid distance learning to get a cs degree, and have some observations.
I don't buy any text books, I don't study, and I play videogames during lectures.
I still usually get As, and in my non-math classes I am disappointed by a less than 99% correct assignment.
I've been put into groups with people that also get A's, and in each case but one, I do all the work because it's been faster for me to just finish the assignment than try to explain what is going on to my group mates.
I have all A's for my classes other than discreet mathematics so far (In college, I didn't give a shit during highschool), and I repeat: I have never studied at all, even once (except for discreet mathematics, holy shit.). I have 0 hours studying on the clock.
This has made me even more of a socialist.
It's bullshit that some people can just be born strong, social, or smart; and reap rewards for something they didn't earn and that can't be learned, and Grades are a dumb way of rating performance.
There are people in my classes who have way lower grades than me that I KNOW could perform at my level or better, they just do badly in school.
I'm not sure how to square this circle. Every day, it becomes clearer to me that nobody deserves anything, and any success you have is a product of your history or your capacity; and if your capacity is determined by your genes and upbringing, you didn't actually earn it and have no reason to be more proud of being smart than a trust fund kid has of being rich.
Hello, long time socialist here. Have you read the socialist classics like Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc?
And don't forget to add Animal Farm and The Gulag Archipelago to your reading list so that you can see how your scheme will inevitably end up.
I think it would probably be more useful to read a history of Cuba or something like that, rather than a fictional book aimed at youngsters.
Sorry, edit: AF was not aimed at youngsters initially, though the school curriculum does often include it. Gulag Archipelago is not YA literature in any sense, and is more or less autobiographical.
I'm very curious where marxbro1917 is coming from, and what is the story of someone who reads ACX and is an unreconstructed Marxist-Leninist.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the story". You mean why do I read this blog?
I recommended Animal Farm as a gentle introduction before taking on The Gulag Archipelago as I didn't know if his tolerance for horror was as high as that of a Marxist.
Given my experience of capitalism includes people doing back breaking labor for rates of pay that allowed to purchase approximately One (1) pair of shoes every 2.5 years, as long as they grew most of their non-staple calories themselves and built their own houses, I think I'm good.
I mean, If we're comparing "Horrors of X economic system", Let's add the famines in India and Bangladesh, The 4 million deaths a year from India alone, and a couple decades of the triangle trade.
Yeah..... if that is the measure of nastiness that you are used to, then you are not ready to read about the crimes of the USSR in The Gulag Archipelago.