@scott my browser just killed 10-20% of my smartphones battery while having this thread open. Then it got hot and crashed. Now my browser shows black and white bars. Please look for another, better way for your readers to have seamless discussions. There is plenty of software and services way better then the current substack crap.
Would it be possible to make a third-party mirror? (Something like "greaterwrong.com" is for "lesswrong.com".) Maybe without the commenting functionality, just for reading.
'just reading' is ok. But I assume the beauty for Scoot and his readers lies in the readers and the very special discussions regarding tone, all kinds of level (IQ, education, wisdom, curiosity, politeness etc.) So ACX without it's readers comments and discussion is like a nation without natives.
Can someone give me an explainer on the Chinese social credit system(s)? Where on the line of "this is a widespread totalitarian thought-policing system" vs "this is just a 21st-century better business bureau and worries about it are just a red scare." What are the good sources to read about this that aren't super partisan?
According to Wikipedia, "the social credit policies vary greatly from city to city", so the answers to your question may also vary.
I don't see the "business quality check" and "though control" as two separate things. That is, you can do the "business quality check" separately. But if you want to implement a good "thought control" system, it is best to conflate it with the "business quality check" system, because that gives people and companies the *selfish* reason to punish the people with low score.
To explain, imagine that tomorrow a dictator would emerge in some Western country, and all people who oppose the dictator would have to wear some symbol. On one hand, it would make it easier for people who support the dictator to punish those who have the symbol. On the other hand, people who oppose the dictator (but were not caught yet, so they don't have the symbol themselves) could *support* the people who wear the symbol. And people who are not interested in politics would not care.
Imagine a more clever dictator, who instead creates a symbol for people who are murderers, rapists, *or* who oppose the dictator. All these categories would have the same symbol, so if you see someone with the symbol, you don't know which category they are. For the people who support the dictator, the situation would not change much: they would still avoid and punish the people wearing the symbol. But now even the people who don't care about the politics would avoid people with the symbol, because with high probability those people are dangerous to them. People who oppose the dictator would probably support the few people they know in person, where they know they wear the symbol merely for political reasons, but would be also wary of strangers with the symbol. This symbol works much better to punish wrongthinkers, because everyone has a selfish incentive to do so.
I don't know how much the system is abused now, but it definitely seems like something that *would* be very easy to abuse.
From Western perspective, it is also weird that children can be punished for their parents' low score. Having grown up in socialism myself, I am not surprised at all; hurting the relatives of wrongthinkers is a popular communist pastime.
So what will be the next political craze? Identity politics has been in for the past 5 years but seems to be on the wane. Maybe war with Russia will take its place? Or maybe another 3 years of fighting over vaccines and masks? What else seems likely? As a long shot bet, I'll buy some abortion-war tickets.
We already had a brief round of That Damn China (outrage over Hong Kong, Uyghurs, Biden saying "China wants to become the most powerful country in the world and I'm not going to let that happen"), and I wouldn't be surprised if it comes back. I got the impression that there's plenty of fuel left for that fire if someone wants to stoke it.
I'm going with 2024-2032- with political majorities secured, the New New Right in the US and the UK passes a series of measures which start as Anti-Crime and Anti-Corruption legislation and ends in number or foreign conflicts, some troubled. Nativism/Conservatism will take the day akin to Reagans first term.
Has the present ever felt so absurd -- not a certain era in retrospect, but as it is happening -- or does it always feel this absurd to people as they start to age?
I'm a zoomer, but I do know that trust in government eroded since the Vietnam War and that in general it seems that there is a lot less unified trust in a central system of beliefs/institutions/whatever. And I think that breeds a lot of wackiness because people just form their own groups and beliefs. Also, the pandemic, but has there not been similar things every century?; it's still weird to anyone who experiences it, but maybe it's not super spectacular in the general course of things. I suppose it's complemented by everything else that's weird; a lot has changed since previous pandemics.
The pandemic has felt more absurd than anything in my lifetime, although President Donald Trump also felt very absurd. Perhaps President Ronald Reagan felt absurd to those who grew up knowing Reagan as an actor, although I doubt that could have felt as absurd as Trump since Reagan was at least governor of California first.
WW2 must have felt absurd--and didn't Camus come up with our modern notion of the absurd because of WW2?
The Depression must have felt absurd at some point. The Great War was absurd, but not sure how it felt for Americans, since they weren't really in it.
My sense is that the times felt more normal in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, than now. I think we are living in the most absurd times since WW2.
The latest episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which just ran on FXX) is one of the best anti-woke takes from liberal Hollywood. If you think the left can't be anti-woke, I suggest you watch it.
In it, they attack viciously how some of their earlier episodes were erased by woke Netflix because they used black-face, they lean in hard on other racial, classist (white yokels) and other sexual stereotypes acceptable to contemporary moral sensibilities, to point a pointy stick in the eye of hypocritical leftists, and actually make it all very funny.
Wokism is dying and Hollywood is taking the lead in killing it.
Maybe it's just fashion changing. Wokeness starts to feel like something that old people do. (I mean, from a teenager's perspective, 30 years is quite old.) Wokeness is not a rebellion; it is what their teachers are telling them to do at school; it is what you are supposed to do in order to keep your job.
(Listening to Jordan Peterson makes you much more of a rebel than being woke. I am sure there are also other options.)
It's not a long-plot driven show. You can watch any episode at any time and it makes sense. Well, you can't watch the episodes that Hulu canceled, I guess.
My opinion on that is that "wokism" has run its course, like preceding popular movements (what are Code Pink doing these days?) and Hollywood, being a commercial operation driven by response to the market, is trimming its sails accordingly.
The wokeist demands on Hollywood are onerous, expensive, and difficult to implement. They are also, very likely, making inconvenient demands on the studios and producers.
Correction: it was Hulu not Netflix who censored the blackface Sunny episodes. It was the Lethal Weapon 4 and 5 episodes. The latest episode of Sunny is Lethal Weapon 7.
I would be very grateful if anyone could help me find an article that I'm 80% sure Scott linked to a few years back: it was about a community mental health worker in India and the general effectiveness of a community-based social work-like approach to mental health, where people with relatively short training can help a lot of others, as opposed to the way that licensed therapists need many years of training and a lot of people can't afford their help. It also mentioned some research done in the 60s and 70s, that showed how these two approaches had comparable results and suggested that the research was kept quiet and then stopped because of lobbying from the licensed professionals.
What's the conclusion on face masks after all the new evidence? This site seems pretty shady but links to several prestigious seeming studies claiming that there is no benefit - https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/
On the other hand there are several sites that do claim effectiveness. Scott's old post took source control almost for granted, but that seems to be up for debate now as well.
The first and strongest conclusion: never ever ever talk about "masks" in this context without specifying what *kind* of masks. The vast majority of masks (Lone Ranger masks, Batman masks, hockey masks, ski masks, etc, etc, etc) obviously provide zero protection against Covid-19, but even within the category of masks worn by people who think they might protect against Covid-19, there is a wide range of performance probably going down to "about as effective as Lone Ranger masks" and possibly even "worse than useless".
Second and almost equally strong conclusion, mask *mandates* that don't specify what kind of masks, are going to mostly encourage people to wear the cheapest and most comfortable masks in the most careless fashion, all of which anticorrelate with effectiveness. The people who are going to wear N95 respirators, are mostly the ones who are going to wear them mandate or no. So don't expect mask mandates to do much good, and in fact it doesn't look like they have done much good.
If you're just looking for personal guidance, or if you are hypothetically a dictator who can impose specific mask mandates on your population, things get a bit hazy. My best guess is:
Typical cloth masks, as typically worn: 5-10% reduction in chance of infection. These are the ones that might actually fall into the "worse than useless" category through carelessness.
Cloth masks diligently worn with careful attention to fit, sterile procedure during handling for reuse, etc: 20% reduction in chance of infection.
Surgical masks as typically worn: 40-50% reduction in chance of infection
N95 respirators as typically worn: 80-90% reduction in chance of infection
N95 respirators diligently worn by people trained to ensure proper fit and not reused: 95% reduction in chance of infection
Is it possible to define "reused" more precisely? If I'm out running errands I reuse the same N95 in different places, but at the end of the day it's going in the "to be washed" bag.
I haven't seen anything that even tries to quantify that. Qualitatively and intuitively, if you are careful to only handle the mask by the straps and keep it e.g. in a ziploc bag between uses, you're probably OK. It's contact with the active surface that matters. But if you're trying to protect both yourself and others, note that both sides count as active surface. Fomite transmission is a minor factor in Covid transmission, but touching something that has the concentrated detritus of everything you've exhaled or coughed up in the past few hours makes your fingertips high-risk until you wash them.
Similarly, maybe throw the used mask directly in the washing machine rather than in a to-be-washed bag where someone else in your household might wind up handling it.
Thanks, both for the link and your personal model. Is there a difference in these percentages based on source control vs. Recipient? I.e are you more/less likely to pass on the infection than you are to get it, conditional on wearing a mask?
Masks are somewhat more effective at preventing the wearer from becoming infected than preventing them from infecting someone else, but it's not a huge difference - at least for asymptomatic individuals. If you're coughing and sneezing, any mask makes a big difference in protecting the people around you. But if you're coughing and sneezing, you should be staying isolated at home.
Create masks with the ability to filter at different particle levels. In theory everyone is wearing a mask correctly [1], but some of the masks are completely useless, varying in the size of particles they stop until we get maybe even better than N95 at the top.
I expect we will find some particle threshold where the masks work, depending on the size of particulates that the flu virus moves with. And once we've experimented with other diseases with different particulate sizes, we'll have a decent model that lets us make good predictions about any novel virus we encounter.
[1] There is a difference between wearing them ideally and how they are worn in practice, just like with condoms. And this is a good thing to study as well.
My gut feeling is they're probably about 30% effective (90% confidence interval: 10% - 60%). I'd like to say that this is based on studies, but really it's more a case of no study I've seen so far significantly shifting me away from my prior.
I doubt it, Eric's point notwithstanding. There are much better compromises between fixed and rotary flight for UAVs such as tilt-rotors and fixed wings with an additional four motors for hovering. I think the difference is that electric motors can be throttled faster and scaled down better than combustion engines.
Modern autogyros seem to be used for surveillance or recon flights, so I guess a drone could patrol for longer? I don't understand what an autogyro's advantage is over a plane, though.
The autogyro's principal advantage over a plane is that it can be flown safely at much lower speeds. This makes then generally safer than small planes: they need far less runway to take off or land, and if the engine cuts out they will gently glide to the ground at low speed. The only caveat is that if the autogyro gets flipped to be at the wrong angle it will drop out of the sky like a stone. However this will generally only happen if the pilot makes a particular mistake while flying, and shouldn't occur due to the wind or anything like that.
An autogyro drone might be useful if you wanted a slow flying drone that used less power than a drone held aloft with rotors, or if you wanted a drone that will be more likely to survive a crash if they lose power or guidance.
I'm fascinated by MoND since I've heard about it years ago.
Latest things I heard from a physicist who had mentioned that only 1 out of 5000 physical theories of the last 50 years or so turned out to be correct (Highs field and particle) was this: modified gravity (MoND is only Newtonian, the derived theory is a kind of modified relativity theory) makes good predictions for one part of observations while dark matter for the other. She predicts that we will have to deal with both like we do already with quantum physics and relativity theory.
That said - I'm just a interested guy with no training in that field
To be fair, isn't this basically what the dark matter theory is too? I don't THINK its made any testable predictions outside of the datapoints it's fit to.
Assuming my understanding is correct, it wouldn't especially shock me if dark matter ended up having some completely different explanation. I'm not especially optimistic about any given one though; we need actual predictions for experiments we have not yet run for a theory to have any credence.
Dark matter is really the opposite - the universe looks like there's matter around that we simply cannot detect by any means other than its gravitational effect.
That doesn't mean that there ACTUALLY is, but dark matter is really just "takes conventional physics and assumes that the reasons for the movements is matter we can't see", which doesn't require exotic physics, just matter that we can't detect for whatever reason.
In all fairness to dark matter, the universe really *really* looks like it's filled with matter we can't see. There are some MOND theories that sort of look like they might work in some cases, but none work for all. For instance, the Bullet Cluster is full of charged matter we can detect, and gravitational lensing shows that there's lots of mass where we don't see matter. It sucks to have a theory with so many degrees of freedom, but the observations really are pretty complex.
Re: predictions, We can't test it directly unless we leave the influence of our galaxy... So the only predictions is in how the universe behaves. (astronomy)
The other prediction is the external field effect. (see link above. Stacy McGaugh's website has tons of info/ data. And a fun read for science types.)
Yeah the External Field Effect (EFE) is a testable prediction. I'm not sure how much good data there is at the moment, but with better telescopes there will be more. You need a certain galaxy system to see EFE, namely a big galaxy and a little dwarf galaxy nearby... nearby at a certain distance (or more correctly acceleration scale.)
Stacy McGaugh also predicted the CMB second peak height before it was measured. That to me, counts as a prediction. Mond doesn't get the third peak height right. The dogs are demanding a walk, but I'll see if I can find Stacy's original paper, and link it in later.
There are a few more parameters in your choice of model overall (the fact that it's so arbitrary gives a few points against it here) but still obviously nowhere near the flexibility of dark matter as an explanation. If it's a very, *very* good fit, I think most people would get to work finding a gears level explanation for it eventually.
Unless there's been a real big leap in model-fit though, I doubt that this qualifies. I'm real sympathetic to MOND theories overall, given how cool it would be if one turned out to be true, but thus far I haven't seen anything quite predictive enough. In all fairness I also haven't seen simulations that are accurate enough to rule them out either, so it's sort of an open question thus far.
Huh what other parameters. Big G... I guess there is some baryon density number/ ratio. (my limited understanding is dark matter theories had to adjust the baryon density to fit the second CMB peak... and that's caused all sorts of fits with people's models. The cosmic lithium problem*. (I'm only a cosmology dilettante.))
*the cosmic lithium problem swings right back into ACX's wheelhouse... and could explain a lot. :^)
How much less credible is a doctor's weight loss advice if the doctor himself is still obese? I think it would only be the ad hominem fallacy if one put too much weight (pardon the pun) on that one data point, or applied it where it wasn't applicable.
I don't trust a teachers or kindergardeners opinion with own kids, a midwife without own birth experience (midwife friend thinks the same after she got a mother) and I wouldn't trust an obese' persons advice on loosing weight. That's because I've seen toany people in my life talking bullshit about things they have no clue and experience in. We humans learn from imitating other humans from the beginning of our lifes. Want to get obese - just imitate a obese person. Want to get lean just imitate a lean one. It's (often) as simple as this.
It would depend on how he presents himself. If we says “As you can see I understand this is not easy for some people.” than his credibility would increase in my eyes.
The doctor who is overweight has descriptive/propositional knowledge (textbook descriptions of the effects of obesity), but it is likely they lack experiential knowledge (personal experience of the effects changing their weight had on themselves) they could share with a patient. In this case, I think the propositional knowledge has much more practical use to the patient, so the fact they are obese should be negligible. Incidentally, a very fit Doctor who had never been overweight wouldn't have particularly useful experiential knowledge either. The most credible doctor, all else being equal, would have been obese in the past but who now has a healthy BMI.
Some propositional knowledge will have more practical utility for the task at hand than other propositional knowledge, and it's more likely that the obese doctor is emphasizing the wrong aspects of it since he hasn't cured himself yet. That's much more likely than being literally wrong about the propositional knowledge.
I think many focus too much on the first law of thermodynamics, which fails because:
1. people aren't lab rats in cages being forced to eat exact numbers of calories
2. body composition and BMR can be affected by isocaloric substitutions. e.g., if you eat no protein you lose lots of lean tissue and your BMR goes down more than if you had isocalorically ate a balanced diet. I know people who seem to eat 90% of their calories from processed carbs.
3. different foods produce different amounts of satiety per calorie. Vegetables and meat > nearly everything in the middle of the grocery store > beer and soda
4. 25% of the calories in protein are spent just in digesting it.
I've noticed that in the U.S., the GDP deflator and real GDP have been growing at the same pace for a surprisingly long time. This has not been the case in Italy (where the GDP deflator has grown much faster than real GDP) or Japan (where the reverse has been the case). Does anyone have any thoughts why increases in nominal incomes have been equally reflected in real GDP and prices in America for so long?
The US actually had a more than 20% disparity between CPI and GDP in the early 1980s during the stagflation period. It has since been returned close to the same level.
Your graph shows this as a modest difference, but if you had defined your graph as GDP/CPI, you would see that it actually has varied over time.
Italy joined the Euro around the start of your graph; it would be interesting to see the data from before that point.
I take an SSRI and also Adderall. The SSRI prevent reuptake of serotonin, the Adderall prevents the reuptake of dopamine and norepinephrine (if I understand correctly). Could this mean I have low qualities and/or too high uptake of neurotransmitters generally?
Probably not? We know that SSRIs, for instance, don't cause clean increases to Serotonin across the brain, and what changes they cause kick in immediately while effects aren't felt for a few weeks, which is evidence against a "levels of neurotransmitters" explanation. That's all pretty handwavy though. Really we don't know why any of this stuff happens, and we're barely making headway.
I've been reading the dialogues between Eliezer Yudkowsky & MIRI and various members of LessWrong on LessWrong, and my current model of Eliezer's belief is roughly "on current trajectory there is over 90% probability that some form of advanced artificial intelligence will kill all humans and it most likely will happen during this century" (if you think my model of Eliezer's belief is wrong, please tell me).
Since most humans during the history of the world have died, I've made my peace with the fact that I too might die. I think it's most likely that everyone will go to nothingness after they die though there's a nonzero chance that I'm wrong about this, but I think everything we know about neuroscience, cognitive science and physics points towards nonsurvival after death.
I think death is negative in the sense that you are deprived of all the positive possibilities of life, but once you are dead, the condition itself is neutral since there are neither positive or negative things in nothingness, there's just nothing, like dreamless sleep.
What I'm concerned about Yudkowsky's scenario is whether there is going to be suffering, pain and other bad things leading up to it. Do you think there will be such things?
The death of everyone currently on the planet is relatively bounded as a negative (though still ~-2*10^11 QALY), but the prevention of all future human births (via everyone being dead at the same time) is a staggeringly-huge disutility (-10^20 QALY is low-balling it).
I think the most likely unaligned super-AI scenario is "all humans exterminated as quickly and efficiently as possible", so there may or may not be a few moments of agony depending on the exact nerve gas used. The really scary scenario is that we somehow end up with an AI that values keeping humans alive but not keeping them happy, and then you get a hellscape until the heat death of the universe. However this seems fairly unlikely to me compared to the first scenario.
I have some hope that any AI researchers who are smart enough to actually make progress towards a general, agentic intelligence would also be smart enough to consider the disastrous consequences of getting alignment wrong, especially since it's something that's now discussed in the mainstream culture.
Ah, but you're forgetting that they're not working in a vacuum. They're working for bosses who want short-term profits from more powerful AI as soon as possible. Moloch is a harsh master and makes people take risks for a leg up in the race. The planning fallacy, of course, does not help, and neither does the modern assumed-online culture of "move fast and break things; we can fix the fallout later".
Well, there is the computational theory of consciousness which says (after pulling out of my ass and paraphrasing something I only THINK exists) that our brains are just biological computers and that consciousness is just fancy math being computed. If that's the case, then we can use the Permutation City argument that as long as there is some analog/medium for computation to happen (rocks, dominoes, water clocks, random dust particles, atoms swirling through the vacuum of space in just the right configuration etc), and given the nearly infinite size of the universe, the probability that at some point not only in space but in time as well there will exist some configuration of matter that perfectly represents the next step of computation of your consciousness if you hadn't died must approach 1. Basically, in an infinite, random, (mostly) eternal universe, anything that can happen does, so why should your consciousness stop just because the medium of computation has changed? Of course, this all hinges on the order of consciousness' computation not affecting subjective experience of the passage of time, but since brains frequently time travel and lie to us about what and how things happened that's not likely to be a problem.
(For instance, when you're by a clock that has a second hand that ticks instead of sweeping through its rotation, try looking away and then turning to look at it quickly. The second hand will appear to have stopped for longer than a second before continuing on as normal. When you turn your head fast enough, your brain can't keep up with the input of your eyes, so it just makes shit up and says "yep that was totally what was happening the whole time," until it can catch up to what's actually happening. The brain can handle and predict continuous movement but it can't handle discrete movements to the same degree. So it thinks the second hand wasn't moving at all, until it moves once and then your brain tries to retroactively say "oh that was moving the whole time yep no mistakes here". But our conscious minds know better. It's fun!)
My problem with the "consciousness calculated in random dust particles" theory is that our everyday experience includes not just being conscious, but also receiving inputs from the environment. If you believe that your consciousness is currently calculated on random dust particles, how do you explain the fact that the world around you behaves predictably?
How does one participate in politics without an ideology? I have plenty of strong opinions about policy but no ideology. I voted against Trump because that seemed like a no-brainer, but normally I don't vote because both options seem equally bad. Third parties seem worse.
Some people get really involved with specific issues, but I don't care about specific issues all that much. I just want the center to hold in US politics. I mostly fear the country becoming too radical on either the right or the left, but I consider the danger of radicalism from either side to be roughly equal. Or rather, I consider the greatest danger to democracy in the USA to be radicalism itself. I suspect that the more radical the left becomes, the more radical the right will become and vice versa.
I suppose I can try to play the role of the median voter who votes against whichever side I think is going too far. It's not a clever role to play, but maybe it's the best.
Take 100 points, make a list of policies goals you care about, and assign a point value to each one.
EG:
Climate change regulation= (100+(-x))
Right to BEAR ARMS(bicep day every day): (100+(-x)+(-y))
etc.
Then, look at the policy history of both major parties for federal elections; and all parties for local election, and total up their for and against positions and the likelihood of them coming to pass against your waited preferences.
EG, I am heavily in favor of climate change regulation and mildly against gun control.
I look at the Dem platform, I see they aren't denialists and are largely ineffective on gun control, and vote straight DEM on federal elections and Green/socialist/libertarian on local elections.
"I suspect that the more radical the left becomes, the more radical the right will become and vice versa."
There's no empirical evidence for that from 2010s-20s America. Over that time, the more radical the left has become, the further left the center-left and center-right have become.
Without arguing the merits right here, I'll just say that the mirror position is held by many on the left, myself included. The formulation oft seen on left social media is that the US doesn't have a left party at all, just a party to the right of Reagan, and a party that's gone insane.
I think your take and my take aren't all that interesting to @Jack Wilson, as we're likely embodying the problem he's lamenting.
This is my advice too. At the end of the day, all politics is local. You will have more success showing your neighbors and community alternatives to the mainstream than you will showing strangers throughout the country. If your neighbors are less radical, their neighbors may become less radical, and so will their neighbors, etc. I also think people are less radical if their day to day life is rather fulfilling. That day to day is mostly a local issues, not a national one.
My 'solution' to this is to vote only for that are veterans. Veterans have demonstrated they care about out country. And the hope is they will be more likely to put country over party. (Which is what we need IMO.)
Is this an abstract preference for more veterans in high elected office, or a methodology that is supposed to apply to the current political landscape? Looking at the US presidency, Obama v. McCain in '08 would have been the only contest where it's applicable since the 90s.
Trying to use it in the presidential primaries certainly helps narrow the increasingly-large fields, but generally speaking I would see it leaving one supporting Jim Gilmore or Webb in 2016, and Buttigieg in 2020. Or Gabbard I suppose, though there are further complications there.
I can't exactly call that an incoherent slate of candidates when the underlying principle is right there, though it definitely cashes out as... unconventional.
But Gabbard isn't a veteran! She's still in the National Guard! 👉😎👉
Pointless nitpick aside, I suppose my point is that in many such cases (the vast majority?) the heuristic will effectively lead to you not participating. It could have uses as the first of multiple sieves, but you'll need a backup plan if you want to reliably exercise your vote.
Yeah, you are right it's only part of my choice. I guess I think we need people in office who will put country first, in short supply.
If you have a better metric for picking 'country first' people let me know. Veteran is all I've got at the moment. (and yeah the national guard counts. .. TBH I think volunteer fireman should count too. (All my best ideas come from sci-fi. ... "God Bless you Mr. Rosewater" :^)
I gave GWB credit, because IMO national guard service ought to count to some degree and if we're litigating details then the heuristic needs updating regardless.
If we're grounding him then Al Gore's enlistment would count for 2000 as well, but especially when talking about Vietnam service there's an added political dimension to choosing that period to serve. Worst case scenario we're relitigating Bill Clinton's ROTC application from 1969, and three decades is still too soon for more of that nonsense.
As a veteran I disagree. This is pure identity politics. And I disagree with the premise. Veterans are just as likely to put party (substitute team) over country or more likely to equate party and country. 3 of the 4 boys in my family are veterans and one is hard left, one is hard right and one is centrist (me, of course). So which one is correct? (me, of course)
Context: I have worked as an advisor to 3 different (Australian) Senators.
There's actually much lower cost/higher reward forms of political involvement than this. Spending a quarter million on a longshot campaign for Governor where even if you win you have no institutional support and probably get replaced after a year comes quite a long way down the list in terms of cost-effective political investments.
I would say if you want to maximise political impact-for-effort, the best method is probably:
Form a lobby group. You can literally do this with a handful of friends. Give yourselves some sort of name that sounds like you might represent someone, appoint people office holders, adopt a constitution. The group doesn't need to do anything, it exists purely for you to be its representative.
Call up politician's offices and ask for appointments to express your concerns about some bill that's coming up. Some will meet with you, some will have their advisors meet with you, some will ignore you. But you'll get a much higher strike rate than you expect.
Take the meetings, sit down with legislators or advisors, tell them what you like or don't like about the proposed law and how you would like to see it changed. Literally no one will ask how many people you actually represent or why they should listen to you.
Most importantly, rinse and repeat. Find any opportunity you can to call around and ask for new meetings. You will build relationships over time, and legislators will learn and begin to internalise your concerns.
Why this works:
Politicians and political advisors spend a large percentage of their time having meetings with concerned interest groups. You're not asking them to take time out of their normal schedule to talk with you, you're slotting into their normal operations. It's not at all hard to get a meeting. I've seen professional lobbyists who make careers from "getting access" for corporate clients. It's pure grift, the client could have just called and asked for the meeting directly.
Politicians use the number of times people come and meet with them over an issue as a rough proxy for how important that issue is. Just by repeatedly badgering them on X issue, you can create an impression that people really care about X.
Politicians get most of their claims and talking points from interest groups (which is a part of why they so often say things that are so misleading). They do very little research of their own. There is no better way to put the salient facts in front of them, or for those facts to become a part of the public debate.
Politicians are like normal people in that they have a selection of issues they care passionately about, and then there's a whole bunch of things they don't have any opinion on. If you show up and tell them what they should think about an issue they previously hadn't thought about much and can express yourself clearly and convincingly, there's a high chance you can get them to agree with you!
Most lobbyists are pretty bad at lobbying! The basic strategy of "Get as many meetings as you can" is very effective and very rarely utilised! The best lobbyists I've seen are Industry Super, who took the opportunity to call me up not only every time a bill impacting the superannuation industry was proposed, but also at every stage of the drafting process and when amendments were being drafted and circulated. Now, they represent a group of funds that manages literally trillions of dollars of investments, but their main lobbying strategy is one that can be replicated by anyone - it costs no money, only time.
There's a saying in politics - "The world is run by those who show up". It's absolutely true."
> Form a lobby group. You can literally do this with a handful of friends. Give yourselves some sort of name that sounds like you might represent someone, appoint people office holders, adopt a constitution.
Mileage will vary as to how effective this is for lobbying any given office, but it's stupidly low cost and scales well if you're ok with casting a wide net.
> Literally no one will ask how many people you actually represent or why they should listen to you.
I'll disagree just a little on this point, that it's worth having the right patter for if it comes up. "East Dakota Steelworkers Association doesn't publish information on our dues paying membership, but there are 27,000 manufacturing jobs in your district." It's an obvious enough dodge if you're looking for it, but I've seen it work on aides before.
This sounds like you may have an ideology, after all: ideologically centrist / moderate. Paul Graham has an essay on accidental vs. ideological centrism here: http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
Regarding radicalisation of the parties: IIRC we do have stats on how the parties have changed over time, and which one radicalized first (as in, one side's legislators and voters got more extreme before the other), but I don't recall which it was, and a brief google for "polarisation over time" did not yield the graphs I remember.
That essay sounds a lot like what Moldbug wrote deriding centrists a decade before it, arguing that given all the political positions one could take, it sure is a monumental coincidence if your politics happens to fall right in the center of the contemporary spectrum of your time and place and you are an independent thinker.
What makes me an intentional centrist is:
1) I believe the USA currently is a very great place
2) I believe rapid political change in-and-of-itself risks destabilizing our democracy
3) I believe there exist many Chesterton's Fences in our society
One could say that the above arguments sound more like those of a conservative than a centrist. If so, so be it.
> I believe rapid political change in-and-of-itself risks destabilizing our democracy
The status quo you defend is partly financed by substantial annual federal budget deficits. (https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/deficit/trends/) Can federal budget deficits, of pre-Covid19 size or worse, be sustained for decades to come? If not, then the status quo is in serious trouble.
If that's the case, what should be done? Large budget cuts or large tax hikes? Both? A big bang of deregulation and mass immigration?
The point is, anyone who thinks federal budget deficits are unsustainable is probably already implicitly committed to at least one radical policy that will cause lasting anger among tens of millions of citizens.
This is pretty much the archetypical small-c conservative argument. How that interacts with with the US system(s) is fiendishly complicated in practice (which might be what you're grappling with), but it's definitely an ideological stance.
Register with whichever party most often wins elections in your city. Run for office and tell voters whatever they want to hear during the campaign, then vote how you actually believe while in office. Coherence is overrated and hypocrisy underrated in politics these days (as measured by voters' actual voting preferences) especially if you can actually deliver legislation people want.
There are a couple more scenarios to look at there... if your opponent is a populist, be slightly less populist, not a policy wonk. Plenty of time for wonkery and thoughtfulness once elected.
If you have to go through a primary system, the level of outrageous you can be is limited by how frequently the party wins the seat you're running for. 60-40, you've got to temper yourself. 90-10, you can say almost anything short of being a Nazi/calling Stalin a personal hero, and still win.
One possibility is to vote on competence. I'm a centrist, too, and the two political parties where I come from aren't that far apart on policy. But I think that competence makes a massive difference. For example, I'm vaguely anti-Brexit, but I think the botched execution has been much worse than the actual constitutional change. So you could vote for whoever you think will execute policy most effectively (so long as they're within the normal realm of policies), and if you want to do more than just vote, campaign for whatever makes government run best. (Not an easy question! It may mean less government, or more, or just different.)
What are some battles where ultra well-built castles were overrun by enemies anyway, and through brute force rather than some clever weapon or tactic that negated the castle's defenses?
I want to know about the most spectacular, high-casualty battles where great castles fell.
Your problem here is most medieval European sources don't go into that level of detail, or focus on individual characters. Not sure about other cultures, but as the Europeans were the major castle-builders this is an issue.
Also brute force assaults on fortifications require you to have a large army. Sane commanders would always try to preserve troops and use other means.
Massive brute-force siege assaults against well-prepared fortifications were frequent feature of 15th-17th century Ottoman campaigns against various European powers.
Successful assaults:
1453 Siege of Constantinople
Negotiated surrenders once partially- successful assaults had rendered defenders' positions untenable:
We talked a bit about the multiple meanings of the word‘literal’. Here is another one that has multiple meanings.
The verb 'bemuse' and the corresponding participial adjective 'bemused'.
When I first leaned the meanings bemuse meant to make utterly confused or muddle, as with an intoxicating liquor.
Now bemused is often used as adjective meaning something similar to amused.
Okay, fine, I get it. Word meanings change with time. The trouble is that it is not always clear which way the author intended to use it. Context sometimes makes it clear but not alway.
Except that the meaning of "literally" is literally "this is *not* one of those sentences that is hyperbole, and it *is* meant to be taken literally". So, very meta, but not particularly useful.
I think your two definitions are on the same continuum of meaning, with a consistent core meaning of some but not total confusion. I've never seen it as a synonym for amused, but it seems semantically appropriate for amused by something not fully understood.
But there's the problem with the new definition. It renders the word ambiguous. Perhaps the smile is confused. Or perhaps it is amused. You have to know Gillian Flynn's personal definition of the word to understand what she means by it. What are words for if you can't even figure out their meanings from context despite knowing several definitions of the word?
I know. I could go on at length about this. I have gone on at length about this over a few pints. It really calls for a long form discussion. The thread is winding down though. Another time.
It's true that words change meaning over time, but at a time when the majority of people use a word in one way while a minority of people start using it in a new way--without any intention of meaning it as slang--the people using it in a new way are misusing the word.
In the case of bemused, some people assume it has a similar meaning to a similar sounding word because they are too lazy to look up the actual meaning of the word. That's misusing the word.
If one day the majority of written instances of the word bemused means "baffled and amused" then and only then will that usage be correct.
Have you looked up the actual meaning of the word? Because I just checked multiple online dictionaries (searched googled "define: bemused") and the top hits both include the "baffled and amused" definition:
m-w.com: (3) having or showing feelings of wry amusement especially from something that is surprising or perplexing
dictionary.com: (3) mildly amused, especially in a detached way.
Or are you an Ultra-Orthodox-Prescriptivist and only count a specific dictionary?
Let me be clearer. I consider giving a word a different meaning for a specific purpose, such as your example for the game Go, to be analogous to using the word as slang, for which I made an exception.
But giving a word a different usage for general purposes WITHOUT KNOWING THE COMMON DEFINITION OF THE WORD is misusing it.
I tend to think of it as a portmanteau of baffled and amused. This is probably not the original definition, but it’s useful for cases where something is funny (as in strange) and also funny as in humorous (usually in a dry, absurdist way). The sort of thing one might raise an eyebrow at while archly expressing one’s puzzlement.
I was hoping no one would ask. I've forgotten. I ran into what was clearly the new meaning last summer and I remember thinking well this effer has a Pulitzer so I guess this thing is here to stay.
I've been retired for a couple years and I read two or three books a week. If it was on my Kindle I could go through all the Pulitzer winners out of the 350 titles there and do a text search but if it was in a paper and ink book it might take me a while.
Sorry. FWIW I'm pretty certain of this. Stuff like this has a way of catching my eye.
Not clear why it matters what Alexandros thinks about the meta-analysis here.
Let's take someone who might actually have heard of "meta-analysis" before yesterday: Andrew Hill. His original meta-analysis suggested that ivermectin worked, but later when he and his colleagues excluded the fraudulent and problematic studies, he admitted that the effect (if any) is tiny. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/95333
Are there any good studies, analyses, or news articles that show what the cost-performance trend is for virtual reality goggles over time? In short, at what rate are their prices declining each year?
I'd imagine one metric would be shown on a graph whose Y-axis was "Real cost per display pixel" and whose X-axis was "Year".
I don't know how common or safe those off-label uses were, and I don't have the time to do a deep dive on this. However, it seems plausible that this might be a case of Pfizer making true claims that had not been certified and approved by the FDA, rather than Pfizer making claims that were actually false.
Every time we have a non-political Open Thread, I think about a political topic or two, and regret being unable to post them. Every time we have a political Open Thread, I forget what I wanted to write about. (So today I decided to write a meta comment instead.)
I despise the "Everything is pollitical" pseudo profound mantra that immature biologically-adult children with no nuance or person-belief seperation love to live with, but the deeper truth it captures is that human culture is a graph (CS kind, i.e. a network) of people, beliefs and issues. There are certain nodes that are definitely, by any reasonable person's book, pollitical, everything else is pollitical to the degree it's close to those nodes.
To answer your question, how many comment-reply cycles is needed to take whatever thread about vitamin D you have in mind to a "heckin Donald trump man" or a "those damn wokies" thread? set some reasonable threshold, say 3, and your filter function is "any topic discussion that can take us to a topic in $list in less than 3 comment-reply pairs is pollitical" where $list is some base set of topics that sufficiently many reasonable minds agrees to be pollitical. Raise, lower, and otherwise dynamically-adjust the threshold as needed according to the community and the discussion you find yourself in.
As much as I like the cleanliness of your second paragraph, is the aggressive tone of the first paragraph necessary? Seems like you could get the same point across with something kinder to start with, then leading into the same second paragraph.
In the spirit of your comment: I'm sure whatever you posted would have been bad and wrong and you are a big doodoo head, unless it would have been based and awesome and you are cool and big and strong .
Did alexandros ever justify his decision to summate multiple outcomes in his meta analyses? I know several people brought this up but I dunno if he answered.
Not sure who brought this up. I simply used what ivmmeta did in order to take Scott's methodology to its logical conclusion while injecting as little opinion as possible. (basically I don't think I injected any opinion whatsoever). If I were to start messing with the endpoints, there would be a whole mess about gerrymandering etc. The ivmmeta endpoint selection mechanism has been stable for a long time as far as I know, and that counts as a kind of pre-registration in my book.
Ivmmeta isn't really taken seriously by anyone familiar with metaanalysis. Whether or not their endpoint selection is stable, there is a fundamental issue with their methods. Summating various outcomes leads to results that are difficult if not impossible to interpret
My primary objective was to demonstrate how GidMK shifted Scott's analysis, which I think I did successfully, though Scott seems to disagree. What you make of the rest of the analysis, well, seems like an endless debate. Imo the focus on mortality is misplaced since nothing else hits those endpoints well either in a disease like covid. (vaccines, Molnupiravir, Paxlovid, you name it).
You can argue what endpoint to use, but the point is it's important to pick one to look at within one meta. Combining multiple endpoints into one meta analytic summation doesn't provide meaningful information.
Lol what. You don't seem to understand how to properly do a meta analysis. You can't justify your method, do you pretend I'm the one not engaging. Whatever. Have fun generating meaningless BS.
I'm pretty sure I've seen a picture of him with a full beard, and I was surprised for the same reason you would have been. Of course that doesn't mean he has a beard now.
I think it's strange that there have been all these great families brought up but I haven't seen any famous twins yet. The twin rate is about 2% so it's starting to get odd that there hasn't been one example yet.
"The Bryan Brothers, identical twin brothers Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan, are retired American professional doubles tennis players and the most successful duo of all time [..] the Bryans are "mirror twins", where one is right-handed (Mike) and the other left-handed (Bob)."
The only famous twins I can think of are the Olsen twins, those guys who were President and Prime Minister of Poland, and people famous for being conjoined twins.
On the other hand, I can't think of any pairs of twins where only was successful. I suppose there might be examples where I just haven't heard of the non-successful twin.
On the great families subject, I wonder if the Plinys Elder & Younger would qualify? I guess people from ancient Rome are less relevant given the lower population and stronger class effects (eg, most of the population was slaves & plebians who would have had no opportunity to become famous historians)
So within the last couple years we've had two fairly prominent instances of major websites (Tumblr a while ago and Onlyfans more recently) having to scrub themselves (to varying degrees of success) of all pornographic content. From what I can tell, the banks that control those site's loans were breathing down their neck or something like that, basically threatening to back out unless changes were made. My question is, why isn't there a bank that's willing to allow that kind of content on their investments? It seems like an easy way to make a lot of money, since porn is a (quick Google search) $12 billion industry, which seems like a lot of money to be left on the ground. A bank that branded itself as open to those kinds of investments and precommited to never change that policy should have all the major players flocking to it, just for the stability and peace of mind if nothing else.
AIUI part of the problem is that most banks are tied into various international enterprises in one way or another, and the Internet itself is international, creating gnarly "all of the jurisdictions" problems. There are a lot of countries that will move heaven and earth to screw over anybody that violates their sex laws, whether it be prostitution or drawn porn of apparent kids or gayness or whatever.
Your average bank probably is too interconnected with too many countries to be able to go "lol we don't have any people in your jurisdiction to arrest or any assets to seize, go bugger yourself"; I imagine a "porn bank" would have to be a startup (and as others note below that's hard).
What comes to mind for me is the fairly recent change(s) to laws regarding posting of pornographic material that was not approved by the people shown, a.k.a concern about revenge porn or material not intended to be sold. There are far more strict laws in that arena, than say, non-pornographic content on Facebook/Instagram/TikTok. An accusation that the person involved did not consent to the filming or the posting is a serious matter than can sink the provider quickly. Banks are going to put a lot of pressure on those providers to ensure that they are following the relevant laws, which include getting proof that the material is legitimate. For stuff being posted directly by members, that's really really hard for a provider to monitor. Documentation that each and every video is properly approved is not something most websites could do, so it's much easier to just take the content down.
- in general they were not blocking all porn, only more problematic one
- and cases where it was not really profitable anyway
- as far as I know more trustworthy and legally safe porn has no serious problem
- porn has sky-high rate of various financial abuse
- porn has much higher rate of various legal issues
- including cases with draconian "strict liability offense" laws - crimes that don't require any intent, or often knowledge, on the part of the offender
- you would be target of various moral panics
- any more serious porn-related scandal would be likely involving pornbank
I don’t have a great view into this world but my guess is liability. First the liability that someone may see something they don’t want to see, but even worse the liability of some thing being posted illegally, child porn, revenge pics, etc.
Once you allow some aspect of the porn industry in you have to tightly manage it. Then your bank has a porn-management department and it makes Santa upset. Is it really worth the risk?
Yep, even Pornhub, which is much bigger than both of those, had a huge problem recently along these lines, and had to purge tons of content. I guess nobody likes porn-mongers, and nobody protests when regulations of them are extremely draconian.
The Philadelphia ACX Meetup will be hosting a Solstice Celebration on Tuesday, December 21 in Ardmore, PA. You can request to join our Google Group here for full details: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia
I am getting a new lawnmower. We are considering gas-versus-electric right now. I am willing to take a bit of a hit on price on convenience for environmental concerns, to a limit.
It seems the best reason to go electric is that a lawnmower doesn't have a catalytic converter. My lawnmower might be spewing out all kinds of harmful stuff, so in theory electrifying my mower before my car is a good idea.
But how can I quantify this? And how bad is it? I probably only burn 5 gallons a year in the mower. What exactly am I spitting into the air from a normal mower at that rate, and how much would I expect to pay to remove that stuff otherwise?
Your missing the biggest downside: Gas walk behind lawnmowers are universally trash. They are a fucking PAIN, they break all the time, they smell, it's never ending.
I'd say go with a batter powered string trimmer, if you are just doing a reasonably sized yard with no brush and have a 100% functional spine.
My son hates the gas powered mower because of how hard it is to start, but a new mower will by definition be easy to start., and stay that way for several years even with no maintenance.
I've been using a battery operator weed eater, the gadget that uses a rotating head with monofilament strands coming out for it, instead of a lawnmower for a while. It's a more flexible device, since it is light enough that I am holding it rather than rolling it.
I've been using electric mowers for over 25 years. I honestly can't believe people still fiddle with gas mowers. They're just a mess, spilling gas, changing oil, strains from starting them, etc.
I used a corded electric mower for years, and have used battery powered ones for at least 15 years. This is on a big lawn as well, so I can't do the front and back on one charge. It hasn't been an issue in all of those years.
All of which is to say, there are plenty of good reasons to go electric that are way more compelling than the emissions or other environmental concerns. If you're interested in that calculation out of curiosity though, have at it.
Why not go neither and get a reel mower, if you're in moderate to good health? No electricity, no gas, high durability if you learn to maintain it. Plus you can usually get them used for cheap(ish). (Bonus: free workout)
If you are in good health and cannot keep your whole lawn tidy with muscle power, the primary environmental problem may be that your lawn is too big. (There's a big movement to replant native flora instead of keeping an artificial green lawn; the applicability of this varies widely by situation.)
The low green things around my house are already “native flora” but they still need mowing just so our property doesn’t tip over the line from “rustic” to “abandoned”.
It doesn't work at all for getting the leaves off the lawn, which is a major major component of yard work I need my mower for. Every few days I have a complete cover and it needs dealt with.
I did the reel mower for about 3 years before my mower suffered a fatal break - it was the larger wheel style. Perhaps I didn't keep the blades sharp enough, but while it was in commission I definitely had trouble getting a good cut. I would have little straggler blades of grass poking up all over - kind of annoying. And if you ever let the grass grow an extra few days, it can be a real (no pun intended) problem, as it can simply get too thick to be managed - the fact that you have to be moving to get the blade spinning is the issue - any other mower can work on a thick section little bit by bit. The workout was great and the lack of noise was awesome, but now that I've had a good experience with battery-powered, I don't think I'll go back.
I have a small yard and have been using a electric mower for years. It works just fine for my purposes. Haven’t had to replace the battery yet.
Batteries have improved since I bought the one I have too.
I guess you could look at the time you spend mowing now and have a look at battery life ratings.
One other plus is that it’s quieter than a gas mower.
I also have a battery snow blower. It got me through last winter but snow accusations were less than normal. I doubt it would handle 2 or 3 feet in a single storm.
As to getting an electric mower - if you get a corded one, it looks to me it won't cost extra compared to a gas one, and you will come out more than ahead in cost because the maintenance is so minimal. I personally can't stand using the corded ones (I've tried), but about 5 years ago I got a battery powered Ryobi. The battery gave out this year and that cost me $100 to replace (I used an off-brand replacement). I think you will pay about an extra $75 upfront for battery powered, and replacing the battery every 5 years is about as expected, so I think I have probably spent an extra $175/5 = $35 per year over just the purchase of a gas powered mower (I'm not counting the electrical cost of charging the battery, but I think it is pretty minimal - 6 Ah at 40 V is 240 Wh or 0.24 kWh or about 3 cents/week). But if you use 5 gallons of gas, that is probably $20 a year, plus the cost of oil changes (time and materials) and any other engine maintenance, and I don't really think I am paying anything significantly extra for the battery-powered electric mower.
As far as the user experience... I love it. I actually consider it a great deal more convenient than a gas mower. It is quiet enough that I am not contributing much to my neighborhood's sound pollution. The grass getting chopped is the loudest part of the machine. I think you could reasonably mow earlier or later in the day without it being a neighborhood nuisance. It is light, so pushing it around is no big deal. Much lighter than a gas-powered of the same size. Starting is literally as easy as flipping a switch - no pull cord issues. My older kids are easily able to help out with mowing. (12 & 9 y.o) I can comfortably cut my back and front on one charge (I would estimate 4500 sq. ft), so there is no hassle with swapping batteries. There is very little maintenance beyond the need to sharpen the blade (which has nothing to do with electric vs gas). It also happens to be much cleaner in terms of particulate emission, but like you, I haven't figured out how to quantify this very well, though I know it's been studied. I think the only time a gas-powered would be significantly better in terms of experience would be if you were regularly cutting either a large area, or extremely thick (or wet) growth. In that case, the extra power and energy capacity would probably tilt things away from electric.
Whether that helps, I don't know. But I hope it is at least more trustworthy than your average internet review.
(Disclaimer: no vested interest, I just happen to really enjoy my battery-powered push mower.)
Some of the electric mowers are very light-duty, so depending on what you borrowed, you may have better experience with a somewhat beefier one. That being said, electric mowers are not particularly great at handling leaves (just like not handling really thick growth). If the area was small, I would recommend raking the leaves (many leaves make a good compost base if you're into that) and still go electric for the mower. Electric leaf blowers also are around, but I haven't had the pleasure of trying them much and don't have an opinion there. If the area is large, you might have to stick with the gas-powered for sanity's sake.
I still need to bag the leaves after raking them, and just chewing them up with the gas-mower has been the best way I've found to do it.
It's the most labor intensive part of having a yard and I've experimented with various other things, including a leaf-muncher that bags, which I'm still sore from using a few days later.
I give a lot of weight to not having to store small cans of gasoline in or around my house. I have a Greenworks electric mulching mower- it's easy to use and has enough power to cut the grass or mulch leaves around our 9000 sq ft property. It was a budget-friendly $170, and while we'll have to see how long it lasts, I can't see any advantage to a gas mower. If you have huge tracts of land, maybe it's a different story, but I'd rather charge a battery than f--- around with gas any day.
Similar experience to me. I have a Kobalt 40v mower from Lowes. Does fine mulching/picking up leaves on 6000 sq ft. No gas to mess with and its way way quieter than gas. I can't see myself going back to gas unless I had enough space to justify a riding mower.
Hey, just wanted to thank the readers who made suggestions about this. I went wit Bit Warden. So far I love it. I got by with little text files with easy to forget mnemonic clues way too long.
KeePass original client on Mac, windows and Linux, with Strongbox on iOS. Strongbox syncs from Drive, OneDrive, dropbox, WebDAV which are all available on the other platforms. So a Kdbx file in a cloud storage.
I use LastPass across all platforms (not certain about a Kindle unless you wipe it and install Android). there’s an annual subscription which seems totally worth the money, IMHO.
Regardless of what you choose, many people are concerned about putting all of their passwords in a single (hackable) account. Some cool internet person, probably in SSC Reddit, suggested that you use the app to generate your super tight random passwords but then in the application, add a 4 character pin at the end. When you use the app or website, the password will be auto filled and you just type your pin at the end. If your password manager gets hacked, there’s still another layer of security protecting your other accounts. I always thought that was a neat idea.
In such case: check is there a working export of your data, including password. And make it from time to time to a safe location. (encrypted file? deposit box?)
Bitwarden free tier is fully functional for all your normal needs, and it doesn't have any annoying nags. I love it so much that I set up a family subscription but that's not necessary.
I’m giving Bitwarden a try. Now I’m trying to decipher my old text file of passwords with the text hints as to what they were for. I’m sure these hints made sense at the time. ;)
I’ll probably end up changing a lot of these passwords.
I'm a big fan of Bitwarden, especially because I can self-host, but I've had a lot of trouble getting it to realize I'm trying to log into something on android. Not sure if other managers are better though.
So, I read this essay--and I have to grudgingly respect one aspect of it:
Its willingness to openly acknowledge the *zero-sum* nature of the intergroup conflict between races and sexes that it sees as so central.
It's a horrifically depressing and amoral worldview, but at least it avoids the much more common reactionary approach of claiming that subjugation actually *benefits* the group being subjugated. Think of the pro-slavery theorists who claimed that slavery paternalistically cared for black people, or the standard anti-feminist view that patriarchy benefited women.
If you're going to oppress me, you can at least avoid insulting my intelligence by claiming that you're only doing it for my own good.
1) Could someone explain to me what "punch right" means? Searching it hasn't helped me very much.
2) Scott: could you explain what Eharding was banned for? I can think of three possibilities, which have different implications about what should and shouldn't be posted.
Bad: his ideology per se
Mad: overly-inflammatory presentation of said ideology
I don't see any incitement to crime there. 90% of the proposals are for government action, and the rest are political-strategy proposals that are completely legal.
"There should be the death penalty for X" (political proposal) =/= "we should murder X in the streets" (incitement).
About the closest it comes is this passage:
"Make life difficult for businesses that choose to go “woke”. There are many ways to do this."
...but there are a lot of governmental ways to do that and in context I think that's implied.
(For the record, I disagree with the vast majority of his proposals on both practical and ethical grounds. There are some that maybe could be shaped into something useful, but that's true of almost anything.)
(NB: he wasn't actually very far from minimum Madness. Most of his points are presented relatively dispassionately; "[executing homosexuals and transsexuals] can't possibly hurt" was an egregious exception but also like 0.2% of his post. The outrageousness of the post stems almost entirely from his actual recommendations rather than his presentation of them.)
On the off chance that you're actually serious about this: What do you mean by "wokeness", in the sense of a thing that you want to combat?
If it's e.g. the acknowledged existence of LGBT people, that's a very non-central definition of "woke". The recognition that LGBT people existed, and the decision that we were going to allow them to continue to exist even if they very loudly proclaimed that existence by e.g. parading through cities half-naked in their fetishwear, long predates the general use of the term "woke". And fighting against that is almost certainly a lost cause.
If it's about how far too many people with degrees in aggrieved-people studies are whining in your face about LGBT rights, demanding that you bake cakes for their weddings and adopt whatever silly pronoun they choose, then I'm sympathetic to your goal, but your plan is exceedingly foolish.
Seriously, an actual *death penalty* for LGBT individuals? In the unlikely event that you managed to impose such a thing, that would marginally reduce the number of LGBT people. But it would greatly *increase* the number of LGBT-rights campaigners getting in your face with their ideology, and the intensity with which they will devote themselves to ruining your life.
There are a *whole fucking lot* of not-woke and actively anti-woke people, who don't want to have to put up with the whining and the mandatory cake-baking and the silly pronouns, and especially not the cancellations. But who are even more opposed to actually *killing* people for being or acting gay or not conforming to their assigned gender. And we're not going to shut up about it, not once you start killing people. We'll hold our noses and ally with the woke, against the greater evil. You won't be able to shut us up without putting us in prison, you won't be able to imprison us without overcoming our forceful resistance, and we will be thinking up exciting new forms of cancellation to visit on you.
Your plan turns a monumental annoyance, into something much, much worse.
"What do you mean by "wokeness", in the sense of a thing that you want to combat?"
Exactly what everyone else means by it.
"If it's e.g. the acknowledged existence of LGBT people, that's a very non-central definition of "woke"."
My point was that anti-LGBT countries tend to be anti-woke, not that the acknowledged existence of LGBT people is on its own woke.
"And fighting against that is almost certainly a lost cause."
Fine. Move onto the other suggestions, in that case. As I've said repeatedly, the suggestions each stand on their own; they do not all become worthless if one is judged unworthy.
"But it would greatly *increase* the number of LGBT-rights campaigners getting in your face with their ideology, and the intensity with which they will devote themselves to ruining your life."
There are a huge number of LGBT rights campaigners in Iran/Saudi Arabia/Afghanistan?
Also, if you were right re: LGBT campaigners, that would mean my proposal has been completely successful -if they're fighting for pre-2011 LGBT rights, they're not fighting for the post-2011 version.
There's this bizarre idea out there that a political side trying to shift the Overton Window further in their political direction necessarily broadens the Overton Window, rather than keeps it the same or shrinks it. What's the evidence for that, exactly?
" But it would greatly *increase* the number of LGBT-rights campaigners getting in your face with their ideology, and the intensity with which they will devote themselves to ruining your life."
I think the solution that follows from Eharding's logic here is quite obvious- death penalty (or life imprisonment, or some other heinous punishment) for being pro-LGBT-rights (or just "anti-anti-woke" in general). The beatings will continue until morale improves, and this kind of system is surely highly stable and will never collapse!
And of course none of this even TOUCHES on how the rest of the world would handle this. Iran can get away with the death penalty for homosexuals because it's withdrawn from the Western international community and built a network around that. America is, even in what some would argue its decline, a large member of the Western international community, and even in the fantasy world where Eharding captures the US government and starts lining up tens of thousands of homosexuals in front of the chair- I hope you like getting embargo'd by everyone (including China, because they'll want to bleed US power as much as possible before coming to the table with a deal of "take our lopsided bargain or fuck you" variety).
Saudi Arabia isn't embargoed by anyone else (and is pro-China, too). Countries are embargoed because of their international actions, not their domestic human rights policies.
Why do you think that the “woke” are so bad? I’m not a fan of them, but certainly not to the point of doing whatever it takes to stop them. I struggle to understand why you think they’re so bad that you would advocate for these policies, and would appreciate a brief explanation of your reasoning
Everyone has different preferences and opinions. Some think wokeness is good, while others think it's very bad. I hold the latter opinion because I view it as an oppressive force that reduces opportunities for White people, cisgender people, and men while increasing crime victimization, lowering academic standards, promoting the incompetent, etc.
I see. And for clarification, are those the only groups with whom you are concerned (i.e. would something that negatively impacted gay people without affecting outcomes for straight people be good, bad, or neutral)?
Most of the very few substantive replies to my post amount to "I don't want to look East, I want Bill Clinton 1996 back". They then propose no policies to achieve the (in my view, questionable) goal of resurrecting Bill Clinton 1996 (and keeping him there). I think I can be safely excused if I think this is wildly unlikely to work.
As someone that is anti-woke, there is so much here that is bad if not completely terrible. It's easy to understand why people think you are a troll, as making this proposal actually advances the cause of wokeness, and it worries me to think that someone that made some of the proposals here seriously might be on my side.
This is a war for hearts and minds; deliberately aping the Nazis and Communists is a losing recipe even beyond how much of it violates basic principles of humanity. There's a reason that the Democrats sent fake neo-Nazis and Confederates to rallies for Republicans in the most recent elections. I'm anti-woke because I believe wokeness fundamentally violates those principles even while they claim to support them. We're at a disadvantage because the Woke control the narrative, which lets them get away with blatant hypocrisy; we don't have that luxury, nor should we take it even if we had the power to do so. None of what you suggest changes that. On top of that, most of what you suggest can't be implemented without having control of the major institutions in the first place, and that doesn't happen without defeating the woke establishment... at which point we no longer need to combat wokeness.
For an example of something salvagable:
"[R]aise college and high (and even middle) school standards [...] (to reduce the social cost of signaling)" is good. However, lowering "the number of Blacks and Hispanics in the education system" isn't a goal of anti-wokeness. If you're a racist, you might be convinced that's going to happen anyways, but it's not the goal. In my case, I want to see more Black and Hispanic parental involvement in the educational system, because I think parental involvment counters the politicized teachers unions, who act as a driver of wokeness (and lousy public schools). We've seen in Virginia that parents care about their kids education far more than they care about being woke because it has an actual effect on their lives and family, and the damage that wokeness has done to their kids education is not something the media can successfully hide.
Our goal is to oppose wokeness. Opposing "wokeness" (or at least the racial justice component) isn't shoving Whites into the oppression stack, it's getting rid of the oppression stack entirely, and getting people not to see race at all. It's most definitely not ramping up the oppression stack in an attempt to destroy society faster before wokeness can wreck everything.
And how do we do that? As far as I could tell, trying this would involve measures similar to most I've proposed, only much more severe and much less likely to work. And given that race is possibly the most permanent aspect of human existence, I don't see how getting people to stop seeing race is at all possible.
"However, lowering "the number of Blacks and Hispanics in the education system" isn't a goal of anti-wokeness."
Maybe not Hispanics, but definitely Blacks. Any serious form of anti-wokeness recognizes the facts Zach Goldberg laid out here and seeks to combat them:
"And given that race is possibly the most permanent aspect of human existence, I don't see how getting people to stop seeing race is at all possible."
According to the reported results of a recent survey (which I strongly doubt the accuracy of), something like a third of all whites applicants lied about their race on college admissions. Even if that's off by an order of magnitude, changing your 'race' isn't hard. If the market overvalues identifying as particular minorities, people will 'discover' enough heritage to game the system, at which point race becomes useless. That there's no internal consistency, that Shaun King can benefit from being 'black' while Clarence Thomas can't, is one of the fundamental flaws in wokeness that will eventually bring it down (but not before doing a ton of damage, which is why it should be stopped sooner rather than later, and hopefully with its enabling establishment). The only reason race matters is that it's a useful tool for the establishment.
"What are some policies you'd like to propose to get to this (in my view, utterly impossible) goal?"
It's not a matter of policies. If you're talking about policies, you're running the government and have defeated the establishment and can deal with wokeness at your leisure. The problem is winning elections so you can defeat the establishment. Promoting trustworthy alternative institutions to the establishment helps win elections. If people see that you're the only side with (for example) media reporting the truth about how bad wokeness is screwing up their kids education, it builds the trust you need to get elected.
And even for Hispanics, they will probably be overrepresented in colleges relative to their test scores in a couple decades. So it makes sense to be proactive here, not reactive.
Again, the world needs some explanation for racial disparities both within the United States and around the world. HBD is one, "not seeing race" is not an answer at all.
I'm really astonished by the replies here. I thought there was at least some hint of anti-wokeness in the rationalist community, and, thus, at least some will toward opposing it. If it exists, I definitely saw none here.
Again, the suggestions are not meant to be taken as a unified block. If you don't like one, discard it (but give a good reason for doing so, and no, "it contravenes liberalism" is not the best of reasons).
I guess we could also eliminate wokeness by completely destroying all life on Earth.
If that doesn't seem like a good solution, it's because people have preferences beyond merely defeating their opponents. For example, Putin's Russia seems quite bad to me... and if it seems like a good solution to someone, the advantage is that it already exists, so people can move there. Some people are looking for a society that is neither woke, nor Putin's Russia.
"I guess we could also eliminate wokeness by completely destroying all life on Earth."
See my reply below. None of my policy proposals have a cost-benefit ratio this bad. Be serious. Challenge my proposals then they are, not imaginary proposals I don't advocate.
(also, rationalists tend to be consequentialists, so if someone opposes wokeness, it's because it makes things worse in particular ways. So it would be a mistake to reduce wokeness by making the world worse, because the whole justification for a rationalist opposing wokeness is that it makes the world worse)
There is more than a hint of anti-wokeness here. That's not the problem. The problem is your ideas are bad, because you haven't put much thought into how they would work.
Look, either this is not parody (as he keeps trying to claim), in which case its bananas racist and explicitly calling for murdering people
or it is parody, and just totally useless epistemic sabotage, with the only merit to make people angry (About something no one actually believes no less!)
I feel like this is NOT content we should allow in our walled garden in either case.
Why should he be banned? He's expressing a political view that is unpopular in the US and Europe, but is popular, I think, in some other countries. e.g, Iran.
He's only advocating for violence carried out by the government, not individual violence.
And he's not a troll. I've seen him consistently advocate for these views elsewhere.
For being a dumb idiot proposing mass murder. And being complete empathy and prediction failure harming own movement (or extremely persistent troll).
Yes, that is quite impolite description but given "Institute the death penalty for transgenderism, as well as homosexuality. This can’t possibly hurt." I consider it justified.
> He's only advocating for violence carried out by the government, not individual violence.
And? I am also strongly against such mass murder also when done by government, to the point of not willing to tolerate such people in places where I am.
Yes, not very tolerant I do not care at all about it. I do NOT consider tolerance as so important especially on internet forums.
> He's expressing a political view that is unpopular in the US and Europe, but is popular, I think, in some other countries. e.g, Iran.
I do not consider it as mitigating in slightest or relevant. It is not like I treat diversity as important goal.
Your proposal plays right into the hands of the woke, because they seem to believe that the country is full of hard-right, racist, homophobic extremists. You claim to be anti-woke, yet ideas like yours give them the food they need to live another day. That's stupid.
I disagree. The reason wokeness advances isn't that people to the right of Republicans on social issues exist, it's that the mainstream right does nothing whatsoever to fight them (remember, wokeness originally spread among the center-left from leftists, not out of fear of any far right, but out of a positive woke agenda). Russia and Hungary have much more homophobia than the Netherlands or Sweden, and yet, also have much less wokeness.
Why should "Popular in Iran" (which, I do not believe is actually true) be the standard we hold ourselves to?
If you're saying our principle should be to allow literally all speech that isn't spam, I disagree with you, but I can see why you'd say that and I have an instinct that way as well, I just think some things over ride it.
If you're saying there is a line somewhere, I believe very strongly that openly advocating for state sponsored violence against specific groups of people should make the cut.
Are murderers specific groups of people? It's fairly popular in the US to advocate for state sponsored violence against murderers. I'm against the state violently punishing anyone for any crime, but I'm currently on the losing side of that political battle.
Ditto. Someone who admits that the only reason they didn't advocate putting African-Americans back in chains is optics (implying he WANTS to but realizes that all but the most rabid reactionaries would pillory him for it) and acts like the logical endpoint of shaping your politics around "owning the libs" is basically a walking nuclear disaster area for this site.
I have to agree with his characterization. Your posts broadly fall into three buckets: Propaganda to glorify anti-woke or pro-white views and demonize woke views, making it illegal to publicly support "woke" positions and compelling the support of their opposites, and making it illegal to discriminate against people who hold anti-woke views while applying some discrimination of your own. When someone points out that most Americans, even on the right, don't want to become Russia or Iran in the name of fighting wokeness, your counter is "yeah, but Russia and Iran are *really good* at suppressing wokeness."
The charitable explanation is that you're single-mindedly optimizing for "owning the libs" (countering or punishing woke positions) without regard for any other values like freedom of expression, civil rights, or limited government. The uncharitable explanation is that you're a fascist, and you think granting the government unlimited power to punish political dissidents is a feature, not a bug.
Thank you for being more eloquent than me on this matter. Personally, I'm gravitating towards the middle option of "Eharding is someone's long-con trolling persona akin to Jace Conners in the 2010's".
I have a hard time framing a non-liberal opposition to wokeness in a meaningful way. I guess it depends on what you think of as wokeness(or what, if anything is wrong with the ideology), to me the most salient quality is that of being anti-liberal. The specific issues that are agitated for will invariably change over time (and have changed over incredibly short time frames already) so 'conservative' opposition is either fundamentally liberal opposition (given the libertarian to conservative overlap in Rat spaces, this should be expected here in particular) or it is positional. Any proposal to 'combat wokeness' that goes beyond 'be more liberal' looks to me like little more than, "lets cancel the cancel mobs".
I was wondering if I could be a serious commentator to your post, but you lost me in the first paragraph. Why are we post liberals? Why would you want to add any of the laws you suggested instead of enforcing liberal standards that already exist in law? You insist you’re not trolling so on the small chance that’s true, I’ll temporarily engage.
In your essay, you’ve essentially outlined exactly what the reactionary backlash against wokeism will look like and it is precisely as terrible as everyone should expect. The issue isn’t, ‘how can we dislodge some permanent social parasite,’ as much as, ‘how can we prevent the inevitable “cure” from being worse than the sickness.’
Wokeism is a fad, one in a series of never ending fads that American consumers gobble up to fill the void of meaninglessness consumerism modern life has created. This fad will end, I think it’s already a process that is underway. As with all terrible fads and ideologies it’s always darkest before the dawn and so the urge to do something radical seems necessary.
The real way to fight wokeism is to a) accept the parts that are correct, reject the parts that are wrong, pteach principled liberalism, and fortify one’s mental defenses against mind parasites. We don’t need new laws protecting straight white people because those laws already exist. What we need is more people pointing at the ACLU and SPLC or MSM saying, “you’ve lost your way.” We need strict adherence to principles not ideology and reaction. We need all people to start asking themselves, “I wonder if my belief is true?” We need a broad movement toward epistemic humility and away from punishing dissent.
Again, the real question shouldn’t be how can we dislodge these terrible people and their terrible ideas, but how can we incorporate the truth into a better vision of the future. Otherwise we’re just riding Foucault’s Pendulum to our doom.
First 'Woke' is a wishy-washy term that can mean all kinds of things depending on the speaker and listener. I mostly consider it a Motte/Bailey. I would state the Motte argument (i.e. Steelman) like this: some people are actually disadvantaged, suffering and largely unseen and this is often due to being pushed to the margins due to immutable characteristics (and choices) that put them outside of mainstream culture. A moral society should seek to aid, or failing that, prevent harm to people, who are unable to help themselves both as a humanitarian and practical goal. Secondly, the broad historical perspective long shared by the mainstream American society has attempted to soften or bury some of it's more rapacious events, ex. Tulsa Race Riots, police brutality, etc. There is some amount of historical reckoning that is due.
The Bailey argument to this is: America is strictly a racist country in which nothing good has ever happened and it should be disassembled.
The overall critiques brought up by CRT, et al. aren't the issue as much as the problem of using that lens as the only lens through which to view the world. It is a very successful ideological parasite that's easy for mid-wits to grasp because pointing a finger at 'bad things' is easy, and somehow when people 'wake up' they default to the notion that they are the second or third person to realized this stuff and everyone else is asleep.
The problems with wokeism are numerous, most essentially, social policing which will inevitably blow back in the ideologies adherent's faces. Middle America, which for this comment includes the ~60% of Americans who do not engage in the culture wars, are waking up to the fact that people are labeling them as racists or trans-phobes, or anti-science or whatever and they won't take it forever. Eharding's little "essay," which reads just like Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" as the kinds of things we can expect to hear more of as the cultural pendulum swings away from woke fad. It's a terrible ide to promote killing people, jailing them, whatever based on the same qualities that we once elevated them for and will lead right back to the same damn thing in another 20 years. What's crucial here is to keep the parts that are good (i.e. Black, POC, LGBTQ_+++ Americans, etc. with the same rights and privileges as everyone else (which in my lifetime has been the trend). It's easy to call out woke stuff as being illiberal but I don't think that makes us post-liberals; I think the opposite: we need to double down on liberal principles of equality and justice more than ever.
Are you at all familiar with anti-discrimination law? You'd be shocked at how much of American equal protection jurisprudence is made up of white men successfully challenging affirmative action-type schemes. Hell, Ruth Bader Ginsberg built an entire career as an ACLU attorney using more sympathetic (to the audiences at the time) male clients to advance rights for women. That's the beauty of procedural and structural guarantees: they work for everybody, even the people those in power don't like.
There are real countries that have had the death penalty for homosexuality, and there remain some that still do (and are major migrant destinations, suggesting they're not the worst places to live on the planet). If homosexuality can be banned, so can transsexuality.
I don't ever expect all these ideas to be implemented, of course. They're suggestions, not a totalizing platform in which one idea is worthless without the others.
It's true - if I didn't already have the theory that this is just trying to do a mirror image of some fantasy vision of what the left is doing, I would be convinced that the point here really is to ban minorities and gay people from any sort of societal advancement, and to explicitly enshrine cis white hetersexism as official authority. I mean, it explicitly says that the goal is to get black and brown people out of higher education!
Supporting getting black and brown people into higher education is "wokeness", and has both anti-white and anti-meritocratic implications. I'm not pro-woke.
Giving him more credit than me. If someone's saying "I only didn't put 're-enslave all blacks' on the list because I don't think it'd be popular enough", I'm going to guess he isn't a fan of blacks even getting a LOWER education.
Some of us pay attention and remember the names of certain commenters. We have more sense to follow links of _such_ posters. I'd say you got off easier than I would have expected. :P
Think about it. Is there a single country that both bans homosexuality and has wokeness as a dominant ideology? I can only think of one possible example, Singapore, which seems noncentral. Similarly, transgender people are some of the most vigilant enforcers of "wokness" in America.
I can see that, if you think that elimination of wokeness is literally more important than human life, this might be a reasonable policy recommendation.
However, most people I know who are anti-woke are anti-woke because they *care* about human life. Unless you can give any indication that the net results would be good for human life, they might legitimately accuse you of being more anti-gay and anti-trans than anti-woke.
It's not being anti-gay and anti-trans as a terminal end, but an instrumental end. It's fine to debate about the value of human life, but the post is first and foremost about finding wokeness's weak points. I am quite anti-woke and believe the right is not taking the threat of wokeness seriously enough. I'm only "more anti-gay and anti-trans than anti-woke" if being anti-gay and anti-trans hinders the cause of anti-wokeness, which I don't think it does.
Are there any American Expats in Taiwan? I've been considering making a move out there to live and work and was interested in getting an American perspective.
I'd want to move there to take a position as an Engineering project manager, and live there permanently
Some time back, Scott wrote about polygenic screening and the first PGT baby. In the piece, he mentions,
"Screening companies will give you the raw data if you ask for it, so if you want to screen for an embryo with green eyes, all you need to do is find some third party algorithm that can screen genomes to figure out the baby's eye color and plug in your data. Does anything like this exist? I don't think so, but I think it would be trivial for a genetics PhD student to make."
Seems a bit fringy. So far as I know, most couples doing IVF are just trying to get *any* viable embryo to stick, and the number who have viable embryos aplenty so they can contemplate some serious winnowing are unusual.
I have kind of a negative reaction to this, because for most couples in this situation it's a painful shock how hard and expensive it is to go all the way to birth, and I feel like this glossy frivolity is an effort conceal some of that hard truth under a layer of bright easy hope. ("Look! This is so easy you can even choose blue or green eyes!") And they do want to believe, very much, so this seems a tiny bit emotionally exploitive.
My partner & I are currently trying to get pregnant via IVF. It's been expensive, stressful, expensive, emotional, expensive, and expensive.
We're also the sort of people who _would_ go for these sorts of extra screening processes, when and where available.
We got extremely lucky with the egg retrieval & fertilization process, and ended up with *significantly* more embryos than is typical. After weeding out "is the embryo even growing correctly" and "does the embryo have the right number of chromosomes", we have a whopping 10 viable candidate embryos. In context, this is a *huge* number.
Any given one of these embryos still has only like a 70% chance of implanting correctly, and doing so is a long, painful, expensive process, and keeping the backup embyros on ice in the meantime is $$$.
All that to say, I'd certainly be willing to shell out like $50-$100 per embryo during the screening process for the ability to prioritize the eggs most likely to be particularly healthy, happy, or intelligent. At this stage, that's basically a rounding error in the overall cost. But, I'm way to exhausted to give a flying fuck about eye color.
At Genomic Prediction, they aggregate the polygenic risk scores into an embryo health score that you can select on. At the eye color selection program, it looks like they are selecting only doing this "in conjunction with [their] general genetic well-being and gender selection procedures." At some point, you're probably trading health for eye color. I'm not sure what the appropriate tradeoff is. I would think it is really low. "Your baby has green eyes but your life expectancy is X lower" What is the appropriate value for X.
(1) I wonder if the "only in conjunction with genetic well being procedures" bit is a way of getting round any legal obstacles to Build A Better Baby. 'No no no, we're not doing eugenics or designer babies, we're just letting parents have that blue-eyed bundle of joy they want!' They do screening for genetic problems, certainly, but this seems a bit superfluous
(2) Remind me again how embryo screening was only going to be for severe problems so people could have healthy babies, and frivolities such as "what colour eyes and how tall do you want?" were never going to be part of a reputable clinic package
"What legal obstacles?" you ask, and indeed one wonders. The Fertility Institutes are very happy to help you dodge the law in whatever repressive hellhole you live in, that won't let you abort unwanted pregnancies for being the wrong sex, those backwards bigots! As in this heart-warming tale of how they helped Lisa and David with "family balancing" (and isn't that a *lovely* euphemism? I suppose the only benefit here is that the selecting out of unwanted embryos is done before implantation, so no need for an abortion when "Oh damn, it's another girl? We wanted a boy this time!" later in the pregnancy):
"Couple 3
Lisa and David were referred to us by a local fertility program near their home in Toronto, Canada. They presented to their local program with a request to assist them in their desire to become pregnant with a boy.
Lisa underwent a tubal ligation 3 years earlier after the birth of their third daughter. Lisa and David explained that they felt that they had "reached their limit" after having 3 children and undertook the tubal ligation. They indicated that with their oldest daughters now growing older and able to help with the youngest one, their thoughts had changed and they now felt that they could care for an additional child.
While totally content with their daughters, David indicated that he was very interested in seeing if the couple could use "new science" to help them achieve the birth of a son. Lisa was very supportive and indicated that she too was ready for another child. She indicated that gender was not a concern for her but that she was ready to support David's decision to inquire about our gender selection program.
They were told by their local fertility physician that gender selection was illegal in Canada. He did advise them that he had seen and assisted in the care of several Canadian patients that were being treated for sex selection at our Center in Los Angeles. He suggested to Lisa and David that they come see us. The couple had an initial telephone based consultation with us. This was followed by the performance of blood tests and a semen analysis that was carried out by a laboratory near their home.
We performed a sex ratio on David's sperm that provides us with very valuable information about David's capacity to produce male embryos. After we learned that the couple seemed to be suitable candidates for the procedure, they underwent their initial start-up examinations at the local center. We are able to interface with physicians near the homes of patients in nearly all cases.
Because Lisa was going to be 39 years old at the time of her delivery, the couple opted to also check their embryos genetically to make sure that a pregnancy with Down's syndrome did not result.
Lisa and David achieved a successful male pregnancy that resulted in a healthy baby boy born at Toronto General Hospital. Their referring physician has sent us several additional patients and two of David's friends have now been seen with a request for gender selection."
There now, aren't we all beaming broad smiles at how those nasty Canadian legislators have been foiled, and rich Canadians can now have the exact balance of high-quality luxury goods - I'm sorry, I mean precious adorable babies - that they require to match their current lifestyles and needs!
Oh, and while I'm snarling about "And you wonder why the fuck I'm a social conservative???", here's the good news about the stable of prime brood mares - I'm sorry, I mean healthy young female egg donors - that are the *exclusive* property of The Fertility Institutes!
"The Fertility Institutes maintain a very active oocyte (egg) donor program. We have over two hundred egg donors, including all races, available for patient consideration. Our donors are extensively screened and are all college or graduate students. Unlike many other programs, we do not utilize egg donors over the age of 27 years, thus assuring our recipients very high pregnancy rates at VERY affordable prices. The majority of our donors (84%) are deemed "in-house" donors which means these young women are not available online through egg donor agencies or other outlets. They are reserved exclusively for patients of the Fertility Institutes. In addition, "in-house" donors do not carry an agency fee associated with their use. We have no age restrictions for healthy potential recipients interested in utilizing our donors. All donations in our program are anonymous. We do not offer "meet the donor" or "donor meets the parents" options, though we do provide very extensive background and genetic history information and can optionally perform a full genetic chromosome analysis on the eggs prior to their use. Photos of all donors are available to potential recipients."
And you need never worry that the bitches on our puppy farms - well I have to apologise again, I have no idea where these glitches today are coming from - will ever try to get in contact with you or the child produced via their genetic material:
"We are pleased to announce that all medical services offered by The Fertility Institutes are available internationally. We work with affiliate clinics in over 42 countries.
For our patients from abroad, including Australia, new local laws in many countries allowing donors to "trace" their eggs or sperm are NOT applicable in the U.S.A. Our donors DO NOT have access to you, information about you, your future children or any of your personal information."
Only the most prime breeding stock is on offer:
"Through our unique association with a consortium of ethnic egg donor agencies, we are able to offer the advantages of a very large selection of young, healthy well screened egg donors from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds combined with the advantage of our ultraselective screening process to assure that our patients needing an egg donor are provided only the finest in available donors.
The donor database is being updated constantly and does not always include our unique ethnic donors (you must call for information, details and availability on specific ethnicities) and always lags behind the actual list of donors available through an office contact (+/- 250 donors currently available). All egg donors are college students, age 18-27 yrs. Minimum B+ college grade point average. Call for additional information or check back as our donor list expands and contracts. No donor is deemed suitable until repeat screenings are carried out following a "match". "Frozen" indicates this donor also has frozen oocytes she has produced available through our egg bank. While listed donors have been screened, no guarantee of the availability of any of the listed donors is implied."
Unable to, or do not want, to carry the pregnancy to term yourself? The Fertility Institutes have you covered! Thanks to their clinics in Mexico and India, a steady supply of poor women selling their services as human incubators is assured, particularly if you're on a relatively tight budget and just can't afford USA prices! Gay or straight, couples or single, they do not discriminate against loaded bank balances!
"Potential parents and surrogates that are matched through our program are united through the efforts of the dedicated medical staff in our offices, with well over two decades of successful experience in surrogacy and egg donation. The high quality services we provide are offered at prices that, in most instances are half of the prices charged by other programs. For those with financial limitations or concerns, our new highly acclaimed Indian and Mexican surrogacy "hybrid" programs can offer further savings of nearly an additional $10,000-$17,000. In this program, ALL of your medical care occurs in the U.S. while a well screened surrogate mother in India will carry your pregnancy to birth or your care may take place over 7 days in Mexico with a Mexican surrogate carrying your pregnancy. For gay patients, our Mexican surrogacy arrangements ARE allowed to involve screened gay parents. Ask about these exciting and VERY popular new surrogacy options!
The early selection of a Center to assist with your plans is crucial to allowing the process that will lead you to parenthood to proceed. As surrogacy options in the United States become increasingly limited as a result of the dwindling supply of well qualified U.S. surrogates from states that allow surrogacy and the ever increasing demand for these women, the Fertility Institutes organization has responded and is the ONLY U.S. PROGRAM with direct ownership of surrogacy programs in both Mexico and India. While current Indian law prohibits the use of Indian surrogates for gay singles or couples, Mexican legislation allows for totally legal surrogacy for gays. The program operated by the Fertility Institutes at our Mexican facility has been deemed a fully qualified center to provide these services by Mexican authorities.While the majority of our surrogacy matches for our gay patients is with qualified U.S. surrogates, our Mexican match option, with the associated cost savings is growing monthly. As soon as you indicate to us your desire to proceed, all available options, domestic U.S.A. and foreign options will be detailed for you."
Ah, progress. Isn't it great to be living in a day and age when human lives are bought and sold like pedigree dogs?
Infertility is something that can completely dash a couple's hopes. Not everyone cares intensely about having children, but many people do and - unlike in the example you quote from their website - quite often the problem isn't caused by the couple. My impression is that in the early days, a woman who could not carry a child to term might sometimes persuade a close friend or sister to carry a pregnancy for her, acting as surrogate - would this still make you think of pedigree dogs?
I agree with you that a lot of their rhetoric is disturbing, and I'm really uncomfortable with embryo selection personally speaking. But I also feel as if "makes it possible for people who desperately want a child and cannot on their own to have one" is the core purpose of the technology, and is one that can genuinely do good for both the parents and the otherwise-nonexistent child (though yes, there are murky ethical issues - I'm just not necessarily willing to say that someone who solves those issues differently than me shouldn't be allowed to make different choices). And I can't tell how much you're angry about it expanding beyond that to "I want a boy instead of a girl" (or vice versa) as opposed to objecting to all applications.
"No, I don't care that you have many studies". This is what it boils down to.
If anyone makes a statement you don't agree with, you're either going to say,
1) You have no proof, or
2) Your proof is a single study; I don't trust single studies claims, and anyway, here is a weakness this study has, or
3) I don't care that you have many studies - parapsychologists *also* have many studies.
Genuinely, I'm not trying to be adversarial, but it's starting to feel like you have *much* different standards of proof for different things.
If you agree with something that has many papers supporting it, you're just going to say something like, "X has been proven over and over and here's links" and not bother to investigate further.
If you disagree with something that has many papers supporting it, you're going to do a deep dive into the papers, discard a majority of them because science nowadays sucks, and then at the end say "You know what, I don't care about how many papers you have anyway".
Diminishing returns: If one study hasn't convinced you, a second and a third might. If five hundred have not convinced you, I'd not expect the five hundred and first to make much of an impact.
Scott's response to the Alexandros Marinos article was *God Awful*. I hope it was because Scott didn't have enough time to digest it, and not because he's dismissive of the work Alexandros put into it, and I hope he comes in to clean this up later.
I heard it described elsewhere as:
**
What bugs me is that he's basically saying "so what if you followed my own original methodology to its logical conclusion, it wasn't a very good conclusion, also fuck modern science"
**
And I say that as a personal fan of the ACX Worms article.
When things get too drawn out, I like to read a little bit of The Onion. It’s kind of like turning the Etch a Sketch over and giving it a good shake.
“Most Idiotic Things Anti-Vaxxers Actually Think Will Cure Covid”
“Hey, I drank grape juice, and I got over Covid, so you can’t say it didn’t work, right? Prove it doesn’t work. Go on, prove it. You can’t, so, therefore, it worked.”
I dont have time to deep dive on many papers in the field I have a goddam PhD, let alone adjacent fields. For things further away you can forget it.
I also know how the sausage is made, and how assuming an abstract and conclusions actually reflects what the data and analysis in a paper suggests is by no means an accurate assumption.
What it boils down to, in the politiest sense possible, if someone is trying to present papers to me to convince me of something then odds are they are a liar and may very well e malicious.
If I don't already like the person, deeply respect them, and hqve utmost confidence that they have already done a deep dive on the papers in question, redoing at minimum any analysis of data themselves, then I will be immune to any but the tiniest change in my priors from ant scientific evidence I myself have not personally collected and analysed.
I'm sorry, but once you lose trust in people and institutions it doesn't come back due to evidence that you already don't trust.
I feel like the natural conclusion of this approach, which I agree is at least valid - if not necessary - is to take no strong position. Or, barring that, to not share a strong position with others. To reflect that you, or whoever, does not have enough time to evaluate all of the conflicting evidence is more than okay. To then claim that one side is correct seems to be a fundamental error, in the way the OP is concerned about.
> if someone is trying to present papers to me to convince me of something then odds are they are a liar and may very well e malicious
More concisely: Proselytization implies deception. Or some other form of bad faith.
It's possible to overcome that prior, but not by proselytizing harder. Costly signals of intellectual integrity help. Other signals hurt. If the topic is tribally-aligned, that's a red flag. If proselytization on an ostensibly factual subject is coupled with active tribal signalling, that's a *giant* red flag.
Trustworthy advocacy -- to the extent that it exists -- is that which is more likely in worlds where the speaker is honest than in worlds where they are bullshitting. It's a surprisingly hard bar to clear.
It seems self-consistent to me. He's saying both that you need lots of studies, and that they have to be good. (And he explained in the original piece why he thinks most of those studies are bad.)
>He's saying both that you need lots of studies, and that they have to be good.
That's kind of my point.
a) he will not investigate studies for quality in such depth if they're supporting a statement he likes; and since *all* papers have weaknesses, he always finds weaknesses in the studies that have results he doesn't like.
b) he pretty straight-forwardly said that it doesn't matter how many studies there are (and remember, he found a decent number of them to be good in the ivermectin case).
Because the Bayesian prior here is that any random chemical is not going to be effective at treating any random disease, with extremely high odds. So when someone claims that this particular chemical treats this particular disease the (large) burden of proof is on the scientists trying to claim there is an effect. The burden of evidence is not equally weighted on both finding and not finding an effect, and it shouldn't be.
Fundamentally though, increasing the number of studies (along with intra-study metrics like p-value) only increases confidence in the studies not being due to chance. Once you have as many as ivermectin has, doubling the number of studies just makes us even more sure that the studies aren't just *randomly* showing a positive correlation. There almost certainly is a correlation, so 50 more similar studies would not really help. (Note the difference between this and what you're saying; the reason why we don't care about the number of studies is that they've *won*. There are enough, high enough effect size studies that we're essentially completely certain that the studies aren't random.)
The trouble is that most of the uncertainty in the question we care about (*causation* and specifically *actually fights COVID, not comorbid worms*) is no longer uncertainty about whether there's a correlation. It's whether that correlation is spurious in some way. That could be due to the worms hypothesis. It could be due to publication bias. Or maybe some unexplored detail of patient selection in third-world countries that happens to be in common between these studies. Or everyone is simply lying out of their ass and all the studies are fake. Who knows! But in the universe where Ivermectin does not cure COVID, it will be due to something like these that more of the same studies could not show.
One would do well to ask: "But Byrel, why are you speculating on outside-failure modes like this? Surely you don't apply this level of scrutiny to establishment studies?! How could anyone get their drugs approved if they have to demonstrate that there's no possibility the statistically significant effect in their trials wasn't due to something their trial couldn't measure? And of course, unjustified variable standards of scrutiny for propositions you would like to believe/disbelieve is a great way to spend a lot of effort getting less well-educated."
First, my hypothetical critic: medical trials are so expensive partly because they actually are better designed to exclude many of the outside failure modes. The FDA actually requires preregistration, which eliminates publication bias and at least makes p-hacking a lot more visible. These sorts of design features move some of the outside uncertainty into the inside uncertainty, which the trial can actually measure.
Secondly, things like worms-for-a-known-antiparasite-drug should *absolutely* be part of the demographics collected on both arms. This isn't something universal to all trials, and some establishment trials really suck because they either don't collect relevant summary data on their arms, or the relevant summary data isn't equivalent between the arms.
Thirdly, I'm more confident that major pharmaceutical companies have an effective fraud-deterrence environment than the people running the Ivermectin trials in the third-world, so I have a lower prior on that failure mode.
I don't THINK I'm having an inconsistent standard here.
(Worth noting that while a lot of people are pointing out that it's sensible to have different standards of proof for different propositions with different priors, I don't buy it. I mean, obviously they're CORRECT in the general case, and certainly in their scenarios about parapsychology and what-not. But *you actually have to justify (to yourself) having a different prior.* And there's no particular reason to have a higher prior on, say, Paxlovid than on Ivermectin, so they should be held to the same standards for rigor.)
>Genuinely, I'm not trying to be adversarial, but it's starting to feel like you have *much* different standards of proof for different things.
In defense of using different standards of proof, different claims do require different assessments purely due to the knock-on effects.
To use an non-charged example, if someone claims that they have a new type of brake disc that is better at stopping cars than existing brake discs then you can do a simple adversarial study to determine this. If someone else claims that they're using their mental power over magnetism to stop their car better than using a brake disc they'd need to reach a far higher standard of evidence to be convincing.
After all, if magnetic mind powers were a thing why are they only just now coming up in this circumstance? Are they unique to the individual trying to stop the car? Are there observable structures in the body of magnetic mind power individuals that allow them to use these ability? Why have we never observed these before? The list goes on and on.
Now, I'll admit that in the real world the line is far less clear cut than this example, but everyone still needs to draw a line somewhere. It's why I won't believe homeopathy is real regardless of how many studies show something is going on. Chemistry and physics don't work like that, the evidence needs to either be overwhelming enough to displace centuries of research or the proponents need to come up with a mechanism that works with the known laws of physics.
This isn't about MSM. It's about the broader scientific community. And the broader scientific community had just as much reason to be skeptical of fluvoxamine as ivermectin initially, but fluvoxamine has been able to (partially) overcome it. Look at the differences between those two.
Good. If the modern tendency to think that the nature of objective reality can be decided by a vote, and the number of papers, theories, theorists, studies, or experts subscribing to a given hypothesis has the slightest bearing on its truth, that will be a blessing.
If studies don't matter, don't use them as supporting evidence.
All of Scott's blog posts constantly use studies to make their point; now, he just dismisses a long string of them, because studies... apparently don't matter?
And keep in mind, those are studies he himself read and found no issues with. So you can't even play the "those studies were bad" card.
Well, as I said, I personally don't think the number of studies makes any difference at all. Might as well add up the weight of the pages printed as far as I'm concerned. The *only* useful criteria are details of what was measured and how closely measurements support the hypothesis. That's the kind of stuff you're only going to find out by a close reading of the original research, and yeah sure it can lead you to elevate one out-of-the-way paper over a metric crapton of other papers, all published in leading journals. Because "number of papers" = nothing, and "leading journal" = even more nothing.
Quite so. Bear in mind that every scientific advance that ever there was occurred because one person proved that everyone else was either ignorant or wrong.
Does anyone know of data on side effect severity for the covid booster? Especially as it relates to previous side effects? I'd really like scientific data, but happy to hear anecdotes if they're what people have got.
J & J in March. No effect. Pfizer in October. I felt a little discomfort in the injected deltoid the next day. Like someone had play-punched me in the shoulder the day before. First time I’ve ever felt any reaction from a vaccination.
First dose, Moderna: mild fatigue and full-body aches lasting about 24 hours
Second dose, Moderna: severe fatigue and full-body aches lasting about 24 hours
Third dose "booster" (half-quantity): following symptoms in sequence over the course of a week:
- 24 hours of moderate fatigue and body aches
- a couple of days of painful stomach bloating and intestinal issues
- a stiff/painful back that lasted a few days
- a morbilliform full body skin rash that lasted a few days.
It took about a week to run through all of these symptoms, after which I quickly felt completely normal again. None of these were bad enough to keep me from working or doing other things, but it was pretty alarming. I'm glad to have the protection from COVID, but I'll definitely weigh the costs and risks more carefully the next time I'm eligible for a booster.
Fwiw, none of the other people I know personally who got Moderna boosters had any side effects besides the fatigue/body aches.
Thank you very much for the answer! And I'm sorry you had to go through that, it sounds extremely alarming. I hadn't heard of a rash as a covid vaccine side effect before.
You don't mention fever - is that something you monitor? I ask because that's the most common side effect people have told me about, and if no one you know who had the boosters got it that's interesting new information.
I'm noticing what I'm going to call Lucidity Bias, the evil twin of Occam's Razor. Whereas OR makes sense because it economizes the number of variables. a Lucidity Bias does not economize, it simplifies, for the sake of clarity.
Simplifying is fine if your purpose is communication. It isn't fine if your purpose is understanding.
The Rationalist community has been accused of being full of non-wheel experts trying to invent the wheel, or something like that. I'm not making that accusation, although I'm kinda riffing off of it, because it's at least possible that is a failure mode of those who question all received wisdom.
Non-experts aren't necessarily worse at understanding a field than the experts. For one thing, the experts may suffer from biases present in the field. They may also lack wider knowledge that puts their expert knowledge in perspective. For instance, if experts in a field lack an understanding of mathematical statistics they may come to wrong conclusions because statistics may be essential for analysis of the subject.
It seems to me that rationalists have a thirst for clarity, perhaps too hungry a thirst. Many fields are complicated and aren't easy to explain to the non-expert. After all, many advanced fields require years of study to be merely caught up to the entry level of understanding. In those cases the intellectually hungry among us may prefer an explanation that makes logical sense based on prior known concepts over an explanation that may require more detailed knowledge which uncovers previously unknown concepts, but which requires years of study to uncover and comprehend.
I suggest everyone tweak in the direction of considering that your opinion may change if you had more expert knowledge.
There's a real problem here, but I think there's also a real value to prizing clarity. There's no particular reason to think a particular clear theory is any more or less likely to be true than a particular obscure theory. But it's often the case that a clear theory is both easier to test, and, if true, is easier to use for recommendations and gives better understanding. This sort of thing can give people reasons to favor clear theories over obscure ones, even when both are equally likely to be true - our goal presumably isn't just believing the truth, but doing something with it, either through testing, recommendations, or understanding.
Kevin Kelly's work on Occam's Razor suggests that its value is best understood in something like this way - though he also emphasizes the ability to reach the truth in the long-term by following this strategy, even if short-term guesses are no more likely to be true.
I think there is good reason to prioritize clarity. A simple model is more likely to be true than a convoluted one (in my experience). The issue is that the prioritization needs to be 75% (clear simple theory) vs. 65%(convoluted theory) and you need to be willing to continue to update your level of confidence as the data changes.
Many people, both in the real world and on these pages, want to simplify everything down to ivermectin works (or ivermectin doesn't) or some other theory. Much of the respect for Scott comes from his willingness to admit uncertainty (on many subjects). Much of the disdain for the Ivermectin side(of that particular discussion) comes from the insistence of its champions that, "it clearly works."
Well put, Jack. You've articulated something that has been bothering me about a number of discussions.
> I think there is good reason to prioritize clarity. A simple model is more likely to be true than a convoluted one (in my experience).
I think the opposite could be the case when the problem space is fundamentally complex. When there are 10s of thousands or millions of variables with many dependencies of varying strength, why would you expect a simple model?
If the problem space is fundamentally complex then I think your (simple) model looks like: "10s of thousands or millions of variables with many dependencies of varying strength" all contribute to the overall final result....
A simple model is more easily juggled in the mind. You can mentally run more complex tests against counterfactuals if the model itself is simple.
Upon rereading, I hate that conclusion because it is generic and sloppy.
What I actually want to suggest is that people update in the direction of opacity, whatever that means, but what I think I mean is be suspicious of clarity.
Specifically, I'm saying that Mencken's quote appears true only because of extreme selection bias; when it is not true i.e. the well-known solution is right, we implement that solution and forget about it for the rest of eternity.
The key thing about political topics is that they are not random. They are, by definition, the things that we disagree about. The vast majority of possible propositions, factual and moral, are obvious and uncontroversial - and so we don't talk about them. 90% of morality is baked into humans by evolution and requires an immense mental and philosophical effort to reject. We disagree merely over a few edge cases.
Got it, thanks. I would generally agree with that, except I think what Mencken (were he interested in defending the quote, which is dubious) would point out is that he used the word "human problem" and that probably rules out any of those throughly-settled issues you mention, because they're not really "problems" we discuss.
I've started reading Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet on substack based on a reference to it from here. His latest post https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/a-surfeit-of-black-bile talks about depression and psychoanalysis - curious to hear what folks here (especially Scott) think about it. Couple of click baity quotes - "Depression makes you a jerk." "psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience".
It's interesting: Smith associates certain perceptions or ideas with his depression–e.g., most of everyday speech is verbal copypasta; universities and awards only exist because enough people agree that they do; in at least some sense, things in general aren't like reeeeally real–these notions have occurred to me as well, and in fact I think they occur to a lot of people, but for some reason they don't really bother me, whereas Smith associates them with immense distress, and they also foster a kind of anger and contempt in him, which causes him further distress. When I hear about the Proust protagonist figuring out who his acquaintance has been hanging out with by paying attention to the new words and phrases she uses, I think "neat, that's very astute," whereas Smith seems to think "ah, now here's someone who understands depression". I'm not sure what to make of this. Maybe it's related somehow to the OCD he describes very vividly elsewhere in the post.
I disagree with the provocative conclusion at the end of this direct quote: "Depression makes you a jerk. One should not be a jerk. Ergo, if depression is a disease, it is a disease that it is morally wrong to have." This does sound like depression to me–in particular, a self-abusive bias that I've experienced in my own depressive episodes. Getting shot in the head could also make you a jerk. It doesn't follow that it's morally wrong to get attacked by a gunman. You can be culpable for your actions, but not your afflictions, right? (sure, it gets complicated when your affliction is the result of your actions...)
That post was a fun read. I like reading eloquent "jerkitudes", partly because I come from a culture where it is one's moral *duty* to be a jerk, which in practice does not leave room for such eloquence. (In my society, original thought is *kitsch*, conspicuous consumption in the poorest taste. Instead, you are expected to build your public presentation from the provided building blocks as a purely instrumental edifice that helps you navigate a zero-sum economic game.)
However, I can't help my knee-jerk reaction when a contemporary cultural notion such as "copypasta" being misused so badly. So, ackshyually, "copypasta" is not simply "parroting others' opinions as your own". (In my lexicon, that's just called "discourse", and I am not as disturbed by its prevalence in human behavior, as I am disturbed by its normativity.)
Copypasta is an ironic reaction to that: literally copy-pasting an opinion, story, or other act of digital speech to play off of others' inability to discern a real opinion from a piece of propaganda. (In spatial terms, you could say that the accepted meaning of "copypasta" is both "in reverse" and "one layer above" the author's usage of the notion.)
In practice, copypasta it's used as a shibboleth to identify functionally illiterate outsiders. They can't identify the purpose of the text in question (a low-effort integrity check), and start expending effort "arguing with the copypasta" as if it were an actual opinion.
In my ethical system, one is culpable for their inconsistencies. (In practice, people are not astute enough to notice them, or simply do not care; this has a self-reinforcing effect.) In this case, individual thoughts expressed in the essay are valid and, taken individually, may be useful morsels of experience.
But using such a blatant misuse of a contemporary notion as an example of the author's mental state leads me to think that any conclusion the text might reach would simply not pass a reality check. You wouldn't hire tradespeople to build a house using Gary Larson's cow tools. The state, on the other hand, is more than happy to pay independent intellectuals to provide the rest of us with broken conceptual tools, which lead us to base our convictions and behaviors on broken models of the world.
In a curious inversion, the author's concern may be rooted in the fact that they have become really good at playing a broken game. Sort of like impostor syndrome in reverse. I think that's something a lot of people can relate to, especially those who, like myself, consider depression is a personalized symptom of a societal affliction. (I believe it's the nervous system revolting against what the author calls "dematerialization". Like it or not, we as animals are optimized to react to simple material stimuli, not complex abstract ones, the understanding of which has to be instilled into every one of us, like building a ship in a bottle, and for better or worse it usually doesn't work that well.)
P.S. Good to know that lexicon trick was from Proust. That allows me to estimate how long it's been known in general, and how prevalent it is in my milieu. We are no more on speaking terms with the person I acquired it from, but admittedly it's been an occasional guilty pleasure of mine to use it on our mutual acquaintances.
"That post was a fun read. I like reading eloquent "jerkitudes", partly because I come from a culture where it is one's moral *duty* to be a jerk, which in practice does not leave room for such eloquence. (In my society, original thought is *kitsch*, conspicuous consumption in the poorest taste. Instead, you are expected to build your public presentation from the provided building blocks as a purely instrumental edifice that helps you navigate a zero-sum economic game.)"
You are making me so curious, which culture are you from??
Eastern Europe :-) We were part of the Middle East and effectively stuck in the Middle Ages until the Great Powers' proxy wars forcibly "civilized" us during the 19th century, and industrialized us during the 20th. Though we have our short-lived simulacra of intellectual traditions, rationalism is largely viewed as a suspicious Western import that we need to pay lip service to in order to be allowed economic opportunities by a cruel Big Other. (Emphasis on "big", as cruel is natural - but one only needs to worry about the cruelty of those entities that are bigger than them, never about one's own until the deathbed.)
I'm only half kidding about this so called "moral duty to be a jerk". My region is populated by kind and hospitable people with near-zero emotional literacy :-) And the further East you go, the weirder it gets - once you're traversing the former Soviet Union the baseline attitude is, by Western standards, effectively sociopathic.
The latter (parenthesized) part of the quoted statement holds true for much of the Western world, accounting for the impotence of public discourse and collective thought that global society seems to be experiencing. IMHO the rise of neoauthoritarian ideologie among collectivists, and conspiracy theories/widespread New Age "spiritual bypassing" among individualists, are symptoms of a nascent epistemic collapse.
If humanity is developing exponentially, this means the largest part of "us learning how to think" happened recently. (Over here it's especially fresh, hence the peculiar historical perspective.) However, exponential dematerialisation (a.k.a. B. Fuller's "ephemeralisation") means immaterial culture is outpacing material development, and there is an ever growing divide between those who appreciate abstract values and those who have no use for them. (I feel like the Internet's recent fascination with aphantasia is symptomatic of that.) Ostracising or pathologising "deviations" from "the norm" doesn't help if that "norm" is actually the minority.
Of course I'd like my people to become the majority, who doesn't :-) But I'm definitely in the minority, being brought up in an atmosphere of useless idealism. It takes a significant toll on my mental health and therefore my survival capacity.
Most Eastern European nations have a fascination with being accepted for the "real, civilized people we actually are". In fact, it turns out that when history shuts the mouths of the pedigreed bullshitters, the rest of the world turns out to be just as unwashed as us :-)
P.P.S. The author did lose my attention around the misuse of "copypasta". I could attribute that to my erratic train of thought, or I could attribute it to the author's thesis falling apart at the first misuse of a complex notion. In practice, it makes no difference.
I found I found his post striking, the descriptions of his mental states are very well written and vivid, and quite sad.
An amusing minor point : he has the French expression "péter un cable" wrong. It just means "to blow a fuse", ie. freak out and not the much funnier "to fart a lead weight"
So I had to go down that rabbit hole and found that "blow a fuse" seems to be the most common translation, but there was one instance of "shit a brick". ;-)
Idiomatic expressions are wonderful! My favorite are the pairs where the images are similar but just a bit different like the English "on cloud nine" versus the French "au septième ciel" (on heaven seven), or the "storm in a cup of tea"/"storm in a glass of water" pair.
Yes "shit a brick" is a very reasonable translation for the French expression "péter un plomb", as they have quite similar meaning (freak out) but the images are very different, as "péter un plomb" directly means "blow a fuse" and "to fart a lead weight" is a mistranslation of both words.
So you're saying that essay contains *two* examples of how humanities could be so much more beneficial (and enjoyable!) if authors *bothered to attempt* rigor? Damn.
Triple Interrobang, in relation to your request for comments last OT:
"Why we Cant[sic] Understand the Other Side" oversimplifies the problem. It's more than just outgroup homogeneity on the level of the individual, since a lot of media bakes in "the majority of the Other Side supports X extreme position". Also, a number of the statistics you cite are only weak evidence for your point, due to the potential for differing definitions (obvious examples here are differing definitions of "offensive to minorities" and "God", and differing understanding of what is and is not false information).
Your vid on cancel culture has a few issues:
1) "a movement known as GamerGate engaged in a widespread and extended harassment campaign against those seen as responsible for spreading progressive ideas in the gaming community"
This is more than a little slanted, although I don't entirely fault you for that since this is the line taken by essentially all media coverage*. Firstly, "the movement" didn't harass people; a minority of people in the movement did (that one should probably have occurred to you given your "Other Side" video). Second, the concerns of GamerGate (at least in its final, most wide-scale and impactful phase) were a *little* more nuanced than "spreading progressive ideas in the gaming community"; the objection was largely to progressives attempting to turf "gamers" *out* of games (a couple of the more notable incendiaries: https://dangolding.tumblr.com/post/95985875943/the-end-of-gamershttps://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-gamers-don-t-have-to-be-your-audience-gamers-are-over- ).
*The thing about GamerGate is that it was basically the watershed rupture between the previously-aligned Grey Tribe (nerdy young mostly-men) and Blue Tribe (the rapidly-nucleating social justice movement). As such there were essentially no media outlets that took the pro-GG position; up until that point "nerdy anti-SJ" wasn't much of a media niche (Scott beat the crowd).
2) You don't really explain why there's the asymmetry in opinions of shame mobs between progressives and conservatives. The obvious explanation is "because there's an asymmetry in the current distribution of such mobs", probably related to things like "progressives use social media more" and "progressives are more politically active". It's noteworthy that the positions on this have basically reversed since the 90s.
3) I think you misattribute fault for some of the effects of "cancellings", in particular people being fired/expelled. A shame mob cannot fire people from their jobs; a shame mob cannot expel someone from a university. Someone with power is taking that action because he or she listened to the shame mob; that's his or her decision and his or her responsibility. I think "stop throwing mobs the heads they demand" is at least as important as "stop forming mobs".
Regarding your more recent "Conspiracy Theorists Aren't Crazy", I think that your title is kind of clickbait and an overstatement. It is a continuum, yes, but the end of that continuum - perfect confirmation bias, in which anybody disagreeing with you is weighted 0 - untethers a person completely from reality. If "crazy" is to have a meaning at all, that almost certainly qualifies. Even the fairly-clickbaity "We Are All Conspiracy Theorists" would be more accurate.
>it was basically the watershed rupture between the previously-aligned Grey Tribe (nerdy young mostly-men) and Blue Tribe (the rapidly-nucleating social justice movement)
I'd say that it was the time when the rupture reached mainstream awareness. Sci-fi (racefail, elevatorgate) and new atheism were conquered first.
Thanks - I only became aware of Racefail substantially later so wasn't sure on the date. Elevatorgate and Gamergate felt closer in time than 3 years, but this timing makes a lot of sense.
To be clear, I'm not saying GamerGate was *decisive* of anything; cracks had been growing for a while and something like it was inevitable. But I call it a "rupture" in the sense of "final catastrophic structural failure", and more pertinently "failure that's obvious without a microscope".
It cites Scott and links to his article: "Recent analysis by Avi Bitterman, a dermatologist in New York, and Scott Alexander, a prominent blogger, suggests that the answer is nuanced."
Nov 27th - print and online editions - The Economist publishes an article on the subject. It does not cite Scott:
Given the quickness of the turnaround, I have to presume the relevant journalist is a paid up subscriber, who saw the Ivermectin post before its official publication on Nov. 18. (I don't remember for sure if Scott gave us a preview of this one, but I think he did).
Why do people keep saying they have been "humbled" when they win an award or get elected to office? Isn't that the exact opposite of what the word means? Can we stop this? Or is it an ineluctable feature of the mendacity of our times?
> Why do people keep saying they have been "humbled" when they win an award or get elected to office?
Winning an award is kind of elevating you above other people who didn't win or even get nominated. If you don't actually think you're "better" or more accomplished than those others, of course that can be a humbling experience.
I don't think there is anything new about this. "I am humbled to win this award" is not a proposition attempting to report on the speaker's state of mind, and still less a statement about the speaker's objective status. It is a performative statement and there is nothing wrong with that. It broadly signals some mixture of: this is a little embarrassing; I want you all to like me and most people prefer modesty to arrogance; there are aspects to my success which are dumb luck; and there are others associated with this who are not being celebrated.
None of this is discreditable, or particularly remarkable, and certainly not new
Nobody was saying "I am humbled to win this award." or, upon winning an election primary "This has been a humbling experience" in the 90s. It's a recent thing, though perhaps it has been around a couple decades now. It used to be that LOSING was considered to be a humbling experience. Nowadays if you tell someone "Trying to compete at the pro level was a humbling experience." they may be confused and ask to see all the awards you won.
I'll note that Philip Roth's novel The Humbling appeared in 2009, so perhaps people still knew what the word meant then.
"Mendacity of our times" sounds overwrought but I confess to finding that usage of "humbled" annoying. Jackson Paul in another reply here gives a nice defense of it though. And I think Merriam-Webster's definition of "humbled" is fine. It includes a sense for "make someone non-prideful" which is... fine, and what these politicians are going for.
I think what's annoying is the insincerity. "I'm overcome with gratitude and a feeling of unworthiness to receive so great an honor, etc" could conceivably be true but you can kind of tell it's more like "it's so great being recognized for being so amazing; and I'm humble to boot!".
Btw, those interested in this debate may like my curmudgeonly list of words that Google's dictionary is ruining: http://doc.dreev.es/words
C'mon man, don't let the politicians change our language. Word have meaning. Politicians change the meaning of words to manipulate the truth. We should resist that.
I'm saying they're being insincere more than changing the language. If we end up with a new sense of "humbled" meaning "honored" then I'll take your side here.
(I'm similarly annoyed by how "not literally" is literally one of the definitions of "literally" now.)
I think the hate on literally is overdone. The use of it in the way you're deriding dates back to like 1766, which isn't too much later than the meaning of "actually," which itself wasn't the original literal meaning of the word anyway, given that it originally meant something more like "as it is written," which is shown in the root word.
Besides, even today it's basically never used to mean "figuratively," but just as an all-purpose intensifier.
Consider the sentence "I'm so tired I'm literally going to die." This is no different in meaning than "I'm so tired I'm going to die," it's just intensified. The speaker isn't saying "I'm so tired I'm figuratively going to die," they're just using hyperbole.
I mean I suppose you can just hate on all-purpose intensifiers in general, or hyperbole, but I think they're fun little pieces of language.
For me, the usage grates less because it seems ungrammatical than that it seems to imply that *before* the award, or election, the speaker was not humble in some unjustified way, meaning he is kind of confessing to being an arrogant prick before the award/election, and saying that the award/election has turned him back into a normal (humble) human being, aware of his limitations and the role of luck and others in his own success.
Which makes me think: you're confessing that you basically didn't deserve this, because you were secretly a narcissist asshole? Bah.
Well that's pretty purist. MW is pretty well respected here among us unwashed hooligan colonials, though, and unfortunately my OED is one of those tiny-print condensed versions, so I'd have to get out the magnifying glass to dig into what the best people think...
Well, carry on. I can assist with small tasks, such as tsking t the use of terminal prepositions, and the verbifying of nouns themselves derived from excellent but neglected Anglo-Saxon short verbs ("utilization" from "utility" from "use" by my least favorite). Sancho! My armor!
In my experience its often true. The few times in my life that I have won an *actual*
Award, it has always been an at least somewhat humbling experience, since I am acutely aware of how many other people had to work hard to position me/ my organization in a position to succeed the way I/it did.
That is, here humbled means not “brought low, humiliated” but “made to realize how much I owe gratitude to other people.” Gratitude and humility often go hand in hand, and it is easy to confuse one for the other.
I'll quit arguing with you after this point, but before about a decade ago the word humbled was only used in a negative sense. Now that public figures keep using it in a "positive" sense, it kinda destroys the other, central definition meaning of the word.
That is how connotations work, yes. Humbled has a positive connotation to it built in from Biblical influence and hundreds of years of Christian cultural domination of the Anglo-sphere. Humiliated does not.
Look into the term "emotive conjugation" for similar examples of just how differently you can frame something by using synonyms with different connotations.
Proposed political system- a country uses proportional representation, but also fixes the number of political parties allowed in the constitution- say, somewhere in the range of 5-8. (If I had to pick a number I'd say 6).
This I think solves one of the key problems of PR, which is small fringe parties who earn 1-3% of the vote becoming kingmakers in a coalition. Essentially, the whole political system is held hostage by a very, very small fringe group. More explanation of the problem here (just so I don't write a small essay)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Election_of_minor_parties
This problem is 'solved' in some current PR countries by requiring parties to win a certain % in order to gain representation in parliament. This then introduces the new problem of wasted votes, which can become extreme in some cases- most famously, in 2002 Turkey experienced 46% (!) of its votes being wasted due to a high threshold.
Setting the number of parties allowed in the constitution to my mind fixes this? Fringe parties are impossible- no one's vote is wasted because the 'threshold' rule is not required. We have collectively thousands of years of experience in parliamentary systems, across many different countries on most continents- I think we can make a reasonable judgement as to what the effective limit on the number of parties should be, and at what point beyond which it devolves into ridiculousness & mindless factionalism. I don't see any redeeming societal value to having 10-30+ parties (yes, the latter is possible in some Latin American countries!) Use PR, establish a maximum number of parties, and let candidates & voters sort themselves as they so choose
You are talking about some of the key problems and the most critical cases of proportional representation. What do you think could go wrong with the system you suggest and be the 'worst' cases for your fixed-party-system?
I'm a fan of hybrid systems that combine a measure of proportionality with the core benefits of single-member plurality elections (skewing elected officeholders towards mainstream views, and allowing voters to vote directly for people rather than just for parties).
Single Transferable Vote, Borda Count, and Limited Voting will all produce roughly proportional results across a multi-member district. The ability to cast more than one vote (in ranked order for STV and Borda) mitigates the "wasted" vote issue by taking into account a voter's down-ballot preferences even if their first choice isn't electorally viable. If the number of members per district is relatively small, then that automatically marginalizes fringe parties by imposing a de facto viability threshold (e.g. a 5 member district requires 16-20% support after transfers of surplus votes to elect someone via STV, depending of the particular STV method used). And the consideration of down-ballot preferences of voters whose first choice candidates are the most popular will tend to advantage candidates with broader appeal.
You didn't adress yet the questions that Carl Pham asked at the beginning, and they are important. The key questions and issues are: In each country how do you choose *which* are the 6 parties that can be elected; or even can exist? How do you allow for changes in the list of those 6 parties? How do you deal with the situation when preferences change and a group of citizens want to create a completely new party?
I agree that there would be some logistical issues to kick off the first election- maybe founding political elites divide themselves into 6 parties- a far left, a couple centrist, far right, neoliberal, a Green, etc.
'How do you allow for changes in the list of those 6 parties? How do you deal with the situation when preferences change'
You have American-style primaries, where anyone can run for any party's seat. (If you are an American- we're weird in doing that, most democracies either don't have primaries or restrict who's allowed to run for them). The parties change over time, over decades & centuries, as new messages become popular with their core group & entrepreneurial new candidates steal voting share with those new messages. Despite having only two parties here, the Democrats & the Republicans have shifted over the decades- now the Dems are the party of the upper middle class, and the Republicans the party of the white working class. A 180 degree inversion in just two decades! Voters switched parties, new candidates (most famously Trump) have appeared with new messages and then reshaped them- frequently to the horror of old party elites.
I mean, look at the Republicans- they are now an anti-free trade/kind of isolationist/somewhat anti-war party of the high school educated. Who could've imagined such a radical change- they used to be almost the complete opposite! Party elites couldn't stop the first wave of populism in the Tea Party, and they couldn't stop the second wave in Trumpism. If your message is popular with voters, you can't be stopped in an open primary (or general election).
So long as the primaries are open, if you have new preferences & citizens want a change, they'll be able to take over one of the existing parties. Over multiple decades & centuries all of the parties will probably be reshaped many, many times. The only constant is change
Thanks for the details. I first wanted to say it was much clearer now, but I don't see how this comment fits with your comment below … Do you want to determine six parties that will be on the ballot for the next say 50 years, or do you want to determine six parties that are on the ballot every four/five years shortly before each election?
I'm much less concerned than you are with 'small fringe parties who earn 1-3% of the vote becoming kingmakers in a coalition' in proportional representation. But given that this is your concern, how does this new system help to avoid that? Six parties are enough for producing small parties that become kingmaker in a coalition.
Your second concern were the votes that get lost because of threshold and your fixed six parties’ system is to be the solution. But consider the example of the latest federal elections in Germany: Six parties were assumed to make it into parliament – and so they did. (For the moment, I’m leaving aside two specifics, namely CDU/CSU and SSW). 24 parties were on the ballot. 8,6% of voters decided to vote for one of the parties that basically had no chance to enter parliament (with their ‘proportional representation vote’). It can be safely assumed that most of the voters did that knowing that their vote would not lead to that specific party being represented in parliament.
So why would you decide to vote for a party that will not get any seats? First, because you might want to signal support for a specific option, and this is more important to you than supporting any of the parties in parliament. Second, because you might be thoroughly unsatisfied with the offers the six main parties are representing (which overlaps with the first reason but is not the same) – those persons might simply not vote at all if those *additional* options were not there. Third, because you might want to help that specific small party to grow – enough votes mean additional publicity and public funds. A boost for a smaller party on federal level can also help its local and regional structures, where the party might be actively involved.
Over the past years, I’ve had conversations with several dozen voters expressing the dilemma between choosing the party they like and choosing the party that will be able to raise a voice in parliament; it's not that uncommon.
This is only an example; one in which the additional parties on the ballot have a function. Voters consciously decide to refrain from selecting a party that will be represented. Are you sure you want to take that option from them? (Even if all the questions about selecting the ‘right’ parties on the ballot were solved.) Some of those voters will bail out and refrain from voting. Are those voices or votes less ‘lost’? Are you generally concerned about all those who are eligible to vote, but don’t?
There are different cases and I have no doubts that looking at the problematic ones is important. Still, when discussing alternative political systems, I'd strongly advocate looking at the whole range of cases.
I'm not sure I buy your claim of necessity here: what is wrong with people voting for their preferred party and the party not getting enough votes to be elected?
Does anyone know why a vote for a candidate/party who is not elected is considered wasted? I've never understood this logic, which kind of implies that democracy is not about inviting people to express their opinions but rather is to avoid anyone being upset.
To illustrate my concerns here,ban anecdote. My early voting history was for candidates from a party who didn't have a hope in hell of winning the constituency in which I was registered. But I wanted my opinion registered. In a by-election a few years ago, the party I always voted for shockingly actually took the seat, and has held it since. Suddenly the votes for that party were no longer wasted. This is kind of the problem with the wasted vote theory: it presupposes no change is possible, and seemingly models voters as tribal drones rather than rational actors. And if your voting system does promote voting along tribal-drone lines, maybe you need to revise the system not tinker with the rules!
I can answer your question about votes being wasted!
In some elections, people vote for one candidate, and the person who gets the most votes wins, and that's the whole plan. It sounds great, but there are actually some serious issues with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
In other elections, voters get to rank their candidates in order. If nobody gets more than half of the first preferences, they cross off the least popular candidates and redistribute those votes to the next preference of those voters, and then it continues until somebody wins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting
I'm aware of all that. I just don't understand how a vote cast and counted is wasted just because the candidate didn't win. It seems to be assumed in all of the criticism of first-past-the-post systems, or at least those that don't use the specious rationale of fair representation of parties (as you may guess, I'm not a fan of that argument), but I've never seen it justified.
If there are only two candidates with a serious chance of winning (as is often the case in first-past-the-post), and you vote for somebody else, then your vote is "wasted" because you didn't weigh in on which of the two big candidates would win. A vote for a *major* candidate who ends up losing isn't considered "wasted".
As much as I'm tickled by the idea of the Nonexistavian People's Party getting relegated to the Lower Local Government division Premier League-style and having to fight their way back up the ladder for the next four year cycle, it's not clear to me why that should be preferable to any of:
- A more finely-tuned threshold (using the same thousands-of-years-of-experience argument)
- A moving threshold, eg. "the top 6 parties or all parties with >= 5%, whichever is greater"
- Minimum vote threshold plus single transferrable vote
Or just don't reify political parties in the first place. That's my primary (no pun intended) issue with systems like PR; better to disintermediate the populace & their representatives.
But the US has *two* parties. Just two, making the US an oligopoly where the two main parties are the only option and all each one needs to do is not be quite as incompetent as the opposite guy.
Other countries have several parties with a delicate balance of power, meaning it's actually a real challenge convincing people that you deserve to get your bill passed. It's all about the voting systems countries use - First Past the Post voting leads to a permanent two-party oligopoly, Preferential voting systems will allow competition to thrive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
There's a difference between not having political parties and not reifying them though. PR effectively does the latter, as the party managers have control over the party (it's not coincidence that stable PR-democracies tend towards managerialism), and the US system has also done this to a point for reasons I never figured out (it didn't look inevitable).
All political systems seem to develop parties. The question is whether you allow the parties a formalised position or not.
You tried it and failed almost 250 years ago. I think we may have learned a few things in that time, including learning directly from your mistakes.
The main things forcing parties are elected multi-member bodies (which can be controlled far more effectively by a party) and plurality voting (which via tactical voting forces there to be two blocs). Scrap both of those and I imagine getting rid of parties would be achievable.
Trying to imagine what getting rid of elected multi-member bodies looks like in a democracy. Maybe a kind of elected oligarchy where (to use a US government parallel) we directly elect each of the heads of the cabinet with their different responsibilities? I'm not sure how to resolve issues that affect all of them (like, say, budgeting and taxes) without it devolving into a multi-member elected body.
If executive leaders are selected by transferable vote or approval voting or some means that more effectively gets rid of spoilers, then parties become important only as informative signals rather than as active coalitions.
99% certain that persistent parties with persistent unelected-unlotteried officials who are skilled at whipping and coalition management would be the stable equilibrium there. Multi-member body politics are difficult, and strongly reward people for party-dynamics regardless of how the representatives are selected.
The key advantage of an arbitrary amount of parties is that it is required for the voters to keep the party administrators in check. If there's a fixed "seat" for Judea People's Front, then people can either vote for that party, of for someone else who has entirely different policies - and if there's any disagreement *within* the party, then their voters would be stuck with whoever wins some internal administrative fight. On the other hand, if The People's Front of Judea can secede from the Judea People's Front, then their voters can decide which of the groups is actually "the real one" who deserves the support.
In addition, it provides a way to re-segregate parties as different aspects become relevant. We definitely don't want a 5-8 way split based on issues which were most important a hundred years ago; some major ideologies from that era (e.g. the literal communist and fascist parties) would get a very small representation, reducing the effective number of parties; but we'd want to allow major parties to get split when new issues become important enough for people to start diverging in their vote while still preferring the "old"party to others because of all the old issues.
If you had American-style primaries, the parties could continually be taken over every generation by new folks with their spin on the day's issues. American-style means anyone can run for their offices, it's just a question of whose message is the most popular. You'd probably have a far left party, far right, various shades of centrist, a neoliberal party, etc. Every 4+ years if they weren't in the majority, a new wave of folks associated with those political views would probably call for new or updated policies, candidates etc. within their matching party. Because the far left people would be attracted to the far left party, the centrists to the centrist party, and so on etc.- this would allow for continual change & regeneration every election cycle
How would you decide *which* 5-8 parties are allowed? The only mechanism that jumps to mind is "those that achieve above a certain threshold in a/several recent elections" -- which means you're just using the threshold mechanism *and* adding in some inertia, which means people who want Party X to replace Party Y on the approved list need to go through multiple election cycles in which their votes don't count (except for boosting the possibility that Party X will be accepted into the pantheon).
You could have a separate qualification election in between general elections, with the top 5-8 parties winning the right to ballot access in the next general election.
The method of the qual election will radically affect the character of the political system. For example, approval voting would have a failure mode where a political coalition with plurality approval could organize itself as 5-8 different "parties" with near-identical platforms to crowd out all other parties from the ballot.
I should clarify that citizens can form any party or organization that they wish- this simply relates to who can appear on the ballot. Many 1st world democracies have used vote thresholds for party for decades- is it really more democratic to let people pretend to vote for a candidate, when they can never really be seated? Not to mention the US effectively only having two parties for over 200 years.
As I mention below, setting the number of parties has to be combined with American-style primaries where anyone can run for party offices. No matter what their belief system is, the only thing limiting the candidate is just how popular their ideas are. Every party must accept every potential candidate- if their message is popular, they'll win a primary in one of them
I understood your longer comment to my question as 'some elites will determine which parties are on the ballot for decades, if not centuries'. So I find that statement confusing. Why form a party, if it cannot be on the ballot? Or did I misunderstand your comment in the first place?
How do you determine which of the [six] parties are allowed to be on the ballot? I am thinking you mean to use their popularity in society, but I'm not sure you how measure that without resorting to previous election results. If using previous election results, then only the first [six] popular parties can ever exist, as no other party will ever reach the threshold to even show up in the future results. If not using previous results, what would you use instead? A pre-election where people indicate who they would intend to vote for, where the top six are used? You have already ruled out just taking the top six parties, as that would result in votes being thrown out - or were you only concerned about the minimum threshold system of throwing votes out, and would be fine as long as all top [six] parties were represented?
US military is funding research into a GPS substitute that could work underwater, underground, and at the poles, it is based on detecting the paths of cosmic ray muons. Seems to require multiple detectors intercepting muons but it's not too clear to me how far apart these detectors need to be. Anyway, pretty interesting stuff.
Re China: One of the important things to remember about China is that "China" is almost always an unhelpful unit of analysis. It's so big and diverse that it's more helpful to think about China as a continent rather than a country.
What's happened in China is that several of the coastal cities have upgraded themselves to European levels of prosperity. Then there's still a huge hinterland with very low levels of income.
That's a lot of success! But it's not like China is going to become an overwhelming world dominator very soon.
While I'm talking about it, though, I will say what worries me. In the next 20-30 years, China's economy will become significantly larger than then USA's; and it will become a more active member of the international community. At the same time, it is hemmed in by nuclear-capable US military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the US-supported Taiwan. This is the kind of situation that Kennedy triggered the Cuban missile crisis to avoid. I think that China will find it unacceptable to have US weaponry that close to its capital, and will want to force the USA to move a little further away. The only question is whether that negotiation can happen peacefully, or whether it requires armed confrontation. I'm very much hoping that it can be done peacefully.
How does this city vs rural hinterland situation in China compare to the different demographic histories of Germany, France and the UK as they industrialised?
And could internal migration towards the coast ease the problems of an ageing population (on said coast, at the expense of the interior) in the same way that external immigration has in the West? I understand that there are still heavy restrctions on where you can relocate within China.
The history question: sorry, I have no idea. I just don't know enough about the history of industrialisation in Europe.
In China, until quite recently, the inland population acted like a basically endless reserve of very low-cost (young) labour for the cities. Now, China is already 50% rural, so that reserve is no longer as endless as it was, and labour costs are rising.
The restrictions on movement were quite harsh, preventing labour from easily moving, organising, etc., and preventing too much movement to the cities, so Chinese cities never dveloped slums. But the controls have been significantly reduced in the last few years. It's now easy to move between cities, and from countryside to city.
I'm not sure if WWIII is unavoidable especially over Taiwan. It will be nuclear and the world will end before any of those good things rationalists have promised us are realized.
Basically, China is unlikely to converge until the late 2030s in total GDP (nominal) and from thereonout even less likely to grow faster still. Even if you use South Korea or Taiwan as a framework to forecast, this does not change.
It all depends on policy. China's GDP by PPP could end up being 35% higher than the U.S. in 2050 at most pessimistic, around 2x at most optimistic. I think the gap will continue to grow after 2050, though, if the Chinese leadership supports a policy of greatly increasing fertility.
Sounds a little pessimistic to me. There's still plenty of urbanisation to go - China is now 50% urban, so there's at least another 400m people who are going to move from country to city in the next couple of decades. That's what drives growth, so I don't see the figures slowing quite as much as that.
The other point is that China's military and diplomatic engagement with the world is likely to continue to grow whether the economy surpasses the USA or not.
As noted, the forecast uses the East Asian tigers like South Korea or Taiwan as a template. That is not pessimistic, it's using the best-performing examples from the previous century and still finds China ends up not overtaking the US in a big way.
China's urbanisation is closer to 65%, not 50%. From hereonout, the relative gains to be made are going to be much smaller. Another wrinkle is that the "nice" cities are already full. Beijing and Shanghai are actively trying to push people away. Network effects are harder to achieve if you're out in hinterland, even if you are moving to a million+ city.
The wildcard would be China's diplomatic engagement but thus far it is an extremely underwhelming area for them.
>What's happened in China is that several of the coastal cities have upgraded themselves to European levels of prosperity. Then there's still a huge hinterland with very low levels of income.
> While I'm talking about it, though, I will say what worries me. In the next 20-30 years, China's economy will become significantly larger than then USA's; and it will become a more active member of the international community. At the same time, it is hemmed in by nuclear-capable US military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the US-supported Taiwan. This is the kind of situation that Kennedy triggered the Cuban missile crisis to avoid. I think that China will find it unacceptable to have US weaponry that close to its capital, and will want to force the USA to move a little further away. The only question is whether that negotiation can happen peacefully, or whether it requires armed confrontation. I'm very much hoping that it can be done peacefully.
Am I to understand you are you hoping that China be allowed to annex territory and become suzerain over a huge part of the world's population (against those populations' will!) peacefully?
I'm rather disturbed by this new birth of appeasement. The idea that the way to maintain peace with China is to abandon our allies so the Chinese feel safe. Appeasement has a track record of doing precisely the opposite of what appeasers want. It emboldens the appeased power to achieve more so the war becomes more likely. And it empowers them so that the resulting war is worse.
Seems pretty obvious, no? Better appeasement and a possibly emboldened China than risking everybody dying? (Maybe not literally everybody, but presumably most people commenting here)
Doesn't seem like a miniscule risk. And for Americans there isn't even any concrete obvious gain.
Would you personally (as an outsider) want to volunteer and join a navy defending eg Taiwan, taking a similar miniscule risk, for the sake of reducing the risk of China expanding somewhat?
If appeasement leads to a change in the intentions of the appeasee, it can be worthwhile. But then it would be called the making of an alliance, or something similar - you only appease an enemy. In thinking about whether appeasement works you have to take into account that if it is really successful, it won't be called appeasement (a variant on "treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason")
Even if the appeasee remains an implacable foe, it can be a successful tactic if you use the time gained productively. The payment of the Danegeld in the 9th-11th centuries by English kings is a proverbial example of failed appeasement:
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
But among the kings who paid it was Alfred, who used the time gained to rebuild his army and defeat the Danes. I think it's still debated whether appeasement of Hitler falls into this category.
In this case, there's a strong case for appeasing China if you think that Michael Pettis and others are right about the fragility and inherent instability of their economic model, or you think that their demographic transition will inevitably lead to a reduction in their population, their rate of growth, and their aggression. If Japan in the 1980s had had nuclear weapons and designs on Korea, the sensible thing to do would have been to be as conciliatory as possible, and wait for the bubble to burst. Which might also have been the sensible thing to do with Japan in the 1930s, horrific though the consequences for China would have been.
In general, if the long-term fundamentals are in your favour, as they have been for relatively free nations with representative governments for centuries now, appeasement has a lot to be said for it.
"Appeasement has a track record of doing precisely the opposite of what appeasers want."
What's the evidence for this? People always mention WWII, but WWI seems to offer precisely the opposite lesson: that bone-headed commitment to alliances over common sense could get 14 million people killed in horrific ways over nothing.
WWI was caused by Germany and Russia both wanting to go to war. Focusing on the specifics of August 1914 misses the point. The rise of nationalism, and the demographic situation in Eastern Europe, meant that conflict was close to inevitable. This continued to be the case until the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after WWII. Alsace-Lorraine meant that France was always very likely to be pulled in.
WWI only looks pointless from the point of view of the UK and the USA, because they didn't really want anything to change as a result of it. That was not true of the other major powers, which is why it happened.
World War 1 started when Serbia (iirc) gave in to the vast majority of Austrian demands. This made Austria think they were weaker than they were and they declared war despite mobilization not being complete. So yeah, I'm saying appeasing them didn't work either. Nor did it work with Russia and Napoleon. I can't think of any times it DID work.
A response to both of you: appeasement is not just giving in to the other side's demands. Appeasement is a policy of maintaining peace with aggressive powers by giving them what they want. It relies on the theory that a power, given its immediate demands, becomes satisfied and will cease being aggressive. In order for an example to be appeasement that worked it must be:
1.) An aggressive power making a demand.
2.) The demanded side choosing to give them exactly what they want in order to avoid violence.
3.) This resulting in the aggressive power ceasing to be aggressive.
None of either of your examples meet this standard. They all involve either negotiated compromises or defeats in war or continued aggression on the part of the other party. I'm not suggesting constant war or a maximalist approach is a good idea. But there's a world of difference between two sides with armies deciding to hammer out an agreement and appeasement.
I don't think you can choose to define appeasement as not including playing for time. The word is most strongly associated with policy towards Hitler in the late 1930s, and playing for time was both an explicit aim of the appeasers, and the reason some historians now argue that it was a good idea. You need to find another word if you're excluding playing for time, or it just gets confusing.
I also think this still falls into the Treason Never Prospers problem. An aggressive power looks like it wasn't really all that aggressive to begin with if it immediately stops being aggressive after its limited demands are met.
Examples that I think might meet your definition would include Roman grants of land to barbarian tribes, which worked for centuries (and we tend to remember the late examples where the empire was in a state of collapse, and it stopped working). Or Japan granting a commercial treaty to the Perry expedition. Various other examples of gunboat diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well, I think, involving Western powers and those areas of the world that they didn't ultimately add to their empires - Thailand, China, South America, Afghanistan. Plus several where appeasement wasn't tried, and should have been (e.g. the second Anglo-Afghan war, the 1868 British expedition to Ethiopia) because the Western power genuinely had no intention of annexing the relevant territory, and would have been happy if their limited demands were met. Understandable though it was that the non-Western power was reluctant to rely on the Western power's assurances on this point.
> I don't think you can choose to define appeasement as not including playing for time. The word is most strongly associated with policy towards Hitler in the late 1930s, and playing for time was both an explicit aim of the appeasers, and the reason some historians now argue that it was a good idea. You need to find another word if you're excluding playing for time, or it just gets confusing.
I can and I do. My knowledge of history has been called into question but from what I've read they were not playing for time. Chamberlain only started re-armament after appeasement failed. He did not initially want to do that.
Chamberlain was hoping to avoid a war effectively skipping over the actual war of 1870 that turned Germany into a so called satisfied state. In part because he expected any such war would lead to a very negative outcome for Europe. Setting aside the destructiveness of the war itself he supposedly said that if there was a war against Germany then they'd need the Russians. And once the Russians were in central Europe how would you get them out?
Of course, the obvious answer would be: don't let Germany get far enough that you need the Russians. Instead the repeated backing down gave Hitler a chance to build up further and make bolder action. It made the war longer and more deadly, setting aside the multiple genocides it enabled. But Chamberlain felt it was possible to avoid the gamble entirely.
Or do you have some evidence he was playing for time? I'm fairly sure the re-armament is considered when appeasement ended, not a part of it.
> I also think this still falls into the Treason Never Prospers problem. An aggressive power looks like it wasn't really all that aggressive to begin with if it immediately stops being aggressive after its limited demands are met.
Not at all. There's no such definitional fuzziness. Aggressive is a role in the definition, not a trait. The aggressor is the one making the demands. The key feature is that the demands stop. That appeasement actually bought peace.
> Roman grants of land to barbarian tribes
This one is complicated because the grants involved submission on the part of the tribe. It made them domestic political actors within the Roman system. I take your point that the system mostly worked and it was effectively giving them what they want. (It's more the Roman's fault it fell apart really.)
> Or Japan granting a commercial treaty to the Perry expedition
There are two issues with using Japan. Firstly, Japan's signature didn't stop western demands. The west repeatedly sought to revise the treaty which only stopped when Japan had enough military force to say no. Secondly, Japan never gave the west everything it wanted. They repeatedly negotiated over specific provisions and won more favorable terms in part because the west didn't want a full blown confrontation. Japan initiated several both in search of better terms and for domestic political reasons. (Seriously, you're going to call the time period that produced Sonno Joi appeasement? They tried to kill every westerner in Japan!)
They didn't always turn out well and sometimes that left Japan in a worse position. But this policy of limited use of military force combined with diplomatic engagement worked well. In a rather anti-appeasement example, the Shimazu got into a shooting war with Great Britain and this actually helped them form a lasting alliance with Great Britain.
> Various other examples of gunboat diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well, I think, involving Western powers and those areas of the world that they didn't ultimately add to their empires - Thailand, China, South America, Afghanistan
Not sure what you mean by South America. If you mean Venezuela then there's the added wrinkle that the US put its thumb on the scale. The example that stands out there is the War of the Triple Alliance where firm early action by Brazil kept the war smaller than it might have otherwise been despite an insanely determined Paraguay.
19th century Afghanistan is an example of the opposite: every time they gave in they lost more and more territory. There were attempts to remove Afghan sovereignty until the Afghans eventually drove them out entirely. While local Afghans sometimes allied with outsiders or struck bargains they never gave away territory in an attempt to appease Russia or Britain. If you mean Soviet Afghanistan then that's more about domestic politics. If you mean 2003 Afghanistan then I suppose that's an example that might have worked. But it's a counterfactual, not something we actually know.
China is another example of the opposite: China fought in both Opium Wars and mightily resisted colonialism. The victories of the western powers simply led to more demands. Likewise, giving in to the Japanese simply led to bolder and bolder Japanese demands and didn't prevent the ultimate invasion.
Thailand again fought and when they compromised just saw Britain and France taking more and more territory. It only stopped because France and Britain agreed to keep it around as a buffer state carved into spheres of influence and under their colonial administration. The two nations could and did adjust Thailand's borders as they saw fit. So another bad example.
> the 1868 British expedition to Ethiopia
I don't know about this one. I'll take your word for it. Though I do know that the Ethiopian military and logistical constraints of the Europeans had more to do with it survival than good will.
Just once? Or over and over again? I ask because you used the word "policy" which seems to imply it happens many times. Also it's kind of hard to argue you have a "policy" of appeasement if you accept a demand once and only once.
There are a whole lot of reasons why a one-off might be a rational approach which works exactly as described, e.g. would it have been a good idea for the USSR to issue a statement of stronger regret for shooting down KAL 007 in 1983 and paid compensation to the families, the way the US did when it shot down Iran Air 655 during the Gulf War? I'd say so, and it would most likely have done them some real good -- the deployment of Pershing nuclear-capable tactical missile in Europe (which was understandably making them unhappy) might well have not gone forward, absent this provocation and the tone-deaf Soviet response. For that matter, I don't think it impossible it contributed to strengthening the Reagan Administration's mandate to take a tougher line across the board -- people were pretty pissed, as I recall -- and that ultimately was very costly indeed to the USSR.
But on the other hand, if one requires repeated giving in to an aggressive power in the hopes of curbing its aggression, I'm not sure there are any good historical examples. As a rule, nations try giving in a little, for a short time, if they think there is something to be gained. I'm not really aware of any example of a blanket policy of the nature you describe. So it's seems to me the question of "how long?" is kind of critical here.
Again, you're mixing up appeasement with anything that involves giving the other side anything. Appeasement is not buying time or compromising, it is giving in in the belief that giving in will turn the hostile power friendly. So danegeld where you rebuild an army doesn't work either. It has to be danegeld where the Danes STOP ATTACKING.
The time periods is irrelevant: it can work on the first go or eventually.
I believe the usual belief is (1) that the Austrians deliberately made unbearable demands of the Serbs so as to have a pretext for the war on which they'd already decided. The Serbian answer did not matter, they could've been bellicose or appeasing, and neither would have changed the pre-determined Austrian response, and (2) the Serbians hadn't a prayer against the Austrians anyway, so the key question from the Austrian perspective was whether or not Germany would back the Austrians up if Serbia's protector (Russia) followed through on its commitments. So, again, the Serbian response would seem to have no effect on what happened.
If there is an action close to Sarajevo that tipped the balance towards world war (instead of some localized Balkan brouhaha), I would suggest it was the German assurance to the Austrians that they would not face Russia alone. I don't really see how that action fits into the category of appeasement, or how anyone's appeasement accelerated its effects.
For an example of when appeasement worked, I suggest three: (1) the decision by George III and Lord Shelburne to negotiate a peace promptly with the Americans after Yorktown, which successfully drew the Americans back from the French embrace, a fact of great importance to England a few years later, (2) a similar decision to cut a deal with the Americans promptly in the War of 1812, and (3) the decision by US Grant to salve the pride of the Southern military commanders after Appomattox Court House by giving unusually generous terms of surrender. In each case the stronger power declined to press its advantage to the uttermost, gave consideration to the weaker power, and won for both a noticeably better future.
Of course, there are many cases where appeasement has led to disaster, no question about that also I would say.
certainly disagree on #3. In what possible way was Reconstruction not an utter disaster? If the Southern establishment were destroyed like the Nazi establishment at Nuremberg, I can't see how that would've been worse for the development of the US (morally certainly, but economically as well, since black people would have been able to contribute more meaningfully to the free market) in the 1860s-1900s.
I agree with you in general on appeasement, and irrelevance of Serbia's answer to Austria (except as the appeasement served to show them as reasonable and move general sentiment in Europe from "Serbia killed an Archduke!" to "Austria is just being warmongering") - but small differing facts: Austria Vs. Serbia was not a guaranteed loss, in fact, Serbia successfully repelled every offensive Austria launched until Germany joined the war. The major ally of Serbia was France (there was no formal alliance with Russia) and it was France that joined the war (which Germany wanted) which pulled Russia (France's ally) into the fray, and Britain (as member of Entente) along. Germany was hoping that this source of war would get France but not Russia and definitely not Britain into the war.
If Serbia had not given in to most Austrian demands, the war would just have started sooner, because the Austria crafted the ultimatum knowing that Serbia would not agree to all of it. In fact, the Serbian gambit of looking like a reasonable party almost worked: the German Kaiser cancelled the famous "blank check" he gave to Austria, but by the time the news arrived in Austria, war had already begun.
Times when appeasement did work: the many times pre-1948 when the US threatened to nuke the USSR to get what it wanted, and the USSR backed down. The many times when the Byzantine empire paid barbarian tribes to stop ravaging their territory. The many countries that the West agreed would fall under Soviet influence after WWII (see "percentages agreement"). "Appeasement" is more the norm than the exception, because people rightly realize that not everything is worth fighting over. There's a reason that "pick your battles" is a common English phrase even today.
>Times when appeasement did work: the many times pre-1948 when the US threatened to nuke the USSR to get what it wanted, and the USSR backed down.
What? I'm not aware of that ever happening, at least not explicitly, and if it did happen implicitly, it was merely to get the Soviets to adhere to existing agreements. The US policy towards the USSR was rather muddled until 1948 and really until Korea.
"Times when appeasement did work: the many times pre-1948 when the US threatened to nuke the USSR to get what it wanted, and the USSR backed down."
This is literally the opposite of appeasement working. The US was the bellicose party in these cases and (clearly, from the fact of there being many times) it didn't lay off, so appeasement didn't work for the USSR. Getting nukes did.
Also, since the nukes gave America a seemingly or genuinely unbeatable military advantage, I doubt whether you can even classify the USSR's actions as appeasement rather than just "losing a fairly abstract military engagement very badly albeit bloodlessly" and/or just "getting kicked around like an abused dog".
I think you're way off the mark here. The parent comment said China won't want US nukes right near their capital, and you somehow jumped to assuming they want China to take over a large part of the world.
You may be misinterpreting the phrase "want to force". In my reading, it's a vague phrase that could mean any type of pressure. You seem to be reading it as meaning "declare war to force".
No, I didn't say they'd declare war to get what they want. I said appeasement makes war more likely and worse when it does happen.
I never said China would take over the world. I said it would annex or become suzerain over a large part of the world's population (by implication, the part that lives in East Asia). Annexation is obviously a reference to Taiwan. Suzerain is a reference to the parent poster's plan to coerce South Korea into not hosting US troops, something they clarified further down the thread. They mean use diplomatic and military pressure and, if that doesn't work, possibly military force. So yeah, I jumped to what they meant. They've been dodging that means Beijing gets to set South Korea's defense policy but that is in fact what that would mean.
This is like a game of written broken telephone. Each comment distorts meaning a little more.
I never said you said China would take over the world. I said,
"[you're] assuming they want China to take over *a large part* of the world",
which was my (perhaps unfair?) paraphrasing of,
"you hoping that China be allowed to annex territory and become suzerain over a huge part of the world's population (against those populations' will!) peacefully?"
In context of what I'm responding to, I hope it's clear that "take over" means "annex or become suzerain", and "large/huge part of the world" was just my attempt to stay close to your own wording.
> They mean use diplomatic and military pressure and, if that doesn't work, possibly military force. So yeah, I jumped to what they meant.
From my reading (I've read the whole thread), they clarified the exact opposite of the conclusion you jumped to.
Taking a step back from nitpicking over word choice, my reading of the original comment is:
China won't want US nukes so close to its capital. I hope they can negotiate for the US to move them further away peacefully and that there is no armed confrontation.
Well, if that's the case then I agree. Apparently my reading skills need some burnishing. A peaceful resolution would be best. One that doesn't involve nebulous economic or political pressure but involves China demonstrating its role as a good and non-aggressive power such that South Korea feels peace is best served by a drawdown. And that such a drawdown actually creates peace. (And hopefully reunification. I don't think even China really wants North Korea as it is.)
It sounds like you have some fairly clear views on who the good guys and the bad guys are. That's fine, but I may not share those views, so it's hard to talk if you just assume them.
"Am I to understand you are you hoping that China be allowed to annex territory and become suzerain..." I didn't say anything like this, so... no? Obviously, you don't know me, but for future reference, if you're talking to me, you can safely assume that I'm not hiding plans for world domination behind mild words.
"At the same time, it is hemmed in by nuclear-capable US military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the US-supported Taiwan. [...] I think that China will find it unacceptable to have US weaponry that close to its capital, and will want to force the USA to move a little further away."
How could this be accomplished in a way that doesn't run over the sovereignty of the nations that host those American bases? You said force. What kind of force, how? Are you going to argue China doesn't want to annex Taiwan? I see a pretty clear implication here. If I'm mistaken I'm willing to admit it but you'll have to explain.
I don't have any vision of who the good or bad guys are in an inherent sense. But I see you as arguing, as I've seen both Chinese and American appeasers argue, that China has some natural right to feel secure. That we should understand Chinese moves to (your word) force the US out of sovereign allied nations as natural and a way to peace. This is objectively not the case. It relies on a model world where Japan does not really exist and is just an American satellite. It's appeasement and it doesn't work. It makes war more likely and more destructive.
"How could this be accomplished in a way that doesn't run over the sovereignty of the nations that host those American bases?"
Again, there seem to be some odd assumptions here. Do you think that South Korean sovereignty depends on or is enhanced by the presence of foreign trroops? That's an inherently weird position! We all know how it's come about, historically, but it's a bizarre place to be starting. How could this be accomplished? North Korea chills out, the US removes its base, China feels less threatened, SK continues as normal. The same goes for the Philippines and Japan. The US could reposition on Guam and Hawaii.
"China has some natural right to feel secure" - yes, I think I do hold that view. Why don't you?
"Chinese moves to (your word) force the US out" - China hasn't made any such moves. And I'm hoping it never will. But countries negotiate over where they might position military bases all the time. I'm not understanding why you think this is a bad thing.
"a model world where Japan does not really exist" - literally no idea what you're talking about there. Japan exists. It will continue to exist without a US presence in Yokohama.
> Again, there seem to be some odd assumptions here. Do you think that South Korean sovereignty depends on or is enhanced by the presence of foreign trroops?
It doesn't rely on it. But it relies on the ability to decide on whether it has troops or not. In short, that the decision about Americans on South Korean soil is made in Seoul and Washington. You said China would want to force them out. Not that you wanted China to diplomatically draw down tensions. You posed an aggressive China using force in a way that might lead to war. You're still not talking about the actual mechanism whereby China convinces SOUTH KOREANS to not want a US base there. You're talking about bargaining chips between the US and China.
> yes, I think I do hold that view. Why don't you?
Because other nations' mere existence creates insecurity. That's the security dilemma. China and America, merely by seeking to defend themselves, create insecurity in each other. Managing and navigating that insecurity is the way to peace. Demanding the other side take actions to end that insecurity and backing that demand up with force is what a war is, more or less. We have a right to security is a very common cry of warmakers.
A nation that infinitely seeks security is definitionally an imperial power because they have to violate other nations' sovereignty to gain that security. For example, by preventing South Korea from having an American base it otherwise might want to have.
Really, if there's one nation in the world that should understand this it's China. Both 19th century European imperialism and 20th century Japanese imperialism in China were posed as bringing peace through security of another nation. This exact issue (the removal of foreign bases) was the motivation for several wars which saw Chinese sovereignty reduced.
> literally no idea what you're talking about there. Japan exists. It will continue to exist without a US presence in Yokohama.
The word "really" is key here. Of course they literally exist. But you're not posing them as equal nations. Japan or South Korea have not been posed as players but as pieces in geopolitics.
"Force" - You're reading way too much into a single word. I didn't mean exclusively by the use of military power. I do think that pressure will have to be applied, but I'm hoping it will be diplomatic and trade pressure.
"Because other nations' mere existence creates insecurity." - In that case, America's stuffed. Because other nations are going to continue to exist. Your nation will always be insecure. As will mine. As is China. And it will continue to attempt to mitigate that insecurity. If you can't accept China's "mere existence" then there isn't a conversation to be had.
"South Korea from having an American base it otherwise might want to have" - Might want, might not want. You are aware that there is some considerable resistance to the US military in South Korea, aren't you? Do you know that American soldiers aren't greeted with open arms all around the world?
I don't see why the competition between the US and China has to follow the US-USSR model closely. It very well may not. I would argue we are first of all missing the kick-off for the US-USSR nuclear rivalry, which would be the desire of the US to forestall further expansion of the Iron Curtain (e.g. through a Soviet-engineered Communist coup in West Germany) without the politically-unsustainable act of maintaining large conventional forces in Germany. From there it's arguable the thing took on a life of its own, since the Soviets developed and deployed strategic nuclear assets as a deterrent to American use of same, and vice versa.
That doesn't really seem applicable to the US-China competition. China doesn't really seem that interested in territorial expansion, although understandably they want to throw their weight around in local security zones. But while I can see the US being willing to go full strategic over an invasion of Japan, say, I can't see the same for freedom of navigation in the South China Sea[1].
I would guess it's for this reason that China itself hasn't been especially eager to grow its own strategic arsenal[2]. They may not see the main competition as military, or helped along by traditional military assets -- in which case, they probably don't care that much about all those US bases in the region. It's maybe also worth pointing out the major economic ties between China and the US, whereas the US had essentially no trading relationship with the USSR. That probably makes a difference, too.
----------------
[1] It's a very interesting question how *that* will shape up, but if I had to guess, I'd say lots of stiff-legged patrols and exercises, sort of like the US/USSR in the Black Sea during the Cold War.
[2] Interestingly, that may be changing, the Chinese seems to be embarking for the first time on a serious expansion of their strategic arsenal, but if I had to guess I'd say the reason is more centered on a potential medium-term showdown over Taiwan than any broad ramp-up in military competition.
Probably a big source of differing opinions is whether we consider the (officially declared) desire for integrating Taiwan even if Taiwan disagrees as "territorial expansion" or not. Arguably, China would not consider it as territorial expansion, while USA and other countries in the region definitely would see it as unacceptable expansion that also threatens key economic and strategic interests (e.g. semiconductor manufacturing).
Yeah I am not competent to assess Taiwan, and I realize that is probably a big part of the equation. I'm not sure why, I just don't feel like I have a feel for it.
I think that it is probable (but not certain) that the issue of China (re)acquiring Taiwan would be actually considered equivalent of USSR acquiring West Germany during cold war.
It's not analogous because West Germany was never part of the USSR, and never had any cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or political affiliation with the USSR. A better analogy might be Nazi Germany's claims to Danzig, which was part of Germany before WWI. But the Danzig population strongly favored annexation by Germany, so it's not a perfect analogy either. I'm not aware of any perfect analogy that's better known than Taiwan itself.
Possibly more analogous to seizing West Berlin, in that that was actually on the table for a while as a potential flash point, where the US might have backed down if it happened but might not; The soviets rolling tanks across the border to West Germany as a whole would have been war for certain.
I really just cannot see either Truman or Eisenhower backing down on West Berlin. The Truman Administration was very seriously considering reopening the roads to Berlin in 1948 by force, which almost certainly would've meant a general war, and I believe some of them thought the Airlift would bring on war anyway, because the Soviets were sure to interfere (but at least then the Soviets would clearly have fired the first shot, literally, since they'd have to bring down some airplanes and kill a bunch of Americans). I can't see them feeling *more* accommodating after the Airlift, sunk cost and all that, plus Berlin having thereby turned into a primary symbol of resistance to the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe.
The US-China relationship is certainly very different to the US-USSR relationship, but a rival having a nuclear-capable base right next to your capital city (when you don't have any comparable assets anywhere near their shores) just seems like a bad idea, whatever the relationship.
China and territorial expansion: the whole "Belt and Road" thing was a fairly major attempt to buy territorial influence, including the right to dock military vessels in locations around the Indian Ocean. And China just pretty much annexed Hong Kong in violation of an international treaty. I'd say they're looking much more interested in expansion than they were 10 years ago.
I also think that freedom of navigation is more important than you're implying. The US is the world's preeminent naval power. Accepting that there's part of the ocean where they can't go would be a very large climbdown.
So I think there's lots of potential for clashes or even conflict. But I hope that the trading relationship will push both sides toward peaceful solutions rather than the other. I live right opposite Taiwan, so I'm very keen for violence not to happen around here!
Sure it's a bad idea. But is it a bad idea worth getting nuked over? (And in the event, both JFK and Khrushchev answered that in the negative.) I'm sure if the Chinese could wish those bases away, or exert some economic pressure to have them gone, they would. But..they haven't yet, so that suggests to me it's not that important to them, so it's a bad idea but far down the list of bad things to get worked up about.
Yes, I agree the Chinese are quite interested in greater influence around the world, and that can shape up like some of the US/USSR rivalry in the 3rd world. Would we get as far as proxy wars, like Vietnam? Seems doubty. The Chinese don't show any big interest in exporting communism, they seem just to be looking for monetary and economic influence, primarily (like any other great power), as well as throwing their weight around -- intimidation and presence -- in the Pacific littoral. Those are all matters of concern, to be sure, but they just don't seem to rise to the same level as Stalin potentially invading West Germany with 2 million men in 1955, and I can't really think of an equivalent concern. Hong Kong doesn't cut it, the Brits gave it back to the Chinese fair and square, and the fact that the Chinese accelerated the absorption in abrogation of the treaty details is the kind of thing that can make the people right there outraged (and they were), and pundits and international relations geeks outraged (and they were) -- but it is not, I think, the kind of thing that will make the generic American voter even a little bit inclined to risk incineration to oppose. Taiwan is another and much more complicated story, and deserves its own analysis, so I will say in brief I think anything can happen with Taiwan and one would need to be very hip to the details (which I am not) to have a defensible opionion.
I don't think there's going to be any need for the US to swallow there's a part of the ocean where they can't go. I don't think the Chinese would push it that far, because it is frankly ridiculous -- nobody has ever successfully defended the principle that some vast swathe of ocean is a national lake. The Soviets kind of wanted to do that with the Black Sea (which is why I made the comparison), but even with the huge geographical advantages they had there, they could not pull it off. I think the Chinese are not dumb enough to even try it in the South China Sea.
Doesn't mean they won't totally get in the faces of American forces, and pretend like they totally *could* run the running dogs off if they wanted to, they just happen not to want to today...which is why I said I expect shit like this:
But my guess it that this is where it stays, that it doesn't broaden into the kind of strategic conflict for which being able to launch nuclear-armed B-2s to blow away Guangzhou is really important (and you could do that from a boomer offshore anyway).
Anyway, I'm no expert, but it's interesting to hear opinions on this, and I appreciate your reading mine and giving your points of agreement/disagreement. I personally wish I understood the potential outcomes in re Taiwan better, less because I fear being turned into greasy vapor in a fireball, but more because that kind of crap can really ruin the economy and I would hate to be eating cat food in retirement.
The way I see it (from a more Chinese-influenced perspective), some crises within China's border (Xinjiang, the border with India, HK) have been handled in a characteristically more heavy-handed way than warranted and those had been exploited by Uyghur & HK elements with covert ties to US strategic interests, or the Indian Army. Taiwan is basically a ticking time bomb that is more likely to go off than not in the medium term. And since the Taiwanese leadership has a great interest to be cozier with other "democratic" states led by the US, this is a great cause for American &/or Japanese intervention. It enables the US to use overwhelming force and escalate, to achieve goals that has only been done by pressure, covert operations & relative isolation.
Thanks for the comment. I don't know if Taiwan is a short-term time bomb. If so, I see that as a sign of weakness in the current Chinese leadership. We all know China is facing two very big challenges in the next few decades: (1) the very fast aging of its population, from the One-Child Policy, one of the greatest mistakes ever made by a major nation, and (2) the fact that at some point the Chinese coastal middle class is going to get fed up with living well below its means and saving so much, which means the price of capital inside China is going to normalize (rise by a lot) -- and then the inefficiencies of a central command economy are going to emerge like leprosy.
To my mind, if the Chinese leadership is actually eyeing a big patriotic adventure in Taiwan, rather than just let sleeping dogs lie for another half century or so, with some regular grumbling and saber-rattling, it means they are worried they can't solve the looming demographic or economic problems, and they're thinking "it's now or never," meaning they see Chinese strength as peaking in the short term and then declining.
> What's happened in China is that several of the coastal cities have upgraded themselves to European levels of prosperity. Then there's still a huge hinterland with very low levels of income.
That sounds like the U.S. in the not-too-distant past. I've read that some of the U.S. troops in the Vietnam War had brain damage from childhood malnutrition.
I find a more interesting question to be: will the US get over itself and try to turn Russia into an ally (or at least neutral) to properly surround China, or will just continue to use Russia as a convenient scapegoat.
Difficulty is that Russia and China have interests that more naturally align with each other. Further, the US is, on a global scale, so much more powerful than China and Russia that they are much more incentivized to work against us than against each other.
Not to metion working with Russia would mean throwing Europe under the bus, which would make all of our allies more skittish.
Simple strategical reasons for the US: China is a rival to the US and a potential threat. Russia clearly isn't.
Also, from the perspective of Russia, you wouldn't want to be allied with a superpower right next to you (China) - that's just gonna lead to you getting dominated in the long run.
More similar culture, the Russian people see themselves as Europeans (because they mostly are). Russia needs the help much more than China does (mainly in transitioning away from the oligarch and corruption model). Russia has much more to worry about from China than it does anyone else. Russia would be easier to please at a negotiating table (adjusting borders, disbanding NATO). There is no actual particular reason for the US to have a problem with or fear Russia (at least not ones that couldn't be fixed through diplomacy), a Russia at it's maximum potential is going to be about half of a United States in terms of output.
But if the choice is between having Russia in your alliance system, or the rest of Europe, that's a no brainer. Do you see a Russian alliance as attainable (for the US) without losing its existing European alliances?
Another difficulty is that you see “cleaning up the oligarchy” as the main thing Russia needs to do, and in a sense you are right. The problem is that the last thing the Russian government, the people you would be allying with, want is to clean up the oligarchy, since that would decrease their power.
This hits the nail on the head. The Russian people might be able to fit in with the western sphere, but the Russian government does not, and unfortunately one must negotiate with governments not the gestalt will of the people
Russia has historically been a much greater threat to the US than has China, and Russia is currently a much greater expansionary threat within Europe than is China. Maybe if Russia withdrew from Crimea it could earn some goodwill?
Nah, no goodwill would be forthcoming. After the USSR dissolved astonishingly peacefully, all things considered, Russia was met with terrible advice, constant suspicion and NATO encroachment. The West was only ever prepared to see it either as an active adversary, or as decaying remains of a former one.
Russians understand this, and thus support Putin's ostentatious defiance. When your options are either bogeyman or laughingstock of the world, the choice is obvious.
"Russians understand this, and thus support Putin's ostentatious defiance. When your options are either bogeyman or laughingstock of the world, the choice is obvious."
I mean, I think you're basically analyzing the Russian view of this correctly here, but as a matter of practical fact they're both, at best. I'd argue they tried to pick bogeyman and discovered laughing stock was behind that door too.
This makes it sound like the former Russian colonies had no say in the process.
Perhaps their thinking was like: "either we join NATO as fast as we can, or ten years later Russians may change their mind and we become their colony again". Looking at e.g. Crimea today, were they wrong?
"You'll note all the countries in question are still below (sometimes vastly) US per capita."
This seems to miss the very obvious fact that China has more than 4x the population as the US. It doesn't need to be anywhere close to US GDP per capita to vastly exceed it in economic, military, and technological prowess. In fact, China is *already* 15% above the US in terms of GDP PPP, which measures how much goods and services the country produces. The situation is even worse than that, because 30% of China's GDP is from manufacturing, compared to only 10% of the US GDP. In terms of how much physical stuff each country produces, the US is at $2.1 trillion per year, while China is at $7.2 trillion per year, or 3.4x America's industrial output. Make no mistake: China is an industrial behemoth that is heads and shoulders above every other country in history in terms of industrial capability, and when it starts dominating the world, shouting "but your GDP per capita is still small!" isn't going to make them stop.
Plus, the US alliance system as currently constituted is going to continue to outweigh the PRC system for the forseeable future, even in absolute terms. Unless you are forecasting major diplomatic realignments, with large chunks of the US alliance system defecting to a Pax Sinica? Doesn't seem very likely to me.
With the USSR gone, there's no reason to align with anyone but the US. Even the people who hate the US don't have a plausible alternative, such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. If China becomes a dominant world power, enough to credibly deter US action, then it would make sense for other countries to seek Chinese alignment. The most likely types of countries to do so are those actively maligned by the US (Iran, Cuba), those in close proximity to China (Mongolia, Vietnam), or especially those that are both (North Korea). North Korea is already tightly connected with China, but that could also be for other reasons, especially considering the history of the Korean War. I think it's too early and China still doesn't have enough power to actually tilt the scales.
What would need to happen in the short term is that China would need to actively intervene in countries that are currently pro-US, especially in countries that have pro-US leadership but not necessarily pro-US populations. Overthrowing the governments of US-aligned countries in the region, especially Taiwan, would be an early show of force and would definitely be a strong indicator of whether my theory is correct. The more China is able to actively intervene in the leadership and policies of other countries, and the less likely the US is to forcibly counter, the more likely that a new alliance system can and would form. I agree that currently China is not in a position to do that, but I'm not sure that "foreseeable future" is still out of the question.
I expect plenty of defections as hegemony game theory gets replaced with balance of power. There must be plenty of hangers-on who will leave once a credible alternative emerges. Not that I think that'll be enough to radically change things in this case.
China will have weight of population and you're right that war is an absolute contest. The average American soldier will no doubt be much better equipped and training because that's what GDP per capita gives you. The question is whether that equipment and training will let them beat five Chinese soldiers. Though if you instead count the entire American alliance system then China would be outnumbered. So it somewhat matters on how the geopolitical chips fall.
Of course, the real issue is that the war is largely going to be in the Pacific. As in, the ocean. There is no equivalent to Eastern Europe where a huge Chinese and American army are facing off. If China is victorious on all land fronts with US allies then it will have taken South Korea. (And frankly taking the DMZ would be a pretty huge task.) If Vietnam ends up on our side then there'd be huge natural barriers. And even if they win then they get... what, former French Indochina? Okay.
Without major naval and air victories China will face a hostile Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, etc that they can't really neutralize. The US will be able to stage naval invasions and bombing runs agains pretty much all vital Chinese infrastructure. Even if they manage, the US has rings of islands further back and has something of a playbook for fighting that war.
So the question is who has more/better planes and ships and high skilled soldiers capable of doing things like naval warfare. And that's where GDP per capita does matter. Smaller but wealthier nations routinely punch HUGELY above their weight in naval/air warfare.
"The question is whether that equipment and training will let them beat five Chinese soldiers."
As a defense nerd (This is an anti qualification, don't take me seriously:)
Absolutly yes, for the forseeable future.
It's not just gear, it's moral, training, and leadership.
Their training is VERY bad compared to the NATO militaries in general, their logistics is bad, their NCO corps is a joke.
That said, none of this maters. China is spending money where it maters to them: the ability to stand off a western power near their borders. They aren't interested in adventures (as far as we know), so the only thing their military needs to be able to do is let their neighbors know who's boss, which it does handily; and support a decent enough arms industry to eat into Russia's foreign markets.
You've correctly pointed out all the reasons why China would not be (and has historically not been) interested in expansionary wars: because it doesn't have much to gain from them. That's why China is likely to focus on using trade, diplomacy, science, and technology to expand its influence, not wars of conquest. These include the Belt and Road initiative; parallel international financial organizations; investments in Africa; building out 5G networks in other countries; and investments in AI, solar panels, and nuclear power (they are currently among the world leaders in all three, if not the world leader). At the most, China might invade Taiwan and fund some proxy wars against US allies, but it's not stupid enough to engage in open warfare with a nuclear superpower like the US. Even the USSR wasn't stupid enough to do that, and their ideology was far more violently expansionist than China's.
Also, if it was advantageous to have a small number of highly equipped soldiers instead of a large number of poorly equipped soldiers, China could do that too. It already has a higher GDP PPP than the US, so it could afford to send the same number of soldiers as the US while equipping them with more expensive gear.
No, it can't. Like I said, war is an absolute not a relative game. Measures like PPP are relative. The US's absolute GDP per capita would outbid the Chinese for equipment/resources.
Its soldiers were less well equipped than their western counterparts? My point is not that China has no chance of winning. It's that the US soldiers will be better equipped. That might not mean they can win: the Soviet army probably would have won in western Europe because it had a solid strategy that involved striking hard and using their numbers to their advantage. But it was predicated on the (correct) idea that 1 American tank was worth more than 1 Soviet tank.
Uh, what about PPP is relative? The point of PPP is to measure GDP in stuff produced within an economy, rather than via what people will pay for that stuff in international trade. PPP is the correct measure for a country's native military industry, because that's all internal to that country's economy and the exchange rate is irrelevant (it's *not* the correct measure for countries that buy military equipment, but the USA doesn't do that and the PRC doesn't do a huge amount of it).
Its correct if the industry is completely internal. But it's not. Things like the price of iron mean that absolute measures still matter. PPP is an adjustment, in absolute terms that means the US dollar buys more.
The thing you're pointing out (I think) is that Chinese guns having less access to steel in a straight up economic competition doesn't mean that they don't have a military industry that can compete. And I'm not saying that they don't.
Why would it outbid the Chinese for equipment/resources? If the US GDP is $21 trillion and it wants to equip a million soldiers, while the Chinese GDP is $24 trillion and it wants to equip a million soldiers, why would China be at a disadvantage?
Your numbers are off. The US has a GDP of $21 trillion and China has $14 trillion. You're doing an adjustment but relative standards like how much toilet paper costs in China made with Chinese labor from Chinese trees is not as relevant in an international competition as the absolute number. Likewise, the relative advantage of the US per person is not relevant if China can swamp out buying power in absolute terms (say, by doubling its GDP per capita but remaining much lower than the US per capita).
My understanding is that while the US Navy trivially controls the open oceans and could probably defeat every other navy in the world put together, shore defences are a real threat and land-based missiles means that US Naval dominance doesn't extend all the way to the Chinese coast - that'd be fine for most purposes, since the US doesn't want to invade China, but is an issue wrt defending Taiwan
I think it depends on timing. Without air superiority (or at least without the other guy *not* having air superiority) it's tricky hitting ships from shore, because you aren't exactly sure where they are. And of course you have no hope of hitting subs. So I think the basic tactical game is a race between the PLA ferrying enough hardware/meatware across the strait and the US bringing sufficient air cover in, e.g. a carrier, at which point further travel across the strait is out of the question.
My speculation would be that the unofficial deal with the Taiwanese is that it's their job to deny the PLA air superiority long enough for American air forces to arrive -- hence they're historical keen interest in buying the best fighters we can make, and the rumors of direct American training -- maybe with the help of whatever submarine or surface assets the USN happens to have nearby at the time.
1) dumbfire is old hat; AShMs of the present day have in-flight targetting, so a rough knowledge of the enemy ship's location is sufficient to launch. Subs are hard to attack, 'tis true, but unless I've missed something the US doesn't have submersible aircraft carriers.
2) modern SAMs have ranges substantially in excess of the 130 km width of the Taiwan Strait; projecting air power over the Strait or even Taiwan would require the destruction of PLA mainland-based SAM installations. (Of course, this does go both ways, with Taiwanese SAMs equally posing an obstacle to PLA air power, although how long those would last against SRBMs is questionable.)
Look up the S-400, the HQ-9B and the DF-21D.
There's also the question of whether a carrier can carry enough aircraft to achieve air superiority against actual land airbases (the answer is generally No, although there are some asterisks).
1) I don't find this super credible. If you mean "rough" as in "plus or minus a few hundred yards" but I can see the ship, visually or on radar, sure, but so far as I know you can't fire an antiship missile at a target over the horizon where you think you know the position +/- 10 miles and expect a hit. I'm willing to be persuaded if you have some linky or other on that point, though, I am not fully versed in this stuff. No, submarines don't carry aircraft, but they can quite easily sink troop carriers and take out land-based targets, so they're a major problem for an invader. Obviously not nearly as useful as air cover, but they can make a mess of your invasion fleet (and your airbases and radar installations on land).
2) Meh. Your first salvo is obviously anti-radiation missiles to nail any long-range search radar, and if the enemy has to depend on short-range targeting radar 100km is going to be a problem. Plus a good assortment of cruise missiles for any fixed batteries, known radar installatations, et cetera. It's not like the principles of establishing air superiority haven't been worked out quite well by American forces, it's just a question of how fast the necessary hardware can get onto the scene. The Taiwanese air force is not poorly equipped on a per capita basis, and if they have the right training I think they will probably do a decent job of slowing the PLA down -- which, recall, has zero as in zippity zap, nada, bupkis instituational experience establishing air cover in a real shooting war. The USAF and USN have decades.
Doesn't mean the Taiwanese are going to win, of course, still less not suffer grieviously, war is always full of surprises after all, and I definitely think the final outcome does indeed depend critically on how fast major USN assets can be brought to bear. But of course unless an invation comes as a *complete* surprise -- meaning intelligence has fucked up again -- they would be doing a little prepositioning anyway.
3) I don't agree. US experience has been that one carrier, possibly two if you're in a hurry, is easily a match for as many air bases as any one non-First-World country has, and maybe even most of the latter. They really are awesome war machines.
I'm very curious about how effective carriers are in the post cruise missile (and I also mean all other variations of advanced missiles) world. Modern navies with carriers haven't been tested in truly adversarial conditions since WWII. I think it's certainly possible that they can still provide major force projection to a region, but I lean towards them probably being not terribly effective in a full war situation. You simply can't get that many planes on a carrier, compared to land bases. With longer plane ranges than we had in WWII, I think that land based planes will also be a better option and negate some of the necessity of carriers as well. Along those lines, I don't think carriers had any impact at all on the European side of WWII, yet there were many planes involved and sea-based invasions.
>I don't find this super credible. If you mean "rough" as in "plus or minus a few hundred yards" but I can see the ship, visually or on radar, sure, but so far as I know you can't fire an antiship missile at a target over the horizon where you think you know the position +/- 10 miles and expect a hit.
A lot of ASMs have search capability. Tomahawk was doing it back in the 80s. (https://www.navalgazing.net/Tomahawk-Part-2) It's not a 100% chance of a hit (it was around 25% for TASM), but this is an area where I expect things have gotten better since then.
That said, yeah, I definitely don't think the carriers are doomed.
A note on 3: its not as if the US would be completely reliant on its aircraft carriers, since it also has access to airbases in Japan and S. Korea. These bases reduce the amount of time it would take to get the necessary aircraft to the front, since instead of moving a carrier all the way there you just send your aircraft to your bases.
Surely any easily forseeable conflict in the Pacific will be primarily naval, and one thing the RN showed through much of the 18th and early 19th century is that experience and discipline can routinely edge out (somewhat) better equipment. The USN has way *way* more bluewater sailing and training experience than the Chinese, so much so that they would be heavy favorites I think even if the numbers and quality of equipment were the other way (and I don't think they are yet).
But it's an important thing to keep, it can't be taken for granted, and if I were God Emperor of the US, I would definitely reorder some national priorities a little to keep and even hone that edge. I would take a pile of money from idiotic nation-building ventures, and from what I consider an overbloated littoral combat strategy, and sink it into plain old traditional bluewater naval ships and training. Boring stuff like building more cruisers and DDGs with upgraded battle-management systems and more drone capabilities, more attack subs with maybe continued emphasis on importing support of special ops, better carrier availability, and more frequent and expensive training exercises. I think the coordination with allies is already pretty good[1] so that one doesn't really need work, but I would guess they (the allies) would be heartened if we (the US) showed more resolve in the area of ensuring strategic naval dominance.
I'd also probably take a gimlet-eyed look at personnel policities and what their focus is, ha ha, arguably even more important, but that's another can of worms entirely.
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[1] I don't know how the Biden Administration stumbled into a freaking brilliant[2] submarine deal with the Aussies, it's like seeing a chimp start speaking in iambic pentameter, but I can forgive a metric ton of fecklessness elsewhere because of it.
[2] Which you can tell it is by the nature of the people furious about it ha ha.
>Surely any easily forseeable conflict in the Pacific will be primarily naval, and one thing the RN showed through much of the 18th and early 19th century is that experience and discipline can routinely edge out (somewhat) better equipment. The USN has way *way* more bluewater sailing and training experience than the Chinese, so much so that they would be heavy favorites I think even if the numbers and quality of equipment were the other way (and I don't think they are yet).
I would be extremely reluctant to draw too many conclusions from experience in that era. I would point to WWI as showing that training and sea experience mattered much less in that era, although maybe things have changed back. Experience still does count, but China has been acquiring it at a fantastic rate, and they're a full-fledged blue-water fleet these days. But no, they're still outnumbered and probably behind us in equipment.
No, the US littoral combat strategy dates back to the early 2000s, when we had decided that the biggest threat was overgrown speedboats in the Persian Gulf, and built very fast and underarmed ships to combat it. It was pretty stupid at the time, and has left us with a pile of useless ships today.
I'm not sure what made our politicians see sense either, but I'm glad we're going to be getting functional submarines. (I understand why the French are pissed off, though, they offered us perfectly good submarines and we insisted on altering the design in stupid ways, then pull out a few years later because altering designs takes time and the new design is stupid - not exactly their fault)
I'm kind of confused about how good for Australia that deal is. Seems like they had a perfectly fine deal and then ran off at the drop of a hat without consulting with the French. We can't afford to lose allies.
I'm also not convinced they're particularly helpful (at least compared to non-nuclear subs). They'll be ready by 2040, which seems like a hella long time, and nuclear subs tend to leave thermal wakes in the water, meaning they'll be easier to spot.
I'm not sure where you're getting nuclear submarines being easier to spot due to "thermal wakes". The wake of a nuclear submarine will be a fraction of a degree warmer than the water around it. Smaller than the temperature difference between the normal operating depth of the submarine and the surface. So any "thermal wake" will rise until it reaches water at the same temperature, whereupon it will no longer be buoyant - the slightly warmed water will not reach the surface where it could be detected by e.g. infrared sensors.
Yeah it's a weird comparison. The GDP per capita of Monaco is enormous (something like $185,000), but nobody trembles before the Monegasque opinion on international affairs.
Big agree. I'd say that the West in general is in the middle of the Denial phase of dealing with China's rise ("no they'll never become a superpower! Something vague about demographics, something something!") Followed soon by Anger, which I suspect will manifest itself poorly around Taiwan. Worth noting that World War 2 was won by the much larger population country with unmatched industrial might to produce endless tanks, planes, ships etc....
Even if there's something in China's development model that causes a crash in the 2020s or 2030s, they are now permanently a global superpower and At The Table of world powers, so to speak. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube here
Sure. The question is whether the US is going to have to adjust itself to living under a Pax Sinica. This is the bit that I (and many other commenters) don't buy. I don't think anyone disputes that the PRC is now a great power and seems likely to remain such.
Literally has for ages had two usages. One usages is descriptive, it states the phrase it is attached to should be interpreted exactly as said. The other usage is as a hyperbolic, it adds emphasis to the phrase it is attached to.
None of this is new. A quick Google search finds both usages go back to the 1700's, making it older than the country I live in (Canada).
There has been a recent uptick of the second usage in the last 10 years, and a reaction against that. Some of this is attributed to recency bias. Although this goes back to the 1700's, a lot of people are just becoming conscious of the dual usages now. Otherwise the reaction is mostly described with the "default" response to people reacting negatively to language change: language is a core part of group identity for people (race, class, culture, etc) and are very defensive to language innovations that come from groups they view as lower.
I mostly see this from people with so-called "right brain" degrees. The increased usage appeared to be driven from celebrities. I do view "right brain" people as viewing celebrities as lesser, so the default explanation seems to work.
I've put "right brain" in quotes each time because I know right brain vs left brain is literally false, but it probably invokes the correct bundle of degrees. Also notice my usage of literally here is the second, hyperbolic, usage. I presume most readers wouldn't have noticed unless I pointed it out.
I've done a bit of poking around and found some citations of 17th century usage of the emphatic 'literally'.
More to keep things lively than to resolve anything I'll add Benjamin Dreyer's take on this in his "An Utterly Complete Guide to Clarity and Style" - Copy Chief of Random House
"LITERALLY
A respectable word that has been distorted into the Intensifier from Hell. No, you did not literally die from laughing. No, I don't care that your cool friends are "literally" thus. If all your cool friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you?"
If I remember correctly, it was only a few years ago that Merriam-Webster and others changed the definition of literally to now also mean the opposite of literally. Given that, literally all rules are off the table now.
There’s no sense in which literally is used to mean to opposite of literally - that is, to resolve ambiguity and make it clear that something is *not* literally true. I’ve checked Miriam-Webster and indeed that use is not given as a definition.
The hyperbolic use is given, but that’s not using literally to *convey that something is* not literally true, it’s using literally to *exaggerate about* something which is not literally true. It absolutely cannot be replaced with ‘figuratively’ and retain the same meaning.
What I’m getting at is that there’s a difference between saying something is literally true when it happens to not be (exaggeration) and using literally in order to inform people that something isn’t literally true (which would be using it to mean its opposite, and as far as I know is unheard of).
‘Like’ has a perfectly clear and well-defined meaning in that sentence: ‘approximately’.
Without intending do be snarky - do you think it might be the case that you find it hard to infer what words outside of your own idiolect are used to mean?
Nonplussed is an interesting word to me because (literally) every time I hear it I have to rack my brains to remember whether it means ‘not bothered’ or ‘bemused’ or what.
Sure. My point was that in the case of a phone call, "literally" is doing work, as one might consider a phone call to be implicitly included metaphorically in "I never saw him before".
The second example you gave is indeed a common function of the word in a sentence like that.
It can also be used to coney that something is stronger-than-approximately true. Allow me to replace your sentence with a different one: “I never see Ted any more.”
This could either mean 1) “I very rarely see Ted these days” or 2) “I literally never see Ted any more”. If I mean the latter then it’s quite handy to add in the word literally to make that clear.
Here’s a (subtler) third way of using the word literally. Imagine that I still see Ted sometimes, but I’m kinda peeved I don’t see him as much as I’d like to, and I decide to use the rhetorical technique of hyperbole to convey the strength of my feelings on the matter. “I literally never see Ted these days,” I say, asserting (2), knowing full well that everyone will understand this to be an exaggeration of (1), which I really mean.
This seems to me to be the correct explanation. I think it's the same thing with words like "really" and "truly" and "actually". Each of them is a step on a treadmill where an expression is first used both precisely and hyperbolically with context making the difference clear, and then some adverb is used to differentiate those two even in contexts where it is ambiguous, and then the precise form picks up its own hyperbolic use and context once again serves to differentiate.
Just like "very", "really", "exactly", "precisely", and the like. It's helpful when people have a verbal tic that differentiates their stronger statements from their weaker ones, even if they draw that line somewhere slightly different from where you do.
I don't use that word, and when I read it, I tend to just kind of skip over it and figure out what's going on from context. (I also do that with "judicious", but with "bemused" I have an excuse!)
I don't use that word, and when I read it, I tend to just kind of skip over it and figure out what's going on from context. (I also do that with "judicious", but with "bemused" I have an excuse!)
According to a graph linked to on MR a decade ago, college football fans are the most conservative of sports fans (NBA fans are the most liberal). That comports with my experience. Wealthy conservative alumni are also often big doners to non-Ivy League colleges, often for purposes of helping the football program as opposed to helping the academic side of the school.
While watching college football yesterday and thinking about the University of Austin, I got to thinking: "Why can't all these rich conservative donors use their money to influence their universities in a more conservative direction, if that is such a big concern these days?"
Then it hit me. If football is the most conservative institution on campus and college football fans tend to stay conservatives, then the best way to preserve a conservative culture at a university is to support the football program.
So maybe what the University of Austin should focus on is putting a good football program together. Of course, the trouble with that is they picked the wrong town...
I think you might be getting a bit of this backwards. I think ecological factors explain why college football fans are one of the most conservative sports fandoms while NBA fans are the most liberal.
First, there's a big effect where people tend to be fans of the most prominent sports team near them. Big metro areas usually have professional sports teams, while many rural areas (particularly in the south) are a lot closer to a town with a flagship college than to a metro area. This alone already means that college sports fans will tend to be more conservative and professional sports fans will tend to be more liberal. But it also predicts variation within a league - I would expect Green Bay Packers fans to be more conservative than Chicago Bears fans, and University of Oregon football fans to be more conservative than USC football fans, just based on the geography of how many rural vs urban people have this team as their geographically closest football team.
There's also a set of effects determining which sport people are fans of. Black people and urban residents are much more likely to be interested in basketball than other sports (I suspect this has something to do with the amount of space and equipment that other sports need, compared to basketball). Soccer is much more popular among immigrants than among people who grew up in the United States. I'm not exactly sure what the relevant effects are between hockey and football. I can't tell if there's anything that actually attracts *conservatives* to football, or if it's just the fact that across most of the South, the closest major sports team to you is a football team, and rural southerners tend to be conservative.
This latter point might be a way for football to influence universities in a conservative way. But if the fans of a university are just the people who are closer to that university than to any other prominent university or professional sports team, then NYU isn't going to get much of a conservative boost from building up a football team - unless they put their stadium farther out into the suburbs than the Jets and Giants.
When the Omicron variant was announced, the stock market went down a lot, which makes sense since the stock market is based on companies whose profits would go down if there were more lockdowns.
Crypto also crashed. On some level this makes sense because crypto is usually correlated with the stock market. But realistically people can buy just as much crypto during a lockdown as they can at any other time, so I don't see why knowing the stock market crashed because of COVID should do this.
Some of it may be rebalancing: maybe I plan to hold 10% of my assets in crypto, but now the market in everything else has dropped, I end up with 12% crypto, so I go sell some (and use the cash to buy the now cheaper stocks)?
Because crypto isn't an investment in a firm that makes or sells things. It's just a fixed valuable (maybe) asset, like gold or fine art. So if the wealth of people tanks -- as it does during a pandemic -- then you will get lower prices when you want to sell your crypto, and the *only* value it has is the potential for someone to pay more for it later. Presumably people who aren't willing to accept the potential lower ROI stop bidding on it now, which drops the price.
I understand why this explanation is appealing, but I think it ultimately obscures more than it reveals about the cause of Friday's move.
It's a common tendency to seek legibility in markets - to try to find a sensible reason "why" for any particular move. I think this is driven by many people's belief that markets are efficient, and so whenever the price of an asset moves, there has to be an explanation for why the new price more accurately reflects all available information.
But the reality is that while markets converge towards efficiency in the long term for the most liquid assets, they can be quite inefficient on a day-to-day basis. This is especially true for an asset class like crypto which is less mature than equities.
In other words, you shouldn't assume that a change in the price of something always corresponds to a change in the expected future value of that thing, or that participants who buy and sell based on new information are responding rationally to that information. In the short term, prices are often driven by participants who are either not very sophisticated, or are acting under incentives which are unrelated to maximizing expected return on the asset in question.
Explanations for price action which appeal to what rational participants would do are fine if no other explanation can be found. But in this case, I think the evidence for a market structure-based explanation is quite strong. This means we don't need to make assumptions that sellers were acting optimally and then try to work backward into their beliefs about how Omicron will impact crypto.
One of the adages from the last crisis that sticks with me is “in a crisis, betas tend towards one across asset classes”, which is to say - when the shit hits the fan, everything goes down.
I wonder from your explanation Re: short term market efficiency if the definition of a crisis or at least a correction, is when some sort of global liquidity preference overrides the expected future returns.
Yes, this is exactly right. The main reason correlations tend to 1 in selloffs is that liquidity becomes much more important than expected returns.
When your ship is taking on water and you need to reduce weight, you don't take time to inventory your whole cargo and pick the least valuable items. You toss everything that isn't bolted down.
You reject the relatively opaque "market mechanics" explanation in favor of a more lucid explanation. You may be correct but to me it looks like a bias for lucidity.
I guess I should add I don't think people view it as a "defensive" asset, like gold itself, or real estate, something for which there will always be a demand, even in crappy economic times, and which therefore safeguards your money against recession. I think people view crypto as an "optimistic" asset like vacation condo time-shares, the kind of thing that will be valuable to own when economic growth is strong. (Also note that I believe crypto was originally sold as a hedge against inflation, so if inflation expectations tank to the extent this underlies investor interest that would argue its value decreases at the margin.)
Crypto gambling (often described as investing, hodling etc) is hilariously volatile, even more irrational than stock market speculation and I would not expect it to behave in rational way.
1) There are now many entities invested in crypto which are not purely crypto investors, meaning they have exposure to traditional asset classes as well. The equities selloff on Friday, and more generally the elevated volatility in both stocks and other assets, caused many of these entities to "derisk" and cut positions across the board. Crypto was no exception.
2) All sophisticated crypto shops are aware of this tendency, and many of them run strategies (both manual and automated) which amplify short-term correlations between equities and crypto, especially during selloffs.
The main takeaway is that although crypto should theoretically be uncorrelated with equities in the long term, the current structure of the market gives rise to short-term correlations.
"The equities selloff on Friday, and more generally the elevated volatility in both stocks and other assets, caused many of these entities to "derisk" and cut positions across the board. Crypto was no exception."
Isn't this always necessarily going to mean buying high and selling low? Aren't institutional investors smarter than that?
Also, note that we are speaking about institutional investors exposed to cryptocurrencies.
And even assumption that institutional investors performed substantial selloff at lower prices is a guess. For all what we know they could sell at start and rebuy later at lower prices or to not be involved substantially and this panic could be minor private investors losing money on crypto, again.
It will mean buying high and selling low *unless* the thing that you derisk ahead of ultimately produces a much bigger move. People who cut risk on the first -3% back in March 2020 looked very prudent a week later.
There are better ways to manage risk than just panic selling at signs of trouble, but if you're overexposed or overleveraged, panic selling early is still much better than panic selling late.
Also, "institutional investors" is a very broad category, which includes encompasses both extremely sophisticated market participants as well as firms that behave in comically dumb ways.
depends on how fast you can sell, I guess? if you sell at the very start of the dip, rather than being the pigeon who sells 3 hours into it, you don't lose much
1-When there’s fear in the air people have a lower appetite for risk in general. This includes risks completely unrelated to the fear in the air, such as the risk of investing in an extremely volatile asset class like crypto.
2-Perhaps some funds were over leveraged and needed to sell crypto to cover short positions.
I don’t think that comparing China to Japan or the USSR (or the Nazis etc) is useful. It’s true that the industrial Revolution is a powerful drug, or rather manufacturing capability is. However when competing against the USSR, Japan or Germany the West kept its manufacturing base. And the size of China matters. It doesn’t have to catch up with the US in per capita GDP - though I think it will; it will be twice the GDP of the US at less than half the GDP per capita. Present trends continuing that’s likely in the near future.
I mean, on the one hand sure, they're more dangerous than the Nazis.
On the other hand, in moral debates this doesn't necessarily matter. To those who believe in a judgement after death, it is self-evident that opposing evil is the winning tactic regardless of the worldly power of that evil ("When you stand before God you cannot say 'but I was told by others to do thus', or that 'virtue was not convenient at the time'. This will not suffice."). Some of us who do not believe in such an event still believe that hopeless resistance is noble.
More dangerous that the Nazis - jury is out on that one. The rest of the paragraph I don’t fully get. I think having defined the Chinese as more evil than the Nazis you want to fight to the last deplorable. Americans could always not get involved given that China is on the other side of the world.
By "more dangerous" I meant "more dangerous to fight" i.e. "more militarily capable". That was a poor phrasing on my part and I apologise.
What I'm saying is that comparisons of the PRC to the Nazis are mostly moral in nature and that, given that, "but they're much stronger than the Nazis" isn't necessarily a slam-dunk counterargument. Many would say that fighting the Nazis would still have been the right thing to do even were it hopeless.
There are plausible counterarguments against "the PRC is Nazi and therefore must be opposed", e.g. "but they're much stronger than the Nazis *and also consequentialism is true and also there's no Last Judgement*" or "you're wrong, they are not as evil as the Nazis". I'm merely pointing out that as written your argument has a huge hole in it.
You’ve totally misread my argument then. I didn’t say anything about the morals of fighting or not fighting the Chinese. Maybe you inferred that because I mentioned Nazis, albeit parenthetically.
I was referring to Scott’s choice of “comment of the week”. I won’t repost it but the gist of it is that the Japanese, and the USSR were once considered economic competitors to the US, until they weren’t. So too he alleges with China. The comment also said that all the countries mentioned had lower, or much lower, gdp per capita.
My points are that gdp per capita isn’t the correct measure between States, that China’s size matters, and that where the manufacturing base of the world is also matters.
I was wondering about a phenomenon I encountered recently (summer of 2020). I was on an astrology summer camp when a few hornets got into our building. Now, these things are mostly harmless according to Wikipedia: won't sting unless you piss them off, if they do sting it's no worse than a wasp.
While there were a few rumors about the then-current news stoey of Asian murder hornets, those were quickly debunked.
Which is why I was surprised to watch a third of my fellow campers go absolutely *hysterical*. After an hour or so of the hornets being around, during which everyone was a bit on edge but otherwise fine, one 15-year-old started screaming at the top of her lungs.
Very soon, two others followed. We quickly moved everyone outside to try and deal with the chaos. Within minutes, we had a group of ten campers, 12 to 17 years old, mostly girls, shuddering and crying on the ground in a group. The occasional terrified scream emanated from the vicinity (I say occasional, but it was more like every 20 seconds).
As I sat outside at 3 AM in the freezing cold playing card games with the others who remained sane, I only wondered what the neighbors might think. The camp leaders ended up sending everyone home early the next day, unsure what was the trigger and therefore unable to prevent any further events.
My questions: is this a thing that has happened often in the past? Personally, I've never seen or heard of anything like it.
Also, what might be the mechanism? These are normally very reasonable people, but one person's irrational panic rendered them all immobile nuisances for over an hour.
Just from an evolutionary perspective, surely that's a huge problem, right? Imagine if a third of your tribe had a complete mental shutdown the moment a lion approached. Seems like a great strategy for getting eaten.
"My questions: is this a thing that has happened often in the past?"
Yes, all the time. It's also constantly happening in the present. Women, especially young women, tend toward (or, if you like, contain a cohort which tends toward) hysteria. Large parts of wokism, and feminism before it, are the same essential behavior -- safe spaces, bizarre rape scares, disproportionate concern over "men's violence against women" and assault at night when women are at (at least) an order of magnitude lower risk of stranger violence than men, etc. etc.
"Personally, I've never seen or heard of anything like it."
That's because people are forbidden from saying it in our society. It's culturally taboo to be aware of mental/behavioral differences between the sexes, especially when they're solidly biological.
"Also, what might be the mechanism?"
Estrogen. Not only does testosterone make you less neurotic, estrogen makes you *more* neurotic than baseline. That's why many women get "mood swings" on the pill, and that's why puberty makes girls morose and prone to anorexia, ROGD and other conversion disorders.
Well, as long as we're telling evolutionary just-so stories, I think it's important to remember that the main threat to humans for most of our evolutionary history wasn't large carnivores, but other hostile humans. Becoming "hysterical" probably makes you more likely to be taken captive, vs more likely to be injured or killed while attempting to resist or flee. Speculating on why this might be an evolutionary advantage, especially for young women, is left as an exercise to the reader.
"Speculating on why this might be an evolutionary advantage, especially for young women, is left as an exercise to the reader."
Specifically, it would be an evolutionary advantage for the *offspring* of young women. It doesn't need to be advantageous for the individual, nothing does as long as it makes you have more kids. If being extremely depressed and self-hating at all times led to you having more and more viable offspring, self-hatred would be selected for.
I can't think of a better alarm than the screams of girls spreading through a tribe. That kind of signaling could be useful to alert others who are not quite nearby. But also, could "yawning" fit under the category "valuable social contagion?" since it may be a signal to the tribe that it's time to make camp and rest?
Yes, things like this happened in the past. Teenage girls are very susceptible to this kind of infectious hysteria but they're not the only ones - see koro:
"Koro is a culture bound delusional disorder in which an individual has an overpowering belief that their sex organs are retracting and will disappear, despite the lack of any true longstanding changes to the genitals. Koro is also known as shrinking penis, and it is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders."
"Tarantism is a form of hysteric behaviour originating in Southern Italy, popularly believed to result from the bite of the wolf spider Lycosa tarantula (distinct from the broad class of spiders also called tarantulas). A better candidate cause is Latrodectus tredecimguttatus, commonly known as the Mediterranean black widow or steppe spider, although no link between such bites and the behaviour of tarantism has ever been demonstrated. However, the term historically is used to refer to a dancing mania – characteristic of Southern Italy – which likely had little to do with spider bites. The tarantella dance supposedly evolved from a therapy for tarantism."
A newspaper article about a novel based on a real mass hysteria episode in 2011:
"In Salem Village in February 1692, Betty Parris (age 9) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11), the daughter and the niece, respectively, of Reverend Samuel Parris, began to have fits described as "beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect" by John Hale, the minister of the nearby town of Beverly. The girls screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions, according to the eyewitness account of Reverend Deodat Lawson, a former minister in Salem Village.
The girls complained of being pinched and pricked with pins. A doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, could find no physical evidence of any ailment. Other young women in the village began to exhibit similar behaviors. When Lawson preached as a guest in the Salem Village meetinghouse, he was interrupted several times by the outbursts of the afflicted."
If a hornet gets inside a room I'm in, I drop what I'm doing until I can either capture it and put it outside or kill it. If somebody wanted me to justi gnore a bunch of hornets buzzing around inside, I probably wouldn't suffer from a mental breakdown, but I would definitely be irritated and unable to focus on astronomy stuff.
>Imagine if a third of your tribe had a complete mental shutdown the moment a lion approached.
The elders of the tribe are ignoring the lions. That is a reason for concern!
Assuming the horns kept a reasonable distance and we’re not acting too aggressively. If I had a herd of hornets buzzing around me I’d probably be acting pretty jinky myself.
Perhaps the thing we're missing is that they're still children. And fundamentally a child is not going to be able to kill a lion, they're going to want to wail and make a bunch of noise so that there family will come and throw rocks at the lion (evolutionarily speaking). Even here, since he didn't report anyone actually getting stung, this was apparently effective as the authority figures handled it.
Perhaps you could argue that a 12-17 year old isn't a "child" as much in the evolutionary sense, but I would argue that with how most developed nations rear their young, 12-17 is still fundamentally dependent upon their authority figures for most things, perhaps enough so that this sort of response might still kick in.
I'd perhaps substitute spears for thrown rocks - spears seem to be old enough to have been noticed by evolution (chimps use them). But otherwise I pretty much agree.
(Also note that it's 12-to-17-year-old *girls*. Women aren't expendable, because tribe growth is limited by the supply of wombs.)
And mass hysteria in some ways makes more sense than a mixed scream/hide approach, since screaming people already give away your location, so hiding is useless but screaming makes everything louder
I concur - wasps where I live (South of France) can generally be safely ignored, bees put me on a slight alert (my wife had to be helicoptered off to hospital after multpile bee stings) and with hornets we don't relax until they are removed from the house or, preferably, irremediably dead.
The ones in the Midwest of the US are also much worse than wasps, and are more aggressive and likely to sting than anything around here except a yellowjacket wasp. Freaking out dramatically is not a good survival tactic here, but being very afraid of a hornet sting is definitely a positive survival trait.
I don't think I would be that bad, but I also wouldn't be sitting there calmly. "No worse than a wasp" is still really bad! I've also never been stung by a wasp before so I don't have a good sense of exactly how bad it is (bee stings are pretty bad, and wasps seem worse).
Does it also seem surprising to you that people are scared of roaches, nonvenomous spiders, millipedes, rats, etc?
Weird, it's the opposite for me. I've been stung by both many times and bee stings hurt much more than wasps. I wonder if the variation is in the person or type of bee/wasp?
In my experience wasp stings are way less painful than bee stings, they do not leave a stinger that you have to remove, and they stop hurting much more quickly.
I have been stung at least 10 times by yellowjacket wasps--no stinger. Maybe the real explanation here is that how bad it is depends on the kind of wasp.
This summer I accidentally annoyed a yellowjacket nest and was stung 5 times and two left stingers in my hand/wrist. I've heard its more common when they're acting in defense of the nest? No idea if that's true or folk lore though.
I had thoughts along similar lines when I was doing sports in high school. I can remember pushing myself to the physical limit, like running until I would literally fall down if I didn't stop (or until I threw up). And obviously when you're pushing that close to the limit, you want to just stop because it's quite unpleasant, but I remember thinking something very similar about lions. Would I just stop if I was being chased by lions? If I'm confident that I wouldn't just sit down and die if I was being chased, then I must be able to *choose* to go until my muscles fail. Obviously that's just a high schooler's logic, but it got me thinking about things like phobias or disgust reactions - like say I can't handle blood, would I freeze up if I had an opportunity to save someone's life by stopping their bleeding? Or less extreme, would I be incapable of changing a diaper if the thought of another person's poop makes me nauseated? (After becoming a parent, it's much easier to deal with poop...)
I have to think that when a life is on the line, people are capable of absolutely blowing past what they thought were physical limits. On the flip side, I think people can put ridiculously small boundaries around what they're capable of dealing with, and if a violation of those boundaries provokes enough adrenaline or whatever, they can actually disable most of their conscious functions and motor control. Though the details are lost to memory, I've had a handful of experiences where people I was with completely shut down during something stressful, and I had to wonder if they'd be truly incapable of being useful in an actual disaster.
I once attended a lecture by the noted explorer and adventurer Sir Ranulph Feinnes, who amongst many other things, attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole. It was during this expedition that he got frostbite in all the fingers on his left hand: upon returning, his surgeon said they would need amputation, but wanted to wait a few months. Feinnes, impatient, cut them off in his garden shed with an electric fretsaw.
Anyway, in this lecture, he said that when your body is telling you it wants to die, and that it can't go a step further, that's when you're about a third of the way towards your *actual* endurance limit. To hit that, first you need to use up literally all your body fat. Then you need to start burning through the muscle tissue. It's only after this that you're actually approaching the limit.
Hey, I can share a relevant learning experience there. It was obvious to me that people are able to exceed what they think about their limits, but it was a bit surprising when I came to it.
The story is that some years ago I had decided to attempt a quite long walk, getting to a place ~55 miles away in one day; which I hadn't done before but I had recently done half of that and felt prepared. Well, I wasn't, and due to some stupid decisions and wrong equipment after some hours and a third of the distance I was sitting there with multiple blisters and I couldn't really walk a single step because it hurt quite much. Like, the trip was definitely over, I could not do anymore - I had walked longer previously, but this was much worse. I had my phone and network, but I was away from roads and there was a few miles until a location where it would be reasonable for some friend to come pick me up with a car. So I had some time for thinking back there, cried a bit, got myself together put on dry socks and some tape on the blisters, and walked on. And when I eventually got to roads, then I figured that I actually could still do some more and wanted to see how much. And then I walked on for 15 or so hours more and reached the planned endpoint.
So my surprising takeaway from this is that it's not that people can do 110% when pressed, that the gap is much larger - that apparently the feeling of "I'm absolutely certain that this is the limit" for me is triggered at less than 30% of the actual endurance capacity, and if I can push past that feeling, then I can do not just a bit more, but multiple times more. And this was a quite impactful revelation.
Astrology actually has plenty of theory, just useless one. So basically like astronomy one (maybe even with some observations) but with lectures/discussions/activities where science is replaced by woo/mysticism/really outdated science.
Chapter 8 on adjuncts is entirely new, and now the chapters match up with those in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. The whole things has been rewritten to be more conversational. There are now online multiple-choice question, online tree diagrams, and each chapter has many more exercises. The glossary has be expanded quite a bit, and the number of terms used has been cut by about 15%.
A few theoretical issues have been tightened up: one being that markers are now recognized as a type of dependent, which was previously somewhat ambiguous. Another one is the treatment of non-predicate adjuncts, based on the recent dissertation on the topic published by Jim Donaldson at Edinburgh.
"There are two drugs which both have stellar Phase III trial results indicating they can reduce the COVID-19 death rate dramatically - one from Merck (Molnupiravir) and the other Pfizer (Paxlovid). We have new weapons to slay the dragon, but we aren’t using them yet!"
Maybe not so stellar for molnupiravir, Merck have issued new results that are somewhat less glowing than the originals:
"Nov 26 (Reuters) - Merck & Co (MRK.N) said on Friday updated data from its study of its experimental COVID-19 pill showed the drug was significantly less effective in cutting hospitalizations and deaths than previously reported.
The drugmaker said its pill showed a 30% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths, based on data from 1,433 patients. In October, its data showed a roughly 50% efficacy, based on data from 775 patients. The drug, molnupiravir, was developed with partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.
The lower efficacy of Merck's drug could have big implications in terms of whether countries continue to buy the pill. Interim data from 1,200 participants in Pfizer Inc's (PFE.N) trial for its experimental pill, Paxlovid, showed an 89% reduction in hopsitalizations and deaths."
So down to 30% efficacy from 50% efficacy for molnupiravir, while paxlovid so far is still holding. But would further tests show a similar drop? Maybe, maybe not.
"Merck has said data shows molnupiravir is not capable of inducing genetic changes in human cells, but men enrolled in its trials had to abstain from heterosexual intercourse or agree to use contraception. Women of child-bearing age also had to use birth control.
Still, the FDA said in its briefing document that there are safety concerns about potential birth defects from the drug and asked the panel to discuss whether the drug should be available to pregnant women."
Again, part of the hesitance of the FDA is that they are terrified of another thalidomide, and such fears are not assuaged by the drug company itself telling trialists not to get pregnant.
"Yet, the FDA has decided to keep both drugs banned."
I think that is an unfair characterisation of the decision.
"Blood is on their hands."
Yeah, well. I've considered and discarded responses to that, because mostly they were sarcasm and that's not helpful. I would simply like to say that the "paxlovid is only re-packaged ivermectin, Pfizer are doing this in order to sell expensive drugs instead of cheap ivermectin, follow the scientific evidence to save human pain, suffering and death" are making the same emotive appeals - is Mr. Elton going to boycott Paxlovid on these grounds now?
I don't know, Mr. Elton, how many people did *you* murder this morning? (Sorry, I know I said I'd stay off the sarcasm, but some over-the-top emotive sloganeering just breaks the chains on that for me).
I think there's a distinction between "valid reasons a given doctor won't prescribe a drug to you" and "valid reasons to make it illegal for any doctor anywhere to prescribe this drug to anyone". A drug that cures covid and causes horrible birth defect would still be a good drug to have! it lets you save the lives of all your patients that *aren't* pregnant women, which give the age skew is going to the vast majority of them even if you disallow it for "potentially pregnant" women and only give it to post-menopausal patients.
It still would warrant some caution, because they're also advising men in the trials not to get anyone pregnant. And it has dropped down in its stated efficacy from 50% to 30% as they did trials on more people, so that's another reason to be cautious.
Paxlovid seems to be holding steady so far, so that probably will be licenced soon. But the emotional pressure appeal is exactly what we saw with aduhelm where the consensus seems to be it's useless and hideously expensive, yet it got approved.
So things like "the FDA has blood on their hands!" may be a sincere cry of frustration, but it's not solid proof one way or the other.
One might argue that the over 50 crowd isn't likely to get many people pregnant, and they are the group most likely to die from COVID anyway, so maybe it is worth releasing just with the "Don't make babies" black label warning. I dunno, staring too long at the FDA's behavior feels a bit like watching a badly written movie. "Why would you do that? You could just... you know better! But wait... that's the worst way to do that!"
I am thinking just ignoring both might be the sanest course of action :)
Fingers crossed for Paxlovid working out for people, though.
If Covid refuses to go away and we run through the entire Greek alphabet and perhaps the unique Cyrillic letters maybe we can keep Thorn and Eth in reserve. Oh boy I hope that is a silly thought.
Don't take my comment too seriously, it was just a joke.
For the sake of the discussion I'd say that if you admit the basic tenets of the christian faith, the most effective intervention will always be to increase conversions to christianism.
Unfortunately a lot of people that call themselves Christians don’t. IIRC people trying to lead a Christ like life were victims of one of the first Crusades. I’d have to grab the right book off a shelf to give the particulars.
But yes I think I know the sense that you are using the word and that would be most effective.
While true, that's still very underspecified. Arguably, it strongly encourages investing in saving lives that haven't yet converted to Christianity, which in practice means Asia.
Regarding the Omicron variant, I know we don't currently have a ton of info. I have two questions that I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts on:
1. What are the best threads/posts on the subject from the last 48 hours? All the good threads I've seen are from last Thursday or Friday.
2. Is there any argument *against* getting a booster ASAP? It seems like a reasonable precaution to take in case Omicron is quite bad, but is it possible that this would be counterproductive (e.g. if the mutations make it *very* different from existing variants)?
The one argument I can see against an *immediate* booster is that you might think a booster is at peak effectiveness from something like 14 to 52 days after the injection (just making up some numbers) and if you expect the omicron wave to peak in your area later than that, you just might delay it a few days or weeks. (But in that case, why not get one now, and then get an unauthorized booster later by saying it's your first dose?)
One hypothesis it mentions, that I find quite interesting, is that this might not be the result of uncontrolled spread in an undetected population, but rather might be the result of long-term mutation within a single immunosuppressed individual. That would help explain why no related sequences have been observed since May 2020. The alternative would require undetected spread of this branch of the family tree in a population that both doesn't get any sequencing of cases done, and also didn't get their indigenous covid strain replaced by Delta (or export it to replace Delta before now).
I can't possibly see how a booster could be counterproductive, but if the fears about vaccine escape are justified it might well be useless (until new boosters tailored to Omicron are developed)
AIUI it's only useless if vaccines no longer protect against severe disease. Vaccine escape could mean that breakthroughs and reinfections get way more common b/c of antibody evasion, but T cells still keep you out of the hospital.
Inspired by Scott's post on testing the effect of CO2 on cognition using WordTwist, I started doing daily chess puzzles while tracking CO2 and other health metrics. I did an interim analysis on the first 88 days of data and found the following:
- Chess puzzles are a low effort (for me), but high variance and streaky measure of cognitive performance
- Note: I didn't test whether performance on chess puzzles generalizes to other cognitive tasks
- No statistically significant effects were observed, but I saw modest effect sizes and p-values for:
- CO2 Levels >600 ppm: R2 = 0.14, p = 0.067
- Coefficient of Variation in blood glucose: R2 = 0.079, p = 0.16
- My current sample size is underpowered to detect the effects I'm looking for. I likely need 3-4x as much data to reliably detect the effect sizes I'm looking for.
- Given how many correlations I looked at, the lack of pre-registration of analyses, and the small number of data points, these effects are likely due to chance/noise in the data, but they're suggestive enough for me to continue tracking.
Questions:
- My variation in rating has long stretches of better or worse than average performance that seem unlikely to be due to chance. Does anyone know of a way to test if this is the case?
- Any statisticians interested in taking a deeper/more rigorous look at my data or have advice on how I should do so?
- Any suggestions on other quick cognitive assessments that would be less noisy?
"My variation in rating has long stretches of better or worse than average performance that seem unlikely to be due to chance. Does anyone know of a way to test if this is the case?"
One simple method is to compute the autocorrelation, meaning the correlation of performance at time T with the performance at time T-1 (or T-i for larger i). If you see a statistically significant positive slope, that's evidence of streaks.
Thanks! I tested for autocorrelation by calculating the pearson's correlation coefficient with lag of 1 to 6 and don't see any meaningful correlation (r2 < 0.01 for all of them).
Yeah, the psychology of streaks is interesting. I don't think we're wired to have good intuitions about how seriously to take several good or bad outcomes in our lives in a row. We're clearly biased in the direction of seeing meaningful patterns No doubt that's part of what makes gamblers get sucked into believing they should go another round because they're in good luck mode, gotta take advantage of it.
No kidding. Even after seeing the autocorrelation and knowing that the streaks are from chance, I still have a strong intuition I can't shake that the streak is real.
Thank you, Luke G! I'm not the person who asked the original question, just someone who puzzled over it. Was not able to translate my intuitions into a formula or an approach, but when I read yours, I saw that, yup, that calculation would capture it. It was like finally having an itched scratched.
"My variation in rating has long stretches of better or worse than average performance that seem unlikely to be due to chance. Does anyone know of a way to test if this is the case?"
Hmm, my stats training is so far in the past that I can't give you an answer, but I keep ruminating about how one would go about answering this question. Some thoughts:
Do you get scores on these chess puzzles, like how long it takes you to solve them? Or is it just yes/no, you solved it or you didn't? If the first, you've got a bunch of numbers. If the second, you've got a string of numbers all of which are 1 or 0.
-OK, if it's a string of 1's and O's, there's got to be a simple way to determine how random the string is. (But I have no idea what that way would be. Might even be possible to feed the whole list of 1's and 0's to some calculator and get an answer.)
-If it's a string of varied numbers, say time to solve, you can't just ask some calculator to check to see whether the string is random, because we wouldn't expect them to be. We'd expect something approximating a normal distribution, with values closer to the mean occurring more frequently than values further from the mean. But there's got to be some statistical way to ask whether numbers associated with good or bad performance cluster together in the sequence of scores.
I suggest going to a couple of the math subs on Reddit and asking what stats approach is appropriate. There's one called /r/math and one called /r/askmath. I posted a question about as knotty as yours on one of them last year and got a lovely clear answer from a cheerful mathematician.
Good suggestion on asking math subreddits, I'll give that a shot.
In terms of the scoring, for each puzzle I get an increase or decrease in rating which is a function of whether I solve it correctly or not, the puzzle rating, my rating, how many moves I get correct (for multi-step puzzles), and how fast I solve it. The exact algorithm is proprietary to the site. Score from a single puzzle is incredibly noisy, so for each daily session, I do 10 puzzles and record my rating change for the set.
Re long stretches of over or underperformance - stress and sleep quality are both obvious confounders to your cognitive performance, and I'd expect stress from work or other life events to come and go in patches lasting weeks or months. Not sure how you'd quantify it short of extensive testing of cortisol levels, but randomising the CO2 level you test at each day so it doesn't correlate with time of week or time of year should suffice to analyse the effect of CO2 specifically.
BTW, I tried applying the same >600ppm filter to your data, but it still shows no correlation between CO2 level and performance (R2 = 8e-5, p=0.81).
Given your data and my prior skepticism of the original UCB paper, I suspect that my results are due to chance or some non-CO2 common cause that's correlated with CO2 levels, but I'll see what I find as I collect more data.
600ppm was the only cutoff I tried. The UC Berkeley paper compared performance at 600, 1000, and 2500 ppm, so I picked 600ppm as my lower cutoff.
My logic for testing the filtered data is that if the CO2 effect was real, there's probably some lower threshold below which it doesn't have an effect (like most toxins).
Thanks for the question. I should have been more explicit about that to avoid questions of multiple comparisons/cherry picking.
Following the discussion in the last post on Helion, a trying-to-get-fusion startup, I've been thinking about how scientific communities develop norms orthogonal to their science.
Fusion has strong collaboration norms. This is most obvious for ITER, which is a collaboration between countries representing more than half the world's population. It is also usually true for private companies. The high temperature superconducting tape designed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems for their tokamak is also being used by Type One Energy to build a stellarator. By being secretive, Helion is betraying the (non-scientific) norms of the community.
I'm thinking that is a kind of founder effect, but I would be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on it.
There are several important examples from the early days of plasma physics, both positive and negative, that helped to establish this norm.
The biggest negative example is the Huemul Project by Ronald Richter. Richter is the origin of the mad-scientist-with-a-secret-base-in-Patagonia trope. In 1951, he and Peron declared that he had GOT FUSION, which caused a lot of excitement and skepticism, until he was arrested for fraud in 1955.
The biggest positive example is from 1968, when a group of Soviet scientists traveled to England to present the results of the T-3 tokamak, which was an order of magnitude hotter than any other experiment. Western scientists were skeptical, so they invited 5 British scientists to come to Russia to do the experiments themselves. The "Culham Five" confirmed the results and published them in Nature the next year. From then on, there was significant collaboration across the Iron Curtain.
Despite being indoctrinated in this field (a la Kuhn), I can see some costs to this attitude. Because we refused to participate in the Cold War, we never had our version of a Space Race. If we ever wanted to get seriously funded, maybe we should have made it something that we can WIN against Russia or China.
This is going to wedge on whether you believe the bureaucracy is being even handed or not. If you do then what happened is that some researchers got permission to use data for a specific purpose. Their research revealed something else. They got published but this was a violation of the terms they got the data under. They were then punished for this, partly because the board thought it would increase prejudice but fundamentally because of the violation of that agreement.
The right wing answer is the claim that this would never happen if they found the opposite. Basically, if someone had violated the agreement but found that it was mostly Swedes attacking immigrants the review board would never have objected. In short that the bureaucracy is putting its thumb on the scales to suppress facts they don't like. Process as punishment, the bureaucracy giving red carpet treatment to one side and scrutinizing the other. Of course it's hard to prove this either way since the counterfactual doesn't exist. But that's what makes it an effective wedge issue.
I think this is a good point. And while it would be very easy to write a "rule selectively enforced against things left-wingers don't like" piece on the strength of one instance of a rule being enforced against a thing left wingers don't like and zero instances of it not being enforced, I think that for it to be ethical I'd want evidence a lot stronger than "I bet it wouldn't have been otherwise" - ideally statistical, not just anecdotal evidence of a handful of cases where it wasn't enforced - before I took that seriously (which is not to say that this isn't a case of selective enforcement, just that it isn't strong evidence of selective enforcement).
After years of seeing "imagine the reaction if Boghossian had been pushing right-wing claims" or "imagine the reaction of Rittenhouse had been black", I no longer trust these sorts of counterfactuals in politically sensitive matters at all. I want actual statistics on real-world examples, not just individual anecdotes supported with imagined counterfactuals.
The issue is a little more complicated than what the article presents, and their summary is sadly somewhat off. I'll try to go over it briefly, but the situation is somewhat complicated and requires some prior knowledge of the legal background.
Under Swedish Law, more specifically under the Ethical Proofing Act (lag om etikprövning, https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/lag-2003460-om-etikprovning-av-forskning-som_sfs-2003-460), some research concerning humans must first be approved by an ethics board before it can commence. There's the usual suspects, such as human experiments and the like; but you also need special permission to process sensitive personal data such as ethnicities or information from Court Rulings (this follows from the 3 §).
Now, the scientist in question actually HAD a permit from an Ethics Board – however, that permit was only valid for investigating the correlation (and possible causality) between criminal proceedings, ethnicity et cetera and cancer prevalence. The Ethical Assesment Board of Appeal is basically arguing that she ignored the conditions under which the data she was using was given to her. According to the Board, should have requested a new permit before she began researching the correlation between ethnicity and crime. So to summarize, the alleged crime here is not researching the correlation per say, instead it's violating some annoying formal rules regarding ethical procedure and permission grants.
In my opinion the whole system of having a prior review when you're dealing with public information (which all Court Rulings in Sweden are) is an exceptionally stupid formality, which stifles creative research and is also prone to abuse; but I can't in all honesty say that the scientist in question here is, speaking strictly legally, totally off the hook. The details in her permit (which I have read and which I have as a file, and which I can send to you if you like) are complicated and difficult for a non-medically educated jurist to understand, but on the face of it, it does sort of look like the scientist has overstepped.
This looks like the kind of thing it would be a mistake to write on without having heard both sides of the story.
"Sundquist and his colleagues already have allegations of violations of good research practice" is the kind of one-line-and-move-on it would be very easy to use to bury facts that don't fit the author's preferred narrative (although, obviously, it could also cover wholly specious allegations).
If you can find the case against this report, as presented by the people pushing it, and you don't find it convincing, I think you're probably good to go.
I would not use that URL. Newsfounded looks like a fake-news site. Their article doesn't have a byline or a dateline, and the text looks like a low-quality machine translation of the samnytt.se article. Other sites running this in English, like "Remonews" and "Newsbeezer" are fairly blatantly part of the same content farm.
As far as the original story, it does look like there's something there.
Surely, it doesn't matter if the information comes from a "partisan source", it matters whether the information is correct? Suspicion isn't proof and I've seen this rhetorical move bandied about far too many times to let it slide. Calling a source "partisan" is justifiable if you move onto demonstrate that the specific claim being made is fraudulent but it is not and can never be enough to discredit a claim on its own.
Is the default, "trust every claim from every website unless you can give strong evidence that the website is unreliable" or "trust no claim from any website unless you can give strong evidence that the website is reliable"?
"Partisan" is not the same as "unreliable". You need to first decide which game you are playing: if the game is about truth-seeking, "partisan" is not in and of itself a relevant factor, only "factual correctness" is. Partisanship can serve as a more or less weak proxy for reliability but it is not the same thing.
If the game you're playing is about competing with your enemy, "factual correctness" is not intrinsically relevant whereas "partisanship" is highly relevant since it lets you know if the source shares your goals or if they're playing for the other side. In a competitive game any claim you come across is legit so long as it furthers your ends. This is not the case in the fact-finding game where you score points by producing the most accurate description (or map) of a selected slice of reality you are capable of. No other goal is permissible in such a game. As soon as you stray from that rule you are now playing the competitive game instead. This is a binary with no sliding scales – there is no way of being a little bit truth-seeking.
In the fact-finding condition, any claim is only as good as the evidence presented to support it. Most claims people make are not meant to be truthful, most games they play are not meant to produce factually correct claims. The assumption is therefore one of scepticism whenever you encounter a claim about the state of reality.
In addition: samnytt.se is considered far right and heavily biased. But the main story of something that looks suspiciously like bureaucracy being used to silence uncomfortable research seems true. Here are some sources less controversial media (in Swedish):
A judge decides whether, if you are given permission to access data for one purpose only and use it for an arguably different purpose, you have broken the law or not.
The big question here is "if the authors had asked to access the data for this purpose, would they have been refused?".
If the answer to that question is "no", then carry on Sweden, nothing to see here but a permit violation.
If the answer to that question is "yes", then there's literally a government conspiracy attempting to hide the truth about this topic and the authors' actions were essentially necessary to expose that truth; at that point you're prosecuting Deep Throat.
The Bayesian issue here is that P(prosecution|conspiracy) is essentially 1 and P(prosecution|!conspiracy) is a lot lower.
(You could, of course, make the argument that the conspiracy exists but is righteous in suppressing this information.)
Whether or not China IS successful is not a policy question. I think that China's growth so far does provide additional reason to remove obstacles to US growth (NIMBY resistance to investment, restrictions on urban residential and commercial development, structural fiscal deficits, obstacles to freer international trade, active recement of immigrants). But what else?
We don't know much. Some evidence for and against it being a big deal. The costs of it being a big deal are greater than the costs of it not being a big deal, so treat it more like a big deal than not.
Most importantly: maintain an attitude about it that doesn't cause you to dig your heels in and disregard further evidence.
On the other hand, as of right now and the next short amount of time whether you care or not probably has close to zero effect on anything other than your mental well being.
Probably add a few more canned goods to your next supermarket runs, and don't make any plans that depend sensitively on the ability to do international travel two or three months from now.
“In the rush to understand the threat posed by the Omicron variant, the worrisome new version of the coronavirus, some experts are pointing hopefully to early signs that it may cause only mild illness, without some of the trademark symptoms of Covid.
But it is far too early to assume that the variant will not cause severe illness, too, warned Dr. Richard Lessells, who coordinates clinical and epidemiological data for the South African Covid Variant Research Consortium.
Many of the early infections in South Africa were spotted among younger people more likely to experience mild illness, he said. The picture may change as the virus spreads through the larger population.”
I think the correct answer right now is "we don't know". The reasonable possibilities range from "not at all" to "very much". The precautionary principle probably therefore suggests you be ready for the worse end of that spectrum (within reason: get your booster if you haven't, have a reasonable stock of items likely to run out, etc. No need to go full prepper)
also to keep an eye on the evidence as it comes in so you know whether it's going to be bad ASAP. (not that anybody here seems to need to be told to do that)
I believe the correct answer is "right now, not at all because there are no behaviour changes you personally can make at this stage that have any impact on what happens with omicron". ( I mean, unless you make public policy or are a virologist or something, but then presumably you wouldn't be asking here)
When it became clear to us that Covid was a serious threat we stocked up on non-perishable foodstuffs, so as to be able to self-isolate pretty completely for a month or two if necessary. It didn't become necessary because food delivery services expanded a lot, but we were self-quarantining fairly strictly until we got vaccinated. If it was clear that omicron was going to be a lot worse, something similar might make sense, although so far I don't think it does. That isn't affecting "what happens with omicron" but "what happens to us with omicron."
I did that, based on the conclusions of a German study. In my case, I had received two Pfizer shots (with almost no reaction) and chose the J&J for my booster. Within 8 hours of the booster, I had an intense flu-like reaction (including aches and fever) that lasted for 5 hours before my immune system decided it was a false alarm. My immune system is generally mediocre because I catch every cold, but in this case it was primed and ready to go when I got the J&J. The German study said the mRNA seemed to promote more antibodies while the more traditional type vaccines promote more T-cells, I think is the rationale.
I am still trying to figure out *why* everyone cares so much about omicron, compared to nu/mu (forget which) which didn't generate this much scare and ended up quickly forgotten.
Maybe some countries or people suddenly realized that they had taken on more risk than they were comfortable with.
Lambda and Mu were flourishing in South America, which hadn't yet been fully exposed to Delta, so it wasn't totally clear whether they were more transmissible than Delta or not (and eventually Delta did overtake them), while Omicron seems to be flourishing in an environment that was already saturated with Delta, which is (weak) evidence that it is in fact substantially more transmissible than Delta.
Omicron also has a *lot* more divergences in the spike sequence than even Beta and Lambda, which had significant immune escape.
Those at least seem to be the explanations that are given by the people feeding the stories - my own reaction is partly these things, and partly because the people feeding the stories seem to be reacting a lot more strongly. While they're not 100% reliable, they're still a useful signal (as they turned out to be with Alpha and with Delta, which I was somewhat skeptical of early on).
Because with a R0>10, there's certainty that you are going to get COVID. You can no longer tell yourself a story about not getting it. Everyone's getting it now.
Question with regard to the intersexual dynamics and relationships:
What are the most interesting papers, findings supported with broad anecdotal evidence, and/or your personal predictions that are very surprising/important and absent in the public discourse/understanding of the topic?
I don't see anything there about smaller groups tending to end up treated worse. Indeed, their model would seem to be totally independent of group size.
(Or are you referring to women being physically smaller than men?)
It's possible I'm remembering a different paper of theirs - I didn't double-check to verify that this is the one I thought. As I recall, the point of the model is that in a homogeneous population, you end up with an equilibrium that is symmetrical for all, but if you have a population with two identifiable sub-populations, you can end up with an equilibrium that is asymmetrical, and sometimes inegalitarian, and if one sub-population involves a lot more individuals than the other, then the smaller sub-population is more likely to end up with the less favorable outcome in those mixed interactions in the equilibrium that evolves.
>As I recall, the point of the model is that in a homogeneous population, you end up with an equilibrium that is symmetrical for all,
Yes, this paper has that.
>but if you have a population with two identifiable sub-populations, you can end up with an equilibrium that is asymmetrical, and sometimes inegalitarian,
Yes, this paper has that.
>and if one sub-population involves a lot more individuals than the other, then the smaller sub-population is more likely to end up with the less favorable outcome in those mixed interactions in the equilibrium that evolves.
This paper does not have that. You're probably thinking of this:
>>In particular, increasing the size of the population makes the Work,M/Work,M outcome increasingly likely. Smaller populations are more likely to end up at inequitable, and unequal, outcomes.
...but that's not talking about relative group size.
Men and women are also groups of roughly-equal size in any event.
By "intersexual dynamics and relationships", do you mean dynamics and relationships between ("inter") the sexes, or dynamics and relationships involving intersex people?
Two new books on AI: Age of AI by Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger has gotten the most press, but I found it impossible to finish. Boring and repetitive. Did anyone find it valuable?
Much better is Rule of the Robots: how artificial Intelligence will transform everything by Martin Ford. Lots of good stuff on the path toward AGI, based on interviews with people like Demis Hassabis and Geoff Hinton. Also has the best coverage I've seen on the AI race with China. Maybe these two would be good candidates for reviews here.
As a great fan of snark, I always automatically prepend 2 or 3 words to certain people's names - convicted felon Martha Stewart, porn star Madonna, indicted war criminal Henry Kissinger.
I thought it was one of those "World Courts" that don't get no respect, but after looking on wikipedia it appears it was actually just Christopher Hitchens. Several other legal actions were also brought against him.
An indictment is a formal set of criminal charges against someone on which they are to be tried. It's occasionally used metaphorically, but I wouldn't call someone an "indicted war criminal" without the literal meaning.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger! (Joining a famous line of war-mongering peace-prize winners, like Yasser Arafat, Aung San Suu Kyi, and current Ethiopian leader Abiy Ahmen.)
What do Henry Kissinger and Bob Dylan have in common? ;-)
Also from wikipedia article on Tom Lehrer - "There is a false rumor that Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. He did comment that awarding the prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete"
Happy to help if you need more folks to help judge ACX applications, develop a rubric etc - I’m off of work for the rest of the calendar year so have plenty of time
Has anybody done a study on the effect of "placebo" in treating COVID? Formally, if you give one group an "experimental" pill (which is just a sugar pill), and the other group the same treatment with no pill, which group does better?
Hopefully you could measure this with a meta-analysis comparing placebo-treated people in published experiments with population-level statistics, controlled for age and calendar date [because of variant shifts].
I've come to think that "the placebo effect" is too diverse and heterogeneous a set of phenomena to be helpful to study.
In a vaccine trial, you want a placebo injection, because the blinding is important to ensure that behavioral factors, positive psychology, biased testing by doctors, etc. isn't the real explanation for the difference in case numbers between the two arms of the study. But if you compare placebo vs nothing, you have no way to disentangle these three types of effects from various others that might be there.
I expect that you're hoping for something that might tell us specifically about whether the positive psychological boost given by the fact that someone seemed to treat you could be effective. But unless we can separate this effect out from "doctors double-checked when they saw results they didn't expect in the control population but didn't double-check in the study population", we can't really conclude very much.
I think this is one part of why it's much easier to do a randomized controlled trial of a vaccine or a pharmaceutical than of a mask or of bike helmets.
If placebo treatment gets the same results as surgery, maybe placebos are surprisingly effective, or maybe the surgery is just worthless and knees heal on their own.
The article assumes that knee surgery works, so it goes on to make the point that placebos are surprisingly effective. But my point was to highlight that an assumption is being made, and without it there are other possible conclusions.
Writing a series on Brain-Computer Interfaces. The last post talks about emerging technologies - some of you might find it interesting. https://howthehell.substack.com/p/bci-part-2
Thanks for signal boosting my post Scott! It took a while to write!
Everyone who cares about the Paxlovid issue should consider submitting a comment to the FDA. It doesn't have to be very long. Here's the direct link where you can submit your comment to be looked at by the committee that will review Merck's EUA application for Molnupiravir:
Note the deadline for your comment to be considered is tomorrow (November 29th) (the meeting is on the 30th).
The comment should probably address something related to Molnupiravir although strictly speaking it doesn't have to. Either way, you should definitely urge the FDA to do the EUA for Paxlovid ASAP!!
"The FDA still hasn't scheduled a meeting to review Paxlovid. It scheduled its meeting for Molnupiravir 7 weeks out. But it scheduled its review of the vaccines just 3 weeks after the submission. One suggestion, if you submit a comment, is to urge the FDA to schedule its review ASAP and to make the timeline 3 weeks (or less) rather than 7."
This is where, theoretically, the suggestion should be "talk to your Congressional representative". After all, if the FDA is blaming the rules for acting slowly, Congress can simply change the rules.
Even without legislative action, somebody in Congress should be motivated to make a scene about this, either Democrats who want to make Biden look good for doing something, or Republicans who want to make Biden look bad for not doing something (and who will then take credit when the drug is approved).
However, based on what's going on with Aduhelm (where Democrats announced an "investigation" 6 months ago and did nothing else), it's not clear any faction in Congress is motivated to try to make things better for the American public -- at least if it involves health care.
As I explain in my post the rules already allow the HHS secretary or FDA to issue an EUA easily if they want to. Or they could use Expanded Access. So no rules changes by Congress are needed, unless you want some sort of more forceful rules forcing them to act in emergency situation, by having some formalized consequences for inaction. Rules requiring more transparency into critical decisions also seem good, or requiring reciprocity (ie if a drug / vaccine is approved for emergency use in the UK, it should automatically be approved by the FDA).
Over the past year I've been called for a congressional inquiry into the FDA on Twitter several times. Here's the main questions I want answered:
-- Why was the AstraZeneca vaccine never approved in Jan-Feb (it was approved in the UK at the end of December).
-- Why no endorsement of challenge trials?
-- Why did they update their EUA guidance to require a longer follow-up period effectively pushed the date of the Pfizer vaccine EUA out beyond the election?
-- Why no faster EUA for Molnupiravir and Paxlovid given the situation?
-- Why didn't they authorize boosters for everyone 18 and over? (we sorta already know the answer to this one but would love to have the question asked).
-- A LOT of hard questions on testing...
Unfortunately, instead Congress is investigating the FDA about Aduhelm instead (a drug which doesn't seem to help with Alzheimer's much but actually performs age-reversal by removing amyloid plaques).
If anyone does write to their congressperson, consider asking for an inquiry too. I'd love to see some FDA officials grilled. I view it as essential preparation for the next pandemic to ensure what happened at the FDA this time around never happens again.
I would say off the top of my head that the chances of a Congressional committee asking any of those questions is zero to about two decimal places. And not because they want to hide something, or secretly want the pandemic to get worse, but because some of them make no sense -- e.g. no one is going to touch reciprocity with a 10-foot pole until thalidomide is buried in the history books , and challenge trials are a nonstarter for a disease with potentially lethal outcomes unless you want to kill all the the plaintiff lawyers first -- and the rest don't really seem like they make anything better. They're like auditing the Fed, an amusing fantasy of asking certain people WTF were you actually thinking? but the chances of the Federal Reserve system actually being dismantled are zip and so it's kind of strategically pointless.
Congress is certainly not above grandstanding, but it would normally have to be in service of some political aim, and I can't see either party getting a political boost from suggesting to the broad public that they shouldn't trust the FDA at all. Well, maybe Rand Paul would get on board with that, so....24 votes to go...
I disagree - reciprocity and challenge trials seem pretty common sense and low hanging fruit that I believe are two of the easiest things we could get Congressional support for. There were a bipartisan group of 35 Congresspeople that lobbied the FDA to support challenge trials, but they never did:
Reciprocity legislation has been introduced at least twice, most recently as a headline part of the RESULT Act, which was introduced by by Mike Lee and Ted Cruz in the Senate and Congressman Chip Roy in the House.
Yes, I get that you think reciprocity and challenges trials make sense. That was quite clear the first time. What I'm telling you is that I doubt very much they make sufficient sense to ~300-400 cautious members of Congress to even debate the issue.
> Why didn't they authorize boosters for everyone 18 and over? (we sorta already know the answer to this one but would love to have the question asked).
What's the reasoning for this? I've been wondering myself. The best I could find was something about "not enough data" but if that were the case, it seems weird they're even approving it at all.
The reason the FDA didn't want to approve boosters for all is that they were only looking at the trial data from Pfizer on reducing hospitalizations and death (and to a small extent the Israel data). If that's all you care about, there isn't a strong reason for people under 65 to get a booster. And the case is especially weak for males 20-30 where there's a ~1 in 200,000 risk of myocarditis. The problem is, as Andy Slavitt, has been saying on Twitter for months, boosters are about way more than that! They are about reducing transmission, for instance, something that the FDA didn't consider at all because there's no RCT directly addressing that question (only a ton of indirect evidence). The Israel data (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114255) and Qatar data (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.25.21262584v1.full.pdf) showed very clearly that efficacy against *infection* drops to near 0 after 6 months for anyone over 18. Other studies have shown the viral load in nasal passages is not significantly different between unvaccinated and people several months after vaccination. If you want to read more about what the FDA officials were thinking, read the article co-authored by Krause and Gruber, the two high-ranking FDA officials who quit in protest: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext
They will show that someone has *coronavirus* but will they identify the variant? I can't imagine that they've already updated everything to find omicron, even if it were merely a software update (and it's probably not?).
It looks like at least *some* PCR tests *can* identify omicron, because they test for the presence of several genes, one of which is so varied in omicron that it doesn't show up - so if you see all the genes but that one, you can be pretty confident that it's omicron (though there were other variants in 2020 that had this same feature).
I am also a lowly medical student, with a background in CS and mild startup experience. I would love to hear about your work. Like Dan, I’d prefer to hear some things about it first: what’s your target customer, and why is this better than existing options? Ideally would like to see that here or via email, but if you feel the pitch has to happen via voice, I’m cool with a short phone call.
Coursera is good, but it isn't the apt comparison to what I am working on.
They don't serve the same purposes, you might easily use my software to absorb a Coursera lecture more efficiently, for example.
This software is effectively a disparate method for medical-specific note-taking / converting text into tutorial formats / using medical drawings on your computer to relay medical information quickly and in professional quality.
I don't know that anything similar exists yet, frankly.
Unfortunately it's already been announced/happened, but if there is an ACX Grant Program 2 I think public applications with a prediction market would have been interesting
That'd be really cool. I imagine it could help a lot with evaluating them faster as well. The applications that everyone predicts have a low chance of being funded can probably be skimmed without spending too much time.
Are you saying that the Republicans are the Party of Freedom of Speech, and the Democrats are not the Party of Freedom of Speech? Or do both parties claim that label?
When a school district in Virginia tries to use a lawsuit to shut down a website publishing information about school finances (especially information released by the school district after parents filed a FOIA request), is that pro-freedom-of-speech, or anti-freedom-of-speech?
When a school district reduces the list of books being given to students in their curriculum, is that a restriction on freedom of speech? Or is it a change of curriculum?
My proposal is "sex ed at 12, AoC at 14". Sex ed has to be before AoC so that kids know things like "you can say no if you want" and "you can get STDs if you have sex in certain ways" (without those, rape-by-deception and rape-by-implicit-coercion rear their heads). And AoC needs to be low so that teenagers don't get a motive to lie about their age. I'd be more open to revising my goals lower than higher.
Different people can react differently to the same thing. For example, you shoot two guys in the chest -- one dies, one survives. But we probably wouldn't look at the second guy and conclude "shooting people isn't *really* lethal, that is mostly a myth". We would probably frame it like "sometimes the victim is lucky".
In the same way, I am curious whether the quality of evidence for trauma being socially created is more like "there is *one* controversial guy on internet who said he was sexually abused as a kid but he doesn't have any trauma" (by the way, if we actually do have the same guy in mind, he changed his opinion later), or there is some statistics saying like "out of X people having this experience, only Y were traumatized".
"This guy isn't traumatised" wouldn't be evidence at all (at least, not in our society); that guy would have to be an exception even to "socially created".
I'm talking about the stories Chaz Gibson mentioned: "kid was doing fine until society intervenes and tells the kid he/she's a victim, at which point kid suddenly develops trauma"; those are straight-up proof that it *can* be socially created, and one would expect much larger numbers of PTSD cases to come from people who already knew society expects X to cause trauma. Moreover, there have been cultures that did this sort of thing on a large scale (or did other associated-with-PTSD things like warfare on a large scale), and they didn't collapse from everyone having PTSD (note also the much-lower rates of PTSD from e.g. WWI, which already had things like artillery).
The model is "if you expect trauma, then people who don't get traumatised will question their experience which can cause trauma; trauma is natively rare so *at present* this is the main cause of PTSD".
> Moreover, there have been cultures that did this sort of thing on a large scale (or did other associated-with-PTSD things like warfare on a large scale), and they didn't collapse from everyone having PTSD (note also the much-lower rates of PTSD from e.g. WWI, which already had things like artillery).
Not sure how to distinguish this from a hypothesis that in the past we expected less "civilized behavior" from people than we do now. In other words, perhaps things that we associate with PTSD now, were simply considered a normal behavior back then.
The idea that there was less PTSD after WW1 is a bit ridiculous to me. Sure the exact definition did not exist but shell shock was pretty well known. The average way someone who did not (manage to) hide the symptoms is very well exemplified by the "slap incidents" of Gen. Patton during WW2.
I personally know a woman who was regularly sexually used by her grandfather until the age of 9, when she stood up to him and refused to let it happen further. To this day she feels that she was violated, and that she has suffered lifelong psychological scars that she still is trying to fully heal: that it harmed her marriage, harmed her relationship with her daughter (something her daughter agrees with, by the by), and caused her to be filled with rage and contempt towards others for most of her adult life.
Did society do that to her? Perhaps. But it should be noted her case is ideal for a non harmful sexual relationship with a pre-pubescent: it was with a family member she trusted, when she made it clear she did not consent he stopped, and every other member of her family she talked to about it tried to minimize the harm, putting social pressure on her not to make a big deal out of it. So it's not clear to me at all that we can assign a high probability to the harm being only caused by social conditioning. And, of course, cases like hers are not hard to find.
Given that we cannot be certain on what the cause of harm is, and given that the only benefit of re-framing society to accept sex with pre-pubescents is to allow a very small fraction of society to experience more sexual satisfaction in their life than before, and given that the risk is normalizing practices that cause lasting psychological harm to children, I would say we should err on the side of continuing to socially condemn sex with pre-pubescents.
I'd say that pedophilia is a sexual orientation. I'd also say that it's one that can't morally be acted out, much in the way that someone with a paraphilia for vore can't either. It's an unfortunate state to be in; like being born a psychopath, or with a severe genetic predilection to addiction. It's not your fault you turned out this way, but you still have responsibility over what you do with what you were given.
The alternative is that people choose to be attracted to pre-pubescents, which doesn't seem tenable in a post-gay rights world. Every argument against "homosexuality is a choice" works for pedophilia as well. Of course the traditional reframing of that argument has been "homosexual attraction is not a choice, but acting on it is" and I would say that certainly applies to pedophilia.
As for the rest, I'm a natural law kind of guy. I believe the telos of sex is towards reproduction, and when you get away from that things get bad. Sex with a pre-pubescent is disordered because they're not a proper target of reproduction, same as having sex with a goat, or a corpse. Of course that leads the standard counterarguments: what about having sex with a barren woman, or a sex toy, or masturbation in general. Quite frankly I don't have great answers to those (I have answers, just not great ones). But I do think going with the "Is this something I can have a child with" standard fits my moral intuition that sex with pre-pubescents is wrong even if no "harm" occurs. If you take a utilitarian standard then it would hold that some sexual acts with pre-pubescents is licit provided they are not physically harmed and either can't remember it or remember it fondly.
As far as age of consent goes, I think post-puberty sex can be licit but may be unwise or coercive. Traditionally that has been prevented by parents being in charge of who gets to have sex with their daughters (sons less so, but you only have to have a governor on one of the sexes to prevent unwise or coercive mating. Since women have a much higher cost to pay from sexual mistakes or crimes it makes since to focus your attention on them). Our society has come to the collective decision hat we will trust people to make their own choices at the age of 18, that seems like a fine Schelling point for when parental guardianship over their children's sex lives should end. So I would support allowing sex between those over 18 and those under it provided that the minor is post-pubescent, the minor's parents consent, and the minor consents as well. Not a perfect system since parents can be neglectful, abusive, negligent, or tricked, but we trust parents to make every other decision for their children despite that so why not the sexual arena as well.
Still, I would be loathe to campaign for such a change: our current system works acceptably well, and it's really not too much to ask for someone to wait 2-5 years for the object of their affections to turn 18 before having sex.
I'm reminded of an interview with Greg Allman. He was asked if was true if the Allman Brothers carried a laminated card with the age of consent in each city they visited. He replied yes.
I'm not familiar with Lysander Spooner, though I'd be happy to learn about him if you care to teach.
Funnily enough, the natural law stuff comes from my religious background combined with encountering the works of Edward Feser to give them a stronger logical foundation. That and reading The Illustrated Guide to Law (https://lawcomic.net/) which brought to my attention the obvious fact that pre-Victorian era puberty was the dividing line in these matters: unlike "age of consent" it is obvious to everyone in the community whether a girl is pre or post-pubescent, so there can be no claim of ignorance. I now view age of consent laws as an attempt by the state to serve a protective role towards young people that I think is generally better suited for parents and guardians.
Was mentioning this before as well when Scott was wondering about slight differences lead to huge differences in the number of comments: Substack's comment functionality is subpar and way behind other 'for discussion' kind of places on the net. They just need to install a decent software and not fall victim to the NIH syndrome.
It entirely breaks rwading comments on phones though, because leaving and coming back to the parent page resets the hidden state of all comments above, and the scroll position is restored before comments are reloaded.
I've pretty much given up on following the comment discussion since the move to substack, the experience is just broken on mobile devices.
Are there any phone browsers which accept plug-ins written by normies? This is fixable, but last time I looked you needed a permission slip from Brandon Eich to install an extension onto any phone browser.
The hostility to the unvaccinated assumes they are more likely to spread the disease, but it isn't clear if that is true. Vaccination is very effective against death, less effective against infection, and the latter declines over time. I've seen one report that it was down to 20% after five or six months, and multiple estimates of about 50%.
Vaccinated people are more likely to be asymptomatic, hence have no reason to self quarantine when infected, and vaccinated people rationally take fewer precautions since the risk if they are infected is less. Combining those, it's entirely possible that vaccinated people are as likely, even more likely, to infect other people as unvaccinated. That would explain why we haven't seen a sharp decline infections, only in deaths, in countries with high vaccination rates.
Update on that: Just today there was a study estimating what fraction of the infections are coming from/going to vaccinated vs unvaccinated people in Germany. Scenario A seems to be the more plausible one, and they get
unvaccined -> unvaccined: 51%
unvaccined -> vaccined: 25%
vaccined -> unvaccined: 16%
vaccined -> vaccined: 9%
The other scenario B assumes that vaccinations decline stronger, but even there vac->vac is only 16%.
Also, I have also been paying attention to the ratio between incidences of infections in unvaccinated vs vaccinated groups (data from various European countries, but on very different levels. Some national, some regional, some by age groups, some pooled). It was quite consistent that the incidence rate in unvaccinated was by a factor 3-10 higher than in vaccinated people, and 10 was frequently appearing.
(There was one outlier, in UK data. This has been hotly debated. There are at least some claims that this was an artifact from different databases, though I don't find this fully convincing. In any case, it is a gross outlier against all numbers from other countries that I have seen.)
These ratios are strongly confounded and must not be taken at face values. Many European places have "3G" rules saying that people need to get tested if they are not vaccinated or recovered. Still, I find it hard to believe that this explains a factor of 10, or that large factors appear consistently over many different places and settings. Consistently, for hospitals in Germany, the majority there (even 90% majority for ICUs) is unvaccinated, even though the vaccination rates in older people are pretty high. (A vaccinated old person is more at risk than an unvaccinated young person, so with similar incidences we might still see more vaccinated people in hospitals.)
So the hypothesis "vaccinated drive the pandemic in Europe as much as unvaccinated" has to explain away a lot of things. That's why I find the conclusion of the study quite credible, that most spreading goes back to, or at least involves, unvaccinated people. Note that this counts absolute numbers of infections, even though unvaccinated people are a minority of the population.
Are those estimates based on data on who gets infected by whom, or on a model, and if the model how do they take account of the two factors I mentioned that increase the probability that vaccinated will infect others?
Also, for the ratio figures, are they doing random testing? If not, they can be expected to underestimate infection in the vaccinated, since they are more likely to be asymptomatic. I know the U.K. does have a program of random testing, don't know if other countries do. If not, that could explain the difference.
No, it's models, so all caveats apply. The assumptions are mostly based on the UK sampling data, and based on these assumption, they try to match the number of symptomatic infections with several models.
I don't think there is any substantial data anywhere in the world (larger than in the order of 10-100 cases) where we actually know for a whole population where the sources of infections are. That's just hard to find out. Of course, we know it for a subset of the infections (i.e., in the same household), but knowing it for a small subset is perhaps(?) not overly helpful for this question.
Yes, you are right. I did look the numbers up a while ago, and then it was close to 90%. But you are right, there has been a significant shift. Still, given how many elderly are vaccinated, 35% and 44% do not seem large. (But I haven't done the calculation.)
I think this is a matter of interpretation. Certainly the situation would be much less dramatic with higher vaccination rates. It *is* much less dramatic in other European countries with higher vaccination rates. Some of them also have moderate to high incidence rates, but as far as I got it, they don't have overflowing ICUs. Germany has made the big mistake of not rolling out booster shots in time, which seems to be the main reason for the 35% and 44% . But even so, the unvaccinated minority makes a huge difference. If ICU patients went down by a factor of 44%, the situation would be pretty much ok.
I share your prognosis (with low confidence) that we have probably seen the peak of the current wave in terms of new infections. But I don't agree at all with the "no significant change in measures" part. According to a current Forsa poll, 63% of Germans have already changed their personal behaviour in reaction to the current wave. (Btw. in the subgroup of unvaccinated it was only 46%.) Large public events like the famous "Weihnachtsmärkte" have been cancelled en masse, as have numerous small events, and big sport events (Bundesliga) are now happening with much smaller audiences. And even so, the only parts of Germany were the trends are clearly reversed are the southern regions, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, which did have lockdowns in highly affected municipalities (closing of shops, hotels, cultural institutions, sports, ...). Heck, some regions of BW had curfews for unvaccinated people!
Apart from that, the question of whether vaccination should be mandatory is a political question. I am not really happy with how quickly the whole political elite has switched from "mandates are impossible" to "sure we do it, how high exactly is the fine". But in principle I support mandatory vaccinations. I think it is still true that European countries with high vaccination rates are doing pretty much fine (perhaps with some moderate measures like wearing masks in winter), while countries with low vaccination rates are facing serious threats, and there are good reasons to be in the first category. Like, really really good reasons. Even good enough to make vaccination mandatory even against the will of a minority, in my eyes.
> and vaccinated people rationally take fewer precautions since the risk if they are infected is less.
A vaccinated person, after vaccination, is likely to take fewer precautions than they were before.
HOWEVER, I am skeptical (as of November 2021) that a vaccinated person, after vaccination, is doing riskier things than an unvaccinated person.
I just don't have a good mental model for "refuses to take vaccine, but takes a lot of covid precautions." I'm sure there are some out there (maybe they just hate needles?) but that's where I am.
I admit that doing anything like that would be not viable, not realistic to achieve and likely a dumb idea anyway.
This comment is mostly result of frustrating situation and knowledge that if I (or some family or friends or also strangers) get in some kind of accident then risk of death or serious injury is now much larger.
There were already deaths in extended family that were directly attributable to vaccine misinformation (that caused for example 90 year old person to not vaccinate, shed died from respiratory illness that quite likely was COVID) or likely from overloaded hospital and collapsed ambulance system (in one case ambulance was not dispatched because none were available, with prompt medical attention maybe it was a survivable, who knows).
The actual blinded trials showed that vaccines reduced infection, even if it wasn't the primary endpoint. Are you claiming fraud or something like that, or more making a point about how behavioral changes are induced in the real world by vaccination?
were the trials testing everyone, or only those that showed symptoms? Also, as jstr implies, the original trials wouldn't tell us what effectiveness was five or six months out.
I think that you are mistaken in considering Western conservatives to be hostile to sexual deviance. If they were, it should be very surprising to see them keep electing homosexual leaders such as Geert Wilders, Ilan Sadé, Søren Pape Poulsen and so on.
Spain has had a number of homosexual conservative senators and the US had a homosexual running to be the conservative party's presidential candidate. Note that we don't see such representation for groups that everyone agrees that Western conservatives are hostile towards, such as pædophiles or communists. So how is this considerable homosexual representation compatible with Western conservatives being hostile to homosexuality?
It seems you've been misled about how western conservatives feel about queen folk
You wrote "But in reality, even now, many queer people in the west do not idenfity with queer culture and would rather live and participate in a conservative society — just one that doesn't want to kill them just for existing."
But in fact only a vanishing small minority of western conservatives want to kill queers for just existing. The other 99% of conservatives do not want this at all. You seem to be arguing against a ridiculous strawman.
Look at some of the recent hot button political issues. They include things like whether a bakery should be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding and whether Transwomen should be allowed to participate in women's sports. These are small fringe issues that exist in a society where both sides, Liberal and conservative, take it for granted that queer folk have a right to exist and have sex with whoever they please.
So, this is the first I've head of that, and all I know is what the relevant wikipedia article says about its use in the US. Very open to being corrected on the facts of the matter if I'm wrong. My impressions from the article is that this defense typically (when successful) leads to a second-degree murder conviction instead of first-degree.
It seems to me that the category of "gay panic legal defense" doesn't really cut reality at the joints. Consider the typical distinction between first/second degree murder (each state defines these, but they're mostly uniform in broad strokes.)
* First degree murder usually requires premeditation or that the murder is committed in the course of a different felony, like armed robbery.
* Second degree murder requires the murder to be unplanned but intentional or caused by reckless disregard of human life.
Murdering someone because you got mad at a homosexual sexual advance (presuming you do it immediately in the heat of the moment, rather than going home and making a plan and killing them the next day) IS second degree murder. Claiming that you did precisely that is a defense against first-degree murder only in that it's a claim that you didn't have a plan to kill them.
And this is why I don't think it's a sensible categorization of legal defense. If you fly off the handle due to a heterosexual unwanted advance and kill somebody, that is also second degree murder. And claiming that you killed someone for a heterosexual unwanted advance is no different as a defense than a homosexual unwanted advance; there's no actual difference between those two defenses (and both should be effective at reducing your charge from first-degree to second-degree if you can convince the jury that you're telling the truth.)
If my understanding of the reality here is correct, then the 'gay panic' term isn't really a distinct type of defense, and so shouldn't be singled out for banning.
There's a generational divide on the issue. I think younger people on the right care way less about gay marriage and so forth than Gen X and especially Boomers do. It's easy not to notice this, though, because there are a lot more Boomers on the right than there are millenials or Gen Zers, currently. As young people who are currently on the left get older and move to the right (as is typical), this will become more apparent over the next couple decades.
I would also note that as far as societal roles for people with non-normative sexual preferences, I think the Catholic church actually offered this for a long time, where *wink* *wink* the priests and the nuns are all celibate because they're married to the Lord or whatever the deal was, certainly served as cover for a lot of gay men and lesbians who opted into those roles over the centuries. Needless to say, this doesn't seem to be working out very well these days, but it at least exists.
As to why the stigma in the first place: I think you're correct that history has something to do with this. Am I wrong, or do a good chunk of the male-male homosexual relationships of ancient Greece and Rome seem to have been pretty exploitative? Modern Afghanistan has some famously awful cultural practices in this regard, too. So I think one could at least posit that a society where the rule of law is somewhat weak and which is stratified by class (which describes a lot of societies right up until quite recently) maybe protects the lower class from exploitation by powerful upper class men when it creates strong stigmas against homosexuality? Just a thought.
One other possible factor I'd throw out there: men have a higher preference on average for sexual variety than women do. But since it takes two to tango in a heterosexual relationship, female preferences wind up being a limiting factor in the male quest for sexual novelty. Obviously, this doesn't work with male-male relationships, and promiscuous sex is a good vehicle for pathogen transmission. Ergo, one could argue that a society with high tolerance for homosexual behavior is one that will inevitably have a higher disease burden (modern society perhaps exempted, since we've gotten good at killing pathogens).
There's no real evidence that people move to the right as they get older. I think people conflate conservative = right wing, when in reality, conservative really just means "resists change".
Indeed, that is the best description of such; people tend to be stuck in their ways and have relatively stable attitudes over their lifetime.
I think a lot of this misconception comes from the idea that the hippies grew up and drifted to the right, but IRL, Nixon won just over half of the under 30 voters in 1972.
I've been meaning to comment on one of these threads, because nobody ever bothers to try steelmanning the 'conservative' position on LGBT issues. I don't necessarily blame my fellow conservatives for doing so, as it's very possible nobody has actually thought much about how and why that came about, and as a conservative, it's possible to defend the status quo without knowing how or why we got there. Chesterton's Fence doesn't apply if you plan to leave the fence alone.
Let's ponder a different question first. Why is American culture so hostile to blind people? There are many things we take for granted that blind people are excluded from. There are jobs we deny them the ability to hold, and they are denied the full ability to access many things the rest of us take for granted. I mean, it's unfair that they can't enjoy the Grand Canyon or the Smithsonian like the rest of us. And yet, while I'm sure somewhere someone is throwing around the world 'ableist', I think it's generally accepted that we don't fear or hate blind people.
The whole raft of LGBT issues doesn't concern something relatively trivial like one of the senses, but something that concerns two of the fundamental drives in almost literally (literally) the entire f**king animal kingdom: copulation and offspring. The cultural divide comes down to the difference between sections of society that can separate the two and those that can't. As a conservative, I'm in the side that can't; fundamentally, I think those who believe they can are still burdened with a lot of assumptions derived from the fact that the two are inseparable that they've never grappled with, and the result is massively damaging political assumptions that proceed on the basis that one side doesn't exist, assumptions that have already had costly effects on society.
My mother is a blue-dog Democrat (she'd vote for a blue dog if it ran as a Democrat) from a blue collar union background. She doesn't think much about politics; whatever the Democrats are for today, she's for. If you told her she was a bigot, she'd be aghast. And yet, I can sense the disappointment that I'm never going to produce her a grandkid (that a large number of my aunts and uncles on both sides of the family are single introverts and that it was obvious that I didn't fall far from the tree may have softened it a bit). It also helped that my sister obviously didn't inherit the same genes. If she had come out as a lesbian, mom would have been devastated (fortunately, she didn't. and my mom has a grandkid to spoil). And yet, if you told my mom she was homophobic for her preferences, she'd be aghast, because as a progressive Democrat that votes for LGBT rights, she can't be homophobic; she's perfectly happy to support LGBT rights as long as she gets her grandkid (and the grandkid has a stable two-parent family, and so many other traditional assumptions, which are completely outdated as long as you're talking about kids other than her grandkid). Mom also wouldn't have hated my sister or anything like that, just been profoundly disappointed.
Even talking about much of LGBT rights assumes a specific answer to the question of how separate offspring and copulation are that was never something that we as a society ever collectively decided on. If you believe the purpose of the existence of the institution of marriage across multiple cultures is to secure the existence of offspring and family lineage (a natural result of thinking that copulation and offspring go together), talking about 'gay marriage' is a non sequitur. Even if slightly different and always imperfectly executed, cultures evolved the institution of marriage because it served a purpose for society.
I'm fully realizing that there is an incompatible values debate here, so there's no right answer. I'm also fully willing to admit that in order to hold on to a bunch of values that they don't fully understand based only on traditions, a fair number of conservatives (and others) have acted horribly towards LGBT individuals. However, if you want me to accept you living with your values, you have to agree to let me live with mine. Part of that is recognizing that just as not wanting a blind airline pilot is not based on fear or hatred of blind people, not wanting to encourage relationships not based on offspring (looked at both in terms of providing a stable home for the kid and a source of support for the parents as they age) is not necessarily based on animosity towards LGBT individuals.
My understanding is that homosexuals do, in fact, play a pivotal role in the rearing of animal offspring. Namely, they act as a guaranteed pair of adults that are unlikely to have their own offspring so that in the (very likely, at least in the animal kingdom) event that an immature cub or offspring loses its parents, it can still be brought up properly. In other words, homosexuals exist so that parentless offspring can be adopted and cared for.
So actually, by your beliefs in the natural order being more important, you should not only be encouraging gay marriage, but also pushing to make it easier for gay couples to adopt!
Speaking of marriage, that's not the only reason marriages were created. Many marriages are done for political, societal, and economic gain. When marriage was invented, women were seen more as property than as people, and marriages were essentially business transactions. It's why, for example, christian weddings have the part about "who gives this bride?", why doweries used to be, and in some places still are, a thing, and why the existence of political marriages by using princesses (usually with no chance at the throne) to secure alliances between nations came into being. It's also why people get married just so one of them can get citizenship, or access to healthcare, or next-of-kin rights, or visitation rights, or a bevy of other societal perks from businesses and institutions that look down on unmarried, cohabitating couples, regardless of orientation.
Oh and one last thing, blind people could totally be airline pilots if given proper training and accommodations. Modern navigational equipment, air traffic control techniques, and weather forecasting mean planes practically fly themselves these days. Just modify the instruments to read measurements out loud and the steering handles with buttons to prompt specific readouts and I'll bet you a blind person could be trained to fly.
Giraffes are not homosexual; as far as can be seen, male giraffes will attempt to copulate with female giraffes and vice-versa. A lot of the supposedly "homosexual" behavior is actually dominance based behavior. That doesn't mean that they don't engage in "homosexual" behavior for other reasons, but as far as we can tell, there aren't any homosexual giraffes in the way that there are gay humans.
Being exclusively homosexual is hugely deleterious from a natural selection POV. The gay uncle theory is wrong for a number of reasons, ranging from "it doesn't actually help to pass on your genes very well" to "many of the animals that exhibit homosexual behavior don't even help rear young."
Indeed, there's fairly significant evidence that the cause of homosexuality in male humans is likely some sort of reaction caused by a woman's immune system on male fetuses; the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be gay, and gay people's mothers are more likely to have certain kinds of antibodies suggesting that they had an immune reaction to a male fetus they were carrying.
This would also explain why homosexuals seem to have significantly higher rates of mental illness than straight people do.
It would also explain why homosexual behavior has never been eliminated; it's primarily environmental, so there's little ability to select against it, and selecting against a strong immune system has much larger downsides than having the odd gay child.
As far as we can tell, homosexual behavior in humans is only about 8-25% heritable - it is a heavily environmentally mediated trait, and none of the alleles which correlate with a higher chance of homosexuality actually cause you to be homosexual, they simply alter the probability marginally (present estimates that the five most associated regions they have found can explain maybe 1% of variation).
This is consistent with the notion that these regions have some other, non-homosexual effect and the homosexuality increase is a side effect of whatever else it is doing (or a mutation that simply isn't deletorious enough to be strongly selected against).
None of this makes homosexuals bad people and it is stupid to discriminate against them, but the notion that homosexuality is biologically advantageous is completely unsupported by any sort of biological evidence whatsoever.
I don't think your point about adoption holds for humans. My impression is that most orphaned kids are usually taken in and raised by blood relatives, the vast majority of whom are not homosexuals, and I wager this has pretty much always been true. Further, there's no reason for evolution to favor such a system, anyway, because the reproductive benefit accrues to the orphaned youngster, not the gay adoptive parent(s).
I mostly agree with the rest of your comment, though.
There are very few kids in the US under 3 available for adoption by strangers. If you give birth to a kid that does not have *extreme* impairment and put them up for adoption, they'll get taken right away.
Okay, but think about the proportions. 100,000 sounds like a lot, but this site says the number of children in the US whose primary caregiver was a grandparent was 2.9 million as of 2010:
In 2010, more than half of children (54 percent) who were living with grandparents were being raised mainly by a grandparent who reported having primary responsibility for most of the child’s basic needs. The numbers of children with grandparents as their main care providers grew from 2.5 million in 2005 to 2.9 million in 2010, a 16 percent increase over the decade.
...
In 2010, about 920,000 children were being raised by grandparents with no parent living in the home. This number declined slightly, however, from 960,000 in 2005. Compared with all children cared for by grandparents, children raised by custodial grandparents are more likely to have a disability, be teenagers, and have family income below the poverty line.
As to your second point, that's true; we do see intra-species and sometimes even inter-species adoption, but that has little or nothing to do with homosexuality, either in animals or humans; it cuts across sexual orientation boundaries. I think I stand by my original point: there's little reason for evolution to favor homosexuality (in males especially, but probably females, too) if their only role in reproduction is to raise somebody else's kids.
I'd like to think I could do a good job of raising my sister's kid if something happened to her and her husband. My brother-in-law has a married sister, so they'd probably be a better bet. My BiL's family are perfectly good people. Still, I don't think they'd do as well raising my sister's kid as they would their own, even though they intended to. I know people who were adopted by loving families and turned out fine, and I know people who were raised by horrible biological parents. Still, I'd wager a sizable amount that if there were a way to rate parenting, on average biological parents are better than non-biological parents.
For that matter, we talk about role models, especially with respect to society. Does a same-sex couple provide a good role model for a child of the opposite sex? Does it help to have individuals of both genders for children to grow accustomed to? I wouldn't know for sure, but I would wager. I suspect there are some couples that would work fine, but if the answer isn't that same-sex couples are on average every bit as good, then we have a good reason for prioritizing opposite-sex couples in adoptions, all else being equal.
And 'every bit as good' is ultimately a value judgement itself. And then there's the social pressure to pretend that 'every bit as good' is there when it's not, to avoid making people feel bad (as opposed to the people that have to live with the long term consequences).
On top of that, there's the social costs associated with normalizing treating sex as something other than reproductive, which gets back closer to the root of the problem. If copulation (sex) isn't a means for reproduction, what is it? Entertainment? Recreation? I don't know what to call it, but any way it leads to serious other issues. We've got a whole 'incel' problem where people that feel society owes them what is nothing more than a short-term diversion feel that they're the victims of social inequality. We've got higher status males that partake in what is supposed to be harmless fun and find that 9 months later they're on the hook for the rest of their life... and the kid as meal ticket isn't being set up for a great future in the process. We've got women that held off on raising a family that discover that when they finally want to get that long term satisfaction of raising kids down that there's nobody there for them anymore.
"Oh and one last thing, blind people could totally be airline pilots if given proper training and accommodations."
Blind people can, with equipment, fly an airplane. But that's not what we're talking about, and the fact that you only mention the mechanisms of flying the plane is an indicator of the problem. For starters, think about the need to deal with emergency situations (where all that additional gear has failed), or the lack of safety resulting from bypassing the regulations put in place to deal with those.
How much would it cost to make blind people totally equal to sighted people as far as outcomes? Proportionately represented in every job from airline pilot to baseball umpire? Just as happy with every art museum and sunset? Hint: with current technology you can't do it, except Harrison Bergeron-style, by blinding everyone.
Just because the technology doesn't exist does not mean you should give up and stop trying to improve things. If the there is a potential point of failure, you build systems and regulations to account for it. Blind people can totally enjoy art museums: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/multisensory-art/486200/. They recreate the art pieces with contours and textures to represent shapes and colors respectively. Building on that idea, we could maybe let them enjoy sunsets too if we developed a cross between the shape display from the first xmen movie https://youtu.be/55voa5Pee2M with enough granularity and these mirrors in different mediums https://www.wired.com/video/watch/obsessed-mechanical-mirrors and then filming the sunset, maybe even using temperature differentials to indicate warm vs cool colors. Blind people can also be taught to use clickers as a form of echolocation, and blind baseball LEAGUES actually exist https://www.nbba.org/ so the problem of blind umpires could probably be solved pretty easily too.
When it comes to whether gay people should be allowed to adopt, kids are not guaranteed to have any relatives that are even alive, let alone willing and able to take them in if something happens. The fact that over 100,000 kids are currently waiting to be adopted just in the US alone https://www.adoptuskids.org/meet-the-children/children-in-foster-care/about-the-children#:~:text=How%20many%20children%20are%20awaiting,are%20waiting%20to%20be%20adopted means that only letting straight couples or exceptional single people adopt is not enough. Even if gay people make worse parents overall, it's not right to throw out a potential solution just because it's not the absolute best possible. I doubt the variance among gay parents is any worse than among het ones, and you must agree that it is still better than having no parents, yeah?
"I'd like to think I could do a good job of raising my sister's kid if something happened to her and her husband. My brother-in-law has a married sister, so they'd probably be a better bet. My BiL's family are perfectly good people. Still, I don't think they'd do as well raising my sister's kid as they would their own, even though they intended to."
As an aside, your intuition is probably correct there, but I'd wager that has more to do with the "if something happened to her and her husband" part. The child would feel stressed because they'd have to adjust to having an entirely new family, and your brother-in-law's family would probably feel stressed because they were suddenly and unexpectedly forced to take responsibility for someone else's child. I'd imagine the results would be a lot better for a married couple that specifically wanted to adopt a child, especially if the child was raised with them from such a young age that he/she didn't remember his/her birth parents.
Regarding your main point, demanding that same-sex couples be *exactly* as fit for parenting is an unreasonably high standard, since statistically speaking there are always bound to be *some* differences when comparing different groups, even if it's just due to random noise and doesn't actually signify anything. It's also an unfairly selective demand, since there are probably all sorts of other categorizations that correspond to parenting quality to some degree, and yet almost no one suggests limiting adoption on the basis of those factors. Should Protestants be discouraged from adopting children on the basis that kids raised by Jewish, Catholic, or Mormon parents tend to have better life outcomes? Should Republicans be discouraged from adopting children if it turns out that kids raised by Democrats have better life outcomes, or vice-versa?
Furthermore, I'm not so sure the difference would be in the direction you assume; if it turned out that gay couples actually did a better job of raising children on average, would you then reverse your position and argue that gay couples should get *preferential* treatment when adopting? In fact, I've seen one study that proves that the children of gay couples do *better* in school than the children of straight couples; while this is partly due to the fact that gay couples who adopt children tend to be wealthier than average, there's still a slight positive correlation even when you account for socioeconomic status. Another study looked at the overall early life outcomes and mental/emotional health of children raised by lesbian parents, and found no difference in their well-being. See for yourself:
"How much would it cost to make blind people totally equal to sighted people as far as outcomes? Proportionately represented in every job from airline pilot to baseball umpire? Just as happy with every art museum and sunset? Hint: with current technology you can't do it, except Harrison Bergeron-style, by blinding everyone."
Argumentum Ad Extremis. If blind people can fly a plane with the aid of machinery, they should be allowed to do so, as long as there's another qualified person in the plane with them in case of emergencies. (Note that having another qualified person in the plane in case of emergencies is already recommended for all pilots, so that part wouldn't even be an added cost or burden.)
Right now, commercial airliners require two fully qualified pilots; presumably, they have a safety reason for that requirement. Changing the rules so that one pilot can be blind with technological assistance means relaxing those safety requirements. You might be willing to pay more and accept the slight additional risk to allow a blind pilot on your next flight, but it should be rather obvious that a sizable portion of the population might have an issue with making that trade and this isn't out of hatred or fear of blind people, but out of rational pragmatism.
Is it unfair to blind people that current safety regulations prevent them form being airline pilots? Yes. Will this make some of them depressed? Almost certainly. Should we do things to open opportunities for blind individuals? Yes. Can we make it so blind people have every opportunity available to sighted people? No. At some point you have to draw the line. Different people will draw the line of the acceptable costs versus benefits at different places. The problem is that once you admit you have to draw a line somewhere you're forced to confront the fact that you can't make the world a fair place for everyone. (And I could repeat the exercise with any number of other subjects. Is it fair that quadriplegics have obstacles to being firefighters? Is it fair that deaf people have obstacles to being sign language interpreters?)
It's unfair that people have physical disabilities. It's unfair that people have different mentalities. It's unfair that people have different starts in life. There's a limit on what can be done to make things fair, most importantly because 'fair' means different things to different people.
When you link copulation to marriage, aren't you really missing the critical middle connection, which is child-bearing? The hypocrisy here is that conservatives who link copulation to marriage don't condemn, say, barren women from marrying fertile men, do they? And lesbian or gay couples by definition aren't at risk of producing offspring from their copulations, per se. Of course, with the advent of technologies like birth control, fertility treatment, and surrogacy, even the link between copulation and child-bearing has been marginalized to a great degree. But since property definitions have evolved (including that women and children are no longer considered property themselves), maybe this copulation-marriage "value" needs to be updated too?
Remembering that the core concern here, "children should be raised in secure, loving two-parent homes when possible," may be the most powerful *reason* for the value means that the copulation-marriage "value" may be too crude and too limited at this point in human evolution.
Progressives, of course, often run too fast on updating values without considering unintended consequences (as Deseach points out in the "choosing embryo based on eye color" controversy elsewhere in this thread), so I understand the social contract includes allowing for conservatives to push back on how values are updated. Still, that does not absolve conservatives from updating their own priors to make sure the "value" still matches the reason for said value.
"When you link copulation to marriage, aren't you really missing the critical middle connection, which is child-bearing? The hypocrisy here is that conservatives who link copulation to marriage don't condemn, say, barren women from marrying fertile men, do they?"
Considering how many times I mentioned 'offspring' in the paragraph above, I don't know why you think I missed something. And while we don't condemn barren women just for being barren, usually societies have an out for marriages that don't produce offspring; in the case of the Catholic Church, the one easy way to get an annulment of your marriage was inability to conceive.
"Of course, with the advent of technologies like birth control, fertility treatment, and surrogacy, even the link between copulation and child-bearing has been marginalized to a great degree."
Again, even though people think it's minimized, there are still a lot of hidden remnants to that link that still crop up, from 'surrogate' parents on the hook for child support to the fallout from ineffective (or "ineffective") birth control.
"Still, that does not absolve conservatives from updating their own priors to make sure the "value" still matches the reason for said value. "
I agree that conservatives should have an idea of what they are conserving, and that a lot of the problem is people that don't realize they are low-information decision makers following the tribe, whether it be to follow tradition or to break it because it seems to no longer apply.
"Considering how many times I mentioned 'offspring' in the paragraph above, I don't know why you think I missed something."
Poor phrasing on my part and you are right - you did draw the correct lines to offspring and copulation. My beef is really that the Church links the "value" from copulation through to marriage and that that link breaks down for the reasons I cited above.
Both marriage and the two-parent household are obviously imperfect social constructs, the problem is that it's rational to believe you have to demonstrate a better idea before replacing them. Saying that marriage "may be" too crude and limited isn't enough; what's the alternative? And is the alternative so obviously superior that everyone has to endorse it?
One alternative was for the state to replace marriage with civil union as the legal contract and leave "marriage" as a spiritual sacrament. This would have satisfied legal protections for all while letting each group define "marriage" as they see fit. There was a time when this would have satisfied the gay community, but conservatives didn't seem to keen on that until too late.
The more serious problem in modern society is that the divorce rate is so high that the ideal of children being raised in a two-parent stable home has had far more serious challenges to it than gay couples wanting to have legal protections or even to raise children too.
You kinda partially pointed this out already yourself, but Japan is actually a great example of a society that's *more* hostile to transsexuality than ours. Trans people don't have to live their entire lives in the shadows (as if they did in the US, or e.g. Britain), but on the other hand, neither is there anything like an attempt to shame people for thinking they're gross, mocking them and so on, and *certainly* nothing like a movement to proclaim them or other types of deviant normal. For a facile example you can look up trivially yourself, Eiichiro Oda, who draws One Piece, is openly *pro*-trans and includes a surprising number of such figures in his comic, *but* they're basically only there to be the butt of jokes about how ridiculous they look and how gross and offputting they are to any normal red-blooded man. (Perhaps most notably, a character getting teleported to an Island whose name basically translates to "Tranny Island" and then spending two years "training" by fleeing from/beating up gross stubbled men in wigs chasing after him and trying to rape him. It's funny! Haha!) Certainly there's no attempt to claim that male transsexuals are actually women or anything like that. And this is the way a guy who sees transsexuals in a *positive* light depicts them. His stance is basically "Rocky Horror is rad".
Like Will G, I think the crucial distinction is that because Japan is securely conservative, there's no (socially relevant) movement to push progressive flat-eartherism like "trans women are women", so there also doesn't need to be any pushback against that. The American right *actually needs to struggle against* this stuff, so they'll inevitably come off as more aggressive about it. But also, since the Western progressive demands themselves are fundamentally insa--- incompatible with observed reality on a high level and have a strong Orwe--- coercive social control aspect, they inherently arouse the anger and even disgust of very many people, which of course is exactly one cognitive step away from aggression. In that sense, it's not about "clinging" -- most of these people would almost certainly either happily revert to a Japanese arrangement, or (the majority, I believe) would be unhappy with it as being too regressive.
I suppose that conservative people are usually religious, but different parts of the world have different religions, and different religions have different opinions on homosexuality. Japanese conservatives do not care about what Bible says on this topic. Conservatives in many African countries are even more strict against homosexuality.
Also, the cultural model of homosexuality seems to be different in modern West. I don't know enough history to say whether it is completely unique, or merely different from the Greek/Roman/Japanese model. I mean the idea of two adult people of the same sex marrying and then perhaps adopting children. As a man in ancient Greece/Rome you fucked little boys because it was fun, and then you married a woman to give you children: your de-facto little slaves and future heirs. Two adults men having sex would be shameful.
So the version of homosexuality that they tolerated was not the one that we have in the West today. Specifically, it did *not* threated the traditional family; your son could be gay, but he still gave you grandchildren.
1) There is a lot of sexual repression, which breeds resentment against those who don't have to sublimate or suppress internal sexual drives.
2) There's such a strong cognitive dissonance between being told sex outside of hetero marriage is wrong by the Church and the lustful desire that can fill one's loins (for hetero or homosexual sex).
3) For some, there is a disgust around homosexuality because they are straight and homosexual sex acts simply sound gross to them, or they are secretly some form of gay and loathe themselves for wanting it.
Technically, fornication (sex outside of marriage) is equally condemned in the Bible as homosexuality but you don't get nearly as many religious folks worked up over that happening as you do gay sex. I suspect the above reasons contribute to making this *personal* for each hater beyond just following another church doctrine so gay sex becomes the locus of all their repression then.
Something which I feel is really important to understanding many conservative positions but which is almost always overlooked in analysis is the importance of aesthetics. A lot of people who lean to the conservative side find many aspects of progressive culture, including gay culture, to be very ugly. This aesthetic preference is impossible to justify in any logical way and conservatives themselves know that just saying "Yeah I get what you're saying but it's just gross and ugly on a visceral level" is a terrible argument. Because of this it almost always gets left out of any pro vs anti homosexuality analysis and the anti position becomes much harder to understand.
I dunno. You're setting yourself up for a Crying Game Moment, I think, in those circumstances. I'm happier being able to tell whose jersey color matches their alma mater, so to speak, and whose doesn't.
While I do think that boiling it down to one cause is oversimplifying, if I had to I would go with this:
LGBT rights are making serious progress in the west and not elsewhere.
I got this from r/mapporn: Countries in Asia that recognize same-sex marriage on a national level. For those that don't want to click, only Taiwan recognizes same-sex marriage.
While I know marriage isn't the only issue here, I still think it is a useful metric.
If lgbt rights aren't advancing, or advancing slowly enough that you don't really notice the change, what is there to push back against? It seems like it would be very hard to be reactionary against an action that isn't happening.
I also think that increasing partisanship is making this much worse. From both sides. The right clings harder to the position as a fuck-you to the left. The left doesn't make arguments that could appeal to the right because they don't understand them/view them as beyond saving/something else.
> will you start intentionally breahting car exhaust if the left advocates for better air quality?
Yes, they already do. It is called "rolling coal".
> The American right, on the other hand, seems incapable to evolve on the issue.
It's hard to say. On the one hand, outside of the South I see it being a case like France/Canada where the conservatives more or less drop the issue once it becomes something people grow up with. However, I'm not sure about that happening in the South and the South is big enough to keep it on the national agenda.
> Japan
Overall, I think you are a bit optimistic about Japan.
> but these people don't have to live in the shadows and hide their entire life
From what I've seen, this isn't the case. It seems there is an expectation that you'll stay in the closet your entire life in order to not cause problems for your family and workplace.
> there is plenty of queer representation in Japanese media
I know this is the case in anime, but is it also like this in other Japanese media? Frankly, I haven't seen it but that could be my lack of exposure.
Anime is weird, and hard to draw conclusions from. A lot of it is weird to Japanese people. It seems like the more mainstream stuff does have less representation. While stuff that is deep in otaku/weeb territory has lots of representation, it also has representation for things the western lgbt community wouldn't want to be associated with. A lot of lgbt representation seems to be either to make them the but of the joke or for "male gaze".
I doubt the western lgbt crowd would look at Japanese media and think they are making progress in the correct direction.
Given I see that LGBT progress is pretty slow in Japan, what is there for Japanese conservatives to react against?
According to recent polling in Japan, somewhere between a plurality and a majority of people there think that same sex marriage should be legalized (one poll by Asahi Shimbun found support there at roughly 65%).
It's also worth remembering that South Africa has also legalized same-sex marriage.
I agree. In Japan, are there organization advocating teaching children that homosexuality is perfectly normal in schools? If a prominent Japanese CEO is discovered to be against homosexual marriage, would it be expected that he would be fired or at least have to recant his views publicly? If a Japanese baker refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, would the state threaten him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines?
If the answer is no, then there's your answer. People can tolerate weird people better if they're not required to praise them.
Western conservatism is unusually pro- nuclear family.
According to the Institute for Family Studies [1], nuclear families were common in England as early as the 1200s. Nuclear families are more flexible and mobile, typically marry later, and put more effort into raising each child than multi-generation households. This might have been a contributing factor to the Industrial Revolution.
If the nuclear family is an unusually good way to organize society (or if many people believe it to be), then it would not be surprising that people resist any modifications to it.
IMHO "conservatism" has become too loaded. When it was originally coined it was supposed to mean "cautious and slow about making changes BUT STILL WILLING TO MAKE THEM AFTER CAREFUL CONSIDERATION". From the original (radical, progressive, moderate, conservative, reactionary) scale, four out of five of those were still technically in favor of making changes, while the last was the one that thought "nope, don't change anything, in fact go back to the way things were".
Somewhere along the way the reactionaries got mixed in with the conservatives while the radicals got mixed in with the progressives, and now being reactionary is rarely brought up while being radical has changed to mean anyone that wants big changes regardless of direction. It feels like the loss of granularity and muddying of terms has made things worse instead of better, because it becomes harder for people to disengage from groups that have a few heinous platforms when that group's other platforms are the closest fit from all the groups available.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if you could go after the republican and democratic parties for violating antitrust laws? They are run like businesses (hierarchical structures, advertisement, research and development, manufacturing and selling of merchandise etc) and offer a main product of political representation, under a pay-what-you-think-is-fair payment schema (donations), and they actively work to keep out competition (third parties) by ensuring there's only a single provider for a certain TYPE of political representation. Should we be just as afraid of duopolies as we are monopolies?
> Somewhere along the way the reactionaries got mixed in with the conservatives
I agree, and think it has to do with how the South moved from being solidly Democrat before the civil rights movement to solidly Republican since Reagan. Before this, it seems like the Republicans were (socially) conservative in the exact way you mean. After the shuffle, it seems the moderates/conservatives in the Republican Party couldn't resist the stronger push of reactionaries from the South. They just kept calling themselves conservatives because a) why not? and b) it has better PR than either reactionary or orthodoxy.
The right is anti-homosexual because the working class is anti-homosexual, and these days the right tends to be much more popular among the working class (while in Japan, the right is more popular in urban areas than rural). The Trump 2016 map in Maine looked exactly the same as the SSM 2012 map, and very unlike the Romney 2012 map.
This. Also we're traditionally a Christian culture. Homophobia is a part of that. So people who are into "traditional values" will be more likely into homophobia.
If the right had it all their own way, part of the agenda would 100% be the removal of all non-traditionally gender and sexuality from all public spheres.
Shit, stonewall was WITHIN LIVING MEMORY. Your parents were alive for stonewall.
>the removal of all non-traditionally gender and sexuality from all public spheres
This is still much weaker than the "Wants to kill them all just for existing" claimed by OP.
Also, I think this the bailey stage of a very noticeable motte&bailey aggressively pro gay supporters often engage in without noticing (to be charitable to them), and I say this as a left-wing moderate gay supporter who's slowly-but-surely kinda getting sick of western LGBT+. They push for things like prioritizing gay "representation" in media and TV, incredibly sexualized parades, and, recently, the inclusion of a sexual comic where two underage boys are giving pleasure to each other in public education in one US state. When people like me get uncomfortable with that and point out that even the "privileged straights" don't dream of demanding 1/10 of this any day of the week, the defence squads retreat into "So you just want to ban gay people entirely?".
I don't, I just want "gay" to stop being a free get-out-of-jail pass for ridiculous and entitled demands that violate the rights of others. You would never defend a man showing cartoon genitals to a child or moaning with desire next to them, yet merely changing the "gay bit" from 0 to 1 suddenly reverses this.
I don't think comparing being gay to being a pedophile is the move. I've only seen outraged screenshots of the book in question, but suggestive situations involving
*only* minors don't seem to be beyond the pale for sex-ed. The people who don't mind sexual content in libraries also don't mind it for straight kids either. LGBT+ aren't getting special treatment there. It's the same people who want to get rid of sex-ed for *everyone* who are most scandalized that this particular book exists. I think we've had this fight before, and the only reason it seems exceptional right now is because it involves non-traditional gender and sexuality.
World War II was within living memory; we don't describe Germans as an unusually warmongering and genocidal people. If people change for the better, you should acknowledge that. And if you make a claim in the present tense, it should be true at present.
Would it though? I don't think you have to believe that conservatives want to kill gay people to believe that they are also weirdly fixated on sexuality and gender. Like, every. single. one of my in-laws has been divorced and remarried, but the one marriage related thing in the whole family that scandalizes all of them is when the gay daughter gets married. And these are people that you'd never even know were opposed to gay marriage unless you knew them *very* well.
I mean that to society in general, they don't read as people who have any issue with gay people whatsoever (as opposed to seeming like they want to kill them...), but secretly they have many issues.
Major conservative politicians have been vocally anti-abortion since Roe V. Wade (and before, of course), yet they stopped being vocally against SSM almost the moment it became the law of the land.
Why do conservative politicians no longer campaign against SSM? A good explanation would be that they realize it wouldn't be a winning issue on the margin among voters they are trying to win over, nor does the issue animate the conservative base.
"Why do conservative politicians no longer campaign against SSM?"
While this statement is true on aggregate, it might be worth mentioning (at least in passing) that one of the cornerstones of the legal brief that Jonathan Mitchell (drafter of Senate Bill 8) filed in support of Texas in the highly mediatized SCOTUS case is that the court should immediately overturn Obergefell v Hodges, Lawrence, and other similar cases (see https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-1392/185344/20210729162610813_Dobbs%20Amicus%20FINAL%20PDFA.pdf, page 24).
I don't believe they would revert to it being illegal. Those are mostly red states and you know that all those Republican legislators are desperately hoping for a chance to get a bit of anal in with some barely-legal boy. \s {for sarcasm}
So this whole thing is just about what you choose to believe is true. Got it. As user Freedom stated above maybe you don’t understand what’s happening here because your fundamental assumptions are wrong.
Well, I'm not a Republican, and I don't pretend to be. I think of most GOP politicians as limp-wristed and overly willing to drop issues they've lost on (like Social Security and Medicare).
Have you looked at the west’s fertility rates? The US is also below replacement rates. Europe is dire. I don’t believe the mantra that China got old before they got rich either, there’s plenty of GDP to be eked out of china’s working population as the relatively uneducated older population is replaced by a younger more educated population. If the working population is more productive the dependency ratio isn’t that important. The west is has passed that demographic bump. Growth in China will slow but only from the crazy numbers of the last two decades.
Catchup is also easier than staying ahead.
As for being driven by demographics to be belligerent towards Taiwan, Taiwan has the lowest TFR in the world. The supposed need for aggressiveness doesn’t make sense. China just has to wait.
Far from people not discussing China’s demographics they are discussed more frequently than the situation in Europe. In fact most Europeans don’t even know the situation in Europe - try telling a guardian comment section that we in Europe don’t have a crisis of exponential population growth but the opposite, an exponential decline in the future. The response is fury or bewilderment. And yet it’s a huge problem.
Not that the latest figures out of China are great (1.3) but that looks like last years specific covid issue. The US had a tfr of 1.6. Both will recover in the next few years and I bet the Chinese are more able to move the needle than western countries. They’ve already reformed.
Perhaps with the assistance of AI and robotics, China will be able to solve some of the problems that come with having an aging population. Anyone who has spent much time in China knows that pollution has reached dystopian levels in some regions. If China had not limited its population growth, then the environmental degradation would only have been worse.
Is China really so aggressive? Like any rational power, they try to gain access to resources by wooing countries with soft power through their Belt and Road initiatives. The US media likes to portray China as aggressive, but aside from being brash in diplomacy and trying to get respect on the world stage, China has not been invading countries and using drone strikes like the US.
Chinese kids have been taught in school that Taiwan is part of China, and it seems likely that China will eventually absorb Taiwan. The US and the West are rational actors. We have too much at stake economically to put much effort into stopping China. Confidence in democracy is at a low point, so would Americans send their children to die in a war in order to ensure that Taiwanese have political freedoms? Americans would not even be willing to give up cheap consumer goods from China say goodbye to cheap consumer goods from China.
China may be aggressive in its quest to reabsorb Taiwan, but this is a very specific and predictable target that they have never given up since WWII. I am arguing that they are not acting aggressively in general. Fifty years ago it would have been easy to predict that China would want to control Taiwan, but it would have been difficult to predict which countries the US would go to war with. We have had so many military adventures and meddled in so many governments. That is aggression.
You watch: Chinese women will soon be asked to "gestate a victory fetus" as an act of patriotism and social credit. Its genes will be sourced from "China's intellectual, scientific, moral and innovation leaders" (all Han), and the most promising ones will grow up in CCP boarding schools. Rewards will be calculated so that rural women can live comfortably just from pushing out one victory baby per year. And if that's not enough babies, they will lure in Filipinas and such to do paid surrogacy work.
Well if they decide to increase fertility drastically right now their future twenty to twenty-five years later doesn't look all that bleak. But Chinese fertility still seems to be declining.
Well, China has a good track record on controlling its demography - the one child policy was really efficient it seems. If they really want more children they may just implement a three-children policy and be done with that...
I'd go to Canada. In fact, that's an active discussion in my household from time to time. I have a lot of family and we have a lot of friends where we are, which keeps us rooted, but I think the 22nd century will be the story of Canada and Russia, and Russia is . . . well, I'd originally written something nasty here, but since there are Russians around, I'll back it off and just say not to my taste.
I have thought about this somewhat and don't think there is an obvious answer. Others have noted Australia or NZ which are great countries but would also be impacted by the US going south.
Switzerland or other small European states could be attractive. Switzerland has the benefit of being an international finance hub that is historical neutral and likely to be left alone in any major cold or hot international conflicts.
Someone else suggested South America. I think there could be opportunities there. Brazil, Argentina, Chile are all highly developed countries (though with very poor parts). They are large enough to be able to withstand the US dropping back economically.
I have thought of this questions mostly to find a country that conforms more closely with my philosophical values which run libertarian. That rules out lots of countries. Usually I am left with Switzerland, maybe Singapore if I can get over it being an autocracy (I also hate humidity and like to ski). NZ and Australia are very tempting but culturally will follow the US/Europe.
I've come to the conclusion that you have to go to extremes to answer this question. Either become hyper local and focus on your immediate neighborhood, city, county. OR become completely unmoored to location. The second option requires living like a bum (which is hard with kids) or being very wealthy and have resources to move anywhere to avoid catastrophe. I am leaning towards hyper local while pursuing options which could result in mega wealth.
The question is whether polarization increasing in the US is a local phenomenon, or just a symptom of a global one. The best explanation I can see for why polarization is increasing is due to the structural effects of social media as compared to broadcast media, and this would predict a worldwide effect (even if the details have been different in different places over the past decade). If this is a global phenomenon rather than a national one, then moving isn't likely to be relevant.
I'm going to guess from your mention of "culture of innovatin, VC ecosystem" that you are in one of the costal cities. Maybe try taking a vacation to somewhere really foreign like Utah for a month and see how it feels...
I've had a lot of the same feelings, albeit as a native American. I think gaining dual EU citizenship is about the best that you or I can do (and you can basically buy it in Portugal, and I think a couple of the other poorer EU states). Once you own your home wherever in Portugal, to my understanding you're then free to move to France or Germany. I would strongly prefer to continue living in a wealthy, 1st world country.
It's easy enough to say 'oh well I can just live in Latin America, or some other developing country'. But if the US falls in widespread civil unrest, the world will actually change, and I'm less certain that being a white American gringo with money who clearly moved from elsewhere would be particularly safe. You're now at the mercy of a non-wealthy country's legal system, or the local populists, or what have you.
I would avoid Canada, not just because of the cold, but because it's so dependent on the US that if America falls or becomes unstable, Canada would be in bad shape. I don't understand how New Zealand has become the wealthy hobbyhole of choice- you are very much in China's sphere of influence, and I would prefer to not live in fear of an authoritarian superpower. Post-Pax Americana, China could simply order New Zealand & Australia around and threaten them if they don't comply.
Britain seems like the absolute best option because it's wealthy, stable, and has a powerful enough military that it can't be pushed around too much
While Aus and NZ might be vulnerable in an international diplomacy sense, they still locally have strong rule of law and wealthy, liberal populations. The worst China is likely to do in practice is demand lopsided trade deals.
'The worst China could do' is to literally invade them in absence of Pax Americana. Or threaten to do so, especially New Zealand which is an absolutely tiny country
I am skeptical that China would benefit from invading and occupying lands so far away from its current territory. Now, the economic impact that China could have on NZ could be huge as NZ relies on imports so much.
If and when Pax Americana can no longer be trusted Australia will probably withdraw from the NPT and acquire a nuclear arsenal. It's big enough and more than educated enough, and it's got plenty of uranium.
That would be quite a challenge, and take a while, 5-10 years would be my guess. The problem is that Australia lacks a nuclear industry, has no access to accurate design specs for modern warheads and would have to rediscover them, and has no heavy launch vehicle industry for designing and building delivery systems. All of that would need to be buitl from scratch, and even in the US, with far greater resources and wartime urgency, that took 4 years start-to-finish for even the crudest B-29 delivered 25kt nuke. To build a credible modern IRBM or ICBM delivered strategic deterrent that would give the Chinese pause would take twice as long I think.
The difficulty is that the US and UK are so culturally similar that any internal problems in America are likely to be happening in the UK for similar reasons. If the UK stands, then they’re the best choice, but if the West falls, I’m going to Rwanda. They’ve got a lot going for them right now, but aren’t important enough for a world power to invade. They’re also less likely to collapse into instability and ethnic infighting, like many other countries, since they’ve learned the hard way where that leads.
I mean if the US is in bad shape, we're left selecting from a menu of not-great options. I would strongly prefer to live in a wealthy democracy with rule of law, and a powerful enough military that they can't be pushed around. That vastly narrows down the world's nations- Britain's one, I guess you could argue France is another. I'd take Germany if they had more military prowess & I didn't think they'd likely just kowtow to whatever Moscow tells them in a post-Pax Americana world
@scott my browser just killed 10-20% of my smartphones battery while having this thread open. Then it got hot and crashed. Now my browser shows black and white bars. Please look for another, better way for your readers to have seamless discussions. There is plenty of software and services way better then the current substack crap.
Would it be possible to make a third-party mirror? (Something like "greaterwrong.com" is for "lesswrong.com".) Maybe without the commenting functionality, just for reading.
'just reading' is ok. But I assume the beauty for Scoot and his readers lies in the readers and the very special discussions regarding tone, all kinds of level (IQ, education, wisdom, curiosity, politeness etc.) So ACX without it's readers comments and discussion is like a nation without natives.
The discord link on the front page isn't working for me? Is this happening to anyone else? Does someone have a different one?
Can someone give me an explainer on the Chinese social credit system(s)? Where on the line of "this is a widespread totalitarian thought-policing system" vs "this is just a 21st-century better business bureau and worries about it are just a red scare." What are the good sources to read about this that aren't super partisan?
According to Wikipedia, "the social credit policies vary greatly from city to city", so the answers to your question may also vary.
I don't see the "business quality check" and "though control" as two separate things. That is, you can do the "business quality check" separately. But if you want to implement a good "thought control" system, it is best to conflate it with the "business quality check" system, because that gives people and companies the *selfish* reason to punish the people with low score.
To explain, imagine that tomorrow a dictator would emerge in some Western country, and all people who oppose the dictator would have to wear some symbol. On one hand, it would make it easier for people who support the dictator to punish those who have the symbol. On the other hand, people who oppose the dictator (but were not caught yet, so they don't have the symbol themselves) could *support* the people who wear the symbol. And people who are not interested in politics would not care.
Imagine a more clever dictator, who instead creates a symbol for people who are murderers, rapists, *or* who oppose the dictator. All these categories would have the same symbol, so if you see someone with the symbol, you don't know which category they are. For the people who support the dictator, the situation would not change much: they would still avoid and punish the people wearing the symbol. But now even the people who don't care about the politics would avoid people with the symbol, because with high probability those people are dangerous to them. People who oppose the dictator would probably support the few people they know in person, where they know they wear the symbol merely for political reasons, but would be also wary of strangers with the symbol. This symbol works much better to punish wrongthinkers, because everyone has a selfish incentive to do so.
I don't know how much the system is abused now, but it definitely seems like something that *would* be very easy to abuse.
From Western perspective, it is also weird that children can be punished for their parents' low score. Having grown up in socialism myself, I am not surprised at all; hurting the relatives of wrongthinkers is a popular communist pastime.
Is there a way to search comments here that's up-to-date? acxsearch.herokuapp.com is over five months out of date now.
So what will be the next political craze? Identity politics has been in for the past 5 years but seems to be on the wane. Maybe war with Russia will take its place? Or maybe another 3 years of fighting over vaccines and masks? What else seems likely? As a long shot bet, I'll buy some abortion-war tickets.
At some point in the future I'm betting it will be animal rights. That would probably be a pretty useful thing to LARP about.
We already had a brief round of That Damn China (outrage over Hong Kong, Uyghurs, Biden saying "China wants to become the most powerful country in the world and I'm not going to let that happen"), and I wouldn't be surprised if it comes back. I got the impression that there's plenty of fuel left for that fire if someone wants to stoke it.
A simple US political history of this century would be:
2000-2005 9/11. War on Terror. Anti-immigration sentiment grows strong.
2005-2010 Disenchantment with the War on Terror. Great Recession. Anti-globalist and anti-immigration sentiment growing stronger.
2010-2015 4th Wave Feminism dominates culture as does the SSM movement. Recent black right's movement starts with Ferguson.
2015-2020 Identity politics all the time. Pandemic which becomes randomly political due to the tribalism which started a couple decades prior.
I'm going with 2024-2032- with political majorities secured, the New New Right in the US and the UK passes a series of measures which start as Anti-Crime and Anti-Corruption legislation and ends in number or foreign conflicts, some troubled. Nativism/Conservatism will take the day akin to Reagans first term.
Has the present ever felt so absurd -- not a certain era in retrospect, but as it is happening -- or does it always feel this absurd to people as they start to age?
I'm a zoomer, but I do know that trust in government eroded since the Vietnam War and that in general it seems that there is a lot less unified trust in a central system of beliefs/institutions/whatever. And I think that breeds a lot of wackiness because people just form their own groups and beliefs. Also, the pandemic, but has there not been similar things every century?; it's still weird to anyone who experiences it, but maybe it's not super spectacular in the general course of things. I suppose it's complemented by everything else that's weird; a lot has changed since previous pandemics.
The seventies were pretty weird.
The pandemic has felt more absurd than anything in my lifetime, although President Donald Trump also felt very absurd. Perhaps President Ronald Reagan felt absurd to those who grew up knowing Reagan as an actor, although I doubt that could have felt as absurd as Trump since Reagan was at least governor of California first.
WW2 must have felt absurd--and didn't Camus come up with our modern notion of the absurd because of WW2?
The Depression must have felt absurd at some point. The Great War was absurd, but not sure how it felt for Americans, since they weren't really in it.
My sense is that the times felt more normal in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, than now. I think we are living in the most absurd times since WW2.
I can't "Expand full comment" as of a few hours ago.
The feature back with my Chrome browser on a Linux machine now. Software developers. Can't live with 'em. Can't shoot 'em. :)
Same here! I wondered if it was a glitch on my end. Maybe Substack is trying to get us to write shorter comments? 😀
It works again now, for me at least.
The latest episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which just ran on FXX) is one of the best anti-woke takes from liberal Hollywood. If you think the left can't be anti-woke, I suggest you watch it.
In it, they attack viciously how some of their earlier episodes were erased by woke Netflix because they used black-face, they lean in hard on other racial, classist (white yokels) and other sexual stereotypes acceptable to contemporary moral sensibilities, to point a pointy stick in the eye of hypocritical leftists, and actually make it all very funny.
Wokism is dying and Hollywood is taking the lead in killing it.
I think the US has a good natural resistance to the existential threats of excessive wokeness and socialism.
Maybe it's just fashion changing. Wokeness starts to feel like something that old people do. (I mean, from a teenager's perspective, 30 years is quite old.) Wokeness is not a rebellion; it is what their teachers are telling them to do at school; it is what you are supposed to do in order to keep your job.
(Listening to Jordan Peterson makes you much more of a rebel than being woke. I am sure there are also other options.)
Sounds interesting, but... already season 15, oh my.
So, is it specifically S15E01 or S15E02 that you recommend? Would it make sense to someone unfamiliar with previous seasons?
Okay, it is S15E02. Not bad, and makes sense without having seen the previous episodes.
It's not a long-plot driven show. You can watch any episode at any time and it makes sense. Well, you can't watch the episodes that Hulu canceled, I guess.
My opinion on that is that "wokism" has run its course, like preceding popular movements (what are Code Pink doing these days?) and Hollywood, being a commercial operation driven by response to the market, is trimming its sails accordingly.
The wokeist demands on Hollywood are onerous, expensive, and difficult to implement. They are also, very likely, making inconvenient demands on the studios and producers.
And everyone involved will pretend to have always hated it
Correction: it was Hulu not Netflix who censored the blackface Sunny episodes. It was the Lethal Weapon 4 and 5 episodes. The latest episode of Sunny is Lethal Weapon 7.
And what would you say is the international relationship between the banning of homosexuality and the banning of other human pursuits?
I would be very grateful if anyone could help me find an article that I'm 80% sure Scott linked to a few years back: it was about a community mental health worker in India and the general effectiveness of a community-based social work-like approach to mental health, where people with relatively short training can help a lot of others, as opposed to the way that licensed therapists need many years of training and a lot of people can't afford their help. It also mentioned some research done in the 60s and 70s, that showed how these two approaches had comparable results and suggested that the research was kept quiet and then stopped because of lobbying from the licensed professionals.
Is it the Atmiyata program? See e.g. https://ijmhs.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13033-016-0113-3
Okay, to dampen Paula annoyance, this:
So where do you think the economy is headed?
If you want an answer to that question you’ll have to ask Yellen.
SO WHERE DO YOU THINK THE ECONOMY IS HEADED?
What's the conclusion on face masks after all the new evidence? This site seems pretty shady but links to several prestigious seeming studies claiming that there is no benefit - https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/
On the other hand there are several sites that do claim effectiveness. Scott's old post took source control almost for granted, but that seems to be up for debate now as well.
Extensive discussion on DSL - https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4841
The first and strongest conclusion: never ever ever talk about "masks" in this context without specifying what *kind* of masks. The vast majority of masks (Lone Ranger masks, Batman masks, hockey masks, ski masks, etc, etc, etc) obviously provide zero protection against Covid-19, but even within the category of masks worn by people who think they might protect against Covid-19, there is a wide range of performance probably going down to "about as effective as Lone Ranger masks" and possibly even "worse than useless".
Second and almost equally strong conclusion, mask *mandates* that don't specify what kind of masks, are going to mostly encourage people to wear the cheapest and most comfortable masks in the most careless fashion, all of which anticorrelate with effectiveness. The people who are going to wear N95 respirators, are mostly the ones who are going to wear them mandate or no. So don't expect mask mandates to do much good, and in fact it doesn't look like they have done much good.
If you're just looking for personal guidance, or if you are hypothetically a dictator who can impose specific mask mandates on your population, things get a bit hazy. My best guess is:
Typical cloth masks, as typically worn: 5-10% reduction in chance of infection. These are the ones that might actually fall into the "worse than useless" category through carelessness.
Cloth masks diligently worn with careful attention to fit, sterile procedure during handling for reuse, etc: 20% reduction in chance of infection.
Surgical masks as typically worn: 40-50% reduction in chance of infection
N95 respirators as typically worn: 80-90% reduction in chance of infection
N95 respirators diligently worn by people trained to ensure proper fit and not reused: 95% reduction in chance of infection
Is it possible to define "reused" more precisely? If I'm out running errands I reuse the same N95 in different places, but at the end of the day it's going in the "to be washed" bag.
I haven't seen anything that even tries to quantify that. Qualitatively and intuitively, if you are careful to only handle the mask by the straps and keep it e.g. in a ziploc bag between uses, you're probably OK. It's contact with the active surface that matters. But if you're trying to protect both yourself and others, note that both sides count as active surface. Fomite transmission is a minor factor in Covid transmission, but touching something that has the concentrated detritus of everything you've exhaled or coughed up in the past few hours makes your fingertips high-risk until you wash them.
Similarly, maybe throw the used mask directly in the washing machine rather than in a to-be-washed bag where someone else in your household might wind up handling it.
Thanks, both for the link and your personal model. Is there a difference in these percentages based on source control vs. Recipient? I.e are you more/less likely to pass on the infection than you are to get it, conditional on wearing a mask?
Masks are somewhat more effective at preventing the wearer from becoming infected than preventing them from infecting someone else, but it's not a huge difference - at least for asymptomatic individuals. If you're coughing and sneezing, any mask makes a big difference in protecting the people around you. But if you're coughing and sneezing, you should be staying isolated at home.
I've raised this issue before, but someone needs to do double-blind tests on masks. Start with the flu, move on to other diseases after that.
Randomized control trials, sure, 100%. But how exactly are you going to give people placebo masks? ;-) [ relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1462/ ]
Create masks with the ability to filter at different particle levels. In theory everyone is wearing a mask correctly [1], but some of the masks are completely useless, varying in the size of particles they stop until we get maybe even better than N95 at the top.
I expect we will find some particle threshold where the masks work, depending on the size of particulates that the flu virus moves with. And once we've experimented with other diseases with different particulate sizes, we'll have a decent model that lets us make good predictions about any novel virus we encounter.
[1] There is a difference between wearing them ideally and how they are worn in practice, just like with condoms. And this is a good thing to study as well.
My gut feeling is they're probably about 30% effective (90% confidence interval: 10% - 60%). I'd like to say that this is based on studies, but really it's more a case of no study I've seen so far significantly shifting me away from my prior.
Is there any use case for a drone autogyro?
I doubt it, Eric's point notwithstanding. There are much better compromises between fixed and rotary flight for UAVs such as tilt-rotors and fixed wings with an additional four motors for hovering. I think the difference is that electric motors can be throttled faster and scaled down better than combustion engines.
Modern autogyros seem to be used for surveillance or recon flights, so I guess a drone could patrol for longer? I don't understand what an autogyro's advantage is over a plane, though.
The autogyro's principal advantage over a plane is that it can be flown safely at much lower speeds. This makes then generally safer than small planes: they need far less runway to take off or land, and if the engine cuts out they will gently glide to the ground at low speed. The only caveat is that if the autogyro gets flipped to be at the wrong angle it will drop out of the sky like a stone. However this will generally only happen if the pilot makes a particular mistake while flying, and shouldn't occur due to the wind or anything like that.
An autogyro drone might be useful if you wanted a slow flying drone that used less power than a drone held aloft with rotors, or if you wanted a drone that will be more likely to survive a crash if they lose power or guidance.
Yes. The use case is, "Hey guys, come see my new drone autogyro!"
So this (what follows) seems like the perfect topic for the rationalist community.
There is an old well established theory (hypothesis) to explain part of the 'world'.
Almost all the experts believe the old theory, and though they have been searching for years,
decades, there is no hard data to support the theory. (No Dark matter has been found... and the
possible un-searched space is small.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Detection_of_dark_matter_particles
There is a newer fringe model, which at some level is just an empirical fit to the data.
And for anyone who knows physics, the fringe idea is crazy. When you integrate the potential
energy, you get a logarithmic divergence. So the model is clearly incomplete. And yet the
fit to the data is awesome! https://tritonstation.com/2021/06/28/the-rar-extended-by-weak-lensing/ * So (it's possible) there is some range of 'gravity' for which this MoND
'fit' is right... and though it may look like a crazy idea, it's also crazy to ignore it.
(there is more to MoND than galaxy rotation curves. It also predicts external field effects,
which also look to fit the data. http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/EFE.html
I've been wanting to post this here, a while (open-thread 200)
I'm fascinated by MoND since I've heard about it years ago.
Latest things I heard from a physicist who had mentioned that only 1 out of 5000 physical theories of the last 50 years or so turned out to be correct (Highs field and particle) was this: modified gravity (MoND is only Newtonian, the derived theory is a kind of modified relativity theory) makes good predictions for one part of observations while dark matter for the other. She predicts that we will have to deal with both like we do already with quantum physics and relativity theory.
That said - I'm just a interested guy with no training in that field
This is her talk: https://youtu.be/4_qJptwikRc
Thanks, Yeah Sabine H. is great! My guess is there is some truth in Mond.
> which at some level is just an empirical fit to the data
If you derive model from data and put it in N parameters it is not very impressive that it matches data.
Is this theory making some testable predictions?
To be fair, isn't this basically what the dark matter theory is too? I don't THINK its made any testable predictions outside of the datapoints it's fit to.
Assuming my understanding is correct, it wouldn't especially shock me if dark matter ended up having some completely different explanation. I'm not especially optimistic about any given one though; we need actual predictions for experiments we have not yet run for a theory to have any credence.
Dark matter is really the opposite - the universe looks like there's matter around that we simply cannot detect by any means other than its gravitational effect.
That doesn't mean that there ACTUALLY is, but dark matter is really just "takes conventional physics and assumes that the reasons for the movements is matter we can't see", which doesn't require exotic physics, just matter that we can't detect for whatever reason.
In all fairness to dark matter, the universe really *really* looks like it's filled with matter we can't see. There are some MOND theories that sort of look like they might work in some cases, but none work for all. For instance, the Bullet Cluster is full of charged matter we can detect, and gravitational lensing shows that there's lots of mass where we don't see matter. It sucks to have a theory with so many degrees of freedom, but the observations really are pretty complex.
Hmm Mond did predict the second hump in the cosmic microwave background.
Here's Stacy's latest post on the subject.
https://tritonstation.com/2021/04/16/bias-all-the-way-down/
There are a few other subtle data points that mond gets mostly right and CDM fails to. It's hard to do experiments in astronomy. :^)
I'm getting double replies?
Re: predictions, We can't test it directly unless we leave the influence of our galaxy... So the only predictions is in how the universe behaves. (astronomy)
The other prediction is the external field effect. (see link above. Stacy McGaugh's website has tons of info/ data. And a fun read for science types.)
> So the only predictions is in how the universe behaves. (astronomy)
Is it making some testable predictions here?
Yeah the External Field Effect (EFE) is a testable prediction. I'm not sure how much good data there is at the moment, but with better telescopes there will be more. You need a certain galaxy system to see EFE, namely a big galaxy and a little dwarf galaxy nearby... nearby at a certain distance (or more correctly acceleration scale.)
Stacy McGaugh also predicted the CMB second peak height before it was measured. That to me, counts as a prediction. Mond doesn't get the third peak height right. The dogs are demanding a walk, but I'll see if I can find Stacy's original paper, and link it in later.
The model has one adjustable parameter.. a_0. the acceleration where gravity changes.
a_0 =~ 1x10^-10 m/s^2. It's basically the break point in the RAR data.
There are a few more parameters in your choice of model overall (the fact that it's so arbitrary gives a few points against it here) but still obviously nowhere near the flexibility of dark matter as an explanation. If it's a very, *very* good fit, I think most people would get to work finding a gears level explanation for it eventually.
Unless there's been a real big leap in model-fit though, I doubt that this qualifies. I'm real sympathetic to MOND theories overall, given how cool it would be if one turned out to be true, but thus far I haven't seen anything quite predictive enough. In all fairness I also haven't seen simulations that are accurate enough to rule them out either, so it's sort of an open question thus far.
Huh what other parameters. Big G... I guess there is some baryon density number/ ratio. (my limited understanding is dark matter theories had to adjust the baryon density to fit the second CMB peak... and that's caused all sorts of fits with people's models. The cosmic lithium problem*. (I'm only a cosmology dilettante.))
*the cosmic lithium problem swings right back into ACX's wheelhouse... and could explain a lot. :^)
How much less credible is a doctor's weight loss advice if the doctor himself is still obese? I think it would only be the ad hominem fallacy if one put too much weight (pardon the pun) on that one data point, or applied it where it wasn't applicable.
I don't trust a teachers or kindergardeners opinion with own kids, a midwife without own birth experience (midwife friend thinks the same after she got a mother) and I wouldn't trust an obese' persons advice on loosing weight. That's because I've seen toany people in my life talking bullshit about things they have no clue and experience in. We humans learn from imitating other humans from the beginning of our lifes. Want to get obese - just imitate a obese person. Want to get lean just imitate a lean one. It's (often) as simple as this.
If the doctor doesn't want to lose weight, null tell (since presumably the person asking for such advice does want to lose weight).
If the doctor wants to lose weight but can't, that's a significant negative tell.
If someone is obese and claims they don't want to lose weight, I'd suspect sour grapes.
It would depend on how he presents himself. If we says “As you can see I understand this is not easy for some people.” than his credibility would increase in my eyes.
The doctor who is overweight has descriptive/propositional knowledge (textbook descriptions of the effects of obesity), but it is likely they lack experiential knowledge (personal experience of the effects changing their weight had on themselves) they could share with a patient. In this case, I think the propositional knowledge has much more practical use to the patient, so the fact they are obese should be negligible. Incidentally, a very fit Doctor who had never been overweight wouldn't have particularly useful experiential knowledge either. The most credible doctor, all else being equal, would have been obese in the past but who now has a healthy BMI.
Some propositional knowledge will have more practical utility for the task at hand than other propositional knowledge, and it's more likely that the obese doctor is emphasizing the wrong aspects of it since he hasn't cured himself yet. That's much more likely than being literally wrong about the propositional knowledge.
I think many focus too much on the first law of thermodynamics, which fails because:
1. people aren't lab rats in cages being forced to eat exact numbers of calories
2. body composition and BMR can be affected by isocaloric substitutions. e.g., if you eat no protein you lose lots of lean tissue and your BMR goes down more than if you had isocalorically ate a balanced diet. I know people who seem to eat 90% of their calories from processed carbs.
3. different foods produce different amounts of satiety per calorie. Vegetables and meat > nearly everything in the middle of the grocery store > beer and soda
4. 25% of the calories in protein are spent just in digesting it.
I've noticed that in the U.S., the GDP deflator and real GDP have been growing at the same pace for a surprisingly long time. This has not been the case in Italy (where the GDP deflator has grown much faster than real GDP) or Japan (where the reverse has been the case). Does anyone have any thoughts why increases in nominal incomes have been equally reflected in real GDP and prices in America for so long?
https://twitter.com/Enopoletus/status/1465723015740760068
Financial policy, timing, and poor graphing.
The US actually had a more than 20% disparity between CPI and GDP in the early 1980s during the stagflation period. It has since been returned close to the same level.
Your graph shows this as a modest difference, but if you had defined your graph as GDP/CPI, you would see that it actually has varied over time.
Italy joined the Euro around the start of your graph; it would be interesting to see the data from before that point.
I take an SSRI and also Adderall. The SSRI prevent reuptake of serotonin, the Adderall prevents the reuptake of dopamine and norepinephrine (if I understand correctly). Could this mean I have low qualities and/or too high uptake of neurotransmitters generally?
Probably not? We know that SSRIs, for instance, don't cause clean increases to Serotonin across the brain, and what changes they cause kick in immediately while effects aren't felt for a few weeks, which is evidence against a "levels of neurotransmitters" explanation. That's all pretty handwavy though. Really we don't know why any of this stuff happens, and we're barely making headway.
Anyone have any recommendations on reading guides/companions for Nietzsche?
I've been reading the dialogues between Eliezer Yudkowsky & MIRI and various members of LessWrong on LessWrong, and my current model of Eliezer's belief is roughly "on current trajectory there is over 90% probability that some form of advanced artificial intelligence will kill all humans and it most likely will happen during this century" (if you think my model of Eliezer's belief is wrong, please tell me).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CpvyhFy9WvCNsifkY/discussion-with-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-agi-interventions
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7im8at9PmhbT4JHsW/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-alignment-difficulty
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hwxj4gieR7FWNwYfa/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-capability-gains-1
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds
Since most humans during the history of the world have died, I've made my peace with the fact that I too might die. I think it's most likely that everyone will go to nothingness after they die though there's a nonzero chance that I'm wrong about this, but I think everything we know about neuroscience, cognitive science and physics points towards nonsurvival after death.
I think death is negative in the sense that you are deprived of all the positive possibilities of life, but once you are dead, the condition itself is neutral since there are neither positive or negative things in nothingness, there's just nothing, like dreamless sleep.
What I'm concerned about Yudkowsky's scenario is whether there is going to be suffering, pain and other bad things leading up to it. Do you think there will be such things?
The death of everyone currently on the planet is relatively bounded as a negative (though still ~-2*10^11 QALY), but the prevention of all future human births (via everyone being dead at the same time) is a staggeringly-huge disutility (-10^20 QALY is low-balling it).
I think the most likely unaligned super-AI scenario is "all humans exterminated as quickly and efficiently as possible", so there may or may not be a few moments of agony depending on the exact nerve gas used. The really scary scenario is that we somehow end up with an AI that values keeping humans alive but not keeping them happy, and then you get a hellscape until the heat death of the universe. However this seems fairly unlikely to me compared to the first scenario.
I have some hope that any AI researchers who are smart enough to actually make progress towards a general, agentic intelligence would also be smart enough to consider the disastrous consequences of getting alignment wrong, especially since it's something that's now discussed in the mainstream culture.
Ah, but you're forgetting that they're not working in a vacuum. They're working for bosses who want short-term profits from more powerful AI as soon as possible. Moloch is a harsh master and makes people take risks for a leg up in the race. The planning fallacy, of course, does not help, and neither does the modern assumed-online culture of "move fast and break things; we can fix the fallout later".
Well, there is the computational theory of consciousness which says (after pulling out of my ass and paraphrasing something I only THINK exists) that our brains are just biological computers and that consciousness is just fancy math being computed. If that's the case, then we can use the Permutation City argument that as long as there is some analog/medium for computation to happen (rocks, dominoes, water clocks, random dust particles, atoms swirling through the vacuum of space in just the right configuration etc), and given the nearly infinite size of the universe, the probability that at some point not only in space but in time as well there will exist some configuration of matter that perfectly represents the next step of computation of your consciousness if you hadn't died must approach 1. Basically, in an infinite, random, (mostly) eternal universe, anything that can happen does, so why should your consciousness stop just because the medium of computation has changed? Of course, this all hinges on the order of consciousness' computation not affecting subjective experience of the passage of time, but since brains frequently time travel and lie to us about what and how things happened that's not likely to be a problem.
(For instance, when you're by a clock that has a second hand that ticks instead of sweeping through its rotation, try looking away and then turning to look at it quickly. The second hand will appear to have stopped for longer than a second before continuing on as normal. When you turn your head fast enough, your brain can't keep up with the input of your eyes, so it just makes shit up and says "yep that was totally what was happening the whole time," until it can catch up to what's actually happening. The brain can handle and predict continuous movement but it can't handle discrete movements to the same degree. So it thinks the second hand wasn't moving at all, until it moves once and then your brain tries to retroactively say "oh that was moving the whole time yep no mistakes here". But our conscious minds know better. It's fun!)
But to answer your last question, no idea
My problem with the "consciousness calculated in random dust particles" theory is that our everyday experience includes not just being conscious, but also receiving inputs from the environment. If you believe that your consciousness is currently calculated on random dust particles, how do you explain the fact that the world around you behaves predictably?
Luck! It's no harder for the Permutation theory to explain the rest of the universe than just a single brain, which is reasonable evidence against it.
There’s a simulation of you in the digits of pi. Just speak the definition of pi and you have implicitly instantiated untold multitudes of beings.
There will likely be suffering, pain and other bad things leading up to it no matter how you die.
How does one participate in politics without an ideology? I have plenty of strong opinions about policy but no ideology. I voted against Trump because that seemed like a no-brainer, but normally I don't vote because both options seem equally bad. Third parties seem worse.
Some people get really involved with specific issues, but I don't care about specific issues all that much. I just want the center to hold in US politics. I mostly fear the country becoming too radical on either the right or the left, but I consider the danger of radicalism from either side to be roughly equal. Or rather, I consider the greatest danger to democracy in the USA to be radicalism itself. I suspect that the more radical the left becomes, the more radical the right will become and vice versa.
I suppose I can try to play the role of the median voter who votes against whichever side I think is going too far. It's not a clever role to play, but maybe it's the best.
Take 100 points, make a list of policies goals you care about, and assign a point value to each one.
EG:
Climate change regulation= (100+(-x))
Right to BEAR ARMS(bicep day every day): (100+(-x)+(-y))
etc.
Then, look at the policy history of both major parties for federal elections; and all parties for local election, and total up their for and against positions and the likelihood of them coming to pass against your waited preferences.
EG, I am heavily in favor of climate change regulation and mildly against gun control.
I look at the Dem platform, I see they aren't denialists and are largely ineffective on gun control, and vote straight DEM on federal elections and Green/socialist/libertarian on local elections.
"I suspect that the more radical the left becomes, the more radical the right will become and vice versa."
There's no empirical evidence for that from 2010s-20s America. Over that time, the more radical the left has become, the further left the center-left and center-right have become.
Without arguing the merits right here, I'll just say that the mirror position is held by many on the left, myself included. The formulation oft seen on left social media is that the US doesn't have a left party at all, just a party to the right of Reagan, and a party that's gone insane.
I think your take and my take aren't all that interesting to @Jack Wilson, as we're likely embodying the problem he's lamenting.
I'd suggest participate in local politics. When you actually have to get practical results, it becomes less ideological.
And for very low stakes (potholes, wrong traffic signs etc) just sending email[1] may be enough to cause some changes.
At least it works for me.
[1] or calling or submitting Officially Looking Piece of Paper etc, it depends on location
This is my advice too. At the end of the day, all politics is local. You will have more success showing your neighbors and community alternatives to the mainstream than you will showing strangers throughout the country. If your neighbors are less radical, their neighbors may become less radical, and so will their neighbors, etc. I also think people are less radical if their day to day life is rather fulfilling. That day to day is mostly a local issues, not a national one.
My 'solution' to this is to vote only for that are veterans. Veterans have demonstrated they care about out country. And the hope is they will be more likely to put country over party. (Which is what we need IMO.)
Is this an abstract preference for more veterans in high elected office, or a methodology that is supposed to apply to the current political landscape? Looking at the US presidency, Obama v. McCain in '08 would have been the only contest where it's applicable since the 90s.
Trying to use it in the presidential primaries certainly helps narrow the increasingly-large fields, but generally speaking I would see it leaving one supporting Jim Gilmore or Webb in 2016, and Buttigieg in 2020. Or Gabbard I suppose, though there are further complications there.
I can't exactly call that an incoherent slate of candidates when the underlying principle is right there, though it definitely cashes out as... unconventional.
Oh I use it at all levels, not just high office. I'm not saying it's ideal, just my way of choosing. (I did write in Gabbard, the last Prez election.)
But Gabbard isn't a veteran! She's still in the National Guard! 👉😎👉
Pointless nitpick aside, I suppose my point is that in many such cases (the vast majority?) the heuristic will effectively lead to you not participating. It could have uses as the first of multiple sieves, but you'll need a backup plan if you want to reliably exercise your vote.
Yeah, you are right it's only part of my choice. I guess I think we need people in office who will put country first, in short supply.
If you have a better metric for picking 'country first' people let me know. Veteran is all I've got at the moment. (and yeah the national guard counts. .. TBH I think volunteer fireman should count too. (All my best ideas come from sci-fi. ... "God Bless you Mr. Rosewater" :^)
Also John Kerry in 2004. Still, only two out of six.
I gave GWB credit, because IMO national guard service ought to count to some degree and if we're litigating details then the heuristic needs updating regardless.
If we're grounding him then Al Gore's enlistment would count for 2000 as well, but especially when talking about Vietnam service there's an added political dimension to choosing that period to serve. Worst case scenario we're relitigating Bill Clinton's ROTC application from 1969, and three decades is still too soon for more of that nonsense.
As a veteran I disagree. This is pure identity politics. And I disagree with the premise. Veterans are just as likely to put party (substitute team) over country or more likely to equate party and country. 3 of the 4 boys in my family are veterans and one is hard left, one is hard right and one is centrist (me, of course). So which one is correct? (me, of course)
*to vote only for those that are veterans.*
Inverse Starship Troopers!
Yeah well it is R.A. Heinlein's idea.
Only veterans were allowed to vote in book.
Actual Starship Troopers, in fact!
You may want to see AshLael's post about this subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/pbgeqo/if_youre_so_smart_why_arent_you_governor_of/hadqka9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
"AshLael
3m
Context: I have worked as an advisor to 3 different (Australian) Senators.
There's actually much lower cost/higher reward forms of political involvement than this. Spending a quarter million on a longshot campaign for Governor where even if you win you have no institutional support and probably get replaced after a year comes quite a long way down the list in terms of cost-effective political investments.
I would say if you want to maximise political impact-for-effort, the best method is probably:
Form a lobby group. You can literally do this with a handful of friends. Give yourselves some sort of name that sounds like you might represent someone, appoint people office holders, adopt a constitution. The group doesn't need to do anything, it exists purely for you to be its representative.
Call up politician's offices and ask for appointments to express your concerns about some bill that's coming up. Some will meet with you, some will have their advisors meet with you, some will ignore you. But you'll get a much higher strike rate than you expect.
Take the meetings, sit down with legislators or advisors, tell them what you like or don't like about the proposed law and how you would like to see it changed. Literally no one will ask how many people you actually represent or why they should listen to you.
Most importantly, rinse and repeat. Find any opportunity you can to call around and ask for new meetings. You will build relationships over time, and legislators will learn and begin to internalise your concerns.
Why this works:
Politicians and political advisors spend a large percentage of their time having meetings with concerned interest groups. You're not asking them to take time out of their normal schedule to talk with you, you're slotting into their normal operations. It's not at all hard to get a meeting. I've seen professional lobbyists who make careers from "getting access" for corporate clients. It's pure grift, the client could have just called and asked for the meeting directly.
Politicians use the number of times people come and meet with them over an issue as a rough proxy for how important that issue is. Just by repeatedly badgering them on X issue, you can create an impression that people really care about X.
Politicians get most of their claims and talking points from interest groups (which is a part of why they so often say things that are so misleading). They do very little research of their own. There is no better way to put the salient facts in front of them, or for those facts to become a part of the public debate.
Politicians are like normal people in that they have a selection of issues they care passionately about, and then there's a whole bunch of things they don't have any opinion on. If you show up and tell them what they should think about an issue they previously hadn't thought about much and can express yourself clearly and convincingly, there's a high chance you can get them to agree with you!
Most lobbyists are pretty bad at lobbying! The basic strategy of "Get as many meetings as you can" is very effective and very rarely utilised! The best lobbyists I've seen are Industry Super, who took the opportunity to call me up not only every time a bill impacting the superannuation industry was proposed, but also at every stage of the drafting process and when amendments were being drafted and circulated. Now, they represent a group of funds that manages literally trillions of dollars of investments, but their main lobbying strategy is one that can be replicated by anyone - it costs no money, only time.
There's a saying in politics - "The world is run by those who show up". It's absolutely true."
> Form a lobby group. You can literally do this with a handful of friends. Give yourselves some sort of name that sounds like you might represent someone, appoint people office holders, adopt a constitution.
Mileage will vary as to how effective this is for lobbying any given office, but it's stupidly low cost and scales well if you're ok with casting a wide net.
> Literally no one will ask how many people you actually represent or why they should listen to you.
I'll disagree just a little on this point, that it's worth having the right patter for if it comes up. "East Dakota Steelworkers Association doesn't publish information on our dues paying membership, but there are 27,000 manufacturing jobs in your district." It's an obvious enough dodge if you're looking for it, but I've seen it work on aides before.
This seems like the right idea.
Ah, now I get it. You are a lobbyist, and you are showing us the most effective way.
This sounds like you may have an ideology, after all: ideologically centrist / moderate. Paul Graham has an essay on accidental vs. ideological centrism here: http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
Regarding radicalisation of the parties: IIRC we do have stats on how the parties have changed over time, and which one radicalized first (as in, one side's legislators and voters got more extreme before the other), but I don't recall which it was, and a brief google for "polarisation over time" did not yield the graphs I remember.
That essay sounds a lot like what Moldbug wrote deriding centrists a decade before it, arguing that given all the political positions one could take, it sure is a monumental coincidence if your politics happens to fall right in the center of the contemporary spectrum of your time and place and you are an independent thinker.
What makes me an intentional centrist is:
1) I believe the USA currently is a very great place
2) I believe rapid political change in-and-of-itself risks destabilizing our democracy
3) I believe there exist many Chesterton's Fences in our society
One could say that the above arguments sound more like those of a conservative than a centrist. If so, so be it.
Original post:
>I just want the center to hold in US politics.
Above post:
> I believe rapid political change in-and-of-itself risks destabilizing our democracy
The status quo you defend is partly financed by substantial annual federal budget deficits. (https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/deficit/trends/) Can federal budget deficits, of pre-Covid19 size or worse, be sustained for decades to come? If not, then the status quo is in serious trouble.
If that's the case, what should be done? Large budget cuts or large tax hikes? Both? A big bang of deregulation and mass immigration?
The point is, anyone who thinks federal budget deficits are unsustainable is probably already implicitly committed to at least one radical policy that will cause lasting anger among tens of millions of citizens.
This is pretty much the archetypical small-c conservative argument. How that interacts with with the US system(s) is fiendishly complicated in practice (which might be what you're grappling with), but it's definitely an ideological stance.
Register with whichever party most often wins elections in your city. Run for office and tell voters whatever they want to hear during the campaign, then vote how you actually believe while in office. Coherence is overrated and hypocrisy underrated in politics these days (as measured by voters' actual voting preferences) especially if you can actually deliver legislation people want.
There are a couple more scenarios to look at there... if your opponent is a populist, be slightly less populist, not a policy wonk. Plenty of time for wonkery and thoughtfulness once elected.
If you have to go through a primary system, the level of outrageous you can be is limited by how frequently the party wins the seat you're running for. 60-40, you've got to temper yourself. 90-10, you can say almost anything short of being a Nazi/calling Stalin a personal hero, and still win.
One possibility is to vote on competence. I'm a centrist, too, and the two political parties where I come from aren't that far apart on policy. But I think that competence makes a massive difference. For example, I'm vaguely anti-Brexit, but I think the botched execution has been much worse than the actual constitutional change. So you could vote for whoever you think will execute policy most effectively (so long as they're within the normal realm of policies), and if you want to do more than just vote, campaign for whatever makes government run best. (Not an easy question! It may mean less government, or more, or just different.)
What are some battles where ultra well-built castles were overrun by enemies anyway, and through brute force rather than some clever weapon or tactic that negated the castle's defenses?
I want to know about the most spectacular, high-casualty battles where great castles fell.
Your problem here is most medieval European sources don't go into that level of detail, or focus on individual characters. Not sure about other cultures, but as the Europeans were the major castle-builders this is an issue.
Also brute force assaults on fortifications require you to have a large army. Sane commanders would always try to preserve troops and use other means.
Massive brute-force siege assaults against well-prepared fortifications were frequent feature of 15th-17th century Ottoman campaigns against various European powers.
Successful assaults:
1453 Siege of Constantinople
Negotiated surrenders once partially- successful assaults had rendered defenders' positions untenable:
1522 Siege of Rhodes
Siege of Famagusta
Close-run failed sieges:
Great Siege of Malta
1480 Siege of Rhodes
1683 Siege of Vienna
Great Siege of Malta was crazy
We talked a bit about the multiple meanings of the word‘literal’. Here is another one that has multiple meanings.
The verb 'bemuse' and the corresponding participial adjective 'bemused'.
When I first leaned the meanings bemuse meant to make utterly confused or muddle, as with an intoxicating liquor.
Now bemused is often used as adjective meaning something similar to amused.
Okay, fine, I get it. Word meanings change with time. The trouble is that it is not always clear which way the author intended to use it. Context sometimes makes it clear but not alway.
How do the rest of you use it and interpret it?
I don’t think the meaning of literal has changed except in certain sentences that are themselves hyperbole and not to be taken literally. 😛
Except that the meaning of "literally" is literally "this is *not* one of those sentences that is hyperbole, and it *is* meant to be taken literally". So, very meta, but not particularly useful.
Don’t agree. The opposite of literally is figuratively, but you wouldn’t use it in that sentence.
I think your two definitions are on the same continuum of meaning, with a consistent core meaning of some but not total confusion. I've never seen it as a synonym for amused, but it seems semantically appropriate for amused by something not fully understood.
This seems like a synonym for amused;
“And you still haven’t called any of these people?” Boney asked, a bemused smile on her face.”
— Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn
But there's the problem with the new definition. It renders the word ambiguous. Perhaps the smile is confused. Or perhaps it is amused. You have to know Gillian Flynn's personal definition of the word to understand what she means by it. What are words for if you can't even figure out their meanings from context despite knowing several definitions of the word?
I know. I could go on at length about this. I have gone on at length about this over a few pints. It really calls for a long form discussion. The thread is winding down though. Another time.
"Amused in a smug way." Connotations of smirking *at* someone rather than laughing *with* them.
A very similar thing happened to "nonplussed."
It's true that words change meaning over time, but at a time when the majority of people use a word in one way while a minority of people start using it in a new way--without any intention of meaning it as slang--the people using it in a new way are misusing the word.
In the case of bemused, some people assume it has a similar meaning to a similar sounding word because they are too lazy to look up the actual meaning of the word. That's misusing the word.
If one day the majority of written instances of the word bemused means "baffled and amused" then and only then will that usage be correct.
Have you looked up the actual meaning of the word? Because I just checked multiple online dictionaries (searched googled "define: bemused") and the top hits both include the "baffled and amused" definition:
m-w.com: (3) having or showing feelings of wry amusement especially from something that is surprising or perplexing
dictionary.com: (3) mildly amused, especially in a detached way.
Or are you an Ultra-Orthodox-Prescriptivist and only count a specific dictionary?
>Or are you an Ultra-Orthodox-Prescriptivist and only count a specific dictionary?
Yes.
Let me be clearer. I consider giving a word a different meaning for a specific purpose, such as your example for the game Go, to be analogous to using the word as slang, for which I made an exception.
But giving a word a different usage for general purposes WITHOUT KNOWING THE COMMON DEFINITION OF THE WORD is misusing it.
I tend to think of it as a portmanteau of baffled and amused. This is probably not the original definition, but it’s useful for cases where something is funny (as in strange) and also funny as in humorous (usually in a dry, absurdist way). The sort of thing one might raise an eyebrow at while archly expressing one’s puzzlement.
Yeah that’s a pretty good take on the newer meaning. I’ve seen a Pulitzer winner use the new one BTW.
Which Pulitzer winner?
I was hoping no one would ask. I've forgotten. I ran into what was clearly the new meaning last summer and I remember thinking well this effer has a Pulitzer so I guess this thing is here to stay.
I've been retired for a couple years and I read two or three books a week. If it was on my Kindle I could go through all the Pulitzer winners out of the 350 titles there and do a text search but if it was in a paper and ink book it might take me a while.
Sorry. FWIW I'm pretty certain of this. Stuff like this has a way of catching my eye.
No worries. I only wanted to know so that I could make a note to never read that author.
I've found one instance from a Pulitzer winner on my Kindle. I don't think its the one I spoke of earlier though.
Jennifer Eagan “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won a Pulitzer in 2011.
Speaks of “an expression of wry bemusement”
Seems like that is the newer meaning.
Oh Crikey. Now I'm going through Pulitzer winners for fiction for the last 50 years to see which ones I've read in the last couple years,
Not clear why it matters what Alexandros thinks about the meta-analysis here.
Let's take someone who might actually have heard of "meta-analysis" before yesterday: Andrew Hill. His original meta-analysis suggested that ivermectin worked, but later when he and his colleagues excluded the fraudulent and problematic studies, he admitted that the effect (if any) is tiny. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/95333
Are there any good studies, analyses, or news articles that show what the cost-performance trend is for virtual reality goggles over time? In short, at what rate are their prices declining each year?
I'd imagine one metric would be shown on a graph whose Y-axis was "Real cost per display pixel" and whose X-axis was "Year".
Re: the parapsychologist analogy. I wonder if you would hold Pfizer to the same standard?
We know that not too long ago they made false claims and had to pay large fines: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/pfizer-fined-23-billion-illegal-marketing-off-label/story?id=8477617
Even our government "experts" seem to continually make important mistakes.
I think skepticism is warranted no matter who the expert is.
I don't trust any of them. I trust those with large financial incentives even less.
I don't know how common or safe those off-label uses were, and I don't have the time to do a deep dive on this. However, it seems plausible that this might be a case of Pfizer making true claims that had not been certified and approved by the FDA, rather than Pfizer making claims that were actually false.
I think the difference is that pfizer has to pay fines if they straight make shit up and get caught.
Big pharma has a strong incentive to not tell bald faced lies that heterodox "Skeptics" and alternative science types Don't.
Every time we have a non-political Open Thread, I think about a political topic or two, and regret being unable to post them. Every time we have a political Open Thread, I forget what I wanted to write about. (So today I decided to write a meta comment instead.)
My problem is deciding what is and isn't political. Since everything seems to get dragged into the political 'storm'. Is vitamin D political?
I despise the "Everything is pollitical" pseudo profound mantra that immature biologically-adult children with no nuance or person-belief seperation love to live with, but the deeper truth it captures is that human culture is a graph (CS kind, i.e. a network) of people, beliefs and issues. There are certain nodes that are definitely, by any reasonable person's book, pollitical, everything else is pollitical to the degree it's close to those nodes.
To answer your question, how many comment-reply cycles is needed to take whatever thread about vitamin D you have in mind to a "heckin Donald trump man" or a "those damn wokies" thread? set some reasonable threshold, say 3, and your filter function is "any topic discussion that can take us to a topic in $list in less than 3 comment-reply pairs is pollitical" where $list is some base set of topics that sufficiently many reasonable minds agrees to be pollitical. Raise, lower, and otherwise dynamically-adjust the threshold as needed according to the community and the discussion you find yourself in.
As much as I like the cleanliness of your second paragraph, is the aggressive tone of the first paragraph necessary? Seems like you could get the same point across with something kinder to start with, then leading into the same second paragraph.
Hell fukin yeah it's political!
Who makes it? Who regulates it? Why is it not reported on in some places, but more so in others?
If a story has inputs or outputs to 2+ people, it's political.
So if you vote for yourself by writing your name on the ballot, it's political? But if you rule your own desert island, that's apolitical?
In the spirit of your comment: I'm sure whatever you posted would have been bad and wrong and you are a big doodoo head, unless it would have been based and awesome and you are cool and big and strong .
Lol.
Did alexandros ever justify his decision to summate multiple outcomes in his meta analyses? I know several people brought this up but I dunno if he answered.
Not sure who brought this up. I simply used what ivmmeta did in order to take Scott's methodology to its logical conclusion while injecting as little opinion as possible. (basically I don't think I injected any opinion whatsoever). If I were to start messing with the endpoints, there would be a whole mess about gerrymandering etc. The ivmmeta endpoint selection mechanism has been stable for a long time as far as I know, and that counts as a kind of pre-registration in my book.
Ivmmeta isn't really taken seriously by anyone familiar with metaanalysis. Whether or not their endpoint selection is stable, there is a fundamental issue with their methods. Summating various outcomes leads to results that are difficult if not impossible to interpret
My primary objective was to demonstrate how GidMK shifted Scott's analysis, which I think I did successfully, though Scott seems to disagree. What you make of the rest of the analysis, well, seems like an endless debate. Imo the focus on mortality is misplaced since nothing else hits those endpoints well either in a disease like covid. (vaccines, Molnupiravir, Paxlovid, you name it).
You can argue what endpoint to use, but the point is it's important to pick one to look at within one meta. Combining multiple endpoints into one meta analytic summation doesn't provide meaningful information.
You don't seem to be responding to my responses, so, um, fare thee well.
Lol what. You don't seem to understand how to properly do a meta analysis. You can't justify your method, do you pretend I'm the one not engaging. Whatever. Have fun generating meaningless BS.
Question: Does Scott have facial hair? His writing reads like a clean-shaven fellow's, with nary a hint of beard, moustache or mutton-chop.
Is my description accurate?
I met him at the Berkeley, CA meetup at the end of August. Bald and clean-shaven then.
I'm pretty sure I've seen a picture of him with a full beard, and I was surprised for the same reason you would have been. Of course that doesn't mean he has a beard now.
I did correctly predict that Scott was bald. He definitely writes like a bald person.
Probably.
I think it's strange that there have been all these great families brought up but I haven't seen any famous twins yet. The twin rate is about 2% so it's starting to get odd that there hasn't been one example yet.
"The Bryan Brothers, identical twin brothers Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan, are retired American professional doubles tennis players and the most successful duo of all time [..] the Bryans are "mirror twins", where one is right-handed (Mike) and the other left-handed (Bob)."
Elvis was a twin whose brother died at birth.
allegedly
Interesting. There's also the Winklevoss twins.
The only famous twins I can think of are the Olsen twins, those guys who were President and Prime Minister of Poland, and people famous for being conjoined twins.
On the other hand, I can't think of any pairs of twins where only was successful. I suppose there might be examples where I just haven't heard of the non-successful twin.
George Bush Sr. And his evil twin Skippy.
On the great families subject, I wonder if the Plinys Elder & Younger would qualify? I guess people from ancient Rome are less relevant given the lower population and stronger class effects (eg, most of the population was slaves & plebians who would have had no opportunity to become famous historians)
So within the last couple years we've had two fairly prominent instances of major websites (Tumblr a while ago and Onlyfans more recently) having to scrub themselves (to varying degrees of success) of all pornographic content. From what I can tell, the banks that control those site's loans were breathing down their neck or something like that, basically threatening to back out unless changes were made. My question is, why isn't there a bank that's willing to allow that kind of content on their investments? It seems like an easy way to make a lot of money, since porn is a (quick Google search) $12 billion industry, which seems like a lot of money to be left on the ground. A bank that branded itself as open to those kinds of investments and precommited to never change that policy should have all the major players flocking to it, just for the stability and peace of mind if nothing else.
AIUI part of the problem is that most banks are tied into various international enterprises in one way or another, and the Internet itself is international, creating gnarly "all of the jurisdictions" problems. There are a lot of countries that will move heaven and earth to screw over anybody that violates their sex laws, whether it be prostitution or drawn porn of apparent kids or gayness or whatever.
Your average bank probably is too interconnected with too many countries to be able to go "lol we don't have any people in your jurisdiction to arrest or any assets to seize, go bugger yourself"; I imagine a "porn bank" would have to be a startup (and as others note below that's hard).
What comes to mind for me is the fairly recent change(s) to laws regarding posting of pornographic material that was not approved by the people shown, a.k.a concern about revenge porn or material not intended to be sold. There are far more strict laws in that arena, than say, non-pornographic content on Facebook/Instagram/TikTok. An accusation that the person involved did not consent to the filming or the posting is a serious matter than can sink the provider quickly. Banks are going to put a lot of pressure on those providers to ensure that they are following the relevant laws, which include getting proof that the material is legitimate. For stuff being posted directly by members, that's really really hard for a provider to monitor. Documentation that each and every video is properly approved is not something most websites could do, so it's much easier to just take the content down.
The sense I got is that regulators are softly (?) coordinating it behind the scenes.
Operation Choke Point. A good horse runs at the shadow of a whip.
beware: I am not a lawyer or banker
- setting up bank is not easy
- in general they were not blocking all porn, only more problematic one
- and cases where it was not really profitable anyway
- as far as I know more trustworthy and legally safe porn has no serious problem
- porn has sky-high rate of various financial abuse
- porn has much higher rate of various legal issues
- including cases with draconian "strict liability offense" laws - crimes that don't require any intent, or often knowledge, on the part of the offender
- you would be target of various moral panics
- any more serious porn-related scandal would be likely involving pornbank
I don’t have a great view into this world but my guess is liability. First the liability that someone may see something they don’t want to see, but even worse the liability of some thing being posted illegally, child porn, revenge pics, etc.
Once you allow some aspect of the porn industry in you have to tightly manage it. Then your bank has a porn-management department and it makes Santa upset. Is it really worth the risk?
Yep, even Pornhub, which is much bigger than both of those, had a huge problem recently along these lines, and had to purge tons of content. I guess nobody likes porn-mongers, and nobody protests when regulations of them are extremely draconian.
The Philadelphia ACX Meetup will be hosting a Solstice Celebration on Tuesday, December 21 in Ardmore, PA. You can request to join our Google Group here for full details: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia
I am getting a new lawnmower. We are considering gas-versus-electric right now. I am willing to take a bit of a hit on price on convenience for environmental concerns, to a limit.
It seems the best reason to go electric is that a lawnmower doesn't have a catalytic converter. My lawnmower might be spewing out all kinds of harmful stuff, so in theory electrifying my mower before my car is a good idea.
But how can I quantify this? And how bad is it? I probably only burn 5 gallons a year in the mower. What exactly am I spitting into the air from a normal mower at that rate, and how much would I expect to pay to remove that stuff otherwise?
Your missing the biggest downside: Gas walk behind lawnmowers are universally trash. They are a fucking PAIN, they break all the time, they smell, it's never ending.
I'd say go with a batter powered string trimmer, if you are just doing a reasonably sized yard with no brush and have a 100% functional spine.
My son hates the gas powered mower because of how hard it is to start, but a new mower will by definition be easy to start., and stay that way for several years even with no maintenance.
I've been using a battery operator weed eater, the gadget that uses a rotating head with monofilament strands coming out for it, instead of a lawnmower for a while. It's a more flexible device, since it is light enough that I am holding it rather than rolling it.
I've been using electric mowers for over 25 years. I honestly can't believe people still fiddle with gas mowers. They're just a mess, spilling gas, changing oil, strains from starting them, etc.
I used a corded electric mower for years, and have used battery powered ones for at least 15 years. This is on a big lawn as well, so I can't do the front and back on one charge. It hasn't been an issue in all of those years.
All of which is to say, there are plenty of good reasons to go electric that are way more compelling than the emissions or other environmental concerns. If you're interested in that calculation out of curiosity though, have at it.
I'm borrowing an electric mower from a friend for a few days, and it definitely starts easier, but so does a gas mower for several years.
The major deficiency is that it's not sucking enough of the dead leaves off of the lawn.
Why not go neither and get a reel mower, if you're in moderate to good health? No electricity, no gas, high durability if you learn to maintain it. Plus you can usually get them used for cheap(ish). (Bonus: free workout)
If you are in good health and cannot keep your whole lawn tidy with muscle power, the primary environmental problem may be that your lawn is too big. (There's a big movement to replant native flora instead of keeping an artificial green lawn; the applicability of this varies widely by situation.)
The low green things around my house are already “native flora” but they still need mowing just so our property doesn’t tip over the line from “rustic” to “abandoned”.
I do have a reel mower! I got it for free.
It doesn't work at all for getting the leaves off the lawn, which is a major major component of yard work I need my mower for. Every few days I have a complete cover and it needs dealt with.
The newer reel mowers have larger wheels than the old style. If I didn’t have the battery mower already I might opt for one.
I did the reel mower for about 3 years before my mower suffered a fatal break - it was the larger wheel style. Perhaps I didn't keep the blades sharp enough, but while it was in commission I definitely had trouble getting a good cut. I would have little straggler blades of grass poking up all over - kind of annoying. And if you ever let the grass grow an extra few days, it can be a real (no pun intended) problem, as it can simply get too thick to be managed - the fact that you have to be moving to get the blade spinning is the issue - any other mower can work on a thick section little bit by bit. The workout was great and the lack of noise was awesome, but now that I've had a good experience with battery-powered, I don't think I'll go back.
I have a small yard and have been using a electric mower for years. It works just fine for my purposes. Haven’t had to replace the battery yet.
Batteries have improved since I bought the one I have too.
I guess you could look at the time you spend mowing now and have a look at battery life ratings.
One other plus is that it’s quieter than a gas mower.
I also have a battery snow blower. It got me through last winter but snow accusations were less than normal. I doubt it would handle 2 or 3 feet in a single storm.
I can't intelligently answer your main question, but I'd love anyone else's input. This link from the EPA discusses it, but I can't vouch for its quality: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/banks.pdf
As to getting an electric mower - if you get a corded one, it looks to me it won't cost extra compared to a gas one, and you will come out more than ahead in cost because the maintenance is so minimal. I personally can't stand using the corded ones (I've tried), but about 5 years ago I got a battery powered Ryobi. The battery gave out this year and that cost me $100 to replace (I used an off-brand replacement). I think you will pay about an extra $75 upfront for battery powered, and replacing the battery every 5 years is about as expected, so I think I have probably spent an extra $175/5 = $35 per year over just the purchase of a gas powered mower (I'm not counting the electrical cost of charging the battery, but I think it is pretty minimal - 6 Ah at 40 V is 240 Wh or 0.24 kWh or about 3 cents/week). But if you use 5 gallons of gas, that is probably $20 a year, plus the cost of oil changes (time and materials) and any other engine maintenance, and I don't really think I am paying anything significantly extra for the battery-powered electric mower.
As far as the user experience... I love it. I actually consider it a great deal more convenient than a gas mower. It is quiet enough that I am not contributing much to my neighborhood's sound pollution. The grass getting chopped is the loudest part of the machine. I think you could reasonably mow earlier or later in the day without it being a neighborhood nuisance. It is light, so pushing it around is no big deal. Much lighter than a gas-powered of the same size. Starting is literally as easy as flipping a switch - no pull cord issues. My older kids are easily able to help out with mowing. (12 & 9 y.o) I can comfortably cut my back and front on one charge (I would estimate 4500 sq. ft), so there is no hassle with swapping batteries. There is very little maintenance beyond the need to sharpen the blade (which has nothing to do with electric vs gas). It also happens to be much cleaner in terms of particulate emission, but like you, I haven't figured out how to quantify this very well, though I know it's been studied. I think the only time a gas-powered would be significantly better in terms of experience would be if you were regularly cutting either a large area, or extremely thick (or wet) growth. In that case, the extra power and energy capacity would probably tilt things away from electric.
Whether that helps, I don't know. But I hope it is at least more trustworthy than your average internet review.
(Disclaimer: no vested interest, I just happen to really enjoy my battery-powered push mower.)
I'm borrowing a friend's electric mower, and it definitely is easier to move being lighter, but it cannot really eat up leaves very well.
Some of the electric mowers are very light-duty, so depending on what you borrowed, you may have better experience with a somewhat beefier one. That being said, electric mowers are not particularly great at handling leaves (just like not handling really thick growth). If the area was small, I would recommend raking the leaves (many leaves make a good compost base if you're into that) and still go electric for the mower. Electric leaf blowers also are around, but I haven't had the pleasure of trying them much and don't have an opinion there. If the area is large, you might have to stick with the gas-powered for sanity's sake.
The yard isn't yuge, but the number of trees is.
I still need to bag the leaves after raking them, and just chewing them up with the gas-mower has been the best way I've found to do it.
It's the most labor intensive part of having a yard and I've experimented with various other things, including a leaf-muncher that bags, which I'm still sore from using a few days later.
I give a lot of weight to not having to store small cans of gasoline in or around my house. I have a Greenworks electric mulching mower- it's easy to use and has enough power to cut the grass or mulch leaves around our 9000 sq ft property. It was a budget-friendly $170, and while we'll have to see how long it lasts, I can't see any advantage to a gas mower. If you have huge tracts of land, maybe it's a different story, but I'd rather charge a battery than f--- around with gas any day.
Similar experience to me. I have a Kobalt 40v mower from Lowes. Does fine mulching/picking up leaves on 6000 sq ft. No gas to mess with and its way way quieter than gas. I can't see myself going back to gas unless I had enough space to justify a riding mower.
But then I need to get them across a river
Can anyone recommend a good password manager? I use an iPhone, a Kindle tablet, an iMac, a Windows PC and a Linux box.
Hey, just wanted to thank the readers who made suggestions about this. I went wit Bit Warden. So far I love it. I got by with little text files with easy to forget mnemonic clues way too long.
KeePass original client on Mac, windows and Linux, with Strongbox on iOS. Strongbox syncs from Drive, OneDrive, dropbox, WebDAV which are all available on the other platforms. So a Kdbx file in a cloud storage.
I use LastPass across all platforms (not certain about a Kindle unless you wipe it and install Android). there’s an annual subscription which seems totally worth the money, IMHO.
Regardless of what you choose, many people are concerned about putting all of their passwords in a single (hackable) account. Some cool internet person, probably in SSC Reddit, suggested that you use the app to generate your super tight random passwords but then in the application, add a 4 character pin at the end. When you use the app or website, the password will be auto filled and you just type your pin at the end. If your password manager gets hacked, there’s still another layer of security protecting your other accounts. I always thought that was a neat idea.
KeePassXC + Syncthing is almost perfect IMO, but it might not work on an iPhone.
Then probably you are not interested in Keepass as it requires setting up synchronization on your own.
I don’t mind a one time fee but don’t want to get locked into a monthly subscription.
In such case: check is there a working export of your data, including password. And make it from time to time to a safe location. (encrypted file? deposit box?)
Bitwarden free tier is fully functional for all your normal needs, and it doesn't have any annoying nags. I love it so much that I set up a family subscription but that's not necessary.
I’m giving Bitwarden a try. Now I’m trying to decipher my old text file of passwords with the text hints as to what they were for. I’m sure these hints made sense at the time. ;)
I’ll probably end up changing a lot of these passwords.
I'm a big fan of Bitwarden, especially because I can self-host, but I've had a lot of trouble getting it to realize I'm trying to log into something on android. Not sure if other managers are better though.
I was about to mention bitwarden
So, I read this essay--and I have to grudgingly respect one aspect of it:
Its willingness to openly acknowledge the *zero-sum* nature of the intergroup conflict between races and sexes that it sees as so central.
It's a horrifically depressing and amoral worldview, but at least it avoids the much more common reactionary approach of claiming that subjugation actually *benefits* the group being subjugated. Think of the pro-slavery theorists who claimed that slavery paternalistically cared for black people, or the standard anti-feminist view that patriarchy benefited women.
If you're going to oppress me, you can at least avoid insulting my intelligence by claiming that you're only doing it for my own good.
1) Could someone explain to me what "punch right" means? Searching it hasn't helped me very much.
2) Scott: could you explain what Eharding was banned for? I can think of three possibilities, which have different implications about what should and shouldn't be posted.
Bad: his ideology per se
Mad: overly-inflammatory presentation of said ideology
Sad: linking to his own blog in an Open Thread
What's the SSC equivalent of fed-posting?
Is this an answer to my #1, or something else?
#2, EHarding was doing it
I don't see any incitement to crime there. 90% of the proposals are for government action, and the rest are political-strategy proposals that are completely legal.
"There should be the death penalty for X" (political proposal) =/= "we should murder X in the streets" (incitement).
About the closest it comes is this passage:
"Make life difficult for businesses that choose to go “woke”. There are many ways to do this."
...but there are a lot of governmental ways to do that and in context I think that's implied.
(For the record, I disagree with the vast majority of his proposals on both practical and ethical grounds. There are some that maybe could be shaped into something useful, but that's true of almost anything.)
(NB: he wasn't actually very far from minimum Madness. Most of his points are presented relatively dispassionately; "[executing homosexuals and transsexuals] can't possibly hurt" was an egregious exception but also like 0.2% of his post. The outrageousness of the post stems almost entirely from his actual recommendations rather than his presentation of them.)
On the off chance that you're actually serious about this: What do you mean by "wokeness", in the sense of a thing that you want to combat?
If it's e.g. the acknowledged existence of LGBT people, that's a very non-central definition of "woke". The recognition that LGBT people existed, and the decision that we were going to allow them to continue to exist even if they very loudly proclaimed that existence by e.g. parading through cities half-naked in their fetishwear, long predates the general use of the term "woke". And fighting against that is almost certainly a lost cause.
If it's about how far too many people with degrees in aggrieved-people studies are whining in your face about LGBT rights, demanding that you bake cakes for their weddings and adopt whatever silly pronoun they choose, then I'm sympathetic to your goal, but your plan is exceedingly foolish.
Seriously, an actual *death penalty* for LGBT individuals? In the unlikely event that you managed to impose such a thing, that would marginally reduce the number of LGBT people. But it would greatly *increase* the number of LGBT-rights campaigners getting in your face with their ideology, and the intensity with which they will devote themselves to ruining your life.
There are a *whole fucking lot* of not-woke and actively anti-woke people, who don't want to have to put up with the whining and the mandatory cake-baking and the silly pronouns, and especially not the cancellations. But who are even more opposed to actually *killing* people for being or acting gay or not conforming to their assigned gender. And we're not going to shut up about it, not once you start killing people. We'll hold our noses and ally with the woke, against the greater evil. You won't be able to shut us up without putting us in prison, you won't be able to imprison us without overcoming our forceful resistance, and we will be thinking up exciting new forms of cancellation to visit on you.
Your plan turns a monumental annoyance, into something much, much worse.
Also, see my below comment re: Bill Clinton 1996.
"What do you mean by "wokeness", in the sense of a thing that you want to combat?"
Exactly what everyone else means by it.
"If it's e.g. the acknowledged existence of LGBT people, that's a very non-central definition of "woke"."
My point was that anti-LGBT countries tend to be anti-woke, not that the acknowledged existence of LGBT people is on its own woke.
"And fighting against that is almost certainly a lost cause."
Fine. Move onto the other suggestions, in that case. As I've said repeatedly, the suggestions each stand on their own; they do not all become worthless if one is judged unworthy.
"But it would greatly *increase* the number of LGBT-rights campaigners getting in your face with their ideology, and the intensity with which they will devote themselves to ruining your life."
There are a huge number of LGBT rights campaigners in Iran/Saudi Arabia/Afghanistan?
Also, if you were right re: LGBT campaigners, that would mean my proposal has been completely successful -if they're fighting for pre-2011 LGBT rights, they're not fighting for the post-2011 version.
There's this bizarre idea out there that a political side trying to shift the Overton Window further in their political direction necessarily broadens the Overton Window, rather than keeps it the same or shrinks it. What's the evidence for that, exactly?
" But it would greatly *increase* the number of LGBT-rights campaigners getting in your face with their ideology, and the intensity with which they will devote themselves to ruining your life."
I think the solution that follows from Eharding's logic here is quite obvious- death penalty (or life imprisonment, or some other heinous punishment) for being pro-LGBT-rights (or just "anti-anti-woke" in general). The beatings will continue until morale improves, and this kind of system is surely highly stable and will never collapse!
And of course none of this even TOUCHES on how the rest of the world would handle this. Iran can get away with the death penalty for homosexuals because it's withdrawn from the Western international community and built a network around that. America is, even in what some would argue its decline, a large member of the Western international community, and even in the fantasy world where Eharding captures the US government and starts lining up tens of thousands of homosexuals in front of the chair- I hope you like getting embargo'd by everyone (including China, because they'll want to bleed US power as much as possible before coming to the table with a deal of "take our lopsided bargain or fuck you" variety).
Saudi Arabia isn't embargoed by anyone else (and is pro-China, too). Countries are embargoed because of their international actions, not their domestic human rights policies.
Why do you think that the “woke” are so bad? I’m not a fan of them, but certainly not to the point of doing whatever it takes to stop them. I struggle to understand why you think they’re so bad that you would advocate for these policies, and would appreciate a brief explanation of your reasoning
Everyone has different preferences and opinions. Some think wokeness is good, while others think it's very bad. I hold the latter opinion because I view it as an oppressive force that reduces opportunities for White people, cisgender people, and men while increasing crime victimization, lowering academic standards, promoting the incompetent, etc.
I see. And for clarification, are those the only groups with whom you are concerned (i.e. would something that negatively impacted gay people without affecting outcomes for straight people be good, bad, or neutral)?
Most of the very few substantive replies to my post amount to "I don't want to look East, I want Bill Clinton 1996 back". They then propose no policies to achieve the (in my view, questionable) goal of resurrecting Bill Clinton 1996 (and keeping him there). I think I can be safely excused if I think this is wildly unlikely to work.
BTW, the state of play in 1996:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FFc0CcpVEAcYhQS?format=png&name=medium
As someone that is anti-woke, there is so much here that is bad if not completely terrible. It's easy to understand why people think you are a troll, as making this proposal actually advances the cause of wokeness, and it worries me to think that someone that made some of the proposals here seriously might be on my side.
This is a war for hearts and minds; deliberately aping the Nazis and Communists is a losing recipe even beyond how much of it violates basic principles of humanity. There's a reason that the Democrats sent fake neo-Nazis and Confederates to rallies for Republicans in the most recent elections. I'm anti-woke because I believe wokeness fundamentally violates those principles even while they claim to support them. We're at a disadvantage because the Woke control the narrative, which lets them get away with blatant hypocrisy; we don't have that luxury, nor should we take it even if we had the power to do so. None of what you suggest changes that. On top of that, most of what you suggest can't be implemented without having control of the major institutions in the first place, and that doesn't happen without defeating the woke establishment... at which point we no longer need to combat wokeness.
For an example of something salvagable:
"[R]aise college and high (and even middle) school standards [...] (to reduce the social cost of signaling)" is good. However, lowering "the number of Blacks and Hispanics in the education system" isn't a goal of anti-wokeness. If you're a racist, you might be convinced that's going to happen anyways, but it's not the goal. In my case, I want to see more Black and Hispanic parental involvement in the educational system, because I think parental involvment counters the politicized teachers unions, who act as a driver of wokeness (and lousy public schools). We've seen in Virginia that parents care about their kids education far more than they care about being woke because it has an actual effect on their lives and family, and the damage that wokeness has done to their kids education is not something the media can successfully hide.
Our goal is to oppose wokeness. Opposing "wokeness" (or at least the racial justice component) isn't shoving Whites into the oppression stack, it's getting rid of the oppression stack entirely, and getting people not to see race at all. It's most definitely not ramping up the oppression stack in an attempt to destroy society faster before wokeness can wreck everything.
"and getting people not to see race at all"
And how do we do that? As far as I could tell, trying this would involve measures similar to most I've proposed, only much more severe and much less likely to work. And given that race is possibly the most permanent aspect of human existence, I don't see how getting people to stop seeing race is at all possible.
"However, lowering "the number of Blacks and Hispanics in the education system" isn't a goal of anti-wokeness."
Maybe not Hispanics, but definitely Blacks. Any serious form of anti-wokeness recognizes the facts Zach Goldberg laid out here and seeks to combat them:
https://zachgoldberg.substack.com/p/exposing-the-group-disparities-discrimination
"and lousy public schools"
I don't buy that narrative.
"it's getting rid of the oppression stack entirely"
What are some policies you'd like to propose to get to this (in my view, utterly impossible) goal?
"And given that race is possibly the most permanent aspect of human existence, I don't see how getting people to stop seeing race is at all possible."
According to the reported results of a recent survey (which I strongly doubt the accuracy of), something like a third of all whites applicants lied about their race on college admissions. Even if that's off by an order of magnitude, changing your 'race' isn't hard. If the market overvalues identifying as particular minorities, people will 'discover' enough heritage to game the system, at which point race becomes useless. That there's no internal consistency, that Shaun King can benefit from being 'black' while Clarence Thomas can't, is one of the fundamental flaws in wokeness that will eventually bring it down (but not before doing a ton of damage, which is why it should be stopped sooner rather than later, and hopefully with its enabling establishment). The only reason race matters is that it's a useful tool for the establishment.
"What are some policies you'd like to propose to get to this (in my view, utterly impossible) goal?"
It's not a matter of policies. If you're talking about policies, you're running the government and have defeated the establishment and can deal with wokeness at your leisure. The problem is winning elections so you can defeat the establishment. Promoting trustworthy alternative institutions to the establishment helps win elections. If people see that you're the only side with (for example) media reporting the truth about how bad wokeness is screwing up their kids education, it builds the trust you need to get elected.
And even for Hispanics, they will probably be overrepresented in colleges relative to their test scores in a couple decades. So it makes sense to be proactive here, not reactive.
Again, the world needs some explanation for racial disparities both within the United States and around the world. HBD is one, "not seeing race" is not an answer at all.
I suspect a cynical attempt to generate controversy to gin up mouse clicks ala Alex Jones. My second guess would be sociopathy.
Either way the best approach is to deprive him of oxygen. Metaphorically of course.
"Institute the death penalty for transgenderism, as well as homosexuality."
Yeah, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you're insane. I'll be really sad if you aren't banned.
I'm really astonished by the replies here. I thought there was at least some hint of anti-wokeness in the rationalist community, and, thus, at least some will toward opposing it. If it exists, I definitely saw none here.
Again, the suggestions are not meant to be taken as a unified block. If you don't like one, discard it (but give a good reason for doing so, and no, "it contravenes liberalism" is not the best of reasons).
There are a non-trivial number of gay people who are not woke at all.
That's true, but the international relationship between acceptance of homosexuality and wokeness remains quite tight.
I guess we could also eliminate wokeness by completely destroying all life on Earth.
If that doesn't seem like a good solution, it's because people have preferences beyond merely defeating their opponents. For example, Putin's Russia seems quite bad to me... and if it seems like a good solution to someone, the advantage is that it already exists, so people can move there. Some people are looking for a society that is neither woke, nor Putin's Russia.
"I guess we could also eliminate wokeness by completely destroying all life on Earth."
See my reply below. None of my policy proposals have a cost-benefit ratio this bad. Be serious. Challenge my proposals then they are, not imaginary proposals I don't advocate.
Don't act like you've considered the cost-benefit ratio of your proposals.
But I have. I didn't put bringing back slavery in there, since nobody seems to want that (and also because I doubt its sustainability or efficacy).
"Putin's Russia seems quite bad to me"
It's poorly governed (as Russia tends to be), but it's not that bad as a country.
"the advantage is that it already exists, so people can move there"
Policy is not a question of individual choice, especially when it comes to ideas that readily cross international lines.
"Some people are looking for a society that is neither woke, nor Putin's Russia."
Explain how to get to such a society, then? There is a dearth of concrete suggestions from my opponents in this thread.
(also, rationalists tend to be consequentialists, so if someone opposes wokeness, it's because it makes things worse in particular ways. So it would be a mistake to reduce wokeness by making the world worse, because the whole justification for a rationalist opposing wokeness is that it makes the world worse)
There is more than a hint of anti-wokeness here. That's not the problem. The problem is your ideas are bad, because you haven't put much thought into how they would work.
I mean, maybe they are. I pretty clearly think I'm missing obvious things. But I haven't gotten criticism from that angle.
@ Everyone else.
Look, either this is not parody (as he keeps trying to claim), in which case its bananas racist and explicitly calling for murdering people
or it is parody, and just totally useless epistemic sabotage, with the only merit to make people angry (About something no one actually believes no less!)
I feel like this is NOT content we should allow in our walled garden in either case.
Why should he be banned? He's expressing a political view that is unpopular in the US and Europe, but is popular, I think, in some other countries. e.g, Iran.
He's only advocating for violence carried out by the government, not individual violence.
And he's not a troll. I've seen him consistently advocate for these views elsewhere.
> Why should he be banned?
For being a dumb idiot proposing mass murder. And being complete empathy and prediction failure harming own movement (or extremely persistent troll).
Yes, that is quite impolite description but given "Institute the death penalty for transgenderism, as well as homosexuality. This can’t possibly hurt." I consider it justified.
> He's only advocating for violence carried out by the government, not individual violence.
And? I am also strongly against such mass murder also when done by government, to the point of not willing to tolerate such people in places where I am.
Yes, not very tolerant I do not care at all about it. I do NOT consider tolerance as so important especially on internet forums.
> He's expressing a political view that is unpopular in the US and Europe, but is popular, I think, in some other countries. e.g, Iran.
I do not consider it as mitigating in slightest or relevant. It is not like I treat diversity as important goal.
It's worth pointing out that Eharding was banned on the old blog and has reappeared here. (Same with Marxbro, if I recall correctly).
ACX does not have a mechanism to discourage stupid posts. Something like a downvote.
Ban seems to be too much, but there is currently no mechanism that would discourage a comment without simultaneously drawing too much attention to it.
What about my post is stupid?
Mass murder is stupid.
Also, not viable political position and not achievable and not helping anti-wokes at all.
So it manages to be both evil, not viable and harmful. Congratulations.
Your proposal plays right into the hands of the woke, because they seem to believe that the country is full of hard-right, racist, homophobic extremists. You claim to be anti-woke, yet ideas like yours give them the food they need to live another day. That's stupid.
I disagree. The reason wokeness advances isn't that people to the right of Republicans on social issues exist, it's that the mainstream right does nothing whatsoever to fight them (remember, wokeness originally spread among the center-left from leftists, not out of fear of any far right, but out of a positive woke agenda). Russia and Hungary have much more homophobia than the Netherlands or Sweden, and yet, also have much less wokeness.
Why should "Popular in Iran" (which, I do not believe is actually true) be the standard we hold ourselves to?
If you're saying our principle should be to allow literally all speech that isn't spam, I disagree with you, but I can see why you'd say that and I have an instinct that way as well, I just think some things over ride it.
If you're saying there is a line somewhere, I believe very strongly that openly advocating for state sponsored violence against specific groups of people should make the cut.
Are murderers specific groups of people? It's fairly popular in the US to advocate for state sponsored violence against murderers. I'm against the state violently punishing anyone for any crime, but I'm currently on the losing side of that political battle.
Thank you, fellow poster.
I think your views are heinous but believe you should be able to express them here.
In my opinion this deserves ban more that this porn spambot that occasionally got hilarious replies.
Ditto. Someone who admits that the only reason they didn't advocate putting African-Americans back in chains is optics (implying he WANTS to but realizes that all but the most rabid reactionaries would pillory him for it) and acts like the logical endpoint of shaping your politics around "owning the libs" is basically a walking nuclear disaster area for this site.
"and acts like the logical endpoint of shaping your politics around "owning the libs""
No.
I have to agree with his characterization. Your posts broadly fall into three buckets: Propaganda to glorify anti-woke or pro-white views and demonize woke views, making it illegal to publicly support "woke" positions and compelling the support of their opposites, and making it illegal to discriminate against people who hold anti-woke views while applying some discrimination of your own. When someone points out that most Americans, even on the right, don't want to become Russia or Iran in the name of fighting wokeness, your counter is "yeah, but Russia and Iran are *really good* at suppressing wokeness."
The charitable explanation is that you're single-mindedly optimizing for "owning the libs" (countering or punishing woke positions) without regard for any other values like freedom of expression, civil rights, or limited government. The uncharitable explanation is that you're a fascist, and you think granting the government unlimited power to punish political dissidents is a feature, not a bug.
Thank you for being more eloquent than me on this matter. Personally, I'm gravitating towards the middle option of "Eharding is someone's long-con trolling persona akin to Jace Conners in the 2010's".
I have a hard time framing a non-liberal opposition to wokeness in a meaningful way. I guess it depends on what you think of as wokeness(or what, if anything is wrong with the ideology), to me the most salient quality is that of being anti-liberal. The specific issues that are agitated for will invariably change over time (and have changed over incredibly short time frames already) so 'conservative' opposition is either fundamentally liberal opposition (given the libertarian to conservative overlap in Rat spaces, this should be expected here in particular) or it is positional. Any proposal to 'combat wokeness' that goes beyond 'be more liberal' looks to me like little more than, "lets cancel the cancel mobs".
I was wondering if I could be a serious commentator to your post, but you lost me in the first paragraph. Why are we post liberals? Why would you want to add any of the laws you suggested instead of enforcing liberal standards that already exist in law? You insist you’re not trolling so on the small chance that’s true, I’ll temporarily engage.
In your essay, you’ve essentially outlined exactly what the reactionary backlash against wokeism will look like and it is precisely as terrible as everyone should expect. The issue isn’t, ‘how can we dislodge some permanent social parasite,’ as much as, ‘how can we prevent the inevitable “cure” from being worse than the sickness.’
Wokeism is a fad, one in a series of never ending fads that American consumers gobble up to fill the void of meaninglessness consumerism modern life has created. This fad will end, I think it’s already a process that is underway. As with all terrible fads and ideologies it’s always darkest before the dawn and so the urge to do something radical seems necessary.
The real way to fight wokeism is to a) accept the parts that are correct, reject the parts that are wrong, pteach principled liberalism, and fortify one’s mental defenses against mind parasites. We don’t need new laws protecting straight white people because those laws already exist. What we need is more people pointing at the ACLU and SPLC or MSM saying, “you’ve lost your way.” We need strict adherence to principles not ideology and reaction. We need all people to start asking themselves, “I wonder if my belief is true?” We need a broad movement toward epistemic humility and away from punishing dissent.
Again, the real question shouldn’t be how can we dislodge these terrible people and their terrible ideas, but how can we incorporate the truth into a better vision of the future. Otherwise we’re just riding Foucault’s Pendulum to our doom.
Which parts are correct?
First 'Woke' is a wishy-washy term that can mean all kinds of things depending on the speaker and listener. I mostly consider it a Motte/Bailey. I would state the Motte argument (i.e. Steelman) like this: some people are actually disadvantaged, suffering and largely unseen and this is often due to being pushed to the margins due to immutable characteristics (and choices) that put them outside of mainstream culture. A moral society should seek to aid, or failing that, prevent harm to people, who are unable to help themselves both as a humanitarian and practical goal. Secondly, the broad historical perspective long shared by the mainstream American society has attempted to soften or bury some of it's more rapacious events, ex. Tulsa Race Riots, police brutality, etc. There is some amount of historical reckoning that is due.
The Bailey argument to this is: America is strictly a racist country in which nothing good has ever happened and it should be disassembled.
The overall critiques brought up by CRT, et al. aren't the issue as much as the problem of using that lens as the only lens through which to view the world. It is a very successful ideological parasite that's easy for mid-wits to grasp because pointing a finger at 'bad things' is easy, and somehow when people 'wake up' they default to the notion that they are the second or third person to realized this stuff and everyone else is asleep.
The problems with wokeism are numerous, most essentially, social policing which will inevitably blow back in the ideologies adherent's faces. Middle America, which for this comment includes the ~60% of Americans who do not engage in the culture wars, are waking up to the fact that people are labeling them as racists or trans-phobes, or anti-science or whatever and they won't take it forever. Eharding's little "essay," which reads just like Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" as the kinds of things we can expect to hear more of as the cultural pendulum swings away from woke fad. It's a terrible ide to promote killing people, jailing them, whatever based on the same qualities that we once elevated them for and will lead right back to the same damn thing in another 20 years. What's crucial here is to keep the parts that are good (i.e. Black, POC, LGBTQ_+++ Americans, etc. with the same rights and privileges as everyone else (which in my lifetime has been the trend). It's easy to call out woke stuff as being illiberal but I don't think that makes us post-liberals; I think the opposite: we need to double down on liberal principles of equality and justice more than ever.
"We don’t need new laws protecting straight white people because those laws already exist."
Do they? How common is it for White people to win on the basis of anti-discrimination law?
"Why are we post liberals?"
Because we had liberalism and it allowed the far left to give us wokeness (and defense contractors to give us Russiagate, etc.).
"This fad will end"
How do you know? How do you know this isn't like Christianity in 340?
"What we need is more people pointing at the ACLU and SPLC or MSM saying, “you’ve lost your way.”"
That does literally nothing. You need actual material loss to be effective.
Are you at all familiar with anti-discrimination law? You'd be shocked at how much of American equal protection jurisprudence is made up of white men successfully challenging affirmative action-type schemes. Hell, Ruth Bader Ginsberg built an entire career as an ACLU attorney using more sympathetic (to the audiences at the time) male clients to advance rights for women. That's the beauty of procedural and structural guarantees: they work for everybody, even the people those in power don't like.
? Interesting comment, poster, can you cite some examples and elaborate further?
> *Institute the death penalty for transgenderism, as well as homosexuality. This can’t possibly hurt.
WTF? I do not care is it serious, really bad parody or false flag operation.
Either way, please stop.
See my below replies. Also, I really would like someone to comment on adding to my proposals from someone who is anti-woke.
I am mildly anti-woke but I am strongly anti-murder.
"It's fine to debate about the value of human life, but the post is first and foremost about finding wokeness's weak points."
How about nuking the entire planet? Think of all the libs that would be owned!
There are real countries that have had the death penalty for homosexuality, and there remain some that still do (and are major migrant destinations, suggesting they're not the worst places to live on the planet). If homosexuality can be banned, so can transsexuality.
Anti-wokes presenting themself as cartoon villains is not one of weak points.
Is your argument banning homosexuality and transsexuality would strengthen wokeness, rather than weaken it?
I don't think you meant all that to be taken literally. More like playing the provocateur to get a discussion going.
I don't ever expect all these ideas to be implemented, of course. They're suggestions, not a totalizing platform in which one idea is worthless without the others.
Seems kind of heavy-handed as parody.
There's no element of parody to it at all, actually.
You are confused.
But apparently many people missed it.
Poe's law reigns, unfortunately.
Dude, I'm a genuine hard right commenter.
Dammit, Marxbro got a second account.
What evidence is there in favor of this idea? Posts by a random unknown dude on the internet don't count.
There's definitely ideology in the list if you look, as well as political priorities apart from doing the mirror opposite of the left.
It's true - if I didn't already have the theory that this is just trying to do a mirror image of some fantasy vision of what the left is doing, I would be convinced that the point here really is to ban minorities and gay people from any sort of societal advancement, and to explicitly enshrine cis white hetersexism as official authority. I mean, it explicitly says that the goal is to get black and brown people out of higher education!
Supporting getting black and brown people into higher education is "wokeness", and has both anti-white and anti-meritocratic implications. I'm not pro-woke.
"Black people going to college is woke"
Yeah, all those woke people in the mid-19th century.
"And anti-meritocratic"
Yes, judging people on their merits instead of their skin color is anti-meritocratic. And 0=1.
The reason people think you're a troll is because your argument is so reactionary you can't even argue it without contradicting yourself.
Pretty sure he is talking about affirmative action. But he's wrong that it is "wokeness" because AA long predates the concept of wokeness.
It is rooted in the exact same ideas and moral framework as wokeness is.
Giving him more credit than me. If someone's saying "I only didn't put 're-enslave all blacks' on the list because I don't think it'd be popular enough", I'm going to guess he isn't a fan of blacks even getting a LOWER education.
Oh, I hadn't even reached this point: "Institute the death penalty for transgenderism, as well as homosexuality. This can’t possibly hurt."
This isn't anti-wokeness. This is a form of totalitarian ideology that hasn't really been explicitly tried anywhere until very recently.
Some of us pay attention and remember the names of certain commenters. We have more sense to follow links of _such_ posters. I'd say you got off easier than I would have expected. :P
Think about it. Is there a single country that both bans homosexuality and has wokeness as a dominant ideology? I can only think of one possible example, Singapore, which seems noncentral. Similarly, transgender people are some of the most vigilant enforcers of "wokness" in America.
I can see that, if you think that elimination of wokeness is literally more important than human life, this might be a reasonable policy recommendation.
However, most people I know who are anti-woke are anti-woke because they *care* about human life. Unless you can give any indication that the net results would be good for human life, they might legitimately accuse you of being more anti-gay and anti-trans than anti-woke.
It's not being anti-gay and anti-trans as a terminal end, but an instrumental end. It's fine to debate about the value of human life, but the post is first and foremost about finding wokeness's weak points. I am quite anti-woke and believe the right is not taking the threat of wokeness seriously enough. I'm only "more anti-gay and anti-trans than anti-woke" if being anti-gay and anti-trans hinders the cause of anti-wokeness, which I don't think it does.
Anyone know of any good rationalist communities in London? I'm looking to meet new people into Scott, Tyler Cowen, etc.
If you search for "London Rationalish" you'll find the Facebook group and the subreddit.
Are there any American Expats in Taiwan? I've been considering making a move out there to live and work and was interested in getting an American perspective.
I'd want to move there to take a position as an Engineering project manager, and live there permanently
Some time back, Scott wrote about polygenic screening and the first PGT baby. In the piece, he mentions,
"Screening companies will give you the raw data if you ask for it, so if you want to screen for an embryo with green eyes, all you need to do is find some third party algorithm that can screen genomes to figure out the baby's eye color and plug in your data. Does anything like this exist? I don't think so, but I think it would be trivial for a genetics PhD student to make."
Well, it's here. The Fertility Institute's Eye Color Selection Program: https://www.fertility-docs.com/programs-and-services/pgd-screening/choose-your-babys-eye-color.php
Seems a bit fringy. So far as I know, most couples doing IVF are just trying to get *any* viable embryo to stick, and the number who have viable embryos aplenty so they can contemplate some serious winnowing are unusual.
I have kind of a negative reaction to this, because for most couples in this situation it's a painful shock how hard and expensive it is to go all the way to birth, and I feel like this glossy frivolity is an effort conceal some of that hard truth under a layer of bright easy hope. ("Look! This is so easy you can even choose blue or green eyes!") And they do want to believe, very much, so this seems a tiny bit emotionally exploitive.
To add a bit of context to this -
My partner & I are currently trying to get pregnant via IVF. It's been expensive, stressful, expensive, emotional, expensive, and expensive.
We're also the sort of people who _would_ go for these sorts of extra screening processes, when and where available.
We got extremely lucky with the egg retrieval & fertilization process, and ended up with *significantly* more embryos than is typical. After weeding out "is the embryo even growing correctly" and "does the embryo have the right number of chromosomes", we have a whopping 10 viable candidate embryos. In context, this is a *huge* number.
Any given one of these embryos still has only like a 70% chance of implanting correctly, and doing so is a long, painful, expensive process, and keeping the backup embyros on ice in the meantime is $$$.
All that to say, I'd certainly be willing to shell out like $50-$100 per embryo during the screening process for the ability to prioritize the eggs most likely to be particularly healthy, happy, or intelligent. At this stage, that's basically a rounding error in the overall cost. But, I'm way to exhausted to give a flying fuck about eye color.
At Genomic Prediction, they aggregate the polygenic risk scores into an embryo health score that you can select on. At the eye color selection program, it looks like they are selecting only doing this "in conjunction with [their] general genetic well-being and gender selection procedures." At some point, you're probably trading health for eye color. I'm not sure what the appropriate tradeoff is. I would think it is really low. "Your baby has green eyes but your life expectancy is X lower" What is the appropriate value for X.
I have two opinions on this entire monstrosity.
(1) I wonder if the "only in conjunction with genetic well being procedures" bit is a way of getting round any legal obstacles to Build A Better Baby. 'No no no, we're not doing eugenics or designer babies, we're just letting parents have that blue-eyed bundle of joy they want!' They do screening for genetic problems, certainly, but this seems a bit superfluous
(2) Remind me again how embryo screening was only going to be for severe problems so people could have healthy babies, and frivolities such as "what colour eyes and how tall do you want?" were never going to be part of a reputable clinic package
What legal obstacles?
I didn't think stuff like this would never happen.
"What legal obstacles?" you ask, and indeed one wonders. The Fertility Institutes are very happy to help you dodge the law in whatever repressive hellhole you live in, that won't let you abort unwanted pregnancies for being the wrong sex, those backwards bigots! As in this heart-warming tale of how they helped Lisa and David with "family balancing" (and isn't that a *lovely* euphemism? I suppose the only benefit here is that the selecting out of unwanted embryos is done before implantation, so no need for an abortion when "Oh damn, it's another girl? We wanted a boy this time!" later in the pregnancy):
"Couple 3
Lisa and David were referred to us by a local fertility program near their home in Toronto, Canada. They presented to their local program with a request to assist them in their desire to become pregnant with a boy.
Lisa underwent a tubal ligation 3 years earlier after the birth of their third daughter. Lisa and David explained that they felt that they had "reached their limit" after having 3 children and undertook the tubal ligation. They indicated that with their oldest daughters now growing older and able to help with the youngest one, their thoughts had changed and they now felt that they could care for an additional child.
While totally content with their daughters, David indicated that he was very interested in seeing if the couple could use "new science" to help them achieve the birth of a son. Lisa was very supportive and indicated that she too was ready for another child. She indicated that gender was not a concern for her but that she was ready to support David's decision to inquire about our gender selection program.
They were told by their local fertility physician that gender selection was illegal in Canada. He did advise them that he had seen and assisted in the care of several Canadian patients that were being treated for sex selection at our Center in Los Angeles. He suggested to Lisa and David that they come see us. The couple had an initial telephone based consultation with us. This was followed by the performance of blood tests and a semen analysis that was carried out by a laboratory near their home.
We performed a sex ratio on David's sperm that provides us with very valuable information about David's capacity to produce male embryos. After we learned that the couple seemed to be suitable candidates for the procedure, they underwent their initial start-up examinations at the local center. We are able to interface with physicians near the homes of patients in nearly all cases.
Because Lisa was going to be 39 years old at the time of her delivery, the couple opted to also check their embryos genetically to make sure that a pregnancy with Down's syndrome did not result.
Lisa and David achieved a successful male pregnancy that resulted in a healthy baby boy born at Toronto General Hospital. Their referring physician has sent us several additional patients and two of David's friends have now been seen with a request for gender selection."
There now, aren't we all beaming broad smiles at how those nasty Canadian legislators have been foiled, and rich Canadians can now have the exact balance of high-quality luxury goods - I'm sorry, I mean precious adorable babies - that they require to match their current lifestyles and needs!
Oh, and while I'm snarling about "And you wonder why the fuck I'm a social conservative???", here's the good news about the stable of prime brood mares - I'm sorry, I mean healthy young female egg donors - that are the *exclusive* property of The Fertility Institutes!
"The Fertility Institutes maintain a very active oocyte (egg) donor program. We have over two hundred egg donors, including all races, available for patient consideration. Our donors are extensively screened and are all college or graduate students. Unlike many other programs, we do not utilize egg donors over the age of 27 years, thus assuring our recipients very high pregnancy rates at VERY affordable prices. The majority of our donors (84%) are deemed "in-house" donors which means these young women are not available online through egg donor agencies or other outlets. They are reserved exclusively for patients of the Fertility Institutes. In addition, "in-house" donors do not carry an agency fee associated with their use. We have no age restrictions for healthy potential recipients interested in utilizing our donors. All donations in our program are anonymous. We do not offer "meet the donor" or "donor meets the parents" options, though we do provide very extensive background and genetic history information and can optionally perform a full genetic chromosome analysis on the eggs prior to their use. Photos of all donors are available to potential recipients."
And you need never worry that the bitches on our puppy farms - well I have to apologise again, I have no idea where these glitches today are coming from - will ever try to get in contact with you or the child produced via their genetic material:
"We are pleased to announce that all medical services offered by The Fertility Institutes are available internationally. We work with affiliate clinics in over 42 countries.
For our patients from abroad, including Australia, new local laws in many countries allowing donors to "trace" their eggs or sperm are NOT applicable in the U.S.A. Our donors DO NOT have access to you, information about you, your future children or any of your personal information."
Only the most prime breeding stock is on offer:
"Through our unique association with a consortium of ethnic egg donor agencies, we are able to offer the advantages of a very large selection of young, healthy well screened egg donors from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds combined with the advantage of our ultraselective screening process to assure that our patients needing an egg donor are provided only the finest in available donors.
The donor database is being updated constantly and does not always include our unique ethnic donors (you must call for information, details and availability on specific ethnicities) and always lags behind the actual list of donors available through an office contact (+/- 250 donors currently available). All egg donors are college students, age 18-27 yrs. Minimum B+ college grade point average. Call for additional information or check back as our donor list expands and contracts. No donor is deemed suitable until repeat screenings are carried out following a "match". "Frozen" indicates this donor also has frozen oocytes she has produced available through our egg bank. While listed donors have been screened, no guarantee of the availability of any of the listed donors is implied."
Unable to, or do not want, to carry the pregnancy to term yourself? The Fertility Institutes have you covered! Thanks to their clinics in Mexico and India, a steady supply of poor women selling their services as human incubators is assured, particularly if you're on a relatively tight budget and just can't afford USA prices! Gay or straight, couples or single, they do not discriminate against loaded bank balances!
"Potential parents and surrogates that are matched through our program are united through the efforts of the dedicated medical staff in our offices, with well over two decades of successful experience in surrogacy and egg donation. The high quality services we provide are offered at prices that, in most instances are half of the prices charged by other programs. For those with financial limitations or concerns, our new highly acclaimed Indian and Mexican surrogacy "hybrid" programs can offer further savings of nearly an additional $10,000-$17,000. In this program, ALL of your medical care occurs in the U.S. while a well screened surrogate mother in India will carry your pregnancy to birth or your care may take place over 7 days in Mexico with a Mexican surrogate carrying your pregnancy. For gay patients, our Mexican surrogacy arrangements ARE allowed to involve screened gay parents. Ask about these exciting and VERY popular new surrogacy options!
The early selection of a Center to assist with your plans is crucial to allowing the process that will lead you to parenthood to proceed. As surrogacy options in the United States become increasingly limited as a result of the dwindling supply of well qualified U.S. surrogates from states that allow surrogacy and the ever increasing demand for these women, the Fertility Institutes organization has responded and is the ONLY U.S. PROGRAM with direct ownership of surrogacy programs in both Mexico and India. While current Indian law prohibits the use of Indian surrogates for gay singles or couples, Mexican legislation allows for totally legal surrogacy for gays. The program operated by the Fertility Institutes at our Mexican facility has been deemed a fully qualified center to provide these services by Mexican authorities.While the majority of our surrogacy matches for our gay patients is with qualified U.S. surrogates, our Mexican match option, with the associated cost savings is growing monthly. As soon as you indicate to us your desire to proceed, all available options, domestic U.S.A. and foreign options will be detailed for you."
Ah, progress. Isn't it great to be living in a day and age when human lives are bought and sold like pedigree dogs?
My response on the issue of surrogacy includes a picture, so I will give the link instead of repeating the argument:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-wrong-with-gestational-surrogacy.html
I do not see how it fits your "human lives are bought and sold."
Is there any version of this you would accept?
Infertility is something that can completely dash a couple's hopes. Not everyone cares intensely about having children, but many people do and - unlike in the example you quote from their website - quite often the problem isn't caused by the couple. My impression is that in the early days, a woman who could not carry a child to term might sometimes persuade a close friend or sister to carry a pregnancy for her, acting as surrogate - would this still make you think of pedigree dogs?
I agree with you that a lot of their rhetoric is disturbing, and I'm really uncomfortable with embryo selection personally speaking. But I also feel as if "makes it possible for people who desperately want a child and cannot on their own to have one" is the core purpose of the technology, and is one that can genuinely do good for both the parents and the otherwise-nonexistent child (though yes, there are murky ethical issues - I'm just not necessarily willing to say that someone who solves those issues differently than me shouldn't be allowed to make different choices). And I can't tell how much you're angry about it expanding beyond that to "I want a boy instead of a girl" (or vice versa) as opposed to objecting to all applications.
Thanks Deiseach for often writing the sarcastic rants I would like to write.
"Beware the man of a single study".
But also,
"No, I don't care that you have many studies". This is what it boils down to.
If anyone makes a statement you don't agree with, you're either going to say,
1) You have no proof, or
2) Your proof is a single study; I don't trust single studies claims, and anyway, here is a weakness this study has, or
3) I don't care that you have many studies - parapsychologists *also* have many studies.
Genuinely, I'm not trying to be adversarial, but it's starting to feel like you have *much* different standards of proof for different things.
If you agree with something that has many papers supporting it, you're just going to say something like, "X has been proven over and over and here's links" and not bother to investigate further.
If you disagree with something that has many papers supporting it, you're going to do a deep dive into the papers, discard a majority of them because science nowadays sucks, and then at the end say "You know what, I don't care about how many papers you have anyway".
Diminishing returns: If one study hasn't convinced you, a second and a third might. If five hundred have not convinced you, I'd not expect the five hundred and first to make much of an impact.
Scott's response to the Alexandros Marinos article was *God Awful*. I hope it was because Scott didn't have enough time to digest it, and not because he's dismissive of the work Alexandros put into it, and I hope he comes in to clean this up later.
I heard it described elsewhere as:
**
What bugs me is that he's basically saying "so what if you followed my own original methodology to its logical conclusion, it wasn't a very good conclusion, also fuck modern science"
**
And I say that as a personal fan of the ACX Worms article.
When things get too drawn out, I like to read a little bit of The Onion. It’s kind of like turning the Etch a Sketch over and giving it a good shake.
“Most Idiotic Things Anti-Vaxxers Actually Think Will Cure Covid”
“Hey, I drank grape juice, and I got over Covid, so you can’t say it didn’t work, right? Prove it doesn’t work. Go on, prove it. You can’t, so, therefore, it worked.”
https://www.theonion.com/most-idiotic-things-anti-vaxxers-actually-think-will-cu-1848090244/slides/9
I dont have time to deep dive on many papers in the field I have a goddam PhD, let alone adjacent fields. For things further away you can forget it.
I also know how the sausage is made, and how assuming an abstract and conclusions actually reflects what the data and analysis in a paper suggests is by no means an accurate assumption.
What it boils down to, in the politiest sense possible, if someone is trying to present papers to me to convince me of something then odds are they are a liar and may very well e malicious.
If I don't already like the person, deeply respect them, and hqve utmost confidence that they have already done a deep dive on the papers in question, redoing at minimum any analysis of data themselves, then I will be immune to any but the tiniest change in my priors from ant scientific evidence I myself have not personally collected and analysed.
I'm sorry, but once you lose trust in people and institutions it doesn't come back due to evidence that you already don't trust.
I feel like the natural conclusion of this approach, which I agree is at least valid - if not necessary - is to take no strong position. Or, barring that, to not share a strong position with others. To reflect that you, or whoever, does not have enough time to evaluate all of the conflicting evidence is more than okay. To then claim that one side is correct seems to be a fundamental error, in the way the OP is concerned about.
> if someone is trying to present papers to me to convince me of something then odds are they are a liar and may very well e malicious
More concisely: Proselytization implies deception. Or some other form of bad faith.
It's possible to overcome that prior, but not by proselytizing harder. Costly signals of intellectual integrity help. Other signals hurt. If the topic is tribally-aligned, that's a red flag. If proselytization on an ostensibly factual subject is coupled with active tribal signalling, that's a *giant* red flag.
Trustworthy advocacy -- to the extent that it exists -- is that which is more likely in worlds where the speaker is honest than in worlds where they are bullshitting. It's a surprisingly hard bar to clear.
>you have *much* different standards of proof for different things
Yes, this is a core feature of Bayesian thinking. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It seems self-consistent to me. He's saying both that you need lots of studies, and that they have to be good. (And he explained in the original piece why he thinks most of those studies are bad.)
>He's saying both that you need lots of studies, and that they have to be good.
That's kind of my point.
a) he will not investigate studies for quality in such depth if they're supporting a statement he likes; and since *all* papers have weaknesses, he always finds weaknesses in the studies that have results he doesn't like.
b) he pretty straight-forwardly said that it doesn't matter how many studies there are (and remember, he found a decent number of them to be good in the ivermectin case).
Because the Bayesian prior here is that any random chemical is not going to be effective at treating any random disease, with extremely high odds. So when someone claims that this particular chemical treats this particular disease the (large) burden of proof is on the scientists trying to claim there is an effect. The burden of evidence is not equally weighted on both finding and not finding an effect, and it shouldn't be.
That's just false! He excluded several anti-ivermectin studies in the original post for being bad!
Fundamentally though, increasing the number of studies (along with intra-study metrics like p-value) only increases confidence in the studies not being due to chance. Once you have as many as ivermectin has, doubling the number of studies just makes us even more sure that the studies aren't just *randomly* showing a positive correlation. There almost certainly is a correlation, so 50 more similar studies would not really help. (Note the difference between this and what you're saying; the reason why we don't care about the number of studies is that they've *won*. There are enough, high enough effect size studies that we're essentially completely certain that the studies aren't random.)
The trouble is that most of the uncertainty in the question we care about (*causation* and specifically *actually fights COVID, not comorbid worms*) is no longer uncertainty about whether there's a correlation. It's whether that correlation is spurious in some way. That could be due to the worms hypothesis. It could be due to publication bias. Or maybe some unexplored detail of patient selection in third-world countries that happens to be in common between these studies. Or everyone is simply lying out of their ass and all the studies are fake. Who knows! But in the universe where Ivermectin does not cure COVID, it will be due to something like these that more of the same studies could not show.
One would do well to ask: "But Byrel, why are you speculating on outside-failure modes like this? Surely you don't apply this level of scrutiny to establishment studies?! How could anyone get their drugs approved if they have to demonstrate that there's no possibility the statistically significant effect in their trials wasn't due to something their trial couldn't measure? And of course, unjustified variable standards of scrutiny for propositions you would like to believe/disbelieve is a great way to spend a lot of effort getting less well-educated."
First, my hypothetical critic: medical trials are so expensive partly because they actually are better designed to exclude many of the outside failure modes. The FDA actually requires preregistration, which eliminates publication bias and at least makes p-hacking a lot more visible. These sorts of design features move some of the outside uncertainty into the inside uncertainty, which the trial can actually measure.
Secondly, things like worms-for-a-known-antiparasite-drug should *absolutely* be part of the demographics collected on both arms. This isn't something universal to all trials, and some establishment trials really suck because they either don't collect relevant summary data on their arms, or the relevant summary data isn't equivalent between the arms.
Thirdly, I'm more confident that major pharmaceutical companies have an effective fraud-deterrence environment than the people running the Ivermectin trials in the third-world, so I have a lower prior on that failure mode.
I don't THINK I'm having an inconsistent standard here.
(Worth noting that while a lot of people are pointing out that it's sensible to have different standards of proof for different propositions with different priors, I don't buy it. I mean, obviously they're CORRECT in the general case, and certainly in their scenarios about parapsychology and what-not. But *you actually have to justify (to yourself) having a different prior.* And there's no particular reason to have a higher prior on, say, Paxlovid than on Ivermectin, so they should be held to the same standards for rigor.)
>Genuinely, I'm not trying to be adversarial, but it's starting to feel like you have *much* different standards of proof for different things.
In defense of using different standards of proof, different claims do require different assessments purely due to the knock-on effects.
To use an non-charged example, if someone claims that they have a new type of brake disc that is better at stopping cars than existing brake discs then you can do a simple adversarial study to determine this. If someone else claims that they're using their mental power over magnetism to stop their car better than using a brake disc they'd need to reach a far higher standard of evidence to be convincing.
After all, if magnetic mind powers were a thing why are they only just now coming up in this circumstance? Are they unique to the individual trying to stop the car? Are there observable structures in the body of magnetic mind power individuals that allow them to use these ability? Why have we never observed these before? The list goes on and on.
Now, I'll admit that in the real world the line is far less clear cut than this example, but everyone still needs to draw a line somewhere. It's why I won't believe homeopathy is real regardless of how many studies show something is going on. Chemistry and physics don't work like that, the evidence needs to either be overwhelming enough to displace centuries of research or the proponents need to come up with a mechanism that works with the known laws of physics.
Okay, so because MSM doesn't like ivermectin, it apparently makes it just as unlikely as "magnetic mind powers"?
I get your point, I do; I would also dismiss 20 psychology papers proving telepathy.
However, if no studies can convince you of claims you don't like, and any studies can convince you of claims you like, *why do you even read studies?*
This isn't about MSM. It's about the broader scientific community. And the broader scientific community had just as much reason to be skeptical of fluvoxamine as ivermectin initially, but fluvoxamine has been able to (partially) overcome it. Look at the differences between those two.
Good. If the modern tendency to think that the nature of objective reality can be decided by a vote, and the number of papers, theories, theorists, studies, or experts subscribing to a given hypothesis has the slightest bearing on its truth, that will be a blessing.
If studies don't matter, don't use them as supporting evidence.
All of Scott's blog posts constantly use studies to make their point; now, he just dismisses a long string of them, because studies... apparently don't matter?
And keep in mind, those are studies he himself read and found no issues with. So you can't even play the "those studies were bad" card.
Well, as I said, I personally don't think the number of studies makes any difference at all. Might as well add up the weight of the pages printed as far as I'm concerned. The *only* useful criteria are details of what was measured and how closely measurements support the hypothesis. That's the kind of stuff you're only going to find out by a close reading of the original research, and yeah sure it can lead you to elevate one out-of-the-way paper over a metric crapton of other papers, all published in leading journals. Because "number of papers" = nothing, and "leading journal" = even more nothing.
Quite so. Bear in mind that every scientific advance that ever there was occurred because one person proved that everyone else was either ignorant or wrong.
Does anyone know of data on side effect severity for the covid booster? Especially as it relates to previous side effects? I'd really like scientific data, but happy to hear anecdotes if they're what people have got.
J & J in March. No effect. Pfizer in October. I felt a little discomfort in the injected deltoid the next day. Like someone had play-punched me in the shoulder the day before. First time I’ve ever felt any reaction from a vaccination.
I'm pure J&J and I felt a little woozy for the booster.
First and second dose: Sore arm, that's all.
The wife:
First dose: felt ill for a day and a half.
Second dose: ill for a day and a half.
Booster: nothing.
It was the opposite of what I expected, tbh.
Anecdata.
First dose Astra Zeneca, 24 hours of chills and fever then fine.
Second dose Astra Zeneca, sore arm for 2 days then fine.
-First dose: No side effects.
-Second dose: Felt mildly ill for about six hours, ate some soup and went to bed. Fine next day.
(For the first and second ones, I was also in my third trimester of pregnancy, so needing to lie down might have had as much to do with that.)
-Booster: No side effects. Also got regular flu shot same day.
All my shots were Moderna.
Thank you very much!
I'll share my anecdote!
First dose, Moderna: mild fatigue and full-body aches lasting about 24 hours
Second dose, Moderna: severe fatigue and full-body aches lasting about 24 hours
Third dose "booster" (half-quantity): following symptoms in sequence over the course of a week:
- 24 hours of moderate fatigue and body aches
- a couple of days of painful stomach bloating and intestinal issues
- a stiff/painful back that lasted a few days
- a morbilliform full body skin rash that lasted a few days.
It took about a week to run through all of these symptoms, after which I quickly felt completely normal again. None of these were bad enough to keep me from working or doing other things, but it was pretty alarming. I'm glad to have the protection from COVID, but I'll definitely weigh the costs and risks more carefully the next time I'm eligible for a booster.
Fwiw, none of the other people I know personally who got Moderna boosters had any side effects besides the fatigue/body aches.
Thank you very much for the answer! And I'm sorry you had to go through that, it sounds extremely alarming. I hadn't heard of a rash as a covid vaccine side effect before.
You don't mention fever - is that something you monitor? I ask because that's the most common side effect people have told me about, and if no one you know who had the boosters got it that's interesting new information.
I didn't monitor my temperature, but I don't remember feeling feverish after any of the three doses.
Just realized I forgot to specify that my third dose was also the Moderna vaccine.
I'm noticing what I'm going to call Lucidity Bias, the evil twin of Occam's Razor. Whereas OR makes sense because it economizes the number of variables. a Lucidity Bias does not economize, it simplifies, for the sake of clarity.
Simplifying is fine if your purpose is communication. It isn't fine if your purpose is understanding.
The Rationalist community has been accused of being full of non-wheel experts trying to invent the wheel, or something like that. I'm not making that accusation, although I'm kinda riffing off of it, because it's at least possible that is a failure mode of those who question all received wisdom.
Non-experts aren't necessarily worse at understanding a field than the experts. For one thing, the experts may suffer from biases present in the field. They may also lack wider knowledge that puts their expert knowledge in perspective. For instance, if experts in a field lack an understanding of mathematical statistics they may come to wrong conclusions because statistics may be essential for analysis of the subject.
It seems to me that rationalists have a thirst for clarity, perhaps too hungry a thirst. Many fields are complicated and aren't easy to explain to the non-expert. After all, many advanced fields require years of study to be merely caught up to the entry level of understanding. In those cases the intellectually hungry among us may prefer an explanation that makes logical sense based on prior known concepts over an explanation that may require more detailed knowledge which uncovers previously unknown concepts, but which requires years of study to uncover and comprehend.
I suggest everyone tweak in the direction of considering that your opinion may change if you had more expert knowledge.
There's a real problem here, but I think there's also a real value to prizing clarity. There's no particular reason to think a particular clear theory is any more or less likely to be true than a particular obscure theory. But it's often the case that a clear theory is both easier to test, and, if true, is easier to use for recommendations and gives better understanding. This sort of thing can give people reasons to favor clear theories over obscure ones, even when both are equally likely to be true - our goal presumably isn't just believing the truth, but doing something with it, either through testing, recommendations, or understanding.
Kevin Kelly's work on Occam's Razor suggests that its value is best understood in something like this way - though he also emphasizes the ability to reach the truth in the long-term by following this strategy, even if short-term guesses are no more likely to be true.
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/kk3n/ockham/Ockham.htm
I think there is good reason to prioritize clarity. A simple model is more likely to be true than a convoluted one (in my experience). The issue is that the prioritization needs to be 75% (clear simple theory) vs. 65%(convoluted theory) and you need to be willing to continue to update your level of confidence as the data changes.
Many people, both in the real world and on these pages, want to simplify everything down to ivermectin works (or ivermectin doesn't) or some other theory. Much of the respect for Scott comes from his willingness to admit uncertainty (on many subjects). Much of the disdain for the Ivermectin side(of that particular discussion) comes from the insistence of its champions that, "it clearly works."
Well put, Jack. You've articulated something that has been bothering me about a number of discussions.
> I think there is good reason to prioritize clarity. A simple model is more likely to be true than a convoluted one (in my experience).
I think the opposite could be the case when the problem space is fundamentally complex. When there are 10s of thousands or millions of variables with many dependencies of varying strength, why would you expect a simple model?
If the problem space is fundamentally complex then I think your (simple) model looks like: "10s of thousands or millions of variables with many dependencies of varying strength" all contribute to the overall final result....
A simple model is more easily juggled in the mind. You can mentally run more complex tests against counterfactuals if the model itself is simple.
Upon rereading, I hate that conclusion because it is generic and sloppy.
What I actually want to suggest is that people update in the direction of opacity, whatever that means, but what I think I mean is be suspicious of clarity.
H. L. Mencken: "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
More accurately, "when the solution to a problem is both widely accepted and correct, people stop talking about it".
Sorry, but that doesn't even come close to the meaning I read in the Mencken quote. Or were you disagreeing with the quote?
I was disagreeing. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
Specifically, I'm saying that Mencken's quote appears true only because of extreme selection bias; when it is not true i.e. the well-known solution is right, we implement that solution and forget about it for the rest of eternity.
The key thing about political topics is that they are not random. They are, by definition, the things that we disagree about. The vast majority of possible propositions, factual and moral, are obvious and uncontroversial - and so we don't talk about them. 90% of morality is baked into humans by evolution and requires an immense mental and philosophical effort to reject. We disagree merely over a few edge cases.
Got it, thanks. I would generally agree with that, except I think what Mencken (were he interested in defending the quote, which is dubious) would point out is that he used the word "human problem" and that probably rules out any of those throughly-settled issues you mention, because they're not really "problems" we discuss.
It's been four months; are there any results from the ACX surveys?
Yes, but they're scattered around wherever the person who wrote the survey has put them. Maybe I should collect them all in one place at some point.
That would be nice!
I've started reading Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet on substack based on a reference to it from here. His latest post https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/a-surfeit-of-black-bile talks about depression and psychoanalysis - curious to hear what folks here (especially Scott) think about it. Couple of click baity quotes - "Depression makes you a jerk." "psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience".
It's interesting: Smith associates certain perceptions or ideas with his depression–e.g., most of everyday speech is verbal copypasta; universities and awards only exist because enough people agree that they do; in at least some sense, things in general aren't like reeeeally real–these notions have occurred to me as well, and in fact I think they occur to a lot of people, but for some reason they don't really bother me, whereas Smith associates them with immense distress, and they also foster a kind of anger and contempt in him, which causes him further distress. When I hear about the Proust protagonist figuring out who his acquaintance has been hanging out with by paying attention to the new words and phrases she uses, I think "neat, that's very astute," whereas Smith seems to think "ah, now here's someone who understands depression". I'm not sure what to make of this. Maybe it's related somehow to the OCD he describes very vividly elsewhere in the post.
I disagree with the provocative conclusion at the end of this direct quote: "Depression makes you a jerk. One should not be a jerk. Ergo, if depression is a disease, it is a disease that it is morally wrong to have." This does sound like depression to me–in particular, a self-abusive bias that I've experienced in my own depressive episodes. Getting shot in the head could also make you a jerk. It doesn't follow that it's morally wrong to get attacked by a gunman. You can be culpable for your actions, but not your afflictions, right? (sure, it gets complicated when your affliction is the result of your actions...)
That post was a fun read. I like reading eloquent "jerkitudes", partly because I come from a culture where it is one's moral *duty* to be a jerk, which in practice does not leave room for such eloquence. (In my society, original thought is *kitsch*, conspicuous consumption in the poorest taste. Instead, you are expected to build your public presentation from the provided building blocks as a purely instrumental edifice that helps you navigate a zero-sum economic game.)
However, I can't help my knee-jerk reaction when a contemporary cultural notion such as "copypasta" being misused so badly. So, ackshyually, "copypasta" is not simply "parroting others' opinions as your own". (In my lexicon, that's just called "discourse", and I am not as disturbed by its prevalence in human behavior, as I am disturbed by its normativity.)
Copypasta is an ironic reaction to that: literally copy-pasting an opinion, story, or other act of digital speech to play off of others' inability to discern a real opinion from a piece of propaganda. (In spatial terms, you could say that the accepted meaning of "copypasta" is both "in reverse" and "one layer above" the author's usage of the notion.)
In practice, copypasta it's used as a shibboleth to identify functionally illiterate outsiders. They can't identify the purpose of the text in question (a low-effort integrity check), and start expending effort "arguing with the copypasta" as if it were an actual opinion.
In my ethical system, one is culpable for their inconsistencies. (In practice, people are not astute enough to notice them, or simply do not care; this has a self-reinforcing effect.) In this case, individual thoughts expressed in the essay are valid and, taken individually, may be useful morsels of experience.
But using such a blatant misuse of a contemporary notion as an example of the author's mental state leads me to think that any conclusion the text might reach would simply not pass a reality check. You wouldn't hire tradespeople to build a house using Gary Larson's cow tools. The state, on the other hand, is more than happy to pay independent intellectuals to provide the rest of us with broken conceptual tools, which lead us to base our convictions and behaviors on broken models of the world.
In a curious inversion, the author's concern may be rooted in the fact that they have become really good at playing a broken game. Sort of like impostor syndrome in reverse. I think that's something a lot of people can relate to, especially those who, like myself, consider depression is a personalized symptom of a societal affliction. (I believe it's the nervous system revolting against what the author calls "dematerialization". Like it or not, we as animals are optimized to react to simple material stimuli, not complex abstract ones, the understanding of which has to be instilled into every one of us, like building a ship in a bottle, and for better or worse it usually doesn't work that well.)
P.S. Good to know that lexicon trick was from Proust. That allows me to estimate how long it's been known in general, and how prevalent it is in my milieu. We are no more on speaking terms with the person I acquired it from, but admittedly it's been an occasional guilty pleasure of mine to use it on our mutual acquaintances.
"That post was a fun read. I like reading eloquent "jerkitudes", partly because I come from a culture where it is one's moral *duty* to be a jerk, which in practice does not leave room for such eloquence. (In my society, original thought is *kitsch*, conspicuous consumption in the poorest taste. Instead, you are expected to build your public presentation from the provided building blocks as a purely instrumental edifice that helps you navigate a zero-sum economic game.)"
You are making me so curious, which culture are you from??
Eastern Europe :-) We were part of the Middle East and effectively stuck in the Middle Ages until the Great Powers' proxy wars forcibly "civilized" us during the 19th century, and industrialized us during the 20th. Though we have our short-lived simulacra of intellectual traditions, rationalism is largely viewed as a suspicious Western import that we need to pay lip service to in order to be allowed economic opportunities by a cruel Big Other. (Emphasis on "big", as cruel is natural - but one only needs to worry about the cruelty of those entities that are bigger than them, never about one's own until the deathbed.)
I'm only half kidding about this so called "moral duty to be a jerk". My region is populated by kind and hospitable people with near-zero emotional literacy :-) And the further East you go, the weirder it gets - once you're traversing the former Soviet Union the baseline attitude is, by Western standards, effectively sociopathic.
The latter (parenthesized) part of the quoted statement holds true for much of the Western world, accounting for the impotence of public discourse and collective thought that global society seems to be experiencing. IMHO the rise of neoauthoritarian ideologie among collectivists, and conspiracy theories/widespread New Age "spiritual bypassing" among individualists, are symptoms of a nascent epistemic collapse.
If humanity is developing exponentially, this means the largest part of "us learning how to think" happened recently. (Over here it's especially fresh, hence the peculiar historical perspective.) However, exponential dematerialisation (a.k.a. B. Fuller's "ephemeralisation") means immaterial culture is outpacing material development, and there is an ever growing divide between those who appreciate abstract values and those who have no use for them. (I feel like the Internet's recent fascination with aphantasia is symptomatic of that.) Ostracising or pathologising "deviations" from "the norm" doesn't help if that "norm" is actually the minority.
Of course I'd like my people to become the majority, who doesn't :-) But I'm definitely in the minority, being brought up in an atmosphere of useless idealism. It takes a significant toll on my mental health and therefore my survival capacity.
Most Eastern European nations have a fascination with being accepted for the "real, civilized people we actually are". In fact, it turns out that when history shuts the mouths of the pedigreed bullshitters, the rest of the world turns out to be just as unwashed as us :-)
P.P.S. The author did lose my attention around the misuse of "copypasta". I could attribute that to my erratic train of thought, or I could attribute it to the author's thesis falling apart at the first misuse of a complex notion. In practice, it makes no difference.
Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet is great. The two posts that got me to start following him were:
What are the Humanities? https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/what-are-the-humanities
Covid is Boring https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/covid-is-boring
I found I found his post striking, the descriptions of his mental states are very well written and vivid, and quite sad.
An amusing minor point : he has the French expression "péter un cable" wrong. It just means "to blow a fuse", ie. freak out and not the much funnier "to fart a lead weight"
So I had to go down that rabbit hole and found that "blow a fuse" seems to be the most common translation, but there was one instance of "shit a brick". ;-)
Idiomatic expressions are wonderful! My favorite are the pairs where the images are similar but just a bit different like the English "on cloud nine" versus the French "au septième ciel" (on heaven seven), or the "storm in a cup of tea"/"storm in a glass of water" pair.
Yes "shit a brick" is a very reasonable translation for the French expression "péter un plomb", as they have quite similar meaning (freak out) but the images are very different, as "péter un plomb" directly means "blow a fuse" and "to fart a lead weight" is a mistranslation of both words.
So you're saying that essay contains *two* examples of how humanities could be so much more beneficial (and enjoyable!) if authors *bothered to attempt* rigor? Damn.
Triple Interrobang, in relation to your request for comments last OT:
"Why we Cant[sic] Understand the Other Side" oversimplifies the problem. It's more than just outgroup homogeneity on the level of the individual, since a lot of media bakes in "the majority of the Other Side supports X extreme position". Also, a number of the statistics you cite are only weak evidence for your point, due to the potential for differing definitions (obvious examples here are differing definitions of "offensive to minorities" and "God", and differing understanding of what is and is not false information).
Your vid on cancel culture has a few issues:
1) "a movement known as GamerGate engaged in a widespread and extended harassment campaign against those seen as responsible for spreading progressive ideas in the gaming community"
This is more than a little slanted, although I don't entirely fault you for that since this is the line taken by essentially all media coverage*. Firstly, "the movement" didn't harass people; a minority of people in the movement did (that one should probably have occurred to you given your "Other Side" video). Second, the concerns of GamerGate (at least in its final, most wide-scale and impactful phase) were a *little* more nuanced than "spreading progressive ideas in the gaming community"; the objection was largely to progressives attempting to turf "gamers" *out* of games (a couple of the more notable incendiaries: https://dangolding.tumblr.com/post/95985875943/the-end-of-gamers https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-gamers-don-t-have-to-be-your-audience-gamers-are-over- ).
*The thing about GamerGate is that it was basically the watershed rupture between the previously-aligned Grey Tribe (nerdy young mostly-men) and Blue Tribe (the rapidly-nucleating social justice movement). As such there were essentially no media outlets that took the pro-GG position; up until that point "nerdy anti-SJ" wasn't much of a media niche (Scott beat the crowd).
2) You don't really explain why there's the asymmetry in opinions of shame mobs between progressives and conservatives. The obvious explanation is "because there's an asymmetry in the current distribution of such mobs", probably related to things like "progressives use social media more" and "progressives are more politically active". It's noteworthy that the positions on this have basically reversed since the 90s.
3) I think you misattribute fault for some of the effects of "cancellings", in particular people being fired/expelled. A shame mob cannot fire people from their jobs; a shame mob cannot expel someone from a university. Someone with power is taking that action because he or she listened to the shame mob; that's his or her decision and his or her responsibility. I think "stop throwing mobs the heads they demand" is at least as important as "stop forming mobs".
Regarding your more recent "Conspiracy Theorists Aren't Crazy", I think that your title is kind of clickbait and an overstatement. It is a continuum, yes, but the end of that continuum - perfect confirmation bias, in which anybody disagreeing with you is weighted 0 - untethers a person completely from reality. If "crazy" is to have a meaning at all, that almost certainly qualifies. Even the fairly-clickbaity "We Are All Conspiracy Theorists" would be more accurate.
>it was basically the watershed rupture between the previously-aligned Grey Tribe (nerdy young mostly-men) and Blue Tribe (the rapidly-nucleating social justice movement)
I'd say that it was the time when the rupture reached mainstream awareness. Sci-fi (racefail, elevatorgate) and new atheism were conquered first.
All of these things were basically 2012 or 2013, right?
Racefail - 2009, Elevatorgate - 2011, Gamergate - 2014.
Thanks - I only became aware of Racefail substantially later so wasn't sure on the date. Elevatorgate and Gamergate felt closer in time than 3 years, but this timing makes a lot of sense.
To be clear, I'm not saying GamerGate was *decisive* of anything; cracks had been growing for a while and something like it was inevitable. But I call it a "rupture" in the sense of "final catastrophic structural failure", and more pertinently "failure that's obvious without a microscope".
This is the kind of thinking that restores my faith in humanity. Kudos!
I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm not sure what you're referring to. Could you explain what I did right?
Congrats to Scott for being cited in The Economist! Timeline:
Nov 18th - Scott publishes his epic Ivermectin post.
Nov 19th - online edition only - The Economist publishes a detailed graphic on the "Ivermectin only helps COVID-19 patients with worms" hypothesis:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/11/18/ivermectin-may-help-covid-19-patients-but-only-those-with-worms
It cites Scott and links to his article: "Recent analysis by Avi Bitterman, a dermatologist in New York, and Scott Alexander, a prominent blogger, suggests that the answer is nuanced."
Nov 27th - print and online editions - The Economist publishes an article on the subject. It does not cite Scott:
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/11/27/ivermectin-may-help-covid-19-patients-but-only-those-with-worms
Given the quickness of the turnaround, I have to presume the relevant journalist is a paid up subscriber, who saw the Ivermectin post before its official publication on Nov. 18. (I don't remember for sure if Scott gave us a preview of this one, but I think he did).
I'm a paying subscriber and I didn't get one.
Why do people keep saying they have been "humbled" when they win an award or get elected to office? Isn't that the exact opposite of what the word means? Can we stop this? Or is it an ineluctable feature of the mendacity of our times?
> Why do people keep saying they have been "humbled" when they win an award or get elected to office?
Winning an award is kind of elevating you above other people who didn't win or even get nominated. If you don't actually think you're "better" or more accomplished than those others, of course that can be a humbling experience.
I don't think there is anything new about this. "I am humbled to win this award" is not a proposition attempting to report on the speaker's state of mind, and still less a statement about the speaker's objective status. It is a performative statement and there is nothing wrong with that. It broadly signals some mixture of: this is a little embarrassing; I want you all to like me and most people prefer modesty to arrogance; there are aspects to my success which are dumb luck; and there are others associated with this who are not being celebrated.
None of this is discreditable, or particularly remarkable, and certainly not new
Google Trends shows searches for "humbled" has quadrupled in popularity since 2009, with a huge spike in the summer of 2016 -- probably due to party convention speech writers looking it up. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=humbled
I think a huge change in searches for "humbled" is suggestive that the usage of the word has changed over time.
Nobody was saying "I am humbled to win this award." or, upon winning an election primary "This has been a humbling experience" in the 90s. It's a recent thing, though perhaps it has been around a couple decades now. It used to be that LOSING was considered to be a humbling experience. Nowadays if you tell someone "Trying to compete at the pro level was a humbling experience." they may be confused and ask to see all the awards you won.
I'll note that Philip Roth's novel The Humbling appeared in 2009, so perhaps people still knew what the word meant then.
"Mendacity of our times" sounds overwrought but I confess to finding that usage of "humbled" annoying. Jackson Paul in another reply here gives a nice defense of it though. And I think Merriam-Webster's definition of "humbled" is fine. It includes a sense for "make someone non-prideful" which is... fine, and what these politicians are going for.
I think what's annoying is the insincerity. "I'm overcome with gratitude and a feeling of unworthiness to receive so great an honor, etc" could conceivably be true but you can kind of tell it's more like "it's so great being recognized for being so amazing; and I'm humble to boot!".
Btw, those interested in this debate may like my curmudgeonly list of words that Google's dictionary is ruining: http://doc.dreev.es/words
"what these politicians are going for"
C'mon man, don't let the politicians change our language. Word have meaning. Politicians change the meaning of words to manipulate the truth. We should resist that.
I'm saying they're being insincere more than changing the language. If we end up with a new sense of "humbled" meaning "honored" then I'll take your side here.
(I'm similarly annoyed by how "not literally" is literally one of the definitions of "literally" now.)
I think the hate on literally is overdone. The use of it in the way you're deriding dates back to like 1766, which isn't too much later than the meaning of "actually," which itself wasn't the original literal meaning of the word anyway, given that it originally meant something more like "as it is written," which is shown in the root word.
Besides, even today it's basically never used to mean "figuratively," but just as an all-purpose intensifier.
Consider the sentence "I'm so tired I'm literally going to die." This is no different in meaning than "I'm so tired I'm going to die," it's just intensified. The speaker isn't saying "I'm so tired I'm figuratively going to die," they're just using hyperbole.
I mean I suppose you can just hate on all-purpose intensifiers in general, or hyperbole, but I think they're fun little pieces of language.
FWIW Merriam-Webster online agrees the usage is correct:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humble
See sense (1) of the verb.
For me, the usage grates less because it seems ungrammatical than that it seems to imply that *before* the award, or election, the speaker was not humble in some unjustified way, meaning he is kind of confessing to being an arrogant prick before the award/election, and saying that the award/election has turned him back into a normal (humble) human being, aware of his limitations and the role of luck and others in his own success.
Which makes me think: you're confessing that you basically didn't deserve this, because you were secretly a narcissist asshole? Bah.
Merriam-Webster online is merely making the same observation I am. The OED would be an objective source for good English usage.
Well that's pretty purist. MW is pretty well respected here among us unwashed hooligan colonials, though, and unfortunately my OED is one of those tiny-print condensed versions, so I'd have to get out the magnifying glass to dig into what the best people think...
MW needs a downgrade in status. That's all.
Well, carry on. I can assist with small tasks, such as tsking t the use of terminal prepositions, and the verbifying of nouns themselves derived from excellent but neglected Anglo-Saxon short verbs ("utilization" from "utility" from "use" by my least favorite). Sancho! My armor!
In my experience its often true. The few times in my life that I have won an *actual*
Award, it has always been an at least somewhat humbling experience, since I am acutely aware of how many other people had to work hard to position me/ my organization in a position to succeed the way I/it did.
That is, here humbled means not “brought low, humiliated” but “made to realize how much I owe gratitude to other people.” Gratitude and humility often go hand in hand, and it is easy to confuse one for the other.
So what word should those actually brought low and humiliated use to describe their experience? The same one?
Humbled is usually used in a proactive context, humiliated in a negative.
Proactive? Is it corporate speak all the way down? What does the word proactive mean that the word active doesn't?
Sorry, typo. I meant to say positive
I'll quit arguing with you after this point, but before about a decade ago the word humbled was only used in a negative sense. Now that public figures keep using it in a "positive" sense, it kinda destroys the other, central definition meaning of the word.
Humiliated?
Shamed?
I’m sure there’s others.
So don't use humbled when the precise meaning is humbled. Gotcha.
Gosh.
Am I humbled or humiliated?
That is how connotations work, yes. Humbled has a positive connotation to it built in from Biblical influence and hundreds of years of Christian cultural domination of the Anglo-sphere. Humiliated does not.
Look into the term "emotive conjugation" for similar examples of just how differently you can frame something by using synonyms with different connotations.
That is pretty funny
More "great family" trivia: Judith Love Cohen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Love_Cohen), who did a bunch of work on the Apollo program, was the mother of Neil Siegel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Siegel), who did a lot of work on navigation systems (for the military but this work has since found its way into consumer devices)... and she was also the mother of Jack Black. (Including link for consistency, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Black :P )
(No idea if other members of this family are particularly noteworthy.)
Proposed political system- a country uses proportional representation, but also fixes the number of political parties allowed in the constitution- say, somewhere in the range of 5-8. (If I had to pick a number I'd say 6).
This I think solves one of the key problems of PR, which is small fringe parties who earn 1-3% of the vote becoming kingmakers in a coalition. Essentially, the whole political system is held hostage by a very, very small fringe group. More explanation of the problem here (just so I don't write a small essay)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Election_of_minor_parties
This problem is 'solved' in some current PR countries by requiring parties to win a certain % in order to gain representation in parliament. This then introduces the new problem of wasted votes, which can become extreme in some cases- most famously, in 2002 Turkey experienced 46% (!) of its votes being wasted due to a high threshold.
Setting the number of parties allowed in the constitution to my mind fixes this? Fringe parties are impossible- no one's vote is wasted because the 'threshold' rule is not required. We have collectively thousands of years of experience in parliamentary systems, across many different countries on most continents- I think we can make a reasonable judgement as to what the effective limit on the number of parties should be, and at what point beyond which it devolves into ridiculousness & mindless factionalism. I don't see any redeeming societal value to having 10-30+ parties (yes, the latter is possible in some Latin American countries!) Use PR, establish a maximum number of parties, and let candidates & voters sort themselves as they so choose
You are talking about some of the key problems and the most critical cases of proportional representation. What do you think could go wrong with the system you suggest and be the 'worst' cases for your fixed-party-system?
I'm a fan of hybrid systems that combine a measure of proportionality with the core benefits of single-member plurality elections (skewing elected officeholders towards mainstream views, and allowing voters to vote directly for people rather than just for parties).
Single Transferable Vote, Borda Count, and Limited Voting will all produce roughly proportional results across a multi-member district. The ability to cast more than one vote (in ranked order for STV and Borda) mitigates the "wasted" vote issue by taking into account a voter's down-ballot preferences even if their first choice isn't electorally viable. If the number of members per district is relatively small, then that automatically marginalizes fringe parties by imposing a de facto viability threshold (e.g. a 5 member district requires 16-20% support after transfers of surplus votes to elect someone via STV, depending of the particular STV method used). And the consideration of down-ballot preferences of voters whose first choice candidates are the most popular will tend to advantage candidates with broader appeal.
You didn't adress yet the questions that Carl Pham asked at the beginning, and they are important. The key questions and issues are: In each country how do you choose *which* are the 6 parties that can be elected; or even can exist? How do you allow for changes in the list of those 6 parties? How do you deal with the situation when preferences change and a group of citizens want to create a completely new party?
Any response?
I agree that there would be some logistical issues to kick off the first election- maybe founding political elites divide themselves into 6 parties- a far left, a couple centrist, far right, neoliberal, a Green, etc.
'How do you allow for changes in the list of those 6 parties? How do you deal with the situation when preferences change'
You have American-style primaries, where anyone can run for any party's seat. (If you are an American- we're weird in doing that, most democracies either don't have primaries or restrict who's allowed to run for them). The parties change over time, over decades & centuries, as new messages become popular with their core group & entrepreneurial new candidates steal voting share with those new messages. Despite having only two parties here, the Democrats & the Republicans have shifted over the decades- now the Dems are the party of the upper middle class, and the Republicans the party of the white working class. A 180 degree inversion in just two decades! Voters switched parties, new candidates (most famously Trump) have appeared with new messages and then reshaped them- frequently to the horror of old party elites.
I mean, look at the Republicans- they are now an anti-free trade/kind of isolationist/somewhat anti-war party of the high school educated. Who could've imagined such a radical change- they used to be almost the complete opposite! Party elites couldn't stop the first wave of populism in the Tea Party, and they couldn't stop the second wave in Trumpism. If your message is popular with voters, you can't be stopped in an open primary (or general election).
So long as the primaries are open, if you have new preferences & citizens want a change, they'll be able to take over one of the existing parties. Over multiple decades & centuries all of the parties will probably be reshaped many, many times. The only constant is change
Thanks for the details. I first wanted to say it was much clearer now, but I don't see how this comment fits with your comment below … Do you want to determine six parties that will be on the ballot for the next say 50 years, or do you want to determine six parties that are on the ballot every four/five years shortly before each election?
I'm much less concerned than you are with 'small fringe parties who earn 1-3% of the vote becoming kingmakers in a coalition' in proportional representation. But given that this is your concern, how does this new system help to avoid that? Six parties are enough for producing small parties that become kingmaker in a coalition.
Your second concern were the votes that get lost because of threshold and your fixed six parties’ system is to be the solution. But consider the example of the latest federal elections in Germany: Six parties were assumed to make it into parliament – and so they did. (For the moment, I’m leaving aside two specifics, namely CDU/CSU and SSW). 24 parties were on the ballot. 8,6% of voters decided to vote for one of the parties that basically had no chance to enter parliament (with their ‘proportional representation vote’). It can be safely assumed that most of the voters did that knowing that their vote would not lead to that specific party being represented in parliament.
So why would you decide to vote for a party that will not get any seats? First, because you might want to signal support for a specific option, and this is more important to you than supporting any of the parties in parliament. Second, because you might be thoroughly unsatisfied with the offers the six main parties are representing (which overlaps with the first reason but is not the same) – those persons might simply not vote at all if those *additional* options were not there. Third, because you might want to help that specific small party to grow – enough votes mean additional publicity and public funds. A boost for a smaller party on federal level can also help its local and regional structures, where the party might be actively involved.
Over the past years, I’ve had conversations with several dozen voters expressing the dilemma between choosing the party they like and choosing the party that will be able to raise a voice in parliament; it's not that uncommon.
This is only an example; one in which the additional parties on the ballot have a function. Voters consciously decide to refrain from selecting a party that will be represented. Are you sure you want to take that option from them? (Even if all the questions about selecting the ‘right’ parties on the ballot were solved.) Some of those voters will bail out and refrain from voting. Are those voices or votes less ‘lost’? Are you generally concerned about all those who are eligible to vote, but don’t?
There are different cases and I have no doubts that looking at the problematic ones is important. Still, when discussing alternative political systems, I'd strongly advocate looking at the whole range of cases.
I'm not sure I buy your claim of necessity here: what is wrong with people voting for their preferred party and the party not getting enough votes to be elected?
Does anyone know why a vote for a candidate/party who is not elected is considered wasted? I've never understood this logic, which kind of implies that democracy is not about inviting people to express their opinions but rather is to avoid anyone being upset.
To illustrate my concerns here,ban anecdote. My early voting history was for candidates from a party who didn't have a hope in hell of winning the constituency in which I was registered. But I wanted my opinion registered. In a by-election a few years ago, the party I always voted for shockingly actually took the seat, and has held it since. Suddenly the votes for that party were no longer wasted. This is kind of the problem with the wasted vote theory: it presupposes no change is possible, and seemingly models voters as tribal drones rather than rational actors. And if your voting system does promote voting along tribal-drone lines, maybe you need to revise the system not tinker with the rules!
I can answer your question about votes being wasted!
In some elections, people vote for one candidate, and the person who gets the most votes wins, and that's the whole plan. It sounds great, but there are actually some serious issues with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
In other elections, voters get to rank their candidates in order. If nobody gets more than half of the first preferences, they cross off the least popular candidates and redistribute those votes to the next preference of those voters, and then it continues until somebody wins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting
There's a great GCP Grey video about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
I'm aware of all that. I just don't understand how a vote cast and counted is wasted just because the candidate didn't win. It seems to be assumed in all of the criticism of first-past-the-post systems, or at least those that don't use the specious rationale of fair representation of parties (as you may guess, I'm not a fan of that argument), but I've never seen it justified.
If there are only two candidates with a serious chance of winning (as is often the case in first-past-the-post), and you vote for somebody else, then your vote is "wasted" because you didn't weigh in on which of the two big candidates would win. A vote for a *major* candidate who ends up losing isn't considered "wasted".
As much as I'm tickled by the idea of the Nonexistavian People's Party getting relegated to the Lower Local Government division Premier League-style and having to fight their way back up the ladder for the next four year cycle, it's not clear to me why that should be preferable to any of:
- A more finely-tuned threshold (using the same thousands-of-years-of-experience argument)
- A moving threshold, eg. "the top 6 parties or all parties with >= 5%, whichever is greater"
- Minimum vote threshold plus single transferrable vote
Or just don't reify political parties in the first place. That's my primary (no pun intended) issue with systems like PR; better to disintermediate the populace & their representatives.
We tried that in the U.S. and ended up with parties anyway, almost immediately.
But the US has *two* parties. Just two, making the US an oligopoly where the two main parties are the only option and all each one needs to do is not be quite as incompetent as the opposite guy.
Other countries have several parties with a delicate balance of power, meaning it's actually a real challenge convincing people that you deserve to get your bill passed. It's all about the voting systems countries use - First Past the Post voting leads to a permanent two-party oligopoly, Preferential voting systems will allow competition to thrive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
There's a difference between not having political parties and not reifying them though. PR effectively does the latter, as the party managers have control over the party (it's not coincidence that stable PR-democracies tend towards managerialism), and the US system has also done this to a point for reasons I never figured out (it didn't look inevitable).
All political systems seem to develop parties. The question is whether you allow the parties a formalised position or not.
It does depend on PR system. STV doesn't directly give parties control over anything, though it has a number of problems of its own.
You tried it and failed almost 250 years ago. I think we may have learned a few things in that time, including learning directly from your mistakes.
The main things forcing parties are elected multi-member bodies (which can be controlled far more effectively by a party) and plurality voting (which via tactical voting forces there to be two blocs). Scrap both of those and I imagine getting rid of parties would be achievable.
Trying to imagine what getting rid of elected multi-member bodies looks like in a democracy. Maybe a kind of elected oligarchy where (to use a US government parallel) we directly elect each of the heads of the cabinet with their different responsibilities? I'm not sure how to resolve issues that affect all of them (like, say, budgeting and taxes) without it devolving into a multi-member elected body.
Keep the multi-member body and keep its representativeness while getting rid of elections by selecting members randomly through a lottery:
https://aeon.co/essays/forget-voting-it-s-time-to-start-choosing-our-leaders-by-lottery
If executive leaders are selected by transferable vote or approval voting or some means that more effectively gets rid of spoilers, then parties become important only as informative signals rather than as active coalitions.
99% certain that persistent parties with persistent unelected-unlotteried officials who are skilled at whipping and coalition management would be the stable equilibrium there. Multi-member body politics are difficult, and strongly reward people for party-dynamics regardless of how the representatives are selected.
Well, that or electing kings.
The key advantage of an arbitrary amount of parties is that it is required for the voters to keep the party administrators in check. If there's a fixed "seat" for Judea People's Front, then people can either vote for that party, of for someone else who has entirely different policies - and if there's any disagreement *within* the party, then their voters would be stuck with whoever wins some internal administrative fight. On the other hand, if The People's Front of Judea can secede from the Judea People's Front, then their voters can decide which of the groups is actually "the real one" who deserves the support.
In addition, it provides a way to re-segregate parties as different aspects become relevant. We definitely don't want a 5-8 way split based on issues which were most important a hundred years ago; some major ideologies from that era (e.g. the literal communist and fascist parties) would get a very small representation, reducing the effective number of parties; but we'd want to allow major parties to get split when new issues become important enough for people to start diverging in their vote while still preferring the "old"party to others because of all the old issues.
If you had American-style primaries, the parties could continually be taken over every generation by new folks with their spin on the day's issues. American-style means anyone can run for their offices, it's just a question of whose message is the most popular. You'd probably have a far left party, far right, various shades of centrist, a neoliberal party, etc. Every 4+ years if they weren't in the majority, a new wave of folks associated with those political views would probably call for new or updated policies, candidates etc. within their matching party. Because the far left people would be attracted to the far left party, the centrists to the centrist party, and so on etc.- this would allow for continual change & regeneration every election cycle
How would you decide *which* 5-8 parties are allowed? The only mechanism that jumps to mind is "those that achieve above a certain threshold in a/several recent elections" -- which means you're just using the threshold mechanism *and* adding in some inertia, which means people who want Party X to replace Party Y on the approved list need to go through multiple election cycles in which their votes don't count (except for boosting the possibility that Party X will be accepted into the pantheon).
You could have a separate qualification election in between general elections, with the top 5-8 parties winning the right to ballot access in the next general election.
The method of the qual election will radically affect the character of the political system. For example, approval voting would have a failure mode where a political coalition with plurality approval could organize itself as 5-8 different "parties" with near-identical platforms to crowd out all other parties from the ballot.
I should clarify that citizens can form any party or organization that they wish- this simply relates to who can appear on the ballot. Many 1st world democracies have used vote thresholds for party for decades- is it really more democratic to let people pretend to vote for a candidate, when they can never really be seated? Not to mention the US effectively only having two parties for over 200 years.
As I mention below, setting the number of parties has to be combined with American-style primaries where anyone can run for party offices. No matter what their belief system is, the only thing limiting the candidate is just how popular their ideas are. Every party must accept every potential candidate- if their message is popular, they'll win a primary in one of them
I understood your longer comment to my question as 'some elites will determine which parties are on the ballot for decades, if not centuries'. So I find that statement confusing. Why form a party, if it cannot be on the ballot? Or did I misunderstand your comment in the first place?
How do you determine which of the [six] parties are allowed to be on the ballot? I am thinking you mean to use their popularity in society, but I'm not sure you how measure that without resorting to previous election results. If using previous election results, then only the first [six] popular parties can ever exist, as no other party will ever reach the threshold to even show up in the future results. If not using previous results, what would you use instead? A pre-election where people indicate who they would intend to vote for, where the top six are used? You have already ruled out just taking the top six parties, as that would result in votes being thrown out - or were you only concerned about the minimum threshold system of throwing votes out, and would be fine as long as all top [six] parties were represented?
US military is funding research into a GPS substitute that could work underwater, underground, and at the poles, it is based on detecting the paths of cosmic ray muons. Seems to require multiple detectors intercepting muons but it's not too clear to me how far apart these detectors need to be. Anyway, pretty interesting stuff.
Popular article: https://www.shephardmedia.com/news/defence-notes/muon-based-research-could-facilitate-arctic-operat/
A related paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75843-7
Re China: One of the important things to remember about China is that "China" is almost always an unhelpful unit of analysis. It's so big and diverse that it's more helpful to think about China as a continent rather than a country.
What's happened in China is that several of the coastal cities have upgraded themselves to European levels of prosperity. Then there's still a huge hinterland with very low levels of income.
That's a lot of success! But it's not like China is going to become an overwhelming world dominator very soon.
While I'm talking about it, though, I will say what worries me. In the next 20-30 years, China's economy will become significantly larger than then USA's; and it will become a more active member of the international community. At the same time, it is hemmed in by nuclear-capable US military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the US-supported Taiwan. This is the kind of situation that Kennedy triggered the Cuban missile crisis to avoid. I think that China will find it unacceptable to have US weaponry that close to its capital, and will want to force the USA to move a little further away. The only question is whether that negotiation can happen peacefully, or whether it requires armed confrontation. I'm very much hoping that it can be done peacefully.
How does this city vs rural hinterland situation in China compare to the different demographic histories of Germany, France and the UK as they industrialised?
And could internal migration towards the coast ease the problems of an ageing population (on said coast, at the expense of the interior) in the same way that external immigration has in the West? I understand that there are still heavy restrctions on where you can relocate within China.
The history question: sorry, I have no idea. I just don't know enough about the history of industrialisation in Europe.
In China, until quite recently, the inland population acted like a basically endless reserve of very low-cost (young) labour for the cities. Now, China is already 50% rural, so that reserve is no longer as endless as it was, and labour costs are rising.
The restrictions on movement were quite harsh, preventing labour from easily moving, organising, etc., and preventing too much movement to the cities, so Chinese cities never dveloped slums. But the controls have been significantly reduced in the last few years. It's now easy to move between cities, and from countryside to city.
I'm not sure if WWIII is unavoidable especially over Taiwan. It will be nuclear and the world will end before any of those good things rationalists have promised us are realized.
> In the next 20-30 years, China's economy will become significantly larger than then USA's
There is no inherent reason to think this.
https://twitter.com/SergiLanauIIF/status/1451182603655172098
https://twitter.com/SergiLanauIIF/status/1453697202673569801
https://twitter.com/SergiLanauIIF/status/1448716939631673349
Basically, China is unlikely to converge until the late 2030s in total GDP (nominal) and from thereonout even less likely to grow faster still. Even if you use South Korea or Taiwan as a framework to forecast, this does not change.
It all depends on policy. China's GDP by PPP could end up being 35% higher than the U.S. in 2050 at most pessimistic, around 2x at most optimistic. I think the gap will continue to grow after 2050, though, if the Chinese leadership supports a policy of greatly increasing fertility.
Sounds a little pessimistic to me. There's still plenty of urbanisation to go - China is now 50% urban, so there's at least another 400m people who are going to move from country to city in the next couple of decades. That's what drives growth, so I don't see the figures slowing quite as much as that.
The other point is that China's military and diplomatic engagement with the world is likely to continue to grow whether the economy surpasses the USA or not.
> Sounds a little pessimistic to me.
As noted, the forecast uses the East Asian tigers like South Korea or Taiwan as a template. That is not pessimistic, it's using the best-performing examples from the previous century and still finds China ends up not overtaking the US in a big way.
China's urbanisation is closer to 65%, not 50%. From hereonout, the relative gains to be made are going to be much smaller. Another wrinkle is that the "nice" cities are already full. Beijing and Shanghai are actively trying to push people away. Network effects are harder to achieve if you're out in hinterland, even if you are moving to a million+ city.
The wildcard would be China's diplomatic engagement but thus far it is an extremely underwhelming area for them.
>What's happened in China is that several of the coastal cities have upgraded themselves to European levels of prosperity. Then there's still a huge hinterland with very low levels of income.
Sounds familiar…hmmm
> While I'm talking about it, though, I will say what worries me. In the next 20-30 years, China's economy will become significantly larger than then USA's; and it will become a more active member of the international community. At the same time, it is hemmed in by nuclear-capable US military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the US-supported Taiwan. This is the kind of situation that Kennedy triggered the Cuban missile crisis to avoid. I think that China will find it unacceptable to have US weaponry that close to its capital, and will want to force the USA to move a little further away. The only question is whether that negotiation can happen peacefully, or whether it requires armed confrontation. I'm very much hoping that it can be done peacefully.
Am I to understand you are you hoping that China be allowed to annex territory and become suzerain over a huge part of the world's population (against those populations' will!) peacefully?
I'm rather disturbed by this new birth of appeasement. The idea that the way to maintain peace with China is to abandon our allies so the Chinese feel safe. Appeasement has a track record of doing precisely the opposite of what appeasers want. It emboldens the appeased power to achieve more so the war becomes more likely. And it empowers them so that the resulting war is worse.
Seems pretty obvious, no? Better appeasement and a possibly emboldened China than risking everybody dying? (Maybe not literally everybody, but presumably most people commenting here)
That's silly. I know it's a fond Less Wrong tradition, but you can't just pit everything against [minuscule X-risk] and go "well, that settles that".
The *real* question is, do we refuse to appease and risk war from that, or do we surgically wax their whole leadership and risk war from *that*?
Doesn't seem like a miniscule risk. And for Americans there isn't even any concrete obvious gain.
Would you personally (as an outsider) want to volunteer and join a navy defending eg Taiwan, taking a similar miniscule risk, for the sake of reducing the risk of China expanding somewhat?
If appeasement leads to a change in the intentions of the appeasee, it can be worthwhile. But then it would be called the making of an alliance, or something similar - you only appease an enemy. In thinking about whether appeasement works you have to take into account that if it is really successful, it won't be called appeasement (a variant on "treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason")
Even if the appeasee remains an implacable foe, it can be a successful tactic if you use the time gained productively. The payment of the Danegeld in the 9th-11th centuries by English kings is a proverbial example of failed appeasement:
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
But among the kings who paid it was Alfred, who used the time gained to rebuild his army and defeat the Danes. I think it's still debated whether appeasement of Hitler falls into this category.
In this case, there's a strong case for appeasing China if you think that Michael Pettis and others are right about the fragility and inherent instability of their economic model, or you think that their demographic transition will inevitably lead to a reduction in their population, their rate of growth, and their aggression. If Japan in the 1980s had had nuclear weapons and designs on Korea, the sensible thing to do would have been to be as conciliatory as possible, and wait for the bubble to burst. Which might also have been the sensible thing to do with Japan in the 1930s, horrific though the consequences for China would have been.
In general, if the long-term fundamentals are in your favour, as they have been for relatively free nations with representative governments for centuries now, appeasement has a lot to be said for it.
"Appeasement has a track record of doing precisely the opposite of what appeasers want."
What's the evidence for this? People always mention WWII, but WWI seems to offer precisely the opposite lesson: that bone-headed commitment to alliances over common sense could get 14 million people killed in horrific ways over nothing.
WWI was caused by Germany and Russia both wanting to go to war. Focusing on the specifics of August 1914 misses the point. The rise of nationalism, and the demographic situation in Eastern Europe, meant that conflict was close to inevitable. This continued to be the case until the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after WWII. Alsace-Lorraine meant that France was always very likely to be pulled in.
WWI only looks pointless from the point of view of the UK and the USA, because they didn't really want anything to change as a result of it. That was not true of the other major powers, which is why it happened.
World War 1 started when Serbia (iirc) gave in to the vast majority of Austrian demands. This made Austria think they were weaker than they were and they declared war despite mobilization not being complete. So yeah, I'm saying appeasing them didn't work either. Nor did it work with Russia and Napoleon. I can't think of any times it DID work.
A response to both of you: appeasement is not just giving in to the other side's demands. Appeasement is a policy of maintaining peace with aggressive powers by giving them what they want. It relies on the theory that a power, given its immediate demands, becomes satisfied and will cease being aggressive. In order for an example to be appeasement that worked it must be:
1.) An aggressive power making a demand.
2.) The demanded side choosing to give them exactly what they want in order to avoid violence.
3.) This resulting in the aggressive power ceasing to be aggressive.
None of either of your examples meet this standard. They all involve either negotiated compromises or defeats in war or continued aggression on the part of the other party. I'm not suggesting constant war or a maximalist approach is a good idea. But there's a world of difference between two sides with armies deciding to hammer out an agreement and appeasement.
I don't think you can choose to define appeasement as not including playing for time. The word is most strongly associated with policy towards Hitler in the late 1930s, and playing for time was both an explicit aim of the appeasers, and the reason some historians now argue that it was a good idea. You need to find another word if you're excluding playing for time, or it just gets confusing.
I also think this still falls into the Treason Never Prospers problem. An aggressive power looks like it wasn't really all that aggressive to begin with if it immediately stops being aggressive after its limited demands are met.
Examples that I think might meet your definition would include Roman grants of land to barbarian tribes, which worked for centuries (and we tend to remember the late examples where the empire was in a state of collapse, and it stopped working). Or Japan granting a commercial treaty to the Perry expedition. Various other examples of gunboat diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well, I think, involving Western powers and those areas of the world that they didn't ultimately add to their empires - Thailand, China, South America, Afghanistan. Plus several where appeasement wasn't tried, and should have been (e.g. the second Anglo-Afghan war, the 1868 British expedition to Ethiopia) because the Western power genuinely had no intention of annexing the relevant territory, and would have been happy if their limited demands were met. Understandable though it was that the non-Western power was reluctant to rely on the Western power's assurances on this point.
> I don't think you can choose to define appeasement as not including playing for time. The word is most strongly associated with policy towards Hitler in the late 1930s, and playing for time was both an explicit aim of the appeasers, and the reason some historians now argue that it was a good idea. You need to find another word if you're excluding playing for time, or it just gets confusing.
I can and I do. My knowledge of history has been called into question but from what I've read they were not playing for time. Chamberlain only started re-armament after appeasement failed. He did not initially want to do that.
Chamberlain was hoping to avoid a war effectively skipping over the actual war of 1870 that turned Germany into a so called satisfied state. In part because he expected any such war would lead to a very negative outcome for Europe. Setting aside the destructiveness of the war itself he supposedly said that if there was a war against Germany then they'd need the Russians. And once the Russians were in central Europe how would you get them out?
Of course, the obvious answer would be: don't let Germany get far enough that you need the Russians. Instead the repeated backing down gave Hitler a chance to build up further and make bolder action. It made the war longer and more deadly, setting aside the multiple genocides it enabled. But Chamberlain felt it was possible to avoid the gamble entirely.
Or do you have some evidence he was playing for time? I'm fairly sure the re-armament is considered when appeasement ended, not a part of it.
> I also think this still falls into the Treason Never Prospers problem. An aggressive power looks like it wasn't really all that aggressive to begin with if it immediately stops being aggressive after its limited demands are met.
Not at all. There's no such definitional fuzziness. Aggressive is a role in the definition, not a trait. The aggressor is the one making the demands. The key feature is that the demands stop. That appeasement actually bought peace.
> Roman grants of land to barbarian tribes
This one is complicated because the grants involved submission on the part of the tribe. It made them domestic political actors within the Roman system. I take your point that the system mostly worked and it was effectively giving them what they want. (It's more the Roman's fault it fell apart really.)
> Or Japan granting a commercial treaty to the Perry expedition
There are two issues with using Japan. Firstly, Japan's signature didn't stop western demands. The west repeatedly sought to revise the treaty which only stopped when Japan had enough military force to say no. Secondly, Japan never gave the west everything it wanted. They repeatedly negotiated over specific provisions and won more favorable terms in part because the west didn't want a full blown confrontation. Japan initiated several both in search of better terms and for domestic political reasons. (Seriously, you're going to call the time period that produced Sonno Joi appeasement? They tried to kill every westerner in Japan!)
They didn't always turn out well and sometimes that left Japan in a worse position. But this policy of limited use of military force combined with diplomatic engagement worked well. In a rather anti-appeasement example, the Shimazu got into a shooting war with Great Britain and this actually helped them form a lasting alliance with Great Britain.
> Various other examples of gunboat diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well, I think, involving Western powers and those areas of the world that they didn't ultimately add to their empires - Thailand, China, South America, Afghanistan
Not sure what you mean by South America. If you mean Venezuela then there's the added wrinkle that the US put its thumb on the scale. The example that stands out there is the War of the Triple Alliance where firm early action by Brazil kept the war smaller than it might have otherwise been despite an insanely determined Paraguay.
19th century Afghanistan is an example of the opposite: every time they gave in they lost more and more territory. There were attempts to remove Afghan sovereignty until the Afghans eventually drove them out entirely. While local Afghans sometimes allied with outsiders or struck bargains they never gave away territory in an attempt to appease Russia or Britain. If you mean Soviet Afghanistan then that's more about domestic politics. If you mean 2003 Afghanistan then I suppose that's an example that might have worked. But it's a counterfactual, not something we actually know.
China is another example of the opposite: China fought in both Opium Wars and mightily resisted colonialism. The victories of the western powers simply led to more demands. Likewise, giving in to the Japanese simply led to bolder and bolder Japanese demands and didn't prevent the ultimate invasion.
Thailand again fought and when they compromised just saw Britain and France taking more and more territory. It only stopped because France and Britain agreed to keep it around as a buffer state carved into spheres of influence and under their colonial administration. The two nations could and did adjust Thailand's borders as they saw fit. So another bad example.
> the 1868 British expedition to Ethiopia
I don't know about this one. I'll take your word for it. Though I do know that the Ethiopian military and logistical constraints of the Europeans had more to do with it survival than good will.
Just once? Or over and over again? I ask because you used the word "policy" which seems to imply it happens many times. Also it's kind of hard to argue you have a "policy" of appeasement if you accept a demand once and only once.
There are a whole lot of reasons why a one-off might be a rational approach which works exactly as described, e.g. would it have been a good idea for the USSR to issue a statement of stronger regret for shooting down KAL 007 in 1983 and paid compensation to the families, the way the US did when it shot down Iran Air 655 during the Gulf War? I'd say so, and it would most likely have done them some real good -- the deployment of Pershing nuclear-capable tactical missile in Europe (which was understandably making them unhappy) might well have not gone forward, absent this provocation and the tone-deaf Soviet response. For that matter, I don't think it impossible it contributed to strengthening the Reagan Administration's mandate to take a tougher line across the board -- people were pretty pissed, as I recall -- and that ultimately was very costly indeed to the USSR.
But on the other hand, if one requires repeated giving in to an aggressive power in the hopes of curbing its aggression, I'm not sure there are any good historical examples. As a rule, nations try giving in a little, for a short time, if they think there is something to be gained. I'm not really aware of any example of a blanket policy of the nature you describe. So it's seems to me the question of "how long?" is kind of critical here.
Again, you're mixing up appeasement with anything that involves giving the other side anything. Appeasement is not buying time or compromising, it is giving in in the belief that giving in will turn the hostile power friendly. So danegeld where you rebuild an army doesn't work either. It has to be danegeld where the Danes STOP ATTACKING.
The time periods is irrelevant: it can work on the first go or eventually.
I believe the usual belief is (1) that the Austrians deliberately made unbearable demands of the Serbs so as to have a pretext for the war on which they'd already decided. The Serbian answer did not matter, they could've been bellicose or appeasing, and neither would have changed the pre-determined Austrian response, and (2) the Serbians hadn't a prayer against the Austrians anyway, so the key question from the Austrian perspective was whether or not Germany would back the Austrians up if Serbia's protector (Russia) followed through on its commitments. So, again, the Serbian response would seem to have no effect on what happened.
If there is an action close to Sarajevo that tipped the balance towards world war (instead of some localized Balkan brouhaha), I would suggest it was the German assurance to the Austrians that they would not face Russia alone. I don't really see how that action fits into the category of appeasement, or how anyone's appeasement accelerated its effects.
For an example of when appeasement worked, I suggest three: (1) the decision by George III and Lord Shelburne to negotiate a peace promptly with the Americans after Yorktown, which successfully drew the Americans back from the French embrace, a fact of great importance to England a few years later, (2) a similar decision to cut a deal with the Americans promptly in the War of 1812, and (3) the decision by US Grant to salve the pride of the Southern military commanders after Appomattox Court House by giving unusually generous terms of surrender. In each case the stronger power declined to press its advantage to the uttermost, gave consideration to the weaker power, and won for both a noticeably better future.
Of course, there are many cases where appeasement has led to disaster, no question about that also I would say.
certainly disagree on #3. In what possible way was Reconstruction not an utter disaster? If the Southern establishment were destroyed like the Nazi establishment at Nuremberg, I can't see how that would've been worse for the development of the US (morally certainly, but economically as well, since black people would have been able to contribute more meaningfully to the free market) in the 1860s-1900s.
I agree with you in general on appeasement, and irrelevance of Serbia's answer to Austria (except as the appeasement served to show them as reasonable and move general sentiment in Europe from "Serbia killed an Archduke!" to "Austria is just being warmongering") - but small differing facts: Austria Vs. Serbia was not a guaranteed loss, in fact, Serbia successfully repelled every offensive Austria launched until Germany joined the war. The major ally of Serbia was France (there was no formal alliance with Russia) and it was France that joined the war (which Germany wanted) which pulled Russia (France's ally) into the fray, and Britain (as member of Entente) along. Germany was hoping that this source of war would get France but not Russia and definitely not Britain into the war.
If Serbia had not given in to most Austrian demands, the war would just have started sooner, because the Austria crafted the ultimatum knowing that Serbia would not agree to all of it. In fact, the Serbian gambit of looking like a reasonable party almost worked: the German Kaiser cancelled the famous "blank check" he gave to Austria, but by the time the news arrived in Austria, war had already begun.
Times when appeasement did work: the many times pre-1948 when the US threatened to nuke the USSR to get what it wanted, and the USSR backed down. The many times when the Byzantine empire paid barbarian tribes to stop ravaging their territory. The many countries that the West agreed would fall under Soviet influence after WWII (see "percentages agreement"). "Appeasement" is more the norm than the exception, because people rightly realize that not everything is worth fighting over. There's a reason that "pick your battles" is a common English phrase even today.
>Times when appeasement did work: the many times pre-1948 when the US threatened to nuke the USSR to get what it wanted, and the USSR backed down.
What? I'm not aware of that ever happening, at least not explicitly, and if it did happen implicitly, it was merely to get the Soviets to adhere to existing agreements. The US policy towards the USSR was rather muddled until 1948 and really until Korea.
"Times when appeasement did work: the many times pre-1948 when the US threatened to nuke the USSR to get what it wanted, and the USSR backed down."
This is literally the opposite of appeasement working. The US was the bellicose party in these cases and (clearly, from the fact of there being many times) it didn't lay off, so appeasement didn't work for the USSR. Getting nukes did.
Also, since the nukes gave America a seemingly or genuinely unbeatable military advantage, I doubt whether you can even classify the USSR's actions as appeasement rather than just "losing a fairly abstract military engagement very badly albeit bloodlessly" and/or just "getting kicked around like an abused dog".
I think you're way off the mark here. The parent comment said China won't want US nukes right near their capital, and you somehow jumped to assuming they want China to take over a large part of the world.
You may be misinterpreting the phrase "want to force". In my reading, it's a vague phrase that could mean any type of pressure. You seem to be reading it as meaning "declare war to force".
No, I didn't say they'd declare war to get what they want. I said appeasement makes war more likely and worse when it does happen.
I never said China would take over the world. I said it would annex or become suzerain over a large part of the world's population (by implication, the part that lives in East Asia). Annexation is obviously a reference to Taiwan. Suzerain is a reference to the parent poster's plan to coerce South Korea into not hosting US troops, something they clarified further down the thread. They mean use diplomatic and military pressure and, if that doesn't work, possibly military force. So yeah, I jumped to what they meant. They've been dodging that means Beijing gets to set South Korea's defense policy but that is in fact what that would mean.
This is like a game of written broken telephone. Each comment distorts meaning a little more.
I never said you said China would take over the world. I said,
"[you're] assuming they want China to take over *a large part* of the world",
which was my (perhaps unfair?) paraphrasing of,
"you hoping that China be allowed to annex territory and become suzerain over a huge part of the world's population (against those populations' will!) peacefully?"
In context of what I'm responding to, I hope it's clear that "take over" means "annex or become suzerain", and "large/huge part of the world" was just my attempt to stay close to your own wording.
> They mean use diplomatic and military pressure and, if that doesn't work, possibly military force. So yeah, I jumped to what they meant.
From my reading (I've read the whole thread), they clarified the exact opposite of the conclusion you jumped to.
Taking a step back from nitpicking over word choice, my reading of the original comment is:
China won't want US nukes so close to its capital. I hope they can negotiate for the US to move them further away peacefully and that there is no armed confrontation.
Well, if that's the case then I agree. Apparently my reading skills need some burnishing. A peaceful resolution would be best. One that doesn't involve nebulous economic or political pressure but involves China demonstrating its role as a good and non-aggressive power such that South Korea feels peace is best served by a drawdown. And that such a drawdown actually creates peace. (And hopefully reunification. I don't think even China really wants North Korea as it is.)
Thank you! Yes, I should have started writing it that way.
I'm not American. I live in China.
It sounds like you have some fairly clear views on who the good guys and the bad guys are. That's fine, but I may not share those views, so it's hard to talk if you just assume them.
"Am I to understand you are you hoping that China be allowed to annex territory and become suzerain..." I didn't say anything like this, so... no? Obviously, you don't know me, but for future reference, if you're talking to me, you can safely assume that I'm not hiding plans for world domination behind mild words.
> I didn't say anything like this, so... no?
Yes, you did. You said:
"At the same time, it is hemmed in by nuclear-capable US military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the US-supported Taiwan. [...] I think that China will find it unacceptable to have US weaponry that close to its capital, and will want to force the USA to move a little further away."
How could this be accomplished in a way that doesn't run over the sovereignty of the nations that host those American bases? You said force. What kind of force, how? Are you going to argue China doesn't want to annex Taiwan? I see a pretty clear implication here. If I'm mistaken I'm willing to admit it but you'll have to explain.
I don't have any vision of who the good or bad guys are in an inherent sense. But I see you as arguing, as I've seen both Chinese and American appeasers argue, that China has some natural right to feel secure. That we should understand Chinese moves to (your word) force the US out of sovereign allied nations as natural and a way to peace. This is objectively not the case. It relies on a model world where Japan does not really exist and is just an American satellite. It's appeasement and it doesn't work. It makes war more likely and more destructive.
"How could this be accomplished in a way that doesn't run over the sovereignty of the nations that host those American bases?"
Again, there seem to be some odd assumptions here. Do you think that South Korean sovereignty depends on or is enhanced by the presence of foreign trroops? That's an inherently weird position! We all know how it's come about, historically, but it's a bizarre place to be starting. How could this be accomplished? North Korea chills out, the US removes its base, China feels less threatened, SK continues as normal. The same goes for the Philippines and Japan. The US could reposition on Guam and Hawaii.
"China has some natural right to feel secure" - yes, I think I do hold that view. Why don't you?
"Chinese moves to (your word) force the US out" - China hasn't made any such moves. And I'm hoping it never will. But countries negotiate over where they might position military bases all the time. I'm not understanding why you think this is a bad thing.
"a model world where Japan does not really exist" - literally no idea what you're talking about there. Japan exists. It will continue to exist without a US presence in Yokohama.
> Again, there seem to be some odd assumptions here. Do you think that South Korean sovereignty depends on or is enhanced by the presence of foreign trroops?
It doesn't rely on it. But it relies on the ability to decide on whether it has troops or not. In short, that the decision about Americans on South Korean soil is made in Seoul and Washington. You said China would want to force them out. Not that you wanted China to diplomatically draw down tensions. You posed an aggressive China using force in a way that might lead to war. You're still not talking about the actual mechanism whereby China convinces SOUTH KOREANS to not want a US base there. You're talking about bargaining chips between the US and China.
> yes, I think I do hold that view. Why don't you?
Because other nations' mere existence creates insecurity. That's the security dilemma. China and America, merely by seeking to defend themselves, create insecurity in each other. Managing and navigating that insecurity is the way to peace. Demanding the other side take actions to end that insecurity and backing that demand up with force is what a war is, more or less. We have a right to security is a very common cry of warmakers.
A nation that infinitely seeks security is definitionally an imperial power because they have to violate other nations' sovereignty to gain that security. For example, by preventing South Korea from having an American base it otherwise might want to have.
Really, if there's one nation in the world that should understand this it's China. Both 19th century European imperialism and 20th century Japanese imperialism in China were posed as bringing peace through security of another nation. This exact issue (the removal of foreign bases) was the motivation for several wars which saw Chinese sovereignty reduced.
> literally no idea what you're talking about there. Japan exists. It will continue to exist without a US presence in Yokohama.
The word "really" is key here. Of course they literally exist. But you're not posing them as equal nations. Japan or South Korea have not been posed as players but as pieces in geopolitics.
"Force" - You're reading way too much into a single word. I didn't mean exclusively by the use of military power. I do think that pressure will have to be applied, but I'm hoping it will be diplomatic and trade pressure.
"Because other nations' mere existence creates insecurity." - In that case, America's stuffed. Because other nations are going to continue to exist. Your nation will always be insecure. As will mine. As is China. And it will continue to attempt to mitigate that insecurity. If you can't accept China's "mere existence" then there isn't a conversation to be had.
"South Korea from having an American base it otherwise might want to have" - Might want, might not want. You are aware that there is some considerable resistance to the US military in South Korea, aren't you? Do you know that American soldiers aren't greeted with open arms all around the world?
I don't see why the competition between the US and China has to follow the US-USSR model closely. It very well may not. I would argue we are first of all missing the kick-off for the US-USSR nuclear rivalry, which would be the desire of the US to forestall further expansion of the Iron Curtain (e.g. through a Soviet-engineered Communist coup in West Germany) without the politically-unsustainable act of maintaining large conventional forces in Germany. From there it's arguable the thing took on a life of its own, since the Soviets developed and deployed strategic nuclear assets as a deterrent to American use of same, and vice versa.
That doesn't really seem applicable to the US-China competition. China doesn't really seem that interested in territorial expansion, although understandably they want to throw their weight around in local security zones. But while I can see the US being willing to go full strategic over an invasion of Japan, say, I can't see the same for freedom of navigation in the South China Sea[1].
I would guess it's for this reason that China itself hasn't been especially eager to grow its own strategic arsenal[2]. They may not see the main competition as military, or helped along by traditional military assets -- in which case, they probably don't care that much about all those US bases in the region. It's maybe also worth pointing out the major economic ties between China and the US, whereas the US had essentially no trading relationship with the USSR. That probably makes a difference, too.
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[1] It's a very interesting question how *that* will shape up, but if I had to guess, I'd say lots of stiff-legged patrols and exercises, sort of like the US/USSR in the Black Sea during the Cold War.
[2] Interestingly, that may be changing, the Chinese seems to be embarking for the first time on a serious expansion of their strategic arsenal, but if I had to guess I'd say the reason is more centered on a potential medium-term showdown over Taiwan than any broad ramp-up in military competition.
Probably a big source of differing opinions is whether we consider the (officially declared) desire for integrating Taiwan even if Taiwan disagrees as "territorial expansion" or not. Arguably, China would not consider it as territorial expansion, while USA and other countries in the region definitely would see it as unacceptable expansion that also threatens key economic and strategic interests (e.g. semiconductor manufacturing).
Yeah I am not competent to assess Taiwan, and I realize that is probably a big part of the equation. I'm not sure why, I just don't feel like I have a feel for it.
I think that it is probable (but not certain) that the issue of China (re)acquiring Taiwan would be actually considered equivalent of USSR acquiring West Germany during cold war.
It's not analogous because West Germany was never part of the USSR, and never had any cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or political affiliation with the USSR. A better analogy might be Nazi Germany's claims to Danzig, which was part of Germany before WWI. But the Danzig population strongly favored annexation by Germany, so it's not a perfect analogy either. I'm not aware of any perfect analogy that's better known than Taiwan itself.
USSR acquiring West Germany would almost certainly be implemented as German reunification, just with Warsaw pact East Germany as the main partner.
Possibly more analogous to seizing West Berlin, in that that was actually on the table for a while as a potential flash point, where the US might have backed down if it happened but might not; The soviets rolling tanks across the border to West Germany as a whole would have been war for certain.
I really just cannot see either Truman or Eisenhower backing down on West Berlin. The Truman Administration was very seriously considering reopening the roads to Berlin in 1948 by force, which almost certainly would've meant a general war, and I believe some of them thought the Airlift would bring on war anyway, because the Soviets were sure to interfere (but at least then the Soviets would clearly have fired the first shot, literally, since they'd have to bring down some airplanes and kill a bunch of Americans). I can't see them feeling *more* accommodating after the Airlift, sunk cost and all that, plus Berlin having thereby turned into a primary symbol of resistance to the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe.
I disagree with a few things you say there.
The US-China relationship is certainly very different to the US-USSR relationship, but a rival having a nuclear-capable base right next to your capital city (when you don't have any comparable assets anywhere near their shores) just seems like a bad idea, whatever the relationship.
China and territorial expansion: the whole "Belt and Road" thing was a fairly major attempt to buy territorial influence, including the right to dock military vessels in locations around the Indian Ocean. And China just pretty much annexed Hong Kong in violation of an international treaty. I'd say they're looking much more interested in expansion than they were 10 years ago.
I also think that freedom of navigation is more important than you're implying. The US is the world's preeminent naval power. Accepting that there's part of the ocean where they can't go would be a very large climbdown.
So I think there's lots of potential for clashes or even conflict. But I hope that the trading relationship will push both sides toward peaceful solutions rather than the other. I live right opposite Taiwan, so I'm very keen for violence not to happen around here!
> a rival having a nuclear-capable base right next to your capital city
Is it actually important given ICBMs and nuclear submarines?
As far as I know USA can send ICBM at Pekin from their own territory and it is a solved problem.
And nuclear submarines carrying atomic bombs are existing anyway.
Sure it's a bad idea. But is it a bad idea worth getting nuked over? (And in the event, both JFK and Khrushchev answered that in the negative.) I'm sure if the Chinese could wish those bases away, or exert some economic pressure to have them gone, they would. But..they haven't yet, so that suggests to me it's not that important to them, so it's a bad idea but far down the list of bad things to get worked up about.
Yes, I agree the Chinese are quite interested in greater influence around the world, and that can shape up like some of the US/USSR rivalry in the 3rd world. Would we get as far as proxy wars, like Vietnam? Seems doubty. The Chinese don't show any big interest in exporting communism, they seem just to be looking for monetary and economic influence, primarily (like any other great power), as well as throwing their weight around -- intimidation and presence -- in the Pacific littoral. Those are all matters of concern, to be sure, but they just don't seem to rise to the same level as Stalin potentially invading West Germany with 2 million men in 1955, and I can't really think of an equivalent concern. Hong Kong doesn't cut it, the Brits gave it back to the Chinese fair and square, and the fact that the Chinese accelerated the absorption in abrogation of the treaty details is the kind of thing that can make the people right there outraged (and they were), and pundits and international relations geeks outraged (and they were) -- but it is not, I think, the kind of thing that will make the generic American voter even a little bit inclined to risk incineration to oppose. Taiwan is another and much more complicated story, and deserves its own analysis, so I will say in brief I think anything can happen with Taiwan and one would need to be very hip to the details (which I am not) to have a defensible opionion.
I don't think there's going to be any need for the US to swallow there's a part of the ocean where they can't go. I don't think the Chinese would push it that far, because it is frankly ridiculous -- nobody has ever successfully defended the principle that some vast swathe of ocean is a national lake. The Soviets kind of wanted to do that with the Black Sea (which is why I made the comparison), but even with the huge geographical advantages they had there, they could not pull it off. I think the Chinese are not dumb enough to even try it in the South China Sea.
Doesn't mean they won't totally get in the faces of American forces, and pretend like they totally *could* run the running dogs off if they wanted to, they just happen not to want to today...which is why I said I expect shit like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4jQhnXrWbg
But my guess it that this is where it stays, that it doesn't broaden into the kind of strategic conflict for which being able to launch nuclear-armed B-2s to blow away Guangzhou is really important (and you could do that from a boomer offshore anyway).
Anyway, I'm no expert, but it's interesting to hear opinions on this, and I appreciate your reading mine and giving your points of agreement/disagreement. I personally wish I understood the potential outcomes in re Taiwan better, less because I fear being turned into greasy vapor in a fireball, but more because that kind of crap can really ruin the economy and I would hate to be eating cat food in retirement.
The way I see it (from a more Chinese-influenced perspective), some crises within China's border (Xinjiang, the border with India, HK) have been handled in a characteristically more heavy-handed way than warranted and those had been exploited by Uyghur & HK elements with covert ties to US strategic interests, or the Indian Army. Taiwan is basically a ticking time bomb that is more likely to go off than not in the medium term. And since the Taiwanese leadership has a great interest to be cozier with other "democratic" states led by the US, this is a great cause for American &/or Japanese intervention. It enables the US to use overwhelming force and escalate, to achieve goals that has only been done by pressure, covert operations & relative isolation.
Thanks for the comment. I don't know if Taiwan is a short-term time bomb. If so, I see that as a sign of weakness in the current Chinese leadership. We all know China is facing two very big challenges in the next few decades: (1) the very fast aging of its population, from the One-Child Policy, one of the greatest mistakes ever made by a major nation, and (2) the fact that at some point the Chinese coastal middle class is going to get fed up with living well below its means and saving so much, which means the price of capital inside China is going to normalize (rise by a lot) -- and then the inefficiencies of a central command economy are going to emerge like leprosy.
To my mind, if the Chinese leadership is actually eyeing a big patriotic adventure in Taiwan, rather than just let sleeping dogs lie for another half century or so, with some regular grumbling and saber-rattling, it means they are worried they can't solve the looming demographic or economic problems, and they're thinking "it's now or never," meaning they see Chinese strength as peaking in the short term and then declining.
Also, some specific leader may by trying to bring glory to himself.
Or to cover-up unrest by quick conquest.
> What's happened in China is that several of the coastal cities have upgraded themselves to European levels of prosperity. Then there's still a huge hinterland with very low levels of income.
That sounds like the U.S. in the not-too-distant past. I've read that some of the U.S. troops in the Vietnam War had brain damage from childhood malnutrition.
I find a more interesting question to be: will the US get over itself and try to turn Russia into an ally (or at least neutral) to properly surround China, or will just continue to use Russia as a convenient scapegoat.
Why you think that Russia would be trustworthy ally to USA? And that only USA needs to change something?
Difficulty is that Russia and China have interests that more naturally align with each other. Further, the US is, on a global scale, so much more powerful than China and Russia that they are much more incentivized to work against us than against each other.
Not to metion working with Russia would mean throwing Europe under the bus, which would make all of our allies more skittish.
What makes Russia a more natural ally to the US than does China?
Simple strategical reasons for the US: China is a rival to the US and a potential threat. Russia clearly isn't.
Also, from the perspective of Russia, you wouldn't want to be allied with a superpower right next to you (China) - that's just gonna lead to you getting dominated in the long run.
More similar culture, the Russian people see themselves as Europeans (because they mostly are). Russia needs the help much more than China does (mainly in transitioning away from the oligarch and corruption model). Russia has much more to worry about from China than it does anyone else. Russia would be easier to please at a negotiating table (adjusting borders, disbanding NATO). There is no actual particular reason for the US to have a problem with or fear Russia (at least not ones that couldn't be fixed through diplomacy), a Russia at it's maximum potential is going to be about half of a United States in terms of output.
This is the same sort of reasoning that says that Iran is a more natural ally than Saudi Arabia.
But if the choice is between having Russia in your alliance system, or the rest of Europe, that's a no brainer. Do you see a Russian alliance as attainable (for the US) without losing its existing European alliances?
Another difficulty is that you see “cleaning up the oligarchy” as the main thing Russia needs to do, and in a sense you are right. The problem is that the last thing the Russian government, the people you would be allying with, want is to clean up the oligarchy, since that would decrease their power.
This hits the nail on the head. The Russian people might be able to fit in with the western sphere, but the Russian government does not, and unfortunately one must negotiate with governments not the gestalt will of the people
Russia has historically been a much greater threat to the US than has China, and Russia is currently a much greater expansionary threat within Europe than is China. Maybe if Russia withdrew from Crimea it could earn some goodwill?
Nah, no goodwill would be forthcoming. After the USSR dissolved astonishingly peacefully, all things considered, Russia was met with terrible advice, constant suspicion and NATO encroachment. The West was only ever prepared to see it either as an active adversary, or as decaying remains of a former one.
Russians understand this, and thus support Putin's ostentatious defiance. When your options are either bogeyman or laughingstock of the world, the choice is obvious.
"Russians understand this, and thus support Putin's ostentatious defiance. When your options are either bogeyman or laughingstock of the world, the choice is obvious."
I mean, I think you're basically analyzing the Russian view of this correctly here, but as a matter of practical fact they're both, at best. I'd argue they tried to pick bogeyman and discovered laughing stock was behind that door too.
> NATO encroachment
This makes it sound like the former Russian colonies had no say in the process.
Perhaps their thinking was like: "either we join NATO as fast as we can, or ten years later Russians may change their mind and we become their colony again". Looking at e.g. Crimea today, were they wrong?
"You'll note all the countries in question are still below (sometimes vastly) US per capita."
This seems to miss the very obvious fact that China has more than 4x the population as the US. It doesn't need to be anywhere close to US GDP per capita to vastly exceed it in economic, military, and technological prowess. In fact, China is *already* 15% above the US in terms of GDP PPP, which measures how much goods and services the country produces. The situation is even worse than that, because 30% of China's GDP is from manufacturing, compared to only 10% of the US GDP. In terms of how much physical stuff each country produces, the US is at $2.1 trillion per year, while China is at $7.2 trillion per year, or 3.4x America's industrial output. Make no mistake: China is an industrial behemoth that is heads and shoulders above every other country in history in terms of industrial capability, and when it starts dominating the world, shouting "but your GDP per capita is still small!" isn't going to make them stop.
Plus, the US alliance system as currently constituted is going to continue to outweigh the PRC system for the forseeable future, even in absolute terms. Unless you are forecasting major diplomatic realignments, with large chunks of the US alliance system defecting to a Pax Sinica? Doesn't seem very likely to me.
With the USSR gone, there's no reason to align with anyone but the US. Even the people who hate the US don't have a plausible alternative, such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. If China becomes a dominant world power, enough to credibly deter US action, then it would make sense for other countries to seek Chinese alignment. The most likely types of countries to do so are those actively maligned by the US (Iran, Cuba), those in close proximity to China (Mongolia, Vietnam), or especially those that are both (North Korea). North Korea is already tightly connected with China, but that could also be for other reasons, especially considering the history of the Korean War. I think it's too early and China still doesn't have enough power to actually tilt the scales.
What would need to happen in the short term is that China would need to actively intervene in countries that are currently pro-US, especially in countries that have pro-US leadership but not necessarily pro-US populations. Overthrowing the governments of US-aligned countries in the region, especially Taiwan, would be an early show of force and would definitely be a strong indicator of whether my theory is correct. The more China is able to actively intervene in the leadership and policies of other countries, and the less likely the US is to forcibly counter, the more likely that a new alliance system can and would form. I agree that currently China is not in a position to do that, but I'm not sure that "foreseeable future" is still out of the question.
I expect plenty of defections as hegemony game theory gets replaced with balance of power. There must be plenty of hangers-on who will leave once a credible alternative emerges. Not that I think that'll be enough to radically change things in this case.
China will have weight of population and you're right that war is an absolute contest. The average American soldier will no doubt be much better equipped and training because that's what GDP per capita gives you. The question is whether that equipment and training will let them beat five Chinese soldiers. Though if you instead count the entire American alliance system then China would be outnumbered. So it somewhat matters on how the geopolitical chips fall.
Of course, the real issue is that the war is largely going to be in the Pacific. As in, the ocean. There is no equivalent to Eastern Europe where a huge Chinese and American army are facing off. If China is victorious on all land fronts with US allies then it will have taken South Korea. (And frankly taking the DMZ would be a pretty huge task.) If Vietnam ends up on our side then there'd be huge natural barriers. And even if they win then they get... what, former French Indochina? Okay.
Without major naval and air victories China will face a hostile Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, etc that they can't really neutralize. The US will be able to stage naval invasions and bombing runs agains pretty much all vital Chinese infrastructure. Even if they manage, the US has rings of islands further back and has something of a playbook for fighting that war.
So the question is who has more/better planes and ships and high skilled soldiers capable of doing things like naval warfare. And that's where GDP per capita does matter. Smaller but wealthier nations routinely punch HUGELY above their weight in naval/air warfare.
"The question is whether that equipment and training will let them beat five Chinese soldiers."
As a defense nerd (This is an anti qualification, don't take me seriously:)
Absolutly yes, for the forseeable future.
It's not just gear, it's moral, training, and leadership.
Their training is VERY bad compared to the NATO militaries in general, their logistics is bad, their NCO corps is a joke.
That said, none of this maters. China is spending money where it maters to them: the ability to stand off a western power near their borders. They aren't interested in adventures (as far as we know), so the only thing their military needs to be able to do is let their neighbors know who's boss, which it does handily; and support a decent enough arms industry to eat into Russia's foreign markets.
You've correctly pointed out all the reasons why China would not be (and has historically not been) interested in expansionary wars: because it doesn't have much to gain from them. That's why China is likely to focus on using trade, diplomacy, science, and technology to expand its influence, not wars of conquest. These include the Belt and Road initiative; parallel international financial organizations; investments in Africa; building out 5G networks in other countries; and investments in AI, solar panels, and nuclear power (they are currently among the world leaders in all three, if not the world leader). At the most, China might invade Taiwan and fund some proxy wars against US allies, but it's not stupid enough to engage in open warfare with a nuclear superpower like the US. Even the USSR wasn't stupid enough to do that, and their ideology was far more violently expansionist than China's.
Also, if it was advantageous to have a small number of highly equipped soldiers instead of a large number of poorly equipped soldiers, China could do that too. It already has a higher GDP PPP than the US, so it could afford to send the same number of soldiers as the US while equipping them with more expensive gear.
No, it can't. Like I said, war is an absolute not a relative game. Measures like PPP are relative. The US's absolute GDP per capita would outbid the Chinese for equipment/resources.
"Measures like PPP are relative."
This is a silly take. The Soviet Union had half the GDP per capita of Germany (though more than twice the population), and yet...
Its soldiers were less well equipped than their western counterparts? My point is not that China has no chance of winning. It's that the US soldiers will be better equipped. That might not mean they can win: the Soviet army probably would have won in western Europe because it had a solid strategy that involved striking hard and using their numbers to their advantage. But it was predicated on the (correct) idea that 1 American tank was worth more than 1 Soviet tank.
Uh, what about PPP is relative? The point of PPP is to measure GDP in stuff produced within an economy, rather than via what people will pay for that stuff in international trade. PPP is the correct measure for a country's native military industry, because that's all internal to that country's economy and the exchange rate is irrelevant (it's *not* the correct measure for countries that buy military equipment, but the USA doesn't do that and the PRC doesn't do a huge amount of it).
Its correct if the industry is completely internal. But it's not. Things like the price of iron mean that absolute measures still matter. PPP is an adjustment, in absolute terms that means the US dollar buys more.
The thing you're pointing out (I think) is that Chinese guns having less access to steel in a straight up economic competition doesn't mean that they don't have a military industry that can compete. And I'm not saying that they don't.
Why would it outbid the Chinese for equipment/resources? If the US GDP is $21 trillion and it wants to equip a million soldiers, while the Chinese GDP is $24 trillion and it wants to equip a million soldiers, why would China be at a disadvantage?
Your numbers are off. The US has a GDP of $21 trillion and China has $14 trillion. You're doing an adjustment but relative standards like how much toilet paper costs in China made with Chinese labor from Chinese trees is not as relevant in an international competition as the absolute number. Likewise, the relative advantage of the US per person is not relevant if China can swamp out buying power in absolute terms (say, by doubling its GDP per capita but remaining much lower than the US per capita).
My understanding is that while the US Navy trivially controls the open oceans and could probably defeat every other navy in the world put together, shore defences are a real threat and land-based missiles means that US Naval dominance doesn't extend all the way to the Chinese coast - that'd be fine for most purposes, since the US doesn't want to invade China, but is an issue wrt defending Taiwan
I think it depends on timing. Without air superiority (or at least without the other guy *not* having air superiority) it's tricky hitting ships from shore, because you aren't exactly sure where they are. And of course you have no hope of hitting subs. So I think the basic tactical game is a race between the PLA ferrying enough hardware/meatware across the strait and the US bringing sufficient air cover in, e.g. a carrier, at which point further travel across the strait is out of the question.
My speculation would be that the unofficial deal with the Taiwanese is that it's their job to deny the PLA air superiority long enough for American air forces to arrive -- hence they're historical keen interest in buying the best fighters we can make, and the rumors of direct American training -- maybe with the help of whatever submarine or surface assets the USN happens to have nearby at the time.
1) dumbfire is old hat; AShMs of the present day have in-flight targetting, so a rough knowledge of the enemy ship's location is sufficient to launch. Subs are hard to attack, 'tis true, but unless I've missed something the US doesn't have submersible aircraft carriers.
2) modern SAMs have ranges substantially in excess of the 130 km width of the Taiwan Strait; projecting air power over the Strait or even Taiwan would require the destruction of PLA mainland-based SAM installations. (Of course, this does go both ways, with Taiwanese SAMs equally posing an obstacle to PLA air power, although how long those would last against SRBMs is questionable.)
Look up the S-400, the HQ-9B and the DF-21D.
There's also the question of whether a carrier can carry enough aircraft to achieve air superiority against actual land airbases (the answer is generally No, although there are some asterisks).
1) I don't find this super credible. If you mean "rough" as in "plus or minus a few hundred yards" but I can see the ship, visually or on radar, sure, but so far as I know you can't fire an antiship missile at a target over the horizon where you think you know the position +/- 10 miles and expect a hit. I'm willing to be persuaded if you have some linky or other on that point, though, I am not fully versed in this stuff. No, submarines don't carry aircraft, but they can quite easily sink troop carriers and take out land-based targets, so they're a major problem for an invader. Obviously not nearly as useful as air cover, but they can make a mess of your invasion fleet (and your airbases and radar installations on land).
2) Meh. Your first salvo is obviously anti-radiation missiles to nail any long-range search radar, and if the enemy has to depend on short-range targeting radar 100km is going to be a problem. Plus a good assortment of cruise missiles for any fixed batteries, known radar installatations, et cetera. It's not like the principles of establishing air superiority haven't been worked out quite well by American forces, it's just a question of how fast the necessary hardware can get onto the scene. The Taiwanese air force is not poorly equipped on a per capita basis, and if they have the right training I think they will probably do a decent job of slowing the PLA down -- which, recall, has zero as in zippity zap, nada, bupkis instituational experience establishing air cover in a real shooting war. The USAF and USN have decades.
Doesn't mean the Taiwanese are going to win, of course, still less not suffer grieviously, war is always full of surprises after all, and I definitely think the final outcome does indeed depend critically on how fast major USN assets can be brought to bear. But of course unless an invation comes as a *complete* surprise -- meaning intelligence has fucked up again -- they would be doing a little prepositioning anyway.
3) I don't agree. US experience has been that one carrier, possibly two if you're in a hurry, is easily a match for as many air bases as any one non-First-World country has, and maybe even most of the latter. They really are awesome war machines.
I'm very curious about how effective carriers are in the post cruise missile (and I also mean all other variations of advanced missiles) world. Modern navies with carriers haven't been tested in truly adversarial conditions since WWII. I think it's certainly possible that they can still provide major force projection to a region, but I lean towards them probably being not terribly effective in a full war situation. You simply can't get that many planes on a carrier, compared to land bases. With longer plane ranges than we had in WWII, I think that land based planes will also be a better option and negate some of the necessity of carriers as well. Along those lines, I don't think carriers had any impact at all on the European side of WWII, yet there were many planes involved and sea-based invasions.
>I don't find this super credible. If you mean "rough" as in "plus or minus a few hundred yards" but I can see the ship, visually or on radar, sure, but so far as I know you can't fire an antiship missile at a target over the horizon where you think you know the position +/- 10 miles and expect a hit.
A lot of ASMs have search capability. Tomahawk was doing it back in the 80s. (https://www.navalgazing.net/Tomahawk-Part-2) It's not a 100% chance of a hit (it was around 25% for TASM), but this is an area where I expect things have gotten better since then.
That said, yeah, I definitely don't think the carriers are doomed.
A note on 3: its not as if the US would be completely reliant on its aircraft carriers, since it also has access to airbases in Japan and S. Korea. These bases reduce the amount of time it would take to get the necessary aircraft to the front, since instead of moving a carrier all the way there you just send your aircraft to your bases.
Surely any easily forseeable conflict in the Pacific will be primarily naval, and one thing the RN showed through much of the 18th and early 19th century is that experience and discipline can routinely edge out (somewhat) better equipment. The USN has way *way* more bluewater sailing and training experience than the Chinese, so much so that they would be heavy favorites I think even if the numbers and quality of equipment were the other way (and I don't think they are yet).
But it's an important thing to keep, it can't be taken for granted, and if I were God Emperor of the US, I would definitely reorder some national priorities a little to keep and even hone that edge. I would take a pile of money from idiotic nation-building ventures, and from what I consider an overbloated littoral combat strategy, and sink it into plain old traditional bluewater naval ships and training. Boring stuff like building more cruisers and DDGs with upgraded battle-management systems and more drone capabilities, more attack subs with maybe continued emphasis on importing support of special ops, better carrier availability, and more frequent and expensive training exercises. I think the coordination with allies is already pretty good[1] so that one doesn't really need work, but I would guess they (the allies) would be heartened if we (the US) showed more resolve in the area of ensuring strategic naval dominance.
I'd also probably take a gimlet-eyed look at personnel policities and what their focus is, ha ha, arguably even more important, but that's another can of worms entirely.
-----------------
[1] I don't know how the Biden Administration stumbled into a freaking brilliant[2] submarine deal with the Aussies, it's like seeing a chimp start speaking in iambic pentameter, but I can forgive a metric ton of fecklessness elsewhere because of it.
[2] Which you can tell it is by the nature of the people furious about it ha ha.
>Surely any easily forseeable conflict in the Pacific will be primarily naval, and one thing the RN showed through much of the 18th and early 19th century is that experience and discipline can routinely edge out (somewhat) better equipment. The USN has way *way* more bluewater sailing and training experience than the Chinese, so much so that they would be heavy favorites I think even if the numbers and quality of equipment were the other way (and I don't think they are yet).
I would be extremely reluctant to draw too many conclusions from experience in that era. I would point to WWI as showing that training and sea experience mattered much less in that era, although maybe things have changed back. Experience still does count, but China has been acquiring it at a fantastic rate, and they're a full-fledged blue-water fleet these days. But no, they're still outnumbered and probably behind us in equipment.
https://www.navalgazing.net/A-Brief-Overview-of-the-Chinese-Fleet
Huh, what's the US' overbloated littoral combat strategy? Where is it supposed to play out? In the waters around China?
No, the US littoral combat strategy dates back to the early 2000s, when we had decided that the biggest threat was overgrown speedboats in the Persian Gulf, and built very fast and underarmed ships to combat it. It was pretty stupid at the time, and has left us with a pile of useless ships today.
More details: https://www.navalgazing.net/LCS-Part-1 (Parts 2 and 3 are also up).
Thanks!
I'm not sure what made our politicians see sense either, but I'm glad we're going to be getting functional submarines. (I understand why the French are pissed off, though, they offered us perfectly good submarines and we insisted on altering the design in stupid ways, then pull out a few years later because altering designs takes time and the new design is stupid - not exactly their fault)
I'm kind of confused about how good for Australia that deal is. Seems like they had a perfectly fine deal and then ran off at the drop of a hat without consulting with the French. We can't afford to lose allies.
I'm also not convinced they're particularly helpful (at least compared to non-nuclear subs). They'll be ready by 2040, which seems like a hella long time, and nuclear subs tend to leave thermal wakes in the water, meaning they'll be easier to spot.
I'm not sure where you're getting nuclear submarines being easier to spot due to "thermal wakes". The wake of a nuclear submarine will be a fraction of a degree warmer than the water around it. Smaller than the temperature difference between the normal operating depth of the submarine and the surface. So any "thermal wake" will rise until it reaches water at the same temperature, whereupon it will no longer be buoyant - the slightly warmed water will not reach the surface where it could be detected by e.g. infrared sensors.
With better aerial monitoring featuring better AI, the difference could well be noticeable.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431270-300-wakeup-call-how-turbulence-could-reveal-secret-nuclear-subs/
We did need nuclear rather than diesel, but I agree that antagonising the French was stupid.
Yeah it's a weird comparison. The GDP per capita of Monaco is enormous (something like $185,000), but nobody trembles before the Monegasque opinion on international affairs.
Thanks for teaching me a new - and unguessable - demonym, Carl Pham
Big agree. I'd say that the West in general is in the middle of the Denial phase of dealing with China's rise ("no they'll never become a superpower! Something vague about demographics, something something!") Followed soon by Anger, which I suspect will manifest itself poorly around Taiwan. Worth noting that World War 2 was won by the much larger population country with unmatched industrial might to produce endless tanks, planes, ships etc....
Even if there's something in China's development model that causes a crash in the 2020s or 2030s, they are now permanently a global superpower and At The Table of world powers, so to speak. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube here
Sure. The question is whether the US is going to have to adjust itself to living under a Pax Sinica. This is the bit that I (and many other commenters) don't buy. I don't think anyone disputes that the PRC is now a great power and seems likely to remain such.
Okay, a cranky pedant question. What is the function of the word ‘literally’ in a sentence like
“I literally never saw him before.”
It could just mean
“I never saw him before.”
But it seems to mean something like
“I never saw him before. Why would you even suggest that I had?”
Then again, it could just be a verbal tic that is making the rounds.
Literally has for ages had two usages. One usages is descriptive, it states the phrase it is attached to should be interpreted exactly as said. The other usage is as a hyperbolic, it adds emphasis to the phrase it is attached to.
None of this is new. A quick Google search finds both usages go back to the 1700's, making it older than the country I live in (Canada).
There has been a recent uptick of the second usage in the last 10 years, and a reaction against that. Some of this is attributed to recency bias. Although this goes back to the 1700's, a lot of people are just becoming conscious of the dual usages now. Otherwise the reaction is mostly described with the "default" response to people reacting negatively to language change: language is a core part of group identity for people (race, class, culture, etc) and are very defensive to language innovations that come from groups they view as lower.
I mostly see this from people with so-called "right brain" degrees. The increased usage appeared to be driven from celebrities. I do view "right brain" people as viewing celebrities as lesser, so the default explanation seems to work.
I've put "right brain" in quotes each time because I know right brain vs left brain is literally false, but it probably invokes the correct bundle of degrees. Also notice my usage of literally here is the second, hyperbolic, usage. I presume most readers wouldn't have noticed unless I pointed it out.
I've done a bit of poking around and found some citations of 17th century usage of the emphatic 'literally'.
More to keep things lively than to resolve anything I'll add Benjamin Dreyer's take on this in his "An Utterly Complete Guide to Clarity and Style" - Copy Chief of Random House
"LITERALLY
A respectable word that has been distorted into the Intensifier from Hell. No, you did not literally die from laughing. No, I don't care that your cool friends are "literally" thus. If all your cool friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you?"
Dreyer's words not mine.
If I remember correctly, it was only a few years ago that Merriam-Webster and others changed the definition of literally to now also mean the opposite of literally. Given that, literally all rules are off the table now.
I have an old - 1989 - hard copy dictionary. At that time it just meant 'in a literal sense'.
There’s no sense in which literally is used to mean to opposite of literally - that is, to resolve ambiguity and make it clear that something is *not* literally true. I’ve checked Miriam-Webster and indeed that use is not given as a definition.
The hyperbolic use is given, but that’s not using literally to *convey that something is* not literally true, it’s using literally to *exaggerate about* something which is not literally true. It absolutely cannot be replaced with ‘figuratively’ and retain the same meaning.
You can /literally/ use the word literally to mean the opposite of literally (using the exaggerated but not true definition of the word).
What I’m getting at is that there’s a difference between saying something is literally true when it happens to not be (exaggeration) and using literally in order to inform people that something isn’t literally true (which would be using it to mean its opposite, and as far as I know is unheard of).
I mean, maybe it means I only had a phone call with him?
I think when I hear/see it now it is usually being used as an intensifier. It reminds me of the word 'like' in speech like
"Bob is dead? I just saw him like last week."
‘Like’ has a perfectly clear and well-defined meaning in that sentence: ‘approximately’.
Without intending do be snarky - do you think it might be the case that you find it hard to infer what words outside of your own idiolect are used to mean?
What do you mean? [joke]
No, most language changes are easy to understand by inference.
There are occasional changes in word meaning that can be genuinely ambiguous but those are rare.
Consider ‘nonplussed’ or ‘bemused’. Those two words are being used in very different ways.
I’m don’t think I approach this as a usage Nazi. More like a language enthusiast.
Nonplussed is an interesting word to me because (literally) every time I hear it I have to rack my brains to remember whether it means ‘not bothered’ or ‘bemused’ or what.
Now that was funny.
Sure. My point was that in the case of a phone call, "literally" is doing work, as one might consider a phone call to be implicitly included metaphorically in "I never saw him before".
I see what you mean now.
The second example you gave is indeed a common function of the word in a sentence like that.
It can also be used to coney that something is stronger-than-approximately true. Allow me to replace your sentence with a different one: “I never see Ted any more.”
This could either mean 1) “I very rarely see Ted these days” or 2) “I literally never see Ted any more”. If I mean the latter then it’s quite handy to add in the word literally to make that clear.
Here’s a (subtler) third way of using the word literally. Imagine that I still see Ted sometimes, but I’m kinda peeved I don’t see him as much as I’d like to, and I decide to use the rhetorical technique of hyperbole to convey the strength of my feelings on the matter. “I literally never see Ted these days,” I say, asserting (2), knowing full well that everyone will understand this to be an exaggeration of (1), which I really mean.
This seems to me to be the correct explanation. I think it's the same thing with words like "really" and "truly" and "actually". Each of them is a step on a treadmill where an expression is first used both precisely and hyperbolically with context making the difference clear, and then some adverb is used to differentiate those two even in contexts where it is ambiguous, and then the precise form picks up its own hyperbolic use and context once again serves to differentiate.
Interesting information. Thanks
There are so many way to express yourself - or be misunderstood - in informal conversation.
Throw in a raised eyebrow or a grin and all bets are off.
I think it's being used as an all-purpose intensifier, to indicate that you feel strongly about it.
I'm going to argue that an all-purpose intensifier = verbal tic.
Tics are involuntary and meaningless. Intensifiers are neither.
Just like "very", "really", "exactly", "precisely", and the like. It's helpful when people have a verbal tic that differentiates their stronger statements from their weaker ones, even if they draw that line somewhere slightly different from where you do.
That makes sense. The language evolves.
I don't use that word, and when I read it, I tend to just kind of skip over it and figure out what's going on from context. (I also do that with "judicious", but with "bemused" I have an excuse!)
I don't use that word, and when I read it, I tend to just kind of skip over it and figure out what's going on from context. (I also do that with "judicious", but with "bemused" I have an excuse!)
According to a graph linked to on MR a decade ago, college football fans are the most conservative of sports fans (NBA fans are the most liberal). That comports with my experience. Wealthy conservative alumni are also often big doners to non-Ivy League colleges, often for purposes of helping the football program as opposed to helping the academic side of the school.
While watching college football yesterday and thinking about the University of Austin, I got to thinking: "Why can't all these rich conservative donors use their money to influence their universities in a more conservative direction, if that is such a big concern these days?"
Then it hit me. If football is the most conservative institution on campus and college football fans tend to stay conservatives, then the best way to preserve a conservative culture at a university is to support the football program.
So maybe what the University of Austin should focus on is putting a good football program together. Of course, the trouble with that is they picked the wrong town...
I think you might be getting a bit of this backwards. I think ecological factors explain why college football fans are one of the most conservative sports fandoms while NBA fans are the most liberal.
First, there's a big effect where people tend to be fans of the most prominent sports team near them. Big metro areas usually have professional sports teams, while many rural areas (particularly in the south) are a lot closer to a town with a flagship college than to a metro area. This alone already means that college sports fans will tend to be more conservative and professional sports fans will tend to be more liberal. But it also predicts variation within a league - I would expect Green Bay Packers fans to be more conservative than Chicago Bears fans, and University of Oregon football fans to be more conservative than USC football fans, just based on the geography of how many rural vs urban people have this team as their geographically closest football team.
There's also a set of effects determining which sport people are fans of. Black people and urban residents are much more likely to be interested in basketball than other sports (I suspect this has something to do with the amount of space and equipment that other sports need, compared to basketball). Soccer is much more popular among immigrants than among people who grew up in the United States. I'm not exactly sure what the relevant effects are between hockey and football. I can't tell if there's anything that actually attracts *conservatives* to football, or if it's just the fact that across most of the South, the closest major sports team to you is a football team, and rural southerners tend to be conservative.
This latter point might be a way for football to influence universities in a conservative way. But if the fans of a university are just the people who are closer to that university than to any other prominent university or professional sports team, then NYU isn't going to get much of a conservative boost from building up a football team - unless they put their stadium farther out into the suburbs than the Jets and Giants.
Steve Sailer has written about that sort of thing:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/america-needs-college-football-in-nyc/
https://www.unz.com/isteve/to-defeat-obama-oilman-t-boone-pickens/
When the Omicron variant was announced, the stock market went down a lot, which makes sense since the stock market is based on companies whose profits would go down if there were more lockdowns.
Crypto also crashed. On some level this makes sense because crypto is usually correlated with the stock market. But realistically people can buy just as much crypto during a lockdown as they can at any other time, so I don't see why knowing the stock market crashed because of COVID should do this.
Does anyone have a good explanation for this?
Some of it may be rebalancing: maybe I plan to hold 10% of my assets in crypto, but now the market in everything else has dropped, I end up with 12% crypto, so I go sell some (and use the cash to buy the now cheaper stocks)?
I would think people sell crypto the same reason they sell stocks. In troubled times Cash is king.
Also it’s rather opaque how much leverage is currently at work in all these financial markets. I think it is very high
Because crypto isn't an investment in a firm that makes or sells things. It's just a fixed valuable (maybe) asset, like gold or fine art. So if the wealth of people tanks -- as it does during a pandemic -- then you will get lower prices when you want to sell your crypto, and the *only* value it has is the potential for someone to pay more for it later. Presumably people who aren't willing to accept the potential lower ROI stop bidding on it now, which drops the price.
Thanks, this is the most plausible explanation I've heard so far.
I understand why this explanation is appealing, but I think it ultimately obscures more than it reveals about the cause of Friday's move.
It's a common tendency to seek legibility in markets - to try to find a sensible reason "why" for any particular move. I think this is driven by many people's belief that markets are efficient, and so whenever the price of an asset moves, there has to be an explanation for why the new price more accurately reflects all available information.
But the reality is that while markets converge towards efficiency in the long term for the most liquid assets, they can be quite inefficient on a day-to-day basis. This is especially true for an asset class like crypto which is less mature than equities.
In other words, you shouldn't assume that a change in the price of something always corresponds to a change in the expected future value of that thing, or that participants who buy and sell based on new information are responding rationally to that information. In the short term, prices are often driven by participants who are either not very sophisticated, or are acting under incentives which are unrelated to maximizing expected return on the asset in question.
Explanations for price action which appeal to what rational participants would do are fine if no other explanation can be found. But in this case, I think the evidence for a market structure-based explanation is quite strong. This means we don't need to make assumptions that sellers were acting optimally and then try to work backward into their beliefs about how Omicron will impact crypto.
One of the adages from the last crisis that sticks with me is “in a crisis, betas tend towards one across asset classes”, which is to say - when the shit hits the fan, everything goes down.
I wonder from your explanation Re: short term market efficiency if the definition of a crisis or at least a correction, is when some sort of global liquidity preference overrides the expected future returns.
Apologies if unclear/poorly articulated.
Yes, this is exactly right. The main reason correlations tend to 1 in selloffs is that liquidity becomes much more important than expected returns.
When your ship is taking on water and you need to reduce weight, you don't take time to inventory your whole cargo and pick the least valuable items. You toss everything that isn't bolted down.
You reject the relatively opaque "market mechanics" explanation in favor of a more lucid explanation. You may be correct but to me it looks like a bias for lucidity.
I guess I should add I don't think people view it as a "defensive" asset, like gold itself, or real estate, something for which there will always be a demand, even in crappy economic times, and which therefore safeguards your money against recession. I think people view crypto as an "optimistic" asset like vacation condo time-shares, the kind of thing that will be valuable to own when economic growth is strong. (Also note that I believe crypto was originally sold as a hedge against inflation, so if inflation expectations tank to the extent this underlies investor interest that would argue its value decreases at the margin.)
Crypto gambling (often described as investing, hodling etc) is hilariously volatile, even more irrational than stock market speculation and I would not expect it to behave in rational way.
Yes, the explanation is that
1) There are now many entities invested in crypto which are not purely crypto investors, meaning they have exposure to traditional asset classes as well. The equities selloff on Friday, and more generally the elevated volatility in both stocks and other assets, caused many of these entities to "derisk" and cut positions across the board. Crypto was no exception.
2) All sophisticated crypto shops are aware of this tendency, and many of them run strategies (both manual and automated) which amplify short-term correlations between equities and crypto, especially during selloffs.
The main takeaway is that although crypto should theoretically be uncorrelated with equities in the long term, the current structure of the market gives rise to short-term correlations.
Excellent
"The equities selloff on Friday, and more generally the elevated volatility in both stocks and other assets, caused many of these entities to "derisk" and cut positions across the board. Crypto was no exception."
Isn't this always necessarily going to mean buying high and selling low? Aren't institutional investors smarter than that?
> Aren't institutional investors smarter than that?
Not really. See average performance of actively managed funds compared to index funds: it is not higher enough to even justify fees.
Also, in case of hedge funds etc they are not even risking own money.
Also, note that we are speaking about institutional investors exposed to cryptocurrencies.
And even assumption that institutional investors performed substantial selloff at lower prices is a guess. For all what we know they could sell at start and rebuy later at lower prices or to not be involved substantially and this panic could be minor private investors losing money on crypto, again.
It will mean buying high and selling low *unless* the thing that you derisk ahead of ultimately produces a much bigger move. People who cut risk on the first -3% back in March 2020 looked very prudent a week later.
There are better ways to manage risk than just panic selling at signs of trouble, but if you're overexposed or overleveraged, panic selling early is still much better than panic selling late.
Also, "institutional investors" is a very broad category, which includes encompasses both extremely sophisticated market participants as well as firms that behave in comically dumb ways.
depends on how fast you can sell, I guess? if you sell at the very start of the dip, rather than being the pigeon who sells 3 hours into it, you don't lose much
If the stock market crashes hedge funds will need to sell assets, including crypto, to raise liquidity.
Not really but I have some bad explanations.
1-When there’s fear in the air people have a lower appetite for risk in general. This includes risks completely unrelated to the fear in the air, such as the risk of investing in an extremely volatile asset class like crypto.
2-Perhaps some funds were over leveraged and needed to sell crypto to cover short positions.
I also was wondering the same thing. (I am commenting partially to follow this.)
Based on the idea that Bitcoin is "the new gold" and used primarily as a "store of value" I would have expected it to go up (indeed, gold did go up).
I don't have a good explanation. My vague recollection is that many years ago Bitcoin was indeed anti-correlated with the stock market.
I don’t think that comparing China to Japan or the USSR (or the Nazis etc) is useful. It’s true that the industrial Revolution is a powerful drug, or rather manufacturing capability is. However when competing against the USSR, Japan or Germany the West kept its manufacturing base. And the size of China matters. It doesn’t have to catch up with the US in per capita GDP - though I think it will; it will be twice the GDP of the US at less than half the GDP per capita. Present trends continuing that’s likely in the near future.
I mean, on the one hand sure, they're more dangerous than the Nazis.
On the other hand, in moral debates this doesn't necessarily matter. To those who believe in a judgement after death, it is self-evident that opposing evil is the winning tactic regardless of the worldly power of that evil ("When you stand before God you cannot say 'but I was told by others to do thus', or that 'virtue was not convenient at the time'. This will not suffice."). Some of us who do not believe in such an event still believe that hopeless resistance is noble.
More dangerous that the Nazis - jury is out on that one. The rest of the paragraph I don’t fully get. I think having defined the Chinese as more evil than the Nazis you want to fight to the last deplorable. Americans could always not get involved given that China is on the other side of the world.
By "more dangerous" I meant "more dangerous to fight" i.e. "more militarily capable". That was a poor phrasing on my part and I apologise.
What I'm saying is that comparisons of the PRC to the Nazis are mostly moral in nature and that, given that, "but they're much stronger than the Nazis" isn't necessarily a slam-dunk counterargument. Many would say that fighting the Nazis would still have been the right thing to do even were it hopeless.
There are plausible counterarguments against "the PRC is Nazi and therefore must be opposed", e.g. "but they're much stronger than the Nazis *and also consequentialism is true and also there's no Last Judgement*" or "you're wrong, they are not as evil as the Nazis". I'm merely pointing out that as written your argument has a huge hole in it.
You’ve totally misread my argument then. I didn’t say anything about the morals of fighting or not fighting the Chinese. Maybe you inferred that because I mentioned Nazis, albeit parenthetically.
I was referring to Scott’s choice of “comment of the week”. I won’t repost it but the gist of it is that the Japanese, and the USSR were once considered economic competitors to the US, until they weren’t. So too he alleges with China. The comment also said that all the countries mentioned had lower, or much lower, gdp per capita.
My points are that gdp per capita isn’t the correct measure between States, that China’s size matters, and that where the manufacturing base of the world is also matters.
Ah. Mea culpa.
I was wondering about a phenomenon I encountered recently (summer of 2020). I was on an astrology summer camp when a few hornets got into our building. Now, these things are mostly harmless according to Wikipedia: won't sting unless you piss them off, if they do sting it's no worse than a wasp.
While there were a few rumors about the then-current news stoey of Asian murder hornets, those were quickly debunked.
Which is why I was surprised to watch a third of my fellow campers go absolutely *hysterical*. After an hour or so of the hornets being around, during which everyone was a bit on edge but otherwise fine, one 15-year-old started screaming at the top of her lungs.
Very soon, two others followed. We quickly moved everyone outside to try and deal with the chaos. Within minutes, we had a group of ten campers, 12 to 17 years old, mostly girls, shuddering and crying on the ground in a group. The occasional terrified scream emanated from the vicinity (I say occasional, but it was more like every 20 seconds).
As I sat outside at 3 AM in the freezing cold playing card games with the others who remained sane, I only wondered what the neighbors might think. The camp leaders ended up sending everyone home early the next day, unsure what was the trigger and therefore unable to prevent any further events.
My questions: is this a thing that has happened often in the past? Personally, I've never seen or heard of anything like it.
Also, what might be the mechanism? These are normally very reasonable people, but one person's irrational panic rendered them all immobile nuisances for over an hour.
Just from an evolutionary perspective, surely that's a huge problem, right? Imagine if a third of your tribe had a complete mental shutdown the moment a lion approached. Seems like a great strategy for getting eaten.
"My questions: is this a thing that has happened often in the past?"
Yes, all the time. It's also constantly happening in the present. Women, especially young women, tend toward (or, if you like, contain a cohort which tends toward) hysteria. Large parts of wokism, and feminism before it, are the same essential behavior -- safe spaces, bizarre rape scares, disproportionate concern over "men's violence against women" and assault at night when women are at (at least) an order of magnitude lower risk of stranger violence than men, etc. etc.
"Personally, I've never seen or heard of anything like it."
That's because people are forbidden from saying it in our society. It's culturally taboo to be aware of mental/behavioral differences between the sexes, especially when they're solidly biological.
"Also, what might be the mechanism?"
Estrogen. Not only does testosterone make you less neurotic, estrogen makes you *more* neurotic than baseline. That's why many women get "mood swings" on the pill, and that's why puberty makes girls morose and prone to anorexia, ROGD and other conversion disorders.
Well, as long as we're telling evolutionary just-so stories, I think it's important to remember that the main threat to humans for most of our evolutionary history wasn't large carnivores, but other hostile humans. Becoming "hysterical" probably makes you more likely to be taken captive, vs more likely to be injured or killed while attempting to resist or flee. Speculating on why this might be an evolutionary advantage, especially for young women, is left as an exercise to the reader.
"Speculating on why this might be an evolutionary advantage, especially for young women, is left as an exercise to the reader."
Specifically, it would be an evolutionary advantage for the *offspring* of young women. It doesn't need to be advantageous for the individual, nothing does as long as it makes you have more kids. If being extremely depressed and self-hating at all times led to you having more and more viable offspring, self-hatred would be selected for.
I can't think of a better alarm than the screams of girls spreading through a tribe. That kind of signaling could be useful to alert others who are not quite nearby. But also, could "yawning" fit under the category "valuable social contagion?" since it may be a signal to the tribe that it's time to make camp and rest?
Yes, things like this happened in the past. Teenage girls are very susceptible to this kind of infectious hysteria but they're not the only ones - see koro:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_(medicine)
"Koro is a culture bound delusional disorder in which an individual has an overpowering belief that their sex organs are retracting and will disappear, despite the lack of any true longstanding changes to the genitals. Koro is also known as shrinking penis, and it is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders."
The Italian 'dancing mania' known as tarantism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantism
"Tarantism is a form of hysteric behaviour originating in Southern Italy, popularly believed to result from the bite of the wolf spider Lycosa tarantula (distinct from the broad class of spiders also called tarantulas). A better candidate cause is Latrodectus tredecimguttatus, commonly known as the Mediterranean black widow or steppe spider, although no link between such bites and the behaviour of tarantism has ever been demonstrated. However, the term historically is used to refer to a dancing mania – characteristic of Southern Italy – which likely had little to do with spider bites. The tarantella dance supposedly evolved from a therapy for tarantism."
A newspaper article about a novel based on a real mass hysteria episode in 2011:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2014/may/26/teen-girls-mass-hysteria-new-novel-tackles-rare-mysterious-illness
And of course the Salem witch craze itself, triggered by two girls having unexplained fits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
"In Salem Village in February 1692, Betty Parris (age 9) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11), the daughter and the niece, respectively, of Reverend Samuel Parris, began to have fits described as "beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect" by John Hale, the minister of the nearby town of Beverly. The girls screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions, according to the eyewitness account of Reverend Deodat Lawson, a former minister in Salem Village.
The girls complained of being pinched and pricked with pins. A doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, could find no physical evidence of any ailment. Other young women in the village began to exhibit similar behaviors. When Lawson preached as a guest in the Salem Village meetinghouse, he was interrupted several times by the outbursts of the afflicted."
If a hornet gets inside a room I'm in, I drop what I'm doing until I can either capture it and put it outside or kill it. If somebody wanted me to justi gnore a bunch of hornets buzzing around inside, I probably wouldn't suffer from a mental breakdown, but I would definitely be irritated and unable to focus on astronomy stuff.
>Imagine if a third of your tribe had a complete mental shutdown the moment a lion approached.
The elders of the tribe are ignoring the lions. That is a reason for concern!
This makes me reflect upon the idea of calluses as an evolution airy advantage.
This generation gets blisters easily
Assuming the horns kept a reasonable distance and we’re not acting too aggressively. If I had a herd of hornets buzzing around me I’d probably be acting pretty jinky myself.
Perhaps the thing we're missing is that they're still children. And fundamentally a child is not going to be able to kill a lion, they're going to want to wail and make a bunch of noise so that there family will come and throw rocks at the lion (evolutionarily speaking). Even here, since he didn't report anyone actually getting stung, this was apparently effective as the authority figures handled it.
Perhaps you could argue that a 12-17 year old isn't a "child" as much in the evolutionary sense, but I would argue that with how most developed nations rear their young, 12-17 is still fundamentally dependent upon their authority figures for most things, perhaps enough so that this sort of response might still kick in.
I'd perhaps substitute spears for thrown rocks - spears seem to be old enough to have been noticed by evolution (chimps use them). But otherwise I pretty much agree.
(Also note that it's 12-to-17-year-old *girls*. Women aren't expendable, because tribe growth is limited by the supply of wombs.)
And mass hysteria in some ways makes more sense than a mixed scream/hide approach, since screaming people already give away your location, so hiding is useless but screaming makes everything louder
> if they do sting it's no worse than a wasp.
Hornets (at least one from Europe) are definitely much, much, much worse than wasps (at least ones present in Europe).
I was bitten by wasps, bee (rated 1.5 wasps) and hornet (rated 15 wasps, required medical help).
I concur - wasps where I live (South of France) can generally be safely ignored, bees put me on a slight alert (my wife had to be helicoptered off to hospital after multpile bee stings) and with hornets we don't relax until they are removed from the house or, preferably, irremediably dead.
The ones in the Midwest of the US are also much worse than wasps, and are more aggressive and likely to sting than anything around here except a yellowjacket wasp. Freaking out dramatically is not a good survival tactic here, but being very afraid of a hornet sting is definitely a positive survival trait.
This sounds exactly like an outbreak of mass hysteria. Everything fits, including the age and gender (mass hysteria predominantly affects young females): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
I don't think I would be that bad, but I also wouldn't be sitting there calmly. "No worse than a wasp" is still really bad! I've also never been stung by a wasp before so I don't have a good sense of exactly how bad it is (bee stings are pretty bad, and wasps seem worse).
Does it also seem surprising to you that people are scared of roaches, nonvenomous spiders, millipedes, rats, etc?
"bee stings are pretty bad"
No, they really aren't that big of a deal
I've been stung by bees and by wasps, and the wasp sting was *definitely* a lot worse.
Weird, it's the opposite for me. I've been stung by both many times and bee stings hurt much more than wasps. I wonder if the variation is in the person or type of bee/wasp?
Maybe someone can be allergic to wasps and not to bees?
Or be stung by bee, become allergic to Hymenoptera and be stung by wasp?
Venoms vary enormously between Hymenoptera species; you're generally not allergic to the entire genus.
The amount of venom injected also varies a lot sting-to-sting, so there's some amount of small sample size variance here.
I figured that surely insect phobias can't be *that* common.
In my experience wasp stings are way less painful than bee stings, they do not leave a stinger that you have to remove, and they stop hurting much more quickly.
Ehhhh... wasps do sometimes leave a stinger, and that usually more than equalizes the differential between them.
I have been stung at least 10 times by yellowjacket wasps--no stinger. Maybe the real explanation here is that how bad it is depends on the kind of wasp.
This summer I accidentally annoyed a yellowjacket nest and was stung 5 times and two left stingers in my hand/wrist. I've heard its more common when they're acting in defense of the nest? No idea if that's true or folk lore though.
+1 wasps are much less painful, no stuck stinger.
Also, it seems to me that serious allergy is more popular with bees.
I had thoughts along similar lines when I was doing sports in high school. I can remember pushing myself to the physical limit, like running until I would literally fall down if I didn't stop (or until I threw up). And obviously when you're pushing that close to the limit, you want to just stop because it's quite unpleasant, but I remember thinking something very similar about lions. Would I just stop if I was being chased by lions? If I'm confident that I wouldn't just sit down and die if I was being chased, then I must be able to *choose* to go until my muscles fail. Obviously that's just a high schooler's logic, but it got me thinking about things like phobias or disgust reactions - like say I can't handle blood, would I freeze up if I had an opportunity to save someone's life by stopping their bleeding? Or less extreme, would I be incapable of changing a diaper if the thought of another person's poop makes me nauseated? (After becoming a parent, it's much easier to deal with poop...)
I have to think that when a life is on the line, people are capable of absolutely blowing past what they thought were physical limits. On the flip side, I think people can put ridiculously small boundaries around what they're capable of dealing with, and if a violation of those boundaries provokes enough adrenaline or whatever, they can actually disable most of their conscious functions and motor control. Though the details are lost to memory, I've had a handful of experiences where people I was with completely shut down during something stressful, and I had to wonder if they'd be truly incapable of being useful in an actual disaster.
I once attended a lecture by the noted explorer and adventurer Sir Ranulph Feinnes, who amongst many other things, attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole. It was during this expedition that he got frostbite in all the fingers on his left hand: upon returning, his surgeon said they would need amputation, but wanted to wait a few months. Feinnes, impatient, cut them off in his garden shed with an electric fretsaw.
Anyway, in this lecture, he said that when your body is telling you it wants to die, and that it can't go a step further, that's when you're about a third of the way towards your *actual* endurance limit. To hit that, first you need to use up literally all your body fat. Then you need to start burning through the muscle tissue. It's only after this that you're actually approaching the limit.
Exactly.
Hey, I can share a relevant learning experience there. It was obvious to me that people are able to exceed what they think about their limits, but it was a bit surprising when I came to it.
The story is that some years ago I had decided to attempt a quite long walk, getting to a place ~55 miles away in one day; which I hadn't done before but I had recently done half of that and felt prepared. Well, I wasn't, and due to some stupid decisions and wrong equipment after some hours and a third of the distance I was sitting there with multiple blisters and I couldn't really walk a single step because it hurt quite much. Like, the trip was definitely over, I could not do anymore - I had walked longer previously, but this was much worse. I had my phone and network, but I was away from roads and there was a few miles until a location where it would be reasonable for some friend to come pick me up with a car. So I had some time for thinking back there, cried a bit, got myself together put on dry socks and some tape on the blisters, and walked on. And when I eventually got to roads, then I figured that I actually could still do some more and wanted to see how much. And then I walked on for 15 or so hours more and reached the planned endpoint.
So my surprising takeaway from this is that it's not that people can do 110% when pressed, that the gap is much larger - that apparently the feeling of "I'm absolutely certain that this is the limit" for me is triggered at less than 30% of the actual endurance capacity, and if I can push past that feeling, then I can do not just a bit more, but multiple times more. And this was a quite impactful revelation.
And if you would be chased by lion (or lion equivalent) then you would likely be able to do even more!
In evolutionary terms it might have been useful if channeled into productive activity.
Maybe irrational behavior and believing in other irrational behavior like astrology is correlated?
Oops! I meant to write astronomy.
Ops, sorry.
I was trying to imagine what an astrology camp would be like. I should have considered autocomplete taking over for you.
Astrology actually has plenty of theory, just useless one. So basically like astronomy one (maybe even with some observations) but with lectures/discussions/activities where science is replaced by woo/mysticism/really outdated science.
I divined that's what you meant
I was biting my tongue.
The second edition of A student's introduction to English grammar by Huddleston, Pullum, and Reynolds is now out.
What is new in the second edition?
Chapter 8 on adjuncts is entirely new, and now the chapters match up with those in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. The whole things has been rewritten to be more conversational. There are now online multiple-choice question, online tree diagrams, and each chapter has many more exercises. The glossary has be expanded quite a bit, and the number of terms used has been cut by about 15%.
A few theoretical issues have been tightened up: one being that markers are now recognized as a type of dependent, which was previously somewhat ambiguous. Another one is the treatment of non-predicate adjuncts, based on the recent dissertation on the topic published by Jim Donaldson at Edinburgh.
"There are two drugs which both have stellar Phase III trial results indicating they can reduce the COVID-19 death rate dramatically - one from Merck (Molnupiravir) and the other Pfizer (Paxlovid). We have new weapons to slay the dragon, but we aren’t using them yet!"
Maybe not so stellar for molnupiravir, Merck have issued new results that are somewhat less glowing than the originals:
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/merck-says-covid-19-pill-cuts-hospitalization-death-risk-by-30-2021-11-26/
"Nov 26 (Reuters) - Merck & Co (MRK.N) said on Friday updated data from its study of its experimental COVID-19 pill showed the drug was significantly less effective in cutting hospitalizations and deaths than previously reported.
The drugmaker said its pill showed a 30% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths, based on data from 1,433 patients. In October, its data showed a roughly 50% efficacy, based on data from 775 patients. The drug, molnupiravir, was developed with partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.
The lower efficacy of Merck's drug could have big implications in terms of whether countries continue to buy the pill. Interim data from 1,200 participants in Pfizer Inc's (PFE.N) trial for its experimental pill, Paxlovid, showed an 89% reduction in hopsitalizations and deaths."
So down to 30% efficacy from 50% efficacy for molnupiravir, while paxlovid so far is still holding. But would further tests show a similar drop? Maybe, maybe not.
"Merck has said data shows molnupiravir is not capable of inducing genetic changes in human cells, but men enrolled in its trials had to abstain from heterosexual intercourse or agree to use contraception. Women of child-bearing age also had to use birth control.
Still, the FDA said in its briefing document that there are safety concerns about potential birth defects from the drug and asked the panel to discuss whether the drug should be available to pregnant women."
Again, part of the hesitance of the FDA is that they are terrified of another thalidomide, and such fears are not assuaged by the drug company itself telling trialists not to get pregnant.
"Yet, the FDA has decided to keep both drugs banned."
I think that is an unfair characterisation of the decision.
"Blood is on their hands."
Yeah, well. I've considered and discarded responses to that, because mostly they were sarcasm and that's not helpful. I would simply like to say that the "paxlovid is only re-packaged ivermectin, Pfizer are doing this in order to sell expensive drugs instead of cheap ivermectin, follow the scientific evidence to save human pain, suffering and death" are making the same emotive appeals - is Mr. Elton going to boycott Paxlovid on these grounds now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufy2AweXRkc
"How many people is the FDA murdering?"
I don't know, Mr. Elton, how many people did *you* murder this morning? (Sorry, I know I said I'd stay off the sarcasm, but some over-the-top emotive sloganeering just breaks the chains on that for me).
I think there's a distinction between "valid reasons a given doctor won't prescribe a drug to you" and "valid reasons to make it illegal for any doctor anywhere to prescribe this drug to anyone". A drug that cures covid and causes horrible birth defect would still be a good drug to have! it lets you save the lives of all your patients that *aren't* pregnant women, which give the age skew is going to the vast majority of them even if you disallow it for "potentially pregnant" women and only give it to post-menopausal patients.
It still would warrant some caution, because they're also advising men in the trials not to get anyone pregnant. And it has dropped down in its stated efficacy from 50% to 30% as they did trials on more people, so that's another reason to be cautious.
Paxlovid seems to be holding steady so far, so that probably will be licenced soon. But the emotional pressure appeal is exactly what we saw with aduhelm where the consensus seems to be it's useless and hideously expensive, yet it got approved.
So things like "the FDA has blood on their hands!" may be a sincere cry of frustration, but it's not solid proof one way or the other.
One might argue that the over 50 crowd isn't likely to get many people pregnant, and they are the group most likely to die from COVID anyway, so maybe it is worth releasing just with the "Don't make babies" black label warning. I dunno, staring too long at the FDA's behavior feels a bit like watching a badly written movie. "Why would you do that? You could just... you know better! But wait... that's the worst way to do that!"
I am thinking just ignoring both might be the sanest course of action :)
Fingers crossed for Paxlovid working out for people, though.
Hopefully nominative determinism won't check out with Dr. Bitterman.
The French Church endorses effective altruism !
So this year the French traduction of the catholic missal (= the book with the text for the mass) changed.
The old translation of the solemn benediction for the Advent read
"May he make your faith firm, your hope joyful and your 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁"
The new translation read
"May he make your faith firm, your hope joyful, your 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲".
From constant charity to effective charity, isn't this the whole point of EA ?
Ah, but what does the French church say about what causes to support, and what're the most effective ways of supporting them?
It sounds like one thing they're saying is "pray for it," which checks out, and I'll agree with them there.
Just curious. What is the final character in your username?
Not Evan, but that looks to be the capital letter Thorn.
Yeah it does. Thanks.
Yep, the capital letter Thorn. I wish it hadn't been dropped by the English alphabet.
Yeah, the those “Ye Olde Coffee Shops” would make more sense. :)
If Covid refuses to go away and we run through the entire Greek alphabet and perhaps the unique Cyrillic letters maybe we can keep Thorn and Eth in reserve. Oh boy I hope that is a silly thought.
Don't take my comment too seriously, it was just a joke.
For the sake of the discussion I'd say that if you admit the basic tenets of the christian faith, the most effective intervention will always be to increase conversions to christianism.
I would say the most effective intervention is to live like a Christian.
Unfortunately a lot of people that call themselves Christians don’t. IIRC people trying to lead a Christ like life were victims of one of the first Crusades. I’d have to grab the right book off a shelf to give the particulars.
But yes I think I know the sense that you are using the word and that would be most effective.
While true, that's still very underspecified. Arguably, it strongly encourages investing in saving lives that haven't yet converted to Christianity, which in practice means Asia.
Regarding the Omicron variant, I know we don't currently have a ton of info. I have two questions that I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts on:
1. What are the best threads/posts on the subject from the last 48 hours? All the good threads I've seen are from last Thursday or Friday.
2. Is there any argument *against* getting a booster ASAP? It seems like a reasonable precaution to take in case Omicron is quite bad, but is it possible that this would be counterproductive (e.g. if the mutations make it *very* different from existing variants)?
The one argument I can see against an *immediate* booster is that you might think a booster is at peak effectiveness from something like 14 to 52 days after the injection (just making up some numbers) and if you expect the omicron wave to peak in your area later than that, you just might delay it a few days or weeks. (But in that case, why not get one now, and then get an unauthorized booster later by saying it's your first dose?)
Zeynep Tufekci has one that I think is from yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/opinion/covid-omicron-travel-ban-testing.html
One hypothesis it mentions, that I find quite interesting, is that this might not be the result of uncontrolled spread in an undetected population, but rather might be the result of long-term mutation within a single immunosuppressed individual. That would help explain why no related sequences have been observed since May 2020. The alternative would require undetected spread of this branch of the family tree in a population that both doesn't get any sequencing of cases done, and also didn't get their indigenous covid strain replaced by Delta (or export it to replace Delta before now).
Here's a good post: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/11/26/omicron-variant-post-1-were-fed-its-never-over/#more-22755
Thanks!
Katelyn Jetelina's postings are also good. She's on Substack I think.
For anyone reading this, it looks like there is now a follow-up to the first linked post: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/omicron-variant-post-2
I can't possibly see how a booster could be counterproductive, but if the fears about vaccine escape are justified it might well be useless (until new boosters tailored to Omicron are developed)
AIUI it's only useless if vaccines no longer protect against severe disease. Vaccine escape could mean that breakthroughs and reinfections get way more common b/c of antibody evasion, but T cells still keep you out of the hospital.
1. Here's one https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-omicron-situation
Thanks!
Inspired by Scott's post on testing the effect of CO2 on cognition using WordTwist, I started doing daily chess puzzles while tracking CO2 and other health metrics. I did an interim analysis on the first 88 days of data and found the following:
- Chess puzzles are a low effort (for me), but high variance and streaky measure of cognitive performance
- Note: I didn't test whether performance on chess puzzles generalizes to other cognitive tasks
- No statistically significant effects were observed, but I saw modest effect sizes and p-values for:
- CO2 Levels >600 ppm: R2 = 0.14, p = 0.067
- Coefficient of Variation in blood glucose: R2 = 0.079, p = 0.16
- My current sample size is underpowered to detect the effects I'm looking for. I likely need 3-4x as much data to reliably detect the effect sizes I'm looking for.
- Given how many correlations I looked at, the lack of pre-registration of analyses, and the small number of data points, these effects are likely due to chance/noise in the data, but they're suggestive enough for me to continue tracking.
Questions:
- My variation in rating has long stretches of better or worse than average performance that seem unlikely to be due to chance. Does anyone know of a way to test if this is the case?
- Any statisticians interested in taking a deeper/more rigorous look at my data or have advice on how I should do so?
- Any suggestions on other quick cognitive assessments that would be less noisy?
If you're interested in the detailed write-up, you can find it at: https://www.quantifieddiabetes.com/2021/11/using-chess-puzzles-to-assess-cognition-exploratory-analysis-of-co2-and-other-mediators-shows-suggestive-but-not-conclusive-effects.html
Original post by Scott: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/eight-hundred-slightly-poisoned-word
"My variation in rating has long stretches of better or worse than average performance that seem unlikely to be due to chance. Does anyone know of a way to test if this is the case?"
One simple method is to compute the autocorrelation, meaning the correlation of performance at time T with the performance at time T-1 (or T-i for larger i). If you see a statistically significant positive slope, that's evidence of streaks.
Thanks! I tested for autocorrelation by calculating the pearson's correlation coefficient with lag of 1 to 6 and don't see any meaningful correlation (r2 < 0.01 for all of them).
Looks like the streaks are just chance.
Yeah, the psychology of streaks is interesting. I don't think we're wired to have good intuitions about how seriously to take several good or bad outcomes in our lives in a row. We're clearly biased in the direction of seeing meaningful patterns No doubt that's part of what makes gamblers get sucked into believing they should go another round because they're in good luck mode, gotta take advantage of it.
No kidding. Even after seeing the autocorrelation and knowing that the streaks are from chance, I still have a strong intuition I can't shake that the streak is real.
Unsettling, how large the rando quotient is in life.
Thank you, Luke G! I'm not the person who asked the original question, just someone who puzzled over it. Was not able to translate my intuitions into a formula or an approach, but when I read yours, I saw that, yup, that calculation would capture it. It was like finally having an itched scratched.
"My variation in rating has long stretches of better or worse than average performance that seem unlikely to be due to chance. Does anyone know of a way to test if this is the case?"
Hmm, my stats training is so far in the past that I can't give you an answer, but I keep ruminating about how one would go about answering this question. Some thoughts:
Do you get scores on these chess puzzles, like how long it takes you to solve them? Or is it just yes/no, you solved it or you didn't? If the first, you've got a bunch of numbers. If the second, you've got a string of numbers all of which are 1 or 0.
-OK, if it's a string of 1's and O's, there's got to be a simple way to determine how random the string is. (But I have no idea what that way would be. Might even be possible to feed the whole list of 1's and 0's to some calculator and get an answer.)
-If it's a string of varied numbers, say time to solve, you can't just ask some calculator to check to see whether the string is random, because we wouldn't expect them to be. We'd expect something approximating a normal distribution, with values closer to the mean occurring more frequently than values further from the mean. But there's got to be some statistical way to ask whether numbers associated with good or bad performance cluster together in the sequence of scores.
I suggest going to a couple of the math subs on Reddit and asking what stats approach is appropriate. There's one called /r/math and one called /r/askmath. I posted a question about as knotty as yours on one of them last year and got a lovely clear answer from a cheerful mathematician.
Good suggestion on asking math subreddits, I'll give that a shot.
In terms of the scoring, for each puzzle I get an increase or decrease in rating which is a function of whether I solve it correctly or not, the puzzle rating, my rating, how many moves I get correct (for multi-step puzzles), and how fast I solve it. The exact algorithm is proprietary to the site. Score from a single puzzle is incredibly noisy, so for each daily session, I do 10 puzzles and record my rating change for the set.
Re long stretches of over or underperformance - stress and sleep quality are both obvious confounders to your cognitive performance, and I'd expect stress from work or other life events to come and go in patches lasting weeks or months. Not sure how you'd quantify it short of extensive testing of cortisol levels, but randomising the CO2 level you test at each day so it doesn't correlate with time of week or time of year should suffice to analyse the effect of CO2 specifically.
Anecdotally, I don't think those patterns matched up with work/life stress, but I don't know how reliable my memory or self-perception is/was.
Thanks!
Can I ask whether you tried any other different ways of slicing subgroups before coming up with >600 ppm as something that was marginally significant?
BTW, I tried applying the same >600ppm filter to your data, but it still shows no correlation between CO2 level and performance (R2 = 8e-5, p=0.81).
Given your data and my prior skepticism of the original UCB paper, I suspect that my results are due to chance or some non-CO2 common cause that's correlated with CO2 levels, but I'll see what I find as I collect more data.
600ppm was the only cutoff I tried. The UC Berkeley paper compared performance at 600, 1000, and 2500 ppm, so I picked 600ppm as my lower cutoff.
My logic for testing the filtered data is that if the CO2 effect was real, there's probably some lower threshold below which it doesn't have an effect (like most toxins).
Thanks for the question. I should have been more explicit about that to avoid questions of multiple comparisons/cherry picking.
Following the discussion in the last post on Helion, a trying-to-get-fusion startup, I've been thinking about how scientific communities develop norms orthogonal to their science.
Fusion has strong collaboration norms. This is most obvious for ITER, which is a collaboration between countries representing more than half the world's population. It is also usually true for private companies. The high temperature superconducting tape designed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems for their tokamak is also being used by Type One Energy to build a stellarator. By being secretive, Helion is betraying the (non-scientific) norms of the community.
I'm thinking that is a kind of founder effect, but I would be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on it.
There are several important examples from the early days of plasma physics, both positive and negative, that helped to establish this norm.
The biggest negative example is the Huemul Project by Ronald Richter. Richter is the origin of the mad-scientist-with-a-secret-base-in-Patagonia trope. In 1951, he and Peron declared that he had GOT FUSION, which caused a lot of excitement and skepticism, until he was arrested for fraud in 1955.
The biggest positive example is from 1968, when a group of Soviet scientists traveled to England to present the results of the T-3 tokamak, which was an order of magnitude hotter than any other experiment. Western scientists were skeptical, so they invited 5 British scientists to come to Russia to do the experiments themselves. The "Culham Five" confirmed the results and published them in Nature the next year. From then on, there was significant collaboration across the Iron Curtain.
Despite being indoctrinated in this field (a la Kuhn), I can see some costs to this attitude. Because we refused to participate in the Cold War, we never had our version of a Space Race. If we ever wanted to get seriously funded, maybe we should have made it something that we can WIN against Russia or China.
I am considering using https://newsfounded.com/polandeng/most-of-those-convicted-of-rape-in-sweden-are-immigrants-but-the-problem-is-the-scientists-who-write-about-it/ as an example of something in an upcoming post. Does anyone have any evidence that it isn't true, or is exaggerated, or any other reason I shouldn't?
This is going to wedge on whether you believe the bureaucracy is being even handed or not. If you do then what happened is that some researchers got permission to use data for a specific purpose. Their research revealed something else. They got published but this was a violation of the terms they got the data under. They were then punished for this, partly because the board thought it would increase prejudice but fundamentally because of the violation of that agreement.
The right wing answer is the claim that this would never happen if they found the opposite. Basically, if someone had violated the agreement but found that it was mostly Swedes attacking immigrants the review board would never have objected. In short that the bureaucracy is putting its thumb on the scales to suppress facts they don't like. Process as punishment, the bureaucracy giving red carpet treatment to one side and scrutinizing the other. Of course it's hard to prove this either way since the counterfactual doesn't exist. But that's what makes it an effective wedge issue.
I think this is a good point. And while it would be very easy to write a "rule selectively enforced against things left-wingers don't like" piece on the strength of one instance of a rule being enforced against a thing left wingers don't like and zero instances of it not being enforced, I think that for it to be ethical I'd want evidence a lot stronger than "I bet it wouldn't have been otherwise" - ideally statistical, not just anecdotal evidence of a handful of cases where it wasn't enforced - before I took that seriously (which is not to say that this isn't a case of selective enforcement, just that it isn't strong evidence of selective enforcement).
After years of seeing "imagine the reaction if Boghossian had been pushing right-wing claims" or "imagine the reaction of Rittenhouse had been black", I no longer trust these sorts of counterfactuals in politically sensitive matters at all. I want actual statistics on real-world examples, not just individual anecdotes supported with imagined counterfactuals.
Agreed; imaginary hypocrisy is the worst kind, in all senses.
The issue is a little more complicated than what the article presents, and their summary is sadly somewhat off. I'll try to go over it briefly, but the situation is somewhat complicated and requires some prior knowledge of the legal background.
Under Swedish Law, more specifically under the Ethical Proofing Act (lag om etikprövning, https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/lag-2003460-om-etikprovning-av-forskning-som_sfs-2003-460), some research concerning humans must first be approved by an ethics board before it can commence. There's the usual suspects, such as human experiments and the like; but you also need special permission to process sensitive personal data such as ethnicities or information from Court Rulings (this follows from the 3 §).
Now, the scientist in question actually HAD a permit from an Ethics Board – however, that permit was only valid for investigating the correlation (and possible causality) between criminal proceedings, ethnicity et cetera and cancer prevalence. The Ethical Assesment Board of Appeal is basically arguing that she ignored the conditions under which the data she was using was given to her. According to the Board, should have requested a new permit before she began researching the correlation between ethnicity and crime. So to summarize, the alleged crime here is not researching the correlation per say, instead it's violating some annoying formal rules regarding ethical procedure and permission grants.
In my opinion the whole system of having a prior review when you're dealing with public information (which all Court Rulings in Sweden are) is an exceptionally stupid formality, which stifles creative research and is also prone to abuse; but I can't in all honesty say that the scientist in question here is, speaking strictly legally, totally off the hook. The details in her permit (which I have read and which I have as a file, and which I can send to you if you like) are complicated and difficult for a non-medically educated jurist to understand, but on the face of it, it does sort of look like the scientist has overstepped.
Europe: we are just as free as America! No, actually, we're even more free!
Also Europe: needs to file for a permit before running a regression
To badly bastardize Tolstoy:
All un-free countries are alike; all free countries are un-free in their own way.
Ethical Review Act is probably more correct than Ethical Proofing Act, forgive the fact that my legal English is a bit weak.
This looks like the kind of thing it would be a mistake to write on without having heard both sides of the story.
"Sundquist and his colleagues already have allegations of violations of good research practice" is the kind of one-line-and-move-on it would be very easy to use to bury facts that don't fit the author's preferred narrative (although, obviously, it could also cover wholly specious allegations).
If you can find the case against this report, as presented by the people pushing it, and you don't find it convincing, I think you're probably good to go.
I would not use that URL. Newsfounded looks like a fake-news site. Their article doesn't have a byline or a dateline, and the text looks like a low-quality machine translation of the samnytt.se article. Other sites running this in English, like "Remonews" and "Newsbeezer" are fairly blatantly part of the same content farm.
As far as the original story, it does look like there's something there.
The story Scott linked to appears to be a translation of a story at the Polish news site Niezależna ( https://niezalezna.pl/416432-wiekszosci-skazanych-za-gwalty-w-szwecji-to-imigranci-ale-problem-maja-naukowcy-ktorzy-o-tym-pisza ); the study referred to, which Niezależna links to but Newsfounded's translation does not, is https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20961790.2020.1868681 . (
Note that niezalezna.pl gives samnytt.se as source (without linking anything specific).
Also, niezalezna.pl is a quite partisan source.
Surely, it doesn't matter if the information comes from a "partisan source", it matters whether the information is correct? Suspicion isn't proof and I've seen this rhetorical move bandied about far too many times to let it slide. Calling a source "partisan" is justifiable if you move onto demonstrate that the specific claim being made is fraudulent but it is not and can never be enough to discredit a claim on its own.
It means that it is
(a) worth extra verification
(b) tracking down real source is even more preferable
(c) they are more likely to misinterpret, selectively quote, not mention important relevant info, fail to research properly etc etc
Is the default, "trust every claim from every website unless you can give strong evidence that the website is unreliable" or "trust no claim from any website unless you can give strong evidence that the website is reliable"?
"Partisan" is not the same as "unreliable". You need to first decide which game you are playing: if the game is about truth-seeking, "partisan" is not in and of itself a relevant factor, only "factual correctness" is. Partisanship can serve as a more or less weak proxy for reliability but it is not the same thing.
If the game you're playing is about competing with your enemy, "factual correctness" is not intrinsically relevant whereas "partisanship" is highly relevant since it lets you know if the source shares your goals or if they're playing for the other side. In a competitive game any claim you come across is legit so long as it furthers your ends. This is not the case in the fact-finding game where you score points by producing the most accurate description (or map) of a selected slice of reality you are capable of. No other goal is permissible in such a game. As soon as you stray from that rule you are now playing the competitive game instead. This is a binary with no sliding scales – there is no way of being a little bit truth-seeking.
In the fact-finding condition, any claim is only as good as the evidence presented to support it. Most claims people make are not meant to be truthful, most games they play are not meant to produce factually correct claims. The assumption is therefore one of scepticism whenever you encounter a claim about the state of reality.
In addition: samnytt.se is considered far right and heavily biased. But the main story of something that looks suspiciously like bureaucracy being used to silence uncomfortable research seems true. Here are some sources less controversial media (in Swedish):
https://lakartidningen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/2021/10/overklagandenamnd-studie-om-valdtaktsman-saknade-tillstand/
https://www.lundagard.se/2021/10/26/forundersokning-inleds-mot-lundaprofessor/
This is also quite interesting: Liberal member of parliament asks the Social Democratic government about the principal issues about academic freedom and ethics boards, gets a non-answer: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/skriftlig-fraga/akademisk-frihet-och-etikprovning_H911341
The original URL: https://samnytt.se/professor-rakade-upptacka-att-de-flesta-valdtakter-begas-av-invandrare-riskerar-atal/
Holy cow, a *judge* decides whether their research is *illegal*?
That seems... impossible. Just my 2 cents. I am rolling to disbelieve.
A judge decides whether, if you are given permission to access data for one purpose only and use it for an arguably different purpose, you have broken the law or not.
The big question here is "if the authors had asked to access the data for this purpose, would they have been refused?".
If the answer to that question is "no", then carry on Sweden, nothing to see here but a permit violation.
If the answer to that question is "yes", then there's literally a government conspiracy attempting to hide the truth about this topic and the authors' actions were essentially necessary to expose that truth; at that point you're prosecuting Deep Throat.
The Bayesian issue here is that P(prosecution|conspiracy) is essentially 1 and P(prosecution|!conspiracy) is a lot lower.
(You could, of course, make the argument that the conspiracy exists but is righteous in suppressing this information.)
Europe
Whether or not China IS successful is not a policy question. I think that China's growth so far does provide additional reason to remove obstacles to US growth (NIMBY resistance to investment, restrictions on urban residential and commercial development, structural fiscal deficits, obstacles to freer international trade, active recement of immigrants). But what else?
I'm unfamiliar with "recement" and can't think of what might've been typo'd to get to it. Could you clarify?
I’d guess recruitment
How much should I care about Omnicron?
We don't know much. Some evidence for and against it being a big deal. The costs of it being a big deal are greater than the costs of it not being a big deal, so treat it more like a big deal than not.
Most importantly: maintain an attitude about it that doesn't cause you to dig your heels in and disregard further evidence.
On the other hand, as of right now and the next short amount of time whether you care or not probably has close to zero effect on anything other than your mental well being.
So...maybe don't care at all?
Probably add a few more canned goods to your next supermarket runs, and don't make any plans that depend sensitively on the ability to do international travel two or three months from now.
Tentative hope in South Africa
From today’s NYT
“In the rush to understand the threat posed by the Omicron variant, the worrisome new version of the coronavirus, some experts are pointing hopefully to early signs that it may cause only mild illness, without some of the trademark symptoms of Covid.
But it is far too early to assume that the variant will not cause severe illness, too, warned Dr. Richard Lessells, who coordinates clinical and epidemiological data for the South African Covid Variant Research Consortium.
Many of the early infections in South Africa were spotted among younger people more likely to experience mild illness, he said. The picture may change as the virus spreads through the larger population.”
A more transmittable version of covid that was milder is something we should hope for. It could grant herd immunity.
Haven't seen anything better than Zvi's write up on it: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/omicron-variant-post-1-were-fed-its
I think the correct answer right now is "we don't know". The reasonable possibilities range from "not at all" to "very much". The precautionary principle probably therefore suggests you be ready for the worse end of that spectrum (within reason: get your booster if you haven't, have a reasonable stock of items likely to run out, etc. No need to go full prepper)
also to keep an eye on the evidence as it comes in so you know whether it's going to be bad ASAP. (not that anybody here seems to need to be told to do that)
I believe the correct answer is "right now, not at all because there are no behaviour changes you personally can make at this stage that have any impact on what happens with omicron". ( I mean, unless you make public policy or are a virologist or something, but then presumably you wouldn't be asking here)
When it became clear to us that Covid was a serious threat we stocked up on non-perishable foodstuffs, so as to be able to self-isolate pretty completely for a month or two if necessary. It didn't become necessary because food delivery services expanded a lot, but we were self-quarantining fairly strictly until we got vaccinated. If it was clear that omicron was going to be a lot worse, something similar might make sense, although so far I don't think it does. That isn't affecting "what happens with omicron" but "what happens to us with omicron."
Thoughts on getting another booster of the opposite technology? Like, J&J booster if we got the Moderna vaccine and booster before?
I did that, based on the conclusions of a German study. In my case, I had received two Pfizer shots (with almost no reaction) and chose the J&J for my booster. Within 8 hours of the booster, I had an intense flu-like reaction (including aches and fever) that lasted for 5 hours before my immune system decided it was a false alarm. My immune system is generally mediocre because I catch every cold, but in this case it was primed and ready to go when I got the J&J. The German study said the mRNA seemed to promote more antibodies while the more traditional type vaccines promote more T-cells, I think is the rationale.
I am still trying to figure out *why* everyone cares so much about omicron, compared to nu/mu (forget which) which didn't generate this much scare and ended up quickly forgotten.
Maybe some countries or people suddenly realized that they had taken on more risk than they were comfortable with.
Two reasons why:
Lambda and Mu were flourishing in South America, which hadn't yet been fully exposed to Delta, so it wasn't totally clear whether they were more transmissible than Delta or not (and eventually Delta did overtake them), while Omicron seems to be flourishing in an environment that was already saturated with Delta, which is (weak) evidence that it is in fact substantially more transmissible than Delta.
Omicron also has a *lot* more divergences in the spike sequence than even Beta and Lambda, which had significant immune escape.
Those at least seem to be the explanations that are given by the people feeding the stories - my own reaction is partly these things, and partly because the people feeding the stories seem to be reacting a lot more strongly. While they're not 100% reliable, they're still a useful signal (as they turned out to be with Alpha and with Delta, which I was somewhat skeptical of early on).
Because with a R0>10, there's certainty that you are going to get COVID. You can no longer tell yourself a story about not getting it. Everyone's getting it now.
> Steve Jobs is the biological sister (adopted and raised apart) of award-winning novelist Mona Simpson
Maybe that should be "biological brother".
Question with regard to the intersexual dynamics and relationships:
What are the most interesting papers, findings supported with broad anecdotal evidence, and/or your personal predictions that are very surprising/important and absent in the public discourse/understanding of the topic?
This paper gives a mathematical model showing why we would expect an evolutionary dynamic of interaction between two easily distinguished groups to end up with an equilibrium in which the smaller group is treated worse: http://cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Inequality_and_Inequity_in_the_Emergence_of_Conventions-FINAL.pdf
I don't see anything there about smaller groups tending to end up treated worse. Indeed, their model would seem to be totally independent of group size.
(Or are you referring to women being physically smaller than men?)
It's possible I'm remembering a different paper of theirs - I didn't double-check to verify that this is the one I thought. As I recall, the point of the model is that in a homogeneous population, you end up with an equilibrium that is symmetrical for all, but if you have a population with two identifiable sub-populations, you can end up with an equilibrium that is asymmetrical, and sometimes inegalitarian, and if one sub-population involves a lot more individuals than the other, then the smaller sub-population is more likely to end up with the less favorable outcome in those mixed interactions in the equilibrium that evolves.
>As I recall, the point of the model is that in a homogeneous population, you end up with an equilibrium that is symmetrical for all,
Yes, this paper has that.
>but if you have a population with two identifiable sub-populations, you can end up with an equilibrium that is asymmetrical, and sometimes inegalitarian,
Yes, this paper has that.
>and if one sub-population involves a lot more individuals than the other, then the smaller sub-population is more likely to end up with the less favorable outcome in those mixed interactions in the equilibrium that evolves.
This paper does not have that. You're probably thinking of this:
>>In particular, increasing the size of the population makes the Work,M/Work,M outcome increasingly likely. Smaller populations are more likely to end up at inequitable, and unequal, outcomes.
...but that's not talking about relative group size.
Men and women are also groups of roughly-equal size in any event.
By "intersexual dynamics and relationships", do you mean dynamics and relationships between ("inter") the sexes, or dynamics and relationships involving intersex people?
Two new books on AI: Age of AI by Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger has gotten the most press, but I found it impossible to finish. Boring and repetitive. Did anyone find it valuable?
Much better is Rule of the Robots: how artificial Intelligence will transform everything by Martin Ford. Lots of good stuff on the path toward AGI, based on interviews with people like Demis Hassabis and Geoff Hinton. Also has the best coverage I've seen on the AI race with China. Maybe these two would be good candidates for reviews here.
TIL Kissinger is still alive
As a great fan of snark, I always automatically prepend 2 or 3 words to certain people's names - convicted felon Martha Stewart, porn star Madonna, indicted war criminal Henry Kissinger.
Who indicted Kissinger?
I thought it was one of those "World Courts" that don't get no respect, but after looking on wikipedia it appears it was actually just Christopher Hitchens. Several other legal actions were also brought against him.
An indictment is a formal set of criminal charges against someone on which they are to be tried. It's occasionally used metaphorically, but I wouldn't call someone an "indicted war criminal" without the literal meaning.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger! (Joining a famous line of war-mongering peace-prize winners, like Yasser Arafat, Aung San Suu Kyi, and current Ethiopian leader Abiy Ahmen.)
What do Henry Kissinger and Bob Dylan have in common? ;-)
Also from wikipedia article on Tom Lehrer - "There is a false rumor that Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. He did comment that awarding the prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete"
It's a fact that many of us have kept learning for a *long* time.
Re: the Schmidt & Kissinger, you may enjoy this review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/21/books/review/the-age-of-ai-henry-kissinger-eric-schmidt-daniel-huttenlocher.html
Happy to help if you need more folks to help judge ACX applications, develop a rubric etc - I’m off of work for the rest of the calendar year so have plenty of time
Has anybody done a study on the effect of "placebo" in treating COVID? Formally, if you give one group an "experimental" pill (which is just a sugar pill), and the other group the same treatment with no pill, which group does better?
Hopefully you could measure this with a meta-analysis comparing placebo-treated people in published experiments with population-level statistics, controlled for age and calendar date [because of variant shifts].
I've come to think that "the placebo effect" is too diverse and heterogeneous a set of phenomena to be helpful to study.
In a vaccine trial, you want a placebo injection, because the blinding is important to ensure that behavioral factors, positive psychology, biased testing by doctors, etc. isn't the real explanation for the difference in case numbers between the two arms of the study. But if you compare placebo vs nothing, you have no way to disentangle these three types of effects from various others that might be there.
I expect that you're hoping for something that might tell us specifically about whether the positive psychological boost given by the fact that someone seemed to treat you could be effective. But unless we can separate this effect out from "doctors double-checked when they saw results they didn't expect in the control population but didn't double-check in the study population", we can't really conclude very much.
I think this is one part of why it's much easier to do a randomized controlled trial of a vaccine or a pharmaceutical than of a mask or of bike helmets.
Well… not sure what you would learn from that. Placebo seem like pretty potent medicine in some odd cases.
Placebo knee surgery
“The placebo worked. Six months after surgery, the 10 patients still didn't know whether they had been faked out or not.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/09/magazine/the-placebo-prescription.html?referringSource=articleShare
If placebo treatment gets the same results as surgery, maybe placebos are surprisingly effective, or maybe the surgery is just worthless and knees heal on their own.
It’s an interesting article. I think the point of it was exactly that placebos are surprisingly effective.
I’m going off my initial reading 20 years ago. Haven’t reread it yet.
I believe even the surgeon didn’t know whether he would perform a real procedure or make superficial incisions until the patient was sedated.
The article assumes that knee surgery works, so it goes on to make the point that placebos are surprisingly effective. But my point was to highlight that an assumption is being made, and without it there are other possible conclusions.
Copy that.
The follow-up question is whether Ivermectin / Vitamin D / Curcumin / Onion Powder works better than a pure placebo at treating COVID.
If we're talking about whether Ivermectin has a 10-20% impact on death rates, it would be extremely useful to know if the placebo effect is 5% or 25%.
Writing a series on Brain-Computer Interfaces. The last post talks about emerging technologies - some of you might find it interesting. https://howthehell.substack.com/p/bci-part-2
Thanks for signal boosting my post Scott! It took a while to write!
Everyone who cares about the Paxlovid issue should consider submitting a comment to the FDA. It doesn't have to be very long. Here's the direct link where you can submit your comment to be looked at by the committee that will review Merck's EUA application for Molnupiravir:
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FDA-2021-N-0758-0012
Note the deadline for your comment to be considered is tomorrow (November 29th) (the meeting is on the 30th).
The comment should probably address something related to Molnupiravir although strictly speaking it doesn't have to. Either way, you should definitely urge the FDA to do the EUA for Paxlovid ASAP!!
See AllAmericanBreakfast's writeup:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5gzkTjPrrNxCDDARc/submit-comments-on-paxlovid-to-the-fda-deadline-nov-29th
(also on the EA Forum : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/N46uFYAtmrYgneFrC/submit-comments-on-paxlovid-to-the-fda-deadline-nov-29th?fbclid=IwAR31pfEhH5QyV7QiQjJVTAfE696Wxb1rrehdCVnUut9ux1UiTA6lbMFOlyM)
They make this excellent point:
"The FDA still hasn't scheduled a meeting to review Paxlovid. It scheduled its meeting for Molnupiravir 7 weeks out. But it scheduled its review of the vaccines just 3 weeks after the submission. One suggestion, if you submit a comment, is to urge the FDA to schedule its review ASAP and to make the timeline 3 weeks (or less) rather than 7."
This is where, theoretically, the suggestion should be "talk to your Congressional representative". After all, if the FDA is blaming the rules for acting slowly, Congress can simply change the rules.
Even without legislative action, somebody in Congress should be motivated to make a scene about this, either Democrats who want to make Biden look good for doing something, or Republicans who want to make Biden look bad for not doing something (and who will then take credit when the drug is approved).
However, based on what's going on with Aduhelm (where Democrats announced an "investigation" 6 months ago and did nothing else), it's not clear any faction in Congress is motivated to try to make things better for the American public -- at least if it involves health care.
As I explain in my post the rules already allow the HHS secretary or FDA to issue an EUA easily if they want to. Or they could use Expanded Access. So no rules changes by Congress are needed, unless you want some sort of more forceful rules forcing them to act in emergency situation, by having some formalized consequences for inaction. Rules requiring more transparency into critical decisions also seem good, or requiring reciprocity (ie if a drug / vaccine is approved for emergency use in the UK, it should automatically be approved by the FDA).
Over the past year I've been called for a congressional inquiry into the FDA on Twitter several times. Here's the main questions I want answered:
-- Why was the AstraZeneca vaccine never approved in Jan-Feb (it was approved in the UK at the end of December).
-- Why no endorsement of challenge trials?
-- Why did they update their EUA guidance to require a longer follow-up period effectively pushed the date of the Pfizer vaccine EUA out beyond the election?
-- Why no faster EUA for Molnupiravir and Paxlovid given the situation?
-- Why didn't they authorize boosters for everyone 18 and over? (we sorta already know the answer to this one but would love to have the question asked).
-- A LOT of hard questions on testing...
Unfortunately, instead Congress is investigating the FDA about Aduhelm instead (a drug which doesn't seem to help with Alzheimer's much but actually performs age-reversal by removing amyloid plaques).
If anyone does write to their congressperson, consider asking for an inquiry too. I'd love to see some FDA officials grilled. I view it as essential preparation for the next pandemic to ensure what happened at the FDA this time around never happens again.
I would say off the top of my head that the chances of a Congressional committee asking any of those questions is zero to about two decimal places. And not because they want to hide something, or secretly want the pandemic to get worse, but because some of them make no sense -- e.g. no one is going to touch reciprocity with a 10-foot pole until thalidomide is buried in the history books , and challenge trials are a nonstarter for a disease with potentially lethal outcomes unless you want to kill all the the plaintiff lawyers first -- and the rest don't really seem like they make anything better. They're like auditing the Fed, an amusing fantasy of asking certain people WTF were you actually thinking? but the chances of the Federal Reserve system actually being dismantled are zip and so it's kind of strategically pointless.
Congress is certainly not above grandstanding, but it would normally have to be in service of some political aim, and I can't see either party getting a political boost from suggesting to the broad public that they shouldn't trust the FDA at all. Well, maybe Rand Paul would get on board with that, so....24 votes to go...
I disagree - reciprocity and challenge trials seem pretty common sense and low hanging fruit that I believe are two of the easiest things we could get Congressional support for. There were a bipartisan group of 35 Congresspeople that lobbied the FDA to support challenge trials, but they never did:
https://foster.house.gov/media/press-releases/foster-urges-hhs-and-fda-to-speed-up-approval-process-for-covid-19-vaccine
The risks from challenge trials for COVID-19 are acceptable: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/risa.13726
Reciprocity legislation has been introduced at least twice, most recently as a headline part of the RESULT Act, which was introduced by by Mike Lee and Ted Cruz in the Senate and Congressman Chip Roy in the House.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2016/02/03/sen-ted-cruz-wants-to-change-the-way-that-the-fda-approves-drugs/?sh=7ae0ccdf59d4
https://roy.house.gov/media/press-releases/roy-reintroduces-legislation-improve-americans-access-lifesaving-medicine
There is a lot of momentum behind such reforms right now given the non-stop horror-show at the FDA during the pandemic.
Yes, I get that you think reciprocity and challenges trials make sense. That was quite clear the first time. What I'm telling you is that I doubt very much they make sufficient sense to ~300-400 cautious members of Congress to even debate the issue.
If legislation actually was introduced in Congress, doesn't that make it much more plausible that Congress would debate the issue?
> Why didn't they authorize boosters for everyone 18 and over? (we sorta already know the answer to this one but would love to have the question asked).
What's the reasoning for this? I've been wondering myself. The best I could find was something about "not enough data" but if that were the case, it seems weird they're even approving it at all.
The reason the FDA didn't want to approve boosters for all is that they were only looking at the trial data from Pfizer on reducing hospitalizations and death (and to a small extent the Israel data). If that's all you care about, there isn't a strong reason for people under 65 to get a booster. And the case is especially weak for males 20-30 where there's a ~1 in 200,000 risk of myocarditis. The problem is, as Andy Slavitt, has been saying on Twitter for months, boosters are about way more than that! They are about reducing transmission, for instance, something that the FDA didn't consider at all because there's no RCT directly addressing that question (only a ton of indirect evidence). The Israel data (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114255) and Qatar data (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.25.21262584v1.full.pdf) showed very clearly that efficacy against *infection* drops to near 0 after 6 months for anyone over 18. Other studies have shown the viral load in nasal passages is not significantly different between unvaccinated and people several months after vaccination. If you want to read more about what the FDA officials were thinking, read the article co-authored by Krause and Gruber, the two high-ranking FDA officials who quit in protest: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext
Slavitt was right, FDA officials were wrong (see https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1439267009519243265)
See also Nobel Laureate in Economics Paul Romer's epic take-down of Gruber & Krause's shameful anti-booster article
https://twitter.com/paulmromer/status/1437806566892359684?s=20
>This is where, theoretically, the suggestion should be "talk to your Congressional representative".
As the rest of your comment implied: Would that it were so simple.
I have more respect for people who try
Do the rapid tests and RT-PCR tests currently offered in U.S pharmacies such as CVS, work well in detecting the Omicron variant?
Yes. The current PCR tests have already been checked and shown to work.
The rapid tests in the US all test for the nucleocapsid protein, which is not where the Omicron mutations are, so are very likely to work as well.
They will show that someone has *coronavirus* but will they identify the variant? I can't imagine that they've already updated everything to find omicron, even if it were merely a software update (and it's probably not?).
No, neither the rapid nor PCR tests will identify which variant you have. Other, follow-up tests are required to do that.
It looks like at least *some* PCR tests *can* identify omicron, because they test for the presence of several genes, one of which is so varied in omicron that it doesn't show up - so if you see all the genes but that one, you can be pretty confident that it's omicron (though there were other variants in 2020 that had this same feature).
https://www.who.int/news/item/26-11-2021-classification-of-omicron-(b.1.1.529)-sars-cov-2-variant-of-concern
I’m a lowly medical student, and I’m creating a medical Education program. Would any of you like to help me develop it or to learn more about it?
I’m coding it myself and I believe you will be intrigued by even its current capabilities : )
Ask for contact information if interested.
Hi Adam,
I am also a lowly medical student, with a background in CS and mild startup experience. I would love to hear about your work. Like Dan, I’d prefer to hear some things about it first: what’s your target customer, and why is this better than existing options? Ideally would like to see that here or via email, but if you feel the pitch has to happen via voice, I’m cool with a short phone call.
5043349497 sounds good : )
I'm interested (and a senior software dev at a FAANG), but would like to understand what makes your proposal not work well on Coursera etc
Set a zoom meeting appointment by email?
abk93@cornell.edu
I'd like to hear something about why existing solutions are insufficient before committing much time.
Coursera is good, but it isn't the apt comparison to what I am working on.
They don't serve the same purposes, you might easily use my software to absorb a Coursera lecture more efficiently, for example.
This software is effectively a disparate method for medical-specific note-taking / converting text into tutorial formats / using medical drawings on your computer to relay medical information quickly and in professional quality.
I don't know that anything similar exists yet, frankly.
Unfortunately it's already been announced/happened, but if there is an ACX Grant Program 2 I think public applications with a prediction market would have been interesting
My grant proposal involved creating a prediction market. Does that count?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-198/comment/3648492
That'd be really cool. I imagine it could help a lot with evaluating them faster as well. The applications that everyone predicts have a low chance of being funded can probably be skimmed without spending too much time.
Are you saying that the Republicans are the Party of Freedom of Speech, and the Democrats are not the Party of Freedom of Speech? Or do both parties claim that label?
When a school district in Virginia tries to use a lawsuit to shut down a website publishing information about school finances (especially information released by the school district after parents filed a FOIA request), is that pro-freedom-of-speech, or anti-freedom-of-speech?
https://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/victory-for-virginia-moms-who-challenged-school-district/
When a school district reduces the list of books being given to students in their curriculum, is that a restriction on freedom of speech? Or is it a change of curriculum?
The trauma is mostly socially created, yes.
My proposal is "sex ed at 12, AoC at 14". Sex ed has to be before AoC so that kids know things like "you can say no if you want" and "you can get STDs if you have sex in certain ways" (without those, rape-by-deception and rape-by-implicit-coercion rear their heads). And AoC needs to be low so that teenagers don't get a motive to lie about their age. I'd be more open to revising my goals lower than higher.
> The trauma is mostly socially created, yes.
What is the best evidence for this statement?
Different people can react differently to the same thing. For example, you shoot two guys in the chest -- one dies, one survives. But we probably wouldn't look at the second guy and conclude "shooting people isn't *really* lethal, that is mostly a myth". We would probably frame it like "sometimes the victim is lucky".
In the same way, I am curious whether the quality of evidence for trauma being socially created is more like "there is *one* controversial guy on internet who said he was sexually abused as a kid but he doesn't have any trauma" (by the way, if we actually do have the same guy in mind, he changed his opinion later), or there is some statistics saying like "out of X people having this experience, only Y were traumatized".
"This guy isn't traumatised" wouldn't be evidence at all (at least, not in our society); that guy would have to be an exception even to "socially created".
I'm talking about the stories Chaz Gibson mentioned: "kid was doing fine until society intervenes and tells the kid he/she's a victim, at which point kid suddenly develops trauma"; those are straight-up proof that it *can* be socially created, and one would expect much larger numbers of PTSD cases to come from people who already knew society expects X to cause trauma. Moreover, there have been cultures that did this sort of thing on a large scale (or did other associated-with-PTSD things like warfare on a large scale), and they didn't collapse from everyone having PTSD (note also the much-lower rates of PTSD from e.g. WWI, which already had things like artillery).
The model is "if you expect trauma, then people who don't get traumatised will question their experience which can cause trauma; trauma is natively rare so *at present* this is the main cause of PTSD".
> Moreover, there have been cultures that did this sort of thing on a large scale (or did other associated-with-PTSD things like warfare on a large scale), and they didn't collapse from everyone having PTSD (note also the much-lower rates of PTSD from e.g. WWI, which already had things like artillery).
Not sure how to distinguish this from a hypothesis that in the past we expected less "civilized behavior" from people than we do now. In other words, perhaps things that we associate with PTSD now, were simply considered a normal behavior back then.
The idea that there was less PTSD after WW1 is a bit ridiculous to me. Sure the exact definition did not exist but shell shock was pretty well known. The average way someone who did not (manage to) hide the symptoms is very well exemplified by the "slap incidents" of Gen. Patton during WW2.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Patton_slapping_incidents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_rape#Female_on_male_statutory_rape
The case of female on male statutory rape seems to show that, even if they don't feel like victims, they still experience psychological distress.
I personally know a woman who was regularly sexually used by her grandfather until the age of 9, when she stood up to him and refused to let it happen further. To this day she feels that she was violated, and that she has suffered lifelong psychological scars that she still is trying to fully heal: that it harmed her marriage, harmed her relationship with her daughter (something her daughter agrees with, by the by), and caused her to be filled with rage and contempt towards others for most of her adult life.
Did society do that to her? Perhaps. But it should be noted her case is ideal for a non harmful sexual relationship with a pre-pubescent: it was with a family member she trusted, when she made it clear she did not consent he stopped, and every other member of her family she talked to about it tried to minimize the harm, putting social pressure on her not to make a big deal out of it. So it's not clear to me at all that we can assign a high probability to the harm being only caused by social conditioning. And, of course, cases like hers are not hard to find.
Given that we cannot be certain on what the cause of harm is, and given that the only benefit of re-framing society to accept sex with pre-pubescents is to allow a very small fraction of society to experience more sexual satisfaction in their life than before, and given that the risk is normalizing practices that cause lasting psychological harm to children, I would say we should err on the side of continuing to socially condemn sex with pre-pubescents.
Read the introduction of this very famous paper: https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf
Talk about a hook, by the way.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to read Lolita after all.
I'd say that pedophilia is a sexual orientation. I'd also say that it's one that can't morally be acted out, much in the way that someone with a paraphilia for vore can't either. It's an unfortunate state to be in; like being born a psychopath, or with a severe genetic predilection to addiction. It's not your fault you turned out this way, but you still have responsibility over what you do with what you were given.
The alternative is that people choose to be attracted to pre-pubescents, which doesn't seem tenable in a post-gay rights world. Every argument against "homosexuality is a choice" works for pedophilia as well. Of course the traditional reframing of that argument has been "homosexual attraction is not a choice, but acting on it is" and I would say that certainly applies to pedophilia.
As for the rest, I'm a natural law kind of guy. I believe the telos of sex is towards reproduction, and when you get away from that things get bad. Sex with a pre-pubescent is disordered because they're not a proper target of reproduction, same as having sex with a goat, or a corpse. Of course that leads the standard counterarguments: what about having sex with a barren woman, or a sex toy, or masturbation in general. Quite frankly I don't have great answers to those (I have answers, just not great ones). But I do think going with the "Is this something I can have a child with" standard fits my moral intuition that sex with pre-pubescents is wrong even if no "harm" occurs. If you take a utilitarian standard then it would hold that some sexual acts with pre-pubescents is licit provided they are not physically harmed and either can't remember it or remember it fondly.
As far as age of consent goes, I think post-puberty sex can be licit but may be unwise or coercive. Traditionally that has been prevented by parents being in charge of who gets to have sex with their daughters (sons less so, but you only have to have a governor on one of the sexes to prevent unwise or coercive mating. Since women have a much higher cost to pay from sexual mistakes or crimes it makes since to focus your attention on them). Our society has come to the collective decision hat we will trust people to make their own choices at the age of 18, that seems like a fine Schelling point for when parental guardianship over their children's sex lives should end. So I would support allowing sex between those over 18 and those under it provided that the minor is post-pubescent, the minor's parents consent, and the minor consents as well. Not a perfect system since parents can be neglectful, abusive, negligent, or tricked, but we trust parents to make every other decision for their children despite that so why not the sexual arena as well.
Still, I would be loathe to campaign for such a change: our current system works acceptably well, and it's really not too much to ask for someone to wait 2-5 years for the object of their affections to turn 18 before having sex.
I'm reminded of an interview with Greg Allman. He was asked if was true if the Allman Brothers carried a laminated card with the age of consent in each city they visited. He replied yes.
Wow! That was awesome and right on (for me) thankyou.
Re: sex dolls, I can only quote "the rents too damn high" candidate for governor of NY back in??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party
Jimmy McMillan. And I'm paraphrasing, not a direct quote.
"The rents too damn high party doesn't care if you have sex with a shoe in the privacy of your home. We do care that "the rents too damn high!"
I'm not familiar with Lysander Spooner, though I'd be happy to learn about him if you care to teach.
Funnily enough, the natural law stuff comes from my religious background combined with encountering the works of Edward Feser to give them a stronger logical foundation. That and reading The Illustrated Guide to Law (https://lawcomic.net/) which brought to my attention the obvious fact that pre-Victorian era puberty was the dividing line in these matters: unlike "age of consent" it is obvious to everyone in the community whether a girl is pre or post-pubescent, so there can be no claim of ignorance. I now view age of consent laws as an attempt by the state to serve a protective role towards young people that I think is generally better suited for parents and guardians.
I can’t even bring myself to read “Lolita”. Too creepy for me.
"It seems to me nobody dare talk about this stuff."
Because it never ends well, and it attracts the predictable kind of audience.
Yeah I think it is new. I see the upside of the feature when I’m reading comments on my iPhone.
Before, deeply nested threads would start to approach ticker tape narrow with only a couple characters per line.
Was mentioning this before as well when Scott was wondering about slight differences lead to huge differences in the number of comments: Substack's comment functionality is subpar and way behind other 'for discussion' kind of places on the net. They just need to install a decent software and not fall victim to the NIH syndrome.
It entirely breaks rwading comments on phones though, because leaving and coming back to the parent page resets the hidden state of all comments above, and the scroll position is restored before comments are reloaded.
I've pretty much given up on following the comment discussion since the move to substack, the experience is just broken on mobile devices.
Leaving and coming back is also broken on desktop.
(I likely won't be renewing my subscription on account of this. I don't like paying money for broken shit.)
Are there any phone browsers which accept plug-ins written by normies? This is fixable, but last time I looked you needed a permission slip from Brandon Eich to install an extension onto any phone browser.
The hostility to the unvaccinated assumes they are more likely to spread the disease, but it isn't clear if that is true. Vaccination is very effective against death, less effective against infection, and the latter declines over time. I've seen one report that it was down to 20% after five or six months, and multiple estimates of about 50%.
Vaccinated people are more likely to be asymptomatic, hence have no reason to self quarantine when infected, and vaccinated people rationally take fewer precautions since the risk if they are infected is less. Combining those, it's entirely possible that vaccinated people are as likely, even more likely, to infect other people as unvaccinated. That would explain why we haven't seen a sharp decline infections, only in deaths, in countries with high vaccination rates.
Update on that: Just today there was a study estimating what fraction of the infections are coming from/going to vaccinated vs unvaccinated people in Germany. Scenario A seems to be the more plausible one, and they get
unvaccined -> unvaccined: 51%
unvaccined -> vaccined: 25%
vaccined -> unvaccined: 16%
vaccined -> vaccined: 9%
The other scenario B assumes that vaccinations decline stronger, but even there vac->vac is only 16%.
Also, I have also been paying attention to the ratio between incidences of infections in unvaccinated vs vaccinated groups (data from various European countries, but on very different levels. Some national, some regional, some by age groups, some pooled). It was quite consistent that the incidence rate in unvaccinated was by a factor 3-10 higher than in vaccinated people, and 10 was frequently appearing.
(There was one outlier, in UK data. This has been hotly debated. There are at least some claims that this was an artifact from different databases, though I don't find this fully convincing. In any case, it is a gross outlier against all numbers from other countries that I have seen.)
These ratios are strongly confounded and must not be taken at face values. Many European places have "3G" rules saying that people need to get tested if they are not vaccinated or recovered. Still, I find it hard to believe that this explains a factor of 10, or that large factors appear consistently over many different places and settings. Consistently, for hospitals in Germany, the majority there (even 90% majority for ICUs) is unvaccinated, even though the vaccination rates in older people are pretty high. (A vaccinated old person is more at risk than an unvaccinated young person, so with similar incidences we might still see more vaccinated people in hospitals.)
So the hypothesis "vaccinated drive the pandemic in Europe as much as unvaccinated" has to explain away a lot of things. That's why I find the conclusion of the study quite credible, that most spreading goes back to, or at least involves, unvaccinated people. Note that this counts absolute numbers of infections, even though unvaccinated people are a minority of the population.
Are those estimates based on data on who gets infected by whom, or on a model, and if the model how do they take account of the two factors I mentioned that increase the probability that vaccinated will infect others?
Also, for the ratio figures, are they doing random testing? If not, they can be expected to underestimate infection in the vaccinated, since they are more likely to be asymptomatic. I know the U.K. does have a program of random testing, don't know if other countries do. If not, that could explain the difference.
No, it's models, so all caveats apply. The assumptions are mostly based on the UK sampling data, and based on these assumption, they try to match the number of symptomatic infections with several models.
I don't think there is any substantial data anywhere in the world (larger than in the order of 10-100 cases) where we actually know for a whole population where the sources of infections are. That's just hard to find out. Of course, we know it for a subset of the infections (i.e., in the same household), but knowing it for a small subset is perhaps(?) not overly helpful for this question.
Yes, sorry. The study is here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.24.21266831v1.full
Yes, you are right. I did look the numbers up a while ago, and then it was close to 90%. But you are right, there has been a significant shift. Still, given how many elderly are vaccinated, 35% and 44% do not seem large. (But I haven't done the calculation.)
I think this is a matter of interpretation. Certainly the situation would be much less dramatic with higher vaccination rates. It *is* much less dramatic in other European countries with higher vaccination rates. Some of them also have moderate to high incidence rates, but as far as I got it, they don't have overflowing ICUs. Germany has made the big mistake of not rolling out booster shots in time, which seems to be the main reason for the 35% and 44% . But even so, the unvaccinated minority makes a huge difference. If ICU patients went down by a factor of 44%, the situation would be pretty much ok.
I share your prognosis (with low confidence) that we have probably seen the peak of the current wave in terms of new infections. But I don't agree at all with the "no significant change in measures" part. According to a current Forsa poll, 63% of Germans have already changed their personal behaviour in reaction to the current wave. (Btw. in the subgroup of unvaccinated it was only 46%.) Large public events like the famous "Weihnachtsmärkte" have been cancelled en masse, as have numerous small events, and big sport events (Bundesliga) are now happening with much smaller audiences. And even so, the only parts of Germany were the trends are clearly reversed are the southern regions, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, which did have lockdowns in highly affected municipalities (closing of shops, hotels, cultural institutions, sports, ...). Heck, some regions of BW had curfews for unvaccinated people!
Apart from that, the question of whether vaccination should be mandatory is a political question. I am not really happy with how quickly the whole political elite has switched from "mandates are impossible" to "sure we do it, how high exactly is the fine". But in principle I support mandatory vaccinations. I think it is still true that European countries with high vaccination rates are doing pretty much fine (perhaps with some moderate measures like wearing masks in winter), while countries with low vaccination rates are facing serious threats, and there are good reasons to be in the first category. Like, really really good reasons. Even good enough to make vaccination mandatory even against the will of a minority, in my eyes.
> and vaccinated people rationally take fewer precautions since the risk if they are infected is less.
A vaccinated person, after vaccination, is likely to take fewer precautions than they were before.
HOWEVER, I am skeptical (as of November 2021) that a vaccinated person, after vaccination, is doing riskier things than an unvaccinated person.
I just don't have a good mental model for "refuses to take vaccine, but takes a lot of covid precautions." I'm sure there are some out there (maybe they just hate needles?) but that's where I am.
> The hostility to the unvaccinated assumes they are more likely to spread the disease
Not only that, they also manage to successfully clog hospitals and there is no willingness to kick them of hospitals to make space for other people.
I admit that doing anything like that would be not viable, not realistic to achieve and likely a dumb idea anyway.
This comment is mostly result of frustrating situation and knowledge that if I (or some family or friends or also strangers) get in some kind of accident then risk of death or serious injury is now much larger.
There were already deaths in extended family that were directly attributable to vaccine misinformation (that caused for example 90 year old person to not vaccinate, shed died from respiratory illness that quite likely was COVID) or likely from overloaded hospital and collapsed ambulance system (in one case ambulance was not dispatched because none were available, with prompt medical attention maybe it was a survivable, who knows).
The difference is that not being fat is requiring much, much more effort and is more complicated than getting vaccinated.
#Fuck'em #SelfSelected
Only Cowards delete comments, and I thought it was fun.
The actual blinded trials showed that vaccines reduced infection, even if it wasn't the primary endpoint. Are you claiming fraud or something like that, or more making a point about how behavioral changes are induced in the real world by vaccination?
were the trials testing everyone, or only those that showed symptoms? Also, as jstr implies, the original trials wouldn't tell us what effectiveness was five or six months out.
Here's one study that shows high efficacy: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3916094
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017 paints a less rosy picture with only ~60 something percent reduction in asymptomatic infection, but that's still an extremely strong effect.
I'm not sure about effectiveness long after vaccination, but I sure as hell got my booster ASAP because it's definitely lower.
I think that you are mistaken in considering Western conservatives to be hostile to sexual deviance. If they were, it should be very surprising to see them keep electing homosexual leaders such as Geert Wilders, Ilan Sadé, Søren Pape Poulsen and so on.
Spain has had a number of homosexual conservative senators and the US had a homosexual running to be the conservative party's presidential candidate. Note that we don't see such representation for groups that everyone agrees that Western conservatives are hostile towards, such as pædophiles or communists. So how is this considerable homosexual representation compatible with Western conservatives being hostile to homosexuality?
It seems you've been misled about how western conservatives feel about queen folk
You wrote "But in reality, even now, many queer people in the west do not idenfity with queer culture and would rather live and participate in a conservative society — just one that doesn't want to kill them just for existing."
But in fact only a vanishing small minority of western conservatives want to kill queers for just existing. The other 99% of conservatives do not want this at all. You seem to be arguing against a ridiculous strawman.
Look at some of the recent hot button political issues. They include things like whether a bakery should be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding and whether Transwomen should be allowed to participate in women's sports. These are small fringe issues that exist in a society where both sides, Liberal and conservative, take it for granted that queer folk have a right to exist and have sex with whoever they please.
So, this is the first I've head of that, and all I know is what the relevant wikipedia article says about its use in the US. Very open to being corrected on the facts of the matter if I'm wrong. My impressions from the article is that this defense typically (when successful) leads to a second-degree murder conviction instead of first-degree.
It seems to me that the category of "gay panic legal defense" doesn't really cut reality at the joints. Consider the typical distinction between first/second degree murder (each state defines these, but they're mostly uniform in broad strokes.)
* First degree murder usually requires premeditation or that the murder is committed in the course of a different felony, like armed robbery.
* Second degree murder requires the murder to be unplanned but intentional or caused by reckless disregard of human life.
Murdering someone because you got mad at a homosexual sexual advance (presuming you do it immediately in the heat of the moment, rather than going home and making a plan and killing them the next day) IS second degree murder. Claiming that you did precisely that is a defense against first-degree murder only in that it's a claim that you didn't have a plan to kill them.
And this is why I don't think it's a sensible categorization of legal defense. If you fly off the handle due to a heterosexual unwanted advance and kill somebody, that is also second degree murder. And claiming that you killed someone for a heterosexual unwanted advance is no different as a defense than a homosexual unwanted advance; there's no actual difference between those two defenses (and both should be effective at reducing your charge from first-degree to second-degree if you can convince the jury that you're telling the truth.)
If my understanding of the reality here is correct, then the 'gay panic' term isn't really a distinct type of defense, and so shouldn't be singled out for banning.
There's a generational divide on the issue. I think younger people on the right care way less about gay marriage and so forth than Gen X and especially Boomers do. It's easy not to notice this, though, because there are a lot more Boomers on the right than there are millenials or Gen Zers, currently. As young people who are currently on the left get older and move to the right (as is typical), this will become more apparent over the next couple decades.
I would also note that as far as societal roles for people with non-normative sexual preferences, I think the Catholic church actually offered this for a long time, where *wink* *wink* the priests and the nuns are all celibate because they're married to the Lord or whatever the deal was, certainly served as cover for a lot of gay men and lesbians who opted into those roles over the centuries. Needless to say, this doesn't seem to be working out very well these days, but it at least exists.
As to why the stigma in the first place: I think you're correct that history has something to do with this. Am I wrong, or do a good chunk of the male-male homosexual relationships of ancient Greece and Rome seem to have been pretty exploitative? Modern Afghanistan has some famously awful cultural practices in this regard, too. So I think one could at least posit that a society where the rule of law is somewhat weak and which is stratified by class (which describes a lot of societies right up until quite recently) maybe protects the lower class from exploitation by powerful upper class men when it creates strong stigmas against homosexuality? Just a thought.
One other possible factor I'd throw out there: men have a higher preference on average for sexual variety than women do. But since it takes two to tango in a heterosexual relationship, female preferences wind up being a limiting factor in the male quest for sexual novelty. Obviously, this doesn't work with male-male relationships, and promiscuous sex is a good vehicle for pathogen transmission. Ergo, one could argue that a society with high tolerance for homosexual behavior is one that will inevitably have a higher disease burden (modern society perhaps exempted, since we've gotten good at killing pathogens).
There's no real evidence that people move to the right as they get older. I think people conflate conservative = right wing, when in reality, conservative really just means "resists change".
Indeed, that is the best description of such; people tend to be stuck in their ways and have relatively stable attitudes over their lifetime.
I think a lot of this misconception comes from the idea that the hippies grew up and drifted to the right, but IRL, Nixon won just over half of the under 30 voters in 1972.
Leviticus 20:13?
Some pretty harsh OT prohibitions.
I've been meaning to comment on one of these threads, because nobody ever bothers to try steelmanning the 'conservative' position on LGBT issues. I don't necessarily blame my fellow conservatives for doing so, as it's very possible nobody has actually thought much about how and why that came about, and as a conservative, it's possible to defend the status quo without knowing how or why we got there. Chesterton's Fence doesn't apply if you plan to leave the fence alone.
Let's ponder a different question first. Why is American culture so hostile to blind people? There are many things we take for granted that blind people are excluded from. There are jobs we deny them the ability to hold, and they are denied the full ability to access many things the rest of us take for granted. I mean, it's unfair that they can't enjoy the Grand Canyon or the Smithsonian like the rest of us. And yet, while I'm sure somewhere someone is throwing around the world 'ableist', I think it's generally accepted that we don't fear or hate blind people.
The whole raft of LGBT issues doesn't concern something relatively trivial like one of the senses, but something that concerns two of the fundamental drives in almost literally (literally) the entire f**king animal kingdom: copulation and offspring. The cultural divide comes down to the difference between sections of society that can separate the two and those that can't. As a conservative, I'm in the side that can't; fundamentally, I think those who believe they can are still burdened with a lot of assumptions derived from the fact that the two are inseparable that they've never grappled with, and the result is massively damaging political assumptions that proceed on the basis that one side doesn't exist, assumptions that have already had costly effects on society.
My mother is a blue-dog Democrat (she'd vote for a blue dog if it ran as a Democrat) from a blue collar union background. She doesn't think much about politics; whatever the Democrats are for today, she's for. If you told her she was a bigot, she'd be aghast. And yet, I can sense the disappointment that I'm never going to produce her a grandkid (that a large number of my aunts and uncles on both sides of the family are single introverts and that it was obvious that I didn't fall far from the tree may have softened it a bit). It also helped that my sister obviously didn't inherit the same genes. If she had come out as a lesbian, mom would have been devastated (fortunately, she didn't. and my mom has a grandkid to spoil). And yet, if you told my mom she was homophobic for her preferences, she'd be aghast, because as a progressive Democrat that votes for LGBT rights, she can't be homophobic; she's perfectly happy to support LGBT rights as long as she gets her grandkid (and the grandkid has a stable two-parent family, and so many other traditional assumptions, which are completely outdated as long as you're talking about kids other than her grandkid). Mom also wouldn't have hated my sister or anything like that, just been profoundly disappointed.
Even talking about much of LGBT rights assumes a specific answer to the question of how separate offspring and copulation are that was never something that we as a society ever collectively decided on. If you believe the purpose of the existence of the institution of marriage across multiple cultures is to secure the existence of offspring and family lineage (a natural result of thinking that copulation and offspring go together), talking about 'gay marriage' is a non sequitur. Even if slightly different and always imperfectly executed, cultures evolved the institution of marriage because it served a purpose for society.
I'm fully realizing that there is an incompatible values debate here, so there's no right answer. I'm also fully willing to admit that in order to hold on to a bunch of values that they don't fully understand based only on traditions, a fair number of conservatives (and others) have acted horribly towards LGBT individuals. However, if you want me to accept you living with your values, you have to agree to let me live with mine. Part of that is recognizing that just as not wanting a blind airline pilot is not based on fear or hatred of blind people, not wanting to encourage relationships not based on offspring (looked at both in terms of providing a stable home for the kid and a source of support for the parents as they age) is not necessarily based on animosity towards LGBT individuals.
Here's my problem with the... let's call it the "offspring argument": homosexuality can be found in the rest of the animal kingdom! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_homosexual_behavior
Hell over 90% of giraffe copulation is between two males! https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ashraful-Kabir-2/publication/353914157_Unusual_pair_bonding_of_some_animals_a_mini_review/links/611896e70c2bfa282a46433a/Unusual-pair-bonding-of-some-animals-a-mini-review.pdf
My understanding is that homosexuals do, in fact, play a pivotal role in the rearing of animal offspring. Namely, they act as a guaranteed pair of adults that are unlikely to have their own offspring so that in the (very likely, at least in the animal kingdom) event that an immature cub or offspring loses its parents, it can still be brought up properly. In other words, homosexuals exist so that parentless offspring can be adopted and cared for.
So actually, by your beliefs in the natural order being more important, you should not only be encouraging gay marriage, but also pushing to make it easier for gay couples to adopt!
Speaking of marriage, that's not the only reason marriages were created. Many marriages are done for political, societal, and economic gain. When marriage was invented, women were seen more as property than as people, and marriages were essentially business transactions. It's why, for example, christian weddings have the part about "who gives this bride?", why doweries used to be, and in some places still are, a thing, and why the existence of political marriages by using princesses (usually with no chance at the throne) to secure alliances between nations came into being. It's also why people get married just so one of them can get citizenship, or access to healthcare, or next-of-kin rights, or visitation rights, or a bevy of other societal perks from businesses and institutions that look down on unmarried, cohabitating couples, regardless of orientation.
Oh and one last thing, blind people could totally be airline pilots if given proper training and accommodations. Modern navigational equipment, air traffic control techniques, and weather forecasting mean planes practically fly themselves these days. Just modify the instruments to read measurements out loud and the steering handles with buttons to prompt specific readouts and I'll bet you a blind person could be trained to fly.
Giraffes are not homosexual; as far as can be seen, male giraffes will attempt to copulate with female giraffes and vice-versa. A lot of the supposedly "homosexual" behavior is actually dominance based behavior. That doesn't mean that they don't engage in "homosexual" behavior for other reasons, but as far as we can tell, there aren't any homosexual giraffes in the way that there are gay humans.
Being exclusively homosexual is hugely deleterious from a natural selection POV. The gay uncle theory is wrong for a number of reasons, ranging from "it doesn't actually help to pass on your genes very well" to "many of the animals that exhibit homosexual behavior don't even help rear young."
Indeed, there's fairly significant evidence that the cause of homosexuality in male humans is likely some sort of reaction caused by a woman's immune system on male fetuses; the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be gay, and gay people's mothers are more likely to have certain kinds of antibodies suggesting that they had an immune reaction to a male fetus they were carrying.
This would also explain why homosexuals seem to have significantly higher rates of mental illness than straight people do.
It would also explain why homosexual behavior has never been eliminated; it's primarily environmental, so there's little ability to select against it, and selecting against a strong immune system has much larger downsides than having the odd gay child.
As far as we can tell, homosexual behavior in humans is only about 8-25% heritable - it is a heavily environmentally mediated trait, and none of the alleles which correlate with a higher chance of homosexuality actually cause you to be homosexual, they simply alter the probability marginally (present estimates that the five most associated regions they have found can explain maybe 1% of variation).
This is consistent with the notion that these regions have some other, non-homosexual effect and the homosexuality increase is a side effect of whatever else it is doing (or a mutation that simply isn't deletorious enough to be strongly selected against).
None of this makes homosexuals bad people and it is stupid to discriminate against them, but the notion that homosexuality is biologically advantageous is completely unsupported by any sort of biological evidence whatsoever.
I don't think your point about adoption holds for humans. My impression is that most orphaned kids are usually taken in and raised by blood relatives, the vast majority of whom are not homosexuals, and I wager this has pretty much always been true. Further, there's no reason for evolution to favor such a system, anyway, because the reproductive benefit accrues to the orphaned youngster, not the gay adoptive parent(s).
I mostly agree with the rest of your comment, though.
The fact that there are over 100000 kids currently up for adoption in the US alone https://www.adoptuskids.org/meet-the-children/children-in-foster-care/about-the-children#:~:text=How%20many%20children%20are%20awaiting,are%20waiting%20to%20be%20adopted. says that's probably not the case. When bad things happen, relatives are rarely in a place to take in another mouth to feed, and that's assuming the kid has any known relatives in the first place. Also, there are enough examples of animals adopting members of other species, let alone from their own https://www.isfoundation.com/campaign/why-do-animals-adopt, that selfish reproductive benefits must absolutely be outweighed by species survival instincts. You would absolutely nurse even your injured worst enemy back to health if the alternative was the potential annihilation of humanity.
There are very few kids in the US under 3 available for adoption by strangers. If you give birth to a kid that does not have *extreme* impairment and put them up for adoption, they'll get taken right away.
Okay, but think about the proportions. 100,000 sounds like a lot, but this site says the number of children in the US whose primary caregiver was a grandparent was 2.9 million as of 2010:
In 2010, more than half of children (54 percent) who were living with grandparents were being raised mainly by a grandparent who reported having primary responsibility for most of the child’s basic needs. The numbers of children with grandparents as their main care providers grew from 2.5 million in 2005 to 2.9 million in 2010, a 16 percent increase over the decade.
...
In 2010, about 920,000 children were being raised by grandparents with no parent living in the home. This number declined slightly, however, from 960,000 in 2005. Compared with all children cared for by grandparents, children raised by custodial grandparents are more likely to have a disability, be teenagers, and have family income below the poverty line.
https://www.prb.org/resources/more-u-s-children-raised-by-grandparents/
As to your second point, that's true; we do see intra-species and sometimes even inter-species adoption, but that has little or nothing to do with homosexuality, either in animals or humans; it cuts across sexual orientation boundaries. I think I stand by my original point: there's little reason for evolution to favor homosexuality (in males especially, but probably females, too) if their only role in reproduction is to raise somebody else's kids.
I'd like to think I could do a good job of raising my sister's kid if something happened to her and her husband. My brother-in-law has a married sister, so they'd probably be a better bet. My BiL's family are perfectly good people. Still, I don't think they'd do as well raising my sister's kid as they would their own, even though they intended to. I know people who were adopted by loving families and turned out fine, and I know people who were raised by horrible biological parents. Still, I'd wager a sizable amount that if there were a way to rate parenting, on average biological parents are better than non-biological parents.
For that matter, we talk about role models, especially with respect to society. Does a same-sex couple provide a good role model for a child of the opposite sex? Does it help to have individuals of both genders for children to grow accustomed to? I wouldn't know for sure, but I would wager. I suspect there are some couples that would work fine, but if the answer isn't that same-sex couples are on average every bit as good, then we have a good reason for prioritizing opposite-sex couples in adoptions, all else being equal.
And 'every bit as good' is ultimately a value judgement itself. And then there's the social pressure to pretend that 'every bit as good' is there when it's not, to avoid making people feel bad (as opposed to the people that have to live with the long term consequences).
On top of that, there's the social costs associated with normalizing treating sex as something other than reproductive, which gets back closer to the root of the problem. If copulation (sex) isn't a means for reproduction, what is it? Entertainment? Recreation? I don't know what to call it, but any way it leads to serious other issues. We've got a whole 'incel' problem where people that feel society owes them what is nothing more than a short-term diversion feel that they're the victims of social inequality. We've got higher status males that partake in what is supposed to be harmless fun and find that 9 months later they're on the hook for the rest of their life... and the kid as meal ticket isn't being set up for a great future in the process. We've got women that held off on raising a family that discover that when they finally want to get that long term satisfaction of raising kids down that there's nobody there for them anymore.
"Oh and one last thing, blind people could totally be airline pilots if given proper training and accommodations."
Blind people can, with equipment, fly an airplane. But that's not what we're talking about, and the fact that you only mention the mechanisms of flying the plane is an indicator of the problem. For starters, think about the need to deal with emergency situations (where all that additional gear has failed), or the lack of safety resulting from bypassing the regulations put in place to deal with those.
How much would it cost to make blind people totally equal to sighted people as far as outcomes? Proportionately represented in every job from airline pilot to baseball umpire? Just as happy with every art museum and sunset? Hint: with current technology you can't do it, except Harrison Bergeron-style, by blinding everyone.
Just because the technology doesn't exist does not mean you should give up and stop trying to improve things. If the there is a potential point of failure, you build systems and regulations to account for it. Blind people can totally enjoy art museums: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/multisensory-art/486200/. They recreate the art pieces with contours and textures to represent shapes and colors respectively. Building on that idea, we could maybe let them enjoy sunsets too if we developed a cross between the shape display from the first xmen movie https://youtu.be/55voa5Pee2M with enough granularity and these mirrors in different mediums https://www.wired.com/video/watch/obsessed-mechanical-mirrors and then filming the sunset, maybe even using temperature differentials to indicate warm vs cool colors. Blind people can also be taught to use clickers as a form of echolocation, and blind baseball LEAGUES actually exist https://www.nbba.org/ so the problem of blind umpires could probably be solved pretty easily too.
In other words, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible .
Getting back to your point about other reasons for having sex though, humans are not the only animals that have it recreationally https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/female-dolphins-appear-have-sex-pleasure-and-orgasms-thanks-their-well-1386150%3famp=1 and a couple other reasons you didn't mention are for stress release and (unfortunately) asserting dominance. Also, regular masturbation might be good for lowering the risk of prostate cancer in men https://www.urologyhealth.org/healthy-living/urologyhealth-extra/magazine-archives/fall-2020/ask-the-experts-does-having-more-ejaculations-lessen-the-chance-of-prostate-cancer so now we can add regular health and fitness to that list too.
When it comes to whether gay people should be allowed to adopt, kids are not guaranteed to have any relatives that are even alive, let alone willing and able to take them in if something happens. The fact that over 100,000 kids are currently waiting to be adopted just in the US alone https://www.adoptuskids.org/meet-the-children/children-in-foster-care/about-the-children#:~:text=How%20many%20children%20are%20awaiting,are%20waiting%20to%20be%20adopted means that only letting straight couples or exceptional single people adopt is not enough. Even if gay people make worse parents overall, it's not right to throw out a potential solution just because it's not the absolute best possible. I doubt the variance among gay parents is any worse than among het ones, and you must agree that it is still better than having no parents, yeah?
"I'd like to think I could do a good job of raising my sister's kid if something happened to her and her husband. My brother-in-law has a married sister, so they'd probably be a better bet. My BiL's family are perfectly good people. Still, I don't think they'd do as well raising my sister's kid as they would their own, even though they intended to."
As an aside, your intuition is probably correct there, but I'd wager that has more to do with the "if something happened to her and her husband" part. The child would feel stressed because they'd have to adjust to having an entirely new family, and your brother-in-law's family would probably feel stressed because they were suddenly and unexpectedly forced to take responsibility for someone else's child. I'd imagine the results would be a lot better for a married couple that specifically wanted to adopt a child, especially if the child was raised with them from such a young age that he/she didn't remember his/her birth parents.
Regarding your main point, demanding that same-sex couples be *exactly* as fit for parenting is an unreasonably high standard, since statistically speaking there are always bound to be *some* differences when comparing different groups, even if it's just due to random noise and doesn't actually signify anything. It's also an unfairly selective demand, since there are probably all sorts of other categorizations that correspond to parenting quality to some degree, and yet almost no one suggests limiting adoption on the basis of those factors. Should Protestants be discouraged from adopting children on the basis that kids raised by Jewish, Catholic, or Mormon parents tend to have better life outcomes? Should Republicans be discouraged from adopting children if it turns out that kids raised by Democrats have better life outcomes, or vice-versa?
Furthermore, I'm not so sure the difference would be in the direction you assume; if it turned out that gay couples actually did a better job of raising children on average, would you then reverse your position and argue that gay couples should get *preferential* treatment when adopting? In fact, I've seen one study that proves that the children of gay couples do *better* in school than the children of straight couples; while this is partly due to the fact that gay couples who adopt children tend to be wealthier than average, there's still a slight positive correlation even when you account for socioeconomic status. Another study looked at the overall early life outcomes and mental/emotional health of children raised by lesbian parents, and found no difference in their well-being. See for yourself:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122420957249
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309949/
"How much would it cost to make blind people totally equal to sighted people as far as outcomes? Proportionately represented in every job from airline pilot to baseball umpire? Just as happy with every art museum and sunset? Hint: with current technology you can't do it, except Harrison Bergeron-style, by blinding everyone."
Argumentum Ad Extremis. If blind people can fly a plane with the aid of machinery, they should be allowed to do so, as long as there's another qualified person in the plane with them in case of emergencies. (Note that having another qualified person in the plane in case of emergencies is already recommended for all pilots, so that part wouldn't even be an added cost or burden.)
Right now, commercial airliners require two fully qualified pilots; presumably, they have a safety reason for that requirement. Changing the rules so that one pilot can be blind with technological assistance means relaxing those safety requirements. You might be willing to pay more and accept the slight additional risk to allow a blind pilot on your next flight, but it should be rather obvious that a sizable portion of the population might have an issue with making that trade and this isn't out of hatred or fear of blind people, but out of rational pragmatism.
Is it unfair to blind people that current safety regulations prevent them form being airline pilots? Yes. Will this make some of them depressed? Almost certainly. Should we do things to open opportunities for blind individuals? Yes. Can we make it so blind people have every opportunity available to sighted people? No. At some point you have to draw the line. Different people will draw the line of the acceptable costs versus benefits at different places. The problem is that once you admit you have to draw a line somewhere you're forced to confront the fact that you can't make the world a fair place for everyone. (And I could repeat the exercise with any number of other subjects. Is it fair that quadriplegics have obstacles to being firefighters? Is it fair that deaf people have obstacles to being sign language interpreters?)
It's unfair that people have physical disabilities. It's unfair that people have different mentalities. It's unfair that people have different starts in life. There's a limit on what can be done to make things fair, most importantly because 'fair' means different things to different people.
When you link copulation to marriage, aren't you really missing the critical middle connection, which is child-bearing? The hypocrisy here is that conservatives who link copulation to marriage don't condemn, say, barren women from marrying fertile men, do they? And lesbian or gay couples by definition aren't at risk of producing offspring from their copulations, per se. Of course, with the advent of technologies like birth control, fertility treatment, and surrogacy, even the link between copulation and child-bearing has been marginalized to a great degree. But since property definitions have evolved (including that women and children are no longer considered property themselves), maybe this copulation-marriage "value" needs to be updated too?
Remembering that the core concern here, "children should be raised in secure, loving two-parent homes when possible," may be the most powerful *reason* for the value means that the copulation-marriage "value" may be too crude and too limited at this point in human evolution.
Progressives, of course, often run too fast on updating values without considering unintended consequences (as Deseach points out in the "choosing embryo based on eye color" controversy elsewhere in this thread), so I understand the social contract includes allowing for conservatives to push back on how values are updated. Still, that does not absolve conservatives from updating their own priors to make sure the "value" still matches the reason for said value.
"When you link copulation to marriage, aren't you really missing the critical middle connection, which is child-bearing? The hypocrisy here is that conservatives who link copulation to marriage don't condemn, say, barren women from marrying fertile men, do they?"
Considering how many times I mentioned 'offspring' in the paragraph above, I don't know why you think I missed something. And while we don't condemn barren women just for being barren, usually societies have an out for marriages that don't produce offspring; in the case of the Catholic Church, the one easy way to get an annulment of your marriage was inability to conceive.
"Of course, with the advent of technologies like birth control, fertility treatment, and surrogacy, even the link between copulation and child-bearing has been marginalized to a great degree."
Again, even though people think it's minimized, there are still a lot of hidden remnants to that link that still crop up, from 'surrogate' parents on the hook for child support to the fallout from ineffective (or "ineffective") birth control.
"Still, that does not absolve conservatives from updating their own priors to make sure the "value" still matches the reason for said value. "
I agree that conservatives should have an idea of what they are conserving, and that a lot of the problem is people that don't realize they are low-information decision makers following the tribe, whether it be to follow tradition or to break it because it seems to no longer apply.
"Considering how many times I mentioned 'offspring' in the paragraph above, I don't know why you think I missed something."
Poor phrasing on my part and you are right - you did draw the correct lines to offspring and copulation. My beef is really that the Church links the "value" from copulation through to marriage and that that link breaks down for the reasons I cited above.
Both marriage and the two-parent household are obviously imperfect social constructs, the problem is that it's rational to believe you have to demonstrate a better idea before replacing them. Saying that marriage "may be" too crude and limited isn't enough; what's the alternative? And is the alternative so obviously superior that everyone has to endorse it?
One alternative was for the state to replace marriage with civil union as the legal contract and leave "marriage" as a spiritual sacrament. This would have satisfied legal protections for all while letting each group define "marriage" as they see fit. There was a time when this would have satisfied the gay community, but conservatives didn't seem to keen on that until too late.
The more serious problem in modern society is that the divorce rate is so high that the ideal of children being raised in a two-parent stable home has had far more serious challenges to it than gay couples wanting to have legal protections or even to raise children too.
You kinda partially pointed this out already yourself, but Japan is actually a great example of a society that's *more* hostile to transsexuality than ours. Trans people don't have to live their entire lives in the shadows (as if they did in the US, or e.g. Britain), but on the other hand, neither is there anything like an attempt to shame people for thinking they're gross, mocking them and so on, and *certainly* nothing like a movement to proclaim them or other types of deviant normal. For a facile example you can look up trivially yourself, Eiichiro Oda, who draws One Piece, is openly *pro*-trans and includes a surprising number of such figures in his comic, *but* they're basically only there to be the butt of jokes about how ridiculous they look and how gross and offputting they are to any normal red-blooded man. (Perhaps most notably, a character getting teleported to an Island whose name basically translates to "Tranny Island" and then spending two years "training" by fleeing from/beating up gross stubbled men in wigs chasing after him and trying to rape him. It's funny! Haha!) Certainly there's no attempt to claim that male transsexuals are actually women or anything like that. And this is the way a guy who sees transsexuals in a *positive* light depicts them. His stance is basically "Rocky Horror is rad".
Like Will G, I think the crucial distinction is that because Japan is securely conservative, there's no (socially relevant) movement to push progressive flat-eartherism like "trans women are women", so there also doesn't need to be any pushback against that. The American right *actually needs to struggle against* this stuff, so they'll inevitably come off as more aggressive about it. But also, since the Western progressive demands themselves are fundamentally insa--- incompatible with observed reality on a high level and have a strong Orwe--- coercive social control aspect, they inherently arouse the anger and even disgust of very many people, which of course is exactly one cognitive step away from aggression. In that sense, it's not about "clinging" -- most of these people would almost certainly either happily revert to a Japanese arrangement, or (the majority, I believe) would be unhappy with it as being too regressive.
I suppose that conservative people are usually religious, but different parts of the world have different religions, and different religions have different opinions on homosexuality. Japanese conservatives do not care about what Bible says on this topic. Conservatives in many African countries are even more strict against homosexuality.
Also, the cultural model of homosexuality seems to be different in modern West. I don't know enough history to say whether it is completely unique, or merely different from the Greek/Roman/Japanese model. I mean the idea of two adult people of the same sex marrying and then perhaps adopting children. As a man in ancient Greece/Rome you fucked little boys because it was fun, and then you married a woman to give you children: your de-facto little slaves and future heirs. Two adults men having sex would be shameful.
So the version of homosexuality that they tolerated was not the one that we have in the West today. Specifically, it did *not* threated the traditional family; your son could be gay, but he still gave you grandchildren.
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian religion.
1) There is a lot of sexual repression, which breeds resentment against those who don't have to sublimate or suppress internal sexual drives.
2) There's such a strong cognitive dissonance between being told sex outside of hetero marriage is wrong by the Church and the lustful desire that can fill one's loins (for hetero or homosexual sex).
3) For some, there is a disgust around homosexuality because they are straight and homosexual sex acts simply sound gross to them, or they are secretly some form of gay and loathe themselves for wanting it.
Technically, fornication (sex outside of marriage) is equally condemned in the Bible as homosexuality but you don't get nearly as many religious folks worked up over that happening as you do gay sex. I suspect the above reasons contribute to making this *personal* for each hater beyond just following another church doctrine so gay sex becomes the locus of all their repression then.
Regarding fornication vs. gay sex:
I don't object to either, but if I did, I would find it easier to forgive fornication, because it sounds like something I would do.
It's not just fundamentalist Christians who are anti-homosexual.
Something which I feel is really important to understanding many conservative positions but which is almost always overlooked in analysis is the importance of aesthetics. A lot of people who lean to the conservative side find many aspects of progressive culture, including gay culture, to be very ugly. This aesthetic preference is impossible to justify in any logical way and conservatives themselves know that just saying "Yeah I get what you're saying but it's just gross and ugly on a visceral level" is a terrible argument. Because of this it almost always gets left out of any pro vs anti homosexuality analysis and the anti position becomes much harder to understand.
This is extremely relevant, yeah.
I'd be way more accepting of trans people if they actually passed as their chosen gender.
I dunno. You're setting yourself up for a Crying Game Moment, I think, in those circumstances. I'm happier being able to tell whose jersey color matches their alma mater, so to speak, and whose doesn't.
While I do think that boiling it down to one cause is oversimplifying, if I had to I would go with this:
LGBT rights are making serious progress in the west and not elsewhere.
I got this from r/mapporn: Countries in Asia that recognize same-sex marriage on a national level. For those that don't want to click, only Taiwan recognizes same-sex marriage.
https://i.redd.it/8br9igy3ekz71.png
While I know marriage isn't the only issue here, I still think it is a useful metric.
If lgbt rights aren't advancing, or advancing slowly enough that you don't really notice the change, what is there to push back against? It seems like it would be very hard to be reactionary against an action that isn't happening.
I also think that increasing partisanship is making this much worse. From both sides. The right clings harder to the position as a fuck-you to the left. The left doesn't make arguments that could appeal to the right because they don't understand them/view them as beyond saving/something else.
> will you start intentionally breahting car exhaust if the left advocates for better air quality?
Yes, they already do. It is called "rolling coal".
> The American right, on the other hand, seems incapable to evolve on the issue.
It's hard to say. On the one hand, outside of the South I see it being a case like France/Canada where the conservatives more or less drop the issue once it becomes something people grow up with. However, I'm not sure about that happening in the South and the South is big enough to keep it on the national agenda.
> Japan
Overall, I think you are a bit optimistic about Japan.
> but these people don't have to live in the shadows and hide their entire life
From what I've seen, this isn't the case. It seems there is an expectation that you'll stay in the closet your entire life in order to not cause problems for your family and workplace.
> there is plenty of queer representation in Japanese media
I know this is the case in anime, but is it also like this in other Japanese media? Frankly, I haven't seen it but that could be my lack of exposure.
Anime is weird, and hard to draw conclusions from. A lot of it is weird to Japanese people. It seems like the more mainstream stuff does have less representation. While stuff that is deep in otaku/weeb territory has lots of representation, it also has representation for things the western lgbt community wouldn't want to be associated with. A lot of lgbt representation seems to be either to make them the but of the joke or for "male gaze".
I doubt the western lgbt crowd would look at Japanese media and think they are making progress in the correct direction.
Given I see that LGBT progress is pretty slow in Japan, what is there for Japanese conservatives to react against?
According to recent polling in Japan, somewhere between a plurality and a majority of people there think that same sex marriage should be legalized (one poll by Asahi Shimbun found support there at roughly 65%).
It's also worth remembering that South Africa has also legalized same-sex marriage.
It's not exclusively the West.
South Africa is unique in Africa given its large white population and probably greater US influence.
I agree. In Japan, are there organization advocating teaching children that homosexuality is perfectly normal in schools? If a prominent Japanese CEO is discovered to be against homosexual marriage, would it be expected that he would be fired or at least have to recant his views publicly? If a Japanese baker refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, would the state threaten him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines?
If the answer is no, then there's your answer. People can tolerate weird people better if they're not required to praise them.
Western conservatism is unusually pro- nuclear family.
According to the Institute for Family Studies [1], nuclear families were common in England as early as the 1200s. Nuclear families are more flexible and mobile, typically marry later, and put more effort into raising each child than multi-generation households. This might have been a contributing factor to the Industrial Revolution.
If the nuclear family is an unusually good way to organize society (or if many people believe it to be), then it would not be surprising that people resist any modifications to it.
[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-real-roots-of-the-nuclear-family/ IFS is a pro-family advocacy group.
IMHO "conservatism" has become too loaded. When it was originally coined it was supposed to mean "cautious and slow about making changes BUT STILL WILLING TO MAKE THEM AFTER CAREFUL CONSIDERATION". From the original (radical, progressive, moderate, conservative, reactionary) scale, four out of five of those were still technically in favor of making changes, while the last was the one that thought "nope, don't change anything, in fact go back to the way things were".
Somewhere along the way the reactionaries got mixed in with the conservatives while the radicals got mixed in with the progressives, and now being reactionary is rarely brought up while being radical has changed to mean anyone that wants big changes regardless of direction. It feels like the loss of granularity and muddying of terms has made things worse instead of better, because it becomes harder for people to disengage from groups that have a few heinous platforms when that group's other platforms are the closest fit from all the groups available.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if you could go after the republican and democratic parties for violating antitrust laws? They are run like businesses (hierarchical structures, advertisement, research and development, manufacturing and selling of merchandise etc) and offer a main product of political representation, under a pay-what-you-think-is-fair payment schema (donations), and they actively work to keep out competition (third parties) by ensuring there's only a single provider for a certain TYPE of political representation. Should we be just as afraid of duopolies as we are monopolies?
> Somewhere along the way the reactionaries got mixed in with the conservatives
I agree, and think it has to do with how the South moved from being solidly Democrat before the civil rights movement to solidly Republican since Reagan. Before this, it seems like the Republicans were (socially) conservative in the exact way you mean. After the shuffle, it seems the moderates/conservatives in the Republican Party couldn't resist the stronger push of reactionaries from the South. They just kept calling themselves conservatives because a) why not? and b) it has better PR than either reactionary or orthodoxy.
Both parties opposed abortion and gay marriage in 1976.
Note: the high use of weasel words shows my lack of certainty.
The right is anti-homosexual because the working class is anti-homosexual, and these days the right tends to be much more popular among the working class (while in Japan, the right is more popular in urban areas than rural). The Trump 2016 map in Maine looked exactly the same as the SSM 2012 map, and very unlike the Romney 2012 map.
This. Also we're traditionally a Christian culture. Homophobia is a part of that. So people who are into "traditional values" will be more likely into homophobia.
What's SSM?
Same-sex marriage.
> will you start intentionally breahting car exhaust if the left advocates for better air quality
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal for nearly this.
"just one that doesn't want to kill them just for existing"
Wouldn't it answer all your questions if you were just wrong about this?
He isn't though.
If the right had it all their own way, part of the agenda would 100% be the removal of all non-traditionally gender and sexuality from all public spheres.
Shit, stonewall was WITHIN LIVING MEMORY. Your parents were alive for stonewall.
>the removal of all non-traditionally gender and sexuality from all public spheres
This is still much weaker than the "Wants to kill them all just for existing" claimed by OP.
Also, I think this the bailey stage of a very noticeable motte&bailey aggressively pro gay supporters often engage in without noticing (to be charitable to them), and I say this as a left-wing moderate gay supporter who's slowly-but-surely kinda getting sick of western LGBT+. They push for things like prioritizing gay "representation" in media and TV, incredibly sexualized parades, and, recently, the inclusion of a sexual comic where two underage boys are giving pleasure to each other in public education in one US state. When people like me get uncomfortable with that and point out that even the "privileged straights" don't dream of demanding 1/10 of this any day of the week, the defence squads retreat into "So you just want to ban gay people entirely?".
I don't, I just want "gay" to stop being a free get-out-of-jail pass for ridiculous and entitled demands that violate the rights of others. You would never defend a man showing cartoon genitals to a child or moaning with desire next to them, yet merely changing the "gay bit" from 0 to 1 suddenly reverses this.
I don't think comparing being gay to being a pedophile is the move. I've only seen outraged screenshots of the book in question, but suggestive situations involving
*only* minors don't seem to be beyond the pale for sex-ed. The people who don't mind sexual content in libraries also don't mind it for straight kids either. LGBT+ aren't getting special treatment there. It's the same people who want to get rid of sex-ed for *everyone* who are most scandalized that this particular book exists. I think we've had this fight before, and the only reason it seems exceptional right now is because it involves non-traditional gender and sexuality.
World War II was within living memory; we don't describe Germans as an unusually warmongering and genocidal people. If people change for the better, you should acknowledge that. And if you make a claim in the present tense, it should be true at present.
Would it though? I don't think you have to believe that conservatives want to kill gay people to believe that they are also weirdly fixated on sexuality and gender. Like, every. single. one of my in-laws has been divorced and remarried, but the one marriage related thing in the whole family that scandalizes all of them is when the gay daughter gets married. And these are people that you'd never even know were opposed to gay marriage unless you knew them *very* well.
"you'd never even know were opposed to gay marriage unless you knew them *very* well"
The self-refuting comment?
I mean that to society in general, they don't read as people who have any issue with gay people whatsoever (as opposed to seeming like they want to kill them...), but secretly they have many issues.
You're confusing me with OP
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FFc0CcpVEAcYhQS?format=png&name=medium
Major conservative politicians have been vocally anti-abortion since Roe V. Wade (and before, of course), yet they stopped being vocally against SSM almost the moment it became the law of the land.
Why do conservative politicians no longer campaign against SSM? A good explanation would be that they realize it wouldn't be a winning issue on the margin among voters they are trying to win over, nor does the issue animate the conservative base.
"Why do conservative politicians no longer campaign against SSM?"
While this statement is true on aggregate, it might be worth mentioning (at least in passing) that one of the cornerstones of the legal brief that Jonathan Mitchell (drafter of Senate Bill 8) filed in support of Texas in the highly mediatized SCOTUS case is that the court should immediately overturn Obergefell v Hodges, Lawrence, and other similar cases (see https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-1392/185344/20210729162610813_Dobbs%20Amicus%20FINAL%20PDFA.pdf, page 24).
I don't believe they would revert to it being illegal. Those are mostly red states and you know that all those Republican legislators are desperately hoping for a chance to get a bit of anal in with some barely-legal boy. \s {for sarcasm}
So this whole thing is just about what you choose to believe is true. Got it. As user Freedom stated above maybe you don’t understand what’s happening here because your fundamental assumptions are wrong.
There is a very high probability (> 90%) Eharding is a troll. Don't fall into the trap.
Eharding has been active on SSC for years, although I don't remember him posting anything openly violent before.
There is a 0% probability I am a troll. I've held the same views for years.
Well, I'm not a Republican, and I don't pretend to be. I think of most GOP politicians as limp-wristed and overly willing to drop issues they've lost on (like Social Security and Medicare).
Have you looked at the west’s fertility rates? The US is also below replacement rates. Europe is dire. I don’t believe the mantra that China got old before they got rich either, there’s plenty of GDP to be eked out of china’s working population as the relatively uneducated older population is replaced by a younger more educated population. If the working population is more productive the dependency ratio isn’t that important. The west is has passed that demographic bump. Growth in China will slow but only from the crazy numbers of the last two decades.
Catchup is also easier than staying ahead.
As for being driven by demographics to be belligerent towards Taiwan, Taiwan has the lowest TFR in the world. The supposed need for aggressiveness doesn’t make sense. China just has to wait.
Far from people not discussing China’s demographics they are discussed more frequently than the situation in Europe. In fact most Europeans don’t even know the situation in Europe - try telling a guardian comment section that we in Europe don’t have a crisis of exponential population growth but the opposite, an exponential decline in the future. The response is fury or bewilderment. And yet it’s a huge problem.
Not that the latest figures out of China are great (1.3) but that looks like last years specific covid issue. The US had a tfr of 1.6. Both will recover in the next few years and I bet the Chinese are more able to move the needle than western countries. They’ve already reformed.
Perhaps with the assistance of AI and robotics, China will be able to solve some of the problems that come with having an aging population. Anyone who has spent much time in China knows that pollution has reached dystopian levels in some regions. If China had not limited its population growth, then the environmental degradation would only have been worse.
Is China really so aggressive? Like any rational power, they try to gain access to resources by wooing countries with soft power through their Belt and Road initiatives. The US media likes to portray China as aggressive, but aside from being brash in diplomacy and trying to get respect on the world stage, China has not been invading countries and using drone strikes like the US.
Chinese kids have been taught in school that Taiwan is part of China, and it seems likely that China will eventually absorb Taiwan. The US and the West are rational actors. We have too much at stake economically to put much effort into stopping China. Confidence in democracy is at a low point, so would Americans send their children to die in a war in order to ensure that Taiwanese have political freedoms? Americans would not even be willing to give up cheap consumer goods from China say goodbye to cheap consumer goods from China.
It's a bit hard to say China isn't so aggressive while noting that they've spent decades deliberately fostering revanchism.
China may be aggressive in its quest to reabsorb Taiwan, but this is a very specific and predictable target that they have never given up since WWII. I am arguing that they are not acting aggressively in general. Fifty years ago it would have been easy to predict that China would want to control Taiwan, but it would have been difficult to predict which countries the US would go to war with. We have had so many military adventures and meddled in so many governments. That is aggression.
You watch: Chinese women will soon be asked to "gestate a victory fetus" as an act of patriotism and social credit. Its genes will be sourced from "China's intellectual, scientific, moral and innovation leaders" (all Han), and the most promising ones will grow up in CCP boarding schools. Rewards will be calculated so that rural women can live comfortably just from pushing out one victory baby per year. And if that's not enough babies, they will lure in Filipinas and such to do paid surrogacy work.
They’ve already opened up the options of 3 babies this year for some, and I think it’s status related. So they get their eugenics that way.
^good prediction^
The unfortunate reality of authoritarianism is that it’s great at coordination problems.
Is it, though?
Historically, authoritarian governments have not been particularly stable over time and tend to be prone to collapse/infighting/replacement/civil war.
China seems really stable right now. Don’t count on it.
Naw. What’s ten years for a long term civilisation.
Well if they decide to increase fertility drastically right now their future twenty to twenty-five years later doesn't look all that bleak. But Chinese fertility still seems to be declining.
Well, China has a good track record on controlling its demography - the one child policy was really efficient it seems. If they really want more children they may just implement a three-children policy and be done with that...
Just the fact that policy within a narrow window doesn't work doesn't mean that policy within a broader window can't work.
On the other hand, the USSR's childlessness tax worked (as can be seen very clearly with the abrupt crash in fertility when it was abolished).
I support such a tax myself, and I say that as someone who's currently childless.
If you're not discriminating against the childless in college and job openings, you're not going far enough.
I'd go to Canada. In fact, that's an active discussion in my household from time to time. I have a lot of family and we have a lot of friends where we are, which keeps us rooted, but I think the 22nd century will be the story of Canada and Russia, and Russia is . . . well, I'd originally written something nasty here, but since there are Russians around, I'll back it off and just say not to my taste.
I have thought about this somewhat and don't think there is an obvious answer. Others have noted Australia or NZ which are great countries but would also be impacted by the US going south.
Switzerland or other small European states could be attractive. Switzerland has the benefit of being an international finance hub that is historical neutral and likely to be left alone in any major cold or hot international conflicts.
Someone else suggested South America. I think there could be opportunities there. Brazil, Argentina, Chile are all highly developed countries (though with very poor parts). They are large enough to be able to withstand the US dropping back economically.
I have thought of this questions mostly to find a country that conforms more closely with my philosophical values which run libertarian. That rules out lots of countries. Usually I am left with Switzerland, maybe Singapore if I can get over it being an autocracy (I also hate humidity and like to ski). NZ and Australia are very tempting but culturally will follow the US/Europe.
I've come to the conclusion that you have to go to extremes to answer this question. Either become hyper local and focus on your immediate neighborhood, city, county. OR become completely unmoored to location. The second option requires living like a bum (which is hard with kids) or being very wealthy and have resources to move anywhere to avoid catastrophe. I am leaning towards hyper local while pursuing options which could result in mega wealth.
The question is whether polarization increasing in the US is a local phenomenon, or just a symptom of a global one. The best explanation I can see for why polarization is increasing is due to the structural effects of social media as compared to broadcast media, and this would predict a worldwide effect (even if the details have been different in different places over the past decade). If this is a global phenomenon rather than a national one, then moving isn't likely to be relevant.
I'm going to guess from your mention of "culture of innovatin, VC ecosystem" that you are in one of the costal cities. Maybe try taking a vacation to somewhere really foreign like Utah for a month and see how it feels...
Find somewhere that will likely be neutral in a WWIII. It's going to my strategy.
I would find Estonia tempting.
Nice place, scary neighbor.
I've had a lot of the same feelings, albeit as a native American. I think gaining dual EU citizenship is about the best that you or I can do (and you can basically buy it in Portugal, and I think a couple of the other poorer EU states). Once you own your home wherever in Portugal, to my understanding you're then free to move to France or Germany. I would strongly prefer to continue living in a wealthy, 1st world country.
It's easy enough to say 'oh well I can just live in Latin America, or some other developing country'. But if the US falls in widespread civil unrest, the world will actually change, and I'm less certain that being a white American gringo with money who clearly moved from elsewhere would be particularly safe. You're now at the mercy of a non-wealthy country's legal system, or the local populists, or what have you.
I would avoid Canada, not just because of the cold, but because it's so dependent on the US that if America falls or becomes unstable, Canada would be in bad shape. I don't understand how New Zealand has become the wealthy hobbyhole of choice- you are very much in China's sphere of influence, and I would prefer to not live in fear of an authoritarian superpower. Post-Pax Americana, China could simply order New Zealand & Australia around and threaten them if they don't comply.
Britain seems like the absolute best option because it's wealthy, stable, and has a powerful enough military that it can't be pushed around too much
While Aus and NZ might be vulnerable in an international diplomacy sense, they still locally have strong rule of law and wealthy, liberal populations. The worst China is likely to do in practice is demand lopsided trade deals.
'The worst China could do' is to literally invade them in absence of Pax Americana. Or threaten to do so, especially New Zealand which is an absolutely tiny country
I am skeptical that China would benefit from invading and occupying lands so far away from its current territory. Now, the economic impact that China could have on NZ could be huge as NZ relies on imports so much.
If and when Pax Americana can no longer be trusted Australia will probably withdraw from the NPT and acquire a nuclear arsenal. It's big enough and more than educated enough, and it's got plenty of uranium.
That would be quite a challenge, and take a while, 5-10 years would be my guess. The problem is that Australia lacks a nuclear industry, has no access to accurate design specs for modern warheads and would have to rediscover them, and has no heavy launch vehicle industry for designing and building delivery systems. All of that would need to be buitl from scratch, and even in the US, with far greater resources and wartime urgency, that took 4 years start-to-finish for even the crudest B-29 delivered 25kt nuke. To build a credible modern IRBM or ICBM delivered strategic deterrent that would give the Chinese pause would take twice as long I think.
The difficulty is that the US and UK are so culturally similar that any internal problems in America are likely to be happening in the UK for similar reasons. If the UK stands, then they’re the best choice, but if the West falls, I’m going to Rwanda. They’ve got a lot going for them right now, but aren’t important enough for a world power to invade. They’re also less likely to collapse into instability and ethnic infighting, like many other countries, since they’ve learned the hard way where that leads.
I mean if the US is in bad shape, we're left selecting from a menu of not-great options. I would strongly prefer to live in a wealthy democracy with rule of law, and a powerful enough military that they can't be pushed around. That vastly narrows down the world's nations- Britain's one, I guess you could argue France is another. I'd take Germany if they had more military prowess & I didn't think they'd likely just kowtow to whatever Moscow tells them in a post-Pax Americana world
I think South America will be one of the best places by 2050.