So I starting reading through this odd print . And it’s a bit alarming considering the public health messaging . I don’t think I have the capacity to defend the paper but would love to listen to others on the subject
Listening to the Shift mystic gospel talk and this guy is already annoying me.
Did you know that Aramaic is incapable of being conceptual? That you can't say "right" or "wrong" in Aramaic, those are Greek concepts? That it's a language rooted in nature and the earth, and you can only say things using agricultural metaphors?
It's the usual sort of vague concepts universally applied (so same in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.) and god/goddess stuff, but he's working "my family are Lebanese and my heritage is Aramaic" hard, and Christianity is all about living in harmony with everyone and everything.
There you go: all join hands and sing kumbaya, that's all it's all about!
Oh yeah, and Christianity went off the rails early, we have to go back to original Aramaic texts. Plus first use of word "patriarchy".
Your standard New Age stuff.
EDIT: And he's just name-checked Joseph Campbell! The inspiration for his "four part Gospels, four part journey, four parts in nature" gimmick!
The idea that Aramaic is incapable of being conceptual would be absolutely hilarious to any of the several million people currently alive who have put some serious time into studying the Talmud. When someone wants to make fun of something for being excessively abstract and hair-splitting, they might call it 'Talmudic discourse'.
Why are you still listening? Penance? You already knew going in that muscular Christianity is far out of fashion, so you can't have been (very) surprised.
I have a friend who used to drag me to every Intelligent Design lecture he could find, so that he could fume and mutter all through it, and then have me confirm for him afterward that there were assorted observational and empirical lacunae that vitiated the conclusions. (I'm not a biologist, but my other "scientific" credentials, PhD, faculty position, et cetera, were such that it pleased his vanity to think they added weight to my critique.) He hated these people, thought they were evil Pied Pipers taking advantage of the good-hearted ignorance of the peasantry to lead them into terrible philosophical error.
And fair enough, we all have our ideas of who the servants of the Dark Lord are[1], and I went along gamely because he was my friend, but I did wonder (and asked once) why he felt he had to subject himself to this particular torture. It's not like there was realistically going to be an opportunity during the coven to leap up, draw Andúril whispering from its sheath, and, catching them unawares, slay one and all. Why not stay at home and watch a good movie instead?
------------
[1] Exempli gratia I have a similar reaction to quantum and other physics-derived woo.
I dropped out pretty much immediately, but I thought it only fair to give the guy a chance in case he had something to say.
After all, I was only going on my impressions of what this would be like, not on what he said out of his own mouth. Well, now I know.
Unkindly, I am thinking he's going the 'scamming the Yanks' route with his whole "my old Lebanese granny who was illiterate but used to chant prayers in Aramaic" routine, because you need the exotic yet authentic background as the hook for the fishies but he may be sincere enough in what he's doing, in that mish-mash 'it's all about personal growth and empowerment' self-help and spiritual designer mode that is so prevalent and popular.
Yes, I think we (Americans) are rather susceptible to that con right now (and perhaps always have been). It's one reason the whole DEI scam has got the legs it has. It may be because we're (still) a Protestant nation, so more willing to believe in salvation through good works than grace, and because we're a mongrel nation, so individually we lack skepticism about magical cultural artifacts. We're like a more primitive tribe willing to believe the schizophrenic, albino, or person born with no arms is an oracle just *because* of the strange difference.
Personally I believe there's a special circle of Hell reserved for the personal empowerment gurus. As if what the world, or even we individuals muddling through it, need most right now is *more* narcissism.
For either reason I would employ a rather different adverb to begin your ultimate paragraph :)
It's Catholicism that believes in salvation through good works and faith. One of the main tenets of Protestantism is "sola fide", salvation through faith alone.
I have a Facebook which I only use to keep up with family members. For some reason, it is now being spammed with a particular type of ads - the spiritual awareness, psychic readings, learn your inner cabbage flavour malarkey.
Generally I have no trouble at all ignoring that, but one particular ad today really got me going because it annoyed me because it's that high-falutin' blend of dumb pop-culture Gnosticism (which has little or nothing to do with historical Gnosticisms) and appeals to authority, as in "this guy has a PhD! Impressive! So you can *really* trust him to know his onions!"
As an aside, yes STEM people I know this chancer comes out of the humanities, but the mystic magic effect of letters after the name does emanate from the aura of "trust me, I am a qualified expert, look at my high-class university qualifications". Ordinary people are going to be impressed, because of the association of "MD" with doctors, and "Professor Whozis" with lab-coat wearing scientists being interviewed on the latest astounding discovery. You can't be too smug about the humanities because the science guys with PhD after their name (hi, Neil!) use such to bolster their credibility as "I am Big Expert" in the public eye.
(I did say today was my day for being spiteful).
Okay, out of sheer "fudge you", I have signed up for the webinar tomorrow being hosted by The Shift Network (a term which has a different meaning in Ireland - yes, tomorrow evening I will be getting the shift! https://www.dailyedge.ie/getting-the-shift-3332738-Apr2017/), a site that has featured "over 3,100 thought leaders in domains as diverse as spirituality, holistic health, psychology, Qigong, somatics, Indigenous wisdom, enlightened business, yoga, herbalism, and peacebuilding."
So what, sez you, the usual grab-bag of New Age woo. Ah, but they like to throw in some pseudo-science bait to keep it all "cross our hearts, this is all based on Real Science!" for the college-educated lot:
I'm going to say here not that poor/working-class people don't fall for this kind of bilge, but that when they do, they stick to psychic phone lines, ghost-hunting shows on TV, and maybe going to a show featuring a medium or astrologer once in a while. You need the nice, middle-class types to fall for "this is quantum mitochondrial vibration" guff, e.g. a 'real' doctor who will teach you all about how to tone up your vagus nerve to, amongst other things, "Reduce tinnitus (ringing in the ears), TMJ, teeth grinding, and even fainting by regulating vagal tone
Access the energetic gateway to your gut — to balance your microbiome":
Right, after that lengthy prolegomenon, what has my knickers in a twist?
Here let me launch into "why is it always Catholics?" I'm sure the Orthodox have people like this, but you don't get them making public spectacles like this, or at least I haven't seen any. Our pal, Alexander John Shaia, PhD is a former Maronite Catholic (potted bio here https://www.quadratos.com/alexander-john/) who has made a niche out of exploiting 'hidden wisdom tradition' within Christianity with his own patent version (the quadratos, which seems to be taking the four Gospels and stitching them into a quilt of 'four seasons, four ways, four paths' mapping: https://www.quadratos.com/the-four-paths/ "Quadratos is a new name for the ancient, universal, four-path journey of growth and transformation. Recognized by every major religious faith and school of psychology, the four-path Journey is sequential, cyclical and never-ending.")
Fair enough, but why am I so annoyed by this? At best (and let's hope for the best), this is simply the mystical tradition at work, another modern Christian version of what the Jewish tradition did with kabbala. If St. John of the Cross, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and St. Dominic could all develop spiritual exercises and paths out of their mystical experiences, why not Dr. Shaia? At worst, it's another re-packaging of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" self-help bafflegab.
If the guy is just a shyster, a grifter, a conman in the long tradition of using a spiritual cloak to extort money and followers out of spiritually-striving boobs, why do I care? I don't know, maybe today is just a bad day to hit on this. I do take my faith seriously, so it does annoy me when I see someone using a combination of re-heated Gnosticism lifted straight out of that Dan Brown novel on top of allegedly Scriptural exegesis, sprinkled with appropriate buzzwords.
I'm finding "the Patriarchy" particularly grating, recently. Dr. Shaia promises to help us:
"- Excavate gifts for your transformation from Christianity’s mystical feminine teachings hidden beneath the shadow of patriarchy
- Learn how the Story of John may have been written by a woman"
"May have" is doing a lot of work there. Of course he has to appeal to "if you think nasty old traditional Christianity is anti-woman, here's my appealing new version which is all Divine Feminine".
I don't need that, thanks all the same, Al. So what makes me think this guy is a hoofler instead of a genuine if well-intentioned mystic? Well, this marketing angle (appeal to women, because they are going to be the majority of the spiritual strivers and seekers with disposable income and time out there) and this charming lump of absolute freakin' nonsense from his Quadratos main hustle page:
"This long awaited publication by Alexander John Shaia brings new depth and meaning to the celebrations and traditions of Christmas, rejoining the Festival of Christmas with its roots in the Celtic celebration of the Winter Solstice.
The ancient Celts celebrated for 13 Days at the Solstice in honor of the mysteries and power of birth, believing the Solstice to mark the rebirth of the sun and with its growing light the promise of life returning amid the barrenness of winter. Early Christians saw the beauty and truth of the Celtic rituals and added a new layer to the story—the story of a universal Jesus the Christ, born anew like the sun, in the midst of our own seasons of outer and inner darkness.
Follow along from the Winter Solstice to the 6th of January with Alexander John’s simple meditations and celebrations for each of the 13 days. This small book offers an essential practice for our time. We must remember that darkness is not the end. Rather, in the very moment of the deepest dark, new life begins."
(Breaking this into two pieces because it's running long and I don't want to hit Substack's comment limit)
The Celts and Christmas. Well of flippin' course. I don't know whether he's genuinely ignorant or this is cynical marketing ploy on his part, that the woo community like Celtique and other Quaint Native Wisdom Traditions bollocks and that associating Northern European festivals with the ever-popular "Bad old Christianity stole all their feast days from the pagans" assertions will help him flog more of his podcasts, books, etc.
He's Lebanese, I'm (alleged) Celtic heritage. I wouldn't dare start discoursing on what native Lebanese traditions came out of where, but I can tell you this: Christmas and the Celts have sweet Fanny Adams to do with each other. If you've ever seen that Wiccan/Neo-pagan wheel of the year, in order to fill it out they had to mingle Irish and Welsh names with good old Norse/Viking traditions around Yule, because we don't have a particular winter solstice festival named for that date.
Even in early hagiographies of St. Patrick, you can associate Christian Easter with native Irish traditions (lighting the fire on the hill of Slane) but there is no corresponding Christian Christmas with native Irish day. The modern calendar name is Nollaig, ultimately derived from the same roots as Noel, Church Latin for the days.
He talks about Epiphany and yes, in Ireland that's "Little Christmas/Women's Christmas" but the traditions around it are post-Christian, not pre-Christian. Merely invoking "For the Celts, this day was a prep day to prepare the house and oneself to conclude the Winter Solstice Festival tomorrow. Why a 13 day festival? 13 was the number sacred to the Goddess and the Winter Solstice Festival was in honor of birthing" is disingenuous at best; there is not, so far as I am aware and my knowledge is admittedly very limited, any 'sacred number/goddess/birthing' stuff. (I have a sinking feeling he is also going to conflate St. Bridget and the Goddess but I'm not touching that).
Christmas day - "The Celtic cycle celebrates "Distaff Day!" News to me.
8th day - "On this day the Celts poured a mulled cider on the roots of an Apple Tree." Call me confused, but I think he is confusing/conflating the *English* tradition of wassailing, which is Anglo-Saxon in origin not Celtic:
It's all disheartening more of the same, and yes, he does the Camino walk which in recent years has become another trendy 'spiritual but not religious' thing.
So yeah, I am going to tune in tomorrow for his (free first lecture, if you like it sign up to pay for a seven week course) webinar and I fully expect to spend the hour groaning, yelling at the screen, and scribbling notes on how wrong he is.
It does interest me. There is, of course, a long *long* tradition of religion (of all stripes) being turned into a means of gaining wealth, power, influence and groupies for those abusing it. The jibes about cunning, cyncial priestcraft do have a point. And the new age stuff has deep roots whether we go back to 18th century Freemasonry and occult crazes, or 20th century Californian ashrams and Aimee Semple McPherson providing up-to-date modern theatrical Christianity in a forerunner of the megachurches.
So why am I annoyed by yet another guy flogging the carcase of the horse in the same weary round of diluted Gnosticism and spiritual but not religious and "Explore the 4 Christian gospels as universal wisdom texts for everyone, regardless of gender, orientation, ethnicity, or spiritual tradition"? Because given his background (with alleged theological training) he should know better.
If he does have legitimate background, why don't I accept that he is a genuine mystic? Because of the hucksterism, the rather too-on-the-nose appeal to re-ordering the four Gospels:
"When these four gospels are restored to their ancient reading sequence — different from their conventional sequence in the Bible — they tell an entirely new story.
Join us for an illuminating new course with Alexander John where you’ll travel the universal 4-Path Journey — and reclaim the four Christian gospels, where Jesus the Mystical Christ becomes the avatar who leads you on this mystical path…
You’ll receive uncommon wisdom all along your journey — including from the profoundly inclusive teachings hidden in Christianity’s gospels, many of which have been lost for 1400 years — that illuminate a vital life map that can lead us to inner freedom, safety, respect, and a profound connection with God."
And of course all the 'divine feminine' tosh. I know it's humbug, but it's humbug that stings me where I live.
Yes, this study only looks at 12-19yo people. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find comprehensive data on the side effects. What I know from my own social circle (which is ~200 people dataset) is that my uncle lost hearing from his other ear (came back in two weeks) and one other friend developed nasty angina right after second dose. Also one of my close friends had a 15s seizure episode where he lost control of his limbs. He has never before had any seizure-like symptoms. Overall I would count the angina and my situation as serious which is 2/200.
-> From bayesian standpoint it seems unlikely that the serious side-effects for whole population are under one in a million but it's possible.
Anyone else finding double responses? I find I have my response (and the responses to me) copied twice... weird. It might explain the large number of comments on this open thread.
Meta-question: what is it with the obsession of this community about prediction markets? I think everybody understands that "past performance does not guarantee etc etc" so it's ultimately a futile effort. Sun rises every day but one day it won't. I see some people hope it helps them with the investing but passive indexes outperform active indexes anyway. Other than that, what is the allure? What is the allure to know the future in detail even?
That is a fully general counterargument against any kind prediction - and, since any action relies on making some prediction about the consequences of this action, against doing anything at all.
I would suggest first it's because Bayes' Equation is just silly if you have no idea what the probabilities that go into it might be, e.g. if the best prior you've got on whether an intelligent AI that wants to kill us all will be developed in the next 10 years is 10% +/- 500% you might as well give up your number-based decision-making right there.
Second, it's one of the strongest social myths of The Internet Age that the truth is out there somewhere -- no matter what truth it is. That *whatever* you need to know, someone, somewhere, knows it, and it's just a question of efficiently finding the right paper, Wikipedia article, blog argument, anecdote. Hence the gigantic effort we put into gathering, sorting, and presenting information from a zillion sources onto each of our handheld 4" screens.
It's certainly a contrast with many prior ages of men, in which more dominant paradigms might have been that the truth depends in no small part on individual reflection, or the collection of new data, or traveling a long and difficult path of enlightenment the first few steps of which are clear enough to anybody already.
But every age has its fads, our is no different. No doubt in 2080 or 2110 they'll think us primitive, rather blind, a little obsessed with sterile pathways.
> What is the allure to know the future in detail even?
On a very basic level, being able to predict the future makes it easier to make good decisions that lead to better futures.
Prediction markets are a way to combine personal financial incentives with weighted wisdom of the crowd to get good predictions. In theory, this might be able to rival literally *any* other predictive method by combining all sources. In practice, there are a lot of kinks to be worked out and maybe their potential is ultimately limited by one factor or another. But it's an emerging space, and worth paying attention to.
Seems like you have two questions: What's the point of predicting future? What's the point of prediction if you cannot get it absolutely 100% right?
Predicting the future is useful if it allows us to make better choices. Think about any project; you could use prediction markets to find out whether it is likely to succeed or likely to fail. Then you could run those that are predicted to succeed. That could save a lot of money.
A prediction that is not 100% right but merely 99.9999999% right (your example with the Sun) is still super useful. In practice, even 80% would often be an improvement over what we have now.
I think it's because it's an interesting academic way to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to make more accurate predictions, and in turn, use those to make better, happiness-creating policies / institutions / etc. I've always been fascinated by them and their potential
For me, it's less about returns. Returns themselves are nice for individual consumers if they're good at predicting, but every person investing also creates a positive externality by creating an informational price signal
Anyone have thoughts on the long term future of prediction markets? I know they've been discussed here before, but they seem to be getting more traction and people involved + a ton of new ones are popping up. I think only one called that Scott mentioned before called Kalshi is actually regulated, but there are a ton on the blockchain too.
If they work out they could be a pretty useful information discovery tool, but I'm not sure how to think about their long-term viability / what to do to make them so? So many ones in the past have failed, but the PM literature is super interesting
Metaculus does have a question for "Will Metaculus still exist in the year 20XX?". The author of the question acknowledged that the game-theoretic optimal move is to predict it with 100% certainty, because if Metaculus ceases to exist there's nobody to call you on being wrong, but they asked users to try and predict honestly anyway.
Re: Social media: Start a new account, @JoeBloggsForMayor or something. That way you avoid mixing your Serious Politician social media identity with the identity that you use for posting cat pictures on Reddit.
I am not convinced that you need to go back through your personal account history and scrub it of all traces of Discourse, considering the things politicians have gotten away with posting, but I do think it's good practice to distinguish what you post as Joe Bloggs from the stuff you post as The Official Position of the Bloggs Campaign
1. Join whichever of the two major parties you prefer
2. Go to meetings, schmooze, get to know all the big fish who fill your local small pond
3. Spend years "paying your dues" by sucking up to those big fish in whatever way seems appropriate
4. Meanwhile, work on becoming the kind of person that makes a good candidate. You are polite, personable, well-connected, well-spoken, and photogenic, and your opinions closely match whatever opinions are most likely to get you elected in your area
5. Now, quietly mention to one of your local big fish that you're interested in maybe one day running for office. If you've done steps 1-4 properly then they'll start telling you what steps 6, 7 and 8 are.
These questions are pretty complicated without knowing anything about the person. What experience do they have with politics? What office and where do they live? Some are easier than others. Are you entering a primary? Typically you would want to get started, outside of Senate or Presidential, about 3 months before the election. you might do 3 months of build up to your announcement or something as well. Also are you running a campaign to win or a campaign to introduce issues?
Hey Matthew, thanks for responding! I purposefully left the questions open-ended, so that anyone with any level of experience could answer with their specific area of expertise. Some more specifics into a situation I'm considering are:
* State level government (Legislature)
* Small state (Less than 2 million population)
* Open to entering a primary (could also run as independent)
* Campaign to win (but focused on one or two key issues, also not sure how realistic a campaign to win would be)
If I could ask you a question as well, where did you get your experience in US politics from?
State legislature in a small state is basically just knocking doors personally and with maybe a few key volunteer supporters. Probably don't need more than $10k if that. Much easier to go independent if you don't like a major party. Another important thing is that your one or two key issues have to be pretty broadly applicable to the area. Is the seat very competitive? Are lots of potential candidates involved? Generally a primary would be harder in this case, if you have no connections to the local party.
One issue that has been discussed on AstralCodexTen multiple times previously is that long term prediction markets are inefficient because the return you would get from being right is less than the return you would get by investing the money in more traditional ways. The idea that seemed obvious to me when I first read about this is for the prediction market to invest the money on your behalf while they have it, and return it with interest, like how banks handle savings. Is there some non-obvious reason why this wouldn't work?
I think a lot of it is just logistics, most prediction markets that exist right now are nascent. This does hamper longer term projections, because it becomes a lot more difficult from a time value of money perspective. But I can't imagine they don't have some long term plan to invest collateral and distribute that among investors - that way you could capture whatever beta return you wanted in addition to your returns from the PM
I've seen two recurring objections, neither insurmountable but both exacerbating existing challenges:
1) The added layer of financialization comes with a significant increase in complexity, both in regulation and in user buy-in. The difficulty in setting up a brokerage when prediction markets themselves are something of a legal grey area is my guess for the main reason it hasn't been tried, though note that while average returns might increase you *will* also see a fee increase v. cash-based systems.
2) "Traditional investing" isn't a monolith, and there is no one financial instrument that is going to meet everyone's needs. An S&P 500 index fund might be popular, but is completely inadequate for anyone that was looking to avoid even more market correlation. [Insert arguments against T-bills, international funds, etc. here.] I suppose you could figure out a system where the prediction market collates users with different asset blends, but that would have significant consequences and I haven't seen a proposal that takes it seriously. Best case scenario you fracture the userbase, and that's a problem when most prediction markets rely on volume to be epistemically worthwhile.
I think it’s time for Scott to revisit some of the older “more than you wanted to know” covid threads and evaluate if some of them were true or were ever true.
My partner is looking for a position in the tech policy domain. I'm wondering if anyone here can recommend an organization with a strong ethical mission (civil liberties, social justice, existential risk) that would benefit from someone with a solid AI/tech background and communication skills.
My partner's specialty is AI safety, regulation, existential risk, that kind of thing. They've just graduated from MIT with a PhD in computer science and have experience in crafting policy and
state-level legislation. We live in Vancouver, WA currently, but are scouting out positions more broadly.
How capable are they outside of AI issues because that is not going to get them a lot of options. General civil liberties/social justice has almost no connection to existential risk. What organizations have they already considered? Presumably the EFF and groups like that they've already looked into and probably the rationalist adjacent ones as well?
They are very capable (AI is just what their education was in) and have looked into the EFF, FIRE, Lightcone, and a few others. I'm wondering if you know any others that might be good to add to the list? Especially more rationalist ones since you probably know the space better than me.
I don't follow the rationalist sphere a ton. You might consider posting on the astralcodexten subreddit or posting on lesswrong.com. The big comment threads here have lots of top level comments with very few getting any sort of response, especially stuff posted after the first 10 hours.
I'm reading a book called "How Democracies Die". In this book, the authors give many examples of countries that were once democratic that were taken over by a demagogue with ambition. Examples include Chavez in Venezuela, Peron in Argentina, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, and many others.
One claim the book makes I found interesting is that political parties need to actively prevent demagogues from taking power. To back this claim, they give many examples of popular demagogues in the US that you've never heard of. You've never heard of them because the political parties refused to support them as candidates.
Then the book gives examples where ideological opposite parties ally to prevent demagogues from taking power. They give examples like Belgium in the 1930s, where a center right Catholic party allied with the socialist party to prevent the fascist party (modeled after Germany's Nazis) from gaining power. Many conservative Catholic voters supported the socialists such that they won.
Another more recent example is Austria in 2016, where the ÖVP (Austrian People's Party) kept the radial right Freedom Party (FPÖ) out of the presidency. The last two candidates remaining after the first round were former Green Party chair Van der Bellen and the FPÖ leader Norber Hofer. So some in the ÖVP, including former presidential candidate Andreas Khol and Chairman Reinhold Mitterlehner, as well as many rural mayors, supported their ideological rival Van der Bellen.
Anyway, the book makes the further claim that presidential systems are less stable against demagogues, because governing only happens through compromise. In parliamentary systems, the prime minister always has a governing majority. Most Latin American countries had presidential systems with legislatures and a supreme court modeled on the US.
I'm curious, can anyone point to counter examples to this, wherein a country with a presidential system, bicameral legislature, and supreme court, does not have a problem governing due to polarization and demagogues gaining power?
Knowing Belgium especially well, multiple parties allying to defeat a party bigger than all the alliance members individually is nothing to write about. Maybe it was the first time it happened, but certainly not the last time center catholics allied with socialists...So there is a question that immediately came to mind: Do ideological opposite parties allies more often to prevent demagogues to come to power, than other non-demagogic but nonetheless fast growing new parties. In other world, is Demagogy a factor? In fact, can Demagogy be defined in another way that a fast growing new party actively recruiting the base of existing parties? Maybe France LREM (Macron) was demagogic when it ate both left and right (but is now the successful center, after it won)?
Was Belgian NVA a demagogic party , but is now simply a nationalistic right party? (at least in northern Belgium, in the south NVA is not competing with the local parties and is used as a bogeyman with the VB (so of course it's demagogic). Was Ecolo (the green's) ever tagged as demagogic? I don't think so, but maybe they did not grow fast enough...And they are sometimes put in the opposition by a socialist (left)/liberal(right) alliance while the green are clearly on the left ideological side, demagogic or not...
I have the feeling demagogue is a quite context dependent, time-evolving etiquette...
When I hear people talking about "democracy dying" in the last few years, I find myself deeply skeptical of their motives. If this became a concern in say, 2017 and since, then it's poorly hidden concern about Trump and Populist Republicans. In a sub-comment you mentioned four criteria found in the book for identifying a demagogue. Those criteria seem to very easily apply to both Trump and Biden (and quite a few other American politicians, including Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Dick Cheney, and Hillary Clinton). In other words, a significant portion of the political leadership in the US is made up of demagogues who are endangering the democracy/democratic principles of the country.
That may be accurate, and it may be a concern, but I am doubtful of both the degree of concern we should feel about this, and specifically the direction of the concern that many of these writers who talk about demagogues and populism are aiming their criticisms. As someone who has studied a fair amount of US history, I find our current level of antagonism to be far less than it has been throughout much of the time since 1776. There was significant disagreement about how to form the government, that certainly didn't suddenly end in 1789. We also fought a civil war, which is a pretty big deal. It infuriates me when people talk about how our current situation is more unstable than at any time in our history - we fought a *civil war*, how can the rest of our history compare to that, unless these people seriously think that we're about to have another one now? We also had significant levels of disagreement and strife during both WWI and WWII, and many of our core constitutional rights were directly and intentionally denied by the federal government. I could find dozens of other examples, from the numerous times the Capital building was attacked/bombed, to various government responses taking away liberties and using unconstitutional powers to defeat opponents.
Why are we concerned that *now* is when demagogues need to be defeated? Again, poorly disguised antagonism for Trump specifically. He's not even the biggest blow-hard populist in our history (my personal money is on Andrew Jackson, but that's not without controversy, especially if we include non-president politicians or non-politicians who had national followings). If a concern about populists boils down to a particular tribe being really mad that another tribe elected someone they didn't want elected, then I have no interest in that discussion. Ask Republicans how they felt about Obama getting elected, or anti-war Democrats about Bush's re-election in 2004. Partisans of all stripes are going to be upset and talk about how upset they are when their opponents win. If a lot of these partisans happen to have jobs in writing for major media, we should not be surprised that they get that message out often. That doesn't make the current situation novel or interesting, and it doesn't mean they're right in their concern or their criticism. I find the lack of concern many of them have about Liberal/Left/Democratic demagogues to be pretty definitive in my mind that they are not principled advocates for democracy, but simple partisans rooting for their team.
There's nothing particularly wrong with that, but there's also nothing in there that should concern the rest of us or cause us to fear for democracy any more now than we would in a world without Trump. Not taking the partisan road also allows us more freedom to criticize anyone who acts like a demagogue (even if they don't always do so or have some non-demagogue traits as well) and also to find good things in politicians who we might not like in total.
I think it's a fair criticism of the book to note it didn't mention many left of center illiberal leaders or demagogues, into which I think FDR could fit. Though it does mention many far left demagogues in other countries, including most Latin American ones.
I don't know, I think it's fair to be suspicious of timing. But that suspicion shouldn't make people ignore obvious signs of how much worse Trump was in upholding democracy than previous presidents at least in living memory.
Now there are plausible scenarios where I could imagine it all falling apart and turning into civil war, or at a minimum something like protracted urban strife. Maybe I'm just catastrophising.
But then I read some of Hamilton's and others views from the federalist papers, and you can see they were keenly aware of how quickly democracy turns into mobocracy. This is why they added checks and balances, separation of powers, enumerated federal powers, and gatekeeping institutions like the electoral college. It's also why they chose a republic over a direct democracy.
They did not predict the rise of political parties that would nullify the purpose of the electoral college.
Wasn't it Franklin who said "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance"? I don't think that statement implies "but we can ignore worrying signs if both sides are doing it" or "we can ignore worrying signs if we suspect political motives are at play".
I agree with you about Andrew Jackson, by the way, he may be another good example of someone who fits some if the criteria. Didn't he start the "spoils system" of governance in the US?
I think you're doing the all too common thing of conflating "democracy" with "liberal values/policies". I think efforts by certain Democrats to facilitate mass illegal immigration and then campaign for amnesty, giving them voting rights or even just facilitating it with the knowledge their children will be citizens with voting rights, represent a bigger "attack on democracy" than anything Trump ever did.
The reason I am suspicious of both the timing and the goals of those writing these concerns is that their concerns are highly selective. Trump Bad doesn't say anything about abuses of power from anyone else. In my mind, Bush and Cheney expanded executive power considerably while in office, in a lot of bad ways. Then, instead of correcting that, Obama expanded it even more, and added new expansions as well as using the ones Bush created! Obama did more to go after whistleblowers and journalists than any US president in a long time, maybe ever. But most people seem to have given him a pass on that. You talk about abuses of presidents within living memory, but I'm going to venture a guess that most of us at least remember Obama, and probably Bush. They both abused government power a lot! Is Trump worse than either of them on that front? I would honestly say no. I will say that he looks more like a buffoon, and so do many of his voters. If that's what's bothering people, I wish they would say that. To say that he's especially undermining to democracy seems false on its face.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to be concerned about abuses of government power, and the expansion of the means of abusing it (and I think most people concerned about these issues look specifically at the Executive in the US). But if your concern is "Trump!" and you don't have a concern about Obama or Biden having and/or [ab]using that power, then all I am hearing is partisan bickering. If you talk non-stop about 1/6 but pointedly ignored night after night of people attacking a federal building in Portland, I'm not sure I trust your motives or goals. I'm definitely on board for "1/6 was bad, and also what happened in Portland was bad, and also..." There's room to criticize anyone and everyone who abuses their power, even if they happen to be on our own "side" on some issue. Some people have a long enough attention span to remember when it was the Democrats arguing in favor of the filibuster or Republicans were upset about a president lowering the dignity of the office.
I'm a big fan of checks and balances. I have no time or interest for "Stop the other party from doing what we did/are doing/will do."
Obama and Bush both fit into the standard centrist corporate oligopoly background. Michelle and George are even buddies! Trump is awful in distinct ways and is more blatantly personally corrupt. Additionally he has no real ideology. Bush and Obama were predictable and broadly within the neoliberal consensus.
I think you're saying that as a positive for Bush and Obama? I'm struggling because I actually disagree that those facts are positive. Trump actually has a much harder time using the government for his personal gains, because he is not connected to the wheels that need to turn to make changes - a fact the media was happy to report when he struggled to get things done. Hillary Clinton, for example, would have had a much easier time obtaining personal gain for herself and her supporters, as she had significant contacts in government and could have immediately put them to use.
I agree that Trump is more blatantly personally corrupt. I emphasize the "blatant" aspect to it, but would strongly disagree that he was/is actually more corrupt. That's part of what I meant by calling him a buffoon. Whatever corruption he has, is visible and loudly reported on. He is loud, boorish, undisciplined, and he either doesn't know how or doesn't care to hide it. Most of those aspects have little to nothing to do with endangering democracy. In fact, that's all part of what makes him popular in the circles that praise him. He seems genuine (or is making very costly signals to reach that group at the expense of other groups), and many Americans are bothered by corrupt leaders who are simply better at hiding it. Very few people seem to think that their leaders are free of various forms of corruption. Trump failing/not trying to hide it is considered a plus, only because the underlying corruption exists either way.
I'm belaboring this point a little bit, because Trump is being called a danger to "democracy." The counterpoint is that other leaders are part of the "neoliberal consensus" - by which we tend to mean the leadership classes among both major parties. If we mean "democracy" as it's generally intended, that should favor Trump *supporting* democracy when he appeals to large segments of the population over a very narrow slice of the population that happens to be in charge. The alternative is some kind of oligarchy, which is expressly *not* democratic.
I get the impression that various elites, including those in journalism who have the greatest ability to express their views, care far more about that "neoliberal consensus" than they do democracy, voters, or a majority of people. That can be seen with the sneering references to "populism" and "popular" in regards to Trump. How can he both be populist and against democracy? That only makes sense to me if we are using a different definition of democracy than the typical meaning. I'm not sure what definition of "democracy" finds Trump to be against it. Is he good for the country? Certainly debatable. If he good for our government and our standing in the world, probably not. What do either of those things have to do with "democracy?"
The issue is that "democracy" got twisted to mean "liberal values". I agree that Trump was "democratic", but in the same sense that America's Founding Fathers explicitly avoided making America a democracy and chose a Republican model.
I am quite sceptical that presidential system have to compromise more than parliamentary ones. If anything, then I would say it is the other way around.
Traditionally, the countries with strongest tendency for compromise that come to my mind are the Nordic countries (where the government is often formed by minority coalitions) and Switzerland. (Who are going insane on this point. They don't have an opposition because all parties form the government. They also don't have a capital city, a head of state, or even a head of government, except for some obscure and purely formal title). In any case, while these countries do have demagogic parties, they are clearly amongst the most stable democracies in the world.
Perhaps a steelman of the book's argument regarding political systems is: though there is no hard and fast rule, the historical examples clearly show a pattern whereby presidential systems have a tendency to end up in a two party system that suffers from polarization, gridlock, and demagoguery. It can happen in parliamentary systems too, but it's somewhat less likely as these systems can support many smaller parties, and nearly always have a governing coalition.
Presidential systems typically have checks and balances to prevent any one branch from having too much power. Would be dictators or demagogues find this process of working with the other branches burdensome and slow, thus the tendency to weaken other branches and institutions.
Moreover, in a presidential system, the people often have divided government, where the legislature and executive are different political parties. Without compromise, governing cannot happen and the people become skeptical of the government doing anything. They in turn become receptive to the promises of a demagogue who says he will get rid of gridlock and get something done for the people.
Then a political party decides to support that demagogue because of the political power (see Venezuela/Chavez and Italy/Mussolini and, the book argues, Trump in the US), but once in, he never leaves.
That's a good way of phrasing it. Though I notice that I am confused because the summary is that "many checks and balances lead to dictatorship", which I am pretty sure is not true. But perhaps it's just my phrasing, perhaps it should be "checks of the wrong type lead to dictatorship" or something like this.
I definitely appreciate the observation that presidential systems are more vulnerable. But my (perhaps naive) explanation would rather be that the president has typically more power in presidential systems, not less. I think the US president or the French president has usually much more power than the German chancellor. Perhaps there is more variance in presidential systems, where the president has to rule sometimes with and sometimes against majorities in the parliament. But the German chancellor *always* has coalition partners keeping him/her in check.
So I would assume that presidential systems (sometimes) have a single person with lots of powers, and that these moments are when democracy is vulnerable. While in parlamentarian systems, it usually does not happen that a single person has so much power. Except in the rare moments when there are true landslide wins which give power to a single person/party; which are exactly the most dangerous moments for democracy. (The issue with Orban is that he got a 2/3 majority of seats in the 2010 election, which allowed him to tamper with the constitution, including the electoral system.)
So my main point of doubt is on the assumption that presidential systems have more checks and balances than parliamentarian ones. And it's not just coalition partners. German politics has also been blocked over long periods of time because it is easy for the opposition to block the second legislative chamber (representative of the regions, where a non-vote counts as NO. The regions are governed by coalitions, and when the coalition partners can't agree with each other, they usually abstain. D'oh!)
Canada has pretty stable governance despite a majority Prime Minister having almost no checks and balances at all besides the soft, unwritten kind. (A minority government can be held in check by the Opposition, but it's less paralyzed than in the equivalent American situation, and norms favour actually keeping the country running.) The PM has *way* more power than a US President in a comparable "trifecta" situation because he directly leads both the legislature and the government. Furthermore, Canadian parties are more strongly whipped (so Joe Manchins are unusual) and the Senate is ineffective as a restraint on the Commons. When I was younger I admired the American system of separation of powers and checks and balances, or the proportional/list parliaments with more room for diverse fringe parties, but the old Westminster system somehow *works*.
I think it might help that Canada has a small population.
I've read that the President of Switzerland is nine people, chosen by the legislature. The constitution requires that the nine represent different cantons and language regions, and an unwritten rule requires them to represent different parties as well. And all this is amiable and works! I can't imagine it working well in the U.S.
Hm, France? Presidential, bicameral legislation, had a stable democratic system for deacdes. Including times of cohabitation, when president and parliamentary majority were politically opposed.
Until Macron came. Though I like him, I think he can (should?) be counted as a demagogue. At least he was outside the traditional party system.
Eric Rall has listed historical counterexamples in the other direction, but there are also recent ones. Hungary with Orban has a parliamentary system. Poland with the Kaczynski brothers as well. Berlusconi in Italy may or may not be an example of a demagogue, depending on what part of demagogue you want to stress.
Eh, as a citizen of Poland (and hardly a Kaczynski's fan) I have to object to my country being lumped together with dictatorships. Absolutely nothing suggests Poland's democracy, as in the competitive process of electing government officials by majority of the vote, is in any way compromised. Kaczynskis are long-time political insiders, PiS has already peacefully ceded power once, and there's no indication they would refuse to do it again, nor is anyone suggesting any viable mechanism for them to do so. So far, they've simply continuously won elections (and accepted all losses they took, e.g. they're currently a minority in Polish Senate).
Going through the list of examples:
> Chavez in Venezuela - allied with the army. (Though I don't think Venezuela genuinely became undemocratic until Maduro, specifically, until after the 2015 parliamentary election that his party lost. Chavez just consistently had legitimate popular support.)
> Peron in Argentina - eh, no idea. (I'm completely ignorant about Argentina, as opposed to merely semi-ignorant as with other countries on this list.)
> Franco in Spain - army general literally winning a civil war.
> Mussolini in Italy - came to power as a paramilitary leader with entrenched interests' support.
> Hitler in Germany - took over government with other parties' and entrenched interests' support, used the position to forcibly dismantle democratic institutions.
> Orban in Hungary - another dubious example, he's tinkered with many government institutions, the electoral system in particular, but it still operates and it's perfectly possible that, e.g., his party loses this year's election. If it does lose and he leaves, was Hungary ever undemocratic?
> Erdogan in Turkey - the country wasn't democratic in the first place, he literally had to overcome the army to consolidate his power.
> Putin in Russia - came to power as an insider with deep state support. Forcibly represses political opponents, but it's hard to determine whether he's more undemocratic than his peers and predecessors or just emboldened by the genuine popularity he enjoys.
Honestly, summed together, those examples don't paint a picture of demagogues being threats to functional democracies (like Poland, Hungary or France). They paint a picture of demagogues being "threats" to nominal democracies which are already rotten. Outsiders who win are playing the game by the actual rules, exposing them to public view in the process. Outsiders who had or would have won a legit democratic election get countered by insiders' outright suspension of the democratic process, which sometimes (often?) propels their demagogue of choice to more power that they wished to hand to him.
I take your point that Poland and Hungary are not examples where the democracy is completely destroyed. But I think it's a fair description that the governments have removed some of the existing checks and balances in the last years. Not all of them, as you point out. In Poland, it's arguably "only" one, the judges.
Orban has removed even more. The most important one being the independent press, but as you say, he has tinkered with other institutions, too.
Being a democracy is a gradual description, there is not just black and white. Many dictators, from Napoleon to Putin and Xi, carry on holding elections, most of them meaningless. As you point out, Hungary is not on the "all black" side of it, and Poland not even close to that, but both countries have made a considerable shift in that direction.
The point is, can you actually tell there was a shift, and if so, in which direction? Is what happens in Poland's judiciary a dismantling of checks and balances, or removing the rot? I have the mental comfort of disliking both sides (Ziobro, Poland's Minister of Justice and the main architect of the reforms, is a thoroughly despicable individual, but our law community is hardly a paragon of justice) and therefore of remaining agnostic until I see the outcome.
The wider point is, in absence of actual understanding of the inner working of institutions, this is simply the correct position to take. You can't look from the outside and declare that democracy is being undermined because things change, just like you can't declare it's preserved because they remain the same. Sometimes, you get autocratic leaders who openly disdain democracy, which makes things a lot clearer, but as long as both sides of the change/stability conflict claim adherence to democratic principles, the only way to establish whether change removes democracy is to allow it to happen and see whether democracy remains afterwards. (Blocking democratically supported change is not an option, because at that point, where's your democracy in the first place?)
And I do mean the only way. Anything else is (unfotunately) indinstinguishable from the outside from motivated reasoning, a tribalistic propaganda on the side of the institutionally entrenched.
I agree that it must be possible to reform things, and I am aware that the old judicial system was accused of being corrupt and communist.
But as you say, details matter. I have no expertise of my own, but I do have reporters that I trust a lot. They do acknowledge and share the criticism of the old system, but they *still* condemn the reforms because they find them going way too far, so that the dangers are out of league compared to the benefits.
And actually, this is no longer the only point. Poland has dropped from place 18 to 59 under PiS in the World Press Freedom Index, due to PiS actions. Again, 59 is not the bottom of the pit. But you ask whether there has been a shift towards autocracy? Yes, absolutely and undoubtedly. The question is just how far exactly the shift was.
Sounds like an argument for an aristocracy. A powerful unelected cadre who can prevent disaster when the peasants are revolting. Not a new argument, it was one reason for the House of Lords in Great Britain and the (pre-Seventeenth Amendment) US Senate.
> I'm curious, can anyone point to counter examples to this, wherein a country with a presidential system, bicameral legislature, and supreme court, does not have a problem governing due to polarization and demagogues gaining power?
The United States? Mexico's not too bad either. Plus a bunch of others. It depends on your definition of "problems due to polarization." Every nation has problems. But places like France or Britain have plenty of polarization too. You'd need to somehow operationalize degree of problems etc.
I would argue the United States does have significant problems governing, in that it functionally can't pass any laws, can't fill many appointed positions, and regularly shuts down the government because of bickering over the budget.
Much of this is because of the particulars of how it's set up, mind you - deadlock in the US means no government, deadlock in most other places means automatically renewing the previous year's budget, etc.
That depends on how powerful the executive is. For example, most Parliamentary systems are weaker in this regard. See Belgium and its inability to have a government for two years. The US can't have that happen. Government shutdowns don't mean the end of government. They just mean the government has to stop spending more than it takes in.
Meanwhile, aside from flashpoints, the US actually passes a lot of laws. It's just that the uncontroversial ones don't make news. To pick random examples, the bipartisan animal rights bill or the Nordstream 2 sanctions until Biden decided the Democrats should end sanctions.
>I'm curious, can anyone point to counter examples to this, wherein a country with a presidential system, bicameral legislature, and supreme court, does not have a problem governing due to polarization and demagogues gaining power?
I can point to a couple counter-examples the other direction, where Parliamentary or Semi-Presidential republics with weak upper houses or unicameral legislatures did suffer from polarization, gridlock, and demagogues seizing power.
The obvious one is Weimar Germany, a Semi-Presidential republic (executive power shared between a directly-elected President and a Chancellor and Cabinet who were responsible to the legislature) with an asymmetrical bicameral legislature (i.e. there was an upper house, the Reichsrat, but is was much weaker in the legislative process than the lower house). Gridlock and polarization were perennial features of Weimar political life, and of course it ended with a demogogue becoming Chancellor and leveraging his faction into a totalitarian dictatorahip.
Next, there's the Third French Republic of 1870-1940, which on paper had a symmetrical bicameral legislature and a strong Semi-Presidential system, but the political culture very quickly shook out to limit the President to a purely administrative/ceremonial role with the Premier and Cabinet dominating the government and the Chamber of Deputies being considerably more important than the Senate in legislative affairs and the selection and retention of Premiers and Cabinets. The Third Republic narrowly avoided being overthrown by a populist coup by General George Boulanger in 1889, and finally fell to another strongman general-turned-politician Phillips Petain in 1940 following military defeat by Nazi Germany. The Third Republic was perennially plagued by political polarization and weak, unstable governing coalitions throughout its lifetime despite being the longest lived constitutional regime of France since the overthrow of the Ancien Regime in 1789.
Would it be fair to characterise the book as "Democracy only works if the elites conspire to ensure that the people don't get what they want"?
Also, the vaguely-defined word "demagogue" is doing a lot of work here. How do the elites tell who is a "demagogue" and hence potential threat to democracy, as opposed to just being someone they don't like?
I haven't finished the book yet, I'm not sure that its only solution is to have political parties that choose people who uphold the norms of democracy.
The answer to your second question is in the book. There is a four part test, based on the work "The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes" in 1978 by Juan Linz of Yale. We should worry when a politician:
(1) Rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,
(2) Denies the legitimacy of opponents,
(3) Tolerates or encourages violence, or
(4) Indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.
In the authors' view, meeting even one of these critera is cause for concern. Latin American leaders that meet one or more of these critera include Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Lucio Gutierrez, and Rafael Correa.
FDR qualifies for all four of these. Was FDR a demagogue who almost killed American democracy? If not, what's the principled definition where he isn't? If he is, then aren't there numerous demagogues who didn't kill democracy and who are very well remembered today?
I agree with other people. These categories are sloppy, at least as you've described them. If they're not sloppy then there's still something missing where some regimes survive multiple demagogues more or less intact and others don't survive one.
Yes, I've heard similar arguments. Certainly he had a democratic norm breaking streak. What springs to mind is his running for four terms and his stacking of the supreme court.
I'm not aware of what he did to encourage violence or curtail the civil liberties of political opponents, though -- any examples?
-As a Democrat, Roosevelt benefited from Jim Crow and the suppression of non-Democratic voters in the South including significant amounts of violence. He specifically tailored his laws to allow this to continue by, for example, excluding African Americans and immigrants from various protections.
-Roosevelt interned several hundred thousand members of various political groups, immigrant groups, and minorities. Most famously the Japanese. This was largely for political reasons despite wartime rationales. He also interned political dissidents under wartime powers.
-Roosevelt neither supported or condemned various partisans of his that called for violence against his opponents. He gave speeches to some of them while dismissing calls to condemn them. Republicans at the time accused him of putting dog whistles to such elements in his speeches.
-Roosevelt used his new regulatory authority to kick political critics off the air. Most famously Father Coughlin but also several others. This got worse as wartime censorship ramped up. He also disproportionately targeted enforcement of new regulations/standards against political opponents and minorities, for example with things like the AAA.
-A Roosevelt ally put out a bill in 1933 that would have made Roosevelt a semi-dictator including, notably, the ability to fire or hire anyone into any government position at will. He failed but it was an attempt to politicize the bureaucracy towards his own ends by (among other things) firing political opponents.
I don't think FDR was a dictator because I think that calling men like him dictators sets the standard wrong. But he does qualify under all four criteria there.
* Henry Ford (did you know the German Nazi party awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938? who knew?)
* Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest with a fiery radio program. Openly antidemocratic, admirer of Mussolini and defender of the Nazi regime.
* Huey Long, governor of Louisiana during the 1930s. Historian Arthur Schlesinger described him as "...a great demagogue ... who resembled ... a Latin American dictator, a Vargas or a Peron".
* Joseph McCarthy
* George Wallace
A more modern example might be Pat Buchanan.
The book claims that after the violence at the 1968 DNC in Chicago, both parties followed the advice of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. They largely eliminated the gate keepers at the top of the party, replacing them with delegates that voters vote for in the primary. Later in the 80s, the DNC added the superdelegate concept to attempt to retain some measure of gatekeeping, but the Republican party did not do the same as they were enjoying the presidency of Reagan.
So my wife and I have been doing some financial planning, and the topic of our kids’ college educations came up. So that led to the question of ballpark numbers for the cost of college in 16 years (the older kid just turned 2). Without getting into the weeds of whether college is worth the time and expense for a particular individual, I’m now curious about how colleges set their tuition and if there is any good way to make long-term predictions about college tuition. So if you’ve looked into this and have some insights, I welcome any comments. All I can find with my Google-Fu is a bunch of different websites repeating the claim that national average college tuition has been growing by 6% per year for the last ten-ish years, so the bar is pretty low. What follows is an account of the high-school-physics-level data analysis I did; feel free to ignore it if you want.
To narrow down the question, I just looked at in-state tuition for CU-Boulder (we live in Colorado and public universities seem to be more transparent about tuition than private ones). Since tuition depends on the number of credit hours taken, I assumed 15 credits per semester. I also only looked at tuition for SY ’05-’06 and later since CU made major changes to how they charged tuition for full-time students at that year. Then CU made a large tuition decrease in SY ’20-’21 which was facilitated by COVID relief money, and then for SY ’21-’22 brought the tuition back up to SY ’19-’20 levels. So my data set is tuition for the CU-Boulder College of Arts and Science from 2005-2019. Here’s the basic graph: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRhcMYCa-LCcMXVHf7huePzxZaxwu46NMFDqXxoVbgsZJZs2rfE2YKLKVkM1dgyN4wO_PilN96paaXq/pubchart?oid=1896179159&format=interactive.
During this time, the cost of tuition increased (on average) 4.9% per year. But its not a particularly close fit, and a linear trend line actually fits the data better, if we go by R2 values. Extrapolating to 2038 gives $11,355 per semester using the linear fit and $17,215 using the exponential. My guess is that tuition will be somewhere between those two numbers, and I don’t really trust such a large extrapolation to be more precise than that. But because I was curious, I compared it to the US CPI and the Denver Metro Area CPI to try to link it to inflation. Unsurprisingly, there was a much closer link to the local CPI than the national, and the graph is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRhcMYCa-LCcMXVHf7huePzxZaxwu46NMFDqXxoVbgsZJZs2rfE2YKLKVkM1dgyN4wO_PilN96paaXq/pubchart?oid=25903969&format=interactive
For what its worth, the Denver Metro CPI has increased on average by 2.4% per year, and that was very consistent in the time under consideration (much more so than tuition increases). So if I combine the relationship between tuition and CPI with that between CPI and time, I get a prediction of $13,635 per semester for the 2038 tuition. I don’t know if this is actually a better prediction than the limits set by the linear and exponential extrapolations but the fact that it falls between them is encouraging.
This is 95% true. You do have to pay if you're studying in Baden-Würtemberg and from a non-EU country. Although even then it's only €3k per year. Most of the best unis are outside Baden-Würtemberg (maybe except Tübingen which is e.g. pretty good on the ML front) though so it doesn't really matter.
To clarify, I’m mostly interested in the exercise of prediction rather than in tips for reducing college costs. As I said the older kid is only two and I have no idea where his interests and talents will lie.
In fact I expect free higher education to disappear progressively at least in France. The gouvernment recently decided to put tuition fees for foreign students, and although they have a very long way to go before they reach the crazy heights of the US, it's a slippery slope without Schelling fence from here.
I'm tempted to ask how many people who majored in mathematics in the US would be able to have a conversation in French but instead I'll just thank you for the correction.
Il fait longtemps que je n'ais pas parle francais avec personne, mais si vous voudrez lire de francais accente, j'aimerais brien la pratique! Although it's worth pointing out that I've never used the French keyboard layout, so diacritics are going to go missing, as in this example.
So if I'm reading the conclusions from the Diseasonality threads correctly, the factors that lead to greater flu incidence in winter are mostly at the population, rather than the individual, level. Specifically, does it mean that dressing up warm doesn't protect you/children from the flu that much? Are there trials about this (sounds straightforward to do)?
What about the "common cold", whatever that is. Also not affected by keeping warm?
Relatedly, why do you get a runny nose (which is also a flu symptom) the moment you go outside to the cold and wind? Is it just a coincidence that it's also a flu symptom, and is affected by the cold?
Back in the old times, when students did not yet have human rights, there were intervention studies on this. I.e., study subjects were kept cold (in cold rooms with little clothes, or even with their feet in icy water), and they were exposed to viruses.
As far as I remember, the outer conditions like temperature or clothing did not have any influence on how many students got infected.
A caveat is that the studies are old, and old studies often don't meet modern standards.
Runny nose is caused by irritation of nasal tissue. This happens due to dry air. All else equal, cold air is less humid than warm. The best way to combat this is artificially humidify internal air or drink more water, not stay warm, although I suppose there may be some marginal effects from energy waste from the body warming itself taking away from immune function. More likely, it's just harder to sleep in the cold and not sleeping decreases immune function.
You can still get runny nose from cold air when it's literally rain or fog outside, i.e. humidity ~100%. And I never ever had anything like runny nose in a sauna, where it's almost as dry as it gets (<10% humidity).
Amazing. I had no idea. But then how come I never get a runny nose in the dry desert, but often do while going out in winter, even if it's rainy (so more humid I think, right?)?
The reason cold air is dry is because it's too cold for some water to phase change into gas. A desert has quite the opposite problem, so your nasal tissue does get irritated, but any phlegm generated also has all of the water evaporate before it even leaves your nose, resulting in hard snot chunks and internal scabbing, but not running.
Rain is a similar issue as cold. Rain is sucking vapor out of the air and turning it into water, making the air more dry even though exposed surfaces are getting more wet. Obviously, that is happening in the clouds usually, not at your altitude, but if it's sufficiently cold, the air there is still subject to the same effect. You're probably not breathing in the rain.
Tales from real estate development y'all may find interesting.
I'm building a duplex in Indianapolis. It's on a corner lot, which is a great location. However, big problem: The current zoning laws dictate that corner lot houses have to face the street with more houses on the block. This may seem like no big deal, except that I have a long, narrow lot, and the long side faces that street. The resulting buildable area is a 17'x138' rectangle. On a wider lot, this would be fine, but 17' is not enough to build a reasonable design. The garage alone is 24'x24'.
Everyone involved agrees that this rule is very stupid and makes no sense, including the (quite nice) people at the planning department, but there's also no way around this except for a variance.
So, I have to submit a variance request, which is a WHOLE GODDAMN THING. $600+ in application fees, for starters. Then I have to retrieve and display signage on the property, which, okay.
NOW I have to send letters to FIFTY-FIVE community organizations, homeowners, and real estate holding companies notifying them of the variance and giving them an opportunity to veto it. That makes no fewer than 56 veto points in the process, the first being of course the board of zoning appeals.
Sending paper letters to that many people is expensive and seriously time-consuming - I've spent over $140 on the needed materials so far and haven't even gotten to the actual "mailing the crap" part.
So in order to get approval to make my house point the same way as the other houses on the block, I lose about 2 months in my schedule, $800 so far, and all of the hair this process has caused me to pull out.
$8000 seems utterly irrelevantly small on the scale of a building project. 2 months delay is a lot more money, and 56 veto points is a a description of Hell; focus on those components.
The $800 is just salt in the wound. It cost $40 and they handled the notices when I did it in another town, which means there's a lot of waste or pure profit in that $800.
It's a northeast corner (top right on a map.) The original house (now gone) faced east, so the long skinny lot has its short face to the east. However, the street to the north has more houses facing it than the street to the east on that block, so they want the house to face north, with the accompanying "front yard" setback.
For most architectural styles, a square-ish house will still have a front, a back, and two sides. The zoning law here is asking that the "front" of all houses be on the street that has more houses on it before it is intersected by another street. So if you're building on the intersection of 3rd Street and Pine, maybe there are 10 houses arrayed in a row along Pine before it hits 4th Street, but only 4 houses along 3rd Street before it reaches Elm?
I find that introduction embarrassingly implausible. AFAIK there wasn't any scientific consensus for how the first cell emerged, not in Sagan's time and not even today. This is to be expected, as the evidence from 4 billion years ago has surely been long since erased in the sands of time. I suppose there is a faint hope of replicating molecular evolution in a lab, but there could have been steps in the process that were highly improbable and therefore did not happen for millions of years in thousands of undersea vents or shallow pools, and steps like that cannot be replicated in a lab.
"While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but an evolutionary process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes."
Retelling the whole modern theory of abiogenesis would be too long, and I'm not really an expert, but in short the steps are:
1. Small organic molecules like simple sugars and amino-acids generated inorganically (what Adam describes). The process is well replicated and we observed it even in some comets and moons in the Solar System.
2. Increased concentrations of small molecules through repeated cycles of water with organic molecules coming in and then drying out, maybe in tidal pools, more likely in *terrestrial* geothermal springs.
3. Highly concentrated small molecules form polymers, especially on the right matrix (that's part of the evidence for geothermal vents, some of them have the right matrix).
4. Some of those polymers are RNAs, some RNAs are autocatalytic, i.e. catalyze their own polymerization.
5. The more efficient autocatalytic reactions outcompete less efficient ones for the available small molecules. If it begins to sound like natural selection that's because it is.
6. RNA calalyzation cycles are more efficient then single-molecule autocatalysis, so more complex reaction chains form.
7. At some point lipid bubble come along forming a proto-cell. Lipids are also polymers and can form through the same process, and probably some RNAs cycles just "learned" (i.e. accidentally mutated) to catalyze lipid polymerization and this change was supported by selection.
8. Proteins and DNA come along later, as a more efficient replacement for reaction catalysis and information storage respectively.
All these steps in isolation have been observed and/or reproduced, with some caveats. The whole process would take quite a while to complete, but we're probably talking tens or hundreds of millions of years, not billions and billions, as evidenced by some findings of extremely early microbial mats, appearing just 100-300 millions of years after the Earth cooled down enough actually to have a surface (for the second time, see Late Heavy Bombardment).
To your question why abiogenesis doesn't happen now, it's because it'd be simply eaten up at the very first stage, increased concentrations of small molecules - that's basically a free lunch for modern microbes. Another reason is that both oceans and atmosphere composition are very different now, so those small molecules don't spontaneously form in any significant quantities. It's not coincidental, to simplify the reason is that all that easily available reaction fuel (ammonia, methane, CO2, whatelse) was mostly consumed by early life in the first 1-2 bln years.
To be fair the modern theory of abiogenesis is full of holes and the probabilities don't quite work out.
My pet hypothesis is that proto-life fell here from another planet, where all the missing phenomena (like the conspicuously absent self-assembling RNA soup) can still be observed.
That just passes the buck up the chain. Either you just say "there's an infinite procession of rocks carrying life with no beginning or end", or "at some point there was a first life-form", at which point you need to settle materialist abiogenesis vs. divine creation all over again.
I'm fine with abiogenesis, I'm not fine with the assumption it would happen right here and just leave a single pattern, fully assembled life form (LUCA) with incredibly weird idiosyncracies that then evolved into everything.
There are many evolutionary niches, and it seems every single one is populated by something using the same translation/transcription machinery, similar metabolic pathways etc. I'd expect a considerable _architectural_ diversity if we started with the RNA soup. It can be preserved in a thermal vent in the Pacific or whatever, but I'd expect to find _something_.
Why would you expect to find something? Modern life exists everywhere including thermal vents and probably the upper mantle. Modern life will eat available organics; proto life doesnt have a chance today. Further, who says proto life all had the same transcription/translation etc machinery? One version simply won. Also the anthropic principle, and the observation that the universe we see isnt exactly teaming with intelligent life (there is a filter somewhere between abiogenesis and kardeshev II.
+1. Evolution during that time would have been very slow because the architectures of the various proto-cells would have tended to be grossly suboptimal, just barely-sort-of working kluges.
It's not surprising, I think, if the "best" internal architecture is able to win the race millions of years before the others could, given this very slow evolutionary environment.
So, I'm thinking the final step is something to do with cell division. When it finally happens, the new life form is likely to have million(s) of years to spread around the world. This first cell would have have lots of competition with other copies of itself, and would quickly diversify into many species due to mutations and imperfections in the copying process. Meanwhile, the older proto-cells that it evolved from are not effective competition because (e.g.) they replicate and adapt too slowly. So the First Cell rapidly becomes many species, some of which dominate over the others and, in particular, dominate over all the proto-cells in the area. The proto-cells die out either because some species of First Cell eats a shared resource and they starve, or because some species of First Cell eats them. (and this didn't have to happen right away; even if it took a billion years to kill off the proto-cells, I guess that would be fast enough to wipe away all evidence that they ever existed.)
Eventually one cell mutates some form of locomotion (edit: the most probable location for the cell is undersea vents, so I'm thinking the "locomotion" could be a form of hibernation that allows the cell to survive long enough to float to nearby vents in rare cases, with that ability getting more reliable over time so that eventually it can reach faraway vents) so that species spreads very slowly around the world. It can still achieve world domination by spreading slowly, just so long as it does so before any of the other, inferior, proto-cell designs can independently evolve similar capabilities.
Edit: Note: I'm just a software engineer and this is mostly guessing on my part.
This line of thinking seems like the flipside of the drunk-under-a-streetlamp motif. You’re giving up on any hope of finding your keys because you assume you must have dropped them down a drain somewhere far away in the dark?
Why would you expect to observe self-assembling RNAs in a developed ecosystem? That's kind of like asking "why there's no native gold in any of the San Francisco parks?" - because if there was any, people picked it up a long long time ago.
I agree that there's open questions, but those are mostly the questions like "exactly what kind of thermal vents it was", not "how the hell all this thing happened".
Note: I'm not positive that the steps 7 and 8 were in this order or what were the details. But that most likely tells about my own ignorance and not about the current state of science.
Interstingly, spontaneous generation was seen as an argument against divine intervention in the 19th century - at the very least during the debate between Pasteur and Pouchet.
It's my intuition that as evolution relies on spontaneous generation, so spontaneous generation relies on divine intervention (or at least creatio ex nihilo). I just find it interesting that modern science seems to depends on ideas that (at least in my science classes) it heavily discredited.
Spontaneous generation was the Aristotelian theory that macroscopic lifeforms were generated directly from decaying matter, i.e. moldy wood just turned into grubs. What you're thinking of is abiogenesis.
I think your question is sort of unanswerable. The Urey-Miller experiment proved in a lab setting that conditions similar to early Earth can result in organic chemicals developing from inorganic, producing the basic amino acids needed to construct living cells, but going from that to self-replicating molecules to entire cells happened in reality over billions of years across billions of parallel "test tubes." Hoping to recreate it in a lab might take the rest of Earth's existence.
But even if you saw it happen in a lab, or if we invented time travel and observed the exact moment is happened in real Earth history, how are you supposed to prove that what you saw didn't involve divine intervention?
To be clear, the Urey-Miller experiment showed that some (not all) of the organic chemicals necessary for life could occur in conditions that we thought early Earth may have been like back in the 60s. Today we believe that the conditions on early Earth were very different, and may have been actively hostile to organic chemicals created through a Urey-Miller like experiment. All of that just to say that abiogenesis is still very mysterious, and has a lot of problems that haven't been solved yet.
I think you've got a straw-man of Aristotle's spontaneous generation. It doesn't necessarily have to deal with decaying matter or macroscopic lifeforms (though he did not know micro-organisms existed). The central idea is that living matter can form spontaneously from nonliving matter, provided the nonliving has the appropriate elements sufficient for spontaneously (i.e. without parents) producing life. But tbh tomato-tomahto.
My follow-up is are we sure that spontaneous generation (sive abiogenesis) has stopped happening?
Yes, pretty sure. New abiogenesis seems to require a large, stable, sterile environment with appropriate energy and matter present.
Sterility protects the developing proto-life-components from being eaten by a more advanced life form, while stability protects them from other forms of destruction. The environment needs to be large to provide enough "lottery tickets" for the proto-life to discover a workable cell architecture. Remember that the sterile environment in which life originally developed was roughly the entire planet (though it seems like only small pockets of Earth would have been suitable for abiogenesis), and despite this immense number of lottery tickets, the common ancestor of all modern life probably still took millions of years to develop. So I don't expect we'll ever discover new abiogenesis.
No. We could be, in principle, as new abiogenesis would produce lifeforms with no phylogenetic relationship to others, but to be sure no such lifeforms exist, you'd need to gene sequence every organism on the planet, many of which are not accessible because they're extremophiles and live in places we can't get to. And even that doesn't prove it "stopped happening," just that any new descent lines that came about ended before we could find them.
Are there any speed reading systems that actually work? I've been stuck around 250wpm forever and I feel very IO limited like an 8-core CPU with a 56k internet connection. I often listen to audiobooks at 1.75x which is coincidentally also around 250wpm. I would rather have neo's ability to download data than have a left hand.
Will, I sort of doubt that this comment applies to your situation, but it may -- and in any case it's info that might be useful to somebody here.
There is a form of OCD where people become unable to read because they are so eaten up by doubt that they are adequately taking in the material they read. They read a few sentences, then wonder whether they were really concentrating when they read them, and so go back and re-read them. But re-reading does not quell their doubt, and the longer they try the worse things get, because after a while the person is so frustrated by the whole situation that they are preoccupied with that problem and do not have much mental space left over for the content of the paragraph they're trying to read. I have seen people with such a bad case of reading OCD that they feel compelled, after reading a single sentence, to go back and double-check just the punctuation in the sentence -- did they mistake any apostrophes for exclamation marks? Needless to say, these people get very little actual reading done, and in fact they usually develop such an aversion to the process that they stop reading anything they are not compelled to by the practicalities of life.
Anyhow, I have observed miniature versions of this syndrome in myself from time to time, and so have a lot of people I know. I'm especially likely to have it happen after spending a week or more online a lot, reading very brief things like posts, and/or reading under circumstances where I can, and do, escape minor boredom or frustration by clicking on something else.
The most effective treatment, both for full-blown reading OCD and for the low-grade version lots of us experience occasionally is to just accept the possibility that you may do a lousy job of taking in info for a while. What I do is just keep moving my eyes over the page at my usual pace, no matter how many details I'm missing. Preoccupation with the quality of my attention & amount of info I'm harvesting usually diminishes over the course of 10 mins or so. Once that issue is less on my mind, there's more mental space to get interested in content, and I go back to being an engaged reader.
So, Will, it might be worth a try for you to just experiment with reading faster while tolerating the feeling that you're not taking in enough, and refusing to give in to the craving to micromanage your attentional processes. If lowering standards and reading faster leads to more engagement with the material, you might get a better trade-off from reading that way than you do with trying to force yourself to read faster while retaining exactly as many details as you do with slow reading.
A technology-assisted method I've found to be useful is Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). The basic idea is that, instead of laying out the whole text right-to-left and top-to-bottom in a rectangle and letting the reader move their eyes across it as normal, in RSVP you display each word of the text one at a time, in sequence, in the same location, so the reader doesn't have to move their eyes or decide where to look next. Obviously this only works on a screen and not on paper, and you need special software to do it, but there are lots of free tools and browser plugins available. Amazon's Kindle app for smart phones also has an RSVP mode called Word Runner that I use often. I find with this that I can read at 450-500 wpm a lot of the time. If the text contains complicated ideas or is otherwise "tough", I find I have to slow down and read normally to really get it, but for lots of the reading I do RSVP makes it a lot faster, and subjectively I think I retain about as much as when reading normally.
I would summarize a lot of the methods as "hastily skim 20% of the words and just assume the rest without actually reading it". But if an author could actually convey his meaning with 20% of the words, he should have written it with 20% of the words.
Maybe you are being tongue in cheek, but I think the point is that human languages are very compressible. People used to be able to get their points across with telegrams, but it would be odd to write a book in telegram form. Perhaps it's possible to train oneself to read regular prose by skipping the words that would not appear in a telegram.
I suspect telegramese would usually multiply the ambiguities in the text, and require the reader to have more knowledge to decode the message.
What rubs me the wrong way about skimming is assuming I know better than the author which words are necessary, before I've even read them. I'd much rather read a summary than skim a text.
When I am listening to an audiobook of a novel, I'll rewind if I miss any small detail, because it could be important later if the book is well written (Chekov's gun principle)
If the author wants to be brief, they can do it without telegramese. For example:
"Success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas . Orevelle Wright"
This can be rewritten as something even shorter which is closer to normal English grammar, less ambiguous, and easier to read:
"4 flights Th morning; 21mph headwind; started level with engine power only; avg airspeed 31mph; max duration 57s. Inform press. Home for Christmas."
(I'm kinda shocked that telegraph operators wasted precious space spelling out numbers.)
The advantage of a book of which only 20% is useful over a telegram with only 20% of the words is that I can go back and read all the words, at my choice, if there is any ambiguity in my mind.
I don't get speed-reading novels, though. I get 5 hours of pleasure reading a novel, and if I speed-read it in 2 hours, I don't compress 5 hours of pleasure into 2 hours. I just now have 2 hours of pleasure.
"How to Read a Book" my Mortimer J. Adler is an excellent resource even if I'm unsure whether it's right for you.
It has numerous tips for tackling difficult tomes, but essentially recommends layering your reading. Read the table of contents first, skim for keywords to flesh out a rough understanding. A more detailed skim where you tackle key concepts and paragraphs and so on. I think someone here may have recommended it to me.
It is a bit light on tips for bringing up raw reading comprehension speed, though it does recommend running your finger over sentences at slightly faster than you are comfortable with. I'm getting Anne Jones' "How to be a speedy reader" soon, so will report back if it's any use.
So I often see people claim that they forget important details when they speed read especially much later after weeks or months but I'm 95% positive that happens to most people even in normal reading. In fact you forget most things. Can most people remember a math problem they did a month go? And you should have far more intentional focus and such on that. Indeed most people couldn't tell you the math problems on a test they just took.
I will say that if I'm reading non-fiction I'll often be slower. Although this isn't always useful. For instance I'm currently reading Empires And Barbarians to get a better understand of the culture, politics, economics, and logistics of Germanic tribes beyond the Roman frontier for the fantasy strategy game I'm working on. There are a lot of caveats and clarifications that are unnecessary and uninteresting to the regular reader and seem more intended to protect from assaults by colleagues/rivals of the author. Total waste of my time. Working on filtering those out.
I think most people could "speed read" around 500 wpm without harming comprehension on non-fictionn. I can get up to 2000 but am usually around 1500 on fiction and as far as I can tell this doesn't harm my experience at all. Perhaps a tiny bit of an issue witha small percentage specific details or something? If I'm really digging for a negative impact.
I mean reading fiction is such a subjective experience. How can you ever know if you lost out by speed reading but I don't think that I do. Speed reading often helps on middle book slog sections of epic fantasy as well. Since I experience it as normal I can avoid the thing that happens to some people where they literally just *don't read* whole chapters of POVs they don't like and miss out if the author did some important plot thing in them.
But on a relatively information dense non-fiction text there is no amount of "training" the average person can do that would get them beyond ~500WPM. Some people with special advantages can of course crack that. But best case you'd have to influence very young children under 5-7 years old to get them some of the advantages such people are benefitting from and some is genetic or based on eidetic memory stuff.
"I mean reading fiction is such a subjective experience. How can you ever know if you lost out by speed reading but I don't think that I do"
Funny, I do almost the opposite : I kind of naturally speed read, possiblly partly because proifessionnaly I spend a lot of time skimming non-fiction. But this clearly decreases my immersion in fiction, so recently I find that I take great pleasure in listening to fiction, at 1x speed of course, as it allows me to better enter the fictional world and enjoy the writing, visualize the scenes, etc...
Speed doesn't have a huge effect on my immersion. But listening to audio is basically impossible for me. Data input is just too slow. 2x helps a little but I still dislike it. My brain just says hey we have a lot of extra processing tim why not just get totally distracted by another topic.
I do agree that the slow pace of X1 audio makes it a bit difficult to maintain attention and I only listen to audio books when I am doing something else, But for me, it does provides a better experience, as I can not skim-read, which I always do in print. And combining a (preferably great!) adio book with a hike in a beautiful landcsape is a really wonderful experience for me :D
I find that I can easily watch fiction movies at 2x speed, and at 3x speed with subtitles; and beyond that point I'm limited by the max speed of the video player and by the space available to display subtitles. I can listen to fiction audiobooks at 2x, but the non-fiction I listen to usually requires speeds from 0.9x to 1.25x. That's already far below my max reading speed.
I was interested in it long ago, but I concluded that the typical claims of speed-readers were impossible. Some people have bad habits which slow their reading, especially having a strong motor linkage between reading and speaking. People who learned to read by sounding things out sometimes still move their lips or vocal chords even if they're not making any sound.
(Fun fact: Peter Abelard (1079--1142 CE) reportedly frightened other students in libraries by reading silently.)
At 250 wpm you're probably not doing that, but you might be slowing yourself down a bit by hearing the words as you read them. I hear some of the words as I read; can't seem to shut them all off; but reducing that might help. For me, the main advantage of speed-reading scanning techniques (making long jumps between fixations) is that it gives me no time to hear the words.
I've lost interest in speed reading, because I remember so little now of what I read that I must read everything twice to retain more than a vague memory of it. I think there's more mileage to be gotten out of optimizing reading speed for retention, better note-taking systems, optimizing the timing of re-reading, and prioritizing and scheduling reading so as to read things near the time that you're going to apply them.
(Also, the degree to which speed-reading works on a text is inversely proportional to the information content of that text.)
Speed-typing, now, that I'd like to learn. Bryan Bishop, whom some of you might know from DIYbio and transhumanist circles, transcribes talks in real time, which means typing about 150wpm for an hour at a time (with many mistakes). Seems impossible to me, but he does it.
In my childhood, I once came across an ad for a course purporting to teach people to speed read, complete with a test. It was supposed to show the reader that they needed the course; instead, I came out in the "speed reading" range.
Now maybe the ranges given in this ad were lower than what you are thinking of as impossible. But on the other hand, maybe not.
I was certainly a notably fast reader, faster than I am today; I think I lost that degree of speed some time in my thirties.
All I had done to become such a fast reader was spend a lot of time reading.
I type notes of most calls and meetings I do in my dayly job. Just a matter of training. I've started this decades ago with using other electronic brain amplifiers like calendars, address books and more because of my many shortcomings like a bad long term memory. Now it's an asset because I find most of the things I've discussed in the past 10+ years in an instant. Sometimes it deals like brain doping - like Google and tej Wikipedia and all the rest.
About Peter Abelard : Saint Augustine reports in the Confessions how he was surprised and impressed by Saint Ambrose reading silently.
"When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when I was present—for he did not close his door to anyone and it was customary to come in unannounced—I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise. I would sit for a long time in silence, not daring to disturb someone so deep in thought, and then go on my way. I asked myself why he read in this way. Was it that he did not wish to be interrupted in those rare moments he found to refresh his mind and rest from the tumult of others' affairs? Or perhaps he was worried that he would have to explain obscurities in the text to some eager listener, or discuss other difficult problems? For he would thereby lose time and be prevented from reading as much as he had planned. But the preservation of his voice, which easily became hoarse, may well have been the true cause of his silent reading."
Now I wonder if I didn't confuse Abelard with Ambrose.
I think that the ancient attitude towards written language was that the marks on paper were an aid to memory, but didn't really contain meaning. Recall the (much, much later) debate over whether, when a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound. Before we understood acoustics, people seem to have thought that speech was spiritual. This was a natural assumption: thought was assumed to be spiritual, and spirit was the breath that animated a body; speech was carried out of one's body on one's breath, and literally inspired that meaning to reform inside some other body. The marks on paper roused the intellect, but only the human voice could imbue communication with spirit and hence meaning.
I can't recall any good quotes directly addressing the non-material, spiritual nature of speech, but I am reminded of Derrida's conclusion that written language itself contains no meaning. Derrida, like all the major post-modernists AFAIK, was a scholar of classical antiquity, and believed in classical metaphysics.
Someone, someday, had the idea of putting spaces between words to help readers. It seems so obvious in retrospect, and yet in 1000 years the Roman empire did not think of it. I find absolutely fascinating the amount of ingenuity that went into basically anything we now take for granted.
Although in Ambrose case there is a strong feeling of "I'm reading silently because I need my half-an-hour a day of actual intellectual work where I'm not interrupted by idiots (like Augustine)".
But in a world where reading material is scarce and expensive (and readers are scarce too), reading aloud is also an economic necessity.
My work paid for a 2-day speed reading workshop which I did. The technique they used was basically reducing the number of eye movements - fixate on two or three positions per line and quickly move from one position to the next, never going backwards. You kinda take in the surrounding words you dont focus on directly from the periphery. At the end of the workshop I got to around 800wpm if I remember correctly.
My takeaway was that it is not that hard to increase the speed at which you optically take in a text, i.e. recognise all of the relevant words. But the real bottleneck for me was not mechanical reading speed but comprehension: I was nowhere near able to take in novel non-trivial ideas without stopping reading and giving me a second or two to process what I just speed-read.
I still do speed reading for text with lots of fluff (e.g. many newspaper articles), texts on topics I'm already very familiar with (so the "surprisal" of actual text compared to expected text is low) or to quickly skim a text to get an idea of what its about. But most of the time I just read normally, and am bottlenecked by the speed of my reading comprehension.
There are people who know more than me about this and hopefully some of them will answer, but I've appreciated Scott H. Young's overview[^1] for a discussion of which speed reading claims hold up, and Tim Ferriss's "How to Speed Read"[^2] for a quick tour of some immediately usable tips.
Anecdotally, I've talked to two friends who read much faster than me that both use a particular kind of skimming as their default reading mode, involving darting around the page noting key words, often nonlinearly, and autofilling in the rest. (Neither of them ever practiced speed reading, they just both independently picked this up from reading voraciously as kids.)
I'm not sure how they avoid missing important but minuscule components—foremost "not" and worse "-n't", which totally flip the sentence's meaning. I would guess the answer is some combination of
a) feeling surprise causes them to reread the sentence,
b) they've built the passive skill of noticing the worst offenders like "not" as they scan, and
c) they just actually run a higher risk of this than more completionist readers.
One friend said her strategy varies a fair bit between types of material (and I suspect this is true for most/all fast readers), with this kind of jumping around being used rarely or not at all for difficult or unfamiliar non-fiction like textbooks and academic papers.
Unfortunately I don't know any battle-tested strategies to develop this technique, but maybe someone else can chime in with more? My first thought is "just try it for a while and see what happens" (which I haven't yet attempted myself, but I'm feeling a rekindled license to try it from writing this!).
In the meantime hopefully the linked info will give you a boost :)
I'm sort of a natural speed reader of the kind you mentioned, and yeah it's obviously all about skimming.
The trick with negations etc is that natural languages are highly redundant, fall in predictable patterns, and you can usually infer not just a word but 20-80% of a sentence from context (!). Consider the process of learning a foreign language you're now fluent in - did you check every single word in a dictionary?
This technique fails horribly with anything that uses an unfamiliar mode of speech (e.g. archaic) or is information dense (academic articles and textbooks, unless you're already deeply familiar with the subject matter).
Yeah, very true, it depends so much on what you’re reading: predictable stuff you can skim and be confident you’ll notice any oddities which require more attention. But any poetry worth reading demands you sound out the words in your head
I once tried to dive into the topic for the same reason. Halfeway in I stopped because it turned out that speed reading for us mortal humans - not rainman - essentialy is skipping words, information, sentences like diagonal readin my own impression at that time might be not correct but I learned that a) I will miss a lot of details of the texts I will speed read. And I wouldn't remember much of speed read parts later. An even worse outcome for myself was that I couldn't enjoy any casual reading of let's say fiction anymore. Speed reading felt extremely hasty, stressed to me and made my life worse not better at that time. So I stopped my attempt completely. Later I learned about mindfulness, deep concentration, flow, executive summaries, secondary literature, short books, and now YouTube for example. When I'm thinking it over - I still kind of speed read fiction. I will often skip a lot of the fat and even some meat and only keep the bones of a story.
Notes are useful for spaced repetition, though I was never a big note-taker.
In school the test schedule provided an automatic spaced repetition. Some quiz would come the day after the reading, and then an overlapping quiz the next week, then a test at the end of the month, then a final at the end of the year. So I basically just showed up to class, never took notes, did the assignments, and remembered enough to ace all the tests without studying, in all high school and most college courses.
So at 36 I still remember everything that was taught in AP Physics, but after listening to all seven Narnia books on my ipod while walking to and from work when I was 30, I can only sketch vague and jumbled outlines of the plots. I'm very confident that if I had gone on some MOOC site to get tested after each chapter and at the end of each book, I would remember a lot more from those books. The test taking would add <10% to the reading time, but improve long term recall by >3x
I honestly do make SRS notes for books after reading them. Not a lot, but 2 or 3 are often enough as a hook.
So sitting here right now, I know Andrew Ketterly is the Magician, and his nephew Diggory Kirke went with Polly Plumber to found Narnia, which was later visited by the 4 children[1], during whose reign the horses Bree and Hwin helped restore Price Cor to the throne of Archenland.
I can recall quite a lot more from the plot just with those basic facts, because I remember a lot of associated plot points when I get those very few SRS notes. And I'm not sure if this is *important* [2], but the cost is extremely low.
[1] I was going to say "I forgot their last name," but while typing this sentence I remembered it was Pevensie.
[2] Part of the reason I did it was as an experiment to see what happens.
Lately, I’ve noticed that people seem to use “Just because it fits the data, doesn’t mean it is true. Correlation isn’t causation” as a way of shutting down a discussion on a theory they don’t want to discuss. I basically interpret it as “I don’t want to discuss this. Please shut up.” These days, I just oblige.
But recently I’ve been thinking, if correlation with existing data and a narrative for how it works isn’t enough to mean a theory isn’t true or at least plausible, then what is enough?
“ So it’s unsurprising that one so often runs into researchers for whom indeed correlation = causation (we certainly wouldn’t want to be freshmen or Internet blowhards, would we?). It is common to use causal language and make recommendations (Prasad et al 2013), but even if they don’t, you can be sure to see them confidently talking causally to other researchers or journalists or officials. (I’ve noticed this sort of constant motte-and-bailey slide from vague mentions of how results are correlative tucked away at the end of the paper to freely dispensing advice for policymakers about how their research proves X should be implemented is particularly common in medicine, sociology, and education.)
Bandying phrases with meta-contrarians won’t help much here; I agree with them that correlation ought to be some evidence for causation. eg if I suspect that A → B, and I collect data and establish beyond doubt that A&B correlates r = 0.7, surely this observations, which is consistent with my theory, should boost my confidence in my theory, just as an observation like r = 0.0001 would trouble me greatly. But how much…?
As it is, it seems we fall readily into intellectual traps of our own making. When you believe every correlation adds support to your causal theory, you just get more and more wrong as you collect more data.”
I know you're probably talking about science, but it seems to me that deductive logic still seems to me to work. Take, e.g. the theory "there is no such thing as universal truth." If this theory were true, then it would have to be false, because "there is there is no such thing as universal truth," is itself an claim to universal truth. Hence, there must be universal truth. No correlation or causation needed :)
I second Abu Ibrahim: "there is no such thing as universal truth except this statement" + "the previous statement is universally true" count as two distinct statements. Hence the exception is unjustified, while my first "there must be universal truths" stands. And hence if there is one universal truth, there must also be many. I think this is getting at the intuition that everything entailed by a universal truth is itself (universally) true.
also, notice the "except..." doesn't get you around the contradiction. You're saying there are no universal truths, and you say there is a universal truth.
How about "there is no such thing as universal truth and your statement is a universal truth"? That's a second, distinct statement which is a universal truth, contradicting your statement. So there must be more than one universal truth.
Thinking this way just capitulates to nonsensical pedants on the Internet.
In normal speech, statements about "all", "none", "every", etc. are implicitly qualified by "nontrivial". "There is no universal truth" implicitly excludes not only universal truths necessary to believe the statement, but statements of that form in general.
PS, to expand a little bit on that: Causation is actually a statement about a counterfactual world. If I say A caused B, then I say that "in an imagined world where A hasn't happened, B wouldn't have happened either".
Randomized control trial. If you don't have that I think you are leaving yourself open to flaws and biases. "controlling for variables" can work but is also known to have issues. Also see https://www.gwern.net/Causality
Unfortunately I think a lot depends on the specific thing you are looking at, and what the data is. I could think of examples where the 'people' are correct; but it still probably shouldn't shut down discussion.
Well, it's enough to make it plausible - though the 'narrative' is doing a lot of work there too - but it isn't enough to *prove* it true, correlation usually does imply a link in practice but the link is often a common cause.
Personally, if someone doesn't want to discuss a whole topic, absolutely let it slide, but if they're discussing their pet theory for a thing then it's totally fair game for you to bring up alternate theories for the same thing.
Yeah, I think the thing that a lot of people have trouble managing mentally to deal with cases (like most controversial issues) where there are lots of plausible answers that fit the data, and we simply don't know which of the many plausible, but mutually exclusive, theories that are out there is true.
Exercise confusion: Glycolysis, the main pathway to free up energy in anerobic exercise is ten times less efficient than oxidative energy production that is used for aerobic exercise. Wouldn't that mean that anerobic exercise should produce 10 times more weight loss than aerobic exercise if matched for total work.
Consider a 80 kg adult male running 10 km in 60 minutes. That's about 617 joules.
Think about trying to match that in some anaerobic exercise allowing for a decent amount of resistance through a decent range of motion. Let's just say squatting. For simplicity, keep the workout at 60 minutes. It'll overestimate a bit because your lower legs don't move, but let's just also grant all bodyweight counts in the work and you're squatting double your own bodyweight (it's not that exact anyway because the actual force required depends on torque, which is unique per body). So 160 kg squats plus 80 kg bodyweight for each rep. Let's say squats are deep enough that you go through a full meter of range of motion.
That's still ~3333 squats required to match the total work of running 10 km. Nobody can do that. Even granting real lifters are going to do multiple exercises to account for individual body parts wearing out, nobody is going to do 3333 combined reps of anything at all.
As far as I know, weight loss research seems to indicate attempting to induce a deficit via exercise of any kind isn't effective because exercise makes you hungry, but you can see here an obvious advantage of aerobic exercise if you're looking to do a lot of total work is aerobic exercise is a lot easier, so you can do more of it.
"weight loss research seems to indicate attempting to induce a deficit via exercise of any kind isn't effective because exercise makes you hungry,
Recent work by Herman Pontzer suggests that the body *somewhat* compensates for calories burned through exercise by using less calories for other processes: "The takeaway for us here in the industrialized world is that we need to stay active to stay healthy, but we can’t count on exercise to increase our daily calorie burn. . . . At the end of the day, our weight is a matter of calories eaten versus calories burned — and it’s really hard to change the calories we burn!" (https://researchblog.duke.edu/2021/03/24/duke-researcher-busts-metabolism-myths-in-new-book/)
Glycolysis utilizes a small part of glucose's energy and then - in the anaerobic pathway - has to ferment it to an awkward form just to regenerate NAD+. There's plenty of energy left inside - consider that yeast ferments glucose into ethanol, not exactly known for low energy density.
It doesn't quite work like that. But HIIT which is primarily anaerobic does look to be pretty effective for weight loss despite requiring far less time than jogging.
The lactic acid that's produced from anaerobic metabolism isn't just excreted. Most of it is metabolized back into glucose once oxygen is available again. There's some inefficiency there compared to aerobic metabolism, but more like 1.1x than 10x.
Not a biologist, so guessing here but... I assume you are correct, but making the comparison with keeping total work constant seems silly. Exercising while holding your breath is so much more difficult, painful, and debilitating that it seems totally unrealistic that you could work out even 1/10 as rigorously as you could during aerobic exercise.
I believe that anaerobic exercise produces a decent amount of acetic acid (vinegar) as a metabolic byproduct, which has to later be cleared by the body after the anaerobic period ends. The fact that you are rapidly dumping acid into your blood during anaerobic exercise is why it feels like burning. Surely it becomes damaging at high enough concentrations or for extended periods. And I suspect it isn't great for your long term health to go into anaerobic mode very frequently.
The anaerobic metabolic pathway doesn't exist for every day use, it's purpose is to enable you to occasionally tap into a short-period superhuman capability level to avoid existential danger.
Bret Weinstein was pushing worry about mRNA vaccines, as not adequately proven to be safe.
I don't know what, if anything, he's been saying on the subject lately, but so far as I know, mRNA vaccines haven't turned out to be especially dangerous, and I'm wondering what would be adequate evidence that they're generally safe.
When I studied Weinstein last June, he and his posse uncritically assumed that all US/UK incident reports (VAERS/Yellow Card) referred to health problems that were definitely caused by the vaccine, i.e. they never considered the base rate - the number of people per million who would ordinarily get sick in a typical day, or week, even if they hadn't taken a vaccine. The sources that they relied on, such as the "Evidence Based Medicine Consultancy" (headed by a leading ivermectin proponent), also ignored the base rate while demanding an immediate halt to the vaccine rollout: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations?commentId=C2BdvmiGif37cfddw
They further assumed that there was severe underreporting. Even though the FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, his guest Steve Kirsch said that OpenVAERS said that the 6,000 deaths in VAERS probably translated to about 20,000 deaths in reality, deaths caused directly by the three vaccines. They generally referred to the three vaccines as "the vaccine", and they did not consider the possibility that any one vaccine could be safer or less safe than any other. Kirsch's own web site claimed 25,800 deaths (citing a blog that retracted the claim a few days later), and a few months later Kirsch would increase his death estimate to 150,000-250,000 (https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/debunking-steve-kirschs-latest-claims-97e1c40f5d74). I noticed in August that the name of the other man on the Weinstein's program, Dr. Robert Malone, appeared as a collective author on Kirsch's blog post, which was also placed behind a paywall, while Kirsch's name was temporarily removed, though it's back now.
So, sure, we can say mRNA vaccines haven't turned out to be dangerous, but good luck convincing Weinstein's audience. I will forever wonder if my now-dead uncle was in the audience...
It's probably worth hammering on that we know more about risks of the vaccine and risks of the diseases than we did a year or two ago and hope to convince at least some people.
I haven't paid much attention to him lately either, but for a long while he seemed to be moving the goalposts as new evidence appeared evidence appeared and winding up in the same place for new and creative reasons. I'm sympathetic to there having been some genuine uncertainty about safety ... some billions of doses ago.
My understanding, based on what Eric Topal reported, is that the FDA considers vaccine "long term effects" to be those things that occur within two months of vaccination. Even normal vaccines do not get long term study of the type I presume Weinstein would want to see.
I'm not sure what Weinstein would want to see. We've already had over a billion doses administered. Where are all the people in hospitals with blood clots?
If the worry is is some vague long term cancer risk, what other vaccines or medicines get the level of scrutiny Weinstein would suppose we need?
My short answer is that the existing data on vaccines is sufficient evidence to conclude they are are safe (on the order if 1ppm of adverse reaction).
Adverse events are more common than 1ppm. I've had myocarditis for 4 months now (after taking Moderna vac). Fortunately the worst seems to be over but my rest heart rate still averages around 73bpm instead of 38 bpm which it used to be (I'm 28yo male with competitive gymnastics background).
Heart rate while walking is 130ish instead of the normal 80. Doing sports is out of the question.
After I developed my sickness I checked out the literature and was surprised to find out that the probability to develop myocarditis could be as high as 1 in 5000.
Results: For the 12-17-year-old male cohort, 6/6,846 (0.09%) patients developed myocarditis overall, with an adjusted rate per million of 876 cases (Wilson score interval 402 - 1,911). For the 12-15 and 16-19 male age groups, the adjusted rates per million were 601 (257 - 1,406) and 561 (240 - 1,313).For 12-17-year-old females, there were 3 (0.04%) cases of myocarditis of 7,361 patients. The adjusted rate was 213 (73 - 627) per million cases. For the 12-15- and 16-19-year-old female cohorts the adjusted rates per million cases were 235 (64 - 857) and 708 (359 - 1,397). The outcomes occurred either within 5 days (40.0%) or from 19-82 days (60.0%).
Note that the myocarditis rate quoted is for teenage boys who had *Covid*. It concludes "Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males", though confusingly it said "876 cases" per million earlier. It continues "Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine". The chance is lower for girls. The confidence interval is pretty wide and I have not otherwise examined the paper.
Where does "1 in 5000" come from? 876 per million divided by 6 would be 1 in 6849; 450 per million divided by 6 would be 1 in 13,333.
Good catch! I read the paper again and it turns out I misunderstood the categories entirely (mixed myocarditis from covid and myocarditis from the vaccine). I have read from another paper that the rate of myocarditis from the vaccine for 20-30yo is roughly 5 times smaller than it is for teenagers. So it seems I was incredibly unlucky as this would implicate that the probability was only ~12ppm.
To fix my mistake for 12-17yo boys the myocarditis rate from the second dose is 66,7ppm which is 1 in 15 000 and the corresponding rate to develop it from covid is roughly 1 in 1000. So if for example ~20% of population gets covid per year. Vaccinating would seem to result in less myocarditis cases overall. Although not by much.
My claim of "on the order of 1ppm" is for the population as a whole, not the cohort of 12-17 years old.
The slightly raised risk of myocarditis in young kids, which it is important to note, HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED as an increased risk for this cohort, still has to weigh against the risks of COVID.
Absent from the conversation is that the vaccines do not prevent one from catching covid. Is a few months of protection from covid worth the potential side effects of the vaccine? If you are a young person who works from home it may not be worth the risk.
I would like to see 5-year RCTs done in parallel with and continuing after the FDA approval of most new drugs, so that we're not blocking access, but also not remaining forever ignorant of the long term effects aside from some handwavy uncontrolled studies.
"Adequate" in the context of emergency defense against a plague that has killed millions worldwide and "adequate" by normal medical standards are two different things. For the former, we're pretty clearly there. For the latter, we'd probably want another year or two of observation and analysis.
I'm sympathetic to the view that since we seem to have mostly defeated COVID, that Omicron looks to be "COVID Lite", we should maybe start shifting towards conventional standards of safety, rather than vaccinating five-year-olds and multiply-boosting everyone else because More Vaccine Is Better. But anyone who's not in an extremely low-risk group should probably still have at least the standard course of Pfizer if they can get it. And I'm skeptical that Weinstein is providing that level of nuance.
I believe the argument is, that was the case for the old type of vaccine, but with these new mRNA vaccines we have reason to suspect much more complicated biological changes
Yes, for instance that in vitro study that found that uncleared spike proteins ( hint only occurs in cells when made in cells ). Have been found in the nucleus and disrupting DNA repair . That seems an important thing to follow up on . And other findings relating to spike proteins effects on bodily systems . Especially considering findings of spike in serum 4 months after injection and levels corresponding to waning
Adequate evidence we have already, truly conclusive evidence will take waiting a few decades to see if cancer incidence or some other very-long-term complication increases.
"Even if vaccines have not been around for long, the sample for the Covid vaccines is so yuuuuge that we can already see what risks they don't have & proceed by elimination."
He starts out by looking at the distribution of adverse effects based on billions of doses already administered. Ends by referencing a paper someone send him a link to that says that cancer risk follows a gamma distribution
TL;DR if there was substantial long term cancer risk, with billions of doses we would already see a signal
I would think the risks associated with micro clotting is more likely to appear and present before cancer . Cancer is already obscure with so many factors and time lines . But the all cause mortality data numbers are now presenting clear images of questionable outcomes overall . I know my wife snd others working in the hospital setting in rural Ontario have seen a noticeable rise in non covid illnesses beyond baseline . So we should be looking at baseline rates for sure
The trouble with cancer (in general) is that the base rate is somewhat high and not highly consistent across regions, so it's hard to tell what caused any particular case of cancer. For example, we can't point to a specific person and say "Vladimir Fukov here got cancer because he lived near Chernobyl!" There's a report estimating that up to 4,000 people might at some point die because Chernobyl (and another saying 9,000) but the report is clear that it's just a projection based on the linear-no-threshold hypothesis and not based on actual cancer data. AFAIK, no one can reasonably conclude based on available cancer data whether the number of cancer deaths was 9000 or zero (but if someone's got contrary evidence I'd like to see it).
On Dec. 26, 2021, Edward O. Wilson, one of the greatest, and kindest, scientists of the 20th century, died at the age of 92.
On Dec. 29, Scientific American published an "Opinion" piece ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson ) calling him just another dead racist whose "dangerous ideas" must be forgotten if we want an equitable future. It called for science journal articles to henceforth be annotated with comments from humanities scholars to provide "context" for their "problematic aspects", and for "commitments from the entire scientific community to determine the portions of historically problematic work ... to be debunked and replaced."
(Also, Darwin and Gregor Mendel were also racist, as is the normal distribution, and physics, which is ruled by "white empiricism". Also, "the application of the scientific method" condemns seeking the specific causes of the inequitable outcomes faced by blacks in America when they can all be explained by structural racism.)
(It's unclear whether Scientific American will stick to its claim that genetics is inherently racist by refusing to publish any more articles on genetics.)
The only reference to anything Wilson did or said is the claim that his 1975 book *Sociobiology* "contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms."
This is a lie in several ways. For one, Wilson was the one debunking the dichotomy of nature versus nurture, by presenting examples of how genes and environment interacted to shape evolution, at a time when academic Marxism was enforcing the dogma that human behavior is infinitely flexible and *entirely* due to environment. For another, Wilson could hardly have spawned behavioral psychology in 1975, because John Watson published "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" in 1913. For another, the focus of that final chapter of *Sociobiology* is on the differences between humans and other animals, not between humans and other humans.
There are certainly things in *Sociobiology* that some people would call racist and sexist. Genetics is, in fact, inherently racist and sexist, if by that we mean that it claims that genetic differences can lead to behavioral differences. Wilson expects that male and female humans have some different innate abilities and proclivities, just as the male and female of every other mammalian species (except possibly wolves) has. He says nothing about racial differentiation, but does ask how genetics might interact with social stratification (as any evolutionary biologist who actually cared about social stratification would have to).
Dr. Wilson, like his enemies, had an intense political commitment: his greatest concern was the extinction of other species by humans. He was *literally the most pro-diversity person on the planet*. Yet as far as I know, unlike his backstabbing Harvard colleagues like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, he never slanted his research to promote his politics.
I admire Dr. Wilson for more than just his science. The personality he revealed in his books is beautiful. He's been more gracious to me personally than anyone else in academia ever was. I'd like to go through what he wrote, and show that he didn't publish anything morally wrong, and did many things morally right; and what a wonderful person he was, and what an injustice SciAm has done by damning him at just the time they should have praised him.
But, as much as I'm outraged at how Ed Wilson has been unjustly vilified, whether or not he or his science was racist is *beside the bigger point*. Even if he /had/ been an unrepentant racist, and his theories had been used to justify racist policies, it would be wrong to suppress them.
Scientific American isn't alone. Nature and Science, formerly considered the two greatest science journals in the world, both committed recently to take race and racial issues into account in deciding whom to hire and what to publish (although neither proposed outright suppression or a collective project of retrospective purgation).
It took Western civilization 3000 years, from the Greek Dark Age almost to the present, to learn the lesson that our epistemology--the way we decide what we believe--must be firewalled from our ideologies. *That was the main point of the Enlightenment*. This is because very right things can look wrong to people who believe wrong things, and nobody is always right. And from the time Europeans began voicing this opinion in the 17th century, it took centuries more of violent struggle, including actual wars, *including the one against the Nazis*, to make that firewall a reality. Not a completely flame-proof reality, but a powerful social construct nonetheless; and one that was constructed not to concentrate power, but to disperse it.
What's at stake here is empiricism and liberalism itself--the hard-won knowledge that physical evidence is more reliable than revelation, that no one is always right, that diversity is better than unity, and that free speech and free action is more helpful than hurtful. We no longer suppress observations that seem to contradict the words of the Bible; neither should we suppress them if they seem to contradict the words of Marx, Foucault, or Cornel West.
The wave of the counter-Enlightenment that began 400 years ago, whose many ideologues each longed for a world where their own private prejudices would rule supreme, is now cresting and *might win*. It seems in some ways to be at the stage the Nazis were at in 1934, after consolidating their power, when they began to persecute Jews and empirical philosophers (it was the Nazis who solidified the power of "continental philosophy" in France and Germany) and rewrite the history books.
Democracy went extinct in Europe in the 4th century BCE, and remained almost inconsequential there for the next 2000 years. If it wins control over America and Europe now, it might be another 2000 years before anything like liberal republicanism or democracy appears again. I am not being hyperbolic. The problem with being America is that we can't count on America to rescue us.
Scott Aaronson declared that he would no longer write for, nor take interviews from, Scientific American ( https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 ). Jerry Coyne, whom I'd never heard of but apparently he has 73,000 subscribers, wrote an angry post critiquing the whole mess ( https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/ ). But SciAm has never asked to interview me, and I don't have 73,000 subscribers. So I brooded on this for days, feeling utterly helpless, before it struck me that I'm not completely helpless. There was, in fact one thing I could do to help: I could vote Republican.
I am totally serious about this. I'm going to vote party-line Republican from now on until we beat back this madness. Climate change and structural racism in America are utterly trivial compared to the prospect of dismantling science and liberalism. Nothing the Democratic party stands for is worth the extremism it tolerates in its attempt to "motivate the base". 10 years ago, I *was* the Democratic base, but now I'm leaving. I'll even vote for Donald fucking Trump if the Republicans foolishly insist on running him.
This Scientific American piece is heinous not only because it is unscientific and speaks of Wilson as if he's Charles Murray, but because it is evidence-free. Much as I disliked Atlas Shrugged, this editorial reminds me of a journalistic smear piece in that book, which "did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one".
What I don't expect to see in Scientific American: any explanation of why our genetic code cannot affect our intelligence. I certainly haven't seen any geneticist defend that position.
Wilson wasn't even an IQ guy (it would be tricky to map that concept onto ants). But the author of that Scientific American piece wasn't restricting herself based on that, since she tarred even Mendel as if his plant-crossing experiments were somehow racist.
How are Democratic politicians responsible for what Scientific American publishes? How will having Republicans in office prevent SciAm from publishing similar editorials? If Trump did anything to stop wokism other than hurling insults, I haven't seen it.
Doesn't promising to vote straight-ticket Republican from now on strike you as a little bit of a strange reaction to a magazine publishing an opinion piece that you disagreed with? It seems pretty clear to be an action that is driven by spite rather than rationality.
I’m not a fan of that article (though it is very clearly marked as “opinion”, and magazines should feel free to publish all kinds of opinion pieces). A reasonable reaction might be to cancel your subscription to SciAm if you are a subscriber. Or to promise to never visit their website to deprive them of your ad revenue. Or to write a supportive comment on Scott Aaronson’s blog. Or to support some of their competitors (some of which are quite excellent, and do not write these kinds of obnoxious articles).
Do you really think that having more Republicans in office will help matters? Will a second Trump term convince SciAm not to publish such things? Did “wokeism” get better or worse under Trump?
Furthermore, it’s plainly evident that Republicans suffer from their own strain of illiberalism. For all their hand-wringing about “cancel culture”, there are numerous examples of people getting “canceled” from right-wing politics for deviating (even the slightest bit) from party-line orthodoxy. While “wokeism” may be a left-wing phenomenon, the left most certainly does not have a monopoly on illiberal ideology. Can you really say that, upholding enlightenment values, the epistemology of right-wing party faithfuls is well-isolated from their ideology?
These are all good points. The epistemology of the right isn't well-isolated from their ideology. But our scientific and academic institutions are well-isolated from that ideology. There was a determined effort recently for, what, 20 years? to teach creationism, sorry, intelligent design, in schools, and it never got far, despite most Republicans (and, for most of that time, most Americans!) believing in creationism.
I can explain why wokeism scares me more than Republicans by contrasting the Republican approach to pushing their ideology on science in the creationism debate, with the Woke approach to pushing theirs. We call what happened over creationism "the creationism debate" because there was a debate. The Republicans found scientists who would argue their views, and they published hundreds of books and videos arguing their views, and held debates.
We don't talk about "the identity politics debate" because there was no debate. No point-cointerpoint debates of the merits of BLM protests, equal outcome vs. equal opportunity, the gender wage gap, or under what conditions trans-females should be allowed to compete in the Olympics. Instead of debate, we have protests, riots, and Twitter mobs; instead of point-by-point arguments, we have calm and imperious partisan pronouncements issued by institutions, and moral accusations screamed en masse at high-profile targets singled out to be examples. This is a tactic Hitler described in /Mein Kampf/, and said he'd learned from the communists. The debate has been shut down, and all that matters now is who has the money, the media, and the institutions; and we suddenly find the Democrats have all three.
Hitler's reason-free mobbing method does resemble the attacks on abortion choice by a religious coalition of mostly-Republican Protestants and mostly-Democratic Catholics, who think they're debating, but can never perceive that their views on "when life begins" are mere metaphysical assumptions. I think this observation gets at an important difference: Each party treats some issues as having an absolute answer dictated by virtue ethics, and some as pragmatic and context-sensitive matters on which we must compare data and viewpoints. In earlier decades, it was the Christian Republicans who were more likely to make absolute declarations based on virtue ethics. Today, it's the Democrats.
Republicans and Democrats both agree in theory that voter fraud, unjust shootings, sexism, and racism are bad; but the Republicans see these as involving questions of measurement, statistics, and definitions, which they approach as consequentialists; while the Democrats see them as simple applications of virtue ethics, with no definitions, quantitative aspects, or trade-offs that require reasoning. (This may be because Democrats live in cities and work in offices, which are artificial environments built to conform to legible, rationalist abstractions; while Republicans live in rural areas, are much more likely to do physical work and to work with animals, and hence more-often find their plans constrained by external, non-social reality.)
Another issue that concerns me is institutional capture, which Democrats have been far more successful at lately. Many of the profs and adminstrators currently promoting woke campuses were radicalized in 1970, and spent the past 50 years patiently gaining control of the humanities departments of college campuses and the editorial boards of journals, opposing faculty hirings on political grounds, and changing student admission policies to eliminate merit scholarships and standardized tests while putting heavy weight on community activism, to get to the point where Democrats plus leftists too radical to call themselves Democrats now have something like a 9:1 majority over Republicans at Harvard, Yale, and other elite universities, in both faculty and the student body. The next 30 years of American science already belongs to them.
The Republicans aren't capable of that kind of long-term patient subversion. The closest they ever got to "subtle" was Karl Rove. The Jan. 6 insurrection is more typical of their style: a sudden, unplanned, disorganized, ineffective burst of rage. That kind of threat seems much easier to me to deal with.
The corruption of scientific institutions is a bigger issue for me than for most people. I'm "biased" because I've always thought of myself as a scientist (though my 1040s haven't always said that). But I only wanted to be a scientist because science always seemed to me to be the most-important component of modern society.
Democrats, not Republicans, are the ones successfully assaulting, infiltrating, and subverting science. This is definitely true in terms of the abuse of institutional power: Nobody, in academia or industry, is afraid of losing their job because they disagree with Republicans; many are afraid of losing their job because they disagree with Democrats, especially in academia and research.
I would argue this is true even for climate change, as the conclusions of recent IPCC reports are closer to "most people won't notice any impact from climate change by 2100" than to "we have a climate change emergency". The science there is getting done okay, but the media has buried that science in a myth of apocalypse.
As to the subverting of democracy that Republicans are accused of, they're legal challenges to change voter registration laws. In most cases, these "dangerous" challenges seek to require voters to have IDs, and to disallow late mail-in ballots. In many cases, these are reversions of changes that were made shortly before the 2020 election. Here in my state of PA, the most-prominent court case was one in which Republicans challenged the constitutionality of an amendment to the state constitution, which had been passed illegally about a year before the 2020 election. There was no question about the unconstitutionality of the amendment; the Democrats won the case on a technicality about the time passed since the amendment.
As to mass violence, consider this article from Time Magazine, Feb. 5 2021, titled "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election". It describes, sympathetically, a secret campaign to win the election for the Democrats, using "hundreds of millions in public and private funding" to adjust voter registration laws, fight attempts by Repubilcans to do the same, encourage voting by mail, suppress Republican propaganda on social media, and–this bit:
"Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country [if Trump won]. … Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that [election] night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling. … As the numbers dribbled out, he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.
"The liberal alliance gathered [on election night] for an 11 p.m. Zoom call. Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. … The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. “We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street,” Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk. …
"So the word went out: stand down. Protect the Results announced that it would “not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.” On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn’t anyone trying to stop Trump’s coup? Where were all the protests?
"Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. “They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it,” he says."
So, a massive, secret organization, with hundreds of millions in funding, some of it public money, had hundred of protests across the country planned and ready to hit the streets in a "counter-coup" if it looked like Trump was going to win. And at 11PM election night, days before anyone could call the election, the leaders already found it difficult to restrain the protestors from hitting the streets, and only talked them down by showing that their model predicted a win for Biden.
When the election was called for Biden, Republicans did nothing.
Add to this the number of violent BLM protests and resulting deaths, and the Democrats can't point any fingers at the Republicans on willingness to use mass violence. Both sides are guilty.
So, in short, the world I see now, which is very different than it was 20 years ago, is one where:
- Democrats are more likely to use context-free virtue ethics, cut off debate, cut off friends and relationship over political differences, use ungrounded moral accusations and intimidation, and argue against liberalism
- Democrats have rapidly captured control of most of America's money, media, and cultural institutions, and are using them to silence their opponents
- Democrats are threatening to turn science back into theology
I'm aware of many stupidities of Republicans, but I don't see them as approaching anything like the existential threat to liberalism that the Democrats are at present.
It seems to me that you are ignoring the most important point, raised by Jqwo.
In you reply you are focusing on stating arguments in favour of position that democrat adjacent culture is worse than republican adjacent culture, all things considered. It's an interesting claim and it deserves some debate on its own. But in the current context it's not very relevant because while it's culture you are worried about (opinion in a journal), you are considering political action (voting republican) as a response. And politics can't really control culture in a democracy.
It may look unexpected that in USA culture is more left leaning while politics is more right leaning. But it's actually a result of a very well calibrated mechanism of toxoplasma of rage. Every outrageous rightist political move infuriates the left, provoking them to do more outrageous leftist cultural moves which in turn outrages the right and vice versa and so on. People on both sides are outraged, elites on both sides prosper. It's actually memetically advantageous for republicans to have people do crazy woke stuff. It allows them to focus on the crazyness of the other side, while lowering the bar for themselves. It doesn't matter anymore whether their politics is good or bad, whether they are competent or not, they can be elected in power just because someone wrote a ridiculous opinion. If you start voting for the other party for culture war reasons rather than political ones, you are not challenging the unhealthy status quo, you are actually contributing to it.
I'm not going to use the terms "left" and "right", because they're misleading. I'll just say "Dem" and "Rep" bcoz those are our parties.
I see the dynamic of each side outraging the other, and driving each other farther apart. I don't see the division between culture and politics that your idea that the US leans Dem in culture and Rep in politics requires. Politics now is mostly arguments over culture, and political actions are trying to shape culture.
If by "culture" you mean "elite culture", I see that; but your final sentence indicates to me that culture and politics are separate domains, which I don't agree with.
The line between politics and culture indeed became blurry in these late days of culture wars when, as you correctly notice, lots of politics is actually arguing about culture, "everything is political" and so on. This is actually huge part of the problem, in my opinion. Blurring the line between politics and culture creates polarization and perversive initiatives for politicians as their electability becomes less correlated with their actual political performance (was the new laws successful? did the candidate delivered on their promises?) and more with being part of the tribe and saying the right words.
But try to make a step back. Let's start with this crude way to divide the two clusters. Politics is about using governmental monopoly on violence in order to affect society; and culture is society doing its own stuff. Political actions come from the top; cultural ones come from the bottom. Government, military and police are political institutes; universities and media are cultural. Law is political; people opinions are cultural.
The division has never been very strict and both clusters affect each other in obvious ways. As a rule of thumb totalitarian governments try to control culture through politics, and in liberal democracies the causation is opposite: culture influence politics more than otherwise.
This framework while still far from perfect gives a much more detailed view than just two opposing blobs fighting in the memetic space. We can see which party/ideology uses which tools and how political sphere influence in US is more pro-republican, while cultural is more pro-democrat.
When you are thinking it terms of just blue blob vs red blob, seeing how blue blob is doing very good may motivate you to feed the red blob more in order to compensate. But more nuanced perspective reveals that it will just make the matters worse if you send reinforcement in the domain that red blob is actually having an advantage in. The solution is deescalation, to allow blue and red to be proportional in all domains.
I think your analysis is too abstract. The fact remains that Democrats in office are likely to support extreme woke behavior, while Republicans won't.
(I also don't agree that culture is bottom-up. If that were so, US culture would be NASCAR and romance novels. Most culture is directed from the top-down. Movies, for instance, are much more likely to get the green light today if they have either a progressive message, or teach medieval and/or post-modern metaphysics. One basic modern cultural belief, that being able to buy nice things is good rather than bad, was one of the major shifts during the Enlightenment. It was intensely debated in the 18th century (and is still contested today by Marxists, particularly of Adorno's school, and many Christians and Buddhists). Rulers of the 18th century, for example Frederick the Great, could have prevented this change, but decided to encourage commerce, rather than taking the medieval approach of having sumptuary laws to make sure the middle class couldn't have nice things.)
A lot of the cultural changes that have happened are partially the result of legal ideas being adopted in common discourse. For instance, the supreme court case Griggs v. Duke Power co. established that the definition of discrimination can include things that do not intend to discriminate, but nevertheless have an outcome that is unequal. This case was from 1970, and ideas like disparate impacts seem to form the foundation of much of modern left wing activist thought. A lot can be said about imprecise definitions of "critical race theory", but the people who were originally of that label were largely legal scholars, interacting with questions of policy. In addition, a lot of the enforcement of progressive ideology is done through institutions such as HR departments.
This demonstrates a way for anti-woke elected representatives to actually impact culture in a meaningful way. For instance, we can change the law so that discrimination suits are null unless there is reasonable suspicion of intent, and we can change the law so that a company offering diversity training cannot be used as evidence in court that they do not discriminate. If we change discrimination law to only cover actual discrimination, then HR departments won't have activists breathing down their neck with lawsuits, and will stop offering diversity training in order to placate these activists. In other words, by specifically targeting the bureaucracies that enforce progressive orthodoxies and the reasons they choose to do so, it is possible to affect the culture. Thus, I do not believe it is irrational to change your vote because of cultural issues, as you imply. The question of whether these are the types of things that republicans will actually do remains to be answered.
Hanania rises some interesting points but I respectfully disagree with his general conclusion about our topic. He shows that cultural institutes can embrace some terms and ideas that originated in governmental bureaucracies, but why these specific terms and not others turned out to be memetically fit enough to reproduce so much in society? And of course why would they originate in governmental bureaucracies in the first place? Hanania traces causality back to Civil Rights Act. But how comes it happened? Didn't it have something to do with Civil Rights Movement?
Hanania mentions, recent CRT events, and they are actually a good example of culture->politics causation. First Fox News starts scaremongering, then lots of people are outraged thinking that CRT symbolize everything that is wrong with US, then we get laws preventing teaching CRT in schools, which being niche subfield of law studies was never taught there in the first place, but it doesn't even matter. And of course it all happens just in front of elections in order to use culture wars drive to get more votes. Will it help against cancel culture even in the long run? I predict that it won't. Now progressives get one more argument to dismiss any accusations about how they restrict freedom of speech: "You know what is the restriction of freedom of speech? Passing literal laws policing what schools are allowed to teach!"
One of the good points is that republicans are not motivated at all to actually do anything in order to decrease "wokeness craziness". It totally fits my model where they benefit from it. Seriously, I'm under the impression that you can get more support from far-leftists in changing a law so that "a company offering diversity training cannot be used as evidence in court that they do not discriminate". These guys are supper annoyed how corporations just pretend to be woke putting rainbow flags from time to time, without actually doing anything meaningful.
Ultimately, Hanania is not very convincing. His pieces have gotten a lot of attention (especially among people on the right), but they don’t hold up well to scrutiny.
Does it really make sense that 2014’s “Great Awokening” is some downstream effect of 1970s case law, that just took 44 years to manifest? “Wokeism” is pretty clearly a global/international phenomenon, perhaps going by different names in different countries. Can this all be explained by some quirks of American civil rights policies? Certainly there is some degree of American cultural imperialism, but that strains credulity.
Hanania also has a strange fixation with HR departments. College students are among the “wokest” there are, but they have basically zero interaction with their universities’ HR departments, and are largely unaffected by employment law. I have never heard of anyone at all whose views were influenced even in the slightest way by HR policy. HR departments can certainly mandate diversity trainings, which people take online and click through in a background browser tab on their computer, just like they do with every other HR-mandated training. And this is supposed to be a primary driver of a significant society-wide cultural movement? And isn’t it the case that almost all of these HR trainings were introduced only after “wokeism” rose in significance?
The conventional wisdom is that politics is downstream from culture, and that remains the most convincing explanation in this case too.
You are correct that diversity training is not entirely to blame but I stand by my basic thesis that it constitutes a very significant part, and opposition to wokeness needs to begin by opposition to wokeness specifically in these types of bureaucracies.
A lot of the jargon that is common to wokeness used to *only* exist in the aforementioned types of diversity training and case law. As recently as ten years ago, many of the words that pervade culture nowadays simply did not exist for normal people, which I believe shows directional influence.
For example, consider the word "Latinx". For a little bit, some people might have told you that this was the inclusive way to refer to Hispanic people, and it was certainly used for some of the diversity crowd. This was despite the fact that only 3% of hispanic people refer to themselves with this word. "Latinx" did not come from bottom up cultural evolution.
I use "Latinx" as an example because it is well understood to be bad, but you might claim that our understanding that it is bad also shows resilience of culture from these bureaucracies, so for a different example: A similar thing happened with the word "Indian" to refer to the original inhabitants of the Americas. Read, for instance, the first appendix in "1491" by Charles Mann, or alternatively there was a very good CGP Grey video about this. Very recently, "Indian" was simply the word that you used to refer to the aforementioned group of people, but nowadays people typically wince a little bit when they hear it. However, according to Mann, "native people who I have met (I think with one exception) have used "Indian". These are examples of ideas that did not arise naturally from culture, but rather were imposed.
College students rarely have to deal with HR departments, but "ethnic studies" requirements end up being much worse anyways. Instead of having to attend a seminar about intersectionality, now you have to write an entire paper in order to please the professor, and stay in a class for an entire semester.
Further, these types of policies shapes peoples views much more than you are letting on there. Most people would say that they are not immediately influenced to buy an iPhone because of a billboard, and yet Apple still decides they are worth putting up. If anyone with authority is saying the exact same thing, even the most hardheaded people can't stay immune from being influenced forever, and they especially can't be immune from being influenced by people with the authority to fire them.
Trump isn't an elephant; he's a buffoon. He isn't smart enough or disciplined enough to take over America.
I am concerned that he might start a nuclear war. I am concerned that so many Republicans distrust the media. But they have every reason to distrust the media. Only the media can fix that.
I sympathize with your and agree with your criticisms of the magazine and its editors. I especially agree with how you speak of the enlightenment.
And I don't mind your voting Republican, they have policy answers too. Unfortunately, the Republican party now seems mostly taken over by Trump and his supporters. Trump is a demagogue and the party should have never allowed him to become their candidate.
But they did, and now 70% of the party believe the election was stolen. Republican candidates on the ballot this year in Arizona believe its officials should have engineered a win for Trump.
The Georgia secretary of state has had it's office weakened by the Republican dominated legislature, which now has additional election power that it could use to apply partisan power to the election. Election boards are losing power to the legislature as well. There could well be a legitimate partisan election dispute.
So, my only suggestion is that when you vote Republican, do not vote for Trump or his enablers. In my view they are much more corrosive to democracy than idiots in the left who think anti racism is the new religion.
I stopped my subscription to SA sometime in the 90's. Before that it was my favorite magazine. Mathematical recreations, computer recreations, and whatever D. Hofstadter called his column. And then there was the Amateur Scientist! These were the columns written just for me. Sometime around 1990 it looked like Forrest Mims was going to take over the Amateur Scientist (AS) column. (For those who don't know, the AS column was all about building science apparatus on the cheap.) Then this happened.
Would voting Republican really help? Wokism got worse under Trump. The more sensible thing might be to try to empower the most anti-woke people on the left side of the aisle in the hope that they recapture the institutions.
How do I credibly signal to the Democrats "I am voting against you because of wokeness but will switch back once you stop being fucking insane?"
And what if this is offset by an equal number of people saying "I'm not voting Republican again until you guys fucking disavow this election-truther nonsense?"
In each respective case, I'd have to be a committed member of the given party, and also able to swallow voting for the other party (and its associated insanities: see the above two paragraphs).
(I totally get it as a "fuck you" vote, and I won't disagree with that argument, because there's so little to it that it's hard for it to be wrong.)
What we need is to replace first past the post elections with any other system. Wet also need open primaries, where any number of candidates can run from any number if parties. Even in gerrymandered districts, candidates will be forced to appeal to the broader majority rather than the narrow minority of the party base.
If we had that, then your vote becomes much more meaningful.
No you can't hope that a small minority on the left will recapture institutions in decline for decades. I think it's gotta be something from the middle... and the middle doesn't really exist anymore.
Being anywhere near effective automatically means you will become a polarizing idiot (or rather, that you will become polarizing, and the media will treat you as an idiot). The establishment doesn't like effective politicians who act against it and treating them as polarizing idiots is one of its defenses against them.
Right, but that's an important distinction. Trump actually *is* an idiot. Or possibly a very clever person pursuing goals significantly different than those he claimed. Either way, he conspicuously failed to demonstrate basic competence in using the real power of the Presidency in pursuit of his nominal goals, and unwillingness to seek competent counsel.
A polarizing but competent politician with an equally competent staff, would lead to a very different outcome even if the media called them all idiots.
There's a sense in which Kruschev was the more "moderate" communist relative to Stalin, and Gorbachev was trying to be more reformist still. He failed in his actual goals, the system fell apart, and basically all Russians now regard the Yeltsin years as their lowpoint, so I guess he wouldn't really be an inspiring example to future reformers either.
The subheading of the first article is "Critics accuse the organization of opposing efforts to stamp out inequity", which is a view that the article seems to be pushing. However, the evidence that they gather is the fact that they "claim to have no position on social justice issues", and a few scattered private blog posts by people involved expressing views that they find problematic (the posts are pretty tame, go read the article). I can't tell whether or not the organization in question is serious and does good work, but the evidence presented in this article is certainly nowhere near enough to hang them with.
The second one argues that the James Webb Space Telescope needs to be renamed, because James Webb was a problematic figure. So what exactly was the sin that he committed, that might give him such a label?
"As someone in management, Webb bore responsibility for policies enacted under his leadership, including homophobic ones that were in place when he became NASA administrator. Some argue that if Webb was complicit, so was everyone working in the agency's administration at the time. We agree. But NASA is not launching a telescope named after its entire administration."
The article argues that James Webb was complicit in homophobic policies that were enacted before he was even there, and he is therefore a problematic figure not worthy of a telescope being named after him.
I'm too young to remember if Scientific American was ever any good, but stories like this certainly don't leave me with a very good impression.
I absolutely want corroboration on this, because I am very damn interested to know what the Abbot of St. Thomas' said that was racist about pea plants.
Now, I may be horribly ignorant and he actually gave lectures about humans and non-white people in general, but until someone produces a genuine quote, I am going to assume the nonentity that grubbed together this cut'n'paste denunciation based on social sciences buzzwords was going on autopilot - "who are big names in biology, what did I learn in secondary school - Darwin, Mendel, all that jazz" - and nothing more.
You bet your bippy I'm annoyed about this. It's bad enough that Br. Mendel gets stripped of his title and secularised, now I've got to put up with puppies yapping about 'racism' on the heels of half-remembered schooldays and "Mendel and genetics" because "genetics - eugenics - racism!" it's all the same, right?
EDIT: Well, I just sent off a reproachful email to "Scientific American" about this, I expect it to do precisely zero, but at least the idiots should now be vaguely aware of a kick in the pants. I could be very rude about Ms. Associate Professor but that isn't helpful.
I noticed a long time ago that when Obama had to fight tooth and claw to bring in supreme court nominees, we got Kagan and Sotomayor, both of whom come down straight progressive ticket in cases as far as I can tell, without the slightest regard for the actual Constitution, whereas when Donald "Literally Satan" Trump and Mitch "Doublesatan" McConnell could go hog wild we got villains like, uh, Neil Gorsuch, a conscientious defender of the law who seems to all appearances to vote according to his sense of what the Constitution actually stipulates, regardless of anyone's personal preferences. That was roughly when I began to sense the exact magnitude of the success of Democrat propaganda.
As a lawyer, Kagan is far more impressive than Sotomayor. In most of her opinions that I've read, her take on statutory interpretation and civil procedure is straightforward and sensible (if not bullet-proof). Plus, no justice who gave the wondrous gift to law school students that is her discussion of what a "tangible object" is in her Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (2015) dissent (aka the "Dr. Seuss opinion"), can be all that bad.
That's what I get for going too fast - grabbed the wrong "Yates" cite. And for what its worth, I'm with Ginsburg's majority (concurred with by Alito, of all people, who also clearly was having a lot of fun with the opinion: "Applying [ejusdem generis and noscitur a sociis] to §1519’s list of nouns, the term 'tangible object' should refer to something similar to records or documents. A fish does not spring to mind—nor does an antelope, a colonial farmhouse, a hydrofoil, or an oil derrick"). But Kagan's dissent is still very good.
But one thing in the recent mess that tickled me was that the current US Attorney General is Merrick Garland, you all remember? The Supreme Court nominee who was cruelly and viciously denied his place by "Doublesatan" and the rest of the villainous GOP?
Well, he's the guy who went all "yep, domestic terrorism!" on the basis of one (1) letter from a school boards representative organisation, whose members were very unhappy with parents protesting their decisions in local schools. They later sort of walked this back (when such "domestic terrorists" included "father of girl raped in school bathroom" and so forth) because that caused them a certain amount of embarrassment:
That sort of marshmallow giving-in to what could best be described as luke-warm activism (you're going to call parents domestic terrorists? really? listen, friend, let me tell you about a little organisation called the Irish Republican Army) doesn't seem to me to augur well for his possible tenure as Supreme Court Justice, so maybe ol' Doublesatan did the country a favour after all 😁
Maybe he was just radicalised. As for McConnell, his damage to the system can't easily be overstated. A significant chunk of the Democrats (me included) now gives exactly zero shit about the Court or its traditions. Doesn't much matter in the short run. The short run is all (R) all the time. But one of these days we'll have another 2008, and the Court will be as big as we need it to be. Then, of course, the other side will do the same thing, and after a while the Court will be like a veto legislature that reflects the will of the last trifecta. Assuming Republicans keep letting us vote, of course.
Just impotent ranting at the moment. They're running the government into the 30s and maybe I'm wrong, but I certainly won't ever again vote in a primary for a politician who isn't willing to de-McConnell-ize the Court, and I'm one of the least lefty Dems I know.
Welcome to the club of how conservatives have felt about Court decisions inventing new rights out of whole cloth for the past fifty years. Your laminated membership card will arrive in 15-18 business days. (/sarc).
I'm not talking about bad decisions, but illegitimacy. McConnell changed the rules in a significant and durable way, and I think we're fighting over who gets to pack the court going forward.
Or maybe that's your point? Something like, "We've hated the thing and wanted it destroyed for years. Now it is. Good riddance. "? In which case, yes. You win. Again. As always. Mazel tov.
As in "yes, we thought those Court decisions were illegitimate, but shrugged and said 'fine, if those are the rules we're playing by, we'll play too' and now sauce for the goose is - a liiiiiiitle bit - sauce for the gander."
Well, remember Garland was picked not because he was the liberal dreamboat of Harry Reid's dreams, but instead because he was known for being maximally milquetoast - in fact, for favorability to hardline conservative positions on law-and-order issues *specifically* - while still being a Democrat on issues of government power, regulatory issues, social issues, etc. The idea was that he was a maximally-easy candidate for squishy republicans in well-to-do moderate districts to accept, theoretically making it harder for Yertle "Doublesatan" McTurtle to gin up a "Democrats Nominate Communist to Court!" narratives in opposition.
So he was selected because he was squishy and easily influenced? That seems to have been borne out by the response to the letter: you want me to denounce domestic terrorists? sure thing!
Yeah, Garland's actions subsequent to being shut out haven't exactly impressed me with his staunch devotion to impartiality either. It's really another great example of the principle: he was described as a wholly inoffensive middle-of-the-road guy, barely even a Dem, back when he was up for the SC.
You are mistaken about Kagan. See eg Masterpiece Cakeshop, and she tends to agree more with Breyer than with Sotomayor https://ballotpedia.org/Elena_Kagan. And she often does not join Sotomayor's rationale.
I think getting involved in primaries is way more influential than changing how you vote come the main election. The the conflict you care about is, AFAICT, currently a live debate in the Democratic party, and actively voting for moderate candidates in Democratic primaries is way way more likely to make your vote count unless you're willing to move to a swing electorate. (and even then, move to an electorate with a tight primary race instead).
A world where Republican ideology trumps reality is not better than a world where Democrat ideology trumps reality.
In Presidential elections, my vote is one of the few that count, since I live in a swing state. But I'm still a registered Democrat, and intend to vote in the primaries.
I'm not afraid of either Democrat ideology or Republican ideology. The mainstream of both parties are, by comparison with parties in other nations, almost indistinguishable.
But the Republican extremists--say, fundy preachers and actual Nazis--are no threat. There are several times as many newspaper reporters writing about the KKK as there are KKK members. Not one university in America has hired a Nazi to teach European history classes. Stormfront.org is probably the biggest white-supremacist online organization in the US, and I checked it just now, and only 2 threads have been commented on so far this year; the My Little Pony fanfiction site I use, by contrast, has over a thousand users every day. So if the Nazis rise up, don't worry; the Bronies can easily take them down.
Whereas the equivalent Democratic extremists have many seats in Congress, and many professors teaching radical doctrines at universities--which, ironically, draw heavily on the writings of actual Nazis like Heidegger and Paul de Man, and of people who got their worldview from Nazi professors, like Foucault and Marcuse. (For example, "authenticity", "lived experience", "power relations", and "race is culture" are all key Nazi ideas.)
If the situation swings too far the other way, I'll swing back. Politically, I'm probably more of a strategic contrarian than anything else.
I share your disdain for that SciAm article, and personally think the world would be a better place if more people voted Republican. However...
I would invite you to read the New York Times' almost-entirely-glowing obituary of the man https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/science/eo-wilson-dead.html (I managed to view it on my phone without a login, I dunno how), and consider that this might be a lot closer to the representative "What Democrats think" than what some weirdo in Scientific American reckons. I also note that the obituary says he was being "cancelled" at conferences by protestors shouting the old "we charge you with genocide" back in the 1970s, so the particular form of idiocy represented by the SciAm article is nothing new.
I would also suggest that the reaction "I am angry about a particular thing so I'm just going to vote a straight other-party ticket from now on" is the kind of dumb behaviour that the culture war is made of, and should be avoided.
The median Democrat (or Republican) has no more opinion of the life and work of Edward O Wilson than they have on whether there are an infinite number of twin primes.
I see the current position of the Democratic party as being like that of the Catholic German Centre Party in 1933, when the Catholics and the Nazis formed an alliance against the communists, and the Catholics agreed to give the Nazis the support needed to pass the Enabling Act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers. (Later that year, and IMHO for the same reason, the Catholic Church itself signed the more-extensive Reichskonkordat with the Nazis.)
The main difference is that it was more justifiable for the Catholic Church to ally with the Nazis in 1933 than it is today for Democrats to ally with radical Marxists and neo-racists, because the Nazi party was the only party that could stop the communists, who openly planned to abolish Catholicism. The Democrat situation today is far different; the radical left is much smaller than the Democratic Party, and wouldn't vote Republican whether the Democrats allied with them or not. I think the Democratic Party would gain more votes than they would lose by ditching revolutionary leftists. And if not, they could still survive and thrive by conceding on some point that's more important to Republicans than to Democrats, like the Second Amendment. They are in no way threatened as a political party.
I agree that one-issue voting is usually dumb behavior. But I realized that liberalism really is the one issue to me. Gun-rights defenders say, "Give the people the right to own military rifles, and all the other rights will follow." That's how I think about liberalism. Call it my religion if you like. My allegiance to liberalism is greater than my allegiance to the United States.
I agree with you about liberalism, and let me just say that a lot of people near the center and even moderate left don't share the woke view.
What is your view on the Trumpistan right continuing to push election fraud conspiracies? To me this is a clear step away from democracy, even if they are more liberal than the far left woke. It's much worse than the far left, because so few people actually agree with that woke idiocy.
I want a liberal democracy, not an illiberal democracy like you get today in Hungary, Turkey, or Russia. And right now I think the Republicans under Trump are headed that way.
I am surprised to hear this, I don't recall any Democrats saying that Clinton actually won in 2016, but maybe I'm biased and wouldn't have heard it. Anyway, she did concede. So did Gore in 2000.
If Clinton or Gore did say this, I would repudiate it.
I mean, even if they are the same in kind they are not the same in degree. I find it interesting that so many on the right find it hard to criticize and repudiate Trump for this.
I don't know about you, but I'm against this behavior regardless of who does it. And now 70 % of Republicans believe the election was stolen, and that is directly connected to what he said in the runup and after it.
Tell me, which Democrat or other Republican, has
* Called for vote counting to stop before counting is complete
* Said that the election is rigged, before it even occurred.
* Called a state governor and asked him to find 11,000 votes.
* Pressured his vice president to throw out electoral votes for his opponent during certification.
* Filed dozens of frivolous lawsuits with no basis in fact and with no chance of winning.
* Refused to concede.
* Refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
* Did not attend the next president's inauguration.
* Tolerated and even encouraged violence at his rallies.
I can admit illiberal tends have been increasing for some time. But come on, this is a step function and an acceleration. I don't think this is even close.
> * Said that the election is rigged, before it even occurred.
Pelosi did that. I recall a BUNCH of Democrats claiming the 2020 election was rigged before it occurred - strategically laying groundwork so they'd have reason to challenge if they lost. This typically happens on BOTH sides. Remember the hullabaloo over the post office? That was an especially egregious example. So here's Pelosi basically saying the election is rigged before it occurred: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/16/903056927/pelosi-calls-back-lawmakers-to-vote-on-postal-service
Quote:
"Pelosi said President Trump was instituting a "campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters." She said DeJoy, a major donor to President Trump and Republican campaigns, is pushing to "degrade postal service, delay the mail, and — according to the Postal Service itself — threaten to deny the ability of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming elections in a timely fashion.""
The post office story was obvious FUD, a big ol' bucket of nonsense that would both (a) serve as pretext to lawsuits challenging the results, and (b) help redirect any BLAME for the results away from people we like to people we don't like ...assuming Democrats didn't like the outcome. Since Democrats DID like the election outcome they didn't need to play this card (and others like it) so naturally the matter was quickly forgotten, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
We had one lady, back in the SSC days, who was otherwise very pleasant and reasonable *but* completely, absolutely, 'here's a quote from a post online about something in a newspaper mentioning an unnamed source who worked in the company supplying pencils to the manager's third cousin' red-hot on "the Russians hacked the voting machines and switched the votes over to Trump because he was their guy".
Couldn't be talked out of it. The election was stolen and the votes 'given' to Trump.
As for your list of "tell me which", do you not remember the Faithless Electors' appeal? 😀 Oh, that one was beautiful:
They wouldn't vote for Trump even if that was the pledged candidate, but they also wouldn't vote for Hillary so in the two-horse race that she was supposed to have won before ever a vote was cast, they managed to take away even more of her vote share.
"In the 2016 United States presidential election, ten members of the Electoral College voted or attempted to vote for a candidate different from the ones to whom they were pledged. Three of these votes were invalidated under the faithless elector laws of their respective states, and the elector either subsequently voted for the pledged candidate or was replaced by someone who did.
As a result of the seven successfully cast faithless votes, the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost five of her pledged electors while the Republican Party nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump, lost two. Three of the faithless electors voted for Colin Powell while John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received one vote. The defections fell well short of the number needed to change the result of the election; only two of the seven defected from the winner, whereas 37 were needed to defect in order to force a contingent election in Congress (a tally of less than 270).
On November 16, 2016, journalist Bill Lichtenstein published an article entitled, "The Way Out of Trumpland: Hail Mary Pass to Save the Nation" in the Huffington Post, detailing the plans by presidential elector Micheal Baca to seek to derail Trump's ascent to the presidency by convincing Democratic and Republican presidential electors to vote for a more moderate candidate on December 19, 2016, when the Electoral College voted. Lichtenstein's article soon went viral, and on December 5, 2016, several members of the electoral college, seven from the Democratic Party and one from the Republican Party, publicly stated their intention to vote for a candidate other than the pledged nominee at the Electoral College vote on December 19, 2016."
"“No, it doesn’t kill me because he knows he’s an illegitimate president,” she said. “I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”"
Jimmy Carter said that Trump was put into office by the Russians:
"In June, former president Jimmy Carter used similar language to diminish Trump’s presidency. Carter said that in his view Trump lost the 2016 election and was put in office by the Russians. Asked if he considered Trump to be illegitimate, Carter said, “Based on what I just said, which I can’t retract.”"
You're right that Donald Trump's behavior is worse than Hillary Clinton's. But that's how escalation works: each side does something more egregious than the other, in a spiral of death for democracy and liberty. The 2016 Democrats were in an earlier phase of the escalation than the 2020 Republicans, but they were not part of the solution. They were 100% part of the problem.
E. O. Wilson was a prolific author who won multiple Pulitzers (and was most recently known politically for his environmentalism), so the NYT can remember him for that (they presumably started writing his obituary years ago so they could quickly publish it the day after he died). The NYT has helped kick off some woke fixations, but it's not yet like a grad school requiring everyone to be far left. After all, they still employ Ross Douthat.
I mean, I grew up in part on Scientific American, and that it's fallen into this unscientific pit is disturbing.
Then again, it's just one, rather minor, publication. Real science journalism will continue in other forums, and we should be careful to get too panicked over one symbolic loss.
Yeah Scientific american was my go to journal for scientific news. I've almost stopped buying those kind of journals due to a lack of articles in topic I'm interested in (functional analysis, PDEs and fluids dynamics don't sell it seems) but I'm definitely not buying SA again.
He would have violated all the usual laws against murdering a US citizen on US soil.
Drone strikes against people, including US citizens, are legal under the 2001 AUMF, but that only applies to terrorists (or other combatants) associated with Al Qaeda or its allies or successors. Not to anyone who is called a "terrorist" or even anyone who actually is a terrorist. This has been very broadly interpreted over the years, but Trump is not in fact an ally of the people responsible for 9/11 so it is not in fact legal to drone-strike him under the 2001 AUMF. And nobody is going to believe Biden if he says "Trump is in league with Al Qaeda", so nobody is going to turn a blind eye to that murder.
Also, I'm pretty sure it's not legal to drone-strike someone on US soil so long as civil law is in place, so you'd need Congress to declare a state of insurrection or the like.
The United States is still technically at war, in a way that gives the United States Government about the same latitude to kill "Islamic terrorists" that it had to kill "Japanese soldiers" on 8 December 1941. Including innocent bystanders who are standing too close to Japanese soldiers, or American citizens who are fool enough to sign up with the Japanese. But it's not license to kill *anyone*.
We should probably do something about that "technically at war" thing, but good luck with that.
The War Powers Act of 1973 introduces the new term "Authorization for Use of Military Force", which unlocks all the traditional powers of a declaration of war but with a requirement for increased oversight. And the Constitution has never been taken to require that the government always use the same language in exercising its powers. If Congress can authorize the president to wage unlimited war with no further oversight, then Congress can authorize the president to wage limited war with some further oversight, and it can invent a new term for that purpose.
I dislike the weasel-wording and would prefer that limited war be called something like "Limited War" so that we are all clear on what we are doing, but that's not a legal or Constitutional requirement. And the Executive Branch has been operating under a legal AUMF since 2001.
I agree Biden isn't nuts enough to drone-strike Trump, but as far as I can tell, there's not actually any formal legal mechanism that prevents him from finding that Trump is an agent of Al Qaida and ordering his assassination. Someone please correct me if I am wrong--my understanding is that some people went to court to demand that the feds demonstrate that Alwaki was legitimately a target, and I think the court basically accepted that the administration didn't have to prove that to anyone.
The "formal legal mechanism" is the same one that prevented e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald from finding that JFK was a mass murderer who was about to kill everyone in Dealey Plaza and shooting him in lawful self-defense. Shooting people in self-defense was and is legal in Texas, if they are e.g. about to commit mass murder.
If a thing is legal if and only if X is true, and a person says "X is true!" then does that thing, but it is blatantly obvious that X is *not* true, then A: any law enforcement officer in the vicinity will arrest them for their crime in spite of their pious declaration of the truthiness of X, ditto the DA and judge and it will go to a jury, and also B: any law-abiding citizen asked to assist in that contingently-legal thing will say "you're in your own". It doesn't much matter whether the person in question is a nutty ex-marine or a president, and it doesn't require a specific process for prior determination of the truth-value of blatantly false claims.
If Biden says "Trump is an agent of Al Qaeda, and the US courts are no longer in operation so we can't just arrest him!" and orders a drone strike, responsible military officers will simply refuse to carry out the blatantly illegal order, and then congress will impeach Joe Biden. Quite possibly the Secret Service will politely but firmly remove him to a secure location in the interim without quite officially arresting him, same as they would if he e.g. grabbed a secret service agent's gun and started shooting into a crowd.
If all the safeguards are reactive rather than proactive and Biden is willing to sacrifice the rest of his term, I think he only has to convince Harris.
The pardon power should have been limited as part of the Twelfth Amendment, but here we are.
In the US, what the law says is whatever the Supreme Court says the law says, and the Supreme Court has been known to interpret the exact wording of the law to reflect their preferred outcome. Which is to say that in extreme cases, politics will always override law.
I would like to think that even a Sotomayor can see that Presidents murdering domestic political opponents by drone strike is not a desirable outcome and would find a way to rule against it regardless of what the actual text of the relevant laws say.
Does anyone here have a strong interest in or opinion on riverine or littoral naval warfare and economic activity? I'm doing a thing where I'd like to have at least a somewhat detailed and accurate picture of this since it is a major part of the experience. Given where I'm from I wanted to have a geography that had an excessive amount of river/lake/delta/inner sea related area.
Rivers and lakes are not uniform. The specific nature of the rivers has huge effects. Some rivers are almost completely unusuable for economic purposes in which case they basically only serve as barriers. Others are easy to navigate. Some flood regularly and some never do. Some have regular tributaries others have irregular wadis... plus there's things like flooding coasts too. And some have both! It's all dependent and you can invent it for fiction or research the real thing for a real river.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-cities-have-curves/ On the economic side of waterways. (Tl;Dr: Before the railways, it was many times harder to move cargo around on land than it is on a boat. For bulk goods like grain, this significantly increases the distance you can move it before it becomes uneconomical)
How can I, for the least expenditure of money, negate my lifetime's carbon footprint up to this point in my life? How do I even calculate what my footprint has been?
I was thinking of donating money to a land trust to buy forests or wetlands somewhere in the Third World for preservation. Of course, it only accomplishes my goal if the land was 100% sure to be bulldozed and paved over otherwise, which I'm not sure I could prove would have been the case.
Exactly. Regarding your carbon footprint: don't negate, mitigate!
Molten Salt Reactors are particularly good[1], but like all reactors, they are very hard to build in the face of public opposition, and current regulations are a difficult bar to clear[2]. But if construction is approved, they should be substantially less expensive (per MW) than traditional reactors.[3] So, gently advocate for them so that the cost impacts of the antinuclear fever of the 70s/80s[4] is not repeated. I assume various difficult regulations are still in effect, but I'm hoping that in an environment where people are less afraid of the technology, maybe the regulations can be done more prudently, much as we regulate airplanes.
Or, if that's not your thing, research the economics of Enhanced Geothermal Systems and report back to me, because I haven't seen a solid analysis of that yet.
Why bother? Work out how much money you are willing and able to donate, and donate that to whatever the highest impact conservation foundation you can find. The fact that you have 'offset' your 'carbon footprint' is meaningless.
I've done some napkin math for C02. The US emits 5 billion tons over 327 million people, so thats 15 tons/per person/per year. So let's say you are 25, thats around 400 tons. CATF claims to avoid a ton of CO2 for a measly $1.26. So you could theoretically offset your entire life's CO2 up to this point for about ~$500. Thats not infinite scalable, something like carbon removal could be but is closer to $100/ton.
At the present margin, yes. In the hypothetical future where we've retired every coal-fired power plant and come up with some clever way of getting peaking and overnight power out of solar and wind, that will be different, but this is a classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.
I think it would be worth making that nuance clearer in your top line recommendation. Writing to your leaders advocating natural gas pipelines *in preference to coal*, so as not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, seems very different to just advocating natural gas pipelines without qualification.
> I’m going to tentatively put my probability that China keeps Omicron contained at 40%, but I don’t have great knowledge about many details that could update that, including the opinions of others who have thought about it. So I would update quickly, especially if someone offered to wager on either side.
This virtuous disclaimer serves a function that feels missing to me in “report my probabilities and later check if they were calibrated”— how confident are you in this prediction?
One fun and badass fix would be: offer both sides of a bet! "I'll bet right now for at 35% implied and against at 45%" is a lot different than the same @5% and @95%. You can still update if you get a lot of interest but if you don't bet at least one taker that's bad form and people should consider your bullshit called, and take you less seriously.
That's how sports-betting odds work nowadays in the U.S. market. The sports-betting places offer something like, "Cubs (+150) vs Giants (-180)". That means that if you bet on the Cubs to win that day's game you have to risk $150 to win $100, whereas if you bet on the Giants you risk $100 to try to win $180.
At least for the casino near me (Pennsylvania) and I'm pretty sure for all US casinos, you have the notation reversed. "Cubs (+150)" means that they are the underdog, and if you bet $100 on the Cubs, your payout would be $250 (your original $100 back +$150). "Giants (-$180) means they are favored and so you would have to risk $180 just to get $100 in additional winnings.
Right! And those get pushed around and become more accurate as people make bets and it acts as a prediction market.
But as a forecaster you could just unilaterally offer both sides, and if people believe you’d actually take either bet, then your forecast and implied confidence convey a lot more information. (And presumably if this became a norm for people to do, it would be easy to bootstrap actual markets on top of them)
Did we ever figure out what percent of COVID cases are asymptomatic? Seems like something pretty important and I remember a ton of speculation back in 2020, but discussion seems to have died down about that.
Also, is there a different symptomatic/asymptomatic rate for different variants? A priori I would guess that this ratio is directly related to viral strength (so all variants' ratios would be the same, except Omicron, which would have relatively kore asymptomatic cases). I know very little about this, though.
Well, 1. there was the Heinsberg-Study by Streeck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_Case-Cluster-Study . Among many other things, it actually examined the blood of a representative number of people from an early "hot-spot" for covid-traces (antibodies), compared that to the deaths - and came up with O,36% inf.-fatality rate for the general (German) population. Some claim it undercounted the deaths - but still the results suggests many more people get infected than tested "positive". (Just multiply the C-deaths by 250 or so and you kinda get an idea of the number of all infected, tested or not. Higher multiplier in younger populations. Right? Anyway, that was the first-gen.-Covid19 and early treatment.)
2. Exactly what is "asymptomatic"? ;) I learned by now: "mild" just means: not spent time in a hospital. Two weeks knocked-out at home with your wife (nurse) feeding you iv - that is "mild", then. Asymptomatic: From "no symptoms" to "You did not go to the doc to get a prescription, just took paracetamol - cuz of all those heavy-cold-symptoms". more research needed + more honest definitions 3. (Un)related rant: The vaccine is praised as "sehr gut verträglich" ("very well tolerated"). Me and all family over 12 yrs. boostered. Pain and days of suffering (sister: for weeks + distorted taste. one cousin: stroke). Very very unlike my flu-shots or any other shot me/we ever got. Yellow fever shot is said to be "not very well tolerated", i.e. killing relatively often. Lucky us. Could I pls pay for my vacc. and get half the dosage!?! (and get it before FDA AMA approval? If Derek Lowe says, it looks ok, I am fine.) Please!
I remember hearing murmurs about how Covid vaccine doses are too large but the FDA doesn't allow changing the dose size without massive studies, and how a study showed that 3 tiny doses worked as well as 2 standard (large) doses. Does anyone have links to back up my recollection?
I don't think it's knowable. Or at least it depends heavily on what you mean by a "Covid case".
Because this is what happens when a vaccine protects you from infection: The virus *does* enter your body and starts multiplying. But since your immune system is prepared for that, it attacks the viruses quickly, and has them all killed after some hours or days.
The definition question then is: Were you an asymptomatic Covid case while you had live Covid viruses in you?
If so, there are tons of asymptomatic cases. If not, we have a tricky "where do you draw the line" question.
The thing people are generally concerned about is asymptomatic spread, so that seems like an obvious dividing line: did the virus multiply enough that you could have plausibly passed it on to someone else?
(Not that I know how you could measure that line reliably.)
The most important question right now is: did you get enough of a case to be immune to it in the near future? Right now it looks like omicron won't go away until most people have had a case, so understanding whether the asymptomatic rate is 10% or 90% makes a huge difference to how many serious cases we can expect, as well as your own personal chance of being symptomatic.
Personally I've had mild annoying symptoms (sore throat, fatigue, sensitive skin) for a few days but I tested negative on a RAT. If I'm lucky then I've currently got an undetectable-by-RAT level infection. If I'm unlucky then I've got something else and omicron still lies in my future.
At least with pre-Omicron COVID, there was very little asymptomatic (as opposed to presymptomatic) spread. If the virus got enough of a foothold to start spreading to other people, it was going to give you a runny nose and a fever or whatnot - but, crucially, not in any particular order. Still, as LarsP notes, the question is undefinable because we can detect the presence of the virus at levels that will cause neither symptoms nor spread and say "that's a COVID case". Probably everybody on Earth has by now inhaled at least *one* SARS CoV-2 virus that didn't immediately die, so what counts as a "case"?
Omicron works differently, and may have significant asymptomatic spread. But it's too early to put a number on that,
I was listening to Lex Fridman talk with Jay Bhattacharya today. https://lexfridman.com/jay-bhattacharya/ He said they were doing antibody measurements in ?March or May of 2020 (I'd have to listen again.) for two communities in California. IIRC they found a death rate of ~0.2% and a lot of unreported cases. Of which I think he said 30-40% were asymptomatic.
(Oh he also had a nice numeric... which I'll probably get wrong, the CFR (case fatality rate) for a 50 year old is about 0.2% and you should double that number for every 7 years over 50 and half it for every 7 years under 50. His point, we need to protect old people from the virus, the young not really so much. )
Looking at covid results for people admitted to hospitals for problems clearly unrelated to covid seems like a fairly decent way to figure out what fraction of people in the hospital's region are covid positive. You could, for instance, look at results for people coming to the ER because of injuries + people in for scheduled surgeries + women there to give birth. Could possibly also figure out what fraction of positives are asymptomatic.
I'm sure plenty of work has been done on this. Super-spreader events early in an outbreak are a good source of data, since you have a large number of people infected at the same time, and the motivation to actually test them all regardless of symptoms.
At a super-spreader Christmas party in Norway which infected 81 out of 110 attendees, the asymptomatic rate was very low indeed, just one out of the 81 cases was totally asymptomatic.
Mind you, two thirds of the _non_-infected attendees also reported symptoms, so the base rate of minor reported symptoms is apparently pretty darn high.
I did notice today a news report that claimed 40% of Omicron cases identified at hospitals were for patients who had been admitted for other ailments -- so that skews the algorithm.
I would guess the rate of asymptomatic cases has gone up over time. I've Just read Zvi's latest post on Omicron and I think he quotes figures of 80-90% asymptomatic (in the US, at least)
Should gain-of-function research on contagious diseases be considered a crime against humanity? What are the benefits that offset the current pandemic?
Why does it need to be a crime? People don't do GoF research for fun; people do it because it's their job, ultimately paid for by the taxpayer in most cases. Prohibit the use of public money for GoF and the rresearch stops.
There are other avenues to stop this without bringing criminal law to bear, such as revoking BSL certification and limiting access to dna printer reagents.
The question wasn't "crime," though some of the answers were. The question was "crime against humanity." The former is not typically a question of foreign policy. The second is. And that means that warfare is a policy option. That could vary from robust to subtle -- cruise missile strikes to SEAL incursions, say. So one of the implicit questions is whether a nation-state's continued support for gain-of-function research should receive attention similar to massing troops along a neighbor's border, conducting long-range missile tests, or making fuel for nuclear weapons.
[late edit] Also, the answers that say, "no, just a crime" implicitly take those options off the table, since we don't typically send the Navy to deal with criminals (with the major exception of pirates -- the shores of Tripoli and all that).
Should it be banned? As Scott Sumners wrote it should be done in labs far, far away from settlements - if at all. With strict&long quarantine rules. Btw: "GoF" is a tricky word, often used to deny GoF ("Wuhan" did not intend "gain", they were just fooling around, err, doing research).
I am in no way an expect here, but here's what I think:
The one potential benefit of gain-of-function research would be preemptive vaccine development. Suppose we had a collection of vaccines for 1000 potential pandemics on hand, so next time there's a weird new disease, we can just see if we already have a vaccine in our stockpile.
Except that's not going to happen. Creating a new vaccine isn't the time-consuming part: it can take as little as 2 days. Moderna's vaccine was designed by Jan 13, 2020, more than two weeks before the WHO had acknowledged that Covid transmits between people. What matters is how long it takes to get the vaccine approved, manufactured, and distributed. I don't think that gain-of-function is involved on these ends.
Another potential ¿benefit? is biological weapons research, but that's definitely not happening because it's illegal.
So no, I don't know of any benefits of gain-of-function research that could offset even a 10% chance of causing the current pandemic.
There might be some benefits that I don't know about, and I would be interested in hearing a counterargument. But even then, we shouldn't be doing it in major population centers. Might I suggest Antarctica? There's plenty of room away from the glaciologists and penguinologists. Or maybe on a ship at sea, with screening and quarantining before returning to society.
That doesn't make sense. Any harmful virus you create in a lab is going to be different than whatever nature would have produced naturally, so a vaccine for a lab-made virus is never going to be useful against any naturally-occurring virus.
I can imagine a lab sampling all the viruses going around, trying to predict small mutations that might be dangerous, and creating vaccines for those just in case nature produces them ... but I very much doubt that a lab could predict which *small tweaks* would be *dangerous*. I imagine in rare cases they could find small tweaks that allow a non-human virus to cross over to humans, or *large changes* that are dangerous (e.g. inserting a part of Ebola), but I strongly doubt it's possible to predict *small mutations* to a natural virus that would make it *dangerous*.
Reckless endangerment is a crime, but as Jackson Paul points out, it's not a crime against humanity. It's not even a particularly serious crime if you get lucky and nobody gets hurt. That's not something we want to change, on "hard cases make bad law" grounds.
What is commonly meant as "gain of function research" probably *should* be considered reckless endangerment if it's not done in the sort of laboratory you normally only see in science fiction movies. What matters is not whether we call it the Super Duper Worst Crime Ever, what matters is whether we reliably inform scientists that they will spend a year in jail if they do it. Making it the Super Duper Worst Crime Ever, makes it harder to build a consensus for that.
The definitions of reckless endangerment were developed when the worst thing that could happen was localized to a town at most. Suppose that all of America’s nuclear missiles could be launched literally with a single button in a black briefcase. I don’t think I would consider a year in prison being an appropriate punishment when the guy designated to carry it opens it up, throws rocks at the button, and misses. What’s wrong with my analogy? It feels closer than driving a car at 100 mph with your eyes closed.
Because you do want to distinguish between a guy who makes a stupid mistake, and a guy who commits deliberate mass murder.
*Particularly* if you're dealing with a guy who you think might be able to kill a few billion people if they put their mind to it. Otherwise, once they make the stupid mistake (and people will always make stupid mistakes), then their best bet is probably to pull the trigger on "let's see if I can kill a few billion people" because the resulting collapse of civilization will make it harder to conduct a global manhunt.
Or they might just try to cover it up, if they think they can manage a coverup. In which case, they probably *can* cover it up, at least at the plausible-deniability level, and if you don't want them doing that then you want the penalty for negligence + attempted coverup to be substantially greater than the penalty for negligence.
Illegal, in many cases, yes; crime against humanity, no.
There are plenty of bad things which should be banned, but which don’t count as a “crime against humanity” a term which should be reserved for the worst crimes, ones which not only did a lot of harm, but which were “intended” to harm humanity as such. Anyway, I think executing (since that is the usual punishment for crimes against humanity) some scientist because they wanted to slightly alter the DNA of a virus in a way which could make it more infectious seems like overkill.
But my phrasing nit-picking aside, “gain of function” is such a broad category that I don’t think it makes sense to legally treat it the same. For instance, back in 2014 the US banned most gain of function research into coronaviruses, without a blanket ban on gain of function research. I think that any debate around the idea should focus specially on what types of GOF research have intolerable risks, and which ones produces sufficient gains that the danger is worthwhile.
So are your arguments (a) crime against humanity is too much, but illegal is OK and (b) even then only for selected contagions? If that’s a fair summary, it seems like there is some cost-benefit always is going on the background. What’s the benefit? What’s the useful part of gain-of-function research that we want to allow?
technically, defininb "gain of function" may be harder than ir seems: tge mRNA vaccines are composed of an adenovirus vector to whose mRNA a sequnce has been addes, enabling a new function. If you are not careful in the definitions, you risk banning the construction of new mRNA vaccines (or other technologies) because it is so hard to define the boundary between obvuously helpful and probably dubious manipulations.
First of all, what kind of anarchist are you if you support empowering an international court system with world sovereignty? :)
But I agree with your point that gain of function research should be eliminated or at least very closely monitored. In grad school I worked with virologists (including some working on gain of function research with H5N1 flu that was the subject of a temporary moratorium) and I would have taken the other side, but now I am not in a virology world and I have become skeptical of the benefits.
This guy here claims that omicron is most probably a lab leak, and so was the original covid. By implication, gain-of-function would be very much a crime against humanity.
Not a biologist here, anyone care to assess the quality of the evidence?
Omicron worked out rather well by having a lower fatality rate and higher transmissibility so that it quickly spread and gave more people resistance. If it's a lab leak, call it a "happy accident".
Reads like a Creationist argument for the existence of God, basically just a long list of "isn't this just TOO incredible a coincidence to believe?" without any pre-existing sound empirical basis for estimating how probable any of these things actually are.
Imagine: The Wuhan lab develops a very infectious but not at all deadly COVID variant for it to outcompete all other variants and stop the pandemic. And then they wait until the Greek letters get to Xi to release it so Xi saves the world :-)
It seems almost plausible that exactly that happened, but then the variant-meisters, fearful of offending Chairman Xi, skipped over the Greek letter that might remind us of him, thus shooting themselves in both feet.
Ξ/习 aside, this is just the kind of thing we would expect them to do behind our backs, sneering at the West’s ethical inflexibility that allows China to make progress in areas others refuse to consider.
...but they forget to inform the WHO about this scheme, which decides that announcing a "Xi variant" of the coronavirus would be kinda awkward, and skip ahead to "Omicron" instead.
The Earth's northern hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun from c. September 21 through the new year until c. March 21. The decreased density of the solar radiation, and shorter time of sun exposure, causes winter. The maximum tilt away from the Sun is defined as the Winter Solstice.
And conversely, the Earth's northern hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun from c. March 21 until c. September 21. The increased density of the solar radiation, and longer time of sun exposure, causes summer. The maximum tilt away toward the Sun is the Summer Solstice.
Mitigating that, though I don't know to what extent, is that the Earth's closest annual approach to the Sun (perihelion) happens in January, typically the coldest part of the (northern hemisphere) winter. Conversely, the Earth is farthest away from the Sun in July (aphelion), which should, in the northern hemisphere, mitigate or moderate the effects of the Earth's tilt somewhat.
But, I (as someone living at c. 50 N) wonder then, whether the seasons are more extreme in the southern hemisphere, where these effects are additive rather than subtractive.
It seems that the distance between perihelion and aphelion (147M km vs. 154M km) is significant enough that there should be a measurable effect.
Thoughts on this from the community? Thanks, just idly curious.
You can just 'do the math'. The distance part is easy. Radiation goes as 1/D^2, where D is the earth to sun distance. for small changes the square is about 2 times the difference so
2*7/150 about 10%. (digs out his calculator before posting... ) the angle thing is much bigger. For me (43 N) just length of day changes by about a factor of three... The angle effect is something like the sine of the angle. (with 90 degrees right over head) so for me Sin(43+23) = 0.91 in the summer and Sin(43-23) = 0.34 in the winter. Almost another factor of 3. It will be bigger for you latitude.
George, nice! I just worked this out last night (for 50 latitude) and then saw your post here.
Yes, the angle thing is huge. In Grade 8 our science teacher showed us an old flickery black and white British film with a happy eccentric old scientist talking about spraying toast with a butter gun, and how much less butter you got as you angled the toast away from perpendicular to the butter spray.
You're exactly right about the sine of the angle. Here at 50 degrees N (although S would be equally valid), at the equinoxes the sun's rays hit at 40 degrees off perpendicular at the equinoxes. Defining perpendicular to the sun's rays as as solar intensity of 1.000, and parallel to the sun's rays as 0.000, 40 degrees yields 0.642.
At the winter solstice, 40 - 23.5 = 16.5 degrees for a solar intensity of 0.284.
At the summer solstice, 40 + 23.5 = 63.5 degrees for a solar intensity of 0.895.
That's a ratio of 3.15:1!
I'll use your figure of 10% maximum difference between perihelion and aphelion. So let's say 5% on either side of the equinoxes (which correspond reasonably well to the halfway between the perihelion and aphelion distances).
So, from the above calculations, let's say solar intensity is 0.284 at the winter solstice, assuming average solar distance. But in reality, in the N hemisphere it would be 0.284 + 5% = 0.284 + 0.014 = 0.298, and in the S hemisphere it would be 0.284 - 5% = 0.270.
Repeat for the summer solstice:
N hemisphere: 0.895 - 0.09 = 0.805
S hemisphere: 0.895 + 0.09 = 0.985
Ratio of summer solstice to winter solstice solar radiation:
N hemisphere: 0.805/0.298 = 2.70
S hemisphere: 0.985/0.270 = 3.65
It does seem that, all other things being equal (which of course they're not), seasons in the S hemisphere would be significantly more severe than in the N.
It works that way on Mars. Mars' orbit is more elliptical than ours, making southern seasons more extreme than northern ones. Mars' orbit is also elliptical enough to make the seasons of unequal length.
I think that local effects swamp this minor effect. Melbourne (37S) has a very different climate to San Francisco (37N), but then again San Francisco has a very different climate to Washington DC, Athens, or Tokyo, which are also all at roughly 37 N... and that's just looking at sea level.
On the other hand, if the sun is meaningfully brighter in summer it might explain why Australia and New Zealand have the world's highest skin cancer rates. (On the other hand, the ozone layer is supposedly thinner over the southern hemisphere).
Ozone hole is most of it. You burn much faster in Melbourne than you do farther north, despite the sunlight obviously being stronger closer to the tropics, because the ozone hole is centred roughly over the South pole. The effect is also noticeably less severe these days than it was when I was a kid, since the ozone hole has been healing over time (the problematic chemicals having been banned in the 80s, and the relevant atmospheric systems having about 20 years of lag to them, IIRC)
Seasons are less extreme in the southern hemisphere. The factor you mention works towards them being more severe, but the greater percentage of sea vs land in the southern hemisphere is more significant.
Agreed, there are many confounding factors - I suppose I'm really wondering what the difference in temperature would be if the northern hemisphere's winter coincided with the aphelion rather than the perihelion. We experienced -35 C a few days ago, not much past the perihelion; would it have been -35.1 at aphelion? -37? -40? Pure speculation on my part.
One technical annoyance about reading comments on substack (as opposed to e.g. reddit) is the collapse subthread behaviour.
On reddit, if you collapse a subthread, you will automatically be scrolled to the item below whatever you collapsed. On substack, if you collapse a thread, the length of the page will change (obviously), but your scroll position (relative to the page start) will not.
Say you are reading thread number n, and after some messages (scrolling down k pixels), you decide to skip the rest and click collapse. Instead of thread n+1 being visible, you will view whatever is at (approximately) thread n+1 plus k pixels. You might end up deep in the discussion of n+1, or at n+3, or whatever. Practically, this means I am less likely to read more than one or two screenfuls into a thread I am likely to collapse eventually.
Does anyone else here observe that behaviour? If so, does anyone prefer that to the reddit-style "scroll to next item" behaviour? Has anyone bugged substack about this yet?
I think the issue is that you can't collapse a reddit thread from inside of it. You *have* to be at the top, because that's the only place the UI controller is.
This bugs me, but much worse is the fact that if I refresh the page for any reason - most infuriatingly, if I accidentally click on someone's name and have to go back - it expands all the subthreads I had collapsed and completely loses my place!
There’s too much incivility here, and I think the amount is increasing. I would say that we should do something about it, except that “we” are not in a position to do much, because we are thinking, feeling and posting in a Scottocracy. I am pretty OK with that set-up, but believe it is time for people to prod Scott to take some action to curb the incivility. It is damaging the forum.
Scott, recently, in a discussion of somebody’s rude post about his *Don’t Look Up* review: “The combination of insulting and wrong gets you banned.” Well, but posts don’t really sort into a box with 4 compartments identified by rude vs polite and right vs.wrong. Rudeness/courteousness and rightness/wrongness are both dimensions along which comments can vary, so what we actually got here is a Cartesian communication space, with 2 axes. Now what? Even if we ban the entirety of Quadrant III, rightness less than 0, courteousness less than 0, how do we make decisions about points in the rest of the space? Is everything in the other quadrants acceptable? If somebody savagely attacks somebody else, but makes a single halfway decent point while doing so, is that OK? Or is there a case for banning that fucker (or at least deleting his post)?
Even if we came up with a formula spelling out what ratio of rightness to rudeness makes a post acceptable it wouldn’t really be useful, because who would want to spend their time making the judgment calls about whether somebody’s cleverness is sparkles brightly enough to make their rudeness tolerable? Surely not Scott, and I’m guessing not you either, reader. So I’m proposing an easy-to-implement approach: Let’s ban primitive verbal abuse, hereafter called PVA.
Here is a specimen. It’s a close cousin of an actual post made here recently, altered enough to obscure its origin:
“For fuck’s sake, screw your head on straight you vengeful heartless lunatic.”
The comment qualifies as PVA because (1) its main intent is clearly to distress the recipient and (2) it has very little substantive content.
The great thing about feature 2 is that it frees the mod from Cartesian considerations. There is no need to consider the rightness-wrongness dimension when adjudicating the case against posts like this one, because it has so little substantive content that it extrudes barely at all into the right/wrong dimension. PVA is heavy on words that are meaningful if used literally, but are being used in a way that has very little meaning beyond “should be despised.” It is impossible to make a good case that someone is a moron, a lunatic, heartless, a brat or a piece of shit, unless you are using one of these terms literally. (And if anyone here identifies a post made by an ACTUAL BLOB OF FECES, I fully support their calling out the poster, even in ALL CAPS.)
In my PVA specimen there is only one word that means anything: *vengeful*. But as it’s used here, it too has very little meaning beyond *despicable*. It would certainly be possible to make a case that somebody’s post is vengeful — though I think you’d have to write a long, smart paragraph to make the case that the post in question is an exercise in revenge, rather than, say, an effective takedown of somebody else’s idea. But the specimen’s author isn’t saying the target’s post was vengeful, he’s saying the target is a vengeful person — and to make a case for that, you’d have to write a whole New Yorker length article.
The incivility on this forum is destructive, because incivility breeds more incivility. Nobody is at their best when rudely attacked. Some will fire back with more of the same, and even people with the restraint not to do so are likely to become more irritable. And when people whose habitual style is incivility read ACX and notice a fair amount of that stuff here, they’ll see our forum as fun place to hang out. And all that goes double for PVA. I have received some PVA comments here, and it felt sort of like having someone spit in my face. It was startlingly unpleasant, and in the aftermath I could feel myself becoming temporarily dumber, meaner and more impulsive.
So I’m proposing that this forum implement some simple system for reporting PVA. How about a *Report* button under each post? I have 2 practical suggestions for making the system as simple and effective.
-Scott, you could probably hire a grad student to identify and deal with unacceptable incivility, following standards you spell out. If all you’re after is PVA, the task would be especially easy. I’m sure there are plenty of grad students who would see the job as WAY better than being a TA. (In my town, they now call themselves TF’s — “Totally Fuckeds.”)
-Remove unacceptable posts, rather than leaving them up with *(banned)* by the poster’s name. That way, you are punishing the poster by removing his turd from the limelight, and also sparing everyone else the unpleasantness of stepping in it.
Yeah, agree. Seems like the right question to ask would be something like, does making this comment serve a worthwhile goal? Many but of course not all comments serve a worthwhile goal. A necessary comment would serve an absolutely crucial goal (I'm finding it kinda hard to think of what one would be, though -- can you?)
Yeah, I read Scott's post about 2 out of 3 after somebody linked it, and I think it's a fine guideline. In fact I was actually pretty moved to see the idea articulated. But in practice, any guideline with that much nuance to it is going to be a real pain to enforce, because to do so somebody has to make judgment calls about posts’ rightness, kindness and necessity. At present, I don't think anybody is even trying to make these judgment calls. Scott doesn't have time to read through every thread and the rest of us don't have a *report* button. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of self-policing within the threads. That’s why in my post I suggested starting with a plan for capturing the low-hanging turds: eliminate PVA, primitive verbal abuse.
A ban on PVA seems perfectly consistent with Scott’s 2 out of 3 rule. In fact, I’d say most PVA scores 0 out of 3. It is certainly not kind. It is not right, because a stream of generic insults or a blast of sarcastic mockery does not have enough substance to it to even be judged as correct or incorrect. And as for being necessary — well, you’d have to consider what task the person emitting a piece of PVA is trying to accomplish, and then whether PVA is necessary to accomplish it. In the most favorable case, the PVA-spewer is trying to silence someone whose presence is so unpleasant & destructive that it’s necessary for the good of the forum to silence them. Even in that situation, though, I doubt that PVA is likely to be the best way to silence somebody like that. Seems more likely that such a target would fire back with more PVA, and then the rest of the forum has to put up with the presence of 2 people squatting in separate ditches hurling pieces of fire and shit at each other.
Banning PVA is at least a start, and while there is not a great deal of it on here, the amount isn’t trivial either, and a little goes a long way. I have been been hit by it myself at least 3 times in the last 2 months, and I probably am less likely to draw that kind of attack than many, because I’m not particularly irritable or confrontational, and I’m not a high-volume poster. As I wrote in my original post, I found being hit with PVA exceptionally unpleasant, and while I may be a bit more thin-skinned than average, I’m not all *that* thin-skinned. If I were, I wouldn’t be posting this!
But the incident that mostly motivated me to raise the civility issue here was some comments made to someone else, a person whose username I had not seen before and have not seen since. The person put up a brief post, part of which was expressing a lot of slightly naive-sounding pleasure at being on the sub, and the rest of which was incoherent. I don't mean that the rest was a mass of typos, or that it was silly and illogical — I mean it was literally incoherent. Somebody jumped right on with a comment that what the person had said made no sense. (OK, so right, not kind, and not necessary). I realize that telling the person they’d made no sense is not savage, and doesn’t even qualify as PVA, but the response really got under my skin, because there are people I am close to who have thought disorders, and are sometimes incoherent. So I posted suggested that it would have worked just as well to say something like, “I can’t understand what you are getting at”. And then one or 2 people came back at me with stuff along the lines of, naw, the guy deserves to be called out for his nonsense. And I’m thinking, here on a forum where people discuss how te be really effective at improving the quality of life on earth, there’s a little group of people throwing barbs at somebody friendly who genuinely sounds impaired, and nobody but me is even protesting.
Scott is our Robespierre, which is fine because there are lots of substacks.
But you're right that the lack of a report button is crazy. Even if it didn't do anything on the backend except make an entry in an httpd log, implement it now in the UI to scare the trolls and get the details working later.
I may have some motivated reasoning going on here, since I'm currently tussling with a mod on another site over this very matter of incivility and what gets you a ban and what is permissible.
I don't really want us to go the route of creating formulas to measure exact degrees of incivility (would we be measuring that in units of billingsgate?) because that immediately invites rules-lawyering and testing how far up to the line you can get before you are judged to have stepped over.
I don't want the "fuck you you stupid fucking bastarding fuck" kind of exchanges, but I also think it is important that there should be room for robust challenges, passionate debate, and genuine warmth of feeling. Not to encourage anger or combativeness, but at times there is a tendency for us to go very much 'theoretical, hypothetical, thought experiment' and then something appalling slips by because it's just couched in that strain of rhetoric so it's a sugared pill we easily swallow.
Someone getting pricked by it and yelling "wait a god damn minute!" is a good wake-up call.
Besides, I am content with the Reign of Terror moderation policy as it stands 😀
This seems like a civil forum to me. The wrath of god occasionally comes down on someone, which I think depends on what parts god is reading. But given god's limited time some random act of wrath may be the best policy.
I mostly agree that an active hand against uncivil content is a good thing, and would not mind Scott channeling his inner Robespierre more often, but I don’t think that your solution really would work. First, it doesn’t have any bearing on comments which do make substantive points, and second because substance is also a scale, so now you have a Cartesian plane with civil/uncivil as one axis and substantive/unsubstantive as the other, and are basically back at the drawing board. You’ve replaced one standard with a slightly more complicated standard. While I would enjoy a moderation system like “let x be a comment’s correctness from 0-10, let y be a comment’s civility from 0-10, and z be a comment’s substantivity from 0-10, comments will be banned if either x + y + z < 12, or if Min(x,y,z) < 3” its probably easier to stick with the status quo and just have Scott ban anyone who annoys him.
Also, I like that you can still see banned comments, since it allows people to see what happened, and makes Scott look less arbitrary.
Can anyone steelman a notion about regression for IQ regression for mean from POV of person like Kevin Bird who believe that high heritabilities from twins studies are confounded (PGS are giving more population stratification, etc etc) and true genetic heritability is low? Why would couples of 160 IQ produce children with 130 IQ but not children with 160 IQ? The answer if easy if you accept genetic explanation. And theirs is?
Let me clarify. Are you saying that if genetic heritability of intelligence is high then we should expect two IQ 160 parents to produce IQ 130 children, but if genetic heritability is low then we should expect two IQ 160 parents to produce IQ 160 children?
I don't see how this is the case, it seems to me that reversion to the mean should win either way.
Some anti-eugenics people also used the argument that children of notable scientists are rarely notable scientists but children of good circus performers are. Doesn't regress as fast. Circus performing is apparently more dependant not on talent but on desire to invest a lot of time for otherwise useless practices, which are spectacular, in part, because they're useless and most people don't bother learning them.
Not a geneticist, so can't speak to the science. But from a lay perspective, I'd compare it to the stereotypical pattern of intergenerational wealth - dynasty founder goes out and gets stonking rich by being awesome (and/or criminal); first descendant generation is raised by the dynamically-awesome founder but is already rich and so doesn't have to work as hard and stabilizes the fortune but doesn't really grow it; second descendant grows up in the lap of luxury and only has some childhood memories of dynamic founder and lives mostly as wastrel high-society types, doing nothing productive.
From an IQ perspective, you have the first generation born into circumstances that make them incredibly driven to acquire knowledge, skills, etc., but their kids - though taught by the parents and thus more driven than average, are still born into the good times that the high-IQ parent creates, thus doesn't have as much to prove and doesn't work as hard. etc., etc., etc.
In other words: regression to the mean is evident in non-heritable traits (ie wealth), so the mere existence of regression to the mean in IQ doesn't indicate one way or the other whether it's nature or nurture.
No, because the wealth is literally inherited. It's a question of how changed circumstances incentivize (or don't) the development of skills/capabilities. The kids could have the same success and/or riches-focused trait and it would not express the same way because they are not in the same circumstance as the non-wealthy dynamic dynasty founder was in at the start of the sequence.
But if adult IQ is heritable to r=.80 then the regression would be statistically in line with results of a Punnet square, not more. That would mean that only a small proportion of offspring from two very intelligent people would regress towards mean IQ. The majority would inherit the genes correlated with high IQ and the advantages of having high IQ parents present ( I.e. exposure to high level language in childhood, books in the household, higher household income than average, higher academic achievement of parents on average, older parents on average [see Flynn effect], etc...). The fact that IQ is heritable to a large degree is exactly why 'regression to the mean in IQ' is a misnomer for lack of achievement of any progenitors' offspring. Conditions and contingencies play a huge role in visible genius, and MOST geniuses are not highly visible. It's nature AND nurture. Always has been.
Anybody knows good resources regarding mindfulness meditation and depression? A friend is going through a depressive episode and we're trying to find out if she should continue meditating and if there are specific forms of meditation that might (not) be helpful.
Meditation generally helps to alleviate depression, though as these write-ups make clear, it's not uncommon to go through challenging periods, and the antidepressive effects tend to be most powerful long-term:
I'm no expert here, but if I were your friend, meditation would be one of the last habits I would cut. I would instead prioritize:
- 8h Sleep, Exercise (esp outdoor social exercise), Gratitude Journal, Reading (some therapy books (e.g. feeling great by David Burns) are surprisingly helpful), every day. Better with people.
- I have heard great things about Ketamine therapy for depression, and have personally had really good experiences with LSD on this front. Careful here though.
- Long term, church (if religious) and getting a dog are some of the easiest ways to improve well-being. Cutting bad habits helps too if sufficient motivation is there.
Does anyone have a good understanding of why direct capture of CO2 from the air is so hard to do efficiently at scale?
Is it the thermodynamics of separating the molecules, the low proportion of CO2 molecules in the air, the energy required to force air through the system, all of these and more? Or is it just that we haven't been trying to invent and built these technologies for very long?
Jonathan Franzen, "The Corrections", 2001. Page 344f.:
The earth was very hot four billion years ago. The atmosphere was unbreathable. Methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide.
Nature hadn't learned to break down cellulose. When a tree fell, it lay on the ground and got buried by the next tree that fell. This was the Carboniferous. The earth a lush riot. And in the course of millions and millions of years of trees falling on trees, almost all the carbon got taken from the air and buried underground. And there it stayed until yesterday, geologically speaking.
What happens to a log that falls today is that funguses and microbes digest it, and all the carbon goes back into the sky. There can never be another Carboniferous. Ever. Because you can't ask Nature to unlearn how to biodegrade cellulose.
Mammals came along when the world cooled off. Frost on the pumpkin. Furry things in dens. But now we have a very clever mammal that's taking all the carbon from underground and putting it back into the atmosphere.
Once we burn up all the coal and oil and gas, we'll have an antique atmosphere. A hot, nasty atmosphere that no one's seen for three hundered million years. Once we've let the carbon genie out of its lithic bottle.
The moral of the story is don't recycle plastic. Send your plastic to a landfill. Get that carbon underground.
Bury it, bury it. Stopper the genie in the bottle.
I read that book for the first time a couple of months ago, it's excellent.
I do agree about the plastics too - provided you can bury it in a way that doesn't leak back into the environment, as it does in many places in the world.
Growing lots of trees, though, can still be helpful - yes the carbon will be released back into the atmosphere, but the process can buy us decades. Joanne Cory's team at Salk is trying to engineer chickpea plants that bury their carbon as essentially cork, which can take centuries to decompose (while also providing us with lots of hummus...).
Much better, though, would be to replicate photosynthesis more efficiently at scale, if that's possible.
It's not hard at all. I can't actually think of any gas that's *easier* to extract from the atmosphere. Seed a still warm large shallow pond with algae. Every year circulate the pond water through a big strainer, remove a year's growth of algae, throw it into a nearby abandoned mine. Shut the (gas-tight) mine door. Repeat as long as you want.
The problem is the scale of what you want to do. In 2018 the United States produced 5 billion metric tons of CO2 by fossil fuel combustion (about 36% directly, in transportation, and another 36% in electricity generation). Random googling suggests an acre of rapidly-growing pond scum absorbs about 3 tons/day of CO2, so if you want to remove all 14 million tons/day of CO2 generated by combustion, you will need 4.6 million acres of pond scum, or 7000 square miles, which is somewhere between the area of the states of Connecticut and New Jersey. This is engineering on a vast scale, and would cost enormous sums of money even though the actual removal is being done for absolute free by the plants.
> This is engineering on a vast scale, and would cost enormous sums of money even though the actual removal is being done for absolute free by the plants
But if you could do it in open ocean instead of a warm shallow pond, then 7000 square miles is no problem at all. Especially if you can get fish to eat it.
Edit: found an article. Being from the Sierra Club it ends with a "Does it work? Yes, but shut up and do something else instead" https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2021-2-summer/stress-test/can-farming-seaweed-put-brakes-climate-change -- but if the numbers are to be believed then natural seaweed currently sequesters about 173 million tons of CO2 per year (compared to 50 billion tons emitted) so we'd need 300 times more seaweed, which doesn't sound nice for our beaches.
You don't want fish to eat it. That's just recirculating it and not actually removing the CO2 from the atmosphere, unless you can guarantee a permanent increase in biomass (hint: you probably can't). To be effective you need to, as stated in the earlier comment, collect it and contain it somewhere.
Here's my response as a chemist: CO2 is a thermodynamic sink. Essentially, it's a very stable molecule that is the endpoint and lowest-energy product for a lot of chemical processes. There are many things that will react with it, but those are pretty high energy compounds, things that need a lot of energy put into them to make. We get our energy mostly from the energy released by chemical reactions that produce CO2 as a product. Going backwards would require putting that energy back in somehow. From the second law of thermodynamics, this will be a lossy process. Even if it weren't you couldn't really get back more than you put in.
Plants are able to capture CO2 on net because the energy they use is coming from sunlight directly. We just don't have the knowledge of photochemistry that would be required to design the right materials that would efficiently convert absorption of light into a reaction that would capture CO2.
Basically, the problem is that it's hard to make a chemical process that results in CO2 being captured and converted to a different form that efficiently transfers energy input from a source that doesn't itself produce CO2 as a byproduct
Artificial photosynthesis is one of those sci-fi processes that would be fantastic if we could do it but it's proved elusive. So much so that I don't think there's been any serious attempts that have gotten past the lab bench stage of research.
It's a shame, because having a technology that takes in CO2, water and sunlight and gives you complex hydrocarbons (probably glucose but we'd take anything with a methyl group tbh) and oxygen as an output would fix 95% of our climate problems practically overnight.
Well that's the beauty of the idea, if you're using artificial photosynthesis as your primary fuel source you don't need carbon capture, you're taking the carbon out the air as fast as you're re-introducing it. It's only if there's also a fossil fuel source in the mix that you have to think about sequestering.
The molecular process of photosynthesis is quite well understood — you can read about it on Wikipedia — but it depends on complicated systems of membrane-embedded proteins that are difficult to assemble and get functioning outside a chloroplast or cyanobacterium. If you are a biochemist trying to figure out how photosynthesis works, you can isolate these proteins and membranes and make them do their work outside their original context. But on an industrial scale, it would be much cheaper just to grow trees or algae, rather than trying to replicate photosynthesis in cell-free systems on a large scale.
Equation 12 gives the thermodynamically required energy to separate a mixture of two ideal gasses in terms of temperature and molar ratio of the ingredients. I *think* we can safely pretend that all of the non-CO2 air is one gas, and all of the CO2 is the other gas, and not be off farther than the ideal gas assumption. Assuming that's true, the thermodynamically required energy for separating the CO2 from a mole of air at 300K (roughly room temperature) is almost exactly 9 Joules. That will produce 0.00041 moles of CO2, or about 0.018 grams.
All of which works out to a thermodynamic minimum of 500 kJ/kg of separated carbon dioxide.
I don't know the amount of energy required by current technology, so I'm not sure if this is a big chunk or not; a priori, I'd be surprised if we beat 25% efficiency on this sort of thing.
Still, if solar power keeps getting cheaper then it might become worthwhile. You could use solar power in the desert to capture carbon on sunny days when production exceeds demand, and then burn coal on cloudy days or at night, and remain carbon-neutral overall.
I mean, I'm not weighing in on whether it's worthwhile; for all I know running a natural gas plant to sequester CO2 is worth it. I suspect it would be net negative atmospheric CO2 by a sizable margin, since the heat of combustion of hydrocarbons should be orders of magnitude higher than the mixing energy of that much CO2 in air.
You can capture it, but then, what? It's a gas. And you need to convert it in more dense form some form to store and bury (coal). Which requires energy, most of which humanity now gets from burning fossil fuels. ~~Renewable sources cannot be increased to match current consumption, even less so have a positive surplus for using to reclaiming carbon, which leaves atomic plants, which are a no-no~~
Ultimately plants use solar flux, so the answer is that we don't have cheap and efficient enough solar batteries.
Or you could just bury agricultural waste in some place where it doesn't burn. IIRC some of Physics Nobeliates wrote about this.
> Renewable sources cannot be increased to match current consumption
Of course it can, the technology exists. It is "only" a question of mobilising the politcal will and getting out of the local maximum that fossil fuels have created in terms of economy, infrastructure etc..
Er, no, we wouldn't store it as a hydrocarbon. It would be necessary to consume more energy to create the hydrocarbon than was released when it was burned in the first place. (depending.)
It's agricultural waste, so it's already a hydrocarbon. Turing it into anything else by any means other than burning it is going to require adding energy. I'm really not convinced by those claims that you could just pump it underground and it will stay there. Not only does that use energy in and of itself, the process is also subject to leaks that are really hard to monitor. I'll accept that some stone formations will slowly consume CO2 converting it into a modified stone, but that's a slow process. The peridotite on the surface in Arabia could reasonably be used that way...but it isn't a fast process. And it basically requires powdering the original stone. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/44-01-secures-5m-to-turn-billions-of-tons-of-carbon-dioxide-to-stone/
CO2 isn't a hydrocarbon, but the stuff doesn't start off as CO2. I was responding to "Or you could just bury agricultural waste in some place where it doesn't burn. IIRC some of Physics Nobeliates wrote about this." But I do seem to have switched thoughts in mid-stream when I then talked about (doubting)"pump it underground and it will stay there." et seq.
P.S.: Composting doesn't require adding much energy, but the processing required does have an energy input. However composting doesn't (permanently) remove the CO2 from the atmosphere. Biochar may be a better option, but I don't know. And I doubt it's permanence (though without any direct evidence to back up my doubts).
Like many people I'm annoyed at how weak our understanding of nutrition and the long term effects of different diets/etc is. Running well designed study to learn more would be insanely expensive and would take a very very long time. There probably isn't any institution out there that would currently fund such a thing. But if someone *would* it seems like it would be massively beneficial for humanity. I'm curious if anyone has tried or even tried to design such a study.
Humans can live on a wide range of diets. There're some forest people that get ~75% of their calories from honey. And then arctic people, that live on meat and fat. Eat what you like, not too much. (And try to spend as much time on your feet as possible, I started working as a prep-cook ~6 months ago, and have lost my man boobs, and 1/2 my beer belly... I attribute it to being on my feet, ~25 more hours/ week. Well either that or the greasier restaurant food I'm eating more of. :^)
And there will be enormous variation in health on these various survivable diets
>Eat what you like, not too much.
This isn't good advice. *What* you eat affects your appetite, and if you're eating an appetite-promoting diet while trying to reduce how much you eat, you're going to feel like crap a lot of the time.
And this ignores the other health effects of various macro and micronutrients.
Yeah of course there are essential vitamins and such. You can eat whatever you want. For me, dang, I love fat and salt. Bacon is nirvana, and mixed in a BLT is food of the gods. I can't wait for summer and good tomatoes. Life is too short for diets. :^)
Of course humans *can* live on a wide range of diets. I'm fairly sure what Bill wants to find out is what kind of diet is optimal. And I don't think you get any useful information about that from the existence of forest people who eat honey.
Huh, optimal for what? Food is essential and also pleasure. Eat the food that grows around you. Now you've got me dreaming about sweet corn in the late summer.
Perhaps it would be beneficial for humanity... but even in our current state of limited information, we certainly do know a good bit about BAD nutrition -- and yet, a very large chunk of the population chooses to disregard that knowledge. That said, if new information could extend life by 10% for just 5% of the global population, that would qualify as "massively beneficial for humanity".
No, we have fairly promising evidence that fairly extreme calorie restriction helps mice, who are very similar to humans in some ways, but very different in ways related to diet and logevity. We have *way* better evidence that increased fat-free mass is *way* better for longevity than extreme calorie restriction. If you are interested, you can star by looking into what is called "the BMI paradox" on pubmed. Or check out this podcast episode: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/podcast-episode-67/
So bad is not some thing, but too much? The end of the all you can eat Chinese buffet? (I never ordered super size, but watched plenty of friends go for several platefuls at the Chinese buffet. )
The pilot study was not performed correctly (ostensibly not due to anything Taubes did wrong) which caused the foundation funding this study to withdraw their funding for the full study.
I worry that there's enough human variance in how different foods are digested, what nutrients are needed, what allergies/inflammation responses exist to what things, etc., that the results might not be hugely useful.
That's where I am as well. "Eat less [bad thing that makes you fat]" has almost never been good advice for me specifically, because I spent most of my life underweight and even now have never been close to overweight. It may be good advice generally, as more and more Americans are overweight, but misses out on big chunks of the population and sometimes drastically misses the cause (some people get fat for different reasons than others, some people gain and lose weight regardless of what they eat, etc.).
And that's just one really "easy" example that we all can intuitively understand. How do we discuss protein, vitamin C, amino acids, or whatever else on a population level? Some people have enough, some not enough, a lot in a good range, and some people who should have the wrong levels based on what they eat, but for some reason don't! A doctor may be able to figure out why someone has the wrong levels for their situation, but that would be remarkably hard to do at scale.
Determining in detail the specific physiology of all individuals is not an realistic public health response to the obesity epidemic. Telling people to drastically reduce sugar intake is. Virtually everyone is going to be better off if they did that.
I'm sceptical of the idea of a meaningful number of people becoming fat 'regardless of what they eat'. Thermodynamic laws don't change for different people, and this wasn't the case a century ago when American diets were drastically different.
I agree that reducing sugar would help with the obesity situation. If people who are not obese now are told that eating less sugar will help them lose weight, that may be good to know in some way, but not helpful in their particular lives.
It's a small number of people, but there are individuals who can eat completely normal and healthy diets and still gain weight/be obese. My point is not that such a group is representative of a large portion of society, but that generalized food guidance is fraught with counterexamples.
I replied above with something that applies here. Yes, there are individuals who can eat [a diet widely considered completely normal and healthy] and still gain weight/be obese. But there is a calorie level for each of those people such that, if the respective person's intake is below that calorie level for a sustained period of time, that person will lose weight. If you eat a lot less than what you were eating before such that your body goes into a caloric deficit, you'll lose weight. I express no opinion on whether maintaining that caloric intake would be easily accomplished.
I don't think many people (should be none IMO) would argue otherwise. The question is about offering general nutrition advice, and the complications of that implementation. If you tell a person they should eat approximately XXXX calories per day and include the following nutrients [X, Y, Z..], that may be great advice. Over a population level you're going to find that X% are going to be underfed, X% overfed, and X% have some weird reaction. Maybe those percents are fairly small, but they are non-negligible.
I'd like advice on trying nootropics to enhance my ability to focus on cognitively challenging tasks. I'd like to test the nootropics one at a time (so not a supplement that has like 20 different ingredients). I also don't want to take anything that requires a prescription (so modafinil and Adderall are out), and I don't want to do nicotine for fear of getting addicted. What are some of the best nootropics to try first? I'm leaning toward creatine and phenylpiracetam, but I'm open to suggestions.
Anecdotally I have not found nicotine, administered solely as nicotine gum in moderate doses (<10 mg/day) to be habit-forming at all. I can use it for days or weeks and stop using it for months with no trouble at all -- I can easily forget to take it when I intend to. *Smoking* is certainly addictive, but its addictive potential is probably not solely attributable to the nicotine itself. That said, I find that nicotine is not something to "keep you going" through long-term demanding tasks, it's best used sparingly for improving planning and seeing new possibilities in old problems -- but nothing beats it for that, in my experience.
You might be interested in theanine. Its a compound found in tea but not (or not in as high a dose?) in coffee. In the past I found taking 100 mg of caffeine via a pill with 100mg of theanine (could have been a different dose, I just took one pill of each) produced a more prolonged energy and focus burst from the caffeine + theanine than the caffeine alone. There was also much less of a "cliff" when the caffeine "wore off". I now only drink tea and find the natural caffeine/theanine levels to be adequate. Theanine is also widely available, not expensive, and I don't think has any common side effects to worry about.
If anyone is interested in a toy example of the different approaches of navigating a search space, there have been a bunch of posts recently about efficient strategies for the game Wordle (last one is my own):
I've been thinking about this too! Wordle is great.
Jon- your solution is a good first approximation, but just looking at letter frequencies ignores information about placement and makes the assumption that choice of letter is independent of the other letters, which is false.
I implemented a greedy solution like Rickard (the first link) does. However, I found a different starting word (REAST) than he, or you did.
My main difference from Rickard is that he was minimizing the average number of remaining possible solutions for each guess, while I was minimizing the absolute distance between the guess's computed distribution of solutions and a hypothetical "spread as evenly as possible" distribution. I think my method is superior, especially in late game play.
My final product is a decision tree for Wordle that takes 5 guesses maximum, with an average of 3.4 guesses
I'm relieved I wasn't the only one who thought this when I encountered Wordle!. Here's the github where I uploaded the code I made:
This is a python script that iterates the greedy algorithm and a json file containing the decision tree (though unfortunately, it is too large to evaluate directly, it's better to traverse it with the code)
I've been doing ADIEU and STORY or STONY as my first two guesses, to get all the vowels and some common consonants. I'm not sure how to think about optimizing the number of possible words left, vs optimizing the human-searchability of the remaining space (which vowels help with a bit more).
I just read that some military communications are "speeded up transmissions," and that sometimes, when you hear a momentary burst of static while listening to the radio, it's actually a military message. Is this true? Does anyone know more about this?
How much data can such transmissions cram into a one-second long radio pulse?
>How much data can such transmissions cram into a one-second long radio pulse?
To directly answer your question, this is a bad question. It depends on what hardware we can build, and the latest advancements in communication theory and RF engineering. For example, 5G brings commercial radio into the gigahertz spectrum, which is higher than 4G could achieve. A 5G radio can fit more data into one second of signal than 4G could. Building electrical circuits that can reliably wiggle at such rates is hard, and the science+engineering are constantly improving. If you're asking for the state-of-the-art, I don't know, but according to extremetech, some Germans transmitted at 100 billion bits in a second back in 2013: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/168566-worlds-fastest-wireless-network-hits-100-gigabits-per-second-can-scale-to-terabits
So extrapolate according to your beliefs of technology advancement.
Somewhat related, after reading about the frequency hopping discussion in a previous OT, I have been wondering if it is possible to hide a transmission in the noise by simultaneously send on many carrier frequencies below the noise threshold (possibly after multiplying the signal with a per-frequency coefficient in {-1,1}, or [-1;1]).
The intended recipient (Bob) would know the carrier frequencies whose signals have to be added (and with which coefficients) while an interceptor (Eve) at an equal distance (seeing the same SNR (signal noise ratio)) would just see that a statistically insignificant (?) increase in the total noise energy.
I guess this would work because given n channels with signal S and noise N, the total sum signal would be n*S, while the noise would only by sqrt(n)*N. (Naturally, as with frequency hopping, the used frequencies and coefficients would be time dependent to defeat statistical analysis.)
Of course, if the sender (Alice) is transmitting from (approximately) a single point (which is likely in some military contexts), the interceptor could use a directional antenna to get a higher gain (and thus SNR) than the recipient and detect the sender (as well as their direction, which may also be valuable in a military context). OTOH, both sides can employ arrays of directional antennas of equal gain for their receivers (at their command centers or something), so if both are the same distance from the sender, this would still give Bob an edge over Eve.
Is there an information theory argument why this would not work?
(Of course, if Eve is flooding the ether with artificial pseudo-noise, they would be in the position to perfectly subtract their own noise, making Alice's signal (which has to compete against Eve's pseudo-noise) stand out like a sore thumb. This could be countered by Bob also doing the same, thus giving Alice sufficient noise cover to hide their signal in.)
Googling for "radio steganography", I mostly found https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.7324 , which seems to be concerned with hiding secret information in obvious legacy messages, not in the noise floor altogether.
Oh, I think they are intimately related. Nyquist's original paper was about how many bits (or pulses) one could get down a telegraph line of given bandwidth.
Nyquist's Law gets you the symbol rate. But your bit rate can be considerably higher -- e.g. if you encode with 256-QAM, your bit rate is 8 times your symbol rate.
Standard FM radio channels are 200kHz wide, so your symbol rate is limited to 100kHz; you're operating in a hella noisy environment (from the perspective of your signal - normal radio stations are noise) so you're probably not doing much better than QPSK for coding, so you have 2 bits/symbol. Under these assumptions you can get 200kb in 1s. But any such transmission probably doesn't care about standardized channel widths and is happy to take over as many of them as it can. Feel free to fudge that answer by a factor of 10 in either direction.
I have an idea for a simple product I'd like to sell. It's a pet litter box with a removable metal grate that would separate the pet from the litter below. How do I go about finding a manufacturer, and getting the ball moving with this? I'd like to sell the litter boxes myself through Amazon.com.
Even if you somehow get somewhere with this, it's such a totally simple thing that people in China would be effortlessly be able of copying it and it's extremely unlikely you will make money from this.
This is already a very common design for litterboxes, in fact I have one (made of plastic, not metal). So I think the best approach would be to not do it, as you will probably lose money. If you still want to, I'd first make a prototype that can be manufactured (eg, CAD files, toolpaths, etc), then start talking to suppliers who make similar products on Alibaba. They will likely be happy to take your money in exchange for product, and can likely ship directly to an Amazon distribution center.
See down-thread for almost everyone thinking it obvious or at least widespread knowledge that the covid vaccines don't and/or shouldn't protect against transmission, and particularly in the case of omicron. Given this consensus, I wonder where the community stands with regard to the justification of vaccine mandates at *this* stage in the course of things. In particular I'd be interested in hearing from those who are strongly in favor of mandates, and especially from those who think they can formulate a compelling legal (i.e. not simply moral) basis for their position.
Personally, I think it's been clear for awhile that vaccines don't prevent infection or spread (though they do decrease both, especially in the first few months after vaccination/boosting). And that immunity to covid wanes, so we can't really eradicate it and getting to herd immunity just means the current wave ends. Those all add up to very little justification for making normal people get vaxxed. I'd say healthcare workers and anyone working around very old/sickly people or people with serious health problems probably should have a vaccine mandate, just in hopes of lowering the probability of spread. But even there, we'd do much better to just give everyone walking into the nursing home a rapid test and send them home if it comes back positive.
Now, vaccines do seem to lower your probability of getting very sick / dying if you do catch covid by quite a bit--probably a factor of 20 or so. That seems to be true for omicron as well, though the vaccines are much worse at protecting you from catching omicron.
My own preferrred policy is to stop trying to strongarm people into getting vaccinated, but also to make the vaccine available for free, and ideally offer boosters every 4 months or so for those of us who really don't want to try our luck with covid.
I've been ambivalent about vaccine mandates for most of the pandemic but with the advent of Omicron I'm firmly against them. Mostly because a universal vaccination campaign is just a waste of money.
I've doubted the utility of vaccinating everyone for some time and I think the numbers support me. Mortality rates in the under 20s is less than 1/100,000, which means you're spending 0.3-6 million dollars to prevent one death of COVID (Big error bars on that figure, vaccine cost is anywhere from a couple dollars per jab to fifteen and people may have had four of those most expensive jabs). For under 20-40s mortality is closer to 1/4,000 which is 12-240 thousand dollars (again huge error bars) which is more reasonable but even at the low end an extra ICU bed for that patient is a similar cost (est $2,000 a night for a couple weeks, so 10-40 thousand dollars). For 40+ it is a no brainer, you're spending hundreds of dollars to save thousands, not to mention the lives that can't be saved by ICU care.
Just by a ROI calculation there seems very little point to impose a vaccine mandate on anyone under the age of 40. Especially if asymptomatic transmission in a vaccinated population is now a thing as that means there's limited to no community benefit to getting vaccinated and we're just looking at serious cases and deaths prevented. Omicron being apparently less lethal (or possibly everyone at risk already being dead/immune) means that the ROI is getting worse month on month, even as the evolving strains mean we need to spend even more money on vaccine development just to keep up with an already poor investment.
Spend the money on ICU beds, or health screenings, or cancer drugs. It'd be a far more durable use of the money and let us be more flexible when the next disease rears it's head. Let the COVID vaccine roll into the autumn flu shot, offer it to the at risk and move on. COVID simply isn't serious to require a vaccine mandate.
Just off the cuff here, but I think a lot of your calculations are misleading.
First off, $2000 a night probably covers mechanical ventilation alone and not much else. I would estimate the costs are at least double that (see e.g. this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15942342/ )
Second, the main cost of COVID isn't the ICU, it's patients becoming dead. I've read a couple of 'cost/benefit' analysis papers assessing the value of interventions in my day, and the number I see used frequently is $200K per quality adjusted life year (QUALY). That means for every year a patient is dead instead of alive. For young patients the death rate is quite low, but the number of life-years lost is high per death, to the tunes of multiple millions of dollars by this accounting. The number of deaths in patients <45 (the number I have easy access to through the CDC, others can improve this estimate) is ~35,000. Many of these people had significant comorbidities, but some just died of COVID, for idiosyncratic reasons that we still don't really understand. This is real, I have done an autopsy on one of these patients. That cost dwarfs the extremely small *marginal* cost of a set of jab (which is the relevant comparison), and easily justifies vaccination in the 20-40 set.
I am not going to argue about the <20 set because I don't know enough. 6 million per death prevented is a lot, but there other benefits besides death here that may merit consideration, such as keeping schools open, keeping parents sending their kids to school, and the possibility of viral mutation that has a more negative impact on kids. As Omicron is proving, you might not have time to mass vaccinate in response to a variant.
I welcome commentary. I will say that I got my kids vaccinated on the logic that we do not know what the next variant will bring, and the virus is getting a LOT of opportunities to change and mutate. The benefits outweigh the risks.
Good point, I hadn't really considered the QUALY cost. Most of this calculation is what was within easy googling range so a more measured analysis might be less pessimistic than mine.
It's hard from an outsiders perspective to really observe how much the vaccine is helping reduce deaths across a range of ages and infection types. The early figure I recall was that vaccinated/unvaccinated was about 20x times less likely to die across age ranges, not sure if this holds when it comes to the under 18s but oh well this is just back of the envelope calculations.
So that would turn that 1/100,000 I used earlier to 0.5/1,000,000 (assuming morbidity has so far been the unvaccinated rate), or to put another way you're saving 19 lives per million jabs given. So for 19 people losing about 70 QUALYs each that's $266million saved or $226 per jab in QUALY savings. Though if we're going down to that level, you probably need to start counting in side-effects into the total, which are currently riding around the one in a million odds of being lethal (across a range of side-effects including anaphylactic shock, TTS and myocarditis), but that's probably not more than a single patient lost in our model example.
Overall, that seems more a reasonable outcome. Not sure how sustainable the $250~ per person QUALY is. The problem with a vaccine mandate for a flu is it's never going away, making it a legal requirement to spend $20-$60 per person every year for the foreseeable future evaporates those savings pretty quickly. Still, if the government have already paid for the vaccine it makes sense to use it, assuming you have no other health issues that might affect the side-effect risk profile.
Yea this analysis seems at least approximately correct. Remember that there are probably some other nice externalities regarding the effect on schools and the like that we're not accounting for here, but then we're also not accounting for the mild and common side effects being incredibly sore in the vaccination site and possibly super tired for a day.
For those reading this, I do want to re-emphasize not to forget the 'variant prepper' reasons, though. I'm not really a prediction market person, but I have to imagine that a prediction market is going for a variant after Omicron (Rho?) and there's no guarantee that will look like Omicron or Delta in its risk profile.
I'm opposed to covid vaccine mandates for so many reasons, I'm afraid this will come off as an incoherent rant.
1.) Since vaccines do little to stop transmission. (no first order public health benefit.) Then (to me as libertarian) it's a choice of personal risk. I choose to get a booster ahead of omicron. If other people make other calculations I'm fine with that.
2.) No coherent message for people who have had covid. A college student I know, just had covid (presumably omicron) and now has to get a booster before returning to college. This is plain silly!
3.) I hate the idea that we need to punish people who made different choices.
4.) New York State is force feeding me the idea (by advertising) that I need to get my young kids vaccinated. (Well I have no young kids anymore...) This looks like madness to me. If there is no reduction in transmission, and young kids are at very low risk of any bad outcome. And there is the unknown long term effects of the vaccine, then why push it? (It's like you are trying to piss off the other tribe.) I have no problem with parents deciding to get their kids vaxxed for covid... their choice.
5.) no health care for un-vaxxed. Ughh really? I don't understand this at all.
a.) what if they had it already?
b.) if they get it and are hospitalized, they will have my pity, not scorn. I'll hope for a good outcome.
Doesn't strike me as an incoherent rant at all, actually exceptionally coherent. I will say that under most schema I categorize myself as some flavor of libertarian as well, but I perhaps prefer to think of myself as a 'classical liberal'. My philosophy education has pretty sizable gaps, so forgive incoherence in this response.
1) If vaccines truly do little to reduce transmission (and I think the jury is absolutely still out on that... what would you say if we just don't KNOW whether it does or doesn't?), then there are still other limited health resources to consider, namely hospital beds and ICU beds.
2) I agree on this. Just as a counterpoint though, when I had to prove my vaccinations when I started medical school (and subsequently for each hospital job I have taken) it was not enough to say that I had a history of chicken pox. I actually had to prove it with an antibody titer. The reason being that this could be objectively documented. A vaccine exception using some objective measure of 'proof' seems perfectly reasonable to me.
3) I agree, I think punishment should under no circumstances be the motivation for any actions with regard to vaccines. While I favor a mandate theoretically, I can't see an implementation that actually works for the general US population because I can't envision a consequence that doesn't result in armed revolt from the vaccine hesitant. However I do wish this were otherwise, I could see a small fine being justified.
4) I don't know the answer to this, but I will say that my reason for justifying my children is that if it helps to keep them in school, it is worth it, and if it helps to mitigate against an unknown future variant that MIGHT have more ill effect on children, it's worth it. SARS-CoV-2 is adapting to a new host, humans, and I expect the situation to remain pretty volatile for the foreseeable future. The risks are just astonishingly low.
5) Yea I hate this argument too. To be fair folks are really just arguing for the (potentially very real) edge case that ICUs get totally full, and you have to decide whether to give care to a stroke victim or an unvaccinated COVID-19 victim. I've argued downthread that this is impossible to implement safely without serious risks, and is very much not the best solution. Maybe if we're in the situation of ED triage I can see this happening, but the fact of the matter is that we are probably going to see vaccinated people dying because ICUs are filled with unvaccinated COVID patients somewhere at some point during this winter's surge, and there's nothing we can do about it now.
Thanks, O. I got really upset by the 'their choice' and limit ICU beds for the unvaxxed that is down thread. And I'm going to try and explain why this upsets me here. Much of this strikes me as an emotional argument. (Aside; I think 'emotional argument' may be the same as 'thinking fast', as opposed to thinking slow... which takes longer :^)
I live in upstate NY, (Trump country) and some of the people you propose denying care to are my neighbors, friends and co-workers. I love these people and I can't understand why you consider treating them in what strikes me as a heartless manner. The choices people make depend on where they get their information and who they talk with. These things seem mostly like a historical accident. They didn't choose their parents, or where they lived growing up. Sure some of these people are part of the blue tribe. (Which doesn't bother me, as long as they treat me as a fellow human being.) But I find many to be part of the disgusted (and disengaged) middle. (Of which I consider myself a member.) I would ask you to 'think slow' about politicizing ICU beds. On a slightly different note, I have no problem with life insurance companies asking about your vax status and adjusting your premium accordingly.
To be clear, I was not the one who proposed denying care. I'm advocating vaccine mandates, as a way to avoid denying care to someone (vaccinated or unvaccinated) due to a viral surge. If we must to deny care to someone primarily because of a COVID surge, my inclination would be to deny unvaccinated individuals first, but I have not thought deeply (slowly) about that and that's not why I got into this conversation. My leaning is that that approach would be a bad idea for practical reasons.
I will also admit to a component of emotional/fast thinking on this whole topic overall. I had to do an autopsy last winter on a woman who died postpartum in large part because the ICUs here were full. That's partly due to staffing issues related to COVID, and partly due to the COVID surge filling the beds. That woman's child is going to grow up without a mother. If that happens again this winter, it is going to be in no small part because of the unvaccinated (look at vaccinated vs. unvaccinated rates in ICUs relative to the surrounding population). This makes me profoundly angry, but that anger is not an argument.
I will merely note that your neighbors friends and co-workers are good people, I am sure, but I encourage you to encourage them to get vaccinated. It's an incredibly easy thing to do, it helps them and it helps those around them (whether that help is mediated by less infectivity, which may or may not be the case, or through not getting as sick and needing as much care from others, which is definitely the case).
I think we likely both agree, convincing people would be the very best option.
Thanks for that O. And thanks for sharing your emotional thinking. The loss of a new mother is twice as devastating. I'm sure this pandemic has caused a large numbers of deaths because for covid adjacent reasons. No ICU beds, medical workers taking care of others, delayed procedures for other things.
Re: convincing others. My take, is that vaccines make sense for old folks like me. ~over 55... I'm 63. All the old folks around here I talk to are vaccinated. For younger people, I'm not so sure, and I'm fine with them choosing either way... (There will be some small number of 'bad' responses to the vaccine, and you have to weight that against the benefit... (I'm assuming we are talking about omicron, for which the major benefit of vaccine is lower risk of hospitalization.) There will be some number of young people for whom getting the vaccine will have been worse than not getting it and getting covid.) I wish we could have a message that reflected the current state of our knowledge about the whole covid situation. And I hear ads on the radio, asking moms to get their 3 year olds vaccinated... A coherent message would be trying to convince those over 55 to be vaxxed... aren't those the ones filling up our ICU beds?
Another big issue is the possibility that people make an important decision that affects lots of people (denying medical care to the unvaxxed) where it turns out the underlying calculation was wrong.
I'm thinking specifically about the under 18 cohort and getting a COVID vaccine. It appears that the rate of infection and serious complications is so low in that group that the known side effects of any of the vaccines will cause more medical problems for children than will be solved (both rare, maybe very rare). If there were a mandate to get vaccinated or lose medical coverage, it would definitely be medically wrong and unjustified for that group. Similarly, there are other groups (young and healthy adults, those who already had COVID, those that react more poorly to vaccines or have specific concerns for these vaccines) that may calculate their own odds and determine that it is not in their best interest given *known* side effects compared to the benefits. If there turn out to be unknown or undercounted side effects, that makes it worse. Denying them medical care seems like a no-win evil. I get that there are 65 year old people with underlying medical conditions that almost certainly benefit greatly from the vaccine, who will end up in a hospital for no good reason when they don't get it. Compared to the alternatives, denying them medical care (or requiring vaccine passports, or whatever else people want to force others to get vaccinated) seems like an ultimately losing proposition.
Right I think I agree with all of that. I find myself turning against the idea of having to show a vax card to get into some event. The big problem in the US is that we have rightfully lost all faith in our institutions. They continue to be unable to admit mistakes and so continue with some lie.. and we continue to think WTF? (I've been listening to Lex Fridman talk with Pat Bhattacharya, and that's made me very cranky about our covid policy.)
>If vaccines truly do little to reduce transmission (and I think the jury is absolutely still out on that... what would you say if we just don't KNOW whether it does or doesn't?), then there are still other limited health resources to consider, namely hospital beds and ICU beds.
OK, but there's an obvious solution to that. We're in a situation where ICU beds are in short supply, and we're willing to do things that would otherwise infringe on personal liberty to keep people from recklessly winding up in an ICU, so for the duration of the crisis:
We ban motorcycle riding.
And probably some other things, but if the actual objective is to minimize ICU bed usage, you start at the top of the list of p(ICU visit per month) and work your way down from there. Probably with a weighting factor for how much of an infringement it is, but "keep your motorcycle in the garage for a couple more months" probably ranks lower on that scale than forcible vaccination.
For the median American, at this point in the Omicron wave, going unvaccinated is not the highest-risk activity on the table. And maybe after we've put a hiatus on motorcycling and shut down the rodeos and pulled the commercial fishing fleet into the harbor and picked all the rest of the low-hanging fruity risks, there will still be enough of a problem that e.g. mandatory vaccination for everyone over 55 will be the next-highest item on the list.
But if you're conspicuously ignoring all the low-hanging fruit, and picking conspicuously unripe fruit (i.e. mandatory vaccination of healthy twenty-somethings), then I'm skeptical that your real interest is in harvesting fruit as opposed to say punishing the currently-disfavored outgroup.
I'm confused why you don't think that vaccination is not exceptionally low-hanging fruit. Very low infringement of rights, very low risk risk, very high reward (it literally IS the thing filling the ICUs that causes the concern, from a numerical standpoint). Lifetime of motorcycle riding might be higher risk overall (is it?) but it doesn't cause the highly temporally correlated risk that we see during a viral surge. Vaccines also have the benefit of materially helping the person you are vaccinating, though unquestionably with an infringement of their autonomy.
And sure: start with a mandate on those >55 yo. I'm fine with that, though maybe I would have proposed 45 if I had been asked to throw out the first number. I'm not looking at our ICU census right now, but I'd guess that would take out the majority of the problem.
I don't think this is a slippery slope, I think the logic applies to infectious disease mitigation in an effort to prevent both primary and secondary harm of epidemics/pandemics. You can still buy your big gulp sodas and ride your motorcycle. I'm not signing on to any of that stuff, that's your life your choice. I wonder how much public health as a discipline has shot itself directly in the leg by its recent overreaches in those directions.
We think forcing people to do something is less liberty-infringing than banning them from doing something, particularly if the thing we're forcing them to do involves bodily autonomy.
Vaccination is perhaps moderately low-hanging fruit, but it's not the lowest-hanging fruit because we're using a vaccine that's about five major strains out of date and provides only marginal protection against a disease that now has, per exposure, a very small chance of putting someone in an ICU bed in the first place. Plus, we've already vaccinated a large majority of the population, and most of the rest have natural immunity about as good as the vaccines, and the people who remain to be vaccinated are annoyingly persistent in not being vaccinated. And we're not even targeting that effort at the people most likely to be hospitalized. So there's a lot of effort per hospital case prevented.
Taking motorcycles off the road is *easy*, once you get over those pesky concerns about human liberty and political polarization and loss of public trust. It's probably not *enough*, but it's an obvious place to start.
For 5, I think the actual position (or at least the one I personally forwarded) is that the un-vaccinated are treated the same as everybody else, except in the specific situation that a hospital has to choose between providing care to them, and providing care to somebody else.
I'd analogize it to prioritizing organ transplants, when organs are of smaller supply than people needing them, to people who, say, didn't destroy their liver with thirty years of alcohol abuse. And yes, that position is hardly universally agreed with, but I think it is a position that I think people are familiar enough with already to understand the arguments for or against, and by analogy, should help illustrate the triage argument here.
(There's an argument elsewhere in the thread about removing people from ICUs, which I think, in the minds of the people raising that argument, analogizes to letting somebody have an organ, then taking it back; but I think this analogy fails because it treats keeping somebody in the ICU as the default inappropriately, where I think 'Keeping somebody in the ICU' should properly be regarded as a continuous action which can and should be changed if a better action becomes available.)
Speaking as an ex-smoker, if I get lung cancer, I should be lower on the transplant list than somebody who didn't smoke.
This general principle is important enough to me to constitute a major part of the criteria by which I define my ingroup. You take whatever risks you want, but they're your risks. If they stop being your risks, you don't get to take them anymore.
I'm sorry, so the hospital has to get my vax info before doing anything? What about if I've had covid? I guess I want to see rational health policy. You shouldn't be punished because of the community you grew up in. If a Christian Scientist comes into the ER seeking help they should get care. (At least in my 'perfect' world. :^)
Since you are talking about perfect worlds: in mine a capacity limit for unvacced people would have been announced last summer. I am thinking about 20% of total ICU capacity or so. In this way society wouldn't completely abandon solidarity with unvacced people. And in a wave, usually only 10-20% of capacity are needed for vacced people, and 40% ICU capacity for corona cases during a severe wave is bearable.
But it removes the thread of overwhelmed hospitals by unvacced. And it aligns incentives better. It still gives an incentive to get vacced, but it acknowledges that some people really don't want to, and it tries to keep the risk of that manageable.
Ideally, the hospital would be able to get your vaccination info with a straightforward query, speaking of "rational health policy". Personally I don't care about the case of somebody who has had Covid.
And it has nothing to do with punishing anybody, it has everything to do with structuring society around choice. We absolutely should not be structuring society so that society has a strong incentive to intervene in our choices. When your choices create a choice somebody else has to make between you dying, and somebody else dying, the correct choice is for you to die. That's what we're talking about here, to be clear.
And I don't really care what community you grew up in; you are the person you are, you make the choices you make. We might be tempted to carve out an exception for the children of parents who make particular choices, but then we're right back to the problem that society has a strong interest in taking those choices away. Either parents are responsible for their children, or they aren't. Pick a lane and stick to it there.
I agree the community is part of who you are. Things that are part of who you are don't invalidate your choices being yours; there's not a "true you" who isn't making those choices, that which is making a choice is all there is.
As for Covid being better protection, unless getting vaccinated somehow makes your protection worse, it's irrelevant. The reasonable precaution to take, outside what should properly be regarded as extraordinary medical situations, is to get vaccinated. If you personally decide you've had Covid, and so don't need to get vaccinated because you're already sufficiently protected, and end up in the hospital - well, you were wrong about being sufficiently protected, no?
From your position on the matter, personally I would prefer to fight the hypothetical there, and would be inclined, insofar as I disagree with the thrust of this entire debate, to point out that the ICU capacity is more limited by staffing issues than beds at the moment, and to investigate how that is impacted by the nonzero number of healthcare professionals who quit because of the vaccine mandates. Mind, I support that mandate in particular, but I think there's some creative accounting going on, with regard to this topic, in terms of how people want to allocate responsibility for deaths.
But accepting the hypothetical, the hypothetical is about the extraordinary situation arises where we must decide who to save; and in that hypothetical, I can see no choice but choosing to save those who took the reasonable precautions, who had no opportunity to avert their own personal disasters.
I was mildly in favor of vaccine mandates, but not anymore. With omicron, I believe that most people will get it, and being infected is giving enough protection against severe disease in my eyes.
Personally, for me the argument for vaccine mandate was never to stop transmission. It was that you can let a transmission wave run through your population without putting the ICU system at the risk of collapsing (without lockdowns or interventions). In my country, the last Delta wave filled the ICU to >40% (in some regions to >80%), despite some interventions and closures, which is not acceptable for me. So once enough people have some protection against needing ICU, vaccine mandates stop making sense for me.
IF everyone is gong to get it, then the difference between them all getting it, and being mildly sick, and them all getting it, and a lot more being seriously sick and going to hospital, is pretty major. If anything more so than before, since you could argue that a person who took other precautions pre omicron would be unlikely to get it, so not benefit from the vaccine directly.
There isn't really any evidence that Omicron is significantly milder in vaccinated patients; this was a factor with earlier variants, but I haven't seen any study so far showing that it's not just milder all round.
It's certainly possible that vaccines might help with this, but it's also possible that the virus has diverged to the point where cellular responses based on the original strain are not particularly helpful.
Well yes, it would be a big difference *during* the omicron wave. My point is that a vaccine mandate comes too late for that. And *after* the omicron wave it will be less important.
Fortunately, it seems that we will get through the omicron wave surprisingly unscathed (at least surprising for me).
My wife got covid at the hospital , testing for antibodies , and terminated for not getting the shots . It didn’t make sense before omicron as well. And now they are even closing some emergency rooms in hospitals in our areas because of lack of staff . Before being terminated she was required to test 3 times a week. While the jabbed , that could transmit the virus or themselves not develop immunity didn’t test at all . Makes no sense , unless the objective is actually instilling the policy of mandating vaccines . Her other job was done primarily from home and also terminated .
Hm, I agree that this doesn't make any sense at all. But it sounds like a bad implementation rather than an argument against vaccine mandates. Having covid should obviously count like vaccine shots. This is the case in Germany, where I follow the discussion. There is a legal vaccine mandate for health workers and caregivers (only for people who actually work directly with patients, or in a building like a hospital or a nursery). But I wasn't talking about this one, I still find this sensible if it's about complementing testing, not replacing it. Vaccination does still decrease likelihood of infection and transmission; not enough to stop a wave, but enough to make sense for hospital staff and caregivers.
I was referring to a vaccine mandate for the general public. There will be an open parliament vote on this soon in Germany, and the outcome is quite open. Other countries like Greece and Italy have already issued such mandates (for people above 50 or 60 or so).
Nah. You get very high compliance rates with mandates, if you mean it and fire the non-compliant. The hospitals are better off with 99% vaccinated staff and 1% gone than they are with 85 or 90 percent and that 1% still around. IMO, of course, but it seems to be widely shared.
And, not for nothing, but the vaccine refusers may just not be the people you want manning the hospitals during a pandemic.
cannabis's story doesn't make sense, though: "she was required to test 3 times a week" means there wasn't a full vaccination mandate, given that an employee could refuse and get tests instead. Doesn't make sense to fire someone for getting Covid unless they lied about vaccination status, which doesn't appear to be the case here.
I don't know about "the community". But I continue to believe that the legal case in favor of vaccine mandates is fairly trivial. We have a lot of precedent here, and precedent is everything in law.
As for the rest - the barn door is wide open, the horse has been stolen. Even more people are going to wind up dead in the US than I predicted some time in 2020. (I went with "at least 1 million excess deaths in the US" at a time when then consensus in SSC-derived venues seemed much lower.) Some of them will die without ever catching covid, mostly thanks to reduced availability of treatment for other conditions.
The more selfish bastards who prefer to avoid well-known unpleasant side effects and smaller vaccine risks to themselves, taking on instead the larger risks of covid itself (reduced by what they hope is a less than 100% chance of them catching it), the more deaths there will be.
But in many cases their decision is rational, if you presume they place zero value on anyone else's life and health. It's even more rational if you presume that they'd like to see certain populations reduced, and calculate that those populations will be more affected by the situation.
Frankly, my biggest argument against vaccine mandates remains the cluster fuck interposed between choosing to get the vaccine and actually getting the shot. I'm going into the omicron spike with a fresh booster, not yet aged enough to be useful, because when I reached the 6 month mark on my original vaccination, I found that I couldn't book a booster sooner than 3 weeks in advance. Others I know haven't been boosted because drop-in-to-pharmacy vaccines are no longer available in our area, and they don't feel capable of navigating the maze of twisty turny web pages and/or don't want to register with multiple health providers (and receive spam forever after) in the hopes that one of them has doses available.
My next best argument is the problem of scarcity. There are still people at higher risk than me, never mind the average reader, who haven't had their first shot, and not by choice. They need that first shot more than I needed my booster. If you or I were to forgo a vaccine in favor of a more vulnerable person in e.g. a 3rd world country, it's hard to argue with the morality of that choice - provided there's good reason to believe the dose won't just go to someone local, even less vulnerable than we are.
I know a couple people who were refused boosters because they were <1 week early, and Rules Must Be Followed. This was utterly idiotic, but also very much in keeping with the spirit of the age.
Frankly, I don't care about levels of government. I live in California, not e.g. Texas. And most of the effective anti-covid measures I've been covered by have started out at the county level, and then sometimes been picked up by state or even nation.
In fact, I'm currently hoping our local county health officer nixes the latest brilliance from state officials - medical people who test positive for covid can now go back to seeing patients immediately, provided they don't have symptoms. (To be fair to the PTB, they are required to wear better masks than others are required to, and are supposed to mostly be treating patients who themselves have covid.)
I've encountered a lot of net.experts who assure everyone that e.g. quarantine is a new and unprecedented innovation. They may mean "quarantines by the federal government of the US," but so far that's never been what they said.
The OP likewise failed to specify a level of government.
IANAL, but I've experienced and observed enough vaccine mandates, both in countries I've lived in and in countries I've visited, to know that vaccine mandates exist, and not all of them have been successfully challenged in the courts, not even in the USA, let alone in countries with different legal traditions.
E.g. the combination of a requirement to attend school, and a requirement to be vaccinated for various communicable diseases in order to attend public schools. That's a vaccine mandate you might be able to buy your way out of it by paying the costs of home schooling.
Even better, the last paragraph of my comment, discussing the effective altruism argument against young, rich, healthy people using vaccine doses, completely disappeared from my post.
In brief, the argument was that *if* you could be reasonably sure the dose you didn't get would go to someone more vulnerable, this would be a good and non-selfish motive. But in the US today, it's more likely to be wasted, or go to someone at even less personal risk than you are.
I got COVID in December of 2020, and was coordinating the disbursement of the vaccines by March 2021. I could have gotten myself on the early list and been vaccinated in the first major groups. I originally opted not to get one because there were a lot of people who desperately wanted one and were much higher risk than me. That was a very real concern at the time.
The reasoning was less strong for a while in first world nations. I'm not sure how reasonable it is to think that a foregone dose in the US will end up in a country with limited access.
If the text at the end of your message got cut off or an edited change doesn't show up, you need to reload the page to see it - usually that suffices. Some sort of page-caching issue.
I just want to register that I do not agree with the premise. Vaccines do not protect against transmission on 100 %, but they do protect against it somewhat, although their effectiveness was reduced in that regard by omicron.
I don´t support universal vaccine mandates, though, so probably not a target audience for this
Still strongly for vaccination requirements. The issue is ICU beds, which are not exactly public goods but do have the feature of non-excludability. Unvaccinated individuals swamping those beds still kills by limiting access for others who, e.g. have a stroke or a postpartum hemorrhage or whatever.
I personally know of one woman who died of a postpartum hemorrhage in the last surge for want of an ICU bed to be transferred to. That shouldn't be happening this surge (but it will).
You realize people have always been dying while waiting for beds right? Full ICU beds isn't a new thing by any means. It is only being talked about now because it makes for good news to make people fearful and appeals both to the emotions of people and the bloodthurst of the same.
It's being talked about now, because it's far more of an issue than it usually is.
There's always tricky triage decisions to be made in an ICU ward, but when you've suddenly got far more patients than usual getting referred then the decisions become a lot trickier, and you're going to be letting a lot more people die who might otherwise have been saved.
And in particular, it sucks to die from something *other* than Covid just because some unvaccinated person with Covid took your ICU bed.
However, I think any vaccination mandate would need to have *already* been put in place by now, in order to get cases down fast enough to avoid ICU oversaturation (in cases where that might happen). Some countries have already peaked.
I wasn't in favor of mandates, but faced with the issue of ICU bed limitations, they might be the least-bad answer at stopping the resource from being depleted.
I'd love for their to be another answer, though. A possible one is "people who didn't get the vaccine get queued second at the ER," which has a lot of problems[1], but might be less bad than mandates.
And it wouldn't be enough (at least for me) to merely say "yes, let's do that" while not expending any political capital to change the status quo.
[1] Practical problems: verifying who was and wasn't vaccinated. Political problems: who *else* now gets second-class status for ICU beds?
Personally I think this line of argument proves too much; once you notice people constantly die for want of resources, and due to human labor being the limiting factor and thus all resources being ultimately fungible, any "wasteful" use of any resources (read: a use which the person doing the describing doesn't agree with) is killing people.
I was for mandatory vaccinations, but insofar as they don't protect against transmission, I can't in good conscious remain in that position.
This is an interesting position. What is it about causing death via transmission through a viral particle rather than through swamping of a limited resource that switches things over for you?
You're making a 'slipery slope' argument about my position--essentially that i haven't specified the roadblocks around what makes my position apply to ICU beds and not ALL wealth in general. As I alluded to in my post, it's partly the public(ish) nature of ICU beds as a resource and their relatively fixed quantity in the short to medium term. It is also relevant that the proposed intervention has extremely low risks.
edit: It might be relevant to specify what kind of mandates we are talking about here. Everyone who doesn't get vaxed goes to prison? Work related requirements? Fines? Shot by firing squad? Details might be pertinent.
Because I think viral particles are sufficiently comparable to weapons - or explicitly comparable in the case of bioweapons - that failure to take reasonable precaution against their "use" / spread can reasonably be viewed as a form of negligence.
For the personal level. For the public level, I think national defense is a valid purpose for government, and the ability to defend the country against bioweapons includes the powers to quarantine and forcibly vaccinate people, among other things; however, these powers have to be balanced against individual rights. There's complicated rules about how to do this balancing, but the short of it is, if there's a less rights-invasive alternative, you can't do the more rights-invasive thing.
So given that we have the less rights-invasive alternative of lowering the priority of COVID people for ICU triage purposes, such that we give the ICU bed to the other patient, there's not actually a good public-health argument for forced vaccinations on the basis of finite ICU resources.
I don't think that proposal actually works, though. ICU bed triage only works until the beds are full, then they are full. Do you pull folks off vents unceremoniously and immediately when someone needs ICU transfer? ICU transfer need is urgent and time sensitive. To open a bed, you quite literally kill another patient.
To be clear, I viscerally love the idea of the triaging based approach. That's a way better concept on so many fronts, for all the reasons you listed. But I foresee pulling someone off a vent and explaining that to loved ones is going to result in dead healthcare personnel.
If you can propose a well thought out schema that takes into account how long it takes folks to recover on a vent (as much as weeks) and not an unrealistic concept of ED triage I am all in on that proposal (will look up thread for it as well, I agree that forced vaccination is undesirable from a rights perspective, I just think that it steps over the line to being justifiable).
I am someone who works in healthcare but not directly in the ICU, so I have some knowledge of how this works but not in the detail that some on this forum may.
Ceasing a medical procedure is less rights-violating than requiring one, even before you consider how many people whose rights you must violate in order to prevent the situation of ceasing to provide medical aid to one person.
So, if it comes down to it - yes. Take somebody off a ventilator. The idea that it is worse to pull somebody off a ventilator than it is to never provide one in the first place smells like Schroedinger's Interpretation of Ethics, to me; why is it worse to conditionally try to help somebody, if somebody else doesn't end up needing your help, than it is to do nothing for them at all?
That way of looking at things seems fundamentally confused, to me.
What about people who have "natural" immunity from previous infection? What about people who cannot get vaccinated due to allergies (or other reasons, potentially including religious)? What would you do with people who used to be fully vaccinated but they aren't getting boosters?
Even if we could agree on the evil choice to force those crazy anti-vaxxers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by cutting off support from the community, there are a lot of problems with such a plan.
Is that a real thing? The number of people with repeat or multiple infections I am aware of is very non-zero. This idea get it and you are done seems false given the I got it. I got it again. I am vaxxed and boosted and got it...
It leads me towards lockdowns and closed borders and mask orders and such to break the chain of transmission because infection/recovery and vax does not seem to prevent illness.
Of course, omicron partly bypasses immunity and we don't have omicron boosters, so there's nothing surprising about that unless you're talking about a different strain. Omicron was fairly common by mid-December IIRC.
John already answered on most of what you said, but I would like to ask (or for you to at least think about) a follow-up question. How long, and how severely, would you want to continue locking down and closing borders?
Related, are you aware of how many people need to continue working, including crossing borders, in order to keep the supply chain moving and keeping people safe in their homes from dying?
The number of people with infections despite vaccination is also very non-zero. Vaccination seems very roughly equivalent to infection in terms of preventing future infection, and reducing severity of future infection. So if you consider it safe enough for Alice to go about in public, eat in restaurants, work at her job, simply because she is vaccinated (but not yet infected), then you should consider it safe for Bob to do those things after he has recovered from infection (but not been vaccinated).
There is a concern with verifying that a person has in fact been previously infected, but at least some people can prove that with the same level of certainty as vaccination. So this seems like a matter of wanting our COVID policy to have everyone organized in neat rectangular grids, than wanting everyone protected against infection to some consistent standard.
I am guessing that you have a problem with this reported study then, which I will admit I just googled my way to (but I have also heard this topic brought up in intrahospital communications).
If people who refuse covid vax deserve to have some of their free healthcare waived, do people who have promiscuous sex deserve to pay in full for anti-HIV medication in case of infection?
Maybe if all the ICU beds are full, and you could consciously determine the people who had promiscuous sex, yes, we could make them the first to be denied care during triage.
What about obese and overweight patients? Diabetics and those with heart and lung diseases from lifestyle choices? They should waive all rights to healthcare as they cause an immense burden to the healthcare system and society as a whole
Nobody here is arguing that unvaxxed people deserve No Healthcare. But in an overflow situation where there is not enough healthcare to go around in a local area, it makes sense to assign it first to the people who took steps to prevent the problem. If there was a similar healthcare overload where there weren't enough beds due to a problem caused by obesity or heart disease, then it would similarly make sense to prioritize the people who made better choices in those cases. But since that isn't happening, and is very unlikely to ever happen, that's kinda an irrelevant hypothetical.
People who remain unvaxxed for reasons other than an allergic response to it are extremely selfish and directly contributing to the actual current problem of overburdened healthcare.
They're not even being selfish. That would imply that what they were doing was in their own self-interest, which is absolutely isn't under any definition of self-interest I can conceive.
This is the footnote I made in the comment I made elsewhere, and will reproduce in full here:
===
I wasn't in favor of mandates, but faced with the issue of ICU bed limitations, they might be the least-bad answer at stopping the resource from being depleted.
I'd love for there to be another answer, though. A possible one is "people who didn't get the vaccine get queued second at the ER," which has a lot of problems[1], but might be less bad than mandates.
And it wouldn't be enough (at least for me) to merely say "yes, let's do that" while not expending any political capital to change the status quo.
[1] Practical problems: verifying who was and wasn't vaccinated. Political problems: who *else* now gets second-class status for ICU beds?
See my more full response downthread, but I want to point out that the waiving rights to healthcare doesn't really work. Triage only works until the beds are full, then they are full. Do you pull unvaxed folks off vents unceremoniously and immediately when someone needs ICU transfer? ICU transfer need is urgent and time sensitive. To open a bed, you quite literally kill another patient.
Love the 'specific actions have specific consequences' concept here, but entirely impossible to implement. If you did, I predict you'd see Doctors and nurses getting shot.
Now, in fairness, if you create law for forced vaccination you are also likely going to see someone get shot, given the vitriol that surrounds this, which is why the way mandates are implemented is important.
The problem is that this situation just sucks. You have to pick a least bad and least rights invasive option, which is never going to feel great.
It's a nice compromise, but not a realistic one- nor one that we should pursue (I think charity, even towards the "undeserving", is a valuable thing for a society to foster).
I love the AAH! It strikes me as a smart and elegant idea with the ability to explain so much of what's unique about human anatomy.
I won't go into the entire theory here (though might in the comments below), but in a nutshell, AAH allows us to take one big geographic factor (changing sea-levels forcing early humans to adapt to life along the seashore) and we suddenly have a good explanation for a variety of major factors including:
Bipedalism
Subcutaneous fat
Loss of fur
Weak sense of smell
Extreme loss of water and salt while sweating
Communication via words.
The list goes on.
If you read Elaine Morgan's Scar's of Evolution you get a tour de force making this hypothesis seem super likely. I flatter myself as someone who can detect a crank or a nutjob and this just isn't the case. She's also gotten approval from heavyweights like Daniel Dennett, and even Richard Dawkins gave it a nod in his book The Ancestor's Tale.
Of course, there are aspects that are a lot weirder and bigger stretches, but open intriguing doors of consideration:
Aquatic Mammals tend to have higher levels of intelligence.
Elephants seem to be another example of a mammal that went semi-aquatic then returned to life on land.
Males going bald but females not (don't even ask lol).
I fully understand that there are alternative explanations for everything. This is clearly an open debate with lots of gaps in our understanding.
But I just can't understand how the Scientific consensus seems so dismissive of this great idea.
Nobody talks about AAH, there are no good video essays either explaining or explaining why it's wrong.
I've tried looking into a proper debunking but nothing seems impressive or convincing.
The scientific consensus seems to regard this idea as not even worth considering for some reason.
But here we have an amazing theory that's initially counter-intuitive, but on further reflection explains a lot.
I'd love to hear the thoughts of people here. Am I just too stuck on an outdated idea that's easily proven false, or maybe I'm wrong about the scientific consensus, perhaps?
Communication via words? Males going bald but females not? Loss of water and salt while sweating? Weak sense of smell? Bipedalism? Why would these be "aquatic" attributes? Aquatic animals don't need to sweat, I think. And don't other apes sweat? Do they not have fat attached to their skin? And fur seems unnecessary on the African Savannah, especially in a big-brained creature that could use clothes (animal skin) if it gets cold. So, there are obvious objections. (Especially when I don't get something)
Many of these factors (like bipedalism, loss of hair) seem equally easy to explain by the standard-model savannah ape hypothesis. Bipedalism gives you height and speed at the cost of tree-climbing ability, which is a worthwhile trade-off if you're moving from the forest to the savannah. Fur is less clear (since many savannah animals do have it) but I can see definite advantages to switching from fur to subcutaneous fat if you're moving from a shady forest to a sunny grassland. Besides, fur isn't explicitly contraindicated for aquatic mammals anyway (e.g. seals).
I think my big question about aquatic ape is: what happened to all the aquatic apes? Why did we abandon the water and move back inland (to the savannah where it turns out most of these aquatic adaptations were pretty useful anyway)?
I find aquatic ape interesting because it bears all the hallmarks of a crackpot theory (e.g. a bunch of proponents who spend a lot of time talking about how they're being oppressed) without being obviously crackpot. But I think the issue is more that it's a theory that sounds great the first time you hear about it but makes less and less sense the more you think about it.
There's just no archeological evidence for this theory - tools, bone structure, sites of findings themselves, whatever evidence we have about diet all point to a terrestrial lifestyle. There's good explanations for all the features that you mention that don't involve aquatic lifestyle. In fact, sweat is a counterexample - the primary use of sweat in humans is for cooling, and you don't need it if you spend a lot of time in or near water. You definitely don't need to be one of the most sweating animals out there. And there's some other traits you wouldn't expect from an aquatic animal - e.g. we're good runners and have exceptional long-distance vision (for a mammal).
I'm not even sure, exactly what period of human evolution this theory regards as the "most aquatic"? Whatever I try to think of it sounds like obvious nonsense.
For the "hairlessness" argument to hold water (sorry), the aquatic period would presumably have to have been fairly early? Semi-aquatic animals like beavers and otters still seem to be pretty damn furry.
Right, but otoh as far as we know humans have been losing hairs for quite a while, probably all the way until Homo sapiens. But H. sapiens definitely weren't aquatic, we have a ton of tools and cave art and campsite findings to confirm that, so it must have been earlier. But even if you go all the way back to H. erectus it doesn't make sense, because they had no problems leaving Africa and adapting to pretty cold and/or arid environments 1-2 mln years ago. So it must have been before even that, before 2mln years. But many if not most of the trends OP mentions have definitely continued past 2mln years, and it's possible that some (e.g. language) have only begun after that point. Which means that there were strong drivers for them even in terrestrial Homos, at which point one wonders why we even need to postulate aquatic Homos given that we 1) clearly don't need them 2) have no evidence for their existence.
I've long thought that all the things this theory supposedly explains have rather obvious alternative solutions, and a bunch of separate things being explainable with one theory isn't necessarily more likely than separate things having separate explanations.
That said, the one thing that I cannot see an obvious alternative solution for is human speech. All attempts to teach other apes to speak were met with abject failure: they cannot be trained to produce anything more than a sigh, apparently because they have no voluntary control over their breathing and vocal chords. Breathing is very important; it makes as much sense for the brain to keep this under autonomous control as your heart rate. But we can't control our heart rate. So how come we can control our breathing?
Obviously, evolving to be able to speak is very advantageous to us, but voluntary breathing is too high of an up-front cost to pay when you have to do the work of developing a language afterwards, but if we already evolved to breathe voluntarily, speech would come at no cost at all. And what other way could we have done that if not by spending time in the water? Being forced to swim to survive is a surefire way to develop controlled breathing, just look at any aquatic mammal.
So that's what wins the theory all the points in my view: I see no better explanation for why we can speak and other apes can't.
Alternative hypothesis: complicated language requires a big expensive brain, and there's no point in having voluntary breathing until you've already committed to a big-expensive-brain strategy.
My guess is it's the other way round - singing was invented in order to teach language.
When you have a baby it's very noticeable how everyone immediately starts singing to it the whole time, and I suspect this is a cultural universal. One of the major jobs a baby has to do is learn language, and we sing songs to them that slow down the articulation of words often drastically, while showcasing linguistically salient features with tone changes, rhyme, alliteration etc.
It's required for every aquatic and semi-aquatic mammal to ensure they don't get a lungfull of water. Aside from them, you can tell that birds such as parrots and ravens have this ability as they can mimic human speech and many other sounds, which requires they control the cadence of their vocalizations and thus the length of their breaths. Other songbirds, those that imprint on their parents and only sing one song, may also have voluntary breathing but I'm not sure, it may also be that their song is rote and involuntary.
In the absence of those indicators, I'm not sure how you would detect an animal's capacity for voluntary breathing, and I would assume its absence.
So I starting reading through this odd print . And it’s a bit alarming considering the public health messaging . I don’t think I have the capacity to defend the paper but would love to listen to others on the subject
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357994624_Innate_Immune_Suppression_by_SARS-CoV-2_mRNA_Vaccinations_The_role_of_G-quadruplexes_exosomes_and_microRNAs
Listening to the Shift mystic gospel talk and this guy is already annoying me.
Did you know that Aramaic is incapable of being conceptual? That you can't say "right" or "wrong" in Aramaic, those are Greek concepts? That it's a language rooted in nature and the earth, and you can only say things using agricultural metaphors?
It's the usual sort of vague concepts universally applied (so same in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.) and god/goddess stuff, but he's working "my family are Lebanese and my heritage is Aramaic" hard, and Christianity is all about living in harmony with everyone and everything.
There you go: all join hands and sing kumbaya, that's all it's all about!
Oh yeah, and Christianity went off the rails early, we have to go back to original Aramaic texts. Plus first use of word "patriarchy".
Your standard New Age stuff.
EDIT: And he's just name-checked Joseph Campbell! The inspiration for his "four part Gospels, four part journey, four parts in nature" gimmick!
The idea that Aramaic is incapable of being conceptual would be absolutely hilarious to any of the several million people currently alive who have put some serious time into studying the Talmud. When someone wants to make fun of something for being excessively abstract and hair-splitting, they might call it 'Talmudic discourse'.
Why are you still listening? Penance? You already knew going in that muscular Christianity is far out of fashion, so you can't have been (very) surprised.
I have a friend who used to drag me to every Intelligent Design lecture he could find, so that he could fume and mutter all through it, and then have me confirm for him afterward that there were assorted observational and empirical lacunae that vitiated the conclusions. (I'm not a biologist, but my other "scientific" credentials, PhD, faculty position, et cetera, were such that it pleased his vanity to think they added weight to my critique.) He hated these people, thought they were evil Pied Pipers taking advantage of the good-hearted ignorance of the peasantry to lead them into terrible philosophical error.
And fair enough, we all have our ideas of who the servants of the Dark Lord are[1], and I went along gamely because he was my friend, but I did wonder (and asked once) why he felt he had to subject himself to this particular torture. It's not like there was realistically going to be an opportunity during the coven to leap up, draw Andúril whispering from its sheath, and, catching them unawares, slay one and all. Why not stay at home and watch a good movie instead?
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[1] Exempli gratia I have a similar reaction to quantum and other physics-derived woo.
I dropped out pretty much immediately, but I thought it only fair to give the guy a chance in case he had something to say.
After all, I was only going on my impressions of what this would be like, not on what he said out of his own mouth. Well, now I know.
Unkindly, I am thinking he's going the 'scamming the Yanks' route with his whole "my old Lebanese granny who was illiterate but used to chant prayers in Aramaic" routine, because you need the exotic yet authentic background as the hook for the fishies but he may be sincere enough in what he's doing, in that mish-mash 'it's all about personal growth and empowerment' self-help and spiritual designer mode that is so prevalent and popular.
Yes, I think we (Americans) are rather susceptible to that con right now (and perhaps always have been). It's one reason the whole DEI scam has got the legs it has. It may be because we're (still) a Protestant nation, so more willing to believe in salvation through good works than grace, and because we're a mongrel nation, so individually we lack skepticism about magical cultural artifacts. We're like a more primitive tribe willing to believe the schizophrenic, albino, or person born with no arms is an oracle just *because* of the strange difference.
Personally I believe there's a special circle of Hell reserved for the personal empowerment gurus. As if what the world, or even we individuals muddling through it, need most right now is *more* narcissism.
For either reason I would employ a rather different adverb to begin your ultimate paragraph :)
It's Catholicism that believes in salvation through good works and faith. One of the main tenets of Protestantism is "sola fide", salvation through faith alone.
What's DEI? Diversity, Equity & Inclusion?
Saw this bit on nominative determinism (on the off chance it hasn’t been posted): https://twitter.com/70sbachchan/status/1476613566262386688?s=21
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Today I am being... spiteful! 👿
I have a Facebook which I only use to keep up with family members. For some reason, it is now being spammed with a particular type of ads - the spiritual awareness, psychic readings, learn your inner cabbage flavour malarkey.
Generally I have no trouble at all ignoring that, but one particular ad today really got me going because it annoyed me because it's that high-falutin' blend of dumb pop-culture Gnosticism (which has little or nothing to do with historical Gnosticisms) and appeals to authority, as in "this guy has a PhD! Impressive! So you can *really* trust him to know his onions!"
As an aside, yes STEM people I know this chancer comes out of the humanities, but the mystic magic effect of letters after the name does emanate from the aura of "trust me, I am a qualified expert, look at my high-class university qualifications". Ordinary people are going to be impressed, because of the association of "MD" with doctors, and "Professor Whozis" with lab-coat wearing scientists being interviewed on the latest astounding discovery. You can't be too smug about the humanities because the science guys with PhD after their name (hi, Neil!) use such to bolster their credibility as "I am Big Expert" in the public eye.
(I did say today was my day for being spiteful).
Okay, out of sheer "fudge you", I have signed up for the webinar tomorrow being hosted by The Shift Network (a term which has a different meaning in Ireland - yes, tomorrow evening I will be getting the shift! https://www.dailyedge.ie/getting-the-shift-3332738-Apr2017/), a site that has featured "over 3,100 thought leaders in domains as diverse as spirituality, holistic health, psychology, Qigong, somatics, Indigenous wisdom, enlightened business, yoga, herbalism, and peacebuilding."
So what, sez you, the usual grab-bag of New Age woo. Ah, but they like to throw in some pseudo-science bait to keep it all "cross our hearts, this is all based on Real Science!" for the college-educated lot:
https://theshiftnetwork.com/about
I'm going to say here not that poor/working-class people don't fall for this kind of bilge, but that when they do, they stick to psychic phone lines, ghost-hunting shows on TV, and maybe going to a show featuring a medium or astrologer once in a while. You need the nice, middle-class types to fall for "this is quantum mitochondrial vibration" guff, e.g. a 'real' doctor who will teach you all about how to tone up your vagus nerve to, amongst other things, "Reduce tinnitus (ringing in the ears), TMJ, teeth grinding, and even fainting by regulating vagal tone
Access the energetic gateway to your gut — to balance your microbiome":
https://theshiftnetwork.com/courses
Right, after that lengthy prolegomenon, what has my knickers in a twist?
Here let me launch into "why is it always Catholics?" I'm sure the Orthodox have people like this, but you don't get them making public spectacles like this, or at least I haven't seen any. Our pal, Alexander John Shaia, PhD is a former Maronite Catholic (potted bio here https://www.quadratos.com/alexander-john/) who has made a niche out of exploiting 'hidden wisdom tradition' within Christianity with his own patent version (the quadratos, which seems to be taking the four Gospels and stitching them into a quilt of 'four seasons, four ways, four paths' mapping: https://www.quadratos.com/the-four-paths/ "Quadratos is a new name for the ancient, universal, four-path journey of growth and transformation. Recognized by every major religious faith and school of psychology, the four-path Journey is sequential, cyclical and never-ending.")
Fair enough, but why am I so annoyed by this? At best (and let's hope for the best), this is simply the mystical tradition at work, another modern Christian version of what the Jewish tradition did with kabbala. If St. John of the Cross, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and St. Dominic could all develop spiritual exercises and paths out of their mystical experiences, why not Dr. Shaia? At worst, it's another re-packaging of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" self-help bafflegab.
If the guy is just a shyster, a grifter, a conman in the long tradition of using a spiritual cloak to extort money and followers out of spiritually-striving boobs, why do I care? I don't know, maybe today is just a bad day to hit on this. I do take my faith seriously, so it does annoy me when I see someone using a combination of re-heated Gnosticism lifted straight out of that Dan Brown novel on top of allegedly Scriptural exegesis, sprinkled with appropriate buzzwords.
I'm finding "the Patriarchy" particularly grating, recently. Dr. Shaia promises to help us:
"- Excavate gifts for your transformation from Christianity’s mystical feminine teachings hidden beneath the shadow of patriarchy
- Learn how the Story of John may have been written by a woman"
"May have" is doing a lot of work there. Of course he has to appeal to "if you think nasty old traditional Christianity is anti-woman, here's my appealing new version which is all Divine Feminine".
I don't need that, thanks all the same, Al. So what makes me think this guy is a hoofler instead of a genuine if well-intentioned mystic? Well, this marketing angle (appeal to women, because they are going to be the majority of the spiritual strivers and seekers with disposable income and time out there) and this charming lump of absolute freakin' nonsense from his Quadratos main hustle page:
"This long awaited publication by Alexander John Shaia brings new depth and meaning to the celebrations and traditions of Christmas, rejoining the Festival of Christmas with its roots in the Celtic celebration of the Winter Solstice.
The ancient Celts celebrated for 13 Days at the Solstice in honor of the mysteries and power of birth, believing the Solstice to mark the rebirth of the sun and with its growing light the promise of life returning amid the barrenness of winter. Early Christians saw the beauty and truth of the Celtic rituals and added a new layer to the story—the story of a universal Jesus the Christ, born anew like the sun, in the midst of our own seasons of outer and inner darkness.
Follow along from the Winter Solstice to the 6th of January with Alexander John’s simple meditations and celebrations for each of the 13 days. This small book offers an essential practice for our time. We must remember that darkness is not the end. Rather, in the very moment of the deepest dark, new life begins."
(Breaking this into two pieces because it's running long and I don't want to hit Substack's comment limit)
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The Celts and Christmas. Well of flippin' course. I don't know whether he's genuinely ignorant or this is cynical marketing ploy on his part, that the woo community like Celtique and other Quaint Native Wisdom Traditions bollocks and that associating Northern European festivals with the ever-popular "Bad old Christianity stole all their feast days from the pagans" assertions will help him flog more of his podcasts, books, etc.
He's Lebanese, I'm (alleged) Celtic heritage. I wouldn't dare start discoursing on what native Lebanese traditions came out of where, but I can tell you this: Christmas and the Celts have sweet Fanny Adams to do with each other. If you've ever seen that Wiccan/Neo-pagan wheel of the year, in order to fill it out they had to mingle Irish and Welsh names with good old Norse/Viking traditions around Yule, because we don't have a particular winter solstice festival named for that date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_the_Year
Even in early hagiographies of St. Patrick, you can associate Christian Easter with native Irish traditions (lighting the fire on the hill of Slane) but there is no corresponding Christian Christmas with native Irish day. The modern calendar name is Nollaig, ultimately derived from the same roots as Noel, Church Latin for the days.
He talks about Epiphany and yes, in Ireland that's "Little Christmas/Women's Christmas" but the traditions around it are post-Christian, not pre-Christian. Merely invoking "For the Celts, this day was a prep day to prepare the house and oneself to conclude the Winter Solstice Festival tomorrow. Why a 13 day festival? 13 was the number sacred to the Goddess and the Winter Solstice Festival was in honor of birthing" is disingenuous at best; there is not, so far as I am aware and my knowledge is admittedly very limited, any 'sacred number/goddess/birthing' stuff. (I have a sinking feeling he is also going to conflate St. Bridget and the Goddess but I'm not touching that).
Christmas day - "The Celtic cycle celebrates "Distaff Day!" News to me.
8th day - "On this day the Celts poured a mulled cider on the roots of an Apple Tree." Call me confused, but I think he is confusing/conflating the *English* tradition of wassailing, which is Anglo-Saxon in origin not Celtic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassailing
Reference to same in "Oh England My Lionheart" by Kate Bush, born and reared in Kent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1So6ok542jA
It's all disheartening more of the same, and yes, he does the Camino walk which in recent years has become another trendy 'spiritual but not religious' thing.
So yeah, I am going to tune in tomorrow for his (free first lecture, if you like it sign up to pay for a seven week course) webinar and I fully expect to spend the hour groaning, yelling at the screen, and scribbling notes on how wrong he is.
Well, the downside of being catholic (small c).
It does interest me. There is, of course, a long *long* tradition of religion (of all stripes) being turned into a means of gaining wealth, power, influence and groupies for those abusing it. The jibes about cunning, cyncial priestcraft do have a point. And the new age stuff has deep roots whether we go back to 18th century Freemasonry and occult crazes, or 20th century Californian ashrams and Aimee Semple McPherson providing up-to-date modern theatrical Christianity in a forerunner of the megachurches.
So why am I annoyed by yet another guy flogging the carcase of the horse in the same weary round of diluted Gnosticism and spiritual but not religious and "Explore the 4 Christian gospels as universal wisdom texts for everyone, regardless of gender, orientation, ethnicity, or spiritual tradition"? Because given his background (with alleged theological training) he should know better.
If he does have legitimate background, why don't I accept that he is a genuine mystic? Because of the hucksterism, the rather too-on-the-nose appeal to re-ordering the four Gospels:
"When these four gospels are restored to their ancient reading sequence — different from their conventional sequence in the Bible — they tell an entirely new story.
Join us for an illuminating new course with Alexander John where you’ll travel the universal 4-Path Journey — and reclaim the four Christian gospels, where Jesus the Mystical Christ becomes the avatar who leads you on this mystical path…
You’ll receive uncommon wisdom all along your journey — including from the profoundly inclusive teachings hidden in Christianity’s gospels, many of which have been lost for 1400 years — that illuminate a vital life map that can lead us to inner freedom, safety, respect, and a profound connection with God."
And of course all the 'divine feminine' tosh. I know it's humbug, but it's humbug that stings me where I live.
Yes, this study only looks at 12-19yo people. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find comprehensive data on the side effects. What I know from my own social circle (which is ~200 people dataset) is that my uncle lost hearing from his other ear (came back in two weeks) and one other friend developed nasty angina right after second dose. Also one of my close friends had a 15s seizure episode where he lost control of his limbs. He has never before had any seizure-like symptoms. Overall I would count the angina and my situation as serious which is 2/200.
-> From bayesian standpoint it seems unlikely that the serious side-effects for whole population are under one in a million but it's possible.
Anyone else finding double responses? I find I have my response (and the responses to me) copied twice... weird. It might explain the large number of comments on this open thread.
Yes
Yes
I'm not seeing that at all
Meta-question: what is it with the obsession of this community about prediction markets? I think everybody understands that "past performance does not guarantee etc etc" so it's ultimately a futile effort. Sun rises every day but one day it won't. I see some people hope it helps them with the investing but passive indexes outperform active indexes anyway. Other than that, what is the allure? What is the allure to know the future in detail even?
> Sun rises every day but one day it won't.
That is a fully general counterargument against any kind prediction - and, since any action relies on making some prediction about the consequences of this action, against doing anything at all.
I would suggest first it's because Bayes' Equation is just silly if you have no idea what the probabilities that go into it might be, e.g. if the best prior you've got on whether an intelligent AI that wants to kill us all will be developed in the next 10 years is 10% +/- 500% you might as well give up your number-based decision-making right there.
Second, it's one of the strongest social myths of The Internet Age that the truth is out there somewhere -- no matter what truth it is. That *whatever* you need to know, someone, somewhere, knows it, and it's just a question of efficiently finding the right paper, Wikipedia article, blog argument, anecdote. Hence the gigantic effort we put into gathering, sorting, and presenting information from a zillion sources onto each of our handheld 4" screens.
It's certainly a contrast with many prior ages of men, in which more dominant paradigms might have been that the truth depends in no small part on individual reflection, or the collection of new data, or traveling a long and difficult path of enlightenment the first few steps of which are clear enough to anybody already.
But every age has its fads, our is no different. No doubt in 2080 or 2110 they'll think us primitive, rather blind, a little obsessed with sterile pathways.
> Sun rises every day but one day it won't
A prediction market can help you quantify exactly how worried you should be that tomorrow will be the day it doesn't.
> What is the allure to know the future in detail even?
On a very basic level, being able to predict the future makes it easier to make good decisions that lead to better futures.
Prediction markets are a way to combine personal financial incentives with weighted wisdom of the crowd to get good predictions. In theory, this might be able to rival literally *any* other predictive method by combining all sources. In practice, there are a lot of kinks to be worked out and maybe their potential is ultimately limited by one factor or another. But it's an emerging space, and worth paying attention to.
Seems like you have two questions: What's the point of predicting future? What's the point of prediction if you cannot get it absolutely 100% right?
Predicting the future is useful if it allows us to make better choices. Think about any project; you could use prediction markets to find out whether it is likely to succeed or likely to fail. Then you could run those that are predicted to succeed. That could save a lot of money.
A prediction that is not 100% right but merely 99.9999999% right (your example with the Sun) is still super useful. In practice, even 80% would often be an improvement over what we have now.
I think it's because it's an interesting academic way to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to make more accurate predictions, and in turn, use those to make better, happiness-creating policies / institutions / etc. I've always been fascinated by them and their potential
For me, it's less about returns. Returns themselves are nice for individual consumers if they're good at predicting, but every person investing also creates a positive externality by creating an informational price signal
Anyone have thoughts on the long term future of prediction markets? I know they've been discussed here before, but they seem to be getting more traction and people involved + a ton of new ones are popping up. I think only one called that Scott mentioned before called Kalshi is actually regulated, but there are a ton on the blockchain too.
If they work out they could be a pretty useful information discovery tool, but I'm not sure how to think about their long-term viability / what to do to make them so? So many ones in the past have failed, but the PM literature is super interesting
Metaculus does have a question for "Will Metaculus still exist in the year 20XX?". The author of the question acknowledged that the game-theoretic optimal move is to predict it with 100% certainty, because if Metaculus ceases to exist there's nobody to call you on being wrong, but they asked users to try and predict honestly anyway.
X-Post from LessWrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BvYJMhvC26Cxi2RPF/political-office-for-beginners):
If an American citizen was looking to run for office (from local, state, all the way to federal), what would be the recommended steps to take?
Specific questions that come to mind:
* How would a Millennial or Gen Z'er deal with existing social media accounts?
* How would a Gen X'er or Boomer create and navigate social media accounts and advertising?
* Where and how would the first $10,000 do the greatest good? First $100,000? Etc.
* Are there political grants/party grants/etc. available in the United States for less-funded campaigns?
* When should a citizen start campaigning for an election?
* Where and how would the first 100 hours do the greatest good? First 1,000? Etc.
Re: Social media: Start a new account, @JoeBloggsForMayor or something. That way you avoid mixing your Serious Politician social media identity with the identity that you use for posting cat pictures on Reddit.
I am not convinced that you need to go back through your personal account history and scrub it of all traces of Discourse, considering the things politicians have gotten away with posting, but I do think it's good practice to distinguish what you post as Joe Bloggs from the stuff you post as The Official Position of the Bloggs Campaign
1. Join whichever of the two major parties you prefer
2. Go to meetings, schmooze, get to know all the big fish who fill your local small pond
3. Spend years "paying your dues" by sucking up to those big fish in whatever way seems appropriate
4. Meanwhile, work on becoming the kind of person that makes a good candidate. You are polite, personable, well-connected, well-spoken, and photogenic, and your opinions closely match whatever opinions are most likely to get you elected in your area
5. Now, quietly mention to one of your local big fish that you're interested in maybe one day running for office. If you've done steps 1-4 properly then they'll start telling you what steps 6, 7 and 8 are.
These questions are pretty complicated without knowing anything about the person. What experience do they have with politics? What office and where do they live? Some are easier than others. Are you entering a primary? Typically you would want to get started, outside of Senate or Presidential, about 3 months before the election. you might do 3 months of build up to your announcement or something as well. Also are you running a campaign to win or a campaign to introduce issues?
Hey Matthew, thanks for responding! I purposefully left the questions open-ended, so that anyone with any level of experience could answer with their specific area of expertise. Some more specifics into a situation I'm considering are:
* State level government (Legislature)
* Small state (Less than 2 million population)
* Open to entering a primary (could also run as independent)
* Campaign to win (but focused on one or two key issues, also not sure how realistic a campaign to win would be)
If I could ask you a question as well, where did you get your experience in US politics from?
State legislature in a small state is basically just knocking doors personally and with maybe a few key volunteer supporters. Probably don't need more than $10k if that. Much easier to go independent if you don't like a major party. Another important thing is that your one or two key issues have to be pretty broadly applicable to the area. Is the seat very competitive? Are lots of potential candidates involved? Generally a primary would be harder in this case, if you have no connections to the local party.
One issue that has been discussed on AstralCodexTen multiple times previously is that long term prediction markets are inefficient because the return you would get from being right is less than the return you would get by investing the money in more traditional ways. The idea that seemed obvious to me when I first read about this is for the prediction market to invest the money on your behalf while they have it, and return it with interest, like how banks handle savings. Is there some non-obvious reason why this wouldn't work?
I think a lot of it is just logistics, most prediction markets that exist right now are nascent. This does hamper longer term projections, because it becomes a lot more difficult from a time value of money perspective. But I can't imagine they don't have some long term plan to invest collateral and distribute that among investors - that way you could capture whatever beta return you wanted in addition to your returns from the PM
I've seen two recurring objections, neither insurmountable but both exacerbating existing challenges:
1) The added layer of financialization comes with a significant increase in complexity, both in regulation and in user buy-in. The difficulty in setting up a brokerage when prediction markets themselves are something of a legal grey area is my guess for the main reason it hasn't been tried, though note that while average returns might increase you *will* also see a fee increase v. cash-based systems.
2) "Traditional investing" isn't a monolith, and there is no one financial instrument that is going to meet everyone's needs. An S&P 500 index fund might be popular, but is completely inadequate for anyone that was looking to avoid even more market correlation. [Insert arguments against T-bills, international funds, etc. here.] I suppose you could figure out a system where the prediction market collates users with different asset blends, but that would have significant consequences and I haven't seen a proposal that takes it seriously. Best case scenario you fracture the userbase, and that's a problem when most prediction markets rely on volume to be epistemically worthwhile.
I think it’s time for Scott to revisit some of the older “more than you wanted to know” covid threads and evaluate if some of them were true or were ever true.
My partner is looking for a position in the tech policy domain. I'm wondering if anyone here can recommend an organization with a strong ethical mission (civil liberties, social justice, existential risk) that would benefit from someone with a solid AI/tech background and communication skills.
My partner's specialty is AI safety, regulation, existential risk, that kind of thing. They've just graduated from MIT with a PhD in computer science and have experience in crafting policy and
state-level legislation. We live in Vancouver, WA currently, but are scouting out positions more broadly.
How capable are they outside of AI issues because that is not going to get them a lot of options. General civil liberties/social justice has almost no connection to existential risk. What organizations have they already considered? Presumably the EFF and groups like that they've already looked into and probably the rationalist adjacent ones as well?
They are very capable (AI is just what their education was in) and have looked into the EFF, FIRE, Lightcone, and a few others. I'm wondering if you know any others that might be good to add to the list? Especially more rationalist ones since you probably know the space better than me.
I don't follow the rationalist sphere a ton. You might consider posting on the astralcodexten subreddit or posting on lesswrong.com. The big comment threads here have lots of top level comments with very few getting any sort of response, especially stuff posted after the first 10 hours.
I'm reading a book called "How Democracies Die". In this book, the authors give many examples of countries that were once democratic that were taken over by a demagogue with ambition. Examples include Chavez in Venezuela, Peron in Argentina, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, and many others.
One claim the book makes I found interesting is that political parties need to actively prevent demagogues from taking power. To back this claim, they give many examples of popular demagogues in the US that you've never heard of. You've never heard of them because the political parties refused to support them as candidates.
Then the book gives examples where ideological opposite parties ally to prevent demagogues from taking power. They give examples like Belgium in the 1930s, where a center right Catholic party allied with the socialist party to prevent the fascist party (modeled after Germany's Nazis) from gaining power. Many conservative Catholic voters supported the socialists such that they won.
Another more recent example is Austria in 2016, where the ÖVP (Austrian People's Party) kept the radial right Freedom Party (FPÖ) out of the presidency. The last two candidates remaining after the first round were former Green Party chair Van der Bellen and the FPÖ leader Norber Hofer. So some in the ÖVP, including former presidential candidate Andreas Khol and Chairman Reinhold Mitterlehner, as well as many rural mayors, supported their ideological rival Van der Bellen.
Anyway, the book makes the further claim that presidential systems are less stable against demagogues, because governing only happens through compromise. In parliamentary systems, the prime minister always has a governing majority. Most Latin American countries had presidential systems with legislatures and a supreme court modeled on the US.
I'm curious, can anyone point to counter examples to this, wherein a country with a presidential system, bicameral legislature, and supreme court, does not have a problem governing due to polarization and demagogues gaining power?
Knowing Belgium especially well, multiple parties allying to defeat a party bigger than all the alliance members individually is nothing to write about. Maybe it was the first time it happened, but certainly not the last time center catholics allied with socialists...So there is a question that immediately came to mind: Do ideological opposite parties allies more often to prevent demagogues to come to power, than other non-demagogic but nonetheless fast growing new parties. In other world, is Demagogy a factor? In fact, can Demagogy be defined in another way that a fast growing new party actively recruiting the base of existing parties? Maybe France LREM (Macron) was demagogic when it ate both left and right (but is now the successful center, after it won)?
Was Belgian NVA a demagogic party , but is now simply a nationalistic right party? (at least in northern Belgium, in the south NVA is not competing with the local parties and is used as a bogeyman with the VB (so of course it's demagogic). Was Ecolo (the green's) ever tagged as demagogic? I don't think so, but maybe they did not grow fast enough...And they are sometimes put in the opposition by a socialist (left)/liberal(right) alliance while the green are clearly on the left ideological side, demagogic or not...
I have the feeling demagogue is a quite context dependent, time-evolving etiquette...
When I hear people talking about "democracy dying" in the last few years, I find myself deeply skeptical of their motives. If this became a concern in say, 2017 and since, then it's poorly hidden concern about Trump and Populist Republicans. In a sub-comment you mentioned four criteria found in the book for identifying a demagogue. Those criteria seem to very easily apply to both Trump and Biden (and quite a few other American politicians, including Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Dick Cheney, and Hillary Clinton). In other words, a significant portion of the political leadership in the US is made up of demagogues who are endangering the democracy/democratic principles of the country.
That may be accurate, and it may be a concern, but I am doubtful of both the degree of concern we should feel about this, and specifically the direction of the concern that many of these writers who talk about demagogues and populism are aiming their criticisms. As someone who has studied a fair amount of US history, I find our current level of antagonism to be far less than it has been throughout much of the time since 1776. There was significant disagreement about how to form the government, that certainly didn't suddenly end in 1789. We also fought a civil war, which is a pretty big deal. It infuriates me when people talk about how our current situation is more unstable than at any time in our history - we fought a *civil war*, how can the rest of our history compare to that, unless these people seriously think that we're about to have another one now? We also had significant levels of disagreement and strife during both WWI and WWII, and many of our core constitutional rights were directly and intentionally denied by the federal government. I could find dozens of other examples, from the numerous times the Capital building was attacked/bombed, to various government responses taking away liberties and using unconstitutional powers to defeat opponents.
Why are we concerned that *now* is when demagogues need to be defeated? Again, poorly disguised antagonism for Trump specifically. He's not even the biggest blow-hard populist in our history (my personal money is on Andrew Jackson, but that's not without controversy, especially if we include non-president politicians or non-politicians who had national followings). If a concern about populists boils down to a particular tribe being really mad that another tribe elected someone they didn't want elected, then I have no interest in that discussion. Ask Republicans how they felt about Obama getting elected, or anti-war Democrats about Bush's re-election in 2004. Partisans of all stripes are going to be upset and talk about how upset they are when their opponents win. If a lot of these partisans happen to have jobs in writing for major media, we should not be surprised that they get that message out often. That doesn't make the current situation novel or interesting, and it doesn't mean they're right in their concern or their criticism. I find the lack of concern many of them have about Liberal/Left/Democratic demagogues to be pretty definitive in my mind that they are not principled advocates for democracy, but simple partisans rooting for their team.
There's nothing particularly wrong with that, but there's also nothing in there that should concern the rest of us or cause us to fear for democracy any more now than we would in a world without Trump. Not taking the partisan road also allows us more freedom to criticize anyone who acts like a demagogue (even if they don't always do so or have some non-demagogue traits as well) and also to find good things in politicians who we might not like in total.
I think it's a fair criticism of the book to note it didn't mention many left of center illiberal leaders or demagogues, into which I think FDR could fit. Though it does mention many far left demagogues in other countries, including most Latin American ones.
I don't know, I think it's fair to be suspicious of timing. But that suspicion shouldn't make people ignore obvious signs of how much worse Trump was in upholding democracy than previous presidents at least in living memory.
Now there are plausible scenarios where I could imagine it all falling apart and turning into civil war, or at a minimum something like protracted urban strife. Maybe I'm just catastrophising.
But then I read some of Hamilton's and others views from the federalist papers, and you can see they were keenly aware of how quickly democracy turns into mobocracy. This is why they added checks and balances, separation of powers, enumerated federal powers, and gatekeeping institutions like the electoral college. It's also why they chose a republic over a direct democracy.
They did not predict the rise of political parties that would nullify the purpose of the electoral college.
Wasn't it Franklin who said "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance"? I don't think that statement implies "but we can ignore worrying signs if both sides are doing it" or "we can ignore worrying signs if we suspect political motives are at play".
I agree with you about Andrew Jackson, by the way, he may be another good example of someone who fits some if the criteria. Didn't he start the "spoils system" of governance in the US?
I think you're doing the all too common thing of conflating "democracy" with "liberal values/policies". I think efforts by certain Democrats to facilitate mass illegal immigration and then campaign for amnesty, giving them voting rights or even just facilitating it with the knowledge their children will be citizens with voting rights, represent a bigger "attack on democracy" than anything Trump ever did.
The reason I am suspicious of both the timing and the goals of those writing these concerns is that their concerns are highly selective. Trump Bad doesn't say anything about abuses of power from anyone else. In my mind, Bush and Cheney expanded executive power considerably while in office, in a lot of bad ways. Then, instead of correcting that, Obama expanded it even more, and added new expansions as well as using the ones Bush created! Obama did more to go after whistleblowers and journalists than any US president in a long time, maybe ever. But most people seem to have given him a pass on that. You talk about abuses of presidents within living memory, but I'm going to venture a guess that most of us at least remember Obama, and probably Bush. They both abused government power a lot! Is Trump worse than either of them on that front? I would honestly say no. I will say that he looks more like a buffoon, and so do many of his voters. If that's what's bothering people, I wish they would say that. To say that he's especially undermining to democracy seems false on its face.
Do you remember when Hillary's supporters rioted and she declared Trump's election illegitimate? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_protests_against_Donald_Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html
Or when the press went hog wild on a conspiracy theory that Trump rigged the election with Russia? https://taibbi.substack.com/p/master-list-of-official-russia-claims
I think it's perfectly reasonable to be concerned about abuses of government power, and the expansion of the means of abusing it (and I think most people concerned about these issues look specifically at the Executive in the US). But if your concern is "Trump!" and you don't have a concern about Obama or Biden having and/or [ab]using that power, then all I am hearing is partisan bickering. If you talk non-stop about 1/6 but pointedly ignored night after night of people attacking a federal building in Portland, I'm not sure I trust your motives or goals. I'm definitely on board for "1/6 was bad, and also what happened in Portland was bad, and also..." There's room to criticize anyone and everyone who abuses their power, even if they happen to be on our own "side" on some issue. Some people have a long enough attention span to remember when it was the Democrats arguing in favor of the filibuster or Republicans were upset about a president lowering the dignity of the office.
I'm a big fan of checks and balances. I have no time or interest for "Stop the other party from doing what we did/are doing/will do."
Obama and Bush both fit into the standard centrist corporate oligopoly background. Michelle and George are even buddies! Trump is awful in distinct ways and is more blatantly personally corrupt. Additionally he has no real ideology. Bush and Obama were predictable and broadly within the neoliberal consensus.
I think you're saying that as a positive for Bush and Obama? I'm struggling because I actually disagree that those facts are positive. Trump actually has a much harder time using the government for his personal gains, because he is not connected to the wheels that need to turn to make changes - a fact the media was happy to report when he struggled to get things done. Hillary Clinton, for example, would have had a much easier time obtaining personal gain for herself and her supporters, as she had significant contacts in government and could have immediately put them to use.
I agree that Trump is more blatantly personally corrupt. I emphasize the "blatant" aspect to it, but would strongly disagree that he was/is actually more corrupt. That's part of what I meant by calling him a buffoon. Whatever corruption he has, is visible and loudly reported on. He is loud, boorish, undisciplined, and he either doesn't know how or doesn't care to hide it. Most of those aspects have little to nothing to do with endangering democracy. In fact, that's all part of what makes him popular in the circles that praise him. He seems genuine (or is making very costly signals to reach that group at the expense of other groups), and many Americans are bothered by corrupt leaders who are simply better at hiding it. Very few people seem to think that their leaders are free of various forms of corruption. Trump failing/not trying to hide it is considered a plus, only because the underlying corruption exists either way.
I'm belaboring this point a little bit, because Trump is being called a danger to "democracy." The counterpoint is that other leaders are part of the "neoliberal consensus" - by which we tend to mean the leadership classes among both major parties. If we mean "democracy" as it's generally intended, that should favor Trump *supporting* democracy when he appeals to large segments of the population over a very narrow slice of the population that happens to be in charge. The alternative is some kind of oligarchy, which is expressly *not* democratic.
I get the impression that various elites, including those in journalism who have the greatest ability to express their views, care far more about that "neoliberal consensus" than they do democracy, voters, or a majority of people. That can be seen with the sneering references to "populism" and "popular" in regards to Trump. How can he both be populist and against democracy? That only makes sense to me if we are using a different definition of democracy than the typical meaning. I'm not sure what definition of "democracy" finds Trump to be against it. Is he good for the country? Certainly debatable. If he good for our government and our standing in the world, probably not. What do either of those things have to do with "democracy?"
The issue is that "democracy" got twisted to mean "liberal values". I agree that Trump was "democratic", but in the same sense that America's Founding Fathers explicitly avoided making America a democracy and chose a Republican model.
I am quite sceptical that presidential system have to compromise more than parliamentary ones. If anything, then I would say it is the other way around.
Traditionally, the countries with strongest tendency for compromise that come to my mind are the Nordic countries (where the government is often formed by minority coalitions) and Switzerland. (Who are going insane on this point. They don't have an opposition because all parties form the government. They also don't have a capital city, a head of state, or even a head of government, except for some obscure and purely formal title). In any case, while these countries do have demagogic parties, they are clearly amongst the most stable democracies in the world.
Perhaps a steelman of the book's argument regarding political systems is: though there is no hard and fast rule, the historical examples clearly show a pattern whereby presidential systems have a tendency to end up in a two party system that suffers from polarization, gridlock, and demagoguery. It can happen in parliamentary systems too, but it's somewhat less likely as these systems can support many smaller parties, and nearly always have a governing coalition.
Presidential systems typically have checks and balances to prevent any one branch from having too much power. Would be dictators or demagogues find this process of working with the other branches burdensome and slow, thus the tendency to weaken other branches and institutions.
Moreover, in a presidential system, the people often have divided government, where the legislature and executive are different political parties. Without compromise, governing cannot happen and the people become skeptical of the government doing anything. They in turn become receptive to the promises of a demagogue who says he will get rid of gridlock and get something done for the people.
Then a political party decides to support that demagogue because of the political power (see Venezuela/Chavez and Italy/Mussolini and, the book argues, Trump in the US), but once in, he never leaves.
That's a good way of phrasing it. Though I notice that I am confused because the summary is that "many checks and balances lead to dictatorship", which I am pretty sure is not true. But perhaps it's just my phrasing, perhaps it should be "checks of the wrong type lead to dictatorship" or something like this.
I definitely appreciate the observation that presidential systems are more vulnerable. But my (perhaps naive) explanation would rather be that the president has typically more power in presidential systems, not less. I think the US president or the French president has usually much more power than the German chancellor. Perhaps there is more variance in presidential systems, where the president has to rule sometimes with and sometimes against majorities in the parliament. But the German chancellor *always* has coalition partners keeping him/her in check.
So I would assume that presidential systems (sometimes) have a single person with lots of powers, and that these moments are when democracy is vulnerable. While in parlamentarian systems, it usually does not happen that a single person has so much power. Except in the rare moments when there are true landslide wins which give power to a single person/party; which are exactly the most dangerous moments for democracy. (The issue with Orban is that he got a 2/3 majority of seats in the 2010 election, which allowed him to tamper with the constitution, including the electoral system.)
So my main point of doubt is on the assumption that presidential systems have more checks and balances than parliamentarian ones. And it's not just coalition partners. German politics has also been blocked over long periods of time because it is easy for the opposition to block the second legislative chamber (representative of the regions, where a non-vote counts as NO. The regions are governed by coalitions, and when the coalition partners can't agree with each other, they usually abstain. D'oh!)
Canada has pretty stable governance despite a majority Prime Minister having almost no checks and balances at all besides the soft, unwritten kind. (A minority government can be held in check by the Opposition, but it's less paralyzed than in the equivalent American situation, and norms favour actually keeping the country running.) The PM has *way* more power than a US President in a comparable "trifecta" situation because he directly leads both the legislature and the government. Furthermore, Canadian parties are more strongly whipped (so Joe Manchins are unusual) and the Senate is ineffective as a restraint on the Commons. When I was younger I admired the American system of separation of powers and checks and balances, or the proportional/list parliaments with more room for diverse fringe parties, but the old Westminster system somehow *works*.
Culture matters a whole lot more than we often give it credit, to whether a government or organization works well.
I think it might help that Canada has a small population.
I've read that the President of Switzerland is nine people, chosen by the legislature. The constitution requires that the nine represent different cantons and language regions, and an unwritten rule requires them to represent different parties as well. And all this is amiable and works! I can't imagine it working well in the U.S.
Hm, France? Presidential, bicameral legislation, had a stable democratic system for deacdes. Including times of cohabitation, when president and parliamentary majority were politically opposed.
Until Macron came. Though I like him, I think he can (should?) be counted as a demagogue. At least he was outside the traditional party system.
Eric Rall has listed historical counterexamples in the other direction, but there are also recent ones. Hungary with Orban has a parliamentary system. Poland with the Kaczynski brothers as well. Berlusconi in Italy may or may not be an example of a demagogue, depending on what part of demagogue you want to stress.
Eh, as a citizen of Poland (and hardly a Kaczynski's fan) I have to object to my country being lumped together with dictatorships. Absolutely nothing suggests Poland's democracy, as in the competitive process of electing government officials by majority of the vote, is in any way compromised. Kaczynskis are long-time political insiders, PiS has already peacefully ceded power once, and there's no indication they would refuse to do it again, nor is anyone suggesting any viable mechanism for them to do so. So far, they've simply continuously won elections (and accepted all losses they took, e.g. they're currently a minority in Polish Senate).
Going through the list of examples:
> Chavez in Venezuela - allied with the army. (Though I don't think Venezuela genuinely became undemocratic until Maduro, specifically, until after the 2015 parliamentary election that his party lost. Chavez just consistently had legitimate popular support.)
> Peron in Argentina - eh, no idea. (I'm completely ignorant about Argentina, as opposed to merely semi-ignorant as with other countries on this list.)
> Franco in Spain - army general literally winning a civil war.
> Mussolini in Italy - came to power as a paramilitary leader with entrenched interests' support.
> Hitler in Germany - took over government with other parties' and entrenched interests' support, used the position to forcibly dismantle democratic institutions.
> Orban in Hungary - another dubious example, he's tinkered with many government institutions, the electoral system in particular, but it still operates and it's perfectly possible that, e.g., his party loses this year's election. If it does lose and he leaves, was Hungary ever undemocratic?
> Erdogan in Turkey - the country wasn't democratic in the first place, he literally had to overcome the army to consolidate his power.
> Putin in Russia - came to power as an insider with deep state support. Forcibly represses political opponents, but it's hard to determine whether he's more undemocratic than his peers and predecessors or just emboldened by the genuine popularity he enjoys.
Honestly, summed together, those examples don't paint a picture of demagogues being threats to functional democracies (like Poland, Hungary or France). They paint a picture of demagogues being "threats" to nominal democracies which are already rotten. Outsiders who win are playing the game by the actual rules, exposing them to public view in the process. Outsiders who had or would have won a legit democratic election get countered by insiders' outright suspension of the democratic process, which sometimes (often?) propels their demagogue of choice to more power that they wished to hand to him.
I take your point that Poland and Hungary are not examples where the democracy is completely destroyed. But I think it's a fair description that the governments have removed some of the existing checks and balances in the last years. Not all of them, as you point out. In Poland, it's arguably "only" one, the judges.
Orban has removed even more. The most important one being the independent press, but as you say, he has tinkered with other institutions, too.
Being a democracy is a gradual description, there is not just black and white. Many dictators, from Napoleon to Putin and Xi, carry on holding elections, most of them meaningless. As you point out, Hungary is not on the "all black" side of it, and Poland not even close to that, but both countries have made a considerable shift in that direction.
The point is, can you actually tell there was a shift, and if so, in which direction? Is what happens in Poland's judiciary a dismantling of checks and balances, or removing the rot? I have the mental comfort of disliking both sides (Ziobro, Poland's Minister of Justice and the main architect of the reforms, is a thoroughly despicable individual, but our law community is hardly a paragon of justice) and therefore of remaining agnostic until I see the outcome.
The wider point is, in absence of actual understanding of the inner working of institutions, this is simply the correct position to take. You can't look from the outside and declare that democracy is being undermined because things change, just like you can't declare it's preserved because they remain the same. Sometimes, you get autocratic leaders who openly disdain democracy, which makes things a lot clearer, but as long as both sides of the change/stability conflict claim adherence to democratic principles, the only way to establish whether change removes democracy is to allow it to happen and see whether democracy remains afterwards. (Blocking democratically supported change is not an option, because at that point, where's your democracy in the first place?)
And I do mean the only way. Anything else is (unfotunately) indinstinguishable from the outside from motivated reasoning, a tribalistic propaganda on the side of the institutionally entrenched.
I agree that it must be possible to reform things, and I am aware that the old judicial system was accused of being corrupt and communist.
But as you say, details matter. I have no expertise of my own, but I do have reporters that I trust a lot. They do acknowledge and share the criticism of the old system, but they *still* condemn the reforms because they find them going way too far, so that the dangers are out of league compared to the benefits.
And actually, this is no longer the only point. Poland has dropped from place 18 to 59 under PiS in the World Press Freedom Index, due to PiS actions. Again, 59 is not the bottom of the pit. But you ask whether there has been a shift towards autocracy? Yes, absolutely and undoubtedly. The question is just how far exactly the shift was.
Sounds like an argument for an aristocracy. A powerful unelected cadre who can prevent disaster when the peasants are revolting. Not a new argument, it was one reason for the House of Lords in Great Britain and the (pre-Seventeenth Amendment) US Senate.
> I'm curious, can anyone point to counter examples to this, wherein a country with a presidential system, bicameral legislature, and supreme court, does not have a problem governing due to polarization and demagogues gaining power?
The United States? Mexico's not too bad either. Plus a bunch of others. It depends on your definition of "problems due to polarization." Every nation has problems. But places like France or Britain have plenty of polarization too. You'd need to somehow operationalize degree of problems etc.
I would argue the United States does have significant problems governing, in that it functionally can't pass any laws, can't fill many appointed positions, and regularly shuts down the government because of bickering over the budget.
Much of this is because of the particulars of how it's set up, mind you - deadlock in the US means no government, deadlock in most other places means automatically renewing the previous year's budget, etc.
That depends on how powerful the executive is. For example, most Parliamentary systems are weaker in this regard. See Belgium and its inability to have a government for two years. The US can't have that happen. Government shutdowns don't mean the end of government. They just mean the government has to stop spending more than it takes in.
Meanwhile, aside from flashpoints, the US actually passes a lot of laws. It's just that the uncontroversial ones don't make news. To pick random examples, the bipartisan animal rights bill or the Nordstream 2 sanctions until Biden decided the Democrats should end sanctions.
>I'm curious, can anyone point to counter examples to this, wherein a country with a presidential system, bicameral legislature, and supreme court, does not have a problem governing due to polarization and demagogues gaining power?
I can point to a couple counter-examples the other direction, where Parliamentary or Semi-Presidential republics with weak upper houses or unicameral legislatures did suffer from polarization, gridlock, and demagogues seizing power.
The obvious one is Weimar Germany, a Semi-Presidential republic (executive power shared between a directly-elected President and a Chancellor and Cabinet who were responsible to the legislature) with an asymmetrical bicameral legislature (i.e. there was an upper house, the Reichsrat, but is was much weaker in the legislative process than the lower house). Gridlock and polarization were perennial features of Weimar political life, and of course it ended with a demogogue becoming Chancellor and leveraging his faction into a totalitarian dictatorahip.
Next, there's the Third French Republic of 1870-1940, which on paper had a symmetrical bicameral legislature and a strong Semi-Presidential system, but the political culture very quickly shook out to limit the President to a purely administrative/ceremonial role with the Premier and Cabinet dominating the government and the Chamber of Deputies being considerably more important than the Senate in legislative affairs and the selection and retention of Premiers and Cabinets. The Third Republic narrowly avoided being overthrown by a populist coup by General George Boulanger in 1889, and finally fell to another strongman general-turned-politician Phillips Petain in 1940 following military defeat by Nazi Germany. The Third Republic was perennially plagued by political polarization and weak, unstable governing coalitions throughout its lifetime despite being the longest lived constitutional regime of France since the overthrow of the Ancien Regime in 1789.
Would it be fair to characterise the book as "Democracy only works if the elites conspire to ensure that the people don't get what they want"?
Also, the vaguely-defined word "demagogue" is doing a lot of work here. How do the elites tell who is a "demagogue" and hence potential threat to democracy, as opposed to just being someone they don't like?
I haven't finished the book yet, I'm not sure that its only solution is to have political parties that choose people who uphold the norms of democracy.
The answer to your second question is in the book. There is a four part test, based on the work "The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes" in 1978 by Juan Linz of Yale. We should worry when a politician:
(1) Rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,
(2) Denies the legitimacy of opponents,
(3) Tolerates or encourages violence, or
(4) Indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.
In the authors' view, meeting even one of these critera is cause for concern. Latin American leaders that meet one or more of these critera include Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Lucio Gutierrez, and Rafael Correa.
FDR qualifies for all four of these. Was FDR a demagogue who almost killed American democracy? If not, what's the principled definition where he isn't? If he is, then aren't there numerous demagogues who didn't kill democracy and who are very well remembered today?
I agree with other people. These categories are sloppy, at least as you've described them. If they're not sloppy then there's still something missing where some regimes survive multiple demagogues more or less intact and others don't survive one.
Yes, I've heard similar arguments. Certainly he had a democratic norm breaking streak. What springs to mind is his running for four terms and his stacking of the supreme court.
I'm not aware of what he did to encourage violence or curtail the civil liberties of political opponents, though -- any examples?
Just off the top of my head:
-As a Democrat, Roosevelt benefited from Jim Crow and the suppression of non-Democratic voters in the South including significant amounts of violence. He specifically tailored his laws to allow this to continue by, for example, excluding African Americans and immigrants from various protections.
-Roosevelt interned several hundred thousand members of various political groups, immigrant groups, and minorities. Most famously the Japanese. This was largely for political reasons despite wartime rationales. He also interned political dissidents under wartime powers.
-Roosevelt neither supported or condemned various partisans of his that called for violence against his opponents. He gave speeches to some of them while dismissing calls to condemn them. Republicans at the time accused him of putting dog whistles to such elements in his speeches.
-Roosevelt used his new regulatory authority to kick political critics off the air. Most famously Father Coughlin but also several others. This got worse as wartime censorship ramped up. He also disproportionately targeted enforcement of new regulations/standards against political opponents and minorities, for example with things like the AAA.
-A Roosevelt ally put out a bill in 1933 that would have made Roosevelt a semi-dictator including, notably, the ability to fire or hire anyone into any government position at will. He failed but it was an attempt to politicize the bureaucracy towards his own ends by (among other things) firing political opponents.
I don't think FDR was a dictator because I think that calling men like him dictators sets the standard wrong. But he does qualify under all four criteria there.
"they give many examples of popular demagogues in the US that you've never heard of." how can you say that and not give us some of those examples.
Good point, sorry! Here are examples they give:
* Henry Ford (did you know the German Nazi party awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938? who knew?)
* Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest with a fiery radio program. Openly antidemocratic, admirer of Mussolini and defender of the Nazi regime.
* Huey Long, governor of Louisiana during the 1930s. Historian Arthur Schlesinger described him as "...a great demagogue ... who resembled ... a Latin American dictator, a Vargas or a Peron".
* Joseph McCarthy
* George Wallace
A more modern example might be Pat Buchanan.
The book claims that after the violence at the 1968 DNC in Chicago, both parties followed the advice of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. They largely eliminated the gate keepers at the top of the party, replacing them with delegates that voters vote for in the primary. Later in the 80s, the DNC added the superdelegate concept to attempt to retain some measure of gatekeeping, but the Republican party did not do the same as they were enjoying the presidency of Reagan.
But those are all people I *have* heard of, and I'm not a historian or anything.
I hadn't heard of Ford, Coughlin, or Long. I had heard of McCarthy and Wallace.
I'm sure you've heard of Ford, even if not in a political context.
Correct.
So my wife and I have been doing some financial planning, and the topic of our kids’ college educations came up. So that led to the question of ballpark numbers for the cost of college in 16 years (the older kid just turned 2). Without getting into the weeds of whether college is worth the time and expense for a particular individual, I’m now curious about how colleges set their tuition and if there is any good way to make long-term predictions about college tuition. So if you’ve looked into this and have some insights, I welcome any comments. All I can find with my Google-Fu is a bunch of different websites repeating the claim that national average college tuition has been growing by 6% per year for the last ten-ish years, so the bar is pretty low. What follows is an account of the high-school-physics-level data analysis I did; feel free to ignore it if you want.
To narrow down the question, I just looked at in-state tuition for CU-Boulder (we live in Colorado and public universities seem to be more transparent about tuition than private ones). Since tuition depends on the number of credit hours taken, I assumed 15 credits per semester. I also only looked at tuition for SY ’05-’06 and later since CU made major changes to how they charged tuition for full-time students at that year. Then CU made a large tuition decrease in SY ’20-’21 which was facilitated by COVID relief money, and then for SY ’21-’22 brought the tuition back up to SY ’19-’20 levels. So my data set is tuition for the CU-Boulder College of Arts and Science from 2005-2019. Here’s the basic graph: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRhcMYCa-LCcMXVHf7huePzxZaxwu46NMFDqXxoVbgsZJZs2rfE2YKLKVkM1dgyN4wO_PilN96paaXq/pubchart?oid=1896179159&format=interactive.
During this time, the cost of tuition increased (on average) 4.9% per year. But its not a particularly close fit, and a linear trend line actually fits the data better, if we go by R2 values. Extrapolating to 2038 gives $11,355 per semester using the linear fit and $17,215 using the exponential. My guess is that tuition will be somewhere between those two numbers, and I don’t really trust such a large extrapolation to be more precise than that. But because I was curious, I compared it to the US CPI and the Denver Metro Area CPI to try to link it to inflation. Unsurprisingly, there was a much closer link to the local CPI than the national, and the graph is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRhcMYCa-LCcMXVHf7huePzxZaxwu46NMFDqXxoVbgsZJZs2rfE2YKLKVkM1dgyN4wO_PilN96paaXq/pubchart?oid=25903969&format=interactive
For what its worth, the Denver Metro CPI has increased on average by 2.4% per year, and that was very consistent in the time under consideration (much more so than tuition increases). So if I combine the relationship between tuition and CPI with that between CPI and time, I get a prediction of $13,635 per semester for the 2038 tuition. I don’t know if this is actually a better prediction than the limits set by the linear and exponential extrapolations but the fact that it falls between them is encouraging.
Plan to send them study in a civilised country w(h)ere higher education is free.
What countries have free higher education for foreigners?
Germany,
This is 95% true. You do have to pay if you're studying in Baden-Würtemberg and from a non-EU country. Although even then it's only €3k per year. Most of the best unis are outside Baden-Würtemberg (maybe except Tübingen which is e.g. pretty good on the ML front) though so it doesn't really matter.
To clarify, I’m mostly interested in the exercise of prediction rather than in tips for reducing college costs. As I said the older kid is only two and I have no idea where his interests and talents will lie.
In fact I expect free higher education to disappear progressively at least in France. The gouvernment recently decided to put tuition fees for foreign students, and although they have a very long way to go before they reach the crazy heights of the US, it's a slippery slope without Schelling fence from here.
Not to be pedantic, but I think misspelling "where" somewhat undermines the point you're trying to make.
Actually I think pointing out a misspelling in the person's post doesn't come across as pedantic -- it comes across as a low-grade gotcha.
I'm tempted to ask how many people who majored in mathematics in the US would be able to have a conversation in French but instead I'll just thank you for the correction.
Il fait longtemps que je n'ais pas parle francais avec personne, mais si vous voudrez lire de francais accente, j'aimerais brien la pratique! Although it's worth pointing out that I've never used the French keyboard layout, so diacritics are going to go missing, as in this example.
Je mange France.
Comment of the day. Admirable.
So if I'm reading the conclusions from the Diseasonality threads correctly, the factors that lead to greater flu incidence in winter are mostly at the population, rather than the individual, level. Specifically, does it mean that dressing up warm doesn't protect you/children from the flu that much? Are there trials about this (sounds straightforward to do)?
What about the "common cold", whatever that is. Also not affected by keeping warm?
Relatedly, why do you get a runny nose (which is also a flu symptom) the moment you go outside to the cold and wind? Is it just a coincidence that it's also a flu symptom, and is affected by the cold?
Back in the old times, when students did not yet have human rights, there were intervention studies on this. I.e., study subjects were kept cold (in cold rooms with little clothes, or even with their feet in icy water), and they were exposed to viruses.
As far as I remember, the outer conditions like temperature or clothing did not have any influence on how many students got infected.
A caveat is that the studies are old, and old studies often don't meet modern standards.
Runny nose is caused by irritation of nasal tissue. This happens due to dry air. All else equal, cold air is less humid than warm. The best way to combat this is artificially humidify internal air or drink more water, not stay warm, although I suppose there may be some marginal effects from energy waste from the body warming itself taking away from immune function. More likely, it's just harder to sleep in the cold and not sleeping decreases immune function.
You can still get runny nose from cold air when it's literally rain or fog outside, i.e. humidity ~100%. And I never ever had anything like runny nose in a sauna, where it's almost as dry as it gets (<10% humidity).
>More likely, it's just harder to sleep in the cold and not sleeping decreases immune function.
What? Do people not have central heating? Or blankets?
Amazing. I had no idea. But then how come I never get a runny nose in the dry desert, but often do while going out in winter, even if it's rainy (so more humid I think, right?)?
90% relative humidity at 0 °C is the same absolute humidity as 11% relative humidity at 35 °C
The reason cold air is dry is because it's too cold for some water to phase change into gas. A desert has quite the opposite problem, so your nasal tissue does get irritated, but any phlegm generated also has all of the water evaporate before it even leaves your nose, resulting in hard snot chunks and internal scabbing, but not running.
Rain is a similar issue as cold. Rain is sucking vapor out of the air and turning it into water, making the air more dry even though exposed surfaces are getting more wet. Obviously, that is happening in the clouds usually, not at your altitude, but if it's sufficiently cold, the air there is still subject to the same effect. You're probably not breathing in the rain.
Tales from real estate development y'all may find interesting.
I'm building a duplex in Indianapolis. It's on a corner lot, which is a great location. However, big problem: The current zoning laws dictate that corner lot houses have to face the street with more houses on the block. This may seem like no big deal, except that I have a long, narrow lot, and the long side faces that street. The resulting buildable area is a 17'x138' rectangle. On a wider lot, this would be fine, but 17' is not enough to build a reasonable design. The garage alone is 24'x24'.
Everyone involved agrees that this rule is very stupid and makes no sense, including the (quite nice) people at the planning department, but there's also no way around this except for a variance.
So, I have to submit a variance request, which is a WHOLE GODDAMN THING. $600+ in application fees, for starters. Then I have to retrieve and display signage on the property, which, okay.
NOW I have to send letters to FIFTY-FIVE community organizations, homeowners, and real estate holding companies notifying them of the variance and giving them an opportunity to veto it. That makes no fewer than 56 veto points in the process, the first being of course the board of zoning appeals.
Sending paper letters to that many people is expensive and seriously time-consuming - I've spent over $140 on the needed materials so far and haven't even gotten to the actual "mailing the crap" part.
So in order to get approval to make my house point the same way as the other houses on the block, I lose about 2 months in my schedule, $800 so far, and all of the hair this process has caused me to pull out.
TL;DR of course the rent is too damn high.
$8000 seems utterly irrelevantly small on the scale of a building project. 2 months delay is a lot more money, and 56 veto points is a a description of Hell; focus on those components.
The $800 is just salt in the wound. It cost $40 and they handled the notices when I did it in another town, which means there's a lot of waste or pure profit in that $800.
If it weren't a duplex you could just put the "front" door on on the side of the house, like sensible builders do rather than deal with variances.
The problem is not where the front door goes, but rather that the setback for the "front" door doesn't leave enough room to build the house.
Can you divide the land into a thin strip on the north side, and sell it to the neighbor? Then you will no longer be a corner lot.
Ah, the Second Life solution.
"The current zoning laws dictate that corner lot houses have to face the street with more houses on the block." I'm not following this
It's a northeast corner (top right on a map.) The original house (now gone) faced east, so the long skinny lot has its short face to the east. However, the street to the north has more houses facing it than the street to the east on that block, so they want the house to face north, with the accompanying "front yard" setback.
I see what you mean
For most architectural styles, a square-ish house will still have a front, a back, and two sides. The zoning law here is asking that the "front" of all houses be on the street that has more houses on it before it is intersected by another street. So if you're building on the intersection of 3rd Street and Pine, maybe there are 10 houses arrayed in a row along Pine before it hits 4th Street, but only 4 houses along 3rd Street before it reaches Elm?
Got it, thanks
Seriously. Zoning laws everywhere I've worked with are a disaster in so many stupid ways. It's really not surprising that there are housing shortages.
Does evolution have to start with spontaneous generation? Does spontaneous generation have to start with divine intervention?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZpsVSVRsZk
I find that introduction embarrassingly implausible. AFAIK there wasn't any scientific consensus for how the first cell emerged, not in Sagan's time and not even today. This is to be expected, as the evidence from 4 billion years ago has surely been long since erased in the sands of time. I suppose there is a faint hope of replicating molecular evolution in a lab, but there could have been steps in the process that were highly improbable and therefore did not happen for millions of years in thousands of undersea vents or shallow pools, and steps like that cannot be replicated in a lab.
A better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
"While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but an evolutionary process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes."
Retelling the whole modern theory of abiogenesis would be too long, and I'm not really an expert, but in short the steps are:
1. Small organic molecules like simple sugars and amino-acids generated inorganically (what Adam describes). The process is well replicated and we observed it even in some comets and moons in the Solar System.
2. Increased concentrations of small molecules through repeated cycles of water with organic molecules coming in and then drying out, maybe in tidal pools, more likely in *terrestrial* geothermal springs.
3. Highly concentrated small molecules form polymers, especially on the right matrix (that's part of the evidence for geothermal vents, some of them have the right matrix).
4. Some of those polymers are RNAs, some RNAs are autocatalytic, i.e. catalyze their own polymerization.
5. The more efficient autocatalytic reactions outcompete less efficient ones for the available small molecules. If it begins to sound like natural selection that's because it is.
6. RNA calalyzation cycles are more efficient then single-molecule autocatalysis, so more complex reaction chains form.
7. At some point lipid bubble come along forming a proto-cell. Lipids are also polymers and can form through the same process, and probably some RNAs cycles just "learned" (i.e. accidentally mutated) to catalyze lipid polymerization and this change was supported by selection.
8. Proteins and DNA come along later, as a more efficient replacement for reaction catalysis and information storage respectively.
All these steps in isolation have been observed and/or reproduced, with some caveats. The whole process would take quite a while to complete, but we're probably talking tens or hundreds of millions of years, not billions and billions, as evidenced by some findings of extremely early microbial mats, appearing just 100-300 millions of years after the Earth cooled down enough actually to have a surface (for the second time, see Late Heavy Bombardment).
To your question why abiogenesis doesn't happen now, it's because it'd be simply eaten up at the very first stage, increased concentrations of small molecules - that's basically a free lunch for modern microbes. Another reason is that both oceans and atmosphere composition are very different now, so those small molecules don't spontaneously form in any significant quantities. It's not coincidental, to simplify the reason is that all that easily available reaction fuel (ammonia, methane, CO2, whatelse) was mostly consumed by early life in the first 1-2 bln years.
To be fair the modern theory of abiogenesis is full of holes and the probabilities don't quite work out.
My pet hypothesis is that proto-life fell here from another planet, where all the missing phenomena (like the conspicuously absent self-assembling RNA soup) can still be observed.
That just passes the buck up the chain. Either you just say "there's an infinite procession of rocks carrying life with no beginning or end", or "at some point there was a first life-form", at which point you need to settle materialist abiogenesis vs. divine creation all over again.
I'm fine with abiogenesis, I'm not fine with the assumption it would happen right here and just leave a single pattern, fully assembled life form (LUCA) with incredibly weird idiosyncracies that then evolved into everything.
There are many evolutionary niches, and it seems every single one is populated by something using the same translation/transcription machinery, similar metabolic pathways etc. I'd expect a considerable _architectural_ diversity if we started with the RNA soup. It can be preserved in a thermal vent in the Pacific or whatever, but I'd expect to find _something_.
Why would you expect to find something? Modern life exists everywhere including thermal vents and probably the upper mantle. Modern life will eat available organics; proto life doesnt have a chance today. Further, who says proto life all had the same transcription/translation etc machinery? One version simply won. Also the anthropic principle, and the observation that the universe we see isnt exactly teaming with intelligent life (there is a filter somewhere between abiogenesis and kardeshev II.
If probability of this happening is really low it seems plausible that it happened once and spread before repeating elsewhere.
Or it went extinct in meantime.
> It can be preserved in a thermal vent in the Pacific or whatever, but I'd expect to find _something_.
Maybe we have not found it yet? It is not like we researched all thermal vents.
+1. Evolution during that time would have been very slow because the architectures of the various proto-cells would have tended to be grossly suboptimal, just barely-sort-of working kluges.
It's not surprising, I think, if the "best" internal architecture is able to win the race millions of years before the others could, given this very slow evolutionary environment.
So, I'm thinking the final step is something to do with cell division. When it finally happens, the new life form is likely to have million(s) of years to spread around the world. This first cell would have have lots of competition with other copies of itself, and would quickly diversify into many species due to mutations and imperfections in the copying process. Meanwhile, the older proto-cells that it evolved from are not effective competition because (e.g.) they replicate and adapt too slowly. So the First Cell rapidly becomes many species, some of which dominate over the others and, in particular, dominate over all the proto-cells in the area. The proto-cells die out either because some species of First Cell eats a shared resource and they starve, or because some species of First Cell eats them. (and this didn't have to happen right away; even if it took a billion years to kill off the proto-cells, I guess that would be fast enough to wipe away all evidence that they ever existed.)
Eventually one cell mutates some form of locomotion (edit: the most probable location for the cell is undersea vents, so I'm thinking the "locomotion" could be a form of hibernation that allows the cell to survive long enough to float to nearby vents in rare cases, with that ability getting more reliable over time so that eventually it can reach faraway vents) so that species spreads very slowly around the world. It can still achieve world domination by spreading slowly, just so long as it does so before any of the other, inferior, proto-cell designs can independently evolve similar capabilities.
Edit: Note: I'm just a software engineer and this is mostly guessing on my part.
This line of thinking seems like the flipside of the drunk-under-a-streetlamp motif. You’re giving up on any hope of finding your keys because you assume you must have dropped them down a drain somewhere far away in the dark?
Why would you expect to observe self-assembling RNAs in a developed ecosystem? That's kind of like asking "why there's no native gold in any of the San Francisco parks?" - because if there was any, people picked it up a long long time ago.
I agree that there's open questions, but those are mostly the questions like "exactly what kind of thermal vents it was", not "how the hell all this thing happened".
Note: I'm not positive that the steps 7 and 8 were in this order or what were the details. But that most likely tells about my own ignorance and not about the current state of science.
Interstingly, spontaneous generation was seen as an argument against divine intervention in the 19th century - at the very least during the debate between Pasteur and Pouchet.
It's my intuition that as evolution relies on spontaneous generation, so spontaneous generation relies on divine intervention (or at least creatio ex nihilo). I just find it interesting that modern science seems to depends on ideas that (at least in my science classes) it heavily discredited.
Spontaneous generation was the Aristotelian theory that macroscopic lifeforms were generated directly from decaying matter, i.e. moldy wood just turned into grubs. What you're thinking of is abiogenesis.
I think your question is sort of unanswerable. The Urey-Miller experiment proved in a lab setting that conditions similar to early Earth can result in organic chemicals developing from inorganic, producing the basic amino acids needed to construct living cells, but going from that to self-replicating molecules to entire cells happened in reality over billions of years across billions of parallel "test tubes." Hoping to recreate it in a lab might take the rest of Earth's existence.
But even if you saw it happen in a lab, or if we invented time travel and observed the exact moment is happened in real Earth history, how are you supposed to prove that what you saw didn't involve divine intervention?
To be clear, the Urey-Miller experiment showed that some (not all) of the organic chemicals necessary for life could occur in conditions that we thought early Earth may have been like back in the 60s. Today we believe that the conditions on early Earth were very different, and may have been actively hostile to organic chemicals created through a Urey-Miller like experiment. All of that just to say that abiogenesis is still very mysterious, and has a lot of problems that haven't been solved yet.
I think you've got a straw-man of Aristotle's spontaneous generation. It doesn't necessarily have to deal with decaying matter or macroscopic lifeforms (though he did not know micro-organisms existed). The central idea is that living matter can form spontaneously from nonliving matter, provided the nonliving has the appropriate elements sufficient for spontaneously (i.e. without parents) producing life. But tbh tomato-tomahto.
My follow-up is are we sure that spontaneous generation (sive abiogenesis) has stopped happening?
Yes, pretty sure. New abiogenesis seems to require a large, stable, sterile environment with appropriate energy and matter present.
Sterility protects the developing proto-life-components from being eaten by a more advanced life form, while stability protects them from other forms of destruction. The environment needs to be large to provide enough "lottery tickets" for the proto-life to discover a workable cell architecture. Remember that the sterile environment in which life originally developed was roughly the entire planet (though it seems like only small pockets of Earth would have been suitable for abiogenesis), and despite this immense number of lottery tickets, the common ancestor of all modern life probably still took millions of years to develop. So I don't expect we'll ever discover new abiogenesis.
No. We could be, in principle, as new abiogenesis would produce lifeforms with no phylogenetic relationship to others, but to be sure no such lifeforms exist, you'd need to gene sequence every organism on the planet, many of which are not accessible because they're extremophiles and live in places we can't get to. And even that doesn't prove it "stopped happening," just that any new descent lines that came about ended before we could find them.
What are good spaces to post classifieds for rationality/EA types?
More specifically, what is the policy on shilling in the ACX Open Thread?
There's a Facebook group called Bountied Rationality. Have a look.
Thanks!
Scott had written about the future of polygenic selection of babies. There is now a metaculus essay about it, with questions to forecast: https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9247/polygenic-selection-of-embryos/
(Not unrelated: I wrote the essay (!), somewhat inspired by Scott's piece to ask these questions on metaculus)
Are there any speed reading systems that actually work? I've been stuck around 250wpm forever and I feel very IO limited like an 8-core CPU with a 56k internet connection. I often listen to audiobooks at 1.75x which is coincidentally also around 250wpm. I would rather have neo's ability to download data than have a left hand.
Will, I sort of doubt that this comment applies to your situation, but it may -- and in any case it's info that might be useful to somebody here.
There is a form of OCD where people become unable to read because they are so eaten up by doubt that they are adequately taking in the material they read. They read a few sentences, then wonder whether they were really concentrating when they read them, and so go back and re-read them. But re-reading does not quell their doubt, and the longer they try the worse things get, because after a while the person is so frustrated by the whole situation that they are preoccupied with that problem and do not have much mental space left over for the content of the paragraph they're trying to read. I have seen people with such a bad case of reading OCD that they feel compelled, after reading a single sentence, to go back and double-check just the punctuation in the sentence -- did they mistake any apostrophes for exclamation marks? Needless to say, these people get very little actual reading done, and in fact they usually develop such an aversion to the process that they stop reading anything they are not compelled to by the practicalities of life.
Anyhow, I have observed miniature versions of this syndrome in myself from time to time, and so have a lot of people I know. I'm especially likely to have it happen after spending a week or more online a lot, reading very brief things like posts, and/or reading under circumstances where I can, and do, escape minor boredom or frustration by clicking on something else.
The most effective treatment, both for full-blown reading OCD and for the low-grade version lots of us experience occasionally is to just accept the possibility that you may do a lousy job of taking in info for a while. What I do is just keep moving my eyes over the page at my usual pace, no matter how many details I'm missing. Preoccupation with the quality of my attention & amount of info I'm harvesting usually diminishes over the course of 10 mins or so. Once that issue is less on my mind, there's more mental space to get interested in content, and I go back to being an engaged reader.
So, Will, it might be worth a try for you to just experiment with reading faster while tolerating the feeling that you're not taking in enough, and refusing to give in to the craving to micromanage your attentional processes. If lowering standards and reading faster leads to more engagement with the material, you might get a better trade-off from reading that way than you do with trying to force yourself to read faster while retaining exactly as many details as you do with slow reading.
A technology-assisted method I've found to be useful is Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). The basic idea is that, instead of laying out the whole text right-to-left and top-to-bottom in a rectangle and letting the reader move their eyes across it as normal, in RSVP you display each word of the text one at a time, in sequence, in the same location, so the reader doesn't have to move their eyes or decide where to look next. Obviously this only works on a screen and not on paper, and you need special software to do it, but there are lots of free tools and browser plugins available. Amazon's Kindle app for smart phones also has an RSVP mode called Word Runner that I use often. I find with this that I can read at 450-500 wpm a lot of the time. If the text contains complicated ideas or is otherwise "tough", I find I have to slow down and read normally to really get it, but for lots of the reading I do RSVP makes it a lot faster, and subjectively I think I retain about as much as when reading normally.
I would summarize a lot of the methods as "hastily skim 20% of the words and just assume the rest without actually reading it". But if an author could actually convey his meaning with 20% of the words, he should have written it with 20% of the words.
Maybe you are being tongue in cheek, but I think the point is that human languages are very compressible. People used to be able to get their points across with telegrams, but it would be odd to write a book in telegram form. Perhaps it's possible to train oneself to read regular prose by skipping the words that would not appear in a telegram.
I suspect telegramese would usually multiply the ambiguities in the text, and require the reader to have more knowledge to decode the message.
What rubs me the wrong way about skimming is assuming I know better than the author which words are necessary, before I've even read them. I'd much rather read a summary than skim a text.
When I am listening to an audiobook of a novel, I'll rewind if I miss any small detail, because it could be important later if the book is well written (Chekov's gun principle)
If the author wants to be brief, they can do it without telegramese. For example:
"Success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas . Orevelle Wright"
This can be rewritten as something even shorter which is closer to normal English grammar, less ambiguous, and easier to read:
"4 flights Th morning; 21mph headwind; started level with engine power only; avg airspeed 31mph; max duration 57s. Inform press. Home for Christmas."
(I'm kinda shocked that telegraph operators wasted precious space spelling out numbers.)
The advantage of a book of which only 20% is useful over a telegram with only 20% of the words is that I can go back and read all the words, at my choice, if there is any ambiguity in my mind.
I don't get speed-reading novels, though. I get 5 hours of pleasure reading a novel, and if I speed-read it in 2 hours, I don't compress 5 hours of pleasure into 2 hours. I just now have 2 hours of pleasure.
"How to Read a Book" my Mortimer J. Adler is an excellent resource even if I'm unsure whether it's right for you.
It has numerous tips for tackling difficult tomes, but essentially recommends layering your reading. Read the table of contents first, skim for keywords to flesh out a rough understanding. A more detailed skim where you tackle key concepts and paragraphs and so on. I think someone here may have recommended it to me.
It is a bit light on tips for bringing up raw reading comprehension speed, though it does recommend running your finger over sentences at slightly faster than you are comfortable with. I'm getting Anne Jones' "How to be a speedy reader" soon, so will report back if it's any use.
How to Read a Book changed my life. Highly recommend this recommendation.
So I often see people claim that they forget important details when they speed read especially much later after weeks or months but I'm 95% positive that happens to most people even in normal reading. In fact you forget most things. Can most people remember a math problem they did a month go? And you should have far more intentional focus and such on that. Indeed most people couldn't tell you the math problems on a test they just took.
I will say that if I'm reading non-fiction I'll often be slower. Although this isn't always useful. For instance I'm currently reading Empires And Barbarians to get a better understand of the culture, politics, economics, and logistics of Germanic tribes beyond the Roman frontier for the fantasy strategy game I'm working on. There are a lot of caveats and clarifications that are unnecessary and uninteresting to the regular reader and seem more intended to protect from assaults by colleagues/rivals of the author. Total waste of my time. Working on filtering those out.
I think most people could "speed read" around 500 wpm without harming comprehension on non-fictionn. I can get up to 2000 but am usually around 1500 on fiction and as far as I can tell this doesn't harm my experience at all. Perhaps a tiny bit of an issue witha small percentage specific details or something? If I'm really digging for a negative impact.
I mean reading fiction is such a subjective experience. How can you ever know if you lost out by speed reading but I don't think that I do. Speed reading often helps on middle book slog sections of epic fantasy as well. Since I experience it as normal I can avoid the thing that happens to some people where they literally just *don't read* whole chapters of POVs they don't like and miss out if the author did some important plot thing in them.
But on a relatively information dense non-fiction text there is no amount of "training" the average person can do that would get them beyond ~500WPM. Some people with special advantages can of course crack that. But best case you'd have to influence very young children under 5-7 years old to get them some of the advantages such people are benefitting from and some is genetic or based on eidetic memory stuff.
"I mean reading fiction is such a subjective experience. How can you ever know if you lost out by speed reading but I don't think that I do"
Funny, I do almost the opposite : I kind of naturally speed read, possiblly partly because proifessionnaly I spend a lot of time skimming non-fiction. But this clearly decreases my immersion in fiction, so recently I find that I take great pleasure in listening to fiction, at 1x speed of course, as it allows me to better enter the fictional world and enjoy the writing, visualize the scenes, etc...
Speed doesn't have a huge effect on my immersion. But listening to audio is basically impossible for me. Data input is just too slow. 2x helps a little but I still dislike it. My brain just says hey we have a lot of extra processing tim why not just get totally distracted by another topic.
I do agree that the slow pace of X1 audio makes it a bit difficult to maintain attention and I only listen to audio books when I am doing something else, But for me, it does provides a better experience, as I can not skim-read, which I always do in print. And combining a (preferably great!) adio book with a hike in a beautiful landcsape is a really wonderful experience for me :D
I find that I can easily watch fiction movies at 2x speed, and at 3x speed with subtitles; and beyond that point I'm limited by the max speed of the video player and by the space available to display subtitles. I can listen to fiction audiobooks at 2x, but the non-fiction I listen to usually requires speeds from 0.9x to 1.25x. That's already far below my max reading speed.
I was interested in it long ago, but I concluded that the typical claims of speed-readers were impossible. Some people have bad habits which slow their reading, especially having a strong motor linkage between reading and speaking. People who learned to read by sounding things out sometimes still move their lips or vocal chords even if they're not making any sound.
(Fun fact: Peter Abelard (1079--1142 CE) reportedly frightened other students in libraries by reading silently.)
At 250 wpm you're probably not doing that, but you might be slowing yourself down a bit by hearing the words as you read them. I hear some of the words as I read; can't seem to shut them all off; but reducing that might help. For me, the main advantage of speed-reading scanning techniques (making long jumps between fixations) is that it gives me no time to hear the words.
I've lost interest in speed reading, because I remember so little now of what I read that I must read everything twice to retain more than a vague memory of it. I think there's more mileage to be gotten out of optimizing reading speed for retention, better note-taking systems, optimizing the timing of re-reading, and prioritizing and scheduling reading so as to read things near the time that you're going to apply them.
(Also, the degree to which speed-reading works on a text is inversely proportional to the information content of that text.)
Speed-typing, now, that I'd like to learn. Bryan Bishop, whom some of you might know from DIYbio and transhumanist circles, transcribes talks in real time, which means typing about 150wpm for an hour at a time (with many mistakes). Seems impossible to me, but he does it.
In my childhood, I once came across an ad for a course purporting to teach people to speed read, complete with a test. It was supposed to show the reader that they needed the course; instead, I came out in the "speed reading" range.
Now maybe the ranges given in this ad were lower than what you are thinking of as impossible. But on the other hand, maybe not.
I was certainly a notably fast reader, faster than I am today; I think I lost that degree of speed some time in my thirties.
All I had done to become such a fast reader was spend a lot of time reading.
I type notes of most calls and meetings I do in my dayly job. Just a matter of training. I've started this decades ago with using other electronic brain amplifiers like calendars, address books and more because of my many shortcomings like a bad long term memory. Now it's an asset because I find most of the things I've discussed in the past 10+ years in an instant. Sometimes it deals like brain doping - like Google and tej Wikipedia and all the rest.
About Peter Abelard : Saint Augustine reports in the Confessions how he was surprised and impressed by Saint Ambrose reading silently.
"When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when I was present—for he did not close his door to anyone and it was customary to come in unannounced—I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise. I would sit for a long time in silence, not daring to disturb someone so deep in thought, and then go on my way. I asked myself why he read in this way. Was it that he did not wish to be interrupted in those rare moments he found to refresh his mind and rest from the tumult of others' affairs? Or perhaps he was worried that he would have to explain obscurities in the text to some eager listener, or discuss other difficult problems? For he would thereby lose time and be prevented from reading as much as he had planned. But the preservation of his voice, which easily became hoarse, may well have been the true cause of his silent reading."
Fascinating!
Reading silently was an impressive accomplishment in St. Ambrose's time, because there were no spaces between words. (See, e.g., this page from the Codex Vaticanus, written not long before Ambrose was born: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Codex_Vaticanus_B%2C_2Thess._3%2C11-18%2C_Hebr._1%2C1-2%2C2.jpg )
Now I wonder if I didn't confuse Abelard with Ambrose.
I think that the ancient attitude towards written language was that the marks on paper were an aid to memory, but didn't really contain meaning. Recall the (much, much later) debate over whether, when a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound. Before we understood acoustics, people seem to have thought that speech was spiritual. This was a natural assumption: thought was assumed to be spiritual, and spirit was the breath that animated a body; speech was carried out of one's body on one's breath, and literally inspired that meaning to reform inside some other body. The marks on paper roused the intellect, but only the human voice could imbue communication with spirit and hence meaning.
I can't recall any good quotes directly addressing the non-material, spiritual nature of speech, but I am reminded of Derrida's conclusion that written language itself contains no meaning. Derrida, like all the major post-modernists AFAIK, was a scholar of classical antiquity, and believed in classical metaphysics.
Someone, someday, had the idea of putting spaces between words to help readers. It seems so obvious in retrospect, and yet in 1000 years the Roman empire did not think of it. I find absolutely fascinating the amount of ingenuity that went into basically anything we now take for granted.
Although in Ambrose case there is a strong feeling of "I'm reading silently because I need my half-an-hour a day of actual intellectual work where I'm not interrupted by idiots (like Augustine)".
But in a world where reading material is scarce and expensive (and readers are scarce too), reading aloud is also an economic necessity.
Aristophanes, chief librarian in the library of Alexandria, began using spaces between words in the 3rd century BCE ( https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150902-the-mysterious-origins-of-punctuation ). Apparently the Romans decided they'd rather save paper.
My work paid for a 2-day speed reading workshop which I did. The technique they used was basically reducing the number of eye movements - fixate on two or three positions per line and quickly move from one position to the next, never going backwards. You kinda take in the surrounding words you dont focus on directly from the periphery. At the end of the workshop I got to around 800wpm if I remember correctly.
My takeaway was that it is not that hard to increase the speed at which you optically take in a text, i.e. recognise all of the relevant words. But the real bottleneck for me was not mechanical reading speed but comprehension: I was nowhere near able to take in novel non-trivial ideas without stopping reading and giving me a second or two to process what I just speed-read.
I still do speed reading for text with lots of fluff (e.g. many newspaper articles), texts on topics I'm already very familiar with (so the "surprisal" of actual text compared to expected text is low) or to quickly skim a text to get an idea of what its about. But most of the time I just read normally, and am bottlenecked by the speed of my reading comprehension.
There are people who know more than me about this and hopefully some of them will answer, but I've appreciated Scott H. Young's overview[^1] for a discussion of which speed reading claims hold up, and Tim Ferriss's "How to Speed Read"[^2] for a quick tour of some immediately usable tips.
Anecdotally, I've talked to two friends who read much faster than me that both use a particular kind of skimming as their default reading mode, involving darting around the page noting key words, often nonlinearly, and autofilling in the rest. (Neither of them ever practiced speed reading, they just both independently picked this up from reading voraciously as kids.)
I'm not sure how they avoid missing important but minuscule components—foremost "not" and worse "-n't", which totally flip the sentence's meaning. I would guess the answer is some combination of
a) feeling surprise causes them to reread the sentence,
b) they've built the passive skill of noticing the worst offenders like "not" as they scan, and
c) they just actually run a higher risk of this than more completionist readers.
One friend said her strategy varies a fair bit between types of material (and I suspect this is true for most/all fast readers), with this kind of jumping around being used rarely or not at all for difficult or unfamiliar non-fiction like textbooks and academic papers.
Unfortunately I don't know any battle-tested strategies to develop this technique, but maybe someone else can chime in with more? My first thought is "just try it for a while and see what happens" (which I haven't yet attempted myself, but I'm feeling a rekindled license to try it from writing this!).
In the meantime hopefully the linked info will give you a boost :)
[1]: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-redo/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwEquW_Yij0
I'm sort of a natural speed reader of the kind you mentioned, and yeah it's obviously all about skimming.
The trick with negations etc is that natural languages are highly redundant, fall in predictable patterns, and you can usually infer not just a word but 20-80% of a sentence from context (!). Consider the process of learning a foreign language you're now fluent in - did you check every single word in a dictionary?
This technique fails horribly with anything that uses an unfamiliar mode of speech (e.g. archaic) or is information dense (academic articles and textbooks, unless you're already deeply familiar with the subject matter).
Yeah, very true, it depends so much on what you’re reading: predictable stuff you can skim and be confident you’ll notice any oddities which require more attention. But any poetry worth reading demands you sound out the words in your head
Thank you.
I once tried to dive into the topic for the same reason. Halfeway in I stopped because it turned out that speed reading for us mortal humans - not rainman - essentialy is skipping words, information, sentences like diagonal readin my own impression at that time might be not correct but I learned that a) I will miss a lot of details of the texts I will speed read. And I wouldn't remember much of speed read parts later. An even worse outcome for myself was that I couldn't enjoy any casual reading of let's say fiction anymore. Speed reading felt extremely hasty, stressed to me and made my life worse not better at that time. So I stopped my attempt completely. Later I learned about mindfulness, deep concentration, flow, executive summaries, secondary literature, short books, and now YouTube for example. When I'm thinking it over - I still kind of speed read fiction. I will often skip a lot of the fat and even some meat and only keep the bones of a story.
Notes are useful for spaced repetition, though I was never a big note-taker.
In school the test schedule provided an automatic spaced repetition. Some quiz would come the day after the reading, and then an overlapping quiz the next week, then a test at the end of the month, then a final at the end of the year. So I basically just showed up to class, never took notes, did the assignments, and remembered enough to ace all the tests without studying, in all high school and most college courses.
So at 36 I still remember everything that was taught in AP Physics, but after listening to all seven Narnia books on my ipod while walking to and from work when I was 30, I can only sketch vague and jumbled outlines of the plots. I'm very confident that if I had gone on some MOOC site to get tested after each chapter and at the end of each book, I would remember a lot more from those books. The test taking would add <10% to the reading time, but improve long term recall by >3x
I honestly do make SRS notes for books after reading them. Not a lot, but 2 or 3 are often enough as a hook.
So sitting here right now, I know Andrew Ketterly is the Magician, and his nephew Diggory Kirke went with Polly Plumber to found Narnia, which was later visited by the 4 children[1], during whose reign the horses Bree and Hwin helped restore Price Cor to the throne of Archenland.
I can recall quite a lot more from the plot just with those basic facts, because I remember a lot of associated plot points when I get those very few SRS notes. And I'm not sure if this is *important* [2], but the cost is extremely low.
[1] I was going to say "I forgot their last name," but while typing this sentence I remembered it was Pevensie.
[2] Part of the reason I did it was as an experiment to see what happens.
Lately, I’ve noticed that people seem to use “Just because it fits the data, doesn’t mean it is true. Correlation isn’t causation” as a way of shutting down a discussion on a theory they don’t want to discuss. I basically interpret it as “I don’t want to discuss this. Please shut up.” These days, I just oblige.
But recently I’ve been thinking, if correlation with existing data and a narrative for how it works isn’t enough to mean a theory isn’t true or at least plausible, then what is enough?
Gwern has a good essay: https://www.gwern.net/Causality
“ So it’s unsurprising that one so often runs into researchers for whom indeed correlation = causation (we certainly wouldn’t want to be freshmen or Internet blowhards, would we?). It is common to use causal language and make recommendations (Prasad et al 2013), but even if they don’t, you can be sure to see them confidently talking causally to other researchers or journalists or officials. (I’ve noticed this sort of constant motte-and-bailey slide from vague mentions of how results are correlative tucked away at the end of the paper to freely dispensing advice for policymakers about how their research proves X should be implemented is particularly common in medicine, sociology, and education.)
Bandying phrases with meta-contrarians won’t help much here; I agree with them that correlation ought to be some evidence for causation. eg if I suspect that A → B, and I collect data and establish beyond doubt that A&B correlates r = 0.7, surely this observations, which is consistent with my theory, should boost my confidence in my theory, just as an observation like r = 0.0001 would trouble me greatly. But how much…?
As it is, it seems we fall readily into intellectual traps of our own making. When you believe every correlation adds support to your causal theory, you just get more and more wrong as you collect more data.”
I know you're probably talking about science, but it seems to me that deductive logic still seems to me to work. Take, e.g. the theory "there is no such thing as universal truth." If this theory were true, then it would have to be false, because "there is there is no such thing as universal truth," is itself an claim to universal truth. Hence, there must be universal truth. No correlation or causation needed :)
"there is no such thing as universal truth except this statement"
I second Abu Ibrahim: "there is no such thing as universal truth except this statement" + "the previous statement is universally true" count as two distinct statements. Hence the exception is unjustified, while my first "there must be universal truths" stands. And hence if there is one universal truth, there must also be many. I think this is getting at the intuition that everything entailed by a universal truth is itself (universally) true.
also, notice the "except..." doesn't get you around the contradiction. You're saying there are no universal truths, and you say there is a universal truth.
How about "there is no such thing as universal truth and your statement is a universal truth"? That's a second, distinct statement which is a universal truth, contradicting your statement. So there must be more than one universal truth.
Thinking this way just capitulates to nonsensical pedants on the Internet.
In normal speech, statements about "all", "none", "every", etc. are implicitly qualified by "nontrivial". "There is no universal truth" implicitly excludes not only universal truths necessary to believe the statement, but statements of that form in general.
Have a look at "The Book of Why" by Judea Pearl.
PS, to expand a little bit on that: Causation is actually a statement about a counterfactual world. If I say A caused B, then I say that "in an imagined world where A hasn't happened, B wouldn't have happened either".
Randomized control trial. If you don't have that I think you are leaving yourself open to flaws and biases. "controlling for variables" can work but is also known to have issues. Also see https://www.gwern.net/Causality
Unfortunately I think a lot depends on the specific thing you are looking at, and what the data is. I could think of examples where the 'people' are correct; but it still probably shouldn't shut down discussion.
Well, it's enough to make it plausible - though the 'narrative' is doing a lot of work there too - but it isn't enough to *prove* it true, correlation usually does imply a link in practice but the link is often a common cause.
Personally, if someone doesn't want to discuss a whole topic, absolutely let it slide, but if they're discussing their pet theory for a thing then it's totally fair game for you to bring up alternate theories for the same thing.
Yeah, I think the thing that a lot of people have trouble managing mentally to deal with cases (like most controversial issues) where there are lots of plausible answers that fit the data, and we simply don't know which of the many plausible, but mutually exclusive, theories that are out there is true.
Exercise confusion: Glycolysis, the main pathway to free up energy in anerobic exercise is ten times less efficient than oxidative energy production that is used for aerobic exercise. Wouldn't that mean that anerobic exercise should produce 10 times more weight loss than aerobic exercise if matched for total work.
Consider a 80 kg adult male running 10 km in 60 minutes. That's about 617 joules.
Think about trying to match that in some anaerobic exercise allowing for a decent amount of resistance through a decent range of motion. Let's just say squatting. For simplicity, keep the workout at 60 minutes. It'll overestimate a bit because your lower legs don't move, but let's just also grant all bodyweight counts in the work and you're squatting double your own bodyweight (it's not that exact anyway because the actual force required depends on torque, which is unique per body). So 160 kg squats plus 80 kg bodyweight for each rep. Let's say squats are deep enough that you go through a full meter of range of motion.
That's still ~3333 squats required to match the total work of running 10 km. Nobody can do that. Even granting real lifters are going to do multiple exercises to account for individual body parts wearing out, nobody is going to do 3333 combined reps of anything at all.
As far as I know, weight loss research seems to indicate attempting to induce a deficit via exercise of any kind isn't effective because exercise makes you hungry, but you can see here an obvious advantage of aerobic exercise if you're looking to do a lot of total work is aerobic exercise is a lot easier, so you can do more of it.
"weight loss research seems to indicate attempting to induce a deficit via exercise of any kind isn't effective because exercise makes you hungry,
Recent work by Herman Pontzer suggests that the body *somewhat* compensates for calories burned through exercise by using less calories for other processes: "The takeaway for us here in the industrialized world is that we need to stay active to stay healthy, but we can’t count on exercise to increase our daily calorie burn. . . . At the end of the day, our weight is a matter of calories eaten versus calories burned — and it’s really hard to change the calories we burn!" (https://researchblog.duke.edu/2021/03/24/duke-researcher-busts-metabolism-myths-in-new-book/)
Glycolysis utilizes a small part of glucose's energy and then - in the anaerobic pathway - has to ferment it to an awkward form just to regenerate NAD+. There's plenty of energy left inside - consider that yeast ferments glucose into ethanol, not exactly known for low energy density.
It doesn't quite work like that. But HIIT which is primarily anaerobic does look to be pretty effective for weight loss despite requiring far less time than jogging.
The lactic acid that's produced from anaerobic metabolism isn't just excreted. Most of it is metabolized back into glucose once oxygen is available again. There's some inefficiency there compared to aerobic metabolism, but more like 1.1x than 10x.
Not a biologist, so guessing here but... I assume you are correct, but making the comparison with keeping total work constant seems silly. Exercising while holding your breath is so much more difficult, painful, and debilitating that it seems totally unrealistic that you could work out even 1/10 as rigorously as you could during aerobic exercise.
I believe that anaerobic exercise produces a decent amount of acetic acid (vinegar) as a metabolic byproduct, which has to later be cleared by the body after the anaerobic period ends. The fact that you are rapidly dumping acid into your blood during anaerobic exercise is why it feels like burning. Surely it becomes damaging at high enough concentrations or for extended periods. And I suspect it isn't great for your long term health to go into anaerobic mode very frequently.
The anaerobic metabolic pathway doesn't exist for every day use, it's purpose is to enable you to occasionally tap into a short-period superhuman capability level to avoid existential danger.
1. You don't need to be holding your breath, you just need to be consuming energy faster than the oxygen supply can keep up with
2. It's lactic acid, not acetic
Bret Weinstein was pushing worry about mRNA vaccines, as not adequately proven to be safe.
I don't know what, if anything, he's been saying on the subject lately, but so far as I know, mRNA vaccines haven't turned out to be especially dangerous, and I'm wondering what would be adequate evidence that they're generally safe.
When I studied Weinstein last June, he and his posse uncritically assumed that all US/UK incident reports (VAERS/Yellow Card) referred to health problems that were definitely caused by the vaccine, i.e. they never considered the base rate - the number of people per million who would ordinarily get sick in a typical day, or week, even if they hadn't taken a vaccine. The sources that they relied on, such as the "Evidence Based Medicine Consultancy" (headed by a leading ivermectin proponent), also ignored the base rate while demanding an immediate halt to the vaccine rollout: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations?commentId=C2BdvmiGif37cfddw
They further assumed that there was severe underreporting. Even though the FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, his guest Steve Kirsch said that OpenVAERS said that the 6,000 deaths in VAERS probably translated to about 20,000 deaths in reality, deaths caused directly by the three vaccines. They generally referred to the three vaccines as "the vaccine", and they did not consider the possibility that any one vaccine could be safer or less safe than any other. Kirsch's own web site claimed 25,800 deaths (citing a blog that retracted the claim a few days later), and a few months later Kirsch would increase his death estimate to 150,000-250,000 (https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/debunking-steve-kirschs-latest-claims-97e1c40f5d74). I noticed in August that the name of the other man on the Weinstein's program, Dr. Robert Malone, appeared as a collective author on Kirsch's blog post, which was also placed behind a paywall, while Kirsch's name was temporarily removed, though it's back now.
So, sure, we can say mRNA vaccines haven't turned out to be dangerous, but good luck convincing Weinstein's audience. I will forever wonder if my now-dead uncle was in the audience...
Thanks very much for getting the details.
It's probably worth hammering on that we know more about risks of the vaccine and risks of the diseases than we did a year or two ago and hope to convince at least some people.
I haven't paid much attention to him lately either, but for a long while he seemed to be moving the goalposts as new evidence appeared evidence appeared and winding up in the same place for new and creative reasons. I'm sympathetic to there having been some genuine uncertainty about safety ... some billions of doses ago.
My understanding, based on what Eric Topal reported, is that the FDA considers vaccine "long term effects" to be those things that occur within two months of vaccination. Even normal vaccines do not get long term study of the type I presume Weinstein would want to see.
I'm not sure what Weinstein would want to see. We've already had over a billion doses administered. Where are all the people in hospitals with blood clots?
If the worry is is some vague long term cancer risk, what other vaccines or medicines get the level of scrutiny Weinstein would suppose we need?
My short answer is that the existing data on vaccines is sufficient evidence to conclude they are are safe (on the order if 1ppm of adverse reaction).
Adverse events are more common than 1ppm. I've had myocarditis for 4 months now (after taking Moderna vac). Fortunately the worst seems to be over but my rest heart rate still averages around 73bpm instead of 38 bpm which it used to be (I'm 28yo male with competitive gymnastics background).
Heart rate while walking is 130ish instead of the normal 80. Doing sports is out of the question.
After I developed my sickness I checked out the literature and was surprised to find out that the probability to develop myocarditis could be as high as 1 in 5000.
Results: For the 12-17-year-old male cohort, 6/6,846 (0.09%) patients developed myocarditis overall, with an adjusted rate per million of 876 cases (Wilson score interval 402 - 1,911). For the 12-15 and 16-19 male age groups, the adjusted rates per million were 601 (257 - 1,406) and 561 (240 - 1,313).For 12-17-year-old females, there were 3 (0.04%) cases of myocarditis of 7,361 patients. The adjusted rate was 213 (73 - 627) per million cases. For the 12-15- and 16-19-year-old female cohorts the adjusted rates per million cases were 235 (64 - 857) and 708 (359 - 1,397). The outcomes occurred either within 5 days (40.0%) or from 19-82 days (60.0%).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34341797/
Note that the myocarditis rate quoted is for teenage boys who had *Covid*. It concludes "Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males", though confusingly it said "876 cases" per million earlier. It continues "Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine". The chance is lower for girls. The confidence interval is pretty wide and I have not otherwise examined the paper.
Where does "1 in 5000" come from? 876 per million divided by 6 would be 1 in 6849; 450 per million divided by 6 would be 1 in 13,333.
Good catch! I read the paper again and it turns out I misunderstood the categories entirely (mixed myocarditis from covid and myocarditis from the vaccine). I have read from another paper that the rate of myocarditis from the vaccine for 20-30yo is roughly 5 times smaller than it is for teenagers. So it seems I was incredibly unlucky as this would implicate that the probability was only ~12ppm.
To fix my mistake for 12-17yo boys the myocarditis rate from the second dose is 66,7ppm which is 1 in 15 000 and the corresponding rate to develop it from covid is roughly 1 in 1000. So if for example ~20% of population gets covid per year. Vaccinating would seem to result in less myocarditis cases overall. Although not by much.
Sorry to hear about your situation.
My claim of "on the order of 1ppm" is for the population as a whole, not the cohort of 12-17 years old.
The slightly raised risk of myocarditis in young kids, which it is important to note, HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED as an increased risk for this cohort, still has to weigh against the risks of COVID.
Absent from the conversation is that the vaccines do not prevent one from catching covid. Is a few months of protection from covid worth the potential side effects of the vaccine? If you are a young person who works from home it may not be worth the risk.
I would like to see 5-year RCTs done in parallel with and continuing after the FDA approval of most new drugs, so that we're not blocking access, but also not remaining forever ignorant of the long term effects aside from some handwavy uncontrolled studies.
"Adequate" in the context of emergency defense against a plague that has killed millions worldwide and "adequate" by normal medical standards are two different things. For the former, we're pretty clearly there. For the latter, we'd probably want another year or two of observation and analysis.
I'm sympathetic to the view that since we seem to have mostly defeated COVID, that Omicron looks to be "COVID Lite", we should maybe start shifting towards conventional standards of safety, rather than vaccinating five-year-olds and multiply-boosting everyone else because More Vaccine Is Better. But anyone who's not in an extremely low-risk group should probably still have at least the standard course of Pfizer if they can get it. And I'm skeptical that Weinstein is providing that level of nuance.
I believe the argument is, that was the case for the old type of vaccine, but with these new mRNA vaccines we have reason to suspect much more complicated biological changes
Yes, for instance that in vitro study that found that uncleared spike proteins ( hint only occurs in cells when made in cells ). Have been found in the nucleus and disrupting DNA repair . That seems an important thing to follow up on . And other findings relating to spike proteins effects on bodily systems . Especially considering findings of spike in serum 4 months after injection and levels corresponding to waning
Adequate evidence we have already, truly conclusive evidence will take waiting a few decades to see if cancer incidence or some other very-long-term complication increases.
Ref this thread from Nassim Taleb
"Even if vaccines have not been around for long, the sample for the Covid vaccines is so yuuuuge that we can already see what risks they don't have & proceed by elimination."
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1467855689531940867?lang=en
He starts out by looking at the distribution of adverse effects based on billions of doses already administered. Ends by referencing a paper someone send him a link to that says that cancer risk follows a gamma distribution
TL;DR if there was substantial long term cancer risk, with billions of doses we would already see a signal
I would think the risks associated with micro clotting is more likely to appear and present before cancer . Cancer is already obscure with so many factors and time lines . But the all cause mortality data numbers are now presenting clear images of questionable outcomes overall . I know my wife snd others working in the hospital setting in rural Ontario have seen a noticeable rise in non covid illnesses beyond baseline . So we should be looking at baseline rates for sure
Er, I don't know about that.
The trouble with cancer (in general) is that the base rate is somewhat high and not highly consistent across regions, so it's hard to tell what caused any particular case of cancer. For example, we can't point to a specific person and say "Vladimir Fukov here got cancer because he lived near Chernobyl!" There's a report estimating that up to 4,000 people might at some point die because Chernobyl (and another saying 9,000) but the report is clear that it's just a projection based on the linear-no-threshold hypothesis and not based on actual cancer data. AFAIK, no one can reasonably conclude based on available cancer data whether the number of cancer deaths was 9000 or zero (but if someone's got contrary evidence I'd like to see it).
On Dec. 26, 2021, Edward O. Wilson, one of the greatest, and kindest, scientists of the 20th century, died at the age of 92.
On Dec. 29, Scientific American published an "Opinion" piece ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson ) calling him just another dead racist whose "dangerous ideas" must be forgotten if we want an equitable future. It called for science journal articles to henceforth be annotated with comments from humanities scholars to provide "context" for their "problematic aspects", and for "commitments from the entire scientific community to determine the portions of historically problematic work ... to be debunked and replaced."
(Also, Darwin and Gregor Mendel were also racist, as is the normal distribution, and physics, which is ruled by "white empiricism". Also, "the application of the scientific method" condemns seeking the specific causes of the inequitable outcomes faced by blacks in America when they can all be explained by structural racism.)
Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of *Scientific American*, tweeted that (https://twitter.com/laurahelmuth/status/1476531766118682625) the opinion piece was an "Insightful critique of E.O. Wilson's work & racism inherent in genetics".
(It's unclear whether Scientific American will stick to its claim that genetics is inherently racist by refusing to publish any more articles on genetics.)
The only reference to anything Wilson did or said is the claim that his 1975 book *Sociobiology* "contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms."
This is a lie in several ways. For one, Wilson was the one debunking the dichotomy of nature versus nurture, by presenting examples of how genes and environment interacted to shape evolution, at a time when academic Marxism was enforcing the dogma that human behavior is infinitely flexible and *entirely* due to environment. For another, Wilson could hardly have spawned behavioral psychology in 1975, because John Watson published "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" in 1913. For another, the focus of that final chapter of *Sociobiology* is on the differences between humans and other animals, not between humans and other humans.
There are certainly things in *Sociobiology* that some people would call racist and sexist. Genetics is, in fact, inherently racist and sexist, if by that we mean that it claims that genetic differences can lead to behavioral differences. Wilson expects that male and female humans have some different innate abilities and proclivities, just as the male and female of every other mammalian species (except possibly wolves) has. He says nothing about racial differentiation, but does ask how genetics might interact with social stratification (as any evolutionary biologist who actually cared about social stratification would have to).
Dr. Wilson, like his enemies, had an intense political commitment: his greatest concern was the extinction of other species by humans. He was *literally the most pro-diversity person on the planet*. Yet as far as I know, unlike his backstabbing Harvard colleagues like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, he never slanted his research to promote his politics.
I admire Dr. Wilson for more than just his science. The personality he revealed in his books is beautiful. He's been more gracious to me personally than anyone else in academia ever was. I'd like to go through what he wrote, and show that he didn't publish anything morally wrong, and did many things morally right; and what a wonderful person he was, and what an injustice SciAm has done by damning him at just the time they should have praised him.
But, as much as I'm outraged at how Ed Wilson has been unjustly vilified, whether or not he or his science was racist is *beside the bigger point*. Even if he /had/ been an unrepentant racist, and his theories had been used to justify racist policies, it would be wrong to suppress them.
Scientific American isn't alone. Nature and Science, formerly considered the two greatest science journals in the world, both committed recently to take race and racial issues into account in deciding whom to hire and what to publish (although neither proposed outright suppression or a collective project of retrospective purgation).
It took Western civilization 3000 years, from the Greek Dark Age almost to the present, to learn the lesson that our epistemology--the way we decide what we believe--must be firewalled from our ideologies. *That was the main point of the Enlightenment*. This is because very right things can look wrong to people who believe wrong things, and nobody is always right. And from the time Europeans began voicing this opinion in the 17th century, it took centuries more of violent struggle, including actual wars, *including the one against the Nazis*, to make that firewall a reality. Not a completely flame-proof reality, but a powerful social construct nonetheless; and one that was constructed not to concentrate power, but to disperse it.
What's at stake here is empiricism and liberalism itself--the hard-won knowledge that physical evidence is more reliable than revelation, that no one is always right, that diversity is better than unity, and that free speech and free action is more helpful than hurtful. We no longer suppress observations that seem to contradict the words of the Bible; neither should we suppress them if they seem to contradict the words of Marx, Foucault, or Cornel West.
The wave of the counter-Enlightenment that began 400 years ago, whose many ideologues each longed for a world where their own private prejudices would rule supreme, is now cresting and *might win*. It seems in some ways to be at the stage the Nazis were at in 1934, after consolidating their power, when they began to persecute Jews and empirical philosophers (it was the Nazis who solidified the power of "continental philosophy" in France and Germany) and rewrite the history books.
Democracy went extinct in Europe in the 4th century BCE, and remained almost inconsequential there for the next 2000 years. If it wins control over America and Europe now, it might be another 2000 years before anything like liberal republicanism or democracy appears again. I am not being hyperbolic. The problem with being America is that we can't count on America to rescue us.
Scott Aaronson declared that he would no longer write for, nor take interviews from, Scientific American ( https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 ). Jerry Coyne, whom I'd never heard of but apparently he has 73,000 subscribers, wrote an angry post critiquing the whole mess ( https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/ ). But SciAm has never asked to interview me, and I don't have 73,000 subscribers. So I brooded on this for days, feeling utterly helpless, before it struck me that I'm not completely helpless. There was, in fact one thing I could do to help: I could vote Republican.
I am totally serious about this. I'm going to vote party-line Republican from now on until we beat back this madness. Climate change and structural racism in America are utterly trivial compared to the prospect of dismantling science and liberalism. Nothing the Democratic party stands for is worth the extremism it tolerates in its attempt to "motivate the base". 10 years ago, I *was* the Democratic base, but now I'm leaving. I'll even vote for Donald fucking Trump if the Republicans foolishly insist on running him.
This Scientific American piece is heinous not only because it is unscientific and speaks of Wilson as if he's Charles Murray, but because it is evidence-free. Much as I disliked Atlas Shrugged, this editorial reminds me of a journalistic smear piece in that book, which "did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one".
What I don't expect to see in Scientific American: any explanation of why our genetic code cannot affect our intelligence. I certainly haven't seen any geneticist defend that position.
Wilson wasn't even an IQ guy (it would be tricky to map that concept onto ants). But the author of that Scientific American piece wasn't restricting herself based on that, since she tarred even Mendel as if his plant-crossing experiments were somehow racist.
Seems like this is a good reason not to pay attention to Scientific American.
How are Democratic politicians responsible for what Scientific American publishes? How will having Republicans in office prevent SciAm from publishing similar editorials? If Trump did anything to stop wokism other than hurling insults, I haven't seen it.
Doesn't promising to vote straight-ticket Republican from now on strike you as a little bit of a strange reaction to a magazine publishing an opinion piece that you disagreed with? It seems pretty clear to be an action that is driven by spite rather than rationality.
I’m not a fan of that article (though it is very clearly marked as “opinion”, and magazines should feel free to publish all kinds of opinion pieces). A reasonable reaction might be to cancel your subscription to SciAm if you are a subscriber. Or to promise to never visit their website to deprive them of your ad revenue. Or to write a supportive comment on Scott Aaronson’s blog. Or to support some of their competitors (some of which are quite excellent, and do not write these kinds of obnoxious articles).
Do you really think that having more Republicans in office will help matters? Will a second Trump term convince SciAm not to publish such things? Did “wokeism” get better or worse under Trump?
Furthermore, it’s plainly evident that Republicans suffer from their own strain of illiberalism. For all their hand-wringing about “cancel culture”, there are numerous examples of people getting “canceled” from right-wing politics for deviating (even the slightest bit) from party-line orthodoxy. While “wokeism” may be a left-wing phenomenon, the left most certainly does not have a monopoly on illiberal ideology. Can you really say that, upholding enlightenment values, the epistemology of right-wing party faithfuls is well-isolated from their ideology?
These are all good points. The epistemology of the right isn't well-isolated from their ideology. But our scientific and academic institutions are well-isolated from that ideology. There was a determined effort recently for, what, 20 years? to teach creationism, sorry, intelligent design, in schools, and it never got far, despite most Republicans (and, for most of that time, most Americans!) believing in creationism.
I can explain why wokeism scares me more than Republicans by contrasting the Republican approach to pushing their ideology on science in the creationism debate, with the Woke approach to pushing theirs. We call what happened over creationism "the creationism debate" because there was a debate. The Republicans found scientists who would argue their views, and they published hundreds of books and videos arguing their views, and held debates.
We don't talk about "the identity politics debate" because there was no debate. No point-cointerpoint debates of the merits of BLM protests, equal outcome vs. equal opportunity, the gender wage gap, or under what conditions trans-females should be allowed to compete in the Olympics. Instead of debate, we have protests, riots, and Twitter mobs; instead of point-by-point arguments, we have calm and imperious partisan pronouncements issued by institutions, and moral accusations screamed en masse at high-profile targets singled out to be examples. This is a tactic Hitler described in /Mein Kampf/, and said he'd learned from the communists. The debate has been shut down, and all that matters now is who has the money, the media, and the institutions; and we suddenly find the Democrats have all three.
Hitler's reason-free mobbing method does resemble the attacks on abortion choice by a religious coalition of mostly-Republican Protestants and mostly-Democratic Catholics, who think they're debating, but can never perceive that their views on "when life begins" are mere metaphysical assumptions. I think this observation gets at an important difference: Each party treats some issues as having an absolute answer dictated by virtue ethics, and some as pragmatic and context-sensitive matters on which we must compare data and viewpoints. In earlier decades, it was the Christian Republicans who were more likely to make absolute declarations based on virtue ethics. Today, it's the Democrats.
Republicans and Democrats both agree in theory that voter fraud, unjust shootings, sexism, and racism are bad; but the Republicans see these as involving questions of measurement, statistics, and definitions, which they approach as consequentialists; while the Democrats see them as simple applications of virtue ethics, with no definitions, quantitative aspects, or trade-offs that require reasoning. (This may be because Democrats live in cities and work in offices, which are artificial environments built to conform to legible, rationalist abstractions; while Republicans live in rural areas, are much more likely to do physical work and to work with animals, and hence more-often find their plans constrained by external, non-social reality.)
Another issue that concerns me is institutional capture, which Democrats have been far more successful at lately. Many of the profs and adminstrators currently promoting woke campuses were radicalized in 1970, and spent the past 50 years patiently gaining control of the humanities departments of college campuses and the editorial boards of journals, opposing faculty hirings on political grounds, and changing student admission policies to eliminate merit scholarships and standardized tests while putting heavy weight on community activism, to get to the point where Democrats plus leftists too radical to call themselves Democrats now have something like a 9:1 majority over Republicans at Harvard, Yale, and other elite universities, in both faculty and the student body. The next 30 years of American science already belongs to them.
The Republicans aren't capable of that kind of long-term patient subversion. The closest they ever got to "subtle" was Karl Rove. The Jan. 6 insurrection is more typical of their style: a sudden, unplanned, disorganized, ineffective burst of rage. That kind of threat seems much easier to me to deal with.
The corruption of scientific institutions is a bigger issue for me than for most people. I'm "biased" because I've always thought of myself as a scientist (though my 1040s haven't always said that). But I only wanted to be a scientist because science always seemed to me to be the most-important component of modern society.
Democrats, not Republicans, are the ones successfully assaulting, infiltrating, and subverting science. This is definitely true in terms of the abuse of institutional power: Nobody, in academia or industry, is afraid of losing their job because they disagree with Republicans; many are afraid of losing their job because they disagree with Democrats, especially in academia and research.
I would argue this is true even for climate change, as the conclusions of recent IPCC reports are closer to "most people won't notice any impact from climate change by 2100" than to "we have a climate change emergency". The science there is getting done okay, but the media has buried that science in a myth of apocalypse.
As to the subverting of democracy that Republicans are accused of, they're legal challenges to change voter registration laws. In most cases, these "dangerous" challenges seek to require voters to have IDs, and to disallow late mail-in ballots. In many cases, these are reversions of changes that were made shortly before the 2020 election. Here in my state of PA, the most-prominent court case was one in which Republicans challenged the constitutionality of an amendment to the state constitution, which had been passed illegally about a year before the 2020 election. There was no question about the unconstitutionality of the amendment; the Democrats won the case on a technicality about the time passed since the amendment.
As to mass violence, consider this article from Time Magazine, Feb. 5 2021, titled "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election". It describes, sympathetically, a secret campaign to win the election for the Democrats, using "hundreds of millions in public and private funding" to adjust voter registration laws, fight attempts by Repubilcans to do the same, encourage voting by mail, suppress Republican propaganda on social media, and–this bit:
"Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country [if Trump won]. … Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that [election] night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling. … As the numbers dribbled out, he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.
"The liberal alliance gathered [on election night] for an 11 p.m. Zoom call. Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. … The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. “We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street,” Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk. …
"So the word went out: stand down. Protect the Results announced that it would “not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.” On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn’t anyone trying to stop Trump’s coup? Where were all the protests?
"Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. “They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it,” he says."
So, a massive, secret organization, with hundreds of millions in funding, some of it public money, had hundred of protests across the country planned and ready to hit the streets in a "counter-coup" if it looked like Trump was going to win. And at 11PM election night, days before anyone could call the election, the leaders already found it difficult to restrain the protestors from hitting the streets, and only talked them down by showing that their model predicted a win for Biden.
When the election was called for Biden, Republicans did nothing.
Add to this the number of violent BLM protests and resulting deaths, and the Democrats can't point any fingers at the Republicans on willingness to use mass violence. Both sides are guilty.
So, in short, the world I see now, which is very different than it was 20 years ago, is one where:
- Democrats are more likely to use context-free virtue ethics, cut off debate, cut off friends and relationship over political differences, use ungrounded moral accusations and intimidation, and argue against liberalism
- Democrats have rapidly captured control of most of America's money, media, and cultural institutions, and are using them to silence their opponents
- Democrats are threatening to turn science back into theology
I'm aware of many stupidities of Republicans, but I don't see them as approaching anything like the existential threat to liberalism that the Democrats are at present.
It seems to me that you are ignoring the most important point, raised by Jqwo.
In you reply you are focusing on stating arguments in favour of position that democrat adjacent culture is worse than republican adjacent culture, all things considered. It's an interesting claim and it deserves some debate on its own. But in the current context it's not very relevant because while it's culture you are worried about (opinion in a journal), you are considering political action (voting republican) as a response. And politics can't really control culture in a democracy.
It may look unexpected that in USA culture is more left leaning while politics is more right leaning. But it's actually a result of a very well calibrated mechanism of toxoplasma of rage. Every outrageous rightist political move infuriates the left, provoking them to do more outrageous leftist cultural moves which in turn outrages the right and vice versa and so on. People on both sides are outraged, elites on both sides prosper. It's actually memetically advantageous for republicans to have people do crazy woke stuff. It allows them to focus on the crazyness of the other side, while lowering the bar for themselves. It doesn't matter anymore whether their politics is good or bad, whether they are competent or not, they can be elected in power just because someone wrote a ridiculous opinion. If you start voting for the other party for culture war reasons rather than political ones, you are not challenging the unhealthy status quo, you are actually contributing to it.
I'm not going to use the terms "left" and "right", because they're misleading. I'll just say "Dem" and "Rep" bcoz those are our parties.
I see the dynamic of each side outraging the other, and driving each other farther apart. I don't see the division between culture and politics that your idea that the US leans Dem in culture and Rep in politics requires. Politics now is mostly arguments over culture, and political actions are trying to shape culture.
If by "culture" you mean "elite culture", I see that; but your final sentence indicates to me that culture and politics are separate domains, which I don't agree with.
The line between politics and culture indeed became blurry in these late days of culture wars when, as you correctly notice, lots of politics is actually arguing about culture, "everything is political" and so on. This is actually huge part of the problem, in my opinion. Blurring the line between politics and culture creates polarization and perversive initiatives for politicians as their electability becomes less correlated with their actual political performance (was the new laws successful? did the candidate delivered on their promises?) and more with being part of the tribe and saying the right words.
But try to make a step back. Let's start with this crude way to divide the two clusters. Politics is about using governmental monopoly on violence in order to affect society; and culture is society doing its own stuff. Political actions come from the top; cultural ones come from the bottom. Government, military and police are political institutes; universities and media are cultural. Law is political; people opinions are cultural.
The division has never been very strict and both clusters affect each other in obvious ways. As a rule of thumb totalitarian governments try to control culture through politics, and in liberal democracies the causation is opposite: culture influence politics more than otherwise.
This framework while still far from perfect gives a much more detailed view than just two opposing blobs fighting in the memetic space. We can see which party/ideology uses which tools and how political sphere influence in US is more pro-republican, while cultural is more pro-democrat.
When you are thinking it terms of just blue blob vs red blob, seeing how blue blob is doing very good may motivate you to feed the red blob more in order to compensate. But more nuanced perspective reveals that it will just make the matters worse if you send reinforcement in the domain that red blob is actually having an advantage in. The solution is deescalation, to allow blue and red to be proportional in all domains.
I think your analysis is too abstract. The fact remains that Democrats in office are likely to support extreme woke behavior, while Republicans won't.
(I also don't agree that culture is bottom-up. If that were so, US culture would be NASCAR and romance novels. Most culture is directed from the top-down. Movies, for instance, are much more likely to get the green light today if they have either a progressive message, or teach medieval and/or post-modern metaphysics. One basic modern cultural belief, that being able to buy nice things is good rather than bad, was one of the major shifts during the Enlightenment. It was intensely debated in the 18th century (and is still contested today by Marxists, particularly of Adorno's school, and many Christians and Buddhists). Rulers of the 18th century, for example Frederick the Great, could have prevented this change, but decided to encourage commerce, rather than taking the medieval approach of having sumptuary laws to make sure the middle class couldn't have nice things.)
I think that this post by Richard Hanania is a pretty good response to at least the first point:
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
A lot of the cultural changes that have happened are partially the result of legal ideas being adopted in common discourse. For instance, the supreme court case Griggs v. Duke Power co. established that the definition of discrimination can include things that do not intend to discriminate, but nevertheless have an outcome that is unequal. This case was from 1970, and ideas like disparate impacts seem to form the foundation of much of modern left wing activist thought. A lot can be said about imprecise definitions of "critical race theory", but the people who were originally of that label were largely legal scholars, interacting with questions of policy. In addition, a lot of the enforcement of progressive ideology is done through institutions such as HR departments.
This demonstrates a way for anti-woke elected representatives to actually impact culture in a meaningful way. For instance, we can change the law so that discrimination suits are null unless there is reasonable suspicion of intent, and we can change the law so that a company offering diversity training cannot be used as evidence in court that they do not discriminate. If we change discrimination law to only cover actual discrimination, then HR departments won't have activists breathing down their neck with lawsuits, and will stop offering diversity training in order to placate these activists. In other words, by specifically targeting the bureaucracies that enforce progressive orthodoxies and the reasons they choose to do so, it is possible to affect the culture. Thus, I do not believe it is irrational to change your vote because of cultural issues, as you imply. The question of whether these are the types of things that republicans will actually do remains to be answered.
Hanania rises some interesting points but I respectfully disagree with his general conclusion about our topic. He shows that cultural institutes can embrace some terms and ideas that originated in governmental bureaucracies, but why these specific terms and not others turned out to be memetically fit enough to reproduce so much in society? And of course why would they originate in governmental bureaucracies in the first place? Hanania traces causality back to Civil Rights Act. But how comes it happened? Didn't it have something to do with Civil Rights Movement?
Hanania mentions, recent CRT events, and they are actually a good example of culture->politics causation. First Fox News starts scaremongering, then lots of people are outraged thinking that CRT symbolize everything that is wrong with US, then we get laws preventing teaching CRT in schools, which being niche subfield of law studies was never taught there in the first place, but it doesn't even matter. And of course it all happens just in front of elections in order to use culture wars drive to get more votes. Will it help against cancel culture even in the long run? I predict that it won't. Now progressives get one more argument to dismiss any accusations about how they restrict freedom of speech: "You know what is the restriction of freedom of speech? Passing literal laws policing what schools are allowed to teach!"
One of the good points is that republicans are not motivated at all to actually do anything in order to decrease "wokeness craziness". It totally fits my model where they benefit from it. Seriously, I'm under the impression that you can get more support from far-leftists in changing a law so that "a company offering diversity training cannot be used as evidence in court that they do not discriminate". These guys are supper annoyed how corporations just pretend to be woke putting rainbow flags from time to time, without actually doing anything meaningful.
Ultimately, Hanania is not very convincing. His pieces have gotten a lot of attention (especially among people on the right), but they don’t hold up well to scrutiny.
Does it really make sense that 2014’s “Great Awokening” is some downstream effect of 1970s case law, that just took 44 years to manifest? “Wokeism” is pretty clearly a global/international phenomenon, perhaps going by different names in different countries. Can this all be explained by some quirks of American civil rights policies? Certainly there is some degree of American cultural imperialism, but that strains credulity.
Hanania also has a strange fixation with HR departments. College students are among the “wokest” there are, but they have basically zero interaction with their universities’ HR departments, and are largely unaffected by employment law. I have never heard of anyone at all whose views were influenced even in the slightest way by HR policy. HR departments can certainly mandate diversity trainings, which people take online and click through in a background browser tab on their computer, just like they do with every other HR-mandated training. And this is supposed to be a primary driver of a significant society-wide cultural movement? And isn’t it the case that almost all of these HR trainings were introduced only after “wokeism” rose in significance?
The conventional wisdom is that politics is downstream from culture, and that remains the most convincing explanation in this case too.
You are correct that diversity training is not entirely to blame but I stand by my basic thesis that it constitutes a very significant part, and opposition to wokeness needs to begin by opposition to wokeness specifically in these types of bureaucracies.
A lot of the jargon that is common to wokeness used to *only* exist in the aforementioned types of diversity training and case law. As recently as ten years ago, many of the words that pervade culture nowadays simply did not exist for normal people, which I believe shows directional influence.
For example, consider the word "Latinx". For a little bit, some people might have told you that this was the inclusive way to refer to Hispanic people, and it was certainly used for some of the diversity crowd. This was despite the fact that only 3% of hispanic people refer to themselves with this word. "Latinx" did not come from bottom up cultural evolution.
I use "Latinx" as an example because it is well understood to be bad, but you might claim that our understanding that it is bad also shows resilience of culture from these bureaucracies, so for a different example: A similar thing happened with the word "Indian" to refer to the original inhabitants of the Americas. Read, for instance, the first appendix in "1491" by Charles Mann, or alternatively there was a very good CGP Grey video about this. Very recently, "Indian" was simply the word that you used to refer to the aforementioned group of people, but nowadays people typically wince a little bit when they hear it. However, according to Mann, "native people who I have met (I think with one exception) have used "Indian". These are examples of ideas that did not arise naturally from culture, but rather were imposed.
College students rarely have to deal with HR departments, but "ethnic studies" requirements end up being much worse anyways. Instead of having to attend a seminar about intersectionality, now you have to write an entire paper in order to please the professor, and stay in a class for an entire semester.
Further, these types of policies shapes peoples views much more than you are letting on there. Most people would say that they are not immediately influenced to buy an iPhone because of a billboard, and yet Apple still decides they are worth putting up. If anyone with authority is saying the exact same thing, even the most hardheaded people can't stay immune from being influenced forever, and they especially can't be immune from being influenced by people with the authority to fire them.
Trump isn't an elephant; he's a buffoon. He isn't smart enough or disciplined enough to take over America.
I am concerned that he might start a nuclear war. I am concerned that so many Republicans distrust the media. But they have every reason to distrust the media. Only the media can fix that.
I sympathize with your and agree with your criticisms of the magazine and its editors. I especially agree with how you speak of the enlightenment.
And I don't mind your voting Republican, they have policy answers too. Unfortunately, the Republican party now seems mostly taken over by Trump and his supporters. Trump is a demagogue and the party should have never allowed him to become their candidate.
But they did, and now 70% of the party believe the election was stolen. Republican candidates on the ballot this year in Arizona believe its officials should have engineered a win for Trump.
The Georgia secretary of state has had it's office weakened by the Republican dominated legislature, which now has additional election power that it could use to apply partisan power to the election. Election boards are losing power to the legislature as well. There could well be a legitimate partisan election dispute.
So, my only suggestion is that when you vote Republican, do not vote for Trump or his enablers. In my view they are much more corrosive to democracy than idiots in the left who think anti racism is the new religion.
Relevant: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/01/01/how-to-think-about-the-threat-to-american-democracy
Good points. See my reply to Jqwo above.
I agree. He's the first president to not concede, and break the norm of showing support for a peaceful transfer of power.
I'm reading a book called "How Democracies Die", and it's pretty depressing how many of the signs we've had in the past 6 years.
SciAm is a joke right now and I have no idea why people still take them seriously.
Until the circus ends I totally agree with your last paragraph.
I don't understand this at all. Sci-Am et al. influence Democrats, not the reverse. Voting Republican will not help in the slightest.
I stopped my subscription to SA sometime in the 90's. Before that it was my favorite magazine. Mathematical recreations, computer recreations, and whatever D. Hofstadter called his column. And then there was the Amateur Scientist! These were the columns written just for me. Sometime around 1990 it looked like Forrest Mims was going to take over the Amateur Scientist (AS) column. (For those who don't know, the AS column was all about building science apparatus on the cheap.) Then this happened.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1990/11/01/big-bang-over-belief-at-scientific-american/33a72112-eddb-46a7-8116-f8d44fc272d2/
(or search Forrest Mims and Scientific American.)
I don't care about the religious beliefs of the guy helping me build my science toys.
The rot in our institutions has been going on for generations.
Would voting Republican really help? Wokism got worse under Trump. The more sensible thing might be to try to empower the most anti-woke people on the left side of the aisle in the hope that they recapture the institutions.
> Would voting Republican really help?
The theory is that you're holding your vote hostage until the madness stops.
I'm sitting here thinking about "does it work?" and all the lines of thought ultimately flows through "how useful is voting, anyway?"
If you live in a swing state it's pretty important.
How do I credibly signal to the Democrats "I am voting against you because of wokeness but will switch back once you stop being fucking insane?"
And what if this is offset by an equal number of people saying "I'm not voting Republican again until you guys fucking disavow this election-truther nonsense?"
In each respective case, I'd have to be a committed member of the given party, and also able to swallow voting for the other party (and its associated insanities: see the above two paragraphs).
(I totally get it as a "fuck you" vote, and I won't disagree with that argument, because there's so little to it that it's hard for it to be wrong.)
I feel like the crazier one party gets, the crazier the other party can let itself get without too many consequences.
What we need is to replace first past the post elections with any other system. Wet also need open primaries, where any number of candidates can run from any number if parties. Even in gerrymandered districts, candidates will be forced to appeal to the broader majority rather than the narrow minority of the party base.
If we had that, then your vote becomes much more meaningful.
No you can't hope that a small minority on the left will recapture institutions in decline for decades. I think it's gotta be something from the middle... and the middle doesn't really exist anymore.
Being anywhere near effective automatically means you will become a polarizing idiot (or rather, that you will become polarizing, and the media will treat you as an idiot). The establishment doesn't like effective politicians who act against it and treating them as polarizing idiots is one of its defenses against them.
Right, but that's an important distinction. Trump actually *is* an idiot. Or possibly a very clever person pursuing goals significantly different than those he claimed. Either way, he conspicuously failed to demonstrate basic competence in using the real power of the Presidency in pursuit of his nominal goals, and unwillingness to seek competent counsel.
A polarizing but competent politician with an equally competent staff, would lead to a very different outcome even if the media called them all idiots.
There's a sense in which Kruschev was the more "moderate" communist relative to Stalin, and Gorbachev was trying to be more reformist still. He failed in his actual goals, the system fell apart, and basically all Russians now regard the Yeltsin years as their lowpoint, so I guess he wouldn't really be an inspiring example to future reformers either.
Just a couple more examples of this type of article from Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-math-research-group-reflects-a-schism-in-the-field/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-needs-to-rename-the-james-webb-space-telescope/
The subheading of the first article is "Critics accuse the organization of opposing efforts to stamp out inequity", which is a view that the article seems to be pushing. However, the evidence that they gather is the fact that they "claim to have no position on social justice issues", and a few scattered private blog posts by people involved expressing views that they find problematic (the posts are pretty tame, go read the article). I can't tell whether or not the organization in question is serious and does good work, but the evidence presented in this article is certainly nowhere near enough to hang them with.
The second one argues that the James Webb Space Telescope needs to be renamed, because James Webb was a problematic figure. So what exactly was the sin that he committed, that might give him such a label?
"As someone in management, Webb bore responsibility for policies enacted under his leadership, including homophobic ones that were in place when he became NASA administrator. Some argue that if Webb was complicit, so was everyone working in the agency's administration at the time. We agree. But NASA is not launching a telescope named after its entire administration."
The article argues that James Webb was complicit in homophobic policies that were enacted before he was even there, and he is therefore a problematic figure not worthy of a telescope being named after him.
I'm too young to remember if Scientific American was ever any good, but stories like this certainly don't leave me with a very good impression.
"Also, Darwin and Gregor Mendel were also racist"
I absolutely want corroboration on this, because I am very damn interested to know what the Abbot of St. Thomas' said that was racist about pea plants.
Now, I may be horribly ignorant and he actually gave lectures about humans and non-white people in general, but until someone produces a genuine quote, I am going to assume the nonentity that grubbed together this cut'n'paste denunciation based on social sciences buzzwords was going on autopilot - "who are big names in biology, what did I learn in secondary school - Darwin, Mendel, all that jazz" - and nothing more.
You bet your bippy I'm annoyed about this. It's bad enough that Br. Mendel gets stripped of his title and secularised, now I've got to put up with puppies yapping about 'racism' on the heels of half-remembered schooldays and "Mendel and genetics" because "genetics - eugenics - racism!" it's all the same, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel
EDIT: Well, I just sent off a reproachful email to "Scientific American" about this, I expect it to do precisely zero, but at least the idiots should now be vaguely aware of a kick in the pants. I could be very rude about Ms. Associate Professor but that isn't helpful.
Ah yes, American Republicans, who famously never let ideology influence their understanding of reality.
I noticed a long time ago that when Obama had to fight tooth and claw to bring in supreme court nominees, we got Kagan and Sotomayor, both of whom come down straight progressive ticket in cases as far as I can tell, without the slightest regard for the actual Constitution, whereas when Donald "Literally Satan" Trump and Mitch "Doublesatan" McConnell could go hog wild we got villains like, uh, Neil Gorsuch, a conscientious defender of the law who seems to all appearances to vote according to his sense of what the Constitution actually stipulates, regardless of anyone's personal preferences. That was roughly when I began to sense the exact magnitude of the success of Democrat propaganda.
As a lawyer, Kagan is far more impressive than Sotomayor. In most of her opinions that I've read, her take on statutory interpretation and civil procedure is straightforward and sensible (if not bullet-proof). Plus, no justice who gave the wondrous gift to law school students that is her discussion of what a "tangible object" is in her Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (2015) dissent (aka the "Dr. Seuss opinion"), can be all that bad.
I'm willing to accept this lock, stock and barrel. Clearly you have a more in-depth grasp of the matter.
Ah, yes, the fish case. But that is the wrong cite. It is 574 US 528. And, btw, that is an example of her agreeing with Scalia and Thomas, FWIW
That's what I get for going too fast - grabbed the wrong "Yates" cite. And for what its worth, I'm with Ginsburg's majority (concurred with by Alito, of all people, who also clearly was having a lot of fun with the opinion: "Applying [ejusdem generis and noscitur a sociis] to §1519’s list of nouns, the term 'tangible object' should refer to something similar to records or documents. A fish does not spring to mind—nor does an antelope, a colonial farmhouse, a hydrofoil, or an oil derrick"). But Kagan's dissent is still very good.
Good job this is the politics thread, ey? 😁
But one thing in the recent mess that tickled me was that the current US Attorney General is Merrick Garland, you all remember? The Supreme Court nominee who was cruelly and viciously denied his place by "Doublesatan" and the rest of the villainous GOP?
Well, he's the guy who went all "yep, domestic terrorism!" on the basis of one (1) letter from a school boards representative organisation, whose members were very unhappy with parents protesting their decisions in local schools. They later sort of walked this back (when such "domestic terrorists" included "father of girl raped in school bathroom" and so forth) because that caused them a certain amount of embarrassment:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/weekly-education/2021/10/25/school-board-group-backtracks-on-letter-for-security-help-from-doj-798428
That sort of marshmallow giving-in to what could best be described as luke-warm activism (you're going to call parents domestic terrorists? really? listen, friend, let me tell you about a little organisation called the Irish Republican Army) doesn't seem to me to augur well for his possible tenure as Supreme Court Justice, so maybe ol' Doublesatan did the country a favour after all 😁
Maybe he was just radicalised. As for McConnell, his damage to the system can't easily be overstated. A significant chunk of the Democrats (me included) now gives exactly zero shit about the Court or its traditions. Doesn't much matter in the short run. The short run is all (R) all the time. But one of these days we'll have another 2008, and the Court will be as big as we need it to be. Then, of course, the other side will do the same thing, and after a while the Court will be like a veto legislature that reflects the will of the last trifecta. Assuming Republicans keep letting us vote, of course.
Just impotent ranting at the moment. They're running the government into the 30s and maybe I'm wrong, but I certainly won't ever again vote in a primary for a politician who isn't willing to de-McConnell-ize the Court, and I'm one of the least lefty Dems I know.
Welcome to the club of how conservatives have felt about Court decisions inventing new rights out of whole cloth for the past fifty years. Your laminated membership card will arrive in 15-18 business days. (/sarc).
I'm not talking about bad decisions, but illegitimacy. McConnell changed the rules in a significant and durable way, and I think we're fighting over who gets to pack the court going forward.
Or maybe that's your point? Something like, "We've hated the thing and wanted it destroyed for years. Now it is. Good riddance. "? In which case, yes. You win. Again. As always. Mazel tov.
As in "yes, we thought those Court decisions were illegitimate, but shrugged and said 'fine, if those are the rules we're playing by, we'll play too' and now sauce for the goose is - a liiiiiiitle bit - sauce for the gander."
Well, remember Garland was picked not because he was the liberal dreamboat of Harry Reid's dreams, but instead because he was known for being maximally milquetoast - in fact, for favorability to hardline conservative positions on law-and-order issues *specifically* - while still being a Democrat on issues of government power, regulatory issues, social issues, etc. The idea was that he was a maximally-easy candidate for squishy republicans in well-to-do moderate districts to accept, theoretically making it harder for Yertle "Doublesatan" McTurtle to gin up a "Democrats Nominate Communist to Court!" narratives in opposition.
So he was selected because he was squishy and easily influenced? That seems to have been borne out by the response to the letter: you want me to denounce domestic terrorists? sure thing!
Yeah, Garland's actions subsequent to being shut out haven't exactly impressed me with his staunch devotion to impartiality either. It's really another great example of the principle: he was described as a wholly inoffensive middle-of-the-road guy, barely even a Dem, back when he was up for the SC.
You are mistaken about Kagan. See eg Masterpiece Cakeshop, and she tends to agree more with Breyer than with Sotomayor https://ballotpedia.org/Elena_Kagan. And she often does not join Sotomayor's rationale.
I think getting involved in primaries is way more influential than changing how you vote come the main election. The the conflict you care about is, AFAICT, currently a live debate in the Democratic party, and actively voting for moderate candidates in Democratic primaries is way way more likely to make your vote count unless you're willing to move to a swing electorate. (and even then, move to an electorate with a tight primary race instead).
A world where Republican ideology trumps reality is not better than a world where Democrat ideology trumps reality.
In Presidential elections, my vote is one of the few that count, since I live in a swing state. But I'm still a registered Democrat, and intend to vote in the primaries.
I'm not afraid of either Democrat ideology or Republican ideology. The mainstream of both parties are, by comparison with parties in other nations, almost indistinguishable.
But the Republican extremists--say, fundy preachers and actual Nazis--are no threat. There are several times as many newspaper reporters writing about the KKK as there are KKK members. Not one university in America has hired a Nazi to teach European history classes. Stormfront.org is probably the biggest white-supremacist online organization in the US, and I checked it just now, and only 2 threads have been commented on so far this year; the My Little Pony fanfiction site I use, by contrast, has over a thousand users every day. So if the Nazis rise up, don't worry; the Bronies can easily take them down.
Whereas the equivalent Democratic extremists have many seats in Congress, and many professors teaching radical doctrines at universities--which, ironically, draw heavily on the writings of actual Nazis like Heidegger and Paul de Man, and of people who got their worldview from Nazi professors, like Foucault and Marcuse. (For example, "authenticity", "lived experience", "power relations", and "race is culture" are all key Nazi ideas.)
If the situation swings too far the other way, I'll swing back. Politically, I'm probably more of a strategic contrarian than anything else.
I share your disdain for that SciAm article, and personally think the world would be a better place if more people voted Republican. However...
I would invite you to read the New York Times' almost-entirely-glowing obituary of the man https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/science/eo-wilson-dead.html (I managed to view it on my phone without a login, I dunno how), and consider that this might be a lot closer to the representative "What Democrats think" than what some weirdo in Scientific American reckons. I also note that the obituary says he was being "cancelled" at conferences by protestors shouting the old "we charge you with genocide" back in the 1970s, so the particular form of idiocy represented by the SciAm article is nothing new.
I would also suggest that the reaction "I am angry about a particular thing so I'm just going to vote a straight other-party ticket from now on" is the kind of dumb behaviour that the culture war is made of, and should be avoided.
The median Democrat (or Republican) has no more opinion of the life and work of Edward O Wilson than they have on whether there are an infinite number of twin primes.
I see the current position of the Democratic party as being like that of the Catholic German Centre Party in 1933, when the Catholics and the Nazis formed an alliance against the communists, and the Catholics agreed to give the Nazis the support needed to pass the Enabling Act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers. (Later that year, and IMHO for the same reason, the Catholic Church itself signed the more-extensive Reichskonkordat with the Nazis.)
The main difference is that it was more justifiable for the Catholic Church to ally with the Nazis in 1933 than it is today for Democrats to ally with radical Marxists and neo-racists, because the Nazi party was the only party that could stop the communists, who openly planned to abolish Catholicism. The Democrat situation today is far different; the radical left is much smaller than the Democratic Party, and wouldn't vote Republican whether the Democrats allied with them or not. I think the Democratic Party would gain more votes than they would lose by ditching revolutionary leftists. And if not, they could still survive and thrive by conceding on some point that's more important to Republicans than to Democrats, like the Second Amendment. They are in no way threatened as a political party.
I agree that one-issue voting is usually dumb behavior. But I realized that liberalism really is the one issue to me. Gun-rights defenders say, "Give the people the right to own military rifles, and all the other rights will follow." That's how I think about liberalism. Call it my religion if you like. My allegiance to liberalism is greater than my allegiance to the United States.
I agree with you about liberalism, and let me just say that a lot of people near the center and even moderate left don't share the woke view.
What is your view on the Trumpistan right continuing to push election fraud conspiracies? To me this is a clear step away from democracy, even if they are more liberal than the far left woke. It's much worse than the far left, because so few people actually agree with that woke idiocy.
I want a liberal democracy, not an illiberal democracy like you get today in Hungary, Turkey, or Russia. And right now I think the Republicans under Trump are headed that way.
I am surprised to hear this, I don't recall any Democrats saying that Clinton actually won in 2016, but maybe I'm biased and wouldn't have heard it. Anyway, she did concede. So did Gore in 2000.
If Clinton or Gore did say this, I would repudiate it.
I mean, even if they are the same in kind they are not the same in degree. I find it interesting that so many on the right find it hard to criticize and repudiate Trump for this.
I don't know about you, but I'm against this behavior regardless of who does it. And now 70 % of Republicans believe the election was stolen, and that is directly connected to what he said in the runup and after it.
Tell me, which Democrat or other Republican, has
* Called for vote counting to stop before counting is complete
* Said that the election is rigged, before it even occurred.
* Called a state governor and asked him to find 11,000 votes.
* Pressured his vice president to throw out electoral votes for his opponent during certification.
* Filed dozens of frivolous lawsuits with no basis in fact and with no chance of winning.
* Refused to concede.
* Refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
* Did not attend the next president's inauguration.
* Tolerated and even encouraged violence at his rallies.
I can admit illiberal tends have been increasing for some time. But come on, this is a step function and an acceleration. I don't think this is even close.
> * Said that the election is rigged, before it even occurred.
Pelosi did that. I recall a BUNCH of Democrats claiming the 2020 election was rigged before it occurred - strategically laying groundwork so they'd have reason to challenge if they lost. This typically happens on BOTH sides. Remember the hullabaloo over the post office? That was an especially egregious example. So here's Pelosi basically saying the election is rigged before it occurred: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/16/903056927/pelosi-calls-back-lawmakers-to-vote-on-postal-service
Quote:
"Pelosi said President Trump was instituting a "campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters." She said DeJoy, a major donor to President Trump and Republican campaigns, is pushing to "degrade postal service, delay the mail, and — according to the Postal Service itself — threaten to deny the ability of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming elections in a timely fashion.""
The post office story was obvious FUD, a big ol' bucket of nonsense that would both (a) serve as pretext to lawsuits challenging the results, and (b) help redirect any BLAME for the results away from people we like to people we don't like ...assuming Democrats didn't like the outcome. Since Democrats DID like the election outcome they didn't need to play this card (and others like it) so naturally the matter was quickly forgotten, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
We had one lady, back in the SSC days, who was otherwise very pleasant and reasonable *but* completely, absolutely, 'here's a quote from a post online about something in a newspaper mentioning an unnamed source who worked in the company supplying pencils to the manager's third cousin' red-hot on "the Russians hacked the voting machines and switched the votes over to Trump because he was their guy".
Couldn't be talked out of it. The election was stolen and the votes 'given' to Trump.
As for your list of "tell me which", do you not remember the Faithless Electors' appeal? 😀 Oh, that one was beautiful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election
They wouldn't vote for Trump even if that was the pledged candidate, but they also wouldn't vote for Hillary so in the two-horse race that she was supposed to have won before ever a vote was cast, they managed to take away even more of her vote share.
"In the 2016 United States presidential election, ten members of the Electoral College voted or attempted to vote for a candidate different from the ones to whom they were pledged. Three of these votes were invalidated under the faithless elector laws of their respective states, and the elector either subsequently voted for the pledged candidate or was replaced by someone who did.
As a result of the seven successfully cast faithless votes, the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost five of her pledged electors while the Republican Party nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump, lost two. Three of the faithless electors voted for Colin Powell while John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received one vote. The defections fell well short of the number needed to change the result of the election; only two of the seven defected from the winner, whereas 37 were needed to defect in order to force a contingent election in Congress (a tally of less than 270).
On November 16, 2016, journalist Bill Lichtenstein published an article entitled, "The Way Out of Trumpland: Hail Mary Pass to Save the Nation" in the Huffington Post, detailing the plans by presidential elector Micheal Baca to seek to derail Trump's ascent to the presidency by convincing Democratic and Republican presidential electors to vote for a more moderate candidate on December 19, 2016, when the Electoral College voted. Lichtenstein's article soon went viral, and on December 5, 2016, several members of the electoral college, seven from the Democratic Party and one from the Republican Party, publicly stated their intention to vote for a candidate other than the pledged nominee at the Electoral College vote on December 19, 2016."
Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump an illegitimate president: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html
"“No, it doesn’t kill me because he knows he’s an illegitimate president,” she said. “I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”"
Jimmy Carter said that Trump was put into office by the Russians:
"In June, former president Jimmy Carter used similar language to diminish Trump’s presidency. Carter said that in his view Trump lost the 2016 election and was put in office by the Russians. Asked if he considered Trump to be illegitimate, Carter said, “Based on what I just said, which I can’t retract.”"
You're right that Donald Trump's behavior is worse than Hillary Clinton's. But that's how escalation works: each side does something more egregious than the other, in a spiral of death for democracy and liberty. The 2016 Democrats were in an earlier phase of the escalation than the 2020 Republicans, but they were not part of the solution. They were 100% part of the problem.
E. O. Wilson was a prolific author who won multiple Pulitzers (and was most recently known politically for his environmentalism), so the NYT can remember him for that (they presumably started writing his obituary years ago so they could quickly publish it the day after he died). The NYT has helped kick off some woke fixations, but it's not yet like a grad school requiring everyone to be far left. After all, they still employ Ross Douthat.
I love E.O. Wilson. His cancelling seems like 'just another brick in the wall'. (It happened long ago... See "Defenders of the Truth")
https://www.amazon.com/Defenders-Truth-Sociobiology-Ullica-Segerstrale/dp/0192862154
Hmm now out of print... ?
I'm not voting for T. I was thinking of changing my party affiliation to R.
But more likely independent.
I mean, I grew up in part on Scientific American, and that it's fallen into this unscientific pit is disturbing.
Then again, it's just one, rather minor, publication. Real science journalism will continue in other forums, and we should be careful to get too panicked over one symbolic loss.
I believe that *is* the scientific approach :)
Science journalism already in general is already diseased, this is just a particularly severe case.
Yes, it's always just one symbolic loss, just like it was "just weirdos on Tumblr" ten years ago.
Haha, but the slippery slope is a fallacy! Please stop noticing that it reliably predicts the future immediately.
^ this. Scientific American was to my knowledge one of the only options for accurate scientific reporting that wasn't reading the original papers.
On the other hand, Opinion pieces have always been trash everywhere, but it's still very disturbing
Yeah Scientific american was my go to journal for scientific news. I've almost stopped buying those kind of journals due to a lack of articles in topic I'm interested in (functional analysis, PDEs and fluids dynamics don't sell it seems) but I'm definitely not buying SA again.
If Biden declared Trump a domestic terrorist and had him assassinated by drone strike, would he have broken any laws?
My understanding based on Obama-era precedent is that:
* the President has total authority over the Disposition Matrix and may place anyone he wants on it
* this includes US citizens
* the War on Terror extends over the entire globe
Of course there are a million *political* reasons why he would never do this, but I'm curious if there are any *legal* ones.
He would have violated all the usual laws against murdering a US citizen on US soil.
Drone strikes against people, including US citizens, are legal under the 2001 AUMF, but that only applies to terrorists (or other combatants) associated with Al Qaeda or its allies or successors. Not to anyone who is called a "terrorist" or even anyone who actually is a terrorist. This has been very broadly interpreted over the years, but Trump is not in fact an ally of the people responsible for 9/11 so it is not in fact legal to drone-strike him under the 2001 AUMF. And nobody is going to believe Biden if he says "Trump is in league with Al Qaeda", so nobody is going to turn a blind eye to that murder.
Also, I'm pretty sure it's not legal to drone-strike someone on US soil so long as civil law is in place, so you'd need Congress to declare a state of insurrection or the like.
The United States is still technically at war, in a way that gives the United States Government about the same latitude to kill "Islamic terrorists" that it had to kill "Japanese soldiers" on 8 December 1941. Including innocent bystanders who are standing too close to Japanese soldiers, or American citizens who are fool enough to sign up with the Japanese. But it's not license to kill *anyone*.
We should probably do something about that "technically at war" thing, but good luck with that.
How can we be technically at war without Congress declaring war?
The War Powers Act of 1973 introduces the new term "Authorization for Use of Military Force", which unlocks all the traditional powers of a declaration of war but with a requirement for increased oversight. And the Constitution has never been taken to require that the government always use the same language in exercising its powers. If Congress can authorize the president to wage unlimited war with no further oversight, then Congress can authorize the president to wage limited war with some further oversight, and it can invent a new term for that purpose.
I dislike the weasel-wording and would prefer that limited war be called something like "Limited War" so that we are all clear on what we are doing, but that's not a legal or Constitutional requirement. And the Executive Branch has been operating under a legal AUMF since 2001.
I agree Biden isn't nuts enough to drone-strike Trump, but as far as I can tell, there's not actually any formal legal mechanism that prevents him from finding that Trump is an agent of Al Qaida and ordering his assassination. Someone please correct me if I am wrong--my understanding is that some people went to court to demand that the feds demonstrate that Alwaki was legitimately a target, and I think the court basically accepted that the administration didn't have to prove that to anyone.
The "formal legal mechanism" is the same one that prevented e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald from finding that JFK was a mass murderer who was about to kill everyone in Dealey Plaza and shooting him in lawful self-defense. Shooting people in self-defense was and is legal in Texas, if they are e.g. about to commit mass murder.
If a thing is legal if and only if X is true, and a person says "X is true!" then does that thing, but it is blatantly obvious that X is *not* true, then A: any law enforcement officer in the vicinity will arrest them for their crime in spite of their pious declaration of the truthiness of X, ditto the DA and judge and it will go to a jury, and also B: any law-abiding citizen asked to assist in that contingently-legal thing will say "you're in your own". It doesn't much matter whether the person in question is a nutty ex-marine or a president, and it doesn't require a specific process for prior determination of the truth-value of blatantly false claims.
If Biden says "Trump is an agent of Al Qaeda, and the US courts are no longer in operation so we can't just arrest him!" and orders a drone strike, responsible military officers will simply refuse to carry out the blatantly illegal order, and then congress will impeach Joe Biden. Quite possibly the Secret Service will politely but firmly remove him to a secure location in the interim without quite officially arresting him, same as they would if he e.g. grabbed a secret service agent's gun and started shooting into a crowd.
If all the safeguards are reactive rather than proactive and Biden is willing to sacrifice the rest of his term, I think he only has to convince Harris.
The pardon power should have been limited as part of the Twelfth Amendment, but here we are.
In the US, what the law says is whatever the Supreme Court says the law says, and the Supreme Court has been known to interpret the exact wording of the law to reflect their preferred outcome. Which is to say that in extreme cases, politics will always override law.
I would like to think that even a Sotomayor can see that Presidents murdering domestic political opponents by drone strike is not a desirable outcome and would find a way to rule against it regardless of what the actual text of the relevant laws say.
Based on a 2014 documentary, I'm pretty sure if he does this Captain America shows up and knocks the drones out of the sky.
Right, but would Captain America be arrested afterward?
Only if he drops a meteor on a third world country. (... or something? I remember basically nothing of Age of Ultron)
Does anyone here have a strong interest in or opinion on riverine or littoral naval warfare and economic activity? I'm doing a thing where I'd like to have at least a somewhat detailed and accurate picture of this since it is a major part of the experience. Given where I'm from I wanted to have a geography that had an excessive amount of river/lake/delta/inner sea related area.
Rivers and lakes are not uniform. The specific nature of the rivers has huge effects. Some rivers are almost completely unusuable for economic purposes in which case they basically only serve as barriers. Others are easy to navigate. Some flood regularly and some never do. Some have regular tributaries others have irregular wadis... plus there's things like flooding coasts too. And some have both! It's all dependent and you can invent it for fiction or research the real thing for a real river.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-cities-have-curves/ On the economic side of waterways. (Tl;Dr: Before the railways, it was many times harder to move cargo around on land than it is on a boat. For bulk goods like grain, this significantly increases the distance you can move it before it becomes uneconomical)
Huh I missed this somehow. I read most of that blog when looking for info on another topic.
navalgazing.net did a series on riverine warfare:
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-North-America
I expected to get this but I couldn't remember the name. This is Bean right? Hey he even mentions the building of the Eads Bridge.
The rest of that series, since it may not be obvious:
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-Africa
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-South-America
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-China-Part-1
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-China-Part-2
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-China-Part-3
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-Europe
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-Southeast-Asia-Part-1
https://www.navalgazing.net/Riverine-Warfare-Southeast-Asia-Part-2
How can I, for the least expenditure of money, negate my lifetime's carbon footprint up to this point in my life? How do I even calculate what my footprint has been?
I was thinking of donating money to a land trust to buy forests or wetlands somewhere in the Third World for preservation. Of course, it only accomplishes my goal if the land was 100% sure to be bulldozed and paved over otherwise, which I'm not sure I could prove would have been the case.
Vote for politicians who will push for/allow nuclear energy.
Exactly. Regarding your carbon footprint: don't negate, mitigate!
Molten Salt Reactors are particularly good[1], but like all reactors, they are very hard to build in the face of public opposition, and current regulations are a difficult bar to clear[2]. But if construction is approved, they should be substantially less expensive (per MW) than traditional reactors.[3] So, gently advocate for them so that the cost impacts of the antinuclear fever of the 70s/80s[4] is not repeated. I assume various difficult regulations are still in effect, but I'm hoping that in an environment where people are less afraid of the technology, maybe the regulations can be done more prudently, much as we regulate airplanes.
[1] https://medium.com/big-picture/8-reasons-to-like-the-new-nukes-3bc834b5d14c
[2] https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
[3] https://youtu.be/TvXcoSdXYlk?t=2366
[4] http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
Or, if that's not your thing, research the economics of Enhanced Geothermal Systems and report back to me, because I haven't seen a solid analysis of that yet.
What's the expected impact of one person's vote?
About the same as one person trying to limit their own lifetime carbon emissions, probably.
Why bother? Work out how much money you are willing and able to donate, and donate that to whatever the highest impact conservation foundation you can find. The fact that you have 'offset' your 'carbon footprint' is meaningless.
Considered to be effective charities in this space:
- Clean-Air Task Force
- The ITIF's clean energy think-tank (https://lets-fund.org/clean-energy)
- Maybe the Coalition for Rainforest Nations?
I've done some napkin math for C02. The US emits 5 billion tons over 327 million people, so thats 15 tons/per person/per year. So let's say you are 25, thats around 400 tons. CATF claims to avoid a ton of CO2 for a measly $1.26. So you could theoretically offset your entire life's CO2 up to this point for about ~$500. Thats not infinite scalable, something like carbon removal could be but is closer to $100/ton.
Maine won't even let people build power lines to transmit hydro power.
Why natural gas pipelines? Are they a net positive in terms of climate change?
At the present margin, yes. In the hypothetical future where we've retired every coal-fired power plant and come up with some clever way of getting peaking and overnight power out of solar and wind, that will be different, but this is a classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.
I think it would be worth making that nuance clearer in your top line recommendation. Writing to your leaders advocating natural gas pipelines *in preference to coal*, so as not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, seems very different to just advocating natural gas pipelines without qualification.
Specifically, natural gas emits about half as much CO2 as coal, and it is credited with recent reductions in US CO2 emissions.
It also causes a lot fewer deaths than coal via other pollutants, though it's still much worse than nuclear or renewables: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Yes, in that they are most frequently used to supplant coal-fired energy, which is substantially dirtier.
From Zvi’s recent covid post:
> I’m going to tentatively put my probability that China keeps Omicron contained at 40%, but I don’t have great knowledge about many details that could update that, including the opinions of others who have thought about it. So I would update quickly, especially if someone offered to wager on either side.
This virtuous disclaimer serves a function that feels missing to me in “report my probabilities and later check if they were calibrated”— how confident are you in this prediction?
One fun and badass fix would be: offer both sides of a bet! "I'll bet right now for at 35% implied and against at 45%" is a lot different than the same @5% and @95%. You can still update if you get a lot of interest but if you don't bet at least one taker that's bad form and people should consider your bullshit called, and take you less seriously.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/omicron-post-13-outlook
That's how sports-betting odds work nowadays in the U.S. market. The sports-betting places offer something like, "Cubs (+150) vs Giants (-180)". That means that if you bet on the Cubs to win that day's game you have to risk $150 to win $100, whereas if you bet on the Giants you risk $100 to try to win $180.
At least for the casino near me (Pennsylvania) and I'm pretty sure for all US casinos, you have the notation reversed. "Cubs (+150)" means that they are the underdog, and if you bet $100 on the Cubs, your payout would be $250 (your original $100 back +$150). "Giants (-$180) means they are favored and so you would have to risk $180 just to get $100 in additional winnings.
Whoops, you're right of course. Clearly my sports-betting days are long past....
Right! And those get pushed around and become more accurate as people make bets and it acts as a prediction market.
But as a forecaster you could just unilaterally offer both sides, and if people believe you’d actually take either bet, then your forecast and implied confidence convey a lot more information. (And presumably if this became a norm for people to do, it would be easy to bootstrap actual markets on top of them)
Did we ever figure out what percent of COVID cases are asymptomatic? Seems like something pretty important and I remember a ton of speculation back in 2020, but discussion seems to have died down about that.
Also, is there a different symptomatic/asymptomatic rate for different variants? A priori I would guess that this ratio is directly related to viral strength (so all variants' ratios would be the same, except Omicron, which would have relatively kore asymptomatic cases). I know very little about this, though.
Well, 1. there was the Heinsberg-Study by Streeck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_Case-Cluster-Study . Among many other things, it actually examined the blood of a representative number of people from an early "hot-spot" for covid-traces (antibodies), compared that to the deaths - and came up with O,36% inf.-fatality rate for the general (German) population. Some claim it undercounted the deaths - but still the results suggests many more people get infected than tested "positive". (Just multiply the C-deaths by 250 or so and you kinda get an idea of the number of all infected, tested or not. Higher multiplier in younger populations. Right? Anyway, that was the first-gen.-Covid19 and early treatment.)
2. Exactly what is "asymptomatic"? ;) I learned by now: "mild" just means: not spent time in a hospital. Two weeks knocked-out at home with your wife (nurse) feeding you iv - that is "mild", then. Asymptomatic: From "no symptoms" to "You did not go to the doc to get a prescription, just took paracetamol - cuz of all those heavy-cold-symptoms". more research needed + more honest definitions 3. (Un)related rant: The vaccine is praised as "sehr gut verträglich" ("very well tolerated"). Me and all family over 12 yrs. boostered. Pain and days of suffering (sister: for weeks + distorted taste. one cousin: stroke). Very very unlike my flu-shots or any other shot me/we ever got. Yellow fever shot is said to be "not very well tolerated", i.e. killing relatively often. Lucky us. Could I pls pay for my vacc. and get half the dosage!?! (and get it before FDA AMA approval? If Derek Lowe says, it looks ok, I am fine.) Please!
I remember hearing murmurs about how Covid vaccine doses are too large but the FDA doesn't allow changing the dose size without massive studies, and how a study showed that 3 tiny doses worked as well as 2 standard (large) doses. Does anyone have links to back up my recollection?
I don't think it's knowable. Or at least it depends heavily on what you mean by a "Covid case".
Because this is what happens when a vaccine protects you from infection: The virus *does* enter your body and starts multiplying. But since your immune system is prepared for that, it attacks the viruses quickly, and has them all killed after some hours or days.
The definition question then is: Were you an asymptomatic Covid case while you had live Covid viruses in you?
If so, there are tons of asymptomatic cases. If not, we have a tricky "where do you draw the line" question.
The thing people are generally concerned about is asymptomatic spread, so that seems like an obvious dividing line: did the virus multiply enough that you could have plausibly passed it on to someone else?
(Not that I know how you could measure that line reliably.)
The most important question right now is: did you get enough of a case to be immune to it in the near future? Right now it looks like omicron won't go away until most people have had a case, so understanding whether the asymptomatic rate is 10% or 90% makes a huge difference to how many serious cases we can expect, as well as your own personal chance of being symptomatic.
Personally I've had mild annoying symptoms (sore throat, fatigue, sensitive skin) for a few days but I tested negative on a RAT. If I'm lucky then I've currently got an undetectable-by-RAT level infection. If I'm unlucky then I've got something else and omicron still lies in my future.
At least with pre-Omicron COVID, there was very little asymptomatic (as opposed to presymptomatic) spread. If the virus got enough of a foothold to start spreading to other people, it was going to give you a runny nose and a fever or whatnot - but, crucially, not in any particular order. Still, as LarsP notes, the question is undefinable because we can detect the presence of the virus at levels that will cause neither symptoms nor spread and say "that's a COVID case". Probably everybody on Earth has by now inhaled at least *one* SARS CoV-2 virus that didn't immediately die, so what counts as a "case"?
Omicron works differently, and may have significant asymptomatic spread. But it's too early to put a number on that,
I was listening to Lex Fridman talk with Jay Bhattacharya today. https://lexfridman.com/jay-bhattacharya/ He said they were doing antibody measurements in ?March or May of 2020 (I'd have to listen again.) for two communities in California. IIRC they found a death rate of ~0.2% and a lot of unreported cases. Of which I think he said 30-40% were asymptomatic.
Jay B. is also a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration. https://gbdeclaration.org/
(Oh he also had a nice numeric... which I'll probably get wrong, the CFR (case fatality rate) for a 50 year old is about 0.2% and you should double that number for every 7 years over 50 and half it for every 7 years under 50. His point, we need to protect old people from the virus, the young not really so much. )
Looking at covid results for people admitted to hospitals for problems clearly unrelated to covid seems like a fairly decent way to figure out what fraction of people in the hospital's region are covid positive. You could, for instance, look at results for people coming to the ER because of injuries + people in for scheduled surgeries + women there to give birth. Could possibly also figure out what fraction of positives are asymptomatic.
Clever! I'm betting none of that data is public, though, so the study would have to be done by someone with access....
I'm sure plenty of work has been done on this. Super-spreader events early in an outbreak are a good source of data, since you have a large number of people infected at the same time, and the motivation to actually test them all regardless of symptoms.
I remember this study from early in the Omicron outbreak https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2021.26.50.2101147
At a super-spreader Christmas party in Norway which infected 81 out of 110 attendees, the asymptomatic rate was very low indeed, just one out of the 81 cases was totally asymptomatic.
Mind you, two thirds of the _non_-infected attendees also reported symptoms, so the base rate of minor reported symptoms is apparently pretty darn high.
I did notice today a news report that claimed 40% of Omicron cases identified at hospitals were for patients who had been admitted for other ailments -- so that skews the algorithm.
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I would guess the rate of asymptomatic cases has gone up over time. I've Just read Zvi's latest post on Omicron and I think he quotes figures of 80-90% asymptomatic (in the US, at least)
I was wondering where that percentage came from, and how they arrived at it.
Should gain-of-function research on contagious diseases be considered a crime against humanity? What are the benefits that offset the current pandemic?
Why does it need to be a crime? People don't do GoF research for fun; people do it because it's their job, ultimately paid for by the taxpayer in most cases. Prohibit the use of public money for GoF and the rresearch stops.
There are other avenues to stop this without bringing criminal law to bear, such as revoking BSL certification and limiting access to dna printer reagents.
The question wasn't "crime," though some of the answers were. The question was "crime against humanity." The former is not typically a question of foreign policy. The second is. And that means that warfare is a policy option. That could vary from robust to subtle -- cruise missile strikes to SEAL incursions, say. So one of the implicit questions is whether a nation-state's continued support for gain-of-function research should receive attention similar to massing troops along a neighbor's border, conducting long-range missile tests, or making fuel for nuclear weapons.
[late edit] Also, the answers that say, "no, just a crime" implicitly take those options off the table, since we don't typically send the Navy to deal with criminals (with the major exception of pirates -- the shores of Tripoli and all that).
The main benefit: for virologists as a rich source of publishable research. See the excellent essay "publish and perish" (Scott likes that substack) https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/publish-and-perish
Should it be banned? As Scott Sumners wrote it should be done in labs far, far away from settlements - if at all. With strict&long quarantine rules. Btw: "GoF" is a tricky word, often used to deny GoF ("Wuhan" did not intend "gain", they were just fooling around, err, doing research).
I am in no way an expect here, but here's what I think:
The one potential benefit of gain-of-function research would be preemptive vaccine development. Suppose we had a collection of vaccines for 1000 potential pandemics on hand, so next time there's a weird new disease, we can just see if we already have a vaccine in our stockpile.
Except that's not going to happen. Creating a new vaccine isn't the time-consuming part: it can take as little as 2 days. Moderna's vaccine was designed by Jan 13, 2020, more than two weeks before the WHO had acknowledged that Covid transmits between people. What matters is how long it takes to get the vaccine approved, manufactured, and distributed. I don't think that gain-of-function is involved on these ends.
Another potential ¿benefit? is biological weapons research, but that's definitely not happening because it's illegal.
So no, I don't know of any benefits of gain-of-function research that could offset even a 10% chance of causing the current pandemic.
There might be some benefits that I don't know about, and I would be interested in hearing a counterargument. But even then, we shouldn't be doing it in major population centers. Might I suggest Antarctica? There's plenty of room away from the glaciologists and penguinologists. Or maybe on a ship at sea, with screening and quarantining before returning to society.
That doesn't make sense. Any harmful virus you create in a lab is going to be different than whatever nature would have produced naturally, so a vaccine for a lab-made virus is never going to be useful against any naturally-occurring virus.
I can imagine a lab sampling all the viruses going around, trying to predict small mutations that might be dangerous, and creating vaccines for those just in case nature produces them ... but I very much doubt that a lab could predict which *small tweaks* would be *dangerous*. I imagine in rare cases they could find small tweaks that allow a non-human virus to cross over to humans, or *large changes* that are dangerous (e.g. inserting a part of Ebola), but I strongly doubt it's possible to predict *small mutations* to a natural virus that would make it *dangerous*.
Reckless endangerment is a crime, but as Jackson Paul points out, it's not a crime against humanity. It's not even a particularly serious crime if you get lucky and nobody gets hurt. That's not something we want to change, on "hard cases make bad law" grounds.
What is commonly meant as "gain of function research" probably *should* be considered reckless endangerment if it's not done in the sort of laboratory you normally only see in science fiction movies. What matters is not whether we call it the Super Duper Worst Crime Ever, what matters is whether we reliably inform scientists that they will spend a year in jail if they do it. Making it the Super Duper Worst Crime Ever, makes it harder to build a consensus for that.
The definitions of reckless endangerment were developed when the worst thing that could happen was localized to a town at most. Suppose that all of America’s nuclear missiles could be launched literally with a single button in a black briefcase. I don’t think I would consider a year in prison being an appropriate punishment when the guy designated to carry it opens it up, throws rocks at the button, and misses. What’s wrong with my analogy? It feels closer than driving a car at 100 mph with your eyes closed.
Because you do want to distinguish between a guy who makes a stupid mistake, and a guy who commits deliberate mass murder.
*Particularly* if you're dealing with a guy who you think might be able to kill a few billion people if they put their mind to it. Otherwise, once they make the stupid mistake (and people will always make stupid mistakes), then their best bet is probably to pull the trigger on "let's see if I can kill a few billion people" because the resulting collapse of civilization will make it harder to conduct a global manhunt.
Or they might just try to cover it up, if they think they can manage a coverup. In which case, they probably *can* cover it up, at least at the plausible-deniability level, and if you don't want them doing that then you want the penalty for negligence + attempted coverup to be substantially greater than the penalty for negligence.
Illegal, in many cases, yes; crime against humanity, no.
There are plenty of bad things which should be banned, but which don’t count as a “crime against humanity” a term which should be reserved for the worst crimes, ones which not only did a lot of harm, but which were “intended” to harm humanity as such. Anyway, I think executing (since that is the usual punishment for crimes against humanity) some scientist because they wanted to slightly alter the DNA of a virus in a way which could make it more infectious seems like overkill.
But my phrasing nit-picking aside, “gain of function” is such a broad category that I don’t think it makes sense to legally treat it the same. For instance, back in 2014 the US banned most gain of function research into coronaviruses, without a blanket ban on gain of function research. I think that any debate around the idea should focus specially on what types of GOF research have intolerable risks, and which ones produces sufficient gains that the danger is worthwhile.
So are your arguments (a) crime against humanity is too much, but illegal is OK and (b) even then only for selected contagions? If that’s a fair summary, it seems like there is some cost-benefit always is going on the background. What’s the benefit? What’s the useful part of gain-of-function research that we want to allow?
technically, defininb "gain of function" may be harder than ir seems: tge mRNA vaccines are composed of an adenovirus vector to whose mRNA a sequnce has been addes, enabling a new function. If you are not careful in the definitions, you risk banning the construction of new mRNA vaccines (or other technologies) because it is so hard to define the boundary between obvuously helpful and probably dubious manipulations.
First of all, what kind of anarchist are you if you support empowering an international court system with world sovereignty? :)
But I agree with your point that gain of function research should be eliminated or at least very closely monitored. In grad school I worked with virologists (including some working on gain of function research with H5N1 flu that was the subject of a temporary moratorium) and I would have taken the other side, but now I am not in a virology world and I have become skeptical of the benefits.
Your first paragraph forced me to check into the local burn center.
😉
This guy here claims that omicron is most probably a lab leak, and so was the original covid. By implication, gain-of-function would be very much a crime against humanity.
Not a biologist here, anyone care to assess the quality of the evidence?
https://bprice.substack.com/p/lab-leak-20
Omicron worked out rather well by having a lower fatality rate and higher transmissibility so that it quickly spread and gave more people resistance. If it's a lab leak, call it a "happy accident".
Reads like a Creationist argument for the existence of God, basically just a long list of "isn't this just TOO incredible a coincidence to believe?" without any pre-existing sound empirical basis for estimating how probable any of these things actually are.
That's completely sound Bayesian reasoning.
Imagine: The Wuhan lab develops a very infectious but not at all deadly COVID variant for it to outcompete all other variants and stop the pandemic. And then they wait until the Greek letters get to Xi to release it so Xi saves the world :-)
It seems almost plausible that exactly that happened, but then the variant-meisters, fearful of offending Chairman Xi, skipped over the Greek letter that might remind us of him, thus shooting themselves in both feet.
This is my new favorite omicron conspiracy theory.
Ξ/习 aside, this is just the kind of thing we would expect them to do behind our backs, sneering at the West’s ethical inflexibility that allows China to make progress in areas others refuse to consider.
...but they forget to inform the WHO about this scheme, which decides that announcing a "Xi variant" of the coronavirus would be kinda awkward, and skip ahead to "Omicron" instead.
The Earth's northern hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun from c. September 21 through the new year until c. March 21. The decreased density of the solar radiation, and shorter time of sun exposure, causes winter. The maximum tilt away from the Sun is defined as the Winter Solstice.
And conversely, the Earth's northern hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun from c. March 21 until c. September 21. The increased density of the solar radiation, and longer time of sun exposure, causes summer. The maximum tilt away toward the Sun is the Summer Solstice.
Mitigating that, though I don't know to what extent, is that the Earth's closest annual approach to the Sun (perihelion) happens in January, typically the coldest part of the (northern hemisphere) winter. Conversely, the Earth is farthest away from the Sun in July (aphelion), which should, in the northern hemisphere, mitigate or moderate the effects of the Earth's tilt somewhat.
But, I (as someone living at c. 50 N) wonder then, whether the seasons are more extreme in the southern hemisphere, where these effects are additive rather than subtractive.
It seems that the distance between perihelion and aphelion (147M km vs. 154M km) is significant enough that there should be a measurable effect.
Thoughts on this from the community? Thanks, just idly curious.
You can just 'do the math'. The distance part is easy. Radiation goes as 1/D^2, where D is the earth to sun distance. for small changes the square is about 2 times the difference so
2*7/150 about 10%. (digs out his calculator before posting... ) the angle thing is much bigger. For me (43 N) just length of day changes by about a factor of three... The angle effect is something like the sine of the angle. (with 90 degrees right over head) so for me Sin(43+23) = 0.91 in the summer and Sin(43-23) = 0.34 in the winter. Almost another factor of 3. It will be bigger for you latitude.
George, nice! I just worked this out last night (for 50 latitude) and then saw your post here.
Yes, the angle thing is huge. In Grade 8 our science teacher showed us an old flickery black and white British film with a happy eccentric old scientist talking about spraying toast with a butter gun, and how much less butter you got as you angled the toast away from perpendicular to the butter spray.
You're exactly right about the sine of the angle. Here at 50 degrees N (although S would be equally valid), at the equinoxes the sun's rays hit at 40 degrees off perpendicular at the equinoxes. Defining perpendicular to the sun's rays as as solar intensity of 1.000, and parallel to the sun's rays as 0.000, 40 degrees yields 0.642.
At the winter solstice, 40 - 23.5 = 16.5 degrees for a solar intensity of 0.284.
At the summer solstice, 40 + 23.5 = 63.5 degrees for a solar intensity of 0.895.
That's a ratio of 3.15:1!
I'll use your figure of 10% maximum difference between perihelion and aphelion. So let's say 5% on either side of the equinoxes (which correspond reasonably well to the halfway between the perihelion and aphelion distances).
So, from the above calculations, let's say solar intensity is 0.284 at the winter solstice, assuming average solar distance. But in reality, in the N hemisphere it would be 0.284 + 5% = 0.284 + 0.014 = 0.298, and in the S hemisphere it would be 0.284 - 5% = 0.270.
Repeat for the summer solstice:
N hemisphere: 0.895 - 0.09 = 0.805
S hemisphere: 0.895 + 0.09 = 0.985
Ratio of summer solstice to winter solstice solar radiation:
N hemisphere: 0.805/0.298 = 2.70
S hemisphere: 0.985/0.270 = 3.65
It does seem that, all other things being equal (which of course they're not), seasons in the S hemisphere would be significantly more severe than in the N.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Orbital_eccentricity Other effects are more important, even when the Earth's orbit is more eccentric than it is right now. (Jupiter pulls it around a bit)
It works that way on Mars. Mars' orbit is more elliptical than ours, making southern seasons more extreme than northern ones. Mars' orbit is also elliptical enough to make the seasons of unequal length.
I think that local effects swamp this minor effect. Melbourne (37S) has a very different climate to San Francisco (37N), but then again San Francisco has a very different climate to Washington DC, Athens, or Tokyo, which are also all at roughly 37 N... and that's just looking at sea level.
On the other hand, if the sun is meaningfully brighter in summer it might explain why Australia and New Zealand have the world's highest skin cancer rates. (On the other hand, the ozone layer is supposedly thinner over the southern hemisphere).
Ozone hole is most of it. You burn much faster in Melbourne than you do farther north, despite the sunlight obviously being stronger closer to the tropics, because the ozone hole is centred roughly over the South pole. The effect is also noticeably less severe these days than it was when I was a kid, since the ozone hole has been healing over time (the problematic chemicals having been banned in the 80s, and the relevant atmospheric systems having about 20 years of lag to them, IIRC)
Seasons are less extreme in the southern hemisphere. The factor you mention works towards them being more severe, but the greater percentage of sea vs land in the southern hemisphere is more significant.
Agreed, there are many confounding factors - I suppose I'm really wondering what the difference in temperature would be if the northern hemisphere's winter coincided with the aphelion rather than the perihelion. We experienced -35 C a few days ago, not much past the perihelion; would it have been -35.1 at aphelion? -37? -40? Pure speculation on my part.
Possibly OT:
One technical annoyance about reading comments on substack (as opposed to e.g. reddit) is the collapse subthread behaviour.
On reddit, if you collapse a subthread, you will automatically be scrolled to the item below whatever you collapsed. On substack, if you collapse a thread, the length of the page will change (obviously), but your scroll position (relative to the page start) will not.
Say you are reading thread number n, and after some messages (scrolling down k pixels), you decide to skip the rest and click collapse. Instead of thread n+1 being visible, you will view whatever is at (approximately) thread n+1 plus k pixels. You might end up deep in the discussion of n+1, or at n+3, or whatever. Practically, this means I am less likely to read more than one or two screenfuls into a thread I am likely to collapse eventually.
Does anyone else here observe that behaviour? If so, does anyone prefer that to the reddit-style "scroll to next item" behaviour? Has anyone bugged substack about this yet?
I think the issue is that you can't collapse a reddit thread from inside of it. You *have* to be at the top, because that's the only place the UI controller is.
That's true in *old* reddit; the new reddit layout lets you click a line to the side to collapse, similar to substack's collapse comment UI.
Yeah, but old reddit is, to many people including me, the only usable version, so it's as good as true of all reddit.
This bugs me, but much worse is the fact that if I refresh the page for any reason - most infuriatingly, if I accidentally click on someone's name and have to go back - it expands all the subthreads I had collapsed and completely loses my place!
Also experience the same behavior, and agree that it's not optimal.
I agree entirely. This a constant source of annoyance, and I am astonished that it hasn't been fixed -- it wouldn't be difficult.
+1. I usually scroll up to the top-level comment before collapsing, as a workaround, but it's annoying that I have to do this.
There’s too much incivility here, and I think the amount is increasing. I would say that we should do something about it, except that “we” are not in a position to do much, because we are thinking, feeling and posting in a Scottocracy. I am pretty OK with that set-up, but believe it is time for people to prod Scott to take some action to curb the incivility. It is damaging the forum.
Scott, recently, in a discussion of somebody’s rude post about his *Don’t Look Up* review: “The combination of insulting and wrong gets you banned.” Well, but posts don’t really sort into a box with 4 compartments identified by rude vs polite and right vs.wrong. Rudeness/courteousness and rightness/wrongness are both dimensions along which comments can vary, so what we actually got here is a Cartesian communication space, with 2 axes. Now what? Even if we ban the entirety of Quadrant III, rightness less than 0, courteousness less than 0, how do we make decisions about points in the rest of the space? Is everything in the other quadrants acceptable? If somebody savagely attacks somebody else, but makes a single halfway decent point while doing so, is that OK? Or is there a case for banning that fucker (or at least deleting his post)?
Even if we came up with a formula spelling out what ratio of rightness to rudeness makes a post acceptable it wouldn’t really be useful, because who would want to spend their time making the judgment calls about whether somebody’s cleverness is sparkles brightly enough to make their rudeness tolerable? Surely not Scott, and I’m guessing not you either, reader. So I’m proposing an easy-to-implement approach: Let’s ban primitive verbal abuse, hereafter called PVA.
Here is a specimen. It’s a close cousin of an actual post made here recently, altered enough to obscure its origin:
“For fuck’s sake, screw your head on straight you vengeful heartless lunatic.”
The comment qualifies as PVA because (1) its main intent is clearly to distress the recipient and (2) it has very little substantive content.
The great thing about feature 2 is that it frees the mod from Cartesian considerations. There is no need to consider the rightness-wrongness dimension when adjudicating the case against posts like this one, because it has so little substantive content that it extrudes barely at all into the right/wrong dimension. PVA is heavy on words that are meaningful if used literally, but are being used in a way that has very little meaning beyond “should be despised.” It is impossible to make a good case that someone is a moron, a lunatic, heartless, a brat or a piece of shit, unless you are using one of these terms literally. (And if anyone here identifies a post made by an ACTUAL BLOB OF FECES, I fully support their calling out the poster, even in ALL CAPS.)
In my PVA specimen there is only one word that means anything: *vengeful*. But as it’s used here, it too has very little meaning beyond *despicable*. It would certainly be possible to make a case that somebody’s post is vengeful — though I think you’d have to write a long, smart paragraph to make the case that the post in question is an exercise in revenge, rather than, say, an effective takedown of somebody else’s idea. But the specimen’s author isn’t saying the target’s post was vengeful, he’s saying the target is a vengeful person — and to make a case for that, you’d have to write a whole New Yorker length article.
The incivility on this forum is destructive, because incivility breeds more incivility. Nobody is at their best when rudely attacked. Some will fire back with more of the same, and even people with the restraint not to do so are likely to become more irritable. And when people whose habitual style is incivility read ACX and notice a fair amount of that stuff here, they’ll see our forum as fun place to hang out. And all that goes double for PVA. I have received some PVA comments here, and it felt sort of like having someone spit in my face. It was startlingly unpleasant, and in the aftermath I could feel myself becoming temporarily dumber, meaner and more impulsive.
So I’m proposing that this forum implement some simple system for reporting PVA. How about a *Report* button under each post? I have 2 practical suggestions for making the system as simple and effective.
-Scott, you could probably hire a grad student to identify and deal with unacceptable incivility, following standards you spell out. If all you’re after is PVA, the task would be especially easy. I’m sure there are plenty of grad students who would see the job as WAY better than being a TA. (In my town, they now call themselves TF’s — “Totally Fuckeds.”)
-Remove unacceptable posts, rather than leaving them up with *(banned)* by the poster’s name. That way, you are punishing the poster by removing his turd from the limelight, and also sparing everyone else the unpleasantness of stepping in it.
The old SSC rule (probably still implicitly followed here) was "make sure you are at least 2 out of true, kind, and necessary."
So that's why "wrong and insulting" gets the hammer.
I've always been confused by the "necessary" part. Is it *ever* necessary to write a comment?
Well, sometimes someone on the Internet is wrong.
Yeah, agree. Seems like the right question to ask would be something like, does making this comment serve a worthwhile goal? Many but of course not all comments serve a worthwhile goal. A necessary comment would serve an absolutely crucial goal (I'm finding it kinda hard to think of what one would be, though -- can you?)
Yeah, I read Scott's post about 2 out of 3 after somebody linked it, and I think it's a fine guideline. In fact I was actually pretty moved to see the idea articulated. But in practice, any guideline with that much nuance to it is going to be a real pain to enforce, because to do so somebody has to make judgment calls about posts’ rightness, kindness and necessity. At present, I don't think anybody is even trying to make these judgment calls. Scott doesn't have time to read through every thread and the rest of us don't have a *report* button. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of self-policing within the threads. That’s why in my post I suggested starting with a plan for capturing the low-hanging turds: eliminate PVA, primitive verbal abuse.
A ban on PVA seems perfectly consistent with Scott’s 2 out of 3 rule. In fact, I’d say most PVA scores 0 out of 3. It is certainly not kind. It is not right, because a stream of generic insults or a blast of sarcastic mockery does not have enough substance to it to even be judged as correct or incorrect. And as for being necessary — well, you’d have to consider what task the person emitting a piece of PVA is trying to accomplish, and then whether PVA is necessary to accomplish it. In the most favorable case, the PVA-spewer is trying to silence someone whose presence is so unpleasant & destructive that it’s necessary for the good of the forum to silence them. Even in that situation, though, I doubt that PVA is likely to be the best way to silence somebody like that. Seems more likely that such a target would fire back with more PVA, and then the rest of the forum has to put up with the presence of 2 people squatting in separate ditches hurling pieces of fire and shit at each other.
Banning PVA is at least a start, and while there is not a great deal of it on here, the amount isn’t trivial either, and a little goes a long way. I have been been hit by it myself at least 3 times in the last 2 months, and I probably am less likely to draw that kind of attack than many, because I’m not particularly irritable or confrontational, and I’m not a high-volume poster. As I wrote in my original post, I found being hit with PVA exceptionally unpleasant, and while I may be a bit more thin-skinned than average, I’m not all *that* thin-skinned. If I were, I wouldn’t be posting this!
But the incident that mostly motivated me to raise the civility issue here was some comments made to someone else, a person whose username I had not seen before and have not seen since. The person put up a brief post, part of which was expressing a lot of slightly naive-sounding pleasure at being on the sub, and the rest of which was incoherent. I don't mean that the rest was a mass of typos, or that it was silly and illogical — I mean it was literally incoherent. Somebody jumped right on with a comment that what the person had said made no sense. (OK, so right, not kind, and not necessary). I realize that telling the person they’d made no sense is not savage, and doesn’t even qualify as PVA, but the response really got under my skin, because there are people I am close to who have thought disorders, and are sometimes incoherent. So I posted suggested that it would have worked just as well to say something like, “I can’t understand what you are getting at”. And then one or 2 people came back at me with stuff along the lines of, naw, the guy deserves to be called out for his nonsense. And I’m thinking, here on a forum where people discuss how te be really effective at improving the quality of life on earth, there’s a little group of people throwing barbs at somebody friendly who genuinely sounds impaired, and nobody but me is even protesting.
Scott is our Robespierre, which is fine because there are lots of substacks.
But you're right that the lack of a report button is crazy. Even if it didn't do anything on the backend except make an entry in an httpd log, implement it now in the UI to scare the trolls and get the details working later.
I may have some motivated reasoning going on here, since I'm currently tussling with a mod on another site over this very matter of incivility and what gets you a ban and what is permissible.
I don't really want us to go the route of creating formulas to measure exact degrees of incivility (would we be measuring that in units of billingsgate?) because that immediately invites rules-lawyering and testing how far up to the line you can get before you are judged to have stepped over.
I don't want the "fuck you you stupid fucking bastarding fuck" kind of exchanges, but I also think it is important that there should be room for robust challenges, passionate debate, and genuine warmth of feeling. Not to encourage anger or combativeness, but at times there is a tendency for us to go very much 'theoretical, hypothetical, thought experiment' and then something appalling slips by because it's just couched in that strain of rhetoric so it's a sugared pill we easily swallow.
Someone getting pricked by it and yelling "wait a god damn minute!" is a good wake-up call.
Besides, I am content with the Reign of Terror moderation policy as it stands 😀
This seems like a civil forum to me. The wrath of god occasionally comes down on someone, which I think depends on what parts god is reading. But given god's limited time some random act of wrath may be the best policy.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/
I mostly agree that an active hand against uncivil content is a good thing, and would not mind Scott channeling his inner Robespierre more often, but I don’t think that your solution really would work. First, it doesn’t have any bearing on comments which do make substantive points, and second because substance is also a scale, so now you have a Cartesian plane with civil/uncivil as one axis and substantive/unsubstantive as the other, and are basically back at the drawing board. You’ve replaced one standard with a slightly more complicated standard. While I would enjoy a moderation system like “let x be a comment’s correctness from 0-10, let y be a comment’s civility from 0-10, and z be a comment’s substantivity from 0-10, comments will be banned if either x + y + z < 12, or if Min(x,y,z) < 3” its probably easier to stick with the status quo and just have Scott ban anyone who annoys him.
Also, I like that you can still see banned comments, since it allows people to see what happened, and makes Scott look less arbitrary.
Can anyone steelman a notion about regression for IQ regression for mean from POV of person like Kevin Bird who believe that high heritabilities from twins studies are confounded (PGS are giving more population stratification, etc etc) and true genetic heritability is low? Why would couples of 160 IQ produce children with 130 IQ but not children with 160 IQ? The answer if easy if you accept genetic explanation. And theirs is?
Let me clarify. Are you saying that if genetic heritability of intelligence is high then we should expect two IQ 160 parents to produce IQ 130 children, but if genetic heritability is low then we should expect two IQ 160 parents to produce IQ 160 children?
I don't see how this is the case, it seems to me that reversion to the mean should win either way.
Some anti-eugenics people also used the argument that children of notable scientists are rarely notable scientists but children of good circus performers are. Doesn't regress as fast. Circus performing is apparently more dependant not on talent but on desire to invest a lot of time for otherwise useless practices, which are spectacular, in part, because they're useless and most people don't bother learning them.
Well, yes.
Being aristocrat vs. commoner, surnames and spoken dialect of language doesn't regress with 0.5 coefficient.
In a sense, reversion to mean always occurs and win. Re-measuring a single individual also has it, but with 0.8-0.9 coefficient.
Not a geneticist, so can't speak to the science. But from a lay perspective, I'd compare it to the stereotypical pattern of intergenerational wealth - dynasty founder goes out and gets stonking rich by being awesome (and/or criminal); first descendant generation is raised by the dynamically-awesome founder but is already rich and so doesn't have to work as hard and stabilizes the fortune but doesn't really grow it; second descendant grows up in the lap of luxury and only has some childhood memories of dynamic founder and lives mostly as wastrel high-society types, doing nothing productive.
From an IQ perspective, you have the first generation born into circumstances that make them incredibly driven to acquire knowledge, skills, etc., but their kids - though taught by the parents and thus more driven than average, are still born into the good times that the high-IQ parent creates, thus doesn't have as much to prove and doesn't work as hard. etc., etc., etc.
In other words: regression to the mean is evident in non-heritable traits (ie wealth), so the mere existence of regression to the mean in IQ doesn't indicate one way or the other whether it's nature or nurture.
No, because the wealth is literally inherited. It's a question of how changed circumstances incentivize (or don't) the development of skills/capabilities. The kids could have the same success and/or riches-focused trait and it would not express the same way because they are not in the same circumstance as the non-wealthy dynamic dynasty founder was in at the start of the sequence.
But if adult IQ is heritable to r=.80 then the regression would be statistically in line with results of a Punnet square, not more. That would mean that only a small proportion of offspring from two very intelligent people would regress towards mean IQ. The majority would inherit the genes correlated with high IQ and the advantages of having high IQ parents present ( I.e. exposure to high level language in childhood, books in the household, higher household income than average, higher academic achievement of parents on average, older parents on average [see Flynn effect], etc...). The fact that IQ is heritable to a large degree is exactly why 'regression to the mean in IQ' is a misnomer for lack of achievement of any progenitors' offspring. Conditions and contingencies play a huge role in visible genius, and MOST geniuses are not highly visible. It's nature AND nurture. Always has been.
Anybody knows good resources regarding mindfulness meditation and depression? A friend is going through a depressive episode and we're trying to find out if she should continue meditating and if there are specific forms of meditation that might (not) be helpful.
Meditation generally helps to alleviate depression, though as these write-ups make clear, it's not uncommon to go through challenging periods, and the antidepressive effects tend to be most powerful long-term:
https://www.headspace.com/articles/meditating-with-depression
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30597302/
I'm no expert here, but if I were your friend, meditation would be one of the last habits I would cut. I would instead prioritize:
- 8h Sleep, Exercise (esp outdoor social exercise), Gratitude Journal, Reading (some therapy books (e.g. feeling great by David Burns) are surprisingly helpful), every day. Better with people.
- I have heard great things about Ketamine therapy for depression, and have personally had really good experiences with LSD on this front. Careful here though.
- Long term, church (if religious) and getting a dog are some of the easiest ways to improve well-being. Cutting bad habits helps too if sufficient motivation is there.
Hope your friend feels better.
Thanks, that's super helpful!
You're very welcome. I hope your friend feels better soon; it's very kind of you to be asking about these things on her behalf.
Does anyone have a good understanding of why direct capture of CO2 from the air is so hard to do efficiently at scale?
Is it the thermodynamics of separating the molecules, the low proportion of CO2 molecules in the air, the energy required to force air through the system, all of these and more? Or is it just that we haven't been trying to invent and built these technologies for very long?
The most efficient place to capture carbon from the air would be the point at which it's getting released into the air in the first place.
Eventually we'll likely need to extract a lot of what's already in the atmosphere.
Eventually, perhaps. Right now capture at the point of emission gets you far more bang for your buck.
Jonathan Franzen, "The Corrections", 2001. Page 344f.:
The earth was very hot four billion years ago. The atmosphere was unbreathable. Methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide.
Nature hadn't learned to break down cellulose. When a tree fell, it lay on the ground and got buried by the next tree that fell. This was the Carboniferous. The earth a lush riot. And in the course of millions and millions of years of trees falling on trees, almost all the carbon got taken from the air and buried underground. And there it stayed until yesterday, geologically speaking.
What happens to a log that falls today is that funguses and microbes digest it, and all the carbon goes back into the sky. There can never be another Carboniferous. Ever. Because you can't ask Nature to unlearn how to biodegrade cellulose.
Mammals came along when the world cooled off. Frost on the pumpkin. Furry things in dens. But now we have a very clever mammal that's taking all the carbon from underground and putting it back into the atmosphere.
Once we burn up all the coal and oil and gas, we'll have an antique atmosphere. A hot, nasty atmosphere that no one's seen for three hundered million years. Once we've let the carbon genie out of its lithic bottle.
The moral of the story is don't recycle plastic. Send your plastic to a landfill. Get that carbon underground.
Bury it, bury it. Stopper the genie in the bottle.
I'm fine with bury vs. burn. But plastic is only a small part of the hydrocarbons we use.
bury or burn, I say. just don't throw it in the water.
I read that book for the first time a couple of months ago, it's excellent.
I do agree about the plastics too - provided you can bury it in a way that doesn't leak back into the environment, as it does in many places in the world.
Growing lots of trees, though, can still be helpful - yes the carbon will be released back into the atmosphere, but the process can buy us decades. Joanne Cory's team at Salk is trying to engineer chickpea plants that bury their carbon as essentially cork, which can take centuries to decompose (while also providing us with lots of hummus...).
Much better, though, would be to replicate photosynthesis more efficiently at scale, if that's possible.
It's not hard at all. I can't actually think of any gas that's *easier* to extract from the atmosphere. Seed a still warm large shallow pond with algae. Every year circulate the pond water through a big strainer, remove a year's growth of algae, throw it into a nearby abandoned mine. Shut the (gas-tight) mine door. Repeat as long as you want.
The problem is the scale of what you want to do. In 2018 the United States produced 5 billion metric tons of CO2 by fossil fuel combustion (about 36% directly, in transportation, and another 36% in electricity generation). Random googling suggests an acre of rapidly-growing pond scum absorbs about 3 tons/day of CO2, so if you want to remove all 14 million tons/day of CO2 generated by combustion, you will need 4.6 million acres of pond scum, or 7000 square miles, which is somewhere between the area of the states of Connecticut and New Jersey. This is engineering on a vast scale, and would cost enormous sums of money even though the actual removal is being done for absolute free by the plants.
Yeah this only reminds me of plans to seed the oceans with nutrients, and let algae stuff drift to the bottom.
> This is engineering on a vast scale, and would cost enormous sums of money even though the actual removal is being done for absolute free by the plants
But if you could do it in open ocean instead of a warm shallow pond, then 7000 square miles is no problem at all. Especially if you can get fish to eat it.
Edit: found an article. Being from the Sierra Club it ends with a "Does it work? Yes, but shut up and do something else instead" https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2021-2-summer/stress-test/can-farming-seaweed-put-brakes-climate-change -- but if the numbers are to be believed then natural seaweed currently sequesters about 173 million tons of CO2 per year (compared to 50 billion tons emitted) so we'd need 300 times more seaweed, which doesn't sound nice for our beaches.
You don't want fish to eat it. That's just recirculating it and not actually removing the CO2 from the atmosphere, unless you can guarantee a permanent increase in biomass (hint: you probably can't). To be effective you need to, as stated in the earlier comment, collect it and contain it somewhere.
>unless you can guarantee a permanent increase in biomass
I'm actually convinced there's a good sci-fi plot somewhere in here.
Plant all deserts with 100 meter tall forests.
Here's my response as a chemist: CO2 is a thermodynamic sink. Essentially, it's a very stable molecule that is the endpoint and lowest-energy product for a lot of chemical processes. There are many things that will react with it, but those are pretty high energy compounds, things that need a lot of energy put into them to make. We get our energy mostly from the energy released by chemical reactions that produce CO2 as a product. Going backwards would require putting that energy back in somehow. From the second law of thermodynamics, this will be a lossy process. Even if it weren't you couldn't really get back more than you put in.
Plants are able to capture CO2 on net because the energy they use is coming from sunlight directly. We just don't have the knowledge of photochemistry that would be required to design the right materials that would efficiently convert absorption of light into a reaction that would capture CO2.
Basically, the problem is that it's hard to make a chemical process that results in CO2 being captured and converted to a different form that efficiently transfers energy input from a source that doesn't itself produce CO2 as a byproduct
Thanks very much, that's a very clear summary.
So is the molecular process of photosynthesis still not very well understood? Or is it just very hard to copy / improve on / scale up?
Artificial photosynthesis is one of those sci-fi processes that would be fantastic if we could do it but it's proved elusive. So much so that I don't think there's been any serious attempts that have gotten past the lab bench stage of research.
It's a shame, because having a technology that takes in CO2, water and sunlight and gives you complex hydrocarbons (probably glucose but we'd take anything with a methyl group tbh) and oxygen as an output would fix 95% of our climate problems practically overnight.
What would we do with all the glucose that would keep the carbon locked up?
Well that's the beauty of the idea, if you're using artificial photosynthesis as your primary fuel source you don't need carbon capture, you're taking the carbon out the air as fast as you're re-introducing it. It's only if there's also a fossil fuel source in the mix that you have to think about sequestering.
But we also need to permanently remove billions of tons of CO2, no?
The molecular process of photosynthesis is quite well understood — you can read about it on Wikipedia — but it depends on complicated systems of membrane-embedded proteins that are difficult to assemble and get functioning outside a chloroplast or cyanobacterium. If you are a biochemist trying to figure out how photosynthesis works, you can isolate these proteins and membranes and make them do their work outside their original context. But on an industrial scale, it would be much cheaper just to grow trees or algae, rather than trying to replicate photosynthesis in cell-free systems on a large scale.
There's a really nice presentation of the thermodynamics of mixing here: https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps/Supplemental_Modules_(Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry)/Thermodynamics/Ideal_Systems/Thermodynamics_of_Mixing
Equation 12 gives the thermodynamically required energy to separate a mixture of two ideal gasses in terms of temperature and molar ratio of the ingredients. I *think* we can safely pretend that all of the non-CO2 air is one gas, and all of the CO2 is the other gas, and not be off farther than the ideal gas assumption. Assuming that's true, the thermodynamically required energy for separating the CO2 from a mole of air at 300K (roughly room temperature) is almost exactly 9 Joules. That will produce 0.00041 moles of CO2, or about 0.018 grams.
All of which works out to a thermodynamic minimum of 500 kJ/kg of separated carbon dioxide.
I don't know the amount of energy required by current technology, so I'm not sure if this is a big chunk or not; a priori, I'd be surprised if we beat 25% efficiency on this sort of thing.
Still, if solar power keeps getting cheaper then it might become worthwhile. You could use solar power in the desert to capture carbon on sunny days when production exceeds demand, and then burn coal on cloudy days or at night, and remain carbon-neutral overall.
I mean, I'm not weighing in on whether it's worthwhile; for all I know running a natural gas plant to sequester CO2 is worth it. I suspect it would be net negative atmospheric CO2 by a sizable margin, since the heat of combustion of hydrocarbons should be orders of magnitude higher than the mixing energy of that much CO2 in air.
That's really helpful, thanks!
Maybe I'm wrong somewhere, but i'll give a try.
You can capture it, but then, what? It's a gas. And you need to convert it in more dense form some form to store and bury (coal). Which requires energy, most of which humanity now gets from burning fossil fuels. ~~Renewable sources cannot be increased to match current consumption, even less so have a positive surplus for using to reclaiming carbon, which leaves atomic plants, which are a no-no~~
Ultimately plants use solar flux, so the answer is that we don't have cheap and efficient enough solar batteries.
Or you could just bury agricultural waste in some place where it doesn't burn. IIRC some of Physics Nobeliates wrote about this.
> Renewable sources cannot be increased to match current consumption
Of course it can, the technology exists. It is "only" a question of mobilising the politcal will and getting out of the local maximum that fossil fuels have created in terms of economy, infrastructure etc..
If you bury it, you not only need to make sure it doesn't burn. You also need to make sure it doesn't decompose and leak, e.g, methane.
Er, no, we wouldn't store it as a hydrocarbon. It would be necessary to consume more energy to create the hydrocarbon than was released when it was burned in the first place. (depending.)
It's agricultural waste, so it's already a hydrocarbon. Turing it into anything else by any means other than burning it is going to require adding energy. I'm really not convinced by those claims that you could just pump it underground and it will stay there. Not only does that use energy in and of itself, the process is also subject to leaks that are really hard to monitor. I'll accept that some stone formations will slowly consume CO2 converting it into a modified stone, but that's a slow process. The peridotite on the surface in Arabia could reasonably be used that way...but it isn't a fast process. And it basically requires powdering the original stone. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/44-01-secures-5m-to-turn-billions-of-tons-of-carbon-dioxide-to-stone/
No, CO2 is not a hydrocarbon.
CO2 isn't a hydrocarbon, but the stuff doesn't start off as CO2. I was responding to "Or you could just bury agricultural waste in some place where it doesn't burn. IIRC some of Physics Nobeliates wrote about this." But I do seem to have switched thoughts in mid-stream when I then talked about (doubting)"pump it underground and it will stay there." et seq.
P.S.: Composting doesn't require adding much energy, but the processing required does have an energy input. However composting doesn't (permanently) remove the CO2 from the atmosphere. Biochar may be a better option, but I don't know. And I doubt it's permanence (though without any direct evidence to back up my doubts).
Like many people I'm annoyed at how weak our understanding of nutrition and the long term effects of different diets/etc is. Running well designed study to learn more would be insanely expensive and would take a very very long time. There probably isn't any institution out there that would currently fund such a thing. But if someone *would* it seems like it would be massively beneficial for humanity. I'm curious if anyone has tried or even tried to design such a study.
Humans can live on a wide range of diets. There're some forest people that get ~75% of their calories from honey. And then arctic people, that live on meat and fat. Eat what you like, not too much. (And try to spend as much time on your feet as possible, I started working as a prep-cook ~6 months ago, and have lost my man boobs, and 1/2 my beer belly... I attribute it to being on my feet, ~25 more hours/ week. Well either that or the greasier restaurant food I'm eating more of. :^)
Did you read Slime Mold Time Mold's posts on this by any chance?
Yeah... maybe that is my source. Thanks.
>Humans can live on a wide range of diets.
And there will be enormous variation in health on these various survivable diets
>Eat what you like, not too much.
This isn't good advice. *What* you eat affects your appetite, and if you're eating an appetite-promoting diet while trying to reduce how much you eat, you're going to feel like crap a lot of the time.
And this ignores the other health effects of various macro and micronutrients.
Yeah of course there are essential vitamins and such. You can eat whatever you want. For me, dang, I love fat and salt. Bacon is nirvana, and mixed in a BLT is food of the gods. I can't wait for summer and good tomatoes. Life is too short for diets. :^)
Of course humans *can* live on a wide range of diets. I'm fairly sure what Bill wants to find out is what kind of diet is optimal. And I don't think you get any useful information about that from the existence of forest people who eat honey.
Huh, optimal for what? Food is essential and also pleasure. Eat the food that grows around you. Now you've got me dreaming about sweet corn in the late summer.
Optimal for nutrition.
Perhaps it would be beneficial for humanity... but even in our current state of limited information, we certainly do know a good bit about BAD nutrition -- and yet, a very large chunk of the population chooses to disregard that knowledge. That said, if new information could extend life by 10% for just 5% of the global population, that would qualify as "massively beneficial for humanity".
Well in terms of extending life, don't we have promising evidence that fairly extreme calorie restriction helps in that regard?
Not exactly
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan
That article says it "probably works".
No, we have fairly promising evidence that fairly extreme calorie restriction helps mice, who are very similar to humans in some ways, but very different in ways related to diet and logevity. We have *way* better evidence that increased fat-free mass is *way* better for longevity than extreme calorie restriction. If you are interested, you can star by looking into what is called "the BMI paradox" on pubmed. Or check out this podcast episode: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/podcast-episode-67/
OK, thanks! Good to know as someone who aims to increase FFM, but previously thought I might be trading off some life for better life now.
OK what is BAD nutrition? (It seems like if you know what's bad then you know what's good... good is anything that is not bad.)
Not bad != optimal
Yeah sorry I have no idea what optimal means besides, not bad. Please define optimal.
On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 is optimal.
9 is not optimal, but 9 is still not bad.
Oh... I wasn't trying to be controversial. Let's start with all the Super Size Me type stuff.
So bad is not some thing, but too much? The end of the all you can eat Chinese buffet? (I never ordered super size, but watched plenty of friends go for several platefuls at the Chinese buffet. )
Gary Taubes's NuSI initiative tried something like this. I don't know the details, but I think it didn't go well.
The pilot study was not performed correctly (ostensibly not due to anything Taubes did wrong) which caused the foundation funding this study to withdraw their funding for the full study.
I worry that there's enough human variance in how different foods are digested, what nutrients are needed, what allergies/inflammation responses exist to what things, etc., that the results might not be hugely useful.
That's where I am as well. "Eat less [bad thing that makes you fat]" has almost never been good advice for me specifically, because I spent most of my life underweight and even now have never been close to overweight. It may be good advice generally, as more and more Americans are overweight, but misses out on big chunks of the population and sometimes drastically misses the cause (some people get fat for different reasons than others, some people gain and lose weight regardless of what they eat, etc.).
And that's just one really "easy" example that we all can intuitively understand. How do we discuss protein, vitamin C, amino acids, or whatever else on a population level? Some people have enough, some not enough, a lot in a good range, and some people who should have the wrong levels based on what they eat, but for some reason don't! A doctor may be able to figure out why someone has the wrong levels for their situation, but that would be remarkably hard to do at scale.
Determining in detail the specific physiology of all individuals is not an realistic public health response to the obesity epidemic. Telling people to drastically reduce sugar intake is. Virtually everyone is going to be better off if they did that.
I'm sceptical of the idea of a meaningful number of people becoming fat 'regardless of what they eat'. Thermodynamic laws don't change for different people, and this wasn't the case a century ago when American diets were drastically different.
I agree that reducing sugar would help with the obesity situation. If people who are not obese now are told that eating less sugar will help them lose weight, that may be good to know in some way, but not helpful in their particular lives.
It's a small number of people, but there are individuals who can eat completely normal and healthy diets and still gain weight/be obese. My point is not that such a group is representative of a large portion of society, but that generalized food guidance is fraught with counterexamples.
I replied above with something that applies here. Yes, there are individuals who can eat [a diet widely considered completely normal and healthy] and still gain weight/be obese. But there is a calorie level for each of those people such that, if the respective person's intake is below that calorie level for a sustained period of time, that person will lose weight. If you eat a lot less than what you were eating before such that your body goes into a caloric deficit, you'll lose weight. I express no opinion on whether maintaining that caloric intake would be easily accomplished.
I don't think many people (should be none IMO) would argue otherwise. The question is about offering general nutrition advice, and the complications of that implementation. If you tell a person they should eat approximately XXXX calories per day and include the following nutrients [X, Y, Z..], that may be great advice. Over a population level you're going to find that X% are going to be underfed, X% overfed, and X% have some weird reaction. Maybe those percents are fairly small, but they are non-negligible.
I'd like advice on trying nootropics to enhance my ability to focus on cognitively challenging tasks. I'd like to test the nootropics one at a time (so not a supplement that has like 20 different ingredients). I also don't want to take anything that requires a prescription (so modafinil and Adderall are out), and I don't want to do nicotine for fear of getting addicted. What are some of the best nootropics to try first? I'm leaning toward creatine and phenylpiracetam, but I'm open to suggestions.
Anecdotally I have not found nicotine, administered solely as nicotine gum in moderate doses (<10 mg/day) to be habit-forming at all. I can use it for days or weeks and stop using it for months with no trouble at all -- I can easily forget to take it when I intend to. *Smoking* is certainly addictive, but its addictive potential is probably not solely attributable to the nicotine itself. That said, I find that nicotine is not something to "keep you going" through long-term demanding tasks, it's best used sparingly for improving planning and seeing new possibilities in old problems -- but nothing beats it for that, in my experience.
Second this on not finding nicotine gum addictive whatsoever.
I'm a big proponent of caffeine in >200mg doses.
why?
I drink two mugs of brewed coffee each morning. So that's about 200 mg. right there.
You might be interested in theanine. Its a compound found in tea but not (or not in as high a dose?) in coffee. In the past I found taking 100 mg of caffeine via a pill with 100mg of theanine (could have been a different dose, I just took one pill of each) produced a more prolonged energy and focus burst from the caffeine + theanine than the caffeine alone. There was also much less of a "cliff" when the caffeine "wore off". I now only drink tea and find the natural caffeine/theanine levels to be adequate. Theanine is also widely available, not expensive, and I don't think has any common side effects to worry about.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-021-01698-z
Description of a gigantic searchable collection of conspiracy theories.
I don't see a search function.
I'm sorry, I got the impression it had one from this discussion.
https://www.metafilter.com/193919/LOCO-the-88-million-word-language-of-conspiracy-corpus
It's possible that the metadata is searchable even if the documents aren't.
Thanks! I might use this for a course project if it turns out to satisfy the required specs.
Gotta remark that I appreciate the funny name of this dataset; kudos to whichever author came up with it.
It recently occurred to me that 21st-century conspiracy theories are a potent new genre of art.
The latest and greatest advance in experiential immersion.
If anyone is interested in a toy example of the different approaches of navigating a search space, there have been a bunch of posts recently about efficient strategies for the game Wordle (last one is my own):
https://matt-rickard.com/wordle-whats-the-best-starting-word/
https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle/
https://jon-simon.medium.com/whats-the-best-starting-wordle-word-81376e2bcbbf
I pulled the list of words, and guessable words (two different lists), and computed the following
- On average ROATE will eliminate 97.4% of words from contention
- AESIR is adversarially optimal as the first guess (the lowest fraction of words which a clue can eliminate is ~92%)
- LATEN has the highest chance of immediately giving you a clue which uniquely specifies the answer (1.8%)
I tried doing some tree search to find optimal guesses taking future guesses into account, but I couldn't speed it up enough.
I've been thinking about this too! Wordle is great.
Jon- your solution is a good first approximation, but just looking at letter frequencies ignores information about placement and makes the assumption that choice of letter is independent of the other letters, which is false.
I implemented a greedy solution like Rickard (the first link) does. However, I found a different starting word (REAST) than he, or you did.
My main difference from Rickard is that he was minimizing the average number of remaining possible solutions for each guess, while I was minimizing the absolute distance between the guess's computed distribution of solutions and a hypothetical "spread as evenly as possible" distribution. I think my method is superior, especially in late game play.
My final product is a decision tree for Wordle that takes 5 guesses maximum, with an average of 3.4 guesses
I'm relieved I wasn't the only one who thought this when I encountered Wordle!. Here's the github where I uploaded the code I made:
https://github.com/andrewgordon17/Wordle_solver
This is a python script that iterates the greedy algorithm and a json file containing the decision tree (though unfortunately, it is too large to evaluate directly, it's better to traverse it with the code)
I've been doing ADIEU and STORY or STONY as my first two guesses, to get all the vowels and some common consonants. I'm not sure how to think about optimizing the number of possible words left, vs optimizing the human-searchability of the remaining space (which vowels help with a bit more).
I just read that some military communications are "speeded up transmissions," and that sometimes, when you hear a momentary burst of static while listening to the radio, it's actually a military message. Is this true? Does anyone know more about this?
How much data can such transmissions cram into a one-second long radio pulse?
>How much data can such transmissions cram into a one-second long radio pulse?
To directly answer your question, this is a bad question. It depends on what hardware we can build, and the latest advancements in communication theory and RF engineering. For example, 5G brings commercial radio into the gigahertz spectrum, which is higher than 4G could achieve. A 5G radio can fit more data into one second of signal than 4G could. Building electrical circuits that can reliably wiggle at such rates is hard, and the science+engineering are constantly improving. If you're asking for the state-of-the-art, I don't know, but according to extremetech, some Germans transmitted at 100 billion bits in a second back in 2013: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/168566-worlds-fastest-wireless-network-hits-100-gigabits-per-second-can-scale-to-terabits
So extrapolate according to your beliefs of technology advancement.
Somewhat related, after reading about the frequency hopping discussion in a previous OT, I have been wondering if it is possible to hide a transmission in the noise by simultaneously send on many carrier frequencies below the noise threshold (possibly after multiplying the signal with a per-frequency coefficient in {-1,1}, or [-1;1]).
The intended recipient (Bob) would know the carrier frequencies whose signals have to be added (and with which coefficients) while an interceptor (Eve) at an equal distance (seeing the same SNR (signal noise ratio)) would just see that a statistically insignificant (?) increase in the total noise energy.
I guess this would work because given n channels with signal S and noise N, the total sum signal would be n*S, while the noise would only by sqrt(n)*N. (Naturally, as with frequency hopping, the used frequencies and coefficients would be time dependent to defeat statistical analysis.)
Of course, if the sender (Alice) is transmitting from (approximately) a single point (which is likely in some military contexts), the interceptor could use a directional antenna to get a higher gain (and thus SNR) than the recipient and detect the sender (as well as their direction, which may also be valuable in a military context). OTOH, both sides can employ arrays of directional antennas of equal gain for their receivers (at their command centers or something), so if both are the same distance from the sender, this would still give Bob an edge over Eve.
Is there an information theory argument why this would not work?
(Of course, if Eve is flooding the ether with artificial pseudo-noise, they would be in the position to perfectly subtract their own noise, making Alice's signal (which has to compete against Eve's pseudo-noise) stand out like a sore thumb. This could be countered by Bob also doing the same, thus giving Alice sufficient noise cover to hide their signal in.)
Googling for "radio steganography", I mostly found https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.7324 , which seems to be concerned with hiding secret information in obvious legacy messages, not in the noise floor altogether.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
Hmm the maximum number of bits was shown by Nyquist to be twice the carrier frequency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem#Historical_background
So something less than that.
Be careful: sampling rate and bit rate are not necessarily the same thing in digital comms.
Oh, I think they are intimately related. Nyquist's original paper was about how many bits (or pulses) one could get down a telegraph line of given bandwidth.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130926031230/http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/proceedings/nyquist.pdf
Sorta two sides of the same coin as shown by Shannon.
Nyquist's Law gets you the symbol rate. But your bit rate can be considerably higher -- e.g. if you encode with 256-QAM, your bit rate is 8 times your symbol rate.
I thought it was called "zip squeal", but google isn't saying much.
Standard FM radio channels are 200kHz wide, so your symbol rate is limited to 100kHz; you're operating in a hella noisy environment (from the perspective of your signal - normal radio stations are noise) so you're probably not doing much better than QPSK for coding, so you have 2 bits/symbol. Under these assumptions you can get 200kb in 1s. But any such transmission probably doesn't care about standardized channel widths and is happy to take over as many of them as it can. Feel free to fudge that answer by a factor of 10 in either direction.
I have an idea for a simple product I'd like to sell. It's a pet litter box with a removable metal grate that would separate the pet from the litter below. How do I go about finding a manufacturer, and getting the ball moving with this? I'd like to sell the litter boxes myself through Amazon.com.
A friend who's a cat breeder has something similar that automatically cleans itself after use.
Even if you somehow get somewhere with this, it's such a totally simple thing that people in China would be effortlessly be able of copying it and it's extremely unlikely you will make money from this.
This is already a very common design for litterboxes, in fact I have one (made of plastic, not metal). So I think the best approach would be to not do it, as you will probably lose money. If you still want to, I'd first make a prototype that can be manufactured (eg, CAD files, toolpaths, etc), then start talking to suppliers who make similar products on Alibaba. They will likely be happy to take your money in exchange for product, and can likely ship directly to an Amazon distribution center.
See down-thread for almost everyone thinking it obvious or at least widespread knowledge that the covid vaccines don't and/or shouldn't protect against transmission, and particularly in the case of omicron. Given this consensus, I wonder where the community stands with regard to the justification of vaccine mandates at *this* stage in the course of things. In particular I'd be interested in hearing from those who are strongly in favor of mandates, and especially from those who think they can formulate a compelling legal (i.e. not simply moral) basis for their position.
Personally, I think it's been clear for awhile that vaccines don't prevent infection or spread (though they do decrease both, especially in the first few months after vaccination/boosting). And that immunity to covid wanes, so we can't really eradicate it and getting to herd immunity just means the current wave ends. Those all add up to very little justification for making normal people get vaxxed. I'd say healthcare workers and anyone working around very old/sickly people or people with serious health problems probably should have a vaccine mandate, just in hopes of lowering the probability of spread. But even there, we'd do much better to just give everyone walking into the nursing home a rapid test and send them home if it comes back positive.
Now, vaccines do seem to lower your probability of getting very sick / dying if you do catch covid by quite a bit--probably a factor of 20 or so. That seems to be true for omicron as well, though the vaccines are much worse at protecting you from catching omicron.
My own preferrred policy is to stop trying to strongarm people into getting vaccinated, but also to make the vaccine available for free, and ideally offer boosters every 4 months or so for those of us who really don't want to try our luck with covid.
I've been ambivalent about vaccine mandates for most of the pandemic but with the advent of Omicron I'm firmly against them. Mostly because a universal vaccination campaign is just a waste of money.
I've doubted the utility of vaccinating everyone for some time and I think the numbers support me. Mortality rates in the under 20s is less than 1/100,000, which means you're spending 0.3-6 million dollars to prevent one death of COVID (Big error bars on that figure, vaccine cost is anywhere from a couple dollars per jab to fifteen and people may have had four of those most expensive jabs). For under 20-40s mortality is closer to 1/4,000 which is 12-240 thousand dollars (again huge error bars) which is more reasonable but even at the low end an extra ICU bed for that patient is a similar cost (est $2,000 a night for a couple weeks, so 10-40 thousand dollars). For 40+ it is a no brainer, you're spending hundreds of dollars to save thousands, not to mention the lives that can't be saved by ICU care.
Just by a ROI calculation there seems very little point to impose a vaccine mandate on anyone under the age of 40. Especially if asymptomatic transmission in a vaccinated population is now a thing as that means there's limited to no community benefit to getting vaccinated and we're just looking at serious cases and deaths prevented. Omicron being apparently less lethal (or possibly everyone at risk already being dead/immune) means that the ROI is getting worse month on month, even as the evolving strains mean we need to spend even more money on vaccine development just to keep up with an already poor investment.
Spend the money on ICU beds, or health screenings, or cancer drugs. It'd be a far more durable use of the money and let us be more flexible when the next disease rears it's head. Let the COVID vaccine roll into the autumn flu shot, offer it to the at risk and move on. COVID simply isn't serious to require a vaccine mandate.
Just off the cuff here, but I think a lot of your calculations are misleading.
First off, $2000 a night probably covers mechanical ventilation alone and not much else. I would estimate the costs are at least double that (see e.g. this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15942342/ )
Second, the main cost of COVID isn't the ICU, it's patients becoming dead. I've read a couple of 'cost/benefit' analysis papers assessing the value of interventions in my day, and the number I see used frequently is $200K per quality adjusted life year (QUALY). That means for every year a patient is dead instead of alive. For young patients the death rate is quite low, but the number of life-years lost is high per death, to the tunes of multiple millions of dollars by this accounting. The number of deaths in patients <45 (the number I have easy access to through the CDC, others can improve this estimate) is ~35,000. Many of these people had significant comorbidities, but some just died of COVID, for idiosyncratic reasons that we still don't really understand. This is real, I have done an autopsy on one of these patients. That cost dwarfs the extremely small *marginal* cost of a set of jab (which is the relevant comparison), and easily justifies vaccination in the 20-40 set.
I am not going to argue about the <20 set because I don't know enough. 6 million per death prevented is a lot, but there other benefits besides death here that may merit consideration, such as keeping schools open, keeping parents sending their kids to school, and the possibility of viral mutation that has a more negative impact on kids. As Omicron is proving, you might not have time to mass vaccinate in response to a variant.
I welcome commentary. I will say that I got my kids vaccinated on the logic that we do not know what the next variant will bring, and the virus is getting a LOT of opportunities to change and mutate. The benefits outweigh the risks.
Good point, I hadn't really considered the QUALY cost. Most of this calculation is what was within easy googling range so a more measured analysis might be less pessimistic than mine.
It's hard from an outsiders perspective to really observe how much the vaccine is helping reduce deaths across a range of ages and infection types. The early figure I recall was that vaccinated/unvaccinated was about 20x times less likely to die across age ranges, not sure if this holds when it comes to the under 18s but oh well this is just back of the envelope calculations.
So that would turn that 1/100,000 I used earlier to 0.5/1,000,000 (assuming morbidity has so far been the unvaccinated rate), or to put another way you're saving 19 lives per million jabs given. So for 19 people losing about 70 QUALYs each that's $266million saved or $226 per jab in QUALY savings. Though if we're going down to that level, you probably need to start counting in side-effects into the total, which are currently riding around the one in a million odds of being lethal (across a range of side-effects including anaphylactic shock, TTS and myocarditis), but that's probably not more than a single patient lost in our model example.
Overall, that seems more a reasonable outcome. Not sure how sustainable the $250~ per person QUALY is. The problem with a vaccine mandate for a flu is it's never going away, making it a legal requirement to spend $20-$60 per person every year for the foreseeable future evaporates those savings pretty quickly. Still, if the government have already paid for the vaccine it makes sense to use it, assuming you have no other health issues that might affect the side-effect risk profile.
Yea this analysis seems at least approximately correct. Remember that there are probably some other nice externalities regarding the effect on schools and the like that we're not accounting for here, but then we're also not accounting for the mild and common side effects being incredibly sore in the vaccination site and possibly super tired for a day.
For those reading this, I do want to re-emphasize not to forget the 'variant prepper' reasons, though. I'm not really a prediction market person, but I have to imagine that a prediction market is going for a variant after Omicron (Rho?) and there's no guarantee that will look like Omicron or Delta in its risk profile.
I'm opposed to covid vaccine mandates for so many reasons, I'm afraid this will come off as an incoherent rant.
1.) Since vaccines do little to stop transmission. (no first order public health benefit.) Then (to me as libertarian) it's a choice of personal risk. I choose to get a booster ahead of omicron. If other people make other calculations I'm fine with that.
2.) No coherent message for people who have had covid. A college student I know, just had covid (presumably omicron) and now has to get a booster before returning to college. This is plain silly!
3.) I hate the idea that we need to punish people who made different choices.
4.) New York State is force feeding me the idea (by advertising) that I need to get my young kids vaccinated. (Well I have no young kids anymore...) This looks like madness to me. If there is no reduction in transmission, and young kids are at very low risk of any bad outcome. And there is the unknown long term effects of the vaccine, then why push it? (It's like you are trying to piss off the other tribe.) I have no problem with parents deciding to get their kids vaxxed for covid... their choice.
5.) no health care for un-vaxxed. Ughh really? I don't understand this at all.
a.) what if they had it already?
b.) if they get it and are hospitalized, they will have my pity, not scorn. I'll hope for a good outcome.
c.) it's seems you want to punish them.
Doesn't strike me as an incoherent rant at all, actually exceptionally coherent. I will say that under most schema I categorize myself as some flavor of libertarian as well, but I perhaps prefer to think of myself as a 'classical liberal'. My philosophy education has pretty sizable gaps, so forgive incoherence in this response.
1) If vaccines truly do little to reduce transmission (and I think the jury is absolutely still out on that... what would you say if we just don't KNOW whether it does or doesn't?), then there are still other limited health resources to consider, namely hospital beds and ICU beds.
2) I agree on this. Just as a counterpoint though, when I had to prove my vaccinations when I started medical school (and subsequently for each hospital job I have taken) it was not enough to say that I had a history of chicken pox. I actually had to prove it with an antibody titer. The reason being that this could be objectively documented. A vaccine exception using some objective measure of 'proof' seems perfectly reasonable to me.
3) I agree, I think punishment should under no circumstances be the motivation for any actions with regard to vaccines. While I favor a mandate theoretically, I can't see an implementation that actually works for the general US population because I can't envision a consequence that doesn't result in armed revolt from the vaccine hesitant. However I do wish this were otherwise, I could see a small fine being justified.
4) I don't know the answer to this, but I will say that my reason for justifying my children is that if it helps to keep them in school, it is worth it, and if it helps to mitigate against an unknown future variant that MIGHT have more ill effect on children, it's worth it. SARS-CoV-2 is adapting to a new host, humans, and I expect the situation to remain pretty volatile for the foreseeable future. The risks are just astonishingly low.
5) Yea I hate this argument too. To be fair folks are really just arguing for the (potentially very real) edge case that ICUs get totally full, and you have to decide whether to give care to a stroke victim or an unvaccinated COVID-19 victim. I've argued downthread that this is impossible to implement safely without serious risks, and is very much not the best solution. Maybe if we're in the situation of ED triage I can see this happening, but the fact of the matter is that we are probably going to see vaccinated people dying because ICUs are filled with unvaccinated COVID patients somewhere at some point during this winter's surge, and there's nothing we can do about it now.
Thanks, O. I got really upset by the 'their choice' and limit ICU beds for the unvaxxed that is down thread. And I'm going to try and explain why this upsets me here. Much of this strikes me as an emotional argument. (Aside; I think 'emotional argument' may be the same as 'thinking fast', as opposed to thinking slow... which takes longer :^)
I live in upstate NY, (Trump country) and some of the people you propose denying care to are my neighbors, friends and co-workers. I love these people and I can't understand why you consider treating them in what strikes me as a heartless manner. The choices people make depend on where they get their information and who they talk with. These things seem mostly like a historical accident. They didn't choose their parents, or where they lived growing up. Sure some of these people are part of the blue tribe. (Which doesn't bother me, as long as they treat me as a fellow human being.) But I find many to be part of the disgusted (and disengaged) middle. (Of which I consider myself a member.) I would ask you to 'think slow' about politicizing ICU beds. On a slightly different note, I have no problem with life insurance companies asking about your vax status and adjusting your premium accordingly.
To be clear, I was not the one who proposed denying care. I'm advocating vaccine mandates, as a way to avoid denying care to someone (vaccinated or unvaccinated) due to a viral surge. If we must to deny care to someone primarily because of a COVID surge, my inclination would be to deny unvaccinated individuals first, but I have not thought deeply (slowly) about that and that's not why I got into this conversation. My leaning is that that approach would be a bad idea for practical reasons.
I will also admit to a component of emotional/fast thinking on this whole topic overall. I had to do an autopsy last winter on a woman who died postpartum in large part because the ICUs here were full. That's partly due to staffing issues related to COVID, and partly due to the COVID surge filling the beds. That woman's child is going to grow up without a mother. If that happens again this winter, it is going to be in no small part because of the unvaccinated (look at vaccinated vs. unvaccinated rates in ICUs relative to the surrounding population). This makes me profoundly angry, but that anger is not an argument.
I will merely note that your neighbors friends and co-workers are good people, I am sure, but I encourage you to encourage them to get vaccinated. It's an incredibly easy thing to do, it helps them and it helps those around them (whether that help is mediated by less infectivity, which may or may not be the case, or through not getting as sick and needing as much care from others, which is definitely the case).
I think we likely both agree, convincing people would be the very best option.
Thanks for that O. And thanks for sharing your emotional thinking. The loss of a new mother is twice as devastating. I'm sure this pandemic has caused a large numbers of deaths because for covid adjacent reasons. No ICU beds, medical workers taking care of others, delayed procedures for other things.
Re: convincing others. My take, is that vaccines make sense for old folks like me. ~over 55... I'm 63. All the old folks around here I talk to are vaccinated. For younger people, I'm not so sure, and I'm fine with them choosing either way... (There will be some small number of 'bad' responses to the vaccine, and you have to weight that against the benefit... (I'm assuming we are talking about omicron, for which the major benefit of vaccine is lower risk of hospitalization.) There will be some number of young people for whom getting the vaccine will have been worse than not getting it and getting covid.) I wish we could have a message that reflected the current state of our knowledge about the whole covid situation. And I hear ads on the radio, asking moms to get their 3 year olds vaccinated... A coherent message would be trying to convince those over 55 to be vaxxed... aren't those the ones filling up our ICU beds?
Another big issue is the possibility that people make an important decision that affects lots of people (denying medical care to the unvaxxed) where it turns out the underlying calculation was wrong.
I'm thinking specifically about the under 18 cohort and getting a COVID vaccine. It appears that the rate of infection and serious complications is so low in that group that the known side effects of any of the vaccines will cause more medical problems for children than will be solved (both rare, maybe very rare). If there were a mandate to get vaccinated or lose medical coverage, it would definitely be medically wrong and unjustified for that group. Similarly, there are other groups (young and healthy adults, those who already had COVID, those that react more poorly to vaccines or have specific concerns for these vaccines) that may calculate their own odds and determine that it is not in their best interest given *known* side effects compared to the benefits. If there turn out to be unknown or undercounted side effects, that makes it worse. Denying them medical care seems like a no-win evil. I get that there are 65 year old people with underlying medical conditions that almost certainly benefit greatly from the vaccine, who will end up in a hospital for no good reason when they don't get it. Compared to the alternatives, denying them medical care (or requiring vaccine passports, or whatever else people want to force others to get vaccinated) seems like an ultimately losing proposition.
Right I think I agree with all of that. I find myself turning against the idea of having to show a vax card to get into some event. The big problem in the US is that we have rightfully lost all faith in our institutions. They continue to be unable to admit mistakes and so continue with some lie.. and we continue to think WTF? (I've been listening to Lex Fridman talk with Pat Bhattacharya, and that's made me very cranky about our covid policy.)
>If vaccines truly do little to reduce transmission (and I think the jury is absolutely still out on that... what would you say if we just don't KNOW whether it does or doesn't?), then there are still other limited health resources to consider, namely hospital beds and ICU beds.
OK, but there's an obvious solution to that. We're in a situation where ICU beds are in short supply, and we're willing to do things that would otherwise infringe on personal liberty to keep people from recklessly winding up in an ICU, so for the duration of the crisis:
We ban motorcycle riding.
And probably some other things, but if the actual objective is to minimize ICU bed usage, you start at the top of the list of p(ICU visit per month) and work your way down from there. Probably with a weighting factor for how much of an infringement it is, but "keep your motorcycle in the garage for a couple more months" probably ranks lower on that scale than forcible vaccination.
For the median American, at this point in the Omicron wave, going unvaccinated is not the highest-risk activity on the table. And maybe after we've put a hiatus on motorcycling and shut down the rodeos and pulled the commercial fishing fleet into the harbor and picked all the rest of the low-hanging fruity risks, there will still be enough of a problem that e.g. mandatory vaccination for everyone over 55 will be the next-highest item on the list.
But if you're conspicuously ignoring all the low-hanging fruit, and picking conspicuously unripe fruit (i.e. mandatory vaccination of healthy twenty-somethings), then I'm skeptical that your real interest is in harvesting fruit as opposed to say punishing the currently-disfavored outgroup.
I'm confused why you don't think that vaccination is not exceptionally low-hanging fruit. Very low infringement of rights, very low risk risk, very high reward (it literally IS the thing filling the ICUs that causes the concern, from a numerical standpoint). Lifetime of motorcycle riding might be higher risk overall (is it?) but it doesn't cause the highly temporally correlated risk that we see during a viral surge. Vaccines also have the benefit of materially helping the person you are vaccinating, though unquestionably with an infringement of their autonomy.
And sure: start with a mandate on those >55 yo. I'm fine with that, though maybe I would have proposed 45 if I had been asked to throw out the first number. I'm not looking at our ICU census right now, but I'd guess that would take out the majority of the problem.
I don't think this is a slippery slope, I think the logic applies to infectious disease mitigation in an effort to prevent both primary and secondary harm of epidemics/pandemics. You can still buy your big gulp sodas and ride your motorcycle. I'm not signing on to any of that stuff, that's your life your choice. I wonder how much public health as a discipline has shot itself directly in the leg by its recent overreaches in those directions.
We think forcing people to do something is less liberty-infringing than banning them from doing something, particularly if the thing we're forcing them to do involves bodily autonomy.
Vaccination is perhaps moderately low-hanging fruit, but it's not the lowest-hanging fruit because we're using a vaccine that's about five major strains out of date and provides only marginal protection against a disease that now has, per exposure, a very small chance of putting someone in an ICU bed in the first place. Plus, we've already vaccinated a large majority of the population, and most of the rest have natural immunity about as good as the vaccines, and the people who remain to be vaccinated are annoyingly persistent in not being vaccinated. And we're not even targeting that effort at the people most likely to be hospitalized. So there's a lot of effort per hospital case prevented.
Taking motorcycles off the road is *easy*, once you get over those pesky concerns about human liberty and political polarization and loss of public trust. It's probably not *enough*, but it's an obvious place to start.
Yes, thankyou for that.
For 5, I think the actual position (or at least the one I personally forwarded) is that the un-vaccinated are treated the same as everybody else, except in the specific situation that a hospital has to choose between providing care to them, and providing care to somebody else.
I'd analogize it to prioritizing organ transplants, when organs are of smaller supply than people needing them, to people who, say, didn't destroy their liver with thirty years of alcohol abuse. And yes, that position is hardly universally agreed with, but I think it is a position that I think people are familiar enough with already to understand the arguments for or against, and by analogy, should help illustrate the triage argument here.
(There's an argument elsewhere in the thread about removing people from ICUs, which I think, in the minds of the people raising that argument, analogizes to letting somebody have an organ, then taking it back; but I think this analogy fails because it treats keeping somebody in the ICU as the default inappropriately, where I think 'Keeping somebody in the ICU' should properly be regarded as a continuous action which can and should be changed if a better action becomes available.)
I think this is a terrible idea, and a general principle that we will very much hate when it is used against our ingroup in the future.
Speaking as an ex-smoker, if I get lung cancer, I should be lower on the transplant list than somebody who didn't smoke.
This general principle is important enough to me to constitute a major part of the criteria by which I define my ingroup. You take whatever risks you want, but they're your risks. If they stop being your risks, you don't get to take them anymore.
I'm sorry, so the hospital has to get my vax info before doing anything? What about if I've had covid? I guess I want to see rational health policy. You shouldn't be punished because of the community you grew up in. If a Christian Scientist comes into the ER seeking help they should get care. (At least in my 'perfect' world. :^)
Since you are talking about perfect worlds: in mine a capacity limit for unvacced people would have been announced last summer. I am thinking about 20% of total ICU capacity or so. In this way society wouldn't completely abandon solidarity with unvacced people. And in a wave, usually only 10-20% of capacity are needed for vacced people, and 40% ICU capacity for corona cases during a severe wave is bearable.
But it removes the thread of overwhelmed hospitals by unvacced. And it aligns incentives better. It still gives an incentive to get vacced, but it acknowledges that some people really don't want to, and it tries to keep the risk of that manageable.
Ideally, the hospital would be able to get your vaccination info with a straightforward query, speaking of "rational health policy". Personally I don't care about the case of somebody who has had Covid.
And it has nothing to do with punishing anybody, it has everything to do with structuring society around choice. We absolutely should not be structuring society so that society has a strong incentive to intervene in our choices. When your choices create a choice somebody else has to make between you dying, and somebody else dying, the correct choice is for you to die. That's what we're talking about here, to be clear.
And I don't really care what community you grew up in; you are the person you are, you make the choices you make. We might be tempted to carve out an exception for the children of parents who make particular choices, but then we're right back to the problem that society has a strong interest in taking those choices away. Either parents are responsible for their children, or they aren't. Pick a lane and stick to it there.
Oh, but the community you grew up in is part of the person you are.
Having covid was better protection than one of the vaccines according to a report from Israel. (Data from the US stinks.)
And about the kids, well I totally disagree with you. enough said, lest I be banned.
I agree the community is part of who you are. Things that are part of who you are don't invalidate your choices being yours; there's not a "true you" who isn't making those choices, that which is making a choice is all there is.
As for Covid being better protection, unless getting vaccinated somehow makes your protection worse, it's irrelevant. The reasonable precaution to take, outside what should properly be regarded as extraordinary medical situations, is to get vaccinated. If you personally decide you've had Covid, and so don't need to get vaccinated because you're already sufficiently protected, and end up in the hospital - well, you were wrong about being sufficiently protected, no?
From your position on the matter, personally I would prefer to fight the hypothetical there, and would be inclined, insofar as I disagree with the thrust of this entire debate, to point out that the ICU capacity is more limited by staffing issues than beds at the moment, and to investigate how that is impacted by the nonzero number of healthcare professionals who quit because of the vaccine mandates. Mind, I support that mandate in particular, but I think there's some creative accounting going on, with regard to this topic, in terms of how people want to allocate responsibility for deaths.
But accepting the hypothetical, the hypothetical is about the extraordinary situation arises where we must decide who to save; and in that hypothetical, I can see no choice but choosing to save those who took the reasonable precautions, who had no opportunity to avert their own personal disasters.
I was mildly in favor of vaccine mandates, but not anymore. With omicron, I believe that most people will get it, and being infected is giving enough protection against severe disease in my eyes.
Personally, for me the argument for vaccine mandate was never to stop transmission. It was that you can let a transmission wave run through your population without putting the ICU system at the risk of collapsing (without lockdowns or interventions). In my country, the last Delta wave filled the ICU to >40% (in some regions to >80%), despite some interventions and closures, which is not acceptable for me. So once enough people have some protection against needing ICU, vaccine mandates stop making sense for me.
IF everyone is gong to get it, then the difference between them all getting it, and being mildly sick, and them all getting it, and a lot more being seriously sick and going to hospital, is pretty major. If anything more so than before, since you could argue that a person who took other precautions pre omicron would be unlikely to get it, so not benefit from the vaccine directly.
There isn't really any evidence that Omicron is significantly milder in vaccinated patients; this was a factor with earlier variants, but I haven't seen any study so far showing that it's not just milder all round.
It's certainly possible that vaccines might help with this, but it's also possible that the virus has diverged to the point where cellular responses based on the original strain are not particularly helpful.
Well yes, it would be a big difference *during* the omicron wave. My point is that a vaccine mandate comes too late for that. And *after* the omicron wave it will be less important.
Fortunately, it seems that we will get through the omicron wave surprisingly unscathed (at least surprising for me).
My wife got covid at the hospital , testing for antibodies , and terminated for not getting the shots . It didn’t make sense before omicron as well. And now they are even closing some emergency rooms in hospitals in our areas because of lack of staff . Before being terminated she was required to test 3 times a week. While the jabbed , that could transmit the virus or themselves not develop immunity didn’t test at all . Makes no sense , unless the objective is actually instilling the policy of mandating vaccines . Her other job was done primarily from home and also terminated .
Hm, I agree that this doesn't make any sense at all. But it sounds like a bad implementation rather than an argument against vaccine mandates. Having covid should obviously count like vaccine shots. This is the case in Germany, where I follow the discussion. There is a legal vaccine mandate for health workers and caregivers (only for people who actually work directly with patients, or in a building like a hospital or a nursery). But I wasn't talking about this one, I still find this sensible if it's about complementing testing, not replacing it. Vaccination does still decrease likelihood of infection and transmission; not enough to stop a wave, but enough to make sense for hospital staff and caregivers.
I was referring to a vaccine mandate for the general public. There will be an open parliament vote on this soon in Germany, and the outcome is quite open. Other countries like Greece and Italy have already issued such mandates (for people above 50 or 60 or so).
The termination of hospital workers seems crazy.
Nah. You get very high compliance rates with mandates, if you mean it and fire the non-compliant. The hospitals are better off with 99% vaccinated staff and 1% gone than they are with 85 or 90 percent and that 1% still around. IMO, of course, but it seems to be widely shared.
And, not for nothing, but the vaccine refusers may just not be the people you want manning the hospitals during a pandemic.
cannabis's story doesn't make sense, though: "she was required to test 3 times a week" means there wasn't a full vaccination mandate, given that an employee could refuse and get tests instead. Doesn't make sense to fire someone for getting Covid unless they lied about vaccination status, which doesn't appear to be the case here.
Right, I think omicron changes everything about mandates.
I don't know about "the community". But I continue to believe that the legal case in favor of vaccine mandates is fairly trivial. We have a lot of precedent here, and precedent is everything in law.
As for the rest - the barn door is wide open, the horse has been stolen. Even more people are going to wind up dead in the US than I predicted some time in 2020. (I went with "at least 1 million excess deaths in the US" at a time when then consensus in SSC-derived venues seemed much lower.) Some of them will die without ever catching covid, mostly thanks to reduced availability of treatment for other conditions.
The more selfish bastards who prefer to avoid well-known unpleasant side effects and smaller vaccine risks to themselves, taking on instead the larger risks of covid itself (reduced by what they hope is a less than 100% chance of them catching it), the more deaths there will be.
But in many cases their decision is rational, if you presume they place zero value on anyone else's life and health. It's even more rational if you presume that they'd like to see certain populations reduced, and calculate that those populations will be more affected by the situation.
Frankly, my biggest argument against vaccine mandates remains the cluster fuck interposed between choosing to get the vaccine and actually getting the shot. I'm going into the omicron spike with a fresh booster, not yet aged enough to be useful, because when I reached the 6 month mark on my original vaccination, I found that I couldn't book a booster sooner than 3 weeks in advance. Others I know haven't been boosted because drop-in-to-pharmacy vaccines are no longer available in our area, and they don't feel capable of navigating the maze of twisty turny web pages and/or don't want to register with multiple health providers (and receive spam forever after) in the hopes that one of them has doses available.
My next best argument is the problem of scarcity. There are still people at higher risk than me, never mind the average reader, who haven't had their first shot, and not by choice. They need that first shot more than I needed my booster. If you or I were to forgo a vaccine in favor of a more vulnerable person in e.g. a 3rd world country, it's hard to argue with the morality of that choice - provided there's good reason to believe the dose won't just go to someone local, even less vulnerable than we are.
I know a couple people who were refused boosters because they were <1 week early, and Rules Must Be Followed. This was utterly idiotic, but also very much in keeping with the spirit of the age.
State and local governments have wide powers to enforce health mandates, but that doesn't mean the Federal government has those rights.
The Tenth Amendment says the opposite, in fact.
Frankly, I don't care about levels of government. I live in California, not e.g. Texas. And most of the effective anti-covid measures I've been covered by have started out at the county level, and then sometimes been picked up by state or even nation.
In fact, I'm currently hoping our local county health officer nixes the latest brilliance from state officials - medical people who test positive for covid can now go back to seeing patients immediately, provided they don't have symptoms. (To be fair to the PTB, they are required to wear better masks than others are required to, and are supposed to mostly be treating patients who themselves have covid.)
You say the legal case for them "is trivial" but what government body is doing something really matters.
I've encountered a lot of net.experts who assure everyone that e.g. quarantine is a new and unprecedented innovation. They may mean "quarantines by the federal government of the US," but so far that's never been what they said.
The OP likewise failed to specify a level of government.
IANAL, but I've experienced and observed enough vaccine mandates, both in countries I've lived in and in countries I've visited, to know that vaccine mandates exist, and not all of them have been successfully challenged in the courts, not even in the USA, let alone in countries with different legal traditions.
E.g. the combination of a requirement to attend school, and a requirement to be vaccinated for various communicable diseases in order to attend public schools. That's a vaccine mandate you might be able to buy your way out of it by paying the costs of home schooling.
Yes, vaccine mandates that have been held up as Constitutional are typically tied to a specific requirement and done by a local or state government.
Even better, the last paragraph of my comment, discussing the effective altruism argument against young, rich, healthy people using vaccine doses, completely disappeared from my post.
In brief, the argument was that *if* you could be reasonably sure the dose you didn't get would go to someone more vulnerable, this would be a good and non-selfish motive. But in the US today, it's more likely to be wasted, or go to someone at even less personal risk than you are.
I got COVID in December of 2020, and was coordinating the disbursement of the vaccines by March 2021. I could have gotten myself on the early list and been vaccinated in the first major groups. I originally opted not to get one because there were a lot of people who desperately wanted one and were much higher risk than me. That was a very real concern at the time.
The reasoning was less strong for a while in first world nations. I'm not sure how reasonable it is to think that a foregone dose in the US will end up in a country with limited access.
That paragraph *eventually* reappeared.
Perhaps Substack would like to hire some competent user interface designers and programmers?
If the text at the end of your message got cut off or an edited change doesn't show up, you need to reload the page to see it - usually that suffices. Some sort of page-caching issue.
*sigh* It looks like the edit function is a no-op. I've twice corrected my typo above of "mega" for "omicron", and I'm still seeing omega.
I have had all kinds of trouble doing edits on Substack. -- editor is really buggy.
I had that experience, and assumed I'd left it too long to try editing. Then came back an hour later and the edit had gone thru.
... Lo and behold, your comment now has its omicron ;)
Edits are all going through, you just have to reload the page.
I just want to register that I do not agree with the premise. Vaccines do not protect against transmission on 100 %, but they do protect against it somewhat, although their effectiveness was reduced in that regard by omicron.
I don´t support universal vaccine mandates, though, so probably not a target audience for this
Still strongly for vaccination requirements. The issue is ICU beds, which are not exactly public goods but do have the feature of non-excludability. Unvaccinated individuals swamping those beds still kills by limiting access for others who, e.g. have a stroke or a postpartum hemorrhage or whatever.
I personally know of one woman who died of a postpartum hemorrhage in the last surge for want of an ICU bed to be transferred to. That shouldn't be happening this surge (but it will).
You realize people have always been dying while waiting for beds right? Full ICU beds isn't a new thing by any means. It is only being talked about now because it makes for good news to make people fearful and appeals both to the emotions of people and the bloodthurst of the same.
It's being talked about now, because it's far more of an issue than it usually is.
There's always tricky triage decisions to be made in an ICU ward, but when you've suddenly got far more patients than usual getting referred then the decisions become a lot trickier, and you're going to be letting a lot more people die who might otherwise have been saved.
And in particular, it sucks to die from something *other* than Covid just because some unvaccinated person with Covid took your ICU bed.
However, I think any vaccination mandate would need to have *already* been put in place by now, in order to get cases down fast enough to avoid ICU oversaturation (in cases where that might happen). Some countries have already peaked.
I wasn't in favor of mandates, but faced with the issue of ICU bed limitations, they might be the least-bad answer at stopping the resource from being depleted.
I'd love for their to be another answer, though. A possible one is "people who didn't get the vaccine get queued second at the ER," which has a lot of problems[1], but might be less bad than mandates.
And it wouldn't be enough (at least for me) to merely say "yes, let's do that" while not expending any political capital to change the status quo.
[1] Practical problems: verifying who was and wasn't vaccinated. Political problems: who *else* now gets second-class status for ICU beds?
Personally I think this line of argument proves too much; once you notice people constantly die for want of resources, and due to human labor being the limiting factor and thus all resources being ultimately fungible, any "wasteful" use of any resources (read: a use which the person doing the describing doesn't agree with) is killing people.
I was for mandatory vaccinations, but insofar as they don't protect against transmission, I can't in good conscious remain in that position.
This is an interesting position. What is it about causing death via transmission through a viral particle rather than through swamping of a limited resource that switches things over for you?
You're making a 'slipery slope' argument about my position--essentially that i haven't specified the roadblocks around what makes my position apply to ICU beds and not ALL wealth in general. As I alluded to in my post, it's partly the public(ish) nature of ICU beds as a resource and their relatively fixed quantity in the short to medium term. It is also relevant that the proposed intervention has extremely low risks.
edit: It might be relevant to specify what kind of mandates we are talking about here. Everyone who doesn't get vaxed goes to prison? Work related requirements? Fines? Shot by firing squad? Details might be pertinent.
Because I think viral particles are sufficiently comparable to weapons - or explicitly comparable in the case of bioweapons - that failure to take reasonable precaution against their "use" / spread can reasonably be viewed as a form of negligence.
For the personal level. For the public level, I think national defense is a valid purpose for government, and the ability to defend the country against bioweapons includes the powers to quarantine and forcibly vaccinate people, among other things; however, these powers have to be balanced against individual rights. There's complicated rules about how to do this balancing, but the short of it is, if there's a less rights-invasive alternative, you can't do the more rights-invasive thing.
So given that we have the less rights-invasive alternative of lowering the priority of COVID people for ICU triage purposes, such that we give the ICU bed to the other patient, there's not actually a good public-health argument for forced vaccinations on the basis of finite ICU resources.
I don't think that proposal actually works, though. ICU bed triage only works until the beds are full, then they are full. Do you pull folks off vents unceremoniously and immediately when someone needs ICU transfer? ICU transfer need is urgent and time sensitive. To open a bed, you quite literally kill another patient.
To be clear, I viscerally love the idea of the triaging based approach. That's a way better concept on so many fronts, for all the reasons you listed. But I foresee pulling someone off a vent and explaining that to loved ones is going to result in dead healthcare personnel.
If you can propose a well thought out schema that takes into account how long it takes folks to recover on a vent (as much as weeks) and not an unrealistic concept of ED triage I am all in on that proposal (will look up thread for it as well, I agree that forced vaccination is undesirable from a rights perspective, I just think that it steps over the line to being justifiable).
I am someone who works in healthcare but not directly in the ICU, so I have some knowledge of how this works but not in the detail that some on this forum may.
Ceasing a medical procedure is less rights-violating than requiring one, even before you consider how many people whose rights you must violate in order to prevent the situation of ceasing to provide medical aid to one person.
So, if it comes down to it - yes. Take somebody off a ventilator. The idea that it is worse to pull somebody off a ventilator than it is to never provide one in the first place smells like Schroedinger's Interpretation of Ethics, to me; why is it worse to conditionally try to help somebody, if somebody else doesn't end up needing your help, than it is to do nothing for them at all?
That way of looking at things seems fundamentally confused, to me.
I agree with both parts of your conment
What about people who have "natural" immunity from previous infection? What about people who cannot get vaccinated due to allergies (or other reasons, potentially including religious)? What would you do with people who used to be fully vaccinated but they aren't getting boosters?
Even if we could agree on the evil choice to force those crazy anti-vaxxers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by cutting off support from the community, there are a lot of problems with such a plan.
Is that a real thing? The number of people with repeat or multiple infections I am aware of is very non-zero. This idea get it and you are done seems false given the I got it. I got it again. I am vaxxed and boosted and got it...
It leads me towards lockdowns and closed borders and mask orders and such to break the chain of transmission because infection/recovery and vax does not seem to prevent illness.
Of course, omicron partly bypasses immunity and we don't have omicron boosters, so there's nothing surprising about that unless you're talking about a different strain. Omicron was fairly common by mid-December IIRC.
John already answered on most of what you said, but I would like to ask (or for you to at least think about) a follow-up question. How long, and how severely, would you want to continue locking down and closing borders?
Related, are you aware of how many people need to continue working, including crossing borders, in order to keep the supply chain moving and keeping people safe in their homes from dying?
The number of people with infections despite vaccination is also very non-zero. Vaccination seems very roughly equivalent to infection in terms of preventing future infection, and reducing severity of future infection. So if you consider it safe enough for Alice to go about in public, eat in restaurants, work at her job, simply because she is vaccinated (but not yet infected), then you should consider it safe for Bob to do those things after he has recovered from infection (but not been vaccinated).
There is a concern with verifying that a person has in fact been previously infected, but at least some people can prove that with the same level of certainty as vaccination. So this seems like a matter of wanting our COVID policy to have everyone organized in neat rectangular grids, than wanting everyone protected against infection to some consistent standard.
I am guessing that you have a problem with this reported study then, which I will admit I just googled my way to (but I have also heard this topic brought up in intrahospital communications).
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm?s_cid=mm7044e1_w
Christian Scientists are anti-vaccine, and that's a church of ~200,000 that's 140 years old.
Yeah, I'm surprised. Members are free to vaccinate but "Most of our church members normally rely on prayer for healing." https://www.christianscience.com/press-room/a-christian-science-perspective-on-vaccination-and-public-health
If people who refuse covid vax deserve to have some of their free healthcare waived, do people who have promiscuous sex deserve to pay in full for anti-HIV medication in case of infection?
Maybe if all the ICU beds are full, and you could consciously determine the people who had promiscuous sex, yes, we could make them the first to be denied care during triage.
What about obese and overweight patients? Diabetics and those with heart and lung diseases from lifestyle choices? They should waive all rights to healthcare as they cause an immense burden to the healthcare system and society as a whole
Nobody here is arguing that unvaxxed people deserve No Healthcare. But in an overflow situation where there is not enough healthcare to go around in a local area, it makes sense to assign it first to the people who took steps to prevent the problem. If there was a similar healthcare overload where there weren't enough beds due to a problem caused by obesity or heart disease, then it would similarly make sense to prioritize the people who made better choices in those cases. But since that isn't happening, and is very unlikely to ever happen, that's kinda an irrelevant hypothetical.
People who remain unvaxxed for reasons other than an allergic response to it are extremely selfish and directly contributing to the actual current problem of overburdened healthcare.
They're not even being selfish. That would imply that what they were doing was in their own self-interest, which is absolutely isn't under any definition of self-interest I can conceive.
This is the footnote I made in the comment I made elsewhere, and will reproduce in full here:
===
I wasn't in favor of mandates, but faced with the issue of ICU bed limitations, they might be the least-bad answer at stopping the resource from being depleted.
I'd love for there to be another answer, though. A possible one is "people who didn't get the vaccine get queued second at the ER," which has a lot of problems[1], but might be less bad than mandates.
And it wouldn't be enough (at least for me) to merely say "yes, let's do that" while not expending any political capital to change the status quo.
[1] Practical problems: verifying who was and wasn't vaccinated. Political problems: who *else* now gets second-class status for ICU beds?
Yes.
In fact, everyone should have to pay the full cost of their health care.
Sin taxes exist on alcohol/tobacco, but promiscuous sex seems to be, in a sense, subsidized.
There's an extra tax on McDonalds?
See my more full response downthread, but I want to point out that the waiving rights to healthcare doesn't really work. Triage only works until the beds are full, then they are full. Do you pull unvaxed folks off vents unceremoniously and immediately when someone needs ICU transfer? ICU transfer need is urgent and time sensitive. To open a bed, you quite literally kill another patient.
Love the 'specific actions have specific consequences' concept here, but entirely impossible to implement. If you did, I predict you'd see Doctors and nurses getting shot.
Now, in fairness, if you create law for forced vaccination you are also likely going to see someone get shot, given the vitriol that surrounds this, which is why the way mandates are implemented is important.
The problem is that this situation just sucks. You have to pick a least bad and least rights invasive option, which is never going to feel great.
It's a nice compromise, but not a realistic one- nor one that we should pursue (I think charity, even towards the "undeserving", is a valuable thing for a society to foster).
I have a strong tendency to trust the scientific consensus. Of course Scott has a post about this (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/17/learning-to-love-scientific-consensus/), but it's also the simple, obvious logic that most experts know more than I do about their own subject.
But I have one annoying exception that's really frustrating my epistemic model of the world, and that's the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis).
I love the AAH! It strikes me as a smart and elegant idea with the ability to explain so much of what's unique about human anatomy.
I won't go into the entire theory here (though might in the comments below), but in a nutshell, AAH allows us to take one big geographic factor (changing sea-levels forcing early humans to adapt to life along the seashore) and we suddenly have a good explanation for a variety of major factors including:
Bipedalism
Subcutaneous fat
Loss of fur
Weak sense of smell
Extreme loss of water and salt while sweating
Communication via words.
The list goes on.
If you read Elaine Morgan's Scar's of Evolution you get a tour de force making this hypothesis seem super likely. I flatter myself as someone who can detect a crank or a nutjob and this just isn't the case. She's also gotten approval from heavyweights like Daniel Dennett, and even Richard Dawkins gave it a nod in his book The Ancestor's Tale.
Of course, there are aspects that are a lot weirder and bigger stretches, but open intriguing doors of consideration:
Aquatic Mammals tend to have higher levels of intelligence.
Elephants seem to be another example of a mammal that went semi-aquatic then returned to life on land.
Males going bald but females not (don't even ask lol).
I fully understand that there are alternative explanations for everything. This is clearly an open debate with lots of gaps in our understanding.
But I just can't understand how the Scientific consensus seems so dismissive of this great idea.
Nobody talks about AAH, there are no good video essays either explaining or explaining why it's wrong.
I've tried looking into a proper debunking but nothing seems impressive or convincing.
The scientific consensus seems to regard this idea as not even worth considering for some reason.
But here we have an amazing theory that's initially counter-intuitive, but on further reflection explains a lot.
I'd love to hear the thoughts of people here. Am I just too stuck on an outdated idea that's easily proven false, or maybe I'm wrong about the scientific consensus, perhaps?
Communication via words? Males going bald but females not? Loss of water and salt while sweating? Weak sense of smell? Bipedalism? Why would these be "aquatic" attributes? Aquatic animals don't need to sweat, I think. And don't other apes sweat? Do they not have fat attached to their skin? And fur seems unnecessary on the African Savannah, especially in a big-brained creature that could use clothes (animal skin) if it gets cold. So, there are obvious objections. (Especially when I don't get something)
Many of these factors (like bipedalism, loss of hair) seem equally easy to explain by the standard-model savannah ape hypothesis. Bipedalism gives you height and speed at the cost of tree-climbing ability, which is a worthwhile trade-off if you're moving from the forest to the savannah. Fur is less clear (since many savannah animals do have it) but I can see definite advantages to switching from fur to subcutaneous fat if you're moving from a shady forest to a sunny grassland. Besides, fur isn't explicitly contraindicated for aquatic mammals anyway (e.g. seals).
I think my big question about aquatic ape is: what happened to all the aquatic apes? Why did we abandon the water and move back inland (to the savannah where it turns out most of these aquatic adaptations were pretty useful anyway)?
I find aquatic ape interesting because it bears all the hallmarks of a crackpot theory (e.g. a bunch of proponents who spend a lot of time talking about how they're being oppressed) without being obviously crackpot. But I think the issue is more that it's a theory that sounds great the first time you hear about it but makes less and less sense the more you think about it.
There's just no archeological evidence for this theory - tools, bone structure, sites of findings themselves, whatever evidence we have about diet all point to a terrestrial lifestyle. There's good explanations for all the features that you mention that don't involve aquatic lifestyle. In fact, sweat is a counterexample - the primary use of sweat in humans is for cooling, and you don't need it if you spend a lot of time in or near water. You definitely don't need to be one of the most sweating animals out there. And there's some other traits you wouldn't expect from an aquatic animal - e.g. we're good runners and have exceptional long-distance vision (for a mammal).
I'm not even sure, exactly what period of human evolution this theory regards as the "most aquatic"? Whatever I try to think of it sounds like obvious nonsense.
For the "hairlessness" argument to hold water (sorry), the aquatic period would presumably have to have been fairly early? Semi-aquatic animals like beavers and otters still seem to be pretty damn furry.
Right, but otoh as far as we know humans have been losing hairs for quite a while, probably all the way until Homo sapiens. But H. sapiens definitely weren't aquatic, we have a ton of tools and cave art and campsite findings to confirm that, so it must have been earlier. But even if you go all the way back to H. erectus it doesn't make sense, because they had no problems leaving Africa and adapting to pretty cold and/or arid environments 1-2 mln years ago. So it must have been before even that, before 2mln years. But many if not most of the trends OP mentions have definitely continued past 2mln years, and it's possible that some (e.g. language) have only begun after that point. Which means that there were strong drivers for them even in terrestrial Homos, at which point one wonders why we even need to postulate aquatic Homos given that we 1) clearly don't need them 2) have no evidence for their existence.
And our swimming ability is very weak compared to beavers and otters.
I've long thought that all the things this theory supposedly explains have rather obvious alternative solutions, and a bunch of separate things being explainable with one theory isn't necessarily more likely than separate things having separate explanations.
That said, the one thing that I cannot see an obvious alternative solution for is human speech. All attempts to teach other apes to speak were met with abject failure: they cannot be trained to produce anything more than a sigh, apparently because they have no voluntary control over their breathing and vocal chords. Breathing is very important; it makes as much sense for the brain to keep this under autonomous control as your heart rate. But we can't control our heart rate. So how come we can control our breathing?
Obviously, evolving to be able to speak is very advantageous to us, but voluntary breathing is too high of an up-front cost to pay when you have to do the work of developing a language afterwards, but if we already evolved to breathe voluntarily, speech would come at no cost at all. And what other way could we have done that if not by spending time in the water? Being forced to swim to survive is a surefire way to develop controlled breathing, just look at any aquatic mammal.
So that's what wins the theory all the points in my view: I see no better explanation for why we can speak and other apes can't.
Alternative hypothesis: complicated language requires a big expensive brain, and there's no point in having voluntary breathing until you've already committed to a big-expensive-brain strategy.
I've seen an alternate guess for the origin of speech: singing.
Singing, according to this theory, predates language, and originally served to attract mates.
My guess is it's the other way round - singing was invented in order to teach language.
When you have a baby it's very noticeable how everyone immediately starts singing to it the whole time, and I suspect this is a cultural universal. One of the major jobs a baby has to do is learn language, and we sing songs to them that slow down the articulation of words often drastically, while showcasing linguistically salient features with tone changes, rhyme, alliteration etc.
[/rampant speculation]
How do we know which animals have voluntary breath control?
It's required for every aquatic and semi-aquatic mammal to ensure they don't get a lungfull of water. Aside from them, you can tell that birds such as parrots and ravens have this ability as they can mimic human speech and many other sounds, which requires they control the cadence of their vocalizations and thus the length of their breaths. Other songbirds, those that imprint on their parents and only sing one song, may also have voluntary breathing but I'm not sure, it may also be that their song is rote and involuntary.
In the absence of those indicators, I'm not sure how you would detect an animal's capacity for voluntary breathing, and I would assume its absence.
I would have thought animals typically have voluntary breathing control, if only so that they can coordinate eating and drinking well.
This 2017 thesis concludes that "Bonobos and chimpanzees both displayed some level of orofacial-motor control [....] Some members of both species also demonstrated breath control [...]": https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=integrbiol_etd