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.
I don’t know if this will interest you or annoy you further. I ran across Bad Guru Substack yesterday. He talks about the commodification of spirituality. I’ve just started spelunking.
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.
I hate, hate HATE how FDR essentially got away with so many awful decisions. As a Huey Long aficionado, I hate that he's mostly brought up in a "good thing we got FDR instead, right?" type of way. Somehow the argument is something like "Huey Long would have gone against democratic norms and done bad things, so it's a good thing that we got FDR instead, a guy who actually did do all those things but he beat polio so shut up. Just shut up"
Just shows to me how conceptually bankrupt most accusations of "demagoguery" are. It is increasingly obvious that this just means whatever the elites need it to in order to keep someone who legitimately poses a threat to them out of power.
* 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.
I thought of something after reading your post on homeopathy again which you linked from your movie talk,
Yes there is a placebo effect and also I saw Dr Ben goldacre years ago talking about a nacebo effect but would the real test (or control? Or whatever) be the complete opposite? Like if someone DIDN'T have a clue if they were drinking something homeopathic and still got effects?
Has anyone ever had their drink spiked homoeopathically?
Seems like regression to the mean surely plays a part in placebo effects: Most symptoms are things that occur less often than does not having that symptom. Some of the people who have the symptom will begin moving towards normalcy around the time they start the placebo, as a result of all the bodily processes that make absence of that symptom more common than present.
But here are a couple of placebo effect situations where regression to the mean would not explain subjects' feeling better from the inactive treatment:
-Situations where the subjects' health problem involves processes that are likely to lead to worsening symptoms as a result of well-understood processes. One example would be incurable, fatal diseases. A less grim one would be the wearing off of local anesthesia after a procedure that did enough tissue damage that worsening pain is the norm as the local wears off. In both of these situations, subjects are in a group where moving towards the mean at a given time for their group = moving towards worse symptoms.
-"Nocebo" effects -- subjects' feeling worse when given a treatment they have been told will produce unpleasant side effects
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.
Don’t vaccines have only very short-term side effects though? As in “if this vaccine will kill you it definitely will before three months have passed?”
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.
You are describing Republicans in broadly flattering terms here. The former GOP might have had some of these positive attributes, but they been missing in action for 5 years now. Only a very few have had the courage to stand up to an unmistakably cruel and ignorant man.
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.
I agree, the SA opinion piece is shite. It is still labeled as ‘opinion’. We are free to disagree. But saying you’ll even vote for the 'I just want to find 11,780 votes’ guy to fight Wokeism seems like throwing in the towel on any hope of recovering a shared observable reality.
That fella makes up convenient facts on the fly and the shell of what used to be the Republican Party agrees or claims to have not heard about it. Or they disagree until they get called out by Sean Hannity and then crawl back and recant.
The events at the capitol building January 6, 2021 frighten me more than the current pandering to Wokeism.
The cult of personality around the knuckle head that that encouraged that event is an immediate threat that has to take priority IMO.
I’ll continue to oppose brain-dead Wokeism on a case by case basis until that crisis has passed.
There is a difference between supporting protests that had accompanying riots and actively trying to overturn electoral results. If 2024 results in the R winning and the D attempt to actively overturn the results, THEN you can start equivocating.
You're right, supporting protests that had accompanying riots is worse. It is not against the law to peddle conspiracy theories about the election, even dishonestly. It *is* against the law, not to mention the basic fabric of society, to loot, assault police, and burn down small businesses.
Right, so any cause that fails to be 100% nonviolent is unconscionable to support? Because if that's the case- if you REALLY want to resort to stacking bodies up in piles- you, at best, make a case for opposing every political party that has ever existed.
That's my position, yes. I oppose every political party that ever existed *at the moment that they're causing mass violence across the country*. If they subsequently change their ways, I might stop opposing them.
I'm comparing Democrats' support for protests that included riots, which continued as the riots were ongoing, to Trump's support for the conspiracy theory, which lead to the Capitol Hill riot, during which he issued multiple tweets telling people to stay peaceful and/or go home: https://www.thetrumparchive.com/
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.
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.
Does anyone have a good refutation of Scott’s post steelmanning NIMBYs? It seems to me like the actual effect on rent from building lots isn’t that pronounced as we would like to think. The literature seems to say the same but I don’t know if Im reading these results properly. I keep thinking of Scott bringing up New York as an incredibly dense city where most inhabitants still give away half their paycheck in rent every month.
NYC is dense (but also, IIRC it build more housing units in the 1920s than it has since 1960) but the areas surrounding it are not. Many people commute from sprawling suburbs full of single-family homes on a daily basis (or at least, did pre-pandemic). It's also in extremely high demand; it's certainly not the case that you could stop building housing and rent would just stay where it is. Even wikipedia calls out "land use regulation, historical preservation, and political opposition" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_housing_shortage#Supply_factors).
1 + 2. As was pointed out originally, issues with the data he presents on housing growth stock undermine these quite a bit. But also, SF and the surrounding area has been underbuilding housing for at least 50 years. It is not at all surprising that it will take more than a few years to fix the problem.
4. Some of these issues are Bay Area-specific, and could be fixed with better policy. Having 3 murders at one train station in 1 week is a statement about your crime policy (or arguably other socioeconomic policies), not about trains. Speaking of policy, the problem is less with liking suburbs, and with forcing every single community in the entire country to be a specific type of suburb, namely sprawling and car-dependent. Sure, some people like living in such suburbs. Some people like living in townhomes or small apartment units. Why do the former get to impose their preferences everywhere by force of law? Because 1950s-era policy is sacrosanct?
5. Seems like mostly a strawman. Cities became less popular starting in after WW2, but have recently become more popular again. That requires a change in policy to reflect what people want to do.
Induced demand certainly exists in some contexts. Eg: a few years ago, a friend of mine was offered an apartment in Long Island City, Queens. Before he accepted, he went over in the evening to make sure that there were amenities open in the neighborhood. Now, LIC has seen quite a bit of new housing over the last 15 yrs or so. At some point in the past, it was mostly light industry, there were relatively few residents, hence relatively few amenities, and hence relatively low demand. My friend would not have moved there then. So, I would not be surprised if the new housing, on balance, increased the prices of the existing stock.
However, LIC is a neighborhood, not a city. The new amenities there certainly did very little to increase the demand for housing in NYC as a whole, because NYC obviously already had plenty of amenities. I am sure the same can be said of most established cities - there might be neighborhoods in Cincinnati in which new housing --> higher prices in that neighborhood, but the effect on housing prices in the city as a whole will still be negative (after all, when my friend moved from the Upper West Side to LIC, the demand for housing in the Upper West Side declined ever so slightly). So, I am guessing that induced demand has a measurable net effect at low levels of density, but at higher levels that effect on rests is swamped by the effect of increased supply (and, by "low levels of density" at the city level, I mean so low that it is not really much of a city at all.
In support of this, I was living in midtown east a few years ago when all the LIC construction was going up. I was able to use that new construction to negotiate a $100/mo decrease in my rent, where initially the landlord wanted a $300/mo increase.
>5. Seems like mostly a strawman. Cities became less popular starting in after WW2, but have recently become more popular again. That requires a change in policy to reflect what people want to do
Just how big do you think immigration is? If you cut immigration in half, it would decrease the rate of population increase by only 0.15%, by my calculation.
And who would you like to bar from entering? My wife perhaps? Who you gonna ban?
So, we all need to live in increasingly small dwellings in increasingly congested cities with increasingly overwhelmed physical and social infrastructure...to bring more people into the country that we don't need?
"Just how big do you think immigration is?"
It's millions of people, disproportionately headed towards the most densely populated areas. And an adult immigrant rents or buys a property immediately. A couple having one child more than the average fertility rate does not result in an increase in demand for property to rent or buy until at least 18 years. This is a huge difference and the latter will have a much smaller impact on the housing market than the former.
Also, immigrants have a higher fertility rate than non-immigrants, meaning fertility and immigration aren't independent variables.
"And who would you like to bar from entering? My wife perhaps? Who you gonna ban?"
How is this an argument? The fact that you specifically, some dude on substack, has an immigrant wife, that means we have to never restrict anyone from from immigrating to the US?
Do you support open borders? No? Then you literally support billions of people not being allowed to immigrate to the US. And if you DO support open borders, then your argument around the effects of immigration on demand are meaningless.
How is this an answer to my question? You want to reduce immigration but refuse to say who should be kept out!
And to suggest there's no room for more housing in the US without making homes smaller? (1) I don't want a smaller home, but I would've been interested in a smaller LOT if that had been an affordable option in my area. It wasn't on offer. (2) Population density is 34/km² in the U.S., 65 globally, 149 in China, 233 in Germany, and 511 in South Korea ... so yes the U.S. has room for more.
There is literally no city in the United States that isn't surrounded by plenty of areas full of single family homes on large lots. Many such places are even in the cities themselves. Congestion is a policy issue, caused by endlessly promoting driving and sprawl at the expense of literally everything else.
"Sprawl" is what allows us to increase our population without living in increasingly small dwellings in increasingly congested cities. No sprawl, no space reduction, no population increase: pick no more than two.
What does that have to do with anything? Total population is not the relevant factor driving up demand. There are plenty of cheap places to live in the middle of nowhere, but people want to live in or near cities.
"There are plenty of cheap places to live in the middle of nowhere, but people want to live in or near cities."
Okay? And what's your big scheme for convincing people to live in the middle of nowhere?
People always act like 'low population density in the middle of nowhere' is some knockdown argument, but not once have I ever seen any of you explain why this is in any way remotely relevant.
Immigrants disproportionately head to densely populated cities. Any increase in housing stock is largely going to be consumed by people moving to the city, and these people are disproportionately immigrants.
The existence of empty space disproves the absurd notion that total national population is at all a relevant variable. People specifically want *to live in and near cities*. This is true of immigrants and non-immigrants, and since we no longer live in a world where 90% of the population must farm to feed everyone, people are going to move to cities. The urban and near-urban population will increase *even if there is no immigration at all.* Total population growth might exacerbate the problem, but even with immigration the US has slid to 0.4% population growth per year. It will quickly join the rest of the developed world in facing a declining population.
If anything, we need *more* immigration, not less, to solve this problem. However, that does require us to actually build some fucking housing, yes. Outside of NYC and maybe Chicago/Boston/DC, US cities are not that dense, and our mid-sized towns and suburbs are almost all wildly sprawly and unpopulated, compared to almost anywhere outside North America. There is absolutely no need to subsidize and legally require detached single family homes on large lots and driving literally everywhere. You can have substantially higher densities that are still not that crowded, with plenty of room for parks, a variety of forms of housing, etc. For example, Austin and its metro area have about 1/4 the density of Zurich and its metro area respectively, despite having about the same total population. Zurich and the surrounding areas are lovely, including plenty of middle density, suburbs, and even farms and wilderness.
Rate of change of population is a very relevant factor driving up demand, though. Without immigration, the rate of increase in population in big cities would be small or negative.
I think you're using a very different definition of "immigration" City growth is primarily driven by people moving out of more rural regions into cities *in the same country*. International immigration certainly adds to it, but net international migration is by no means required for increasing urbanisation.
> Building new housing lowers the price of housing" is one of the most replicated findings in economics
Without reading the paper you mentioned, is it possible that building new housing would lower the price of housing in the short term but raise it in the long term?
Induced demand is a thing for cities. If you add new housing units to an already-popular city then you'll increase the number of people living there, which makes the city an even bigger economic hub than it already was, which makes living in the city an even better option (at least economically) for more people.
The fact that twelve million people live in New York City, or thirty million want to live in Jakarta, is not because New York City or Jakarta have any natural beauty or charm, it's because twelve or thirty million people are already living there. The growth of megacities is a nasty Molochian trap which robs economic activity from smaller towns and cities and forces people into cramped conditions.
>The growth of megacities is a nasty Molochian trap which robs economic activity from smaller towns and cities and forces people into cramped conditions.
Woah, this is an absurd premise. The reality is that agglomeration is a real thing and has economic benefits, and plenty of people don't mind or prefer living nearby other people, and in net are more than happy to trade the economic benefits of agglomeration for less personal space.
You don't have to prefer that, no one is forcing you to. But smaller towns are not entitled to any economic activity.
>Says who? Why are some people entitled to things but others not?
I didn't say anybody is entitled to anything. What I objected to is the idea that cities "rob economic activity from smaller towns." I reject the idea that any such economic activity is robbed, as the smaller towns are not entitled to any economic activity that might end up in a city under a free market. The cities aren't entitled to it either. Agglomeration is a real thing that delivers real economic benefits, and business owners should be free to choose where to locate their business so as to be successful. If the marginal business owner chooses to locate in a city, that isn't entitlement, that's the free market.
Allegedly it's a trend for some older tech companies to open offices near Provo, UT, because Mormons have a hard work culture and don't drink, or something. If so, great, let business locate there and reap the excess benefits of Mormon culture, and let the Mormons be rewarded appropriately for developing such a culture. As I understand, they almost entirely live in single-family housing.
I linked to data on the question of ID for cities, but unlike roads, housing costs a market rate (approximately; less for existing residents, but more for newcomers, which is the relevant party). Some amount of network effect might be theoretically possible, but right now most cities and nearby suburbs are so sparse that it will be a long time before anything legitimately starts running out of room to build more.
Also like I pointed out, I believe part of the reason for NYC being so cramped is that the surrounding areas are so sprawly. There's an enormous difference in density that happens very quickly from skyscrapers to car-dependent suburbia. If you don't like or can't afford the latter, then extremely high density is your only alternative. A large area with medium density (so a mix of commercial, single family, townhomes, small apartment blocks, etc) can house a very large number of people with high quality of life, but such development is illegal in most of the US. Moreover, the suburban towns have ceded a great deal of their economic potential to the cities by greatly limiting space for everything except for expensive, unproductive, single family home-only residential areas.
Finally, I think it is clearly the case that many people do like living in or near cities. Stores, people, and things to do are plentiful and easily available. You get to meet a huge variety of people and the population can support niche interests. Being able to walk and bike places helps improve physical fitness, and allowing children more independence (since they can go places on their own without being driven) is good for their development. I have greatly enjoyed visiting places like Tokyo, where I could go to restaurants, museums, markets, and outdoor attractions without having to fight traffic or deal with road signs in an unfamiliar city.
And that's another part of the problem. The people in the Molochian trap of New York City look out to those of us in sprawl, see that it is good... and want to take it away from us so more of them can live slightly less cramped than they are.
In fact, these "medium density" places exist. Manhattan has a density of 75,000/square mile. Brooklyn, a mere 37,000. The Bronx, 35,000 Queens, 22,000. Jersey City, 18,000. Newark, 12,000. Yonkers, 12,000. Below that you're down to actual suburbs, like Belleville at 11,000 and Bloomfield at 9,000. You could describe Newark outside the small downtown as "a large area of medium density", though alas it somehow fails to provide a high quality of life.
> Moreover, the suburban towns have ceded a great deal of their economic potential to the cities by greatly limiting space for everything except for expensive, unproductive, single family home-only residential areas.
The suburban bedroom communities in the NJ suburbs of NYC are doing far better than the ones which have space for production (which is largely abandoned and decaying). My own suburb indeed had industrial space.... but the era of the suburban factory is gone, and they're apartments (and a national park) now.
If sprawl is so wonderful, why does it have to be enforced by law? You should be ok with repealing zoning, parking requirements, lot size rules, setback requirements, and all of the other things making denser development illegal in most of the country. And of course, having similar levels of subsidy for all kinds of infrastructure. It would be terrible if your wonderful lifestyle were only possible on the back of legalized theft from the people you despise, like most suburban sprawl is. I'm sure you don't want to be so reliant on others.
> If sprawl is so wonderful, why does it have to be enforced by law?
Everything's enforced by law in New Jersey. And almost everywhere else. Manhattan, for instance, has parking _maximums_. The exception is (sprawly) Houston.
> You should be ok with repealing zoning, parking requirements, lot size rules, setback requirements, and all of the other things making denser development illegal in most of the country.
That's not on the table. Nobody with any power at all wants to repeal all this; instead they want to tweak the rules to encourage the things they want while banning the things they don't. They sometimes spin this as freedom, but it ain't. It's not "repeal setback requirements", it's "require zero setback". It's not "repeal zoning" it's "rezone denser" or "change the rules for a zone to make it denser".
Alex addresses the induced demand argument in one of his links.
Also, I disagree on the relative charm of Jakarta and New York. There are vast numbers of people who are drawn to the non-economic ammenities that only large cities can offer, even if the economic benefits of agglomeration are what power the initial growth
Regarding #4, in California there seems to be a notion of saying every city/juristiction must build more housing and a significant amount of designated "low income housing". This would forcibly change all neighborhoods instead of designating certain areas to be dense at a coarse regional granularity. It will be combined with calls to build more transit to these new apartment enclaves, and then change the zoning because it's now near a "transit corridor", etc.
I can buy the need to plan for density at the level of the major metro areas but I'm not convinced suburbs should be forced to change when there are many more appropriate areas for dense building. The desire seems to be primarily to insert such housing into already-desirable zones, which are desirable precisely because of their current non-density and high cost.
"Affordable housing" is mostly a left-wing shibboleth (YIMBYs seem to draw from all over the political spectrum, but usually lean liberal rather than far-left IME). Whether through ignorance of the science, ideology, or whatever other reason, leftists don't like the idea that the market can solve the problem by just building more housing, which will lower rents. They seem to think that rent can only be lowered by legally limiting it, either in general with rent control or in specific cases. In reality, this is a made-up problem, and they are going to make it worse.
When the cost of building any housing is so inflated, and demand is so high, developers are going to build higher-profit ("luxury" in left-ese or "market rate" in sane English) housing when they can build anything. Normally, this housing then moves down the cost chain as it ages, becoming next decades middle-class housing and next generation's affordable housing, and the rich move into the new thing. But there is no new thing, and fixed rents and taxes make it so that there's no reason to downsize, so people with high incomes keep occupying older stock.
Trying to force artificially underpriced housing into whatever nooks and crannies it will fit by fiat just exacerbates the above problem by further lowering the profitability of new development. The real motivation shines through, when leftists manage to stop an entire new project from being built and celebrate as a result. They would rather no new housing be built at all than "luxury" housing, because making livable cities is not the goal, it's just to spite anyone who might have money or make a profit.
YIMBY's realize that building any housing reduces the price of all housing, since rich yuppies can move out of their old inner-city basement apartments and into nice condos further out and open up the older housing stock for low-income renters. Here's another study: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1334&context=up_workingpapers which found that even market-rate housing in low-income areas reduced rents.
I agree that sticking a bunch of huge Cabrini-Green towers in the middle of some leafy SF suburb would be a problem, for multiple reasons. But that's a far-left proposal, not a YIMBY one.
Scott mentions the slippery slope which I think is valid. New condos can be quite nice and may be an upgrade over a degraded area of old single family homes. But the current push is to put such condos everywhere, as far as I can tell.
I know at least one such development planned to go up in the middle of an area full of $2-3M+ single family homes. These are often 50-60+years old but have a steady rate of being replaced with new construction.
From the perspective of an existing resident, there's little upside to supporting condo developments with many more people using the same old facilities and roads. Far better to get a new park and brand new "luxury homes". The condos are also more likely to be rentals with people packing into the rooms in ways they're not designed for. There seems to be a lot of unmet demand for properly large apartments with proper urban planning around them, not random condos here and there.
I don't really buy the slippery slope argument. I doubt most of the people in SF are applying it (or any of their arguments) to ban all immigration, or indeed prevent anything anywhere from ever changing, which is the logical conclusion. Who has the right to keep the world the same it always was? In addition, in places where more housing can be built, do all locations just get more and more urban indefinitely forever? No. Cities go up and down in size, suburbs wax and wane, and typically the city stays in roughly one area, except over extreme timescales. You don't *need* to turn hundreds of square miles into Manhattan, an urban core + a wider area of medium density is sufficient.
And I'm aware of *why* people don't want development near them, I just don't think that anyone is entitled to control all of the land in the whole town just to preserve their home's price. Which really gets at the most basic reason I don't buy the slippery slope: Even if it were true, it wouldn't justify the onerous and ridiculous regulations.
>But the current push is to put such condos everywhere, as far as I can tell.
Let's assume that developers build too many luxury apartments. What happens? They go unoccupied, and the developer loses money. Then they either lower the price to the point where they become occupied, or they continue to lose money. Eventually, they either lowered the rent to a rate that was affordable to the market or the developer loses so much money they go out of business and become a cautionary tale to the other developers for pricing beyond what the market could bear. This is a problem that solves itself. Literally the worst case scenario from "developers built too much luxury housing" is that developers rent for below-cost to stop hemorrhaging money, which is a win for would-be tenants and a loss for the stock market.
Which post of Scott's are you referring to? Matt Yglesias' 70-page book The Rent is Too Damn High is a quick pro-density argument from I think 2012. It's mostly hard-to-argue-with (imo) mechanistic argument than heavy with empiricism, but it does have some empiricism in there.
Over the last two years I've seen a number of studies (but didn't collect them, sorry) showing modest (1-4% iirc) declines in rent on adjacent blocks when new units are built in large cities. When you say "actual effect isn't that pronounced," what do you actually mean? That wording seems a bit squishy. It also seems to kinda operate on the premise that there's some other idea for driving down rents that is very pronounced that we should do instead. I think that building new units doesn't drive down rent quite as much as we'd like, but it's the only tool in the toolbox. In my view it's a relatively basic supply and demand problem unless someone proves to me otherwise.
Another way I like to think about it is that, in most industries, we worry about monopolies and duopolies colluding to keep supply low and margins high. For housing, municipalities seem to do that for them as a result of some normal human biases.
The absolute hilarity of somebody proclaiming the rent is too high....who also wrote a book literally advocating for America's population to be increased by >600 million people in the near future.
Build as many units as you want, rent is going up under such circumstances.
I didn't say deregulating the housing market is inconsistent. I specifically took issue with his belief that the rent is too high. Deregulate all you want, but virtually unlimited immigration* is going to lead to higher rent, period.
*Even if you or Yglesias say that it's not unlimited, so what? Once these new immigrants and their descendants are the majority of the population, it's their preferences that count politically, not yours or yglesias' or anyone else's.
>Deregulate all you want, but virtually unlimited immigration* is going to lead to higher rent, period.
Only if we don't build enough housing. High housing prices are a market signal that incentivizes developers to build more housing, and for more entrepreneurially-minded people to enter the market as developers, and for more investors to provide liquidity for housing development. The high prices of housing in San Francisco suggest that a lot of people want to live in San Francisco. Yglesias proposes that we attempt to satisfy this demand, and not handicap our potential economic growth with artificial restrictions.
>Once these new immigrants and their descendants are the majority of the population, it's their preferences that count politically
Sounds fine, at such a point they'll be American citizens and have as much claim to the future of our shared civilization as any other American. That you suggest this is a bad thing to me seems frankly really gross and anti-American.
> Over the last two years I've seen a number of studies (but didn't collect them, sorry) showing modest (1-4% iirc) declines in rent on adjacent blocks when new units are built in large cities.
That sounds like a small decrease in rent for a very large decrease in quality of life. If I had an apartment building next door I'd need to deal with noise, traffic, loss of sunlight and privacy.
Most people would agree that it's a large increase in quality of life, because the added density also brings more amenities. Also, most people seem to actually like density.
Yes, one apartment building has a small effect. But 10 apartment buildings could have a pretty large effect (1.03^10=1.34, or 34%). Greater density also means that things like better public transit can be offered, so that less people need to travel by car. Most American cities today, basically all of them except NYC, are at an awkward level of density where public transit is expensive and bad. Higher density means you can afford more expensive (better) transit infrastructure and achieve lower ridership costs due to amortization across a higher population per distance traveled.
It's somewhat of a collective action problem. The marginal cost/benefit for a single building is, as you say, basically negative for most neighbors, hence most of them get shut down. But a land-use regime where you could build dense urban cores that could be surrounded by as much single-family suburbia as desired would probably be preferable to everyone. Instead we have a situation that everybody hates: everything is expensive, public transit is pretty bad everywhere, but traffic is also bad everywhere, and those trends will only get worse with more sprawl.
> But a land-use regime where you could build dense urban cores that could be surrounded by as much single-family suburbia as desired would probably be preferable to everyone
But I feel like that's what we already have, and that YIMBYs are proposing to turn the single-family suburbia into dense urban core too.
The western half of San Francisco seems to be covered in houses on tiny 3000sqft blocks, which doesn't really fit into either the "dense core" or "single-family suburbia" categories. Nonetheless, this seems like appropriate zoning for that area.
Now, if you want to flatten the Tenderloin and replace it with luxury apartments I'm right there with you.
Very true, but it seems doubtful that very many of the people leaving NYC or San Francisco or other large dynamic cities are actually relocating to places that would strongly benefit from an infusion of new people. E.g. there was some publicity pre-COVID about hipsters moving from Brooklyn to Detroit but when you looked closely it totaled fewer people per year than get struck by lightning. There's certainly no sign of the vast Farm Belt's towns and small cities (which I spend time in professionally) regaining any of their stunning long-term population losses except for the ones with meat-packing plants and hence new-ish Mexican-immigrant clusters. Etc.
Far more likely is that most of the people picking up and leaving the big cities are going to either nearby suburbs or Sun Belt metros, neither of which seems like strong examples of places being made noticeably better by the influx. Certainly from Chicago, where I live, those are the places to where the city's Black-middle-class exodus has been flowing.
I think it’s possible the effect from new housing isn’t really all that large, at least if we are thinking of realistic increases in the housing supply (I’m assuming little regulation).
I agree that there is no other tool in the box for lowering rents, but I worry that, for some people, the effect sizes just aren’t worth it. I get that if you do some utilitarian math 5,000 additional people in superstar city X is really good. It’s also great that those 5,000 get absorbed by new housing and so the price doesn’t increase, but making that sort of case to your uncle, who votes in every election, is fairly impossible. Maybe it would be easier if there was a bigger effect on prices, maybe not, but a lot of people really loathe traffic and urbanization in general and love their cars and small homes and so on and the YIMBY case offers them very little.
For the record: I favour Japan’s land use regulations, so I’m on your side.
Yeah I think you're 100% correct that the price declines are not enough to get people salivating at the thought of cheaper rent. It's totally one of those things where you'd really have to sustain high rates of development for a decade to get to an effect size where the average person notices without being told.
For what it's worth, arguing with the supply-side skeptics in my life, I've found explaining that "new luxury apartments compete at the high end and drive down the price of last-year's luxury units, and so on" to be effective. I think this way, even though the price decline is modest, you make people instead think about getting a nicer apartment for the same price. I think there's a cognitive asymmetry here that does some work.
As someone who would be called a leftist, personally I consider that kind of broad term to be about as helpful as neoliberal in actually discussing things, my concern is that you would open up more middle rent housing by opening up zoning but this sounds pretty similar to trickle down to me and I don't expect the benefits to reach the bottom 30% of the population. I think this is the major difference between grey tribe libertarian YIMBY people and people who are worried about the "lower" classes. I'm not opposed to zoning changes necessarily like many people are but I don't think that is a broadbased solution for the concerns of the people commentors like Alex are insulting and denigrating.
As someone who lives near the old site of Pruit-Igoe I don't think towers, at least as they are currently typically designed, are an effective solution. In fact I'm not exactly sure what you could do because the "market" will do the best it can to shove anyone below the 50% of income out of desirable places.
That I suspect is the source of rent-control and other similar policies. Subsidizing the less well off. Typically this is targeted at existing residents because "stopping people from getting kicked out of family homes" is more sympathetic than "subsidize the less well off".
I often think there's a high-level generator of disagreement here. Would you prefer A) The bottom 30% see their real purchasing power increase by 30% while the top 10% see their wealth grow by 100%, or B) The bottom 30% see their real purchasing power increase by 10% while the top 10% see their wealth shrink by 10%?
I am very much a mindset-of-abundance, positive-sum-game person, and I would greatly prefer A. I think opening up zoning would result in more of an A-type situation. Opening up zoning regulations would make everyone better off, but yes I suspect more of those benefits would accrue to the wealthy than to the bottom 30%. I still think that's in everyone's best interests. I understand being concerned about inequality per se, but only as a heuristic. I think following your concern over inequality to the degree where you'd prefer B over A is pretty sad.
While we're highly attuned to look at things relatively, I also believe that absolute standards of living exist. I think living in an apartment with dirty water, poor insulation, and no heating/cooling is objectively worse than living in an apartment with clean water, good insulation, and climate control, and I'd prefer a world where the bottom 30% lived in the latter than the former. The question of how to arrive there is a complex empirical question, not a moral one, so to me it seems weird when the "people who are worried about the lower classes" turn to moral arguments on this topic. I suspect that they are morally confused.
It seems to me that today's luxury apartments have all those amenities. It also seems to me that there does not exist the political will to publicly subsidize all of the bottom 30%'s housing to have those amenities. It seems like the fastest way to arrive at the world where the bottom 30% have access to those amenities is to let developers compete to build luxury housing for 20 years such that today's luxury apartments are the bottom end of the housing spectrum.
Prices will generally depend on two things. Mostly, it will be based on demand for housing. Much below that, a floor exists based on actual cost to build and maintain a profitable (even very small margin) unit of housing.
If there are 100 units of housing for $100 each, increasing total units by 5% to 105 shouldn't have a drastic effect on prices. Demand is probably still the major decider in prices, so maybe the price drops to $95, but maybe a much smaller difference and it's $99 - less, but not meaningfully. To get a much stronger drop in prices, you would need to build a much larger amount of additional housing - like 10-20%, to the point where you have absorbed most of the interest in living within that particular city and all excess demand - where prices can drop more significantly. They can never drop below what it costs to profitably create more housing, though, as contractors and developers will not make housing at a loss.
How much housing is needed will depend on how much extra demand there is. SF right now has a ton of excess demand, so maybe we would need to see 50% increases in housing to see that significantly drop. I don't think anyone knows for sure, though. If prices do come down, the prospect of living in a particular area gets better, and that would then raise demand again.
Exactly. In a lot of very desirable cities, you’d have to build *lots* of new housing for there to be a noticeable effect. That kind of sucks. We should still deregulate, though.
Oh, absolutely. I think this analysis helps to understand why building 1,000 units in a huge city like New York doesn't reduce prices, and why we should never expect it to.
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.
Lockdowns and a bunch of other things are just as authoritarian but a lot more inconvenient and ineffective. Going all in on vaccines is not only very reasonable from a technical / scientific standpoint, but it offers a great escape valve for the neurotic impulses of the people that want to “do something” the moment deaths and cases increase. If a fixed portion of our attention is going to go towards policing covid behavior, it might as well be this. The other thing is that governments and people tend to automatically freak out when many people come down with the virus and die of it anyway, and vaccines invariably keep deaths and hospitalizations down, which again calms down lockdown impulses.
That being said, I agree with Ziegler that vaccines reduce transmission and infection, probably, but the effect seems to be insignificant enough that a mandate isn’t all that justified. Hard to know.
For the record, my preferred “compromise” is for anti-vaxxers to simply waive their right to healthcare in some way or another (the specifics are tricky) and the rest of us to get on with our lives (antivaxxers would by and large not mind this solution either, I think, from my irl knowledge of a few).
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).
I agree its not very doable, but to address the actual things you mention:
- Natural immunity should definitely count, in my opinion. The fact it doesnt for most health bureaucracies (see the Djokovic fiasco) is one of the bigger reasons I suspect a lot of vax public policy is motivated by liberal fetishes and not the Science.
- Allergic people can’t help it. Shouldnt be punished.
- Religions. The supreme theological authority should go ahead and state a position. I doubt any reasonably large religions will come out as anti-vax. One-person religions should not count. There remains the problem of cults, but I cant really say I care a lot about their right to be or not be vaccinated. I acknowledge this is pretty tricky and debatable, but the entire pandemic has been so.
- Boosters should be taken into account the first few years before covid becomes endemic, I’d say.
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 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 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.
It could be for, say, kingfishers, but given that all cetaceans (plus manatees and dugongs, which are of a completely separate order) use complex vocalizations in a variety of ways, it seems that this capacity came part and parcel with their adaptation to the water. However, it's still possible that living underwater itself selects for vocalization ability, and semi-aquatic species don't develop it as well.
This thesis notes of an orangutan, "Of the 19 times a human model whistled for Bonnie, she whistled back 14 times; thus, this whistle sound seems to be under voluntary production. Bonnie is also able to modify her whistle duration, as her whistles were significantly longer following a model with a longer duration than a shorter model (Wich et al., 2009)" https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=integrbiol_etd
Something something hyoid bone (from reading _Altered States_ 40 years ago, "your friend is a fucking gorilla")... ah, google says:
"The hyoid bone is crucial for speaking as it supports the root of the tongue. In non-human primates, it is not placed in the right position to vocalise like humans."
They're always breathing. Most of the time they breath quietly, but sometimes they hoot or scream or whatnot. From my understanding, their vocalizations are mostly under conscious control.
I think that, without conscious control of my breath, I would still be able to speak (though with an odd cadence).
From what I've read, they hoot and scream when they're agitated or otherwise emotional. They can suppress their natural instinct to vocalize but they cannot scream on command.
My wife studied Chimp behavior in grad school, I'll check in with her, but from what I picked up via osmosis, this seems very incorrect.
-edit, from my wife-
"They can scream on command and by desire and be quiet on demand"
Do you have a source for your original claim of "they have no control over their breath and vocal chords"? The more I think about it the more ridiculous that sounds. There are lots of reasons that attempts to teach apes to speak have failed, but I've never heard that as one of them.
This one has been knocking around for a long time, so long that though I vaguely remember rebuttals of it, I don't even remember what those were.
I think part of the case against is that we have examples of mammals that spend time in the ocean and they didn't turn out like us (whales, dolphins, seals) and we have whales that came out of the sea, spent time on land, then went back into the sea.
The claimed adaptations of humans as 'aquatic apes' just aren't enough to support "amphibious" rather than "spent time beside the water". And that is the claim there: that humans didn't just live in the littoral zone but spent considerable time in the water. Compare seals to us - e.g. the claim in this pretty graphic that human women have large floating breasts so as to be able to feed babies while immersed:
Well, some seal species copulate in the water, but they don't have those kind of breasts - "Walruses are unique in that mothers nurse their young at sea. The female rests at the surface with its head held up, and the young suckle upside down"
I'm not convinced by those comparisons, because we're the only apes that went aquatic, so obviously it'll look different from other types of mammals that went aquatic. But the similarities are clearly there.
Again, I'm a fan of the idea that elephants are another example of an animal that went aquatic and then returned to land. They're clearly super different from us. But it's a hint that this is something that happens.
I'll definitely agree that the graphic about breasts isn't convincing at all, but I'd say it's a bit of a cheap shot, as it's far from a central aspect of the theory. In fact that's the first time I've seen that idea. Off hand it's weird that only females would evolve breasts in that case. I also remember Elaine Morgan also assumed we breastfed on land.
Alas the best explanation for breasts I've seen is that old reliable: sexual selection. Ie, the easiest way to explain any weird anatomical phenomenon.
I'd love to hear more about this. Hadn't heard of this specific example before but I feel like there are many examples I've come across where the expert consensus refutes something but it's hard for an outsider / lay-person to understand exactly how it's been de-bunked or disproved.
OK so another example I used to have is the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Initially this was considered a fringe idea (at least when it was proposed by Hugh Everett). But the truth is this has quickly become a very mainstream idea.
But yeah, I strongly recommend the Scars of Evolution by Elaine Morgan. It's very dated but still intruiging.
I remember when I came across this theory, it was also claimed that human infants are unique among primates in being able to swim immediately on delivery.
I assume this claim is false, but if there's a paper out there demonstrating its falsity experimentally it must be pretty darkly amusing one...
Of course, human infants cannot actually swim. If they are fat, they don't sink. They do hold their breath, as do many other mammals(diving reflex). They waggle their arms a fair bit. This is not swimming.
I wouldn't say it's completely unfalsifiable. Truly unfalsifiable hypotheses tend to be completely disconnected from evidence one way or the other.
We can certainly imagine finding evidence in _favour_ of aquatic ape, e.g. if we dig up some kind of proto-human skeleton that shows signs of an aquatic lifestyle.
So every proto-human skeleton we dig up that doesn't show signs of an aquatic lifestyle counts as (weak) evidence against aquatic ape.
I was going to say something similar, and I also agree with your sub-comment that just-so stories are an indictment of the field.
I find very little that is genuinely worthwhile in the field of evolutionary biology, because almost none of the field (at least as practiced) is falsifiable. If someone came up with a different/better just-so story, we would have very little means of determining which, if any, are actually correct. Maybe part of this theory is true, maybe it isn't, but regardless we have zero means to test anything. We can't run an experiment, so it's just the theorizing parts of science.
I'm not going to say it's useless, but I think, as a process, we definitely shouldn't confuse such fields with science, or their products with knowledge.
I'd relate it to good art, more than science, in that it can provide interesting perspectives whose value is ultimately fairly subjective and arbitrary; it's not a description of how the world actually is, but rather a particular way of looking at the world.
Correct! I think the AAH is the best available explanation.
However, it is the best available explanation in the sense that "god(s) did it" were the best available explanation before Darwin. We should be careful to distinguish between "best available explanation" and "probably true".
Well, i guess to avoid overheating (similar as the elefant, who retained his fur only in his incarnation as mammut) and to be able to sweat more efficiently.
The human temperature regulation relies mainly on our ability to sweat. In fact our fantastic sweating feature is much underappreciated nowadays, but it enables us to run for a long time through the african steppe without overheating.
I once heard about bushmen of the kalahri that literally outrun antelopes until they break down from exhaustion, this massively impressed me.
Humans are not the fastest, but it seems we can outrun most aother animals with our endurance.
I do not know, if this is how the first hairless apes hunted, but it would explain the sweating and the hairlessness better than the aquatic ape theory.
yeah, I weirdly assumed most mammals can swim immediately on delivery actually, but I guess that's wrong too. Like nobody teaches mice or Kangaroos how to swim, but I think they're both able to. I wonder if there's a list somewhere of which mammals can naturally swim.
Is anyone here following development status of omicron specific boosters?
I don´t, honestly, they will not help with this wave. But I´m starting to be moderately concerned about a new wave next winter, due to waning immunity. It would be nice to avoid it, and omicron specific boosters seem like maybe best option (?)
I would like to see an explanation of the legal hurdles to a variant-specific booster. My assumption is that the process of approving a variant vaccine is almost, but not quite, as onerous as approving the original vaccine.
This assumption explains the time frame being longer than 4 months.
If I'm right, this is another great argument for reforming FDA rules. It may take months to demonstrate efficacy, but if all Pfizer is doing is tweaking the mRNA code slightly, there is no reason to expect the variant vaccine is not effective, and every reason to expect it will be more effective than the Covid Classic vaccine.
Therefore Pfizer should only need to prove safety, not efficacy, in order to begin manufacturing the shots and get an EUA. Meanwhile, in parallel, challenge trials could be used to show efficacy. The government could agree to buy the new shots, with an insurance policy that pays out if they prove ineffective. All this shouldn't take more than a month.
Even if eggheads don't allow challenge trials and people are given a shot that is not yet proven to work, that's so much better than waiting until the omicron wave is over before offering omicron shots!
If both reforms could be done (EUA based on safety alone + challenge trials), I suppose it would also allow flu shots that are more effective, because the strain(s) targeted by the vaccine can be chosen later in time, thus taking into account the latest mutations and prevalence data.
YIMBY supporters (or YIMBY Ideological Turing Test passers) of ACX: What’s the YIMBY case (if any) for the existence of public parks rather than, for example, bulldozing Central Park to make way for more housing? Is there in fact a consistent argument against this?
Applying what I understand to be the basic principles / arguments in favor of YIMBY principles, it seems that public parks are – broadly speaking – the ultimate YIMBY anathema (I’m being only partially tongue in cheek here, I think I’m applying what I generally see as the core pro-YIMBY arguments):
• Unlike low-density zoned homes, public parks house literally no one, and thus preclude people living in the city center even more than single-family zoning does, and thus represent the maximum in opportunity costs vis a vis land that could be, but isn’t used for residential development
• Proximity to public parks generally (modulo ones that become popular drug dealer / criminal / homeless hangout spots) increases property values in the area, which prevents people lower down on the income ladder from living there in there, which as I understand it is among the chief terminal goals of YIMBYism (i.e., to bring down housing prices).
Now, obviously accusing YIMBYs of wanting to bulldoze central park for more apartment buildings is the sort of thing that would typically have a strong negative emotional valence, so I’m concerned that this risks being a straw man, but I’m not certain that that’s true here--perhaps the YIMBY argument is that you just bite that bullet, in fact the economic value of shoving more people into the city center is virtually always going to be larger than the economic value of a public park, and if parks create so much utility then they can pay their own rent in the form of private parks that people can pay to enter—and the fact that these are thin on the ground suggests that in fact parks are and essentially always will be a suboptimal use of land that can only exist by thwarting the march of the private market.
Alternatively, the (in my view weaker) YIMBY-compatible argument for public parks might be that there’s a difference in kind between the utility of public greenspace in parks—which anyone can enter—versus private greenspace as imposed in the form of setbacks and lawns / minimum lot sizes.
I don’t think this argument is totally specious (in particular, I would agree that the utility of greenspace tends to scale superlinearly with its contiguous area. I would say that Central Park provides much more value than a set of microparks of equivalent size scattered throughout New York. Also there are many activities that just can’t reasonably take place (or take place only in a dramatically degraded manner) in smaller areas—frisbee, sports fields, wildlife habitats, etc.), but I don’t think that that argument directly responsive to the kind of bulldozer utility-maximization arguments that are the core of YIMBY—parks can have superlinear utility but still have less total utility than apartment buildings do.
However, beyond the superlinear utility argument (which isn’t a knockdown) arguments that public greenspace intrinsically provides more utility than private greenspace *in a way that justifies deviation from laissez-faire land use* seem weak. Despite being public, parks are going to provide dramatically more utility to people who live in their immediate area than to the residents of a city at large, which creates an (admittedly imperfect) analogy with the private enjoyment of lawns being enjoyed by the owners of said lawns (and as the SFH-zoning contingent would often say, lawns create public external utility because SFH neighborhoods both look and are significantly nicer places to be than denser neighborhoods, which is why SFH zoning is a thing in the first place). And without a superlinearity argument, it would seem to be arbitrary whether the geographically-limited benefits of a park are distributed among many parcels for *de jure* private enjoyment versus a different set of parcels for *de facto* private enjoyment by dint of the costs in time and travel imposed on those who aren’t geographically proximate. As far as I can tell the counterargument to *that* might be something like a set of apartment buildings providing for more intensive and efficient use of greenspace for enjoyment rather than individual houses with lawns that are 99% unoccupied, but I think that while this is a decent argument it isn’t a knock-down (in brief, because lawns provide externality reduction in addition to recreation space, and because more intensive use of the commons tends to degrade their utility).
So, TL;DR: YIMBYs, why shouldn’t we bulldoze Central Park and cover it with apartment buildings?
"Note that with severe enough property limits, negative declared property values can make sense. For example, if a property must be maintained so as to serve as a public park, the only people willing to become owners are those who get paid when they take the property, and then get paid per unit time for remanning owners. In this way, city services can be defined and provided via this same decision mechanism."
YIMBY generally means one of two related things. First, that private land should be free for its private owners to use in whatever manner they feel advantageous(*), including but not limited to high-density housing. And second, that public land should be put to whatever is most generally in the public good, even if that means a homeless shelter or a nuclear power plant.
In the former case, public parks aren't private land. Outside of anarcho-capitalism, there is no general "requirement" that all public land should be turned over to private owners. If a private property developer wants to build a high-rise apartment building, let him buy someone else's private property - if the high-rise apartment building is at all market-optimal, he should be able to offer a price that will convince the current residents to take the money and run, and per NIMBY the neighbors don't have any say in the matter.
In the latter case, *maybe* the best public good is to turn a public park into a public housing development, but probably not - parks are a real public good, and if you're going to increase the population of an area, you're probably going to want more of them, not less. So pave over the local landfill and turn *that* into a public housing development.
And in either case, if you turn too many parks into high-density housing, lots of real people are going to say "why would I want to live in this hellscape without a hint of green space?" and look real hard at whether they can afford to convince themselves they can afford to move out to the suburbs and commute (or telecommute). At that point, a bunch of your low-density housing becomes suddenly vacant, and sure you can find people to move in to it if you try, but maybe you should have just turned that low-density housing into high-density housing and left the parks alone.
Is there any urban area where we want to turn all the parks *and* all the low-density housing into high-rise apartments, and if so, why?
* And doesn't literally stink up the place or otherwise impose gross externalities on the neighbors.
Granting as a preliminary matter that I'm responding solely to the latter case except to the extent that I think the rationale for the latter case militates against the existence of public land at all[1]
"Is there any urban area where we want to turn all the parks *and* all the low-density housing into high-rise apartments, and if so, why?"
What I had in mind specifically here was the quite literal example of Central Park, which is surrounded by high-density housing in an area with incredibly high population density and high housing prices (also, there's not a lot of low density housing to upzone in the area.). While I'm sure one good argue that this contrived relative to, say, legalizing ADUs in Portland, I think it's nevertheless a fair one to hold the YIMBY position accountable for before because It's one of (quite possibly the) maximum examples of the problems that YIMBYism purports to solve:
(1) High opportunity costs created by leaving land undeveloped (given the astronomical rents commanded in Manhattan), and
(2) Insufficient housing for everyone who could be working there[2]
Relatedly, reaching Manhattan-levels of density on the basis of utility-maximizing arithmetic seems to be an actual factual goal of YIMBYs in the highest demand metros where (predictably) the YIMBY/NIMBY fights tend to be the most acute (The Bay Area, Seattle, etc.) and would indeed seem to be the terminal end goal of any YIMBYist program.
Obviously building over Central Park would reduce the per-capita QoL of nearby residents but candidly I *suspect* it would be utilitarian-optimal in the sense of increasing legible local GDP on net because the value of the apartment buildings and the number of additional dwellings that could be built would overwhelm the per-capita QoL reduction.
In essence, this seems to me to be the core YIMBYist argument: that the magnitude of the gain of putative benefits of stuffing more people into a fixed area of land is higher than the loss any putative benefits that accrue to existing landowners for leaving land undeveloped (for new residents it's probably a safe assumption that living there is positive-sum since they aren't subject to any QoL reduction by dint of reduction in open space because they can only move in after the open space has already been developed.)
It seems broadly self-evident that the contingent who initially imposed low-density zoning did so out of a perception that the quality of life of residents would be higher in a low density than a high density environment (why else would you zone it that way in the first place?) so in a sense the belief that the sheer number of positive-sums transactions from higher density will outweigh any putative loss of the benefits of a lower-density environment are kind of implicit in the YIMBYist stance.
Where I think we disagree is in whether there is, in fact, whether there’s an equilbrium in which ‘lots of real people are going to say "why would I want to live in this hellscape without a hint of green space?"’ – I don’t see an ex ante reason to believe there is one nor do I see why one should be implicit in the YIMBY worldview (if anything, I suspect that YIMBYs probably tend towards being those whose visceral reaction to density is positive and whose need for greenspace is low to nonexistent, which seems likely to be a genetic preference with surprisingly even distribution in the US population https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/13/big-houses-art-museums-and-in-laws-how-the-most-ideologically-polarized-americans-live-different-lives/ ) even if it weren’t for cities already selecting for people with an IDGAF view toward greenspaces. More concretely: unless you’re one of the vanishingly small minority of people with a view of Central Park (or maybe Prospect Park) out your windows, Manhattan (and Brooklyn) are *already* urban hellscapes that would be made marginally but not necessarily qualitatively worse by eliminating the last vestiges of anything other than concrete and asphalt, against which would be a likely-substantial increase in the GDP. This is particularly the case because of the selection effects you can expect urban environments to exhibit (i.e., people who don’t care about greenspace are going to find it less psychologically costly to live there and so you have a population weighted towards people who don’t care about trees in the first place, because Manhattan is already hell if you do).
TL:DR: I don’t think it’s at all clear that there *is* a limiting principle that suggests the best use of public land wouldn’t be to hand it all over to private developers. If parks provide so much value they can charge for entry, which not only offsets the opportunity costs of leaving the land undeveloped but also helps limit oversubscription to a scarce resource.
[1](not trying to argue that point in full, more just that I think that unless you take the view "all parks should be private and paid by entrance fees" it's very hard without either a philosophical or an empirical precommitment to a particular development pattern and public-to-private space ratio to defend any particular Schelling Point as far as either the existence or the use of public land.)
[2] Taking Scott's post "Steelmanning the NIMBY's" as background, and particularly in view of Gwen's tweet-length summary of how the alleged 'failure mode' of point #3 isn't one (basically that *even if* rents don't go down with more density / houses built this is a reflection of enormous positive-sum transactions unlocked by the additional building, so heads-density-wins tails-nondensity-loses https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/#comment-674255 ), I don't think it actually matters whether the utility increase is mediated by a reduction in rents *per se.*
> It seems broadly self-evident that the contingent who initially imposed low-density zoning did so out of a perception that the quality of life of residents would be higher in a low density than a high density environment
Well, I own a house in the suburbs not because that's what I wanted - no, I was satisfied downtown and I'd rather not mow a lawn and I'd rather be in walking distance of a grocery store - but because that was the "best value" available in my area. My city has overpriced condos and underpriced duplexes, so I went with the latter.
> Obviously building over Central Park would reduce the per-capita QoL of nearby residents but candidly I *suspect* it would be utilitarian-optimal in the sense of increasing legible local GDP
Utilitarians want to maximize utility, not simply "legible" utility. Personally I'd prefer to stay out of NYC entirely because, as an island full of skyscrapers, it's a worst-case scenario for building housing, and so is expensive for good reason. If I somehow lived there anyway, I wouldn't care for Central Park to be *quite* so large, but surely there are small buildings that could be replaced with large buildings before encroaching on something so iconic? [edit: mind you I would prioritize more housing over the park, if higher density is impractical.]
This. Even the Kowloon Walled City had an open public area in the middle, and that's about as extreme on the "no controls on construction" as it's physically possible to get, given the de facto absence of any government at all
It's probably reductive to call me a YIMBY when housing policy is hardly something I give a first thought on an average day, but I live near a major metro downtown, there is in fact quite a bit of new housing construction happening near me, and I support it. And I am broadly supportive of decreasing zoning restrictions as well as eliminating many points in the vetocracy such as neighborhood integrity and historical preservation councils.
That said, my wife and I are in the process of attempting to get licensed to become adoptive parents, and one thing I acutely noticed when walking around is there is absolutely nowhere for kids to play around here. We badly need a park. Consider that I live in a block of contiguous townhomes with no yards. Each individual unit of housing having its own dedicated outdoor space is almost certainly wasteful of that space in a city, but a shared outdoor space for the entire neighborhood doesn't seem to be.
I don't think anyone's position is ever as simple as "raze everything that isn't housing and turn it into housing." Very few people want to live exclusively in cubbyholes stacked to the top of 1000 foot tall buildings. We just want more housing than currently exists.
I'm not a true YIMBY in all senses but I think chopping off even 75% of central park would be fine actually. the city I live adjacent to actually has an even larger park but then land here isn't nearly as insanely overvalued. I think we could do roof parks/gardens and that would be superior to spending ground level space. Maybe you could do some sort of fancy sunlight redirection and just build over ground level parks if you really want to save them. Central park is vastly underutilized for the space it takes up and having periphery park would probably just generally be better regardless of roof/sun light magic based parks.
I'm a resident YIMBY and I do actually take something akin to the position you're describing. My belief is that the design of urban areas should support the flourishing of all conscious beings (or equivalently: total utility). I don't think excessively large urban parks always support that. People derive utility from parks, but they also derive utility from having affordable housing, being able to live close to their job, and from the economic activity that concentration in cities generates. Similarly, I think plants and animals are often better served by allowing more people to live in cities (thus preventing exurban sprawl) than by having urban parks that support wildlife. That's not to say I oppose all urban parks! Parks make people happier, healthier, and more creative - those things are good, and we should still have parks, but it's worth balancing that against the costs of keeping big areas closed to development.
I'm not a New Yorker and don't have as good a handle on the nuances of life in NYC, so I don't want to comment directly on the Central Park question. But I do live in the DC area, and a remarkably large fraction of the land in DC is taken up by Rock Creek Park. I would happily support shrinking Rock Creek Park quite a bit to open up more land for housing. DC would still have plenty of parkland for recreation and contemplation, and the newly available land could house tens of thousands of people who would otherwise be forced to live in exurban developments or to leave the city entirely.
This isn't a totally fringe position either - my recollection of Death and Life is that Jane Jacobs similarly argues that making big public parks has tradeoffs, and that underutilized public parks are a poor use of space. Going all the way to pure laissez-faire land use would go too far for my taste, as I think that public parks are like libraries in that free access to them produces big benefits. But turning some of less utilized areas of larger public parks into land that's available for housing seems like a win to me.
This immediately makes me think of the repugnant conclusion of utilitarianism. If we can slightly decrease everyone's quality of life if it means that we can support a greater number of human lives, is that not a net utility gain? And if so, should we not keep decreasing that until we have the maximum number of people that only barely live lives worth living?
In the same way, if we can bulldoze Central Park and cram it full of apartment buildings because the benefit to the people who can now live there is greater than the benefit of Central Park as an amenity, then we should get rid of everything that could plausibly stand in the way of more people being able to live a better life in the city. The end result of such a policy is that city life becomes only marginally better than subsistence farming.
I'm trying to address this as dispassionately as I can, but this is basically my personal view of the matter.
I think there's an axis involving the involuntary conversion of use-value into exchange-value and whether this should be accorded a privileged status in neighborhood geographic character that goes under-examined in these debates (I may get around to writing a blog post about that some day....). While there's at least one class of asset that we allow involuntary conversion of use- into exchange-value for (viz., common stock, e.g., when a company accepts a tender offer), for basically every other class of good we do not -- you don't get to just take my old rake and leave a check. The astronomically high subjective value ascribed to homeownership and neighborhood character (as well as high transaction costs and noncommodification of the asset class) would normally counsel very strongly in favor of protecting reliance on use-value, the chief countervailing argument (on this particular limited axis) being that subject utility from living in a neighborhood is largely a function of the quality of your neighbors, which is too contingent to place a reliance interest in. There are in turn some good (though highly charged and not entirely dispositive) arguments against *that* rejoinder but that's getting too deep into the weeds for here.
Other than the repugnant conclusion / Iron Law of Wages / race to the bottom issues you addressed and the use-vs-exchange value issue, I also find the lack of any temporal limiting principle very concerning. Basically, here's is how I view the natural outcome of a YIMBY loop which seems to assume population ingress as essentially a constant that has to be accommodated (rather than, e.g., rerouted elsewhere because "my backyard's full"):
(1) Time t0: There aren't enough houses to meet demand; At least there is lots of open space which provides opportunities for recreation and a pleasing view.
(2) Time t1: Bulldoze open space to to build dwelllings
(3) Time t2: People move into newly-built dwellings
(4) Time t3: There aren't enough houses to meet demand; there is no open space and everyone's individual quality of life is lower, while the long-term problem of “existing dwellings are insufficient to meet demand” still exists.
Because there's so much low hanging fruit elsewhere.
I can think of examples where protected land should be auctioned off but NYC's zoning insanity presents more proximate opportunities for increased capacity than repurposing land that everyone generally feels positive about.
Basically I think the argument is, living in nice places is good, and there are lots of things you could bulldoze (or just build up on top of) to make room for more housing before you would think about destroying public goods like parks.
Public parks are shared amenities, bordering on being infrastructure like roads, schools, and fire stations. We don't bulldoze Central Park to put up highrises for similar reasons we don't want to tear up the pavement of Sixth Avenue to build houses in its place.
That is, the median resident wants access to a certain amount of green open space near their home for recreation and whatnot, and lack of this significantly diminishes the utility of a given dwelling unit. This preference can be met in several ways: private lawns, enclosed common areas maintained by HOAs, private parks funded by membership or gate fees, local public parks, or more distant public parks paired with transport infrastructure facilitating access a la Jones Beach and the Wantagh State Parkway.
A proper YIMBY could endorse any of those alternatives depending on what's the most efficient use of land, although I'd expect most YIMBYs to lean towards the latter options since shared space can be expected to have less overcapacity than single-family private space.
That said, there is a socially optimal amount of open space for a given land use pattern and set of resident preferences. It's certainly plausible that there might be too much parkland and not enough housing on the margins, in which case bulldozing some underutilized parks might be the YIMBY-prefered options.
A laissez-faire capitalist would incline towards whichever mix of the private choices the market prefers (single-family yards, HOA common areas, or privately owned outdoor recreation space), but it's a mistake to equate YIMBYs with laissez-faire: there's some overlap on preferred policies on the margins (loosening of zoning restrictions to allow denser development, as-of-right building permits, etc), but I suspect the median YIMBY to be technocratic center-left, not any type of libertarian.
Your response is very thoughtful on this and I think I don't have a wide scope of disagreement in terms of some of the object-level claims but I think I would broadly disagree with the claim that it's incorrect to equate YIMBYism with libertarianism. I see your point that the median YIMBY is probably from a technocratic-center left milieu (and with respect to various other regulations wouldn't necessarily be expected to endorse laissez-faire solutions), but I think that the nature of YIMBY as directed fundamentally to the problem-space of "reduce or remove restrictions on building" (hence 'yes in my backyard') means that *with respect to the narrow problem scope implicated by the philosophy* it's fair to so characterize them.
I think this is also, broadly speaking, putting YIMBYism on a sounder philosophical footing rather than putting words in its mouth or doing it a disservice: the libertarians have a ready answer to the question of what's "most efficient" or "socially optimal" in a world of tradeoffs -- basically, that it's exactly what the private market decides (I think the technocratic center-left / neoliberal position is similar, with the exception that the market solution is more of a default presumption with an implicit and not insurmountable burden of proof for deviation from the market equilibrium because, e.g., markets are extremely bad at pricing in externalities and externalities are everywhere). Thus, the YIMBYs essentially argue that if the amount of housing that would be built absent zoning is > the amount of housing with zoning, the existing zoning equilibrium is per se socially suboptimal. This also has the benefit of freeing the YIMBYs from having to argue that there's a command-economy solution to the problems of zoning which is obviously going to be very difficult to reconcile with the mainstream of technocratic centrism.
Lastly, I think the YIMBY's really are in the position of the less-government side of the Zoners - vs -YIMBY divide. SFH zoning is (in my view) essentially an attempt to leverage government power to solve a collective action problem (viz., the perceived downsides of residing in a high-density area) that obviously needs to restrict individual landowners' capacity to defect (e.g., by building an apartment complex on their property) in order preserve the zoners' desired equilibrium. The YIMBY's basically don't view this as a legitimate exercise of public power even if it might be a legitimate exercise of private power (say if a developer build the subdivision and rented out the houses instead of selling them)*, which is kind of the classic fight of "regulations and government exist to solve collective action problems and externalities" versus the libertarian "private disposition of property results in socially optimal outcomes" reified in this particular domain.
*HOAs are weird hybrid public-private creatures of statute and contract and I honestly don't know what the libertarian stance on them is (I think in favor?) so I'm going to dodge the HOA issues for now.
Part of where I'm coming from is my experience in right-libertarian politics (I was on the board of directors of the Republic Liberty Caucus of California in various capacities from 2009-2016 and was briefly on the central committee of the Santa Clara County Libertarian Party in late 2016). I lean YIMBY on most zoning and urban planning issues and YIMBYness is one of my major heuristics for whom to vote for in local elections, but I was in a distinct minority there among Libertarians and Liberty Republicans I dealt with.
The prevailing view I saw among my fellow libertarian types was suspicion of YIMBYism being the latest fashion of High Modernist urbanism, an effort by technocratic leftists to use government fiat to force people to conform to their preferred highly-legible mode of living. And I see where my fellow libertarian types are coming from here: I've heard a bunch of stuff from urbanist advocates both on the rhetorical level (e.g. railing against the "plague of suburban sprawl") and the specific policy level (changing zoning to mandate density and transit-oriented development, "road diet" transit policies, etc). Vox is a major offender here: much of their YIMBY-adjacent content that I've seen seems more like it's advocating reversing the direction of government interference in favor of dense urban development rather than the more libertarian-friendly approach (c.f. Reason's YIMBY-adjacent content) of lifting the government's thumb from the scale.
Part of the disconnect between me and my fellow libertarians on this issue is probably a question of type of libertarians. For the RLCCA in particular, most people came to it via the 2008 or 2012 Ron Paul campaigns, which emphasized the Rothbard/Mises branch of Libertarian thought, while I incline much more to "bleeding heart" libertarianism: I lean a bit towards the technocratic side of the technocrat/populist spectrum, while most of them are well onto the populist side of the spectrum, and my approach political ideology is more incrementalist and pragmatic while theirs is much more deontological. And a lot of the disconnect was less a disconnect on preferences in specific issues (it was pretty easy for me when drafting party platform proposals about urbanism and zoning to come up with language that I and my fellow RLCCAers were all happy with) than preference about whom to compromise and ally with (my preference was and is to ally with moderate YIMBYs to advocate for things like upzoning and as-of-right permitting, while theirs was to compromise with right-populist NIMBYs to oppose pro-urbanization mandates).
More broadly, I think there's a spectrum, or perhaps a web, of different policy preferences and ideological approaches here, and in different times and places very different coalitions have the potential to form. Parallel to right-libertarians allying with right-populist NIMBYs vs allying with pragmatic-centrist and left-libertarian YIMBYs, there's also a choice for the pragmatic centrist YIMBYs to ally with left-libertarians and right-libertarians vs allying with advocates of using the government to actively encourage or to mandate urbanization.
I don't have anything substantive to add to this at the moment but I just wanted to respond that this was a fascinating description of the dynamics at play and I really appreciate your having posted it.
Do expected benefits from more housing have to be necessarily nominated in some kind of monetary units? Because I can very well imagine a YIMBY argument saying that housing has a massive utility value (I don't remember it well and I don't have time to reread it, but I think here https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ had a good rundown of relevant factors) and more housing is a massive net utility gain as opposed to a large park.
Suppose you're in a society that's far more densely packed than the one we live in, and the YIMBY argument is not about green spaces, but about whether or not apartments should have kitchens, instead of providing public kitchen-spaces, since the kitchens in apartments are currently taking up a huge amount of space in this theoretical society for a room that is used only 5% of the time it exists; instead, we could have shared kitchens.
Your argument, in a sense, amounts to "Given that you all want to demolish kitchens, why shouldn't we bulldoze the shared kitchen?"
Now, the difference between private and public spaces is not purely quantitative; a shared kitchen is not, in fact, perfectly analogous to a private kitchen, and you can sunbathe in the nude in a fenced private yard in a way that you can't in Central Park. However, the difference between private greenspace and public greenspace is not comparable to the difference between having greenspace, and not having greenspace.
I think your analogy is helpful to think about and cleverly put but I'm not sure I would agree that it's necessarily dispositive, but unfortunately this responsive may be subject to enough subjective mediation that we're at an impasse
Specifically, the concern with the kitchen is that it's something that basically can't be forgone (I mean, I guess you could go full Singapore and have some combination of public eateries and delivery be the primary source of meal consumption, so it's not inconceivable, but I think we'd agree that to first order there has to be some kind of kitchen), but I'm not sure that that's true with parks -- places (including in NYC) with no proximate access to greenspace exist everywhere (also, Kowloon Walled City was a thing), and I just don't view greenspace as something that *must* exist in a city (indeed, cities essentially by definition have little of it) so much as a pleasant amenity--but then, so is a lawn.
More generally, I'm not that I would agree that the difference between private greenspace and public greenspace is not comparable to the difference between having greenspace, and not having greenspace." -- I think that while this is probably true for recreational purposes, it strikes me as false as far as "what do you spend most of your time looking at / what is your visual and auditory milieu?" If the nearest park is even a few blocks away, then while that clearly is much better than no such park existing, the lion's share of your existence is characterized by inhabiting a "concrete jungle" without respite regardless of its presence.
Obviously that's reflective of a subjective perception but it seems like one that's a serious contributor to the SFH zoning impetus against which the YIMBY position is fighting, right? With respect either to parks or private lawn setbacks, the Zoner position would in either case be a reification of "I like seeing leaves / grass / trees more than brown and gray buildings and am willing to restrict development of land for private dwelling to ensure my immediate living environs reflect this preference," whereas the marginal YIMBY position is more or less always going to be "fewer trees, more places for people to live."
Note that Kowloon Walled City, as the most extreme example of density we have, still did have an open public plaza in the centre (while not a very green one, that's tangential to the point of public common spaces)
The lion's share of most people's existence is characterized by inhabiting a "drywall jungle", regardless of how much greenspace there is outside.
But also, I think we're talking about two radically different purposes for greenspace. Central Park does not behave like the yards of my neighbors; it acts more like my own yard, albeit less private. Insofar as you want to achieve the kind of greenspace that "my neighbor's yards" provide, a large contiguous block of greenspace is basically the least efficient way of achieving this; it would be better to, say, increase the separation of buildings, such that the area between buildings becomes split between sidewalks, greenspace, and streets, instead of just sidewalks and streets. You can't realistically achieve this in a city like NYC, where everything is already built, except maybe on very long timescales.
The YIMBY position isn't "fewer trees, more places for people to live"; it is "Denser development"; take a neighborhood, bulldoze everything, and then build a massive skyscraper in its place - with the same ground footprint as just the houses, leaving a massive greenspace - and you've achieved that objective.
I'm far from an expert on this subject. But my assumption was always that Yimby's are fine with the concept of dedicated (protected) public spaces. So yes to parks, yes to public museum's etc. They're more opposed to restrictions on area's that everyone agrees should be places where people live.
Like no Yimby is going to be ok with bulldozing a street to build a skyscraper on what used to be a highway.
I think the YIMBY would in practice take the position that zoning is a lower-hanging fruit than parks are and would face less opposition so the pragmatic thing to do is fight against zoning, but what I'm trying to get at is that I'm not sure I understand why there's a consistent limiting principle that wouldn't apply equally to public laws settings aside public land for non-development as to private land for non-development.
I take your point to be in some sense that this is kind of like the question of whether honey is vegan -- many evangelical vegans really don't care because most of the animal welfare marbles are in all the other parts of veganism -- but also, like, assuming the YIMBY rationale is premised on a maximization of economic utility (which tends to be a very powerful force when unleashed on a problem) the justification for the existence of public spaces at all seems like it's subject to the same question.
It's not that there's a limit that we can derive a priori but that there's an optimum which most of North America's urban areas are clearly on one side of. Few NIMBYs would push for the average European city to be made as dense as Kowloon Walled City.
Note that there were quite a number of anti-abortion murders and bombings, so while I agree that it's a small minority of people that take that stance said minority exists and imposes real security costs. The analogy also differs in that assassinations can be unilateral, while bulldozing central park for more skyscrapers is something that would require a lot of buy-in
>I think this is strawman-adjacent, if not an actual strawman. As you point out yourself, very few people would be in favor of bulldozing central park to make more apartments.
It's not meant to respond to an actual position, he's saying that given the beliefs of YIMBYists, why not X?
I have strong doubts that the aggregate value of the all the housing that could be built in Central Park would not exceed by at least two orders of magnitude the diminution in value of housing along Central Park West and (by commensurately less with distance) other housing on the UWS / UES, but I concede that this is very much an empirical question. Indeed, this seems to highlight the tension in your point that "Walkable high density neighborhoods with access to amenities are land-expensive for a reason: people like living there. " -- doesn't this basically conflict directly with the notion that land should be left empty anywhere in view of the empirical evidence that high density zoning is land-expensive?
Separately, (maybe this should be its own thread?), I feel like the pandemic hasn't really caused rents to dramatically decrease (my understanding is they have, but not by *that* much) despite the dramatically decreased utility of urban amenities for city-dwellers. This may be an issue that generates more heat than light (and admittedly is strongly influenced by the fact that for me personally, putative urban amenities provide negligible marginal utility relative to the disutility I incur for living in a dense city) but I think the chief amenity people seek for urban living is payment (which, were remote work a plausible long-term arrangement, would suggest a very different set of equilibrium living arrangements than would demand for physical proximity to restaurants and museums and such). Square footage is dear in the city because people like having it, but they get paid more (and have more labor market fluidity) and live in smaller spaces than they would otherwise prefer as a tradeoff.
Is there a way in Substack comments to collapse each top-level comment and replies or to just skip to the next one? I find it very annoying to have to manually scroll past long sub-threads on topics I'm not interested in, especially because the indentation differences are hard to follow.
This got some great responses over on FdB's substack, so I want to ask the smart people over here as well:
Does anyone here have a story of learning a new language in their adult life, especially with a focus solely on reading/writing*? I'm attempting to take up German. I've been doing Duolingo for the last two weeks, and I plan to start supplementing it by hand-translating books on botany or something. Lots of people seem to recommend Anki but that seems so soulless to me.
*I say solely on reading/writing because I have no interest in speaking verbally to people in the language. I just want to read fountain pen forums and philosophy books dammit!
I've learnt both French and Spanish as an adult, well enough that I was able to work fully in Spanish.
Anki/Duolingo etc. are good for getting some basics, but if you want to start reading philosophy books, I doubt they will be enough.
For me, after 2-4 weeks using language apps, I picked books that I knew *very* well - for me it was Harry Potter and the His Dark Materials series. I then got them in both English and the target language. I then just tried to read the book, relying on (a) knowledge of the books (b) words that look similarish to English (c) the basics I'd got from the app. Whenever I got stuck (which was often) I'd use the English language copy of the book as an answer key. I think this is easier if the target language book is on an eReader, my Kindle will define words when I press on them and also remember which words I've looked up if I want to build vocab lists.
When I finished a book, I then picked a more demanding book.
For both languages it took about a year until I was reading complex, adult novels (Count of Monte Cristo for French and 2666 by Bolaño for Spanish)
I think the advantage of this system is that it is much much much more enjoyable than the apps. It also follows the maxim of "learn the thing by doing the thing."
I don't think I have a natural affinity for languages, but nonetheless using this method I've managed to really surprise people by how quickly I was able to learn.
Okay so I'm definitely not far enough along to remotely say I've learned a language, but: I've been studying Chinese for about 9 months, and mostly focusing on reading. I do use anki-like apps, and I guess they're a bit soulless but I like the learning process. I practice reading with news articles specifically written for language learners. I'm not sure if they could act as a full replacement for flash cards though. Although German does at least use the same script as English, so that helps.
You may find fluent forever (the app) to be a less soulless version of anki. It does focus on pronunciation at first but I suppose you could ignore that if you never plan to speak or listen to the language. In my experience, I don't find duo lingo to help me learn anything except how to fill in duo lingo exercises. I've yet to meet anyone that he que fluent in a language by using it, although I haven't seen any data on it.
Have you seen the kind of sentences that German philosopers write?
> But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human--all-too-human facts.
guys, i swear the german version of this is easier to understand. Selbstverstaendlich.
> Ernstlich geredet, es giebt gute Gründe zu der Hoffnung, dass alles Dogmatisiren in der Philosophie, so feierlich, so end- und letztgültig es sich auch gebärdet hat, doch nur eine edle Kinderei und Anfängerei gewesen sein möge; und die Zeit ist vielleicht sehr nahe, wo man wieder und wieder begreifen wird, was eigentlich schon ausgereicht hat, um den Grundstein zu solchen erhabenen und unbedingten Philosophen-Bauwerken abzugeben, welche die Dogmatiker bisher aufbauten, - irgend ein Volks-Aberglaube aus unvordenklicher Zeit (wie der Seelen-Aberglaube, der als Subjekt- und Ich-Aberglaube auch heute noch nicht aufgehört hat, Unfug zu stiften), irgend ein Wortspiel vielleicht, eine Verführung von Seiten der Grammatik her oder eine verwegene Verallgemeinerung von sehr engen, sehr persönlichen, sehr menschlich-allzumenschlichen Thatsachen
To my ear the german of this sounds better. Weird phrases like ‘but to speak seriously’ -> 2 common words ‘Ernstlich geredet.’ The german words also are much more common-use words in german than the english translations are in english. Kinderei -> ‘kid’-ing -> “puerilism.” Anfängerei -> hold-on-ery -> “tyronism”. Even ‘All-to human’ is just one word ‘allzumenschlichen.’ It also helps that the Important Words (nouns) are capetalized.
Also, there are concepts in german sentences like 'doch' which are kind of like 'nevertheless it may still be' that your brain just gets used to when you use it all the time.
Indeed the German text is much easier to understand! But it depends on the philosopher.
Kant is famously so unaccessbile that even Germans prefer the English translation. Hegel is a nauseant anyway. I would recommend Schopenhauer's "Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit" as a very accessible, clearly written philosophical text.
I look forward to when I can read the original. Out of curiosity, how common is the "all-to-" part of "allzumenschlichen" in German? I notice it comes up a lot in Nietzsche's work - especially in Zarathustra.
1. The Kaufmann translations of Nietzsche's works are *much* better than Zimmern's:
> "Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism. And perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again *how little* used to be sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosopher's edifices as the dogmatists have built so far: any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief; some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all to human facts."
2. Nietzsche spends section 247 of that same book (Beyond Good and Evil) lamenting how German writing of his age has lost the style of the past when "the laws of written style were ... the same as those for spoken style"! Personally, I love his style, but I do recognize that it creates a barrier to understanding. I find reading it aloud as though I were presenting to an audience makes it far easier to follow!
I learned French and some German as an adult. I took formal classes, so I don't have a good recommendation on materials overall, but I recommend 2 things specifically:
1) The "English Grammar for Students of X" book for the language you are studying
2) Anki
Anki isn't a language-learning app: it's a flashcard app. Learning a language really requires memorizing vocabulary, and flashcards are the best way to memorize vocabulary. (Paper flashcards work too, but anki spaces the repetition, and is easier to carry).
Once you have the basics of grammar and vocabulary, translation is really high-value--it's not fun, but it really helps with building fluency and vocabulary.
I absolutely loved Language Transfer when I was learning Spanish, so I can certainly recommend it for German if you're into audio resources. He teaches the new language to a beginner on the podcast, explaining every detail of the grammar and really does a great job of building upon the pieces he introduced previously. Slowly you learn to be confident with the basic grammar and you have much better grasp on the language compared to just studying vocab in Anki, which seemed soulless to me too.
I have it saved if ever I get back to German as a first resource to try.
I've taught my partner English (we're Germans, his English from school was abysmal) by making him watch English movies with me - he then learned enough to use English for programming advice (very important), and we now sometimes use English at home, and he's become quite confident. Movies were the only studying he did. I suspect you could learn any language like that - get some primer in grammar, then just exposition. Or switch the order of grammar lessons and movie watching, I don't know.
Meanwhile, I became obsessed with Latin last year after Duolingo offered a course - I finished that one in two months and decided to go for a proper course at university. We surpassed duolingo within a week - don't be fooled, duolingo is fun and a nice start, but I thought I was making great progress, and it turned out I was not. Nine months later and I'm getting my proficiency certificate this month. With Latin, all my usual strategies of language practice fail - hard to get exposition to a dead language. I sometimes read Wikipedia in Latin, that helps. But it's the classes, really. I'm not good by any means yet and the purely translation-based approach in class isn't helping either, but I'm slowly getting to a point where I don't translate everything in my head. Very little experience writing, so I still suck at that, and I can't speak it one bit, it's all in text. Interesting about that might be that the jump from practice texts to Cicero is very quick and comes early - the course I'm doing is cramming five years of school lessons in two semesters, and I'm now translating single-sentence paragraphs. Don't coddle yourself with easy sentences. Look at the real deal early on. And don't worry about vocabulary, that happens all on its own once you know enough (say, the 1000 most common words - sounds more than it is, English borrows enough from Germanic languages that cognates make this easy). Also, find someone to chat with in German (in chat, I mean). It really helps getting the grammar right to use it actively. As it's not part of Latin class, I've taken up translating German and English poems and song lyrics and letting family (who don't speak Latin) guess.
English with English subtitles was our go-to, but he had basics and I could help make sense of things he missed. I picked up bits of Danish from watching Danish with English subtitles (and then Danish with Danish when re-watching) with no prior knowledge, so I think that could work, too. There's language learning helpers (Chrome extensions) for Netflix, I use Language Reactor - this can help you quickly make sense of the subtitles. That is very helpful, though I do that just for fun, not to get properly proficient - I don't watch enough visual media.
I learned modern Hebrew and Norwegian as an adult. For reading I found it super helpful to start with popular fiction where I knew the story already. Things like Harry Potter and Jurassic Park, where all of the exposition is linear, all of the dialog conventional, and all of the story familiar - I don't think I finished most of them, but I found I was able to develop my passive reading skills very quickly this way. Versus starting with things I really wanted to read.
In the same vein - my wife is a polyglot (native fluency in 6 languages - 3 Asian, 3 European - and passing fluency in several others), she says soap operas are great for picking up a new language, she always knows what characters are saying from context. She puts the subtitles on so she can learn to read at the same time.
I learned Farsi as and adult in Wisconsin in 3 months and German at age 17 in Germany in 12 months. I can only read children’s books and Farsi. I read lots of philosophy books in German and I do think one thing to consider is that old German and old calligraphy German is harder to read than a top 10 krimi novels lol. Also I think it’s a false distinction between reading/ writing proficiency and speaking my proficiency. I was like fluent in German after 4 months of living there speaking only German so I think maybe you should ‘just go live there’
There are great translations. Why read in the original German?
Often English translations from French and German (especially French) sound better than most native English writers. I've never had a bad experience with translation from such a closely-allied language.
On the other hand, translations from Latin usually sound mediocre, and translations from Greek usually sound horrible. It's almost like the translations sound better the closer the original language is to high-status English, so that French > German > Latin > Greek.
As a French native and someone fluent in reading English, English translations of French classics are just not the same. It's not the same language, people don't talk and write the same way. I wouldn't call one better than the other, but something is clearly lost (and something else gained) when translating something.
I read & loved the C.S. Moncrieff translation of Proust. If you're familiar with that translated version and the French original would love to hear your take on how they compare.
I think English shares more vocabulary with Latin than German.
And every time I read some supposedly amazing translation and then look at the original I notice I was missing a lot. Reading philosophy in the original language is a good reason to learn a language.
"In 2016, English vocabulary is 26% Germanic, 29% French, 29% Latin, 6% from Greek and the remaining 10% from other languages and proper names. All together, French and Latin (both Romance languages) account for 58% of the vocabulary used in today's English." https://prolingo.com/blog/is-english-really-a-germanic-language/
I had previously thought English was mostly German from the angles/saxons/jutes that came over from the vicinity of Denmark, but then it got a ton of french vocab that was disproportionately high status thanks to our Norman overlords post-1066. But it makes sense that if educated people were doing a lot of their scholarly work directly in Latin until the 18th century, we could get a lot of vocab directly from latin without French/German intermediaries.
If those fractions are by word count in the dictionary, I would suggest that the fraction of Germanic words in everyday speech is a lot higher. Obscure and technical words are more likely to be Latin and Greek (e.g. "obscure" and "technical" respectively) but words in daily use by ordinary peasants are more likely to have retained an old Germanic root.
To be fair, a sizable number of academic terms with Latin roots have been taken directly from Latin in German, too. But in my past year of studying Latin, I find an English derivative for about 70% of new vocabulary, and a German one maybe 30% of the time. But German is a lot closer to Latin in grammar, I think.
Admittedly, part of my reason for learning a language at all is to not be locked into monolingualism for my whole life. I've previously tried Russian at college, but had a bad experience for a variety of reasons. German has the benefit of both being far easier and overlapping with topics I care a lot about (such as philosophy).
I won't disagree with you about translated German works sounding better than most English. I've fallen in love with Nietzsche's writing style after reading the Kaufmann translation of Beyond Good and Evil.
I support reading the originals in German, I have no evidence other than experience but a lot of confusing concepts (I’ve read / attempted Freud, Frege, Hegel ) are to me are clearer in German than when I have attempted to read them in English. Ymmv
For German in particular I highly recommend April Wilson's "German Quickly." When it comes to speaking, I greatly prefer Pimsleur's language courses, often available through a good public library system, to Duolingo (which I've tried but disliked and abandoned quickly, though perhaps for aesthetic/format reasons as much as anything else). With Pimsleur I was able in very short order and with no prior knowledge to learn basic Russian, enough to fumble through conversations. I took up German in my late twenties, less interested in speaking than in reading, and found that, together with the Wilson book, reading bilingual editions of authors I enjoy and attempting my own translations went a long way toward getting me up to speed. As with most later-in-life-acquired skills, I've found that language fluency dulls very quickly with disuse, so a little practice every day is essential. I would add that, in my experience, even if you don't want to speak the language, going through a course like Pimsleur, which, again, puts much more emphasis on speech, can really help with reading and writing in non-obvious ways. Reading is more than just decipherment!
I taught myself Russian and Polish as an adult. What helps as much as anything was forcing myself to do everything in the language I was learning, writing grocery lists, etc..
That and being constantly on the lookout for new words, phrases, grammatical quirks, etc. to learn.
Do you remember what books / audio tools you used for Russian? I really like languages but gave up on that one after about 6 months as it was just so damn hard.
This was from before the widespread availability of internet, so I used an old record of Vladimir Vysotskii.
Polish is more difficult than Russian, FWIW. The grammar is more complicated and has more exceptions, not to mention Polish words contain so many consonant clusters that every word sounds like the the same mish-mash of "S" "W" and "Z".
I am told that the hardest languages for Westerners to truly master are the Arabic and Turkic languages. This is because:
1. As actually spoken, they rarely speak in plain sentences. "I would like a beer, please!" is kind of thick and cloddish. Instead, one might write "The foamy nectar of Hamm's, refreshing brew of sky-blue waters, yellow and crisp. is what I seek from thee!"
2. A lot of conversational Arabic, Turkish, etc. consists of cultural references, e.g., quotes from the Koran or historical events, or poems that everyone knows or movies that everyone has seen. If you didn't grow up in that culture, you won't get the reference.
The best analogy I can give is if someone was learning English and then went unaccompanied to a Star Wars convention. Even if they have a good vocabulary and understanding, they'll have a hard time grasping what is going on, if they have never seen the Star Wars movies. What is everyone talking about and what exactly is "The Force"?
Hamm’s, huh? You must have spent time in the Upper Midwest. Though, there is an Ella Fitzgerald song where she riffs on the jingle. Maybe it’s fame is wider than I’m giving it credit for.
The beer refreshing
The beer refreshing…
Pre Covid, the gal behind the bar at the joint on the corner would start pouring me a pint before I found my stool. I was their Norm.
Do you speak Arabic or Turkish? If so, I'm curious about communication about science -- say in a lecture. Does the language used in that context retain any of the funky, fancy, strung-together-cultural-references quality? Even hearing that there's a bit of it remaining in a lecture about physics would delight me.
I had mentioned the theory to native speakers of Arabic and they said it made sense. Now I'll have to ask whether this also applies in the scientific context.
That stuff about Arabic and Turkish sounds very folk-wisdomy. I think there are much more difficult languages for Westerners to learn, phonologically and grammatically, among e.g. Amerindian and Australasian languages.
Among people I know who've learnt Arabic, the big issue seems to be "which Arabic"? You tend to be taught the standard variety, which is what they speak on e.g. Egyptian news broadcasts, but if you try to talk that way in conversation everyone will laugh at you. But then one of my friends who went the other direction and learnt colloquial Moroccan Arabic found that people from the Levant or the Gulf region couldn't really understand him.
In 2010 I started a new job in China. My wife, who had just retired, decided to study Chinese, and she did, seriously, up until Covid interrupted everything. She is one of the only people I’ve ever known who found learning to read and write Chinese to be easier than oral Chinese, and she got pretty good at it. As for historical precedents, the famous early 20th translator of the Chinese classics, Arthur Waley, reportedly never spoke Chinese. The story goes that he found the classical literature so beautiful, he didn’t want to ruin it with images and sounds of the real China. Of course, the Waley story might be entirely fictional, I don’t know.
She started with books and flash cards, then took some classes at a community college, and continued with tutors, more books, language exchange with Chinese friends learning English, and eventually started watching Chinese TV and movies. She has a Chinese character program on her phone (Pleco) and she would look up every character she didn’t know and add it to her flash cards. She’s visually oriented so learning the characters wasn’t the hard part, and Chinese syntax is relatively simple (compared to, say, German or Japanese), but the tones of the spoken language were very hard for her. The best way to learn to speak Chinese is an immersion program, preferably one in China, but there are some in the US, too.
I've never learned one from scratch, but I've had good luck using Anki to improve my German vocabulary. It's just flashcards. Find some flashcard software you like and use a frequency-weighted word list or a word list in whatever domain you're interested in. Or just put down words as you learn them so that you can retain them.
It seems that any expert working in a giving area will typically be "alarmist" about whatever they are an expert on. There's probably a couple of reasons for that. The most simple is that if you spend all of your day focused on a topic it will probably be more important to you than other people. Second is that you are more likely to know about all possible catastrophic potential. And third, if your life/income is tied to an industry/topic, the more "alarm" there is about it, the more funding *and* importance you'll have.
I think this is true of everything from climate change to virology to diet and economic issues. I feel like this is a topic Scott may have touched on, but I don't remember anything specific.
Is this a common thought/understanding? Is there a name for it? (Or am I off base here?)
If so, what do we about it in an era where we *need* to "trust the experts" and "follow the science"?
I don't think that this is a general trend. Here are some counterexamples:
Virology. The whole debate over gain-of-function research is because virologists are doing something that most people think is too dangerous. And there's the anecdote from the Ancient Plagues post of the Russian microbiologist self-injecting 3.5 million year old bacteria out of curiosity.
Flying. The public is a lot more worried that something bad might happen to the airplane than the pilot is.
GMOs. See Toxn's comment.
Nuclear power. We didn't abandon hydroelectricity after the Banqiao Dam failure, so why are people still scared of Chernobyl???
In finance there's an idea around a volatility premium where the anticipated volatility of the future ends up generally being higher than the actual volatility.
I'm pretty confident this effect is pervasive and deeply baked into the human psyche.
Also, the experts you hear quoted by journalists are quite likely to be at the alarmist end of the spectrum.
And which sort of expert is going to be elected head of the WHO? The sort that will describe the latest IPCC report as "Code red for humanity".
Contrast that with this kind of statement from IPCC Lead Author Prof Richard Betts "Most climate scientists do not subscribe to the 2 degrees 'dangerous climate change' (I know I don't)".
And which of these statements is most likely to be in a headline in the msm?
Even if experts were not more alarmist than the general public, what ends up in our media is alarmist as can be.
I worked and studied in plant genetics for a time, and had a very different experience. For one, workers in our field were almost universally pro-GMOs (while being able to have complex conversations about public versus private development, conventional (reactionary) versus precautionary legislative approaches and what specific traits would be most beneficial). The things we were concerned with were the resurgence of crop pests and diseases, loss of soil productivity, unsustainable farming practices, and changes to farmland caused by climate change. The things we were positive about were improved approaches for imparting things like disease, drought and salinity resistance, the potential of new and neglected crops, and the coming information technology revolution in farming.
The lay public were uniformly alarmist about GMOs and ignorant/misinformed about the rest.
Conclusion: if experts seem more or less alarmed than you about something, it may be because you're simply less informed than them. Were you to become more informed, you would be likely to discover that they have nuances of opinion about topics which are equally (or even more) important to them, but about which you were previously unaware.
While I think what you're describing is real, and often has a component of fallacy-by-the-expert to it, I think it's also quite likely that the average member of the public is insufficiently "alarmist" (read: careful, taking actions to prevent/mitigate) about quite a lot of things.
Think about driving: Everyday activity, the experts are super-alarmist, and the average driver is quite poor and injurious accidents quite common. The dangers of poor nutrition- similar. The dangers of no exercise- similar. Various industry-related things- cropland renewal, food processing safety, logging, etc., etc. Investing- the average person spends too much and doesn't save enough, and when they *do* invest, they invest in risky assets (houses, single stocks) instead of broad, diversified funds.
There are a *few* areas where the average person is too cautious- moving locations and career/job swaps are two that come to mind- but this could definitely be part of the difference in "alarmist perception".
I am concerned that the [edit: longtermist] effective altruist community is committed to ending all human consciousness and thereby ending all human value. This seems inconsistent with their stated aims.
There's a dominant strand of thought in that community that uploaded people would be conscious and therefore the best way to increase long term utility would be to transition human society to computers.
David Chalmers has a good account of the view that computers would be conscious here:
His view is that if you created a computer that replicated the outputs of a brain region for a given set of inputs, when connected all together we should consider the simulated brain to be conscious since it would be functionally equivalent.
Here's my sketch of the problem. If you think that the existence of consciousness depends on the physics/metaphysics of our universe, I don't think such a machine can be conscious in the same way humans are.
The meta problem of consciousness is the difficulty of explaining why humans talk about consciousness. A lot of theories of consciousness give an explanation for why we might have consciousness (atoms are conscious, sufficient computation generates consciousness etc), but the meta problem asks how the consciousness that is generated can causally affect our utterances (for instance this comment). If we think that the correct theory of consciousness will be able to solve this problem, then the statements of conscious systems about their consciousness should be causally affected by their conscious states.
In other words, the outputs of a system that is conscious in our universe should be different in a universe that does not allow consciousness (even if such a universe is merely a philosophical possibility). i.e. if you "turn off" consciousness in our universe, we would presume that our behavior would change (even if the only change is that philosophy of mind seminars become really boring).
Unfortunately, a computer simulation of a brain cannot fulfil that requirement. If we simulated a brain, then at some level, the brain and the input of a question "are you conscious?" can be represented as a Turing machine with a given state. A Turing machine's outputs are logical truths in the same way as 2+2=4 is. We don't think that metaphysics or physics affects whether 2+2=4 is true and by the same logic, the output of a Turing machine with a given set of inputs should not vary according to metaphysics either.
What this means is that the simulated human brain's answers about whether it is conscious cannot be causally connected to whether it is conscious or not. If we think that the meta problem of consciousness should be solvable by a correct theory of consciousness, this means that simulated minds are doing some fundamentally different from human brains when they talk about their claimed conscious states.
Basically, human brain uploading is a process precisely designed to build zombies that will trick us (and themselves) into thinking they are conscious.
If you are an illusionist about consciousness, then none of this should trouble you because you don't think there is a hard problem of consciousness. But, if you think that consciousness does exist, you should be really worried that brain uploads would report exactly the same internal experiences in a universe without consciousness.
We won't know much of anything for sure until brain uploads work reliably, which I don't think is likely within the next century. Even if it's achieved, I think it'll be done first on cadavers, so I wouldn't get to live out my fantasy of chatting with my digital twin.
Setting that aside, it'll be highly educational. I am EA and not an illusionist. If digital copies are verified accurate simulations who still report experiences of qualia, that would strongly challenge my "consciousness is monadal/real" view, increasing the evidence for both illusionism and epiphenomenalism (in which the digital people are p-zombies), the latter seeming less likely than illusionism on my priors. (edit: Unlike you Jon, my sense is that if consciousness causally affects our speech, then a computer accurately simulating a human brain will not generate a mind that is convinced of its own consciousness the way mine and yours is.)
At that point I'd just say "oh well, can we just please keep humans around anyway?" Because it seems like in the illusionist world, it doesn't matter what we do because *nothing* matters, whereas there remains a little probability mass on other possibilities, so we should act as if one of those other possibilities are true.
I think Chalmers' dichotomy of "Biological theorists of consciousness" and "Functionalist theorists of consciousness" is not quite right, because I am not really a "biological theorist": I suppose that *at present* only biological brains are conscious, but that if we can scientifically figure out what consciousness is, we can figure out how to put it in a computer. After that, it could be okay if humans die out, but only if we're, like, properly certain that the conscious computers really are conscious. (edit: geez, what am I saying? of course I don't expect humans to let *themselves* die out, and I'm not landing on the side of Bender's sleepwalking goal of "kill all humans", and there's enough space in the galaxy for everyone, biological or not. All I really mean to say is that if life ends up as all synthetic beings, that could be just fine if they're conscious.)
Other people have already done good work at noticing the mistake in your reasoning: the assumption that it's possible to execute consciousness simulation in a universe with doesn't allow consciousness to exist.
I, however, am intrigued by this statement:
"Basically, human brain uploading is a process precisely designed to build zombies that will trick us (and themselves) into thinking they are conscious."
What do you mean here by zombies tricking themselves? What "self" are we talking about if they are not consciousness? Do you uncouple sense of self from the consciousness?
"His view is that if you created a computer that replicated the outputs of a brain region for a given set of inputs, when connected all together we should consider the simulated brain to be conscious since it would be functionally equivalent. "
I think that I do not understand the argument. It seems indeed possible that, at some point, we will be able to "replicate the outputs of a brain region for a given set of inputs, " but why would that imply consciousness for the simulation? Many things can be simulated or reproduced artificially, but it does not imply that all their properties are identical.
If a mind-simulation produces the same outputs as the original when given the same inputs, then the simulation must also be able to produce the same kind of consciousness-related talk that we are producing right now (at least, if the original has a philosophical nature). If you want to then say that the upload isn't conscious then you have to accept that consciousness-talk is not caused by the speaker being conscious, because the upload does exactly the same thing, for the same reasons, without the consciousness.
But if you accept that, then this very conversation becomes hard to account for and even harder to justify. Why are we talking about consciousness, if it can't have any causal connection to the fact that we are conscious? We would have to accept that when I wrote "the fact that we are conscious" this was true by pure coincidence, because an upload of me would have written the exact same thing even though it would be false. And if we do accept that why should we expect the arguments raised here to mean anything when they have no causal connection to their subject matter?
"If a mind-simulation produces the same outputs as the original when given the same inputs, then the simulation must also be able to produce the same kind of consciousness-related talk that we are producing right now (at least, if the original has a philosophical nature). If you want to then say that the upload isn't conscious then you have to accept that consciousness-talk is not caused by the speaker being conscious, because the upload does exactly the same thing, for the same reasons, without the consciousness."
It seems to me that I need only to admit that an output identical to consciousness-talk can be produced without consciousness, which seems reasonable to me.
"But if you accept that, then this very conversation becomes hard to account for and even harder to justify. Why are we talking about consciousness, if it can't have any causal connection to the fact that we are conscious? We would have to accept that when I wrote "the fact that we are conscious" this was true by pure coincidence, because an upload of me would have written the exact same thing even though it would be false. And if we do accept that why should we expect the arguments raised here to mean anything when they have no causal connection to their subject matter?"
I think that I am missing your point. It seems to be that you are arguing that if two "black boxes" always produce the same output for a given input, then the content of the two boxes, i.e. the processes inside, must be identical, which I find far from obvious.
As an anecdote, a few weeks ago, it took me about 10 message exchanges to realize that the customer service representative I thought I was talking to was actually a chatbot. Amusingly, when I asked to speak to a human, the bot kept repeating that it was indeed human. The bot was of course a very crude simulation of a human person and I think we can agree that it has no consciousness whatsoever. But I can imagine an extremely advanced version of the same bot that would be indistinguishable from a human, and it seems to me that this advanced simulation could be no more conscious than the little chatbot.
The whole point of mind upload is that it behaves exactly the same way as a mind for exactly the same algorithmic reasons.
It's not two black boxes that we are comparing, doing exactly the same things with the same inputs. It's two transparent boxes, where every tiny detail of the mechanism is doing exactly the same thing, with the same input, even though boxes may have been made from different material.
OK, another objection then (I am quite aware that I am trying to rationalize my feeling that uploads are not conscious!):
What we are comparing (brain versus upload) is not IMO "two transparent boxes, where every tiny detail of the mechanism is doing exactly the same thing," but one material mechanism and a simulation of this mechanism. It seems to me that a simulation can not been identified with what is simulated. IMO a simulation is like a projection of a very complex object on a much simpler "space" : a very small number of properties can be simulated, and certainly not the whole object itself.
Chalk me up as one of the people who don't believe in the "hard problem". You haven't provided any actual reason to think simulated minds have less/more of a causal connection between their inputs & outputs, you just assume something mysterious is going on with biological minds and don't see any mystery in digital minds.
This seems like a successful reduction-to-absurdity of the claim that consciousness both has causal impact, and isn't purely computational.
For uploads to work the way you propose, for them to exactly reproduce all human behaviours including those where we talk about consciousness, and yet not be consciousness, it must be that even once you have specified exactly how a system acts in all circumstances, there is still an additional fact of whether the system is conscious or not that can be toggled independently.
But that means consciousness has no causal impact.
If we allow "circumstances" to include not just sensory inputs, but e.g. examining a simulated brain in a simulated particle accelerator we can rule out not just detection via philosophy paper, but through any physical mechanism whatsoever.
You can have p-zombies and epiphenomenal consciousness, or you can have conscious uploads, but I don't see any way you can avoid having either.
It's true that it's not possible to build a computer with the property that it's answer to the question "Are you conscious" will change when we turn off consciousness.
That's not because computers are incapable of consciousness.
It's because you can't "turn off consciousness". It would be like turning off energy.
Also, your argument for why computers would continue to behave the same if you did "turn off" consciousness, also applies to humans. Our actions are determined by a physical chain of cause-and-effect that could be represented by a computer program.
1. The inputs and outputs Chalmers is talking about are not at the level of the whole brain, but at the level of individual neurons (or even smaller sub-units, if those sub-units turn out to be relevant to consciousness). What you should imagine is replacing each neuron, perhaps one at a time, with a little piece of silicon with the same functional properties (i.e. same mapping of inputs to outputs). This is an important difference - it is not just the inputs and outputs of the brain as a whole that have to match, but those of every little piece.
2. It only makes sense to model the behavior of the simulated brain as a Turing machine insofar as the same makes sense of our own biological brains. After all, they share the same input and output behavior. Yes, it is hard to see how being conscious could be causally connected to behavior on this model. But these same difficulties apply to biological humans.
3. You could instead (as I think you do, IIUC) take a non-functionalist view and say that the inputs and outputs of each neuron (or whatever smaller subunits) aren't enough. For example, maybe it's something about being built out of carbon instead of out of silicon that makes us conscious. And sure, it is possible that our universe has some extra rule like this. But I see no reason to believe it - it seems arbitrary and ad hoc to me.
4. That said, as Chalmers seems to agree, we don't have a good theory of consciousness, so we shouldn't be very confident in any of this! I think the three main theories of consciousness relevant here are functionalism, non-functionalism, and illusionism. Two of these say the uploads would be fine, so maybe our confidence should be about 2/3! (Tongue in cheek of course, though that is roughly my personal credence.)
Where does ethics/thinking about ethics/making decisions with ethics intersect with “consciousness”? I used to think ethics intersected closely with consciousness but I’ve revised that.
I think the idea is that consciousness relates to moral value. For example, it's fine to step on a leaf, because it's not conscious. Or, should we be concerned about animal/insect welfare? Many think it depends on whether/to what degree they are conscious.
I don't feel too confident this is right, but I see the appeal and think it's a pretty widespread view. Curious to hear how you've revised your thinking on this.
I'm not up for as strong a statement as "it'll never work", but I'm up for "show me an actual system that 100% acts like a human mind, to any input, and then we'll talk."
In the part about Turing machines, you seem to make an unstated assumption that this hypothetical universe whose laws of physics don't allow consciousness would allow Turing machines to exist. I'm not sure how you would justify this; a hypothetical universe whose laws of physics don't allow Turing machines to exist also seems conceivable to me. If you don't accept that assumption, another resolution of this question that doesn't imply your conclusion about uploaded minds possibly being p-zombies is possible, namely: a Turing machine's precise simulation of a human brain is conscious in the same way as the original brain is, & this means that a universe that doesn't allow consciousness would have to also not allow Turing machines.
Your interpretation seems to make an unstated assumption that consciousness can be created with any sufficiently large Turing-equivalent machine? But Jon M disagrees.
Turing machines are logical entities. While the circuits that we use to represent Turing machines might not be possible in particular universes, a Turing machine as Turing described it can be represented as a string of ones and zeros and a reading head that follows a simple series of rules to go back and forth along that string. You can build a physical instantiation of that algorithm out of rocks, dots on a piece of paper or anything else. I don't think there are many laws of physics that wouldn't allow something that could represent a Turing machine.
>You can build a physical instantiation of that algorithm out of rocks, dots on a piece of paper or anything else.
You can build a physical instantiation of the program's memory out of rocks, dots, &c. The same isn't necessarily true of the "reading head" that actually executes the program.
Maybe tone down your accusations against EA a bit? It's not a "dominant strand of thought in that community that uploaded people would be conscious and therefore the best way to increase long term utility would be to transition human society to computers.". Find yourself someone who actually believes this and argue against them instead, it's a better look.
My guess would be that very few EA people believe this. Even among the subgroup of EA people who care about this issue, most of them would probably agree to keep a couple of non-uploaded humans around (it minimizes risk, and you won't be able to convince all humans to upload anyway).
Your reaction is needlessly defensive here. I don't think the original comment was an "accusation" in the emotive sense you're using the word. It was just a (perhaps mistaken) attribution of a claim. He's not saying there's anything blameworthy in making that claim, he's just exploring its consequences.
I've made an edit to clarify that I mean the longtermist AI community. However, I do stand by the claim that that community has a strong tendency to believe uploaded minds would be conscious and morally valuable.
A few examples:
Holden Karnofsky explicitly make these claims here:
Tendency to believe uploaded minds could be conscious and morally valuable? Sure, I'd guess all three of the people you cited would put over 50% credence on this, and that's probably true for a majority (though certainly not all) people in the EA longtermist community. My own personal credence is maybe something like 70%.
High-confidence consensus that "the best way to increase long term utility would be to transition human society to computers" and that we should therefore charge ahead and do that? No, of course not. EA thinkers who I have seen discuss this take seriously the risk that we could be replaced by entities that aren't conscious, and that this could be a disaster. They take seriously that choices about our longterm future have to take into account a wide range of views rather than be narrowly shaped by any particular conception of the good. (Could I be missing some secret cabal with more extreme views? Sure, I guess, but I see no reason to think so.)
Of course, it's true that views of consciousness have very high stakes, and it's certainly reasonable to worry that a community could go astray by having incorrect views of consciousness even if they aren't fanatics about it. :-) So while I thought the worries expressed in your first couple of sentences were pretty misplaced, and despite disagreeing with your substantive argument about consciousness, I appreciated your comment.
"uploaded minds would be conscious and morally valuable" is very much not the same as "the best way to increase long term utility would be to transition human society to computers". None of the people you mention makes the second claim as far as I know.
First, I apologize to Scott if this is not appropriate to post here, and will delete it if that's the case.
My father is a programmer who mostly worked for energy companies in the Houston area throughout his career. In his retirement, over the past decade and more, he's been working on what appears to me to be a very powerful machine learning modality based on specification logic (S-logic), which uses developmental networks called S-networks for learning and prediction. I'm an archaeology professor, so far from an expert on this stuff. What I write here will rely on what he's explained to me, the introductory documents he's written, and what I've seen of this methodology.
S-networks are self-constructing software objects that use aspects of S-logic (including model trees, weight interval probabilities, and multi-dimensional vector distance) to learn and predict complex memories. S-networks are a kind of neural network, but they differ from other neural networks in widespread use, and the methodology was developed independently of existing neural networks. I understand that S-networks are never subject to "catastrophic forgetting," for one thing.
An S-network provides a service to a client application, existing in its own partition separate from the application that relies on it. It starts off with no memories at all, and begins learning and predicting immediately and indefinitely as it accumulates disparate types of data. The foundational S-network software service is provided as an API with versatile tools for developmentally learning complex situations, prioritizing them, recognizing them, and reporting those recognitions, which should facilitate software development methodologies that emphasize modular design and separation of function. Client applications might produce very complex developmental learning situations, but when they use S-networks, all of the retained learning complexity resides separately in the S-networks. An application interacts with an S-network to record its restricted view of events and receives predictions from the S-network at a neural scope corresponding to a high-level complex situation previously learned, involving that application and potentially other agents. Each application/agent can then optionally use the S-network to record additional learning about a new response, which might mean adding new types of data, adding to detailed memories for an existing type of data, or adjusting biases of memories, for example, those involved in ambiguous predictions. I've observed this modality in use; we've been experimenting with it as a tool for placing archaeological ceramic sherds in ceramic types (a technical concept in archaeology analogous to "species" in biology), and it works.
The reason I'm posting this is that my father is looking for potential collaborators who might be interested in working with him on this methodology, with a view to their building a business. (My dad does not want to be involved with *running* the business; he wants to focus on developing S-logic and S-networks.) It's that commercial aspect that makes me hesitant to post about it here in Scott's space; I don't want to spam the open thread for private gain. But considering that this tool is extremely powerful, with potential applications for everything from heavy industry to social media, I thought I might reach out to a community many of whose members are software developers who are (importantly) aware of AI risk. I've been reading SSC/ACX since about 2014, and if very little technical knowledge about AI has rubbed off on me, I do know that about the readership. My father and I are both a little apprehensive about potential abuses of this tool, which I won't go into here.
Anyhow, if anybody would like to find out more, I would like to put my dad in touch with people who are able to build on this work in ways that I can't. My Gmail address is cociyo, and if you would like, I can share a longer and more detailed introduction to S-logic/S-networks and connect you with my father. I live in Central Texas; my parents live in Georgia but should be living in Michigan in about a year - but geography is perhaps not very important to this kind of undertaking.
I'm currently ~150 pages into Godel, Escher, Bach and can't describe what the book is about or even what I'm benefiting from reading it, other than it being quite enjoyable at times. I'm currently enrolled in uni (bio-chem) so any reading is somewhat of an opportunity cost to me.
Could anyone share their experiences with it and/or what you took from the book?
It was a transformative experience for me (for the better). Also liked his other books. Re. opportunity cost - it's timeless enough that it won't go stale.
A review of this book was participating in the book review contest here at SSC. It didn't reach the finals, because it was too technical for that. But I enjoyed reading the review, and I understood why the book was special to the writer of the review.
I am not very representative because I have strong background knowledge. (I knew Godel's incompleteness theorems before. I actually teach them in class.) But it could be worth a trial.
An alternative title would be "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and Some Other Stuff That It Reminds Me Of".
The connection between Gödel and all the other topics (Escher, Bach, DNA, Zen, AI, Lewis Caroll, and many others that I've forgotten) is actually pretty tenuous, but it's fun to read.
This brings back memories! Three of us bought it when we were in college because we were broke and we could not afford the full price. Then we passed it around on a strict schedule and teased each other on the parts the others had not read or understood. I ended up being the final keeper after college ended. I am still waiting for my friends to knock at my door and ask to have it back.
You're in a slightly unusual situation given that you're in bio-chem; most people who come to it come from the computer/AI side (hand-waving here), and those people quite commonly report hitting a wall when the DNA stuff starts. (....spoiler?) So good luck with the whole thing.
I haven't read Godel Escher Bach, but I can tell you that you're being (perhaps jokingly) very unfair to Infinite Jest. It's brilliant, and I genuinely don't think I've ever told anyone I've read it (until now).
Similarly to what some of the other commenters have said, I read it as a teenager when it was fairly new and loved it. It’s a playful book, whimsical in its own erudite way. Doesn’t really have a main point, it’s more of a meditation on examples of recursive / self-referential / meta-whatever stuff across different fields. Besides the pleasure of reading it, the main things I got out of it were 1) an increased appreciation of Bach’s cleverness as a composer, and 2) a basic (non-rigorous) understanding of Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. Which was helpful as a corrective to the dream of once-and-for-all figuring everything out in a perfectly logical way.
If reading it is cutting into time you feel would be better spent on other pursuits, there’s no need for you to read it now. You can always come back to it someday when you have more free time. I read it on vacation at a beach.
I read it in middleschool and didn't really appreciate the math and can't remember a lot of it now. But my memory of it is that it had a strong impact on me just in terms of presenting novel ways of looking at things, interesting thought experiments and ideas, an approach to understanding the world that was more open and explorative.
I don't know what value the book would have to an adult that's already encountered these things piecemeal in other places, but it's great for kids.
I also read it in the 80s as a young person. My take on it then was that the book is about the idea of 'meta levels', and it was such a new idea that it hit me in the face like a fist upon first reading. But I didn't finish reading it that first time, I only got about 2/3s of the way though. When I picked it up again a few years later, the idea of 'meta' had so seeped into me that I couldn't re-read the book. It just seemed so obvious and plodding the second time around I couldn't get through it. It was a victim of it's own success. I'm curious to know how you are finding it Matt - the concepts of metalevels and feedback loops are so much a part of our zeitgeist today that I can't help but suppose that to a modern reader the book must seem a bit trivial. Fun but trivial. Back in the day it was like a thunderbolt.
I read it in college as a humanities major, and it makes a really good introduction to the mathematics behind computation. (For a humanities major, at least.) That plus hobbyist tinkering with programming was all the training I had for my current career as a front-end web developer. I'm not saying it can replace a CS degree, but if you're interested in that sort of thing, it's at least a good start.
I read it a couple of times when I was in undergrad; I'm 50 now, so the following is from an old memory. The book is for entertainment, and for having a shared experience you can talk about, since about everyone in STEM reads it sometime. It's about self-similarity, which is an important idea in many fields. But the book is not deep in itself. The things you're learning in biochem and other classes are deep.
The example of the MUU language near the end is a good thing to learn. And Godel's theorem is certainly deep (Hofstaeder doesn't add anything to it). I think the followup book, Metamagical Themas, is more interesting and entertaining.
To sum up, I think it's a good book to read, but don't expect to find the secrets of the universe in it (you'll find some of those secrets in your classes).
I read it in the 80s as a young person. I think my parents had a VIC 20 early personal computer. But things were still pre-digital in important ways. The book is about repeating patterns (IIRC) and perceptual illusions. Why repeating patterns being compared across different disciplines was so cool - I mean, it is cool, but it’s a given in the digital age. We’re saturated with awareness of recursion and repeating patterns.
Reading it now is probably a very different experience. It’s a long meditation on the nature of meaning and self-reference also and that would be time consuming. A lot of it probably went over my head. There was periodically something Lewis-Carroll-y that made me very bored.
At some point during undergrad I dropped everything and read TE Lawrence’s “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” I am sure it didn’t help the grades, or the coursework, but I still remember learning certain things from that book. But yes, opportunity-cost.
I've been wondering about how people who don't understand technical complexities, and who know they don't, make decisions about which experts to trust. I have a hunch that i'm hoping people can poke holes in: most debates between competing people claiming to be experts aren't really about technical complexity; they are just debates about values in disguise.
For example, some people hate cryptocurrency all-together, some are 'bitcoin maximalists', and some are into 'cryptocurrency' as a general thing. I don't think most people involved here understand most of the technical details. So how does someone decide to become, say, a bitcoin maximalist if they don't understand what a consensus algorithm really is?
My hunch is that people are using their existing values, and seeing how well they map onto the kinds of arguments made in different communities. For example: bitcoin tends to draw more right-leaning people, because of its libertarian ethos. Even if people don't understand the details of technical arguments, anyone with a libertarian bent gets a vibe from the community around bitcoin which is very much aligned with their existing values: “don't trust institutions, people in general are shitty, so it's better for none of them to have power. It will take a very long time but doesn't need some leader making adjustments. Simple rules are the best, and correctly aligned incentives will keep everything working better than any alternative. The money supply should be fixed, nobody should have the power to create more, because that power will invariably be used for corrupt purposes. Proof-of-work Mining incentivizes renewables, and keeps skin in the game.”
Contrast this set of values with those held by "the ethereum community", which has a different set of values: “more complexity lets us do more good. A community should collaboratively make decisions to move together as a whole. With the right knowledge, we can make better decisions and thus improve the world for everyone. The money supply should be whatever the community decides and isn't a hugely important detail. Mining is wasteful and a technological relic, there are more advanced solutions which use less energy.”
Both of those philosophies reflect different values systems. And I suspect those value systems _themselves_ are what people are using when they choose which camp to join.
My hunch is that the same thing applies to arguments over lockdowns or vaccine mandates, etc - people aren't 'arguing' over cause and effect beliefs, they are just loudly shouting their existing priors. I'm pretty sure there's nothign new in this idea (e.g. posts on less wrong about 'flag waving', etc) - but what i'm wondering is, if we can't fight that, wouldn't it make more sense to try and come up with arguments for things we believe in, from multiple camps?
I can imagine something like a 'rosetta stone' of arguments, which tries to make red-tribe centric AND blue-tribe centric arguments for the same things. Is that likely to work? If you did so anonymously (so people didn't see you as a hypocrite), wouldn't that be a better way to advance your values in the world?
Why is it important to understand technical complexities? I generally find that people who are invoking technical complexities generally are either poor communicators or invoking them cynically with the goal of obscuring. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, there are essentially only three properties that matter: mining gets you bitcoin and takes energy and computer hardware; currency supply is fixed and can't be changed; anyone having 51% of the mining capacity is bad and breaks the whole system. I don't see why explaining the technical details would help anyone really.
Definitely, if people want to know technical details, there's value in that. But none of the questions you've posed really matter when asking, for example, "is encouraging using Bitcoin as an investment instrument better than discouraging using it as such?" It only matters when comparing the merits of different cryptocurrencies, or when designing cryptocurrencies, which is beyond the scope of most discussion of cryptocurrency.
Most discussion doesn't need to involve technical details - in fact, the technical details don't matter at all in most cases, and could be different without affecting the arguments. So listening to an economist who doesn't understand how Bitcoin works, and only knows its economic properties, talk about the merits and demerits of using Bitcoin as a reserve currency, for example, is not a problem. In this case, the technical complexities are irrelevant, and shouldn't be discussed at all. It's sufficient to know that Bitcoin mining takes a massive amount of energy and computer hardware, without knowing why that's the case, for example.
I feel like I'm answering a different question from the one you posed, though, I just can't put my finger on what I'm missing. So feel free to correct my framing here / tell me what question I should be trying to answer.
OP probably wasn't limiting "technical complexities" to computer tech.
Bitcoin's economic properties are also the technical details. People who don't understand technical complexities aren't going to understand economics either, e.g. Bitcoin and inflation, or an economist arguing against Bitcoin-as-a-currency because of velocity of money and GDP (the complexities of that argument are beyond me, but the economics intersects the scaling details).
And if you did make Bitcoin a reserve currency then the game theory that secures its blockchain may break*, so an economist who doesn't understand how Bitcoin works couldn't properly discuss it as a reserve.
* An aspect of the blockchain is secured by the fact that actors will gain more if they help the network than if they attack it, the catch is that the "more" is denominated in bitcoins, and so if it were to become a reserve currency then "political gain" (and currency gain) not denominated in bitcoins enters the equation. A state being able to undermine faith in another country's reserve might be worth more to them than the bitcoin wealth it would forgo by throwing a spanner into things.
For anyone interested: Recently finished a very short novella on my (free) substack, minus an epilogue I will write probably sometime this week, purpose of which is to explain pillars of what I call an algorithmic republic. Specifically seeking criticism or any points of confusion. Am already planning a rewrite as I went overboard with a few jokes.
The Forum: a way of replacing regional broad based authority by allowing people to either direct their votes themselves or to choose representatives based on topic.
The Index: so learning lingo of this group and this is something like a prediction market but using juries to adjudicate adversarial claims and keeping ratings by topic so you can auto-suppress noise.
Minerva: autonomous non-lethal sentry drones that can be summoned via wake word or wake sign.
Am going to write out case studies of each of these in the following weeks to explain how they could be used to address real world problems.
Thanks for the comment! Want to make sure I follow: idea is that there’s a question on the forum? As in how the law/proposal is phrased? I can add clarification around that in the piece but want to make sure I’m not misunderstanding.
So Arnold Kling had interesting piece last week, arguing (I guess from a right-wing perspective) that the US could use a COO to manage the government, along with a more independent auditor. (Honestly you can safely skip the first three-quarters of this piece and just get to the logistics starting at 'Restructuring The Regulatory State'). I disagree with large chunks of what he wrote, but it's an interesting jumping off-point for a discussion.
France uses a semi-presidential system, where a popularly elected President manages external affairs, and a more traditional Prime Minister apparently manages domestic ones (I don't know the exact division of labor). It'd be interesting to take Kling's COO and adapt it a bit to the US- say, a coalition in Congress appoints a COO to do the actual day-to-day management of the US government (2ish million employees, so the size of Walmart- a budget of I believe $6ish trillion). They could manage the bureaucracy, perhaps by being given the power to fire a small number of otherwise protected civil servants every year- enough to keep the bureaucrats on their toes, not nearly enough to go back to the 19th century patronage system. Making the position less partisan by removing direct election and maybe requiring a supermajority in Congress for an appointment might help make day-to-day management less political. (If Congress can't agree then maybe the 'old' COO can name their successor, to incentivize Congress to play ball).
Would be curious to hear people's thoughts! I'm a bit of a democracy skeptic, and would like to make some of the actual administration of the government less democratic & more technocratic. And of course most other 1st world countries already have a non-popularly elected Prime Minister, so it's not too wild of an idea
As always, the system is defined by its condition and its constraints, not what label anyone chooses to put on it.
The COO as proposed is a Cabinet-level official requiring Senate confirmation that has the ability to unilaterally rewrite vast swathes of law. The obvious result is that the seat goes permanently unfilled, except maybe when you have a mid-50s Senate majority and aligned President they trust to keep the COO on an extremely short leash. This is an unnecessarily elaborate proposal for narrow, volatile filibuster reform.
(Ok, the *really* obvious result is that this would require at least one Constitutional amendment to set up in the first place at a minimum, and it's a complete non-starter.)
The CA and their Audit Agency don't appear to have any explicit powers the GAO doesn't already have. This is a proposal to... make people take it more seriously? By slashing the Comptroller's term length? Genuinely not sure what structural changes Kling is thinking of here.
Not just trying to naysay here, but I'm not seeing anything here worth building upon.
The COO being able to 'unilaterally rewrite vast swathes of law' part is obviously silly, Kling was just completely wrong there. Closing/restructuring various agencies should be a function of Congress, not the COO. I was more interested in a general manager-type.
"The CA and their Audit Agency don't appear to have any explicit powers the GAO doesn't already have"
As mentioned with the Control Yuan in Taiwan example, other countries have their auditor-types constitutionally protected. For example Trump famously fired 5 different inspector generals who were supposed to be overseeing different departments- the idea would be to make them unfireable. His aides also flouted the Hatch Act several times, which prohibits government officials from campaigning while in their official duties. All the GAO could do with Kellyanne Conway's repeated violations of the law was..... refer her to Trump, who was her boss. Towards the end of his time in office he held a campaign event on White House grounds, which again is a Hatch Act violation. There were..... zero consequences.
I'm not really interested in doing in doing a ton of Trump-bashing, simply pointing out the most recent examples of behavior that an auditor should be able to investigate & fine. (We could easily see a Democratic president doing the same thing in the future). Constitutional protection seems like a good idea
It's one thing to declare that the COO has a charge to maximize operational effectiveness and another to set up a system where the COO is incentivized to follow this charge. The ability to reorganize the executive branch is a huge amount of power that someone appointed by the president (with advice and consent of the Senate) might use for other causes. Similarly, what incentive does the Chief Auditor, appointed by the same president, have to be adversarial to the COO? The author talks about some interesting ways in which this might fail, but he doesn't mention the boring / depressing failure: both the CA and COO are partisans with largely the the same goals. Just like how the adversarial relationship between Congress and the President doesn't work like it's supposed to when everyone follows their party's line.
I think that the regulatory state needs more democracy, rather than less. If some agencies are supposed to be independent, their leadership should be independently elected. The EPA administrator should stand for election every four years like the president and the SEC commissioners should run every six years like Senators. I suspect that the Post Office might get more efficient before an election for the Postmaster General.
This might just end up with the Red vs Blue tribalism that even many local elections have become. But it might also encourage more independent politicians and split-ticket voting. If someone likes Democrats on the environment, but Republicans on the economy, they could make this known.
Something like this already exists on the state level. You'll remember the Georgia 2021 runoff election, where Democrats picked up two Senate seats. There was also a runoff for Public Service Commission, which was won by Lauren "Bubba" McDonald, a pro-nuclear, pro-solar Republican.
This seems similar to how city governments work, except the city manager is appointed by the mayor, not the city council. I don't get the impression that cities are in any general sense better run than countries because of this.
It may not even be that this is because a government doesn't need or benefit from a more technically qualified operations lead to implement ideas subordinate to the elected vision person's vision, but positions like this already exist even if only in an unofficial capacity.
That's not an accurate description of the French system at all. Presidents are elected with a strong domestic policy agenda. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Macron#Domestic_policy) Though the dynamics are a bit different from those of the american system.
Given how trivially easily checkable that is I'm somewhat sceptical about the value of the rest of the analysis
While I did mention my lack of French constitutional expertise- I think what you're missing is that Macron's party (which he founded!) has a raw majority in the National Assembly, a rather extraordinary thing in a multiparty system. The Prime Minister, who is selected by the President, is then voted in by the Assembly. So while I'm sure the current PM is executing Macron's domestic vision, I stand by my assertion that he's 'managing domestic affairs'. Your link merely notes that Macron has 'pressed' for reforms. I invite you to read the Wiki page on how a PM works in France. This is trivially easily checkable, BTW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_France#Role
"According to article 21 of the Constitution,[2] the prime minister "shall direct the actions of the Government". Additionally, Article 20[2] stipulates that the Government "shall determine and conduct the policy of the Nation", and it includes domestic issues, while the president concentrates on formulating directions on national defense and foreign policy.... when there is a cohabitation. In such cases, a constitutional convention gives the prime minister primacy in domestic affairs, while the president oversees foreign affairs. His responsibilities, then, are akin to those of a prime minister in a parliamentary system"
I like thought experiments like Arnold's a lot. However, I don't see the difference between the COO and, say, the deputy secretary or senior civil servant. Using the word COO doesn't somehow explain how/why they'd be different than what exists today.
Sorta the same thing on the auditor front. We have an Inspector General (IG) agency and a Government Accountability Office (GAO).
He's kinda doing the thing people often done in this community where they have an exciting idea and too quickly start typing instead of reading and learning what exists already.
Arnold does say of the chief auditor proposal "One might think of this agency as a bulked-up version of the existing Government Accountability Office." He might have just proposed strengthening the GAO. That's my big problem with the ideas in the cited piece; in most cases, there's an easier way to go about them.
The President of the United States is the head of the Executive branch of government, responsible for the day to day operations of government. "The buck stops here" and all that. He's already effectively the COO. There's no reason to create and empower a new position, with all the work that entails. Instead, he could just bring in advisors with operational expertise to advise him on how to fix things. Fixing the regulatory bureaucracy is not a one-man operation. (A hypothetical COO is also definitely not something for the legislature to have its fingers in; separation of powers is important.)
There is an argument that the Constitution attempted to do this. The argument goes that the use of the word "faithfully" in the description of the President's domestic duties - "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" [Art. II Sec. 3] - imposes a fiduciary duty on the President like that imposed on the executor of an estate. However, there's no real way of enforcing that on a head of government, so absent self-regulation the idea vanished. Oh well. We can't have nice things.
On the topic of an auditor, which Kling also brings up- many countries have constitutionally-protected audit departments, and Taiwan in particular has the 'Control Yuan'. They're a constitutionally independent auditor who examines the other branches of government. Not a bad idea for the US either! I'd also argue for making the Justice Department more independent, possibly with a Federal Reserve-style board of appointments with fixed terms
We briefly had a miniature version of this with the laws concerning special prosecutors. Judges used to be able to order the appointment of special prosecutors to ferret around in the executive branch looking for malfeasance, but the law was allowed to expire when both parties got sick of it after the Clinton administration.
You mean it's outside the political Overton window. It is entirely within the fiscal Overton window. A collapse of the US government is inevitable. That which cannot go on forever will cease.
I would bet on a dollar collapse before a government collapse. The US government cannot and will not go bankrupt, as all of its obligations are owed in dollars, which the Federal Reserve can print at will.
The US government is bankrupt. It cannot collect enough tax income to pay its current debt load. Is that not obvious to you or do I need to go into details?
That's not what "bankrupt" means. While I agree that the US government will face a fiscal reckoning and it won't be pleasant, you don't make that case by overstating it.
If your liabilities exceed your assets, you're bankrupt. Even if the liabilities aren't due yet, if your assets having arrived yet and cannot conceivably cover the liabilities, you're bankrupt. What definition are you using?
Bankruptcy is a legal process, not a state. By your logic, every new college graduate that took out loans is 'bankrupt', as their liabilities exceed their assets. This is triply so for new med school graduates, Ivy League law school grads, and so on. Their liabilities vastly exceed their present assets. In fact, by your logic, a homeless man is wealthier than a new surgeon on their first day of work, or really that same surgeon at any point through the first half decade or longer of their career. What would you rather be, a homeless man or a brand new surgeon? By your logic a villager in Africa struggling to eat on less than $2 a day is doing fine financially, and is in fact doing better than a brand new Harvard Law grad just starting work at a white shoe law firm. Which of those two people would you rather be?
If you want to reply, please answer- there are 4 million new college graduates in the US every year, we can safely say that 70+% of them have taken out loans. Are these 2.8 million new grads with loans- every year- 'bankrupt'? Yes or no?
I'm actually mildly concerned about US government spending, but you have like the lowest quality, most easily ignored arguments on the topic. There's lots of room for improvement here
You're not bankrupt until your current liabilities exceed your current assets. After all, your revenue might increase. You might get a windfall or jubilee. Your horse might learn to sing.
Merely having total debt in excess of your assets is not an uncommon situation (consider someone with no assets except a new car they just bought on credit) and isn't bankruptcy.
Trillions of dollars from the world's capital markets apparently disagree, as they fund the US government at a much lower rate than I paid for my mortgage. I would put the judgement 'the combined capital markets of planet Earth' as a slightly more reliable source than 'learnliberty.org'.
Also, while I'm not a fan of the 'household finance' view of government debt, you're uh sort of ignoring assets there when you say 'the US government is bankrupt'. For instance we have an entire continent's worth of natural resources, $56 trillion of real estate on the continental US alone, and so on. That's without even getting into large room for tax increases- instituting a 10% VAT, like every other country on Earth has, would raise about a trillion dollars a year. There's lots of room to raise income taxes in the US to European levels, etc. etc. I find the 'bankrupt' claim lacking.
Anyways, I find the line of argument a non-sequitur. 'We can't do good government reforms because finances' doesn't really follow- even with a much smaller government, we'd still want it to function better, right? We could in theory cut spending a lot *and also* have a COO to better manage things- you could even argue that a COO would make spending more efficient
Foreign governments and foreign people have been slowing the growth of their lending to the federal government. Remember that the US borrowing rate has been growing. Not just borrowing more, but borrowing a larger amount every year.
$56 trillion of real estate? Privately owned. The government's share of it is only $2 or 3 trillion.
The US *has* increased tax rates and gotten less tax revenue.
The reform that the US needs is to do less. Maybe a COO could help? It couldn't hurt -- Congress is already spending money like a drunken sailor and that's an insult to drunken sailors.
You: "Foreign governments and foreign people have been slowing the growth of their lending to the federal government". Right off the bat man- they're not 'lending', they're bond purchases. These are conceptually different things.
"Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasuries in June climbed to their highest since February 2020, Treasury Department data showed on Monday, in what analysts described as broad-based demand.... Foreign holdings of Treasuries in June were the second largest on record"
"Foreign investors cannot get enough US government debt, which analysts say could help soften the blow when the Federal Reserve starts to cut back its own bond-buying programme this year.
Overseas buyers snapped up more than a quarter of the $41bn of 10-year notes on offer in August, the highest percentage in three years.... The upbeat demand shows that buyers remain drawn to the deepest, most easily tradable bond market in the world"
This seems plainly false- maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying? Federal government debt servicing costs are about $500 billion a year by the data I'm seeing, which is less than a quarter of tax revenue.
If you're talking about the deficit overall, then the key point is that "we don't choose to pay for it" is very different than "we can't afford to pay for it."
You're ignoring the unfunded obligations. Or are you suggesting that the US government is not going to pay its debts? You should read the Public Debt Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Interesting argument, but it seems founded on the completely arbitrary assumption that all US government liabilities have an average servicing cost of 2.5% per year- pretty suspect given that the interest rate on treasury bonds is actually negative when accounting for inflation:
(And I'm also suspicious of the claim that there's no way to increase tax revenue but that seems further into the weeds than I really want to go this morning.)
I'm a early 30s Canadian looking to spend 2-6 weeks in an American city this Jan-March to 1) get away from winter here and 2) a trial run to provide better evidence for if I should think about moving to a new city.
Right now I'm considering visiting Austin, Denver or San Diego (+ maybe somewhere in Arizona).
If any SSCers either know someone or have an apartment or an extra room I can rent, please let me know! Alternatively, if anyone wants to sublet/do a homestay in my apartment in Toronto, that would be great as well :)
This is like 10 different PhD's worth of question. What do you want to know?
At the highest level of abstraction, 'information is written into the neural network through a variety of biological mechanisms as things happen, then retrieved from it later by another series of mechanisms'.
I was wondering if the brain's memory is an emergent phenomenon from its topography -- i.e. the architecture in which the neurons are wired (10 billion neurons with a connectivity of 200,000).
Specifically, I was wondering if the way the memories are formed is that the brain starts with an electrochemical signal to a bunch of neurons, and they transmit it to their connected neurons (changing the topography every so slightly along the way), and they transmit it to their connected neurons (again, changing the topography every so slightly) and so on until the signal eventually dies out. And the resultant new topography of the brain is one in which a particular neural pathway when excited from its inputs IS the memory. Triggering the memory works in a similar fashion.
Only literature I could find on this with my rudimentary search were in agreement with this theory -- Lashley's experiments in 1950 (Equipotentiality can be explained by this -- the electro-chemical impulses just find a new outlet to form the memory) and Penfield's experiments in 1937 (by poking electrodes at the appropriate neuron in the temporal lobe, he was able to trigger a very specific memory). Curiously, it can also explain "priming" (similar concepts possibly overlap in some set of neurons) or how such a structure can evolve purely out of biology and possibly whole lot of other phenomena & questions.
Are there any theories / observations against this idea? If not, what are currently the open questions in this field?
There are a lot of constraints with memory formation i.e., it has to be possible for it to occur almost instantly. So this means that memory _cannot_ be say a function of a brand new neuron or synapse forming, because that will take a lot longer than 'nearly instantaneous'.
Note that this is different from say, learning a language, or how to rebuild a car engine, something that takes a very long time and a whole lot of learning, in that case it is entirely reasonable to think that new synapses may be formed between previously unrelated neural networks in the course of study.
So LTP starts from - there are already synapses, any given neuron might be synapsing on a 1000 other neurons, but how do you know if those synapses *matter*, this is where LTP comes in. (some handwavey electrophysiology follows)
Two neurons, generally firing in a non-coordinated manner, their synaptic strength probably doesn't increase or decrease. Let's say neuron A fires 1/sec, and synapses onto the dendrites of Neuron B which normally fires after it's been triggered ~1000 times. If Neuron A is one of 1000 other neurons that all fire ~1/sec, then there is no association between the two, no LTP will occur. But now say Neuron A starts to fire at ~100/sec, now fully 10% of the activation energy neuron B requires to fire is coming from Neuron A. You could say that the salience of Neuron A to Neuron B is now enormous. Existing receptors on Neuron B, that mediate the transmission from A to B, become more active. More receptors, that are held in special vesicles within the dendrite of Neuron B for just this purpose, will be transported to and appear on the surface of the dendrite. New proteins are synthesized, some right there in the dendrite, others later in the cell body. The surface area of the dendrite expands, new dendrites may form to synapse onto Neuron A, which may itself expand.
The end result, once Neuron A's firing rate drops back down to 1/sec, as a result of LTP it is now contributing say 20 times what any other neuron is to the activation of Neuron B. The two are now strongly associated. Repeat this across millions of neurons and that *may* be the physical foundation of memory, or at least our best guess for it currently.
It’s been many years since I’ve worked on this stuff, so I may be neglecting new research, but I don’t think the basic story has shifted too far from this.
First to answer your question, is memory an emergent function of the human of the topography of the human brain and the billions of connections within? I would say…yes and no. Yes in the sense that this topography would include the dendritic exercise and expansion I described. No in the sense that you don’t need billions of connections. Sea slugs can form ‘memories’ in the sense that they will learn to recoil from danger signals using a very similar form of LTP, and they’ve got only ~20,000 neurons to work with. But of course the way a memory is experienced will be very different in a slug and a human.
Second I just wanted to offer a more colorful example of how memory formation works than Neuron A and Neuron B:
Imagine you come home one day and tell your spouse you were just chatting with your neighbor Frank. As soon as you say the name Frank, they turn to you and say ‘Frank, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒎𝒖𝒓𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒓?’
At that moment two formerly independent neurons (huge networks of neurons actually), one for your neighbor Frank, the other for the concept of MURDER will suddenly, massively strengthen the previously weak input between them. So much so that, at least for as long as you live in that neighborhood, and possibly for the rest of your life, whenever you hear the name ‘Frank’ your brain will autocomplete ‘the murderer’, and likewise any murders you notice will definitely bring Frank to mind.
On what level are you asking? There's so many different ways to approach the question, you'll need to be more precise. Do you want a functional answer? Biochemical? Circuitry? Phenomenological?
I only have bits and pieces of an answer, but anyone who has more will need to know, too.
I am looking for a functional answer. What are the physical changes in the brain's structure when a new memory is formed? Can the changes be 1:1 mapped with the new memory?
I wrote out a more detailed answer why I was wondering about this question in another comment in this thread.
I'm a reporter covering the diagnostics beat, which for the last two years has basically meant COVID testing. I wrote a (longish) thing looking back on my reporting and trying to figure how much I thought FDA had or hadn't messed up with rapid tests. Thought it might be of interest to people here (though, warning, it ends up amounting to something of an apologia for FDA.)
Was there ever discussing of implementing the serial rapid testing at the workplace level rather than individual level?
I’m familiar with a workplace which does “test to stay” once a week for workers who are unvaxxed or didn’t report their status (they also do a daily symptoms check via Google form, but nothing happens if you don’t do it).
Your point about using tests for spot-check which were designed to be serial, is a good point. I think if workplaces were test to stay/test to show up for everyone, daily, not just the vaccinated, there would be a greater chance of creating indoor air with fewer virus particles.
A 90% accurate spot-check test sounds great until I’m counting on it to create Covid-free crowds. If it’s missing 10/100 positive cases, in a school of 400 people that’s 40 walking around contagious even after passing the test. That’s not that much different from an 80% accurate spot-check test in terms of air quality (willing to estimate this.) I’m up against this right now, having symptoms very much like Covid, getting negative results, but will have to go back to work soon. “Oops, I tested too early!” Is an infuriating problem. The cultural support for working sick is not gone everywhere; stay out too long and you just look weak. I would love a big stockpile of tests right now, I could take 5 of them in a row and improve my odds of getting the real answer. As it is I’ll probably go back and just, hack into the KN95. That may be their real function, makes it harder to tell when the wearer has to gasp. Unless the very slow but “better” test results arrive and are positive.
Individuals will definitely have differing levels of success in terms of the individual tests. Those little squeeze vials of mystery liquid for the BinaxNows don’t have directions for what to do if the droplet misses a little. Is 5.5 drops better than 6.5 drops? Does it throw off the creep up the dipstick? Is that $10 down the tubes because I missed? Gaah. Making regular testing institutional would solve some of this (miss? Throw it out, get the next one.)
There are definitely some workplaces and schools that have set up regular testing programs, but I don't have a good sense for how widespread that is. My guess is probably not that widespread. I did some stories looking into K-12 testing which the federal government has provided a ton of money for, and outside of a few places like Massachusetts, states saw very low levels of participation in the school testing programs they had set up, even though it was all or mostly subsidized.
"A brilliant, feisty scientist at the center of a nasty, backstabbing, utterly absorbing, cliff-hanging scramble for the Nobel Prize. "The Emperor of Scent" is a quirky wonderful book." Praise for "Emperor of Scent" by John Berendt. https://www.amazon.com/Emperor-Scent-Story-Perfume-Obsession/dp/0375759816. I blew through this book, a fun read. The old school idea is smell is a sensed by sensing the shape of a molecule. The 'outside' idea is that we sense the vibration spectra of molecules. I wish there was a betting market for the vibration idea.
Along with three out of four of my immediate family, I have Omicron. All four of us were double-vaxed with boosters. Among my friends I know of 12 who have Omicron, and think 8 of them were fully vaxed.
I've not previously held militant negative opinions about vaccinations, but from my perspective it doesn't seem that my November'21 booster worked very well.
I don't see much news on this. MSM and social seems to prohibit saying anything that might seem vaccine negative. I understand they don't want to feed those who are blindly anti-vax, but how do we ensure appropriate risk and reward for big-pharma if not by good/bad coverage and statistics? What action can moderate people take that doesn't require us to join some fringe movement?
Best data I have seen is that a fresh booster is ~50% effective against Omicron, and a stale initial course ~0%.
So it's not unexpected that you would know lots of boosted people getting infected, but it still helps a little bit.
The real issue is that the boosters probably go to ~0% effective within 2-3 months -- so booster mandates seem like they will be a bridge too far for many people.
IDK the solution if you don't want to join a fringe movement -- I guess once everyone notices that over half of the vaccinated people they know have got Omicron anyways, these movements may not be so fringe, lol.
This seems roughly expected to me and shouldn't change your calculus. Some seasons the flu vaccine is very effective. Some seasons it is pretty much worthless. If there was some way to know in advance which was the case, that could impact your decision making, but there isn't. Omicron was reported on November 24th. You got your booster in November. There was no way to know at that time it wouldn't help.
The correct way to evaluate this as a decision is as a repeated trial, not a single event. Assuming a new variant will out every six months for the rest of your life, along with a new booster. What percentage of boosters need to be effective over your entire lifetime to make it worthwhile to take them all? It probably doesn't need to be a huge percentage. It's similar to the principle that it's best for almost all people to just buy stock as often as they can and not worry about whether a specific year will be a down year or not.
Uhm, sorry, but the article you cite is not supporting your claim at all. The subheadline is
"It looks like a bad flu season, he [the Penn expert] said, and the shots may keep you out of the hospital"
- All of the cited people emphasize that the shot probably still helps against severe illness, even though protection against infection is lower than average. The author of the study says:
"Even when flu shots don’t keep you from getting sick, they do seem to prevent hospitalizations and deaths."
- "Lower than average" is miles away from "zero effect". The rate of protecting antibodies seems to be around 45%-65% against different strains, if I read it right. This is a bit below average for flu shots, but I don't think it's much lower. The 90%+ that we got for the mRNA corona vaccines was very untypical.
I don't see any reason why public health people should stop recommending flu vaccines.
Do you have "militsntly negative opinions" about parachute because you can still twist your ankle on landing? Vaccines prevent serious injury and death.
It's common knowledge that you can still get covid and especially the omicron variant. I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim otherwise! Why would you be even slightly more anti-vax as a result of them behaving as advertised?
Well considering the claims made early and the result and subsequent claims made after , how does anyone not question and look deeper into the science ?
When people working in the hospital that people may know are telling them they are seeing much higher rates of non covid related illnesses . And as everyone knows or witnesses that there is controversy and censorship at play around the science .
At some point, if they can bare to look , it seems people might just want to check and see what these so called misfits and unclean are pointing to
What’s the point of wearing a parachute if your not jumping from a plane ?
In my experience, if *anyone* is jumping out of the plane, then *everyone* wears a parachute, including the pilot. I hear Trump got booed for saying he got the jab?
Hmmm, my sources are fairly consistent that what the booster is doing for you is increasing the chances that your cases are short and mild, and also contagious for a shorter period.
It's also reducing the odds of you catching it at all, but omicron is very good at getting through in spite of vaccination, so your odds of a breakthrough case were still high.
If you'd been a bit luckier on the random die rolls, you'd have had asymptomatic cases, or no covid at all.
If you hadn't had the booster, or worse yet hadn't had the original vaccine, you'd be more likely to be waiting for an unavailable hospital bed, but still would most likely have only had a "mild" case (treatable at home), unless you have extra risk factors.
"This has caused a lot of frustration and confusion among people who genuinely believed this thesis and believed their own state and region to be free of future COVID dangers. As the entirely predictable winter surge started hitting the states that this chart implied would not be hit, there has been a clear frustration that the expected relief did not come about."
You may be feeling the frustration this article is talking about.
How do you know it’s omicron ? The shot were demonstrated to be waning quite quickly for Delta as well . Is there any confirmation you got for variant ?
My understanding of the vaccines this entire time is that they would probably prevent severe outcomes, not illness altogether. So I’m awaiting my probably-unavoidable case of Omicron, but I’m no longer terrified it will kill my elderly in-laws. So the vaccine is a clear and continuing success so far as I’m concerned.
I heard plenty that said my booster was mostly to protect me from going to the hospital, and that it has little effect on transmission. (But Zvi is my covid source) So a booster should be a personal safety decision. The whole vaccine mandate stuff is crazy, IMHO, and the 'blindly anti-vax' should be able to decline for any reason.
Frankly, I have seen tons of news on this in the mainstream media. The simple message is that Omicron is an escape variant. The more precisely message is that a two-dose vaccination provides close to zero protection against infection, and that booster provides more-than-zero and less-than-hundred protection against infection.
For example, my preferred news source wrote last Friday (translated): "The risk of infection is assessed as very high for the unvaccinated group, high for the convalescent and vaccinated people with basic vaccination (two vaccinations) and moderate for the group of those vaccinated with booster vaccinations (three vaccinations)."
For severe infection (i.e., you need to go to hospital), my take from the news is that booster shots probably still protect well against them, though there is still some uncertainty because it is so new. Which is why they still say that you should get a booster asap. I don't think I have to complain about the news coverage.
My understanding is that the idea of a better result with a booster came from data where the booster is only counted after the 14 day period , so the infection that arise in that period ( where I also understand there is some clear science around innate immunity impairment ) is added to the double vaxx count . Which account for the higher double vaxx numbers . And interesting the relative unvaxxed numbers are the lowest - which either implies previous natural immunity effect in the cohort , or that the vaccinated are also suffering from original anthemic sin ( similar to influenza vaccine)
I can't rule out that such a miscounting has been done in some study or some analysis, but the moderate protection against infection does not just coming from epidemiological data.
The first analyses took blood samples from boostered and non-boostered persons and checked whether Omicron viruses (sometimes the real thing, sometimes pseudoviruses) were neutralized by the antibodies in the blood samples. This is not susceptible to the miscounting issue that you described.
For the low incidence in unvaxxed people, do you have a reference for that? My first hit on google is for Washington (state), and there it is the other way round, with unvaccinated having 2-6 times higher incidence, depending on the age group (plots on page 5 and 6).
[edit: my initial response was dumb so I'm deleting it. Anyway here's some recent numbers Google gave me:]
"For its analysis, the agency assessed 147,597 Delta cases and 68,489 Omicron cases from November 27 to December 17. It found that for those with a Pfizer primary series and booster, efficacy against symptomatic disease was 70% immediately after the third dose but fell to 45% at 10 weeks or longer. [....] The report didn't include data on vaccine efficacy against severe disease, including hospitalization and death, because the number of Omicron cases admitted to the hospital following a positive test was too small to create an estimate."
Current vaccines prevent infection complications, they don't prevent infections. I had the original COVID strain, and it took me almost 3 weeks to get over it, had breathing difficulties, high fevers, etc. It was terrible.
I now have Omicron with only two vaccines, second taken 6 months ago, and it's a minor nuisance by comparison. Easier to handle than a cold, and I got my infection right after a mild case of bronchitis. I haven't even taken any medication for it. The difference is night and day.
Isn't that more to do with Omicron than it is to do with the vaccine? My unvaccinated friends have had an almost identical set of symptoms (low grade fever, itchy throat, sore lower back etc...)
Partly due to Omicron for sure, but the severity of the symptoms are worlds apart. I didn't get half of the symptoms you describe. No sore throat, no headaches, just some mild aches and that's it.
Partly Omicron, partly protection from vaccines, partly protection from having had it before, or so I would guess. You have all of them working for you.
I have another test case to compare to though: girlfriend who's same age, same ethnic background, got two Pfizer doses where I had Astra+Moderna. My infection was considerably milder than hers. This agrees with the evidence that seems to suggest the Moderna is more effective.
The vast majority of people with COVID (any variant) don't go to hospital.
It's very hard to tell the difference between "95% are OK" (unvaccinated) and "99.5% are OK" (vaccinated) without a sample size much bigger than "my friends".
Those numbers are in the right sort of range, but they are illustrative, ie I haven't looked up the real numbers, and also they depend a lot on the variant and also on the definitions of "infected" and "seriously ill" (are we counting tested-and-asymptomatic? are we counting hospital visits, hospital admissions, requiring supplemental oxygen, are there different diagnostic/intervention standards in different places with different studies?).
The effort required to produce a really comprehensive answer to this is disproportionate to that reasonable for an internet comment.
Considering 90%+ of hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated I'd say vaccination status may have a pretty obvious role in the severity of symptoms.
I thought those high numbers of unvaxxed in hospital was first of all an accounting for a period where pretty much everyone was unvaccinated , like starting the count from Jan 1 2020. So the better approach is a per 100,000 kind of thing . But even then the data does not reflect the true picture . Like the way the influenza vaccine data was suggesting the same thing . But actually had no effect on all death numbers . Where it was confounded because those that were mostly healthy were taking the shot and those not healthy
Didn’t bother and died . So that is why we need to see confirmation of this claim by checking the all death in relation to vaccinated status
It's not cumulative, the unvaxxed people also make a much higher proportion in hospital if you only count the last month.
The same Washington data that I linked elsewhere in this thread also gives hospitalisation and death rates per 100,000, stratified by age, for the last month. Hospitalisation is 10-14 times higher in unvaccinated people than in vaccinated people, and for deaths it is a factor of 15 in the group 65+. The spread is pretty consistent for the whole data history in the document. It's also consistent with the Ireland data mentioned above, and data from Germany and other countries looks pretty similar.
not provable unless we know the condition of the patients. what is their weight, health conditions, diet, exercise level, age, do they just HAVE covid19 or are they explicitly FOR covid19, etc. Sidenote, if ICU isn't near overflowing during winter it is abnormal, anyone who has worked in ICU can attest.
No, but they don't need to be. They just need to be more effective than not getting vaccinated. There's no dichotomy between vaccines and early treatment: getting vaccinated and getting early treatment is probably better than either alone.
There's the separate question of availability - vaccines are much easier to access than Paxlovid or sotrovimab, or even fluvoxamine - though hopefully that will improve with time.
Not to mention you'd need a doctor that would actually give you early treatment. I figure some doctors would be like "look, everybody's getting Covid and the FDA approved Covid treatments cost a fortune so go away, and if you feel like you're dying, go to hospital".
But of course, by then, it's not early treatment.
Also, there's a lot of disagreement about which non-expensive treatments, if any, actually work. Amazing to me how people can be so sure something works that they will bet their lives on it.
Well I think it’s generally a good idea to receive care under the guidance of a doctor . If a doctor so chooses to prescribe off label or to fulfill the requests of the patient
For early treatment with medicines that others have taken and spoken about during a period where no treatments are recommended seems their only responsibility is to ensure some exploration of risk and and contraindication. Preventing doctors from doing so without clear scientific reason is highly
Questionable . I am surprised anyone would volunteer for an experimental vaccine before trying medicines that have decades of safety .
Well, that certainly does put everything in the hands of the diagnostic test capacity . Where , it may still be able to
Use deductive reasoning to determine one is infected with something , and by the public health records , what it might be . It’s been the common method for centuries . It also depends on the iantrogenic risks of treatment .
In the absent of available treatment I used high Cbd full die treatment cannabis at a medicated dose of 1-2 mg/kg/day of the Cbd portion and no higher thc ratio of 1:3. This was provided to me by a md friend that prescribes cannabis . For me , my symptoms were suggesting cytokine storm kind of thing and I needed to interrupt it and hit it fairly hard. I wasn’t going to sit on my hands and wait like a moron at home till my lips turned blue. Of course the usual increasing of immune supportive nuetracueticals . But I needed something strong to interrupt the positive feedback cycle that was kicking in . Would that have been detrimental without a test when the only things going around were sars2 andvRSV? I don’t believe so and certainly the md didn’t share any such risk .
I've never seen people talk about CBD for COVID treatment, but it seems interesting, since I know it can have anti-inflammatory properties. Are there studies I can read about this?
Among the many scandals that is the FDA is the fact that the "booster" that is given right now is still the OG vaccine that was devised in February 2020. The core benefit of RNA vaccine is supposed to be that it is very easy to change the RNA code to take into account a new variant without impacting the production logistics.
Maybe I just haven't heard of it: is there any approval request for a vaccine variant that is currently pending ?
mRNA vaccines are easier to change than once-a-year-and-pray virus vaccines, but that doesn't mean they can be devised, manufactured, and distributed immediately.
I'm thinking more like six months, but at least you don't have to guess at the up and coming virus. Anyone have more details?
It shouldn't take six months now that the mRNA vaccine production pipeline is in place. I might believe six weeks, though I'm not an expert.
It's moot, because the issue isn't devising, manufacturing, or testing the vaccines, it's getting approval to use them. That still seems to be a six-month thing, which is why we don't even have a Delta booster yet.
And if I had my choice, I think I'd rather have a Delta booster than Omicron, on account of I don't much care if I get a bad cold but dying would really suck.
From my understanding all shots distributed right now are still 162b2 under the EUA. Not a single comirnaty is in production or distribution . It’s really kind of a weird situation for sure
Yes. The FDA hasn’t streamlined it’s process for alterations to the approved vaccines. The pharmaceutical companies haven’t submitted Omicron specific vaccines for approval.
It's a manufacturer constraint, no variant-specific boosters have been submitted for approval. This is mostly because in pre-Omicron trials, the OG booster did a very good job of neutralising all known variants (in fact, there was some evidence that switching to a booster based on e.g. delta or beta would potentially lead to an overly-specific immune response).
Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J are all working on omicron-specific boosters but we haven't heard much about their progress recently. AZ started trials for a beta-specific booster over the summer but I don't believe the results have been reported.
If I were to send 1,000 relatively personalized letters to 1,000 (ultra-)high net worth individuals, requesting a substantial donation ($100K-1M) to cover my living expenses for the next years (or my entire lifetime), so I can focus on the high-impact work hopefully improving the world, how likely am I to succeed? Specific probabilities would be appreciated.
On one hand, rich people are rich because they're good at making money and not spending it too much. There are many organizations specialized in fundraising, and they probably went for most of the low-hanging fruit. On the other hand, there are exceptions to the efficient market hypothesis. I keep hearing about the multimillionaires (e.g. living in the Middle East) who waste money on luxuries and generally don't know what to do with it. Does it create a space I could utilize to my and the world's benefit, and if so, how?
If they want to donate money, they'll have a foundation. If you write to them instead of the foundation, they'll forward the letter to the foundation. If you don't follow the form that the foundation wants, you go to the circular file.
Those are called "begging letters" and the rich have been receiving them for centuries so by this point, they have methods for screening them out. Mainly "Thank you for your letter, go away, A. Secretary".
How would you respond if you won the lottery and suddenly thousands of letters with heart-rending stories begging for you to pay Little Orphan Sally's one-legged puppy's veterinary bills came flooding into your post box? I doubt you'd answer every single one.
You would just be one of the many who routinely write to rich people looking for free money, in the same sort of example. Dickens wrote a piece about this very phenomenon (extract below) published in 1850:
"I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some time, a chosen receiver of Begging Letters. For fourteen years, my house has been made as regular a Receiving House for such communications as any one of the great branch Post-Offices is for general correspondence. I ought to know something of the Begging-Letter Writer. He has besieged my door at all hours of the day and night; he has fought my servant; he has lain in ambush for me, going out and coming in; he has followed me out of town into the country; he has appeared at provincial hotels, where I have been staying for only a few hours; he has written to me from immense distances, when I have been out of England. He has fallen sick; he has died and been buried; he has come to life again, and again departed from this transitory scene: he has been his own son, his own mother, his own baby, his idiot brother, his uncle, his aunt, his aged grandfather. He has wanted a greatcoat, to go to India in; a pound to set him up in life for ever; a pair of boots to take him to the coast of China; a hat to get him into a permanent situation under Government. He has frequently been exactly seven-and-sixpence short of independence. He has had such openings at Liverpool - posts of great trust and confidence in merchants' houses, which nothing but seven-and- sixpence was wanting to him to secure - that I wonder he is not Mayor of that flourishing town at the present moment.
The natural phenomena of which he has been the victim, are of a most astounding nature. He has had two children who have never grown up; who have never had anything to cover them at night; who have been continually driving him mad, by asking in vain for food; who have never come out of fevers and measles (which, I suppose, has accounted for his fuming his letters with tobacco smoke, as a disinfectant); who have never changed in the least degree through fourteen long revolving years. As to his wife, what that suffering woman has undergone, nobody knows. She has always been in an interesting situation through the same long period, and has never been confined yet. His devotion to her has been unceasing. He has never cared for himself; HE could have perished - he would rather, in short - but was it not his Christian duty as a man, a husband, and a father, - to write begging letters when he looked at her? (He has usually remarked that he would call in the evening for an answer to this question.)
He has been the sport of the strangest misfortunes. What his brother has done to him would have broken anybody else's heart. His brother went into business with him, and ran away with the money; his brother got him to be security for an immense sum and left him to pay it; his brother would have given him employment to the tune of hundreds a-year, if he would have consented to write letters on a Sunday; his brother enunciated principles incompatible with his religious views, and he could not (in consequence) permit his brother to provide for him. His landlord has never shown a spark of human feeling. When he put in that execution I don't know, but he has never taken it out. The broker's man has grown grey in possession. They will have to bury him some day."
I understand that, if you win the powerball or otherwise suddenly come into a great fortune, you will be inundated with requests for money, long forgotten middle school classmates will suddenly reemerge with flattering tales, distant relatives that you didn't know you had will develop a keen interest in you and your family, cranks will beg you to fund their latest scheme, etc..
If you Google "lottery winners and begging letters", there are a heap of such stories:
"Burn all the begging letters, advises £10m winner Lavery"
"Begging letters wing their way to Lotto high flier"
"Begging letters drive Lottery winner abroad"
"Euromillions winners forced to flee"
"Couple who scooped £148m Euromillions jackpot receive 40 begging letters a week but admit they read them all because 'if you don't ask, you don't get'" - one couple who do read the letters, so hope there for our friend!
I agree this is what happens in >99% of cases. But there are at least ~250,000 UHNWIs in the world. If I could reach just 2% of them (5,000), and only 0.1% of these (5 indiviudals) would be interested in supporting me, that should be sufficient. This makes my seemingly naive idea a coordination problem: how do you identify and reach these people? I'm not sure if the 0.1% estimate is too optimistic, but I occasionally hear about a Russian oligarch or a sheikh who seems in the mood for random spending.
"This makes my seemingly naive idea a coordination problem: how do you identify and reach these people?"
That is the problem in a nutshell right there. Simply writing a letter is not going to be enough, the very rich get thousands of requests for funding and they have layers of admin to keep those from getting to their personal attention unless it is something very unusual.
Even if you met one of these guys face-to-face, they are trained since infancy not to hand out money for sob-stories because *everyone* wants money off them. If you're not an established foundation or big-name charity (like the Met Gala) then you have to stand out: if you can get your name all over the media like Malala Yousafzai so that it becomes trendy to give her donations for her activism, you're okay, otherwise you're out of luck.
Plus, your random sheikh or Russian oligarch is very unlikely to give a damn about human rights activism anyway. There has to be something in it that appeals to the very rich person, be it a niche interest of theirs ("oh yeah I'm very interested in saving the lesser-spotted gunkleback!") or it's something trendy and in the news now, or something very novel and attention-grabbing. Just "fund me for a year/ten years so I can work on great stuff (unspecified) for humanity" isn't enough; if you're Nobel Laureate Dr. AT MA, PhD, etc. etc. with a stunning new cure for elbow scurvy but you need to do some further research, then you may grab their fickle attention.
"Disco Elysium" is a game with a very definite left slant, but they're fairly on the money when it comes to the Mega-Rich Light-Bending Guy:
MEGA RICH LIGHT-BENDING GUY “It’s a shame I can’t get out and explore myself. One of the downsides of being an extremely high-net-worth individual is that mobs of low-net-worth individual are constantly banding together to ask for money”.
YOU “Wait – why don’t you help them? You’ve got so much money it can’t make a difference to you.”
MEGA RICH LIGHT-BENDING GUY “There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to hand out al the handouts. It’s like feeding seagulls. There are always more, and they never seem to do anything interesting with it- except more seagulls.
Spending money is a matter of desire, I’m sure you agree. I don’t have the desire for spending it like that.”
I don't believe that one in a thousand would be interested in supporting you, given that every one of those thousand is busy knocking back dozens of requests a week anyway.
My experience with UHNWIs is that they tend to be constantly on their guard when interacting with us mere poors, because at any moment a friendly interaction can turn into a "Oh hey can I have some money?"
In the late 1990s, I was an intern at a non-profit in Washington DC. One of the things about the job I hated was that an hour a week, everybody had to cold call CEOs and other important people from a list asking if they'd like to donate or work with the non-profit. The list was developed based on the company or individual having some connection (no matter how tenuous) to the non-profit's mission. Of course, most call recipients had no interest whatsoever.
As the non-profit was not especially large or notable, and there are hundreds or thousands more of such organizations in the DC area alone, my experience makes me think that the 1000 richest individuals must get many such offers a day. Absent a specific connection to you or your line of work, I think you have a very low chance of any of them even reading your offer, much less agreeing to it.
Of course, many people subscribe to the "it only takes one" theory.
Kings and other rich people used to keep artists, philosophers, and similar folks on a subsidy as a status enhancement. It is a shame that this is no longer true. On the flip side, the Gates Foundation might be more responsible for the decline of disease in Africa than any other single organization, so there’s that.
I don't have specific probabilities, but without any special connections to those individuals, I would say practically nil. By virtue of being ultra high net worth, they probably get such requests all the time.
I'm interested in the easily movable tiny/prefab homes. Is there any chance I could get a solid one (~60 sqm = ~650 sqft) for <$100k in the next few years? Any recommendations would be appreciated. People keep telling me that I should consider a RV if mobility is important.
Well, spending my entire life there, changing location each 2-4 months. Maybe I should keep on saving for two cheap tiny houses in different locations + a small trailer? Can probably save $200k by 2030, when such houses and cars should be cheaper.
Easily movable homes are not the same thing as prefab homes.
Prefabs are attached to a solid foundation and can't be moved again after that attachment (they're concreted-in).
Otherwise, you are basically talking about a mobile home (a "trailer"). 650 square feet is bigger than a travel-trailer (limited to 400 square feet in most US jurisdictions), but is a pretty small single-wide (1650 is the upper limit for a single-wide).
You might want to consider something like a fifth-wheel travel-trailer with lots of slideouts if you're wanting to travel a lot. Or a smaller single-wide if you only want to move once or twice a year.
There are tiny-home style single-wides and travel-trailers (ie things like pitched rooves).
650sqft is too big to be easily movable, the largest RV trailers are about half that (though slideout systems help boost it and make it quite comfortable). A single-wide mobile home can get you to that size, but you'll have to hire professionals every time you want to relocate. Both mobile homes and RV's can be obtained for much less than $100k.
I have a couple of elderly and/or disabled family members with no particular interests, spending a lot of time at home, isolated and stressed out due to the pandemic, mostly watching TV and doing household chores. How could I make their lives more interesting? Books and board/card games don't seem like a good fit. I thought about buying a VR headset and virtual trips through beautiful locations, but I'm open to many different ideas.
If they're willing to put up with a bit of frustration there are people who want to practice with native English speakers on Skype or whatever. They're usually willing to talk about whatever or listen to stories so long as you're willing to help them improve their English. I've seen a few old people fruitfully tell their stories to eager Chinese or Africans or whatever. They just have to stop every now and again and explain. Which, to be frank, they seemed to enjoy.
Arrange for someone - ideally a family member or a neighbour but you could pay someone - to take them out for a short walk or even a car ride once a week, or shopping. Give them something to look forward too, that is both outside their house and with a person they can talk too.
This is something I can do right after the omicron wave, but still far from a novel, interesting, enjoyable experience accessible to the elderly/disabled. 2022 technology and markets should have something interesting to offer to such people, especially when they have to stay at home.
I don't know your relatives, but unless they are particularly eager for new technologies, I doubt "cool new virtual tech" is really going to give them the same pleasure as "going outside and interact with real people".
Most old people I know of picked up smartphones/computers as a mean to keep in touch with their friends and younger relatives, they are not particularly interested in cool new things.
As a quick question to the commentariat, based on the side-comment about Magellan in the movie review for the move "Don't Look Up":
What human thinker first pointed out that the Earth casts a rounded shadow on the Moon during an eclipse, and that this was evidence for the spherical nature of the Earth?
I am curious who here can correctly identify the actual source of that argument.
Not precisely answering your query, but as a side-note to it; from the way Dante describes the globe in his "Divine Comedy", he was basing his geography on Classical Greek sources, and they divided up the sphere of the world into five (or seven, depending) zones or climes:
The idea was that the torrid zone at the equator was where the rays of the Sun struck hardest, being nearest to earth, and thus that it would be impossible for people to travel from the northern (temperate) zone to the south because you'd get burned up. Thus, while there might be habitable lands and even peoples living in the corresponding southern hemisphere, they couldn't travel to us nor we to them.
The first recorded person was a Greek, Anaxagoras. The idea of a spherical earth was already present but he observed the rounded shadow of the Earth on the moon. Iirc, he was specifically attempting to deal with the argument that Earth was a hemisphere (half a sphere) because people didn't believe the Phoenicians that they'd been to the other half. (Or at least claimed they had.) Though don't quote me on that.
While flat earth cosmologies were still around they were not widely held by astronomers, sailors, or natural philosophers as far as I can tell. There were various arguments against it ranging from the concept of going over the horizon to the complications of predicting astronomical events on a flat surface over distance.
I was trying to remember whether it was Aristotle or one of the lesser-known Greek authors from that time period. Interestingly, it's easier to find references to Aristotle on that subject. Though Aristotle depended on Anaxagoras for part of his explanation of the spherical shape of Earth..
You are right about an ancillary detail, though: sailors, even though they were not among the educated class, had too much first-hand experience to assume a perfectly-flat surface for Earth.
They knew that a watchman on top of the mast could see further than the man on on the deck. They knew that the tops of mountains, or lighthouses/tall-monuments, would be visible before the base of the mountain/lighthouse/monument would be visible.
"To understand Dante's conception of the universe it is necessary to know something of the theories of the world and its surroundings as held by the principal astronomers among the ancients, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Ptolemy. Ptolemy, indeed, did little beyond enlarging on the teaching of Hipparchus, and drawing his conclusions from that other's observations. Hipparchus was, perhaps, the greatest astronomical genius, considering his want of instruments, and the paucity of previous observations, that the world has produced. At Dante's time little progress had been made in the twelve hundred years since Ptolemy made his calculations.
...In the centre of this system came the earth. What the precise idea of the form of the earth was in Dante's time is doubtful. Some seem to imagine that it was supposed to be a flat circular surface like a round table. This could not have been so, at any rate to the more learned of his day. Aristotle, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, had taught that the earth was a sphere, transfixed by the great pole which ran through the universe. [In the " Convito " II. vii. Dante shows that he not only knew the earth was a sphere, but that he was not so very far off its actual size, namely that it was 3250 miles to the centre of it. In Con. IV. viii. he gives 6500 miles as its diameter.] But whatever they imagined the shape of the earth to be, its most learned inhabitants, in the Middle Ages, had no certain knowledge of any land beyond that of which they had experience themselves, had heard of from travellers, or were told about by the few great authorities they so implicitly trusted.
In Dante's time the pillars of Hercules, close to where Gibraltar now is, was its western boundary, India its boundary on the east, because Orosius, who was contemporary with St. Augustine, said so. Their knowledge of northern countries was vague and indistinct, and a short way towards the equator in Africa soon brought them to the extreme habitable south. Round this limited portion of land they imagined a great circular ocean to roll, called poetically here " Amphitrite." Beyond this ocean came a space large enough to allow the sphere of the fixed stars to revolve. For they believed that these stars with the sphere in which they were placed revolved round the earth, with a regular motion, once in every twenty-four hours.
Both Heraclitus and Pythagoras had held that the earth revolved on its axis, but Aristotle and Ptolemy denied this, and said it was utterly impossible. Dante, of course, followed Aristotle. It would have seemed to him a scientific heresy to doubt Aristotle on such a point. A remarkable thing is that, far as the ancient and mediaeval astronomers were from the truth, yet, as Sir G. C. Lewis points out in his "Astronomy of the Ancients," for all practical purposes their system was as good as ours."
Aristotle has the argument somewhere if I remember correctly, but I don't think it was original too him. At the very least it was a known fact from 5th century BC onward. [EDIT : except that Aristotle from the 4th century BC]
(which is the reason why the Magellan quote irked me so much)
The Magellan quote was jarring to me. It referenced an idea that was known to Aristotle and his contemporaries, and gives credit to Magellan.
In a movie review which discusses the difference between Lone Genius and challenges the Establishment and Consensus Science, it looked like a huge mistake.
In retrospect, it was a reference to the Lone Genius theory. The main thrust of the movie review doesn't depend on this one detail being right or wrong.
But it reminded me of how often the Lone Genius theory can be based on a deep misunderstanding of the history of science.
I think Scott expected "Gosh, guys, this is so clearly a joke I thought you'd all get it" but he underestimated the amount of literal-minded contrarians who will hit the keyboards within 0.01 seconds to respond to fake history 😂
Next time (if there is a next time) that he does another reader survey he should include that as a question:
Q. Do you have a sense of humour?
A.
1. No, and I'm immediately suspicious you asked me that
2. Yes, and I wrote an entire series of blog posts about the history of jokes, jocularity, hilarity, and "fun" on my Substack, see link here!
3. Of course I do, I read ACX, don't I?
4. Of course I don't, I read ACX, don't I?
5. What is this "humour" thing and where can I find references to it in the Sequences?
I think Scott thought the Magellan quote was self-evidently a joke which is why it surprised him so many of us went "Well, NO" about it, but honestly, I have seen so much of that kind of 'quote' used in all seriousness about the Middle Ages (often calling them 'the Dark Ages'), the Renaissance that went back to the past for the pure correct sources, science versus religion, swipes at the Catholic Church, swipes at Christianity in general, current day culture warring and so on, that it triggered my "Well, NO" reactions as well.
One thing about the Reformation and the Renaissance that struck me as a recent thought was the pop culture idea of "peeling away the accretions and corruptions and going back to the pure past". Nobody seems to suggest we should, for example, go back even fifty years ago to the principles of medicine or scientific discoveries or scholarship of that time, and that whatever development in policy or understanding since then is a 'corruption' to be peeled away. Even allegedly secular or non-sectarian historical (or pop history at least) programmes unquestioningly trot out some version of the Reformation Protestant notion of church corruption of the pure Gospel doctrine, without considering the idea of development of doctrine as further discovery, not corruption.
Sometimes, fields make progress and sometimes they don't. Medicine has clearly been on a monotonically upwards trajectory over the past century. In other fields (e.g. music or architecture) it's less clear, and some people would say we've gone backwards in many ways in these fields over the past century.
Looking at the thousand-ish years between Rome and the Renaissance, it's fair to say that some fields progressed, some stagnated, and some regressed. A 14th century cathedral would have impressed any Roman, a 14th century clock (or suit of armour) would have knocked their socks off, but the best 14th century sculptures were unimpressive compared to the best Roman or Greek ones. If you're a 16th century Italian sculpture fan and you suddenly see your mates Mike and Don cranking out the greatest sculptures in a thousand years, you can be forgiven for thinking you're living in a Renaissance.
Magellan didn't make it home, but two of his ships completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth. It wouldn't have been unnatural to say at that time "Magellan has proven the Earth is round", even though it was not actually a subject of theoretical doubt. He proved it in a physical way by going around it.
"considering the idea of development of doctrine as further discovery, not corruption." I'm stealing this sentence. Could handy in any debate with a Protestant or a traditionalist.
You're entirely welcome! There were a heck of a lot of bad accretions that needed scraping off, and the Counter-Reformation was the response to the kick in the pants we needed, but even liberal Protestants tend to imbibe it in the water that what their denomination does today is "goes back to Gospel principle" and is somehow *not* one of those mediaeval papal insertions or developments (e.g. ordaining female clergy, which is a development by examining the discipline, the source texts, and tradition both large T and small t in making the decision).
There was someone, possibly Elaine Pagels, who said she tried to discover an early pure Christianity, but no matter how far back she looked, all she found was people arguing.
Seems like the very existence of four Gospels instead of a single canonical account is consistent with the idea that people were arguing about what happened even before anything had been written down in the first place.
I don't know, but the ancients seem to have thought the earth was a circle rather than a square, so I'm not sure how impressed they'd be with the round shadow on the moon as an argument against their round earth position.
I believe it was the horizon that gave the ancient Greeks the clue that the earth was spherical.
True. But when there is a lunar eclipse, the sun and moon must be in opposition so the sun must be on the opposite side of the earth. Hmmm, but lunar eclipses don't always happen at midnight local time, so that is evidence in itself for a spherical earth.
(indeed time zones are very good evidence for a spherical earth)
Without reliable clocks or long distance communication you're not going to realise the existence of time zones, though.
I don't see how lunar eclipses at not-midnight preclude a disc-shaped Earth though. I can imagine a situation where the sun, the moon, and the disc-shaped Earth are all in conjunction with the moon low in the sky and the sun just under the horizon. The shadow of the Earth would look less curved than usual, but as long as the Earth is a thick disk instead of a thin one then it wouldn't be glaringly noticeable.
If you go this way the horizon is no evidence either because the Earth could be some kind of positive-curve surface (like a paraboloid or something) that only looks like a sphere at a local level.
This is a bit off topic, but the fantasy world of Glorantha (from the original RuneQuest paper and pen RPG) is flat but has a horizon. The reason for that in-world is that light seeks to return to the sky, so light rays bend upwards. This makes me pretty sure that people wedded to the idea of a flat earth can come up with some reason why the flat earth’s shadow on the moon was round.
Lol, that’s pretty deep . Did this come to you when reading it to your kid ?
My experience with animals is they don’t need to see each other to be aware of the other . It’s interesting that we tend to lead our children toward a use of sight toward comprehension and awareness . I wonder if perhaps we overdo it and fail to explore other forms of sending , this confining our offspring to limited utility for a lifetime . Certainly there are stories of people developing other senses far better . Like I heard of people using sound like bats , sonar .
Here are some words I would like to see retired from media (and Twitterati) accounts of COVID. In other contexts, these words could maybe take a two-year sabbatical:
Cases/infections/[Variant_name] are:
Surging/Spiking/Skyrocketing (<-- This one really Grinds My Gears) /Soaring
-->> Apparently, cases or what-have-you never "increase" or "rise". Or ever "decline". Based on the media reports, every human being must now be dead.
_______________
Covid / [Variant_name] / THE PANDEMIC is:
Raging/Exploding/Out of control/Dominant
-->> OMGWTFBBQ! Shelter in Place! Maybe it won't notice us!
________________
Hospitals / Health Care Workers / Health Care System is/are:
Besieged/Overwhelmed/At Capacity/Collapsing
-->> Have they considered the option of just turning patients away?
________________________
While I am writing the Style Guide, here is another change:
"Eight HOMES have already been lost in the deadly wildfires, and another 200 HOMES are threatened."
-->> Eight HOUSES burned down. Not HOMES, you maudlin grifters. Yet every disaster, it is required to say "HOMES" for maximum bathos.
-Fire will burn down your HOUSE
-Alcoholism destroys HOMES
_____________
Also: TRAGEDY needs to go back to being a reserved word. Accidents and natural disasters are not TRAGEDIES unless somebody involved brought it on themselves through HUBRIS, or were BLIND to their inner nature, or were past a Point of No Return.
As long as you're prescribing, can you implement a twenty-year ban on the coining of portmanteaus without High Council approval, violation punishable by Alaskan exile?
Not related to my other comment. Rick Ankiel? What qualifies him as tragic? I'm a St Louisian, I remember him well, and I don't recall any tragic circumstances. But, I was away when he forgot how to pitch, so I'm wondering if I missed something. Was he a giant cocky ass or some such?
He was only 20, a rookie, and selected to pitch in Game 1 of the NLDS against all-time great Greg Maddux when he had the five wild pitch game he never psychologically recovered from. He wasn't the number one starter and it was a pretty controversial decision, and Tony LaRussa clearly knew he wasn't mentally ready for it, given he hid that he was even doing it by misdirecting during the press conferences leading up to it and only announced the decision once it was too late for media to talk to Ankiel. LaRussa has said it's the decision he mosts regrets out of any he ever made as a manager.
I remember. But, isn't all that Tony's hubris, not Rick's? If the gods destroy you through no fault of your own, is that tragedy, in the classic sense?
>Hospitals / Health Care Workers / Health Care System is/are:
>Besieged/Overwhelmed/At Capacity/Collapsing
> -->> Have they considered the option of just turning patients away?
I'm not sure I understand your point here. My hospital discontinued all elective procedures as of last Tuesday, so as to move staff and be able to keep up with both covid and the non-elective stuff. Which is to say, yes, they've considered just turning people away. That's what we're doing.
I think "at capacity" and really "over capacity" are perfectly cromulent descriptions of the situation. If we reach the point where we have to turn away non-optional cases ("Yes, that does sound like a heart attack but don't come here because there's no one to treat you."), then I would say that besieged or overwhelmed would be appropriate. If we let said hypothetical patient come anyway and they or some significant percentage of our patients received substandard care due to lack of resources, such that those patients were injured or died, I would call that collapsing.
Like I said, I'm not understanding what you want done instead.
Sure, alarmism and exaggeration are a thing in media. But sometimes surge, spike and even skyrocket are appropriate, as each of them evoke a specific form on on the graph. A variant is dominant when it is the most common one. I don't understand what your beef with that one is.
"Have they considered the option of just turning patients away?" - this makes me so angry I can't properly express it. Homes are not houses, houses are not homes.
In modern parlance, "tragic" means "causing or characterized by extreme distress or sorrow" (says Oxford), whereas literary tragedies are much less so because, you said it, people brought it upon themselves.
Homes is specifying that people (used to) live in them. A house could be empty. And it seems like there's some inconsistencies in how people understand "house", but what about apartments? Buildings that aren't used for housing? There's all sorts of building types and complicated ways in which they overlap with living quarters, and "homes" is just an easy way of saying "soandso many households are now out of home". It's simple and precise, so a really good word for its purpose.
I think that there is some legitimate substance to the question of turning people away when it comes to emergency rooms. They are an economic unit in the hospital that has an ideal utilization rate. Below that, you are paying people to sit around. Above that, you are stretching resources (overtime, burnout, whatever). So we have to look some askance when stories bemoan that emergency departments are 90%+ full. I’d like to know what they were, on average, in 2010-2018. Does anyone have a good link for that?
I am curious if anyone is following the all death data being reported in various nations in relation to the pandemic .
The idea is to assess the pandemic and it’s response based on all death data , and by some breakdown of age range and sex - in comparison with a 10 year average .
It appears that 2020 tends to be higher then the average , and 2021 is higher then 2020 or the same in most highly vaccinated nations .
Should we have expected to see highly vaccinated nations with the same all death numbers as 2020 or less? Considerate the effectiveness of vaccines and the “harvest effect” that the Lancet wrote about in the summer of 2020 in analysis of Italian excess death numbers .
I would have expected 2021 to be demonstrably better ( less and closer to average ) then 2020. So what could be the reason ?
In high-income countries at least, the most deaths were recorded in the third wave, which peaked slightly past Jan. 1, 2021 and so more deaths were recorded in 2021 than 2020. However, death reporting is often delayed somewhat, and of course, people tend to be exposed maybe 2 or 3 weeks before they die. So the exposures that caused a lot of 2021 deaths actually occurred in 2020.
The average rich country reached a 50% vaccination rate around August 18, so it doesn't make sense to look at *total* 2021 deaths and try to make any conclusion. It is somewhat encouraging to note that the death rate is slower in Sept-Dec 2021 than in Nov 2020-Feb 2021, but that's still not a very precise or scientific methodology, since it ignores all kinds of factors other than vaccines. Government behavior, individual behavior, the *fraction* of the population getting infected, the differences between Delta and earlier variants (remember the reason why Delta replaced the others) ... don't expect people to reach a reasonable conclusion if they are ignoring these factors.
I would point out that generally there were less restrictions before mid-2021 than after mid-2021. My province of Alberta, for example, announced that it planned to ease restrictions after vaccination rate passed 50%. In fact, they lifted the requirement for people with Covid to quarantine, and no longer recommended people get tested for Covid... but then Covid infections went way up, so they backpedaled. Still, things are certainly more open now than in early 2020.
All together. Just pandemic in general. It seems like a bit of a game to break things down into variants , like excuses for failed policies or something . I think if one is to look at all death data one can first look at the bulk and then overlay the various story lines . Like when we’re lockdowns deployed , when we’re vaccines deployed , what variant was emerging when .
I think Eugene meant that delta and omicron (and actually, alpha) were the reasons for new and more deadly waves.
Most Western countries had their heaviest deah toll in the winter 2020/21. At this point, vaccines were not yet very relevant, and the alpha variant made the wave higher and thus more deadly.
Since that wave, death tolls haven't been getting close to previous peaks in many countries.
So "post-vaccine" has been considerably better than "pre-vaccine", it just doesn't align well with the new year.
By the way, the economist is still doing a great job tracking excess deaths:
Yes. Delta in particular was more virulent and more transmittable. The vaccines only started to make a difference to outcomes late last year, they weren’t very useful against transmission.
As the vaccine rate is higher , which in many countries is at the latter part of 2021. If the data is available by some break down of age category then the data can also look to reflect those categories as they were distributed first at the older age groups snd worked their way down . We can agree that the effectiveness of the vaccines should reflect in a lower all death result ? At least toward the average expected death . In addition the harvest effect would likely also be a factor as it’s possible the higher incidence would be in the first non prepared wave. Those that survived would likely be more robust for any further infection . So I see two reasons to expect lower all deaths in this cohort for 2021.
I wouldn't be too optimistic that age cohorts give useful information. Younger age groups had not much excess deaths, which makes it hard to tell them apart from random fluctuations. Even in the age group 45-64 you can only see a clear signal during the heaviest phases of the heaviest wave, but not much more than that. (There is a plot in the economist article on this as well.)
By the way, one of the categories that can be chosen in the data explorer of ourworldindata is "excess mortality".
I had a look at a few countries. Not systematically, but I took some countries with high vaccination rates (Portugal, Denmark, UK), middle vaccination rates (Switzerland, Germany, US), and low vaccination rates (Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia). Actually, the effect is more dramatic than I had imagined. For the high-vac ones, excess mortality is almost gone, while for the low-vac the latest waves are as bad as ever. I can't rule out that I had some sort of selection bias (I threw out Chile and Brazil after realising that hemisphere matters), but in any case I didn't expect it to be so extreme.
I've been on Ribbonfarm reading about creepiness-as-unpredictability. It sounds like an impulse I should fight against. Nothing human is alien to me, etc. I warmly invite everyone to do something spontaneous immediately!
There is a reason such instinctive reactions exist, because instability and unpredictability in some areas can indicate it in other areas, which makes a person potentially dangerous.
If I only have access to 1mg melatonin, can I dissolve the 1mg tablet in 100ml of water and drink only 30ml? Does this work like I (naively) expect it to?
Probably. Melatonin is water-soluble, specifically:
>Soluble in water (0.1 mg/ml), ethanol (8 mg/ml), benzene, chloroform, methanol, DMSO (50 mM), toluene, and dilute aqueous acid, and very slightly soluble in petroleum ether.
To find the answer to this you can check the solubility of melatonin, which PubChem lists as 2 g/L at 20 C, so assuming the melatonin isn't attached to an insoluble salt (check the bottle) then that should work fine. Make sure to crush it into powder before you dissolve it.
That’s a good idea and clearly what the pharmacy tends to do . I would guess that if putting it into solution one would want to ensure it’s soluble in the the chosen medium and that it does interact and loose any potency . Like it one is desiring to take one part and save the rest . Then there is the potential of breakdown of the molecule , like those hydrogen bonds in water can breaks things down well over time
Hydrogen bonds probably won't break down melatonin, but your stomach acid will. If you dissolve a hormone in water, it would be more effective to hold the liquid in your mouth and let it diffuse through the mucous membranes rather than swallowing it.
Most hormones , I believe are lipid soluble which suggests to me that a water solution would create a suspension , unless a nano emulsion is applied . In which case either an alcohol or oil seems appropriate. But just as someone who dunks around with cannabis oil and some medical background
I've taken 20-35 mg a day of dextroamphetamine (in the form of 70 mg vyvanse + 0-15 mg of straight up dextroamphetamine per day, all prescribed) for ADHD for the past few months. My heart rate when I'm sitting still but doing something actively (e.g. if I'm working on the computer or having a conversation with a few friends) varies between 90-ish and up to 110-ish during the day. It can increase to over 130 if I'm e.g. walking around or cooking food. According to my sports watch my overall resting heart rate is between 58-62 most days, but I think that's mainly because my heart rate is low during sleep (when the amphetamine has worn off).
I was curious whether this was normal and healthy or if I was putting too much stress on my heart, so I asked my GP about it (I don't have regular access to the psychiatrist who originally prescribed the medication). He told me it was normal, but to be honest I don't completely trust him: he's old and mostly treats older patients. Does anyone have any insight or any links to insight about whether the mentioned heart rates are normal/healthy or not? For reference, I'm around 30 and my max heart rate is roughly 200 or slightly above that.
I'm in nearly the exact same situation, and my doctor was similarly unconcerned. Having a high RHR makes me nervous, but I feel much better when taking my meds. I don't have any answers for you, just commiserating.
110 is quite high. If I were you I'd look up on pubmed if cardiovascular exercise reduces stimulant HR the way it reduces RHR, either way it sounds like a good idea (ideally _not_ done on stimulants).
My understanding is the definition of resting heart rate excludes sleeping. In practice your sports watch may be using some of that data to calculate it, but ideally RHR should be being measured while you have the dextroamphetamine in your system also.
Why don't manufacturers increase the price when there is high demand and low supply? (Like PS5 or certain cars) And why do people get upset when these products are sold second hand at a higher price?
You just named example where the original retailer did set a higher price. What are examples where they did not? I don't think event tickets really count, because scalpers in that case are taking advantage of increasing desperation as event time draws near, and the original seller can't just wait to sell every ticket on the spot at the very last minute because it's unnecessarily risky. Scalpers quite often lose money when they prove to be wrong and an event does not sell out. For events that are for sure going to tell out instantly, original ticket sellers usually do set a very high price.
If you're thinking of GPUs during Covid, I think there are two separate reasons. One, NVIDIA and AMD made bad demand forecasts and didn't realize they'd sell out so quickly. Two, in the long run, much of their market position relies on the premise that chips get both cheaper and more powerful each generation. A huge reason for much of the 30 series hype was double the cores and potentially first ever 8k 60 fps chip for half the price of the last generation. To hype that up for months only to pull out the rug at the last minute and sell it for double the last generation's price instead risks undercutting all future trust that consumers place in your marketing.
Did PS5 increase in price? I'm not following it closely. I just keep seeing stories of long waits and high resale prices.
If scalpers take a genuine risk with event tickets with the benefit of making tickets available until the last moment, I don't see what's the problem with that. But I deliberately didn't include event tickets as example because I think the people going to the event are themselves part of the experience for everybody else and I can understand it if the organizers don't want the event to be filled with rich people who only go as a status symbol because that wouldn't be the same experience.
If someone else here knows better, please correct me, but it seems like the presence of scalpers does not, certis paribis, indicate that the company is better off selling at a higher price. If the company were a perfect monopoly and the good was necessary and they had infinite computing power, you would be able to price discriminate perfectly to each consumer and set the maximum value that each is willing to pay.
In the real world, companies forecast demand and set the supply based on the profit maximizing quantity, which is the same whether scalpers are present or not; the price collected by a scalper is capturing the consumer surplus that arises from the delta between a consumer preference and the retail price. The presence of scalpers does not indicate that a higher price is necessarily supported by the market, it merely represents the cannibalization of consumer surplus by those willing to eat the risk of finding a party that values it more than the marginal retail cost. This is also why scalpers are almost universally discouraged; their activity captures consumer surplus without generating any return for the producer.
I'm overall in favor of scalpers because they're helping do price discovery, but there are cases when the original firm deliberately underprices in order to make their product available to lower-income people.
Interesting - they definitely increase price transparency, but does that benefit outweigh the lost consumer surplus? This is sort of the core problem the commentariat have been arguing over w/r/t to Georgism; is having a more efficient allocation of land worth the headache of kicking grandmas out of their homes to get there?
In addition to what everyone else has said; companies ship their org chart. Production and pricing are two different departments. The pricing department has spent a good long time figuring out a complicated pricing strategy over time and different markets, and isn't going to let it get ruined just because those production jerks can't keep up with demand.
In a small business it's easy to be agile with pricing, but once you're the size of Sony or Ford it's not.
A few things. Firstly, nominal rigidity. Basically, consumers don't understand economics so they don't like nominal prices changing. They generally would rather have less product at the same price than the same amount of product at a higher price. (Or at least, they don't notice.) This leads to all kinds of work arounds like keeping the nominal price the same while reducing the amount of good sold or allowing supply shortages to persist.
Another thing is that pricing is not just signaling to the market but competitors. If everyone's console is about the same price and yours goes up then it gets marked as the "expensive one." This might be good or bad for branding depending on what you want.
For another, scarcity is often a branding thing. When you need to be waitlisted to get a Bugatti it's not because Bugatti just can't possibly open a second factory. It's because they want to seem scarce and exclusive. Video game consoles have the same effect where everyone actually wants to sell out of stock early on for the prestige. They then ramp up production.
Lastly, there's also just a natural ramp up since generally they bring one manufacturing chain online then copy it until they're at capacity. Basically, getting the first supply chain involves getting factories that become the template for future versions. And copying the initial version multiple times is easier than standing up multiple of the same thing without a master version to compare. This often means the initial run hovers around what's the maximum output of the smallest optimal factory in the supply chain. Not always, since these things vary a lot, but often. Especially for unique products that don't have interchangeable inputs.
Of course, you can delay launch to save up more inventory but that's often undesirable. Not to mention you often don't know how much demand there is until the wait list forms. It's safer to make people wait than it is to overproduce because .while the waitlist loses money it's easy to sell your boss that it's a positive. "Look at all the demand!" (while conveniently leaving out hypothetical sales that never happen) is easier to spin than "we have to pay to warehouse the unsold stock."
Largely because a lot of their customers/potential customers will be angry.
Firstly, because most people feel that it is unfair for people with more money who can afford the higher price to be prioritised.
Aside: when you use prices to control demand, it does not in practice prioritise the people who want the item the most (the people who will gain the most utility from getting it), but the people with the most money - while it is true that people will scale how much they will pay by their expected utility, that is massively outweight by the huge variations in disposable income, so there are plenty of people who could drop $2000 for a PS5 without a second thought.
Second, antagonising future potential customers is a really bad idea for Sony or Microsoft. Suppose Sony did this with the PS5 and Microsoft didn't with Xbox Series X. Then the supply chains settle down, production rises in 2024 and the markets can clear at the current list price. At that point, assuming this does annoy potential PlayStation customers, many of them choose to get the Xbox instead. This not only costs Sony PS5 sales in a couple of years, it also costs them game sales - on which they get a significant cut of the price, and which represent much more revenue than the revenue from the consoles themselves. There's a reason the consoles are sold below cost - they want the absolute maximum volume of sales.
Note that there are other things that do get the price raised when there is high demand and low supply. Take a look at chicken prices at the moment, for instance.
What tends to predict this is the extent to which the brand is valuable and the manufacturer anticipates an ongoing relationship with their customers. If I'm buying generic chicken thighs, then I probably don't even know which farm or slaughterhouse I bought from, so I can't avoid them in future if they jacked their prices up. But I do know who NVidia are, or who Sony are, or who Tesla are. And they all want to have sales in 10 years time as well as right now.
Many people feel that it is fairer to allocate limited stock on the basis of the amount of time and effort customers are prepared to put in to obtain it than on the basis of the amount of money customers have - because time and effort correlate much better with utility than available money.
After an earthquake, the housewife who wants to fill the family minivan with gasoline in case they decide to evacuate the next day, has more time on her hands than the construction contractor who is trying to get his truck to ten different rush jobs at ten different sites across town.
Not pretending there aren't exceptions, but if you do it by price, then the rich lawyer who wants to fill with gas so he can drive to the backup office in another city will have more available money than the contractor.
... and I did say that it was a better correlation, not that it was a perfect one.
Your options in a short-term emergency are price, time-and-effort, or a pre-designed regulation that has a priority order (you can't invent a regulation on the fly in a short-term emergency). None of those are ideal; I think that a mix of time-and-effort and a short priority list works best in most cases (so your priority list might be fire appliances and ambulances and then empower certain officials to grant priority chits, and then people line up after that).
In a longer-term but temporary supply constraint (like PS5s; there will eventually be enough for everyone that wants one), I'd usually want to get the regulators out of the issue and let the manufacturer/retailer decide for themselves (the only exception I can think of is regulating an essential, like rationing food in wartime).
How much does the lawyer value getting to his backup office?
Increased price sends an important signal to people: stop using this. And most people can survive just fine for a day without buying new gas, or new food.
Typically when there is a crisis, lots and lots of people fill up on gas *that they don't need at all*. Because why not? That's where all the incentives are pointing.
I've seen, in person, a mob of people rush into something and pick it clean, because there was no crowd control and someone triggered a rush. This isn't a rare occurrence. Given the choice between "get it and have it" or "be a decent person and wait calmly in the queue and never get it," there aren't enough people who choose the latter, and the operant conditioning is to not do it.
If people know there is an adult running the process, though, they calm down.
For something like a gas shortage, I assert it doesn't take much to get people to say "huh, maybe I'll wait." A mandatory $2-per-gallon surcharge sends the signal "if you can just wait this out, you should." And once you aren't punishing decent behavior, the decent behavior will build on itself, and the shortage will resolve itself quickly.
We can totally plan ahead for this, and we should.
You'll notice that the majority of the cases we are talking about are ones where greater production is already strongly encouraged and it isn't clear that production would rise if there was more money.
Think about the things that are scalped (and if it isn't being scalped and there aren't any anti-scalping measures, then there isn't demand at a significantly higher price). Tickets to live performances: venue sizes are not easily changed.
Manufactured items that are in severe supply constraints, especially where there is a single manufacturer (cars, consumer electronics): the manufacturer is already trying to raise production. Would they really be able to build more PS5s or XboxSXs if they could offer more short-term money?
Sure, if there were long-term guarantees - but Sony/Microsoft are already raising production capacity by building more factories, so the market-clearing price is going to drop anyway.
Look at commodities in the same situation - their prices do surge because it's all interchangeable.
People generally believe that things should be priced “fairly”, which I think as much as it means anything means based on the cost of production rather than demand, and the marginal profit is probably not worth the brand damage from raising prices
People feel that the announced price is a promise from the manufacturer and people expect promises to be kept and feel that it is cheating not to do so. So if I haven't had a chance to buy a $399 PS5, then Sony can't increase the price (once it's been widely available on sale for a while at that price then increasing the price for inflation is annoying but acceptable).
Contracts are mostly kept to because people think they are promises, not because of legal obligations - plenty of people do not make a differentiation between a unilateral promise and a contract.
(indeed, you could interpret this as promissory estoppel: "I saved money to purchase a PS5 at $399; Sony promised to sell me a PS5 for $399, for this reason they are obligated to sell me one that that price because I have acted in reliance on their promise and have suffered by saving - due to the time value of money")
Scalping is very annoying, for people who are trying to wait to buy the Zbox online for a birthday or Christmas present for their kid, priced at $399 but when they do log on they find "sorry all out of stock" because a tout managed to buy up all available stock and is now selling it on eBay for $500 because "ha ha if you want to give your kid this present right now, pay my price or get lost, sucker".
Personally, I wouldn't pay it, but I don't have a kid that I promised I'd get them this toy they really, really wanted. It's profit for the shops, it's profit for the manufacturers, because they don't care who buys all their stock in one fell swoop, but it annoys ordinary consumers (and I imagine probably the manufacturers in the end if some third-party vulture is making an extra $100 for nothing off their product).
Eventually more stock will get into the shops, but if you're looking for that present *now* rather than in two months' time, then people pay scalpers, which only encourages them (ditto with concert tickets and the like).
Yes , in some countries there are clear rules based on listing of price . And this is likely a common held idea in many stable economies . The very notion that the listed price can not be met should be reflection of the stability of the market in general . And, as a matter of public relations all indications of price by a company should be scrubbed from all media to reflect the reality of the situation for the company . However, unless there is a specific law in a domain the idea that they should anything is only relevant to the impression. Of the consumer .
I mean, I would not fancy taking Sony to court on that basis. But contract law including estoppel is written based on what people feel to be fair, and the fact that you can make a credible argument on promissory estoppel points to why people think that it's fair.
I think people would grumble but eventually accept if Sony said "Due to increase in price of necessary rare raw material to make the new console, the price has to go up by X amount and it'll be Y weeks later".
But if Sony went "We only made 100,000 but demand is for 150,000 so we're just gonna slap up the price because we can", people would be more pissed off because "hey, ramp up your production and meet the demand!"
Exactly. I think there's a bunch of economics-brain going on here.
Lots of pricing strategies that make sense if you think like an economist but really piss people off. Price differentiation without product differentiation is another one (I paid three times as much as him for the same thing). Even minor product differentiations ("pro" versions that are three times the price with very minor differences) are much more socially acceptable, and rich people will just pay it on the basis that the cost of the time to work out whether any of the feature differences are ones that matter to them is greater than the price difference.
Oh, the "pro" version of things does annoy me at times (Microsoft, looking right at *you* here): six versions of the same product, and if I want the *one* element out of the five fancy additions not in the basic model, I have to buy the more expensive version even if I'm not going to use the other four.
But it definitely is a different case over "I paid X for it and he only paid Y for it and it's the same thing". We get a lot of that in Ireland, with differences between what someone would cost in the UK or in the US versus the increased price in Ireland. Some of it is understandable (difference between sterling and euro, increased transport costs, etc.) but some of it is "and on top of that, we'll stick on another bit, just because we've got the nearest thing to a monopoly".
I thought that in every instant where price was artificially limited that other factors kicked in and the end results was worse outcomes . That the free market is the best way to deal with price . Things that are hard to get will fetch a higher price . If there is profit then someone will innovate and find a way .
I think IP rights limits free market and leads to processes of price gauging though .
Do enough people understand that for that to be a consideration in how you price your playstations though?
Also have you thought about how information and decision making costs lead to problems with free markets? (This is something I’m interested in but not super informed on)
How did you reach that conclusion? To me it seems self-evident that there has been huge amounts of innovation in housing in the last few millennia and that the quest for profit has been a large part of the reason for this.
If by "IP rights" you mean patents (as opposed to trademarks and such), then the *general* answer is a definite yes. Patents patently restrict supply and increase prices, in terms of the seller's profit margin. They are explicitly designed for that purpose. (although lately they tend to carry less and less profit for actual producers, and more and more profit for lawyers and a cottage industry of patent-hoarding robber barons)
Is that angle particularly relevant for the *specific* case of PS5 and cars? No, since those specific cases are drowning in other externalities which are orders of magnitude more relevant. Inasmuch as the OP was specifically about PS5. that would be a no.
Not really . I don’t know too much of it , but I think there is like this issue with limited amount of processors or something right? Semi conductors I think .
I am trying to think through it but it’s complicated . There are ways that players can corner the market on things . If it’s essential things then a war can ensue . IP can be utilized or regulatory capture can be used as well . There are definitely rotten ways to leverage supply and demand . And these days seem to very much be times of big power making moves . Cause if some do it in one sector then others look to do it in another . Of those big invested groups like van guard just get all their groups to deploy it .
I doubt the production could really be ramped up on the short term, it if it could you would not do it, because the disconnection between supply and demand we have now is conjoncturel, not structural, and any (significant, non-baseline-trend) increase in production would give you too much capacity once the situation goes back to normal.
(To give an example : there is right now a crisis in France's universities because the number of students have grown a lot but the number of professor has decreased, but the government does not want to hire more professors because they would need to pay them for 40 years afterward while the number of student will decrease in a few years (the bump is mainly due to the so-called 2000 baby-boom).
I'm guessing there must be other constraint preventing the US solution of hiring grad students or postgrads to short-term TA or Lecture contracts instead of hiring tenure-track professors. And also preventing other solutions like hiring older career-switchers as professors with the expectation they're likely to retire in 10 years instead of 40.
They mainly use short terms contracts yes. What I was getting at is that you don't build a new factory if you think the mismatch between supply and demand is only going to last a couple years.
(France has a system that is very different from the US. There are no tenure tracks, and very few short terms TA or lecture contracts compared to the US. Basically the assumption used to be that after your PhD you'd get directly hired as a "maître de conférence", which is basically a tenure without the associated prestige (but with the un-firable, open-ended contract). This isn't true now, but the rate of open-ended contracts to fixed-term contracts is still way higher than in the US (or Germany btw).
Your second question is part of the answer to your first question. Many loyal fans will be just as pissed if the company (rather than a third party) sells at a higher price. And that wouldn't be a problem (high demand, like you said), except that those items will continue being manufactured and the fans you just counterfactually pissed off by increasing the price are the same ones who would wait a year or two and buy the item then.
To be honest the whole supply and demand graph doesn’t work at all for many products. The plot of supply or demand vs new iPhone prices is a straight line. If there are supply constraints the company doesn’t increase the price they agreed at launch, if demand is tapering Apple doesn’t reduce prices but lowers its supply to channel. (In any one year I mean).
Nobody expects them to do anything else, only on the secondary markets do iPhone prices move according to supply demand graphs; there used to be some “gouging” on resales of just released iPhones when they didn’t estimate supply correctly.
Anyway whenever there is an agreed sticker price people think anything above that price is price gouging - concert tickets are a good example. Nobody cares if you buy a house and sell it for a much larger price - which has higher social implications - if anything that’s considered a shrewd investment. Put an agreed price on something and it’s considered very bad practice to sell at a higher price.
This is goal impressive goal shifting. I am clearly talking about the consumer price of products. I obviously understand that Apple reduces its own internal demand and that external demand is influenced by price. Because I wrote that.
What isn’t happening is Apple reducing or increasing the sticker price of iPhones which is what the supply demand curve indicates would happen.
They can raise them occasionally. Doesn't happen a lot in consumer electronics or cars (in both cases, because annual releases of new models give an opportunity to establish a new sticker price), but there are plenty of other products that have strong price expectations - "dollar menu" at a fast-food chain, for instance (McDonald's now has the "$1 $2 $3 dollar menu" because they had to increase some prices).
The second one seems to me to be about the feeling of unfairness: these people aren't helping at all, and get to keep a premium for doing nothing. You might call them rent seekers, as they don't provide any benefit and simply suck resources away.
e: "they" referring here of course exclusively to scalpers, who seek to buy and immediately resell. I'm not talking about all people who are selling second hand.
But they are helping by making a product available to someone who really needs/wants it (as demonstrated by willing to pay a premium) instead of just to people who are lucky. Buying and immediately reselling at a higher price is exactly what every shop does. Are shops not providing value?
One problem is that people's cutoff price in a situation like this is determined much more by disposable income than by how much they actually want it on a subjective level. Scalpers are less likely to redirect to someone who wants it more than they are to simply redirect to someone richer. Redirecting surplus to the rich is not generally considered a public service.
Most shops also make it much more convenient for customers to get products. They buy in bulk from manufacturers, arrange for products to be available in a convenient place, etc. By comparison buying from a scalper is usually less convenient than buying form the original seller.
Well that depends on what you mean by your reference to "The shop". As referring to the original creator, it provides a lot of value as it is the creator of the product. Then there are commercial sellers which sell to consumers, obviously valuable to all parties.
I might grant that there is some value in selling at a higher price to people who really want it, but in the case of scalpers that is a solution that creates its own problem: a big group of people who are now going to buy from the scalpers wanted to buy it from the original seller, so in the case of this group, the scalper actively took value away, without providing anything in return.
Only in the specific case of someone who did want to have the product but could for some reason not buy from the original seller did the scalper provide value. The question is how big this subgroup is relative to the people who buy from the scalpers. My guess is significantly small, what do you think?
Isn't a scalper just a reseller we don't like? Why use such a loaded word? I agree these resellers shouldn't be necessary if the manufacturer would set a more reasonable price. But given that for whatever reason the manufacturer doesn't do that, the resellers are helping the market be more efficient and their profit is there reward. Given that anyone could do the reselling, I'm tempted the think that in the limit their reward would approach fair compensation for their effort. ("they shop" was a typo for "every shop")
A scalper is a specific class of resellers, who buys scarce goods from retailers and resells them on the secondary market at a premium in order to arbitrage a shortage into a price increase.
This annoys people because the additional premium is perceived as unjust, and because the scalpers' purchases through retail channels tend to get blamed for heightening the shortage at retail price by buying up stock for secondary market resale.
Basically, it comes down to a preference by many consumers for queue-rationing over price-rationing. The scalpers, by catering to other consumers who prefer price-rationing, bid up the queuing cost at retail channels and are seen as abetting those who are willing to pay to jump the queue.
I recommended this nearly 2 years ago for scarce covid goods like toilet paper, but the government should bite the bullet and go all the way to *mandating* price increases, via a special surcharge tax.
Vendors don't want to bother with customers angry over prices. Customers don't seem to get as angry over empty shelves.
Scalpers are just exploiting the fact that the price is not set on the market and takes the risk that the market will pay more. The only thing apparently wrong with it is that the consumer wants to pay less and that the venue or artist fails to extract the value of their show. But as we know now, some of the biggest scalpers are the ones involved in the show itself . Other times scalpers are simply the corporate recipients that get free tickets by some kind of support or sponsorship .
Well I do agree "scalper" is negatively loaded, I did originally not want to use it at all but I edited to include it as it does lay the distinction between flipping and other kinds of second hand selling.
I like the framing of scalpers making the market be more efficient, that does make sense. It does seem to me that it would be better if there were less scalpers and the manufacturers were free to set better prices, as then the money ends up being invested in the product. But you're right, it's just exploiting arbitrage between the low product price and the price people are willing to pay for it. In that sense you could say it's fair compensation.
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'.
For abstract hair splitting there’s always ‘Jesuitical discourse’ if you want to go New Testament.
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.
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).
I don’t know if this will interest you or annoy you further. I ran across Bad Guru Substack yesterday. He talks about the commodification of spirituality. I’ve just started spelunking.
badguru.substack.com
Article about the writer
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/style/alex-ebert-bad-guru.html?referringSource=articleShare
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
It’s a ghost copy after you post. Will disappear when you refresh.
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
> Anyone have thoughts on the long term future of prediction markets?
Isn’t there a prediction market forecasting that? :)
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.
Continuing to dispute a lost, recounted, challenged and upheld election is undemocratic.
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.
I hate, hate HATE how FDR essentially got away with so many awful decisions. As a Huey Long aficionado, I hate that he's mostly brought up in a "good thing we got FDR instead, right?" type of way. Somehow the argument is something like "Huey Long would have gone against democratic norms and done bad things, so it's a good thing that we got FDR instead, a guy who actually did do all those things but he beat polio so shut up. Just shut up"
Just shows to me how conceptually bankrupt most accusations of "demagoguery" are. It is increasingly obvious that this just means whatever the elites need it to in order to keep someone who legitimately poses a threat to them out of power.
"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.
Touché!
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)
I thought of something after reading your post on homeopathy again which you linked from your movie talk,
Yes there is a placebo effect and also I saw Dr Ben goldacre years ago talking about a nacebo effect but would the real test (or control? Or whatever) be the complete opposite? Like if someone DIDN'T have a clue if they were drinking something homeopathic and still got effects?
Has anyone ever had their drink spiked homoeopathically?
"Placebo effects" might just be regression to the mean. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/
Seems like regression to the mean surely plays a part in placebo effects: Most symptoms are things that occur less often than does not having that symptom. Some of the people who have the symptom will begin moving towards normalcy around the time they start the placebo, as a result of all the bodily processes that make absence of that symptom more common than present.
But here are a couple of placebo effect situations where regression to the mean would not explain subjects' feeling better from the inactive treatment:
-Situations where the subjects' health problem involves processes that are likely to lead to worsening symptoms as a result of well-understood processes. One example would be incurable, fatal diseases. A less grim one would be the wearing off of local anesthesia after a procedure that did enough tissue damage that worsening pain is the norm as the local wears off. In both of these situations, subjects are in a group where moving towards the mean at a given time for their group = moving towards worse symptoms.
-"Nocebo" effects -- subjects' feeling worse when given a treatment they have been told will produce unpleasant side effects
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.
Don’t vaccines have only very short-term side effects though? As in “if this vaccine will kill you it definitely will before three months have passed?”
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.
You are describing Republicans in broadly flattering terms here. The former GOP might have had some of these positive attributes, but they been missing in action for 5 years now. Only a very few have had the courage to stand up to an unmistakably cruel and ignorant man.
You are ignoring that elephant in the room.
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.
> there are numerous examples of people getting “canceled” from right-wing politics for deviating (even the slightest bit) from party-line orthodoxy.
By not humoring the former president for example. See Liz Cheney.
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.
The threat of of damage from Trump’s Big Lie and the reality denying buy in from so many Republicans is all too real.
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.
I agree, the SA opinion piece is shite. It is still labeled as ‘opinion’. We are free to disagree. But saying you’ll even vote for the 'I just want to find 11,780 votes’ guy to fight Wokeism seems like throwing in the towel on any hope of recovering a shared observable reality.
That fella makes up convenient facts on the fly and the shell of what used to be the Republican Party agrees or claims to have not heard about it. Or they disagree until they get called out by Sean Hannity and then crawl back and recant.
The events at the capitol building January 6, 2021 frighten me more than the current pandering to Wokeism.
The cult of personality around the knuckle head that that encouraged that event is an immediate threat that has to take priority IMO.
I’ll continue to oppose brain-dead Wokeism on a case by case basis until that crisis has passed.
There is a difference between supporting protests that had accompanying riots and actively trying to overturn electoral results. If 2024 results in the R winning and the D attempt to actively overturn the results, THEN you can start equivocating.
You're right, supporting protests that had accompanying riots is worse. It is not against the law to peddle conspiracy theories about the election, even dishonestly. It *is* against the law, not to mention the basic fabric of society, to loot, assault police, and burn down small businesses.
Right, so any cause that fails to be 100% nonviolent is unconscionable to support? Because if that's the case- if you REALLY want to resort to stacking bodies up in piles- you, at best, make a case for opposing every political party that has ever existed.
That's my position, yes. I oppose every political party that ever existed *at the moment that they're causing mass violence across the country*. If they subsequently change their ways, I might stop opposing them.
I'm comparing Democrats' support for protests that included riots, which continued as the riots were ongoing, to Trump's support for the conspiracy theory, which lead to the Capitol Hill riot, during which he issued multiple tweets telling people to stay peaceful and/or go home: https://www.thetrumparchive.com/
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.
Didn’t the democrats question Trump’s election. And W’s election. Maybe not the candidates themselves, but it was done.
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.
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.
.
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.
Does anyone have a good refutation of Scott’s post steelmanning NIMBYs? It seems to me like the actual effect on rent from building lots isn’t that pronounced as we would like to think. The literature seems to say the same but I don’t know if Im reading these results properly. I keep thinking of Scott bringing up New York as an incredibly dense city where most inhabitants still give away half their paycheck in rent every month.
Edit: it was dumb not to include the post
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/
Please include the relevant link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/ (seems like Alex Zavoluk was faster than me there.)
Personally, I dimly remember the oil rig analogy, but have not thought about the topic, or how one would tie this into a Georgian framework.
FWIW, Scott does not not mention NY much in that article, but mostly talks about SF.
"Building new housing lowers the price of housing" is one of the most replicated findings in economics. See https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01055/100977/Local-Effects-of-Large-New-Apartment-Buildings-in?redirectedFrom=fulltext for one example.
NYC is dense (but also, IIRC it build more housing units in the 1920s than it has since 1960) but the areas surrounding it are not. Many people commute from sprawling suburbs full of single-family homes on a daily basis (or at least, did pre-pandemic). It's also in extremely high demand; it's certainly not the case that you could stop building housing and rent would just stay where it is. Even wikipedia calls out "land use regulation, historical preservation, and political opposition" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_housing_shortage#Supply_factors).
Specific objections in Scott's post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/):
1 + 2. As was pointed out originally, issues with the data he presents on housing growth stock undermine these quite a bit. But also, SF and the surrounding area has been underbuilding housing for at least 50 years. It is not at all surprising that it will take more than a few years to fix the problem.
3. AFAIK evidence does not support strong induced demand for housing: https://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-neighborhood-price-effects-of-new-apartments/
4. Some of these issues are Bay Area-specific, and could be fixed with better policy. Having 3 murders at one train station in 1 week is a statement about your crime policy (or arguably other socioeconomic policies), not about trains. Speaking of policy, the problem is less with liking suburbs, and with forcing every single community in the entire country to be a specific type of suburb, namely sprawling and car-dependent. Sure, some people like living in such suburbs. Some people like living in townhomes or small apartment units. Why do the former get to impose their preferences everywhere by force of law? Because 1950s-era policy is sacrosanct?
5. Seems like mostly a strawman. Cities became less popular starting in after WW2, but have recently become more popular again. That requires a change in policy to reflect what people want to do.
6. Seems mostly unrelated to housing.
edit: the highlights thread (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/02/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nimbys/) also has good responses.
Induced demand certainly exists in some contexts. Eg: a few years ago, a friend of mine was offered an apartment in Long Island City, Queens. Before he accepted, he went over in the evening to make sure that there were amenities open in the neighborhood. Now, LIC has seen quite a bit of new housing over the last 15 yrs or so. At some point in the past, it was mostly light industry, there were relatively few residents, hence relatively few amenities, and hence relatively low demand. My friend would not have moved there then. So, I would not be surprised if the new housing, on balance, increased the prices of the existing stock.
However, LIC is a neighborhood, not a city. The new amenities there certainly did very little to increase the demand for housing in NYC as a whole, because NYC obviously already had plenty of amenities. I am sure the same can be said of most established cities - there might be neighborhoods in Cincinnati in which new housing --> higher prices in that neighborhood, but the effect on housing prices in the city as a whole will still be negative (after all, when my friend moved from the Upper West Side to LIC, the demand for housing in the Upper West Side declined ever so slightly). So, I am guessing that induced demand has a measurable net effect at low levels of density, but at higher levels that effect on rests is swamped by the effect of increased supply (and, by "low levels of density" at the city level, I mean so low that it is not really much of a city at all.
In support of this, I was living in midtown east a few years ago when all the LIC construction was going up. I was able to use that new construction to negotiate a $100/mo decrease in my rent, where initially the landlord wanted a $300/mo increase.
>5. Seems like mostly a strawman. Cities became less popular starting in after WW2, but have recently become more popular again. That requires a change in policy to reflect what people want to do
Or we could just reduce immigration rate.
Or we could just legalize building more housing.
Just how big do you think immigration is? If you cut immigration in half, it would decrease the rate of population increase by only 0.15%, by my calculation.
And who would you like to bar from entering? My wife perhaps? Who you gonna ban?
"Or we could just legalize building more housing"
So, we all need to live in increasingly small dwellings in increasingly congested cities with increasingly overwhelmed physical and social infrastructure...to bring more people into the country that we don't need?
"Just how big do you think immigration is?"
It's millions of people, disproportionately headed towards the most densely populated areas. And an adult immigrant rents or buys a property immediately. A couple having one child more than the average fertility rate does not result in an increase in demand for property to rent or buy until at least 18 years. This is a huge difference and the latter will have a much smaller impact on the housing market than the former.
Also, immigrants have a higher fertility rate than non-immigrants, meaning fertility and immigration aren't independent variables.
"And who would you like to bar from entering? My wife perhaps? Who you gonna ban?"
How is this an argument? The fact that you specifically, some dude on substack, has an immigrant wife, that means we have to never restrict anyone from from immigrating to the US?
Do you support open borders? No? Then you literally support billions of people not being allowed to immigrate to the US. And if you DO support open borders, then your argument around the effects of immigration on demand are meaningless.
> How is this an argument?
How is this an answer to my question? You want to reduce immigration but refuse to say who should be kept out!
And to suggest there's no room for more housing in the US without making homes smaller? (1) I don't want a smaller home, but I would've been interested in a smaller LOT if that had been an affordable option in my area. It wasn't on offer. (2) Population density is 34/km² in the U.S., 65 globally, 149 in China, 233 in Germany, and 511 in South Korea ... so yes the U.S. has room for more.
There is literally no city in the United States that isn't surrounded by plenty of areas full of single family homes on large lots. Many such places are even in the cities themselves. Congestion is a policy issue, caused by endlessly promoting driving and sprawl at the expense of literally everything else.
"Sprawl" is what allows us to increase our population without living in increasingly small dwellings in increasingly congested cities. No sprawl, no space reduction, no population increase: pick no more than two.
What does that have to do with anything? Total population is not the relevant factor driving up demand. There are plenty of cheap places to live in the middle of nowhere, but people want to live in or near cities.
"There are plenty of cheap places to live in the middle of nowhere, but people want to live in or near cities."
Okay? And what's your big scheme for convincing people to live in the middle of nowhere?
People always act like 'low population density in the middle of nowhere' is some knockdown argument, but not once have I ever seen any of you explain why this is in any way remotely relevant.
Immigrants disproportionately head to densely populated cities. Any increase in housing stock is largely going to be consumed by people moving to the city, and these people are disproportionately immigrants.
The existence of empty space disproves the absurd notion that total national population is at all a relevant variable. People specifically want *to live in and near cities*. This is true of immigrants and non-immigrants, and since we no longer live in a world where 90% of the population must farm to feed everyone, people are going to move to cities. The urban and near-urban population will increase *even if there is no immigration at all.* Total population growth might exacerbate the problem, but even with immigration the US has slid to 0.4% population growth per year. It will quickly join the rest of the developed world in facing a declining population.
If anything, we need *more* immigration, not less, to solve this problem. However, that does require us to actually build some fucking housing, yes. Outside of NYC and maybe Chicago/Boston/DC, US cities are not that dense, and our mid-sized towns and suburbs are almost all wildly sprawly and unpopulated, compared to almost anywhere outside North America. There is absolutely no need to subsidize and legally require detached single family homes on large lots and driving literally everywhere. You can have substantially higher densities that are still not that crowded, with plenty of room for parks, a variety of forms of housing, etc. For example, Austin and its metro area have about 1/4 the density of Zurich and its metro area respectively, despite having about the same total population. Zurich and the surrounding areas are lovely, including plenty of middle density, suburbs, and even farms and wilderness.
Rate of change of population is a very relevant factor driving up demand, though. Without immigration, the rate of increase in population in big cities would be small or negative.
I think you're using a very different definition of "immigration" City growth is primarily driven by people moving out of more rural regions into cities *in the same country*. International immigration certainly adds to it, but net international migration is by no means required for increasing urbanisation.
> Building new housing lowers the price of housing" is one of the most replicated findings in economics
Without reading the paper you mentioned, is it possible that building new housing would lower the price of housing in the short term but raise it in the long term?
Induced demand is a thing for cities. If you add new housing units to an already-popular city then you'll increase the number of people living there, which makes the city an even bigger economic hub than it already was, which makes living in the city an even better option (at least economically) for more people.
The fact that twelve million people live in New York City, or thirty million want to live in Jakarta, is not because New York City or Jakarta have any natural beauty or charm, it's because twelve or thirty million people are already living there. The growth of megacities is a nasty Molochian trap which robs economic activity from smaller towns and cities and forces people into cramped conditions.
>The growth of megacities is a nasty Molochian trap which robs economic activity from smaller towns and cities and forces people into cramped conditions.
Woah, this is an absurd premise. The reality is that agglomeration is a real thing and has economic benefits, and plenty of people don't mind or prefer living nearby other people, and in net are more than happy to trade the economic benefits of agglomeration for less personal space.
You don't have to prefer that, no one is forcing you to. But smaller towns are not entitled to any economic activity.
"You don't have to prefer that, no one is forcing you to. But smaller towns are not entitled to any economic activity."
Says who? Why are some people entitled to things but others not? Why are small income earners entitled to the same standard of living as me?
>Says who? Why are some people entitled to things but others not?
I didn't say anybody is entitled to anything. What I objected to is the idea that cities "rob economic activity from smaller towns." I reject the idea that any such economic activity is robbed, as the smaller towns are not entitled to any economic activity that might end up in a city under a free market. The cities aren't entitled to it either. Agglomeration is a real thing that delivers real economic benefits, and business owners should be free to choose where to locate their business so as to be successful. If the marginal business owner chooses to locate in a city, that isn't entitlement, that's the free market.
Allegedly it's a trend for some older tech companies to open offices near Provo, UT, because Mormons have a hard work culture and don't drink, or something. If so, great, let business locate there and reap the excess benefits of Mormon culture, and let the Mormons be rewarded appropriately for developing such a culture. As I understand, they almost entirely live in single-family housing.
I linked to data on the question of ID for cities, but unlike roads, housing costs a market rate (approximately; less for existing residents, but more for newcomers, which is the relevant party). Some amount of network effect might be theoretically possible, but right now most cities and nearby suburbs are so sparse that it will be a long time before anything legitimately starts running out of room to build more.
Also like I pointed out, I believe part of the reason for NYC being so cramped is that the surrounding areas are so sprawly. There's an enormous difference in density that happens very quickly from skyscrapers to car-dependent suburbia. If you don't like or can't afford the latter, then extremely high density is your only alternative. A large area with medium density (so a mix of commercial, single family, townhomes, small apartment blocks, etc) can house a very large number of people with high quality of life, but such development is illegal in most of the US. Moreover, the suburban towns have ceded a great deal of their economic potential to the cities by greatly limiting space for everything except for expensive, unproductive, single family home-only residential areas.
Finally, I think it is clearly the case that many people do like living in or near cities. Stores, people, and things to do are plentiful and easily available. You get to meet a huge variety of people and the population can support niche interests. Being able to walk and bike places helps improve physical fitness, and allowing children more independence (since they can go places on their own without being driven) is good for their development. I have greatly enjoyed visiting places like Tokyo, where I could go to restaurants, museums, markets, and outdoor attractions without having to fight traffic or deal with road signs in an unfamiliar city.
And that's another part of the problem. The people in the Molochian trap of New York City look out to those of us in sprawl, see that it is good... and want to take it away from us so more of them can live slightly less cramped than they are.
In fact, these "medium density" places exist. Manhattan has a density of 75,000/square mile. Brooklyn, a mere 37,000. The Bronx, 35,000 Queens, 22,000. Jersey City, 18,000. Newark, 12,000. Yonkers, 12,000. Below that you're down to actual suburbs, like Belleville at 11,000 and Bloomfield at 9,000. You could describe Newark outside the small downtown as "a large area of medium density", though alas it somehow fails to provide a high quality of life.
> Moreover, the suburban towns have ceded a great deal of their economic potential to the cities by greatly limiting space for everything except for expensive, unproductive, single family home-only residential areas.
The suburban bedroom communities in the NJ suburbs of NYC are doing far better than the ones which have space for production (which is largely abandoned and decaying). My own suburb indeed had industrial space.... but the era of the suburban factory is gone, and they're apartments (and a national park) now.
If sprawl is so wonderful, why does it have to be enforced by law? You should be ok with repealing zoning, parking requirements, lot size rules, setback requirements, and all of the other things making denser development illegal in most of the country. And of course, having similar levels of subsidy for all kinds of infrastructure. It would be terrible if your wonderful lifestyle were only possible on the back of legalized theft from the people you despise, like most suburban sprawl is. I'm sure you don't want to be so reliant on others.
> If sprawl is so wonderful, why does it have to be enforced by law?
Everything's enforced by law in New Jersey. And almost everywhere else. Manhattan, for instance, has parking _maximums_. The exception is (sprawly) Houston.
> You should be ok with repealing zoning, parking requirements, lot size rules, setback requirements, and all of the other things making denser development illegal in most of the country.
That's not on the table. Nobody with any power at all wants to repeal all this; instead they want to tweak the rules to encourage the things they want while banning the things they don't. They sometimes spin this as freedom, but it ain't. It's not "repeal setback requirements", it's "require zero setback". It's not "repeal zoning" it's "rezone denser" or "change the rules for a zone to make it denser".
Alex addresses the induced demand argument in one of his links.
Also, I disagree on the relative charm of Jakarta and New York. There are vast numbers of people who are drawn to the non-economic ammenities that only large cities can offer, even if the economic benefits of agglomeration are what power the initial growth
Regarding #4, in California there seems to be a notion of saying every city/juristiction must build more housing and a significant amount of designated "low income housing". This would forcibly change all neighborhoods instead of designating certain areas to be dense at a coarse regional granularity. It will be combined with calls to build more transit to these new apartment enclaves, and then change the zoning because it's now near a "transit corridor", etc.
I can buy the need to plan for density at the level of the major metro areas but I'm not convinced suburbs should be forced to change when there are many more appropriate areas for dense building. The desire seems to be primarily to insert such housing into already-desirable zones, which are desirable precisely because of their current non-density and high cost.
"Affordable housing" is mostly a left-wing shibboleth (YIMBYs seem to draw from all over the political spectrum, but usually lean liberal rather than far-left IME). Whether through ignorance of the science, ideology, or whatever other reason, leftists don't like the idea that the market can solve the problem by just building more housing, which will lower rents. They seem to think that rent can only be lowered by legally limiting it, either in general with rent control or in specific cases. In reality, this is a made-up problem, and they are going to make it worse.
When the cost of building any housing is so inflated, and demand is so high, developers are going to build higher-profit ("luxury" in left-ese or "market rate" in sane English) housing when they can build anything. Normally, this housing then moves down the cost chain as it ages, becoming next decades middle-class housing and next generation's affordable housing, and the rich move into the new thing. But there is no new thing, and fixed rents and taxes make it so that there's no reason to downsize, so people with high incomes keep occupying older stock.
Trying to force artificially underpriced housing into whatever nooks and crannies it will fit by fiat just exacerbates the above problem by further lowering the profitability of new development. The real motivation shines through, when leftists manage to stop an entire new project from being built and celebrate as a result. They would rather no new housing be built at all than "luxury" housing, because making livable cities is not the goal, it's just to spite anyone who might have money or make a profit.
YIMBY's realize that building any housing reduces the price of all housing, since rich yuppies can move out of their old inner-city basement apartments and into nice condos further out and open up the older housing stock for low-income renters. Here's another study: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1334&context=up_workingpapers which found that even market-rate housing in low-income areas reduced rents.
I agree that sticking a bunch of huge Cabrini-Green towers in the middle of some leafy SF suburb would be a problem, for multiple reasons. But that's a far-left proposal, not a YIMBY one.
Scott mentions the slippery slope which I think is valid. New condos can be quite nice and may be an upgrade over a degraded area of old single family homes. But the current push is to put such condos everywhere, as far as I can tell.
I know at least one such development planned to go up in the middle of an area full of $2-3M+ single family homes. These are often 50-60+years old but have a steady rate of being replaced with new construction.
From the perspective of an existing resident, there's little upside to supporting condo developments with many more people using the same old facilities and roads. Far better to get a new park and brand new "luxury homes". The condos are also more likely to be rentals with people packing into the rooms in ways they're not designed for. There seems to be a lot of unmet demand for properly large apartments with proper urban planning around them, not random condos here and there.
I don't really buy the slippery slope argument. I doubt most of the people in SF are applying it (or any of their arguments) to ban all immigration, or indeed prevent anything anywhere from ever changing, which is the logical conclusion. Who has the right to keep the world the same it always was? In addition, in places where more housing can be built, do all locations just get more and more urban indefinitely forever? No. Cities go up and down in size, suburbs wax and wane, and typically the city stays in roughly one area, except over extreme timescales. You don't *need* to turn hundreds of square miles into Manhattan, an urban core + a wider area of medium density is sufficient.
And I'm aware of *why* people don't want development near them, I just don't think that anyone is entitled to control all of the land in the whole town just to preserve their home's price. Which really gets at the most basic reason I don't buy the slippery slope: Even if it were true, it wouldn't justify the onerous and ridiculous regulations.
>But the current push is to put such condos everywhere, as far as I can tell.
Let's assume that developers build too many luxury apartments. What happens? They go unoccupied, and the developer loses money. Then they either lower the price to the point where they become occupied, or they continue to lose money. Eventually, they either lowered the rent to a rate that was affordable to the market or the developer loses so much money they go out of business and become a cautionary tale to the other developers for pricing beyond what the market could bear. This is a problem that solves itself. Literally the worst case scenario from "developers built too much luxury housing" is that developers rent for below-cost to stop hemorrhaging money, which is a win for would-be tenants and a loss for the stock market.
This is good, thanks
Which post of Scott's are you referring to? Matt Yglesias' 70-page book The Rent is Too Damn High is a quick pro-density argument from I think 2012. It's mostly hard-to-argue-with (imo) mechanistic argument than heavy with empiricism, but it does have some empiricism in there.
Over the last two years I've seen a number of studies (but didn't collect them, sorry) showing modest (1-4% iirc) declines in rent on adjacent blocks when new units are built in large cities. When you say "actual effect isn't that pronounced," what do you actually mean? That wording seems a bit squishy. It also seems to kinda operate on the premise that there's some other idea for driving down rents that is very pronounced that we should do instead. I think that building new units doesn't drive down rent quite as much as we'd like, but it's the only tool in the toolbox. In my view it's a relatively basic supply and demand problem unless someone proves to me otherwise.
Another way I like to think about it is that, in most industries, we worry about monopolies and duopolies colluding to keep supply low and margins high. For housing, municipalities seem to do that for them as a result of some normal human biases.
The absolute hilarity of somebody proclaiming the rent is too high....who also wrote a book literally advocating for America's population to be increased by >600 million people in the near future.
Build as many units as you want, rent is going up under such circumstances.
I'm sure it feels like a fun gotcha but there's nothing inconsistent about wanting to both deregulate the housing market and increase immigration.
I didn't say deregulating the housing market is inconsistent. I specifically took issue with his belief that the rent is too high. Deregulate all you want, but virtually unlimited immigration* is going to lead to higher rent, period.
*Even if you or Yglesias say that it's not unlimited, so what? Once these new immigrants and their descendants are the majority of the population, it's their preferences that count politically, not yours or yglesias' or anyone else's.
>Deregulate all you want, but virtually unlimited immigration* is going to lead to higher rent, period.
Only if we don't build enough housing. High housing prices are a market signal that incentivizes developers to build more housing, and for more entrepreneurially-minded people to enter the market as developers, and for more investors to provide liquidity for housing development. The high prices of housing in San Francisco suggest that a lot of people want to live in San Francisco. Yglesias proposes that we attempt to satisfy this demand, and not handicap our potential economic growth with artificial restrictions.
>Once these new immigrants and their descendants are the majority of the population, it's their preferences that count politically
Sounds fine, at such a point they'll be American citizens and have as much claim to the future of our shared civilization as any other American. That you suggest this is a bad thing to me seems frankly really gross and anti-American.
> Over the last two years I've seen a number of studies (but didn't collect them, sorry) showing modest (1-4% iirc) declines in rent on adjacent blocks when new units are built in large cities.
That sounds like a small decrease in rent for a very large decrease in quality of life. If I had an apartment building next door I'd need to deal with noise, traffic, loss of sunlight and privacy.
Most people would agree that it's a large increase in quality of life, because the added density also brings more amenities. Also, most people seem to actually like density.
Yes, one apartment building has a small effect. But 10 apartment buildings could have a pretty large effect (1.03^10=1.34, or 34%). Greater density also means that things like better public transit can be offered, so that less people need to travel by car. Most American cities today, basically all of them except NYC, are at an awkward level of density where public transit is expensive and bad. Higher density means you can afford more expensive (better) transit infrastructure and achieve lower ridership costs due to amortization across a higher population per distance traveled.
It's somewhat of a collective action problem. The marginal cost/benefit for a single building is, as you say, basically negative for most neighbors, hence most of them get shut down. But a land-use regime where you could build dense urban cores that could be surrounded by as much single-family suburbia as desired would probably be preferable to everyone. Instead we have a situation that everybody hates: everything is expensive, public transit is pretty bad everywhere, but traffic is also bad everywhere, and those trends will only get worse with more sprawl.
> But a land-use regime where you could build dense urban cores that could be surrounded by as much single-family suburbia as desired would probably be preferable to everyone
But I feel like that's what we already have, and that YIMBYs are proposing to turn the single-family suburbia into dense urban core too.
It depends on what you consider a suburb. Is San Francisco a suburb? Because over half of it is zoned for single families.
The western half of San Francisco seems to be covered in houses on tiny 3000sqft blocks, which doesn't really fit into either the "dense core" or "single-family suburbia" categories. Nonetheless, this seems like appropriate zoning for that area.
Now, if you want to flatten the Tenderloin and replace it with luxury apartments I'm right there with you.
Thanks, seems right. The other way to lower rent is to lower demand, people leave the city. (Which sadly seems to be happening in NYC.)
Why is it sad that people are leaving NYC? New York would be better with fewer people, and many other places would be better with more.
Very true, but it seems doubtful that very many of the people leaving NYC or San Francisco or other large dynamic cities are actually relocating to places that would strongly benefit from an infusion of new people. E.g. there was some publicity pre-COVID about hipsters moving from Brooklyn to Detroit but when you looked closely it totaled fewer people per year than get struck by lightning. There's certainly no sign of the vast Farm Belt's towns and small cities (which I spend time in professionally) regaining any of their stunning long-term population losses except for the ones with meat-packing plants and hence new-ish Mexican-immigrant clusters. Etc.
Far more likely is that most of the people picking up and leaving the big cities are going to either nearby suburbs or Sun Belt metros, neither of which seems like strong examples of places being made noticeably better by the influx. Certainly from Chicago, where I live, those are the places to where the city's Black-middle-class exodus has been flowing.
I think it’s possible the effect from new housing isn’t really all that large, at least if we are thinking of realistic increases in the housing supply (I’m assuming little regulation).
I agree that there is no other tool in the box for lowering rents, but I worry that, for some people, the effect sizes just aren’t worth it. I get that if you do some utilitarian math 5,000 additional people in superstar city X is really good. It’s also great that those 5,000 get absorbed by new housing and so the price doesn’t increase, but making that sort of case to your uncle, who votes in every election, is fairly impossible. Maybe it would be easier if there was a bigger effect on prices, maybe not, but a lot of people really loathe traffic and urbanization in general and love their cars and small homes and so on and the YIMBY case offers them very little.
For the record: I favour Japan’s land use regulations, so I’m on your side.
Yeah I think you're 100% correct that the price declines are not enough to get people salivating at the thought of cheaper rent. It's totally one of those things where you'd really have to sustain high rates of development for a decade to get to an effect size where the average person notices without being told.
For what it's worth, arguing with the supply-side skeptics in my life, I've found explaining that "new luxury apartments compete at the high end and drive down the price of last-year's luxury units, and so on" to be effective. I think this way, even though the price decline is modest, you make people instead think about getting a nicer apartment for the same price. I think there's a cognitive asymmetry here that does some work.
As someone who would be called a leftist, personally I consider that kind of broad term to be about as helpful as neoliberal in actually discussing things, my concern is that you would open up more middle rent housing by opening up zoning but this sounds pretty similar to trickle down to me and I don't expect the benefits to reach the bottom 30% of the population. I think this is the major difference between grey tribe libertarian YIMBY people and people who are worried about the "lower" classes. I'm not opposed to zoning changes necessarily like many people are but I don't think that is a broadbased solution for the concerns of the people commentors like Alex are insulting and denigrating.
As someone who lives near the old site of Pruit-Igoe I don't think towers, at least as they are currently typically designed, are an effective solution. In fact I'm not exactly sure what you could do because the "market" will do the best it can to shove anyone below the 50% of income out of desirable places.
That I suspect is the source of rent-control and other similar policies. Subsidizing the less well off. Typically this is targeted at existing residents because "stopping people from getting kicked out of family homes" is more sympathetic than "subsidize the less well off".
I often think there's a high-level generator of disagreement here. Would you prefer A) The bottom 30% see their real purchasing power increase by 30% while the top 10% see their wealth grow by 100%, or B) The bottom 30% see their real purchasing power increase by 10% while the top 10% see their wealth shrink by 10%?
I am very much a mindset-of-abundance, positive-sum-game person, and I would greatly prefer A. I think opening up zoning would result in more of an A-type situation. Opening up zoning regulations would make everyone better off, but yes I suspect more of those benefits would accrue to the wealthy than to the bottom 30%. I still think that's in everyone's best interests. I understand being concerned about inequality per se, but only as a heuristic. I think following your concern over inequality to the degree where you'd prefer B over A is pretty sad.
While we're highly attuned to look at things relatively, I also believe that absolute standards of living exist. I think living in an apartment with dirty water, poor insulation, and no heating/cooling is objectively worse than living in an apartment with clean water, good insulation, and climate control, and I'd prefer a world where the bottom 30% lived in the latter than the former. The question of how to arrive there is a complex empirical question, not a moral one, so to me it seems weird when the "people who are worried about the lower classes" turn to moral arguments on this topic. I suspect that they are morally confused.
It seems to me that today's luxury apartments have all those amenities. It also seems to me that there does not exist the political will to publicly subsidize all of the bottom 30%'s housing to have those amenities. It seems like the fastest way to arrive at the world where the bottom 30% have access to those amenities is to let developers compete to build luxury housing for 20 years such that today's luxury apartments are the bottom end of the housing spectrum.
Prices will generally depend on two things. Mostly, it will be based on demand for housing. Much below that, a floor exists based on actual cost to build and maintain a profitable (even very small margin) unit of housing.
If there are 100 units of housing for $100 each, increasing total units by 5% to 105 shouldn't have a drastic effect on prices. Demand is probably still the major decider in prices, so maybe the price drops to $95, but maybe a much smaller difference and it's $99 - less, but not meaningfully. To get a much stronger drop in prices, you would need to build a much larger amount of additional housing - like 10-20%, to the point where you have absorbed most of the interest in living within that particular city and all excess demand - where prices can drop more significantly. They can never drop below what it costs to profitably create more housing, though, as contractors and developers will not make housing at a loss.
How much housing is needed will depend on how much extra demand there is. SF right now has a ton of excess demand, so maybe we would need to see 50% increases in housing to see that significantly drop. I don't think anyone knows for sure, though. If prices do come down, the prospect of living in a particular area gets better, and that would then raise demand again.
Exactly. In a lot of very desirable cities, you’d have to build *lots* of new housing for there to be a noticeable effect. That kind of sucks. We should still deregulate, though.
Oh, absolutely. I think this analysis helps to understand why building 1,000 units in a huge city like New York doesn't reduce prices, and why we should never expect it to.
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.
Lockdowns and a bunch of other things are just as authoritarian but a lot more inconvenient and ineffective. Going all in on vaccines is not only very reasonable from a technical / scientific standpoint, but it offers a great escape valve for the neurotic impulses of the people that want to “do something” the moment deaths and cases increase. If a fixed portion of our attention is going to go towards policing covid behavior, it might as well be this. The other thing is that governments and people tend to automatically freak out when many people come down with the virus and die of it anyway, and vaccines invariably keep deaths and hospitalizations down, which again calms down lockdown impulses.
That being said, I agree with Ziegler that vaccines reduce transmission and infection, probably, but the effect seems to be insignificant enough that a mandate isn’t all that justified. Hard to know.
For the record, my preferred “compromise” is for anti-vaxxers to simply waive their right to healthcare in some way or another (the specifics are tricky) and the rest of us to get on with our lives (antivaxxers would by and large not mind this solution either, I think, from my irl knowledge of a few).
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
I agree its not very doable, but to address the actual things you mention:
- Natural immunity should definitely count, in my opinion. The fact it doesnt for most health bureaucracies (see the Djokovic fiasco) is one of the bigger reasons I suspect a lot of vax public policy is motivated by liberal fetishes and not the Science.
- Allergic people can’t help it. Shouldnt be punished.
- Religions. The supreme theological authority should go ahead and state a position. I doubt any reasonably large religions will come out as anti-vax. One-person religions should not count. There remains the problem of cults, but I cant really say I care a lot about their right to be or not be vaccinated. I acknowledge this is pretty tricky and debatable, but the entire pandemic has been so.
- Boosters should be taken into account the first few years before covid becomes endemic, I’d say.
Christian Scientists are anti-vaccine, and that's a church of ~200,000 that's 140 years old.
Also, no they don’t. Church officially took no stand.
Wait what? These are the people behind the Christian Science Monitor? What?
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.
The idea is that sin taxes bring in enough revenue to cover the costs derived from an obese / unhealthy population, I think
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.
Yeah the “compromise” is pretty unrealistic.
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 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
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
Nothing animals do is 'voluntary'
How do you know?
As an animal, I can confirm.
But how do we know it's not an automatic involuntary response to going underwater?
It could be for, say, kingfishers, but given that all cetaceans (plus manatees and dugongs, which are of a completely separate order) use complex vocalizations in a variety of ways, it seems that this capacity came part and parcel with their adaptation to the water. However, it's still possible that living underwater itself selects for vocalization ability, and semi-aquatic species don't develop it as well.
Ah sorry yes I'm with you.
Other apes can't speak, but they can make a number of different vocal noises, even without control of their breath.
Yes, but they can't vocalize voluntarily/on demand, can they?
This thesis notes of an orangutan, "Of the 19 times a human model whistled for Bonnie, she whistled back 14 times; thus, this whistle sound seems to be under voluntary production. Bonnie is also able to modify her whistle duration, as her whistles were significantly longer following a model with a longer duration than a shorter model (Wich et al., 2009)" https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=integrbiol_etd
Something something hyoid bone (from reading _Altered States_ 40 years ago, "your friend is a fucking gorilla")... ah, google says:
"The hyoid bone is crucial for speaking as it supports the root of the tongue. In non-human primates, it is not placed in the right position to vocalise like humans."
They're always breathing. Most of the time they breath quietly, but sometimes they hoot or scream or whatnot. From my understanding, their vocalizations are mostly under conscious control.
I think that, without conscious control of my breath, I would still be able to speak (though with an odd cadence).
From what I've read, they hoot and scream when they're agitated or otherwise emotional. They can suppress their natural instinct to vocalize but they cannot scream on command.
My wife studied Chimp behavior in grad school, I'll check in with her, but from what I picked up via osmosis, this seems very incorrect.
-edit, from my wife-
"They can scream on command and by desire and be quiet on demand"
Do you have a source for your original claim of "they have no control over their breath and vocal chords"? The more I think about it the more ridiculous that sounds. There are lots of reasons that attempts to teach apes to speak have failed, but I've never heard that as one of them.
Anyone else know of this theory exclusively because of that fat pride Tumblr post? Heh.
This one has been knocking around for a long time, so long that though I vaguely remember rebuttals of it, I don't even remember what those were.
I think part of the case against is that we have examples of mammals that spend time in the ocean and they didn't turn out like us (whales, dolphins, seals) and we have whales that came out of the sea, spent time on land, then went back into the sea.
The claimed adaptations of humans as 'aquatic apes' just aren't enough to support "amphibious" rather than "spent time beside the water". And that is the claim there: that humans didn't just live in the littoral zone but spent considerable time in the water. Compare seals to us - e.g. the claim in this pretty graphic that human women have large floating breasts so as to be able to feed babies while immersed:
https://theaquaticape.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/human_aquatic_adaptations.jpg
Well, some seal species copulate in the water, but they don't have those kind of breasts - "Walruses are unique in that mothers nurse their young at sea. The female rests at the surface with its head held up, and the young suckle upside down"
Thanks.
I'm not convinced by those comparisons, because we're the only apes that went aquatic, so obviously it'll look different from other types of mammals that went aquatic. But the similarities are clearly there.
Again, I'm a fan of the idea that elephants are another example of an animal that went aquatic and then returned to land. They're clearly super different from us. But it's a hint that this is something that happens.
I'll definitely agree that the graphic about breasts isn't convincing at all, but I'd say it's a bit of a cheap shot, as it's far from a central aspect of the theory. In fact that's the first time I've seen that idea. Off hand it's weird that only females would evolve breasts in that case. I also remember Elaine Morgan also assumed we breastfed on land.
Alas the best explanation for breasts I've seen is that old reliable: sexual selection. Ie, the easiest way to explain any weird anatomical phenomenon.
I'd love to hear more about this. Hadn't heard of this specific example before but I feel like there are many examples I've come across where the expert consensus refutes something but it's hard for an outsider / lay-person to understand exactly how it's been de-bunked or disproved.
OK so another example I used to have is the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Initially this was considered a fringe idea (at least when it was proposed by Hugh Everett). But the truth is this has quickly become a very mainstream idea.
But yeah, I strongly recommend the Scars of Evolution by Elaine Morgan. It's very dated but still intruiging.
I remember when I came across this theory, it was also claimed that human infants are unique among primates in being able to swim immediately on delivery.
I assume this claim is false, but if there's a paper out there demonstrating its falsity experimentally it must be pretty darkly amusing one...
Of course, human infants cannot actually swim. If they are fat, they don't sink. They do hold their breath, as do many other mammals(diving reflex). They waggle their arms a fair bit. This is not swimming.
Fair, sloppily expressed by me.
So have there in fact been experiments where they just lob a bunch of infant mammals in a pool and see which ones sink?
There are programs that try to teach children as young as 6 months to float. Unsure if it is well-studied.
https://www.infantswim.com/lessons/isr-lessons.html
I have no idea but I bet that humans born 1000 years ago (no prenatal vitamins, no fast food, no grubhub) would sink just fine.
I don't think modern obesity kicks in quite that early. Babies are always fat, even the ones who will become skinny kids and skinny adults.
Babies aren't fat if their mothers are half starved.
It's not so much that it is easily proven false as that it isn't meaningfully falsifiable, I think.
I wouldn't say it's completely unfalsifiable. Truly unfalsifiable hypotheses tend to be completely disconnected from evidence one way or the other.
We can certainly imagine finding evidence in _favour_ of aquatic ape, e.g. if we dig up some kind of proto-human skeleton that shows signs of an aquatic lifestyle.
So every proto-human skeleton we dig up that doesn't show signs of an aquatic lifestyle counts as (weak) evidence against aquatic ape.
I was going to say something similar, and I also agree with your sub-comment that just-so stories are an indictment of the field.
I find very little that is genuinely worthwhile in the field of evolutionary biology, because almost none of the field (at least as practiced) is falsifiable. If someone came up with a different/better just-so story, we would have very little means of determining which, if any, are actually correct. Maybe part of this theory is true, maybe it isn't, but regardless we have zero means to test anything. We can't run an experiment, so it's just the theorizing parts of science.
I'm not going to say it's useless, but I think, as a process, we definitely shouldn't confuse such fields with science, or their products with knowledge.
I'd relate it to good art, more than science, in that it can provide interesting perspectives whose value is ultimately fairly subjective and arbitrary; it's not a description of how the world actually is, but rather a particular way of looking at the world.
Why would it be any less meaningfully falsifiable than any other hypothesis about human evolution?
That many just-so stories are accepted is an indictment of the field, not an argument for additional just-so stories.
I think you're not criticizing the AAH, rather huge swathes of the entire field of evolutionary biology.
Correct! I think the AAH is the best available explanation.
However, it is the best available explanation in the sense that "god(s) did it" were the best available explanation before Darwin. We should be careful to distinguish between "best available explanation" and "probably true".
Right.
Exactly. For a concrete example: Are there other theories on why human's lost their fur that are more falsifiable?
Well, i guess to avoid overheating (similar as the elefant, who retained his fur only in his incarnation as mammut) and to be able to sweat more efficiently.
The human temperature regulation relies mainly on our ability to sweat. In fact our fantastic sweating feature is much underappreciated nowadays, but it enables us to run for a long time through the african steppe without overheating.
I once heard about bushmen of the kalahri that literally outrun antelopes until they break down from exhaustion, this massively impressed me.
Humans are not the fastest, but it seems we can outrun most aother animals with our endurance.
I do not know, if this is how the first hairless apes hunted, but it would explain the sweating and the hairlessness better than the aquatic ape theory.
Not to my knowledge, no. However, the absence of a better alternative explanation is not in itself evidence for your preferred explanation.
It's not evidence for it, but it's a reason to prefer it. That's implicit in you "better". (Not that I'm saying this is the case with AAT).
yeah, I weirdly assumed most mammals can swim immediately on delivery actually, but I guess that's wrong too. Like nobody teaches mice or Kangaroos how to swim, but I think they're both able to. I wonder if there's a list somewhere of which mammals can naturally swim.
Is anyone here following development status of omicron specific boosters?
I don´t, honestly, they will not help with this wave. But I´m starting to be moderately concerned about a new wave next winter, due to waning immunity. It would be nice to avoid it, and omicron specific boosters seem like maybe best option (?)
The Pfizer CEO just claimed they'll have one ready in March.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/covid-vaccine-pfizer-ceo-says-omicron-vaccine-will-be-ready-in-march.html
Astra Zeneca said in December that they would start work on one but I haven't seen any updates since (although I haven't followed it).
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/kimberleespeakman/2021/12/21/astrazeneca-begins-work-on-omicron-targeted-vaccine/amp/?espv=1
I would like to see an explanation of the legal hurdles to a variant-specific booster. My assumption is that the process of approving a variant vaccine is almost, but not quite, as onerous as approving the original vaccine.
This assumption explains the time frame being longer than 4 months.
If I'm right, this is another great argument for reforming FDA rules. It may take months to demonstrate efficacy, but if all Pfizer is doing is tweaking the mRNA code slightly, there is no reason to expect the variant vaccine is not effective, and every reason to expect it will be more effective than the Covid Classic vaccine.
Therefore Pfizer should only need to prove safety, not efficacy, in order to begin manufacturing the shots and get an EUA. Meanwhile, in parallel, challenge trials could be used to show efficacy. The government could agree to buy the new shots, with an insurance policy that pays out if they prove ineffective. All this shouldn't take more than a month.
Even if eggheads don't allow challenge trials and people are given a shot that is not yet proven to work, that's so much better than waiting until the omicron wave is over before offering omicron shots!
If both reforms could be done (EUA based on safety alone + challenge trials), I suppose it would also allow flu shots that are more effective, because the strain(s) targeted by the vaccine can be chosen later in time, thus taking into account the latest mutations and prevalence data.
Thanks
YIMBY supporters (or YIMBY Ideological Turing Test passers) of ACX: What’s the YIMBY case (if any) for the existence of public parks rather than, for example, bulldozing Central Park to make way for more housing? Is there in fact a consistent argument against this?
Applying what I understand to be the basic principles / arguments in favor of YIMBY principles, it seems that public parks are – broadly speaking – the ultimate YIMBY anathema (I’m being only partially tongue in cheek here, I think I’m applying what I generally see as the core pro-YIMBY arguments):
• Unlike low-density zoned homes, public parks house literally no one, and thus preclude people living in the city center even more than single-family zoning does, and thus represent the maximum in opportunity costs vis a vis land that could be, but isn’t used for residential development
• Proximity to public parks generally (modulo ones that become popular drug dealer / criminal / homeless hangout spots) increases property values in the area, which prevents people lower down on the income ladder from living there in there, which as I understand it is among the chief terminal goals of YIMBYism (i.e., to bring down housing prices).
Now, obviously accusing YIMBYs of wanting to bulldoze central park for more apartment buildings is the sort of thing that would typically have a strong negative emotional valence, so I’m concerned that this risks being a straw man, but I’m not certain that that’s true here--perhaps the YIMBY argument is that you just bite that bullet, in fact the economic value of shoving more people into the city center is virtually always going to be larger than the economic value of a public park, and if parks create so much utility then they can pay their own rent in the form of private parks that people can pay to enter—and the fact that these are thin on the ground suggests that in fact parks are and essentially always will be a suboptimal use of land that can only exist by thwarting the march of the private market.
Alternatively, the (in my view weaker) YIMBY-compatible argument for public parks might be that there’s a difference in kind between the utility of public greenspace in parks—which anyone can enter—versus private greenspace as imposed in the form of setbacks and lawns / minimum lot sizes.
I don’t think this argument is totally specious (in particular, I would agree that the utility of greenspace tends to scale superlinearly with its contiguous area. I would say that Central Park provides much more value than a set of microparks of equivalent size scattered throughout New York. Also there are many activities that just can’t reasonably take place (or take place only in a dramatically degraded manner) in smaller areas—frisbee, sports fields, wildlife habitats, etc.), but I don’t think that that argument directly responsive to the kind of bulldozer utility-maximization arguments that are the core of YIMBY—parks can have superlinear utility but still have less total utility than apartment buildings do.
However, beyond the superlinear utility argument (which isn’t a knockdown) arguments that public greenspace intrinsically provides more utility than private greenspace *in a way that justifies deviation from laissez-faire land use* seem weak. Despite being public, parks are going to provide dramatically more utility to people who live in their immediate area than to the residents of a city at large, which creates an (admittedly imperfect) analogy with the private enjoyment of lawns being enjoyed by the owners of said lawns (and as the SFH-zoning contingent would often say, lawns create public external utility because SFH neighborhoods both look and are significantly nicer places to be than denser neighborhoods, which is why SFH zoning is a thing in the first place). And without a superlinearity argument, it would seem to be arbitrary whether the geographically-limited benefits of a park are distributed among many parcels for *de jure* private enjoyment versus a different set of parcels for *de facto* private enjoyment by dint of the costs in time and travel imposed on those who aren’t geographically proximate. As far as I can tell the counterargument to *that* might be something like a set of apartment buildings providing for more intensive and efficient use of greenspace for enjoyment rather than individual houses with lawns that are 99% unoccupied, but I think that while this is a decent argument it isn’t a knock-down (in brief, because lawns provide externality reduction in addition to recreation space, and because more intensive use of the commons tends to degrade their utility).
So, TL;DR: YIMBYs, why shouldn’t we bulldoze Central Park and cover it with apartment buildings?
"Note that with severe enough property limits, negative declared property values can make sense. For example, if a property must be maintained so as to serve as a public park, the only people willing to become owners are those who get paid when they take the property, and then get paid per unit time for remanning owners. In this way, city services can be defined and provided via this same decision mechanism."
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/01/fine-grain-futarchy-zoning-via-harberger-taxes.html
YIMBY generally means one of two related things. First, that private land should be free for its private owners to use in whatever manner they feel advantageous(*), including but not limited to high-density housing. And second, that public land should be put to whatever is most generally in the public good, even if that means a homeless shelter or a nuclear power plant.
In the former case, public parks aren't private land. Outside of anarcho-capitalism, there is no general "requirement" that all public land should be turned over to private owners. If a private property developer wants to build a high-rise apartment building, let him buy someone else's private property - if the high-rise apartment building is at all market-optimal, he should be able to offer a price that will convince the current residents to take the money and run, and per NIMBY the neighbors don't have any say in the matter.
In the latter case, *maybe* the best public good is to turn a public park into a public housing development, but probably not - parks are a real public good, and if you're going to increase the population of an area, you're probably going to want more of them, not less. So pave over the local landfill and turn *that* into a public housing development.
And in either case, if you turn too many parks into high-density housing, lots of real people are going to say "why would I want to live in this hellscape without a hint of green space?" and look real hard at whether they can afford to convince themselves they can afford to move out to the suburbs and commute (or telecommute). At that point, a bunch of your low-density housing becomes suddenly vacant, and sure you can find people to move in to it if you try, but maybe you should have just turned that low-density housing into high-density housing and left the parks alone.
Is there any urban area where we want to turn all the parks *and* all the low-density housing into high-rise apartments, and if so, why?
* And doesn't literally stink up the place or otherwise impose gross externalities on the neighbors.
Granting as a preliminary matter that I'm responding solely to the latter case except to the extent that I think the rationale for the latter case militates against the existence of public land at all[1]
"Is there any urban area where we want to turn all the parks *and* all the low-density housing into high-rise apartments, and if so, why?"
What I had in mind specifically here was the quite literal example of Central Park, which is surrounded by high-density housing in an area with incredibly high population density and high housing prices (also, there's not a lot of low density housing to upzone in the area.). While I'm sure one good argue that this contrived relative to, say, legalizing ADUs in Portland, I think it's nevertheless a fair one to hold the YIMBY position accountable for before because It's one of (quite possibly the) maximum examples of the problems that YIMBYism purports to solve:
(1) High opportunity costs created by leaving land undeveloped (given the astronomical rents commanded in Manhattan), and
(2) Insufficient housing for everyone who could be working there[2]
Relatedly, reaching Manhattan-levels of density on the basis of utility-maximizing arithmetic seems to be an actual factual goal of YIMBYs in the highest demand metros where (predictably) the YIMBY/NIMBY fights tend to be the most acute (The Bay Area, Seattle, etc.) and would indeed seem to be the terminal end goal of any YIMBYist program.
Obviously building over Central Park would reduce the per-capita QoL of nearby residents but candidly I *suspect* it would be utilitarian-optimal in the sense of increasing legible local GDP on net because the value of the apartment buildings and the number of additional dwellings that could be built would overwhelm the per-capita QoL reduction.
In essence, this seems to me to be the core YIMBYist argument: that the magnitude of the gain of putative benefits of stuffing more people into a fixed area of land is higher than the loss any putative benefits that accrue to existing landowners for leaving land undeveloped (for new residents it's probably a safe assumption that living there is positive-sum since they aren't subject to any QoL reduction by dint of reduction in open space because they can only move in after the open space has already been developed.)
It seems broadly self-evident that the contingent who initially imposed low-density zoning did so out of a perception that the quality of life of residents would be higher in a low density than a high density environment (why else would you zone it that way in the first place?) so in a sense the belief that the sheer number of positive-sums transactions from higher density will outweigh any putative loss of the benefits of a lower-density environment are kind of implicit in the YIMBYist stance.
Where I think we disagree is in whether there is, in fact, whether there’s an equilbrium in which ‘lots of real people are going to say "why would I want to live in this hellscape without a hint of green space?"’ – I don’t see an ex ante reason to believe there is one nor do I see why one should be implicit in the YIMBY worldview (if anything, I suspect that YIMBYs probably tend towards being those whose visceral reaction to density is positive and whose need for greenspace is low to nonexistent, which seems likely to be a genetic preference with surprisingly even distribution in the US population https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/13/big-houses-art-museums-and-in-laws-how-the-most-ideologically-polarized-americans-live-different-lives/ ) even if it weren’t for cities already selecting for people with an IDGAF view toward greenspaces. More concretely: unless you’re one of the vanishingly small minority of people with a view of Central Park (or maybe Prospect Park) out your windows, Manhattan (and Brooklyn) are *already* urban hellscapes that would be made marginally but not necessarily qualitatively worse by eliminating the last vestiges of anything other than concrete and asphalt, against which would be a likely-substantial increase in the GDP. This is particularly the case because of the selection effects you can expect urban environments to exhibit (i.e., people who don’t care about greenspace are going to find it less psychologically costly to live there and so you have a population weighted towards people who don’t care about trees in the first place, because Manhattan is already hell if you do).
TL:DR: I don’t think it’s at all clear that there *is* a limiting principle that suggests the best use of public land wouldn’t be to hand it all over to private developers. If parks provide so much value they can charge for entry, which not only offsets the opportunity costs of leaving the land undeveloped but also helps limit oversubscription to a scarce resource.
[1](not trying to argue that point in full, more just that I think that unless you take the view "all parks should be private and paid by entrance fees" it's very hard without either a philosophical or an empirical precommitment to a particular development pattern and public-to-private space ratio to defend any particular Schelling Point as far as either the existence or the use of public land.)
[2] Taking Scott's post "Steelmanning the NIMBY's" as background, and particularly in view of Gwen's tweet-length summary of how the alleged 'failure mode' of point #3 isn't one (basically that *even if* rents don't go down with more density / houses built this is a reflection of enormous positive-sum transactions unlocked by the additional building, so heads-density-wins tails-nondensity-loses https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/#comment-674255 ), I don't think it actually matters whether the utility increase is mediated by a reduction in rents *per se.*
> It seems broadly self-evident that the contingent who initially imposed low-density zoning did so out of a perception that the quality of life of residents would be higher in a low density than a high density environment
Well, I own a house in the suburbs not because that's what I wanted - no, I was satisfied downtown and I'd rather not mow a lawn and I'd rather be in walking distance of a grocery store - but because that was the "best value" available in my area. My city has overpriced condos and underpriced duplexes, so I went with the latter.
> Obviously building over Central Park would reduce the per-capita QoL of nearby residents but candidly I *suspect* it would be utilitarian-optimal in the sense of increasing legible local GDP
Utilitarians want to maximize utility, not simply "legible" utility. Personally I'd prefer to stay out of NYC entirely because, as an island full of skyscrapers, it's a worst-case scenario for building housing, and so is expensive for good reason. If I somehow lived there anyway, I wouldn't care for Central Park to be *quite* so large, but surely there are small buildings that could be replaced with large buildings before encroaching on something so iconic? [edit: mind you I would prioritize more housing over the park, if higher density is impractical.]
This. Even the Kowloon Walled City had an open public area in the middle, and that's about as extreme on the "no controls on construction" as it's physically possible to get, given the de facto absence of any government at all
It's probably reductive to call me a YIMBY when housing policy is hardly something I give a first thought on an average day, but I live near a major metro downtown, there is in fact quite a bit of new housing construction happening near me, and I support it. And I am broadly supportive of decreasing zoning restrictions as well as eliminating many points in the vetocracy such as neighborhood integrity and historical preservation councils.
That said, my wife and I are in the process of attempting to get licensed to become adoptive parents, and one thing I acutely noticed when walking around is there is absolutely nowhere for kids to play around here. We badly need a park. Consider that I live in a block of contiguous townhomes with no yards. Each individual unit of housing having its own dedicated outdoor space is almost certainly wasteful of that space in a city, but a shared outdoor space for the entire neighborhood doesn't seem to be.
I don't think anyone's position is ever as simple as "raze everything that isn't housing and turn it into housing." Very few people want to live exclusively in cubbyholes stacked to the top of 1000 foot tall buildings. We just want more housing than currently exists.
I'm not a true YIMBY in all senses but I think chopping off even 75% of central park would be fine actually. the city I live adjacent to actually has an even larger park but then land here isn't nearly as insanely overvalued. I think we could do roof parks/gardens and that would be superior to spending ground level space. Maybe you could do some sort of fancy sunlight redirection and just build over ground level parks if you really want to save them. Central park is vastly underutilized for the space it takes up and having periphery park would probably just generally be better regardless of roof/sun light magic based parks.
I'm a resident YIMBY and I do actually take something akin to the position you're describing. My belief is that the design of urban areas should support the flourishing of all conscious beings (or equivalently: total utility). I don't think excessively large urban parks always support that. People derive utility from parks, but they also derive utility from having affordable housing, being able to live close to their job, and from the economic activity that concentration in cities generates. Similarly, I think plants and animals are often better served by allowing more people to live in cities (thus preventing exurban sprawl) than by having urban parks that support wildlife. That's not to say I oppose all urban parks! Parks make people happier, healthier, and more creative - those things are good, and we should still have parks, but it's worth balancing that against the costs of keeping big areas closed to development.
I'm not a New Yorker and don't have as good a handle on the nuances of life in NYC, so I don't want to comment directly on the Central Park question. But I do live in the DC area, and a remarkably large fraction of the land in DC is taken up by Rock Creek Park. I would happily support shrinking Rock Creek Park quite a bit to open up more land for housing. DC would still have plenty of parkland for recreation and contemplation, and the newly available land could house tens of thousands of people who would otherwise be forced to live in exurban developments or to leave the city entirely.
This isn't a totally fringe position either - my recollection of Death and Life is that Jane Jacobs similarly argues that making big public parks has tradeoffs, and that underutilized public parks are a poor use of space. Going all the way to pure laissez-faire land use would go too far for my taste, as I think that public parks are like libraries in that free access to them produces big benefits. But turning some of less utilized areas of larger public parks into land that's available for housing seems like a win to me.
This immediately makes me think of the repugnant conclusion of utilitarianism. If we can slightly decrease everyone's quality of life if it means that we can support a greater number of human lives, is that not a net utility gain? And if so, should we not keep decreasing that until we have the maximum number of people that only barely live lives worth living?
In the same way, if we can bulldoze Central Park and cram it full of apartment buildings because the benefit to the people who can now live there is greater than the benefit of Central Park as an amenity, then we should get rid of everything that could plausibly stand in the way of more people being able to live a better life in the city. The end result of such a policy is that city life becomes only marginally better than subsistence farming.
I'm trying to address this as dispassionately as I can, but this is basically my personal view of the matter.
I think there's an axis involving the involuntary conversion of use-value into exchange-value and whether this should be accorded a privileged status in neighborhood geographic character that goes under-examined in these debates (I may get around to writing a blog post about that some day....). While there's at least one class of asset that we allow involuntary conversion of use- into exchange-value for (viz., common stock, e.g., when a company accepts a tender offer), for basically every other class of good we do not -- you don't get to just take my old rake and leave a check. The astronomically high subjective value ascribed to homeownership and neighborhood character (as well as high transaction costs and noncommodification of the asset class) would normally counsel very strongly in favor of protecting reliance on use-value, the chief countervailing argument (on this particular limited axis) being that subject utility from living in a neighborhood is largely a function of the quality of your neighbors, which is too contingent to place a reliance interest in. There are in turn some good (though highly charged and not entirely dispositive) arguments against *that* rejoinder but that's getting too deep into the weeds for here.
Other than the repugnant conclusion / Iron Law of Wages / race to the bottom issues you addressed and the use-vs-exchange value issue, I also find the lack of any temporal limiting principle very concerning. Basically, here's is how I view the natural outcome of a YIMBY loop which seems to assume population ingress as essentially a constant that has to be accommodated (rather than, e.g., rerouted elsewhere because "my backyard's full"):
(1) Time t0: There aren't enough houses to meet demand; At least there is lots of open space which provides opportunities for recreation and a pleasing view.
(2) Time t1: Bulldoze open space to to build dwelllings
(3) Time t2: People move into newly-built dwellings
(4) Time t3: There aren't enough houses to meet demand; there is no open space and everyone's individual quality of life is lower, while the long-term problem of “existing dwellings are insufficient to meet demand” still exists.
Because there's so much low hanging fruit elsewhere.
I can think of examples where protected land should be auctioned off but NYC's zoning insanity presents more proximate opportunities for increased capacity than repurposing land that everyone generally feels positive about.
Basically I think the argument is, living in nice places is good, and there are lots of things you could bulldoze (or just build up on top of) to make room for more housing before you would think about destroying public goods like parks.
Public parks are shared amenities, bordering on being infrastructure like roads, schools, and fire stations. We don't bulldoze Central Park to put up highrises for similar reasons we don't want to tear up the pavement of Sixth Avenue to build houses in its place.
That is, the median resident wants access to a certain amount of green open space near their home for recreation and whatnot, and lack of this significantly diminishes the utility of a given dwelling unit. This preference can be met in several ways: private lawns, enclosed common areas maintained by HOAs, private parks funded by membership or gate fees, local public parks, or more distant public parks paired with transport infrastructure facilitating access a la Jones Beach and the Wantagh State Parkway.
A proper YIMBY could endorse any of those alternatives depending on what's the most efficient use of land, although I'd expect most YIMBYs to lean towards the latter options since shared space can be expected to have less overcapacity than single-family private space.
That said, there is a socially optimal amount of open space for a given land use pattern and set of resident preferences. It's certainly plausible that there might be too much parkland and not enough housing on the margins, in which case bulldozing some underutilized parks might be the YIMBY-prefered options.
A laissez-faire capitalist would incline towards whichever mix of the private choices the market prefers (single-family yards, HOA common areas, or privately owned outdoor recreation space), but it's a mistake to equate YIMBYs with laissez-faire: there's some overlap on preferred policies on the margins (loosening of zoning restrictions to allow denser development, as-of-right building permits, etc), but I suspect the median YIMBY to be technocratic center-left, not any type of libertarian.
Your response is very thoughtful on this and I think I don't have a wide scope of disagreement in terms of some of the object-level claims but I think I would broadly disagree with the claim that it's incorrect to equate YIMBYism with libertarianism. I see your point that the median YIMBY is probably from a technocratic-center left milieu (and with respect to various other regulations wouldn't necessarily be expected to endorse laissez-faire solutions), but I think that the nature of YIMBY as directed fundamentally to the problem-space of "reduce or remove restrictions on building" (hence 'yes in my backyard') means that *with respect to the narrow problem scope implicated by the philosophy* it's fair to so characterize them.
I think this is also, broadly speaking, putting YIMBYism on a sounder philosophical footing rather than putting words in its mouth or doing it a disservice: the libertarians have a ready answer to the question of what's "most efficient" or "socially optimal" in a world of tradeoffs -- basically, that it's exactly what the private market decides (I think the technocratic center-left / neoliberal position is similar, with the exception that the market solution is more of a default presumption with an implicit and not insurmountable burden of proof for deviation from the market equilibrium because, e.g., markets are extremely bad at pricing in externalities and externalities are everywhere). Thus, the YIMBYs essentially argue that if the amount of housing that would be built absent zoning is > the amount of housing with zoning, the existing zoning equilibrium is per se socially suboptimal. This also has the benefit of freeing the YIMBYs from having to argue that there's a command-economy solution to the problems of zoning which is obviously going to be very difficult to reconcile with the mainstream of technocratic centrism.
Lastly, I think the YIMBY's really are in the position of the less-government side of the Zoners - vs -YIMBY divide. SFH zoning is (in my view) essentially an attempt to leverage government power to solve a collective action problem (viz., the perceived downsides of residing in a high-density area) that obviously needs to restrict individual landowners' capacity to defect (e.g., by building an apartment complex on their property) in order preserve the zoners' desired equilibrium. The YIMBY's basically don't view this as a legitimate exercise of public power even if it might be a legitimate exercise of private power (say if a developer build the subdivision and rented out the houses instead of selling them)*, which is kind of the classic fight of "regulations and government exist to solve collective action problems and externalities" versus the libertarian "private disposition of property results in socially optimal outcomes" reified in this particular domain.
*HOAs are weird hybrid public-private creatures of statute and contract and I honestly don't know what the libertarian stance on them is (I think in favor?) so I'm going to dodge the HOA issues for now.
Part of where I'm coming from is my experience in right-libertarian politics (I was on the board of directors of the Republic Liberty Caucus of California in various capacities from 2009-2016 and was briefly on the central committee of the Santa Clara County Libertarian Party in late 2016). I lean YIMBY on most zoning and urban planning issues and YIMBYness is one of my major heuristics for whom to vote for in local elections, but I was in a distinct minority there among Libertarians and Liberty Republicans I dealt with.
The prevailing view I saw among my fellow libertarian types was suspicion of YIMBYism being the latest fashion of High Modernist urbanism, an effort by technocratic leftists to use government fiat to force people to conform to their preferred highly-legible mode of living. And I see where my fellow libertarian types are coming from here: I've heard a bunch of stuff from urbanist advocates both on the rhetorical level (e.g. railing against the "plague of suburban sprawl") and the specific policy level (changing zoning to mandate density and transit-oriented development, "road diet" transit policies, etc). Vox is a major offender here: much of their YIMBY-adjacent content that I've seen seems more like it's advocating reversing the direction of government interference in favor of dense urban development rather than the more libertarian-friendly approach (c.f. Reason's YIMBY-adjacent content) of lifting the government's thumb from the scale.
Part of the disconnect between me and my fellow libertarians on this issue is probably a question of type of libertarians. For the RLCCA in particular, most people came to it via the 2008 or 2012 Ron Paul campaigns, which emphasized the Rothbard/Mises branch of Libertarian thought, while I incline much more to "bleeding heart" libertarianism: I lean a bit towards the technocratic side of the technocrat/populist spectrum, while most of them are well onto the populist side of the spectrum, and my approach political ideology is more incrementalist and pragmatic while theirs is much more deontological. And a lot of the disconnect was less a disconnect on preferences in specific issues (it was pretty easy for me when drafting party platform proposals about urbanism and zoning to come up with language that I and my fellow RLCCAers were all happy with) than preference about whom to compromise and ally with (my preference was and is to ally with moderate YIMBYs to advocate for things like upzoning and as-of-right permitting, while theirs was to compromise with right-populist NIMBYs to oppose pro-urbanization mandates).
More broadly, I think there's a spectrum, or perhaps a web, of different policy preferences and ideological approaches here, and in different times and places very different coalitions have the potential to form. Parallel to right-libertarians allying with right-populist NIMBYs vs allying with pragmatic-centrist and left-libertarian YIMBYs, there's also a choice for the pragmatic centrist YIMBYs to ally with left-libertarians and right-libertarians vs allying with advocates of using the government to actively encourage or to mandate urbanization.
I don't have anything substantive to add to this at the moment but I just wanted to respond that this was a fascinating description of the dynamics at play and I really appreciate your having posted it.
Do expected benefits from more housing have to be necessarily nominated in some kind of monetary units? Because I can very well imagine a YIMBY argument saying that housing has a massive utility value (I don't remember it well and I don't have time to reread it, but I think here https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ had a good rundown of relevant factors) and more housing is a massive net utility gain as opposed to a large park.
Suppose you're in a society that's far more densely packed than the one we live in, and the YIMBY argument is not about green spaces, but about whether or not apartments should have kitchens, instead of providing public kitchen-spaces, since the kitchens in apartments are currently taking up a huge amount of space in this theoretical society for a room that is used only 5% of the time it exists; instead, we could have shared kitchens.
Your argument, in a sense, amounts to "Given that you all want to demolish kitchens, why shouldn't we bulldoze the shared kitchen?"
Now, the difference between private and public spaces is not purely quantitative; a shared kitchen is not, in fact, perfectly analogous to a private kitchen, and you can sunbathe in the nude in a fenced private yard in a way that you can't in Central Park. However, the difference between private greenspace and public greenspace is not comparable to the difference between having greenspace, and not having greenspace.
I think your analogy is helpful to think about and cleverly put but I'm not sure I would agree that it's necessarily dispositive, but unfortunately this responsive may be subject to enough subjective mediation that we're at an impasse
Specifically, the concern with the kitchen is that it's something that basically can't be forgone (I mean, I guess you could go full Singapore and have some combination of public eateries and delivery be the primary source of meal consumption, so it's not inconceivable, but I think we'd agree that to first order there has to be some kind of kitchen), but I'm not sure that that's true with parks -- places (including in NYC) with no proximate access to greenspace exist everywhere (also, Kowloon Walled City was a thing), and I just don't view greenspace as something that *must* exist in a city (indeed, cities essentially by definition have little of it) so much as a pleasant amenity--but then, so is a lawn.
More generally, I'm not that I would agree that the difference between private greenspace and public greenspace is not comparable to the difference between having greenspace, and not having greenspace." -- I think that while this is probably true for recreational purposes, it strikes me as false as far as "what do you spend most of your time looking at / what is your visual and auditory milieu?" If the nearest park is even a few blocks away, then while that clearly is much better than no such park existing, the lion's share of your existence is characterized by inhabiting a "concrete jungle" without respite regardless of its presence.
Obviously that's reflective of a subjective perception but it seems like one that's a serious contributor to the SFH zoning impetus against which the YIMBY position is fighting, right? With respect either to parks or private lawn setbacks, the Zoner position would in either case be a reification of "I like seeing leaves / grass / trees more than brown and gray buildings and am willing to restrict development of land for private dwelling to ensure my immediate living environs reflect this preference," whereas the marginal YIMBY position is more or less always going to be "fewer trees, more places for people to live."
Note that Kowloon Walled City, as the most extreme example of density we have, still did have an open public plaza in the centre (while not a very green one, that's tangential to the point of public common spaces)
The lion's share of most people's existence is characterized by inhabiting a "drywall jungle", regardless of how much greenspace there is outside.
But also, I think we're talking about two radically different purposes for greenspace. Central Park does not behave like the yards of my neighbors; it acts more like my own yard, albeit less private. Insofar as you want to achieve the kind of greenspace that "my neighbor's yards" provide, a large contiguous block of greenspace is basically the least efficient way of achieving this; it would be better to, say, increase the separation of buildings, such that the area between buildings becomes split between sidewalks, greenspace, and streets, instead of just sidewalks and streets. You can't realistically achieve this in a city like NYC, where everything is already built, except maybe on very long timescales.
The YIMBY position isn't "fewer trees, more places for people to live"; it is "Denser development"; take a neighborhood, bulldoze everything, and then build a massive skyscraper in its place - with the same ground footprint as just the houses, leaving a massive greenspace - and you've achieved that objective.
I'm far from an expert on this subject. But my assumption was always that Yimby's are fine with the concept of dedicated (protected) public spaces. So yes to parks, yes to public museum's etc. They're more opposed to restrictions on area's that everyone agrees should be places where people live.
Like no Yimby is going to be ok with bulldozing a street to build a skyscraper on what used to be a highway.
But I could be very wrong here.
I think the YIMBY would in practice take the position that zoning is a lower-hanging fruit than parks are and would face less opposition so the pragmatic thing to do is fight against zoning, but what I'm trying to get at is that I'm not sure I understand why there's a consistent limiting principle that wouldn't apply equally to public laws settings aside public land for non-development as to private land for non-development.
I take your point to be in some sense that this is kind of like the question of whether honey is vegan -- many evangelical vegans really don't care because most of the animal welfare marbles are in all the other parts of veganism -- but also, like, assuming the YIMBY rationale is premised on a maximization of economic utility (which tends to be a very powerful force when unleashed on a problem) the justification for the existence of public spaces at all seems like it's subject to the same question.
It's not that there's a limit that we can derive a priori but that there's an optimum which most of North America's urban areas are clearly on one side of. Few NIMBYs would push for the average European city to be made as dense as Kowloon Walled City.
Would 1000 homes with park generate more tax revenue than 2000 homes and no park?
Yes, make taller buildings.
lol username checks out
Note that there were quite a number of anti-abortion murders and bombings, so while I agree that it's a small minority of people that take that stance said minority exists and imposes real security costs. The analogy also differs in that assassinations can be unilateral, while bulldozing central park for more skyscrapers is something that would require a lot of buy-in
>I think this is strawman-adjacent, if not an actual strawman. As you point out yourself, very few people would be in favor of bulldozing central park to make more apartments.
It's not meant to respond to an actual position, he's saying that given the beliefs of YIMBYists, why not X?
I have strong doubts that the aggregate value of the all the housing that could be built in Central Park would not exceed by at least two orders of magnitude the diminution in value of housing along Central Park West and (by commensurately less with distance) other housing on the UWS / UES, but I concede that this is very much an empirical question. Indeed, this seems to highlight the tension in your point that "Walkable high density neighborhoods with access to amenities are land-expensive for a reason: people like living there. " -- doesn't this basically conflict directly with the notion that land should be left empty anywhere in view of the empirical evidence that high density zoning is land-expensive?
Separately, (maybe this should be its own thread?), I feel like the pandemic hasn't really caused rents to dramatically decrease (my understanding is they have, but not by *that* much) despite the dramatically decreased utility of urban amenities for city-dwellers. This may be an issue that generates more heat than light (and admittedly is strongly influenced by the fact that for me personally, putative urban amenities provide negligible marginal utility relative to the disutility I incur for living in a dense city) but I think the chief amenity people seek for urban living is payment (which, were remote work a plausible long-term arrangement, would suggest a very different set of equilibrium living arrangements than would demand for physical proximity to restaurants and museums and such). Square footage is dear in the city because people like having it, but they get paid more (and have more labor market fluidity) and live in smaller spaces than they would otherwise prefer as a tradeoff.
Is there a way in Substack comments to collapse each top-level comment and replies or to just skip to the next one? I find it very annoying to have to manually scroll past long sub-threads on topics I'm not interested in, especially because the indentation differences are hard to follow.
You click the faint grey bar to the left of any comment to collapse that comment and all the replies to it.
Thank you! This will greatly increase the number of comments I actually read.
Thanks!
This got some great responses over on FdB's substack, so I want to ask the smart people over here as well:
Does anyone here have a story of learning a new language in their adult life, especially with a focus solely on reading/writing*? I'm attempting to take up German. I've been doing Duolingo for the last two weeks, and I plan to start supplementing it by hand-translating books on botany or something. Lots of people seem to recommend Anki but that seems so soulless to me.
*I say solely on reading/writing because I have no interest in speaking verbally to people in the language. I just want to read fountain pen forums and philosophy books dammit!
I've learnt both French and Spanish as an adult, well enough that I was able to work fully in Spanish.
Anki/Duolingo etc. are good for getting some basics, but if you want to start reading philosophy books, I doubt they will be enough.
For me, after 2-4 weeks using language apps, I picked books that I knew *very* well - for me it was Harry Potter and the His Dark Materials series. I then got them in both English and the target language. I then just tried to read the book, relying on (a) knowledge of the books (b) words that look similarish to English (c) the basics I'd got from the app. Whenever I got stuck (which was often) I'd use the English language copy of the book as an answer key. I think this is easier if the target language book is on an eReader, my Kindle will define words when I press on them and also remember which words I've looked up if I want to build vocab lists.
When I finished a book, I then picked a more demanding book.
For both languages it took about a year until I was reading complex, adult novels (Count of Monte Cristo for French and 2666 by Bolaño for Spanish)
I think the advantage of this system is that it is much much much more enjoyable than the apps. It also follows the maxim of "learn the thing by doing the thing."
I don't think I have a natural affinity for languages, but nonetheless using this method I've managed to really surprise people by how quickly I was able to learn.
Okay so I'm definitely not far enough along to remotely say I've learned a language, but: I've been studying Chinese for about 9 months, and mostly focusing on reading. I do use anki-like apps, and I guess they're a bit soulless but I like the learning process. I practice reading with news articles specifically written for language learners. I'm not sure if they could act as a full replacement for flash cards though. Although German does at least use the same script as English, so that helps.
You may find fluent forever (the app) to be a less soulless version of anki. It does focus on pronunciation at first but I suppose you could ignore that if you never plan to speak or listen to the language. In my experience, I don't find duo lingo to help me learn anything except how to fill in duo lingo exercises. I've yet to meet anyone that he que fluent in a language by using it, although I haven't seen any data on it.
Have you seen the kind of sentences that German philosopers write?
> But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human--all-too-human facts.
guys, i swear the german version of this is easier to understand. Selbstverstaendlich.
> Ernstlich geredet, es giebt gute Gründe zu der Hoffnung, dass alles Dogmatisiren in der Philosophie, so feierlich, so end- und letztgültig es sich auch gebärdet hat, doch nur eine edle Kinderei und Anfängerei gewesen sein möge; und die Zeit ist vielleicht sehr nahe, wo man wieder und wieder begreifen wird, was eigentlich schon ausgereicht hat, um den Grundstein zu solchen erhabenen und unbedingten Philosophen-Bauwerken abzugeben, welche die Dogmatiker bisher aufbauten, - irgend ein Volks-Aberglaube aus unvordenklicher Zeit (wie der Seelen-Aberglaube, der als Subjekt- und Ich-Aberglaube auch heute noch nicht aufgehört hat, Unfug zu stiften), irgend ein Wortspiel vielleicht, eine Verführung von Seiten der Grammatik her oder eine verwegene Verallgemeinerung von sehr engen, sehr persönlichen, sehr menschlich-allzumenschlichen Thatsachen
To my ear the german of this sounds better. Weird phrases like ‘but to speak seriously’ -> 2 common words ‘Ernstlich geredet.’ The german words also are much more common-use words in german than the english translations are in english. Kinderei -> ‘kid’-ing -> “puerilism.” Anfängerei -> hold-on-ery -> “tyronism”. Even ‘All-to human’ is just one word ‘allzumenschlichen.’ It also helps that the Important Words (nouns) are capetalized.
Also, there are concepts in german sentences like 'doch' which are kind of like 'nevertheless it may still be' that your brain just gets used to when you use it all the time.
Indeed the German text is much easier to understand! But it depends on the philosopher.
Kant is famously so unaccessbile that even Germans prefer the English translation. Hegel is a nauseant anyway. I would recommend Schopenhauer's "Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit" as a very accessible, clearly written philosophical text.
I look forward to when I can read the original. Out of curiosity, how common is the "all-to-" part of "allzumenschlichen" in German? I notice it comes up a lot in Nietzsche's work - especially in Zarathustra.
"allzu" is relatively common. You can add it to a lot of words, but with with the current spelling rules you write e.g. 'allzu gut', 'allzu schnell'.
Two points on that:
1. The Kaufmann translations of Nietzsche's works are *much* better than Zimmern's:
> "Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism. And perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again *how little* used to be sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosopher's edifices as the dogmatists have built so far: any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief; some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all to human facts."
2. Nietzsche spends section 247 of that same book (Beyond Good and Evil) lamenting how German writing of his age has lost the style of the past when "the laws of written style were ... the same as those for spoken style"! Personally, I love his style, but I do recognize that it creates a barrier to understanding. I find reading it aloud as though I were presenting to an audience makes it far easier to follow!
Failure of translation could be a consequence of horrible writing in the originals.
I learned French and some German as an adult. I took formal classes, so I don't have a good recommendation on materials overall, but I recommend 2 things specifically:
1) The "English Grammar for Students of X" book for the language you are studying
2) Anki
Anki isn't a language-learning app: it's a flashcard app. Learning a language really requires memorizing vocabulary, and flashcards are the best way to memorize vocabulary. (Paper flashcards work too, but anki spaces the repetition, and is easier to carry).
Once you have the basics of grammar and vocabulary, translation is really high-value--it's not fun, but it really helps with building fluency and vocabulary.
I absolutely loved Language Transfer when I was learning Spanish, so I can certainly recommend it for German if you're into audio resources. He teaches the new language to a beginner on the podcast, explaining every detail of the grammar and really does a great job of building upon the pieces he introduced previously. Slowly you learn to be confident with the basic grammar and you have much better grasp on the language compared to just studying vocab in Anki, which seemed soulless to me too.
I have it saved if ever I get back to German as a first resource to try.
I've taught my partner English (we're Germans, his English from school was abysmal) by making him watch English movies with me - he then learned enough to use English for programming advice (very important), and we now sometimes use English at home, and he's become quite confident. Movies were the only studying he did. I suspect you could learn any language like that - get some primer in grammar, then just exposition. Or switch the order of grammar lessons and movie watching, I don't know.
Meanwhile, I became obsessed with Latin last year after Duolingo offered a course - I finished that one in two months and decided to go for a proper course at university. We surpassed duolingo within a week - don't be fooled, duolingo is fun and a nice start, but I thought I was making great progress, and it turned out I was not. Nine months later and I'm getting my proficiency certificate this month. With Latin, all my usual strategies of language practice fail - hard to get exposition to a dead language. I sometimes read Wikipedia in Latin, that helps. But it's the classes, really. I'm not good by any means yet and the purely translation-based approach in class isn't helping either, but I'm slowly getting to a point where I don't translate everything in my head. Very little experience writing, so I still suck at that, and I can't speak it one bit, it's all in text. Interesting about that might be that the jump from practice texts to Cicero is very quick and comes early - the course I'm doing is cramming five years of school lessons in two semesters, and I'm now translating single-sentence paragraphs. Don't coddle yourself with easy sentences. Look at the real deal early on. And don't worry about vocabulary, that happens all on its own once you know enough (say, the 1000 most common words - sounds more than it is, English borrows enough from Germanic languages that cognates make this easy). Also, find someone to chat with in German (in chat, I mean). It really helps getting the grammar right to use it actively. As it's not part of Latin class, I've taken up translating German and English poems and song lyrics and letting family (who don't speak Latin) guess.
When you say you watched English movies, does that mean that it was English audio with German subtitles, or fully English?
English with English subtitles was our go-to, but he had basics and I could help make sense of things he missed. I picked up bits of Danish from watching Danish with English subtitles (and then Danish with Danish when re-watching) with no prior knowledge, so I think that could work, too. There's language learning helpers (Chrome extensions) for Netflix, I use Language Reactor - this can help you quickly make sense of the subtitles. That is very helpful, though I do that just for fun, not to get properly proficient - I don't watch enough visual media.
I learned modern Hebrew and Norwegian as an adult. For reading I found it super helpful to start with popular fiction where I knew the story already. Things like Harry Potter and Jurassic Park, where all of the exposition is linear, all of the dialog conventional, and all of the story familiar - I don't think I finished most of them, but I found I was able to develop my passive reading skills very quickly this way. Versus starting with things I really wanted to read.
In the same vein - my wife is a polyglot (native fluency in 6 languages - 3 Asian, 3 European - and passing fluency in several others), she says soap operas are great for picking up a new language, she always knows what characters are saying from context. She puts the subtitles on so she can learn to read at the same time.
I learned Farsi as and adult in Wisconsin in 3 months and German at age 17 in Germany in 12 months. I can only read children’s books and Farsi. I read lots of philosophy books in German and I do think one thing to consider is that old German and old calligraphy German is harder to read than a top 10 krimi novels lol. Also I think it’s a false distinction between reading/ writing proficiency and speaking my proficiency. I was like fluent in German after 4 months of living there speaking only German so I think maybe you should ‘just go live there’
+1 for just go live there, if and whenever you can.
There are great translations. Why read in the original German?
Often English translations from French and German (especially French) sound better than most native English writers. I've never had a bad experience with translation from such a closely-allied language.
On the other hand, translations from Latin usually sound mediocre, and translations from Greek usually sound horrible. It's almost like the translations sound better the closer the original language is to high-status English, so that French > German > Latin > Greek.
As a French native and someone fluent in reading English, English translations of French classics are just not the same. It's not the same language, people don't talk and write the same way. I wouldn't call one better than the other, but something is clearly lost (and something else gained) when translating something.
I read & loved the C.S. Moncrieff translation of Proust. If you're familiar with that translated version and the French original would love to hear your take on how they compare.
I think English shares more vocabulary with Latin than German.
And every time I read some supposedly amazing translation and then look at the original I notice I was missing a lot. Reading philosophy in the original language is a good reason to learn a language.
Oh. I did not know that. Claim:
"In 2016, English vocabulary is 26% Germanic, 29% French, 29% Latin, 6% from Greek and the remaining 10% from other languages and proper names. All together, French and Latin (both Romance languages) account for 58% of the vocabulary used in today's English." https://prolingo.com/blog/is-english-really-a-germanic-language/
I had previously thought English was mostly German from the angles/saxons/jutes that came over from the vicinity of Denmark, but then it got a ton of french vocab that was disproportionately high status thanks to our Norman overlords post-1066. But it makes sense that if educated people were doing a lot of their scholarly work directly in Latin until the 18th century, we could get a lot of vocab directly from latin without French/German intermediaries.
If those fractions are by word count in the dictionary, I would suggest that the fraction of Germanic words in everyday speech is a lot higher. Obscure and technical words are more likely to be Latin and Greek (e.g. "obscure" and "technical" respectively) but words in daily use by ordinary peasants are more likely to have retained an old Germanic root.
Of the words on this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English the vast majority seem to have a close equivalent in Modern German; the first one on the list I could find which comes from the Latin is "people"
To be fair, a sizable number of academic terms with Latin roots have been taken directly from Latin in German, too. But in my past year of studying Latin, I find an English derivative for about 70% of new vocabulary, and a German one maybe 30% of the time. But German is a lot closer to Latin in grammar, I think.
Admittedly, part of my reason for learning a language at all is to not be locked into monolingualism for my whole life. I've previously tried Russian at college, but had a bad experience for a variety of reasons. German has the benefit of both being far easier and overlapping with topics I care a lot about (such as philosophy).
I won't disagree with you about translated German works sounding better than most English. I've fallen in love with Nietzsche's writing style after reading the Kaufmann translation of Beyond Good and Evil.
I support reading the originals in German, I have no evidence other than experience but a lot of confusing concepts (I’ve read / attempted Freud, Frege, Hegel ) are to me are clearer in German than when I have attempted to read them in English. Ymmv
For German in particular I highly recommend April Wilson's "German Quickly." When it comes to speaking, I greatly prefer Pimsleur's language courses, often available through a good public library system, to Duolingo (which I've tried but disliked and abandoned quickly, though perhaps for aesthetic/format reasons as much as anything else). With Pimsleur I was able in very short order and with no prior knowledge to learn basic Russian, enough to fumble through conversations. I took up German in my late twenties, less interested in speaking than in reading, and found that, together with the Wilson book, reading bilingual editions of authors I enjoy and attempting my own translations went a long way toward getting me up to speed. As with most later-in-life-acquired skills, I've found that language fluency dulls very quickly with disuse, so a little practice every day is essential. I would add that, in my experience, even if you don't want to speak the language, going through a course like Pimsleur, which, again, puts much more emphasis on speech, can really help with reading and writing in non-obvious ways. Reading is more than just decipherment!
I taught myself Russian and Polish as an adult. What helps as much as anything was forcing myself to do everything in the language I was learning, writing grocery lists, etc..
That and being constantly on the lookout for new words, phrases, grammatical quirks, etc. to learn.
Do you remember what books / audio tools you used for Russian? I really like languages but gave up on that one after about 6 months as it was just so damn hard.
This was from before the widespread availability of internet, so I used an old record of Vladimir Vysotskii.
Polish is more difficult than Russian, FWIW. The grammar is more complicated and has more exceptions, not to mention Polish words contain so many consonant clusters that every word sounds like the the same mish-mash of "S" "W" and "Z".
I am told that the hardest languages for Westerners to truly master are the Arabic and Turkic languages. This is because:
1. As actually spoken, they rarely speak in plain sentences. "I would like a beer, please!" is kind of thick and cloddish. Instead, one might write "The foamy nectar of Hamm's, refreshing brew of sky-blue waters, yellow and crisp. is what I seek from thee!"
2. A lot of conversational Arabic, Turkish, etc. consists of cultural references, e.g., quotes from the Koran or historical events, or poems that everyone knows or movies that everyone has seen. If you didn't grow up in that culture, you won't get the reference.
The best analogy I can give is if someone was learning English and then went unaccompanied to a Star Wars convention. Even if they have a good vocabulary and understanding, they'll have a hard time grasping what is going on, if they have never seen the Star Wars movies. What is everyone talking about and what exactly is "The Force"?
Hamm’s, huh? You must have spent time in the Upper Midwest. Though, there is an Ella Fitzgerald song where she riffs on the jingle. Maybe it’s fame is wider than I’m giving it credit for.
The beer refreshing
The beer refreshing…
Pre Covid, the gal behind the bar at the joint on the corner would start pouring me a pint before I found my stool. I was their Norm.
Do you speak Arabic or Turkish? If so, I'm curious about communication about science -- say in a lecture. Does the language used in that context retain any of the funky, fancy, strung-together-cultural-references quality? Even hearing that there's a bit of it remaining in a lecture about physics would delight me.
I don't, but I am now intrigued by the thought.
I had mentioned the theory to native speakers of Arabic and they said it made sense. Now I'll have to ask whether this also applies in the scientific context.
Thanks!
That stuff about Arabic and Turkish sounds very folk-wisdomy. I think there are much more difficult languages for Westerners to learn, phonologically and grammatically, among e.g. Amerindian and Australasian languages.
Among people I know who've learnt Arabic, the big issue seems to be "which Arabic"? You tend to be taught the standard variety, which is what they speak on e.g. Egyptian news broadcasts, but if you try to talk that way in conversation everyone will laugh at you. But then one of my friends who went the other direction and learnt colloquial Moroccan Arabic found that people from the Levant or the Gulf region couldn't really understand him.
In 2010 I started a new job in China. My wife, who had just retired, decided to study Chinese, and she did, seriously, up until Covid interrupted everything. She is one of the only people I’ve ever known who found learning to read and write Chinese to be easier than oral Chinese, and she got pretty good at it. As for historical precedents, the famous early 20th translator of the Chinese classics, Arthur Waley, reportedly never spoke Chinese. The story goes that he found the classical literature so beautiful, he didn’t want to ruin it with images and sounds of the real China. Of course, the Waley story might be entirely fictional, I don’t know.
Listening and speaking are so hard compared to reading!
How did your wife do it? Chinese is what I want to learn.
She started with books and flash cards, then took some classes at a community college, and continued with tutors, more books, language exchange with Chinese friends learning English, and eventually started watching Chinese TV and movies. She has a Chinese character program on her phone (Pleco) and she would look up every character she didn’t know and add it to her flash cards. She’s visually oriented so learning the characters wasn’t the hard part, and Chinese syntax is relatively simple (compared to, say, German or Japanese), but the tones of the spoken language were very hard for her. The best way to learn to speak Chinese is an immersion program, preferably one in China, but there are some in the US, too.
I've never learned one from scratch, but I've had good luck using Anki to improve my German vocabulary. It's just flashcards. Find some flashcard software you like and use a frequency-weighted word list or a word list in whatever domain you're interested in. Or just put down words as you learn them so that you can retain them.
I made my own flashcards, and every new word I learned I added to my flashcard. pile I ended up making several thousand.
It seems that any expert working in a giving area will typically be "alarmist" about whatever they are an expert on. There's probably a couple of reasons for that. The most simple is that if you spend all of your day focused on a topic it will probably be more important to you than other people. Second is that you are more likely to know about all possible catastrophic potential. And third, if your life/income is tied to an industry/topic, the more "alarm" there is about it, the more funding *and* importance you'll have.
I think this is true of everything from climate change to virology to diet and economic issues. I feel like this is a topic Scott may have touched on, but I don't remember anything specific.
Is this a common thought/understanding? Is there a name for it? (Or am I off base here?)
If so, what do we about it in an era where we *need* to "trust the experts" and "follow the science"?
I don't think that this is a general trend. Here are some counterexamples:
Virology. The whole debate over gain-of-function research is because virologists are doing something that most people think is too dangerous. And there's the anecdote from the Ancient Plagues post of the Russian microbiologist self-injecting 3.5 million year old bacteria out of curiosity.
Flying. The public is a lot more worried that something bad might happen to the airplane than the pilot is.
GMOs. See Toxn's comment.
Nuclear power. We didn't abandon hydroelectricity after the Banqiao Dam failure, so why are people still scared of Chernobyl???
In finance there's an idea around a volatility premium where the anticipated volatility of the future ends up generally being higher than the actual volatility.
I'm pretty confident this effect is pervasive and deeply baked into the human psyche.
Also, the experts you hear quoted by journalists are quite likely to be at the alarmist end of the spectrum.
And which sort of expert is going to be elected head of the WHO? The sort that will describe the latest IPCC report as "Code red for humanity".
Contrast that with this kind of statement from IPCC Lead Author Prof Richard Betts "Most climate scientists do not subscribe to the 2 degrees 'dangerous climate change' (I know I don't)".
And which of these statements is most likely to be in a headline in the msm?
Even if experts were not more alarmist than the general public, what ends up in our media is alarmist as can be.
I worked and studied in plant genetics for a time, and had a very different experience. For one, workers in our field were almost universally pro-GMOs (while being able to have complex conversations about public versus private development, conventional (reactionary) versus precautionary legislative approaches and what specific traits would be most beneficial). The things we were concerned with were the resurgence of crop pests and diseases, loss of soil productivity, unsustainable farming practices, and changes to farmland caused by climate change. The things we were positive about were improved approaches for imparting things like disease, drought and salinity resistance, the potential of new and neglected crops, and the coming information technology revolution in farming.
The lay public were uniformly alarmist about GMOs and ignorant/misinformed about the rest.
Conclusion: if experts seem more or less alarmed than you about something, it may be because you're simply less informed than them. Were you to become more informed, you would be likely to discover that they have nuances of opinion about topics which are equally (or even more) important to them, but about which you were previously unaware.
While I think what you're describing is real, and often has a component of fallacy-by-the-expert to it, I think it's also quite likely that the average member of the public is insufficiently "alarmist" (read: careful, taking actions to prevent/mitigate) about quite a lot of things.
Think about driving: Everyday activity, the experts are super-alarmist, and the average driver is quite poor and injurious accidents quite common. The dangers of poor nutrition- similar. The dangers of no exercise- similar. Various industry-related things- cropland renewal, food processing safety, logging, etc., etc. Investing- the average person spends too much and doesn't save enough, and when they *do* invest, they invest in risky assets (houses, single stocks) instead of broad, diversified funds.
There are a *few* areas where the average person is too cautious- moving locations and career/job swaps are two that come to mind- but this could definitely be part of the difference in "alarmist perception".
I am concerned that the [edit: longtermist] effective altruist community is committed to ending all human consciousness and thereby ending all human value. This seems inconsistent with their stated aims.
There's a dominant strand of thought in that community that uploaded people would be conscious and therefore the best way to increase long term utility would be to transition human society to computers.
David Chalmers has a good account of the view that computers would be conscious here:
http://consc.net/papers/uploading.pdf
His view is that if you created a computer that replicated the outputs of a brain region for a given set of inputs, when connected all together we should consider the simulated brain to be conscious since it would be functionally equivalent.
Here's my sketch of the problem. If you think that the existence of consciousness depends on the physics/metaphysics of our universe, I don't think such a machine can be conscious in the same way humans are.
The meta problem of consciousness is the difficulty of explaining why humans talk about consciousness. A lot of theories of consciousness give an explanation for why we might have consciousness (atoms are conscious, sufficient computation generates consciousness etc), but the meta problem asks how the consciousness that is generated can causally affect our utterances (for instance this comment). If we think that the correct theory of consciousness will be able to solve this problem, then the statements of conscious systems about their consciousness should be causally affected by their conscious states.
In other words, the outputs of a system that is conscious in our universe should be different in a universe that does not allow consciousness (even if such a universe is merely a philosophical possibility). i.e. if you "turn off" consciousness in our universe, we would presume that our behavior would change (even if the only change is that philosophy of mind seminars become really boring).
Unfortunately, a computer simulation of a brain cannot fulfil that requirement. If we simulated a brain, then at some level, the brain and the input of a question "are you conscious?" can be represented as a Turing machine with a given state. A Turing machine's outputs are logical truths in the same way as 2+2=4 is. We don't think that metaphysics or physics affects whether 2+2=4 is true and by the same logic, the output of a Turing machine with a given set of inputs should not vary according to metaphysics either.
What this means is that the simulated human brain's answers about whether it is conscious cannot be causally connected to whether it is conscious or not. If we think that the meta problem of consciousness should be solvable by a correct theory of consciousness, this means that simulated minds are doing some fundamentally different from human brains when they talk about their claimed conscious states.
Basically, human brain uploading is a process precisely designed to build zombies that will trick us (and themselves) into thinking they are conscious.
If you are an illusionist about consciousness, then none of this should trouble you because you don't think there is a hard problem of consciousness. But, if you think that consciousness does exist, you should be really worried that brain uploads would report exactly the same internal experiences in a universe without consciousness.
We won't know much of anything for sure until brain uploads work reliably, which I don't think is likely within the next century. Even if it's achieved, I think it'll be done first on cadavers, so I wouldn't get to live out my fantasy of chatting with my digital twin.
Setting that aside, it'll be highly educational. I am EA and not an illusionist. If digital copies are verified accurate simulations who still report experiences of qualia, that would strongly challenge my "consciousness is monadal/real" view, increasing the evidence for both illusionism and epiphenomenalism (in which the digital people are p-zombies), the latter seeming less likely than illusionism on my priors. (edit: Unlike you Jon, my sense is that if consciousness causally affects our speech, then a computer accurately simulating a human brain will not generate a mind that is convinced of its own consciousness the way mine and yours is.)
At that point I'd just say "oh well, can we just please keep humans around anyway?" Because it seems like in the illusionist world, it doesn't matter what we do because *nothing* matters, whereas there remains a little probability mass on other possibilities, so we should act as if one of those other possibilities are true.
I think Chalmers' dichotomy of "Biological theorists of consciousness" and "Functionalist theorists of consciousness" is not quite right, because I am not really a "biological theorist": I suppose that *at present* only biological brains are conscious, but that if we can scientifically figure out what consciousness is, we can figure out how to put it in a computer. After that, it could be okay if humans die out, but only if we're, like, properly certain that the conscious computers really are conscious. (edit: geez, what am I saying? of course I don't expect humans to let *themselves* die out, and I'm not landing on the side of Bender's sleepwalking goal of "kill all humans", and there's enough space in the galaxy for everyone, biological or not. All I really mean to say is that if life ends up as all synthetic beings, that could be just fine if they're conscious.)
Other people have already done good work at noticing the mistake in your reasoning: the assumption that it's possible to execute consciousness simulation in a universe with doesn't allow consciousness to exist.
I, however, am intrigued by this statement:
"Basically, human brain uploading is a process precisely designed to build zombies that will trick us (and themselves) into thinking they are conscious."
What do you mean here by zombies tricking themselves? What "self" are we talking about if they are not consciousness? Do you uncouple sense of self from the consciousness?
"His view is that if you created a computer that replicated the outputs of a brain region for a given set of inputs, when connected all together we should consider the simulated brain to be conscious since it would be functionally equivalent. "
I think that I do not understand the argument. It seems indeed possible that, at some point, we will be able to "replicate the outputs of a brain region for a given set of inputs, " but why would that imply consciousness for the simulation? Many things can be simulated or reproduced artificially, but it does not imply that all their properties are identical.
If a mind-simulation produces the same outputs as the original when given the same inputs, then the simulation must also be able to produce the same kind of consciousness-related talk that we are producing right now (at least, if the original has a philosophical nature). If you want to then say that the upload isn't conscious then you have to accept that consciousness-talk is not caused by the speaker being conscious, because the upload does exactly the same thing, for the same reasons, without the consciousness.
But if you accept that, then this very conversation becomes hard to account for and even harder to justify. Why are we talking about consciousness, if it can't have any causal connection to the fact that we are conscious? We would have to accept that when I wrote "the fact that we are conscious" this was true by pure coincidence, because an upload of me would have written the exact same thing even though it would be false. And if we do accept that why should we expect the arguments raised here to mean anything when they have no causal connection to their subject matter?
"If a mind-simulation produces the same outputs as the original when given the same inputs, then the simulation must also be able to produce the same kind of consciousness-related talk that we are producing right now (at least, if the original has a philosophical nature). If you want to then say that the upload isn't conscious then you have to accept that consciousness-talk is not caused by the speaker being conscious, because the upload does exactly the same thing, for the same reasons, without the consciousness."
It seems to me that I need only to admit that an output identical to consciousness-talk can be produced without consciousness, which seems reasonable to me.
"But if you accept that, then this very conversation becomes hard to account for and even harder to justify. Why are we talking about consciousness, if it can't have any causal connection to the fact that we are conscious? We would have to accept that when I wrote "the fact that we are conscious" this was true by pure coincidence, because an upload of me would have written the exact same thing even though it would be false. And if we do accept that why should we expect the arguments raised here to mean anything when they have no causal connection to their subject matter?"
I think that I am missing your point. It seems to be that you are arguing that if two "black boxes" always produce the same output for a given input, then the content of the two boxes, i.e. the processes inside, must be identical, which I find far from obvious.
As an anecdote, a few weeks ago, it took me about 10 message exchanges to realize that the customer service representative I thought I was talking to was actually a chatbot. Amusingly, when I asked to speak to a human, the bot kept repeating that it was indeed human. The bot was of course a very crude simulation of a human person and I think we can agree that it has no consciousness whatsoever. But I can imagine an extremely advanced version of the same bot that would be indistinguishable from a human, and it seems to me that this advanced simulation could be no more conscious than the little chatbot.
The whole point of mind upload is that it behaves exactly the same way as a mind for exactly the same algorithmic reasons.
It's not two black boxes that we are comparing, doing exactly the same things with the same inputs. It's two transparent boxes, where every tiny detail of the mechanism is doing exactly the same thing, with the same input, even though boxes may have been made from different material.
OK, another objection then (I am quite aware that I am trying to rationalize my feeling that uploads are not conscious!):
What we are comparing (brain versus upload) is not IMO "two transparent boxes, where every tiny detail of the mechanism is doing exactly the same thing," but one material mechanism and a simulation of this mechanism. It seems to me that a simulation can not been identified with what is simulated. IMO a simulation is like a projection of a very complex object on a much simpler "space" : a very small number of properties can be simulated, and certainly not the whole object itself.
There is a joke that every object is a quantuum computer perfectly simulating this object.
Would you agree that perfect simulation, a projection of an n-dimensional object into n-dimensional space preserves consciousness?
Chalk me up as one of the people who don't believe in the "hard problem". You haven't provided any actual reason to think simulated minds have less/more of a causal connection between their inputs & outputs, you just assume something mysterious is going on with biological minds and don't see any mystery in digital minds.
Artificial consciousness would be the greatest moral catastrophe imaginable and paves the way for incomprehensible suffering.
This seems like a successful reduction-to-absurdity of the claim that consciousness both has causal impact, and isn't purely computational.
For uploads to work the way you propose, for them to exactly reproduce all human behaviours including those where we talk about consciousness, and yet not be consciousness, it must be that even once you have specified exactly how a system acts in all circumstances, there is still an additional fact of whether the system is conscious or not that can be toggled independently.
But that means consciousness has no causal impact.
If we allow "circumstances" to include not just sensory inputs, but e.g. examining a simulated brain in a simulated particle accelerator we can rule out not just detection via philosophy paper, but through any physical mechanism whatsoever.
You can have p-zombies and epiphenomenal consciousness, or you can have conscious uploads, but I don't see any way you can avoid having either.
It's true that it's not possible to build a computer with the property that it's answer to the question "Are you conscious" will change when we turn off consciousness.
That's not because computers are incapable of consciousness.
It's because you can't "turn off consciousness". It would be like turning off energy.
Also, your argument for why computers would continue to behave the same if you did "turn off" consciousness, also applies to humans. Our actions are determined by a physical chain of cause-and-effect that could be represented by a computer program.
1. The inputs and outputs Chalmers is talking about are not at the level of the whole brain, but at the level of individual neurons (or even smaller sub-units, if those sub-units turn out to be relevant to consciousness). What you should imagine is replacing each neuron, perhaps one at a time, with a little piece of silicon with the same functional properties (i.e. same mapping of inputs to outputs). This is an important difference - it is not just the inputs and outputs of the brain as a whole that have to match, but those of every little piece.
2. It only makes sense to model the behavior of the simulated brain as a Turing machine insofar as the same makes sense of our own biological brains. After all, they share the same input and output behavior. Yes, it is hard to see how being conscious could be causally connected to behavior on this model. But these same difficulties apply to biological humans.
3. You could instead (as I think you do, IIUC) take a non-functionalist view and say that the inputs and outputs of each neuron (or whatever smaller subunits) aren't enough. For example, maybe it's something about being built out of carbon instead of out of silicon that makes us conscious. And sure, it is possible that our universe has some extra rule like this. But I see no reason to believe it - it seems arbitrary and ad hoc to me.
4. That said, as Chalmers seems to agree, we don't have a good theory of consciousness, so we shouldn't be very confident in any of this! I think the three main theories of consciousness relevant here are functionalism, non-functionalism, and illusionism. Two of these say the uploads would be fine, so maybe our confidence should be about 2/3! (Tongue in cheek of course, though that is roughly my personal credence.)
Where does ethics/thinking about ethics/making decisions with ethics intersect with “consciousness”? I used to think ethics intersected closely with consciousness but I’ve revised that.
I think the idea is that consciousness relates to moral value. For example, it's fine to step on a leaf, because it's not conscious. Or, should we be concerned about animal/insect welfare? Many think it depends on whether/to what degree they are conscious.
I don't feel too confident this is right, but I see the appeal and think it's a pretty widespread view. Curious to hear how you've revised your thinking on this.
It's nothing to worry about because it'll never work.
I'm not up for as strong a statement as "it'll never work", but I'm up for "show me an actual system that 100% acts like a human mind, to any input, and then we'll talk."
In the part about Turing machines, you seem to make an unstated assumption that this hypothetical universe whose laws of physics don't allow consciousness would allow Turing machines to exist. I'm not sure how you would justify this; a hypothetical universe whose laws of physics don't allow Turing machines to exist also seems conceivable to me. If you don't accept that assumption, another resolution of this question that doesn't imply your conclusion about uploaded minds possibly being p-zombies is possible, namely: a Turing machine's precise simulation of a human brain is conscious in the same way as the original brain is, & this means that a universe that doesn't allow consciousness would have to also not allow Turing machines.
Your interpretation seems to make an unstated assumption that consciousness can be created with any sufficiently large Turing-equivalent machine? But Jon M disagrees.
Turing machines are logical entities. While the circuits that we use to represent Turing machines might not be possible in particular universes, a Turing machine as Turing described it can be represented as a string of ones and zeros and a reading head that follows a simple series of rules to go back and forth along that string. You can build a physical instantiation of that algorithm out of rocks, dots on a piece of paper or anything else. I don't think there are many laws of physics that wouldn't allow something that could represent a Turing machine.
>You can build a physical instantiation of that algorithm out of rocks, dots on a piece of paper or anything else.
You can build a physical instantiation of the program's memory out of rocks, dots, &c. The same isn't necessarily true of the "reading head" that actually executes the program.
Maybe tone down your accusations against EA a bit? It's not a "dominant strand of thought in that community that uploaded people would be conscious and therefore the best way to increase long term utility would be to transition human society to computers.". Find yourself someone who actually believes this and argue against them instead, it's a better look.
My guess would be that very few EA people believe this. Even among the subgroup of EA people who care about this issue, most of them would probably agree to keep a couple of non-uploaded humans around (it minimizes risk, and you won't be able to convince all humans to upload anyway).
Your reaction is needlessly defensive here. I don't think the original comment was an "accusation" in the emotive sense you're using the word. It was just a (perhaps mistaken) attribution of a claim. He's not saying there's anything blameworthy in making that claim, he's just exploring its consequences.
I've made an edit to clarify that I mean the longtermist AI community. However, I do stand by the claim that that community has a strong tendency to believe uploaded minds would be conscious and morally valuable.
A few examples:
Holden Karnofsky explicitly make these claims here:
https://www.cold-takes.com/digital-people-faq/
Rob Wiblin (80,000 hours) makes these points on his podcast all the time.
Nick Bostrom assumes the moral value of digital people in Superintelligence (see box 7 how big is the cosmic endowment?)
Tendency to believe uploaded minds could be conscious and morally valuable? Sure, I'd guess all three of the people you cited would put over 50% credence on this, and that's probably true for a majority (though certainly not all) people in the EA longtermist community. My own personal credence is maybe something like 70%.
High-confidence consensus that "the best way to increase long term utility would be to transition human society to computers" and that we should therefore charge ahead and do that? No, of course not. EA thinkers who I have seen discuss this take seriously the risk that we could be replaced by entities that aren't conscious, and that this could be a disaster. They take seriously that choices about our longterm future have to take into account a wide range of views rather than be narrowly shaped by any particular conception of the good. (Could I be missing some secret cabal with more extreme views? Sure, I guess, but I see no reason to think so.)
Of course, it's true that views of consciousness have very high stakes, and it's certainly reasonable to worry that a community could go astray by having incorrect views of consciousness even if they aren't fanatics about it. :-) So while I thought the worries expressed in your first couple of sentences were pretty misplaced, and despite disagreeing with your substantive argument about consciousness, I appreciated your comment.
"uploaded minds would be conscious and morally valuable" is very much not the same as "the best way to increase long term utility would be to transition human society to computers". None of the people you mention makes the second claim as far as I know.
First, I apologize to Scott if this is not appropriate to post here, and will delete it if that's the case.
My father is a programmer who mostly worked for energy companies in the Houston area throughout his career. In his retirement, over the past decade and more, he's been working on what appears to me to be a very powerful machine learning modality based on specification logic (S-logic), which uses developmental networks called S-networks for learning and prediction. I'm an archaeology professor, so far from an expert on this stuff. What I write here will rely on what he's explained to me, the introductory documents he's written, and what I've seen of this methodology.
S-networks are self-constructing software objects that use aspects of S-logic (including model trees, weight interval probabilities, and multi-dimensional vector distance) to learn and predict complex memories. S-networks are a kind of neural network, but they differ from other neural networks in widespread use, and the methodology was developed independently of existing neural networks. I understand that S-networks are never subject to "catastrophic forgetting," for one thing.
An S-network provides a service to a client application, existing in its own partition separate from the application that relies on it. It starts off with no memories at all, and begins learning and predicting immediately and indefinitely as it accumulates disparate types of data. The foundational S-network software service is provided as an API with versatile tools for developmentally learning complex situations, prioritizing them, recognizing them, and reporting those recognitions, which should facilitate software development methodologies that emphasize modular design and separation of function. Client applications might produce very complex developmental learning situations, but when they use S-networks, all of the retained learning complexity resides separately in the S-networks. An application interacts with an S-network to record its restricted view of events and receives predictions from the S-network at a neural scope corresponding to a high-level complex situation previously learned, involving that application and potentially other agents. Each application/agent can then optionally use the S-network to record additional learning about a new response, which might mean adding new types of data, adding to detailed memories for an existing type of data, or adjusting biases of memories, for example, those involved in ambiguous predictions. I've observed this modality in use; we've been experimenting with it as a tool for placing archaeological ceramic sherds in ceramic types (a technical concept in archaeology analogous to "species" in biology), and it works.
The reason I'm posting this is that my father is looking for potential collaborators who might be interested in working with him on this methodology, with a view to their building a business. (My dad does not want to be involved with *running* the business; he wants to focus on developing S-logic and S-networks.) It's that commercial aspect that makes me hesitant to post about it here in Scott's space; I don't want to spam the open thread for private gain. But considering that this tool is extremely powerful, with potential applications for everything from heavy industry to social media, I thought I might reach out to a community many of whose members are software developers who are (importantly) aware of AI risk. I've been reading SSC/ACX since about 2014, and if very little technical knowledge about AI has rubbed off on me, I do know that about the readership. My father and I are both a little apprehensive about potential abuses of this tool, which I won't go into here.
Anyhow, if anybody would like to find out more, I would like to put my dad in touch with people who are able to build on this work in ways that I can't. My Gmail address is cociyo, and if you would like, I can share a longer and more detailed introduction to S-logic/S-networks and connect you with my father. I live in Central Texas; my parents live in Georgia but should be living in Michigan in about a year - but geography is perhaps not very important to this kind of undertaking.
Would you mind describing some more of its accomplishments?
I'm currently ~150 pages into Godel, Escher, Bach and can't describe what the book is about or even what I'm benefiting from reading it, other than it being quite enjoyable at times. I'm currently enrolled in uni (bio-chem) so any reading is somewhat of an opportunity cost to me.
Could anyone share their experiences with it and/or what you took from the book?
I read it around by college years as well. I wish I had read it when I was younger and had more capacity for awe.
I would recommend seeing these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWZ2Bz0tS-s
As you mentioned, I myself felt I lacked an understanding of the big picture. This really set things straight.
It was a transformative experience for me (for the better). Also liked his other books. Re. opportunity cost - it's timeless enough that it won't go stale.
A review of this book was participating in the book review contest here at SSC. It didn't reach the finals, because it was too technical for that. But I enjoyed reading the review, and I understood why the book was special to the writer of the review.
I am not very representative because I have strong background knowledge. (I knew Godel's incompleteness theorems before. I actually teach them in class.) But it could be worth a trial.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xexFJ7h0vULMDE7N77q_MIzXoerexfe_CqqGEL6hEoQ/edit#
An alternative title would be "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and Some Other Stuff That It Reminds Me Of".
The connection between Gödel and all the other topics (Escher, Bach, DNA, Zen, AI, Lewis Caroll, and many others that I've forgotten) is actually pretty tenuous, but it's fun to read.
This brings back memories! Three of us bought it when we were in college because we were broke and we could not afford the full price. Then we passed it around on a strict schedule and teased each other on the parts the others had not read or understood. I ended up being the final keeper after college ended. I am still waiting for my friends to knock at my door and ask to have it back.
BTW it's about Mu.
You're in a slightly unusual situation given that you're in bio-chem; most people who come to it come from the computer/AI side (hand-waving here), and those people quite commonly report hitting a wall when the DNA stuff starts. (....spoiler?) So good luck with the whole thing.
GEB is basically the Infinite Jest for engineering culture. You read it so you can tell other people you've read it and parts of it are kinda fun.
Great social signaling tool.
I haven't read Godel Escher Bach, but I can tell you that you're being (perhaps jokingly) very unfair to Infinite Jest. It's brilliant, and I genuinely don't think I've ever told anyone I've read it (until now).
GEB is something you can actively quote.
Infinite Jest sits like a prominent hog on your bookshelf for people to notice and catalyze a convo on how brilliant DFW was.
There’s a protocol to the pretense.
Similarly to what some of the other commenters have said, I read it as a teenager when it was fairly new and loved it. It’s a playful book, whimsical in its own erudite way. Doesn’t really have a main point, it’s more of a meditation on examples of recursive / self-referential / meta-whatever stuff across different fields. Besides the pleasure of reading it, the main things I got out of it were 1) an increased appreciation of Bach’s cleverness as a composer, and 2) a basic (non-rigorous) understanding of Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. Which was helpful as a corrective to the dream of once-and-for-all figuring everything out in a perfectly logical way.
If reading it is cutting into time you feel would be better spent on other pursuits, there’s no need for you to read it now. You can always come back to it someday when you have more free time. I read it on vacation at a beach.
I read it in middleschool and didn't really appreciate the math and can't remember a lot of it now. But my memory of it is that it had a strong impact on me just in terms of presenting novel ways of looking at things, interesting thought experiments and ideas, an approach to understanding the world that was more open and explorative.
I don't know what value the book would have to an adult that's already encountered these things piecemeal in other places, but it's great for kids.
I also read it in the 80s as a young person. My take on it then was that the book is about the idea of 'meta levels', and it was such a new idea that it hit me in the face like a fist upon first reading. But I didn't finish reading it that first time, I only got about 2/3s of the way though. When I picked it up again a few years later, the idea of 'meta' had so seeped into me that I couldn't re-read the book. It just seemed so obvious and plodding the second time around I couldn't get through it. It was a victim of it's own success. I'm curious to know how you are finding it Matt - the concepts of metalevels and feedback loops are so much a part of our zeitgeist today that I can't help but suppose that to a modern reader the book must seem a bit trivial. Fun but trivial. Back in the day it was like a thunderbolt.
I read it in college as a humanities major, and it makes a really good introduction to the mathematics behind computation. (For a humanities major, at least.) That plus hobbyist tinkering with programming was all the training I had for my current career as a front-end web developer. I'm not saying it can replace a CS degree, but if you're interested in that sort of thing, it's at least a good start.
The main thing I took from it is to be skeptical of people who think everything can and should be done “rationally.”
I read it a couple of times when I was in undergrad; I'm 50 now, so the following is from an old memory. The book is for entertainment, and for having a shared experience you can talk about, since about everyone in STEM reads it sometime. It's about self-similarity, which is an important idea in many fields. But the book is not deep in itself. The things you're learning in biochem and other classes are deep.
The example of the MUU language near the end is a good thing to learn. And Godel's theorem is certainly deep (Hofstaeder doesn't add anything to it). I think the followup book, Metamagical Themas, is more interesting and entertaining.
To sum up, I think it's a good book to read, but don't expect to find the secrets of the universe in it (you'll find some of those secrets in your classes).
I read it in the 80s as a young person. I think my parents had a VIC 20 early personal computer. But things were still pre-digital in important ways. The book is about repeating patterns (IIRC) and perceptual illusions. Why repeating patterns being compared across different disciplines was so cool - I mean, it is cool, but it’s a given in the digital age. We’re saturated with awareness of recursion and repeating patterns.
Reading it now is probably a very different experience. It’s a long meditation on the nature of meaning and self-reference also and that would be time consuming. A lot of it probably went over my head. There was periodically something Lewis-Carroll-y that made me very bored.
At some point during undergrad I dropped everything and read TE Lawrence’s “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” I am sure it didn’t help the grades, or the coursework, but I still remember learning certain things from that book. But yes, opportunity-cost.
I've been wondering about how people who don't understand technical complexities, and who know they don't, make decisions about which experts to trust. I have a hunch that i'm hoping people can poke holes in: most debates between competing people claiming to be experts aren't really about technical complexity; they are just debates about values in disguise.
For example, some people hate cryptocurrency all-together, some are 'bitcoin maximalists', and some are into 'cryptocurrency' as a general thing. I don't think most people involved here understand most of the technical details. So how does someone decide to become, say, a bitcoin maximalist if they don't understand what a consensus algorithm really is?
My hunch is that people are using their existing values, and seeing how well they map onto the kinds of arguments made in different communities. For example: bitcoin tends to draw more right-leaning people, because of its libertarian ethos. Even if people don't understand the details of technical arguments, anyone with a libertarian bent gets a vibe from the community around bitcoin which is very much aligned with their existing values: “don't trust institutions, people in general are shitty, so it's better for none of them to have power. It will take a very long time but doesn't need some leader making adjustments. Simple rules are the best, and correctly aligned incentives will keep everything working better than any alternative. The money supply should be fixed, nobody should have the power to create more, because that power will invariably be used for corrupt purposes. Proof-of-work Mining incentivizes renewables, and keeps skin in the game.”
Contrast this set of values with those held by "the ethereum community", which has a different set of values: “more complexity lets us do more good. A community should collaboratively make decisions to move together as a whole. With the right knowledge, we can make better decisions and thus improve the world for everyone. The money supply should be whatever the community decides and isn't a hugely important detail. Mining is wasteful and a technological relic, there are more advanced solutions which use less energy.”
Both of those philosophies reflect different values systems. And I suspect those value systems _themselves_ are what people are using when they choose which camp to join.
My hunch is that the same thing applies to arguments over lockdowns or vaccine mandates, etc - people aren't 'arguing' over cause and effect beliefs, they are just loudly shouting their existing priors. I'm pretty sure there's nothign new in this idea (e.g. posts on less wrong about 'flag waving', etc) - but what i'm wondering is, if we can't fight that, wouldn't it make more sense to try and come up with arguments for things we believe in, from multiple camps?
I can imagine something like a 'rosetta stone' of arguments, which tries to make red-tribe centric AND blue-tribe centric arguments for the same things. Is that likely to work? If you did so anonymously (so people didn't see you as a hypocrite), wouldn't that be a better way to advance your values in the world?
Mostly through evaluating credibility. Does this person do what they say they will do? Do their predictions pan out?
Why is it important to understand technical complexities? I generally find that people who are invoking technical complexities generally are either poor communicators or invoking them cynically with the goal of obscuring. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, there are essentially only three properties that matter: mining gets you bitcoin and takes energy and computer hardware; currency supply is fixed and can't be changed; anyone having 51% of the mining capacity is bad and breaks the whole system. I don't see why explaining the technical details would help anyone really.
"what problem does mining solve? why does it need to use so much energy? isn't there a better solution?"
How would you answer this question without going into technical details?
Definitely, if people want to know technical details, there's value in that. But none of the questions you've posed really matter when asking, for example, "is encouraging using Bitcoin as an investment instrument better than discouraging using it as such?" It only matters when comparing the merits of different cryptocurrencies, or when designing cryptocurrencies, which is beyond the scope of most discussion of cryptocurrency.
Most discussion doesn't need to involve technical details - in fact, the technical details don't matter at all in most cases, and could be different without affecting the arguments. So listening to an economist who doesn't understand how Bitcoin works, and only knows its economic properties, talk about the merits and demerits of using Bitcoin as a reserve currency, for example, is not a problem. In this case, the technical complexities are irrelevant, and shouldn't be discussed at all. It's sufficient to know that Bitcoin mining takes a massive amount of energy and computer hardware, without knowing why that's the case, for example.
I feel like I'm answering a different question from the one you posed, though, I just can't put my finger on what I'm missing. So feel free to correct my framing here / tell me what question I should be trying to answer.
OP probably wasn't limiting "technical complexities" to computer tech.
Bitcoin's economic properties are also the technical details. People who don't understand technical complexities aren't going to understand economics either, e.g. Bitcoin and inflation, or an economist arguing against Bitcoin-as-a-currency because of velocity of money and GDP (the complexities of that argument are beyond me, but the economics intersects the scaling details).
And if you did make Bitcoin a reserve currency then the game theory that secures its blockchain may break*, so an economist who doesn't understand how Bitcoin works couldn't properly discuss it as a reserve.
* An aspect of the blockchain is secured by the fact that actors will gain more if they help the network than if they attack it, the catch is that the "more" is denominated in bitcoins, and so if it were to become a reserve currency then "political gain" (and currency gain) not denominated in bitcoins enters the equation. A state being able to undermine faith in another country's reserve might be worth more to them than the bitcoin wealth it would forgo by throwing a spanner into things.
1. Mining lets people who don't trust each other to hold themselves to commitments.
2. It doesn't have to and there is better technology.
3. Often yes.
Sure it’s mostly ideological. Knowing how distributed ledgers work isn’t going to affect anybody’s ideology though.
Understanding the technicalities of climate change might affect ideology though, as the actual threat is somewhere between doomsters and deniers.
For anyone interested: Recently finished a very short novella on my (free) substack, minus an epilogue I will write probably sometime this week, purpose of which is to explain pillars of what I call an algorithmic republic. Specifically seeking criticism or any points of confusion. Am already planning a rewrite as I went overboard with a few jokes.
The Forum: a way of replacing regional broad based authority by allowing people to either direct their votes themselves or to choose representatives based on topic.
The Index: so learning lingo of this group and this is something like a prediction market but using juries to adjudicate adversarial claims and keeping ratings by topic so you can auto-suppress noise.
Minerva: autonomous non-lethal sentry drones that can be summoned via wake word or wake sign.
Am going to write out case studies of each of these in the following weeks to explain how they could be used to address real world problems.
Again, all criticism welcome.
Whoever gets to determine how questions are determined in your voting forum is going to be incredibly politically powerful
Thanks for the comment! Want to make sure I follow: idea is that there’s a question on the forum? As in how the law/proposal is phrased? I can add clarification around that in the piece but want to make sure I’m not misunderstanding.
So Arnold Kling had interesting piece last week, arguing (I guess from a right-wing perspective) that the US could use a COO to manage the government, along with a more independent auditor. (Honestly you can safely skip the first three-quarters of this piece and just get to the logistics starting at 'Restructuring The Regulatory State'). I disagree with large chunks of what he wrote, but it's an interesting jumping off-point for a discussion.
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/designing-a-better-regulatory-state
France uses a semi-presidential system, where a popularly elected President manages external affairs, and a more traditional Prime Minister apparently manages domestic ones (I don't know the exact division of labor). It'd be interesting to take Kling's COO and adapt it a bit to the US- say, a coalition in Congress appoints a COO to do the actual day-to-day management of the US government (2ish million employees, so the size of Walmart- a budget of I believe $6ish trillion). They could manage the bureaucracy, perhaps by being given the power to fire a small number of otherwise protected civil servants every year- enough to keep the bureaucrats on their toes, not nearly enough to go back to the 19th century patronage system. Making the position less partisan by removing direct election and maybe requiring a supermajority in Congress for an appointment might help make day-to-day management less political. (If Congress can't agree then maybe the 'old' COO can name their successor, to incentivize Congress to play ball).
Would be curious to hear people's thoughts! I'm a bit of a democracy skeptic, and would like to make some of the actual administration of the government less democratic & more technocratic. And of course most other 1st world countries already have a non-popularly elected Prime Minister, so it's not too wild of an idea
As always, the system is defined by its condition and its constraints, not what label anyone chooses to put on it.
The COO as proposed is a Cabinet-level official requiring Senate confirmation that has the ability to unilaterally rewrite vast swathes of law. The obvious result is that the seat goes permanently unfilled, except maybe when you have a mid-50s Senate majority and aligned President they trust to keep the COO on an extremely short leash. This is an unnecessarily elaborate proposal for narrow, volatile filibuster reform.
(Ok, the *really* obvious result is that this would require at least one Constitutional amendment to set up in the first place at a minimum, and it's a complete non-starter.)
The CA and their Audit Agency don't appear to have any explicit powers the GAO doesn't already have. This is a proposal to... make people take it more seriously? By slashing the Comptroller's term length? Genuinely not sure what structural changes Kling is thinking of here.
Not just trying to naysay here, but I'm not seeing anything here worth building upon.
The COO being able to 'unilaterally rewrite vast swathes of law' part is obviously silly, Kling was just completely wrong there. Closing/restructuring various agencies should be a function of Congress, not the COO. I was more interested in a general manager-type.
"The CA and their Audit Agency don't appear to have any explicit powers the GAO doesn't already have"
As mentioned with the Control Yuan in Taiwan example, other countries have their auditor-types constitutionally protected. For example Trump famously fired 5 different inspector generals who were supposed to be overseeing different departments- the idea would be to make them unfireable. His aides also flouted the Hatch Act several times, which prohibits government officials from campaigning while in their official duties. All the GAO could do with Kellyanne Conway's repeated violations of the law was..... refer her to Trump, who was her boss. Towards the end of his time in office he held a campaign event on White House grounds, which again is a Hatch Act violation. There were..... zero consequences.
I'm not really interested in doing in doing a ton of Trump-bashing, simply pointing out the most recent examples of behavior that an auditor should be able to investigate & fine. (We could easily see a Democratic president doing the same thing in the future). Constitutional protection seems like a good idea
It's one thing to declare that the COO has a charge to maximize operational effectiveness and another to set up a system where the COO is incentivized to follow this charge. The ability to reorganize the executive branch is a huge amount of power that someone appointed by the president (with advice and consent of the Senate) might use for other causes. Similarly, what incentive does the Chief Auditor, appointed by the same president, have to be adversarial to the COO? The author talks about some interesting ways in which this might fail, but he doesn't mention the boring / depressing failure: both the CA and COO are partisans with largely the the same goals. Just like how the adversarial relationship between Congress and the President doesn't work like it's supposed to when everyone follows their party's line.
I think that the regulatory state needs more democracy, rather than less. If some agencies are supposed to be independent, their leadership should be independently elected. The EPA administrator should stand for election every four years like the president and the SEC commissioners should run every six years like Senators. I suspect that the Post Office might get more efficient before an election for the Postmaster General.
This might just end up with the Red vs Blue tribalism that even many local elections have become. But it might also encourage more independent politicians and split-ticket voting. If someone likes Democrats on the environment, but Republicans on the economy, they could make this known.
Something like this already exists on the state level. You'll remember the Georgia 2021 runoff election, where Democrats picked up two Senate seats. There was also a runoff for Public Service Commission, which was won by Lauren "Bubba" McDonald, a pro-nuclear, pro-solar Republican.
This seems similar to how city governments work, except the city manager is appointed by the mayor, not the city council. I don't get the impression that cities are in any general sense better run than countries because of this.
It may not even be that this is because a government doesn't need or benefit from a more technically qualified operations lead to implement ideas subordinate to the elected vision person's vision, but positions like this already exist even if only in an unofficial capacity.
That's not an accurate description of the French system at all. Presidents are elected with a strong domestic policy agenda. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Macron#Domestic_policy) Though the dynamics are a bit different from those of the american system.
Given how trivially easily checkable that is I'm somewhat sceptical about the value of the rest of the analysis
While I did mention my lack of French constitutional expertise- I think what you're missing is that Macron's party (which he founded!) has a raw majority in the National Assembly, a rather extraordinary thing in a multiparty system. The Prime Minister, who is selected by the President, is then voted in by the Assembly. So while I'm sure the current PM is executing Macron's domestic vision, I stand by my assertion that he's 'managing domestic affairs'. Your link merely notes that Macron has 'pressed' for reforms. I invite you to read the Wiki page on how a PM works in France. This is trivially easily checkable, BTW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_France#Role
"According to article 21 of the Constitution,[2] the prime minister "shall direct the actions of the Government". Additionally, Article 20[2] stipulates that the Government "shall determine and conduct the policy of the Nation", and it includes domestic issues, while the president concentrates on formulating directions on national defense and foreign policy.... when there is a cohabitation. In such cases, a constitutional convention gives the prime minister primacy in domestic affairs, while the president oversees foreign affairs. His responsibilities, then, are akin to those of a prime minister in a parliamentary system"
I like thought experiments like Arnold's a lot. However, I don't see the difference between the COO and, say, the deputy secretary or senior civil servant. Using the word COO doesn't somehow explain how/why they'd be different than what exists today.
Sorta the same thing on the auditor front. We have an Inspector General (IG) agency and a Government Accountability Office (GAO).
He's kinda doing the thing people often done in this community where they have an exciting idea and too quickly start typing instead of reading and learning what exists already.
Arnold does say of the chief auditor proposal "One might think of this agency as a bulked-up version of the existing Government Accountability Office." He might have just proposed strengthening the GAO. That's my big problem with the ideas in the cited piece; in most cases, there's an easier way to go about them.
The President of the United States is the head of the Executive branch of government, responsible for the day to day operations of government. "The buck stops here" and all that. He's already effectively the COO. There's no reason to create and empower a new position, with all the work that entails. Instead, he could just bring in advisors with operational expertise to advise him on how to fix things. Fixing the regulatory bureaucracy is not a one-man operation. (A hypothetical COO is also definitely not something for the legislature to have its fingers in; separation of powers is important.)
There is an argument that the Constitution attempted to do this. The argument goes that the use of the word "faithfully" in the description of the President's domestic duties - "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" [Art. II Sec. 3] - imposes a fiduciary duty on the President like that imposed on the executor of an estate. However, there's no real way of enforcing that on a head of government, so absent self-regulation the idea vanished. Oh well. We can't have nice things.
On the topic of an auditor, which Kling also brings up- many countries have constitutionally-protected audit departments, and Taiwan in particular has the 'Control Yuan'. They're a constitutionally independent auditor who examines the other branches of government. Not a bad idea for the US either! I'd also argue for making the Justice Department more independent, possibly with a Federal Reserve-style board of appointments with fixed terms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Yuan
We briefly had a miniature version of this with the laws concerning special prosecutors. Judges used to be able to order the appointment of special prosecutors to ferret around in the executive branch looking for malfeasance, but the law was allowed to expire when both parties got sick of it after the Clinton administration.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The government needs to do less, not do what it currently does better. Why? It's simple and it's obvious: we can't afford to do what we're doing now.
Shrinking the government is entirely outside the Overton window for now.
A functional government would be an improvement. So try to hold the line at "stop growing until you get better at what you're doing now."
You mean it's outside the political Overton window. It is entirely within the fiscal Overton window. A collapse of the US government is inevitable. That which cannot go on forever will cease.
And you will die one day , so why not kill yourself now?
Nothing is permanent in this world of transience.
Sure, the USG will eventually collapse, but will that be in 8 years or 800 years?
I would bet on a dollar collapse before a government collapse. The US government cannot and will not go bankrupt, as all of its obligations are owed in dollars, which the Federal Reserve can print at will.
Ask Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, or Venezuela how well that worked for them.
I would rather do without a government than do without dollars.
Not sure how you propose to do that, considering that the dollar is more or less pure fiat, but OK.
This is far from obvious.
The US government is bankrupt. It cannot collect enough tax income to pay its current debt load. Is that not obvious to you or do I need to go into details?
That's not what "bankrupt" means. While I agree that the US government will face a fiscal reckoning and it won't be pleasant, you don't make that case by overstating it.
If your liabilities exceed your assets, you're bankrupt. Even if the liabilities aren't due yet, if your assets having arrived yet and cannot conceivably cover the liabilities, you're bankrupt. What definition are you using?
Bankruptcy is a legal process, not a state. By your logic, every new college graduate that took out loans is 'bankrupt', as their liabilities exceed their assets. This is triply so for new med school graduates, Ivy League law school grads, and so on. Their liabilities vastly exceed their present assets. In fact, by your logic, a homeless man is wealthier than a new surgeon on their first day of work, or really that same surgeon at any point through the first half decade or longer of their career. What would you rather be, a homeless man or a brand new surgeon? By your logic a villager in Africa struggling to eat on less than $2 a day is doing fine financially, and is in fact doing better than a brand new Harvard Law grad just starting work at a white shoe law firm. Which of those two people would you rather be?
If you want to reply, please answer- there are 4 million new college graduates in the US every year, we can safely say that 70+% of them have taken out loans. Are these 2.8 million new grads with loans- every year- 'bankrupt'? Yes or no?
I'm actually mildly concerned about US government spending, but you have like the lowest quality, most easily ignored arguments on the topic. There's lots of room for improvement here
You're not bankrupt until your current liabilities exceed your current assets. After all, your revenue might increase. You might get a windfall or jubilee. Your horse might learn to sing.
Merely having total debt in excess of your assets is not an uncommon situation (consider someone with no assets except a new car they just bought on credit) and isn't bankruptcy.
Trillions of dollars from the world's capital markets apparently disagree, as they fund the US government at a much lower rate than I paid for my mortgage. I would put the judgement 'the combined capital markets of planet Earth' as a slightly more reliable source than 'learnliberty.org'.
Also, while I'm not a fan of the 'household finance' view of government debt, you're uh sort of ignoring assets there when you say 'the US government is bankrupt'. For instance we have an entire continent's worth of natural resources, $56 trillion of real estate on the continental US alone, and so on. That's without even getting into large room for tax increases- instituting a 10% VAT, like every other country on Earth has, would raise about a trillion dollars a year. There's lots of room to raise income taxes in the US to European levels, etc. etc. I find the 'bankrupt' claim lacking.
Anyways, I find the line of argument a non-sequitur. 'We can't do good government reforms because finances' doesn't really follow- even with a much smaller government, we'd still want it to function better, right? We could in theory cut spending a lot *and also* have a COO to better manage things- you could even argue that a COO would make spending more efficient
Foreign governments and foreign people have been slowing the growth of their lending to the federal government. Remember that the US borrowing rate has been growing. Not just borrowing more, but borrowing a larger amount every year.
$56 trillion of real estate? Privately owned. The government's share of it is only $2 or 3 trillion.
The US *has* increased tax rates and gotten less tax revenue.
The reform that the US needs is to do less. Maybe a COO could help? It couldn't hurt -- Congress is already spending money like a drunken sailor and that's an insult to drunken sailors.
You: "Foreign governments and foreign people have been slowing the growth of their lending to the federal government". Right off the bat man- they're not 'lending', they're bond purchases. These are conceptually different things.
"Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasuries in June climbed to their highest since February 2020, Treasury Department data showed on Monday, in what analysts described as broad-based demand.... Foreign holdings of Treasuries in June were the second largest on record"
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-treasuries-foreign-ownership-june-hit-highest-since-february-2020-data-2021-08-16/
"Foreign investors cannot get enough US government debt, which analysts say could help soften the blow when the Federal Reserve starts to cut back its own bond-buying programme this year.
Overseas buyers snapped up more than a quarter of the $41bn of 10-year notes on offer in August, the highest percentage in three years.... The upbeat demand shows that buyers remain drawn to the deepest, most easily tradable bond market in the world"
https://www.ft.com/content/47551bfb-8ca3-4e73-b34b-0ad19905ae15
This seems plainly false- maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying? Federal government debt servicing costs are about $500 billion a year by the data I'm seeing, which is less than a quarter of tax revenue.
Sources:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W006RC1Q027SBEA
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA
If you're talking about the deficit overall, then the key point is that "we don't choose to pay for it" is very different than "we can't afford to pay for it."
You're ignoring the unfunded obligations. Or are you suggesting that the US government is not going to pay its debts? You should read the Public Debt Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
https://www.learnliberty.org/videos/10-myths-about-government-debt/
Interesting argument, but it seems founded on the completely arbitrary assumption that all US government liabilities have an average servicing cost of 2.5% per year- pretty suspect given that the interest rate on treasury bonds is actually negative when accounting for inflation:
https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/us
(And I'm also suspicious of the claim that there's no way to increase tax revenue but that seems further into the weeds than I really want to go this morning.)
I'm a early 30s Canadian looking to spend 2-6 weeks in an American city this Jan-March to 1) get away from winter here and 2) a trial run to provide better evidence for if I should think about moving to a new city.
Right now I'm considering visiting Austin, Denver or San Diego (+ maybe somewhere in Arizona).
If any SSCers either know someone or have an apartment or an extra room I can rent, please let me know! Alternatively, if anyone wants to sublet/do a homestay in my apartment in Toronto, that would be great as well :)
What is the currently accepted theory on how the brain's memory works?
This is like 10 different PhD's worth of question. What do you want to know?
At the highest level of abstraction, 'information is written into the neural network through a variety of biological mechanisms as things happen, then retrieved from it later by another series of mechanisms'.
I was wondering if the brain's memory is an emergent phenomenon from its topography -- i.e. the architecture in which the neurons are wired (10 billion neurons with a connectivity of 200,000).
Specifically, I was wondering if the way the memories are formed is that the brain starts with an electrochemical signal to a bunch of neurons, and they transmit it to their connected neurons (changing the topography every so slightly along the way), and they transmit it to their connected neurons (again, changing the topography every so slightly) and so on until the signal eventually dies out. And the resultant new topography of the brain is one in which a particular neural pathway when excited from its inputs IS the memory. Triggering the memory works in a similar fashion.
Only literature I could find on this with my rudimentary search were in agreement with this theory -- Lashley's experiments in 1950 (Equipotentiality can be explained by this -- the electro-chemical impulses just find a new outlet to form the memory) and Penfield's experiments in 1937 (by poking electrodes at the appropriate neuron in the temporal lobe, he was able to trigger a very specific memory). Curiously, it can also explain "priming" (similar concepts possibly overlap in some set of neurons) or how such a structure can evolve purely out of biology and possibly whole lot of other phenomena & questions.
Are there any theories / observations against this idea? If not, what are currently the open questions in this field?
"This is like 10 different PhD's worth of question." Accurate.
I think the best explanation for how memory is encoded in the brain has to start with long term potentiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
There are a lot of constraints with memory formation i.e., it has to be possible for it to occur almost instantly. So this means that memory _cannot_ be say a function of a brand new neuron or synapse forming, because that will take a lot longer than 'nearly instantaneous'.
Note that this is different from say, learning a language, or how to rebuild a car engine, something that takes a very long time and a whole lot of learning, in that case it is entirely reasonable to think that new synapses may be formed between previously unrelated neural networks in the course of study.
So LTP starts from - there are already synapses, any given neuron might be synapsing on a 1000 other neurons, but how do you know if those synapses *matter*, this is where LTP comes in. (some handwavey electrophysiology follows)
Two neurons, generally firing in a non-coordinated manner, their synaptic strength probably doesn't increase or decrease. Let's say neuron A fires 1/sec, and synapses onto the dendrites of Neuron B which normally fires after it's been triggered ~1000 times. If Neuron A is one of 1000 other neurons that all fire ~1/sec, then there is no association between the two, no LTP will occur. But now say Neuron A starts to fire at ~100/sec, now fully 10% of the activation energy neuron B requires to fire is coming from Neuron A. You could say that the salience of Neuron A to Neuron B is now enormous. Existing receptors on Neuron B, that mediate the transmission from A to B, become more active. More receptors, that are held in special vesicles within the dendrite of Neuron B for just this purpose, will be transported to and appear on the surface of the dendrite. New proteins are synthesized, some right there in the dendrite, others later in the cell body. The surface area of the dendrite expands, new dendrites may form to synapse onto Neuron A, which may itself expand.
The end result, once Neuron A's firing rate drops back down to 1/sec, as a result of LTP it is now contributing say 20 times what any other neuron is to the activation of Neuron B. The two are now strongly associated. Repeat this across millions of neurons and that *may* be the physical foundation of memory, or at least our best guess for it currently.
It’s been many years since I’ve worked on this stuff, so I may be neglecting new research, but I don’t think the basic story has shifted too far from this.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity-dependent_plasticity#Role_in_learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-dependent_plasticity
Thank you for your response! I went through the Wiki page, and seems like I now have a couple of research papers added to my Reading List :)
Also you're welcome!
First to answer your question, is memory an emergent function of the human of the topography of the human brain and the billions of connections within? I would say…yes and no. Yes in the sense that this topography would include the dendritic exercise and expansion I described. No in the sense that you don’t need billions of connections. Sea slugs can form ‘memories’ in the sense that they will learn to recoil from danger signals using a very similar form of LTP, and they’ve got only ~20,000 neurons to work with. But of course the way a memory is experienced will be very different in a slug and a human.
Second I just wanted to offer a more colorful example of how memory formation works than Neuron A and Neuron B:
Imagine you come home one day and tell your spouse you were just chatting with your neighbor Frank. As soon as you say the name Frank, they turn to you and say ‘Frank, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒎𝒖𝒓𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒓?’
At that moment two formerly independent neurons (huge networks of neurons actually), one for your neighbor Frank, the other for the concept of MURDER will suddenly, massively strengthen the previously weak input between them. So much so that, at least for as long as you live in that neighborhood, and possibly for the rest of your life, whenever you hear the name ‘Frank’ your brain will autocomplete ‘the murderer’, and likewise any murders you notice will definitely bring Frank to mind.
On what level are you asking? There's so many different ways to approach the question, you'll need to be more precise. Do you want a functional answer? Biochemical? Circuitry? Phenomenological?
I only have bits and pieces of an answer, but anyone who has more will need to know, too.
I am looking for a functional answer. What are the physical changes in the brain's structure when a new memory is formed? Can the changes be 1:1 mapped with the new memory?
I wrote out a more detailed answer why I was wondering about this question in another comment in this thread.
I'm a reporter covering the diagnostics beat, which for the last two years has basically meant COVID testing. I wrote a (longish) thing looking back on my reporting and trying to figure how much I thought FDA had or hadn't messed up with rapid tests. Thought it might be of interest to people here (though, warning, it ends up amounting to something of an apologia for FDA.)
https://adambonislawski.substack.com/p/how-much-should-we-blame-fda-for
Very interesting read.
Was there ever discussing of implementing the serial rapid testing at the workplace level rather than individual level?
I’m familiar with a workplace which does “test to stay” once a week for workers who are unvaxxed or didn’t report their status (they also do a daily symptoms check via Google form, but nothing happens if you don’t do it).
Your point about using tests for spot-check which were designed to be serial, is a good point. I think if workplaces were test to stay/test to show up for everyone, daily, not just the vaccinated, there would be a greater chance of creating indoor air with fewer virus particles.
A 90% accurate spot-check test sounds great until I’m counting on it to create Covid-free crowds. If it’s missing 10/100 positive cases, in a school of 400 people that’s 40 walking around contagious even after passing the test. That’s not that much different from an 80% accurate spot-check test in terms of air quality (willing to estimate this.) I’m up against this right now, having symptoms very much like Covid, getting negative results, but will have to go back to work soon. “Oops, I tested too early!” Is an infuriating problem. The cultural support for working sick is not gone everywhere; stay out too long and you just look weak. I would love a big stockpile of tests right now, I could take 5 of them in a row and improve my odds of getting the real answer. As it is I’ll probably go back and just, hack into the KN95. That may be their real function, makes it harder to tell when the wearer has to gasp. Unless the very slow but “better” test results arrive and are positive.
Individuals will definitely have differing levels of success in terms of the individual tests. Those little squeeze vials of mystery liquid for the BinaxNows don’t have directions for what to do if the droplet misses a little. Is 5.5 drops better than 6.5 drops? Does it throw off the creep up the dipstick? Is that $10 down the tubes because I missed? Gaah. Making regular testing institutional would solve some of this (miss? Throw it out, get the next one.)
There are definitely some workplaces and schools that have set up regular testing programs, but I don't have a good sense for how widespread that is. My guess is probably not that widespread. I did some stories looking into K-12 testing which the federal government has provided a ton of money for, and outside of a few places like Massachusetts, states saw very low levels of participation in the school testing programs they had set up, even though it was all or mostly subsidized.
"A brilliant, feisty scientist at the center of a nasty, backstabbing, utterly absorbing, cliff-hanging scramble for the Nobel Prize. "The Emperor of Scent" is a quirky wonderful book." Praise for "Emperor of Scent" by John Berendt. https://www.amazon.com/Emperor-Scent-Story-Perfume-Obsession/dp/0375759816. I blew through this book, a fun read. The old school idea is smell is a sensed by sensing the shape of a molecule. The 'outside' idea is that we sense the vibration spectra of molecules. I wish there was a betting market for the vibration idea.
Seconded, as a great read!
Along with three out of four of my immediate family, I have Omicron. All four of us were double-vaxed with boosters. Among my friends I know of 12 who have Omicron, and think 8 of them were fully vaxed.
I've not previously held militant negative opinions about vaccinations, but from my perspective it doesn't seem that my November'21 booster worked very well.
I don't see much news on this. MSM and social seems to prohibit saying anything that might seem vaccine negative. I understand they don't want to feed those who are blindly anti-vax, but how do we ensure appropriate risk and reward for big-pharma if not by good/bad coverage and statistics? What action can moderate people take that doesn't require us to join some fringe movement?
Best data I have seen is that a fresh booster is ~50% effective against Omicron, and a stale initial course ~0%.
So it's not unexpected that you would know lots of boosted people getting infected, but it still helps a little bit.
The real issue is that the boosters probably go to ~0% effective within 2-3 months -- so booster mandates seem like they will be a bridge too far for many people.
IDK the solution if you don't want to join a fringe movement -- I guess once everyone notices that over half of the vaccinated people they know have got Omicron anyways, these movements may not be so fringe, lol.
This seems roughly expected to me and shouldn't change your calculus. Some seasons the flu vaccine is very effective. Some seasons it is pretty much worthless. If there was some way to know in advance which was the case, that could impact your decision making, but there isn't. Omicron was reported on November 24th. You got your booster in November. There was no way to know at that time it wouldn't help.
The correct way to evaluate this as a decision is as a repeated trial, not a single event. Assuming a new variant will out every six months for the rest of your life, along with a new booster. What percentage of boosters need to be effective over your entire lifetime to make it worthwhile to take them all? It probably doesn't need to be a huge percentage. It's similar to the principle that it's best for almost all people to just buy stock as often as they can and not worry about whether a specific year will be a down year or not.
For flu, we do know sometimes. We know this year's flu shot will be ineffective. Public health people recommend taking it anyway
https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/flu-shots-effectiveness-2021-h3n2-penn-20211217.html
This does not increase my confidence in recommendations from public health people, since apparently they don't actually change when the facts do.
Uhm, sorry, but the article you cite is not supporting your claim at all. The subheadline is
"It looks like a bad flu season, he [the Penn expert] said, and the shots may keep you out of the hospital"
- All of the cited people emphasize that the shot probably still helps against severe illness, even though protection against infection is lower than average. The author of the study says:
"Even when flu shots don’t keep you from getting sick, they do seem to prevent hospitalizations and deaths."
- "Lower than average" is miles away from "zero effect". The rate of protecting antibodies seems to be around 45%-65% against different strains, if I read it right. This is a bit below average for flu shots, but I don't think it's much lower. The 90%+ that we got for the mRNA corona vaccines was very untypical.
I don't see any reason why public health people should stop recommending flu vaccines.
Do you have "militsntly negative opinions" about parachute because you can still twist your ankle on landing? Vaccines prevent serious injury and death.
It's common knowledge that you can still get covid and especially the omicron variant. I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim otherwise! Why would you be even slightly more anti-vax as a result of them behaving as advertised?
Well considering the claims made early and the result and subsequent claims made after , how does anyone not question and look deeper into the science ?
When people working in the hospital that people may know are telling them they are seeing much higher rates of non covid related illnesses . And as everyone knows or witnesses that there is controversy and censorship at play around the science .
At some point, if they can bare to look , it seems people might just want to check and see what these so called misfits and unclean are pointing to
What’s the point of wearing a parachute if your not jumping from a plane ?
In my experience, if *anyone* is jumping out of the plane, then *everyone* wears a parachute, including the pilot. I hear Trump got booed for saying he got the jab?
I'd quantify my uncertainty, ie. Would I wear a parachute if there's a 20% chance I'm not jumping from a plane?
Hmmm, my sources are fairly consistent that what the booster is doing for you is increasing the chances that your cases are short and mild, and also contagious for a shorter period.
It's also reducing the odds of you catching it at all, but omicron is very good at getting through in spite of vaccination, so your odds of a breakthrough case were still high.
If you'd been a bit luckier on the random die rolls, you'd have had asymptomatic cases, or no covid at all.
If you hadn't had the booster, or worse yet hadn't had the original vaccine, you'd be more likely to be waiting for an unavailable hospital bed, but still would most likely have only had a "mild" case (treatable at home), unless you have extra risk factors.
https://polimath.substack.com/p/the-case-of-the-abandoned-metrics
"This has caused a lot of frustration and confusion among people who genuinely believed this thesis and believed their own state and region to be free of future COVID dangers. As the entirely predictable winter surge started hitting the states that this chart implied would not be hit, there has been a clear frustration that the expected relief did not come about."
You may be feeling the frustration this article is talking about.
How do you know it’s omicron ? The shot were demonstrated to be waning quite quickly for Delta as well . Is there any confirmation you got for variant ?
Citation for shots waning markedly with Delta?
My understanding of the vaccines this entire time is that they would probably prevent severe outcomes, not illness altogether. So I’m awaiting my probably-unavoidable case of Omicron, but I’m no longer terrified it will kill my elderly in-laws. So the vaccine is a clear and continuing success so far as I’m concerned.
I heard plenty that said my booster was mostly to protect me from going to the hospital, and that it has little effect on transmission. (But Zvi is my covid source) So a booster should be a personal safety decision. The whole vaccine mandate stuff is crazy, IMHO, and the 'blindly anti-vax' should be able to decline for any reason.
Frankly, I have seen tons of news on this in the mainstream media. The simple message is that Omicron is an escape variant. The more precisely message is that a two-dose vaccination provides close to zero protection against infection, and that booster provides more-than-zero and less-than-hundred protection against infection.
For example, my preferred news source wrote last Friday (translated): "The risk of infection is assessed as very high for the unvaccinated group, high for the convalescent and vaccinated people with basic vaccination (two vaccinations) and moderate for the group of those vaccinated with booster vaccinations (three vaccinations)."
For severe infection (i.e., you need to go to hospital), my take from the news is that booster shots probably still protect well against them, though there is still some uncertainty because it is so new. Which is why they still say that you should get a booster asap. I don't think I have to complain about the news coverage.
My understanding is that the idea of a better result with a booster came from data where the booster is only counted after the 14 day period , so the infection that arise in that period ( where I also understand there is some clear science around innate immunity impairment ) is added to the double vaxx count . Which account for the higher double vaxx numbers . And interesting the relative unvaxxed numbers are the lowest - which either implies previous natural immunity effect in the cohort , or that the vaccinated are also suffering from original anthemic sin ( similar to influenza vaccine)
I can't rule out that such a miscounting has been done in some study or some analysis, but the moderate protection against infection does not just coming from epidemiological data.
The first analyses took blood samples from boostered and non-boostered persons and checked whether Omicron viruses (sometimes the real thing, sometimes pseudoviruses) were neutralized by the antibodies in the blood samples. This is not susceptible to the miscounting issue that you described.
For the low incidence in unvaxxed people, do you have a reference for that? My first hit on google is for Washington (state), and there it is the other way round, with unvaccinated having 2-6 times higher incidence, depending on the age group (plots on page 5 and 6).
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/data-tables/421-010-CasesInNotFullyVaccinated.pdf
I’ll see if I could find it. I think it came from Denmark .
The MSM actually had been quite clear that the vaccines are less effective against preventing infection against omicron. Here's a sampling.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/22/1066315800/the-vaccines-work-against-severe-disease-heres-why-boosters-are-still-a-good-ide
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/omicron-covid-variant-resistant-pfizer-vaccine-south-africa-rcna8678
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/omicron-variant-covid-19-vaccines-news-pfizer-efficacy/
Data I saw was that boosters reduced risk of infection 50% a few days after the jab, 30% 45 days after, declining to 10-20% after 90 days.
[edit: my initial response was dumb so I'm deleting it. Anyway here's some recent numbers Google gave me:]
"For its analysis, the agency assessed 147,597 Delta cases and 68,489 Omicron cases from November 27 to December 17. It found that for those with a Pfizer primary series and booster, efficacy against symptomatic disease was 70% immediately after the third dose but fell to 45% at 10 weeks or longer. [....] The report didn't include data on vaccine efficacy against severe disease, including hospitalization and death, because the number of Omicron cases admitted to the hospital following a positive test was too small to create an estimate."
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/96412
Current vaccines prevent infection complications, they don't prevent infections. I had the original COVID strain, and it took me almost 3 weeks to get over it, had breathing difficulties, high fevers, etc. It was terrible.
I now have Omicron with only two vaccines, second taken 6 months ago, and it's a minor nuisance by comparison. Easier to handle than a cold, and I got my infection right after a mild case of bronchitis. I haven't even taken any medication for it. The difference is night and day.
Isn't that more to do with Omicron than it is to do with the vaccine? My unvaccinated friends have had an almost identical set of symptoms (low grade fever, itchy throat, sore lower back etc...)
It's both, but we're not sure exactly in what ratio.
Here in Ireland the unvaccinated make up 54% of the ICU cases while being 7% of all adults and in general younger than the vaccinated population.
Partly due to Omicron for sure, but the severity of the symptoms are worlds apart. I didn't get half of the symptoms you describe. No sore throat, no headaches, just some mild aches and that's it.
Partly Omicron, partly protection from vaccines, partly protection from having had it before, or so I would guess. You have all of them working for you.
I have another test case to compare to though: girlfriend who's same age, same ethnic background, got two Pfizer doses where I had Astra+Moderna. My infection was considerably milder than hers. This agrees with the evidence that seems to suggest the Moderna is more effective.
Did she have prior infection as well? Because otherwise that's a confounder.
The vast majority of people with COVID (any variant) don't go to hospital.
It's very hard to tell the difference between "95% are OK" (unvaccinated) and "99.5% are OK" (vaccinated) without a sample size much bigger than "my friends".
Those numbers are in the right sort of range, but they are illustrative, ie I haven't looked up the real numbers, and also they depend a lot on the variant and also on the definitions of "infected" and "seriously ill" (are we counting tested-and-asymptomatic? are we counting hospital visits, hospital admissions, requiring supplemental oxygen, are there different diagnostic/intervention standards in different places with different studies?).
The effort required to produce a really comprehensive answer to this is disproportionate to that reasonable for an internet comment.
Considering 90%+ of hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated I'd say vaccination status may have a pretty obvious role in the severity of symptoms.
I thought those high numbers of unvaxxed in hospital was first of all an accounting for a period where pretty much everyone was unvaccinated , like starting the count from Jan 1 2020. So the better approach is a per 100,000 kind of thing . But even then the data does not reflect the true picture . Like the way the influenza vaccine data was suggesting the same thing . But actually had no effect on all death numbers . Where it was confounded because those that were mostly healthy were taking the shot and those not healthy
Didn’t bother and died . So that is why we need to see confirmation of this claim by checking the all death in relation to vaccinated status
It's not cumulative, the unvaxxed people also make a much higher proportion in hospital if you only count the last month.
The same Washington data that I linked elsewhere in this thread also gives hospitalisation and death rates per 100,000, stratified by age, for the last month. Hospitalisation is 10-14 times higher in unvaccinated people than in vaccinated people, and for deaths it is a factor of 15 in the group 65+. The spread is pretty consistent for the whole data history in the document. It's also consistent with the Ireland data mentioned above, and data from Germany and other countries looks pretty similar.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/data-tables/421-010-CasesInNotFullyVaccinated.pdf
I agree that sometimes data can be misleading, but this is one of the rare cases that the picture is really clear and unambiguous.
not provable unless we know the condition of the patients. what is their weight, health conditions, diet, exercise level, age, do they just HAVE covid19 or are they explicitly FOR covid19, etc. Sidenote, if ICU isn't near overflowing during winter it is abnormal, anyone who has worked in ICU can attest.
I think it's unreasonable to expect the vaccines to protect from infection by a variant for which they weren't designed.
At least the vaccines are still quite effective against hospitalization.
Are the vaccines more effective then early treatment ?
No, but they don't need to be. They just need to be more effective than not getting vaccinated. There's no dichotomy between vaccines and early treatment: getting vaccinated and getting early treatment is probably better than either alone.
There's the separate question of availability - vaccines are much easier to access than Paxlovid or sotrovimab, or even fluvoxamine - though hopefully that will improve with time.
You've got to distinguish between theoretical effectiveness and in-practice effectiveness.
Even if early treatment was better in theory, it would only work if you get a test almost daily so that you can actually ask for a treatment.
Vaccines will work wether you think about them or not.
Not to mention you'd need a doctor that would actually give you early treatment. I figure some doctors would be like "look, everybody's getting Covid and the FDA approved Covid treatments cost a fortune so go away, and if you feel like you're dying, go to hospital".
But of course, by then, it's not early treatment.
Also, there's a lot of disagreement about which non-expensive treatments, if any, actually work. Amazing to me how people can be so sure something works that they will bet their lives on it.
Well I think it’s generally a good idea to receive care under the guidance of a doctor . If a doctor so chooses to prescribe off label or to fulfill the requests of the patient
For early treatment with medicines that others have taken and spoken about during a period where no treatments are recommended seems their only responsibility is to ensure some exploration of risk and and contraindication. Preventing doctors from doing so without clear scientific reason is highly
Questionable . I am surprised anyone would volunteer for an experimental vaccine before trying medicines that have decades of safety .
Well, that certainly does put everything in the hands of the diagnostic test capacity . Where , it may still be able to
Use deductive reasoning to determine one is infected with something , and by the public health records , what it might be . It’s been the common method for centuries . It also depends on the iantrogenic risks of treatment .
In the absent of available treatment I used high Cbd full die treatment cannabis at a medicated dose of 1-2 mg/kg/day of the Cbd portion and no higher thc ratio of 1:3. This was provided to me by a md friend that prescribes cannabis . For me , my symptoms were suggesting cytokine storm kind of thing and I needed to interrupt it and hit it fairly hard. I wasn’t going to sit on my hands and wait like a moron at home till my lips turned blue. Of course the usual increasing of immune supportive nuetracueticals . But I needed something strong to interrupt the positive feedback cycle that was kicking in . Would that have been detrimental without a test when the only things going around were sars2 andvRSV? I don’t believe so and certainly the md didn’t share any such risk .
I've never seen people talk about CBD for COVID treatment, but it seems interesting, since I know it can have anti-inflammatory properties. Are there studies I can read about this?
Among the many scandals that is the FDA is the fact that the "booster" that is given right now is still the OG vaccine that was devised in February 2020. The core benefit of RNA vaccine is supposed to be that it is very easy to change the RNA code to take into account a new variant without impacting the production logistics.
Maybe I just haven't heard of it: is there any approval request for a vaccine variant that is currently pending ?
mRNA vaccines are easier to change than once-a-year-and-pray virus vaccines, but that doesn't mean they can be devised, manufactured, and distributed immediately.
I'm thinking more like six months, but at least you don't have to guess at the up and coming virus. Anyone have more details?
It shouldn't take six months now that the mRNA vaccine production pipeline is in place. I might believe six weeks, though I'm not an expert.
It's moot, because the issue isn't devising, manufacturing, or testing the vaccines, it's getting approval to use them. That still seems to be a six-month thing, which is why we don't even have a Delta booster yet.
And if I had my choice, I think I'd rather have a Delta booster than Omicron, on account of I don't much care if I get a bad cold but dying would really suck.
From my understanding all shots distributed right now are still 162b2 under the EUA. Not a single comirnaty is in production or distribution . It’s really kind of a weird situation for sure
FDA delenda est, but this isn't the FDA's fault. Had we built a new vaccine, it would have been targeted for Delta, which Omicron didn't come from.
Is it an FDA constraint or a manufacturer constraint?
Yes. The FDA hasn’t streamlined it’s process for alterations to the approved vaccines. The pharmaceutical companies haven’t submitted Omicron specific vaccines for approval.
It's a manufacturer constraint, no variant-specific boosters have been submitted for approval. This is mostly because in pre-Omicron trials, the OG booster did a very good job of neutralising all known variants (in fact, there was some evidence that switching to a booster based on e.g. delta or beta would potentially lead to an overly-specific immune response).
Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J are all working on omicron-specific boosters but we haven't heard much about their progress recently. AZ started trials for a beta-specific booster over the summer but I don't believe the results have been reported.
If I were to send 1,000 relatively personalized letters to 1,000 (ultra-)high net worth individuals, requesting a substantial donation ($100K-1M) to cover my living expenses for the next years (or my entire lifetime), so I can focus on the high-impact work hopefully improving the world, how likely am I to succeed? Specific probabilities would be appreciated.
On one hand, rich people are rich because they're good at making money and not spending it too much. There are many organizations specialized in fundraising, and they probably went for most of the low-hanging fruit. On the other hand, there are exceptions to the efficient market hypothesis. I keep hearing about the multimillionaires (e.g. living in the Middle East) who waste money on luxuries and generally don't know what to do with it. Does it create a space I could utilize to my and the world's benefit, and if so, how?
They won't read them. Your letter will be immediately binned by a flunkie when they see its asking for money
Your more like to die from covid
Create and sell an NFT promising the future nobels or prizes you will get to the holder.
If they want to donate money, they'll have a foundation. If you write to them instead of the foundation, they'll forward the letter to the foundation. If you don't follow the form that the foundation wants, you go to the circular file.
Those are called "begging letters" and the rich have been receiving them for centuries so by this point, they have methods for screening them out. Mainly "Thank you for your letter, go away, A. Secretary".
How would you respond if you won the lottery and suddenly thousands of letters with heart-rending stories begging for you to pay Little Orphan Sally's one-legged puppy's veterinary bills came flooding into your post box? I doubt you'd answer every single one.
You would just be one of the many who routinely write to rich people looking for free money, in the same sort of example. Dickens wrote a piece about this very phenomenon (extract below) published in 1850:
http://www.readprint.com/chapter-22830/Reprinted-Pieces-Charles-Dickens
"I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some time, a chosen receiver of Begging Letters. For fourteen years, my house has been made as regular a Receiving House for such communications as any one of the great branch Post-Offices is for general correspondence. I ought to know something of the Begging-Letter Writer. He has besieged my door at all hours of the day and night; he has fought my servant; he has lain in ambush for me, going out and coming in; he has followed me out of town into the country; he has appeared at provincial hotels, where I have been staying for only a few hours; he has written to me from immense distances, when I have been out of England. He has fallen sick; he has died and been buried; he has come to life again, and again departed from this transitory scene: he has been his own son, his own mother, his own baby, his idiot brother, his uncle, his aunt, his aged grandfather. He has wanted a greatcoat, to go to India in; a pound to set him up in life for ever; a pair of boots to take him to the coast of China; a hat to get him into a permanent situation under Government. He has frequently been exactly seven-and-sixpence short of independence. He has had such openings at Liverpool - posts of great trust and confidence in merchants' houses, which nothing but seven-and- sixpence was wanting to him to secure - that I wonder he is not Mayor of that flourishing town at the present moment.
The natural phenomena of which he has been the victim, are of a most astounding nature. He has had two children who have never grown up; who have never had anything to cover them at night; who have been continually driving him mad, by asking in vain for food; who have never come out of fevers and measles (which, I suppose, has accounted for his fuming his letters with tobacco smoke, as a disinfectant); who have never changed in the least degree through fourteen long revolving years. As to his wife, what that suffering woman has undergone, nobody knows. She has always been in an interesting situation through the same long period, and has never been confined yet. His devotion to her has been unceasing. He has never cared for himself; HE could have perished - he would rather, in short - but was it not his Christian duty as a man, a husband, and a father, - to write begging letters when he looked at her? (He has usually remarked that he would call in the evening for an answer to this question.)
He has been the sport of the strangest misfortunes. What his brother has done to him would have broken anybody else's heart. His brother went into business with him, and ran away with the money; his brother got him to be security for an immense sum and left him to pay it; his brother would have given him employment to the tune of hundreds a-year, if he would have consented to write letters on a Sunday; his brother enunciated principles incompatible with his religious views, and he could not (in consequence) permit his brother to provide for him. His landlord has never shown a spark of human feeling. When he put in that execution I don't know, but he has never taken it out. The broker's man has grown grey in possession. They will have to bury him some day."
I understand that, if you win the powerball or otherwise suddenly come into a great fortune, you will be inundated with requests for money, long forgotten middle school classmates will suddenly reemerge with flattering tales, distant relatives that you didn't know you had will develop a keen interest in you and your family, cranks will beg you to fund their latest scheme, etc..
If you Google "lottery winners and begging letters", there are a heap of such stories:
"Burn all the begging letters, advises £10m winner Lavery"
"Begging letters wing their way to Lotto high flier"
"Begging letters drive Lottery winner abroad"
"Euromillions winners forced to flee"
"Couple who scooped £148m Euromillions jackpot receive 40 begging letters a week but admit they read them all because 'if you don't ask, you don't get'" - one couple who do read the letters, so hope there for our friend!
I agree this is what happens in >99% of cases. But there are at least ~250,000 UHNWIs in the world. If I could reach just 2% of them (5,000), and only 0.1% of these (5 indiviudals) would be interested in supporting me, that should be sufficient. This makes my seemingly naive idea a coordination problem: how do you identify and reach these people? I'm not sure if the 0.1% estimate is too optimistic, but I occasionally hear about a Russian oligarch or a sheikh who seems in the mood for random spending.
I keep on sending emails to people offering to give them money if they help me move my wealth out of Nigeria, but they never respond.
"This makes my seemingly naive idea a coordination problem: how do you identify and reach these people?"
That is the problem in a nutshell right there. Simply writing a letter is not going to be enough, the very rich get thousands of requests for funding and they have layers of admin to keep those from getting to their personal attention unless it is something very unusual.
Even if you met one of these guys face-to-face, they are trained since infancy not to hand out money for sob-stories because *everyone* wants money off them. If you're not an established foundation or big-name charity (like the Met Gala) then you have to stand out: if you can get your name all over the media like Malala Yousafzai so that it becomes trendy to give her donations for her activism, you're okay, otherwise you're out of luck.
Plus, your random sheikh or Russian oligarch is very unlikely to give a damn about human rights activism anyway. There has to be something in it that appeals to the very rich person, be it a niche interest of theirs ("oh yeah I'm very interested in saving the lesser-spotted gunkleback!") or it's something trendy and in the news now, or something very novel and attention-grabbing. Just "fund me for a year/ten years so I can work on great stuff (unspecified) for humanity" isn't enough; if you're Nobel Laureate Dr. AT MA, PhD, etc. etc. with a stunning new cure for elbow scurvy but you need to do some further research, then you may grab their fickle attention.
"Disco Elysium" is a game with a very definite left slant, but they're fairly on the money when it comes to the Mega-Rich Light-Bending Guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoLrn-aIzCE
MEGA RICH LIGHT-BENDING GUY “It’s a shame I can’t get out and explore myself. One of the downsides of being an extremely high-net-worth individual is that mobs of low-net-worth individual are constantly banding together to ask for money”.
YOU “Wait – why don’t you help them? You’ve got so much money it can’t make a difference to you.”
MEGA RICH LIGHT-BENDING GUY “There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to hand out al the handouts. It’s like feeding seagulls. There are always more, and they never seem to do anything interesting with it- except more seagulls.
Spending money is a matter of desire, I’m sure you agree. I don’t have the desire for spending it like that.”
I don't believe that one in a thousand would be interested in supporting you, given that every one of those thousand is busy knocking back dozens of requests a week anyway.
My experience with UHNWIs is that they tend to be constantly on their guard when interacting with us mere poors, because at any moment a friendly interaction can turn into a "Oh hey can I have some money?"
In the late 1990s, I was an intern at a non-profit in Washington DC. One of the things about the job I hated was that an hour a week, everybody had to cold call CEOs and other important people from a list asking if they'd like to donate or work with the non-profit. The list was developed based on the company or individual having some connection (no matter how tenuous) to the non-profit's mission. Of course, most call recipients had no interest whatsoever.
As the non-profit was not especially large or notable, and there are hundreds or thousands more of such organizations in the DC area alone, my experience makes me think that the 1000 richest individuals must get many such offers a day. Absent a specific connection to you or your line of work, I think you have a very low chance of any of them even reading your offer, much less agreeing to it.
Of course, many people subscribe to the "it only takes one" theory.
42%
WRONG. It's 43%.
How would you get their contact info?
Kings and other rich people used to keep artists, philosophers, and similar folks on a subsidy as a status enhancement. It is a shame that this is no longer true. On the flip side, the Gates Foundation might be more responsible for the decline of disease in Africa than any other single organization, so there’s that.
I don't have specific probabilities, but without any special connections to those individuals, I would say practically nil. By virtue of being ultra high net worth, they probably get such requests all the time.
I'm interested in the easily movable tiny/prefab homes. Is there any chance I could get a solid one (~60 sqm = ~650 sqft) for <$100k in the next few years? Any recommendations would be appreciated. People keep telling me that I should consider a RV if mobility is important.
What, specifically, are you envisioning having and doing with it?
Well, spending my entire life there, changing location each 2-4 months. Maybe I should keep on saving for two cheap tiny houses in different locations + a small trailer? Can probably save $200k by 2030, when such houses and cars should be cheaper.
Easily movable homes are not the same thing as prefab homes.
Prefabs are attached to a solid foundation and can't be moved again after that attachment (they're concreted-in).
Otherwise, you are basically talking about a mobile home (a "trailer"). 650 square feet is bigger than a travel-trailer (limited to 400 square feet in most US jurisdictions), but is a pretty small single-wide (1650 is the upper limit for a single-wide).
You might want to consider something like a fifth-wheel travel-trailer with lots of slideouts if you're wanting to travel a lot. Or a smaller single-wide if you only want to move once or twice a year.
There are tiny-home style single-wides and travel-trailers (ie things like pitched rooves).
Thank you for these suggestions, Richard. Do you have any specific companies or models in mind? They would be helpful.
Sadly, I don't have specifics for your side of the Atlantic.
Thank you for these suggestions, Richard. Do you have any specific companies or models in mind? They would be helpful.
650sqft is too big to be easily movable, the largest RV trailers are about half that (though slideout systems help boost it and make it quite comfortable). A single-wide mobile home can get you to that size, but you'll have to hire professionals every time you want to relocate. Both mobile homes and RV's can be obtained for much less than $100k.
You want a regular trailer, or one branded as a "tiny home" for middle class pretensions? I imagine you'll pay a lot more for the latter.
I have a couple of elderly and/or disabled family members with no particular interests, spending a lot of time at home, isolated and stressed out due to the pandemic, mostly watching TV and doing household chores. How could I make their lives more interesting? Books and board/card games don't seem like a good fit. I thought about buying a VR headset and virtual trips through beautiful locations, but I'm open to many different ideas.
Why are card games not a good fit? Depending on the generation, that may have been exactly what they did with friends when young.
I understand if the concern is card games are close contact, but I think that’s a concern with any interaction that will brighten their day.
If they're willing to put up with a bit of frustration there are people who want to practice with native English speakers on Skype or whatever. They're usually willing to talk about whatever or listen to stories so long as you're willing to help them improve their English. I've seen a few old people fruitfully tell their stories to eager Chinese or Africans or whatever. They just have to stop every now and again and explain. Which, to be frank, they seemed to enjoy.
That is a great suggestion: most older people have tons of personal anecdotes that their families are tired of hearing!
… and back then nickels had bumblebees on them. Give me 5 bees for a quarter we used to say…
Arrange for someone - ideally a family member or a neighbour but you could pay someone - to take them out for a short walk or even a car ride once a week, or shopping. Give them something to look forward too, that is both outside their house and with a person they can talk too.
This is something I can do right after the omicron wave, but still far from a novel, interesting, enjoyable experience accessible to the elderly/disabled. 2022 technology and markets should have something interesting to offer to such people, especially when they have to stay at home.
If outside is not an option right now arrange for regular video calls
I don't know your relatives, but unless they are particularly eager for new technologies, I doubt "cool new virtual tech" is really going to give them the same pleasure as "going outside and interact with real people".
Most old people I know of picked up smartphones/computers as a mean to keep in touch with their friends and younger relatives, they are not particularly interested in cool new things.
As a quick question to the commentariat, based on the side-comment about Magellan in the movie review for the move "Don't Look Up":
What human thinker first pointed out that the Earth casts a rounded shadow on the Moon during an eclipse, and that this was evidence for the spherical nature of the Earth?
I am curious who here can correctly identify the actual source of that argument.
Not precisely answering your query, but as a side-note to it; from the way Dante describes the globe in his "Divine Comedy", he was basing his geography on Classical Greek sources, and they divided up the sphere of the world into five (or seven, depending) zones or climes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clime
The idea was that the torrid zone at the equator was where the rays of the Sun struck hardest, being nearest to earth, and thus that it would be impossible for people to travel from the northern (temperate) zone to the south because you'd get burned up. Thus, while there might be habitable lands and even peoples living in the corresponding southern hemisphere, they couldn't travel to us nor we to them.
The first recorded person was a Greek, Anaxagoras. The idea of a spherical earth was already present but he observed the rounded shadow of the Earth on the moon. Iirc, he was specifically attempting to deal with the argument that Earth was a hemisphere (half a sphere) because people didn't believe the Phoenicians that they'd been to the other half. (Or at least claimed they had.) Though don't quote me on that.
While flat earth cosmologies were still around they were not widely held by astronomers, sailors, or natural philosophers as far as I can tell. There were various arguments against it ranging from the concept of going over the horizon to the complications of predicting astronomical events on a flat surface over distance.
I was trying to remember whether it was Aristotle or one of the lesser-known Greek authors from that time period. Interestingly, it's easier to find references to Aristotle on that subject. Though Aristotle depended on Anaxagoras for part of his explanation of the spherical shape of Earth..
You are right about an ancillary detail, though: sailors, even though they were not among the educated class, had too much first-hand experience to assume a perfectly-flat surface for Earth.
They knew that a watchman on top of the mast could see further than the man on on the deck. They knew that the tops of mountains, or lighthouses/tall-monuments, would be visible before the base of the mountain/lighthouse/monument would be visible.
To quote from a translation of "A Question of the Water and of the Land" by Dante, from a debate in 1320 as to why the land was higher than the water:
https://archive.org/details/cu31924028135337/page/n17/mode/2up
"To understand Dante's conception of the universe it is necessary to know something of the theories of the world and its surroundings as held by the principal astronomers among the ancients, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Ptolemy. Ptolemy, indeed, did little beyond enlarging on the teaching of Hipparchus, and drawing his conclusions from that other's observations. Hipparchus was, perhaps, the greatest astronomical genius, considering his want of instruments, and the paucity of previous observations, that the world has produced. At Dante's time little progress had been made in the twelve hundred years since Ptolemy made his calculations.
...In the centre of this system came the earth. What the precise idea of the form of the earth was in Dante's time is doubtful. Some seem to imagine that it was supposed to be a flat circular surface like a round table. This could not have been so, at any rate to the more learned of his day. Aristotle, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, had taught that the earth was a sphere, transfixed by the great pole which ran through the universe. [In the " Convito " II. vii. Dante shows that he not only knew the earth was a sphere, but that he was not so very far off its actual size, namely that it was 3250 miles to the centre of it. In Con. IV. viii. he gives 6500 miles as its diameter.] But whatever they imagined the shape of the earth to be, its most learned inhabitants, in the Middle Ages, had no certain knowledge of any land beyond that of which they had experience themselves, had heard of from travellers, or were told about by the few great authorities they so implicitly trusted.
In Dante's time the pillars of Hercules, close to where Gibraltar now is, was its western boundary, India its boundary on the east, because Orosius, who was contemporary with St. Augustine, said so. Their knowledge of northern countries was vague and indistinct, and a short way towards the equator in Africa soon brought them to the extreme habitable south. Round this limited portion of land they imagined a great circular ocean to roll, called poetically here " Amphitrite." Beyond this ocean came a space large enough to allow the sphere of the fixed stars to revolve. For they believed that these stars with the sphere in which they were placed revolved round the earth, with a regular motion, once in every twenty-four hours.
Both Heraclitus and Pythagoras had held that the earth revolved on its axis, but Aristotle and Ptolemy denied this, and said it was utterly impossible. Dante, of course, followed Aristotle. It would have seemed to him a scientific heresy to doubt Aristotle on such a point. A remarkable thing is that, far as the ancient and mediaeval astronomers were from the truth, yet, as Sir G. C. Lewis points out in his "Astronomy of the Ancients," for all practical purposes their system was as good as ours."
Aristotle has the argument somewhere if I remember correctly, but I don't think it was original too him. At the very least it was a known fact from 5th century BC onward. [EDIT : except that Aristotle from the 4th century BC]
(which is the reason why the Magellan quote irked me so much)
The Magellan quote was jarring to me. It referenced an idea that was known to Aristotle and his contemporaries, and gives credit to Magellan.
In a movie review which discusses the difference between Lone Genius and challenges the Establishment and Consensus Science, it looked like a huge mistake.
In retrospect, it was a reference to the Lone Genius theory. The main thrust of the movie review doesn't depend on this one detail being right or wrong.
But it reminded me of how often the Lone Genius theory can be based on a deep misunderstanding of the history of science.
I think Scott expected "Gosh, guys, this is so clearly a joke I thought you'd all get it" but he underestimated the amount of literal-minded contrarians who will hit the keyboards within 0.01 seconds to respond to fake history 😂
Next time (if there is a next time) that he does another reader survey he should include that as a question:
Q. Do you have a sense of humour?
A.
1. No, and I'm immediately suspicious you asked me that
2. Yes, and I wrote an entire series of blog posts about the history of jokes, jocularity, hilarity, and "fun" on my Substack, see link here!
3. Of course I do, I read ACX, don't I?
4. Of course I don't, I read ACX, don't I?
5. What is this "humour" thing and where can I find references to it in the Sequences?
> 5. What is this "humour" thing and where can I find references to it in the Sequences?
Ah, this is clearly a joke, because there is no "humour" in the Fun Theory Sequence!
I think Scott thought the Magellan quote was self-evidently a joke which is why it surprised him so many of us went "Well, NO" about it, but honestly, I have seen so much of that kind of 'quote' used in all seriousness about the Middle Ages (often calling them 'the Dark Ages'), the Renaissance that went back to the past for the pure correct sources, science versus religion, swipes at the Catholic Church, swipes at Christianity in general, current day culture warring and so on, that it triggered my "Well, NO" reactions as well.
One thing about the Reformation and the Renaissance that struck me as a recent thought was the pop culture idea of "peeling away the accretions and corruptions and going back to the pure past". Nobody seems to suggest we should, for example, go back even fifty years ago to the principles of medicine or scientific discoveries or scholarship of that time, and that whatever development in policy or understanding since then is a 'corruption' to be peeled away. Even allegedly secular or non-sectarian historical (or pop history at least) programmes unquestioningly trot out some version of the Reformation Protestant notion of church corruption of the pure Gospel doctrine, without considering the idea of development of doctrine as further discovery, not corruption.
Sometimes, fields make progress and sometimes they don't. Medicine has clearly been on a monotonically upwards trajectory over the past century. In other fields (e.g. music or architecture) it's less clear, and some people would say we've gone backwards in many ways in these fields over the past century.
Looking at the thousand-ish years between Rome and the Renaissance, it's fair to say that some fields progressed, some stagnated, and some regressed. A 14th century cathedral would have impressed any Roman, a 14th century clock (or suit of armour) would have knocked their socks off, but the best 14th century sculptures were unimpressive compared to the best Roman or Greek ones. If you're a 16th century Italian sculpture fan and you suddenly see your mates Mike and Don cranking out the greatest sculptures in a thousand years, you can be forgiven for thinking you're living in a Renaissance.
Magellan didn't make it home, but two of his ships completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth. It wouldn't have been unnatural to say at that time "Magellan has proven the Earth is round", even though it was not actually a subject of theoretical doubt. He proved it in a physical way by going around it.
"considering the idea of development of doctrine as further discovery, not corruption." I'm stealing this sentence. Could handy in any debate with a Protestant or a traditionalist.
You're entirely welcome! There were a heck of a lot of bad accretions that needed scraping off, and the Counter-Reformation was the response to the kick in the pants we needed, but even liberal Protestants tend to imbibe it in the water that what their denomination does today is "goes back to Gospel principle" and is somehow *not* one of those mediaeval papal insertions or developments (e.g. ordaining female clergy, which is a development by examining the discipline, the source texts, and tradition both large T and small t in making the decision).
There was someone, possibly Elaine Pagels, who said she tried to discover an early pure Christianity, but no matter how far back she looked, all she found was people arguing.
Wow, Christianity really is descended from Judaism! (Am Jewish.)
Seems like the very existence of four Gospels instead of a single canonical account is consistent with the idea that people were arguing about what happened even before anything had been written down in the first place.
I don't know, but the ancients seem to have thought the earth was a circle rather than a square, so I'm not sure how impressed they'd be with the round shadow on the moon as an argument against their round earth position.
I believe it was the horizon that gave the ancient Greeks the clue that the earth was spherical.
It's an argument FOR the round earth position.
But a round flat earth (a shallow cylinder) that is fixed to facing the sun would also cast a circular shadow, so it offers no evidence either way.
The earth does not have one side fixed to facing the sun. If it did, the sun's position in the sky would be fixed.
True. But when there is a lunar eclipse, the sun and moon must be in opposition so the sun must be on the opposite side of the earth. Hmmm, but lunar eclipses don't always happen at midnight local time, so that is evidence in itself for a spherical earth.
(indeed time zones are very good evidence for a spherical earth)
Without reliable clocks or long distance communication you're not going to realise the existence of time zones, though.
I don't see how lunar eclipses at not-midnight preclude a disc-shaped Earth though. I can imagine a situation where the sun, the moon, and the disc-shaped Earth are all in conjunction with the moon low in the sky and the sun just under the horizon. The shadow of the Earth would look less curved than usual, but as long as the Earth is a thick disk instead of a thin one then it wouldn't be glaringly noticeable.
If you go this way the horizon is no evidence either because the Earth could be some kind of positive-curve surface (like a paraboloid or something) that only looks like a sphere at a local level.
This is a bit off topic, but the fantasy world of Glorantha (from the original RuneQuest paper and pen RPG) is flat but has a horizon. The reason for that in-world is that light seeks to return to the sky, so light rays bend upwards. This makes me pretty sure that people wedded to the idea of a flat earth can come up with some reason why the flat earth’s shadow on the moon was round.
That's pretty wild, I just started playing Six Ages yesterday and on the very same day subscribed to ACX. I have immediately found my people...
A Straussian Reading of Brown Bear, Brown Bear: https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1476360940711030787
Lol, that’s pretty deep . Did this come to you when reading it to your kid ?
My experience with animals is they don’t need to see each other to be aware of the other . It’s interesting that we tend to lead our children toward a use of sight toward comprehension and awareness . I wonder if perhaps we overdo it and fail to explore other forms of sending , this confining our offspring to limited utility for a lifetime . Certainly there are stories of people developing other senses far better . Like I heard of people using sound like bats , sonar .
That’s a great point! Yeah, I’m reading kids books to my kids and then, boom, they alchemize into philosophical parables.
The books alchemize, not your kids. I assume. Just checking because it is a weird world…
Here are some words I would like to see retired from media (and Twitterati) accounts of COVID. In other contexts, these words could maybe take a two-year sabbatical:
Cases/infections/[Variant_name] are:
Surging/Spiking/Skyrocketing (<-- This one really Grinds My Gears) /Soaring
-->> Apparently, cases or what-have-you never "increase" or "rise". Or ever "decline". Based on the media reports, every human being must now be dead.
_______________
Covid / [Variant_name] / THE PANDEMIC is:
Raging/Exploding/Out of control/Dominant
-->> OMGWTFBBQ! Shelter in Place! Maybe it won't notice us!
________________
Hospitals / Health Care Workers / Health Care System is/are:
Besieged/Overwhelmed/At Capacity/Collapsing
-->> Have they considered the option of just turning patients away?
________________________
While I am writing the Style Guide, here is another change:
"Eight HOMES have already been lost in the deadly wildfires, and another 200 HOMES are threatened."
-->> Eight HOUSES burned down. Not HOMES, you maudlin grifters. Yet every disaster, it is required to say "HOMES" for maximum bathos.
-Fire will burn down your HOUSE
-Alcoholism destroys HOMES
_____________
Also: TRAGEDY needs to go back to being a reserved word. Accidents and natural disasters are not TRAGEDIES unless somebody involved brought it on themselves through HUBRIS, or were BLIND to their inner nature, or were past a Point of No Return.
Tragic:
Oedipus, King Lear, Rick Ankiel, Chris Bell
Unfortunate:
Covid deaths, Tornadoes, JFK, Buddy Holly
_____________ END OF PRESCRIPTIVISM ___________
As long as you're prescribing, can you implement a twenty-year ban on the coining of portmanteaus without High Council approval, violation punishable by Alaskan exile?
Not related to my other comment. Rick Ankiel? What qualifies him as tragic? I'm a St Louisian, I remember him well, and I don't recall any tragic circumstances. But, I was away when he forgot how to pitch, so I'm wondering if I missed something. Was he a giant cocky ass or some such?
He was only 20, a rookie, and selected to pitch in Game 1 of the NLDS against all-time great Greg Maddux when he had the five wild pitch game he never psychologically recovered from. He wasn't the number one starter and it was a pretty controversial decision, and Tony LaRussa clearly knew he wasn't mentally ready for it, given he hid that he was even doing it by misdirecting during the press conferences leading up to it and only announced the decision once it was too late for media to talk to Ankiel. LaRussa has said it's the decision he mosts regrets out of any he ever made as a manager.
I remember. But, isn't all that Tony's hubris, not Rick's? If the gods destroy you through no fault of your own, is that tragedy, in the classic sense?
I think you're right - the hero has to fail as a result of some personal flaw or action, so Ankiel's case wouldn't be a classical tragedy.
He did have a pretty decent redemption arc as an outfielder, though. He made some outfield assists that were nigh-unbelievable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cSgDflCF98
>Hospitals / Health Care Workers / Health Care System is/are:
>Besieged/Overwhelmed/At Capacity/Collapsing
> -->> Have they considered the option of just turning patients away?
I'm not sure I understand your point here. My hospital discontinued all elective procedures as of last Tuesday, so as to move staff and be able to keep up with both covid and the non-elective stuff. Which is to say, yes, they've considered just turning people away. That's what we're doing.
I think "at capacity" and really "over capacity" are perfectly cromulent descriptions of the situation. If we reach the point where we have to turn away non-optional cases ("Yes, that does sound like a heart attack but don't come here because there's no one to treat you."), then I would say that besieged or overwhelmed would be appropriate. If we let said hypothetical patient come anyway and they or some significant percentage of our patients received substandard care due to lack of resources, such that those patients were injured or died, I would call that collapsing.
Like I said, I'm not understanding what you want done instead.
I disagree with quite a lot of these.
Sure, alarmism and exaggeration are a thing in media. But sometimes surge, spike and even skyrocket are appropriate, as each of them evoke a specific form on on the graph. A variant is dominant when it is the most common one. I don't understand what your beef with that one is.
"Have they considered the option of just turning patients away?" - this makes me so angry I can't properly express it. Homes are not houses, houses are not homes.
In modern parlance, "tragic" means "causing or characterized by extreme distress or sorrow" (says Oxford), whereas literary tragedies are much less so because, you said it, people brought it upon themselves.
>Homes are not houses, houses are not homes.
Eh? I think most homes are houses and most houses are homes. Which still means OP is a little odd to be complaining about which is used.
Homes is specifying that people (used to) live in them. A house could be empty. And it seems like there's some inconsistencies in how people understand "house", but what about apartments? Buildings that aren't used for housing? There's all sorts of building types and complicated ways in which they overlap with living quarters, and "homes" is just an easy way of saying "soandso many households are now out of home". It's simple and precise, so a really good word for its purpose.
I think that there is some legitimate substance to the question of turning people away when it comes to emergency rooms. They are an economic unit in the hospital that has an ideal utilization rate. Below that, you are paying people to sit around. Above that, you are stretching resources (overtime, burnout, whatever). So we have to look some askance when stories bemoan that emergency departments are 90%+ full. I’d like to know what they were, on average, in 2010-2018. Does anyone have a good link for that?
But then the public might not have enough of an emotional response to keep their attention or be lead to support certain actions or policies .
It’s been interesting to see how media has changed as ad dollars have drastically declined .
I am curious if anyone is following the all death data being reported in various nations in relation to the pandemic .
The idea is to assess the pandemic and it’s response based on all death data , and by some breakdown of age range and sex - in comparison with a 10 year average .
It appears that 2020 tends to be higher then the average , and 2021 is higher then 2020 or the same in most highly vaccinated nations .
Should we have expected to see highly vaccinated nations with the same all death numbers as 2020 or less? Considerate the effectiveness of vaccines and the “harvest effect” that the Lancet wrote about in the summer of 2020 in analysis of Italian excess death numbers .
I would have expected 2021 to be demonstrably better ( less and closer to average ) then 2020. So what could be the reason ?
In high-income countries at least, the most deaths were recorded in the third wave, which peaked slightly past Jan. 1, 2021 and so more deaths were recorded in 2021 than 2020. However, death reporting is often delayed somewhat, and of course, people tend to be exposed maybe 2 or 3 weeks before they die. So the exposures that caused a lot of 2021 deaths actually occurred in 2020.
The average rich country reached a 50% vaccination rate around August 18, so it doesn't make sense to look at *total* 2021 deaths and try to make any conclusion. It is somewhat encouraging to note that the death rate is slower in Sept-Dec 2021 than in Nov 2020-Feb 2021, but that's still not a very precise or scientific methodology, since it ignores all kinds of factors other than vaccines. Government behavior, individual behavior, the *fraction* of the population getting infected, the differences between Delta and earlier variants (remember the reason why Delta replaced the others) ... don't expect people to reach a reasonable conclusion if they are ignoring these factors.
I would point out that generally there were less restrictions before mid-2021 than after mid-2021. My province of Alberta, for example, announced that it planned to ease restrictions after vaccination rate passed 50%. In fact, they lifted the requirement for people with Covid to quarantine, and no longer recommended people get tested for Covid... but then Covid infections went way up, so they backpedaled. Still, things are certainly more open now than in early 2020.
Delta and omicron?
All together. Just pandemic in general. It seems like a bit of a game to break things down into variants , like excuses for failed policies or something . I think if one is to look at all death data one can first look at the bulk and then overlay the various story lines . Like when we’re lockdowns deployed , when we’re vaccines deployed , what variant was emerging when .
I think Eugene meant that delta and omicron (and actually, alpha) were the reasons for new and more deadly waves.
Most Western countries had their heaviest deah toll in the winter 2020/21. At this point, vaccines were not yet very relevant, and the alpha variant made the wave higher and thus more deadly.
Since that wave, death tolls haven't been getting close to previous peaks in many countries.
So "post-vaccine" has been considerably better than "pre-vaccine", it just doesn't align well with the new year.
By the way, the economist is still doing a great job tracking excess deaths:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Thanks , I ll check their references they list and see how it why they may be different from the data I have seen .
Yes. Delta in particular was more virulent and more transmittable. The vaccines only started to make a difference to outcomes late last year, they weren’t very useful against transmission.
Yes, I suspect any effects should be seen
As the vaccine rate is higher , which in many countries is at the latter part of 2021. If the data is available by some break down of age category then the data can also look to reflect those categories as they were distributed first at the older age groups snd worked their way down . We can agree that the effectiveness of the vaccines should reflect in a lower all death result ? At least toward the average expected death . In addition the harvest effect would likely also be a factor as it’s possible the higher incidence would be in the first non prepared wave. Those that survived would likely be more robust for any further infection . So I see two reasons to expect lower all deaths in this cohort for 2021.
I wouldn't be too optimistic that age cohorts give useful information. Younger age groups had not much excess deaths, which makes it hard to tell them apart from random fluctuations. Even in the age group 45-64 you can only see a clear signal during the heaviest phases of the heaviest wave, but not much more than that. (There is a plot in the economist article on this as well.)
By the way, one of the categories that can be chosen in the data explorer of ourworldindata is "excess mortality".
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer
I had a look at a few countries. Not systematically, but I took some countries with high vaccination rates (Portugal, Denmark, UK), middle vaccination rates (Switzerland, Germany, US), and low vaccination rates (Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia). Actually, the effect is more dramatic than I had imagined. For the high-vac ones, excess mortality is almost gone, while for the low-vac the latest waves are as bad as ever. I can't rule out that I had some sort of selection bias (I threw out Chile and Brazil after realising that hemisphere matters), but in any case I didn't expect it to be so extreme.
Happy British Monday morning, everyone!
I've been on Ribbonfarm reading about creepiness-as-unpredictability. It sounds like an impulse I should fight against. Nothing human is alien to me, etc. I warmly invite everyone to do something spontaneous immediately!
There is a reason such instinctive reactions exist, because instability and unpredictability in some areas can indicate it in other areas, which makes a person potentially dangerous.
Creepiness seems to have a lot of different meanings-- for me, it means predictably clingy.
{Whips OP in the face with a large mackerel}
A mackerel! I see you take your fish-slapping very seriously indeed.
If I only have access to 1mg melatonin, can I dissolve the 1mg tablet in 100ml of water and drink only 30ml? Does this work like I (naively) expect it to?
Probably. Melatonin is water-soluble, specifically:
>Soluble in water (0.1 mg/ml), ethanol (8 mg/ml), benzene, chloroform, methanol, DMSO (50 mM), toluene, and dilute aqueous acid, and very slightly soluble in petroleum ether.
Source: https://www.scbt.com/p/melatonin-73-31-4
To find the answer to this you can check the solubility of melatonin, which PubChem lists as 2 g/L at 20 C, so assuming the melatonin isn't attached to an insoluble salt (check the bottle) then that should work fine. Make sure to crush it into powder before you dissolve it.
You could use a pill splitter instead. https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Health-Personal-Care-Pill-Crushers-Splitters/zgbs/hpc/8626404011
As a note, pills that aren't scored are not promised to have the drug evenly distributed throughout the pill.
That’s a good idea and clearly what the pharmacy tends to do . I would guess that if putting it into solution one would want to ensure it’s soluble in the the chosen medium and that it does interact and loose any potency . Like it one is desiring to take one part and save the rest . Then there is the potential of breakdown of the molecule , like those hydrogen bonds in water can breaks things down well over time
Hydrogen bonds probably won't break down melatonin, but your stomach acid will. If you dissolve a hormone in water, it would be more effective to hold the liquid in your mouth and let it diffuse through the mucous membranes rather than swallowing it.
Most hormones , I believe are lipid soluble which suggests to me that a water solution would create a suspension , unless a nano emulsion is applied . In which case either an alcohol or oil seems appropriate. But just as someone who dunks around with cannabis oil and some medical background
Can't remember if I linked this before, but Chimerical Colors seem kind of weird and interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_colors
I've taken 20-35 mg a day of dextroamphetamine (in the form of 70 mg vyvanse + 0-15 mg of straight up dextroamphetamine per day, all prescribed) for ADHD for the past few months. My heart rate when I'm sitting still but doing something actively (e.g. if I'm working on the computer or having a conversation with a few friends) varies between 90-ish and up to 110-ish during the day. It can increase to over 130 if I'm e.g. walking around or cooking food. According to my sports watch my overall resting heart rate is between 58-62 most days, but I think that's mainly because my heart rate is low during sleep (when the amphetamine has worn off).
I was curious whether this was normal and healthy or if I was putting too much stress on my heart, so I asked my GP about it (I don't have regular access to the psychiatrist who originally prescribed the medication). He told me it was normal, but to be honest I don't completely trust him: he's old and mostly treats older patients. Does anyone have any insight or any links to insight about whether the mentioned heart rates are normal/healthy or not? For reference, I'm around 30 and my max heart rate is roughly 200 or slightly above that.
I'm in nearly the exact same situation, and my doctor was similarly unconcerned. Having a high RHR makes me nervous, but I feel much better when taking my meds. I don't have any answers for you, just commiserating.
110 is quite high. If I were you I'd look up on pubmed if cardiovascular exercise reduces stimulant HR the way it reduces RHR, either way it sounds like a good idea (ideally _not_ done on stimulants).
My understanding is the definition of resting heart rate excludes sleeping. In practice your sports watch may be using some of that data to calculate it, but ideally RHR should be being measured while you have the dextroamphetamine in your system also.
Why don't manufacturers increase the price when there is high demand and low supply? (Like PS5 or certain cars) And why do people get upset when these products are sold second hand at a higher price?
You just named example where the original retailer did set a higher price. What are examples where they did not? I don't think event tickets really count, because scalpers in that case are taking advantage of increasing desperation as event time draws near, and the original seller can't just wait to sell every ticket on the spot at the very last minute because it's unnecessarily risky. Scalpers quite often lose money when they prove to be wrong and an event does not sell out. For events that are for sure going to tell out instantly, original ticket sellers usually do set a very high price.
If you're thinking of GPUs during Covid, I think there are two separate reasons. One, NVIDIA and AMD made bad demand forecasts and didn't realize they'd sell out so quickly. Two, in the long run, much of their market position relies on the premise that chips get both cheaper and more powerful each generation. A huge reason for much of the 30 series hype was double the cores and potentially first ever 8k 60 fps chip for half the price of the last generation. To hype that up for months only to pull out the rug at the last minute and sell it for double the last generation's price instead risks undercutting all future trust that consumers place in your marketing.
Did PS5 increase in price? I'm not following it closely. I just keep seeing stories of long waits and high resale prices.
If scalpers take a genuine risk with event tickets with the benefit of making tickets available until the last moment, I don't see what's the problem with that. But I deliberately didn't include event tickets as example because I think the people going to the event are themselves part of the experience for everybody else and I can understand it if the organizers don't want the event to be filled with rich people who only go as a status symbol because that wouldn't be the same experience.
If someone else here knows better, please correct me, but it seems like the presence of scalpers does not, certis paribis, indicate that the company is better off selling at a higher price. If the company were a perfect monopoly and the good was necessary and they had infinite computing power, you would be able to price discriminate perfectly to each consumer and set the maximum value that each is willing to pay.
In the real world, companies forecast demand and set the supply based on the profit maximizing quantity, which is the same whether scalpers are present or not; the price collected by a scalper is capturing the consumer surplus that arises from the delta between a consumer preference and the retail price. The presence of scalpers does not indicate that a higher price is necessarily supported by the market, it merely represents the cannibalization of consumer surplus by those willing to eat the risk of finding a party that values it more than the marginal retail cost. This is also why scalpers are almost universally discouraged; their activity captures consumer surplus without generating any return for the producer.
I'm overall in favor of scalpers because they're helping do price discovery, but there are cases when the original firm deliberately underprices in order to make their product available to lower-income people.
Interesting - they definitely increase price transparency, but does that benefit outweigh the lost consumer surplus? This is sort of the core problem the commentariat have been arguing over w/r/t to Georgism; is having a more efficient allocation of land worth the headache of kicking grandmas out of their homes to get there?
In addition to what everyone else has said; companies ship their org chart. Production and pricing are two different departments. The pricing department has spent a good long time figuring out a complicated pricing strategy over time and different markets, and isn't going to let it get ruined just because those production jerks can't keep up with demand.
In a small business it's easy to be agile with pricing, but once you're the size of Sony or Ford it's not.
A few things. Firstly, nominal rigidity. Basically, consumers don't understand economics so they don't like nominal prices changing. They generally would rather have less product at the same price than the same amount of product at a higher price. (Or at least, they don't notice.) This leads to all kinds of work arounds like keeping the nominal price the same while reducing the amount of good sold or allowing supply shortages to persist.
Another thing is that pricing is not just signaling to the market but competitors. If everyone's console is about the same price and yours goes up then it gets marked as the "expensive one." This might be good or bad for branding depending on what you want.
For another, scarcity is often a branding thing. When you need to be waitlisted to get a Bugatti it's not because Bugatti just can't possibly open a second factory. It's because they want to seem scarce and exclusive. Video game consoles have the same effect where everyone actually wants to sell out of stock early on for the prestige. They then ramp up production.
Lastly, there's also just a natural ramp up since generally they bring one manufacturing chain online then copy it until they're at capacity. Basically, getting the first supply chain involves getting factories that become the template for future versions. And copying the initial version multiple times is easier than standing up multiple of the same thing without a master version to compare. This often means the initial run hovers around what's the maximum output of the smallest optimal factory in the supply chain. Not always, since these things vary a lot, but often. Especially for unique products that don't have interchangeable inputs.
Of course, you can delay launch to save up more inventory but that's often undesirable. Not to mention you often don't know how much demand there is until the wait list forms. It's safer to make people wait than it is to overproduce because .while the waitlist loses money it's easy to sell your boss that it's a positive. "Look at all the demand!" (while conveniently leaving out hypothetical sales that never happen) is easier to spin than "we have to pay to warehouse the unsold stock."
"nominal rigidity" Ah, that's the fancy name for "sticker prices are sticky prices"
Largely because a lot of their customers/potential customers will be angry.
Firstly, because most people feel that it is unfair for people with more money who can afford the higher price to be prioritised.
Aside: when you use prices to control demand, it does not in practice prioritise the people who want the item the most (the people who will gain the most utility from getting it), but the people with the most money - while it is true that people will scale how much they will pay by their expected utility, that is massively outweight by the huge variations in disposable income, so there are plenty of people who could drop $2000 for a PS5 without a second thought.
Second, antagonising future potential customers is a really bad idea for Sony or Microsoft. Suppose Sony did this with the PS5 and Microsoft didn't with Xbox Series X. Then the supply chains settle down, production rises in 2024 and the markets can clear at the current list price. At that point, assuming this does annoy potential PlayStation customers, many of them choose to get the Xbox instead. This not only costs Sony PS5 sales in a couple of years, it also costs them game sales - on which they get a significant cut of the price, and which represent much more revenue than the revenue from the consoles themselves. There's a reason the consoles are sold below cost - they want the absolute maximum volume of sales.
Note that there are other things that do get the price raised when there is high demand and low supply. Take a look at chicken prices at the moment, for instance.
What tends to predict this is the extent to which the brand is valuable and the manufacturer anticipates an ongoing relationship with their customers. If I'm buying generic chicken thighs, then I probably don't even know which farm or slaughterhouse I bought from, so I can't avoid them in future if they jacked their prices up. But I do know who NVidia are, or who Sony are, or who Tesla are. And they all want to have sales in 10 years time as well as right now.
Many people feel that it is fairer to allocate limited stock on the basis of the amount of time and effort customers are prepared to put in to obtain it than on the basis of the amount of money customers have - because time and effort correlate much better with utility than available money.
After an earthquake, the housewife who wants to fill the family minivan with gasoline in case they decide to evacuate the next day, has more time on her hands than the construction contractor who is trying to get his truck to ten different rush jobs at ten different sites across town.
Not pretending there aren't exceptions, but if you do it by price, then the rich lawyer who wants to fill with gas so he can drive to the backup office in another city will have more available money than the contractor.
... and I did say that it was a better correlation, not that it was a perfect one.
Your options in a short-term emergency are price, time-and-effort, or a pre-designed regulation that has a priority order (you can't invent a regulation on the fly in a short-term emergency). None of those are ideal; I think that a mix of time-and-effort and a short priority list works best in most cases (so your priority list might be fire appliances and ambulances and then empower certain officials to grant priority chits, and then people line up after that).
In a longer-term but temporary supply constraint (like PS5s; there will eventually be enough for everyone that wants one), I'd usually want to get the regulators out of the issue and let the manufacturer/retailer decide for themselves (the only exception I can think of is regulating an essential, like rationing food in wartime).
How much does the lawyer value getting to his backup office?
Increased price sends an important signal to people: stop using this. And most people can survive just fine for a day without buying new gas, or new food.
Typically when there is a crisis, lots and lots of people fill up on gas *that they don't need at all*. Because why not? That's where all the incentives are pointing.
I've seen, in person, a mob of people rush into something and pick it clean, because there was no crowd control and someone triggered a rush. This isn't a rare occurrence. Given the choice between "get it and have it" or "be a decent person and wait calmly in the queue and never get it," there aren't enough people who choose the latter, and the operant conditioning is to not do it.
If people know there is an adult running the process, though, they calm down.
For something like a gas shortage, I assert it doesn't take much to get people to say "huh, maybe I'll wait." A mandatory $2-per-gallon surcharge sends the signal "if you can just wait this out, you should." And once you aren't punishing decent behavior, the decent behavior will build on itself, and the shortage will resolve itself quickly.
We can totally plan ahead for this, and we should.
"How much does the lawyer value getting to his backup office?"
Not very much, but a $1,000 tank of gas is not enough money to think twice about.
I think exactly this.
But all that time and effort is to no one's benefit. A higher price, on the other hand, encourages greater production since it causes greater profits.
You'll notice that the majority of the cases we are talking about are ones where greater production is already strongly encouraged and it isn't clear that production would rise if there was more money.
Think about the things that are scalped (and if it isn't being scalped and there aren't any anti-scalping measures, then there isn't demand at a significantly higher price). Tickets to live performances: venue sizes are not easily changed.
Manufactured items that are in severe supply constraints, especially where there is a single manufacturer (cars, consumer electronics): the manufacturer is already trying to raise production. Would they really be able to build more PS5s or XboxSXs if they could offer more short-term money?
Sure, if there were long-term guarantees - but Sony/Microsoft are already raising production capacity by building more factories, so the market-clearing price is going to drop anyway.
Look at commodities in the same situation - their prices do surge because it's all interchangeable.
People generally believe that things should be priced “fairly”, which I think as much as it means anything means based on the cost of production rather than demand, and the marginal profit is probably not worth the brand damage from raising prices
People feel that the announced price is a promise from the manufacturer and people expect promises to be kept and feel that it is cheating not to do so. So if I haven't had a chance to buy a $399 PS5, then Sony can't increase the price (once it's been widely available on sale for a while at that price then increasing the price for inflation is annoying but acceptable).
Contracts are mostly kept to because people think they are promises, not because of legal obligations - plenty of people do not make a differentiation between a unilateral promise and a contract.
(indeed, you could interpret this as promissory estoppel: "I saved money to purchase a PS5 at $399; Sony promised to sell me a PS5 for $399, for this reason they are obligated to sell me one that that price because I have acted in reliance on their promise and have suffered by saving - due to the time value of money")
> you could interpret this as promissory estoppel
You could, but it wold not go anywhere at all. I can sue you in Romanian court because my pet trout died - but it will not go anywhere.
Like that promissory estoppel.
Scalping is very annoying, for people who are trying to wait to buy the Zbox online for a birthday or Christmas present for their kid, priced at $399 but when they do log on they find "sorry all out of stock" because a tout managed to buy up all available stock and is now selling it on eBay for $500 because "ha ha if you want to give your kid this present right now, pay my price or get lost, sucker".
Personally, I wouldn't pay it, but I don't have a kid that I promised I'd get them this toy they really, really wanted. It's profit for the shops, it's profit for the manufacturers, because they don't care who buys all their stock in one fell swoop, but it annoys ordinary consumers (and I imagine probably the manufacturers in the end if some third-party vulture is making an extra $100 for nothing off their product).
Eventually more stock will get into the shops, but if you're looking for that present *now* rather than in two months' time, then people pay scalpers, which only encourages them (ditto with concert tickets and the like).
Yes , in some countries there are clear rules based on listing of price . And this is likely a common held idea in many stable economies . The very notion that the listed price can not be met should be reflection of the stability of the market in general . And, as a matter of public relations all indications of price by a company should be scrubbed from all media to reflect the reality of the situation for the company . However, unless there is a specific law in a domain the idea that they should anything is only relevant to the impression. Of the consumer .
I mean, I would not fancy taking Sony to court on that basis. But contract law including estoppel is written based on what people feel to be fair, and the fact that you can make a credible argument on promissory estoppel points to why people think that it's fair.
I think people would grumble but eventually accept if Sony said "Due to increase in price of necessary rare raw material to make the new console, the price has to go up by X amount and it'll be Y weeks later".
But if Sony went "We only made 100,000 but demand is for 150,000 so we're just gonna slap up the price because we can", people would be more pissed off because "hey, ramp up your production and meet the demand!"
Exactly. I think there's a bunch of economics-brain going on here.
Lots of pricing strategies that make sense if you think like an economist but really piss people off. Price differentiation without product differentiation is another one (I paid three times as much as him for the same thing). Even minor product differentiations ("pro" versions that are three times the price with very minor differences) are much more socially acceptable, and rich people will just pay it on the basis that the cost of the time to work out whether any of the feature differences are ones that matter to them is greater than the price difference.
Oh, the "pro" version of things does annoy me at times (Microsoft, looking right at *you* here): six versions of the same product, and if I want the *one* element out of the five fancy additions not in the basic model, I have to buy the more expensive version even if I'm not going to use the other four.
But it definitely is a different case over "I paid X for it and he only paid Y for it and it's the same thing". We get a lot of that in Ireland, with differences between what someone would cost in the UK or in the US versus the increased price in Ireland. Some of it is understandable (difference between sterling and euro, increased transport costs, etc.) but some of it is "and on top of that, we'll stick on another bit, just because we've got the nearest thing to a monopoly".
I thought that in every instant where price was artificially limited that other factors kicked in and the end results was worse outcomes . That the free market is the best way to deal with price . Things that are hard to get will fetch a higher price . If there is profit then someone will innovate and find a way .
I think IP rights limits free market and leads to processes of price gauging though .
Do enough people understand that for that to be a consideration in how you price your playstations though?
Also have you thought about how information and decision making costs lead to problems with free markets? (This is something I’m interested in but not super informed on)
Profit hasn’t reduced housing costs, or increased innovation.
How did you reach that conclusion? To me it seems self-evident that there has been huge amounts of innovation in housing in the last few millennia and that the quest for profit has been a large part of the reason for this.
The last few millennia? Maybe. The last few decades, no. The cost of building a house seems to have remained static or increased relative to incomes.
Do you think IP rights are the cause of the low supply of PS5 and cars?
If by "IP rights" you mean patents (as opposed to trademarks and such), then the *general* answer is a definite yes. Patents patently restrict supply and increase prices, in terms of the seller's profit margin. They are explicitly designed for that purpose. (although lately they tend to carry less and less profit for actual producers, and more and more profit for lawyers and a cottage industry of patent-hoarding robber barons)
Is that angle particularly relevant for the *specific* case of PS5 and cars? No, since those specific cases are drowning in other externalities which are orders of magnitude more relevant. Inasmuch as the OP was specifically about PS5. that would be a no.
Not really . I don’t know too much of it , but I think there is like this issue with limited amount of processors or something right? Semi conductors I think .
I am trying to think through it but it’s complicated . There are ways that players can corner the market on things . If it’s essential things then a war can ensue . IP can be utilized or regulatory capture can be used as well . There are definitely rotten ways to leverage supply and demand . And these days seem to very much be times of big power making moves . Cause if some do it in one sector then others look to do it in another . Of those big invested groups like van guard just get all their groups to deploy it .
But I think the question is only about raising price with high demand and low supply , not about how to influence demand and supply
What if production could be ramped up but only at a higher cost? This irrational notion of fairness seems to result in market failure.
I doubt the production could really be ramped up on the short term, it if it could you would not do it, because the disconnection between supply and demand we have now is conjoncturel, not structural, and any (significant, non-baseline-trend) increase in production would give you too much capacity once the situation goes back to normal.
(To give an example : there is right now a crisis in France's universities because the number of students have grown a lot but the number of professor has decreased, but the government does not want to hire more professors because they would need to pay them for 40 years afterward while the number of student will decrease in a few years (the bump is mainly due to the so-called 2000 baby-boom).
I'm guessing there must be other constraint preventing the US solution of hiring grad students or postgrads to short-term TA or Lecture contracts instead of hiring tenure-track professors. And also preventing other solutions like hiring older career-switchers as professors with the expectation they're likely to retire in 10 years instead of 40.
They mainly use short terms contracts yes. What I was getting at is that you don't build a new factory if you think the mismatch between supply and demand is only going to last a couple years.
(France has a system that is very different from the US. There are no tenure tracks, and very few short terms TA or lecture contracts compared to the US. Basically the assumption used to be that after your PhD you'd get directly hired as a "maître de conférence", which is basically a tenure without the associated prestige (but with the un-firable, open-ended contract). This isn't true now, but the rate of open-ended contracts to fixed-term contracts is still way higher than in the US (or Germany btw).
Your second question is part of the answer to your first question. Many loyal fans will be just as pissed if the company (rather than a third party) sells at a higher price. And that wouldn't be a problem (high demand, like you said), except that those items will continue being manufactured and the fans you just counterfactually pissed off by increasing the price are the same ones who would wait a year or two and buy the item then.
To be honest the whole supply and demand graph doesn’t work at all for many products. The plot of supply or demand vs new iPhone prices is a straight line. If there are supply constraints the company doesn’t increase the price they agreed at launch, if demand is tapering Apple doesn’t reduce prices but lowers its supply to channel. (In any one year I mean).
Nobody expects them to do anything else, only on the secondary markets do iPhone prices move according to supply demand graphs; there used to be some “gouging” on resales of just released iPhones when they didn’t estimate supply correctly.
Anyway whenever there is an agreed sticker price people think anything above that price is price gouging - concert tickets are a good example. Nobody cares if you buy a house and sell it for a much larger price - which has higher social implications - if anything that’s considered a shrewd investment. Put an agreed price on something and it’s considered very bad practice to sell at a higher price.
> The plot of supply or demand vs new iPhone prices is a straight line.
No.
1) demand remains influenced by price.
2) you mention "lowers its supply" just a bit later
This is goal impressive goal shifting. I am clearly talking about the consumer price of products. I obviously understand that Apple reduces its own internal demand and that external demand is influenced by price. Because I wrote that.
What isn’t happening is Apple reducing or increasing the sticker price of iPhones which is what the supply demand curve indicates would happen.
This also: sticker prices are sticky prices.
They can raise them occasionally. Doesn't happen a lot in consumer electronics or cars (in both cases, because annual releases of new models give an opportunity to establish a new sticker price), but there are plenty of other products that have strong price expectations - "dollar menu" at a fast-food chain, for instance (McDonald's now has the "$1 $2 $3 dollar menu" because they had to increase some prices).
The second one seems to me to be about the feeling of unfairness: these people aren't helping at all, and get to keep a premium for doing nothing. You might call them rent seekers, as they don't provide any benefit and simply suck resources away.
e: "they" referring here of course exclusively to scalpers, who seek to buy and immediately resell. I'm not talking about all people who are selling second hand.
But they are helping by making a product available to someone who really needs/wants it (as demonstrated by willing to pay a premium) instead of just to people who are lucky. Buying and immediately reselling at a higher price is exactly what every shop does. Are shops not providing value?
One problem is that people's cutoff price in a situation like this is determined much more by disposable income than by how much they actually want it on a subjective level. Scalpers are less likely to redirect to someone who wants it more than they are to simply redirect to someone richer. Redirecting surplus to the rich is not generally considered a public service.
Most shops also make it much more convenient for customers to get products. They buy in bulk from manufacturers, arrange for products to be available in a convenient place, etc. By comparison buying from a scalper is usually less convenient than buying form the original seller.
Well that depends on what you mean by your reference to "The shop". As referring to the original creator, it provides a lot of value as it is the creator of the product. Then there are commercial sellers which sell to consumers, obviously valuable to all parties.
I might grant that there is some value in selling at a higher price to people who really want it, but in the case of scalpers that is a solution that creates its own problem: a big group of people who are now going to buy from the scalpers wanted to buy it from the original seller, so in the case of this group, the scalper actively took value away, without providing anything in return.
Only in the specific case of someone who did want to have the product but could for some reason not buy from the original seller did the scalper provide value. The question is how big this subgroup is relative to the people who buy from the scalpers. My guess is significantly small, what do you think?
Isn't a scalper just a reseller we don't like? Why use such a loaded word? I agree these resellers shouldn't be necessary if the manufacturer would set a more reasonable price. But given that for whatever reason the manufacturer doesn't do that, the resellers are helping the market be more efficient and their profit is there reward. Given that anyone could do the reselling, I'm tempted the think that in the limit their reward would approach fair compensation for their effort. ("they shop" was a typo for "every shop")
A scalper is a specific class of resellers, who buys scarce goods from retailers and resells them on the secondary market at a premium in order to arbitrage a shortage into a price increase.
This annoys people because the additional premium is perceived as unjust, and because the scalpers' purchases through retail channels tend to get blamed for heightening the shortage at retail price by buying up stock for secondary market resale.
Basically, it comes down to a preference by many consumers for queue-rationing over price-rationing. The scalpers, by catering to other consumers who prefer price-rationing, bid up the queuing cost at retail channels and are seen as abetting those who are willing to pay to jump the queue.
Also, scalpers are hard to distinguish from scammers - and many are also them, making buying stuff even more irritating.
I recommended this nearly 2 years ago for scarce covid goods like toilet paper, but the government should bite the bullet and go all the way to *mandating* price increases, via a special surcharge tax.
Vendors don't want to bother with customers angry over prices. Customers don't seem to get as angry over empty shelves.
Scalpers are just exploiting the fact that the price is not set on the market and takes the risk that the market will pay more. The only thing apparently wrong with it is that the consumer wants to pay less and that the venue or artist fails to extract the value of their show. But as we know now, some of the biggest scalpers are the ones involved in the show itself . Other times scalpers are simply the corporate recipients that get free tickets by some kind of support or sponsorship .
People pretend that if it wasn't for the scalper, they could get the product at the MSRP.
Sometimes this is true, but nearly always not. But the lack of access to the counter-factual universe means no one is forced to change their mind.
Well I do agree "scalper" is negatively loaded, I did originally not want to use it at all but I edited to include it as it does lay the distinction between flipping and other kinds of second hand selling.
I like the framing of scalpers making the market be more efficient, that does make sense. It does seem to me that it would be better if there were less scalpers and the manufacturers were free to set better prices, as then the money ends up being invested in the product. But you're right, it's just exploiting arbitrage between the low product price and the price people are willing to pay for it. In that sense you could say it's fair compensation.
This feels like spam
You don't have a name and the post talks about how to make money. Those are both red flags.
The fact that you responded is a very strong mark against it being spam, though.
Very reminiscent of influencer spam.