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.
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
(1/2)
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)
(2/2)
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.